Speck and Riverrun

Lyra watches the short man lie against the wall in the silvery dawn hours glowing through the frosted windows in grids. This side faces the sea. She knew this was a close place to a beach but wasn’t sure if she’d get to see one herself. The screaming seagulls made it more obvious it was true.

She needed to get to know more of Seth. Now that she’s sure it’s him she feels extra cautious to make sure it’s him. Beard matches, so does the tussled black hair, the slightly lost eyes. No need to jerk him awake though.

Lyra clanks around a bit in her large pack, unfamiliar with how it was packed, but managing to fish out food of some kind. There are a lot of individually wrapped wafers sewn into the corners of the pack. She yanks and noisily unwraps a red foil square, bites into its dark marble contents. There’s a fruity gaminess she likes.

She hears a rustle behind her and looks back, Seth rises on one arm.

“Here!” she tosses an unopened generic bar of fruity meat jerky over her left shoulder. He snatches it from the air and rips the wrapper open and shoves it in his mouth in three big bites without waiting to chew.

“Gwolthftheewarroo?” he masticates back to Lyra. She points to the foot of the ledge at a packet of about a dozen water bottles. Seth chews a little bit longer and washes it down with half of one.

“Mmmrp. OH GOD thank you I was starving, got those stomach feelings so intense it woke me up… or maybe the sunlight did?” noticing for the first time it is morning. Invigorated, Seth becomes deeply curious about the stale smelling machine shop around them, pops up and starts wandering around the dim light and faded tools.

Without turning, asks, “And where was it you said we are?”

“Old LA train-yards, hidden in the abandoned tip of a full circle block of warehouses. We were supposed to meet on the platform in Union Station but were held up… uh, diverting and securing this place. Lyra glances at Paisley, who Seth now notices is sitting amiably at the end of the long wall-bench, upright but eyes shut as though in meditation.

The dust covered tools and oily smells are putting the maker in Seth at high alert. Awake now, his mind is somewhere else as he begins to wander, pulling up to a large fractal vise.

He places the water bottle and slowly turns the large knob on one side, speaking as he watches each level of dove-hinged jaws clamp together and surround the bottle in eight neat touch-points: “Once they found out I knew a better way, they took my work and then tried to take my life.”

The low sun finds a way through unseen lines and corners of windows, throwing diagonal traces across the room that fill the silence.

“Better way?” Lyra finally asks, familiar with the subject but not the science. “Better way for what?”

“To remove the need for power!” Seth cranks the vise a little tighter. A thin sunbeam sparkles on the water still inside. Lyra doesn’t know the whole story, she was thrown into the midst of a corporate power struggle looking for mercenary work, and got sent here on an extraction mission. She looks sideways at Seth and shrugs imploringly.

He continues. “Well, not all of it. But the intense parts that need it the most, where they want scale. Their systems have been burning so many resources, eating through so much, creating dependencies they cannot justify, they can’t scale forever.”

Seth turns the vise knob tighter. The material from the bottle doesn’t crumple, nanofibers individually take in the pressure. A pattern of eight dimples can be seen displacing the inside. The upper part of the bottle begins to bulge as he turns, but doesn’t break.

Seth stops. Turns to Lyra, flowing across the sunbeams like one of the machines. Seth brings his eyes to her face and looks pleadingly, “I was able to show a sequence could remain in a metastable arrangement and provide the same depth of qubit field operations, I thought they would want to keep me around, I can’t believe I was just almost killed, I didn’t expect, this isn’t what, sorry this is so much, but I don’t–-”

His verbal stream of consciousness after being saved from certain death is cut short, the entire shop leaps into high contrast color.

They both look to Paisley. On each side of his inhuman jaw is a two-centimeter patch of light diffusing out and washing the room a deep alert red. The dark shadows cast by the huge machines makes everything strongly monochrome.

“Woah,” a little shocked by the sudden change, Seth barely sees a large object flying across the edge of a large lathe between him and Lyra. Just as 25 kilos of backpacking gear barrels into him, Seth catches a strap and swings the whole pack around, nearly throwing himself off balance and tumbling into a bin of scrap, catching the bottle affixed in the vise for balance.

“Put it on, we go up. Now.” Lyra has shouldered the pack and with her left hand tucked in one strap, points to the ceiling with a free arm. At the edge of the curved room the sunlight can’t make it through a set of painted glass tiles, high up the wall of the warehouse. In this slim shadowed space Seth spots a metal staircase leading to the roof.

