The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

“Relax,” he said. “I’ll make it better.”

Reluctant to upset the alien further, the man held it out and looked away. JoEl inspected it. The fingers were pointing the wrong way. Blood was dripping down onto the floor. This was no good. This was no good at all.
 

“Dear oh dear,” JoEl said as he bit down on the tip of his glove and pulled it away from his hand.
 

He waved his free hand over the youth’s broken one. The air above the hand warbled as the chemical reaction started. Within a few seconds, the skin healed over. The youth looked on slack-jawed as the skin sewed itself shut. He even giggled with joy at the sight of it, but then he stopped. The healing was going too far. The skin continued to sew itself together and the bones inside were still splintered. The fingers began to merge together into a mangled mess. He screamed as it all melted together into a mix of thumb and what looked like a wing. The youth’s eyes dropped shut and his head fell to the floor. He’d fainted.
 

“Marvellous,” JoEl said. “All better, and just in time for your sleep.” He tapped the youth on the head. “And as I’ve done you a favour, I think it fair you do one for me.” He got up and walked to the car. He climbed inside and turned the engine on with the keys still in the ignition. He tapped the dashboard and with a click the bouncing tribal rhythms returned. “Marvellous,” JoEl said again as he reversed the car out of the carpark, leaving the sleeping youth with his newly healed appendage. “Just marvellous.”

Nisha Bhatia

Nisha opened her eyes. It was easy enough.
Keeping
them open was the struggle. This hangover might be the worst she’d ever had. Her head spun and her stomach churned and all she could think about was water. She needed water. Her kingdom for some water.

“Here,” a voice said, as something cold pressed against her fingertips. A glass of cold water. She took it and lifted it to her chapped lips.

She poured it onto her cotton-tongue and drenched her mouth. She gulped it down and felt a pang of hurt as it reached her stomach and tickled whatever crystals of alcohol had settled there.

She handed the empty glass back to the blur on her side. A soft pinkish shape with dark brown hair amidst even softer background of greys and whites.
 

“Thanks,” she tried to say but her voice was too coarse. She coughed and tried again. “Thank you”.

“That’s okay, miss,” the voice said. A child. Soft. Sweet.

The shapes around her came into focus.

A large room with no windows. Monitors. Posters. Walls full of diagrams in purple. The boy to her right. She looked at him. Squinted. His eyes were brown, but they sparkled. A fine powder of purple starlight.

“Where am I?” she said.
 

“You’re about one hundred and sixty feet below the surface of London,” came a voice from behind her. An adult man. “You are in one of the most secret places in the world. The headquarters of the IPC — The Indigo Parade Collective.” The man walked into the room. His voice quiet, calm, impatient. “And … you are our prisoner.”

“What?” Nisha said as she sat up. “Where the fuck am I?”

“Language, Miss Bhatia. There are children present. Plus, I was only kidding.” The man smiled at her. And suddenly she recognised him. In fact, she recognised the room. She’d been there before. It was the room from her vision. The man, with dark hair down to the bottom of his neck — a perfect line of bangs above his eyes. The platform shoes he was standing in. The slimming, long-sleeve black top.
 

“Dr Warwick?” she said.

He nodded. As he stepped closer the plastic of his shoes squeaked. He placed his hand on the young boy’s shoulder.
 

“And this here is Sammy,” he said.

Nisha looked at the boy and a sickening horror crept up inside her. It clambered up and stretched out to her feet, her fingertips, the ends of her hairs. Of course. She knew Sammy. She knew his face. His pale skin and his fair cheeks. Wearing a tight, salmon-coloured onesie. On his chest was the IPC branding — the letters and the indigo eye. She’d seen his face before. However, the last time it was one of tears and pain. He was dying, along with hundreds of others.

“He’s an indigo child,” Dr Warwick said.
 

“And he’s going to …” Nisha stopped herself. She wasn’t in the habit of scaring young children.
 

The silence hung in the air and Dr Warwick knelt by the boy and whispered into his ear.
 

