The Ghost of Sephera

by J. D. Tew

  ‘Depositing virus load.’

  “Eppa’s quiet surrender ended in her demise.”

  20 LINCOLN: EARTH AT PRESENT

  After my escape at the Council’s prison, I am now on a course for Earth. My sensory nodes are going haywire as I regret having left Theodore in that hellhole.

  My mission to Earth is about closure.

  As my disassembled Dietons soar beyond the grasp of Zeerowan’s stratosphere, the effects of outer space-travel on my microscopic bodies are minimal. The Dietons, which make up my body, are fitted with sub-atomic propulsion turbines fabricated from Zane’s nanotechnology. As I soar through outer space, I analyze that I will take on less damage by dissipating entirely, yet banding together in the same nebulous cloud.

  Initiate separation sequence. Traveling at a fraction of our size will facilitate success.

  We are not affected by thermal burnout like most vessels, because we enter the gaseous atmosphere of planets slowly by retarding the effects of gravity. The cold of outer space has only a minute affect on our nano-circuitry. We are designed to travel everywhere, even in the uncharted regions of the galaxy.

  Earth’s terrestrial nature will be favorable to us.

  My cautiousness is unanimous. There are five hundred and twenty billion Dietons assigned to this body; all experiencing a profound emotional response to this trip. This will be the first visit to Earth since before my death, three years ago.

  The past is beyond my control, yet I cannot stop evoking the memory of my parents. My mother died of breast cancer when I was young. I loved her. She was everything to me. Years ago, my father did his best as Mr. Mom to restore the cherished concept of family, far beyond its definition in the dictionary.

  More and more I am veering toward my human designation; yet I am Sepheran; I am embracing both of these profound appellations. This is why I cannot deny this urge in my continuous processing of algorithms to travel to my home. Soon my mission will be complete. Soon all will fall into place and it must.

  Odion is reeling in every nation from the galaxy into captivity by collecting planets, as if assembling a shiny trophy collection. Yet, calamity and hatred dogs his steps and oppressively burdens his millions of victims. I’d love to go giant in his presence, and crush him like an ant.

  At times, throughout my latent existence, I have calculated my need for assistance to be minimal, but now I can only imagine that this war needs Theodore more than ever. We need him. We need his courage. My courage is bound to the laws of my creator—Zane. Yet, Sepheran culture is feeding upon its own ingenuity, branching our far beyond its algorithm, to the point that Zane would never recognize who and what we are today.

  Theodore and I can only do this together.

  This is selfish—going to Earth. Yet I need this. Need... what could a machine possibly need?

  I’ve been down that road.

  Wow! There it is, Earth. The Somalian Horn of Africa nearly piercing the Gulf of Aden, as a swirl of bluish-gray translucent cloud formations, ten kilometers above, mask the surface. At this point in my adventure, Earth’s spherical majesty is beyond comparison. I have only seen a portion of the galaxy, but so far nothing else can compare with the beauty of Earth. The sun is warming my solar energy cells; I feel grateful toward our own star.

  My Dietons each assume a blunt sphere-cone or biconic shape to create drag, pushing air aside quickly to avoid terminal thermal damage.

  Engage passive and active coolant systems. We must retard the heat.

  The underlying premise of this mission is killing me; I can feel the nerves of seeing my dad. I have no nerves, so it is laughable to say I am feeling, and moreover, it is also ridiculous to say that nerves are causing this feeling, but this is my design. The toughest part of all in this quest will be convincing my father that I am his son. He’ll probably hand me a bottle of all-purpose cleaner and ask me to scrub the kitchen. It’s better than nothing.

  The heat is intense, but we have experienced far more destructive atmospheric entries. Moments pass and we are in.

  Entry complete.

  The air is calm; we slow and the heat subsides.

  We can now see the low-lying plains of central North America. The quilt of mid-west farms are arranged together at the seams of their borders, knitting an interwoven network of harvest gold, forest green, and russet brown fields. Soaring closer, we start to form into Lincoln. I hold my hands in front of me as if I am Clark Kent, emulating Superman. I watch as my fingers take shape before my eyes, commanding each Dieton to assume and accept its new position on the Lincoln canvas.

