Forts: Endings and Beginnings Read online

  Less than a foot from the glass casing, Tommy came at last to a stop. Though the tiny particle hadn’t moved, he could hear it humming from behind the transparent walls of glass. From a distance, the marble-sized sphere seemed to be a single, almost perfect shape. Up close it looked like something else entirely. This wasn’t one particle, but a million—a billion maybe—all of them moving, and swirling, and spinning in a wild, unorganized dance. This was chaos masquerading as perfection.

  It was a living contradiction.

  Reaching his hand forward, Tommy placed his palm against the glass. When he did this, he did so without a moment’s hesitation or lag of thought. The world around him had slowly, almost unnoticeably, gone silent and wispy. Everything beyond him and the particle reduced to a murmur, and an echo, and a remembrance. Though the air in the cave remained chilly with the exterior breeze off the water world known as Aquari, the glass felt oddly warm against his flesh. Almost instantly the warmth began snaking its way through the grooves in the prints on his fingers, up his hand, through his arm, and into his shoulder. From there it cascaded across the interior of his chest and coated his ribcage in warming goodness. Behind the glass, the miniscule ball of light seemed to breathe with him, expanding and contracting like air being blown into a balloon before being sucked back out. Suddenly it was moving in harmonious synch with the heaving of his chest. When he breathed deep, it grew to the size of a soccer ball. When he exhaled, it shrank again to its original diameter. Despite everything that happened to him, despite the loss of his brother, Staci, and the undeniably frustrating nature of his young life, the incredible sensation caused Tommy Jarvis to smile. He couldn’t help it, and even if he could, he didn’t believe he would have wanted to.

  Though they had no face with which to express such an emotion, the swirling masses of the particle smiled back.

  Digging through a filthy old satchel hanging from his side, Arthur Crumbee hastily retrieved an even filthier notebook and a barely-there nub of something resembling a pencil. Initially his thought was that every single detail of what he was seeing needed to be recorded and examined and reported. His colleagues would never believe a word of it. Doctor Fillznitz would think he’d gone crazy. Professor Ludbow might go so far as to call him a liar and accuse him of falsifying data. His wife—a brilliant mind in her own right—would likely suggest he seek therapy. In his excitement, he allowed himself to forget that there was no one left to whom to report his findings. Fillznitz was murdered two weeks after the Ochan invasion; Ludbow was hauled away to a work camp four days later. His wife died in his arms in the very cave in which he stood. Lowering his head, Arthur slipped the notepad back into his satchel and tossed the pencil nub to the rock beneath his feet. They were useless. He was the first of his friends to witness the particle do what none of them in their wildest dreams believed it capable of doing. He would also be the last.

  With a heavy, regretful heart, Crumbee returned his gaze to the boy fifteen feet away with his hand pressed against the glass container. Inside, the particle continued to expand and contract. Soft blasts of light extended outward with each breath, illuminating the surrounding cave and its harsh, unforgiving features he had come to know so very well. It was hard to believe he’d survived here as long as he had – hard to believe he’d managed to trudge forward in the face of such uncertainty. It was even harder to believe he’d managed to do it all without Tamara, without his wife. Now extending further into the recesses of the cave, the humming, glowing light of the particle hit Arthur square in the chest and warmed his clammy skin. He’d been so very chilly for so very long, so chilly he’d almost forgotten exactly what warmth felt like. He’d spent so many years cowering in the dark with only the particle to keep him company, engaging in one-way conversations with a friend that never talked back. He missed the warmth. He missed its touch. It was in this instant the little scientist understood exactly why he’d survived so very long with so very little. It was for this moment, for this very second. He had suffered for this boy.

  His fingers sliding across the slick surface, Tommy reluctantly removed his hand from the glass. He’d seen what he needed to see, and so much more. He’d heard what he needed to hear and felt what he needed to feel. First his mother and now the particle; they’d spoken to him in different ways. What they had to offer was clear—in a confusing, whispered, riddle-filled sort of way. This wasn’t merely a conscience. He had floated into this unassuming cave for a reason. The tides played their part well. He encountered the weird looking little scientist with the old fashioned eyepiece for a specific purpose, too. None of it was random. It couldn’t be.

  Nothing was random.

  Slowly the particle returned to its original size, its gentle hum reduced to a barely audible whisper. As his breathing slowly returned to normal and the warmth began to seep again from his chest, Tommy turned to Arthur Crumbee and stared at the little man through the strands of thick hair dangling in front of his eyes. “My brother and Staci are alive. I need you to tell me everything you know about this thing.”

  Breathing deep, Arthur straightened his back and puffed out his chest, a wiry smile spreading across his face. “I thought you would never ask.”

