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Hayward's Reach
All posts tagged Hayward's Reach
Suicide Seed
Posted by Ebonstorm on May 25, 2013
Posted in: Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: ebonstorm, Hayward's Reach, Mehta, mercenary, Monsanto, mushrooms, population decline, Russia, seeds, South America, Thaddeus Howze. 2 Comments
a tale of Hayward's Reach
Stephanie Mehta woke Thursday morning to her clock radio in her tiny apartment in the Russian city of Moscow. It was little more than a room with a kitchen and bathroom. She shuffled around slowly until she got her bearings. She was a diminutive Indian woman in her early thirties, with clear skin, long hair, and full lips. Her mother always wondered what was holding up her grandchildren when she had a daughter as beautiful as she was. Just another thing they had to fight about.
Her Russian Blue, Fedya, hopped up onto the counter and nuzzled her, releasing a tiny squeak, indicating his hope for breakfast, sooner rather than later. She nuzzled him back, and stroked him absently while she tried to remember what there was to eat in her apartment. She knew not to look in the half-height refrigerator, because she had not had anything fresh enough to require refrigeration in quite some time.
The tiny markets on the outskirts of Moscow had been bringing in less food in the last few years. Farmers were complaining about reduced harvests, and no one seemed to have any idea why the crops were getting smaller and smaller. Stephanie had taken to growing potatoes in the corner of her apartment from the eyes of earlier generations she had scavenged, and had been successful in managing their growth. Her apartment did not have much, but sunlight was in abundance.
"Sorry, little one, it looks like potatoes again." His tiny reply seemed resigned to potatoes, and he ate them with vigor. "I promise to bring you something that looks like meat from the hospital tonight."
Stephanie washed up quickly, trying not to use up her allotment of water for the day. Water shortages had become all too frequent since she came here eight years ago to start her residency. She opted to come to Russia because so many of her people started moving north as the rising sea levels drove many Indians into Rangapur. Her mother suggested she move to Russia because of the growing economic prosperity there.
She had since informed her mother that economic prosperity was relative. Yes, Russia was doing better in some ways, and worse in others. For example, India had more doctors, but Russia had more hospitals. If she didn't hurry she would be late for her shift. Fortunately she lived in a barracks arrangement right next to the Municipal Hospital No. 15, and it only took her fifteen minutes to walk across the overpass into the main hospital courtyard.
The hospital was busy, people everywhere, babies crying, staff bustling about trying their best to tend to patients. As she danced through the crowds, patients touched her white coat and asked her questions. She tried not to stand still lest she be overrun. They needed to go through the brief paperwork at the desk before they could be seen. She would see as many today as her supervisor would let her.
She was technically a full doctor, but her supervisor had been reluctant to sign off on her paperwork because it kept her with him here at Fifteen. She would have been upset if she hadn't loved her job so much, even with the lack of resources, the constant rush of patients, the government interference, or any of a number of other issues. She wasn't just a doctor, she was a healer; she wanted to find out how to help as many people as possible.
Ekantika Das was her last patient of the day, and she agreed to take her from her supervisor, Helmut Baum, who had been on for three days straight. Mrs. Das looked tired, strained. She was probably borderline malnourished and dehydrated, like most people were these days. The rains had been less frequent, and the summer was one of the hottest on record.
"What brings you in, Mrs. Das?"
She began tentatively. "Doctor Baum scheduled me to come and see him a few weeks after my miscarriage." Stephanie had looked briefly at the record and saw that she had three miscarriages in less than two years. Each happened earlier and earlier during her term.
"I would like to run a series of tests to see how you are doing, and when I am done, we will see what we can do. Do you still want to have children?" Many women, if they find they cannot carry to term, these days opt just to give up.
"Yes, desperately. My husband and I work as part of a collective on the outskirts of town, trying to turn older buildings into hydroponic structures to supplement food output for the greater Moscow area. We are recently wed, and would like to have children since neither of us is getting any younger."
"I understand. These tests will take less than a week, so I will send you an email to schedule your visit."
"Namaste, Doctor."
The rest of the week was uneventful, and there was even a slowdown at the hospital. Patients were always reluctant to come to hospitals these days since the number of cases of MRSA had risen in the last twenty years. Over-use of antibiotics had caused the rise in the resistant disease strains. People needed hospitals more than ever, but were reluctant to come there with the risk of catching a nearly incurable disease while being served.
Later that week, when she got the test results, they were unusual, but she could not put her finger on why. She went back and checked Dr. Baum's records. He had made some notes about fertility issues in several of his patients, so she kept working. Something about it seemed strange to Stephanie. In a momentary lull, she went down to the primitive records databases and made some soft queries using the records of the female population of child bearing ages at the hospital. After a few dozen questions, she made a startling discovery. The number of births at the hospital and in the area in general had dramatically dropped, far below the statistical average. She thought she had done something wrong and double-checked her queries.
These numbers could not be right. This would be a thirty percent reduction in live births in less than a ten year period. Stephanie was tired. She assumed she had made a mistake and planned to run the check from home once she was settled.
Fedya was enjoying his purloined sirloin and wrestled mightily with it. It was mostly scrap from the senior doctor's kitchen, but that mattered little to him. His gusto gave Stephanie a warm glow while she studied the data now from the fourteen nearby hospitals.
She couldn't understand why no one had noticed it before now, but the more she looked at it, the more she could see the scale of this issue. But she would need more information and likely some corroboration with some colleagues, possibly in London. With the new civil war in the U.S., she wasn't likely to get much data except from the neutral states like California or Oregon. So she prepared a data package for a variety of hospitals and sent it off. Immediately, she received an instant message.
GreenMachine: You are in danger.
Dr. Mehta: Excuse me?
GreenMachine: There is not much time. Can you meet me in an hour at this net address?
Dr. Mehta: Who are you?
Greenmachine: This address is secure, but you cannot be at your apartment. I have slowed the trace, but they will find you in twenty-four hours. Pack a bag. Now hurry.
Dr. Mehta: I can't leave my cat.
Greenmachine: Then take him with you, but for God's sake, hurry. Now get to the coffee shop, and we will give you further instructions.
Dr. Mehta: I have no intention of leaving home on the say-so of some unknown IM.
Greenmachine: You have discovered a reduction in birthrates in the area hospitals where you work. You have checked this against local hospitals in the Russian datasphere. You find the information able to be confirmed with an 87% accuracy. Tomorrow you will receive data clusters from your points in London, New Delhi, Mexico, Canada, Brazil. You will see that this trend or worse had happened across the globe. How am I doing?
Dr. Mehta: How do you know I did all this?
Greenmachine: GO TO THE COFFEE SHOP. NOW.
The IM client connection vanished, and she sat up in disbelief. Putting her data key into her pocket, she grabbed her night bag and packed two changes of clothing, her level 1 Medical ID, and all the money she kept in the house. She barely spent any, so she should have plenty available.
She dropped Fedya off at a friendly neighbor's with a generous bribe of her latest potato crop and some cash in the event she was gone longer than a few days. Fedya complained the entire time until she gave him his favorite squeaky toy. Dame Romanov agreed to take care of him. She had always liked him and said he would have plenty of mice to keep his belly full.
When she got to the coffee shop, the terminals were empty because it was near midnight. When the late shift came on, the place would fill up, but that would not be for another hour or so. She sat down and put on the wireless ear buds sitting in the sonic cleanser.
As soon as she plugged in her data-key, a video image appeared. The man sitting in the video was in a laboratory with a single tech working in the background. He was wearing a full bio-suit, so his face was obscured, but she could see this was a real lab with real equipment, not a stage. "Doctor, you have discovered something Consanko does not want known. Birthrates all over the world are declining due to the interactions of a genetic manipulation called 'suicide seeds.'
"This technology was designed thirty years ago as a means of controlling food production on Earth. Seeds were being designed to fail to produce a new generation of seeds so Consanko would become the sole provider of seeds as it cornered the market on genetic seed materials all over the planet.
"Once they had patented nearly all of the food crops on the planet, they gathered the genetic materials, mapped the genomes, and proceeded to alter the seed products to ensure no seed would be produced by the resultant plants. People would have to pay every season. Needless to say, Consanko grew fabulously rich.
"As scientists had predicted, monocultures would be a problem when blight, insects or disease struck, but Consanko had variants it saved for that occasion, and their wealth continued to grow until this very day. But I noticed there was a corresponding effect in animal populations that ate seeds created from these plants. They became increasingly sterile. You have now learned the other secret: that it is affecting us as well. More slowly, but just as effectively."
The lab tech in the background seemed to be working hurriedly. The man in the front of the display held up a picture. "See this face? Memorize it. He is the person you are trying to find. When you look through our upload, you will find he knew about everything. Maybe he can help you find the answers you are looking for."
An explosion rocked the room. Smoke started coming from the ventilation shafts. "We don't have much time. That explosion was a trap set up in the ventilation. They won't try that route again. Our suits will protect us from the gas, but in a few minutes, they will up the ante and we won't survive. Our upload is on its way to you via our intelligent agent. We are destroying any trace of our information to give you as much lead time as possible. Doctor, we are sorry to involve you in this fashion, but we had lost hope that anyone would notice. We were going to leave our data to an intelligent agent and hope the first person who found it was as good as you are."
"What do you want me to do?" The sight of an arc cutter coming through the armored door showed their attacker's progress in the attempt to gain access.
"We want you to stop this. There must be a way to reverse it, some way to introduce our reproductive viability back into the species before it's lost completely. Our predictions say in thirty years, humanity and most animals will have lost any possibility of reproduction."
"I am not a geneticist. I wouldn't even know where to begin!" Mehta was feeling frantic as she watched the smoke grow thicker.
"We know you are not a geneticist, but you have other friends. It will take a team to solve this problem, the same way it took a corporation to cause it. We are out of time, Doctor. Godspeed."
End of transmission. End of recording. Agent instructed to your key codes. All resources are at your discretion.
This was a recording? "Agent, accept vocal input."
"Accepting."
"How long ago did this recording take place?"
"Two standard days ago."
"Then how were they answering my questions?"
"They weren't; they anticipated a variety of responses; I provided the interface adaptations. Doctors Lawrence and Cloverfield have been dead for forty-eight hours."
"How much time do I have before they come looking for me?"
"All temporal estimates are still accurate, as your information requests have been slowed but not stopped. In 24 hours, you will be apprehended, likely by Interpol or the Soviet police as an enemy terrorist. Recommendation: leave the country."
"And go where, pray tell?"
"To the coordinates left by the doctors."
"And where is that?"
"The coordinates on the map indicate a location inside the remaining Amazon jungle. It will require one, possibly two major airline flights, one charter flight, and likely six to ten hours of ground travel. You should begin now."
"I need to go back to my apartment. I am not ready for this."
"That path is not recommended."
"Let's see you stop me. Agent offline."
Stephanie did not know what she was seeing, but she was certain this was some elaborate practical joke. The shaky camera, the explosion, the shutoff of the camera seemed just too dramatic. When she got back to her building, several emergency vehicles were sitting outside. The lights were off, so whatever it was, it was already over. They were taking several bodies out on stretchers, and one of them had a grey cat lying on top of it. It looked like…
"Fedya!" The grey cat jumped down and ran through the street to Stephanie, and she suddenly realized who one of those bodies was. Showing her badge to the paramedic, she asked, "Show me the bodies."
When they pulled the covers back, the first was the delicate body of Dame Romanov. The second was Helmut Baum, her boss, her sometime lover, her friend. He had been shot in the head. Seeing him that way was like a physical blow to her system. She grew lightheaded and fell back into the arms of a strange man who had come up behind her.
"Do you know this man, Doctor?" The man's Russian was impeccable, and he looked like he could be a policeman or an inspector. His hands were strong, like a vise, and he literally held her up from falling. He was a giant wearing an ill fitting suit, as if they could barely find anything to cover him properly. He had a strong face, young looking, but his eyes were hard, sharp; they glittered like flint in the streetlights, the eyes of a man who had seen too much.
"His name is Doctor Helmut Baum." He was in apartment 17. Her apartment. Waiting for her. She said none of these things.
"I am Inspector Piotr Nikolayevich Rasputin, and I have a few questions for you. The first is where have you been for the last few hours?"
"I was at the coffee shop for the last two hours. Helmut was at the apartment waiting for me to get in. He had just come in from his shift. Can I sit down, Inspector?"
"Yes, of course."
"Do you know what happened?"
"They appear to have been assassinated. Do you know of any reason they might have been targeted?" Piotr had his own reasons, but he wanted hear hers first.
"No, I don't know why anyone would want to hurt him. He was a good doctor. He did not have any enemies." But Stephanie knew it wasn't true. She had logged in with his address a few days ago, because he was logged in and had a superior clearance. The first traces would have been on his account.
"I'm going to have to take you into the field office for questioning, Dr. Mehta. It shouldn't take too long."
"Can I go to my apartment and put my cat there? Will the police allow him to stay at the scene? If not, can I put him with another neighbor?" These questions came boiling out all once.
"Yes, of course, you can leave him with another neighbor. I'll wait right here until you get back." Piotr shook out a cigarette and lit up as she moved toward the apartment building. The police had already canvassed the property; whoever they were, they were very good. They left no clues, no casings, no signs of forced entry. An inside job, perhaps.
The emergency vehicles pulled off after twenty minutes, and she had not returned. He put out his third cigarette and went into the building. She was not at her apartment, but one neighbor did have Fedya. But he said she had left nearly twenty minutes ago. So she knew where to drop the cat, and used the remaining time to get a head start.
Touching his datapad earpiece, he spoke into his mastoid comm, "Agent, put a trace on her medical ID at all the local airports and any recent taxi pickups. Do not alert her to the flags. Just follow and report."
"Request activated, flags sent out. Will notify."
Piotr got into his car and headed to the Moscow airport. Sometimes technology is no match for a good hunch. When he got to the airport, his agent had already found her booking a flight to South America, quite a distance for a woman with nothing to hide and very little luggage to pack. He decided he needed to see what was really going on.
"Agent, book corresponding flights, inform Command of itinerary. Log it as active investigation. Inform pilot of intent to carry firearm onboard. Clear security checks."
"Acknowledged. Activity in progress."
This was just to ensure her safety and his curiosity. He had not been out of the country for a while; he was sure South America would be lovely this time of year. She sat in coach the whole time reading. He was not sure what it was, and did not want to risk having his agent read over her shoulder, so he took this time to catch up on his rest. The only thing he could think of was smoking a cigarette the whole flight until he fell asleep. Where could she go?
"Or what will happen? You will make me eat some bland chips and tasteless fish from your country? Perhaps some of your beer that tastes like piss? My cat makes a stronger brand of beer in his litter box."
When the plane landed, he knew he would have to confront her. The next leg of the journey was on a small private plane with only twelve seats. It would be hard to remain inconspicuous. The heat was terrible, and the humidity worse. He took off his jacket and remembered he did not bring a change of clothing, so he was going to have to get something local first chance he got.
His training as a KGB agent instantly came online once he landed. There were four hours between the landing and the smaller flight. He took that time to hunt around in the airport for vendors of more local attire. It did not take long for him to find some more comfortable shirts, slacks, and a bag to carry his gear. A pair of sunglasses and a white hat completed the ensemble.
Now, a bit more comfortable and armed with a selection of local toiletries, he cleaned up, changed, and was able to get to the airport runway with plenty of time. The doctor had managed to clean herself up, but it was obvious she had not slept on the flight over and was in need of rest.
A man from Russia got off the plane. Piotr noticed him at first and thought he was just a tourist. But the coincidence of his waiting for the same plane made him more suspicious. The man had the movement of a trained fighter; he walked on the balls of his feet. He kept his hands clear of his pockets. He sat with his back to the wall and faced the entire area.
Piotr tipped his hat forward and slumped his shoulders. The man's gaze passed over him, stopped momentarily, and then moved on. He was looking for something, but Piotr did not know what that might be. Thirty minutes before the flight was due to leave, the small plane landed and taxied into the runway. A crew came out to refuel and inspect the plane. The pilot chatted with his relief, and then the preflight was underway.
The suspicious man began to move closer to the doctor, and she did not seem aware of his approach. Piotr also moved closer, sitting behind the two of them, hiding behind a magazine. He put his gun under his bag in the chair next to him.
"Dr. Mehta. I am going to have to ask you to come with me. British intelligence." The man's accent was certainly British, but there was something strange about it.
"Don't you have to show me some ID or something?" Stephanie asked. She had a look of intense skepticism mixed with real fear. Something was definitely wrong, and she was completely out of her depth.
"Just come with me, miss, and we will sort this out in the customs office." The "agent" reached out to grab her arm and move close to her. He whispered something, and Piotr knew what it was. He had a handgun pressed against her back.
"Excuse me," Piotr stood up and in his thickest Russian accent asked, "Do you know what time our flight will be leaving?" He was certain they would have almost no chance of understand what he was saying.
"Sod off. I am busy with the lady."
Piotr took off his hat and held his hand out to Stephanie. "My name is Piotr. And you are?" He could see the recognition and relief in her eyes. But he tried to transmit the idea that they were not out of the woods yet.
"Stephanie. Stephanie Mehta."
"And your friend?"
"Her friend is telling you to mind your bloody business, Russian."
Whoever this fellow was, he was not a member of British Intelligence. He lost his temper far too easily. Likely a mercenary. He brought his gun out from under his coat and redirected it at Piotr. Exactly as planned. Piotr stepped to the right of the gunman's hand and with a single maneuver, relieved the man of his gun, breaking two of his fingers. His aggressive wristlock held the man and brought his arm behind his back in a breaking position. It happened so quickly, no one saw anything at all. Piotr handed the gun to Stephanie and used his other hand to pat the man down.
