tli_productions | Fic: Frequently Asked Questions (3/6)

Header information and notes contained in Part 1.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

3

Becker wakes up early, to an empty bed. He ignores the small flare of panic and instead goes through to the living room. Stephen is dozing on the sofa, curled up against one arm but with head clearly facing the bedroom.

So much for a morning cup of tea. Becker bypasses the kettle in favour of his phone, which is back on the bedside table. There aren’t any messages but then again, it’s barely five am. There’s still time.

Stephen’s awake when Becker goes back through. He gives the kettle a pointed look.

“How long have you been out here?” Becker asks quietly, flicking the kettle on. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a mug on the shelf behind Stephen. It’s full, but cold. He tips it into the sink and rinses it out.

Stephen frowns. “Couple of hours, maybe. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

Becker leans back against the counter. “Want to talk about it?”

Stephen shakes his head. “Something’s been bothering me for a while. About the anomalies.”

“In general or something specific?” Becker finds two clean mugs and tips a generous helping of sugar into his own. He has a feeling he’s going to need it.

Stephen frowns again. Becker joins him on the sofa and offers him the mug of sugarless tea. Stephen wraps his hands carefully around it and finally Becker thinks he has an idea of what is going on.

“It doesn’t have to be right,” he says as gently as he can. “What’s bothering you about the anomalies?”

“The one in the pit,” Stephen says. “The one we opened.”

“That led to the top of the cliff,” Becker continues.

Stephen considers his words carefully. “It can’t have been a coincidence. I think they were put there.”

Becker frowns. “Put – by whom?”

“Whoever built the future ARC,” Stephen says. “The technology was there, why not move the anomalies as well as map them?”

“How?” Even as Becker says the word he starts to remember. The British Museum. His first day on the job. “The sun cage,” he says.

Stephen nods. “Rebuild that and you could move anomalies at will.”

“Or...” Becker exhales loudly. “Or you could group them together.”

Stephen’s eyes widen a fraction. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“The model,” Stephen says. He downs his tea like he’s doing a shot, already climbing over the back of the sofa. “We have to get to the ARC. Now.”

o o o o o

Winter comes to the valley almost overnight. The hominids have been gone for a few weeks now, so at least there’s no competition for fish or firewood any more.

It wasn’t always a competition, though. Claudia wraps herself in one of the pelts one of the – she thinks – older hominids had left a little too obviously near her encampment after the first chilly winds had come, and heads out to check her traps.

The frosty ground crunches under her feet. Claudia focuses on taking small, measured steps. Something screeches in the distance. She shivers but tries to ignore the noise.

No sudden movements.

She keeps going. There’s another screech, louder this time.

Another.

It’s getting closer.

Claudia runs. The pelt slips from her shoulders. She pumps her arms and tries to breathe.

Something pounds behind her. Too fast for a hominid. Too heavy for a Phorusrhacos.

She trips and falls. Rolls down a slope. She digs her feet into the ground and comes to a stop on her back.

The sun is low in the sky but bright, direct. Claudia squints and covers her face.

Something looms over her. Claudia shrinks back.

There’s a hand.

Claudia stares. The hand is calloused, dried blood at the cuff.

Skin. Clothes.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” a voice says. Claudia can’t tell if it’s male or female, but it’s human. “Here, take my hand. I won’t hurt you.”

Claudia reaches out. Lets herself be pulled to her feet. A few metres away she sees a small – thing – on its side on the ground. There’s a spear sticking out of the side of it.

She looks back at the hand she is still holding. Follows the arm to the body to the head.

A woman watches her. Tanned skin, dark eyes, head tilted. Her face is inscrutable.

“Are you all right?” the woman asks. She has a thick accent. She looks to be in her fifties. She’s the first human Claudia’s seen in months.

Claudia stares.

The woman pauses, then says: “Come on. I’ve got a fire pit in the next valley, we can cook this chap for breakfast.”

Claudia thinks about the artefact, buried underneath her own fire pit. It’s well hidden. She’s armed.

This woman can’t be real.

It might be a trap.

Claudia shakes her head. She takes half a step back. Stumbles on an icy rock.

It takes a couple of seconds to regain her bearing.

The woman is still there.

Watching.

Waiting.

Claudia shakes her head again.

“Okay,” the woman says. She points behind her. “If you change your mind, my camp’s that way. You keep breakfast, I’ll find something else.”

Her face twists, softens slightly. “I’m Charlotte. Look after yourself, okay?”

She picks up her spear, turns around and walks away.

Claudia watches her disappear over a ridge before breathing out. The dead creature at her feet is maybe the size of a badger. She slings it over her shoulder and carefully backtracks to her camp.

No sense in wasting food.

It’s several days before Claudia stops hearing voices in the wind or seeing lights flicker in the distance.

o o o o o

The journey to the ARC is quiet. Jess – who has probably been tracking them at least since they pulled into the car park – flags down Stephen as soon as he and Becker enter the hub. There’s a brief touch to the small of his back, and then Stephen is gone and Becker is left to his own devices.

