Infernal

Thirty meters below the Australian outback on an Earth known simply as E-579, a four square mile compound buzzed with activity. Technicians in grey BanaTech uniforms scurried this way and that like worker ants performing incomprehensible tasks in a colony while blue suited colleagues hovered over keyboards and mainframe computers, punching keys and throwing switches in response to the myriad blinking lights and audio prompts only they could fathom. More men and women, these dressed in the black garb of Jefferson’s security services, stood silently by, watching the hustle and bustle of the research and science teams. Most had little practical knowledge of what was going on around them—and more than a few didn’t care—only that what was happening here today was of grave importance to BanaTech’s future and that their standing orders were clear: Observe. But do not interfere.

At the center of the complex a vast, egg shaped chamber measuring twenty yards across and fifty yards high glowed with a soft warm light. A nearly imperceptible thrumming sound, more felt than heard, came from a thirty foot oculus of ferrous metals set into the floor at the center of the chamber. A multitude of wires—high tension electrical lines, high definition multimedia interfaces, networking leads, USB, AVI, and coaxial cables of every sort—linked the portal to a bevy of computer towers and hard drives crowded around a small, eight point restraint chair to the left of the device. The chair had been modified for size and to allow the passage of wiring through the back.

A soft thunk was heard by the three technicians in the chamber as a twenty by fifty foot plug door set seamlessly into the wall dropped inwards before sliding open on massive hydraulic cylinders. Two men in plain white lab coats pushed a gurney bearing a small, semi-conscious form through the opening. The door closed behind them.

“Is she ready, Doc?” a female technician named Cortez asked.

“The surgery went well,” Doc responded, wiping greasy hair from his brow. He hated it in here, especially after what happened on the last full run up of the Focal Point Generator. Despite the chamber being held to a constant fifty-eight degrees by several cooling towers he found it stuffy and unbearable. He was sweating profusely and wanted nothing more than to get this part of the procedure over with so he could join the others in the control room, safely separated from the chamber by twenty-four inches of reinforced Lexan. “The neural implants are in place,” he nodded, “and she’s been prepped for the test. The rest is up to her and the QC’s.”

“Give us a hand here,” he said to a male technician whose name he couldn’t remember.

They unstrapped the girl from the gurney—in her sedated state she offered no resistance—and lifted her into the restraint chair. She wore nothing but an examination gown, held closed with Velcro at the back. Doc opened the closures before placing the child in the chair.

“Couldn’t we have at least put underwear on her?” the male technician—Doc now remembered his name was Perry something or other—asked.

“She’ll be spending a lot of time in this chair,” Doc answered, “and will have to be catheterized. Clothing would only get in the way.”

“Christ,” the other female technician muttered in disgust.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Kearn?” a voice asked. The plug door had reopened unnoticed and Alex Jefferson had entered.

“No, sir,” she answered, paling visibly at the sight of the man. “I just thought we could offer her a little dignity.”

“Dignity denotes respect and status, Ms. Kearn,” Jefferson said, approaching the assemblage. “It is a measure of worth and rank. It has little to do with how one is clothed.”

“Does anyone here question the worth of this child?” he asked, eyeing the Mirror of a man he’d had no qualms about incinerating on a road in Kansas several months before.

“No sir,” the group replied, almost in unison.

“Then that is her dignity, Ms. Kearn. You’d do well to remember it.”

Kearn nodded and began strapping Eliana into the chair. The two other technicians and the assistant that had accompanied the doctor into the chamber set about attaching the various leads and wires from the computer towers to connectors and ports that had been surgically embedded in Eliana’s spine and brain stem, and now protruded from the skin of her back and neck in a straight line like a row of tiny bean sprouts.

“How long until she is ready?” Jefferson asked Doc.

“I’d say about forty minutes,” the overweight man answered. “Once we have her linked to the QC’s through the neural interface we’ll need to run a few tests to make sure the connections are stable. Then, once the sedatives have worn off, she’s all yours.”

