The energy washed over him like a white-hot wave, drenching his body with the boundaries of the cosmos. He heard a primal scream, and he dimly wondered if the voice was his own. The sensation was rapturous and murderous at the same time; he felt as though his every molecule were being ripped apart.
The unknown swallowed him whole, and he braced himself to survive the culmination of his work.
Ten Years Ago
Reed Richards was focused on his work. That in itself was nothing new.
The young man had seemingly evidenced a keen intellect and a driven focus from birth, so it wasn't unusual to see him with a pencil and pad in his hands rapidly scribbling the idea that had abruptly popped into his head. That he was currently in bed, scrawling formula by the morning's first few rays of sunlight was also old news. It wasn't even the least bit unusual that the brown-haired prodigy was naked; Reed habitually slept in the nude and assumed everyone else did too.
No, the atypical part was that there was a naked woman in bed with him. Scarcely six months younger than Reed, the woman had chin-length blonde hair and eyes as blue as his favorite college sweater. Those eyes opened slowly, blinking in reluctance to accept daylight. "What time is it?" she slurred, only awake by a marginal definition.
Reed continued writing, completely oblivious.
"Working on the anomaly?" she asked, then glanced over to his clock. "At six in the morning? On a Sunday?" That last word was delivered with the icy edge of one who refused to believe in mornings.
Finally glancing at her, her replied, "the inspiration woke me up. You were right, Sue: it helps to think about something else for a change. All I needed was a diversion to work through the creative block."
Sue Storm stretched under the blanket. "Yeah, I think last night's activity qualifies as a diversion."
He paused to consider that. Indeed it was; he'd spent the entirety of their relationship so far wondering what had attracted a brainy upper-class social butterfly to a lanky bookworm from Yancy Street. He'd guessed it was his mind, she'd insisted his body had something to do with it as well and last night she managed to convice him.
So that puzzle was solved; Reed returned his gaze to his notepad. "It turns out we've been going about this the wrong way."
Propping herself up on her side, she raised an eyebrow, drilling a hole in him with her gaze. "Is that so...?"
"Yes. You see, we've been having difficulty identifying the odd instances of 'space-warping' phenomena...."
She searched under the blankets for her underwear. "Because it seems to have no known cause, and we've been through every possible quantum scenario."
He held up the notepad, pointing with his pencil eraser to a specific formula. "No known cause in this dimension."
Grabbing the notepad from his hand, she took a closer look at it, turning on a nearby lamp. "Alternate realities? I thought we ruled out String Theory as a cause a month ago?"
"We didn't invalidate the concept itself. There are alternate realities, and there are ways of proving it. We've just had no way of looking into it--"
"Until now," she finished for him, snatching his pencil and making her own additions and corrections to the formulae. Unlike Reed, whose thought processes were entirely internal, Sue found it necessary to move her lips and mumble to herself as she worked. This habit didn't cause her to appear inferior to Reed; in fact, he enjoyed watching her work through a problem.
So he watched her lips move, her eyes dart, and her pencil attack the page. The lamp light spilled across her features and highlighted her golden tresses. He thought she looked even more like an angel than she usually did. And all that skin peeking from beneath the blanket ... well. He moved closer to her and started kissing her neck.
"Reed," she mumbled as she continued the formula on a new page. "Reeeed...?" She thwapped him on the nose with the eraser.
"Ow!"
"I'm busy."
"Too busy...?"
"You started it. I'm awake and my brain is clocking a few thousand miles an hour and it's all your fault."
He shrugged, peering at her progress. "Does my math check out?"
"So far. Now, shhh! Or I'll lose my train of thought."
So he continued watching her, wondering if they were always going to trade off on who would get to be the supergenius.
Five Years Ago
"See? I knew having two geniuses in the family would pay off!" Sue's brother Johnny exclaimed as she and Reed gave him the tour of an aircraft hangar. At age 22, Johnny was only a few years younger than his sister, but the expression of boyish wonder on his face made him look far younger. "So this is what you two've been working on all this time. This is awesome!"
"Admittedly, it's not finished yet," Reed pointed out almost apologetically as the three of them and a handful of NASA personnel journeyed up a flight of metal steps to the half-completed vehicle.
"Yeah, but c'mon, man," Johnny argued, "it's a spaceship!" It was indeed; based loosely on the class of space shuttles NASA had used for years, this craft bore a number of modifications designed by Reed and Sue. This was going to be no ordinary space flight. "I don't get to see a lot of spaceships outside of TV. It must be no big deal to you guys, but...."
"Are you kidding?" Sue replied with a smirk. "I'm still getting used to this. Reed and I have spent so many years in the theoretical phase of this that we have to pinch ourselves every day. We can't believe we managed to get this far with the project."
Johnny's gaze swept along the interior bulkheads, seats, and instrument panels, finding the setup both familiar and foreign. Familiar because he'd been in the driver's seat of plenty of racecars over the years. Foreign because this spaceship's cockpit was like a cross between a stock car and a stealth bomber. It was the ultimate speed machine, and he was getting weak in the knees just being inside it. "So run the theory by me one more time, Sue. Use small words."
