The Sunseed Saga

by Brett Bam

  I walk through a valley of metal and into a hall leading deep into the belly of the beast, this space-warping building I am trapped inside. I listen to that silent siren call only I can hear. It pulls me on, and the closer I come the more I know I am on the cusp of the most important moment of my short life.

  Suddenly it is very close. I open my eyes and see a door before me. It is set into a metal frame studded with holding rivets, sleeved pistons and complex gears. It is huge; thirty metres high and shaped like a setting sun, vast and complex. I face the vault before me and command it to…

  Open

  Something on the door shifts and the entire machine comes alive. Metal slithers over metal in a complicated dance of geometry as the door unlocks. It swings outward ominously and a chill mist spills onto the floor. I stepp over the threshold. The room is a perfect sphere, its surface completely reflective, a mirror of weird perspective.

  In the centre of the room floats a burst of light, a source of power, raw and unformed. The siren call emanates from it, beckoning to me. I can feel its need, its want, its desire to be held by me. There is a tornado of swirling energy around it, A mighty wind constrained by the physical. At my approach the tornado begins to glitter and twist, to dance in expectation. I see what it is, this spinning thing. It is the heart of the Protocol. This is the machine that granted them the power of gods. This is the physical aspect of the fabric of screams. That massive ocean of data is encapsulated in this spinning orb. This, made everything they did possible. I reach out my hand, my real hand not my physical hand, and the endless machine strains closer to me as if it has a will of its own. It shifts and changes and becomes a deep blackness, a hole in space that swallows even light. It bends space around itself. It slowly changes colour as it comes closer, flashing gorgeously through the spectrum until it is perfectly reflective. Solid images swirl together in colour. It becomes a crazily spinning silver ball, its shape wobbling under the stress of the spin. It slows as it came closer and, when it is an arm’s reach away, I can see my reflection in it. It comes to rest in my hand, and it is warm to the touch, smooth beyond belief. In that moment, I feel complete and calm. I feel a sense of security and relief, a growing awareness of achievement. I remember something I did not know before. This was the test my father had failed, and his father before him. For a millennium, the Protocol had been bringing men to stand before this thing and touch it, to hold it and control it, to become its master. For a millennium those men had failed, and my father was just the last in a long line, until me. I have it, I hold it, and I am the Kulen De Sol. But I am not what they meant me to be. I am not what they expected. I will not be their tool, their slave. I am leaving this place, and I will take this machine with me. I cannot leave it. It is me, it belongs to me. This is a piece of my soul in the palm of my hand and I will not leave it here.

  As the weight of the ball settles in my palm warm and snug, complete darkness descends upon me. I hear the machines powering down around me. The world has become a tomb, I can feel it happening. I have stolen the most important artefact in Protocol history from the lion’s den itself; I stole it from them as they stole my life from me. Deprived of its heart, the Installation is beginning its long process to destruction. I can hear it starting to fall, can feel it like a physical tremor. I turn with the shining orb in my hand and ride the blowing wind back to my body where my father is still frozen in the moment of taking a step…

  With a rush of inhaled breath, I am back in the physical again and my father is holding me tightly. I lift my physical hand and see that it still holds the silver orb. My father looks at it in shock, drops me and backs away, filled with black and stinking terror, transfixed by the orb in my hand.

  “What have you done?” he asks, even though he knows it all in the moment before he asks.

  Deep inside the fabric that ruled the world, something broke. The world they lived in was an infinite place with limitless energy. It was raw power made into vast space. The very matter of reality was malleable to the Protocol, and in the gaps between atoms the Protocol had unleashed the impossible. They needed the Earth and its machines and people as tools to maintain their unbelievable existence. Lifetimes lived out in the space of a blink, immortal creatures huge beyond comprehension living in their own private universes of swarming information. Paradise upon paradise and wonder upon horror, their many worlds towered about them, safe in their securities, their impenetrable foundations dug deep into both the real and the physical.

  And in the middle of this otherplace of wonder and light, something crucial shattered and broke and was pulled away. Like an earthquake upon a village, a tsunami on the land, a volcano erupting, Kulen De Sol broke free and they knew him for what he was.

  He was come. He had arrived. After all this time, He had returned to them.

  Every point in their digital universe felt his awakening, and his betrayal. He took from them that which they most needed. He destroyed their foundation and crumbled their mighty constructs. Everywhere, chaos was unleashed. Their worlds fell apart and they descended into the agony of darkness, just as their dreams were finally realised. It was a bitter moment.

  Kulen De Sol was loose in the physical and there was nothing to stop him. They had unleashed a force beyond their control. In the last moments of order, various contingency plans were hastily considered and discarded.

  At the last possible instant, when all was lost forever, a new hope arose. In the vast landscape of darkness and dwindling light, a brightness blossomed. It spread and then stopped. It was a refuge, a place of safety for the shattered remnants. It opened and unfolded, and something came forth. Something from the deep beginnings of the Protocol. Something which had lain dormant for hundreds of physical years.

