He raised his gold-flecked brown eyes forlornly to Jamie's cool, blue-eyed gaze. She nodded. He approached the television, half-bowed, as if it were a holy shrine. One touch and the screen hissed softly to life, resolving into an image of an elderly, white-bearded Jim Bakker in a TV studio. He grinned and started to speak. His face and the studio dissolved, replaced by a sign NEW EDEN. Welcome All Saved to Eternal Life! posted on a hill covered with daisies. The outlines of what resembled a small Midwestern town loomed in the background.
"The doorway is open," Brian stated in grave tones.
Jamie couldn't move. She felt as weak and immobilized as a sick child. All her strength couldn't salve her conscience. She was about to shove a 13 gigaton explosive into their illusory paradise. So much for eternal life.
"What's wrong?" Brian asked. "Are you afraid you can't make it back? You know I can't help you with that. The door is one way."
"I know. I'm not going in, Brian."
"Then..." He pushed back his long brown bangs and stared at her. "Why did you have me do this? You just wanted to see it?"
"No." Jamie focused on her mission and shutting down the voices in her head telling her that she was about to murder countless numbers of innocent people. "I'm going to send something through."
"What are you talking about?"
Jamie walked over to the cherry wood hutch. She popped open one of the locked doors. A touchpad was imbedded in the silvery surface of the MAME cylinder. It was a control timer, responsive only to her fingers, just as the controls on the big-screen television only responded to Brian's. She could set the detonation from one second to five hours. It was not one of those Dr. Strangelove/spy movie bomb timers that once started couldn't be turned off. She could start or stop it as she pleased. But once it was through the gateway, that control ended. The President and her advisors felt that setting the shortest time possible while maintaining some veneer of safety was the best tactic. She needed only to get it through and then shut down the portal. Neither she nor anyone else knew what would happen if the MAME detonated before the gateway was closed, but that wasn't anything anyone wanted to test.
I'll set it for one minute, Jamie decided. She could cut it closer, but why take the chance? Longer, and the Elementals would have more time to disarm it. It might be disarmed en route, for all they knew. Or it might not even be allowed. Part of her hoped it wouldn't. She clearly wasn't cut from the same "collateral damage" cloth so many higher-ups in the military were.
Jamie gritted her teeth. It was do or die time.
"What is that?" Brian was peering down over her shoulder. She hadn't even heard him come up. "Dear God...is that a bomb?"
"Yes."
"You're going to try to blow up Heaven?" Fear and disbelief rose in equal measures in his voice. "Are you serious?"
"It's a very powerful bomb."
"A nuke?"
"More powerful than that."
"I can't let you do that."
"I almost wish you could stop me."
Brian spun and sprinted toward the television. With a heavy heart, Jamie slowed him to a stop and eased him to one side.
"I'm sorry, Brian," she said. "It's the only way we could think of to end the threat."
"They won't let it in." He struggled in vain against the invisible force holding him.
"I guess we'll see."
"If it works, you would murder hundreds of thousands of people!"
"I know."
Jamie set the timer for 60 seconds, but didn't hit start. She levitated the hutch to her head height and walked with it over to the gateway, where she could see a young woman watering the flowers with a hose, oblivious to the portal and the watching eyes. Jamie paused at the shimmering image. At least the woman would feel no pain. Nor would anyone else, she hoped.
"Please don't do this, Jamie," Brian moaned. "You have no right to play God!"
I'm not playing. That thought clunked in her head. How did she have the right? No. No right. Instead, she had an imperative. She had good intentions, but then didn't they pave the way to hell?
She pushed the start control. The display lit up in brilliant flashing red: 59...58...57 –
Jamie propelled the hutch and its deadly cargo toward the screen. It stopped the instant it contacted the image. Jamie pushed a little harder. The wood creaked dangerously. "An antimatter device is incredibly unstable," the Alternate Research Director, Jacob Kushner, had cautioned her. "It longs, even aches, to detonate. Especially with this device, where we've sacrificed some of the redundancies and other safeguards for size and power. Handle with care!"
