The Cosmic Queen
“You’ve been off the grid for a long time, Eleanor,” Barlow said, hands raised above his head. “Surely you can spare some time to hear what I have to say.”
“I can spare a few seconds before I shoot you in your deranged head, Tony Barlow,” she said. “You can tell me how you found me, so I know who else I need to kill when they come knocking.”
“Victor Zhang,” Barlow said. “May the Conscious Plane welcome him home.”
That remark seized her attention. Eleanor Morgan lowered her weapon, face pinched in a frown.
“Dead, you say? Not old age, I’m guessing – that bastard was going to outlive us all with his treatments. Who killed him?”
“You know who,” Barlow said.
The founder of the Cosmics looked to be about Victor Zhang’s age – well over a hundred years old, though she showed her years more acutely without access to the latest anti-aging treatments in her isolation. Her wavy, lightning-white hair hung down to her waist and her bare, toned arms were a leathery bronze, baked under the sun. Her face was both elegant and open, with large, expressive hazel eyes, a pointed chin and arched nose. Her chapped lips pursed as her eyes darted from Barlow to Hadrian, taking in his tattoos and wolf eyes with a curious frown, before settling on Amira with unmistakable curiosity.
“Who is this, Barlow?” she asked, keeping her eyes on Amira. “Just like you, to dangle some curiosity in front of me, like I’m a fish to be reeled in.”
Before Barlow could answer, Eleanor appeared to change her mind and lunged toward Hadrian, pressing the mag gun to his forehead. Hadrian sank to his knees with raised hands, his eyes wary but his voice calm.
“I’m a good bodyguard, love,” he said. “Leave the girl alone and you’ll have no trouble from me. You have the upper hand, with whatever you’ve got pointed at us on that hill. You can shoot Barlow. I’ll watch and mop your lovely brow after.”
Eleanor laughed, raspy and gleeful.
“Does anyone not want you dead, Tony?” she managed between fits of laughter. “You can’t even wrangle a proper ally when you go hunting for trouble.”
“Enough with the theatrics, Eleanor,” Barlow said. “If you mean to shoot me, then I’ll surrender myself to the Conscious Plane and to the Conscious Plane, as you taught me to do long ago. But if you’re curious enough – about how we found you, why I’m here now after leaving you be for over a decade, why I have these two people with me – then I suggest you drag us at gunpoint to somewhere sheltered where we can talk.”
Eleanor’s eyes narrowed, but darted to Amira again. Her face tightened with irritation – annoyed, Amira imagined, that she had proven Barlow right and could not resist the allure of his mysterious bait. If this woman was truly the former head of the Cosmics, she must have possessed an inquiring mind, a natural desire to search for answers.
“All right, Barlow,” she said. “You win. For the moment, anyway. Follow me. But you don’t get any coffee – not even the shitty stuff.”
Hadrian chuckled as they followed her out of the clearing and pushed their way through a dense maze of trees. The putrid, sweet smell of rotting leaves and wet soil greeted Amira’s nose with each step forward. She craved an indoor space with air conditioning, and hoped the coffee ban was limited to Tony Barlow.
The thicket of foliage parted, exposing a structure on the edge of a high hill. Amira could only label it a structure, not a house. It had four walls made of rusted corrugated metal panels and a roof of the same material, blanketed with a thin layer of dried palm leaves. A pipe extended along the side wall to a pan on the roof, a makeshift water collector. A window had been cut into the side of one corrugated wall, a dark, jagged square that revealed nothing of the interior. A smaller metal shed, perhaps an outhouse, stood about twenty feet away.
Even the poorest homes in the compounds were better than this. They had proper irrigation systems, water, energy. Pathways that glowed blue in the night from harvested solar power.
“Lovely place you’ve got here,” Hadrian said in a tone that perfectly balanced sincerity and sarcasm.
If Eleanor was offended by their reactions, she didn’t show it. She let out a short, gravelly laugh.
“Casa Morgan,” she said. “It’s untraceable, and that’s the best thing I can say about it. Well, don’t just stand there with your jaws hanging open. Come on in.”
