by Inmon, Shawn
To his right, Alex saw Sekun-ak approaching.
“Gunta, Manta-ak.”
“Gunta, my brother.”
“I was just coming to see you, but I am happy to find you out in the world again.”
“It’s time,” Alex said, then squinted at Sekun-ak. “What was it all for?”
“What was all what for?”
“Lanta-eh. The Chosen One. Draka-ak kidnapping her, me going after her, her wasting away until she died. What was it all for?”
“The prophecies did not reveal that. We do not know. But we have faith that she did what was needed.”
“Your faith is greater than mine.”
“That’s what she loved about you, you know.”
“What?”
“That you always do the right thing, even when you don’t understand it or even believe it. It doesn’t matter. You still do it.”
“You buried her, I suppose.”
“Where she asked to be buried, yes.”
“Where is that?”
“On top of Prata-ah. She said there is a reason, but did not tell me what it is.”
Alex began his recovery by walking around Winten-ah. Sanda-eh held onto his right hand. Monda-ak limped along beside his injured left side.
Every step, every lap around the field, Alex felt better physically. He believed that as long as he kept his body in motion, the return of his spirit would follow.
After another month, Alex felt strong enough to walk to the top of Prata-ah. Monda-ak still limped, but Alex noted that when they got away from other people, it was less noticeable. Monda-ak liked sympathy even more than he did food.
He considered taking a horse, but he wanted to spend some time on top of Prata-ah and he did not want to leave a horse vulnerable to attack at the bottom of the hill.
And so they walked. It was a warm morning and for the first time since he battled godat-ta, he broke a sweat.
They stopped by a stream and ate their lunch, listening to the sounds of the brook and the birds singing in the trees.
By the time they reached the top of Prata-ah, the sun was at apex.
Alex walked directly to the stone structure Lanta-eh had directed him to build and touched it lightly. It was warm in the afternoon sun. He saw that the spot she had chosen for her burial was inside the walls. In the Winten-ah way, there was no grave marker, but the soil was still raised where they laid her body.
Alex leaned against the stone with his good right hand and felt a wall inside him break. Tears flowed down his cheeks and he sobbed for all the losses he had absorbed. Sanda-eh did not say anything, but simply leaned into him, supporting him.
When the flood of emotion had slowed to a trickle, he stood up and blew a noisy breath out.
From behind, a man’s voice said, “Hello.” The voice said, Hello, not Gunta.
Alex spun around, his right hand instinctively grasping the handle of his two-bladed axe.
Five people stood quietly at the top of the trail. They were people such as Alex had never seen in Kragdon-ah.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Visitors
Alex’s mouth fell open. Standing before him were three men and two women. After so many years in Kragdon-ah, these people did not look right to him. He let his uninjured hand rest on his two-bladed axe.
The man who had spoken said, “Hello,” again with a slight smile. He was shorter than Alex, and appeared to be Asian. One of the women was less than five feet tall and had bright, copper-red hair. One of the men was dark-skinned, but different than what Alex had come to expect in Winten-ah. This man’s skin was much darker than the Winten-ah or any other tribe in Kragdon-ah. The second man was taller—perhaps an inch taller than Alex—and had a neatly trimmed beard. The second woman was tall and lithe, but tall in the twenty-first century definition—perhaps five foot eleven. This woman stared intently at Alex.
Alex moved Sanda-eh behind him. Monda-ak, who bristled at any stranger approaching, did not seem particularly interested in these four.
“You said ‘hello’ to me.”
“Is that what you heard? English, then? Then you are Alex Hawk,” the Asian man said. “You are who we seek.”
Alex nodded, and the man nodded back. That also set Alex back on his heels. Aside from Lanta-eh, who had made a passing attempt to learn the body language of the twenty-first century, no one had nodded at him in more than a decade.
“When you speak,” Alex observed, “your mouth doesn’t match your words. It’s like watching an old Kung Fu movie on late night television.”
“That was too many references for my translator to keep up with,” the man said. “But I think I understand what you mean. My lips move differently than the words you hear because it is translated from the language I am speaking to your own core language. This is the newest iteration of the translator. It has the ability to peek into your brain and find your most comfortable language.”
This was too much for Alex. He had been in the midst of an emotionally cleansing breakdown, when these four strangers appeared as if out of nowhere. Still, he resolved to hold on to his center. “I don’t care for things having a peek inside my brain. What language are you speaking?”
“You get used to it. Things looking inside your brain, I mean. Any concept of privacy, even in our own minds, was done away with long before I was born. I am speaking what you would think of as English as well, but it has undergone many changes over the centuries. If you tried to speak your English to someone born several thousand years before you, you would likely need a translator too. Language constantly evolves.”
Alex’s head was swimming, but he focused on the primary question at hand.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
The group smiled more broadly.
“I am Bista Lai.” He pointed to the Black man and said, “This is Limda Krastan.” He glanced at Alex, then asked, “Is the translator giving you understandable translations from your own experience for our names? I know they must sound foreign to you otherwise.”