He wasn't carrying anything else. His ID said his name was Howard Mason, but Piotr doubted the ID was real. Using his real Russian police ID, Mason was taken into custody, and Stephanie and Piotr were questioned by the local authorities. Many hours later, it was called an act of random violence, nothing more. But Piotr knew better. It was time to get some answers from the beautiful doctor.
When they were walking back to the smaller plane runway, Stephanie started talking. Piotr decided to keep his request simple and see what she had to say. "It started with the bees. Dr. Sheppard said he noticed first when colony collapse began to show up in the newspapers."
"Who is Dr. Sheppard?" Piotr interrupted.
"He was the leader of the genetic engineering teams who pioneered the last great plant genome modifications. His work created the super-yield wheat, the rust resistant potatoes, the suicide seeds, and the natural insecticides common to almost all plants today. He worked for Consanko for nearly thirty years."
"So your trip here has something to do with him?"
"I was reading the information on the flight here. It had been gathered and collated by two later scientists, peers who reviewed his papers and were not satisfied by his safety information. They spent the last fifteen years refuting his notes about the "restrictive coding" built into the gene maps of his genetic constructs. Their contention was that the genetic transform viruses and bacteria used to modify the plants was completely unable to be contained to that environment."
"So this brings us back to the bees, yes?" She looked at him incredulously. "Yes, I went to school once upon a time."
She continued. "Yes, this brings us back to the bees. They moved pollen from the genetically engineered plants, first to their hives, then to other plants. Which ultimately moved them to us. The first signs of the suicide genes were the failure of some bee colonies, as their queens became less able to reproduce stable colonies."
"So now you think it has moved into the human population?"
"Correct. If what I have discovered is true, the human race will likely be extinct in less than one hundred years, and unable to reproduce in less than sixty. Consanko has put poison into the environment on every major land mass on Earth."
"Then this explains why people are trying to kill you, Doctor. You know too much. So I assume this means we are going to talk to Doctor Sheppard?"
"If anyone knows what can be done to reverse this, he would be the one."
The small plane captain started ushering people onboard, and the two of them sat in the back of the craft away from everyone else. Piotr put his gun in his lap under his hat. Stephanie curled up next to him and leaned onto his shoulder and fell into a dreamless sleep.
Piotr, already rested, considered what he knew about corporate politics and industrial espionage and hoped this would end better than this sort of thing usually did. On a good day, only bad people died. On a bad day, everyone did. He checked his backup piece, and stashed a huge knife under his shirt.
The flight, leaving late in the day, arrived eight hours later in the early morning in the small town of Quito, Ecuador. Stephanie woke, still looking tired and out of place. She is just a doctor who has been told the world is coming to an end, Piotr; how do you expect her to look? The only reason you don't look like her is that your world came to an end a dozen years ago. She reminds you of Natalie. Enough of that; keep your mind in the game.
Two men met them at the runway. Piotr knew them well. It had been nearly eight years since he had been there, but these two were still working the rainforest, gathering intelligence on the two dozen corporations currently fighting over what was left of it. Javier and Hector Morales, two brothers who worked with the KGB and whose loyalties were relatively unquestioned, reported regularly, their intel was good, and they were able to keep their noses clean. This made them decent agents, and Piotr did not tell them anything more than that he needed a car and a decent local map. They didn't know what he needed one for, and they didn't care.
"Rasputin, you look terrible," Javier began.
"How is that any different than normal?" Hector finished.
"It is good to see you two, as well. Did you get my request?"
"Yes, your dull agent made the request and was very clear about what he wanted. Do you really still use the Kinataci 4000 model? It's nearly eight years old." Javier smiled while he teased Piotr. "My wristwatch has more power than your agent."
"Seriously, Piotr, we have children here in Ecuador who have better agents than that. Are you going to upgrade any time soon?" Hector handed Piotr the map pack and the car keys.
"And who is this lovely creature?" Hector muscled Javier out of the way as Stephanie approached the car after getting her bag.
"My name is Stephanie." She shook hands and took in the quaint little airstrip on the edge of Quito. The car was something from earlier in the century; she did not recognize it, and thought it might actually still use some sort of petrochemical to power it.
"Rasputin, you did not tell us you would be bringing company. Keeping the good things to yourself, as usual." Hector smiled, something honest and real, and Piotr realized they misinterpreted the relationship. Let it go.
"We have to get moving. When we get back, we will share a beer or something before we take off. Thanks for the save."
"No problem. We are always here for you, Rasputin. You saved our lives, once. We owe you."
The car was old and serviceable and started up immediately. Neither of them had much to say on the trip; it was hot and miserable and both had grown used to the dry heat of the Moscow summer. Here at the equator, the weather was always hot and wet, with seasonal showers every day at around eleven o'clock and again at three as the winds shifted.
The GPS on the map said they were nearing their destination. Stephanie realized this was likely the place because they started seeing a variety of hydroponic domes erected for what looked like miles in every direction. These domes were scattered within the forest canopy and seemed to be strangely porous, allowing trees to grow through them even as they defined an area, each with a sixty foot diameter at the bottom. The dome appeared to be grown and continued to grow with the plants around them. Most were opaque, but a few showed levels of transparency, and people were servicing the plants within.
The domes gave way to a series of smaller prefab buildings. No security was visible, and a driveway with a number of other vehicles parked outside seemed a good place to start. They sat for a while, getting the rhythm of the place. Piotr made sure his guns were ready and scanned the grounds for anything out of place. Workers moving canisters on small flatbed trucks seemed to be the only road traffic. Occasionally, a larger twelve-wheeler would roll out or come back into the property.
A bearded man with graying hair got out of a vehicle near one of the campers, and Stephanie noticed him. He looked very similar to the photo she was shown on the video clip. She tapped Rasputin on the arm, and the two of them walked from the car to the prefab. When they got to the top of the stairs, Piotr entered first, and the small man was sitting behind the desk with his gun drawn and pointing at him.
"Please come in; your young friend, as well. I have been expecting you. Have a seat."
Once they were inside away from the blistering sun, Stephanie welcomed the opportunity to take a seat. The sun seemed to drain the strength from her body. She did not even have the ability to maintain any concern about the firearm pointed in her direction. "Dr. Sheppard, I presume."
Sheppard put the gun back into his desk and pointed to a small table in the back of his very organized office. "Please, have some water; you will find you sweat quite a bit more than you think here."
After they had a glass of water, and then a second, Doctor Sheppard got down to business. "Did the company send you? I am surprised it took them this long to find me."
"No, sir, we have come here at the request of Doctors Lawrence and Cloverfield. They said you would know why we were here."
"Did they? Did they tell you what I am doing here?"
"No, they said you were no longer working for Consanko, and you expressed some level of regret for what happened."
"Regret? No, my dear. Regret does not even begin to describe what I feel. I thought my work here might be enough. Would you like to see it? What about you, young man? You do not look like a scientist. If I were to try and read you, I would say a corporate hit man, government agent, possibly KGB, or if they are still in existence, a CIA agent."
"Very good guess, Doctor. So why are you here? If you have regrets for your work, why retire to this place? You were a very rich man; you could be living anywhere."
"The answer to your question lies out there. Are you rested enough for the tour? It's the least you can do before you kill me."
The three of them stepped out into the terrible heat of the day and strode toward one of the domes. "I made these domes myself. I designed them to absorb and convert the solar energy into a cooling chamber. I have patented the technology and am making a tidy fortune in the equatorial regions all over the globe."
As they stepped through a simple series of flaps, Stephanie noted the vast difference in the internal temperature of the tent, and by the time they were inside the dome proper, the temperature was less than fifty degrees, nearly an eighty degree drop. The air was cool, even a bit damp, and over eighty percent of the sunlight had been dimmed, making the area just a bit brighter than sunset. Dr. Sheppard touched a small remote on his wrist and the dome became a bit brighter as the spines of the hexagonal shapes began to glow with a blue light.
"I could make the dome more transparent, but that would bring in more heat; I want to wait until this dome has been harvested. But the polymorphic materials used in the construction of this dome are grown into this location. See?" He pointed to the edge of the dome, and Stephanie could see the dome seemed to move into the ground. There were none of the seams she would have associated with a constructed work.
The material covering the hexagons was thick and a bit rough, and had a scaled appearance. "The scales are a polychromatic material capable of converting sunlight into electrical energy. That electricity is used to cool the tent as the fabric absorbs the energy of the air using superconductivity. The energy absorbed is redirected by an underground organic network to a power storage facility used to maintain all of the vehicles and other power needs here."
"Why the strange design, growing them below the forest canopy?" Stephanie asked.
"Because they are not visible from space," Piotr answered before the doctor could respond. "You said harvest, Doctor. What are you growing?" Piotr walked over to one of the trees and touched the strange formations growing on the trees and in the underbrush. "They look like mushrooms."
"Very astute. Indeed they are mushrooms, mushrooms of my own design. What do you know about mushrooms?"
Piotr looked at Sheppard and answered. "I like them in my soups and on my steaks. Do I need to know more than that?"
Sheppard laughed and said, "No, I guess not. I hope you really like mushrooms, young man."
"What are you talking about, Dr. Sheppard? I came here to discuss a means of reversing the birth reductions in the human and animal populations."
"Young lady, when we first began our studies and first genetic experimentations, we were young and thought we were going to feed the world. We thought we would work with companies like Cansanko who would ensure that our patents would be protected, and we would be able to work with corporate backing. With their money and our skills, no problem of food production could confound us. But they had their own agenda. They rounded up seeds from all over the world and began to patent the seeds. The seeds! Can you imagine? We were outraged. Seeds belong to everyone, we said. They laughed and called us idealistic and told us to get back to work. We would have fewer complaints when we were rich."
Dr. Sheppard found a chair near the monitoring station and raised the lighting a bit. The two of them saw dozens of varieties of mushrooms, all over the room. They had been walking inside a very limited area. Once there was more light, they saw a rainbow of mushrooms, some close to the ground, others towering at three and four feet, shelves of mushrooms growing on the sides of trees. Some of them appeared to be the classic shapes, but others looked like ocean waves, some like bushes, but they were all growing harmoniously, beautifully, together. She had never seen anything like it.
"We went back to work, to increase the yield of our newly patented seeds. And with the revolutionary work of Dr. David Lawrence, we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. Every time we worked on a new patent, we felt like explorers, crossing boundaries we had never conceived of. We became gods, Promethean in our endeavors, with no thought to the consequences."
Piotr heard the helicopter blades first. His training in war zones made him more alert. The others heard them soon enough.
"We don't have much time. I have been expecting them. I thought you were going to kill me. But now I realize they have been reading my notes. You see, when we first started noticing the problem, they started burying my ideas. And when Laurence and Cloverfield's work began to show we were wrong and there was the possibility of genetic pollution, they were killed."
"I thought they were killed two days ago." The look on Stephanie's face was undecipherable.
"They were. Two days and five years ago. I left the company in disgust and refused to do any more work once I had seen the error of my ways. The company refused to acknowledge my work until recently. Now I suspect they want my help. The work we did was revolutionary, and they killed the only two other people who really understood it."
"Then who sent me this message?"
"I did." Dr. Sheppard stared hard at Stephanie. "I need you to finish my work here. I need someone young and idealistic, someone who believes in a future worth fighting for. I need you here to fight for the present while I try and redeem myself and the future of humanity. I wish I had some words that would ease the years ahead. But I don't. Our pride has led to the fall of our species. I hope I live long enough to make it right. I am an old man, a stupid old man."
"What about Helmut? What happened to him?"
"He had begun his own investigation. I did not find his data flags because he was pursuing a different angle. By the time I realized what he was doing, they were already on to him. I am sorry for your loss." Stephanie realized that she did not kill Helmut with her research. This only increased her grief.
The helicopters were close enough to begin landing, and the dome began to vibrate with their approach.
Sheppard stood up and walked over to the two of them. "The pollution has spread to all crops everywhere. What Consanko did not release and does not want people to know is that all of their original source seed has been corrupted, as well. So they have been selling seed for the last decades, but the seeds they are selling are the last of their kind from the last stockpiles of any seed on Earth. None of it has the ability to create new seeds. What you and your team don't find on your own, won't be found. Mushrooms will feed some of humanity, but our conservative estimates are that more than two thirds of the human race will die of starvation."
Sheppard looked up and tears flowed from his eyes. "I need you to finish what I have started here. Everything you need is here; all the command codes have already been transferred to you. I have done all of the heavy lifting. All you need to do is teach humanity what we have done here."
Walking toward the door, Sheppard stopped and looked back, wiping his face. "You were worried about humanity not having a future in a hundred years. I am going to leave here and go with those men landing outside, because if I don't, humanity won't have a future in less than ten years. Good luck."
Suicide Seed, Hayward's Reach © Thaddeus Howze 2011, All Rights Reserved
Pax Cyridian
Posted by Ebonstorm on March 8, 2013
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: Cyridia, genetic engineering, genome, Hayward's Reach, insect, Ona, Pax Cyridian, Penrose, recombinant DNA, spasm, Twilight Continuum. 1 Comment
a tale of the Twilight Continuum
Hanging from the side of a building, cloaked in shadow, I could see the lights from the police roachsters sweeping the warehouse district and knew that we could not stay here long. I tried to visualize a route that would take me back to the city core but from here, every route was the longest route. Cyridian was not made for ease of driving but for optimal grazing for our bugs to maintain their bulk and their health.
Cyridian was designed by the city's founders to be as ecologically friendly as possible with the industrial complexes as far from the city's living quarters as possible. Closer to the inner rings were the commercial and educational service areas and then within the center of the city were the living quarters for bugs and people in the direct center.
I patted the internal dash of my Bug and she warmed the internal energy centers of her power plant. She did not activate her bright-lights, she was a nocturnal species capable of seeing easily in the dark. I put on my sensor band, so I could see what she was seeing. Her vision spanned the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums, she was an omnivore, so she hunted and foraged on plants when other prey was not available.
"Run, run?"
"Far to run. Must run soon."
"Stay still. We have to wait until the time is right."
"Wait, wait."
She was never the most patient vehicle. Her parent insects were adapted because they were strong and amazingly intelligent. She was one of the few breeds capable of true interaction. For most people Bugs were just an analog for machines. So much so, they used the default activation codes designed by the breeders. "Bug On," was the code phrase used to activate the systems of the Bug control interface. Most never created or updated the control system or password. It was not for security, because no one stole here, it would have been to personalize or empathize with the vehicle.
Cyr-Bugs were never truly embraced by most of the humans of Cyridian. Our subtle racial dislike of insects followed us from Earth. Despite the fact that the Cyridian insects have allowed us to have a lifestyle that embraced nature, remain peaceful and have a life completely dedicated to living in harmony with the world, many Cyridians were never in love with our symbiotic partners.
"Okay Ona, go fast to quadrant seven. Stay off the road."
"Bump, bump, okay Penrose?"
"Yes, Ona, bump, bump. I am strapped in."
Ona stretched her legs and tumbled into the underbrush. It was a very bumpy and rough ride. But the advantage was hers because the police roaches simply had to go around. Around on Cyridian meant many miles of alternative pathways like an old maze puzzle. Ona rarely got to travel this way because my job simply did not give me the time to let her roam like I would have wanted. As a matter of fact, it's my job that put me in this position in the first place. I am a gene-engineer. I change bugs into conveniences for the people of the Empire. I'm not used to people shooting at me, or trying to kill me. Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order. I went to work this morning…
"Penrose, I'm seeing some organic components missing from your warehouse stockpiles," shouted my boss from his desk pit. He didn't even wait for me to slide into my desk before making demands. I saw that Barry, my co-engineer, hadn't even shown up for work yet. Brown-nosing the boss does have its perks.
"I'm right on it. It has to do with the last alterations I made to the Series 19 upgrades. I will check the data right after I grab some crabs."
"Bring me a couple back," he mumbled and went back to whatever he was doing on his multiple terminals. Passing his pit, I looked down and saw some new recombinations he was working on, ugly designs to my sense of aesthetics but he had customers who loved his carapace work.
I tapped into my desk system as I walked by and looked at the reports he flagged in my heads up display. I didn't recognize any of these requests. I got to the kitchen and picked up five or six crabs, a local insect delicacy, flash fried and coated in a dusting of sugar.
"Run a trace on these requisitions, please." My computer would put a marker out on them and inform me where the organic components went. It was a bit of a concern because of the quantities being rerouted. Enough for fifteen or twenty Bugs. The components were the organic interfaces used to control or interact with a Bug's system.
Since many of the systems in our buildings were created with or by or supported by the local insects, any that require our interaction had to be fitted with a control interface. The control interface technology was one of the things we created here.
The flag came up indicating the resources ended up in a facility at the very edge of the city, about fifty klicks from here, as the dragon flies. Driving will take about one hundred klicks. "Boss, I'm going to have to go out there. The system that authorized it requires a personal code to access. I am going to have go during working hours, because they barely have any comm systems out there at all. It's one of the newer installations."
"Do what you need to Penrose. I have seven new carapaces I need you to look at before you go, though. Can you do it at lunch?"
I had left Ona out to graze and found her sitting in a field, eating into a nest of what we called su-mona. They resembled Terran termites in that they burrowed underground and fed on woody materials. But each was the length of a man's arm and had complexes that could spread for dozens of miles. They were a primary source of food for Ona's species and one of her personal favorites.
