A medical team supervised by Dr. Russell hoisted Kano's limp body onto a stretcher. Koenig stepped close, eyed the unconscious man, and asked in a tone a short notch above a whisper, "How is he?"
Helena shook her head slowly. "Heart rate, respiration, all stable and calm. It's like, well, it's like he fell asleep."
The commander's tone rose to sharp. "That's not good enough, doctor."
She matched his volume. "Would you prefer that I lie, commander? Until I get him to the care center, that's the best I can do."
They caught one another's eyes for a split second. In that moment, an apology, of sorts. Or as close to it as John Koenig dared.
Then he was gone, pivoting away and addressing Sandra who now manned the computer console. "Status?"
"Computer remains shut down, commander. No outside data allowed, internal operations curtailed."
He looked to the view screen. Eagle One—Alan—hovering in the empty space between the moonbase his actions had just saved, and the mysterious, pulsating object.
"Paul, pull Eagle One out of there. Ground all flights. Put reconnaissance section on standby."
Professor Bergman mused, "Do you think that's wise, John? You said it before; Alpha is wide open."
Koenig pointed at the view screen. "Until we know what we're dealing with, we stand down." He put a hand on his forehead as if nursing a head ache. "So far the only result of our actions is a dead Eagle crew and damage to Main Mission."
Morrow transmitted the recall message. An electronic beep signaled the ship's acknowledgment. He then stood straight, narrowed his eyes, and asked, "Commander, what about Alan?"
Koenig bowed his head and shook it dejectedly. "He saved us. He saved all our lives. He had no choice."
Morrow cocked an eyebrow and asked, "Do you think he sees it that way?"
# # #
David Kano woke up after too short of a night of sleep. His surroundings, so very similar to his quarters on Alpha, but not exactly right. A picture out of focus. An incomplete vision.
What is Alpha?
He thought he should know. It seemed important. All he knew for sure was that he was… home. Yes, that was it. His university jacket hung on a coat rack nearby. It smelled new.
First year. This is my first year.
On his night stand, a data pad. His semester grades had come through. They were good but… but not…
Not perfect.
Did that explain the heavy pounding in his heart? The empty pit in his stomach?
No.
He swiped a finger on the pad and called up a private message. It was from her. It was goodbye. His first love, his first broken heart, made worse by her choosing his closest mate. They would never be close again.
Kano slammed a clenched fist into his temple.
This is wrong.
He tossed aside the pad and swung his feet out of bed, covered only in a silver robe. Windows that should have looked out on an emptiness filled with strange constellations instead looked out upon a cloudy sky, rain in the distance on the far side of low hills.
This isn't right… but why? What is it I'm forgetting?
On the far wall, an exit. It opened as he approached and he stepped into another room constructed with the materials of Alpha—perhaps the commander's office—but not of Alpha. A living room at his homestead so many years ago.
His father sat at a Jarama desk reading the news from a sheet of e-paper, a cup of tea within reach. His closely cropped hair was more gray than black; his face a permanent scowl even when he found reason for joy, which was rare.
"Glad to see you finally got out of bed."
"Oh stop, Sheldon," said a woman's voice.
"Mother."
In she walked, her stride graceful, her body slender and smooth, her hair tucked beneath a black wrap. She stepped to her son and put an arm around him.
"Feeling any better?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean," she said, and it was true; she tended to sense everything about her son. She understood him. And while that often made them close, he sometimes felt the desire to hide from her; to not let her see inside his soul as clearly as her vision seemed to allow.
When he didn't respond, Dana Kano said, "It will hurt for some time. You may think you'll never get over her, but you will. Someday there will someone else. Someone better suited for you. Time heals all wounds."
His father scoffed. "You lost, son. Everything in life is a competition. Your friend won this time."
"Sheldon!"
"He's right, mother. I did lose." David sat across from his father and placed his head in both hands. "I never saw it coming. She said she loved me."
