Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1)

by Houston V. Grant

  “A neural cloak doesn’t have to make things less scary looking, they can be manipulated for different effects. We just happen to use it frequently to put people at ease. And no, this isn’t a neural cloak—he’s quite real.”

  The thing didn’t come any closer, and I started to calm down. It looked like a cross between a giant salamander and a shark: four legs, smooth, wet-looking gray skin, black spots, wide mouth with rows of sharp teeth, and eyes on top of its head.

  “How does this animal make you feel?” he asked.

  “It depends on who’s side it’s on. Right now, it’s making me a little nervous. What do you feed these things?”

  I wasn’t trying to be funny, but he laughed. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear,” he said. “Try closing your eyes and using your other senses. Then tell me what you sense.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to do what he was asking, although I still wasn’t entirely clear what he wanted me to say. “I still feel a little nervous,” I said. “That thing really looks like a shark.”

  “Ok, keep going,” he prompted. “Try to feel it through your fear. It’s not going to attack. Just try to relax and sense it. See if you can feel it with your mind.”

  I felt like I was on a psychiatrist’s couch. But I was feeling calmer, so there was something to it. I tried again. And this time, I thought I felt a pulsing coming from the direction of the creature. It felt almost like blood pounding in my ears, but without the head rush.

  I must’ve gotten a strange look on my face, because he said: “what is it? You’re thinking something.” I kept my eyes closed, thinking maybe I was just getting a headache, but the pulsing didn’t hurt at all, it was just insistent. I told them what I felt.

  “Congratulations,” he said, patting the animal on the head. “You’ve detected your first biosim. This is an ormri, it’s one of our native species. We co-exist with them in much the same way as humans and dogs. This breed was of a kind used to guard imperial palaces on Earth. The ways in which sensitives can detect them varies—some, like you, can sense their presence mentally, some can smell them in a way—much the way people can taste the difference between real and artificial sugar. Your ability to sense them will improve with time and practice. Let’s try another.”

  He clapped his hands together and another Enlil came in leading a large dog on a leash.

  “Can you sense this one?” he asked. I closed my eyes and concentrated, but I didn’t feel the pulsing this time. “No,” I finally admitted.

  “Good. Because this animal is real.” The dog handler took the dog out and came back with another. This time I could clearly feel it even before it came in.

  “You can sense it, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Your Talaris coding would have given you the ability to detect and control biosims. The implants enhance it.”

  “Wait, I can control it too?”

  “It will get stronger with practice,” he said, “But yes. See if you can make it sit.”

  “How do I do that?” I asked

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Just try.”

  I looked at the dog again and thought about it sitting down. Envisioned it. The dog sat. I wasn’t sure if I had anything to do with it or the dog had just decided to sit. I imagined it howling at the moon—sitting down, ears laid back, head tilted back and howling. The dog came over to me and layed down at my feet. No howling, though.

  “Is that what you wanted it to do?” he asked.

  “No, I wanted it to howl.”

  He laughed. “As I said, it will take some practice. But you’re able to sense and connect with them. That’s a very important first step. You’ll need something else to take full advantage of the abilities your implants will give you. Let’s get you outfitted.”

  He handed me off to one of the other Tkosi, who took me to another room with a device in the middle that reminded me of the TSA full-body scanners at the airport. He told me to strip and step inside.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “We’ve already done the invasive stuff,” he said. ‘This is a scanner to fit you for a chumahai.”

  “I’m sorry, to fit me for what?”

  “The suit you’ll need. It’s a great honor to get one. Just strip and step inside.”

  I did and instinctively looked down for the footprints to place my feet. Of course they weren’t there. The scanner started to make a whirring sound, but nothing else was happening as far as I could tell. And then it started—for lack of a better word—painting me.

  The scanner clothed me by spraying a liquid metal type of material onto me, from the bottoms of my feet to the neck. The only part of me that it didn’t paint was my head. It only took about a minute to complete. This was the same shiny metallic suit I’d seen Tashmit and some of the other Enlil wear. Mine was more of a dark copper color, but otherwise very similar.

  When I stepped out, Tashmit had joined us.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “Your first chumahai.” The material was so thin that I was barely aware of it, yet it was completely solid and didn’t feel squeezy tight. She looked me up and down. “Looks good on you.”

  “Thanks.” I felt more like her equal now that I had on some decent clothes. I’d felt a little inferior before—first wearing scruffy hiking gear and then whatever formless clothes they’d given me to wear while she strutted around like a goddess in her flowing metal suit. But now I had my own. She looked even sexier to me now than she had before.

  I held out my arms to examine myself as Tashmit looked on, checking me out. She sounded pleased when she spoke. “This suit is a form of biosimulant. We call it living metal, chumahai in our language, but technically, it’s a bio-enhanced organo-metallic alloy. The short version is that some of the molecules of the alloy are replaced with DNA molecules. Each suit is unique and coded specifically to its wearer. And since you have the biocoding of an ancient Talaris, you have access to all the functions that a Diplo would have used.”

