Chapter Text
Purpose, as Our Eyes Turn Towards the Stars
Entanglement
He wasn’t certain how everything had come crumbling down like this. He had spent decades climbing the scientific world, right up to Administrator of the world’s most advanced and well-funded scientific organisation, lead scientists in some of the most incredible scientific breakthroughs ever made by man. He had the ears of politicians, he could suggest scientific consensus to Senate committees, he could fund and defund scientific projects nationally and abroad at a word.
Yet, as he sat in his office, it was clear the world had gone to Hell.
A resonance cascade, a fringe hypothetical dreamed up by one of newer post-docs in the Lambda Complex, a so unlikely scenario that while almost every scientist on the Lambda Project knew of the concept, few believed it was even possible. And as their teleportation experiments had progressed and they added to their collective scientific knowledge, it had seemed ever so more unlikely.
Teleportation. It might have been a secret now, but he was going to get a Nobel Prize for it when it was publicly revealed. Not him personally but Black Mesa itself, and Doctor Wallace Breen would be prominently displayed as Administrator and lead scientist of the project. An organisation had never been given a Nobel Prize in Physics before, but he would have been there receiving the prize on behalf of the first.
His dreams slipping between his fingers was interrupted by the dull thumps of gunfire through the walls of the administration block of Black Mesa.
He could remember reading the first reports brought back from Xen all those years ago, a freshly minted post-doc himself; tales of the most breathtaking sights ever laid upon by human eyes, indescribable, so beyond human knowledge of the universe… and tainted by horrifying creatures of nightmare. He knew they were outside, he knew they were killing his staff as he sat in his suede leather chair, and he didn’t know how he was going to survive the next few hours.
The Hazardous Environment Combat Unit would be here soon, and he hoped he would live long enough for rescue, but the sounds outside made that light seem ever dimmer. He had opposed the HECU’s creation, he had seen it as a waste, unnecessary given how unlikely they would ever be needed as to admit it was needed was to admit that what they were doing might be negligent. But he hadn’t wasted any resources blocking their creation; unnecessary yes, but not problematic enough to be worth the effort of quashing. Wallace was very glad now that he had not.
There was a louder thump this time, powerful enough that he could feel it through his feet. Tensing, he scrunched up his eyes, wondering if the roof might cave in on top of him as he knew it had in some parts of the facility. But after a few seconds he carefully looked up, the roof appearing sound.
Then there was a bang on his door.
He had to stop himself from jumping out of his chair, from trying to run, but the heavy mahogany coffee table he had propped up against it seemed to hold. There was another thump and then another before something on the other side moaned — the red of the emergency lighting adding a sinister effect to the scene.
His body tensed, he stared at the door for another five minutes solid before he was able to relax a semblance.
Wallace turned to the fine crystal decanter on his side table. It was tempting to go out his final few hours with the aid of a half-century scotch, but it surely would be his final few hours if he did. He didn’t feel completely hopeless just yet; there was still the tiny pinprick of light called survival, of rescue, and drunkenness would certainly… strangle it.
He blinked a few times, noticing a strange glimmer in the crystal; white instead of emergency red.
He turned and his eyes widened at the sight of a thin beam of light rising from the floor and extending over his full height. He wondered for a moment if maybe the roof had finally caved in and in a concussed haze, he was confusing the light for a fluoro tube hanging by its wiring. But it started to widen, a pure white rectangle appearing before him, wide enough to be a door.
A man in a suit stood inside it.
He knew that face, he knew those almost iridescent green eyes, but… he couldn’t put a name to it.
The man stepped out and into his office, ignoring the look of shock on the Administrator’s face to brush down his immaculate suit, a briefcase in his off hand.
He knew this man, he had seen him at a dozen meetings, meetings between Black Mesa staff, meetings between government departments and politicians, equipment demonstrations to the military and industry, but he had never… questioned.
The man looked up, staring at him, as the doorway quickly thinned and vanished.
“Doctor Wallace Breen.”
The man spoke like he savoured each word, like he was trying a favourite food or drink for the first time in many years. His face was adorned with a small smirk, but something about it was off — there was something inhuman in his visage.
