“Wow…”
“PROTUS!-” Liara turned the radio down. She was sick of hearing his command bellowing from it. The lowered volume was much more pleasant on the ears.
“…Do you control the spire?”
“I am in charge of it yes, but I do not control it. That would be outside of my remit…”
“…Who controls it?”
“The control of the Spire is governed by a board of authorised personal. I am not at liberty to disclose the individual’s names…”
“…But you know what happened here don’t you? Can you tell me?”
“I am not permitted to disclose that permission with you, I am sorry.” its apology felt as mechanical she anticipated it would be.
“Krahm wants you to activate the emergency escape route…” She prompted the floating skull.
“I am unable to comply, Krahm is not present. He can not be identified…”
“Krahm, did you hear that?” She plucked the radio and pressed it near her face.
“…Damn. Tell him Krahm has authorised it.”
She relayed the message.
“Negative. No administrative rights acknowledged.”
“…Tell him,” Krahm sighed, “tell him, ORIGIN,”
She repeated the word.
“Affirmative. Authorising complete administrative abilities,”
She was surprised that it only took one word. An English word at that. On second thoughts maybe that was secure enough…? How many aliens would know her alien language.
“Would you like to activate the emergency escape route now?” Protus was nothing but polite and subservient.
“Does this route lead straight to the surface?”
“It is a highly classified direct route to the board room on the 1st floor…”
So the route wasn’t quite as good as she’d hoped.
A tickling swept up her oesophagus and she held her breath. She wanted to cough. Was it beginning again? Had whatever mysterious liquid she’d injected into her system finally worn off? She pressed a fist to her mouth.
“Protus, can you access the data from the lab?”
“Yes. I am unable to transfer the data or make a hard copy of it, but I can access it…”
“Liara, you haven’t got the time for this…” Krahm protested.
“Krahm, you promised me answers… I want to know what the hell happened on this fucking shit-hole. I’ve just risked life and limb battling some fucking accident you made, the least you could do is tell me what the fuck it was!” There was a lot of swearing but it felt appropriate.
“…Ok… Ask Protus to display the overview of the research data,”
She instructed Protus to do so. The skull broke into thousands of pixels and quickly reformed as a collection of 3D images. There were numerous folders, several floating panels with what looked like a play icon, and in the centre a 3D pictograph of something she didn’t recognise. It took her a few seconds to study it before she realised it was a representation of the mysterious object from the lab. The pulsating floating artefact Krahm had explicitly told her to steer clear of.
“What am I looking at?” She adjusted the volume on the radio.
“Press the icon in the middle…” she reached in and touched the small little hologram. It flickered and pinged against her touch. She felt like she was poking around in a VR rendition of a computer.
“…You remember how you wondered where you came from?,” Krahm began syncing nicely with the new image appearing before her. It showed a solar system, but not one she recognised. There was a string of twelve planets and four of them had large rings. “You wondered who made you? Then when you found who made you, you wondered who made them?”
She nodded but it was obviously lost on Krahm.
“We found our makers, we found our maker’s makers. We even found their makers! But eventually we reached a dead end. We searched the galaxies and couldn’t find who had made them. As we searched we encountered life-forms that had been made independent of our own lineage. They had the same questions, they traced their own parentage to a blank…”
Liara watched the display zoom out and display hundreds of galaxies. It continued to zoom out and the galaxies became little specks.
“Have you noticed how life seems to just be variations of the same blueprints? Like there’s a grand design…? What if its built into our cells?…”
His questions were thought provoking.
“We learned how to understand the cells, yet we couldn’t find a way to access these blueprints. We could harvest memories from cells but we couldn’t find the proof of the ‘grand design’…”
“…And then we found a Xeed. For a long time we’ve known of the black space in the centre of the galaxy. We’ve never managed to successfully explore it. Every ship we sent there disappeared… None of our neighbours understand what it is either. It is the greatest mystery in the whole universe…”
The display had zoomed out and now showed a large radius of glittering galaxies. There was a large hollow space in the middle. She wondered where Earth was in amongst the glittery sea of holographic stars. It was humbling to realise just how big the universe actually was. It was much larger than any human had ever considered.
“…One day we found strange comet-like objects are fired out of the centre of the mass. Sometimes these objects strike planets or stars and wipe out entire solar systems. Sometimes they land on planetoids and create new solar systems. The targets are always random. When we witnessed this for the first time we witnessed a new planet being born. We watched brand new life being spawned…”
The display dissolved back to the folders and icons.
“…Then one day we caught one of those strange comets. In the middle of it we found a strange seed…”
Her eyes hovered over the Xeed. The artefact was literally a manifestation of the seed of life. They’d found it and brought it here to the spire.
They were studying it.
Now it was at the bottom of the ocean.
“Ask Protus to show the footage of the contamination incident…”
Protus obliged her. The display turned into a 3D holographic depiction of the lab.
