"Um... boss? Shouldn't you have told him the whole truth?" one of the other scientists spoke up.
"I couldn't, without telling him what he doesn't have the security clearance to know. Besides, why does he need to know?"
"Because this is potentially his most dangerous assignment?" volunteered the assistant, "Because if anything does happen to go wrong, he'll face a fate worse than death?"
"He wouldn't understand it anyway, and it isn't going to go wrong. If I thought that thing had any chance whatsoever of breaking free, I wouldn't be standing in the same room as it. Or on the same planet as it." he added as an afterthought.
"But you said our containment fields can't hold it!"
"Not permanently, no. But long enough to transport it to the prison."
"Do their defenses work yet?"
"The first live test happened three days ago. I've heard that it went so well, the scientist who hit the switch now can't leave. The real thing will be fully up and running well in time for the ship to arrive." the scientist stared up at the machine, "I never dreamt such a thing was possible before this project began, Robertson. A completely enclosed localised reality, bound by an infinite causal loop. The perfect containment field - it will be conceptually impossible to escape!"
"Its just a larger scale version of the pocket realities used in the Capture Chance system."
"Ah, but they were never very stable - they were only for temporary use and needed a strong dimensional anchor. Most bounty hunters still can't use them."
"Mission accomplished."
They both turned to look at the new arrival, who leant against the glass door, idly pushing it back every time it tried to close on him.
"Ah, Schumizer. Ever the reliable one around here. Which one relented, out of interest?"
Schumizer snapped his finger and a small boy walked in.
"This is Kirk Kurtliegen. Say hello to the nice doctor, Kirk."
The boy ignored him and stared up at the machinery with the same thoughtful look as any small child planning to pull something apart with no regard for whether it breaks or not.
"The youngest brother? I can't sign a tenancy agreement with a ten year old child!"
"You don't understand. The agreement's already been signed by the oldest brother. Then the father sold this kid to me for fifty thousand bucks."
"WHAT THE...? Schumizer, my orders were not to do ANYTHING ILLEGAL!"
"Sorry." Mr. Schumizer shrugged, "It was just sort of happening when I got there, you know what those Kurtliegens are like, and you know how auctions are, you have to act fast, can't let a deal go by. But hey, he could be useful, he's young enough to be conditioned easily, he'll be good for Agency training in a few years, he knows the Island backward, it'll help us deal with any problems with the family in the future to have one of them around."
"I don't care what you do with him, as long as I never see him, or any other small children, in this lab again. Which bit of 'top secret' and 'highly breakable equipment' do you not understand?"
Schumizer shrugged and pulled Kirk, who was trying to evade notice so that he can edge across the room to a particularly inviting glass tube that crackled and glowed blue, back through the door.
"Self-important prick. " he said, "Right, now that's sorted, where do you want to go next, cafeteria or cybernetics lab?"
"What was the blue thing?" asked the boy.
"You know the Capture system? That's where we store the empty units when we're not using them. They break really easily."
"Cool. What was the big thing in the middle of the room?"
"That thing?" Schumizer shuddered, "Believe me, you don't want to touch that."
Schumizer and Seagal were relieved to finally be away from the construction site.
The sweltering heat was almost unbearable, the noise of the enormous drilling machines that dug so far into the dormant volcano that they had to be shielded against pockets of magma was deafening, clouds of rock dust and volcanic ash billowed everywhere.
The scientific crew oversaw every detail of the operation, taking notes, talking in excited whispers and pointing at details Schumizer could not see but assumed were fascinating to a quantum physicist. They insisted that everything be done in painstaking detail – the cylinder must be lowered precisely into the hole, most importantly, to avoid damage. It would be suspended there by an antigravity field similar to the one Schumizer used to hover – unlike the technology the cylinder was based on, it had been easy to affect large areas with and was taking decades to miniaturise. At every step, checks were performed on the cylinder to make sure the capture field was still holding. The process was going to take all day.
"No, no, left a picometre!" screamed the scientist,'Doc' Algernon Pentaclinus, waving his arm left in a frantic motion. His concern wasn't only due to being the head of the scientific operations on the Island – he had witnessed the strength of the causal loop firsthand. It had been three days before he could step out of his office door without re-appearing again through the other door. He did not want to take any chances with the thing the field was designed to hold.
Schumizer understood their concern. He was one of the few people on the team who had seen the thing inside the cylinder and knew exactly how dangerous it was. However, guarding the facility was both boring and largely necessary. Nobody was going to attack an Agency team handling equipment too large to steal on a virtually unreachable prison island. If the thing got out, there was nothing he could do about it. Despite the enormous import of the operation and the potential danger to the entire Multiverse should anything go wrong, they were really only watching a human-sized cigar-shaped metal cylinder be lowered on a crane into a pit in the centre of a mountain.
"Hey, kid, are you bored?"
"Look, a giant drill!" replied Kirk. He was leaning over the handrail, swinging his legs, his eyes on the construction machines. Schumizer sighed. Small boys were too easy to impress. He swung over the rail so that he was facing Schumizer, upside down, "Is that thing going to drill right under the Island? It'll collapse!"
"Don't worry, the Agency are making a lot of changes all around the Island but they're not here to destroy anything."
"But they were taking down all the doors!"
"They're going to put in stronger doors. With big locks."
"There's no use locking that door. There are about ten secret passages into that room."
"You should point out all the secret passages. Do you really know where everything is on the Island?"
"I've been in every room in the castle and all three of the Towers, I've been all through the forest and up on the mountains. I've been on the cliffs and the beach, but not in the sea, there are sharks, and not the swamp 'cause you sink if you go there. And of course I know where everything in our house is."
"What about these caves?"
"They don't really go anywhere that interesting. There's a ledge under me, you know, so you don't need to worry if I fall."
"Do you know about all the traps that are here?"
"Oh, most of the traps are old and rusty, they don't work any more. We can't pay to maintain them. But most of the stairs are dangerous too, for the same reason."
"Say I had a limitless budget and I wanted to get all those traps working – in fact, I could make them better - but I had to know where they all were, how they worked, which ones worked and which ones didn't. Also, which passages led in and out of the rooms, so I can stop people going in and out as they pleased."
"There are secret rooms, too. I hide from Father, and show my brothers how to as well, and make them pay me to use the rooms. The adults hardly ever go in at all any more, though, they don't know what they're missing."
"You know what? I agree. I think this is a very important matter that needs to be resolved right now." Before I go insane from boredom and throw myself down the pit, thought Schumizer, "Seagal, coming with?"
"Huh?" the other Bounty Hunter flinched, "Sorry, I was asleep."