“It isn’t, but I’ve now known a Doken-ak, Sekun-ak, Ganku-eh, and Senta-eh, so I think I can manage.”
“Mama!” Sanda-eh said, popping from behind Alex’s back when she heard Senta-eh’s name.
Alex stroked her hair and allowed her to come out into view. He sensed no danger from these people and had a hunch that if they had wanted to harm him, he couldn’t have stopped them. “Yes, that’s your mama,” Alex answered her, stroking her hair.
Bista smiled at her and said, “What a beautiful child!”
“Luckily, she drew more heavily from her mother,” Alex said, trying to keep the sadness out of his voice.
“Ahh. Yes, of course. Lanta-eh communicated this to us. We are very sorry.” He turned to the small, red-headed woman and said, “This is Marta Preyer. She is our empath, the person who communicated with Lanta-eh on our journey. The woman staring at you with such intent is Emily, with no last name. That was not her birth name, but it is the one she has chosen. Finally,” he said, pointing to the man with the beard, “that is Pandrick Masten.”
“You already know my name somehow, though the people of Kragdon-ah call me Manta-ak, not Alex Hawk. This is my daughter Sanda-eh, and my best friend Monda-ak. Your names don’t tell me anything about who you really are and where you come from.”
“It is a long story, and I will tell it to you, but the short answer is that we come from here. Or, more accurately, our ancestors did. We have come to help you. You and everyone we left behind on Earth.”
Bista turned to the man he had identified as Pandrick and said, “This is going to require some time. Can you set up a small camp here?” He turned to Alex. “Are there predators in this area?”
“This is Kragdon-ah. There are predators everywhere,” Alex answered. He considered telling them of godat-ta, but tucked that memory away for himself.
“Set us a small camp with a rejection field. That will do us.”
The bear
ded man nodded, slipped what looked like a stiff, shiny piece of paper out of a pack. A hologram field popped up above the stiff paper and he tapped away for a few moments.
And then there was a camp. A fire, seven comfortable camp chairs, even a coffee pot heating on a spit above the fire. A cast iron skillet that Alex absolutely recognized sat beside the fire.
“That’s...” Alex was at a loss for words.
“That’s from your memory. Somewhere in your long-ago, you remembered a camp that looked like this.”
“I wouldn’t even say like this. It was this.” Alex changed the subject. There was so much he needed to know, but he started with, “What is a rejection field?”
Bista thought for a time. “Some of the things we discuss can only be understood in broad terms. You were born when? Twenty-Second Century?”
“No, Twentieth. I was born in 1992. I stepped through the door in 2019.”
“The door?” Bista seemed puzzled for a moment, then said, “Ah, of course. What you call a door, we call a portal. Either works perfectly well. Which is more than I can say of that technology itself, which was a great failure.”
Alex filed that comment away to come back to later, as it seemed important to him.
“As to what a rejection field is, I can tell you that it makes it nearly impossible for any organic material to pass through it. As to the how, that’s difficult to explain. If you had stepped through the portal and ended up fifteen hundred years earlier, you could have explained what a cellular phone was, but could you have told someone from that time how it worked? So they could understand it? Of course not. It will be the same with many of the things we will discuss. I can tell you what they do, but we won’t want to take the time to get into the how of the thing. Please, let’s sit down and thank you for the pleasant memory you gave us to build.”
Alex took a few steps to the camp, reached out and touched one of the camp chairs, which was exactly like the ones he and his dad had when he was young. He could even smell the distinct, musky smell the chairs had after a winter in the garage. It had exactly the right texture and give. Nostalgia filled him.
“Sanda-eh, you come sit next to me,” Alex said, pulling one of the chairs close.
“I like this, Dadda.”
“I liked it too. Wait,” Alex said, tilting his head. “Do I hear water running? I remember this camp being alongside the Snake River, but there is no running water near this hill.”
“That’s all pulled from your memory,” Bista said. “But it’s just for effect. It doesn’t actually create a river.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it did,” Alex said.
Alex sat in the camp chair and winced a bit as he accidentally hit his left hand on the arm.
The man introduced as Limda took a step toward him and said, “Do you mind if I scan your hand? How did you hurt it?”
“I hurt it trying to get Lanta-eh up here on the last day. The day she died.” Alex chose not to explain any more. “You can scan it if you’d like. There’s not as much there to see as there used to be.”
Limda pulled an oblong silver object out of his breast pocket and moved it slowly over Alex’s hand.
I stepped through the door into Land of the Lost and now ended up in Star Trek.
Limda looked at the device in his hand, nodded to himself, then sat down. He took the same stiff paper as before and entered notes into it. Oddly, Alex noted that for the first time since his run-in with godat-ta, there was no pain.
“Pretty nifty device you’ve got there,” Alex said.
Limda only smiled.
