Offworld

by Robin Parrish

  "Mae!" he shouted down toward the scaffolding she was running along. She stopped in place and looked up at him.

  "We're leaving!" he said. "The exit's just ahead, go on!"

  She nodded urgently and he watched her run.

  He ran as well, but was forced to dive face-forward onto the catwalk when someone shot at him from behind. The catwalk nearly gave way as the quantum machine let loose a powerful jolt, and Terry knew their time was up.

  The quantum machine was dying and was not going quietly into the night.

  Trisha was frantically pounding keys on the main data terminal, blood oozing from small scratches along her hands and face, sweat pouring down her neck and back, when the entire Vault shuddered violently and she was thrown to her knees.

  She looked up to see Owen climbing a set of stairs from an opening near the center of the machine where the light originated. But he wasn't alone....

  "What are you doing?!" she cried.

  "He's hurt!" Owen replied, lowering Chris to the ground and pressing a piece of fabric to Chris' neck wound.

  At that moment, someone fell out of the sky behind her, and Owen raised his rifle just as she spun in place.

  It was Terry, who'd just jumped-or maybe fell, she wasn't sure which-from the catwalk two stories up. He rolled with the impact and came up close to where she stood.

  "Watch out!" Terry shouted as a spray of gunshots rained down behind him.

  Owen saw something she didn't and raised his gun to point over her head. He fired a single shot, and the gunshots from above stopped.

  "Thanks," said Terry, before he raised his hand to his ear and shouted, "Mae! Where are you?"

  "Outside already!" she called back.

  Terry didn't reply. Owen said to him, "Take Chris, and keep putting pressure on his neck! I'm going back to the Box!"

  Owen was already running as Terry hefted Chris with both arms. He began moving toward the exit, which consisted of a big metal blast door that slid down vertically. Turning to Trisha, Terry said, "Less than three minutes left! Did you enter the code?"

  Trisha shook her head in a frenzy. "This thing's too slow! I'm still waiting for the command prompt to come up."

  She looked again at the screen. There was a tiny hole in it, with cracks radiating outward. And it had gone dark.

  "Oh no!" she said. Her stomach lurched, and her heart was beating so hard she thought it might jump out of her chest. "Beech, I need you!"

  She glanced back at Terry, but he'd already gone through the exit with Chris in his arms. She looked down at the ground, where cables from the back of the screen were snaking down to a computer box.

  Owen ran up to her. "Oh, sweet Moses .. " he said, inspecting the damage to the data terminal.

  "Okay, okay, don't panic," she said, as much to herself as to him. "We can still do this. The screen is dead, but all we really need is power to the CPU. The box is welded to the ground, there. It looks like an L-series, I think."

  Owen knelt and examined all sides of the small, nondescript silver cube. Four wires and cables stuck out and twisted away into other parts of the machine. "Ports are a little different. I think it might be some kind of advanced prototype from the same manufacturer."

  The Waveform Device shook hard, and Trisha thought she heard the sound of bits of metal tearing free from somewhere in the machine, but she didn't let herself look to see what it was. She didn't want to lose her nerve. Instead, she clung to the railing beside the console for dear life, determined to stay on her feet.

  "I can see a yellow LED light inside, through the vent!" said Owen, his tone reminding her that they had only seconds remaining.

  "Exactly what I was thinking," she replied. "I'll enter the fail-safe code, and if you see the light blink when I tap the keys, that means the CPU read the keystrokes."

  Let'' just hope the commandpromptfinally came up, she thought as she typed the three-letter code.

  M. A. E.

  "It blinked three times!" shouted Owen.

  "Okay, you can get up!" she said, standing back from the terminal.

  Owen rose to his feet. "How will we know if the fail-safe is working?"

  The white lights in the Vault suddenly switched to blood red and started blinking. A loud siren began to wail like a tornado warning, and there was a high-pitched sound that went lower and lower as they listened. It was the sound of the machine shutting down, and it was earsplitting. The blast door at the exit began to descend as well.

