//------------------------------// // As One Life Ends... // Story: Sojourner // by LastAmongEquals //------------------------------// Sojourner by LastAmongEquals Chapter 1 “As One Life Ends...” This is going to be the day that changes my entire life... I pulled my car into the parking space with butterflies in my stomach, taking several deep breaths to try to calm myself as I put the car in park and shut the engine off.  Across the lot was my destination, the Fowler High Energy Research Building.  Despite having spent the last three-and-a-half years of my life becoming increasingly well acquainted with the university’s campus, I’d never really noticed this place before now. It was a wholly unremarkable building—perhaps slightly larger than the rest of the structures on campus, but the cladding and architecture were designed to the same look, blending into the surrounding college ambience so well you’d hardly know there was anything remarkable about the place at all.  Or at least, you’d never know it if it wasn’t for the gigantic crowd currently milling around the front entrance with signs, shouting eco-centric slogans and epithets at the doors. I shook my head slowly as I really took the scene in for the first time.  It was a madhouse, especially this week.  Fifteen years of intensive research into alternative energy sources had almost bankrupted the school at times, but there had apparently been a major breakthrough that was changing everything.  Nobody knew what it was, though, since access to the building was so strictly controlled and no members of the press were ever admitted. Until today, anyway. I smirked at the fleet of numbered and antenna-decked vans parked down the side of the access road, the army of newsmen reading off long-winded versions of “we have no idea what’s happening but it sure is something” in an effort to keep viewers interested.  They were all keyed up ever since the department issued a statement that there would be a major press release at the end of the week, in which they would unveil the future of clean energy.  There would be no cameras, but literally the entire world was waiting and watching. And I was going to get the first scoop... It made perfect sense, but I could still hardly believe it was happening.  While the department was operating in a largely unilateral manner, they were still loyal to the university, and so the first dibs on interviews, tours, and information would be given to the campus newspaper.  And fortunately, by sheer luck (and everyone else being too busy...) it had come to me—a senior general studies major with only a passing enthusiasm for journalism—to break what was arguably one of the largest, most important stories in the history of the world. So, you know, no pressure. This is going to change everything, the thought rolled through my mind again.  After today, my life is never going to be the same. Only five months and change until I graduated, and as long as I didn’t completely and royally screw this up, this one story could land me almost any job of my choice.  I could be a reporter at just about any paper in the country—and even if I didn’t want that, I’d be known as the guy who broke the Clean Power Story from the moment I walked in the door no matter where I went.  This credit could do a lot of good for me.  Granted, I didn’t exactly know how at this point, but I felt sure about it. I leaned around and dug through the wreckage of my back seat, looking for my cell phone, which was buried under a few empty water bottles, a very smelly karate gi, and some other assorted crap.  I know, I know: my car’s a mess.  I don’t really use it enough to care. Another deep breath, a second to double-check that I had my keys and my IDs on me and that my car was locked, and I headed out. The media-and-protester circus fell out of sight as I walked around the building to a side exit hidden in among the landscaping.  I stepped up to the blank, red door just as the bell tower rang out one in the afternoon, and—as per the instructions in my emails—the door was unlatched just enough for me to let myself in.  I did so, making sure the door latched closed behind me and finally got a look at the man who I’d been conversing with digitally for the last week. “Dr. Mueller, right?” I asked. “And you must be... Ash.”  The researcher reached a hand out to shake mine, his smile faltering and his stride hitching just enough to be noticeable as he did.  I had to fight to keep my eyes from rolling. “Let me guess, you assumed I was a girl, right?” He ran a hand across his scalp, embarrassed.  “Forgive me, I may not have taken the time to look you up in the student registry.  I just saw your name in the email address header as ‘Ashley’ and sort of assumed...  I’ve been a bit... occupied.” I smirked.  “I’m sure.”  I couldn’t really be upset at him.  At least at first glance, he was every inch like what I’d have stereotyped as a lead scientist, from his salt-and-pepper goatee and bald head right down to his feet, which were clad in sandals instead of shoes.  He finished extending his hand and I took it, giving it a firm shake my dad would no doubt be proud of.  “Don’t worry about it, my parents were kind of weird.  It’s great to meet you,” I said casually.  He didn’t pull his hand back after I let go, though. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’m obliged to double-check your identity before I can let you into the building.” “Oh, right!”  I knew that; the emails had made it very clear that I shouldn’t forget a photo ID when I visited.  I passed over my student credentials, which he looked over and passed back with a smile. “Thank you.  Normally I wouldn’t prefer to be quite so paranoid, but it’s protocol.  Also, we’ve had a few rather serious threats of late against the department, so things are a bit on edge around here.” “Threats?  Over what?” “Oh, you’ll see,” he replied cryptically before he straightened up and went into an obviously scripted recitation.  “Once we go in, I must ask that you observe a few guidelines.  No press has ever been admitted to this building since it opened, and there are reasons for that.  