Kingdom Gone

THE PAST'S PRESENT

The lights come on.

So far, Nijah has been directing us through the dark, but Sam must've got the generator online, because all the monitors blinked online as well. We were in a large room, half filled with things you'd find in a medieval times museum, like a suit of armor and flags. The half we were on was mainly empty, except for a few scattered televisions and a big ass monitor atop a console covered with dimly lit buttons and a dusty keyboard.
"I wonder why they bought out an entire castle just to store a couple of servers." I say, booting up the computer.

"A moat beats a firewall anyday." Nijah responds, digging through an old box full of wires.

The big monitor lights up, and a logo spins in its center. Black setup screens pop in and out, the twenty year old computer heating up, then the screen turns blue, with one sentence in pixely white text floating in the middle.

DNA verification required.

A device lights up on the console, green lights surrounding and hand shaped recess. I stare at it quizzically.

"Jason." Circe says, holding my arm. I turn and see where she's looking, Sam walking into the room.

With an Eighth Kingdom soldier beside her.

"Sam watch out!" I yell, whipping out one of my secondaries.

"No!" Sam cries, blocking the soldier with her arm. "He's a friend."

Nijah sniffs the air. "What the hell?"

The two walk over and my jaw drops.

It's the guy from the boat.

I couldn't tell at first, but when I pictured the thick facial hair, and took away the starched uniform, it was definitely him.

"I believe you all deserve an introduction." The man says, voice still old and grovely. "I am Thomas Quincy. Also famously known as Detective Q."

What. The. Fuck.

"Well this adventure just keeps getting weirder and weirder, doesn't it?" Nijah says, sitting down on the floor.

"On the contrary, my dear. I've been a part of this journey since the very beginning. The very beginning."

In this moment, I finally place his voice, realizing why it sounded familiar when I heard back on the boat. "It was you, wasn't it? All those years ago?"

He gives me a silent nod, and then lightning flashes through the window on the outward wall, and I swear during that millisecond I saw the hat and trench coat. "I set you on this path, Jason. All of you, actually."

My eyes widen. "Sam's anonymous investor? Nijah's drug guy?"

"All me. For a very specific purpose."

"And what purpose is that exactly?" Nijah asks, standing. "You after the nuke schematics too?"

He looks us over. "Yes. But not to take them. I'm here to destroy them, and all remnants of the experiments in nuclear technology done by the Tenth Kingdom."

Circe stares at him. "How do you about this? About the schematics? About us?"

Detective Q shifts his gaze to me. "Because I knew his mother."

No one says a word. My stomach bunches in knots, the mention of my past freezing me up.

When he realizes no one was going to respond, he spoke. "You all know about me. About how I exposed the experiments being conducted by Posterum a few decades ago, and what many don't know is that I discovered the creation of the nuke, 20 years ago. But not in time. I knew I could've stopped it, saved this Kingdom, if I had been quicker. But I didn't, so after what occurred, I went into hiding." He clears his throat. "During my investigation into the experiments, I discovered that the pair who ran the company were married. Parents, of a sweet young girl who was no more than 12 years old. Before I busted them, I made sure their daughter would be taken care of, put in a good home, and would go to the best school. I kept track of her for a few years, but as my reputation grew, I lost contact. It wasn't until I was hired by the First Kingdom military to investigate the Tenth Kingdom's research projects that she came back into my life." Detective Q looks at me. "I confirmed the resurrection of Prosterum's experiments, being conducted by the Tenth Kingdom. And led, by none other than the little girl from ten years prior. Though, then she wasn't a girl anymore, and she had followed directly in her parent's footsteps." He closes his eyes. "I did my job. I found out about her research, about the nuclear bomb, but she must've caught on that I wasn't in town just to catch up, and had the bomb relocated. And right after I forwarded my information back to my clients, the bomb went off." A single tear crawls down the old man's cheek, then he opens his eyes and looks me right in the eye. "The girl was your mother, Jason."
I flinch. The words physically hurt, hurt more than any punch I've ever taken. I didn't believe it. I didn't want to. "Bullshit."

"I wish it didn't happen the way it did, Jason, but it did. She escaped the explosion, made her way south, and I couldn't find her after that. But after years of digging, I finally discovered that she had died, but left a son, in an orphanage in the Third Kingdom."

I want to cry, my chest feeling like a black hole, slowly eating away at my insides. "Why. . ."

Detective Q walks up to me and hugs me, and suddenly I'm the 10 year old back in the orphanage, staring at Sister Melani's dead body under the bed. "I found out everything about your mother's work, Jason. I knew a few of her facilities survived the explosion, but all of her projects of this classification required her specific genome to unlock. The same genome you carry in your blood." He steps back. "If you don't believe me, unlock the computer."

I stare into space for the longest time, burning everything he just said into memory. I gasp, snapping out of it, and looking at everyone. "Sam, bind him."

Sam is hesitant at first, but eventually walks over to one of the boxes of technical junk, grabs a fistful of circuits and opens her arm, revealing the complexity within. After a bit of tinkering, her arm lights back up, and grabs the Detective's wrists.

I look at Nijah. "Are there any explosives or hidden traps?"

She cocks her head and sniffs. "Not that I can detect. Why?"

I'm still breathing hard, but I walk over to the console and look back at the old man. "I believe you, Detective. But there are too many unanswered questions. Like how did you find us here? Or why are you a part of the Eighth Kingdom military? But we'll have time for that later." I put my hand on the device, and it glows. I feel a slight prick and jerk my hand back, but the screen lights up, and reveals a desktop. The words "Hello, Dr. Landing" crawl along an info bar on the bottom of the screen, confirming it.

My mother destroyed the Tenth Kingdom.

Sam passes the Detective over to Nijah and goes to work on the keyboard. She scans through every application and document on the hard drive. After a few minutes, she finds what she's looking for. "Alright, this is it. Everything related your mother's, I mean, Dr. Landing's experiments can be accessed through this portal. If I can cook up a nasty virus via my arm's mobile computer, it should erase all the data in the servers downstairs."

While Sam types thing's on her arm's interface, a light blinks on the screen. She looks up and clicks it, reading the information as it loads in. "A warehouse just south of here was accessed four minutes ago."

"By whom?" I ask, leaning in to read the screen.

Sam looks at me. "It was accessed by your mother."