Away Saga

by Norman Oro

  The subsequent week saw a steep rise in the number of cases; and with each disappearance came the same perplexing illness. A new medical term was soon heard all over Prime as physicians began referring to it as displacement sickness. The symptoms were so horrific, though, that it became widely known as simply the “sickness”. People who’d been afflicted described it as death without death. Their lung capacity had degenerated to the point where they could only breathe in just enough air to keep themselves alive, nothing more, throwing them into an excruciating state of perpetual suffocation. Every organ felt as though it were on fire, constantly seizing up and struggling to function. Invasive procedures to expand or supplement lung capacity invariably killed the patient. Many candidly wondered whether living with the sickness was any better. The afflicted were incapacitated, unable to sleep and could communicate only through a language harness, which translated brain activity into computer text. When one of the patients later passed away, it wasn’t because of the sickness’s physical symptoms. He’d simply lost the will to live.

  With the disappearances growing in scope and taking on a decidedly ominous tone, the Grell turned to their religious leaders as they always did in times of crisis. And as in the past, their leaders vigorously counseled prudence, compassion and hope, forcefully turning back the storms of paranoia that were quickly gaining strength all over Prime. For several seemingly endless days, under the most harrowing of conditions, the Grell went about their business as best they could. Even as the number of cases sky-rocketed, there were no riots. There were no mobs. Hope and piety quietly prevailed.

  When the disappearances ended the following month, it seemed their ordeal was finally over. And it was just in time. By then, life had essentially ground to a halt in Ehdl, and in every other city on Prime, with almost all businesses closed, the streets deserted and hospital wards overflowing. The Supreme Council had issued a worldwide state of emergency then began distributing clean suits, language harnesses and intravenous kits, so people could care for one another at home to relieve the strain on Prime’s overwhelmed hospitals and clinics. However, to the Grell’s dismay, the following day brought more people afflicted, and the day after that, even more. The sickness was still spreading. By then, its symptoms had changed, with patients now complaining of voices endlessly echoing in their heads, all in indescribable pain. Despite age-old religious proscriptions and social mores, requests for euthanasia started trickling in.

  The next day, Alma and Pret began hearing the voices. Less than an hour later, simply standing up became exhausting. Hearts racing, tears streaming down their cheeks, they rushed into their bedroom, placed language harness connections onto their temples, inserted needles connected to intravenous drips into each other’s veins then lied down, hands clasped together. Just as speech became impossible, the contact lenses they wore began displaying each other’s words.

  Dor Deos alles is moheluk, Almchen. Alles.

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  Cline’s Embrace

  For several days afterwards, Prime became utterly silent with most of her inhabitants incapacitated. It was then when news of a cure began circulating around Ether. An afflicted little boy in Ehdl named Cline Elter had suddenly begun speaking and breathing normally again, sending waves of joy throughout the planet. Physicians began examining him immediately, hoping to identify what cured him. Strangely his black hair had turned completely white and the whites in his eyes had conversely darkened to a pitch black. Otherwise, though, after good-humoredly undergoing a day’s worth of testing, they found him to be as healthy as any other seven year old boy in Ehdl.

  Once the examination was finished, a news correspondent asked him how he felt. After explaining that he felt much better, Cline thanked the doctors for healing him and said he wanted to become a doctor too when he grew up. Another reporter then asked if he remembered anything from before. He did. Mostly he remembered how he couldn’t breathe and how badly his body hurt. He also remembered all the people talking to him in his head, lots of them screaming because they were hurting too, just like him. The voices wouldn’t go away, so he reached out to one then hugged it as hard as he could, like his parents had taught him, until it did. A few minutes later, he started feeling a lot better, even though the other voices were still there.

  As Prime’s doctors and scientists reviewed the data from Cline’s physicals, reports of his miraculous recovery blanketed the planet. Made desperate by their pain, many took it upon themselves to do as Cline did. They reached out to the innumerable voices screaming in their heads and embraced them until they went silent. Invariably it worked. The desperation and gloom that had gripped Prime was soon replaced by exultation. The Ether boards were inundated with accounts from those cured. Like little Cline Elter, their hair went white and their eyes turned pure obsidian. Without exception, though, those cosmetic changes were judged insignificant compared to being released from the death without death.

  A few weeks later, exactly two months after the first reported disappearance, the government officially rescinded the state of emergency; and there were people once again out in the streets of Ehdl. Simply happy to have their lives back, the Grell soon realized they’d received much more. They found they could teleport themselves at will.

  A month after what came to be known as Cline’s Embrace, Alma and Pret stood side by side on Gem’s highest summit along with dozens of other grateful survivors taking in the snow-covered peaks of what’d been dubbed the Elter Mountains. No one there could remember ever feeling more alive. Religious services the next day throughout Prime across every faith overflowed with the distinctive alabaster hair and darkly opaque eyes of the thankful. What people referred to as the Test was over.

