by Mark Kraver
“Reeze, take one last look,” Yahweh said. “It is a place of peace, now. But if someone was to discover how to get here from another universe it would all be in jeopardy.”
“My parents would then be in danger. I understand,” she said, holding out the navigational chip he had given her to emphasize how much she understood.
Yahweh raised his eyebrows to Zenith who leaned back into her chair with relief.
Numen snatched the chip from Reeze’s hand, then turned to Zenith.
Zenith looked surprised, until she lowered her eyes with a heavy sigh and slipped her hand into the pocket containing her navigational chip. She extended it to Numen, but Yahweh reached out and took the chip, telepathically telling her, “Have faith.”
“Weren’t there four chips?” Reeze asked.
The thoughts of the other far-superior brains on board simultaneously exploded with “Zaar!”
“He said he was following my orders,” Yahweh shrieked, realizing the meaning of Zaar’s message. “I had commanded him to save as many as he could. He must have thought, or was made to think, he was saving the crew somehow.”
“The words of a crazed zombie not so crazed after all,” Zenith muttered.
Yahweh exhaled and shook his head in disbelief. “If they found out about the navigational chip to another populated universe,” he said, “it could be catastrophic. It could be invasion.”
“You don’t think he used the chip to navigate the Z-pods to Heaven?” Zenith cried, questioning the possibility. “Helios?”
“We are entering the Halo’s event horizon,” Numen announced, cutting off all communications and projecting the massive storm in space onto the forward viewer.
All eyes shifted around the cabin as Numen locked onto Yahweh, and he locked onto Zenith, and she locked onto Reeze with a telepathic link.
Inside their hallucinations of the Halo’s event horizon, everything felt different. Each of the crewmembers re-lived lucent dreams tainted by other’s past, crossed with the intersecting timelines of their present and future, as their minds flattened into a two-dimensional hologram.
The quietness of the connectome exploded with thought:
“Z-pod eradicated by starvation in the blue, but have found a foothold at Helios?” Nadira asked, frightened.
“Zaar used his navigational chip to invade Helios for the Z-pods. How could one of your children do such a thing?” Lanochee asked.
“We are all word chemicals trapped inside a book called life. The three-brain problem within us can rewrite those words into many different stories,” Yahweh answered.
Chapter 87
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, Earth
Library of Souls
Past, Present, Future
Yahweh felt himself pulled through the Halo’s intersecting dimensions of space-time with a rush of unfamiliar visions solidifying into a familiar musky smell. He was surprised to find himself watching past images from Prime Pole Braniff’s personal office in the spiraling arm of the Mingus Tower. There was an ongoing animated dialog between the Prime Pole and Headmaster Zenn; Yahweh recognized it was taking place just before he left on his rescue mission to Earth.
“What do you mean he cannot be found?” Prime Prole Braniff twitched in subdued rage, struggling to regain his breath after each sentence. “Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing—losing a graduate student? I’ll have your job for this.”
The next words were silent, hissed from the darkened recesses of the room directly into Braniff’s mind, but Yahweh could somehow hear the ominous question too: “Have we a problem?”
Zenn cocked her ear almost imperceptibly but Yahweh could tell she’d caught wind of it as well. “He was here, and then he was gone,” Zenn said, wary of the other presence.
“I don’t care if you have to account for every person on the planet—I want him found and found now,” Braniff demanded with a gaunt, dazed look. He then twisted his body with both arms seemingly paralyzed at his sides, abruptly dismissing Zenn from his office.
“I wonder who’s pulling his strings?” Zenn thought to herself as she stepped out of his office and into the hall. Concerned by the Prime Prole’s strange behavior, she stood still outside his closed, soundproof, hermetically-sealed door, trying to listen with her mind’s eye, though she could only pick up a few words at a time.
On the other side of the door, Braniff froze in place. “Master Kwai Muk,” he said, his voice quivering. “He will be found at once.”
Slithering onto the ceiling like an octopus, the Z-pod extended a tentacle to reach for Braniff’s back. Kwai Muk puffed through its tracheal blowholes with a gurgling, vibrating hiss as it used suction cups to cross the ceiling toward its prey.
“You are a pitiful species. How is it that I find myself catching a foothold in this universe with the likes of you? My brethren in this universe will need sustenance soon.”
“You mean souls to feed upon,” Braniff groaned.
The Z-pod raised its paddle shaped middle appendage and touched the now-paralyzed Braniff on the side of his head. Braniff wailed in agony inside his mind, only making a snorting sound through his nose.
“Not just souls, but a whole universe of souls,” Kwai Muk dribbled, puffing air in and out of its blowholes as Braniff finally let out a true blood-curdling scream at the top of his diseased lungs.
Zenn cringed, hearing the screams inside her head.
“Why does it matter? The Nasi are all under your control—kill me now.”
“Kill you? We will not kill you, yet,” Kwai Muk sputtered. “I liberated you. You think being conscious is corporeality, when it is merely a preparation for your unconscious mind to wander through what is physical, what is truth, what is consciously unconscious reality. I still need you to shut down those soulless abominations—the seraphim and cherubim.”
