On Distant Shores Page 16

  Chapter Sixteen – The New Reality

  There were no more hostiles to deal with. They sat in the mechs for a good hour, watching for inbounds. Mike felt that the situation had cooled down, and with no more hostiles inbound, Mike started rotating the team out to get something to eat, drink, to stretch, or to hit the latrine. Another two hours and they were back down to their lowest security stance, with Mickey on watch in his mech armor.

  The security team was much friendlier now. Days of interacting with Mike and the team had brought the groups together. Now they understood they had the same mission, to protect each other, and the engineers below. As Mike and his team sat down among the security police and other Air Force personnel that were now on the security team, he could feel how the attitudes had shifted. He and his team were now accepted. Stories were told and retold as the afternoon wore on.

  Lenny and Matki Awrani came over to talk to Mike. Mike was eating an MRE. Matki Awrani eyed the MRE covetously. Mike fished out a muffin top and tossed it to him. Matki Awrani’s eyes lit up as the package flew through the air towards him. He snatched it out of the air and started to open it. His eyes rolled in pleasure as he saw the chocolate chip muffing top. Mike motioned for them to have a seat with him.

  “Hey Mike, how are you?”

  “Pretty good Lenny. How are you and M.A. doing?”

  Matki Awrani was busy inhaling the muffin top.

  “He has some more information about the dragons.”

  “Really? That translation software of yours must be working pretty good.”

  Lenny nodded, “Yeah, it’s almost scary how well the AI is working in the translation program.”

  Mike considered this, “I know what you mean. The AI in my mech armor is getting so good that I don’t even realize that it’s there. Every now and then, though, a display or icon will light up a split second before I realize that I triggered it.”

  Mike took a bite of lasagna, “So, what’s up with the dragon situation?”

  Lenny threw a rock at one of the stalactites on the cave floor, “Well, it’s not good news.”

  Mike laughed, “I didn’t think it would be.”

  “It’s not going to stop.”

  “What’s not going to stop?”

  “The dragons. They’ll keep on coming until one of them finally claims this location. It’s their way.”

  “Their way, huh? Maybe we can change their ways.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible. M.A. says that there has always been a dragon in this valley. When one dies, another replaces it. Sometimes the one replacing it hastens the dying process. That’s what they do.”

  Mike mulled this over. He wanted a place that they could use as a base. From what Lenny was telling him that was going to be impossible in this location.

  “And, it gets worse.”

  “Good Lord, Lenny, you’re just the bearer of bad tidings today.”

  Lenny looked glum. Mike saw the look on Lenny’s face. He softened his voice, “Hey, Lenny, don’t worry about it. I’m just kidding you. I would rather you tell me the good news and the bad news. I need both, so that I can make good decisions. Bad news doesn’t get any better with time. It stinks worse, like road kill in the sun.”

  Lenny nodded, the look on his face lightened a small bit. “Mike, you know those dead dragons in their eggs, in the shaft. The ones we had to drag out with the mother?”

  “Yeah, that was a big mess.”

  “Well, it turns out that was a blessing in disguise.”

  “Mmmm, and why is that?”

  “Well, think about the size of those things. They were the size of large pit bulls, and M.A. tells that they get bigger than that before they’re born.”

  “Yeah, but they’re all dead.”

  “Well, these are.”

  Mike put his head down into his hands, then ran his hands through his hair.

  “Let me guess, there are other females with other broods.”

  “Yeah, there are. Probably not around here, because we just killed two females. One that had a brood about to hatch, and another that was going into estrus. When the brood hatches, they gang up into packs, and go hunting, until they get big enough and can’t stand to be around each other.”

  “You’re telling me that we’re going to be dealing with not only the big ones, but the little ones as well.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  Mike thanked him for the information. The rest of the day was spent doing maintenance on the mech armor, to make sure that it was ready for more hard usage.

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  He dreamed of a lazy Saturday. Before they got the pups, when they had just started trying for a baby. He was lying in bed and Jo was sleeping on his chest. He was looking up at the ceiling, watching the patterns of light as the sun crept through the blinds and the shadows of the ceiling fan as it moved. It was a sweet day. Any day he had with Jo was an amazing day. He looked at her beautiful face, her breath tickling the hairs on his chest.

