The World's Game

by Jacobo Izquierdo

  His words resonated inside that pyramid producing a lasting echo. Palac, who was paying his whole attention to the explanations, found it difficult to imagine that landscape so different from what it was now. Nowadays, dark brown and back were the predominant colors and, in a lower proportion, some different tones of greys made that dull scenery even more arid.

  “But...” Jalop’s expression became suddenly sad. “…the perfect symphony of the elements was altered by Xibak’s death. The extinction of our star provoked a chain of catastrophic events. The planet remained in a total darkness and chaos started. Temperature collapsed, the plants died some days later and the animals wandered searching food that allowed them to survive. The situation caught everyone by surprise since they had to improvise an emergency plan to get food soon.”

  “Such plan consisted of placing hundreds of huge lights that made it possible produce harvests with which make food. During a not very long period of time, they could survive doing that, but the crops weren’t enough to feed the whole population and that lead to the first conflicts. Yewut, who was Palac’s grandfather and midarian leader at the time, at seeing that the situation was turning unbearable, ordered an ambitious project to his scientists.”

  “This one consisted of transform their bodies internally so as not to have to eat. As it happened in ancient times when his ancestors modified their blood so as their body cells didn’t grow older and so they were able to live almost eternally.”

  Palac looked at him with amazement. He had no idea about the information he was receiving. He had never wondered how his body worked internally. He only wandered up and fro the planet. His father’s apathy had made of him an authentic ignorant, as the rest of the midarians of his age.

  “Where was out ancestors’ food ingested by?” Palac started to search along his body a perforation by which food could enter the body. His face, formed only by two huge eyes, lacked of a mouth. With his fingers, he explored one by one the tiny aerials located above his eyes that made it possible for him to hear and communicate, either orally or telepathically. These, as if they were a speaker, emitted the information he wanted to transmit. His mind was capable of filtering thoughts and actions so that a thought could never be expressed aloud.

  “Good question,” said Jalop opening his eyes. Midarian eyes, apart from providing them with great sight, allowed them to express their feelings. Wide open eyes meant joy or surprise, while half-opened ones mean sadness or distrustfulness. And closed or almost closed, hate or anger. “After a thousand years after your grandfather’s command and after several tests, they finally managed to modify the first midarian. In order to live without eating, they had to totally transform his body. First, they eliminated all the organs and cleaned it inside. Later, they suppressed the mouth, which was the place from where food entered the body. Finally, they sealed all the orifices so that the body remained totally hermetic.”

  “Mouth?”

  Jalop pointed to the area below the eyes. Although it could hardly be seen, an opening of four centimeters made an irregular imperfection on his smooth skin.

  “Right here. If you press a bit you’re your fingers, you’ll see that there’s a small cavity.” It couldn’t be appreciated with the naked eye since evolution had made the skin cover the area.

  “It’s true! There’s something such as a small hole. Food must have been really tiny since it’s not very big.”

  The historian nodded.

  “As I was telling you…” he started again. “…after sealing the openings, they incorporated to the head of this midarian millions of socs joined with the blood. These had the function of moving to all the body corners and provide it with constant and infinite energy.”

  “Socs?” Palac asked.

  “Socks are micro-parasites with such incredible properties. When they live inside the body of a being, they make the organism accelerate, providing it with high levels of energy. This source of infinite energy produces a premature cellular aging that leads to a soon death. Midarian blood, at having been modified, isn’t affected negatively. Quite the opposite, its performance is improved significantly by suppressing the need of sleep, food or even air. For that reason, the body must be completely hermetic.”

  “What happened next?”

  “After finishing modifying the first one, it was established a year lapse to evaluate the results. During the first days, the midarian seemed to have gone mad: he couldn’t manage to canalize the excess of energy. Body and mind had to eliminate from their memories habits, such as sleeping, resting, eating or simply breathing. After a while, he learnt to control his new organism and the experiment was evaluated as a success. Once its viability had been proved, Yewut ordered all Mida’s inhabitants to be modified. The lack of food had made animal population decrease since the crops produced by the artificial lights weren’t enough to satisfy the food demand. Once the transformation of all the midarians had finished, agriculture and livestock disappeared. The aspect of the planet continued changing: it turned darker and more frightening every time. The vegetation and colors disappeared, giving way to very frequent volcanic eruptions that created an arid and mountainous scenery. For millions of years, our ancestors moved from one place of the planet to another to avoid being swallowed by the rivers of lava. Sick of getting away, they found the way to get advantage of such boiling substance. They diverted they magma course towards some energy plants that turned heat into electricity.”

  Jalop stood up and made a gesture for Palac to follow him. They walked for some meters up to a white plasma tower base. Hundreds of thousands of towers perfectly separated and aligned lit every corner of Mida. Each off them lit an area of ten kilometers.