The park center was a common grazing area and without the constant effort of Bugs, it would grow out of control in a matter of days.
"Penrose, I found su-mona, want to share?"
"No thank you, Ona. Will you be done soon? We have a trip to go on."
"A long one, yes?"
"Very. Over two hours."
"Can Ona run?
"As fast as you like." She hurriedly chomped down the rest of her termites. There was goo all over her face. Using her pelipaps, she wiped it away as quickly as she can she said, "Ona is finished."
I climbed into the carapace chamber organically crafted out of her mighty exoskeleton. I slid in and she formed a ridge to support my back. I put on my sensor band and could see the road through her eyes. She took off down the road at over 95 kilometers per hour.
When we arrived at the warehouse, it was mid afternoon, there had not been much traffic, so Ona really could move as fast as she wanted. It had been great to allow her to show off her speed. She was not nearly as fast as roaches who could reach speeds of 150 kph, but only for short bursts. Ona could do what she did all day long. Beyond the edge of the city, her ancestors still roamed free and could be quite dangerous to visitors of our world.
If you came to live on Cyridian you were given genetic modifiers which made you emit an odor considered unpleasant to most of the more aggressive animals of the planet, and armed with Bospor stingers, you were safe from the rest that might still eat you.
The warehouse was closed up and no staff was available to accept my query for entry. I slid out of Ona and walked up to the wall of the warehouse. The building was created out of the traditional silkstone but it seemed to have other properties. I licked the building and my chemical mods indicated there were traces of other toxins on the outside of the building. I was immune to anything the planet had to offer. I had to be to work with the number of toxic insects we handled to do our jobs. I found the toxin to be a strange one because it was not found in most of the insects local to the area.
Ona normally settled into grazing once we arrived at an area, but she seemed reluctant to move from where she stopped. She waved her palps around and put them into her mouth to taste the air.
"Ona? What's wrong?"
"Bad genes here."
"Whose work is it. Is it mine or Barry?"
"Barry's taste."
Each engineer has a signature to their work. There are only five or six of us in Cyridian and we have marked our work to ensure stability and accountability in design.
"Trouble. Danger." That made me nervous. Ona is one of the larger and more dangerous predators on this planet. If she was worried, we might be in trouble.
I walk back to Ona when two roachsters pull up behind her and two law enforcement agents got out of the vehicles. Ona turned around and eyed them. The roaches were calm and did not respond to her veiled threat. "Can we help you Gene-engineer?"
"What seems to be the problem, officer? I came out here to investigate a technical requisition supply issue."
"This warehouse is restricted." The officer seemed strange to me. He kept his hand on his Bospor pistol. The second officer stayed next to his roachster.
"Perhaps I have been misinformed." Ona, bristled when I walked back to her.
"Penrose. Not good. Something wrong."
"I know, but we have to go."
Then there was a booming from the warehouse behind us. The roachsters backed up with the amazing speed they are capable of. Ona leapt away from the warehouse and landed facing it.
"Okay, that doesn't sound normal."
"We are going to have to ask you to leave, sir."
The booming happened again but this time the wall exploded open and the law enforcement officer is crushed instantly by the falling wall debris. The speed at which it happened shocked me, but Ona was already in motion. She grabbed me and wrapped me in the energy dampening material inside her chassis and backed away from the hole. The other officer got out of his roachster with his Bospor pistol drawn.
The creature that came out appeared to be a variant on Ona's design but much bigger. The modifications included increased chassis armor, stronger leg designs and several other surface mods I did not recognize. But I knew weapon work when I saw it. This was an illegal mod.
"Run, run, Penrose?"
"No Sweetie, not yet."
The second officer jumped out of his roachster. He directed the first roachster to try and remove the debris from his downed partner. The roachster tried to lift the debris, but it was designed for speed not strength. The illegally modified creature looked out of the hole at the roachster and roared.
The officer fired on the creature. The Bospor pistol launched a round from the gun with a huff of highly compressed air. The Bospor stinger flew at over eight hundred feet per second. The tiny blob landed on the creature. Nothing happened.
Impossible.
The Bospor was the most toxic animal on the planet. Quiet scavengers, nothing ate them and they were non-aggressive. Their only defense is their deadly neurotoxin launched with series of gas-launched spines. The powerful neurotoxin kills everything with a nervous system on Cyridian. It is why they we modified them as weapons.
"Now we run, Ona."
The gene-mod opened one of its ports on the side of its massive body and a coughing ejection of phlegm struck the officer. He began to smoke and scream immediately and ran backward until he fell down. Then he turned into a pile of smoking organic mess. The creature coughed again and one roachster was struck in the side, the other backed up and turned its turret on to the gene-mod. It fired two chemical backed Penranol projectiles. Both organic projectiles struck the gene-mod. One bounced off of the dense carapace, the other stuck and burst into flame. I had seen enough.
We ran as fast as we could. When we reached the next civilized part of the industrial area we tried to call back to my office with no success. Barry might have already left. I tried to reach his comm badge but he didn't answer. I heard the alarms of roachsters as they approached our position. Ona began to fidget and I touched her to calm her down. As the roachsters surrounded us, I began to get the impression something was terribly wrong.
Barry gets out of one of the roachsters. "Hello, Penrose. I see you found out about my project."
"That monstrosity is yours? What happened to do as little harm as possible?"
"That was before Venris Tel Corp offered me 50 million credits to build them an organic tank. Then it became "Do less harm to your planet and more to others for the proper funding." Barry sneered at me. "You think you're better than me."
"You realize you just confessed?"
Barry looked around at the cops and laughed. "These guys? They work for me. They help me keep things under control and they get a nice piece of the action."
"Penrose…" began Ona
"Not now, Ona."
"You and your talking car. You talk about me, but making a car that talks is the real crime."
"It's because they are not cars, they are living things. That's what happened on Earth, we began to treat the world as a commodity."
"So you make your freak car?"
"Yes, I wanted something that I didn't have to say 'Bug On' to get it to activate to."
"No matter, what I've done will make me fantastically rich, but only if you don't survive to tell people. Gentlemen, if you please."
I began to hear a rumbling sound, rhythmic and growing stronger, fast. The roachsters turned to face down the road and put their bright-lights onto the road.
"Penny, we should go."
"Yes, Ona, I think you're right."
The Gene-mod barreled into the center of the roachsters, shooting its acidic phlegm with abandon. Ona had backed up away from the road, until she was out of line of sight. The acid bombs landed on several of the roachsters and their agonized shrieks filled the air. The gene-mod had a burn all over its top carapace but was otherwise undamaged. It barreled into the other roachsters and there was the brittle sound of carapace against carapace contact.
The roachsters chosen for their speed and savage temperament slashed into the gene-mod and the battle was joined. Ona and I used the distraction of them fighting for their lives to run for ours.
We managed to make it to the working ring and I tried to reach the Central Administrator. I left Ona to graze while I made my way into the building complex. Barry, being my boss had rescinded my access to the office. I would have to make a run to the center of the city.
I could see the headlights of the roachsters searching for me. I guessed that meant Barry was still alive. We turned into the park and made good time. We stayed off the roads where the roachsters had a speed advantage and crept the city's overgrown grazing areas. I had to put a visit into the Sector Chief, personally. She lived in the central region, on the west side.
It took us fifty minutes and four close calls before I had to leave Ona at the edge of the center region. The roads were pedestrian friendly but less so for Bugs.
"You wait here, Ona. Stay under cover. I'll be back for you soon."
"Okay, Penrose. I wait here."
I started toward Lanris Corli's place and realized I didn't know what I was going to tell her. I didn't have any evidence. Using the scent glands of the Pinaris beetles we created organic street lights by attracting and feeding the bioluminescent insects over certain areas of the street. We used other kinds of glow-paint for areas that needed to stay lit but relatively insect free. It took me about five minutes to reach her domicile, a lovely spincast place made from the silk of a Wayran moth, one of the projects I headed years ago. I knocked on the door. It took about a minute for her to answer.
"Gene-engineer Penrose at your service, ma'am."
"Cut the crap, Penrose, why are you at my door this late?"
"Well, I have evidence of a plan to weaponize our technology and sell it off-planet."
The sleepy look vanished from her face. In retrospect, I think I should have paid closer attention.
"Come in Gene-engineer. Let me get dressed. Tell me the rest."
She invited me in and vanished into her bedroom. I explained about the gene-mod and it's rampage. When she came back out she was dressed in her Civil servant uniform of blue and gold. She was also carrying a stylish chemical pistol of Old Earth manufacture.
"I didn't want this, Penrose. We were trying to get them off planet, before anyone noticed. If we could've had one breeding pair and the gene-mods no one would have been the wiser."
"There is more than one of those things? I guess this means you have to kill me, now."
"It doesn't have to be, there are potentially several clients who would pay for our genetic technology, which has no equal in the Empire. Killing you would be a waste of a very important irreplaceable resource."
"So why the gun?"
"I can't have you running out of here before you hear my offer. There are always other administrators you could have confessed to who would been appalled to know what you just suggested to me."
"You could have gone the seduction route? Made me believe we were going to be friends. After befriending me you could have killed me. It's what the Nornian spider does with its multiple mates over the course of its lifetime."
"You need to get out more." Her phone rang. "I see. I will take care of it." She hung up. "Barry's dead. It looks like your value just shot up. But we have a problem."
Pointing at the gun, "I'd say we have two. If you plan on having my help, you need to put that away. Its making me nervous. You won't like me nervous."
"It's my insurance, don't get any ideas. The gene-mod is out of control and heading toward the center complex. If anyone gets a clear look at it, we might be in trouble. The police will open a breach in the shield and attract some native fauna in. We'll claim this creature is one of them and cover it up before anyone can investigate."
"I want Barry's share."
"Getting bold, are we?"
"No, I am thinking I won't have much of a career on Cyridian before this is over, so I'm just thinking ahead. Especially if I help you with this."
"Alright, let's go." As we stepped out of the doorway into the courtyard, the streetlights flickered. The streetlights were comprised of clouds of the local fireflies, genetically inclined to stay near pheremone emitting sites scattered throughout the city. Working with nature, we don't imprision the insects. They were free to come and go but between the pheremone and the nectar, they provide light sufficient for our modified vision. Then the lights went out. But that only happened when a predator approached. Lanris had only a split second of warning. She looked up right before the gene-mod landed its massive bulk right on top of her head, killing her instantly. She managed to get off a single shot.
In that split second, when the lights fled, before it arrived, I realized what was happening and leaped into the brush, running for my life. They made the damn thing able to fly? What were they thinking? And with a stealth mode, no less? That was insane!
The gene-mod was right on my tail. It knocked down trees and steel-like bamboos as if they weren't even there, fibrous splinters raining down all around me. I could smell its power plant, it was overheating, flying was probably not the ideal movement for it. If I ran fast enough, maybe it would run out of energy and have to stop and rest.
I could hear it getting closer and closer, I looked back only once and could see it's crazed look as its bright-lights locked onto my position, I ran into the brush to obscure its vision, even for second. If I could just make it back to the park, I could hide from it. It had no major sensory mods I could see, so I could escape while the police, the real police handled it.
But I wasn't going to make it. I could smell it just seconds from me. There was a crashing sound coming from my left and a tree dropped right behind me. It caused the gene-mod a moment of hesitation, but it bit right through the tree. Then another tree landed behind me and a third.
Who is throwing trees behind me?
When I came to the clearing where Bugs awaited their owners, there were no Bugs there, including my own? Where was she? It was not like her to move too far once I told her I was coming back. She would have stayed near a feeding station. I was going to die here. On level ground there was no way I could outrun it.
I turned and ran anyway. I heard the buzz of two approaching roachsters. I did not know whose side they were on, so I just ran away from them too as the gene-mod burst out of the underbrush. These weren't just roachsters, these were Hunter-seekers, killers designed to destroy bugs that breached the shield. They were big, strong and fast, some of the deadliest things we ever engineered. So dangerous, they were only released into areas that had been overrun because they killed everything they came in contact with. Once they had neutralized all threats, they were destroyed with internal toxin bombs. One-use creatures unable to be bred, except under the most ideal conditions. There were never more than four or five available any more since we perfected the shield and pheromone technologies.
With lightning speed, they turned their attention to the gene-mod with their bright-lights flashing all over the area as they battled the monster. Their flashing blade mouths, tried to cut into the carapace of the gene-mod but most of their blows were scratches in comparison to the injuries it dealt. But these were no ordinary roachsters. Their nervous systems amped to the highest degree, most of the gene-mod's attacks missed their mark fully.
But the battle was far from equal. I looked on in horror as the full extent of the gene-modifications began to show. It began to regenerate its injuries. Regeneration was rarely added to any genestruct because there were too many potentials we wanted to avoid. Unnecessary cancers and 'regrettable immortality'. Cells that divide too often sometimes became cancerous. And immortality can be inconvenient if you were seeking to kill a creature to prevent it from passing on its immortal genes. The potential to destabilize an ecosystem was too great, hence its name 'regrettable immortality'.
I hoped the police were trying to get something bigger to fight with because with the venom, acid, armor, speed, flight and regeneration mods this thing was boasting, it would kill us all before the next day was done. One Hunter-killer went down under the super-strong legs of the gene-mod, speared through in four places and pinned into the spin-crete beneath.
I couldn't think of anything I could do to stop this. While the last Hunter-killer got a few more wounds in, the brush behind it began to move. I saw several Beetles, the most common of the auto-bugs used here. Each is carrying a tree in its front leg set. They surround and set upon the gene-mod with the trees, each swinging the tree limb as if it were a willow wand. The concussive booms stagger the gene-mod with each blow, but it continues its relentless assault on the Hunter-Killer.
Then I saw Ona. She came out of the forest and she was singing. Rubbing her pelipaps together she makes a series of strange but beautiful sounds, and when she does the other auto-bugs increase their assault. The gene-mod turns and grabs one of the auto-bugs, a female, and sprays it's toxic venom. She screamed horribly, convulsing while she died.
The others hesitated and the Hunter-Killer got in a final strike before it was cut in half by the slashing jaws of the gene-mod. It struck the genestruct in the eye with its sword-like forearms. The strike is deep, a few inches to the left and it could have been mortal. The Hunter-Killer's arm broke off and the sword-like claw remained embedded in the eye socket of the gene-mod. The other auto-bugs renewed their attacks but not nearly as durable as the Hunter-Killer, each was cut down, one after the other.
Once it's done, it turned toward me and advanced slowly. There were only a few times I had regretted my occupation. Once, before I was completely gene-modified to live on Cyridian, I was working with a spasm-fly and was bitten. No one knew I hadn't completed my modification so I spent a half a year in a spasm chamber, immobilized in a stasis field so my muscles didn't pull the flesh from my bones. That was the lowest point in my technical career. I had few other regrets. The occasional lack of family bit deep, but with my gene-mods, I would live to be a nice two hundred or so, (or would have until today) so I always thought I would have time.
The gene-mod approached and I knew I was seconds from death. The only question was how. Venom? Acid? Stomped to death? I hoped it would be quick. I was not looking forward to be stomped to death. Then I heard that whistle again and the gene-mod turned again.
Ona. What was she thinking?
It turned away and I could feel my bowels growing weak. Being close to dying really made bodily control a challenge.
Ona stepped away from the brush and approached the gene-mod. But she was bigger, redder, and her eyes had a particular gleam I had never seen before. Then I remembered. This was her maternal combat mode. Mothers, when their young are in trouble, change and become dangerous killing machines. On this world, multiply that by five.
She flew.
I mean, I knew she could do it, I had just never seen it. She flew fast. She slammed into its side and knocked it off its feet. Ona is big, much bigger than the roachsters, and she used her bulk to her advantage. She landed on its underside and stabbed her sword-like pedipalps into it undercarriage, near the base of the legs, and severed its ability to control two of those legs. She bounded away as it uses its outer carapace wings to flip itself over.
It landed with a grunt and fluids sprayed out from underneath its legs, the two damaged ones are barely able to hold up the carapace in the back of the creature. Its carapace was dragging the ground. It's down but not out.
The genestruct turned to face Ona with its good eye and I am on its blind side with the sword hanging out its eye. As long as the claw remained in its eye, it could not regenerate the tissue. The creature sprayed both venom and acid from its weaponized glands. Ona leaps forward dodging the venom but getting hit with the acid. Using her strong back legs, she sliced forward and cut off the wing casing covered with acid. She howled, a sound I have never heard her make before.
She and the genestruct circled each other and tentatively attacked each other but neither has an advantage. Ona was slowing Her injuries were taking a toll on her. The genestruct was slowly regenerating and soon able to raise itself on its hind legs. Ona scurried around onto its blind side and rushed it, slashing along the region between the carapace and the legs. She is able to get a good and solid wound. The beast roars and explodes into action. It cut deeply into her side armor, pushed her back before it moved away from her. She had damaged it seriously. The genestruct stopped moving and fell over with one set of legs unable to move. Ona was badly hurt as well. She bled from a dozen injuries all over her carapace and undercarriage. I ran over to her and tried to stop the bleeding.
"Penrose, run, run."
"I can't Ona. I can't leave you. Now get up. We have to go."
"Penny, I can't run. Go now. Ona loves you. Ona dies for you."
The silence was oppressive. It was never quiet on Cyridian. Insects were always talking here. Anything near this battle realized they were in the presence of something terrible and hoped to avoid drawing attention to itself. Even scavengers, normally bold, made no attempt to approach. Ona's quiet and ragged breathing was the only thing I could hear. Her internal plant was already offline.
