by Richard Leru
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1.The End
2.The Beginning
3.Destiny
4.The Turn
5.Launch
6.The Mission
7.Solar System 1
8.Settlement
9.Solar System 2
10.Solar System 313
11.Solar System 314
12.Erebus II
13.The Debate
14.Broken Loop
15.After Zero
About The Author
THE LOOP
Richard Leru
Copyright © 2014 Richard Leru
All rights reserved.
Broken Loop is not just a story about scientific discovery and travel among the stars. It is a journey into the most important aspects in life; love and free choice. The greatest source of love in my life has been my family and friends. Thank you, especially to my mother, father, brother, and sister. Your inspiration and help has made this story possible.
Richard Leru
1.The End
“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.”
– Henry Drummond
Life returned to his body and the fogginess left his mind. With all the strength Alex Runner could muster, in that moment, he pulled himself to a seated position. He looked around the room. Everything was dark gray, from the walls, to the floor, to the ceiling. He could feel the hard metal against his back as he leaned on the smooth wall. The floor was like a rougher version of sand paper, titanium covered with texture spots to avoid slipping. It was dark gray, the same as everything else. The only light came from outside the bars. It was just a small flood bulb in an open casing. Everything was metallic, from the feel to the smell. The air was so acrid with the scent of metal, he could almost taste it.
Alex was currently calling an 8-foot by 6-foot storage compartment home. This compartment had been turned into a makeshift prison cell, especially for him. His cell had solid metal walls on three sides and bars on another. There was no bed, no sink, nothing but that dim light shining its orange glow on everything. Alex was alone in the storage bay. Outside of his cell, he could see a hundred more compartments just like his, lit barely by a series of small round lights overhead. One of a hundred cells in two straight lines. This was his home.
The only things to keep him company were his digital watch and the picture that made his current situation bearable.
The light flickered and the ship shuddered. The others were trying to get her moving again. It didn’t matter without his help; without the key code, they weren’t going anywhere.
Alex looked at his watch. Only ten minutes to go. He could imagine the chaos that must be happening up top right now. People would be running around, screaming at each other, a mixture of stress, desperation, and fear. Certainly some wanted to come kill Alex or torture him to force the answer from his mind. It wouldn’t matter, he would hold out long enough, even if they tried.
Alex was sitting in bottom of the first ever, true starship, the Erebus. Erebus was a large ship he himself had helped design and build. It measured over 1700 feet in length, 1500 feet high, and 1500 feet wide. The name originated from the Greek mythological god of darkness. Its mission was to explore deep space in search of life. The ship’s body was oval shaped, modeled after the thorax of the common honeybee, with a large section in the front made of glass. This appearance had earned it the rather unaffectionate nickname of “The Grape.” Few scientists and inventors would have appreciated their greatest breakthrough to hold such a belittling nickname, but Alex didn’t care. It wasn’t ever about the ship for him. His love was the science that made it fly, his science, and more importantly, Angela.
A flashback of his life began to run through Alex’s mind. Re-watching the chain of events that had brought him to this point. How much he had changed. In the last weeks his life, his mind, and his personality were completely molded into a new frame.
Where had all this change started? When had his life started taking this massive turn? He saw clearly, every major change in his life was because of her. What would she say now, looking at him?
Alex examined himself sitting on the floor of his makeshift prison. He was still wearing the generic clothes the mission parameters mandated. White boots that ratcheted shut on the side, much like the motocross gear he had seen when he was younger. Loose, military order, black pants with green stripes running up the sides, and a black long sleeved shirt with the Milky Way logo in green on the front with his last name, Runner, across his upper back. Alex rubbed the exhaustion from his face, feeling his slight facial growth. His fingers ran through his hair, which was overgrown and starting to look unkempt. Alex was six feet tall and in pretty good shape. He had been a runner, partly, he assumed, because of his last name and partly because of his thin frame, which made it easy.
He let out a laugh, finding it funny that, even at this time, with it all possibly coming to an end, he was still thinking about his appearance. He could see her now, almost feel her, kissing his cheek and giggling because his five o’clock shadow tickled her. Here in this prison cell, miles away from her, he knew he was loved.
For some reason, Alex began to talk, not to anyone in particular, just talk. He had been silent for hours now and felt he needed to explain his story to someone.
“Thank you, I’m glad I could be here.” started Alex, as if the press was questioning him.
