The green aircraft flew relatively low in the sky, the roar of its engines, the only mechanized sound heard. The craft tore through the thick atmosphere of the now dead planet. No ordinary vehicle, this one was composed of pure will. The will of it’s pilot intent on understanding an enemy before a confrontation.
“Analysis completed. Alien entity appears to be an uncatalogued life form.”
“Just what I wanted to hear. ‘It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.'”
“Please clarify command, John Stewart.”
“Never mind, Ring. A bit of Earth humor. Go on.”
“The scans indicate the creature is primarily composed of interwoven fields of energy with a subatomic structure interacting directly with the fabric of space. There is microscopic particulate matter of an undefined nature which may comprise the physical body of the Entity. “
“Is that how it manages to play havoc with our sensory sweeps. It can decide it’s here one minute and gone the next?”
“Such an unusual physiology gives it unknown capacities regarding its relationship to space-time. Since it is interacting at the Planck level of the of the universe, it may be capable of warping space-time directly.”
“Excuse me Green Lantern? Er, do you have a name?” The Dirne citizen looked pretty indistinguishable from any other member of their species. Bilaterally symmetrical, they appeared cosmetically similar to humans but their physical structure showed generations of genetic manipulation. Their super-sensitive skin was rust colored, with tiny variations too tiny even for the human eye to recognize, but the Dirne claimed they had over five thousand color shade distinctions.
Dirne faces were smooth with only eye indentation and no external ears, their slightly larger heads housed a powerful multi-lobed brain. Descending from an aquatic environment, their entire body was a sensory organ whose collective light absorbing capacity was ten thousand times human acuity. A patch of their skin the size of a dime, could perceive as effectively as a human eye with 20/20 vision and hear as well as a cat, well within the 40,000 Hertz range.
Recorded data storage showed the Dirne wore loose-fitting diaphanous robes, which gave them the ability to perceive each other fully and interpret their changing radiation signatures, another more subtle and yet advanced communication. By vibrating membranes near what humans would call their vocal cords, the Dirne could communicate using sound. Much slower than human speech, their vibrations were rich in nuance, each tone having a specific meaning. To human ears they sounded much like crickets. From inside their environmental suits, they must have been feeling as blind as bats.
“You can call me John. John Stewart of Earth.”
“Please call me, Faran alb Dine. I am the chief engineer of the power facility you rescued us from. We have tried to be patient while you have performed your investigations but I believe we may be able to help. May I interact with that display you are using?”
“Sure. Ring, grant access and create a viable interface for Faran alb Dine and her associates.”
“In progress. Converting visual data. Interface developing. Translating. Complete.”
Faran stared intently and then motioned to her fellows who leaned over from their seats. Stewart altered the information display into a three dimensional structure capable of being seen by everyone. At first silence and then as if an insect swarm had invaded the tiny ship, untranslated chittering commenced.
“Okay, calm down. One at a time. Faran? Something you want to tell me?”
“No, John Stewart of Earth. I do not want to tell you.”
“You can tell me, or I can have the ring go second by second and translate your conversation. As a Green Lantern we record every interaction we engage in. I would prefer you tell me and make it easy for me to understand.”
“How much do you know about your omni-device?” Faran asked.
“The power ring? Enough to use it. Enough to exercise my will over its programming.”
“It’s underlying technology?”
“Honestly, very little. The Guardians are so advanced, their technology might as well be magic to me. We are trained in how to use the ring, what its limitations are, how to get the best performance out of it and how to be the best Green Lanterns we can be. It converts our conscious will into physical intent. The underlying technology only matters to species who can actually understand how it works and even they admit to being a bit baffled at times. So if our problem requires me to understand the fundamental underpinnings of my ring, we’re in trouble.”
“Then I shall endeavor to make this as simple as possible. I recognized the energy signature of the creature because it utilized the same technology we do in our power plants. It used “inflation energy” to power its transformations and destruction in our environment.”
Inflation energy, I remembered being taught the Universe was once smaller than an atom and when it engaged in the Big Bang, it expanded faster than the speed of light. This energy was called “inflation” and as the universe expanded, this was the energy of that expansion. As far as we knew, inflation was still happening, moving everything in the universe farther apart.
This energy would be nigh infinite and inexhaustible. It could also be potentially unstable if not properly understood. A mistake would make an antimatter accident look like Pop Rocks.
