Chapter 2

Corren realized what was happening on the other side of the door and ducked to the side to avoid being seen, but the damage was done. He heard nothing, “That’s odd,” he thought to himself, “This room isn’t sound-proofed.”

*Click*

“That’s the lock, so it did see me. Best idea? Run!” Corren began to sprint down the corridor. He had almost reached the end when the door had fully opened. He looked back as to see who it was that might soon end his life and to try to see his colleagues who he had assumed were all dead. He had assumed correctly, however he did not manage to confirm his fears. A midsized muscular looking man stood in the doorway, looking straight at Corren as he turned the corner still in full sprint.

“Loki! Go after him, but don’t kill him. Odin wants him alive, says he could be useful.” Loki turned towards the man giving him orders.

“Don’t worry Thor. I’ll look after the little guy.” Loki began his pursuit of Corren.

“Self-defense! That’s what I need, something to defend myself. There are some prototype weapons in storage, could use one of those. Okay. What’s next? Oh! Got to get the data back from Aims. What else? Erase all traces of the program. Wait why do they want it anyway? No never mind that, not important at this point in time. Damn, there is a copy still in the chair. Think Corren, think! Remote accessing! I was pissed Rowen put it in but it’s going to be helpful now. Good I’m here.” Corren, now standing outside the storage swiped his hand across the scanner. The door opened and he leapt inside, swiping his hand across the scanner inside the room before he was even fully inside. The door started to close as soon as his body had crossed the threshold. Corren attempted to catch his breath quickly before giving up and beginning to scan the storage room for a suitable weapon to use against his assailant. “Deto!” Corren exclaimed picking up the Pulse Gun prototype and the fully developed Shock Gloves. While both were never intended to be handled at the same time it would have to work.

Deto: An exclamation of success. Its origin lies in the Japanese word for congratulations written as omedeto in Romanji.

The Pulse Gun was a master’s project that attempted to create a hand held directed EMP that would allow you to target specific electronic devices while leaving others unharmed. It was not successful in elementary testing as it simply disabled all electronic devices in the path of the pulse, even penetrating basic shielding and was thereafter discontinued.

The concept of Shock Gloves is similar to that of the 21^st century stun gun. Instead of only two points of contact the shock gloves provide several points and adjust the output to the life form or object they are touching as not to cause any permanent or lethal damage.

Corren’s chain of thought was suddenly interrupted by the sound of the door opening. He quickly positioned himself facing the door with a clear line of fire. Loki stood triumphantly in the doorway. Corren fired the Pulse Gun; the room smelt as the air after a lighting storm. “Well that didn’t work too well now did it?” mused Loki with a smug grin on his face.

“Did he realize all his electronic devices just failed? Or is he just completely oblivious?” Corren asked himself. He probably should have realized that while facing an opponent such as Loki, one should concentrate on his movement or it would be over before one realizes it. As soon as the pulse had passed through Loki, he had begun to move quickly towards his target and before Corren could figure out what Loki was doing, he was already in Loki’s headlock.

Loki figured if Odin wanted the target alive, unconscious would have to do, as he wasn’t about to leave his target conscious. No, definitely not. Conscious targets only cause trouble. They kick, they scream and sometimes they even bite. Loki particularly didn’t like the biting, that was one experience he need not have again.

While Loki was in this state of deep thought, he did not realize that Corren had positioned his left arm so that his hand was touching the back of Loki’s head. Loki noticed the touch as soon as it occurred but did not think much of it as the most it could achieve was removing his bandana, and although he did not like this idea, it did not bother him to the extent of wanting to do something about it.

This was Loki’s mistake. In Loki’s defense, he had never been up against a weapon of this type before this moment. Corren activated the left glove. Current surged from the glove through Loki’s head, his body suddenly collapsing as a result of losing consciousness. As Loki’s body began to slump Corren freeing himself from the headlock slipped out from under it and let Loki’s almost lifeless body drop to the floor. “I wonder why these things never went into production. They work like well enough,” pondered Corren before snapping back to the reality where he had almost just been killed.

