Cobalt: The First in the Trinity Series Novels

by CG Blade

  “Wonder what someone has been up to Ter?”

  “It resembles Stonehenge Petra. Some scientists believe it has magical powers or some astral significance. Others say it is a calendar. The original is in Wiltshire England”

  “I think Mr. Nelson has lost his mind if this is his doing.”

  “If he is a robot or a replacement then he really didn’t have a mind to begin with at least his own mind. So he probably has a processor or some other form of computation device similar to mine.”

  “Ok, Ter. That’s a good observation.” Petra smirked now opening up another Twinkie from its clear plastic wrapper taking a bite and looking over the decaying view ten feet below her. “It looks like they were either drawn to this spot or wandered over it maybe at night. Whichever one, something here took them out. None of the bodies seemed to try to escape or crawl away. Something is protecting this area. Why?”

  “I cannot give you a logical answer Petra. There is no recorded history of death at the original Stonehenge.”

  “There’s only one way to find out Ter.”

  Petra slid down the small declining hill and walked towards the center of the circular stone structure, stepping over animal and human remains on her way down. In the distance, she could hear a familiar whining sound getting closer.

  “I think we woke something up, Ter!”

  “It sounds similar to the drones at the factory Petra.”

  Petra quickly morphed into her new cobalt armor and slowly turned around, scanning for the direction of the incoming sorties. “I’d like to try something different this time. It might be outside the proverbial box.”

  “What you might have in mind is risky Petra”

  “Let’s see what our friends bring first.” Petra could see blurs of black dots in the sky coming at her fast. There were eight teardrop Ammonite shaped drones in her view coming from over the town hovering and dodging the dirty roofs as the whining got louder. “I’m going to try to capture one of these drones Ter.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me Petra.”

  Petra burst out in laughter telling Ter she got the context right.

  “Okay Petra focus,” She told herself aloud.

  All eight of the drones now circled the stone monument and hovered ever so slightly at a ten degree downward angle about six feet off the ground trying to figure out Petra’s next move. With her new armor covering her exposed areas there was nowhere for the drones’ silver bullets to descend to. There was no heat whatsoever coming off her body anymore.

  “Now we know why these bodies are here. There must be sensors in the area notifying the drones. I wonder who else knows we’re here.” Petra moved sideways in a quick shuffle motion and all eight of the ten-foot long tear shaped black drones trained their sights on her trying to anticipate her next step mimicking her shifting gestures. She leaped up and wrapped her arms around one of the black shiny drones while the others watched in calculated excitable movements. It tried to escape her grasp by firing blasts of propulsion while turning its exhaust in the opposite direction, not easily breaking free but doing it anyways. Now deciding to climb one of the ten-foot high twenty stone columns Petra was standing over the bloodied decaying scene below her. The drones were now at her level weaving back and forth like goldfish in a bowl anticipating the next feeding.

  “Okay Ter here we go!” She trained her eyes on one drone and then quickly jumped to another. It caught the unsuspecting drone off guard as she wrestled it like a gator to the ground. Petra found the only access panel she could see on the top of its round shiny protruding head and ripped it open. There were circuit boards with wiring and a brown propulsion tube inside. She quickly went through a series of switches before she found one that settled the unit down long enough to handle. “Can we reprogram this, Ter? Can I take control of these?” she asked lying on the dusty blood soaked ground with her arms still wrapped around the unit.

  “I do not know of a reason why you could not Petra. You should be able to reprogram them to recognize your face as a friendly and others as bogies as long as the drones have facial recognition software. I will just need the circuit information and wiring numbers to lead you through it. The question we need to ask is ‘what if the bogies are not hot so to speak or are not human?’ If there is no heat signature will they still function just as we saw here with you?”

  “I see what you mean,” Petra said staring at the inside guts of the drone. “Let’s get this one changed over to our side and we’ll see if we can work on that little problem.”

