by Brett Bam
Their best and only hope carried them far out into space and on an orbit which would take a very long burn to correct beltwards. If they slowed down out there, the Korporatsie would be upon them in an arena without witnesses. Their best bet was to burn to add to their velocity and send them spinning off toward Earth.
“Oh shit! Incoming!” yelled Berea. Se squirted the info onto their displays, a floating defence platform had activated and was deploying weaponry toward intercept.
“Jack Mac, what am I dealing with?”
“Electronic warfare mostly, nothing kinetic yet.”
“Can you handle it?”
“Let's find out.”
Dalys bathed their flight path with countermeasures which ballooned out from the hull and began to accelerate away. Jack Mac deployed the weapons suite again. He took long seconds, adjusting his aim before firing. Seventeen rounds speared out and reached over the distance to touch the gadgets racing toward them. Each round scored a hit and fire blossomed and died in the dark.
“It's switching tactics! Kinetic weapons engaged.” Moabi warned.
They had to trust the countermeasures at this point, Jack Mac ignored the incoming armament and targeted the defence platform thousands of kilometres away. He fired the big gun three times and the boom-boom-boom shook the RHS.
“Countermeasures holding!” their displays showed the orange blossoms sparkle and die, “Direct hit!” They all cheered and the Ribbontail leaped for space.
“Well, you got your wish Mr De Jaeger, looks like you’re in with us for a long run. Be careful with my ship and my people. I don’t trust you and if you disappoint me, I’ll kill you.”
Oscar swallowed and turned his eyes to the holo displays, watching as the only home he had ever known slid away from him at high speed. He was terrified for his life, yet elated at the same moment.
Chapter 4
Kulen De Sol
The first thing I feel is curiosity. What shape does this limbo hold? I feel outward, away from myself, a new concept. I use that very first, most basic of all my instincts, touch. I stretch out with what little I have, a small creature born into blindness, reaching in the darkness, and I feel a massive nothingness hovering beyond my perceptions.
And yet it is not nothingness, I am moving through something that tugs at my fingers. It is all around me, covering every part of me, flowing through my hair and over my face, through my legs and between my toes and my fingers. I shift, disturbing the liquid, making it flow. It slows my movement with its viscosity.
I try to swallow and I feel the thing in my mouth and throat, feeding me, feeding from me, breathing for me, penetrating my body, providing the sweet pleasure of breath. I can feel its foundation in the pit of my chest. It touches me there most intimately.
My eyes are closed. I remember the earlier pain and, carefully with much fear, I open them and see nothing but a dull orange hue, the liquid pressing on my eyes.
I stare, trying to understand what I see, but I do not, I cannot. My hands are free. I stretch and reach to the limit of my ability, and then with sheer desperation scrambling in the pit of my stomach, I gain that one more little and extra bit.
And I touch something, a solid object of some sort, flat and smooth.
A barrier.
It is vibrating gently, a soft disturbance muted by the thickness of the liquid, and that’s all. I have no idea what to do next. I close my eyes squeezing the liquid from beneath my eyelids. It oozes away. My fingertips rest on the barrier.
I listen.
After a long time the vibration becomes audible.
I don’t know if it is getting louder or I am listening more carefully. The sound is complicated with many levels, almost like the murmur of a million voices but from a great distance. It grows more complex as I listen, more subtle. It is composed of many layers of which I can only discern a few. It is so soft, but getting clearer every moment as I concentrate harder and listen closer. The pitch varies and I hear distinct voices amongst the murmurs. There are soft ululations which are slightly stronger and closer than the others. I do not understand what it is I hear.
With my eyes closed I begin to see the voices like individual threads weaving through a larger fabric, a new kind of perception. It is a visual splendour which flowers and opens in my mind. It is bright and clear and occupies an entire hemisphere in my mental perception.
I can see and hear the vibrations now, but they seem to be from an inner direction, rather than out there in the void of liquid with its one solid object, its barrier. I turn my senses inward upon myself, paying attention to the inner, to the fabric with its noisy sinuous threads that I hear inside my head and chest and behind my throbbing heart. Somehow the vibration here is stronger and I can listen that much closer.
I see without opening my eyes. In that moment, something fundamental unravels. Like silk sliding from steel, I feel myself split gently in two. My spirit and my body are separate, where I was one, I am now two. I hover behind myself and in front of myself, one is real and one is physical. The real part of me slips forward, unencumbered by the physical restraints, the limbo of liquid, unencumbered by the barrier.
And I see a shimmering mass that heaves and twists before me, that hemisphere in my mind’s eye. It stretches out into infinity below me, a finely woven fabric disturbed by a wind I cannot feel.
I reach forward and try to touch the fabric. It is further away than it looks. Then, as if I have taken a step from a precipice, I fall. I fall away from my body into empty space and toward the fabric which is endless before me. As I fall closer to the curved, threaded, mirror surface, the murmurs become ululations became voices and then shouts and finally screams which flash beneath the surface of this strange rippling expanse. The screams swirl like a current beneath the fabric. And then suddenly the fabric is right there and I plunge into it with a great speed.