  He stretched, and she shifted as he moved. When she slept, Jo would hold her hands together, like she was praying. As he moved, one of her hands moved across his chest and then stopped on his stomach. He leaned his head forward so that he could inhale the clean smell of her hair. He breathed in deep, enjoying the aroma. He kissed the top of her head. Her hand shifted across his stomach, to the other side of his body, and her body shifted in closer to his. His skin warmed as more of her body came into contact with it.

  He kissed her again, on top of her head. She shifted her head so that he could kiss her forehead. He twisted his body so that he was facing her. She moved her arm under his body as he slipped his other arm around her. She moved her head so that they could kiss. The kisses started small, slow. Jo started exploring his body with her hands and he explored hers. He loved her lean, muscular body. Yoga was such a wonderful thing. The kisses grew in length as they explored. The kisses became full, long, and languid.

  Jo whispered his name, “Mike.”

  He kept kissing her.

  “Mike, hey Mike.”

  Mike woke up. He was dazed as he looked around. Finally he recognized his surroundings. The cot that he was on creaked as he shifted his weight. He let the air out of his lungs in a grunt.

  “Hey buddy, are you okay?”

  Mike opened his eyes and looked at the smiling face of Rob Torres.

  “Hey Mike, you were groaning in your sleep. I was worried about you after today.”

  Mike waved Rob off, “Yeah, don’t worry, I’m okay. No problems. It wasn’t nightmares, it was memories.”

  Everett walked over, “Hey, everything okay?

  Mike nodded, “Yeah, just dreaming about Jo.”

  Everett looked concerned. This was the first time Mike had mentioned Jo since the incident. He was worried about Tom and Mickey as well. Neither of them were big talkers. He and Rob had talked about their families, the ones they had left behind. Everett knew it wasn’t going to get easier as time moved on. He would have to monitor the team to make sure they were okay.

  Everett was on watch. From now on, there would always be one leader on watch with the guards. The days on this planet, or this dimension, or this universe, whatever the hell it was, were much longer than they were on Earth. The team had figured that out the first full day topside. The day didn’t seem like it would ever end. So, they timed the day length, hoping the information might help them figure out where they were. They timed the day from sunset to sunset to figure out how long the day was. This was complicated by the cloud cover in the area, so it wasn’t precise, but they discovered the day here was about thirty-three hours long.

  They broke down the day into four eight hour shifts, which would slowly rotate as that extra hour came into play. Mike, Everett, Jen, and Lieutenant Jondreau, or Ken as he now preferred to be called, were the leaders of the shifts. Security was ev
enly divided into four shifts, ready to be called in case of emergency. Bodies were packed in close across the cave floor. Maintenance and logistics were broken down into shift rotations as well. Rob, Mickey, and Tom pitched in to ensure that all necessary tasks were taken care of.

  Mike swung his feet out of the sleeping bag, and then moved into a sitting position. There was a fire at the mouth of the cave, with a murder bird roasting on a homemade spit. It turned out that murder bird was edible and very tasty. Plus, they were too stupid to run away when they saw a hunting party. They were like murderous dodo birds. He wondered about their eggs. He could use an omelet.

  Mike looked out past the fire and he could see that night had fallen. He yawned. Everett squatted down next to the fire, and filled a canteen cup with coffee and moved over to Mike and Rob. Rob sat down on the edge of the cot. Everett came over and gave them both cups of coffee. Everett sat down on his heels, and they were quiet for a minute as they thought about the people that they left behind.

  Rob asked, “Do you think we’ll ever get back?

  Mike looked at him, “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know where we are, or where they are, or how we can go back.” He paused, “Hell, I don’t even know if the brain trust downstairs can figure out where we are or what we can do about it.”

  They grew quiet again. Mike sipped his coffee, wondering when the last of it would run out, “Who’s in the mech armor?”

  Everett answered, “I put Murph in.”

  It had been agreed, on conference with the brain trust and security leadership that more people needed to get acclimatized to the mechs. The others may not have the athletic ability that Mike and his team did, but the work that they had done paved the way for others to use the mechs. Plus it made sense. If Mike, or anybody on the team, were hurt, they would need to be replaced. Now, the Air Force personnel and civilians were being rotated through systems training so the AI could get used to them. The AI had been reprogrammed so that it had profiles for the people that rotated in and out of the equipment. Mike even ensured that the profiles for Mike and his team were located on each suit of mech armor in case they couldn’t get to their original mechs.

