Chapter 2: Learning Curve

We all imagine ourselves the agents of our destiny, capable of determining our own fate. But have we truly any choice in when we rise? Or when we fall? Or does a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction? Is it evolution that takes us by the hand? Does science point our way? Or is it God who intervenes, keeping us safe?

The man with the goatee picked up the cell phone and flipped it open with practiced ease. “Yes, sir?”

“Yes, sir, the package has been delivered.”

“I have my lieutenants monitoring the situation now, sir.”

“No, sir, I don’t believe she has any idea.”

“Are you sure, sir? I don’t think that’s necess… yes, sir.”

“Sir, I really don’t think he poses any threat to us.”

“Yes, sir.” With a sigh, he held the phone to his ear even after the other end of the line went dead. For the third time in as many days, he turned the situation over and over again in his mind, wondering why all this was necessary. This was not why he’d gotten into this business, but there was no backing out of it now. The avalanche had started, as the saying went, and it was too late for the pebbles to vote. Slowly, regretfully, he punched a speed-dial number and hit the Talk button.

“Yes, it’s me,” he started, a note of mourning creeping into the otherwise immaculately professional and commanding voice. “We have received our go orders. The target is number 47. Bring him in, give him the standard treatment. He is to remember nothing of the incident, or of anything relating to current events.” He hung up the phone, without waiting for a response; he knew there wouldn’t be one.

There never was.

##############################

Jeanie sat on her bed in her attic bedroom, slowly, inevitably, going insane. Jim was gone on another business trip to Massachusetts, and with every minute he was gone, she realized that she missed him more. As the two of them spent more and more time together, the more things about him stuck in her brain: the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes when he laughed, even the really minute details like the rhythm of his heartbeat when the two of them sat together.

Closing her eyes for a moment, she could still envision everything about him when he said goodbye four days ago, from the slight breeze blowing down the street to the sound of the traffic from the nearby highway to the song playing on the radio -- Stone Sour’s “Through the Glass” -- to the car that had driven past as she stood at the driver’s window of his car -- a maroon 2003 Honda Accord, PA license plate HRG-0925, with a 30-something brunette behind the wheel, driving with her knees because she had had a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

Boy, she thought to herself, I must be desperate not to think about him. Why do I remember crap like that?

Returning her thoughts to Jim, she realized the worst part was that she really didn’t feel like there was anyone close to her with whom she could talk about it. Her roommates were certainly out: Brianna was never around, Olsen was going through his/her own transformation, and Chris… well, things with Chris were the way things with Chris were. T.J. was nice enough, but he was still giving off his “I’m tired of taking things seriously” vibe. Trevor, despite the two of them having become better friends over the last year, still kind of creeped her out a little bit -- she still wasn’t really comfortable with people randomly flirting with her, a trait for which he was infamous -- and she still barely knew his housemate, Shaune, at all. Whitney was at school, an hour’s drive away. As she continued ticking down her mental list of friends, her phone rang.

“Jeanie? Hi. It’s Rebecca Roach.”

“Rebecca? Hey!” The two of them weren’t the closest of friends, but just hearing a comforting voice did wonders for Jeanie’s mood at the moment. “What do you need?”

Rebecca paused for a moment before answering, as if searching for the right way to phrase things. ”I just got the feeling that maybe you could use some company or something tonight, since I know Jim’s out of town. John’s over, we’re just playing around on the Wii. We can come pick you up, if you want.”

Rebecca had been spending quite a bit of time with John Prager recently, and while Jeanie wasn’t sure that the burgeoning couple would help take her mind off Jim, it was still better than sitting in her room and stewing. “That would be… perfect, Rebecca. Thank you.”

“Anytime. We’ll be right over.”

##############################

Jim sat in the hotel restaurant, picking at his cheese sticks. He marveled for a moment at whatever equipment they had in that kitchen; he’d been sitting there nibbling at them for at least 15 minutes, and they were still almost too hot to eat. Sipping his water, he sat back and tried to relax.

He’d been sent to Massachusetts on business enough times now that it was no longer “strange,” but it still wasn’t “home.” “Home” was his apartment in Pittsburgh, with his bed and his stuff and his games and his Jeanie and his friends. This was… this was a place to spend a few days and make a little money.

And eat pretty bad cheese sticks, he mused to himself. He tossed the appetizer back onto the plate, small crumbs of breading scattering as molten cheese oozed between them, and signed the slip of paper sitting next to him that would bill the food to his room. The ambient conversation was louder than he would have expected, so it was the pattern of the words more than the words themselves that caused him to look up and see a familiar face standing in front of him.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear… Hey!” he said with no small degree of surprise. “What are you doing here?? Aren’t you supposed to be in Pittsburgh?”

