The infinity cure, p.3
The Infinity Cure, page 3
“I wonder if they even got an invitation,” said the other journalist, a woman in her twenties, matching his mocking tone. Riva Lorton was relatively new to the scene, but being conventionally pretty and convincingly blond, she had of course quickly risen to prominence in conservative media as a newscaster for Fox RT. Same old story since, what, Katie Couric? Greta something? Hiroe strained to remember the names and faces she’d studied in her broadcast history courses in college, which itself was ancient history—over thirty years ago.
Although she was ambivalent about Static for her own reasons, Hiroe bristled at the other two journalists’ dismissive attitude. It was a solid service whose members knew they couldn’t rest on any laurels.
“Well, if they do come, at least they won’t do a hit piece on Faith Benedict and her coastal elite celebrity friends, full of dog-whistle fearmongering about aqueans,” Hiroe said, smiling tightly at Riva. Perth pressed his lips together in barely contained amusement as Riva rolled her eyes.
Hiroe wasn’t done. “And, you know, they’ll be able to tell the story in a way a majority of people will understand, instead of doing a pompous, mind-numbing think piece that’ll win awards despite no one making it through the whole thing.”
Perth yawned theatrically. “Someone’s got a chip on her shoulder tonight. What, are you gunning for a job at Static?”
Fat chance. She mumbled something and they brushed off her cutting comments and moved on to other industry gossip. Perth shamelessly eyed Riva’s cleavage and she laid it on thick for the hell of it, twisting a lock of blond hair and pursing her lips in a pretty pout while listening to him.
Hiroe barely paid attention to their bored antics; she was still stinging from Perth’s unintentionally well-aimed barb about Static.
She soon excused herself. She’d never engaged in the backstabbing and one-upmanship so common in the industry. It was probably one of the reasons she’d never risen very far in the ranks herself, but that wasn’t why she’d gotten into reporting. Lately she’d caught herself wondering why she had in the first place.
Of course she remembered her idealistic early days, dreaming of breaking a story that changed the world. Journalism had presented itself like a lifesaver as she cast about for purpose in high school after her first passion had died for her. She’d long since gotten through disillusionment and into a mindset of acceptance, but once in a while she felt tired of what she did.
Something about the combination of philanthropists, attention-seekers, cynical reporters, and stargazers in this room had brought that feeling to the surface. Or maybe it was the mention of Static that had done it. Or maybe the drink she’d had in the waiting station hadn’t fully acclimated her body to the absolute pressure of being underwater.
Whatever it was, she decided another glass of wine would help take the feeling away.
She was nursing her third glass and feeling more relaxed and content when a musical tone cut through the chatter. All eyes turned to the center of the room, where a life-sized image of Faith Benedict slowly resolved until it looked every bit as solid as the guests. The gradual appearance was for dramatic effect; there was no reason it couldn’t have appeared fully formed in an instant.
The striking hologram wore what looked like a rich velvet pantsuit, all black with black embroidery creating a subtle pattern around the neck and cuffs. Her shimmering silver hair was swept back from her face in a smooth bun that swirled in a coil like a nautilus shell.
No matter where anyone was positioned in the room, Faith appeared to be facing them directly. The figure stood serenely, hands folded in front of her, until the resolution was complete and the guests had lapsed into attentive silence.
“My friends and honored guests,” Faith said, “it’s such a privilege to serve as your host this weekend. This event was thrown together hastily, as you know from your last-minute invitations, so I apologize for our less-than-perfect preparations. I appreciate you all making time in your busy lives despite the short notice. That tells me that this cause is every bit as urgent to you as it is to me.
“After seeing our government repeatedly fail to adequately address this health crisis for some of Earth’s most vulnerable inhabitants, I decided action was needed. Not in six months, not next year, but now.”
The room burst into applause and the apparition waited, nodding, until they’d quieted again. “I thank those of you who donated generously to attend this weekend’s event, and your money will be put to immediate use in research and treatment.
