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The Locket

By R. Strange

By R StrangePublished 3 years ago 23 min read
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"Alright! Listen up!" The handsome young soldier was speaking to the rows of seats in the ferry, occupied by people who have that particular look of heat dishevelment, most of them awake, but several helplessly unable to manage it. The soldier braced himself against one of the bent pipe grips as the ferry bucked along the ocean chop. "You were all assigned lockers back at the port. You have been instructed to leave any electronic devices, recording devices, phones, educational holograms, anything with a chip in it. If you have forgotten to lock anything at the harbor, we have rental boxes on board the ferry, this is your last chance. You will pass through an EMP gate, and any technology with a chip in it will be rendered unusable, any media will be erased. Do you understand?"

No one made a comment. "Ma'am, can you wake that fellow next to you and make sure he understands? We don't want you losing your vacation photos, right?"

Everyone moved slowly as though the heat created a thick syrup in which their minds and bodies were suspended. Even the spray from the waves that struck the plastic windows burned the eyes a little with refracted sunlight.

The woman in the purple blouse rubbed her eyes and wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth, then bolted upright, as she was gently prodded by the kindly face of an old woman wearing thick jade beads and a ridiculous amount of gold on the frames of her glasses.

"Oh my, I never fall asleep in public like that. I'm lucky it was you sitting next to me."

The woman said something in Chinese she didn't understand, then pointed to a multilingual sign flashing near the stairway to the pilot's cabin. The ferry gave a sinking feeling, and its hydroplanes dropped into the water, and the hull of the vessel came to rest on the surface. The sign read "Be sure to leave electronics or they will be damaged by EMP fencing protocols."

She was very thorough, but patted her pockets, and checked her thigh harness pack just to be sure. Then she touched the locket she wore around her neck, and her eyes wandered the room, looked at the soldiers, read the sign again, then stood to smooth her clothes and tuck a few stray hairs behind her ears.

"Nothing!" she shrugged, and the lady next to her nodded and smiled enormously, then offered her a moon cake, wrapped in a piece of cloth that she had in what looked like a cross between a briefcase and a bamboo picnic basket. The woman in purple declined, but wished she had been offered something very cold to drink instead. Ahead was a peninsula of land that had been left raw and verdant, overflowing with plants and punctuated by ornate railing and a gate near the landing that looked like it contained the narrative of an entire human life, told in a few minutes of woodcarving. On the landing, two lanterns rested short and squat at the corners, looking bloated and ready to go home from too many tourism dinners. Back home, she reflected, that wouldn't be a lantern, that would be a fireplace. Strapped to the tops of each were a number of small electronic sensors and lenses, and their ancient stone character was traced with wires and conduits, like the blue veins forming along her legs and ankles these days.

Their faces would be registered and searched before they were through the little overgrown park and into the sprawl of buildings that served as a hazy backdrop in the distance. They would get on a series of canopied electric carts with 20 seats each, and be conducted along a causeway and into the city. By the time they reached the end of the causeway, the guard house at the other end, which maintained a staff of 12 soldiers, would have received clearances, and usually, several would be stopped at the fence, and put back on the carts to return to the ferry, their faces flashes with a light red overlay on the screens. It was always precautionary, the soldiers never knew why, but there were always a few who were not welcome.

The lady in purple, Harriet Ocho, was a nature writer. She was here not for the city, but for a small shrine in the heart of it, which was the mouth of a cave, and held three interesting structures from three major dynastic periods. All of interest, but more of interest for her, was a pool deep down one of the stone channels, where there lived a small cloud of ghost shrimp. They had been discovered when a residential tower had collapsed above, disturbing the cave walls and causing an opening to appear, exposing a new chamber in the warren. It wasn't very deep, but one couldn't explore the majority of it without diving equipment, and it contained numerous new species, mostly of the sort that had exoskeletons. The shrimp in particular were very elegant, and had evolved long spiney whiskers for feeling their way around in the dark, which bore the appearance of delicate rice noodles as they spun and turned about in the slightly brackish water.

