“This whole thing. What are you going to get out of working in a secret project no one will know about for years?”
The technician didn’t seem interested in answering the question and instead stood behind Mikhail and continued checking the suit for leaks. After a moment, he stood there in silence then patted him in the back as to confirm everything was alright. “Doctor Wei teaches at my university,” he said. “He brought me in to help around.”
“Really? What is your major?”
“Electrical engineering. I was part of the team that designed the HEMS actuators,” Robert said with pride.
“In that case, let me tell you, you guys did a great job.”
Robert nodded then stepped back in front of Mikhail and grabbed his hand to check the small screen built into the back of the arm. He then tapped on the touchscreen and the onboard electronics powered on. Mikhail felt relieved as the controlled environment inside cooled down his body from the neck down.
“Have you practiced using the water reclamation system?” Robert asked then crouched to get a better look at Mikhail’s crotch.
“You mean the urine pouch?” the Major replied with a hint of disgust in his voice.
“Yes?” Robert said, standing up and crossing his arms. “As I said before, you’ll have to get used to urinate in it then drink the filtered water.”
“Do I?” Mikhail asked. “Chances are I will evaporate as soon as I step in the portal. I doubt I’ll live long enough to get thirsty.”
The technician shook his head and stepped away towards one of the lockers on the back of the room and grabbed a clear glass helmet. “You got to be more positive, Major,” he said as he handed it to Mikhail. The Major grunted as he took the helmet and held it under his right arm. “Anything else?”
“It’s okay to be nervous,” Robert said, surprising Mikhail who had learned to not expect much human interaction from the otherwise cold and down to business engineer.
“Kid, this is nothing new to me. Won’t be the first time I suit up and face death before lunch.”
Robert chuckled and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Alright, let’s go,” Mikhail said as he walked away while absentmindedly reaching for his breast pocket to feel the hard plastic of the picture wallet inside through the thick layers of the HEMS. Robert followed and they stepped out of the changing room. By then he had learned to navigate the underground maze although there were still plenty of unexplored tunnels that made him wonder just how long had these people been digging. Eventually they reached the service elevator and they got in. Robert swiped his ID badge on a reader by the door then pushed the button all the way on the bottom. The wire mesh doors closed then soon they were descending towards the Celestial Gateway control room.
The two occupants stepped out of the elevator and into the cold, damp cavern and immediately, Mikhail was startled by the strange combination of the smells of earth and machinery in the air. He gazed at the contraction on the other side of the surprisingly large cave. A small army of scientists, technicians and assistants swarmed around the twenty-five feet tall structure of metal and cabling. Some of them at ground level, others on the surrounding scaffolding. Affixed to the ceiling of the cave, right above the machine, Mikhail saw the countdown timer. T-minus 36 minutes or so and counting. Someone seemed to notice the new arrivals and word spread until at one point, every person in the cave looked at them. Robert took that as a cue to step back. Mikhail turned and nodded at the technician who returned that same look everyone else in the facility had given him since the first day he arrived there. The look reserved for a dead man walking.
As normalcy returned to the busy team, Doctor Wei broke from the group, approached Mikhail and shook his hand. He spoke of the technical minutiae of the experiment but his words faded into the background noise. Many times the Major had been briefed on the science of it and yet his mind struggled to comprehend the complex mathematics involved. Mikhail had been at one time a test pilot, not a theoretical physicist. His job was to risk his life not to understand the forces jeopardizing it in the first place. But he understood they were all in the joke. He had not been selected for the experiment out of his level of understanding of reality but simply because he was a guy accustomed to danger, with nothing to lose and no one to miss him if worse came to worse.
The countdown reached t-minus 25 and Mikhail was signaled to approach the pedestal and prepare to begin. He put on his helmet and secured it to the suit. A faint hiss of compressed oxygen confirmed the airtight seal and he breathed in the artificial flavor of the life support system. He checked the system’s integrity and his own vitals on the screen affixed to the underside of his right arm. Everything was on the green. Not that it would be of that much help. If anything went wrong, he would disintegrate without even realizing it. If the experiment worked, no one knew what would happen to him. Mikhail didn’t know which outcome scared him the most.
“We are about twenty minutes away from synchronization, Major,” Doctor Wei’s voice crackled through the radio in Mikhail’s helmet.
“Copy,” he replied.
“As previously discussed, the countdown marks the start of the synchronization window,” Wei added. “We’re talking about an alignment of several celestial bodies so there will be some error in the calculations involved in predicting when the Celestial Gateway will open.”
The countdown clock was not visible from the pedestal but Mikhail knew the complex cosmic alignment the Initiative had been waiting for years was about to occur. A very specific arrangement of solar system and extraneous bodies was going to push and pull on space-time in such a way that gravity would converge on a single point just enough to create one of those paradoxes that stubbornly refused to obey the maxims that mathematicians smugly wasted so much chalk writing down on blackboards. That single point of convergence happened to going to be on the platform he was standing on. It was still unclear how long the Gateway would stay open and so the Initiative decided to not waste time with a drone. This was going to be either an event that was going to redefine mankind’s understanding of the universe or history’s most expensive scientific joke. Mikhail figured that was the main reason the whole project was kept a secret to the general population outside of the international team of researchers.
