Sispyhus Rising
…gaps have a way of catching up
"Jared Leto, you are a sight for sore eyes."
After the wave connected, a face popped up in full colour on the screen. It belonged to a family friend, Sia Blackburn. Bright green eyes peered at him from behind a pair of oval half-rim spectacles, and her thick and curly red hair was pulled back off her face in what was most probably a ponytail.
"Just the person I wanted to chat to," Jared said. "Ni hái hao ma, Sia?"
"I'm well," Sia replied. "And you?"
"Fine, just fine." He shifted slightly in his seat. "So I heard about the new wormhole tech," he said, deciding it was time to get straight down to business. "Or rather my cook did – seems she hears a lot of things these days."
"That's meant to be classified information," Sia said sharply. "How did she find out about it?"
"Sounds to me as if she moonlights as a hacker. Wouldn't be surprised with that shiny new tablet she's been toting around, which I don't know where she got it."
"That's neither here nor there. So you know about the tech – you do realise it's still being tested?"
"I figured as much. Look, Sia, the thing is that I've picked up a Traveller. And, uh…"
Sia's face took on a scowl. "I'm kind of busy here Jared, could you hurry it up a bit?"
"The Traveller in question is from twenty-first century Earth-That-Was."
"Tian xiaodé," Sia breathed. "How did they even get here?"
"The way Rika tells it, he was hit by a great big truck. He was killed back home and somehow wound up here."
"I can assume you're looking to get him home again?" Sia asked, and Jared nodded. "That might be a tall order, sending someone back a full half-millennia."
"Well, slightly more than half a millennia – he arrived here on January nineteenth."
Sia seemed to be working this over in her head. "I'll need to meet him," she said finally.
"I thought as much. I have his permission to tell you that he's a Traveller, and he's aware that an in-person meeting might be imminent. When did you want to meet up?"
"How about this coming Saturday? I'll wave you when I'm on my way."
"That works fine for me. So I'll see you then?"
Sia nodded. "See you then."
The link was broken, and Jared rose from his seat and left the office.
Sarika, Shannon and Taylor were still seated at the long table in the dining area when Jared emerged from the office. "We have a meeting with Sia set for this Saturday," he announced. "No time set in stone, but she'll send through a wave when she's on her way from Cobbham." His gaze turned onto Taylor. "We do have quite a bit to be done before then, though – not least of which is getting you an ident card. You should have gotten one not long after you arrived, but we haven't had the time or the means."
"We should get that done today," Shannon said. "It'll make dealing with the clinic a lot easier." He frowned. "I think we might have to fudge a few details though."
"On it," Sarika volunteered. She reached down to her satchel, unlatched it and drew out her tablet, setting it down on the table. Looking up from firing it up, she saw Jared was looking at her with one eyebrow raised. "What?"
"I knew you were a hacker."
Sarika let out a quiet snicker. "And it took you this long to work that out?" She shook her head in amusement. "Horse breedin' ‘n' wranglin' ain't the only pie my ma and pa have a thumb in. They're also some of the finest hackers in the Border. Taught me an' Zach all we know." Her fingertips danced across the tablet's screen. "Fudging details, now that's the easy part," she said as she swiped two fingers across the screen from top to bottom. "The trick is slipping those details in and making it look like they've always been there."
Here she looked up briefly at Taylor. "I'm going to need a few basic details from you. Birthdate is the most important, just about everything is anchored to that one itty bitty little piece of info."
Taylor ran a hand back through his hair, messing it up even more than it was already. "March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-three," he replied.
"Damn," Sarika said in quiet awe. She let out a low whistle. "Okay, we change two digits…and voilà!"
Taylor looked to his right over at the tablet and saw the most basic part of his existence change before his eyes. There were now just four people in all the ‘Verse who knew his true birth date, including himself – to all who mattered, he had been born on March fourteenth, 2483. That it could be changed so easily rattled him just a bit.
Sarika spent the next couple of hours working up a fake record for their Traveller. She sent tendrils of information out into the electronic ether, setting up new records in some places and tweaking old records in others. By mid-afternoon she had a full record worked up, one that any hacker worth their tech could be very proud of.
