The transportation elevator lumbered upward along the outside of the space station at a monotonously slow pace. Inside the conveyance, three disparate souls couldn’t help but wonder what the hell they had found here, on the edge of oblivion.
“I wish I knew what was at the end of that cable.” Justine pressed her face against the elevator’s transparent hull and marveled as the mooring cable continued to sway back and forth. “Maybe it’s a marker of some kind…like a landing light.”
“The cable’s too big for just a light,” Joseph said absentmindedly. “It has to be something bigger.”
“Like what?”
His human mind devoid of answers, the deputy could only shrug his shoulders in response to her very valid question. “We would have to get closer to find out.”
Justine squinted into the darkness, disappointed that she might never know the meaning behind that blinking orange light. “Come on, Foster,” she teased his intellectual ego. “You’re telling me that you’ve got nothing in that bag of tricks for this kind of situation?”
Foster rubbed his chin apprehensively, teasing her right back. “Maybe, but I’m not quite sure the Air Force would want me divulging any of their secrets to a lowly FBI agent.”
“Secrets.” Justine raised her arms in a semi-innocent pose. “Who am I going to tell? We’re probably a billion miles away from the earth right now.”
“At least.”
Foster let her imagination dangle for a second before giving in to her pleading. “Fine…” He theatrically delved deep inside the bag. “It’s not like they ever took the stuff past prototype phase anyway.”
“Prototype phase?” Justine watched in nervous anticipation as the scientist pulled forth a small aerosol spray dispenser. Tinted black, just like the rest of his equipment, he started to shake the container vigorously.
“What is that… hairspray?” She said, disappointment dripping from every word.
“No,” Foster grinned slyly. “It’s WOW spray.”
He depressed the small nozzle on top of the can and a hiss of odorless paint expelled forth. Waving his hand back and forth, Foster meticulously coated a good portion of the hull with what looked like basic primer. This process continued until the orange-tipped cable became hidden entirely.
“You see, Agent Rushing. Ever since the Air force started making high-supersonic aircraft, engineers have had a problem integrating real-time HUDs within the bulky windshield material required for pressurization at those speeds. They experimented with holograms, flexible LED displays, and even interactive visors that tied directly into the plane’s avionic warfare package. But nothing they tried ever seemed to work just right.”
Foster stood back from the wall to admire his handy work.
“Then, out of the blue, a nerdy little woman appeared.” Foster opened his closed fist like a bomb went off in it. “In the middle of completing her molecular virology doctorate at Johns Hopkins. This unassuming scholar was confronted with a problem so fiendish that many a medical grad student have driven themselves insane trying to overcome it.”
“And what problem would that be?” Her voice was skeptical while her eyes conveyed nothing short of pure wonderment.
“What problem?” He turned to Justine with the flair of a campfire storyteller ready to pounce on an unsuspecting camper. “The problem of no TV’s being allowed in the staff break room.”
“Televisions,” Justine rolled her eyes and laughed. “That’s stupid. Why wouldn’t they be allowed to have a television in the break room?”
“Apparently, standard TVs, even flat panels, give off a type of radiation that’s hazardous to certain experiments running inside the lab’s more sensitive areas. Factoring in those experiments constituted the bulk of the center’s yearly funding…”
Justine could easily see where this morality tale was headed. “TV or the grant money? That’s not a hard decision for a university to make when facing a tight budget.”
“Exactly. So, in a moment of reality television weakness, this nerdy little girl hit upon the extremely brilliant idea of OLER.”
“OLER… what’s that?”
“Organic Light Emitting Resin.” Foster watched the grey paint incrementally fade away until only a thin, nearly invisible coating of resin remained. Once again, the massive cable and orange tipped enigma was completely visible. “Of course, her problem was one of stealth. How do you introduce an electric current to a device without running wires or building a box to house it in?”
Justine recalled Foster explaining to her how all his gadgets were powered. “And of course, that’s where you stepped in.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Actually, Hoover was the one who brought this little invention to my attention as a potential backup screen for my Blackberry. Though, how Hoover ever came across the woman in the first place is still a complete mystery.” He tucked the can of spray paint back into his satchel. “But as I said, the government never took her idea past the prototype stage.”
“How does it work?”
Foster scratched at his head like he was trying to remember an essential fact without a string tied around his index finger to help him remember. “You’ve heard of nanotech before, haven’t you?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Of course, microscopic machines injected into the body, which can be programmed to do all sorts of crazy things.”
“Correct.” He stepped forward. “This stuff sort of works like that, only on a much more restrictive basis.” Foster pressed his right palm onto the freshly dried resin, then waited. Out of the corner of his eye, he observed Justine performing what looked like an impression of a person needing to pee badly. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” She tried to control her excitement, but the thought of another futuristic device really got her adrenaline flowing. “I just want to see what this stuff can do.”
