by Toby Minton
Gideon broke first.
“Unlike you and your brother, Ace’s body has never been affected by energy from the genesis element,” Gideon said, looking back at the map. “It’s already worked its changes in you. When I introduce more energy into your already modified systems, it goes to repairing any damage.”
“Great,” Nikki said. “That’s what we want, right? Repair her ‘damage.’”
“As I said, your systems have already been affected,” Gideon said, looking at her again. “In all probability it would repair the damage to Ace’s tissues. But it would also alter that tissue in ways we can’t predict, as Savior’s early experiments proved time and again. It’s not worth the risk, especially with a brain injury.”
“Huh,” Nikki grunted. “So you can heal people like us, who rarely need it, but nobody else? Handy.”
“Indeed,” he muttered, keying in changes to the map and pretty much blowing her off.
Nikki opened her mouth to give grumpus a little what-for—she really hated contrary people—but Michael headed her off again. Talk about pushing her cranky buttons.
“What about the other team?” Michael asked, looking over at Mos, who was leaning against the rail beside Elias, his impressive arms crossed in front of him. “Was the mission a success at least?”
Mos shook his head and looked at his boots with a grimace. “That’s a big negative, kid. Traffic got too thin. We followed as long as we could, but I know they made us long before we broke off. They were making for the Wasteland. We know that much.”
“Before or after they made you?” Elias asked.
“Hard to say,” Mos replied.
Elias stepped closer to the map and gave it the stink eye. “If they knew what they were doing, they were leading you to the middle of nowhere. Maybe even to another ambush.”
“Mm-hmm,” Mos agreed.
“Speaking of which,” Michael said, “this Hunter thing we keep running into. Is it one of Savior’s other…experiments?”
“No,” Gideon said. He looked down at his hands, but Nikki could tell he wasn’t seeing them or anything else in the room at the moment. Michael got that look sometimes. “Not an experiment. At one time, it was Savior’s greatest achievement. But like Savior—like me—the Event changed it forever.”
“You said something like that earlier. You said, ‘the element we discovered through the Gateway,’” Michael said. “You were part of it, weren’t you? You were there when the Event occurred.”
The pause was even longer this time. When Gideon finally did look up, Nikki didn’t see the same intimidating—or mildly intimidating—mysterious, scarred figure. She saw a normal, vulnerable man. In those two very different eyes, she saw one very human emotion: regret.
“I wasn’t just there on the day of the Event,” Gideon said, his voice sounding wholly human for the first time since they’d met him. “I was responsible for it.”
Mistakes
Chapter 21
Gideon…52 years ago
Gideon reached the end of his note cards before the elevator even reached sub-level five, and he wondered yet again, now that he knew his speech lasted all of eight floors, why he’d asked to be the one to give this press conference. Pushing his glasses back up on his nose, Gideon took a deep breath and started reading his notes again from the top, trying to ignore the countdown display of the rising elevator.
Of the two of them, Hale was by far the more outgoing. Hale was always the one to handle press releases, announcements, proposals—essentially anything dealing with people. A scientist with an actor’s charm and charisma, not to mention a model’s physique, Colonel Christopher Hale was a media magnet. Cameras loved him almost as much as the reporters behind them. He was the natural choice to announce the success of what promised to be the most groundbreaking project of the century. In fact, every reporter and dignitary crowded into the conference room on the ground floor of the Gateway, Colorado installation was expecting Hale to be in this elevator. “Disappointed” wouldn’t even begin to describe the mood in the room when Gideon, in all his wiry, nervous, painfully technical glory greeted them instead.
“But it’s my design,” Gideon mumbled, looking up from his notes. One of the soldiers beside him glanced over, giving him an undecipherable look, and Gideon adjusted the collar of his dress uniform.
This is the culmination of a lifetime of ridiculed hypotheses, he thought, as the guard turned his eyes back to the elevator doors. My hypotheses. I need to do this. Gideon fixed his gaze on the shiny doors, not even seeing his reflection, and forced a few calming breaths into his lungs. This is my responsibility.
The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors slid open, revealing the pristine white corridors of the main level. The guards exited first, preceding Gideon down the otherwise empty hall, and he was suddenly glad for their presence. He’d visited the main floor only a handful of times since moving into the research facility, and never to explore anything other than the exit. He doubted he could have found his way to the conference room on his own, not without an embarrassing amount of wandering.
The thought of embarrassment brought Gideon’s mind back to his impending speech. He glanced down at the note cards as he walked, doubting the wisdom and eloquence of his late-night scribbling. He knew he would not come across as self-assured and awe-inspiring as would Hale, but then again he was not making this speech to corner his piece of fame. He had no desire to spend any time at all in the limelight. He was better suited to the shadows of the research lab. Gideon was making this speech simply because he had designed the machine causing all this excitement. While Hale was overseeing the biological aspects of what they were attempting, Gideon was the physicist who was making their trip possible. He felt obligated to explain his design to the world. He had created the monster, so to speak, therefore it was his job to unveil it.
