ConQuest (The Quest Saga) (2 page)

Q wasted no further time in running to the entrance of the school. He got into a car that had just pulled up to him.

“Shall we leave?” asked the driver, with a heavy English accent in his voice. Q nodded his head. That was Charles. He had been originally hired as a housekeeper for Carlos’ mansion, but also functioned as a driver.

He was an old man of around fifty. His grey hair was neatly combed back. His pointy face and brown eyes showed a serene calmness.

It was a short 10-minute drive to their mansion. The mansion, according to Carlos, had been built in the early 1800s. It had an old look to it, but was still a teensy bit contemporary because of the renovation that was done recently.

Q entered the mansion. “Carlos!” he called out “I’m home!” There was no answer.

“That’s odd,” Charles said. “The master was home when I left.”

Q figured out that Carlos had probably just gone out for a long drive. It was a small routine of his. He said it helped him relax. Q never understood it though. The last thing you’d call relaxing is driving a sports car at 200 miles an hour!

Carlos usually came back home for dinner after a drive, so Q decided to go to his room and play his G.A.M.E. It was a virtual reality system that he’d developed with Carlos’ help.

You have no idea what potential a FIFA game had until you played it on the G.A.M.E. If you’re wondering what it stood for, it’s Gaming Awesomeness Made Easy.

He started playing his G.A.M.E. He breezed through the initial stages and reached the league final. He was halfway into the game when all of a sudden a dark form fell from the virtual sky and blocked a shoot that he made.

Q thought it odd since there wasn’t supposed to be any glitch.

The black figure smiled. Instead of the color of pearly white teeth, a blood red arc formed, sending shivers down Q’s spine.

“Deactivate!” Q said. He needed to get out of the virtual reality.

His vision turned bright white. When it dimmed down Q saw the familiar surroundings of his room.

He had installed certain safety procedures for the G.A.M.E, in case it malfunctioned, though he’d never thought that it’d
actually
malfunction. He had it all voice-controlled. So all he had to say was ‘deactivate’ and the G.A.M.E would shut itself down and bring him back to reality.

Q was a bit tensed. He’d never experienced a glitch in any of his games before. It may be okay in a normal game but in a virtual reality game it might have drastic effects on the player.

Theoretically, he could be trapped in the virtual world forever. His thoughts would flow through the system as 1s and 0s while his body remained lifeless, hoping for his mind to return.

Q’s anxiety was rattled by a loud blast that left the room shaking. His instincts took over immediately. He rushed out of his room and looked around.

There was no smoke or debris. He looked over the railing at the ground floor. Charles walked by with a tray in his hand. He seemed calm and cool.

It was as though the blast had never happened!

Q wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. He was sure that he’d heard a blast. He’d even felt the ground beneath him shaking.

He turned to go back to his room when something caught his eyes. He noticed lights coming through the rim of the door that led to Carlos’ lab. Shades of unearthly colors flooded his face.

A tiny part of Q’s brain recognized the light. Memories flooded his mind.

When Q was very young Carlos had told him that aliens lived inside his lab. Sure, that was baby talk. But when Q tried to get in one night, he saw eerie lights flashing on and off. When a ten-year-old sees something like that, he never wants to try it again.

The lights that he saw now flashing from the door resembled the same lights that he had witnessed five years ago. He held on to the handle and turned it.

The door was open! Carlos never left the door to his lab open.

There’s something fishy going on here, Q thought.

He opened the door slowly. Suddenly the lights stopped glowing. A pitch black room awaited him on the other side. Q felt around the wall for a light switch and turned it on.

He took soft and careful steps as he searched the lab for the source of those lights. It was only when he’d finished searching that he took a good look at the lab.

Q was astonished by what he saw. The whole place looked like Dexter’s Laboratory (without the robots). He half-expected ‘Deedee’ to show up.

Q whistled, clearly impressed. “To think Carlos had a place like this,” he chuckled.

He ran around Carlos’ lab like a hyperactive three-year-old, carefully observing every little device. He noticed that Carlos’ lab had a library.