Jamie hit the Stop control and then Reset. Was it over? If she upped her telekinetic push, at some point the cylinder would be compromised. Would she even see or feel the flash? She backed it off.
"See!" Brian cried. "They won't accept it!"
A prime rule of teleportation burst in her head: teleportation required full physical contact with any object in order to transport it. Was it the same here? Only one way to find out. She drew the hutch toward her. Her fingers hung over the keyboard display. If she set the time now, and carried the hutch with her into the virtual heaven, she was committing to her own death. But wasn't that only fair? If she was willing to kill thousands of others to save her world, why not herself? Why did she deserve to be an exception?
Shutting down images of Kylee and Dennis, of a life that would never be, Jamie set the timer for five minutes. That gave her a chance while minimizing the Elementals' chances. If they could figure out the deadly hutch in five minutes why not in three? Or one? Maybe they'd just think she wanted to bring some nice furniture into heaven?
Jamie grasped the hutch in her arms and released her telekinetic hold. The half-ton weight wasn't heavy for her, but it was awkward. With a telekinetic assist she raised it vertical, achieving a better balance. She slid her right hand around and tapped the Start control. Never had she felt less like a hero.
She shuffled toward the gateway and erstwhile big screen TV, expecting resistance – half-hoping for it – but then she was stepping through and a new, happy-shiny world formed around her while Brian's basement snapped into non-existence.
He arms were empty. Jamie stared at them. Where had the hutch gone? Of course it wouldn't fit in one of the aliens' body-sized virtual reality chambers. Maybe it was sitting on the alien ship's pathway that ran between the virtual chambers?
"Oh!" the young woman gardener hopped to her feet with a startled laugh, brandishing a hand trowel. "I didn't see you come up. I don't recognize you. Are you a newbie or a visitor?"
Jamie eyed the hand trowel. She could almost hear the tick tock of her life running out. If I awaken, I might actually have a chance. She hadn't thought of that. No time to think things through clearly. But if she woke up, couldn't she distance herself from the antimatter bomb...or fly it down to the core of the ship where it could detonate away from the people in their VR chambers?
Jamie clenched her jaw, facing the woman. "Could I borrow your trowel?"
"Um." A tiny glint of fear sparked in her eyes. "Well, sure –"
Jamie snatched it out of her hand and gritting her teeth stabbed the trowel into her right thigh with all her might.
"Gaaahhh!"
Tears sprang out of her eyes. In real life, even her super-strength would've failed to drive the trowel into her flesh. Its blade would've crumpled into an inconsequential ball. But here in illusory reality, the blade penetrated to the bone. Pain battered her body in waves. She'd almost forgotten how much a normal frail body could hurt.
"Wake up!" she shouted, squeezing her eyes shut.
Nothing. It was not enough. Jamie opened her eyes. The woman - more a girl, though who knew how old she truly was? – was stumbling back from her, wild-eyed and shaking her head in horror.
"What is wrong with you? Are you possessed?"
"Leave," said Jamie.
She had to focus. Tick tock. How much time had passed? No time to think about that. If s
he wanted to live – whatever her life was worth, in that moment all she could see was Kylee's loving eyes – there could be no halfway measures.
Yanking the spade from her thigh she reversed it and jammed its bloody blade into her left eye. She dimly heard someone scream. It might've been her. The agony was epic, beyond what she could've imagined. But she couldn't stop there. It had to be intolerable, horrific, apocalyptic. She shoved the blade deeper into her now-blind eye. Now she was screaming – one continuous stream of agony arcing upward to sounds beyond human hearing –
Her agony ended in mid-note and the scene transformed between the blink of her eyes. She was gazing up at her reflection in a transparent panel.
I'm awake. Jamie struggled to catch up with what her brain already knew: she was in an alien virtual reality chamber. Act.
