Cobalt: The First in the Trinity Series Novels

by CG Blade

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jackie asked as she watched Emily play with it like a child handling rain soaked dirt for the first time.

  “It’s amazing—wow,” Emily said staring at the sparkling gel. “How did you—find—this?” Emily now was contemplating whether she should join Petra, lie down next to her, and smother both of them in the extraordinary substance that was seeping into her subcutaneous. It was warming and tingling as it flushed throughout her nerve endings and fingertips. She was experiencing overwhelming feelings of pleasure and youth. She wanted to be a part of it. It was unlike a…drug. Wonder what it’s like, she thought, to be her in that tub. I want to love this stuff. She slowly moved her hands closer to her face staring at her fingers through the gel when Bar walked back down the stone steps. He was looking at an addict. Emily was enjoying the Cobalt...a lot.

  “Emily? Are you okay?” He asked trying to ‘wake’ her back up. Her eyes started closing and her head was tilting back. She had the look of a woman on the verge of an intense orgasm. Her hands were almost to the point of smearing her own face neck and body with the eager blue invader. “Emily what the…?” Bar asked, grabbing her arms and pulling them down hard.

  “What? What are you doing? Leave me alone!” She barked back at him.

  “Bar clean up her arms it’s a normal reaction. To certain individuals this compound is very… shall I say…hypnotic or inviting at first. It affects everyone differently. Clean her up and put gloves on her. She’ll be okay,” Jackie instructed calmly.

  Under protest from Emily Bar cleaned her up leaving blue stained white hospital towels in a pile on the floor.

  “I’m—I’m—sorry Bar.” Emily looked like a puppy dog that just gotten scolded realizing what it had just done.

  “It’s okay,” Bar told her. “I think we’ve got a good signal now. I changed the cable upstairs to a port that was not being used. Let’s keep going.” Bar brushed off the incident as a chemical reaction gone wild. Emily seemed like someone who had just been caught with their hand in the ‘proverbial cookie jar’ and did what she was told. Her arms and hands looked twenty years younger.

  Jackie was now remotely monitoring Petra through her own Vidset tied to Bar’s network. She could witness Petra’s recovery in real time and was giving him instructions with Tinker now sitting next to her in the lab office again.

  “I’ve got three petabytes per second,” Bar told Jackie.

  “Cover her head with the ice Bar we’ve got to overclock Ter!”

  Bar began pouring bags of ice over Petra’s head and packing it down in the hopes that Ter would speed up the process and rejuvenate Petra’s body faster. Overclocking was an old trick programmers used when they needed more bus speed on a computer circuit. A liquid ice cooled processor always ran faster than a normal processor without it.

  “Great. Now initiate the program again.”

  “There’s—something—happening here!” Petra’s body was shuttering as if it was coming back to life. Her legs shook and the tub was vibrating the floor below it. Ice was melting quickly over her head and chunks of it went flying and cracked in pieces when it hit the floor. “We—I—don’t believe it!” Emily yelled again. The torso of this broken blonde patriot was thrashing back and forth against the sides of the tub violently.

  “Can you see her eyes?” Jackie asked Emily.

  Emily tried to hold her head steady the best she could while she flipped an eyelid open. “One…two…” Emily counted the pulses as best as she could as Petra shook and they all decided that they were on the right track.

  Slowly over the next thirty minutes Petra’s arms and fingers had formed and grew out of their remaining stumps. Her beautiful features and skin remained as she soaked up most of the gel in the tub during her transition. All of them let out a big sigh as Petra lay still in the tub now a complete and whole woman and very intact. Remnants of cobalt gel spots were everywhere.

  “Okay, you two. You’ve got to clean her up check her vitals and clean up all of the cobalt substance in the area.” With ten more various sized white towels, Bar and Emily wiped and washed Petra’s perfect skin. Bar discarded the towels in Hazmat bags as Jackie instructed along with all of the barrels that would join them on the flight home. “No trace of this substance can be left behind, Okay? We do not need this compound getting into the wrong hands. At least here at the lab we can control it,” they both cleaned up the area, the plastic sheeting, and surrounding equipment.

