Chapter Fifty-Four

March 20, 110

The blow against the water had awakened him.

The young boy had felt how water had entered his lungs and was several meters below the surface due to the violence of the impact. But he had awakened nonetheless.

He felt cold and wanted air. He could see that the water had a certain reddish hue. It was blood coming out of his nose and blending with the water. Struggling, he took a few swims and felt himself getting closer to the surface. Yet he still could not see the sunlight.

Instead it was a raging storm in the grey sky.

The boy was in despair and finally poked his head above the water, like a dead man coming back to life, tearing through the veil of his shroud.

He fought and struggled against the current, and spat as he felt some of the blood enter his mouth and leave a metallic taste. No matter how absurd it all seemed to him. Somehow, he was drowning.

The water surrounded him on all sides, and the current seemed to drag him furiously. He struggled, feeling the coldness drill into his limbs, and his clothes felt heavy. Swim, he would have to swim. But did he even know how to swim?

How had he gotten there in the first place? Had he fallen out of a boat?

The adrenaline of the situation made him think of nothing but survival, still a part of him was terrified. Who was he? What was he doing there? Why couldn't he remember anything?

From the sky, clogged with gray clouds, thick raindrops were falling, as if the sky itself was also trying to drown him, along with a choking wind that made the raindrops lash him in the face. He thought he saw flashes in the sky. Lightning? Where was the thunder? No, more like where was the sound?

He heard in a strange way, as if he had something plugging his ears and could feel a buzzing sound.

Fighting against the current, he tried to keep his head afloat, and saw the nearest shore. It was not far away. A hundred meters? Maybe less, maybe more? But he had to try. With numb limbs, he tried to give a few strokes and realized he could swim. He had muscle memory of it, though he couldn't remember how he had gotten there. One stroke, two, three... seven. Slowly, the coast seemed to be growing before his eyes. Through the rain he could see houses near the shore and docks. It must be in the vicinity of a port, but that must surely be a river or lake because it was fresh water.

He was going to make it. It couldn't be far away.

Suddenly his hopes were swept away, when he saw a small wave come over him and carry him back underwater, submerging him a couple of meters again.

Again he struggled and looked to the surface, it was not far, just a couple of meters and he could breathe again. But the current was fighting to pull him under but, to where this time? The boy stuck his head above the water and, suddenly, his field of vision saw how something dark sticking out of the water was approaching him, growing at an alarming speed.

No. It wasn't that.

It was him, being pulled at full speed against it.

The boy hit his head against a big stone and everything went black.

***

March 20. Tuesday. 5:35PM. 110 S.A.

Valais, Noville. Lake Lemac. Switzerland

"Come here! Help me!"

The shout of a middle-aged man, calling to others around him, caused everyone to rush to the small dock.

The man who had just shouted entered the water, which covered him up to his chest, and swam the several meters that separated him from the boy.

It was a miracle he had seen him.

He and his family were spending a few days of rest nearby and had decided to go fishing that day. Although they hadn't gotten anything, it had been a fun few hours. They had arrived after noon when the sun was shining but, as the hours went by, some clouds had appeared.

In spite of those clouds, nothing foreshadowed the storm that in a matter of minutes descended on the region. A strong wind was blowing and the rain made it impossible to see the shore on the opposite side of the lake. All those who were in the vicinity had to suddenly load up their belongings and leave the place.

It was the same for the man. He had already loaded the folding chairs and the automatic rail rods into the vehicle, when he looked out into the lake and thought he saw something strange. At first he thought it might be some kind of big bird struggling in the water, but soon he realized that what he had taken for wings were arms and soon he saw a head struggling for air. Was it a child? Or at least it appeared to be a youngster. Could it be some kind of fey too?

He focused his eyes and made his way to the dock and, before jumping into the water, he shouted to the few people who were still around.

The waters of the lake had become somewhat violent from the fury of the sudden storm and the man watched as a wave pushed the boy onto a nearby rock some distance from the dock. He thought for a moment that he would cling to the rock, but soon saw him lost.

Who could be crazy enough to try to swim in that storm? Although it could well be that he had been caught unawares. If so, where was the family? No boats could be seen nearby so he could not have fallen from any boat.

Within seconds the man had swum to the boy and was now holding him in his arms as he swam back to the dock. Another man had jumped in and helped carry him.

The boy had hit his head, from which a trickle of blood was flowing. He was also bleeding from his nose. Between the two of them they lifted him onto the dock and tried to get him to wake up, but he was unconscious.

In the man's vehicle, his wife had gotten out when she saw him run onto the dock. She was concerned when she saw him enter the water as he had not even told her why he had rushed in that direction.

"Mom, what's wrong?" asked a child, about five years old, in the back seat.