“Quite the predicament you find yourself in,” the man continued, stumbling over the word predicament with an atypical stressing. “Your —” The man awkwardly paused to inhale “— former colleagues do not seem too… enthused.”
He was hallucinating, he was sure of it. He must have been cracked on the head the head by something. He glanced around the room, looking for evidence of the damage.
“I am… very real, Doctor Breen.”
He swallowed as the man continued staring at him.
“I come… offering you a trade — a favour for a favour. One you are really in —” The man breathed mid-sentence again “— no position to decline.”
Wallace recognised it for was it was: an ultimatum — an ultimatum given by a practical man, a man who could clearly get what he wanted and would not feel a drop of empathy while doing so. He stared at the door to his office again, a few deep breaths in and out.
But this thing was right.
“What — what would you have me do, in exchange f-for my survival?”
The man smiled inhumanly widely and stepped back. Wallace hadn’t realised how close the man had been, standing over him, until that point. He… wasn’t sure how it had happened. He tried to run the interaction through his head again.
Intersection
Wallace’s recollecting was cut short by the world vanishing is a flash of light. The colours of the nebula seemed muted as he came too, still seated in his suede chair. But soon the colours returned, the sight —
“Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary?”
The man walked around him, the briefcase missing from his hands. The man walked around him through thin air, walking on the void of space. Wallace looked down to find his chair was firmly planted on the ground on the edge of a cliff overlooking the void. He looked over his shoulder, but noticing the reality behind him he turned his chair until he faced a recognisable biome.
Bioluminescent fungi clinging to the floating masses of rock, red and purple alien grasses growing from almost every surface, patches of luminescent blue flowers, the long white sticky rope of an ambush predator descending from a rocky overhang. Looking up, he now knew the nebula was really the thinning between worlds, the bleed through of other realities. This was the borderworld, Xen.
He jumped out of his chair at the sight of a pack of houndeyes. But they didn’t move, frozen in time, unaware of the prey in their midst. He turned back to the man more unnatural than the frozen alien pack animals. He didn’t seem to even acknowledge the environs they stood in or the environs he was not standing on… he just stared.
The words suddenly registered, it had sounded like the being had quoted someone.
“My —” The man breathed again mid-sentence “— payment, Doctor, for your… survival, is quite simple: you will save your species from extinction,” he said as he kept walking over the void and back onto Xen’s solid ground, circling around him.
Wallace’s mind raced at the statement; what could he do to save the human race? Would he stop the invasion by Xen lifeforms, was… Xen an existential threat to humanity? Could he be handed the knowledge to undo all this? A device that could undo the resonance cascade?
Superposition
The world flashed again in blinding light. As he tried to blink away the ghost images on his retinas he came too in the shattered remains of a city, the world strangely dimmed despite the sun high in the sky. Looking up, Wallace recognised that the sun was muted behind dust high in the atmosphere.
Realising the implications of that, he turned back to the city. It was clearly once a city on the coast; the rusting hulks of ships bottomed out in the sand could be seen in the distance, centuries of garbage exposed on the sea floor… where the sea had retreated far into the distance.
The city itself though was just ash and shattered rubble. Rubble that had been shattered again and again into dust.
“This is in the future — a —” another breath “— possible future.”
He turned in shock, surveying the landscape. There was nothing; no person, no animal, no standing structure but… a Corinthian order, a pillar of marble, a staple of high classical architecture, standing alone amongst the rubble, canted slightly forward. Atop it was some more jagged marble and four letters: “NEW Y” in gold lettering. It was all that was left of the New York Stock Exchange — all that was left of one of the world’s busiest cities. Maybe ten million people had once lived within twenty miles of this point.
There was a rumble, a deep sounding horn in the distance. A solitary seagull took flight. It seemed to be New York’s lone seagull.
Looking south towards the sound, he couldn’t make out the structure in the distance; a black building cresting the horizon, a cloud of smoke or steam bellowing from the top. But, he didn’t need too; he watched out of the corner of his eye as the man smirked again.
