Captured (The Prometheus Project Book 2)

by Richards, Douglas E

  She nodded. “It’d be great.”

  “I thought the same thing,” admitted Ryan. “But think about this: what if you couldn’t feel any pain and you put your hand on a hot burner without realizing it?”

  After thinking about this for a few seconds, Regan could see where her brother was headed and her green eyes sparkled in delight. If you could feel pain, no distraction in the world could prevent you from instantly snatching your hand away from the burner. But if you couldn’t, you might just leave it there, with horrible consequences.

  “Cool,” she said. “It’s a warning system.”

  “Yeah. It’s obvious when you think about it,” said Ryan. “But I never did before. Pain lets you know when you’re doing something harmful to yourself and also if you’re damaged inside—in a way that’s impossible to ignore. Suppose you were a quarterback and you fractured your throwing arm. Without pain you’d never know it. You’d keep throwing, which would just make the injury worse. But if you could feel pain, you’d be screaming and checking yourself into a hospital for an X-ray.”

  “I thought quarterbacks were supposed to be tough,” said Regan, grinning. “Do they really scream when they fracture their arms?”

  Ryan laughed. “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’ve never actually been close enough to a quarterback who was fracturing his arm to tell.”

  “We may never know,” quipped Regan. “It probably isn’t easy finding a quarterback willing to do that experiment.”

  Ryan smiled.

  “Okay,” continued Regan on a more serious note. “But once pain warns you that you’re hurt, it sure would be nice if you could just turn it off.”

  “We talked about that, too,” said Ryan. “It turns out—”

  A thunderous burst of telepathy exploded into their minds!

  Ryan instantly forgot what he was saying and he and his sister barely managed to keep their bikes from crashing.

  “WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. WARNING. UNAUTHOR—”

  Just like that, the immensely powerful telepathic message stopped, as abruptly as it had begun.

  And at the same time, the faint glow in their minds that represented the reassuring presence of the Teacher, the city’s extraordinary computer, vanished, leaving nothing but a cold, unsettling emptiness in its place.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Possible Intruder

  Regan stopped her bike abruptly and realized that Ryan had done the same.

  “What just happened?” she said worriedly.

  Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad. Can you still feel the Teacher?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t either. Do you think it’s dead?”

  Regan considered. It wasn’t clear if it was ever alive, but she knew what he meant. “Maybe. But I doubt it. It’s just too advanced for that. Maybe it needed to leave the city for a while. Maybe it doesn’t want us to be aware of it anymore for some reason. It’s hard to say.”

  Ryan nodded unhappily. “What do you make of the ‘Unauthorized Entry’ warning?”

  Regan shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it came from the city. And whoever sent it really wanted to make sure a telepath would get it. I didn’t know telepathy could be so loud.”

  “Me neither,” he said, wincing. “I wonder what caused it. Did someone from the Prometheus team go somewhere they weren’t supposed to? Enter a structure they weren’t supposed to?”

  Regan thought about this. When they were in contact with the Teacher, it had told them the city was built by a race called the Qwervy. The Qwervy had dropped off a single tiny robot—a nano-robot—on Earth, and the nano-robot was programmed to make other nano-robots, and so on, until there were trillions of them: enough to build an enormous, elaborate underground city. Once the city was built, the nano-robots, or nanobots for short, served as the repair crew. Although harmless, they looked like a swarm of voracious insects as they went about rebuilding anything that needed repair.

  The Qwervy used the city as a secret observation post. Using one of the many portals that connected the city to other worlds, they would check in on humanity every hundred years or so, trying to determine when humanity was mature enough to join the galactic community of advanced civilizations. Once Earth became a member, visitors could come at any time. Until then, however, only authorized Qwervy and a small number of others were permitted to come to Earth.

  But the Qwervy’s secret observation post was no longer secret. Humans had managed to find the city and break into it, something they shouldn’t have been able to do for a long, long time and something that had surprised even the Qwervy. Their father, Ben Resnick, in fact, had been the man who had calculated how to break through the city’s force-field barrier.

  The Qwervy thought humanity was a promising species but also had a dark and dangerous side it needed to master. They had decided to let the trespassers remain in the city to see if the humans could learn from the city’s technology rather than destroy themselves with it.

  “I don’t think anyone on the team caused it,” said Regan finally. “The Teacher gave us full permission to explore the city. If there was something inside that was totally off-limits, it would’ve told us. Besides,” she added, “it can use technology we can only dream of. If someone from the Prometheus team wanted to go somewhere the Teacher didn’t want them to go, it could easily stop them.”

  “So what’s going on? If the warning wasn’t caused by anything the Prometheus team did, then it had to be caused by someone, or some … thing,” he said worriedly, “entering the city through a portal.”

  “Maybe,” said Regan, unconvinced. “But maybe not. Exactly when did the Teacher disappear, before or after the warning?”

  Ryan stared off into space, a confused look on his face. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “The warning was so loud in my brain that I wasn’t paying attention to whether the Teacher was still there or not. After it ended, I realized the Teacher was gone, but it might have gone just before the warning rather than just after. I don’t know.”