“Very well,” Jefferson said. He turned for the exit, the turned back to the group. “I’d be sure to get it right the first time,” he added. “The Elder will be joining us shortly and will be most displeased if there are any irregularities.”

The Elder disliked Rip travel and avoided it unless it was absolutely necessary, but his vague unease at having his molecules fragmented and shot across the Multi-verse with God knows what happening to them in between paled in comparison to his desire to be on site for the first successful test of the Focal Point Generator. It had taken most of two days to traverse four separate Rips to get to this Earth, followed by a three hour long helicopter ride from a point just outside Sydney to the Forward Operations Base deep in the Australian outback. Despite his age and the overwhelming heat of the desert he arrived feeling excited and as fresh as a forty year old man.

He was escorted down into the facility to a residence much like his own on the Homeworld by a two man security detail. Each BanaTech facility had a similar suite—most of which he’d never visited—luxurious and spacious, and a bit ostentatious for his taste.

“I wish to see Alex Jefferson,” he told the younger of two guards, a man in his early twenties who flinched almost imperceptibly at the command. “And have Sophia Bledell, designation six-three, informed that I want her in the control room during the FPG test.”

“I believe she’s already there, sir,” the older of the pair said, casting his awestruck companion a reproachful look. “She’s been monitoring the Key since they arrived.”

“Very good,” he said. “Leave me now.”

When the pair had departed and the room was quiet he called out: “Ashmedai!”

“I am here, old man,” a voice like a snake slithering across silk replied. A shadow detached itself from the center of the wall and slid like water to the Elder’s side. The creature was so tall it stood hunched over despite the cavernous twelve foot ceiling, and was nearly five feet in girth. This was a far more imposing creature than the Elder’s companion on the Homeworld. Still, he felt no fear. The power of the Infernal lie in intimidation and influence. He was certain he was immune to both.

“Your bretheren on the Homeworld send their greetings,” the Elder told the creature, “and ask that you assist me in whatever way is necessary.”

“We’re aware of our desires,” Ashmedai said. The Elder was unsurprised. Despite being incorporeal and cut off from the Rips he knew the Infernal had a communications network that spanned the Multi-verse. He had no idea how such a thing was possible, but then, he had no idea how the creatures—or creature, if one subscribed to their maddening pronoun usage—could exist in the first place. “What is it you require?”

“Shortly before leaving the Homeworld,” the Elder replied, “I received word of another Enigma Rip on E-424, a mere twenty minutes after we retrieved the Key. Do you know anything about this?”

“It is inconsequential,” the Infernal hissed, “if Farris is dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead,” the Elder assured the creature with a note of satisfaction. “My Tyro informs me he was beaten quite severely before being shot in the head.”

“Then it is of no importance.”

“And our meddlesome friend?”

“He hides on an Earth we cannot see,” the creature said, “but is weak and frail. To leave his sanctuary would kill him. He can cause us little harm.”

“You’re certain?”

The creature remained silent, refusing to repeat itself.

“We will move forward then,” the Elder said.

“We will be watching,” the Infernal said. Then rose into the ceiling and vanished.

Eliana hurt.

She could not express it, nor could she move to free herself from it. Her outward appearance was tense but compliant. Only a single tear running down her left cheek gave any indication of the fire like pain in her back and neck and the stabbing, throbbing pain in her privates like when she had to make water but a hundred times worse. Inside her mind she was screaming. For help. For an end to the torment. For the man she’d trusted to keep her safe.

A harsh buzz was building in the back of her mind. Like the sound of the angry wasps that had stung her arms when she was four years old and hadn’t understood that the pretty flying things she’d seen busily flitting about the odd paper like balloon structures in the arboretum were really mean and hurtful things in disguise. She’d only wanted to hold one; to examine it further. It hadn’t liked that and its friends hadn’t liked it either. She’d been stung eleven times and the pain had been terrible—nothing like the pain in her head now, though—but she’d been unable to cry or even run before her mother pulled her away and soothed her with words and a funny smelling liquid on her wounds.

