STARWEB 1-5

by M. Modak

  John and Kayla looked stunned but Rana had a small knowing smile plastered on her face. “So,” Kayla asked, “your answer to WWJD, when those men were harassing us at the truck stop, was to make them go unconscious,”

  “I could have done a lot worse to him,” Michael said, “I didn’t hurt the man even though he had crossed the line. I hate violence but not at any cost. Rana’s and your lives are more valuable to me than my present sense of peace. Those men had no right to threaten us. WWJD, I believe, he would have stopped those men, if he chose to. Jesus had abilities beyond what I have acquired, so far, so I can’t tell you exactly what he would do. I think John and I did the right thing.” Michael looked over at Kayla to see if she had any objections to what he had said but she just smiled and nodded. He added “But I could be mistaken.”

  The Limo stopped and the driver got out. Michael quickly opened the door, making sure not to hit the driver as he hurried to open it for them. When Michael and the others were out of the Limo, he asked the Driver, “Can you wait for us? There will be a big tip for your trouble.”

  The driver smiled, “I’ll stay as long as that,” he pointed up, “will let me stay.” Then he pointed in the general direction of the parking lot. “I’ll be over there.”

  Michael grinned as he nodded. He said, “Thanks,” then turned toward the lab.

  Everyone followed. They walked up the main entrance. A tall, well-aged man, with a white beard who looked very much like Gandalf the gray, greeted them. The old man had a warm smile that instantly made everyone feel at ease. He stretched out a big hand and Michael shook it. Michael said, “Thank you for meeting us like this. I have a lot to show you.”

  The doctor smiled as he shook the other’s hands. Michael said, “This is Dr. Simon Peterson.”

  “We are at a critical phase in the experiment,” Dr. Peterson said, “You are welcome and you have come at the right time, but we should hurry.” Then he turned and started walking inside. Rana gave Kayla a puzzled look then followed as everyone entered the Lab works’ main building. Michael began to tell Dr. Peterson all he knew about Aughra, John having Joshua’s knowledge, and the fact that this was not Anna walking with them. When he said the last part about this not being Anna Dr. Peterson stopped in mid stride and did a double take on Kayla before going on. He didn’t ask any questions.

  They went through several passages, each needing a pass to get through, until they reached two large doors guarded by armed men. The hallway had a sterile feel to it like walking through a hospital but without the occasional painting or flower arrangements placed here-and-there to soften the look.

  The last door they went through opened into a large meeting room with a long table, a small bed, like the kind you would see in an emergency room and a large unrolled flexscreen sat at the far end of the room. The doctor gestured for everyone but John to sit down. He asked John to lie down on the bed. John gave an anxious look at Kayla but when she nodded, he walked over and sat down on the bed. He didn’t know why he was still taking her advice. The thought of what she had done to Aughra hurt almost as bad as the thought of never seeing the kids or Elizabeth again.

  He shook off his hurt feelings as he tried to place his mind somewhere else. On the wall, the hanging flexscreen played the news with the sound on mute as subtitles rolled beneath the screen. They saw a picture of the large storm gathering above them. They had all seen the dark clouds thickening, as they were getting closer, but with all that was going on, no one thought more about it. Other than that, the news repeated what Michael and John had seen in the bathroom at the truck stop; the Aughra Effect was touching more people.

  “Many of the scientists here,” Dr. Peterson said, “have also switched personalities claiming to be people from another world…We had to sedate one of them after the change. For hours straight, he kept screaming that he would never see his family again. After the others got him to calm down, we caught most of the same information Michael had reported to me before you guys came here. When he said he had you with him,” He looked at John, “I knew we needed to meet. We know all about you. Under different circumstances, I would shake your hand and recommend a Nobel Prize for your accomplishment. It’s something we’ve only dreamed about since our space probe returned years ago with the, S-matter, as it is called in your world. Over in this universe, it’s referred to as XJ-72654, or just the XJ-stuff.” He paused as if considering whether he should go on and then decided to do so, “What do you know about the origins of the S-matter?”

  “Around 15 years ago,” John said, “a space probe landed on a passing asteroid. The robot dug a little, discovered a previously unknown substance and extracted what it could. It was a very small amount of matter; it looked like a silver wood chip chiseled off something larger. Our scientist checked for months and confirmed that it didn’t match anything on the Periodic Table.”

  “What happened to the asteroid?” Dr. Peterson asked.

  John looked surprised at the question, “That’s an answer to a mystery my security clearance wouldn’t permit me access. The official story is that the asteroid fell into the sun. However, as any kid with a telescope during that week knew, there was no way that could have happened. The asteroid had gone missing… Later on, the event’s official history was, “corrected,” on the web. NASA gave the asteroid a trajectory that had its path fall into the sun.”

