Chapter 2 (pt 1)
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ALLISTER ADAMS
Riser Town, Suburbs of the District
Day 215
Allister’s employment Assignment was due to start before the afternoon was lost, and by the low position of the sun and long shadows stretching behind him, he knew that evening was on its way. He looked at the time-measuring app on the CYNQUE device embedded in his wrist to be sure. The days and hours and minutes glared back at him in the same neon-green hue. Nothing told time neutrally anymore. It just told them how much they had left.
A little under 215 days.
He dodged a few more lingering drones, moving building to building, ducking under hanging ladders, and sprinting through open stretches of pavement. He gave thanks when he reached the bottom of his building, trying not to let the exchange with Quigles sink in. But his heart was weighed down, his feet lifting slower and slower up the winding flights of stairs to his home. Less from fatigue and more from that same sense of loss as earlier.
Since then, he’d lost the game, the neighborhood, and his best for the rest.
He paused midstep and gripped the metal railing tightly with a mix of frustration and sorrow.
Maybe humans could never understand. Maybe it was only other Evolutionaries who could grasp the full weight of his burden.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone,” he muttered, squeezing the rail.
The metal crumpled beneath his fingers.
Allister swore up and down about his enhanced strength, another one of his potentials he couldn’t control, then resumed his journey to his doorstep. There had to be others out there like him. Evolutionaries not joined up with C20 who wanted to use their potentials to save humanity rather than hurt them.
He stood face-to-face with his front door and said to himself, “I gotta find a way to skip Riser Town. Better for Mom, she can stay put. Better for me, I can cynque up with peeps like me.”
He turned and looked out over the barren alley behind his building. Nothing but trash blowing in hot wind.
“Gotta skip Riser Town,” he repeated.
He’d planned to sneak by his mom and head straight to the shower pod to get ready. A decent plan, except as he reached for the transparent sliding panel door, he paused at the aluminum container full of junk next to his feet.
It wasn’t like his mom to leave trash near the house. She liked to keep that little square slice of patio pristine at all costs, to the point he’d find her up sweeping it in the middle of the night.
Curious, Allister knelt down next to it.
He moved the already open lid farther back and rummaged through the box full of gadgets, trinkets, and printed photographs. It didn’t look like trash to him, so he wondered why it was outside.
“You get into it with another one of those kids?” his mom yelled from in the house.
“Sort of. Hard to explain,” he replied, picking up what looked like a small transmitter.
Is this my dad’s?
He became more suspicious the deeper he dug.
“I told you about those boys up the block. They’re killin’ types.”
Allister rolled his eyes. It was the same speech he always got in the afternoons. She’d been warning him to stay inside and away from the FBX crew, especially lately, with the drones on high alert and the raids happening more frequently.
“Lucky we don’t have nothin’ they want, besides blood,” his mom continued.
“One thousand, Mom.”
He fiddled with the transmitter to confirm it didn’t work, then turned it over before sighing and putting it back. As he reached down, his eyes locked on an upside-down photo of him sitting on his dad’s shoulders.
His heart seemed to get even heavier. The sort of sinking sadness that came whenever he thought back to his formative years.
The day in the photo was a day he would never remember, like any day that had passed before he turned eight years old.
He rested his fingers on top of the image, just as intrigued by the texture of printed visuals as he was by his bright, snaggle-toothed smile. Did he used to be that happy? He was so used to seeing everything on screens and projected as holograms, he was trying to zoom in on the picture without picking it up. Thinking to himself maybe those individual pixels would show every missing detail from his past. But the image was as it was. A snapshot. A frame of time suspended. He couldn’t get closer to it, nor could it get closer to him.
Unless.
Allister caught himself smiling as he picked it up.
In the photograph, he was seven, holding up locks of his dad’s hair as if he were the littlest puppeteer. His dad’s eyes were puffy and wrinkled at the corners, barely visible because his smile covered so much of his face. A thick, unruly beard surrounded his mouth like joy surrounded the moment.
On his dad’s shirt, the logo had two letters, A and P, conjoined on the same line. It stirred more memories that would not surface.
Was it a long-dead fashion brand? Or, maybe a clever combination of their first names?
Allister and Patrick.
He would’ve smiled at that thought, but he frowned again, angry that he couldn’t remember his own playfulness, or his dad, or the time they spent together when he was alive. From those seven years, all Allister had from him were those two words, Foeht Zeorgen, and a small assortment of vintage clothing. Those words were special though, they were the last thing he remembered hearing his dad say before he died, and twelve years later, the phrase wouldn’t let him go, nor would the deep voice that whispered it to him in his dreams.
His fingers tightened around the material until he became aware of himself.
He loosened his hold and tried smoothing out the photo’s new crease against his leg, wanting to restore the glossy finish, the uninterrupted purity of father-son love.
“I know it’s been a couple days, but I found some decent food!” his mom interrupted. “Hurry up so you can eat this before you go. It’ll be spoiled by morning!”
