The United Planets of Earth had recalled the Enigma and her captain back to the skies over Earth. They needed a face to face with both the man who had carried out the strike against the terrorists from STR1-FE and the man who had ultimately let the survivors escape back into the the Frontier.

Cade had been stationed on the Enigma for the last nineteen months, and had seen Captain Shard command it through several situations that ended uglier than the encounter with the terrorists from STR1-FE at Archer’s Agony. The only reason Cade suspected this one was different was because this event was regarded as a failure. The fact was Captain Shard should have been able to keep things from going as far and becoming as violent as they did. Now no matter the cover ups and propaganda that was published, something of the story would reach the people of the Frontier, and that story had the Enigma firing on a group of unarmed civilian ships lead by a Service-Corp extremist.

Still Cade doubted Shard was in any real danger. The U.P.E. navel structure needed, and actively rewarded, men like Shard and after a few levels of functionaries had had their hands on the report, Cade was sure it would say exactly what they needed it too in order to slap Shard on the wrist and send him back out into the Frontier.

Cade was another story, he had been ordered to report to Lambda Headquarters as soon as he had arrived in orbit. The only information he had about his current status was “Under Consideration.” He had been ordered to stay in San Francisco and not to attempt to contact anyone in the government or the navy, but beyond that, he had been given complete freedom.

As he walked through the small hangar, where his personal Dagger Class fighter was kept, it was those orders that were wearing on his mind. He quickly ran through the flight prechecks in his neural link, as he walked alongside the long angular craft. It was no wonder these small, one manned, fighters had been dubbed, “Daggers”. They were sleek and sharp with two wings that protruded out from either side and swooped forward in a slicing like motion. Every aspect of U.P.E ship design followed the same philosophies as their commanding ranks; fast, efficient and lethal.

...

Cade looked down over the city of San Francisco from the seat of his Dagger. Normally he would be happy to see his home again, its towering buildings that extended far above the clouds, its sprawling land mass that reached out to beyond the edge of the old bay, its monolithic seismic stabilizers that had made it all possible. But today Cade saw no beauty in this city that, despite not having lived in for years, he still considered home. His return was not after a mission well done; this was no joyous homecoming. Instead, it was a forced return where the best he could hope for was a reprimand for his actions aboard the Enigma.

His supervisors were not pleased. He had submitted the report of the events that had transpired during the Deviant Rising incident. They had felt, at best, Cade had overstepped his authority in forging the release orders. Nothing he had said could convince them that nothing more could be gained from their detention and that Shard had lost sight of the bigger picture. They had asked why he hadn’t had the prisoners executed if there was nothing more to be gained from them. Cade argued the loss of life was too high a price and that a better move would be to have them released and then to publish propaganda to discredit their stories. They had commended him on his concern for human life, a hollow commendation from an organization that had thought killing the Rising’s crew was a better option.

They ordered Cade to return to Earth for debriefing and evaluation. So that is what Cade did. He landed his Dagger at a small public pad about a mile away from his destination, if you didn’t count vertical distance. He took an elevator to one of the lower streets; this level was the original street level of San Francisco.

As Cade walked down the streets bathed in a perpetual twilight, he thought to himself that the age of the properties was probably little comfort to the poverty-stricken people who lived here. The further down you went, the cheaper the property became, and, as a result, the more desperate the people. Despite everything, Cade liked it down here. He felt things were more honest. Down here, if someone stabbed you in the back, they didn’t smile in your face while doing it.

As Cade walked through the gloomy Under City, it began to rain. Cold water poured from the lips of upper streets. It made everyone head indoors. Not that it was really all that much better for most of them. By the time Cade found his way to the stately church, the streets were deserted.

Cade pushed his way through the double doors of Grace Cathedral., he instantly felt the warmth that his situation seemed to be conspiring to deny him as the thick, earthly, smell of sage washed over him. The main chapel was filled with people. Cade took a place at the back row as his eyes were drawn up to the few remaining stained-glass windows that lined the chapel. Most had been broken over the years, but a few had survived. Cade quickly found his favorite. It depicted a man with shaggy white hair and piercingly intelligent eyes. As Cade stared, he could almost believe Albert Einstein was staring back at him from the window, his famous equation etched into the glass beneath him.

Grace Cathedral was home to the Magdalenes not out of reverence for anything in Christianity, but to remind people of the importance of historical preservation. The sect gathered histories and preserved them for future generations. In a giant server bank in the old Chapel of the Nativity, it was said humanity’s history for the last three hundred years was stored. Cade was sure that was somewhat less than true.

