tli_productions | Fic: Frequently Asked Questions (5/6)

Header information and notes contained in Part 1.

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

5

Lester’s office is empty when Burton arrives. He surreptitiously checks his watch as he bypasses a couple of technicians with neither spatial awareness nor a concept of indoor voices. It’s long past the time the civil servant has usually clocked in, and the perceived unprofessionalism rankles.

Across the atrium, Dr Hart and Jessica Parker are still in deep conversation, seemingly unaware of anything around them. Everyone else on this level appears to be working, at least.

Burton adjusts Lester’s office chair for comfort, then quickly sets himself up on his laptop – his own of course, not some subpar government-issued machine. He dedicates part of the screen to a random cycle of the ARC’s internal CCTV.

Another part shows the progress reports already visible from April Leonard’s terminal.

In Connor Temple’s laboratory, the progress with his anomaly dating device is obvious. Burton makes a mental note to remind the boy about his unprofessional behaviour, although he cannot deny that the fist pumps make a useful visual reference.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Dr Hart and Jessica Parker finally part ways, and... oh. That’s interesting. Burton issues several rapid commands on his keyboard, and it doesn’t take long to confirm that several members of the ARC’s field team and their ‘associates’ are nowhere to be seen, still including James Lester.

A quick search of another server confirms that Lester’s itinerary for this morning is threadbare, and his own redundancies within the ARC’s systems show Burton precisely zero anomaly activity anywhere in the British Isles. As an isolated case this wouldn’t be worth the attention, but the last few days have suggested that this is hardly taking place in a vacuum.

Burton doesn’t consider himself the dramatic type, but he does let out a loud, long exhale even as he steeples his fingers and considers the evidence before him.

Perhaps his habit of quiet observation has finally run its course.

He reaches inside his jacket for his mobile phone (private, untraceable), and makes a call.

o o o o o

As Gideon Anderson is escorted back inside the residential facility by a stern looking nurse, Emily considers her options. Her mind is a blur, whirling much faster and more haphazardly than she can keep up with.

Across the table from her, Matt looks decidedly apprehensive. It might not be so obvious to other people, but Emily has learned to spot the smaller details.

Eventually, she lets herself ask: “Do the others know?”

“About which part?” Matt responds warily.

“Any of it.”

“No,” he says simply.

“Even after last night?”

Matt shakes his head. “This has nothing to do with Danny’s situation.”

“It has everything to do with it,” Emily argues. Across the garden a couple of residents turn to watch her, and she realises she has raised her voice. She drops to a harsh whisper. “Assuming you’re not lying right now -”

“I’m not.”

“- then you must know more about the anomalies than the rest of the team – anyone in this whole era – put together,” she tells him. “How could you hold that back?”

“I don’t,” Matt says. “Know more about the anomalies.”

“But you came here.”

Matt nods slowly. “It was my father’s plan. A handful of us came back to key points in history, to stop something far worse than anything the ARC’s seen so far.”

“Convergence.” The word sounds alien on Emily’s tongue, but she trusts the seriousness in Matt and Gideon’s tones when they had discussed it.

“It destroyed everything,” Matt says. “I wouldn’t wish the world I grew up in on anyone. That’s why we’re here.”

“To change history.”

Matt shakes his head. “To fix our present.”

“At the cost of theirs?”

Matt has no response to that. He leans back in his chair, and suddenly seems much older, much wearier than he had this morning.

“And you intend to make me an accomplice.” Another concept that is anathema to Emily. She has come to like the ARC team – even Captain Becker and his asinine adherence to rules – and just the thought of deceiving them is uncomfortable.

Matt sighs. “My father is dying. The doctors here can only make him comfortable.”

Emily sighs. “I understand the burden of loneliness. I do. But this – this isn’t something you can... selectively share with those around you.”

Matt’s expression shifts. “I can’t do this alone.”

Emily can’t arch a single eyebrow the way her childhood governess could, but she settles on emulating her sternest expression. “Need I remind you of Mr Lester’s repeated proclamations from last night?”

Finally, Matt smiles. “Please don’t.”

