Keeran was unaware that Omeyn MuneMei was at this moment monitoring his progress through spy technology and with the Ghola she had previously attached to Amily as a suspicious Person of Interest. Maybe the uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong that Keeran ascribed to his nerves was actually due to his subconscious instincts detecting being watched. His conscious thoughts were tempered by long experience and he knew not to ignore these feelings. In some ways he did not care; he was going in anyway. The result was, he started the day in this uncomfortable mood, uncertain and not at all in the confident manner he wanted. When they finished their breakfast and boarded the ferry to commute across the slop of the Traganz river the Ghola mingled invisibly with the crowd seeking to cross.
Omeyn MuneMei had fashioned Spargar culture ages past in her actual lifetime by being the first and original Grand Omeyn that inspired The Spyre. On her death she processed her physical form into the first iteration of the biological computer so she could continue to rule via the Mind that developed into the expanding technology behind Spargar. As the original person processed into the biological computer, Omeyn MuneMei was the highest function of the Mind spinning out multiple physical images of herself to manage Spargar across her empire wherever she was needed. Her power had multiplied exponentially with the massive growth of the Mind as generations of Spargar and abductees had been added to the system in their billions. She could now control all of the Spargar empire from the Mind ramified across all Spargar-controlled worlds. The Mind monitored them all carefully and the Administrator caste decided when a particular individual was of no further bodily use and ready for processing into the network of the Mind.
There were few people living in the Spargar empire who could justify to the Administrators their continued life into old age. When their usefulness was coming to an end Spargar people could look forward to being processed into immortality by joining with Omeyn MuneMei in the Mind. Omeyn MuneMei officially ruled in law that mortality in the living worlds and immortality in the Mind were the only two phases of life in Spargar. There was no role in Spargar culture for belief in souls, so Omeyn MuneMei had ruled out their existence. That being so, she was aware of the useful anomaly where shades could be generated at the precise instant of processing mortal people into the network at the point of death. She stepped in and kept some of these shades from joining the Mind just prior to their assimilation as members of her Ghola spy network as they could travel amongst people invisibly and without need for resources or sustenance. She had their absolute loyalty due to their non-status, in limbo, waiting in thrall for her to process them fully into the Mind. This small Ghola community was denied acknowledgement they even existed. Their only role was to take tasks and to report back to Omeyn MuneMei until she released them to join her in the Mind. This treatment of the desolate Ghola souls in Spargar culture was so completely different to the honoured role of independent souls in the culture of Dawn of Gaya.
Omeyn MuneMei was ignorant of the invisible natural process that occurred when Spargar souls were wrenched from their physical forms at the Mind interface that freed them to merge with newborns across Spargan in much the same way and as little understood as most births on developing planets like Earth. The total lack of understanding of the recycling of the soul and its natural reincarnation in Spargar allowed for the great benefit that there could be no religious challenge to Omeyn MuneMei. Their cycle of life, followed by immortality in the Mind, delivered a complete philosophy within Spargar. No other explanation of life was required and in any case it was totally proscribed by Omeyn MuneMei and opposition would attract most serious penalties.
A singular controlling iteration of Omeyn MuneMei sat at the utmost height of the tallest central tower of The Spyre. She manifested akin to a clone of the original Omeyn capable of interfacing directly to the intellectual might of the Mind. She wore the traditional black robes of the Omeyn with the cowl down about her shoulders. She had a calm expression, steady almond eyes widely spaced above a fine straight nose over full wide lips. She favoured displaying her bald head that displayed the planes of her aristocratic cranial structure. She always communicated in steady, commanding tones emanating from within her but unspoken by mouth so as not to indulge in the weakness and emotionality of her living underlings. Her rich, quiet tones belied the swingeing actions she often chose that drove Spargar forward with unceasing vigour across multiple political battlefronts around the galaxy. She could multi-thread multiple physical copies so that each individual campaign could benefit from her personal attention wherever it was required. The monstrous power of the network could spin up as many virtual copies of the original as were necessary to handle every initiative. They all benefitted from sharing the full intellectual might of the collected Omeyn MuneMeis connected to the Mind. This allowed her to manage the current campaign to dominate planet Earth alongside all the other campaigns running at the same time without strain or inattention to detail. It was Omeyn MuneMei herself that had overseen the Zarnha strategy against Dawn of Gaya on Earth and had personally tracked the Pointers of Dawn across the generations that were active in progressing Gayan enlightenment in direct conflict with Spargar.