The work we do here has not only a certain financial value, but would also be worth a great deal to any institution’s pride should our research be stolen, even accidentally.  For that reason, I must insist that you not take any photos, and that anything you see in any of the rooms we pass must remain strictly off the record.  Failure to do so could result in charges of corporate espionage being filed against you.” He broke a smile.  “Honestly, though, I think what you’re here to see should give you plenty to write about as it is.” With that out of the way, he swiped his ID to open the door into a hallway, and led me quickly towards the elevators at the other end.  I passed room after room, all without even the typical sidelight windows that a classroom would have.  Most of the doors were closed tightly, and a few even closed as we were walking down the hall.  Not that I could really see much of anything, mind you. I found my head slightly spinning as the elevator closed behind me.  “So...” I began as the Doctor punched in a floor and swiped his ID again, “what am I here to see, exactly?” “Ever since this department opened fifteen years ago, we’ve had one major area of study,” he began as the elevator started to slowly ascend.  “We take on all sorts of projects in order to publish and keep grant money coming in, but our big goal has always been stellar physics.  We’ve researched deep space, anti-matter, and the very nature of gravity itself, and all of our study has finally come together in our greatest work yet.” I don’t know if he planned it or if the drama of the moment was just perfectly aligned, but right as he ended his line the doors opened and I found myself in a large research room.  The walls, floor, and even the tables were all research-white to an almost painfully reflective degree—though about 90% of the walls were at least covered with monitors, server racks, workstations, and other research furniture.  A few other scientists milled about the room with clipboards and whatnot, and a couple of doorways led off into offices and other rooms.  The whole thing would have been depressingly cliche, straight out of a tech-company commercial—were it not for the feature at the far wall that dominated my attention. The opposite wall from the elevator was completely clear, showing a massive bulk of industrial-grade machinery, and I mean “massive” to the scale where from fifty feet away, the bolts holding this rig together were clear as day.  It was hard to tell what the equipment housed, but it all surrounded something so unexpected that I could barely take in anything else.  I walked slowly across the room, dazed, until I came to the barrier wall and placed my hand against the glass. I found myself face-to-face with an honest-to-God black hole. It was tiny, sure, but that’s absolutely what it was.  The truly dark center of the thing was about the size of a quarter, but the utterly perfect depth of the darkness was... well, captivating is really the only word that does it justice.  I felt like I couldn’t stop staring into the void and the gently swirling accretion that surrounded it. The doctor leaned nonchalantly against the glass, and I suddenly realized that I could feel the stresses from his body through the glass as it strained.  It felt almost as if the wall was vibrating to an inaudible hum.  I pulled my hand back, hesitantly.  “Pretty, isn’t it?” he said.  “There’s been a few researchers who have shown the same tendencies from time to time.  Once they start looking into the event, it’s hard to look away.” “I... Whu—how?  Wh—what?”  I flailed my arms at the black hole, still unable to truly grasp what was going on. Dr. Mueller laughed and rolled a desk chair over to the nearby table in the center of the room so he could take a seat.  “Officially, it’s known as the first Terrestrial Gravitational Event Anomaly, or TGE-1,” he explained. nodding at me to take a seat of my own.  “Unofficially, we call it ‘The Hole’.  As to the how, well...” I pulled myself away from the trembling glass and found a chair across the table from him, trying to figure out just what I should be paying attention to as I laid my cell phone on the table and toggled the voice recorder on.  “For several decades now, it’s been known to science that micro-black holes could be formed by particle collisions, if they were energetic enough.  The problem has been that if they’re too small they tend to evaporate themselves away almost instantly via Hawking radiation, and if they were large enough to be stable, well, they tended to expand.  It takes a very controlled input of mass into an event to keep it stable, and this is the first time an event like this has ever been close enough to Earth for us to have any input.” I hastily scrawled a few sentences down.  “So, how did you make it stable?” “Ah, that’s a bit of a trade secret,” he replied.  “I will have to suffice to say that our research into gravity and how we can interact with it magnetically has had much of the bearing on our success, and that’s why we felt confident enough to take a shot at creating a micro-event of our own.  The upshot, though, is that this baby produces enough gravitational energy to power our homemade electrical generators indefinitely.  TGE-1 alone is powering this entire campus, and will soon expand to most of the surrounding city once we refine the generator tech we’re using.” “This is... wow,” was all I could think to say.  “It’s just—It’s all so unreal.”  My brow furrowed slightly as my reporting instincts figured out what the real question around all this was.  “So, major scientific breakthroughs, virtually unlimited energy, zero dependance on fossil fuels and such and a huge leap forward for the human race—why are there protesters outside?” Dr. Mueller sighed.  “People often fear what they don’t understand.  There was a danger when we first turned it on, I suppose, because there’s really no way to know how well the math will hold up on an experiment this large until you try it.  