by J. Benjamin
“I think you all know why you are here,” the secretary-general said. “No need to sugarcoat this.”
“You’re shutting down the portal,” said the secretary of state.
“Correct,” he replied. “And believe me when I tell you, this was not an easy decision.”
“People, let’s get down to business,” Secretary Jackson interjected. “At this moment, two of our gammanauts are engaged in a spacetime sequence. It has been thirty-one hours since our last communication with the gammanauts. They remain unconscious. Even by the most conservative standards, that is far too long. For all intents and purposes, we must now assume that they are permanently lost and have reached the point of no return. To ensure the survival of the human race and prevent a potentially catastrophic event with an unknown alien civilization, we have no choice but to end the sequence.”
“And then what?” the secretary of global agriculture asked.
“I’ll take that one,” Thomas said to Gwen. “As soon as I give the order, the Leon Esposito Accelerator will be shut down. The lasers feeding the portal off of Ocean Beach will cease. Within seconds of this happening, both Chief Lacroix and Admiral Ashford will either die from a heart attack or go permanently brain-dead and die shortly after.” Gasps filled the room.
“They won’t feel any pain,” Gwen said. “It will be as quick as shutting off a lightbulb.” It still didn’t calm the room down. Thomas paused for a few moments.
“Believe me, I wish there was another option,” Thomas replied. “This has to be done. For the safety of humanity, this is the only way.” He looked through the glass at the unconscious bodies of Kiara and Matt. They peacefully floated over the ground with their heads connected to the machines above.
“Dr. Srivastava, are you ready?” Thomas asked.
“Yes… Mr. Secretary-General,” he replied.
“Very good. Commence shutdown,” Thomas commanded. Dr. Srivastava opened up the shutdown sequence from his console. Understandably, it came with several fail-safes, given the gravity of what it entailed. One by one, Dr. Srivastava overrode each process. Finally, he reached the penultimate query: Shutdown spacetime sequence? WARNING: This action cannot be undone. Yes or No?
“Ready on your command, sir,” Dr. Srivastava said.
“You know what doc, let me do it,” Thomas replied. “You’re not the one who should have to live with this on his conscience.” The doctor stepped aside and nodded as Thomas approached the shutdown trigger.
“This is it,” Thomas said. He turned to Gwen. “For humanity.”
“For humanity,” she replied.
Thomas felt adrenaline quickly fill his body, and his left finger trembled as he slowly brought it toward the console. He was nervous. His finger was four inches away from changing history. A loud and seemingly thunderous alarm caught him off guard. It caught everybody in the room off guard.
“What the hell?”
“It’s an emergency,” Dr. Srivastava said. “Somebody is trying to get inside. It must be important.”
“Patch them in,” the secretary-general said. Dr. Srivastava nodded. “This is Thomas Adler. What’s going on?”
“Mr. Secretary-General! Open up! It’s urgent!” It was Thomas’ Deputy Chief of Staff, Lila.
“Lila? We’re kind of in the middle of something very important here,” he replied.
“It’s about that,” Lila said. “I have the CEO of Cosmineral on the phone. Sorry, former CEO of Cosmineral. He says it’s urgent and that it relates to the classified mission at hand.”
“Are you kidding me?” Gwen stammered. “How did he find out about this briefing? This is a major breach of security. You tell him that he does not have GSF clearance.”
“Open the door,” Thomas commanded the two soldiers guarding it. His deputy chief of staff immediately ran inside.
“He’s on hold. Whenever you’re ready,” Lila said, and Thomas nodded back. She pressed her right earlobe. Thomas did the same.
“Dev Ivanov, you are now speaking to the secretary-general of the Global Space Federation,” Lila replied. She clicked her earlobe again and stepped away.
“Dev Ivanov,” Thomas said. “You better have a damn good explanation for this. Or so help me God, I will throw the book—”
“Do not abort the sequence!” the man on the other side shouted as he cut him off.