Harriet's mother was Irish, and couldn't stand noodles, comparing them to worms. Harriet, in an unrelated habit, had from an early age taken to collecting bugs and bringing them indoors, to watch them crawl on the table, or finding the hollow shells still carrying their fetching details, would leave their dried remains on window sills, where she could gaze at them in the sunlight, then forget them, leaving her poor mother to have a fit of horrors shen she went to open a window for fresh air. Harriet's father was Mexican, but he grew up right on the edge of Chinatown, and so because of her mother's disdain, they would sneak off together with a wide lunch thermos, visit one of their favorite noodle places (there were three), to fill it with broth and top it with red chili oil. Their very favorite would pack half the thermos full of cilantro and sprouts before the noodles, then add the hot broth, so that the greens would be fully wilted and cooked by the time they arrived in the park. Harriet would produce a plastic bowl and two pairs of thick plastic chopsticks from her little purple backpack, and they would slurp away happily, watching the jacaranda blossoms spiral to the ground. When they arrived home, all her mother would say, pointing at the oily spots from the slurp spray that had landed on her father's shirt, was "I guess we're eating dinner late again!" She always put on a ferocious look when saying this, but would turn to Harriet with her huge, freckled smile and give a wink that both of them could see. "She's more Mexican than I am," her father would sometimes say, about how she could use her face to express emotion like a traffic light.

The ferry struck the tires on the landing with a thud, and the wobble noticeably decreased, except for what was left strangely lingering in the passenger's nervous systems. The old woman with the jade necklace took a seat again beside her on the electric cart, and said something in Chinese. Growing up, Harriet had picked up just a few words, and mostly could get a sense of meaning from the way someone spoke, but this was the southern dialect, and she was helpless without her translation earpod. She had been warned that crossing the fence meant relying on a human interpreter, and every interpreter in that city was absolutely going to be a chaperone as well.

"The shrimp won't mind," she told the editor of Phylum Magazine, sidestepping the usual, "You're a woman so be extra careful" routine. She'd tracked fossil dinosaur poop in a warzone, collected termite nymphs on the edges of a conflict mineral mine, photographed earth eschewing canopy creatures in forest preserves guarded by armed and frequently glitchy drones (depending on whether or not guerillas had hacked the control station that day).

"This is a cave shrine in the middle of a bustling, total surveillance urban forest. What could happen that wouldn't be noticed?"

"It's all well and good as long as you remain on the right side of the cameras."

"I've been sober four years Phil, I'll be good."

"Don't accept any food or drinks from strangers."

Harriet turned and looked at the old lady with the glittering, ultra glam glasses sitting beside her, who once again smiled with enormous matronly radiance. She gave her the most discerning, eye winking look of scrutiny she could muster, but the lady's smile didn't budge, as though she was some kind of prosperity deity.

"Ok Phil," she had said, "But I'm going to pick a random noodle stand for hot chili noodles, and I'm going to have dumplings with that, and there's nothing you can do about it."

"All an editor can do is ask. Oh! Dr. Bronwere wants to know if you can double check on that prohibition to take biological samples. She thinks they may have relaxed the rules since last year."

"I can try, but that may be up to my babysitter."

As they pulled up to the fence that separated Emerald City from the rest of the known world, a line of interpreters waited on the other side, each wearing the same navy blue, thin suit cloth and a casual white shirt without a collar. They didn't even try to hide their uniform function - record, report, edit, and translate, in that order. Between them was a large gate, minimal to function, with a trailer sized box on either side, and the gate was actually humming with electric charge. Someone in the group said the sound was entirely for affect, EMP devices don't make audible noise.

Their soldier announced for a final time, "Just to confirm, no pacemakers, no chip bearing implants, no devices at all? Any chip will be wiped and rendered unusable, unrecoverable, beyond this point. Alright? It's been a pleasure accompanying you across the channel, enjoy your visit to Emerald City!"

Then he turned in the middle of the gate, facing a soldier from the other side who stood to mirror him. Each snapped a tight, formal salute, and turned. The guard on the other side stepped to the side of the gate, and formally extended a white gloved hand gesturing to the group to enter. The soldier who had accompanied the ferry hopped on a cart and waited.

