The Lonely Whelk Read online

  “But why?” Boris protested. “I didn’t do anything! It’s not my fault!”

  “It is your fault. I saw you, with my own eyes, stab the Door with the microwave emitter at full. That’s what caused the Door to go critical.”

  “No! It’s not my fault. Naytiri handed me the thing – she must have turned it on! I only accidentally bumped the Door with it.”

  “I did not!” Naytiri protested.

  “Hush,” John said. “I saw the whole thing. I watched you pick it up, turn it on, and quite deliberately and stab it through the Door. Now, please, if you won’t exit the building amiably, I will call security to have you removed.”

  “Fine!” Boris shouted angrily. “But I’m going to fight this. And I’ll win, you’ll see.”

  “Okay, have a nice time,” John replied. A little frown settled into his eyebrows as he watched Boris stomp from the room. Kaia watched him pull out his teaching tab and quickly type.

  “Just have to let them know he’s coming,” John muttered. “Now you three,” he said, looking up as he finished typing. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

  “It’s all my fault,” Kenton admitted. “I was trying to impress you so I told them to set up for our next experiment. We weren’t going to do anything before you okayed it but... well, Naytiri argued with me but I didn’t listen.”

  “What’s the rule?” John asked.

  “Everything must be okayed by John before moving further into the process,” the three chorused.

  “Indeed. And you wouldn’t have been able to start until tomorrow afternoon anyway – the math isn’t finished!”

  “I just thought.... maybe we could start without all the math-”

  John’s fist interrupted Kenton as it smashed into the table with a thundering boom. “Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong! You never ever, ever neglect the math! The math could save our lives! Tell me this – what if your idea had specifically been to stick that microwave emitter in an actual microwave? The math would have told you it was a stupid idea! It would have told you that should you attempt it, you would end up destroying a perfectly useful appliance. If you had done the math on this one, you would have discovered the same thing: that you would be destroying a perfectly good Door and everything around it. You never, ever don’t do the math.” He took a breath.

  “Sir,” Olivia ventured timidly, “When Boris stuck the microwave emitter in it caused the problem, but when you did the same thing it fixed the problem.”

  A smile pushed the frown out of John’s face. “Yes, it’s a simple problem really. I just did the math and reset the emitter to neutralize the extra waves flowing through it. It’s happened more than once.”

  “What about the microwaves that are supposed to be in the Door?” Naytiri asked.

  “That is all part of the math – which is why you should never start without doing all the appropriate calculations. If Quin and I hadn’t reacted quickly, the Door could have blown sky-high, taking us and our entire city with it, destroying several miles of terrain on the other side, and causing miles of devastation on both sides of all of the Doors within the blast. Which is potentially a lot. I mean, look at the room we’re standing in.”

  Kenton grimaced and dropped his head into his hands.

  “So, you three are on probation. Kenton, you will not be able to set foot in the Door Room until I decide otherwise. You will be spending time monitoring some of the undergraduate students and their experiments.”

  Kenton grimaced, and his friends looked at him pityingly.

  “Naytiri and Olivia,” John continued, “Kaia will be taking over the team, but if anything else happens, you’re out for good. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” the girls nodded.

  “Good.” John looked at his watch. “Now, get out of here. Kaia and I have work to do.”

  The three exited the room.

  John turned to look at Kaia and grinned. “See this?” He pointed to the Door. Kaia was surprised that he had moved past the incident so abruptly, but she followed his lead.

  “It’s a Door,” she replied, leaning in to peer closely at it. “But it looks weird. It’s got colours floating in it.”

  “You can see those? Good work! Most people don’t notice them. Anyway, this is it!”

  “What?”

  John sighed. “What do you think?”

  “Is it an underwater Door?” Kaia gasped. “In school they said those were impossible, because the brainwaves of all the fish push water through the Door at an uncontrollable rate! Or maybe it was just that fish kept swimming through.”

