The Prometheus Effect

by David Fleming

  “Hmmm. So this tram goes through the moon to the other side?”

  “In almost a straight line. When we arrive, you’ll be able to see the Earth, though the lunar-camouflaged view window distorts the image slightly. You can bring up a clearer image with ambiance controls.”

  Numerous people came and went once they reached the Earth side of the moon. It was by far the most people Mykl had seen since his arrival at the City. Nods of greeting made it clear that everyone knew Jack, but they all moved with the speed of purpose, and none stopped to chitchat. They all appeared to be working on something, and the tension of that something was as palpable as an immovable deadline.

  Stepping out of foot traffic, Jack knelt next to Mykl and directed his attention to the wall beside them. Jack drew a circle on its surface with an index finger, and a directory appeared with glowing letters.

  “After you bring up the directory, just navigate through the list until you find what you’re looking for. Then draw another circle on the place you want to go. An H&G trail will illuminate to direct you,” Jack explained.

  “What’s an ‘H&G’ trail?”

  “Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Bread crumbs. Right.”

  “And little Noah doesn’t get fat from eating them,” Jack said. “Double-tap the screen to clear the directory, and draw an X on the trail when you no longer need it.” Jack demonstrated by asking for a trail line to Mykl’s room—which was actually named “Mykl’s room” in the directory. The base had obviously been notified of his arrival. There had better be ice cream then.

  An aqua-colored thin line appeared in the floor, starting from the wall where Jack had been tapping. They followed it around corners and through more pressure doors until they arrived at a door marked with a flashing circle of the same color. Mykl stepped inside.

  To his surprise, it was set up exactly like the one he used at the City, right down to sailing ships on the blanket. He almost tossed Stinker on the bed out of habit before remembering that the bear now carried a passenger.

  “Well, I have work to get to,” Jack said, “so I’ll leave you two to settle in. Gravity controls are accessed via the ambiance settings. Noah prefers moon-actual,” he added, quirking a smile and closing the door.

  Mykl set Stinker on the bed. Noah crawled out immediately and started making energetic jumps on the blanket. After a few jumps, he stopped, stared at Mykl, and pointed to the nearest wall. Mykl understood: the mouse wanted him to adjust the gravity. So he pulled up the settings and lowered the gravity as far as it would go. Moon actual. His arms drifted from his sides, and his guts felt like they were redistributing.

  Noah responded by making spectacular—for a mouse—leaps from one end of the bed to the other.

  “Is this why you like the moon?” Mykl asked.

  Noah responded by doing flips and twists in the air. With careful use of his tail, he could control his tiny body to land mostly feet first.

  “Well, at least someone gets to enjoy jumping on the bed.”

  Light streamed through a squat window recessed into the wall—a thick pane of glass, only a few inches high. Glass? Who am I kidding? It was most likely diamond. The window sat too low for an adult to conveniently look through, but still too high for him. No matter: he just reached up to the ledge and pulled himself up to peer out.

  A brightly lit, starkly shadowed lunar landscape filled the lower half of his thin panorama. Shades of gray upon gray made up the Byrd Crater. Above that, in the dark abyss of space, hung the Earth, in a living, vibrant blue.

  The scene struck Mykl as fantasy. Here he was, a new species of human, on the moon, staring at the Earth, with a half alien mouse at his side. Only five days ago he’d lived on the Earth, gazing at the stars, wondering if anyone was out there. What adventure will my next week of life bring?

  Noah leapt from the bed to Mykl’s shoulder, then hopped into the recess to observe with him. But even in one-sixth gravity, Mykl’s arms were already starting to tire, so he lowered himself back to the floor. Noah stayed to watch, alone with his tiny mouse thoughts.

  The opposite side of the room held a large, blank, unadorned wall, with no furnishings against it. Mykl knew precisely what to do with it. He adjusted his chair and activated the computer.

  “Good evening, Mykl,” the computer voice said.

  “No, no, no. Voice commands off! Still creepy.”