Musty air greeted them inside the dark house. Amira blinked several times before her eyes adjusted from the brilliant tropical sun outside, until the outlines of rusted furniture took shape. All in all, Eleanor Morgan’s living space comprised of a crude kitchen, a rickety table, several rusted chairs, and a sleeping cot that looked surprisingly clean and comfortable. The only nod to civilization was an archaic computer monitor – two dimensions, with no holographic overlay – on the far wall, displaying live camera feeds from the area’s perimeter. Something to keep basic security in place, without the insecurity of a Stream connection.
“This must have been what the Cataclysm years were like,” Hadrian muttered.
“Yes and no,” Eleanor Morgan said over her shoulder. “For many, this was life before the Cataclysm, when the changing climate brought floods and destroyed crops. Why do you think they called them the Drought Wars? While the rich were building those fancy space elevators, most of the world lived in this kind of poverty, unable to drink clean water. The Cataclysm just levelled the playing field a little more. And killed a fair number off as well.”
“Is this some kind of atonement?” Barlow asked. He pulled up a chair and sat with his arms folded in his lap, the picture of polite inquiry. “Do you think this state of living solves any problem or changes anything from the past?”
“Don’t give me that patronizing lecture, Barlow,” Eleanor Morgan snarled. “Do you think I’m unaware of that rational state of affairs? I deal with my choices in the way best suited to me, as do you.”
Barlow raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, Eleanor, I’ll get to the point,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not here to argue or to belittle you. I respect you above all others, even after you left the Cosmics for your exile. I’m here seeking your knowledge, because our world will be in a terrible state if we don’t. You may have chosen to disengage from that world, but it still turns without your permission, and people will suffer if you sit aside.”
“Holy Void, I thought my daughter was dramatic,” Eleanor said, but she shuffled to the stove and heated a rusted kettle.
“Lucia sends her regards,” Barlow said, his ghostly eyes settling on the pot of coffee with unmasked longing.
“No, she doesn’t,” Eleanor shot back. “But how’s Orson?”
“He seems happy,” Amira interjected. Eleanor responded with a stare, her eyes narrow behind a steaming mug.
“But I have a good inkling why you’ve come to me, Barlow,” Eleanor continued after a pause. “Rather than the other slew of clever people in your orbit who love nothing more than solving difficult problems. And your motives aren’t just to save the world from some chaos, I reckon – compound-related? They’re always a convenient scapegoat, an obvious villain. You have your own agenda, Tony. You always do. It’s the only consistent thing about you.”
“My agenda this time is humanity’s agenda,” Barlow said.
Eleanor snorted in time with the kettle’s high whistle. She mixed a pot of coffee and poured out several cups.
“Ta, love,” Hadrian said as Eleanor handed him a cup. Amira nodded a silent thanks when handed her own cup, chipped in two places. Eleanor stared at her as she took her first sip.
“You’re a compound girl,” Eleanor said. “That’s what’s been bugging me about you. I knew there was something.”
Amira swallowed back the hot, gravelly coffee before she could muster a response.
“Was,” she said with as much firmness as possible.
“You never stop being a compound girl,” Eleanor said. “Not fully, anyway. I could see it in your eyes. Which one? The Remnant Faithful? With your lovely complexion, I doubt it’s the Trinity.”
“Children of the New Covenant,” Amira said. Past the shock of the Cosmic’s comment, she took a more measured response to the questioning – it was a chance to get some information of her own. “And I guess you’re right. It does stay with you, and that isn’t the awful thing I once thought it was. It made me everything I am today. It taught me to be resilient. Do you know from experience? I never heard you had a compound background.”
“Resilient and resourceful,” Eleanor said with a shine in her eye. She looked at Amira with something new – respect. “And no, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a Westport brat from birth. But my first partner, my legal husband, was from a compound. One of the smaller ones. He taught me things I wouldn’t have learned at the Academy. A different way of thinking about the world that made it into the eventual philosophy of Sentient Cosmology.”
Dr. Mercer’s voice echoed in Amira’s ear. It is dangerous to try to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, Amira. The Cosmics and the compounds believed in similar concepts, although their moralistic positions were different. Where science couldn’t provide proof or an answer, the Cosmics offered theories, largely based on wishful thinking. Now the origins made sense.
