The 500 Day Man
Shaddoth
500 Day Man
By Shaddoth
Copyright © 2021 Shaddoth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
First printing edition 2021.
Chapter 1:
The population of Earth came to a standstill and stared at their TV’s, those that didn’t use their telescopes, watching the night sky for a red blinking light, smaller than a pinhead from three hundred million kilometers away. Legacy III was the latest attempt by SI’s Marissa Milsner’s Dimensional Boring Device, mounted inside of a building sized space ship, to attempt to traverse the distance to Alpha Centauri at speeds faster than light.
Scientists were heavily divided on whether or not Milsner’s and Strife International’s test results were fabricated.
According to the reported results of the last test, Legacy II reached Alpha Centauri A, 4.3 light years away, in under fifteen days. The spacecraft lasted long enough to activate a beacon before everything failed. The size of the craft and distance between the two solar systems made locating the spaceship remains impossible with our current telescopes and technology.
Milsner’s team claimed to have received a signal across the quantum entangled water molecule sent from SI’s spaceship when it reentered our dimension at Alpha Centauri. Not my forte, don’t ask me how it worked, but it was supposedly a near instantaneous method for communication regardless of the distance involved. Since Milsner’s team were the only ones with access to the machines which linked the Legacy II and their space station, Hope, located in the asteroid field orbiting Psyche, similar to countless small moon sized chunk of rocks found in the galaxy, no one off station could verify their findings. The lack of access to the Milsner’s Machines angered Earth based scientists, which led to a great deal of dissatisfaction and questioning of the veracity of the Super-Genius’s teams’ results, her equations, her methods, and her integrity.
Even the veracity of quantum entanglement communication working at all was called in question by a great many scientists worldwide for the second time; ever since Lady Strife first used that method to get real time data between her headquarters in Missouri and her space station Hope over twenty years ago.
But Marissa Milsner and her team were able to convince the right people of Legacy II’s success, ensuring that more than enough funding for the third multi-billion-dollar craft was not an issue. Most importantly, Lady Strife of Strife International and Catherine Larkin of L&S were involved as co-sponsors. The two most brilliant Scientists of the Space age fully backed Milsner’s ideas and accepted her results by placing near unlimited funds behind Milsner’s Dimensional Boring Device and their Legacy Program.
What was not up for debate was the witnessed disappearance of the Legacies I and II from the exact points in space at the exact points in time when Milsner said they would. The tens of thousands of telescopes focused on the hundred-meter-long spacecrafts each had billions of witnesses as both crafts in turn vanished when and where Milsner’s team said they would. Even the high energy telescopes and observatories watching and tracking the spaceships admitted that, after the initial silvery burst of light, no further energy waves were emitted. The über-math geeks argued and concluded, for the most part, that the energy released was not enough to account for even partial destruction of the ships.
No debris, no explosions, and not enough energy released to account for disintegration of the ship as it translated from the launch point left room for the unexplained, and a chance for Milsner’s assertions to be correct. All too many Earth-side eggheads and skeptics refused to conclude anything, nor believe Milsner’s results.
Warp, wormholes, FTL, and other ‘fictional’ means of traveling stellar distances faster than the speed of light, would forever be hogwash to those inflexible minds. Einstein was an absolute god to them and so were his equations. Even though some of his theories had already been proven incorrect in quantum, along with some of his space related theories, was immaterial to those learned physicists.
Then there were those that believed, mainly believed because they wanted to. The rest of the humans in Sol system watched for a repeat and hoped.
Legacy III was supposed to have fixed the radiation shielding issue that was suspected to have caused the demise of the last spaceship.
I was among the hopeful, not one of those on Earth though. I earned my way to Mars as one of the team comprised of five maintenance personnel planetwide who were responsible for maintaining the ‘Leftwise algae’ spreaders located across the planet. Those blasted things had a tendency of jamming on a regular basis — the spreaders, not the algae.
It was almost as if they were designed to clog. A theory that every Tech on Mars had, but none dared to speak aloud.
At least once every four to five days, Martian days, I would board my assigned rover and fly to one of the eight kilometer-long spreaders that I was assigned to. Spend the five to nine necessary hours fixing the latest malfunction — everything from flushing out one clogged intake or another of the hyperactive red algae, to trouble shooting the fusion connection. Fusion reactors were never meant to be shaken around as much as those were, and even they glitched now and then.
At the same time, the powers that be, aka my bosses at L&S, insisted that while I was onsite, I spend the hours needed running over the logs and tweak what the readouts hinted might need preventive maintenance, each and every time a spreader encountered a hiccup. None of my repair trips ever ended being less than eight-hour sessions, some even took more than a full day. Mars Day. I gave up on Earth time a week after my arrival at Athens base. The thirty-nine minutes extra actually made acclimating to the new day length easy on my circadian rhythm.
Since I was between maintenance cycles, I too watched the countdown of Legacy III’s launch with the company provided twenty-inch telescope and wished for their success.
3…2…1…0.
I waited the three minutes for the light to reach my location while snacking on flavored algae-crackers – of which I had a limitless supply.
I could have sworn that I saw a tiny silver dot replace the ship before it disappeared from my telescope’s aperture. No explosions, no burst of light, no color changes via Doppler in the vanished dull gray vehicle. Now I, along with everyone else, would have to wait for the announced results some two weeks away.
…
I woke a Friday morning sixteen days later, checked my messages and the news. Milsner’s team reported a success. Strife International received the signal from Legacy’s beacon and, according to their press release, performed a few undisclosed pre-programmed experiments before sending the recall signal to Legacy III, which was still intact.
Hopefully, we would all find out soon. Marissa Milsner’s team even promised to provide coordinates and time of the expected return location for the ship. Lady Strife, of Strife International, reported that Legacy III would spend 48 hours in system gathering data before returning home and repeated their promise to let us know of their findings once they were determined.
Until then, I had work to do. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to personally watch the reentry, since my position on Mars’ surface would be facing away from the reentry quadrant of space when Legacy reentered our solar system.
…
Reclining on my chair, I relaxed while listening to an older Metal song by a band long since retired, watched the night sky, and waited for the news. Jupiter twinkled overhead and for the hundredth time I thought of journeying to Hope station for a closer view once my time here was completed. Mars’ atmosphere wasn’t much, still only eight percent of Earth’s, but it was slowly improving. At most, twelve to fifteen more years and mankind would be able to walk the surface without a mask. Hopefully earlier, but doubtful.
The discovery of three mammoth underground oceans, only one was too far underground to access, gave mankind reason for the final push forward on making this formerly barren world Earth’s second home. That, along with the space anchor at L1 supporting the thousands of kilometers wide magnetic shield which blocked most of the harmful cosmic radiation headed Mars’s way, were the two main catalysts to jump-start humankind’s colonization of the red planet.
Mrs. Larkin, she had refused all attempts of conferring her doctorates by nearly every university on Earth, guaranteed a third upgraded magnetic shield for Mars in the next three years to replace the current one at the L1 point between Mars and the sun, blocking 71% of the sun’s harmful radiation.
I thought seriously about the future hardships that Mars would undergo while taking a break from my telescope.
To my consternation and surprise, a large silver sphere entered Mars’ night sky, forty degrees over the horizon. The silver bubble popped, disappeared or never was there to begin with. I was not sure at all which of those was the correct choice. The elapsed time from its appearance to the sphere vanishing must have been half of a second. Or less.
Less than a minute later, the Vid announcer excitedly reported that Legacy III arrived back in our solar system, at the exact coordinates that the Milsner team stated and at the exact time predicted…
Which couldn’t have been right.
If it was over there, then what was that up here at 40 degrees… I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. The time and distance were off too. Unless Milsner’s team had a secret second craft running, or they might have been followed. Or I could have been seeing things.
I wouldn’t have been the first person stationed on Mars to Fray or even Crack without recognizing the signs…
I did report my sighting though. Everything of note was reported. Always. Even if you saw little green men or silver bubbles in the night sky.
