Ethan opened his case warily. Inside were two clear disks with tiny gold poles attache—something to hold the contacts while putting them on. The top of the case was a pocket-sized mirror.
“That’s why your eyes glow . . .” Ethan heard his son say.
“Yes,” Rovik replied.
Ethan grabbed the first pole between thumb and forefinger and used the mirror to put it on. Immediately a group of semi-transparent blue frames appeared around the edges of his vision, but they were all too blurry for him to decipher.
Beside him, Alara stirred. “If I’m constantly in contact with your planetary network, there must be a powerful transmitter in these. Is the radiation dangerous to us . . . or to a baby?”
“No, our communication systems are instantaneous and they do not generate radiation the way yours do. It is perfectly safe.”
Ethan put in the second contact and suddenly the blue frames snapped into focus. In one of them he saw the weather, and a pair of news headlines. They read, Fires still burning above the Celestial Wall and Omnius Rallies the Strategians for War. Other frames gave him information about himself, Heart Rate 92, Cholesterol Levels High, Projected Lifespan 76. Ethan squeezed his eyes shut to make the display go away. It was back again as soon as he opened them. His pulse pounded in his ears and he watched his HR jump to 105. How dare Omnius tell him how long he was going to live!
He heard Alara gasp. Others around the table were having similar reactions. Ethan turned to his wife, “What is it?”
She shook her head, her violet eyes now glowing with an alien brightness. He watched her lips part in a smile. “Our baby! It’s a girl!”
“What?” Ethan’s anger faded, replaced by a spreading warmth that made his head feel suddenly light and airy, like the whole world had just suddenly become a better place. Alara’s grin spread from her lips to his, and he grabbed her face in his hands and kissed it. “How do you know?”
“Because I can see her! I’m watching . . . I’m watching her now. Oh she’s so beautiful. . . .”
“How? Where?” Ethan shook his head, trying to find where he could see the same thing on his display.
Master Rovik came up behind them and laid a hand on each of their shoulders. “Ethan, focus on the bottom corner of the display. Where it says link, then think about your wife. A confirmation dialog will appear. Think yes. Alara, you have to confirm the visual link.”
Ethan did as he was told, and a moment later he was watching their baby, too, in full 3D, and what he supposed had to be simulated color. She was beautiful. Incredulous, Ethan turned to Master Rovik. “How are we able to see this?”
“Your Lifelinks were also designed to monitor your bodies, not just your brains. Among other things, the ability to image your bodies provides Omnius with a way to see mortal wounds before you die, so he can transfer your mind away before you suffer unduly. He can see a tumor growing before you know it’s there, or yes, watch a baby growing in its mother’s womb.”
Ethan opened his mouth for a cutting remark, but he quickly shut it again and turned wordlessly away to focus on his daughter’s tiny hands and feet. She looked so fragile, her body small and head too big. You don’t have a Lifelink yet, he thought. No one watching you except for us. You’ve got no cares in the world—just sleep and sweet baby dreams.
His hand found Alara’s and he held on tight, his resolve hardening faster than molten duranium. He knew he had to protect their daughter, to keep her safe from the world she would be born into. Avilon, with all of its pre-supposed perfection was plagued by a force much more insidious and frightening than the Sythians had ever been—Omnius, the AI god of Avilon, a force so powerful that it could even predict the future . . . and maybe even make those predictions come true, he thought.
Try as they might, the Sythians had never done anything that scary.
* * *
After breakfast they walked out onto the terrace and around the side of the palace to a broad gray platform. There a shuttle craft was hovering down for a landing, the sun reflecting brightly off its hull. Atton’s eyes were somehow automatically shielded from the glare by the augmented reality contacts he wore, so he could see that the shuttle was shaped like a disk. The edges of the disk were transparent, and he could see rows of empty seats running around the rim, looking out. A name and ship type appeared on his ARC display. Bright yellow text hovered above the shuttle as it drew near—the Sightseer, a Quantum Space Jumper.
“Why send a transport to give us a tour of Celesta when they could just teleport us from one place to another?” Atton wondered aloud.
“Maybe they want us to appreciate the journey, not just the destination,” Ceyla suggested, giving his hand a squeeze.
“Maybe.”
All six of the Peacekeepers who’d joined them for breakfast stood with the refugees, waiting for the transport to land. As soon as it did, Master Rovik, the one with the cape, turned and gestured for them to follow. They boarded the shuttle and took seats along the rim, facing a floor-to-ceiling viewport that wrapped around under their feet and curved overhead. The Peacekeepers sat with them, spacing themselves out along the rim of the shuttle. Master Rovik disappeared behind a door that Atton supposed led to the cockpit, somewhere in the center of the disk-shaped craft.
“What’s the first stop?” Ceyla asked the Peacekeeper who was sitting down beside her.
He turned to her with glowing yellow eyes. “You will see,” was all he said.
The shuttle rose off the ground, giving an aerial view of the countryside around the top of Destiny Tower. There were dozens of mansions like the one they’d awoken in, gently rolling fields of grass and majestic trees filled the gaps between them. The nearest mansion was about a kilometer away. There Atton saw another transport like theirs, a bright speck hovering in for a landing. A small group of white-robed people waited on the landing pad below.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones going on a tour,” Atton said, pointing to the second transport.
