Worlds Apart

These days, the only thing that brought him any comfort was going down to the track. He was spending more and more time there, figuratively running from his problems.

He finished the last of his cereal, picking up his rucksack as he made for the door, giving his mother insincere promises that he would do better as he went.

***

Jamie ran, his sneakers kicking up dust on the oval track, sweat soaking his mesh tank top. It felt good to run, to feel his muscles burning, to feel the wind on his face. At least for a while, it helped curb his frustration, elevate his dour mood. It helped to jog his brain, too. Somehow, he always had more clarity when he was running. Maybe the extra blood flow and oxygen did something to his brain.

He wasn't going to just sit around and wait for Liz to contact him. Maybe she couldn't, maybe her parents were actively preventing it. There must be some way for him to find out where she was. Information was a commodity, after all, it was always available for the right price. Hopefully for less than passage on a freighter would have cost.

***

The mag-lev train came to a stop, Jamie stepping out of the car, and onto an elevated platform that protruded from the glass facade of a skyscraper. A crowd of people soon pushed past him, filling the available space, packing themselves shoulder-to-shoulder like sardines in a can. He watched as the automatic doors closed, a low hum filling the air as the train sped off again, sliding along its winding rail. It soon vanished between two towering buildings in the distance, the sky a maze of interconnected walkways and magnetic rails at this elevation. He was at least two hundred floors above street level, protected from the wind by a glass canopy.

He made his way through a turnstile and into the building, another residential tower block not unlike his own, emerging onto a commercial plaza. Planters filled with carefully-tended trees and shrubs added some much welcome greenery to the vast edifice of glass and metal, myriad stores and eateries packing the available space. The center of the building was an open shaft, bridged by curving walkways, escalators leading to the upper and lower levels.

It didn't take long for him to find the elevator terminal, taking one down to ground level. Even in the evening, this part of the city was pretty packed, throngs of pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. The sirens of a police car rose above the chorus of voices, Jamie pausing to watch it pass by. The other cars on the road moved aside in perfect sync to clear a path for it, the city's transit system taking control of their navigation computers, filling in the opening behind the vehicle just as quickly as it blazed by.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, checking that he was at the right stop. If the address that he had found on the city's intranet was correct, his destination was nearby.

Jamie pushed his way through the throngs of people, heading into the Old Town, the glittering glass and steel of the skyscrapers slowly giving way to older brickwork. When sea levels had begun to rise in the twenty-second century, many of the coastal cities had been largely abandoned, new construction beginning on modern metropolises further inland. There were still buildings dating from prior centuries, going all the way back to the colonial period, but many of the oldest structures were now submerged beyond the coastline.

While still tall, they were dwarfed by the kilometer-high edifices to his back, their facades weathered over the centuries to leave the bricks stained and irregular. Even the asphalt on the roads was cracked and uneven, neglected because so few vehicles came down this way. An old highway towered above him to the right, casting its shadow on the buildings below, no longer in use. It probably led to a part of the city that was now underwater.

His destination was an old tower block, maybe ten storeys tall, probably far cheaper to rent out than the fancy offices in the high-rises. Flashing neon signs advertised various services, from payday loans to personal injury lawyers. He spied the one that he was looking for, a private detective agency.

He mounted the steps, entering into an old lobby, the walls covered in cracked tiles. It smelled of damp, like old wood, the room lit by a solitary bulb that hung from the ceiling. It wasn't all archaic, however. To his right was a modern computer terminal, a kiosk with an embedded touch panel. Jamie walked over to it and pulled up a list of the offices, keying in a code to put a call through to the right one. There was a brief delay, then a woman's face appeared on the other end of the feed. She had a dark complexion, her curly hair tied up in a tight bun, the beginnings of a white collar visible at the bottom of the frame.

"Hi," Jamie began, not sure what to say. "Is this the...detective agency?"

"Do you have an appointment?" the woman asked, the glow of a computer display lighting up her face as she tapped at a keyboard.

"No," he admitted, "I didn't know I needed one."

