Chapter 99: 99 Hello World, Part Three

On her first morning back in the real world, Angharad got up bright and early. She opened the blinds in the spare room she'd dumped all her stuff in the night before, made her bed like Freya always nagged her to do, and put on an outfit she knew was ten years out of date.

The kitchen was empty of even a robot maid, which was a puzzle she'd have to ponder later, but she knew her way around the coffee machine and the toaster. Those, at least, weren't up to date or complicated tech.

And then she threw open her father's door, to see him already awake, eating something she knew was not on his diet plan and watching the morning news.

"Okay, first of all, I have several projects you need to help me with," Angharad said.

Her father looked up with a wry smile. "You wouldn't be you if you didn't have a project."

"Like, first of all, I'm pretty sure there are still several people that came back from Zapville with me that are still locked in that military installation in wherever that was, and we need to get them all out, one way or another. I mean, like, I think we should probably track down their families first before we work on that. But I can make a list of names."

"Alright, let's get to it." He moved a pile of papers further away on the low table beside the bed and pulled open a notebook.

"And, also, I'm going to need to look up things about this sabotage that apparently happened on the gates ten years ago."

"Angharad, I researched that already. I have entire folders of information about it. You can look at what I did before you go off in that direction."

Angharad clutched her coffee tighter. "Okay, I mean, I guess I should have considered that. I've kind of only had a day to think about this. And, uh, after we make that list and work out an action plan, I need to find a guy in Toronto and give him a book."

*

Outside, the world was warm enough that Angharad only had to wear a denim jacket over her cotton dress. The sky was a soft blue, patterned with wispy, drifting clouds.

She remembered her last few days at Zapville, hot and cold, the darker days so dreary that even Josephine, whose skin was always burning hot, had had to keep her hoodie closed over her sports bra when she did pull ups on her bedroom door to show off. Josephine was still trapped under fizzing grey skies. Angharad knew that she wouldn't be seeing Josephine, anyway, even if enough people had voted to send Josephine back home to sultry, tropical Hawaii. Still, she wished.

"If I could go back in time I'd vote and make them choose her, too," she told the indifferent sky. And then laughed at herself. If she could go back in time she should stop everyone going to Zapville at all.

Her father didn't want to let her leave the house for coffee, real coffee made by a person manning a machine rather than just a machine on its own. No slight to machines, of course.

He hovered and worried and said, "No, no, I just got you back, I don't want to risk you..." until the walls started to close in on her and the white painted ceiling started to feel like the grey electric barrier and she said, "I need air, I can't breathe, I need to get out..."

And then somehow she found herself in a cafe, staring at the carefully curated, bland posters on the walls and not entirely sure how she got there from her house.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of bright red hair and startled. But the red-haired woman sitting at the table didn't turn around, or reveal herself to be a phantom, and if, somehow, that was Eliza from that last school sitting at that table, she'd be just another twenty-something Californian who never really knew Angharad at all.

*

Back in the office with her soy cappuccino, Angharad moved furniture around and set up a desk for herself. She couldn't remember how she'd had things the last time she'd been there. Everything inside the building had been moved around. The work spaces were different, more open and empty. She remembered them filled with employees and the buzz of innovation. She didn't understand where that all went.

*

Freya was the first to call.

"Are you angry that I tracked you down?" Freya asked.

"No," Angharad said. She swivelled in her chair to look at the way her father, the famously inscrutable Leonard Silver, scowled at the phone in her hand. "But daddy might be."

"Whoops!" Freya said, and laughed. Her voice was soap bubbles over the phone, bursting on impact with Angharad's ear.

Angharad slanted a look at her father and mouthed, 'it's okay', so that he'd at least pretend to not be listening to her every word.

"I kind of thought the first person to track me down would be you. And it had to be you tracking me down, not the other way around. It's not like there's a million Moons where you are, but I would have had to do actual research. All you had to do was look up my father's offices. It's like a magic spell – all you need if you want to find me is my full name."

"You didn't think it would be Jin?" Freya asked.

"He's... I don't want to say he's self-absorbed, but..."

Freya laughed again. "I'll let him know what you didn't say."