After passing through the fence, they were conducted to a row of tables scattered a good distance from each other in the open air, where their bags and garments were searched. Removing the straps, Harriet placed her thigh pack on the table as the gloved inspector went through every fold, and ran a scanner along the seams, looking off to the side at a screen only visible to them. She picked at the buttons, tugged at the stitches, and rolled the straps in her fingers with a thoroughness that would make her a great naturalist. She wouldn't have an interpreter until after this part, so she couldn't say it. The inspector pointed at her necklace, and she removed the heart shaped locket, set with a single green pear cut sapphire, like the single tear of some sentimental plant, and handed it over. It was opened, scanned, its edges looked at under magnification. It was placed on some sort of sensor surface, then handed back, possibly with the slightest trace of a smile that said, "It's pretty." Hariett did everything she could to slow her hand as she took it back, though the muscles in her arm wanted her to snatch it as ferociously as possible, as though a feral child shared her body, and only came out when she was up to something.

Looking to her side, the old woman was having her eyeglasses inspected with a scanner. The lady again smiled, but then was approached on either side by two thin soldiers. Suddenly her smile dropped, and she let loose a flurry of sharp edged words, words that Harriet actually knew quite well from her days in Mexico City. My word, sweet old grandma was also a corner bar of expletives she thought only the schoolkids knew! She even had this sort of rolling dance, moving her round body as she swore, like a beach ball spinning in the water. It was given that extra touch of the performative, when in the middle of the unceasing protest, she gave Harriet just the slightest wink, and perhaps also a wave goodbye, as she was almost tenderly, at least in a hands off way, conducted back towards the carts.

"You're done," said a voice in perfect English. A lanky man with several enormous moles on his cheek appeared, they looked a little like the standing stones in those old books Harriet's mother used to fawn over. He was one of the interpreters that had been assigned to meet the group. "You can take your bag, and I have a car waiting for you, Miss Ocho."

***

Harriet pulled open the glass door that allowed access to the narrow balcony, and was struck immediately by the constant wind. Her room was more than sixty floors up, and she couldn't spend more than a few minutes in the withering blast, but there was an automated air sanitizer system which claimed to be 'chrysanthemum scented' she was trying to diffuse, its scent was in fact something one would expect to come from the plastics in a manufacturing facility. On the bed her bag was packed, and she had delivered her bloodwork, now it was only a matter of time before she was cleared to leave again.

At the entrance to the cavern, as she had hoped, the interpreter who did not speak a word to her on the way there, except to stare fixedly at her knee while sitting next to her in the back seat, chose to remain outside with the car and its air conditioning. He must have been aware that the cave, which one would think would be cool, became warmer the further one descended. Harriet's mother had a few coal miners in her family, going way back, they had all bonded once over this once seeing a magazine article which had pictures of giant selenite crystals found deep in a cave in Naica, in Chihuahua. They were so large it was as though the climbers trying to slide along their slick, obtuse surfaces were like tiny beetles trying to escape a jar of writing instruments. This fortress of solitude was found deep in a mine, and because it was closer to the center of the earth by just so much, it was also hotter than the surface. Her father explained the men in heat resistant suits wore portable air conditioners on their backs, and still could only spend a little while in the cave before it became too much for them. He told her selenite referred to moonlight, yes just like Aunt Selena, and as a girl she imagined beams of moonlight bouncing off shiny rocks as they made their way down, becoming trapped in a pocket of earth millions of years of ago, and then slowly turning to stone in the total stillness.

The ghost shrimp weren't nearly as deep, but the temperature did go up about ten degrees, and it was already sweltering outside. Large fans at intervals near the entrance created a thunder of noise, and she was grateful for their disruption of the main cavern's silence, breaking the tension of meeting the group there, until she passed them and ducked into the section that was off limits to the public, past the shrines and their little electric candles. She met two others who weren't from Emerald City, who helped her communicate with the biologist and her team assigned to the caves. The first thing they had done in the white noise of the cave fans was to lean in and warn her about the biologist's assistant, using the hand gesture of patting something low to the ground to keep it there. Then they spent about three hours navigating difficult passages, tight squeezes, passing back and forth diving gear through crevasses, strapping it on and removing it. There were multiple stages where they had to de-equip on the way through, and fortunately, this allowed several moments for Harriet and the biologist to be alone at last, without the nosy assistant, along with a guest who could help them communicate. Their voices were shaped by the narrow, tall cavern shapes, making them sound deep and loud. Even the soft splash of water created a calamity as they spoke with only their heads and shoulders above the water line.