“Really? Hoover,” his face was a mixture of amusement and indifference. “Hit this thing with a dose of phosphorus.”
With that command, he yanked his hand away from the coated hull. In its place, remained a faint, glowing green outline of his palm. Foster stepped back and allowed her to study the phenomenon before proceeding further with his demonstration. “Do you see them?”
“See what?” Justine leaned in close for a better look, but all she saw was that ghoulishly glowing green handprint. “I don’t see anything but a Vulcan fingerprint.”
“Funny.” Her movie references were getting easier to spot. “Look closer at the fine details, squint if you have to.”
She pressed her face so close to the phosphorescent print that her eyes started to cross. As they refocused, Justine began to see hundreds of specks of light hidden within the image. These specks shifted from side to side like shaken up grains of sand in a glass full of thick liquid. Unsure of what was happening, she asked. “Are those things moving?”
“Yes.” He swiped his hand over the print. This motion sent the green particles spreading outward like swirls of green dye in water. “This resin is brimming with small organic machines that process ambient light and electricity. When activated, the substance reacts to form minute pinpoints of multicolored lights.”
“So, this stuff is alive?”
“In an algae sense of the word… I guess. Reset it, Hoover.”
Instantly, the green particles blinked out of existence. Foster tapped on the hull with his forefinger and waited. After a second, a tiny blue reticle popped into existence. Like with his tablet, he maneuvered the floating cursor to the orange tip at the end of the massive cable. Once there, the small box seemed to recognize the target because the reticle grew large enough to encircle the tip and its surrounding area entirely.
“Hoover,” Foster stepped away from the wall again. “Blow it up.”
On his command, the reticle enlarged to over three times its original size. The whole coated area, now alive with the faintest hum of electricity, illuminated the once indiscernible details of the cable’s hull and outer plating.
“He still hasn’t been able to crack the static electricity issues though. So, I wouldn’t touch the stuff after walking on thick carpet. But in a pinch, it works just fine.”
“Wow…” Justine sighed with astonishment. For the first time since laying eyes on the cable, she was able to make out the orange glow clearly. She mumbled. “That’s amazing.”
“Hence, the name... WOW spray.”
“What happens when you run out of that stuff? I guess they don’t sell it at your local Walmart.”
“No,” Foster patted his satchel appreciatively. “But that’s the awesome thing about WOW spray. Since its basically just cybernetic algae, it just regrows itself inside the container.”
“Really?” Justine’s hand instinctively reached out for his satchel. “How long?”
“Given what I just used,” Foster playfully shifted his toy sack out of her reach. “Probably about an hour.”
At a loss for words, Justine could only reiterate her earlier observation which just happened to coincide with its Foster given name. “Wow.”
For the rest of the elevator ride, the trio mostly kept to themselves and their own questions yet to be answered. Or in the young FBI agent’s case, just playing with her new toy.
Completely and utterly enthralled, Justine kept using the WOW spray to examine the devices perched at the end of those monstrous cables. After a quick photo analysis, Hoover concluded they were engines about the size of a small office building. Perched silently against the blackness of space, these monolithic monsters of thrust seemed to be the only things keeping the station clear of the black hole’s gravitational forces.
The geek in her couldn’t find a way to close her slack-jawed mouth.
On the other hand, Foster spent this lull in the conversation internalizing his thoughts about everything. Mainly, he theorized about what kind of aliens could have been so nasty that fifty thousand of them were sent to earth. Was it just murderers dumped here? Or had there been a war? Was that initial batch just the prisoners from the losing side?
Maybe a neuropsychological disease had rampaged across the cosmos, and this station was just a last-ditch attempt at quarantining the infected. Possible, but why continue using the prison if that was the case? Still, as highly unlikely as that theory was, such a thing would at least explain why there were so many assholes on Earth.
Then, even wilder theories sprang forth, but none of them seemed remotely possible, let alone satisfying. Eventually, his normally hyperkinetic mind settled down as he sighed heavily into the darkness. He needed more information.
He needed to see what was on the next floor.
Meanwhile, Joseph sat on the floor cross-legged, chin resting in his hands, preparing himself. From the onset of this little excursion, he had wagered his long-kept secrets that these humans could lead him to his body. And much to his astonishment, with the aid of their insanely weird computer program, they were close. Very close.
This fact should have made him happy. But surprisingly, Joseph found whatever joy he felt tempered by memories of loss and...
Love.
The word nagged at his tongue like bitter fruit. Once so new and sweet, now merely the thought of it turned Joseph’s normally unflappable stomach sour. Twenty years ago, a foolish boy had let that foreign emotion infect his mind. As a result, generations of his people had passed away while he spun helplessly, trapped on a world not his own.
The sullen deputy wondered, even if he could make it back, who would remember him? Then, a worse thought entered his already troubled mind. What if they did?
