In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 by Nathan Van Coops

Author:Nathan Van Coops [Coops, Nathan Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Skylighter Press
Published: 2016-08-07T23:00:00+00:00

“Some people go on spiritual journeys to ‘find themselves.’ Time travelers find themselves all the time. We usually take journeys to get away from ourselves.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2010

Chapter 22

Mym surveys the fragments of mineral on me as I get to my feet.

“Anything else you want to break now that you’re here, or do you think you got it all?” Her voice is playful. I can see the corners of her mouth turned up through the mesh over her face.

“I think I’m good.” I smile back and dust myself off. “What’s with the ninja outfit?”

“Precautions.” She extracts the mineral I used as an anchor from the rubble I’ve created, and moves slowly toward a dusty glass door. I study the room, taking in the catalogued shelves of rocks before following her. The door opens automatically and we step onto a covered wooden walkway.

The environment couldn’t be more removed from the urban skyscraper I just left. Beyond the walkway, a scraggly lawn has a tenuous foothold on the red sandy earth before it blends with sparse woods and brush. To the left, the ground tapers downhill to a pond, and an earthen trail winds it’s way into the trees.

“Where are we?” I crane my neck upward. Even the sky looks different. The puffy cumulus clouds of England and Northern France have been replaced by wisps of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere.

“Mungkan Kandju.”

I lower my gaze to the woods. “God bless you.”

Mym laughs. It’s a sweet sound that springs out of her, and despite her somber appearance, I can tell she’s happy. “It’s the name of this place. It’s a forest.”

“Is it Africa?” The lean trees stretching toward the sky around us look as though they’ve been wanting and needing their whole lives, never getting quite enough.

“No. Queensland, Australia. This used to be a national park. Now it’s owned by the Academy of Sciences.”

“Students of this school really get around, don’t they?”

Mym leads us along the plank walkway and around the corner. More single story buildings are scattered in a loose rectangle. A colorful flock of parakeets is chirping away atop the roof of the building nearest to us. “You figured out how this school works, right?”

“You mean the metaspace? Yeah. It’s pretty fancy.”

“Take a look at this place.” Mym gestures to the ramshackle buildings around us. It takes me a moment to realize what she’s suggesting, but then I reach for my tablet and hold it up. Through the screen, the area is completely transformed. The wooden one-story buildings are now a series of interconnected towers with catwalks and bridges. The scraggly grass is lush and green and, to my surprise, the place is bustling with people. I have to lower the tablet and double-check my surroundings to make sure they are not really walking past me.

“Wait, so they’re—”

“They call it commuting.” Mym plucks a wildflower from one of the weeds and twirls it in her gloved fingers. “They used to maintain this campus as a real site in addition to the metaspace version, but people stopped coming.

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