  This training was extending to more than just mech armor training. Mike and his team were shifting back to their Special Forces background, and starting to train everybody on weapons systems, hand to hand combat, survival, small unit tactics, and first aid. While the older guys weren’t able to fully participate in some of the more athletic activities, such as the hand to hand combat training, a lot of those guys, especially the ones that had prior military training, were death with a rifle or hand gun.

  Their major problem was ammunition. They were getting low. They dealt a large amount of damage to the dragons, and other predators. The rub was, these were large animals, and required a lot of damage to bring them down.

  Tom was working with Hank, the fabrication lead, to build a few rifles big enough to take down the dragons. This led to other problems though, such as brass, gunpowder, and primers. They had the fifteen pieces of brass for the .50 BMG that was expended in the first fight with the original dragon. They only had thirty-five unfired cartridges left. They would have to figure out how to make new bullets. That wasn’t an easy prospect when you didn’t have an industrial base to work with. So they were looking for ways to create weapons that would deal with the problem.

  Luckily, the small bullets for the rail guns were made of iron, so a pass with a homemade magnet, over the area where the carcasses were eaten or decayed, picked up some of the iron that had been fired. Some of the iron had been eaten with the chunks of meat, and scattered. They wouldn’t be able to recover it all.

  Still, staying where they were was untenable. They couldn’t stay in the facility for several reasons. Climbing up and down the ladder everyday would get harder for the older people, and was, in fact, hard enough for some of them as it was now. So they needed a base that was on the surface. There was also the problem that the structure was sitting at an angle, putting stress on the materials that it was constructed of, stress that it wasn’t designed or built to hold. Plus, they had to deal with the dragons that would continue to drift into the valley.

  That last part was significant. Talking to Matki Awrani, who was some kind of hunter/scout/biologist for his people, he found out that, while the last beast that he fought was a big critter, some of the dragons could be as much as two tons larger. Mike didn’t like the thought of having to fight two or three of those gigantic beasts at the same time. He didn’t think that they would be able to survive that encounter. While the beasts might not be able to crack the mech armor, what would happen when they ran out of ammunition for the rail guns, and the security team ran out of ammunition for the rifles that supported the mech team?

  That wouldn’t be a good day for anybody.

  Mike asked Matki Awrani if there were any places that the dragons wouldn’t, or couldn’t go. Matki responded by pointing at the mountains behind them. The mountains would stop the dragons, but it wouldn’t stop the packs of young dragons that might roam, looking for prey.

  Mike stood and stretched, “I think I’m going to get some fresh air.”

  Everett stood and said, “I think I’m going to join you. You don’t mind do you?”

  Mike smiled, “why would I?”

  Everett shrugged, “Well, you were thinking about Jo.”

  Mike motioned towards the cave entrance with his head, “No prob. Come on.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, then I’m coming’ with you,” Rob added.

  They walked out, enjoying the cooler night air. During the daytime, the guys in the Mech armor chopped up the meat of the dragons and had taken it far away from the cave. They drug the carcasses very close to the mouth of the valley, about fifteen kilometers away from the entrance of the cave. Even with the blood and gore strewn across the meadow, everybody was hoping that the distance and amount of meat would keep the other, larger scavengers away.

  “God, this is a strange world,” Everett said.

  “Yeah, but there is a lot about it that is very familiar. It’s almost as if we landed in a dimension just off from ours. I mean, what if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out by that big meteor in the Yucatan. Would the world have ended up like this?”

  Mike continued to sip his coffee. The sounds of the small animals and insects drifted across the meadow. This was a good sound. Hopefully it meant that there weren’t predators out there hunting them.

  “So, what are we going to do?” Everett asked.

  “Well, I think we need to move back up into the mountains. We need to send a scout team out to find a place we can fortify against predators. That would give us some space to be able to drag everything out of here up to there, and maybe we can set everything up so that we can have electricity and some capability of fabrication.”

  Everett nodded agreement.

  Mike continued, “That means we have to get everybody on board. And I’m not sure these people want to be dragged further out of their comfort zone.”

  Everett added, “Yeah, They’re so far outside their comfort zone, I’m amazed more of them haven’t gone off their rocker, like Jamison.”

  Mike shook his head at the mention of the name, “Yeah, all he does now is rock, drool, and keep saying it isn’t his fault.”