“We mastered antimatter, thousands of years ago but to allow us to develop faster than light ships, we needed better and more efficient energy. We crosses the threshold to zero-point energy and this gave us new realms of matter and energy transformations. Though there were minor accidents during the development, within a few lifetimes, we were able to harness these energies with no risk to ourselves or our civilizations. Imagine our surprise to discover others had learned to use similar technologies but not always for beneficial means. The Malthusians were also utilizing this energy and one of them even tried to harness it directly from the First Source.”
She meant the rogue Guardian, Krona. He altered the fabric of the Universe causing rips and shears across time and space distorting and folding the universe in upon itself several times. On Earth, these disruptions caused the parallel universes we are rediscovering. “Those problems were corrected by the Malthusians; we call them the Guardians now.”
Farad’s tone became strident and short. “Those corrections, as you called them, distorted time and space for worlds across our galaxy and my people were nearly wiped out as these perturbations caused our power supplies to become unstable and destroyed entire planets in the wake of that work. We never forgave the Malthu, er Guardians for their hubris and when their Manhunter experiment went rogue we knew we had made the correct choice in avoiding their organizations.”
“What does this have to do with our problem now?”
“On Dirne, we have a saying: ‘A problem not studied is a problem unsolved.’ I shall present you with a conundrum. Compare these two signatures and I shall identify one. This one is your omni-device, your power ring. Note the distinctive and unique energy curve, inflation energy transformation and non-baryonic matter display. Your device converts dark matter and dark energy into a matrix of energy able to be manipulated by your intent. The constructs generated appear to be only as real as the interface user perceives them to be. Each user can affect the underlying reality based on their level of understanding. Since the constructs you create are made from non-baryonic matter, as soon as you stop concentrating on them, they return to their naturally non-material state.”
Wow. A better explanation than the Guardians ever gave. Complete with graphics.
“I think I understand. Each user affects reality based on their understanding of it. If you are not a scientist, you visualize what you want and then the ring attempts to make it happen utilizing the inherent preponderance of dark matter and converting dark energy into conventional energies. The conversion process is normally energetic the same way converting matter into energy produces more energy than would be readily apparent.”
“Correct. Now look at this second signature. Does it look familiar?”
It did. But its amplitude was far greater than anything on the first curve. It was at least one hundred times more powerful. “This can’t be right. Nothing doing this could possibly exist. Ring, confirm hypothesis.” The ring was silent as it ran its analysis and in less than a minute, it’s reply was exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
“John Stewart, the hypothesis is potentially flawed. The Great Battery of Oa has a similar profile and amplitude. Such artifacts would be extremely rare but completely within the potential development of Guardian science.”
“Do you recognize this as a Guardian project?”
There was a pause, perhaps a tenth of a second before the reply: “This information is classified. Any attempt to access such data further will be reported to the Guardians.”
“Now do you understand why we didn’t want to tell you? If we are correct, you are facing a creature, likely of Guardian design, whose capacities dwarf your own. Capable of utilizing constructs and energy conversion technology on a scale ten times your own.”
A timer indicated a two minute countdown to arrival at the predefined coordinates. As the six of them approached the underground facility, they could see spears of smoke forming around the base, forming into more substantial shapes. Humanoids made of grey smoke. They approached the entry points on the above ground station. Doors refused to open preventing the smoke forms access. The smoke tore at the doors and in a few seconds reshaped themselves until they could pry the doors apart.
Sparks flew and the contest between the smoke entities and the security doors was never in doubt.
“Any bright ideas? Now would be a good time.”
“As a matter of fact, we do. But we will need time to implement it.”
“In other words, you need me to stall for time.”
“If we survive, we need to tweak your translation matrix. We need you to “delay the enemy” while we work on a countermeasure to its power manipulation abilities.'”
“Stall for time. How much do you need?”
“At least ten minutes.”
“Stall for time with an enemy at least ten times as powerful as I am. Keep him from noticing you and killing me. Piece of cake.”
“Translation error. Don’t be late.”
John exited the craft after conferring briefly with Farad alb Dine. He floated down to the smoky grey forms attempting to penetrate the security doors. The alien it seemed was all to eager to mock him. “Green Lantern of Earth. Your help has been invaluable. What I seek is buried deep directly below me.”
“Funny. I was hoping the exact same thing.”
I can’t believe I am about to take a page from Guy’s book. On the other hand, a stopped clock can be right twice a day.
