The Prometheus Effect

by David Fleming

CHAPTER 41

  In a windswept crater, a robotic rover on Mars built a sandcastle at the commands of its new controller. Mykl yawned. This wasn’t quite as much fun as he had thought it would be. Nor was the quick tour of solar system camera feeds. The novelty of different-colored dirt wears off fast when you can’t actually touch it. He smoothed the castle back into the depression he created and returned the rover to its default settings. Now if a different country’s rover happened to come across his work, there would be no incriminating evidence. It was a good thing the City had the only functioning probes on the planet.

  “You still up?” Delilah asked from the doorway.

  “Too much to explore,” Mykl answered.

  “Jack is on his way back with another guest if you would like to meet them when they arrive.”

  “Someone new to the City?” Mykl looked forward to seeing someone else’s first reaction to the place.

  “Yes, she finally passed her tests to get in.”

  “Like my tests?”

  “Mmm…” Delilah rubbed her hands together and stared at the ceiling while contemplating his question. “Harder, I would say.”

  “Really? This is someone I have to meet.”

  ***

  Much to Jessica’s surprise, Sebastian’s weapon was returned to him, and Jack offered him a deal. If Sebastian could bring him the artifact, Jack promised a payout involving more zeros than he had fingers. Sebastian departed happily, his elevator taking the same direction as his fate.

  “Please accept my apologies for striking you, Miss Stafford,” Jack said. He offered her his handkerchief.

  “The way I see it,” Jessica said, taking the handkerchief to squelch the blood flowing from her nose, “it’s the least painful part of what you’ve already put me through. But worth it to get rid of that ass.”

  “Sebastian’s predictability makes him one of our greatest assets. Though his mission is still incomplete.”

  Jessica blinked in astonishment. “He’s working for you?”

  “He’s been volunteering for us for many years now, but he doesn’t realize it. He is the best at what he does.”

  “Did he have to take the same oath that I did?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “But—I’m nothing like him!”

  “You wouldn’t be standing here if you were.”

  Jessica had a million questions to ask. But, as a woman, one needed to be asked first. “Why do you go by ‘Jack the Ripper’?”

  The men standing with Jack appeared at ease with her question, like they had heard the answer many times before. Even in tactical gear bristling with deadly weapons, their faces assumed a look of non-threatening respect. This didn’t feel like a group intending to abduct her. It was more like an honor guard here as an escort.

  “The original Jack the Ripper tried to improve society by killing what he thought were the undesirable dregs of civilization. My friends call me by that name because I rip from existence the best people the world has to offer—in order to allow them to reach their greatest potential.”

  “Am I the best the world has to offer?” Jessica asked meekly.

  “One of many,” he replied. “Would you like to meet others?” Jack motioned to the waiting helicopter beyond the glass vestibule.

  “All right, but one more thing…”

  Jack raised his eyebrows.

  “Why do you carry a straight razor in your pocket?”

  ***

  On the short flight out beyond the city glow and into barren desert darkness, Jack provided answers to Jessica’s questions. She still had more as they disembarked at a pine tree-lined mountain ledge. Everyone, she learned, had to pass a test of some sort to become a member of Jack’s organization. Her test just happened to be the hardest and most diabolical. Jessica had proven to be one of a very select few with the moral character needed to succeed. Now it was Jack’s turn to hold up his end of the bargain.

  As the helicopter peeled away, chilling winds from its rotors buffeted treetops and pressed her skirt against her legs. Jack beckoned her to follow him under a rock outcropping. Rough boulders served as solid steps leading upward to a cave suitable for a hermit. Someone had had the wit to mount a doorknob and doorknocker on the back wall.

  Jack tapped the doorknocker twice and waited. This must be another test, Jessica thought. Then the ground beneath them, a disk of coarse rock, began to descend. Light streamed in in a circle from all sides until glistening clear surfaces of a much larger space surrounded them.

  They stepped off onto a textured translucent floor.

  “What is the power source for all this?” Jessica asked.

  “What would you like it to be?” Jack replied.

  She ran her fingers along a wall. It had a soapy crystalline feel instead of slick glass. Turning to face Jack, she said, “I would like it to be real.”

  “Can you survive another ten minutes in an elevator?”

  “I’m sure it beats the stairs.”

  Three parallel tracks ran from floor to ceiling around them. As far as Jessica could determine, they were the only devices holding this transparent cylinder—that Jack called an elevator—in place. Jack urged her to grip a safety railing. Slowly, the illusion of rising walls took hold as they started to descend. Then they became a blur of motion. She was alone and plummeting into the secret lair of a man called Jack the Ripper—and yet she felt safe.

  After all, he had been truthful about why he had the razor. The elevator smelled of shaving cream.

  Gravity eased its grip, and Jessica estimated they were one third of the way to weightlessness. Minutes passed before she once again sensed the soles of her feet pressing normally against the floor. How far had they dropped? In the final minute of descent, the encompassing rock became dark and an invisible heaviness enveloped her; then motionless silence.

  “Welcome to the City, Miss Stafford.”