Then the sound of a powerplant restarting echoed across the forest. The brightlights of the genestruct came back on. Weak and flickering, but they slowly got stronger. I hear the coughing of the acid cannon being prepared to fire. I couldn't let that happen. Ona couldn't move yet.
I jumped up and tried to draw its fire. Confused and with only one good eye, it chose me and fired. The acid blob, hit the ground near me and part of the splash landed onto my uniform. Designed with genetic constructs in mind, the uniform neutralizes most of it, but the quantity overwhelms it and my flesh bore the rest. The pain was excruiating. I fell forward as my legs gave out, face down into the underbrush.
But for the first time since it happened, I was glad of the spasm-fly attack. I was in stasis for six months. During that entire time, my nervous system was under assault, being constantly stimulated without relief, everyday until it was brought under control. I learned my threshold for pain. And while this certainly was terrible, it was nothing compared to that six months.
I screamed. I cursed, I raged. And I got up.
"I've had about enough of you." The gene-mod coughed, and sputtered as it tried to repair itself. I could hear its power plant as it struggled to stay online.
It was dying.
I limped up to its blind side, and I could hear its inquiry sounds as it tried to figure out where I was. I knew these sounds. It was looking for someone to help it. Designed to have someone support it, its injuries led it to believe someone should be helping to repair it and those chirps of query meant it was expecting someone.
I saw the Hunter-Killer leg hanging out of its ocular cavity. I reached up, grabbed the end of the leg, and reorienting it, pointed it directly into its brain. The thrust is brief and the green ichor of the construct's blood covered me in one final surge.
It did not resist. There was a sound like a sigh of relief and the creature eased itself into a resting position. I looked at the creature and saw it was covered with pain mods, all over its armored carapace, used to control it. They were inflamed. Something drove this creature to rage. But what?
"Hello Gene-Engineer Penrose." The voice was familiar and despised. I turned around and in the early morning light I could see his well-dressed and diplomat's outfit with a tiny remote in his hand. He also had two burly Junantra guards, genetically modified supermen at his beck and call.
"Ambassador Cohen." I spat blood out of my mouth. "So all that interest in my work a year ago was not as harmless as I thought."
"You wound me, Penrose. You should be happy I took an interest in your work and had such avid supporters amongst the populace."
"So you could make this poor thing?"
"That poor thing has killed sixteen roachsters, all six of the hunter-killers left in the city, and two dozen other assorted vehicles. It was one of the finest killing machines ever made, even on this world. And it's mine."
"I know. It's worth millions."
"Billions, my good man. We made them in breed-capable pairs."
"You are the final link in the chain aren't you. You made the off-world connections."
"Yes, and once we collect our genetic material from this one, for breeding, we will be on our way. So sorry about your car." One of the Junantra guards walked over to the creature's mouth and began extracting vital genetic chambers that could be used to breed the creature. The ambassador and the other guard walked over to me and helped me to my feet.
"And what about me."
"That depends on you. The Human Race is still out there conquering the Universe and needs minds like yours to help it. I know you are a pacifist like all of your people here, but think of the potential value you could bring to our kind with your organic war machines."
"I know. I would be paid handsomely to destroy life all over the galaxy for fun and profit. No thanks." My blood was flowing down my leg, off of my arm and head.
"I am afraid I cannot allow you to leave knowing what you do."
"I am afraid I am not asking to leave." With blood on my hands, I reached out and slashed both the ambassador and the Junantra on the neck with my razor sharp nails. Working with gene-constructs, you occasionally have to have the ability to defend yourself. I had been weaponized during the time I was in the healing chambers. Such work was not common knowledge. It was necessary to save my life. Living here, being stronger and faster is a survival technique. On Earth, I would have been superhuman, here, I was just a faster, more agile snack.
Since being infected with spasm-fly venom, my survival altered my body as the potent virus has remained part of me. Living as an SP-V, I lived a life suffused in constant agony as my nervous system is antagonized by the virus, but I can control the spasms and constrictions with the help of the anti-viral gene mods inside my body.
The ambassador and his guard were not so fortunate. It tool only a few seconds for them to double over in pain and for their muscles to begin to pull back on their bones until they start to snap. An agony so great, they were rendered speechless as their vocal cords tore themselves in their throats. Every beat of their hearts, passed the weaponized virus into every cell of their bodies. Only being in a medical facility allowed me to survive the spasm-fly virus. Without immediate medical attention, their bodies will be turned inside out in a matter of minutes and I realized I left my comm badge with my car; in my dying car.
The Junantra died first, his superhuman strength is no asset here. His grunts are terrible, but brief. The ambassador dies only minutes later. The second guard hearing something, rushed to their aid, and with a quick slash he died a few minutes later.
I went over to Ona and saw she is already dead; my beautiful Ona, my first best friend. I will make you again, my dear. You have been far better to me than most humans I know.
I sat down with her and watched the sunrise. Looking over at the ambassador, I felt no regrets. Since he was the last of them, it should make it easy to clean up and ensure creatures like this one are never made again. With any luck, the Council will be able to investigate fully and hunt down the other one and see that it's destroyed.
I came here to Cyridia to get away from the violence of the Empire. Here, everything is trying to live, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. I can live with that. That's nature. But to kill each other for money. That's an obscenity any way you look at it.
Just because I live on a planet full of peaceful people does not make me a pacifist.
Pax Cyridian © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
Artwork: Flesh Raiders © Elderscroller/Markus of Austria; an artist on DeviantART
Posted by Ebonstorm on January 2, 2013
Posted in: Insurrection, Short Story. Tagged: ebonstorm, Glendale Mokoto, Hayward's Reach, holographic interface, Insurrection, Pele Mokoto, starship, supernovas, Tales of the Twilight Continuum, Thaddeus Howze, the Quantaspheric Interface, the QueEye Core. 1 Comment
Invasive Species and Supernovas
a tale of the twilight continuum Θ
Pele Mokoto sat back in the center of the room, trying to make sense of the impossible.
Her face was pale, her gaze haunted. She was looking into the Quanta-sphere's holographic display. Her recliner shifted as her center of gravity moved and she reoriented the image in the center of the holodisplay. She realized this was more important than she first thought and opened two dozen displays adding hundreds of other computations and variables.
When she was done, she sat back and accelerated the flow of time in her simulation a million times. She activated the comm system with her intent and spoke to the open air. "Glen, I need you to come to QI as soon as you can. It's urgent."
Glendale Mokoto was coming up from the engineering section of the Hegemony's finest scout ship, Hayward's Reach, after recalibrating the C-divider engine matrix. The scout ship was making good time after the last set of gate jumps and would be ready for full speed operations using the CDE.
"I was going to stop and clean up, honey. Do you want to pipe it down into the shower?"
"I have compiled this data for the last two years, I can wait until you're done. Go ahead. I will run some other near-local parallels."
"Great, I will be right up, I promise." Glen shot up the center of the gravity tube connecting all of the spaces on the ship. The tubes reconfigured themselves as he passed through them as his intent became to the ship's quiet AI. Hayward's Reach was a ship comprised of some of the most advanced sciences in the Hegemony.
He showered quickly and put on his standard uniform, stopping only long enough to change the colors, setting on a teal long tonic and cool earth toned slacks. He almost never wore shoes, anymore. It was formal night so they agreed to dress for the occasion wearing actual fabric rather than their standard holographic dress. When he made his way to the Quantaspheric Interface chamber, she was sitting in the dark, the only light in the room, glowed off of a light terminal on the chair in front of her.
"Okay, what is so important? Are you still using the Que-Eye stream to watch cross-time episodes of 'I Love Lucy'?" The Que-Eye technology allowed the Reach to peer into the potential of nearby universe which share constants with our own and see alternative futures.
She looked up and thought about what she wanted to show and the room blazed with light. There was a blue giant in the middle of the room showing in a glorious high resolution hologram. As the image approached the star, Pele's voice was tense and no-nonsense, "This is a blue super-giant along the path we are using to approach the core of the galaxy. I noted it because it only recently became visible as we cleared a dust band which blocked it from view a few years back."
I remember that band of heavy intergalactic dust. It obscured an entire segment of the galaxy previous unseen by optical telescopes, we were excited as we were seeing something never seen by any of the sentients in our section of the galaxy. The Hegemony is vast, covering over one third of the Milky Way galaxy but there are still two thirds, only visited by probe ships and the mysterious Precursor Races.
She continued. "I picked this star because it was one of the most massive on record. It has two smaller partners, about ten times the size of our sun, one of which I thought was a brown dwarf or failed star when I first looked at its energy signature. But as we got closer and I focused more of the optical array on the stars, I noticed this was unlike anything in the Hegemony database. So after another year of study. I decided to send out a scientific package. It would travel close enough, fast enough my curiosity would be assuaged, and still be fast enough to catch up to us once we passed it. When the probe caught back up today. I thought I would find… I don't know what I thought but I didn't think it would be this."
The display finally zoomed in on the blue giant and then changed direction toward its smaller partner. Instead of seeing a clean bright presence, the star's light is dim as if seen through a dense haze or smoke.
As the probe moved closer, she had the image cleaned up and what I saw was unbelievable. A network of tendrils surrounding the star at the level of the corona of the sun. These bands had to be millions of miles long and hundreds of thousands of miles across. They were sweeping over the surface of the star, nearly obscuring it from vision. What remaining light was not absorbed by the dark material, was blocked by the cloud of particles.
"What is that?" I am no scientist, but living onboard the Reach for almost thirty years now, had given me the opportunity to learn more about science than I had every planned to, so I might have, once upon a time would have been able to be called Dr. Mokoto, if I wanted to. Such things are an idle vanity, and nothing more, on the Reach. We are the only two crew members, so we can call each other whatever we like.
Pele, on the other hand, was an honest to god scientist and used her time to learn sciences from at least fifteen alien scientific scholars and the best the Humani had to offer. All I could hope is she would give me an explanation that would not require half a dozen doctorates to understand.
"It is absorbing the energy of the star, converting it into some form of computronium. It's eating the star."
She didn't say anything else after that. That didn't seem so bad. I mean, it's a space dwelling organism, its got to eat something. "Okay, so what is the emergency? You found something you believe is eating a star. I mean it is important, but we catalog two dozen important things a year, why is this different?"
"Look at this time projection."
This can't be right. I know I don't have to ask her did she check her numbers, the data is right there. I hate using the part of my brain, my new brain for superfast calculations. It reminds me I'm no longer really human. But in this instance, I could not help myself.
"Project this on to the Que-Eye, and accelerate time stamp, five thousand years a second." In fifty seconds, the star could no longer be seen visibly. In another fifty seconds, all but the lowest wavelengths of energy could be detected. Seconds later, the star collapses and explodes.
There is a signature I did not expect to find there. There is a quantum foam transition wave, which built up as the star was preparing to nova. All matter caught in the transition would be converted to quantum foam and leave the universe for an undisclosed but finite amount of time. During this time this matter is capable of leaving C-space and traveling faster than light.
Now I am more than a bit concerned.
The blue giant it is circling would be the first recipient of the material and it is thousands and thousands of times more massive. If it were to do the same thing, the explosion would be billions of times more devastating. This would spread fast. This galactic arm is dense with stars, just like these two.
"Now, this is what I called you for. Load Que-Eye parallel, local references to this star, nearby multiversal shards, separate and extrapolate for similar occurrences of Black Ooze infestation. Find most likely and nearest shard, present expansion rate based on these calculations."
The Que-Eye interface is an alien technology. There are only four in the known galaxy, making Hayward's Reach a treasure beyond imagining. The technology of the Que-Eye have been extrapolated by the Hegomony's best Minds and are used in the predictive engines created by the Hegemony for interstellar warfare, and in some of the predictions used by galactic and planetary leaderships to make good policies on their planets. But the three alien devices which are still in the empire proper, lie on the edge of the Hegemony on isolated planets, predicting the future and reading the past of a galaxy. Ineffectively, with as much accuracy as an ancient seer of the Gods if you ask the wrong questions.
We discovered something about the QI core technology. Too many questions prevent it from being useful. The very quest for knowledge sought by hundreds of scientists on the QI worlds prevent them from getting anything useful. It was only when Pele and I were alone did we discover just how powerful and dangerous these things were.
But these devices do not just predict the future or present the past. They can show parallel universes just like ours where the future or the past is different than out own. Some of these futures are so close to our own, only tiny differences separate us. We can see a universe where Earth is not abandoned to the Great Enemy and Hayward's Reach is never built. We can see a universe where antimatter bombs did not rip into the crust of the my home planet almost rendering it uninhabitable to the stragglers who remained behind to fight for Earth.
We used it to view the past history of the Earth, to view events which might give us insight into the minds of the humans, and now recently other races with equally significant histories, like the rulers of the Hegemony, the Corvans. We have tried other even older races, but those crafty Second Races can sometimes cloak history from the Que-Eye, their understanding of temporal mechanics giving them an edge in keeping secrets.
To be honest, the Que-Eye was sometimes used in a fashion similar to old Earth's internet, and even occasionally to look at cats, too. Pele has a particular series of stories on a QI-distant Earth, where cats have magical abilities and secret save the world on a more than occasional basis. Most of the time, it is more of an entertainment device than a tool. But in the last decade, Pele had begun putting it to use in new and disturbing ways.
The Hegemony placed the Que-Eye on Hayward's Reach because the Botoni, plants who are scientists, believe it to be sentient and seeking information. Since the Reach would be traveling farther and faster than any ship in the Hegemony, they believed the Que-Eye should be on the ship.
They were unable to explain it to anyone in a manner we could understand, saying only that their Root had spoken and the Root was never wrong. The Root was their world-computer comprised of a network of roots circling the planet in a band thousands of miles wide. Idiosyncratic, opinionated but to their credit, they are the most decorated scientists in the Hegemony and the Corvans agreed without truly understanding. The Mariovel, who for the most part remain inscrutable in almost all things, agreed to help and grew the Reach around the Que-Eye core which was around the size of Old Texas.
Pele was entranced as displays appeared around her, her brow furrowed in concentration. The room dimmed, and grew momentarily quiet. When the Que-Eye is running, there is a background sound, barely audible, but as the images build, the air thickens as if you are mired in the flow of time itself. Images from parallel universes flow into existence building around us, or in this case, a galaxy slowly being extinguished.
A small section darkened. Then a series of novas, and a period of nothing, the black section spreading as the galaxy continues to rotate. Then another series of darkening, novas, inactivity. Meanwhile the entire black region continues to spread. New stars try to form in the darkness, but disappear relatively quickly, their tiny nova's eclipsed by the much wider band of novas taking place on the edge of darkness. Once the darkness reached the center of the galaxy, it spread rapidly, a deadly cancer extinguishing stars at an accelerated pace.
"Look there. See the building transition wave?" She slowed the image and showed an overlapping image. I could see a transition pattern building on top of the smaller waves pushing the darkness along.
"Are you thinking it may try to spread to another galaxy?"
She reoriented the view of the galaxy we were looking at. All this time, we had been looking at the galaxy from above it, spread out below us like a giant glowing spiral. She panned the view away from the galaxy and waited for the imaging system to catch up.
No, I don't try to understand how Quantaspheric Interface worked. The core of the Que-Eye is the size of an island and is in the center of the ship. The information processed is linked to the Mind of our ship and then translated into information we can understand in the Que-Eye imaging area or to smaller terminals on the ship.
The panning complete, we stood in awe. We could see an entire swath of the galaxies of this universal neighbor extinguished. An entire void covered the view to the port side of the local galaxy. A projected path showed this creature was one of the first things born in their Universe, and expanded with the universe, keeping a permanent footprint in the space of their universe. The scale boggled the mind. Its footprint was seen in the background radiation of that universe.
This thing is continuing to expand and could conceivably consume all the stars and hydrogen in that universe, hastening the death of their universe billions of years sooner than our own. I try not to get too involved in the mathematical, probabilities we view using the Que-Eye. It's easy to do when we are looking at harmless fantasies or probabilities. We treat them as stories, some bright, some dark, a form of cosmic voyeurism, an intergalactic cable with an infinite number of channels. Then you see something like this and realize the Que-Eye is not a toy.
It's a tool. A tool for a race of gods who didn't even leave instructions for how to use the remote. Pele is looking at the footage from our universe, I see the Que-Eye coordinates reset to home. "I am going to spend the next two years, and all the computing power we can spare to study this."
"I am not going to ask you why, because I can see this is going to be a threat. If your work proves to be true, the Hegemony is going to have to do something about this." I shook my head, a habit I still hadn't gotten out of.
"I didn't show you the worst part of it."
"What could be worse than this?"
"This. Look at these Que-Eye coordinates. These are the realities closest to us in a particular direction of space and time." I looked at her not comprehending what she is alluding to. The stare she gave me, placed an imaginary dunce cap on my head. She continued. "Universal constants match the closest to us in this particular direction meaning this series of universes along this axis is most like us."
"And?" Still not getting what she was showing me.
A few more waves of her hand and then I began to see. There were a multitude of universes around us, the probability map showed us at the center of the wave of universe like ours. "When I looked at the universes closest to us, I thought they were blank areas in the Que-Eye feed; like empty spaces on a radio dial. I thought they were probabilities that simply didn't happen. With what I learned from this probe, I began to review those settings again. They were not blank spaces. They were universes which have already been consumed by this creature. The beast leaves a signature substance, a unique form of neutronium; compressed neutrons, the result of its diet of dying stars. Do you see it now?"
Yes. This creature, this first sign was the harbinger of things to come. In our universe, this creature was not one of the First Races to develop sentience. One of the Precursor Races, in their infinite wisdom, found it and destroyed it, preventing its sweeping surge which took place across other universes from happening here.
