The Quantum Prophecy, Ryan Matthew Harker [books under 200 pages txt] 📗

to catch the name of the store. Even though it was night it had been late enough in the twisted course of his purposeless journey that it had managed to find perch in his mangled consciousness. When read off the broken sign which hung from only one corner it said, “Smoked Wood: Natures Gifts and Oddities.”
Nearly everything in the pouch had come from that little shop of what- days ago, a week? The lock-blade knife, a straight razor (he never knew when he'd run into some women...eh?), a waterproof container of wooden matches, two Bic lighters, and a small box of dental floss which could be useful for all kinds of purposes.
The only things he kept in the bag that were not from the store, purely for sentimental reasons, were his top two canines which had fallen out when his longer more dagger-like pair had grown in permanently.
Candlelite finished his musing and with the rabbit skinned he ate his meal raw. This was something that would have made him ill to just think about a few weeks ago. Though it did not bother him much now he still preferred his meals cooked but he could not risk the attention a fire would draw with his trip-trailing bastards somewhere in the area.
After a satisfied belch he sighed and rose to resume his aimless trek once again.
The sun was high in the sky and just starting its descent as the day moved into mid-afternoon. The wind shifted out of the east and started blowing warmly out of the south.
Candlelite observed that he was moving somewhat north northwesterly when something queer ahead of him caught his gaze. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end as his mind tried to decipher what exactly it was he was gazing on. The trees that the tree line in front of him consisted of were slightly odd to say the least and as he edged closer he was able to begin to make crude assumptions about the strange trees. He gathered himself, his hair standing down, and strode toward the nearest tree in order to observe it more closely. Reaching out he tentatively traced the distinct border between the consistencies in bark texture, wondering what could possibly be the cause behind this strange occurrence.
This is what Candlelite observed about the trees; it seemed that through some occurrence the trees had aged somewhat peculiarly, or not aged somewhat peculiarly, depending on how one looked at it. It was like there was some kind of invisible border and on the side he was in all of the forest was normal, while on the other side the forest appeared to be many years younger. You see, depending in its path of growth, roughly half of the tree he was looking at had aged and the other half had not and this gave the trees that grew on this boundary a warped, twisted look that did not appear to be natural. This was definitely a mystery he wanted to get to the bottom of. No, it was more than that; this was a mystery he felt strangely compelled to get to the bottom of.
So with that strange new conviction this strange young man set out following the unnatural border through the trees.

