Dad wouldn’t always leave me in a tree to watch, as others trained for combat. He still loved to run and would sometimes suggest that we run together. He could have easily talked and run at the same time, but mostly he enjoyed using a run as an opportunity to think. I didn’t always give him the chance.
“Dad? Can I ask you something?” I began.
He didn’t reply, but he slowed his pace as an indication that he was listening.
“When you were back in time, why didn’t you ask Jesus questions? From what you and Mom have said, you could have spoken to him in English. Nobody would have understood; so it wouldn’t have posed a risk of changing the Bible, or history.”
“What do you think I should have asked?” he replied.
I didn’t have an answer, so we ran for nearly another kilometer in silence before he spoke again.
“Do you remember the first three-dimensional hologram puzzle set we to gave you?” Dad asked.
“Of course. It had one thousand different puzzles programmed into it.”
“That’s right. The first puzzle was easy, but they got harder as you went along. Do you remember puzzle nine hundred and twenty-eight?”
“No.”
“It’s the one you got stuck on,” he said.
“Oh … right.”
“You never asked me for the solution, and if you had, I wouldn’t have told you. Puzzles are created for just one purpose: to be solved. Being given the answer would have ruined the puzzle for you. I could have asked Jesus for the secrets of the universe, but I assume that He would have felt the same way. Why ruin such a magnificent puzzle?
******
We run in the forest for hours after getting off the bus in Rio. We’re running out of both energy and daylight, when I see our destination: an ancient house shaped like an octagon. There’s a light glowing in a second floor window.
Being an octagon, the house has many doors, all of which are left unlocked; so I pick the one with the welcome mat and walk inside.
“Brill? You home?” I call.
“Upstairs,” we hear from above.
We find him in bed.
“Are you my grandchildren?” he asks. “Wait, you’re too young for that. Are you my great- grandchildren?”
“No, Brill. We’re friends. You were friends with our parents, Cephas and Martha Paulson, remember?”
“They were a pair, those two. I thought they’d never admit they were in love with each other.”
“We’re trying to find them, Brill, but first we need to find the location of Bethany House. You built it. Can you tell us how to find it?”
“Bethany House?” he says. “How hard could it be to find? It’s a national monument.”
We lock eyes and it’s clear to me that despite being over a century old, his mind is as sharp as ever. Sharp enough that he’s only going to give me the information he chooses.
I use my com to display the aerial shot of the national monument on a large screen; then I split the screen and request a very old newscast.
“That’s the footage of when Bethany House was destroyed,” Austin says.
“Compare the shots,” I say. “What do you see?”
“Two smoking holes in the ground,” Zera says.
“Look at the original footage,” I say. “It’s like a bomb crater - the slopes are slightly angled. Then look at the monument site.”
“The sides are nearly vertical,” Austin says. “Like it was precision - cut by digging drones.”
“They can’t do that!” Zera says. “Bethany House is like holy ground.”
“They didn’t touch Bethany House …” I say, “… because that’s not the real Bethany House.”
“The entire national monument is a fake?” Zera asks.
I turn to Brill. He wants to smile, but he won’t allow himself.
“Mom said they’d sometimes run from Capon Springs to Bethany House. The National Monument is fifty kilometers from here. That’s a pretty long run.”
His face returns to the pretense of senility, like he’s forgotten my statement.
“I have something here for your father,” Brill says. “I found a whole box of the special light sticks he was always asking about. He always carried light sticks around after he got buried alive in that cave. The ones like this are hard to find. They stopped making them a long time ago because some fool stared at one for so long it made his eyes hurt.”
He reaches into his nightstand, brings out the box and hands it to me. I remove one from the box and stick it into my pocket.
“Thank you, Brill. I’ll be sure he gets them. Now, can you tell me how to find the real location of Bethany House?”
“There’s nothing to tell. The easiest way is to start at the barn and head north. Either you find it or you don’t. When you get lost enough times, you learn to find it. Now, you be sure he gets those light sticks.”
