Julia left sleep behind with reluctance. It clawed at her - impulsively - for its continuation, in spite of the shrill alarm and slanted light that skewered the room. Sleep was a joy and its relative brevity only enhanced its appeal. Julia could sleep for days; she would indeed sleep for days when it was over. It was the quantification of “it” that was never quite (and, she knew, never would be) determined. In another reality, I sleep well, she thought, smiling into a deep stretch which did some to appease the longing; at least until the same time tomorrow. She rolled out of the otherwise empty bed.
Coffee. Black and strong and splashed with cold water for speed of consumption.
Quickly washed and clothed in clean-enough and not-too-creased clothes, Julia exited her front door and sniffed deeply at the soft haze of morning as she made her way towards the train station. It was the perfect time of day and she was always sad to pass so quickly through it. The Halloweenian fog and the threadbare traffic; straining, sleep-chocked eyes and burnt, caffeinated mouths; blasted radios and mantras barked at twitching brake-lights and the slightly phlegmy bird-chorus above. The Gothic glaze was cool on skin but there was warmth in the thick cloud overhead: threatening and imminent.
She made her way to the front of the platform where there would be fewer people, more seats, and therefore a greater chance of loneliness. The hovering train hissed to a stop and the silent commuters stumbled in. Julia found a forward-facing seat - so as not to feel queasy - and opened a paperback novel, cracking the spine with a whip of hands, relishing its passivity. “It’s what the book wants.” Her father used to say when they would sit and read by cosy pub fires when she was a young girl. “The book deserves to be shown love, through the ritual of violence.” He would smile and laugh and swig his brown pint and then they would fall separately into streams of words that meandered and charted very different courses.
This book was a horror, or at least it claimed to be.
Julia sipped her coffee and allowed her eyes to wander across her dozen fellow travellers. The commuting neural network, bound via a lilting nerve-ending to the nucleus, the hub; heads down and eyes wide at screens - as though to warm the eyes before a day of doing more of precisely the same - or at mirrors with stretched faces and measured brush-strokes, or lolling with the trains gentle, maternal sway in a queer and desperate half-sleep. We’re just signals, she thought, running with a singular purpose from A to B and desperate to be some part of a whole.
She returned to her book - re-snapping the spine for good measure - and began to follow the words again, her ADHD made the first paragraph an irrelevance as her mind warbled, wandering around the cabin and through the train of her thought like a drone, before coming back and - not without a great deal of forced thought (which in itself was another barrier to dimming the brightness in her mind and focussing on the task at hand) - parting the mental mist to pick up the thread of Beatrice and her beautiful, but very much stalked, existence. Beatrice was blocking unknown numbers and reporting to the police the shadowy figure she had seen lurking and staring at a distance. Her fears were being broadly ignored by her friends and the authorities and it seemed that the inevitable vindication of her concern was merely a chapter or two away. Julia prided herself on her ability to address and then sideline her distracting and chaotic thoughts in times of need, such as work, sleep, or an attempt to understand what opportunities a poor girl like Beatrice had to prevent her inevitable demise, but now they returned. She found herself watching the words pass by like the trees and grey-brown industrial structures outside the window, passively observing their transition across her vision without a thought as to what relevance it might have to her. She thought of ghosts, and aliens, and what it must be like to believe that they were all around us, at all times. There was beauty in the release of oneself to the possibility, allowing the unreal to bleed into the plain and hyper-real, to interfere and integrate and implicate itself into the here and the now. It was not a man with his hood up and a screwdriver in his pocket that was the apex cause of fear, but the demon that lived in your cupboard, or the dancing lights that whizzed across the sky and examined random people and then wiped their memories. These are better things to fear, right? Softened by their improbability, their lack of physicality. Being chased around your house by a real living human with a grudge and a six inch Phillips was dumb fact: a priori. Maybe one day these fears will be possible, she mused with a half smile at the silently marching stacks of letters ahead of her. We can but hope.
“Julia?”
The scattered words in her head exploded and bled into the stared quiet of the carriage. Julia looked up at the voice and her heart sank. Brian. “Brian.”
“I didn’t know you got this train.” He frowned and looked and squeezed and sat. Julia winced and offered a little space. “How are you?”
“Not bad, thanks. You?” Julia kept her book open in her lap in the hope it might declare itself as the true, intended focus of her attention. Can a book clear its throat?