But judging from the number of probabilities this creature shows up in, the multiverse must have a great preference for it. Pele walks over to me, waving to turn off the Que-Eye, taking me in her arms.
The first thing that came to my mind was the Great White Shark. It existed on Earth for 450 million years, its evolution complete, it remained relatively unchanged as nature deemed it, a perfect killing machine. It just adapted to fit the oceans it swam in.
Just like this thing.
We, Second and Third Races in the Hegemony, like to look at the Precursors as these perfect amazing beings who lived for billions of years, evolved beyond our comprehension, leaving behind tools, ninety-nine percent of that we find, we still can't use. But I am beginning to think the one thing they needed, they lacked… a competent exterminator.
The deadliest invasive species in the galaxy, a creature larger than anything made by any race in the Hegemony, larger than the Mariovel, a legendary race of beings who are capable of making entire habitable planets. A creature powerful enough to consume a star and breed exponentially in the space of a few hundred thousand years, is happening two dozen light years behind my ship.
And not a Precursor in sight.
Insurrection: Invasive Species © Thaddeus Howze 2012. All Rights Reserved
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: bomb, celebrated hero, Cognoseti, Earth, galaxy, gate system, Glendale Mokoto, Hayward's Reach, Henrenki, last hero, Pele, science fiction, Sjurani, space opera, star gate, starship, Twilight Continuum, videogames. 3 Comments
From the ansible memoirs of Exalted Scout, Glendale Mokoto, Hero of the Exodus Wars and the Fall of Earth. These are an amalgam of the earliest recordings before he was presumed lost.
Two hundred years ago, I was nothing special. I had no extraordinary abilities or talents. I was not blessed with superhuman strength like members of the New Order, genetically manipulated to be the perfect human specimens, trained and bred to be the ultimate warrior protectors of the human race.
I did not augment my mind with sentient mechanical intelligence like the Cognoseti, who became human predictors of the future of man. It was their wisdom that discovered the Earth's greatest hidden secret; that we were not the first creatures on Earth to evolve into sentience. These human machine hybrids would later house the first true machine-descended intelligences in human history.
I did not mingle my DNA with those of animal species to garner advantages lost by the development of our bigger brains. The Transformed, whose malleable DNA allowed them to absorb genetic traits of other species would lead Humanity in the exploration of new worlds after we lost our home in the Sol System.
You see, I was just a baseline human, good genes, nice teeth, good skin, and until it fell out in my fiftieth year, a nice head of hair. Two hundred years ago, I was also the most celebrated hero; indeed, I was the last hero of the Exodus of Man. They named a starship after me, they named a continent after me, they named thousands of children after me. And to me that was a strange thing, seeing how I did not actually survive the experience.
To ponder this, and to explain why you are now able to know any of this, you have to know a bit more about Old Earth.
I remembered the stink of the war. It got up into your nose and never left. You could smell the burning flesh, the expended rounds, the fear, exhilaration, the blood-lust, the sheer terror of the Henrenki boiling up out of the ground in every major city on the planet.
I remembered the fighting, the endless fighting, the bravery of our young ones, their ceaseless dying, wheat before the scythe. When we retreated, the Henrenkai came, wave after wave, like the ocean filling in the beach of our dead.
I remembered them as they swarmed over our positions with machine guns blazing; our bullets tearing into their nacreous, resilient flesh but they kept coming.
Things looked hopeless until the New Men appeared, with their mysterious talk about the Art of War, talk of the brush strokes of their weapons, their mastery of their mysterious battle-trance. In those days, all we knew of war was the spastic struggling of the uninitiated to battle. We had been too long at peace.
Our struggles for survival, even before He came all but absorbed our attention. But even after generations of peace, we were still a warlike species and returned reluctantly to the field of battle. Every man woman and child was armed because this was a war without quarter and without mercy.
When the Cognoseti revealed His existence, He rose from the oceans, the Ancient Enemy of all who live in our galaxy. We did not know He was legendary. We did not know what scars He and His kind had swept across the face of that, as yet unknown to us, galactic empire. We did not know what He wanted, only that He destroyed all that we had, with malice and forethought. We did learn one thing: when He rose from the Pacific Ocean, we realized the nature of our enemy, He had the might of an entire world, buried within our own.
Mechanically-sentient, He created weapons like the Henrenkai from His very flesh, the organo-mechanical body in which He fell to Earth billions of years ago and hid in the iron core of our planet. He hid because He was pursued by the greatest species our galaxy had ever spawned. He hid and waited until they passed away or forgot; we are not sure which. When He arose again, He had been all but forgotten by everyone in the galaxy. How could they not; nearly three billion of our years had passed while he slumbered.
So we were forced to fight Him on our own, tiny simians against a god-like machine who had tried to enslave an entire galaxy. He fought us on land, sea, air, and even in space. What could we do against an enemy so incredibly powerful? He destroyed a third of the human race and had barely awakened. We lost all hope.
Then we received a signal from space. It appeared on every communication band, every wavelength, every technology, all at once. If you were watching anything, listening to anything, it appeared and told you to be ready.
A prophecy had sent them back to us. They told us it was time to leave our world. They told us to gather as much of our world as we could carry. We did not understand, but we gathered our resources, every animal, every plant, every insect we thought we could find and catalog. We even set aside entire islands, marked with force fields to make them stand out.
We had no idea of what the Sjurani were capable of back then. We did not know what to expect, but their message gave us hope, so we fought on.
I remember the first time I saw their ships. They blotted out the sun. We fought a retreating battle to their designated pick up points. They gathered us up with tractor beams, entire cities, whole islands. It was rumored they took the entire African continent. Something about it being a template for our entire world's DNA.
They landed in their reptilian regalia and fought alongside us, as terrifying as the Henranki in their own way. Garishly colored in silks and metal, reptilian, festooned with gem-encrusted scales, loud, large, and boisterous; think of Old Earth fraternity boys armed with plasma cannons and rocket launchers and you will know something of the Rex, a warrior-breed of the Sjurani.
They helped us hold the line against the Ancient Enemy while we fled. They claimed they were the descendants of dinosaurs who had been born on Earth hundreds of millions of years in the past. We were too desperate to care. And too foolish to realize why that was more important than we knew at the time.
The evacuation took two weeks. My battle-brothers, old and new, human and Sjurani, fought until the very last ships were leaving the planet. Hundreds of millions were moved to ships every day, each scarred with the loss of someone or something precious.
The Sjurani told us He was soon to fully waken. Once that happened, we would stand no chance at all. The Ancient Enemy had only one agenda, and that was leaving the Earth. We could never allow that. Our planet's gravity well was the only thing that prevented Him from opening a gateway to another universe – a universe full of creatures as powerful as he was.
But we could take the fight to Him: A suicide mission.
He had raised an island in the Pacific, a place from whence all of his forces rose to the surface. We would fight him there.
We infiltrated the Ancient Enemy with the help of Sjurani technology. We carried into Him an antimatter weapon, created by the Sjurani, with the force of a billion Hiroshima bombs. A weapon far more powerful than anything Humanity could ever create. His arrogance in being shielded from outside, made him believe he was invulnerable. Once inside His armored shell, we could use short range teleportation to penetrate deep into His neural network. Three groups entered the alien machine. Even if all three were successful, they told us our weapons would not kill Him. But we could wound Him, perhaps even lobotomize Him, for a time.
This would allow the two hundred million humans who agreed to stay behind to cover the final retreat. The West Coast of North America was destroyed in this final battle. The Rocky Mountains were all that remain of that coastline. One billion humans left the Earth in that two week period with some of the most terrifying fighting ever seen in any war, any conflict.
Once the antimatter was placed, I, the last survivor of three dozen of the finest warriors of two races, made my way to the surface killing everything in my path. I waited. The never-ending supply of Henrenkai continued to boil forth from the Ancient enemy. In that last moment before detonation, I lay down my exhausted weapon and the Henrenkai stopped, confused by the act.
With seconds remaining, I assumed the battle occurring in space had interrupted my teleport and I resolved myself to dying, free of anger and the corruption of war. I vowed never to wage war again. My death would keep my promise.
I opened my arms and the battle-enraged Henrenkai charged me, their razor sharp talons poised to shred flesh from bones. In those final seconds, time slowed as I watched them. Close to me, I studied them in a way I had never before. Their anatomy was a marvel: Bones of carbon fullerenes, talons sharper than the sharpest steel. Wide, predator-set eyes, excellent for determining the distance to me, their prey. I could smell their hot breath, a bitter almond overtone, and I closed my eyes, ready for death. No fighting, no resistance. I felt the antimatter as it detonated. A shockwave swept through me. I could feel it in my very atoms.
Suddenly, I could see the blast wave of energy and could feel my atoms snatched away protectively within the teleport sheath. I felt my body dying as the waves of antimatter, converted to gamma rays and cosmic radiation, were transformed into the most powerful kind of destruction in our universe, in the perfect release, the ultimate annihilation of matter. No man can ever say he sat in the heart of a star and lived to tell others of it. Neither could I. It would have been breathtaking if I had a breath to take.
In that eternal second, I violated causality and was in two places at one time. I was trapped in the containment field, experiencing a quantum reality, existing in two places and in neither. I was onboard the ship in a viewing chamber teleported, so they thought, to allow me, with the remnants of my species, to see the death of my world. Such a weapon would destroy the Earth as we knew it. I watched, both detached at a distance and intimately aware of the death throes of my home planet.
For a moment, I could be anywhere and any when; I moved through time and space. I saw the Ancient Enemy's arrival on Earth three billion years ago, fleeing, from the Precursors. He crashed into a small planet in an unidentified star system with a small yellow star. I could feel His terror, I could feel His near dissolution, His flesh, burned with a fire like a solar flare, tearing His substance apart. He submerged Himself into our planet and the rocky surface extinguished those flames and His terror subsided. He sank into our world, and His screams grew quieter, until after an eon, He slept and forgot.
As I stood there in the middle of the greatest energy release since His arrival, I realized He would not die. He would survive just as He did before. Our work was almost in vain. His massive, nearly indestructible bulk would provide one benefit. Those who remained behind would not be wiped out from the weapon. They would be stranded on a world still trying to kill them. The thought was terrible and the last thing I remembered.
I was the last human to leave the Earth two hundred years ago, an unwitting and unwilling hero of a war we all but lost.
I woke several years later on our way to Toranor, a system of Gaian super-worlds created by a race of highly-advanced beings called The Precursors. No other race in the galaxy has ever come close to their level of technological capability. They were as far beyond even our Sjurani benefactors as we were beyond ants.
The Toranor star system had trillions of sentients living in harmony in what was called the jewel of the Corvan Empire. Now homeless, Humanity and the Sjurani were offered a place on one of their lesser worlds. I knew I would never call this place home. I had seen too much, done too much. There would be nothing for me here.
All that I valued died with Earth.
I asked what a single man could do in an Empire of sentients with magnificent technologies, making our human achievements, even in the year of our Lord 2475, seem like children's toys? How could I distinguish myself?
By providing the one thing all Empires need: New boundaries. I became a Scout. I was told the role of a Scout was a solitary one. I would be provided a robot companion if I desired. My job would be to map stars toward the center of the galaxy for planets capable of being terraformed by the Mariovel at some point in the future. I was promised the knowledge of the Empire at my fingertips and all the time of my life to read and learn it.
It was then the Sjurani revealed to me that I had died during the teleportation. They had never tried to teleport during an antimatter explosion. No one ever had. My mind was able to be reconstructed, but my body had died. They took my mind and placed it within a robotic shell that mimicked my own form so well that I was never aware of the change at any time.
I was angered at first. I walked around for almost a year, on Galtan II, our new home, knowing something was different, but not knowing what. Galtan II was like all of the worlds of Toranor, beautiful, diverse, fantastic. The knowledge that all of these worlds were created by a sentient species that was not God, boggled the imagination. Imagine a star system with twenty habitable worlds. The knowledge would turn our ideas of science and religion on their ears.
Galtan II boasted a forest that spanned the entire equatorial band of the planet, one giant forest whose myriad trees were connected by their root system into one organic supercomputer, a single hive mind which could separate segments of itself to communicate with other forms of life. One of the most amazing world-minds in this part of the empire. Yes, there were others. Since the Botani did not choose to live in the colder parts of the planet, we were offered the other two thirds of the world to live responsibly on. With the technology of the Sjurani supporting our own, we could be good neighbors.
The Sjurani told me that what they did, they did for love of my heroic sacrifice. They created an entire technology around saving my life. I learned later they held my psychic resonance in an energy field that consumed the energy of a world for years. I felt guilty once I learned what was done on my behalf.
I learned that my condition, once successful, because of my heroic stature, spurred a whole division of baseline humans to make the transition to the robotic. We were called The Transcended. They gave up their flesh to become the first robotic-human hybrids. Were there consequences? Certainly, but none of them ever considered it an unfair trade, except perhaps for me. I would have liked to have had the choice.
When I was appointed a Scout, the Corvan empire made a starship for me; since I was no longer a living organic, they made something faster than had ever been created before. I named it Hayward's Reach after a small seaside town where I lived the quiet life of a writer before the end of the world came for us all. Before activating the ship, the greatest generals, admirals and Sjurani Rex came to see me off. They said wonderful things, heroic things about me and my sacrifices. I didn't listen.
All I could hear was the loneliness. No, the alone-ness that space offered me. I thanked them. I climbed aboard my ship and synchronized my ansible to an ansible station here on Galtan II which would relay my reports. Since an ansible could only be paired once, something about quantum entanglement, it was the most critical thing I could do unless I wanted to communicate relativistically.
My pilot was a Cogneseti, a sentient intelligence housed in the mechanical body of a woman. She was the first of her kind, a mechanical version of myself. I started life as a man and became a machine. She started her existence as a machine and became a woman.
Her name was Pele. She named herself after the mythical goddess of the legendary Hawaiian Islands that are no more. When I asked her about her name, she said once she had studied human history. The tale of the Hawaiians fascinated her and she had taken it upon herself to study all of the notes on Earth's Polynesian cultures. Our ship was equipped with a distillation of all of the knowledge of the human race. We would also have an upstream of new ideas and achievements when time and bandwidth permitted. When I asked her why she was coming with me, she said since she would never get to see Hawaii, the next best thing was to discover a place like it somewhere else.
She arranged our path through the empire and indicated we would reach the edge of the Empire in as little as three jumps and three months using their Gate system. After that, we would be on our own, moving at approximately thirty-two times the speed of light. It would take us three thousand years to cross the galaxy. We would be taking the scenic route, flying through as many star-dense systems as possible. We were the fastest things in the Empire, streaking away from all that I knew, and I was glad to be doing it. It was unlikely we would survive the journey across the galaxy. The Sjurani estimated we might live for four hundred years with careful maintenance. We promised to change our oil regularly. Pele laughed. The Sjurani just looked quizzically at me.
Sitting down, I called up a data-screen. The words were queued up from earlier in the day, waiting for me. Pele was sitting at the nav station monitoring the ebb and flow of the aether. I read out loud as would become a tradition for the two of us in the decades to come: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…"
I had always wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities, and at that moment, it seemed appropriate. I never had the time before. Taking my companion's hand, this new season of light illuminated our souls as we fled into the core of the galaxy, to see things no man had seen before. I, once being the most ordinary of men, had transcended the human experience for something never done before. It was, indeed, the best of times.
Hayward's Reach © Thaddeus Howze, 2011, All Rights Reserved
The Hub World is copyrighted by Ville Kröger under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Some Rights Reserved.
Through the Gate is a concept project by Andrey Lifanov © 2006 . All Rights Reserved.
The Great White Spot
Posted by Ebonstorm on July 16, 2012
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach, Short Story. Tagged: climate change, global warming, great, Hayward's Reach, hurricane, Jupiter, satellite, science fiction, space station, speculative fiction, spot. Great Red Spot, weather, white. 3 Comments
From space, it looked like a ball of blue and brown; blue oceans swirled with windblown whitecaps and the occasional tiny island could be found, but most were scoured clean by the Last Storm. You couldn't see much of the surface anymore because of the cloud cover. The white polar ice caps were tiny buttons on the top and bottom of the globe.
During the year, they appeared and disappeared. If you took a vantage point from the lone satellite of this blue planet, you would notice on the night side that no light was emitted, no radio transmissions to disturb your electromagnetic slumbers. It was a quiet planet circling a nondescript yellow-white dwarf with eight other planets and assorted planet-junk. Strangely enough, if your vision was sharp enough, you would see hundreds of artificial satellites circling the planet.
You would see communication satellites beaming signals to each other, reminding each other where they were to ensure signals moving from the ground to other places on the planet were not interrupted. They never received those signals any longer, since there was no one to send them. There were many global positioning satellites, each designed to know every single street and every square inch of the planet and tell you where you were at any moment in space and time, anywhere on the globe. They hadn't had a single query for a over than a year.
Military reconnaissance satellites watched key sections of the globe for threats to countries that no longer existed. Linked to those satellites are space-based weapons platforms using a variety of technologies to deliver death from above. These weapons sat quiescient, unaware of their lack of targets.
Two satellites were still doing their jobs. The first was a weather satellite. It still chugged along, gathering information about the only weather phenomenon that still mattered, the Last Storm. Yes, there were still record temperatures all over the world. Yes, flooding was occuring in all the places men once lived. Island nations had disappeared under the rising water levels. Polar ice caps has already disappeared. Coastal cities were all but erased. These satellites noted all of those things, but lately, the only information it tracked was called the Last Storm.
