The Futility

Chapter 02 - Bouquet of Coincidences

📍 Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, US.

🗓️ Six days after Kamioka's incident

Anna opens her eyes and looks at the clock above the television, which reads thirteen minutes to ten o'clock in the morning. She feels really well and refreshed. It's the first time she's had a decent sleep since her departure from Japan four days ago. She is lying in bed in a hospital gown when she notices a bouquet of purple Hydrangea flowers and a white card with a handwritten note from Don Mitchell on the desk beside her. She puts her palm covering her mouth, holding her laugh. The doctors said that she was just exhausted from shock and had mild dehydration. The nurse comes in and tells her she is free to go home today.

While she is packing her clothes into her bags, she grabs the remote to turn up the television volume. She watches a news replay of the Japanese Prime Minister holding an international press conference about the Kamioka incident. He is conveying his condolences to all the victims and their families and stated that the incident was caused by a failure in the facility's power source. He vowed that a loss like this would never happen again in the future, especially in Japan. Swiftly, Anna got out of her hospital room while scoffing at the prime minister's speech, believing it all as an alibi to hide the truth.

📍 Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

It's almost noon, Anna walks through Harvard Yard while texting Don, one of her closest friends, a computer science student. He says that he is at Widener Library with another friend. Don waves his hand and asks how she is when they meet inside. Anna is saying that she has a serious matter to talk about. She is showing him encrypted databases on the laptop of her presumed dead supervisor, Antoine Voges, when she notices Don's friend, Miles Knox wearing an unusual cloth. She's asking him what he's wearing. In his long white robe and keffiyeh, Miles says that he is still caught up in the hype of The Line's fourth anniversary. Don explains that a lot happened when she was in the hospital. He says that she needs to catch her breath first.

📍 Sommerville neighborhood, a mile from Harvard University.

Later that night, at Anna's house in Somerville, one mile from Harvard, Don, and Miles who's still dressed in traditional Arabic attire, were attempting to decipher Voges' databases on his laptop, the one Voges handed her before jumping out of the helicopter. Miles is connecting several cables from Voges' laptop into his while Don explains that the incident in Kamioka coincidentally occured on the same day as the fourth anniversary of The Line, and before the Japanese Prime Minister's press conference, The Line's founder, Ahmedin Sufi, who is also the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, addressed this issue as part of his speech as soon as the media made it public. Making Ahmedin Sufi as the first person on the international stage to address this issue. Miles teases Anna, saying that she knows nothing about The Line. Then he is frantically explaining that The Line is a smart linear city in Saudi Arabia. The most liveable city on this earth right now, without cars or pollution, a quintessence of humanity's future habitat. He adds that Ahmedin is one of humanity's true heroes.

Don is sleeping on a couch, Miles is still trying to decipher Voges databases, and Anna is watching Ahmedin Sufi's speech about The Line's advancement to prosper its society and how dangerous scientific discoveries could be in the hands of negligent forces, then addressing the Kamioka incident. Then Miles throws a popcorn at Anna; she paused the video that she was watching and put her phone on the table beside Voges' laptop, and Miles asks her to wake Don up. He was successful in removing the databases' encryption. Start by showing them a picture of a man in a black leather coat with a little girl on his lap, sitting on a park bench. Anna notices that the man in the picture is Antoine Voges when he was young, while Don asks her about the little girl. Anna believes she is his daughter. They saw several other pictures of Voges before his research in Kamioka, including his wedding where Minoru is present, his daughter's birthday party, and his attendance at his daughter's graduation ceremony at a really young age. Anna concludes that Tori Voges, Antoine Voges' daughter, is a very gifted brilliance, while looking at the latest picture of her, doing research at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Then Miles asks them to prepare themselves; he shows them a partition of databases full of highly elaborate theoretical physics equations. Anna is wondering what they are all about. Miles says don't ask him, and Don adds that he has never seen equations like them before. Anna promptly stands up, walks in a circle across her living room, and begins to sum up everything she knows in an annoyed manner. She's yelling about what kind of equations those are, why Voges never told her, and why, if he loves her daughter, he jumped out of the helicopter and ran toward an obvious disaster. Miles interrupts to say that Kamioka's power source isn't located on the eastern side of the facility. Anna yells again that Miles is right and also questions what Minoru's big idea is. Don asks both of them to calm down, but Anna is suddenly tripped by the long cables that connecting Voges' laptop to Miles'. Voges' laptop and her phone fall into her body while she's lying on the floor. In front of her face, inexplicably, the laptop screen that is still showing a picture of Tori starts glitching in a purple and black pixelated appearance while generating awful malfunction sounds. Anna has a pale face as she remembers the purple Hydrangea flower from the hospital mixed with the strange dark purple sky from the Kamioka's incident.

Don, with Anna's supple body, assists her in getting up and sitting her on the couch while Miles rushes to fix the glitch. Don asks if she's all right, and she slowly picks up her phone from the floor, which has paused on Ahmedin's face. Anna asks Miles to move away from the laptop while juxtaposing her phone's screen with a picture of Tori on the laptop, and then she says that Ahmedin and Tori have the same faces. Miles yells to Anna that she is talking nonsense-how come two unrelated people have the same face? Anna answers him by saying that he should imagine Ahmedin without his beard and keffiyeh and Tori without her glasses. Again, Don asks both of them to lower their voices, telling Anna that it is just a coincidence while suggesting her to take a rest. Then Anna says that she needs to go to France in order to meet Tori and tell her about his father's equations. Don asks her why France, and she says the CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where Tori Voges does her research, because she believes whatever those equations are, have something to do with Kamioka's incident. Miles adds that the Large Hadron Collider is located exactly in France-Switzerland border. She smoothly goes upstairs while saying that she just remembers someone who could help. Miles stares at Don asking what's wrong with her. Don answers that she just needs another long decent sleep.

###