The Expansion Project

By Brian McMickle

What if? The question has both inspired and plagued mankind since their existence. Who hasn’t looked up to the stars wondering what is actually out there? What if you could find out? What if the answer found you?

What if you woke up one morning on another planet, with little to no memory of how you arrived? What would you do? This is the quandary that former CIA operative James Singer finds himself in. Though his new caretakers appear to be a friendly race, the pending invasion sitting just outside the atmosphere forces him to wonder what kind of mess he has been thrown into this time.

As James begins to regain the missing pieces of his memory, he finds himself right back in the mix of his former spook days, trying to uncover the purpose of his arrival on this new planet as well as the whereabouts of his wife, Anna (a pilot for NASA), all while trying to survive in the midst of an interstellar war.

(The journey continues with book II in the series, Echo Nova Delta ~ on preorder now!!)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian McMickle
• Release date: Jun 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370008599

Brian McMickle

BRIAN MCMICKLE, is the author of Nothing Left along with his latest novel, The Expansion Project, a sci-fi thriller that straps the reader’s own imaginarium to a rocket ship and hurls it through the quantum tunnels of space while exploring the adverse effects of mankind no longer being confined to a single corner of the universe.Growing up in Locust Grove, Georgia, Brian acquired a knack for the art of storytelling at a very young age. As a musician, he continued honing his craft through his teens and twenties by writing songs, before finally trying his hand at his first fictional novel in 2009. Brian has an ability to create engaging characters that are crisp and complex, yet familiar. Whether on a cruise ship or in outer space, it is the characters that propel the stories and give the reader a feeling of thumbing through the journal of an old friend.Brian currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife and two children working amid the software industry as a Solution Architect.

Book preview

1

The Extraterrestrial

Location: Unknown

Everything was quiet and calm when James awoke.  There was no TV in the background, no sound of the coffee maker brewing, no alarm clocks rushing him to whatever it may have been set for, and most of all, there was no recollection as to why he was not hearing these things.  This however was only the mildest of oddities that the morning brought.

The most alarming oddity was when he tried to open his eyes.  The rushing flood of light jolted his hands to his face to try and shield himself from whatever overly luminous agent was attacking his slumber, but no origin to this illumination could be pinpointed.  Every direction he turned, it was there.  He closed his eyes even tighter and then eased them into a slight squint before reopening them.  There was nothing but light.  Again, he tried thinking that they just needed to adjust.  When they didn’t, he began to get frightened that he may have lost his sight altogether.  He desperately repeated the process until suddenly something strange happened.  This time, when he closed his eyes, if felt like he was opening them at the same time.  Once opened, the room was not quite so bright, though his eyes still had some adjusting to do.  There were shapes, but they made no sense.  Though pleased with a bit of progress, he closed and reopened his eyes a few more times to try to get the feeling again.  At last, he opened them and there was light, only not as bright as before.

Finally, things were coming into focus.  Slowly he began to make out his surroundings despite several items were initially showing up in pairs before homogenizing themselves back into their singular state.  Large tan stones made up the walls of the open room, which were decorated in strange tapestries.  The writing was unclear to him.  Everything was unclear to him.  Where was he?  How did he get there?  He started to get up and move around.  His muscles locked as he rolled off his bed onto the floor.  He gasped and let out a heavy moan like a college kid after waking up the morning following too many drinking games. Slowly, he pulled his face off of the stone floor, stretched himself out and eased his way into a standing position.  He had a level of soreness like nothing he had ever known.  His movements were shaky at first.  His muscles didn’t feel weak, they simply weren’t responding as usual.

James walked over to the walls and tried to get a closer look at the writings and the pictures, but nothing was registering.  The more he tried to piece the mystery together, the more he discovered he could not recall anything that had happened.  Was he on a mission somewhere?  He wasn’t chained or tied up to anything.  That was a good sign.  However, the soreness and trouble with his eyes couldn’t be anything good.  If it was torture, then he must have been healing for a while.  There was no visible scarring, though much of his skin looked odd to him.  He noticed a very clean spot on his arm where a mole had once been and there was not as much hair on his arms or legs.