“I beg your pardon?” Thomas inquired.
“Mr. Secretary-General, I know where they are!”
“Where who are?”
“The gammanauts, I know what happened to them as soon as they crossed the bridge!”
“You what?” Thomas shouted.
“They are not dead. They were re-routed. They are not at Kennedy. I have traced their path beyond the bridge. If you abort the shut-down sequence, I can help you.”
“Dev,” said Thomas. “You are on trial right now for a litany of crimes. One of those includes lying to GSF investigators about activities that unfolded on the Herschel. Why should we trust that any information you bring forward is credible? Last I recall, you were expelled as the CEO of Cosmineral.”
“For the last seven months, I have been working with Cosmineral’s former chief technical officer to reconstruct a critical technology that will help your team understand what is happening beyond the bridge. A nanodrive. At first, we were worried that this technology was lost forever. But we brought it back,” Dev replied.
“And you have this device in your possession?” Thomas asked.
“Correct, and I am ready to surrender the device to GSF Intelligence. I will even show your scientists how it works and help you use it to do what is necessary to save the gammanauts,” Dev replied.
“What is in it for you?” Thomas asked. “I know how you operate, Dev. You don’t make offers like this unless there is a huge upside.”
“A full and unconditional pardon for all crimes committed both on and off Earth. You pardon me, and I tell you everything. I’ll even do it under a full brain scan to show I’m not lying. Swear on my mother’s grave.”
“Swearing on Heather Zel’s grave? That’s a bold assertion,” Thomas said. “You tell me everything we demand to know. You tell our engineers what they need to know. We’ll discuss pardons if and only if your information is helpful in every way, shape, and form.”
“Secretary-general, if I am wrong, you can space me from the Sagan yourself, but do not shut down the sequence!” Dev said.
“Hold, please.” He put Dev on hold.
Thomas looked back to the console and aborted the shutdown. The entire room looked at Thomas Adler with surprise.
“By executive-order, the portal is to remain open, and the spacetime sequence is to continue without interruption!”
“Thomas, what’s going on?” Gwen asked.
“Ladies and gentlemen. New intelligence has come to light. The sequence continues.” The entire room burst into thunderous cheering. A new wave of hope and exhilaration swept over the GSF’s Cabinet as well as the scientists. People leaped out of their seats in excitement and hugged each other. Thomas put Dev back on the line.
“Mr. Ivanov. You better be right,” Thomas said.
“I give you my full assurance, sir.”
“Where are you?”
“I am at the executive suite at the New Sir Francis Drake in Union Square in San Francisco.”
“Good,” Thomas said. “Don’t go anywhere. I am sending a military escort to bring you to the base as soon as possible. Be at the rooftop of your hotel in five.”
“Will do,” Dev replied. “Oh, and Mr. Secretary-General, since we are now completely transparent, there is something you need to know that is very relevant to the gammanauts.”
“I’m listening,” Thomas said.
“Last year there was an incident at the Mimas colony. You recall?”
“The Herschel Incident. How can I forget? Three of your mercenaries were killed by Saturn’s rings after they attempted to flee your station.”
> “That’s what we wanted you to think.”
36
Location Unknown
Kiara stood with Matt on a shoreline. The sky was mostly blue. The horizon was slightly pink. Was it Earth? No. The multiple moons hanging in the air gave that away. There were at least four of them, and Kiara wouldn’t be surprised if there were more out of sight. Damn, they are massive! Kiara thought to herself.
“Okay, that was a trip,” Kiara said.
“That is putting it lightly,” Matt replied. “What is this place? Another simulation?”
“Nope,” Kiara said. “I think we’re in a real physical location this time.”
“How do you reckon?” Matt asked.
“Right there,” she said as she pointed further down the beach. Less than a mile away, their Aquarian host ship sat upright on the sand. It had planted itself between the waves and a grove of palm trees. Kiara and Matt were able to distinguish their host from the countless identical others with an internal sense that appeared to exist in their Aquarian biology.