Brill rolls over and shuts his eyes, so we head for the door.
“If you do find the hole, be mindful of the power connection,” he says. “The drones just disconnected our power tap. They didn’t seal the main line or even fill our access tunnel like they should have, fool robots.”
Thank you, Brill.
******
Brill’s granddaughter, Pauline, gives us three rooms for the night at Capon Springs, and then feeds us breakfast in the morning. Her husband, John, gives us a ride in an ancient electric bus part of the way to our starting point. We run from there.
“The barn Brill mentioned has to be the barn that the survivors of Bethany House hid in and named ‘The Manger’,” I say.
“The barn owned by the Ralph’s,” Austin agrees. “Do you think they’re still alive?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They’d be over one hundred.”
When we arrive, we see a young woman riding a horse around a large pasture. She rides over to us.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hi. Our parents were friends of Bill and Wendy. Does either of them still live here? I ask.
“Bill died four years ago, but Wendy is still here,” she says. “I help her out around the house and bring her what she needs. My name is Katie.”
“Do you think we could speak with her?”
“I’m sure she’d love some company.”
She dismounts and walks the horse all the way to the front door.
“Wendy? Some friends are here to see you,” she says, then mounts the horse and returns to the pasture.
We find Wendy sitting on a soft, old chair, listening to a novel. One look tells us all that she’s now blind – there’s only so much that technology can do when you’re over a century old.
“Hello?” she says. “Please, come in.”
“Hello, Wendy,” I say. “My name is Jocie. I’m here with my brother Austin and our friend, Zera.”
“Jocie? That name was very popular for girls about twenty years ago. The name Austin - that’s a lot less common, and I think you’re the first Zera I’ve ever met. Are your parents with you, Jocie? I would so love to have a visit from Cephas and Martha.”
“How did you know who we are?” Austin asks.
“Your father, of course. He said you’d visit.”
“Then you know why we’re here?” I ask.
“Of course not, dear. Cephas loves a mystery too much to ever spoil how it’s going to end. He just said that I should feed you and let you sleep in the barn for a night, like he did.”
“We need to visit Bethany House,” I say. “Can you tell us how to find it?”
“I did go there one time when it was first being built, to deliver water,” she says. “It was about a one hour walk and it was at the top of a hill.”
“Anything else?” I ask.
“We had to crawl into some blackberry bushes, because we heard a drone overhead, but it turned out to be a maintenance drone inspecting hatches.”
“Hatches?”
“There were access hatches to the big power lines. Brill and Austin thought it was funny that they got access to power without ever breaking open a hatch; so the drones would fly over and think everything was normal.”
Find the hatches, and you find Bethany House.
“Wendy? Will you use your com to show us a satellite picture of your house?”
When the screen displays the picture, I zoom out and trace a line straight north with my eyes.
“Look at this area of the picture,” I say. “A square kilometer has been altered.”
“It looks normal to me,” Zera says.
“That’s the problem,” I say. “Because it’s computer-generated, it has a pattern to it. Someone altered the picture, because the Bethany House hole would be visible. See how the trees are spaced? It doesn’t have the randomness of nature.”
“I don’t see it,” Austin says.
“Trust me; there’s a pattern.”
“Now look here,” I say. “See these silver dots? They’re the hatches that Wendy saw. They’re spaced at regular intervals along this line, except in the altered area. Whoever altered the database to remove the crater, also accidentally removed the hatch from the picture. The real Bethany House is somewhere in that kilometer.”
It’s early; so despite Wendy’s insistence that we should take some time in the barn where our parents stayed, we set off in search of Bethany House. The terrain is rough, with some steep, wooded hills, sprinkled with an occasional collection of boulders that look like they were dropped randomly by a giant hand.
“Wendy said she walked to it from her house in an hour when she was sixty years old, so we must be getting close,” Zera says.