Quickly, he tried to remember anything he could.  His name was James.  He was from the United States of America.  He began to count, and say things in his head.  He started to recall historical events; World Wars, revolutions, art, music, countries, political figures, movies, actors, and so on.  He went to MIT; he worked for the CIA shortly after graduating.  Where was his last mission?  He couldn’t figure it out.  He started to move around the room to look for clues.  Everything still looked foreign to him.

He made his way over to a window.  The light was still rough on his eyes.  He stood there for a moment while they adjusted.  The view began to come into focus but nothing could have prepared him for it.  He was definitely not home.  Had he died?  Maybe this was just a rabbit hole he somehow tumbled down.  That would explain the amnesia.  No.  It was too real.  He wasn’t dreaming.  Only one thing was certain, Kansas was not anywhere close by.

Wherever he was, it was high up.  Across the skyline was a mountain range like none he had ever seen.  He was surprised at how warm it was for being so high up.  It was perfect.  The dark green landscape had subtle hints of colors working their way down the mountain.  He noticed large groupings of colors that were slowly phased out and into others like a very smooth, cascading gradient.  It was hard to take it all in.  His eyes followed the mountain down to his left to see a vast, clear river that sat at the foot of another mountain across from him.  He then followed the river upstream and saw that it was being fed from a cluster of waterfalls.  They weren’t direct drops but rather a set of broken forty five degree slopes up to larger waterfalls.  The one to the left was broken into three waterfalls with a much steeper slope against a convex cliff side.  The middle one fed to a single waterfall that went directly up a very tall and towering cliff.  He couldn’t follow the one to the right as another mountain side blocked the view.  His eyes were starting to adjust again and began to reveal a greater level of detail than usual.

The colors had caught his attention and he began to analyze patterns.  As he looked again to the left at the mountain across the river, he started to distinguish shapes.  It began to make sense why the colors were grouped together; blues with blues, purples with purples, etc…  The sections that were solid colors looked to be some type of housing or building structures.  Where the colors phased to the next grouping were actual plants with blooms that held those same colors.  As he looked closer to his current residence, he noticed it followed the same pattern.  Very pale greens, whites, and grays made up the architecture that surrounded him.  There was a terrace that was edged by a waist high stone wall that was the same coloration of the structure he was in.  Past the wall was a reasonable drop off, and past that was a small village of similar buildings.  These were harder to see as there was some haze and fog that had set in around the area.  The stone wall had a gateway in the middle of it.  There was a path from his current residence to the gate.  His eyes started to follow the path as he noticed some movement in his peripheral.

The gate was as hazy as the village below, as was the terrace that footed his building.  Through the haze he saw something making its way through the gate.  A figure.  The shape appeared almost human but something was not quite right.  The color---the features---something was off.  James didn’t panic.  If his host had wanted to harm him, it certainly had the opportunity.  All the same, he was not quite prepared for how to approach the situation.  James went back through the room to an open doorway.  He made his way through a small hallway and down a winding set of stairs that opened into what he thought was a living room.  There were two doorways across the room that opened up to the terrace.  James made his way outside.

About twenty feet separated him from the figure.  He thought about running but had no idea where to go.  The figure made no advances to him and did not seem threatening.  It was not armed with any kind of weapon.  James looked around to size up his situation to make sure he wasn’t being surrounded or could in fact make a dash somewhere if it came to it.  Then---it spoke.

Hello friend, it said.

James paused, astonished.  It spoke in plain English.  Was this some kind of joke?  An elaborate prank of some kind?  Even up close, it was rather like a human, causing James to want to go pull at its face, but as he sized up this new being, he noted that the dimensions of it were off by just enough to make the possibility of a suit and makeup somewhat unlikely.  The tall figure was fairly thin and athletic.  James noticed the long and lean definition, and more distinctly, that the muscles themselves, were not the same as those of a human.  His brain scrambled as hard as it could, but he simply could not fathom how anybody could create a prank this elaborate.  It just wasn’t possible.

Are we friends? James replied, not knowing how to respond.

