Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

But if he failed, if he died trying, there would be no second chances for humanity.

He spoke into the microphone taped to his shirt collar. “Jack, are you there?”

There was a momentary pause, and then King’s voice, breathless, sounded in his ear. “I’m here, Danno.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”

“Save it for later, buddy. I heard everything. You gave it your best try.”

“She did something to the Prime, Jack. Turned it against itself. I have to get to her computer to turn it off. You heard what she said. If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”

“Then stop it. Do what needs to be done, Danno.”

“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”

King was silent for few seconds then simply said: “Roger.”

“I’ll keep talking so you know what to do.” Parker took a deep breath. The tingling sensation was getting stronger even though he had yet to take a step. “If I stop talking, you’ll know what it means.”

He lurched forward and instantly the itch became a fire burning on his skin, deepening into his muscles. One step forward, two… Despite his promise to keep communicating, the words were stolen away.

Another step…

He stood over Sasha’s corpse, reached past her… The pain was deep inside him now, but his extremities felt numb and cold. He stretched out his hand, closed his fingers over the hard plastic of the laptop. He couldn’t tell for sure if he was gripping it; his fingers had no sensation whatsoever, but through the haze, he could see the screen moving between his outstretched arms.

With what felt like the last of his strength, he staggered back down the passage, away from the Prime. Each step brought a measure of relief from the pain, but the coldness remained in his extremities.

“Jack, I have the computer.”

He thought he heard his friend say something, “Thank God,” perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure. Something was happening to his hearing, to all his senses.

He peered through the fog now clouding his vision and stared at the computer screen. A sound file was playing from the virtual urghan, playing a single note in an endless loop. Below the graphical representation of the wave, he saw numbers: 7.83.

That’s it, he realized. The frequency of life—7.83 Hz.

“It’s the Schumann Resonance!”

He couldn’t tell if King responded, so he kept talking.

“It’s a constant waveform produced by the friction of the Earth’s surface rotating beneath the ionosphere. You can’t hear it—it’s below the audible range for human hearing, but it’s everywhere, all the time, and has been for billions of years. Some scientists called it the ‘Earth’s heartbeat.’”

Like a beating heart, Sasha had stopped it with something akin to defibrillation. It was a simple matter of wave dynamics; when two oppositely phased waves of the same frequency met, they cancelled each other out completely. It was the same principle used in sound-dampening headphones.

That was what Sasha had done; she had dampened the frequency of life, and plunged the Prime into deathly silence.

He tapped a few keys and shut down the waveform, trying to explain what he was doing to King, and wondering if it would make the difference.

The sudden flare of pain in his muscles told him it hadn’t.

“It’s not working,” he rasped, and then he realized why. Sasha had stopped the beating heart of the Earth. It wasn’t enough to stop the phased wave; he needed to start the heartbeat again.

His fingers fumbled uncertainly on the keyboard, making the adjustments that would play the Schumann Resonance again. A sine wave began oscillating across the screen, but that was the only change.

“It’s not working. I think it needs to be closer to the Prime.” He wasn’t sure if the words were even coming out or if he was just imagining them. “There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker. I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.

Gritting his teeth, he lurched forward, straight into the eye of the storm.





FIFTY-SEVEN


King heard every word.

When the fissure had first opened, separating him from Parker, he had lingered there, wondering if he should try jumping across. Before he could make the attempt, he heard Parker’s voice in his headset, and he knew that whatever else had happened between them, his friend was still trying to do the right thing.