"This is a spacecraft," Sue explained, clenching Reed's hand to keep him from jumping in with his own jargon, "but it's not designed for outer space. Or at least, not the outer space we're familiar with. Remember the Nobel Prize Reed and I won when we were still at MIT?"
"For proving that some other universe exists, right? You called it Sub-something."
"Subspace. But we ended up calling it the Negative Zone."
"Okay, that." Johnny glanced around at the cabin, more slowly this time. His jaw dropped as understanding dawned. "So ... you're building this thing to actually go there?"
She nodded. "It's taken us and the government years just to figure out the breaching technology. We've wanted to go since we first found out about it, but it's just been a matter of how."
Johnny stood over the instrument panel, studying the buttons, dials, and switches. He was forcing himself not to touch anything even as every impulse in his body itched to play the controls like a video game. "This stuff sounds pretty hush-hush." He glanced sidelong at his sister, her fiancé, and the working staff. "So I'm gonna guess there's a reason you're showing me all this."
Sue stepped forward, pulling Reed with her. "Johnny, you've always been an adrenaline junkie. You've always been attracted to the fast and dangerous. I'm the brainy one in the family, but you've always been the fast one. Hell, you've been racing in one form or another since you could crawl. Well, we could use your reflexes. We only have the vaguest clue what's in the Zone, but we're pretty sure it's a dangerous place. Are you interested?"
Johnny rolled the idea around in his head. "Well, you're telling me I'd have to give up NASCAR and go through astronaut training, just so I can test out your science project and maybe die in the process."
"Or you can look at it this way: we'll be counting on you to help keep us alive. We know it's a lot to ask, and you'll need time--"
"I'm in."
Sue couldn't decide how surprised she should actually be by that. "Johnny, are you sure...?"
Naked sarcasm flowed from Johnny's words. "Yeah, sis, let me take a good long time to think about it. You're giving me the opportunity to ride something that'll make a racecar look like a tricycle. And I get to Boldly Go Where There Is No Starbucks. And then there's the part where you flat-out need me for something. Yyyyeah, that's a tough decision." He shrugged. "You had me at 'this is a freakin' starship'."
"Excellent," Reed replied with a wide grin. "Let me be the first to welcome you aboard the project, then. We can go through the mountains of paperwork later, but first, we should introduce you to the rest of the staff and crew. Especially your co-pilot."
Blindsided, Johnny stopped in his tracks. "'Co-pilot...?"
One Hour Ago
"Request permission to toss my co-pilot out an airlock, sir," Major Benjamin Jacob Grimm spoke up as he turned to Reed, jerking a thumb at Johnny. They were now out of Earth orbit, with the starlit expanse of space surrounding them on all sides. The majesty of the experience was humbling; it tended to remind humans just how small they really were ... but Ben was too busy reacting to Johnny's latest remark to fully enjoy it.
"Request denied," Reed answered with a smile as he glanced up from an instrument panel. "Again."
Sue was more serious; she held Johnny's gaze. "Do us a favor and cut out the wisecracks, okay? This is serious business."
"It is? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we accomplishing what we've spent years setting out to do? We're in space, we're in a ship you guys designed--"
"But we're not in the Negative Zone yet, Junior," Ben reminded him. "So knock it off." He was possessed of a burly frame and rough, chiseled features, but mostly, it was his deep, gravelly voice and piercing blue-eyed gaze that commanded respect -- even Johnny's. "Everything so far's been a walk in th' park, 'cause it's been done before. Leavin' Earth's atmosphere is old hat; it's what we're about t'do that ain't been tried yet."
"It was tried once," Reed ominously reminded them.
"Yeah, there's that," Ben conceded with a nod. "But I mean on a scale this big."
"On that note," Sue announced from her seat at a science station, "we're about to reach the Access Zone any second." Up ahead, between the Earth and the path of the moon's orbit, lay a safe zone where a portal could be opened to the Negative Zone without risking Earth's environment. She and Reed powered up the ship's portal generator, which hummed with slowly-building energy. That hum swelled into a roar as the machine warmed up to optimal conditions. A forcefield surrounded the ship.
"Brace yourselves, kids," Ben informed his crewmates as he pressed a few final buttons in preparation and followed his own advice. "Portal breach in three ... two ... one....!"
A circular rift opened up ahead of the ship, quickly expanding to twice the vessel's size. It could best be described as an expanse of nothing opened up in a background of more nothing; any further attempt at perception invited dementia. The spacecraft and its crew entered the portal and were swallowed up by it as it closed itself behind them.
The interior expanse of nothing abruptly gave way to total chaos, as a riot of sounds, colors, and experiences reached out from all directions and slammed against the ship's forcefield. It was, Ben found himself musing, something like plunging into the depths of an ocean in a submarine and abruptly losing track of where the surface and the bottom were. Truth told, he was beginning to wish he were in an ocean; at least then he would know what his surroundings were made out of. "Big Brains? This forcefield o'yours is gonna keep all the stuff outside from gettin' to us, right?"
"What happened to those Air Force nerves of steel?" Johnny asked as he co-piloted, clearly enjoying himself.
