RANDOM ISLAND, NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA
August left Griffin strapped to the gurney, unconscious and ready for his operation. The automated surgeon in Griffin and Sarah’s operating rooms required him to start the process from a workstation in a nearby room that looked like it had been hastily converted from a broom closet into a tiny office. There was enough room for an office chair and a tiny desk with a computer workstation that had a keyboard and mouse and four monitors arranged in a grid from an articulated monitor stand that was attached to the wall.
Preparing Griffin and Sarah for their Rebirth had been far more difficult and time-consuming than he had anticipated. His mind was unable to focus on the runes for the spell matrices and even though he’d done this a hundred times back on Nolm, that was still ten thousand years ago and his Bleakness-riddled brain was struggling to recall all the myriad details required for the procedure to be successful. He was in danger of falling behind his rigid schedule, even after he’d padded it out to try to account for the Bleakness’ effects on him. He had not anticipated that the damage would be as extensive as it was. At least now he could engage the auto-surgeon and it would take care of the rest.
He flicked on the light in the tiny closet and sat down at the workstation, fingers a blur as he entered commands into the keyboard before the monitors had come out of their sleep mode. On the screen in the operating theater where Griffin was strapped down, several tools retracted from the auto-surgeon, and moved with robotic precision to open the box on the tray that was arranged beneath it. The auto-surgeon began making the incisions on Griffin’s chest and August watched for a little while longer, then minimized the video feed from Griffin’s chamber and brought up Sarah’s who was also naked and strapped to an operating table.
Griffin had Cerise Tekara’s blood in his veins. The boy’s blood—no matter how diluted it was with an Earth human for a father—was ready to accept the power of the Etherheart. It would be as natural as breathing for him. But Sarah was full, Earth-born, pure human. She had never tasted even a hint of tensa energy. Griffin’s very DNA would sing once he awoke in Nolm, but what would happen to her? He believed she’d likely die, but it didn’t prevent him from feeling a glimmer of curiosity.
A twisting pain churned in his gut, sending rippling feelings of weakness through him. The pain knocked him from the seat. He gasped and groaned on the floor, sweat popping out all over him as he was wracked. He barely had the strength to stand anymore. There was only one way to stop the pain, though it would kill him quicker. That was what was so insidious and deadly about the Bleakness: using tensa in any way accelerated the condition rapidly. But he was too weak now, too muddle-headed to continue without the clarity and strength he could get from his Attributes, even if it was for only a short time.
He let his tensa circulate through him for the first time in two hundred years. The sheer rush of power he felt as the energy burned its way through him was exhilarating in a way he hadn’t felt in far too long, making him want to leap and dance and do all the things his slowly failing body no longer allowed. Before he’d learned he had the Bleakness, he’d avoided circulating his tensa because it only made him want to use his grafts and that was a slow death sentence if you couldn’t get spent tensa back.
August felt energy flood his muscles, life returning to him a thousand times over as tensa suffused him once more. He felt the Bleakness within him too. Even with tensa coursing through him as strongly as it did now, the Bleakness would take him. It would twist the tensa within into nothingness. The more tensa he cycled through himself, the faster the process would happen and the quicker the Bleakness would take him, coring him from within.
August stood up from the floor, righting the chair and sitting back in it, strength returned to him once more even if only temporarily. He knew he had a very limited time, so he acted smoothly and quickly. He entered the commands for the armature in Sarah’s operating room to begin her procedure and then got up and left the little room to begin the next phase of his plan.
The medical facility was at the top of a very large compound that extended deep underground, hidden away from the prying eyes of the rest of the world. He made his way to the elevator which would take him to the Gate facility, hearing the pounding of waves outside as the Atlantic Ocean tried its best to tear the place apart. The medical facility was directly beneath one of the only landmarks that Random Island was known for: a red-and-white checkered lighthouse. It must be truly bad up there for him to hear the waves pounding the lighthouse from here and he couldn’t help the twinge of guilt that came over him as he acknowledged his culpability.
He stepped into the elevator, the doors closing softly behind him. The elevator descended rapidly, using high-speed pulley systems to go over 100 mph until it reached its destination and slowed smoothly to a stop. He tried meditating to keep his mind clear and calm, but the stillness that used to be second nature eluded him. Instead, what he found within was…very little. Almost nothing.
Where he had once felt fury at his fate, now it was a distant irritation. The only true emotions that he could feel now were a weak sense of regret and, stronger than regret, guilt. He had known what he had doomed the world to for decades; centuries, really. But only now that the end he’d caused had come, the guilt ate at him as much as The Bleakness. It had hollowed him out, made him do things to try to fix what he’d broken, even though there was no fixing what he’d done. All that was left was his plan, such as it was. It started a few years ago when he’d sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into building this facility.
He'd constructed his lab mostly under the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland, knowing that the solitude offered by the remote location would be exactly what his Gate project needed. He now knew just how naïve that project had been. There was never going to be a grand return for him and Cerise. The Gate never would have been able to send them back, not then and not now. Cerise had known; she’d even told him several times. But he hadn’t believed her. He felt certain that she was wrong, had overlooked something. He should have known better and now it was too late.
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The facility felt empty with the entire staff evacuated. He’d sent them all home a week ago, providing them with a very generous and unexpected bonus. He hoped they’d spent it all by now. The lights in the elevator flashed as a small tremor nearly knocked August from his feet. The elevator paused for a moment, then continued. A few moments later, the doors opened, and August walked out of the elevator and onto a catwalk that looked out into The Pit.
