Mad Science Institute

by Sechin Tower

  I struggled up two more struts before I noticed a vent grate at my right. Light shone through it into the shaft, and I knew this must be room B-1, the room Shirtless had said contained “the thing,” whatever that was.

  Up above me, I could see Rusty place the first earthquake grenade on the tower cross beams, his narrow arms moving with precision as he clamped it into place. Below me the sounds of shouts and occasional crashes told me that retreat was not an option. I had to escape and take the data on my USB drive to the police, but if I went the same direction as Rusty it would increase the chances that we would both be caught. My robot was in the clear, but if just one of the bikers spotted the maintenance hatch and stuck his head in to look up, there was no way he could overlook me dangling up here. That meant B-1 was my best option.

  I crawled on my belly across a steel joist until I was close enough to peer through the grate. Only a small portion of the room was visible from where I was, but it was enough to recognize that this room was totally different from the one below it. It was a much smaller, square room that originally might have been just a large maintenance locker. It was spotlessly clean and uncluttered, although there was a strong odor of a dog kennel coming from within.

  I looked up again and gave up on climbing any higher. Even if I made it all the way up to where the shaft opened onto the roof of the building, I wasn’t sure how to get down from there. My body already ached from climbing to the halfway point, and if I made a single miss-step or if my fingers slipped, it would be curtains for me. I decided to go for it through the room. After all, how much worse could it be?

  Very carefully, I braced myself as best I could on top of the joist and wormed my arms out of my backpack straps. I quickly found a pair of pliers, and managed to undo the screws on the vent cover from the inside. With ninja-like stealth, I pushed the grate away from the wall and lowered it to the floor, then wriggled my way through the opening and into the room.

  The clean part of the room had a real hospital vibe to it. The white tiles of the walls and floors were scrubbed and glistening. By the exit door, a tray of polished flasks and beakers rested on a shiny metal table. However, the other part of the room, the part I hadn’t been able to see through the grate, was much more organic. By organic, I mean slimy and disgusting. All the mess was centered around a pulsing, white membrane sack that was as tall as I was. It looked like an internal organ that had been ripped out of some epic-sized fish, and it was streaked with red and blue veins while some kind of clear fluid oozed from its skin onto the floor. This membrane sack was too big to have gotten through the door, which made me think it must have been grown right there in that spot.

  The most surprising part was that Nikki Du Boise stood in front of it. She wore her pink lab coat and was glaring right at me.

  “You shouldn’t’ve come, Soap,” Her voice was flat and cold.

  “Nikki,” I said. “What’re you doing here? We have to get out of here.”

  She just shook her head. “They have guards outside the elevator upstairs and they’ll be lookin’ for you up on the roof as soon as they work out where you went. There’s only one option left. Here, hold out your hand.”

  I extended my arm, palm up, and stepped over to her to take whatever she wanted to give me.

  She snapped one end of a pair of steel handcuffs onto my wrist. I was so startled that I didn’t pull my hand back before she clicked the other end to the leg of her workbench.

  I yanked at the handcuffs, but the workbench was bolted to the floor. The commotion caused something inside the membrane to swish around and press at the stretchy white walls of its prison. Whatever was inside there, it wanted out.

  Chapter 35 ~ Dean

  Victor, Dean, and Angela were on the road for hours, resting only briefly to have lunch and to get Dean a new phone. It was early afternoon when they pulled to a stop in a secluded clearing in the forested area that formed the border between two corporate farms. Using the GPS in Victor’s phone and the map from the egg, they calculated the digging spot as best they could, then set up the equipment.

  The auto-shovel, according to Angela’s rendition of the history of the Mechanical Science Institute, was invented by an engineering professor in response to a comment from the captain of the Langdon University debate team eighty years ago. The debate captain reportedly said “if you institute crumb-bums are so smart, how come we’re still digging holes with shovels?” As it happened, that student went on to a career as a contractor who specialized in digging foundations for office buildings, which meant he dug holes for a living. If he had known about the auto-shovel that his comment had inspired, his life might have been much easier.

  Although the name made it sound like a hand-tool, a fully assembled auto-shovel was actually almost the size of a small Volkswagen. It was a rounded cylinder that resembled a jet engine in its shape, but otherwise it looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel with its rusty iron body, ornate brass knobs, pressure gauges, and steam whistles. At its bottom end there were three large, grinding drills that crunched up the dirt or rock in the machine’s path and fed it through its body, spewing it out its tail. The device made a nice hole about three feet in diameter, and as it burrowed down it built a metal ladder behind itself and ran buckets of dirt and rocks up a pulley system. This waste was then deposited outside the mouth of the hole, where it would eventually pile up high enough to spill back in. This meant that humans—namely, Victor and Dean—needed to shovel the debris into wheelbarrows and cart it away. Ironically, the machine required the assistance of the shovel it was meant to replace.

