GENESIX: THE TRILOGY

by Greg Logan

  “What if Scott and Jeff don’t come back?” April said. “What if they’ve gotten into some sort of trouble?”

  “Oh, they’ll be back,” Jake said. “And when they do, Jeff will learn new definition to the word trouble.”

  Jake suggested they all get into their battle suits. With the computer down, they were totally blind to what was going on outside. They needed to be ready for any kind of emergency.

  At the seven hour mark, Jeff and Scott returned. There was no flash of light. They were just suddenly standing in the middle of the floor in Scott’s main lab.

  “Scott!” April said, and ran toward him and threw her arms around him.

  He returned the hug but said nothing. She stepped back, looking at him. He looked older, somehow. Tired. Not so much physically weary, but exhausted in his very soul. There was a sadness in his eyes, and April thought they had a little bit of a haunted look.

  The way he seemed was not because of the time travel. Scott was the only one among them who could handle Jeff’s time travel effortlessly. April knew it was something else.

  Jake was about to pull Jeff aside and tell him they needed to have a talk, but he stopped when he saw the look in Scott’s eyes.

  “Scott?” April said.

  Scott said, “We need to get the power up in this place. And I mean now.”

  Sammy said, “Jake and I had a look at it and decided what sort of schematic we need. We think – “

  Scott cut him off. “Do it. Get the materials. I don’t care where you get them or how, as long as you do it now. I don’t care who sees you or knows about it. The time for covert operations and secrecy is over.”

  He turned and headed down the corridor.

  April started to follow him, but Jake placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

  “Let me,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Jake looked to Sammy. “Get started on that generator. Follow the man’s orders. Do whatever you have to do. Jeff, take him anywhere he needs to go to get materials.”

  Sammy and Jeff both nodded.

  Jake turned away from them and followed after Scott.

  NINE

  Scott had an office in a small room next to the quarters he shared with April. Not that he used it much. Most of his research was done in one of the labs. But he was there now, sitting behind the desk. Akila kept candles to burn during meditation and yoga exercise, so Scott had grabbed one and mounted it in an empty beer bottle and stood it on his desk. The tiny flame caused shadows to leap and dance against the walls.

  The candle flickered beside him, and in front of him was a full bottle of beer he hadn’t touched.

  Jake sat in a chair in front of the desk, a beer in his hand. His was not untouched.

  “We have to get the power back on,” Jake said. “We’re sitting ducks, here. If Peter LaSalle decided to come after us now, we wouldn’t know he was coming until he started pounding his way through the wall. And with the computer down, even if we had power, we still couldn’t run the hologram that covers the door to the hangar deck. Anyone flying by in a chopper will see a big, gaping opening there.”

  Scott said, “It would also be visible from overhead with satellite imagery. A dangerous thing, with Kincaid and his goons looking for us. Man, we’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Then, what’re we doing in here?”

  “I’m taking a moment to get my bearings. And you’re sitting with me because that’s what you do when I’m trying to get my bearings.”

  “Does seem that way, doesn’t it? It was that way back in the old days, when we worked out of Boston.”

  “Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? Those days in Boston.”

  Jake nodded. “A lot’s happened since then.”

  Scott sighed and shook his head.

  Jake said, “You all right?”

  “Not really. I kind of doubt I’ll ever be all right again. Not after what I saw. It was horrific, Jake. Words couldn’t do it justice.”

  “Try me.” He took a sip of his Bud Light. The Heineken was gone, thanks to Chuck.

  “We all know intellectually of the horrors of war. But to see it up close. And to see it when it involves people you know.”

  Scott now reached for his beer and took a sip. Until this moment, he hadn’t realized it was Bud Light. “Where’s the Heineken?”

  “Chuck took care of it for us.”

  “I’ll have to speak to him about that. He’s getting out of hand. A lot of stuff around here seems to be getting out of hand.”

  “Jeff, most notably. I’ll have a talk with him.”

  “No. He was right. Maybe it sort of grates on the nerves to be dressed down by a seventeen-year-old boy, but he was right.”

  Scott took another sip of beer. Then he brought the bottle back to his mouth and kicked back three large gulps.

  “Don’t go getting drunk now,” Jake said. “Remember, you have to save us all from an alien invasion.”

  “On our list of things to do.” Scott gave a bitter chuckle.

  “So, tell me. You were gone seven hours. What happened?”

  “Jeff pulled me seventeen years into the future. Of course, the future has been altered already because apparently in the future Dead Jeff came from, we all died when the central computer turned on us. A virus planted there by the aliens. Because things have already changed, Jeff had to first take us back to a time before Dead Jeff showed up, and then zipped us forward to the future that no longer exists. I didn’t even know it was possible to do that.”

  Jake was shaking his head. “This is why I never majored in theoretical physics.”

  “I thought it was because you were a jock.”

  “There is that. Actually, I was an engineer.”

  “Good. You can be in charge of getting the lights back on.” Another chuckle. Not so bitter this time.

  Scott said, “There’s so much I don’t know, Jake. I thought I had a handle on what time was and how to traverse it. I even created a way to travel through time.”

