The Works of Nick Hayden

Even Richard Doutman’s modified XSV-9 struggled beneath the weight of the emergency transport trailer. His cycle hadn’t been designed to transport two dozen 12- and 13-year-olds against the movement of the Trans-Continental Conveyor. He didn’t mind. He expected his life to be interesting.

“How’re they holding up?” Local patrolman George Alberton asked over the comm.

Doutman checked his mirror. They sat remarkably still and seemed almost solemn. “Scared them good.”

“Lucky you were around,” Alberton said. “We’d have sent copters and never have had them out in time. Great work rigging the transport to your cycle.”

“Just doing my duty, sir.”

Alberton laughed. “Saving the world, a day at a time.”

“And signing autographs. Don’t forget the autographs.” Doutman played into his popular persona. The people enjoyed it. “Any luck locating their teacher?”

“We’re working on it. According to what the kids told us via comm, he stepped out at the last service station to finalize some official documents, but the school rejoined the Belt on autopilot before he returned. Odd we haven’t received a complaint yet.”

Looking at the students again, he saw them arguing, with at least one girl crying. A low-end Conveyor residence might reenter the Belt accidentally, but a school, without its teacher? A tech school, no less? No, it had been a prank. The kids had probably hacked into the piloting system and took off before their teacher knew what happened. A well-played prank until the U-turn had failed. A costly prank.

But the teacher hadn’t reported in yet? It was more than odd. It was…. “Alberton, I’m disengaging the transport. Send someone to pick it up. Something’s wrong.”

Leaving the students to flow along the 1st Belt, he whipped his cycle about, revved the engine, and shot past them. He switched off the comm. He preferred to do his serious riding in silence.

Traffic was heavy this close to the Conveyor’s end. Personal jetties, corporate barges, rented two-story getaways, pleasure yachts all congregated in the 1st and 2nd belts and waited for their U-turn. Even with the proper authorization and fees paid in full, they might still be pressed over to the berm to park until the right strings were pulled. Those that refused to pull off tumbled into the great hole where the Conveyor ended, to join the wreckage of those who had come before.

He zoomed into the 3rd, then 4th belt, redlining his cycle and hurtling forward with increasing speed at each belt. The tech school, christened, Hello, World!, sped toward the pit along the 5th. Under normal circumstances, such an esteemed vessel would be queued up for immediate U-turn. But something had gone wrong.

Doutman swerved tightly alongside the roaming residences of rich men and luxurious government offices, reveling in the danger even as he pressed forward, his engine rumbling against his chest. In front of him, an intricate structure of girders, cranes, cables, and pneumatic arms marked the Conveyor’s eastern extreme. High above, a mansion hung suspended, moving gracefully in giant claws, destined for the West Conveyor, where it would make its return trip across the continent.

Blaring alarms reached him over the wind tunnel of his speed. Alberton would turn them off when he realized what was happening. Glancing at his traffic screen, linked into the official grid, he located Hello, World! a mile ahead. He had only minutes before it tumbled over the edge into the junk heap beyond.

He pushed another ounce of power out of his cycle, leaning low over the tank. He smiled. He would make it, just barely.

He flipped on his thermal scanner as he approached. Nothing. He hadn’t sensed anyone extra last time, either. He pulled a tight circle around the school, his knees nearly scrapping the ground, and burned rubber as he skidded, brakes tight, through the entryway. He’d left the door open when evacuating the students.. Tearing across carpet, across the foyer, he swerved into the dining room, and jerking left, rammed through a double-hinged door with enough force to crack it. The kitchen. In a quick motion, he jumped off, setting the kick stand, and pried open the freezer, the only place a heat signature could have been hidden. An older man was huddled in the corner, hugging himself for warmth.

“Quick!” Doutman said. “There’s no time.”

The man started to speak, but Doutman pulled him up and threw him forward toward the cycle. Doutman jumped on, revved the engine, and waited impatiently as the man climbed on. His sensors told him Hello, World was about to say goodbye.

“Hold on!”

The cycle leapt forward. Doutman felt the panicked grip of the teacher around his waist with grim satisfaction. The floor beneath them began to tilt as Doutman exited the kitchen. With a straight path to the entry, he gunned it as the incline steepened. He felt laughter rising in his throat. He shot out of the school into air. He hung for a moment, Hello, World! tumbling down, down into the pit….

