Kairos
Reason in Man is rather like God in the world. ~ Thomas Aquinas, Opuscule II, De Regno
1.
Exordium
Sherlock woke all at once, no trace of unconsciousness, no unwanted grogginess filming over the rising spin of his mind. He remained still, eyes kept gently shut against what he immediately grasped was total darkness and total silence. He allowed his consciousness to filter along his body, checking for injuries, for information, for immediate threats, for another presence in proximity. He allowed irritation – but examination of the mistakes that led him here could wait while other observations concluded.
He was naked and upright – of that, he was certain immediately. His bare, pale rump leaned back against firm, if scratchy, support. There was a slight, damp chill hanging against his slender form, just humid enough to tamp his dark and unruly curls against his thin face. A shiver threatened to ripple across his flesh at this input and he ignored it as quickly as it tempted, though he thanked the ghost of sensation for teaching him that he was functionally uninjured. Muscles shifted imperceptibly and found minor bruises as they moved. He assessed his surrounding space and found the air around him enclosed and mostly stale – mostly. There was a wisp of outer air... but first. His nostrils flared and picked up dirt and clay loam.
Yes – small particle size, aroma clean and preternaturally fresh . Worker's loam, taken from a dig site, probably east end or (Springfield/Dartford/Ipswich), they've all had a great deal of rain recently and a tarp – yes, yes, faint hint of industrial plastic there, oils and grease and turpentine, under the cold and mossy freshness – couldn't keep it all out. Damp, adds a certain percentage of weight. Reminds me of Cornwall – material for rammed earth? Irrelevant tangent – probably – file for later. More relevant: Quite hefty, really. Feet immobilized, air felt three and a half inches below the knees, packed tight I presume, pending a test.
Now. Other scent – wood... treated -scratchy, as noted- pine, recently cut, enclosure. Custom cut packing crate, my height and width plus depth, roughly three additional inches square save for above, where there is only one. Hanh, waiting so long for a trim's done more than annoy John, it's spared me a clue where my hair brushes the wood. More a coffin, really, but cheaper. How dramatic.
All this in a space of seconds.
Sherlock wiggled a toe experimentally and found no give against the thickly packed dirt. With a tiny sag of annoyance, he allowed his eyes to open against the darkness.
As expected, he saw nothing. Not even the faintest outline of the wood before him. He brought up one arm normally but found just enough space between him and the borders of his enclosure to bring his hand up to the height of his hip. Bending his elbow until it connected with his side walls and leaning back allowed him to brush the hand up across himself and verify the inch of clearance above him. His new boundaries firmly established, he relaxed his legs again and assessed a tiny change in sensation. Straightened. Sagged. Leaned very slightly from side to side. Came to the simple and obvious conclusion.
I am suspended, likely by a heavy industrial chain, in a tight, custom made pine box, not airtight, my movement purposefully restricted. Tiny gaps between front and side planks allowing me oxygen indicate the room containing my enclosure is wholly dark. I am also, thus far, utterly alone.
Now the next assessment: How did I get here?
He let his eyes flutter closed again and stilled his mind, preparing to reconstruct his before with perfect clarity.
. . .
"What precisely, John, is a Honey Boo-Boo? Is it some new urban legend?" Sherlock searched the blank face of his roommate to perhaps read a shorter, simpler answer and found none.
"What?" came the useful response. John Watson did that annoying little head shake that he favored when seeming to avoid giving Sherlock a simple answer. Sherlock paused his memory for a moment to more deeply examine the expression with bemused distaste. Was his question really so difficult to parse? Regardless. A detail. He resettled himself within his prior self and resumed the recollection.
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Groceries. You put it forth to me this morning that I ought be the one to tend this minor yet insufferably annoying chore and so I did, forcing myself to endure some tepidly boring young clerk who would not shut up about this phenomena. Her tone suggested mild horror. What is it? Some specter? A new La Llorona? The Morrigan herself?" He allowed frustration to creep into his voice. It wasn't that he cared, precisely, but someone knew and was affected by some fact that he did not, even if he should need that fact for no longer than the second it would take to learn it.
"It's a child, Sherlock. It." John pulled a hand down over his face and sank deeper into the slowly decaying lounger. Newspaper crinkled against his thigh, itself still wrapped in an ugly tartan bathrobe. "That's an arse way to start. Little American girl. Bit plump, if I may be rude. Family's presented as a train wreck, but honestly, they're supposed to be quite sweet and loving. Charming chavs, if you like. Crap telly, state style. Coming over with some rubbish new channel at some point, apparently."
