Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  With each passing day, the number of voices the Cley felt in their minds grew. Fortunately, along with that increase came an almost miraculous ability to take them all in and make sense of them. It was almost as though their cognitive systems had been built for just that purpose and had simply been waiting for the chance to be put to use. Within days, everyone began calling the perpetual grostish within their minds the global consciousness.

  Just one year after the very first reported disappearance, profound changes had already taken place all over Halcyon. As people increasingly used displacement for everything but the shortest of errands, there were hardly any cars left on Ohnz’s streets and most commuter trains sat idle or were being repurposed. To further their understanding of their abilities, the Cley established the Field Research Adjunct, a group within the Braf devoted to investigating what the department called Van der Weg energy. Aiden Hower extended Ide Meadow an offer to lead the division, which he accepted almost immediately, becoming its first director.

  Only a few months later, while looking into potential biochemical explanations for the Awakening, Ide’s team inadvertently discovered something that sent ripples throughout Halcyon: The Cley had stopped aging. For a race that prided itself on its advances in promoting longevity, with Ide’s generation expecting to live at least half a millennium, this was astonishing. After artificially aging cell samples thousands of years, the researchers found they kept replicating with perfect fidelity. Gone were the transcription errors that caused cellular deterioration and eventually death. Based on their findings, the average Cley wouldn’t age past one hundred twenty years old. For those like Ide, who were well into their two hundreds or older, they’d gradually find themselves feeling and looking younger as newly generated cells replaced older ones throughout their bodies. Though they could still die, it wouldn’t be by the passage of time alone. Among the Awakening’s gifts, the Cley added virtual immortality.

  As word spread of the adjunct’s discovery, the profound sense of gratitude and humility that by then permeated the Cley global consciousness deepened even further. They’d been given so much that the desire to somehow give something back was universal. After several years of debate and planning, they ultimately looked to the stars to share what they’d learned and what they could do. Reasoning that Halcyon couldn’t be the only world to have undergone such a transformation, the Cley decided to search for other awakened races and build alliances with them.

  Once the governing council chose the science department to lead the effort, the adjunct set about looking for worlds to contact. Ide requested that the planetary sensor grid be reoriented outwards, away from Halcyon rather than towards it, to detect Van der Weg energy. It took a few hours to reposition the ministry’s satellites; however, once the telemetry went online, he and his researchers were shocked by what they saw. All of space seemed to be perforated by light.

  With thousands of destinations to choose from, mission planning began in earnest. The obvious means for reaching those worlds was displacement. By then, Ide’s division had made significant advances in understanding teleportation and in building a theoretical framework to describe it. Among other things, the adjunct had discovered that individual Van der Weg fields sufficed only for self-displacement. Teleporting objects and other people required harnessing the energy pooled within the global consciousness. Like any other common resource, displacement was easier when few people were using their abilities; and although large objects were more difficult to displace than small ones, distance never seemed to be a factor. Teleporting something to the other side of Halcyon required as much effort as sending it from one corner of a room to another. It turned out the only real limitation to that distance was knowledge of the destination. If a Cley had been somewhere, the impressions of that place and its location became available to the global consciousness, making it relatively easy to displace an object there. In lieu of that, Ide’s team found that knowledge of a destination’s relative position combined with detailed images of it also yielded fairly precise displacements.

  Utilizing the adjunct’s theoretical models, the Department of Science and Exploration started preparing for its first mission. Although they considered a number of proposals, the Cley ultimately decided to send a probe a distance of about six light-hours to their system’s outermost planet, Fern. Six hours and fifteen minutes after teleportation, the probe would beam a signal back to Halcyon that would enable the department to bring it home.

  Despite its relative simplicity, the Cley’s first interplanetary expedition via displacement uncovered an aspect of their abilities that few had thought was possible. Specifically, after the probe returned, its telemetry indicated that it had waited six hours and fifteen minutes on Fern’s surface before sending its signal. Puzzled at how that could be, technicians spent days troubleshooting its electrical and mechanical systems. However, they found no malfunctions. For many, this was every bit as startling as finding out they’d no longer age. Even theorizing a viable method for faster-than-light travel would’ve been judged an unparalleled accomplishment within Halcyon’s scientific community. Bypassing perhaps millennia of theory and research, the Cley now had that capability at their fingertips.

  When the time came to pick a destination, the science department set its sights on the most brilliant world it could find in its Van der Weg charts. The planet they chose was Nimbus-1, a green, white and blue globe some fifty light-years away. The department then started displacing probes towards it. Although many team members from previous outworld expeditions were still alive, as the probes ventured further and further away from Halcyon, the firsthand sensory information needed for accurate displacements became increasingly scarce. Fortunately the Cley had since developed sensors and imaging technologies that remotely generated strikingly realistic holographs of places no mission had ever actually reached. After fifteen years of methodically leapfrogging from one region of space to another, the science department began closing in on its destination.

