*
I had a moment of epiphany, as Khonen’s images flashed onto television screens around the computer room. It was as though all the pieces of jigsaw puzzle had suddenly fallen into place.
Both of my incarnations (on Cerrina and on the starship) came to the same conclusion and spoke assertively to their respective audiences as one voice, ‘Vitcha is using a modified version of his teleportation system to reproduce his own brain using Eric’s flower. To put it bluntly, Vitcha is implanting his mind into Khonen’s severed head! And we cannot allow that to happen.’
*
On the bridge of the Kesinko, Tukarra, who had also seen Khonen’s cry for help told Aleq, ‘That’s it. That’s what you’ve been waiting for. If Khonen can take over control of the Ether then we can kill Vitcha! Khonen is a good man. I know we can trust him.’
At the same time, probably because Vitcha was preoccupied trying to take over Khonen’s brain, Aleq was suddenly besieged with dozens of messages from Ellie saying, ‘It’s now or never!’
*
I would like to think my father had given Ellie his permission to make the next move, because she reached for her hand-gun and fired it point blank at the large jar containing Vitcha’s brain.
The glass shattered, and most of the liquid gushed onto the floor. However, the brain was now thickly enclosed in gelatinous new living tissues. The pulsating mass seemed unaffected by the loss of fluid and the flurry of electronic messages flashing around the computing equipment was building to a hiatus.
A second shot would surely have finished him, but Ellie had no bullets left. Ignoring the complaints issuing from pain receptors in her robotic arms, she reached through the jagged broken glass into the tank and started to tear out handfuls of the veins, arteries, and nerve endings that surrounded Vitcha’s brain.
Unfortunately, Aleq had chosen just that moment to slam the Kesinko’s Dark Matter engines into reverse, in an attempt to shake off the rapidly deteriorating hull of the Paricianne. As a result, Ellie was thrown to the floor, and immediately ensnared by the very same tentacles that had previously left her alone.
With both myself and now Ellie tightly constricted by the snake-like bonds, all we could do was watch and wait to see if Ellie had managed to do enough damage to Vitcha to set us all free.
Chapter 33 – Ending the Madness
Woynek was lying, when he said he would guide Tom and Lynne around the minefield, back on Earth. He had sensed that something terrible was about to happen, and its epicentre would be the Obelisk, close to Vidora, that all Scavengers had both hated and revered for decades.
So instead of helping Tom and Lynne to meet up with Tukarra and myself at Bunker 7, he had taken them to see his own pet project: a project he had managed to keep secret from the other Scavengers for many years.
Before the Great Asteroid impact, the major cities of the Earth had been interconnected with rocket propelled bullet trains. The trains could shoot along, under the ground, through highly evacuated aluminium tubes, at over three thousand miles per hour. They were levitated away from the sides of the tube on a cushion of electromagnetism. The speed of the train alone, was sufficient to produce a virtual ‘image magnet’, in the aluminium. The image magnet was both created and repelled by superconducting permanent magnets, built into the walls of the pressurised passenger compartments, along the length of the train.
But that was a very long time ago. Now, only a few of the tubes remained intact, and Woynek had discovered an entrance to one of them. He thought it prudent to have a personal escape route, just in case he lost a power struggle for leadership of his clan.
There was no vacuum in the tube these days, and no way to produce the superconducting magnetic field needed to lift a train. However, Woynek had cobbled together a makeshift, two seater, rocket sled, that rode along on roller bearings.
Naturally, Tom protested when Woynek showed him the sled. There was no way he was going to leave me, or Tukarra for that matter, behind in Bunker 7. So Woynek had simply delivered Tom a single punch to the jaw, taking Tom completely by surprise, and knocking him out cold.
Woynek belted the unconscious Tom into one of the seats on the sled. He then wrapped his muscular arms around Lynne, lifting her feet off the ground, and kissed her cheek.
With tears welling in his eyes, ‘Goodbye, my beautiful daughter,’ he said. ‘Until we meet again.’
A moment later, Lynne had buckled herself into the second seat and Woynek lit the eagerly awaiting touch paper, by striking a flint against another rock.
Whilst a dusty web of fuse cords fizzed and sparkled, Woynek implored Lynne to take Tom with her as far away from Vidora as she could. Then he turned, and ran to take cover from the torrent of flame that was to follow.
It must have been an exhilarating ride down the tube, with hundreds of fire sticks, like huge Roman candles lighting in sequence, flaring behind the sled.
Lynne thoroughly enjoyed the ride. It was as though she had been set free, to look forward to the future, to a new life in a new place. The wind and her long brown hair, lashed at her skin. She had never felt so cool.
Tom missed the spectacle completely. The next thing he knew, a group of Scavengers were pulling him out of his seatbelt, and welcoming both Lynne and himself to some celebrations.
They were taken to an underground atrium, similar to the oasis in Vidora. A jumbled pile of grey robots, intermingled with a tangle of dismembered robot limbs, had been built at its centre. All the robots had been disabled one way or another. Some had been battered to bits, others had a hole in their backs where their power packs should have been.
