Charlie rushed over to the Kalligeneia and checked on her. “She’s still alive. She seems like she’s asleep.”
The red-skinned woman stirred as Charlie touched her. “No, I’m remembering. Let me ‘member.” She looked a little older, possibly, but not as elderly as the other Aelfwyrd did. The starvation and the carefully cared-for hair were the only real changes he saw in her.
“How long were we in there?” Charlie shouted at her. “How long did you wait? Did I regenerate too? Is there another Charlie somewhere?”
He turned to the Aelfwyrd at his side, “We must have been cut off in that room. The Genesis Chamber made new versions of us. Space was twisted. Maybe time was too? We could have been in there for decades.”
“It looks like it,” Aelfwyrd said, further examining the other version of himself. “But…. Why am I black?”
Except for the race, the age, and the health, the new version of himself looked like the same man. Some of the facial features were a little different, but his hands were his hands. His teeth were his teeth. He recognized the clothes that the other version of himself wore.
“Time wouldn’t change my race. Unless, there was a reason I changed it myself?” he muttered.
“Who are you supposed to be?” A deep voice called out from the back of the room.
Charlie, Aelfwyrd, and Kalligeneia turned as a man walked forward wearing a white robe with gold trim. It was a new black-skinned David Aelfwyrd.
“Oh, come on. This is crazy!” Charlie shouted.
The new Aelfwyrd and the one Charlie had come with walked over and looked each other in the face. They walked the same. They were the same height. Their facial expressions were the same. The faces were a little different, as their ethnicities were different, but there were two Aelfwyrds.
“Is this our ship?” The new Aelfwyrd asked.
“No. We’re on an alien world,” the Caucasian Aelfwyrd replied. “Do you know any reason why there would be two of me?”
“Well, only because there are two of me and that makes it fair,” the new Aelfwyrd cocked his head.
“And why are you black?”
“Just lucky, I guess. What’s wrong with you?”
“This is very very strange,” the white Aelfwyrd said, rubbing his hands through his light hair. “There is no reason for there to be two of us. Are the beds from the Genesis Chamber down here? Why would anyone move them?”
The new Aelfwyrd hooked a thumb over his shoulder and pointed in the direction he had walked from. The first Aelfwyrd immediately pushed past him and ran back there.
“Charlie! Charlie, you’re going to want to see this.”
Charlie gently put Kalligeneia’s arm over his shoulder and he walked with her over towards the Aelfwyrd he knew. As he passed the new one he said to him, “Have we met before?”
“I don’t know, but I know some tests we could do to make sure.”
Past some strangely shaped blue sculptures, Charlie, Kalligeneia, and Aelfwyrd found a series of familiar white slabs. One of them had been smashed into pieces.
There were dead bodies around the other two, old and mummified remains which looked like Kalligeneia and the new dark-skinned Aelfwyrd. None of the dead bodies looked less than a decade old.
“There are their beds, Charlie. The other me was just born on one of these.”
The new Aelfwyrd pointed at the one on the right.
Charlie pointed to the broken one. “Who does that belong to?”
“No idea,” one of the Aelfwyrds replied. Charlie wasn’t looking at them, so he wasn’t sure which one. Their voices were exactly the same.
At this point, another Kalligeneia and a single Avraam walked in through the large blue doors. They didn’t look older. This Kalligeneia was her normal self, with a messy black bee’s nest for her hair. They both still wore the broken suits which they had had on when the fell through the red biomass and into the village of the snake-people.
“Charlie?” Kalligeneia called out as the approached.
Charlie turned to the older-looking Kalligeneia with an accusation on his face.
“Is that me?” the thin Kalligeneia smiled. “I must have changed everything. Or… is this another remembering?”
“What are you talking about?” the light-skinned Aelfwyrd asked her.
“The ‘membering.” She held up a piece of the blue moss as if that explained everything.
That Aelfwyrd took it from her. “This is ‘membering?”
