“Umn mast ansa. Infamashn of vapon, hav.”
“From your sub-space communications. But exactly how, I have no idea, I swear. Look, maybe you can read my mind. If you can, please, go ahead. You will see how insignificant I am in the military chain.” There was an awfully long silence. I prepped myself for another “splat” in case they did not like the answer… but nothing happened. All of a sudden, my point of view shifted again, and I bumped my back into a cold hard surface. I realized that I was spread on my back on the floor and looking up at the ceiling. I felt like throwing up.
Now that they had their answers, I did not see the value of them keeping River and me alive. What would they do to us? My best guess was that the end was near. There were no diplomatic relations between us and them, and thus a prisoner exchange would be pointless. Our lives were worth nothing except what little information we could provide, and it looked like we had already played that card.
I struggled to stay awake, but my body was weak. Eventually I fell asleep.
***
I experienced no dreams. No visual dreams. Through the heavy veil of the dark abyss, I heard Ebony’s voice: “Mazula, wake up. We need to escape.”
Eventually, I woke up and saw Ebony sitting next to me and staring without saying a word. “Oh hi! Glad to see you’re ok.” Ebony did not respond, but in my head I heard a thought:
“Don’t talk, think. They may be listening.”
Great. I was hallucinating.
I picked myself up from the floor and touched Ebony by the shoulder.
“This is real, Mazula. Don’t be an idiot.”
I heard the thought again, but Ebony’s lips were not moving.
Thoughts kept streaming: “Mazula, I can transmit my thoughts to you. It’s a long story, but this is the reason I am in the military. Well, part of the reason anyway.”
Ebony shrugged her shoulders and gave a faint smile.
“Ebony? What’s going on?” I said aloud.
This time she responded audibly.
“Mazula, what’s not clear about not speaking? Concentrate!”
“Ok, ok! Yes, ma’am!” I said, still audibly.
“An experimental device in my brain amplifies my brain waves and transfers them to you, bypassing your hearing system. You’ll get used to it. And yes, you can respond, but you must concentrate, as if you are typing each word. Visualize typing and saying these words out loud. Try it.”
“EBONY,” I “typed” in my head. She responded:
“Yes?”
“WHAT THE HELL?”
“We don’t have time for this, Mazula! We need to run! We are in big trouble!”
“YOU THINK? I’M GLAD YOU’RE CHIPPER NOW BUT I’VE BEEN THROWN AROUND HERE AND, TRUST ME, I KNOW JUST HOW MUCH TROUBLE WE ARE IN.”
I hoped my spelling was correct.
“Slow down! Try shorter sentences! It comes to me scrambled.”
“OK, READ MY EYES.” I gave her a stare. Ebony chuckled. “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR LEG,” I thought slowly.
“They took care of it. When you jumped off the cliff, they pushed me over right after you. I ended up in a room like this one. I was immobilized, as if bound by a force field. The Unkari came in and out several times, then they purged their atmosphere and poured breathable air. I had no other choice than to breathe in, because my headgear spontaneously retracted.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how, but it did. The room was empty at that point. Then I saw a cloud, or maybe a colonial organism, like a bee hive, but it looked like fog, translucent, yet somehow intentional.”
“I know what you mean. I saw it too.”
“The cloud coated my leg, and healed it. I don’t understand why would they bother though.”
“What did they ask you?” I was getting better at this strange communication.
“Nothing.”
“At all?”
“Not a word. I didn’t talk to anyone. After my leg was healed, the headgear popped up, the purge routine was repeated, and their atmosphere was restored. Some time later, the guards came back, threw a cloth on my head, and brought me here. I did not see where they were taking me, but I counted steps. This place is about 500 meters away, unless they walked me in circles.”
“Can you do a mind meld too?”
“Why would I blend my mind?”
“Never mind.”
“Anyway, I’ll explain it to you later, when we are safe. Also, if it makes you feel better, this project is classified and highly experimental. That’s why I couldn’t tell you before. But if we don’t get out soon, there will be no Ebony to court-martial. For now, just know that it works, and that they know our language better than they speak it. Talking audibly is not safe.”
“Do you remember anything about that jump? How did we get here? Where is here?”
“Good question. Let me check B5 for our coordinates.”
“I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Ebony out loud and stuck her wrist towards me. The monitor showed long lines of numbers. Those were the coordinates, but I couldn’t make any sense of them just by looking at them. Reading my confusion, Ebony swiped the monitor and pulled the menu with the stellar classification.
Star name: Gliese 581
Spectral type: M3V, red dwarf
“I’ll be damned. I know that much. We are in our neck of the woods, it’s only about twenty light-years away from Earth,” I thought.
To be clear, it still wasn’t walking distance home. But not only we were in our galaxy, we were in one of the nearest star systems.
“Ebony, do we have a colony there?” I thought.
“No. There are no planets with the right habitable conditions. For humans, that is.”
“Can we tell which planet exactly are we on?”