  Chapter 25

  SUBSTANTIATION

  Emily and Bar made their way to the Meredith Med Lab the next day as Petra worked over the drone’s circuitry for the next six hours with Ter’s electrical and technical advice. Doctor Sanders had been taken out of his tank and put into a regular bed at the facility and was resting peacefully given fluids and hourly monitoring. The tests done on Cooper revealed that he had severe organ damage and Jackie was meeting with the staff to discuss his options the next morning. It was now getting close to dusk in the desert as Petra finished up with the last drone, closing its access panel and admiring her work. Now at her disposal waiting for instructions were Petra’s eight new hovering friends. Ter gave her instructions on how to provide the drones with keywords and signals for manipulating them similar to an attack command for a dog.

  “Now we can find out where the sensors are that brought these drones…let me see…” Petra searched all over the stone pillars for a sensor, a switch, a button, or anything that would trigger an event that brought the drones to this site. She started moving and pushing bodies crawling down on her hands and knees sweeping decaying flesh, maggots, and crumbling dried extremities out of her way. She continued searching and eventually stumbled upon a small thin green laser beam a millimeter in diameter coming off the bottom of each one of the stones about a foot off the ground. Each beam was jutting out to the center of the circle of large grey stones and to each other. The ever-darkening sky made it easier to see the beams that met in the center and formed a typical cartwheel configuration. She moved all of the bodies, bones, and bloody clothing until all twenty of the lasers were now visible completing the circle and spokes. The ground under her began to shudder and shake as dirt and dust swallowed her up in a cloud of thunderous roar.

  “We’re moving fast and we’re going down faster Ter!”

  The entire circular stone temple with bodies and all began to lower into the earth as she held onto a jagged column, trying to balance her weight against the fall. The lower half of her cobalt body was coming off the platform due to the weightlessness she was feeling from the ever-quickening descent. The decaying pieces of flesh followed her every move down the one hundred foot wide shaft as it gained speed and she felt like it was never going to stop. Sand and dirt followed her down the hole from the shaken earth above as the speed got faster like a ball rolling down a steep hill. Then, by some mechanical or electrical trigger, the descent was over. Just as fast as it had begun, it had come to a smooth controlled stop. Dust and dirt settled back down over everything around and on top of her as her feet hit the platform. Bones and bodies rattled and jumbled up and the smell of death was now more prevalent than before. She looked up through the dust and peered at the front edges of the hovering drones at the opening of the shaft and starry moon lit circle staring back down at her.

  “That was exciting,” Ter proclaimed.

  “Guess we fell into that one Ter.” Petra chuckled to herself wiping away the sand and dirt from her shoulders. Maggots and decayed flesh stuck to her armor like flypaper as she picked them off and flicked them away.

  “I’m going to have to have Jackie install a laugh track.wav file.”

  “That would be annoying,” Petra said still half-laughing. “Have you ever watched ‘How I Met Your Android’? Not good Ter, not good at all.”

  Petra stepped off the dusty death laden platform and stepped into a dark moist cavern blasted out of the earth and
rocks. The dirt and dust covered tunnel had apparently not been visited in a while. As she moved, dust kicked up around her armor covered feet. She strained to look and feel around for some kind of control panel or switches in the dark to shed some light on the situation.

  “There’s a panel here I think.” She was standing next to the stone column on the platform near the right side of the wall inside the tunnel. Her fingers were on a steel panel attached to a pedestal coming out of the floor. There was no heat to help guide her as she felt three rows of four switches all sticking up of the top of the small four-foot high panel. She slowly turned one of the twelve switches.

  A male voice came through speakers in the cavern. “Welcome. Shall I turn on the infrared lighting?”

  “Yes…” Petra told it wondering what was next.

  “It’s probably infrared lit due to the quick optical change someone would experience from daytime to darkness down here,” Ter suggested. “The staff at the lab did that with you when you came out of Cobalt letting you adjust slowly.”

