Resonance by J. B. Everett (free ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📕

out uncorrected. “It’s not just dead and alive. There are three categories. Alive here. Alive there. And dead in both.”

 

His back to her, he nodded, and left. As he hobbled off, looking older than he ever had before, she wondered if he really wanted to study or just didn’t want to trek the distance to the cafeteria.

 

Alone in the tent with David laid out on the other bed, Jillian moved her sore muscles. Her jaw had already gotten its workout, but her legs and arms could use some good range-of-motion exercises.

 

She stretched and twisted, feeling for the third time the strain of movement on long unused muscle. She began to wonder if she would feel this every time she awoke. If each time she fell asleep she would have to wonder where she would wake up.

 

Before the thought could depress her, Jordan wheeled in the cart containing the EEG set up. Wires hung in wrapped loops off the side of the cart, the ends little silver snaps waiting for the corresponding pads. Jordan had two pages of the thick foam stickers with the snap backs and small sponges in the center holding conducting gel.

 

When he turned his back to her she heaved herself off the bed, and grabbed the babyrail as her legs tried to buckle under her. Without seeing him move in behind her, Jillian only felt his arm slip around her waist and lift her fully upright, legs extended, and finally supporting herself. She batted his hands away and carefully walked the two feet to get to the head of David’s bed. Without a sound she began pushing away his blond hair, snapping the wires to the pads and sticking them across his head. For a moment she pushed away her own concerns, and admired the pattern that the probes made - simple, mathematical, containing no fear, concern, or disbelief.

 

Within minutes the small screen was tracing a series of green lines across its face, showing the brainwave activity of a comatose David. The theta waves were low, indicating a non-dreaming state. But that didn’t mean anything. Not until he passed at least three hours – overnight would be better to prove that he hadn’t entered any REM sleep cycles, no dream phases.

 

They watched silently until the lines completed their first trek across the screen, then they turned to get dinner.

 

Jordan watched her while she ate. She consumed food like he had normally only seen her consume information. But he didn’t judge. He hadn’t been through what she had. Even in the simplest sense.

 

He hadn’t walked the reversal long after it wasn’t safe for anyone else. He didn’t awaken before anyone else and toil to save lives. And he hadn’t slipped back under. Never mind what she claimed she had seen.

 

She wasn’t speaking to him. Not in the flat-out-refusal way that a child would mete out punishment, but he could sense her withdrawal, her pain that he didn’t just blindly believe all that she said.

 

The one thing she had done was convince him that she believed it. But it didn’t make sense, not the way she said. And she could have dreamed it. Hell, everyone had a dream or two that felt so real you bought into it, even after you woke up. His lips pressed together. The difference was that people who dreamed woke up.

And, once confronted with some sort of evidence, they let go. He had once dreamed his puppy had died, but he woke up and was corrected by a single bark. A good lick on the face and the dream was banished.

 

Here, two full hours later, Jillian still believed. And she was trying to spread the news, at least to him and Landerly.

 

And she could have dreamed it. He had watched her thumb through the ‘deceased’ list when she’d been awake the first time. Jordan also knew that her brain was razor sharp. It could have memorized, somewhere in her vast subconscious, the entire list. Who knew what a brain like Jillian’s was able to catalogue? If she had once passed by that tech’s file, if it had been open, she could have absorbed every fracture, every nick on every bone.

 

He watched as she carefully cut the turkey slices on her plate with the dull cafeteria knife, slicing neat squares from the ovals before her. She dunked them in gravy then chewed them, her motions as uniform as her cuts, and she never made eye contact. She was angry.

 

Equivalently she’d had the answering bark. He’d talked to her, they’d touched. Landerly touched her. She had dreamed they were dead, but all the signs saying otherwise couldn’t convince her.

 

And that theory. That was neat. She managed to sew it all together so it worked. One set here, one there. She could simply continue the dream when she went to sleep.

 

With new eyes, he looked at her, knowing that she felt it, and that she wouldn’t return the gesture. Was she simply so smart that she could drive herself insane? His dream had dispersed, although the memory of the terror was still glass-clear in his adulthood. But he didn’t - couldn’t - make up ways for it to have truly happened. Jillian was smart enough that she could.

 

He waited while she methodically finished the food on her plate. Wordlessly, she stood and went back into the line. If her back hadn’t been to him she would have seen his jaw unhinge.

 

Maybe she’s pregnant.

 

David.

 

Like lightning, a bolt of deep jealousy traced a sharp path through him. He worked to push the thought back down inside, to shove it low and bury it deep. She was just eating a lot because of the stress on her system from being comatose for a good portion of the past week.

 

He saw her exiting the line and coming toward him. The cafeteria plate no longer in her hands, but replaced by a paper napkin roll of plasticware, and a black plastic plate piled high with food he couldn’t identify through the steam inside the lid.

 

His breath let out. Not pregnant.

