The Republic of New York was one of the small countries created after the terrorist attack of 2095 against what used to be the continent of North America. An attack which later came to be called the Severing, according to the history books. There's nothing extraordinary to write about the country, but they do make the best cuisines in the westside of the world. Not to forget, they have the fourth largest defence system and the sixth largest population of scientists on the planet. At least that was something to brag about.
Although irrelevant, the route to Area 56 was nothing short of surreal. We were blindfolded. I sensed the vehicle we were put in hovering up, down and sideways, which made me assume they had put a three year old in the driver's seat. After three hours of irrelevant protocols, we arrived at our destination. An underground facility filled with busybodies conducting test-drives and analysis here and there. We were approached by General Singh, a man with a grudge, whose idea of fun were bench presses and fistfights.
"Dr Ruben," he growled. "Don't tell me you brought children here as a remedy to our national crisis."
"I don't have time for your petty remarks Singh, they need to see the Orb," Ruben replied, walking past the general.
"It dropped," he said. That response was heavy enough to make Willow and Ruben halt.
"What do you mean dropped?" Willow asked. "What dropped?"
"The countdown alphabets, it's no longer four, it's down to two."
"When the hell did that happen?!" Ruben exclaimed.
Singh pulled out a lighter and lit the cigar in his mouth. His smooth stride held our attention as he passed us and walked into the elevator before us.
"That's an irrelevant question Doc," he said, blowing out a cloud. "How long are y'all going to stand there? Get the hell in, we don't have time for loitering."
I forgot to mention, the man sometimes acts like he has a screw loose somewhere in his head.
The elevator took us ninety-five feet below sea level, down to Level 592, the Orb room. A room that was white, an acre wide and two acres high. There was only one door serving as the entrance and exit, it was a very large vault door. An acre opposite that door was a large two way mirror window.
The attraction of the day though, was the Orb itself. Previous descriptions didn't do justice to the magnificence of this thing. It was twelve feet in height and width. They said it was a black Orb but that was relatively true. Its major colour was indeed black, but there was also blue, blue hexagonal stripes, a colour that seemed to be pulsating in accordance to the countdown.
The alphabets that represented the declination of the countdown were very alien indeed, they seemed to resemble ancient Arabic words fused together with calculus' differential characters. The only proof we had that it was indeed a countdown, was the fact that it acted in the same way a countdown from a bomb would.
"So it's true," mom said, watching the countdown.
"Every word of it," Ruben replied. He had the same worried look mom had on her face.
She exhaled. "They should have sent this thing back to the freaking orbit."
"We're going to need reports on previous research and analysis," I said to Willow.
"Isn't that why we have mom here?" Eddie asked.
"We'll need all the help we can get," Isoken replied. "Let's hurry and get this over with, I've got experiments to finish back home."
Activating Xiota was next to impossible in my opinion. There were too many unknown variables to deal with, I mean what were they expecting us to do? Toy with it until we accidentally activated the alien A.I.? On a larger scale there was another option, which was, the major problem. It was a matter of defusing the bomb and stopping the countdown. If we could do that without the help of the A.I., it would save us the time we seemed to lack.
Of course that too was a long shot. How do we hack an alien device that has no connections to the world of science in which we resided? This was where mom came in. Apparently, our predecessors had also attempted a similar endeavour to hack the Orb.
. "We invented a pad sensor that served as a connection device," she said.
But it didn't work, at least not on the Orb. Maybe there was something we could do to make it more efficient, some upgrades of sorts. It had been more than fourteen years since the use of the device, science had made notable advances since then. This was Eddie's line of thought. The Pad Sensor was more of a hacking device than a connection device. It was a grey polyester device small enough to fit the hand of a grown man. First you link the device directly to your Specta-Computer, then you stick the Pad on the device you want to connect to and finally command your Specta-Computer A.I. to do the hacking with the aid of your mental prowess.
Now the problem here was that they let the Specta-Computer A.I. do all the work. The artificial intelligence incorporated in those eyeglass computers in the past were quite restrictive. Their operating system wasn't as open as the new versions of today. So maybe if we did a little upgrade on the Sensor and made use of the Mac-Shade pro14 version of the Specta-Computer, we might get somewhere.
Video reports weren't of any use. Seventy percent contained lunch breaks and idle chats about quantum loops and pathological black holes. At least we got to see our parents having fun, I barely remembered the smile of my dad, in a way the videos were relevant. There was the footage of Xiota's appearance, though, labelled as top secret. From what we saw, Dad and Edward did in fact activate the Orb accidentally. It was an honest mistake really, there were no sensors, carbon dating, blood fusion, electromagnetic bonding manipulation, or push of a button. None of that. They were just observing the hexagonal stripes and out came Xiota, in the form of a holographic humanoid. Our attempt to replicate those exact circumstances was fruitless.
We spent two weeks trying to connect. And although we seemed to have made progress by passing what seemed to be a firewall, it was not in any way a useful win. All we could see past that firewall were shapes changing forms in a glassy, sheen background. A kaleidoscope, the Orb was showing us a stupid kaleidoscope.
"It's toying with us," Isoken said. She did that thing she usually does when she's angry and frustrated. So all we heard for the next five minutes were death threats to the inanimate object, in the Benin dialect.
"It's already too late to try anything new," mom replied.
The characters were down to one. Based on the nature, we couldn't tell if it was far from zero or close to zero. What we could tell was that we were out of time and we needed to get out of there.
"We need to leave," she added, heading for the vault door while we tagged along. But before we got to the door, it automatically got shut.
"No one's going anywhere until the threat is neutralised," Singh echoed from the observation room.