//------------------------------// // It's full of stars // Story: A world with no giants // by TheSexyMenhir //------------------------------// In a world with no giants Ch.01 “It’s full of stars” When Angelo Gordon awoke this morning he felt a jolt of youthful energy, the likes of which he hadn’t felt for at least twenty years. Even the cracking of bones and his chronic knee pains didn’t serve to remind him of his age. For once he didn’t turn of the radio of his alarm clock, and instead decided to sing along to the generic pop song that was playing, despite not knowing the lyrics. Humming along with more enthusiasm than skill, he went straight for the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine, before he made his way to the bathroom. A quick shower, shave, and brushing of teeth later, and he felt ready to take on the world. He took a short moment to check his features in the bathroom mirror. The face that looked back at him couldn’t be called handsome in the traditional sense. His black hair already showed a worrying amount of grey, and the bags under his eyes couldn’t be explained away as laugh lines anymore, but he had a strong jawline, and his deep green eyes shone with an undeniable spark of intelligence. His opinion of himself often varied between spent-Sylvester-Stallone and George-Clooney-lookalike. Today was definitely a ‘Clooney’-day. By the time he had donned his suit, the coffee was ready and he enjoyed a quick cup of black goodness. The amount of coffee he consumed, and what this did to his biorhythm, might have been one of the prime reasons for the bags under his eyes, but he just couldn’t begin his day without some ‘jumpstarting’. A quick glance to the clock revealed that it was time to go to work. Being late on his “Big Day” just wouldn’t do. A German import waited in his driveway. Frankly speaking, the car was far more expensive than would have been appropriate for his scientist’s wage, yet he kept the black sports-car, claiming that it was a nice memento of his midlife crisis. (Others would argue that it was a sign that he was still stuck in it.) With a satisfying purr the engine started. The sun was only barely scraping on the horizon, and the streets had yet to fill with the daily bustle. In the fifteen years he had worked at the lab, he never quite understood why he had to get up at this god-forsaken hour, but his superiors had been quite adamant about it. Having made good time on the highway, he approached the flat glass building. With the early morning sun reflecting in the artfully shaped window-front of the building, for the first time in his life, Angelo could read the slogan above the front door without cringing at how cheesy it was. “Building the future, step by step,” the chrome-plated sign announced to the world. With a spring in his step he entered the building. “Morning Becky!” he greeted the receptionist. The receptions design had been inspired by sci-fi motives and presented itself in a pristine white, with smooth surfaces and without sharp corners. Becky’s black suit was the only contrast in the room. “Good morning Mister Gordon. Good luck for your big day,” Becky replied, as he walked past her towards the elevators. With the push of a button the doors opened and he entered the steel lined cabine. A quick swipe of his keycard unlocked access to the lower levels. Much of the research-complex had been built underground, not to conceal their horrible experiments from the public eye, like that scandalmonger from the local newspaper regularly wrote, but to shield the sensitive equipment from interference. The elevator doors opened and revealed his kingdom, ‘Laboratory 12’. To be more precise, he stood in the locker room, which would lead to the disinfection corridors, but once he passed those he would stand in his laboratory. One change of clothes and a shower with various aggressive chemicals later he entered the large room. Much to his surprise he wasn’t alone. “Anna? I thought I had told you that you weren’t to enter the laboratory alone,” he scolded the young red haired women (not that her hair could be seen under the hair cover all lab workers were required to wear). “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to go over the control programs once more before the test run,” she replied. Angelo sighed. That Anna was allowed into the lab in itself was already an oddity, since she technically was only an intern. Anna was a student at the nearby university, but once he had caught wind of her almost supernatural affinity for programming and system analysis he had pulled some strings to allow her into his lab. Of course his colleagues had other ideas about why he had brought the attractive 20 year old women down here. “Didn’t you allready check those twice yesterday?” he asked raising an eyebrow. A sheepish chuckle escaped his young intern, “I guess I’m getting a bit nervous.” “Haha, and here I thought it was MY lifework that is about to be fulfilled,” he fobbed his young assistant. “You can continue here while I take another look at ‘The Suit’,” he said, as he fought down the urge to further poke fun at Anna. ‘The Suit’ of course had another name, given to it by the PR department that already was gauging the projects monetary value, but “Foreign-Environment-Acclimation-and-Hazard Avoidance-Unit” was a bit of a mouth full for casual conversation. And ‘The Suit’ had a nice dramatic flare to it. Behind the overly complicated name hid a reinforced aluminium exoskeleton covered by a silicon-skin with a lead lining. An array of servos allowed the wearer to move the yellow behemoth, that weighed as much as two grown men, even after they had replaced the original steel construction with as much light weight materials as they dared too. The water- and air-tanks and the plethora of measuring devices added to the suits sizeable weight as well. From the outside ‘The Suit’ looked like an oversized Hazmat-suit, unsurprisingly so, since it technically was one. They wouldn’t actually need the suit today, seeing as the first test run was thought of as a proof of concept more than anything else, but Angelo always found that working on the suit helped calming his nerves. When he was sure that all joints were still sealed tight, he began with his actual work. In the beginning the work in Lab 12 had been a shock for Angelo, but over the years he had learned to love the almost ‘hands-on’ methodology that they applied around here. While he started out with only a PHD in physics he soon found himself dabbling in engineering, chemistry, and metallurgy as well, as he tried to adapt to the needs of his new job. But the machines had been built, the programs had been set up and now only data gathering, fine tuning, and double checking mathematical formulas remained. Not that he minded, after all it was this ‘dry’ lab work that had drawn him into the field in the first place, but sitting still behind his desk only added to the nervousness his assistant had awakened earlier in the morning. Little by little the team arrived and the large underground room filled