“You’re going to get up from the table and follow me,” she said quietly, shaping the words very carefully, leaning over so that only he could hear her. The bangs of her blond hair fell in front of her eyes.

In Jim’s mind, everything else in the room fell silent. The words echoed past his ears, past his mind and into his very soul. Not saying a word, he got up from the table and followed her as she led him out of the restaurant to the curb. A black SUV was waiting there, its engine already running, the young man behind the wheel looking both nervous and bored at the same time. She opened the back door for him and spoke with the same even, deliberate tone. “Get in, sit down and fall asleep. You really want to go to sleep.”

He nodded slowly, stepped into the vehicle, and lay down across the back, asleep almost before his head hit the seat. She closed the door behind him, then walked quickly to the front passenger door and got in.

“Let’s go,” she said to her brother, who silently shifted the car into Drive.

##############################

Kate walked into her apartment the next afternoon, the last rays of sunlight streaming in through the window as she tossed her bag and coat onto the recliner. I’ll put them away later, she thought. She grabbed the remote and turned on the TV just to have some background noise. It had been too quiet the last few days; she hadn’t heard from Bayani, and she was starting to get worried. Ever since his thing with the clock last week, he just hadn’t been himself: preoccupied, distracted, even downright moody.

Come to think of it, many of her friends had been acting strangely recently. And the fact that most of those friends were also the Senior Staff for the convention of which she was Chair worried her greatly. The last thing she needed was another explosion of drama; the last one had threatened to tear Tekkoshocon apart, and it had only been by the hard work of several people -- several of the people I’m now worrying about, she now realized -- that they had gotten through it. This was her family, and despite the strong, commanding veneer she presented to them, it tore her apart when they fought amongst themselves.

She picked up her phone and called John’s number, hoping that he would play the voice of reason to her worrying, but there was no answer. She turned towards her DVD shelves and reached for one of her box sets, not wanting to watch whatever it was that was playing on the TV.

“Miss me?” came Bayani’s voice softly from the other chair.

Kate wheeled around, almost knocking her chair over as she flung her arms around him. “Honey!” she almost screamed. Where did you come from?” Only after her initial surprise and glee at seeing him did she really take the time to look him over.

She’d never seen him more tired. His jacket was dusted with soot, his face was haggard, his glasses scratched. There was a scar running down his cheek that hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him. But worst of all was the look in his eyes. The familiar spark that had been one of the things that had initially caused her to fall in love with him was, if not dead, then certainly on life support.

“What happened? Where have you been?”

“Not where,” he said, very evenly and dispassionately. “When.”

##############################

It had been a week and a half since Whitney discovered the sketch of her and Jimmy. It was just two days after that when she had -- with no knowledge or memory thereof -- drawn herself and Trevor flying away from the burning ExpoMart. To say that she was worried would be an understatement of galactic proportions.

To say that she was becoming obsessed would be approaching the general ballpark.

“I didn’t know you were a ‘Heroes’ fan,” Trevor had written over IM after she sent him the sketch. She wasn’t; in fact she didn’t even know anything about the show. When she told him this, he explained to her with some surprise that she’d included “The Symbol,” a stylized half-DNA helix shaped like a long “S,” in her picture, as a charm hanging from the zipper of his jacket. It had taken her another two days to realize that The Symbol had also appeared in the sketch of her and Jimmy, on the cover of the sketchbook. From there, she had become fixated. Having not heard from her, Jimmy had already called her more than once to remind her to put down what she was doing to -- in no particular order -- go to class, do her show, eat, sleep…

All she could think of was trying to remember every sketch she’d done, and trying to find any more that were unfamiliar… or any more that featured The Symbol. It didn’t matter how long it would take, it didn’t matter what it cost.

Whitney Robinson was on a mission.

##############################

“Are you interested in our Rewards Card program? It lets you take advantage of special offers, plus you can build up points good towards ‘Personal Shopping Days,’ where you save an extra 10% off everything you purchase.” The pitch was rote by now, and Lindsey Wagner tried her best not to let the boredom of repetition show through in her voice.

“No,” said the customer dismissively, his voice gruff. Everything about him, from his slightly hunched-over posture to the baseball cap pulled low over his brow, made it very clear that he wanted to have as little to do with people as necessary.