  Jamison was failing at an alarming rate. The docs were thinking that it was a series of strokes or maybe even a tumor.

  Everett spoke, “How could it be his fault. I mean, what the hell.”

  A light source was trying to peak out from behind the clouds. The clouds were still pretty thick, but there was definitely a glow behind them, indicating the presence of some kind of satellite. Silence descended again, as they sank back into memories. A light wind sprung up across the meadow. They watched as the breeze made the grasses in the meadow shift in rhythm. They relaxed further as the natural world moved around them.<
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  Everett spoke, “Well, I think I’m going to go ahead and get some more coffee.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll get another cup. I’m going to stay out here for a while. I need some fresh air after sleeping next to Stein. What about you Rob?”

  “No, I still have some.”

  Mike and Everett walked back to the fire. They poured some water, then sat the cups next to the fire, until it began to boil.

  Sergeant Joseph nodded as he walked past. Mike watched as the big security policeman walked past the large mech armor towards the latrine. Nobody dared to piss in the meadow anymore. Mickey put his foot down pretty quick to ensure that people weren’t squatting down anywhere they decided, leaving urine and feces all over the place. He designated an area, then a ‘hey you’ work detail dug a slit trench for a latrine. Some of the women were upset at the lack of privacy. They got over it when it was pointed out that at the present time, walls would impede the security over watch from doing their jobs.

  Joseph stood at the slit trench and Mike looked away. Even though they worried about disease vectors, the slit trenches were pretty close. People shoveled in dirt to cover urine and feces when they were finished with their business. White toilet paper glowed in the night.

  Rob said, “Hey, that’s the first time I’ve seen the moon out here.”

  Everett and Mike looked up at this revelation.

  Mike called out, “What, the moon is out?”

  “Yeah, clear as a bell.”

  Everett looked at Mike, “I guess the wind blew the clouds away.”

  Mike replied, “Well, let’s take a look.”

  He and Everett walked out and took a look at the sky. The moon was three quarters full.

  “Wow. That looks fantastic.”

  Joseph zipped up and joined them.

  The moon glow across the meadow, along the bobbing high grass, was mesmerizing. They stood a few minutes and stared at the moon. The moon didn’t look quite the same. It had scars that Mike didn’t remember.

  “Well, we know we’re on Earth.”

  Rob, Mike, and Sergeant Joseph looked at Everett, “What do you mean?”

  Everett looked back at them, motioning towards the moon, “Our moon, our earth.”

  “Wow.” The group looked over at Rob. Rob looked like he was deep in thought. Evidently, Everett had triggered something in his memory.

  Rob asked, “Who’s in the mech armor?”

  Everett looked at him, “Murph.”

  Rob reached into his pocket, pulled out his ear bud, and put it in his ear, “Hey Murph, do you know how to use the visual functions on the mech armor.”

  Murphy’s deep voice replied, “Ah, no, I’m just kind of watching the screens that are already up.”

  “Okay, no prob.”

  Rob walked over to the side of his mech armor. He started climbing up the side.

  “Hey Rob, what’s going on?” Everett asked.

  “Ah, nothing really, I just want to get some pictures. Something is nagging at a corner of my mind, and I need to see if it clicks with anybody downstairs in the brain trust.”

  “Anything we can do to help?” Mike asked.

  “Naw, just give me a few minutes and I’ll be back out.”

  Rob climbed in. This wouldn’t need a full fire up, so he didn’t even climb all the way down inside of the armor. He clicked on the switch that fired up the electronics, then pulled the helmet up and switched it on. He put the helmet on and watched the head’s up display light up.

  As it lit up, he watched the drone feed spin up. Finally it blinked on and showed the valley. He re-targeted the lens so that it was looking up at the moon in the sky. He took several pictures. He reset the drone camera back down to the valley below. He turned off the helmet and shut down the electrical systems. He shut the hatch of the mech armor to keep moisture out, and climbed down the side.

  “Get what you wanted?” Everett asked.

  “Yeah, as good as I could, I guess.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?” Mike asked.

  “No, I’ll just wait until morning and drop downstairs and see if anybody knows something. It might be something, but it’s probably nothing.”

  Mike kept quiet, trusting Rob’s instincts.

  The night moved on, to the sound of insects, wind rustling through the grass, the smell of coffee and roasting bird.