  "It's working," commented Trisha, looking around at the machine self-destructing above and below them.

  Owen grabbed her and pushed her toward the exit. "Get out of here, Trish! I have to get back to the Box ... !"

  She ran through the exit, but grabbed him by the hand and wouldn't let go. Her arm was right under the blast door as it continued to descend.

  "What are you doing?!" he screamed. 'let go!"'

  "Look at the time!" she countered. "Two minutes! You can't reach the Box in two minutes!"

  Owen faltered for a moment, and she could see in his eyes that he knew she was right. `Just come on!" she said, giving his hand a good yank.

  Trisha refused to let go of Owen's hand, so he had no choice but to slide under the door, just before it fell closed with a powerful clang. Then they ascended several winding flights of steps in a small cement stairwell.

  At the top, Trisha glanced at her watch. They were down to just under two minutes. She had to be sure all five of them were clear of the stadium; this was going to be a very big blast....

  But she knew something was wrong the second she emerged from a small closet-type room at the top of the stairs and ran into a wide access corridor at the ground level of Rice Stadium. It was night already, and Terry waited there, still carrying Chris just outside the door. Chris was awake but groggy and weak, and holding the cloth at the side of his bleeding neck.

  Tears filled Terry's eyes, and he looked at Trisha with infinite sadness.

  And she knew.

  "I thought ... she was out," Terry said. "She lied, on the radio.... I shouldn't have taken my eyes off-"

  "Get out, Terry! Move.!" she ordered, and together they managed to lift Chris out of the building and into the parking lot. Roston's men were scrambling and ignoring them in pure panic, some of them making a run for it on foot, others piling into jeeps and squealing out of Roston's makeshift base.

  About fifty feet clear of the stadium, they stopped and sheltered as a group behind a parked jeep.

  Trisha looked down at her watch. Ninety seconds.

  With a glance back at Terry, who had collapsed and wouldn't look up at her or anyone, she put a finger to her ear.

  "Mae?" she said, and she was shaking now, weariness and dread filling her soul. "Can you hear me?"

  "Yep," Mae replied. "Think I see it. Just followed the light, like that guy in the dream said."

  "Why?" said Trisha. She felt tears burning her eyes but fought them back.

  "Knew since the dream," Mae replied. "Old man said it had to be one of us that did it. Knew it had to be me-I'm the one who don't belong here. Or anywhere."

  Trisha gasped.

  "How could you know about ... ?" asked Owen. "We never told you

  "Put it together on my own," said Mae. "Smarter than I look, ya know."

  Owen smiled ruefully. "Yeah, you sure are."

  "Makes sense," continued Mae. "Not supposed to he alive. And all y'all have stuff to live for."

  "I'm sorry," whispered Chris in a weak voice, and Trisha only now realized he was listening and aware of what was happening. "This isn't how any of us thought it would end"

  "S'okay," Mae replied in an unwavering voice. "Finally get to do somethin' to help."

  "You helped," said Chris, looking into Trisha's eyes. "You helped all of us. More than you'll ever know."

  Despite her best efforts, Trisha couldn't prevent a pair of tears from rolling down her cheeks. She had to swallow hard to get her voice working again. "Is the
re anything we can do for you?"

  A brief silence was followed by Mae's voice, saying, "Would'a liked to a' heard some of Terry's poetry. Don't much matter now."

  Terry looked up, and he stared into the night sky, his eyes darting back and forth as he tried to focus on the stars but seemed to be piecing something together in his mind. Voice trembling, he spoke:

  "The stars, the heavens, they whisper in song.

  Unbound from Earth, her soul here belongs.

  As life and death wrestle forlorn years,

  Let sleep wipe free her distant tears...."

  Deep within the quantum machine, Mae smiled wide, closing her eyes, Terry's words washing over her. When Terry was silent, Mae reached out and opened the Box without fanfare or flourish.