  “Borderline brilliant.”

  “Not at all. Absolute idiocy, on my part. It’s the equivalent of putting a blind man behind a steering wheel and telling him to drive. Just because he might not hit a tree doesn’t mean he’s a great driver, it just means he’s lucky. And that’s what I’ve been. Lucky. I didn’t get us all shredded by the strands of time. They’re quite beautiful, you know, when you’re being pulled along through them by someone like Jeff. But you slide through them the wrong way, and they can rip you apart.

  “Jeff showed me something I didn’t know was possible.” Scott took a pull off his beer. “Did you know it’s possible to step out of the time stream, just barely, and still watch what’s going on? That’s what we did. Everything had a sort of faded look to it because we weren’t quite there. And the voices all had a sort of echo to them. Like a radio off in the distance that’s been turned up too loud. These people couldn’t see us, but we could see them.”

  “What’d you see?”

  Scott told him about watching the thirty-four year old Sara being tortured by her handler. The one she called the Controller. And then the young Jeff showing up and blasting one of them with raw zeta energy being fired from his eyes, and then bashing the other one into unconsciousness.

  They then stayed around to watch the battle. The final battle.

  “An army of horrible androids,” Scott said. “They were humanoid, but with visual sensor units for eyes, and just a speaker for a mouth. Jeff – the older version of our Jeff – Dead Jeff – he was fantastic. Between him, Quentin and the Darkness, they dispensed of over a hundred of those things.”

  “Quentin was there?”

  Scott nodded. “Oh, yeah. His hair was white, but it was Quentin. He and their Jeff had become quite close. We saw their Jeff refer to him as family. And Sammy was there, too. And Rick. Jeff, Quentin, Sammy and Mother were leading a small group of survivors. And Sara, of course. She and Jeff had been together for a l
ong time.”

  He told how the future Sara had died after being tortured by the Controller, and another alien woman took her place. But the survivors discovered she was an alien.

  “Jeff – the future Jeff – never knew Sara really loved him. He thought the alien squid he and the others fought – the one they thought was Sara – was the real Sara. It’s kind of confusing, I know. A lot was happening fast.”

  “Did you call her an alien squid?”

  Scott nodded. “A name their Jeff apparently came up with for them. Anyway, that was part of the reason he fought the android army with such intensity. But before he could stop them, a hover craft with some sort of energy weapon – I think it might have been firing an ion beam – it hit Logan Airport, where the survivors were staying. Mother died. Sammy did, too. Most of them. In the end, Jeff and Quentin and the others defeated the Army, but at a terrible cost.

  “That was when the future Jeff decided to come back and warn us. But before he could..,”

  Jake said, “But before he could, he got hit by a bullet from Kincaid’s SWAT team.”

  Scott nodded. “He never knew Sara really loved him.”

  “So, our Jeff succeeded in possibly altering the future.”

  Scott nodded. “Apparently originally, our central computer turned on us without warning and killed most of us. Somehow the squids had hacked into it. They never could have hacked into Sammy, when he was serving as the central computer, because he’s a quantum computer. But the new one is a more conventional computer and hacking in was possible. But now, thanks to your son, we have a fighting chance.”

  Jake took another chug of beer, finishing it off, and stood the empty bottle on the desk. “To have a fighting chance, we have to get the lights back on and we have to get the computer running. Or build a new one. And we have to come up with a plan.”

  “I think I have one. As wild as it might be.”

  Jake snorted a chuckle. “When have you come up with a plan that wasn’t wild?”

  “Good point. At least I’m consistent. But, Jake, I want you to take command.”

  “Me?”

  “Jeff made some very good points tonight. And he proved them by taking me to the future. Showing me what happened. That entire time line happened because we weren’t prepared enough when we went back to 1880. If we had left well enough alone, then that alien scientist would have activated all of the meta-humans, and an army of them would have been waiting for the alien fleet. Thanks to me, he and his android assistant were dead before we really knew they were on our side.”

  “You can’t take the blame for all of it.”

  Scott nodded. “It’s too much. Even for me. Trying to be the leader here. Trying to think for everyone and run all of the various scientific experiments and tests we have going on. For years – ever since the start, really – I’ve been the head of our little team, but you’ve always been the heart.”

  Jake shrugged. “I always thought April was the heart.”

  Scott shook his head. “She’s the conscience. But you’ve always been the heart.”

  “You’re our leader, Scott.”

  “You have a natural leadership quality to you. And you think tactically. Better than I do. You have to take command. We need to get a new computer built. And it has to be a computer that can’t be hacked by the invaders. We need to restore power to this facility. We need to begin rounding up shape-shifters and determine which of them will fight with us, and which will not. And I have to put my plan into action. And all of it pretty much has to happen at once.”

  “You really want me to take command?”

  Scott nodded. “They do call you Captain, don’t they?”

  “All right. I’m going to want to bring the Boston people in on this. It involves them, too. We can use Snake’s and Mother’s judgment. And if Quentin really is the man you think he is, then we need him, too.”

  A voice spoke from the darkness around them. A deep baritone. “A wise decision, Jake Calder. I will go brief them.”

