THE WANDERER

SPLIT

Deep in thought, staring through the glass in his office located on the top floor, Dr. Norton was mentally iterating through the events that led to this very moment, a habit he developed over the years to scan through his plans with the intent of spotting loopholes, flaws, and defects in the structural integrity of his schemes. Although his plan looked flawless, he still exercised doubt and also planned for contingencies. This Machiavellian trait was one of the reasons for his success in the corporate world. He treats his colleagues as pieces on a chess board, to him, everybody is a complex system of interaction possessing weaknesses that can be exploited.

Although humans love to pride themselves on being individually unique, his research on behaviorism coupled with observation and personal experience proves otherwise. Those who are more self-absorbed or dogmatic about the notion of individual uniqueness are more susceptible to manipulation. The self-delusion is too immersive, creating an echo chamber of arrogance and willful ignorance, this gives them the illusion of control oblivious to the fact that they are pawns. These are the best candidates for manipulation. The conduits for idealistic extremism.

"What the hell are you up to Norton?"

A sharp and searing voice interrupted his brooding. It was Evelyn Anderson, wearing a suit that clung to her body like a second skin revealing her hourglass figure. The 'gravi-suit', as it was called by Prometheus Enterprise is a skin-tight suit invented for transportation. It's powered by gravitons allowing the wearer to levitate, fly or just float around like a weightless piece of paper. The surface is coated with photovoltaic cells solving the problem of power. They also made one for astronauts, with modifications. An astronaut can propel through space with great ease and control by manipulating the space-time in his/her immediate vicinity.

"Oh, great to see you too Evelyn. You're looking splendid by the way.....is that a new hairdo?"

"Cut the bullshit Norton," she snapped back coldly.

"What do you want Anderson?" Norton changed his countenance realizing she meant business.

"I'm talking about the hoax of a presentation you did, you weren't even trying. You lazily lied through your teeth."

"But they bought it didn't they?" Norton said, with a fixed smirk.

"You're not even denying it."

"Deny what Evelyn? I only hear inquiries, no accusations. There's nothing to deny." He said curtly.

"What happened to the Medusa project Norton?"

"What are you talking about? Do you have amnesia, or Alzheimer's already at work, when was the last time you went for a checkup, Miss Anderson?"

"Don't patronize me, Norton, you very well know what I'm talking about."

"You were there, we shut down the project. The guys were having moral crises."

"Then what was it doing at the office during your presentation?"

At this moment, It was so quiet, one could hear a fetus' heartbeat. Realizing someone found a hole in his plan and that someone wasn't him, he finally spoke,

"How did you find out?"

"Well, I found it bewildering that the board accepted your half-baked story, so I decided to take a look at the cube myself. Turned out to be an advanced version of the prototype we worked on. I don't know how you managed to make it smaller when we were struggling to make it work with a bus-sized satellite. Making it into a small cube is a genius idea."

"You sound surprised."

"Of course, why would you need a device that runs on the Medusa code? So, I decided to investigate."

"I was talking about the genius part, you sound surprised that it was a genius idea."

"Oh please get over yourself. Anyone with half a brain could come up with that."

"Maybe, but they won't have the brain power for execution. A couple of years and a team of 20 engineers might have a clue....."

"If you'd stop choking on your balls so hard, you might find the time to explain why you needed a powerful hypnotic device for a presentation."

Norton was relieved to discover that Evelyn still doesn't have the full picture of his scheme. If he played this well, he should be able to play down her suspicion, perhaps ask her to join him. Inside that head decorated with silky red hair lies a powerful computing machine capable of insane efficiency, her brain.

"You still haven't explained your apparent immunity to the device," Norton asked with a straight face.

But this isn't going to change anything, Evelyn already knows something's up. He has to handle this delicately.

"Yeah, I thought of that as well. I made some changes to the content hoping to persuade my sister to tell me her password, but it didn't work. I thought it was a genetic predisposition."

"It can't be a genetic predisposition," Norton retorted curtly.

"Yeah, I found that to be the case later on. It worked when I tried it on my brother. I persuaded him to give me sensitive details about his clients, he did without thinking about it. He actually thought he was making a conscious decision."

"It's fascinating how you treat your loved ones like lab rats. Says a lot about your relationship status."

"Excuse me!" Evelyn was upset.

"Apologies. Your story is yet to give me any useful information."