  The artifact inside was so painfully bright to look at, but she didn't let herself turn away. The truth was, it was beautiful. Terrifyingly so.

  A heartbeat later, the artifact's energy was set free from the Box and the Vault began to quake, violent explosions tearing through the machine. Her eyes seared in pain and she closed them. She was alone, but not truly alone, as she covered her head with her hands and listened to the machine coming apart all around, crashing, rending, tearing, screeching.

  Mae looked up at the machine as it started to fall. A small part of her wished that she wasn't alone at the end.

  You are not alone, a voice whispered like the call of a dove.

  Then she smiled. I'm not alone, she thought to herself. Never alone.

  Pipes fell, catwalks ripped free, circuits and transistors sparked and caught fire, monitors and lights blinked out, and the machine coughed up endless volumes of fog and steam. Despite her eyes being closed, she could sense the artifact was glowing brighter still, until it seemed to turn inside out and was removed from this world.

  Mae opened her eyes.

  Without the presence of the artifact and the beacon of light, the room was now utterly dark. Once the cacophony of sounds came to an end and the last pieces of steel settled inside the Vault, there were ten seconds of silence as both inside the chamber and on the surface above, everything became ominously still.

  Then the world ripped open.

  An explosion went off, powerful enough to shake every corner of Houston.

  And the world went dark.

  And Mae was no longer alone.

  Everywhere around the world where people had once breathed and eaten and slept and talked and loved and lived ... they lived again.

  In the most remote primal villages in Africa, and in the mountaintop monasteries of Tibet. In the frozen tundra of Russia and northern Europe and Canada. In the deserts of Africa, Asia, and America. In the tropical paradises of the Caribbean and the South Pacific. In the streets and homes of the civilized world, including Houston, Texas.

  Wherever they were when the Waveform Device removed them from existence was where the device returned them. Not everyone that disappeared reappeared in a safe place. If they were driving cars, they were put right back in the drivers' seats of their cars-whether still on the road or not. Lives were lost, of course, far too many in airplanes that had crashed and were obliterated, or in boats capsized and sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  But the survivors were many. One minute they were gone, and the next minute they were there, standing or sitting in the chair or vehicle or sidewalk or shop or library or church where they'd vanished.

  And they knew. They didn't know exactly what they knew, but they understood that something monumental had happened. One look at the state of their surroundings told them that they'd awakened after being gone, and while waking up to a world of pain was hard, it was far better than never waking at all.

  Chris fought his way to his feet, ignoring the protests of his friends, and looked over the hood of the jeep they'd hid behind. Smoke and debris was still falling from the sky, remnants of the explosion that had destroyed the Waveform Device, making it hazy and hard to see in the nighttime air.

  The four of them stood shoulder to shoulder there, and watched and waited for the air to clear. When it finally did, they saw it.

  Rice Stadium was gone. It had been replaced by a massive crater in the Earth, its outer lip just meters from where Chris and his friends stood. The pungent smell of hot metal and burning rubber and wood filled the atmosphere, and was difficult to breathe.

  "Look," whispered Trisha.

  They turned. A handful of people had materialized in the parking lot. One of them was a janitor of some kind, who probably worked at the college. Two others were athletes who looked like they'd just arrived at the stadium to get in some off-season practice time. There were one or two more in Chris' viewing range.

  They just stood there, all of them, unmoving. They looked around, taking in the incredible sight of Roston's military encampment that had taken over the parking lot and was now abandoned, and the more stunning sight of the crater where the stadium used to he.

  Chris couldn't stand up anymore; he was too tired. He sank to the ground and held the blood-soaked cloth to his neck. The bleeding seemed to have slowed, but he was going to need stitches to fully repair the damage. And his shoulder had been severely aggravated and would be out of commission for weeks, if not longer.

  Terry collapsed beside him, massaging his leg with one hand and wiping his wet eyes with the other.