The Scavenger uprising, that had resulted in the demise of the robots, seemed to have been caused by something high above them, something they were all staring at.
As was the case in Vidora, there were giant television screens hanging from the roof of the atrium. Every screen showed the crowd of Scavengers, themselves, waving their fists in the air and surrounding the sad heap of broken robots.
The picture changed to similar scenes of crowds on Cerrina, and then to show Aleq and Tukarra on the bridge of the Kesinko and finally Ellie and myself in the computer room.
The tentacles, that had constrained us, gracefully uncoiled from our limbs and deftly formed a protective curtain around Vitcha’s vandalised brain.
Despite being released, I was finding it much more difficult to breath and I slumped to the floor. Ellie was hardly affected by the low air pressure and came over to see what she could do for me, but all she could do was hold my hand.
Vitcha summoned some strength to access the Kesinko’s public address system again to report, ‘I’ll let you keep watching the pictures, Aleq. Before long, Rhett will die from the lack of air, and my brain will be fully restored. Ellie you have only delayed my escape to Cerrina. I hope you and Aleq will enjoy the next few millennia floating aimlessly around the cosmos together, cast adrift as I was.’
*
On the bridge of the Kesinko, Tukarra watched Aleq struggling with the controls, flipping switches, pulling levers. He seemed to be getting nowhere.
In addition, she watched the broadcast pictures, provided by Khonen, slowly cycling around the three locations.
She saw that I was dying in the computer room: Ellie kneeling over me - out of ideas and out of time.
She could also see my double trying to console Suran on Cerrina.
*
I held onto Suran’s shoulders and looked her straight in the eye saying, ‘As awful as this may sound, Khonen will require an expert botanist, such as yourself, to feed and water this plant and to train future generations of gardeners to look after him.’
She was still wiping away the tears as I turned away from Suran, to lie down next to Tukarra, and kiss her goodbye. But I never made it to Tukarra’s side. In one final act of spite, Vitcha must have regained control of the damaged leaf behind us.
With the still living Tukarra watching from afar, but unable to warn
me of what was about to happen, Vitcha had slowly and quietly positioned one of Eric’s chair sized leaves above me, and in a instant he caused it to drop down over my head, its razor sharp teeth tearing into my neck.
Suran wielded her axe once more, and this time, with just one swing, she was able to chop the single engorged leaf off its stalk completely.
*
Just then, Aleq noticed that a tiny green light had illuminated, on the control panel in front of Tukarra.
‘Vitcha must have lost interest in blocking the connectivity of these controls through the Ether,’ he declared as he stretched an arm in front of Tukarra to press the button marked, ‘Terminate Experiment’.
Moments later, Ellie reported back to Aleq that the poison had been deployed, but to no avail. A few of the tentacles protecting Vitcha’s brain had withered, but little else had happened. Ironically, because Ellie had broken the glass container, the lethal dose had spilled onto the floor along with the rest of the fluid that Vitcha’s brain had once been suspended in.
Then on the view from Earth, Tukarra noticed ginger haired Tom looking up at the camera and there, holding onto him, was Lynne.
Her mind was made up. She owed it to humans, to the Elite, and even to the Scavengers everywhere, to end this now. We had already died senselessly on Cerrina and she wanted to make our second deaths count.
Tukarra had correctly guessed that if the ‘Terminate Experiment’ button had only failed in the final delivery of its payload then the self-destruct mechanism was more than likely also armed.
She broke out in a cold sweat; waiting until the slowly changing pictures showed her own face. She didn’t know whether my limp body in the Computer Room could still see me, but blew me a kiss nevertheless.
Then, swallowing hard, she thumped her hand onto the second big red button.
In far less than the time than it took Aleq to shout, ‘Nooooh,’ the entire hydrogen fuel and anti-matter catalyst reserves, were dumped into the fusion reactor core; turning the whole ship into a massive hydrogen bomb.
*
Every television screen and every televisual session on Earth and on Cerrina now showed a picture of the dwarf planet Pluto and its attendant moons.
In the same frame, a single white pixel represented the Paricianne, its many passengers and crew, the minds of my father and of Ellie trapped in their robot bodies, and the lives of Tukarra and myself.
Whilst the crowds of Scavengers on Earth, and the Elite and their children on Cerrina, watched in awe; that pixel brightened just a little, then faded to black.
Epilogue – New Beginnings
You may have thought my story would end here, but then who could have written these words? All my previous manifestations have now expired.
You may have remembered that third copies, of Tukarra and myself, are winging their way across the cosmos. Their complex streams of quantum information will reach New Earth, carried on a powerful beam of radio waves, in just another one million years time.
It is asking a lot, I know, but if all is still well with Quatinus 1 by then, our bodies should be fully reconstructed as soon as that radio signal is received. Then we could well become the first humans to set foot on a temperate planet, orbiting a Sun like star, belonging to another galaxy.
After arriving on New Earth, there is also the slim chance we might happen across and press ‘The Button’, that my father had told our other incarnations about, and so manage to recover and reconstitute the political leaders, scientists, and senior military personnel who were stored in the scout ship’s memory banks.
