Remembering what he had seen in the portal, Max realized it didn’t matter who stood in his way, there existed but the one sentence, alloyed into his mind, one which kept him awake at night and haunted his every step through the material world. “I can bring them back.” Oh yes, Max thought. I had waited long enough. He would bring them back. He would bring them back or I’ll find a way to cast down the sun and boil the oceans until He does.
***
In the hectic machinations of his mind – most of it the result of his connection to the Link – Bolt nearly missed the firing of the frontal thrusters. Their bursts slowed down the rover’s approach to what deceptively felt like a crawl.
Suspended and floating ahead of them, the Alpha Station was like a ball cut in half and then flipped over so its hollow insides faced the Earth. On its rim, a bay–door gaped open. With the station’s size being that of a small city and its population fluxuating around fifteen thousand, the orbital–drifter was an achievement to be proud of. Artificially aided and timed so its drift would always position it in the way of the sun’s reflected rays, it was a place where anyone eager to experience the sensations of an endless day could find a home. Perpetually tipped so the tops if its buildings faced the Earth, the refracted light proved more than enough to illuminate its streets. The sun’s rays upon the station’s exposed back adequate in gathering enough energy for everything else.
Bolt craned his neck to get a better look over the armature up front, and could see the huge plates side–stacked over its back. Each turned with the practiced motion to attain optimal angle for energy gathering, or turned with others around it to burn away a piece of debris or a small meteorite with a powerful lens effect. It took a maintenance crew for Bolt to truly appreciate the size of these plates. He watched what he guessed to be a five member group emerge from beneath one of the platforms on the station’s rim. Against the huge piece of energy–gathering technology, the men slowly drifting over it looked like dots. Each hardly seemed to move until one looked away and then back again. They meandered over the edge of the glaring white surface of the square and disappeared beneath in unison, like a centipede. The motions of the things made Bolt wonder if what he had seen were actually cleaner–bots, there was no real way to tell from his distance and angle.
Nearly soundless, the forward thrusters fired up again in one short burst. Bolt saw the a corona of yellow flame spread outward from each end of the vehicle.
Crawling towards the station, its immensity became even more apparent as they neared the still expanding slabs fit for something giant. It had long since lost the appearance of a mouth, since any mouth that could open to that degree was either alien or broken. Its shadow enveloped them as they passed beneath it, its size suddenly making their movements seem even slower. The vehicle’s interior darkened, the red dashboard its only source of illumination, as the thick, neon lighting running over the center of each wall outside did little else, but inform them they weren’t crashing.
“Why is there even a gate here?” Bolt asked. “Are they afraid someone might come in uninvited?”
“For the most part,” the driver said. “Also has to do with the fact that they simply could build a gate, so they did.”
Up ahead, an area became clearer, light there seemed more concentrated and revealed a dock. On it, dozens of figures milled about in what seemed to be utter confusion. Bolt later noticed most them were android–workers or cargo–lifters.
He perceived a subtle vibration as the mag–walls engaged and directed the vehicle along an approach vector, carrying it to a free docking clamp. The chatter over his Link increased and Bolt looked over to Max.
“We’ve been here before?” he asked.
“Nope,” Max said.
“Feels like we had. You sure?”
“Well,” Max said without turning, his eyes distant as if he were looking at something Bolt couldn’t see. “Perhaps you have, but you never told me about it. It’s entirely possible.”
“Possible,” Bolt repeated. “You got something over the Link? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
***
How would one know the way anyone looks like after they had seen a ghost?
Max knew it was simply an expression, a saying to let someone know they look like shit, but really, why a ghost? Perhaps he couldn’t comprehend such an expression because he was seeing ghosts – or what might as well have been ghosts – constantly, and figured his expression looked nothing like what he would imagine it would after seeing an actual apparition. He couldn’t even classify or claim them to be hallucinations or things that weren’t there. They felt more like visual reinterpretations. Things that were always there but had before been filtered by his brain for the sake of his own sanity. Now, the filter was gone. The wisps seemed to slide out of the wall and into his mind only to mock him with their indistinct nature, or to implant some subconscious scheme which he found himself considering minutes later. Ideas bounced and echoed inside his skull in quantum leaps, without a single tangible connection between them.
But now that he considered it, yes… his face might look like he’d seen a ghost.
“Just Link–chatter, I think,” he told Bolt.
“Ya, a lot of it here.”
In the dark of the tunnel, he could see a reflection of himself in the frontal view–port. His pointy black beard had gotten shaggier, his full upper–lip almost totally concealed behind the unshaven mess curtaining over it. In the likeness, his eyes were hidden, hooded in shadow as he gazed over the white letters drifting upon his mind. His thick black hair waved over his forehead.
