The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1)

by Noah K Mullette-Gillman

  Charlie picked one of the stations at random and sat down. There was a computer in front of him. There was a strange keyboard with colored keys at three different heights. He pressed what seemed like it might be a space-bar and then a screen appeared.

  The text on the screen read, “Captain Charlie Daemon recognized. Password.”

  He didn’t try to guess.

  Charlie went back to the elevator and went down to the prison level. As he walked out, he saw Allambree, wearing a white and gold robe, walking towards him.

  “Captain Charlie Daemon? Oh, what miracles!”

  “It’s good to see you again, Allambree.” Charlie shook the giant’s hand. His own was like a child’s in the future-man’s hand.

  “Did we know each other well?” Allambree’s face was lit up. He looked like a fan.

  “No, we met briefly in-between times that David’s tricks killed us.”

  “Do you know how many of me there have been before me?” Allambree asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “I just got here. I think I know less than anyone. Is Doctor Aelfwyrd down here?”

  “Yeah, I just visited him. Let me take you.”

  They began to walk.

  “Do you remember everything from your briefing?” Charlie asked.

  “I reckon I do.”

  “I don’t even know my passwords. In my mind, I was walking away from the war, I was freezing to death, and then this horrible magical animal appeared.”

  “Tell me.” Allambree sounded sincerely interested.

  “It was a dark creature. It was almost like it was all animals at once. It was a bear, a wolf, a dragon, a squirrel, a moose, you name it. It undid reality and it fed on my body.”

  The giant’s eyes went wide. “That’s an amazing dream.”

  “But I don’t remember it as a dream. It feels as real to me as any memory.”

  Allambree nodded. “You must remember, everything in our memories is a dream. Your old life was a fiction. There may have been a man who was similar to you a long time ago, but your life as you remember it, and my life as I remember it never really happened. The people who designed this ship also designed us. They may have based our lives on their real history, but they also changed anything which they wanted to. Maybe the real President Daemon was a woman. Maybe she was an alcoholic and a cripple. They added and removed any experiences which they wanted to, in order to make the person they thought our mission needed. That’s my theory.”

  “So, we’re not real people? We’re just simulations?”

  The big man smiled a warm smile. “Naw, I don’t think that’s true. S’true our pasts have been manufactured, but it is within our power to create any future we wish. You and I could live long lives, if we keep an eye on Doctor Aelfwyrd, and we can make anything of those lives which we wish.”

  “That’s a bright and cheery thought.”

  There were about a hundred small cells on the prison level. Seams which existed between them looked to Charlie like they could be combined into larger ones, if there was a reason to do so.

  Aelfwyrd sat in a small cell. As the two men approached him, he sat facing them. He had been waiting.

  “Captain, I’m worried that you misinterpreted my actions.”

  “Not really.”

  “I was genuinely trying to help you. It does neither of us any good to pin our existence to what we do or do not remember. You are Charlie Daemon, just as you were before we began our experiments. You’re whole, intact. You’re you.”

  “So, what should I do with you, Aelfwyrd? If I kill you, I can already see that you’ll come to the same conclusions again and again.”

  Aelfwyrd nodded. “That’s logical. But would you blame the next David Aelfwyrd for what he hasn’t done? It won’t have been his hands which tied you up. He won’t even know what I’ve done.”

  “I thought you said that existence doesn’t depend on memory?”

  “Oh, he’ll be me. But he won’t have done what I have done. It will be like a video game when you go back to an old save and make another choice. You cannot know what he will do.”

  Allambree spoke up. “You do though. You’re convinced that he will make the same choices that you’ve made.”

  “Perhaps.” Aelfwyrd smiled. “But if that’s so, it’s only because I believe I made most of the right ones. I was taking so little, and trying to give so much. That’s what I do, you know. You wouldn’t be what you are, my friend. You wouldn’t have been able to live and study in that intellectual paradise world if I hadn’t begun the work to re-create humanity in my time. I am your father.”

  Allambree made a sour face.

  Charlie and Allambree left Aelfwyrd where he was and went back to the elevator.

  “If you don’t remember your briefing, then I’d better share what I know.” Allambree punched in the button to take them to the top floor. “There are twelve crew members. Five men and seven sheilas. You are the earliest, coming from the 21st century. We have two crew members from the 28th. We can assume that the people who created our mission were some time after that, perhaps a long time after that. I have heard it said that they are from the 32nd century, but I’m skeptical that it’s that early.”

  The elevator opened and the two men were on the top floor of the capital building.

  “You and I, the crew, our ship, the plants, the animals, our whole ship were designed according to careful design. No detail was left to chance. The plan, the blueprint for this plan, was broadcast on a futuristic signal out into deep space. When the signal reached the right distance it found matter and commanded it. The matter moved and changed and it formed our world, or ship, even the people which the planners had intended for the mission.”

  “I have heard most of this already.”

  Allambree nodded.

  “What I’d really be interested in hearing more about are the details of our ship.”