  “The electricity generated in the energy plants was used to feed these towers that illuminate the whole planet. Hadn’t you ever wondered what its power supply was?”

  Palac did not answer. The historian went back inside the pyramid and he followed him.

  The modification of midarian civilization turned its warrior stronger and more powerful. In the battles for the conquest of resources it was very advantageous not to sleep or eating, needs the enemies had to quench in order to survive. But it didn’t take long for them to find the first problem derived from mutation. The slightest scratch or wound on the skin led to a sudden death. Apparently, the socks raised blood pressure and, when wounded, they bled to death in four minutes. In order to heal their wounds water of life was used. It was water from the springs of Turilan and they had magical healing properties. It healed any cut or damaged tissue in a few seconds. The extinction of the star made that spring disappear.

  Jalop walked to one of the corners of the room and started to move some objects placed inside one of the dozens of arks piled against the walls. Finally, he took an object from inside it. It was a cylinder made of gold about twenty centimeters long. At the bottom, it had a small legend: WATER OF LIFE.

  “This is the only container we had managed to keep.”

  “And do you say that the water inside it heals any injury?”

  Jalop nodded.

  “The problem is that when a midarian was injured in a battle, he died in the majority of the cases anyway since the healers didn’t arrive in time to save his life. To face the excessive mortality, they had to think about a way of protecting themselves. They found the solution in some suits that fitted perfectly well on the body as a second skin. Yewut ordered manufacturing them uninterruptedly. The material used to make all of them was a mixture of plistor and silver, except from your grandfather’s one, which was made of gold and plistor, despite the resistance was practically the same, he wanted to distinguish his from the rest’s.”

  Plistor is a metal with unique properties. It is light, resistant and very elastic. It can be found in its liquid state inside the mountains of Rijan, a volcano with very frequent eruptions of lava and that holds such complex material in one of its chambers.

  “That’s why my suit is made of gold!”

  Jalo
p started to laugh.

  “Now I understand why it is so important,” he muttered, remembering the incident at the mine.

  “Plistor is essential for our civilization. We are dressed with the suit when we’re born and we never again take it off. This material has the property of stretching from our first tiny body.” When midarians are born, they are slightly longer than twenty centimeters. Body maturity is reached when they are two thousand years old. “Our warriors’ vulnerability made combat with no protection very dangerous. Hands were protected with aluminum gloves, and the feet with titanium boots with five gold nails on the point, whose function was merely ornamental. The use of plistor didn’t remain unnoticed by the rest of the civilizations of the galaxy. The attacks to our planet to steal the exclusiveness of such precious metal became constant for millions of years.”

  “Have you said exclusiveness?” Palac asked with wide open eyes.

  “I don’t know if I had already mentioned it, but Mida is the only planet in the galaxy that produces such valuable material.”

  “Wow!” He exclaimed, surprised.

  “Now it comes the most interesting part. The attacks to conquer us and take plistor over were frequent, but they didn’t cause great trouble. The weapons our warriors used were very powerful and the enemies had serious problems to damage the suits. That was until civilization with warfare experience spotted our weak point at that time. Our eyes!” He exclaimed. “The engineers in charge of developing the suit chose not to cover the head so as not to lose field of view. A mistake in the design that we paid dearly…” Jalop added, sad and crestfallen.

  “What happened?” Palac asked fastening his glove, a mania he repeated very frequently and that was increased when he was nervous.

  “It was the last battle Mida suffered. The battle of the cowards,” the historian said showing the papyrus that told the fight. “Only a few warriors coming from planet Azlap were enough to assassin the whole population. A total of two million of male midarians and twenty female midarians died. The reason for such a brutal attack was simple to take plistor over. Those...” Jalop tried to hold his rage “…savages appeared and landed their craft in the north of the planet. They must have watched us for some time since they knew that area had almost no monitoring at all. They downloaded a powerful weapon that paralyzed the minds of all the inhabitants, and in an act of cowardice, they finished with the life of all our brothers. All of them, except from Yewut, Grias, Beiler and his mother, Plisalet. Fortune wanted these four midarians weren’t in Mida. They were visiting planet Zelapon to receive their leader’s approval.”

  “Crizal was Zelapon’s unique inhabitant: for millions of years, your grandfather asked his acquiescence when he had to decide appointing an important position on our planet. This being had very high levels of intuition and he was capable of predicting if the candidate would be able to, in the future, do his job flawlessly. Without his approval, no one was designated. In ancient times, new designations were made when the candidates weren’t still a year old. It was made this way to start with the training as soon as possible. That day, Bailer had received Crizal’s acquiescence and the four of them were returning to give the news to their brothers. When they got to Mida, the scene was devastating. Piles of corpses were lying scattered along the planet. The monitoring satellites revealed the attackers’ identity. The cause of death had been the same for everyone: a big perforation on the head produced by a plasma gun.”

