Skyborn The Divine

12: Cold

Alice stepped barefoot into the laboratory, the cold, hard floor turning her feet numb as though she'd stepped onto a frozen lake. That was something she'd had to get used to in past five weeks in ORIGIN's subterranean world. Cold. Constant, mind-numbing, strength draining, breath-stealing, merciless cold. Athena had made sure that Alice had scarcely a moment of warmth since she'd arrived for her training. She'd been made to exercise while Athena sprayed her with water from a hose. She'd had to haul concrete blocks the size of minivans up and down the length of the Ready Room, all through knee-deep, freezing mud. Athena would sometimes order her to get down on her belly and roll in the artificial surf of a man-made sea, seemingly put there in the Ready Room some days for no other apparent purpose than to make Alice miserable. And miserable she was. She exercised while tired, while hungry, in the water, in the mud, and in the dark. And in the cold. Always, in the cold.

In fact, the only times she wasn't shivering or her teeth weren't chattering was when she was in her bed, and that was too rare and too brief to be of any comfort.

So compared to all that, this momentary reprieve from her training to walk barefoot into a bright, sterile laboratory was like a stroll in the park. The floors really were cold, though, and her jaw was beginning to tremble.

The huge white and gray machine looked like something of a cross between a medieval torture rack and an MRI scanner. The whole thing moved and swiveled like a gyroscope. It was so impressive and incomprehensible that when she saw it, she asked the man beside her if it was some sort of alien spacecraft.

"No, it's not alien." It was Dr. Jaa Lee, the man she'd met the day of her tour of ORIGIN. Most staff and team members referred to him affectionately as Jolly. "But the technology is so far beyond anything we could reproduce that it might as well be from another world. Carlo Angelus, the man who invented it, had such a high IQ that many theorize he was a metahuman himself."

Jolly was a Chinese man in his mid-twenties, and the amount of respect he seemed to provoke from the other members of the technology department led her to believe he might be a capable genius himself.

Several medical and technology staff members worked together to secure Alice to the machine. Her wrists, ankles, torso, and head were strapped down so that she was spread-eagle over the framework of the machine. As she felt the numerous hands secure her in place, the machine began to hum so deeply that it made her teeth chatter.

Athena, who was never far away these past weeks, watched the whole thing passively.

"Is this what the machine is for?" she asked, trying her best to stifle her trembling. "To make me do my best impression of a star fish?" It was possible that her shakes had less to do with the temperature of the floor and perhaps to do with how being attached to this machine made her feel.

"It's to show us your Angelus field," answered Jolly. "We've been able to detect it before with smaller equipment, but this will be the first time we will actually be able to see it."

"What's an Angelus field?" She remembered overhearing Clawson and Jolly speaking to each other about her "field" before and had never understood what they'd meant.

Jolly grinned, an eager student being asked his favorite question in class.

"It's a quantum field made of non-Newtonian particles that interact with space-time. The body acts as a quantum field generator and the particles often change the metaphysical properties of the generator by allowing it to supersede the laws of Newtonian physics and thermodynamics."

For a moment, Alice was quiet. If her hand wasn't buckled tight to one of the spokes of the machine, she would have scratched her head with it.

"So, what's an Angelus field?" she asked again.