One of the first techs stationed on Mars kept seeing ghosts and didn’t report it until too late. The low-grade uranium rock that he had kept on his desk, one that he thought looked so pretty, emitted enough radiation to slowly destroy his eyes and other soft tissue glands in his face.
L&S had learned their lesson, so did all the subsequent Techs stationed here.
The silver bubble spooked me enough that I gave up stargazing and went inside for a drink. My unofficial algae still produced a bitter but decent vodka, light-years better than my algae beer, which tasted like red pea swill.
Seventeen minutes and nine seconds after my UFO report, I received a signal from corporate, indicating that in five minutes I would get a Vid message and to standby.
Peachy…
My camera LED lit blue, letting me know that my end was being recorded while I waited for the incoming Vid.
“Geoffrey?”
Great, it was the Wicked Witch of Earth, Mars, and the rest of the Solar System. “This is Geoffrey Volkstag,” I replied to the blasted camera, trying to keep my face and voice neutral.
“Would you please go over your sighting with me?”
Odd, she sounded live… Shit, Miss Sydney Thomas was in orbit on Grenadier station. Fuck. That couldn’t be good. “Yes, Ma’am. I was reclining in my Enviro suit outside of base at 22:02, stargazing. I understood that Legacy III would not be in my quadrant, so I didn’t have my telescope sighted at the time. Jupiter was setting and neither moon was above the horizon. Approximately twenty-five seconds before the Legacy III announcement arrived on the Vid, I saw a large silver sphere appear at 40 degrees over Olympus for a brief half-a-second. Maybe a quarter second. I admit I was lucky to have caught it.”
“What makes you think this ‘silver sphere’ you report was large?” The young-looking elfin-faced blonde woman asked with that perfectly pleasant and perfectly modulated voice of hers.
If I hadn’t known better, and I did, I would have thought the number two in L&S was a recent college grad, innocent of the real world.
Snort. Right…
“The sphere was the size of my fingernail and suffered through some blurring. I’ve seen Grenadier Station pass overhead enough to recognize the effect of atmospheric distortion. That, along with no atmospheric alarms going off, led me to conclude that the sphere was at least in low to medium orbit. For something to be that visible in low orbit or further, it would need to be a kilometer across at the minimum. Depending on how high it actually was, it may have been much larger.”
“You reported that the ‘Sphere did not move’. How did it disappear? Can you describe what you saw?”
“I don’t know. Popping like a bubble? A shell retracting so that only the rim on the diameter was the only part of the sphere left? It was too fast and too far away to give you an accurate report, Ma’am.”
“Or like a spinning ring suddenly stopping?”
“Possible. I didn’t have any recording instruments facing that direction. It could have also just dissipated or retracted faster than my eyes could follow. There are too many other explanations for the phenomenon that was out there. None of which I have an answer for.”
“Is it possible that the ‘sphere’ appeared inside the atmosphere of Mars, yet didn’t make a large enough disturbance to set off yours or our alarms?”
“Possible but unlikely. The sudden displacement would have left strong ripples. Its disappearance would have left a void, allowing the air pressure to equalize in a hurry. Unless the object is still in Mars’s atmosphere hidden somewhere…”
My boss’s, boss’s, boss questioned me for a half hour on the blasted UFO before changing the topic to my current work. The level of detail in those questions proved that she wasn’t a talking head, but understood all aspects of my job, probably as well as I did.
“Geoffrey, are you happy on Mars?”
The sudden change of topic was not unexpected, nor was that particular question. “I could use real beer. And a steak.” I stopped there, not pushing it. Who knew how the Wicked Witch would react or why she even asked?
“What about people? You have been planetside for 487 days now.”
“I’m okay. I call a couple friends when I need to, and my handler on Grenadier talks to me every day. Bob, Shanka, Silver, and Rose keep in regular contact. Atlantis Base is also the staging area for the science teams, which gives me additional human contact that the rest of the Techs don’t get.”
“What about Human contact? Touch, taste, smell, sight, the feel of a living breathing body next to yours?”
Are you offering?
“I miss contact with others, but I can continue here for my next two hundred days.” I signed on for a year, a Martian year, with increasing bonuses every sixty days. The completion bonus was worth more than the rest of the contract plus bonuses combined. I had long since passed the minimum day count for any early bonus forfeitures.
L&S could test all they wanted, thirty days solo in Death Valley was still on Earth, along with the rest of their family, friends, enemies, and classmates. Mars surface had between four and forty humans on it at any given time, including scientific explorations. Knowing that you were truly alone, and living with that sense of ‘aloneness’ day and night, changed a person. Besides the five of us Techs, Mars would get sporadic visitors, mostly surveyors, xeno-biologists, and geologists. No scientific teams stayed planetside more than a month in the early years and, exceedingly as the years passed, few more than two weeks.
For the last two hundred and fifty days, no one other than us Fusion Techs stayed planetside on Mars for more than fourteen days. That had become the new Rule.
Of the five of us, Bob had broken 180 and would be asking for a recall soon. He had begun to fray hard, I even sent in a notice to that effect over forty days ago. I thought his Fraying was further along than he reported, or anyone mentioned. Shanka and her equally useless husband would not make it to their first 60 without coming unglued. That was another dumb experiment by L&S, which they had to have known would fail.
Not that I blamed them for trying. Still, it slowed the project and added to the final bill. Couples never worked planetside and rarely on the station unless they had decades together.
Until about three Earth years ago, they had even problems station side.
I guessed that the increasing numbers on Grenadier made life easier. Couples and individuals no longer needed to flee space and return to Earth after a month or two of being separated from our homeworld.
Humans needed humans to cope.
Silver, Mary Beth Silver, neared her 300th. A significant milestone. She and her family would be set for life and she looked forward to retiring together near them. The elderly physicist even briefly considered going for 360, but the sadness in her voice at her latest grandchild’s birth, for which she was absent, was telling. So too was the hole in her heart when she spoke of her family and life before Mars. Silver would see her 300th, stay the two extra days that everyone did now, and rush to see her family, hoping to get her life back together. Chia, still green at twenty days in, was in the early ‘wistful’ stage.
“What do you think of your ex-wife being pregnant and getting married to Olivia Samuelson?”
“I wish the kid all the luck in the world, growing up with that crazy bat and my ex will not do him or her any favors.”
“That wasn’t the question I asked, Geoffrey.”
I shrugged, an odd habit for one that lived in perfect solitude, but a habit from my youth and father I couldn’t get rid of. “I hope she can get her head on straight and be happy.”
“Even after everything Grace did to you?”
“Yes, Miss Thomas. Even after she burned my house down and tried to cut my balls off.” I had gone over that countless times, with countless shrinks and non-shrinks, before receiving final approval for this job. Even Miss Thomas interviewed me for three hours — the final step for any Tech being accepted to the Program.
“Are there any issues with your regrowth?”
My package was new and improved long before I left Earth, I knew it and they knew it. Even at eighteen, I wasn’t this healthy. Why the questions?
“None, Miss Thomas.”
“What are your plans after your contract ends, Geoff?”
‘Geoff’ was it? “I haven’t made any. I have two hundred more days here, sixteen days in transit back to Earth, and then an Earth month of being a lab rat.”
“Do you mind me calling you Geoff?” Miss Sydney Thomas asked.
“Not really, no.” I didn’t. Geoff was what I called myself in my mind.
“Earth month. Do you consider Earth your home?”
That was an unexpected question. I looked around, my office, my computer, my coffee cup… “This is my home, I guess.” I knocked on the wall beside me.
“And in two hundred thirty-seven days, when you are free from being a lab rat, what are your plans?” she inquired.
“I guess I will look for a new home then.”
“Have you considered a mobile home or a boat?”
“Not really, but I haven’t considered much of anything. It’s still too far away. I thought that there was a company-wide prohibition on speaking to any Mars techs about returning to Earth unless we brought the subject up?”
“There is. I wrote it.”
Oh. Did she think of sending me back early? Did they disbelieve my sighting and conclude I was unstable?
