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EDGE Laboratories were appropriately named due to their work on developing cutting edge technologies. It had been a mere coincidence, the naming: Environment Dynamics and Global Elevation. They were a relatively new company that had received prestigious funding from the World Council themselves to aid in the research work that was being undertaken to maintain the planet’s ecology and climate. Most of their projects were top secret, with goods and equipment being transported via the Global Defence Force for extra security, but the general idea of their work was known within the science community.
Despite their altruistic nature, EDGE had not escaped certain controversies, mainly stemming from groups of internet keyboard warriors who believed one search was the equivalent to years of extensive research and study. Most of the issues that were raised were easily debunked or disproven with a simple graph or a research paper published, though, of course, many of those conspiracy theorists never believed them. It was a constant battle between scientists and the disbelievers, but it was never a battle that caused much concern.
Until that October accident.
EDGE hadn’t yet unveiled their latest, life-saving device. There had been rumours of one but nothing had been confirmed. Doctor Lyra Fernsby had been teasing her team’s work for months in the lead up to the announcement, which had only allowed the conspiracy theorists to stoke more fires for EDGE to try and extinguish. Dr. Fernsby and her team had seemed unfazed, however, and had allowed the media to be drip-fed information slowly over the course of the summer.
Nobody had foreseen an outright attack on the laboratories and so no preparation had been made in preventing such an intrusion. Situated on Killegray, an island uninhabited and so assumed to be safe, one of the EDGE labs — where their new technology was being trialled — were ambushed overnight. Security perimeters were breached and the few guards that were stationed in the complex had tried to hold off the intruders with little effect. Molotov cocktails seemed to be the attackers choice of weapon and it wasn’t long before most of EDGE caught fire. The volatile nature of the laboratories, their equipment and resources, meant an evacuation of the small team on site that night was needed ASAP. The GDF and International Rescue had arrived on the scene by dawn-break.
By the time they had arrived, most of the EDGE laboratory had been destroyed. Thankfully, as it was night, most of the scientists that were based in the Killegray laboratories had been on the mainland, waiting for the morning boat ride over to begin their day shift. There had only been a few worked inside the labs when they were attacked, and they had all managed to get to relative safety.
With no people to save, Virgil and Scott turned their attention to the stability of the buildings.
Brains, who had willingly joined Virgil in Thunderbird Two (much to both brothers’ shock) had already begun the calculations in his head the minute Two had landed. Of course, without reliable data from the site itself, his answers were only estimations and, thankfully, it didn’t take much convincing to get Virgil to accompany him into the smouldering devastation.
Suited in appropriate gear to avoid injury or worse, Brains and Virgil — who was now clad in his exo-suit — entered the remains of the labs. Brains found himself being extremely thankful for their masks. The fire exposed the air to whatever EDGE had been working on in this specific section, making the section extremely toxic. His mind posed different theories about what could have caused such poisonous fumes. Some of his conclusions hit the mark more accurately, perhaps, but none of them, Brains deemed, were actually the truth.
Dr. Fernsby had flown over with the GDF and Brains made a mental note to speak to her about EDGE’s work once he and Virgil were finished doing the checks inside the building. There were some questions he had that were purely out of the curiosity of his scientific mind, but there were some that were more pressing.
Namely, what had they been working on that had conspiracy theorists so panicked that they resorted to such a violent outburst. Desperate people, desperate times, desperate measures…
Brains knew better than to believe in conspiracies, but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand the implications of them. If someone was to resort to totally destroying somewhere, and possibly a destroying a few lives along the way, whatever they believed must have been strong enough, and frightening enough, for them to carry out the act. Whatever was in this lab…
“Readings behind here… I can’t get a fix.” Virgil noted, coming to a halt outside of a metal door.
Whilst Brains was searching for toxins in the air, Virgil had been doing an analysis of the building’s structure. Given the incessant beeping from both their devices during their entire trek so far, Brains had theorised that these labs wouldn’t be open for people to use again for a long, long time.
Virgil rapped his knuckles against the door. “Still solid. Very solid.”
The metal looked to have been slightly singed by the fire but had remained remarkably undamaged engulfing inferno that had destroyed the rest of the corridor. Charred walls lined the hallway. A couch that had been positioned a few feet away had been completely burned and was now crumbling into ash. The light fixture on the ceiling had burst and glass had shattered across the blackened flooring.
Yet this door had remained pretty much unscathed.