The transparent lid blew off and she flew out. A black, Praying Mantis-like creature was prying into the hutch on the corridor floor between the rows of virtual reality chambers. Light beams from its appendages made the cherry wood glow a surreal pinkish-blue. The same kind of creature-machine that had attacked them on her and her team's emergence before. She smacked its head from its body with a focused telekinetic punch. As the Mantis collapsed, she spotted the red countdown display blinking through the open bottom door.
4 – 3 –
STOP! Her panicked thought reached the control faster than her flight across the five meters. The countdown had halted on 2. Somehow, sans calculation, she'd telekinetically tapped the Stop control with the right pressure and precision to avoid destroying the unit and likely detonating the bomb. As Jacob Kushner had said, it longed to explode.
Jamie dropped down at the open door and manually hit Reset. Her body hummed with relief. Okay. She gathered herself. Out of the frying pan but now into the fire? She floated a few meters above the hutch, taking in the view: the same thousands of rows of people sleeping in their virtual paradise tombs spiraling down for roughly a couple of kilometers before encountering a black wall. That was new.
Above her shone the same massive circular lights – an energy source or projection? No had ever answered that question – bathing everything in a soft, rather ominous glow. Her choice seemed obvious: fly the MAME to the ship's core power/control source and detonate it there. Not only would it probably do the most damage to the ship there, it might be far enough or shielded enough from the sleeping dreamers not to kill them all. Probably not, but it was still their best chance.
A pair of Mantis creatures appeared by the hutch. Jamie removed their heads. Either they were weaker in this world or she'd gotten stronger. She was grateful either way. Time to go.
Jamie snared the hutch – considered shedding the bomb's wooden shell but decided the risks of doing that outweighed any possible benefit – and flew it down with her toward the center of the ship. This time, unencumbered by the team, she was free to travel at speed through the vacant spaces, the spiraling rows of virtual chambers passing in a blur.
Jamie focused her dematerializing power on the black wall ahead. She was surprised she could feel its resistance with her mind. Not so much as if she were pressing against a heavy weight or steel wall – more like a hard math problem clogging her thoughts. She concentrated harder and sensed it give. The section she was focusing on didn't disappear so much as turn fuzzy. Jamie had no idea how she'd fare striking a wall at several hundred miles per hour without telekinetic assistance – especially one of the Elementals' ultra-strong walls – but she wasn't eager to find out.
She'd slowed to about fifty miles per hour when she hit the fuzzy area in the wall. It reminded her of entering the water from the high-dive platform at their municipal pool: a hard slap of resistance on her head and shoulders and then she was through. The hutch, following in her wake, showed no sign of damage.
It was as though she'd entered into a massive, labyrinthine spider web composed of varicolored strands of light. The light beams branched off from what appeared to be a microscopic glowing orb far below, like electrons orbiting a nucleus. This was different, too. She couldn't ask for a better roadmap with every strand of light pointing to her destination. Zooming her vision in, Jamie could see that the orb was the spherical equivalent to a small three-story building.
The lights carried power: enough current – whatever their current was – to snap through her body when she'd grazed one of them, as if she'd stuck her fingers in a toaster. What would they do to the MAME? Could the light beams trigger an explosion? What was the difference between matter and energy? Her high school science credentials weren't providing any answer. She made a point of avoiding them the rest of the way – not easy since their density grew the closer she got.
Jamie squeezed into a tiny clear space twenty or thirty meters from the sphere, and contemplated her next move. The obvious choice was to set the MAME timer for two or three minutes and fly out of there like the legendary bat from hell. Another possibility, amorphous yet annoyingly seductive, was breaking into the sphere and attempting to compel whoever or whatever was inside to send the people in the virtual containment chambers home. A fool's mission, surely. What would her negotiating chip be? And the aliens might not be able to send them home en masse even if she somehow strong-armed them into that.
They might defeat her before she could set the timer. They might defuse the bomb while she dithered.
