CHAPTER 9 - EVERYONE'S GOT A SECRET
BEFORE
Jessup, Maryland
The next couple of weeks went by in a flash. Rebecca and Ansem spent all of their free time together. Rebecca looked up from the trampoline in her backyard while she held her boyfriend’s hand over her shoulder. The moon was small, a sliver crescent, but the stars were bright. It was a beautiful free night of love and happiness.
Ansem didn’t have any kind of social life before her. He never went out nor had people over. He had very few hobbies. When he was a kid, the only thing he played with was his chem-set. He wanted to be a scientist his entire life; not just any scientist, but one remembered and rich, with his own laboratory, someone who cured something major, like cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease. And yet his life did not lead him there.
Out of all the sharing they had done, Ansem was still keeping something from Rebecca, and it was in the basement of his house. He decided that he would have to tell her eventually. And while on the trampoline, in fact, while she was looking at him like no other time before, he decided to show her.
Ansem took Rebecca to his house and down the stairs to the basement. At first she feared the worst walking down those steps. Step by step her paranoia grew. Who keeps anything good in a basement? It’s rarely a train set and most of the time a mass grave. Ansem opened the door and took her inside.
It was a computer desk and a lab table filled with beakers, Bunsen burners, hot plates, and a refrigerator spanning the entire length of the basement wall where he kept every chemical he’s collected and created.
“What is all this?” Rebecca had to ask.
“My gift to mankind. My life mission. My legacy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Rebecca, I have figured out how to cure the common cold.”
“What?”
“The sniffles, influenza, allergies, pneumonia, all treatable.”
“How?”
“It has always been there, I guess too many people would lose their jobs and money if there was no need to buy cough syrup. I’m creating a supplement…just like you take for your anxiety.”
“Does anybody know about this?” Rebecca was still uneasy.
“Just the two of us- for now anyway.”
Ansem sat at the lab desk. He had pulled something up from his laptop and wanted Rebecca to take a look at it. Not just as an attending physician but as a medical student who took enough electives to know what she was looking at when it came to things like DNA coding and lab reports. It was all checking out to her.
His math and logistics were fully proven; he had a complete knowledge of medicine and was treating the common cold with an array of different inhibitors and growth serums derived from inverted irregular cells. Once combined and wrapped into an antibiotic, it will attack any virus, infection, or threat to the body and keep virtually every disease away.
“Is that why you bought all the shipping companies?”
“I want this to be available to the masses. If anyone finds out about this the FDA will throw me in prison. You see…the technology and knowledge has been around for over twenty years now. The only reason I can think of as to why they haven’t produced it is because if they gave it to the public…seasonal sickness would go down ninety-seven percent. Entire healthcare industries would be devastated.”
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“So why do you still want to do this?”
“It is every person’s right to live free of sickness. I can give that to them.”
“When do you plan to send it out?”
Rebecca stood next to Ansem who was sitting at the desk with his body turned the other way. This was the first time there was ever any distance between the two of them since their first date. Rebecca was no longer scared of her beloved’s secret in the basement. She was not afraid at all with his plight. It was the fact that he would be breaking the law and proceeding without the FDA. No one is above society’s laws, even if the government is corrupt. Ansem had good intentions. She just didn’t know if she agreed or not. Rebecca looked over Ansem’s shoulder as he fondled a test-tube in his hands at his desk in the basement.
“They are being prepped to go out on the twenty-first. Four days before Christmas…”
Manhattan, New York
It was the beginning of December when Samuel came out of his coma. He had seen many things while he was under and could not remember any of them. It felt like he had lived for hundreds of years. When Vanessa saw him awake she kissed him with wet lips from all the tears. There was little hope for Samuel, every doctor had said so. Vanessa refused to pull the plug on him. Something told her, somehow she knew that he was meant to come back and live on. This world was not finished with Samuel Gordon Chase.
“What did you see?” she asked him later at home, in bed.
“I stepped into the oncoming grid.”
“What?” she repeated.
“When I got in that room, before I passed out, I saw the grid. I think my consciousness was thrown into it.”
“I don’t understand”
“I saw my life outside of itself…as a whole… And then I weaved through it, unseen by myself. Along my journey I came upon the grey mist, and that is why I cannot remember anything now except the beginning.”
“You sound even crazier than before, Sam,” Vanessa admitted.
“I know, honey. This all seems, well, farfetched, but in time I promise you will understand. You asked me what I saw… I saw the Time Collider.”
The next day Samuel did not rest. He went into his laboratory to find that the results from his test had pushed the research and development phase into overdrive and they were able to get enough funding to manufacture the portable Tachyon Resonator. The original concept Samuel had first drawn up. Some had the right mind to question his motives and ethics participating in such a risky experiment, but most were all too happy to throw money at him after the results came in.
Samuel could not figure out how to combine the Time Collider with the Tachyon Resonator. It was not until he threw out the notion of achieving the speed of light altogether that he realized what had to be done. The Time Collider bent space and time, placing the entry and exit point together, but it could not infiltrate the intrinsic fabric of reality. For that, the doctor needed to build one more device.
Samuel slid his Time Collider blueprints over the Tachyon Resonator blueprints, and with one more piece of tracing paper covered both of them. He outlined the circle of the Tachyon Resonator and etched in the triangular mainframe of the Time Collider. In the middle of the circle and triangle he smiled and wrote down three words.
Quantum Wormhole Catalyst
Always a childhood axiom of Samuel's since he was enthralled by modern American comparative mythology; he never thought he would be able to apply it to physical research and development. Everything was coming together…The Tachyon Resonator isolated the surrounding area and converted the atmosphere. The Time Collider held the fabric of the space-time continuum in rippled stasis. And the Quantum Wormhole Catalyst created a thread from one dimensional timeline to the next.
This assembly was complicated and risky. If not done right it could open up Earth to infinite dangerous dimensions where anything was possible, including the darkest of human nightmares. To be safe, the jump would have to be made in outer space. Where there was enough room and zero gravity to achieve maximum velocity, no elemental factors could interfere with the experiment like wind resistance, and there was no danger of reemerging in the middle of a wall.
With the resonator being done already it would not take them that long to create the collider and Q.W.C. Their end of the experiment would be done before Christmas. It was the spaceship part that would have to wait for the department to find a suitable government provider. It was not long before General Saarsgard of the US Air Force caught wind of Samuel’s miraculous recovery and subsequent discoveries and contacted him from the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. He informed Samuel of his base and what they were building inside of it.