“I’ll be in in a sec…,” Allister said.
Another keepsake caught his eye.
Why’s she tossing all this stuff?
He picked up a piece of squared card stock.
You are the only hope! Join the Andromeda Project today! read the title. It was dated
FALL 2033.
His CYNQUE device came to life in the intrusive way artificial intelligence technology often did: triggered by immediate surroundings, geolocation tracking, changes in the environment, visual cues. The device was forcefully adhered to his wrist, the wires constantly digging beneath his flesh for a biometric reading to verify he not only existed but was…connected. Or, in other words, CYNQUED.
“Cynque cancel,” he commanded under his breath.
But his CYNQUE kept loading whatever data file was linked to the tiny card. The word retrieving flashed across the air above his wrist, and in that instant, a near-transparent video screen popped up and played an infomercial.
In it, the suited soldier stood upright, spoke with zest, and wore a wide smile. The logo on his clothing was an identical match to the one stitched on his dad’s shirt.
“The Andromeda Project is looking for people like you!” the soldier said. “We believe it’s not the end for our world, and together, with the help of our great governments, we can find the solution. It starts with you — you and your amazing potentials, you and your dynamic intelligence.”
A slightly older woman replaced the man on the screen, her voice a whole octave higher than the man’s, the inflections on her words even more exaggerated and forced.
Allister leaned closer to his CYNQUE, cupping his hand around the speaker to keep his mom from hearing.
“Are you dedicated to saving our race before natural disasters wipe us out? Do you want to hone and master your specific potentials? It will take courage. It will take vulnerability. It will take resilience. I challenge you to step into your highest self as an Evolutionary, to live in honor and integrity, to be in contribution. You can stop the apocalypse and return our world to its former glory.”
“Mega. The gov’s looking for Evolutionaries now?” Allister asked, excitement sneaking into his voice. “To stop the apocalypse?”
It was the answer to all of his problems, a chance to be an Evolutionary hero.
“You matter, because you are the only hope,” the woman continued.
“I’m the only hope,” he repeated.
The transmission glitched hard, fast. The video blanked and another voice replaced that of the two soldiers and their jovial recruitment messaging. The new voice was low, serious, shaking.
It was his dad’s.
Allister held his breath and lifted the CYNQUE to his face, unable to see anything but the blackened screen with the vocal recording embedded in it.
The world fell away as his dad started speaking.
“Son,” he said. “I don’t know how you got your hands on this, but your Mom isn’t gonna be happy about it. All I can say right now is…use your potentials — ”
There was an urgency and seriousness in his dad’s language. One Allister didn’t think would have come from the smiling face he’d seen in the photograph.
The transmission glitched again, stretching his dad’s words into long, drawn-out syllables. “The apocalypse can be stopped if we can find the — ”
Allister managed to catch him saying something about artifacts before the message cut off.
Trying to steady his trembling hand, he waited for more information and barely registered his mom yelling for the third time.
“I know you hear me calling you!” she shrieked.
Allister snapped back to reality. “Whoa, Mom,” he said. He looked up to find that she was straddling the open doorway, fuming. “What’s got you triggered?”
“What’s got me — ?” She leaned down and snatched the photo out of his hand.
“What are you doing going through this stuff? This is all trash.”
Allister rose in silence. He closed his hand around the square card, afraid she’d take that, too.
But he wanted the photo back, so he reached for it.
She held it away from him. “You need to get ready for your employment assignment. Clock is ticking.”
She was gripping the photo so tight, he knew it would bend even more, become creased in too many places and thereby ruined.
“Don’t ditch the photo, Mom. It’s not trash,” he said, insistent.
ARTIFACT REVEAL:
CYNQUE Prototype — Original development on the Cynque prototype began in Paris underground during 2030. This was the same year as the first Arrival, awakening Quincyn Bordeaux’s genius level intellect. Prior to that, Bordeaux was a joke in the tech community, having produced numerous failed products.
CYNQUE acts as a singular device, or, dare we say, a ONE device, to replace cell phones, most computers, and tablets. Its holographic projection capabilities allow for incredible versatility with regards to display. Within CYNQUE, an energy grid of personal information is curated, and a self-contained network of verified information is distributed consistently to all those who are CYNQUED. All verifiable and traceable to a source. Sound familiar?
Yes. The CYNQUE backend system uses blockchain technology.
Dr. Bordeaux launches CYNQUE in 2032, at what he claims is the end of the great disconnection and misinformation age, hoping to bring us back together. What starts as a test for those lucky survivors of the Paris 2030 Superstorm may yet become something so much more. These 1,111 Technological Devices of various colors, textures, materials, and design elements, provide essential information to survive the future.
Features: Geolocation, Messaging system, Video projection, Screen display, Health monitoring, Data storage, Information distribution, Limited AI capabilities, Speech activated.
Classification: Artifact
Suite: Technology
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
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