Refraction | Part 2 | Multiverse
5) What Happened to Cpl. Stone
Corporal Stone liked to consider himself a fairly even headed individual. He was a practical, reasoning man. He was a child of the War. Which made him fear war immensely, because he knew how bad it could get. He reasoned that the greatest protection from war would be to become a defender of peace. So when the United World Government (which was not really the entire world, but a thin majority it.) set up office and created a Military Establishment. John Stone signed up. He worked desperately to get a cushy desk job, far from were any fighting would ever be, but key to the fighting. He wanted to be indispensable and safe. He found that ‘indispensable’ was not really an Army word, in almost any context, so he shifted gears and became one without being the other. He scored a post as a guard in a scientific research facility in what had been eastern Colorado when he was a child.
It was just what his mental Doctor had ordered. He wasn’t crazy about the idea of having to work so far below the surface, with so many thousands of tons of rock above his head, but it beat the hell out of being in one of the fighting divisions. Though rarely called upon, they never went anywhere pleasant, or did any thing fun. At least not by the account of Corporal John Stone. So he sucked it up and dealt with the occasional claustrophobic moments. He was on an on-two-off-one schedule that brought him to the surface and to his lovely Mary Ellen every third week, and the Army provided her with a comfortable home and a job at the Com/Sat facility as a holo-tech engineer. It suited them both, and the were happy for the most part save for one problem of Mary Ellen’s. Not to say it was really HER problem.
She too had been a child and a victim of the War.
And her scars had left her barren.
So it was more like a terrible sad blanket that lay over their marital bed, than a problem, but it would be a lie to say it caused no friction between them. Their love had been strained since they found out for certain she would never conceive a child, regardless of therapy. Too often the weeks apart were easier than the weeks together.
Which is why, in his own pragmatic way Corporal John Stone did what he did on the day they fired The Machine.
The Machine, Stone surmised, was some sort of super-supercollider that was built to do who-knows-what on some minutely boring scale. He had access to the tunnels in which it lay, a good part of his job consisted, in fact, of driving through them in an electric cart. But that was about all he saw of The Machine, or knew of its purpose. It lived in long boring steel and concrete tunnels, and people in clean suits attended to it somewhere that was off limits to him. He spent his days humming along in his nearly silent little car in the half dark of the man made caves, thinking about his problems making his plans, altering them as events altered his life. Ever adapting to find the safest place for himself, in world who had greeted him with terror.
In the weeks previous there had been greater activity in Stone’s normally quiet section of tunnel. More little electric carts brought people from the clean rooms out to check on various connections and access panels that broke the occasional monotony of the view. From their excitement, and increasing numbers, not to mention his own superior’s grim faced admonitions to check Every Goddamn I.D. on Every Goddamn Body in the Tunnels, against The Computer, no matter what.
Stone did as he was told. He met a lot of people, he had never seen before, and would never see again, but their Goddamn I.D. checked out on The Computer in his little electric car every time, so he let them do their thing, and went on his way.
On they day of the firing, their was a surge in frenzied activity in the tunnels, Corporal Stone stopped his car in the tunnel and did his best to keep a list of every Dr. Patel, Specialist Engineer Hiroki, and Betty Winters, Grad Student, that scooted past him on their bust errands. He set the computer to searching the list for anomalies, while intercepting people and scribbling their names into his PDA before they could hurry past. Eventually the bustle began to die down, when Corporal John Stone received from his superior to clear the tunnels as The Machine was in it’s final count down. The same announcement began to ring out in several languages through loudspeakers in the tunnels only moments later.
Stone drove back to his entry point, checked his weapon and car with the pool, the guys told him word had come down that all non-essential personnel had been ordered to barracks. That suited him fine. He walked back to his barracks to find eight other soldiers already there, playing cards and doing the types of things soldiers do when they are not soldiering. Like sleeping, which is what Stone intended to do, and did, promptly after puling off his boots, his blouse, and hitting his rack in the corner of the room.
While Corporal John Stone slept The Machine fired. Things happened of a highly unexpected nature. One of these was a total power failure of the main and back up systems. In the darkness, Stone sat up, in a nap induced fog to a scene of bedlam. Flashlights splashed the walls and the room with sudden images. Stone roused himself and prepared to jump into the fray when something whizzed by at high velocity grazing his skull and knocking him out. Stone was left sleeping as various people in the room left through various and sometimes sudden doorways. Einstein rolled around in his grave.
When he awoke he was (he thought) alone in the barracks room. He climbed from his bed and put a hand to his throbbing head. Dried blood flaked off, the wound didn’t seem severe but Corporal Stone was rattled, is was if he had awoken into one of his War nightmares. Like so many of those he thought he could here a baby crying. He stumbled from his cot to the center of the long low room, found his canteen hanging from his gear web and drank from it. He stood quietly in the darkness. It cleared his head some, but he the sound persisted. Stone looked at his watch, it read, 14:07:52. He looked away from it and asked aloud,
“Am I awake? I am awake.”
He looked back to his watch. 14:07:56. A good sign that he was indeed awake.
But still the sound persisted. Closer than the occasional shout from the hallways outside the barracks. An infant howling, coming…from…his footlocker?
Stone pulled a flashlight from his gear web, unlocked his footlocker, popped it open. And there he was, a perfect, if not somewhat large, baby boy. Stone quickly moved the light from the child’s eye’s and hefted him from the steel box. He was wrapped in an ornate linen swaddle, and had a golden bracelet on his wrist.
“Hey, hey buddy, how’d you get in there? Huh? Man but you’re a heavy one aren’t you?”, Said Stone, calming the child. “You got any goddamn I.D.?"
Stone slid the golden band from the wrist of the child. By it’s heft he could tell it was most likely solid gold. He read the inscription on it, and slipped back over the wrist of the child, who didn’t seem aware of it’s weight.
“Chuck, huh? Well it suits you, pal, so I guess Chuck it is.”
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