She saw several Tethu stood around the Xeed. They were hovering around it, typing and tapping on their slices of glass.
“…The Xeed, it contained some sort of evolutionary accelerant. We knew if we could crack its genetic architecture we could find the blueprints of life and then maybe we could find the route-”
“-To God…” Liara finished with a whisper. They were on the trail of God. This alien race was on the cusp of finding the real God. The maker of all the makers. Her insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe dawned on her. She was grain of sand in comparison of everything she was being presented with.
She had a small moment where she realised that it had taken her two lifetimes and two extreme fights for survival for her to find God. She’d found God a billion light-years from Earth. Who’d have thought it…
“…When we was attacked,” the display showed the lab being violently shook and a Tethu stumble forward. His outstretched hand touched the Xeed as he fell. “There was an accident, one of our researchers touched it,” the display illustrated the grotesque and sudden mutation that ravaged the Tethu, “and he became… the Progenmorph. Now you understand why it translates as that…”
“…Because its both progeny and the progenitor… It’s both…” she had been right all along.
“The second attack destroyed half the mainframe and corrupted the quarantine procedure…”
“So it wasn’t contained. The creature got loose and…” she didn’t need to finish the sentence. She’d just spent several hours battling through the aftermath of this very incident. “…That’s why I was woken up… Because the systems went offline…”
“Yes…”
“How come Protus is intact?”
“Protus isn’t… half of its systems are corrupted and destroyed.”
“…And this data disk… It contains all your data doesn’t it. That’s why you’ve been helping me escape… You need the hardcopy of everything that I just sent to the bottom of the ocean…”
Krahm didn’t initially respond.
“…You remember how I gave you that virus, to destroy the Arafoids… I did that because I respected you. I admired all that you exhibited. The courage, the bravery…”
Arafoids? Was that the real name of the Fours?
“…I always wondered what kind of maker would just hand a weapon of mass genocide to a human…”
“Sometimes… Sometimes as a maker you need to undo your creations, for the better good. The Arafoids had created a great sense of disharmony in the galaxy. Not only had they disrupted international relations, they’d also turned on their own kind. The Sharfoids were persecuted. Learning that they’d managed to undo the sterilisation was the last straw…”
“So you really were going to wipe them all out…” Liara felt a little unnerved. It felt brutal and cold. She recalled Krahm tearing the Four baby in half. It had been a grotesque demonstration of power.
“We’d forbidden them from reproducing. We’d made them sterile and they still disobeyed our wishes…” They’d been made sterile? Liara had thought they had made themselves sterile with their continued genetic modifications. To know the Tethu had inflicted it upon them made Liara that fraction more apprehensive.
“I admit, giving you the vial was an experiment. I was curious to see whether you would do it…”
Both of them knew how that ended.
“…I rescued you because I felt I owed you. I never expected for you to be affected by the virus… I never expected them to have wove Arafoid DNA into your own…”
It made her a slight angry to think of it. Her life had been one long pattern of violations and having so much enemy DNA inside her own system was yet another violation. Would she have still used the virus if she’d have known she was going to kill herself too? Probably…
She knew the Tethu had been struggling with the means to reverse the virus they’d indirectly inflicted upon her but even now there was only the faint promise of a cure dangling before her. After all the things she’d been through, suddenly she wasn’t certain she was going to make it to the end of this journey. It panged in her chest briefly, the desire to follow Krahm’s research. She was close to finding out the creator of everything. The designer of the original blueprints.
“…I am sorry you have been involved in this. I wanted to learn from you… This was not what I…” he trailed off. She felt he was genuinely remorseful for how events transpired.
“…This data,” she turned the subject back, “…did you find what you were looking for?”
“…We found what we think is a star-chart…”
“A star-chart?”
“Maybe… it might just be the route to… the centre of the universe…”
“Now I understood why it’s so important…”
“You’re both important…”
Liara strongly doubted her worth was anything in comparison to the possible illustrated guide to the creator of everything.
“Liara… I want you to understand you were important to me.”
She noted the past tense.
“…I sent the real Liara Nicholson to Earth with the survivors from Nillem City, please understand that I am on your side…”
He’d sent the real Liara back to Earth? It had never crossed her mind what had happened to the real Liara… To know she was home felt bittersweet. Liara had made it. The nightmare would be over for her…
A sudden creeping cough caught her off guard. She gritted her teeth and resisted it.
“…If you come to the surface, we can go use that data and learn all the answers to the world. I know you Liara, I know you want to know…”
He really did know her. He had a first-hand experience of her memories. He knew her as much as she knew herself. It didn’t make her feel comforted. If anything she felt a little disturbed.
“…And the cure?” she managed to ask between the desire to cough.
“…I think I have it. Come to the surface, I’ll collect you and we can do this together…”
The desire to know did intrigue her.
This would be the answer to everything, every question she ever had.