Whatever metal it had been crafted from hadn’t melted under the intense heat. Titanium, maybe? Molybdenum? Brains laid his palm against it and, despite his heavily gloved, protected hand and despite the heat that should have at least warmed the metal, the door was freezing cold.
“Hey, check it out.” Virgil pressed his own gloved hand over a circular side panel. Like the door, it had remained intact. It even operated as normal. “Open sesame.”
The metal door opened without a hitch. Smoothly, it slid upwards to reveal a chamber that was still pristine and untouched by flame. White floors and white walls were the stark opposite of the outside corridor’s burnt ruins.
Brains offered Virgil a cautious look. He seemed to take note of it, to understand what Brains was saying: Be careful. This is weird. Tread carefully. Virgil offered him a small nod of recognition and then carefully took a step inside.
Their dusty boots left black footprints on the tiling, soot and ash falling from their suits and onto the pristine floor. Bunsen burners lined one work surface, with other scientific equipment being neatly arranged on others. Whatever this chamber was, it seemed to be a working lab, just as the rest of EDGE’s building had been. Somehow, this one had managed to escape the carnage.
The whirling from Virgil’s exo-suit as he walked across the lab was the only sound. It echoed through the chamber eerily. Something told Brains that they shouldn’t be there, but he rarely listened to gut feelings and he wasn’t about to start now.
Virgil reached the far end of the room, halting in front of some computer systems. He began to type into the screens, no doubt trying to ascertain what kind of work was being done in the lab. To have this amount of protection, whatever the project was, it must have been important. Brains wondered whether it was where most of EDGE’s more secretive experiments took place. A sealed laboratory, unable to be breached from the outside.
His theory was only strengthened when he tried to contact Scott, who was still with the ground crew, and received nothing but static in return.
“Something about this room seems… wrong.” Virgil commented, as though reading Brains’s mind. He continued to type away at the terminals with no luck. Sighing, Virgil took a step away and threw his hands up in the air in defeat. “It’s a shame comms are down, else we could ask John to hack this thing.”
“M-Move over. Let me try.”
Brains joined Virgil at the computers and began his own attempt of hacking in.
It was no easy feat, but Brains had always enjoyed a challenge. He might not have been a great hacker like John was, but he could still find his way around code easy enough. Within a few seconds, he had broken their firewall. Another minute and he was able to pull up the latest schematics to whatever work the lab technicians had been overseeing in the chamber.
Virgil’s eyes squinted, not from an ability to see but from a lack of understanding. Brains, much to his annoyance, found himself in the same boat.
“What… is that?” Virgil asked out-loud, not caring for being overheard due to their belief in the laboratories being empty of life. “Is that some sort of… drone, maybe? A transport machine?”
Brains flicked through more of the files, skipping over reports and landing on a blueprint that gave the two engineers a better idea of what they were looking at.
The structure was something Brains had never seen before, a remarkable feat of engineering. Over five foot high, with a domed top and a gradually protruding body. Blueprints showed capabilities for the machine to be used for transport, as Virgil had suggested, but there was more. Brains zoomed into the hologrammatic blueprint, eyes scouring each and every detail. He couldn’t ascertain what each element was meant to do; blue orbs on the base skirt seemed more decorative than anything else, but when were scientists so keen on the aesthetics of prototypes? What appeared to be an eyestalk stuck out from the dome, with two more extensions lower down toward the middle of the prototype's… body. It felt wrong using human terms to describe a machine.
“O-Oh, my.”
“What is it, Brains?”
There was something fundamentally wrong with the machine. Brains hadn’t noticed it at first. Then again, he couldn’t exactly blame himself for it. It wasn’t everyday one came across such a variety of unknown materials. Alien materials.
Brains changed the screen back to the reports, scanning the data that was offered. Virgil, as patient as always, waited for him to assess whatever it was he needed to. Brains found himself glad he was with him rather than Scott. Repeats of the question, growing more and more irate as Scott became impatient, would have been infuriating. With Virgil, he had time to properly evaluate the work in front of him and—
His face dropped.
It was an impossibility.
Virgil had detected his shoulder slump, the way his mouth hung agape. “Brains?”
“T-the composite of the door… The w-walls… It’s not of—”
Brains broke off and began jogging over to the structure neither of them had really taken notice of when they’d first entered.
It could only have been described as an incredibly large capsule and had them both dwarfed. Brains estimated the height of it easily reaching just over eight foot and, if he had to guess, Brains would have hypothesised it being made of the same material as whatever the rest of the room had been made from. A hand to the hull told him it felt the same.