  He located the folder with satellite feeds. He wanted a real-time image of the Earth. But the perspectives he found weren’t quite right. He finally found image feeds from cameras located on the moon, and from one of these, he zoomed in to get the perfect angle. A vibrant blue planet filled his wall from floor to ceiling.

  Noah had finally tired of Earth-gazing and was now playing Supermouse by flying from perch to perch across the room. No wonder he went ballistic at seeing Mykl enter the lab with Stinker. From the looks of it, he was having the time of his life. Even when one of his landings missed, he just tumbled lightly to the floor.

  Mykl watched as the half-alien mouse suddenly stopped his leaping and zipped under the bed. A moment later he shot back into view and leapt onto the desktop with his rear end swinging around wildly and his back legs kicking in the air, scrabbling for traction. He was holding something in his front paws, and he set it on the desk. It looked like a round blue disk.

  Mykl leaned closer to examine it. “You’ve found a blue button,” he said, confused.

  Noah darted to the end of the desk and gripped his hind feet on the edge. He sprang out and upward to the bed. With a late flip, he landed near Stinker, clawed his way up the bear’s head, and tapped the missing eye.

  “You found Stinker’s eye!” Mykl exclaimed. “That means…”

  Of course that’s what it means, he said to himself. That means my dad lived up here when he was a kid. Like I am now. That explained the unusual window height; it was probably set for his father’s height on his last visit, a few years older than Mykl was now.

  Mykl rolled the button around in his fingers. He decided he would have Delilah sew it back on, so Stinker would have two good eyes the next time he battled a monster.

  A horrifying thought came to his mind. Mykl quickly looked under the bed—and felt ridiculously relieved to find nothing there.

  Mykl returned his attention to the computer. Jack had given him limited access to his administrative files, so that Mykl could peruse the problems within and try to think of viable solutions. But right now, Mykl just wanted to in check on his friend James. Folders had been added for both James and Jessica, and he browsed their contents, which included early recordings of them on assignment.

  Then he discovered a very recently added video clip that shocked him. It showed James pulled roughly from an elevator and held at gunpoint. Then the video cut and started up again from a different feed. This one was in a room decorated by someone infatuated with the color red. Jessica was already there, and James entered, pushing a silver cart. A short man seemed angry. As the first sucker punch landed, Mykl’s hands flew to cover his face. He wanted to intervene, but he knew this had already happened, and nothing in his power could change that. His heart broke as James wailed for the man not to throw away Dawn’s letter. He flinched harder than James did as each wet smack of the lamp cord left a new mark.

  Finally, mercifully, the clip ended.

  Mykl trembled in his chair. He felt sympathetic pain and a tight tingling of his own back.

  Full of trepidation, Mykl opened the written report attached to the video file. It read: “Wounds not serious. First aid applied. Medication given for pain. Agent performance exceptional. Al.”

  Mykl breathed a sigh of relief. Why, why, why would Jack put James, or Jessica for that matter, in such a dangerous situation? Were they agents now? Like his mother had been? He didn’t want them to suffer her fate.

  A light flashed from Mykl’s Earth-wall. He whirled to see several more flashes appear in sequence, and then nothing. Mykl replayed the feed f
rom the first flash. They didn’t originate on the planet, but in space above it. This struck Mykl as very wrong. He had to tell Jack.

  Stinker watched him run out of the room with his one good eye.

  CHAPTER 72

  Stains of cherry juice covered the front of James’s crisp white uniform shirt. He pulled two more fresh cherries from a clear plastic container and popped them into his mouth, then once again wiped his sticky fingers on his shirt.

  James brought his tips to Rose on a more regular basis now. She pretended to be just as ornery as ever, and he played along just as stupidly. Since the other cocktail waitresses tended to avoid her, she was much easier to catch alone than Al was in his busy kitchen.

  Today, when he arrived for work, James had slipped Rose a message. In it, he both thanked her and made a request. He needed a sedative for a six-year-old child, approximately twenty kilograms. All he offered for a reason was: “She deserves better than the asylum.”

