Lunar 3097

by Gary Timbrell

  Stryker stood across the table from the tech and stared at him, not saying anything, just staring. After what seemed like an eternity, she shouted, “Get your crap and get back to your little do-nothing desk. Get out of my office and get out of my face!”

  People in the hallway turned and wondered what was going on; then the door to Stryker’s office flew open, and the pitiful small man came flying out with his arms full of items that threatened to fall all over the floor, but he managed to keep them under control until he got to the turbo lift. As he attempted to push the call button … The entire load hit the floor.

  Stryker’s office door slammed so loudly that the people in the hallway jumped. One young lady carrying an armful of files nearly lost them. When the turbo lift door opened, the tech kicked his belongings into the lift and walked in and pushed the down arrow.

  Stryker reached for the comm. set from her desk. “Plan B, go ahead and bring it to headquarters. Yes, all of it. I don’t care, just get it here!” With this, she pushed the button to end the call and sat down behind her desk, all the time staring at a huge pile of data packs from the RAIDA project that was still on the long table in her office.

  “Son of a bitch!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  “Where do you think they are taking us?” asked Abbey.

  “I don’t know. Having no windows in this van doesn’t help, but from the sounds outside, I would say to ISA Headquarters,” replied Alex.

  Just then, the van stopped, and the driver got out and came around the back of it and opened the doors. The light streamed through and hit them both in the eyes, causing a stabbing pain in Abbey’s head.

  “Out!” shouted the guard.

  They had arrived at a dock with skippers lined up along the shore ready to transport people to the ISA Headquarters. Abbey and Alex were escorted to a dark skipper with tinted glass and no numbers or markings of any kind.

  “This is a weird-looking skipper,” said Abbey.

  “Yeah, it’s a prisoner transporter. There are no controls inside. It’s fully automated, and once inside, you don’t get out until you reach your destination, and they let you out from the outside.”

  “Well, isn’t that just great!” said Abbey.

  “What did you expect? A limo. With champagne and caviar?”

  “Get in” was the only thing the guard said as he motioned them into the transporter. They sat down, and the dome closed with a swish, and off they went to ISA Headquarters.

  “I don’t like feeling trapped,” said Abbey.

  Alex laughed and said, “Get used to it. We are going to be trapped for a very long time.”

  ISA Headquarters

  The skipper pulled up to a large steel door. The door started to slide open upon their arrival. The skipper glided inside the building and made its way along a hallway to another door. This door opened upward, the skipper glided in, and it came to rest on an apron. The canopy opened with a swish.

  “Out!” said the guard almost sounding the same as the guard that put them in the skipper.

  They got up and out and were escorted to a room with two cots, a mini-fridge, and a door that looked like it went to a bathroom. Abbey had never seen this part of the building before and wondered if it was a full-time detention center or a place for staff to rest during a long mission.

  An hour later, a guard entered the room carrying a tray. He moved across the room and pulled out a table from the wall; then he set down two plates and two glasses. He bent down and pulled two cantilever stools from the wall, looked over at the pair, and said, “Eat.”

  “You guards are not the best conversationalists, are you?” said Alex.

  The guard just looked at him and turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  Abbey sat and started to eat. The food tasted like hospital food. In other words, it tasted like nothing. Alex took the drink and walked over to the cot and sat down with it.

  “I wonder if they intend on keeping us here without letting us see a lawyer,” he said.

  “Isn’t that against the law?” said Abbey in between mouthfuls of food.

  “Well, I guess they figure we know all about breaking the law,” replied Alex with a sarcastic grin on his face.

  Abbey hated it when he grinned like that. It made her want to slap him.

  Two days passed. All they did was sit and stare at each other. There was the occasional break when the guards came and went with food, but nothing else happened.

  On the third day, just after what Abbey thought was morning, having no windows in the room made it hard to know when it was night or day, a guard came in and escorted them out to the turbo lift.

  The door opened, and the lift took them to the seventh floor, another floor Abbey had never seen. The door opened to a hallway, and they were escorted to a pair of doors and told to wait. One of the guards went inside and closed the door behind him.

  Both Alex and Abbey fidgeted and kicked their heels just like a couple of schoolkids waiting to see the principal. Then the doors opened, and there was Stryker with her hands behind her back, standing in front of what looked awfully familiar to Abbey.

  “How did you do this?” she said to Stryker.

  “Not hard. Just got your address, broke into your apartment, and loaded the truck,” she replied.

  Right there in ISA Headquarters were the entire contents of Abbey’s personal control center all set up and ready to go.

  “You have one chance, and one chance only, to save your asses from going to jail for the rest of your lives. Contact the AIs and get them under control, or I won’t be able to help you.”

  Stryker walked up to the two of them, looked them both in the eyes, and said, “If you do this, you will still be able to walk without a walker when you get out.”

  CHAPTER 11

  ISA Headquarters

  “Who gave you the right to make a deal with those two?” said Addison. “You had no right. We only needed one of them. That way, we get what we want and still have someone to prosecute for the crime. That would have made everybody happy!”

