by Mark Kraver
“Fecal transplant?”
“Yes master. Space-based life involves all three of your brains. The mental capacity of your cerebral cortex has been conditioned by your academy training to strengthen your consciousness. The primitive neurons of the digestive tract nourish your subconsciousness and help you make difficult decisions. And the fecal collective brain inside your gut modulates your behavior—not to mention forms a stool.”
“But I wouldn't be eating.”
“Correct. The fecal transplant takes that into account. The engineered bacteria, viruses and protozoa that will colonize your large intestine distal to the infundmitium will not require a nutrient flow to thrive, and they will coexist well with your digestive leg pouches.”
“Will it hurt?”
“A stool?”
“No, the prep.”
Numen created a subfolder for his ‘Dissatisfaction’ file under the name ‘Annoyance’ before answering, “Unknown.”
“I hate that answer,” Yahweh said, walking through the door to the flight prep clinic leaving Numen behind. “What? You’re not going in with me?”
“Because you want me to hold your hand?”
Yahweh frowned again.
“Aw, I see I will have to allocate more subfolders to my ‘Dissatisfaction’ file.”
“What did you say?”
“I said you will not have any memory of the flight prep if it is dissatisfactory,” Numen said, knowing his master had certainly heard what he’d said.
At dusk, Yahweh emerged from flight prep with a sour look on his face. He was dressed in a skin-tight golden gravity suit. Embedded in the outer layers of the suit were barely perceptible fish-scale size graviton emitters. On his back was a small similar colored backpack housing his environmental processing unit that kept him clean and healthy. Also included in his pack were an array of sensors, designed to keep him safe from harm.
The distant spaceport supported a busy interplanetary shuttle service to the rest of the Helios system of planets and beyond. A group of travelers walked briskly past Numen who was waiting next to a giant statue of Gog glowing in the center of a huge glass dome pavilion. Everyone in eyesight noticed Yahweh as he walked over to Numen. The luminescent shrubbery and ornamental topiaries landscaping every hook of the florid city began to glow as Heaven set on the distant horizon. Yahweh realized each person or group of people passing placing their fists on their right breast and bowing at him on their way through the spaceport.
Numen reached out and touched the backpack, pairing the sensors within with his circuitry for life. “Well?” he asked.
“Well, what?”
“Did it hurt?”
Yahweh didn’t know how to answer. It didn’t hurt as much as it felt violating. “One moment I was myself, and the next I was not,” he said, struggling to remember the details. “I think I was unconscious.”
The gold suit was smooth and felt like his own skin. He could feel something on his back and reached to touch it.
“It’s your backpack,” Numen said, sensing his master’s question. “It is a portal for nutrients and an assortment of other sensors that I can access directly. You can have the clinic place it on your chest in the form of anatomical features, if you would like.”
Yahweh glanced at his chest and shook his head, imagining what it would look and feel like having breasts. Then he thought about never eating again. “No more ice cream and chocolate chip cookies?”
“You won’t need ice cream or chocolate chip cookies anymore.”
“That’s not the point, no one needs ice cream or chocolate chip cookies,” he said, putting a hand to his forehead; his companion, it seemed, didn’t understand the first thing about life.
Numen filed that look away in its own separate folder to be named at a later date.
A group of academy upperclassmen from Yahweh’s school were walking past. Before he could say hello, they each saluted with their fist to breast and marched away without stopping to converse.
Yahweh forced a smile and nodded his head. “What’s that all about?” he asked Numen.
“You are a celebrity.”
“What? No, that’s silly.”
“Do you see anyone else around here with a gold gravity suit sporting a shiny new seraph?”
Yahweh looked around and noticed everyone was staring at him. “Everyone is looking at me.”
“Some are actually looking at me, too,” Numen said, tracking the pupils of their eyes.
“Let’s hurry to our ship. I feel like an ichthyoid in a fishbowl.”
