by Elin Wyn
A whirlwind of thoughts took over my mind. Was this just an after effect of our time with the Puppet Master? Stress-bonding from being lost together in the tunnels? Lingering emotions from the dream?
So many questions.
And for once, it didn’t matter.
I had my answer.
“I love you, too, Takar.”
Takar
After breakfast…or lunch…what was that meal called that the humans said came between breakfast and lunch? Brunch? Whatever it was, after we ate, Daphne went to go see her parents to let them know that she was safe and still alive. Afterwards, she told me, she would go to the hospital to check in there and get back to work.
I was sad that she had to leave, but it was the right thing. We couldn’t just stay in the apartment in each other’s arms for the rest of eternity, no matter how much either of us wanted to.
So, after she left, I showered, gathered my gear together, and went to find my brother. I found Rokul working his shift in the armory, going over everything and ensuring that things were how they were supposed to be. Today, he was double checking inventory.
The armory felt as close to home for many of us as our own dwellings did. More so for some, such as myself, my brother, and Axtin. Then again, lately Axtin had been spending less time at the armory. Rumor had it he and Leena were attempting to have children.
Apparently, the worries generated from Vrehx and Jeneva’s pregnancy didn’t extend to them, especially since Axtin was a Valorni. He didn’t have the issue with the scales that we Skotan s did.
The inside of the armory was simple. The locked outer door could only be accessed by biometric, optic, and numerical code. There was a sensor installed on it by Zarik, one of our engineers, that also ran a quick biometric scan of you to ensure that you were allowed within the armory. If you were not, a small alarm went off to remind you that you needed to get signed in by one of the commanders. If the alarm was not turned off within a certain amount of time, an alert was sent out to each member of the security team, each strike team, and all the leaders.
He had gone a bit overboard, but I liked it. Inside, there was a counter that had been made part of the cage that locked away all the weapons and ammunition, another door identical to the first connected to the counter. There was a small portion of the cage left open to have some of the smaller weapons passed through, but too small for a person to get through.
Inside the cage were three steel tables and six aisles. The tables were there for disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly purposes, as well as home to the four datapads used to inventory everything.
Ever since the battle with the Xathi ended, we had been able to restore our weapon and ammunition counts, as well as modify our own weapons. The humans had some weapons that we did not, and after studying them, Axtin and Sylor had been able to make several hybrid-style weapons.
Using the human technology and melding it with ours gave us new weapons, better weapons, and a better way to make ammunition. While we were still low on the ammunition we used for our bigger weapons, like Daxion’s portable cannon, we had more than enough—hopefully—for the slightly smaller and modified weaponry.
Also, Axtin, Dax, Sylor, and Sakev had all managed to find the time to forge and create either newer versions of their personal weapons, or simply to duplicate them. Axtin had his original hammer, and her two ‘little sisters’ as he called them, in his own possession, but there were two more of the big hammers and six more of the little ones.
Dax had made four more crossbows, yet to his frustration only managed one duplicate of his never-ending-quill. That was understandable, the technology needed to turn organic materials into his crossbow bolts was powerful, and difficult.
Sylor and Sakev had come together to make some new swords, each of them outfitted with a small electrical pack that not only cut or stabbed their opponent, but also electrocuted them at the same time.
It was an impressive array. I, however, had never been one to go that route. I was much more comfortable with my handguns, my rifle, and my collection of knives—something that had grown thanks to Rokul finding that kid out in that little no-name village where he and Tella had first met.
The knife he had gotten me was a personal favorite, and I had occasionally gone to work with the boy on my latest commissions…plural.
“Brother,” I said as I found him in one of the back aisles of the armory.
He looked over, nodded, and returned to his counting of the ammo clips. I allowed him to finish before I spoke up again.
“How are things going?”
He smiled. “Nearly as good for me as they are for you.” He turned to me, his smile becoming more mischievous.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, absentmindedly taking one of the rifles down and setting it on the table.
“I haven’t inventoried that yet,” he said. He quickly scanned it, then moved back to inventorying the rest of that aisle. As he scanned and checked, he answered my question. “You did something that I didn’t think you would do.”
“What’s that?” I asked as I pulled off the stock and began working on the rest of the disassembly.
“You found yourself someone that you want to be with, someone other than me that takes up your sense of responsibility,” he said. I detected something in his voice that made me turn to look at him. He was looking at me with a look I hadn’t seen on his face since our family was killed.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, taking a step toward him.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just…” he turned his head and let out a big breath of air. He turned back to me, a forced smile on his face. “You’ve taken care of me since as long as I can remember, which is saying something, because it was supposed to be my job to take care of you.”
“It never bothered me, brother,” I said.