  I had superpowers? I was intrigued.

  “You’ll have to experiment to find all the things that a chumahai is capable of. But for starters, all chumahai are bioenhancement and life support suits. The implants you just received amplify your bioelectric signals and abilities to allow you to interface with the suit. The basic functions common to them all include temperature regulation, skin protection, and physical enhancement.”

  She walked around me as she spoke, inspecting. “It will keep you perfectly comfortable in frigid cold as well as blazing heat. It’s waterproof, radiation resistant, and can heal minor wounds. You can already see how light and comfortable it is. It also gives you added strength and endurance.

  You also have Talaris biocoding and new implants. You’ll be stronger, faster, and all around enhanced from what you were before. Wounds will heal faster, you’ll be more energetic. Together with the implants you’ll be able to find and operate portals and biosims, self heal, and use electrogenesis. That ability is actually one that we modeled on the electric eels on Earth.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. I’d seen video of an electric eel killing a horse that had wandered into a muddy pool in South America, so I was hopeful.

  “To find their way in the muddy waters where they live, electric eels generate electric fields and sense the returns. They use it to navigate, communicate, find food, defend themselves, and attack. They can sense the presence of other creatures by detecting the bioelectricity created by their muscles. And they can kill with it.”

  “So you’ve made me into a multilingual, super strong, human electric-eel that can control synthetic animals?”

  She laughed. “It sounds ridiculous when you say it that way,” she said. “But yes, that’s the gist of it. With practice you’ll probably be able to sense your environment better electrically than with your standard senses. It’ll get stronger and more precise as you learn to use it, but you’re far stronger than any electric eel—and they can kill horses. But rememb
er that electric eels usually conduct electricity through water, which is much more conductive than air. You’ll have the same limitation.”

  I was not pleased when I first found out about these implants, but this was pretty damn cool. “And the chumahai has DNA,” I said. “Does that mean it’s alive?”

  “In a way. It doesn’t have a brain, but spread throughout the suit is a network of neurons copied from those in your brain. The suit will enhance the physical benefits you gain from the Talaris biocoding and help you focus your bioelectric abilities.”

  “A neural net,” I said. “Like a jellyfish.”

  She smiled. I’d seen girls on Earth smile at the same things—she thought my brain was sexy. “Similar. Your Earth jellyfish have neural nets, but no central control. You control your chumahai. But as you practice and gain more facility with it, you’ll find that you’re able to…delegate some thought to the suit. Think of it as superenhanced reactions. It’s like your suit learns what you want to do and helps you do it faster than you could on your own.”

  “So it’s like an external hard drive? An external brain?”

  She shook his head at that. “It doesn’t think for you. It just lets you process more information and faster.” She looked at a readout. “Yours duplicated your neurons three times, so four times the sensory input as your body alone.”

  “What else does it mean to have so many neurons in the suit? Won’t that make me feel pain more?”

  Again, she was impressed. “Good question. No. No pain receptors, and the neurons are buffered so that the extra sensory ability doesn’t increase pain perception, so you needn’t worry about that. Each chumahai is different, so I can’t say exactly what it might do for you. The implants will augment all of your senses and the chumahai senses everything about you—mental, physical, emotional states and augments that.”

  “How do I make it work?”

  “Focus on sensing different parts of your body individually—the arch of your foot, each toe, your ankle, your knee, thighs, hips, and so on. It will take a little while to get used to it. Once you are able to do that smoothly, you will begin to sense the chumahai. At that point it will become apparent how to work it.”

  “How do I take it off and put it back on?”

  “Draw three lines across your chest,” she said.

  I did and with a soft-whooshing sound, the chumahai seemed to melt off me and collected in a shimmering pool of coppery liquid on the floor. I stood there naked and suddenly very hot. The air in the room was much hotter than I had realized with my chumahai on.

  “To put it back on, put some exposed part of your skin into it,” she instructed.

  I stepped into the pool with a bare foot and within milliseconds, the suit covered me again.

  “It knows you already,” the tech said. He handed me a flask. “Carrying case.”

  I held the flask so the opening touched my chumahai and drew the lines across my chest. The suit filled the flask. I stuck my finger in the opening and in less than a second was wearing my suit again. Tashmit was right. I was very well aware of it now. I could feel it. A second skin.

  “Is Betty Ann getting a chumahai too?”

  “Indeed. We picked her up because of her biocoding. We find lots of biocoded humans, but you two are representatives of code classes that are extremely rare nowadays. Most biocoded humans we find have the code of Laborers. That was the most abundant class and even now they’re not particularly rare. Outside of the Laborers, biocoded humans were generally divided into those coded for military work—soldiers and scouts and the like—and those coded for administrative and parliamentary functions. You are biocoded as a Talaris. It’s technically an administrative type, but of a function that could typically expect to require close combat, espionage, and rapid movement, which is why you get the traits you do. Talaris biocoding was intended to assist the Talari in carrying messages, and protecting themselves and their mission, quickly and over any terrain.