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  The next morning, Rob found Bobby McFarland. With Bobby’s help, they searched the internet pages to find what was nagging at Rob. Rob was a smart guy, with one hell of a memory. He had a ninety percent retention of everything he read. Last night, when he looked at the moon, he remembered something that he learned in an elective astrophysics class about the solar system.

  Once he found the information that he was looking for, and did the calculations, he brought the information to Mike and Everett. Mike, being the mathematician of the group, ran Rob’s calculations again. Mike wasn’t happy with the results. Rob’s calculations were correct. Mike approached Pang and Jondreau. They in turn talked to Colonel Mitchem, Dr. Randall, Major Nosstrand, Bob Leitz, Dr. Humphreys, and Dr. Nachman. A meeting time was set. They all came up to the surface. What Rob had to say was important, and, if spread through the facility without proper socialization, could cause major problems. When everybody was topside, the crowd moved out into the meadow. Tom and Mickey were on guard to ensure that nobody walked to the crowd and interrupted. Rick Stein was inside the mech armor on watch.

  Mike started, “First, I want to thank you for coming out when we asked.”

  Mitchem and Randall didn’t look happy, but when did they ever. When they heard there may be an explanation about where they were, they reluctantly agreed to come out. Mike didn’t think he would ever get them on his side. He really didn’t care, but he needed everybody’s support, to include Mitchem and Randall.

  “I wonder if Mitchem knows about his new nickname,” he thought, “Probably. Kind of hard to avoid it.”

  Dr. Nachman spoke, “Well, if you have an explanation for how we got here, then I think everybody is willing to listen.”

  Major Nosstrand spoke, “And if we find out how we got here, maybe we can figure out how to get back.”

  Mike paused for a moment, “Well, we’ll see.”

  He continued, “Since its Rob’s theory, I’m just going to let him talk.”

  The group looked at Rob with anticipation. He cleared his throat, “Well, I don’t know if any of you know anything about the moon and its relationship with earth,” He held up his hand as a few looked ready to speak, “Ah, just let me finish, then we can go ahead and talk about it in general.” They settled down, and he continued, “We took some pictures of the moon face last night, and this moon is our moon. There are some new scars on the face, but you have the same craters, and the dark spots from its early history. They correspond with the same spots we have on our moon. So I can say with high probability it is our moon.”

  Bob asked, “So, this means that we’re in a parallel universe or something?”

  Rob answered, “Well, more ‘or something’ than parallel universe.”

  The crowd looked confused so he continued, “What a lot of people don’t know about the moon is, due to tidal forces, and the transfer of angular momentum from the earth to the moon, the moon is actually moving away from the earth a small distance, about one and one half inches per year.”

  Mitchem spoke, “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Rob continued, “Well, due to this energy and momentum being transferred to the moon, the earth’s rotation is actually slowing down, a few milliseconds every year.”

  They didn’t connect the facts.

  Rob broke it to them, “The earth’s rotation right now is about thirty three hours, which means that we have an additional nine hours added to our day.”

  It connected to the ones with the scien
ce backgrounds. Groans sounded, ripped from the people that caught on. Bob sagged to the ground, squatting as he put his hands over his face. Dr. Nachman leaned back, looking up at the sky, his arms folded against his chest.

  Major Nosstrand looked like she was going to throw up.

  Mitchem, since he was more of an administrator than a scientist or engineer, looked confused, “What the hell is going on?”

  Randall looked at him like at Mitchem as if he was a child. Randall looked at Rob, “Have you done the math? How long?”

  Rob looked very unhappy as he nodded at the question, “Yeah, I did the calculations. And since Mike is a mathematician, I had him run them as well. Nine hundred thousand to a billion years.”

  Mitchem was really confused now, “A billion years for what? What the hell are you all talking about?”

  Mike took pity on him and explained, “It means, that we’re about nine hundred thousand or a billion years into the future from our time.”

  Mitchem’s face cratered, “How is that possible? That isn’t possible? How could that happen?”

  Mike looked at all of the scientists before him, “I don’t know. I was hoping that one of you might.” All he saw was confusion on the faces around him. “Look, you’re the people that created the quantum computers. You created the batteries that seem to suck energy out of nothing, quantum batteries that create energy by tapping into the vibration of quarks. So, since you’re messing with the basic laws of physics, I wonder if one of you knows something about what’s happened to us.”

