Previous Chapters:
Chapter 0, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5
He hadn’t put a voice lock on his bracelet.
Why hadn’t he done that? How could he have been so stupid? So thoughtless? And why had he trusted a child enough to show her how it works? Nobody could predict what havoc she might wreak, once she figured out the commands stored on his bracelet. She already knew “levitate”, what if she figured out something more dangerous?
There were also no weight restrictions programmed into his device. Sophie had full access to everything he had created, and she clearly had no conscience.
The bullet wound in his leg, still not fully healed, sent out flashes in pain as he was running in the direction of where Sophie had gone. Out of the small forest, into the adjacent park.
Panting, he stopped at a park bench, leaned on it with one hand, and looked around. Children were playing. Adults were having conversations or looking at their phones. Dogs were running around. But there was no trace of Sophie anywhere.
She had seen him use the invisibility formula, so she knew that it was a possibility. Finn cursed himself for fixing the problem he had encountered: The formula no longer caused the light to be bent around the user, it projected an image of the space behind, like an overlay. The invisible person would vanish upon applying the formula but would still be able to see.
Sophie had likely figured out how to activate this one.
“Fucking shit!” A mom passed by with her two children. Her disapproving stare would have made Finn apologize under normal circumstances, but this time, he ignored it. There were more important things than not teaching children swear words!
Oh, how even that brought his thoughts back to Sophie and her insistence that it was unfair only adults could swear. Little brat.
Over and over again, his eyes scanned the surroundings, hoping to spot something that could give away Sophie’s location, but it was pointless. She was gone.
Finn’s hand started cramping, and he realized that he was still holding Sophie’s bracelet, tightly wrapped into his fist. Its metal edges were digging into the soft skin of his palm.
“I have to go home and come up with a plan”, he mumbled. “I have to find her.”
Turning back the time would have been the best option, but Finn was still not ready to mess with that again. A voice inside his brain kept telling him it would be a horrible, horrible idea to turn back time again, and that he would not want to deal with the consequences.
What consequences? That wasn’t sure, but if you mess with time, time has a way of messing back, in unpredictable ways. And he still didn’t know enough about this simulation to even guess what might happen if he turned back time for more than a week.
But what were the other options?
There had to be a way to track down Sophie, or ideally the bracelet itself. Maybe she didn’t carry it with her the whole time? Would she leave it at home during school? There was no way of knowing.
In a science fiction movie, the bracelet would have given off a specific radioactive signature that Finn could have tracked, but reality didn’t do Finn this favor.
“But maybe … maybe I can change that.” What if he changed reality in that regard? It was all he had been doing the whole time, after all. Changing the bracelet’s physical properties shouldn’t pose that much of a problem.
Then again, what kind of radioactive signature could he use? He didn’t want anyone to die of radiation poisoning … and how to detect the signature? Finn let out a frustrated scream. Why did it have to be so difficult? Why was there no manual?
Deep breaths. He had to take deep breaths and calm down, being agitated wouldn’t bring him anywhere. What were the facts?
Number one: Sophie had the bracelet.
Number two: She knew that it could be activated with the right words but didn’t know which words would work.
Number three: To track down the bracelet, he had to come up with something.
He pushed these three facts around in his head while playing with Sophie’s bracelet in one hand.
Sophie’s bracelet, designed to be similar to his own. They both contained the same mechanisms, the same circuits, the same structures. They were copies.
“Same repels same. But what if it didn’t? What if the two bracelets pulled towards each other? But not too hard, I don’t want it to come flying towards me at high speed. It should be more like a pull … like a … like a divining rod, showing me the direction in which I have to go!”
If the bracelet could pull softly but steadily towards the other one, Finn would have an effective way to track down his own – without giving people radiation poisoning.
He grabbed a stack of paper and a pencil and began to make the necessary calculations.
With how much strength should the bracelet pull? Should it increase? No, that would mean that further away, the pull might not even be noticeable. Should it take into account buildings? Finn scratched his head. He would have to add maps of the city for that to work. Sure, following streets would be easier than having to figure out how to get around himself, but he wasn’t sure how to put that into a formula.
“Don’t make it more complicated than it has to be, Finn”, he scolded himself. “Easy formulas. Minimal changes to the simulations. You don’t want anything unexpected to happen.”
His bullet wound ached again as if it was trying to support this statement by reminding him of the worst time when he didn’t consider all variables.
Should his own bracelet, currently in Sophie’s hands, pull too? But then she might notice something is amiss, no, he didn’t want to risk that.
Hours passed by, during which he furiously scribbled, erased, calculated, and recalculated until he was finally happy with the result.
He programmed the formula into his machine and nervously watched the blue light, fearing an error.
Then the light turned green, and the bracelet in his hand started slightly tugging in one clear direction.
Sophie wouldn’t be able to hide anymore.
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