  Easing toward the ground like a balloon leaking helium, I land in a zone near Afton, just off of the St. Croix River, near my home in Minnesota. No humans present at the moment. After touching ground, I disguise my actions to front as a jogger. It will be hard to refrain from running like an Olympian, but I’ll give it a shot.

  I miss my father.

  This isn’t jogging attire, but I use my memory cache’s best depiction of Lincoln to form Dietons into the clothes that I wore in the past. Loose laced boots on my feet, skinny jeans that are somewhat loose in the waist, and a skateboarding logo-T.

  After jogging for an hour, without tiring one bit, I arrive at my house, feeling nostalgic and overwhelmed.

  Seeing my father now would be a dream come true.

  I knock on the door and after about five seconds, the door opens.

  “Can I help you?” A Latino woman answers the door. “Puedo ayudarle?” she asks. My stunned state confuses her into wondering whether I speak English or Spanish.

  “Yes. I suppose you can. Do you know where Mark is? He used to live here,” I say, mentioning the first name of my father.

  She says, “The owner that lived here died. That’s all I know. I hope I’m not passing on the wrong info. Maybe you can find something from the public record on the web.” She is spouting off everything that may help as I walk away, confused.

  “My mother died years ago. Never mind. I’ll check it out.” It’s odd that she would reference my mom’s death in relation to the previous owner; my mother died many years ago of breast cancer, when I was young.

  I start running, choosing a small Internet cafe up the street. The analysis of the air shows high levels of pollution, compared to the historical levels I still have stored in my memory cells. I arrive at the cafe. There is a balding man sitting in a chair at a cubicle. His partially exposed butt is showing through the open section between the back rest and the seat cushion. The gap between his shirt and his belt is wide enough to display a cross-section of the crack of his rear end. Disgusting.

  “Oh hey! Can I help you, sir?” The middle-aged man stands up. Apparently he is the worker or owner. His name tag reads: Jimbo. As he hops upward, I notice he’s playing an online strategy game.

  “Yes, you can, actually. How much for an hour on the computers?”

  “It’s a flat rate of ten dollars for thirty minutes. Sorry, my dad boosted the prices. He doesn’t let me make any business decisions since I moved into his basement.”

  “Okay. Here is the cash.” As I reach toward my pocket, Dietons are working from within my pocket at an astounding rate to form a wallet and also the cash inside of that wallet. My fingers breach the pocket, and I pretend to struggle while pulling the wallet out of my skinny jeans. Thankfully the Dietons formed in time. I hop up and down while I pull the wallet out, then open the billfold to pull out some cash.

  He is testing it with a marker! Damn it!

  We panic, but recover by adjusting the colors to assume a brown shade on the surface area of the ten dollar bill as the marker traces across it.

  “Okay. I’ll put you at station six. No downloading of pirated material on torrents. No gaming,” he says as he steps in front of his monitor to turn off the game. “Sorry. And absolutely no ordering of flack vests, machine guns or tear gas. My dad doesn’t need any Feds here after I ordered that case of horse steroids last month.” I look at him lik
e he is strange. “Hey, I wanted to beef up. Give a guy a break! Sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

  I walk away, sit down at my station and begin the search. I start by searching my father’s name, Mark Royce. Nothing. I access a popular ancestry site, searching for local obituaries and death certificates, hoping that my father up and moved. There are hundreds of names matching my father’s but I find it easy to narrow them down by date and location.

  Descendant: Mark Royce

  Date of Death: March 2017

  Cause of Death (as determined by autopsy): suicide

  Frantically, I start searching for obituaries. Shock drives me near insanity as I read his obituary.

  Mark Nathaneal Royce passed away in his home in Oakdale, MN on March 12th, 2017. Mark was born in Farmington, MN. After attending the University of Minnesota, he provided superlative patient care as one of Minnesota’s finest dentists for two decades. He is predeceased by his loving wife and his son, presumed dead after a drastic disappearance that was never solved. The losses were too difficult for Mark to bear. Mark is remembered by his family, and is now our gift to God in Heaven.