  Mike looked at Nachman, “I hear that you did of work with some physicists for the quantum battery that we use in the mech armor and the big battery that is running the facility.”

  Nachman nodded slowly, “Yes, but that couldn’t do this.”

  Mike asked, “Do you know of anything that they were proposing that might have touched on this?”

  Nachman was quiet for a moment as he thought about it, “Well, I helped with the structures that they needed to tap into the quantum fields. The only thing that I can think of was a discussion on the quantum Zeno effect, the Turing paradox, stochastic systems, and the Bekenstein bound.”

  Mike thought, “Great, I have no idea what the hell that might be.”

  Mike spoke, “This was pertaining to what?”

  Nachman said, “Well, they were trying to figure out how to keep the mech armor from being defeated by large energy delivery systems.”

  “Energy systems? Like what?”

  “They knew that the enemy would try to figure out how to defeat the mech armor. One of the ways they thought this might happen is if somebody figured out a way to pulse a large amount of energy at the armor to defeat the graphene fibers. They wanted to defeat or channel those pulses away from the armor.”

  The group stood and thought about this for a moment. Pang was the first to break the silence, “Well, a nuclear attack is a large pulse of energy. Were they trying to figure out how to defeat a pulse of energy that big?”

  Nachman slowly shook his head, “I don’t know. I know they were thinking about every type of battlefield conditions that the armor might run into. This was all theoretical, however.”

  Bob added, “Yeah, and two years ago, quantum computing was a theory. Then we had the quantum computer and they figured out the quantum battery. What the hell else would they be able to figure out with the help of a quantum computer?”

  Mitchem spoke up, “There’s no place that it could be. We only have the quantum battery and quantum servers for our computers in the facility. That plus all of the fabrication equipment. We don’t have anything else.”

  Mike thought about Jamison, “Would Jamison put anything in the facility without telling you?”

  Mitchem thought for a second and replied, “Well, he couldn’t put it in. Smith, Crandall, and Weitz would have to help get everything put into place. They designed all the systems in the facility.”

  Pang spoke, “Then let’s go ask them if there’s anything we should know about.”

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  They called and got Luis Garcia and John Smith to come up for a conference. Luis and John were the main electrical engineers that designed the systems of the Area 19 facility. Before they climbed the ladder to come upstairs, John sent another tech to find Josh Weitz and tell him to come up. The two men walked out to where the group was standing. Since so many people were out of the cave for such a long time, Tom climbed into his mech armor and moved forward to cover for them.

  Luis was in front of John when they walked out. He greeted everybody and then asked, “So, what’s up?” John caught up and said hello, then listened as Mike started asking questions.

  “We were wondering if anything has been installed recently in the facility.”

  Luis thought, “Such as? I mean, we install new computers, servers, work on upgrading the electronics, put new things into the mech armor. I need a little bit more to go on.”

  Mitchem spoke, “Something that may be unusual, or different than what you have done in the past.”

  Luis had a contemplative look on his face as he thought about this, but John spoke first, “Well, we did do that upgrade to the servers.” Luis agreed, “Yeah, we received some new components that had to be added to the main servers.”

  Mike looked at Mitchem, “Did you authorize this?”

  “Authorize it? No, I didn’t even know that there was going to be an upgrade.”

  Bob was facing towards the cave, “Hey there’s Josh. If there was a computer upgrade, he would know about it.”

  Josh came over, unhappy that he was there, his petulant teenager persona in the forefront. Mike wondered how he had ever kept a job back in the world. Mitchem, unwilling to deal with his whining, cut to the chase, “Josh, has any kind of system upgrade been done to the computers?”

  Josh shook his head, “Upgrade, no. No upgrades were authorized through me. There are no upgrades available right now. They were talking about some new capabilities they discovered that were going to be incorporated into the new system next year, but not right now.”

  Smith looked at Garcia, “Then what the hell did we install?”

  Mike asked, “Who told you to add the new equipment to the computer?”

  Weitz looked concerned, “Wait, what, somebody added more equipment to the computer? What the hell? Nobody ran the specs by me.”

  Smith turned to Weitz, “Well, there was a box on the third floor, and Jamison came down and told us that we needed to add it to the existing servers.”

  Weitz spoke, “This didn’t come through me. I haven’t seen anything new, no additional traffic or energy spikes on my diagnostics.”

  Mike paused, then said, “I think we all need to go downstairs and take a look at the computer system.”