  And Rose had come through. Just now, when he had stopped by her station to drop off his tips, she had given him another paper bag of cherries—in which she’d stashed a fingernail-sized dermapatch with the sedative he requested. She’d whispered to him that the medication absorbed painlessly through open skin, and that within minutes, the subject would fall asleep and stay that way for several hours, or until the patch was removed.

  James was immensely grateful, even though if things went perfectly, he wouldn’t have to use it.

  Things never went perfectly for James.

  When he reentered the bustling kitchen, Timmy beckoned for him to come over. “You doin’ okay, James?”

  James barged right into Timmy’s personal space and bent down nose to nose with him. He said, “James okays! How Timmys?”

  “Whoa!” Timmy exclaimed, taking a step back, “Two squares! Two squares!” he said, pointing to the twelve-inch-square tiles on the kitchen floor. “This is my space, that’s your space.”

  “James like Timmys.”

  “I like you too, buddy. Two squares. Okay?”

  James gave him a wild thumbs up, almost losing his slinky in the process.

  “James,” Al called out, “a word with you, please?”

  James trudged to his boss.

  “Can you stay for a few hours of overtime?”

  Timmy’s head shot up at the word “overtime.”

  “I can’t pay you though.”

  Timmy quickly made himself scarce and disappeared. Everyone else in the kitchen was too busy toiling away at tasks to notice anything.

  Al waved James into his office and dropped the charade. “James, there’s something going on with the dragons. We have video and audio in their suite, but they’ve always suspected that, so they routinely pass notes. And today, they’ve been doing it all day. Now everyone is gone except for Fan. I need to you go up there and see if you can find out anything.”

  James arched an eyebrow in a wordless question.

  “You’ve been vetted now,” Al replied. “There shouldn’t be any more trouble like yesterday.”

  James nodded his acceptance.

  “Oh, one last thing,” Al said. “If things go bad, don’t come back here. You and Jessica need to get back to her car and get out of town. Fast. Use your best judgment.”

  And that, James thought, was why he’d requested the sedative. “If,” in these cases, often turned to “when.”

  As James left the office in search of an empty cart, Al yelled loud enough to his back for the kitchen staff to hear, “And don’t forget the silverware! They leave it sitting around all over the place!”

  ***

  When the elevator opened up on the one hundredth floor, James already had his arms up in anticipation of facing another gun. But no one confronted him. In fact, the hallway was deserted. Pushing his cart forward, he heard Fan speaking tersely in Chinese inside the main room. The entry lay wide open, and he warily pushed the cart through, as if he knew there was a hungry tiger inside waiting to pounce.

  Fan was speaking into a bulky phone that was attached to a briefcase with a twisted cord. From the briefcase, another line ran to a portable reflector dish on the dark balcony, aimed up at the stars. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and raked James with a death-to-you glare.

  “James gets dishes, please?” he asked meekly, fidgeting with his slinky.

  James knew by the look in Fan’s eyes that his life hung on the edge of a cliff. A few tense seconds spiraled into infinity before Fan snapped, “Be quick,” and went back to his conversation.

  The handset volume allowed James to make out most of the other side of the conversation, but James found it difficult to manage all three of his priorities simultaneously: playing stupid, interpreting the conversation, and searching for dirty dishes. But he found the dishes everywhere, including in potted plants throughout the main room, and that allowed James to get progressively closer to Fan.

  The top of his cart teetered with dishes by the time he made it to the open balcony sliders. He was running out of places to search for dishes, and if he didn’t leave soon he would risk suspicion. But the conversation flowed too rich with unguarded words for him to leave now.

  Speaking rapidly in Chinese, Fan said into the handset, “This line may not be secure.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Nothing they can do to stop it. Our plane has arrived and is preparing for EMP.”

  “Excellent. We have Sebastian in our possession and the girl has not left her suite. What do you want me to do?”