“Geoff, can you picture yourself living on a boat for a few years?” she reiterated.
“Yes.” ‘Yeah’ was never to be used while dealing with higher ups, none of us understood why, just that it was an unstated, yet enforced, rule. “I never have been on a houseboat, but a decent one might not be bad for a little while.”
“Geoff, Money for you shouldn’t be an issue. You are closing in on 100 days planetside and we all expect you to make it the full six ninety.”
True.
“I wasn’t referring to a common houseboat.” She meant one of those huge yachts that cost tens of millions.
“I haven’t thought about it. I might look around when I return to Earth. Until then, the point is pretty moot.”
“Everyone that has lasted more than 120 days retired, turned to teaching, or started a small business. Do you have any plans for the future?”
“Not really, I don’t even know where I will end up living.”
“Legacy IV will be manned,” Sydney Thomas announced suddenly, completely surprising me.
I froze at the implications.
“Are you interested?”
I knew my expression revealed everything to she who read me so well. ‘Stunned ox’ summed it up pretty well.
“Legacy IV will not just be hopping to Alpha Centauri and back.” She struck again.
I waited. Trying to un-stun myself in time for her coup de grace.
“You plus four crew for the first few voyages. Then we will evaluate and decide. We, Geoff.”
“I’m included? What the? Oh, you want me to captain Legacy. I’m not military, a pilot, nor an astrophysicist.”
“Geoff, we need someone we can count on. Someone stable, someone who has ‘been there and done that’. Someone we know will be able to handle the vastness and emptiness of space to head the Legacy mission. Someone who doesn’t need the support of others to succeed.”
“Send me the package, I’ll read it when I get back from the next maintenance run.”
I’d consider her offer.
“I will. And, Geoffrey, I was not offering.” There wasn’t even a hint of the smile remaining which had been present for the earlier interview.
It took me a full second to realize what she meant. I held my breath until the monitor went blank and the camera light returned to yellow.
Fuck.
Chapter 2:
I read through L&S’s contract, which was similar to my current one in that there was no legalese. I was tempted, even without the extra zero. Mars was a safe place for me to get my shit together and away from humanity. Legacy was a completely different animal. It was dangerous. Deadly dangerous. With thousands of possible chances of dying per second. Every second.
A single seal, chip, screw, micro asteroid, micro black hole, or radiation flare could and would mean that the mission, ship and all aboard. I and the mission would then end violently and quietly a very long way from anywhere I could consider home.
****
Legacy III had made one other jump to a nearby star system and returned safely, only to be retired and completely disassembled by Milsner’s team.
That was a huge plus in their court for me accepting the job. The extra zero was strange and excessive. Too excessive, I thought. My contract on Mars, including bonuses, was for 100 million if I lasted the full Martian year. Before I arrived on Mars, Mark Indigo held the record at 312 days, earning twenty-five million dollars for his time and efforts. Silver received the same now that she was back on Earth.
Two Hundred Million per year didn’t make sense to me. Half paid up front. There were even strange clauses about me being the ‘Captain of the Ship’ and a list of my rights of command, one of which stated that while onboard and I remained Captain the Legacy, no one, including the owners, could gainsay my orders. Yet they could fire me at any time, for any reason, AND only if they were not on board any version of Legacy in which I was given Captainship.
The worst part was that Miss Thomas had been too accommodating. She was a shark, I knew it, she knew it, hell, everyone that ever had dealings with her or L&S knew that she was the super-shark that ate other sharks.
They wanted me on Earth as soon as I signed. Legacy IV needed twelve months to complete the internals ‘officially’. Miss Thomas hinted that it was considerably less than that. People were the issue, not the ship. Of the last batch of twelve perspective spacefarers, only two passed to stage 4 of the trials. I wasn’t sure and had asked the true reason on why such a harsh testing requirement was necessary. Each jump between systems should only take one or two dozen days subjectively. The onboard clock for Legacy III read that less than ten days elapsed during the fifteen-day trip to Alpha Centauri. Hell, if they were that worried about the effects on us during the jump, just sedate or cordon off the crew.
I wasn’t being told everything. Nor was anyone else.
Or wasn’t being told that something very specific which was worrying them. Until I found out what, I think I would pass on their offer.
…
“Are you certain, Geoff?”
“Positive, Miss Thomas. You will not give me the full brief until I sign, and I won’t agree unless I get that information. Something doesn’t mesh and you know it.”
The smile which lit her elfin face warned me of my impending doom. “See you tomorrow morning. Good night, Geoffrey.” Click.
What the hell? Was that another of her ‘tests’?
…
At 06:58, Mars mean time, alarms sounded, disturbing me from my breakfast of coffee and honey flavored algae flakes. Athens Base was the first permanent, continuously occupied settlement on Mars. Even if that settler was one sole technician, it had never been not occupied in the first seven years since its inception. Thus, it earned the right for Ground zero on the Mars world clock.
Athens was also the storage depot for all initial housing and ground-based transportation planetwide. The Space Hook would deliver and retrieve people and machines from a nearby plateau. That Hook was more cost effective and safer than the personal transports docked at the station. Those transports were meant for running about Mars’ moons and upper atmosphere, not descending into and out of gravity wells.
Through the southern window, I witnessed a red and white shuttle descend from the bright morning sky. A first for me. I, and everyone else who visited Mars planetside traveled via the space elevator attached to Grenadier space station or the L&S Shuttle assigned to Grenadier. To my knowledge, there were only four personal craft similar to that red and white one in existence –which could travel through space and in and out of gravity wells freely, all unpurchasable for any price. Each of the four vehicles employed no identifiable means of propulsion or fuel source.
The famous black and white Shuttle One, owned by the fearsome Lady Strife, CEO of Strife International and Hope station, and the smaller blue and white one owned by the ungodly brilliant Larkin and Smith owner Catherine Larkin, my ultimate boss, were two of the four. The third, a red and white tour bus sized vehicle, was strongly suspected to be Sydney Thomas’s personal shuttle, but others had been seen using it when the Manipulator Extraordinaire was elsewhere, unlike the blue and black ones who were for their owners’ exclusive use only.
The fourth, a green and white two-person super craft, had been seen in action around Earth, but no one reported knowing who it belonged to.
I just Knew that Miss Sydney Thomas was inside that red and white space car. Visiting me unannounced planetside didn’t feel right after I just refused her offer. Placing my unfinished breakfast in the fridge, I sought out my skinnies and quickly dressed.
Miss Thomas was accompanied by a guard in black power armor. That wasn’t surprising, what was surprising was that she wore a cream colored windbreaker and brown slacks while exiting her vehicle. And low hiking boots. No envirosuit at all.
The rumors of her owning a personal force field were just proven to be true.
As she and her guard closed in on the airlock, her mechanical bodyguard veered off to walk the area with a floating camera trailing, while the petite woman tapped the entry code before stepping through the reinforced airlock.
“Good morning, Geoffrey, may I enter your home?”
“You may.” Halting just inside the communications hub, which one of the earliest Tech’s commandeered for her home instead of the smaller housings that we were originally supposed to live in, Miss Thomas toggled the switch, closing the airlock door behind her.
“Will you show me your around?”
Warily, I replied “okay” and wondered what she was playing at.
I showed my boss’s, boss’s, boss, the comm office, which had a permanent active connection to Grenadier station. The main conference room had been converted into a hydroponics farm. One of seven in the small base. The other six were in three separate buildings in case of a disaster. The small administrator’s office had converted into my bedroom. Mostly a cot and clothes closet. The storage room became my dining room and kitchen.
“Thyme, basil, chile peppers. Why only those three?” She asked about my herb collection, which I grew myself. Keeping them in planters located in the building I spent the most time in made sense to me, who was not born with a green thumb.
“Limited room for more. With those three, I get enough flavor to tide me over between food shipments.”
“And, of course, your coffee,” she teased.
“My one concession to civilization.”
Turning to me while standing in the door, almost as if to block my exit from the kitchen, she changed the topic abruptly. “Have you ever watched a show called System Gate?”