  “How much deeper is this thing going to have to go?” Dean asked as he surveyed the rising mounds of dirt all around them. They had needed to stop the auto-shovel three times so far because it could pile up the dirt much more quickly than they could haul it off. He didn’t mind the work—even with his cracked rib, it felt good after sitting behind the wheel for half the day—but the jet-engine noise of the auto-shovel was getting to him. It would have been very conspicuous in any other location, but at least they had some privacy here among the uninhabited rolling hills of mechanically tilled earth that seemed to extend as far as the sky.

  “You boys are doing fine,” Angela said, studying her laptop screen. “The radar readout indicates a pocket of reduced density within three meters.”

  “Come again?” Dean asked.

  “It says we’re almost there.”

  “That’s assuming it hasn’t collapsed after millions of years of geological action,” Victor panted. He had been struggling to keep up with Dean at the shoveling. His face was red and drenched with sweat, yet he had only been able to move about two wheelbarrows for every three of Dean’s. It was still far more than Angela had done since setting herself up as supervising technician.

  An orange light flashed in the control display on her screen, and Angela immediately keyed the commands to stop the drill’s progress. Half an hour later, they had reversed the auto-shovel out of the hole and completed the last excavation with old-fashioned picks and shovels to reveal a section of a broad, flat stone etched with more than just age.

  Victor brushed the dust off the stone and found carvings of the same dancing reptilian figures that decorated the Topsy reactor room. Dean got down on his hands and knees to get a closer look. The late afternoon sun shed plenty of light above them, but at the bottom of a twenty-five foot hole it was too dim to make out the details.

  “Those look kind of familiar,” Dean said, tracing the carvings with his fingers.

  “How would you have seen these before?” Angela asked. “I thought you said you hadn’t been to the reactor room.”

  “I haven’t, but look.” Dean brushed dirt away from one of the figures to reveal curving barbs along its back, lanky arms, and round eyes with the slit pupils of a snake. “Does that remind you of anyone’s new pet?”

  Victor shook his head in denial, but he grew still as he stared deeply into the bas-relief eyes. “You m
ight be right,” he finally said. “But what does it mean—that this place was built by chupacabras?”

  “Aliens,” Dean folded his arms with pride at having scooped the conclusion out from under his younger, better educated colleagues.

  “They aren’t aliens,” Angela said with unexplainable confidence. “Now, hand me one of those earthquake grenades.”

  Victor spread out his arms as if trying to keep a soccer ball out of the goal. “You’re not going to break this,” he said. “These carvings might be hundreds of millions of years old. It’s a scientific treasure.”

  “And it’s blocking the way to even more treasures,” Angela glared at him. “In case you forgot, we’re on a tight time schedule here.”

  The decision went to Dean, simply because he was carrying the satchel with the earthquake grenades.

  “We need to find out what’s down there before the Professor does,” Dean said as he peeled back the adhesive covering and pressed the grenade’s thick, gooey pads onto the center of the stone.

  Victor, outvoted, had no choice but to lower his arms and give up his protest. He snapped a few pictures of the carvings with his phone before the three of them retreated up the ladder to let the grenade do its trick.

  The reinforced glass at the museum had only taken three seconds to break, but this stone door took a full two minutes. It cracked in half and fell inwards, opening up a dark hole that belched out a gust of stale air. After they cleared the rubble from the broken cover-stone, they found another stone surface waiting below, but this one was smooth and perfectly round. When Dean set his foot on it, it bobbed slightly under his weight as though it were floating on water.

  “It’s an elevator,” Angela said, joining him on the disk.

  “What’s holding it up?” Dean asked. There was a small gap running around the outside of the disk, and when he shone his flashlight through it he could see a smooth black shaft descending far down into the bedrock below. He could see no gears, pulleys, or any other means of support.

  “It hovers the same way my flight pack does,” Angela said. “It uses electrical repulsion to press against the Earth’s natural magnetic field. The same thing happens when you try to push the south ends of two magnets together: one magnet always moves away from the other. Only with this, one of those magnets is the Earth.”

  The idea that he was standing on a floating rock with nothing solid to hold him up made Dean more than a little nervous, but the platform seemed stable enough, even as Victor added his weight to the total.

  Angela located a mark on the wall that resembled a hand-print but with three long fingers instead of the typical five. When she pressed it, the disk descended at a speed just short of terrifying. Down they went, the stone walls rushing past them, the entrance to the shaft shrinking to a small dot of sky above their heads.

  “How did you know to press that spot?” Victor asked after his stomach caught up to him.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she shrugged.

  Dean and Victor exchanged glances.

  At the bottom of the five hundred foot shaft, the disk slowed gracefully and allowed the three of them to exit into a large underground room that made Dean realize he had never truly known darkness. In Los Angeles, there were always streetlights, porch-lights, and headlights, so even at midnight in the dead of winter the entire region was bright enough to chase the stars out of the sky. Even locked inside a closet, light would still find its way through the gap at the bottom of the door. Down here, however, the darkness seemed solid, like a curtain that had to be brushed aside with every step. Here, the beams of their flashlights seemed shrunken into nothing more than pale pinpricks of illumination amidst the vast sea of blackness. Add to this the extreme temperature, which Dean estimated to be close to 100 degrees, and even without the leering devil-faces carved on the walls it would have been easy to imagine themselves in the pit of hell itself.