  “You only have a few minutes until launch. Bring the traitor… Kill the girl.”

 

  James knew he had involuntarily flinched upon hearing Jessica’s fate. Had Fan noticed? He didn’t know, and he couldn’t afford to make eye contact now. He knew the fire in his own eyes would give him away. His adrenal system dumped a cascade of biochemicals into his bloodstream.

  Time slowed down.

  Pretending to search the base of a densely leafed plant, James surreptitiously observed Fan’s reflection on the polished steel handle of his cart. It severely distorted the image, but he could tell that Fan was reaching for something on the table next to him. James kept his back turned and tried to hum, but his dry throat produced a croaky cough instead.

  Fan lifted the object off the table and stalked with carefully placed footsteps to stand behind him.

  James forced himself to relax. He would be faster without tension in his body. He slowly drew breath as Fan raised something over his head.

  At the moment of Fan’s commitment to an executioner’s blow, James pivoted on his knee like an uncoiling spring. He caught Fan’s descending wrist in his left hand and squeezed it with adrenaline-fueled strength. The thin bones of Fan’s forearm snapped audibly. Dark and unbelieving eyes gazed into a merciless titanium gray stare.

  Before Fan could utter a sound, before the marble lamp fixture even fell from his hand, James grabbed Fan by the throat and lifted his feet from the floor. Like a wet blanket being tossed over a clothesline, James drove Fan’s spine down onto the hardwood crest of a high-backed chair. Made to last for generations, the beautiful chair never moved, and the top of Fan’s thoracic spine proved to be no match for the quality workmanship of his ancestors. Bones shattered, paralyzing him from the chest down. His bladder and bowels released their contents. His legs quivered beyond his control.

  Though his would-be assassin now trembled helplessly, anger and the demand for justice still raged through James. It had been a long time since he had last contemplated taking a man’s life. Then, he had chosen to run and live on the streets instead. Now, he would have to run again. Every moment that passed put him and Jessica in more danger.

  “Who… are… you?” Fan managed to whisper.

  James ignored the question. There wasn’t enough time to get acquainted now. He grabbed Fan by the front of his shirt and carried him out to the balcony. If Fan’s men found him, he would tell them it was James who had injured him, and it would be all
but impossible to escape the hotel. Only one reasonable choice remained if he and Jessica were to make it out of this alive.

  James swung Fan over the railing like a rag doll.

  His legs dangling limply, Fan gripped the rail with his one working hand. Fear distorted his face. “No,” he pleaded weakly.

  Bright flashes in the distance silhouetted the northern mountain ranges. One came from the direction of the City—and Dawn. Electric blue crackling sparks danced at lightning speed along the power lines gridding Las Vegas, and then all the lights in the city went out in a muted hush. The high-pitched squeals of tires—followed by concussive impacts—echoed from far below. Then the screams.

  “Why?” James demanded, pulling Fan hard against the rail.

  “P-power,” Fan answered.

  “Your country would destroy the world for power?” James asked.

  “Not destroy. Enlighten. Under a new world order.”

  The hotel shook and shuddered, causing James to tighten his grip further, lest he drop Fan. A distant rumbling boom echoed off mountains ringing the deathly dark valley.

  “That wasn’t just an EMP, was it?” James demanded. “Was it?”

  “That… was your destiny!” Fan said, grabbing James by the collar with a challenging look in his eyes.

  James placed his forehead against Fan’s. In Chinese, he said, “You are without honor. A disgrace to your ancestors.”

  Then he released his grip.

  CHAPTER 73

  Fan’s fingers slipped from James’s shirt and caught the end of his slinky. James held on to the other end and watched the coils straighten until it was yanked from his grasp. Damn, he thought. He had started to develop a sentimental attachment for the thing.

  James grabbed the satellite phone, along with its components, and threw them off the balcony. Followed by his cart. With a little luck, Fan’s men wouldn’t find out what had happened until he and Jessica were long gone.