“The beginning? … Well, I guess you could say that it all started with her.” Alex paused, focusing on finding the right words to answer his imaginary interviewer. “She was my peace, she was my inspiration, and most of all, she is my love.” He looked down at the picture in his hands. “Even now, just looking at her face, I know it will all turn out well. I didn’t know this would be the last time I saw her,” Alex said, waving the photo in the air. “We took this photo on the patio of our townhome. Who knew how much beauty and memory could be contained in a single Polaroid? You know, mankind’s whole existence is in the balance, but in this moment, this time of the greatest chaos ever known to man, she gives me calm.”
Staring at the picture, Alex let a gleeful smile climb onto his face. He looked closely at what was the last image he ever received of Angela Martin. His fingers traced the outline of her face, followed the soft curves of her cheekbones, down to her red lips. She had auburn hair and eyes as green as the Chicago River on Saint Patrick’s Day. Angela Martin was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her smile lit up the room and was far stronger to Alex than the dim orange light outside of the bars of his jail cell.
Eyes aglow at the image of Angela’s happy grin, Alex began to drift. He allowed himself to slip into a waking dream, back to when he first met Angela. He went back to that moment when his life was changed almost 20 years ago.
2.The Beginning
April 2, 2010
It was early morning in western New Mexico. Alex was hiking an abandoned, very lightly used, trail alone. He had done this a hundred times before. At the age of thirteen, Alex was already years more independent than most children his age. His parents encouraged exploration and self-reliance, and Alex made the most of it.
With every step, he could feel the path under his feet, taste the coolness of the fall morning air. Birds flew overhead, travelling south to avoid the upcoming freeze. The only sign of life other than him that morning were their calls overhead, squawking as they flew in their typical “V” pattern.
Alex paused and watched as the lead bird traded places with one of the others following him. Alex watched, thinking back on learning from his father years ago how this technique allowed the birds
to fly further by reducing air resistance. He had loved learning about such things from his dad. Anything he could apply to the world around him, his inquisitive mind wanted to know more about.
The birds soon moved out of sight and Alex continued on. This morning’s jaunt was up a new trail he hadn’t hiked before. It was named after an ancient Native American chieftain whose name he could not pronounce and didn’t care to try. History had always been his parents’ love, not his. When Alex thought of history, he thought of the many moves from small country to small country with his parents, chasing some artifact or ruin site. He thought of constantly being the new kid in school and never having a real friend. Alex wasn’t a complete waste socially, the Runners were just never in one place long enough for any sort of deep friendship to develop. So, in the end, Alex had put up emotional barriers, never allowing anyone to really get close. Why should he? In a matter of a few months, they would be distant memories anyway, so the lonely path was his to walk.
The Runner family was a travelling set of archaeologists. Alex himself was named after Alexander the Great. His parents had been on a dig in Crete when Alex was conceived and was later born in the ruins of Knossos at a makeshift field hospital. History was literally in his blood. They would go where the work took them and where new history was to be unearthed. This, more often than not, was in some third world country where few people spoke English and fewer yet wanted to learn. They were moving constantly.
From the age of one, Alex had been cared for, not by his parents but by village elders, witch doctors, and medicine men. He had been sung to sleep with wooden flutes and animal skin drums. His early schooling wasn’t about reading, or writing, but channeling the spirits of the mother goddess or whatever deity was most prominent in the region the Runner family had moved to.
Their latest relocation landed them in some tiny encampment, way off the beaten path in western New Mexico.
A mountain biker had found a cave painting that turned out to be a whole complex of ruined homes deep inside the rock of a cliff face. These ruins belonged to a sect of the Anasazi Tribe, Native Americans who built a complex fabric of culture, roads, and commerce and then vanished for no apparent reason. This new discovery directly to the west of Chaco canyon was believed to just possibly hold the key to the migration patterns of the Anasazi.
His family had jumped at the opportunity to explore this new mystery. Alex had been excited when he first heard they were headed to the U.S. At the time, they were living in tents in Thailand. The U.S. sounded like, maybe, just maybe, they would be close enough to a city that he could do something other than read on the weekends. He had been disappointed.
Where they were living looked like a town from the old western movies. Two rows of buildings down one dirt road with houses on both ends. There wasn’t even a school, and for the meantime, Alex was learning from a homeschool curriculum book.
He would read the book and do the exercises. When his parents came home at night, if they even did, he would show them his completed work. Often, Alex would be days or even weeks ahead on his studies because there was nothing else to do. His parents never really noticed.
