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

by Noah K Mullette-Gillman

  Sally reached for him and pulled his shirt, helping him into the exposed shelter. They hid in two corners, Avraam and Mew Tse on one side, and Sally holding Charlie down on the other.

  Charlie tried to tell them that Wu was dead but, as the reef was beaten again and again, they slipped and tumbled and barely managed not to crush their heads on the coral. Talking was impossible.

  An hour later, the monster’s pummeling seemed to have stopped. The storm was pounding instead. The wind shouted as it poured through the cracks in the reef and their shelter. The water flowed over the coral and through their legs like a river.

  “We need to get out of here,” Charlie said to Sally.

  “There’s nowhere to go,” she whispered back and burrowed further into his chest. They were shaking from the cold.

  Avraam stood up and began to move towards the entrance.

  “No,” Mew Tse said loudly.

  “What am I doing?” He shouted at her.

  Sally pulled away from Charlie and moved slowly towards the Russian. “Don’t go out there.”

  He put his two hands on either side of the portal and poked his head out.

  “What is happening?” he shouted, louder now.

  Sally grabbed him by his arm, but he didn’t respond. Avraam moved out of the shelter, almost slamming Brightly against the wall as he did so.

  Charlie moved past her, resting his hand on her shoulder as he slid around. He followed Avraam out of the cave.

  The sky was black. The freezing rain felt like it was slapping the side of his face. It ran over his cheeks and tried to pour in-between his lips. It dripped from his chin. As Charlie reached for a safe hold on the rocks, his fingers slipped on ice. Avraam was walking forward, towards the ocean.

  “Avraam! What are you doing?” He called out, not sure if he would be heard over the roaring storm.

  Lightning struck. It was orange and thick. In fact, it hurt Charlie’s eyes to suddenly see such a brilliant burst. He fell to his knees and scratched himself on the coral again. He had too many little scrapes and bruises. He was beginning to feel ripped open.

  Avraam took two more steps forward, and then stopped. He turned and looked back at his captain. “It’s not me. My legs are being controlled by someone else. It’s not me.”

  And so Charlie let go of the icy rocks and he ran forward over the sharp and slippery reef. He dove forward and tackled Fock, trying to knock him to the ground. But the big man did not fall. He took another step forward, with Charlie latched onto his back. Then he paused again.

  “Leviathan is calling me back.”

  “How is that possible? You’re stopping yourself. You’re fighting. You can do this.”

  He walked three more steps forward. “We‘ll wake up on our ship. Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Charlie. We won’t even remember.”

  Avraam took three more steps forward.

  Charlie let go.

  The big Russian’s feet were now in the ocean. He took one more step and fell over the side of the reef.

  Charlie began crawling his way back. Lightning struck again and he fell down one more time. He rammed his left thigh into a rock and shouted in pain. When he opened his eyes again, there was a ribbon of Fahrey45ajopoul45643689a11111127paya. The sky was filled with strange shapes and inexpressible colors. So much stranger than even what he had seen on the alien ocean world. Something like a four-dimensional cube seemed to be eating the smoothness of the rocks. Great gold and silver arcs, which reminded him of the rings of Saturn, appeared to stick out from behind everything in front of him, as if he were seeing behind a projection.

  Charlie watched an image of Avraam out towards the ocean with Charlie on his back and then jumped in, Charlie still attached. The confusing image of himself held onto the big Russian as it went into the ocean. It all seemed so real.

  He closed his eyes and put his palm over his forehead. He closed the third eye manually, like a friend would do for a dead man.

  When he opened his two eyes again, he could barely see anything through the dark and the ice and the rivulets. He crawled over the rough ground and back into the cave, turning his clothes to ribbons as he went.

  Sally pulled him inside and the three survivors huddled together tightly and roughly all through the banging and crashing weird-night.

  July 2183

  “Snot-face is a hate word.”

  “Snot-face is a hate word.”

  Nihaya’s warning repeated in the Queen’s head again and again as the Martians came out on stage. She’d seen them on video before. She’d spoken to them online, but she’d never been in the same room as the post-humans before.

  Steven and Carla Gervais had been flown down from the Red Planet just for the interview. They were farmers, each had been Martians for a little over two years and Aelfwyrd had assured the Queen that they were stabilized. Not all of the colonists were. Twelve in one hundred would suffer from catastrophic cancerous growths in the first year, but the Gervais family was a success story.

  On Earth, he had been arrested twice: once for trespassing, and once for assault. She had been arrested three times for stealing cars and was facing a possible twenty year jail sentence. On Mars they had become model citizens.

  Mrs. Gervais explained that she had never felt like she had a choice but to break the law when she was on Earth. She had never had any opportunities or any hope that she could ever have a job.

  “Yes, we had food. Yes, the Daemon Act made sure that we all had homes. But we could never own anything. This is an age of wealth and luxuries, but we were always on the outside looking in. We could never have any of it.”

  “We could never have anything,” Steven added sadly.