  The Cley were pleased to see that their telemetry confirmed that Nimbus-1 had awakened. Though its energy levels were slightly more intense, the planet’s surface bustled with the same whirl of field activity found on Halcyon. During the entire expedition, there was a curious absence of electromagnetic signal coming from the planet; and it was only when they were about a light-day away that a probe finally detected something. It was an extremely faint message repeating over and over.

  “Vilkom. Vy sint de Ta’oh. Ons weld is Ahtin. Es is wel un tide guvessen das vy henin epvartet habin.”

  It was a message of greeting in, of all languages, Ide’s native Ohnzdeytsch. He then realized that quite possibly, they’d just found the outworlders who’d been visiting Halcyon through the centuries. They were called the Ta’oh and their world was called Ahtin. Within a few hours, the Cley displaced a probe to beam their response.

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  A couple of days later, the transmission from Ahtin stopped repeating and a new message took its place.

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  The science department’s mathematicians soon extracted a layer of ones and zeroes embedded in the signal that generated a holographic image of Ahtin and its capital, Ty’oh. It also held information about the planet’s inhabitants. Though their civilizations were of comparable ages, the Ta’oh had apparently awakened very young as a race, almost a millennium before the Cley. Their technology was relatively underdeveloped at the time and they hadn’t yet discovered the Van der Weg field that powered their abilities. Like the Cley, however, they were fascinated by the universe they inhabited; and immediately began displacing satellites further and further out into the reaches of space to see if there were any others like them. A few decades after their awakening, one of their satellites detected electromagnetic transmissio
ns originating from a planet they knew as Dagat; and just as the Cley had followed Van der Weg particles, the Ta’oh began following those radio signals.

  Once their probes reached Halcyon, they continued studying its media and correctly deduced that the Cley hadn’t yet awakened. Concerned that their presence might be misinterpreted, they sent expeditions over the centuries hoping to one day find them in full possession of their abilities. In the meantime, they focused their efforts on developing a highly sophisticated understanding of the Van der Weg field and had since migrated most of their communications, as well as media, to their global consciousness.

  After reviewing information about the Ta’oh, the governing council assembled a delegation with Ide serving as the science department’s representative. They materialized in Ty’oh to find a world much like their own. The city was situated high in the Ng’ta’us mountain range surrounded by forests and freshwater lakes. Feeling the cool morning breeze on their cheeks, they saw an honor guard arrayed before them and just past it, the Royal Palace, an immense fortress of brick, mortar and glass rising from the ground into the clouds. Negotiations initiating relations between their two worlds went smoothly; and embassies opened the following month, formally inaugurating the Alliance.

  Over time, other worlds joined Ahtin and Halcyon, bringing with them their knowledge and technologies. As Allied expeditions radiated outward away from known space, they often encountered others like themselves eager to make good use of the unexpected abundance of gifts bestowed upon them. However, just as often, their expeditions found baffling instances of genocide, whole worlds seemingly murdered. Because Van der Weg particles traveled at the speed of light, what at a distance seemed like a promising candidate for membership in the Alliance all too often turned out to be a lifeless world with corpses choking its streets and mass graveyards in space choking its skies.

  In order to understand what could’ve caused such atrocities, the Allies sent their explorers to comb through those dead civilizations, collecting any clues they could find. It was a gruesome task and many assigned to it had themselves isolated from their global consciousness because what they found was so troubling. After decades spent piecing together languages of long gone races, reverse engineering their recording technologies and poring over their media, the science department’s planetary investigations committee released its findings. It concluded that it wasn’t genocide on a global scale, but rather a form of mass suicide. Each of those races had apparently died from its own awakening.

  The committee then made public volumes of salvaged footage from those civilizations taken just before extinction. It contained scenes of millions of people suddenly displaced thousands of feet into the air then falling to their deaths, millions more materializing in street clothes in the vacuum of space, others having their heads displaced without their bodies, and so on. Few had ever imagined or wanted to know that the global consciousness could be put to such purposes. It was the Foling crisis from long ago run amok.

  The committee explained that within the promise of each awakening lay a trial by fire. It noted the adjunct’s discovery that new abilities at first almost exclusively obeyed the subconscious. As the awakening proceeded, the immense power of the still formative global consciousness was put at the disposal of those primal urges. On Halcyon, Ahtin and other Allied worlds, institutions, customs and social mores existed to hold those impulses in check until the power of the Van der Weg field was brought under conscious control. However, not every race enjoyed such safeguards. Many succumbed to prejudices, fears and vices given terrible force by the field. In a sense, the awakening seemed to be a mechanism for an incredibly brutal form of natural selection. Species that might in any way go on to threaten others snuffed themselves out. After seeing firsthand the often awe-inspiring civilizations that those races left behind, the committee believed there had to be a better way.