His own mirror image, however, was only a background, what drew his attention were the words he saw and the font used to relay them. They could only have come from one source. A soundwave accompanied the written sentences, a sound which his brain displayed before him in a stream of vibration to visually reflect the voice. He had come to hate it, it always wanted something of him. It brought instructions, never answers, and always, always wanted Max to do its bidding. For a moment, he thought he could see the golden thread which had carried the data blurt to his mind – an after–image of microwaving light. It had come from Earth, Max knew that much, but had it come from the Administrator directly? The voice was different than he remembered it, it said, “Find Dr.Boeree. Put an end to the experiment.”
Messages like these had grown quite common since the Admin had spoken to him. But never had he gotten one such as this. Before they were always specific, they always told him what he should do and where to go about doing it. But this made him wonder. It seemed strange to him that a being so powerful would even require or trust an agent to do the work for him – an invisible, hooded stranger. Perhaps that was what had made Max so reliable, he was a dog without anything left to lose and everything to gain, a dog manufactured and unleashed without restraint or care. Indeed, the only restrains were constructed and placed there by Max himself. By his own mind. He didn’t care much for people in general, and in part that had a lot to do with his father and what he told him once. He said, “Son, don’t ever be sad because of people. They will all die.” Still, he didn’t particularly enjoy hurting them. The only people he seemed to truly care about were those already gone, or at least lost to him in some way or another. He had to bring them back, and thus often wondered if the Administrator chose to ignore the rage slowly building up inside his proxy. Perhaps He thought it of no concern. Perhaps he thought to keep sending him on errands until Max’s mind would implode with the effort… It certainly felt like he was losing his mind – his touch with reality. But what is reality, really? Is it this illusion which the senses create? Or it something more?
Unrelenting, the apparitions of thoughts and after images of internal conversations of people he couldn’t see, but knew were everywhere around him, didn’t help. He felt like he had taken a psychedelic drug whose effects never stopped. They. Never. Stopped. They should, but they didn’t. They didn’t even let him sl
eep.
He had to find this Dr.Boeree. But instead of stopping his experiments like he had done before – without question or concern, without a mind for anything else but the vague hope that the task’s completion would compel the Admin to reunite him with his family – instead, he would find out why the experiment needed to be stopped. Like he should have done all the times since.
This place, this station, Max felt, would be where he could even hope to come closer to the enigma of the Administrator. He wondered why he hasn’t ever done it before.
Max felt a strange sense he couldn’t quite explain. It took Bolt to point out what it might be.
***
“Can you feel it?” Bolt asked.
“Feel what?” said both the driver and Max in perfect unison.
“Dunno,” Bolt said. “I felt it on the Moon as well, but here…I don’t know, here it seems even more pronounced, or maybe I just got used to it. It’s like some veil had been cast away, like I’m out of range of some presence which before had constantly been with me. Maybe my mind’s getting use to the fact that I can’t remember shit.”
The expression on Max’s face made it clear he felt it to, but perhaps realized it only now as Bolt pointed it out.
They didn’t speak more of it for the time being, even though it felt like they should. And as Bolt opened his mouth to say something else, the whole vehicle suddenly shuttered. They had reached the docking clamps, when it became clear someone had screwed up with their vector of approach. The shuttle scraped over the platform’s edge, the sound of it cutting even through the thick hull of the vehicle. A screech of metal in pain shook the insides as the exterior shell buckled. A sense of entrapment rolled over Bolt like a tidal wave. He braced himself over the window slit, the only surface of the vehicle where he could get any semblance of a grip.
“God dammit,” he heard the driver belch.
Unable to hear himself think, memories rolled over him in flashes of unabridged scenes and maddening events within which people played their parts with voices he couldn’t recognize and faces that weren’t there. He expected chaos, he expected a crash, a cracking of bones as he was propelled against the interior wall. Nothing happened. In moments, it was over. The emergency clamp above the vehicle powered up and the magnetic force snatched the shuttle as if it were a toy.
“You guys ok?” the driver asked, not waiting for either of them to respond. “’Tis the second time this happened. Someone’s getting his fuckin’ ass kicked.”
“I thought this whole procedure was automated,” Max spat. “How the hell can an automated system not recognize an error sooner?”
“I think someone doesn’t want you on this station,” the driver said. “I’ve seen it happen before, some asshole hacker tampers with the approach vector to scare you or whatever the fuck. Welcome to God damn Alpha Station. Don’t give anyone the satisfaction of acting surprised if you see some weird shit.”
CHAPTER 7
The Nightmare Begins
Spring and warmth. The station’s air possessed these two qualities in abundance. It made both of the men feel like some new warm season had just begun to wake up, or at least that a wet one was left behind or morphed into a different, infinitely more soothing climate. The light of it hit them as soon as they exited the lower docks and stepped on the station’s town–complex for the first time. They had located Zack over the Link and met him on the main square. The surface of it shone like dark marble and was no less reflective. Bolt’s own silhouette looked back at him as he looked down. I need a haircut. The surface and buildings looked and even smelled of bleach, providing a pleasant contrast against the darker and flaked ground. A few hundred meters about them, the station began to curve upward in all directions except their immediate up. The curvature surrounded them by buildings of white stone. Each of the structures looked like they might have been melted into existence and alloyed with the station, imbued with perfect geometry while still molten, then exposed to light until all the color was.
