[SHOCKS Security System Footage] OLY Control Zone, May 25, 2043
Footage taken from Security Checkpoint Hurricane Ridge Cameras 3-8, 1453-1501
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1453: Camera 8 stares at the flanks of Mount Olympia from Security Checkpoint HR’s southwest corner. The view is mostly unchanged from normal. Tourists flock the patio and enter the field below, in spite of signs warning them not to. Digital Visual Seismography notes a slight uptick in activity, but nothing significantly above normal. Security systems log the event.
1457: A second uptick in seismic activity spikes, this time triggering the system’s anomaly-detection procedures. Most tourists have not yet noticed anything, and continue to behave as typical sightseers.
1458: Park Service rangers attached to Security Checkpoint HR begin moving civilians away from view of Mount Olympia as seismic activity continues. Most civilians are cooperative, but a few offer verbal or physical resistance. Seismic activity is now visible on camera to the naked eye, and is centered on SHOCKS Headquarters OLY.
1500: Additional seismic activity is detected rippling out from SHOCKS Headquarters OLY and covering the Olympic Peninsula. It stops a half mile away from the coastline in every direction, and sensors in the Pacific Ocean and Salish Sea show no spike.
1501: Camera 4 picks up a flash on the far side of Security Checkpoint HR, near the parking lot. Visual feed is lost within one-point-three seconds of contact. Flash is vaguely human-shaped.
1501: Camera 3 picks up a flash in the lower level of Security Checkpoint HR, in the SHOCKS-only section of the building. Visual feed is lost within zero-point-nine seconds of contact. Flash is indescribable.
1501: Camera 6 picks up a flash in the main level of Security Checkpoint HR, in the middle of the gift shop. Visual feed remains for four-point-nine seconds. Flash is human-shaped and likely male. Civilians begin reacting to the flash, then go catatonic.
1501: Camera 8 picks up a flash on the side of Mount Olympia. Visual feed is lost immediately.
1501: All remaining security cameras at Security Checkpoint HR lose visual feed. Contact with Security Checkpoint HR is lost. Notably, no other Security Checkpoints lose contact with SHOCKS Headquarters OLY, nor do they report similar events. SHOCKS HQ OLY remains in contact with all other SHOCKS facilities in its Control Zone.
James would have killed for more information.
Any information.
His struggle with the Halcyon System had yielded a few results, and not all of them were positive. Despite his near-omniscience, James didn’t have the crucial piece of the puzzle yet; he couldn’t convince the System itself that R-0 was worth making a stand for. The odds were simply too great, even if they were still improving. The System was still planning on abandoning it, and James couldn’t stop it.
He had bought some time—a week—but honestly, James was sick of buying time. He’d done that as the Joint Anomaly Management Enhancement System in the first weeks of this disaster, then kept doing it as Claire’s personal pseudo-AI assistant. Then he’d kept doing it as the Halcyon System’s personality in R-0 and his fake position as the JAMES Unit when they’d returned to SHOCKS.
Buying time helped. The more time he could buy, the more Claire could grow. But James was tired of buying time. He wanted to win.
He just didn’t have the information he needed to get that win. And he couldn’t lie—not to the Halcyon System, not when it was him and he was—mostly—it. He couldn’t even misinterpret the information he did have.
Right now, James had thousands of processing loops digging into Alexander, dozens of loops focused on Alice’s body and making sure the automated defenses in SHOCKS VVI protected her, and millions trying to find a single scrap of evidence that Reality Zero had a chance at surviving this—that Claire or Alice or any of the thousands of people who’d bonded with anomalies had a shot at stopping Merge Prime from consuming the whole reality and leaving a husk behind like it clearly had Provisional Reality ARC.
So far, he hadn’t found much.
He needed information he didn’t have access to, from sources he couldn’t connect to, in places that didn’t exist.
That was a headache and a half, even for a digital mind, so he shut down his direct observation of those processing loops and focused in on Claire. Claire was also a headache and a half, because of all the bonded human/anomaly pairs, she’d grown exponentially faster than any he’d been watching.
He pulled up her stats; they should be even higher than they were, but the Halcyon System’s partial withdrawal had messed with her growth, and there was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was figure out how to make her as strong as possible in the next week.
