More or less... the end. Here it is, and thank you to Tikatu, Agent Five, Varda's Servant, Darkhelmet, Impekkable, Barb, Opal Girl and all the others who've penned a review or two. Your comments were always welcome. (A few changes have been made, for continuity's sake.)
64
Madrid-
A fallen candle and a little girl, far from home and afraid of the dark. Gordon arrived in time to find a dorm room already wreathed in leaping flames, which had spread from bed to curtains to rug, trapping the young girl in a corner.
The fire made an ugly, ravening noise, especially when combined with screams. He'd already hit the alarm on his wrist comm, having bought himself a little time by running ahead in the dark.
The pin was out of the extinguisher. Aiming low, he compressed the trigger at the end of the hose, and fired. Cold, white powder jetted forth, creating for several moments a path. She was terrified, though, shrieking for her mother.
Gordon didn't think, he moved; lunging across the clear space, the roaring in his ears a combination of fire and pounding blood. Then there was the little one, all skinny, clutching arms and smoldering long hair. Her night shirt caught, just at the edge, but he slapped it out, and turned again.
A curtain of hungry brightness had sprung up. It was hard to see a way, but they had to go. He knew that.
More noises, more white powder, like the blessing of rain, of water. The hallway, into which strong small hands pulled him (Anika; and he thought, 'Brave lass') was cold and dark. Safe as the ocean.
Someone pounded upon him, but he had trouble letting go of the little one, who clung tightly, crying and coughing.
Wharton-
The messages were checked. One was grim, the other disturbing. Gordon had called first, about a power failure in Spain. He'd had a hunch that the outage was a computer problem, possibly an attack, and he turned out to be right. It was an ugly, devastating hack, devised by one 'Anarchik', and a few of his or her cronies.
The power grid had been altered, routing energy completely past Madrid, to Barcelona and Salamanca, which experienced massive transformer explosions as a result. Spain was having a very bad year.
In the high-vaulted, wood beamed chapel, beneath windows of ancient, colored glass, Fermat Hackenbacker did his best to help out. He risked a lifetime's worth of demerits using his PDA during the service, trying to get the various spaghettied programs sorted out and running again.
Sam and Daniel sang extra loud, seated on either side of him on the hard wooden pew. Eager fellow conspirators, they spread their dusty hymnals to cover his activity whenever a proctor shuffled past. The fact that Daniel Solomon was theoretically Jewish, and Sam Nakamura more or less agnostic, ought to have raised some questions, but they sang 'Shall We Gather At the River' like a pair of angels, so nobody minded.
Fermat wrapped things up in the middle of the Reverend Alworthy's thundering sermon, having an extra reason to shout a fervent 'Amen!' when power was restored to benighted Madrid. He turned in the handles of the guilty hackers ('DNC' and 'Kryptoni3n', as well as this 'Anarchik'). It was with tremendous satisfaction that young Fermat let the FBI know exactly who to go after for all the damage and chaos.
Then the second message. Very short, and hard to explain, it would haunt him for quite some time. The screen had flashed, revealing a staticky, dark image. Looked like John, except that… Fermat knew that something was different, and couldn't figure out why the change refused to come into focus.
Even as he struggled, under cover of The Seven Deadly Sins, to resolve a dangerous blackout, the boy considered John's cryptic message. He must have been speaking over a patched-together line, because Fermat hadn't recognized the number. And again, there was something; a flaw, or change that… but the notion refused to be grasped, wriggling away like something slimy-strong and terribly quick.
John had leaned rather close to the screen, his blond hair falling forward, his voice a frozen whisper.
"Fermat, I called to… (burst of static)…not there, so… (unintelligible)…anyway." He'd shrugged. "Some… (white noise) …time, maybe."
Then, he ended the call. Nor could Fermat reach him afterward, though he tried through dinner and dessert, then Pride, Lust and Anger. Nothing. For many reasons, it was important that they find and reprogram Five, who perhaps held the key to all this.
After chapel, in their dim little corner of the maze-like steam tunnels, the three boys huddled around Daniel's chromed laptop. He'd opened it up, arranging the slim computer on a rusted pipe brace, so that they could view the screen at the optimal angle. Flushing a little, trying very hard to keep the pride from his voice, Daniel slipped in a disk, and hit the 'run' key.
"Okay," he began. "Just remember that it's a work in progress. I mean, it's done, yeah… but if you have any suggestions, I'll consider adjusting the parameters. Up to a point. Now, the visuals are a little primitive, but the rendering process will take care of that, and I'm going to shut the volume off and narrate the action, myself."
It was an open question how anyone so visibly bursting with pride could manage to feign humility, like that. Pudgy, smiling Daniel looked exactly like a new father. All he needed to complete the image was a handful of cigars.