"The shields will hold," Reed answered, shouting to be heard above the turbulence that rattled the ship. "We're still in the Distortion Area; another minute and we'll be out of the--"
An alarm sounded, drowning out the rest of his sentence and filling the cabin with flashing red light that heralded bad news. "Forcefield generators are failing," Sue informed them in a clipped voice that wouldn't allow itself to convey panic. "Backups on standby! Rerouting power. Damn it! Distortion Area's overpowering everything we've got!"
"Just hang tight," Johnny piped up in a tone of voice that was disturbingly laid-back, even in this crisis. "I'll get us through this."
"No," Ben corrected, "we will!" He increased the aft thrusters, fully intending to race through the storm like a bat out of hell. He had no way of knowing if he was making any progress at all, but at this point he was relying on faith and gut instinct anyway.
Then the 'field generator died. Then all hell broke loose.
Now
Silence was his own kind of hell, Sue decided. The last thing she remembered, the forcefield generator had died and she'd found herself sledgehammered from every direction by the Distortion Area's crushing onslaught. Her senses had been assaulted, and now all she could perceive was cold stillness.
Was this what death was like?
Her senses slowly returned to her, needles of awareness pinpricking her like blood returning to a limb that'd lost circulation. She was driven to distraction by the sensation, but she supposed it proved she was still alive. Or maybe it was no proof at all.
A deep, distorted voice droned somewhere in the distance; it took her a moment to realize it was someone saying, "she's waking up, sir."
She opened her eyes, and she immediately regretted it when another flare of light razed her field of vision.
"I see that, Kowalski," another voice answered. "It's about time one of them did." Sue regained enough wits to recognize both voices.
She felt a thin, stiff mattress beneath her and firm straps holding her. An infirmary cot. She was in the ship's infirmary, no doubt, strapped to the cot to keep from floating in the zero gravity. She must have been carried from the cockpit by the ship's hidden passengers....
"Looks like Richards and Storm are coming around too," another soldier -- Delgado? -- announced, and Sue opened her eyes and slowly sat up, gazing around. The light was no longer blinding, and she guessed someone had shone a pen-light onto her pupils to see if they were dilated.
Sure enough, they were still in the Negative Zone, and Commander John Jameson and his SHIELD unit had managed to drag her, Reed, Johnny, and Ben into the sickbay. The six-man unit had been nicknamed "The Stowaways" even though they had full government authorization to accompany Sue and her crew on the Zone mission. The catch was that SHIELD's involvement in the mission was a tightly-guarded secret. The soldiers were hard at work in the confined space of the infirmary, keeping the four official crewmates hooked up to equipment and monitored, even though they looked like they needed medical attention themselves.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" Kartopoulos, another soldier, asked as he held a pair fingers in front of her face.
"Two," she answered, then looked over at Reed, who was the next to wake up. His return to consciousness wasn't as gradual as hers -- he jolted quickly against his cot's straps, gasping in surprise as if he'd just awakened from a nightmare.
He looked around and blinked a few times, catching his breath. "We're still alive...?"
"For the moment," Jameson replied in clipped tones, standing over him. From Sue's limited experience with John Jameson -- Ben knew him better -- he was a friendly, personable man in his off-hours, but a consummate professional in the field. He was obviously in the latter mode. "We need to get all of you up and around so we can figure out what went wrong."
"The forcefield gave out," Sue informed him, eyeing the buckles of her bed straps and wondering if she even had enough coordination to float around.
"You promised it wouldn't," Jameson replied, including Reed as well. "How many times did you make that promise at different stages of this project?"
Reed stared at the floor, apparently too ashamed at this turn of events to bother counting a soldier's fingers. "I know what I promised. I was so sure of it ... I made so many calculations. I checked and double-checked...."
"Listen, Reed," the commander told Reed. "Look at me. We need you to focus, so we can salvage this situation. We're on a mission, and we need to complete it. Do you understand me?"
Reed nodded.
"You know why we're here."
Reed frowned and nodded again, the signature look of sharp determination returning to his face. "Viktor Von Doom."
"Why's everybody in such ... a sour mood?" Johnny asked as he woke up. His speech slurred. "We all ... survived the ride, didn't we? That light show was a -- damn, is it freezing in here, or is just...?"
Navasota, the solider attending to him, placed a hand on Johnny's forehead. "Sir? Feels like he's got a fever. He's burning up." From her vantage point, Sue could just barely see that he was sweating profusely. Considering he was claiming to be cold, that didn't seem like a good sign.
Jameson and the others watched with rising concern as Johnny's body temperature climbed past the dangerous levels on a display monitor. From what she could see, everyone else's body temperature remained relatively the same.
Amid the panic, Johnny remained calm. "Uh, guys? Actually I'm starting to feel better now."
They ignored him. "Sir, permission to administer a sedative?" Navasota asked Jameson as he reached for one of the sickbay's many cabinets.
"No really, guys," Johnny assured them. "I swear, I feel f--"
Then his clothing, straps, and med cot all caught fire. A moment later, so did he. Johnny screamed.
TO BE CONTINUED
Next: "Voyage, Part Two: Transformation"