Double update!
-----PROLOGUE-----
Commodore Ghettex had returned to his station and was now bellowing loudly at a white-faced young science assistant who happened to have the bad luck to stand near him. The poor lad would probably have suffered a mental breakdown if it weren't for Ghettex's senior comms officer.
“Sir, your grandfather wants to talk to you.”
Still red-faced and wheezing, Ghettex came back to his senses and strode angrily into the comms room. Everybody inside had worked with him for at least a few years, and experience told them that when he looked like this it would be wisest to slip out of the room silently and wait until half an hour after he had left it – he sometimes went back in after a few minutes, and the last person to experience that still suffered from what psychiatrists could only identify as shellshock.
“You wanted to talk to me?” The face of Grand Admiral Jurihaan Ghettex, member of Kytheran Central Command, appeared on the screen in front of him.
“Erit, Erit, Erit. Quite a mess you have up there.”
Commodore Ghettex could barely contain his anger as he spoke. “You know very well that I did all I could to prevent it. If anyone is to take the blame, it would be
you.”
“Me? Oh really.”
His voice now cold, Erit replied: “You know perfectly well what I'm talking about, old man. There is something going on here, something which isn't right. And I'm pretty sure
you are behind it.”
“Why the hell would we be behind the hijacking of one of our own experimental fightercraft?”
“I think you know what I'm talking about. The way she learned how to push that fighter to its limits so soon. The robot fighters not taking her down as soon as they had the opportunity. The way that fighter accelerated beyond the speed of anything in existence.”
“Come again?”
“The way that fighter bolted away from me in the transpace tunnel. The way it accelerated. Trust me, your experiments have succeeded. You have managed to achieve instant acceleration, and not only that, you managed to accelerate that fighter to
three times the speed of light.”
Grand Admiral Ghettex slowly turned white. His eyes widened to a point where Commodore Ghettex thought they would fall right out of the old man's face.
“You..... you.....
What?!?”
Commodore Ghettex gave the utterly shocked face of his grandfather a cold stare and disengaged communications.
-----END OF PROLOGUE-----
---------------PART THREE: INSIDIOUS MACHINATIONS---------------
-----CHAPTER ONE: TROUBLE-----
It had been three weeks since former Captain First Class Elsee Tamarillho had encountered the enigmatic post-humans who claimed the human race did not evolve on old Earth. Three weeks of running and hiding in asteroid fields, storms and cometary drifts. She didn't take on the Kytheran forces out to get her again; for one, the fighters chasing her nowadays were piloted – which meant they wouldn't fall for the tricks she used to destroy all prototype asteroid-belt robotic fighters back at Kythera – secondly, she didn't feel the need to kill any more fellow Kytherans. The government might have betrayed her; but she was still a born and bred Kytheran spacer, and so were the pilots trying to kill her.
She was always monitoring all military comms bands, to make sure she knew about any attempts to attack her before they actually started shooting at her. Two hours ago, she picked up a Commonwealth-wide news transmission on the civilian channels – she didn't listen to it because it was Commonwealth-wide news, or even because it was an unscheduled transmission, she listened to it because it was about the results of her actions of three weeks previous. The last asteroids in the Kytheran System had disintegrated due to the rather inexplicable chain reaction set off by her lobbing two seismic charges into the middle of an asteroid. The “asteroidal fission reaction”, as the scientists called it, had finally ended. Apparently, the chances of a sustained reaction of this type in any asteroid belt were nanoscopically tiny, yet it had happened. Tamarillho half-and-half suspected the post-humans had a hand in it, but she hadn't had the chance to ask them, as she hadn't encountered them since they first-
No.
She had had no encounter.
She had fallen asleep. Nothing more. It was just a dream.
A very very vivid dream.
Now was not the time to dwell on strange, almost nightmarish dreams, now was the time to focus on matters at hand. She was approaching – what, the seventh? warp point since her first enc- no,
dream in an attempt to evade the meticulous scans carried out by several satellites which had been deployed in the local asteroid fields and near the lone storm, at the very edge of the system, right on the Caranck border. To leave the relative safety of asteroids and storms for too long meant almost certain death, as the Kytheran navy had stationed fast-reaction frigate groups in most inhabited systems within the Commonwealth and, fast or not, her fighter was no match for an 800 meter warship designed specifically to protect the really large capital warships from fighter attack. The frigates were always stationed in empty space, the pattern laid out evenly, every spot in the system within one hour of travel for some of the faster frigates. Fortunately, in this system the frigates had not yet deployed near the warp points as they had in several other systems, so she could make the leap from one of the small asteroid pockets orbiting an uninteresting gas giant to the warp point.