“Yes sir,” the boy said before running out of the door where the doctor had entered.

They waited for a while until convinced he was out of listening range.

“You know what’s going to happen to them, right?” Nisha said as she climbed out of the chair she’d been snoozing in.

“I personally have no idea how
you
know anything about the indigo children, and I know a damn sight less about what you
think
is going to happen to them.”

“They’re going to die,” Nisha said.

“What makes you say something drastic like that? How could you know?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I saw it.”

“Where?”

Nisha fell silent. She looked around the room searching for an answer. Something that didn’t make her sound mentally ill.

“Okay, Miss Bhatia. Why don’t you start with how you even know who the indigo children are?”
 

“I had a vision. I saw … no, it was more than that. I felt the pain. I saw the invasion, but … I mean, that’s impossible. I’m a smart person. I don’t believe … but, I mean I saw it. I saw the children. And then I saw this room. I saw you, Dr Warwick: I saw you and the dead child.”

Nisha found her hands flying around as she tried to say with them what she couldn’t with her words.

“Interesting,” Dr Warwick said as he took the penlight out of his pocket and walked over to her. “May I?”

She nodded and he bent down and shone the penlight into her eyes, one at a time. His thick cologne made her eyes water.

“There are a lot of things in this world that you might not believe, Miss Bhatia. For example, I have no idea how you saw what you saw, but when it comes to the indigo children, it is best to reassess what you think is possible and what isn’t.”
 

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Come on,” he said as turned the penlight off and held his hand out to her. “I’ll show you.”
 

***

This was the lowest floor in the subterranean academy, he told her. Hundreds of children. One hundred and thirty-eight and a few more potentials in their outreach boarding programs. All living in and occupying this base of the HQ — The IPC Academy. The complex layout of the rooms in the building was confusing to Nisha. It didn’t make sense. Any of it. A cluster of sterile rooms void of the energy you'd expect in an underground school full of children. No shouting. No bouncing. Certainly no laughing. Other than the occasional beeping of monitor screens and the voices coming from the lectures delivered by video, the place was eerily calm.
 

The individual classrooms were washed in greys and blacks, and the only colour came from the children's odd form-fitting onesies in various crayon-shaded colours. A designated colour for each class, or year. The IPC insignia stitched into the shoulders and chests of the uniforms.
 

Nisha had a passing memory of each of their faces. She tried not to stare.

In each of the classes, they appeared to be teaching something completely out of Nisha’s knowledge. Math that would make Pythagoras squirm. Formulas that would make Einstein cry.
 

Dr Warwick led Nisha through a smaller corridor and into a room lined with windows. Behind one of the windows was an adult in a lab coat. A teacher, perhaps. He was sitting on one side of the table with a child on the other. There were wires and sensors attached to the poor kid’s head, leading up to the ceiling, through, and out into the unseen. The room was dark and gently lit by a few clear white light bulbs along the ceiling. The window they were in front of had a small control panel by Dr Warwick’s hands.
 

The adult inside, an older man with a thick grey moustache, had a stack of cards in his long-fingered hands. He slid a card out from the desk and asked the child what the card was.
 

“Don’t worry, Miss Bhatia. It’s one-way glass. The can’t hear or see you.”

“What are they doing in there?” Nisha said.

“Testing,” he said, a smile creeping up on his face.
 

The doctor and Nisha watched as the child guessed correctly. Queen of diamonds. A good guess. One out of fifty-two. A damn good guess, in fact.

“Correct again, Darpal,” the teacher inside said, a microphone picking up his voice and pushing it through the tinny speakers above Nisha’s viewing window. “That’s sixty-two to you. One to me.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Nisha said. Mouth open wide. Loose-jawed.

“Yeah well, they can’t always be right,” Dr Warwick interjected, missing the point of Nisha’s amazement. “Just nerves, I guess.”

“Who are they? The indigo children?”

Dr Warwick took a step back from the viewing window. He looked to Nisha. He frowned. He was disappointed.
 