“Very close,” I say. “Look.”
Ahead of us is an old cabinet. The door has fallen off and spilled its contents onto the ground: heavy fighting sticks and sets of reactive padding.
There are no signs of trails, as the forest has reclaimed them all. We know the house sat atop a high point, so we head uphill.
“There it is,” Austin says.
On top of the hill is a stand of trees that is younger than those surrounding it. If there was once a lawn here, it too has been reclaimed. Inside the stand, we can see the edge of a large hole. Austin keeps walking.
“Stop!” I say. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to erase this spot from public databases. Maybe they did even more.”
We stand for a long time, as I carefully scan the trees.
“There are proximity sensors in the trees. They’re probably linked to cameras,” I say.
“Can we jam them?” Zera asks.
I look to Austin.
“If we do, we wouldn’t get our pictures taken, but whoever placed them would be immediately tipped off that we’re here,” he says.
“All the houses in the Four network had escape tunnels,” Zera says.
“Let’s see if we can find one. Maybe we can access the hole from the inside.”
We search for thirty minutes, without success, until I notice a fallen tree that has been torn apart by some large claws.
“An old escape tunnel would make a pretty nice cave for a bear, wouldn’t it?” I say.
I start looking for bear scat. What I find is, thankfully, old and it leads us to a tunnel entrance hidden between a boulder and a tree.
“Do you think anyone is at home?” I ask.
“Not at this time of year …” Austin says, ‘…but a stunner, set on the highest setting wouldn’t be a bad idea, just the same.”
Zera volunteers to go first, and we follow after a muffled “all clear.” The tunnel is mostly clear until we reach a bent metal ladder that leads up. The chamber above is full of debris.
“Check this out,” Austin says, and I shine my light on the wall near the ladder.
“It’s the initials of all the members of Four who visited,” I say.
“There’s Dad,” he says.
“And Mom,” I say, shining my light on a different section.
“They loved this place,” Zera says.
“Should we add our initials?” Austin asks.
“We’d need some serious power tools to clear that debris,” Zera says, when we’re done carving our initials in the dirt.
“And a way to power them,” Austin adds.
Power?
“That’s it,” I say. “Brill said to mind the power connection because the drones hadn’t done a proper job. We can break into one of the hatches and get in through the tunnel they dug to steal power. We’ll go under all of the proximity sensors in the trees and nobody will know we’re here.”
The hatch system is easy to find, because the drones keep the area clear of trees as part of their regular maintenance.
“The hatch has an ultrasonic lock on it,” Austin says. “The drones just transmit the right frequency combination and the lock will open.”
“Can you hack into it?” I ask.
“I doubt it. It could be a single frequency, or dozens, played in a particular order. There’s no way to know.”
“What if we shoot it?” Zera asks.
“The locking pin would freeze in place,” Austin replies.
“Can we trick it?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’re in the middle of nowhere, breaking into a place where nobody would normally want to go,” I say. “Security could be very low, just a simple combination of tones that would never be produced accidentally in nature.”
“We could program a com to emit ultrasonic tones, starting just outside the range of human hearing, and stepping up at say 10 hertz at a time,” Austin says. “It would be like singing a messed up set of scales to get every possible combination of notes.”
He pulls a small computer out of his bag and starts setting it up. It only takes him couple of minutes.
“Even using a computer, this could take a while to find the combination,” he says.
Half an hour later, we hear the bolt click open.
“It was just a three-tone combination, each tone about one hundred hertz apart,” Austin says.
Zera is smiling at us.
“What?” I ask.
“Mom always told me to be nice to the nerds.”
“I’m sending the combination to your coms,” Austin says. “Let me go in first and make sure it also works from the inside.”
He opens the hatch.
“What’s that smell? I ask.
“Ozone,” Austin replies. “The electrical lines are superconductors, but there’s still some static when you’re moving that much power.”
He climbs down the ladder and closes the hatch. We hear it lock, and then unlock, and he opens the hatch.
