In orbit above New Terra, the air in the Zero Room was sweaty and tense. The metal walls fluoresced anemically in Republic blue, reluctantly lighting the war-hardened faces around the conference table. The hologram at the center displayed a map of the region, with the red peninsula of the invasion now stretching deep into the blue Republic space.
“We must use The Weapon. I see no other choice.”
Most present nodded in unison, but Salah seemed surprised. Hesitant at first, she finally spoke.
“The Weapon? You mean a Torkh? Do we even have those now?”
Hohn stared at her for a moment. Then, to Salah’s relief, he smiled. But in that lighting, it could just as well have been a frown.
“Ah, representative… Salah. You are new to the Council, aren’t you? We have a single unit buried on the Old Earth. It was last used seven centuries ago, but telemetry shows it’s still functional.”
The surprise on Salah’s face morphed into anger as she realized the implications.
“So you let 8 star systems come under Tsalek control, endangering 80 billion and killing a billion humans and droids? You diverted civilian blood supply to the defence systems, letting another billion starve to death? And now you tell me you’ve had a solution all these years?”
Salah had now risen and was leaning on the conference table, staring at Hohn. Her hesitation had clearly disappeared.
“Please, calm down. It was a conscious decision. Recent events have made powers far greater than the Tsalek interested in Republic space. Our unit only has a few decades of runtime left, and according to our intelligence, it won’t nearly be enough. But we must not waste any more time. The excavation team is standing by. All in favor?”
Robert woke up to the warm rays of sun hitting his face. Another day, another adventure. His escort was already waiting outside the chamber.
In a few minutes, he was standing in an enormous hall which looked like an ancient relic. The air was stale from centuries of decomposition and the walls were crumbling in places. People in white lab coats were scurrying around with equipment. Their center of attraction seemed to be a large bionic apparatus consisting of a high-rise throne surrounded by control panels. The flesh-like material of the throne pulsed and throbbed in a steady, but not perfect, rhythm.
“We begin immediately,” announced Robert. “What is our status?”
Hohn walked up to him. “The system is online. Blood supply steady with nominal oxygenation and nutrition.”
“Good. You may order your troops to abandon their spacecraft and return to safety.”
As he walked up to the apparatus, Robert took off his shirt to reveal a series of neural taps running through his spinal column. He lowered his body gingerly on the throne, a frown of anticipation forming on his face. The throne rose to meet it as if eager to engulf him. He leaned back and a strange expression took over his face as his neural taps met with the receptacles on the backrest. Agony, pleasure, long-lost friend… Thoughts and emotions swirled in his mind like a dizzying, melting merry-go-round. He let his head sink into the warm flesh, which now completely enveloped him except his nose and mouth.
“I am beginning the Torkh routine. Connecting to comm systems.” His lips stopped moving mid-sentence as he switched to the comm speakers. His voice now multiplied, announcing things simultaneously.
“Bypassing defence systems... Taking over physics simulations… Psionic amplifier online... Connected to sensor grid... All weapons now psionically augmented… Commandeering spacecrafts… Conceiving attack strategy...”
“Two months straight without a break! It took longer than I expected.”
Robert was visibly exhausted and had a bleeding nose. Seated across from him was Council head Hohn.
“You did great.”
“Now that it’s all over, though, I’m planning to go on a long vacation.”
Hohn stared at him for a moment.
“I’m sorry, but that is not possible.”
“What do you mean? I just saved the butts of a quarter trillion people! If not a vacation, surely there must be science to be done? Engineering problems solved? Mathematical breakthroughs required? I’m sure you could utilize my—”
“I’m sorry Robert. Cerebrals have become a rarity in the human population. In fact, one hasn’t been born in centuries. With only a few decades of it left, each second of your life is too precious to waste. Besides, you are state property. You volunteered to be a Torkh, remember?”
Robert felt a hand grab his shoulder and a needle pierce his neck. He felt the all too familiar sensation of his body shutting down for another hibernation.
“We must use The Weapon. I see no other choice.”
Most present nodded in unison, but Salah seemed surprised. Hesitant at first, she finally spoke.
“The Weapon? You mean a Torkh? Do we even have those now?”
Hohn stared at her for a moment. Then, to Salah’s relief, he smiled. But in that lighting, it could just as well have been a frown.