  Regan thought about it for a few seconds and then shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not sure either,” she admitted. “But I can’t believe anything unauthorized could make it through a portal with the Teacher still here. Maybe the Teacher decided to leave, or had to repair itself for some reason, or change its programming, or … something … and this caused a false alarm.”

  “Then why did the warning just suddenly stop like it did?”

  Regan shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe whatever caused the false alarm fixed itself. Maybe, with the Teacher gone, a blade of grass from an alien planet blew through a portal before the automatic portal security system could take over.”

  Ryan considered. She could be right. It could just be a false alarm. The fire alarm had sounded at school several times over the years, and so far it had always been due to either a false alarm or a fire drill.

  Ryan frowned. On the other hand, this didn’t mean you could just ignore it. You always had to assume there really was a fire and leave the building. “I sure hope you’re right,” he said. “But we still need to check it out, just in case.”

  Regan nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But exactly how are we going to do that?”

  “Good question,” replied Ryan. He shook his head in frustration. “I only wish I had a good answer for you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  A Painful Assault

  The Resnick siblings began riding toward the alien city once again.

  “What about telling Dr. Harris and the team?” suggested Regan.

  “What would we tell them?” said Ryan. “We can’t tell them we can’t feel the Teacher anymore, because they don’t know about the Teacher. We can’t tell them about the telepathic warning because they don’t know we’ve become telepathic.”

  Regan frowned. He was right. The Qwervy had wanted to see how humanity handled the discovery of the city all on it
s own, so had instructed the Teacher to cease all communication with them and not to help humanity in any way. The Teacher had asked them to promise to keep its existence a secret and they had agreed. Since their telepathy stemmed from their interactions with the Teacher they had decided not to tell anyone about this either.

  They hated having to keep secrets from their parents and the team, but they had made a promise to the Teacher and it was one they intended to keep. After a few minutes of further discussion, however, they agreed on a strategy they thought would allow them to determine if the telepathic warning was a false alarm or not.

  They reached the main Proact gate and were quickly waved through by the guards. Proact was a company that served as cover for the scientists on the Prometheus team, but also employed top scientists from every field who knew nothing about Prometheus. These scientists worked on advanced projects using human science and technology. The vast Proact grounds were enclosed by a razor-wire fence and protected by laser alarms and roving guards. The only access to the alien city, far underground—an enormous elevator housed inside a concrete bunker—was within this perimeter, but was protected far more extensively.

  Once inside Proact, they passed through several additional checkpoints, provided several passwords, and had their fingerprints and retinas scanned electronically, a ritual they had come to know well. Finally, after ten minutes, they were at the last phase of their journey, inside the enormous Prometheus elevator as it plummeted downward toward the alien city.

  Regan looked up toward the multiple cameras she knew were hidden inside the elevator’s ceiling and waved happily at the elevator guards who were monitoring their arrival down below. The kids were a favorite of the members of Prometheus security, and Regan knew that whoever was on elevator duty would appreciate any break from what was clearly the most boring security rotation of them all.

  At last the elevator stopped and they stepped off into a massive, man-made cavern, the size of a baseball stadium, illuminated by powerful electric lights and filled with machinery and high-tech equipment.

  They immediately recognized the two heavily armed guards who faced them as they exited the elevator, Captain Dan Walpus and Lieutenant Duncan Martin. Both were tall, clean-cut and athletic.

  All of the members of Prometheus security were hand-picked by Colonel Carl Sharp, the head of security who had quickly become among their closest friends on the team. Colonel Sharp knew that he and his security team were absolutely necessary for a project of this importance, but he also didn’t want the scientists to feel as though they had suddenly joined the military. To ensure they would be as comfortable around his men as possible, he insisted that his team wear civilian clothing and that everyone, including the two youngest members of the team, call them by their first names instead of their military titles.

  Both men smiled warmly. “Hello kids,” said Dan cheerfully. “How was school?”

  “Great,” they both said at once. “How are you guys doing?” added Regan.

  Duncan shrugged. “You know. Same old, same old. The elevator goes up, the elevator comes down. The elevator goes up, the elevator comes down. So far, no bad guys.”

  “Fantastic,” said Regan grinning. “Good work. I bet the place would be crawling with bad guys if it weren’t for you.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Dan playfully.

  “You know, that reminds me of a joke,” said Regan. She paused for a moment to make sure she had it straight in her head. “A girl living in Pennsylvania sees a man dressed from head to toe in bright purple polka-dots,” she began. “The girl asks the man why he is dressed like that. The man says, ‘I’m dressed like this to scare off all the Kangaroos.’ The girl raises her eyebrows and says, ‘Kangaroos? But there aren’t any Kangaroos in Pennsylvania!’ To which the man replies, ‘Exactly! You see how well it’s working.’”

  Both guards grinned from ear to ear. “Have we ever told you you’re our favorite young woman on the team?” said Dan.