"Not everything is a competition, David," she tried to assure. "If you go through life thinking that way, you'll never open up. No one will ever get inside that heart of yours. You'll be alone."
"I'd rather be alone than feel this way."
"Don't say that," she scolded.
Dad put the e-paper down, leaned forward, and told him, "Your focus should be on your studies, anyhow. Don't worry about lost love. Women come and go."
Dana's eyes turned to daggers. But he did not relent.
"Your focus should be on your studies. Nothing else. Your grades this semester were horrible."
Mother came to his defense again. "Horrible? A ninety eight average is horrible?"
"Anything less than one-hundred percent is failure. If he wants to get into the space program, if he wants to join one of the big corporate conglomerates, nothing short of perfection will do!"
"You're driving him too hard!"
"You're too soft on him!"
David stood and staggered away from the table. Their back-and-forth grew louder and louder still.
"Stop! Stop it!" he cried, and the room went dark; the voices faded.
# # #
Commander Koenig stepped from the travel tube car into the boarding tube. Ahead of him, Eagle One's open passenger compartment door. Co-pilot Pete Johnson-helmet slung under an arm-stepped out.
"Carter?"
Johnson glanced back over his shoulder.
"We touched down half an hour ago, sir. He hasn't moved from his seat."
"Get some rest, Pete."
"Yes, sir."
Johnson entered the travel tube, Koenig took a deep breath and boarded the Eagle. A few stray beeps and tones carried through the interior, although they served no purpose at the moment.
He walked forward into the command module. Alan Carter sat in the pilot's seat, his helmet off but otherwise still in his orange atmosphere suit. His eyes stared forward, but they were not looking outward.
"Alan."
Carter turned his head slightly, but did not make eye contact.
"I know how you must feel."
"Yeah," the pilot said. "Sure you do."
Koenig licked his lips, knelt, and put a hand on his friend's shoulder. "I've made life and death decisions. I've sent men to die before, so that others could be saved."
"I pushed the button. Me." Carter nodded toward the laser trigger on the control panel. It was red; blood red to Alan's eyes. And that same blood was on his hands.
"Alan—"
"Parks. Bannon."
Koenig raised his voice just a little to try and cut through the self doubt; the self-pity. The shame.
"Alan, you did the right thing."
"No, commander, I did the only thing I could think of."
"Sometimes, Alan, there's no difference."
Carter did find Koenig's eyes this time. "And sometimes there is. I guess I'll never know for sure, now will I?"
# # #
Motionless and silent lay David Kano's body on a cot inside the medical center. Dr. Russell stood over him, her attention alternating between his physical form and the screen monitoring his bodily functions.
Prior to the events of September 13, 1999, Dr. Russell was a confident, capable physician and, on occasion, a surgeon. Training for her position on Alpha in the days when the moon remained in the grasp of Earth's gravity had been vigorous and challenging. She needed to be ready for any emergency and, with several hundred living together in close confines, she needed the knowledge base and creative problem solving abilities to deal with the sudden appearance of any disease, illness or other communicable condition. After all, even with a fleet of Eagles on standby, help from Earth was always quite some time away.
So she had come to Alpa equipped with a mental encyclopedia of medical knowledge and the expertise to operate the base's advanced health care equipment. She had strode into Alpha confident in who she was and what she was capable of doing. Perhaps no person in all of Earth's history had been better prepared for such a challenge.
Space, however, had other plans.
First came sick Meta probe astronauts, a condition that brought on madness before death. She had never seen anything similar. The answers eluded her then and became moot with the ejection of the moon from orbit.
In the time since, she had faced an uncountable number of diseases, illnesses, and conditions that defied her ability to understand. In truth, Dr. Helena Russell with centuries of accumulated knowledge at her fingertips and man's most advanced hardware at her disposal was so thoroughly outmatched by the incomprehensible oddities of deep space, that she might as well be using leaches and bloodletting like her medieval predecessors.