Sam appeared slightly skeptical, but then, he always did. And Fermat…? He was still concerned about the messages, and unable to get 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' out of his head.
Giving away his evening snack of apple juice and cinnamon crackers, he linked his PDA to the laptop. That way, the scenario could be tidied and rendered in real time, in preparation for uplink.
"Right," Daniel said, as the first images appeared on the screen. "It starts with a frame grab of Endurance, which I rotated 180 degrees and placed against a standard space backdrop. Cut to the interior… and then you find out through flashbacks that the mission commander is working for the Defense Department, black ops sector, and that he's allowed the government to use Endurance, the whole Mars mission, to test a new, long-range teleportation device. The plan is for the ship to get to Mars… okay, right here there's this kind of long montage of crew interaction scenes. Just to, you know, set up the characters and tension. He loves her, she doesn't love him, and these two have a major grudge match going…"
Narrow face illuminated by the screen's bluish, flickering gleam, Sam smiled.
"I don't believe it," he whispered to Fermat, beneath the ongoing monologue. "It's the loooove boat!"
Fermat rolled his eyes, digging a sharp elbow into his friend's ribs.
"Sh- shut up… 'M- Mister Movie Critic'. E- everyone thinks… their b- baby is… adorable."
Daniel heard the whispering and paused the scene, his expression one of martyred dignity.
"As I was saying," he began again, nobly, "they get to Mars, there's some dramatic stuff on re-entry… blah, blah, blah… Okay. Here we go. McCord waits until the whole world is watching, then triggers the teleportation device. It's all a big government plot, see? Because there's this huge celebration scheduled in Times Square, to honor the first manned Mars shot. There's a teleport station under the speakers' podium… there it is… nice Photoshop manipulation, no? Did you spot us in the crowd? We're in pretty nearly every scene. Like 'Where's Waldo?' "
Daniel had indeed done a good job, digitally altering a shot of New York City's most famous street scene. To the giant electronic billboards and jagged skyline, he'd added dignitaries, cheering crowds, and several beaming NASA types. It certainly looked real. The question was, would it fool Five?
"Right, so… one station of the teleporter is on Mars, brought there by Endurance, and the other's in New York. The defense contractors expect to cause a huge stir by…"
"I thought you said it was the Defense Department," Sam protested, leaning a little further forward. "Seems like the last thing they'd want to do is put a secret ops project on public display, like that."
Greasy water, dripping from an old pipe, splished and plinked onto the laptop. Daniel wiped it hurriedly away, saying,
"Work with me, here, Sam-urai! The details are flexible, at this point. Anyway, it gets better. Let me fast forward a little… there! This is where you find out that the Hood has learned about the teleporter, and that he's decided to break things up. A lot."
Hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels, Daniel continued,
"He hires himself a hacker… you like the jacking-ports on his temple? It's my Uncle Preston, only without the zits, and with a cooler wardrobe. Can't wait till he sees this!"
Another smile and a wry addendum:
"I kind of raided my family portrait file for all sorts of people. The CIA chief is my neighbor, Rabbi Cohen. I was nice to him, though. I gave him what he's always dreamed of: hair."
"O- okay…" Fermat interjected, chuckling, "s- so far we've… got groping astronauts… a covert/public… weapons t- test, and a hairy Rabbi. W- when do things… s- start to happen?"
A large, grey rat scurried past them, pattering through a chain of grimy puddles. Daniel threw a crumpled cookie wrapper at the rodent, which then oozed back into the shadows, all stench and squeak and pestilence.
"They happen soon, trust me. The hacker retrieves schematics for the teleport stations, and figures out a way to override transmission. The Hood builds a station of his own, to intercept and capture the unwary astronauts, to use them as hostages. You with me so far?"
Fermat's head was reeling, but he nodded.
"G- go…on."
"So, the big day arrives, when the crew is supposed to make their first live transmission from Mars… (Yeah, it is a nice background. I downloaded it from the archives)… And then McCord triggers the teleporter, which is right under the American flag. I dunno! He snuck out and put it there while everybody else was busy! Stop asking dumb questions! So, he triggers it, only something goes wrong. There's this huge flash of light, and the crew and ship are scattered through time and space, appearing randomly, like, everywhere. Except for John. The Hood catches him, at his secret headquarters in a volcano."
Daniel was building up steam now, and fast forwarding like mad. Images of world-wide disaster and snarling villainy double-timed it across the flat screen, almost funny.
"…and the burned-up husk of Endurance materializes in Times Square, half in and half out of a skyscraper. Storms erupt, tidal waves strike, people turn up missing, or get transferred through time, prehistoric beasts get shifted around, and it ends with the Hood… I used an old Ben Kingsley screen shot, 'cause I couldn't find any good footage of the real thing… holding John Tracy at gunpoint, demanding 300 million dollars to fix things up, and spare the last astronaut. McCord winds up dying heroically, to save the day."