Are we not? It almost sounded offended.  I hoped we would commence our conversation by establishing a friendship.

Friendships usually take time and trust, James said, still thinking like a spy and wondering if he needed to interrogate his host.  He also realized that he was at the mercy of this mysterious figure and should probably start off on a good foot.  Can I trust you?

I like to think so.

James had no idea what to say.  He didn’t want to offend his host by any means but still wasn’t sure that he could trust it.  James had carefully observed the eyes as it spoke.  He remembered an old friend, Colonel Jennings, always telling him to pay attention to the eyes when he was looking for the untold information.  But he could see no lie and no ill intent.  Moreover, he didn’t remember any harm being done to him.  Then again, he was incredibly sore.  He thought back to his own eyes.  Maybe he was on some type of hallucinogenic truth serum and was being interrogated by an enemy.  He didn’t feel sedated, and as strange as everything was, he was sure he wasn’t dreaming.  All the same, he pinched himself a couple of times.  It was definitely not a dream.

James looked around to try to make sense out of something—anything.  The trees were unlike any he had seen and so was the architecture.  Suddenly, he noticed something of even more peculiarity as he looked up to the sky.   There were two suns.  Either he was on the set of an old sci-fi film, or he was not on Earth.  The figure noticed his odd behavior and how he was looking around as if trying to find something.

Are you lost? it asked.

Yes, James answered and took a look around.  Lost---definitely sounds---accurate.  Although, I’m not entirely sure where I was going, so I guess this very well could be the right place.

Do you see ok?

I seem to be---why? James thought back to the light from earlier.

You are looking around as if you cannot see well.

I’m just trying to figure out where I am.

You are in a safe place.

James looked at it with an astonished and stupefied look.  He couldn’t find any words to retort with at the moment.

Do I speak your language well? it asked.

Better than most actually, James wondered how that would be possible though he was still focused on discerning his surroundings.  Where am I?

I am guessing, a very long ways from home.

Yeah, that was kind of my first guess too, James muttered, while taking another look at his surroundings.  But what is this place, and how did I get here?

This is a different planet from your own.  We have no name for it in your language.  Perhaps you might find a name suitable for it.  Your second question was going to be one of my own.  We found you on the shores of our dark waters.  We were surprised that you survived the crash.  It pleases me to see that you are well.

James scrambled to remember anything about a crash.  Nothing.

How are you able to speak to me? James asked.

We did an extensive study on the vessel that brought you here.  We found an information system that some of my colleagues and I studied quite thoroughly.  We found much there, including an instructional program on the languages of your planet.  From the writings in the ship, we were able to match the language with what we believed to be your own.  I’ve been studying it since you arrived.  I am very excited to be having a dialogue with you.

Thank you, James replied, trying to keep his manners.

What is your name?

James stood puzzled for a little while, feeling more confused than he had ever felt in his entire life.  Should he give his real name?  Was he traveling under an alias?  He decided at this point the truth would be safer than trying to come up with a cover story.  Especially since he didn’t know if there was anything to cover.

James, he answered.

How did you get here?

James paused as he tried again to search his memory.

I don’t remember, he finally answered with an almost empty expression.

Your memory is not with you?

I guess not.  Do you have a name? James asked, trying to be polite.

Not one that would easily be used in your language, it said.  It then proceeded to state a name that was indeed too difficult for James to use on a regular basis.

Is there a name for your species? James asked, hoping that the question would not offend him.  Somehow the word species felt odd.  It could simply have been because James had never asked anyone what the name of their species was.  It’s not like there was precedent for the etiquette of the encounter.  The figure politely spoke a word that was fairly long and oddly pronounced.  Had he known he would have been communicating with life on another planet, James would have at least made an attempt to learn some of the basics.  He tried his best but could really only retain the last two syllables.  It sounded like ‘samgji with a soft g".

Hmmm..  James paused and looked at the figure again.  I’ll try to work on it.

Perhaps for the purposes of our conversations, it continued, you could give me a name in your language.

