by Ivan Kal
“Do you know what this is?” Adrian asked.
Anessa looked at the unimpressive globe; it was silver in color with no markings whatsoever. “No, should I?” Anessa asked.
“Of course you should, this is what you came for. The reason why your Elders sent you against my people,” he said nonchalantly.
Anessa’s eyes widened as he levitated the sphere above his palm. A telepathic pulse came from the sphere, and Anessa knew that he was telling the truth. The Elders had told her that the beacon was unmistakable, and it was.
“This is the device your Elders want. Do you know what it is?” he asked Garaam.
“It is the device left by our ancestors, holding all of their knowledge,” Garaam said, sliding closer to the edge and leaning forward.
“It does contain all of their knowledge, yes. But it also contains the consciousness of Axull Darr, or rather a copy of his consciousness,” Adrian said.
Garaam frowned. “Axull Darr?”
Adrian looked at her strangely. “Axull Darr, one of the People, the one who created our three races,” he explained, and then turned to look back at Anessa with a question in his eyes.
Anessa grimaced. She knew about Axull Darr because she had pressured the Elders into telling her, but everyone else still believed that Shara Daim were direct descendants of the People.
“We are descendants of the People, we weren’t created,” Garaam said with a hint of anger, turning to look at Anessa, but the look on her face must’ve told her the truth. “Anessa?”
“The Elders kept some things from the rest of us. We are not direct descendants of a colony left behind. We were created by Axull Darr from his own DNA, infused into a lifeform on our homeworld.”
Garaam looked shocked, but before she had a chance to say anything, Adrian interrupted.
“I brought you here so that you may learn the truth right from its source.” He placed the sphere on the table. “Axull Darr,” he called, and lines started appearing in the sphere. Anessa felt a telepathic vibration in the Sha, and then moment later, a being was floating above them. It looked vaguely like a Nel, or a Human, or a Shara Daim, but it was different.
“I am Axull Darr,” the hologram spoke.
Adrian stood and moved towards the doors. “You will not have this device. Try to fight your way out and both you and your people in my system will die,” he said, allowing a bit of his certainty to leak through his mind. “Talk with him, ask about anything that you want to know. I will wait outside.”
As soon as Adrian left, Garaam stood and grabbed the sphere; Axull Darr didn’t react.
“So they lied about more things than we thought,” Garaam said under her breath.
Anessa frowned at her. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Garaam turned to look at her, an embarrassed look on her face. She remained silent for a moment, enough to look at the sphere in her hand and then back at Anessa. “There are things that you don’t know. There are some of us who have been having…let’s say suspicions about the Elders.”
“Suspicions,” Anessa said, shocked.
“We should speak of it later, away from enemies.” Garaam turned to look at Axull Darr but kept speaking to Anessa. “Are we sure that this isn’t some kind of a trick?”
“You felt its beacon,” Anessa said, giving in to Garaam’s change of topic, with every intention of speaking about her suspicions later.
“I did,” Garaam said. “He said that you are a copy of our ancestor’s consciousness,” Garaam said to Axull Darr.
“That is correct, I have all his memories and knowledge. I am him, in a way, a digital version of his mind,” Axull Darr responded.
“So if we are not descendent from a colony, why did you create us?” Garaam asked. And Anessa turned her complete attention on him, interested; the Elders had given her only snippets that she wasn’t even sure were true.
“We, the People, were the first intelligent race in the galaxy. We lived for a long time, but eventually we started dying off, until finally there was only a handful of us left. We tried to find a way to save ourselves, and inadvertently we created something that shouldn’t exist, a horror that we were too weak to stop. Some of us fashioned a plan to contain it, but I disagreed with their methods. I split off from them and came to this area of space; I found three different worlds and merged my DNA with the emerging lifeforms of those planets: Nel, Human, and yours—Shara Daim. This was in the hope that someday you would grow powerful enough to stop what we created,” Axull Darr said.
