For days before his visit, Felix has been in a webmail conversation with Dr Jenny Kuok, one half of the pair leading the supercapacitor project. She pounces at the mention of investors, and agrees to discuss their work over tea.
In the lobby of the NERC, a electrical systems engineer nonchalantly points him in the direction of the Future Sciences Lab. “Careful with those crazy guys.” He barely lifts his face from his reading. “They’re real mad scientists. Doctor Kuok is here every single day of the week.” He soon finds directories in plenty along every hall, and locating it becomes an exercise in following arrows.
It is hard to imagine the kind of future that the people of this world might aspire towards; to his mind, this world is the future, so far beyond his imagining that the idea of anything beyond it seems unfathomable. Yet the Future Sciences Lab is all of that aspiration in one: on the screens outside, banners declare a future of manned missions beyond the solar system, travel beyond the speed of light, and brain-computer interfaces, all outlined in two languages.
The quarry of his search—the Kuok-Lee supercapacitor—is one such future given form. The evolution of a technology originally developed for electrical vehicles, this particular incarnation was designed to condense stupendous voltages and discharge them over an extended length of time. Like the sun tower, he finds himself thinking as he leaves the notice board.
Even having received the best education in physics that his country has to offer, Felix cannot claim to fully understand the mechanisms of its operation. He knows one thing for certain, however: it is the missing piece of the San Francisco City Lab’s wormhole portal.
Watching the goings-on of the lab through dimmed windows, it is not hard to tell where the part itself is, concealed in a box sealed with a biometric scanner. It is removed once from the safe, seemingly to tighten a few fasteners, then returned immediately after. Staff of every description come and go, but only a handful look at it.
It is only around lunchtime that someone finally exits, and he halts them to ask after Dr Kuok. “Oh! You're the one she's waiting for,” the researcher pipes up, before disappearing back inside.
When they returns, they bring the woman herself, with a sealed cup of coffee and countless rings under her eyes. Yet she effects the same eagerness he noted from prior correspondence as she calls out, “Come, come! Mister Mercer, right? Let's go to the cafe.”
She takes him down the lift to the first floor, to the eatery at the bottom. “How was the flight here?” she asks as they meander down.
“Long, but uneventful,” he replies with a practised smile. “A little trouble at customs, but we sorted it out.”
“Oh, yes, always these days,” she mutters. “Our relations with the US are much better than three years ago. But we still can't get the prototype past customs.”
The conversation rambles through an eclectic array of topics. Dr Kuok swigs from her fresh three-shot coffee. Tea here comes in sealed plastic containers, and he doesn't especially like the sweetness, even when he asks for no sugar, but he sips politely on his drink.
Then, without giving away his true purpose, Felix musters up his best impression of his father. He positions himself as an interested business owner, asking about the capacitor’s uses and the range of its applicability.
“It was designed before we knew what it would be used for—large machines, maybe electric tunnel borers or a particle accelerator. But the San Francisco City Lab told us that they were interested in co-developing it. They have an interest in the supercapacitor for a machine they're building: the wormhole portal. We have been working in tandem to develop the port standard.”
“And this wormhole portal—its purpose is to tunnel into another universe?”
“Yes! Sounds crazy, right? But their first tests succeeded—they transported one gram of matter out of our universe.”
“So…they are sure there is another universe somewhere?”
“It's the most likely explanation.”
Felix’s goal here is not to gather information about the portal, although it does interest him. He is here for something that will be of far more immediate use: her face.
He takes a comprehensive read of her features as they talk, committing it to his memory, where it absorbs and reflects light, the shape of her eyes. He plays the part as well as he can, answering her inquiries with more of his own.
Then, when they part ways at six o’clock, he stops in the courtyard garden, and recreates a perfect likeness of her visage in his hands. He buys dinner, and he makes notes in his pocket book, sketching some of the details.
It isn’t until past ten o’clock that the last researcher leaves the lab, turning off the lights behind them. As the door swings shut behind them, Felix, hidden in plain sight, stops the door with his foot and slips in.
The departer does not notice that the door takes a split second longer to click shut.