It also informed him of the capsule humming. He staggered back a step.
“M-Metal c-cannot be alive.”
Virgil crossed the room to stand at Brains’s side. Where there had once been confusion on his face, now there was pure concern. “What do you mean?”
Brains didn’t offer a response, his entire focus solely on the problem in front of them. Because it was a problem. Just what had EDGE Laboratories been experimenting with down here? The question should have been enough to stop Brains from wandering over to the entrance hatch, but it didn’t. Curiosity got the better of him.
Like the door outside, the panel worked and opened the first door to the capsule.
“Brains?” Virgil’s whisper was still laced with concern. When he wasn’t answered, he tried more sternly. “Brains!”
Brains was far too curious to listen. He ignored the warning tone in Virgil’s voice and stepped into the capsule.
The door led to an antechamber, with two more of those metal doors: one to his left and one to his right. With no appearance of an opening panel, the left-hand side didn’t seem to have a way to open it. That saved him the trouble of choosing. Brains strolled over to the right.
Behind him, still in the laboratory, Virgil still stood, clearly torn over whether he should follow him or not. “Brains? We should get out of here.”
“In a m-minute, Virgil.”
Like the previous two doors before, the metal wooshed and slid open. The humming seemed louder from inside this room, though still faint and subtle, and whilst he was growing increasingly curious, Brains didn’t dare step over this threshold. There was something about this room that had his skin crawling. For once in his life, Brains decided to listen to that gut feeling.
The room beyond the threshold was dark, but enough light filtered through from the laboratory behind him so Brains could make out shadows. One shadow, to be more precise. The shadow of a now-familiar shape.
From the doorway, he could make out key parts of the structure and he could tell that the prototype was yet to be finished, if the blueprints were anything to go by. Holes in the bodywork of the Transport Machine (as Brains had so eloquently named it for now, for his own benefit) suggested that it was only partly built and was still awaiting completion.
“Brains!” Virgil snapped in his ear.
He hadn’t realised Virgil had joined him. So wrapped up in the thoughts and theories running around his mind, Brains jumped out of his skin.
Virgil, in a tone that was full of guilt, returned to his whispers. “Sorry, but we really should be— Is that…?” He trailed off, evidently having only just noticed the structure standing in the dark. Unlike Brains, Virgil ignored any primal fears and walked straight into the room.
“B-Be careful. We don’t want to set off a-any a-alarms.”
“It’s incredible!” Virgil marvelled the machine, his exo-suit still making that clunking sound with each step. It whirred as he lifted an arm to trace his finger from the domed head down to the midsection. He gestured to the two holes. “Brains, look. It doesn’t look finished.”
Virgil remained mesmerised by the machine for a few more seconds, broken only by the shock of what happened next.
The end of the eyestalk began to light up, and the machine began to move.
Brains could feel his stomach churn with fear. Virgil jumped away from the prototype and without a glance back, began to usher Brains from the room.
They left the capsule, Virgil closing the doors behind him with another press of the panels.
“W-We should—”
Brains was cut off by clicking of guns.
In front of them Dr. Fernsby stood with two armed guards at her side, their weapons trained on them.
“You saw it.” It was more of a statement than a question. Fernsby ignored Virgil’s glare.
“What the hell is that thing? The whole place felt…”
“Alive?” She offered, her smile twisting into a sly grin. Her eyes roamed over the two in front of her, as though she were sizing them up, before gesturing to the guards to advance.
“Take them to join the other one. Make sure they’re not seen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As the guards drew closer, Brains realised that they weren’t GDF guards. The insignia on their uniforms was wrong. Since when did EDGE have their own private army?
Virgil was unceremoniously stripped of his exo-suit. Clearly he thought it better to co-operate than resist, what with the barrel of a gun pointing at his head.
The suit was thrown into a corner. Brains flinched at the sound of parts breaking.
“You’ll have to pay for that.” Virgil quipped, earning him a clobber around his head. It was a hard enough hit to daze him and one of the guards found himself dragging a limp Virgil from the room.
Brains felt the barrel of the second guard’s gun dig into his back.
“Move!” The almost robotic-sounding guard ordered.
He was in no means a fighter and so didn’t give following the order a second thought. With the threat still very evidently behind him, Brains followed the first guard out.
He just hoped that Scott would realise something was wrong in time before things escalated any further.