| Chapter 13 | Chapter 15 |
Part II
14
Wietse
Kauai, Hawaii, March 2nd 2043
After Wietse had just picked up his equipment from the floor, while still off centered by the unexpected fall, a stern voice came from behind him.
"Sir, … what are you doing here, sir?"
Wietse had hit the ground quite hard. He had taken quite a fall. Two, maybe two and a half metres down just minutes before.
So close Wietse thought. How could I have been so careless on this last batch?
Wietse put his hands up and slowly turned around expecting to see one of his armed PUPR's guards. As he turned around though, the owner of the stern voice looked that much different from what Wietse had anticipated.
The young man, a well-tanned muscular man in his late twenties, dressed in typical Hawaiian tourist attire, looked startled as he saw Wietse's face and took a step back.
"Sir? …"
The young man went silent for a second, looking at Wietse's confused facial expression as Wietse tried to evaluate the situation. Then without making the actual sounds, the young man's lips formed the easily recognizable word: 'fuck'.
"I am so sorry, sir that this happened. This has never happened before, sir. Please, sir, have some water. I must convey my deepest apologies on behalf of Kaiwi Travels. I don't know how this could have happened but rest assured that you will be compensated for your discomfort and your guide shall be duly disciplined. This is unacceptable, sir. I shall do everything in my power to make things right for you, sir."
The young man took a small bottle of water out of his backpack and handed it to Wietse.
"Here, sir, you must be completely dehydrated after a whole weekend being stuck here. You look a bit disoriented. Most likely due to the dehydration and the hunger. I really don't know what your guide was thinking last Friday. Leaving the island one person short? And an elderly gentleman like yourself at that."
"I'm in the PUPR slicing-farm facility !?" Wietse murmured as he stared in disbelief at the ranting young man who was trying to apologize for something that didn't exactly make sense.
"Yes, sir. Indeed. This whole island used to be 'the' main PUPR military stronghold in Hawaii during the war. Good to see you at least still know where you are. I am sure that is a good sign. Three days stuck on this fortress of an island without any food or water can't have been easy on someone your age, sir."
Wietse looked at the young man in wonder. Wietse had lived completely cut off from any of the normal sources of outside data. The occasional glimpses his M-brane folding had allowed him had not exactly given him the impression that the war had been coming to an end. If it had, if PUPR had lost, that would explain why unfolding his escape plans had seemed to go almost too easy. The guards had been much less on their toes the last few months and there were less of them as well.
While M-brane folding hadn't shown Wietse much of the outside world, it had aided him tremendously in gathering both intel and material for planning his escape. An escape that now had come a bit earlier than expected apparently. Or had it? My God! Had it?
Wietse realized that the fold was probably still active. That meant his guards could …..
At that moment a white plastic coffee cup came falling down just centimetres in front of Wietse's face. Damn, Wietse though as he bent over towards his equipment.
"What the hell is that?" The young man spoke.
As Wietse got up, he saw the young man pointing at the ceiling directly above his head.
A bowl-like mirror about a seventy centimetres in diameter attached to the ceiling, but Wietse knew it was neither a mirror nor bowl-shaped. It was the visible section of the output sphere of an M-brane fold. A spherical output section that judging from its curvature had grown in diameter from a mere five centimetres, enough for Wietse to push some utensils through in order to try and steal additional quantum trinities through a return fold, to three, maybe three and a half metres in diameter. The output of the fold sphere, and thus also its input sphere had grown.
Wietse tried to think. How? Could the two folds have merged as he tried to push the little box of quantum trinities through the fold? It could if the box contained partial trinities that were entangled with the partial trinities inside Wietse's control hardware! Could he still control the resulting fold now that two had become one?
The readings on Wietse's screen weren't making any sense.
"Sir, please, we need to get out of here?"
As the young man looked at Wietse in fear, Wietse looked up at the ceiling again. It was a guard. What before looked like a mirror now clearly wasn't. The mirror-like surface showed the distorted image of one of Wietse's PUPR guards crouching. Then what looked to be a stapler came dropping down. Severely distorting the shape of the fold exit sphere as it entered the room. As Wietse looked at the stapler, he noticed the little box.
"It's the trinities. I need to use them." Wietse spoke softly, almost inaudibly.
"Sir, please?" The worried voice of the young man spoke. "We need to get out of here. This must be war tech! Dangerous war tech!"
Wietse looked at the young man and saw a face being close to a state of total panic.
"Go on, kid, I'll be right behind you."
The face of the young man looked puzzled, but then as was visible in his facial expressions, his fear overruled his desire to understand and he ran off as if chased by a tiger, leaving Wietse to work on his equipment.
Wietse started fiddling with his equipment. After carefully placing each of his newly acquired quantum trinities into his handheld console core, Wietse managed to reassemble his little console. There was a huge crack, though, in the old-school touchscreen that Wietse was using. The crack had been there after he had first picked up his equipment, but now it ran over the whole screen.
To his relief, the touchscreen still worked and the sphere was responsive.
Wietse made the sphere shrink, and as it did, a gaping hole in the ceiling became visible. Then Wietse made the sphere, that now was small enough to fit through the hole in the ceiling, hover down slowly.
"Ok, let's see what this baby can do," Wietse spoke out loud.
As the sphere started growing again, growing to the size of the room, the image eerily mirrored yet not truly mirrored by the sphere started showing an image with pine trees. There was a mountain and a lake. Looking at the sphere gave Wietse a bit of a nauseating sensation. While he had experienced looking at images from quick moving entry spheres a number of times before, it was quite different for a sphere two and a half metres in diameter than it had been with a sphere less than one-tenth that size. The remote black sphere was moving at great speed across the landscape as Wietse searched for a place to go. Then the image on the sphere came to a rest on the shore of a small lake. Wietse made a last swiping movement on his touchscreen. Instantly the silvery sphere went pitch black.
I need to work on doing this more stealthily, Wietse realized. I'll figure that part out for my next jump. I've got to get myself out of here first. This might no longer be a PUPR island right now, I'm pretty sure there are swarms of kill-drones stashed here somewhere, ready to be activated if they figure out I've escaped.
"Sir? Are you still alive?" The trembling voice of the young man spoke, as he skittishly showed only his face and the fingers from his right hand from behind the door post.
At that very moment, Wietse lunged himself into the huge black sphere. The sphere flickered between mirror and pitch black for a short moment, then vanished completely.
"Sir? Sir ?"
| Chapter 13 | Chapter 15 |