“But that’s only one of the goals I had in bringing you here, so if you came here by another means, don’t think your presence isn’t vital as well. I hope that by the end, after the speeches, presentations, and workshops featuring some of the best minds in the world, you’ll come away with a renewed determination. That, filled with purpose, you’ll spread the word, put pressure on our elected officials, and help change hearts and minds of people who think this cause, and these people, unworthy of attention and assistance.”
Hiroe applauded with everyone else, clinking her rings against her champagne flute. She stole a glance at the two aquean bartenders, who were also clapping with their long-fingered webbed hands. She thought she saw tears shining in the young woman’s amber eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
The doors of the room opened and the crowd began to move toward them. Hiroe took one more glass of champagne and followed the rest of the guests.
They entered a large hallway with a moving floor. They stepped on in groups and were carried smoothly past convincing replicas of large traditional paintings and digital art displays. Hiroe found herself behind a gaggle of excited lottery winners and listened to their urgent whispered conversation with benign amusement now that the wine had mellowed her mood.
The walkway led to another door. An attendant opened it and they were at the back of an auditorium with perhaps two hundred seats, sloping down toward a dark empty stage. There was ample standing room in the back, and some of the guests remained there, milling and chatting, while others began to fill the seats.
Hiroe stood at the very back, taking it all in. The room must have been its own structure, the hallway one of the connecting tunnels. Like in the foyer of the home, the walls contained floor-to-ceiling windows, and she was once again reminded with a jolt that she was far underwater. Gardens and sea life, artfully lit, seeming to move in concert with the music that permeated the auditorium, created dazzling vistas in every direction.
“You going through a midlife crisis?” An instantly familiar voice close to her brought her out of her near hypnotic state. She turned, already rolling her eyes, to face the speaker.
“Nice to see you too, Demonte,” she said.
The man continued as if she hadn’t said anything. “Covering an event under the ocean? Why would you agree to this unless you decided you needed to face your fears or some shit? Prove something to yourself? Am I wrong?”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I was given the assignment, so I came. That’s all there is to it.” She shrugged, attempting nonchalance. “Besides, if you don’t look out the windows you can’t even tell we’re in water. It’s not like we’re deep sea diving.”
Demonte grinned, irritatingly handsome still. His face didn’t hide his age, but somehow he wore his mid-sixties in a confident, comfortable way that even Hiroe had to admit was working for him. “Well, you seem to be doing great. Congratulations.” He held out his arms and Hiroe acquiesced to a short, stiff hug.
“I’m surprised to see you here, too,” she said. “Don’t you have a media empire to run? This is more an assignment for a beat reporter like me.”
He shrugged, seemingly impervious to her sarcasm. “Static’s a flat organization. Everyone contributes. Besides, I like to keep my hand in it. This is what I chose this career to do.”
“Cover a rich old lady’s garden party while she pays lip service to caring about the poor unfortunate aquean masses?” Hiroe shot back.
He laughed. “I missed you, Hiroe.” She knew he was being sarcastic and it stung. They’d been an inseparable duo, practically able to read one another’s minds, and then he was suddenly gone. She’d learned to work alone and with other reporters, but some of the pleasure had been drained from her job, and she’d never quite forgiven him for it, even ten years later.
Demonte started to say something else, but the music suddenly quieted and a hush fell over the audience. The lights outside the windows dimmed, so that only shadows of fish and waving seaweed were visible. Then the glass panels became opaque. The inside lights also came down, and the stage slowly illuminated. As it did, the figure standing in the middle also appeared on each of the windows around the audience, at varying angles and degrees of close-up. One panel to Hiroe’s left was zoomed in tightly, the face filling the entire screen, and her stomach fluttered a little as the light slowly revealed its features.
