1165. Pantadôra, 8
(Armylè)
Elsewhere meanwhile, Cheryl was returning to a more peaceful life.
Her father Xian was also enjoying the leisure time. Good luck to the next lead researcher meant to replace him.
They lied on the beach, tanning.
Some people saw Cheryl and her bob head and long bangs hiding her eyes, and a doubt whether she was the Cheryl Rough. The haircut and look were similar. But she could not sing.
She still had a computer on her lap. She was typing something.
Her father was reading a book.
Time had stopped seemingly now for them, but in a regenerating way.
X - How do you feel?
C - Better. I really needed a break... And you too. Why did you spend so much time in the laboratory these last years?
Cheryl’s tone was teasing. Xian smiled, proud of his daughter he could never deny.
She knew everything. He knew that she knew everything. So they could play being elusive.
X - You know, so long one is not actually working in a field, we think everything is easy, everything has already been done and invented. Easy work everyone else has... Research is my passion, and it’s endless. When we really dive deep into something, there’s nothing better but that feeling of endless knowledge to reach around... However we lose perspective of time and children growing.
C - You’re right. We can’t see what’s below our nose anymore in time...
She still had a nose, but that was her way to make a pun out of it.
And she was openly and with apparent impunity betraying the city. Cheryl was typing a message meant for people outside.
X - What are you writing your friends in this game?
C - Just what we sometimes need. To... find back some perspectives. You know how much I love researching things to.
X - Just don’t lose yourself too far in this world like I have okay?
C - I’ll be careful.
He knew she was researching illegal data about the city and our history. He was not a stranger to everything she was doing. He had employed her, and shared about everything he had access to. He had opened the doors she was using.
Xian had created her, but he did not control her anymore.
So he sighed with a smile. He trusted her.
Xian stood up and went to walk a little alongside the water. The landscape was pretty. The sky was clear. An endless stream of microscopic technologies was fine-tuning everything in the city. He had been conscientious rebuilding their understanding for as long as he could.
He had spent his youth looking for information where it still was, and beyond the walls holding them where it was not. For his research, long before the incident destroying his daughter’s face, he had been the traitor.
They had made her something subtly different, and she had been able to pick up everything dodgy he had been doing before.
Now she still reached out through the network of Rise for knowledge and possible people, outside our walls, as he had done in the past.
A long time ago Xian himself had shared openly documents about his work or the city.
It spread through the networks outside the city.
He had reached out to anyone in the dark, and found out lights still blinking. He had received answers now and then. Xian had exchanged words with survivors of the white day outside. They had exchanged documents indirectly.
And more importantly for us and history, trying to understand the world from either side, he had shared Morhens’s thesis about T.I. as soon as he realised it could mean something for the people outside.
It reached Mushio and young Myersa eventually, more than twenty years ago.
A beacon of light shared by our city unknowingly, shedding the darkness of magical superstition for a changed world.
Geder Morhens’s theory of Terra Incognita.
A new god’s particle that changed the world, more noticeably in QCD.
Little did we know how far it had spread.
Now it was Cheryl travelling virtually through the fewer ruins that were left. Xian had moved on in responsibilities and lost the chances to continue doing things so dangerous as a citizen of our city. As a lead technologist on our historical technologies, he was very likely under much stronger scrutiny, permanently.
He had never been foolish.
But hidden behind the mask of her missing face, Cheryl had gain and kept hidden some possibilities. Her powers born from hybrid biotechnologies had given her the powers her father had given up around the time she was born.
She was still venturing in places she shouldn’t have, now for the both of them.
So he stood feet in the water, wondering.
He had made no mistakes.
He trusted his daughter wouldn’t either.
Cheryl was playing with dangerous figurative fires. Opening doors with consequences lurking.
She sent more messages under different names to her friends, to Néphéline, to Elyne, to me, to the city hall and to the health ministry. She also threw more bottles into the sea of information outside the city, even then...
She played the itchy revolutionary.
Cheryl shut her computer and tidied up into a bag.
She stood up and slowly walked toward the sound of the sea.
She had thrown her lines and hooks to move things in the way she wanted to see.
Someday Solaris would become an open city.
~