In the pitch darkness, he identifies the camera watching the safe, and puts a bubble around it. He finds the metal box by the light of its digital display, blinking 22:13. “Now, let us see,” he murmurs, conjuring Jenny’s ghost face for the reader.
It takes scant wavelength reconfigurations before the device accepts Felix’s recreation as the real thing, and uncomplainingly unlocks with a beep.
*
This is almost too easy, for an act he has prepared for in such detail.
He has barely registered how fast his heart is racing until this moment. It is hard to parse that the object in his hands, a metal cylinder covered in rivets and grooves and held comfortably in both hands, holds the key to his return home.
Home. He was afraid to contemplate the possibility in earnest until he had the capacitor. And now, the thought of home swallows his senses—the bridges he wandered over, the harbours he set sail from, the mother and father he left behind.
Then his thoughts snap to Adelaide.
Of course, his home must win out again. He cannot be aware of a way to return, and not toil towards it.
But briefly, he wavers. To know someone else who understands the fear he hides away, and to see that she has lived the life he has always dreaded, and to long to keep offering her a safe haven…if there were a way to do both, to return and to remain beside her, he would take it. But that has to be her choice alone.
The security cameras see nothing as he slides the safe door gently back in place. He tiptoes away, opening the door just a crack to slip through, and then he is out in the depths of night. He stirs no leaves as he slides the capacitor into the bag he brought for it, and races to the station—nary an eye, biological nor mechanical, to witness him.
When Felix returns to the hotel room in Mong Kok, it is like discovering a crime scene.
Adelaide does not answer his knocking, not even an hour later. When at last he unlocks it with her keycode, she is not there.
Then he notices the objects lying on the floor that should not: apples, a bowl, his note.
Beneath a paperbag by the counter, he finds Adelaide's phone.
He has already begun to piece together a picture of what happened, but now, as he turns the phone over to find a 13-hour recording in progress, his dread crystallises.
He stops the recording. She was never especially careful about hiding her password from his view, so he taps it in—080646.
Without voice commands, he opens the file explorer and trawls through folders until he finds the recording. He starts playing it—a rustle of paper and fabric, a thud, and shouting—
Adelaide's scream startles him into a vertiginous tailspin of terror. Come quietly and this will all be over quickly.
He pauses the recording.
His heart hurts before his mind can catch up to it. Could he have done something? Should he have waited to be sure this precise scenario would not eventuate? His mind races and races, but it is too late to plan for a contingency that has already come to pass.
He continues playing the recording. More details surface: they saw her at the airport—they are taking her back to the lab.
As the door creaks shut and the recording goes silent, Felix turns off her phone. Again he is alone with the booming of his heart. Despite all her horror, the threat on her life, she knew exactly what to do.
He picks up his own phone, and starts searching for a flight.
For the first time in her life, Adelaide sees the inside of a private jet. If not for the shock collar and the return to eating puree, she would call it luxury.
But no number of plush PVC cushions, no free servings of apple juice to her cabin, could stop her wanting back the streets, their chaos, their fiery glow.
The speaker crackles once, and her captor's voice says:
“Adelaide Moore. I hope you are having a comfortable flight so far. I have a few questions for you, if you'll be so kind as to answer them. Remember, if you answer honestly, you may earn yourself some concessions during your future stay.”
Adelaide does not speak. She doesn't know if the camera over the screen is watching her, but if it is, it will see nothing in her face.
“Miss Moore, we understand you were not travelling alone. Who were you with in Hong Kong?”
She does not answer.
“Miss Moore? Who helped you escape?”
She stares right at the camera, unblinking. If I say even one word, I endanger him.
“You understand we can lighten your sentence and improve the conditions of your living space, if you cooperate.”
It takes a few more unanswered questions before the agent recognises they are trying to squeeze water from a rock. She is a veteran of silence. Nothing they say can extort an answer. They finally leave her alone with a sigh cut short by the click of the microphone.
Adelaide starts to fall asleep close to Hong Kong's afternoon, according to the screen. Since she boarded the plane, she has not spoken a word, not even to the automatic attendant. It's as if her mind has reverted to that primordial state, the one held in by green walls and terrazzo.
But she knows it too well to protest it. She closes her eyes, and sees the lights on the penthouse ceiling.