The aquean man’s eyes were closed. His silvery blue hair, roughly cropped in a short cut that framed his youthful face, shone in the stage lights. His eyebrows and eyelashes had the same glimmer as his hair. Mesmerized, Hiroe watched a muscle jump almost imperceptibly in the impossibly smooth, flawless green skin of his cheek as he clenched and released his jaw.
At last he opened his eyes, which were a dark amber, almost brown, and he seemed to be looking straight at her from the window panel. She looked away for a second, feeling as self-conscious as after she’d touched the VR aquean swimmer, then looked toward the stage where the man actually stood.
His blue-green lips parted and he took a deep breath. The sound that came from him was somewhere between humming and talking. Hiroe had never heard anything like it. It started deep in his throat and moved toward the front of his mouth, becoming a series of whispers, and then moved back again, returning to a more guttural sound.
She suddenly thought back to the ceremonies she’d witnessed in the VR exhibit, and thought she could begin to hear similarities to this performance. Without the distortion of traveling through water instead of air, it sounded wildly different. Also, the ceremonial singing had been joyful, and what she was hearing now was full of mourning, heartbreak, and anger.
The song, or poem, or whatever it was, seemed to reverberate inside Hiroe, creating a warmth that spread from her belly into every part of her body. She shivered, glanced around and caught Demonte watching her with a wry smile.
Hiroe stiffened and looked away haughtily. She watched the young man on the stage with folded arms, trying not to let his hypnotic performance overtake her senses again.
His vocalizing reached a crescendo that drew gasps from the audience, then cut off suddenly. The room burst into applause. He stood still with eyes downturned until it died away. Then he looked up and spoke, in English this time.
“That song is in an ancient aquean language, a language that fewer and fewer of our children are learning. The language is ancient but the song is new, written just five years ago by our most revered poet of modern times.” He spoke her name in aquean, a series of sounds unreplicable by most humans.
“If you know of her, you probably know her by the human version of her name, Marteer Cosa. She wrote that lament as she lay dying of aquamycosis. She passed on shortly after. By the time she finished writing it, she was no longer able to sing it herself.” His eyes pooled with liquid and Hiroe felt a lump in her throat despite her best efforts to remain unmoved.
“The song is about our stolen world,” the young man continued. “It’s about the death of our oceans which has sent many of us onto the land. It’s about being refugees, even though we’re the original people of Earth. As I’m sure you know, science has proven that we aqueans were made entirely of the Earth’s elements, while humans evolved from matter that came to Earth from outer space.”
He drew a breath. “The surface of our world used to be seventy-five percent ocean. Now it’s eighty percent. And yet you call it Earth, for the twenty percent of the planet that is the domain of the humans. Terre, Aarde, Jorden; in almost every human language the name of our planet means ‘earth.’
“But I digress,” he continued. “We lost Marteer Cosa to aquamycosis as we have lost so many others; as we have lost our home, our waters, our sacred places, to the ravages of the climate crisis and the machinations of heartless corporations and governments greedy for our territory. The past decade in particular has been a period of nearly incomprehensible loss for aqueans. We thought we knew how to be resilient, but we are being tested to our very limits. We may not be able to survive this latest test.”
There were rustling sounds as some audience members shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but there were also murmurs of agreement and empathy.
“I know these truths aren’t easy to hear. Most would prefer to turn away from them. That’s why I’m grateful to Faith Benedict, and to all of you who have come a long way, and given a great deal, in order to come and hear them. I’ve been losing hope. But this gathering awakens a glimmer of promise in me. Perhaps we, all of us together, can begin to bend the arc of history back toward justice for us aqueans.”
He bowed deeply and turned his back, walking quickly toward the back of the stage, out of the spotlight and out of sight before the audience had a chance to realize he was done and start clapping again.
The image of Faith Benedict shimmered into convincing solidity in his place on stage. “As most of you know, that was Louvin Interre, the rising poet, historian, and aquean rights activist. I’m deeply honored by his presence here tonight, as I hope you are.” The audience burst into another round of applause.
