The four agents were seated in the austere-looking room where Bob usually critiqued their missions. He took his customary place at the head of the table and ordered the lights to be dimmed. Lit simply by the pale glow coming from the platform of the holographic projector, his face looked like it was made of stone. Graphite or obsidian. Laura floated like a mirage above the console normally reserved for viewing neural recordings.
“Can we speak freely?” asked Bob, addressing the hologram.
“Yes. Our conversation will remain… confidential.”
“What about the surveillance cameras?”
“I’ve taken care of them.”
A robot placed cups of steaming coffee before the four humans, and one of a cold viscous liquid in front of the Ganymedian. Without saying a word, Bob pensively stirred his drink with a spoon. He was the only person to add sugar. The silence started to weigh heavily on the foursome.
Tess couldn’t sit still any longer. She threw her cup against a wall, where it shattered into multiple pieces.
“What the hell is going here?!”
“Stop that,” Bob growled.
“Go screw yourself! It’s you who needs to stop! Stop taking me for an idiot, for one thing!”
“We owe you some explanations, it’s true,” conceded Laura.
“‘Some’? More like a huge packet of explanations!”
Rr’naal intervened at this point like a quiet student timidly lifting a finger to attract their teacher’s attention.
“Those images… That mission with the… what did you call them? ‘Living dead’? What were they?”
“Living dead?” coughed James. He almost spat out his coffee.
Dominika was gaping. She gave Tess a questioning look before asking, “What did you actually see, in the recording?”
“A town… in 1992. It was invaded by zombies.”
Dominika frowned. A Russian woman from the 1940s was no doubt unfamiliar with the concept of zombies. The same applied to an Englishman from the nineteenth century, as a matter of fact.
Seeing the bewildered look on her friends’ faces, Tess explained, “It involves… dead people’s bodies that come back to life to devour the living… The only way to kill them for good is to blow their brains out, if you believe the films and books…”
“It was horrible,” Rr’naal confirmed. “Dreadful.”
“The town was called Rhineland,” Laura revealed. “Located in Wisconsin, near a laboratory–”
“Let me guess,” Tess hissed venomously. “Experiments gone wrong? Hubris, sorcerer’s apprentices, mad scientists, all that?”
“Something of that nature, yes.”
“And my mother? Was she one of the guinea pigs?”
“She was infected, yes. But she was given an antidote before the mutation reached an irreversible stage.”
James spread his hands, still looking dumbfounded. “Wait, wait… Tess’s mother?”
“What does she have to do with all this?” added Dominika, just as stupefied.
Bob stood up and started to pace, saying, “Four agents were sent back to 1992 to extract Marcy Culligham. It was a high-risk mission. None of the receptacles were expected to survive, which caused some waves, some heated debates within the agency.”
“The receptacles all died?” enquired Rr’naal.
“Yes. But Marcy was saved. That was all that mattered to us.”
“And Pete Razovski?” asked Tess. “I saw him in the chopper, during the evacuation…”
“Well, I guess you can probably brag about being the only person in the world to have seen their parents meet for the first time.”
Bob had an ironic grin on his face, but his words had a deadly serious ring.
All eyes now turned toward Tess. She’d stood up and was shaking her head, as if physically denying the facts could erase them, reduce them to nothing. She’d had too many shocking revelations in too short a time. She simply couldn’t believe it. It was all too much to take in at once!
“Did I hear you correctly? He’s my father?”
“You heard me loud and clear.”
Tess had the impression that reality was receding from her, at the other end of a long black tube, as if she was looking at things from within a tunnel. She’d started to sweat. If this wasn’t a panic attack, it sure felt like one.
Bob tried his standard joke, “You’re not going to puke, are you?”
“You’ve already used that one on me.”
The atmosphere in the room remained tense. Tess was like a vial of nitroglycerin that needed to be handled with infinite precaution.
She stopped pacing and stood there clenching and unclenching her fists. “I don’t understand any of this. Why him? Why Marcy?”
“One thing at a time,” Bob admonished her.
“Pete has the ability to travel through time without being hosted by a receptacle,” explained Laura, in a more conciliatory tone. “He works for the Syaans.”
“He is a Syaan,” Bob corrected her.
Reality was becoming harder and harder to decipher. Tess tried to register all the information she was receiving, arrange it in a coherent manner, but it was a little like trying to insert a round peg into a square hole. She was too upset to speak, and it was finally Dominika who broke the silence: “Since the beginning of our training, you’ve been going on and on about the Syaans being the bad guys, our deadly enemies!”
“We ourselves believed that official version for a long time,” Bob sighed.
“That was before we understood that the real situation was far more complex than that,” Laura added. “Your father helped us see things more clearly. Without him, we’d still be in the dark.”
Tess fell back into her chair. “Damn, I think I’m going to need an aspirin.”
“It’s not so complicated, really,” Laura said. “But another faction exists, a group that makes the Syaans look like a bunch of choirboys.”
“Does this group have a name?” asked Rr’naal.
“If it does, we don’t know it,” Bob claimed.
“What’s their goal? Their objective?”
“There again, things aren’t clear…It seems that they’ve been at war with the Syaans since the beginning of time… And they don’t care what happens to us poor humans.” Bob glanced at the Ganymedian. “I guess the same applies to extraterrestrial races like yours.”
Dominika banged her fist on the table in exasperation. “So why continue to feed us the ‘anti-Syaan’ line?”