  “You have,” said Regan, her eyes twinkling. “And I keep telling you I’m the only young woman on the team.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true,” countered Dan lightheartedly.

  Ryan shook his head. He had witnessed similar exchanges all of his life. Regan had a playful, friendly personality that was infectious. He had never known anyone who could just naturally charm people the way his sister could. But as much as he didn’t want to break up the fun, they were running a bit late and he was anxious to enter the alien city.

  “Do you know if Carl is here today?” he asked Dan.

  Dan nodded. “He’s inside Prometheus. He should be there until late tonight.”

  “Thanks,” said Ryan as he and Regan headed toward the far end of the cavern and the only entrance into the alien city.

  They soon approached a familiar array of high-powered lasers, microwave force emitters, high-tech generators, and other advanced equipment unleashing a furious assault on the opaque force-field wall. Ben Resnick had figured out how to precisely tune this energy to counter-balance the frequency of the shield, inactivating, or nullifying, a large, rectangular section of it and creating an entrance to the city. This massive onslaught of energy had to be applied continuously to prevent the gap in the force-field from instantly closing.

  As always, an ever-changing rainbow of colors danced across the opening, obscuring what was beyond. They calmly stepped through it and into Prometheus, a magnificent city sprawled out farther than the eye could see in every direction, including up. By some miracle of alien technology the city was immensely larger than the hole it had carved out deep in the earth of Pennsylvania.

  A large row of top-of-the-line, electric-powered golf-carts were now parked beside the entrance: not only larger and faster than standard golf-carts, but far quieter as well. Beside these were parked a number of huge, electric trucks, all green, with rectangular cargo beds about three times the size of a standard pick-up. Four adults could fit comfortably in the vehicle’s large front compartment, either sitting or standing. The team called these unique electric trucks “Haulers” because they were used to haul heavy scientific equipment around.

  Both kids loved driving the golf-carts, but it was Ryan’s turn, and he jumped into the driver’s seat while his sister sat beside him. No matter how often they traveled within Prometheus the unusual and spectacular architecture and the exotic alien vegetation never got boring. They passed buildings that shimmered and others that changed colors depending on the angle from which they were viewed. Buildings that appeared to be floating and others that sparkled brilliantly as though made of diamonds. Some of the buildings were simple and elegant while others were in the shape of awe-inspiring geometric figures, like impossibly complex three-dimensional snowflakes that had come to life.

  They had agreed to meet their parents at three-thirty and they were running a little late. Ryan quickly accelerated the cart to its top speed, and before too long the familiar zoo building he and his sister had discovered during their first adventure in the city came into view. As usual, amazingly real-looking holographic images of alien animals appeared one by one in front of the door, showing anyone passing what could be found inside.

  Small though it was, the zoo building contained numerous doors, or portals, that each led to a different primitive planet. The Qwervy allowed visitors on these planets since none of them had intelligent life. Circular force-field barriers, similar to the Prometheus shield, completely surrounded the portal entrances on each planet to protect visitors from any dangerous animals, but a tram could be used to cross these force-field domes to explore.

  Ryan passed the zoo—which was now showing the three-dimensional image of a giant creature, covered in red fur, with a body like a polar bear and a face like a crocodile—and stopped the cart in front of their parents’ new laboratory building. It was octagonal, like a stop-sign, but silver instead of red. Their mother, Amanda Resnick, had specialized in predicting what alien life would be like, but she no l
onger had to predict: she was the first biologist on Earth who could actually study the real thing. She had set up shop in the building next door to the zoo and their father had set up his lab there as well.

  The building appeared not to have any entrances, but appearances were deceiving. As the kids walked up to the middle of a solid wall a large panel seemed to dissolve, creating an entrance. Once they passed through it the wall rematerialized behind them. Regan had dubbed these “invisible doorways.” While they were quite visible, it was impossible for anyone to know they were doorways just by looking at them, so the name was somehow appropriate.

  Their parents were both wearing long white lab coats. Their father was sitting at a large, stainless-steel table in the center of the room studying a computer screen. Their mother, a short, attractive woman with soft features and blue eyes, was peering carefully through a powerful microscope at one end of the table.

  The kids started to say hello. From out of nowhere their heads exploded in pain! Something was hammering at their brains and bringing pure agony in its wake.

  They grabbed their ears as the merciless blast of searing pain hit them with such force they weren’t even able to scream.

  The pain was blinding, as if red-hot fireplace pokers were being jammed into each ear, stabbing relentlessly at their brains.

  And there wasn’t a doubt in either of their minds that if whatever was causing the pain didn’t stop, they couldn’t possibly survive it much longer.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Alien Device

  Ryan’s legs felt rubbery and he knew he was nearing collapse.

  “Ryan, leave the building. NOW!” came a shouted telepathic command from his sister, already outside of the building, which barely managed to find his conscious mind through the immense pain crushing his brain.

  Somehow his legs obeyed her command and the next thing he knew he had joined his sister outside.