“When I was a kid, maybe an old rerun once or twice.” Her out of the blue question warned me that I might not like the direction of this conversation. Sydney Thomas never did or said anything without a reason.
“Alpha Centauri A has a similar large ring orbiting the star at 10 AUs from its sun. It’s a little over nine kilometers in diameter and two hundred ninety meters thick. We think it is coated in solid gold but were unwilling able to take a sample. It looks just like the one from the show. Except for the size and the thousands of runes engraved on one side of the surface.”
Standing in the middle of the doorway of my kitchen/dining room, she looked and sounded serious. I didn’t like it. I knew she was not making the supposed ‘System Gate’ up.
“Seven of the runes were glowing in both ultraviolet and soft X-ray. We believe that the gate is active and has a programmed destination. We also believe that we were followed back by someone or something. You witnessed that with the ‘silver sphere’ you reported. Whoever it is, it uses the same dimensional travel as we do and probably an advanced version compared to ours. We also suspect it was an automated craft sent to observe and report.”
“And you want me to take a peek to see what is on the other side of the System Gate?”
“Eventually.” She paused for effect, “Our trials with chimps and pigs came out clean in our first jumps.”
Wait, weren’t the Legacies supposed to be unmanned?
Oh. They were technically ‘un-manned’.
“We want humans to be the first to meet whoever is on the other side of that Gate.” She was being cryptic, I felt that Miss Sydney Thomas was leaving something out.
“I’m not a cypher nor a diplomat. The only language I speak is English with a scattering of phrases I learned from others stationed here. Why me?”
“One: you understand fusion well enough to repair it on a daily basis. Two: you can survive solitude, if necessary for long durations, and stay sane. Three: you can keep the world’s biggest secret. Four: you have a steadiness that few do. Five: you are trustworthy. Six: I trust your judgment.”
Somehow, I felt that the last reason stated was the most important one in her view. “Are you failing your candidates because of possible meetings with aliens?”
“In part. How they react to the unknown and horror can help me get a glimpse of what would happen if they met a non-humanoid alien. Overcoming flight and fight responses is important in those situations, wouldn’t you agree?”
“If it’s so important to you, why aren’t you going?”
“My DNA is broken. We don’t know if I would survive the trip.”
… Broken? How could someone’s DNA be broken and them still be alive?
“…Okay…” There was nothing I could say to that.
“I chose you to go in my place. Even if you have to go alone.”
“The Legacy is half of a kilometer long. I can’t be in two or three places at once if there is an issue.”
“That’s what Bots are for. I do have three people that passed the tests so far. But let me ask you this: You have been on Mars for nearly five hundred days. You have seen techs, surveyors, and scientists come and go. How many do you think have lasted more than ninety days consecutively on this planet and come out unscathed? I have heard you and the rest call it being ‘Frayed’.”
We were not supposed to use Fray and Cracked in the presence of the higher ups, but we did amongst ourselves.
“A handful. Maybe.” I knew that everyone stayed too long. The incentives were too good not to push for that next sixty-day payout.
“Less than two. We haven’t had a returnee pass a psyche eval yet.”
“No one has?” That surprised me. I would have sworn that Silver would have passed and at least one of the others that I had met in my time here might have.
“Mary Beth did not pass. She began fraying over two hundred days ago. You are the only one that has passed all of our tests so far. Catherine and Master believe it is because humans are all linked spiritually, and coming this far from Earth alone severs that link. We keep trying to reintegrate the returnees with their family and friends, but there remains a disconnect.” She didn’t pause and continued with her odd theory.
“Something is not allowing the returnees a reconnection with the rest of the human race. You do not have that problem. I can’t decide if you were never connected to begin with, you are too damaged to know better, you are unique in the lack of need for your fellow humans, or are fooling everyone, including yourself and me.”
The petite woman before me did not like admitting the possibility that I might be pulling the wool over her eyes.
“We want you to take people with you,” she continued.
“Even knowing they will break?” I had to ask.
“Even knowing they will break,” she admitted. “A short stint away from mother Earth may not break them away from the web. Although that is unlikely. It’s possible that your presence will keep them intact too.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Cargo bay nine will have eight stasis pods installed. Shove them in one and lock the door. They will sleep until you return. If you shove them out an airlock, no one would say a word. I’d prefer to have them alive and in stasis for evaluation later, but I rather have you return safely, then them in control and you dead.”
“That’s why the absolute power you offered in my contract would go to me. You are sure I won’t break and expect my crew to.”
“Unless you can find a way to keep them sane. Yes,” she stated all too clearly. “The first four jumps to and from Hope will be with test crews. We will test and evaluate them, and you. Not that I expect you to be other than you are now. Then we decide if we send you through the Gate. Probably alone if I am right.”
“But that could easily be a one-way trip.”
“It could. I do not believe it will be. Nor does Catherine, Master, or Moria.” Catherine had to be her boss, Catherine Larkin, the owner of L&S and widely acknowledged as the Earth’s smartest human ever. I didn’t know who Moria was, but she had to be someone considerable, if Sydney Thomas included her in that ‘guesstimate’ along with her boss.
This ‘Master’ had to have been her rumored teacher. Supposedly Catherine Larkin’s husband, a man spoken of but never seen in public outside of Miss Larkin’s company.
“Why don’t couples last on Mars?”
“We don’t know. All of our guesses are based on the belief that Catherine is correct with the ‘Spiritual Web’.” Sensing that I wanted my boss to elaborate, she obliged me. “A mated pair are strongly bonded to each other. That bond connects to the Web tighter than an individual’s.”
That made a strange sort of sense, if there actually was a life web binding humans together.
“What about the space stations? They don’t have that problem.”
“Past a certain population size the stations are stable, the community becomes self-supportive. Both Hope and Grenadier have over a thousand residents. I consider them as small webs of their own. The scientific and sightseeing trips away from either station are all kept under two weeks now. All the early expeditions that lasted more than a month,” she shrugged purposefully, “we see issues in those early team members but not in the later arrivals.”
The early arrivals were five years ago, they might have been out of Miss Thomas’s reach by now. I wagered privately that it irritated her to no end, being unable to drag those scientists and technicians back for more testing.
“Wait. That is the real reason the five of us techs are spread out over Mars? If you based us all in the same place, we would end up bonding and… damn.”
“Correct, Geoff. Yet not entirely.”
“Huh?”
“This brings me to the last reason why we want you on that ship.” I waited, again getting a bad feeling where this was going. “Have you noticed that you get visitors when no other technician does?”
“I thought it was because I was in Athens Base. It’s not. Is it?” A suspicion began forming in my mind.
“We don’t know why, nor do we have any means on how to go about testing our ideas without destroying a lot of people, but anyone that comes in contact with you for more than a few days planetside has less mental and emotional stress than those that landed in other Mars substations earlier in your investiture. We think that you influence their connection to the Spiritual Web just by being near them. In a positive way.”
I didn’t know if she was pulling my leg or discovered something, but I do know that, for the last three hundred days or so, every expedition planetside had been based out of Athens. Even those that sought out the poles or the second mammoth ocean, located deep underground in the southern hemisphere, were based out of Athens. The visitors living in my base had become a standing joke amongst those of us planetside Tech’s; they had been dropped on my doorstep to see the 300, 400 and now 100-day monkey in the zoo.
I didn’t know one way or the other. They were just people to me. Some decent, some not so but, with the extremely limited timetables planetside, no one ever stayed here long and direct physical interaction was prohibited on my end. I could talk to them, but not touch outside of a suited-up handshake or offering a helping hand, righting a fallen scientist back up after tripping in the low gravity in uneven terrain.
“Think of it as having a superpower.”
I rolled my eyes, “Great, my Superpower is to let other’s run away from Earth.”
“Geoffrey, if that truly is your super power, then it is worth more than the rest of the super abilities on Earth. Don’t you see?” she asked with a tinge of excitement. “Unless we build city sized ships, you might be our only link to the stars.”