"And we are done," she said in triumph. "Londinium's Central Hall of Citizen Records now has a new file." She cleared her throat and read off the most pertinent details. "Jordan Taylor Hanson, born March fourteenth 2483 in New Harrowgate, Londinium – only child of William and Georgina Hanson, both deceased in 2502."
"Sounds good Rika," Shannon said in approval. "Now how about getting that ident card sent for?"
"Give me a minute Shannon, I'm doing my best here." She tapped away at an on-screen keyboard, scribing a request for a new ident card.
"They won't think this is strange, will they?" Taylor asked, now slightly worried.
"Oh no, they get these kinds of requests all the time," Sarika assured him. "It's pretty routine. Someone might accidentally drop theirs into an engine intake, others could inadvertently or otherwise drop theirs on the floor or ground somewhere and get it trodden on. They're not exactly indestructible."
"And you would know this how exactly?" Jared asked. Taylor noted that he sounded a little amused. "Drop yours in an engine intake one day, did you?"
"I was ten, okay?" Sarika protested, amidst a gale of laughter from Jared, Shannon and Taylor. "And I wanted to see what would happen! Don't tell me that neither of you two experimented on yours!" Jared and Shannon both laughed even harder at this, and Sarika rolled her eyes. "Bìzui nín hen bùtitie de nánsheng," she mumbled, and set about completing the ident card request. "Taylor, when you're quite finished laughing I'll need a photograph of you. One that's relatively recent."
In response, Taylor held up one of his index fingers and got up from his seat. He went to his messenger bag, which was stowed in a corner near the kitchen bench, and he knelt down to rifle through it. From its depths he produced his phone and a mini-USB cable.
"You can use my phone's camera," he said as he rezipped his bag. "That tablet's got a USB port or two on it, yeah?"
"Should do," Sarika replied, and she began running her fingers along the tablet's edges. "Found one."
Still knelt on the floor, Taylor very quickly fussed with his hair, making it feel somewhat respectable. When he could no longer feel any bits of hair sticking up every which way, he rose to his feet and took his phone and cable across to the table. A few key presses later he had the camera activated. "You press this key to take the photo," he instructed, pointing to a round silver key on the keypad, "and this one to save it." He touched a key on the leftmost side of the phone, right under the hinge that connected the screen to the keypad.
Sarika took a photo quickly, and let Taylor have a look before she saved it. This photo would be the one that went on his permanent record, both of them knew that, and so it needed to look halfway decent. Taylor nodded his approval, and Sarika saved it before hooking up the phone to her tablet. The photograph was soon uploaded to the tablet, and a few taps and swipes at the screen later the request was submitted.
"We should get a response soonish," Sarika informed them, and checked her waves while she was waiting.
‘Soonish' turned out to be less than five minutes. A chime sounded from the speakers embedded on the short sides of the tablet, and Sarika pulled up the new wave from her inbox.
REPLACEMENT IDENT CARD REQUEST APPROVED AND PROCESSED
YOUR NEW IDENT CARD MAY BE COLLECTED FROM FIVE POINTS CITY PLAZA IN TWO DAYS
MISS CORBEAU, PLEASE PRESENT YOUR CURRENT IDENT CARD UPON COLLECTION
"Two days?" Taylor asked in slight disbelief. "It's going to take that long?"
"One thing you have to remember, Taylor, is that the bureaucracy is still the bureaucracy no matter what century or universe you find yourself in," Sarika said as she marked the message as received. "But there's a very shiny silver lining to this, don't you see?"
"Not really, no."
Sarika grinned now, displaying two rows of straight white teeth. "It means that nobody in Londinium central command picked up that you weren't actually born there, or anywhere else in the ‘Verse for that matter. As far as they're concerned, you are just another fine and upstanding citizen of the Core who accidentally mislaid their ident card somewhere."
"How did you say you were injured?"
"He was hit by a truck," Sarika replied.
From the outside, the main clinic in Five Points looked to be well-cared-for, but at the same time a little rundown. Creeping ivy covered the redbrick walls, softening rough edges. A rack that had bicycles of varying ages and states of repair chained to it was bolted to the front wall at the right of the door. Each of the concrete steps at the front had a shallow dip in it, the result of more than a hundred years of feet traipsing in and out of the clinic. A sign above the door read Five Points City Clinic in both English and in Mandarin.
