Chapter Forty-Six

“It has to be a lottery. It must!” Rosa said, shaking his head. He gripped his wife’s hand under the table. “Outside of crew and necessary personnel for the operation of the Mothership Ark, it has to be fair.”

“Rosa, like I’ve told you on countless occasions, who gets to be on the ark isn’t our decision to make.” Edmund’s low voice reverberated out of the computer’s speaker. His face was prominent on the screen, their other colleagues fading into the background of the video call while he spoke. “The UiN will decide—”

“Well, they have it wrong! This is not what we agreed to!” Rosa erupted. He caught Eva’s feigned half-smile out of the corner of his eye. “They can’t just make a list of passengers and expect the rest of the world to be all right with that. A lottery for all—”

“With seats fairly allocated to each country per capita,” she clarified

“Right,” he agreed. “Seats fairly apportioned to each country, who will themselves host the lottery that any of their citizens can enter—”

“Governments are easily corrupted, Rosa,” a colleague of theirs spoke up.

“Do not be so naïve as to think even our own government wouldn’t try to rig the system,” the engineer continued.

“As you would have seen in our report—if you’d taken the time to read it, we proposed an independent oversight committee for the lottery—”

“Enough!” Edmund said. The conversation halted immediately.

“This is a moot point—it is not our decision to make. They’ve unofficially allocated seats, though nothing is final yet.”

Rosa opened his mouth to speak, but Edmund cut him off.

“I’ve already forwarded your report to the UiN, Kuzland. So, it’s out of my hands.”

Rosa raised his hands in the air. “All I’m asking is to be heard about this. This is not what you agreed to. This is not what you said.”

“And they’ll hear you,” Edmund assured, “Now can we get back to the nuclear supply chain, please?”

The rest of the meeting was uninteresting to Rosa. They spent the time going over old maps of nuclear deposits that he’d already scoured.

They needed deuterium, a particular isotope that, upon its discovery, represented 0.72% of Earth’s naturally occurring deuterium.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

However, they used it for nuclear power generation, and the supply dwindled over the years.

Now they needed it for this mission—and they needed lots.

Operations to splice engineer deuterium into DeuteriuFloro-Qex—the kind they need—had already popped up around the globe. But the production wasn’t fast enough. Intertwining electrons of nuclear particles was not a one-and-done operation. Rosa was convinced this was where they should put their resources.

So, knowing most of any substantial natural deuterium deposits were gone, he leaned back in his chair and just listened to the pointless chatter.

When the meeting was over, Eva shut down her computer while he stood and paced her lab. Even after years together, it astounded him how impeccably clean she kept it.

He swiped a finger over the white desktop and analyzed it for any sign of dust or dirt.

“Do you even work in here? It seems abandoned,” he asked.

At first, she seemed confused, tilting her head to the side as if to prompt him to elaborate. But she quickly caught on.

She tossed a pen at him jokingly.

“Why are you so mean!”

“Mean?” he said, feigning insult. He crept toward her chair. Holding the armrests, he leaned over her. A mischievous smile crawled across his face.

“Were you not the one to just throw a pen at me?”

Her smile was sultry. She sat up tall as if to taunt him.

“And what are you going to do about it?”

He pressed forward until his lips hovered right above hers. He swept his bottom lip against her upper lip.

“You’ll have to wait and see.”

And with that, he pushed off the armrests, sending her wheeled chair rolling back across her office. She laughed as she did back in their college days.

“Rosa!” she begged, her voice eager.

Eager, hungry for more playfulness.

But he was walking toward the door.

“Sorry, hun, I have to get back to work! I have a world to save,” he replied.

She laughed at him.

“I’ll get you back for this, you know! You just wait!”

And he knew she certainly would. In fact, he excitedly looked forward to it.

* * *

The lights were off in her bedroom, but Viktoriya could not shut her eyes.

She inhaled deeply, staring up at the ceiling overhead. The nothingness was her space.

She let her eyes flutter shut and let the rush of time and space disintegrating wash over her once again.

She followed the silvery corridor to HH190.

“Hello,” she called out, but her voice disappeared.

A tugging feeling gently began pulling or pushing Viktoriya from the spot she hovered as it towed her away backward from HH190 along one channel of the web.

She saw galaxies passing, nebulas gliding by as she rode the strand of the glowing web faster and faster.

As she turned to face forward, more and more galaxies came into view as the corridor twisted and wound its way through the universe, similar to a smooth roller coaster rail that made sweeping arcs and gliding bends as it went on and on.

Much like a river that comes to a fork, dividing and splitting into many paths, the web also branched into different paths, breaking away into different directions from the main.

Then she saw one segment branching toward a familiar sight in the distance—the Milky Way, as she then progressed along its sweeping path, onward into the solar system, and finally to Earth.

And then her eyes snapped open.

And the glowing silver strands—the web between all that she’d only ever seen in the Spectrum during her flash-outs—appeared above her in her room. Much like a holo-map showing her journey through the universe, slowly fading from her view.