The three men greeted each other and began to walk over the square and down one of the alleys leading from it. The black tiles underneath their feet were replaced by a type of glossy white glass. Bolt thought he might lose his footing and fall over the surface, such was their apparent smoothness. The fall didn’t happen, and he looked ahead instead. At no point of their trek thought the narrow, Mediterraneanish streets, did it seem like they were walking on anything but a straight line forward. Their eyes told them otherwise. Their sight spoke of an upward curvature which seemed like it would be impossible to climb at one point. Bolt could even spot people at angles which defied gravity, and by all accounts, the people ‘ahead of him’ looked like they stood sideways.
“Still seems familiar?” Max asked him.
“Now that I see it,” Bolt said, “it feels like I should remember something which so clearly fucks with your mind …”
“But?”
“I’ve got nothing,” Bolt admitted.
“Perhaps it is for the best, eh?” Zack smiled, his rough voice scraping over the white surface of the windowless buildings, echoing almost absurdly. “I find it best not to tally here for an extended period of time.”
“Why is that?” Bolt said and looked up, where the oceans of his homeworld threatened to bleed through the atmosphere, over the cloud cover, and engulf them in wet blueness. Bolt felt that, if he could reach far enough, he could touch the blue expanses. He smiled at this. Eyes like to deceive. “So?” Bolt said after he noticed Zack remained silent. “Why shouldn’t one stay here?”
“Do I really have to explain it to you?” Zack smirked. “This place is quite something else, as you will soon come to find out. I’ll admit, the absence of all borders and affiliations is very freeing, you don’t get this kind of sense of freedom on Earth.”
“You mean freedom to do any scientific research you please?” Max intervened.
The narrow passage ahead stood just wide enough for the three of them to walk side by side. The road itself was tilled and made up of smaller, square–glass components.
“Well of course,” Zack said, “but that’s only part of it. I’m certain you’ve both felt it since you left Earth, eh? A palpable change in something. A something you can’t quite define.”
Bolt followed a step behind them as Zack made a sharp turn to the right. He noticed they began to move away from the tall structure jutting out from the center of the station. The further away they moved from it, the more Bolt began to recognize a pattern in the building’s construction and layout. Closer to the center, the buildings were more tightly packed, laid out on a hill around the central tower. The rise upon which the buildings sat gave the whole sight a feel of some kind of Arabic slum, a feeling Bolt figured had significance somehow, but knew too little about the station to truly appreciate the irony of it.
“A change in something sounds about right,” Bolt nodded to Zack’s remark, indeed he felt something, or rather, an absence of something. “I’ve just told Max this, before we came here,” he said. “A loss of something. What do you suppose it means?”
“It means that damn Admin has a bigger grip on our minds that we would like to believe, that’s what it means,” Max said.
“Whatever the case,” Zack said, shrugging of the remark as it were too radical to even consider, “you’ll begin to feel a better here, I think, at least right up to the point where you start to feel worse.”
“Was that suppose to be funny?” Bolt asked.
“I don’t know, was it? It’s simply a fact.”
“A fact of what? That for some unexplainable reason we feel better when we leave Earth and then worse when we’re away from it long enough? You don’t find that strange at all?”
“Strange? Not at really. Curious, very,” Zack nodded. “I suppose it’s like being away from home, you know? You are glad to be away when you leave, and you enjoy it as your brain experiences new sights and whatnot, but after a while, you start to miss the fam
iliarity as the external stimuli become too constant.”
“That’s one way of explaining it,” Bolt said.
“And how would you explain it?” Zack asked.
“I’d say what Max said has some merit.”
“Right,” Zack snorted. Bolt couldn’t see his face, but was certain that Zack’s eyes rolled so hard they might unscrew and fall out of their sockets. “We’re here.”
“Where’s here?” Bolt asked, looking up at the five–story building. It looked like any other structure on the station, angular and strangely inviting. It waited at the end of an alleyway surrounded by the neighboring white walls, none of which reached quite as high. “You said we’re going to complete the experiment,” Bolt said. “Go through another portal? Remember?”
“We will, but the power requirements to open one are immense, we’ll not be able to do it until tomorrow.” Zack said.
“And until then?” Bolt asked.
“Until then, I’ve something you need to see.”
***
Zack led them through a series of empty rooms, each too quiet and dark for Bolt to see anything. The only object casting any illumination was a spiraling staircase at the end of the last room. Each step of it spread an inner light from its edge, faint and unobtrusive. They ascended, passing a second, third, and a fourth level, all of them panting as they reached the top. Following Zack, the two men walked to their left and through another series of rooms, each more illuminated than the last as light from the glass–wall infected the walls and spread. They reached the last room, greeted by the outside view. The stationscape rolled inwards and have Bolt a sense a though they were riding the crest of a high wave, its curvature revealing the numerable buildings and structures. All roads, although punctuated here and there by a plaza or a slightly wider street, led to a central sprawl surrounding the tower.