Chapter 59

Time: Unknown, parked in a field of corn...

We all woke up about the same time in the cockpit. Hoshi looked totally confused and surprised that we were still in one piece. The view outside was that of a setting sun. The plane was surrounded by a vast expanse of corn...

I probed with my mind and sensed the 400-foot sound barriers in all directions, about 23 kilometers away. I probed a little more closely. I think my seat in the cockpit was directly opposite the center of Antelope Freeway. I noticed A'moth looking at me. "Uh, sorry about that," I mumbled.

A'moth nodded thoughtfully. "Oh, don't apologize. I think I know what happened. Just imagine if you hadn't managed to take the plane with you. We would have been left above the flood with a few minutes of fuel..."

I nodded and gulped. "You would have had no way to save the children..."

Hoshi looked at us bewildered, yawned and said, "What are you talking about? Where are we?"

Isabelle remembered first. "Welcome to Antelope Freeway. Hoshi, you're going to feel very sleepy in just a moment. All the girls will too. Don't try to fight it. It's a mental adjustment as your subconscious learns to deal with the new power available to it. There's nothing to fear. We'll watch over you."

Hoshi shrugged and nodded, looking at the peaceful scene outside the window. Within a few minutes she and the six girls in the main cabin entered an uneasy dreamlike sleep.

Jim and I felt uncomfortable about witnessing the process we knew was coming, especially with the young girls. So we had a short discussion with A'moth and Isabelle. They would stay with Antelope Freeway's newest arrivals, and Jim and I would go find Cindy. Before we left, A'moth noted happily that the Freeway hadn't lost its touch. The jet's batteries were magically charging on their own. Running the ventilation and the lights would be no problem.

I thought finding Cindy would be a snap. I jumped Jim and myself directly from the cockpit to the top of one of the temporal walls, and then down to the patio area. Within the walls, Jim dreamed us back to the arctic. We were there seconds after we left the jet, and we started searching the floors looking for Cindy.

And she wasn't there. Jim and I were dumbfounded. We finally went up to the arctic surface. I was half expecting the island to be under 200 meters of water, but it appeared the same as when we had left it. The sun was also about 24-degrees above the horizon, right at the summer solstice position. We had moved at least half a year into the future... Or the past... With the water level the same as before, had we moved into the past? That was a scary thought... Could be meet ourselves if we did? And where the hell was Cindy?

We started checking out the terrain on the arctic island. Jim was jumping us to the Freeway and then back again to the island in various spots. For about an hour we found nothing, and then at one location near the center of the island, I noticed something and pointed it out to Jim. There was a rabbit about ten meters away from us, looking absolutely shocked by our presence. Jim and the rabbit locked eyes. "Cindy?" Jim whispered.

The rabbit nodded once and then disappeared. A moment later Cindy in human form appeared and she ran to Jim sobbing and hurled herself into his arms. After a minute of fierce hugging and gasping, she finally calmed down enough to speak. "Jim! The year! It's 207145, June 21'st of 207145. It's the year of Earth-loop reset!"

Future Interlude XII: The Solar Tower

Aina time: 11:58 AM day 198 of 1474 H.E.

Ekela wandered around the second floor area, being very careful not to touch anything. He drifted back to where Mayoni and Kalea were working with the slip controls. The speed in which the twin sisters chatted and experimented with the controls astonished him. They had already activated a date and time display on one of the strange looking monitors, in English no less! The rest of the displays looked like gibberish to Ekela, but he heard Mayoni and Kalea referring to the graphics as raw X-tree symbolics...

"Look at this," Mayoni whispered to her sister.

"What?!" Kalea's eyes went back and forth from the monitors to the controls. "Those look like resonance pump controls for a reality interface!"

"Yes, I know."

"But what's it doing here? We're not inside a slip bubble!"

"You sure?"

" Ah! " sang Kalea happily, and she started activating additional controls on her own.

Ekela stared at the sisters. They seemed so happy in their explorations, almost cheerful. He shook his head in wonder and then stared at the day's date and time. Mayoni and Kalea were acting as if they were back at their Spirit House quantum labs. They both seemed so relaxed! For Ekela, the place gave him the creeps...

Time: 11:16 PM June 21, 207145 Nebraska reference time

The five of us were together at last. I jumped Jim and Cindy back to the jet. A'moth and Isabelle had Hoshi and the girls all lying stretched out on the comfortable chairs in the main cabin. We would occasionally hear a soft gasp or sigh as they struggled with their ids. It was two hours after sunset, and if our own experience was a guide, Hoshi and the girls had another two hours to go...

The five of us had a conference in the small cockpit...

"You're sure Cindy, about the date?" Isabelle asked. Cindy just stared at her in return.

"Jim," asked A'moth. "How much time do we have left?"

Jim shrugged. "It could happen at any time. Havika's writings from the previous loop mention that Hiapo and Kalea got the reset date from decrypting X-tree code from the solar tower. He mentioned the Earth year of 207145, but he never mentioned the date. So... I guess anytime. We have a 50% chance that we have at least three months. Let's be optimistic and assume we have that much..."

"So what do we do?" I asked. I looked at Jim first, then Isabelle.

Isabelle finally answered. "We never came up with a plan that made any sense. We'll just have to use our imaginations and hope... that we come up with something..." Isabelle noticed Cindy was looking kind of shell shocked. She went over and held her in a hug.

Cindy started to weep. "You have no idea, what it was like. Almost five hundred years of loneliness! I almost went insane..." She gasped, "I thought of suicide... walking south from the island out of the slip bubble... either drowning or freezing to death... And then... I started to hang out with the rabbits! I learned how to dream myself into a rabbit. They became my friends, my family..."

Jim came over and sat down by her other side. "Husband," she whispered softly, and she reached up and stroked his cheek. They started holding each other. After a while Cindy sighed deeply.

"Cindy," I asked, "Is the WFM still around?"

She shook her head. "No. They're all gone. I'll tell you the story..." She needed a moment to compose herself. We all waited patiently.

"Ulsan got eighteen satellites up in orbit before it was destroyed. They built well! Seven of them are still functional now, at least to some degree. I have visual recordings of what the first days of the wave were like, from all over the world. About 87% of the land area of the world was directly submerged by the global wave, almost all of what escaped was in the northern hemisphere. The sloshing went on for weeks. It destroyed both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. When the waves finally subsided, water levels worldwide were up 200 meters."