  “It’s not that! It’s the Bridge Door!” John replied, exasperated.

  “That’s even better!” Kaia stepped forward and gazed at it intently. “You’re serious? It really exists? Really? And it can take me anywhere?”

  “Well, anywhere there is another Door.”

  “Obviously,” Kaia replied, rolling her eyes. “Can I go through it?”

  “No,” John said. “You don’t have travel clearance yet, as you’ve only been here for one day. I’m working on that. But this is your project, of which you are not allowed to tell anyone. It requires Level Four clearance – which you will have as of tomorrow. The students are only at Level Six. First you will be watching it for a few days. You will analyze and monitor all colour, opacity, and shape changes for the period of one week. We have some tools for that. Then, presuming our proposal gets accepted, you will be allowed to go through to one known location, to monitor the sensation of traveling through the Door. We also have some tools for that. Put on those glasses I gave you.”

  Kaia pulled out the 3D glasses and looked at the Door. Her mouth dropped open. The edges of the Door were sparkling and fuzzing, blurring and clearing. The colours bled together and separated. It looked like a rectangular rainbow that was bleeding colours and attempting to pull them back while they tried to escape.

  “Amazing!” Kaia said, moving her head back and forth to make the colours change and blend.

  “It actually gets kind of boring after a while,” John said. “Quin gets the really fun part. He’s going to find out if it will take us to any locations we don’t know about.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “Classified.” John shrugged. “But for the rest of today, you’ll follow me around some more. Tomorrow morning you can help Naytiri, et al. do some math, and then you can spend the rest of the day on this. I’ll also have some files delivered to your office with all of the original tests done on the Door.”

  “I get an office?”

  “Of course!” John replied. “You’re standing in it!”

  Clyde was feeling a little tense after the incident in the Door Room. Rock had explained the meaning and implications of a red Door, and although Clyde felt that their security procedures were actually quite good – compared to their security features in other areas, at least – it still made him feel a bit anxious. Rock had then taken time to show Clyde all of the different features of the Security Room, and then left him in charge of watching the screens. This was an easy enough job, but as Ivanna the Bard said, Easy is only as valuable as its outcome, as is difficulty.

  The screens splayed out in front of him like the many-faceted gaze of a mitleed fly gazing into the bowels of a rhinoraffe. Each screen showed a different room. Sometimes there were many screens showing the same room from all angles; the Door Room was a prime example of this.

  The outside screens flipped from one room to another, all displaying labs with nothing very interesting going on. The center bank of screens showed the Door Room from many angles. The layer of screens in the middle varied from outdoor scenes to the secretary’s front desk to a large kitchen to a zoo to a few dark rooms. Clyde leaned in to peer at the screen showing the zoo; this screen flipped from one animal cage to another. The animals were very strange, unlike any he had ever seen. They must be from other planets, he assumed. Some had highly technologically-advanced cages, which he presumed provided di
fferent mixtures of elements in the air.

  He had just turned his gaze back to the Door Room when his comm buzzed.

  “Clyde,” Rock said. “John just fired a young man named Boris. He is leaving the Door Room now. Please keep your eye on him and ensure that he leaves the building.”

  Clyde gulped. This was a nearly impossible task, given that he had not yet completely learned the layout of the building. This meant that he couldn’t be sure which cameras mapped to what screens.

  “Use the blueprint on the table,” Rock’s voice continued to crackle over the comm, apparently reading his mind, “to figure out what route he should take. You will see small numbers associated to the cameras. Those numbers are on the edges of the screens.”

  “Got it,” Clyde replied, running over to the table with the blueprint. The blueprint was a book about a hundred pages thick. He picked it up and flipped through; the Door Room, according to the Index, was on page 12. Door Room to elevator, he assumed, and then out the front. It shouldn’t be too hard. Unless he went back to his office first.

  “What is his office number?” Clyde asked.

