Infinity Born

by Douglas E. Richards

  All of those watching this scene inside the Command Center’s conference room were utterly transfixed. Repulsed and horrified, of course, but stunned and mesmerized as well.

  Brown ended the show and the screen became as empty as everyone now felt. “I think we’ve all seen enough,” he said softly, “and we have pressing matters to return to. But you should know that Jordan went on to gather the three heads in a large duffel bag, like they were some kind of grisly souvenirs, and then raced away in a sports car. The car left his garage about fifteen minutes after the rod’s impact.”

  No one spoke, or even breathed, for several long seconds.

  “So Jordan triggers his kinetic round on a timer,” President Mattison mumbled, breaking the silence, no longer doubting Brown’s conclusions. “Then he wipes out his entire family. Then he almost kills himself tilting at door-shaped windmills. Finally, he flees the scene with three, ah . . . trophies in tow.”

  “In a nutshell, yes,” said Brown. “With one correction. This wasn’t his entire family. His oldest child, Melissa, who’s a senior in high school, is visiting a friend for a few days in San Francisco. She’s most likely still sleeping soundly, even as we speak.”

  The president nodded. No doubt this would be the last time Melissa Jordan slept soundly for a long, long time. “I assume Jordan’s security system automatically sent this footage to the local cops,” he said. “Have they caught him yet?”

  “Not a chance,” said Brown. “Not after Turlock got hit like it did. Every cop and fireman for miles around is in way over their heads responding to the injured and dying and helping with triage. They wouldn’t stop to arrest Jordan if he crawled by them with his middle finger extended. We tried to track him after seeing the security video, but he had some high-tech tricks up his sleeve for avoiding satellites and cameras and we lost him. With his resources and brilliance, if he wants to stay lost, it’s hard to imagine he won’t be able to do it.”

  “We need to freeze his assets,” said Andrew Havens.

  “We tried,” said Brown. “But we were already too late. About twenty percent of his net worth disappeared instantly. He must have had a plan in place for vanishing this money at a moment’s notice—just in case. Brilliantly done, as one would expect of him. Not sure where the money went, but probably in multiple numbered accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. We were able to freeze the majority of it, but he’s hidden about two hundred billion dollars.”

  “A thousand times as much as he needs to stay off the radar,” said Chris Best miserably.

  The president blew out a long breath. “We can worry about capturing him later,” he said. “Right now, we have a crisis to address. My gut says to stick with this being a natural disaster. Admitting that we were hit with a weapon like this will panic the shit out of everyone. Yes, nukes are even worse, but we have deterrents in place, and the last time a nuke went off in anger was in the 1940s. And everyone has become at least somewhat acclimated to the nuclear threat. The threat from kinetic weapons, on the other hand, is completely off the radar. We’re at the highest levels of government, and many of us weren’t even aware of the possibilities. So do we really want to awaken the public to this harsh reality while fires are still raging in Turlock, and people are still dying?”

  The Secretary of Homeland Security winced. “I’m afraid we don’t have a choice,” he said. “My group has tipped off too many people in our rush to get to the truth. And my sources tell me this story has already leaked to the media. Even if it hadn’t, the cat wouldn’t have stayed in the bag for long, anyway. Professor McGowen isn’t the only scientist who will be able to tell that the object that hit us wasn’t a natural meteor. ”

  “Shit!” said the president simply. “That puts us in a very bad position.”

  Lou Nevins frowned. “What about the video you just showed us?” he said to the Secretary of Homeland Security. “This hasn’t leaked, has it?”

  “It hasn’t,” said Brown. “We can still keep Isaac Jordan’s involvement a secret if we want to.”

  “No!” said President Mattison. “That would just make a bad situation worse. Given that we can’t hide the fact of a kinetic round,” he added, “that’s the last thing we can do. We need to get this footage to the media as soon as possible. When the nature of this attack goes public, we don’t want anyone thinking that Russia, North Korea, or China was behind it. Or a Jihadi group. Talk about blind panic.”