“What’s with the Oz act?” Demonte muttered to Hiroe. “Why hasn’t she come to her own party yet?”
“Planning a dramatic entrance later, I guess,” Hiroe said with a shrug, though she’d been wondering that herself.
The hologram continued. “Next I want to welcome to the stage—” Her voice suddenly sputtered and cut off, though her image continued to mouth words. The audience stirred and whispered. Then came a crackling sound and a woman’s voice cut in and out, finally coming in clearly from somewhere.
“Help me,” the voice said, shakily. Then it rose to a sudden shriek. “Help me, please!”
CHAPTER SIX
For a few moments all Hiroe could hear was ragged breathing. Then: “They’re trying to …” The sound cut completely and the auditorium erupted with questioning cries and worried murmurs. Some audience members stood up and looked around for the source of the voice. Hiroe hadn’t seen anyone emerge when Faith had been interrupted. It was coming from somewhere else.
The image of Faith dissipated quickly from the stage. “Is this part of the show?” Demonte murmured. Hiroe didn’t answer. She was already moving briskly down the middle aisle toward the stage, where she’d spotted a couple of people identically dressed, as if in some kind of uniform, leaning together and talking urgently. One of them lifted her wrist and spoke into it as Hiroe approached.
“What’s going on?” Hiroe called as she got closer. The two guards looked up sharply.
“Please return to your seat, ma’am,” the woman said in a terse, dismissive voice. “Everything is under control.”
Hiroe started to argue but noticed the other guard held a palm-sized stun gun casually at his side. She glanced behind her and found an empty seat, perching on it, to appear to comply. By the other side of the stage, she saw the stocky man in the cheap suit who’d been staked out near the basketball star at the cocktail party. Lottie’s husband Ben. He was speaking urgently to a guard who, after a moment, nodded and gestured for the man to follow him. He did so at a hurried clip.
The lights in the auditorium came up halfway, and a man walked to the edge of the stage. He held up his hand and his voice rang out over the sound system. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I please have your attention!”
The crowd’s babbling subsided as everyone’s eyes turned to the man.
“Thank you,” he said when he was satisfied with the noise level. “Mrs. Benedict asked me to pass along her apologies for the interruption. We’ve investigated what you heard earlier, and we discovered the source of the voice.
“One of our guests, Lottie Wineman, wandered off to another part of the home instead of coming to the auditorium with the rest of you. Unfortunately she tripped and fell from a balcony onto the floor below. Her leg was broken.”
A brief hubbub arose, but the man’s raised hand once again quieted it. “She bravely crawled to a security station outside the room where she fell, and managed to activate an emergency broadcast mechanism to ask for help. Once we detected the source of the distress call, we found her there, unconscious from shock. She’s been transported to Mrs. Benedict’s infirmary, where she’s receiving the best of care. She’ll need to stay there for the next couple of days, but we’re thankful her injuries weren’t more serious.
“So, without further delay, we’ll continue the night’s events. Up next is Doctor Stuart Hauser, one of the leading researchers in the field, to tell us more about aquamycosis and share the latest developments in our search for the cure.”
Hiroe puzzled uneasily over the explanation for Lottie’s transmission as a short, balding man came onto the stage to a round of applause. From her front row seat Hiroe could see his hands trembling ever so slightly. He chuckled nervously. “Well, how can I follow that excitement?” The crowd tittered politely, partly in relief. He pointed sideways with a small pen-shaped object and an image of an aquean body appeared. He moved his hand and the image zoomed in until the audience was looking at a representation of cells.
“Who are they?” a voice whispered next to Hiroe as the man on stage began to speak. Startled, she turned. Her heart skipped a beat as she recognized the young aquean poet who had opened the program, and who had taken the seat next to her unnoticed. Louvin Interre. He was even more stunning up close, so much so that she found herself alternating between staring and dropping her eyes to avoid looking at him.