“I don’t know, it seems…” I shrugged.
“Too much?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t notice my slip until I replayed the encounter in my mind later, causing me to wince when I reviewed our conversation.
A frown from the beautiful elven face denoted that she caught my gaffe. Even if I didn’t.
“We have two round-trips planned. Honestly, we can put anyone in a ship and jump. A few days travel in each direction and back isn’t much. We just would block off everything important and have them be passengers. A day or month away from that selfish bitch of a Mother Earth won’t kill anyone. But if we send someone with knowledge, understanding, and a working brain outside of Mother Earth’s iron grasp, we can hope to get real answers. I want to make those jumps as close to each other as possible. The first trip will be a simple pair of jumps, there and back. Then the first team of four will disembark and you will take four new passengers for a four-jump journey. We test and evaluate, then decide.”
“Geoffrey, will you give me that, please? If you still hate the idea of going through the Gate, we will never force you.”
Fuck…
“Thank you, Geoffrey.”
I knew she couldn’t read minds but… “I know I am going to regret this.”
“Do you want help packing?”
I laughed ruefully. She knew that I would agree. That’s why she brought her personal transport. It was to pack me up and bring me to Earth.
“No, I have it. Give me four hours to settle things here and take a last walk around the base.”
“Of course. Boris and I will go sightseeing. See you at twelve.”
Giving me another one of those insanely perfect smiles of hers, “Thank you, Geoff, I will do everything I can to make sure you will not regret this decision.” Turning smartly, the Manipulator Extraordinaire walked out of the base, summoned her guard, and flew off. Her task done here. Maybe I could add a clause that anyone else besides Sydney Thomas could negotiate with me.
It’d never fly, but I could hope, couldn’t I?
Chapter 3:
It had been five hundred and twenty-two days since I first set foot on Grenadier Station. A lot had changed since then, primarily the number of people. An Earth year and half ago there were nine hundred workers, mostly electricians and welders and their families that lived and worked in the cavernous decks of the three-kilometer wide, multi layered station. According to Miss Thomas, over four thousand people now called human’s largest space construction ‘Home’.
The second biggest change, to me was the gravity. My first visit to the Mars orbiting space station had the outer regions stable at just over 38% of Earth’s gravity, similar to the gravity on Mars’s surface. As more systems came online, the station’s gravity kept increasing until where it was today surpassed 0.70 g. At least in the outskirts of the diamond shaped structure it did. The inner areas remained half that. Artificial gravity generation and inertial ‘dampeners’ made all this possible. L&S’s goal, mankind’s goal, was to colonize Mars, which needed time and a boat load of terraforming before any substantial migration could be hoped for.
I stood still in the little used observation bubble which extended out from a lower tier of the station watching Mars slowly rotate under me while I thought of all the changes happening around me in silence. The tall, athletic blonde assigned to be my shadow and guide, kept me company during my three day stay on the station. Not that I needed it. She might have though. I detected boredom from her that someone without a purpose exuded after staying too long in a single area while on vacation – a particular type of restlessness.
“Dr. Volkstag? Your dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. If we leave now, you will have time for a shower,” Helen hinted.
I believed that she would do pretty much anything to get out of this, other than visual, stimulation-less glass enclosed bulb. But to me the view was breathtaking.
“Sure. What’s on the menu tonight?”
“Steak and beer.” I heard a grin and a bit of envy in her voice.
“Oh?” Cow meat on the station was unheard of, there were other meats that were much cheaper to grow or import. Beer was rare too, but not as bad as steak, or exotic fish.
“You did ask for steak and a beer.” The amusement in her voice was more obvious this time.
I did, the night of the UFO sighting. “Just me?” I headed out; steak sounded awesome. So too did real beer not flavored by algae.
“There was a lottery for the rest of the cow, Syd had it butchered and distributed in half pound portions, everyone who won received a portion. I heard that the residents are splitting their winnings with friends.”
Even here Miss Thomas made people dance to her tune.
My guide with the ludicrously meter-long blonde braid followed me into the VIP suite that had been assigned to me for during the quick turn around awaiting Miss Thomas’s shuttle preparation for the return trip to Earth.
“The miners delivered a decent sized ice ball yesterday. Fresh water showers await. Come on, Hero, I’ll wash your back.”
That was a first, she had been flirting since I had been introduced to Sydney Thomas’ aides when she picked me up from Mars’ surface, Boris, Sydney Thomas’s android bodyguard, who had been built and Created by her boss Catherine Larkin, Stacy Pinta, Miss Thomas’s mousy secretary, and Helen Jacoby, her all around gofer. I was pretty sure that both women were altered, enhanced, or outright superhumans.
I didn’t refuse the back washing, but that was all it was, aside from a bit of teasing. Dinner, as promised, was delivered just after I dressed. Helen, dressed in a thin white swimsuit, which did not hide her piercings in the slightest, even under her silver silken robe, joined me at my personal en suite table. After stealing a bite of my steak and a sip of my dark beer, we discussed the state of Grenadier Station and Project Legacy.
The steak rocked and the beer was even better. Unfortunately, aside the tease in the shower, Helen didn’t offer, nor seemed to want more.
The Hero part was becoming a fact, unfortunately for my piece of mind. “520 Days” had spread throughout the station and Earth. My name was on everyone’s tongue. Not quite what I wanted or intended when I signed up for the Mars job. My time planetside was 200 days longer than the next longest of the Mars techs, current or former, with the majority lasting less than 183 days. I remained almost a full Earth year longer than most on the Mars surface and was deemed a ‘Hero’ because of that.
Peachy.
The steel-faced Android Boris, Sydney Thomas’ personal bodyguard, attached Miss Thomas’s red and white car to a fifteen-by-thirty-meter ‘house’ and flew home with the four of us inside.
Those three women had a VERY odd inter-personal relationship in which Sydney Thomas dominated.
Very odd…
Mostly, I read on the way back to Earth and watched Vids, giving them as much space as needed. My next Earth-year would be immersed in study and preparation for Legacy IV’s launch with me in the Captain’s chair. But not until after I had a good vacation somewhere warm. Somewhere with lots of water. Warm water and maybe a bikini clad woman or three.
…
My tests came back in the expected ranges: loss of 0.5% bone mass and an increase in musculature by 8.8%. My blood related tests were very similar to when I first signed up, most even improved under the strict diet and exercise routines planetside. Compared to my time on Mars, the three months of training I underwent at L&S before leaving for Mars was a cake walk.
The shrinks on staff were decidedly off balance with me. They had expected someone or something different than what I gave them via their extensive tests. I was sane, not fraying and/or broken or completely disassociated with the rest of humanity. Something that no one else could say that returned from their stint on Mars, according to Miss Thomas.
Silver visited near the end of my three-week evaluation. Mary Beth pretended to be happy while she discussed her family and grandchildren, yet I felt an undercurrent of aloofness, unacknowledged.
“I thought you would be in Barcelona right now.” Aside from her children and grandchildren, a month-long spa and sea vacation was all she could talk about the week prior leaving Mars.
“Next week. Izzy first.” I smiled at the pride in her voice. Even if there was a shadow behind it and in her eyes, and an all too eerie calmness to her voice.
“Geoff, you don’t feel it, do you?”
“Hmm? Feel what?”
“Thought so.” Sighing, Silver took a look around at the monitors in my room before continuing. “They are all strangers now. Everyone I knew before I left is different to me and me to them. They are… I don’t know how to explain it. My psychiatrist thinks I am exaggerating. She doesn’t understand, can’t understand.”
“Mary Beth, I think I do understand. Instead of feeling cut off, why don’t you start over and reconnect with the people you care about,” I suggested.
“Reconnect… I’m not sure I know how anymore.”
“Yes, you do. Think of your grandsons. Just be a part of their lives and the rest will come. I heard that most returnees become teachers. Have you considered that?”
“I applied for the night supervisor’s position at the Pittsburgh Fusion plant,” she blurted out in a rush. I thought she felt a bit guilty at the admission.