 

“Ready?” She looked at him, but only at the surface. And when he nodded she began walking away. Not waiting for him to get up. Not looking back to be sure he followed.

 

He trailed behind, mesmerized by the soft sway of her hips, the light blue scrubs hugging the curves that were partially obscured by the jacket she had slung on. Her sneakers cut even steps in the shortest path to the records tent. In the dimming light, it was one of the few lit up like a bulb. A faint shadow marked the spot where Landerly sat just inside.

 

Jillian lifted the flap and pushed her way in, the canvas falling back into place behind her so that Jordan had to open it for himself.

 

Landerly was taking the plate from her, looking more like her grandfather than her boss. For the old man she had smiles and easy conversation. They were already discussing the fact that Landerly still couldn’t identify a sorting factor, other than the one that he and Jordan had already figured out. He lifted the lid from the plate and stabbed at the turkey with his fork, explaining while he cut the meat into neat, even squares. “The elderly and infirm died. The people who had any or all the markers you two found before the complete reversal hit.

 

But a lot of young people died that I can’t account for. There’s no age or race bias …” His voice trailed off as he dunked the perfect cube of turkey into the little puddle of gravy Jillian had gotten him.

 

And Jordan almost turned tail and ran. Dear God, he was stuck in a small tent with two of them. Falling hopelessly head over heels for one of them, and she wasn’t speaking to him. Instead of fleeing screaming, he opened his mouth. “There’s a gender bias that the females fell under and woke up or died first. But beyond that, there’s no statistically significant difference in who woke up and who died.”

 

Jillian cocked her head. “Did you check for a religious difference?”

 

“Huh?” Jordan heard it come out of his own mouth. Years of education and student loans down the drain.

 

“The Jewish people are the only religion that’s its own race, but there may be a religious bias in the sorting.

 

I don’t know anything about the physiology of religion, but something must exist.”

 

Jordan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Of course, he and Landerly had been wracking their brains, but Jillian in her first few minutes in the tent proposed something they hadn’t thought of. She drove him nuts, so why the hell did he like her so much?

 

Without being asked, Jordan slipped out of the tent and went in search of Jason. Lucy was gone now, and she had been a fantastic go-to girl. He’d wondered if she’d had some sort of crush on him, or if she was just that efficient and willing to do whatever needed to be done. Jason was simply driven. He saw the opportunity afforded by the drastic shift in population, and he was going to come out on top.

 

Jason was in one of the other lit up tents. Of course. He would work well into the night, sleep a few hours and wake up early. He’d make sure he was indispensable. And certainly that’s how Jordan found him, sitting at a desk, frowning at the yards of graphs in front of him. “What’s the trouble?”

 

Jason looked up, a hint of startle showing on his face. “I must have messed it up, but …”

 

Jordan almost smiled. Messing up didn’t seem like much of an option for someone like Jason. “What did you mess up?”

 

“Well, I figured that if compasses were acting up, maybe other things had, too. My first thought was the MRI. It’s magnetic, so that made sense.”

 

“Is it messed up?” Jordan stifled his inward sigh. The last thing anyone needed was more problems, but if they existed they needed to be checked out.

 

Jason shook his head, still looking confused. “No, it was fine. I guess the internal field is just too strong to be bothered by the earth’s field. The NMR was next. Same issue. But both the IR and UV-vis are honked up.”

 

“Honked up?” That was one he hadn’t heard in a scientific sense before.

 

“I got nothing. So I tried to recalibrate it.”

 

Jordan felt his fists hit his hipbones. “And … ?” It felt like he was pulling teeth over messed up machinery when he needed Jason working on finding out what he could about Jillian’s religious bias theory.

 

“I recalibrated the UV-vis.”

 

“Oh.” Well, that certainly hadn’t been what he expected, not given the look on Jason’s face. So he launched into what he needed. “We-”

 

“No. I recalibrated it. But our visual red recalibrated in the UV scale. The whole thing’s off by a frequency of 300 hertz.”

 

“Hmmmm.” So the machine was fucked. He tried again to speak.

 

But Jason wasn’t having any of it. “I got my Dad to check the ones out at the labs. They all recalibrate the same. I even called U Mass and UCLA. They’re the same.”

 

Jordan nodded. “Good, I’m glad you got that solved.” And he shifted mental gears. After explaining what they needed, Jordan headed back, pushing aside thoughts of the future. If Jason reacted by overworking and over-thinking, others would react by shutting down. Suicides were a highly likely outcome. Some had lost their entire families. And it was inherent in the human species that some people just didn’t survive that.

 

He shook his head, trying to make out the two voices as he approached. Jillian’s soft lilt, her laugh, and Landerly’s response, for the first time Jordan detected a scratch in the old man’s voice and wondered how many years of his younger life the man had spent smoking. He pushed through the canvas flap, enjoying the feeling of the heat enveloping him. Lord knows, the two of them had probably solved all the earth’s problems