Read Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds Online
Authors: Geoffrey Arnold
Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds (3 page)
Gallia, as they called their Great Great Aunt Lellia, would say that events coming together like that were synchronicities, meaningful occurrences. It happened to the twins from time to time when they seriously wanted to achieve something important: by working together. Sometimes it suited what they wanted, at other times it prevented them from achieving their aim: but then that invariably turned out to have been for the best.
They knew from the slowly moving colourscopes of pale browns and greens on the walls that they were in Gumma’s wing of Lungunu. As they returned to the corridor end of the junction they looked both ways.
Standing side by side at arm’s length they held hands and tilted their heads to the side, one to the left the other to the right, ready to share the results.
After a while their eyes detected a tiny irregularity in the movement of the colours.
Each twin took one colour, circled it through their linked memories and played the relevant sequence backwards until the flow across the wall appeared to halt. They smiled as they saw down at floor level a little door set well back behind the false image of a solid wall. On hands and knees they crawled to it.
The lock required a key with two opposed sets of trines. They slid their minds into the lock.
‘No temporal sequencer. This is too easy?’
Qwelby thoughtsent.
‘We’re not supposed to be here. Remember!’
Tullia responded
They mentapushed the tumblers into the correct alignment.
In a world where children manipulated energy from a very early age, security was usually on a practical level, with quantum level devices being reserved for where exceptional levels of protection were required. Moving several solid levers, each imbued with additional inertia, required a major effort. Although tumblers were smaller and could not be loaded with so much inertia, juggling the usual two opposed sets of ten required intense skill. But not for the twins with their unique mental bonding.
Inside the room they found a big, colourless trunk that wasn’t really there.
Tullia bathed the trunk in a thoughtprojection so that Qwelby was able to examine it. After a few moments, they agreed that there was no conversion alarm.
His green body-suit was slashed with bright red patches shaped like flames. Some of them were pockets, fastened with teethless zips called szeames. He unszeamed one and took out one of Gumma’s inventions, a Molecular Gadget Reconstructor, which they had shortened to Mogarcon. It looked like a fat water pistol. Turning a dial on the side caused the free-flowing, phosphorescent energy inside to provide whatever gadget was selected. He chose a temporal readjuster, activated the plasma flow and swept it across the trunk. The air shimmered and a solid, grey trunk appeared.
‘No obvious lid. No handles. Two locks, one at each end. Two keys, needs Gumma and Gallia to open. But only one set of tumblers in each,’ he announced.
Putting a key in a normal lock, irrespective of the number of sets, the tumblers would jiggle up and down until the key was fully inserted. Turn the key: unlocked. A similar situation for thought projection.
Sliding their minds into the locks they exchanged images.
‘Deactivating the alarms as a start is well beyond us,’ Qwelby said.
‘Gumma definitely does not want us to open it,’ Tullia agreed.
They grinned.
The first alarm was in case a tumbler moved without a keyblade having been inserted. The second was for the time sequence. And the third? They would find out.
Holding hands and merging their energy fields into one so as to achieve maximum synchronicity, they started work. As the last two tumblers slid into place the first two alarms deactivated. Freed of the interlocking, the third disappeared.
The trunk hummed. The twins held their breaths, and sighed with relief when the top opened up like the petals of a flower in full bloom. The trunk now looked like a brown and gnarled tree trunk, its sides almost hidden by the fluorescent white petals of an enormous white moonflower.
‘Phew!!’ Both of them let out long held breaths and wiped sweat from their brows. ‘That was tricky,’ they said, their minds momentarily too tired to thoughtshare and to recognise the slightly out-of-focus nature of their surroundings indicating a temporal discontinuity.
Searching through the trunk, Tullia took out a shallow round box. It was dusky pink with an eye on the lid, both the oval and the central orb etched in silver. As she examined it, the oval turned pale blue, the orb purple, and the etching around the orb lavender, matching her own eye.
‘Neat,’ she said, turning the box so that the eye on the lid matched the angle of hers, then tilted the box until it was exactly parallel with her own eye. The lid opened, as she had expected. Inside was a confusing mix of colours which turned out to be produced by three semi translucent disks of varying shades of blue, green and red.