“Amira is a neuroscientist under my employ,” Barlow said. “And one of the most skilled holomentic readers in North America. Possibly in the world, with more practice.”
“Interesting,” Eleanor said half-heartedly.
“And she was also present at the Gathering,” Barlow added with a slow smile.
The silence that followed sucked the air out of the room, leaving Amira breathless. Eleanor stood still as a stone, her thin arms taut as she gripped the pot of coffee with a trembling fist. Her jaw clenched and unclenched.
“You think this is a game, Barlow?” she whispered through gritted teeth. “After all of that smooth nonsense, you drop this on me?”
She slammed the pot on the table, earning a jolt from Amira and Hadrian. Barlow remained still and placid, his watery, light blue eyes distant as Eleanor stormed out of her own home. Her curses faded with each stomp through the mud.
“You really have a way with people, Barlow,” Hadrian said, helping himself to a banana on the counter.
“She’ll cool off in an hour,” Barlow said. “I speak from experience. She’ll pace and fume, but I’ve done enough to force her to listen with an open mind. Trust me. With Eleanor Morgan, we can’t just come out and ask for her full cooperation. This is a chess game. All the pieces have to be in the right position before I move in on the check.”
“How long are you planning to stay here?” Amira asked with an arched brow.
“Weeks, if we must.”
“Weeks?” Amira rose with an exasperated huff and began pacing around the narrow confines of the room. She rubbed her fingers against the scars on her palms, old whip marks from her time on the compound. That was too long. Rozene needed her nearby to monitor her connection with Nova, to understand what Barlow had done to her. Her own friends, the children on the ship – all were in danger from Andrew Reznik and the Trinity Compound. And the Cosmics, under Lucia Morgan, couldn’t be trusted either. Her enemies would not sit with crossed arms while they played emotional tag with a troubled, haunted scientist. Thirty days, Reznik had threatened on his live broadcast. What game was Barlow playing? Why did they need Eleanor Morgan so badly?
From the fury etched on Hadrian’s face, Amira wasn’t alone in her thoughts.
“Everything in its right time,” Barlow said in his most calm, measured tone. The side of his mouth curled in a subtle smile. “Believe me, if I felt there was a safer and better place to be right now, I would leave this minute. But nothing else matters if we don’t make headway with Eleanor Morgan. If we don’t get through to her, the Trinity will, and they won’t be as patient as me.”
* * *
While Barlow and Hadrian lounged under the shade of nearby trees, Amira explored the area around the house. Beyond the outhouse, another structure lay at the base of the hill. She slid down the dusty, gravelly path to explore. Also constructed from corrugated metal, it was wider than the house but assembled with less care. A place meant to shield its contents from the sun and rain, but not a habitable space otherwise. She leaned down to pass a low, slanted door into the structure.
Amira shrieked at the sudden, clinging sensation on her arm. She swatted at the invisible attacker, the shafts of sunlight catching the furry outlines of a large spider. It scuttled into a dark corner. Panting, she scratched absently at her arms for a moment before collecting herself. The shed was lined with spider webs, but also shelves of familiar equipment. Digital coursebooks, space conditioning suits, tools for basic engineering projects.
And in the center of a room, a heavy canvas cloth covered a large, vertical object. Though her deepest senses told her what it concealed, she raised her hand carefully, fingers closing around the thick cloth. With a steady exhale, she pulled the canvas back.
A holomentic reader. It bore the familiar discs, designed to rotate over a box-like body, and an adjacent monitor for reading results. Only, some differences. No holomentic platform. A simple navigation panel for moving the sensor between different levels of sleeping and waking conscious states. No—
“It’s an oldie.”
Amira spun around. Eleanor stood at the door, her white hair framed by the fierce sunlight. The older woman’s lip tightened in a faint smirk, satisfied by Amira’s shock, and she walked into the room.