Lindsey’s voice caught in her throat for a moment, then she continued with a practiced smile, “Well, then, that’ll be $14.93.” Being a generally friendly and outgoing person, she tried to make her customers as comfortable as possible, but when they were curt and snappish to her in return, as this one was, she tended to feel it. The man already had the exact change in his hand, placed it down on the counter, grabbed his book and was out the door as Lindsey called after him, “Sir, you forgot your…” but he was already gone, scribbling something onto a piece of paper he had removed from his pocket.

“…receipt. Sigh.”

A few seconds later, Lindsey’s cell phone sounded its “New Text Message” chime. She flipped open to find a message from Trevor: “Don’t you hate customers like that?” Looking up confusedly from the cashier stand, she could see his face, half-hidden behind one of the shelves in the sci-fi section, grinning and winking at her. She and Trevor had become extremely close friends over the past few months, and the feeling of safety he gave her was exactly what she needed right now. Seeing nobody coming towards the registers for the moment, she bounded across the store and leapt into his arms.

“Hey sweetie,” he whispered into her ear before setting her back down. “Rough night?”

“You have no idea,” she answered as she shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Need a break?”

She noticed almost immediately that here was something in his eyes and voice that said that the two of them needed to talk. Part of why they had become so close was the fact that they could read each other so easily. She glanced at her watch, nodded to him, and as she ran to tell her manager that she was taking her break, he called after her to grab her coat. She returned a few moments later, pulling on her jacket. “Where are we going?”

“Outside.” His voice got low and he glanced from side to side, despite himself. “I need to show you something.”

“What’s going on?”

He searched a moment for the right words. “Do you trust me?”

“What?”

He repeated the question again, emphasizing each word. “Do you trust me?”

Despite her confusion, she smiled at him, wondering what could possibly have him so worried that he would have to ask that of her. “You know I do. I trust you more than just about anyone. Trevor, I love you and you’re pretty, but you’re starting to freak me out.” Hearing that broke his serious demeanor somewhat, and smiling, he took her hand and started walking quickly out of the store and towards the entrance to the mall where she worked. “Where are we going?” she asked, almost giggling with nervous excitement.

“To look at the stars.”

##############################

“April?!” Kate asked, shouting even though she was whispering. “You went to… APRIL?!?!”

“April.” Bayani took another sip of the tea that Kate had made for him to try to bring him back to what the two of them considered “normal.”

“But… that’s not possible, you can’t travel through time! No one can!”

“I CAN!” he shouted, not caring anymore if her neighbors heard him. This stopped her momentarily, which allowed him to catch his breath and regain his composure as well. “I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I was there, just for a few minutes. It was… it was the weekend of Tekko.” She knew by the way his face fell when he said it that this was not going to end well. “We were all there, and then something happened, I don’t know what. It started out as a fight, I think, one of those random hall battles. John was there, trying to contain it, with Chris and Joe and the rest of Public Safety, and it just got out of hand. Next thing I knew, there was some kind of… fire or something. People started panicking, I couldn’t see very well. There were kids running everywhere.” Kate, unable to speak at this point, simply sat and waited, her mouth hung slightly open and her eyes starting to well up with tears.

“Suddenly, everyone was fighting. Not just attendees, I mean us too. Olsen was yelling at T.J. and Jimmy was running around because no one could find Whitney, Gogal was… I don’t know, Gogal was in the middle of it all somehow, Rebecca was trying to get the attendees out… it was insane.”

“Where was everyone else?”

“You… you don’t want to know.”

##############################

“He’s ready for you, sir,” said the blonde into the phone.

On the other end of the line, she heard the satisfied voice of the man with the goatee. “Excellent. Has the recognition problem been taken care of?”

“Not yet. You wanted him whole for the experiments, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course. How careless of me; thank you.”

“When can you get here? I don’t know how long we can hold him before we start arousing suspicion.”

“As soon as I can. Keep him under sedation until then. Use your brother if you have to, but nothing before you took him. I want him as pristine as possible.”

“Does she suspect anything, sir?”

“I don’t believe so; that problem is being taken care of as we speak. It turns out we have another unwitting ally in our little crusade.”

##############################

“Wasn’t Jim supposed to get back today, Jeanie? Where is he?” Rebecca inquired.

“He was,” she said, “but he had to stay there. I got an email from him this afternoon.” At this, she became more than slightly annoyed. “I mean, you think he would have at least called me! Of course, it was the first time I’d heard from him at all in, like, three days, so I guess it’s better than nothing.”

