Chapter 9

Chapter 8  (13+) Jack tells Lise she is in trouble from some unknown threat #2036687 by Hyperiongate

Chapter 9
 
I am locked in a place of my own creation. I have a tale to tell myself… but not just yet…not just yet.

When will that be; that optimal time to meet myself; to say, “I am you and there is much we need to discuss.”

I send out a tentative string of inquiry, looking for anything that may help me decide rightly. Probability curves dance around; nearly all bring premature death to ME and thus, an end to my mission. I cannot let that happen. I don’t think I can endure too many more infinite loops.

Try. Die. Repeat…

I look for an outcome amongst outcomes. There are infinite possibilities but that does not mean that anything is possible. Every path has a low probability of success. I must take what I can get.

In the meantime, I need to help myself along a path; one likely to result in failure. However, there are some opportunities along this particular path. There is one person that walks along every path to my success. I reach out to her carefully. She is extremely receptive to my thought-string. Gently, I guide her down a probability string of mutual consent; it will eventually intercept the one I have chosen for me; for us. Annie is my only hope.

Annie could hardly wait to get to work. After last night’s shift, she’d gone to her nursing class and was surprised at the pedestrian pace the instructor used to cover the material. This was a first as she usually found it difficult to stay up with the material. In the past, these classes were a source of frustration for her. She’d be sleepy after working a graveyard shift at the hospital. Half awake, she’d been lucky to keep her eyes open much less understand the material.

Today had been different. She’d easily understood everything. In fact, she seemed to be thinking ahead of the instructor, correctly anticipating each line of thought. By the end of the four hours, she’d found herself wondering if this was even something she need bother attending. Maybe there were more challenging nursing courses for her to take.

After class, she’d gone home and slept the soundest sleep she could remember. She didn’t know if she dreamt or not but when she awoke, the strange new patient, John Doe number 11, was on her mind. She rushed through the process of dressing and making dinner. He was waiting for her. She just knew it.

When she arrived at the hospital, Annie rushed down to her observation room and felt a bit surprised by the excitement she’d carried with her all evening. Through a large window in her observation booth, she could see the body floating in the tank. As she got comfortable in her chair, she began to consider who that might actually be out there. Did he have a family? Was he aware of his condition? Did he feel alone or afraid? Who was this JD11?

She’d been working with the burn unit for a few months and had never seen such a tremendous amount of damage. The radical new treatment he was undergoing made quite a site to see as he floated mid-tank. At the start of her first shift with the patient last night, she found it difficult to look directly at the body. Damaged beyond belief; it forced Annie to think of JD11 as an “it”; an inanimate object to which she had no association other than to observe a few dials.

By the end of the shift, things had changed. That was a person out there. Someone with a history. Someone that needed her. She’d even imagined that he’d talked to her.

Imagined? Annie wasn’t so sure.

“He knows I’m here.”

The thought struck her so suddenly and with such certainty that she could not remember not knowing this. How could that be? How could she reach back in her memory and not know of a time where he was not waiting for her; at this moment and at this very place. It was as if this moment in time had been waiting patiently for itself to arrive; bringing with it the certainty of “he knows I’m here.”

She shook her head trying to clear away the preposterous thought. She was a nursing assistant and he was a comatose patient with a survival probability scraping the bottom of the charts.

“Annie, what an imagination you have,” she thought as she took her seat in front of the dials and monitors she was tasked with keeping an eye on.

She pulled a new textbook out of her bag. She’d stopped by the college bookstore on her way in to pick it up. She really didn’t need to read it just now since it was intended for a course was considering taking next semester. However, she’d already finished the textbook for this semester last night. She wasn’t sure how that actually happened but accepted that it did with little more than a passing thought. Tonight, she planned on getting ahead of the game.

Eight hours later, without so much as a glance at the clock on the wall, Annie reluctantly sensed that her night shift was nearly over. The last eight hours had flown by. She had completed her new text book during the first couple of hours of her shift, without noticing anything special about the accomplishment. Forgotten was the fact that she had never been a good reader, or student for that matter. That all seemed to be in the past. Tonight she’d polished off a six hundred page text book almost as fast as she could turn the pages. She didn’t know it at the time, but had anyone asked her to recall what was on any particular page, she could have done it, verbatim.

Bored and only half way through her shift, she’d taken a short break and visited the hospital library where she borrowed a couple of books. While she was gone, there was no one in the observation booth to notice as a thin membrane blinked shut over the patient’s eyes and then open again. This would have astonished the burn team. They all knew that when he went into the tank the day before, he’d had no eyelids at all. In the history of mankind, there were no know instances of eyelids regenerating on a human. As far as they knew, that was still the case.