"Stay here, honey. I'll be right back."

The woman, covering herself from the rain with her hands, approached the group that had gathered around her husband and the child just pulled from the waters.

"What happened?"

"I don't know," her husband replied. "I just saw him drowning."

"Is he all right?"

"Yes, he just lost consciousness from hitting the rock on the dock." The man picked up the boy and one of the local men motioned for him to follow him to one of the huts a few yards away. "Don't worry, go calm Adank down. Let's see if he reacts and if we ask him where his family is."

The group retreated, leaving the surprised woman behind but, as her husband had indicated, she returned to the vehicle.

The little boy had stuck his nose to the window, trying to see what was going on, but when the group had disappeared into the shed, he could no longer see anything. His mother got into the vehicle and shook off some of the raindrops and the wet spots on her clothes evaporated almost instantly.

The woman turned around and looked at the little boy. "Are you all right, don't you feel dizzy?"

The little boy shook his head. His mother smiled at him and gently ran her hand over his head.

The truth is that the reason they had decided to go to the place for rest was because only three days ago the little boy had gotten his Neurowire and was slowly getting used to the interface. The doctor had recommended a quiet place away from the big cities, where there was less visual pollution and that way the communication networks would not interfere with the Neurowire interface.

They had decided to pay a visit to her husband's father who lived near the lake. The woman only hoped that the little boy would be all right, but the truth was that the little boy was also excited about the short visit to his grandfather, along with the interface and the new things he was seeing through the Neurowire.

"Are we going back to Grandpa's house?"

His mother's eyes had been riveted on the hut and she was looking somewhat worried. "Yes, we'll be leaving soon."

"Where did dad go?"

"He'll be here in a moment. Don't worry."

Adank stopped asking, but again focused his gaze on the stall, almost blurred by the rain. The rain seemed to be falling more violently.

What the family didn't realize was that getting out of the place wouldn't be so quick.

Inside the hut the boy had been placed on a table, where the group of people were looking at him strangely, trying to get him to react. There was something strange about him. The first thing that caught their attention was that his clothes had not dried when he entered the hut.

On the other hand, the clothes he was wearing, a simple T-shirt and jeans, seemed a little strange. A bit too old-fashioned. His sneakers were of a lace-up style, something extremely old and not worn for many decades either.

One of the men tried to send a message to his Neurowire, to see if he could wake up but to no avail. In fact, in that security hut they had a device to detect Neurowires in case someone disappeared in the lake and they were surprised to find that the boy did not have one.

After a few minutes of trying to get him to react, he finally woke up with groans of pain and tried to put a hand to his forehead, where someone had already put a compress to stop the blood.

The man who had rescued him stopped him when he tried to sit up. "You're all right. You're not in the water."

"M-my head..." the boy complained, putting a hand to his temple and opening his eyes. His vision was blurred and he couldn't make out faces well.

"Does it hurt anywhere?"

"M-my head, it feels like it's going to explode."

"You hit a rock hard."

A woman from the group approached and spoke in a calm voice. "Tell me, how did you fall in the water? Were you with a friend or someone else?"

The boy looked at her, blinking. "I don't remember." Then he looked at the other people around. "I-I can't remember anything…"

"Can you contact your family? You don't have a NW device."

"I-I don't...know. I can't remember."

Those present looked at each other. It was possible that he was confused by the shock and that he had just woken up. It was best to leave him a few minutes to remember.

But the problem was when the minutes passed, and then hours.

He also didn't remember anything when they had to call the local social services to take care of the matter.

That child had come out of nowhere and with no memory. Almost as if he were a fey, although in his case he was still an ordinary human. Or so it seemed.

***

Veyteux. Lake Lemac. Switzerland

In a small forest with a dock and a few boats, which separated the lake shore from the road, a dark-colored air transport was parked on the water. And in it several tactical droids had just loaded instruments and other industrial cargo bags. The droids were working in silence and had almost finished loading everything into the transport. They didn't care about the rain or the storm.

Among them was Janus, who had binoculars focused on the southwest of the lake, towards Valais. He didn't mind being soaked from head to toe. In fact a smile had formed on his lips.

"Just in time," he murmured.

Just as Aleister had told him last year, everything had turned out as predicted. Indeed, the pieces he had been looking for were not yet where he needed them. They had just arrived.

He lowered the special binoculars and went to where the droids were and entered the transport. Some droids were already in the seats, while others were securing the crates with the instruments. In the center was a platform where they had placed the small hyperbaric chamber, with the newly rescued specimen.

Everything had gone as expected. He had found the djjin and the homunculus. The homunculus had now been put to sleep to rest from the pain.