“Ah, representative… Salah. You are new to the Council, aren’t you? We have a single unit buried on the Old Earth. It was last used seven centuries ago, but telemetry shows it’s still functional.”
The surprise on Salah’s face morphed into anger as she realized the implications.
“So you let 8 star systems come under Tsalek control, endangering 80 billion and killing a billion humans and droids? You diverted civilian blood supply to the defence systems, letting another billion starve to death? And now you tell me you’ve had a solution all these years?”
Salah had now risen and was leaning on the conference table, staring at Hohn. Her hesitation had clearly disappeared.
“Please, calm down. It was a conscious decision. Recent events have made powers far greater than the Tsalek interested in Republic space. Our unit only has a few decades of runtime left, and according to our intelligence, it won’t nearly be enough. But we must not waste any more time. The excavation team is standing by. All in favor?”
***
Robert woke up to the warm rays of sun hitting his face. Another day, another adventure. His escort was already waiting outside the chamber.
In a few minutes, he was standing in an enormous hall which looked like an ancient relic. The air was stale from centuries of decomposition and the walls were crumbling in places. People in white lab coats were scurrying around with equipment. Their center of attraction seemed to be a large bionic apparatus consisting of a high-rise throne surrounded by control panels. The flesh-like material of the throne pulsed and throbbed in a steady, but not perfect, rhythm.
“We begin immediately,” announced Robert. “What is our status?”
Hohn walked up to him. “The system is online. Blood supply steady with nominal oxygenation and nutrition.”
“Good. You may order your troops to abandon their spacecraft and return to safety.”
As he walked up to the apparatus, Robert took off his shirt to reveal a series of neural taps running through his spinal column. He lowered his body gingerly on the throne, a frown of anticipation forming on his face. The throne rose to meet it as if eager to engulf him. He leaned back and a strange expression took over his face as his neural taps met with the receptacles on the backrest. Agony, pleasure, long-lost friend… Thoughts and emotions swirled in his mind like a dizzying, melting merry-go-round. He let his head sink into the warm flesh, which now completely enveloped him except his nose and mouth.
“I am beginning the Torkh routine. Connecting to comm systems.” His lips stopped moving mid-sentence as he switched to the comm speakers. His voice now multiplied, announcing things simultaneously.
“Bypassing defence systems... Taking over physics simulations… Psionic amplifier online... Connected to sensor grid... All weapons now psionically augmented… Commandeering spacecrafts… Conceiving attack strategy...”
***
“Two months straight without a break! It took longer than I expected.”
Robert was visibly exhausted and had a bleeding nose. Seated across from him was Council head Hohn.
“You did great.”
“Now that it’s all over, though, I’m planning to go on a long vacation.”
Hohn stared at him for a moment.
“I’m sorry, but that is not possible.”
“What do you mean? I just saved the butts of a quarter trillion people! If not a vacation, surely there must be science to be done? Engineering problems solved? Mathematical breakthroughs required? I’m sure you could utilize my—”
“I’m sorry Robert. Cerebrals have become a rarity in the human population. In fact, one hasn’t been born in centuries. With only a few decades of it left, each second of your life is too precious to waste. Besides, you are state property. You volunteered to be a Torkh, remember?”
Robert felt a hand grab his shoulder and a needle pierce his neck. He felt the all too familiar sensation of his body shutting down for another hibernation.
“I celebrate that we found you. We were forced to induce a coma to curtail brain damage.”
Shiilak’s staccato voice fell like hammers on Heather’s eardrums. His English was interspersed with pauses and his wording unusual, yet grammatically perfect. She thought she could discern real concern through the strange alien intonation.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“We are in the belief it is the Shaar parasite, which afflicted our ancestors multi-hundred years ago. We eventually grew resistant to it and had long thought it to be extin—”
“Well is there anything you can do about it?” she interrupted.
“Perhaps. But this is the most pernicious pathogen our history documents. It is a computational parasite—it carves out regions of the host brain for its own purposes, while the authentic… no, original... spore dissolves without traces. Those portions of the brain are reprogrammed and become the parasite.”
“There has to be a treatment, right?”
“We must rebuild the severed neural connections before the reprogramming concludes. You are fortunate we found him in time. He lay unconscious with brain activity indicative of hallucinations. I mustered the foresight to promptly put him in a coma.”