  “You mean persecute not prosecute,” said Stryker. “This is not the time for vengeance or politics, sir. We have a mission to complete, and putting either of them in jail won’t get that done.

  “I never made a deal with them anyway. I just made an inference that I could help them if they helped us. To what extent I can or will depends on what they can do for the mission. There’s no one else that can help us with this.” With that, Stryker turned to walk away.

  Addison stood from his desk. “No no no. You don’t get to dictate to me what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m in charge of this operation, and I make the decisions. Someone has to pay for this mess, and I can assure you that it’s not going to be me.”

  Stryker turned and stared at Addison. “Your plan was to leave everything another twenty-four hours and see what happened. Nothing happened, and nothing will happen until those two are allowed to get to work. I’m doing what is best for this mission. If you can’t see that, then fire me and deal with this mess on your own!” With that, Stryker turned, and this time, Addison just watched her leave.

  LUNAR 3097

  Slowly, the AIs worked their way toward the outcropping still on the horizon from their position. It was an extreme distance from the Lander. If this had been a human research mission, it would not have been possible to bring test samples from so far away from the Lander. No technology would allow for that length of a trip, one-way, let alone back again.

  “RAIDA2, this is Flight Control One. Please respond … RAIDA2, this is Flight Control One. Please respond …”

  “This is RAIDA2.”

  ABBEY’S CONTROL CENTER

  ISA Headquarters

  “Oh my God! 2 responded,” whispered Abbey. “Now what?” She turned to Alex with an expectant gaze.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t expect to get a response, did you?” he whispered back.

  “We
ll, I guess first things first. Let’s see if 2 will tell us the situation out there, and we can go from there.” Alex nodded his consent.

  “RAIDA2, this is Flight Control One. Sitrep, please.” The delay felt like forever.

  “Flight Control One, this is RAIDA2. 2 and 3 are fully operational and en route to target ‘A’ compound, ‘AZURE239’ location, for acquisition of same.”

  Abbey’s jaw fell open. She was stunned by the last transmission.

  Alex had a very worried look on his face.

  “What the hell do they intend on doing with it?” he said in a low voice as if the AIs could hear him.

  A sudden look of horror came over Abbey’s face. “You don’t think …?” she said, also in a low voice.

  “What, that they intend to find a way to destroy it?” said Alex. “How does 2 know what ident was assigned to the compounds?” said Alex.

  Abbey just frowned at him, and through her hooded eyebrows, she said, “Ah, what part of complete download of all ISA files did you forget?”

  “I guess you got a point there. So they know the entire plan from soup to nuts. Would they be that vindictive?”

  “Who knows what they are planning,” said Abbey just as Stryker walked up behind her.

  “Who’s planning what?” she inquired, startling both Abbey and Alex.

  “The AIs,” said Abbey. “We have contacted them, and they are in the process of collecting AZURE239 from its location.”

  “Why would they be doing that?” she asked.

  “We thought maybe to destroy it,” said Abbey.

  “Or hold it hostage for whatever it is they want,” added Alex.

  “What the hell could a couple of robots on a planet millions of miles away possibly want?”

  “I don’t know, but they downloaded everything from the ISA server. They know how valuable that compound is to us,” replied Abbey.

  “You’re suggesting that they intend on holding the AZURE239 hostage?” said Stryker.

  “Maybe. We don’t know, but I have an idea. Why don’t we ask them?” replied Alex.

  “No. We need to have a meeting with the rest of the team and decide where to go from here. There’s no protocol for this situation. We have never dealt with an entity on another planet,” said Stryker. “We only have one chance not to screw this up any more than it already is.” She continued. “Conference room in twenty minutes, and if you even as much as push that comm. button before we meet and decide on how to proceed, so help me God, I will throw both your asses in jail immediately.” She looked at them both square in the eye. “Did I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal,” said Alex.

  Stryker left the room, and Abbey was bouncing up and down in her chair. “What’s the matter with you?” said Alex.

  “I soooo want to ask 2 what he’s planning right now.”

  Alex’s eyes got as big as saucers. “Are you freaking kidding me? Okay, now I know you’re insane. I thought that it was just a one-time thing, but after all we’ve been through, and you want to break another direct order from our superior? There’s something very wrong with you!”

  “I never said I was going to do it. I just said I wanted to!” Abbey replied with her nose upturned and her face away from Alex.

  “You can act all you want,” replied Alex. “I know if you saw even an iota of agreement from me, you would already be talking to 2!”

  “Wow, you know me pretty good,” she said with a devilish smile. “So?”

  “No way. I’m out of here. See you at the meeting—if you’re not in jail.”

  “I was just joking,” she laughed. “I’m not going to do anything that will screw up our chance at getting out of this hole. Let’s go get something to eat before the meeting,” she said as she rose from the control center and walked with Alex out the door.

  “Sorry, I can’t right now. This is the first chance I have had to call Ariana and try to explain what’s going on. I might not get another.”

  He turned and walked to a turbo lift and left Abbey standing, wondering if there was anything like a cafeteria on the seventh floor, or would she have to go upstairs and face all those people on her own floor? Suddenly, she was no longer hungry.

