Authors: Rob May
Jason dreamed: crazy, frightening vivid dreams that seemed to last forever. He was running through London while buildings exploded all around him. To escape the chaos, he ran to Hyde Park and dived into the Serpentine, but the lake was stuffed with floating skeletons that grabbed at his feet as he kicked. He tried to surface, but a vast alien saucer splashed down on the lake, blocking his escape. He kept swimming, and found a tunnel. The water was getting hotter and hotter, and he had to dodge currents of boiling lava that spewed forth from underground vents.
When he eventually made it back to dry land, he found himself in a dark jungle. But a thick layer of dust covered every tree and leaf, and an oppressive silence smothered all life. Then he heard a low growl; something was moving through the trees: a large creature … a catron! But this one’s flesh had fallen away, revealing a metallic monster underneath, with jaws like knives that
clack-clack-clacked
as they gnashed away …
Jason felt a hand take his. Doo was standing next to him. ‘It’s going to be alright,’ she said.
The jungle blurred and faded around them. The thanacatron was padding closer to them, but as it did so it seems to be slowing down, like it was moving through water. Jason had that curious sensation of realising he was waking up, but being unable to move his head or arms.
He panicked slightly, and felt a cold sweat break out all over his body. Then the dream faded, and with a twist of his body he rolled out of bed and onto the floor.
The room was pitch black, but a glow from the corridor filtered through under the door. The LCD numerals on the bedside clock said it was 04:21 …
… 14th September
2065
.
Jason freaked out and ran to the light switch. Under the bright glow, he checked his reflection in the mirror. It was okay, he hadn’t aged fifty years. Brandon’s plan to put them all in a kind of hibernation for the duration of the journey must have worked.
He looked back at the bed. Doo was sleeping peacefully, making cute grunting and gurgling sounds. The rolled up duvet she had put between them, to stop Jason groping her over the next ten decades, was still in place.
He smiled at the memory of them all retiring to bed, and Brandon coming round with hot milk and cookies to tuck them all up.
The smile froze on his face. He listened, and the smile gradually became a frown. They were supposed to all sleep for a hundred years. He had woken up too early!
The panic started to return. Would he be able to get back into the deep sleep if he returned to bed now? Or was the spell broken? Was he now doomed to wander the ship on his own for fifty years until everyone else woke up? Until he really was sixty-five?!
He took a few deep breaths and tried to think. Thinking wasn’t his best skill, though—he could have done with the help of some of his friends, but if he woke them up too, then he might be adding to everyone’s problems if they couldn’t find a way to get back to sleep again.
He was snapped out of his thoughts by a nearby growl.
Oh no! The catrons! I wasn’t dreaming! We should never have brought them aboard. Some species just don’t deserve to be saved from extinction, no matter how magnificent.
He opened the door of his room and looked up and down the corridor. The service lights were on, casting a dim bluish glow, but there was nobody and nothing around.
He heard the growl again, nearer this time. Then he realised …
It was his stomach rumbling.
‘Well, that figures,’ he said to himself. ‘I haven’t eaten anything in half a century.’
Jason put all of his worries behind him and concentrated on more immediate concerns: breaking his fast. He wandered down to the canteen, and discovered that it was occupied.
Brandon and Kat were sitting at the end of one of the long Formica tables, eating cereal. Their heads were close in conversation. Kat looked up when Jason walked in. She wiped a tear out of her eye and put on a smile.
‘Hey, come and join us. We defrosted some milk.’
Jason filled a bowl up with Lucky Charms. He would have preferred Frosties or Coco Pops, but the options were all American.
‘Good sleep?’ Brandon asked him.
‘Not bad,’ Jason said. ‘I could do with another few months lie in, though. I take it you woke us up. Everything alright?’
‘Um …’ Brandon began. ‘Well, no, to be honest.’
‘We broke up,’ Kat said, patting Brandon on the arm.
‘Good!’ Jason said. ‘Er, I mean, it’s good that you can both finally move on with your lives and everything. But … couldn’t all this wait until we got to back to Earth. I was enjoying hypersleep, or whatever you call it.’
‘There’s something else,’ Brandon said darkly. ‘Something I haven’t told Kat yet. In fact, when you hear what it is, you’ll realise why we had to break up.’
Jason felt a sudden surge of apprehension. ‘Well, come on, man. What is it?’
Brandon looked awkward. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘to get back to Earth; I didn’t tell you the whole of it.’
Jason held up a hand. ‘You don’t need to tell us all the technical details. We trust you to science your way out this mess we’ve got ourselves in. We get the gist of it, right, Kat? We zoom round the galaxy for five thousand years, and by the time we get home it will all be bird, bees and daisies.’