Yet those third copies, of ourselves, could not have written this text either. They were already in transit, when the dramas involving Eric, Vitcha, and Khonen had been played out. Therefore, the versions of Tukarra and myself, who should eventually arrive on New Earth, may never know what really happened on Cerrina or the starship.
That said, what no material being anywhere in the universe knew was that, against all the odds, a fourth copy of the two of us had been created.
*
Travelling at the speed of light, the radio waves from Earth had taken only seconds to reach Cerrina, and less than five hours to reach the star cruiser, Paricianne.
Less than a second after that, they had filtered past the system of moons belonging to Pluto. In particular, and quite by chance, the radio waves passed right through Hydra, the moon where the second copy of the two of us had boarded the Dark Matter Tug boat - along with my father and Ellie as robots.
Hydra was in fact a captured asteroid and, as we had discovered for ourselves, it was composed almost entirely of Astracite crystals. In that sense, Hydra was very similar to the asteroid my father had studied before his career really took off.
If only he could have carried out an analysis of this particular moon at that time, he would have found that the quantum state of every molecule, within every crystal, carried exactly the same atomic alignment as every other molecule of Astracite previously discovered.
This incredible alignment extended to the large solid cylinders of Astracite, used in my father’s teleportation device, right down to the microscopic Ether interface chips, built into our clothing, and implanted into the brains of the Elite.
However, none of this had happened by pure chance alone. Unbeknown to the human race, trillions of these amazing asteroids, and countless Astracite crystals, had been deliberately scattered throughout time and space, to wait for intelligent life to find them and put their unique properties to good use.
Each crystal was in fact like a fly, attached to the hook of a fishing line, and the lines cast in our Solar System were twitching like they had never twitched before.
*
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now fill in some of the technical details for you.
The Astracite crystals maintain their atomic orientation, irrespective of how far apart they are in our universe, because they are each part of a larger whole that resides within an orthogonal plane of existence, in the Realm of Dark Matter.
Note: these invisible extra dimensions, we thought were inhabited only by particles of Dark Matter, should not be referred to as an ‘alternative universe’, because Dark Matter is essential to our own cosmological evolution by organising and shaping our galaxies.
So Dark Matter is important to us all, and in this book I have also explained how Vitcha Kesinko’s Dark Matter Engine Technology had become particularly important for the long term survival of the human race.
Even so, I could never have guessed just how important the actual Realm of Dark Matter itself was about to become for Tukarra and myself.
*
One moment we were in Bunker 7, the next we were stood in a field of long blue grass. In the field, there was a lake of liquid gold and scarlet trees laden with the strangest fruits imaginable.
There was no discernible source of light. Everything around us gave off a warm mellow glow, as if benefiting from some form of internal illumination. A calming, gentle, jangling sound, like long forgotten garden chimes, seemed to be emanating from the trees.
‘Over there. Look. Over there,’ shouted Tukarra. Her right arm was outstretched, and she was pointing.
We were not alone.
The field we were standing in was bordered, on all sides, by fast flowing streams of cool clear water.
Stood in another field, very similar to the one we were in, there were two people who looked just like us.
They appeared to be humanoid in form, one male and one female. They wore all-in-one blue and pink suits, like ours. I could just make out that the man had brown hair, and he was accompanied by a blonde companion, who was pointing at us with her left arm.
And then it dawned on me.
Everywhere I looked, right into the far distance, there were identical fields each surrounded by a river, and each containing a pair of people. Half of those pairs were facing in the opposite direction.
We couldn’t help ourselves, we had to wave, and it
became both painfully and amazingly obvious all the people we could see were in fact rotations and reflections of the two of us.
*
For both Tukarra and myself, the first few hours of our extraordinary, kaleidoscopic, new lives were marred by soul destroying visions. They showed ourselves being tortured on Cerrina, and being starved of oxygen on the starship.
At first, we could not be certain they portrayed real events. Waves of images, and fragments of conversation, wafted through our minds. They made us feel faint, and we had to lie down in that long blue grass to stare blankly at the yellow-green sky.
Holding tightly onto each other, as though we were watching a scary movie, we exchanged only the minimum of words between us - just enough to establish we were both experiencing the same things, the same struggles for life and death.
To our relief, the visions came to an abrupt end. We suddenly felt immersed in a thick syrupy silence. Only then were we able to take stock, to touch and pinch each other, and appreciate just how blessed we were to be alive and well in a completely new world, however peculiar it was.
At least this was a world that seemed to be totally and utterly at peace.
*
The air was fresh and warm, and apart from the strangely populated fields, and the colours of the plants and trees, we seemed to have arrived in an ideal holiday destination - albeit one that we correctly assumed was intended to sustain us for the rest of our natural lives.
The only real problem was with the sky. Hiding behind vibrant yellow clouds, there was an emerald green canvas that had a dynamic cellular structure, like dividing bacteria, or churning frog-spawn. It gave me the impression we had been put in some kind of goldfish bowl.
Escaping the Sun Page 27