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Aubrey

Twenty Years Later.

Irun my hand through my wet hair, applying the grey dye carefully.

I’m sixty-four years old. Luckily, in the age of botox and plastic surgery, I can simply pretend I spent money not to look like it.

My one subterfuge is the hint of grey in my hair – a subtle touch that instantly makes me look older.

If I don’t add that touch of grey? I still look and feel thirty-two.

I know now for a certainty that I can get back to those three men. I’ve been stuck back here on Earth for three decades; and I haven’t aged a day.

It’s fate. Destiny. I came back from their world inexorably altered, and deep down I know that means we’ll be together again. Me, and my three Aurelian warriors.

Together, we’ll be complete.

John Gold passed away six years ago. Since then, I’ve been calling the shots completely, and my firm has become the country’s powerhouse in alternative energy.

Then, I moved into politics.

President Marigold Landels shakes my hand. “You’ve shown incredible promise, and I feel confident putting you on as our Secretary of Defense. This is an age of peace, and an age in which the best defense is found from energy sovereignty.”

“Thank you, Madame President,” I reply, keeping a grave expression on my face as I accept the honor.

I got my security clearance a year ago. If they interviewed my therapist, she didn’t tell them jack shit to stop my chances for success. Thank God therapy is more normalized in this day and age.

I take my office in the West Wing of the most important building in the world, and instantly staffers start pouring in with requests.

I ask for information on the energy projects. They send me a huge list of projects, and all it takes is a “control f” for the term “orb” and my search comes up with the project I’d been chasing after all this time.

Given that its taken me twenty years to get this far – twenty years of scheming, subterfuge, determination and grit – I find it ironic that I find what I’m looking for within twenty seconds of taking my seat at that desk in Washington DC.

A top-secret, classified energy program…

…based off materials recovered from a meteor crash in 2003.

The staffers and executives are stunned when my first actions as Secretary of Defense aren’t to review our troop levels, visit our bases overseas, or discuss new military technology.

Instead, the same day I take office, I order a plane to take me to that particular energy project for a tour.

It’s top-secret. Classified.

But I’m the goddamn Secretary of Defense.

The same day as I take office, I achieve the goal I’d worked at diligently for the past twenty years. I knew that all I needed to do was get in, and I’d find it. I take an executive plane and I see it for myself.

I am going to see the Orb. It sounds so crazy, but it’s going to.

The project has been running for nearly forty years now – forgotten by most of the government. The site is stunned when the Secretary of Defense herself makes a surprise visit. The scientists who meet me at the gate are full of smiles, eager to show off decades of work that they’d assumed had been lost and forgotten, as happens to so many government projects. Along with a scientist, a high ranking military general stands silently watching me. My coming here must have triggered some alarm in the military structure of the government.

But they have no idea.