He walked off, down the corridor, to the next mantrap. When he got to it, he just used the security token from each guard in turn and entered the lock. He waited while the system verified the identities, and then it opened the door, allowing him to exit. He continued to walk down the corridor, past the infirmary. He stopped at the kitchen and went into the store room to find some food. He ate some cheese and bread, a few chunks of ham, and an egg and drank a cold club soda while he waited for the alarms to sound.
He did not have long to wait. Red lights began to flash on the walls of the room. He stood at the back of the room, chewing slowly and watching the hallway through the glass windows on the kitchen doors. A group of armed men sprinted past the room. Groenig finished his mouthful of bread and cheese, swallowed the rest of the beverage, threw the cup away, and walked straight out of the kitchen.
There were five men rushing away from him down the hallway, and he quietly ran after them. When he had caught up with the last man, he touched him with the Tesla weapon. The man collapsed in a boneless heap. Groenig caught up with the remaining men, killing each one quickly and methodically moving to the next in the line. The lead man must have had some indication that something was wrong because he whirled on Groenig at the last second. But, it was too late. The man thrust his arm to block the Tesla rod, and the instant it contacted him, he died and fell to the floor.
Groenig moved on and found the main entrance lobby. He walked straight up to the two guards standing there. One was on a phone, and the other was drawing his weapon when Groenig touched them in turn. He then looked for the elevator to the surface. He entered the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor. He smiled as he noticed “The Girl from Ipanema” was playing. “Elevator music!” he thought.
*****
When he had gotten to the surface, he noticed that the sky looked noticeably odd. The heat was oppressive, and he immediately began to sweat. He looked around for a moment and then decided on a target vehicle, turning into a parking spot. He took the car by the simple expedient of killing the owner as she exited her vehicle. He touched her with the glass rod device, and she died. He grabbed her by her hair, pulled hard, and threw her body to the ground. He sat in the driver’s seat, closed the door and adjusted the seat, the mirrors, and put on his seat belt. He started the car and put the air conditioner on full blast. For several minutes, he reveled in the feel of the air blowing from the vents.
Tuning the XM radio to the local Albuquerque station that carried “The Love Doctors”, he adjusted the volume precisely and then locked the station into the radio’s memory. He backed the car out of the parking space, unceremoniously crushing the head of its former owner.
He turned the wheel, and carefully drove out of the lot, towards Los Alamos. He was going to need some of the exotic materials he had left there, the last time he had been allowed to work for the Sandia Corporation.
He mentally planned his journey, from his current location. A helpful sign at the gate made him aware if he did not already realize it, that he was now leaving Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque. Groenig turned onto the road leading to I-25 North, out of Kirtland AFB, to US84, where he would take New Mexico 502 to NM-4. From there it was all back roads and desert to the secret labs of Sandia.
As he turned onto the highway, he suddenly noticed that, although the speedometer indicated he was moving at thirty miles per hour, the sensation of movement had stopped. He could see clouds, and birds, and a jet plane as it began to lift off from a runway near him.
But, everything seemed frozen in place. A new sensation overwhelmed him, and he felt himself growing smaller. His mind attempted to comprehend what it was observing, and he at least knew that his intellect allowed him to remain a rationale participant, and not become frightened of the experience.
Groenig found himself in the foot well of the car, near the accelerator and brake pedals. He tried to lift himself up, but could only roll along. The vehicle traveled off the highway, slowing. It hit a parked bus, and the airbags deployed. Groenig was tossed up and back onto the driver’s seat. The mirror hung at an angle, and he could see that he was in a pickle, to put it mildly.
He heard a tremendous shrieking noise, as the passenger jet aircraft flew only tens of feet over his wrecked car. The jet blast from one of the engines shook the vehicle, and almost flipped it over. He was tossed onto the rear deck near the shattered back window by the buffeting. He saw the jet hit the ground, bounce once and then career off into some buildings.
He watched as a massive explosion smashed the buildings to the ground, but the flaming ball was luckily moving away from him.
He tried to move again, but only could roll back and forth from his stomach to his back. He felt very strange, his eyes were unfocused, but not from injury as best he could determine. He thought the blurriness was from tears, but he was taken aback at that image. He looked again at the broken mirror, and his mind told him that he saw a baby, naked and mewling, rolling on the back deck. He urinated all over himself.
*****
Only a few weeks after The Wave had hit the Earth, Dr. Martin Groenig was miserable indeed.
He tried, again, to rise from his crib.
“They keep me in a fucking CRIB!” he mentally fumed.
He balled his tiny fists uselessly in frustration. He yelled out to the nurse, again. “For fuck’s sake, will you fucking change this motherfucking diaper?” His voice squeaked out the words indignantly.
He had finally been on his way to permanent freedom when the Wave had hit, and he cursed again the absolute bad luck that had befallen him. He had been found a few hours later when someone actually had decided that they had better go looking for him. The teenaged boys and twentyish man who came upon him were not sure they had actually found their target. The man, an officer from Kirtland, recognized the Tesla weapon, and the clothing swaddling a baby and made the correct determination. The vague, distorted swearing sounds coming from the babe’s mouth confirmed his suspicions, and once more, Groenig was back in captivity.