The Pittsburgh plant was the seventh UF based Fusion plant and the one with the least draw on its systems.
“Aren’t you massively overqualified for that?” I laughed.
“I’ll be close to the grandkids, but not too close. It’s a two-hour drive to Nowhere, Ohio, where Ollie and Kae live.” Her daughter’s family.
“And you can’t sit around and do nothing,” I added. “I still think that being more active in their lives can only be a good thing for you and them. Join clubs, even if it’s chess one night a week. And get schooled,” I grinned. She was terrible but loved the game.
“Stop that. I’m not that bad, you are just too good.” Giving me another once-over, she brought up the real reason of her visit instead of touring vineyards in southern Europe. “They are talking about a ticker tape parade for you.”
“Fuck that.” No Way In Hell!
My older friend grinned, “I knew that would be your answer. L&S is leaking like a sieve with your numbers. Too much to not be intentional.”
Miss Thomas strikes again. “Do I want to know?”
Instead of telling me, she switched the subject again. “I received an offer for my eggs. One million dollars.”
“Your eggs?” Mary Beth was fifty-seven…
“Right, what eggs? I’ll be fifty-eight in a month. Any eggs left in my body have long since petrified.
“I’ve been offered fifty K per weekend of study. My alma matter, who has never contacted me outside of the usual donation spiels, did a hard sell last month by the university president in person. Thankfully, you came along and shattered all the records on time and production. Even came out as sane as you went in, which we all know isn’t very…” she teased.
Groan…
“A 29-year-old genius, stable as all hell, who survived the horrors of Mars. The momma queue will line up around the block. The DNA banks will be in line behind those women. You could be the highest paid sperm daddy in the world with harems of thousands spread around the globe. AND even better… Dr. Volkstag,” Mary Beth smirked, “those women would pay you for the privilege. Not you them. Think of all the money you would save on dates and shoe shopping.”
“Ha, bleeding, HA.” I groaned at the lines of pursuers and the pressure.
“Your pic will be forgotten in fifteen in this messed up society of ours, but your name forever added to the history books. Remember, you will always be important to those that want to use you. Few people or businesses even care about Mars. It’s twenty years away for serious colonization. By then they will be too old to move or care.” Peering over her imaginary granny glasses, waving a finger at me, “I can’t see you hiding, but shotguns on your lawn chair are bad, young man.”
“I don’t think you have to worry too much about that,” I replied soberly.
“Oh?”
“L&S secret. Understood?”
“I’m all ears.”
“Miss Thomas snatched me off of Mars to be her personal chauffeur.”
“Bullshit.”
“Legacy IV.”
“You’re fucking insane. Didn’t you learn anything on Mars? Was 100 not good enough for you?”
“520.” I corrected, hoping to derail my friend.
“Geoffrey!” I didn’t expect her to be pissed at me.
“Two trips, I promised. After that,” I shrugged, “who knows?”
Silver extended her visit for another two hours as we discussed the training and job offer. I didn’t notice until after she left, but Mary Beth was much more emotional and engaged than when she first arrived at my temporary New Mexican home.
Maybe Miss Thomas was on to something about me emotionally influencing others.
…
“One, I don’t care which, as long as it has a viewership of at least one million. You did agree to it when you signed your contract,” Miss Thomas reminded me.
I couldn’t claim small print. That clause was numbered and clear as day before I signed on for the Mars program. A bloody talk show…
…
“Welcome to Good Morning World. Doctor Volkstag, thank you for agreeing to come on our show today.” The oversized host, Michelin Blowhard or something, call me ‘Mike’, welcomed me before his audience of five hundred live people and televised numbers of over 10 million. I ended up letting Miss Thomas choose for me, since I had no interest in any of the morning housewife time wasters. This was her gig anyway.
“Thanks for having me.” Not that I was thankful, but I had been cued on certain acceptable responses.
The host glossed over my rote response. “You survived more than five hundred days on the surface of Mars. No one else has stayed for more than 320. How? And better yet, why would you isolate yourself for two years on a barren world?”
“I kept busy. Every day there was something to fix, work on, repair, adjust, see or do. I wasn’t completely alone. Athens Base was the landing point for off-worlders, mostly scientists. Twice times a month a new team would arrive and stay for a week or two, doing their own projects.”
“Did you fluff their pillows too?” insert laugh card for the audience to demonstrate their sheep-ness.
“No, L&S took care of that. My job was maintenance. Specifically for the algae spreaders.”
“You are a doctor, what kind of doctor are you?”
“I have a doctorate in Physics-Fusion.”
“With an impressive sounding degree like that, getting a job on Earth shouldn’t be difficult; why go to all the trouble and travel billions of miles away to Mars?” A loaded question.
“I was in debt from school and my divorce. L&S was hiring. However, only people with my skill set and education were being considered. The spreaders are all fusion powered and sometimes I had to make snap judgments on what to fix and what to replace. Besides, we need people on Mars now if Mankind is ever going to want to live there in the future.”
The host was skilled at setting his guests up to incriminate themselves. He wouldn’t go as far as becoming hostile and press if they didn’t fall into his traps, but the openings were there for whoever followed up in other venues. He probably got kickbacks or his jollies out of seeing people squirm.
“Word is that you are a rich man now. Fifty million is nothing to sneeze at.”
I didn’t like him parading how much I earned on Mars. “Less than two thirds of the 80 million you make, Mike. 62.13%, I believe. But I only have to pay 15.35% in taxes as a self-employed, out of country worker for more than a year. Which isn’t all bad.”
That, and I made my money honestly, not being a professional liar.
I wondered how long before someone told him that we made about the same after taxes? Chuckle… or if they even would.
The rest of the interview continued in the same vein. When other guests arrived, the topic remained on me with a seemingly friendly edge, including a regularly appearing guest chef, who came prepared with a half dozen algae recipes. A couple of her creations were pretty good too, I wish I had her algae chip and dip recipe when I was on Mars. Not that I had access to garlic or avocado. But still…
Marta P. apologized after the set, claiming ignorance of today’s guest list. Just that the producers asked for that base in today’s samplings. The ‘guide’ that the producers of the show assigned me was not at all pleased with my showing. Apparently, no one was allowed to mention how much Mr. Blowhard made a year. The housewives don’t like to be reminded that their blobbing in front of the TV generated more than 80 Million for the ‘unnaturally nice’ host from advertisement revenue alone.
I took the guest chef’s apology with a grain of salt – I kill me, though I did get a few of her recipes to pass along to the poor slobs still stationed on Mars, before entering the waiting limo heading to the airport.
Snorkeling, scuba, sand and fruity drinks with way too much alcohol beckoned. Bikini watching too. Couldn’t have a high-end Malta resort without gold diggers and skimpy bikinis.
…
The third day on the,” Cough, ‘Vatican subsidiary,’ Cough, ‘wonderful island of Malta’, my cellphone rang while I sipped a too strong watermelon cocktail. An unknown number appeared on my phone. Not that I had more than the minimum numbers that Stacy Pinta, Miss Thomas’s secretary, programmed into it: L&S company personnel department, a few of my former professors, plus Silver.
Bob and others that had returned before me had not contacted me, nor did I ever expect them to. During her visit, Silver had hinted that Bob would need a hospital stay. I wished him luck, the British hospitals weren’t the best and after that last round of lawsuits, might have been even worse than I had read.
I kept being distracted by a gorgeous young mother in a barely-there cutout bikini, who kept bending at the waist, with knees slightly spread and locked, to speak to her daughter playing in the sand. When not wiggling that firmly rounded tush aimed right at me, I received a promising smile or two. I wasn’t complaining, but the phone ringing interrupted my smile and, stupidly, I answered the blasted thing.
“Bro. You’ve been back for a month and never called. What’s up with that?” I fought the urge to throw the idiotic device in the Med. And him.
“Dan. If you lose this number and never call it again or contact me in any way, I will give you two hundred thousand dollars.” Not that he’d hold on to it for more than a year before it was all squandered.