It came into existence nearly ten years ago. Weather satellites made the pivotal discovery of the Last Storm in 2096, when it was just a tropical depression in the South Pacific Ocean. With winds in excess of three hundred miles an hour, no one viewing it at the time, knew they were looking at what would eventually render the planet a lifeless wasteland.
Now, it covered half of the northern hemisphere at any time, and blocked the sun from a quarter of the planet. Swirling above the planet is what, if there were scientist left to name it, a Great White spot circling the surface of the Earth, similar to the Red Spot on Jupiter, just hundreds of miles across instead of tens of thousands. A storm of matchless ferocity and intensity. It drove sand debris into the air at almost four hundred miles an hour.
The other satellite still doing anything significant, had only one man left on board. The last known survivor of the human race. His name was Sergei Balmasov. He was no longer living in the classic sense. He sat and looked out the observation window of the new International Space Station in muted horror; his mind broken.
He once listened to the wideband radio as the world came to an end. He listened as people called for help that would never come. He listened while radio stations told people not to panic, gave assurances that the storm would turn away from Hawaii, then as they ordered evacuations of South Pacific islands, and as the storm erased those islands, and crippled those evacuations, he listened to the death tolls.
As it approached Hawaii, he listened to the military channels as they considered what to do when they realized there would not be enough resources or time to rescue everyone there.
He wept as the military turned their ships around and returned to the United States. When Hawaii stopped transmitting, he turned off his radio to silence the horror, at least for a time. He could see the Storm from space as the world turned beneath him.
When he woke the next day, and turned the telescope toward Hawaii, it was gone.
Ships that had been fortunate enough to leave Hawaii early in the warnings were not safe. The storm overtook their ships. One hundred and twenty thousand sank as their ships were capsized in the torrential storm.
The remaining population died in the storm awaiting rescue ships that could never come. Hawaii, born of fire, home to people for five thousand years, was washed away in a single night, all of her people returned to the sea. The Last Storm slowed for a time and it was thought it would expire at sea, its forces spent. And while its winds slowed, it did not stop. It simply grew larger, much larger.
Sergei had no time to grieve as the storm approached California. Hearing about Hawaii, Californians fled to the mountains as meteorologists predicted the storm breaking against the Rocky Mountains. As it came within a thousand miles of California, the rains began. It approached the coast of California, its terrible winds drove tidal swells of water which hammered the coast turning any building on the coast to splinters.
The fifty-foot swells had never been seen before and thrashed the coastline, drove water into the streets of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Torrential rains caused people who did not believe what they had heard about Hawaii to re-evaluate their position and they ran for their lives, for all the good it would do them.
The roads to the mountains were jammed with cars and trucks. The storm was inexorable. When it reached the coast, the winds were in excess of two hundred fifty miles per hour. Nothing made by man could withstand such winds. Skyscrapers lost windows, cars were flipped and carried for miles, trees uprooted, homes swept away by winds, rain, and waves. All convential wisdom about storms was lost as this monster approached the mountains.
As the storm reached the mountains, everyone's hopes rose, even as they ignored the carnage. The mountains would break the storm; it would run out of energy.
Instead, it did the unexpected. It turned south, but did not die.
Los Angeles was the next major metropolis to be swept away. The storm was being fed by the Pacific and kept moving south. As the edge of the mountains receded, the storm proceeded east into the Gulf of Mexico and continued to grow. Most of Mexico to the borders of Costa Rica and South America were completely inundated by water.
Refueled by the heated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the storm's power increased, and with its increased size, it affected the Southern mainland states and basically erased them, from Nevada to Florida. Nearly one third of the population of the United States was destroyed in the first forty hours of the Last Storm of the century. Nearly all of Mexico and Costa Rica were decimated. Tens of millions were believed dead.
As the storm pulled away from the United States, its size increased again, absorbing water from across its entire area, and energy from the very warm waters of the Atlantic. It swept across the Southern tip of Europe, but even that tiny brush destroyed most of the UK, Greece, France, Italy, and all of the Mediterranean. At this point, emergency signals crossed the globe, with everyone trying to determine where the greatest need for emergency service would appear next.
It didn't matter. The storm would soon be everywhere.
The storm grew larger and more powerful, as it re-crossed the Pacific. Considered a national emergency by every government on the planet, humanity rallied in a effort to stop this threat. This was a sign of too little, too late. Climate scientists sat quietly in the briefing, chafing that they had been unable to convince the world governments of this final inescapable result of global warming. Being right was of little consolation.
It was considered such a threat, militaries threatened to throw nuclear weapons into the heart of the thing. Physicists tried to warn the military against this foolish act, trying to remind the military that a storm this size was already more powerful than every nuclear weapon on Earth with every second of its existence. But desperate men would try anything.
A great carrier, the Independence, last of her kind, caught in the storm and unable to escape, decided to use a nuclear device, but was destroyed before it could make the effort.
People fled wherever they thought they could go, but climate models had begun to reveal a startling truth. The storm was by now so large it could feed from any ocean, anywhere, at nearly any time, until it ran out of energy. Climatologists theorized it would become a permanent fixture on the face of the planet. Those climatologists called it The Great White Spot. It swept across the Earth over twenty-five times before stabilizing at its current size of one sixth of the globe. The remainder of the planet was covered in perpetual cloud cover that remained that way for another six years.
Sergei listened to the radio until the signals grew less and less. Communications from the ground lasted two more years, but by the year 2103, he could not detect a single radio message anywhere on the planet. He held out hope that somewhere, somehow, mankind had survived. Until the cloud cover broke enough to see the planet.
Until today. Then he wept like a child.
The mountains were gone, ground away by the five hundred mile an hour winds. The Rockies, the Appalachians, the Himalayans had been scoured from the planet. Nothing made by man had survived. The Earth was smooth and uniformly brown. He stared, looking for any landmarks. Nothing remained.
Sergei lasted his last year eating the stored food onboard the ship. The satellite alone could keep him alive for five years easily, but his mind was shattered by what he saw. In order to cope, he used climatological models from weather satellites under his control to determine that the Great White Spot would last for another twenty years in the best case scenarios. In the worst, it might never stop.
Sergei Balmasov, on the tenth anniversary of the Last Storm, and the last human being left alive anywhere, opened the bottle of vodka he had carried aboard all those years ago, and drank a toast. He finished the bottle in about an hour. He set all of his notes into the computer and set a radio broadcast into space, repeating what he had learned about humanity during their last days on Earth. He stepped into an airlock without a suit, closed the door behind him. He held his breath while he cycled the lock and jumped out into space. With his dying breath, he chose to look upon the Earth.
His message, to anyone who might one day come across our once-blue planet, was a tombstone marker. "Here lies the final resting place of the Human Race. We saw the future, but could not embrace it, until it embraced us. May God have mercy on our souls."
The Great White Spot © Thaddeus Howze 2012, All Rights Reserved
Posted in: Chapter, Hayward's Reach. Tagged: Anansi, Cairo, eagle, ebonstorm, Egypt, Hayward's Reach, horror, Horus-ka, invader, Kemet, modern urban fantasy, Ptah, short story, star, Thaddeus Howze, The Aspect War. 2 Comments
Hail the Spirit Army
Ptah laughed.
The sun rose over what looked like the city of Cairo. The early morning light cleared the horizon and was bright and sharp, stinging the eyes with its searing, illuminating essence. The duskiness of night, suddenly evaporated in a single moment, stark and striking. The land had an alien presence as if it were someplace else, far removed from humanity, and in its way, it was. This was not Egypt of Earth, though it resembled it very closely. The markets slowly rising, people going about their tasks, farmers working the land, fishermen gathering their nets, weavers gathering their reeds, bureaucrats readying their papyrus, pharaohs discussing the affairs of this place, this Kemet, the perfect Egypt. This was the land of legend, of the thousand and one Arabian Nights, a place of mystery, populated by the spirits of men, lead by the god-born and protected by the remnants of the once-great gods of this place. And in this place, Ptah, grandfather to the gods of Kemet, saluted the morning Sun, his brother-son, Ra as his laughter trailed off into the morning.
His laugh was punctuated with the rhythmic stride of running alongside a well formed young man of twenty five or so, it was so hard to remember, it seemed as soon as you got to know them they died, but he liked this young man, full of questions, heresy and rage, eager to take on a world that had done nothing good for him. He had grown strong during his training with Ptah, his body and spirit forged by his time in the Desert Outside of Time. This place was in the boy, filling him with its essence, becoming a part of him, the silence, the vastness, the stillness of the desert, hiding its secrets from all but the most knowledgeable. I brought him out here one last time to reveal the last great Secret to him. He deserves to know where his Fate will lead him.
"What do you mean the gods did not create the universe?" Lumumba gasped in the warming desert air. His incredulity pasted on his face along with the sweat and windswept sand of the early morning air. "Everything I was ever taught, no matter the religion, indicated that the gods, or God or whatever we worshiped created the universe and everything we know in it."
Ptah ran effortlessly alongside Lumumba, his bare feet barely touching the hot sand, his short and powerful frame clothed in little more than a pair of biking shorts. His night black skin, shown with a shimmer of sweat and a mild musky scent rose from him, otherworldly and intoxicating. "I, or someone like me, I forget which, was said to have created the universe, and populated it with my sister-wives and brothers who, then, in some manner created the world, then the animals, populating it finally with people who, of course, look like us, and ultimately worship us and we share our wisdom with our children and we all live happily ever after, or something like that. What's missing is the detail. And the truth of the matter is that no god, old or modern has any interest in humanity knowing the truth of our origins." Ptah, smiling Ptah, was for the first time since Lumumba met him, was not smiling. "Rest a moment."
"Thank you, I needed to stop. You say I don't need to breath or eat or sleep here, but I always feel just as tired as if I did." Lumumba sat down on a nearby rock and caught his breath, sipping from an old canteen he wore on his belt.
"And you will, as long as you believe you need to. You have come here for almost fifteen years and still do not understand the nature of this place." Ptah's smile returned to his face as he turned toward the morning sun.
"And how would I ever learn it's true nature, oh mysterious one, when you do everything in your power to make sure I never truly understand this place?"
"The question is the answer."
"That is exactly what I am talking about Ptah, you never tell me anything useful. Just print that stuff on some fortune cookies and we are in business." The tone is light and bantering, as this was a conversation that had been chewed on before same as the rough unleavened bread they shared.
"Perhaps the idea is to convince you to think for yourself. There may come a time, when such free lunches will be not forthcoming. It will be time for you to leave us soon. We only have one more teacher for you to see." Ptah was ever-smiling but his face seemed to have another, more subtle, cast this early morning as perhaps a secret burden weighed heavy upon him.
"Another teacher? We had been spending so much time together lately, I assumed there was no other teaching left for me, your august company excluded." Lumumba's mind cast back to his early days in the Desert. Lumumba stared at Ptah and considered just how long he had been coming to the Desert with its silver sands, strange oases, and perfect palms. The Desert also hid a collection of eclectic folk who wander its sand sea dunes, hidden from the rest of the afterworld.
These were wonderful people who trained him in everything from any kind of survival to dining etiquette, combat both open handed and with a wide array of weaponry, ancient or modern, a variety of languages, he could speak nearly two dozen now, without an appreciable accent. He had met people from nearly every culture and every part of the world. They all seemed to be part of the Desert no matter where they were from originally. Everywhere he went, and he was beginning to think, every-when he went, Ptah knew everyone and everyone knew him. There were several times his trainers appeared to be from a range of times, from the Visigoths to Vietnam. It hurt his head to think about it so he just learned to accept it just like everything else he did when he was with Ptah. It was Ptah, and Ptah told him when he met him, to expect the improbable, prepare for the impossible and accept that just about anything could be true, somewhere.
Ptah would take him across the Desert, running, they never rode a vehicle unless their teacher used or needed one. Ptah kept telling him that he wanted the essence of the Desert to sink into him. Since he never really explained it, Lumumba let it go as the random nattering of a senile deity nearly eight thousand years old. Once they reached their teacher, Ptah would leave and promise to return. Eventually he would and the lesson would be over. The teacher was never surprised, but Lumumba was never aware of how they would know. Lumumba was never able to tell what time it was and since his watch refused to keep accurate time in the Desert, he eventually stopped wearing it.
This had been their ritual with the occasional trip to the City, as Ptah called it. But as usual, nothing done with Ptah was simple, easy or made any sense at all. Every trip to the City, started with a trip to a clothing store where they were both fitted for what amounted to period costuming. There were several different shops but they all seem to do the same thing for Ptah, create stylish clothing that was better than the biking shorts or worse, that skirt thing that Ptah tended to favor. Once he put on a suit, he appeared to be quite substantial and deadly serious. Leaving the clothier, Ptah would head into the city proper and find a particular building, and upon opening the door and passing through it, Lumumba and Ptah would find themselves transported to where ever or whenever, their costumes dictated.
Trips to the City, and by proxy, where ever the doors lead were almost always trips that revolved around learning some obscure lesson that could have been delivered by Ptah in the Desert, but it appeared that Ptah enjoyed his jaunts as much as Lumumba secretly did.
"Yes, you have a final teacher, but he cannot be trusted, and rightfully so," Ptah said. "Today is your graduation day and I bear gifts for this day." Reaching into his backpack he pulled out five rods about the length of a man's forearm. On the end of one of them was the head of an eagle. The other rods were ornately festooned with cartouches that Lumumba recognized as the Battle of Horus against Set. "Put it together, using your Ka, like I have shown you."
Lumumba focused his will and his Ka leapt to his command, surging forward and was visible in his fingertips as he held each section of the staff together and smoothed over the separation point until the entire staff was a single piece with the Eagles' head on the top end. The staff was weighted, but perfectly so, and Lumumba's spinning of the staff, appeared effortless. He began a staff ritual weaving the staff in a complex series of movements, that while they appeared random slowly began to form a barrier in the area painted by the staff. After a few more seconds, the sands near the barrier began to rise about knee level and stayed there wavering as if under the effects of anti-gravity.
Ptah walked up to the barrier and studied the work, allowing his divine senses to study his protégé's work. It was perfect, the young man's mastery of his Ka showed a marked improvement even since the last time they did this type of Work. "Explain the basis for our sorcery."
"Sorcery using the Ka harnesses the pure spirit of the caster and is best used for creating constructs and barriers that protect the body and the mind. This is the purest of the spirit forms of magic. It is also the fastest cast, and has the shortest span. It also works well between realms and suffers the least degradation in the realms of Men. Creative use of Ka can often mean the difference between life and death.
"Good, good, go on." Ptah was secretly pleased that his lessons had been received so well. The manifestations Lumumba was creating were without flaw.
"Mastery of the Ba, or blood magic allows for powerful offensive magic. But since you cannot harm without harm, Ba requires a sacrifice of blood or bone, yours or someone else's. Down the dark path is Mastery of Ba, since many of the necromantic arts can be found there." Lumumba manifested the Claws of Ra and cut into his palm allowing a tiny flow of blood. Wiping his blooded hand across his new staff, the head of the staff suddenly sprouted a short two foot spear tip comprised of blood red light. Swirling the weapon, he sliced into the face of a nearby rock, cleaving through it. "The problem with Mastery of Ba is its continued requirement of sacrifice to maintain it. To use this blade, for instance, would require a constant application of blood and in a long battle, that could be dangerous to one's health."
"Very good, what is next?"
"Sheut Mastery is the control of the shadow side of all things. By interacting with the shadow of an object or a person, it is the same as interacting with that object. With Sheut, I can temporarily control the will of a man or destroy or move a physical object that does not possess a living will simply by interacting with its sheut. Mastery of the Sheut is one of the most difficult of magics because, subverting a living will is forbidden due to its karmic costs. However, Sheut is a powerful force if one is attempting to destroy unliving objects since they cannot object to their Sheut being disrupted by a sorcerer of sufficient strength. This is also a magic that works well in the world of Men because it does not violate the Compact and reveal the existence of magic. Sheut is a very flexible form and there are sorcerers who practice nothing but Sheut because of its wide range of applications from destruction of matter to animation of objects."
"Two remain."
"Ren Mysticism, or the Mastery of the Name. Bequeathed by Brother Thoth and Sister Isis, Ren Mystics seek the secret names of all things. The secret name of a person or object allows complete mastery of that object, weaving the threats of reality and control to the mystic using it. This is why we keep our secret names to ourselves and only reveal them to those who love us best. To know the Name of a thing or person allows the greatest power over an individual, mastery of their very soul forces and life essence. A powerful Ren Mystic can slay the living and raise the dead. This power barely works in the world of the Living due to the disruption it causes in the Compact, but in Spirit World, it is one of the greatest powers possessed by the learned. You have taught me to guard my Name and the power that could be had if someone knew it. I have never told another soul. I have woven the threads that might reveal my Name tightly within my essence to make them proof against mortal divination. I have learned to read the threads of all things in order to find their secrets as well."
"And the last?"
"The Forbidden Power of Akh. Practitioners of this power create imperfect resurrections of formerly living beings. There is no rule that says these creatures could not be beneficent servants but the power seems generally sought to return men to life with a form of immortality placing them beyond the reach of Death. It is forbidden because almost all who seek this power become corrupted while under its influence. Life is for living and when one's allotted time is due, one graciously leaves the world and returns to the Cycle here in the Desert Outside of Time, awaiting a return to life in the future. Using the Forbidden Power disrupts the cycle and imbalances the Spirit World. With sufficient imbalance, the two worlds fall from balance and can both be destroyed. Hence the prohibition of this very dark art. All who use it, with only the tiniest of exceptions are slain and their creations destroyed. I have learned it, as you have taught it, to return the dead to the Cycle and to disrupt the creations that utilize that art. I am never to pervert the dead to create Akh-life, except in the defense of a greater good."