David Kano was now the most recent example of such an oddity.
"There's nothing wrong with him," she murmured to herself. "But he won't wake up."
The outer door opened and Commander Koenig barged in using big, long strides.
"Helena, I want you to do a medical and psychological evaluation on Carter."
Her attention turned away from her patient for a moment. "How is he?"
"I'm asking you. Kano?"
She turned back to the immobilized technician. "I can't find anything wrong with him, other than an unusually high level of brain activity." His glare said he was unhappy with that answer. "By all indications, he is in deep REM sleep."
"Are you telling me he's dreaming?"
She shook her head in the slightest, looked at the monitor, and answered. "Yes, but more intense."
"Have you tried to wake him?"
"Yes, but gently. No medication. No response. His body appears to be content with whatever he's experiencing."
Koenig paced away, scratched his chin, then spun back around and wagged a finger toward the ceiling.
"Helena, there's an object out there that we don't understand. The only thing we know is that it's getting into our computers. Overloading them. First Eagle Four, and then Alpha. In each case, we shut it out by sealing off the inputs." He stepped next to Kano and pointed at the prone man. "Before he came to Alpha, David Kano was part of an experiment to link the memory and calculating ability of a computer to the thinking ability of the human brain."
"Yes, John, I'm aware. We tried to duplicate that experiment when the guardian of Piri infiltrated our computer. With disastrous results."
"But Kano still has fibre sensors implanted into the cortex of his brain as a means to link with computer."
"What are you saying?"
"Helena, what if that object out there is accessing Kano's brain through those sensors? It reached out to Eagle Four and we blocked it. It reached out to our computer and we blocked it. Now I think it somehow discovered that link in Kano and is getting to him the way it got to our computers."
Helena squinted and her mouth hung open in the slightest.
He said, "We don't know their intentions, but if I'm right, whatever alien intelligence is in that object outside our window is in Kano's head transmitting… something."
A flash of light flickered from the external windows drawing their attention as well as gasps from a pair of nurses working nearby.
The commander's commlink beeped. He pulled it from his belt as a quick draw gunslinger from the old west could draw a six-shooter.
"Yes?"
Professor Bergman said, "Another energy burst from the object. Sixty minutes after the last one. No damage but, John, it's up to something."
# # #
"Wake up, sleepy head," a gentle voice whispered in Kano's ear.
He groaned, blinked, and at last opened his eyes which adjusted to the morning sun beaming in through a skylight high above. He saw the walls of his first apartment, his degree from university framed and hanging above a metal desk cluttered with computer components.
"Ugh," he sighed. "Can't I sleep a little longer?"
It had been a trying week at work, starting with building a new AI module for the X2 flight computer and synchronizing data streams for the agency's archives. He had not come home on time one single day.
Well, at least the weekend had come.
"We're going to the beach today. You promised."
Her olive-skinned hands stroked the side of his cheek. He reached up and ran his fingers through her long black hair. "Anna, must I keep every promise?"
"Yes" she smiled. "I didn't drive all the way over here just to watch you sleep. So, yes, you must."
The room felt familiar in many ways. The aura, the emotions conjured by the quarters reminded him of the first years of his career when he worked with a relentless furor to earn his credentials within the space agency. He even dared to dream that he might—might—someday earn appointment to the prestigious moonbase Alpha. He heard they were building the most sophisticated computer systems there.
There was also a sense of deja vu within these walls. He thought he should recall the design…
Alpha? Was this my room on Alpha, smothered beneath a shroud of memory?
She took hold of his cheeks and stared into his eyes. "I love you, David."
His heart beat fast; thumping hard. Those words should have brought peace and happiness, but the wound caused by another woman four years ago was still fresh. Like the bell causing hunger in Pavlov's dogs, Anna's innocent and sincere admission brought panic to David Kano. To accept them… to return those words… was to expose his person to danger. To pain.
He kissed her forehead. "Let me get my things. We'll go straightaway."