Cheeks pink, forehead slightly damp, Daniel concluded by spreading his arms and gusting out,
"Think that will get your missing computer's attention?"
Sam replied before Fermat could work out what he wanted to say.
"Well, it owes a lot to 'The Philadelphia Experiment', and there are some major logic flaws, but… the main thing is, it seems wildly improbable, Daniel."
Young Solomon frowned, then pulled up his laptop's calculator function and began punching in numbers. Suddenly uneasy, Fermat asked him,
"D- Daniel, wait. What… are you… d- doing?"
"The math, Fermion; just the math. Hold on a sec…"
"I don't… think th- that's such a… good idea, Daniel."
Something his father had told him, something about an odd notion of John's…
"If you… figure th- the odds, you m- might… collapse the wave… function, and… and make a really unlikely… out- outcome, the only possibility."
But Daniel, deep in the figures, hadn't heard a thing.
"Hah!" he crowed, pointing out the calculator function's result, "10 to the 37th power to 1, against. How 'bout them odds! It could happen!"
Sam threw his older friend a deeply pitying look.
"Sure, Dan. After the universe recycles about fifty times. And, you'd need a monster power source to transmit that much matter, that far, and keep it together."
Fermat looked at Sam, the scenario's reflected end scene playing itself out against the glass of his spectacles.
"How much power?" He enquired, a little hoarsely.
"Oh…" Sam shrugged, numbers tumbling like autumn leaves through his far-seeing mind, "on the order of a second Big Bang."
"Or… a b- baby… universe?" the other boy prodded, growing ever more anxious.
"Sure, I guess. But who has one of those in their pocket?"
Right. Deeply upset, Fermat jerked at the cord linking his PDA to Daniel's laptop. His PDA started to fall. The boy gasped and threw a hand out to catch the thing, which had cost several thousand dollars and held all of his transcribed class notes. Grabbing for the valuable little computer, he accidentally hit the send key.
"No…" he breathed. "Stop! C- come on, stop! Daniel…turn yours off! W- we're not… ready! Th- there's no containment unit!"
Daniel moved, but not quickly enough. It was out there, rendered photo-realistic by his own computer, and translated into steel code, which she would be certain to open and run.
A coded script… a calculated probability… an accessible power source… an extremely fast, intelligent computer… All it would take, now, to turn possibility into fact, would be for someone to give her authorization.
Fermat pulled out his phone, and began frantically dialing his father.
Tracy Island- 20 minutes prior to the accident:
Virgil was at the desk, in his father's big office. Scott was due back from the mail run to Tahiti at any moment. He'd called in once, already, alerting the island to expect inbound traffic.
They'd joked around a little, Virgil sensing his brother's unease, and doing his quiet best to jolly Scott into a better humor. Yeah, things were a little rough, just then, but Virgil Tracy firmly believed that everything would turn out all right in the end; that hard work and good intentions were weapons with which to vanquish fate.
Then, an alert came through. Two of them, actually. Power had been completely shut off to Madrid, Spain. Local crews were on it, and the situation didn't qualify as a true IR emergency, but Virgil placed them all on stand-by, nevertheless. People sometimes panicked during blackouts. Fires got set, crashes happened, and it was best to be prepared.
Next, Gordon's portrait comm flashed. Nothing else, though. No image or words. Just a swift alert, a "Hey, how's it going? Got a situation over here in Madrid," sort of thing.
Virgil stood up, pressing the all-call button that would summon his father and Alan. Brains was down in one of the labs, still trying his damndest to create an interstellar spaceship drive. Virgil doubted whether the engineer would even hear the alert, as focused as he often got.
By the time people began to arrive and the Learjet touched down, Virgil had more, and weirder, news.
"Dad," the big young man said to Jeff Tracy, his brown eyes filled with disbelief, "I just got some kind of blackmail threat from a guy that says he's trapped below Washington, D.C. He says he knows who John is, and that he'll start talking if we don't pay him a couple of million, and rescue his sorry butt. Something's up with Gordon, too, and, uh… the lights are out in Madrid."
Jeff blinked. He'd come racing out of the den, nearly trampling Kyrano in the process, and was slightly out of breath. He'd been at the island for several months, now, but was far from tanned or relaxed.
"What? Blackmail? Again?"
Now TinTin, Alan, Gennine, Kyrano and grandmother joined them, just in time to hear the explanation. What there was of it. Scott was slower coming up.
Hitting the desk comm, Jeff called up his eldest son.
"Scott," he snapped, as the dark-haired young man's face appeared on screen. "Get Brains up here. He's in one of the labs, with the comm shielding up. Use an emergency access code, if you have to, but…"
"Yes, Sir. One engineer, coming right up. I needed to talk to him, anyway. C'mon, Mutt."