A doorway opened, pure white, before it swallowed the universe. There were indiscernible flashes of light before the doorways was in front of him again. It narrowed and vanished, and he quickly found himself on what he thought was the south end of Staten Island, overlooking the remains of New Jersey, in front of a massive factory of black metal on the bay. There was a symbol painted on its side, hundreds of feet tall, in the shape of a meteor plummeting through the atmosphere in a dark yellow colour — or maybe it was of a spanner turning a bolt... There were several enormous pipes leading out to the ocean in the distance, but he couldn’t discern what the factory was for.
“What did this, how did this happen?” he asked desperately.
“Who did this is the Combine, and how is they exterminated your species.”
The being didn’t seem phased by the statement it had made; he discussed species wide genocide like one might discuss the weather over some coffee. His tone matched his veneer.
“And Xen? Are they from Xen?”
“No.” Wallace thought he could see an inkling of malice in the man’s expression. “Ironically the… denizens of Xen are refugees… fleeing the Combine.”
It was an interesting realisation; in a way Wallace could see that, he could see why they had been so hostile, why they had never tolerated any attempts at contact, and why they might try to come to Earth at the first opportunity, if this was anything like the fate bestowed upon them.
“So, I’m to stop them?”
The man chuckled; it was not a nice sound.
“There is no stopping the Combine, Doctor Breen.” he replied, gesturing widely. “Your planet’s —” another breath “— path was decided the moment Doctor Freeman entered the test chamber.”
Wallace’s eyes widened in realisation.
“The sample you gave us!” he roared.
The being didn’t even react to his words, his accusation of instigation, of perfidy.
“The Combine will come — sooner that you perhaps expect — and they cannot be stopped. Humanity can —” a breath “— only surrender or be reduced to ashes.”
State
There was another flash of light. He found himself in space again, a… Dyson Sphere was being constructed in the distance around a star. The distant star was occluded, but some light still peeked through patches in the shell as it was slowly formed. It was an astronomical achievement in every sense of the word; a feat that was thousands or possibly millions of years ahead of humanity.
He suddenly noticed the railing he held in a white knuckled grip; cold steel, flaking red paint, rust stains running down the welded plate. It was evidence of many years of water damage... in the vacuum of space. Turning, he realised he was on the bow of a ship… an ocean-going ship, in deep in space, orbiting an alien star an impossible distance from earth — and distance might even be a null quantity if he wasn’t even in the same reality.
BOREALIS
He stared at the words stencilled in white lettering above the bridge, reading them over and over again… it was that ship.
Wallace noticed something; his eyes jumping to one of the many windows that lined the bridge. He thought for a moment he had seen the sudden gleam of glasses reflecting the light of the distant star, a figure standing in the window, watching this exchange. But that was ludicrous, it was completely ludicrous to think that any life existed on this ship, in the cold vacuum… except for himself. His thoughts faltered.
Turning around he found the mysterious man standing to the side, watching. His face strangely pleasant, but some undercurrent made it unsettling, made worse by their unnatural locale. It was difficult to imagine a human not being phased by the location.
“This is not —” a breath “— your present, but in… astronomical terms, it is… close enough.”
Wallace turned back to the Dyson Sphere.
“This… is the Combine?” he asked, gesturing at the construct.
“A —” another breath “— part.”
The message silently passed was inevitability. They were… insects in the face of this power, this capability. Insects so trivial that why would this Combine even bother to look where they were placing their boot? It was a very good question and he started to have an inkling of a suspicion.
“Why are they called the Combine?” he asked, suspecting the answer was in the name.
The being gave a single chuckle and smirked.
“It is… n-not a name they give themselves, but it is interesting that a —” another breath “— hundred-thousand worlds, in a hundred-thousand realities would c-come to the same… conclusion.”
No, not insects; wolves.
Wallace could remember the story he had heard in a biology lecture he had taken for extra credit all those years ago. The tales of the wolves that tens of thousands of years ago came begging for scraps from primitive humans, cautiously approaching the light of the campfire. But humans lived on the edge of survival then, and only the most useful and most obedient wolves would be fed.
Any wolf that made the mistake of biting the hand that fed them would be driven out into the night, forever watching, unaware of why they were denied, and killed if they dared to offer dissent, to upset the… order imposed.
Only the wolves that could be correctly shaped — the wolves with the correct temperament and skills to be useful to man would survive. And then they stopped being wolves, they became something else.