There was an inner rim that looked as though it could rotate, with a series of little openings through which they thought they could see images. Trying to see them more clearly, Tullia discovered that the rim rotated, but in the opposite direction to what she had expected.
Tullia closed the box and handed it to Qwelby, the eye once again a dusky pink etched in silver. He matched the lid to the plane and angle of his eye just as she had done. The colour of the eye changed to reflect his own and the lid opened.
Agreeing with Tullia to call it Soloc, short for colours backwards, Qwelby closed the lid and put it to one side.
They knew Gumma experimented with Time, which was slightly elastic in the fifth dimension. It also had its own colouration. Gumma intended the box to be safely locked away. That meant they were not supposed to have it. Yet it was coded to open for each of them.
At the bottom of the trunk something coloured seemed to be wriggling. Qwelby delved and picked up a blue and green ball. Looking closer, they realised that the colours were on the inside of a semi-translucent surface. It looked like a map of a world that was inside out. They put that to one side very, very carefully. They knew if they thought too hard about what it might be like to be inside, with the power of image-into-action they could find themselves inside.
Then there was a magic lantern. It was black. The sort of black that wasn’t really black, but wasn’t dark grey either. They knew it was a magic lantern because the controls didn’t make any sense. On one side was a dial that had two layers. The lettering was small and they could just make out the words.
Unlikely < OFF > Possibly Uncertain < ON > Probably
More < ? > Less
There were cone-shaped projections on two opposing sides. There was a cover over what they assumed was the front one, presumably to stop the photons escaping. Tullia thought about that. What goes in through the back? Carefully she put it to one side. Something that odd just had to be useful. Didn’t it?
A faint chiming sounded in the room and everything shimmered.
‘Dragon’s Breath!’ Qwelby exclaimed. ‘The third alarm. When the other two deactivated that one must have been in a future timeframe. That future must be now!’
¡Share!
Tullia’s thought contained no sisterly request.
Opening his mind and shutting his eyes, Qwelby felt like a rubber band that was stretched and then snapped back.
The alarm stopped.
Feeling sick, Qwelby opened his eyes and saw that the room looked normal. ‘Now we’re in trouble,’ he moaned.
Being told off by his older sister was irritating, but it was part of their relationship. He hated it when they were reprimanded by anyone else as it was always focussed on him. Tullia did what he called her “Little Girly Act,” fluttering her long eyelashes, making her oval eyes go completely round and projecting totally unwarranted innocence. How anyone could think she was cute was beyond him!
‘Temporal readjustment. The time frame had not reached its end.’ Tullia rolled her eyes to the sky at his failure to understand what she had done. Then she made her eyes go round, fluttered her eyelashes, and gave him an overdone, sickly sweet smile.
He wanted to strangle her.
Putting her hands to her throat and making choking noises, she stuck out an elongated, bright pink tongue and made her eyeballs pop out.
He couldn’t help it. He laughed.
Their quarrels seldom lasted long, usually descending into silliness and laughter.
‘Oh, Kaigii, remember what happened last time?’ she said, acting the caring big sister, knowing he always fell for that.
Boys. So easy to manipulate!
She hid the thought behind her Privacy Shield.
Qwelby smiled, also hiding his thought as he allowed himself to be manipulated. She had made him laugh. And he thoughtsent an acknowledgment that he owed her one for saving them from being discovered. Some time in the future she would collect on that.
PICTURES
They never had time to sink back into the memory as a swishing sound made them realise that the room was disappearing into whatever alternate timeframe it normally existed.
<¡Gather:Go!>
Hugging each other they were swept into the corridor. When they looked back, no trace of the door remained. As they eased back from one another and looked down between them, they grinned. Competing was fun, cooperating brought rewards. Trapped between them were all the items they had put on one side together with a fawn coloured canvas satchel. Opening it, they discovered a black box inside in its own pocket, and agreed to examine that later.
Having put all their objects into the satchel, they stood up and mentascanned. The emergency created by the SuperXzyling was over and House was returning to normal. They did not dare summon Lift as that would tell House they were in the attic. They needed to find a door and override the security system for long enough to get well away from the attic. Then they would relax and House would know they were there. Everyone would assume that they had got into their own suite by subverting that part of the security – successfully responding to the challenge set by their great great uncle.
