Chapter 5

So now you know. Now you know the reason why I stood looking at the newly delivered implant. You have guessed the rest.

During the five years that it took me to perfect the AI, many of the advances, unbeknown to me, were siphoned of and used in the Corporate Wars, powering the AI’s of mass destruction. That melding of mind and machine was my fault. I never knew there was a war until it came time to launch the ship. We never even named her, just calling her The Ship. All my work had been used to help the corps destroy each other and hence the planet. It was my fault. The guilt was unbearable. I even used the gem to stop my heart, but the link with the team prevailed. Again and again they started my heart back up. They had been kept safe as well, since they were they only leverage that the corp had upon me.

The day of the launch arrived. I had been interfaced to the AI, Janus, for seventeen straight hours and the strain was beginning to tell. The name Janus was apt in my mind.

“Final check complete Doctor Ortega. All systems nominal”

“Ok, Janus. Good luck”

“Thank you Doctor Ortega. It has been my pleasure to be associated with you. Link disconnect in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….”

Bliss. The link now severed, I removed myself to a secured area, waiting for the ship to depart. I still had no idea how it was to happen. Max had died two years earlier, heart attack, denying me the satisfaction of killing him myself.

Watching the monitor, I turned to one of the no name assistants that I had been working with and said, “Commence countdown”

“Countdown Commencing. Thirty seconds until departure. Mark.”

Thirty seconds! How the hell would that ship lift off in thirty minutes, never mind thirty seconds. I looked at the ship and I then felt rather than heard a high pitched whine and just in front of the nose of the ship, a small black nothingness appeared. What was that. I moved forwards to the abort button, but the no name stopped me.

“No. This is what is supposed to happen. The ship is opening a portal to another dimension of space. It will allow it to travel instantaneously between two points but the range is limited to one million kilometers.”

“What use is that?” I started to ask, but I had already figured it out. To travel great distances, all you had to do was to repeat the one million kilometer jump numerous times, calculating between each one was what the AI was required for. The human part was there to assist in the decision making when right or wrong were not valid options.

“Where’s it goings?”

“The M40 galaxy. We think it will take about 200 years to do a round trip.”

The countdown finished and the ship just popped through the cloud, well the cloud just passed down the ship. With an undistinguished ‘pop’ the ship and then the cloud vanished.

And that was that. The corp had finished with me and I finally arrived at the surface. I was appalled. The sand of Death Valley was scorched black. I spent the next few days looking for anything that resembled the Earth, not this landscape for an apocalyptic movie. I found nothing. The guilt, the fear almost sent me insane but the link prevailed. I would not be able to die. What would I do.

I had learned a few things whilst I was ‘incarcerated’ and also experimented with the gem. We had all learned to turn them off but we had never done that for long. It was like loosing an arm. I told the rest of the team what I intended to do. They agreed that it would be for the best. They agreed that it was the only way to save me from myself. I returned to the bunker and made my way to a restricted area and using a few of the tricks I had learned with the gem, hacked my way to a small no-descript room, erasing from the base systems that I was even on site, and uncovered a small coffin. Designed for manned deep space, this was a statis pod by which I would finally be at peace.

Setting the controls for two hundred years, hoping that I would not survive, I said my goodbyes to the team, terminated the link and shut the lid.

Oblivion came quickly.

And I dreamt.

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