"And as far as I am concerned, there is no greater good that would warrant such a creation, but to not teach it to you would make you vulnerable to anyone who knew it." Ptah was pleased that this, his greatest gift, had been received well and it would be used wisely.
The two had been walking and talking for some time away from Memphis and Ptah had been manipulating their path until they had come to what appeared to be a great forest along the edge of the Desert. "That is the Great Forest. A manifestation of all of the World's greatest forested regions, jungles, rainforests, and other planted regions. We are expected there. As they approached the Great Forest, the smell of immense age wafted from the Forest. The air of the Desert was dry, crisp with a light metallic taste, the forest's scent was cooler, mustier, like an old closet filled with woolen sweaters, still but not unpleasant.
As they grew closer, the size of the immense trees became more apparent, from a distance they appeared to be the size of a strong man, but when they were closer, it was clear they were much, much larger. It would take twenty men, arm to arm to encircle even the smallest of these trees. The trees vanished into the sky and covered the sun allowing only the tiniest spots of light to reach the ground. Great eagles were also seen flying in the canopy, each, incredibly large, some the size of a small airplane.
As they left the Desert behind and moved deeper into the forest, the sense of age only increased and they walked until they had come to an area that seemed older, the trees more bent, great spider webs were woven through the canopy, whispering their secrets, waving in an unfelt breeze.
"Welcome, weary travelers to my land," said a great voice from apparently nowhere. Lumumba looked around but could see no one speaking, and the voice seemed to come from everywhere.
"Look up, my son," Ptah had already found an immense stump to sit on and was pointing skyward.
Lumumba looked up and was surprised to see the largest spider he had ever seen dangling just a few feet from his head. It was the size of truck and its eight eyes, burned with intelligence. Lumumba could feel its will pressing down upon him, a physical presence, making the air thick and his movement slow. He wanted to move his hand to invoke his Ka, but he simply could not move his fingers at all.
"So this is the savior, the protector of mankind, the one we have been waiting for nearly a thousand years? He certainly does not look like much to me. As a matter of fact, I think he is an arachnophobe to boot." The great spider moved with an alarming agility for something so large, and swung itself down to land in front of Lumumba. Its eight eyes never lost their intensity, as the spider made its way around him, viewing him from all sides. "I thought he would be taller."
"You say that about all the heroes, Anansi. I am a respectable four feet tall and it has not held me back any," Ptah responds with a jocular tint to his tone. This eases Lumumba's fear of the giant spider plucking his clothing and his new staff with its glistening razor sharp pedipalps.
"Yes, boy, that glistening substance is venom; enough in each bite to slay a thousand men. A single touch from me and you would be dead before you knew it. No, I am not a spider. I resemble one, but a spider my size could not exist where you come from. Consider me the iconic representation of what all spiders imagine themselves to be, awe-inspiring, powerful, killing machines. And no, I am not reading your mind, your face says everything."
"And let's not forget humble and full of grace."
"You scare the boy in your way and I scare him in mine, Ptah."
"Did your master tell you about me, Horus-ka?" hissed Anansi as it waved its forelegs around Lumumba.
It was hard for Lumumba to listen to Anansi's voice, it caused him to want to run away and never stop, so filled with menace, its very presence confounded his concentration. Lumumba watched as he began to sense the weaving of the threads of magic. "Yes, sir, he did mention you in passing when he talked about well known deities of the African continent. He said, you were a known liar and scoundrel. And that if I were to meet you in person, to not trust a single thing you said to me unless you swore on your ancestors first."
"He said what?" roared Anansi, his huge forelegs waving faster around Lumumba, his body tense and hair all over his form stood erect and crackled with what appeared to be electrical energy. "A liar, and a scoundrel, not to be trusted, eh? Did he tell you that I stole the moon and the stars for man, did he tell you that I liberated all of the stories of the world for humanity, so that you would have something to do around your fires for the last fifteen thousand years? Did he tell you that without me, you would not have fire, since the gods wanted to keep it for themselves?"
The air in the clearing was still as Lumumba considered his answer. Lying to deities was almost always the wrong thing to do, since most could tell when you were. But Ptah did mention that diplomacy when discussing them was always the best choice since gods were known to be a bit thin-skinned, sensitive about their exploits and capricious in the response to how they are seen by humans. Lumumba decided to go with candor. He hoped Ptah would step in before anything bad happened.
"Yes, sir, he did tell me some of those things. He said that you stole the stars but spilled them on your way out of heaven so they scattered throughout the sky. He mentioned that you borrowed the sun because you lost your way coming out of the underworld and forgot to put it back when you were done. He also mentioned that you did liberate all of the stories of the world, but you did it so that you would have people pay you to hear them. On your way to the market, it was said that the stories fell into the river from the calabash you carried them in and were lost, found by beggars and fishwives who used them to get money from people. On the matter of fire, he mentioned that you did steal fire for us, but only because you took pity on us one day when we were freezing and you did not have a warm place to stay having been kicked out of Heaven again and so you gave us fire, so you could be warm." Lumumba had begun to regret his decision as he felt the energy of Anansi building in front of him, its claws waving closer and closer to his body. He dared not move since the claws were sweeping all around him front to back, faster and faster.
Ptah snickered and turned away from Anansi, taking a sip of water to hide his laughter.
"So he did, did he? Anansi whispered. A deep breath followed with Anansi sounding just a little bit contrite. "Well, so that the truth be known, he has not lied. Not once. All of those things are as you say. I am a selfish deity who happens to benefit others while I am trying to benefit myself. As I have done now. He is ready, Ptah." Anansi stopped waving his claws over Lumumba and backed away.
"I call you Horus-Ka, the spirit of Horus. Your next answer will determine the fate of men and gods. When confronted by evil, do you use the force of arms or the strength of will to resolve the problem?"
Horus-Ka looked to Ptah but his face was stony and unresponsive. "Sir, –"
"I am Anansi, The Weaver of Fate, Teller of Tales, Trickster of the Gods, Defender of Man, I am no man. Call me as I am, Kwaku Anansi," interrupted Anansi with enough force to nearly knock Horus-Ka from his feet.
"Forgive me Kwaku Anasi, Ptah, Father to the Gods, I have been taught when confronting evil that force of arms is almost never the only solution to a problem, and that truly winning the battle relies on a keen eye, a strong mind, a full heart, a ready wit and a forceful will. I will only use force of weapons when no other avenue presents itself. This I pledge to you, my masters." As Horus-Ka completed his statement, two circles of fire formed with a bridge of flame connecting them.
The circle around Horus-Ka was filled and surrounded with a variety of cartouches each flickering in multi-colored flame, the second circle about ten meters away was much larger and opened to a vista similar to the Great Forest Horus-Ka had seen earlier in the day with one vital difference. A giant creature seeming to be comprised of earth tore through the Forest and approached the barriers that kept the Forest and the Real World separate. If the scale were to be believed, this creature stood over a thousand feet tall, towering over the redwoods of the Great Forest. Giant Eagles and tiny men sitting on those eagles seemed to be engaging the creature unsuccessfully. One tower had already fallen and when three of them were toppled, the creature would be able to cross into the world of Men.
"That is your first great task, Horus-Ka. You must protect the world of Men. It is too close to the boundary for any of us to be of any help to you. Your gifts and your training will need to be enough. Know that the people you see there are denizens of the Spirit World, when they die, they fall from the cycle of life, never to return. They need you to stop this creature. If it pierces the boundary, it will cause a massive earthquake wiping out the Atlantic coast of Africa, South America and parts of the North American continent."
"Who could have done this, how is this even possible? Ptah, you said that the Compact prevented magic like this from even working in the world of Men?
"These creatures do not obey the Compact and have begun their assault on our world. They have begun a battle which will pit all of the Spirit Realms and the World of Men against each other, and when the White Host, the Cold Gods and Demon of Babylon have exhausted themselves, they will destroy the victors. This opening volley will liberate the Demon and you cannot allow that. If she is freed too soon, things will not be in place. Ptah, what of your brothers and sisters?"
"They are hidden in the world of Men with no memory of who they are, it is their only chance of survival and the only chance there will be some gods left when this Scourge is done. We are the last, and Horus-Ka, son of man and gods, you must be our weapon. Otherwise we have none. As a man, you may go places even gods fear to tread. Now go, we shall buy your freedom with our lives, if it comes to that."
The clearing was suddenly lit from the distance as beams of cold white light streaked through the trees and illuminated the webbing of the clearing. Screams of agony and rage are heard in the distance.
"I do not think they like the decorating I left for them. It is so hard to find venom laced webbing these days." Anansi turned to Ptah. Make ready my brother, my traps will not hold them long." Anansi leapt into the trees, and skittered across a web work hidden in the canopy. "Horus-Ka, the weavings of fate upon you are strong, I wove them myself. But you were given a thread of Fate before I met you. That fate I could not change. Be strong and in your darkest hour know that Fate is your ally, even if you cannot believe it at the time. Farewell, son and spirit of Horus."
Ptah turned to Horus-Ka and took a necklace from his bag. It held an icon of a disk with the Eye of Ra upon it. "When I am gone, you will be unable to return here without this talisman. Only Ra will remain behind to protect the Spirit World because he is safe within his chariot of fire. All of the souls here will depend on you once we are gone. Now go. Make us proud.
"Is that it? No ideas, no clues how to defeat the thousand foot tall colossus? "
"If heroism were easy, everyone would do it." Ptah's armored hand snatches a spiny arrow from the air, mere inches from Horus-Ka's face. "I am confident you will do what is necessary. Go." And with that Ptah pushes Horus-Ka into the second circle of flame and into his destiny.
"And now I go to mine. Anansi save some for me."
"There are plenty to go around, my brother. You know I could not undo what Fate had given him."
"I know, but you gave him a chance to save the world first."
The number of lights in the forest increased and the number of eyes those lights came from doubled. And doubled again; and again. Soon the forest was lit and there was no darkness. Ptah and Anansi held the portal open until Horus-Ka arrived. Then the portal closed and was sealed, unable to be opened again. After that moment, no one without the Eye of Ra would be able to enter or leave the spirit realm. This would not help Ptah, who armored with a mighty staff whose head of Anubis, slew any that it touched instantly, a magnificent flaming helm which shot forth beams of the light of Ra, incinerating all it shown upon, whose thews allowed him to strike each hexapedal creature and slay them with a single blow and mighty Anansi, whose webs, fangs, claws, and venom destroyed dozens of these creatures a second, and it was still not enough. Both of these beings were soon overwhelmed and the number of their enemy soon exceeded their ability to slay them, formidable though they both were.
But they were not trying to win. They simply needed to buy some time. This was not the real battle. The real battle was being fought in the heart of a boy they rescued twenty years ago against a monstrosity of stone and magic. Anansi projected a blast of venom and hurled a star from the sky upon a cluster of the enemy. His venom seared their stony flesh and the star destroyed then by the dozens. But after a day and a night, he had begun to tire. Standing upon a mound of the dead, he and Ptah were surrounded and exhausted.
The six legged creatures fell back for the first time in two days. A man-like creature strode forward, lit by the light of glowing sigils. He had two winged serpents flying over his shoulders. His body was gnarled and bent, but glowed with boundless power. He wore an elaborate headdress and metallic bracers on his arms and feet. His face was covered but the area of the headdress where his face might be was illuminated with a pale light which showed the face in shadow, a long aquiline nose and a cruel sharp jawline. His voice was liquid menace and if a human were listening he would have heard a language thought dead, the tongue of the Mayan Olmecs. "Never send a dog to do a man's job." The two serpents turned toward Ptah and Anansi and opened their mouths. A sound like the rattling of a thousand bones of the dead being ground to dust, slowly, agonizingly streamed toward the two gods.
Anansi, reached heavenward again and pulled another star from the firmament. The star streaked toward the forest. Exhausted by this final effort, Anansi fell still holding the star only with his will alone.
Ptah's helm shown again with Ra's Light but it weakened and guttered. Ptah moved the last few steps toward Anansi and he could hear the star's imminent arrival. The Great Forest was lit from above as the star grew in the night sky. The remaining hexapeds turned their eyes skyward and the Olmec directed his will upon Ptah and Anansi. And then, Ptah's light went out and a star incinerated the Forest.
Horus-Ka arrived about two kilometers from the edge of the forest where the second barrier to the world of Men shimmered in the early morning light. There were many defenders already in place whose variety of weapons were made ready. Some were familiar to Horus-Ka, many were not. The defenders were sitting still preparing their Ka for this final confrontation. Many were invoking sigils that would no matter what happened meant their ultimate dissolution as entities on the Wheel of Life. Horus-Ka did not stop them. Each man had to make his own decision. As he walked toward the forward line, many of the men and women stopped as he passed and whispered. The monstrosity drew closer and nothing being done seemed to have any effect on it. Beams of light and mighty songs rang out, each filled with spiritual puissance. The drummers at this second line began to beat their rhythm and sing. As they sang, the swords and spears of their brothers began to glow and smolder. The creature despite its terrifying appearance was not alone. It had a vanguard of smaller creatures that attacked and destroyed any siege weaponry that might have a chance against the beast. Several mortars were already set up and ranging to the creature was being taken. Several mortar teams had already begun fire and as soon as they did, the creatures turned as a unit and bore down on those mortar squads. The defenders opened up with a variety of rifles and other ranged weapons, including bows, crossbows and atlatls. As long as the drummers played and sang, their weaponry struck the hexapeds blasting hunks of their armor away, blowing off their heads or limbs. But there seemed to be an unstoppable wave of the creatures so the defenders whittled away and slowed the wave of creatures but could not stop it.
As the creatures closed, eventually it came down to hand to hand to protect the mortar squads. Grenades were used as the creatures closed, but hand to hand was simply not enough to protect the mortar teams. As each group were eventually overrun, the creatures seemed momentarily confused before they oriented on their next target.
The mortars had some level of effectiveness as the creature was being blown apart by the explosive rounds. But the creature's incredible mass prevented the mortars from striking a killing blow. Horus watched the battle and for a moment, just a moment, lost all hope of stopping the monstrosity. These people were throwing away their immortal lives against a threat that could not have ever been conceived of.
Then he remembered his training. Ptah had taken him to a hill one day and asked him why the enemy always sought the high ground. Looking around, he realized that when you have the high ground, you have visibility and can see all of your enemy. Ptah told him if you cannot deny your enemy the high ground, deny him the advantage of high ground. He watched the giant and realized the smaller horde moved where the giant was looking. So the great creature was providing vision to the smaller groups. Deny it vision and we might have a chance.
Looking around, he saw a small contingent of what appeared to be military leaders conferring. "Commanders, I was sent by Ptah to help. Do you have any smoke grenades or systems to deliver smoke to the creature. Ideally, smoky mortars would be ideal until I can get close enough to the creature to blind it."
One grizzled veteran smiled and said "Aye, I think we can arrange for some cover and smoke, but if you want to take the battle to its eyes, you will need more than a spear or a staff. We were planning on saving them until the creature grew closer, but if you are willing to get closer, they might work better. We only have a few tanks and they are at the third barrier. I have twelve RPGs and six young men just crazy enough to try and use them."
"We will have to split into two groups, one for each eye. Lay down the smoke around its head which should slow the horde and allow us to do more damage to it reducing its size as well. Concentrate your groups and keep your drummers and spell-singers back. The two groups will approach from eagle-back and make a single pass on each eye at the same time using the cover of smoke. Blinded, the horde should be much less effective. If we are successful, I want you to use your tanks immediately to lay down as much fire as possible, using exploding rounds if you can, but wait until the creature is truly blinded and the horde is pinned down as much as possible. Otherwise, the creatures will make a straight line for those tanks and they will simply not stand a chance if that happens."
The old colonel called to his RPG teams and got four eagles ready. "I have included one spell singer on each eagle. They cannot use the RPGs but if they are singing once you fire, the RPG will be that much more effective. They understand the risk. As do I. I will be on the second eagle."
Looking out over the battlefield, the next mortar squad was readying its weapons and the smoke rounds were being prepared. Two large rotary machine guns were placed in front of the mortar teams and some metallic constructions were also being placed down in front of this squad to give it the longest survival time possible. The command group was being ushered back to the third line, except for the old colonel. The eagle pilots had the eagles ready and the teams were boarding. Horus prepared to get on to his eagle when the old colonel spoke. "Begging your pardon, Horus-Ka, but I do not think you should be going with us. If this goes south, we need you to find a solution, already we are using the ideas you have given us and would be loathe to lose you. Ptah would never forgive us."
Colonel, I don't plan on telling Ptah, do you?" Horus-Ka laughed and climbed aboard the eagle. The four eagles took off and the smoke mortar drops began.
Two other mortar teams also began fire explosive rounds, this time in front of the approaching horde. The smoke spread quickly and began to obscure its vision. As the smoke grew thicker, the horde slowed its approach. The remaining forces, concentrated their fire, from everywhere, tearing into the hexaped armor. Spell singers, rallied, drummers played their hearts out, their fingers bled and they did not stop. The Horde slowed and for a moment, the firepower of the Spirit Army held the creatures at bay.
The smoke was thick and the eagles split off to fly behind the creature to set up their approach. They flew high above the smoke and aligned themselves, with a final wave, all four began their approach. The pilot, spell singer and one commando were on the front half of the eagle, and two commandos were on the back end of the eagle. The smoke was incredibly thick but as they approached the surface of the creature they could see through the smoke and began to set themselves up for the shot.