“Who is this guy anyway? Why was he trying to kill me? What is that emblem on his chest?” The realization that he was getting distracted by unimportant things hit him like a Teslabahn. “What was the next part of the plan? Programming Center! I have to get the data before getting out of here.”

Making his way to the Programming Center involved many moments pinned to walls as the doors to a multiple of rooms kept opening and closing. Each time one would open Corren would jump at the nearest wall and seemingly tried to meld with it. This earned him many strange and concerned looks from the students and professors that emerged from the doors. Most of the female students would giggle amongst themselves when he did this, looking back only to turn away again to giggle some more. This would normally have annoyed Corren as he didn’t like not being in on the joke, but today he was far more concerned with staying alive.

Reaching the Programming Center he entered as he had the storage room, with the exception that shortly after entering the Center he broke into another sprint for the booth at the back of the class. Not even noticing what could possibly be the dirtiest look ever given on the Atlantis University Campus.

Corren burst through the doors of the booth and continued to where Aims was sat. Aims had, as soon as the bursting occurred jumped in his seat and then swiveled towards the origin of the noise. He was extraordinarily surprised to find that it was Corren who had almost knocked the doors off their connection to the wall. He stood up just as Corren reached him.

“Aims! I need that data on the disc I gave you, now! Then I need you to...”

“Hold on a nano-second, and catch your breath,” Aims interrupted.

Corren took a deep breath and continued, “...to delete any traces of what I gave you from the University System. Not a shred of it can survive. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but could you explain why?”

“No time, and the less you know the better. Probably,” Corren added, not sure if this was true but it was what he had always seen said in movies when they were short on time and it seemed to work there.

Aims sat back down turned to his solid stream and began entering commands. On a slightly less eventful day Corren would have been impressed with the speed at which Aims handled the task he had been given, but this was not an ordinary day, and for Corren even Aims’ fastest was not fast enough. “Here, that’s everything you gave me including some corrections I made. There were a few...”

“No time,” interrupted Corren. “Thank you, for everything,” he concluded before turning to dash back towards the exit.

“Loki! Respond!” shouted Thor. He reached into one of the many pockets in his jacket and took out a small box, only a few millimeters thick. He placed the box on the table in front of him, removed his right glove and placed his finger, squarely in the center of the top plate of the box. The area under his finger briefly glowed before removing his finger. The top plate commenced to glow and the light began to rise, shapes of light emerged out of the glow.

Four red dots appeared in roughly the same area. Thor looked at this with displeasure, “Tyr, Loki is not appearing on the map.”

Tyr looked up from behind the chair, “The stream is accurate, either he is in a shielded area or his comms have been disabled. The latter is more probable, very few rooms in this section have shielding.”

“Bragi, go find Loki and bring him back here. Freya, you help Tyr with the chair.”

Bragi made his way to the door, placing his hand in front of the scanner it opened. Stepping through the door his shoulders almost touched the frame. As the door closed Freya turned to Thor and asked, “Why did you send him? He is the most conspicuous out of all of us. I could have gone.”

“I doubt Loki would come back unharmed if I sent you. Also, Loki will most likely need to be carried, Bragi will have no problems complying with either.”

“Bragi, it seems the last sign of Loki came from within some sort of storage facility,” relayed Thor “It is located down the corridor and on the right of your location.”

“Understood,” confirmed Bragi and changed course towards the storage room.

Placing his hand in front of the scanner the door slid open for Bragi. Upon entering the room he immediately saw Loki’s unconscious body lying in a heap on the floor. “It seems our comrade has been incapacitated. The target is not here. I assume he has fled,” announces Bragi.

“The target is not a problem; he is most likely headed to his residence. We will stop by later and retrieve him when we are done here. Tyr, monitor any activity coming from his home, don’t let him contact anyone.” Hearing no response Bragi figures that Tyr agreed and just didn’t use his comm. There really was no point in using it when he and Thor were in the same room. Bragi leant over and grabbed the back of Loki’s jacket tightly lifted him up and threw him over his shoulder as though he were handling a large sack of potatoes. Slowly, Bragi moved to the door.