*
The chamber thunders around her, as if there were a storm outside, and the air conditioning continues to hum to cover it.
On the other side of the Pacific, it is still nighttime. This night goes on and on, through a sky about to be lost to her again. The ramp goes down, and she walks, legs aching, led by a squadron of ten with rifles over their shoulders and faces of helmet glass. This hangar is not the airport they departed from.
She gets five minutes to breathe the quiet air, and to see the fleeting stars. And then the soldiers march her into the belly of an armoured carrier. She does not speak even then.
Lights hum and trees rustle darkly. Adelaide doesn't perceive much else, on account of the nylon blindfold that was strapped over her eyes by gloved hands. She hears a glass door open, and a breeze wash over her that smells familiar. Smells of needles and alcohol and sterilisation.
The scents grow heavier with the tang of memory. Something flutters away on the wind as she re-enters the laboratory.
Inside the blindfold, her vision goes bright and dark in turns as the soldiers march her, led by the arm, to the loading elevator. She hears it ring its arrival—ground floor, going up.
There is no small talk, not even shuffling feet. The doors slide open, and she can hear the silence beyond. They lead her through a melange of scents and sounds, all echoes of those things she saw and heard for eleven dark years—things she has always known, though not by name.
And then her feet click on terrazzo.
“Ah, there you are, Adelaide! Welcome back.” Her heart leaps then plummets like a skipping stone, for she has heard that voice before, through the trilayer window—has known it, hated it, yearned for it.
“Doctor Seeley,” says a soldier. “We understand we will be leaving Moore with you.”
“That I did discuss with your commander,” Seeley replies. “I can take care of things from here.” He chuckles. “Eleven years helming this project, it teaches you a thing or two. Did you tease out any details about her escape?”
“She hasn't spoken a word since we collected her from the base.”
“I salute your work, anyhow.” The voice of the doctor is much closer to her ear now, and she hears boots march away and polyester crinkle, feels a gloved hand steer her by the shoulder. “How was your trip, Miss Moore? Missed your room?” The same hands unwrap the blindfold.
As the blue light fills her eyes again, and she recognises her old bed in front of her, exactly where she left it except with the sheets remade, her lower lip wobbles with unshed tears.
“Good,” she croaks, turning to look Dr Seeley in the eye. He is wearing a bright orange hazmat suit, but she recognises the glasses, the wrinkles on his brow.
He nods once. A smile. “That is good to hear,” he says, and then steps away from her, out across the wall boundary. “The lab will be putting security staff outside your room. So please…don't try slipping out again, they won't be so nice next time time. Understood?”
“I understand.”
Then, the wall begins to slide shut between them, just like it did eleven years ago—and the ceiling lights flicker on to replace the glow of blue.
One sleep. Two. Three. Adelaide doesn't keep track. Four meals, five.
Shadows she doesn't know move in front of her window. Some of them carry guns. She takes her notebook, crumpled in her skirt pocket, and reads what she wrote there. She writes more at the end. Her thoughts are all about the world beneath the lab. She wants to believe it was more than just a dream.
She tries, over and over, to commit Felix’s face to the page, but she isn't skilled in drawing. She remembers the colour of his hair, and the way he smirks when he is about to reveal some grand secret, like the skyline, or the tale of his life.
He could make pictures with such clarity that they looked real. Does he ever draw?
Three sleeps. And then—
The sirens start wailing.
They rise in guttural unison, and they're coming from everywhere, within her walls and beyond them. The shrieks of humans join them, but only the sounds in the adjacent hallway penetrate the walls, and flash out of knowing when they’ve run away, to be drowned by the sirens once more.
Lights are flashing, red and yellow, and she flies to the window, fighting to perceive what is outside. Two silhouettes flash by, and then silence.
She goes back to the bed to wait, heart pounding louder than the alarm. Something about the sound tells her it has to do with her. She watches the window intently, waiting for something to tell her when to move.
Ten minutes later, the wall clicks. With a familiar groan of steel and plaster, it starts to pull open. The gap on the left end widens like a mouth, one momentous inch at a time.