With a swish Lyra leaps up first. Seth follows closely, keeping his distance underneath. Her feet look as if she wears ninja slippers, grabbing each rung by her toes. It seems that Paisley is twice Seth’s height and width, but the brute makes it up the narrow two-story pipe just as quickly.

Lyra scrambles through a square door, pulls Seth up by the arm into the small space, Paisley following on the other side of the hole. It is a control room, built for just a handful of instruments and operators, offering a wide view of the surrounding industrial area. Now open to the air, windows completely gone, so also stripped clean of any electronics or other sorts of salvage.

Then as if it came from nowhere, BRRRRRRTHHHHSHHHH… a sleek, vertically-arranged hovering object appears on the roof of the structure. It almost looks like it has spots.

“Quick quick quick!” Lyra whisper-orders to the two men. They shuffle through the broken-out window, grasping the edges and heaving their bodies onto the flat roof. Behind them, Lyra flips onto it like a gymnast, making purchase on the balls of her feet and sliding a meter on debris to where the open-cockpit helicopter sits whirring deeply, like a swarm of very large bees.

Against the nearby LA highway and mag-train traffic, it is barely audible. The carrier looks like a clear umbrella over a palm tree stump. An area for up to three passengers is arranged beneath a lightweight windshield that circles the upper half. To Seth, it looks like a fuzzy ski lift.

“HEY! YOU UP THERE!” comes a shout in short echoes like a tile bathroom, careening through the warehouse alleys.

Lyra glides into one of the carrier’s spaces and pats the seats on each side of her. Paisley and Seth take up each, moving to attach their packs and then twirling to sit back on them, facing out.

When are all finally belted across the chest with their feet tucked into soft pouches on the triangular base, the edges of their seating begins to wrap them close. In just a matter of seconds, thin tendrils of material have rolled across their legs and arms clutching them to the innards of the odd gondola.

Lyra regards wide-eyed Seth. Whatever doubt she had is no good to her now. She reaches over and pats him on his secured arm and starts to say something encouraging, but is interrupted by more loud shouting, getting closer.

“HEY! STOP!” the voice echoes again, now several groups of footsteps pounding cement are heard running around the building below.

Taking two straps above her, Lyra allows the same material to grow across her hands, grasping her wrists firmly. “READY?!” is all she can manage to shout as the craft immediately lurches upwards, off the roof and into the sky.

They’re flying, and it feels like they’re barely connected to a device no bigger than an eagle. Looking up, Seth can’t see how the propellers are made, but his curiosity falters while Lyra attempts to steer and control the thing. She swings it back and forth on its axis just slightly one way and then the other, pulling each arm down and resting the other, getting a feel for yaw…

“HALT! GROUND THAT VEHICLE NOW!”

…then the elbows, forward and back, spinning on the central axis a couple of times for feel and and finally Lyra yells “OK! LEAVING NOW! BYEEEEE!”

As if by sudden action of Lyra’s learned control, the vessel darts to the right where they come face-to-face with the side of a freeway, blinding sunlight rising above trapped commuters. A mag-train flashes by on the other side, just beyond the main yard where Seth fell out of the car. The track rises above the LA River here, where he should have been (face-down most likely) less than 48 hours ago.

They whoosh up several meters higher, drifting north and slightly east. Canyons of concrete and tall warehouse walls gushing with graffiti make the ground below them seem like a model of a film set. They rise above buildings not far from where Seth’s trail of blood pushed him out of the wreckage of the wheelchair. Their pursuers will not fire so close to the public, they’re almost free. In a final vertigo-inducing set of acrobatics, Lyra clears the freeway and zips them across the river.

♮ ♮ ♮

Lyra has been in one of these flying whirligigs before, it’s clear. Seth certainly has not, his “seat” feels more like a cargo attachment, form-fitting special safety gear he guesses. Their packs are snug enough behind each of them, made to strap in and secure its passenger. Military-grade paratrooper gear? Vulcan scientific exploration vehicular? Vigilante underground railroad transporter?

While turning the words over in his mind to distract him from the uncomfortably angular ride, Lyra’s voice suddenly brightens the half-dome surrounding them. Now that they were airborne, the underneath of the umbrella was kept fairly comfortable and wind-free. Some sort of built-in mic and speaker system amplified their voices instantly.