The Pit was the name they had given to the spherical chamber where the Gate itself had been constructed. Even now, familiar as he was with the facility, August’s gaze was immediately drawn to the enormous metal ring in the middle of the huge, hundred-meter-wide chamber: the Gate.
It hung in the very center of the room, five meters in diameter and weighing more than a hundred metric tons, and impossibly, it was suspended completely unsupported in the middle of the air. The Gate was made of silvery metal that was polished to a mirror shine. Runes and engravings covered every surface of it, marking out the complex spell diagrams necessary for physical instantaneous travel. It floated there, silently rotating and shifting, even though it was dormant.
He'd pinned so much hope and effort on this Gate. It had taken him ten thousand years to get to this point. August had done everything he could over the millennia to retake the power he’d squandered when he’d first arrived on Earth but it had all been for nothing. Instead of a triumphant return, he would be sending two young Reborn into a world that had moved on without him. The world he had known would not exist anymore, though he’d done everything he could for Griffin and Sarah to ensure that they would have as many advantages as they could. Those etherhearts he’d given them were his life’s work before he left Nolm. The Great House Seal and Enhanced System Access he’d embedded into their etherhearts should provide timeless advantages. At least, he hoped they were.
Memories of his time on Earth mixed with his memories of Nolm until he couldn’t tell the two apart; his grasp on his pasts was homogenizing. That meant The Bleakness was progressing even faster than he had predicted: even though his mind had been sharpened by his Attributes, there wasn’t much of it left. Soon enough, he would be completely insensible and, shortly after that, he would die. But he didn’t think that he’d be able to die without The Herald gloating at him one last time. After all, he had fulfilled its prophecy all those thousands of years ago by freeing the entity himself. That was one thing that galled him now: that The Herald had been right ten thousand years ago.
He tried to hurry through the Pit to get to the control room as quickly as possible, not exactly eager to hear from The Herald again so soon. A complex web of catwalks and control stations were positioned around the chamber, including a central stairway that led down to the Gate. August followed the catwalk along the perimeter of the chamber up to a stairway and through a door cleverly hidden in the ceramic wall of the chamber. This was the main control room for the entire facility. From here, he would start the process of opening the Gate to tunnel across a galaxy’s worth of space in an instant. He strode into the control room, the light turning on automatically.
The control room for the Gate looked like the launch control room from a NASA rocket launch. There were huge floor-to-ceiling wall monitors at one end of the room and several workstations staggered throughout where normally technicians would be checking and reporting on progress. He missed those technicians now, especially with his mind disintegrating. He needed their casual excellence and creative thinking. But they were home now, with their families. Or maybe they were doing all the drugs while having depraved sex. It didn’t matter to August now, so long as they didn’t spend their last few hours here. That would be truly tragic.
He turned on the wall monitors that displayed various video feeds in the room. He went to the main control terminal and entered the priming sequence for the Gate. He wouldn’t power it on until Griffin and Sarah’s procedures were complete. He’d need every erg of power he could squeeze from his batteries for the Gate to send two newly Reborn to Nolm. It would be the best thing for them, even if they hadn’t passed the Stone Gate yet. The only thing left for them here—for all of humanity—was death.
He felt the whole room begin to thrum with carefully controlled power as the priming sequence began. The monitors showed the rings of the Gate start to move, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Residual tensa sparks were spontaneously created and annihilated in little purple flashes of light within the Gate and all around the spherical room. Such waste would not be tolerated in the Capital, August thought, but for working with scientists who had never before even imagined tensa energy existed, the Gate is a true marvel. I just wish I could have extended the Gate… He sighed. I have let Cerise’s sentimentality infect me. Still, I would save more lives if I could. They hadn’t dared test it more than once because of the hard limit on tensa energy he had to work with.
He smiled as he remembered how Dr. Chakraborty had explained the automated sequence she had created. She’d used SpongeBob animations in her PowerPoint presentation—she’d been particularly proud of the slick loopback prevention she’d designed. She’d pointed it out with that little pen she always carried—the one with the purple fuzzy thing at the end of it. He started up the sequence she had designed now, setting it to a one-hour timer.
He had to set several other automated sequences at various other stations. The Gate’s systems were designed so that they could be controlled from the main control console, but each station was specialized in the tools they could use. August needed the added control those stations offered. Each station should have been manned by a qualified engineer, not him. He frowned as he worked; he was not used to feeling so mawkish. It was so…common. He moved one of Dr. Kilmeade’s plastic dinosaurs from the control surface, placing it on the cactus plant on a nearby shelf. It was a plastic cactus, a joke gift from Amanda Jameson in IT to emphasize how there was no sun here.
August felt another tremor of the Bleakness rock through his body, but his tensa-strengthened muscles barely shook. He felt the pain of the insidious disease scraping away at his insides like a distant scratching. Barely noticeable but persistent. That itch would get steadily stronger, he knew. In the last days, Cerise had almost constantly been scratching at her skin when she wasn’t paying attention. He wouldn’t get that far. By the time the itch became strong enough for him to notice it as more than a distant irritant he would have already dissolved from the inside out. He glanced at the timer on the main terminal. It had ticked down from 60:00.00 to 43:28.77
He had one last station to activate and set to its automated task, then he would be able to get out of the facility and back up to the surface. He needed to see the Sun before he died. He couldn’t go to his grave with the feeling of the empty presence of the Herald as one of the last things he remembered. He felt the presence of the Herald almost constantly now like it was standing in the corner just out of sight. It was disconcerting. He knew it would be here soon. It was whispering of its imminent arrival almost nonstop now.