by Eddie Patin
In America, one of the last superpowers holding out against joining the United Earth Alliance, several individuals across the country are going about their lives, unaware that UEA scientists are quietly conducting the first real test of their new Dimension Drive technology that will change everything...
Do you love guns, tactical realism, and monsters? Are you a fan of cosmic horror and dark fantasy / sci-fi? Love the Mist? Lovecraft? Doom? Stranger Things? EMP and Prepper Survival? This story is full of terror, suspense, and bad language. If you can dig it, strap in for a ride to Hell!
(Read on for a preview)
1 - Chad Murray
UEA Science Research Lab, Geneva, Switzerland
Portal Zero sat pristine and dormant before the team of UEA scientists, soldiers, and an international news crew. No one had no idea that everything they perceived as reality was about to be mangled and turned upside down by the infinite horrors of the cosmic unknown...
“So we’re not actually doing it live,” Chad said, tightening the pivot points of the tripod.
Looking at the bright digital display, he tilted and pitched the camera little by little until the composition was just right. Melinda adjusted her shirt, her bra, and the lapel microphone tucked into her bright red blazer. She moved a strand of medium-length dark hair out of her face, back to the side where the makeup team intended it to stay.
“No, Chad. This is for later.” She pressed her ruby red lips together and glared at him. The anchorwoman gave him that look—the look he’d seen plenty in these last two months that spoke volumes of resentment and annoyance.
Too young, her eyes said. Just a dumb kid. A skinny little hipster playing with the big dogs. Even though Melinda had known Chad for several years when he was in high school and throughout college, even though she was a family friend, the young man couldn’t shake the feeling that she hated him for getting a hand-up in the network. It wasn’t his fault that she'd agreed to take him on when his uncle asked her to.
Melinda could have said no. Chad would have understood and started as an intern like everyone else.
There were no other twenty-two year old technicians working for senior anchors, after all.
Later, looking back on this moment as he sat on the irradiated ground of the California wasteland, Chad would laugh at how none of it mattered; how his worrisome little house of cards would soon be ripped to pieces like the rest of the world...
But for now, here he was, deep underground in a secret research facility for the United Earth Alliance, surrounded by soldiers and scientists, shooting something super-important for one of the largest media networks on the planet.
No pressure.
“This is Melinda Ballard reporting live at the UEA’s Science Research Lab under the UEA Office in Geneva, Switzerland.” She smacked her lips. “Geneva, Switzerland. Switzerland.” Melinda was looking at the camera even though Chad wasn’t recording, repeating bits and pieces of her introduction as if warming up her tongue. Chad knew that she’d been one of the senior anchors for the United News Association for what ... six years now? But even still, this particular gig must be a big deal for her too.
He wondered if she ever got nervous.
With a perfectly manicured hand, Melinda reached over to the table out of view of the camera and grabbed a bottle of water with a straw. She carefully pursed her lips and took a drink.
“Then why do you keep saying live?” Chad asked. He scratched at his scruffy face and felt his man bun to make sure his hair was still in place.
She smirked at him, her crow’s feet barely showing under the makeup.
“Because, kiddo, it’s for the viewers. Makes them trust the news if it's live. We'll still have to edit this later.” She put the bottle back on the table and composed herself, adjusting her ear piece. “This is Melinda Ballard reporting live at the UEA’s...”
The camera was pretty-much good to go. Chad had positioned Melinda a third into the frame, and behind her, viewers could clearly see parts of the desks and computer terminals, the scientists or technicians (whatever they’re called these days, Chad thought) working at their individual tasks. In the center of the shot was the gate, up at the front of the room.
Gate. Portal. Whatever.
The room wasn’t very large. Chad and Melinda were set up in the back on the left, and the floor sloped down to the far wall—toward the gate—with three rows of technician terminals and equipment along the way that reminded Chad of a college classroom. There were three long rows of desks, with a central walkway down the middle. The difference between this deep, underground science lab and a small university classroom was that up at the front of the class—where a professor might normally stand at a whiteboard or something—there was only the gate...
Portal Zero.
When Chad was a kid, he'd watched a movie called Stargate. That movie had a huge portal mechanism with a great, big runway and a large, rotating ring-thing full of Egyptian glyphs. Whenever the characters—the soldiers and such—walked into the portal, it was a huge deal: walking up that runway, rolling up their massive pallets of equipment...
There was certainly no shortage of techno-stuff in this room, but this place and its coming big test was rather lackluster compared to Hollywood’s version. The portal itself was a large ring about seven feet in diameter, just like in the movies, made of steel or some sort of metal alloy, but there were no fancy glyphs or runes or other decorations to make it look magical and cool.
It was just a big metal ring. Columns and cases of electrical equipment and sensors were attached to it on the outside of both sides, bolted onto the heavy steel frame. There wasn’t any sort of magical field inside, humming and buzzing and waiting. There was no black hole, or even a fancy, twisting aperture. On the other side of the ring was just the back wall of the room, about two feet behind it: a solid concrete wall painted UEA baby blue. A huge array of wiring was connected to the hardware on the outside of the ring, all neatly gathered into two thick tentacles of Cat 5 Ethernet cables, power cables, and other wires that Chad didn’t recognize at a glance. The bundles were zip-tied together every twelve inches or so and led to the various technicians' desks and terminals. Both of the thick, collected cordage bundles were attached firmly to the concrete floor with black duct tape.