with the noises of activity. Twelve men and women, not counting him and Anna, each of which had become a friend over the many years they had worked on this project. Martin, Johnson, Abdullah, Jennifer, Martinez, Alex, Florence, Kim, Ramirez, Mrs. Smith, Jensen and Bjorn, names that by now he almost knew better than those of his family. A quick glance at his watch revealed that there was only half an hour left until the testrun. He cleared his throat and instantly the room fell silent. Of course they all had waited for him to make a speech, after all his flare for the melodramatic was well known. As he looked at the thirteen faces that suddenly turned towards him, Angelo found himself struggling for words. “My dear... colleagues...” he began, only to vigorously shake his head before he started again: “No! My friends... You know that I’m not a fan of long speeches...” “Since when?” Ramirez interrupted him eliciting a round of laughter from the room. With a smile on his lips Angelo continued his speech, “You all have worked with me for a long time now, and some of you have stood with me from the beginning of this project until today, but regardless of how long, I have one thing I want to say to you; thank you! Thank you, for listening to this crazy man's ramblings, thank you for standing with me, thank you for helping me achieve my life work.” As he ended the room was silent. That is until Ramirez once again interrupted. “Little bit early to declare your life work isn’t it? You still got another forty years left to ramble,” he joked. The tense atmosphere in the room dispersed as quickly as it had come, once again leaving the troupe of scientist laughing. “Okay, everyone knows what he’s got to do. In ten minutes it’s go time!” Angelo shouted, sending the room into a busy chaos once again. Ten minutes later the thirteen and a half scientists had gathered in front of the experiment-chamber. Inside the white tiled room, stood a single machine. A simple steel ring about two meters in diameter placed on a solid steel pedestal. The outside appearance of the machine was deceiving, beneath the smooth steel surface hid some of the most sophisticated technology known to mankind. There were no consoles or flashing buttons, only two computer screens and the matching keyboards and mouses. The operations that were about to unfold were much too complex to be controlled by merely human reflexes, and the necessary settings had been input into the control software days ago. The only bit of drama the scientist had allowed themselves, was a huge switch that originally had been part of a old high voltage fuse box, which was wired into the computer to give the control program the start signal. “Ladies and Gentleman, cross your fingers!” Angelo intonated as he walked up to the switch. He took a deep breath and the silence in the room told him, that everybody was holding their breaths at well. With a satisfying snapping-sound the switched fell into the on-position. For a moment nothing seemed to happen only a soft noise indicated that the computer was busy with it’s operations. Another moment passed. The first few members of the team had to gasp for breath and still nothing had happened. Disappointedly Angelo turned away from the window into the test chamber. He looked at the desolate face of his colleagues as he tried to come up with something to say, but his mind was blank. Then Anna suddenly screamed, “There look!” Angelo whipped around on his heels and stared back into the chamber. And yes, there it was. Just in the middle of the Steel ring, a small black dot hovering in midair. As if it had only waited for them to look at it, the dot began to expand. The dot didn’t seem to be a physical object, and it’s growth was reminiscent of watching a whole being burnt into celluloid. When it’s edges touched the outside of the ring it stopped expanding; a perfect square shaped hole, floating in free air. Just as he thought that the hole had stabilised, it began to change again. Like thick dark fog, the inside of the square began to billow, slowly dissolving and freeing the view into the inside. It was full of stars. It might have been cheesy, but the quote seemed entirely appropriate. Like the monkeys staring into the obelisk, Angelo felt like something had been unlocked inside of him, revealing a bigger part of his existence, as he stared into the starry void. Angelo licked his dry lips and with a raspy voice he managed to say, “The Portal Project was a success.” It took a few moment before the message sank in, then the room suddenly exploded into cheers. Someone, probably Jensen, produced a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses and soon the entire team was busy giving toasts, hugging each other, or openly crying tears of joy, whichever seemed appropriate to express their excitement. --- It had been nearly an hour and Angelo had been busy partying, and why shouldn’t he? He had just completed the biggest success of his lifetime. A part of the team was already starting to get drunk, but today Angelo wasn’t bothered by this. Only when he could free himself from the cheering crowd for a moment, he noticed that Anna hadn’t returned to the main lab, with the rest of the team. Silently he departed from his partying teammates and searched for his intern. He found her still standing in the test chamber, her nose pressed against the window. Just for a moment, Anna seemed less like the twenty year old women she was, and more like a little kid staring wide eyed at the display of a candy shop. “Why aren’t you with us in the main lab celebrating?” he asked her, but either she hadn’t heard him or she ignored him. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, awe clearly audible in her voice. She walked up to her and took the place to her right. Once again he looked into the star filled void, that was still hanging there, suspended in mid air. “Yes, yes it is. But a bit eery if you ask me,” he confessed. Something about the patch of black unsettled him on a level he couldn’t comprehend. “Where do you think it leads?” Anna asked, not prying her eyes away from the portal for a second. “I don’t know... Probably just empty space since we didn’t work out how to aim it yet.” His romantic side of course wanted to believe that there lay another world on the other side of the portal, but realistically there was just a lot more vacuum compared to the few specks of matter that floated around in the emptiness of space. The probability that they had hit another planet on their first try was laughably low. Anna looked somewhat saddened by this revelation. Better to keep her expectations realistic. This was a huge jump forward for mankind, but they still had a lot of work ahead of them. Suddenly she turned to him, and looked him into the eyes, “Do you think, I’ll still be around when we figured out how to aim this?” The question hit him like a ton of bricks. He stuttered and tried to come up with an answer that was at the same time truthful, and yet reassuring, but in the end he could only lamely mutter, “I don’t know.”