“Still,” he said, his face still sad. “You stepped up and cared for me, making sure that my impulsiveness didn’t end up killing us and you didn’t have to. You joined the military because of…”
“Because of the Xathi,” I interrupted. “And even if they hadn’t attacked, I was still heading in that direction.”
He nodded. “I know, but you followed me. You were smart enough to go anywhere, to do anything in the fight with the Xathi, instead you followed me. You were there to keep me as much out of danger as you could.”
“You would have done the same,” I countered. This was not like him. “What’s wrong with you?”
He threw up his arms in exasperation. “I’m trying to thank you and apologize for everything. I wasn’t the most reliable brother around, and I…I sort of used you. I was so used to you always being there for me that I took you for granted. You are far too smart to be my damn babysitter,” he exclaimed loudly. “I mean, look at what you’ve done when you haven’t been busy taking care of me.”
I was at a loss for words. I had never thought that he felt this way. “What are you trying to say, Rokul?”
“I’m saying that I’m proud of you.”
I was blown away. The force with which he said those words were like nothing I had heard from him before.
“You are…without a doubt…the smartest person I have ever met,” he continued. “It doesn’t take you very long to learn something, and no matter who we’re working with and what their specialty is, you end up understanding it within hours, a few days at the absolute most. I know that when you’re not constantly looking after me, you can, and generally do, accomplish anything.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But, if you’re about to say something stupid, like we should separate or something, I will beat you to the floor.”
He grinned. “I’m not saying that at all, and you know you can’t beat me in a fight.”
“Well,” I said slowly, playfully.
“Ha, ha. You’re funny,” he said, finally smiling. This was the brother that I knew. “Look, I’m just trying to say that I’m proud of you for finding someone to s
pend your life with.”
“You think Daphne and I will spend our lives together?” I asked.
He nodded. “A giant multicolored flower told me.”
Of course the Puppet Master had told my brother.
“That, and Daphne and Tella have become instant friends. She mentioned the dream,” he explained. His expression became serious again. “You need to concentrate on your life now. I have my life, and someone to be with. You do, too, now. We will always be brothers, always inseparable, but we both have our own families now.”
“Families?” I asked, a smile creeping onto my face.
He shook his head. “Not like that. I don’t think I’m ready to become a father,” he chuckled. “An uncle, yeah.”
“Shut up.”
He laughed. “But you get what I’m trying to say, right?”
I nodded. “We’re family, all of us, but we sometimes have to be our own family.” He nodded as I continued. “It might be nice to see how you grow. Besides, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” I said with a grin.
Now it was his turn to look confused. “What do you mean?”
I smiled broadly. “Well, I’ve always been faster, stronger, smarter,” I drew out each word just slightly to let him know I was joking, “better looking, and more interesting than you are.”
It dawned on him finally. “Nice.”
Daphne
Whenever I had the chance, I used Takar’s spare comm unit to call this Fen person and have a rift opened so I could visit with Puppet Master. After the first few times, Fen set up an AI to respond to my voice and open a rift for me, since I was always going back to the same spot.
How brilliant must she be, to just build an AI to do a task for her?
I couldn’t wait to meet her, but some things had to come first.
Takar had been right when he said that I would get used to traveling through the rift. Now I only felt a few heartbeats of vertigo each time.
Over the past few days, I had gone to visit the Puppet Master at least two or three times a day. Today’s lunch called for another trip. I called Fen, asked for a rift, and stepped through when it popped up.
“It is good to see you once again, friend Daphne,” his voice projected into my mind as I stepped through the rift and into a tunnel, where a chair of vines carried me down to his chamber.
“Hey there, PM,” I said as I waved to him. I sat myself down at the ledge, noticing a small platform of vines sticking out a short distance underneath me. Guess my near fall yesterday prompted that.
There was no way I would survive a fall if that wasn’t there.
“Your mate would never forgive me if I let something happen to you,” he said, reading my mind. “If you were injured or killed while in my care, he would bring a weapon that could harm me. I’ve read it in his mind. I would also miss our talks.”
“Then I better be more careful, huh?” I said as I scooted back a little. I set down my lunch bag and opened it, taking out my sandwich. PM moved a vine over by me, offering up a small selection of fruits. “Thank you,” I said.
“It is my pleasure. What do you wish to speak about today?”
I took half a moment to finish chewing my first bite of my sandwich, then answered. “Well, I wanted to talk about the others out there like you.”
“And what do you wish to know?” he asked, tilting his head to the side as he shifted slightly. I had already learned from him that every time he shifted, it was to open the buds that needed to be opened when the sun hit them. The level of concentration that was needed to monitor every single plant on the planet, it must have been insane. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that almost everything he did must be done subconsciously, just like us.