Omeyn MuneMei was frustrated she did not know how the peoples of Dawn of Gaya seemed capable of integrating fully into the culture of the local peoples of each new world. Gayans were competing with her in such a way that they were very difficult to detect until it was too late and they often achieved their objectives. She would then have to deal with the consequences as they affected her own campaigns. This always led to delays and more work that got in the way of her plans. She could see the historical patterns and connections of Gayan campaigns with the benefit of hindsight. Analysis of the problem in the Mind had allowed her to see involvement of Keeran’s group of Gayans on Earth that led to the connection to Kyra. Omeyn MuneMei then decided on the initiative to have her abducted to The Spyre to flush out Keeran from his role on Earth and take him out of the Gayan campaign for Earth. Right now he was on his way towards Kyra with the local suspect Amily now confirmed as a local agent, closely monitored along the way by her Ghola. Omeyn MuneMei had no tolerance for emotionality but she was intractably curious to know how these Gayans could so easily discover the completely novel action of abducting one person from their home planet and then track down their whereabouts so quickly to The Spyre. Especially as the extraction from Gaya so uniquely and exquisitely broke the terms of the Epsilon treaty that could theoretically expose her to outright war with the Gayan empire and all non-Spargar races of humans. That was in theory of course; she was confident that there was no great risk from action against a single individual especially after it had been successfully and secretly concluded.
Halfway across the river Traganz and Keeran was feeling distinctly queasy. Whether it was the vexing feeling something was wrong beyond the sheer audacity of his actions, the quiet before the coming storm or just the liverish reaction to the ferry riding the one-metre swells, he was sitting there most impatient and uncomfortable. Most of all Keeran was irritated that after all these ages he still could not control his anxieties under strain. He knew his fears had grown within his soul as it passed from generation to generation and showed no sign of abating.
Amily cast him a sidelong glance, “Are you feeling all right, Keeran?” she asked, controlling any hint of a smile.
Amily thought Keeran was looking peaky and decidedly pale when he replied, “Very well, thank you. I will just be pleased when we get over there and get going.” He didn’t much feel like talking and he finished speaking abruptly. Amily got the message and joined Keeran silently gazing at the wall of buildings approaching on the north bank. The Spyre was much more visible now behind the front rank. Those high riverside buildings mostly hid the lower Spyre but the peaks impressively reached for the sky. They all shimmered with reflected sun and clouds washing the metallic surfaces of the very many needle-pointed towers, interconnected with gossamer arches and
bridges. Around the riverbank interface many ferry transports were offloading and the bank was smothered in a dark line of workers, like ants seething to get into the buildings.
Soon Amily and Keeran disembarked the ferry pier and climbed the few steps up to the wide promenade that fronted onto the river on several levels separated by broad steps. People strode purposefully in all directions. Most were Spargar workers dressed in the familiar one-piece suits in black or dark blue. Keeran was struck by the homogeneity of the crowds and their appearance in Braganza versus the wide diversity of peoples in Corinth City back on Gaya. Fortunately as they crossed under the wide bronze arch leading into the Ministry of Alien Affairs they were joined by several aliens of varying appearance and dress who of necessity worked in trade and communications between the Spargar empire and other alien regions of the galaxy. Keeran and Amily were wearing sombre business clothes that fitted with the colour scheme of the Spargar workers but they still appeared somewhat different and stood out distinctly from Spargar workers who glanced away and gave them polite berth as they passed by.
Keeran and Amily were feeling tense as they felt the strengthening of the psychic red threads leading them to Kyra as she grew nearer. The red threads were pulling into and through the immediate building to the tallest one in the serried ranks beyond and lifting upwards towards the highest floors. Amily led them to the banks of elevators that rode up the front of the building with spectacular views out across the river. South of Traganz seemed insignificant with distance, like a toy town viewed from the speeding ascent of the elevator. Keeran was affecting nonchalance to conceal the discomfort of replacing the unsettling effects of the unpleasant river swells with the vertiginous rise up the building. The elevator had no walls or glass and it recurred to Keeran that he could step directly out into lofty space. This was one of the fashionable design thrills; force-field walls of the elevator gave the impression of riding up on a platform with no protective walls. Keeran was keeping well away from the invisible sides but some local workers were leaning on the force field in positions that made it seem impossible they would not fall straight out. Keeran felt like clinging to the wall side whilst trying not to look out of place. He felt he had his mind under control one second by focussing on his mission and then the view distracted him to minor panic the next.
