Micro-fiction 088 – Quantum Police (Echoes series)

Can Aadya, mother of the long-abandoned Cyrus outwit the Quantum Police and find her son? Only time will tell…

Aadya had lost count of the number of time jumps, she’d taken to be here. The exhaustion showed in her narrowed eyes, now lost of their youthful vitality in her long search for her son.  She knew the Quantum Police, the Quants, would be close behind, keeping track of her time signature, following her through before she could erase her trail, so she must check co-ordinates and move on. On her belt she gripped the tiny sphere that propelled her through time, harvesting just enough energy from the air around her to move to her next location, this time much closer to where she needed to be. 

Her left hand twisted the sphere, pulled the energy in, shut it off then she spun her hand back, opening a slit of light in the air before her, and she slithered through, looked at the dark shadows around, found a metal staircase and ran up and stared back down. She had just enough time to cast another time jump a few feet beyond the one she’d run away from, and as she watched three Quants dived out of the fading time flare and chased through the decoy she had placed.

She sighed. She had bought herself some respite and slid to the metal floor at the top of the staircase, and caught sight of her reflection in the dull metal. Her afro was still tied back, her long boney features still betrayed the defiance of her years of searching. She leaned back and knocked her head on the metal wall, the sound resounding around what she now realised to be a huge, disused warehouse. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and she saw the vast, looming shapes of machines, long idle in the age of quantum intelligence and the restrictions on energy. She allowed herself to remember the last conversations with her partner Bree, and their son.

“Go, now, while you have the chance.” Bree had shouted at her, pushing her out of the dome.

“I can’t leave you! I can’t leave Cyrus.”

“You must, otherwise we’ll all die, and what’s the point of that?”

“You go then.”

“I can’t. You know that!” Bree shouted back, gesturing at her injured metal leg. “I can’t time jump, the metal would blow the magnetic field.”

“I know, I know!” I remember screaming at her, tears flooding down our cheeks, pushing and holding each other. She pressed a tiny sphere into my chest.

“Look it’s here, you must go.” The last remaining flight out of the planet hovered just below our dome, the countdown visible on its turtle-shaped hull. I submitted to Bree’s final shove and fell towards the open cabin below.

“Tell Cyrus I’ll do everything I can to return for him.” I shouted up.

“And me?” Bree looked dismayed

“Yes, yes and you!” I cried, and laughed and cried again as the craft lifted up carrying the last rescuable citizens from the planet through the crumbling organic skyfields, the shattered defence shields floating hopelessly around us.

I remember picking myself from the floor of the cabin, crawling to the last Cryo-unit and holding the sphere to my chest as I plunged into a nightmare sleep of a hundred years.

When I woke, everything was sore, especially my chest, and I found someone learning in to me, wrenching at my torso.

“What are you––?” It was the sphere, that’s what they wanted. 

“You don’t even know what it is?” The man whose blurring shape loomed over me hit his head and staggered back.

“How do you know?” I understand exactly what the sphere could do and damned myself for not hiding it while I slept.

“A quantum harvester!” The man hissed at me. He seemed to be the only other one awake. All the other cryo-units in the room were –– I remember the chill in my stomach, still trying to recover from the hundred year sleep, and the sight of the burned and broken other units. “Did you do that?”

“No!” He stepped back. “The Quants.”

“The what?” 

“The Quantum Police! Didn’t they have them where you were from?”

“No, but if they were after this I can imagine what they want.”

“Yes,” the man was still agitated, “to stop it happening again.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was that technology that destroyed out world, our entire star system.”

“You mean the planetary Quantum harvesters? They were shut down, both of them.”

“Yes, but not till they accelerated the energy loss in our sector, five stars, all dwarfed, husks without energy. Then the planets.”

“So why were the Quants here?”

“They could detect your device.” The man still watching her closely, was calmer now.

“Well why didn’t they take it?”

“They just knew it was was on the ship. The cold of the cryo-units masks the time signature. But they were called away.”

“And they burst open the Cryos just to find this?” She held the tiny sphere between them.

“They said their job was to obliterate any form of that technology.”

“So why didn’t they get to my pod?”

“A different Quad team found one in another dormitory. They rushed down there.”

“So, dumb luck then.”

“Yes. The whole deck was destroyed, but the Quants, they’re still here.”

“Why are you so interested?”

“If they find another one, they’ll destroy this whole deck too.”

“Ah.” Aadya shook her head, and clearing the fogginess from her brain, she clipped the sphere to her belt, twisted it one way, then the next, she nodded at her would-be attacker, “I’d better be off then.” 

A small slit appeared in front of her, and she jumped through.

She knew the sphere did not store much energy, so the jumps could only be small. It took several goes to move around the ship, then, over time, from one star freighter to another as she gathered intelligence about how to reach her abandoned partner and son, to bring them too out of the destroyed sector. The problem was the amount of energy required to do it, the size of which would attract every Quant in the universe.

Aadya looked down from the metal platform, a gantry she now realised, and regarded the huge machine shapes. 

“Starship engines. Quantum drives.” She muttered. She had read enough, jumped enough, heard enough from secret meetings and covert operations that what she needed was a huge source of energy to propel her from her current location, ten light years from her former planet, and reach Bree and Cyrus. Finally she had managed to jump into the location of the last generation of Quantum drives, long decommissioned in favour of safer forms of interstellar travel, but Aadya’s best hope. 

She swung herself down the staircase and strode to the engines, which reached up to the ceiling of the warehouse, twenty stories higher, judging by number of galleries that marked the dark walls. She had learned that the energy could be parsed into small packets and fed into the Quantum sphere on her belt, as long as the engine source remained on. Assuming that it could be started in the first place.

Just as she began to check for the fusion controllers that would operate the engine she heard a footstep.

“Stop.” It was a quiet voice.

She did not reply. She realised she was in an open space, far enough away from anyone, enough time to jump away without difficulty.

“Please.” The words were delivered by a figure walking slowly towards her. Even in the shadows of the warehouse she could detect the familiar, simple uniform of the Quants. 

“Don’t do this.” The man held up his hands. Aadya could see others moving behind him.

“I’ll do anything to rescue my son.” As she flickered her hand across the sphere on her belt it occurred to her this was the first time she’d heard any of the Quants say a word. She shrugged, she knew they’d follow her, but she’d keep once step ahead as always.

The Quantum Police watched the air shimmer, as the energy was extracted from the wave-forms within, then a single flare of white light reared mid-air. The woman they had followed for years stepped in, turning her head slightly and disappeared. 

The Quant who had approached her carefully a few moments before and spoken so quietly shook his head. As he and his companions raced towards the disappearing strip of light he muttered, “Just stop running mother, you really don’t need to rescue me.”

[End]