The colourscopes stopped moving and they were plunged into the dark. Qwelby got out the Mogarcon and dialled up a torchlight. They returned to the T-junction and found the top of a spiral staircase. Qwelby set off first, shining the narrow beam on the steps.
*
‘Will we ever reach the bottom?’ Tullia asked after a long time.
‘We must do,’ answered her twin. ‘Lungunu is always a bit strange. Okay, never as weird as this, but it can’t be so weird that there isn’t a bottom to a staircase. After all,’ he said with eminent logic, ‘it has got a top.’
‘Do you think that life on Earth is ever like this?’ Tullia said.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Don’t know, really. Just been thinking about the flikkers we watch.
Their minds scanned their memories of how ordinary Tazii had come to know something of Azura and its people. It had started when Tazian scientists picked up occasional electronic transmissions. As the years went by and the Azurii plunged further into the quantum world, increasing numbers of their transmissions were captured and the images deciphered: Television programmes being beamed around Earth by satellite.
For the Tazii, taking decisions that affected the whole race took a very long time. As was customary, conflicting interests were eventually accommodated. Transmissions were heavily screened for unacceptable levels of violence, first by a few daring Discriminators and rapidly followed by what were to become increasingly complex, self-programming algorithms. When appropriate age-related categories had been allocated they were made available through specially built facilities called Elmits. The quality was poor, so the programmes were called Flikkers.
The idea behind the Elmits was to give the Tazii a flavour of Azuran life. Hence the rooms where the flikkers were shown were small compared to Tazian rooms; the chairs were totally unresponsive, not transmitting movement, feelings or sensations; there were no moving colourscopes on walls and ceilings, and the pictures themselves were watched on small, flat screens.
Most adults displayed little more than a passing interest. But, as with the young of all races throughout the multiverse, something new caught on and became a fad: in many different directions, including clothes and hair styles from a wide mix of centuries. A weekly visit to an Elmit with friends to laugh at the backward Azurii and their impossible lives became a must.
Recently, the most daring youngsters had taken to visiting one of the new LockDown Clubs. Entry was by wearing Azuran clothing that was completely dissimilar to any current Tazian fashion. Heavy energy emitters ensured that once inside no thoughtsharing or sending was possible, and all auras were scrambled so as to be unreadable. Even the strongest youngster was likely to leave within half an ouer, pleading for sanity. The twins had never visited one. The mere thought of not being in mental contact was enough to give them nightmares.
A whole new range of HoloWrapper Kartoons was created. Even young children screamed with the thrill of being cut into several slices, or flattened by a steamroller followed by the brief experience of life in a two-dimensional world.
The twins laughed. It was not just young children who enjoyed what to the Tazii was a quantum-like sense of fun in the KiddyKartoons.
‘Their lives seem so, well, restricted,’ Qwelby said. ‘Take their sports. They’re all solid. Kicking balls, throwing things, no mental interference, nothing exciting. What a life where imagination doesn’t work. Not even in their space stories.’
‘They have some good effects, though. Pretending it does work.’
‘But that’s just make-believe.’
‘Unkh!!’
Looking at his feet as he was concentrating on lighting the steps, Qwelby had bumped into a wall. He dropped the Mogarcon and the light went out. He got down onto his knees and started to run his hands over the floor.
*
Click. Before he could ask his twin what she was doing, a small circle appeared on the wall. As it grew, it seemed as though the wall was dissolving, a soft light shining through from outside. As the image cleared they realised they were looking down on a sort of desert.
As their eyes adjusted to the bright light, they were able to make out a large expanse of land. Sandy, red brown and fairly flat with a lot of scrubby bushes and little trees. It seemed to go on forever. They thought it must be a desert because it was so hot and dry, but it wasn’t what they thought of as a real desert with big sand dunes and an oasis.
A group of figures appeared at the bottom of the picture. They were making their way steadily across the ground. The twins could see them easily as the trees had very thin branches and no leaves. It was a group of dark brown and almost naked men carrying spears and bows. They paused now and then to check the ground as though they were following the tracks of something.