  Following their lead, Trisha and Owen both sank to the ground as well. Trisha looked as if she could sleep for a month. Owen was clearly tired too, but he was still alert, watching the area with a gun in his hand, just in case any of Roston's men should return.

  Chris wanted to say something, to mark the moment. It was done, and at last they were really home. But he couldn't assemble the words in his mind in any suitable way.

  Some time later, they heard sirens wailing. Red and blue flashing lights were headed their way, no doubt drawn by the crater and the plume of smoke the blast had created, which was still hovering high in the air over Rice University and was probably visible all over Houston on this clear, warm summer night.

  "What are we going to tell them?" asked Trisha, her voice weak.

  "The truth," replied Chris.

  "But how?" Trisha countered. "How do we explain everything that's happened?"

  "Easy," said Terry, speaking for the first time. `Just tell them their lives were saved by someone who never existed."

  Hours later, the few remaining television sets and computers across America and across the world that still had electricity received their first broadcast in months.

  "To everyone able to watch and listen in around the world, we are very glad to be broadcasting to you this evening. We understand that there are still millions around the globe without power, but authorities have pledged to work around the clock until everything is restored just the way it was, before ...

  "Well, before we were all gone. Information is still sketchy, but a source inside the Pentagon has revealed to this network that authorities have an active investigation already underway to discover the root cause of the unprecedented event that has encompassed the globe. We can exclusively reveal that the White House is calling this event `The Offworld incident,' and rumors are swirling that a small but unidentified group of trustworthy individuals has come forward, and they are explaining the details of the incident to government officials as we speak.

  "We understand that the president is listening in on this debriefing from the White House, along with several dozen other world leaders who are listening remotely from around the globe. And insiders believe that we may get an unprecedented joint statement from several of these world leaders before the night is out...."

  Christopher Burke, Trisha Merriday, Owen Beechum, and Terry Kessler departed the FBI building early the next morning just before sunrise. Their presence there had been successfully kept a secret from the press, but two very important people were notified and were waiting for the four of them to exit.

  Owen dropped to his knees at the sight of Clara, his wif
e, and Joey, his son, who ran into his father's arms the second they were out the door. Clara quickly joined them, and the three members of the Beechum household were reunited in something bigger and more meaningful than a group hug. Tears fell from their eyes as they clung tightly to one another, tighter than they ever had before.

  "I missed you," said Joey, his face lost somewhere in their huddle.

  Softly, gently, Clara's voice could be heard saying, "I did too."

  Chris, Trisha, and Terry stepped away, seeing that their friend had come home at last. And despite Owen's incredible fortitude, they knew he would not be able to hold back his emotions. Not this time. Rather than spoil the moment, they smiled to one another and walked on.

  Without the machine creating its impossibly bright beacon of light, the last predawn hour was free to wrap darkness around the streets of Houston.

  Terry limped on ahead a few paces, favoring his wounded leg, and giving Chris and Trisha a much-needed moment alone. He sat down at the base of a set of concrete steps and very uncharacteristically waited there, patient and quiet.

  "Guess you'll be heading off to see your family," said Chris.

  Trisha nodded, unable to stifle a yawn. "There are a lot of them to see. And they'll be worried about me."

  "I'm sure they are," said Chris, trying to appear casual. Then a thought occurred to him. "Though NASA will be expecting our debriefing."

  "They can wait," replied Trisha. "We need to be around the people we care about most."

  "Mm. How are you feeling?"

  She was the picture of exhaustion, with drooping eyes and sagging shoulders.

  "Tired, sore . . " she said.

  Chris was sure he looked as bad or worse. His shoulder was in a new and more binding immobilizer, the cut on his neck had been stitched and then covered with a fresh bandage, and he was banged up and scratched up almost everywhere else on his body.

  "You need to sleep," he said.

  "I don't want to sleep. I want to hibernate."