“Are there any risks to the procedure?” she managed.
“Death. Despite the similarity between our species, our relative unfamiliarity with the human neurophysiology will complicate matters”, Shiilak explained.
“And the prognosis if left untreated?” Heather’s voice came out weak.
“Progressive insanity, followed by certain, painful death. At least in us Tsaleks.”
Heather felt lightheaded. She looked up at the sky and was greeted by the strange alien cityscape, lazily lit by a bright red sun. Buildings shot up like glistening tentacles deep into the sky—intertwining, separating, then intertwining again. Some seemed to circle back towards her, threatening to scoop her up. It was as though the verisimilitude of the whole situation was slipping away. She realized she had collapsed to her knees.
“Take me to him. I need time to think it over”, she said, trying to compose herself.
“A luxury we do not have. You have three of your hours.”
Jason lay on an impeccable white bedding surrounded by sterile metal walls. His chest rose and fell in tandem with the rhythmic pulsing of the bionic medical apparatus. The lighting in the room had a strange, clinical quality to it—it seemed to pervade the room uniformly with no apparent source, and cast no shadows. Heather sat wordlessly beside him, staring at his limp body. The austere surroundings and the bizarre control panels—designed, no doubt, for Tsalek ergonomics—did little to comfort her.
Shiilak had said Jason could probably hear her, but she didn’t speak. Her mind instead wandered to the events of the past several years. She wanted to tell herself this was just another hurdle, just another exploding power relay or a decompressing hull breach, just another barrier they’ll eventually break through, like she and Jason always did.
The journey that had brought them to this planet mere days ago had been nothing short of nerve-wrecking—right from the moment they had received The Signal seven years ago. In defiance of the Earth governments, a small group of scientists and engineers had launched in humanity’s first superluminal spaceships, to investigate the first signs of intelligent life in the cosmos. That was three years ago. The celebrations among the skeleton crew had quickly faded into monotony, and then into increasingly neurotic periods of apprehension interrupted only by tragedies. She saw the other two spaceships succumb to the unforgiving harshness of space. She saw her other crewmates perish one by one to mishaps and suicide. She didn’t blame them. Traveling in the barrenness of space for so long, where the only indicator of progress is a readout on a screen, you begin to question the existence of Earth itself. But she and Jason had pulled through it all. Jason had pulled both of them through. Sweet Jason—like an anchor to her past, an anchor to reality. In college they would—
Her reverie was broken by Shiilak’s entrance.
She nodded at him.
Jason woke up with a splitting headache. He was still groggy, but he could tell something was different. He felt… more. Too much.
Heather and Shiilak were standing next to him. “You were infected by an ancient Tsalek parasite”, Shiilak began to explain.
Jason heard sounds. His attention jumped to the vibrations in his eardrums. He saw Fourier transforms. Then he recognized the words and then realized their meaning. Something was not right. His heart had started pounding. He had started pounding his heart.
“Your digestive, pulmonary, cardiac… in fact, all your organ systems except the musculoskeletal, were disconnected from conscious control. We managed to restore the severed neural pathways.”
“Wait what? That's not how humans work!” exclaimed Heather with a start.
“How do you mean? And what about the hallucinations?”
Jason instinctively released a large dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He momentarily observed the progress of vasoconstriction in his facial tissue, before yelling at Shiilak.
“There was no parasite! I was dreaming, you idiot…”
His voice trailed off as his attention was distracted by the micro-tears forming in his strained vocal cords. He began to formulate the optimal repair strategy.
Shiilak’s staccato voice fell like hammers on Heather’s eardrums. His English was interspersed with pauses and his wording unusual, yet grammatically perfect. She thought she could discern real concern through the strange alien intonation.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“We are in the belief it is the Shaar parasite, which afflicted our ancestors multi-hundred years ago. We eventually grew resistant to it and had long thought it to be extin—”
“Well is there anything you can do about it?” she interrupted.
“Perhaps. But this is the most pernicious pathogen our history documents. It is a computational parasite—it carves out regions of the host brain for its own purposes, while the authentic… no, original... spore dissolves without traces. Those portions of the brain are reprogrammed and become the parasite.”
“There has to be a treatment, right?”