‘Right!’ Kat said.
Brandon screwed up his face. ‘That’s the problem. Five thousand years won’t be long enough.
Forever
won’t be long enough. When the thanamorphs spread throughout Earth, they infected every living organism … from the largest mammals and trees, to the smallest insects and bacteria …’
‘So what you’re saying,’ Kat said after a pause, ‘is that there’s no life left to mount a comeback.’
Brandon nodded. ‘Earth is sterile … inert … bereft of life. There’s a pretty good chance that the only living things in the entire universe right now are on this ship.’
They all sat in silence for a few moments. Jason stirred his Lucky Charms with his spoon. He had left them too long and they had gone soggy. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?’ he asked Brandon.
Brandon shrugged. ‘I didn’t want to worry everyone. If things don’t work out, then it’s probably best if everyone just …’
‘Just never wakes up,’ Jason stated flatly. ‘Hell, Brandon, this is some hole we’re in.’
‘You’ve got a plan, though. Right, Bran?’ Kat said, ever the optimist.
‘Yes. I think so. It’s … well, it’s probably best if I just show you. Come on!’
They abandoned breakfast and followed Brandon to the elevator. The ship was eerie and quiet—like walking around school at night in the middle of the holidays. They rode the lift in silence. Jason couldn’t even begin to imagine what Brandon’s plan could be, so he didn’t waste any breath trying to guess.
The control room at the top of the
Majestic
was lit only by the endless starfield outside the giant triangular windows. Brandon led them to one of the windows, and they all stood looking out.
Stars, stars and more stars. Each one represented a solar system and a cluster of planets, but even Jason knew that the chances of any one of them being habitable was infinitesimally small.
The stars seemed to blur as he stared out at them. Jason rubbed his eyes; he was still feeling sleepy.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ Kat said.
‘Is
what
what you think it is?’ Jason said, confused.
‘That depends,’ Brandon said to Kat, ‘on if what you think it is, is an
Einstein-Rosen Bridge
.’
Jason could see it now: what he thought was a product of his sleep-befuddled brain was actually a rippling circle somewhere out in the blackness of space. Only the surrounding stars delineated its shape, softening and stretching slightly, as if they were being pulled into a—
‘Wormhole,’ Kat said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’
‘Yeah, well that’s just the layman’s term for it,’ Brandon said. ‘The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is the, er 3D tube that connects two 2D locations in space. If this was a film we were in, I’d do the trick with the folded paper to demonstrate.’
Jason gave his sister a perplexed look.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Where you fold a sheet of paper in half and then jab a pen through it, to demonstrate the wormhole that joins two spots in space that are otherwise light years apart!’
‘She’s right,’ Brandon said. ‘Although it’s more like burning a hole through the paper with a blow torch. Wormholes are caused by massive surges of radiation—the deep space equivalent of forest fires.’
‘Alright,’ Jason said. ‘This is all very awe-inspiring and everything, but the question is: if I jumped down that wormtube, where would I end up?’
‘Earth,’ Brandon said.
Jason almost fell over. ‘Earth?’
‘Earth, huh? Kat parroted. ‘Well, that’s … convenient.’
‘It’s not really that unlikely,’ Brandon explained. ‘There are countless wormholes opening up and closing naturally all over space. The starmap built into the superluminal drive has an
exotic energy
scanner that can detect them. I set it to wake me up when—’
Jason slammed his palm hard against the window, cutting off Brandon mid-sentence.
‘Enough of the
technobabble
!’ Jason said. ‘It’s a beautiful wormhole, I’m sure, but what difference does it all make, anyway? If we wanted to go back to Earth, we could have just gone and flown there fifty years ago. And now it seems no matter when we go back, there’s going to be nothing for us when we get there except dust and bones.’
‘
You’re
not going back,’ Brandon said. ‘You’re going to go back to sleep in a bit and carry on trekking through space for another fifty years … for another two-thousand-five-hundred years in real time.’
He gave Jason and Kat an apologetic look. ‘I’m going through the wormhole. I’m going to go and get things ready for when you arrive …
‘I’m going to use the bionoids to terraform the Earth.’
Brandon spread his arms out wide while Jason buckled up the straps on the oxygen tank of his IEVA spacesuit.
Intra/extravehicular activity
—Brandon wasn’t going to be taking any chances while entering the wormhole. The suit had to be able to withstand the unpredictable effects of exotic radiation—the kind of cosmic fairy dust that, in comic books, turned dweeby scientists into superheroes.
‘But in real life is more likely to mutate you, turn your body cells inside out, and then vaporise you,’ Brandon said as he pulled on his Spandex and Kevlar gloves.