“Our history, our beliefs, are that we are destined to rule this galaxy through strength and power, just like our ancestors did before us,” Garaam said unsurely. It must’ve been a shock for her to learn that the Shara Daim had been created.
“My people never ruled the galaxy through strength. We were the first intelligent race in the galaxy; there was no one to oppose us. Over time, we spread across the stars, and then grew lonely, so we encouraged other life, uplifting them and guiding them to join us to the stars. We never had wars, never conquered anyone; we were simply too far ahead of anyone for them to be a threat to us. We helped younger races through turmoil, mediated between them, showed them how to master technology. But we never thought ourselves better than them; we were older, wiser, not superior.”
Garaam was looking at him, her feelings reflected on her face, and Anessa could see that her friend felt the same way that she did. His words went against everything that she knew to be true and that she had been taught. It was hard, so hard of Anessa to accept that as truth. She had been fighting doubt since that moment when the Elders had told her a part of the truth, and then even more as Adrian had tried to convince her. And now she could feel her belief disappearing; the core of who she’d thought herself to be was tumbling down.
“May I ask you a question?” Axull Darr said, jolting both Anessa and Garaam from their thoughts.
“Yes,” Anessa answered quickly.
“Why are you aging?” Axull Darr asked.
Anessa and Garaam looked at each other in confusion.
“What do you mean?” Anessa said.
“The sphere’s sensors have just finished their analysis of your code. The genetic markers required for preventing the aging process have been disabled. I was wondering if you know why your people decided to do that,” Axull Darr said.
“You are saying that we shouldn’t age?” Garaam asked, a hint of anger entering her voice.
“Once you gained the Sha, your race would stop aging; the two evolutions are tied together. Unless you did something like what the humans did. They stopped their own aging long before they gained the Sha; in a way, they stopped themselves from gaining it in the manner that I intended. But there are no signs that something like that has happened to you. Your DNA followed the path laid down by me exactly; the genes were disabled after they were active, and that could’ve only happened on purpose.”
“They must’ve done that, too,” Garaam said, agitated.
“Garaam?” Anessa said.
“We need to go, Anessa. If this Human will let us leave, we must go now. We knew that they had been doing things to keep their power, but now it makes sense,” Garaam said.
“The Elders?”
“Yes. We must talk, on one of our ships,” Garaam said, now impatient.
“May we leave now?” Anessa asked.
“Of course, I’ll let Adrian know,” Axull Darr responded.
***
As they were escorted back to their shuttle, Anessa paused and turned to look at Adrian. He stood behind her, watching her intently. Garaam noticed her pausing and used just a bit of Sha.
“Anessa?” Garaam asked.
“Go on, I’ll be right there,” Anessa said.
She stepped forward and stopped in front of Adrian. He was looking up at her, and again Anessa was struck at just how different they were. She was larger than him; he almost looked like a child compared to her. And yet anyone looking at him could see the
presence that he had; his eyes held depths that spoke of a long life. She had hated him once, looked down on him as an insignificant pebble standing in her way. However, gradually, as she’d spent more and more time with him, that had changed. She no longer hated him, not even now when he had killed so many of her people. She respected him. She knew that he had done only what her people had forced him to do.
Something drew her to him. There was a sense of power around him, unlike anyone she had ever met. But it wasn’t just that she felt herself attracted to him in a physical way, it was more. His mind, his skills, all of those appealed to her. He was someone that was always driven to become stronger, someone who demanded respect by his very presence. Who, like her, possessed great power. In his heart, he was a warrior that only cared about a worthy challenge, just like her. If he were a Shara Daim, she would have involved herself with him by now. But he was not, and their people were at war.
Adrian quirked his eyebrow at her, a gesture that made her smile again. She put her hand on his face affectionately, not being able to help herself. “Goodbye, Adrian,” she said, and turned around, leaving him behind, feeling his eyes on her back as she stepped onto the shuttle.