Once again he redirected their conversation. She grunted in disappointment, but he pretended not to notice
Kano quickly changed into casual clothes and called to her "I'm ready" as he retrieved a data pad from the desktop.
She glared at that pad. "You're not bringing that to the beach!"
"This?" He acted innocent. "It's nothing. So we know the weather and the train schedule."
Again she shook her head and walked for the door. Kano pursued.
"Anna, I need my—"
"Your computer, yes, I know."
The door slid open and out she went. He followed… onto the surface of the moon, but it was sand, not rock, with a blue sky overhead. The sound of the tide ebbing in and out could be heard, a salty taste in the air, but this was an ocean of imagination, hidden from view.
A beach ball bounced off his nose.
Anna had thrown it. She was happy and smiling and he forgot why they argued. David retrieved the ball, tossed it high, and slapped it toward her.
"This is a perfect day," she said.
Perfect?
That word haunted him since childhood. He had spent his years at school chasing perfection in the classroom. In the time since graduation, he looked for it in the workshops and laboratories of the space agency. Could he make something that was without fault? The ultimate computer? Would that finally be enough to earn favor with his father's ghost? To put that spirit of self-doubt to rest?
But in those thoughts he hit upon a new idea. He stepped to Anna, took hold of her shoulders, and agreed, "Yes, it is a perfect day."
Could he find perfection outside of academia? Beyond work? Was love a flawless condition? Was it possible that he could feel a sense of accomplishment from his bonding with another person? A relationship in perfect balance between her charm and his intellect, her spirit and his reservedness?
When she looked at him, he could tell that she saw something that he did not. More. Deeper. For years now he thought the key to unlocking the uneasiness in his soul was to find that perfection in a machine; to create it, the ultimate achievement. But he wondered—for the briefest of moments—if maybe she offered a different path to release. Some times, late at night, he let himself dream that Anna was that for which he searched. Yet every morning in the cold light of day, his hopes returned to microchips and processors.
If David Kano listened to what his heart hinted at, then maybe he could stop seeking the impossible and find contentment instead.
She told him yet again, "I love you."
David smiled, opened his mouth and echoed her words—
BEEP.
A commlock on the beach towel called.
"Don't answer it," she pleaded.
"Don't be silly." The idea of not answering an incoming communication was as foreign to him as the idea of not breathing, or being late for work.
David grabbed the device and opened the channel. "Yes?"
A monotone and vaguely female voice—a voice he should have recognized as belonging to Alpha's main computer—spoke plainly: "The time has come."
A shiver in his spine. A cold sweat on his brow.
David dropped the commlink to the beach blanket.
"I have to go."
Anna took hold of his arm. "No, you don't. It's your choice, David. Listen to me, please."
He took a deep breath. "Anna, it's okay."
"That's what the other three test subjects said."
He struggled and managed to flash a reassuring smile. "They have identified the problems. This time, there will be no mistake."
"You don't really want to do this. I know it, David. It's your father. You're trying to prove something to him."
"Anna, my father died two years ago."
"But he lives! He lives in you. Looming over you, his shadow cold and dark and smothering."
"That's not true. This is my choice." He took hold of both her hands. "I will survive this."
"I'm not worried that you'll die. I'm not worried the procedure won't work, David; I'm worried that it will."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll be lost to me, David. Lost to everyone. You'll be part of a machine." She pulled free of his grasp and walked for the entrance. "Lost inside a computer."
"You're not making sense. Anna, come back!"
The outer air lock door opened and in she went. Kano followed, stepping into a cold, dark room.
"Anna? Where did you go?"
A spotlight flared to life, its harsh beam illuminating an operating table surrounded by monitors and lights.
Motion, to his left. Close.
David turned and faced a person wearing blue surgical scrubs and a matching face mask. He held a power drill aloft. The sharp metal drill bit glimmered with an unnatural shine. It spun with a harsh, piercing screech.
Kano screamed.