  As best they could tell, they were walking through a large vault with evenly spaced and intricately decorated pillars interspersed with free-standing obelisks. In the dim lighting, the pillars and obelisks seemed like a crowd of ghosts constantly moving, always following and forever surrounding the intruders on every side. After eons of being sealed away beneath the earth, nothing lived within the stale air of the cavern. There were no cobwebs, no scampering rats, not even a blind cave-fish. The three of them were intruders in the land of the dead, and the only sounds around them were their own footfalls echoing off the granite walls.

  Dean’s firefighter instincts told him that the obelisks were for decoration, but not the pillars. The spacing and shape of the columns that pressed up against the ceiling indicated that they were needed to keep the massive weight of the earth above them from crashing down onto their heads. It was worrisome to think of it, but if the cavern hadn’t collapsed in millions of years then the chances were good it wouldn’t fall while they were there.

  “This place is way bigger than our reactor room,” Victor said as he wiped perspiration off his brow. “It’s a lot hotter, too.”

  “There’s a magma flow behind this wall,” Angela pointed her flashlight’s pale circle of illumination at the side wall. “These caverns served as geothermal power plants. This one is still working, too—that’s how the elevator had power.”

  “Okay, you’re starting to make me nervous,” Dean said. “You know something you aren’t telling us.”

  “I know lots of things that I’m not telling you,” she aimed her flashlight out into the darkness. “Keep looking around. If we find what I’m looking for, I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  As they proceeded, the floor sloped downwards until they came to a set of short but steep ramps leading up into an area that might have once been a temple. Inside the elevated space there were no obelisks, but squat stone pedestals projected from the floor between the pillars.

  “Found it!” Angela announced.

  Dean hurried over to see that she stood before one of the pedestals, her hand resting on a white metallic statue about the size of a footstool. The statue was shaped similarly to the chupacabra, with the same curving spines down its back, long arms, pointy claws, and iguana-like head. But this creature stood on heavily muscled legs that extended straight down from the middle of its body, and the weight of its torso was counterbalanced by a long, thick tail. It was almost as if whoever carved this statue had wanted to graft Choop’s upper body onto a tyrannosaur’s lower half, like a dinosaur version of a centaur.

  “What is it?” Dean asked.

  “It’s pure teslanium, that’s what it is,” Angela responded.

  Angela wrapped her arms around the statue and lifted it an inch off the pedestal before grunting and letting it fall back into place. “Phew,” she breathed. “It’s heavy. How much do you think it weighs?”

  Dean grasped the statue around its underbelly and hoisted it up. To him, it wasn’t difficult to lift, but the exertion was enough to make his biceps flare out against the sleeves of his t-shirt.

  “I’d guess forty or fifty pounds,” Dean said.

  “Fifty pounds!” Angela’s eyes blazed in excitement. “Let’s get this thing to the elevator.”

  The three of them worked together to carry the load. Dean could have managed the weight by himself, but the shape was awkward and the extreme heat increased the difficulty of any exertion. Once they had set the statue into the center of the stone disk of the elevator, Dean turned to Angela.

  “Okay, spill the beans,” he said. “You promised you’d tell us what you know about this place. I still think it was made by aliens, by the way.”

  “I keep telling you, they weren’t aliens,” Angela said with mild annoyance as she moved away from them to inspect the iguana-faced carvings on a pillar. “These creatures—we call them ‘progenitors’— they evolved right here on Earth. They built cities and harnessed electricity millions of years before our ancestors had learned to fling poo at predators.”

  “Impossible,” Victor scof
fed. “Paleontologists would have found their remains in the fossil records, not to mention signs of their cities and tools. There would be evidence. We would know.”

  “What do you think this place is?” Angela gestured to the pillars around her. “The progenitors aren’t going to be dug up with dinosaur bones because they never spread across the globe like human beings. By instinct, they were tied to their spawning grounds, kind of like how salmon have to return to a certain inland river every year. In fact, their entire civilization was confined to a single valley in what is probably now the South Pole. All of these caverns, all of the red dots on our map, these were just automated outposts. The progenitors visited these places, but they didn’t stay. Ultimately they were all bound to their homeland: bound to be born there, bound to mate there, and bound to die there. It seems like a strange flaw for creatures of such advanced intelligence but, well, you can’t fight your DNA.”

  Despite the heat of the cavern, Dean shivered. He had been brought up like a good Catholic, believing that God had made humankind in His image and given dominion over the Earth to the descendents of Adam. Agriculture, architecture, art—no other species in the world could compete with human beings in any of these things. If Angela was right about these progenitor creatures, then it meant human beings were not God’s original masterpiece. Dean wasn’t ready to grasp the implications yet, but he had a feeling the idea was going to haunt him for some time to come.