“We must rebuild the severed neural connections before the reprogramming concludes. You are fortunate we found him in time. He lay unconscious with brain activity indicative of hallucinations. I mustered the foresight to promptly put him in a coma.”
“Are there any risks to the procedure?” she managed.
“Death. Despite the similarity between our species, our relative unfamiliarity with the human neurophysiology will complicate matters”, Shiilak explained.
“And the prognosis if left untreated?” Heather’s voice came out weak.
“Progressive insanity, followed by certain, painful death. At least in us Tsaleks.”
Heather felt lightheaded. She looked up at the sky and was greeted by the strange alien cityscape, lazily lit by a bright red sun. Buildings shot up like glistening tentacles deep into the sky—intertwining, separating, then intertwining again. Some seemed to circle back towards her, threatening to scoop her up. It was as though the verisimilitude of the whole situation was slipping away. She realized she had collapsed to her knees.
“Take me to him. I need time to think it over”, she said, trying to compose herself.
“A luxury we do not have. You have three of your hours.”
***
Jason lay on an impeccable white bedding surrounded by sterile metal walls. His chest rose and fell in tandem with the rhythmic pulsing of the bionic medical apparatus. The lighting in the room had a strange, clinical quality to it—it seemed to pervade the room uniformly with no apparent source, and cast no shadows. Heather sat wordlessly beside him, staring at his limp body. The austere surroundings and the bizarre control panels—designed, no doubt, for Tsalek ergonomics—did little to comfort her.
Shiilak had said Jason could probably hear her, but she didn’t speak. Her mind instead wandered to the events of the past several years. She wanted to tell herself this was just another hurdle, just another exploding power relay or a decompressing hull breach, just another barrier they’ll eventually break through, like she and Jason always did.
The journey that had brought them to this planet mere days ago had been nothing short of nerve-wrecking—right from the moment they had received The Signal seven years ago. In defiance of the Earth governments, a small group of scientists and engineers had launched in humanity’s first superluminal spaceships, to investigate the first signs of intelligent life in the cosmos. That was three years ago. The celebrations among the skeleton crew had quickly faded into monotony, and then into increasingly neurotic periods of apprehension interrupted only by tragedies. She saw the other two spaceships succumb to the unforgiving harshness of space. She saw her other crewmates perish one by one to mishaps and suicide. She didn’t blame them. Traveling in the barrenness of space for so long, where the only indicator of progress is a readout on a screen, you begin to question the existence of Earth itself. But she and Jason had pulled through it all. Jason had pulled both of them through. Sweet Jason—like an anchor to her past, an anchor to reality. In college they would—
Her reverie was broken by Shiilak’s entrance.
She nodded at him.
***
Jason woke up with a splitting headache. He was still groggy, but he could tell something was different. He felt… more. Too much.
Heather and Shiilak were standing next to him. “You were infected by an ancient Tsalek parasite”, Shiilak began to explain.
Jason heard sounds. His attention jumped to the vibrations in his eardrums. He saw Fourier transforms. Then he recognized the words and then realized their meaning. Something was not right. His heart had started pounding. He had started pounding his heart.
“Your digestive, pulmonary, cardiac… in fact, all your organ systems except the musculoskeletal, were disconnected from conscious control. We managed to restore the severed neural pathways.”
“Wait what? That's not how humans work!” exclaimed Heather with a start.
“How do you mean? And what about the hallucinations?”
Jason instinctively released a large dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He momentarily observed the progress of vasoconstriction in his facial tissue, before yelling at Shiilak.
“There was no parasite! I was dreaming, you idiot…”
His voice trailed off as his attention was distracted by the micro-tears forming in his strained vocal cords. He began to formulate the optimal repair strategy.
It was a day decorated by
the gods themselves. The sun sported a deep red blush. The sky
dazzled around it in an impeccable gradient, with strokes of cirrus
painted on. The wind, applauded by the rustling leaves, whistled the
finest tunes and the petrichor from the previous night still pervaded
the air. A poet and their pen would have relished the impression.
Sadly, Shay was neither. Her eyes did wander to the heavens every
once in a while, but the object of the glances was hardly a piece of
natural art: Amid the picturesque background floated, as if by magic,
the Cube.