“The GPS gives me only the coordinates of the star. But let’s think logically. The Unkari live in cold places. Their main chemical elements are methane, nitrogen, and hydrogen. So we are looking for an ice ball. Let’s look at what kind of planets are here.” She started swiping the monitor, pulling the profile of each planet in the Gliese 581 system.
Here is what we came up with:
581b was the first planet. It was a hot, Venus-like gaseous ball. Hot was not good.
581c and 581d were also warm by Unkari standards, and the chemical compositions were too different from the typical Unkari habitat.
That left us with two other planets.
We did not have a lot of data on them, but we had some approximations of temperatures, and both of them were very, very cold, just like Erinozhan. Could we have existed next to the Unkari all this time? Did the Unkari move here recently and, if so, when? Most importantly, did they possess the technology of stable wormholes? If our B5 data was correct, we had covered an enormous distance in one leap, from the Erinozhan underground canyon to the Gliese 581 system. We had no answers to any of these questions. But, at the very least, we had a faint glimpse of hope. First, Ebony was in good shape again, and we could think of an escape. Second, when it came to escaping, it seemed that our chances had now significantly improved. Still we had no transport, but those were just the details that we had to work out, one at a time.
12
INTACT MEMORIES
Four days had passed since River and I were captured. Apparently, our captors wanted to know why humans invaded Unkari territory. Whenever they didn’t like the answer, they killed us in countless horrible deaths, only to bring us back to life for more questioning.
“Video game. We’re in a game,” I thought to River, who, as I had just found out, had a top-secret military gadget in her brain allowing non-verbal communication, or NVC as she liked to call it. I thought it was funny how adamant River was that I call it NVC, because telepathy according to her is something you threaten your children with when
they change a password to their grade record, at which point I couldn’t help but notice that it sounded a bit too personal. But then, what do I know about the childhood of a human race made up of genetically enhanced geniuses?
“Video game? Mmm… Not an accurate term, but I get it. It seems that we are nudged to make certain choices, and whenever we choose wrong, the sequence repeats,” River thought back.
“We go back to the previous level. When we complete the level correctly, we move on. But River, this is insane! If I understand you correctly, we are not in any Augmented Reality (AR) environment. Think about the magnitude of technology it would take to manipulate our very existence!”
“AR can be affirmatively ruled out, Mazula. Our cat suits are integrated with our parameters down to the molecular level. Aging leaves specific traces in the chromosomes. With each cellular division, chromosomes are copied, but the new copied chromosomes are shorter than the previous one. There are forty-six chromosomes in each cell. Each one of them is like an individual clock. Monitor ten cells, and you get 460 synchronous measurements. Our cat suits measure millions of cells simultaneously. That’s an impressive degree of reliability and validity, if you ask me.”
“Wait, wouldn’t we age in the AR? You know, every time we take a virtual vacation or watch a movie, we still age.”
“True. But virtual time and real time never match. Say if you take a two-week virtual vacation, you actually spend five minutes of real time. Thanks to our atomic clocks integrated in the B5, we know exactly how much we have aged. There is no discrepancy between the real time, measured with the atomic clock, and our cellular age, according to the chromosome measurements. We are not in a simulated environment, trust me on that. I analyzed it since the first loop and checked all the parameters I could think of. It is something else.”
I racked my brain over this puzzle and could not come up with anything. However, if the genetically enhanced genius from the 4th Orbital Colony could not figure it out, why should I even bother? “Ebony, is it true that all your people have photographic memories?”
Ebony leaned against the wall of our holding cell, mulling over something in her B5.
“For the most part,” she thought without lifting here eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“We are born with the full standard package. It includes enhanced health, and athletic and cognitive capacities. Eidetic memory is part of the package.” She emphasized the eidetic. River was really into naming everything properly. “Sometimes, rarely, an individual may choose to switch it off. This procedure is irreversible, so my people think carefully before they commit to it.”
“Why would someone decide to switch it off?”
“Personal reasons. Experiencing war would be one of them. You don’t want to perpetually remember every sensory input when you are injured or tortured.”
“Do you remember?”
“Yes.” Ebony finally looked me in the eyes.
“I’m sorry. It must be hard. Now I think I understand why your people stay away from conflicts and the military.”
“Now you do.”
“Did you consider switching off before enlisting?”
“Yes, I did. But the military was explicit that if they were to start a diplomatic conflict over my asylum on Earth Prime, I’d have to be intact.“
“Is that what they call it?”
“Sounds objectifying, doesn’t it?”
I smiled faintly. I couldn’t tell why, but somehow it did sound pejorative. I also thought that Ebony was not such a bad soldier after all, I mean, considering. At first, I thought that she was a grouch. She didn’t deal well with being injured, true. Now that I learned about the price she paid for enlisting, I regretted being so quick to judge. It was obvious that she was on her first field mission. What was General Parietti thinking? I promised myself to never vote for the Sinkor Administration again. In fact, I considered leaking everything that went wrong with this mission. All of this would have been avoided if not for the knee-jerk leadership style of one very powerful, paranoid, and xenophobic general.
