The Gate (8 page)

Devlin stared at her for a long moment
and relaxed visibly. He grimaced. “I haven’t figured that out,” he
replied frankly. “Do you think this is the best place to sort this
out, though? I’m almost positive Carly’s HESS has access to this
room and uses it regardless of her programming.”

Brenda shot Carly a horrified look. “I
thought you said …?”

“She never really tested it, did you
Carly?”

Carly felt her face heating at Devlin’s
reminder. She hadn’t forgotten it, precisely. She’d just been too
upset, on a personal level, at the way things had transpired to
consider what Devlin had warned her of—that Trude hadn’t followed
protocol. A few seconds might not mean much if one were talking
about humans. They didn’t have that precise a sense of timing.
Computers could track time to the nanosecond, however.

And Trude had not only interrupted them
without the time lapse it was supposed to allow, but it had cited a
seriously lame excuse for overriding.

And the cover story she’d cooked up,
she realized now, was just about as lame.

“Maybe we should make this brief and
meet up in the underground?” Devlin suggested.

“That may have been compromised after
our last meeting there,” Brenda said tightly. “You were standing in
the door, remember?”

Devlin flushed. “Shit!” He thought
about it for several moments. “There wasn’t any monitoring devices
after the first flight.”

Surprise flickered in Brenda’s eyes.
“We know that. It’s one of the reasons we used that area for access
to the tunnels. It could still have been sensitive enough to pick
up the conversation. We weren’t exactly quiet,” she finished
dryly.

Devlin frowned. “It’s been days,
though. Any indication that it did?”

Brenda shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard
of, but we didn’t actually discuss anything that would have been a
high priority. They might still have flagged it. If we went back,
we could be walking into a trap. Nobody wants to take that chance.
I know I don’t.”

“They don’t have the Arapaho language,”
Brenda said in Arapaho.

“That might keep them from knowing what
we say, but it isn’t going to prevent the suspicions that would
convince them to bring one of us in to investigate,” Devlin
responded in the same language.

Carly didn’t know what the exchange had
been about. She hadn’t learned enough of Brenda’s language to catch
more than a word here and there, but the look on Brenda’s face made
her chest tighten with empathy for her friend.

Brenda swallowed a little convulsively
several times. “Dev?”

He looked like he wanted to surge
toward her and hug her but when he swayed toward her, Brenda seemed
to withdraw and he stiffened. “It is me, Brenny.”

She looked skeptical and his expression
tightened.

“I don’t know what happened or how it
happened. There are still things I can’t remember. But I know I’m
not just a machine programmed with your brother’s
memories.”

“You … Dev died. There is no way he
could’ve survived. It just isn’t possible.”

Devlin started to respond and paused.
His expression tightened. “The HESS is trying to break the patch I
uploaded. It will have it in a matter of seconds. Find a place
where we can safely talk.”

Carly stared at him in dismay, unnerved
at the suggestion that they were getting in deeper and deeper
trouble, but Brenda looked even more suspicious.

“If you aren’t a cyborg, how could you
do that?”

Devlin shook his head. “I didn’t say I
wasn’t more cybernetic than human now. Whatever happened I was
majorly FUBAR. You’re right about that. I just said that I was in
here, Brenny. I am here. I am your brother.”

Chapter Seven

Carly still didn’t know if she truly
believed that the man she’d fallen in love with still existed
inside the cyborg shell that she’d bought or if she just wanted to
believe it and he’d managed to quite the threads of doubt with the
things he’d said and done. It would’ve been easier to know her own
mind if she hadn’t wanted so badly to discover that Devlin was
alive and she had the chance of finding the love she
wanted.

Because she realized that, even if it
was true, she only had a chance of it.

She had fallen for the Sim lover that
had shared her bed so many lonely nights. She’d gotten the chance
to know him intimately and then come to know the other side of him
through Brenda and even the history she’d dug up
herself.

As unconventional as learning the man
had been, she knew Devlin Bear as well as anyone could possibly
know another person. She thought it was entirely possible that she
knew him better because of the unconventional way they’d met and
she’d learned all the intimate details about him. If they’d
actually met and gotten to know each other in the traditional way,
it might have been years, if ever, before she’d come to know him as
she did now.

It hadn’t been that way for him. She’d
chosen his Sim. He hadn’t gotten to know hers.

And she was afraid that the way he had
gotten to know her didn’t show her in her best light or allow for
the possibility of him falling in love with her.

In fact, as dismaying as it was, the
circumstances might make it impossible for him to care for her at
all.

Even future tense.

She felt guilty for even focusing on
that, though, when his situation was so … well, bizarre.

She should have her mind on more
important things—like survival, she thought uneasily as they
followed the guide that had been sent to take them to the meeting
that had been arranged.

They’d entered a different way than
before, but they were still in the mechanical labyrinth of the
colony.

It was dangerous. Any doubts she’d
entertained before that there was an organization of rebels that
were dead serious about toppling the government stranglehold on the
populace had vanished. As long as it was nothing more than
suspicions and hadn’t involved anything more than the occasional
‘secret’ meeting between her and Bren, she’d comforted herself with
the belief that the group was nothing more than a handful of
malcontents that got together to complain.

That comforting illusion had begun to
fall apart almost as soon as she’d taken her obsession over Devlin
to the next level.