Q was going to pick up a book when he felt a ray of light fell across his eyes. He looked at the ceiling and noticed a network of surveillance cameras.

He checked out all the cams when he realized that something was wrong. He picked up a pen and a piece of paper from a table.

“I need all the cam positions,” he murmured.                           

He went around noting down all the cams’ positions. When he finally finished, he looked at the paper. His suspicions were correct!

The area right in front of the door was completely hidden from the surveillance system. It was a blind spot!

Carlos never made a mistake like this. He had to have done this on purpose. But why would he create a blind spot in his own lab? For the kind of research he was doing, he needed top level security.

There were so many thoughts racing in Q’s mind that his head started to spin              . He decided to take it one thing at a time.

He searched around the blind spot. He looked for anything out of place, anything odd on the floor. But even after an hour he couldn’t find anything.

“Absolutely nothing!” Q cursed as he walked to the door. He was about to leave the lab when he suddenly felt a searing heat on the whole of his back.

It felt like someone was using a flamethrower against him. Strangely, it didn’t seem to cause him even the slightest bit of pain.

He turned to investigate the source of the heat. You could imagine his surprise when he just saw thin air.

Suddenly he heard a high pitch sound. A circle of light slowly formed, gradually getting brighter. Then suddenly it expanded. Inside the circle was nothing but a black void.

“A portal…..” his jaw dropped as he stared in awe.

That’s when he realized he didn’t really want to hang around to see what came out of the portal. Sure, an E.T coming out would be awesome but what if the terminator came out instead?

He searched around frantically for some space. Under one of the research tables, he finally found a spot large enough for him to hide. Only then Q realized that the portal had emerged in the cameras’ blind spot. It couldn’t just be a coincidence.

“Carlos must have had all this pre-planned,” Q murmured.             

After the light died away and the heat came down, he lifted his head up with a mix of anxiety and fear.

A humanoid exited the portal. The portal immediately closed behind it with a bright flash. The form slowly brought its hand to its helmet and took it off.

With what Q saw next, he wasn’t worried that his heart might skip a beat; he was more worried if it might skip a whole cycle!

Spy

It was Carlos!

Q could make no mistake. The man looked exactly like his brother. His short brown hair and the beard he kept trying to grow were all proof of the man’s identity. Q wondered why Carlos was wearing one of those high tech suits that you would’ve probably seen only in video games.

Carlos uttered the word ‘Ethosien’. The armor detached itself from him and turned into a Rolex watch. Q silently remembered the time when he had accidently dropped the very same watch into a swimming pool. He sincerely regretted doing that.

Q crouched behind the table, his teeth clenched. He didn’t want to get caught. It was not that he would get grounded but he was sure it wouldn’t be a pretty picture. If Carlos had kept this big a secret from him, Q sure didn't want to tell him that he’d just stumbled upon it.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Carlos walk out the door. That was one experience he’d never want to have ever again.

A million chances and I still wouldn’t have guessed that Carlos would come out of the portal, Q thought.

He finally dragged himself out of the lab. His brain was still going crazy. He was trying to process everything he’d seen. Carlos had stepped out of a portal in full mech-armor.

Q wondered why he was in that armor. Was he a Navy SEAL? But even those dudes didn’t use portals to move around. Maybe Carlos had something to do with Area 51? Even then, portals seemed to be too much!

He was still in deep thought when he heard Charles call him for dinner. He walked to the dinner table.

The whole room looked like JK Rowling had designed it. Large paper chandeliers hung from the wall. Two banners of green rose up on either side from the bottom of the stairs. And to add a touch of ‘witch’ to it, there was a Jack ‘o’ Lantern, fully lit and creepy.

By the time Q sat down, Carlos had already started his dinner. Q observed Carlos, who was sitting opposite to him, with a new-found curiosity.

He was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans and no armor. He still wore his Rolex though.

“How was your day?” Q said expectantly.