  “3359,” Rock replied, “and remember to turn off the comm when you’re not using it. I can hear you breathing.”

  “Yessir.” Clyde looked down at the Comm. Which button was it? The white one, the green one, or the gold one? He frowned and hit the green one. He flipped through the book for a few minutes and figured out a good route that Boris should be taking: cameras 77, 342, 333, 56, 558, 0044, 23, and 1002. Plus the elevator camera: 5.

  He looked up at the screen. Boris was in the hallway outside the Door Room talking on his phone. Clyde glanced at his notepad – the next screen was 342. Boris began to wander slowly down the hallway; he was talking animatedly, waving his free hand around, and looking quite irritated. He got in the elevator – camera 5. Clyde moved his eyes to camera 0044. This was the ground floor camera where he should come out. He waited.

  “Clyde?” Rock’s voice emanated from the comm. “The secretary says he hasn’t showed up yet.”

  “He’s in the elevator,” Clyde said, hitting a button on the comm without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Great,” Rock replied. “He is not authorized to go back to his office. Don’t let him get away.”

  “Yessir.”

  Clyde looked back at camera 5. Boris was gone, and had not appeared on 0044. He looked around frantically. Where had Boris gone? There he was: camera 1222… what floor was that?

  He ran to the blueprints.

  “Rock,” he said. “Boris is on camera 1222, which is...” He flipped the pages rapidly.

  “That’s not good,” Rock replied. He was breathing heavily. “He’s gone towards the high-level offices – John and Quin’s floor. Check cameras 37, 47, and 60–69.”

  Clyde spun around and gazed at the numbers. Boris was in 37.

  “Thirty-seven,” Clyde stated.

  Rock didn’t respond.

  Boris reappeared on screen 60.

  “Rock?” Clyde asked. He didn’t hear anything. He could feel his heart rate going up. This was very stressful.

  Boris was now on 63, and appeared to be fiddling with a doorknob. He looked over his shoulder anxiously. A moment later, he opened the lock and vanished into the dark.

  One of the dark screens blazed to life. Boris was in an office with a massive desk shaped like a turtle with a disk on its back. He was rifling through the desk drawers. What could he be looking for? He flicked his eyes across the other screens. It was hard to watch one specific screen and pay attention to all the others at the same time, given that there were probably several hundred over the entire wall. He finally found screen 1002, which was the one with the secretary. Bob was frowning and flicking a little red light on and off. Clyde wondered if that was some sort of signal. There were three people at the desk: a woman wearing an atrocious wig, a giant, terrifying man, and a thin spidery man.

  Where was Rock?

  “Rock?” Clyde asked anxiously. He pushed the buttons. There weren’t enough staff. Someone needed to deal with the people at the front desk and someone needed to deal with Boris. Either that or they needed to lock down and deal with the problems one at a time. If Rock could send some of the other members of the security staff over, then this wouldn’t be an issue. Unless all of the other security were trapped together with Rock.

  “Rock, where are you?” he said, hitting the button. “Secure building, now!”

  To his horror, he saw that he had hit the gold button and a moment later he heard his own voice echoing through the loudspeaker system of the Globe: “Secure building, now!”

  Kaia stood in the middle of the Door Room, trying desperately to take in all of the details flooding in from all directions while John stood talking to Professor Backriver. She had just acclimated to the noise and begun tuning out the conversations that were interfering with John’s when a voice came over the loudspeaker. It said quite clearly: “Secure building, now.”

  John let out a loud sigh. “Well, that wasn’t Rock.” He grinned. “This is turning into an interesting first day for you, isn’t it? Watch.”