Annie returned from the library and looked down at the books she’d borrowed and thought, Why these? Without thinking about what she was doing and in complete disregard of the rules, Annie walked out of her observation booth and into the TIG room. There was a chair over in the corner. Annie pulled it next to the TIG tank and sat down. She opened up the first book, A Tale of Two Cities, and began to read aloud to JD11.

Annie had never read an entire book just for fun. She was amazed at how much she was enjoying the story. Every now and then, she would look over at JD11. There was no question in her mind that he was enjoying it as well.

As she read through the night, Annie felt as if he were looking at her from where he was floating in the tank. Every hour she would take a break and return to the observation booth where she would record various readings and then return quickly back to her chair next to JD11. She didn’t really understand the data that she was collecting. Still, she could see trends. Numbers were increasing in almost every column. His feed rate was going up. Heart rate, kidney functions etc., were all showing higher values with each passing hour. She didn’t need to be a doctor to know that all of this meant he was getting better.

Annie had no idea how right she was.

Once her shift ended, Annie decided to have breakfast in the hospital’s cafeteria instead of going home to get ready for class. She felt confident that she could skip a class or two without missing anything important. After all, she’d already finished reading, and understanding all of the course material.

She also wanted to sit in on the morning briefing on JD11. As part of the team, albeit a small part, she was welcome to attend if she wished. No one expected her to participate. After all, she was just a nursing assistant. Annie understood this. She just wanted to see what the experts had to say about her patient. Besides, she felt as rested as if she had just finished sleeping all night.

*****


As Annie was reading to JD11, the night drops started at Artifact Base. Large planes flew in low and slow, dropping their cargo on target before lumbering back into the blackness of the night sky. Black parachutes, invisible against the moonless sky, set their dangling loads down softly. After each drop, men would scurry out to the landing zone and begin to unpack equipment and supplies. A bus-sized container would be emptied in minutes. Its collapsible sides would allow it to be broken down quickly; leaving no indication that it had ever been there. A load would come in every twenty minutes. They would continue to do so until one hour before sunrise.

Standing outside of his tent/office, Colonel Wes Lanier watched events unfold. He did not get directly involved. He needed a secure, level 3 compound up and running by morning. He’d made one call. That was all that was needed. People that worked for the Colonel knew how to get things done.

Barracks were constructed to house up to one hundred troops and scientists. An armory, and mess tent went up along with several other structures that would serve as offices and laboratories. Everything was prefabricated and easy to assemble quickly.

Eventually, if it became necessary, more durable structures would be built. For now, canvas was the order of the day. They only exception to this was the Artifact Structure. It was being built around the artifact since they didn’t seem to be able to move it. It needed to be capable of meeting extreme Clean Room standards. A significant power source with backups would have to be available at all times. From the outside, it would have to be thermally inert making it invisible to the prying eyes of foreign satellites. Finally, it would have to be bomb proof. If a country suspected that the United States had access to advanced technology that they were not interested in sharing, they would be very tempted to simply eliminate the “advantage” such a thing might bring.

Security was airtight. Motion sensors were everywhere. A rabbit wouldn’t be able to scratch itself within five miles of the camp without being automatically targeted by remote weapon systems. Foot patrols were plentiful but not evident. The idea was that part of being secure was to be invisible. Thermal imaging from above would show almost no activity. The five mile perimeter insured that line-of-site observations would yield little more than a few military type structures. No big deal. The military was always practicing out in this part of the country anyway.

The final piece to the puzzle was something simply called Plan B. Far overhead, outside the range of civilian radars, a specially equipped B-2 stealth bomber carved Mobius circles in the sky. It provided secure communications as well as blanket surveillance of the areas across several spectra, including infrared. Its most important role was its ability to deliver a very special payload, on target and on time at a moment’s notice. Should the worst case scenario come to be, Plan B would ensure that the Artifact site was bombed down to bedrock. Nothing would survive. Colonel Lanier was the only one that could pull that particular trigger.

Satisfied that work was progressing as planned, the Colonel turned in for the night. He knew the camp would be completed down to the last nail by the time he got up early the next morning. The only exception would be the Artifact building. That might take an extra day or so.

When it was completed, the only thing capable of destroying the building would be in the belly of the B-2 high overhead.

Or possibly whatever was floating down inside the building’s walls, thought the colonel. He was well aware that they were building a structure with a dual purpose. It needed to keep others out while containing whatever beast they may have floating in the hole within.

Chapter 10  (13+) Annie tells about reading to JD11. The Brotherhood enters the game. #2036979 by Hyperiongate