“What do you mean you’re lying?”
“There was a survivor. Grias was rescued by your grandfather when he received the alarm sign from the leader of Silotaco. When he arrived there, he found him with multiple injuries and brought him to Mida, where he was completely healed. Grias never forgot this event and from that moment he became his footman.”
“Are those animals the ones that inhabit Racot?”
“No. After observing through the zac all the species that inhabited the planet, your grandfather reached to the conclusion that those animals were the most intelligent ones and, therefore, the ones that would be in charge of communicating with him in the future. He waited for a long time until his patience finally came to an end. Those weren’t the beings he was looking for his game, he wanted…”
“Sorry to interrupt you,” Palac asked shyly. “Why did his patience come to an end? Hadn’t he achieved his aim?”
“Not completely.” He made a pause and stood up from his chair to observe in the monitor the behavior of some midarians who seem to be arguing. “Retention squad!” He shouted. Although he was at several kilometers from them, the telepathic communication could establish contact.
“Sir, I can hear you perfectly!” One of the squad members answered. “What’s going on?”
“I’m watching that several midarians have disobeyed the behavior code.”
“Which is your position?” He asked as he ordered his soldiers making gestures for them to get ready to act.
“In the surroundings of the historical pyramid!”
“Sir. We’re going to proceed!”
The distance that separated the place where the incident was happening was covered quickly. The average height for a midarian was three meters and seventy centimeters and some of them weighed around two hundred and fifty kilos. Their long limbs allowed them to move at speeds that exceeded the two hundred and fifty kilometers per hours. In a few minutes, they got to the spot. They surrounded the group that was provoking the incident and the person responsible of the patrol established communication con Cabolun again.
“Sir, are you sure you want to implement the protocol?”
“Yes!”
He turned his back to the monitor and went to his throne again while Palac remained in silence and without daring to move a finger. Even though he knew how unsavory the protocol of action was, he didn’t take his eyes from the screen. In it, the patrol had just killed the group that had provoked the incident. One of the soldiers was laying the bodies on a floating platform to take them away.
“Where were we?” Cabolun asked with no sign of remorse at all. “Oh, yes. I remember now,” he added diverting his eyes from his son. “As I was telling you, your grandfather had achieved his aim. His project was more ambitious than the one of just creating a civilization of predators. He was convinced that such creatures wouldn’t provide him with the amusement he was looking for. Finally, he took a drastic decision.”
“What did he do?” Palac asked, still shocked by the images he had just seen.
“He ordered the total destruction of planet Beiler. He travelled to it and from his craft, the Spores315, he shot a unique projectile that swept it away completely. The majority of these gigantic animals died on the spot. The ones that survived did it later due to the climatic sequels the explosion produced.”
“I still don’t understand the reasons why he acted that way. What did he get with that?”
“Very simple: restarting the game. Returning the planet to its virgin state, as it was when he found it. The aim now was to redo the experiment. In order to reestablish the planet’s initial conditions, he had to wait sixty million years. After that time, he decided to retake the experiment, but this time with much more evolved particles. Repeating the procedure used in the first trial, your grandfather traveled to Racot again. Once there, he could see with his own eyes the effects the impact of the projectile produced. The geography of the planet changed enormously: from a unique mass of uniform earth, it then transformed into dozens of irregular fragments of the most diverse sizes.”
“What a disaster!” Palac said, troubled. He would have never imagined that his grandfather had carried out such a devastating experiment.
“After laying the particles, he had to wait several millenniums more to start noticing some activity. First, dense and vast vegetation was formed. Later, some animals appeared. These were much weaker and smaller than the previous ones, but at the same time, much more intelligent Hoping to find what he was looking for, he waited a long time until one of them called his attention. It was evolving extremely fast compared to the other. It stopped walking in four legs to be biped. Its appearance was also modified over time, but its main change took place in its intelligence. It solved the problems that arouse in its life, learned to fight and to make tools to improve its wellbeing. There was no doubt at all, which was the animal meant to dominate the new civilization. Even better: his game!” He shouted provoking great commotion in the room.
“Are those Racot’s inhabitants?”
“Yes! They’re to blame for everything! Everything!” He yielded even louder.
Chapter 4
Year 2069. The little astronaut trainee has matured considerably. He is tall and athletic. His hair is brown, short and neat. He has got bluish big eyes. His nose disgorges into a pair of thin and delicate lips.
Sitting in an uncomfortable chair in front of an untidy desk, he is holding in his hands the craft he waved when he was nine years old. His workplace is not precisely at the NASA headquarters, where he used to dream to be when he was a child. He worked as a librarian at the University of Albuquerque. Without having the training to do that job, he got the post thanks to his condition of being Mike Rogers’ grandson.