The moment the gap is one person wide, the room flashes bright again. Then he is standing right there—golden hair and a coat on his shoulders.
“Addie!” The voice casts out every last doubt. Her mouth gapes, and her heart surges.
Stuffing her notebook in her pocket, she springs from her bed and flies straight into a hug, crying before she registers that Felix is steering her to the exit.
“I am ever so pleased to see you too, but we must go at once.”
“Did you get the part? Where is the machine?” she gasps as the lights go dim and he leads her out through the crack.
“Yes! I heard your message. The machine is in the metaphysics lab.”
“Please let me come with you!” she cries then. “They found me even there, across the sea. They told me there's no way to disappear. There's nowhere in this world where I can be anymore.”
“Are you sure?” He meets her eye.
She nods vigorously, eyes already welling up. “I want to start over. Even if it means leaving this all behind.”
“It is settled, then! Come, the evacuation won't last forever.” He lifts a finger to his lips, and she nods, pulling her mouth into a line.
And then they burst out into the corridors again—and this time, she is ready, when he takes her arm and whisks her away through the cold.
The guards are gone. The corridors are empty, and the alarms echo down them, seemingly to no one. The windows reveal the faraway lights of San Francisco, beyond a carpet of black.
Together, cloaked in the blaring noise, riding within a ripple of light, they thread their escape through the facility’s halls, trash bins and door plaques and railings lit red in flashes. Felix pauses at the directory, eyes scanning for something, and then— “the Experimental Metaphysics Lab,” he whispers, and before Adelaide has found it on the list, he has dragged her onto a flight of stairs.
At every landing, the ground outside looks closer. More signs of people flutter at the ends of the hallways, none ever seeming to see them.
She senses when they have gone underground because the halls lose their windows and become heavily punctuated by pillars. The doors double in number. The alarm is still shrilling, the voice of a god. They stagger to a stop before one pair of doors, and Adelaide glimpses the plaque hanging above it—Experimental Metaphysics Laboratory - B2-01—while Felix tugs on the handle. No luck.
“Alright, let's see,” he says, running to the scanner whose blue screen demands a face.
Then he lifts his hand, and in his palm conjures a face, the face of Dr Seeley—
As the lock clicks and Felix barrels it open with his shoulder, they hear footsteps thundering from the end of the corridor behind. “It's the prisoner!” Her companion’s fingers close around her wrist and pull her through. “B2-01, EML, they're—”
They stumble inside. Then Adelaide and Felix gaze upon that great and terrible machine, the quarry of their search.
It is a cylindrical gazebo that spans the entire room. A dais of metal, wires, and cladding is sheltered by a roof of the same size held up by several pillars, all speckled with the tiny lights of screens and status beacons.
Even as he dashes up the steps into the machine’s interior and searches, Felix produces something from inside his coat: something cylindrical and metallic, pockmarked with LEDs and ports.
As he slots the part into its housing, the scientists burst through the door, pointing and shrieking. In the same moment Felix yells, “Get in!”
Adelaide’s feet act before her mind. She sprints up the steps to the dais, screaming at the bellows of her name. It lights up as she crosses the threshold, like runes, humming to life beneath her feet. Felix is on the other end of the dais, hands flurrying across the controls in barely comprehending anxiety.
When he looks over his shoulder, he yells a warning and slams a button on the dashboard. Glass hisses shut over every opening, all the windows and doors, severing them from the sounds outside.
One scientist bangs on the glass. Beyond, the lab doors fly open again. Three officers crash in, pointing pistols at her.
Within two seconds, the shouts beyond the glass are drowned out by the crescendoing rumble of the machine. It rattles with the power it’s guzzling; beyond their chamber, the lightbulbs of the room brighten.
It is in these electric throes that Adelaide feels the first warping of space sweep over her, like the pull of gravity surging and ebbing even though the ground is still. She stumbles to Felix’s side as sparks ignite somewhere beyond the chamber.
The scientist has retreated. The police are aiming their guns, barrels pointed at the panes. Her feet leave the ground, then connect with it again. The machine starts beeping, out of rhythm with the alarm outside. A bullet cracks the glass.
“Hold on tight!” Felix calls out, snatching for the rail along the edge of the control panel, and her hand with the other.