There was no Hollywood bullshit—no regular pointless beeping machines, no holograms, no big laser maps of space with radar stuff or whatever...
It was just the gate ... and a bunch of computers.
That wasn't to say that it wasn’t impressive...
This was definitely the first real, live inter-dimensional portal Chad had ever seen—the only portal he’d ever seen that wasn’t on TV or in a video game.
If it worked...
Not actually live, Chad corrected himself in his head.
“Alright, ready to do the intro segment?” Melinda asked.
“Sure.”
The senior anchor loosened up her shoulders. Chad looked around at the scientists, all calmly working on their computers, occasionally getting up to talk to a neighbor nearby, or the project director, standing at the back of the room behind them. Four UEA soldiers stood quietly near the entrance of the room behind the news team, two on either side of the sliding glass door, each holding what Chad assumed was some sort of machine gun. They were dressed in blue-grey jumpsuits, wore some sort of ... torso armor full of pouches and gear, and had the UEA-colored pale blue helmets on their heads.
Melinda took a breath and smiled. “Are my tits okay?”
Chad’s eyes glanced down then up again. He nodded, and signaled her to go.
The anchorwoman stood smiling for a while after the red light turned on, then came alive with energy.
“This is Melinda Ballard reporting live at the UEA’s Science Research Lab under the UEA Office in Geneva, Switzerland. Today we’ll be reporting from the UEA buildings of both Switzerland and from the UEA Headquarters in Manhattan, New York, because scientists and organizations
all around the world are coming together for the first ever test of the newest technology to advance humanity as a whole. That’s right—I’m talking about the UEA’s new Dimension Drive technology, ‘Dim Drive’ for short.
“Behind me is a team of talented UEA technicians all under the direction of UEA Science Director Dr. Stefan Freudenstein, one of Germany’s top scientists, who has been working on this technology for the last two years." Melinda smirked. "And what is Dim Drive you ask? When faced with the irrefutable evidence of man-made climate change and resource scarcity of the twentieth century, as proven by UEA and United Nations scientists of the time, ten years ago the newly formed United Earth Alliance announced its United Pilgrimage Initiative, declaring its focus on finding habitable worlds for humankind and the development of fast and reliable deep space travel to get us there...”
Chad watched the camera display intently and looked up when one of the scientists walked by. The man looked directly into the camera, and his white lab coat glared in the lights for just an instant.
A little messy for the take, but no big deal.
Everything was going fine.
Irrefutable evidence? Chad thought. Those were strong words. Was that right? He shrugged. Well, Melinda would know, he supposed. The young man had grown up hearing about global warming and humans raping the world and all that all his life...
“Now,” Melinda went on to say, performing flawlessly for the camera, “the science team is getting everything squared away, and the actual test will take place at any moment! Past the desks behind me is the gate itself, appropriately termed ‘Portal Zero’, which will—hopefully—create a direct means of instantaneous transportation to the other identical gate waiting for us in New York!”
Melinda paused, smiling and nodding her head at the camera for a while. Chad looked down at his laptop screen, and saw that one of the anchors back at the studio in Los Angeles was asking her a question. He had the volume turned low so that it wouldn’t become a distraction, since there was a bit of a transmission delay.
“Yes, indeed,” Melinda suddenly said with a smile. She pivoted to the side a little, allowing the shot---as Chad had set it up—to focus more on the portal behind her. There were three small, metal crates sitting on the concrete floor close to Portal Zero, one of them perforated with dozens of holes designed to allow airflow. “The test will consist of not only connecting the two portals, but the scientists will also be passing those three crates through Portal Zero to reappear in New York so that the science team there can check for any flaws in transmission. One of the crates is full of fresh, organic food, another is holding the refrigerated heart of a pig to study the portal’s effect on viable organ transplants, and the other...” She paused, stepping back fully into the shot and giving the camera a totally goober smile. “...holds a puppy!”
The anchor woman stood smiling and nodding for several seconds, then flashed a big smile and spoke again.
“It certainly is! He’s a young Jack Russel Terrier, and he’s so cute! We’ll all be rooting for little Max, for sure!”
With that, Melinda stood for a while smiling then turned away to the scientists.
Chad heard the faint voice of the anchor back at home on his laptop. “We now go to our own correspondent, Katherine Hall who's live in New York, to see the other side of the Dim Drive Portal Zero. What’s happening over there, Katherine?”
“How long, guys?” Melinda asked the group of technicians with a low, disinterested voice.
Chad heard the correspondence with Katherine playing faintly on his laptop while he thought about the pack of smokes in his jacket pocket. They were saying something about not doing a smaller trial because of ‘critical mass’ or something...