  The grand spectacle before her defied the imagination. It couldn’t possibly be real. There was nothing on earth like it. If this was another computer-generated illusion, it was far more remarkable than her test in the polyhedral room. She took a step forward with a hand extended, as if to touch it.

  “It’s real.”

  The voice came from in front of her instead of behind, and it sounded much, much, younger than Jack’s. A small boy in blue pajamas and bright white socks seemed to have materialized out of thin air. He wore a quirk of a smile and stared up at her through inquisitive copper eyes. A tattered teddy bear dangled from his hand, its furry foot hovering an inch off the ground. The kid was adorable, but… odd.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked.

  “Jessica, this is Mykl… who, at midnight no less, should be in bed right now,” Jack said.

  “Hello,” the boy said.

  “Hello, Mykl.”

  ***

  Mykl took a step back to better see the adults towering over him. The girl was pretty, like his mom, but with a less secretive air about her.

  He flung an arm behind him. “Do you like it?”

  “Are you sure it’s real?” Jessica asked, still not quite certain.

  “Can I take her on the tour in the morning, Jack?”

  “Sure. Just don’t show her any of the secret stuff.”

  “But…”

  Jack winked.

  “Funny,” Mykl said.

  “What’s funny?” Jessica asked.

  “Come on.” Mykl took her by the hand. “We have to kill you now.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “It’s about time. I was already getting way too bored here.”

  Surprised at having his sarcasm thrown back at him, Mykl looked up at her, and they both burst out laughing. This one’s a keeper.

  Mykl was allowed to tag along with Jack and his new recruit to settle her into a room several doors from his original one. Mykl even performed a brief introduction to the workings of the lights and amenities. They decided on an arctic winter aurora motif for her ambiance se
tting, then Mykl promised to collect her in the morning for a tour.

  Back in his own room, Mykl set his own ambiance to the star field Jack had used in the Operations Center. He didn’t find the satellite feed listed in his folders, but it was simply a matter of recalling strings of numbers and characters and entering them as an ambiance preset. With Stinker to protect him, he drifted off to sleep, warm and blissful under a blanket of ships in a sea of stars.

  CHAPTER 42

  Twelve million miles away, a mindless agent of destruction tumbled silently in the cold vacuum of space at over seventy thousand miles per hour. Camouflaged on its scarred surface was a propulsion system specifically designed for one purpose: to bring the wayward beast home and turn it loose. Like the eyes of a wolf, a stealthy probe kept careful watch on its prey—and the two brothers preceding it.

  Mykl awoke with a start to flashing lights all around him. Scarlet red lines slashed brilliantly across his star field as the image rotated and changed perspectives. The visual illusion made his bed feel like a lifeboat being tossed in a stormy sea. More colored trails mirrored the first. He did his best to track the lines and make sense of them. Another perspective change tossed him farther out into space, making him dizzy.

  He soon saw that every line terminated at the same fuzzy bluish dot. And as the dot grew larger, Mykl recognized it—for he had played with its replica many times.

  Between blinks, the image changed again. Reflexively, Mykl thrust his bear between him and the tumbling asteroid. He pressed himself deeper into his bed as it threatened to crush him.

  “Wake up, dumbass,” Mykl chastised himself. “It’s just a picture.”

  He jumped down from the bed to find out what was playing havoc with his ambiance setting. The door to Jack’s office was open, and the lights within flashed in time with those in his room. He walked to Jack’s door and stopped at its threshold.

  Jack immediately froze the image with a slap of his palm on the desk. A projected scarlet streak cut Mykl’s silhouette in half, from shoulder to hip and through the eyeless socket of the bear at his side.

  “What…” Mykl raised his bear to the static image of sharply shadowed rock.

  Jack took in a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry, Mykl,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was. All the flashing in my room woke me up.”

  “In your room?”

  “I set it to the same star field you showed me in the Operations Center.”

  “Of course you did,” Jack said softly to himself. He crossed an arm over his chest and pinched the bridge of his nose, then moved his hand to cover his mouth and gave Mykl an appraising stare. Finally he lowered his hand to indicate the chair next to him. “Take a seat,” he said.

  Mykl clambered into the chair with Stinker clutched tightly to his chest. “It’s going to hit us, isn’t it?” he asked, indicating the asteroid.

  “Yes.”

  “But, I thought you said you were able to prevent that kind of thing from happening.”

  “I can.”

  “So…”

  “There’s a reason.”

  Mykl leaned back and furrowed his brow. He couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would let an asteroid hit the planet if they could prevent it.

  “This asteroid and the two preceding it,” Jack said, “are not on a random trajectory. Their courses have been altered to ensure they hit not just the Earth, but the United States. The country controlling them has tried twice in the recent past to do the same thing, but our organization was able to thwart both efforts. However, I can’t keep causing ‘rocket malfunctions’ and ‘communication glitches’ without them becoming suspicious. Especially when they instituted a triple redundancy of every system, including rockets, on this launch. Were I to put a stop to this, the finger of suspicion could only be directed at the United States. It would be enough to start a war. By allowing this mission to go as planned, it buys us time.”