The first thing the biologist wanted to know was what was happening outside Emerald City. She had no idea, and explained that all material she was allowed to see was assigned for relevance to her duties, from childhood. Epidemiology information about the various parasites that had swept the world as it heated up were tightly restricted to those who needed to know. She asked about neighboring cities, and about the massive refugee camp near a certain town where her family lived, where she hoped they still lived. She asked if the water had risen any faster since the last mark. Harriet and her coworkers had adopted the common term Atlantis to refer to this, 'Has Atlantis grown much larger?' and the irony of discussing it quickly, in the brief privacy of the cave pocket filled with water, was not lost on her. Atlantis, unlike its namesake as a city or island in ancient myth, was not a single dot on the map, but had become the name for almost anywhere - a nearly continuous strip of coastline that skirted much of the world's land edges, and numerous river basins as well. It described beaches and shores, whole coastal towns and slices of cities, now underwater up to as much as a few miles inland in certain places.

This discussion was ordinary enough but took place in hushed tones in Emerald City, explained the biologist. They kept their own measurements through a word of mouth network, using marks along the trunks of trees, but it was difficult in the spring when the weather kicked up waves. Harriet told her she felt she could trust her, which had to be repeated a few times, almost as if there wasn't a word for trust there for a moment. On the way in, perhaps wanting to be sure, Harriet had made small talk about a physics lab that was experimenting with an old paper from the 00's on the potential of time crystals, or the possibility that spacetime might solidify into unchanging states in eddies and swirls of freely 'flowing' time. Neither she nor the biologist were well versed in physics at all, but meandered it into topics between the group related to the subject of caves as places of considerable stasis. Undisturbed pockets of mineral bearing water are the reason for crystal formation, and in their case, over considerably shorter spans of time, divergent evolution like the ghost shrimp. But Harriet was also measuring the biologist's reaction to the discussion of crystals.

She only briefly touched on the capacity of crystals for storing information in a solid state that was radiation resistant. They did not get into the reliable pulse of electrons in an everyday piece of quartz, one of the most common materials in the heart of the planet, and how it was perfect to serve as a little beating heart for electronics devices like a wristwatch, a tiny ethereal conductor of an electronic device's dance. They did not get into the almost limitless density of information that could be stored within a crystal matrix, or that it had quietly been perfected. But the biologist did have time to sum up the problem at hand, as the beam of an underwater flashlight brushed their legs, indicating the approach of the rest of the diving party.

"We aren't allowed books, none of my colleagues are allowed to share. Paper books are prohibited except for children. No books of any kind that do not pertain to our job function are allowed! No cross field studies without special approval. No fiction, no fantasy, no mystery, and definitely no religion. Only books that are assigned to your discipline. No news of any kind!"

The shrimp were spectacular, though she wasn't able to transport a sample. The cavern was a completely sealed time capsule of life, far more fenced than the city above. A sort of slime fed the microscopic things, and then tiny hunters ate them, and then the shrimp were the apex predator here in this tiny bubble world, spending lifetimes feeling around for movement, and then devouring it. Nothing in that place suggested doom, and the group fell very still when they had reached it. Life carried on completely indifferent to the designs of mankind, although now that this little world touched the large one, it was bound to be completely changed sooner or later. There was very little in the world that humans were capable of leaving unchanged.