On the inside, however, as would be expected from a clinic it was clean and well-kept, but lacked the clinical feel of the hospitals that as a child Taylor had spent far too much time in during his breaks from school. His mother often couldn't find a babysitter for him and his siblings, and so until Isaac was old enough to take on that role they had tagged along with her to work. Instead it felt warm and inviting, with walls painted a bright sunshine yellow and soft carpet on the floor.
The doctor frowned and made note of Sarika's response on the datapad she was working from. Unbeknownst to anyone in the system, the medical record she had open hadn't even existed prior to the Tuesday just past. Sarika's hacking into Londinium's records had included the creation of a complete medical record based on Taylor's own real life records (or as much of them as he could remember, anyhow) from Earth-That-Was. To Sarika at least, it was fairly evident that it was this record the doctor was looking at. Embroidery on her uniform shirt gave her name as Dr. Mairen Hampstead.
"And where did this happen?" Dr. Hampstead asked, now having set the datapad down on her desk. She motioned for Taylor to take his shirt off and unhooked her stethoscope from around her neck.
"Over on Greenleaf, at the Kitchener Docks in Sandford Downs," Taylor answered, his voice muffled by his T-shirt, being as he was in the process of pulling it over his head. "Hurt like hell, I'll tell you that much."
Dr. Hampstead smiled slightly. "I imagine it would."
The physical examination was over fairly quickly, with Dr. Hampstead scribing even more notes onto her datapad when she was done. "You seem to have healed fairly well," she said, "but being as you've said you intend to recommence weapons training very soon" Taylor nodded at this, as much as it was a half-truth "I believe it would be best if you had a scan or two done to make sure – one of your wrist, and another of your ribs."
"There's also something else we'd like you to do," Sarika said. She leaned forward in her seat almost conspiratorially. "I understand that you are able to trace a person's genetic history from nothing more than a blood sample." When Dr. Hampstead nodded, Taylor noted that Sarika smiled slightly. "How far back are you able to trace it?"
"Up to thirty generations. The overall cost depends entirely on how many generations are being traced, but it's fixed at one credit per generation."
"What about tracing forward?" Taylor asked.
"It's possible," Dr. Hampstead replied, "but I unfortunately don't have the technology available for that sort of genetic tracing. You would need to visit a Core clinic or hospital to investigate that possibility."
Taylor and Sarika looked at one another. They had worked out that there were twenty generations between Taylor and Sarika – and Taylor knew very well that there was a chance, however small, that he and Sarika could be related to some degree. And there really was only one way to find out if that was the case.
"How long would the trace take?" Sarika asked. Her hand was inching ever closer to the pocket that held her wallet as she spoke.
"No longer than a couple of hours."
Two hours. Sarika knew they could find a lot to do in two hours. She bent down to her right side and unbuttoned a pocket on the leg of her pants, drawing out her wallet and flipping it open, and thumbed out her Paquin Mutual bank access card. "Twenty-one generations should about do it," she said.
"You'll need to speak with the receptionist at the front desk," Dr. Hampstead told her. "She'll get the process started."
After scans of Taylor's ribs and wrist had confirmed that he was completely healed, and once Sarika had had a blood sample drawn, they left the clinic and unchained the bicycles that Constance had loaned to them from the bicycle rack. "Constance downloaded a tourist map of Five Points into my datapad," she said as she crammed her helmet onto her head over her hair and buckled it under her chin. "What do you feel like for lunch?"
"Honestly?" Taylor replied, and Sarika nodded. "Italian. Haven't had it in a while now."
Sarika gave him a smile. "I'll see what I can find."
It didn't take Sarika long to locate the nearest Italian restaurant, located just a short bicycle ride away on Winchester Drive. After she had wirelessly downloaded the directions to her wrist computer, they hopped on their bicycles and headed over to the restaurant. Around halfway into the ride, Sarika looked across at Taylor and saw something that made her smile.
He was laughing.
"What's so funny?" she called out over the hum of traffic around and above them.
"I'm just remembering something from back home," he called back. "There's this band I like a lot, and the music video for a song they released in 2009 is them and a bunch of their fans riding bikes around Los Angeles. Got to see them live a few times as well." He grinned and eased back on his pedalling somewhat, and belted out the chorus of the song in question at the very top of his voice. "We were the kings and queens of promise…we were the victims of ourselves…maybe the children of a lesser god…between Heaven and hell, Heaven and hell…"
"I'm going to want to hear some of this music of yours when we get back to Merewether," Sarika said as Taylor stepped up the pedalling. Her wrist computer beeped shrilly, and she banked left into the adjoining street, Taylor following her lead a moment later. "I mean it. It has to be better than what's around at the moment. I stopped listening to the radio years ago, and not just because I live on a spaceship either."