His eagerness to study and becoming an astronaut disappeared with the death of his grandfather. One day after it, he was sent to a reception center in which he spent the sufficient amount of years to leave that cold place. Without much eagerness, he enrolled at university. First, he tried with the career of journalism with the sole purpose of meeting more girls. It was a highly demanded career by women. He didn’t manage to finish the third semester: the parties and the nightlife did not go hand in hand with the morning classes. He decided to leave Journalism and he enrolled at the medical school. He is the only one who knows what reasons led him to do so since the sole sight of blood makes him faint. Whether due to fate or to a coincidence, for a change, luck would have it. He made great friends, something unusual in him, because he did not have many until then. And despite the fact of being absent from classes very frequently and, therefore, not passing any subject, after so many years, he was finally happy. Having spent so many years in a reception center, where affection was scarce, had turned him into a cold and suspicious teenager. But in that moment, he was beginning to feel the warm sensation you feel when you are treated well. His three roommates cared about him and made him feel special. Despite knowing that situation would come to an end someday, he tried to enjoy every moment with them.
The most feared day for Josef had come just two month ago. His roommates managed to graduate and he decided that with thirty-one years old, the moment to leave the campus and look for a job had come. Once more, fate or chance made a vacancy for librarian appear in that same university.
His inexperience and lack of absolute knowledge in the subject did not impede him getting the job. The first two weeks he lived in a small room shared with a group of students from the outskirts of the city. Some disagreements with the rest of the tenants made him search another place to stay.
It was then when he found a house for sell near the university. He decided to get in touch with the seller to see it inside. He was fascinated from the very beginning. It had a large garden full of flowers, a great room with a central fireplace, four bedrooms and four bathrooms. «More than enough for living.» After deliberating for several days, he bought it. A week later, he sold the house in which he lived with his grandfather. A
ccording to what Josef had read, the buyer was a multimillionaire Astronomy lover who had acquired one by one all the houses of the astronomers who had formed part of mission Life. Knowing this information was useful for the youth to deliberately increase the property price so as to get as much money as possible. «He’s going to buy it no matter how much he has to pay for it, » he repeated for himself over and over again. Before selling it, he visited it for the last time to pick some personal stuff, among which there was that mysterious chest. All of them were in a small store he had rented until he finished furnishing his new house.
That day, after work, he called a removal firm to have the stored objects transported. It took them no more than ten minutes to download them in the middle of the room: an old desk, two telescopes, a dusty pool table, some boxes packed with books and photographs and that old chest completed the belongings he had saved from that fetish man’s hands.
As a boy opening Christmas gifts, he sat on the floor and started to examine the boxes. He could not help smiling at seeing a photograph of his grandpa wearing his astronaut suit beside the USA president. «How important my grandfather was!» He thought with proud. In another one it appeared himself riding a bike. Mike was running behind him to prevent him from falling down. He raised his look and observed with nostalgia that old pool that once belonged to Efrén Reyes, one of the best players ever. His grandpa had acquired it at a charity auction in the city of Los Angeles. Just under the pool table, it was the old chest. At seeing it, he felt a chill, because that chest had been the topic of the last conversation he had with his progenitor. He stood up and slowly went to where it was, he dragged it until he left is out of the pool reach and breathed deeply. Next, he started to roll up his right arm sleeve, revealing a ten digit- numeration resting on a pedestal with his name. «It’s important for you never to forget the numbers I’m going to tell you, » his grandpa asked him before telling him the secret. The decision of having the password tattooed had been reinforced thanks to the abusive consumption of marihuana during his first years at college. « I can’t forget the combination. I’ve got to do something for this shit not to erase everything from my mind.» Fortunately, the ink covered his arm before it was too late.
Josef ran his left hand’s fingers across the numbers, cursing the reason why he had decided to print his skin forever. He took a deep breath again and pressed the small square that protected the lock. He still remembered the sound made by the gear when the digital screen got uncovered. He typed the password and the chest opened. Inside it, everything was as he remembered it: newspaper cuttings, photographs, an old teddy vulture, a handwritten book and a small object unknown for him: a 32Gb-storage device which did not call his attention very much. Neither the passing of time nor the wetness nor the dust had affected even minimally the interior of that worn out chest. Its hermetic properties had created unbeatable conditions for the perfect preservation of all the elements.
“What would he have written on this book?” He mumbled.
He opened it and looked at several pages. Carelessly, he placed it back inside the chest. One of the newspaper cuttings called his attention and he took it to be able to read it under a modernist lamplight he had recently bought.
Today’s newspaper’s headline, December 1st, 2031. An American plane destroys UFO on New Jersey Coast, causing panic among the citizens who witnessed the scene. At verifying that the craft was not detected by radar and disobeyed the warnings sent front the control tower, it was decided to shoot down the craft to ensure safety to everyone present. Sources close to this newspaper assured that the craft was recovered by an American ship and it is being investigated at the well-known Area 51.
He left that cutting again and picked another to examine it.