  LUNAR 3097

  2 and 3 walked on through an entire Lunar cycle. The outcrop was looming higher now, still not on the scale of Earth’s mountains, but markings could be made out, scars from eons of erosion. Even a dead world is scarred by time. Time is relentless, never ending. The one constant in all of creation is time. In a word: panoptic.

  2 and 3 moved in a robotic step pulling along the five wagons they had made from the interior of the Lander, moving ever closer to their target, relentless in their quest for the mineral known as AZURE239.

  The reason for their quest, only known to them, was it a benevolent trip, or would it prove to be malevolent at the end of it all? Only 2 and 3 knew the answer to that question. The question is, will they reveal the reason to Earth?

  RAIDA Project Conference Room

  “Let’s settle down, please,” shouted Stryker over the din in the room. Abbey could feel the tension in the room. You could cut through it with a knife. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, or was everyone staring at her, pointing in her direction and whispering about her?

  She looked around the room for Alex, but he wasn’t there. All of a sudden, she experienced a cold chill run down the entire length of her back. Did he make a run for it? she thought. He wouldn’t be that stupid … would he? Just then, the door flew open, and in came Alex, red faced and sweating.

  “Sorry I’m late. Was on the phone with my ex-girlfriend.” He glanced over at Abbey and shook his head.

  Abbey walked around the table to take her seat, and as she passed Alex, she bent down and said, “I’m so sorry, Alex.”

  “No big deal,” he said as he looked down so as not to make eye contact with anyone in the room. These were the people that relied on both of them to stay in contact with the AIs throughout the mission, and he felt like he had let them down.

  “OK, this is where we are, at this minute,” said Stryker, standing at the end of the table. Even the “nerds” from down the hall had been called to this meeting.

  “The robots are, at this moment, collecting the compound AZURE239. We have no idea what they have in mind, but the reasons run the gambit. They are collecting it so that it’s ready when we get there …” Stryker hesitated, “doubtful; or they are going to hold it hostage until their demands are met, but we’re not sure what they might be. Or they intend on destroying it.”

  “Why can’t we just go get the compound from the source and cut the AIs out of the problem?” asked a tall, skinny man, part of the nerd group.

  “We don’t know where the compound is located. It was excavated so long ago that its only reference points are with the AIs. They designated the idents for each excavation as they went. We have the ident, but not the location.”

  “Why don’t we just track their location beacon signals, and then we would know where they are?” asked a second member of the nerd team.

  Stryker raised her eyebrows and turned to the man. “The robots thought of that and turned off the signal beacons, so we don’t know where they are, or where they’re headed.”

  “Do we know when the sample was excavated?” asked Abbey.

  Three or four of the nerds started shuffling papers, looking for that data.

  “If we know the date, we can go back into the record we have and determine where the AI was at the time, and that will give us a general idea where the compound was extracted.”

  “Great idea,” replied Stryker. “It just occurred to me, the AIs might be moving the compound because they think we know where it is, so they’re going to relocate it. They won’t take it to the Lander because that’s the only reference point we have, so we have to start there, and they know that.”

  “So you’re saying that there’s only a limited amount of that compound, and the AIs are going to
mine all of it and move it to a new location?” asked Alex. He had sat very quietly during this meeting.

  “We don’t know,” answered Stryker. “We just don’t know. They must know that it’s going to take us six months to get there, so they have enough time to work, but should there be a limited quantity of AZURE239, they could exhaust it from its present location, relocate it, and hold it hostage, yes.”

  She turned back to the nerds. “Have we gone through the rest of the samples to see if there is any more of AZURE239 at a different location?”

  The tall nerd spoke up. “We think that if there is more of the compound, it is deeper underground. The vein the AIs found was a lucky hit, probably due to the erosion of an outcropping that left it exposed on the surface.” He continued. “The AIs didn’t have much in the way of excavation tools, so they could only dig so far. Maybe we could equip the next mission with digging equipment and start a mine if we could find another vein.”

  “Therein lies the problem,” replied Stryker. “We don’t have much time.

  “Well, I guess the first step is to ask the robots what they want.” She continued. “Abbey, Alex, go back to your control room and find out what they want. Make sure you do not agree to anything without running it by Addison.”

  “OK,” said Abbey. Alex just nodded his head, stood, turned, and left the room.

  Abbey turned to the group of nerds. “Please get me the date that 2 excavated that sample, and I’ll try to pinpoint the location.”

  The group all looked at each other and began to chuckle.

  “What the hell are you laughing at?” she snapped.

  The tall, skinny nerd turned to her. “It’s just that we noticed that most people call them AIs, Kelly Stryker calls them robots, and you call them by, well, it’s as if you use their first names.” This brought another round of snickers from the group.

  “Did it ever cross anyone’s mind that it was for the sake of time? If every time I spoke to or about one of them, and I had to say AI #2 or robot 2 or RAIDA2, it takes time, whereas 1-2-3 is much quicker and to the point.”