“But that wasn’t good enough for you.”
He collapsed back into his seat with his shoulders slumped. “I just couldn’t let go. All I thought about was Sarah. The last sight of her, looking so frightened, so lost. She sacrificed herself so I could live. I couldn’t deal with that. It… consumed me. Because of her I was pulled into the wormhole. Because of her I had gone where no man should have, shuttled across the bridge of space and time.”
“How long were you there?”
“Months. Enough to gain the Denizens’ trust. I was their case study, their living link to the past. It was easy to get them to be comfortable with my inquiries. They believed my fascination with their advanced technology was healthy curiosity. In truth, I was obsessed with learning all I could about their gateway. It was still in place, still connected to my timeline. My emergency pod had damaged the gateway, and they were determined not to reopen the bridge for fear of rupturing the timeline and theoretically destroying the past and present.”
“And you took advantage of their caution.”
“As long as the gates remained on both sides, it was possible for me to go back. And I couldn’t get that out of my head. I needed to convince them it was safe for me to slip back to the exact moment I departed, but with a more powerful vessel. One that could take me and Sarah back up to the surface. Back to our lives, where we could leave the future behind like a bad dream.”
“I take it they didn’t see things your way.”
“Exactly. But the Denizens were naïve to a fault. They related critical information without a second thought because they didn’t understand the nature of betrayal. They didn’t comprehend dishonesty, or even what a lie was. I told them many lies, and created a massive disturbance by overloading one of their ship engines to distract them. In the chaos I abducted their chief engineer and tried to force him to open the gateway. He couldn’t cooperate. I had to… hurt him.”
He took a nervous glance at Maria, but didn’t see the condemnation he expected. He continued, the words nearly tripping over themselves to escape his lips.
“While he was dazed, I scanned his vitals to override the safety protocols. I was desperate. Not thinking straight. The entire ordeal had a maddening effect on my psyche. All I could think about was going back, you understand? It was more than a notion. It was a need, an animal craving that consumed my every thought. I had commandeered a special diving suit they used for deep sea exploration on interstellar missions. Far more durable than the Gorgon, and equipped to withstand immense pressure. I was more than willing to gamble using it to resurface on Earth if I needed to.”
“What happened when you opened the gateway?”
Albert was silent for a moment. His eyes squeezed shut.
“It was all a rush. A hazy torrent of adrenaline and anxiety. Despite its advancement, their technology was simple to use. I was able to align the gateways to reopen the bridge. I calibrated it the best I could to arrive hours before my mission, so I could stop the entire thing and save the lives of my crew and my wife.”
He felt tears slide down his face as he fought to finish the story. “The portal opened. It was the most petrifying and captivating thing I’ve ever seen. The light, the noise… like some ancient god awakening in a foul mood. It was at that moment I realized the truth. I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.”
Maria leaned forward, eyes intent on his face. “What came out of the wormhole?”
“Nothing.” Albert scrubbed a hand across his cheeks. “Deis disengaged the manual override and shut the portal down immediately. It wasn’t until later that I found out what happened. I had overshot my calculations by a long shot. The bridge had connected with Earth some seven months before my fateful mission. Dec 10, 2015. I remember that day with the greatest of clarity. The day Sarah discovered the energy pulse she believed to be extraterrestrial. The day that set into motion the mission that killed her and the crew, and sent me on a crash course with the future in the first place.”
He gazed again out the window, but instead of the beauty of Earth, he saw his tortured visage reflecting from the glass, forlorn against the backdrop of dark and empty space. “I was the one responsible for that energy pulse. I killed my crew, I killed Sarah, and I doomed the world. It was me the entire time.”
Sentience.
The nearest wall came alive. A liquid, ghostly figure emerged from the panel in an uncanny display of winding cables and polymorphous casing, slowly transmuting into Deis’ familiar android form. He approached, assessing Albert with his dark, gleaming eyes.
“I can surmise the rest of your story, Dr. Rosen. Your disastrous choice resulted in the repercussion the Denizens feared: further weakening of the damaged gateway. The wormhole verged on collapse, a catastrophe with the potential to irrevocably damage Earth. If that occurred, the entire timeline would be wiped out. So the Denizens chose to seal the damaged gateway in the past, allowing their side of the bridge to take the brunt of the damage from the wormhole’s collapse.
“Then they sent you on a much longer route, using established wormhole connections to place you in a time and place where you might do some good with your firsthand knowledge of their fate. They knew that the backlash of exotic matter would destroy their entire station. Unless a habitable planet was nearby, death for all aboard would be a certainty.”
Albert covered his face with his hands, nearly smothering his choked response. “You don’t know that. Maybe the blast wasn’t as devastating as they feared. We don’t know. We’ll never know.”
Deis stroked his chin with an opaque finger. “Oh, I believe we know beyond a doubt. Consider what I told you about the Cataclysm, Dr. Rosen. It originated with the Aberrations: ruptures that randomly appeared, expelling inexplicable, terrifying phenomena that often were linked to the consciousnesses of anyone nearby. The result was madness and massive death tolls. But we can identify what those Aberrations truly were.”
Maria’s eyed widened. “Remnants of the Neuroverse. When the bridge collapsed and the station was destroyed, the collective psionic energy of the Neuroverse had to go somewhere. Pulled into the wormhole as it collapsed, that energy apparently was dispersed across space and time, pulled to Earth because it was the only place in this universe where similar energy existed.”
Deis nodded. “The Aberrations were attempts to connect the Neuroverse with its place of origin, but the result of such contact was disastrous, especially when combined with invasive ruptures caused by the wormhole’s collapse. Reality itself was threatened, and the Cataclysm was the reset button required to correct the destructive phenomenon.”
Albert shook his head. “Psionic energy? No such thing, and even if it were, there’s no way it could—”
Deis’ expression was that of a patient professor lecturing a dimwitted student. “Why did you open that gateway, Dr. Rosen? Why ignore all caution, common sense and knowledge of the deadly consequences of such an action?”
Their vessel crumpled around them like aluminum foil, and Sarah’s eyes stared from the depths of dark waters; her hair haloed around her face when she was torn away from him with irresistible force.
“Because…” Albert paused. His chest tightened, wracked by grief and guilt. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“My system is connected to the consciousnesses of every human being in stasis, Dr. Rosen. I see what they see. I experience what they experience, life after life in the Neuroverse.”
“You don’t understand because you’re not human!” Albert leaped up and jabbed an angry finger at Deis. “You can download as many experiences as you want, but you’ll never be able to comprehend them. You don’t feel what it means to be human, to have that need for affection, for love. You don’t understand the way emotion impels us to act, how it affects every aspect of our existence. You think you’re intelligent? Congratulations. But that’s only half of what makes us human. You wouldn’t know about the other half. I opened that gateway because I loved my wife. I would have done anything to get her back. Anything. That’s what love is. That’s what it makes you do. How could you understand that? You’ve never felt a single goddamn emotion in your artificial life!”