Chapter 1

The laboratory was dark, lit only by the glow of the solid streams and a throne of fiber optics, crystal drives and nano-fabric. Several shadows were standing around the throne like chair; a few others are sitting at consoles looking at three solid streams each. The right streams displayed a program going through lines of code written in Cryptic very rapidly, while the middle stream displayed a loading bar at ‘99%’.

Solid Streams are a form of screen with a high level of interactivity. The stream itself is made up of millions of nano-emitters that, as the name suggests, emit light. The nano-emitters can also detect when they are being displaced by an object, sending details of the interaction back to whichever piece of hardware has been determined to handle the interaction. Many solid streams allow for three dimensional interaction, those most on only for a limited distance.

Crystal Drives are a form of storage device similar to the 21^st century Solid State Drives. Crystal Drives use a specially developed memory crystal the lattice of which can be altered using a discrete frequency beam. This molecular level storage allows for large amounts of data to be stored in a comparably small volume.

Cryptic is the most widely used form of writing in the world, mainly having replaced the Latin characters as well as Cyrillic and several others.

As the loading bar reached ‘100%’, the shadow sitting at in front of the stream turned towards the throne. He was a young looking man with short light brown hair, wearing a completely white outfit bearing the Atlantis University logo on the left side of his chest. With a broad smile on his face he relayed to the figure standing in front of the chair, “The program is built Dr. Talemir.”

Atlantis is one of the three oceanic cities. The city is renowned for housing the largest technology companies in the world. The university is most famous for the science and engineering disciplines as well as having the most advanced medical facilities on the planet. Virtually all scientific developments of the 23^rd century have occurred on Atlantis. For this reason it is said to be the capital of scientific research and knowledge of the world. Located in the Atlantic Ocean it was the last of the three cities to be completed mainly due to it being the largest of them. It is named after the legendary city written about by Plato.

“Let’s not get ahead of Rowen, I’m not a doctor yet,” responded the man with grayish-silver hair, wearing a similar outfit, laughing off the remark.

“Semantics my dear Corren, mere Semantics,” replied Rowen still grinning.

Still laughing at his friend and colleague’s remark Corren asked, “Are you planning on running the program or should we pack up?”

“Just waiting on your orders boss,” replied Rowen his smile somehow now even larger than before.

“Then run it before we all die of suspense,” joked Corren. Rowen in mocking dramatic fashion moved his finger towards the execute button on the solid stream. He turned his head back towards Corren to see if he is would get a response. Corren looking slightly annoyed at this point taped his wrist as though pointing at a watch. Rowen taking the hint touched the solid stream.

The chair powered up almost immediately, “Crystal Drives Online,” announced the shadow sitting at the second set of streams. “External Synaptic Sensor Array Online,” announces the shadow further.

“Begin the calibration process,” ordered Corren. The shadow at the second console taped the solid screen on his right, at the center of the image of the chair. A ripple moved from the touched area to the edges of the stream. A loading bar appeared on the middle stream reading ‘Calibration in Progress 0% Completed’.

A high pitch sound began to emanate from the headrest area of the chair. “What’s that sound?” Corren asked the others. The others just looked at him puzzled. Rowen turned towards Corren once more.

“What sound? I don’t hear anything, you sure it’s not just you?”

“It’s getting louder. Where is that coming from?” Corren began walking towards the chair. The volume of the sound increased with each step. “Shut it down, quickly!” Corren shouted realizing that the noise is coming from the chair.

“What are you talking about Corren?” responded Rowen with a worried look on his face.

“The noise is coming from the chair. Turn it off before something happens.”

“What could possibly happen?”

*Crack*

The sound echoed through the room. One of the others hit a kill switch next to him. The power to the chair was cut. “What the Flux was that?!” exclaimed Rowen. Corren walked up to the chair’s head rest and saw that a crack splitting it down the middle.

Running a finger down the crack in the headrest he answered, “That was sthe sound of nano-fabric being split apart. It’s a good thing we caught that now, instead of when someone is in the chair. The whole head rest is toast though, I’ll go get a new one.”

“So that sound was…”

“Probably a frequency you can’t hear, all that clubbing really did some damage huh?” Corren joked.

“It’s more likely that that is was a frequency above 20 kilohertz, I mean half these guys have probably never even been to a club,” Rowen retorted.

