Chapter 6
Chan’s stomach had been complaining again of emptiness for quite some time, so he turned the ratty old bicycle toward home.
At the bottom of the outside stairway, he dismounted. He had no lock or chain and decided he would have to carry the thing upstairs to his apartment. His eyes turned up the stairs and then back at his bike twice. He started to bend down, then changed his mind. The stairs were the split-flight type with a landing halfway up to the next floor. The steps climbed over themselves in a counterclockwise direction. He stepped around and faced the rear of the bike. Then he squatted and inserted his shoulder through the frame until it touched the seat tube. Standing up, he lifted the bike, hanging mostly off his back and not pressing too awfully hard on his shoulder. It allowed him to climb with less effort, swinging it out from his right side as he made left turns up each flight. On his floor he gently let it down, turned it around and rolled it to his door.
Once inside his efficiency apartment, he glanced around a bit, and then wheeled it over in front of the now empty old bookcase. Leaning the bike against it, he said, “You two can hold each other up until I come with a better plan. Hopefully neither of you will collapse and wake up the neighbors.”
After a perfunctory meal, he went out and climbed the stairs to the top floor. He sat facing out through the railing as he had done so many times before. However, instead of burying his attention in a book, he watched the evening traffic on the streets that were in his line of sight.
He was already wishing he could stay at the lab. Despite the oddness of such cramped quarters and so very far underground – he had never gotten around to asking how far – it had given him so many answers to all those questions he never had the clarity to ask. While there was no crazy sense of any of the adventures that had filled his books and his dreams, the whole thing kept calling him farther and deeper into The Brotherhood.
So it was the next day passed all too slowly before he was scheduled to pass back through the portal for an evening session in the gym and library. Even the project at work that had filled him with purpose just last week barely held his attention in the shop. The boss let him go early, so Chan decided he would have dinner at the lab cafeteria since he would arrive a few hours ahead of local time.
He waited in the square. It occurred to him to wonder if anyone had noticed that he was there on a regular basis now. He started to look around, then reminded himself not to be so obvious. Over a period of some moments, he turned this way and that when something moved or made enough noise to justify turning his head. Pretty soon his eyes had scanned the whole panorama. There was just enough traffic that he knew he couldn’t have spotted anything that wasn’t obvious. Still, he decided to wander away from his spot for awhile, surreptitiously checking his watch. There was plenty of time, too much time. He studied a few windows without really seeing anything, then stood for a moment near the river roughly where he was when this whole thing started. Glancing back toward the area of the portal, he saw nothing amiss, of course, but his mind knew that screens there projected parts of the view.
Finally it was about the right time and he drifted to an angle where he could approach the portal casually and pretend to open the door. It was almost anticlimactic. But upon crossing through the portal curtain, he was surprised to see Pete there again. The man pointed to the portal behind him and Chan turned to look. It was already gone, and there was no technician there.
“Your watch does more than you know. The portal was set up to sense your approach and activate just long enough to let you through. It reacts to your watch, which acts like a key for some things we do here.”
Chan stared at his watch for a moment, and then looked up.
Pete said, “You probably sense that something is up. We’ve had trouble and need to change our plans. We made sure the portal deactivated the moment you cleared the curtain because someone has been poking around and may have a device that could let them detect the portal.”
Chan changed quickly into the lab uniform. Without a word Pete walked toward the same direction as before and Chan followed. This time Pete stopped at the odd panel that was door-sized. He pointedly waved his own watch in front of one side, then pushed and the panel became a door without a handle. He turned and closed it behind them in a tiny space with low lighting.
Instead of the lift this time, there were narrow, steep-angled stairs heading down. However, each step had an inset cut on alternating sides. It made it much easier to walk down so long as you used the proper foot for each step. At the bottom was a larger open space that branched out into hallways in three directions. Pete turned and went back the direction they had come from the floor above.
He entered a lounge with several softer chairs than any that Chan had seen elsewhere in the facility. The room was roughly the size of the foyer above them where Chan first entered. On one wall was a very large display screen. Pete walked over to it and made some complicated gesture with his left hand and the screen took on the faintest difference in color to indicate it was now powered up.
He waved with an open hand to one of the chairs and Chan took a seat. Pete dropped into another of the low chairs beside it. “Ask questions if I go too fast.” He glanced at Chan to make sure he was ready. Chan nodded.
“The chamber behind our fake doors back on the square is shielded electronically. We have evidence that someone managed to unlock the chamber and used a scanning device. They would not have found anything … except that it was shielded. Aside from precious few private companies with all the right permits and so forth, only governments use such shielding, officially.”
He paused a moment and shifted in his chair to face Chan more directly. “You mentioned a rowdy mob the day you first accidentally touched the curtain of the active portal. You were not the target of that; it was an attempt by one of our people to protect the portal from someone else. You wisely fled the scene, because it got ugly and our member was arrested. We began paying close attention because we knew someone was getting too interested, someone who has caused us trouble in the past.”
Chan’s eyes widened. “But you kept using that site?”
Pete smiled. “Yes. We were trying to wrap things up but you came along. Our computer algorithm picked you out as a good recruit, so we played it as carefully as possible.”
Pete leaned back into his chair. “This has not been a good time for us the past few decades. We’ve lost a few key players and a good number of technicians. Except for military and some government-trained academics, most people learn very little science. What your schooling referred to as ‘science’ is at least a half-century behind current research and technology.”
Chan cut in, “And The Brotherhood.”
“And The Brotherhood also knows current science,” Pete agreed. “When the global government first arose, they immediately took control of what was the Internet in those days. That was mostly wires and short-range radio waves running between some very expensive computer hardware, and then branching out to the rest of the world. I’m sure you’ve heard stories from older folks talking about having a terminal at home. The government changed things by increments, so that by the time they had pretty much total control, most home computers were completely worn out or obsolete.”
Pete spread his hands. “Up to that point, human society had been changing rapidly with the free flow of ideas and alternative viewpoints. That ended before you were born. Society has remained quite static. While we are glad to see that reading has made such a strong comeback, we deeply regret not being able to get our message out.”
“A message I’m still not sure I’ve gotten myself,” Chan pointed out.
Pete brought his hands together palms up. “That’s because with the loss of a ubiquitous means of instantaneous communication, you aren’t even in a position to understand it. It’s worse yet for most of the rest of humanity. We were thinly scattered enough when the Net was still open, working together entirely online. Back then we were sim
ply a peculiar bunch of people who recognized a shared philosophy. That philosophy had put us at odds with Western Civilization and our conscious rejection of it was hardly popular. Had we not seen it coming, our different approach to looking at things would have been snuffed out. It was slow going, but our virtual community was growing and we were setting people free to see the world differently.”
Pete looked at his watch. “Before I drop you into this ocean of arcane philosophical study, we need to eat something. It’ll be a late night for you, but if you want some gym time, we need to get started on this as soon as possible.”
Chan showed his clowning nature by pretending he wasn’t sure he could handle the task, moaning and groaning. Then suddenly with an impish grin, “So my training will be accelerated?”