  *

  *

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SIXTY-THIRD WORLD

  *

  Born into a rather average family of meager means, young Arthur Crumbee was raised to believe that with hard work and dedication all things were possible. And work hard he would. Utilizing a steadfast patience not often associated with youth, Arthur chose to forsake the average pleasantries of childhood, instead dedicating any and all free time to his studies. Because of this choice, his days were mostly lonely exercises, yet strangely fulfilling at the same time. For Arthur, mathematics came easily, and the sciences even easier. History intrigued him only in the way its sometimes-vague connections to the future would stir his mind like little else was capable. For young Arthur, the unknown was intriguing because the unknown was a problem, a problem waiting to be examined and understood, a problem begging to be solved.

  After completing the required courses of all children born in his world, Arthur made the decision to continue his studies and was accepted into one of the finest schools available. The challenges this new place had to offer were many and varied. The increased difficulty only strengthened his resolve and fueled the embers of knowledge already flickering within the delicate folds of his brain. It was in this place that he narrowed his field of study, choosing to focus his energy exclusively on the most uncharted of frontiers: space. In many ways, it seemed the obvious choice. In fact, Arthur remarked to his mother over a phone conversation late one afternoon that he was surprised it had taken him so long to come to this realization. How many times had he lay in bed at night as a child, gazing through the window of his second flood bedroom at the stars above? How many times had he imagined himself traveling from one to the next, and what he might find? More than he could count. They say space is limitless: an unending openness in which even the most impossible are given the opportunity to be proven wrong. For a scientist hungry for the problem far more than the solution, the allure of such a concept was wonderfully intoxicating.

  As his parents watched with proud smiles from the crowd below, Arthur graduated in a little less than nine years, two ahead of the average. Barely a month later, he was assigned at MNSTA to a surprising position of power for one with his relative inexperience.The Mangellian National Space Travel Administration had been in existence for nearly a hundred years and had only recently begun to make remarkable strides in the area of space travel. Soon, traversing very long distances in a very short amount of time would be possible. The creation of stable, artificially constructed, yet naturally powered wormholes would drastically reduce the time needed to move between galaxies, and open up the universe as a whole. Conjecture and hypothesis would become possibility, and with a bit of patience, possibility might transform into reality. He was living in a remarkable time.<
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  Less than three years into his tenure, while half asleep and thumbing through a stack of reports nearly the thickness and weight of his head, Arthur bumped rather accidently into a female researcher in the hallway while she was doing much the same. Amidst a wild cascade of tumbling papers the pair stumbled awkwardly to the chilly tile of the floor.

  Her name was Tamara, and this moment of cartoonish tomfoolery would forever change the lives of them both.

  Were it not for the crashing of their bodies the pair would never have met. Had it not been for angry remarks and pointing of fingers that occurred immediately afterward, they might never have spoken. If they hadn’t shared an ever so brief glance while looking over their shoulders as they went their separate ways, they might never have know how badly they wanted to speak again.

  Within a month they had shared their first bits of each other’s dinner while on a date. After a month and two weeks they’d kissed for the very first time. A year after that, they married in the shadow of the Negala Observatory as their parents watched teary-eyed and proud from the crowd below.

  Two had become one, and thus it would remain.

  It was less than a month later, however, that an incredible discovery was made, a discovery that would forever change the lives of not only the happy newlyweds, but the Mangellian species as a whole. Hovering just inside, the gravitational pull off the fifth planet in their solar system, in perfect synchronicity with the massive, uninhabited gas giant, a group of explorers happened upon something for which they had no explanation. It was a particle. Not just an ordinary particle. This was something more. The bizarre sphere was unlike anything they’d ever encountered. So odd was it that the instruments on their ship insisted it didn’t exist at all. It did exist, though. The Mangellian astronauts could see it very clearly. It was the size of a truck. The unexplainable glowing sphere of light was carefully retrieved a month later, brought to the surface, and left in the care of one of the greatest scientific minds the Mangellians had at their disposal: Arthur Crumbee III.

  When he was born, Arthur’s mother so very badly wanted to name him Steven. Steven had such a unique, trustworthy ring to it, she thought. Steven was the name of her father and his father before him. It rolled off the second tongue like honey from the comb. It sounded regal and important while not overly conceited. His father, however, insisted on Arthur. The name had been a Mangellian favorite for years. It was sturdy and it held weight. In the ancient Mangellian texts, it was Arthur of Arezeleth that discovered the path from the Deserts of Despair and led the Mangellian race to the life-giving forests of Chintilu. The name had meaning beyond its years. To his father, Steven sounded girlish and maybe even a bit soft. The name Arthur implied the progress of ideals and of discovery. It came with built-in stature. A name like Arthur could be taken seriously. It seemed a perfect fit.

  For years, with Tamara as his companion, sounding board, and research partner, Arthur examined the perplexing ball of light, attempting to make the unexplainable explainable. The answers he sought proved slippery, though. For every riddle he believed solved, another arose. For every answer he found himself faced with, two entirely new questions, and for every two questions, ten more waited patiently in the wings.

  This proved to be frustrating and time consuming work for the now middle-aged scientist—so wonderfully frustrating.