“Have we decided on a name for it yet?” Kiara asked.
“I was thinking about Minerva,” Matt replied.
“Minerva?” Kiara asked. “The Roman goddess of Wisdom?”
“You know your classics.”
“I prefer Minnie. More humanizing, if I do say so,” Kiara suggested.
“Well… except it’s not exactly human,” Matt said.
“And we’re not exactly Aquarian, yet we’re in their bodies.”
“True,” Matt replied. “So these aliens have the universe, multi-verse, probably God-knows-what, available at the tip of their fingers…. errr… I mean tentacle-appendage thingies.”
“Yup,” Kiara replied.
“And they’ve been around for millions of…” He stopped mid-sentence. Kiara noticed he was distracted by something off in the distance on the shore.
“You were saying? Millions of years?”
He grabbed her hand and nudged her attention toward the pink horizon.
“Kiara! Look!”
Look, she did. Typically, when a sky turned pink, it was the visual effect of the sun setting on the horizon. Yet the “sun” of this planet hung high above them and nowhere near the horizon. It was precisely where it would be if it were noon. There was no explanation for why their sky was blue, and the sky a couple miles away was pink except for an environmental division that defied all of natural science.
The area beneath the pink sky was something entirely different than the area where they were standing. For starters, the water was bright orange. It wasn’t water, at least as humans knew it. From what Kiara could gather, it appeared to be a foreign compound in a mass liquid quantity, possibly argon or methane.
However, it wasn’t even the pink sky of the separate environment that caught Matt’s attention. It was what was occurring inside. It was the imposing behemoths floating in the shallow air above the ‘pink space.’ Kiara focused her vision closer, which was a convenient feature of her Aquarian body.
“Those things. They look like blimps,” Matt said. “I think they’re alive!”
The objects indeed appeared to be living creatures. They resembled floating sperm whales except far more round. Their outer layers were a blight neon pink, almost like the atmosphere of their environment. Kiara noticed one of the creatures slightly flatten as it descended.
“They are blimps,” Kiara said. “Or hot air balloons. That’s why their air is pink. It’s coming from those creatures.”
“How the fuck does any living thing do that? It’s like they’re floating cows.”
Before Kiara could respond, something unusual was happening with the one creature that had descended toward the orange liquid. Four massive, rope-like arms appeared from the sides of the beast and plunged into the ocean below. Several seconds passed. Suddenly, the creature’s arms jerked mightily.
It lifted its rope-arms from the water like a fishing boat reeling in a net. What emerged from the water was a species that could have employed an entirely new class of scientists in the GSF life sciences division. It resembled a bloated javelina, but with fins and spikes like a sea urchin. It had several visible orifices that resembled sea anemones.
As the sea javelina attempted to break from the grip of the blimp creature, a massive hole opened on the side of the flying behemoth. The loud siren noise that followed was loud enough to be heard from miles away. The airborne beast tossed the prey into its opening. What happened next almost made Kiara and Matt look away in revulsion.
The gaseous interior of the massive creature quickly digested and dissolved the smaller beast while it was still alive. As the unfortunate sea creature had its organs atomized, the sky monster grew in size and floated higher into the atmosphere.
“What the fucking fuck was that?” Matt asked.
“I think we just witnessed a floating alien eat a swimming alien, break it down to a gas state, and use the energy to stay airborne,” Kiara said.
“This place is weird,” Matt replied.
“Amen.”
“We call them aeroceteas, flying whales. They’re not from here,” a mysterious female voice said. Kiara and Matt turned around as if they had heard a ghost. A woman, probably in her forties or fifties, stood behind them along with two younger-looking men.
“Who are you? How did you get here?” A shaken Matt asked. “I thought the Aquarians didn’t talk with verbal expressions.”
“Aquarians? Is that what you call them? No, we are not Aquarians. We are like you. We are humans. We are from Earth.”
Both Kiara and Matt’s eyes widened in astonishment.