Jamie wasn't sure how long the young man in light blue coveralls had been floating beside her. She instinctively lashed out – of course this couldn't be a man! – but other than a slight stirring in his face and body, he showed no response. A holograph?
"I have been wondering what manner of entity you are," he said in flawless network English.
"You're an alien."
"As are you. But that doesn't answer either of our questions, does it?" He smiled. He had a face like a handsome movie star playing a god, Jamie thought, made even more surreal by his oversized blue eyes.. "I am Mikenruah. My civilization calls itself 'The Elementals.'"
"I know who you are. My civilization calls itself 'human.'"
"Yet you are clearly more than that."
"I have unusual powers."
"I have noticed." He nodded to the hutch, floating a few feet away. "Judging from the magnetic fields, you have brought a matter-antimatter weapon with you."
"Yes."
"Your intention is to destroy or incapacitate this ship."
"It is."
"Why?"
"Because you're planning to destroy my world."
"Why do you believe that?"
Jamie didn't reply. It occurred to her that full transparency might not be the best policy.
"You are not concerned about the human beings in our virtual network? Aren't they your species – people of your civilization?"
"I am concerned. But your ship threatens our entire world – many more than you have here."
"You've been misinformed. We have no intention of destroying your world. Your own people will soon be achieving that. We're merely preserving a few of you."
If Jamie had been standing on solid ground, it would've dropped from underneath her feet. Was he lying? Was there any way she could know? The logic resonated with her. This was one crazy, screwed up world. People living in primitive squalor while others roamed the solar system with hyperdrive space ships and MAME weapons and President Tomlinson seeming to consider herself some kind of imperial overlord. But was it bad enough to make self-destruction a certainty? She'd never been sure how much to trust the Elementals' far-future predictions. In fact, some of the aliens themselves hadn't fully trusted them.
"You deceived those people," said Jamie. "They never would've chosen to enter your fake heaven if you'd been honest."
"We know. Only a minuscule percentage would've agreed. We've done this procedure many times. Those who knowingly choose a virtual world face eventual insanity. You must believe a world is real to lead a meaningful life. We've learned that some degree of self-deception is necessary to psychologi
cal well-being. That counters the ethical objection."
"If you think deception is okay," said Jamie, "you could be deceiving me right now."
"Perhaps you are still in the virtual network – merely a more expanded version of it?"
He was smiling. Jamie's blood ran cold. She wouldn't put it past these people to pull off something like that. Sometimes she wondered if the idea that they could take them on was itself an illusion.
"I'm going to detonate the bomb," she said. "So unless you can stop me, those people are going to die here now anyway."
"You don't believe we mean you no ill will?"
"I can't take the chance. This ship could destroy the human race. It has to be taken out."
"And if we wanted to do this, what would prevent us from simply sending other ships?"
"Time and resources. You don't have unlimited quantities of either."
"How would you know what our time and resources are?"
"A little cosmic birdie told me?"
"So you're willing to destroy your people here?"
Jamie hesitated, needing to draw her answer from a deep and dark place. "Yes. As I said, I can't take the chance."
The alien holograph or whatever it was stared into her eyes. "I see. May I make a suggestion?"
"Okay."
"Permit me to leave and I will turn the ship over to you."
"You're physically here?" Jamie was surprised. "Your core self?"
"Within the sphere. This surprises you?"
"I assumed your core self was on another world somewhere."
"Sadly, no. I'm young. I haven't accumulated the necessary resources yet. This project is a means of doing that."
"So you'll die."
"Depending on the energy yield, my best guess is yes. Hence, my offer."
"How would you leave?"
"I could teleport to a safe location from one of the virtual network stations."
Jamie pushed herself to parse the logical ins and outs of this surprising turn of events. But then when didn't events in her life have some surprising turns? All she could do, as always, was her best. A wrong choice could kill hundreds of thousands of people. No pressure or anything.
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