“I guess. Sure. It helps us go back and remember, and then change what we remember. A lot better than therapy.”
He took out some tools and began examining the moss.
Avraam and Kalligeneia walked over. They saw the white slabs, the dark-skinned Aelfwyrd, and the second Kalligeneia.
“Who’s she?” Kalligeneia asked, pointing at the new version of herself.
“I am the walrus,” the new Kalligeneia smirked.
The two red women faced each other face to face. “What’s wrong with her?” The younger Kalligeneia asked. “She’s so thin.”
The older Kalligeneia shook her head and then smirked again. “I don’t have time for that stuff. I’ve been busy fixing the past.”
“What does she mean, Charlie?” The Kalligeneia he knew was getting upset.
The white Aelfwyrd looked up from studying the blue moss. “I believe it’s a drug of some sort. This Kalligeneia and the previous Aelfwyrd were addicts.”
“That’s why they’re so thin,” The younger-looking Kalligeneia said. “They couldn’t be bothered eating.”
The other Kalligeneia laughed and threw her hands in the air. “Yeah, but you know what sweetie? The way I remember it, no one killed Sophie. The Ramafish escaped. Our mother never got sick. I fixed it.” She pointed at the side of her head. “I fixed it in here.”
“Are you saying you changed your memories? Amazing,” The old Aelfwyrd commented.
Avraam spoke up. “Your memories or reality?”
She shrugged. “It’s the past. Memories were all that were left. ”
Charlie turned to Avraam. “How did you two get through that room?”
“We walked. It was just a simple room with a table. I don’t see why all the fuss,” Avraam replied.
The Caucasian Aelfwyrd nodded at Charlie. “When you took the rock, it must have taken the power source for the effect.”
Avraam then pointed at the two versions of Doctor Aelfwyrd. “Which one is the evil twin?”
Charlie replied. “It’s Aelfwyrd. They’re both – well, at least morally debatable. Alright, well we can’t stay down here forever. I want these two and their Genesis Beds taken onboard. Take the blue moss too so Aelfwyrd – the Aelfwyrds can study it.”
The dark-skinned Aelfwyrd approached Charlie with an open hand. “I just wanted to say what a pleasure it is to finally meet you. You were a hero of mine. I never heard about you having a third eye though. Did I, an I, give you that eye?”
Avraam interjected. “That’s right. Your eye is open. Is it working now?”
But Charlie scowled. “One of you was enough trouble. You try any crap, together or separately and we’ll see how easy it is to smash your slabs.”
This Aelfwyrd looked disappointed and taken aback. “Don’t blame me for what he did.”
The other Aelfwyrd replied. “The funny part is I didn’t even do it. It was another Aelfwyrd entirely.”
“So, we’re to blame for the sins of a previous life? The captain’s a Buddhist! Has he set up a caste system on the starship yet?”
As they began packing everything up, Charlie walked around behind the Genesis Beds. There was a low and winding archway and beyond that the open sky. He walked out and found himself on an open air walk-way. He could hear the pounding of the yellow waves. The smell of their sulfurous mist had never completely left him, but it was thicker out there. The red ropes of living “Cosmic Shag” made a closed sky far above his head.
There were tables and chairs
set out for people to sit on. At one he found the ancient bones of two snake-people. They looked like they had died centuries before.
Beyond that sat what looked to him like a spaceship. This ship didn’t look anything like the shuttles which came from the Shamballa. Instead it reminded him of the blue robot he had found among Nayara’s effects in the Crystal City.
January 2309
“It has been five years since you took my freedom away and condemned me to solitary confinement,” Allambree began. “Five years since you took away my home, five years since you took away the sunlight – any sunlight, Sol or alien. I understand that I frightened you all. I didn’t do what I did because I wanted to create a monster. I’m not an anarchist. I didn’t want to give birth to a new A.I. or resurrect the old one. I took a chance. I ran a single processor at levels modestly beyond what the law provides for less than a day.