“Come again?” Matt asked dumbfounded.
“My name is Eden Brenner. You can just call me Edie. To my left is Alex Harper, and to my right is Simon Emerson.”
“Hello,” they both said at once.
“Who do you work for?” Kiara asked. “There aren’t supposed to be any other gammanaut sequences. It’s impossible. There’s only one spacetime reactor in existence. The other one got sabotaged.”
“Kiara! Wait!” Matt interrupted. He walked up to Edie Brenner. “You people look familiar. Have we met before?”
“That is a possibility,” Simon replied.
“But SG Adler would have declassified any parallel sequences taking place,” Kiara said.
“Wait a second. Declassified? Is Thomas Adler the secretary-general now?” Edie asked. “What happened to Katelyn Lew? What batch are you guys anyway? Number twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Batches?” Kiara asked, puzzled. “What? No. There are no batches. We are the only batch.”
“Listen!” Edie said, with urgency. “Let’s start from the beginning. For starters, you’re not the first humans to cross the bridge. Big surprise.”
“No,” Matt replied. “Surprises are waking up in alien bodies in a random place of the universe and finding out they can make us our human selves. With regards to the GSF, sadly, nothing surprises us anymore. I always suspected in the back of my mind that something like this was possible, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Yeah… about that,” Simon replied.
“You two really have been kept in the dark,” Edie said. “We worked for Cosmineral. We were operating out of the Herschel. GSF ain’t the only player with spacetime sequencing technology.”
“Yes!” Matt replied. “The William Herschel Station at Mimas! I remember now. You were the three who died in an ice-mining incident in Saturn’s rings. That was back in December.”
“Whatever they told you, it was a bunch of lies,” Edie said.
37
GSF Executive Suite
The small, concrete room was empty except for a titanium table, two chairs, a manila folder, and the two men sitting across from one another. One was handcuffed to the table.
“Intelligence is reviewing the nano-drive. Thank you for that,” Thomas said.
“You’re welcome,” Dev said, clearly nervous.
�
��Now. I am not in the business of unpleasant interrogations, but if you want any hope of a pardon, you will fully cooperate with me and answer all my questions truthfully. Understood?” Thomas asked.
“Yes,” Dev replied blankly.
“How long has this been going on, Dev?”
“Two and a half years.”
“Your spacetime sequencing technology?” Thomas inquired.
“We had been experimenting with wormhole accelerator technology for much longer than that. That is public record. However, our first attempt at extracting the human consciousness and beaming it through a spacetime sequence took place on January 19, 2080.”
“Tell me,” Thomas asked. “How did that first attempt end? How many candidates were involved?”
“The first attempt had only one gammanaut. The sequence was a total failure.”
“What happened?” Thomas inquired.
“The gammanaut died,” Dev replied, very uncomfortably. “His brain was practically fried. We realized that sending in one at a time was a bad idea. So, we moved to three gammanauts, recognizing that it would equalize the energy levels of the sequence and prevent an incident like the first one.”
“What happened to the first set of three?” Thomas asked.
“They died,” Dev replied while looking down at the table.
“How many gammanauts were involved in total from the initial experiment to the infamous Herschel incident?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t see how that part is relevant,” Dev replied.
“Dammit! How many candidates? Dev!” Thomas slammed the table and shouted. Dev’s face shook nervously.
“Fifty-two. Often in batches of three. Eventually, like you, we figured out how to get it down to two per batch.”
“Fifty-two? Did they all meet the same fate as the first four? Dead?” Thomas asked.
“Most of them, yes. However, there is more to the story than that,” Dev said.
“More to the story than a bunch of mercenaries being used as human experiments? Do tell,” Thomas said.
“Well, for starters, every single one of the mercs volunteered and were not forced to participate in the Cosmineral spacetime program. They were fully briefed on the potential consequences and all signed contracts absolving Cosmineral of any responsibility for what happened after they went beyond the bridge.”