“This is an earlier edition,” Eleanor elaborated, running an affectionate hand over its dust-coated surface. “One designed before you were born, most likely. You don’t look older than thirty. I had to learn holomentic reading in its infancy. This one doesn’t have all the fancy, slick features you see in the modern models. No holographic displays, just a simple 2D image on a screen. But don’t be deceived. This is a tough little machine that does all of the essentials, along with a few attempted… configurations on my part.”
“Configurations?” Amira joined her in front of the reader, sliding her own fingers across the dials. In this strange place with this strange woman, it felt familiar. A piece of home, tugging at her chest.
“Attempts to read things that a holomentic reader isn’t designed to read,” Eleanor said. “There was a lot of experimentation back in the day about psychotropic drugs like DMT. People believed that the hallucinatory experiences may have been the conscious mind viewing parallel worlds. I designed this in an attempt to capture the visual of a parallel world.”
“Did you?” Amira asked, fascinated.
Eleanor’s mouth tightened into a scowl.
“No,” she said. “Although Aldwych confirmed the reality of multiverses in other ways. Math and experiments with antimatter. But we did learn useful things about near-death experiences, the other popular area of study at the time.” A shadow passed across her face for a moment, accompanied by a violent shudder across her body. “We achieved confirmation of what people have said about end-of-life experiences for centuries. The sight of a tunnel leading to a light, loved ones beckoning them forward – or away. People on operating tables, clinically braindead, hovering over their own bodies and seeing things they shouldn’t be able to see, hearing conversations between doctors in a neighboring room. That out of body sensation.”
“Disassociation,” Amira said. She knew it well, and not just from the Academy courses and textbooks that covered exactly what Eleanor described, a known but unexplained phenomenon of the mind. She had endured her own share of disassociations throughout her life. First, at the Gathering, when she and a young Andrew Reznik fled the chaos of the federal raid. And then, at the Carthage station when placed under extreme stress. And a similar incident at Victor Zhang’s house, again with Andrew Reznik nearby, hovering in the same out of body state as she was. When she hovered over the scene on Hadrian’s ship only days ago, it no longer startled her. It became as natural as eating, for her mind and body to break their natural tethers.
But such experiences were not meant to be picked up by a holomentic reader. Her own Academy exam proved as much. When she disconnected from her body in the desert, the holomentic reader poring over her mind went dark, until she returned to her body again.
Amira touched the device again with renewed interest. Could this holomentic reader capture true dissociative experiences? Moments where, as she was beginning to believe, the human mind could graze the edges of the Conscious Plane, the collective consciousness that both the compounds and the Cosmics believed in?
She tore herself away from the machine to find Eleanor staring at her. The old woman’s face was both shrewd and curious, closed and open. Not unlike Amira, who spent most of her post-compound life convincing others that she could be trusted, only revealing the parts of herself that others found comfortable. Should she confide in this pioneering Cosmic, this queen in exile? She had no reason to trust Eleanor, but she also had no reason to trust Barlow, yet found herself dependent on his protection. Perhaps she should cast a wider net.
On the way back up the hill, she told Eleanor about her own dissociative experiences, starting with the Gathering. About the strange connection with Reznik. How no holomentic reader could see into her mind that she knew of – until now.
Eleanor listened in silence but when Amira finished, she stopped in her tracks. She grabbed Amira’s arm, spinning her around until the two women stood face to face.
“You and this man were both at the Gathering together?” she asked, urgently.
“Yes,” Amira said. A sour taste crept up her throat. “Well, no. I was in the audience of worshippers. He was on the podium, behind the Elders. But when the Feds – the North American Alliance forces – raided, we ran in the same direction. Then it happened.”
Eleanor spat on the ground.
“It’s still about fifty-fifty whether I’ll shoot Tony Barlow in his sleep,” Eleanor said. “But he’s no fool. This is a puzzle I can’t resist, for reasons beyond my intellectual curiosity. Amira, I promise you that whatever else transpires, I will help you understand what is happening to you and why. I owe you as much.”
“Why do you owe me?” Amira asked, confusion knotting her forehead, but Eleanor Morgan had already begun trudging through the wet soil back to the main cottage.
“All right, Barlow, you crafty snake,” she barked. “I assume you brought tools and toys. Get my holomentic reader working again and I’ll get started on M. Valdez’s brain.”