I felt the chilly breeze hitting my face.
The surprising sensation temporarily derailed my thoughts.
“It is rather odd for the temperature to be this low in July, especially considering that this is supposed to be a tropical area”, I thought while considering if the drastic change was due to the first stage of the nuclear winter.
Looking up I notice that the sky is clear enough to see the stars.
“I might as well enjoy it while I still can”, I chuckled quietly and slowly laid my old body onto the grassy plain.
The ground was a little warmer than the air above it. Closing my eyes, I thought back on the time when I lived relatively peaceful, thinking I escaped from the horrors of my childhood.
“I guess this is as far as I can run. I am unsure, whether it is good that my problems caught up to the rest of humanity before they reached me, but I am certainly not going to complain”, I chuckled again while feeling a deep melancholic sadness wash across me.
Opening my eyes again after waiting a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, I feel my linear thought processes slowly ebb out. Sensations from both my body and mind become murky, losing my sense of time I silently observe how the tiny specks of light move across the sky.
Suddenly a sound from the intercom at the steel door behind me, rips me out of my thoughts. I kick my brain into work mode, and hurry to the door.
“Are you there Matt?”, a distorted feminine voice asks.
“I’m here Caroline! Is everyone ready?”, I replied.
“Yes, Peter was closing the fuel valves and John just finished helping me with the last pieces of cargo”.
“I’ll be right down. You should board as soon as possible. We’re already far luckier than we have any right to be. The fanatics could’ve had a unit nearby. If Charles had betrayed us any earlier we would’ve been toast”.
“See you in a bit”.
The intercom went silent.
I swiped my card across the detector and entered the code in the keypad hidden behind a fake stone in the wall. When I first started working here, I always thought that my employer was paranoid. After figuring out what kind of machines they stored here, my opinion changed… drastically.
No place on Earth is safe enough for things like those. Whoever hid them here should have destroyed them, or at least sent them to the Moon.
I slowly walked down the stairs, while trying to avoid bumping my rifle into the concrete walls and the steel pipes above my head.
Reaching the rudimentary control room, I sit down in front of the monitors and turn them on. I spent some time looking at the security footage from the other entrances to the facility, to assure myself that the fanatics have yet to arrive.
I switch to the camera on the inside of the capsule and turn the radio on. It was a rather old one and I doubted that it was designed to reach much further than the immediate area around the facility.
Not that it mattered.
“Are you guys ready for the launch? We don’t have all night”. I spoke towards the microphone.
“Wait, we need to talk about what to do with Charles. All of you have been trying your hardest to dodge the subject the past few hours”, John said.
I started feeling annoyed. The naïve humanist in John could apparently not keep his mouth shut, even when he really should.
“Caroline do you care to explain it to him? I have to power up the necessary systems”.
In truth, I already started doing it after turning on the radio, but I needed an excuse to escape the time consuming task of explaining why we should refrain from letting a traitor with detailed knowledge of the things we were trying to protect escape.
“Caroline we can’t just kill him, he probably doesn’t even understand how any of the artifacts work. He’s an astronaut, not a physicist”.
“It doesn’t matter John, the fact that Charles knows that it’s possible to construct artifacts like these makes him a threat”.
“He barely even paid attention to them. He didn’t even ask questions about how they worked, until after Matt got the reactor up and running, and he only told the fanatics our location when he talked with them on the phone.
He probably didn’t even understand the science behind the FTL drive we found. You have to at least be retarded to not understand something that simple. How the hell is someone like him supposed to be a threat?”
“John, you’re forgetting that the fanatics are holding a lot of scientist hostage. What do you think they’re going to do after they figure out, that Earth isn’t the only place they can potentially spread their wretched influence to?”
I watched them argue back and forth, while glancing at the monitor showing Charles’s cell. He was sitting hunched over on one of the cardboard boxes, with his head between his hands.
He did not resist when we locked him there. He probably thought that we would let him go, when his friends turned up.
He was out of luck.
I started charging the advanced capacitor located at the very top of the underground facility.
I looked at the digital clock above the door, and said; “Two minutes until the launch procedure begins”. It interrupted John’s and Caroline’s little quarrel and John conceded. Since Peters silence meant he was siding with Caroline. Not that any of them would have time to change what was going to happen with Charles anyway.