The elevator braked to a halt on the 420th floor with an uprush lifting the occupants to a weightless stop. Amily and Keeran crossed a dramatic but unnecessary bridge connecting the elevator tubes to the building through an open arch into an atrium decorated with light gold metallic glazes. A small group of co-workers sympathetic to Gaya awaited Amily there and escorted them to one of the side rooms, this time with a view looking out away from the river through a number of towers towards the tallest steeple in The Spyre. This was visible through many other less significant pillars webbed by numerous cross bridges at this intermediate level. These crossing places were much reduced in number at higher levels. Just a few improbably long and slender arches with few tiny figures crossing were visible higher up and the people crossing were sparse and seemed to be crawling in the slow motion of height and distance. Workers swarmed across the lower bridges like ant convoys coating the silvery threads of the bridges with their weaving black lines. The bridges were open once more and enclosed only by force fields to the side and above, like the elevators, giving great views for the workers crossing and making them exposed to view from the surrounding steeples. There were routes for craft in several loosely defined columns that arced out of the building towers then rose vertically into the sky that had seemed to be moving like roiling silver smoke when viewed from across the river earlier. Now they could be seen to be volumes of spacecraft controlled in narrow channels to drift in to dock on certain of the towers and then leave on up-channels that curved out from the towers up into the heavens.
These spacecraft transiting to and from The Spyre were necessarily small as the larger ones were not practical for navigating the city or the docking stations. Giant platforms, like the one in Earth’s solar system off Saturn, were too massive and ungainly to transport across space. These huge stations were formed of many smaller craft that travelled to the site and then coalesced at the appointed location to grow a space station, cloaked when necessary. The craft visible in the channel streams coming in to The Spyre were either orbital transports or deep-space transits. They came in varying shapes and small sizes making for a great spectacle en masse. They were scaled from about half to about the full size of the Maria. The deep-space transits were vastly more valuable than orbital transports due to their capability for warp travel across the galaxy, which meant they had DMF drives installed that were lacking on the orbital transports.
The space traffic carried all kinds of cargo needed by The Spyre and facilitated travel back out into space for Zarnha of Spargar personnel. The vast bulk of the interstellar traffic was in the dark business of abducting human beings from developing planets to be assimilated into the Spargar Mind network. This provided the growth to meet the ever-expanding demand for computing power and communications at its core and also added knowledge about each emerging race when its diverse DNA was captured into the Mind. This traffic in innocent bodies amounted to a hundred thousand people a year from Earth alone, multiplied by a hundred or so other planets at differing stages of interest to Spargar. Like cattle culled from a farmer’s field, it was surprising how few emerging human races even noticed this process was occurring, let alone rose up to do anything about it. This was facilitated by the capability of Spargar technology and operations to be stealthy enough to avoid detection, especially at night. Spargar systems were certainly not a hundred per cent effective though and relied on speed and disbelief on the many occasions they were seen but not acted against.
Amily and Keeran were talking openly with their small co-worker group about their official role handling some standard IT maintenance tasks. The Mind was in a state of continual upgrade. Amily and the group were tasked with maintenance of the network management software that was always stretched by growth of the system and the hugely complex network that reached out into Spargar-controlled space. Beyond the normal verbal conversations about their daily tasks, Amily and Keeran could communicate soul to soul at the same time through shared ideas and feelings to discuss how to find and rescue Kyra. They knew she was being held in the main control tower as the red threads connecting the Gayans pulled up in that direction. The other workers present were of Gayan origin too so they could also add their advice at this otherwise undetectable soul-to-soul level. The others in the group were unaware of the family connection to Kyra so they only loosely felt the surge of emotion in the room, the sense of loss, the outrage at the abduction and the consequent determination to rescue Kyra. Since the walls of the Spargar buildings swarmed with electronic bugs and tiny flying specks that may have been insects but may equally have been microbot spies, it was good that the group for all the world appeared to be discussing some routine day-to-day maintenance tasks that would mean heading across to the main tower where the central network consoles were housed.
This could have worked out fine if it were not for the reports from the Ghola to Omeyn MuneMei over the previous night and day. Having followed Keeran and Amily in their ferry commute across the Traganz, the Ghola was currently observing the group nearby. The Ghola was a desolate soul, without status and lost in limbo but enslaved by Omeyn MuneMei to keep watch on the group. The Ghola would consequently be mournful, embittered by Omeyn MuneMei’s disdain, except no other Spargar even knew of their existence to share in their misfortune. Gholas were very useful indeed to Omeyn MuneMei for this kind of surveillance and manifested just beyond the consciousness of Keeran and Amily, engendering a nervous frisson in the Gayans that they ascribed to the dangerous nature of their work. Keeran and Amily always worked in this kind of high-pressure situation so the pressure and risk was quotidian to them.
The Omeyn MuneMei that was the iteration co
ntrolling the central tower of the Spargar empire managed a cell of Zarnha intelligence agents in the close proximity of the supreme control centre high atop the building. All work groups containing alien crew would be monitored by the control tower including this IT maintenance crew containing Amily. Omeyn MuneMei herself was taking personal control of surveillance that multiplied the level and quantity of the Zarnha security force attending the issue. To their rear a holoscreen displayed the life-size image of Kyra attached to her assimilation port a thousand levels below in the same main command tower.
Star Matters Page 9