He’s halfway to his office when Sergeant Emerson appears. “Boss.”

“Emerson.”

“I’ve got everyone’s reports on the two anomaly responses yesterday.” She offers him a flash drive, which he takes. “Thought you’d want to look them over before we submit them.”

“That’s... very diligent of you,” he says.

Emerson flashes a half smile. “A lot happened yesterday, sir. Just wanted to make sure it all tallied up.”

“Good thinking,” Becker says absently.

Emerson gives him a curt nod and disappears down another corridor.

The feeling of unease only gets worse when he logs into his terminal and opens up the reports. They’re clean, concise – and utterly devoid of any impropriety. There’s nothing to say that Danny Quinn is missing in action, and even Ethan-slash-Patrick warrants only a passing mention.

Everyone seems to have decided they’re withholding information now. Becker can only wonder what the hell his people are playing at. He takes his laptop and the flash drive down to Stephen’s lab, thinking he might get on better writing his own reports there, only to find Connor contemplating the anomaly model.

Becker quickly remembers all the tracking and surveillance technology in the ARC and takes a calming breath. “How is everyone, after yesterday?” he asks.

Connor shrugs. “’Bout as well as you can expect, I think. If anything major had come up we’d have let you know.”

“I know.” Becker makes himself comfortable in the far corner of the lab.

Connor peers at a few notes tacked to the wall. “Where’s Stephen?”

“Commandeered by Jess.”

“Oh, okay. I was hoping to compare notes. Y’know, on what we talked about last night.”

Becker clearly isn’t the only one hyper-aware of his surroundings today. “I think he’s had a few ideas, too.”

“Cool,” Connor says. He glances at his watch and looks apologetic. “I’ve got a thing I need to check on. When Stephen shows up, let him know I was here, yeah?”

Becker nods. Connor points a couple of times at one of the post-its, mutters something to himself then leaves. Purely out of interest Becker goes over and looks. Stephen’s handwriting is atrocious, but if Becker squints he thinks he can make out the words ‘Permian’ and ‘recurring’. It’s either that or ‘recursive’ which makes less sense.

Connor’s interest in a probable marker for the Forest of Dean anomaly is just the latest ominous thing to happen today, and it’s still early. Becker sets his laptop aside and steps into the maze of strings and post-its. It’s not as physically impressive as Cutter’s original construction, but the scale to which Stephen has been able to rebuild it in just a few days definitely is.

Stephen Hart, the tracker. He’d told Becker once that he could retrace any route he’d already taken, no matter what had changed around him. Becker had snorted and called him a walking Duke of Edinburgh Award.

“Guilty as charged,” Stephen smirked. He stretched out on Becker’s mum’s sofa like he belonged there. “Could have got my Gold Award three times over.”

Becker felt decadent, tucking his legs underneath him, a glass of cheap fizz in one hand, his back to the dining room and the garden full of his family beyond it. He wanted to lean closer to Stephen, touch him, do something that might make a scene, even if nobody else could see them. “Bet you were fun at parties.”

The smirk disappeared. “Wouldn’t know.”

Tinny 80s pop wafted in from the garden. Becker knew he was on thin ice, but that had never stopped him before. “Me either,” he said, hoping he’d gauged the sudden mood shift correctly.

It didn’t matter.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Stephen said. He climbed to his feet, brushed off Becker when he tried to make contact. “I have to go, Look, tell them I’m a knob, that I’m not good enough for you, I -”

“Wait,” Becker started.

Stephen shook his head. “What are we even doing here? Role-playing happy boyfriends like what? Like I’m not dead and buried at St. Barnabas? Come on, tell me Becker, what about any of this makes any sense?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” Becker told him.

“Oh yeah?” Stephen demands, louder now, drowning out Cheryl Baker’s pleas to make his mind up. “And what are the right questions, then? What should I be asking?”

Becker blinks away the memory. He still doesn’t have an answer for that, although his instinctive response of dragging Stephen into the downstairs toilet and sticking a hand down his trousers had made for a decent enough diversion.

Here and now he’s surrounded by post-its. Mapping out answers to questions he doesn’t know how to ask. That he might not ever be able to ask.

A shiver runs down Becker’s spine.

o o o o o

Abby puts the kettle on.

Claudia watches her quietly.

Abby empties the dishwasher and starts putting things away.

Claudia watches her quietly.

Abby rifles through the cupboard for tea bags. “I think Jess has only got Earl Grey, is that okay?”

Claudia watches her quietly.

Abby takes a breath. There are only so many ways she can remind herself that none of this is easy for any of them. Least of all Claudia Brown. Abby’s tried to imagine what would happen if she walked into a world where she never existed, and someone else had her face. She’d ended up feeling sick to the stomach and holding on tighter to Connor in bed.

