You have (with some debate) chosen B.
“I don’t think that will be so easy, Secondborn,” says Celling. “Based off what we know of the situation up north, and what the Protinam that have witnessed the event have told us, you’ve been sent to another reality.”
“What?”
“A parallel universe. One superficially similar to your world, but where Atlantis never existed.”
“That… agrees with what I have observed. We Cisharni can sense each other, even to the very ends of the Earth, and I do not sense them here.”
“So you see, going to the location of Atlantis in our universe will not-”
“I know well how that would work,” the Secondborn snaps. “This is certainly an interesting phenomenon, but do not be condescending.”
“Well, that complicates the matter of sending you back. Maybe analyzing the event that sent you here may help? If you remember? We could try to recreate that.”
“That would be… undesirable. What about the man who built your spatial gateway? Does he know of alternate dimensions?”
“Erin Quill?” Celling asks. “He’s unavailable. He’s in Antarctica. We haven’t heard from him in a while.”
“What’s he doing now?”
Erin presses buttons furiously on the broad, metallic-grey control panel of the wormhole.
Mira looks over his shoulder. “You’re not executing the mass transfer,” she shouts, over the shrieking wails of warning klaxons and destabilization alarms.
“Yeah?” he said, continuing without looking up. “Well, I’m pretty sure I can fix this, but if I can’t, I’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing that Padelheb goes down with me.”
Padelheb sighs. “I’m not sure, Erin, why you’re putting your little vendetta with me over the heart of human civilization.”
“Forty minutes to detonation,” Erin said, ignoring him.
Mira leans in further until her hair ticks over Erin’s ear. “Erin Quill, always being such a goddamn hero…”
Erin Quill ignores her and moves over to another panel, where he pulls out a printed sheet of paper from a slot. He studies the figures on it. “Now, if I could actually tell what you were trying to do here…” he said. Abruptly, he stops and looks up as if coming to a sudden realization. He slams the paper down and whirls around to face Mira.
“You were trying to open the wormhole,” he says.
“How do you know?” Mira asks.
“Because I just ran some simulations, and you were sending commands to the regulator that overloaded it in just the right way to expand the wormhole back up to its normal proportions, prying it open through brute force at our end.”
“So it would have worked?” Mira inquires.
“Yes it would have worked,” Quill says angrily. A beam of red light from the alarms sweeps over his face. “Barely. Barely, barely, this side of the apparatus had enough energy to expand the wormhole without the other one’s cooperation. It also put the system in a state outside its normal operating envelope, running off a thousand risky assumptions, where one slight fluctuation could cause the whole thing to blow. Which is exactly what happened. Now, if I’m going that, I need to know exactly what the target aperture was-”
“..1.5 centimeters,” Mira answers instantly.
Padelheb glares at her. “Be careful, Miss Kethalyn. Don’t tell him too much.”
Erin ignores him. “One point five centimeters…” he muses. “That’s a specific target. That’s a specific number. We took out the signal thread, so it’s not information you wanted to…” he turns around and walks up to Mira urgently. “What did you send?”
“What?” Mira asks.
“Have you sent anything through the wormhole yet?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Don’t tell him,” warns Padelheb.
“Because the wormhole’s manifold is sensitive to mass transference,” says Erin. “Even a pencil’s worth of matter is enough to upset it. Mira, I need to know if you threw anything into the wormhole!”
“Not yet,” Mira answers cautiously. She backs away from Quill and stands next to Padelheb.
“Good,” Quill says. He paces around the column-shaped wormhole apparatus, adjusting dials. “One point five centimeters…” he mutters to himself, coming around the other side. He puts his thumb and index finger together into a small circle and holds it up to eye level, squinting. “One point five centimeters. What could you do with that?”
He looks around the room. “Something like this?” he says, grabbing for an unlabeled ampoule of clear liquid, standing on a nearby table.”
“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” screams Mira.
Quill stops and whirls to face her. “What’s in it?” he asks.
Padelheb points at the display counting down the minutes until the wormhole destabilizes. “Shouldn’t you be worrying about that first?” he says smoothly.
Without missing a beat, and without glancing back, Quill jabs at a button on the panel and kills the destabilization alert.