“My actions did not result in the awakening of an A.I. What I did was dangerous, but the danger never came to fruition. Instead, I was able to use that processor to break the code of the Griffon language and give humanity a new literature larger than its own.
“We don’t know anything about humanity going back more than 30,000 years. We have almost no knowledge going back 10,000 years. And, while the dates are debated, it seems to be the case that the human race has no literature older than 5,000 years. We are a race with amnesia!
“The Griffons kept records going back 35,000 years. They maintained a rich literature more than 8,000 years old. They had longer to think about the nature of reality than we did. They had longer to think about what it is to be alive. They wrote stories, just like we did. They wrote poetry. They’re all dead now, but we get to inherit all of their knowledge. We get their memories, their history. I took a risk, but humanity will be richer for what I did, and we will be richer for all eternity!”
Allambree wore chains around his ankles and chains around his wrists. He sat at a rectangular table made of cheap particle plastic. His lawyer and his lawyer’s associate sat to his right.
There were protesters outside, violent and furious protesters. Allambree had spent most of the last five years in solitary confinement, not as punishment, but it was what the government had to do to keep him alive. The media saw him as a villain, as one of the most dangerous villains in human history. Many believed that he had been trying to resurrect The Machine that day on Griffon. There were contested reports that his actions had created a nascent A.I. which had had to be put down by government black ops teams before the public found out the truth. The government denied this, but the theories persisted.
“I’ve come here to ask for my freedom. Either set me free by giving me back my life, or set me free by releasing me from this life. But I don’t want to spend the next fifty years in a cage. And I don’t deserve that.”
Dario Willingham represented the state. He stood as he spoke before the court, and before the cameras.
“The truth of the matter is we’ll never know what happened that day. Did Allambree bring The Machine back to life? Was he trying to? Or maybe he was, as he says, just an over-eager scientist doing whatever he believed he had to do to move humanity forward. We’ve known a lot of people like that before. Once upon a time, they used to take the poor and the disadvantaged, make them grow extra noses and genitals on their bodies for the rich. The poor people couldn’t say no. They had no power. They had no choice. And then some of those good people were forced to lease their very brains over to the scientists and let them borrow months of their lives, just use them as machines.
“That’s where The Machine came from, you know: Some over-eager scientists who were willing to risk humanity to drag us forward at any cost. Now, look. I’m not saying Allambree is an evil man. I don’t know that he was trying to kill us all. I am saying that he didn’t care. He was willing to risk killing us all if it meant he could translate some old stories and poems from alien to human.
“I read one of the books. It’s a good book. But I wouldn’t die for it. I wouldn’t risk my sons lives for it. But Allambree would. He did.
“We’re asking the court to do everything in its power to keep Allambree behind bars for so long as he does draw breath. We are asking the court to treat him in the harshest possible manner and to make an example of him. We cannot take the chance. He says our culture goes back 30,000 years. I’ll take his word for it. He’s the historian. But I’ll tell ya. He’d end it. I can see the tombstone: 30,000 B.C. to 2309 A.D. Here lies the Human Race, slaughtered by The Machine.
“Don’t think it could happen? Don’t think it will happen if we fail to make an example of this man and make sure all scientists everywhere respect the computational limits put in place to protect us? Well, then it will happen. The robots are coming for us all. The only way to stop them is to make an example of Allambree. Thank you.”
Two weeks later, before the court rendered its decision, Allambree Alawa was found dead in his cell, the victim of a prison guard attack. There was a long and very public trial of those guards and they were eventually set free.
7
PRESENT DAY
The shuttle burned its way through the low-hanging biomass to get down to the palace. Vast pieces of the living mass thundered to the ground, shattering rocks as it impacted upon the land beneath it. It made a sound like elephants falling from the sky. It smelled like barbequed meat.