“I know you have many questions. Lanta-eh told Marta much of what you have been through. We know you lost your wife a few years ago to what the Winten-ah call the curse.” Bista looked at his companions before he said, “We—or at least our ancestors—are responsible for both the door and this curse.”
“Then that means you are responsible for the death of my wife.” There was a hard edge in Alex’s voice as he leaned forward. He wasn’t about to leap at these people as he had once done the warriors of Lasta-ah in this very spot, but he wanted to convey his feelings.
“Not us, specifically, but our ancestors, yes. We are here to make it right, as best we can. We cannot undo what has been done. Our ancestors attempted that, and that is what brought you here in the first place. All we can do is make things better going forward.”
Alex leaned back, told himself to relax. He knew that every question he’d had over the previous ten years could be in the offing. He just needed to wait for it to come to him.
“Tell me what I need to know,” Alex said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
A Brief Future History of Earth
Bista took a seat opposite Alex and, assuming the air of a professor, said, “The world changed on July 16, 1945.”
“What? Almost fifty years before I was born? I should have seen what was going on, then.”
“I’m sure you did. Much of what I am about to tell you has been examined and reexamined by what you would call artificial intelligence millions and millions of times. In the end, the greatest mind ever created in the universe decided two things were certain. One, that mankind would develop nuclear weapons. That development might have come sooner, or later, but it was inevitable that they would be created. Some possible scenarios had one country or another beating the country which actually developed it.” He turned to the bearded man known as Pandrick. “That was The United States of North America, wasn’t it? That developed the bomb first?”
“The United States of America,” Pandrick corrected him.
“Ah, right.” Bista turned to Alex. “I am no historian. That is Pandrick’s role. I’m sure he will want to ask you some questions before we leave. We know so much about key events, but there’s nothing like the perspective of someone who lived through things. In any case, every possible scenario showed that humanity would eventually create nuclear weapons and that those weapons would soon grow powerful enough to destroy the world many times over. It was inevitable.” He cleared his throat and looked slightly uncomfortable. “Though our ancestors didn’t have access to the same conclusions we did. Thus, the portals, or the doors, as you call them. In the early stages, they tried a number of different things that did not work out.”
“I am thoroughly confused,” Alex answered. “It was inevitable that nuclear weapons would be created. So what?”
“That was one of two conclusions the artificial intelligence came to. The second was that once the weapons were created, there was a one hundred percent certainty that those weapons would be used. Not just once, as you might be thinking, but in a catastrophic war. The AI showed that, given enough time, it was a certainty that a scenario would arise in which not one, but two leaders would think a nuclear war was winnable. It is not, of course. Not once the stockpiles have been built, refurbished, built, refurbished. There is no such thing as a tactical or winnable nuclear war.”
“Are you saying this happened? That there was a nuclear war?”
Bista nodded. “Not one, but two. That was likely inevitable, too, since the first one wasn’t as disastrous as everyone had projected it would be. Leaders didn’t have the same certainty after the first attack. Our AI made allowances for the fact that it was possible that we would learn from what we had done. We did not. The fact that the first nuclear exchange did not end life as we know it actually led directly to the second conflict. We—our ancestors—were not around for the second war.”
“How’s that?”
“The answer is one man. Janus. Like our Emily here, that is not the name he was born with, but he adopted it when he was very young. As a teenager, he created an artificial intelligence that had the ability to network with every camera feed in the world. That gave him access to literally billions of cameras around the world. Cameras in banks, at red lights, home security, at every street corner.”
“So, this Janus had access to billions of cameras that showed long stretches of noth
ing,” Alex said. “What good does that do him?”
“I would have thought the same thing. But Janus was a genius like no other. He recognized patterns where others saw only blurs of data. The artificial intelligence he created, which he called Janus II—the man was not without an ego—sorted through that incalculable number of data points and organized it into trends. How many seconds does it take someone to cross a street? Is it different today than it was a year ago, or five years ago? How willing are people to run a red light? Are people going in to get something to eat at a fueling station, or do they go home to eat something healthier? He divided this wealth of information into sections, then compared it to events—wars, the rise and fall of financial markets, interest rates, a thing he created called The Happiness Index. Then he set Janus II to work on making connections. And they were there. Everything is connected.”
“Not in Kragdon-ah,” Alex said. “Here, if you run across a path, it’s probably because something is chasing you.”
Bista smiled. “You’re probably right. There needs to be a certain level of civilization before this kind of information is helpful. If you are worried about shelter, food, and safety, your actions might be predictable, but you don’t need something like Janus II to predict it. But, in Janus’s time, things were more complicated. He found that Janus II was able to successfully predict almost everything, even the completely unpredictable events like massive storms or tornados. More to the point of this story, though, it allowed him to project with better than 99% accuracy, stock and bond movements. You can probably guess what happened from there.”
“He became another one of those rich assholes who thinks he knows everything?”
Bista winced, and Alex made a note of that.
He likes this guy Janus. He’s important to him.
Bista turned to Emily. “While we talk, you should start your work.”