2
The news played relentlessly on a small grainy TV screen under rabbit ear antennae, a set that looked like it belonged back in the ‘50s. Caleb’s vision cleared and he wondered if in fact he had been transported back in time.
Through a fog of confusion, he could just make out that he was in a living room with atrocious decorations: a shag rug and a plaid couch, gaudy lampshades on two desk lamps, wood-paneled walls on one side, and yellow floral wallpaper on the other. Venetian blinds blocked out a dim light from outside, and a lone door was closed to his left. A wooden sign beside it declared: HOME IS WHERE YOU DREAM BEST.
He blinked rapidly and tried to rub his eyes but found he couldn’t move his arms. His fingers twitched, as did his bare toes. Tried to look down but even his head was too heavy to tilt.
Too heavy, or…constrained? Maybe straps of some kind holding him down? He was in a recliner, that much was certain, but couldn’t see his feet. Couldn’t see anything but the TV. In between snippets of news, played far too loud, he could see his reflection in the screen: a gaunt thing secured to a chair, wearing what looked like a hospital gown.
He was about to do another scan of the room, for whatever good that would do, when he finally paid attention to the screen itself.
He soon enough wished he hadn’t.
The next five minutes Caleb almost forgot about his predicament as he raptly followed the story, the absolute bombshell that the US Government had indeed been funding a black operation, way below the radar of Congress, the President and anyone else without specialized clearance. Caleb had a moment of hope that this could be a shining chance to enlighten the world, to present the positive accomplishments his team and others like him had achieved. As long as they didn’t pick and choose from the past, as long as they didn’t focus on the worst…
But in the end, of course that was all they focused on. Claiming continued National Security secrecy, they couldn’t speak about any successes or achievements of Stargate, so instead the story was one of fear. Forget the NSA and their satellite or wireless surveillance. Forget WikiLeaks and the insecurity of emails. This was something far more invasive, and impossible to stop. Psychics. Mutants, essentially, with the power to see anything.
There was nowhere to hide, the story maintained, and no one was safe — not the highest politician or the vaulted multi-national CEO, and definitely not the average Joe on the street.
They cut to riots outside of the White House and the U.N., pundits all over the place interviewing scientists, biologists, Cold War veterans who had their own conspiracy theories and tales to tell, and even church leaders weighed in.
Fortunately, the story hadn’t named names yet…but they did have a grainy clip of Caleb and Orlando led out of the building in cuffs, along with a dozen other members, before hoods were thrown over their faces.
Someone would place their identities.
“Damn it.” The secrecy he enjoyed, his family enjoyed — was all about to come to a crashing end. It was beyond negligent, and close to inciting something far worse. He had to get out of here, had to get to Alexander and Phoebe.
Oh God, the twins…Were they safe?
What was happening? He had to find out.
Closed his eyes, and let his mind free, let it soar on a boat launched with a shot of adrenaline and chased with desperation.
Ask the right questions. Ask to see—
But it was already there, as if waiting for him.
How—?
He started to ask, but then was drawn in, and had to follow where his sight led.
A bleak desert. Baked earth, or clay. Not quite sand.
Walking. With a stick, a gnarled withered thing held in a bronzed hand.
Bare feet, a straggly beard. Hand held up to the ward the off ever-present cruel sun. Something in the distance, something red and immense, rising like a misshapen head from the cracked earth.
Then, rushing toward it in a flash, too fast to gain a sense of its measurements or scope, then climbing, ascending the ridges and tight handholds. The top, a roughly even surface, standing on the edge overlooking the bleak landscape.
Except, not so bleak. To the east, a distant set of twin peaks. A rugged but majestic beacon in the barren landscape, standing powerful and commanding respect and attention. Just as something demanded focus in the opposite direction.
Turning, his gaze accelerates like a zoomed magnification to arrive on a strange, almost alien rock formation: two nearly perfect spherical boulders resting like badly-shanked golf balls in an outcropping of other stones.
The plateau shakes, the walking staff falls and the sky darkens.
Looking to the north:
A cloud, all-too-familiar in shape.
Ballooning into a mushroom shape with an eerie stillness preceding it, until…
His gaze rockets forward as the cloud moves in reverse, collapsing on itself, and the vision follows…
Zeroes in to the location, to the detonation, and time restarts.
A white hot light, and now he’s above it all, ascending fast. Faster, looking down on a familiar water-locked continent, then seeing the Earth spin, but a line of white hot energy tracing from the detonation point, back farther to the east-west line he had just surveyed with the strange rock formations, arching now across the ocean, splitting and racing across different angles.
Crisscrossing Asia, the Pacific, into the Americas and splitting again, spanning the continents, bridging oceans, creating…
A world grid.
“You’ve seen something,” said a calm male voice that interrupted the vision and put a final doorstop on the rush of pure psychic energy firing inside Caleb’s mind.
He snapped back to the present. To the chair, to his binds around his wrists and feet. To the cheesy art décor of his ‘cell’. And he focused, using his regular eyes once more, but taking longer than usual to access this banal sight.
A blurry face belonging to a fit figure, all in black. Heavy boots, loose black khakis and a turtleneck to match. Black hair even, in curls over dark eyes. The voice, young. The face, now that it came into clarity: also young. Maybe Orlando’s age. Something about it, about him, familiar.
“Do you know me?”
Caleb squinted, trying to focus the last bit to resolve the last blurry edges.
“I imagine not,” said his captor. “Too busy in the lower levels, doing your special studies and visions. Or was it all administrative, no more fun and excitement for the director?”
“What…?”
“Not bothering with the simple day-to-day, or the initial round of recruitment?”
Caleb cocked his head. Closed his eyes, not trusting what they would show him, not yet. He reached out again with his other sense, probing now that he had the right question.
The Stargate lobby, SWAT teams rushing in while a figure in a hood waited outside. This one, the same — on the roof, smiling and waiting for him.
A flash and the same young man, in a hooded sweatshirt now, sits at the testing table, reading cards, and smirking up at the source of the vision, as if it’s a hidden camera and he knows exactly where it is.
Caleb’s eyes snapped out, and this time there was no need to focus. He saw in perfect detail.