Chapter Twenty
Three months later — December — Veritas
Adrian sat in his quarters on board the Veritas as he waited for his ship to enter the trans-lane on its way to Sanctuary. Sora and Akash were lying at his feet sleeping, and Axull Darr was floating in the center of the room above a table. It had been three months since the Shara Daim forces had left the system in a hurry; something about the fact that the Shara Daim were aging had upset the other Dai Sha. Adrian didn’t know why, but at least according to what Axull Darr had overheard, not all Shara Daim believed blindly in their Elders, which was a good thing for the Empire. Unrest and division among the Shara Daim could only give the Empire more time to build fleets. No matter what he had led Anessa to believe, the power he had brought to Sol was almost the entirety of what the Empire had. All Shara Daim had to do was to split their large force and attack multiple systems at the same time and the Empire couldn’t win.
Those last words from Anessa still kept him awake, which was an achievement, as he generally didn’t sleep for more than two or three hours a day. There had been something in her eyes when she’d looked at him, an echo of how he himself felt. But her words at the end had told him that she understood the same thing that he did. Their people were at war, and the next time they saw each other, they might be forced to fight against each other again. And this time he wouldn’t be able to hold back.
His gamble had paid off; he knew that destroying an entire Legion had shown them that the Empire could fight them on equal ground. It broke the illusion that they couldn’t be beaten. Adrian was only sorry that he’d had to do it by killing so many. He knew that the relations between the Shara Daim and the Empire would suffer for it, but what he had gained was time, which was more important. Already the Fleet’s shipyards across the Empire were working tirelessly to build ships, and Warpath’s Forge was close to doubling its construction rate.
Now he only hoped that Anessa could change her people. Before she’d left, Adrian had given her some of the data copied from the sphere so that she could have proof that the Shara Daim version of history was severely edited. If she managed to convince enough of her people, they might be able to change; if not, they would either descend into a civil war or outright split. Both were options that worked well for the Empire. If they still wanted war, the Empire would give it to them.
Adrian now had room to breathe, and pursue other projects while he waited to see what happened with the Shara Daim. The thing he was most looking forward to was a breakthrough in genetics that would now allow Seo-yun to give him more of the upgrades for his Sha, and he now had time to leave for Sanctuary. He left Gotu in charge of Olympus Mons, with Aileen going back to Tarabat, and five fleets were still in Sol under Johanna’s command.
Adrian looked at Axull Darr, debating whether to ask him a question that had been on his mind for a long time. He knew that Seo-yun had tried to ask him the same thing but Axull Darr wouldn’t speak of it. Finally, he decided that he could lose nothing by asking.
“You told us once that you created us to fix the mistake you made, but you never told us what that mistake is,” Adrian said.
“Because you can do nothing as you are now,” Axull Darr said.
“But what harm can there be for us to know if we can’t do anything about it?” Adrian asked.
“You are young and rash; my people were old and far wiser than you, and still we made a mistake. I do not want you to fall into temptation and start experimenting with the same things we did. Already you are too close for my comfort.”
Adrian frowned. “We are? Why not tell us then so that we know what to avoid?”
“I…It is not that simple, the temptation is great, and already your knowledge is approaching the level where you can abuse it,” Axull Darr said.
“You have seen the history of Earth; we know about temptation and the price of succumbing to it,” Adrian said.
“Yes, and it is the one thing that gives me hope that you might not follow my people’s footsteps. You are not like us. We didn’t have any obstacles; we pushed sciences in all directions unopposed, never thinking about the consequences because we had never suffered because of them,” Axull Darr said.
“So why not trust us?” Adrian asked.
Axull Darr remained silent for a while. “Perhaps you are right, perhaps I see too much of myself in you. Very well. I will tell you the story about what we did.”
Adrian leaned forward attentively as Axull Darr started to speak.