Sherlock gave him a long, cool look. "Do people care about such things, really?"
"I don't know, Sherlock, I wasn't the one who watched uncountable bloody hours of crap daytime telly in a single stretch last winter." A tight little smile accompanied the shot before John pulled the newspaper back up to shield his face from any verbal return.
Ninety-three and a half. I couldn't stomach the midseason recap of Prince's show, the new narrator was far too unctuous. He did not disrupt the memory with this information, much as he had not offered it at the time. Seemed tactically irresponsible.
Sherlock paused the memory again and examined the room for anything out of joint, moving himself out of place to consider the newspaper in John's hands. The top headline read: NEW PARLIAMENTARY TALKS UPSET RADICALS AND RACISTS ALIKE,while a secondary in only a slightly smaller font held some breathless hyperbole about a starlet's plastic surgery. The Daily Mail, hurrah and hurray. He moved on, assessed the short pile of mail. Three bills, four pieces of junk, a catalogue, some note from Mrs. Hudson, a narrow blank envelope – he paused and looked at that last again. Damn, forgot to look at that more thoroughly earlier. He pursed his lips and considered. There was nothing he could do with it now without adding speculation to the carefully reconstructed event, so he filed the image of it away with a mental asterisk.
He let himself move, an intangible wraith amidst the frozen moment. From the kitchen door he identified the scent of cheap coffee, weak tea, a day old crust of bread with jam on it (blackberry, jar's still open in the fridge), and something more sour in a bin. Chicken papers. Garbage to be gathered that day. Unimportant.
The window was cracked open very slightly in the main room where John sat in stillness. Sherlock moved to it, glanced out on reflex but saw nothing but a fragmented piece of architecture across the way. The rest was empty void. He could populate the memory with the rest of the scenery, but it was a pointless expenditure of mental energy. The void did not concern him. Nor did the entwined wafting smells of a trash bin below and vehicle exhaust. Nothing useful there, no missed clues.
He stepped into himself again and let the memory continue, mentally glazing over as John responded to another simple question with weary sarcasm. Really, why was conversation with the man so bloody hard sometimes?
"You'd rather I went out, then?" Sherlock asked, stretching out his arms in a snappish gesture of irritation. "Let you alone, since I'm apparently being difficult by some strange metric of your design."
"Yes, Sherlock, I would bloody love that." John remained hunched down behind the newspaper, but the clenched knuckles at its edges belied the irritated expression. "Stay out for lunch, would you? I'm due to be stood up by a date by then." He sighed, shook the paper meaninglessly.
Sherlock shook his head as he grabbed his coat and tugged it on. "She will, of course. I overhead the phone call. The conclusion is so clearly foregone that even you've observed it. Why waste the time?"
"You. Overheard. My-"
Sherlock missed the rest of the rising statement by sailing out the door, coat flapping behind him. He'd already calculated how it ended, although in his mind's reflection, he might have allowed the other man a bit of conversational closure for his own sake. Then he tossed the thought aside.
. . .
Sherlock ignored a few hundred meters of rambling sidewalk travel by mentally fast-forwarding through it. The usual vehicles, public buses, and CCTV units had populated the street, leaving no interesting information to mull over. Home considered carefully, the only other thing he wanted from this controlled memory was the two minutes before his next memory of an abrupt awakening in the dark.
. . .
He froze the memory again with a flash of deepening irritation with himself. In a fit of pique, he was just about to duck down a side alley past a sandwich shop that he knew was under-observed by the CCTVs. Fourteen separate phone messages sat ignored on his cell, each one from Mycroft and each one almost certain to be indescribably boring. The notion of going unobserved even for a handful of seconds – even as he knew it was unlikely Mycroft had anyone wasting their time watching over him that particular afternoon – was a tempting one.
Seven seconds total. That's what a normally-walked course through the alley and a blind corner onto the next street would buy him for privacy. Seven seconds of symbolically thumbing his nose, or maybe even a half minute of lazy amble, if he chose.
Time moved again, molasses as he studied each second for long minutes. His feet chose the amble, his face turned up to a grey sky and closed windows in featureless brick walls. The air was redolent with garbage, human urine, and a gasping waft of fresh air fighting for a place to stay. Classy, but it was freedom of a sort.
