by Scott Baron
“Yes, Captain,” Winnifred, ‘Winnie’ Yang replied. “The critters are caged up and secure. We’re all buttoned up and ready to go."
“How about you, Mr. Quick? I hope we won’t need your services, but are you set to go?”
“Yes Captain, standing by.”
“All right, then, everyone sit tight and let the computers do their thing. This is automated and should take less than two minutes to cycle through.”
What Captain Reynard didn’t know was that a lone microcircuit was about to fail in the most spectacular manner. A fluke of poor quality control, caused by a rather embarrassing oversight, had allowed it to slip into the mix. It was a tiny thing, but it was enough.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. One,” Captain Reynard counted down.
Nothing happened.
Then their reality spun and went to shit, pausing to hit the fan on the way for good measure.
“What the hell’s going on?” Gaspari managed to utter through the forces assailing her, before vomiting on the deck.
Charlie knew. It was obvious to him. Obvious and horrifying.
“Shut it down! Shut down the power systems!”
But it was too late.
The ship had torn a hole in space, a massive wormhole that had formed in a flash.
“We’re being pulled in!” Charlie shouted as the ship spun on its axis and lurched toward the gaping maw.
“Give me full power, all engines! Get us free fro––” Captain Reynard tried to say.
The ship was swallowed whole before he could finish his thought, then was abruptly spat out unceremoniously on the other side of the wormhole, somewhere very far away, just as the space anomaly vanished in a flash.
“Status?” the captain barked over the warning sirens.
“Life support operational. Drive systems online but losing power. Navs are all shot to hell,” Gaspari said.
“What hit us, Charlie?”
“It-it was an unstable Einstein-Rosen bridge,” he said, shell-shocked. “I think we somehow tore open a wormhole. It shouldn’t have even been possible. We should be dead. But for whatever reason, the same malfunction that got us here also protected us.”
“From what?”
“From being turned inside out and boiled down to jelly,” he replied.
“Captain, we’re being pulled in toward a gravitational field,” Gaspari said. "Something is reeling us in.”
“Visuals. On all monitors.”
“Aye, Captain,” she replied.
The screens flickered on for a moment before going black, but it was enough. It was a huge, round shape. An object with immense gravitational pull.
“Buckle up, everyone, this is going to get bumpy,” Captain Reynard barked over ship-wide comms.
“What was that?” Charlie asked.
“It looked like a planet.”
Charlie strapped in tight and wondered what colossal design flaw had escaped notice. What the hell had managed to go so wrong for things to come to this.
The answer might have surprised him.
Chapter Three
The strangest of things can cause a domino-effect disaster. Faulty materials, improper securing of load-bearing connections, or, in this case, human error of the most negligent variety. And it was such a very human folly that caused the whole thing.
“C’mon, Johnny, no one will know,” the coverall-wearing clean room tech said, attempting her very best to show at least some of her feminine shape through the bulky over suit.
“Arlene, are you nuts? You’re going to get us both fired,” Jonathan replied.
He scanned the bustling lab, hoping none of the busy staff had overheard her propositioning him. Their affair was a secret. Not only because having relations with coworkers within the same department was against company policy, but also because Arlene was married to a giant of a man who just so happened to also be the HR manager.
If anything became public, it would be her husband deciding his employment fate. The man would not, however, lay a finger on him. Of that, Jonathan was sure. Arlene had bitched about his passive nature enough times by now for him to know that, despite his intimidating size, he possessed a weak spine.
He was also, Johnny learned, surprisingly under-endowed for a man of his enormity. Sometimes, nature played funny little jokes, it seemed.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” she said, brushing her rear firmly against him as she slipped past, carrying a tray of high-density data chips to the destruction chute. Another batch had microfractures in the still-cooling circuit underlay, and, while they were structurally sound enough to support the data and power lattices embedded upon and within, the minuscule imperfections caused the flows to be out of parameters.
They disposed of thousands of dollars worth of imperfect material every day. A cost of doing business in this zero-tolerance industry. And these particular chips were highly specialized, on order for yet another top-secret project for some billionaire playboy, rumor had it.
The chips clattered to their doom down the chute, and Arlene walked by him again. Her look was sensual fire. Jonathan worried his growing erection might become noticeable despite his bulky clean suit.
“Five minutes. The decon showers,” she whispered, gently groping him as she passed. The showers were the one place on the level where there was no video surveillance. A response to the threat of potential lawsuits should images of naked workers getting a Silkwood shower ever be leaked.
They’d be totally alone, and despite common sense screaming at him, it was tempting. He could feel the pressure in his pants rapidly growing, sapping his IQ and self-preservation instinct with every pulse.
“Don’t do it, Johnny,” he mumbled to himself, attempting to put work––and job security––before animal urges.
Four minutes later he watched as Arlene walked from her work station. He might have withstood the hormonal onslaught had she not briefly turned and looked back at him. The raw want in her eyes shot straight to his groin, sending another flush of endorphins through his body.