“Why? Because they are not food?”
“They are not food, therefore of no use to us in our exploitation of your universe. We have waited long enough, watching, listening from your underworld; controlling those key figures to do our bidding in secret.”
Braniff groaned at how naive their civilization must had become to be so easily manipulated, to find themselves under the spell of such a vile monster.
The color and pattern of Kwai Muk’s chromatophore skin cells changed as it shifted its focus. “You must find the boy and send him on his mission. Otherwise, someone will become suspicious about why you are not responding to your Creators’ Ra and El emergency beacon on that desolate planet Earth. The boy is getting closer to our discovery. All the hours and hours that child spends on the galacticNet—he is already communicating with our universe, and it will be only a matter of time before he realizes we have already invaded.”
Braniff closed his eyes as Kwai Muk’s color-shifting tentacles moved across his forehead and probed his eyelids with kissing suction cups, tasting the cranial nerves that led to his deliciously-seasoned brain matter. “Very clever of your predecessor’s agent Armilus to infect your Creators solar systems with alphabiotic signature.”
Zenn gasped, almost blurting out the name Armilus in her surprise. Braniff turned to look at the doorway for a brief instant, but couldn’t open his eyes against the probing wormy feelers.
Kwai Muk continued unaware. “The signature queen is a reasonable species. She is only interested in securing raw materials for her next spawn. Such a simple life. You’ve got to envy her.”
“Bot queen? —There is no such infestation—and Armilus is now Ra’s seraph, Rogue.”
“All need not be revealed at this time. Time is a curious thing between the universes,” Kwai Muk said, examining the inter-universe navigational chip with one of its long suction cupped fingering arms.
“Why not kill the boy?”
“Kill the boy? A dead Elohim child would alert everyone in Helios. You are not like your predecessor’s agent; you canno
t see the big picture. You do not see the endpoint because you are blinded to our real purpose,” Kwai Muk said, turning up the pressure inside his skull with its paddle-shaped tentacle.
“En-lighten me,” Braniff struggled to say with his teeth clenched so tightly they cracked and popped under the strain. “How does Armilus fit into all of this?”
“In time, in time. Now find that boy, and send him and his abominable seraph to the queen. She is waiting to kill them both, or you will lose your soul to unbearable pain,” Kwai Muk said, tightening its grip on his skull and sending Zenn away amid more uncontrolled screams.
Yahweh’s hallucinations dissolved into a blur and then refocused on an image of Headmaster Zenn meeting himself at the front doors of the academy. Heaven was rising over the building spires and distant purple mountains. She looked relieved to see him. Yahweh was dressed in his father’s tunic and looked disheveled like he had not slept all night.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Zenn said, leading him inside with a guiding hand.
“You must not have looked very hard,” he said, trying to read her thoughts, but today she was an impenetrable rock.
They both walked into a gravilator tube and whisked off to the seraphim station without saying another word. The chief engineer, Dexter, met them at the front door, distraught.
“Thanks to the extra time you gave us by not showing up when you were supposed to,” he said, perturbed at the delay in his scheduling. “It is up and running with a little difficulty. The Nasi’s programming has been downloaded and it is ready to be imprinted.”
“Wait, I thought I gave you enough time to imprint him,” Yahweh said, sheepishly looking at the headmaster. He sensed she knew he’d purposefully eluded this station, giving the engineers more time to make special modifications to his new seraph.
“He was imprinted with the supplied neural engrams—What was it? You and your sapient father—into his personality subroutines through quantum entanglement, plus the humor and emotions subroutines. What a mess,” Dexter chastised.
Flora cut in. “But this is more basic than that, more general. A bond that cannot be broken.”
“Hello, my master Yahweh. I am your personal seraph,” the new seraph said. His head plate still opened, exposing his mitochondrial-core memory processor.
“We are still having trouble coaxing the mitochondria inside his core to feed from the IM module,” Flora explained, apologizing for the seraph’s state of assemblement. “It normally takes days to acclimate them to this process, instead of hours.”
“Seraph, do you have a designation?” Yahweh asked, nodding with the understanding that this technical difficulty was all his fault.
“No, I do not have a designation as of this date. It is implied that you had not decided what to name me yet.”
“Numen. I’ve decided to call you Numen.”
“Numen. I will enter that into my memory. Thank you, but my processor is running very slo…”
“Maybe… I think this trick will do,” Flora said, rummaging through a large draw under her workstation and pulling out what looked like a handheld laser.
“Great, now she’ll perform a magic show,” Dexter exclaimed.
“Krypton-chromium corundum laser. Six hundred sixty-six nanometer wavelength will hopefully stimulate the little organelles to begin assimilating ADP into ATP at an accelerated rate,” she said. Passing the red laser over the mitochondrial-core, they watched the 3D histographic display bounce up and down on her workstation as she stimulated the processor with coherent light energy. “One more pass and—” when she passed it again over the exposed head compartment of the hastily-assembled seraph, the workstation display raised to full power and stabilized. After a sigh of satisfaction, Flora touched both of Numen’s ears and his facial compartments slid into place.