With his ring flaring and bleeding wild energy, John Stewart severed the bonds of local matter beneath the creature and inserted antiparticles in their place. The resultant antimatter explosion could be seen from space and liberated a percentage of the atmosphere in the blast; an environmental catastrophe John hoped to repair. If he survived.
The Farad alb Dine and her fellow scientists stopped working; they were at some considerable distance and protected by John’s ship construct, in momentary horror as the light from the explosion ended.
Knowing it would not be enough, they worked feverishly as the wisps of the smoke-like alien began to reform in the tortured ruins.
a tale of hayward’s reach
“I went yesterday.”
“I went out the day before.”
“I don’t care who went out, when. Put your guns on and get out there and bring back something to eat. I don’t care what it is.”
“See what you did, now she’s mad at us.”
“I didn’t make her mad, you did.”
“Anyway, food won’t hop into the house by itself. You two get a move on. Get back before dark.”
“Yes, Auntie.” Ma’s sister was almost as mean as she was.
We left the habitat by the back door, and after looking both ways we started down the vine and headed out of the park, into the city. It used to be called Philadelphia; back when stuff like that mattered.
“Did you pack everything?”
“Why do you always ask me if I packed everything, its not like you weren’t standing right there, supervising.”
“Last time we were out, you forgot the wipes.”
“So, you were forced to use your hand or some leaves, why should I care, how you handle your business?”
“You ought to know.”
“Be quiet. I hear something.”
Whenever we go out, we are always very careful. There used to be lots of humies once upon a time, but after They came, there were a lot less. We can see the one closest to the main city. It sits outside of the city proper and sends its parts looking for food.
Humies learned not to live in the cities if they wanted to avoid being food. Mama said once, cities used to be filled with humies but now, nobody with any sense goes there. That’s why there is so much stuff still there. We don’t tell Ma, but sometimes we go there and look for stuff. We learned how to avoid the plants and their critters.
“There it is. It’s a cabbage-head.”
“I don’t like cabbage-heads. We just ate one a few weeks ago. I’d rather eat my boot first ‘fore I eat another.”
“We ate our boots last week, so we probably shouldn’t get a cabbage-head anyway, they be the makings of poor boots.”
We let the cabbage-head wander off. They weren’t too dangerous or too bright and noisy as all get out, so you didn’t have to worry ’bout them sneakin’ up or anything. They looked like a horse with the head of a cabbage. And they were about as bright.
Then we saw them. And we nodded. That was the target. Razorbacks. That’s what mama called them when she taught us to hunt. Razorbacks were part of the Creature, a fast and dangerous part. They hated humies, too.
We waited cause there were too many to try and get one. They had six long legs and were really fast even though they were twice as big as a humie.
“Why don’t you watch ’em, while I catch some shut eye.”
“kay, its gonna be a while.” I liked it better when he slept anyway, its the only relief I get from his godforsaken mouth. We had taken a position near the edge of the city where a lot of the Creature’s parts wandered looking for scavenging humies. There was a mild quakin’ and I could see the Creature moving closer to the city. It must be real upset or real hungry, it moved a whole dozen feet today.
There were still humies living in the city, we knew that cause we could see their lights at night, but the Creature did not have many ‘spring that moved around after dark. There were a few, but not many. Humies tried to do their scavenging after dark, cause it was a bit safer than when there were hawkwings about.
After a couple of hours, the Creature settled down, mostly cause the sky was ‘cast and it did not have any shine on it. The razorbacks started moving back toward the Creature. It was taller than all of the buildings near us. Mama said it was nearly five thousand feet tall and when they landed they changed the weather, killing humie by the dozens every second for years. She said something about spores, but I was never good with that science type stuff. My brother was much better.
One of the razorbacks turns and holds still. It starts makin’ its supper sound and turning around. We duck behind the heavy rock wall and wait. It turns toward a building near the clearing next to it. A humie runs out and tries to scurry to the next building. The razorback supper sound grows louder as it turns to the humie, locks its legs and charges fast, faster than any humie could hope to be.
The humie turns around and points a tiny gun at the razorback. Its pop does not even make the razorback blink. The razorback runs past the humie and its skin bursts with blood. It staggers and tries to keep running. The razorback circles and passes again. The touch of its skin rips the flesh off the humie, and after the second pass the humie falls down.
A second humie runs out, he is a bit bigger and is carrying a shotgun. But shoots too soon and the razorback does him in quick.
“Get up. We got one on the hook.”
“I was just startin’ to have my favor dream and you ruined it.”
