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Ripples from the Weather Aggregator 
by Sean Monaghan

In the line at Heathrow, Jaclyn kept seeing suspicious characters. Any one of these people could be after her.

Once she was in the air, it would be all right. Everything would be fine.

All she had to do was get off the ground.

She wondered if they could touch her once she was through passport control. Did they have people on the other side? Surely not.

Ahead of her in the line a heavy family in bad layered clothing huffed along. The nine-year-old in an Iron Man tee-shirt over a white turtleneck, complained that he was cold. The baby, over Mom’s shoulder, burped and gurgled, staring at Jaclyn. Someone further back was eating a falafel wrap; she could smell it. The buzz of people wafted through the wide, high terminal building. Businessmen, backpackers, retirees.

Who was it? Who was going to find her?

When she reached the front of the line the Air Canada clerk took her passport disk and called up the flight. Jaclyn leaned in towards to the screen facing the line to keep her name and destination from being broadcast to everyone. Mostly no one would care, but someone was watching.

“Montreal today, Miss Platt?” English accent. Jaclyn still wasn’t used to the odd vowels.

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting like this. You could have taken the first-class queue.” The woman leaned out onto the counter, pointing along.

Jaclyn had forgotten.

“Come down, we’ll take care of you properly.”

“It’s fine. I don’t have luggage. My employer bought me the ticket. I’m just not used to ... ”

The clerk smiled, showing faintly snaggled teeth. Not unattractive, but could do with a little work. “That’s just fine Miss Platt. You make sure you go to the lounge through there, put your feet up.” She handed Jaclyn her passport.

The three hundred meters to the passport control door felt like a hundred miles.

All she knew was that Tim had phoned at 2 a.m. and told her to get to Montreal. Fast.

“I don’t understand,” she’d said, bleary and sleepy.

“Belinda’s leaked your paper. They’ll take you in.”

“Who?”

But Tim had hung up. Her bedside display had delivered the flight details, Heathrow, 6 a.m. She’d gotten in her car right away.

• • •

In the lounge she went over her presentations. Her paper was simply a weather pattern aggregator. Shift bodies of air with subtle effects. Move heat out of the atmosphere into the ocean, or vice-versa. Mitigate those monsoons; send rain to the drought areas.

No practical real-world applications. You didn’t want to experiment with the planet, even when all the models worked. It was simply theoretical. Tim had told her to just keep working on it. The university was happy with her work, so long as she continued with a minimum of teaching — which amounted to three guest lectures a semester on meteorology theory.

From the open buffet she got herself a fruit bowl and sat, glancing back through his emails. He called her work compelling and controversial. It would interest both governments and terrorists. She’d thought private industry more, but the ramifications were broad.

It had been difficult to believe that anyone would threaten her over it. Her car had been keyed, her office broken into. Someone had tried to torch her house. Police called it local hoodlums. They had their hands full with murders and riots anyway.

Continued... 

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© 2014 Sean Monaghan

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Jinn
Deficit
The Line of Fate
No Sleep till Deadtown
Gladys Collins
The Cloud
Pigs Fry; Pigs Fly
Ripples From The Weather Aggregator

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