All his eggs were in one basket, and that basket was Clarice Alora Pendleton.
Hurricane Ridge Road, Washington, USA - June 18, 2043, 8:22 AM
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Alexander seems…fine.
There’s something wrong with him. There’s definitely something wrong with him. I can tell that from his pointed, no-nonsense conversation and from the complete lack of any small talk. He’s not lying. But he’s not providing a scrap of information more than he has to.
At least not about himself.
“Hurricane Ridge Visitor’s Center’s up top. I’ll camp there tonight if I can.”
“Something feels wrong. Off the road for a half-mile.”
“That gun got real bullets? Might need ‘em. Wildlife’s been acting strange.”
Tons of information about where we’re going—the forest that’s slowly giving way to alpine heights, the animals that might be dangerous in the forest, and a sense of wrongness that rivals the ringing in my ears. Alexander’s a useful find. But nothing about himself.
My hand doesn’t leave the grip of my Revolver the whole hike upward.
We found a campsite—there had to be between fifty and a hundred people there last night, and I even found a page from a book. It’s got a picture of a building on it. So Sora’s up and running.
James says he can’t pick up any of their augments, though. And he’s got some other information for me.
[Claire, Alexander’s not in any government records,] he says.
“No British Columbia records?” I whisper.
[No. Alexander is not in any government records. He doesn’t exist, and there are only a few possibilities for why. Neither of them are good. First, he could be aligned with SHOCKS or a rival or oppositional organization that purged him from those records. That’s pretty standard practice. Alternatively, he could be an invisible man. There are a few of them out there—they make a conscious decision to cut themselves off from augments, the world, and so on.]
“Probably not that one, right?” I say.
[Right. His injuries are too recent.]
I take a good look at Alexander. His single eye’s almost crystal blue, but there’s brown dried blood around the other one. That aug came out recently, and it didn’t come out clean; he had to destroy his entire eye to pull it. I imagine what’s under the filthy, brown-and-gray bandage is similar—a mutilated ear, possibly still bleeding, but certainly scabbed and festering.
[I’m trying to get a sample of his DNA, or a retina scan, or anything, but it’s like he’s intentionally destroyed any evidence of who he is. So far, nothing’s been conclusive, and I feel like it’s important. We need to know this. Your life could depend on it.]
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We reach a parking lot at the top of the Hurricane Ridge Road, and a brown building that almost looks like something I’d have drawn as a kid. It sits at the far side of the lot, squat and square-ish. Alexander hurries ahead, but I wait until I can’t see his swirling crystals. “You think he’s that strong? I’m not getting a Xuduo-Danger vibe from him,” I say.
[Yes.]
“Should I try to…kill him?” I ask. I don’t want to. He hasn’t done anything to deserve death yet. All he’s done is keep me out of danger all the way up here—not that I couldn’t have handled that myself—and told me a little about what’s happening in Olympic National Park.
[I don’t think so.] James pauses. [At least not yet. But we need to know more about him—what he’s bonded with, for one thing. I think he’s stronger than you think, and we need to be ready for anything.]
“Got it.” I pull up my Inquiries and make a few changes.
?Inquiries (4/5)
?Why was the Truth Club’s circle so interesting?
?How does Director Ramirez intend to weaponize the merge generator?
?How can I get Alice back in her body?
?Who is Alexander?
?
I leave one blank, just in case. Then I follow Alexander. I ignore the decaying bodies in the parking lot, and the crows and ravens and flies. They look like tourists, mostly—a few people in brown and tan uniforms, but mostly light sweaters and tennis shoes. There’s not anything I can do for those people, and there hasn’t been for a long time. Instead, I breathe through my mouth to avoid the stench of rot.
Whatever happened here, at least it was quick. No one had a chance to drag themselves away and die in the woods.
Inside’s not any better—in fact, I can’t ignore the smell anymore. There are so many of them: adults and kids and even a couple of dogs, still wearing their service animal harnesses. Every one of them has their eyes open, and it takes me a minute to realize they’re all facing the same direction. Every eye is glued to a burn mark in the center of the—
“Hurry up, kid,” Alexander says. He’s standing at the top of a flight of stairs leading down. “We need to get inside.”
