Zoey knew she was in a hospital room even before she opened her eyes. She automatically shut out the electronic periphery, trying to maintain the silence in her mind. Far off, she could feel something stabbing at her mind. It was the same dull pain that had caused her to collapse in the first place.
She opened her eyes to find that she wasn’t wrong in her assumption. Her parents were sitting in chairs by her bed, worried looks on their faces.
“Hey, pum’kin,” said her father.
“I’m sorry,” was all Zoey could think to say.
“It’s okay,” said her mother. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” replied Zoey, though her head still ached. “I don’t know what came over me. Some kind of bug.”
“The doctor examined you and couldn’t find anything wrong with you. They could do more tests if you wanted,” said Alice. “These things happen sometimes with interplanetary travel.”
“No, no tests,” snapped Zoey as fear crept into her voice, a fear of what they would find if they looked closely enough. “I said I was fine. Please, I just want to go home.”
“We just wanted to make you okay. You collapsed right in front of everyone,” said Alice. “And you were vomiting.”
Harold took Alice’s hand. “Honey, let’s just give her a moment to reorient herself.” After her parents left, Zoey covered her face in frustration. She hadn’t meant to snap at them, and they had no idea what was happening to her. In fact, she didn’t know what was happening to her.
The pain in her forehead was returning, but it wasn’t coming from within. Again, there was that sense of something in the distance, piercing her mind. She screwed her eyes shut, hoping it would go away.
It didn’t.
Zoey saw some clean clothes and her small mp3 player on a chair near her. Her mother must have thought Zoey would be in the hospital longer than a day.
She started to reach for the player. She paused, then simply turned on the player, and then left it on the chair. She lay back in the uncomfortable bed and closed her eyes. Going through a couple of breathing exercises, she calmed her mind and emptied it of irrelevant matters. Slowly, she started letting in the data surrounding her.
Her focus was on her mp3 player. Its small CPU was devoted to playing the mp3 files saved in its memory. Set at random, the song Zoey heard in her mind was an up-tempo song with a soft female voice and a heavy techno influence.
While letting the music continue, her mind searched throughout the hospital’s internal mainframe until she came across their phone lines. The term “phone lines” was, of course, archaic, since all of the hospital’s calls were handled by wireless networks. She found a way to dial out and searched out the connection to the police station. In the corner of her mind, the techno song was still playing; its singer crooning on about love and dancing.
Suddenly, there was a voice. “Jacksonville Police Station.”
“Can I speak to Detective Fairborn?” asked Zoey by transmitting her thoughts through the phone connection.
“One moment.” Zoey toned out the police’s on-hold musak in preference to the song playing on her mp3 player.
“This is Fairborn,” came a crisp voice.
“This is Zoey Walker, Detective.”
“Yes?” came the impatient reply.
“I was wondering if you made any progress on this missing persons case? The one that killed my friend?”
“As you well know, Ms Walker, I am unable to discuss current investigations with the public, especially one who is potentially a suspect.”
Zoey realized that without Sara and her credentials she couldn’t blame Fairborn’s reluctance to divulge information. “I know, it’s just…”
“I also don’t tolerate amateur detectives. If you get in my way, I will arrest you.”
“Thanks,” Zoey thought back and disconnected the line. The techno song was over by now. The silence was soon replaced by the slow stirring of an orchestra. Zoey extracted herself from the hospital’s phone system and again felt something piercing her mind.
In her mind’s eye, she saw, far away, a burning light not unlike an eye. Its gaze drilled into her mind, causing her unbearable headaches. She reached out to it and felt herself stretching out, for untold miles, away from the comfort of her body. The orchestra in the back of her head erupted with string ostinatos and brass flares as she took off across the digital map in her mind.
There, at her destination, she discovered the “evil eye” was nothing more than a simple transmitter on top of the tall building. The “image” of the building in her mind was created from a choppy montage of images taken from satellites and stored in numerous Internet-based map sites. The music had quieted, except for the rising tension of the ominous string section.
Why was the transmission hurting her? Was she receiving some sort of feedback from it? She tried to access the building’s system, but she found nothing within. Either the building was a derelict with no electricity, or it was using a closed system that was heavily encrypted.
Going from the antenna to its source, Zoey followed the trail down below the building, but her mind could not penetrate whatever was underneath it. She then listened to the transmission itself, but could not decipher its code. Instead, she blocked it from her mind, so that it would not harm her again. Slowly, her mind’s pain seemed to fade, but Zoey was not done.
Reaching high into “the sky”, she felt herself lift again. Distantly, the orchestra was reaching a crescendo as she saw the Earth through the eyes of a satellite. Using the satellite, she focused on the building she was just examining. She took the coordinates that the satellite gave her and burned them into her memory.
She was already starting to feel disoriented, being so far from her body for too long a time. She plunged “downwards” retracing her steps. The orchestra was becoming quiet again as she felt the familiar presence of the hospital she had just left. She was soon reunited with her body and the darkness within her mind. She struggled upwards towards “the surface” until her eyes opened.
There was a stillness in her room, and her parents had not come back yet. Zoey wasn’t sure how long she had been under and absently reached for the mp3 player.
It was still playing, but instead of displaying the name of the song, it listed a series of numbers. Numbers that Zoey recognized instantly as coordinates.
Click here to read Chapter 6
Written by J M Emmons. The story and all characters are copyrighted by J M Emmons.
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