On the ground, the last of the smoke mortars had been fired and the mortars were packed up as the defenders held the line still using their guns and ranged weapons. The Horde was slowed but not stopped but now it was a retreating battle that constantly poured on the firepower. Machine guns mounted on the tanks began to fire into the horde providing cover for the retreating defenders who ran out of ammunition. As the Horde recovered, they surged forward but their sudden charge was broken by a group of warriors riding large cattle with long spears whose tips flamed red and whose shields deflected the leaping creatures, the warriors garbed in red robes, moved as one, their spears flashing and protecting the retreating spirit army members. Their fury was so great the Horde fell back as the warriors sang and stomped the ground in their approach. The cattle whose great horns were armored gored the creatures and flung them about. The spirit army rallied and began to support the great warriors and broke the rush of the Horde. For the first time today, the Horde retreated.
The eagles made the final dive, the wind roared in Horus-Ka's ears and the pilot raised his hand to indicate the time to fire. The spell-singer began her song, clear and crisp despite the wind, her song to the men, focused their attention, hardened their will and they for a moment forgot they were a thousand feet in the air, terrified of a creature from their most terrible nightmare and were less than one hundred meters from that creature; what a song, literally pure magic.
The eagle banked and the eye loomed into sight. The pilot dropped his hand and everyone fired. The eagle banked again and pulled away as the explosions sounded behind it. The creature screamed a primal sound, a thousand trumpets blaring and Horus-Ka and his team were directly in the blast.
The second team while also successful in the strike were set upon by leaping hexapeds that had climbed up the side of the creature when it saw them approaching it. Their eagle was covered with the hexapeds and the last thing Horus-Ka saw of them was the old colonel firing his hand gun and the spell singer using her magic as a weapon against the horrors and then they faded into the smoke.
Seconds after Horus's eagle was driven from the air by the scream of the creature, tank fire rocked the air and the face of the creature suddenly had craters forming in it as the tank rounds tore through the surface of its stony skin. The smoke was driven away as the mortars and tank fire began to tear into the creatures structure.
The creature's forward approach had been arrested at the third and final barrier and every artillery weapon fired ceaselessly. Blinded, the creature could no longer direct the horde and the Spirit Army while taking heavy losses were destroying the Horde. Drummers who were close to the horde directed their music as a weapon toward the creatures and destroyed them with the vibrations of their drumming. Many drummers died, but none left their drums, destroying creatures with spell, sword and song until the very end.
Once the creature was blinded, the concerted effort of spell-singers, blessed artillery, and the concentrated fire of the Spirit Army ground the creature back to the dust from which it was formed. The horde was decimated and hunted until the last creature could be found and slain.
Horus woke aching and bloody from his crash. "You plan on lying there all day, do you, lad," the old colonel said as he offered Horus his hand. "The beast is dead. Your plan while completely daft, worked. Unfortunately, no one else survived but the three of us." Horus said a quick prayer for those souls lost.
"The spell-singer says the center of this magic is nearby and thinks we should investigate. She is already looking at something, so let's get you up and at it," the colonel gruff tone seemed to focus Horus-Ka's attention.
Horus looked around and saw that both eagles, and their pilots had died in the crash. The creature had fallen over and its open mouth was less than one hundred meters away. As they moved closer, the spell-singer had already climbed up into the mouth of the creature and illuminated the interior of the creature's mouth. "Lord Horus, here is the source of this foul magic." She pointed to a large disk shaped object about a meter in diameter. It seemed to be forged of a strange clay or rock and the patterns etched in it were painstakingly drawn and etched. "This appears to be the magical equivalent of a computer. The program is written along the outer edge and the inner structures seem to direct the magical energy allowing this creature to draw upon the energy of the land for its sinister purpose. It was meant to wander through our world and steal energy to release in the world of the living. Like all magic, it can be traced back to its source if you are willing."
"Now what kind of hero would I be, if I weren't? I have been waiting all my life for this. Colonel, get back to your people and contain this artifact. Learn all you can so if this thing makes another appearance, you won't have the problem we had this time. Let's move this thing and see what we can learn about our enemy."
The Aspect War: Hail the Spirit Army – Thaddeus Howze © 2010, All Rights Reserved
The Burden of Wealth
Posted in: Short Story. Tagged: asset management account, Black, black science fiction, Citizens, extraterrestrial civilizations, financial structures, galactic community, Hayward's Reach, Plutarchs, science fiction and fantasy, space opera, Twilight Continuum, wealth inequality. Leave a comment
One of the most recent civilizations to join the Hegemony, the Plutarchs, a group of sentients from a highly advanced world, upon discovering the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations insisted on becoming a member of said civilizations. The Plutarchs (our name for them, that was the closest translation that worked in polite company, their actual translation was "the owners of everything") were insistent they could improve galactic commerce by bringing their ideas to the community of worlds.
They insisted their way of dealing with wealth, its management and development, mastered over millennia ensured the furthering of progress, improved innovation and inspired their populace to work harder than ever with new levels of prosperity for the civilization. And while there was poverty, it was an accepted part of the lifestyle of their planet and the people who were poor understood it was their lot in life. It simply couldn't be helped. Poverty was a natural side-effect of wealth and knowledge of that fact ensured wealth moved where it needed to be in society.
The Hegemony tended to not involve itself in the politics of worlds unless those worlds wanted to join the galactic community. The Hegemony was less than happy with the social structures and were absolutely sure they wanted nothing to do with the Plutarchs financial structures since the Plutarchs, for all of their wealth had failed to handle issues on their own planet to the standards of the Council of Worlds. While the Hegemony watched the Plutarchs and Citizens relationships, the Plutarchs insisted they should be allowed to join the Hegemony and would not take no for an answer. After a decade of watching the planet, the Hegemonic Council's solution was a unique one.
The Council's decision was one that did not change the inherent nature of the planet. Since every Citizen was fitted upon birth, with an automatic asset management account, which tracked their wealth and assets and assigned them a numerical value, indicating their wealth, the Council decided to build on that idea. Every citizen was fitted with a gravitic torc. A beautiful piece of jewelry that could not be removed by local scientists. The torc would be linked to the databases of the world banks and would reflected the wealth of the person, the richer they were, the more affected by the force of gravity they would become.
Once the system was installed (and it took some time, the Hegemony insisted on hiring local workers and paying them a galactic Citizen's wages for their efforts) it would be active on all one billion of the Citizens. It was explained how the technology would work and Plutarchs who were extremely wealthy would be given a month to decide how to organize their funds. Most didn't seem to understand how the devices would work and were unhappy with how the Hegemony decided to go about their indoctrination.
The Council tried to explain how the galaxy was a big place and worlds who wanted the benefits of the Hegemony, a community of over sixty thousand inhabited planets and millions of other kinds of biomes, artificial, virtual, chemical or mechanical, slavery of any kind was frowned upon by responsible members of the Hegemony. No race could trade, sell, or interact with the Hegemony if they engaged in slavery or slave-like conditions. The state of Citizens on the Plutarchs world easily qualified as a form of wage slavery and indentured servitude.
Citizens were unable to own property unless they were already born into wealth. If a Citizen managed somehow to become wealthy enough to afford property, they paid three times the current rate as a form of entrance fee into the Plutarch society. Most of the time, Citizens were paid only what was necessary for them to meet their monthly allowance of resources. The net result was, at the end of the month, Citizens had a net worth of zero. Sometimes it was less. If a Citizen had a net value of less than zero, they were allowed to use debt management mechanisms to keep track of that debt.
Unfortunately, once a Citizen fell deeply into debt, they were usually unable to get out of debt and interest rates ensured they would be driven to penal slavery, either by failing to pay the interest which then criminalized their poverty and ensured they were sent to debtor's prisons to work off that debt being paid one tenth of their previous wages. Citizens sent to prison, died there and their debt was divided among their surviving relatives.
Citizens could be educated, but only one tenth of one percent could afford to do it without incurring new costs. Most were forced to get an education they could not afford and became part of a workforce that could only pay enough to keep their debt from growing, nothing more. Yes, even under these conditions, innovations, breakthroughs, developments continued to happen because people were desperate to escape their conditions. Most of those technologies were "developed" by the Plutarchs who paid their wages as work for hire, making sure the Citizen got to keep none of the funds created by their labors.
As the month wound on, most Plutarchs ran about trying to figure out how to maneuver their wealth into accounts that would make their money appear on paper to belong to someone other than themselves. Others made corporations, claimed those corporations were persons and divested themselves of their wealth. Normal Citizens hearing the news of their impending joining of the Hegemony were unable to muster much enthusiasm, especially when the Hegemony indicated it would make no changes to the status quo of the civilization.
The gravitic web was established one week before activation of the Wealth Management System and the Citizens who established it complained nothing would change for them and the Hegemony was simply a greater version of the structure of their world and it was simply preparing Citizens for their eventual enslavement as members of the galactic community. Most of those technicians were paid a tidy bonus to establish the gravitic web and were pleased to see the Hegemony was far less stingy than the Plutarchs of their world and they had better work hours as servants of the Hegemony, so they surmised it might not be as difficult when they became Citizens of the Hegemony.
A great fanfare preceded the Hegemonic Council's arrival on the Plutarch's world for their acceptance ceremony. The gravitic web was activated at the same time as the treaty was signed. The signer of the treaty and ninety percent of all Plutarchs died instantly, crushed under the weight of their wealth. Once activated, it could not be easily shut down. The Council retired to quarters and would wait for the next representatives of the Plutarchs to appear.
The Hegemony's computers did not accept prevarications used by the Plutarchs for generations to pretend they were less wealthy than they appeared to be. If money could be tied to you in some fashion, no matter how tenuous, it was and the burden of that wealth was yours. The remaining nine percent were hospitalized and unable to move until they actually divested themselves of their wealth. Most died a few months later bowed under their ever-increasing wealth since their engines of prosperity favored wealth flowing uphill faster than they could figure out how to get rid of it. By the end of the month, the Plutarchs, down to the last entity were dead. The remaining Citizens, once a new governing body was elected, met with the Council and decided they would leave the Hegemony's gift running as a reminder of where they came from.
The remaining Citizens reformed many of the rules that allowed the Plutarchs to exist in the first place. Debts were forgiven, prisons were opened, education became a service provided by the government. Prosperity would be localized, and local Citizens were respected no matter where they lived on their planet. The new reforms made it possible to be wealthy but it would be up to everyone to ensure egregious disregard for the system could never return. Gravity would handle the rest that tried.
Yes, there are rich Citizens today. You can tell them from the occasional shuffle of their step or their slightly bowed backs, tastefully dressed with very comfortable shoes. Most accept that burden gracefully and work diligently to ensure they never grow wealthier faster than they can return to the truly innovative, intelligent and capable Citizenry what is theirs, dignity in work and a prosperity equal to their effort.
The Burden of Wealth © Thaddeus Howze 2012, All Rights Reserved
Image Credit: The Terminal by Sebastien Hue
Charon – Boatman of the Afterlife of Last Resort
Posted in: Character Bio, Hayward's Reach. Tagged: cappuccino, Charon, coffee, Death, ebonstorm, Ferryman, Hayward's Reach, humor, macabre, pennies, stroke, Thaddeus Howze. Leave a comment
Charon ©2010-2011 ~fo3the13th (JOEL AMAT GÜELL)
A Cappuccino with Charon
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop, dodging my workplace, when I saw Him come in. I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing at first, because, well, this is San Francisco, and you are liable to see almost anything here. He was wearing the equivalent of a long ragged cloak, stained with age and reeking of an unspeakable odor.
It was the scent of a recently opened grave, and while I had not been near one in a while, I had put a dead raccoon in my garbage can once and left it there for a week in the hot sun. Worst thing I have ever smelled. I was only too happy when the garbage man came. It was worse than that. No one else seemed to notice.
His cloak hid is face, but it was safe to assume I didn't really want to look too deep in there, anyway. He was carrying a pole with a strange watermark on it and two runnels near the top. His hands were strong looking, like a weightlifter's, with veins running through them. I could not see much else of him, but he was big, much bigger than I had imagined him to be.
See, I figured this had to be the Boatman of the River Styx.
"Cappuccino," he said in a scary baritone.
"Four seventy-five, please."
"Surely you jest?" was his response.
"Uh. Yes."
He reached into his pocket and put pennies on the counter. Lots of pennies.
"Sir, we can't take those."
"They're still currency, aren't they?"
"Sir, they're pennies."
"I get paid in pennies."
"Excuse me, miss, I will take care of this." I found myself reaching into my pocket and paying with a five. "Keep the change." The crowd was getting kind of hostile, and I wasn't sure what might happen if he got pissed off. He looked at her, reached across the counter with his large, ham-like hand, and touched her chin.
"Rebecca Montez, angry boyfriend, six years from now, lamp. Unfortunate." She looked at him as if he were crazy, but did not move. Almost as if she were under a spell.
He turned to me and said, "Thank you, Daniel Simmons."
"How do you know my name?" I already knew the answer.
"I know all of your names." That voice was really starting to work me. The rhythm of the shop resumed and people went back to typing.
"What are they seeing? How is it only I can see you?"
"Cappuccino, up."
"Uh, that's you."
"Let's sit and talk, Daniel Simmons."
"Okaaaaay." Didn't like where this was going.
I sat down at the table and tried to hide my face behind the screen of my laptop so I could resist the temptation to look into his cowl. He reached across the table and closed my laptop, gently.
"So, Charon, can I call you Charon? What brings you up for coffee? And why is it no one else can see you?"
"Mmmmm. Good cappuccino. Very nice." The cup disappeared into his cowl and did not come back out. "People deny their mortality. Part of my gift, people simply refuse to see Death for what it is, a part of Life. No one can see me because to them, I am some unfortunate hobo having coffee with an overdressed preppy. That would be you. As to why I am here? I need a guide, and since you can see me, you are volunteered."
"And I can see you because?"
"Embolism, three weeks from now."
Sobering. What could I know about that he would need a guide for?
"I am looking to franchise my infernal service."
"Earth is very busy these days, lots of dying, and humans keep making new ways to kill each other off. I can't keep up. Look at this bicep." He pulled back his sleeve and showed me this massive arm that would not have looked out of place on the Incredible Hulk. "Go on, touch it."
"Um, no thanks."
"I used to be scraps of bone and flesh; now I have biceps from pushing that thing." He points outside the window.
For a moment I saw the flash of a large gondola-like boat, about the size of an eighteen wheeler. Off in the distance, I could see people, thousands of them, tens of thousands, standing patiently, wearing clothing from what looked like medieval times. When I looked harder, I could see dozens of different eras standing and waiting patiently for their turn to cross into the Afterlife. Then the street returned to its mundane appearance.
"Yes, I just cleared the backlog from the Black Plague last week. Do you know how long it takes to move seventy five million people by gondola? But I still have the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, World Wars I and II, Korea and every other little bush conflict modern governments feel justified in creating." He was starting to sound a little hysterical and maybe pissed off.
"Uh, what about other death-oriented entities like yourself? Aren't there others out there harvesting the dead?"
"Valkyries are still working, but they only want the valiant dead, so they swoop in and pluck one guy out of thousands, put him on their flying horse and they're gone. I've tried shouting out, 'Hey, you could grab a few more,' but they keep mentioning something about Valhalla having a quality assurance clause, and then they're gone.
When I complained to the Niflheim Residency Committee, they indicated they aren't responsible for all of these people. They closed their doors when the last of the Vikings bought the farm. Something about Niflheim having a purity standard."
"There are certainly other death agents, yes?"
"Heaven only takes devout Christians. Let's just say that number isn't going up. Same with the other sects. People don't seem to have a desire for really rigid religious structures anymore, so most of those places are closing their doors, or waiting for a management decision from on high. Hell, well, it's just overflowing. They even changed the sign. Used to say 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here.' Now it says, 'Abandon hope all ye who thought to enter here. Entry denied due to overcrowding.' So, I keep going, moving the Dead into their afterlife of Last Resort. But I am starting to fall behind, so I hoped someone here might have some idea how to franchise this operation."
"So you're hoping to find people willing to help you ferry the Dead, for a fee. What kind of benefits would you be offering? You need a good benefits package if you are trying to recruit these days."
"I am not trying to enter into management. I do not want to take responsibility for their work. I want to hand off a section of the workload to other interested parties."
"That's the problem. Who's going to be interested in buying into a business where your job is to move the Dead across the River Styx into the Afterlife of Last Resort? What do they get out of the deal?"
"As long as they work for the Company, they can avoid dying of anything, as long as they manage their company effectively. If I have to pick up their slack, I will carry them across the Threshold myself. I am not interested in who they hire, as long as they get the job done."
"Effectively immortal, long term job security, open hours, free hand in hiring, no micromanaging. I think I am going to quit my job. Okay, what's the cost to buy into this program?"
"Two pennies."
This guy has no money sense. How can you run a business on two pennies a soul? "Okay, first things first. We're going to get you a suit and a bath. After that we are going to work together is to increase the cost of dying. What we need to do is get a cut of the funeral home business…"
First Appearance: A Cappuccino with Charon appears in my debut series of short stories called Hayward's Reach available from Amazon.
About the Art: Charon is a very popular guy on the internet. I found many pictures of him but nothing that quite did him justice the way I wanted. I decided on this one by fo3the13th because he showed him as a muscular man rather than a skeleton pushing a boat. I liked the somber tones and clean lines. Joel Amat Guell is a professional artist and retains all copyrights to his art.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl