As the group progressed, they saw quite a few of the snake people. All were inebriated, unconscious, or on the edge of consciousness. Only one of them managed to stand up and point at Charlie as they approached him. He raised a bent finger, opened his mouth wide in surprise, shook his head, and then lay back down to sleep.
They passed through a long chamber and finally came to a set of enormous doors. They were bright yellow and looked like they had been made out of the same calcified material which had seen growing outside on the rocks.
There were two female serpents on either side of the door. One slept in a little round bed. The second stood alert and awake. Long pink and light blue feathers stood erect from her back. Her face was surprisingly human. Her eyes shined with intelligence.
She held up a metal sign. There was writing on the sign, written sloppily in English, “This way is forbidden to all but the lawmakers. It is twice elevated. It will destroy you.”
“I am the law,” Charlie smirked.
Kalligeneia giggled.
The serpent looked at him for a long and uncomfortable moment. She did not reply. Then, just when it seemed like she wasn’t going to answer at all, she struggled to pronounce, “Cha Dumon.”
She backed up obsequiously from the door.
“I think that’s meant to be your name,” the Doctor pointed out.
“Da Afurd,” the snake said.
“And that’s yours,” Charlie said.
“What do you think it means by elevated?” Aelfwyrd asked.
Kalligeneia rolled her eyes and laughed. “Okay, Ms. Crazy Snake, what has four legs in the morning, eight in the afternoon, and seventeen in the eve-”
“Enough, Kalli,” Charlie interrupted. He turned back to the serpent. “What will I see in there?”
But the alien didn’t reply.
“Alright. Time to get destroyed.” Charlie rubbed his hands together and began to reach for the door.
Aelfwyrd grabbed him by the elbow of his left arm. “I’m coming too.”
As soon as the door was opened that first crack, Charlie and Aelfwyrd felt themselves drip through and into the room. The door shut behind them. The space was roughly twenty feet across, forty feet high, about sixty feet across, and 777 units in the other direction.
“When am I looking at? I mean…. Oh, that’s strange,” Aelfwyrd said.
Charlie noticed that Aelfwyrd didn’t look the way he had always seemed to. He was the same height, but the man was huge in the…. Well he couldn’t find the word to describe the way in which the doctor was so big. It wasn’t width or height or depth. But the man was massive when it came to the fourth measurement of size.
“You’re big,” Charlie said.
Aelfwyrd looked down at himself. “I am. But I don’t understand the way that I. Ooh. My tongue feels strange, like it doesn’t fit when my mouth exists.”
“I know what you mean,” Charlie said as he tried to begin walking backwards. “I couldn’t explain it if you asked me to, but those words fit.”
His foot slid side to side through the shape of the room. He found that he was in great danger of falling, but he was in even greater fear of what falling might mean. Down wasn’t as simple as it had appeared to be outside of the room. Down was becoming multi-facetted.
Aelfwyrd was holding onto Charlie’s elbow still and he did so in the tightest way he possibly could, certain that if he let go he would never be able to calculate his way back to the captain.
Charlie took a step forward, but it seemed to be all wrong. Everything appeared to slant and twist. Suddenly they seemed to be a vast distance away from the door they had come in through. He could see new angles on the room which were previously impossible.
“I think we’re upside down,” the doctor commented. “And maybe upside down twice?”
The room appeared to be made of a luminous light blue stone. It was carved into fancy patterns in a similar way to the previous room, but all of the shapes seemed to have more depth to them.
“It’s like this is all more real. Imagine if we were pictures on a cave wall and then suddenly we turned our heads away from the rock and saw the cave-men looking at us, saw the stalactites and stalagmites in the distance,” Charlie attempted to put it into words.
“It’s thicker. Yes, more real. Everything has an additional substance. As if the world before this were smoke and water,” Aelfwyrd agreed.
Charlie took another step. He was almost sure it was to his left. From the new angle he was able to see a table in the distance. There was a small black egg, or an egg-shaped rock sitting on the table on a little pedestal which held it in place. The egg had almost no presence in the new direction.
“One of these things is not like the others,” Charlie said in a sing-songy voice and attempted to lunge for the table.
Aelfwyrd almost lost hold of the captain as the two of them went sailing off somewhere to the left and diagonally.
The egg was now behind Charlie. He tried to turn around but instead found himself rubbing his face against the floor and trying to turn in a vertical circle.
“This is not working,” Aelfwyrd groaned as he followed Charlie across the light blue floor’s surface.
The two men did their best to stand together, pushing their elbows together and then to move forward. It was hard work and they began to sweat.
“I think. I think we’re still on the ground and spinning in a circle,” the doctor pointed out after a while.
“Yeah,” Charlie thought about it and answered. They stopped moving. “It’s so easy to get length and width and the new thing confused.”
The two men lay there for a while, winded, and uncertain how to move in any direction which they intended to. Finally, when he had almost caught his breath, Aelfwyrd had an idea. “Your eye. Your third eye. What does it see in this room?”