  Though his peers balked at the suggestion, Arthur eventually came to believe the particle was in fact a remnant of the beginning. It was the only explanation that made sense. He had come to the conclusion that the particle was an echo of what was left behind when the universe birthed itself into existence, a recollection of when the formless was given form and the shapeless morphed into something else entirely. Despite the slightly muffled chuckles in their voices and the obvious rolling of their eyes, Arthur believed without an ounce of hesitation that they had in fact stumbled upon what he dubbed the God Particle. Unfortunately, he would not be afforded the time necessary to prove his hypothesis and silence the gawking objections of his detractors.

  Barely a week later, the sky turned red, the world went dark, and everything changed.

  Spreading like a sort of awful, dusty light, a glowing cloud of ominously dark maroons and reds so deep they resembled the heat of a fire a billion years old spread rapidly across the world the Mangellians had come to know as home. As the foggy redness engulfed the cities, the technological advances on which the race had grown to rely ceased to function. Everything complicated and electronic went dead. Computers sputtered and stopped. Lights flickered and faded. Planes tumbled from the sky before crashing in violent fiery heaps. Their engines coughing one final time before being rendered useless, cars and trucks smashed and collided into one another, bending steel into flesh and snapping bone like a twig. In a matter of hours, the complex was reduced to the simple and the simple transformed into chaos. In a matter of days, there remained only havoc.

  It was during this initial craziness that the Ochan army invaded.

  Having been returned to the dark ages in a matter of moments, the Mangellians found themselves wholly unprepared for the manner of warfare the dark army of the Tyrant king brought to their doorstep. The weapons they had become so accustomed to were suddenly useless, and those they hadn’t wielded in generations in short supply. Adept in the dirty and the nasty and the close quartered, the Ochans spread quickly through their cities, devouring all things living and laying waste to a lifetime of scientific progress with frightening ease.

  As the Ochan army marched ever closer to their particular city, Arthur, Tamara, and a select few of their surviving associates retreated to the safety of the abandoned subway tunnels below. Despite the objections of his wife, Arthur insisted on bringing the God Particle along for the journey. Over the years the once truck-sized ball of light had patiently dwindled to something that could easily rest on the tender folds of Arthur’s palm. Though great caution was required, transporting it from hiding place to hiding place in an attempt to stay ahead of the Ochan regiments proved a relatively simple task. Despite his detractors, Arthur could not bring himself to let it go. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. As the war progressed—his home world quickly becoming less and less safe—the story of the doorways and the Fillagrou forest became a matter of common knowledge. Arthur received word from a trustworthy source that some of the Mangellians were retreating to a world called Aquari in hope of finding safety. Apparently the Ochans seemed to have little interest in a world covered exclusively by ocean. It was believed by some that they could find safety among the vast, uninhabited waters. Though he could see an endless number of flaws in this bit of logic, Arthur had run out of options. The scientist who once reveled in a universe of endless possibilities suddenly found himself faced with the very real prospect of having none from which to choose. His parents had long since died, along with his remaining family and friends. The boundless sense of opportunity that space once presented him now seemed so very far away and so achingly unreachable. Now there was only him and Tamara, and the particle. Nothing else mattered, and their safety was of the utmost importance. He’d lost everything and couldn’t fathom the idea of losing Tamara as well. The choice had already been made. Arthur Crumbee’s future was scratched in a wall made of an unbreakable stone so tall it would forever block his path. A meager life at sea was to be his future. The water world of Aquari awaited.

  Years later, the floating mass of wood and rusted nails he’d come to call home was attacked in the night by a single Ochan warship. The battle did not last long. Within a matter of minutes, the Ochans had set the boat ablaze, murdered much of the crew, and begun the process of boarding that which remained afloat. Sneaking their way onto an escape boat, Arthur and Tamara managed to escape under the cover of night. Watching as the angry, foaming waters doused what remained of the fiery vessel and the Ochan soldiers murdered those not so lucky, Arthur clutched the glass container holding the particle close to one side and his wife to the other. They hadn’t be
aten him, not yet.

  After weeks of drifting aimlessly at the mercy of the tides, with both he and Tamara starving and barely clinging to life, their escape ship drifted into the mouth of a single cave cresting the tip of the water. It wasn’t much, but it was safety. The rocky hideaway not only provided shelter from the elements, but offered an abundance of mossy plants to quell their aching hunger pains.

  Tamara however, was sick.

  She had been sick for some time, and was only getting worse. While the moss growing sporadically on the walls of the cave’s damp interior provided sustenance enough to keep them alive, it did little to alleviate the disease spreading throughout her body. Arthur remained at the side of his wife, watching helplessly as her condition worsened and she was devoured from the inside out. Eventually a time arrived when Tamara ceased to resemble Tamara at all. She had become someone else, something different and unrecognizable. She’d transformed into something he could barely stand to look at without crying. The day arrived, as he had known it would for some time, and for which he had prepared himself to the best of his ability, when she died in his arms. Going limp and spindly and useless, Tamara’s arms dropped to her sides and her knuckles clanked off the slippery stone. Her head rolled back and her mouth fell open as if searching for a final gasp of air just beyond her reach.