  The red lighting slowly increased, bathing everything in a warm orange glow from above her. She could now see the switches on the control box. “Okay? This one is for…” The lights slowly changed from a warm orange to a soft white blue.

  “Someone sure has their lighting down. Let’s see what we’ve got next…” The next switch doused the entire room in a bright white light. The room was a type of ‘waiting room’ similar to a doctor or dentist’s office from the 1950s or 1960s. There were sofas, tables, end tables, lamps and a snack and beverage counter. All covered with sheeting and neatly perforated clear plastic that seem to fit all of the pieces perfectly. The top of each piece of furniture was coated in a thin layer of filmy dust and settled debris that had fallen off the rocky ceiling above. The entire room was about thirty feet deep and had a twenty-foot high arched ceiling had been cut out of the rocks above arcing to the thirty-foot wide floors below. The floor was tiled with ten-by-ten inch square white tiles that Petra could now see as she moved around, kicking up more dust. A large wooden coffee table was the center of the room between the sofas that had some magazines showing through from under the clear plastic sheeting.

  “Let’s see…” Petra tore off the plastic on the coffee table sending dust flying. She picked up one of the magazines and rapped it on the side of her armored leg to shake off some dust. She held it up to the light and read the cover: Robotics Monthly Edition #567, June 21st …2050. There was a small auburn haired girl dressed in coveralls and tennis shoes on the cover sitting in the middle of a room filled with replicas of herself in all different poses. She was holding her knees that were under her chin clutching a picture frame with a man’s photo in it that was holding a small brown tube of liquid in the air.

  “Ter this photo she is holding is…”

  “…A young Ray Nelson...yes Petra.”

  “That means—let me see—” Petra wiped more of the stained dust off the jacket cover and read the caption at the bottom of the cover. “The World’s first Wonder Woman in this Robotics Monthly edition.” Petra continued reading, “Dreama Nelson the five-year-old Robotics whiz kid from the Berkeley Institute of Technology and Robotics gives us an insight into how we could use her father’s new propulsion tubes to better mankind in the future.”

  “If she was five here Ter...”

  “She would be thirty-one-years-old now Petra.”

  “Dreama—Nelson? The same as—Dreama Nelson—Dreama Vernucy?”

  “It would be possible Petra. According to my database she had a close relationship with her father until her mother died when she was ten-years-old. My files also indicate she may have at one time blamed her father for her mother’s death but she actually died from the Circonic Plague unleashed by Islamic terrorists in the year 2055.”

  Petra sat down on a plastic covered lime green sofa and carefully read some of the magazines on the table, stunned and surprised at what she was reading. Grandiose and detailed events had to transpire to make this horrible weird plan before her unfold and work. A shocked Petra got up and moved towards the far wall of the cavern, looking over the walls and seams.

  “There has to be more, Ter. This can’t be all of it—the signal. Where is the signal? This is like a waiting room for something—there has to be more.” Petra walked back to the control panel at the stone platform she came down on earlier.

  “Let’s try…” she brushed off the dusty switches and turned one of them. A rumble started at the far end of the arched room. The wall began to move up into the ceiling of the rocky cavern until it must have hit a sensor and stopped abruptly. As the wall went up, the platform she came down on slowly went back up to where it started depositing dirt and dust everywhere. Petra flipped another lighting switch to reveal a declining white hallway to another set of silver doors that opened in the middle. She stepped below the arched wall and into the twenty-foot long hallway. At the far end, she could see another set of switches and buttons about waist high at the left wall by the steel doors.