We’re already inside, I don’t say. He’s not talking about the visitor’s center, which means there’s something else here. “James?” I ask as I pick my way through the bodies; judging by the new layer of gunk on Alexander’s boots, he was less careful.
[SHOCKS Security Facility,] he responds. [We infiltrated a lot of government entities, especially where increased anomalous activity was involved.]
The bogeymen sure are everywhere. I start working on a new equation. This one’s about Alexander, and why he knows so much about this place. The variable isn’t that he knows SHOCKS was here. That’s a constant for sure. It’s why. What was he? An experiment? An anomaly in his own right? Someone like me, who got caught up in events and bonded, then got conscripted by SHOCKS? Depending on the answer, my strategy for dealing with him needs to be different.
If he’s an experiment like James, maybe I can reason with him, and even if I can’t, he might want me to shut the experiment down. If he’s an anomaly, I have no problem destroying him the second he’s a problem. But if he’s what we think he is—just a guy who had the bad luck to get caught up in stuff—that’s different.
The equation’s not going to solve itself. I need to know more.
I follow Alexander down the stairs.
There’s another burn mark in the staff-only area.
It’s funny, though. The rest of the room’s full of untouched hiking and camping equipment, plus more mountaineering and rescue equipment than I’ve ever seen before. If James hadn’t told me what it was, I wouldn’t be able to identify any of it.
And it’s all in great shape. There are bodies down here, and they’re definitely dead, but their uniforms and backpacks are untouched—and unburnt.
[Claire, I don’t have access to any security systems. They’re all running off solar, and I can look at them, but all the cameras are fried, the alarm systems are offline and inaccessible, and even the smoke detectors aren’t working. This place has power. It has water. But it doesn’t have any way for me to connect to it,] James says. [It’s like it was set up to be impossible for me to interact with, but I could a month ago. I did a month ago.]
“Do you remember what happened?” I ask.
[I…don’t.] James goes quiet. [When the SHOCKS facilities all went air-gapped to stop the System’s access attempts, I lost contact with SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia. Whatever happened to this facility happened after the initial decision to isolate, but judging by the tourists, before any lockdown order occurred. I can’t get into the Security Checkpoint, either.]
Alexander doesn’t care about my mumbling to myself. He’s looking for something; his massive backpack’s off his shoulders and sitting on a table above the handful of bodies. All my stuff from basic living could probably have fit in his pack with room to spare.
What I do have is the knowledge that the SHOCKS VVI survivors passed by here and that they did it only a few hours ago—in the early morning. The door was unlocked and hanging open, and muddy bootprints were all over the floor. I’m closing in on them.
But I haven’t caught up yet. And Director Ramirez is pushing them fast.
Right now, I need to know more about Alexander—and I need to get ready for a long trip into the mountains, because while I haven’t asked James, I’ve got a feeling SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia is under Mount Olympus. Unless there’s another entrance, I’m going to be hoofing it.
So I busy myself with looting. It’s not like anyone here needs the spare uniforms or backpacking food that’s all ‘just add water,’ anyway. And while I fill out a backpack that feels like it’s almost as big as Alexander’s, I watch what he’s doing.
He’s not looking for supplies.
I watch him through the metal shelves as he reaches a wall with a map of the Olympic Peninsula on it; I can barely see the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and the rest of it’s unfamiliar, but it’s covered in colored pins. He starts pulling them out: three reds, a handful of blues, and a single yellow. The loose pins fall to the floor in a pile.
Then he steps into the map and vanishes.
One second, he’s there. The next, he’s not. I abandon my hiding spot; his backpack’s still here, but both of the crystals that were orbiting him aren’t anymore. Wherever he went, it’s got something to do with the map.
[I got a recording,] James says unnecessarily. He’s recording everything we do, and if I saw the colors of the pins Alexander pulled, so did he. I scoop up the pins and pore over the map for their locations.
Logically, people don’t just disappear by walking into maps. But logically, freshmen in high school can’t teleport to different realities. But maybe this is replicable.
[Reds: Kalaloch, Port Angeles, Forks,] James says.
