Captured (The Prometheus Project Book 2) (2 page)

What had happened to the team? What had happened to the entrance? And how long would it be before the same thing happened to them?

Before their adventure was over, they were able to find the answers to all of these questions—and more. They discovered a zoo building that allowed them to visit other planets instantly. They forged a friendship with a telepathic computer called the Teacher. They learned who had built the city and why. Finally, they figured out exactly what had happened to their parents and the others and were able to save their mother’s life.

Just another boring day in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Harris was impressed. Very impressed. They had made enormous contributions to the team. Their courage and capabilities were truly remarkable. After all they had done, Dr. Harris changed his mind and agreed to let
them become members of the team. They had certainly earned it.

Their discovery of the alien city and these adventures are all chronicled in the book,
The Prometheus Project: Trapped
. The Resnick kids were certain that nothing they would ever do the rest of their lives could possibly be more exciting, or more important.

They were wrong.

Six months had now passed since the events in
The Prometheus Project: Trapped
. During this time, when Ryan and Regan weren’t attending school, they spent almost every waking minute in the alien city, helping the scientists explore the most important discovery in the history of the world. Life could not have been more exciting. And so far, they had not encountered any further dangers.

But this was about to change.

They had no way of knowing it, but they were about to embark on yet another adventure—one even more demanding and more dangerous than their first.

And this time, there would be more—far more—than just their lives, and the lives of the Prometheus team, hanging in the balance.

C
HAPTER
1
A W
arning

“Y
essss!” said Ryan Resnick happily, pumping his fist in the air.
Finally
. The three o’clock bell had rung. The
Friday
bell. The weekend had officially arrived.

Ryan bolted out of the classroom, down the stairs, and outside to his bike securely padlocked to one of the school’s many bike-racks. He was so eager to take off he thought he might actually jump out of his skin. But after three full minutes there was still no sign of his sister Regan, two years younger than him.

“Regan,”
he thought as hard as he could, straining to broadcast the thought as forcefully as possible.
“Where are you?”

“Sorry,”
came the telepathic response.
“Held up by a teacher. Be right there.”

A few seconds later Regan shot through the door.
She had strawberry blond hair, a freckled face, and green eyes that always seemed to sparkle.

“Let’s get going,” said Ryan impatiently as he saw her and then, realizing this wasn’t a very friendly greeting, added, “how was school?”

Regan quickly worked a combination lock and removed it from her bike. “Great,” she replied as she stuffed the lock in a pouch attached to her handlebars. “Fantastic even.” She paused, raised her eyebrows, and added, “Then again, when you’ve explored Prometheus, it’s hard to get excited about school.”

Ryan nodded as he and his sister jumped on their bikes and took off.

Their school really was terrific. No money had been spared on the facility, the teachers were excellent, and the students were eager to learn; many of them children of accomplished scientists. In the few months the new school had been open they had both made numerous friends. But nothing could
possibly
compare to Prometheus. Nothing on Earth, at any rate. One day they hadn’t known about the astonishing alien city and the next it had become, by far, the most important part of their lives.

Not only had their first visit to the alien city forever changed the course of their lives, it had changed
them
—given them new abilities. This was almost certainly due to their interactions with the city’s unbelievably advanced, telepathic central computer. Because they had first activated it inside an alien classroom it had introduced itself
simply as the Teacher. The Teacher was wonderful and they had rapidly developed a very special relationship with it.

During their first telepathic conversation with the Teacher they had developed splitting headaches and it was forced to end the conversation in mid-sentence. The Teacher had realized that the telepathic frequency it was using was not compatible with their minds, and if it did not end the conversation it was in danger of damaging their brains. Later it was able to find a way to communicate with them telepathically without causing any damage, and even to temporarily speed up their brains so that it could have a lengthy conversation with them in less than a second. In this super-accelerated mode, their brains were working so quickly that even a speeding car would have appeared to them to be completely frozen in place, like a statue. In some way, something the Teacher had done during these interactions had subtly changed the structure of their minds.

Now, even though the Teacher wasn’t really alive, they could always sense what they thought of as its
life-force
, a faint but comforting mental glow that told them it was still out there, still going about its business. And most astonishing of all, they had found that they were now telepathic! Well, at least with each other. And while it still required more effort to communicate telepathically than out loud, their skills continued to improve. Perhaps someday they would develop into full telepaths.

Their telepathy, and their adventures together, had brought them closer together than they ever would have believed. Since they had discovered Prometheus, working together and getting along had very quickly become as much a habit for them as arguing and teasing each other had been before.

They had been riding in the direction of the alien city for several minutes when Regan broke the silence. “So how was your day?” she asked.

“Great,” said her brother. He had short, light brown hair, green eyes and a smile that made people feel comfortable around him. “We had a really cool discussion about pain in Mrs. Rosen’s science class.”

“Pain?” said Regan, confused. “What do you mean? Like how to cause it?”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Sure Regan. She was teaching us how to torture people.”

Regan smiled, feeling a bit foolish. “Okay, maybe not how to cause it. How about how to get rid of it?”

“Nope.” Ryan shook his head.

“Okay, I give up. What did you talk about?”

“Believe it or not, why it’s important?”

“Why it’s important?” she repeated in disbelief.

“You know. Why it exists in the first place.”

“That’s an easy one,” said Regan confidently. “To make people miserable.”

“So you think it would be better if there was no such thing as pain?”

She nodded. “It’d be great.”

“I thought the same thing,” admitted Ryan. “But think about this: what if you couldn’t feel any pain and you put your hand on a hot burner without realizing it?”