The sensation is one of submergence, a total drenching of the soul. I am still falling, but slower now, almost gently. I drift through the fabric of murmurs and screams enraptured with the sensation, slipping languidly from thread to thread. I fall a long distance very slowly, with strange things passing me on my descent. I realise that each strand, each of these running streams of information are the life streams of individual creatures. Their entire recorded existence displayed here as a continuous thread. To move up and down these threads was to move through time and sample the individual perceptions of millions of streams of consciousness. Each stream contributed to the whole, and the whole was composed of an almost infinite count of threads.
In this place, I am free from the things that press into my physical body. In this place, I am free of the liquid and its barrier at the edges of my reach. I am free from the limits of sight and touch and taste and smell. I am free of the need to breath. I am nearer to the ululations now, amongst them, surrounded by them. They are no longer soft, but echoing through the fabric which surrounds me. Far away, at the limits of sight, objects are falling upward through the fabric like a soft and luxurious rain.
Then below me something begins to loom. From this high up it looks horrendously complex and involved, a smorgasbord of smeared colour and patterns that are jagged and sharp. The thing I am seeing is utter chaos, a solid mass of flickering imagery that makes no sense to me.
I notice the chaos begins to repeat itself, I see a pattern here repeated there, a movement here happening again and again, and then a movement there that looks exactly the same. A scream sounds; a vicious yell which fades and becomes a voice softly whispering the same thing over and over. I stare and stare as the thing below me slowly changes as I fall towards it, and I learn to see what I am looking at. And finally, I find a semblance of order in the chaos.
It is beautiful. Tiny darts of light begin to coagulate in the fabric around me, flying closer to me, centimetres from my awareness. Stopping and touching me, testing and searching me, saturating me, trying to find a way in. I wonder how this marvellous thing before me perceives me
and if I perceive it properly. And with that thought comes a new perspective and I understand more. It does perceive me; my presence has stirred it into a tumult. There is a great clamour begun, and the fabric itself is recoiling and fleeing, running away, receding. What I had thought a solid structure beneath me swirls and moves and vanishes, and I am alone above a great pit which grows greater at every moment.
I fall, I collapse forward into that abyss as if from a great height and instead of allowing the terror to overwhelm me I accept it and allow it, and the fear passes. The thing before me scatters from my path, dissipating like dust before a great wind.
I try to reach some of that light as I fall, that colour, that shape, that rippling fabric. I want to touch it and feel it, to see what it is, but it eludes me far too fast. Far too elusive as if it is not real at all but some fantastic illusion I cannot understand or properly comprehend.
And then suddenly the lights and the screams and the voices come together to form a bright shape of light that sweeps upwards at me, sharply and aggressively. As it comes closer it looms and swirls and swarms all about me until it absorbs me and I am swimming inside it.
My sense of wonder fades and is replaced by a tight claustrophobia. I feel clutched in a fist.
The voices and screams and lights and shapes coagulate sharply into a singular whisper that echoes about the fabric, and it speaks a garbled static of words which crystallise and say…
Anomaly isolated. It is a spot of blindness, a location of nothing, which denies us.
It is the singular.
You are the singularity.
I cannot perceive your perception; you are unique in this multitude.
You are Kulen De Sol, the reaper of the sun. You are the last man born of machines. You have come at last. We have succeeded.
The great light blinds me, its voice overwhelms me and I feel it begin to consume me. It pushes and pulls at me. It feeds from me and tears me apart. It rapes me, it violates me and separates me from myself. I begin to leak away into the fabric of screams and lights, absorbed and assimilated into the wholeness of this place. I feel its enormity and I realise that I am nothing to it. I am but a puny part, and it swallows me.
Forced perceptions flash before me, too fast to follow. The comfort of escape is denied to me. Yet, I do not lose consciousness though I do not have the strength to fight it. I cannot believe that I am withstanding this maelstrom. Surely it will kill me. Spread me thinner and thinner until I am no more, and that would be a release. Surely, I will be torn apart and scattered into this great wind. How could I still be whole? Am I? I imagine I feel the slow arrival of death approaching, a blessed peace.
Death… I perceive death. I see it rise up as a spectre, holding its arms out in preparation for that last terminal embrace, and desperate panic claws at me from inside. I push back for the smallest of an instant, the task consuming my every fibre of being, a last and desperate effort. I push at this horror of information, this thunderous waterfall of pulsing light and sense-overwhelming sound, and irresistible flow. Miraculously I see a difference. I see the light strain and stretch thin, and then snap. Something has let go and I am drifting. The light and the murmurs begin to flow differently around me, no longer quite as hard, yet still fierce. Instead of beating against me it is now carrying me along in its flow. I am moving with a mighty wind, no longer falling, but flying. I feel that I am coming together, becoming more coherent. A tiny space of peace opens up around me in the storm and I begin to see images. A small bit of understanding pierces my heart like a ray of sunlight through the murk. I begin to watch, and I begin to learn, to understand. It is teaching me.
An eternity passes almost without notice as I watch the flow, seeking understanding. Then suddenly, it changes, surges and separates, shattering into individual shapes which flee directly away from me.