But it had not been as easy as it had seemed. The lake was large and they had spent a good part of the day secretly moving around trying to find the place where it would happen. It was much worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

The indications Aleister had given Janus about his vision had helped him triangulate a possible area, but the perimeter had been large. So he had been scouring the area for any anomalies.

Only about fifteen minutes ago they had finally been able to detect the arrival zone when there was a specific place in the forest where the temperature had changed dramatically. There had been a heat wave that had spread for a few seconds. Thanks to that he had found it. It was just a tiny thing, but it was indeed alive.

It was a homunculus temporis. A type of alchemical anomaly that was thought to be only hypothetical in other centuries.

Janus would never have believed it possible, but he had seen it with his own eyes. A creature reminiscent of the primal state of a developing fetus. Something so small and weak that anything could kill it in that state. It was a high price to pay. After all, a homunculus temporis was not supposed to be able to really travel through time. According to the grimoires it was the ability to age really slowly that made him unique. Almost like what Aleister had done to escape his own death, as he had told Janus that night last year.

Although in their case they were playing with a fractus core that could move things through time. A shard of that fractus core was what had allowed that homunculus to travel to the future, but the price was that his body had to regenerate almost from scratch.

If Janus' visions were correct, he would need something much bigger to carry out the final part of his plan. Although he had already taken care of that by buying the tracts of land he would use according to his visions. That old and abandoned particle accelerator was what he would use in a few years for it.

The pieces were all in place, or rather at the right time.

The homunculus and the child, that had just been rescued a few kilometers away from where he was.

There was still the detail of the brat Michael Levin but, according to his vision, it would not be for a couple of years that he would acquire that metamorphic capacity that linked him to everything that would happen in the future.

He had to be one of the ones to take that stone and give it to that special fey that had appeared decades ago called EVE. Janus would have to go at the last minute to Benjamin Bloodworth, so that the eccentric billionaire could not refuse. He wouldn't refuse, Janus had done enough research on EVE. It was possible that she was actually a Keelian and that Benjamin was hiding her. There could be romantic motives behind it, but that didn't matter to Janus.

They were all necessary pieces to save civilization. The rest didn't matter.

He had already done what he had to do. All that was left was to let the rest of things go on as normal. He was there at that moment, so he knew he would succeed at that stage, but he couldn't afford not to worry. Because he would have to disappear when it was over to begin the second and final phase of his plan.

He would have to prepare a plan to alert the Aeon and that guy he had met all those years ago, B.K.

The Black Knight.

Yes, B.K. could help him by the time the first phase was over. After all, he had to leave Yuturna with someone to protect her. Not that B.K. was entirely trustworthy. But he knew that the automaton had above all things a sense of justice that would make it impossible for him to refuse.

Janus approached the chamber with the homunculus and looked at it. It was not a pleasant sight, but that something so small was also a cog in the whole thing still surprised him.

"We're ready to go, sir," said one of the tactical droids.

"Let's get the hell out of here then," Janus sighed, and sat down in one of the side seats of the transport. Looking at the hyperbaric chamber again, he frowned. "Nothing else was detected, right?"

The droid who had spoken first turned and looked at Janus. "There were two anomalies but not biological. Two pieces fell into the lake but one was a pair of airplane seats and the other was something smaller. They fell about two kilometers from here. According to your prognosis it is possible that they are simply pieces of the plane on its journey to the future."

"Yes I know that," Janus replied. "Nothing else?"

"Nothing, sir. Were we expecting anything else?"

Janus narrowed his eyes at the droid, but shook his head. "No, nothing else... I guess."

The transport closed the rear hatch and slowly began to rise into the air over the waters of the lake. The droid in charge of the flight finally turned on the transport's invisibility system and it faded from sight.

Janus meanwhile kept thinking. There was a part of it that bothered him since the day he had received the visions, during the Tokyo explosion. Since that day he had been following the steps of one of them. The one with the best ending.

First, using the connection of the stone from the Kuril Islands, during the explosion, he had sent that command to his past self in 2001 to awaken his consciousness.

Then in 2014, during that primitive time of his being he had carried out his first murder, although he didn't know what it was important for. It would not be until later that he would realize why.

Then in 2099, after what happened in Tokyo, using connections and dark secrets he knew, he had a special team of soldiers moved to that lake a year after the Tokyo explosion.

Among those soldiers there was one who would be in charge of supplying his blood to the core. The truth was that the fractus core could kill anyone of a lower dimension who was not prepared. That soldier named Marco Bicini supplied his blood which fused with the core. That sample of matter from the third dimension would allow the core from a higher dimension to serve the world. Otherwise a disaster like the one in Tokyo would occur.