“Very good. Excited for the announcement this morning.” Brian was a PA to the new CEO and was all business bluster and romance with big wet brown eyes and mop of brown hair that quivered in apathy at the train’s undulations.
“Oh. What is it?”
“That would be telling.” His bright teeth walled off the query.
“But it’s exciting.”
“Oh yes. Super exciting. I cannot wait.”
“Good.” Slowly, she raised the book and moved her eyes away from the colleague beside her.
They met the page and the words came into focus as he said “whatcha’ reading?”
“Oh, it’s just a crappy horror.”
“I can’t stand horror.” He shrugged like a proud toddler and Julia lowered her book.
“Oh.”
“I haven’t read a book in years.”
“Oh?”
“No, I just play games on my phone.”
“What stop is this?” Julia craned her neck as the train slowed.
“Woking.”
“Woking?”
“Woking.”
“Only fifteen minutes left, then.” Julia winced.
“And it’ll fly by now I’ve got somebody to talk to!” He smiled broadly before an entering passenger’s backpack caught the back of his head and made his hair wobble with a brief intensity and a look of abject disdain smothered his face. “People can be so rude.” He whispered.
“Indeed.” Julia nearly bit off her bottom lip.
The train pulled into Waterloo and they alighted together. Julia jostled ahead in a failed attempt to get away - muscling into a crowd that bled from the train in an urgent and earnest wave - but he maintained his presence beside her, riding the jostles and tuts as he matched her stride for stride. They walked through the station in the uniform, rhythmic march one expected and then out into the crisp cool of a London morning. They joined the other humanoid vessels in their group-surge under a bridge and then over a bridge and then down several alleys that led to their office: a glass-metal tower on the edge of the clear blue Thames. Julia had worked up a sweat walking faster than normal so as to reduce the time Brian had to speak about inanity. He was panting like a dog when they blipped their passes through security and nodded to the dead-eye security guards.
“See you at the presentation.” He shouted over his shoulder as they parted ways out of the elevator on the eleventh floor and that marked the end of their shared journey. Was it worth it, Brian? She thought. Was that a sufficient distraction from the unpredictable chaos of your own thoughts?
She was the first to arrive in the small, walled-off corner of the floor where the Integration Analysts were neatly corralled. Julia removed her jacket and slumped into a chair, clicking on her PC and absent-mindedly scrolling her phone as it churned into life. The headlines were white noise as she thumbed their pixel-clumps in a smooth, rhythmic procession. GORE EYES SECOND TERM; UK’S HOTTEST DAY ON RECORD HITS 30-DEGREES; 34 SPECIES THRIVING IN THE NEW QATTARA SEA.
Nothing of note, again. She placed her phone down. It’s no wonder the 24hr news cycle died a death. Nothing happens any more, she thought, the grass may well be greener, but it’s not all that exciting.
Her email loaded on an over-large PC monitor and she scrolled through - deleting the automated alerts and junk nonsense from Linkedin chancers - looking for any sign of life.
She loaded the Elsewhere terminal and letters formed in pretty, pulsing groups. A few seconds passed and then text appeared on a black screen:
ELSEWHERE LOADING…
ELSEWHERE MODULE PL2_EARTH.ewh LOADING…
ELSEWHERE MODULE LOADED…
FINDING VESSEL…
FINDING VESSEL…
VESSEL FOUND…
COMMS CHECK 1. 2. 3…
COMMS CHECK COMPLETE…
LOADING INTERFACE…
LOADING INTERFACE…
STARTUP COMPLETE…
WELCOME TO ELSEWHERE, COMMANDER AGYEMAN. HAVE A NICE FLIGHT…
The text and its black background disappeared and the screen burst into light and colour. She blinked to allow her eyes to adjust and scan the scene. To assess where she was. Sky or sea? Sky or sea? It was almost always one of the two. Occasionally it was a forest, or a lake, where an analyst had been lazy before lunch and dropped a ship in the nearest clump of dense greenery. Neither were ideal and both were frowned upon. Lochs were blacklisted. A long, thin silver fish danced across the screen and she marvelled at its shimmer and shine in her headlights. The image re-calibrated in her mind and she could see bubbles, the rippling disturbance of a warm current of water, and flecks of flourescents that twirled gracefully at the limits of the ship’s lighting. Sea it is.