“You know that my people were dying. We didn’t know why, but we believed that it had to do with the Sha and our use of it. To understand why we thought that, you need to understand what the Sha truly is,” Axull Darr said, his blank eyes somehow focusing on Adrian. “And that is hard to explain to someone like you who doesn’t have billions of years’ worth of knowledge; your people don’t even have terms for most of what my people knew. Imagine a force that binds the entire Universe together, something that makes it all real, that keeps it from falling apart. What allows stars to exist, and what allows for gravity, and all the other things that exist in the Universe, the background on which the Universe resides. That is the Sha. The mind is a vessel that allows a being to influence that force. And like anything in the Universe, it requires energy to be used. Most lifeforms evolve the interface that allows control of the Sha naturally, each slightly different. Your friends there, for example.” Axull Darr pointed at the sleeping forms of Akash and Sora.
“They have evolved a way to feel and influence emotions, to bend this force just a little to achieve that. We evolved it naturally as well, and we added to it, pushing our abilities further artificially. And for several billions of years, everything was fine—until we started dying. We didn’t age, much like your people don’t, but suddenly our bodies started to deteriorate; bonds that held our body fell apart and we died. For a long time, we couldn’t find the cause, and nothing we did could help us. Then there were only eight of us left, and we were desperate. We didn’t want to die, so we tried to find a cure. One of our suspicions was that we had somehow grown dependent on the Sha, but that our bodies and minds couldn’t process enough of it. We had different ideas and projects, and three of my closest friends ran one of our more promising ones. They made a base in a system at the edge of the galaxy, and there they created a completely new lifeform using both our technology and the Sha, something we had never done before. The life wasn’t intelligent. It was an organism that could evolve rapidly; we thought that if we introduce our DNA into it, it might evolve and cure whatever it was that was ailing us. Show us how to allow our bodies more access to the Sha.” Axull Darr paused, his face dropping.
“But life was never meant to evolve so fast. It takes millions, billions of years for the Universe to create life. And when we
did it in a matter of a couple of years, it turned out wrong. Our DNA gave it access to the Sha and a sort of primal intelligence. It got loose, infecting the three that had created it, merging its DNA with theirs. DNA that had evolved far beyond what we’d designed it to be. The three became something else; the infusion of the artificial life cured them, making them a new lifeform, one with the experiences and knowledge of what they once were. They were more evolved, smarter, stronger with the Sha, and driven to consume and grow more. Our goal of resurrecting our people was corrupted in their minds, and they used that life that we created as a blueprint to create a servant race of highly intelligent beings that answered only to them. This race they created used life and matter as fuel to reproduce, to build a kind of hybrid biological and technological ships and weapons under the guidance of the three. Before we realized what was happening, the three had dismantled the system they were in and built an army and fleets of ships. The rest of us weren’t all there; we had different projects all over the galaxy, and by the time we noticed what was happening, it was too late. The three had left that system and found an intelligent race that lived in a system nearby. They killed them all, using their biological matter to grow their army even more and to build more ships,” Axull Darr said, and grew quiet.
Adrian swallowed, hard. “What happened then? Did you try to stop them?” he asked.
Axull Darr nodded. “Of course. We had ships still, powerful ships, but there were only five of us left. There was nothing we could do against armies and fleets that had the same technology we did, more advanced even, as it was augmented with biotech that we had never really used. The three had perfected it. We went to younger races and asked for help, uplifting several of them to fight our war. We did what we could. The armies and ships of the three relied on biological matter for food and fuel, so we destroyed planets, vaporized entire star systems, but we only slowed them down. The races we uplifted were losing; every soldier that fell was food for our enemy. In the end, we were forced to build machine armies to fight our enemy, but we knew that they couldn’t defeat them; they had no Sha and were at a disadvantage, as every enemy soldier could use it. Eventually, four of my people decided that it was a lost cause; they wanted to change the parameters of the AIs fighting the enemy from destruction to containment. I disagreed with the methods they wanted to use to enforce it and split from them.”