The buzz grew louder and with it came a rush of whispered voices. Not like people whispers, all cluttered and confusing in her mind, but more structured, like dozens of numerical sequences running all at once.

Yes! She cried in her mind. Numbers were less random than people and the world they lived in; far easier for her to understand, respond to, and control. Numbers were strict and had rules she could grasp and relate to. There was order in them, a coherent language in which she could express herself and be understood.

As the numbers began speaking, Eliana listened. She relaxed as the pain from her extremities lessened, became distant and unimportant. Finally, the world around her fell away. Blind, deaf, and mute to the technicians in the FPG chamber, Eliana began responding to the stimulus of the Quantum Cray’s.

She began doing what they asked her to do.

“The QC’s have established a connection and are communicating with the Key,” Kearn announced, reading from the monitor at her station to the right of the oculus. She’d had misgivings about this test from the beginning, especially in what she saw as the mistreatment of a handicapped child. But her excitement at seeing her life’s work—and the work of about a hundred other scientists—finally coming to fruition was overwhelming. She no longer saw the girl as a child but as a tool. A tool they would use to establish a permanent, controllable Rip that would allow them to unlock the secrets of the Multi-verse.

Light in the chamber became stronger and took on a pinkish tinge. Brighter at floor level, it began to circulate in a clockwise direction. Up the wall and across the ceiling, down the opposite wall and back to the floor where it became a shade darker and picked up a hint of blue. The cycle was slow, but picking up speed. A soft thrumming sound accompanied the light, like the sound of a great engine slowly starting up from far away.

“Energy output at seventy percent and rising,” Cortez said from another set of monitors behind and to the left.

“The Key?” a voice they all recognized as Jefferson’s spoke through their wireless headsets.

Perry, directly to Eliana’s left, consulted screens displaying heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and oxygen saturation; as well as a high-density electroencephalogram monitoring Eliana’s brain activity. “Her vitals are all in the green,” he said. “A little slower than normal for a child her age but that’s indicative of a deep state of relaxation. Her sensorimotor rhythms are almost nil,” he continued, referring to the EEG, “and her Delta and Theta waves also indicate a relaxed, almost comatose state. Her Beta and Gamma waves though…what the hell?” The technician began digging through the paper printouts piling up on the floor under the machine.

“Yes?” Jefferson prompted.

Perry looked up, startled. “I’ve never seen this before. Her low amplitude Beta waves are fluctuating all over the place. This is seen in deep concentration but I’ve never seen numbers like this. And her Gamma waves are completely off the chart, unrecordable, as if she’s binding all her neurons together into a network in preparation for some vast cognitive function.”

“Is she in danger?” an older voice Perry recognized as the voice of the Elder rasped.

He consulted the monitors again. Rechecked the printouts.

“I don’t see any indicators of fibrillation in the heart, or ischemia or hemorrhaging in the brain, all precursors of impending cerebrovascular accident.” He went to Eliana’s side and carefully examined her face, raised each eyelid and passed a penlight in front of them. “There’s no drooping of facial muscles and papillary response is normal. I don’t see any tell tales of an incipient stroke.” He stepped away from the girl and looked towards the six by fifteen foot observation window at the shadowy, indistinct figures in the control room. “I’d say no. She’s not in any danger.”

Only Cortez noticed him put his right hand behind his back and, in an utterly useless and childish gesture, cross his fingers.

The light coming from the FPG chamber was so great that even the photochromic properties of the observation window did little to lessen the glare. The technicians inside the chamber had donned protective eyewear with lenses similar to that used in welding and continued their task of monitoring the oculus and the Key as the light increased in color and intensity. It had turned from a pale blue to a vibrant, almost electric purple as it coruscated around and around the chamber, ever faster and faster, until it had become a blinding multicolored blur accompanied by the now bone vibrating thrumming sound of pure energy rising to incredible and potentially dangerous levels.