They walked past white marble column-supported domes of glass that displayed past and present Elohim Creators in statue form. Yahweh looked up at the dome featuring El holding a planet in one hand and blowing a star out of his other up into the air. Next to El, under the same dome, stood a statue of Ra dressed in a long flowing gown, a staff in her right hand folded against her breast and a cherub shaped like a raptor perched on her left shoulder. Her eyes were painted with dark angular makeup that made her look as though she was peering into the onlooker’s soul. She wore a headdress that made her appear much taller that El.
“I wonder what they will be like?” Yahweh asked.
Numen accessed his quantum molecular data bank, retrieved a synopsis of the Creators in question, and began flooding his master’s mind with facts and images.
“No, it was a rhetorical question,” Yahweh chastised, catching the eyes of several underclassmen he knew from the academy. They all enviously saluted him, and Yahweh forced another smile saying telepathically, “Get me out of here.”
Numen led Yahweh to the spaceport where his ship was waiting to launch. Yahweh couldn’t wait to get out of the public’s eye. He made a mental note to wear a hooded gown or even configure his newly installed graviton emitters into something mundane the next time he ventured out in public. They entered the launch bay where his craft was docked, and their ship looked amazing.
“It is the newest design for deep space exploration.” Numen informed his master. “This ship is fitting for your role as a pioneer. It has an indefinite renewable power source and a pulsar cannon.”
Before Yahweh could inquire as to why he needed a pulsar cannon they noticed Braniff and a few of his Nasi cronies standing nearby, just off the side of the launch dock. They seemed to be waiting for his arrival, and the group began limping out onto the launch platform the moment they saw Yahweh and Numen.
“There you are—,” Braniff blared out in a complaining slow rant, swinging his limp arms, out of breath. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to make it—We were discussing your replacement.”
“I hail your pardon, Prime Prole Braniff. I had little time to put my things in order before leaving on such a lengthy mission,” Yahweh said, bowing with right hand on breast.
“I see you have picked a seraph—They all look the same to me—What was so special about this one?” Braniff puffed.
“Nothing special. I was interested in the seraphim selection process, that’s all.”
“I’m glad I do not have one following me around for the rest of my life,” Braniff said dismissively. “It looks like you are ready to launch—Please give Ra and El my warmest regards.”
Yahweh felt an unconscious push to enter the spacecraft. He turned to face Numen who touched green keys lit in the palm of his right hand and opened the portal to the ship’s cabin.
“Thank you for the warm send off, we will probably not see each other again?”
“That is most certain true—I assure you,” Braniff said, with a drooling smile.
They walked into the ship’s interior, and Numen recompiled the portal’s opening closed.
“Didn’t you find that odd?” Yahweh said. He wrinkled his nose. “And what’s with that musky smell? My proximity sensors were screaming volatile sulfur compounds putrescine and cadaverine.”
“You know, all Elohim act and smell alike,” Numen said, playing off Braniff’s insulting comment that all ser
aphim were alike.
“God, I hope not,” Yahweh said, first smelling his own armpit and then winking.
Numen waved his hand over several floating control panel spheres and commented, “I like this ship. Very spacious and user-friendly. I think even a human could pilot this ship.” With another wave of his hand the hibernation pod in the rear of the ship popped open with a hiss. “Next stop Earth.”
“It still all seems so incredibly surreal. Yesterday, I was a graduate student studying disturbing peculiarities on the galacticNet in what appeared to be another blue shifted universe, and today I’m hibernating on my way to a distant planet to rescue my Creators.” Yahweh said, climbing into his pod and sitting down. “This thing is too small.”
“I believe it calls for a more fetal position,” Numen said, directing his master to tuck his arms and legs closer to his body.
“Oh?” Yahweh lay down on his side and pulled his legs toward his chest. “Oh no, this will never do…”
Numen abruptly closed the pod’s hatch and waved his hand over the instrument panel’s floating spheres, causing the pod to fill with a fluid that immediately froze solid.