As humans, our brains sent out millions of tiny little commands every second. We didn’t have to think about making our heart pump to send blood flowing through our veins and arteries so our body parts could work. We didn’t have to think about our liver cleansing our body, or our stomach processing the food we ate, breaking it down into the nutrients we needed to survive. It just happened.
Our brain did everything we needed it to do because it had to be done. It was just a natural process. The people that said that we only used ten percent of our brains were…well, they were off on their estimates. We actually used all of our brains, which was a no-brainer—pun!—but our conscious use of our brains ranged from five percent to fifteen percent…some as many as twenty percent. However, those that used twenty percent of their brains usually flamed out and died young.
They were geniuses, but they were eccentric…or had some other form of…abnormality, so they ended up dying young because they tended to forget to do something that the brain normally would have done on its own to protect itself and the body.
PM was doing the same thing. It was the only explanation that made sense to me.
“Very true, my friend. Many of my actions are done automatically without any conscious thought of my own. I have found,” he said, “that if I think about what I do instinctively, I make mistakes. Can I tell you a small secret?”
“Please,” I said, happy to hear any secrets PM was willing to share.
“The desert in which I first created the crater, where the Urai live in the remnants of the Aurora, was a mistake. It was originally lush grasslands, but then I began thinking about what I was doing there, and I lost control,” he confessed.
I was blown away. To think, a place as beautiful as the desert wasn’t supposed to be one. Just…wow.
“Now, my friend,” he said, “what is it you wish to know about those like me?” he asked, reminding me of my original question.
“They were all like you?” I asked.
“In a sense. Much like you and the other females of your species are the same, you are different.”
“Okay,” I said with a nod. “How did you communicate with one another? I mean, space is massive. It took us humans nearly a decade to reach Ankau…if our records are correct.”
“They are,” he said. Good to know. “My kin and I communicated much as you and I communicate now. For us, the distance in space is nothing because our minds are connected. When one wishes to speak, we simply open our mind and speak.”
Wow. The ability to just do that. I wondered how it would be if humans could do the same.
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” I asked.
“Your other wondered the same thing about mental communication.”
He was talking about Takar. “I guess he and I are more alike than I thought,” I said.
“That is why I helped the two of you share your dream.”
“My…dream?” I asked.
“In a sense,” he said.
Now I had to know. “Was that dream…mine? Did that mean that it’s not real?”
“It was real.”
“How? Did you give it to us?” I demanded.
I could hear him chuckle in my mind as I watched his form shake a bit. “To answer your unasked question, the dream you shared with Takar was something that showed a potential future. The connection between the two of you was stronger than I had felt in quite some time.”
“What do you mean, ‘connection’?” I asked.
“Every being has a certain…what is the word you humans use…aura, or force about them. Perhaps it is more simplistic than that. There is a cosmic thread, connecting every being in the universe to another. Each of those threads vary in strength, some are as thin and tenuous as air, some are as strong as the forces that bring life into existence. You and Takar have one of those connections.”
“We do?”
Puppet Master actually nodded.
“Then, what about the rest of your kind?” I asked, trying to force the conversation back on track. I wanted to know more about how he knew about Takar and me, but first things first.
He chuckled. “You humans have such complex minds, a veritable web of tangents and directions for your though
ts to take. Before I answer your voiced question, let me finish with the other. The dream that the two of you shared was because I temporarily connected your minds and showed you what should come in your future. The two of you belong together. That is why you had such strong feelings for one another from the very beginning, even if you gave them the wrong meaning.
“As to your voiced question, there used to be many of us stretched throughout the universe. Now, I am no longer sure. I have not been in contact with them in thousands of your years.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I do not know. Our connections simply…vanished. The threads are still there, but my mind tells me that they are no longer connected.”
That was worrisome. There was potential that he was the last one left, or that the others had abandoned him for some reason. I wondered if there was something I could do to help him, but then realized that there most likely wasn’t. How was I supposed to find more of PM’s kind if I didn’t even know what he was?
Ooh. “Have you always been inside a planet?” I asked.
“No.”
Really? Okay. “Oh, then…how are you inside one now?” I asked.
There was a moment’s hesitation. “When I first arrived in this,” I felt some subconscious massaging of my mind, “galaxy,” he said after that small hesitation, “I felt the comfortable heat of the sun and decided to bask in its warmth. During the millennia in which I slept, the dust and debris of the galaxy closed in around me and closed me in. When I awoke, I realized what had happened and decided to complete the creation. I spread myself throughout the earth, bringing it together properly and creating the atmosphere and plant life. A few hundred years later, a meteor shower struck, and the particles and enzymes eventually came together to form life.”
“And Ankau was born,” I finished.
“Yes.”
I nodded. Now I had a better understanding of things.
Sort of.
I doubted that all planets were made up of whatever kind of beings the Puppet Master was, but there were several, and something had messed with that.