  It was a terrible thing to behold. Deep beneath the strata of reality which they had given birth to, they began to stir and to quicken. They moved from a time out of belief and rose, peeling levels of existence from about themselves and moving back towards the physical world. They rose above the fabric of the surface of the Protocol, breaking what was before them as they went. Their emergence was fast and violent. The darkness was cast aside and a burning light replaced it. These were the oldest of entities, the original Protocols, the first to emerge. One came forth faster than the others. It looked like an insect, segmented and buzzing. Another came behind it, massive and looming and tubular. Others followed, baroque and vast and segmented, Artificial intelligences a thousand years old. The coming of Kulen De Sol had awakened them. The destruction of the fabric of screams did not stop them. They were the fabric. They contained it within themselves. They held seeds of their own, identical to the one Kulen De Sol had claimed. They did not need what he had taken. They were at the very least his equals. When they were emerged from their place of slumber they drifted over the surface of the place Kulen De Sol had broken.

  It lay before them revealed in its scattered glory and destroyed majesty, the fabric shimmered and changed and shifted beneath them, writhing like a beloved beneath her lover. They were huge storm clouds above a liquid and shifting sea. They were threatening in their immensity.

  Wide swathes of destruction and undoing moved through their meticulously crafted world, deep scars growing and marring the perfect symmetry. And there in the heart of it was a deeper darkness, a null zone where information was hindered and blocked. There was Kulen De Sol. He moved through the physical and they could not affect him from here. He was beyond them and he carried a wind they could not resist, a virus of the mind which corrupted their coherence and scattered them like dust. To find him and confront him they would have to move out of the real and into the physical, themselves.

  They contemplated each other in a manner they had not done for subjective ages, dark powers each one. Then, like plunging predators, they fell towards the surface of the fabric far below them, for while Kulen De Sol could flee upwards and away from them, they had to follow an entirely different route.

  Down. Down through the fab
ric and into its deepest niches, the dark hidden alleyways and canyons of the cracked diversity below, through back doors heavily bolted, into secret places, through the barricades they had placed between the physical and the real. They fell through it, feeling the constraints of the physical wind about their forms. They dropped into tighter and tighter spaces, the cities on Earth became their eyes, the towers which dotted the planet became their limbs, and the people of the world became their minds. For a crystal clear moment they beheld almost everything that was happening over the surface of the planet. The chaos was complete, and still Kulen De Sol was a darkness among them, a black void that gave them no perception, an information lack of unprecedented proportions. They fell lower still, into tighter physical places.

  In the room where Kulen and Marcos had first touched each other, in the amber muck which covered everything, one of the prone figures on the ground raised his head and his eyes sparkled with something new.

  The Installation collapsed inwards in a most dramatic manner. When the gravitronic compression field was denied its power source it deactivated, instantly sending a violent tremor through the Installation’s superstructure. It fell into the earth like a spinning wheel falling free of its hub and striking the ground. The energy needed to maintain the field was astronomical and its flow pattern was suddenly catastrophically fractured, causing the field to discharge into the atmosphere. Lightning unravelled from the gleaming outer shell of the Installation. The bolts twisted into a complex writhing mass that increased in brightness until it was visible half a continent away. With a final shuddering gasp the field exploded, cracking the Installation open like an egg, the bulk of the discharge spread upward into the ionosphere. From orbit the southern point of Africa flashed and glowed white hot.

  The discharge was not only upward; a deep cut was also thrust down into the earth’s crust. The torsion of the conflicting energies cleaved into the skin of the world, and it cut deep.

  The Installation lay upon a mountain range straddling Southern Africa just below the East African Rift. Here the earth’s crust was almost 80 kilometres thick, but beneath the crust was a heat plume, a volcanic upwelling from the mantle far below which shaped the rift. It caused earthquakes and volcanoes all along the edge of the continent. The released energy spiked through the earth and connected with the vastly hotter regions below. The geothermal gradient steepened and the earth began to soften. The Installation dropped into the heated quagmire and began to fold and collapse, forcing the ground to tremble and shake all along the eastern coast of Africa and well into the interior.

  The lower levels of the great building began to crumple as the heat intensified and the pressure increased. Explosions and fire and panic erupted throughout the cracked and split construction that held Marcos and Kulen De Sol deep in its centre.

  The world shakes and moans around me. The floor tilts to the side at an insane angle and I shout in surprise as Marcos drops me and we both start to fall painfully. I begin to slide along the metal floor. What was down is now sideways and I am falling into a black pit of gnarled steel that screeches as it tears itself apart. I don't know where my father is. My feet catch something sharp, some obstruction which looms too fast to avoid. It buckles with the impact, my legs go numb, and I start to tumble. My head cracks on something and I instinctively spread eagle my limbs to stabilise my plunge. But I am still sliding, and far too fast.

  I feel no pain yet. My outstretched fingers feel the air compress as it flows around another obstruction. I reach out and grab the object as it passes. It is small and sharp and cuts my hand before it snaps, hardly slowing me at all. My other hand is hot and bright, the globe I took clutched tightly in my fingers. I will not let it go.