  Mirroring the plight of its citizens, Ehdl’s infrastructure also slowly came back to life, as offices reopened and people returned to work. Soon information links throughout Prime were re-established. Only then, as data began flowing once again to and from every corner of the planet, did the Grell learn the true nature of what had cured them. Astonished by the events surrounding Cline’s Embrace and wishing to chronicle them, it was a retired biostatistics professor, Brin Thant, who made the discovery. Once the necessary information networks were back online, he pooled all the data available from Prime’s healthcare facilities and synchronized them. What he found felt like a knife in his heart. After a few hours spent checking his work, he called every contact he had in the press and in city government then posted a chart of his findings on Ether.

  Professor Thant’s graph was so simplistic it was almost child-like. The message it contained, though, was anything but that. His post explained that the X-axis represented the number of days since Cline’s Embrace. The Y-axis represented billions of people with the sickness. The circles plotted the cumulative number of Grell across all of Prime who had recovered by a given day, the boxes were those who’d died. His post noted that there was an almost one-to-one correspondence between deaths and recoveries. In other words, for every person who recovered, it appeared that at least one person died. Tests he ran ruled out coincidence and so, based on the data, he could draw only one conclusion: Every Grell who’d recovered from the sickness, some two billion of them to that point, did so by killing another Grell.

  The next day, Dr. Thant’s post triggered a firestorm of controversy. After enduring days and, in some cases, weeks of crippling agony, after seeing friends and family perish, many angrily asked, “How dare he? After everything we’ve been through, how dare he make such claims now?” The response even among those in Prime’s scientific community was uncharacteristically ugly and venomous. Many noted scholars, some of whom were once his colleagues, publicly assailed his reputation, his methods and his work. Eventually, though, his analysis stood vindicated. There were no mistakes. Every Grell who’d recovered from the sickness, three out of every four people on the planet, had reached out and unknowingly murdered someone to surv
ive. That was the secret, some had even called it the magic, of Cline’s Embrace.

  With Prime’s communications systems restored and the overwhelming din of the afflicted gone, the Grell soon confirmed that the voices in their heads were in fact those of other Grell. Ironically it was the very absence of those screaming voices that now haunted them; and many would’ve given anything to hear them again. Though they couldn’t have known it at the time, there was no hiding from the fact that the Grell had become a race of murderers. Even their spiritual leaders, many of whom thoughtfully looked upon their troubled flocks with new eyes of obsidian themselves, were at a loss to discern God’s will in what had transpired. All they could do was remind them that His will transcended mortal concepts of what was just, and it was folly to believe they could somehow force it to be otherwise. However, they urged their followers to never forget that God’s love also defied all mortal reckoning; and that it was unconditional and always would be.

  Despite counsel from their leaders, the Grell heart collided over and over again that year with the enormity of what they’d unwittingly done, struggling to make sense of it. Ultimately they salvaged the resultant wreckage in the only way they could. They beatified the hundreds of millions whose lives had been taken, so others could live. Instead of a composition showcasing the achievements of his people, the mural Pret created for Ehdl’s newest business center was a monument to those the Grell swore would never be forgotten.

  As the first anniversary of the Test approached, life had returned to normal on Prime. Despite the trauma they’d endured, most had settled back into reassuringly familiar daily routines. However, that was to be short-lived. A few days afterwards, the screams within the Grell shared consciousness returned as people began falling sick again. Only those who’d inadvertently killed more than once the year before were spared; and within a few days, Ehdl’s streets were once again empty. Unlike the year before, though, no one embraced anyone unless requested. Grell piety stubbornly held. Eventually a system evolved whereby those who were at the brink of death let it be known, so someone else, usually a friend or a loved one, might embrace them first then recover. And so Prime remained, an entire world enduring terrible pain, until nine months later, the screams were gone again. Through attrition, half the Grell who’d fallen sick recovered. Most walked out of their homes into a ghost town. Only one quarter of the people who’d filled Prime’s streets, parks and buildings less than two years earlier were still alive.

  Soon the Grell resumed tasks that they’d grown all too familiar with; they buried their dead and revived their shuttered businesses. They also began preparing themselves for the next wave of sickness, which their scientists warned was only a few months away. On a cold, bright winter’s day, as Ehdl awoke to its first snowfall of the year, millions of Grell found themselves suddenly materialized in the vacuum of space. Only those who had the presence of mind to realize what’d just happened displaced themselves back to the surface. Most perished. Already stretched beyond the limits of endurance and unable to reconcile the obvious with their cherished notions of a just universe, the Grell only slowly began to understand what was happening all around them. Prime was under attack.

  Survival

  It was a race of predators called the Gwyer. As they’d done on countless other planets staggering under global crises, they intended to forcibly clear Prime of its inhabitants then colonize it. Within minutes, millions of their shock troops were streaming through Ehdl’s streets, killing everyone they saw. Never having had the time to hone their new gifts, much less train themselves to use them for combat, many Grell panicked and displaced themselves to Gem, only to discover that the Gwyer were already there, waiting to cut them down.