Except this time humanity was not the master, but the fearful creature in the dark, daring to approach the campfire. Either humanity would submit willingly, or they would bare their teeth, demonstrating their unwillingness to make themselves useful to this Combine.
Trouble, and humanity risked being reduced to a footnote, only remembered by archivists and archaeologists — and that assumed the Combine even cared for the ash heap of history.
He turned back and stared out across the solar system at the alien construct. He momentarily wondered if this was another frozen reality, another plaything of this being, or if he was really orbiting the star at several kilometres per second. But at astronomical distances the human eye could not make out even those sorts of speeds without weeks of effort, of observations and of recording.
Wallace could see that pinpricks of light through the gaps in the partially constructed Dyson Sphere seemed to twinkle, suggesting the latter, but he couldn’t trust his eyes anymore.
“Are you a member of the Combine? Do you work for them?” he asked suddenly, turning the face the man again.
The being chuckled again.
“The Combine and —” another breath “— my Employers are not… friends.”
The man smiled again as he finished; it seemed satisfied by the conclusions he had made. Wallace was beginning to think the man’s eyes actually glowed, an unnatural shade of green visible against the blackness of space.
A mercenary perhaps, finding new worlds for this Combine, leading them to Earth, breaking down the barriers between that separated them? Or perhaps much worse, that Earth was the new stomping grounds of a proxy war between the Combine and his Employers, two interdimensional superpowers that cared little for the collateral damage wrought?
He lacked the context to truly make an informed decision — a literal outside-context problem. He simply could not be sure of alien logic, of alien reasoning, or of their motivations, or that they had any human notions at all. Glancing again at the man, Wallace knew his only interaction with sapient alien life had certainly confirmed that belief.
Still, knowing you were out of depth — awareness of your inadequacy — was better than being in over your head and overestimating your own ability.
“So, you want me to negotiate the peace, negotiate humanity’s surrender? Show our…” he gestured as he considered the worlds. “… suitability for integration into the Combine?”
The lack of context was grating; why did a possible enemy of this Combine want it to grow stronger, to claim new worlds, to claim new stocks of useful biodiversity? Did he perhaps believe the Combine would get bogged down here somehow — a ploy to slow the enemy down? Or maybe he felt humanity could contribute in some way to the Combine that would weaken them or reduce their desire for subjugation — reduce their desire to enforce their will on other worlds?
But then again, Wallace realised, it wasn’t the Combine that had opened the door for hostile alien life to ravage his facility, to kill his staff and to enter Earth’s biosphere. It wasn’t the Combine that made humanity known to a hostile alien power, weakened the barriers separating them and enabled them to step through.
“I a-assume the agreement is suitable to you, Doctor? If you wish I can —” a breath “— always return you to your office at Black Mesa.”
Wallace’s eyes narrowed at the man. There was no real choice, an arbitrary imposition if you will.
“Yes, the terms are acceptable,” he replied, mustering all the surety he could.
Convergence
The world flashed again and he found himself on a street. Six tall Corinthian orders stood in front of him, superimposed on a white marble building. Jutting out between them were three flag poles, the Stars and Stripes frozen in the wind.
Looking around, the street was populated by hundreds of frozen people, and the air by frozen pigeons and seagulls. He wouldn’t call the location familiar, but he knew his way around New York well enough.
Turning, he spotted a newspaper stand only a short distance away. He could already see the full front-page image of blue and white, a portal far larger than he could ever have imagined hovering over a clearly terrestrial landscape of a boreal forest before he began to step closer. The words “PORTAL STORM?” lined the bottom of the page. The newspaper next to it was a broadsheet, the front page featuring a smaller copy of the same image, but accompanied by walls of text.
He reached out for it. As his hand grasped the paper, he found he was slightly shocked to be able to interact with this frozen world at all.
“PORTAL STORMS” CONTINUE TO CAUSE HAVOK ACROSS THE GLOBE
RECORD BULL ENDS AS MARKETS REACH RECESSION TERRITORY IN FACE OF “PORTAL” UNCERTAINTY
He wasn’t sure how things had moved so quickly; it hadn’t been even half a day since —
He glanced at the date: May 24th. Six days… It had been six days since… everything went to Hell.