“Pleasant dreams, master.”
Numen assumed his post as pilot of the craft and announced to spaceport command that he was ready to depart.
“Depart at will,” signaled the spaceport conductor, as Numen engaged the two antimatter powered nacelles and lifted off.
Breaking orbit for the first time was not meant to be special for a seraph companion, but for Numen, it was spectacular. He marveled at how close the Helios trojan planets were to each other inside the inhabitable zone of the star Heaven, and the patterns of lights on the planet below were illuminatingly astounding.
The ship accelerated to near light speed past the massive gas giant planet, Hercules, outside the inhabitable zone, and begin to respond to the gravitational pull of the waiting Halo at the outer reaches of the solar system. The gigantic swirling mass of dark-matter was such an immense time gradient it tore normal space-time apart, separating one universe from another. Numen piloted the small craft into the center funnel of the Halo’s event horizon, and the tiny ship vanished from the star system with a silent flash of green light.
Yahweh erupted from his hallucinations, snapping the telepathic link with Numen, Zenith, and Reeze.
“Master? Did you have a bad dream?”
Yahweh sat with his body quivering, and his eyes rolled up as he tried to regain his composure. “They are already here.”
Bullet, Yahweh’s personal cherub popped into view with a scowl on its little baby face, looking for what it was he needed to protect his master from.
“They are where?” asked Numen.
“Helios. The Z-pod were at Helios.”
Bullet looked confused with a ‘huh’ sound.
The seraph frowned. “You saw one?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but they are here—I mean there.”
Zenith and Reeze woke hearing their master’s words and sat up, alarmed.
“I felt them also,” Zenith recovered enough to say, with both Melvin and Theodore popping out to protect her as well.
“Me too,” said Reeze, holding her head, still feeling dizzy, as Oscar held her from falling onto her face. “I do not know if I actually saw one, or maybe I smelt it in the shadows.”
“The Halo event horizon can reveal intersection between the past, present and future, but not all timeline come true, master,” Numen said waving his hand in the air to shoo away the confused pesky flying babies.
“This one is true. It matched my memories down to Prime Pole Braniff’s sleepwalking rants. He was like Zaar in the blue universe. Zaar, you remember Zaar?”
“Helios is where they were headed with Zaar,” Zenith asked. “They must have gone into the past. We are already too late,” she concluded with shock splashed across her contorted face.
Yahweh opened his mouth to speak but realized immediately that what he now sensed was beyond what he could verbalize. He locked his eyes on Numen with an unspeakable command of what needed to be done. Numen nodded, punching several keys in his right palm to calculate past intersecting timelines, detached his left hand, and inserted his severed wrist into the navigation panel’s streaming flo-ware.
“Next stop, Heaven,” Numen said, twisting his arm inside the translucent panel and jumping out of space-time into the green universe’s past timeline.
Alarm rang out inside the connectome, but no one dared say a word. Lanochee comforted Nadira in his strong arms while running his tender fingers across her temples trying to soothe her troubled thoughts.
Chapter 88
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, Earth
Library of Souls
Planet Omega Prime, Helios System of Planets
City Center Spaceport
Timeline Before the Rescue Mission
“I wonder what they will be like,” Yahweh asked his new seraph, Numen, looking at the massive statues of Ra and El under the glass domes of the City Center Spaceport. “No, it was a rhetorical question,” Yahweh said, waving off Numen’s attempts to flood his mind with trivial facts about the Creators’ lives and times. Several underclassmen he knew from the academy walked by enviously saluting him.
Numen led his embarrassed master through the spaceport where their ship was waiting for launch.
“There you are,” Braniff blared out as if he were awakening from a deep sleep. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to make it—We were discussing your replacement.”
Slinking in the darkness of the docking bay ceiling puffed Kwai Muk, Braniff’s puppet master. Watching and listening for the slightest sign of deceit.
