Here & There Read Online Free PDF Page B

your floating battery out there going to give me the ████████ 5 of power I need?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Then my physics will work.”
    Pierce puts his hand on Reidier’s shoulder. “You’ve definitely earned yourself a vacation. But first, let’s change the world. Wait till I’m back in the observation deck.”
    He exits.
    From off of the back of a chair, Reidier picks up, of all things, a tattered tweed sport coat, adorned with worn elbow patches and a lapelpin made from an old computer transistor. He puts on the jacket and straightens his brown velvet tie.
    Reidier looks at Eve. She gives the slightest of nods. The corners of his lips flutter up briefly. He walks over to Otto and opens up the Plexiglas cover over the button in front of the boy.
    “Wait until I tell you,” Reidier says.
    Otto nods.
    Eve moves to stand behind Otto and places her hands on his shoulders.
    Reidier walks over to Ecco. In similar fashion, he opens the button cover in front of Ecco. 6
    Once again, Reidier admonishes, “Wait until I tell you.”
    Ecco smiles up at his father.
    Reidier stands behind him and glances over at a monitor. It shows Pierce taking his seat in the observation area. Reidier places his hands on Ecco’s shoulders.
    For a moment, the four of them stay perfectly still, a tableau of the nuclear family: mother, father, and twin boys, mirror images of each other.
    “On ‘go,’ boys. Three, two, one, go.”
    The boys press their respective buttons as Reidier says something to himself, but the audio garbles it into guttural gibberish as the video interference begins. The image freezes. Some areas transform into static, lines pixilate, artifacts randomly pop up. Still you can decipher the four of them, until the next iteration of interference. The images of all four of them stretch sideways in a wavelike pattern and split, so now there are eight of them, and then the video goes black. It all happens in a matter of seconds.
    The hard drives at Brown and at the Reidier home cannot backup instantaneously. Depending on the cycle, there can be anywhere from an eight to a sixteen second delay. This is why we never actually see the boys press the buttons.
    None of those present survived. No remains were ever recovered. Officially, the immense power the test was pulling from Pierce’s floating battery or some unforeseen, exothermic factor vaporized all living matter within a hundred meter radius.
    Still, there’s something perplexing about that final image of the four of them.
    There’s a similarly intimate moment in the last recordings of the Reidier home footage. 7 It’s in Eve and Reidier’s bedroom. It’s the night before, according to the video counter, 12:21 a.m. Eve sits on the bottom edge of their queen bed. She’s wearing old gray sweatpants and a white ribbed tank top. She’s staring down.
    Reidier shuffles down the hallway and into view. He leans against the doorway, dressed in flannel pajama bottoms, slippers, a V-neck undershirt, and fittingly, his tweed sport coat. He watches his wife, his head tilting to the right like a confused beagle. Reidier bites his lower lip and sighs.
    It’s the sigh that gets Eve’s attention. She shrugs, her eyes finally pulling up to find him. “I know. I know.”
    Reidier smiles and shuffles across the room to the edge of the bed. The two of them sit there, side by side, staring down.
    From one of the high-angle camera feeds, 8 we can follow their gaze. In front of them, on the middle of the carpet, is a zipped-up suitcase. Folded on top of it lies the faded red sweater.
    They were planning a family vacation regardless of the outcome of Reidier’s test the following day. As Eve put it, the trip would be either a “much needed celebration or refuge.”
    They lean against each other at the edge of the bed. “Wear it tomorrow,” Reidier says.
    “It doesn’t go with my favorite blouse. I’ll look like a color-blind leprechaun at a Christmas party.”
    The