  He looked at the doctor but the older man remained silent. John continued his story, “At the time of the discovery I had just received my third doctorate, Applied Theoretical Entanglement. My equations matched the properties in the S-matter. My thesis called for an unknown material to exist that would unlock entanglement in ways never before observed. I already worked-out most of the finer details in my thought experiments. When I demonstrated them in complex computer simulations those equations became top secret and in high demand. They led to strange experiments using the Smatter. Then the Air force, DOD, and NASA approached me and gave numerous grants to build Aughra. The rest is history.”

  The old scientist nodded at that then said, “What I’m about to tell you is Top Secret and cannot be repeated under any circumstances. I believe that if I’m going to have all the information I need from you I need to give you all the information I have. That seems fair, right?”

  “What information?” John asked.

  The doctor pulled out a small flexscreen and punched a few buttons. The larger view screen behind him went black. A silent moment passed as stars appeared in the background and finally, approaching from the right of the screen, a large, potato shaped rock tumbled into view. It was a clip taken by a space probe as it closed in on a deep impact crater near the center of the asteroid. The crater appeared to have recently occurred but the damage wasn’t consistent with any natural collisions of large rocks floating through space. It looked dented in places where it had once been smooth. Violent scorch marks tattooed the area. John leaned in a little closer and noticed several perfectly round holes, spread out in sets of three, on the outer edges of the impact site. The video sped up through the landing procedures. Then slowly, the robot’s arm extended and went through several tests before it started to drill into a preexisting hole at its deepest point.

  At the bottom of the screen, common chemical tracers began to register in a small graph that analyzed the data in real time. Suddenly, not far ahead, a light flashed followed by the movement of several rocks in a clearly intelligent manner. A door had opened!

  “Now watch the chemical traces detected over the next 30 seconds.” The doctor said as a bright light exploded up through the hole where the drill was and passed over the spectrometer. The chemical properties scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  “S-matter,” John said. The man nodded and gave a reassuring smile.

  The video continued as a crab like creature, half the size of the probe, moved in a fluid but mechanical fashion. It walked suspiciously out of the door and over to the probe. With an appendage it lifted the drill away
from the hole it had penetrated and carefully dislodged the probe from the asteroid’s surface; releasing it into space.

  As the probe slowly rotated the angle of the video changed. The camera wasn’t able to track the asteroid properly but at the corner of the screen, just as it started to pass out of view, the asteroid changed course under its own power, and headed out of sight in a different direction!

  John said, “You’re showing me… you’re telling me that the material I used was from an alien spacecraft!?”

  “I can’t confirm that because so far none of the other scientist we’ve recently interviewed, from your universe, have any idea what S-matter is or where it came from. You are the lead scientist on this project and I had hoped you could have added something to our understanding. It seems your government compartmentalized information to the highest degree.”

  “Compartmentalized information?” Rana asked.

  “That’s code speak for, they keep secrets well from each other, even within the highest circles of those who should know,” Kayla said.

  “Oh,” Rana replied but obviously still confused.

  John looked again at the view screen with the chemical readings frozen on the detector. He guessed the size of the drill that the probe had attached to its arm then he did some quick calculations and said, “You don’t have enough S-matter to perform any of the experiments I did. We had a chunk of that silvery metal substance about the size of a dime. It looks like you only have some light shavings.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Peterson said, “that’s true but we had enough to do other test and enough to smash with our new particle accelerator commissioned especially for this study.”

  John said, “A new particle accelerator!”

  “Yes, it came on line in Texas about three years ago. We quickly found the graviton particle and many other particles before unknown. Nevertheless, due to the lack of S-matter we decided to reserve the last of what we had for another time when technology may be better and we can do more with it.”

  “You guys finished the Superconducting Super Collider?” Kayla said a little teary eyed, “You must have used the funding, that in my universe, went into creating Aughra.”

  “Yes,” Doctor Peterson said as he waved his hands, “that XJ-stuff inspired the world’s investors to rebuild that old accelerator. Together, we discovered a new frontier in science, antigravity. However, everything about this project, but its true origins, has been available on the internet. We intended to reveal all that soon. In time we would a real discussion about the possibilities of life existing elsewhere in the universe...” Dr. Peterson looked at Kayla. “It’s also what gave us the idea to build the gravitational wave detectors... And that leads us to today, and now you.” He turned and made a point to stare at John.

  “What do you have in mind?” John asked.

  “Late last night, the detectors started receiving a weak stream of information coming from the gravitational lens as predicted. But we’ve also received another scrambled signal piggybacking on the slowly increasing gravity waves.”

  “What do you think it is?” Rana asked.

  “It could be as natural as a pulsar star creating the interference or it might just be a loose wire for all we know. Nonetheless, it’s got everyone’s attention. Some think Aughra, the aliment and this signal all have something to do with the switching of personalities that’s going on. But so far this signal’s purpose has not been identified.”