  A hush fell over the room just as the message ended. Then the sounds flared back up, roaring through the room like a wave – people talking, discussing, making up rumors about what the message meant. Professor Backriver didn’t even say goodbye; he headed towards the nearest Door and was gone. The next moment, people from other planets went home – just like that. It was the strangest thing Kaia had ever seen. One minute, there were hundreds of people milling about the massive room. The next moment, they seemed to disappear as they stepped through the Doors, just popping out of existence like bubbles: Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Then the scientists began to disappear. A few of the white-smocked clowder went through the Doors, but most of them gathered up their papers and headed straight for the exit. In less than a minute, the room was nearly empty.

  “Everyone is trying to leave the building,” Quin informed them, bursting in, “and we have a suspicious group of conspiracists entering through the front. Rock is stuck in the permanent hospital wing. He’s being held captive by Mad Jack.”

  “Mad Jack?” Kaia asked.

  “We have a bunch of people here who have just crossed over the line into insanity,” John replied. “He’ll be fine, but this is an inconvenient time to be trapped. Was that Clyde?”

  “Yeah,” Quin replied. “Doesn’t know how to use his comm.”

  “Are we really shutting down?” Kaia asked.

  “I think we should,” Quin replied. “Then we can solve our problems one at a time.”

  “Who are these conspiracists?” John asked.

  “We don’t know. They were harassing Bob, and he recognized one as a known assassin. They are now swimming upstream, as everyone in the building is trying to leave and they are trying to enter, so it should take them longer than usual to get here. That said, it will probably make it easier for them to get to their destination unnoticed,” Quin replied. His voice seemed to echo in the now mostly empty room. “Since we’re going into lockdown, you should handle this room. I’ll talk Clyde through the process.”

  “Okay,” John replied. “We’ll send the emissary notes through each Door, and then we can regroup.”

  “Great.” A moment later, Quin was gone.

  “How does he do that?” Kaia asked. “It’s like he just disappears.”

  “He’s got training in the ancient art of Stealth,” John said. “And he can do it while sprinting.”

  “Stealth, like from the Kramandu Mountains on the Edge?” Kaia asked, her eyes widening. “That’s seriously impressive.”

  “Yes it is. He actually taught it for a couple of years.”

  “Him? Teaching?”

  John grinned. “I imagine his classes consisted of him telling his students to ‘do as I do’ and then disappearing.”

  Kaia laughed.

  “Okay,” John said. “Enough fun. I don’t bel
ieve in fun! To work!”

  “To work!” Kaia repeated. She then looked at John expectantly.

  “What? I said, ‘to work!’“ John exclaimed. He frowned. “Oh. I have to tell you what to do.” He paused. “Just follow me around, I guess. To the printer!”

  He ran off, with Kaia close at his heels. At one end of the room a partial office had been set up. It had filing cabinets, four really old computers, and a giant printer. John began to maneuver through the folders in one of the filing cabinets. He pulled out a document which read “Emergency Procedures.”

  “This is what we send to the governments on the other sides of the Doors when we have a security breach,” John explained. “It just says, ‘It’s no big deal, but we don’t want to cause any interplanetary issues, so please keep your people away from the Door until we say otherwise.’ Here, make three hundred copies.”

  “Three hundred!” Kaia repeated with surprise.

  “Yep.” John grinned. “Welcome to being an intern. Also, each one needs to be rolled and placed into a canister.” He hit a series of buttons on a wall panel next to the computers. A section of the wall slid up, revealing a contraption that looked vaguely like a wine holder with three hundred very small bottles of wine.

  “Those are the canisters?” Kaia confirmed.

  “Yes. Now start copying. We have probably less than five minutes to deal with this. I’m going to go do a once-around to make sure we don’t have any stragglers who didn’t go back through their Door.” John ran off.

  Kaia grinned. Copying was definitely an intern’s job, but adding a high-level emergency and a super tight deadline definitely made it less dull. The copy machine began spitting out copies of the document. One after another (after another after another after another after another), she grabbed the copy, rolled it up, stuffed it in a canister, and dropped it on the floor next to her feet. Each made a clanging noise as it hit the floor, and after a moment, she was doing them so fast the noise didn’t seem to stop.