He was only half-listening to the familiar middle-aged woman preaching from the pulpit, instead letting her words wash over him as he scanned the rows of pews, watching faces and trying to see the people those faces hid, “...you are all singular unique beings, but those in power act to hide the truth, they create a world where your potential is suppressed. Your capacity for action hindered... hindered because they fear you… They fear what you could do. They create a world where you are nothing more than small pieces that do as they will, because the alternative is a world where everyone has the ability to change that world. We look back at the past, we look up at the stars, and we look forward into the future as we’ve done for centuries. But it is not in these places that we find our celestial gift. The truth reveals itself when you look within yourself and find an emotionally compelling vision and purpose for your spirit. Something that invigorates you with the spark to feel alive inside and that you have a burning desire to become or accomplish.”

“The average and mediocre man has spent his life majoring in minor things. He’ll never reach his purpose because he has allowed his fears to paralyze him. He has allowed the world to tell him he is powerless to change his life let alone the world. He has been taught to be a victim of his circumstances. Since he cannot believe he can achieve what he wants, this lonely, dimly lit man will never take strides toward what he really wants. This is why some people flourish and some people are simply trying to survive. When a man has only been trying to survive and has not taken direct and decisive direction to thrive, inevitably he’ll lose hope and the promise of a great life. The beauty of his dreams will slip away back to the noise of the universe in which it came.”

“Nurture what it is inside you as much, if not more than, you tend to those outside pursuits. Take the time to plant the seeds you need to grow a healthy crop of self enlightenment. Take the time to make yourself large in your own estimation, and so will you in the estimation of the world.”

“Large people don’t only exist at the top of society, they aren’t only the rich and powerful, in fact some of those people are very small people. A large person is someone who takes every opportunity, who takes them and makes the most of them, a large person might start out begging for food, and finish their lives serving it to others. The point is that the large person acted, and they acted because they took the time to grow themselves to a place where they could. I see large people all around me, I see it every time someone tries to make their lives better, every time someone takes the time to consider the why of a thing instead of simply accepting what is.”

“So friends... look into yourselves and throw off the lies you’ve been told your entire lives and take charge. Take charge of yourselves to change the world around you. Every one of you has this power; the power to grow yourselves into something large and into something that can reach out into the world around you and make a change.”

“How very bad it would be for those in power if everyone knew they were just as capable of changing the world… How very disruptive would it be for people to know that we, as human beings, every one of us, have absolutely amazing powers.”

“As we find ourselves exploring a vast and awesome universe, probing the boundaries between thought, energy, and matter as we travel faster than light to distant star systems, colonizing the heavens themselves, one universal truth is made self-evident, There is no wonder out there that can compare to what’s inside all of you. Don’t let that go to waste. Don’t let them cram you into the little box they’ve made for you.”

The priestess was wrapping up her sermon and Cade tried to keep a low profile as he wondered how many of the churchgoers would be capable of understanding what she was saying. Cade understood it all too well he told himself, examining his bionic arm. He had seized the opportunities life had offered him, and there was little doubt that he had made changes in the world, but at what cost?

His attention was brought back to the priestess as she wished everyone a safe journey home. Everyone began to file out. Cade looked at her, meeting her eyes for a moment. She was in her early forties and still possessing a beauty that age hadn’t diminished. When everyone was gone, she came and sat beside him. “Welcome back. How did bringing the light of civilization to those who don’t want it go?”

Her tone was harsh, but something in her eyes smiled, and Cade knew she was glad to see him. Something in that smile stirred something deep in Cade. Something he could barely register, but it warmed him. Cade tried not to meet her eyes. Instead, he fixed them on the large steel cross at the front of the church. It was covered in wires, running down from it, which connected to little stations on the backs of the pews. “Not so good.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she said. “We’ve been hearing rumors. Nothing reliable of course, but still information finds its way to us sooner or later.”

“Should you be telling me that?” Cade asked.

“Cade… if you were going to turn us in to Lambda, you would have done it a long time ago. I know I can tell you things and not fear that cybernetic soldiers will come knocking on the door.”

“They wouldn’t knock, Tarja.”

“That’s a relief. I was afraid they might come when no one was here to let them in.”

Cade smiled. Tarja had always had a playful way of dealing with him.

“So long as we are on the subject of the Lambdas, there is something I wanted to talk about with you.”

The briefly lived smile dropped from Cade’s face almost as quickly as it had appeared. It wasn’t common for Tarja to want to talk about Cade’s work, and when she did, things had a habit of getting complicated. Right now, things were more complicated than he was happy with, but he knew whatever it was, it was bound to be important.

“Come with me. I need to show you something,” she said.