“I hail your pardon, Prime Prole Braniff,” Yahweh said. “I had little time to put my things in order before leaving on such a lengthy mission.”
“I see you have picked a seraph—They all look the same to me—What was so special about this one?” Braniff said, sensing he was being watched by his hiding mollusk master. He hoped the boy would not say something about finding references to invasion over the galacticNet that would prevent him from leaving and provoke an all-out Z-pod assault.
“Nothing special, I was interested in the seraphim selection process, that’s all.”
“I’m glad I do not have one following me around for the rest of my life—It looks like you are ready to launch—Please give Ra and El my warmest regards,” he forced himself to say to hurry the young naive boy on his way.
“Thank you for the warm send off. We will probably not see each other again?”
“That is most certainly true—I assure you,” Braniff drooled, trying to make a cordial smile for both the boy and Kwai Muk.
Braniff and his Nasi cronies stood on the launch pad watching as Numen piloted the spacecraft out of the port hangar and achieved escape velocity into outer space. He knew there was a good chance they had sent the young pioneer and his useless seraph companion to their deaths at the hands of an alphabiotic queen, but their minds were now numb. A fungal infection implanted in their brains excreted the proper mixture of neurotransmitters to render them victims to their Z-pod master’s will. Each knew their end was near and welcomed it. One more task, one more uncontrollable act, one more abominable command that would change the universe, forever.
Prime Prole Braniff stumbled over to a communication console on the nearby wall of the launch pad and rolled his limp hand over the floating spherical controls. He dialed in the seraphim station and asked for the chief officer, Dexter.
“This is Prime Prole Braniff,” he slurred. “I need you to report on your complement of active seraphim and cherubim on the planet.”
“Prime Prole, I am humbly sorry for bothering you about the special orders for Pioneer Yahweh. It was my mistake. We rushed his order through and installed all the modifications he ordered without delaying the mission.”
“
Yes—you are extremely efficient—Are there any more active seraphim on this planet?” he asked, no longer hearing his own voice inside his head.
“Just one, but he refused that one. Something about it not being unique enough for him, I recall.”
“Interesting,” Braniff slurred, bracing himself against the wall so he would not fall to the ground as his vision blurred and his head began to spin. “What do you plan on doing with the one that is assembled?”
“It has been placed in hibernation until it will be needed by someone else, of course. Standard protocol.”
“Good,” he said, after a long pause of deep raspy breathing. “Keep it there—under no circumstance will you issue it to anyone without my permission.”
“Yes, Prime Prole Braniff, your wish will be done.”
“And I need for you to initiate general recall order—sixty-six—immediately.”
“General order sixty-six? But that will recall all the cherubim to their storage pods over the entire planet.”
“This is an order of the highest degree—Do you understand?” Braniff slurred as greenish liquid ran out of his mouth, nose and ears.
“Yes, Prime Prole Braniff, your wish will be done.”
Not bothering to terminate the communications link with the seraphim station, Braniff turned to look at his fellow Nasi with a blank stare. He was now completely blind as mushrooms began to erupt from his eye sockets and nose.
“It is done,” he yelled as loudly as his muffled, drooling lips allowed. He slid to the floor, still conscious, waiting for the end of his misery.
Hissing rattled louder from the shadows as Z-pod began to slither out of the structural recesses, into the lighted dock and began to feed upon their paralyzed victims. First, they gobbled up the mushroom morsels growing out of their facial eruptions, and then the rest of their neural tissues through oozing eye sockets.
Screams rang out through the city as hungry Z-pod poured from the sewers, attacking and feeding upon the population of Omega Prime. The massive hordes of slimy tentacles clung to their victims’ heads, sucking brain tissue out through their eyes and ears. Entire families, school classrooms, and workstations were trapped and preyed upon; snared victims watched the ghoulish mollusks creep from one strangled soul to the next, feeding until they were full, releasing foul green excrement, and then continuing their force-feeding as fast as they could consume their prey.