“Strange —” a breath “— isn’t it, how time can c-change, Doctor?”
He shot around to find the man far further away that he should have been to whisper those words in his ear. For the first time Wallace noticed the Black Mesa logo adorning the man’s briefcase. His eyes narrowed: he wasn’t sure if it was mocking or just part of the cover of this malevolent alien entity. He had nothing to say to the thing’s games.
“I —” a breath “— do not believe you require… handholding, so I believe this is where I get off.”
There was another inhuman smile before he turned and stepped through a rapidly appearing doorway. Wallace watched as it went from a rectangle to a thin beam of white nothingness before vanishing completely. There was maybe two or three seconds before he could hear a loud rushing noise as the world started moving again.
It was… familiar. The sounds of people, of the wind. But, hidden underneath he could feel an undercurrent of fear, of uncertainty. Black Mesa was echoing across the world… and the many universes layered upon each other.
He had to wonder if this was psychosis, a breakdown — insanity telling him he had been the Administrator of Black Mesa, and that he was carried across time and space by an alien entity posing as a human. He held the newspaper up again, and started to read the —
“Hey you! You gonna buy that?”
Wallace tensed and slowly turned to the proprietor. He… did have his wallet on him he realised as he dug it out of his jacket’s inner pocket. Opening his wallet he paused momentarily at the Black Mesa ID and security badge he had stored between the two folded halves, his own face looking up at him. Behind it was a folded photograph. Wallace shook the thought out of his head and handed the man a five, turning and walking away before he could get any change.
Conservation
Wallace took a seat at a café overlooking Upper Bay. He had been here several times before, the location not being far from a number of government buildings he had dealt with regularly.
He had seen further signs of tension as he walked to the familiar café; police on higher alert, a tension in the air difficult to put into words, and finally a street blocked off as a SWAT team in the distance waering NBC equipment inspected something biological and dangerous laying obscured on the ground.
The young lady took his order and he continued reading his paper. The death toll seemed staggering just from these portal storms alone. He didn’t see any direct statements about Xenian life but there were reports of strange sightings. For once he feared the broadsheet was too reputable — too reputable to buy into nonsense tales of alien life, even in the face of dozens of massive portals floating over Earth.
They had started two days after the accident, appearing at random intervals, sometimes lasting minutes and sometimes lasting indefinitely. The one pictured over freezing boreal forest was in Alaska, having formed over Anchorage with the death of nearly every inhabitant before drifting east over the continent. There were rumours that they were the result of a scientific accident, but none yet named the US or Black Mesa. The other theory was some sort of superweapon let off by an unknown group, a weapon more terrifying than any nuclear bomb. It was surreal that even the second theory was correct in its own way.
He flipped the broadsheet over to read the lower half the page before he dropped the newspaper in shock.
NUCLEAR EXPLOSION IN NEW MEXICO CONFIRMED TO HAVE HAPPENED AT BLACK MESA RESEARCH FACILITY — “SUPERMASSIVE” PORTAL LATER FORMED OVER SITE
No picture accompanied the small story. An unexplained nuclear explosion in the United States was still front-page news, but the portal storms had actually managed to eclipse it.
He… wasn’t sure how he felt. He had expected deaths, many many deaths as he had sat in his office. But people would escape, the HECU would rescue the living still left behind, the Xenian creatures inside the facility would be hunted down and destroyed.
He quickly read the first few lines looking for a date: the early morning of the 18th, less than 48 hours before it had all begun, long before the HECU could have cleared the facility, and long before anyone but the most quick-footed could have escaped.
There were so many faces, young and old, that he could imagine. Everyone from veteran scientists he had known personally for decades to the young and recently graduated men and women who would tremble as he made his inspections through the facility. Scientist’s families too; wives, husbands, sons and daughters — so many had lived at Black Mesa.
It was a strange feeling to know most of your colleagues were probably dead, that you too would have been if not for the intervention of that thing. And that thing had started it all.
Wallace could feel anger coursing through his veins and he read the title over and over again. Anger as the casual disregard for his employee’s lives, anger at the being that set-in motion the chain of events that led to it. Anger at the lack of reason, the lack of explanation for why they had been thrown away as collateral. Anger at the sheer gall afterwards to tell him what he had to do, to ultimate to him, to effectively demand his compliance.