Emily waits. Matt sighs and stands up. He picks up his jacket and holds out his arm to help Emily up. She doesn’t take it. He nods, and instead gestures her to the car park.

Inside the relative safety of his vehicle, Matt exhales loudly. “We don’t know exactly what happened to cause the convergence. Or when it happened. Most of the records were lost, but enough survived to suggest that the second Anomaly Research Centre was the likely point of origin.”

Emily frowns, and Matt continues quickly. “That’s this one.”

Emily closes her eyes. For perhaps the first time since she had left her own time, she wishes she was somewhere else. At the same time, she knows it’s folly; some things are too important to wish for the safety of ignorance. “Something here will cause the end of the world?”

Matt stares at his hands, loosely gripping the steering wheel. “Or someone. My father’s theory is that one man was the architect of convergence.”

“I suppose you have a candidate for that as well?”

“Philip Burton.”

o o o o o

Claudia runs.

She blunders through thick undergrowth. Plants scrape into her arms and hair. Helen’s rucksack is a foreign weight on her back and the ground is unsteady but she runs. The glass device is too heavy to be useful, too useful to drop. Her stick is long gone.

Behind her the dinosaur is slowly catching up.

Claudia dives into thick shrubbery, gets as low and small and deep as she can. Above her is huffing and flashing sunlight from the rapidly moving plants.

Something bites at her ankles. Claudia screams and kicks.

The monster withdraws. Heavy footfall recedes into the distance.

Claudia clamps her free hand over her mouth and forces long, deep breaths until the only thing she can hear is the chattering of animals smaller than she is. She wriggles around until she’s half-sat, half-leaning against the rucksack on the ground, knees pulled up in front of her. She tucks the glass device in the small space on her stomach and fumbles for the buttons.

The lights eventually come back on, but only the buttons. They’re solid outlines this time. No flashing, no swirling display.

No anomaly nearby, she decides. Adrenaline and unfamiliar terrain mean she has no idea how far or in which direction she had left ho – the valley.

Dinosaurs mean predators, which means Claudia’s gone right to the bottom of the food chain. She needs to find shelter. She needs to find some bearings.

She needs to find a way out of this place.

First, she needs to get out from under the shrubbery.

The chittering around her is quiet but constant. It might mean there’s nothing larger than Claudia hanging around, but there’s only one way to find out. It takes some more amateur gymnastics to put the glass device safely inside the rucksack, and tighten up the straps around her shoulders, before she tackles the first order of business.

On her hands and knees now, Claudia surveys her immediate surroundings. The shrubbery is dense, but not impossibly so. She’d got in here, after all.

Something chirps in front of her. Claudia holds her breath as a small lizard, maybe the size of a cat, approaches her. Its head ticks to one side, and a long, thin tongue darts out. It makes another chirping noise, then disappears into the undergrowth.

The light shifts again. Claudia works her way forward, an inch at a time. The rucksack pulls and shifts with each branch. Sweat rolls down her neck.

Slowly, eventually, she climbs to her feet.

The forest rolls away in every direction for as far as she can see. The trees are large and numerous, and the undergrowth is a dizzying mass of colour that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Coupled with the constant hum of unseen animal activity and a heavy weight in the air, it’s a sensory overload that hits her like a truck.

She doesn’t know how long is it until she remembers she’s not safe here.

Shelter. Bearings. Escape.

She picks a direction and starts to walk.

o o o o o

Through the porthole-like window to his lab door, Stephen sees Hilary frowning over his laptop. He telegraphs his movements approaching the door, but Hilary clearly isn’t concentrating very hard. His expression softens as the door hisses open.

“How did it go with Jess?”

Stephen waits for the door to close behind him. “Very informative. She’s good at what she does.”

“Yes, she is.” Hilary closes his laptop and tucks it under his chair. “Connor stopped by. He’s had a few ideas since last night.”

Stephen nods. The anomaly model surrounds him, a few post-its rustling against his head and shoulders as he tries to get his thoughts in order again. He steps clear of the paper, brushes his shoulders down. The instinctive urge to be quiet, alert, is still too powerful to ignore.

“Stephen?”