  “Wonder what this is for Ter?” Petra’s cobalt covered body stepped in front of the panel with colored switches on the white tiled steel wall. This section seemed to be sealed off from the environment and the cavern. It was dust free, smelled clean, and purified. There were air vents pushing air around on the ten-foot high six-foot wide tiled ceiling as she pressed a button on the panel that read, “Workroom”. The steel doors opened with a whoosh vacuum sound as the force of the air almost dragged her down a small set of steel steps. As the doors opened outward toward the workroom, the caverns arched wall slowly came down and shut her off from the waiting room. Petra found a red switch that read, “Work Lights” and turned it. “You have got to be kidding me” Petra exclaimed as a giant set of light fixtures disguised as hanging white globes suddenly popped on revealing a factory floor that was in every sense of the word magnificent. It was almost a quarter of a mile long as it was wide and she could see computers, tables, tanks filled with liquids, and all the equipment needed to fulfill one’s visions and dreams.

  “This looks like—”

  “A laboratory of some kind”

  “A laboratory for what though Ter?”

  Petra stepped onto the laboratory’s white rubber coated floor. It was immaculate looking. Nothing seemed out of place as she wound her body around the rows and rows of shelves filled with electronics and computers and other lab equipment. She slowly made her way towards the back of the room through a maze of tables filled with books and charts and anatomy skeletons. Most of the equipment looked ancient by 2076 standards. In the back of the laboratory there were three hazy looking glass horizontal tanks bathed by shadows under the twenty-foot high steel ceiling lights. Many of the computers in the building connected to monitors or visual equipment and were still turned on and running.

  Chapter 26

  STUPEFACTION

  “Call Jackie Ter.”

  “Yes Petra. It is 11:04 p.m. Eastern Standard time in New York.”

  “It’s fine Ter. I think she will want to see this. Maybe she can help” Petra walked up to one of the horizontal tanks in front of her in the back of the room and ever so slightly wiped the clear glass surface that seemed to have a frosted look and feel to it.

  “Hello Petra?”

  “Jackie?”

  “Yes. Good to hear from you. How is your night going? We are all on pins and needles here. We think Jim might need a while in the cobalt solution and a Terprise upgrade. His heart, part of his lungs and surrounding veins in his chest ended up severely damaged by the ‘Crimson’, as we all call it now. I think we’re going to have to regrow some of his organs. Dr. Sanders is doing much better but he’s still in our ICU. Bar and Emily made it back okay without incident.”

  “I figured as much. It might be better for Jim in the long run if you keep him in the solution until he can fully heal. I am in some type of a laboratory under the ground in Mercury. You’re not going to believe who I found.” Petra was
now wiping more of the glass tank’s surface with her warm palm to get a better look inside. “Can you tie into my Comset and get a visual?”

  “Yes sure, hold on.”

  Petra was now wiping the whole tank down with some clean rags she found. Cables running to a metal box, a screen, and a keyboard sitting next to the tank connected to each other. Hoses and wiring pumped in and out of the large crystalized tank from smaller various sizes of vials, liquids, and tubing. All of them were frosted over and cold looking making a hissing noise every few seconds or so in a rhythm similar to a heartbeat. A set of double steel door were on the wall behind the horizontal tank which rested on a frame of eight wheels that rolled easily on the floor when she put pressure on the tank wiping it down.

  “Okay wow what do you have there? Looks like a—”

  “A Cryofreeze and an old one at that I think.”

  “Sure is. Who’s in it?”

  “Take a look.”

  Petra gazed inside through the wiped wet glass at the occupant’s face.

  “Ray Nelson!” Jackie blurted aloud spilling her hot cup of coffee in the process. It splashed all over her and her desk.

  “Sure is Jackie. He’s at least maybe forty or forty-five-years-old here.”

  “Then who made the Raybots—the replacements?”

  “Okay now this is where it gets weird so stay with me here on this. His daughter was a kid genius. At age five, she was building replicas of herself with dear old dad here sometime after he developed the brown propulsion tube units. Ray’s wife dies at…”

  “Thirty-nine,” Ter told her

  “She dies at age thirty-nine from Circonic Plague. The girl was ten years old at the time her mother died. Ray’s wife was buried in a lot in the Grand Cayman Island and the girl just up and disappears. She is gone at age ten after the funeral without a trace. Just vanishes. The kid’s name was Dreama. Dreama Nelson.”