There is a whirring sound as the room’s lights return to normal, the display goes dark, and the alarms vanish.
The three of them stand there in silence for a while.
“Oh don’t worry,” says Quill. “I stabilized the wormhole a quarter hour ago. I just decided to keep that thing on because I figured you’d be significantly more loose lipped if you thought were were all about to get blown up. Now. Tell me. What’s in this vial?”
“Mira, you better not say anything,” Padelheb warns.
“What’s he got on you?” Erin asks.
Mira Kethalyn looks bemused. “What?”
“Why are you listening to him? Just to spite me? Oh well,” Erin says, making as if to slam the vial down upon his foot.
“No!” shouts Mira. She glares at Quill, wild-eyed. “Quill, that’s dangerous-”
“Dangerous?” Quill says. “In what way? Toxin?”
“Don’t tell him,” says Padelheb. “He’s insane.”
“Look, whatever is in here, you were planning to send it to Argentina.”
This time Mira looks totally clueless. “What?”
“Well, who told you to expand the wormhole?”
“Mira-” Padelheb says.
Mira jabs a finger in Padelheb’s direction. “He did.”
“Well, then he was planning to send this to Argentina. What’s in it?”
Mira glances at Padelheb, then back at Quill. “Erin, I- Padelheb hired me to make it a few days ago.”
“What is it?” asks Quill again.
“A viral agent created through superinfection and reassortment of the influenza virus,” Mira says.
“Superinfection onto what?”
Mira looks at Padelheb again. “A sample he gave me.”
Quill’s eyes look like they’re popping out of his head. “So you actually crossed the most virulent virus known to man with something he gave to you? And you didn’t even check what it was? Genome structure.”
“Single stranded pseudocyclic RNA,” Mira says instantly.
“Yeah sure, because that narrows it down. Karyotype?”
“Three chromosomes of different size.”
Erin swears under his breath. “Well, I know one thing that fits that.” He holds the vial to eye level. “Hantavirus. Extremely dangerous. Usually confined to the jungles of South America. This gets inside you, you bleed from the inside out - bleed from the eyes, the ears, the mouth - dead within a week. It’s a blessing it doesn’t spread that fast. Unless, of course, someone integrates its genome into the one for the common cold, such that it can use common cold particles to spring across the air, from person to person, house to house, city to city. If one drop of this touches open air, Antarctica falls within the month.”
Erin whirls upon Padelheb, still holding the vial. “But that’s not the plan, is it? You don’t plan to drag us all down with you for no reason. You built in a fail-safe. So that a group of people can rise from the ashes to take charge. That group just happens to contain you, doesn’t it?”
“All of Antarctica,” says Padelheb.
Erin looks shocked. “What?”
“There’s a flaw in the binding mechanism corresponding to a mutated protein in Antarctican DNA. The virus will spread throughout the Antarctican population, but its full lethality will not be revealed until it reaches the Argentinian natives. Anyone with Argentinian blood will be struck down. A sad consequence of mingling with those primitives.” He chuckles.
“You’ll hang for this,” Erin swears.
“I think not,” Padelheb says, advancing towards Erin. “I did what was needed to eliminate the threat of our errant head scientist, but who could have guessed that he would recruit an old friend of his to create this bioweapon-”
“What?” gasps Mira.
“-and forced open the wormhole - which, as he himself admitted, only he could control properly - to send it to Argentina? What horrors could have happened if the Guardian of the State hadn’t caught up with him? Too bad the agent was released, and the conspirators killed, during the struggle,” Padelheb continues. He aims the gun at Quill. “So no, I have no plans on hanging soo-”
Mira hurls a flask of liquid onto the floor.
A billowing cloud of sulfuric white smoke shoots up behind Padelheb with a woosh.
Padelheb drops the gun and grabs at his eyes, coughing, until he feels Quill press the muzzle of his own weapon into his back. “No, I don’t think you will hang,” Quill hisses. “Chaos is a ladder, Padelheb. I’m tipping the ladder. Now.”
Options:
A: Allow Quill to shoot Padelheb.
B: Tell him something to stop him.
Poll
13 (46.4%)
Author
Topic: (SG) SPAMOVERLORD: Epilogue: Guest Week (Read 303155 times)