As the shuttle passed over the jaundiced sea, it displaced the water beneath it and created a great cloud of yellow mist which created a soft mist for the waiting crew, as if it was raining.
As neither of them had any information about the alien space-craft, the two new crew members from Tertius-5 were brought back on board the Shamballa, as were their Genesis Beds, and everything else which looked like it might be useful.
No one seemed to know what had happened to the one snake-creature who had actually spoken English.
Sally and Umbra knew the most about spaceships, and Wu Gwei knew the most about weapons, so they were brought down quickly to examine the ship, as most of the rest of the crew were brought up. Charlie gave orders that the recently discovered versions of David Aelfwyrd and Kalligeneia Athanas were to be confined to the Capital building until further notice.
The latest incarnation of Wu Gwei, naturally, had no implants or mechanical parts. He was dressed in a simple white collared shirt and purple pair of slacks. He wore two guns and a sword all holstered to his back. He also carried a silver metal orb about half the size of a basketball.
When the quartermaster reached the vicinity of the alien ship he placed his orb on the ground and then began to whistle. A red light began to shine from the device and against the side of the ship. He was apparently scanning it.
“Your third eye is open,” Wu Gwei commented.
“It seems to be working now.”
“And what do you see?”
“Most things look normal. Every once in a while I notice an extra angle to an object, a thickness which can’t be measured in the three dimensions we usually have. I see shapes moving around quickly, as if there… well, I don’t understand it yet. The words I try to use to describe it are all wrong. I’m seeing things which are beyond human experience,” Charlie replied.
Umbra leaned over and took a close look at his third eye. “It changes color,” she observed. “If I watch it for a while it cycles through blue and green and a light purple.”
“Like a mood ring?”
The great white-haired physicist turned and looked out over the hand-rails into the amber ocean. Her long fur blew dramatically over the edge. “I don’t like the way this planet smells. The sulfur is like a baby’s dirty bottom.”
Sally bent down and was examining the results of Wu Gwei’s scan with him. They both looked concerned, but not worried.
“What can you tell me?” Charlie asked.
Wu Gwei answered. “It’s not one of ours. It’s unquestionably made of the same technology as the probe which attacked you.”
Charlie looked at the ship, at its shining silver-blue surface. He consciously focused with his new third eye. Tiny red, orange, and blajonge motes became visible around the surface. They looked hot to him, and sharp, although no bigger than flakes of dust. “Is the ship radioactive? I’m seeing something: little sharp red dots floating around it. Could I be seeing radiation?”
“Radiation doesn’t stand still. It moves. It disintegrates. I don’t know what you’re seeing. The ship is actually less radioactive than the background levels of this planet, which is another reason for us not to waste any time,” Umbra Farrah answered.
Charlie ran his hands around his forehead, not touching the new lids or eyeball. “I really need an instruction manual for every new body part.”
He closed his third eye gently with his fingers.
Wu Gwei, Sally, and Umbra began cautiously approaching the ship. They didn’t run into any immediate danger. In fact, a door opened in the back of the craft when they drew near to it.
Inside, they watched as bright white lights switched on one at a time, the ship woke up and became aware of their presence. There was a green rug held down with bronze-colored metal edges. The rug was stained with what looked like fairly normal brown muddy footprints.
They all paused for just a moment. Then suddenly Sally stepped forward and pushed her way up and through the door.
“Wait,” Umbra protested weakly.
But the pilot didn’t feel like waiting anymore.
They didn’t find any traps or waiting attackers. The ship was old, used, and in need of new rugs. The seats were a little small, but Sally was able to sit in the command chair and began figuring out the controls right away.
“Can you fly it?” Charlie asked, walking up behind her.
“I can do more than that. I have access to their computer. There wasn’t even any protection. It’s like they’ve never heard of passwords… or even locks.”
“What can you see?” He asked.
“Charlie. This is incredible. We’ll have to translate this, but I think we have the files of an advanced alien race here. I think we have their history!”
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 32