The director’s voice spoke up from the back of the room, thick with his German accent. “It looks like we’ll be ready in about twenty minutes, Ms. Ballard, give or take.”
To let the news team create their own lighting, Freudenstein had turned off the fluorescent ceiling lights at the back of the room. The imposing man now stood in the dark near the soldiers, watching his team work with his arms crossed. The senior scientist’s face was severe, and he was thin and lean. The small spectacles perched on his nose reflected the light of a dozen computer screens.
“Should I stop it?” Chad asked Melinda, who was taking another sip from her water bottle, being careful not to move her hair or mess up her makeup.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ll start it up again in fifteen minutes or so. That was good.”
Chad was dying for a cigarette, but he knew that he couldn’t smoke down here, and wouldn’t be taking the lift back to the surface any time soon. Instead, he pulled out his vape, pressing the LED-lit button, and took a long drag on the propylene glycol smoke that tasted like caramel cappuccino. The device sizzled, and he blew a thick cloud of vapor toward the ceiling, earning him some looks from the soldiers.
“Do not do that,” the director said suddenly, the disdain in his voice as thick as his accent.
Chad nodded, embarrassed, and stuffed the vape back into his pocket.
“Yep,” Chad said. “Good.”
“Any minute now, Ms. Ballard,” the science director said.
The room had certainly become more animated in the last five minutes, the technicians all declaring when they were done with their individual duties and migrating to help each other. The energy of all of the people working on this project was starting to buzz, and the soldiers started standing a little straighter as well.
Chad heard a little bit of techno-speak here and there, but found that he could keep up with very little of it, even as an AV guy. It seemed that most of what the scientists were talking about involved physics, which was never Chad’s strong suit.
Plus, he just wasn’t paying much attention to what the others were doing.
Melinda spent most of her downtime sitting on a folding chair and playing on her phone.
Chad sat at his laptop, idly watching one of the anchors in L.A., Brent West, discuss a criticism of the president's latest rejection of the UEA’s repeated encouragement to let go of its antiquated borders and join in the politico-economic union of the United Earth Alliance. Chad wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that, but everyone on TV at least sure supported joining the world government...
Sometimes, Chad felt a little ashamed that he was still part of a xenophobic culture that resisted the ways of the future. He could feel it in the eyes of all of these UEA people—the soldiers, scientists, and other individuals he’d encountered on this trip. Their disapproval was palpable.
But something about the U.S. joining the UEA didn’t feel right either...
The young man didn’t really know what he thought about it. But he’d support his network and stand up for his job—that was for sure.
“Thank you, doctor,” the anchorwoman said. She looked at Chad and her dark, thin eyebrows arched. “Ready, kid?”
“Uh yeah. Should be good—hang on...” Chad stood up from the flimsy plastic and aluminum chair and pushed it back out of the way. He double-checked the camera, checked the levels and output on the laptop, and made sure the shot hadn’t moved. Everything was ready. “Just tell me when.”
Melinda straightened her red blazer, checked her microphone, and took another sip of water. She watched the science team.
“Ready, doctor,” one of the men exclaimed.
Melinda pointed at Chad.
He hit record, and signaled back at her.
The anchor woman, smiling in the lights for several seconds, blinked, breathed evenly, waited for several seconds, then opened her mouth to speak.
“Initiate phase one,” Freudenstein said suddenly in the background.
“Thank you, Katherine. This is Melinda Ballard back in Geneva, Switzerland, reporting to you live from the science lab facility under the UEA Office. We are seconds away from the first ever test of UEA’s new Dimension Drive—Dim Drive—standing in front of what the UEA is calling ‘Por
tal Zero’, along with the science team working hard to bring this new benevolent technology to better the whole of humanity...”
All of the scientists behind Melinda were intensely focused on their work. Some of them typed furiously. Others were monitoring various graphics and text feedback that Chad didn’t understand.
“Phase one complete,” one of the technicians said.
“Hold it for a minute,” the director said, his accent was thick, but his voice was intense and cut through the room like a laser.
Melinda was still talking. “Dim Drive is short for Dimension Drive, which is a major project of the UEA’s United Pilgrimage Initiative, and is the latest technology involving space travel. After the test, we’ll be showing you a graphic explanation about how this new technology works, but I can tell you that it’s not warp drive or some other form of faster than speed of light travel from the movies. The simple explanation is that it involves bending space through the use of what’s called an ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’. Basically, they're creating a shortcut, like a worm hole, between two points in space, or space-time as physicists—”
“How are we doing, Plessner?” the director asked from the back of the room. He uncrossed his arms and moved up into the empty central walkway between the desks. “Is it holding?”
“Stable, sir,” the man responded, looking up from his computer screen. “Should I initiate Phase two?”
“Do it,” Freudenstein responded. “Keep an eye on the levels.”
Melinda went on. “Respectable scientists have calculated that our planet Earth will not be able to sustain the world population much longer. According to the UEA, in just seventeen years all of Earth’s natural resources will be consumed, and we will be suffering from lack of food, as well as the weather extremes caused by manmade global warming...”