John had come back from the bathroom during the last of this, and put his hand on her shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Jeanie, I’m sure he’s fine. Y’know, sometimes things come up at the last minute.” Seeing that his attempt at honest reassurance wasn’t helping, he smirked and tried a different approach. “Well, either that or he met some gorgeous blonde in the hotel restaurant, followed her out and you’ll never see him again. Y’know,” he continued, shaking his head playfully, “it really does break my heart that -- ow ow ow…” as Rebecca grabbed him by ear and pulled him away from the table.

##############################

Chris opened the cardboard box that had mysteriously shown up at his house. It was addressed to him, and had been mailed to him, but there was no return address. Inside, he found a miasma of papers, research, notes, tapes, and maps. He recognized the handwriting instantly, and the reality of it froze him to the core. The first letter he found was addressed to him, and was as much as anything a last will and testament. The second, written by a different person, rambled on at great length about how his father’s life had been cut so tragically short, and ended simply “He started it, but I couldn’t let him finish it. So now it falls to you.”

###

Trevor and Lindsey floated several hundred feet above the mall parking lot, confident that no one else could see them in the dark. Her eyes were wide with astonishment. “What?” he asked her playfully. “I told you we were going to look at the stars.”

###

Cat woke up that morning from what seemed like a vivid dream. She was not looking forward to going to classes that day; there were some days when she was very glad to be a Physics major, and others when she just couldn’t stand it. This was looking to be one of those “just couldn’t stand it” days. Worse yet, she’d forgotten to do her homework. Or so she thought: sitting there on her desk, in Mike’s own handwriting, was everything she’d need to get through that part of the day. She smiled. This was going to work out just fine.

###

Whitney was on the phone with Jimmy, barely able to speak through the crying. He was trying to console her, but it was no use; he was almost as devastated as she was. “Oh my God, no, oh my God, no, oh my God, no,” she kept repeating under her breath as her hand traced the pencil lines of the sketch she had just completed. There she was, on her knees on the floor, cradling her dear friend Jeanie’s body in her arms. Jeanie’s body was covered in blood, and the top of her skull had been removed.

###

T.J. walked up to the door of his own house, but realized too late that he had forgotten his keys. “Ah, crap,” he muttered to himself. “Gonna have to use the ‘emergency entrance.’” He closed his eyes for a moment, steadied himself, and then very carefully passed his hand through the molecules of the door. Feeling inside, he found and unlocked the deadbolt, twisted the doorknob lock and let himself inside. As he walked in, he shook his hand out for a few seconds. Stings like a mother every time I have to do that…

##############################

It took Trevor a moment to recognize that the muffled sound he and Shaune heard that evening was, in fact, a knock on their front screen door. Not only were they each absorbed in their respective laptop computers, but the television was also on, and the sound they were trying to identify resembled not so much someone knocking on a door, but more someone weakly and awkwardly kicking a loose sheet of metal. This, as it turns out, was exactly what it was.

He extricated himself from both the computer and the obstinate feline that currently occupied his lap, got up from the chair and opened the door. Chris Aumiller stood on his front porch, a large cardboard box cradled in both of his hands. His entire body was shaking; at first Trevor thought it was simply due to standing outside in a t-shirt in January. But once he saw the dried tracks of tears on Chris’s face, his reddened eyes, and the look on his face that conveyed both conviction and helplessness, Trevor bit back his initial, somewhat sarcastic reply.

“Holy shit, man, what are you doing out there without a coat?” he asked with genuine concern as he opened the screen door to let Chris inside. “It’s freezing!”

“Guys,” Chris started, choking momentarily on his words before continuing, “I got this in the mail. It’s stuff that used to… used to belong to my father…”

“What,” Shaune asked, not understanding but concerned about her friend, “your mom found it cleaning out the house or something?”

“No. There’s no return address. Whatever this thing is that’s happening to people… it goes deeper than any of us realize.”

This thing that’s happening to…? Trevor chose his next words very carefully. “What ‘thing,’ Chris?”

“I know something’s going on. Your dreams, Bayani disappearing, Olsen flipping out… it’s all connected.”

Gears started turning in Trevor’s mind, but there were still too many pieces missing for him to put it all together. “I don’t get it. What’s going on? What’s in the box?”

“I don’t think my father committed suicide, Trevor. I think he was murdered. And he was murdered… because of this.” And with that, Chris pulled a laboratory notebook from the box and held it up for the other two to see.

They both stared at the cover of the notebook, their jaws hanging open in astonishment. The long, flowing S-curve of The Symbol stared mercilessly back at them.

For all his bluster, it is the sad province of Man that he cannot choose his triumph. He can only choose how he will stand when the call of destiny comes, hoping that he'll have the courage to answer.

To be continued…