by Dan Glover
"Don't listen to Luciana, darling Nate. She isn’t thinking right. Ever since she arrived here, she's been depressed. I tried talking with her, but she told me I cannot know what she's going through since I have my husband here with me."
He knew Karen was right but in the end it didn’t matter. He was the one who asked Kirk to come with him to old America, and he was the one who left him here. Though Nate had returned once not long afterwards, the dense sand dunes overlying the entire city had made it impossible to find the right tunnel.
"I went back, sweet Karen, but Kirk's body wasn’t there. But I'm not sure if I had the correct bearings. Micah's nanobots had replicated so heavily that they formed gigantic hills of sand when the fell from the sky after Pete flew his jet into the nexus.
"I was positive I had the same coordinates and I even found a tunnel, but from what I understand the old City was filled with tunnels. Still, it seemed much like the same one where we left Kirk. Maybe next trip I'll bring Micah along."
Micah was living in Toulon, however, and Nate couldn’t bring himself to go there. He knew it wasn’t right, what he did to Ginger and Amanda, leaving them like he did. He couldn’t face them. Besides, he reasoned that Micah wouldn’t be much use anyhow if the old City had changed as much as he thought.
The first trip to old New York had nearly been disastrous. They'd been lucky to escape. The second trip had been devastating. Losing Kirk had doomed life with his own family. He couldn’t face Luciana, and each time he looked into Ginger's or Amanda's face he saw simmering revulsion that he felt inside.
Even Chester had shunned him. The big cat seemed to know that Nate had left his friend behind and though Chester was sociable with everyone, he shared a special bond with Kirk.
Now, looking at the ground and attempting to find his own footprints, he saw the impressions in the muck of an enormously big cat, just like the footprint Chester would make.
Chapter 28—Storms
They weren’t prepared for the storm.
Ginger noticed the huge halo around the moon three days earlier but thought nothing of it. She had once heard that such a ring meant ice crystals had been forced high into the atmosphere and portended bad weather but it had been so long since they had any storms in Toulon she ignored the warning signs.
The sea began acting strangely that morning. Normally the Mediterranean had no tides to speak of but when Ginger went outdoors to have her coffee on the veranda she noticed the beach went much farther out into the sea than it usually did.
"My darling Amanda, come and see this. Something strange has happened to the water."
The two of them stood together staring out at the expanse of sand reaching far out into the Mediterranean. When Ginger reached down to take Amanda's hand in hers, she didn’t pull back like she'd done in the past.
"I've read that when something like this happens, precious Ginger, that a tidal wave is forming."
"But doesn't that happen after an earthquake, my darling Amanda?"
"Why is the sky so dark in that direction?"
Ginger looked to the west where Amanda pointed. She had been so enamored with the spectacle of the sea that she didn’t notice the clouds forming on the horizon. It looked as if night was coming but it was still early morning.
"Could it be a hurricane, my sweet Amanda?"
"We better alert everyone, darling Ginger. I'm afraid we're in for a blow."
They'd weathered storms in the past but generally the weather had been mild in the south of old France. Unlike the open sea, the Mediterranean storms were understated affairs with little impact on the estate and the vineyards that surrounded it..
Ginger had never seen the sea behave like that, however. As she hurried to put up the livestock, Amanda told her that she would run down to the vineyard and let Joshua and the others know about the approaching danger.
The dark clouds advanced far more quickly than she anticipated. Before Ginger had managed herd the goats into the barn, she was being pelted with a gritty black dust that irritated her eyes and lodged in her nostrils and throat so that she was forced to put her shirt over her nose and mouth to breathe through the coarse cloth.
The horses were mad with fear refusing to be herded into their stalls. They frightened Ginger nearly as much as the skies and the sea. Loki, a big black stallion that was normally as tame as a lamb, kicked through the corral fence and took off into the nearby wooded hills. The other six horses followed in his tracks. Ginger could only stand and watch them go.
The cows on the other hand were eager to take shelter flocking to the gate as soon as she opened it. They all had a terrifying light shining in their eyes as they mooed and shuffled and pawed at the ground waiting their turn to get inside.
The hens were already huddled in the chicken coop as Ginger closed the shutters and though she looked for the roosters they must have fled to some safe haven only they knew about.
When she began to hear the rumbling Ginger realized she'd been feeling it for several minutes moving up through the ground into the soles of her boots. By the time she made it back to the castle the intensity had increased causing her feet to feel as if bees were stinging them.