Bob’s expression hardened, as did his tone. “Because we’re practically certain that the agency has been infiltrated, including its highest decision-making bodies.”
“Big changes are about to happen,” Laura explained. “Big upheavals.”
“We think these mysterious creatures, the real ‘bad guys’, if you will, are going to launch an all-out attack on our base here,” Bob continued. “The station’s spatiotemporal coordinates are supposed to be a deeply guarded secret, but our adversaries are nonetheless close to locating us, according to my old friend Pete…”
My father! thought Tess, and felt her heart being wrung like a wet rag. She still had trouble believing it. She chewed at her nails. Her whirling thoughts were making her dizzy.
And to think I believed he was hitting on me, the first time I saw him, in the club!
She emerged from apparent lethargy to ask, “So, Razovski, Pete… He’s actually a double agent?”
“Or even triple,” Bob muttered.
“And you trust him?”
“He’s my friend,” replied the master instructor with a shrug of his shoulders.
James asked another question: “Do you have any idea how the traitors, if there are traitors, are communicating the station’s coordinates to their accomplices?”
“The most likely hypothesis is that they’re using quantum cubes,” Laura answered. “These cubes form spontaneously during each mission. They are a physical consequence of the transfer, like a trace or a vestige.”
“If someone managed to gather all the cubes of all the missions carried out by the agency, these quantum recordings could, by crossreferencing, allow them to triangulate our exact position in space and time,” Bob said. He looked directly at Tess and, before continuing, smiled at her. “Luckily, your father found a way to ensure that at least one of these cubes was equipped with a tamper-proof security system.”
“Oh yeah? And what is this super-system?”
“You.”
Tess was flabbergasted. In the space of a second, her mind went blank, as if it had suffered from an internal short-circuit. She’d believed that she had become blasé by now, vaccinated by all the repeated shocks she’d received. She’d thought that, henceforth, nothing would ever surprise her again. But she was wrong.
Bob continued speaking, “After the experiments carried out on her, your mother presented a certain number of very rare genetic characteristics. Characteristics that we needed. The cube was encoded in such a manner that only a descendant of Marcy Culligham and Pete Razovski could approach it. A little like the sword Excalibur in the Arthurian legends, you see? Only one person in the entire universe is capable of removing the sword from the stone.”
“And in your story, Arthur is me?”
“Indeed.”
“And the sword is this cube?”
“That’s right.”
Tess shook her head, before sighing in resignation. “I must be dreaming.”
Laura resumed explaining: “If, as we fear, the information contained in all the other cubes generated by our preceding missions has now been hacked by our adversaries, you can imagine how critical this last quantum artefact is for our survival.”
“Recovering it will be the objective of your next run,” Bob announced. “However, be careful, it’s imperative that this mission remains a secret…”
“Are you quite sure that the agency is harbouring a nest of spies?” James asked.
“We’re not sure of anything, but as long as we’re in doubt, you will be given a fake objective, a cover story. Once you’re out in the field, you will carry out the true mission: bringing us the cube!”
Tess would have liked to put a lid on her anger, but it was proving impossible. For the second time in less than ten minutes, she erupted, “So, you’re cool with the idea of playing with people’s lives? Programming them before they’re even born, as if… as if they’re some kind of genetic software? Does this stuff amuse you? Is it fun?”
“It doesn’t amuse us at all,” replied Bob, very seriously. “We aren’t in a position to choose the weapons we use. Our opponents are always one step ahead of us. We’ve had to adapt to that.”
“And when, exactly, did you intend on telling me about my father, my mother, and all this other stuff?”
“We wanted to prepare you gradually,” Laura answered her. “But your initiatives and those of your father have forced us to reveal everything all at once. I’m truly sorry about this. I’m aware that the things we’ve just told you aren’t easy to take in.”
“Oh no, it’s all good, just peachy! My mother was a lab rat. My father has so many allegiances that nobody knows who he’s really working for. You’re counting on me to save the universe. Perfect. I’ll buy it. Anything else? Are you sure? Hitler’s not my uncle, is he? No? You’re all finished? Because otherwise, go ahead, knock yourselves out: it’s my round and I’m paying!”
By this point, Tess’s cheek was suffering from a nervous twitch.
“Pete was instructed not to get in touch with you under any pretext,” Bob sighed. “But I’m getting the feeling that, in your family, you have a very peculiar manner of interpreting orders, don’t you?”
Tess, breathing heavily, did not reply. What good would it do? Her eyes were like burning coals. Her closed fists remained glued to the table.
Bob turned to the young woman’s teammates. “Bravo for hacking the surveillance systems and that little expedition through the air ducts.”
“It was nicely done,” Laura added.
“Although doomed to fail,” Bob decreed. “Your timing was too tight. Luckily, Laura and I were here to cover for you. An escapade like that could have landed you in jail or condemned you to serving as training receptacles for the rest of your days.”
“And this new mission?” asked James. “The one with this famous cube? When will it happen?”
“Soon. We can’t tell you anything more for now.”
“As usual,” said Tess sourly.
“As usual,” Bob confirmed. Then he sighed, “All right, that’s all, unless you have other questions.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Tess snorted. “I still have wheelbarrows full of questions!”
“And I have a report to write… Somebody has to clean up your messes, right?”
The four agents stayed silent.
Bob ended the session: “We’ll meet again soon. Dismissed!”