She feels as if she were inverted for moments, and her head spins wildly. Beside her, Felix leans against the dashboard. “It's working, it's working—” His voice, too, is pulled and pushed, as if distorted by the Doppler effect.
The room grows hot. A row of ceiling lights blow out. Yes, the wormhole portal is drawing a volume of current that nothing else in the building has remotely been designed to handle. All the bulbs flash dark, and the room is lit by the machine.
And then the bulbs are no longer there, nor is the room, nor are the police, for everything has been pulled into thin threads, like strings of melted plastic. Her companion disappears in the pulling and tautening of the world.
Moments before the snap, Adelaide feels Felix’s fingers tear away from her. Immediately she is seized by despair like nothing she’s felt before, a deathly fear that she no longer knows where, nor who, she is.
She begins to fall, and she keeps falling for eons, and closes her eyes as she cries, the distant roar washing over her.
Adelaide lands on her knees in dust and darkness. Her fall echoes softly in the silence. Beneath her is not the bumped metal floor she expected, but a woven carpet.
She looks up—and sees vaguely that she is inside a metal cage of sorts, over which is draped a velvety sheet, like an old stage curtain, masking out all but the faintest light.
“Addie,” whispers a voice she knows.
She jolts up, and sways, feeling like she’s just been spat out by a clothes dryer. “Felix?” she answers, noticing how parched her throat is.
A gentle glow fades in over the space. Felix is standing with his back against the frame of the structure—an octagonal chamber that arches above their heads, scaffolded with wrought brass. His wide eyes sweep the room, coming to rest on the single sliver in the drapery where light glows through.
As she meanders towards him, his face goes slack with wonder—and as she reaches him, he laughs and pulls her into a hug.
It is no perfunctory embrace. He buries his face in her hair, and she can hear the shortness of his breath, sense his composure crumbling.
“We've made it. This is the one. This is where I was meant to arrive!”
His words register, but her thoughts are momentarily awry—with how unlike him this joy is, and how it delights her.
Eventually, to her dismay, he lets her go with a clearing of his throat. “Up there,” he says, pointing overhead at where the scaffolds arch and join in a starburst in the centre, like the top of a birdcage. A structure like a gyroscope—a disc mounted on an axle within a spherical frame—hangs down upon a chain from the joining. “That is a planar focus. While the Tunnel Machine would punch a hole into the fabric of space and channel the traveller through it, this planar focus was responsible for attracting the traveller back to a singular destination upon this plane. The Trapper’s Cage, we called it. Alas, it must not have accounted for the existence of other worlds.”
She stares upward at the hanging gyroscope. It is her first sight of a world she’s never seen—and she commits it firmly to memory. “Then…are we in…your San Francisco?” she says.
“Let us see,” he replies in a whisper, parting the curtains with an arm.
He extends his other hand towards Adelaide, who grasps it with her own. Then they step out through the curtain. As her eyes acclimatize, she sees that they are inside a wooden hall. Intermittent windows reveal pieces of the city beyond, and lamps glow down from sconces. Crowded around the Trapper’s Cage is a maze of other large structures, similarly draped in cloth.
Then, near the end of the hall, they hear a door slam open. “Hello? Is someone there?” The voice is ragged from panting.
Both straighten at the shout as it echoes across the hall. They creep around the circumference of the veiled Cage, in the direction of the voice.
There is someone standing at the double doors—with messy brown hair, barely reined into a ponytail. “You two!” the newcomer calls. As they inch forward, the stranger's eyes follow them.
“We two, indeed!” Felix answers. “Good day to you…and at the risk of sounding mad, may I know our current year and location?”
The stranger wears a brown coat that hangs to her knees. “The year is 1894, and we are by the wharves of San Francisco,” she says.
Adelaide and Felix glance at each other—his eyes widen, and a smile spreads on his face. “Wonderful! Oh, pardon my manners,” he answers, extending a hand. “Mercer, Felix. Pleasure to meet you…”
“I’m Vesper,” she replies, stepping forward to shake it. “Or, er, Captain Lovelace if you will. Forgive the rush, but we have been searching for you both. Would you come with me, please?”