"One moment, please," she added, turning to look off-camera. She had a short conversation with someone, too far away from the mic for him to make anything out. "Mister Bradley will see you now," she said. "Fourth floor, second door on your right as you leave the stairwell."

"Thank you," he replied, the woman quickly ending the call. He looked for the stairs, finding them at the end of the lobby. As he made his way over to them, he noted that there was an old bank of mailboxes on one wall, the kind you'd find in old apartment buildings. Some of them were hanging ajar, likely no longer in use, the labels so faded that he couldn't make them out.

He climbed the stairs, the old banister creaking, eventually arriving at the fourth level. The floor here was lined with peeling linoleum, the walls whitewashed, making him feel like he was in some kind of abandoned insane asylum. It was hard to tell if this building had once housed offices, apartments, or both. Most of the rooms were certainly vacant. He was starting to feel as though he shouldn't be here, but he pressed on.

There was a buzzer beside the door to the detective agency, and he pressed the button, the panel opening automatically to let him pass. Inside was a rather small waiting room, the walls lined with chairs, a solitary potted plant standing in one corner. The woman who he had spoken to on the kiosk must be the secretary, she was sitting behind a wooden desk, a computer terminal perched atop it. She glanced at him through the holographic display, waving him in.

"Go right on through," she said, gesturing to another door at the back of the room to her right. There was nobody else in the waiting room, business wasn't exactly booming. He opened the door and stepped inside. The dingy office was even smaller than the waiting room, furnished with only a desk and two chairs. There were a few papers strewn about on its surface, along with an ashtray that hadn't been emptied in a good while. A man rose to greet him, extending a hand through the holographic display of another computer terminal. Jamie shook it, then took a seat, his eyes drawn by the lazy motion of a ceiling fan.

"What can I do for you?" the man asked. He was middle-aged, with a scruffy beard, clad in a dress shirt with a loose tie. He certainly didn't look like a sleuth to Jamie, but if he had been wearing a trench coat and a fedora, that would probably have been even weirder.

"I read that you know how to find people," Jamie began. "You're a detective, right?"

"That's what it says on the sign," he replied, looking Jamie up and down skeptically. "You're pretty young to be looking for a private eye. Most of my clients want me to keep tabs on an unfaithful spouse, or find an illegitimate child, but something tells me you aren't a divorcee. What brings you all the way down to Old Town?"

"I was hoping that you could find a friend of mine," he replied, fishing in his pocket for his phone. "She isn't missing. Well, not exactly. Her parents took her off-planet, and I don't know where she went." He pulled up a picture of Liz, handing the phone off to Bradley, who held it up to examine the screen. "I have no way to contact her right now, no address, no number."

"This...this isn't a human," Bradley said, eyeing Jamie curiously.

"I'm aware of that," he replied. "She's a Borealan, and she went back to their homeworld."

"So, you want me to track down an alien that went back to Borealis? That's...what?" he asked, examining the picture again. "Seventy light-years away?"

"That's what I was hoping," Jamie replied with a nod.

"Kid," Bradley began with a sigh, handing the phone back to him. "I operate within the city limits. If this was a teenager who had run away to join a corporate mining op on Ganymede, maybe I could pull some strings, find some info. But Borealis...that's way out of my jurisdiction. I wouldn't even know where to begin."

Jamie placed the phone back in his pocket, his face falling.

"Do you know anyone who could help?" he asked.

"Help find an alien off-world? Nope," Bradley said with a shake of his head. "What you need is Naval Intelligence, not a private detective. Even if a PI did take the case, for the money it would cost to get them all the way out there, you could probably buy your own freighter and fly it there yourself."

"Thanks anyway," Jamie muttered, starting to rise from his seat. A flash of sympathy crossed the detective's face, and he motioned for the boy to sit back down.

"You like this girl, yeah?"

"Yeah," Jamie replied, his cheeks starting to warm. Cross-species relationships weren't exactly common, and it wasn't something he wanted to gush about to a total stranger.