“This is made in the same facility I found Paisley. Sorry for all the jerking around, I’m trying to pick a path through a lot of airspace we cannot be caught in.”

In the distance they can see the Great Disney Nanodome rising through the broody ocean-effect haze. A near replica in design of the old concert hall that was leveled in the Great Elsa Fire, Disney captured their own airspace under a climate controllable fixture. This greatly expanded their available hours during the harshest of heat storms. Built of materials that can disassemble and reassemble during and after earthquakes. Seth has never seen it from the air.

So high in the air. Suddenly, the seat around him feels like the fractal vise where he left his bottle of water. His breathing becomes labored, head feels heavy, the sun gleaming sideways off the Disney dome shines in his eyes.

Pulling him out of anxiety’s spin, Lyra announces like a flight captain: “We’re off to a place called Hetmaikaa. There’s an oasis. I’m glad we found you or I wouldn’t know what to do there. Paisley is great for specimen collection but data presentation is a challenge.”

Seth feels like he’s riding tandem, back when he and his gang of college friends in DC stumbled on an abandoned 1979 Honda CB650. They worked several days rebuilding the carb, which sat undone on Seth’s coffee table for a couple of tense weeks. Purple gas tank, that’s what he remembers about it. And really bad suspension. But the bike got them around the city. Finding gas became a problem.

This loud motorcycle memory makes him yell too loud in response, “ARE WE GOING–” realizing his mistake because both Lyra and Paisley jump at his too-loud voice. In a normal tone this time, he says “Sorry, uh… are we going there in this thing? How far is this place?”

“It won’t take us long, not in Speck here.” They feel the entire vehicle shake, like a hiccup. “She’ll get us there in under an hour once we’re free of the city. Jawbone Canyon is our next stop!”

Lyra is leaning into the Captain act, swings them to the left and above a set of brutal high-rise apartment blocks, then steeply to a 500-meter floating cruise. Spinning them directly into the rising winter sun, she hopes to get as close as possible to the tips of the foothills to keep their passage hidden.

♮ ♮ ♮

The San Gabriel range is close on their left. Lyra taps a shuffling pattern into the footrests. The transport picks up speed and moves them even closer, swinging in and around the topology to keep them out of sight but moving quickly. In just a few quick minutes, they’ve flung themselves up a canyon with a river and a few long reservoirs, and then into the middle of the mountain range.

Up here the peaks are spread out, they aren’t as rocky and chunked as the higher elevations, trepidatious for the small craft. Short, stubby vegetation barely survives on the sides as they make their way up the canyon. Then sudden drops in elevation are meeting them at every turn as they snake between the largest of the peaks. Soon the bare windblown browns and grasses give way to a dark green splotch of pine forests stretching down and to the west.

As if without warning, the mountains are behind them and the wide expanse of the high desert lies stretched out as far as they can see. It felt more like they were moving time around them than going fast. The terrain a 3D map where they could shrink down and fly around. The ride felt that easy, any of the discomfort of their too-prompt departure had melted away to a comforting feeling, like being held in someone’s hand.

“Mojave proper,” Lyra offers, “we’re landing close to the far end, we’ll have to hike inward to find Hetmaikaa. Somewhere near an old lake bed. Or so the instructions say.”

Seth jokes, “always an old lake bed, isn’t it?”

Old lake beds in the desert are frequent these days, the last of their water sits hoarded by the tips of mountains. Many people who settled in this sector are gone, the land has gotten harsh and overgrown or returned to the sand.

Seth looks easterly across the brazen tan of the landscape, “Why not just fly there?”

“Oh that would mean we’d have to carry a fourth pack with enough rations and water for Speck. She’ll be our bivouac HQ in Jawbone. I’m not sure she’s up for the dreamscape.” Lyra leans over and not-whispers, “I think she likes you, Seth!”

For the first time, he notices the little foot rests and seat endings have irregular spots, like a minimal leopard, matching the underside he saw from the roof. The sticky-not-sticky binding material around his limbs seems to very briefly, for a split second, tighten and let go.

Did a helicopter just hug him?

What’s a dreamscape?

Paisley scans behind them, trails of glistening gray he notices across the mountainside are bothersome. Not logical parts of the landscape. Too straight. Quantum-field disruption lines?

He reaches to his computer of a jaw and sets a manual proximity monitor, then relaxes back in his seat. Seth isn’t the only one ready to be connected with the ground again.