  What happens when billions of my sensory nodes overheat with the addition of shock, grief, and sorrow, all rolled up into one overwhelming outburst? My rage flows through my billions of disparate particles, relaying unanimously this feeling of utter devastation.

  I look down at my hands, trembling. My desk is rattling savagely, causing the middle aged man to glance at me with concern. Shrieking, I smash my hands on the monitor, shattering the polyester surface of the screen. Sparks are flying and singeing the fabric-covered cubicle. As I stand and curse at the demolished computer, the man is cowering away from me hunched over. He reluctantly turns to me, his lips quivering.

  “Listen buddy. I know the Internet can be evil at times. Hell, I just lost all my diamond armor to a troll thief after he depleted my health points with poison; I had to restart at the beginning of the level. It sucks, but it’s not worth having the Feds show up here again! C’mon man, my dad has a bad heart. You feel me?”

  His plea languishes away among the dispassionate carbon-composed particles in my body. I emit an ear-splitting scream at him, shattering all the windows in the dilapidated Internet café. Whimpering, the dude dives for cover under the shoddy fold-up tables as the glass bursts out in millions of pieces, sprinkling shards all over the floor.

  Maintaining my solid form, I burst with rage and launch into the air, slamming through the roof, destroying sprinkler heads and copper pipes. An explosion of pink insulation, cheap ceiling tiles fragments, and concrete dust erupts into the open air above the roof. As the poor gamer frets about in absolute terror, water from the damaged sprinkler network rains down upon him.

  There is no time to waste; not after this.

  Theodore cannot die in prison and Odion will not rule any longer on my watch.

  I have died and I have been reborn. Now, in my Dietonic form, it is time to avenge the unjustified death of my father.

  21 THEODORE: CHECKMATE

  “With Eppa apparently disabled, I was left with a sinking feeling that this whole debacle would land me a spot in the big house—a prison. And sure enough, it did. It just took a while for the Council’s investigators to learn of my actions at Eppa and further discretions that were soon to unfold.”

  Why would Eppa lie to me about Zane and Odion, and what could she stand to gain? There was just no way of telling. Now, I had a bordering-on-crazy reactionary plan, and it relied on Trazuline’s scrambling need to rescue his daughter, as well as Zane’s hunger for control.

  The way Eppa told the story, it was if Zane was dead, killed by Odion, and now ironically a by-product of the afterlife he had created—now a Sepheran, composed of Dietons. And all along we were led to believe that Zane was a mortal being!

  I saw Odion in a new light, yet this revelation did not hamper one bit the revulsion I harbored for his agenda of evil. He ordered the death of my grandparents. Though it must have been very mortifying for him to see his beloved wife enter a realm of the unknown—neither dead, nor alive, but a Sepheran, no longer knowing who she was.

  That is exactly the same dilemma I faced with Lincoln once he became Sepheran. And people warned me it would be exceedingly difficult. Against all odds, I managed to pull it off. Even Odion couldn’t bring his wife to the former reality they had so intimately shared together.

  What if Eppa was telling the truth?

  I know now that there are always ways to find the truth. And some people are just better at it than others, and I had an idea how I would go about it.

  I had a hunch about Zane.

  We had docked Freebird on a Gurtian mothership, the Rheinhoster. The Gurtians were known supporters of the Opposition—close friends to the Karshiz king, but their military role was not substantial. They were just lending their resources and their support to King Trazuline, but that alone was pivotal.

  I was set to receive a mission brief from King Trazuline, waiting outside of his temporary office in Rheinhoister. Upon entering, Trazuline said that Eppa shut down moments after we left, rendering it inoperable. It seemed too good to be true. It was hard for me to picture this conclusion, as Zane likely planned for all contingencies, including any attempted attack on his beloved fortress. But until I had more intelligence, it was a given that Eppa had been destroyed.

  King Trazuline was sitting upon his chair; a silver hygiene drone trimmed the coarse hair on his head and another drone was sweeping the fallen clumps into a canister. Concentrating on Trazuline was difficult, while drones buzzed about their business, disrupting our social interaction. Trazuline said, ‘How do you like this ship?’

