Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

chance. When she pushes through the heavy wooden door, she stops as she meets the eyes of a handsome, well-dressed, middle-aged man in the mirror. He pauses for a moment, then continues flicking water off the tips of his fingers.

“Bonjour, madame,” he says. “Est-ce que tout va bien?”

Henrietta inspects the space. The bathroom is otherwise empty, the urinals unoccupied, all the stall doors ajar. There is a collapsed plastic sign behind the trash can—TOILETTES FERMÉES POUR NETTOYAGE—which she picks up, snaps open, and sets outside.

The man uses a towel to dry his hands, and the way he smiles at Henrietta tells her that he believes he is being propositioned. And that whatever is next on the day’s agenda can wait.

“Je suis désolé,” Henrietta says apologetically, opening the door still farther in the universal gesture of inviting someone to leave. “C’est une urgence.”

As the man compresses the wet towel into a tight ball, he smiles in a way that attempts to convey Your loss.

“Bonne journée,” he says, dropping the wad into the trash on his way past.

“Au revoir, monsieur.”

Three sinks and plenty of mirror. As she approaches the first one in line, she wonders how long it will take to generate enough steam that she can start writing. But as she reaches for the hot water, she stops. Automatic faucets.

“Putain,” she says to herself. For some reason, Henrietta reserves most of her cursing for French—even back home—since, to her ears, it sounds much less vulgar.

She could probably plaster wet paper towels around the ultrasonic sensors to keep the faucets running, but the water wouldn’t be nearly hot enough to produce the amount of steam she needs. This time she screams.

“Putain!” The anger somehow feels good even though the reverberation in the closed brick and metal space hurts her ears. “Merde-putain-merde-putain-merde-putain!”

A moment of defeat, then a forced refocus. A frantic inventory of what else she could use. Soap. She cups her hand beneath the dispenser and waits for a miserable, watery dribble that drains straight through her fingers.

Henrietta closes her eyes to check the legibility of the afterimage. The numbers and symbols are still very much there, but they are already less crisp. She has maybe two, three minutes left before she will be taunted for the next twenty-four hours by useless patterns of indistinct blobs. And then for the rest of her life for letting such a unique and transformative opportunity evaporate right in front of her eyes.

Lipstick! But all she has is pink lip gloss. And the soft doe-foot applicator would be like painting with a tiny limp brush when what she really needs is…

Chalk!

Instantly, Henrietta connects the dots between her metaspecs and the Fulltouch Virtual Blackboard app on her phone. But she needs it to be dark. She turns and checks the wall by the door, and is relieved to see a switch.

This might actually work.

She waits until she has her specs on and the app open before she turns out the lights. While the Fulltouch Virtual Blackboard app uses the time-of-flight sensors embedded in her glasses to build a volumetric model of her surroundings, Henrietta takes several blind steps toward the middle of the men’s room. When the scan is complete, the app renders the default virtual surface: a full-sized, aluminum-framed, clean and reversible blackboard. And right in front of her face, in the dark, Henrietta’s misfiring retinas project the secrets of The Antecedent. All she has to do now is trace.

She does the exercise twice—once on each side of the board, flipping it over with a dramatic, full-body gesture—just in case she has made any mistakes. But even if she has, the Fulltouch computer vision algorithms will almost certainly work them out. As she transcribes, Henrietta finds it sublime that she is currently manifesting the world’s deadliest weapon. That the physics for The Antecedent had existed since the moment of the Big Bang, but that nobody had thought to arrange and manipulate energy and matter in precisely this way. Henrietta is literally plucking the potential to rewrite the entire future of humanity right out of thin air.

Even though the file is already saved, she screenshots both sides of the blackboard and verifies an encrypted backup has been copied to the cloud. Henrietta then turns, gropes for the door, and when she snaps on the plasma-tube lights, she is smiling. There isn’t even any evidence to erase, clean up, or destroy. She takes a moment to breathe and to calm herself down and to appreciate the fact that she has just done what was previously believed impossible: stolen some of the most highly classified and sensitive information from one of the most secure cleanrooms in the world. It is as though her entire life has guided her toward this exact moment, all made possible by an exceptionally rare congenital genetic disorder.

She walks briskly down the hall, leaving the yellow plastic sign in place behind her, then abruptly stops. The colors used to render the equation were obviously not accidental. Although her CIP is documented in medical literature, now that her parents are dead, Henrietta is the only one who knows the exact combinations that trigger it. That means The Static was not just addressed to her; she was also its author.

But the realization that she sent herself a message across time is not what she finds so astonishing. Some part of her knew that all along. The fact that she will one day attempt to murder the only friend she has is what Henrietta finds so enticing about the future.

38

  KILONOVA

HARD HATS, IT seems, are a study in personalities.

Vanessa Townes is dutifully wearing hers—with the optional attachable chin strap. Moretti’s is on backwards, but intentionally so, like he ought to be sporting a neon reflective safety vest and issuing catcalls while lewdly clutching his balls. The tall, thin, dark-skinned kid in the lab coat is wearing a high-tech, matte-white helmet with an indistinct logo on the side, a retractable metaspec visor evocative of a