“Are they refugees, too?” Ceyla asked.
This time Atton read the Peacekeeper’s name from the glowing blue text that appeared above his head—Templar Delon Tarn (Acolyte).
“They are Avilonian children,” Delon replied.
Ceyla nodded. “Master Rovik mentioned something about that last night. Do all of your children have to go through The Choosing?”
“Yes.”
“When did you go through yours?”
“At the same time as everyone else. Age eight.”
“Eight? How can you possibly be expected to choose where you will live for the rest of your life when you’re eight years old?”
“For most children The Choosing is just a formality. It is a chance to learn how the other half—or third—lives.”
“But some children choose to go to the Null Zone.”
“Yes. Some do.”
“Do their families have to follow them?”
“No.”
Ceyla gaped at the Peacekeeper. “What? You send them into the Null zone alone?”
“No one sends them. Those who choose to go, go freely. There are institutions to look after them.”
“That’s barbaric!”
“Barbarism is the product of free will. If we weren’t free to choose, we wouldn’t be responsible for our actions. Even children are accountable.”
“But you can’t expect kids to make the right choices when they’re still so young!”
Atton chimed in, “Why make people choose at all?”
The Peacekeeper fixed Atton with his yellow-eyed gaze. “Would you like to live in paradise with a body that ages, sickens, and dies? You would eventually die and be forced to resurrect anyway.”
Atton shook his head. “It should at least be an option to live in Etheria with the body you were born with.”
Ceyla scowled. “How do you know you’re not going to kill all of those kids when they transfer to their perfected bodies?”
Delon’s yellow eye
s narrowed. “Are you suggesting that what we are is more than physical matter?”
“I’d say it was more than a suggestion,” Ceyla put in. She was an Etherian—the old kind—which meant that she believed in Etheria as a place that existed on some other plane of existence with a good god named Etherus who was the creator of the universe and ruler of Etheria. “Omnius’s Lifelink implants are just a technological version of the immortal soul, and Omnius is a human-made version of Etherus,” she said.
The Peacekeeper’s lip twitched. “Your religion was founded on rumors of life on Avilon. There is no life after this one, so I suggest you accept Omnius’s offer to preserve the one you have. You don’t need to die, Miss Corbin.”
Ceyla replied through gritted teeth, “The Etherian religion pre-dates Omnius and his so-called paradise.”
“Really?” Delon cocked his head. “Show me the proof of that, and I will shout it from the highest rooftops. I will personally lead a rebellion to overthrow Omnius and stop The Choosing once and for all.”
“Aren’t you afraid Omnius will hear you?” Atton asked through a smirk.
“I would never actually lead a rebellion against Him, because you can’t prove that Omnius has been lying to us. We are not atheists by choice; we are atheists because no one, not even Omnius, can find proof of a life that exists beyond this one. One of the reasons for The Choosing is to weed out those who are susceptible to creationistic thinking. They would seek to undermine our entire way of life.” Delon shook his head. “Those people will never tolerate the idea that this is all there is, and we will never tolerate their insistence that it isn’t, so we live apart, with the religious fools living in shadows and governed by chaos, while the enlightened live in the light, governed by the truth.”
Ceyla shook her head furiously, blond hair flaring over her shoulders, her blue eyes wild and flashing. “You are the fool,” she whispered.
The Peacekeeper smirked and looked away, ending the conversation. Atton looked away, too. The Peacekeeper’s arguments troubled him in a way he couldn’t explain. He wasn’t religious. He wasn’t an atheist either. So what did it matter?
And yet, it did matter.
In the distance, the horizon appeared as a misty white line of tall buildings, shimmering in the morning sun. The seemingly endless countryside around the palace where they’d spent the night came to an abrupt end. Atton recalled the night sky, with all its shining stars, and he wondered about that. If the city lay all around them, the light from it had to be filtered out somehow or they wouldn’t see the stars. No doubt the same something hid the skyscrapers from view when they were standing on the ground. Smoke and mirrors, Atton thought. It was tough to tell how much of what they saw on Avilon was simulated and how much of it was real.
The shuttle was still rising, now hovering at least 500 meters off the ground, but ground was a deceptive concept, since the rooftops below them, which formed the ground level of Celesta, were themselves a full kilometer above the real surface of the planet.
The shuttle spun in a slow circle to give them all a 360-degree view of their surroundings. Buildings rose up everywhere in the distance. Bright green parks adorned the rooftops of the low-rise buildings, and shimmering cascades of water skipped from one level of the city to another. In the very hazy distance, Atton could see a mid-level series of bridges or elevated streets criss-crossing between the highest buildings. Above and below those streets, faint, blurry black lines of air traffic etched the sky.
It looked so peaceful, so orderly and neat—a sharp contrast from the night before when the Sythians had turned it all into a raging inferno.