  “Her vitals are perfect,” Emily told her using an electronic monitoring clamp that sat on Petra’s forehead.

  Bar was pulling the plug out of Petra’s neck when he saw her hand reach up for his.

  “Did you two bring any Twinkie’s with you?” Petra asked trying to wipe the blue gel off her eyes and face.

  Emily laughed and started crying holding her mouth with her hands as Bar smiled back at her.

  “Welcome back,” Jackie told her.

  “Why don’t you ask them for an apple?” Ter suggested

  Bar walked around the table, pulled out a black bag, and handed it to Petra. She unzipped it, pulled out a Twinkie, ripped off the plastic wrapper, and began chewing.

  “I’ve never seen a naked woman in a tub eating Twinkies before!” Tinker said with the Irish in him coming out as he pushed Jackie’s head out of the way so he could get a better view.

  Petra stood up in the tub and walked over the edge of it. She stood in the middle of the room and waited there for a second, licking the cream filling from between her fingers. The air in the room was filling with a lingering clean fragrance similar to an untouched wintery outdoor scent from her movements. Emily and Bar were following her every move as her magnificent nude curvaceous body began to change from the ground up. Her beautiful epidermis was now changing colors to an accommodating green camouflage that they had all seen many times before.

  “Nice uniform,” Bar stated. His mouth and eyes were wide open for the entire world to see.

  “Thank you,” Petra replied. Her cap with officer insignia now adorned her head along with her green camos.

  Emily slapped Bar in the stomach with the back of her hand, as a jealous girlfriend would do in this situation. He took a step back, holding on to his gut.

  “This isn’t a strip club!” Emily told him jokingly.

  “Try out your armor,” Jackie suggested from the table Vidset snickering at Emily’s comment.

  Petra’s form quickly changed from the ground up again. The cobalt spirals and etchings followed her contours until it reached the top of her head. She tried to get a look at her elbows and shoulders overlooking her newly gloved fingers. Her eyes sparkled like cobalt gems under a light at night.

  “The programmers and I made some changes. I hope you like them. Tinker called it the ‘Phoenix Armor’ due to your ash rising and new winged epaulettes.”

  “Yes, I did that!” Tinker yelled like a child who just put a drawing on a fridge with a magnet.

  Her new armor feathered outward at the shoulders with her rank insignia and her elbows were encased with beautiful cobalt spirals as were her new gloves covering her fingers. None of her skin was exposed anymore.

  “I’m…sorry Petra. We made a huge mistake when we did your armor programming last year,” Jackie told her sorrowfully.

  “It wasn’t your fault Jackie. Where’s Jim and where’s Nelson? Is he—dead?” Petra asked now changing back into her camos.

  “You took Nelson out—or what was supposed to be Nelson. He’s was a replacement or some kind of a robot.”

  Bar and Emily were still hanging on every word and move Petra was making while still trying to clean up some of the cobalt gel remnants in and outside of the tub.

  “Jim is still in cobalt solution as well as Doctor Sanders. I think you might have saved Jim’s life. Thank You.” Jackie was almost welling up. “We also made some other changes to your programming but unfortunately we still can’t do your surgery for the brontobyte microchip upgrad
e unless you want to come back to the lab for a couple of weeks. I sent a peripheral module upgrade for Bar to install until you can get back here.”

  ”What is the new upgrade?” Petra asked staring at Jackie’s small head on top of the table.

  “Tinker assisted the team in providing you with a modified sat link that you can record on and send to us in real time so if you’re in trouble we might be able to get to you quicker. We also got rid of the annoying GPS navigation voice modulator you had. The microchip module Bar has will also add to your memory allocation but it’s only temporary.”

  “Okay. What happened to the number puzzle? You said you might have cracked the collider numbers?”