This was – what, the seventh? warp point since her enc- no,
dream of the post-humans. She approached the event horizon, and a blue flash later she found herself standing on the same rocky plateau she had been so startled to discover three weeks earlier. Again, she had no control over her legs.
“Oh come on! This is just a dream! Wake up already!” she muttered to herself as she tried lifting one of her legs up with both arms. However, it was as if she was a gehenniumsteel statue from the waist down. Giving up her attempts to move her leg, she looked into the ever-present mist. The deep, resounding voice startled her.
“Welcome back, Captain.”
“It's OK, this is all just a dream, no need to worry now.....” She couldn't convince herself, partly because her voice was two octaves higher than normal and rather shaky.
“I understand your inclination to dismiss this all – to dismiss
us – as a dream, but believe me, this is all very true.”
“You were right. We
should have brought her here. She indeed wouldn't-” Tamarillho could barely hear the whisper, but she clearly recognized it as a separate voice from the first. So there was more than one post-human here?
“Quiet.” The first voice again, also a whisper, though less quiet, as if it was giving the second voice a reprimand. On a whim, Tamarillho released one of her nanos and set it to scout the surroundings. “We have brought you here for a reason.” The voice now sounded as it had before. The nano returned, and she knew her surroundings now – a circular, almost perfectly flat plateau, just rough enough to stand on without having to adjust your balance every few seconds. At the edges, the rock dropped away sharply, descending seemingly infinitely into darkness.
“Your surroundings have no meaning. We merely chose this as it was the easiest to project you into. There is nothing more than what your nano reported.” So they knew about the nano.
““Project me into”? What are you talking about?”
“This is not reality as you know it. This is what we have come to call the Plane of Thought – though this is an inadequate description of this place. The rock, the abyss, the mist, it is all but an illusion. Like this.”
And suddenly Tamarillho stood in nothingness. Utter nothingness. Everything was black. She couldn't see her body, it was as if her mind alone existed here and nothing else.
“This is an approximation of how we perceive this Plane. Here, only thought exists, only our minds, and nothing else.” The plateau was back, and Tamarillho could see her body again. Her senses were tingling, and she found she could move her legs too.
“But you were saying? You had a reason for bringing me here?”
“Indeed we have. You see, we have been like this for a long time – for too long, to be honest.”
“How long then?”
“Sixteen billion years.” A silence fell.
“But..... but that's impossible. The entire Universe is sixteen billion years-”
“I am afraid that that is yet another of your, ah, misunderstandings. The Universe is, in total, over eighty billion years old.”
“Eighty billion years ago the Universe would have had a
negative size.”
“Let me explain. The Universe was created – how we do not know – eighty-one billion two hundred forty-three million one hundred and ninety-eight thousand twenty-two years, fourteen weeks, two days, six hours, forty-four minutes and nineteen point six two two five eight seconds ago.”
“A- What? How can you know that?”
“Suffice it to say that we can. Now, the early history of the Universe is exactly as your scientists have described it – they see the
real beginning of the Universe, up to two billion years after that, where there is a sixty-five billion year gap between their observations. We evolved much like you have described, only our real home planet – Humana, hence humans – was located nearer to the Galactic core, was the size of a gas giant, was much more fertile and had a more pleasant climate than Earth. Our poles were comparable to the Mediterranean sea region on Earth, our equator marked the middle of a band of regions with just barely tropical climates. No deserts, few mountains, warm water oceans – what you would call paradise. We believe that the paradises described by the many religions you had on Earth all stem from the dim racial memories of Humana. We thrived there; our industrialization occurred gradually, and we always kept an eye on our environmental impact – something we, or rather our very distant descendants, forgot on Earth. This is all due to the fact that we had a far better understanding of our environment than you did, by the time our industry started to develop.”
“Somehow that strikes me as highly unlikely; a race with little or no industry having an excellent understanding of their environment.”