“Good,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to get stuck down here.”
We all climb down. The lines are at least thirty meters below ground level, and the closer we get to the bottom, the more I feel like there are ants crawling over my skin. The tunnel must have been dug by a massive drone that was also spraying some sort of insulating plastic on the walls as it went. The electrical line itself is at least a half meter in diameter.
“Everything looks insulated, but don’t touch anything,” Austin says.
We have a narrow space where we can walk beside the line, but we don’t have to go far. Just twenty meters down the line, we find the hole where Four broke through. The power line they used is still there, as is a fried drone that presumably got the job of detaching it. The hole in the casing of the main line has been sprayed with the same plastic that coats the walls.
“A Band-Aid,” Austin says.
“A what?” Zera asks.
“It’s an expression grandpa James used. Before liquid skin was created, people would cover small wounds with a sticky piece of cotton and let them scab over.”
“Gross!”
“True, but it worked. Anyway, the name became synonymous with a temporary patch.”
I’m the smallest, so I volunteer to wiggle through the hole, and into Bethany House. The tunnel is only a half meter in diameter, but I’m so happy to be away from the static and ozone smell that I don’t mind having to crawl. It’s also good that I don’t mind small spaces, because after one hundred meters, I see pinpricks of light that are still another one hundred meters away.
My knees are scraped and bruised by the time I reach the lights, where I find that a layer of broken rock has blocked the tunnel. I try pushing at the largest rock, but I can’t budge it.
“Jocie?” I hear Austin call from back up the tunnel, and realize that he’s crawled in behind me.
“There’s a rock that’s too heavy for me to move, blocking the end,” I say.
“Let me try,” he says.
“How will you get past me?”
“Lay flat and I’ll crawl over.”
I’ve always thought Austin has bony knees and elbows, but as he crawls over, I realize just how bony they really are.
“Sorry,” he says, to my many groans of pain.
He struggles with the rock for several minutes, before he also gives up.
“There’s just no leverage,” he says. “If I could push with my feet, I bet I could move it, but there’s no way I can turn around in here.”
“Finally,” I say.
“Finally, what?”
“There’s finally a time when being short is exactly what’s needed. It’s going to be tight, but I’m just small enough that I can turn around.”
I’m just small enough? That’s what Dad said…
What’s going on?” Zera asks from up the tunnel.
“Not you, too,” I say. “We’re already kind of jammed up in here.”
Austin crawls backwards, and gets to feel what it’s like to have someone crawl over him while he lays on solid rock. When he’s out of my way, I start the process of turning myself feet first towards the rock. When I’m halfway there, I get stuck. I try to reverse the process, but I can’t go that way either.
“Austin, I need some help. I’m stuck.”
He can’t help it, he starts to laugh.
“So much for being just small enough,” he says. “I would have thought that someone as good at puzzles as you are would have seen that you’re too big to fit in that spot.”
I shift my left foot a few centimeters to the right.
Just big enough to fit inside a puzzle! That bar isn’t just a piece of a time machine; it’s also a piece of a puzzle.
“You seemed to know what would fit where, when you were driving the tube car,” Austin says.
I’m able to grab my left foot with my right hand and rotate it past my right leg.
But who created the puzzle? It can’t be Dad.
“You thought making me and Zera scream was really funny. I could see it on your face.”
I slide my right leg forward as far as I can, which shifts my weight and allows me to lower my head slightly.
It has to be me. I create the puzzle.
“It’s just a puzzle, Jocie. Figure it out,” Austin says.
With my head lower, I can rotate my shoulders.
How am I going to tell Austin? It will crush him.
“Or do you need help from your baby brother?”
My shoulder blade pops free, though not without the loss of some skin, and I fall on my belly with my face towards Austin.
“I do need help from my baby brother,” I say. “I need you to do that one special thing you’ve been waiting your whole life to do.
But it’s not what you think it is.