Through Your Eyes Page 6

  Jazz hands. Mocking him now.

  He asked, clearly missing my great gag, "Sorry, what did you just say? You said something before. Did you say you heard whispers?"

  He had stopped in his tracks and was looking at me, intently. Not blinking, with a hard, heavy gaze. Hands in front of his body. No longer the lecturer. The pupil?

  I repeated everything as before.

  He stopped me at the word 'whispering', or rather, I stopped as he turned pale. Deathly. The ashen colour I once saw on a person's face when he had a massive heart attack. It was my school history teacher, Mr Bainbridge, while he was telling off another boy for not handing in his homework on time, little knowing that time was exactly what he didn't have.

  "Oh dear. Dear, dear, deary me. A misunderstanding I think. A mishearing. I didn't understand what you said," he said, panicking somewhat, I thought.

  He continued, "Tell me about these hands and figures reaching for you? How many? Has this only happened once? Did they say any words to you? Faces. Could you see faces? Whispers? Whispers you say...Did they rhyme or sing songs?"

  I interrupted, "Just once, the feeling of dark hands reaching out to me. Grabbing, pushing, and groping blindly around my house and at me. I had the overwhelming feeling of them wanting, a deep sense of needing something. And then I was gone from them, rather than them from me. Whispers, yes lots of whispering. Chattering, but I couldn't make out words."

  He said, "Something has changed. Something is different. I have felt it for some time, but your appearance now and what you are saying means some alteration must have occurred."

  He paused and was thinking deeply. His index fingers were together. The Professor was back in the house.

  "Please! Let me take a look at the device again," he said, urgently thrusting his hands to me.

  I handed it to him without question. What else hadn't he told me? Imminent alien attacks?

  He examined it, flipping one side to the other. He produced a pair of glasses and then a magnifying glass, looking, pausing and then nodding. He walked over to a workbench and looked underneath it, pulling out a small drawer, and producing a long thin metallic object. Torch like.

  And he shone it over the device.

  CSI. Looking for blood or other more unsavoury bodily fluids.

  And he perused and pondered for five minutes, gazing at a particular aspect of the box and then suddenly dropped it from his hands! He took several long strides back and fell into the armchair. Absolute panic. He started to hyperventilate and was sweating and spluttering everywhere, eyes engorged and red, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. He then started to cough frantically, with spittle flying everywhere including over his own face. He was shaking his head from side to side. Was this a physical problem, like he was going into major shock, or having a mental breakdown or grand mal seizure?

  I saw a kitchen area through the back, and poured him a glass of water. I held his head and gave him some of the liquid. He choked a gulp down, and then, with time, started to calm down. I spoke to him, slowly and clearly.

  "Breathe, Siris, gently, through your nose," I said.

  I was trying to save him from whatever it he was suffering from, and slowly but surely, his breaths became easier and more even.

  He sat up meekly and then spluttered at me.

  "This device has been altered. Someone has done something to it."

  There was spittle on my face now.

  I said, "What do you mean? Show me."

  He turned and showed me the box and pointed to the signs, fingers shaking, jabbing at the device.

  "What do you see here? Do you know what this is?" he said.

  I looked and told him about my pathetically brief research, and the knowledge of the seba, the idea of doorways and gateways. He was a gatekeeper after all, so he should know.

  He shook his head and said, "This is not an Egyptian hieroglyph. It represents the pardo."

  He flipped over the other side of the device and pointed at the eye.

  He said, "The eye symbol represents experience, knowledge and vision through your own eyes using the device. The two circles below, one in front and below, one behind and below, both represent vision and knowledge in time. The past and present if you wish."

  And then he swallowed deeply and shook his head. He now pointed with a shaking, bony finger at the star symbol.

  He said, "But this. No, no, no, it will not do. It doesn't make any sense. This seba as you call it is not a seba. This is not some silly story about symbols and adventures in museums. This is reality. It hardly seems possible, though."

  He shone the light over the box. It was faint but I could see it.

  A ring.

  Around the star.

  A bit of an overreaction to a circle, I thought.

  He said:

  "This ring is important. It changes everything.

  The ring signifies the duat,

  The otherworld,

  The land before the afterlife,

  Where the souls descend to before their death.

  They are the sisters of rhyme and song,

  And meddling will remove you from time before long."

  And then before I could say anything, a noise, a crashing; something or someone was approaching from the front. The front door glass shattered inwards. Smoke, the smell of burnt wood and glass rose up, lingering in our noses. Red light, like a laser pointer, shining through the room, piercing and blinding our eyes as we tried to take cover. But not a light. This light was cutting, slicing and burning like an actual laser. I moved to the back of the shop.

  "Run, run," he shouted. "The only way you know how to run. Do it. Do it!" he screamed.

  I put my hand in my pocket, groping around for the box.