“Geoff, bro. Don’t be like that. You’re rich now. How about sharing some with your big brother?”
“One fifty and each time it gets lower.”
“Three hundred it is. Thanks, brother mine,” he gushed. I would kill whomever gave that smarmy bastard my number.
“I said two. When I get back to the states, I will call you.”
“Where are yo-” Click. thumb down, block caller.
“Problems, Mr. Geoffrey?” That pretty Italian smile inquired from the chair adjacent to mine in lightly accented English. The matching face and body of the woman wiggling twenty-five feet in front of us on the beach, smiled pleasantly at me.
“Nothing unexpected or worth my time, Miss…?”
“Gina.” Those smiling eyes sparkled.
Gina and her twin sister Marie were vacationing in Malta for a week with their children. Both women were divorced and looking to play. They did resist my teasing and sole blatant hint about togetherness, not that I pushed or was serious, which they knew. Thankfully, they did not mind sharing me one at a time.
My three weeks in Malta helped decompress me. Those two lovely ladies were not the only ones to visit my bedroom during my vacation or I theirs, but they were the most honest with their desires. They wanted a child and a week to try. An even better bonus was that both women were intelligent and friendly. They dominated my time during my first week in the Med and their smiles kept the rest of the sharks at bay.
Joe, Dino, and Sonya, their children, received my picture and autograph. Good kids.
I changed on Mars. Or maybe it was my return to Earth that changed me. I noticed more about people and their emotions with the fluid interactions of the gold diggers and the mother’s seeking a sperm donor. I read them better. Much better than I ever had.
Maybe not to Sydney Thomas’s level. But light years ahead of where I used to be as a clueless engineering mindset twenty-something male, pre-Mars.
….
A lawyer, an updated will, a restraining order and two checks, one for the barracuda in a suit and one for the waste of human flesh of a brother, were the first things I accomplished on returning to New Mexico. My new home for the following six months while L&S put together their two teams of four and I underwent a thorough study and training regimen.
Privately, I still believed that anyone could be a member of the initial crew. Miss Thomas had plans on top of plans, though. A great many of which I was not privy to. Nor did I exactly care to know what was going on inside that pretty head of hers.
Deep-immersion learning via KWQ, the memory wonder drug with possible side effects for misuse, which included guaranteed insanity and death on and after the third application, did not prevent my boss from personally setting up and administering my treatment sessions. All nine of them, which scared me silly until an hour-long explanation was delivered to me by my new boss personally on the true effects and the real equation behind using the drug.
…
Six months of studying passed quickly, during which I worked out and studied even more. Twice a weeknight I was basically ordered to find something or someone to entertain myself with. Even if it was an employee. Or especially. Miss Thomas was harder to read than the rest of humanity. Few of the women on the base would say no, their reasons strange to me. I wasn’t movie-star good looking, nor a da Vinci, Einstein or Edison, yet my genes were treated that way. I didn’t have to ask for companionship, there were seemingly endless lines waiting for my genes and quality time with me. Phone numbers, cards, and room keys were pressed upon me, most of the time singly, yet, more frequently than I could understand, pairs and trios of ladies would also proposition me.
The married ones really set my hackles on edge. The first one that brought along a notarized document, granting her husband’s approval, had me disappear faster than a quark on a bad spin.
My choice of Saturday or Sunday, I was ordered to leave the base and socialize with humans for at least four hours — ‘If I could find any’, Miss Thomas ordered.
Ha, bleeding ha.
There were countless days where I questioned Sydney Thomas’s own humanity. Those days ended in ‘y’.
I felt that I was in grad school again, pressing my thesis along with helping my professors run their and my experiments. My every waking moment was on a strict timetable, yet this time without being married to an unknowingly brainwashed psychopath. I ate, slept, and breathed physics, circuits, esoteric engineering, and power systems for those six months stationed inside the L&S headquarters.
Sex was a good stress relief, though attachment-less sex became old after the novelty wore off mid-way through my stint at L&S’s New Mexico base.
Strangely, I found myself with more free time than expected by the end of the fourth month, even with the heavy scholastic workload Miss Thomas assigned me. At the end of six months, I even had an inkling of how the Dimension Boring Device worked. As for Legacy itself, I was a great deal more familiar with the overall workings of the vessel than I ever expected. Stellar navigation was still beyond me, I would always need to rely on the onboard computers and the promised Bots to travel between star systems.
That KWQ wonder drug had accelerated my learning by five or even ten years, compressing my studies into six months.
Miss Thomas assured me that my comprehension was all me. I almost believed her.
Chapter 4:
Three days before I was to be released for a vacation following the conclusion of my studies, I met Miss Catherine Larkin for the first time. I had heard she looked young, but I never imagined that the thirty-nine-year-old super-genius was the serious but innocent looking twentyish woman before me.
What was even odder was Miss Thomas’s Android guard’s response to the woman who owned L&S.
“Greetings, Mother,” Boris, Sydney’s bodyguard said upon seeing Catherine Larkin.
Hugging the armed and armored Android, “Hi, Boris, has Syd been treating you well?”
“Yes, Mother. Miss Sydney has been informative. How is Mother and Mother’s Master?”
“Don’t start, Boris.” Miss Thomas interrupted the reunion of the Android and his creator.
Quiet public knowledge was that Catherine Larkin studied under her husband, Smith, as a teen, marrying him shortly after her twenty-first birthday. Except for that single day of her wedding, she publicly referred to her husband only as ‘Master’.
The founding of Larkin and Smith, L&S, was launched before Christmas that same year and skyrocketed to heights beyond what anyone else could imagine in the next two.
“I’ve been swamped, the fusion redesign of the Mars air purifiers is kicking my ass, but He’s been less sucky of late.” Both of them ignored my boss’s warning and continued with their reunion.
Contrary to Miss Thomas’s crisp clear diction, Miss Larkin broke most every informal and unwritten rule of speech around the elvish manipulator with countless ‘yeah’s’, ‘kinda’s’ and other slang derivatives. During their fifteen minute reunion.
I was torn between shock and mirth at the super genius’s speech patterns and Miss Sydney Thomas’s disgust at her boss’s common way of speaking.
I briefly wondered if Mrs. Larkin was the reason behind Miss Thomas’s strict adherence to remove such words as ‘yeah’ from company vocabulary. Not that I was brave enough to ask that aloud.
“Dr. Volkstag, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” My ultimate boss nodded to me in greeting while settling down across from me, once her reunion with Boris ended with a smile and a pat to his chest.
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
“Do you think you are ready to head the Legacy Project?”
“As much as I am able. Stellar Navigation is beyond me.”
“Moria has three sets of Bots which will take care of that chore for you. Most of the calculations need a high order computer to run anyway. Syd tells me that you are the one she trusts to captain Mark IV. It’s quite odd, other than my husband, Sydney trusts no one outside her control.”
“Catherine,” warned Miss Thomas. Warned with icicles and promises of pain to be applied in great quantities for eons, if the crisp, razor sharp chill in her speech was any indication of her displeasure.
“Boris, can you take Syd to my office, Master is waiting for her,” Miss Larkin seemingly was immune to Sydney Thomas’ threats.
“Affirmative, Mother.”
“Catherine, I will await you in my office when you are done with Mr. Volkstag. We have much to discuss.” Miss Thomas replied with additional arsenic laced saccharine, yet obediently followed Boris the Android out of the conference room, closing the door behind herself.
Miss Larkin watched her Vice President of Operations exit the small eight-seat conference room, not releasing a sigh until after the door was firmly closed and a count of ten had passed.
“Get comfortable, Geoffrey. I want to test your understanding of the Legacy systems…”
The following twelve-hour grueling question and answer session proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Miss Larkin knew each and every system on board of the Legacy to a degree unobtainable for me. Regardless of how much time I spent in study and practice.
Rumor was that she refused every attempt of Earth’s universities for honorary PhDs. Speculation abounded for why, but no one wanted to say the real reason. Not that she needed the extra letters after her name. There wasn’t a hard science field, outside of the biologies and chemistries, that she had not mastered.
