Empire Games Series, Book 1(54)
“I thought it would be best if I came to witness the first test jaunt,” Smith said easily. “It’ll be a major landmark.”
Rita nodded seriously. Landmark for what? she wondered. “But you’ve got the para-time machines…” She noticed Dr. Lane glance briefly in Smith’s direction, and his twitch of acknowledgment.
“They’re not very flexible,” he said blandly. His movements as jerky as a small bird’s, he stepped to one side. “Doctor, if you’d like to begin your orientation?”
“Sure.” Jenn smiled at Rita again. “Rita, because we cut back on the suppressors, you should be sensitive to trigger engrams now. So what we’re going to do here is try a very simple test run. First, we’re going to ground you—that should prevent you from jaunting by accident—and use the EEG and EKG to see what happens when we expose you to an engram. I’ll need to take bloods, too. Then this afternoon we’ll do it again, only without the grounding straps and using ambulatory biomonitoring.”
“Ah.” Rita stared at the marks on the floor. “What will happen?”
“This is a mirror room; there’s an identical facility in the time line the engram we’re using is keyed to. And there’s a transporter cell next door. What should happen is that you’ll jaunt over there; then we’ll use the transporter to come over and confirm you’re healthy before you make the return jaunt.”
“Jaunt? You’re using that word—”
The Colonel shrugged. “We lifted it from an old SF novel. It’s short and descriptive and differentiates what you’ll be doing—jaunting—from what the transporters do—para-time traversal.” He seemed to be mildly amused, if slightly tense. He turned to Dr. Lane: “I’ve got a meeting with Professor Schwartz now; message me before you proceed with the actual jaunt test.” He nodded at Rita and departed.
Rita stared at the door, then looked at Dr. Lane. “What now?” she asked, feeling hollow.
Jenn pointed her to the examining table. “Take a nap. Marianne should be here—we need to start by wiring you up. This is going to take a while, I’m afraid.”
Rita lay down and stared at the ceiling. “Does Colonel Smith visit often?” she asked.
“Is that his name?” Dr. Lane shook her head. “I wouldn’t know.” Her tone dropped slightly. “You’re asking questions again. Bad habit.”
“Sorry. I get bored easily.”
“Try not to.” Dr. Lane stood. “Back in a minute.” She disappeared, leaving Rita alone with her unanswered, stifled questions. More than a minute passed before she returned, Marianne and another paramedic trailing behind. “Okay, showtime! First, we’re going to wire up the EKG harness. You’ll be wearing it for the rest of the day, so if you wouldn’t mind stripping down to your underwear…”
*
The morning passed in a blur. Wired into an itchy tangle of electrodes, Rita sat through most of it staring at strange knotwork designs on the big screen on the wall opposite. Jenn and her assistants bustled around, discussing their test equipment readings as if Rita weren’t there.
“Okay, I’ve got another series of knots for you,” Jenn told her. “Ten coming up. Press the button if you feel queasy, have any visual disturbances, or feel unwell in any way—that shouldn’t happen, but it’s a precaution.” The button was attached to a long cable leading to one of the racks of equipment behind her. Rita clutched it nervously, thumb hovering. What appeared to be an elaborate sailors’ joke appeared in the middle of the screen. “Next one coming up.”
The knot dissolved, replaced by a similar, but somehow different tangle of lines. Rita stared at it, vision blurring. Somehow it didn’t want to come into focus. “How many more—” she began to complain, as the lines writhed and another knot condensed out of the pointillist flickering on the screen. “Hey, your monitor’s broken.”
“Broken?” Dr. Lane looked up sharply. “Okay. Let’s try the next.”
The disturbance went away, as another knot appeared. “Hey, it fixed itself,” said Rita.
“Uh-huh. Next.” Something about Dr. Lane’s tone had changed.
“Was that it?” Rita asked.
“Listen, why don’t we get through the rest of this sequence then break for lunch,” Jenn suggested. Rita, knowing a diversion when she heard one, nodded and kept watching the screen, and herself for sudden headaches. That was it, she realized. That was a trigger engram. But she was grounded, electrostatically earthed, the Q-machines she still only half believed in blocked from entering their excited state. Somehow it barely seemed real.
After lunch—another bland burger in the staff canteen—Rita slouched reluctantly back to the test room with Dr. Lane. She was even more enthused than usual: babbling about procedures and test protocols and blood pressure monitoring for some reason. Rita nodded politely and let it all flow over her. The reality was that she didn’t much want to be here, but there was no obvious way out. And the morning’s tests had reassured her slightly that whatever they’d stuck in her hadn’t had any obvious bad effects. She could live with an itch in her left forearm and the inability to focus on a particular odd-shaped knot. “After you’re jaunting controllably we’ll switch on your engram generator,” Jenn told her. “But not until the day after tomorrow at the earliest.”