  “Yes, I was getting to that. This is why I’ve brought you up here. You really need to see to appreciate it.”

  On the top floor of the Capital Building there was a series of comfortable chairs facing a massive display screen which covered a whole wall. It reminded Charlie of an IMAX screen, although maybe a little smaller. The floor was carpeted with a short blue carpet, but in the space between where the carpet ended and where the screen began there was another glass floor with a black liquid beneath.

  Two more chairs, shrouded in darkness were in the front corners of the room, where they could be pulled forward to face the rest of the seats. A tall figure suddenly rose from the farthest away.

  She was covered in long white hair on her head, her arms, her stomach, and her legs. Her face was also furry, but that hair was short like on a cat or a horse’s face. Her eyes had no pupils or details. They only contained a single uniform metallic gold color. Her lips were red and plump. She was over seven feet tall, but curved and shaped like a woman. Her mouth was open, displaying long strong teeth. Her arms and the sharp gold-colored claws at the ends of them were aloft. On her head, starting just above her temples, and then coiling back behind her ears to come around in parallel with the line of her jaw, she had a pair of yellow and gold ram’s horns. She wore a simple blue dress, a thick gold necklace, and silver bracelets.

  “Are you my dinner?” She asked in a raspy voice.

  She took a slow, ponderous, and threatening step forward.

  Allambree laughed.

  And then the white-haired woman laughed as well. In fact, she giggled.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not really a cannibal blood monster. I just love doing that.”

  “Captain Daemon, this is the great Umbra Farrah, inventor of siagonal travel.”

  She was smiling warmly now. Umbra Farrah held her hand out daintily for Charlie to shake or kiss. He chose to awkwardly shake it.

  “Good choice. I’ve always been told I’m too salty.”

  “A pleasure to see you again, Charlie,” she replied, the rasp gone from her voice.
/>   Charlie frowned. “Nice to meet you.”

  She giggled again.

  “What’s siagonal travel?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh boy,” Allambree sighed.

  She grabbed Charlie’s hand unexpectedly and began to move it as if he were writing. “Imagine if you were writing a letter to someone, maybe to Amber.”

  “Um, okay.” Charlie suddenly felt naked. Who was this woman who knew such intimate details about his life? He wasn’t ready to talk about Amber.

  “But imagine that you wanted to write to Amber in another dimension.” She lifted his hand up a few inches. “Now, normally when we move through extra-dimensional space we expect to come out at the precise analogous location.” She then moved his hand forward about a foot. “What if when you came back into our dimension you had moved a distance to the left or right or up or down or northeast? Siagonal travel allows for non-linear transduction into and out of extra-dimensional space.”

  She let go of his hand and smiled broadly. She lips were especially beautiful, but her canines looked huge just behind them.

  “I’m not positive that I understand.”

  “That’s alright. You never do.”

  “Allambree was just going to tell me about my ship.”

  The space-aborigine held out his arm towards the furry woman. He was eight feet tall, and she was about seven. At six feet, Charlie had never felt so small.

  Umbra Farrah walked over to the glass surface, bent down, and placed her hand on it. A three-dimensional image of a world soon appeared in mid-air.

  “We live on the UUS Shamballa, the Unified Universe Ship Shamballa. It was imagined and designed by the greatest minds from the future. What they conceived was a small and wandering moon, a true ‘planet’ in the Greek sense. Our world-ship is roughly one hundred miles around. You could walk it in a week, if you didn’t need to stop to rest too much.

  “There are seven cities on the surface: a marble city, a crystal city, a city of petrified wood, and others. Each one is as much a work of art as the Marble city below us. Each one is large enough for thousands of people to live, but we’re just a crew of twelve.”

  “Why is that?” Charlie asked.

  “My theory is that they wanted to give us options. You and I and our many iterations could live for centuries. There are enough supplies and options on our ship to provide for that. For now, we’re based in the Marble City. Maybe in a few years we’ll get sick of it and want to try the Wood City? We have the choice.

  “Now, the Shamballa is surrounded by a powerful energy field over which we have control. It protects us from the universe outside and helps us to maintain the environment which we need to live. It gives us our gravity. It also allows us to maneuver our ship as well as, or better than, any traditionally constructed vehicle.”

  “We can move our moon?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Allambree smiled widely, like a little boy.

  “And can we do that sideways-diagonal travel which you were talking about?”

  “We can,” Umbra replied.

  “Can we go home to Earth, if we want?”

  She shook her head. “Even if we knew where Earth was in relation to our current location, the entire point of our mission was to send people farther out than could ever be achieved by other methods. We didn’t fly here. There was no hyper-sleep or hyper-warp. You and I and these chairs and the Marble City were sung into existence through the transmission of a very rich and specific signal wave.”

  “How does that even work? If I hear a song, it doesn’t make me do what it wants me to. It sure doesn’t cause my atoms to re-arrange themselves.”