*****

Max looked up when the soft alarm began to sound. He had sensors rigged up along the entire perimeter of the WurmDome which was what he had dubbed the stasis field created by the massive amount of unknown energy dispersed throughout the region. He had the sensors set to go off when triggered by a certain heat signature produced by anything even remotely resembling a human being. Therefore an ape could set it off if not for the other sensors he had also installed to measure the specific amount of bioelectrical energy emitted by any trespasser. When coupled with the thermal radar this proved to be an almost one hundred percent reliable detection system warning against any intruders of the human persuasion entering what he had come to think of as his domain.
Well the red light was flashing now. He pushed off from the desk he sat at and rode his cushy swivel chair across the floor to the row of monitors opposite from him. He got there just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of something blurry go skating off camera.
Now to see who this mysterious visitor is, not a problem, he thought to himself. Just a push of a button and presto, rewind is initiated!
The screen showed a well-built man strolling across the screen. Just before the image was lost again Max hit pause and sat thoughtfully studying his visitor.
The man was Caucasian, blonde hair, blue eyes, definitely of an Irish/English descent. He was also; Max could not help but notice, almost nude and this lead to the fact that the young man was well built; with good muscle tone, he could have very well been an athlete of some sort.
Max sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes thoughtfully behind his spectacles.
Where was this person going? Judging from his appearance it hardly seemed feasible that he could know anything about Max or the Complex. What little news he could gather from what remained of the Global Broadcasts had led him to conclude that what was left of the world had either been conditioned into forgetting or had never been taught anything even close to, what in the beginning had been termed ‘The Quantum Conundrum’.
So it seemed this young man was just some random wanderer. It did seem somewhat strange to Max however that besides hardly owning a stitch of clothing, his only thing by way of possessions seemed to be some sort of pouch hanging from ‘round his neck. Not your typical traveler then.
Dr. Kimbal sighed loudly and pulled himself gently out of his chair. Despite outward appearances, inwardly he was beginning to feel his almost 100 years. Not all of them surely but getting on towards fifty or sixty of them he guessed.
He meandered over to a large coffeepot and poured himself a dollop into a cracked and stained mug that he always kept on hand. Once it was about a quarter full he turned to the bottle of bourbon sitting next to the coffeepot and proceeded to fish the other three-quarters of a cup out of it and into the mug. One good thing about the WurmDome, he thought as he took a swig, was that he could consume larger quantities of his favorite beverage with absolutely no (or at the least, very little) collateral damage to the internal workings of his weathered body.
Well, in his present situation there was not a whole lot he could do to monitor the young intruder. He would only be able to follow his progress with the other sensors he had positioned around the Complex if the man crossed through them. At one time Max had spent almost an entire year doing almost nothing but working on the designs of both sensors and being completely unqualified to do the job had not deterred him much. Learning the ins and outs of genetic engineering had not left him much time for anything else but he had always been particularly fond of anything that had to do with electronics. Ever since he was a little kid of no more than seven or so, he had been tearing apart any electronics and putting them back together again. Anything and everything that could be assimilated on the subject was. Then Max, in the latter years of high school, had decided to put his passion on the back burner and like a fool, followed some little flirt of a girl into a field of study that really meant nothing to him. But the knowledge of his younger years never left him. And the Complex had a very large, very complete technical library with books on almost every subject under the sun. Between those two sources Max was able to use that year cobbling together the very same sensors that he relied on today.
He smiled to himself while thinking on those years gone by. Remembering the following six months it took him to put up the sensors also amused him. He had set them up in concentric circles with twelve ever widening circles in all, spreading the full sixty miles of the WurmDome in any direction from the Complex.
So Dr. Max Kimbal sipped his coffee and started to watch the printout on the Wormhole as he settled back to wait for the second string of sensors to be tripped.

*****

It took Candlelite many days to travel the entire circumference of the strange wall and from what he could tell it ran in an almost perfect circle for hundreds of miles. He knew his trip was at an end when his sense of smell informed him that he was crossing a trail of his own scent at least two and a half weeks old. In all that time he had found nothing stranger than what had already been evidenced in the trees. Stalking off away from the young trees and deeper into the old, he decided to make camp and proceed in the morning.
Upon waking with the dawn of a new day he quickly shook the accumulated dew of morning from his bare skin and stepped through a forest lit with the gray of a sun not quite yet to rise. He briskly made his way towards the barrier of his curiosity. In making his journey around this thing he had yet to cross into the younger section of forest. Some instinct older than the ones newly arisen seemed to cry out against his entrance through this obvious curtain into the past.
Looking out at the young forest in front of him the cursed man shrugged back the shadow of superstition and stepped out of the old world and into the young. Crossing the invisible barrier Candlelite felt a slight tingle pass through his entire being that caused all of the hair on his body to stand on end briefly and then nothing, everything was normal again. He proceeded with caution, uncertain of these strangely familiar surroundings. Every now and again he would catch a fleeting glimpse of some small bird or woodland creature as it fled his approach. His progress was quick for he only stopped long enough to hunt or rest briefly and his journey became more comfortable as time passed with nothing out of the ordinary happening.
Candlelite was finally stopped by hunger, which until then had not bothered him because of a rather large meal he had eaten the night before. He resumed his trek after pausing for a quick lunch, all the while marveling at the apparent youth of the vegetation around him. He had never before been in a forest of this age and found its lushness rather refreshing though he found himself marveling less and less at his surroundings as the newness of it all faded to commonplace.
Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. Not moving he cast his senses around him like a net as he searched for the abrupt cause of his wariness. For two minutes he stood still as a statue before he dared to make a single step. Lost within his senses of smell and hearing he failed to see the small branch below his falling foot. This was Candlelite’s undoing. The dry wood snapped with a loud crack and his position was revealed. There was a brief rush of wind and with a roar a giant paw came crashing into his head. His brain reeling he went flying through the air, only a quick glance showing his assailant. A grizzly of tremendous size stood instantly over his battered body. Standing full length on hind legs the