Disclaimers: First, I don't own the rights to DC Comics or any of its intellectual property, including the Adam Strange franchise. I also don't own any rights to the stories by H. G. Wells or Disney (I make a reference of two to some of their intellectual property as well). Finally, I am not a real writer – I am just venting ideas that have entertained me in those quiet moments people believe I am thinking about something productive. You have been warned.
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Gateway: The Strange Tale of Dr. Aaron Strange
Rating: T (violence, coarse language, suggestive adult themes)
Synopsis: A modern-day reboot of the Adam Strange story (of DC Comics) and loosely based on H. G. Wells' "The First Men in the Moon"
Genre: Sci-Fi, Romance
by: G. Hodges (Jan 2016)
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It's been almost twenty years since I last spoke to my old friend. He's always been an eccentric but earnest guy, but when he popped out of the blue and insisted we meet right away at the old diner I could only figure he was in trouble. He was, but in no way could I have ever imagined the kind of problems he had endured.
His was a story only a madman could believe.
In hindsight, I'm glad I went to see him. I suspect he really needed an old friend to listen to him. No one else could swallow the tall tales of his Gateway, or even have the patience to decipher him when his ramblings tracked away from the speech of normal people. Yes, he was brilliant – but the kind of brilliance that comes with a touch of eccentricity.
Dear reader, please understand that I am giving my best account of a three-hour lunch and conversation with a guy in a simple dive of an eatery in our old college town. I'm not a scientist, and I assure you that I am not a person who is prone to fantasy. I've scrubbed all identifying information (for both our sakes) and I'm taking some limited creative license to the less clear parts of his story. Perhaps this is how I handle such a revelation – as a professional writer, I have found solace in the written word, and it is writing that grounds me to reality when faced with the surreal topic I was made privy to just recently.
Let me begin: it was in the early Summer of 2015, and my friend (let's call him Dr. Aaron Strange) found me on Facebook after we lost touch back in college almost twenty years ago. He wanted to catch up on old times, and really insisted we find an opportunity to meet up at the same diner we used to hang out at in between classes for lunch. I was an English major, and Aaron majored in Physics, but a chance meeting in a general ed class got us to be fast friends.
There was no Facebook back then (there was hardly even an internet) so after college we lost touch with each other. I went on to start trying to publish books while Aaron went to grad school. Now, here he is – older, grayer, growing a beard, and looking disheveled and broken.
We dispensed with the obligatory pleasantries right away. After about ten minutes or so of light chat to catch up on old times, he lets me in on the reason for his sudden reappearance into my life.
"I'm sorry I am only now taking the effort to make contact with you again," he sheepishly starts. "But, after all that I have experienced in the last few months, I just couldn't keep it all quiet. My life and career are over – my wife has left me, and my son is... Goodness knows where now. I don't think I'm going to survive much longer, and I just didn't want my story to die with me. I've seen things that no one could imagine could be real. I've opened Pandora's Box, and I fear there may be evils that may one day follow my trail and wreak havoc upon the Earth. There is so much more going on in the space between my hands than anyone has ever dreamed possible. And I've seen it!" He holds his hands out in front of him like he's telling a "I caught a fish *this* big" story to emphasize his point.
At the time, I was totally ignorant to his point, so I challenged him on this. How could someone who was a budding scientist at a prestigious university only two years ago have such a cataclysmic fall if he was honest and at least passed as intelligent? His answer – he got a little too curious about a modern mystery, and concocted a very unorthodox experiment to prove his theory.
As with all wild stories, it starts humbly and in the middle of desolation and nowhere: "It all began when I was on a research vessel off the coast of Guam. I was a research assistant looking into trying to get a better measurement of the Gravitational Constant, and we were making measurements of the pull of gravity at the bottom of Challenger Deep. What we found seemed odd, but not unique – we found the constant to be a tad higher than most other laboratories, furthering the debate rather than trying to end it. The Primary Investigator was interested in trying to better understand Dark Matter and wanted his own high-precision measurements to work with, and the U.S. Military keeps some of those measurements secret for fear of people trying to use it to locate underground bunkers and such. Anyways, as I poured over the data, I got a crazy idea and drafted the raw beginnings of my own set of experiments that led to my family's utter calamity..."
It is just before dawn, and Dr. Aaron Strange is feverishly working in his basement. After nearly a year of research, planning, building, testing, and squirreling away high-tech laboratory equipment, the core component of his masterpiece was finally taking its final form in front of him. It was a wide, flat ring with a hole about 1.5 meters diameter. The unit was up against the wall, suspended from the floor by about half a meter by supports and technical equipment. The laboratory was filled with a cacophony of sounds from the pumps, slow gas releases, cooling fans, and other noises one might think of in a science lab.
His genius is only interrupted by the presence of a woman who has grown impatient by his lack of interest in anything outside his lab. His wife.
"Aaron! Are you listening!? I've been calling you for over ten minutes – breakfast is ready! Stop what you're doing and get up here right now!"
Finally, after overcoming an inertia that drives people like him to take on the kinds of grand projects they do, he stops his work and reluctantly accepts his wife's command to take sustenance. Dr. Strange takes the seemingly long walk to the breakfast table where his wife and teenage son are waiting on him – well, at least his wife.
His son, Adam, is already digging into his home cooked breakfast. He smiles as he takes a breath of air to greet his dad. His father returns the greeting, and calmly sits into his chair as his displeased wife looks hard into his face. Once again, she starts to complain about his lack of interest in what is going on in the family. Once again, he is forgetting all of his promises to be a good husband and father, especially after quitting his job and having to move all of the family – at his own insistence – to work for a tech company located near Mount Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai'i. He had really infuriated his wife when he purchased a dump of a house just because he loved the basement and its location on the island.
And to top of it all, he doesn't even know how to swim, much less have any interest in surfing – the only cottage industry on the island that can justify the sky-high property values and cost of importing everything but sugar cane and pineapples.
Dr. Strange still defends himself, arguing that the life of a dirt-poor postdoctoral fellow at his old employment was going nowhere – this was a new start, and it seems he's the only one enamored by the new job. His hours are still excessive, he's still paid a slave's wage, and he's still absent around the house because of "research" – but at least he's happier, and they don't have to travel far to have a dream vacation.
Once breakfast is over, Adam grabs his skateboard to go to hula practice and meet up with friends later. Dr. Strange goes back downstairs, and Mrs. Strange goes outside to chat with the wife and mother of a Japanese family living next door. Dr. Strange finishes his last connections, performs a few systems checks and tests, and finally taking a deep breath, starts to activate the device. He stares with heart-stopping anticipation at the ring against the wall, looking for a sign that the device is working as it starts to hum to life.