  Red lights. Blood. An arm, a scuffle of limbs and dark clothes, muffled screams, suddenly silenced, and then finally, the last thing I saw.

  Two of them appeared, the little and large show.

  The grunts.

  The larger was familiar. Teeth. A hat. Heavy set. Acromegalic. Solomon Grundy lookalike from DC comics.

  He swiped his colossal hand at me. I looked at his hand as it passed through my chest. And I felt no pain, because I held the ribbon strongly, frantically. No damage done.

  Neo, I moved too fast for him?

  And he smiled at me.

  And I moved away, to get far away, and to try and find a way of ending this awful nightmare, once and for all.

  So I pulled again, firmly and smoothly, and as hard as I could despite Siris' advice to the contrary...

  10.

  Had I really pulled too hard? Siris had warned me about doing this before, and yet this time, I had been able to control my movements. The carnage at the tailor shop had been a big shock, and I had wanted to get out as quickly as possible. Maybe it was this fight and flight reflex Siris had told me about? When I needed to get away from the danger, then I was able to do so without thinking about it too much and get to somewhere safe.

  But poor Siris, what had I left him to face all by himself? Were they the same people chasing me from before? Was I a coward for leaving and not staying to defend him? But what would I have done, what did I possibly possess that could have protected him or me from those beasts? I would have to return as soon as I could to try and help him, but first I would have to stop moving, to get out of this stream, this ether, and then go back.

  The question I hadn't thought about was regarding how to stop. Was there a brake?

  As the lights flew past me within this strange other worldly place, I saw little windows or exits that presumably represented points in time I could either enter or leave. How I would do that was impossible to say, especially as these little apertures were too far away from me. Surely, I would leave the ether at some point, but how did I know when or where that would be?

  And then I reached the nearest exit point. It seemed absurdly obvious to me that this was my stop, in the same way you would subconsciously press the sto
p button on a bus when you see yourself getting closer to your destination. And it was that easy, almost as if my mind and body automatically knew exactly where I needed to go. As I exited this point, I waited for the walls and lights around me to stop spinning. When I stood and looked around, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  There was nothing but destruction and despair around me. Where there once was a proud city, stood a massive pile of stone coloured in blood. An entire building had been reduced to rubble. Inside this colossal room was a giant chasm extending downwards for ever, a bottomless pit of light. I sat down, but it was more like falling down, and felt the pain in my hand rise up horrendously towards my arm and head. It was excruciating, and I had to sit still with my eyes closed to stop myself from throwing up. I opened them after a few minutes and tried to take in the view around me.

  And then I saw him.

  He was standing, looking down into the depths of the charred crater before him. The earth around him shimmered of cinders and dust interspersed with red and white lights.

  I could see his tears now, splashing on her face, as he held her in his arms.

  Then I realised what was happening. It was as if the whole thing was a mirror spanning many, many years.

  And he was me.

  And she was her.

  It was the woman with the green eyes.

  He saw me now, through his blazing eyes, looking back at his own gleaming eyes staring back at him. And then his eyes joined my gaze, and he truly saw me.

  And he spoke to me, but as he spoke it was as if the words were coming from my own mouth.

  "Look at what they have done to her, my poor girl! Fighting over it like children over a toy, all for the sake of power and control. And everything has turned to dust. You must stop this. I cannot do it anymore, I don't have the means. You must help me."

  I said to him, "How can I help? Where must I go? What must I do?"

  And then he said, "Go back to the beginning. Bring me the device from the start, before they have any knowledge of its conception. Bring it to me so I can destroy it," he paused to choke back the tears. "And save her."

  I said, "Tell me about this device?"

  Talk about kidding myself. I knew I was deceiving him or should I say, deceiving myself, but if I gave him my own device, I would be left high and dry in this hell hole.

  He said, "You must bring me my device, the one I constructed at my laboratory. It is still in my past but remains waiting for you in your future. You must bring me this so that I can undo what has happened here. I must stop him from doing all this, and the device is the only way."

  I thought about what I needed to do, and as I thought, he looked at me, registering something in his mind. It was as if he suddenly knew what I had in my jacket. I squeezed my hand firmly around the device in the same way you grab your wallet in your pocket, when walking through a crowd on a tube train in London. Or maybe that was just what I did. I could see him getting more agitated and angry, but I couldn't give it to him, not yet. I would find him and get his device and would help him.

  But not right now.

  As I moved away from him, I could see him shouting at me, his face red with fury! I don't know how I had got to him in the first place, or when this encounter took place. It wasn't a conscious decision to seek him. Certainly, I had some control over where I was going, but this time it was as if I had been drawn by him to this point in history. The knack seemed to be the ability to move to key positions in time which involved me.

  Or maybe they were versions of me.

  How I found this exit point was beyond me.

  The next step was to return to Siris, to try and save him from the awful marauders. I assumed that I would automatically go there by thinking about it? If not, then I was getting very, very worried, and, as Siris had warned, I was beginning to feel very, very tired.