So when an official press conference became inevitable, Gideon surprised the team by insisting he do the talking. Even more surprising to the rest of the team had been Hale’s full support of the idea. They misunderstood Hale, mistook him for the glory hound all that media adoration would have created out of a lesser man. Gideon knew better. Hale was more than just a partner; he was a friend. There was more going on behind those blue eyes than the world understood.
Rounding the last corner, Gideon caught sight of a second set of soldiers flanking the double doors at the end of the long hall. He crumpled the note cards in his fist and dropped them into the polished metal trashcan at a crossing corridor. The last thing he needed was to confuse himself by trying to decipher his own spidery writing. He knew his design. He knew what he had to say.
The guards swung open the conference room doors, triggering the staccato chatter of cameras and the clamor of competing voices from the waiting crowd, and Gideon approached the podium with measured steps. The clamor dwindled as it became clear no one else was following him. The thin, dark haired man approaching the podium was a wash for their imagined splash-page layouts. A number of them settled back into their chairs, lowering recorders and resetting them. They likely assumed Gideon was another delay. Surely this pale, unassuming officer wasn’t the main attraction.
Somehow their casual dismissal bled away Gideon’s stage fright. He smiled slightly at the absence of fear he felt facing what now seemed an ambivalent audience. Pushing his glasses back from the humped bridge of his nose, Gideon leaned slightly toward the microphone and cleared his throat.
“My name is Colonel Marcus Edward Gideon,” he said, drawing the eyes of those in the crowd who had done their research. “And I’m here to announce the successful activation of the Gateway Project—the planet’s first interstellar doorway.”
The shouts and questions erupted with renewed fervor, punctuated by the click and flash of every camera in the room.
Several minutes passed before the group quieted enough for Gideon to continue. The press, it seemed, were more enthusiastic than Gideon had hoped. Their excitement emboldened hi
m, drew him out from behind his social barriers. When he finally began explaining his design, anxiety was not a concern. Brevity was.
To say Gideon was passionate about his design was an understatement. When he spoke about it to members of his team, they usually had to politely stop him so they could get back to work. Now that he had a room full of people, broadcasting to millions more, who weren’t already intimately familiar with the project, he wanted to expound every intricate detail.
But even if his currently exuberant audience could maintain their interest, his classification observers would shut him down instantly if he went too far. Therefore, Gideon forced himself to stick to the approved overview. Most of the results he could describe. The means and methods he could not.
Holding back was a challenge, but Gideon managed to outline the basics and start fielding questions without straying too far afield or exposing too much. At least, his observers hadn’t stepped in yet.
“So you don’t know where the other end of the Gateway opened?” one of the reporters near the back of the group asked, holding his recorder straight up over his head in an attempt to get decent video.
“Not exactly,” Gideon replied. “The atmosphere on the other side is more occluded than ours, making star recognition difficult. We do know the planet is closer to its parent star than Earth is to Sol. The surface temperatures and radiation levels are higher.”
“But still within habitable levels?” the same reporter pressed.
“Yes,” Gideon replied. He had to wait again for the babble to die down before he could go on. “The atmosphere and soil composition, what little we’ve tested, is remarkably similar to our own. With minor adjustments to compensate for the differences in temperature, radiation, and air quality, humans could quite easily survive—”
“Don’t you find that a little too convenient,” a foreign representative near the front cut in. His suit was tailored, his dark hair and beard carefully trimmed, and his posture was formal and rigid, unlike the jostling crowd surrounding him. Also unlike the press, he didn’t have a recorder of his own. He was flanked by two equally well-groomed bodyguards, one of whom casually held a recorder at waist level.
“Considering the nature of the Gateway,” Gideon replied. “I most certainly do not.”
Gideon didn’t know which country the man represented, but he wasn’t surprised by the skepticism. A number of nations had publicly denounced the U.S. for sponsoring the Gateway project. Most of the dissenters considered the project scientific grandstanding, a “reckless and foolhardy leap from a scaffold of postulation with no groundwork in solid theory,” as their official joint report put it. But nearly every country backing the report was a current or former rival of the U.S., and their respective scientific communities were conspicuously absent from the report.
“The beauty of the Gateway design is its simplicity,” Gideon went on. “It doesn’t target specific locations. It simply opens a portal in its current location, a door through the fold in space that’s already there.”
“You’re referring to the Mirror Worlds principle,” another reporter in the back shouted. The members of the press had organized themselves by a hierarchy of influence and prestige. The back of the room belonged to the less well known, the less respected: the gossip and alternative science rags.
“We come seeking science. You give us fiction,” the scowling representative sneered.
“The concept of mirror worlds is not far off,” Gideon replied to the reporter, ignoring the animosity of the representative. “But ‘similar worlds’ would be more precise. Our hypothesis hinged on the idea that folds in space naturally form between like bodies in the universe. The Gateway simply opens a door between two bodies already linked by such a fold. In other words, if we took the Gateway to the surface of Mars and activated it there, it would open a door to a planet elsewhere in the universe with similar characteristics to Mars: mass, composition, speed of rotation, etc.”
