Now & Again Read Online Free Page B

workers busy in cubicles, commuters racing by on freeways, passengers boarding flights, and angles into corner offices in high rise buildings. Everything was in high definition sharpness and in full spectrum color and yet, the overall impact was disturbing; the arena felt so public and the images displayed, so private.
    Taken as a whole, the screens represented the immediate, ongoing slices of the branching multiverse. The images were captured in-real-time by less-than-bacteria sized nanorobots and retained within the massive underground memories of the Reivers Corporation archive. The archive itself was the single biggest product
the Reive
produced, as well as its most irreplaceable resource. The ultimate relational database, everything that happened at
the Reive
connected in some inescapable way to the archive.
    Within the hierarchy of
the Reive
, the arena floor technicians held a critical but undervalued place. Perceived more as brawn than brains, each floor tech, or often more than one, was aligned with unique teams inside the corporation. A floor tech’s investigative work was driven by the needs and projects set by specialists above him, who were committed to one of the many endeavors currently competing for archive search time. Similar to the highly charged buyers and sellers in the pit at the New York exchange,
the Reive’s
floor techs skillfully traded for time and space on the powerful workstations in the arena.
    Alarms in the archive meant a serious degradation of one of the bundled signals initiated by the nanos and propagated through the membrane that enclosed one of the myriad of timelines. At least, that was what they traditionally meant, and why the techs dubbed them
branestorms
. Formerly, alarms were exceedingly rare and typically of short duration, with full event capture smoothly resumed. In fact, many older techs, now senior techs or section supervisors, could recall years with no alarms at all. In recent days, however, the warbling of a branestorm was progressing from a weekly to a nearly daily occurrence, and the end results were troubling.
    This time the alarm was focused on a medium height screen whose images were rapidly distorting and losing coherence. The first responders quickly paired off, each with different diagnostic equipment. One tech probed the connections while the other waved a handheld sensor device and noted the readings. More techs raced up just as the screen suddenly devolved into digital snow and, just as abruptly, the alarm switched to a prolonged, single tone – which indicated a total loss of signal.
    All the techs stared in shock at the hissing screen. Sweating and out-of-breath, a senior tech in a tie bustled up to the group and paused dumbfounded before the disrupted screen. He dug out a palm-sized device, manipulated it for a moment, and then watched as the screen went black. Discouraged, he continued tapping on his tiny screen until the tone cut off. The small group assembled beside a nearby workstation to debrief when the sudden warbling cry of a new alarm scattered them again.
    Two levels above the arena, Quyron Shur, a slender Asian woman, hurried down a transparent hallway overlooking the arena. Glancing below, she scanned the walls of screens to locate the display that had triggered the second alarm, but couldn’t see it. She stopped beside a door and pressed her palm against a subtle rectangle in the wall. The door opened with a soft pop and she quickly entered one of the balconied offices. Inside, there were transparent walls all around, although a few sections of glass had been tinted to provide a sense of privacy. Except for a wide, multi-function workstation near an inner wall, the office layout was stark in its simplicity. Quyron smoothly crossed the room, waved the computer awake, and activated multiple, razor-thin screens as she swiveled her mesh chair beneath her.
    Hurriedly fluttering a hand near the central display as an ID sign-in, she scowled. “Hello?