"Contact lenses."

"What?"

"I wasn't affected because I was wearing contact lenses." She said curtly.

"Fascinating," Norton said, formulating a train of thought.

"Are you doing a side project for the military?" Evelyn cut in, disrupting his thought process.

"Why would you think that?"

"Well, your device would really be helpful to the Earth's government, it would be a convenient way to make the moon colonists shut up. I presume you were doing a test run during your presentation. You get to save your current pet project while scoring big with the military."

"That's an interesting thought. but, why don't we observe parsimony and just stick with saving my pet project?"

"Really, you're telling me that you invented a powerful mind-altering device just to maintain your time-travel project?"

"Yes. And it's called the Chronos project. You make it sound silly."

"I don't believe you. You're hiding something Eric, I'm certain of it. And I'm going to find out."

"Well, I'm not the one who took corporate property home."

"Property running on blueprints from a supposedly banned project. Do you really want to play this game, Mr. Norton?" She asked, directly staring at Norton.

"I've told you already, there's nothing remarkable going on as you're imagining. Give it a rest Evelyn."

"Don't mess with me Norton, you don't want me as an enemy." She said as she left his office.

Norton knew Evelyn too well to treat her statement as a bluff. But the last statement, 'you don't want me as an enemy, is this her way of saying she wants in on whatever he has going on? Hard to tell, I have to think this over, Norton thought to himself.

"Contact lens huh? Who would have thought?" Norton said, returning to the initial position he was in before Miss Anderson walked in.

Back on Olympus, Dr. Smith was going through the calculations and data regarding their plans. Her relationship with Dr. Norton is somewhat complicated. They are not together for romantic reasons, it's more of an intellectual and professional affair. The foundational basis of their relationship has been a key factor sustaining their cooperation. Their story is one of hostility, two intellectual rivals going at it with everything they got just to undo the other. 

It's a spill-over fight from grad school. They somehow managed to find a common ground in their mutual hatred for humanity, they were the perfect couple. Dr. Smith works with Dr. Norton on the Chronos project, a cooperation between their respective companies. Mastering time travel and probably taking the manipulation of space-time a little further was a big deal for these two.

They and their respective teams experienced some difficulties earlier on in the Chronos project, but they did make some progress. They managed to make a tiny crack in the fabric of space-time right there in the lab. The crack has remained there, given that they lacked sufficient energy to make it behave in any other way.

What's fascinating were the anomalies experienced after the crack was made. Luckily for them, it was a localized event and still is, as far as they can tell. These anomalies have been the driving force behind the scheming, planning, and manipulation. A quest to master time travel and perhaps, the fundamental forces of nature has led to something else, something unexpected.

The results from her previous calculations as well as the team's said the same thing.

"Don't you think we should publish our findings? We've been working on this for years now. These discoveries are too exciting to keep to ourselves, we need to share them with the world."

"That's an interesting thought Dr. Lawson, however, we don't really know what's going on here," Dr. Smith said, looking at the young lady.

"Perhaps, but we can make presumptions based on available data. I mean, there's a crack in spacetime," Dr. Lawson continued.

"We've been putting cracks in spacetime before you were born Dr. Lawson, there's nothing new and special about it." Dr. Smith retorted.

"But did you experience strange dreams and visions? I don't think they are the same thing. I'm having lucid dreams of living another life. It's beyond lucid, I feel like my mind has been transferred into another body."

"Uhmm, how does lucid dream fit into all these?"

"Exactly, now you get my point, Dr. Smith."

"We've been on this project for 13 years, and we've all been mentally evaluated, there's nothing wrong with our heads."

"Maybe that's the problem, we're looking for what is wrong in correlation with the visions."

"How do you mean?"

"Instead of checking for any sign of Illness or damage, we should check for altered functionalities, structure, or even peculiar pathways."

"Dr. Lawson, are you saying the emissions from the crack have in some way altered us on a fundamental level, at least mentally?"

"Yes Dr. Smith, that's what I'm saying. It's the only explanation I got right now for our massive hallucinations. Someone spiking our food supplies is still on the table." She said jokingly.

Dr. Smith smiled and said, "well, we have to do a detailed analysis then...... I'm talking about the food supplies." They both giggled.

"I'll contact the neurologist, but first an announcement."