Stephen jumps. Adrenaline floods his system again.

“Sorry,” they both mutter at the same time.

Stephen takes a few long breaths. Slowly pivots around the model until he’s standing closer to Hilary. “How safe is it in here?”

Hilary nods slowly. “Safe enough. Surveillance is mostly visual only.”

“Mostly?”

“You have to actively opt into audio. Only a few people can do that.”

Stephen nods. He holds out his hand to Hilary, surprised at how gratifying it feels when he takes it to pull himself to his feet. Hilary’s hand is warm around his. It’s nice.

“Stephen?” Hilary asks again, quieter this time.

Stephen nods jerkily. Separates their hands. He’s already lost the train of thought he’d been holding onto before.

Slowly he pieces it back together again.

“We don’t need to map the junction to find Danny,” he says quietly, carefully.

Hilary’s expression shifts, but he waits.

Stephen takes a deep breath, gestures to the anomaly model just out of reach behind him. “It’s already been done.”

Understanding dawns on Hilary’s face. “You’re talking about the future ARC.” His face twists a little. “That won’t be an easy sell.”

“It is – no,” Stephen catches himself, “it might be the best option.”

“I believe you,” Hilary says quietly. “Walk me through it, then we’ll take it to the others.”

Stephen turns around, looks over the model, the combination of his and Cutter’s experiences. Two timelines apart, now coming together.

He reaches out to the model, fingers brushing over a cluster of post-its referencing different encounters in the Forest of Dean anomaly.

“It starts here,” Stephen says.

o o o o o

Claudia spends eight days in the forest. She scavenges roots and leaves, conserves her water bottle for as long as she dares. Shelter comes in the form of a twisted, giant tree that none of the locals seem able to climb. In leaf-filtered sunlight and relative safety, she examines both the glass device and Helen’s notebook.

The device is clearly some kind of anomaly detection device, a far more advanced version of the gadget she’d seen Connor build before she’d been ousted from the Home Office. She stumbles across a sequence of buttons and finger swipes that pull up strings of numbers that she can’t decipher. She tries several times to retrace her steps back to her valley in the Pliocene, after a sleepless night of distant roars and the guilty jolted remembering that she’d left the artefact buried underneath her campsite.

Becker had seen fit to strand her millions of years in the past to keep it out of the wrong hands (or her away from whatever support or connections were left to her, a dark voice often reminds her); it seems so very wrong to waste her ordeal over being damned forgetful.

The notebook is a lot. Helen had clearly been on some kind of mission when she’d died, and it’s more than Claudia can manage to put enough of the pieces together to figure it out. Philip Burton gets more than a few mentions, as does a history of events that as far as Claudia can tell simply hasn’t happened yet.

Helen’s obsession with the future seemed to have finally paid off, or at least fed into something deeper. Whatever she’d been planning since the day that had changed everything, it’s been a long time in the making. Pun not intended.

But Helen’s dead now, so Claudia’s almost tempted to leave her madness where it belongs – out of sight, mind and even out of time. She tells herself she’s only keeping the notebook until she needs the pages to start a fire – it’s a better alternative to keeping hacking her hair off – but even if she’s the only human for miles and years around, it’s not the most convincing argument she’s ever made.

On the ninth day of trying to get back to the valley, the glass device finally gives Claudia something. She lets it lead her to a series of rocky outcroppings where, in the middle of a colony of small feathered dinosaurs and their nests, the device tells her an anomaly will open.

She weighs her options. The dinosaurs are smaller than her, but there are still dozens of them and only one of her.

She climbs onto the first rock. Several of the nearby creatures display their wings at her, hiss, then scuttle away.

She steps across to the next rock. There are a few more attempts at intimidation, but no outright aggression.

Claudia slowly works her away across to where the device blinks happily. She’s near the middle of the nests now but no one seems interested in breaking the stalemate. They’re herbivores, she thinks dizzily. They have to be.

Otherwise she’d be dead.

She holds the device tight to her chest and presses the right button.

Too late, she realises she’s misjudged the distance. The anomaly opens around her, and Claudia falls.

o o o o o

Onto: Part 6

o o o o o