When he reached and finally caught up with the scientists, all three of them were dead. Their bodies lay strewn across the floor, their palms and heads missing. The room where he tracked them down to was dark, with light from the outside illuminating only the grim scene of murder where the three men had been piled up into a neat stack of dead flesh. Their blood was black. His boots made subtle, disgusting sounds as he walked, inspecting the work of this, as of yet unknown killer. He shifted his right eye and through a series of mental commands scrolled through a menu. A pattern recognition system ran and took one and half thousand pictures in two seconds it took him to move from one side of the room to the other. For a moment, a font read “Analyzing…” and pulsed in his mind. His power supply went down for a full 10% as a three dimensional projection made of large pixel formations manifested in his mind’s eye. A pattern of footsteps, bloodspatter, relative force used and the location of the trauma, even the fact that the bodies were dragged to their present location, revealed to him that there were in fact two men that had done this. They had been in this room all along and intercepted the three scientists as they ran down the corridor outside. They had left behind their scent, mico-pieces of dirt that must have been on their shoes, specks of their skin and even a small hair which indicated one of the killers had cropped, brown hair. Saul pressed the tip of his index finger to one of the skin fragments and allowed the system to check for DNA matches. The result came back negative. His in-suit computer calculated and further enhanced the image of the scene, projecting all of the movements of the two men as they dragged the bodies inside, severed their heads and then demolecularized their hands after taking imprints by using a multitool device. They had then walked out of the room. There was something else as well. Before the two men moved out, one of them had inserted a needle into each of the severed heads. An information stream of brilliant data-light flew through the extraction material and into the assassin’s wrist device. The man checked the screen on it and double tapped it.
The scene repeated two more times, beginning to end, before Saul disabled the mind-display and walked out of the room.
The sounds of heavy footsteps were nearly upon him, he had to move fast. The DNA sample of the skin he had stored into his memory banks provided him with a new pattern to follow. He ran, moved hunched and silent, his cloaking matrix enabled just in case. The two men Saul was following had left behind an info-pocket, a fragment of residual data which had been encrypted and stored into one of the scientist’s own mind-banks. They had passed information over a local transmission system and a part of it could be read, it was like mist hanging in the ar. The words were fragmental, with letters missing and sentences incomplete. Gramatix ran a series of basic deciphering protocols and the words slowly came into focus, yet were still jumbled, out of place and with missing letters. A word-patterning program soon fixed that. The text came clear, clinical and precise. The final version of the transcript didn’t appear, but had been imprinted upon Saul’s mind.
“The experiment was a total success. We have finally found the correct sequence to initiate the wormhole. And to think the Administrator had nearly pulled the plug on the project...While it is true that a series of further tests need be done, I am reasonably certain that the sphere will open. It will open because it must. It is, after all, the ultimate gate. It will change the face of humanity forever.”
Saul knew what the experiment had been about, but had no idea the scientist were successful, or even that they were so near to performing the first test.
He remembered the brief conversation he had with his employer.
“Would the people in charge of the corporation whose facility I’m to raid not grow suspicious, if you–“
“That is irrelevant,” the man had said. “All we require of you is to attain the artifact, nothing else matters. Who ultimately develops and perfects the portal technology is not an issue here. My corporation will do anything in its power to attain the element mined and for this reason, I have been issued to fund you with all the resources necessary for the completion of your task.”
Saul Gramatix had listened to the man’s words while watching his credit account swell with a number he didn’t even know existed, at least not in a world where resources were supposedly somewhat scarce. He had seen more zeros on his screen than he cared to count.
He recalled the number even now, as he neared the last gate of the antechamber and found it open just enough to allow a grown man to slither in between the two open metal jaws. Saul enabled his scanner and found no life signs within, nor in the control room above the antechamber. Yet he had grown suspicions of the device – the implant in his head. Someone was scrambling it, he could tell, for his vision had become somewhat static-ridden and granulose. The two men had supposedly gone within, Saul could see their trail, but could not spot anyone. He saw the fragment, felt the radiation emanating through it. It was imbedded in the far wall on the other side of the antechamber.