  The tone of the doctor’s voice lowered, “I have a prototype that was brought in by a friend who’s been working in the Memory Reconstruction and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Department, at the University of Florida. A graduate student invented it. This machine will revolutionize the field of psychology, and mental health in general! We are able to view or recall memories and the images from dreams then watch them like a movie, though some…clips are very disturbing.”

  “How is that even possible?” Rana asked, “I thought memories were my own, like my thoughts.”

  The doctor looked at her and said, “How you perceive memories is your own choice. Its overall meaning, your interpretation of [what happened] mostly comes from your perspective. Your social-economic history colors that perspective. A life experience, and frankly how open-minded you are, informs you about the world even before you understand what you’re witnessing.

  “However, the eyes and brain function as an electrical receiver and information processor that plugs into a remarkable storage device. The trick has always been to find the pathways each person’s brain uses to store this information. Being able to quickly locate and collect this spread-out data and place it into a single form like images, sound, taste, etc.… is the key... This has been achieved, at least in the visual cortex.”

  He returned his attention to John, “We asked the doctor and his graduate students to come here and use their memory machine to help us understand what our lost scientists have trapped in their brains.” He flipped a switch on his little flexscreen and the larger viewer changed to a fuzzy image that jumped around a little. The video skipped through several different angles. It showed a silent movie of John standing beside a large, stone fireplace preforming the speech he had given a few hours ago. John felt embarrassed and excited to see an image from his own universe.

  Dr. Peterson answered the unspoken question, “We spliced three different memories together to get this continuous image. We edited the bathroom breaks and such. Unfortunately, the machine only gives us about a full day’s worth of memories. The hope is that we will soon be able to go as far back as weeks. But again, the brain is a very complicated storage device…” The doctor continued talking about the machines other possible uses but Michael, John, Rana, and Kayla had stopped listening when the picture of John standing in front of Aughra appeared. The image froze.

  The doctor spoke loudly, “That is Aughra!” It was a statement not a question.

  “Yes,” Kayla said.

  “The video resumed as John flipped the switch. The seine turned into total chaos as suddenly Aughra spilled a black substance onto John. A few moments later Aughra exploded into a spinning blur of blue and purple. A strong burst of wind lifted John and Kayla into the air sending them flying off in two directions. John slammed into the back wall as Kayla hit the exit door hard!

  From the top of Aughra’s spinning mass came a flow of blue light. It looked like smoke drifting off an extinguished candle. It rose from its center and spread across the ceiling. Slowly at first, and then gradually the whole ceiling began to crumble. None of the fragments made it to the ground. Everything directly above Aughra abruptly disappeared in a flash of sparkling dust that further dissolved, revealing a clear, star filled sky.

  The video then began to narrow perspectives as one by one the remaining onlookers blacked out, many waking up here. The last clip came from a person hiding in a small space under a table, in the very corner of the lab, not far from the door. It showed John getting up to his feet and walking strangely toward the exit.”

  John said, “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “I think that’s Joshua,” Michael said.

  The clip continued. When Joshua arrived at the exit, a chair caught up in the torrent, flew at him. He ducked, avoiding the brunt of the chair, but its leg hit his shoulder, causing him to fall down. A moment later a table crashed hard into the wall right next to him, spun and struck him in the back of the head. He collapsed to the ground as a small pool of blood began to spread beneath him.

  A moment later the exit door opened and Kayla stepped through. Kayla said, “I didn’t do that… that’s not me! That must be Anna”

  The video continued as Anna stretched out a hand and took Joshua by the arm, dragged him into the hallway and shut the door behind her. Then the video went blank.

  John looked over to see Michael crying. Rana had tears streaming down her face too.

  “I hope he’s okay. He was lucky the table struck the wall before hitting him.” Kayla said.

&n
bsp; There was a long moment of silence then John said, “That’s how I remember it happening, up until the time Aughra activated and I blacked out. Actually it’s exactly as I remember it though it’s a little fuzzier in my head.”

  “That’s expected,” Dr. Peterson said, “what we see seems to be recorded accurately but recalling it in your own mind, under this kind of stress, is difficult.”

  “So, you want to hook me up to this memory machine and see what happened as my brain saw it?” John asked.

  “I may not get the opportunity again to have the memories of the man who invented Aughra, the key person who was there when it all happened.”

  He decided it was worth trying. “Okay let’s do this, John wanted to see his full memories; perhaps they could find something that would help.

  Rana noticed his words, the way he used that phrase, “let’s do this,” it was one Joshua often used. She had noticed a lot about John had changed since the first time he woke up crying near the dance floor, fused with Joshua’s’ memories. She wished her Joshua was okay and that Anna was taking care of him.