  The group agreed. It took a while, and in hindsight, Mike should have just held the meeting downstairs. It was much easier to get physically fit soldiers down than it was to get out of shape scientists up the ladder. Rob stayed upstairs, with Everett. As the group walked past the cots in the play room, he looked at Jamison, who was drooling and muttering to himself and thought, “What do you know, you crazy bastard.” Jamison couldn’t move the left side of his body. Joan Nosstrand saw the direction of his gaze, “it has to be a tumor. I don’t think that anything else could be affecting him like this. He’s lost a lot of motor function.”

  They walked on past to the stairwell, following Mitchem and the Brain Trust upstairs. They navigated the stairs to the third floor. This was going to be the first time Mike saw the battery that was running the facility and the servers that ran all the software. He was disappointed when he saw what was actually in the room. Luis pointed out the different components to the group.

  There were racks of electronic and computer transmission equipment. It only took up a quarter of the room. The racks were right up against the back wall, and next to it was a cube tha
t was about three feet on all sides. Electrical cables led to it. Evidently that was all that was needed for the quantum battery. Next to it was a narrower cube, maybe two feet wide and a foot and a half deep, also about the same height as the quantum battery, with computer on top of it. Along one side of the quantum computer was a smaller panel that was removed. A power cable was plugged in, and about twenty fiber cables led from it to the computer racks that held the transmission equipment.

  Weitz walked forward, “What the hell is that?”

  Garcia replied, “That’s what Jamison had us install.”

  Weitz looked at the cube on the floor. Compared to the elegant quantum battery and the quantum computer, it was a behemoth. It was six feet long, four feet wide and five feet tall. It was in the same type of black graphene cabinet that the other two were in. It had no power source. It only had a single USB cable running from it to the quantum computer.

  The group of people looked at them and watched as the three engineers conferred.

  Weitz continued, “Was there any paperwork, anything that could tell you what the hell this thing is?”

  Smith nodded. He walked over to a desk and grabbed a thin book and then gave it to Weitz.

  Weitz opened up the book, “What the hell is a null generator?”

  He looked up at everybody else, “Does anybody know what a null generator is?”

  Bob answered, “I don’t know, but in light of what we have experienced, I don’t like the name.”

  Mike spoke, “Can you please disconnect that damn thing to ensure that we don’t suddenly end up floating in space on a charred planet as the sun explodes?”

  Nachman said, “We don’t even know if that’s what got us here.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to take any chances. I don’t know what a null generator is, but I think, if you people don’t know what the hell it does, I would prefer it be unplugged.”

  Weitz raised his hand, index finger pointed towards the ceiling, “Wait, I want to check something.”

  He walked over to the computer, and started to run some programs.

  “Okay, I think I found the code when you plugged it in. Was it on Monday, the 13th?”

  Smith and Garcia both nodded their heads in the affirmative. Luis replied, “Yeah, that was the date.”

  Mike thought about the date. That was after the Saturday he and his team unloaded the truck and brought the equipment downstairs. He mentioned that to the group.

  Mitchem started talking, “So, Jamison used people that aren’t ordinarily used to unload the truck, and he didn’t tell Josh that this piece of equipment would be plugged in.” He breathed in deeply and then exhaled, “What the hell.”

  Weitz kept looking at the information on the screen. He spoke, “Well, it looks like, a few days ago, right when we experienced the incident, the null generator suddenly had a spike of activity. A command was sent to it, then it started gathering some additional information.”

  Mitchem asked, “What information?”

  “Telemetry information, about missiles.” Josh looked some more, “actually about missiles heading towards our location. Then there was no more information.”

  Josh looked up, “I think we were cut off from everything after that. No more information was available.”

  The group thought about this. Mitchem spoke, “It sounds like it was monitoring to find out if we were about to be hit, then it did whatever it does. Then we ended up here.”

  Mike looked at Humphreys and Nosstrand, “If Jamison becomes lucid, you might want to talk to him about this.” They both nodded. Mike had another idea. He looked at Weitz, “Can you read the emails of Jamison?”

  Weitz looked at Mitchem, for permission. Mitchem nodded.

  “Yeah, I can do that. What are you looking for?”

  Mike answered, “Anything that can tell us what the hell that thing does.”

  Weitz nodded.

  Mike looked at the group, “Now, I need to talk to you about moving.”

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