Now that it’s on, it’s relatively harmless, but of course there will always be people who think that this will be the thing that destroys the entire world, just like they did when the CERN collider was first brought online in Europe, or when the Manhattan Project was formed to create the atom bomb.” I leveled what I thought was my best hard-hitting-reporter’s face at the professor.  “You said relatively harmless.  Is there any danger from this experiment?” “On a large scale?  No.  But of course a black hole isn’t completely harmless.”  He nodded towards the glass wall.  “That wall is all that separates us personally from an extremely surreal end of existence.  It’s made right at the extent of the event horizon.  Crossing the line of that glass would mean that you’d fall in and never come back, so I guess there’s that as a risk.  And mathematically, TGE could expand to the point where it would begin to overwhelm the containment and swallow the earth, but someone would have to put a lot of mass into it to do so.  Like, a few thousand cubic acres of dirt, lot of mass.” I jotted more notes, hoping that I’d be able to read my shaky handwriting when I got back to my dorm room.  “So, this whole thing out front of the building is a misunderstanding then, right?  Do you expect it’ll all blow over soon?” “I sure hope so...” he said quietly.  “Sadly, there have been a few more... radical instances.  The department has received several threats so far from some eco-terrorist front, but so far nothing has come of it.”  He brightened back up.  “The police and the FBI are aware of the situation, so I don’t think we’re actually in any real danger here.  If I did, I certainly wouldn’t be here!” he said with a laugh. I absently laughed along as I wrote, not really paying much attention to what was actually being said.  Terrorists?  Conflict over the end of the world?  The holy grail of free and unlimited clean energy?  Hazy visions of a Pulitzer Prize flickered at the back of my mind as the realization of just how big this event truly was started to sink in. Honestly, I was so absorbed in my future article that I didn’t even notice anything going wrong at first.  The first few muffled pops from the hallway just sounded like a blown light bulb, or a paper bag in the stairwell.  Even the first faint screams didn’t register with me.  It wasn’t until my interviewee froze with a worried expression and the rest of the scientists in the room started looking anxiously at the door that I even looked up. Dr. Mueller jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over behind him.  “Everybody out!” he yelled suddenly. One of the entry doors to the room burst open, almost tearing its hinges from the casework as several rather large-looking people stormed into the room.  They were all dressed in roughly-matching piecemeal military surplus, but they were toting some serious hardware.  I felt like I should have been able to identify some of the weapons, but I was a bit shocked, to be perfectly frank. As the college kid in a hoody and the sole person in the room not wearing a lab coat, I stuck out badly.  Sure enough, one of the armed men moved rapidly over to me, pushing me roughly out of my seat and back against the glass wall, bellowing at me to stay put. I cowered, I admit it.  My mind was fuzzy, and all I could think as I covered my head with my arms was It’s not fair!  This is supposed to be the beginning of a whole new life for me! Against my back, I could feel the strain of the glass as it fought against the pull of the unnatural gravity field.  I watched, horrified, as the assailants began to herd the scientists together, keeping them all in check under the barrels of their assault rifles. One of the insurgents, just as unrecognizable under his ski mask as all the others, stepped up to one of the larger consoles, eyeing it meaningfully.  “You were warned.  We’re shutting this little experiment down, professor.” “You can’t!” Dr. Mueller protested.  “There are procedures for that!  The containment system is critical, if you—” “Someone please shut him up?” the leader snarled, raising the butt of his rifle to smash the console’s panel in. Time figuratively slowed down as everything went to shit around me.  The professor sprang up to tackle the pseudo-soldier, and they collided hard.  I flinched back as a loud crack rang out in the room, and had just enough time to look up and see the tiny hole in the wall above me, cracks spiderwebbing across the face of the sheet. The wall behind my back exploded inwards, and I felt the unreal sensation of falling backwards from my place against the ground. Time began to slow down in a much more literal sense.  As I fell, I watched the Doctor get thrown to the floor.  The terrorist leader drew a pistol from his belt with excruciating slowness as chaos broke out in the room.  Fleeing scientists and chasing insurgents drifted to a stop, and everything went perfectly still as my body accelerated to the same speed as the light that was bringing the information to my eyes.  In the lab, I could see Dr. Mueller’s flinch stuck in time like I was, the blooming muzzle flash of the pistol frozen like a flower, and even the tiny bullet hanging in midair between the two.  I could almost even make out the ripples of violently displaced air around the bullet. I knew in my mind that outside, in the real world, it was already all over.  Dr. Mueller and who knew how many scientists were already dead, and I had already snapped out of their existence in the space between heartbeats as the black hole claimed me. The knowledge was nothing on the actual experience, though.  Time had no meaning for me anymore, and I felt the agony both forever and in an instant.  My body felt stretched, like every individual inch of me was on a separate torture rack—but beyond that, I could feel my mind being pulled apart at the seams.  All I could do was scream.  I screamed long past the point where it hurt.  I kept screaming even after it stopped hurting altogether.  And I screamed long beyond the point where my throat was capable of producing any sound at all. And then there was nothing. Briefly.