Then tires touched Conveyor, and Doutman pulled laboriously away from the edge. The man was screaming, more rage than meaning. He was going to flay the kids, break their bones, stuff them into dark, little boxes until they begged forgiveness.

Doutman flipped on his comm. “Alberton, this is Doutman. I found the teacher. The kids had left him to die.”

“Murder?” Alberton was incredulous.

The teacher’s words continued to pour over Doutman like lava, searing his ears. The man was devising tortures. “Perhaps not without provocation.” Doutman passed beneath a palatial structure, inches from the pillars supporting it. That shut the man up.

“Lucky you were here,” Alberton said again.

“Yeah, guess so.” It was an interesting life, that was certain. “As long as you take care of the paperwork.”

 

“Now if you would close your eyes, Mr. Eldritch. For some reason, it won’t project properly unless we shut our eyes for about half a minute beforehand.”

Theodore Eldritch obliged the scientist. “No need to be dramatic, Chris.”

“I—don’t misunderstand, sir. I’m not trying to be dramatic. You really won’t be able to see it unless you close your eyes first. The technology is…temperamental.”

“Temperamental?”

“It appears differently to everyone. You may see nothing. What you see will be different than what I see.”

“That makes data collection difficult, I assume?”

“Interesting, to say the least, sir. We’re working on finding a more quantitative method, but we were lucky to stumble upon a working scope at all.”

That much Theodore knew. He had occasionally scanned the lengthy reports of non-progress, but he had his money invested in so many projects, he hadn’t kept up with the pneumatech division until the breakthrough happened late last week.

“Go ahead and open your eyes, sir. Hopefully you see something on the screen.”

The wall monitor was the room’s only illumination, and it was dim. A barren landscape beneath a stormy sky vibrated uneasily on the screen. The picture was not video, but something between pointillism and sand art. The sky and earth and the few stricken trees melded slowly into one another, not disappearing, but slowly transforming, two or three scenes existing at once.

“And this is—”

“The best we can tell, it’s a representation of the soul. We feed in the data, and an image emerges. We’re in the early stages of study, of course, but we believe the images are a sort of pictogram, like images in a dream that manifest unconscious emotions. Spiritual hieroglyphs, if you will.”

Theodore nodded absently, his gaze transfixed. An endless pit seemed to be opening in the screen, a sort of fire or electricity blazing about it. It felt something like being eaten and something like falling off a cliff. It was not a pleasant sensation.

“Does it usually affect the viewer emotionally?”

“Yes. Well, usually. It gives us a better grasp of meaning when it does.”

The pit was becoming a plain, rotating and flattening. A few jagged rock sculptures rose up, like discarded works of art.

“This is…fascinating.” Remarkable, yet disturbing.

Theodore’s business brain began to come alive. Pneumatech had been a long shot, but with his fortune, even gambles sometimes paid off. After the Gene War, the intellectual community had grasped for some new method of aiding mankind’s progress. Theodore himself had helped write some of the laws meant to push humanity closer to a harmonic whole, to little avail. Laws and traditional science had not eliminated war, hatred, or stubborn ignorance.

But now—the soul. If they could interpret what was in the heart of man, they could judge wisely. If they could test the effects of psychological influences upon the emotional and spiritual nature of man, they could construct cures and healthy environments. If they could further develop a device to manually rearrange these pneumatogical images into ones more pleasing…well, perhaps that was getting ahead of himself.

The landscape continued forward as if he raced along the desert. Lightning flashed and stayed, as if caught in a snapshot, then curled downward to form slender, sickly reeds. Bleak expanses opened up, filled with dried-up lakes, fissures that led deep into darkness, shattered rock.

Souls like this needed reconditioned, or if they refused to change, eliminated.

Theodore looked away. The images were beginning to overwhelm him. When he glanced back, the screen was blank.

“If you break the connection, you have to start over,” Chris explained.

“That’s quite all right. Let me see a different one.”

“Excuse me?”

“Different data. A different soul. A brighter one.”

“I can’t do that, sir. I told you the scope interacts differently with each person.”

“But you must have given it data, Chris. Change the data.”

“I didn’t give it data, sir. You did.”