The light scatters before me, dust before the wind, and the pit yawns again. The screams increase in intensity until they are painful to perceive, the light becomes brighter eliminating all the colour and blending it into a solid wall of white pain.
Pain again. I turn and flee from it. The light fades at my flight and I leave it behind. I soar upwards, away from this real place, back toward the quiet of the physical place. Back toward that place where I was limited by five senses, where I was submerged in a liquid. Where there is quiet and peace, safety and sanctuary, where there are things pushing deep into my body in horrible violation. Yet even that is preferable to the onslaught of the fabric of screams. Up is out, and so I scrabble for a surface so far above me I cannot perceive it other than a slight glimmer at the edge of vision.
Behind me I feel the light coagulating again, shining hotly, growing hotter and burning. The glimmer of the real place above me is so far away, and the screaming light, that blinding collection of the fabric of screams and murmurs is right behind me. My fear spurs me on.
And then the surface of the physical is close and I watch as it approaches at a speed unrealised and unperceived. I thrust into the membrane separating the real and the physical with a rush and a scream…
…and I am almost back in the liquid place, the physical place. The fabric gripping to me like a gossamer glue which I cannot shake off, stretching through the barrier between the real and the physical and clinging to me. I struggle into it and against it, but it will not let me go.
Here on the threshold of freedom, I am caught and held back from escape. I can feel my physical body around me like a badly fitting suit of clothes, heavy and large and thrashing fitfully as I try to pull it back on over my naked soul. But the screams are there, the threads of the fabric clinging and pulling and hampering my movement, its strength slowly but surely pulling me back beneath the surface of the physical and into the real, absorbing me once more into its influence, beneath the membrane, the interstice between there and here. I have not the strength to break free, it has me and against my will, my terror kicking and screaming, impotently demanding my release, the lights swallow me, and once again I am falling, my screams echoing from nothing.
Chapter 5
Dalys
60 days before the flare
The Ribbontail dropped into Earth’s atmosphere at 500 kilometres a minute, skimming the ionosphere. She was under partial thrust, her dissipater fans shifting slightly as Dalys fed course corrections into her datacore. Proximity alerts pinged urgently as molecules of oxygen and nitrogen bounced off the hull. Moabi Mahlambo rolled his eyes across his console and the photo-sensitive panel tracked a cursor wherever he looked. He blinked at the screen to deactivate the alarms, casting Dalys a baleful look. They were very close to air thick enough to damage the hull casing, and Moabi kept a sharp eye on the impact monitor. He was ready to squirt the information on to Dalys' console if the warning zone flashed amber. Dalys grinned to herself, for such a big man the Zulu could be tremendously paranoid about that kind of thing. Scared to burst the bubble.
Earth loomed immense below, startling in its scope and beauty. The Ribbontail’s crew were glued to the holographic representations displayed on their consoles, each as detailed as if it was a window on the real thing.
Earth was an object of curiosity to all of them. They had maintained orbits over most of the solar bodies at one time or another but this was their first time here, and the ancestral home of man carried an air of respect and awe that most planets did not deserve. The contours of the continents and oceans below were hidden by darkness. The South American continent was a scattered sea of electric light, sparkling through all the colours of the spectrum, denser and brighter on the coastlines. The northern hemisphere was dark and still, drowned under the storm which engulfed most of the world.
Soon the sun brightened the horizon and the crew awaited their first Earth sunrise with an eager anticipation. Dalys watched with an almost religious awe, ignoring Moabi’s yellow alert, while the curvature of the planet began to burn with a magnificent rainbow of colour as they swept toward the terminator. Their approach ha
d dropped them into an elliptical orbit. They passed over the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean as the sun rose, roaring, over Africa.
The larger part of the globe and most of the northern hemisphere was smeared with a tumultuous cloud, a storm than covered half the Earth. It was of such proportions that it looked like a swollen, pitted blister on the planet’s skin. There were clouds so thick they boiled under their own weight. A tremendous eye in the storm yawned open, an abyss of calm empty air. The terminator was directly over this volcanic pit and it marred the terminators smooth curvature as the morning sun shone down on the devastated Earth below, revealing all her wounded glory. The Worldstorm governed the weather patterns of the planet with a vicious callousness that regularly devastated what remained on the surface. Great rolling arms of the storm swirled mercilessly across the Southern Hemisphere. This morning, however, Southern Africa was clear and bathed in bright morning sunlight, a few strands of white cloud sweeping up the eastern coast.
The Indian Ocean glowed a deep blue, and the continent shone a soft and diffused brown, knotted here and there with deep green rifts of vegetation that blurred the surface. Weather patterns swirled over the surface of the ocean behind Africa, dark storms that looked like they were going to make landfall. Their strength and might hidden by their altitude, each one was a small offspring of the giant Worldstorm. They spun lazily away from its fringes, savaging the land beneath them like malevolent fractal images.
The glorious colours of the sunrise glared into a brilliant white as they drifted higher, moving away from the planet now. Far in the distance, and directly in their flight path, Earth harbour shone like a comet, with a sparkling trail of ice particles glittering in its wake from its atmospheric overspill. From a great distance the wake looked like a thin silver ribbon spiralling lazily away into space. Up close it was almost a snowstorm.