Angharad spun to face the bookshelves and gave herself the illusion of privacy. "Anyway, I'm not worried that you could track me down. I'm worried that other people could, but... I mean, the worst case scenario already happened, right? It's not like hiding who I was actually made me all that safe, and... I mean, if you want, you can give this number to Jin, too. And also to Sophie if you've already tracked her down."

"Of course I have! She wasn't difficult to find. I don't have access to Jin right now to put him on the phone, but if I did, I would still make him go to the effort of calling you himself."

"And, like, taunt him with it? Just to watch him make funny faces?"

"Definitely!"

Angharad laughed, imagining it.

But Freya spoke again, bursting Angharad out of that bubble, her voice all business. "Have you checked on who of our group is still in the custody of that Canadian military installation yet?"

"Uh, not yet. I mean, I made a list to do it but I barely just got back home."

"I understand. I have also been busy. I can email you through a list of what I've learned so far and what is yet to be done. Unfortunately, I have been preoccupied with the NCT air force of today assessing me thoroughly to see if a war veteran of yesterday like me fits their vision of the future."

"Oh, so I guess you're busy with that. It's cool. I just need to home-school myself, go through my dad's notes on the sabotage of the gating system ten years ago, and figure out who else has to be sprung out of foreign military prison. No big deal."

"You can do it. I believe in you. And about those notes..."

Angharad cleared her throat. "Well, I believe that if you're willing to be interrogated at length by the great Leonard Silver himself, he might be convinced to share with you information that has impacted your welfare and mine."

Angharad spun her chair back around to view her father's wry smile. He really was working, files open on the desk in front of him, but something about his eyebrow raise told her he'd be willing to allow Freya's request for information to distract him if Angharad handed him the phone.

"You really don't get enough credit for how good you are at jargonising things," Freya said.

*

That's right – the sabotage. Angharad had to remind herself of the importance of looking into that.

She walked around the desk she'd set up in her new room with the file folders an ominous pile on top of it. Circled it until she reminded herself to stop being so dramatic. They were only files. They couldn't hurt her worse than she'd already been hurt.

She sat, calmed her breath, and opened them.

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The saboteurs – her father's notes called them Luddites, though that was hardly the historical reference Angharad would want to make in face of this information – had infiltrated positions at Space Bridge Solutions, that much was obvious. Print outs of newspaper articles covered bits and pieces of investigations and trials.

The people arrested were a disorganised group that made a wide variety of somewhat contradictory demands. Some wanted an end to gate travel, some wanted an end to international travel in general, one or two felt that charging for gate travel was an abhorrent practice and it should be free to everyone. At least one or two were religious nuts that expressed distaste for evil physics tearing open space like that.

Angharad didn't really understand the physics of it all, but she was pretty sure it didn't tear open any holes, just opened brief tunnels from one part of the world to another and then closed them again. But she couldn't be sure, and the idea of figuring out Einstein–Rosen bridges when she could barely understand the ultra-basic version of general relativity made her head want to explode.

Not all the gates had been targeted. Apparently they hadn't needed to be. Angharad was no more an engineer than she was a physicist, but to be fair, she was also only 17. It was hard to wrap her head around the hows of the sabotage that lead to the gate portal sending her to Zapville and not the place she was meant to go.

But none of the articles told her what she really wanted to know. Was the sabotage the result of a movement that happened spontaneously? The end result of people with different ideals but similar goals meeting on the internet and radicalising to the point of taking direct action that cost people's lives? Or was there a person behind it, responsible for directing people into making those choices? The last option would have made it easier for her to have someone to blame but she just couldn't bring herself to believe it. What she knew of the world made the wider sociological explanation easier to believe. A terrorist group borne of people's rage and frustration that decided sometimes you need to crack some eggs, and didn't care that people's lives weren't eggs and what they made wasn't an omelette but a gigantic mess – that made perfect sense to her.

But making that kind of sense didn't help her at all.

Maybe someone took advantage of the sabotage and landed them all in Zapville, or maybe it was just an accident. But they'd all still been there, and trying to learn why and how wouldn't unravel time.

*

James and his wife visited the company building the next day. Angharad watched them from faraway: the long corridor an endless tunnel and James and Leonard and three other people a distant family drama framed by the doorway. James' wife had a golden tan, a white-toothed smile, clothes that showed a casual California sensibility, and from a distance she smiled a lot, but her blonde hair had been straightened until it was stringy, and Angharad was good at telling a practised smile from an authentic emotion. The children, two dark-haired boys in shorts and generic slogan tees, were a blur as they walked around behind James and Leonard.