As the men moved through the trees and out into a wide area of low bushes, a group of women appeared, obviously following the men. Tullia noticed their hair. All wore it close to their heads and woven into many different patterns, except for one. She was a lot taller and bigger built than the others with a reddish colour to her tan. She had long black hair that fell below her shoulder blades in many thin plaits.
Tullia thought there was something familiar about her. She stood up to take a closer look. With a shock she saw she had quite a different view of the scene. It could not be a picture she was looking at. It had to be a window she was looking through. She stood there stunned.
What is happening today?
The big woman turned round and looked up. Tullia’s eyes were drawn to the oddity of her wearing what looked like a necklace made of vegetation. The men came running back to kneel in front of the women, shielding them. A slender youth stood up, hefting his spear. To the twins, it seemed as though the people were staring right at them. The big woman frowned, clearly puzzled rather than frightened. Tullia was sure there was something familiar about her. She wanted a better look. With her arm, she wiped away from the window the mist that had formed from their breath.
An older man gestured. The young man pulled back his arm and threw the spear. The twins ducked and knocked the lantern off the step. Everything went dark as the window disappeared.
They sat back down feeling a bit silly.
‘We never go that dark brown. Even Tazii who live in the WarmBand still retain our reddish hue,’ Qwelby said feeling very puzzled.
‘Did you notice that woman with the long plaits?’ Tullia asked. ‘There was something familiar about her.’
‘No, I was looking at the men with their spears and bows. They must be tracking an animal.’
‘Can we can wind the pictures back?’ Tullia wondered, desperately hoping that they could.
She picked up the lantern. As she turned the dial she realised that what she thought was the projector with the flap over it, was at the back. A light appeared on the wall.
Oh well, simple mistake.
The light slowly changed into a picture –
or a window –
thought Tullia. Slowly, whatever it was they were seeing cleared – snow! There was a lot of land, a steep hill sloping down to a more gentle slope and lots of trees. They looked very pretty with their branches all covered in thick snow.
Together they moved closer to the wall and looked at the scene from opposite angles. They agreed. It wasn’t a picture they were looking at. The different views they had were exactly as if they were looking through a window. Yet they had gone down the stairs so far they had to be underground.
Whatever the answer, the really big question was: what was the point of the pictures or scenes they were being shown? Just as all Tazii, the twins lived their lives intimately connected with the quantum world, where everything was connected in one way or another. There had to be a reason, however difficult it might be to find the answer.
The lantern made a soft humming sound and the scene disappeared.
Tullia turned one of the dials around. Click, click. Nothing happened. Taking a deep breath, she thought:
In for a Quark, in for a Twistor,
and tried turning the other dial backwards. Kcilc. The Lantern shuddered and a window reappeared. It was fuzzy and bright. All they could see was a greyish white colour. Feeling very unsettled, they sat and waited for a picture, or a scene, to appear.
When nothing happened they summonsed up their courage and stood up to look through what they had accepted must be a window. The view was still very fuzzy. Strange shapes were dotted along the hillside. One of them was larger than the others. As they watched, it split into three as they saw two shapes move to either side of the third.
In silent agreement, the twins used their arms to wipe away the condensation on the window, just as two of the figures turned and looked up, right at them it seemed.
‘A snowman!!’
‘Children??’
‘Our sort of age??’
‘Pale faces and blonde hair!!’
They turned to look at one another, each seeing the look of amazement in the other’s eyes.
‘Azurii!!’
Tullia was intrigued by the girl’s hair style. A series of multi-coloured rings around the top of her head. How had she created that effect?
‘Kaigii?’ She turned to look at her twin. His face was pressed against the window, his eyes two violet ovals. Concerned, as he was only a boy, younger than her, and she had to look after him, she moved alongside and gently put her arm around him so as not to disturb his deepstate.
Something was different. She leant her head against his and searched. He was not there! He had left his body and gone travelling. That meant using the seventh dimension. They had done that a few times with full preparation and under close supervision by Lellia in her special Seliya Chamber. And always together.