"My iPod should still have a decent amount of juice left on the battery. I'll need to find a way of charging it before it dies completely though."
"Talk to Jared about it," Sarika advised.
The GPS in Sarika's wrist computer led them to a very cosy Italian restaurant halfway along Winchester Avenue, tucked away between an electronics store and a women's clothing boutique. To Taylor's mind it was a very strange place to build a restaurant, but it seemed to work – there were a number of bicycles chained up out the front, and through the window could be seen tables that were full of the restaurant's patrons. It was evidently very popular with the residents of Five Points.
"I hope we can get a table," Sarika said as they chained up their bicycles and ventured inside. "It looks pretty packed." Out of the corner of her eye she spotted two young women standing up from a table against the right wall of the restaurant. "Looks like we might be in luck after all."
They were seated quickly and handed menus by one of the waitresses. While Sarika went through her menu, Taylor studied the screen that had been built into the tabletop, protected by a thin sheet of what looked like glass. It almost looked like a flat-screen computer monitor, the images and text on the screen constantly shifting and changing. When Sarika started tapping away at it, its function was revealed.
"What're you having?" she asked as she tapped the name of her chosen meal into a space on the screen. "My treat, so anything you like."
"Within reason, though?"
"Within reason," Sarika confirmed. "I ain't made of money."
Once Taylor had decided on his lunch, Sarika tapped his order into the screen and pressed the image of a round green button set in one corner. "And now we wait," Sarika said as she sat back in her seat. "Won't be long."
Their meals arrived not even ten minutes later, something that greatly impressed Taylor. He was less impressed when Sarika's pocket started ringing. She swore softly and put her knife and fork down. "I'm sorry about this," she apologised as she stood up and worked her hand into her pocket. "I'll be back in a couple minutes."
True to her word, she returned not two minutes later and resumed her seat. "That was the receptionist at the clinic," she said as she dug into her tortellini boscaiola. "Dr. Hampstead's finished the trace, so whenever we're ready to head back she'll talk with me about what came up. Or us, I guess, seeing as it potentially concerns you as well." She shrugged. "Only one way to find out."
They returned to the clinic after lunch, with Sarika disappearing back into Dr. Hampstead's office with the doctor for the first ten minutes after their arrival. She returned to the waiting room with her datapad in both hands and a somewhat shocked look on her face.
"I think you need to see this," she said as she sat down next to Taylor. "I honestly never expected it." She handed Taylor her datapad and gave him a quick crash course in using it, and he loaded up the results file. The first result was Sarika's own, followed by her parents'.
CORBEAU, Sarika Aurelia – born July 19 2490
LEE (CORBEAU), Illyria Margretha – born August 7 2466
CORBEAU, Angus Vincent – born May 18 2465
"You'll need to go right to the end," she said quietly. Taylor frowned briefly, but did as she said. The five records he saw there gave him one of the biggest shocks of his life.
HANSON (BELMONT), Jordan Elizabeth – born April 14 2012, deceased September 18 2090 (78 years)
WINTHROP (HANSON), Caroline Rhiannon – born July 8 1983, deceased February 28 2078 (94 years)
HANSON, Jordan Taylor – born March 14 1983, deceased January 19 2012 (28 years)
CLARKE (HANSON), Georgina Anne – born July 27 1959, deceased February 9 2040 (80 years)
HANSON, William Isaac – born August 22 1958, deceased February 18 1991 (32 years)
"Yòng yi ge liàn jù zhan de cào wo," Taylor whispered.
Sarika forced out a shaky laugh. "My thoughts exactly," she said quietly.
+++
Translations
Mandarin
ni hái hao ma?: how are you?
tian xiaodé: name of all that's sacred
bìzui nín hen bùtitie de nánsheng: shut up you inconsiderate schoolboys
yòng yi ge liàn jù zhan de cào wo: fuck me sideways with a chainsaw
Slang
ident card: identity card