  They weren’t human. Despite herself, Gloryannana couldn’t help but be shocked by them. Martians carried heavy exo-skin on their backs, and shoulders, and on the tops of their heads. They had no hair anywhere on their bodies. The heavy skin reminded her of rhinos or elephants, armadillos perhaps. It wasn’t flexible like regular skin. It was armor grown to protect their bodies from the worst ravages of the Martian rays. It normalized the gravity for comfortable walking. Underneath the armor there were new organs which could absorb and transform the cosmic rays and use it for fuel. Martians were allowed to eat, but they could get most of their nutritional requirements just from standing naked on the surface.

  As a result, clothes were no longer legally required. They were still human, and had all grown up on Earth, but they were learning to spend hours each morning sunning themselves in special parks set up for sun-bathing. Nudity was becoming normal for the post-humans.

  And the Gervais family was naked when they appeared on Gloryannana’s stage. They didn’t have to be. They didn’t want to be, but it was the Queen’s request.

  The face was the difficult part and she hoped that Carla’s still somewhat shapely naked body would help to distract from the film which covered their eyes and mouths. It was white and gooey, translucent at best, perfect for life on the red planet, but utterly alien to look at.

  They were horrible, and the fact that these monsters with armored backs and snot-faces were affable and charming made it worse. They disgusted the Queen, though she hid it well.

  A dark thought actually voiced itself in her head, “It would be better to let humanity die off than to turn it into monsters.”

  She pushed the thought back. She smiled and asked them how the constant nudity affected their sex lives.

  She asked them if it led to the rampant casual sex which many had feared.

  “No more than before,” Carla joked. The audience laughed hard at that one. Steven feigned a look of shock which added all the more to the gag.

  There were lines. There was a seven year wait list for recruits. No one seemed to care that they were required to swear an old-fashioned oath to the British Corporation in exchange for the transformation. They were selling themselves into slavery. Thousands of eager and screaming indentured servants were begging to be shipped
across the galaxy like livestock to spend the rest of their lives doing whatever they were told.

  And Earth was getting worse. The Queen would be moving up to Mars for the winter. She would never be transformed, but more and more of her life would be spent off-planet.

  Whisperiah was being groomed. She had appeared in movies for years, her love-life had been documented and watched by the public since she was a little girl. Soon it would be time to give her her own show. Maybe in a few years Gloryannana could retire permanently to Bowie City and allow her daughter to run more of the Corporation?

  Rambam was never going to be any good at acting. He just didn’t have the aptitude. The best coaches in the world had helped him through the three movies he had made, but even his mother knew that he wasn’t very good in any of them. The kindest of critics compared him to a bigger and more muscular Hayden Christensen. That would never do.

  The Queen and her retinue walked down through the building to her board meeting. The same old and omnipotent men sat around the table, each looking like young men, as had sat there for decades. The Queen sat with them. They smiled at her politely.

  At this point the lights went out.

  The rich and the powerful found themselves in utter cave blackness. Four seconds passed in silence before one of the men cleared his throat. Three seconds after that the door began being broken down from the inside. Half a minute later, the room filled with red light. The Queen saw the glow resting upon the board’s faces. They didn’t look human to her. All the rich and the important people looked like frightened animals in the unnatural light.

  Her guards grabbed her and Twelves and dragged them away. The firm hands took the two women down the hallway and then down a special emergency stairs and finally into the bunker. It was shut behind them immediately. The Queen, her assistant, and seven highly armed and thoroughly trained soldiers sat in the weakly growing red light and simply waited.

  “What do we know?” Gloryannana asked.

  “The whole city is out. There’s no power.”

  “Why?”

  “We have no further information.”

  “Are there casualties?”

  “We have no further information.”

  “Is it an attack?”

  A second guard answered, “My Queen, we don’t know anything. There’s no electricity in London. The priority was getting you to safety.”

  “Well, how safe are we?” she asked.

  But her guards didn’t reply.

  Their faces were hard set, and a little frightened. Each one of them had to have been imagining a horror scenario.

  Twelves was sweating profusely. She spoke in a tiny little voice. “This bunker could withstand a direct trans-nuclear blast.”

  The Queen nodded.

  Two hours later, communication was re-established and the Queen received a call. Electrical power had been cut throughout the entire planet and it would be a full week until the counter-measures could be fully implemented and England restored. Gloryannana was ashamed as the thought flitted through her head that this might in some way help with the population problem.

  But it would help with the work deficit. The majority of household electronics across the nation would need to be replaced in the coming weeks.

  Basic power was restored to the building about an hour after that. The Queen learned that the rest of her board had been forced to sit and wait where she had left them with nothing more than a few terrified and clueless guards to protect them. She made up her mind that protocols would have to be updated and she instructed Twelves to initiate the review.

  It wasn’t until that evening that answers began to trickle in. She spoke to Brigadier-General Fowler on a hardened line.

  “The problem seems to have originated in Meyrin.”

  “CERN,” The Queen stated.