Angharad knew James knew she was down the hallway watching, but every time he looked down the hallway and away from what he should be looking at, his eyes slid over her without acknowledgement. He didn't introduce her to his family.

Nor did she stride up the hall and introduce herself, even though she knew she could. James was an obstacle to what Angharad wanted; she didn't see the need to ingratiate herself.

James and Leonard Silver raised their voices, bared their teeth. Angharad rolled her eyes and returned to her room.

In her room she had lists of lists to return to, plans upon plans. She occupied a few hours making notes, studying, trying to catch up on all the knowledge she should have gained in the ten years she'd missed out on having.

At seven at night James barged into her room. Angharad looked up from her piles of notes, feeling her face fall into severe lines upon sight of him.

"You didn't come out to bother us," he said.

"I'm busy, James. I'm studying. I actually want to finish high school so I can get into a useful university."

His face contorted into a sneer. "Oh, you don't need that. I'm sure we could get you a nice modelling job for a catalogue somewhere."

"Do you need something or are you just here to waste my time?" she asked.

"What useless subject do you expect to study?"

"Business, of course," she said with a smile. "So I can take over this business."

He laughed. "I will never let that happen."

"It's cute that you think you have any control over this, James. Now get out of my room before I start to scream."

He narrowed his eyes at her but he walked out.

*

Dinner was spent on the couch in front of the TV in the lunch room, with all lights off other than the flickering brilliance of her father's old videos. She'd seen them all before, all the shaky phone camera videos of her parents and Moshe and the friends they'd had, talking about their life philosophies at parties, breathing out dreams and ideas into clouds of smoke.

Her father paused in the middle of eating his microwaved broccoli, his blank stare much more tired and lined than the vibrant, energetic Leonard Silver on screen. "Look at us. We were so young. It's like looking through time at the waste of youth. We were so sure we would save the world, and all we did was make it worse, like every generation before us."

"Wow, that sounds exactly like the stuff Dr Yeoh used to say, and I wasn't impressed by her pessimism, either."

"I spent so many years running from what happened to Nadia and Moshe in the hope of protecting you and I didn't protect you from anything. All I did was trap you in a tiny box. I'm a terrible father."

"Don't say that!" Angharad yelled. "You're a great dad."

But she didn't know what to say when her father put down his plate and started to cry. And the sounds of her mother's voice on screen talking about science and markets and the importance of plans filled her with a fear she couldn't understand.

*

Angharad wasn't sure what she'd expected Tsuyoshi's uncle Tim to be like, but whatever it was it was nothing like the man who made his way into their office. He was hunched over and small in a chair in the reception area, and looked older than Tsuyoshi had described him. Then again, maybe Tim Okada had been that large, looming figure when Tsuyoshi knew him, back before the child he'd been raising disappeared. It was strange how grief could shrink a person.

Tim pressed his hands into his knees as Angharad walked out into the reception area, but didn't look up until she called his name.

He was polite, well spoken despite his lost puppy dog eyes, as he followed Angharad into one of the empty waiting rooms and sat across the wide, round table.

"You said you knew something about what happened to Tsuyoshi?" he asked.

Angharad tried to neaten her clothes while she thought about what to say, but only managed to press her skirt suit further out of shape. "Yeah, I mean, after the accident we went to the same place. He was really nice to me."

"He's a nice boy, underneath it all."

"There's, uh, something of his that I thought you should have." Angharad unwrapped the book from the towel she'd kept it in and pushed it across the table. It was a little grimy still. She'd tried hard to clean it as much as she could without making it worse but there was only so much she could do.

Tim reached out but his hands stopped before the book, as if he was afraid to grab it.

"Did he read it?" Tim asked.

"I mean, I don't know if he read it."

"Is he alive wherever you went?"

"I don't know if... He was alive when I last saw him. I believe he's okay. I have to."

Tim nodded. Angharad let him have a moment to collect himself without speaking. Not that she knew what to say.

He finally wrapped the book back up in its towel, picked it up, stood. "Thank you for bringing this to me. It was kind of you."

He saw himself out.

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