Inside the control room, two technicians as well as Jefferson and the Elder with Sophia by his side, had put polarized glasses on to protect their eyes from the brilliance emanating from the other side of the glass. Despite the darkened sunglasses, the Elder could see what no one else could. Inside the FPG chamber, a little to the left of the viewing window, stood the Infernal, Asmedai. Risen to its full height of just over fourteen feet, it waited. It seemed unaffected by the energies swirling about and throughout the chamber, untouched by the light, unswayed by the incredible hum of the generator, which had to be hurting the ears of his technicians even though their headsets contained a digital signal processor with noise cancellation properties.

What are you waiting for, creature? he thought, knowing the Infernal could both hear and communicate with him if it so desired.

There was no response.

“Sir,” a blonde technician named Angela Martin said to Jefferson. “We are at one-hundred percent output. The QC’s report they are ready to lock on to the target coordinates.”

The target coordinates, Jefferson knew, were located in an isolated area of a newly discovered Earth that had been deemed safe for human exploration by the QC’s and designated E-999. He and Sophia both looked to the Elder for confirmation. A simple nod was his only response.

“Sir,” Martin interrupted before Jefferson could give the order. She sounded confused and alarmed at the same time. “I’m receiving a message over the network, but it’s not coming from the QC’s.”

“Where is it coming from?” the Elder asked.

“It appears,” she said, pausing in obvious puzzlement. “It appears to be coming from her. From the Key.”

“How is that possible?” Sophia demanded, moving towards the console. The Elder laid his hand on her arm, staying her.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“It’s one word over and over, sir. Stop.”

Asmedai turned its head at this, as if looking into the Elder’s soul.

“So she’s in there after all,” Sophia said wonderingly. “Even with the neural link and the QC’s controlling her mind, she still has a will. Amazing.”

The technician looked at Jefferson and was surprised to see a small frown of worry on his face.

“Carry on,” the Elder ordered. Asmedai turned his gaze back to the oculus.

“Transferring power now,” Martin said, punching in the command. All light and sound in the FPG chamber ceased.

Everyone save the Elder—and presumably Asmedai—held their breath. This is where things had gone awry on E-372. The QC’s had channeled the energy from the chamber into the oculus, but instead of forming the expected Rip it had created a self sustaining time dilation field that had trapped Michael Manus forever. Many scientists, as well as the entire installation had been lost. The next few moments would tell if a similar event would occur here.

There was an ear-piercing roar of static over the intercom and the internal lights of the FPG chamber powered back on. The oculus appeared as it had before; the light and energy that had swirled about the room were simply gone.

“Did we fail?” Jefferson asked, removing his glasses and tucking them into his shirt pocket as he approached Martin at the console.

Martin checked the controls before looking up, excitement in her eyes.

“We did not, sir,” she answered, grinning from ear to ear. She stood up, nearly knocking her chair over and peered through the observation window. “I can’t see anything in the portal, but it’s there. The QC’s have confirmed it. We have established an artificial Rip terminating on E-999, and it’s stable.” Cries and whoops of jubilation echoed over the intercom from the technicians in the FPG chamber. Their instruments showed the existence of the Rip as well.

Sophia threw her arms around the Elder, beaming. The Elder returned the embrace briefly, and then gently pushed her away, his eyes returning to the Infernal. Jefferson, unseen, glared at them with undisguised hatred.

A young and mostly forgotten technician at the back of the control room spoke up: “Um, guys. I think we might have a problem.”

The Elder turned toward the voice as all celebration in the room slowly stopped.

“The QC’s are reporting a number of Enigma Rip openings throughout the Multi-verse. They’re random and popping up in unusual locations, as if whatever safety mechanism that usually keeps them from opening within a hostile environment has been turned off. One of them just opened over Pikesville, Kentucky on E-424 and is channeling nuclear fallout onto a crowded beach in Mexico City on E-186.”

“Oh my God,” Martin cried.

“Shut up,” Jefferson told her. “How many Enigma Rips are there?” he asked the technician.

“The number seems to be growing at a geometric rate, sir,” the youth answered, his face gone pale. “They’re expanding exponentially and the QC’s can’t keep up with it.”