“We thought that
you
might know the answer, Miss Bhatia. You’re the one with the visions, after all.”

“I … I don’t know.”

He sighed. Nisha felt more useless as each second passed. Dr Warwick looked more exhausted. His manners were crumbling away. His patience dripping on the floor by his feet. She could see why he had got into a physical fight on national TV. She hadn’t seen the viral clip, but had heard the gist. He’d punched some religious guy in the testicles and declared he “was God!”

“Well, back in the seventies you had all sorts of pseudoscientific, new-age nonsense going on. It was all about karma and zen and whatnot, but things … some things … were different. Ann Tappe predicted a new wave of children to be born into the world. Children with telepathic abilities, untapped creativity, empathic abilities allowing them to receive or push feelings between themselves and a host. Some of the world’s most powerful people came together and formed the IPC. The aim was to find and nurture the indigo children and let them guide humanity to its next step in evolution. But then … nothing happened. Not until after the new millennium, anyway. That was when the first one was born. A child who seemed to know everything. Every answer to every question. Every adult concept.” He took a moment to cough into a tissue he’d taken from his pocket before continuing. “It took us a while,” he said. “But eventually we realised it wasn’t that the boy knew everything already, he was simply reading the answers from his parents’ and teachers’ brains. He was somehow tapping into the collected knowledge within the room. The little shit was just an incredible cheater. And we only found that out after he started getting the binary fits — epileptic-like seizures forcing the child to read out strings of binary code that, as far as we could tell, was nonsense. That, and the sparkle in his eyes, and we started to realise we had something a little peculiar.”

He took a deep breath.

“And then … we found more. More of them with the binary fits and the indigo sparkle, and we decided to bring them all together. To teach them. To test them. To try and find out why they are the way they are.”
 

“And have you? Have you found out why they are like this?”
 

Nisha wiped her forehead, still clammy and foggy.
 

“Well … yes. And no. We thought they were some next step in evolution until … until one of the children started talking about The Signal.”

“The Signal?”

“Yes, I know. No idea what it means, but then more of the children spoke of it.”
 

Dr Warwick shook his head with the nonsense of it all. As if blowing the fringe from his eyes blew away the craziness.

“And you know the weird thing?” He took a step towards Nisha. His shoe squeaked. He spoke quieter now, with more intent, like he was telling her a secret that he hadn’t even told the other doctors. “Miss Bhatia, we tested the children. We scanned for all electrical signals coming from their brains and, when they spoke of The Signal or when they had their binary fits, a signal was sent out.”

“What kind of signal?”

“An electronic beacon of a signal. A big old bastard that blasted out and onwards, but focused too, like a sharp laser aimed in a single direction. My theory, and this is just a theory, is that they are communicating with some sort of intelligent alien life. I believe these children will introduce us to the greater intelligence of the universe. Miss Bhatia, I think … ” He was whispering so quietly now she had to lean in closer to hear. “I think they’re calling something. They’re leading something here to Earth.”

“But … but something is killing them. Something
will
kill them.”
 

“How do you know that? Your
visions
? Gah!” The way he said visions, whatever credibility she’d had with him before waking up had vanished. “You don’t even know what these children are and what they can do. How can I trust your so-called visions?”

“Then how do I know about them?” Nisha said. “Tell me that.”

“Some kind of psychic collateral, or something. I don’t know, but you’re confused. It was a mistake to bring you here. My apologies. We’ll take you back.”

“Please,” Nisha said. “Something is going to come here and is going to kill these children.”

As Nisha said that she heard crying coming through the tinny speakers. A sobbing. Distorted. Broken up amongst the static.
 

“Please,” a voice said through the speakers. “Please don’t let it kill us.”

Nisha and Dr Warwick both turned back to the window. The child’s face was pressed up against it. He shouldn’t have been able to see through it, but he was looking right through the glass to Nisha. Looking right into her eyes.
 

“Please, Miss Bhatia,” the child said again. “Save us.”