“Eve, what’s my location?” She said into the headset microphone as she eased the accelerator and gently guided the ship up towards the distant surface.
“Hello Commander Agyeman. Location: Baltic Sea, east of Stockholm, co-ordinates: 59.380650, 20.641658. Depth: 285 metres… 278 metres…”
“Thank you, Eve.” The mention of the Baltic gave her pause, given how shallow it was, but she knew that Commander Boyle had taken a liking to the Scandinavian countries. Perhaps tracking a long-lost lover, or an alternate self. One to keep an eye on, she noted mentally as she navigated her ship towards the surface: manually manoeuvring the vessel was always her preference; it kept the mind active, engaged. So many analysts glazed-over and lost the joy of their jobs by dictating to Eve. The speed at which the craft was supposed to leave water was just short of Mach 1 but - given that there were no other vessels or humans on the small disc of radar in the bottom right-hand corner of her screen - she controlled the exit and allowed the world-above-water to slowly ease itself into view.
She was always struck by the rough darkness of this place. The clouds that hung in a silver-grey sky, limp with smog, were a reminder of what might have been; the butterfly-wing moments that define existence. The need to bake energy into existence and allow for its byproducts to clog the air and spoil the earth, the water that you need to survive, it must be barbaric. It’s where we would be without the Teslan Perpetuals, she considered, not for the first time, as she guided her ship vertically up toward the blinking lights high above. At least the stars are familiar.
“Eve, give me a bearing to destination-preset zero five one; covert mode active. Auto-drive on.”
“Yes, commander, bearing to destination-preset zero five one; covert mode active. Auto-drive commencing. Auto-drive commenced.”
The ship jerked left and the stars blurred into a vision of light as the ship quadrupled in speed and directed itself toward her target. Words ran from the top corner of her screen:
ELSEWHERE MODULE CONFIGURATION MODE…
AUTO-DRIVE: ACTIVE
CO-ORDINATES SET TO: 37.2514143,-115.8818603…
COVERT MODE: ACTIVE
MANUAL OVERRIDE: AVAILABLE
ENJOY THE RIDE, COMMANDER AGYEMAN…
Julia leant back and cracked her knuckles, enjoying the view of the horizon - a semi-circle of egg-white light against a vast black - that skewered her monitor. There was a moment of calm as the ship zipped forward at twice the speed of sound, the edges of the screen trembling slightly and the line-whip edge of the planet shimmering. After several seconds, the vessel slowed - marked by a settling of the screen to a fixed image - and pivoted ten degrees to the right. There it hovered, somewhere over the North Atlantic Ocean, waiting. Julia leant forward and squinted at the screen but the deep darkness and the back-lighting of the setting sun made finding anything difficult. But then it emerged out of a towering silver-grey cloud around three clicks south-south-east: a Boeing 747 passenger plane.
AUTO-DRIVE: ACTIVE
COVERT MODE: ACTIVE
STATUS: EVASIVE…
It was a common occurrence, what with those in the Elsewhere becoming more and more suspicious of an other’s presence - not helped by some rather irresponsible analysts - but every time she came close to being seen it made her heart beat harder in her chest and her palms begin to sweat. In spite of her training, the impulse to override auto-drive and careen the vessel right up to the window of the bloated plane was hard to ignore. It would be an act of terror, one for which she could face half of her life in prison, and would cause a butterfly effect that might bring down an entire civilisation, albeit elsewhere. It had been extensively war-gamed what might happen if a vessel crashed, or was shot down, or if a gateway was discovered and none of the permutations were positive. The people of elsewhere were particularly closed-minded and hostile to outsiders, even to those that were born in their own reality, let alone beyond.
But her ship remained autonomously still and just watched the plane as it was consumed by another cloud and away.
STATUS: NORMAL
The ship twitched right and jumped forward as its engine snapped into silent life. The clouds were almost invisible, at the speed they were passed; a rough silver-grey blur and the horizon a fixed, white unattainable. Julia glanced up and around the office, rolling her head on her shoulders and allowing air to pop out of her neck in soothing burps. Mike Wizel arrived and gave her a wave and a smile - which she returned - before slumping into his chair and poking his machine into life.