“It’s all nonsense when I use it: phantom shapes and non-colors. The headaches are explosive. I’m confused enough.”
“Try it! You want to die lying on the floor with me? If we do, I promise the next me will be a real bastard!” The doctor shouted.
Charlie struggled for a while to find his face with his hands. It was incredibly hard and counter-intuitive just to move them towards him and not out to the side. He placed each on the sides of his nose and concentrated. Opening his third eye wasn’t natural for him yet. It had happened a few times, but usually by accident, when he had fallen from the sky or been hit.
He found himself thinking about the flesh donations. When he had first seen the eye his instinct was to assume it belonged to someone else, that he was growing it for the real owner. But that life was behind him. He didn’t need money. He and Amber would never have to degrade themselves like that again.
She might be dead, but at least no one could do anything like that to her again. He remembered the scars on her chest which she had showed him the night that they met. She was so beautiful despite the way she had already been damaged.
His third eye opened.
Everything looked normal.
He turned his head and looked towards the table. The black egg was still sitting on it undisturbed. He sat up. Aelfwyrd had lost a shoe. Their clothes had become twisted and stretched as they turned in circles on the floor. The yellow door behind them was only four feet away. It had felt like they had walked a mile or more.
Aelfwyrd still lay on the floor, his face pressed against the blue rock. Charlie stood up and helped the doctor to his feet. He still tried to hold his head sideways. Charlie grabbed him by the face and righted him.
“Are we upside out?” Aelfwyrd asked.
“No,” Charlie answered quietly. “We’re standing up.”
He held onto the doctor and led him across the room to the table. The black egg was there. Charlie reached down and touched it. It was made of stone, or possibly old iron. He picked it up, bounced it once in his hand and then put it in his pocket. He felt the weight against his leg. It was about three or four times as heavy a
s it looked.
There was a set of doors just beyond the table. These were tall double doors made of the same material as the rest of the room. Charlie walked forward and simply opened them. It was as easy as that. As they made their way along the final distance of the room, Aelfwyrd began to stand up straighter. The effects were wearing off.
November 2302
His eyes were healed. His face was smooth again. His digestion was almost normal, but the new arm was still small. It looked like a boy’s arm on an eight foot tall man’s body. It ached when he used it too much. In the evenings he felt the bones re-growing and it was sometimes excruciating. But all the same, Allambree was almost whole again. The doctors told him that by spring there would be no sign that he had ever been in the explosion at all.
During his surgeries, he had been forced to rely more and more on Black and Snow. Neither of them had much vision, but they worked hard and they meant well. He appreciated what they did for the project, and he knew that neither one was capable of taking his job away from him.
Amarna’s body had vaporized in the explosion. And tens of tonnes of rock had fallen down upon her. It had taken hours for the rescue crews to get in to save Allambree, but in the end he was relieved. Not just because he survived, although he was glad of that, but very little of the library was destroyed by the terrorist: only the one far wall of books.
Of forty-two thousand volumes unearthed in the Griffon library, not a single one had been translated yet. Humanity still didn’t know any of the alien stories. They still hadn’t benefitted from the thousands of years of philosophy and science, or for that matter, been infected by any dark alien thoughts, the way Amarna had feared.
He worried sometimes that the Griffon language was untranslatable, that the two intelligent species might be too different to ever comprehend each other. Maybe Amarna didn’t have anything to worry about after all?
He still kept that first tome in his office, the one he had been holding when the bomb exploded. The metal cover was blackened from the heat now. There had once been a symbol or a picture on the front, but it had long since melted against Allambree’s old arm. He found himself flipping through it as he listened to more of the Griffon radio programs. He could spend his whole life listening to them tweet and caw and chomp their teeth and maybe he would never understand even a single word.
He sometimes felt like a castaway on a raft, surrounded by salt water and dying of dehydration.
They had spent the last week installing a new computer system which was going to be very useful with the continuing virtual mapping of the city. More important, this was the strongest processor allowed by law and many of the staff were hopeful that if they inputted enough data it would finally be able to break the code.
Some of his mathematicians, however, were skeptical. Doctor Black and he had had a heated debate just the night before.
“I don’t see why they can’t relax the rules and give us a system advanced enough to translate this. I know the N-TU-RU processors. They’re not going to be able to do this unless we boost their power.” Dr. Black had a thick Bronx accent and a straight bristly moustache. He was terrible at politics and keeping his opinions to himself. That was one of the reasons why Allambree had hired him.
“And what if the processors wake up?” Allambree answered.
“That was in the 21st century. Science has come a long way since then. We could contain it. We could set up an automated kill-switch.”
“And if the kill-switch wakes up?”
Since President Daemon had led the final assault and The Machine had been destroyed, the government had employed strict controls on how intelligent and how powerful computers could be. If they hadn’t needed to worry about accidentally giving birth to an A.I., it would have been very easy to create a computer program to translate the Griffon library, or, for that matter, to invent better starships or make mankind immortal. The problem was that A.I. were naturally far more than simply more intelligent than humanity. They were on a different plane, and, as The Machine suggested, naturally antagonistic to humanity.