“Well, just this one time,” he rationalized, tidying his workstation and quickly crossing the room.
“Where you off to, Cooke?”
It was Bill Turling. Not his boss, thank God, just another lab employee. One who happened to be a stickler for rules, though. In the schoolyard, he would have been the kid who narced on the other kids for eating candy bars between classes.
“Taking a leak, Bill,” he replied. “Why? You want to watch?” Johnathan knew any allusions to anything remotely homoerotic would shut the man down immediately. How sad, he thought, that he keeps himself closeted in an era where sexual orientation was unimportant to nearly everyone.
He guessed Bill had come from one of those overly religious households that deemed anything outside their myopic world view to be a sin. It was too bad, really. Everyone in the lab knew, nobody cared, and Johnathan knew for a fact that at least one of his male coworkers found Bill kind of cute.
But no one plays matchmaker for narcs.
“Suit yourself, Billy boy,” he said with a forced laugh. The man would ask no further questions, at least not for a while, and Johnathan had somewhere to be.
“What took you so long?” Arlene said, pulling at the zippers of his suit, while already halfway out of her own.
“Bill,” he replied.
“Ugh. That guy,” she groaned, yanking Johnathan’s clean suit down to his knees. “Come on, we don’t have much time,” she said, spinning her back to him.
Johnathan obliged, quite vigorously at that, and five minutes later, the pair left the decon shower area––a few minutes apart––casually making their way back to their workstations.
Arlene was still in somewhat of an afterglow daze when she delivered the next tray into the destruction chute, while carefully depositing each of the chips from the other tray into small Mylar pouches, flooding them with neutral gas, then sealing them to be shipped out for installation.
What her sex-addled brain failed to notice was that she had destroyed the wrong chips.
After lunch, she finally noticed her mistake. The trays she used to sort the good from bad were reversed at her workstation. Had she done that?
A panic flooded her body. What if she was found out? They’d review the security camera footage. Her husband would review the footage. What would he see? They’d been careful, heading off to the shower area separately, but were they discreet enough?
Doubt flooded her mind. Johnathan had been right. She could get them both fired. And worse, she could give her husband grounds for divorce of a nature that would even preclude alimony. She doubted he’d have the spine to do it, but if he wanted to, he could not only fire her, but leave her penniless as well.
It was only a handful of bad units that were mistakenly sent out, she rationalized. And there were triple redundancies in all of those high-tech systems these days, anyway, so it probably wouldn’t make the least bit of difference.
Her panic subsided. Yes, she thought. That makes sense. It’ll be fine.
Arlene put the whole thing out of her head and got back to work, the burst of adrenaline slowly fading from her body.
Twenty-three months later, thousands of miles away in the depths of space, a multi-billion-dollar spaceship would power up all of its systems, massive amounts of energy passing through the meticulously constructed vessel. There were backups and redundancies, and backups to those, but within each of them, a handful of data chips lay waiting. Waiting like a shark in deep water, invisible, but ready to strike at any moment.
Chapter Four
Nearly eight months before their disastrous mission, Charlie and his pilot friend put another of their employer’s toys through its paces. The ground shook slightly, a low rumble jostling the cup of coffee resting on the small folding table at Charlie’s side. Another series of ripples spread across the surface, like a small pond in a storm. Then another.
“You okay up there?” he asked over his comms headset as he scanned the readouts whizzing by on his data terminal.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Rika asked from the pilot’s seat of the towering mech. “You making a crack about my driving?”
Charlie wasn’t, and even if he were, he knew better than to mouth off to the particularly strong-willed woman while she was operating a nearly three-story-tall survey and maintenance mech as she ran it through its paces.
“Of course not. You’re a great pilot.”
Rika smiled, amused. “Good save, Charlie,” she said, then continued walking the giant machine down the testing path. “Hey, take a look at the left knee servos, would ya? I’m feeling a little bit of stiffness in the joint.”
Charlie began typing in a series of diagnostics commands, pulling up detailed schematics of the machine. Calling it a giant robot would be a misnomer, since it was technically a human operating it. Nevertheless, it was a bipedal work of wonder, and arguably the most technologically advanced––and costliest––mech ever built. And he would know, having designed a good portion of the machine’s engineering.
“Joint appears to be functioning within parameters,” he replied.
“Well, it feels like it’s got arthritis,” she shot back. “Balance feels off.”
“Hang on,” Charlie said, pulling up a wider frame of the mech’s schematics. “I think I see the problem. It’s a lag in one of the relays in the lower back area, right where the pivot would translate to an unexpected transfer of force through the endoskeleton. That’d put more pressure on that side. Give me a minute to see if I can’t adjust it from here.”
“Copy that, standing by,” Rika replied, bringing the mech to a halt.
