Rebellion in the Shadows

The lab was more organized than the last time. The mess of wires and debris, were shoved off to the side. Tesser stood over a strange, circular item on one of the tables. The small metal object was opened in the middle and she was making some sort of adjustment with a soldiering iron. Arwago got her attention and we walked towards her, sidestepping some of the clutter.

Tesser was wearing her goggles and her eyes looked three times their normal size when she looked towards us. When she saw Arwago her entire face lit up. Then she saw me, and her look turned sour. She grabbed a rag from a drawer and threw it over the device she was working on. After the soldiering iron was unplugged, her tiny feet brought her towards us.

“Arwago? I was just finishing up a little project. Did you need something?” she was shooting furtive me glances in between each word.

“Actually, I need a favor for Talaya,” Arwago said. He went to look at a desktop monitor near where Tesser had been working in an attempt to ignore both of us in favor of the screen.

“Why?” Her cheeks flushed and her eyes disappeared. The clear lenses of goggles had darkened, turning into monitors. I knew from the way she typed in midair as she faced my direction. After a few seconds, she stopped typing and a light flashed from the top of her goggles. Her calcumat said aloud, “Clear.”

“Did you just scan me? Arwago what the hell?”

“Can’t be too safe,” Tesser said, adjusting her goggles to the top of her head.

“I don’t need this, I will find someone else to help me out,” I said.

“No, come on. Tell her what you told me.” His eyes were sincere. Something about them was so open, so inviting, like anything I told him would be safe. It was the same feeling I got from my dad, even if Arwago was twenty years his junior.

I decided to put everything on the table. Not just about my dad, but about Zarleque and what we had seen during the simulation. They both sat and listened without interrupting, until I described Arkii’s surface.

“Blue, as in water?” Arwago asked with his mouth agape, “Did you see land? Or anything else?”

“No, just the water and only for a second,” I said. He frowned and looked at the ground lost in his own thoughts.

After I finished. They looked at each other and held a silent conversation. It lasted a few seconds, then Tesser started talking very fast.

“Let’s review the system at your home and see the entry-exit log. We can also try to ping the body chip your father has. While we do that, we need to check hospital records just to be sure he hasn’t been admitted. We can use his physical description and a recent photo. I can pull one from his last entry into the home since it would be the most current.” She ran around the lab from monitor to monitor. Arwago didn’t look fazed at all by the chaos. He squished farther into his comfortable chair and scrolled through the same calcumat screens as before. It was making me dizzy to watch her run around, so I sat down next to Arwago.

“I’m going to scan the house for fingerprints and heat signatures to make a time table,” she said.

“Wait, what does this mean?” I asked.

“It means we believe you and want to help,” Arwago said.

“Thank Tau. Is there anything I can do?”

“Sit tight. Its going to take a while,” Tesser said. I tapped my foot. It was only a few minutes until I was bored out of my mind.

“I’m gonna look around,” I said to Arwago.

“Try not to break stuff,” he said. His eyes didn’t leave his screen.

The beakers and flasks were nearby, so I went to investigate them first. I leaned down to eye level and watched the bubbles form, float to the top and leave through a tube that spiraled into a green bag. Each one inflated the bag a tiny bit more. When that got boring, a bright, blue light across the room grabbed my attention.

I came around the cluster of counters and cupboards and was surprised to see Arwago leaning against the wall next to the door. The way he was standing there made my face flush. It felt like he had caught me doing something wrong.

“I was just looking around,” I said. He didn’t look up from his calcumat but reached over and closed the door.

“Don’t touch anything,” he said, and with that, walked back over to Tesser. She had turned the monitor of her goggles off and was staring at me. It was haunting to see her eyes magnified so clearly from so far away. The look they gave me was unnerving. She turned back to the desktop and the goggles turned back on. My self-tour of the lab was over, so I rejoined them at the desks. Arwago was reading and she was still working, so I sat down. Watching them was even less exciting than watching the bubbles. After a while, I fell asleep.

It felt like only minutes later when Tesser woke me.

“Hey,” she said. Her face was filled with concern. Arwago was standing next to her and had a similar, if not identical look on his face.

“Did you find him?” I asked with a yawn. Tomma had jumped into my lap at some point and was sleeping in a ball of fur on my lap.

“We need more information,” Arwago said.

“Like what?” I asked. They looked at each other as if they didn’t know who should give me the bad news. Arwago apparently lost whatever contest they had and explained.

“So, we investigated and it’s complicated. His calcumat is either broken or purposefully turned off. Even trying to ping the body-monitoring chip isn’t working,” he said. Tesser jumped in, “That doesn’t happen. Ever. They are sustained by body temperature, they are waterproof, shock proof, heat resistant. They hardly ever break. Yours is the first calcumat I have seen malfunction in five years, six months, and ten days. Our money is betting that it was tampered with to hide his location,” she said.