“You wants some boots or not. You can walk barefoot for all I care, but I wants some boots. There ain’t no better hide than razorback and ain’t no better eatin’ either. So shut up and get up.”
We check our guns and make sure our chems was dry. No sense shooting if nothing happens. I don’t want to tangle with a razorback with just my knife if I can avoid it. My brother is good in a fight but it just the two of us these days, so we can’t afford to get hurt.
The razorback is so busy eatin’ it doesn’t even hear us getting close. We hid in the shadows of the building. It don’t see too good and we know that having hunted them for years. It was slow going. Ma says no sense rushing if you get et by what you be chasing. By the time we are close enough to shoot, it was getting dark. We would have to gut, skin and carve before the biguns came out. And then run for home.
As we approached, my brother covered the right and I covered the left, making sure there were no razorbacks hiding that we might have missed. They were group kin, so where there was one, there may be more. The long shadow of the Creature fell over us and we used the cover of its darkness and the setting shine, to sneak up just a few dozen feet from the creature. We aimed, making sure we hit it below the sack in its belly. That was the only part we could eat and we wanted to be sure we didn’t just come home with boots. Mama would tan our hide.
We each had three in our shooters. They were hand-made from parts in the city. Three barrels, three chems. I shot first, making sure to hit it in the head. My brother shot second, hitting it in its hind brain. If you didn’t get both, it could still trample you with its head shot clean off. We ducked back into the darkness to wait. We couldn’t wait long with dark coming but it was always best after bustin’ a chem or two. After ten minutes, we went to work.
“Hurry up, you got that sack yet?”
“Don’t worry about me, you just get the hide for our boots.”
“I am. I am going to get enough for mama to get a coat too. This razorback’s skin is good.”
The skin was covered with a fine grade of spines, but they only cut you if you rubbed the wrong way or if the razorback was alive and pushing them up. Even though it was really big, it was delicate and slashed it food, bleeding it before eatin’. The spines and its leathery hide gave it a toughness that made for fine boots.
We loaded the sack and the hide into our ruck, and started making our way home. We had to pass by the river on our way back to wash off the blood before going home. No need to make it too easy to find us. The river was not too far off and we made good time.
We waded in quick-like and cleaned ourselves up. We could hear the wind shifting near the Creature and once the shine was completely gone, we knew the Bigguns was on the prowl. Picking up our guns at the shore, we started running back toward our tree.
We were in too much of a hurry, when we heard a booming sound from the underbrush ahead of us. We had our guns ready, when two of the bigguns burst out, mouths wide open, spit flying everywhere. Each of us took one, I took the right, he took the left. We shot them straight in their mouths. Its the only spot on their bodies not covered in heavy armor. Each chem went straight into their brains and blew up from the inside.
We jumped over their bodies and kept running. Others would hear the chem and rush toward food. We moved through the outskirts of what mama called a suburb. She learned all of this from reading. She said she taught herself when she was young and there were other humies to live with. It had been a long time since other humies lived with us, nearly thirty summers, give or take.
We could hear them coming.
Sounded like three, maybe four. All of the Creature’s parts were fast and hungry. If mama were here, we would just turn around and fight, mama was hell on wheels in a fight, but since she hurt her leg a few summers ago when we were surrounded by razorback and hawkwings, she don’t hunt with us anymore.
“What ya wanna do?”
“I hear, three, maybe four.”
“We only got, a two chem between us.”
“we could drop the food and get away, its slowing us down.”
“If we come home without food, mama’s going to eat us. I would rather be out here with them.”
“Just keep running.”
When we came to the park, we could see all of the Creature trees that had landed here. Mama said humies learned to kill the trees brains when they was little and we could live in them while they grew. The trees never got their own creatures when they did not have brains and humies learned to live in them and make homes out of them. We could see our tree in the center of the park but it was just too far, we wasn’t gonna make it.
“We gonna have to fight, you know that, right.”
“Have I ever?”
They jumped out of the brush and the earth shook with their landing. We dropped our ruck and had our guns out. One chem each. Four Bigguns. They looked so much bigger up close. When we stopped, they stopped. They had got have seen the two others we killed, and no one was volunteering to go first. We used that to get a few dozen more yards, by pointing at whichever moved toward us first. That wasn’t gonna work too much longer.
“Biggest one first, on the right.
“Then the one next to it.”
“Got your knife?”
“Yep. Aim for the eyes.”
We stopped moving, each of the bigguns with an armored head and a spike collar stood still. They seemed to know we were going to fight. We roared at them at the top of our lungs, and bared our teeth. The largest two responded in kind. And then they were dead. We dropped out guns.