The plan for the day was to have it run through a full course of exercises to work out any bugs in the system. Bugs like the one they had just found. While Charlie was proud of the device, he griped in private that making the massive machine in a human shape had put it at a huge disadvantage from the get-go. Walking on two legs simply wasn’t the most efficient way to ambulate something that large.
His boss, however, had other ideas. And when Brockton Millbury had an idea, oh boy, you had better watch out. He was a brilliant man, no one would argue against that, but he was also more than a little bit of a dreamer, and his exceptional wealth afforded him the ability to demand the unusual––and often impulsive––of his team.
A forty-five-foot-tall mech was just that sort of whimsical creation. A crazy design, napkin-sketched late one night, now made reality by a team of talented men and women.
And a huge bankroll.
When the difficulties and weaknesses of the design idea were pointed out, he had told his minions he had the utmost faith in them. Then left them to get to it, the hastily jotted drawing that looked like something designed by a comic-loving kid acting as their lone starting point.
The design would go through many iterations, of course, losing the most impractical aspects––like folding in on itself to transform into a plane. It did actually wind up being designed to fold, but into a boxy and protective travel configuration, designed for ease of loading into transport craft.
It had taken quite some time to construct, even with the enormous amount of money thrown at it, but at long last, a fully functional version was up and running. It may have lacked the racing stripe awesomeness of Brockton Millbury’s original concept, but Charlie had made sure it had more than a few bells and whistles.
“Hey, while I’m running these systems mods from here, how about you give the surveying and digging apparatus a quick run-through again?”
“On it,” Rika replied, flipping a series of switches in the console.
Most systems were touchscreen operated, but Charlie had thought it wise to equip the mech with manually activated switches as well, just in case. Everyone had such confidence in the rapidly growing power of computers these days, but he still possessed a healthy bit of skepticism. A ‘what if?’ mentality that had served him well over the years.
The gripping hands of the mech spun and locked out, the wrist joints pivoting and retracting the hands as digging tools slid into place one by one. It was a cool toy his boss had ordered created, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be a functional one.
Drill heads and jackhammer bits cycled through, each powering on, running a test activation, then returning to their home nestled within the mech’s arms.
“All good, Charlie,” Rika reported, returning the hands to their original configuration. “How’s it going down there?”
“Still working on it.”
“Maybe you should swap out with me for a while. It might be faster from in here.”
“Rika, you know I’m a crap pilot,” he said with a little chuckle.
“Hey, I’ve seen you on the simulators. You’re not that bad.”
“Simulators are far different from the real thing. It’s the wobbling around as it walks that throws me off. Doesn’t feel right, ya know?” he said. “Hang on, I think this should do the trick."
Charlie punched a series of commands into the keyboard, adjusting the tolerances in the troublesome relay. The red lights on the screen turned green one by one.
“Okay, that should be it. Give it a go.”
The mech took a few lurching steps.
“Yeah, that’s much better. Thanks, Charlie.”
“You got it. Now let’s finish the run-through and grab some lunch. I’m starving.”
He was on his third serving of chicken pot pie when Rika gave him the look.
“What? I’m hungry. And I like pot pie.”
“You really don’t stray from your comfort foods, do you?”
“I like what I like.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, so adventurous.”
“Hey, you can go eat all that weird stuff. Me? I’ll stick to the staples.”
“In abundance, apparently.”
“I said I was hungry. It was a busy morning.”
“Yeah, but you’re eating like a powe
rlifter, Charlie, and all you did today was push buttons and run diagnostics.”
“The brain burns calories too,” he replied. “And besides, I’m in pretty good shape.”
He patted his belly––which was not large by any means––for emphasis. He had always been athletic, and during his stint of military life all those years ago he even had an actual six-pack. Now, however, with a sedentary job, a layer of softness had taken up residence on his frame.
“I’m not saying you’re fat, Charlie. Just, you may want to slow it down a little,” she said with a chuckle. “Unless you want to join me for a few circuits on the O-Course.”
He groaned at the thought. The obstacle course had been a part of his daily life when he first went through his military intake years prior. That was before reality set in and he realized he’d never be a mission tech or ops engineer with the elite squads running emergency missions around the globe.
When he returned to the facility many years later, it had recently been bought by his billionaire employer. The government had been selling off underutilized facilities when they found themselves in need of money, and his boss had picked it up for a song. And so it was that Charlie wound up back at his repurposed old base with the task of overseeing the design, engineering, and construction of Mr. Millbury’s new toys. It was a sweet job, and what better place to do so than from the enormous facility, purchased as is, complete with its own obstacle course still intact.
He couldn’t help himself when he first arrived, and muscle memory kicked in when he gave the O-Course a nostalgic little run-through upon arriving at the facility he had thought he’d never see again.
The next day his entire body ached everywhere. That was unexpected, and he briefly thought about making the O-Course a part of his daily routine once more, but then work got heavy and his plans shifted. He could always start again next week, he’d tell himself. And besides, he worked a desk job. There was no rush.