  The scattered remnants of Prime’s armed forces and police immediately mobilized and countered as best they could; however, they quickly found themselves undermanned and outgunned. Ultimately it was a noncombatant who decided the battle. His name was Ira Grossveld, an elderly pensioner who at the time was caring for his wife, Anya, one of the few who still hadn’t recovered from the sickness. When he saw Gwyer troops enter their building in Ehdl, he barricaded their apartment’s entrance, hoping it would go unnoticed. It didn’t. Soon the door and the furniture behind it were reduced to ashes as footsteps started thundering toward their bedroom. Out of anger at how everything had come to pass and at how pointlessly their lives would end, Ira reached out with his mind, pushing beyond even the limits of the Grell shared consciousness. He reached as far as he could until he couldn’t go any further, until the voices in his head from all the other Grell were gone. Once he stopped, he was startled to find himself looking out through the eyes of one of his own would-be killers.

  Through those alien eyes, he saw the door to where he and his wife were hiding; and he could even see the heat signatures coming from their bodies as they cowered behind it. He also felt the soldier’s almost giddy sense of anticipation at killing them. No matter how he tried, though, the body he inhabited wouldn’t obey his commands to stop. The room kept getting closer. When he felt the soldier’s hand grab the door, he reflexively willed himself to displace. He did. The door was gone. In fact, the entire building was gone as the body he was in found itself floating in the void of space. It struggled mightily to teleport itself once again, but Ira wouldn’t let it. He then reached out to each of the soldiers in their apartment and did the same thing. Once he was back in his own skin, the footsteps outside were gone; and he and his wife were safe.

  In an instant, he communicated what he’d just done and how he did it worldwide using the still formative Grell collective consciousness. Within hours, millions of Gwyer found themselves drifting several hundred miles above Prime, inexplicably unable to displace themselves to safety. And as the Gwyer fell that day, those still afflicted by sickness began reviving, seemingly resuscitated with each death. The next morning, the Grell discovered how to take over the Gwyer shared consciousness itself; and a few hours later, they’d extinguished them as a species.

  Although the joy at having successfully defended their world against invasion was profound and widespread, there were no celebrations that day. Mostly there was only a weary sense of relief at having survived yet another ordeal. By practically every measure, the Grell were exhausted. A month afterwards, as information once again flowed through Prime’s cities and people began venturing back out into her streets, the Supreme Council commissioned a study, the most ambitious of its kind. In light of the wrenching changes the Grell had experienced, it asked a committee made up of their leading thinkers to build a roadmap for their future.

  When the study was released one year later, its findings were daunting. Reasoning that they needed to first know where they were to determine where they could go, the committee assessed the impact of the Gwyer invasion first. During the two day battle, almost one hundred million people had died; and among Prime’s cities, Ehdl was perhaps the only one still fit to really be called that. Despite the rubble that littered her streets, she’d actually sustained relatively little damage. Prime’s other major cities weren’t so fortunate. Even with their newfound abilities to help them, the study estimated that basic necessities like clean water and sanitation services wouldn’t be regularly available to their inhabitants for at least several more months.

  As for the sickness, the committee’s scientists verified that unless a Grell murdered at least once a year, they’d fall gravely ill. Conversely, if they killed multiple times, as many inadvertently did during the Test, each additional life taken kept them free of the death without death for another cycle. Although the sickness was undoubtedly lethal, the committee’s researchers were surprised to discover that staving it off granted a kind of immortality. The adults who’d survived the Test had apparently stopped aging; and cellular assays indicated that no one among the younger Grell would ever age past their mid-thirties. After examining those who recovered during the battle for Prime, the committee’s scientists concluded that the sentient killed did
n’t have to be Grell in order to ward off sickness and preserve that immortality. Extinguishing any sentient led to recovery, so long as it was done using the victim’s own field abilities. Also, through the distributive properties of their shared consciousness, the life taken by any Grell in that manner helped resuscitate those afflicted. Among the patients who recovered during the Gwyer invasion, none had been in any condition to take part in Prime’s defense.

  After reviewing its findings, the committee believed that how the Grell dealt with the sickness would dictate their future; and its study strongly encouraged devoting all available resources to curing what was arguably the root cause of the calamities that had befallen them. Unfortunately, Prime’s scientists were only beginning to fathom just how intricate the sickness truly was and it was unclear when a cure would be available. Until then, the committee ended its report by urging the creation of a central authority that would seek out alien races and extinguish them as necessary.

  The study’s conclusions quickly threw Prime into a tumult. Given a glimpse into a future that was almost diametrically opposed to who they were and had been as a people, Pret and Alma joined in the debate over whether the Grell should go on at all. Many argued that the sickness’s next visitation should be allowed to be its last; and the committee’s recommendations were heatedly debated for almost a year. Ultimately, however, the prospect of a cure, along with the realization that the next wave of sickness was little more than a year away, tilted the balance. Once the committee’s recommendations were finally accepted, the Grell set to work reconfiguring their society to relentlessly pursue a single objective: Survival.