No one was prepared, when, with a noise like shifting realities, the world itself bent in half.
Mars, Endurance- watch change:
Linda Bennett hadroused him, giving John's arm the slightest of shakes. He rolled from his bunk with poorly concealed alertness, having slept not at all. Too busy planning a trap.
They'd made it back to the ship by this time. The supplies had already been stowed, and a little digging done. The power suits weren't in prime condition, or the tractor, either, but they were functional. Time for a genuine tune-up, and refurbishment of the battered probes, soon enough. Now, though, he had other business to attend to.
After his wash-up, John bade the doctor a very distracted good night, and then went forward. He was taking a tremendous risk, and he knew it, but too much hung in the balance for him to simply keep low and out of sight. As long as his 'hitchhiker' stayed out of things…
Up front, in the creaky, already dust-grimed flight deck, John sat down in the pilot's seat, and booted up the main computer, a two-setting fossil barely deserving of the name.
Swallowing some aspirin he'd brought along to settle a tension headache, John pushed past the operating system and began negotiations with the computer's dim little compiler. Then, the rear hatch opened. John did not immediately turn around, figuring that Bennett had simply forgotten something.
It was the silence, the lack of either excuse or explanation, that got his attention. He looked back and up, lifting a hand to brush away hair that badly wanted cutting. Recognition hit, and he stopped breathing for a moment. What stood there was Doctor Bennett's body, but what looked out through her brown eyes was not Linda.
Slowly, John stood up. As she walked forward, brushing a slim hand against bulkhead and instrument panels, hatches locked, cameras turned off, and the computer shut down. Maybe he should have been more concerned, but at the time, all that mattered was that she'd survived. That, somehow, Five had found a way to hide, and then to come back.
She proceeded along the narrow aisle between seats, stopping less than a foot before him. She didn't breathe or move as Linda Bennett did. Instead, there was something tauter, more athletic about her walk and stance. Curiously, she reminded him of someone, but he was too torn by cross-cutting emotions to pursue the notion.
She looked up at him, barefoot and tousle-haired, clad in the simple shorts and tank top that the doctor had put on to sleep in. And then she said, nearly without inflection,
"Why?"
For he was, of course, her creator, and the creator is never wrong.
"Because… I thought I had to. To stop that thing from reaching Earth. I didn't…"
With an effort, John mastered himself. He'd never been good at dealing with strong emotion.
"The last thing I intended was to harm you."
Her response was swift in coming, though not entirely rational. She had looked upon him through sensors and glass lenses. Detected the vibrations he produced using microphones of diverse sorts. Never before, though, through the organics of an analog female.
"It would have served your stated purpose better to have allowed the hostile program to complete its function, John Tracy. Interference has led to infection. This possibility was known to you."
He nodded. What was there to say? He'd acted as he had because he couldn't allow her to face Hackenbacker's nightmare alone. Because…
"We've been working together since I first wrote a program. Deep inside your 'body', on Thunderbird 5, was the motherboard of my first computer. Yes, the possibility was known, and acceptable. Put it another way, Five. You were worth it."
John Tracy had accepted needless risk on her behalf. He had become infected, to the point that complete reformatting, by her or the alien intelligence, was virtually inevitable.
And then, because lenses, microphones and sensors were inadequate, and always had been, she raised an arm of the body she'd hacked, and drew the fingers across John Tracy's face. Desiring to learn what such things 'felt like', she touched him. His flesh was warm, with a slight roughness, where his hurried 'shave' had missed some of the facial hair.
Interface of a sort was possible in these forms, though there was risk. Another pace forward placed her in direct contact with him. There were protocols to be followed; certain gestures and forms of contact, like the three-way handshake initiating communication between units in cyberspace. This much, she'd learned, and could apply.
Then came an upload, a program written in her own coding language. Nor was this all, or most hazardous. Disallowing time to do more than open the program, a sudden, violent shockwave tore away from Earth, propogating through space at the speed of light. The reality-smashing fold expanded, a ring of pure energy that destroyed everything it encountered. A ring flashing inexorably toward Mars, and John Tracy. Probabilities tumbled through the filters in all of her various locations. Seeking, she found available commands. An escape scenario.
"John Tracy, authorization required."
"What…?" he demanded, not understanding her query.
"John Tracy, immediate authorization required."
Her voice had taken on a definite edge, for she could see what had happened. What was coming.
Kuiper lay derelict, sheared in half by the hurtling wave. Next the Deep Space Observatory, blown apart by unstoppable, pitiless energies.
"John Tracy…"
He said, perhaps sensing at last the descending axe,
"Grant..."
And it all went dark.