“Anyway, she’s the second highest ranking politician in this country, yet she has no plans after the next election. Most people would have already announced their plans to run for President, or that they are going to start a TV talk show, or write a book about being the youngest VP in history. Not Penelope. She hasn’t said anything about her plans,” Hoppy said. He glanced at Marie, who nodded for him to continue. “Which led us to think outside the box, or outside this world.”
Marie took the tablet and swiped at a few tabs, bringing up a list of names.
Smith swung the tablet toward himself, and looked at the obviously classified document. His mind screamed about national security, but just before he uttered anything, he remembered this wasn’t his national government nor was it his planet. There were lines he wouldn’t cross to get back home, but peeking at a column of names he wasn’t supposed to see wasn’t very high on that list.
At the top was a label: “E2 Expedition.”
There was about a dozen names underneath, starting with Penelope Bridges at the top, with her title next to it—”VP.” Following her name were a veritable who’s who in the government with various Cabinet members, Congressmen and women and U.S. Senators. One name was even noted as a “SC Justice.”
“What the heck is this?” Nik Davidson asked. He’d been peering over Smith’s shoulder to get a look at the screen.
Smith thought he knew.
“These are people leaving this world. Penelope is planning to replace your wife on our world and all these people are going with her,” Smith said.
“How do you know that?” Nik asked.
“I’ve seen these names before. Well...most of them. Right, Marie?”
The analyst smiled as Smith said her name. “I hoped you’d remember, but I wasn’t sure with all the craziness we’d endured the past few days.”
“What? Who are these people?”
Smith picked the fourth name down on the list.
“This guy right here? John Phillip Koon?” Smith asked Davidson.
The man nodded. “Who is it? I’ve never heard of him.”
“You wouldn’t. He’s nobody in our world. Well...not nobody, but nobody you’d recognize. He’s a neurosurgeon in Fargo, North Dakota. Not too long before we came to your place in Indiana, we sent a team to his house after it essentially imploded. I hadn’t heard back yet for sure whether he and his family had died in the ‘accident,’ but I think now we know he was supposed to,” Smith said. He looked back down at the list. “It says here he’s a U.S. Senator from North Dakota on this world. And this name a few spaces down is a Congresswoman from Virginia. Same deal as North Dakota. In fact, almost all the names here are names connected to sites where portals sprang up in our world.”
“What’s the goal? Why?”
Hoppy spoke up. “You haven’t been here. You don’t know what it’s like. Our world is different from yours. The terrorists achieved total victory on 9/11. We were sent reeling from the fourth plane hitting the White House. The Middle East terror groups were emboldened after that and we got hit again and again. No embassy between Greece and China was safe, it seemed, and even today we don’t have a presence in the Persian Gulf states,” Hoppy said. It was clear the experiences were still somewhat fresh and emotional for him. He sat down with Marie standing right next to him. He looked away, his eyes on a wall behind Agent Smith. “Project Blink came around and I helped implement it. I thought it was the fix. I thought we’d make the world a safer place. They sent agents to the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of Saudi Arabia, hunting down the very men who hunted us. The bad guys died, but it wasn’t enough.”
“What do you mean?” Smith asked.
Hoppy took a deep breath and glanced back at Smith, almost as if he dared to look him in the eyes during his semi-confessional. His eyes went back to the blank wall.
“I mean that once the terrorists were killed, new ones popped up to take their place. Once they were killed, even more sprang up. Finally, it seemed as though we had gotten most of them, but then heads of state starting dropping off in mysterious ways. I was told to keep my mouth shut. I was told it was for the greater good. Agent Smith was one of the few who objected. Even then, he didn’t trust me when he took his boldest step of all—going over to your world. He’s dead, and in the end, I doubt he knew where my feelings lie.”
The room was quiet for a few moments as they remembered the alternate Agent Smith and his sacrifice to get them all here. Smith shuddered thinking about the man with his own face, but knew they didn’t have the time for mourning now.
“Okay, Hoppy. I’m sorry about all that, but why? Why do these people want out?” Smith said, emphasizing his last words while jabbing at the tablet screen.
“They’ve done it to themselves. In addition to the connections they have to your world, they also have a connection here. They are all the secret members of the Project Blink Executive Committee. From the beginning, they’ve been the brains behind the operations, authorizing everything from preemptive strikes in Lebanon to assassinations in Poland,” Hoppy said. “So, while they’ve made this world what it is, I think they aren’t happy with the world they’ve created in their own image. Once they got the idea to scoot to a new world, free of the scars they’d inflicted, I think they were ready to go.”
Smith knew Hoppy and Marie wouldn’t be showing all this without a big reveal. He looked at the two analysts.
“So what do we do?”
Hoppy and Marie smiled and looked at each other. The two clearly knew what they wanted to say and they virtually matched each other syllable for syllable.
“We’re going to stop them.”
