The Second Sphere
Chapter 9

There were five years separating me from the end of my career. In the grand scheme of things, it was a short amount of time. But in this pressure cooker of a life, amidst the never-ending threats and the need to produce results, five years seemed like a long time.

I left the cramped office and walked down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, fondling the drive in my pocket. I pushed the door, feeling a lust and in need of a bit of privacy. A man on the way out shot me impish eyes, but didn’t say anything. I lumbered to the sink, put my hand on the cold, hard, white surface, and bent over. The water started to run. I reached down, gathered some in my hand, and splashed it on my face.

I felt the stillness of my surroundings, went into one of the stalls, and locked it. The drive appeared in my hand, and I let a dose go before I heard the door to the bathroom open again. Feet shuffled across the floor and the door to a stall creaked open. The door locked, then I heard the swoosh of a zipper and pants dropping to the floor. An explosion, then a splash soon followed.

I leaned back against the wall as the colors began to pop and my mind began to run. I saw the present far in the distance, at the end of a long dark corridor, just as the past swallowed me in one gulp.

Earth.

Being away made it seem like a magical place, a world of infinite possibilities. Maybe I put too much pressure on the idea of home. Whether that was the case or not, I couldn’t believe that being on earth was worse than what I felt for the last fifty years of life on the moon, encumbered by the limits placed on my movement.

I couldn’t think about my future as retirement so much as a transition. Because in reality, retirement was impossible. This never-ending life required work until I chose not to renew my transfer or some unforeseeable event extinguished humanity. My pension would give me a year or two to get back on my feet and find myself a new vocation. So the threat by Quincy Laslow to take away my hard-earned retirement fund made my palms sweat.

I’d been in the intelligence business for a few centuries, and that was long enough. There were other adventures out there, or at least I hoped there were. I often imagined myself doing something completely different, like, say, working behind the counter of a store. I imagined the leisurely talks with smiling, happy customers, and going home at five o’clock to sit on my balcony with a cold drink and watch the sky as night descended on the earth. My imagination didn’t provide many details. For instance, I didn’t know what I wanted to sell, didn’t think about doing the books, or ordering merchandise. I just knew that I longed for some kind of normalcy. The game we played with the Green Revolution had worn me out. I needed a fresh start.

I didn’t care where I lived. There were no countries to choose from. Just being on terra firma mattered. No more separation from the things that mattered most to me, no more need to rely on an artificial nature at the Source for hope. I thought about the simple things that I wanted when I got back to earth, rays of sunshine on my face, a long stroll on a hot summer evening, to see my daughter and grandson in the flesh. I desired all of those things more than I could say, and certainly not in that order.

I remember what it was like before we had Three Spheres. There was a romantic notion about space exploration. Words like destiny and honor were tossed around as though God wanted us to rule the universe. The longer I lived, the less I believed that any higher being wanted our reign to stretch beyond earth.

I was a country boy, from a town with a dying coalmine and people struck with horrific lung diseases. It was a hard life; a poor life. And it made me want to escape, to explore places that I, as of yet, didn’t know, to free myself from the burden of what would have certainly been a life in the mines. That’s why I enlisted in the army after high school; to see the world, maybe do some good, to get away from the constraints that my birth placed on me. The military introduced me to potential. The training instilled discipline as a tool to create a better life. There was honor in it, certainly, but for many of us, it was also about the hope of a different outcome than the previous generation.

When the China attacks happened, everything changed. It wasn’t just Los Angeles and Boston that bore the scars. My life in the army suddenly went from discussions about managing conflict, and regular training, to constant physical threats in the span of one month.

The mountains of China were about as close to hell as I’d ever experienced. It was a barren landscape inhabited by people whom we didn’t understand. As much as we wanted everyone to believe what we believed, to coerce them into peaceful capitalism, we were confronted with the truth that a complex world couldn’t be ruled by simple notions of right and wrong. We never seemed to learn our lessons. After a few tours, I needed to get out. As soon as I could, I left the military to go back to school and get some books in my head. I needed to understand where I’d been and where I wanted to go.

In the halls of higher education, I discovered that, despite finding my days in China terrifying, I’d become something of an adrenalin junkie. It would never be enough to sit at a desk and write memos. Sure, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but, equally important, I needed a rush. At the first recruitment fair I attended during my senior year, I went straight to the Central Intelligence Agency table.

My first years working for the Company, I spent the majority of my time back in hell. I could only guess how much we chased our collective tail, how far we actually were from winning that war. We were still clueless, in over our heads in a culture that we didn’t understand, fighting a war without realistic plans. But I wasn’t a decision-maker at the time, merely a pawn placed at the whim of those above me.

When I got a break after those few years of being abroad and headed home, I felt like I had chosen the wrong path, that if I had to spend another moment being an ignorant handler’s plaything, I would go insane. I thought about giving up on the intelligence field altogether, maybe go back to get a PhD, use my brain and experience to help change the theories behind the way the world ran. But I felt a deep conflict. I still needed that rush.

A colleague of mine at the Company suggested I check out Laslow.

The Laslow Corporation got into the intelligence field after decades of defense contracting. Ed Laslow was big into chemical and biological weapons in the ’80s and a regular thorn in the side of human rights organizations throughout the world because his products were the leading cause of death among civilian populations in conflict zones.

But he was also a master of Research and Development, the creator of a company pushing the fields of robotics and biological exploration into new and previously unknown territory. He seemed to know the next big thing before anyone else. When the War on China was born, Laslow flipped his political connections into a nice piece of U.S. government pie in the more legitimate intelligence field, eventually becoming the leading contractor with the government.

There was something sexy about the intelligence wing of the Laslow Corporation. Maybe it was the headlines they made. Maybe it was the connections they had throughout the world that hadn’t been tainted by the stink of U.S. government ineptitude. All I knew was that I wanted in. I sent in my resume and waited.

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