James thought for a moment.  He had settled on his host being male based on his voice and general build.  Since he was classifying the species in his head as the Samgji, he felt he should name the first one…"

Sam, he said.  You kind of look like a Sam.

I look like Sam?  This time the figure had the confused look.  Who is Sam?

Well, it’s just a name really.  There are a lot of Sams…  James realized that this wouldn’t be easy to explain.  Now you are Sam.  Sam looks like you.

Sam…  He paused for a moment, nodding his head and seeming to grasp the concept.  I like this name.

Ok, James said with a smile and a slow nod.  If this really was the first encounter for mankind, James at least felt like it was off to a good start.  He would have been even more proud of himself if he would have been able to stop staring at Sam.  He was amazed at his gentility.  Even his voice was in every way calming.  He kept forgetting the fact that he was lost and had no memory.  His captivation began to take him.  He looked around some more to continue to soak in his surroundings.  A million questions popped into his head, but before one could complete itself as a thought, another one pushed it out.  He finally decided to hold off on questions and try to acclimate to his surroundings.

James began to feel a few more aches, so he started to stretch.  His neck was especially stiff.  He rolled it around producing a loud series of popping noises.  Sam looked at him with much wonder.  After a few small stretches James began to get back to the matter of what happened to him.  He looked at Sam who was completely fixated upon him as if he was waiting for James to perform some sort of trick.

So what happened to me Sam? James finally asked.

You crashed into our dark waters, he replied.  We saw you go down and a few of us went to explore and found you on the shoreline.  You were still alive, so we brought you back to this place.

And what is this place?

I am unsure whether you would call it a hospital or a rehabilitation center.  It is a place for healing and meditations.  Many come here for renewal.

New concerns continued to pop into James’ head.  Was I the only one?

We found no others.

James felt a sense of relief.  At least he hadn’t lost an entire crew.  Then again, it would have been nice to have another human around if that person would have survived the crash.

How are you feeling? Sam asked.

Hmmm…  James took a moment to ponder the question.  He moved his arms around in a half stretching motion.  I’m a little stiff.  Overall, I guess about as good as one can be when waking up on a strange planet and having no idea how he got there, why he is there, or even where in the universe ‘there’ is.

That is good, Sam said.  We were worried about whether or not we would be able to successfully repair you, as we have never tried to heal one of your kind before.

Have you ever encountered any of ‘my kind’ before?

Not exactly, but we are immensely fascinated.

You said repair? James asked as he began to get extraordinarily curious. He realized that he had no idea what all had been done to him.  What did you mean by that?

I’m afraid you were quite unwell after both the crash and your encounter with the dark waters.  We had to make some modifications to your system in order for you to be able to function normally on our planet.

Modifications? Scenes from the movie Alien burst into his head as he imagined a creature suddenly bursting through his stomach.

Yes.  You were slightly broken in some areas.  Some of your nerves took on extensive damage causing forms of paralysis.  Also, your optical system endured severe burns from the waters.  We had to adjust them.  Your external layer of skin would not have fared well after the damage from the waters, so we had to strengthen it to be able to endure several environments across this planet, including the waters.  We were able to keep your appearances very similar to what we believed they were originally.  It may take some time to adjust to several of the modifications.

James felt a small level of panic.  Was he hideous?  Had he been malformed?  He felt his face and several areas but nothing seemed to be out of place.  His thoughts then turned more towards his internal modifications.

You said my nerves were damaged…how am I able to move?

We have attached a signal generator that takes the signals emitted from the control feature of your central nervous system and sends them to neural sensors that have been implanted in other portions of your body.

And my skin?

It is a chemical that attaches with your epidermis creating a symbiotic material that is more durable.

And my eyes?  I had trouble opening them when I woke up.  It felt like I was trying to open a separate set of eye lids.