  Nevins nodded his agreement, as did several other attendees.

  “We’ve been painted into such a corner this time,” continued the president, “that for once, the best option is to reveal everything we know. We have to finger Isaac Jordan and make it clear this was a one-off event perpetrated by a madman.”

  Mattison paused in thought. “Now that we know it’s safe to go back to the surface, I say we do that now. I’ll arrange for a televised address to the nation for thirty minutes from now. I’ll jot down some bullet points, but I won’t wait for a written speech. Sometimes a heartfelt, unprepared address is the most effective. Jeff, you continue working to gather evidence so the case against Jordan is as tight as it can be.”

  Brown nodded. “Will do,” he said.

  Mattison turned to his Secretary of Defense. “Andrew, have the military continue sending doctors, medical equipment, and blood to Turlock. We want to err on the side of too much humanitarian assistance rather than too little. And I want these fires out, the wounded cared for, and the situation normalized as soon as possible. I don’t care how many men and women you have to mobilize to do it.”

  “Roger that,” said Andrew Havens.

  4

  The stir the attack on Turlock caused in the US and around the world was immense—as it should have been. And the panic. But as each day passed without another attack, the fear lessened, and people once again went on with their lives, only glancing up at the sky to wonder if this day would be their last on rare occasion.

  Less than three months after the tragedy in Turlock, Isaac Jordan’s daughter, Melissa, the sole survivor of the bloody massacre that had taken place in her home, disappeared, despite electronic and human security protecting her in case her father tried to finish the job.

  Six months after this, when an extensive effort to find her had turned up nothing, Melissa Jordan was finally presumed dead. She was presumed to have been killed by her father, who hadn’t been deterred by what he must have considered laughable security measures.

  A little over three years later, Isaac Jordan was found. He had been killed in an auto accident, and the officer on the scene had recognized the most reviled man on the planet, despite the obvious attempts Jordan had made to change his appearance. Jordan’s identity was confirmed using DNA analysis, and just like that, almost four years after the strike on Turlock, the chapter was closed on perhaps the most remarkable human in history.

  Never had a man achieved so much, only to fall from grace so completely, so destructively. The gulf between Isaac Jordan’s highs and lows was far greater, and far more dramatic, than that of any character out of a Shakespearean Tragedy.

  Never had a man achieved so much, and been so admired, only to die as the most despised man on the planet.

  And that was that. After killing his entire family, along with more than five thousand innocent residents of Turlock, California, the greatest genius in a century was dead.

  Despite tireless investigations, and a four-year manhunt, little was ever found to add to what Jeff Brown and his people had learned in the first few hours after the attack. While Isaac Jordan had killed his wife and sons with pure hatred etched across every inch of his face, spitting a malevolent curse at each after he did so, by all accounts he had loved his wife and kids as much as any man.

  But whatever insanity had gripped him, whatever justification he thought he had for his actions, would forever remain a mystery, buried along with his body.

  PART 2

  Experiments

  5

&nb
sp; (Eight Years After the Attack on Turlock)

  Trish Casner was groggy but felt absolutely content, her body luxuriating in total calm and comfort, and her mind too befuddled to seize on any possible worries. This was as close to perfect peace and serenity as it got, a taste of nothing less than heaven.

  But the moment she began to truly appreciate the ideal state of sleep she was in, a blaring alarm gradually began to work its way through her thick cloak of tranquility, threatening to wrest her consciousness back to the cold reality of the living. She was a fetus floating in the womb, about to have her peace shattered by a harsh journey to the outside world, followed by a cold pair of umbilical cord scissors lying in wait.

  Not if she could help it.

  She would buy more time in paradise no matter what the cost. She would wake just enough to hit the snooze button before lapsing back into a blissful state at the edge of sleep. If only the snooze was set to kill the alarm for an eternity rather than an all-too-fleeting eight minutes.