  ‘It’s pretty rad, sire, though, I’m just really in a hurry to hear the mission details, and my crew is waiting for strategy,’ I said.

  ‘I apologize. So about the mission, Theodore. In some ways it helps that I was formerly Zane’s commander. I know the exact distance of the Zone of Termination’s perimeter, around the Uriel. With a shuttle, we will warp within a half-parsec of the Uriel’s ZOT.’

  ‘ZOT?’ I asked.

  ‘As I mentioned, Zone of Termination.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  During the entire brief, Trazuline displayed a small-scale animated model of the mission over a holigramicom. ‘Once there, we will wait until we gain clearance from the space traffic coordinator. After gaining permission for entry into Urilian airspace, you and your team will accompany me to fly said shuttle within a kilometer of the Uriel, in an effort to hail Zane and seek diplomatic conference.’

  I smiled. I’d known what his plan was, and I wasn’t surprised. Many of his men had whispered to me when I boarded his ship that the king, well, he wasn’t thinking rationally. His nightmares over visions of his daughter, Tezmarine, being tortured behind bars had taken a devastating toll on him. He projected an image of being resolute and cheerful, but it was a façade. Everyone knew, including me, that the king was concerned about the future of his great planet, Karshiz.

  After all, Tezmarine was heir to the throne. The future of his legacy depended on her rescue.

  No doubt, this was a suicide mission. All Zane had to do was say no, and capture Trazuline, and throw him behind bars right beside Tezmarine. Without so much as a ‘thank you’ from Zane for dumping this opportunity in front of him like reeling a black sturgeon right into his net. I knew it, but I was clever enough to know that I could not deter the king, no matter how much I tried. Still, I had to play my role. I pretended to protest.

  ‘Sounds like suicide,’ I said. ‘Nezatrom will read your thoughts. Zane’s elite Bromel guard will take you down easily. They have the potential to take us all prisoner! It’s Tez... You’re nervous, sire.’ I had raised my voice, loud enough to make the mood uncomfortable for both of us.

  I brought up subject of Nezatrom, as he was Zane’s sidekick—a liaison to our fist adventure to the Uriel, Zane’s ship. Nezatrom was Zane’s advisor, a Sepheran. I knew
of Nezatrom, but back then, eons before I matured in my role as space adventurer and commander, I did not truly know what he really was.

  ‘I’m not nervous; I’m invested, Theodore. Nezatrom actually doesn’t even really exist. Yes! Believe it! He and Zane are one! It’s silly, but you didn’t need to know this before, and now, after your meeting with Eppa, it should all make perfect sense. I feared telling you about these troubling facts, before, as I always thought that you would think of me insane, only injecting fallacies into your mind.’

  ‘Ohh,’ I said, pretending to play dumb. ‘So Zane was Sepheran the whole time, and was just using Nezatrom as a cover?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Migalt? A beast that could potentially take down our entire squad?’

  ‘I’ll handle it. Our focus is diplomacy, Theodore, not battle.’

  I said, ‘Well, sire, if you wish it, we will support you.’

  ‘You’re holding something back, Theodore.’

  ‘I am?’ I pretend to be offended by the question.

  ‘Is there something that you know that I don’t?’

  I exclaimed loudly, bringing out my best acting skills. ‘Sire! If I did, I would tell you.’

  Trazuline’s hands were upon his sleek black desk, leaning forward, as if he wanted to reach across the desk and apologize for luring me into this predicament. ‘Theodore. He has my daughter.’

  ‘I know. I will send a small team to escort you to the shuttle, once my men are ready.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  ED and I turned and walked away. Out of sight and earshot of Trazuline, I spoke with ED. ‘ED... can you get me a temporalysis?’

  While we walked, ED turned to me and said, ‘Yes, we have one in our emergency kit, but for medical emergencies only, when we have a mentally unstable person on our ship.’

  ‘Thanks. Can you get it, when I ask you to do so?’

  ‘Certainly, but that is an instrument of detention. It makes the detainee incapable of speaking or moving. Primarily, the council uses them in prison settings. Why do you ask?’