Dr. Martin Groenig squirmed around to attempt to get a better look at where that damned nurse was located, but his eyes still were not focusing very well, and his motor skills, for a seven-month-old baby boy, while in the normal percentile, still were found lacking for his needs.
It was time to change his fucking diaper, and that bitch was nowhere to be seen.
He yelled as best as he could with his little lungs. “Nurse! For fucking fuck’s sake! My ass is covered in shit! Would you please get in here? NOW!!”
Groenig looked at the monitors around his crib. They were mostly just bright colors, but he and a few optics experts and a neuropathic pediatrician from the Lovelace Medical Center had managed to come up with an ingenious method by which he could babble at a microphone, and he could see what he was actually saying on the monitor.
It was a lot of work, but it was more the frustration of having a super-genius IQ mind in the body of a toddler that aggravated him.
As he lay there, waiting for his diaper to be changed, he reviewed the information he had collected over the last few weeks. He mentally perused the data regarding how The Wave had changed everything. The military and government feeds he had demanded had yielded a few consistent results.
All organic matter had somehow reverted to a biological age of somewhere around forty years younger.
All over the globe, people had just vanished. At first, many believed it to be the Biblical Rapture until it rapidly became evident that they were also changed.
People were regressed approximately forty years. There seemed to be some exceptions, with survivors reportedly claiming having been less than forty years old being regressed to an age of four or five. There was only a handful of infants, and Groenig had no inkling as to why he was spared.
Over five billion people were simply gone. In the United States, the population had immediately plummeted to just about 50 million, from 330 million.
But, tha
t was only the effect of their existence being erased.
The next wave of reduction came from the inevitable casualties that occurred when people were suddenly ill-equipped to deal with their current situation. Many people went insane and committed suicide. Some people were murdered by the unhinged; most people were too intent on trying to gather food and water and joined together to solve their local problems. The psychological pressures were immense. Surprise battled with grief, and also joy for some. Many people who had been much older were delighted to find themselves in a younger version of themselves. However, people who had regressed to pre-pubescence were generally not handling the change gracefully. There was a huge culture shock that became evident based on ageism. The very young were almost unilaterally ignored since they had become more dependent on the older people again. This did not sit well and was the source of some friction.
Another series of casualties were from people occupying vehicles in transit. For instance, pilots in aircraft, who did not disappear, attained the biological ages of from seven months old to almost 20 years old. A lucky few managed to be on autopilot and did not completely lose their minds immediately were able to guide their aircraft to safe landings. Many pilots, suddenly babies or children, screamed in horror as they realized their predicament. A few had the presence of mind to summon ‘adults’ to the cockpit, to try to instruct them as to how to control the aircraft. Most of these did not succeed.
A report from NORAD had noted that one particular plane, carrying a former President and First Lady, who had also served as Secretary of State, crashed into a field in Arkansas when one pilot vanished and the other, barely a teen, was unable to fly the plane because his uniform belt had snagged the controls, when he found his clothing absurdly over-sized.
The ecological effects were catastrophic. Many trees had survived, but all dogs, cats, rats, horses, and cows were gone. Wildlife such as deer and rabbits were also no longer part of the ecosystem. Long-lived animals, primarily those in zoological gardens and biospheres were still alive, but most were babies, cubs or young adults.
In the oceans, surface plankton and algae had suffered significant losses. Unusually, deep water kelp and pond vegetation below a certain amount of water were apparently unaffected. Whales, dolphins, and sharks, as well as most species of bottom-dwelling fish, were also equally unchanged. Regression seemed to occur uniformly to the planet surface, but water of any great depth provided some insulation against The Wave.
While the infrastructure of the planet remained untouched, all organic life was subjected to Regression, which is what Groenig had suggested the phenomenon be named.
*****
The nurse had finally arrived. He growled at her as she began to prepare the ointments and other necessary accoutrements that were required to clean him and clothe him. She undressed him with a small grimace since the odor was not pleasant. His onesie had acted like a wick and soaked his entire body with urine and feces.
The nurse, dutifully, took off the onesie and dropped it into a hamper. She then took him over to a small tub, where he was rinsed off in a stream of warm water. It felt wonderful, he reflected.
He decided to enjoy the sensations and give his overtaxed mind a wee bit of rest.
He saw a man walk briskly into the room. The man took a moment to survey the situation, watching as the nurse changed Groenig, and then threw back his head and laughed heartily. When he stopped, he had a couple of tears at the corner of his eyes. He wiped at them absently and spoke to Groenig. The nurse was cleaning Groenig’s naked body with a wet nap, and it chilled him a bit.
Now, the man walked over to him and gave him an appraising look, and grinned widely. His demeanor was that of a man who was happy, and greatly relieved. He looked quite dapper in his tweed suit, and his eyes twinkled with mirth and intelligence.
“Well, Martin! It appears you were right after all! I am thoroughly looking forward to spending a lot of time discussing what this phenomenon has done and whether we can reverse it. I hope you harbor no ill feelings towards me?” The man had a huge grin on his face.