"Have you tried to contact her any other way? I'm guessing her phone isn't working out there, there won't be any coverage, even if you could get through the buffer. Did you try sending her a letter by freighter?"

"That's the issue," Jamie replied, "I have no idea where she went. If I had an address, maybe I could do something, but..."

Bradley pulled up a window on his terminal, Jamie watching the inverted display as he searched for information on Borealis.

"Place is a fucking backwater," he muttered, his eyes scanning the page. "Most of the planet isn't even charted. Do you have an idea of what region she's in, at least?"

"Elysia," he replied. "That's where her family is from, it's the only place I can think of that they might go."

"The planet has an FTL satellite," the detective continued, "and Elysia looks like the most developed region. You got the device ID for her phone?"

"Huh?" Jamie asked. The detective gestured for him to hand over his phone again, tapping at the screen as he searched through the call history.

"There you go, device ID," he said as he leaned over to show Jamie. "When you're on a network, you have an IP address, but every physical device also has a hardware ID. If you can get a message through to Elysia, and she has some kind of data connection, she can receive it. The message will float around on whatever network they have until the correct device connects. I don't know if they even have a public intranet there, but it's your best shot."

"I can't believe it's really that simple!" Jamie exclaimed, a fresh surge of hope perking him up.

"I doubt there's much civilian traffic between Borealis and Earth," Bradley continued, examining the data on his readout. "You could send a message through public channels, and it'll just wait in the satellite's buffer until there's bandwidth available, but who knows how long that might take. There are also companies that operate their own FTL satellites, but those come with a pretty heavy premium."

"Is there another option?" Jamie asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Perhaps," the detective replied, leaning back in his chair. "Maybe I know a guy who works for the Navy, and maybe he can encrypt your message using UNN protocols, bump it up to the top of the queue. It'll cost you," he warned, "but...less than using a commercial satellite." He typed in an address and saved it to Jamie's phone, passing it back to him. "Write your message, then have him send it to this device ID. Make sure to specify that you're sending it to the ID, not the number."

"Thank you, so, so much," Jamie stammered as he rose from the chair to shake the man's hand again. "You have no idea what this means to me."

"I think I have some idea," Bradley replied with a smirk.

"What do I owe you?"

"Eh, nothing," the detective said with a shrug. "You took up ten minutes of my time, it's no problem. Besides, you'll need the money for your message. Better make it a good one, kid."

***

It took Jamie a good two hours to compose his message, this might be his one chance to get across everything that he wanted to say. He told Liz that she was stupid to apologize in the note that she had left him all those months ago, he explained how much he had valued their time together, how he wouldn't trade it for anything.

If she hadn't contacted him so far, it was either because something was preventing her from doing so, or her message was just stuck in the buffer. As such, he didn't expect a reply, but he could always hope. She had promised that she would find a way to reach him if one existed, and Liz was a smart girl, far smarter than he was.

The next step was to get in touch with Bradley's contact at the UNN. If what the detective had said was true, then this person should be able to encrypt his message, passing it off as a higher priority communication so that it could get through the buffer faster. All Jamie had been given was a phone number, audio only, with an anonymous ID. Messing around with the Navy's encrypted communications wasn't a trivial affair, it was probably all kinds of illegal, but what other choice did he have?

He had looked into private satellite services, the technology involved was incredibly complex. The storage devices of two satellites had to be paired in a lab, so that what changes were made in one were instantly reflected in the other, regardless of their distance. It was all quantum mechanics, stuff that Jamie couldn't hope to wrap his head around. One of the satellites then had to be shipped to whatever planet or station needed it. The costs involved were astronomical, and the price of securing a place in the queue was similarly extortionate.

Jamie opened his bedroom door, checking that his parents were still out, then called the number. It rang for a good minute before someone picked up, a garbled voice coming through on the other end. It was being run through a synthesizer, just enough to mask the person's identity. It was hard to tell if it was even male or female.

"Who is this?" the voice demanded.

"I was given this number by...a mutual acquaintance," Jamie began. "They told me that you can get messages through the satellite buffers. Is that true?"

"Five K," the robotic voice replied.