  She flopped her arm to the right in a practiced motion, calibrated so that her hand would land on a button on top of her small clock.

  Only she didn’t flop her arm to the right.

  Her arm didn’t move a millimeter. Undeterred, and trying not to engage her brain so she wouldn’t be awakened more fully, she tried again. The result was the same.

  After just a few more seconds of groggy experimentation she realized she couldn’t move anything, not her legs, arms, fingers, toes, or nose. Not her lips or forehead. Everything was locked in place, save for her ribcage, which continued a slow rise and fall, filling her lungs with life.

  Was she paralyzed?

  Her full consciousness now came flooding back and she realized she couldn’t even open her eyes. She was completely entombed—Han Solo in a block of carbonite. She searched her mind, but had no idea where she was, or how she had come to be there.

  Just as panic began to burst forth from deep within, the foam cocoon that encased her like a second skin underwent a computer-driven phase transition, returning to a liquid state and draining away, finally freeing her to open her eyes.

  She blinked and strained until her vision returned. She was in a coffin-shaped chamber, instantly familiar as a suspended animation pod to anyone who had ever seen a science fiction movie. While she had no memory of how she came to be here, she was eerily certain she was on some kind of space vehicle, which seemed absurd, bat-shit crazy. Even without a memory she knew in her bones that this was far from a routine circumstance for her.

  It was impossible for her to be on a spaceship, and yet she knew that she was.

  The alarm finally stopped sounding and she glanced down just in time to see an IV line that had been inserted into her arm retract painlessly and disappear into the side of the pod. The pod’s transparent plastic lid slid open automatically with the slightest of whooshing sounds, and a small restraining strap retracted, leaving her free to float gently out of the pod.

  Float?

  Holy hell! she thought. She was in zero gravity. She hadn’t just been feeling weightless in a spiritual sense. She hadn’t needed the world’s best intuition and a futuristic suspended animation chamber to know she was in space, after all. The complete lack of gravity had provided another clue, but her conscious mind wouldn’t let her acknowledge the truth of it. Good work, Sherlock, she chided herself.

  Finding herself in a spacecraft made no sense at all. It was laughably absurd.

  As she rose she grasped one of the many gray straps that were affixed to the walls and ceilings, convenient handholds for those who found themselves floating. She noted absently that she was wearing black silk pajamas, even as part of her had expected to find herself clad only in white panties and undershirt, a suspended animation garb made famous by Sigourney Weaver.

  Surprisingly, even though liquid had drained from around her, her skin and hair were bone dry, as were the pajamas. Even though the substance had acted like a liquid, it had somehow managed to avoid one property she had foolishly grown to expect in all of her liquids: the ability to make things wet.

  She inspected her surroundings. She was in a cylindrical chamber, about the diameter of a jet airplane, or a submarine, except in place of steel she only found white, antiseptic plastic, light but sturdy. There were sealed doors at the far end, which she suspected led to a cargo compartment.

  Her eye was instantly drawn to a coffin-like chamber sitting beside the one she had just vacated. She gazed down at the supine figure inside. It was a hardened foam statue of a male body, only his pinkish mouth and nostrils free of the enveloping substance, which transformed to a liquid before her eyes and ran to the bottom of the chamber and into a drainage system underneath.

  Less than a minute later, while she searched her memory and continued to come up empty, a male figure floated up from the pod, also clad in black silk pajamas. Even though the man’s pajamas were loose fitting, it was clear from the parts of his body she could see that he was an Adonis. His face was breathtaking in its perfection, and she had no doubt his body was the same.

  He stared at her in horror. “Jesus, Trish, what have you done?”

  She squinted. “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “Shit!” he said, taking a deep breath. “You’ve got temporary amnesia. Do you even know who you are?”

  She opened her mouth to answer but shut it again in alarm. The truth was that she didn’t. Didn’t know her background, how she came to be here, or even her own name, which apparently was Trish.