Capitol Bound
Smith shook his head as he latched the straps of a backpack over his shoulders. Hoppy had loaded up the pack with various bits of electronics and machinery and mumbled phrases with words like “explosive” and “important.” The man was definitely the man in charge at the moment—it was his world and the team was traveling on his portal network. If Hoppy wasn’t really on their side, they’d find out pretty quickly when they didn’t materialize on the other side. At least it would be quick. Smith didn’t know about painless, but how painful could it be if it was almost instantaneous?
He tried to put those thoughts out of his mind. This would be the first time he’d be traveling through one of these portals totally voluntarily, so he took a few minutes to rid himself of thoughts of death. In his job, he encountered death nearly every day. Why should today be any different?
Around the Control Room, the others prepared themselves as well. Nik Davidson was also shouldering a pack like Agent Smith’s, filled to the brim with equipment Marie and Hoppy deemed irreplaceable. Even if they didn’t use it in their next stop, Smith was okay with a few extra items. Director Wall might even crack a smile if they came back with some advanced technology.
“Um, Agent Smith?”
Smith turned to find Jodi and Braden behind him. The teens had been vital in the defense of the underground cave from the attempted incursion from the other side. Smith reminded himself it was from the “other” side technically, but it was from agents from this side trying to get here from his home world. It was almost too much to keep straight. Regardless, the teens had been helpful, but they needed to get home. All the others in the Control Room were at least adults who chose in some way to be here. The teens just wandered into an open portal from their reality.
“Yeah, Braden, what’s up?”
The boy pursed his lips, almost afraid to answer. Jodi nudged him with an elbow and he spoke up.
“Agent Smith, Jodi was asking…” another nudge and he corrected himself, “We were wondering when we might be able to go home.”
While Smith hadn’t forgotten about the pair, he also didn’t have an answer for them. Agent Smith was at the mercy of Hoppy and his portal network, and so were the teens.
“Let’s get Hoppy over here and we’ll ask him.”
&n
bsp; The technician ambled over. “Did I hear my name?”
“Yeah. Any way to get Braden and Jodi back home? No reason to take them into the lion’s den, right?”
“Uh, yeah. They’re going to have to come with us. At least for now,” Hoppy said, scratching his chin. He gestured to a shut down portal on the opposite wall. “We shut them all down. I’ll be able to start up the hardline back to D.C. long enough for us to get there—the portals across this world are a somewhat different story than from one world to the other. I can’t get them home until we get to the Utility Company and figure out what to do next.”
Smith was speechless. He wanted to get everyone out, and having the kids alongside was just a few more people he could have on his conscience at the end of the mission.
Hoppy saw the expression on the agent’s face and spoke up again. “I’ll do my best to get their portal network working there. We’ve shut down the planet to planet network from here, but it’s a lot easier to restart in D.C. since that’s where the boundary was first crossed. Believe me—as soon as I can get Braden and Jodi back, I will.”
Smith knew it wouldn’t help to show fear in front of the teens, so he smiled and clapped Hoppy on the shoulder. Turning to Braden, Agent Smith tried to reassure the boy.
“See, we’ll make sure you get home. Hoppy and Marie are experts. We all want to get home, too. We’ll get you there. I promise.”
_____
The six of them stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the main cave. According to Hoppy, the dark portal was the lone place where they could activate the cold network to get to Washington, D.C.
Agent Smith knew that while they were walking into a familiar place—The Utility Company, his home away from home—it was enemy territory. He couldn’t count on friendly faces. They needed to portal into someplace private, if possible. When they were discussing the plan about an hour earlier, Hoppy and Marie had left it to Smith to decide on where they could cross over. Smith had remembered the locker room at his own U.C. headquarters and proposed the six-foot tall mirror he adjusted his tie in every morning. It took a bit of coordination, but the technicians were confident they could establish a secure connection between the cave and the locker room. Hoppy was making the final calculations as Smith tapped his ring finger on his thigh.
Nik Davidson scooted closer to Smith as the group waited.
“Are we sure this is going to work?”
Smith tilted his head a bit as he considered the question. “I’m confident in everything I do, Mr. Davidson,” Smith said. “But, I’ll be honest. We’re walking into a situation I’m not one hundred percent briefed on with players I am not too familiar with. This is a world none of us know except Hoppy, and even he is an outsider in his own land. Do I think we are going to win? Yes I do, because I have to believe that. But I would be lying if walking through this portal in a minute doesn’t scare the pants off me, either.”
Davidson audibly swallowed.
“Thank you for your candor, Agent Smith.”
A few feet away Hoppy reached over to the cave wall and flipped a switch. The portal switched from a view of the stone wall behind it to a dark locker room thousands of miles away. Marie gasped at the change and the two teens began to talk simultaneously. Agent Smith cleared his throat and the cavern quieted down.
“Okay everyone. I’ll lead the way. Braden, Jodi—you two follow me with Hoppy and Marie following. Davidson, you good to come last?”
Nik looked up as if he wasn’t expecting Smith to talk to him and mumbled an agreement. Smith wondered for a moment if Nik was prepared, but had to trust that the man was on board with the plan. This was the only way to get his family back. They all agreed. It was the only way, so Smith was forced to count on Nik one way or another.