Harriet looked out the window of her room as big, heavy drops of warm rain struck the sliding door with an audible patter. She looked down the street which was completely covered with tropical growth, giving the city the appearance of stone monoliths rising above a carpet of green. She chose the assignment to get away from all the desertification gigs, looking for this or that last remaining pair of animals. She had no idea how strange it would feel to work in a place where the machinery spoke a language she couldn't understand, as she generally didn't have to work within a EM fence, besides the occasional swanky hotel. She tried to concentrate and learn in the elevator as it counted off floors, it was a long ride to her level, but her brain lost the thread pretty quickly, and she wondered if translator pods had made that side of her mind less nimble.

She decided to change her pants into something more water resistant now that it was raining, and as always, did so by wrapping a towel around her legs, the way you would at the beach, though there were very few sandy beaches left in the world now and few could afford to visit the natural ones. She found herself habitually studying the corners of the bathroom, the fixtures, as she changed, wondering where the hidden eyes were, but knowing perfectly well fiber optic cameras were a little more than the width of a human hair now, and undetectable. Knowing every angle of her room was closely watched made getting comfortable nearly impossible, but this was a good thing, she constantly told herself. She tried to imagine living somewhere that information was so tightly controlled that you could not even find out if the next settlement down the coast was still standing.

A few minutes later, a knock came at her door. It was her babysitter. He gave a slight bow, and offered her a small paper sack of the kind school kids in her mother's childhood photos used to carry their lunches. It contained a small bottle of anti-parasite medication, a familiar brand name, and a little rice candy with a shiny blue wrapper twisted at both ends. She thanked him, and indicated she was ready, subtly disposing of the candy in a cannister in the hall.

The ride down in the elevator was excruciatingly slow, and even seemed to lag at a certain point. The interpreter was not one for small talk, but now he was staring at her shoulder, and repositioning her body did not seem to change this fixation point.

"Will they assign you a new person to interpret, when we get there, or are you off for the day?"

He didn't respond immediately, but briefly flashed a look at her face before returning to her shoulder. "I'm sorry you weren't able to select a noodle stand spontaneously when we arrived, but may I make a suggestion of one we can stop at, to enjoy on your way across the channel? They will hold the boat until you are on it."

She calmed herself, which wasn't difficult at all considering how bone weary she was from the climb back up through the cavern system.

"I don't find the medication goes well with food. Thank you though."

She had caught the parasite on assignment on a tightly packed tourist boat visiting a submerged region of Baja California, which now included a chain called the Baja Islands, looking for new signs of divergent evolution in the now isolated habitats. She was told that even with the medication, it was unclear how many years she would still have, which had caused her to start taking more dangerous assignments.

In the lobby, she watched as a group of six paramedics escorted a person outside. She noted two of them had particularly firm grips on the upper arms of their patient. After they had gone by, they were in a car and headed for the jetty.

Standing outside the car, she bent over the window to say goodbye to the translator, who remained seated, as the driver removed her luggage from the trunk. This oversight was not missed. "It appears your jewelry has been damaged during your spelunking expedition, Miss Ocho."

Harriet grabbed the locket, made as a gift for her mother by special request, who was a data engineer that specialized in solid state information storage. Of course she already knew the sapphire was missing, she had pried it out and handed it to the biologist herself, but she feigned disappointment briefly, before shrugging and saying she should have left it in her room when she went down to the caverns. "At least the stone is something I can replace."

She had held the biologist's hands cupped in her own, and looked into her eyes as she spoke as slowly as possible while her words were relayed. "The entire Library of Congress, and seventy other university libraries. All the news archives we could find in your language. Every academic paper available at the time of storage. More dubbed movies than you could watch in a single lifetime. I'm told you already have instructions on how to read it?"

The biologist shed a single tear of gratitude, and could not contain a brief, youthful tremble of excitement, shaking her fists in a happy dance that splashed the cave water. That was the moment that Harriet felt she could cling to as a confirmation she'd handed it off to the right person.

But now, as the interpreter's car pulled away, she stood still in the soggy hot downpour even as someone from the ferry rushed over with a clear umbrella, and had to wonder if the biologist would even last a day. Harriet would never know. Casting off, she took the locket from her neck, and placed it in her pocket as she watched the verdant teeth of Emerald City shrink in the distance.

Sci Fi
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R Strange

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