"Shouldn't you contact a neuroscientist, hell maybe a psychologist?" Dr. Lawson suggested.

"Maybe I should bring in a therapist."

Dr. Smith said mockingly as she worked to the middle of the lab with the crack behind her. The lab was a glass enclosure separating them from the crack.

"I'd like to thank you all for your dedication and hard work. You've put so much effort into this project, a project of more than a decade. We're all geniuses here which is a good thing, I don't have to explain myself. I think it's time we use the eye."

The noise in the room was obvious, it was caused by murmurings from members of the team after hearing her statement.

"We've been slaving for two years," she continued.

"An effort to store sufficient energy to expand the crack. I'm glad to tell you that the wait is over." She concluded with a look of accomplishment on her face.

"But we don't really know the whole story about the crack. We all think it's a time portal but it could be something else. A pocket dimension, a wormhole to another planet, or a higher dimension. Maybe something totally different, we have no clue. Not to mention the collective hallucinations. We clearly don't know what we're dealing with here."

"What are you suggesting Dr. Tyrell?"

"I believe there should be a consistent increment in our energy output. This might be slow, but we'll be able to see what's going on and watch it as it evolves over time. We don't have to unleash the eye."

The others nodded in agreement.

"So basically, doing what we've always done for the past decade?"

"Not really, we've made some adjustments to the device and we've seen significant changes."

"Very well then, what's the status report?" Dr. Smith asked in a voice telling of someone used to giving to others.

"For every tetra-electron volt supplied, the crack expands by approximately 1.381 inches."

"We can definitely boost these figures."

"What do you suggest Dr. Luther?"

Dr. Tryrell inquired with searching eyes.

"The eye is basically a giant battery for stellar energy right?"

"Yes...." Dr. Tyrell said, already aware of what was coming next.

"Why don't we take a piece of this cosmic juice and feed it into the crack? We already know the amount of energy needed to expand the crack to the desired width."

"Cosmic Juice, really?" A colleague responded to her comment.

"All we have to do is stream this energy from Titan using a teleway. But we have to find a way to regulate the stream, there should be a detour before it is redirected to the crack."

Dr. Tyrell said, rubbing his chin.

"We should be really careful with the calibration, we don't wanna destroy the moon with..." she hesitated, "cosmic juice overload."

"Why didn't we think of this earlier?" Another scientist asked.

"It's called 'being cautious, that's standard procedure." Dr. Tyrell cut in.

"So we finally get to use the eye, this is going to be awesome." Dr. Lawson said with so much enthusiasm, it irritated Dr. Tyrell so much he let out a grunt.

"I think we're set"

"We're all good over here," Said a voice coming from a transparent screen.

"Good, everything is in place?"

"Yeah."

"Ok, here we go."

The team took their positions after exchanging confirmation messages. In the lab, there was an object looking like a tripod stand with a diamond-shaped device attached at the top. The tripod-like object stood in front of a teleway already churning with ocean blue, an indication that it is active.

Back on Titan, the 'Eye' was already set. There was also an active teleway close to it, it was connected to the teleway at the lab.

"We're all good over here," a scientist said looking into a transparent screen.

He pulled down a lever and then hit a button from the control room. Immediately, a thin stream of energy came out of the 'Eye' like a laser beam. This beam was directly opposite the huge plasma rays coming into the 'Eye' through a teleway from the other end. The source of the plasma was a star in another part of the universe. The ejected beam went into the teleway and came out the other end of the lab. The beam hit the diamond-shaped device on the tripod, but it didn't get through, the pressure and intensity were building.

"Hold," Dr. Tyrell yelled, an attempt to outdo the ringing and hissing noise produced by the stream.

"Now," Dr. Tyrell barked, moments after his first command.

One of the scientists on Titan turned a knob slowly after hearing Dr. Tyrell's command. As he turned the knob, the ringing noise intensified, and the stream was able to pass through the tripod and hit the crack. As he continued to turn the knob, the intensity as well as the volume of the beam increased. The crack expanded as the beam continued hitting it. After thirty nerve-wracking minutes or so, the crack gave out a loud hiss, like a pressurized container being forced open.

"Stop," Dr. Tyrell yelled again.

The 'Eye' was slowly shutting down, the stream of energy hitting the crack slowly returned to a thin beam and faded away.

What they saw before them,  looked like a partly closed door leading to a well-lit room.