“I was wrong,” Yahweh said, with a wink and a tug on his earlobe. “This job can be exciting.”
Flora rolled her eyes. “He is rebooting and will load all of his subroutines,” she said. “His core organic matrix will come online shortly.”
“I will not be held responsible if it malfunctions,” Dexter said. He was trying to distance himself from any failures that would come from his seraph being tampered with, particularly one being rushed through production without the proper final testing. “This little trick of hers only works for a short time, you know. The amount of laser energy injected into the mitochondria will only last until you are inside the Halo to wherever you are going. Then it’s a 50:50 chance of recovery.”
“What does that mean? How will I know if it works?” Yahweh asked.
“If it’s still functioning when you wake from hibernation, then you’ll have your answer. No telling what a millennium of assimilating your neuro-engrams and your father’s humor will do to its central processing unit. It’ll probably want to deactivate itself.” Dexter stopped talking and pressed his lips into a smug look of I told you so.
“I’ll take full responsibility,” Yahweh said, cutting him off with a wave of his hand while studying Numen’s face closely to see if they had done something terribly wrong.
“Happy Consciousness Day,” shot out of its mouth as Numen’s ocular receptors popped opened, startling Yahweh. The biomechanical seraph looked around the room, and then he looked at his new master.
“Master Yahweh. You look shorter than I had imagined.”
Yahweh looked at Zenn, Zenn looked at Dexter, and Dexter looked at Flora who said, “That’s extraordinary. I’d never heard of a seraph imagining anything before.”
“Me either,” Dexter said.
“This way, master,” Numen said, holding out his golden hand toward the door. “Preparations for our departure are running behind. We must take the gravilator to the City Center Spaceport, immediately.”
Leaving the station, Yahweh looked at Dexter with a childish smirk of his own before saying, “So far so good.”
“Time will tell, young pioneer,” Dexter said with a sigh. “Time will tell.”
Then Yahweh looked at Flora. “Thank you, Flora. I think,” he said with a wink and a tug on his earlobe. He then looked at Zenn with a feeling of finality.
“We will journey together again, soon” Zenn said, before hugging her illustrious student and kissing him on his large forehead. She whispered into his ear, “Watch your back,” then turned to leave before she could no longer control her emotions.
Yahweh frowned. That was the second warning he had received in as many days. “Goodbye, Auntie Zenn,” he said after her.
She didn’t look back.
“This way master,” Numen urged.
Yahweh watched Zenn disappear into the gravilator tube. What did her idea of ‘soon’ mean, he wondered.
Yahweh turned to leave when Flora said, “I wish I were as brave as you, Pioneer Yahweh.”
He paused for a moment without turning to acknowledge her words, and then left the seraphim station with his very own brand-new, special order seraph.
They entered the nearest gravilator tube and launched towards the City Center Spaceport at dizzying speed. It was an awkward moment for Yahweh next to his new lifetime companion. What does one say to a machine, he thought?
“Maybe, how’s the weather?” Numen said.
Yahweh grinned. “You’re telepathic, too? Perfect.”
“I thought you knew. It is a simplified way for me to report to you without anyone knowing.”
“I didn’t know,” Yahweh said, stepping off the gravilator onto the spaceport.
“Why didn’t you speak telepathically to me in the seraphim station?”
“I believe there is a telepathic dampening field inside the station, so we biomechanical beings do not become too chatty.”
“What else do I need to know about you?”
“That I cannot injure you in any way through action or inaction. I will obey your orders, except where such orders conflict with your life. I will protect you as long as such protection does not conflict
with your life.”
“Life, as in life or death?”
“Is there another dimension of life you subscribe to?”
Yahweh frowned with a look that Numen filed under the general category of ‘Dissatisfaction’ for future processing during downtime between destinations.
“This way master. Your body must be fully prepped for your new flight suit,” Numen said, directing him toward a crowded concourse.
“Great. So, can you access the preprogrammed itinerary?” Yahweh asked.
“Of course.”
“And if I order you to tell me what it is, you’d have to obey?”
“Affirmative. However, you were told not to access this data until we reach our destination.”
“Right. What is our destination?”
“The planet Earth, six point six-six thousand lightyears away.”
“And who are we saving?”
“Creators Ra and El.”
Shock spread across the boy pioneer’s face like a bad rash. “And why are they sending me?”
“Unknown.”
“Why is it such a secret?” he asked.
“Unknown.”
“Unknown because we have not reached our destination?” he asked.
“Unknown, because I do not have that information.”
“Then tell me something you do know.”
“Flight prep has been anticipating our arrival for many hours. They said they would have to hurry.”
“Hurry? What does that mean?”
“I believe it means go fast?”
Numen filed his master’s look into the growing ‘Dissatisfaction’ file.
“What is involved with a full body prep?” Yahweh hesitated to ask.
“Full body prep? Redirecting your renal and alimentary canal systems to recycling pouches, fecal transplant, applying a gravity assist integument and anastomosis graviton emitters to your peripheral nervous system, infundmitial cauterization, to name a few.”