The cure was the larger priority.
“Protus. Open the emergency escape route.”
“Affirmative,”
A little opening appeared slightly off-centre. A red ladder slid down to the ground.
“I’m coming up…” Liara announced slipping the radio back on her suit.
CHAPTER TEN:
She emerged in what appeared to be a presentation room. She righted herself behind a podium that addressed a long desk. Neat little black chairs on wheels marked the seating area. The only door was at the back of the room.
The grey room was back to the monochromatic palette. The dark grey carpet made of some curious synthetic fibres felt soft underfoot.
The door hissed open as she arrived.
Yet another corridor greeted her. To her left was a lift shaft. The doors had been cut open with some type of heated tool. Ahead of her a little narrow doorway denied entry with a little red light. To her right the corridor continued. It navigated left.
She could hear banging and crackling coming from around it. She hesitated for a moment before deducing it wasn’t the Progenmorph. It sounded like electrical fire. Like a welder.
Between her and the corner stood two ominous bridges of white metal that spanned the entire width of the corridor. She would have to pass under them. A little conveyer belt lined the wall either side of it. Was it the Tethu equivalent to a metal detector?
She stepped towards it. She glanced left and right, the little alcoves housed little waiting areas. Colourful blobs lined the tables like beanbags.
Had she actually died and gone to Corporate Hell? It had been a humorous idle thought before, now she wasn’t convinced she wasn’t right after all. The giant cushions struck her as the pretentious touch of a corporation trying to appear trendy. She half anticipated there to be a basketball court somewhere, for the ‘cool kids’ to look ‘cool’… She passed under the first bridge without incident.
The sound of a Tethu conversation was occasionally audible between the intermittent crackling of the welding iron.
No incident followed the passing under the second bridge. She slinked to the corner and peeked around it.
There was a trio of Tethu struggling to cut their way through the door. It struck her as odd that the door was impassable. Had the spire completely locked down? She’d rebooted the system twice over, wasn’t that supposed to have lifted the lockdown?
Should she radio Krahm? She’d silenced him when she left the boardroom, just in case.
Would he be as surprised to find the exit locked? It had never crossed his mind. He was convinced this was the home run.
The feeling it was a peculiar wrinkle in his plans made her apprehensive.
She watched the Tethu continue to carve their way through the door. The work was slow and steady. The metal of the door was thick.
Should she retreat back down the corridor and let Krahm know? She wondered whether he would be interested in his fellow Tethu. Would he want to rescue them too? But he’d not been interested in any survivors before…
BOOM.
She was just stepping away from the corner when the door exploded in a burst of shrapnel, flames and flesh. What the hell? Had they triggered some sort of booby-trap? Some self-defence mechanism? Liara was a little deafened by the blast but her eyes worked fine. One of the Tethu, a slender yellow specimen, had been flung against the wall. Its legs and one arm had been torn off in the blast. She guessed the other two Tethu had been eviscerated in the blast judging by the chunks of flesh and blood coating the walls in a large radius.
The Tethu was slowly bleeding out, it extended a hand in a
weak protest.
A blue bolt of plasma pierced it between the eyes and it dropped down dead.
The world suddenly shifted around Liara. Suddenly she was gravely aware that the explosion had not been a defence mechanism. It was someone getting in.
The unknown entity that had staged the attack was now making their way into the spire.
It was the shittiest of possible timings.
There was a crunch of boots upon fragments of metal. Then a barrage of clicks.
Clicks that Liara recognised.
Her stomach fell, her jaw hung loose. No, it can’t be…
She dared a peek.
Sure enough, five heavily armoured Fours were climbing through the hole they’d just blown in the door. The sight of the blue humanoids was earth-shattering. They were back in her presence once more. The monsters that had quickly become a haunting staple of her life were suddenly back in it. It wasn’t enough that the Progenmorph had turned her life upside down, now the Fours had arrived for their turn.
Weren’t they all dead? Hadn’t she killed them all?
Their wicked mouths full of cruel black teeth moved as they clicked to one another. Their beady black eyes lazily scanned the destruction they’d caused. They were armed to the teeth, in each of their four hands they held extended guns. They looked like machine-pistols. They were wearing battle-scarred chest plates that looked darker in contrast to their pale blue skin. The Fours were ugly; sinister by appearance. They were hairless, muscular and tall. They had no noses, only a small ridge of one remained. They had smooth pouches between two long muscular legs, pouches that made them look genderless, but Liara had first hand knowledge of where their genitalia was hidden. The five Fours were male, none of them had the female breasts or braids around the ears.
These Fours had decorated themselves with war paint on their faces, five different designs painted in white paint. The leader of the group, or the one who entered at the front, bore a shape that looked like a crude crow. The second; a collection of stripes. The third had panda eyes. Number four had horizontal wavy lines that looked like a child’s impression of waves. The fifth’s face was painted completely white in a block of paint.
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