  Wish

  Ultimately the Alliance decided that selective intervention was the key to shepherding worlds through their awakenings. Within a few years after the committee’s report, the Alliance Council established the Central Development Ministry to monitor unawakened races and counteract trends that might imperil them. Even gifted with near immortality and the power of the global consciousness, the Cley and their allies immediately recognized that they were embarking on an almost overwhelming task. Even a cursory glance at the science department’s latest Van der Weg charts revealed thousands of unawakened planets. They’d have to spend millennia secretly guiding those civilizations to an event that lasted on average no longer than a couple of months. Nevertheless, it was the better way they all had sought; and so, despite their misgivings, preparations soon began to establish outposts throughout the galaxy.

  Although the Cley didn’t know it, a powerful new ally would soon arrive to help them. As the development ministry started reviewing intelligence reports to identify the first group of planets it would watch over, Ide’s research adjunct confirmed an ability that most on Halcyon had relegated to folklore and superstition. Shortly after the Awakening, certain Cley swore they could affect things like the weather and the outcomes of sporting events. Although the claims seemed almost silly, Ide’s team was nevertheless obligated to investigate them. Running experiments over the course of centuries using random phenomena that were beyond the scope of even the Cley’s abilities, they were astonished to find that it was no myth at all. Based on their results, they had to conclude that the Van der Weg field granted wishes. Sometimes it took a few minutes and other times it took decades or even longer, but eventually what was wished for happened.

  Based on their research, Cley fields could selectively affect events to reach a desired outcome. For example, an electron could be nudged to zig when it otherwise would’ve zagged, causing a random number generator to produce results that were anything but random. Although their findings showed that the ability did in fact work at the individual level, wishes made by multiple people had a fair chance of interfering with one another, often causing delays or unintended consequences. Overly complicated wishes met with similar difficulties. The wishes most likely to be fulfilled as intended were simple ones made as a group. Though it took some time for the Cley to accept that such an ability truly existed, they were soon considering ways to harness the Awakening’s latest gift.

  To collectively utilize their new ability, they eventually decided to resurrect the grostish, which their global consciousness centuries earlier had rendered obsolete. And so, as the Allies assembled the teams that would man their first outposts, there was a trembling near every Cley heart that hadn’t been felt in over two hundred years. Ide and Tawny were having dinner at the time. Once they felt it, they closed their eyes, reviewed the proposal set before the global consciousness then voted. A few days later, they joined some seventy-nine billion other Cley in wishing for something they hoped would always guide them: Wisdom.

  The primary mission on the thousands of worlds the Allies eventually monitored was to observe and report to the Central Development Ministry, which carefully tracked each race as it neared its awakening. By then, Ide’s research adjunct had developed field energy sensors that could predict to within a few centuries when that would occur. If necessary, the ministry’s outposts were authorized to influence events; however, any substantial intervention required unanimous approval from the Alliance Council. The bar had been set high because no one wanted to meddle in the affairs of what would likely be a future ally. Counterbalancing that, of course, was the fact that a world needed to first weather its awakening before it could join them.

  It was, as expected, a difficult and almost overwhelming task. Standing by, watching and recording natural disasters, plagues, famines and warfare ravage planets was a grueling exercise in discipline when the Alliance had technology and expertise that could’ve easily mastered such calamities. However, as most agreed, each world had to learn on its own. Only the most dire of crises ever resulted in the Allies intervening; and even then, th
ey were sometimes forced to employ tactics that weren’t as pure as they would’ve liked. In one instance, they engineered a devastating conflict to teach a people to hate war. Nevertheless, after millennia of careful monitoring and guidance, they looked on with some satisfaction as the first group of worlds successfully awakened. A few days later, the Alliance revealed itself, casting light on its efforts throughout the ages then inviting each race to join it. Invariably they accepted; and two dozen millennia after the first treaty between Halcyon and Ahtin, the Allies numbered over three thousand worlds.

  For hundreds of centuries, the development ministry continued guiding races through their awakenings. By then, it had amassed an immense storehouse of knowledge recorded from thousands of worlds over tens of millennia. Its staff used that information to formulate quantitative laws of cause and effect that almost infallibly predicted a society’s development based on the outcomes of certain events. As interventions grew more precise, the ministry’s failure rate dropped until it was essentially zero. Eventually the Allies’ success brought them to an expanse of space at the cusp of the Andromeda galaxy called the Steppe.

  Their scouting expeditions discovered that it was a region unusually rich in sentient life; and the first group of worlds under their watch there grew to number over ten thousand. For ages, they painstakingly applied the techniques that had served them well in the past. However, as those races began to awaken tens of millennia later, they inexplicably succumbed despite the Alliance’s best efforts to cultivate institutions, customs and beliefs to make it otherwise. The ministry’s failure rate was turned on its head with none of the thousands of races in the initial group surviving its awakening. The Alliance could only watch from a distance as each world went silent. Something had gone terribly wrong.