Carlos lifted his eyebrow. Q could feel Carlos’ coffee brown eyes trying to analyze his face.

“Just fine. I spent the whole day trying to enhance the nano army.”

Q knew that he was obviously lying. The only conclusions he could come up with were: One, Carlos was hiding something. Two, his mind had been taken over by aliens like in Ben 10: Alien Force. Three, he really did do what he said. Four, Q had eaten too much Jell-O and hallucinated the whole portal incident.

It was most probably the first one, but Q usually hallucinated a lot after eating Jell-O.

There was this one time when he thought he had a bomb in his hand, while it was actually a plate of Jell-O. That’s one New Year’s Eve party Q would love to forget.

Q finished dinner and went to his room. Though he’d like to say he slept like a baby, he just couldn’t. He kept thinking about what he had seen earlier in the day. It wasn’t the kind of sight that you’d forget very quickly.

He needed to somehow see what Carlos was up to. The portal had opened up in a blind spot for the cameras, so catching it on video was impossible. Just then he got a brilliant idea.

If he couldn’t recreate the portal or catch it on tape, he would just have to follow Carlos to it. He knew how to hack into the video feed that kept a constant surveillance of Carlos’ bedroom door.

That was the great thing about security systems; you could always use it against the people who installed them in the first place.

Q brought up the feed on his palmtop. Speaking of Q’s palmtop, it was an amazing piece of tech! Q and Carlos had taken a whole year to develop it.

It was what you could, would and should call a marvel of technology.

It didn’t use nanotech processors but atomic processors, so it could clock up to 15 THz. It had a 16-core chipset, so it was probably multiple times more powerful than a supercomputer.

It was capable of hacking any server through its advanced ‘Quad’ computer language system. It was a revolutionary advancement over the regular binary.

With a 5-inch screen and approximately 5 billion pixels, it could run N.O.V.A 3 at 300 fps and do it for months at a time with the 20Kah DD (Dynamic Destructor) battery. It was a new type Carlos had invented.

Don’t forget the 5000 MP C.R.U.S.H density camera with a 10 Giga watt Flash. At full power, the flash could just about kill anyone!

He had custom-made headphones that ran on Red Laser 4.0, which was his alternate to Bluetooth. The headphones were so small that they could be concealed in your ears.

They were highly sensitive and had inbuilt voice commands that would respond only to Q’s voice. Oh, and the palmtop was only 2 mm thin!

Cool, right!?

Dear reader,

It has been duly noted that Q and I tend to get carried away with our high tech explanations. We are very sorry for this and we will look to improve in future.

- Dhayaa

“Come on Carlos, please go to your lab now,” Q pleaded with the feed on the palmtop. He waited and waited.

All along he wondered what the portal was about. What secret was Carlos withholding from him?

An hour passed.

Two hours.

Four hours.

Q stayed up all night, but it was of no use! He didn’t even see a flicker of movement.

Q left the palmtop on his desk. He rubbed his eyes and tried to get rid of the drowsiness.

Suddenly, he saw the image on the palmtop change. His eyes scanned the picture. Carlos opened his bedroom door and walked out into the corridor.

Q’s heart beat faster and faster. He was getting really excited. He expected Carlos to go to his lab.

Instead, Carlos headed down the stairs and straight into the kitchen.

“Any coffee, Charles?” Q could hear Carlos ask.

Q switched off his palmtop dejectedly. His investigation was a failure. He rested his head in his hands and tried to think up another plan.

“Q! When did you say your soccer match was again?” Carlos’ voice called out to him.

Q wondered what he was talking about.

Then it dawned on him. He’d forgotten all about the inter-school soccer match he had to play that morning!

Q threw on a jersey and a pair of shorts. He ran down the stairs, his bag in one hand and shoes in another.

“Morning,” Q greeted Charles as he walked over to the breakfast bar.

“Where’s Carlos?” He asked. Charles pointed to the living room.

“Maybe I should just ask him about the portal,” Q murmured to himself. It seemed like the only option he had. He headed towards the living room.