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“I hope you guys remember the plan. The navigational computer, I programmed is going to bring the ship into a high orbit around Wolf 1061 b, after the ship exits the wormhole. The planet is only 13.8 Ly from Earth, so the margin of error on the exit coordinates is relatively small. Worst-case scenario is that the ship has to decelerate rapidly over the course of a few hours. Once the ship is in a slowly decreasing orbit around Wolf 1061 b, you need to assemble the FTL drive, before the ship starts skimping the atmosphere. The plan is to use stray atoms to power the reactor, if it doesn’t work there’s still reserve fuel for at least two years. More than enough time to reach one of the other planets in the cluster that has a suitable atmosphere. Everyone’s job during the trip is as follows: Caroline, try to keep everyone alive. John, try to keep everyone from going insane… rer. Peter, try to keep the ship from blowing up, please”. I said jokingly to alleviate some of the tension.
“Matt…”, Caroline started: “We’re all very happy to have known and worked alongside you… sorry”, I could see the other two give a slow nod in approval.
I grumpily replied; “We already talked about this. There is only a tiny chance that I can survive the trip. Two years of fuel are far more valuable than a corpse, not that the corpse wouldn’t work as fuel for the reactor. I prefer to stay behind and erase all evidence. My life’s work is in the computer on the ship. Keep it safe, in my place”.
I pressed the button for starting the launch procedure and a quiet rumbling indicated that the facility was working on removing the exhaust from the launch chamber.
“Sixty seconds until liftoff”. I said while pulling the lever to retract the giant doors at the top of the silo.
I cut the connection to the capsule, and watched the number on the display decrease.
“… 5,4,3,2,1”
The floor shook. I hit the big yellow button to discharge the capacitor.
All the cameras on the outside of the facility instantly showed a snowstorm. The excess energy from the formation of the stable wormhole, just a few hundred meters above the silo, instantly disrupting any picture they should be sending.
The shaking stopped, leaving me with the sound of the facility removing the fumes left behind by the rocket that carried my friends off this shitty planet.
I felt numb from the sadness washing over me again. With a herculean effort, I heaved my tired body out of the chair and towards the stairs.
As I made my way up the stairs some of my old scars started acting up again, I ignored them as I had gotten used to the pain a long time ago.
I passed by the storage room that served as Charles’s cell. He was busy trying to break down the steel door with his bare hands. “He probably heard the launch, and thinks that sound was the arrival of his ‘friends’.” I thought; “Let me just snuff out that glimmer of hope he feels. Damn traitor!”
“That sound you just heard, were your brothers determined on reducing this place to rubble.” I bluffed, towards the door.
“Please let me out, they have my family. I had no choice!”
I felt resignation at the utter foolishness of the statement. My reply was harsher this time; “Do you seriously think that your wife and daughter are in a state, where they’re going to be happy to see you again. That’s assuming that they’re still alive, which his highly unlikely.”
Walking on, while ignoring the screaming. I did not have a large surplus of time, so I could waste it on a fool.
Finally, I reached it. The device that allowed us to open large wormholes.
I started reprogramming it. The coordinates for the entrance of the wormhole changed from 300 meters above the silo.
To just five meters below the lowest point of the facility. The size of the event horizon, increased to engulf the entirety of the research facility. Lastly, I set the coordinates for the exit far outside the known part of the universe. To accomplish this, I had to shut off all safety measures, except for the overload prevention.
The location of the exit did not matter. Since the wormhole would shut down in the middle of transferring the facility. The first problem with the currently programmed wormhole, is the massive diameter of the event horizon. There was no way the meager amount of energy, currently located in the capacitor would be able to keep it stable.
The second problem is that once the capacitor enters the wormhole, the energy needed to keep it open, and stable vanishes.
When the wormhole vanishes, the matter in transit reenters normal space and undergoes a massive relative deceleration.
Best case, scenario is that whatever is traveling through the wormhole turns into a cloud of elements.
Worst case, scenario is that it turns into pure energy, which would most likely end up as a cloud of free hydrogen atoms.
Both scenarios where perfect for what I had in mind.
I dragged my old body back down the stairs again, and dropped myself in the control chair.
Watching as the sun slowly crept up over the horizon, I thought about what I could have done differently.
Concluding that human nature is far too prominent in most humans. For me to change anything, far too many humans would have to look past their own delusion, and accept the harsh reality.
“Impossible!” I thought, while pressing the yellow button.