Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“In a few minutes.”

Adrienne turned back to work on the room, which had been emptied and its soundproofing tripled in the last forty-eight hours. Flora had made it clear to Peter that the scientist doing this favor for the Group would be hers permanently in order to keep a lock on the Group’s “proprietary information.” Peter had leaped at the chance to offload his least-favorite associate. On the plus side, Adrienne was a profoundly gifted physicist and tech. She had installed eight black panels in the room: two large ones fixed on floor-to-ceiling columns and six smaller but still sizable panels on rotary devices by the walls. A viper’s nest of wires led outside the room to the Group’s private generator and to a control box that looked like the kit of a DJ. On the platform fixed to the floor sat the last stone Mikel Jasso, one of the Group’s field agents, had brought back from the Southern Ocean. Flora had privately dubbed it “the Serpent” because there had been no trouble at all in her garden of relics and finds until this one showed up. Since its arrival there had been a succession of ruptured, melted deep freezers and her researcher Arni Haugan had been found dead on the lab floor, his gray matter liquefied and pouring from his ears. This experiment had to work or Flora would have to seriously consider throwing the artifact back in the ocean. Success here would be preferable.

“Ready for nothing,” Adrienne grumped. She handed Flora headphones with an embedded communication device and placed a set on her own head.

“How audible is this going to be if the soundproofing fails?” Flora asked. “I do not want to be aggravating my neighbors.”

“Nobody’s going to hear it,” Adrienne snorted. “Including us, unless you have canine ancestry.”

Before Flora could respond to the dig, Adrienne flicked a switch and said, “But ultrasound decibels can do damage too.”

Flora most certainly felt the sudden hum of electricity. But far more importantly, the Serpent stone jumped four feet in the air and hung there, at the exact midpoint between the floor and ceiling panels. Flora laughed out loud. To date, the heaviest object to be acoustically suspended was a metal screw. Now they had lifted something magnitudes larger.

Adrienne was not indulging in a celebration. The stone was bobbling wildly and she was quickly but lightly turning knobs, nudging the side panels into different angles. The stone stabilized for a moment, then two—then suddenly flipped upside down, and Flora gasped. Its crescent carvings were now facing the ceiling, the object quivering.

“Huh?” said Adrienne.

“You weren’t expecting that?” Flora said over the hum.

“A stone shouldn’t suddenly become bottom-heavy, like a water balloon.”

“Magnetism?” Flora suggested.

Adrienne glanced at readings on a laptop, shook her head. She bent over her console, turning a knob with a feather touch Flora would have thought impossible from her lumpen personality. In the center of the room the stone returned to its previous equilibrium.

Adrienne stood still, watching intently.

“So…?” Flora asked, pondering.

“That should have been impossible,” Adrienne replied. “I knew there would be minor fluctuations, but in order for an object to flip like that, the sound wave on one side would have had to overpower the other, which would have destabilized the levitation. The stone would have dropped to the floor.” Adrienne peeled her eyes from the major milestone she had just achieved, which no one would ever hear about, and looked at her new employer. “What the hell is this thing, Dr. Davies?”

“A very ancient relic with properties we do not understand,” Flora said. “Yet.”

“You already told me that,” Adrienne said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Flora’s implacable expression caused Adrienne to snort in frustration and turn away. As she did, her eyes shifted to the door, beyond which sat the destroyed freezers. She looked back at her new boss.

“Flora, did it try—to get out ?” Adrienne asked.

“Not exactly,” Flora replied. “Lord, don’t go imparting intelligence to it. It’s just a mass of nickel and iron.”

“And uranium is just silvery white metal,” Adrienne said. “This thing has all the hallmarks of being very, very dangerous.”

Flora glanced at the levitated stone. “Not anymore.”

Adrienne turned a little scarlet. “Christ, you could have told me. What did it do?”

“Hopefully, nothing it will do again,” Flora replied. “In fact, now that you’ve tamed it, why don’t we see what it hasn’t been telling us .”

Andreas Campbell pulled his mail cart west on Ninth Street. He stopped outside the Augustine Apartments and switched off the audiobook on his iPhone. Elizabeth Bennet was just telling Mr. Darcy he was the last man she’d ever marry. Leaning over his cart to retrieve the building’s bundle of mail, Andreas suddenly doubled over with pain. The stabbing in his gut was so sharp, he had to transfer his full weight to the cart, and the pain kept coming. He felt a spike of blinding, searing heat rocket to his head, as if his body temperature had just soared to triple digits—which it had.

Looking down the street, he saw people near Sixth Avenue and called weakly, trying to get their attention. He waved helplessly at the lobby beyond the glass doors of the Augustine. The doorman was chatting with a maintenance man, not looking at the street, and the security camera was pointed in the opposite direction. Andreas fumbled for his phone in his pocket.

As the next assault of pain lunged through his kidneys, he fell to his knees, clasping his stomach and then screaming at his own touch. His midsection felt like it was exploding outward in every direction. He vomited on the sidewalk, trying to scream through his convulsing throat. Then the heat came again and he screamed so hard that blood vessels burst in his eyes.

The doorman finally caught the strange and desperate image through the sliding glass doors and he and the maintenance man ran down the steps to help. There they found the mail carrier lying on the sidewalk, blood pooling around his body, vomit sprayed around his head.

“Call 911,” the doorman yelled, loud enough to attract attention from passersby on Sixth Avenue. He knelt next to the man, hands hovering over him, not knowing what to do as Andreas continued to claw at the pavement, his voice losing force.

A crowd began to gather, gawking and gossiping about the nice man who had worked in the neighborhood for years as they captured the tragedy on their cell phones. In the background the maintenance man attempted to describe the scene in broken English while pleading for an ambulance. Finally they heard a siren in the distance, coming nearer.

“Hold on,” they told Andreas. “Hold on!”

Flora Davies was heading from the basement up to her office when her phone chimed with an alert. A week before, when rats had inexplicably stampeded from Washington Square Park to the basement entrance of the mansion, she had set a dozen tracking systems to alert her if anything unusual happened nearby. These were a confluence of social media platforms that fed her data based on keywords and GPS locales. An algorithm used by the NYPD starred potentially disruptive events. There had been surprisingly few alerts: a couple of muggings, a police takedown of a sword-swinging nut on Bleecker Street, and tiresome celebrity sightings. Now there was a stream of tweets with photos and exclamation points.

“Probably a rock star,” she muttered irritably. Then she noticed the sprawl of a body, and the blood. It was in front of the nearby Augustine. She moved rapidly through the tweets and, yes, someone had snapped the carrier’s ID and posted his name. She knew him, she thought, though she could barely recognize his face.