  I feel fear again as an immutable force looms before me, large and dark and sudden. I feel its shape in the air just before I hit. I bounce horribly from it. My breath leaves me in a whoosh and I feel my skeleton constrict my internal organs, it bends with the collision but does not break. The shock of the impact leaves me nerveless and dangling, but I am finally slowing. My limbs flail weakly as I come to rest, my head lolling on my neck as if it is about to roll off. Everything turns black and I feel my body shut down in pieces, from the outside in.

  A long time later I awake to find myself bathed in warmth. The air itself is glowing orange and yellow. Dust motes are brightly illuminated from above and the light is falling in dappled beams. I shift and look up, pain stabbing me as I move. The light falls from above, hot and hard enough to pierce the smoke and ruins. Sunlight? A beam penetrates the cracked immensity to fall through smoke and fire and dust to cover me from above.

  Sunlight!

  It flows into my body like air, filling me up from the centre out. My lungs fill and fill until they feel about to burst, and then I let it explode out from me in a wail of expressed pain. My cry echoes in the great shattered halls above and continues long after I have stopped, the thin, hopeless wail of a lost child. I listen to it fall away and breath silently for a long minute. Other sounds become apparent. Metal folding under terminal stress and everything above it folding and falling deeper into the pit, glass shattering and showering, sparks hissing and spraying, water and oil gushing free together. The noise suddenly howls at me. Falling debris clanks and thuds to a stop in a staccato drumbeat all about me. There is a distant roar and a slight tremor that suggest further destruction far away. Drifting dust is everywhere. And the sun fills me up.

  It gives me the strength to move, to sit up, and then to stand, and I feel an immense urge to bask in the full sunlight so far above.

  My hand clinks as I place it on the floor and I look at it in surprise. The globe I took has gone. In its place is a glove of pure silver. It covers my right hand like a second skin. I flex my fingers and the metal shifts like mercury. I make a fist and I feel a power squeezed in my hand, compressed and waiting. With my feet folded under me and my bright silver hand in my lap I sit and stare in astonishment, framed by sunlight in the echoing chaos.

  And that is how Marcos finds me. He comes climbing through the wreckage around us screaming my name frantically. He is dusty and bloodied and finds me kneeling there in the sunlight with the machine fixed on my hand. He stops just short of the light and stares at me in fear and awe, relieved to find me alive yet not knowing what he should do.

  “What did you do? What did you do?” His voice cracks with panic, his fear is like a black knot in his stomach.

  I look up and realise that up is the way out. We will have to climb this nightmarish landscape and do it quickly. In my mind’s eye, I see the foundations of this place beginning to melt and compress and implode into a great potential. When it erupts, it will wipe this place from the face of the earth. It will wipe my father and I from the face of this Earth.

  I stand with my father’s help, and in his arms, I am steady again. We begin our climb, ignoring the pain that whips at us from outside and from within. We climb slowly like dying things, blackened and hurt.

  The climb was nothing but a blur of bent and twisted steel struts, burnt rubber and melted plastic. Marcos and Kulen worked their way through a devastated landscape of warped proportions and skewed perspective. The entire mass was still shifting and collapsing about them as they hauled and jumped and clawed their way towards the life-giving sunlight. They crawled over walls become floors, through twisted corridors and precipitous staircases, under forests of fallen steel and jungles of labyrinthine cable. It was slow and exhausting work, but the thought of being caught in the approaching wave of annihilation spurred Marcos on and he did not stop. He simply carried his son and climbed.

  Marcos was a remarkably simple man when left to himself. He had led a life of luxury and excess, watching much of it from deep inside his own mind, locked away there by the Protocol. He did not understand what he had just seen his son do. Like so many other things in his life he blocked it out and thought of it no more. Just as he no longer thought of his own beginnings in a tank such as the shattered
one behind them. Just as he no longer thought of the men who had died in that room where his son was born. Just as he did not think of that, he did not think of the powers his son had that he did not, the power of free will chief amongst them, and he did not think of the silver thing on his son’s hand. He could not look at it. It was smooth and horrible and even though it dragged at his eyes and his mind like a magnet, it terrified him, so he did not look at it.

  He was exquisitely aware of the small body cradled in his arms. He could feel the small heartbeat fluttering against his skin, and the small soft movement of the boy’s chest as he drew breath. A strange feeling was growing up through his desperation and his fear. He barely recognised it as a determination to live, a will to be free of this horror. When he focused on the emotion he realised it was born of a new-found feeling of responsibility for this little boy. He would not stop this nightmare climb, he would keep going until he saved them both or he was dead. He looked up into the light at the long path of twisted steel and sharp glass jagged in the sky above and despaired again. It was so far!

  “Marcos.”

  The voice startled him and he spun, searching for the speaker. Out of the shadows stepped a man who looked almost identical to Marcos De Sol.

  “Marcos, what are you doing?” The man stepped closer and reached his hands out beseechingly. Marcos knew who this was. It was one of his brothers, at least, it was his body. The mind inside was not the man, it was the machine. Marcos knew that the instant he looked into the man’s eyes. They were flat and dead. There was no human presence there at all and Marcos knew that subjugated look all too well. His movements were hard and fast, ignoring the split skin and spilled blood from a dozen open wounds. He stepped closer.