After thinking about this for a few seconds, Regan could see where her brother was headed and her green eyes sparkled in delight. If you could feel pain, no distraction in the world could prevent you from instantly snatching your hand away from the burner. But if you couldn’t, you might just leave it there, with horrible consequences.

“Cool,” she said. “It’s a warning system.”

“Yeah. It’s obvious when you think about it,” said Ryan. “But I never did before. Pain lets you know when you’re doing something harmful to yourself and also if you’re damaged inside—in a way that’s impossible to ignore. Suppose you were a quarterback and you fractured your throwing arm. Without pain you’d never know it. You’d keep throwing, which would just make the injury worse. But if you
could
feel pain, you’d be screaming and checking yourself into a hospital for an X-ray.”

“I thought quarterbacks were supposed to be tough,” said Regan, grinning. “Do they really scream when they fracture their arms?”

Ryan laughed. “That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’ve never actually been close enough to a quarterback who was fracturing his arm to tell.”

“We may never know,” quipped Regan. “It probably
isn’t easy finding a quarterback willing to do that experiment.”

Ryan smiled.

“Okay,” continued Regan on a more serious note. “But once pain warns you that you’re hurt, it sure would be nice if you could just turn it off.”

“We talked about that, too,” said Ryan. “It turns out—”

A thunderous burst of telepathy exploded into their minds!

Ryan instantly forgot what he was saying and he and his sister barely managed to keep their bikes from crashing.

“WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. WARNING. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. WARNING. UNAUTHOR—”

Just like that, the immensely powerful telepathic message stopped, as abruptly as it had begun.

And at the same time, the faint glow in their minds that represented the reassuring presence of the Teacher, the city’s extraordinary computer, vanished, leaving nothing but a cold, unsettling emptiness in its place.

C
HAPTER
2
A Possible Intruder

R
egan stopped her bike abruptly and realized that Ryan had done the same.

“What just happened?” she said worriedly.

Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad. Can you still feel the Teacher?”

“No.”

“I can’t either. Do you think it’s dead?”

Regan considered. It wasn’t clear if it was ever alive, but she knew what he meant. “Maybe. But I doubt it. It’s just too advanced for that. Maybe it needed to leave the city for a while. Maybe it doesn’t want us to be aware of it anymore for some reason. It’s hard to say.”

Ryan nodded unhappily. “What do you make of the ‘Unauthorized Entry’ warning?”

Regan shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure
it came from the city. And whoever sent it really wanted to make sure a telepath would get it. I didn’t know telepathy could be so loud.”

“Me neither,” he said, wincing. “I wonder what caused it. Did someone from the Prometheus team go somewhere they weren’t supposed to? Enter a structure they weren’t supposed to?”

Regan thought about this. When they were in contact with the Teacher, it had told them the city was built by a race called the Qwervy. The Qwervy had dropped off a single tiny robot—a nano-robot—on Earth, and the nano-robot was programmed to make other nano-robots, and so on, until there were trillions of them: enough to build an enormous, elaborate underground city. Once the city was built, the nano-robots, or
nanobots
for short, served as the repair crew. Although harmless, they looked like a swarm of voracious insects as they went about rebuilding anything that needed repair.

The Qwervy used the city as a secret observation post. Using one of the many portals that connected the city to other worlds, they would check in on humanity every hundred years or so, trying to determine when humanity was mature enough to join the galactic community of advanced civilizations. Once Earth became a member, visitors could come at any time. Until then, however, only authorized Qwervy and a small number of others were permitted to come to Earth.

But the Qwervy’s secret observation post was no longer secret. Humans had managed to find the city and break into it, something they shouldn’t have been able to do for a long, long time and something that had surprised even the Qwervy. Their father, Ben Resnick, in fact, had been the man who had calculated how to break through the city’s force-field barrier.

The Qwervy thought humanity was a promising species but also had a dark and dangerous side it needed to master. They had decided to let the trespassers remain in the city to see if the humans could learn from the city’s technology rather than destroy themselves with it.

“I don’t think anyone on the team caused it,” said Regan finally. “The Teacher gave us full permission to explore the city. If there was something inside that was totally off-limits, it would’ve told us. Besides,” she added, “it can use technology we can only dream of. If someone from the Prometheus team wanted to go somewhere the Teacher didn’t want them to go, it could easily stop them.”

“So what’s going on? If the warning wasn’t caused by anything the Prometheus team did, then it had to be caused by someone, or some … thing,” he said worriedly, “entering the city through a portal.”

“Maybe,” said Regan, unconvinced. “But maybe not. Exactly when did the Teacher disappear, before or after the warning?”

Ryan stared off into space, a confused look on his face. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “The warning was so loud in my brain that I wasn’t paying attention to whether the Teacher was still there or not. After it ended, I realized the Teacher was gone, but it might have gone just
before
the warning rather than just after. I don’t know.”

Regan thought about it for a few seconds and then shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not sure either,” she admitted. “But I can’t believe anything unauthorized could make it through a portal with the Teacher still here. Maybe the Teacher decided to leave, or had to repair itself for some reason, or change its programming, or … something … and this caused a false alarm.”

“Then why did the warning just suddenly stop like it did?”

Regan shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe whatever caused the false alarm fixed itself. Maybe, with the Teacher gone, a blade of grass from an alien planet blew through a portal before the automatic portal security system could take over.”

Ryan considered. She could be right. It could just be a false alarm. The fire alarm had sounded at school several times over the years, and so far it had always been due to either a false alarm or a fire drill.