  Jake almost fell out of his chair. Scott dropped his beer bottle, and what was left of the beer cascaded down over the edge of the desk.

  “What the hell?” Jake said. “The Darkness? You’re here?”

  “I have been here much more often than you know. I will go and brief Mother and Snake.”

  TEN

  Everyone was congregating in the main lab while Scott and Jake talked down in Scott’s office. The room was lighted with several of Akila’s candles. Each one was mounted in a petri dish and placed on a lab table.

  Sara said, “What does it take to get a battle suit? These are cool.”

  She was sitting on a lab table. She was still in her tank top and jeans, and Jeff was in his red battle suit.

  He said, “You gotta join the team.”

  “I do have a meta-ability. I can see in the dark. I’ve been able to ever since I was a little girl.”

  Ashley was standing nearby, leaning onto the lab table with both elbows. She said, “When Sara was a little girl, she fell down the stairs at home and was knocked out cold. We took her to the hospital. She had a concussion. Shortly after that her ability to see in the dark started. That was when our handlers realized the original Sara must have had what you call the genesis gene, and it was copied when they copied her DNA to create our Sara.”

  Chloe was in a lavender battle suit. She said, “You know what’s kind of strange? If I understand all of this correctly, the genesis gene is powered by nano-bots. But, nano-bots are tech. Why can’t I detect the tech in any of us?”

  Ashley said, “The alien scientists are trying to figure out the genesis gene. It was created using their technology, but the alien who created it back in the nineteenth century used a lot of original thinking. But from what they can figure, it’s some sort of bio-nano technology.”

  Sara said, “So, when they turned us into copies of the original Reid children, the baby Sara’s genesis gene was able to copy into me. Even the – what’d you call it? Bio-nano technology? Even that copied.”

  April was there, in her golden battle suit. “You know, if the original Sara had a genesis gene, then so did the original Ashley. The genesis gene is dominant. Which means,” she looked at Ashley, “you do, too.”

  Ashley was surprised to hear this. “Me?”

  Sara said with a smirk, “Maybe we can hit you in the head and see what kind of ability manifests itself.”

  Ashley threw a mock scowl at her. April was amazed to watch the two of them. Here they were, alien shape-shifters. Squids, Jeff said they were called in the future. And yet, they were still very much human sisters.

  Rick Wilson was in his orange battle suit with a comet painted on the chest, and Akila was in the somewhat skimpy suit designed for her by April. Akila liked freedom of movement in battle, so the suit she wore was made out of the same material as the others, nylon that had been treated with various types of radiation and chemicals so it wouldn’t burn and couldn’t be cut, but the top covered her no more than a sports bra, and the bottom was essentially a pair of hip-hugging briefs. She wore boots that rose to the knee, and about her bare middle was a belt equipped with everything the other suits had. Akila could virtually fly by manipulating gravitational fields, and she had a force field.

  Chuck was in what looked like a white space suit, though he had set the helmet down on one of the lab tables.

  He was checking out Akila’s legs, which he did every chance he got. She was fully committed to Jake and he could respect that, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t look and appreciate. But as he did so, he was strolling over toward Chloe, trying to make it look like he was just casually wandering.

  “So, Chloe,” he said. “I was wondering..,”

  “No.” she said flatly.

  “No, what I meant was, when this is over..,”

  “No.” She wasn’t going to even give him the chance. She then walked over to the lab table and hopped up on it to sit beside Sara.

  “
So,” Sara said. “You’re part of the team, too.”

  “I was. I retired to go to college, but I guess I’m what you would call a reserve. They keep a suit around for me.”

  Chuck, now feeling a little dejected, went to the dorm fridge and pulled out one of the last Bud Light’s. It was a little warm now, but he generated a little of his freezing power through his gloved hand and into the bottle, and within a few seconds had a cold beer.

  Ashley said to Chloe, “I have to confess, they know you’re a meta-human. They call it an altered human. They’ve known for a while. The whole idea of me being your roommate was to spy on you. I think they have a couple agents among the people in Boston, too. They’ve been expending some resources trying to figure out what the Darkness is and how to contain him. But I don’t think any of them know about this place. If they do, no one’s mentioned it.”

  Jeff said, “Scott and Dad have always tried to keep our very existence on the down-low. I always thought they were being a little paranoid, but now I’m kinda glad.”

  April said, looking toward the corridor, “Here they come.”

  Scott strode into the room. He was now in his gray battle suit. Jake followed him.

  Scott said, “All right. We’ve made some decisions. There’s a lot to be done, and it has to be done fast. Jake’s taking charge and he’s going to coordinate this.”

  Jake walked over to Chuck. Chuck didn’t realize Jake was powered-up at all until Jake snatched the beer bottle out of his hand effortlessly. He crushed the bottle in his grip, sending beer suds splashing to the floor.

  “No more of this,” Jake said. “And I want you to leave the women here alone. They’re teammates. They’re to be treated as such. We’re at war. Act like it.”

  Jake strode to the center of the room. Scott said, “You have the floor, Captain.”