Oh, that was the most fascinating part, Sam began with more excitement than he had shown so far.  As I said, your optical system was burned.  When we were implanting the neural sensors, we were able to add connections for the optical sensors.  The only difficult part was having the ability for you to be able to utilize them as you only had one set of covering for them.  We added more layers and a series of lenses.  They are extremely thin but connected surprisingly well with your optical sensors.  We feared they would be rather difficult to become accustomed to, but will be most useful if you are to spend any time with us or in any neighboring systems.  For similar reasons, we also placed a filter in your respiratory system.  You should be able to breathe more efficiently now without inhaling gases that are foreign to your own atmosphere.  This only works for gases that hold a concentration similar to the levels in most atmospheres.  High doses of any gas can still make it through your system.

Sam spoke with a great deal of intrigue but was able to maintain a certain degree of reserve.  He was a scientist, as were many of his kind.  Sam was specifically geared towards nanotechnology.  The chance to explore this field on another species was more than most scientists could ever even dream about on earth.  It was not too uncommon for Sam, however, no one on Sam’s planet had ever had the chance to operate on anyone from earth before.

James, at this point, was beyond baffled, beyond amazed, and a little bit nervous.  It sounded like something out of a comic book.  An empty memory was more than enough to deal with without having to come to terms with the fact that he had just been re-engineered.  He wondered for a few moments if maybe he was on some kind of reality TV show.  This all seemed a little extreme to him, even for a TV show.  And there was no way that a reality TV show would have a big enough budget for something like this.  He had to be dreaming.  There was no other explanation.  But that didn’t explain the stiffness in his muscles and the vivid entity in the form of an extraterrestrial standing in front of him.  James rolled his head around as he rubbed the back of his head and began to stretch his arms again.

Perhaps we should go for a walk to help you work out the soreness, Sam said.

The invitation was more than welcome.  Not just to help with the soreness, but also his curiosity was kicking into high gear concerning his new surroundings.

James nodded in agreement and began to follow his host as they made their way across the terrace to the outer wall that surrounded it.

Are we friends now? Sam asked.

James smiled.

We’re off to a good start. He began to wonder if the people of Earth would have been as welcoming to Sam.  James quickly concluded that this would not have been the case and diverted his attention more to the flawlessly landscaped scenery that surrounded him as he made his way towards the gate, eager to see more.

2

The Candidates

Earth – several months earlier

The vacant apartment had been echoing the voices of the television all afternoon.  It was now six o’clock and the unemotional, over pronounced syllables meant the news was on.  The late breaking story this time was in space exploration, which usually warranted an immediate ‘thumbs down’, or a ‘not relevant to me’ rating from the majority of subscribers.  Despite the many advances that had been made in the areas of terraforming, communications technology, and aerospace engineering, the interest in the subject had dropped to nearly null.  It wasn’t until a group of scientists made a discovery regarding the creation and navigation of wormholes that things got interesting.  Before that, the thought of deep space exploration seemed perilous.  We knew we’d never reach the end of the universe.  Even at the speed of light it would take far too long—so why bother?  Now, as if we were simply hopping through the warp zones of an old Nintendo game, we could traverse the far reaches of space.  Mankind was ready to travel.  They were excited and ready to explore, but for what…no one really knew.  Nevertheless, the world had found itself in another space race.

Naturally, there was talk about expansion, exploration, and of finding other forms of intelligent life.  However, no one really wanted to move to another planet, nor were they psyched about finding other forms of intelligent life after cinema had always depicted the encounter with conflict and hostile take-over.  The idea of another species to compete against, or share with, hadn’t won the hearts of many either.  Isolationism and racism had reached an all-time high though neither of them were ever addressed by their proper name.  But that had nothing to do with this.  This, like many other events in history, was a distraction--a nice little ‘look, over there, it’s Elvis’ for the viewers and voters at home.  This home however, had no viewers.

The first of the two inhabitants was James.  He had recently taken a position as a professor at MIT where he had once been a student and a promising recruit for any major company.  But it was the CIA who managed to grab him up after his graduation and bring him on board as an analyst.  After only a few years, he felt he had seen enough to last a couple lifetimes.  Once an idealist out to save the world, now James merely sought to change the way the future leaders of the world would think.  His intelligence was rivaled only with his love and compassion, mostly for his wife, Anna, the second inhabitant.  Both were accomplished pilots but Anna was the one who had excelled in the aeronautical realm whereas James had developed more of a mind for the digital world.  In school they talked of joining the NASA space program together.  However, life had other things in store for them.  Now their world had come full circle back to the same place where their lives had left off.  NASA was recruiting for its up and coming mission.