‘This whole plan of yours is just crazy,’ Jason said. ‘Never mind jumping into wormholes, what about all the
plot
holes?’
‘What do you mean?’ Brandon laughed.
‘I mean, are you sure this is only option? It all seems a bit dramatic. What about just flying the
Majestic
to Earth, dropping you off, then the rest of us continue our round trip of the galaxy afterwards?’
‘Not enough fuel to fire up the superluminal drive more than once,’ Brandon shrugged, as if this was patently obvious.
‘Alright then,’ Jason said, ‘so why don’t we all go to Earth and just wait there in orbit while you’re fixing up the planet?’
‘Because then you’ll be waiting almost three thousand years, rather than fifty. I’m confident I can put you back to sleep for another fifty years before I leave, but I don’t know if I’d be able to do it for three thousand. I don’t know if
I’ll
be around that long for a start.’
There was an awkward silence. ‘I’m going to
try
to terraform the Earth—seed new life with the bionoids, and try and accelerate its growth—and I’m going to
try
and keep myself alive by sustaining myself with the bionoids, too. Maybe after I’ve kick-started the regeneration I can build a little hut and sleep the years away myself until you guys arrive. Or maybe by the time you get there, I’ll be—’
‘Don’t say it,’ Jason said. ‘You’re crazy, do you know that? And brave. Alright, I admit it—so long as it doesn’t involve fighting, you’re the bravest person I know.’
‘And you,’ Brandon said, with a slight catch in his voice, ‘are the bravest person I know when it does involve fighting.’
‘Well, obviously,’ Jason said. ‘Alright, you’re all set. Ready to go where no one has gone before; to take one giant leap for humanity?’
‘Of course, I’m ready,’ Brandon said. ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to do something like this.’
* * *
They met Kat in the elevator on the way down to the hangar. She had a trolley full of boxes of food from the stores. ‘Beef jerky, salami and cheese slices,’ she said. ‘Enough to last a few weeks, I think, but not thousands of years.’
‘I can use the bionoids to process some more,’ Brandon said. ‘Can’t be any less natural than this plasticy-looking junk.’
Kat looked cross. Jason could tell Brandon was getting techy with nerves. ‘Do you want a gun?’ Jason asked him. ‘To shoot rabbits for food? When you eventually manage to breed a few rabbits of course.’
‘No guns,’ Brandon said firmly. ‘And, you know what—maybe no rabbits either. I have a whole database of DNA to work with, and most of the animals and plants I’ve scanned came from Corroza, not Earth.’
The elevator doors opened and they rolled the trolley of supplies into the hanger. The wide open space as full of vehicles: armoured MTVs, tanks, zelf fighter ships (left behind from when the Arch Predicant’s men had briefly taken control of the
Majestic
), and in the far corner: a familiar sleek shape.
‘Did you wax her or something?’ Jason asked Brandon. ‘She looks amazing.’
‘I got up a week ago to get her ready,’ Brandon said, stopping Jason from running a finger along
Discord’s
hull. ‘But it’s not wax—I had to polarise the hull with protective gamma paint, so don’t touch.’
Inside the ship there were stacks of books and comics, piles of clothing and boxes full of tools. ‘You got everything you need?’ Jason said, looking around the deck and thinking about all the adventures they had been on in this little rocket.
‘I think so,’ Brandon said. ‘I even found and XBOX and some games to take. The centuries will just fly by. I never did find all the bobbleheads in
Fallout
first time around.’
‘What do you need us to do?’ Kat said.
‘Nothing. When I’m gone, just go back to sleep and I’ll see you when you get to Earth.’
‘And if your plan doesn’t work?’ Jason said.
‘It will. Trust me.’
‘And
if
it doesn’t?’ Jason persisted.
A sad look passed over Brandon’s face. ‘I’ve programmed the bionoids to wake you two first,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘If you get back to Earth and it’s still dead … then maybe you might not want to wake everyone else.’
They all exchanged uncomfortable glances.
‘But it
will
work!’ Kat said. ‘It always turns out alright in the end.’ She paused for a moment, seemingly reflecting on the all the tragedy and destruction that they had battled through to get to this point. ‘Okay,
almost
always,’ she added.
There was nothing more to say. Brandon and Kat hugged for a long time, until Brandon had to forcibly extricate himself from her embrace. He hugged Jason next for the minimum possible duration. Then he walked them silently back to the exit ramp.
Jason and Kat had barely set foot back on the hanger floor before the ramp closed shut and
Discord’s
boosters fired up.
‘He really doesn’t need our help,’ Kat said regretfully.