  Mykl shook his head. “Buy us time for what?”

  “The window for developing alternative energies to replace the world’s reliance on fossil fuels closed long ago. Most people believe the published scientific data that claims we still have several hundred years’ worth of oil to burn. The truth is, at current consumption rates, we have only twenty. A handful of nations are getting close to discovering this, and they aren’t sharing their findings. Instead, they are playing an international game of chess to gain control of the last reserves. It’s the main reason the US has relied on foreign oil all these years. The plan all along was to keep its own oil fields in reserve for when the rest of the world ran dry.

  “A solid plan, except for one thing: history has shown repeatedly that if one side has what the other desperately needs, desperate measures will be used to acquire it.”

  Jack gestured to the screens. “China is the country responsible for these three asteroids—although it could just as easily have been any of the other space-exploring countries at odds with the United States. But China does not know the full consequences of their actions. They thought they were clever: they selected asteroids large enough to do precisely enough damage to preselected targets without causing any lasting effects to the planet. What they did not account for, since it is unknown to them, is the Europa virus. It has been found in a dormant state on many asteroids we have surveyed. The release of that virus on Earth would end all human life.

  “So: we have neutralized the virus on these three asteroids. Furthermore, I severed China’s data feed from the asteroids more than a month ago. Up until the last transmission, everything confirmed an optimal trajectory. But we will allow only one of those asteroids to impact—and at a place of our choosing. The other two will bounce harmlessly, albeit quite dramatically, off the atmosphere.

  “However, when China fails to achieve their intended goal, they will try again—or some other country will do so. Unless we do something to stop them.”

  Life must be easy for those who go through it oblivious to reality, Mykl thought. As if the threat of nuclear Armageddon wasn’t enough, now humans had learned to lob asteroids at each other like snowballs. Lethal virus-laden snowballs at that.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Mykl asked.

  “You like puzzles. What do you think can be done about it?”

  “Besides start over?” Mykl replied flippantly.

  Jack leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk. Several seconds of silence passed before he asked softly, “Could you do that, Mykl?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kill everyone on the planet to settle the world’s problems.” Jack waited for an answer.

  “I—I don’t think—”

  The thought of a few well-placed meteors erasing major problems in the world popped into his head. No. That was playing with fire. No wonder Prometheus got into so much trouble.

  “No. I couldn’t. Any solution that involves extinction isn’t a solution. It’s another problem.”

  Jack nodded. “Ideas are easy to come by. Finding solutions that don’t lead to further problems takes a great deal more thought—and planning.”

  “Like releasing City technology.” Mykl’s mind started clacking down the rails into the dark tunnel of that possibility. “If only the United States had it, then other countries would attack preemptively to try and acquire it.”

  “Or out of fear,” Jack added.

  “And giving it to the whole world at the same time”—stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man—“would mean any country could destroy the world, and they wouldn’t need nukes or asteroids. And they could do it…”

  “Faster than the speed of light,” Jack finished.

  Mykl felt a sudden chill. How do you get people to look past their petty differences of politics, culture, and religion, when life is the larger matter at stake?

  Jack blanked all the screens in his office, leaving only the cool glow of an overhead waning crescent moon for light. “Come on,” he
said. “I’ll tuck you back into bed. We’re not going to be able to solve all the world’s problems tonight.”

  Before Jack left Mykl’s room, he set the ambiance to Voyager’s forward camera view. “There you go. It should be smooth sailing for the rest of the night. But if you wake to an alien invasion fleet filling the screen, be sure to come get me. Sweet dreams!”

  Stinker’s all-seeing eye hid Mykl’s smile at Jack’s joke. Still, he spared one last glance at the empty stars—just to be sure.

  ***

  Back at his desk, Jack finally had a moment to view his priority messages. Three from Dr. Lee were coded urgent. After reading the first, his expression turned grim. The second had him puzzled and alarmed. And he had to work hard to contain his fury after finishing the third. One of her patients was dying, another was dead, and one was going to wish he was dead when Jack saw him again.

  No. That kind of anger was irrational and unfair. Fury melted into futility, and finally acceptance, as he reasoned out the ironic inevitability. There was already enough tragedy in the truth, and he was powerless to alter it. And even if he could alter it, no agency could persuade him do so.

  However, there were issues in which he did have the authority to make a difference, and no time to waste. He tapped the “acknowledge” link in Dr. Lee’s message. While waiting for her reply, he composed a note to the person who, before today, was his most trusted agent.

  His desk chimed.

  “Cindy? Good, you’re still up. Collect Dawn. I’ll meet you at the cryo-lab.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Soft sounds spiraled Dawn up from the shadowy well of her fitful slumber. Someone kept calling her name.

  “Daherlee? Whatimeisit?” she said groggily.

  “It’s about four thirty in the morning.”

  Dawn groaned and scrunched into her pillow.

  “Jack approved your procedure. We didn’t think we should wait a moment longer than necessary to start. He’s waiting for you at the lab to answer your questions.”