“We didn’t have
perfect knowledge of our environment, we merely were better aware of it, and we realized what the long-term effects of ecological impact might be. Also, our industrial technology developed slower than our science. We had everything we needed; the few predators large enough to pose a threat, were also intelligent enough to allow for a basic form of communication, and we had what you might call an “agreement” with them, more of a mutual understanding actually.”
“You mean to say you shared a planet with intelligent predators?”
“Only as intelligent as dolphines, or maybe chimpanzeas.” The post-human getting the words wrong suddenly sparked a feeling of mistrust in Tamarillho, as she realized the being’s (for she doubted they were humans now as well) words had her almost in trance, in adoration of the words, like a small child getting taught about space liners or colony expeditions. She hid it under a blanket of the same bland emotion she had felt previously; she wasn’t certain he couldn’t divine it, but if he did, he didn’t show it. “The main difference is that these creatures were more communicative, their vocal chords could produce a wider range of sounds. They lived in packs, though you might say they more resembled tribes; these creatures’ social sense was exceptionally well-developed, compared to predators on other worlds. They had what you might call tribal elders; one species even had a gathering of the “elders” once per year, on a forested mountain near the north pole, where matters that influenced the species as a whole were attended to. They were not of human sentience, no; but their semi-sentience was so convincing that most people thought they were fully sentient, until the first steady communications started.” He paused. Tamarillho realized she was staring blankly at a point just to the right of the “eyes” of the mist figure which had slowly drifted into view. She quickly collected herself and looked it straight into the hollow cloudy eye-sockets.
“You are bored.” Though they were spoken on a normal, almost conversational tone, the words cut through Tamarillho like a blade of cold steel, or a shaft of fiery ice. “You are no longer captivated. You are hiding something.” Tamarillho felt the creature look into her, peering into the depth of her emotions. She fought it, but he was persistent, and more and more post-humans joined in the effort until finally they broke through to the core of her feelings and retreated. She fell to her knees, gasping, clenching her fist against her chest as she could breathe again.
“You mistrust us, Commander Tamarillho.”
“Captain..... First..... Class..... Tamarillho, now..... you creep.”
“But you still see yourself as a Commander. As a middlingly-ranked officer in the merchant shipping navy. As the discarded human being sent off to become a garbage collector.” Every word of this sneer cut through Tamarillho like an ice cold dagger. She suspected it wasn’t just because of her. Silence fell between them, only broken by Tamarillho’s gasping breaths, which were slowly returning to normal, and what seemed to be the whispers of a crowd coming from deep inside the fog. The figure had retreated; Tamarillho suspected it was whirling around her, looking for another opening in which to strike.
“No.” she whispered. “No. I am not a garbage collector. I am a decorated Captain First Class. I am a hero.”
“No you are NOT!” The creature was inside of her again. “That is what they said you were, but inside you still think of yourself as a
garbage collector girl!” At this a sudden fury boiled up inside Tamarillho. “Ah, I see I’m right. Why would you be angry if I was merely telling you lies?!”
Tamarillho directed her fury, the anger enveloped the creature. She used her pent-up rage, collecting ever since she had been told she was going to become a test subject, to hold on to the creature, tightening her grip. It started to shriek. Others came in, tried to subdue her fury but she tightened her grip yet again. She felt the creature’s emotional defenses starting to buckle; it was losing its grip. It was slowly descending into madness. Still she held on, still she kept on squeezing the creature with her emotions, switching from impulsive rage to cold, dark hatred. She was now gasping for breath, but none would come to her. Still she held on; finally, she felt the last shred of resistance give way. She did not ease her grip; she pushed on, analyzing it, absorbing it. She knew what they were up to; she knew why they had chosen her. Her very strength, the reason they had chosen her, had now become their worst enemy.
The rest of the post-humans – for now she knew that they
were post-humans – retreated, leaving her gasping again, but this time her throat only tightened. Another voice came from the mist; younger, more menacing.
“You will not leave this Plane alive.”
Instinctively, she knew it was right. It was only her mind that was here; but if she was suffocating here, she must also be suffocating inside her fighter. Death here would mean death everywhere. Slowly the world turned black. She knew she was going to die.
Then, everything went blue and she lifted her head up from the fighter’s controls, gasping for desperately needed air.
-----END OF CHAPTER ONE-----
Re: The Demise
Linear Mode