  “Bar and some of the team think it’s a coordinate number. They may be latitude and longitude numbers to be exact. If they are correct those people dying at collider sites are having a sort of breakdown right before they died and are trying to get the coordinates out in the open. Their brains may have tried to disengage the microchip or get rid of it causing them to reveal the source of the signal in the process. It would be like going to their last confession. It may be our only link to all of this. There was another unfortunate collider death at Albany last night with the same circumstances as the others.”

  “Yes they are—coordinates we think.” Bar was now reading off his virtual notepad to Petra that he pulled out of a bag next to him. “Yes—39 degrees 36’ 39” North and 115 degrees 59’ 35” West. Mercury, Nevada to be exact. Good old US of A. It’s a closed city in Nye County Nevada. It was constructed by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950 and was a test site until 1992. It closed after the nuclear ban treaty and at one time housed over 10,000 people and scientists. It was used as a testing site for nuclear research and Base Camp Mercury had launched over a dozen or so rockets to test the effects of radiation in the area until they changed the name of the town permanently to Mercury.”

  “Have you had a chance to analyze any of the liquid compounds found at the factory or the cylinder I dropped at the steps of the factory?” Petra asked.

  “There weren’t any liquids there. The whole place was cleaned up—everything was gone by the time we got here. There was just trashed equipment and bots. What did you find?” Bar asked.

  “The red liquid in the cylinders I found. They were in shipping crates. They were also in the vats being processed for…something?”

  “If it’s the same red liquid that Dreama and Nelson had inside them it’s some awful stuff. It’s very corrosive to organic or carbon based units,” Jackie added. “We have a sample here at the lab. What do you think it is?”

  “I believe someone is using it to develop super robots or replacements, if you will. Perhaps a replacement that cannot be detected easily by heat signature or maybe a type of robot that seems to take on human qualities for human replacements somehow. Jackie can you check a couple of chemical compounds for me tonight? Can you analyze them and compare them for me against each of their properties if I give you the information?”

  “Sure. Just give them to Emily or Bar before you leave and we’ll get it done.”

  “I’m going to head to Nevada if I can catch a ride back tonight. Bar I need you and Emily to give me the additional equipment modification so I can find out what Nelson was up to before I go back to the Med Lab for the upgrade surgery. Thank you all for giving me the opportunity to serve again. If Jim wakes up—”

  “—I’ll tell him when he wakes up,” Jackie interrupted her. “You do what you need to do and I’ll hold things down here.”

  “What was it like Petra?” Emily asked. “Being resurrected I mean.”

  “It was like sleeping again I guess. My vital microchip was still active and I was aware of some activity around me. It was like being paralyzed inside my own mind but not being able to move.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again,” Jackie added. “Good luck Petra. See you soon.”

  Jackie and Tinker signed off to get some much-needed shuteye while Bar installed the new memory microchip into Petra’s neck port and tested it out with Emily’s help over the Vidscreen network. Petra gave the chemical compound information to Bar and Emily and she told both of them goodbye. Bar and Emily stood there and watched Petra turn around and walk away up the basement steps in her green camouflage uniform holding a black bag full of Twinkies like none of the past forty hours had ever happened. The two of them scrubbed and cleaned the basement and tub before leaving the hospital for the Jetport back to Meredith. A soaked fragrant blue stained white hospital face towel packed in between plastic sheeting made its way into Emily’s carryon bag while Bar was busy packing up his equipment.

  Chapter 24

  TRANSMUTATION

  “It’s over with dear. There’s nothing to worry about,” a calm Ray Nelson in his usual red white and blue garb told President Long calmly as he sat on her white sofa in the Oval Office watching her apply too much pancake make-up again. Its overly obnoxious cosmetic smell and powder was all over the top of the desk in front of her.

  “Are you sure she’s dead? Did you see a body?” she asked now applying gold lipstick over the lines on her wrinkled pouting lips. The matching gold pantsuit she was wearing was stretching tightly over her chubby mid-section putting tension on buttons while she sat behind the President’s desk in her chair.

