Prologue

O800

The tech observed the status of the systems across the board, hunched over his counsel, waiting for the signal. The loud speaker overhead spoke:

"Temporal locks engaged."

"Subject 318 is secured in the chamber."

The tech glanced up from his screen to look over at the lead scientist. "Ma'am, um, this is just a test run right? We don't need the subject from cold storage for this."

The scientist smiled at the obvious discomfort of the tech, her project had that effect on these computer geeks. "We do not need it in there, but we better get used to waking it and bring into the chamber in standby mode, relax this is the future of space exploration, we will all be famous one day."

The tech nodded, "Ok Ma'am, the Golem's neural net is in standby and ready to interface."

The scientist checked the board and smiled; "perfect." She stepped into the command chair and lowered the helmet on to her head. "Let's start at 5% awareness shall we?"

Dizziness swept over her for a brief moment, she had the distinct feeling of being in two places at once. "Damn! this is odd, increase it to 10% and dim my awareness to 60%."

"Will do Ma'am." The tech said fiddling with the controls.

Her dizziness increased, she could then see she was in the test chamber. Slowly she lifted her head, "yes!" she was in the Golem. It was working and stable. When she shut her eyes she could see the outside where her real body was. It took a minute for her to focus and speak with her real body. "This is so great Ted, you have to try this. I can feel everything, it's like I am the Golem."

The tech laughed. "No thanks Ma'am. With the detail to genetics you put into it and the gender choice I think I'll pass on it, perhaps on the mark 2? Now Ma'am, today's test is to see if the signal will pass through the event horizon and be stable. We will open the wormhole to our moon base now."

The lights in the chamber dimmed as the generators routed power to the gravity well. The scientist could see the beginnings of their stable wormhole forming. "Ted, all appears to be fine at this end. I can make out the base. I am going to step through once it stays solid."

Elsewhere on the base 0700

The group of terrorists had been paid by a rival company to sabotage the test site. The managers of that company believed in manned exploration of space, not robotic. The terrorists had already taken out the guards on the perimeter and set explosives on the farthest generator when the test had started.

Back to the lab.

"Doc, we are getting some weird readings from the generators."

Just then an explosion rocked the base, Ted heard a scream from inside the test chamber. "Ma'am, there was a massive power surge right now. Are you ok in there?"

The scientist got off the floor to walk to the chamber window, she gave the tech the thumbs up, she looked at her body and from there she could see the read out was fine. "Everything seems to be ok, what took out the gennys? Power down the test and get me out of here..."

The sentence was interrupted by the lab door being blown open and five masked men with machine guns bursting through it, they didn't wait to open fire at everybody in the room.

The scientist watched from in the Golem as her own body was ripped to shreds, as well as that of her assistant and lab tech. The terrorists had been told to destroy all prototypes and computers they could.

The Golem in the chamber howled with rage, having watched her body die, she began to pound on the chamber door, never being designed to release from the inside. The terrorists opened fire on the chamber, to little effect. What neither the Golem nor the terrorist noticed was the cascade failure of the wormhole. The explosion that followed leveled the lab.

It would be weeks before the story would be figured out. The terrorists had killed the lab personnel and rigged the generators to blow, the resulting unstable wormhole collapse killed everyone on site. Dr. Sumner was declared dead and her Golem project was shut down.