Pulling our knives, we rushed the next of the creatures while they absorbed the shock of what happened. While they had good vision facing forward they had to turn their whole bodies to see if something moved to the side of them too quickly. With six legs they could do that fast, but only if another one wasn’t in the way. While they were trying to negotiate, we slipped to the side of the Biggun and stabbed into its eye sockets with our knives. We were covered in its warm eye jelly and blood and it reared backward knocking us aside with its huge head.
We landed on the ground, hard and our knives were still in the head of the Biggun that was running off into the overgrowth of the suburbs.
The last Biggun, turned toward us and seemed to sense our vulnerability. It stamped the ground and huffed. The tree was right behind us but it might as well have been miles away. With those six legs, he would be on us faster than ugly on my brother.
We stood up, determined to go down fightin’, though without weapons, we did not have much of a chance.
I looked up at the Creature in the distance. It glowed with a green light once the ‘shine was gone. It made it easier for its kin to find it. I could see three others in the distance, each standing still over a different part of the city. My brother and I had managed to live in the shadow of the things for thirty years before dying.
“I don’t want to die.”
“Who said anything about dying?”
“Between the two of us, all we got left is some harsh language.”
We started laughing as the creature closed with us. We would do our best.
We heard a swooshing sound, like nothing we had ever heard before. We thought it might be a creature we had not seen yet, so we crouched low, so we could try to get up on the Biggun’s back, over its snapping jaws.
And then there was the loudest boom I ever heard. Sharp shards of metal ripped though our skin and we were thrown from our feet. Chunks of Biggun landed on us. There was a crater where the Biggun was. It looked just like the ‘rite craters from when the creatures landed all them years ago, only a sight smaller.
My ears were ringing and I was a bit dizzy for a second. I saw my brother was okay with little more than a cut on his forehead and some minor wounds on his chest.
“What were the two of you laughing about down there. Did you see something funny I didn’t?”
“Where are you manners at boys?” The voice was Auntie’s.
“Thank you, ma.”
“Now get up here and bring me whatever you managed to find out there. You did find something. If not, you bring up that blowed up Biggun meat. Its foul, but you can eat it in a pinch.”
“We found something, ma.”
“Razorback, your favorite.”
“Did you bring me any hide? You know I need a new coat this winter.”
“Yes, Ma, we got you and Auntie fixin’s for a new coat.”
When the smoke cleared we could see Ma looking down on us with some strange contraption on her shoulder. It was a tube with a handle on the bottom and had a orange tip facing down toward us. Her sister was looking out toward the horizon while she stared down at us as we climbed the rope toward the house. The tiny scratches we suffered wouldn’t keep us from getting home.
When we got to the house, Ma kissed us while her sister watched the horizon. Then we all turned into the house and slid the ironwood door closed. My brother’s arm had a nasty cut and Ma tended it while her sister looked me over and cleaned my arm and chest wounds.
Both of them fixed our injuries with their medical kit placed between us, with the same speed and the same way at which we butchered that razorback, they were able to tend our wounds, one handed.
It had become second nature because we were injured almost ever time we left the house. We sat facing each other with our arms at our sides. Our huge broad chest was covered with scars from earlier surgeries after being in the field. A quick inventory and they were satisfied we were okay. Our four heads and two bodies silhouetted in the internal green light of the Creature tree.
“You boys look a right mess, don’t they sis.”
“They sure do. A right mess. Nothing a meal and a good night sleep won’t fix. Go lay down while we make supper.”
They kissed each of us and we walked into the back of the house, which was carved out of the flesh of the Creature-tree and saw our bed carved into the wall of the tree. They had already turned it out and fluffed our pillows.
“Face down or face up?”
“Face up. These cuts on my chest hurt.”
As we lay down and covered up with the blanket, he was out in seconds. We almost didn’t make it today. But there is no place I would rather be than right here with my brother, big head and all. I could hear mom and sis walking in the kitchen doing their dinner-making dance, one hand stirring and the other keeping the pot steady, singing some old duet.
I pulled his arm under the blanket and lay back on my own pillow making sure I faced right. He always starts out turned left but ends up turned right in the night.
He sleeps with his mouth open. I hate that.
Brotherhood © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved
a tale of the twilight continuum Θ
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
Through the Gate is a concept project by Andrey Lifanov © 2006 . All Rights Reserved.