  “Yes Helen. I have video of it taken by the drones. She and all of her parts are quite dead and I checked the morgue there. She’s listed as a Jane Doe with a toe tag. The police are actively looking for a crime scene they won’t find.”

  “Did Cooper tell you anything before he—died?”

  “No, but I’ll find out what he was up to soon enough. Unfortunately, his body wasn’t at the morgue. He’s been moved.”

  “What—the—?” Long dropped her lipstick on the table in mid swipe and it made a metallic clink sound. “Are you kidding me? Where the hell is he?”

  “Don’t worry Helen,” he told her calmly again. “He can’t speak if he can’t wake up. He’s got enough liquid in him to kill three people. Take it easy.”

  “You’d better be right Ray. This is getting out of hand. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard! I want to start the bar-coding process ASAP. I need to put the hammer down soon! Keller and Sheehan are still on our world tour addressing the nations at the WAS in Geneva. We need to get this done now!”

  ***

  First Lieutenant Petra Kayden Dace boarded a Jet Transport-Carrier to Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada via NAS Jacksonville an hour after leaving the hospital basement in Gwadar. She didn’t have the same crew as she had to Gwadar with her on the flight so she dodged a bullet with her explanation of why she was still breathing and her destination to the U.S. that day. She was just “taking some time off for much needed sun soaking and R & R in Las Vegas,” she told the crew. She landed a day later in a town like her that never slept and she changed into more appropriate attire for the desert consisting of curvy blue jeans, a white tank top with large green lettering that read ARMY across her chest, and black calf high boots. On her way out of town, she stopped at a local Fructose Mart and a Hover-Buggy shop. She rented a blue four-seater Dune Hover-Buggy for the day and headed to Mercury at 11:00 a.m. under bright sunshine and a mild –seventy-seven degree desert heat. The one-hour trip was uneventful as she passed mounds of desert brush and their respective species of nature. A sign on her way into town read: NEVADA TEST SITE-NO TRESSPASSING-RADIATION HAZARD. Past the warning sign were more dirt roads abandoned buildings and desert. There was a lot of desert as far as she could see. The morning heat was starting to change into the arid afternoon as the wind kicked up small brown and tan cyclones of dust devils and debris. Petra stepped out of her blue buggy and scanned the landscape of the town in front of her. She parked a pair of new black sunglasses on her head as she inserted another Twinkie into her mouth and began chewing. The main street had dozens of buildings that were no longer vacant and most of them were dirty and broken up. The daily beating of ult
raviolet rays of the unforgiving sun scorched the top of everything within sight. She started walking down the middle of the main street like an actor in a western movie looking for the bad guy.

  “Where should we start, Ter?” Petra was now standing still. Her thermal HUD was now up scanning for heat signatures that were over two feet off the ground.

  “Pick a building and start—”

  Petra interrupted Ter quickly. “What is that awful smell?” Her nose was now inhaling a foul odor sailing through the air following the wind patterns. She tried to detect a compass direction.

  “It smells like—death. I’ve smelled this before.”

  Petra let her dog-like one hundred million olfactory receptors guide her through the town streets like a bloodhound chasing after a lead. She was acutely aware that she was overly sensitive in this area now and used it to her advantage. She walked to a ravine at the far edge of town about a half a mile away from her buggy and stopped at a vacant clearing. A recess in the earth resembled a saucer bowl filled with bodies. They were in all forms of decomposition and most of them had detached limbs and missing digits. There were human and animal remains in this shallow grave that were piled on top of each other and stretched for about fifty-feet in either direction. The sun and wind drenched clothing and fur were in various stages of decay and disintegration as thousands of insects and flies made their home here now. Outside of the center of this putrid doll collection was a grey stone configuration similar to Stonehenge but half the height and more complete. A dilapidated and broken silver elliptical satellite dish on a pole hung over the side of one of the stone columns attached to the top.