What nobody knew was that the three fractus were connected. If the one in the Kuril Islands was the mind, the one that had appeared in Lemac could be considered as matter. The largest of all was the one that had deactivated itself in Russia and whose nucleus still remained in storage. That one could well be called the conduit.

The problem was that despite the DNA sample the core could still kill anyone who was not prepared. Or at least that was what he had understood from his visions.

The core would be with Marco Bicini, who would be in charge of guarding it. What Janus didn't know at that point was that Aleister would be involved with it as well.

Each person who had received visions from the stone received several visions of different endings. And among them one vision was the right one. At least if one wanted to get a good ending. Therefore, when he met Aleister, both had to check what each knew to corroborate that they were on the same page.

Aleister was the one who had helped Marco Bicini to leave the core in a place where no one would touch it for over a hundred years. Janus didn't know why but, apparently, that core had more than one destiny. And he should not interfere with it if he wanted everything to go the way it should. Decades ago there had even been a related massacre in Kazakhstan, but even so he had decided not to intervene with the event. Only Gehirn had intervened, but that had been even ten years before that massacre. An occult group had gone after him for sticking his nose where it didn't belong and so he had had to flee into deep space. Who knew if Gehirn hadn't gotten some vision from that core that made him flee. However the answer to that was beyond Janus' control.

In fact the only thing he had taken care of was to remain vigilant of that box under the Vatican floor, waiting for someone who would extract it in the future. Michael Levin, who was still a child and whose future was linked, since in addition to extracting that box, he and a girl would be the ones to get him the piece to start the second phase.

The vision was strange, but he had to follow the steps he had received if he hoped to succeed. For him, it was an equation, with the difference that the order of the factors could result in a catastrophic outcome for civilization. Even if he could not manage all the variables, he had to manage concisely those he could control.

But, above all things, there was one detail that caused him some concern. And that had to do with what had just happened.

The homunculus had arrived from 1952 from the Ancient Era to the 110 thanks to that shard that Aleister had obtained in Japan in 1908.

The child had been on the plane in 2012 from the Ancient Era, to be sent to 125 and from there, due to the time distortion, to the 110. Although in that case it was more appropriate to say that the time was linked. Which meant that at that time an emission of those particles had occurred from the sun. 2012, 110 and 125 were linked by those particles and the core.

The savitronic particles sent from the sun at superluminal speed had activated the tokions inside the core and connected in time to allow travel only in the direction of the future.

The problem then was obvious. The core was whole when Aleister left it and still was, at least the one Aleister had left hidden with Marco Bicini.

Then, how had it reached the past at the hands of Satou Nobuyama in two halves? That was something he did not know.

And what disturbed him most was that there had to be a connection of the core stones at the time of sending. The one half that was in the underground of the Vatican was still there. The other one, that was in the plane, would in the future be in 125 already, in EVE's hands along with the one in the Vatican to reunite the two halves.

If so, then what would have made it possible for the child and the homunculus to arrive at the same place if the one half in that moment was safe?

The child had to have traveled from the past 2012 to the future 125, and then back to the past in the 110 through the distortion that would occur in the plane. But what had been powerful enough to make him reach the past in 110?

According to his prediction operations it was clear to him that he would have to use a particle accelerator for the final phase. But someone had delivered the stone into Satou Nobuyama's hands. Was there someone hidden somewhere in the lake who had been the anchor for the arrival of the child and the homunculus? Was it possible that it was the same person who had brought the core to the past in two halves? How powerful could that person be and what technology did he have to do that? Would it be someone, or something?

Despite his long life the truth was that Dark Events always found a way to surprise him in some way or another.

Well, I guess it's the clues I don't know about. Aleister couldn't tell me either, thought Janus, and deep in thought he began to make plans for the future.

Right... those other important variables will also be there at that time, should I plan some way to attract them? Well... I guess I still have fifteen years to worry about it.

***

Janus' transport dissapeared in the rainy skies.

No one on board noticed what was passing by at that moment nearby. On the other hand it was obvious that no one would notice.

It was a tiny black metal sphere less than a millimeter thick.

The sphere was carried by the winds of the storm and headed south following the path of the Rhone.

Less than a hundred meters from the water, a new current of air carried it to the center of the Rhone, where in other years the commune of Massongex had been established.

The sphere reached the turbulent waters at that moment and then sank several meters where it merged with the sandy soil of the river.

The waters dragged it a few meters until it stopped. But by the time it had stopped its size had changed again. It was now at least a millimeter and a half and had continued to sink into the sand and mud.

With the passing of fifteen years that sphere would change in size and shape. But what would come out of that transformation would not happen in Massongex. It would happen three kilometers away, in Monthey. Where it would crawl under the mud until, one night, it would finally emerge from the waters to give a scare to a group of university students who would be fishing in the area.

Although that was a story for the future.