It had always been easy to sympathise with Jenny, particularly in the early days of Nick Cutter’s weird but surprisingly detailed imaginary girlfriend. Stephen had complicated things – and when hadn’t he, really – but now Claudia Brown is very much a real person, not some strange conspiracy connecting people from another reality.

It’s complicated, and Abby’s never liked complicated. Emily would be better at this, had already developed some kind of rapport with Claudia, but Emily wasn’t here right now. She’d disappeared first thing, when Matt had knocked on the front door and asked her to go somewhere with him. Even though Abby had volunteered to stay behind with Claudia, it still felt a little like Connor and Jess had abandoned her for the relative safety of the ARC.

It’s a good thing Abby’s had experience dealing with complicated. And there’s an idea, a question, that’s been slowly developing at the back of her mind, after something – one of the very few things – that Claudia had said yesterday.

She sets a steaming mug down in front of Claudia, who watches her quietly.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” Abby says, taking a seat not quite opposite Claudia. “In the nicest possible way, you’ve been this abstract thing, an idea that Professor Cutter brought back through an anomaly one day. And we knew Jenny first. She’s our person. Does that make sense?”

Something flickers across Claudia’s face. She watches Abby quietly.

“I think everyone wants to know your story. And whatever you want to tell people, that’s fine. I want to say I get it – I spent over a year trapped in the Cretaceous wondering if an anomaly was going to reopen – but I don’t know what you went through.”

Claudia wraps her hands around her mug. Her gaze flickers.

“I don’t want this to sound like an interrogation, because that’s not what this is,” Abby says, as gently as she can. “But there’s something I want to ask, and if you have an answer then I’d really like to hear it.”

Claudia watches Abby. She hesitates, then nods.

Abby steels herself. “What do you know about Philip Burton?”

o o o o o

Philip Burton sits back in his chair.

He’s in his office – his real office, not the pretend laboratory he maintains at the ARC or Lester’s little box, when he feels like appropriating that. His real office is spacious and naturally lit and overlooks his life’s work. From here he can see numerous technicians and scientists scurrying around bringing his vision to life, and much more beyond that.

For the moment, however, his attention is focused firmly in front of him. CCTV footage from the ARC is split into four small sections on the already small computer screen, and he flips back and forth between the live feeds.

Normally Burton wouldn’t bother with the minutiae of the anomaly project like this. But yesterday afternoon the ARC’s internal systems had reported a cascade system failure with several servers corrupted. What had caught Burton’s interest was that for a little over two hours, there was no surveillance data, visual or movement-based, that had been recorded. Those missing hours coincided with two separate but concurrent anomaly incidents, and Burton did not believe in coincidences.

On the main screen, he watches a live feed of Dr Hart leaning closely into Jessica Parker’s personal space at the hub’s main computer terminal. No matter what angle Burton selects, he can’t tell what they’re saying.

Burton reaches for the intercom. “April, could you come up here for a moment?”

It’s a few minutes before April arrives. “What is it, Philip?” she asks calmly.

Normally Burton wouldn’t allow such familiarity from any of his staff, but this was no ordinary project and April Leonard PhD was no ordinary hire. Aside from an uncanny ability to think outside of the box, she tended to the same regard for the greater good that Burton himself held. And in the few months she had been at New Dawn, she had proven herself invaluable in many ways.

“Has anyone been able to identify the source of the ARC’s... computer mishap yesterday?” Burton asks her.

April shakes her head. “With the new data from the anomalies themselves, looking into that hasn’t been a priority. Shall I make it one?”

“Please. Better yet, make it yours.” And even as he speaks, Burton comes to a small moment of inspiration. “Notify me securely when you’ve made some progress; I shall work from the ARC today, I think.”

April raises an elegant eyebrow. “Do you think they’re hiding something?”

It’s a question that Burton has been mulling on and off for some time, but more so in the week since Stephen Hart had made his little reappearance into affairs. “For their sakes, I certainly hope not.”

He waits for April to leave before gathering his things. In the bottom drawer of the desk is his business organiser, an unhackable leather-bound folio with all of his appointments, memos and notes on the New Dawn project. He leafs through the calendar section to confirm there will be no competing demands for his attention today.

Tucked into the back of the folio are a sheaf of papers he had removed from one of the notebooks Stephen Hart had brought to the ARC with him. Helen Cutter’s handwriting sprawls all over, referencing events in history that Burton doesn’t yet understand the connections to.

Paper clipped onto the back page is a photograph of himself. It’s grainy, clearly taken from a newspaper, but Helen Cutter had seen fit to hold onto it until the end.

Burton brushes his thumb over the picture before tucking it and the rest of the sheaf back into the folio. He hasn’t seen Helen in years, of course, but he can’t help but wonder if, due to the nature of the anomalies, it won’t be long before he meets his erstwhile mentor once more.

o o o o o

Onto: Part 4

o o o o o