His stewing was broken by the young lady returning with the entrée.
If this Combine came, he hoped they would be able to answer his questions, that they could tell him why, and that they could tell him what that thing was.
The Combine.
The food in his mouth tasted dry and stale at the thought. It should have been delicious — he knew it was delicious — but the Combine were a terrifying thought. He had no illusions about them; whatever they would do would change humanity, make them unrecognisable and distort them so utterly that the very nature of humanity would change. There was no resistance that could be offered and he would have to keep the hot-headed fools that would choose to fight on regardless of the consequences at bay. He would have to show them the error, show them inevitability of utter Combine victory. Any misstep on his or someone else’s part and humanity would be crushed, its people, its cities and its culture reduced to ash.
But it was better than extinction, better than human finality. They would make the best of it, he would do his utmost to get the best deal he could for humanity and he would show the Combine how valuable an unmutilated humanity could be to them, the things he could achieve, the things he had already achieved.
And then… he would watch for this inhuman monster, watch for what boulder it had dislodged to roll down the mountain, what disadvantage was inflicted on his Employer’s enemies by humanity’s compliance. He would watch and then he would thwart whatever the being had planned — thwart the being, as it wasn’t the Combine that had brought ruin to Black Mesa and humanity; it had done it, and a being who had done that was no friend of humanity.
He wasn’t a military man, but he had managed many projects over his career so he figured it would be months or maybe a few years before the Combine arrived. The sheer number of men and equipment needed to invade a world was monumental, it would take time to organise it all, to prepare and to plan.
But…
“… sooner that you perhaps expect …” he remembered, the strange inflections echoing in his mind.
And he had expected months to years, so if the being had not been lying it could be anything from… this very moment to months, perhaps. It was a grim thought, with the lack of time to prepare, to influence minds, to insert himself into the discourse, to be ready.
His lunch soon came and he did his best to eat in peace, some thought devoted to how best to approach this problem, of where to start, of who he should begin speaking to. He wasn’t sure how he would explain his survival — maybe he could rely on the fact that all records of him being at Black Mesa that morning were likely gone with the facility?
He paid for his meal and left the restaurant. He could feel something off looking out over the bay. He wasn’t sure what until a few moments later when the first pinpricks of light formed in the sky; a nascent portal. A few other stopped and stared, some with fear in their eyes, but most had not yet noticed the signs.
Wallace had little doubt unspeakable evil would be committed by the Combine when they soon arrived, but he hoped people would understand why he did this, understand that there was no other choice, that death of the human species was not an option.
Remembering it, he opened his wallet and pulled out the photograph. It was creased down the middle, the “best” photograph of the several taken of he and the staff of Anomalous Materials. He had told the photographer it satisfied him and to distribute copies to his office and the Anomalous Materials team. He didn’t have much need for his wallet while at Black Mesa, but carried it anyway. The first copy of the photo — this copy, he had forgotten in his wallet a few days before the accident.
There was Walter, Isaac, Eli, Magnusson and him at the centre. He hadn’t realised it at the time but even Isaac’s protégé Doctor Freeman was there standing over Isaac’s shoulder. Of Freeman, Wallace was certain he had perished mercifully quickly at the centre of this catastrophe; just the amount of energy involved all but guaranteed it. It had likely also claimed the lives of Isaac and Eli.
More heads turned as the nascent portal expanded rapidly, a huge disk of plasma as the air was ionised by electrons stripped off matter where the portal intersected with other worlds in Calabi–Yau space. There were shouts and screams — shouts of superportal, of fears of a malevolent unnatural force tearing through New York. But no; Wallace knew at this moment that this portal was a deliberate construct of the Combine, that this was their entry point. He was proven right a few moments later as the first alien aircraft entered Earth’s atmosphere.
As he thought back to his colleagues, he felt certain they would understand what he was about to do, the need to prevent more loss of life, to prevent extinction. Walter, Isaac, Eli, Magnusson, Doctor Freeman and countless others had already lost their lives, and more would follow. But Wallace knew in his heart what had to be done to curtail the rivers of blood.