  Bronzed Adonis frowned deeply. “Hold on,” he said, rising several feet and manipulating a small touch screen on the ceiling. The entire forward wall of the chamber they were in dissolved and was replaced by countless stars, brighter and more beautiful than any star field she had ever seen, instantly blinking into glorious existence. A moment later she realized the bulkhead material hadn’t phase-shifted like the foam to become transparent, they were viewing the outside on a monitor, projected there by ultra-high-definition video cameras.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, turning away from the stars and staring into the piercing blue eyes of her traveling companion.

  “Burt Dalton,” he replied, continuing to look horrified to the core of his being, as though he had just watched his favorite puppy get hit by a car. “And you’re Trish Casner.”

  He closed his eyes as if his oncologist was about to convey the results of a biopsy, with the news likely to be devastating. “Halle,” he said, his eyes still closed, “what is our current distance from Mars?”

  “Just over thirty-eight million miles,” replied the ship’s computer from several tiny speakers implanted in the compartment.

  Dalton nodded gravely as though the oncologist had confirmed his worst fears.

  “What’s going on, . . . Burt?” asked Trish Casner anxiously, certain that she didn’t really want to know. “How did I get here? Why can’t I remember?”

  Dalton removed a box of metal clips from a compartment nearby and helped her clip herself to the handhold so she could float in place without needing to grasp it. He sighed. “The pod you were in is designed to provide a perfect environment, the proper drugs, and the proper nutrition for a three-week hibernation.”

  “Suspended animation,” she said, nodding. “I guessed as much.”

  Dalton shook his head. “No. Not like what you’re thinking. Still haven’t cracked that nut. Just a very deep, drug-assisted sleep. The drugs are very effective, but in about half the population they induce amnesia upon awakening, which lasts about eight to ten hours. You can tell who’s susceptible to this side effect through genetic testing.”

  Trish blew out a relieved breath. “I’m obviously susceptible. But I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my memory will be coming back. How do I know you?”

  Dalton’s pained expression didn’t diminish. “You and I are engaged to be married,” he replied.

  Trish’s mouth fell open. “Wow. This memory loss thing goes deep. You�
�d think I’d get some glimmer, some shadow of recognition if you mean that much to me. But I’m getting nothing.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled impishly. “But I get why I’d fall for you, at least physically. You may be the sexiest man I’ve ever seen. I don’t even remember what I look like, but I’m already positive you’re out of my league. How did I manage to land you?”

  He smiled sadly. “Because you’re funny and self-deprecating. Because you’re amazing on too many levels to count.”

  “You probably say that to every girl who has no memory,” she said with a grin, but this attempt at levity only seemed to depress him further. “So what’s going on?” she added warily.

  “There was an emergency on the Mars colony. An accident wiped out most of their food supply. You and I were visiting Moon Base Destiny. I wasn’t scheduled to fly to Mars for several months, but since I was the only Mars-certified pilot on Destiny, and the colonists are quickly running out of time, I was tapped to go.”

  “Are you saying that Mars flights only leave from the Moon?”

  He nodded. “The amount of fuel you save by avoiding Earth’s gravity well is extraordinary. Usually I make the trip with my co-pilot, Steve Rowell. He’s a good friend of yours, who introduced us, by the way. But I couldn’t wait for him to get to the Moon. Given the urgency of the situation, I was forced to make the trip alone.”

  Trish Casner swallowed hard. “But you’re not alone,” she pointed out. “I’m here.”

  “Yeah,” he said, frowning deeply, “I noticed. You must have thought that since Steve couldn’t make it, there was room for a passenger. So you stowed away. You must have sealed yourself in a hibernation chamber after I was already under. You’ve seen me do it often enough the past few years. I’m sure you wanted to surprise me. I’ve told you that we’re only conscious during the last week of the journey, and I’ve often complained about how boring that week can be. And that’s when I at least have Steve for companionship. Knowing you, you decided that a week of wild, weightless sex would turn this from my loneliest journey ever into the greatest week of my life.”