As
the light began to fizzle out, I found myself in the middle of a clearing atop
a desert ridge. Below me, the restored Owens Lake sloshed about in the wind,
the lights of Devil's Junction barely a twinkle in the distance as the sun set.
The time was just past seven in the evening, with a minute passing every
fifteen seconds.
Some
four hundred feet ahead was a large steel door embedded firmly in a rocky
outcropping. To be honest, it reminded me of an old videogame series, but
disregarding that allusion I made my way toward it slowly. Up close, the door
towered over me, large enough to accommodate an oversized semi-truck. This has to be the holding area. Meaning
the main facility...
Turning
to my left, I began to scan the rocks for signs of glass or metal. It was
understandable now why the Americans hadn't found this site. All of the
metalwork I could find had been painted with a glare-resistant lacquer, while
the glass was tinted in just the right way to appear natural. That's when I saw
a blue pickup truck moving at a high rate of speed in the opposite direction. A transaction?
I
followed the dust trail made by the pickup and it led me to a narrow stretch of
roadway. Walking back up it led me to the far side of the ridge, where embedded
in the rocks was a very obscure compound. Two men stood by a set of
double-doors, armed with semiautomatic rifles. Though I knew I'd appear as
nothing more than a mirage to them, the sight of the weapons made me cringe.
Under normal circumstances, I was certain that they would dispose of me, no
questions asked.
I
made my way around them and floated through the double doors, entering into a showroom of sorts. Along the walls were
racks of nitrous canisters, with a countertop running along the far side. In a
way, it reminded me of a tire shop. A lone figure walked on down the hall,
appearing to have completed the paperwork for the earlier transaction with the
blue pickup. I followed him intently.
He
appeared to be the other man from the incident three weeks in the future. If I
was lucky, maybe I could save him too, but for now my target was Nick.
Following this other man, we ended up in a laboratory of sorts, where the
nitrous was being synthesized in large quantities. The setup was very clean - too clean - that it made me wonder just
how an accident could possibly occur.
Fortunately
for me, I found Nick easily; he was in the backroom controlling the automated
systems through a desktop computer. With nothing else to do, I sat in the
corner of the room and watched him go about his work. Jazz music played in the
background as he moved from analysis tool to spreadsheet application, making
notes every fifteen minutes with the utmost precision and accuracy. At around
eleven o' clock, he put the system in sleep mode and headed out.
His
destination was a residential common in the facility's upper floor. He calmly
drank a beer as he read up on the latest tech news, and by midnight, he had
made his way into a cabin-style room to fall asleep. Descending on him, I allowed
my form to materialize into his dream. I stood before him in a white room, and
he began to speak.
"What
is this place?"
"This
is an alternate reality space," I answered, "where I can communicate
with you properly. My name is Dalia Webster; I am a diver."
"A
diver, eh?" He grabbed his arm and pulled it up over his head. "Does
that mean you've come to stop me from dying?"
"That's
right. I take it you know of Dr. Thatcher's work then."
"I've
read up on his theories, but I never thought I'd see the process at work. So
Dalia, tell me how I am going to die?"
Conjuring
up chairs for us both, I sat down, clasping my hands together. "In three
weeks, this facility is going to be destroyed. I don't know why or how, only
that your corpse ended up in my hospital along with two other people."
"Hospital?
So you're a doctor?"
"I
am the chief medical officer for the Devil's Junction municipal hospital, yes.
My roommate is the one who performed your autopsy." I handed him a slip of
paper. What's odd is you were burned, but it was bleeding out that killed
you."
As
he scanned the paper and the possibilities written down on it, his frown only
continued to become more and more exaggerated. "You want me to believe
this was foul play? Bitch, I don't know who you are, but you're barking up one
hell of a tree with this theory of yours."
"Do
you have any enemies, Nick?"
"None.
And even if we did, they'd never be able to set foot in the lab."
"What
about your associates? Any tension there?"
"Again,
barking up the wrong tree."
With
a sigh, I made some calculations in my head, then moved on. "I'm going to
be frank with you. The way a dive works
is that I can only interface with you when you are in delta state, such as
right now. Communication is lost if you start to dream or if you start to
awaken. Therefore we don't have much time." A nod, and I continued.
"Time
also works differently for me than it does for you. The next three weeks for
you will be five days for me. Precision is going to be very important if we
want to pull this off. The event has to occur exactly as it did before, and we
have to pull you from this reality at the ideal moment to keep you alive. Make
sense?"
"So
you're saying," he concluded, "that where your ability is to enter a
reality like an added layer in a photoshopped image, you have to cut me out of
the frame?"
"That's
right."
"That's
crazy! How in the hell are you going to remove me from the environment I'm in
at the very second disaster hits? And what's going to happen to this facility
when shit goes down?"
"Well,
if I'm right, then we should be able to save everything, facility included.
That said, I need more time to figure things out. Get some rest, and I'll get
back to you after you've had a few sleep cycles. Hopefully by then, I'll be
able to put a plan together."
With
that, I began to dematerialize, only stopping when I heard him ask, "How
can I trust you?"
I simply smiled and replied, "Because I need you for my own
plans." And with that, I had returned to the outside, watching him as he
dreamt his way through the night.
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