So his life went, a pattern of constant loneliness. Every weekday he would study his books, and every weekend, he would hike the surrounding mountains. The inclines weren’t extreme, but were challenging enough, allowing Alex to run on the flatter areas while enjoying the beautiful landscape and openness of it all.
It really was far better than any of the ruin locations they had previously lived in though. Jungles usually surrounded their “homes”, often with paramilitary units roaming for something or someone to kill. Here, Alex was at least safe, but still alone.
All these moves wouldn’t have been so hard, maybe even would have been fun, if he had had someone else there with him. His parents, however, had only seen fit to have one child, no brothers or sisters to share his pain. He had no one to talk to if he was feeling sad or proud. He was alone.
It was his choice, too, though. His parents always invited him to come to the dig site with them, to share in the discoveries and the new revelations.
He didn’t care. After travelling so much and seeing so many historical pieces of record unearthed, cleaned, preserved, and studied, Alex had come to a sad belief: they were all the same. Every culture had different names for things, different customs, and different means for recording their history, whether it was pottery, cave paintings, figurines or even great buildings, but the story was always the same. He felt he could tell the history of ancient peoples or any culture, so he was not interested in learning more about the lives of past civilizations in the New Mexican frontier.
Alex’s parents wished he would join them in their quests. They could be a family of ancient history buffs, but they would not force him. Despite all their failures as parents, they would, in the end, allow Alex to follow his passions. It was the Runner way. They had stunned their own parents by going into archaeology. Alex’s father had left medical school after two years, much to the dismay of his parents, to study history, while Alex’s mother was well on her way to becoming a lawyer before jumping ship, literally.
Her family had been on a luxury yacht, cruising the East Indies, when they ran into a young archaeologist who had just discovered a new ruin site. His passion and excitement infected the youngest of the family’s daughters, Alex’s mother. As the ship left harbor, sailing for Australia, she looked to the shore and there, standing with his feet in the sand, holding a cardboard sign, was Alex’s father. The sign simply said, “Take a leap of faith.” She did.
Diving off the ship fully clothed, she swam the remaining distance to shore and never looked back. This made family reunions very awkward, as one can imagine. That passion for chasing curiosity and leaping with faith was what led his parents to archaeology and each other. They found passion in their work and in each other’s arms.
Alex had no idea what his passion was, so his studies ranged on a variety of different topics, always trying, always looking for something new, searching for that moment of pure inspiration. Alex could see the love his parents had for what they were doing and wanted to find that same kind of passion in his own life. He just hadn’t found it yet. There was time though, he supposed, he was only thirteen. So he just kept reading his books and hiking the mountains. Week after week, it would go on.
AFTER A LONG flat spot on this morning’s hike, Alex slowed his pace from a run to a walk, feeling the heat of the sun mixed with the cool fall breeze. The crisp in the air meant that he was getting close to the top of the mountain. He took a break and took out the nutrition bar he had brought along with him for a snack. Alex was hoping to make quick work of the last part of the hike and hurry down the mountain to Ellie’s Diner before it closed at six. Saturday was homemade pie day, and Ellie made the best key lime pie he had ever tasted. She had come with her husband for the dig from South Florida and opened the only real eatery in the town. Today was the last day for key lime before she switched to pumpkin for the season.
Sitting there, dreaming of the cool, crisp, slightly sour pie, Alex put the bar back into his bag, wanting to save more room for dessert, and started off ,ith a little extra energy in his step.
The remainder of the climb did not take long. Approaching what he knew was the top, Alex told himself he would look at the New Mexican vista for only a few minutes and head back down.
He had seen it from this mountaintop before, taking a different trail. This spot was not unfamiliar to him. Alex knew the beautiful scenes of rippled landscape that lay below. The mountains cutting the horizon with snowcapped peaks. It was a view he loved but had become somewhat mundane. Today was different.
As he came over the crest of the summit, he did not see the sweeping view of the mountains and valleys. He did not look down on the dot that was his small town home. Today, he looked at what would change everything.
He saw an angel.
3.Destiny
As Alex reached the top
of the mountain, there she was. For years, he had travelled the world, and seen carvings and paintings of beautiful angels. Now, for the first time, he saw one in the flesh. She was a thing of young beauty, standing there with her red hair blowing in the breeze.
“Uh… Hello.”
Wow, he sounded like an idiot, but that’s all he could force out of his nervous mouth. She was so beautiful with the midday sun shining on her.
“Hi, I’m Angela, what’s your name? Are you part of the camp, too?” Her voice rose higher in pitch with every word. The perk in her tone made it evident that she was both surprised and excited to see someone her own age here.