“In any case I’ll go get one of the spares from storage.”

“While you’re at it you should probably have the programmers look at the code again to see if anything in there could have caused this.”

“Good idea,” said Corren making his way over to Rowen’s console. On the surface of the console was a fourth solid stream with an octagonal shaped disk on it about the size of a large coin. There was a glow around the coin displayed on the solid stream with several options linked to it. Corren picked up the disk and put it in his coat pocket. As he walked towards the door he turned to the group and said, “Could you begin dismounting the broken headrest, we can save time that way.”

Walking down the hallway towards the programming center Corren took the disk out of his pocket to take a look at it. The resin colored storage device sparkled slightly in the lighting of the hallway, the university logo imprinted on one side. “750 Terabytes. So much code to be able to complete the project. Seems a bit much, but what needs to be done, needs to be done.”

Corren stopped at a door with ‘Programming Center’ written on it in Cryptic, slipping the disk back into his pocket. Corren stuck out his arm and waved his hand past the black, half cylindrical ID scanner. The words ‘Access Granted’ appeared on the door, and it slid into the wall on the left. Corren entered the lab to see that a lecture was in progress. He quietly walked along the back of the class to the large booth at in the corner. He opened the door to find five men dressed in black with the university logo on the upper of their sleeves. “Hey guys. You busy?”

“Corren!” exclaimed the man at the back of the room getting up from his chair. The man was wearing the same as his colleagues, his eyes were sky blue with a cloud effect moving through them, and his hair was carrot orange.

“You’ve changed it again, you just love hacking your gadgets don’t you, Aims?” Corren said trying to suppress his laughter. The man looked at Corren with a combination of an irritation and confusion.

“So I suppose you want me to believe that your natural hair color is silver?”

“Alright so I’m a hypocrite, but Orange?”

“Did you come here to make fun of my choice in hair color or do you want something?”

Walking over to Aims, Corren took the disk out of his pocket handed it to him. “I wanted you to take a look at the code again. The head rest of the chair cracked while we were running the calibration.”

“Okay, but that sounds more like a hardware problem.”

“I know, and I’m going to storage to pick up one of the replacements, but in the mean time, could you take a look, see if we missed something?”

“Sure, but you owe me a drink.”

“Understood, I’ll leave it to you then.” Corren exited the room back into the class. He noticed that the lecturer was glaring at him on his way out of the Programming Center. “Must have been laughing quite loud if he heard me,” thought Corren.

The hall was empty with the exception of the occasional grad student, as Corren made his way to the storage room. Once again with the wave of his hand the door slid open. Corren entered the room to see many projects he remembered from both previous years and the current one, a few of them only half completed. After a few minutes of walking through shelves of parts and tools he reached the head rest replacements. He grabbed one and began to walk back towards the exit of the storage room. Swiping his hand across an ID scanner once more, he exited the storage room.

Coming down the hallway to his lab Corren noticed that the door was closed. “That’s odd,” he thought to himself, “there is no reason for the door to be closed, if all they are doing is dismounting the head rest.” He walked up to the door trying to look through the transparent section. Puzzled that the transparency of the sections seemed to have been disabled he accessed the door’s control panel. “There is no reason for the transparency to be off. Just what is going on here?” Corren changed the transparency parameters in a matter of seconds, closing the control panel he looked through the transparent section.

A film of red covered the section he was looking through. He could make out three figures in different positions around the chair, a forth was standing over what could only have been one of his colleagues with a long curved sword in its left hand and a handgun in its right hand. No sounds could be heard from behind the door, looking up at the ceiling of the roof he saw a sphere where none had been before. Shifting positions he further saw that there were several figures lying on the floor, lifeless. Dread filled his mind; those could only be his remaining colleagues. “Are they dead?” he asked himself, “is this their blood on the door? Why? Who?” A thousand questions raced through his mind each receiving no answer.

A fifth figure appeared on the other side of the door, apparently facing the opposite direction. Suddenly the figure turned around to face the door.

Prologue

“Odin Calls,” bellowed a figure standing in the doorway to a dark room. A midsized muscular man, wearing all stealth colored clothes and bandanna with an emblem on them, standing next to the android combat simulator, turned from the device and looked at the figure.