  “The four survivals searched unsuccessfully across the planet a midarian that had managed to escape from such a brutal attack. A few days later, they heard a loud roar in the sky. Five enormous crafts with the shield of Azlap were approximating. They were extraction crafts with the capacity to store millions of tons of material. These warriors committed the mistake of thinking that the planet was empty and decided to send only extraction vehicles, not a single combat one. Grias, Plisalet and little Beiler remained hidden in the mountains. Your grandfather got onto his craft and waited for it to finish landing. A moment later, it took off and from the sky he bombarded the extractors until they had been totally disintegrated.”

  “Furious and moved by rage, he started to planet Azlap and shot an extremely powerful projectile that broke the planet into a thousand pieces. The bodies of our brothers, following the midarian tradition, were thrown to Rijan’s interior to be consumed by lava.”

  “Now I understand why it is called the battle of cowards. How did they manage to repopulate the planet?”

  “Good question. Due to the lack of female population, only twenty, Grias had been working on the construction of a machine that allowed artificial germination. The problem was that when that happened, it hadn’t been finished yet. Plisalet, in a gesture of sacrifice in favor of midarian people, offered to take part in the reproduction until the machine was ready. The process was very slow and expensive since gestation lasted three months and she could one beget one at a time. A few years later, Mida had fifty inhabitants, an insignificant and dangerous number, because they could be attacked again at any time.”

  “Grias’ skill allowed to finish it before it was too late. The machine had two functions. The first one made it possible to create a hundred midarians a day from only a drop of blood; different among themselves and with aleatory physical and mental capacities. The second one, only one with appearance very similar to his creator and with an intelligence a hundred times superior than the one of an average warrior. The inconvenience was that the creation process lasted a million years and during that period the machine fell in disuse. This function was designed only to create your grandfather’s successor. Your father was the first one in using it, and you, the second.”

  Palac remained startled and thoughtful. Jalop’s words were answering many of the questions he had wondered in the past. He was now beginning to understand the hate most midarians felt towards him. His body and mind had been designed to highlight above everybody.

  “When was the helmet incorporated in our outfit?” Palac asked as he hit it.

  “For many years, your grandfather was dedicated to beget thousands of midarians to populate Mida as fast as possible. Meanwhile, Grias had started to develop a helmet that protected their heads against any attack. Made exclusively with plistor, it was placed on the warriors’ head two weeks after they had been born so that it perfectly docked to his cranial structure as well as to his eyes. The transparency of plistor —when it is extracted in its liquid state it is violet, but when it gets solid, it turns transparent— didn’t undermine visibility. Communication aerials weren’t affected either.”

  “When will you answer my question?” Palac, who was starting to get bored, asked.

  Jalop made a gesture of disapproval and stood up.

  “The midarians that were created exclusively from your grandfather’s blood started to grow until a population of ten million inhabitants was created. Beiler, already as the captain of the midarian army, made all of them undergo a hard training about the handling and use of our weapons. His aim was that each of the new inhabitants knew how to defend our people from any possible situation. Impatient and expectant, many of them were waiting for the moment in which they could act; moment that never arrived due to the peace treaty signed by the hundred most powerful planets of the galaxy. The prohibitions were as follows:

  It’s forbidden visiting an inhabited planet without its leader’s authorization; it’s forbidden overflying the aerial space of a planet without its leader’s authorization; it’s forbidden invading inhabited planets that had been invaded without their leader’s authorization; it’s forbidden using artificial weapons. It was only allowed using your mind as a defensive action. Any planet which disobeyed one of the conditions of the treaty would be attacked and destroyed by the others.

  By signing this treaty, Yewut allowed the rest of the inhabitants to choose the way in which to spend their time. Learning about our weaponry wasn’t necessary anymore. That’s the reason why weapons have stopped being made a
nd used.

  Would you like to know something else about our history?”

  “For the time being, it’s enough. I’ve got to visit my father, he wants to show me something,” he answered as he walked away from the pyramid.

  “All right. I hope you never forget that your grandfather…” he added holding back “ …was a great leader. ”

  Chapter 8

  In 2046, the IBS (Intelligent Braking System) was compulsory incorporated to every vehicle. A sensor located in the front part automatically stopped the car when it detected an obstacle at less than two meters of distance. The system was improved over time until the number of people run over by vehicles was reduced to the minimum. In 2050, an innovation that changed completely the road traffic was approved. Towns and cities from around the world connected some switchboard on their roads. These were had the function of automatically limit the speed of the vehicles according to the rules of each road. The switchboards acted directly on the computer, preventing the driver from exceeding the limits. Nowadays, most brands manufacture intelligent vehicles. These are cars without pedals or steering wheels, in which the drivers are mere passengers. Their interior is designed according the buyer’s demands. Televisions, computers, even beds are several of the options this market offers. The computer works under the auditory or tactile passenger’s commands.