He turned to the wall and began walking towards the portal.
_____
Nik watched the other five file towards the portal. For the life of him, he couldn’t move his feet. It was almost as if his feet were glued to the cave’s floor. He knew he needed to go. He needed to leave.
But what if he couldn’t do it? He was chasing down the people who took his family from him, blindly going from one universe to the next, not thinking about where he was going. With so much time on his hands, Nik’s fears got the best of him. What if failure was not only an option, but the only option? He was not only trying to save his wife, he was also battling this world’s versions of him and Penny in the process. How could he win against that? They had the home field advantage. All he had was Agent Smith.
He trusted Smith. Implicitly. Even though the two had a rough introduction, Nik knew the agent was one of the best men he’d ever met.
So why couldn’t he move?
Fear.
He was afraid. What if something happened? What if something happened to Smith? Hoppy and Marie had good heads on their shoulders, but they weren’t agents like Smith. The teens wouldn’t be any help, either. No, it was clear the only firepower in the whole group came from Agent Smith. An Agent Smith who himself admitted to anxiety and insecurities.
After Marie plunged through the portal, Nik Davidson looked around wildly. One thing caught his eye. The half-body of Liszt, the analyst who hadn’t made it to this side. The double of Hoppy. Nik flipped up the tarp covering Liszt’s body and tried to avoid the blank stare from Liszt’s one open eye. He fished through Liszt’s pockets, searching for something. He didn’t know what. Nothing.
Finally, he found it. Liszt’s TARDIS. They’d given it back after they found him, but now it was a memento for a world neither one of them might ever see again. Nik knew enough about Doctor Who to know the Time Lord never used guns, instead resorting to his trusty sonic screwdriver.
But Nik wasn’t The Doctor. He patted his own pockets and rediscovered the gun he’d had since he shot out the controls on the portals hours earlier. He’d shot out the magazine, but he’d found new ammunition and reloaded. He put the TARDIS back on top of Liszt’s body, hoping that if perhaps The Doctor was real in this universe he could go back and save the poor analyst.
Nik straightened up and looked at the event horizon in front of him. He still felt ill prepared, but with a gun for himself, Nik felt a bit better about facing the unknown future on this unknown world.
Lockered
Even though Agent Smith had told Hoppy where to program the portal exit, he was still surprised when he set foot in the locker room of the Utility Company in Washington, D.C.. The technology was impressive; he was in a place he knew well. Or at least he thought he did.
The room was dim, but illuminated in a regular pattern thanks to the lamps hanging from the ceiling. As Smith looked around, he noted that the only difference between his own locker room and this room was the color of the lockers. His own were blue. These were a dark maroon.
Upon entering the room, training took over and Smith did what he could to secure the room as the rest of the team came through the portal. He first went to the door that connected the locker to the main office—the one that led to the outside world. He pulled a locker bank over to the door and pushed it against the entrance, and then cleared the space while he advanced towards the only exit. That way would lead to the agent offices. An area that could be the one place he was most wanted.
The others stepped through with a small pause between the scientists and then finally...Nik Davidson. Smith thought it odd for a brief moment, but then pushed it out of his mind. He didn’t have time to debate the punctuality of a man who was traveling cross-country through a teleportation device.
“Okay. What’s next?” Marie asked once they were all safely in the room and Hoppy had disengaged the portal. Braden and Jodi sat huddled on a bench on the opposite side of the locker room.
Smith walked over to a locker—#27—and pushed up on the latch. The locker sprang open with a familiarity that Smith wasn’t sure he even wanted to feel.
“This is my locker,” Smith told
them over his shoulder as he focused his attention on the meager belongings inside. Belongings that his double would never again see or use. With his doppelganger dying back in Smith’s Sedona, Smith realized he could be this world’s Agent Smith. Just another person with a familiar face.
Inside the locker hung a couple white button-up shirts with matching black ties. A pair of shoes sat at the bottom of the locker with a pair of socks balled up inside. The socks, though, were not black. They didn’t go with the rest of the outfit. Smith crouched down and lifted the socks out of the shoes. Inside one of the socks was a phone. Smith swiped across and the screen lit up. The home screen defaulted to a video player.
Smith’s own face was staring right back at him. He hit play.
“Hello. If this is who I hope it is, congratulations for making it this far. If it’s anybody else besides myself watching this...you don’t need to watch this to know you’re on the wrong path.
Anyway, back to myself. Congrats again. But, if you’re watching this, there is a very good chance that I am dead or incapacitated. So that sucks.”
The video version of Smith pursed his lips for a moment while he thought.
“If you’re still in play and Penelope hasn’t gotten through the portal, I need to tell you about her team. She’s got almost two dozen others who hail from all parts of the government and corporate world with her. If she succeeds, she will supplant each of those people back in your world.”
Smith nodded to himself as he was hearing confirmation of information Hoppy and Marie had mostly suspected.
“But, what you may not know is that virtually the entire workforce of The Utility Company—especially the agents—are also working for Penelope. So, if you’re here watching this, you need to move and move now.”
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