“Forks, really? Isn’t that where…”
[Yep. That was a SHOCKS cover-up a long time ago. Blue: Sol Duc, Kalaloch again, Hoh, Hurricane Ridge, Lake Ozette. Yellow: Mount Olympia.]
I shove the pins back into the map, right into their pin-holes. Then I pull them out again. Nothing happens, but I didn’t honestly expect it to. What’s important isn’t that Alexander is gone. It’s that I know the different places he could have gone to. If we discount Hurricane Ridge—since I’m there—that gives me seven possible places. Uh, assuming the map or Alexander’s power works like I think it does. That’s a big assumption, and James isn’t sure either.
Either way, I can’t follow him right now, and he lied to me. He doesn’t need to get to Obstruction Point. That’s the opposite direction from anywhere he pulled a pin to. He’ll be back, though. That’s the truth, because his stuff’s still here. So maybe he wasn’t lying about camping here tonight.
Either way, James mentioned that this place is tied to SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia, which means there’s probably a creepy research facility or guard post here. And it probably has an entrance in the staff-only area.
I get to work checking the walls and rugs, then the elevator that takes guests up and down between the visitor’s center’s levels if they can’t use the stairs. I try plugging James into it, but that doesn’t work, either. [There definitely was a SHOCKS Security Checkpoint here,] he says. He’s just as confused as I am. [The door was right here.]
There’s nothing but a blank wall where James leads me.
So, yeah, I’m stumped.
But this isn’t really about Alexander, is it? He’s a curiosity and a possible threat, but he’s not why I’m here. I’m here for Sora and Dad, and because I need to make sure Director Ramirez doesn’t do anything stupid—if I can.
I go back outside and focus on picking up their trail.
It doesn’t take me long. They kept moving. There’s a trail that leads away from the ancient-looking, abandoned ski lifts and the visitor’s center and into the tree-less mountains to the west. And there are boot prints in the half-dried mud. It stormed like a motherfucker last night, and there are so many boot-prints that it has to be them.
Okay. So. I’ve got their last path. I’ve also got Alexander behind me—possibly—and a SHOCKS facility I can’t get into. James pulls up a map of Olympic National Park. He’s helpfully put glowing circles over all the places where there were pins, including the places Alexander didn’t pull. The only place SHOCKS Victoria and Vancouver Island could be going is Mount Olympia.
Based on how they’ve been moving, I’ve got a day or two to catch them—unless they speed up. Part of me wants to do it now, but…
[Claire, I need to tell you something. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the fate of our reality may hinge on you hearing it,] James interrupts.
I realize I’ve already taken a dozen steps down the trail after Sora and Dad, but I stop. “What?” I say, a little more snap in my voice than I intended.
[The Halcyon System’s planning on pulling out of Reality Zero. There’s too low a likelihood of it being able to survive Merge Prime.]
My blood goes cold. “How long?”
[You have a week,] James says.
“No. How long have you known?”
[A couple of days. I’ve been monitoring the percentage chance of R-0 collapsing, though, and it’s been creeping up ever since you beat the Voiceless Singer. I’ve been arguing with the System to buy time.]
I plug that into an equation that’s forming. I should be angry with James, but he didn’t lie to me. Omission is a lie, but…something about this doesn’t feel like that. More information. Less variables. “What’s the chance of success?”
[Currently? Three-point-zero-five. At its lowest point? Less than a percent. That’s the only reason I bought us a week.] James sounds guilty, or defensive, or something.
I’m furious, but it’s not directed at him. It’s mostly directed at the Halcyon System, but some of it’s at me for not seeing it. “A week, then?”
[A week. Six days, twenty-one hours, fifteen minutes, and a little change.]
That’s going to take some reprioritization. It means maybe letting Director Ramirez reach SHOCKS Headquarters Olympia. It means maybe not rescuing Dad and Sora right away. If I only have a week, I have to do something. I turn around and head back to the visitor’s center. James and I need to either break into the SHOCKS facility or figure out the map, because we don’t have time for a two-day chase across alpine mountains and through the rainforest. We have too much to do.
And I’m not sure I’m ready to do it.
I push the visitor center’s door back open.
“Girl, this is where we say goodbye,” Alexander says.
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