Dr. Stephen Hawking picked the naked infant body of Dr. Martin Groenig up with his two hands, and Groenig squirmed and squawked at him. He mustered all the wind his tiny lungs could gather and bellowed out.
“FUCK YOU CRIPPY BOY!” he yelled, and peed all over Hawking’s suit.
"We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat."
-- Queen Victoria
"Any sane person would have left long ago."
-- Princess Diana
"All my possessions for a moment of time."
-- Elizabeth I
Chapter Thirteen
10 HOURS PRIOR TO WAVE IMPACT ON EARTH
Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II, the constitutional monarch of sixteen realms of the 53-member Commonwealth of Nations, Head of the Commonwealth and Supreme Governor of the Church of England was enthralling the gathered onlookers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. by asking about the Ruby Slippers from “The Wizard of Oz”, worn by Judy Garland. They appeared a bit frayed, and the Queen had asked the Curator for some background about them.
“Well,” began the attractive young woman.
“Oh! I am sorry, Your Highness! I mean, Your Majesty!” she sputtered.
The Curator had been chosen by the Queen’s Major Domo, primarily for her excellent etiquette in how she had handled royalty in the past. Her name was Julia, and she had been with the museum for ten years.
Julia curtsied, awkwardly, and it was evident that she was inexplicably flustered by being in the presence of the Queen.
The Queen motioned to one of her guards and spoke a few words to him privately. The guard went to the rest of the entourage and asked them to please give Her Majesty a moment of two of privacy. (He pronounced the word as priv-a-see, with a typical English accent.) The guard escorted the group to another exhibit.
The Queen approached Julia, and taking her by the elbow, walked a few paces away from the other guards. Then, she looked around to be sure that she was not being overheard.
“My dear, please feel free to address me in any manner that makes you comfortable,” said Elizabeth.
“Let’s just not stand on ceremony. We are just very interested in what you have to say about these marvelous shoes!”
The Queen stepped a bit closer to Julia and whispered conspiratorially in her ear. “Julia, I am a huge fan of Judy Garland. Let’s do put on the show, and all that, but please relax, girl! All of this froo-froo and flummery just sets my teeth on edge some days. It gets in the way of my learning. But, I simply must know as much as possible that you can remember about the provenance of this item.”
The Queen straightened herself out, and a prim smile came to her face. She stared earnestly at Julia and then chuckled a bit.
Julia, blushing, said, “Thank, you, Ma’am. I am so sorry!”
“I am not always this ill at ease, it’s just…”
“Please, my dear. We are just wanderers on this globe, such as you, seeking knowledge and wisdom in our old age!” said the Queen.
“You are most gracious, Your Majesty!” said Julia, attempting to curtsy again.
Julia began her dialog by taking a deep breath.
“These particular prop slippers were worn by Judy Garland during her dance routines on the Yellow Brick Road. We have researched this and have ascertained that, of the several pairs of props, only a few had felt on the bottom of the slippers".
Regaining some of her poise, she continued.
“However, according to Rhys Thomas, all but one pair of slippers had orange felt on the soles.”
More confidently, Julia pointed and said, “Further, these slippers, although both size 5C, are not an exact match.”
Julia paused to allow for a bit of drama.
“You may have noticed that the bow on the left slipper is higher than the bow on the right?” she said.
Julie carefully pointed out the discrepanc
y, and the Queen was obliged to look more closely.
The difference was subtle, but it was there.
The Queen nodded her head, slightly, and Julia now felt more at ease.
Julia said, “This odd attribute of this particular pair of ruby slippers has been fueling speculation that perhaps other copies of the slippers may exist.”
She paused for effect, again.
“Nevertheless,” she continued, “in the 1939 musical, there is a noticeable difference between the two shoes.”
Julia, now in her element, smiled at the Queen.
“You may have seen that in the scene when Dorothy taps her heels three times, the slippers seem odd?” she asked.
“Why, of course!” said the Queen. “We never did understand why they appeared that way, and we ascribed it to the cinematographer choosing a strange angle at which to film.”
Julia smiled broadly, and said, “We know that another pair of slippers was formerly owned by a Tennessee woman named Roberta Bauman. Ms. Bauman won them by placing second in a National Four Star Club ‘Name the Best Movies of 1939’ contest.”
Julia continued speaking calmly.
“In 1988, they were offered up at the auction house Christie's of London. The slippers were sold for $150,000 plus Christie’s customary $15,000 buyer's premium. The buyer was a Mr. Anthony Landini. Mr. Landini arranged a deal to allow the Disney Company to start showing them at the Disney/MGM Studios' Florida Theme Park. Tourists, who were standing in the queue for the Great Movie Ride, were able to see many famous movie props, and these were included in the collection. The slippers were displayed at the ride's debut in 1989 until they were sold by Mr. Landini at auction in 2002 to Mr. David Elkouby for $666,000,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“My word!” said the Queen. “You certainly do know quite a bit about these items. Are you as knowledgeable as to the provenance of every item under your care?”
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 16