At t-minus 10, Mikhail was notified to prepare to follow the previously rehearsed procedure. He felt for his breast pocket once more just to confirm the picture was still there then took a series of deep breaths to clear his mind. It had previously been agreed that there would be no final countdown as the calculations for when the event was actually going to begin could be off a few seconds. Just as Mikhail listed the ways to tell if the event was occurring in his head, it all begun.
The ground beneath his feet shook, forcing him to spread his arms for balance. A bright light flashed and he instinctively tensed his muscles to resist the pushback of an explosion but it never came. There was no heat or any sort of violent reaction. In fact it suddenly became very cold in the cave. The intense light died down and eventually he was able to look at the massive chrome sphere floating in front of him.
“What the hell?” Mikhail muttered as he turned to see the team of scientists and technicians behind him.
“Stand by,” Wei said as he and his colleagues appeared to fight the temptation of staring at the impossible object and instead worked on their computer terminals.
“This doesn’t look like a portal at all,” Mikhail said again.
“You weren’t paying attention in your briefings,” Wei lectured him. “It’s a fourth dimensional construct so it doesn’t really look like a sphere either. That’s just how our primitive tridimensional senses perceive it.”
“Of course,” the Major added sarcastically then turned back to observe it. For some reason, he felt the strange urge to get closer and at the same time, his primitive survival reflex stopped him from doing so.
“It seems to be stable enough. Proceed when ready but hurry up. We don�
��t know how long it will stay open.”
Without warning, the sphere expanded until Mikhail could see it right in front of him, just a few inches away from his face. Its perfectly polished surface became irregular and rifts raised from it in horizontal lines from top to bottom. The spin that had been subtle up to this point was now more evident and its speed caused Mikhail to become dizzy until he had to close his eyes. Carefully, he raised his right arm to touch the sphere which felt cold and as if he was dragging his hand through fine sand. The sphere was not a solid object but appeared to be stuck between a liquid and a pulverized state. Gaining more confidence, Mikhail thrust his hand into it then quickly pulled it back just to confirm it was intact. Even the electronics in the monitoring screen were still working. Although the warm sensation he felt on the other side disturbed him a little.
It is safe, Mikhail thought. Then just like that, he gathered strength and jumped in.
Mikhail Novak had to blink several times to adjust his eyes to the brightness around him. He looked up and saw nothing but bright, uniform white light. He looked to the sides and saw the same thing. There was no sense of location as space seemed to expand into the infinite on all directions. Then he looked down and saw that the floor was a solid reflecting surface which looked like a grainy mirror that also ran farther away than his eyes could register. After confirming there was nothing to see anywhere, he stood there confused and almost disappointed at the simplicity of the situation. He looked at his vitals on the life support status display to confirm everything was right with his body. Curiously, the timer showed it had been 64 minutes since the Celestial Gateway had opened.
For a while, Mikhail walked on a random direction, hoping to see any landmark at all but again, he found nothing and without any spatial reference points, it appeared as he had not moved from his starting point. Frustrated, he looked back on the display. It had now been 38 hours and 12 minutes since T-minus zero but it felt much less than that. His suit did not have that much oxygen in it. Mikhail concluded time simply ran on a different schedule in there, wherever he was. A bit bored now, he flipped through the different information pages on the touchscreen until one in particular startled him. His suit sensors detected a breathable atmosphere around him. For a while he thought about the consequences of removing his helmet but then concluded he would rather die right then and there than to wait until the HEMS oxygen supply ran out and with a quick motion, he unsecured the helmet off the suit and took it off.
At first, the voices were faint and distant. Almost whispering to him. Then they became louder and louder. Mikhail looked in all directions searching for the source but only found the bright nothingness. The voices became deafening screams and he let go of the helmet to cover his ears. As much as he pressed against the sides of his head, the screaming would not be muffled. He kneeled on the ground and closed his eyes, hyperventilating. Trying to keep his mind calm, he concentrated on making sense of the voices but they sounded as foreign languages to him. Then the volume increased more and more until, desperate, he screamed himself in agony.
Then he began understanding some of them which he realized were speaking in Ukrainian. As his mind focused on those, they grew louder and muffled the nonsense away as if the familiar speech was his point of reference. There was no specific message in the voices but they appeared to be random samples from people discussing everyday matters. The volume also lowered down and he let go of his ears and opened his eyes. The nothingness he had been in had transitioned to a blue sky with scattered clouds which were reflected on the mirror-like floor he was standing on.
“Hello?” he said, hoping to get the attention of the voices but they continued in the background much like a recording playing casual conversations.
“[Who is there?]” he tried again in Ukrainian to see if it made a difference. The voices immediately stopped then he felt a sharp pain in his head. The temples pulsated with the same rhythm as his heartbeat, forcing him to close his eyes in agony while still images from past memories came in and out of focus. Mikhail felt as if the images were a sort of waking dream and he wondered if he had died and this was the afterlife. After a few minutes, the pain subsided and he stood up. When he opened his eyes, Mikhail was standing on the steel platform back in the natural cave where the Celestial Gateway had opened and the team of scientists and support personnel all cheered, welcoming him back to the safety of planet Earth.