After the shuttle had made a full rotation, it suddenly leapt forward, but none of them felt the tug of movement. Countryside raced by beneath their feet. It ran to an abrupt end with a blue river of light that ran around the top of Destiny Tower—the shield that separated Celesta from Etheria. It was hexagonally segmented and semi-transparent, revealing the city of Etheria below. Then came the jagged rise and fall of low-rise towers and neatly organized parks. Narrow footpaths ran along the rooftops, and Atton spotted a train, running on elevated tracks. There were no streets on the ground for cars, but plenty of landing pads where they could hover down in front of the buildings.
Atton turned back to the Peacekeeper. “Why do you have transports on Avilon if you could just teleport from one place to another?”
“Because teleporting, as you call it, is expensive. Quantum jump drives are cheaper for long, interstellar distances, but for planetary travel we only make quantum jumps when time is of the essence.”
“That makes sense . . .” Atton said, quietly relieved that he wouldn’t have to go through the disorienting process of jumping every time he wanted to go somewhere. “Where are we going?”
“You will see,” Delon replied, repeating the short answer he’d given a few minutes ago.
Atton frowned, and Ceyla whispered to him, “What’s with all the mystery?”
He shook his head. “Another part of Omnius’s shock and awe program.”
“Well, I’m running out of awe. He’s already laying it on a bit thick,” she replied.
Atton knew what she was talking about. The reunion with their loved ones in the clouds was a good example. Why reunite them in the sky, and use technological wizardry to make them all think they were somehow floating above the clouds? He had a feeling Omnius was using technology to inspire reverence. Omnius grando est, he thought, recalling the words of praise he’d heard last night. Back then he hadn’t known what they’d meant, but he’d managed to guess—Great is Omnius.
Maybe by the end of the week he’d be chanting that, too.
Chapter 8
Bretton took off the helmet and sat back in his chair, slowly blinking in the sterile white light of Dag’s operating room. Dag had grown tired of standing at his control console and he was now slumping on a stool, wide-eyed with shock. Despite warning Farah to keep the engine running and keep a lookout for trouble, he’d told her to join him inside Dag’s shop right after the initial revelation that the man they’d rescued was a Sythian agent. She was seated in a chair next to his, now yanking off her helmet, too.
“I wasn’t expectin’ that,” Dag said simply.
“You think the Etherians know about this?” Farah asked.
“If they do, they’ve been awful quiet,” Bretton said. Etherians were allowed to visit their loved ones in the Null Zone, but Nulls were not allowed to visit them in Etheria. That one-way flow of traffic brought with it the occasional news from the Uppers, but it was far from an official source, and Omnius didn’t allow his people to share everything they knew. Perhaps this was one of the things they were keeping to themselves?
Farah busied herself with peeling a few sweaty blond locks of hair off her forehead. They’d had their heads inside those helmets for hours while Dag took them on a guided tour of Commander Lenon Donali’s treacherous mind.
It wasn’t Donali’s fault that he was a traitor; he’d been made into a Sythian agent against his will, but now that Bretton knew the whole story, he couldn’t help feeling like Donali’s capture had been a stroke of fate.
“So we’re all Sythians,” Farah said.
“Not exactly. They’re still millions of years down the evolutionary chain from us. That makes them alien enough,” Bretton said.
“But they used to be humans,” Farah replied.
Bretton nodded.
“I’m more surprised that there have been two Great Wars,” Farah said. “One in this galaxy, and one in theirs. History repeated itself even after we should have known better.”
“Maybe we forgot.”
“Omnius is right to make us choose,” Dag mused. “Immortals and mortals can’t live together without slaughterin’ each other over their beliefs.”
“Do you think Omnius knows all this?” Farah asked.
“If someone out there with a working Lifelink knows about it, then so does he,” Bretton replied.
“Simple, Omnius lied,” Bretton said.
Dag shook his head. “Lyin’ ain’t the same as omission. When you know everythin’ there is to know, ain’t possible to share it all.”
Bretton smiled thinly. “We’re not talking about demystifying quantum indeterminacy to predict the future. We’re talking about the origins of our race. Omnius doesn’t share everything he knows because if he did, he wouldn’t have the upper hand anymore.”
Dag shrugged. “What’s it matter if he hid that from us?”
Bretton gave an incredulous snort. “If he’s hiding where we came from, maybe that’s not all he’s hiding. We need something to open peoples’ eyes, to make them see what Omnius really is, and why they should shut him down. This could be it.”
“Even if you get it right, they’ll never all see that at once,” Dag replied. “And I’m not sure we can shut him down. You’re wastin’ your life with bitterness, Bret, and it’s goin’ to get you killed.”
“Just because it’s personal doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You can hide down here and pretend we’re not oppressed because Omnius more or less keeps his nose out of our affairs, but we’re stuck. Children are the future, and we aren’t having any. When was the last time anyone down here got a breeding license? Never. They’re too expensive.”
“Lots of unlisted Nulls get illegally fertilized and have kids without a breeding license,” Farah said. “They can afford to feed and clothe their kids, but that’s it. No money for education or health care. That’s why the government makes us pay before we have any children. I’m no fan of Omnius, but we can’t blame him for all of our problems.”
Dag nodded along with Farah’s arguments. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you should listen to your partner, Bret. She’s a smart one, and she’ll keep you out of trouble.”
Dark Space: Avilon Page 9