  “Precisely. Switzerland is now roughly 120 kilometers larger today than it was yesterday.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The Queen’s voice rose two octaves.

  “There is a new peak in the Alps, one taller than any mountain which was there previously.”

  “So, we have an active tectonic plate. A geothermal event.”

  “No, we don’t like that scenario. We’re not reading any substantial increase in heat. In fact, the new mountain is covered in snow. And if a new mountain were to burst through it could never happen this quickly. Moreso, a geothermal event would put a peak on land which already existed. This is new territory. It is new and expanded space.”

  “You’re not making any sense at all!”

  “Quite. CERN has now been cut cleanly in half. The Western side of the facility is more than one hundred kilometers away from the Eastern portion. The buildings aren’t destroyed. The facilities are more or less intact. There is an extra expanse of space and matter in-between one room and the next.”

  “You are suggesting madness. Get me your superior.”

  “Your Grace, in this matter you will find no one with a better understanding of the situation. I personally visited this building two weeks ago and I spoke with the men in charge. I know what they were working on.”

  “And what, pray tell, were they working on?”

  “The practical warping of space and time, with the goal being faster than light travel.”

  “And so the theory is that the Swiss have created millions of tonnes of rock in the middle of their own bloody country – out of thin air?”

  “It’s the inescapable and certain fact, Your Majesty.”

  The Queen sighed. “Then we are all made of stars.”

  8

  PRESENT DAY

  The morning was bright and sunny and beautiful. The skies of Primus-3 were a lovely light blue and the few clouds they did see were fluffy and white.

  “It was the worms,” Sally said. “The parasites inside Avraam told him to return to the leviathan. They were either its off-spring, or a symbiote, but that was the whole point of infecting him, so they could take over his body and force him to surrender.”

  “We can’t spend another night in that cave. We’ll all die.” Charlie said.

  Sally nodded. “We’ll freeze.”

  Charlie looked down at his legs and his arms. He was cut and scraped all over. It reminded him of Avraam’s chest after Wu Gwei had sliced and burned him to try and get the worms out.

  “How do we know we’re not infected too?”

  “We can’t rule it out,” Sally admitted. “But we don’t have any reason to think we are. Avraam was in direct contact with the leviathan. We weren’t.”

  “Don’t know. Might be,” Mew Tse said quietly.

  “Might be,” the captain nodded as he looked out across the water.

  There was a splash and then the woman from the 28th century was gone.

  “It’s okay. She jumped.” Sally comforted Charlie.

  He climbed up onto a higher rock, to see farther into the distance. She climbed up and joined him.

  “I don’t know a lot about this world, or this mission. I don’t know you people well yet, but I don’t want to give up what I’ve got. We could just jump in and feed the fish and forget we were ever here, but I don’t want to forget,” Charlie said.

  “You won’t remember forgetting. You won’t…miss the memories,” Sally said with a smirk.

  “Do you want to give up?” He asked.

  “I’ve been on worlds like this before. In my real life, I explored all kinds of alien planets. A lot of them had life. There were monsters, predators. I can’t tell you what a great adventure it all was.”

  “And?”

  “Charlie, this is fun. I’m sorry. I guess I should be upset about Fock and Gwei, but they’ll be fine. You can’t mourn people who come back. This is a game. It is! It’s a puzzle that we have to solve. There is a way that you and I and Mew Tse can get off of this world and not have to die for a little while first. The question is: are we smart enough to figure it out? And if we get it wrong? It’s okay. We just go back to start.”<
br />
  In the distance, Charlie could see a large mass. He thought that it might be the island where the shuttle had landed on the first few trips. “We need to get off of this reef. That’s the first step. We need to get back to the beach.”

  “Good. That’s a goal we can aim for.”

  They walked across the reef to where the larger pieces of the shuttle had been the day before. None of them remained after the storm.

  “How long have you been alive this time?” Charlie asked.

  “Nearly three years. I’m told the previous me decided to go for a walk around our planet-ship and never returned.”

  Charlie was surprised. “You don’t know what happened to her? Could it have been Aelfwyrd?”

  “No. It wasn’t him. There’s no reason to assume foul play. I could have slipped and fallen. Maybe I ran into an animal out there?”

  “Are there dangerous animals on the ship?”

  “There aren’t supposed to be. They told us it was a loving place full of sunshine and candy, but if you believe that one…”

  “You never looked into it?”

  “Well, apparently it didn’t work out so well for me. You know, the last you wasn’t so big on exploration. He spent a lot of time in the studio writing songs.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned. It’s not as shameful as you make it sound. Do you remember any of them?”

  “I never said it was. It’s just a waste to come all the way out here and party all the time. Anyway, yes, there was one called ‘Swan.’ I liked that one. I don’t know. It’s been a while. You and Gwei used to jam together.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He plays electric guitar. He’s really amazing.”

  Charlie laughed. “An actual cyborg on guitar… That’s pretty hardcore.”

  There was a splash. Mew Tse had returned from her swim and was climbing back onto the reef.