Leaning against the wall, Ebony kept working something out on her wrist monitor.
“Ebony, do you have trees on the 4th Orbital?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Have you seen an ebony tree?”
“Ah, no, not really. I know what they look like from pictures. Why?”
“Ebony trees are native to where I am from. They grow all over the West Africa. I take it you haven’t seen a real ebony carving?”
“No, I haven’t. Cadets don’t get away-time from the Academy compound much, and in my case, you know, they watched me like a hawk.”
Ebony was listening intently. I didn’t notice when I started talking audibly, but she didn’t seem to mind this time. “My grandpa had a collection of ebony antiques that were in his family for ages. Those statues were carefully displayed in his living room, on a bookshelf. I imagine that he could become filthy rich if he sold them. Heavy, smooth, and black, like roasted coffee grounds, ebony is an incredibly elegant wood. Before the ebony restriction was imposed, people used to cut the trees uncontrollably, especially after the Big Ice came down from the poles. Everyone who didn’t evacuate to the orbital stations, like your ancestors, crowded the area fifteen degrees below and above the equator. If you look at the map, it’s mostly Brazil and a number of African countries. Anyway, ebony trees almost went extinct. When the Big Ice melted away and a lot of people moved out from the tropical longitude, West Africa set out on a mission to preserve the ebony tree, only to find out there were hardly any left.”
“Isn’t there a famous Ebony park somewhere in Africa?”
“Now there is. It took the effort of the whole continent to find small seedlings, transport them to Cote d’Ivoire, and plant them on acres of reclaimed land.”
“Have you been there?”
“I have, indeed. I proposed there to my future wife.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“I’m not. She died from the flash fever before our wedding.”
“I had no idea, Desiree.”
“I know. But it’s water under the bridge now. It was a long time ago. I made my peace with it. The reason I remembered those trees, obviously, was your name, but there is more to it. Ebony is incredibly strong. It actually feels more like rock than any other wood. Anyway, my people think that it is pretty special.”
I had a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow. I knew that she knew that our chances to get out of this alive were… Heck, math was never my strength, but I am sure she made an impressive probability analysis, and it wasn’t looking good. I had to throw her calculations by adding another factor in: a will to live. Many times in human history it had proved to be a wild card, and I was going to bet all my chips on it this time.
“Heck, Ebony, you are named after the strongest tree on Earth! That counts for something! We are going to be ok! I promise!”
“I’ll take your word for it, Mazula.”
River smiled at me, and I was struck by the sight. Come to think of it, it was the first time I had seen her smile. It was a beautiful sight. And then the floor of our cell parted in the middle with an intimidating hiss and started retracting to the sides, exposing a chasm below us into which our breathable air was fast escaping.
13
ON FIRE
“Brace for impact!” I yelled to Ebony and retracted my headgear.
The chasm below us was getting wider. Soon enough we were on our toes on the opposite sides of the small holding cell, pressing to the walls and struggling to keep steady. The walls were perfectly smooth, leaving no possibility to hold on to them. The sooner we realized that the jump is unavoidable, the better. “River! You can do it! Think of it as parachute training!”
“We have no parachutes!”
�
��I know! But our suits will absorb some of the impact!” For Ebony’s sake, I had to come up with a lie fast, and this was the best I could do.
“Really?” Ebony was not buying it, but hoped I’d persuade her otherwise.
“Absolutely! When your leg was broken, remember?”
“Yes, the suit stiffened to create a cast.” She confirmed.
All of a sudden, my blatant lie looked like a glimpse of hope. In the face of imminent threat, any idea was better than no idea at all. “Exactly! We need to manually input multiple broken bones diagnosis, and the suit will cast the entire body.”
What hogwash, I thought to myself, but kept rolling with the idea.
“Mazula, are you nuts?? We won’t be able to move! If anything happens while we fall… Do you realize that we can’t reprogram the suits on the go? And think of the shock to the body upon such a hard impact!”
“You have another idea?”
“I suggest partial casting. First, we group for the impact here, then we program the suit to cast the head and the body, leaving arms and legs mobile. When we fall, we try landing on the side, like we were taught in martial arts training at the Academy, remember?”
“Ok, I guess I’m impressed.” Not! not. But what could I do? The receding floor was only about twenty-five centimeters long on each side, and I wore large shoes. At the rate the floor was receding, we had about a minute and a half before the jump was inevitable. “Is there any setting we can use to absorb the shock from the impact?”
“Maybe. Maybe we should manually set for zero gravity? The suit will increase air pressure inside to compensate to 1G. We will have a layer of padding. I don’t know otherwise…”
“Let’s do it. Can you script a program and wire it to me?”
“Sure. Give me a second.”
“Take your time.”
While River ferociously inputted data on her B5, I was wondering what the Unkari were trying to accomplish with this stunt. Was this their standard execution procedure? Were they done with us? Or maybe… Maybe the chasm was the entrance to another wormhole leading some place away from this planet?
329 Years Awake Page 25