A shadow drifted over him from behind. Quick-moving, average height, slender silhouette mangled by a long, thick coat slightly heavier than the weather demanded. Sherlock began to turn slightly to get a glimpse of what was not yet a determined threat to his past self – just another traveler. Observing himself in the now, Sherlock tried to get a glimpse of what he had long since realized was indeed just such a threat. The figure hung in shadow, the light behind him, challenging the details of his memory.
Steps charged towards him from the front – slow time made each thud of the feet rumble forever as heavy boots crunched against cracking concrete. Sherlock turned as fast as he could, his past-self catching up to his realizations and jerking to the side. The frontal assailant adapted to that, and slammed hard into him, knocking them both to the ground.
The figure behind caught up, and strong (bare!) hands grabbed at Sherlock's arms.
Total height of first man is six and one, the charger shorter and stockier at five seven. Hands are long, gnarled evidence of several breakages and sprains. Fighters both. White males, both late thirties... turn the hand... turn the hand before I pass out... what is that?
Memory stretched forever as he examined the fragment of an identifying tattoo. Circular fragment, rough Latin inscription, not the full word – LLVM. Central figure, multiple legs. I've seen something like this before, but not quite. Masonic resemblance, yes. Come now, pull up that sleeve a little more -
Time oozed. The sleeve did not co-operate. In fact, as the tall man bent down over his prone form, the tattoo slipped further away from view. The memory came to a natural end as the stockier man jammed a syringe into Sherlock's neck and pressed the plunger.
He fell into nothingness, and opened his eyes into the blackened present.
. . .
Not much to go on, is it? Sherlock stared fixedly at the wooden planks he knew to be just inches from his face. Damn. He pursed his lips and ignored the urge to blame John Watson for his current troubles – not that sheer spite and weariness might not cause a sharp remark later (he assumed there would be a later, of course), but it wouldn't do him any good now.
He considered his observations for a while, then got bored. He wiggled, feeling the tiny sway and, more importantly, the blood move in his legs. He waggled. Then he got really bored.
"Hello?" he said, his voice plummy and bright. "Seem to be a bit boxed in. Anything? Anyone?"
Nothing.
"Could I at least get a torch and a magazine?"
Nothing.
"Well, shit," he muttered, slouching as best he could into a halfway sort of but not quite seated position. He thought about pi for a while.
. . .
Fourteen and a half minutes passed since he broke the silence. He'd given up on numbers and moved on to imagining violin practice (it wasn't going well, much to his annoyance) when something changed.
He narrowed his eyes and immediately located it. A tiny red LED dot, visible between the side planks of his box, on the far side of what he realized was a quite large room.
"You are bored now, sir. This is good. We can discuss more pleasant alternatives for your energies." The voice was deep and rich and nearly accent-less, rolling forth from a clear speaker set close to the box. He detected notes of upper class strident and nasal tones anyway. European schooling. Not England. Germany? Norway? Austria? He didn't have enough yet to narrow it down. Meanwhile, he kept silent.
"Mr. Holmes, we have an irresistible proposition for you. It is simple. Solve for us a practical issue and you will be unharmed. More importantly, others will also be unharmed. We recognize that you will be reluctant to bend for your own well being, so there have been other arrangements."
"This is already uninteresting. You should probably just kill me and have done."
"You will live regardless. Your housekeeper, your roommate, your living family. We will tear through those as you wait. But threats are indeed dull. Let us instead discuss the real carrot."
Sherlock arched an eyebrow.
"You will be given a hypothetical scenario to examine. One room, one chance to access it, one target at its core to eliminate. We will give you all the relevant information you need to assess the situation, and we have already given you peace, quiet, and a chance to give it your undivided attention.
"Should the plan you devise work... others will live. Many others. In exchange, one life only will be lost."
"And this you consider a fair trade."
"You will like the scenario. It is complex, it will adapt as your plan adapts. We will work through these permutations together. Your mind might solve it where ours has not. This is the power you have, and your weakness – an unsolvable riddle is anathema to both parties, yes?"
Sherlock considered. The voice had a point – but perhaps more humanely, it would give him time to glean more clues about his captors, the purpose behind the scenario, and perhaps, a better way out than through. "Who am I speaking with?"
"We – I, sir – am Vox."
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Really?"
"It is title, not name. I speak for others."
"Florid." A note of disapproval crept into his voice as he filed away the new detail for examination.
"What is life without a little excessive drama?" The rich voice let itself drop into an amused basso. "Shall we begin?"