ARRIVAL AT DESTINATION-PRESET 051
COVERT MODE: ACTIVE
SCANNING FOR PROXIMATE VARIABLES…
SCANNING FOR PROXIMATE VARIABLES…
SCANNING FOR PROXIMATE VARIABLES…
PROXIMATE VARIABLES: 0
BACKGROUND VARIABLE SCAN: ACTIVE
AUTO-DRIVE: DISABLED
ALL YOURS, COMMANDER AGYEMAN…
“Thanks, Eve.” Julia said and returned her gaze to her screen which displayed her altitude as 24,000 metres. The sky was clearing with the rising sun and she enjoyed the stillness and solitude of the vista: hovering in complete silence, invisible and alone in a different reality. Bliss. She eased the nose down, the brightening Earth looming into view as a grey-green-blue sphere beyond a thin, patchwork veil of broiling steam. Then accelerated. In spite of it being on a screen in a well-lit office in south west London, and her sitting comfortably in an ergonomically designed and assessed chair, her stomach felt the lurching wave as she fell, at impossible speed towards the ground. The clouds were all she could see in a heartbeat, and then they were gone. In another heartbeat, the ground was not just a blanket of blurred primary colour but a formation of thin lines that intersected and overlapped to form roads and buildings. Wide stretches of burnt orange - coming to life in the rising sunshine - marked a deserted expanse. Another second: she had to stop accelerating and twist the craft left and lift the nose. It twisted and settled, parallel to the ground no more than one hundred metres below, and then she hit the accelerator again. The ship stormed forward before rising up and back into the clouds. She could feel the force of the movement in spite of its digitisation and it being a literal world away.
PROXIMATE VARIABLES: 5
The update appeared on her screen and she smiled. I am the inbound variable. But they will have only felt the air twitch and blinked a flash of light that would be shrugged off as an optical illusion. A trick of the light. The craft continued up and up until the light faded at the edge of the atmosphere.
PROXIMATE VARIABLES: 0
“Eve. Altitude check.”
“Altitude: 98.632 kilometres, commander Agyeman. Do you need assistance in completing your tasks today?”
“No, Eve. Thank you.” Julia said with a laugh. “I’m just enjoying the view.”
“Noted, commander.” The Eve fell silent. This would be flagged as an minor misdemeanour, Julia knew, along with the speed she has travelled so close to the ground and her proximity to variables. Subjects of my next 121, no doubt, she mused as she allowed the stars overhead to come into focus against the sheer boundless black. I’m out there somewhere. She knew that wasn’t strictly true, as had been explained in her training, but the thought was more comforting, more tangible than accepting the existence of a concurrent, co-relational reality. To physically exist somewhere in relation to elsewhere was aligned better with her perceived reality. “Commander, the session will expire in thirty minutes.” Eve said, slightly more softly, reluctant to disturb Julia again. Her conscientiousness had grown over recent months: she was more receptive and appreciative of human emotion, more considerate. Probably as a result of a recent patch, Julia surmised to herself.
“Roger that, Eve.” She said, shaking the clouded, distracting thoughts out of her head to focus on the task at hand. She dipped the nose, lilted left again and dropped with a tap of the accelerator. Reconnaissance: photographs, building scans, radiation readings. The check-list was etched into her brain from years of recurring training (and a non-negligible amount of admonishing). As the cloud-line loomed up to meet her, and the blackness beyond was beaten away by the growing light of Earth-bound morning, everything went momentarily blank.
“What the fuck-” Julia started. She could see Mike look over from his seat out of the corner of her eye but she ignored him and straightened her face which was enough to cause him to shake his head and turn back to his own screen. What the fuck was that, she completed the thought in the safety of her own head which was now awash with panicked, scrolling calculations.
“Commander Agyeman.”
“Eve, what was that?”
“What was what, commander?”
“That thing that just flew by.”
PROXIMATE VARIABLES: 0
“There are no proximate variables, commander.” The words appeared on the screen to confirm Eve was actively checking.
“No, not now. Check logs for last 30, 40 seconds.” Julia said, closing her eyes as she attempted to control her voice and keep it low enough to get Mike’s attention. This doesn’t need more drama, not yet.
“Commander, no variables have been seen since 10.32. Your pulse is elevated and retinas dilated, I suggest a break. Here is safe for disembark.”
“No. No.” Julia was shaking her head. “No, I saw it. Err, playback transmission… roll back two minutes.”