Ufo51 Magazine’ s headline of July 2040. A UFO chases a passenger plane towards Paris-Los Angeles airway during two long hours. The pilots flying the commercial plane claimed the object or the craft that was following them was travelling at such an exorbitant speed that immediately after it appeared on one side of the plane, it could be seen on the other. One of the pilots declared that he thought he was going to die, but the craft suddenly disappeared leaving no track at all.
He put the cutting inside the chest again and he started to look for and read the most important covers of the yellow journalism. In all of them the topic of sightings of UFOs in different parts of the world was dealt with. That was something that didn’t surprise him at all, because it was so frequent news on TV.
He then thought about revising the book content. He picked it from inside the chest and put it on the desk. He took one of the chairs from the living room and started to examine it. The book title was The World’s Game. Below, several questions seemed to be waiting for an answer.
Why were they in ancient times? Are they playing with us? Why did they build the pyramids? Was Jesus Christ one of them?
Frowning and somehow surprised because of the questions, he opened it on the first page and started reading.
Chapter 1. Cave paintings
In 1837, in the area of Kimberley, in the northeast of Australia, a lot of paintings called WANDJINAS were discovered. According to the translation, they mean: wise beings that brought civilization and prosperity to the villages of the area. When the aborigines were asked about the origin of the paintings, they answered that their ancestors had not been the ones who painted them. They said that the artists were beings that had come from the sky. Among the paintings, figures as big as six meters long, with white faces and without mouth call the attention. In one of the most remarkable ones, it appears a being dressed with a pink robe with a double circle around his head, also pink and golden. On the pink area, there is something written, but it is illegible.
In 1939, in the region of Tassili (Algeria), paintings on the walls of the caverns were found. In these, beings with helmet appear. They are very similar to astronauts. The most curious thing is that after having been subjected to Carbon-14 tests, the paintings revealed being from ten to fifteen thousand years old. They are known worldwide as: the astronauts of Tassili.
In 2010, in Madhya Pradesh (India), a group of archeologists that were working with the tribes of a mountain in a remote area found cave paintings of what seems to be a spacecraft and an alien inside a cave. The sacred texts of Vedantic Hindi literature talk about what for some people has been interpreted as spacecrafts (for others they are only the symbolic vehicle of gods), known under the name of Vimanas. These antique flying machines make some people believe that aliens are no other thing that the gods referred to in the myths and that have interacted with humanity for thousands of years, even creating man «in their likeness», as part of their genetic experiment.
For several hours, he continued reading dozens of pages on which his grandpa clearly talked about extraterrestrial manifestations from ancient times. Finally, he finished reading the first chapter and went to bed.
The following morning, he washed himself and, as every day, he walked to university. When he was about to cross the street that led to the entrance, a car passed by across a pool of water and made Josef completely soaked. «Shit!» To make his anger grow even more, the car driver opened the window and showed the V sign with his fingers as we drove away. «Son of a…» Without time to come back home and change clothes —he was in charge of opening the library— he got into the bathroom and dried himself with some paper and with the air from the hand drier. «Ten minutes,» he thought as he ran hastily to have breakfast at the university cafeteria. After so many years going to that place no wonder why he was served breakfast without being asked what he would order. The waitress knew Josef’s preferences, so she served him a cup of coffee along with two cookies without speaking. That day, the old and shabby employee hadn’t gone to work. In her place, a young and inexperienced trainee tried to please the clients.
She was blonde, tall and slim. Her long and smooth hair waved every step she made. Her light and almond eyes seemed to captivate anyone who looked at
them.
That morning the cafeteria was very noisy. Several young boys, startled at such beauty, crowded on the counter expecting to exchange glances with her. Altered by testosterone, they let out rude and inappropriate comments. Josef, unaffected before such disgusting situation, raised his hand and she, who was alert, went close to him at once.
“Good morning,” she said very kindly bending her body forward and showing a perfect smile. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“As usual,” answered Josef with a serious expression.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said holding tight the tray she was carrying in her trembling hands. “This is my first day and I don’t know that is as usual,” she answered carefully.
“Well, as usual is a coffee with cold milk with two chocolate cookies. Have you understood or do I have to repeat it?” Josef asked with a nasty tone of voice, making some people from the tables around look at him.
“Yes, I’ve understood. I’ll bring it right now, sir,” the waitress lowered her head and went straight to the counter to have the breakfast prepared.
Josef stood up and picked the newspaper. As every day, he had breakfast alone. He was not a sociable person. Maybe life had been too hard with him, that’s why he took out his frustration on others. He did not allow the slightest approach with strangers. Since his roommates had graduated, he had fallen into a deep loneliness from which he didn’t seem to be willing to come out.
“Here it is what you’ve ordered, sir,” the waitress said with a wide smile.
“Thanks,” he answered without taking his eyes from the newspaper.
The waitress went to serve another table from where she was being insistently called. Josef took the coffee and sipped it.
The World's Game Page 3