“It’s about time, I was getting bored with just training,” he said, excitedly. A burly man, with dark brown hair, wearing the same clothes without the bandanna, looked up from the book he was reading.

“Maybe you should try reading, Loki,” he remarked.

Loki looked at him and responded, “Hurts my brain, but you could really do with some brushing up of those hand to hand skills, right Freya?” An average height woman, with shoulder length black hair, looked up from the disassembled firearm on the small table in front of her and turned her head towards Loki.

“Keep me out of this Loki,” snapped Freya.

“As you wish, what about you Bragi?” asked Loki grinning from Freya’s apparent discomfort.

“Worry about your own skills, Loki, Tyr could take you while he’s reading that book,” responded a tall man, with bright blond hair, leaning casually against one of the pillars by the wall.

The figure in the doorway stepped forward and bellowed once again, “Enough Loki, Odin awaits.” The four immediately responded by making their way towards the doorway.

The dark room was basked in the glow of a large screen with the same emblem as on the clothes, displayed. Five large cubes sat at equal distances from each other, each with a name of a Norse god displayed on the top surface. The emblem is replaced by the silhouette of a man. “Your next mission is tomorrow,” boomed the speakers. “Your flights to Atlantis have already been arranged; I should not have to remind you how critical it is that you know your duties, now study up.” The silhouette was replaced by the emblem once again.

The five began to walk to their respective cubes. Loki was the first to arrive at his and placed his hand on the cube. The edges of the top of the cube began to glow a light blue color, the blue then started to fade across the top square crossing under Loki’s hand and continued to the other sides. Loki removed his hand to see the light blue glow fade away and a message appear in the center of the screen reading, ‘Loki Confirmed, Awaiting 4 Confirmations.’ Loki looked around to see that the others had not yet reached their cubes. “Come on guys, I want to get this over with,” exclaimed Loki impatiently.

“I wouldn’t be so excited about this mission if I were you Loki,” remarked Tyr.

“And why would that be Tyr?”

“Well for one the word study was used,” retorted Bragi.

“While true Bragi that is not what I meant. He mentioned Atlantis that means that the probability that the task involves complex technology is high and judging by what we have had to acquire in the past few months, this will be a very complicated mission, meaning there is going to a lot to learn in one night.”

“Then we should start learning our tasks and objectives,” announced Thor.

“If you boys could keep quiet and place your hands on your cubes we could probably be done by now. I have preparations to make before we depart for Atlantis.”

Thor, Tyr and Bragi placed their hands on their cubes. The same process that appeared on Loki’s cube worked its way through the remaining three cubes. Loki looked at the top of his cube as the ‘Loki Confirmed, Awaiting 3 Confirmations’ was replaced by a set of documents, images and schematics.

“Interesting, I thought it might be something in the university. This technology is amazing, but I still don’t see how it fits in with everything else,” said Try slightly puzzled.

“It isn’t our task to question Tyr, we are here to perform a job, nothing more nothing less,” snapped Thor.

“I apologize for thinking out loud Thor.”

“Fwew! All I have to do is stand guard,” exclaimed Loki gleefully.

“You got lucky Loki, I have to help disconnect the damn thing,” announced Bragi discontentedly. Freya looked up from her cube and then began to walk towards the door.

“Freya, are you sure you know what you need to, to complete your task?” questioned Thor.

“My task is not all that difficult to remember.”

“Lucky you Freya, I have like 15 pages to get through, this is going to take me all night,” said Loki.

“This is why you should read more Loki,” responded Tyr with a grin on his face.

“Maybe your right Tyr, how much do you have to go through anyway?”

“It seems like Odin has put me in charge of the technical aspect, I would say there are about 50 pages here.” Tyr moved his index finger over the image of something that looked like a dentist’s chair. Pressing this image with his finger he stepped back. The top corners of the cube popped out slightly and faced an invisible point above the center of the cube. A three dimensional image of the facility was displayed above the surface of the cube.

Loki seemingly not fazed by this in the slightest turned to Tyr and said, “Am I glad I’m not you, anyway,” he turned back towards Freya and with a cheerful wave exclaimed, “Later Freya!”