“As you wish, commander.” The voice was level but there was tone of doubt undermining the automated source. A small square appeared on the screen which displayed a smaller repetition of Julia’s monitor, replaying the moment her vessel had paused and she had checked her altitude: she heard her voice - quietly, as thought caught on the wind - in conversation with Eve.
“Enlarge”. She requested. The rectangle doubled in size. “Forward 10.” The image blipped forward to show a still scene of a billion stars on black. “Forward 10.” The same again. She paused and then the ship lilted and rolled left, the stars barrelling out of view and the soft glow of Earth’s horizon chasing the last away. “Here it comes.” The ship dropped at speed as she had accelerated and then… it happened. “There!” She cringed at her raised voice and held her breath for a second. To her relief, Mike didn’t flinch; his headset on and his own work holding his attention. “Pause. Step back. Back. Back.” The screen blinked each time and another image, slightly different, from a moment before appeared. It was the top of Earth, the horizon, tiny silver pin-prick stars, “back,” and then, “back,” and then “stop. There.” It was a silver craft. “Eve, what is that?” The silence that followed seemed to stretch out into the boundless black sky that surrounded her ship and was more unnerving than the presence of any unknown, unidentified vessel on her screen. “Eve?” More silence followed and Julia wondered if her screen had frozen, locked up with the sheer volume of assessment required. But that was almost unthinkable and had never happened in her career. Specks of dust crept across the front of her vessel’s live camera to emphasise the fact. The smaller screen with the replayed image rocked back a couple of frames and then forward again. “Stop.” Julia said, shaking her head. What is she doing? It then quickly zoomed through the preceding thirty seconds or so, and then further, reversing her steep dive and climb, her pause in midair for the passenger jet, her setting coordinates for the original destination. “Stop!” Julia shouted as she rose to her feet. Mike spun around to see what the commotion was for and then removed his headphones, frowning as he took in Julia’s consternation. She didn’t notice him. Her eyes were too fixed on the impossible scene that was unfolding before them. “Eve!” She yelled but then the video stopped, the small rectangular box disappearing entirely and then her screen clicking to black.
ELSEWHERE MODULE TERMINATING…
ELSEWHERE MODULE TERMINATED.
“Session terminated. Have a good day, Commander Agyeman.” Eve’s dislocated voice was as clear as a bell, unweighed by any untoward experience, anything that might be of concern. It was just a plain, calmly delivered expression of warmth.
“Fuck.” Julia slammed her palm onto her desk and her screen wobbled in its dumb darkness. Mike rose to his feet.
“Are you okay?” A human, tangible voice was welcome as Mike spoke.
“Yes.” Julia said, shaking her head. “I just-” She screwed up her face, now panicking as to what might be happening: what was Eve doing with the information she had observed? Why kick me out? All at once, Julia was an other, distinct and remote and left to her own devices. But what if nothing is done? It’s then my word against that of an artificial intelligence known for its binary thought, not its ability to lie. She stopped short of allowing herself to wonder what it was she had seen; that raised far to many questions which her panicked brain could only push aside for now.
“Just..?”
“…crashed.” She said. “…in the sea.”
Mike weighed her with a thoughtful look and Julia wondered if he has seen through her lie, but then he beamed as he leapt and raised his palm up over his head. “Yes! First time?! Welcome to the club, Jules!”
She forced a smile and high-fived him. “Happens to the best of us, I guess.” She shrugged. Mike clapped his hands and spun around, his blonde hair flopping. He appeared to Julia as a Labrador; gleeful and gormless.
“We thought it would never happen!” He laughed, looking around for colleagues to share in the joy but it was still just the two of them. “They get so pissed when we do that. I’m basically famous in Retrievals now! We have to celebrate, beers tonight?”
“Sure.” Julia said, returning to her seat, hoping the blonde dog would get the message and bound back to his own.
“Awesome.” He bounced on the spot for a few seconds and then half-skipped, half-slunk back to his desk. Julia exhaled deeply as his headphones returned to his head.
Julia tapped the screen and the login page appeared. She typed in her credentials and hit return.
ACCESS DENIED.
She rubbed her hands together, pushing back the rising panic. I’m sweating, I missed a key. She tried again.
ACCESS DENIED.
No. No. No. The panic broke the flood-defences and made her claw for sudden breath. What have I done? She was back on her feet and walking to the door when a voice made her stop.
“You going to the Town Hall?”
Fuck. She checked her watch, 10.25 AM. 5 minutes!