Still disturbed by the strange experience had gone through, he smiled with relief. He was not, as previously planned, walking on the surface of an alien planet but at least he was back home in one piece. Wei approached and hugged him. The Doctor was emotional in a way Mikhail had never seen since he first met him. Then other people joined in the welcome and as he received it, he turned his head behind him to see the perfect chrome sphere still floating there and apparently not going anywhere. All at once they would ask Mikhail what he had seen on the other side. Some of them held cameras, as they recorded the historic event. High up in a mix of relief, happiness and pride, he couldn’t help but smile and try to answer their questions as best as he could.
Then he realized they were all speaking Ukrainian.
The retired test pilot struggled to remember if that’s how it was supposed to be but his memory failed him and couldn’t for sure determine if the scientific team from the Hermes Initiative was in fact composed of native Ukrainian speakers. The uncertainty became too much and he pushed back away from them. If he spoke English or Ukrainian, it didn’t matter, they would answer in the tongue of his motherland. Then the pain returned and he was forced to close his eyes and hold his head down.
And again the pain stopped and when he opened his eyes, he was there in the hospital room, holding the Polaroid camera, as Haya wiped her eyes from the flash in confusion.
“[Dear god],” Mikhail muttered and he tossed the camera aside to hug his daughter. He had taken the picture almost thirty years ago and the memories of impotence he had felt when he spent the last weeks of her life watching her wither away returned. When he broke the hug, he wiped tears off his face and his daughter still sat there, observing him with curiosity.
“[I love you, papa],” she said laboriously, her true sweet voice distorted by the terrible disease.
“[I miss you so much, sweetheart],” he said as he looked around the room and himself. He was still wearing the HEM suit then he noticed outside of the hospital room window where there should be a street, he only saw the cloudy blue sky from before. He then returned his attention to his daughter but when he turned to face her, the hospital room was gone and he was standing again in the endless mirror field with a blue sky.
Many things rushed through his mind. The scenes he had seen appeared to be what he wanted to see not what could happen or had happened before. He had always figured the greatest regret of his life was to not have been there for Haya in the moment she passed away. The girl had gone to a better place on her own one night even after the diagnosis had been steady remission. But he hadn’t been there and now the vision had given him the chance to say goodbye. He was clearly in a distorted state of mind so he kneeled on the mirror-like floor and he took deep breaths to calm himself and regain some clarity of thought.
Even with the years he had on him, his mind still remained that bright, razor-sharp asset that had gained him praise and a place in the highest ranks of the Ukrainian Air Force and so once he calmed down, he meditated on the nature of the visions. The former had been a return home, unharmed. The latter was the goodbyes he never got to exchange with his daughter. And they both had come after he spoke in his native language out there in that nothingness.
Then a voice deep in mind echoed, informing him he was correct. For a moment, he sat there unsure of how to react. The voice had not been a clear human speech pattern but rather, it felt as if a memory of being correct in his assumption had spontaneously appeared in his head. Someone or something was trying to communicate that way. And again, he received positive confirmation.
“[Where am I?]” he asked of the formless being or beings.
A vague memory of an echoing radio transmission from one of his flight missions came to his mind. In the memory, he was attempting to establish radio contact with a distant control tower but the message would not arrive. Then the memory transitioned to a time where he was driving home and his car broke down, leaving him stranded in the middle of the woods.
“[Am I in transit? Am I traveling?]”
The same image that he had interpreted as a yes formed in his mind. Excited, he confirmed he had made contact with some sort of intelligence out there.
“[Can I go back?]”
The mental image was vague and abstract but somehow it felt like a negative. It hit him that crossing the edge of the Celestial Gateway was going to be a one-way trip but he had had weeks to prepare for such an outcome and so he decided to make the most of it.
“[When will I arrive?]”
The memory of standing next to his broken-down car returned but it was only a still image and it remained so for several minutes until the he realized the meaning.
“[Never?]” he asked as a deep terror took ahold of his chest.
In response, he received the same positive answer, confirming his fears.
“[Can I go elsewhere? When can I leave this place?]” he asked again.
Again, the same still mental image returned, making it absolutely sure he understood he was trapped there, alone. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Nothing to see. Until the end of time.
*
Decades ago, Mikhail had learned the communication pattern the intelligence on the other side used. It came as second nature now to initiate a form of conversation in which he would ask a question to no one in particular and he would receive an answer by the intelligence digging out a memory from his past. On many occasions he had had to ask repeatedly until the answer in his mind made sense. There was a general chaos in the way this entity he now thought of as a formless, invisible being would transmit information. When he asked the reason he was trapped there it would not reply. When he asked about the nature of the place he was in, the answer was a memory that included some sort of communication mode. One time it had been a memory of himself writing a letter, another, making a phone call. His training as a radio communications technician besides that of a pilot eventually put the memories in context until he understood the Celestial Gateway was a construct for transmitting information and he was stuck in its buffer. After years of meditating on this fact, he had reached the conclusion that the reason for this was himself not being compatible with the encoding protocol it used.
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