  Infil biocoding, which is what Betty Ann has, was focused on enhancing abilities to identify, detect, conceal, and escape. The base functions of her chumahai are the same as yours and it can usually electrogenerate, but very weakly. Basically, just enough to power batteries and things like that. Her reflexes and physical abilities are also greatly enhanced—more than yours possibly. She can also Neuroconceal, as you heard, and the Infils’ abilities in that respect are typically very strong. Basic Neuroconceal only suppresses or enhances emotions in the target. If the old stories are to be believed, Infils could often control precisely how the target perceived them—visually, aurally and emotionally.”

  “So she’s a spy,” I said.

  Tashmit smiled. “You catch on quickly. I like that.”

  The next several weeks were spent on Tkosa, training and learning more about our newly-activated abilities. The Enlil had a vicious form of martial art called Kvona that was geared towards those, like them, with especially long limbs. I was able to learn it passably well, but Betty Ann took to it like a duck to water.

  In addition to all of the amazing benefits that it conferred, I quickly learned that I could control the color of the chumahai to make it exactly match my skin, meaning I could wear it all the time when I went home and no one would even notice. Wearing it made me feel much more alive and engaged with the world. I learned to keep a low-energy electric shield around me to sense my environment whenever I wanted and, if I so desired, shock anything that touched the shield. Just as Tashmit promised, I could sense and feel so much through my Electrosense. I could hear better. I could walk in total darkness and feel exactly where everything around me was just using Electrosense. My brain processed the electrical impulses that it received into sensations that I understood, so it was like I could see and feel the shape and size of objects all around.

  Tashmit came to my pod to speak to me and check on my progress. “You’re coming along quickly,” she said. “Everyone with the ability to Electrogenerate uses it all the time at first. You’ll tire of it eventually. Remember that every movement of your muscles requires electrical energy and you can literally exhaust your batteries. You don’t want to be in a situation where you’ve used all your electrical energy up.”

  I didn’t think Tashmit was any warmer emotionally than I’d seen her before, but I felt as if I was beginning to understand her. I asked her how the Tkosa decided what color to make their chumahai, since hers was always silver.

  She laughed at the question, but answered. “It’s a good question. It’s just funny to me because I’ve always known how we use them. The natural color of a chumahai is a form of personal expression or status. We tend to wear them in their natural color unless we need to change it for some reason.”

  As she said this, hers changed to a color that matched the blued copper of her skin. The contours of her body were clearly visible, although the section between her legs was smooth like a Barbie doll. She seemed to read my thoughts.

  “Wearing skin-colored chumahai has sometimes caused humans to think that we lack genitals,” she said in a very serious tone. “But that’s not true at all.”

  I decided to take the bait. “I never would’ve thought that,” I said. “Although I have wondered…”

  She stood and approached me. “Have you? You’re made the same as we are. One of the reasons our forerunners spent so much time on Earth is because of how attractive Tkosi find humans.” She looked me up and down. “We’re very compatible.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  Her black eyes glistened. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said and swiped three times across her chest.

  She was gloriously naked under her chumahai and my breath caught just looking at her. As tight and body molding as a chumahai is, it still hadn’t done justice to her actual naked form. Her skin smelled like incense smoke and I reflexively inhaled deeply.

  Her pretty laugh came out again. “I’m glad you like,” she said.

  “I definitely like,” I replied as I swipe
d across my own chest.

  6

  I spent the next several weeks training on Tkosa. I went from feeling railroaded by the Enlil to feeling lucky. The idea of traveling the world like Indiana Jones with electrical superpowers had grown on me. I spent most of my time training with Betty, so I didn’t see Luis much. He didn’t have any of the rare genetic coding Betty Ann and I had, but the Enlil wanted us to return together, so they were keeping him there until they sent me back. I felt bad about that, but when I finally got to hang with him, he was having the time of his life.

  We met up in the cafeteria where I’d met Betty Ann.

  “This is the best vacation I’ve ever been on,” he said through a mouthful of succotash. “You’ve been too busy doing karate and shit, but I’ve been exploring the city. The tech they have here is….” He shook his head in amazement.

  Luis had always been a gear-head—even though he ran an adventure company, his degree was in engineering—so getting to check out advanced alien technology was right up his alley.

  “They tested me and said my technological aptitude is high, so they’ve been seeing how much of their tech I could absorb,” he said.

  I’d sat down preparing to apologize for getting him into all this, so I was relieved by what I was hearing.

  “And they party,” he said. He took another bite as he thought. “Their music is weird as fuck, but they get down.”

  I laughed. “You’ve been to Enlil parties? What are they like?”

  He shook his head in amazement again. “Maaan. They’re very cerebral, but they really get down. Nothing like it on Earth. We gotta go before we go back home.”

  I felt much better. “Why are they showing you all the tech? Just cuz you’re curious?”

  He gave me the look that meant I’d said something incredibly stupid. “No, man. They’re training me to be one of their agents on Earth. You and Betty Ann are the operatives, and I’m the handler. You’re James Bond and I’m the woman that’s his boss.”