She led him to a vaulted doorway in the back of the church, down a long flight of stone stairs. She lead him to an ice-cold room lined with servers, with a giant holographic screen in the middle. The giant storage banks humming away along the walls did nothing to diminish the grandiosity. Painted over the entirety of the walls was a depiction of a Middle-Eastern family in some sort of barn surrounded by onlookers.

“That’s new. What is it?” Cade inquired.

“Oh, some of my students reproduced the mural behind that bank of servers. They felt it would bring something to the room. And I suppose it is history of a sort.”

Tarja went over to the server bank and ran her hands over the painted stars depicted there. “So simple. No more than points of light. It makes you wonder how such a thing could inspire generations of men and women to achieve so much. I wonder, had we had the vivid skies over Solace or Strife, would we have reached them sooner?” It was true that space in the Frontier was more vivid and colorful than around Earth. She took a moment to shake herself from her contemplations. “But that’s not what I brought you here to see.”

With that, she headed for the main screen surrounded by machines. Cade knew it was at least one hundred years old. “So you know ever since the Helix went up, we’ve been anonymously uploading parts of our archives to it, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, with the last batch, my students noticed something interesting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A few weeks ago, they found some old books in what we think to have been a children’s school not too far from the cathedral. One of the books was about the ‘American Revolution.’”

“The American Revolution? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Neither had we. We looked through everything we have and nothing… Nothing at all. Not a single reference. But these books must have been six or seven hundred years old. And we don’t have much going back that far.”

“Okay, so you found a new piece of history. There is nothing all that unusual about that.” he said, starting to feel a confused as to what Tarja was trying to tell him.

“That’s not the unusual thing. We archived the books and then put them in a packet for anonymous upload to the Helix, but when we went to check how far it had saturated, we couldn’t find it. Like it had been deleted from the Helix Network.”

“Could it have been a mistake?” he asked.

“That’s what we thought. So we tried uploading just those books and again. Nothing. They just weren’t there. Something was removing them. So we checked our database against our uploads and found many things were just missing. They’d been removed.”

“That shouldn’t be possible. Only a high-ranking Lambda agent could remove something from the Helix once it’s been uploaded.”

“Exactly. So we did a bit of digging around and found something disturbing. All around the Helix, things that should be there aren’t. It’s as if something has been systematically purging information.”

“What kind of information?”

“News and history and technical information, mostly having to do with wars and revolutions.”

“That can’t be right. If Lambda was doing anything like this on the scale you suggest, someone would have noticed by now.”

“Not if they’ve been doing it for centuries.”

Her suggestion caught Cade dead in his tracks; the idea was haunting.

“That’s not possible.” Cade felt he had to defend his organization; flawed as it was, it still served a vital purpose. “Neither Lambda or the Helix Network have been around that long.”

The priestess continued, unfazed, “Then they inherited a mission or goal from a previous group and network. Maybe this goes back to the original interwebs…”

Cade knew she had to be wrong even his organization had limits to its reach. The scale she was talking about was far beyond anything Lambda would be comfortable with. The risk of discovery was too great. No, there had to be some other explanation. Lambda wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t some shadowy organization sweeping things from history. “It’s just not possible, and even if it were, what would Lambda have to gain from something like this? Honestly, this whole thing sounds like the plot to a bad science fiction movie.”

“Cade, you’re a genetically modified and artificially enhanced member of a government agency that doesn’t officially exist. Your life is a bad science fiction movie.” She took a deep breath and sighed. “Can you just look into it? If you’re right and it’s not Lambda, then isn’t it something Lambda needs to know about? Shouldn’t they investigate?”

“I’ll see what I can find. But I don’t expect it to be anything.” Tarja gave him another smile as he turned to walk out. He briefly returned it, and then he was gone, fading into the shadows.

As Cade made his way back to the landing structure and climbed back into his Dagger for the trip to Lambda headquarters, the priestess’s words kept floating around in his head. He would investigate if just to prove she was seeing a conspiracy in one of the only places Lambda didn’t have one. They didn’t purge information; they didn’t need to. They had methods that were either more subtle than that or much more direct. Either way, it didn’t fit.

Cade lifted off the public pad, not bothering to avoid hitting a barely functioning ticket bot that had been floating around his craft all morning. It hadn’t been able to ticket Cade’s fighter for reasons it couldn’t understand, but due to some sort of malfunction, it continued to try over and over again anyway.

Cade piloted his Dagger through the space between the two cities, above and below. The trip to the Lambda HQ was quick, and as Cade maneuvered in for a landing on the roof between two other identical crafts, his mind was brought back to his initial problems. His status loomed heavily in his mind. He still had to report for his final hearing though, and after his little trip to see Tarja, he honestly had nothing else he wanted to do.

Next Chapter: Chapter 24: The Helix And The Pentegram