“Just one similar body?” the same reporter asked. “Isn’t it possible, considering the size of the known universe, that millions of similar bodies could exist.”
“Of course,” Gideon replied. “Our hypothesis was that a fold would link only two such bodies, but we aren’t taking any chances. Once we established a stable connection twelve days ago, we kept the link active to make sure we maintain contact with the same planet.”
“Are you claiming you’ve had a door open to an alien world for twelve days?” the representative rumbled, his face flushing. “What gives your United States the right to risk the lives of everyone on the planet? You don’t know what kind of disease and infection could pass through your gateway.”
“The link remained active,” Gideon clarified, “not the door. We closed the interstellar door almost immediately and maintained only a trickle of energy into the aperture to maintain the link. We have opened the door only three times since then, and only for brief periods. We have detected no contagion crossing the threshold, but even if something had come through, our lab is secure.”
The flushed rep’s eyes narrowed, his mouth forming an angry line. “We shall see,” he breathed, but he was close enough for Gideon to make out the low words.
Gideon turned his attention to the rest of the clamoring throng and pointed to another reporter in the middle of the group.
“You haven’t mentioned the element you discovered,” the woman said. “Many people are calling it the next God particle.”
Gideon smiled as he answered. For Hale, finding life elsewhere in the universe was the greatest possible discovery they might make. For Gideon, finding a new element to add to the periodic table would be hard to top. “I wouldn’t put our discovery on the same level as the Higgs boson, but we do have evidence of a new element.”
“One you can’t detect directly,” the woman countered. “Sounds like a Higgs situation to my readers.”
“The element we’ve detected is simply that, an element,” Gideon continued. “But it is one we’ve never seen before. We haven’t been able to detect it directly because it doesn’t seem to exist long in its original state. It bonds with and alters any other element it encounters in a seemingly random way, usually resulting in the formation of yet other known elements. This trait inspired its temporary name: genesis.”
“If you can’t detect it,” the representative growled, “how do you know it hasn’t come through your door?”
“We can’t detect the element, but we can detect the energy it releases,” Gideon replied. “When the element interacts with others, it gives off a unique energy signature. Regardless of which elements it encounters or what other elements result, it always releases the same energy.”
“Is this element related to dark matter in some way?” the woman asked.
“Another of your readers’ beliefs?” Gideon asked with a smile. Several people laughed. “We don’t believe so,” Gideon answered. “As I said, the energy the element gives off is unique, and we haven’t detected it anywhere else. Because the element exists only for a fraction of a second in most cases, we first assumed it was a product of the door itself, that when we tore through the fold in space, the element was released or created in the process. But we have since detected background levels of the element’s energy in the atmosphere of the planet on the other side of the door, indicating the element was present there in significant amounts in the past. As you can see, we have much more to learn.”
“That’s fascinating stuff, I’m sure,” one reporter bellowed over the others. “But what about life? Isn’t that Colonel Hale’s focus on this project?”
At mention of Hale and the search for extraterrestrial life, the excitement level in the room increased further, as did the anger darkening the face of the representative still glaring at Gideon.
“It is indeed,” Gideon replied. He motioned to one of the technicians standing by, and an image of Hale’s machine appeared on the large screen beside the podium. “This is SETI VII, or just ‘Seven,’ as we cal
l it, Colonel Hale’s most impressive creation to date.”
The image showed Seven in both quadruped and biped modes, its polished metal frame an amalgamation of Hale’s previous canine- and mantis-inspired designs.
“Seven is the most advanced Autonomous Scout Rover to date. Its ability to seamlessly switch from bipedal to quadrupedal locomotion allows it to traverse nearly any terrain it encounters. With the latest full spectrum sensor suite and our most sensitive detection and image processing software, Seven processes its environment in greater detail than any drone before it. But you know all that,” he said.
The reporters chuckled. As advanced as Seven was mechanically, that wasn’t what had them all abuzz.
“With Seven, Colonel Hale went a step beyond the artificial intelligence processors of previous ASRs. He wanted Seven to be able to react to its environment and adapt in ways artificial intelligence had failed to do in the past. And he succeeded where no one has before,” Gideon said, “by incorporating a biomechanical processor that is, in essence, an organic brain.”
“Abomination,” the representative snarled, but whatever followed was drowned out by the competing shouts of the reporters vying for Gideon’s attention.
“With Hale’s processor, Seven isn’t just programmed and sent on its way,” Gideon continued when he could hear his own voice again. “We still upload mission information to its memory banks, as with previous models, but we also train and teach Seven, much as one would any other soldier.”
Gideon inwardly winced at his choice of words and glanced at the row of generals seated along the wall to his left. Their gazes were fixed to the screen beside Gideon that showed Seven in action on the desert testing grounds. Gideon knew what they were thinking. He’d known all along that the potential for weaponizing Hale’s design was a major reason the Gateway project received such generous funding. But he didn’t have to like it. He had yet to master Hale’s easy acceptance of their superiors’ motives.