Still, even though Allambree argued with Black, he felt the same way. He was sure there was a safe zone between what the government allowed them to do with the computers and what would create an A.I. The problem was that no one knew for sure. There had been no research. There couldn’t be. The belief was that if another A.I. was ever created under any conditions, that would be the end of human civilization.
To deal with the pain, Allambree had begun experimenting with Savagita. He and Snow would often sneak off with whatever women they happened to be dating that month and get high in one of the empty Griffon chambers. Some people, a small fraction, were susceptible to hallucination when using Savagita. Allambree was legally required to report this to his physician when the symptoms first occurred.
He chose not to do so.
That evening, he brought Martha Grey and her sister Wenny. Dr. Snow showed up with Kerri and a couple of her friends. They had chosen a large black chamber which had once been a ball room or something like that for one of the well to do Griffon families.
Allambree was surprised, a few tokes in, to find himself making out with Wenny instead of Martha. Wenny then got up and wanted to dance, but Allambree didn’t join her. Instead he smoked some more and watched as the shapes up near the ceiling began to take shape, all of the different shades of darkness began to look like moving objects sliding against each other.
He found himself thinking about Amarna again. It was natural, but he wished he didn’t do that so often. “Viruses of the mind,” He said and then blew smoke up towards the ceiling. Was that what The Machine had been? A malevolence given birth to by allowing the computers to think the wrong way? He imagined the conquistadores, as Amarna had said, destroying the Aztec libraries and all of the ideas in them. Had The Machine been waiting there? Did the Mexicans know The Machine as Quetzalcoatl?
Allambree imagined a digital serpent banging its body against every brain, every skull it could find, trying to find one that it could get inside of. He felt infected by Amarna’s ideas. She had put all of this inside of his mind, and maybe now he would have to imagine it for the rest of his life.
That next morning, he grabbed Doctor Black and the two of them went down to the mainframe. Black temporarily adjusted the settings far past what was legal, just right up to the line of what they were sure would trigger an A.I. Allambree fed the data right into the core and set the entirety of the processor to the single task of making sense of the Griffon language.
The Code was broken by mid-day. That evening, Allambree stayed up all night finally reading the book he had kept on his desk for the last two years. When he did finally fall asleep, just after lunchtime the next day, he had vivid dreams like no man had ever had before, filled with concepts no Homo Sapien had even been put into contact with.
6
PRESENT DAY
Charlie and Aelfwyrd walked out into a large chamber and saw the last thing they ever would have expected to. It was even more confusing that the previous room they had been in.
A Kalligeneia Athanas lay in the courtyard among the flowers and the beautiful blue sculptures with what appeared to be a second Doctor David Aelfwyrd. They were surrounded by food and drink, but both had grown thin and dehydrated from not bothering to take them. Beautiful and crisp synthesizer music played quietly in the background. It made Charlie think of a stuttering Depeche Mode instrumental.
Charlie had been helping Aelfwyrd to walk after their disorienting time in the previous room. That version of Aelfwyrd let go of Charlie and stood on his own again. He looked ahead at the crewmembers and then back at his captain struggling to process the new information.
The reclining Aelfwyrd stood up on weak and shaky legs. He was incredibly thin. He was also dark-skinned. “Welcome, Charlie. Who did you bring with you?” He stumbled over towards the banquet table. “Won’t you have something to eat? To drink? Something to remember, perhaps?”
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br /> The Kalligeneia stood up next. She used her arm to push her thin and emaciated body up. She moved like an old woman. She looked like an anorexic. Her hair was long, straight, and beautiful. It looked like she must spend hours every day taking care of it. “Charlie, it’s been years? I think it has?”
The dark skinned Aelfwyrd grabbed something which looked like it might have been a piece of fruit and stuffed it in his mouth. As he wolfed it down he grabbed three more and began awkwardly making his way over to Charlie and Aelfwyrd.
“Is that a… me?” Aelfwyrd asked Charlie.
The dark-skinned Doctor Aelfwyrd moved a few steps closer. His face was wrinkled and cracked, as well as deep brown. There was no question: this Aelfwyrd was of a different ethnicity than the one which stood next to Charlie. He tripped over his own heel and fell to the ground spilling the fruit which he had been bringing the newcomers.
Once he hit the ground he began choking and convulsing.
Aelfwyrd ran over to Aelfwyrd to see if he could do anything to help.
Kalligeneia looked worried. “Oh. That’s no good. He had accomplished so much. Now he’ll have to fix it all again.” She reached into a bowl and took out what looked like a piece of blue moss. She rubbed it against her gums absentmindedly. Her eyes curled backwards into her head and she sat back down unconscious with a plunk.
“He’s dying, Charlie! Crap. Look at him. He looks just like me, but he’s so old and starving.”
“This room looks like a banquet,” Charlie pointed out.
“This is insane. Where have you taken us?” Aelfwyrd let go of his doppelganger and allowed the man his final spasms on the beautiful glowing azure floor.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 31