This particular exploration was far more complex than the usual space rock collection.  They were calling it The Expansion Project.  The mission would require five ships.  Two of them were fully crewed in hopes of setting up potential stations on other planets.  The rest were smaller scout teams with the intention of setting up communication stations to work through the quantum tunnels and deploy smaller satellites to begin mapping the outer regions of space.  NASA was recruiting captain positions for three separate ships.  There were two letters in the apartment regarding the up and coming missions.  One lay on the bar that separated the kitchen and the living room, and the other lay in the trash…unopened.

Three months prior to receiving the letters, the threshold of the apartment was crossed by the couple for the first time.  Three months of complete bliss.  To James, he had found exactly what he wanted.  Anna however, never got the grand adventure.  She had been working as an aerospace engineer.  The firm that she worked for did custom designs for highly advanced needs.  Her customers ranged from military applications to rich eccentrics.  More recently she had been involved in customized projects for space exploration.  James was perfectly happy with her choice of work at first.  He assumed that she would remain the person behind the plans, rather than the pilot.  He thought that they would finally be able to begin a new life together.  However, just like after college, something had thrown a monkey wrench into their plans.  Before, it was James’ move into the CIA that challenged such a future.  This time, it would be the letters from NASA.

Anna thought that this was their chance to be pilots together like they had planned, but James didn’t trust it.  An argument commenced over the letters and the apartment remained quiet ever since.  They casually avoided the situation; Anna in hopes that James would come around in time to join her and James in hopes that Anna would begin to see things his way, without constantly having to argue his point.  It was a classic case of the elephant and the rhino.  An immoveable object was being charged by an unstoppable force.  All that managed to come about was an absence of each other that could only end in regret. But even though the topic was not being discussed in the apartment, it didn’t keep the subject from making its way into the limelight elsewhere.  The news team on the television was on site in Washington awaiting the announcement of the final plans for the new mission.

Washington D.C.

The committee moves to discuss the remaining three positions for the Expansion Project, the mediator said.  Dr. Timothy Edwards, I believe you are first up.

Thank you, Gene, Edwards responded while getting to his feet.  Ladies and Gentlemen of the board, it is imperative that we begin preparing for this mission immediately.  We must launch on September 4th if we want to be able to take advantage of the quantum positioning.  With any luck, our three com teams will have their first round of tech deployed within a month and our two on-planet teams will have initial camp setup inside of two months.  If all goes according to plan, we’ll be getting enormous amounts of data for Christmas this year.  Once further intel is gathered from the teams, we’ll be able to reposition our com teams to new locations starting on the second phase of the quantum positioning schedule which will be around June 6th.  We need to give them plenty of time to set up satellite stations as well as position trajectory spheres.  As you all know, the first two ships have filled all positions and have been undergoing intensive training for several months now.  I would like to now bring before the board my recommendations for the three remaining positions to begin intensive training ASAP.

Hold on a minute there Timmy, I’m a little confused here.

The interruption came from a man sitting across the table from Dr. Edwards.  His name was Colonel Bruce Jennings.  He was practically a legend for his time but far more regarded in military matters than political ones.  To many who were pushing the project, he was a thorn in their side.  Edwards had pushed to get Colonel Baxter to oversee the project from the military side of things, but Jennings was a preference of the President.  His practicality and concern for the highest levels of security made him a valuable asset to any political leader.

It was my understanding that the remaining three ships would not launch until several months after the first two ships, Jennings continued.  How are these people supposed to be trained for an assignment like this in just two months, and moreover, how are their ships supposed to be finished by that time?  From what I understand, the vessels intended for their missions are still in Beta testing.

Edwards shot a faintly annoyed half grin in the direction of the Colonel but recomposed himself before he answered the question.  "These pilots have each been selected based on their ability to perform this mission with only minimal amounts of training.  Five letters were sent out to men and women