  But most importantly of all, I was getting very, very scared.

  11.

  Ten years later.

  The Novertium research laboratory.

  I sat back and swirled the golden brown liquid round in my glass. It was a twenty five year old Talisker that I had been saving for a very long time? Actually, I had been waiting for this moment for years, and finally it had arrived. I didn't even like whisky, but thought I ought to celebrate with something, otherwise it would appear as if the last ten years had not meant enough. It was today that we would present our findings, present the final version of our newest technology. This technology would change the way the world would look at things, the way it thought, and for the better, I hoped.

  I looked around at the laboratory. My laboratory. My life's work, well, I supposed at least a decade's worth. It blinked back at me, with a multitude of Star Trek like lights flashing away. However, these lights actually had a function, this wasn't a set from TV, it was real work. My lab was relatively small compared with the rest of the facility, but then it didn't have to be too large. This laboratory was the core. The nerve centre of the entire organisation; this was where my ideas were formed, and where those people who then put my ideas into physical, working, tangible hardware, returned it back to me.

  The core was where I created the new technology. Not your everyday bog standard stuff, this was at the forefront of human evolution, or at least that was what I had let myself believe.

  'The next big step,' I used to call it, before I realised it sounded a little too Third Reich for my liking.

  The rest of the complex consisted of different departments providing support almost solely for our purposes. Cutting edge computer departments maintained and run by hundreds of colleagues, with hard drives capable of storing the entire memory bank of human history!

  And memory, real memory!

  Information technologists housed in rooms the size of three football stadiums. Manipulating the hardware and tweaking the software and, from what I could see, working day and night to get the most out of the vast resources we had been provided by our illustrious board of directors.

  There were Quantum accelerators housed in huge rooms the size of several aircraft hangars. These units were responsible for research into harnessing the energy released when particles were moved around from one state to another, and moving them from one place to another. The key here was how to manipulate this energy into a useful fuel required for our work.

  Men in white lab coats, after all, we were traditionalists, walking around with clipboards and hard hats, nodding to each other, with their names carefully printed on their lapels. I still found it amusing.

  Most impressive of all were the Neuro-Cyber Units.

  There were five in total, each having a different girl's name. In order of importance they were: Anna, Ellie, Elisabeth, Rosie and Freya. In these units, were housed the most important and complex work in the facility; the neural interface construction.

  These and many other units were housed in approximately one hundred thousand square feet of space.

  This was not a James Bond set, with a mad professor planning to take over the world. We were here to make a difference. All those lame things you hear the lovely ladies at beauty contests saying they would like to change: world peace, eliminate hunger, to better mankind. It all sounded pretty ridiculous, but that was what we were actually trying to do. A new chapter in human evolution!

  Steve Kleinmann, my right hand man, was hovering and pacing backwards and forwards around his workplace on one of my monitors. He was the one who had started out as my tutor, becoming my colleague and, I was a little embarrassed to admit, was now more of an assistant to me. He had taken it well, but deep down I was sure there was a little green envious monster trying to break out. I had really thought that I was the thick one in the group all those years ago! That was until that one day arrived, that spark, the great moment of inspiration leaped into my mind; that eureka moment. I really was sitting in the bath when it had happened, and it had come to me in a flash; the spark, the idea, the inspiration behind our research.
/>   Just like in the movies.

  And Chris Stowe, the computer geek I had known from way back. From that one chance meeting after work, when we were first introduced to each other. He had helped to convert all my ideas into words that were coherent in computer language. Years and years of painstaking translation, sweat and tears, now on the home straight of victory.

  These were the senior members of our group of four. It was the head offices of Novertium that had supported us. They were the only company to have given us the time and money to give this idea a chance.

  We had looked at the manipulation of energy through the application of time with a neurological interface, allowing your mind to control and master both energy and time simultaneously.

  Total bullshit when we had tried to sell the idea to bigger companies. Our research involved looking at the energy required and released during particle transfer of physical objects. This bit wasn't difficult. This part took us three months.

  We were then able to apply this to time and through shear hard work, and some serious mishaps and mistakes, achieved this colossal piece of work. This part took us three years.

  The rest of the time? What we hadn't expected to learn about was the application of this to the brain; neurological mechanisms, and how to apply our ideas via a neurological interface.

  Thought.

  And then she walked in. The fourth member.

  And I thought.

  Abigail Angela Freeman, expert in psycho neurological sciences. The person who had turned my outlandish plans and ideas into real hard evidence, and got us results, real results.

  Abby, who had been with me all this time.

  After that first perfect and accidental meeting when we had met in that pub. An old music hall I seemed to remember. I couldn’t help but remember her love for Bombay Sapphire gin, with tonic and a touch of lemon. With ice. What an evening it had been. The French restaurant afterwards had been perfect.