"Five thousand credits?" Jamie asked, trying not to sound too surprised.

"You want a message sent? This is how it goes. You send me the payment, and once I get it, I ask you for the file. I encrypt the file, I bump it up the queue, and it gets sent off. Smaller is better. The larger the file size, the higher the chance someone notices. If it's too big, I won't risk it."

"Alright," Jamie replied. He didn't have five thousand credits, and he had no idea where he was going to get it, but he wasn't about to tell this person that. "I want to send a text file, that's all. A few kilobytes."

"No bank accounts," the voice added, "nothing traceable. You buy online gift cards, you send me the codes."

"I'll need some time to get the money together," Jamie replied.

"I ain't going anywhere," the voice replied, hanging up.

"Five thousand creds," Jamie muttered to himself, staring at his phone. "Where the hell am I going to get that kind of money?"

He was an eighteen-year-old college student, he lived with his parents, he didn't even own a car. He looked around his room, wondering if there was even anything that he could sell. A computer terminal, a game console, a VR kit. His phone was easily the most expensive thing that he owned, but pawning it would defeat the purpose. There was maybe two thousand credits worth of electronics, but that still left him three thousand short of his target.

Maybe he could get a part-time job? Even working minimum wage, he could probably raise the money in a few months. That would leave even less time for schoolwork and practice, he was already having issues in that area, but what else could he do?

***

A few more months crawled by. Jamie had been able to secure a part-time job at a supermarket in a nearby building, and he took all the hours that his employer was legally allowed to give him, squirreling the money away in a savings account. His parents were initially encouraged by what they saw as him taking charge, finding a new direction in life, but his academic performance wasn't improving.

There had still been no word from Liz, and it was coming up on six months since her departure. His desire to contact her had not diminished, and after weeks of tedious work and frantic cramming to keep up with his classes, he managed to raise enough money to pay his contact at the UNN.

It was a surreal feeling to blow all of the money that he had earned on gift cards for online stores, but he soon had a collection of codes ready to send. Once again, he called the number, hoping that it hadn't changed in the interim. He would feel foolish if he had to return to Bradley's office just to ask for a new one.

He breathed a sigh of relief as the call connected, that same distorted voice coming through on the other end.

"You got the money?" the contact asked. They had probably made a note of Jamie's number the last time he had called.

"I got the codes, just like you asked," he replied. "What do I do now?"

"Send them over," they insisted, Jamie opening up a text chat. There was a chance that this person would simply take the untraceable codes and just hang up, there was no guarantee that he would even send the message, but Bradley had seemed sincere. All that Jamie could do now was trust him. He took a minute to copy over the codes, then sent the message. There was a delay as the stranger presumably cashed them in, checking that they were real. Just when Jamie was starting to think that he had been scammed, the voice crackled again.

"Send me the file."

Jamie complied, copying a simple twenty-kilobyte text file into the chat window. There was another delay, then the robotic voice spoke once more.

"It's away, priority one. Should get sent in the next few hours."

"How will I know when it arrives?" Jamie asked.

"What do you want, a tracking number?" the voice scoffed. "This isn't a post office, kid. You sent your message to a device ID, so it'll get there when it gets there. The rest is up to you."

They hung up, Jamie trying to stay positive despite the lightness of his wallet. The message was away, this was the culmination of everything that he had worked for over the last few months. All that he could do now was hope that Liz received it, and if he was doubly lucky, that she had some way to reply.

He felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. The pain of being separated from Liz had not diminished, but he was now confident that he had done everything that he reasonably could to reach her. There was some small comfort in that.

***

Jamie raced along the oval track beneath an overcast sky, his mind moving just as quickly as his feet. After a year of waiting, there was still no word from Liz. His message must have been sent by now, and she knew his address, his phone number had not changed. Was it possible that there was no service where she had wound up, that even finding a computer terminal in a public library was out of the question? Could her parents have taken away her phone so that his message had never reached it? Was Borealis such a backwater that she couldn't so much as find a freighter that would deliver a letter for her?