The excision of it would take precision and instruments he didn’t possess. But it was difficult to assess just how imbedded the fragment was, he would have to get closer, and he still might be able to do it by hand. It wouldn’t take too long to pop in, try and remove the object, place it in the container his employer had provided and run back out. Saul figured one minute would be plenty of time. He squeezed in between the open gate. He took one step into the chamber, when the gate behind him closed with a sound of metal on metal.
Intercom systems interfaced with his cochlear implant and a voice rang in his head.
“I knew you would come back,” it said. It was a woman’s voice, calm but for a layer of rage and resentment. “You’re not the only one with implants, you know. Hiding myself from your sensors had been easy. I suppose you honestly believed we would pay you this much for a job almost anyone can do? We need a subject. Someone to test out our technology, and you happen to be quite perfect for the job, Saul Gramatix. I supposed you deserve at least an explanation.”
The chamber began to shutter as a set of circular stairs were elevated out of the middle of it and began to visually undulate. A current beyond anything produced outside of this chamber made the lines of each stair indistinct and nearly impossible to determine. The stair began to resemble a cone. The white glare intensified until nothing but light could be seen. Saul’s internal systems recognized the danger and opted to lessen the visual stimuli pickup. His vision darkened as a thin layer of nanites spread over his eyes, acted as shading material. He could again see each stair, barely. There was a total of ten, each more luminous than the last as they pulsed. A sound of coiling electricity spun the room and wobbled, bounced off walls and shook his chest. Saul could feel his gut shaking. He took a step back, then pressed his back against the gate as an explosion in the middle of the chamber painted the room black. All light was sucked into the black, energetic center. He watched as the red crystal was torn out of the wall and floated towards it and stuck fast in air, suspended by magnetic currents. It spun around its axis so fast the red, fragmented and pointy object became a ball. Time slowed down for a split second and Saul watched the fragment explode into fine dust and spread into a disk. He could see every small particle. There was another, muted crack in the air, as though someone had broken the spine of time, and he was thrown back against the wall. He could barely pick himself up, but when he did, the room was dark, darker even than before. Yet in the middle of it, a circle the size of a door stood, outlined by an energetic collection of lines, interconnected and braided together, tearing into smaller lines and reforming. The light appeared to come out of nowhere, but did not illuminate the room. It was as thought it was contained, centered.
To walk towards the gateway quickly became his biggest fear. He didn’t remember ever being this afraid, this frozen in place. He heard a voice in his head. It was the woman, but her words were indistinct, lost in the screaming white noise of the portal. Saul took a step. He couldn’t decide what to do, until he simply ran towards the shimmeri
ng circle. He had always been a fatalist, and he might as well die now, he thought. No one would miss him anyway.
Life and death intertwined for a brief instant. There was no pain, only a moment of total loss of self as he was atomized and remade. He briefly entered a plane where life is death and death didn’t exist. He ended up in a room on the other side of the portal, a gun pointed at his head. The room was dark, the portal disengaging behind him without sound. The room lit up and proved to be small, smaller than he had expected. There was nothing inside but Saul and the man in front of him.
“Your cooperation has been exemplary,” the man said, his voice devoid of emotion. Saul heard the trigger click. He had registered the shot fired, but didn’t feel it. There was no pain, only blood. He could sense it oozing down his forehead. He had closed his eyes instinctively, yet when he opened them, he saw it wasn’t his own blood that he felt. The man in front of him was still on his feet, miraculously, for the right side of his head was missing. The shooter collapsed to the ground to reveal another figure standing behind the first. He recognized the voice that addressed him and finally saw the face of his employer. It was plain, unremarkable and forgettable in every way.
“No loose ends,” said the man. “You are now officially dead to the world. But we need you yet, Gramatix. You work has only begun.”
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