Privately, I believed it would be the same as if a high school physics teacher gave a gold star to the Noble Prize winner. She knew that she was light-years ahead of the other scientists and so did most of those Deans with half a brain. Even if the Administrators just wanted their name associated with Catherine Larkin, no one wanted to feel like a fool.
In a very real way, I felt honored that I was able to spend a few days learning and being questioned about my understanding of Fusion by the woman that invented it. Those three twelve-hour days were the most intense that I ever experienced, intellectually. My own PhD defense was nowhere near as rigorous, but my professors at MIT were not going to be entrusting me with a multi-billion-dollar spacecraft.
We were eating sandwiches after the final question and answer session was mostly over, she asked me, “What do you think about meeting aliens, Geoffrey?”
“I still think I am in way over my head. Communication will be an insurmountable issue, even if both sides find a language that we can pass words back and forth outside of basic binary. Cultural and syntax misunderstandings can lead to unimaginable potholes. Or worse.”
“I don’t agree. Not with the first meeting. Later meetings definitely.”
“Why don’t you agree, Ma’am?”
“Those stations, or Warp Gates, must be set up to deposit the exiting craft in a very specific location. Any intelligent species that wanted to communicate would have primed their border guards not to react to triggers. The warlike ones would have already used the gate to attack Earth. I discount the attackers on the first meeting. Moria agrees with me. Master cautioned that they might be waiting for us to make contact before becoming aggressive, in order to fulfill an abstract set of criteria.”
That name had been bugging me, “Who is Moria?” Sydney Thomas had used it a few times.
“Moria O’Shannan is Lady Strife of Strife International; SI. She is the one building Legacy.”
“Oh, I had only heard of Lady Strife. Not her given name.” I lost a few points with Miss Larkin with that question.
“For the last nine years Moria has mostly remained on Hope with Marissa working on Legacy. Her name is losing recognition on Earth.” I felt forgiven for not correlating the two identities.
“I have viewed the alien recognition program that Jeff made for Syd. I have no idea how you passed. It was too disgusting for me to last five minutes.”
I shrugged, “The first two times were pretty bad.” I was about to elaborate, but suddenly recognized that Miss Larkin didn’t want to actually discuss that issue further.
“Where are you going on vacation?” she changed the subject again. Something, which disconcerted me in the first few hours of my interrogation, was her constant shifting the questions from one subject to another, with no link or connection between the two.
“Scotland, I have always wanted to visit their castles and highlands.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, I have not made any arrangements. No time really, my class schedule had been keeping me too busy for anything other than the occasional mandated recreation.”
“How did you find the pacing of the classes I designed for you?”
I was surprised. I didn’t know that Miss Larkin was the one who designed my classes. I had thought Miss Thomas had a hand in them, but never asked.
“Very intense at first, I needed about three months before I stopped worrying about keeping up. I did feel that the pace slowed near the last two months and in the last month I even had extra time for independent study”
“That was all you, Geoffrey.” She smiled at me in approval. “I set up the class schedule to push you while you were on Earth. I was worried that you would need extra time. Did you have any negative effects from the KWQ or stress?”
“No, Ma’am.” She had to have known that from the reports.
“Good. I’ll make sure that Moria keeps up your training at Hope. If you feel you can accelerate it without issues, let her know.”
“I will.”
“Moria is going to build a colony ship. We’re jointly funding it. Unfortunately for all of us, you seem to be the only one that can scout out the way forward without us building city sized spacecrafts. We plan on building them regardless of your findings and participation. What your efforts can do is save countless lives, time, and resources by finding safe paths.
“What you haven’t been told is that we do not need to use the System Gate. Marissa, Moria, and I have calculated that it would only take 163 days in warp to reach Devlin’s star where the first planned colony is set to land.”
I was shocked. No one, myself included, believed that the range of the spacecraft exceeded twenty light-years. None of their tests had exceeded seven light years, and those were all in straight lines and all but one had been announced as failures.
Later, I silently applauded my bosses’ handling of the information, which encouraged the international community to come to that conclusion.
Devlin’s star was a blue giant 212-light-years away, sixty-five parsecs, with a pair of high-probability habitable worlds. BUT. There was a super-massive red giant almost in direct alignment with the needed path. Multiple jumps seemed a certainty to reach that star, adding countless unknowns to the voyage.
“Moria is building a few dozen remote scout ships to explore the star systems with the greatest potential.” While this latest information did not surprise me, no one on Earth knew of SI building anything of that scale. If the building were done anywhere in visible space, all of Hope Station would know it and report it back to Earth. Leaving me to conclude that there was an embargo on the information.
Which felt off…
“You’re right, we are hiding their construction,” she guessed my thoughts.
“The ‘safe paths’ you mentioned aren’t paths for the colony ships, are they?”
“No. They are for meeting aliens without leaving obvious trails. We have five possible systems that show signs of intelligent life. We need you to be the Ambassador for all of humanity.”
I was floored again. I had not thought that far in advance. Point of first contact with a possible meeting with an alien civilization was not the same as being the one responsible for All contacts with aliens. Or positive signs of alien life. Possible and positive were often quite far away.
On top of my new promotion bombshell, she just said she located alien intelligent life!
Multiple instances of intelligent life.
Miss Larkin allowed me time to internalize my new post and their findings.
“You know where they are?” I had to ask. There were too many questions, I didn’t even know where to start and that one felt safe.
“Yup. One definite, two systems with over a 68% likelihood and two with a 17% chance. Give or take.”
Wow…
“Who do I report to?” Ambassadorship. Get back on track Geoff…
“Sydney.”
Figured.
“Won’t the nations of Earth…” choosing my words carefully, “be pissed off for being excluded?”
“They still haven’t started the Destiny,” replied my boss at the UN’s disgusting lack of progress with the second space station orbiting Mars, proposed ten years ago. There had been billions of dollars promised to the Project, yet no forward movement since then.
No one mentioned that the Venus space station never passed the UN committees. Nor the Saturn station. The collective Earth governments were completely relying on L&S and SI for those.
The UN, instead spent the money promised for the space programs on themselves and their pet projects, rather than any structure in space, especially if someone else was going to build and maintain one in the same region without costing them a dime spent their resources on their own pet projects.
Pretty much everyone knew that going through the UN to build the station was stupid and a waste of money. Why the team of L&S and SI continued to fund their state sponsored expeditions with only a token admission fee for anyone who visited their space stations was beyond me and all of my colleagues.
The powerhouse nations, such as the United Federation, India, Russe, and Xhina, all had their own space programs and didn’t share information amongst themselves beyond the superficial levels. Those countries went only so far as to build ships to travel to Grenadier station or Hope Station and back. With L&S-produced engines and inertial dampeners, of course.
The EU had their own program, which was set up by L&S, greatly reducing the expenditures for those countries contributing. Unlike the Superpower’s space programs, they completely followed L&S’s blueprint for their vehicles, including recently starting the small moon-based space station to be used as a local staging point.
The Federation’s orbital moon station was still years away, eighteen to twenty-nine months, according to the London Times, before they planned on placing the first girder. The Federation’s proposed station was also bloated in size, and the bill was politically pork infested, causing me to worry if it would ever be launched. The rest of the superpowers other than Xhina showed no signs of contributing to the other’s stations or building a staging station for their own use.
All space tourism was the providence of Strife International who had their own programs. Not even L&S contributed to that endeavor. L&S shuttles were earmarked for approved scientific expeditions only.
There were countless questions and speculations on why such a sharp division between the two cooperating companies, but no answers were available. Even at the lowest corporate levels.
The EU’s remote mining operation of Ceres began a few years ago with little to show for it. It had been almost twenty years since SI launched Project Starfare, which used nanobots to build the Hope space station in the asteroid belt, and still no one wanted to purchase Strife’s plans on building their own nanobot miner system. For now, it seemed that every nation was content on using SI and L&S to do the heavy lifting.