The lighting was poor in the room they
were led to, but sufficient to make it clear that the room was
filled with people. She wondered if the lighting was deliberate to
help conceal the identity of the rebels.

They were told to wait near the
entrance.

“We have reason to believe our security
measures may have been breached and time isn’t a luxury we can
afford so I’m going to get right to the point,” said the man
cloaked in shadows who addressed the group. “I’ve been given
permission to identify one of our members because she may have just
the information we’ve been hoping for.”

Murmurs rippled through the group, but
despite their obvious surprise and excitement, they were careful to
keep their voices low.

The shadowy figure held up a hand.
“Brenda’s brother was working on a secret, government sponsored
project. As far as she knew, he’d been killed in an ‘accident’ that
the government blamed on one of our splinter groups. He’s here
today to tell us what really happened.”

Carly felt the jolt that went through
Devlin at that announcement. She was shocked herself. She certainly
hadn’t heard Devlin say anything to that effect. He’d told both her
and Brenda that he didn’t know what happened.

Brenda joined the shadowy figure
holding the floor.

“My brother, Devlin Bear, was working
on a top level security project at Area 173 in New Mexico when the
facility was destroyed a year ago. As you’ve all probably heard,
there were, supposedly, no survivors. My family was informed that
Devlin was positively identified as one of the
casualties.

“I believe now, though, that he did in
fact survive and he’s with us here today to tell us what he can
about the project and the accident.”

Carly glanced at Devlin. It was too
dark to really see his expression, but she could tell from the
stiffness of his movements that he wasn’t happy about the way
things were going. Nevertheless, he moved forward to join Brenda
and the other man.

He surveyed the group and Carly
realized abruptly, with a surge of fear, that their identities
weren’t safe from him.

What if he was nothing more than a
‘plant’ the government had sent to ferret out the rebels, she
thought in sudden horror?

“The project I was working on for the
government was, as you’ve heard, a top level security project.
Regardless, it had no weapons potential that I’m aware of,” Devlin
began. “There was some potential that it could have military
applications and that was the reason for the security.”

“What were you working on?” someone in
the back, who’d clearly made an almost comical attempt to disguise
their voice, asked.

Several people snickered, but it seemed
as much a nervous reaction as actual humor.

Devlin hesitated. “Dimensional
theory.”

“And that had the potential for
military applications?”

Devlin shrugged. Again, he seemed
reluctant to proceed. He glanced around at the group. “As happens
quite often, though, I found something … unexpected. An alternate
universe. That had far more potential in benefitting mankind that
anything I’d expected to find and … I didn’t report it.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “It was a
moral dilemma when I was under contract, but the implications were
so fantastic that they couldn’t be ignored. I knew if I turned it
over to the government some private sector would be allowed to
exploit it and mankind in general would certainly benefit, but at
cost when I felt like it should be free to everyone.

“Without getting into technical
explanations that some of you might find confusing, this universe
exists in tandem with our own and it is pure energy. Tapping in to
the moon’s resources saved us from complete disaster when we tapped
out of the oil and natural gas used in the past, but we all know
how that turned out. The government allowed private industry to
exploit it and, economically, the common citizen only benefitted in
so far as being able to continue to struggle to pay for their
energy needs.

“I’d managed to develop a … well, I
called it a gate. I hadn’t gotten far enough in my research to
figure out a way to capture the energy for use when the facility
exploded.”

There was a prolonged, expectant
silence when he stopped speaking. Carly was dimly aware of it, but
she was as caught up in speculating on the potential of Devlin’s
discovery as everyone else seemed to be.

Free, unlimited energy? It boggled the
mind.

But how was he going to figure out how
to capture it without his lab?

“We’d like to hear what happened,” the
lead speaker prompted after a few minutes.

That dragged Carly from her
speculations and she looked at Devlin expectantly.

He seemed hesitant to speak and she
wondered why. Was he reluctant because of the trauma of his
experience? Or was he afraid he couldn’t maintain the illusion that
he really was Devlin Bear because he hadn’t been there at
all?

“I don’t actually know what happened,”
he said finally. “I sensed that something was wrong just as I began
powering up the reactor to open the gate. I’ve tried since then to
figure out what that something was or if it was anything at all.
All I can remember, though, is this … sinking feeling that
something just wasn’t quite right a few seconds before the
explosion. And then a blinding light.

“It seemed that a lot of time passed
before I became aware of my surroundings again.”

He stopped. “I’m a scientist,” he
continued after a long pause. “I won’t speculate about what
happened—either before or after the explosion. I couldn’t remember
anything at all at first—not even my name. I knew there were people
around me, or thought I knew. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard
them.

“I finally began to get my memories
back after I was …. I can only say that it’s clear I was severely
injured in the explosion. I didn’t have any sense of my body
anymore until I woke up in this unit. I’m not sure how much of me
is cybernetic—most, I think—but I am Devlin Bear. I did survive the
explosion and … I remember my research, which, I think, is the most
important thing.”

The silence that followed that
revelation was longer than the first. Carly was abruptly swamped by
guilt for doubting him. No wonder he seemed so aloof! It must be
horrible for him to realize the damage was so extensive that he’d
had to have so much of his body replaced with
cybernetics!

“Oh my gosh! Heaven!” somebody near the
back gasped out loud, stunning the entire group for several
minutes. “The light! So many people that died and were resuscitated
have talked about it! And the awareness of others! The energy! It’s
the souls! He found the gate to heaven!”