  “Oh, but it can. If I were to place a handful of sand on a drum and then vibrate that drum at a specific wave-length, I could command those grains to form a picture. Once I understand the language, I can choose the picture. I can make the granules re-position themselves however I want. With a rich enough signal, I could even tell their sub-atomic parts to re-align. This may sound fantastic. But it is science.”

  Charlie smirked. “I don’t believe that rock and roll can really change the world…”

  “Course you do.” Allambree nudged him with his elbow.

  Umbra continued. “We can go anywhere we want. We can see anything. No one gives us orders or instructions. Well, you’re the captain, but you’re not exactly a dictator. We can use this amazing ship. We can explore, learn about outer space, see things which no one has ever seen before, learn what’s unknown, write songs about it.”

  “So, why do we need slaves?”

  Umbra frowned. “You appear to not remember your passwords, which means the robots we were sent with do not work. Mr. Wu attempted to create new ones, from scratch and we were all shocked to discover that they also demanded your password. But with or without robots we need someone to dig up the mineral riches of our moon and the worlds we find.”

  “Why?”

  “Mostly for gold.”

  “Gold! For God’s sake. You’ve just told me that we’re the richest and most privileged people in all of history, who cares about crap like that?”

  “It’s not for jewelry.” Her hand rested on her necklace. “We need the gold to use as fuel for the Tri-frost Engine.”

  Charlie sat down on one of the chairs and rubbed his chin. The holographic image of their world-ship was slowly shaping in front of him. The seven cities around the equator seemed to cover a very small portion of the surface. “What’s out there? What’s in-between our cities?”

  “The wilderness: forests, fields, lakes. It’s quite large.” Umbra Farrah moved her hand over the hologram, choosing a specific spot and making it stand still once she had found it. “This here is a quarry of cheese.”

  Charlie laughed. “Shut up.”

  Umbra laughed with him. “Honestly. Medicine flows from the trees. There are animals evolved to pick up your trash, or to help if you skin your knee. It’s an entire biosphere designed to serve and assist us.”

  “What..um… who were the people who made all of this? What kind of civilization would make us and this ship even knowing we would never come back to them? I don’t get it. That’s not the humanity I’ve had the displeasure of knowing.”

  Umbra smiled. “But you like people?”

  “Some of them.”

  “You were the last President of the United States of America. We say the last because during your time the union expanded to include all of North and South America, and then all of Europe. But really, that wasn’t the most important thing you did.

  “You took a look around at a society of people struggling to feed and shelter themselves and their families, a society with the technology to just give these basic requirements to everyone. You said that if the American dream was only to own a house, then no one was aiming high enough. You wanted people to have the security and education and time to pursue higher aspirations.”

  “I guess I was set to become a wise old fart, wasn’t I?” Charlie joked.

  “Indeed. In the 22nd century our Gloryannana was known as the Voice of England. She was both monarch and entertainer. Billions of people went to bed every night only after watching her broadcast, listening to her talk to the great artists, actors, politicians, important people of her day.

  “And our Doctor David Aelfwyrd was her most important employee. Under her orders, he set about transforming humanity so that it was capable of living on Mars. It was later discovered that his experiments killed and destroyed thousands of people, but by then he had died and millions of citizens lived on Mars, all of which had sworn fealty to the British Corporation.

  “In the 23rd century -”

  Allambree interrupted. “That’s my era.”

  “Yes, our Sally Brightly and Allambree Alawa come from the 23rd century. She was an explorer on three different spaceships, the last of which she was captain on. She traveled throughout the Milky Way Galaxy encountering alien life forms. Some of them were like insects. On a few worlds they were more a
dvanced animals. In her career she visited 63 planets, but on none of them did she find intelligent life.

  “Allambree lived on a world which had used to be home to an intelligent race, but sadly they died before we found them. He was in charge of the whole planet, and the whole archeological expedition. He worked on translating their languages, studying their culture and literature.”

  “The people of Griffon had as rich a history as we do,” Allambree said, a little sadly. “The advance to humanity was incalculable. We had new Shakespeares, new DaVincis, new Bibles, but we could never talk with the authors.”

  “But we also had the unused and imperfect work they had done towards developing the Geft Machine,” Umbra added seriously.

  “What’s that?” Charlie asked.

  “The Geft Machine was built after Allambree’s time. It was the ultimate wish-fulfiller. Everyone on Earth, everyone on Mars, all people everywhere were asked to put in their orders. Maybe I wanted a chest of gold, you wanted a palace, Allambree wanted a fleet of galleons. The Geft machine was charged up and linked to the power of a distant sun. Once a year it simply printed out everything that everyone wanted and created it. Suddenly all material needs were fulfilled. You could have anything which you had the imagination to think to ask for.”

  “Everyone on Earth could have a palace?”

  “As long as you had the space to keep it.”

  “What about if everyone asked for a space-station to keep their palaces on?”

  “Then everyone would have the space to store those palaces. There were many millions of spaceships and space-stations during the 24th century.”

  “What about people? Could I wish up my perfect wife? Could you wish back people who had died? Or pets?”