‘He did, and he will,’ Jason said. ‘He needed me to destroy the Arch Predicant; he needed you to lead the balaks to safety. And you can bet that when we get back to Earth, he’ll have accidently created an infestation of those strange purple flying hedgehogs we saw in the jungle, and he’ll be too soft to do anything about it. Trust me, there will be chaos for us to sort out!’
As
Discord
hovered into the airlock, Jason and Kat went to the viewport, a long wide strip of reinforced quartz glass that afforded a view out towards the wormhole. Discord hovered back into view again, this time on the other side of the glass, and accelerated towards the strange rippling space anomaly.
‘This is going to be as much fun as the water slides in Highgate Leisure Center,’ Brandon said, speaking over the hangar intercom.
‘Good luck, you crazy fool’ Jason said, not knowing if Brandon could hear him or not. Kat laughed and took her brother’s hand as they watched.
Brandon appeared to be talking to himself. ‘Alright, I’m setting an insertion vector now … should be able to drop into the same angular velocity to match the … oh no, ouch—’
Brandon’s last words coincided with
Discord
jerking violently, flipping over and settling into a slow roll.
Jason and Kat watched as Brandon’s ship endlessly rotated over and over. It was just floating in space now, facing to one side, perpendicular to the wormhole.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Jason muttered. ‘Bran? Are you okay?’
‘Sounded like he banged into something in the cockpit,’ Kat said. ‘Or got hit …’
There was just static over the intercom. Jason and Kat hesitated only a moment before turning and running for one of the zelf spaceships.
Kat took to the controls. Jason spied one of the zelfs battle suits. He tore off his tracksuit and started pulling on the armour. Kat manoeuvred the ship to the airlock. They both worked without words, as if what they had to do was both obvious and obligatory.
Out in space, Kat inched towards
Discord
with almost agonising care, tapping on the forward boosters and almost immediately compensating with reverse thrust. The last thing she wanted to do was overshoot
Discord
and fall down the wormhole instead.
‘That’s close enough,’ Jason said at last. ‘I’m going out the top hatch.’
‘Be careful!’
Before he could even have second thoughts about what he was doing, Jason was flying through space between the two ships. He hit the hull of
Discord
with a thump, and hoped against hope that the automatic security would recognise him. Luckily, It did: he slammed his left palm against the door panel and grabbed the edge of the hatch with the same hand as it opened up. He swung his legs in and pulled the hatch shut behind him. The deck was in disarray after the sudden depressurisation and repressurisation of the ship, but the cabin up front had automatically sealed itself shut. Jason opened the door and stepped inside.
Brandon was lying on the floor next to the pilot’s seat, an ugly bruise above his eye. There was blood on the inside of his helmet’s visor. Jason dropped to his knees and shook him awake.
‘Urgh!’ Brandon moaned.
‘Come on, wake up,’ Jason urged. ‘What happened, Bran?’ He pulled off his own helmet and looked around the cabin anxiously, half expecting a surprise assailant to appear from somewhere.
‘It’s alright,’ Brandon groaned. ‘I forgot to put on my seatbelt, and got thrown to the floor when the wormhole took hold. Where are we?’
‘You bounced back out. Hell, Brandon—only you could be so stupid! Your head’s so far in the clouds thinking up grand schemes, you don’t see immediate danger.’
‘Everything okay?’ Kat’s voice came out of the intercom.
‘Just Brandon being a tool,’ Jason said. ‘Head back to the
Majestic
, Kat. We’ll follow you in, give Brandon a cup of tea and a biscuit, then try this thing again!’
Outside the cockpit window, the stars stopped spinning, and instead began to blur and shimmer.
Brandon scrabbled to his feet and pulled himself up to the dashboard. ‘Oh no, here we go …’
Jason watched in horror as the yawning void of the wormhole filled the view. ‘Turn us around, Brandon,’ he said as calmly as he could manage. ‘I’m not coming with you on this trip. I’m not leaving Kat and Doo behind.’
‘It’s too late,’ Brandon said, dropping back into the seat. ‘I’m sorry, Jason.’
Jason stood numb with disbelief. He could hear Kat shouting over the intercom—
‘You can’t go! You can’t leave! You need me to look after you, Jason!’
—but he couldn’t find the words to respond.
And then it was too late. Discord was grabbed by the wormhole and sucked into the twisting, swirling tube. The stars stretched and blurred and they found themselves rushing down a tunnel of technicolour lights.
‘We’re both just a couple of worms now,’ Brandon said, risking a faint grin.
Jason wasn’t so thrilled. ‘More like a couple of turds,’ he said. ‘Flushed down the toilet of the galaxy.’
Brandon’s smile evaporated. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That would be more like it.’