Tesser looked at Arwago again and she began talking slowly and quietly,

“OK, so there’s more information, I ran fingerprints for the house. There’s a ton, like over twenty, and some are from today. Body heat signatures registered as recently as an hour ago, but there was no access to the house through the code panel. Meaning someone disabled it and went inside.”

“Can you tell who any of the fingerprints belong to? Maybe a neighbor or something?” I was thinking of Suttah or any of the other neighbors that hung out around our house.

“Not yet but soon. It just takes a few hours to run that through our database, then it will take a little longer to cross reference that with heat signatures, so I’ll know who was in your house and at what time. It’s important to establish a timeline,” Tesser said. She swiveled her chair around back to the desk and was typing again. “We would like to keep looking for him using a few things that you can give us.” Tesser had swiped info to my calcumat and I projected it into the air in front of me. It was a profile of my dad. Some of it was general; his eye color, hair color, height and weight. Then there was some not-so-general information.

Tesser started to explain while typing on a standard holo-keyboard, “We ran a diagnostic on basic household functions so we could really build a decent profile. It will create an algorithm that can identify your father based on his daily habits in conjunction with his physical appearance. I mean, we can even go as far as doing a follicle count on his head.”

The information she was talking about was detailed to say the least. The time he woke up every day, his body temperature averages by hour, how often he urinated, his daily caloric intake, and how many times a night he turned, coughed, or snored were all listed on there. Even things such as the frequency range of his voice, his pulse, and blood pressure. Everything that made my dad an individual person was on those reports. All pulled from his home monitoring system and old calcumat records.

“The idea is that with more information we can really build a profile that can only be filled by your father. Is there anything we missed?” Arwago asked.

“No, you could practically clone him with all this.”

Tesser turned to me, “To do that we would need his blood, speaking of which…” Tesser stabbed me in the finger with a tiny pin. A single drop of blood formed, and she wiped it away with a cotton stick before I could even yelp out.

“What the hell? A little warning next time maybe?” I said sucking the accosted finger.

“We are going to use your DNA to finish the profile. We can biotrack people in real time, but it takes a while to complete. Maybe two days,” she said as she dropped the stick into a clear tube.

“Whatever it takes I guess,” I said. Tesser glanced at Arwago. She closed her eyes then nodded. Another silent conversation I didn’t understand.

“There’s something else.” Arwago flicked his head towards the other end of the room. He walked to the door that he had closed before, the one to the blue room. He stopped and jerked his head to the side again— he wanted me to follow him. I jumped up, forcing Tomma out of my lap and sending him flying across the floor. He gave me an angry disapproving hiss that I ignored and followed Arwago.

He opened the door and walked inside. The room was the size of a large closet. There was nothing in there except the blue glow of the monitors and a few folded metal chairs.

On one of the many screens the word “Password?” displayed. A holographic keypad appeared in the center of the room floating right below chest height. Arwago typed his password in and half a dozen camera feeds covered the entire wall. He looked briefly at each of the fifteen or so different live feeds of bedrooms, offices, and the hangar bay.

My wide eyes zoned in on each of the different scenes in turn. “Tau Ceti,” I whispered.

“We have decided to trust you. There’s one main reason: it looks like Sidarc doesn’t trust you.” He stood at the keyboard, each tap of his finger bringing up another view.

“Trust me with what? Treason?” I asked, wide-eyed. One screen was a comm sheet that updated every half second with new comms from hundreds of different people. It looked like same thing that Arwago was constantly scrolling through on his calcumat.

“Treason? No, see I prefer other terms for it,” he said. His laugh only made everything sound more unbelievable.

“Arwago, I can’t be here. I need to go,” I said. I started for the door, but he blocked my path.

“It was just a little joke. Let me explain.” He raised his hands in the air and gave me a soft smile. It was hard not to trust that face.

“Fine,” I said. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious. He dragged a pair of the metal chairs to the center of the room with an obnoxious scraping sound. We both sat, and he stared at me.

“There are things that have been happening, and it has been going on for a while. I’m not really sure when it started but I know that people have spent years trying to figure it out.” His brown eyes stared without blinking, but I didn’t look away. He had rehearsed this, or at the very least presented it to many people before me.

“There are people in on it from all over the world. It’s bigger than you can possibly imagine, and Tesser and I are sort of in charge of it.”

“A big part of what, exactly?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.

“I don’t want to freak you out. After I tell you, I want you to take time to really think about it. There’s information I can give to you— tons of it— to help support what I am saying,” he said. I didn’t talk, just waited on bated breath to hear what he had to say. He leaned in closer.

“The World Flying Force isn’t what you think it is, and we aren’t going to take it anymore.”