“Ahem...”, coughed
one of the nameless faces surrounding her for the third time, trying
its best (and failing rather miserably) to keep her attention. Once
again Shay was jolted out of her trance, and once again her attention
refocused onto her interviewer. Shay wasn't particularly fond of
daydreaming. In fact, she was rather averse to it. She considered
herself to be a woman of action, and she was hardly alone with this
impression. And yet, the almost motherly pride that every glance of
the Cube brought to her was too tempting, even for her. Of course,
the fact that she had little respect for interviews such as these
didn't help either. Her eyes lazily shifted back to the scrawny,
uninteresting figure in front of her and the unmistakable air of
corporate pompousness that the sight carried with it made her cringe.
Her gaze finally settled upon the bionic arm holding the expecting
microphone, it being perhaps the only thing in this whole affair that
piqued her interest in the slightest. “Would you mind giving our
subscribers a watered down version of how it actually works?...”
The same old question echoed yet again. Shay sighed internally as her
lips automatically recited a well rehearsed answer for the umpteenth
time.
The ill-named contraption
in question was a remarkable ring of rather unremarkable proportions.
A trespassing hippy (assuming they managed to dodge the infinite
stream of bullets greeting them) would have mistaken it for a piece
of Third Renaissance “art”, perhaps deriving a deep existential
meaning of the hollow shape. Perhaps not. But the unassuming
appearance hardly betrayed the fact that the thingamajig represented
the epitome of human ingenuity. It had taken an immeasurable amount
of human genius distilled over a millennium to birth that curious
structure. The mismatching name, of course, was rumoured to be an
artefact of some ancient Newtonian equations that predicted a cube
instead of a ring. Little did they know that the engineers came up
with it on one of the nights when their blood had more alcohol than
glucose. Many a sly smile had been exchanged over this cute little
in-joke.
It had all begun about a
millennium before the birth of Shay Snow, with a most outrageous
proposal by a little known Mexican physicist. The world had laughed,
or at least sniggered, when Miguel Alcubierre had first suggested the
possibility of faster-than-light travel without violating General
Relativity. Although the mathematics presented was viable, the metric
tensor so obtained was quickly discarded by the traditionalists as a
mere mathematical artefact with no physical interpretation. With the
prevalent technology handicapping any experimental verification for
centuries, the idea quickly receded into the background, preserved
only as a curiosity in university textbooks on geometric topology.
Fast-forward about a
thousand years, and you find the Earth way past her final breaths.
After all, a finite ball of dirt could cater to only so many at once.
It wasn't a question of efficiency either. Humans excelled in that
department. The most uninhabitable corners of the globe had been
terraformed to serve their needs: The Antarctic was bedizened in lush
green and the finest loam covered the entire Sahara. And yet, in the
grand scheme of things, terraformation was but an ephemeral solution;
one final hooray before the end. The sole long-term solution, of
course, was obvious. New Earths were needed.
Obvious as it was, it
took a while for the realisation to percolate into the general human
outlook. Fortunately, finding candidate planets for terraformation
was not that difficult. Getting to them in a viable amount of time,
however, was an entirely different story. And so the most brilliant
minds of multiple generations set out to find a solution and find a
solution they did, in some ancient books on geometric topology: the
Alcubierre Warp Drive was born. A large scale implementation,
however, was still far away. Unsurprisingly, the energy requirements
were huge at any significant scale. And yet again, the human
ingenuity was tested to its limit. And yet again, the humans won.
Seven centuries worth of tweaking the shape of the warp bubble
brought down the required energy from a few solar masses to a few
kilograms. Shay herself had a relatively minor (although vital) role
in this. However, it was under her leadership that the centuries of
work culminated in the form of the Cube. It was, dare she say it, her
secret guilt. But it was all for the greater good and that was
good enough for her.
Hearing her name called
out from the podium broke her out of her reverie. The countdown was
about to begin. She stole a glance at the Cube one more time and then
shifted her gaze to the terrapods, buzzing and ready for launch. An
uncountable number of cameras followed. “T minus 16...” it began.
Light years away, from the
other side of the event horizon of one of the countless insignificant
black holes, a Watcher peered, observing its favourite universe. A slight artefact in the radiation emitted from the singularity betrayed the sorrow that engulfed it. The cancer had metastasised.
Monotony of hollow tones,
It echoes in a ghastly
mesh
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