Just before she went inside she stood at the door with a hand on her brow to shield her eyes from the onslaught of grit. Looking up into the clouds swirling and dancing overhead she saw faces forming and unfurling and as soon as she thought she recognized them they morphed into nightmare images she remembered seeing pictures of in books like Dante's Inferno... figures of flames shooting out of mountains and devils with pitchforks impaling unfortunate victims upon sharpened tongs.
"I couldn’t find Catan or the others."
Amanda startled her. The day had turned to night and she assumed the girl had gathered the others and were already safely indoors.
"I don't understand, darling Amanda... Catan told me this morning that he had work planned in the vineyard."
"I'm not feeling well, precious Ginger."
She hadn’t realized it until that moment, but she wasn’t a hundred percent either. She had assumed the rumble under her feet had unsettled her stomach but now it began to dawn on her that the nausea and dizziness she was feeling was perhaps a symptom of Lake Syndrome.
She had never actually experienced the sickness but she knew from her reading and from taking with others what to expect. It would start with a headache and itchy skin, progress into stomach problems, and quickly devolve into a full-blown illness leading to death within just a few hours.
"Why would Catan and the others leave us like that, sweet Amanda? They know what will happen. We need to find them right away."
"What are we going to do if we can't find them, precious Ginger?"
She didn’t like the way Amanda was putting her in charge. Her friend knew full well what they were going to do if they couldn’t find the Lake people. They were going to die. Ginger tried to think of alternative plans but the buzzing in her feet had worked its way up her body and seemed to have settled in her head.
She couldn’t seem to remember the closest colony of Lake people nor could she recall if they had any available mode of travel to reach it. She wanted to go to the vineyard and look for herself, just to be certain Catan was gone, but she knew by the way she felt that he was.
Amanda should have figured this out by now. She was the doctor. She could have been working on a cure all these years rather than lounging in the sunshine and drinking wine. Acute anger was another symptom of Lake Syndrome. Ginger knew that. She had to get hold of herself, and quickly. Something inside her head snapped and she had the answer.
"Come on, darling Amanda... let's get out to the barn and see if one of the vehicles will start. We'll drive around and see if we can find any sign of Catan. Failing that, we'll make the trip to St. Tropez. If we leave now we still have time. Amanda?"
The girl had collapsed on the floor and was convulsing spasmodically as tiny ripples zigzagged beneath her skin that was rapidly turning an ugly
shade of blue. Going to her, Ginger tried to pick her up but she was too heavy to carry.
Panicked now, she staggered to the door opening it and hoping to find someone, anyone, to help her friend. The room was spinning around more quickly though and all of a sudden the floor rushed up at her. As she fell she thought she caught a glimpse of something standing on the porch. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human.
Chapter 29—Alive
If they caught on to what he was doing, they would exile him.
Even though he had come to adore and perhaps even love her, Ena had once promised that if he dabbled with his nanobots again she would take him into the wilds and leave him there to either die or to turn back into the monstrosity that he once was.
He preferred death.
Micah had finally solved the problem that vexed him for centuries, however, and he had to take that chance. It came to him while walking about the estate. The solution was so simple he thought it wouldn’t work, but it did.
The key had always been to marry the inorganic with the biological. Heretofore he had been manic at programming his machines to evolve as materialistic creatures on account of the frailty of the flesh, his own flesh. The problems with that approach were legion but he couldn’t seem to divert from that course once chosen.
By incorporating the nanobot within a living membrane, it became more than metal. It came to life. In doing so, the machines should theoretically master the conundrum of the body far better than ever before.
The people of the Lake would become redundant. Instead of having to rely upon their presence to keep his own life force flowing he would be free to chose his own destiny. All the People would finally be free.
He was tired of being a second-class citizen. The Ladies treated him as someone to avoid at all costs. He felt like a scourge on humanity. The People acted as if he was a canker, someone to be pitied if not reviled.
It wasn’t right. He had accomplished more than any other living being on earth. Alone, he had solved the problem of mortality and even if he didn’t get it right the first time, there was no reason to believe he couldn’t eventually succeed.
The People would come to see him as their savior and not their enemy. They would learn to appreciate his intellectual largess rather than eschewing it as something unnatural and unwholesome. He had only to make a few tiny adjustments and the world would be in the palm of his hand once again.
He had mistakenly assumed water was the bane of his tiny creations. It would short circuit the delicate electrical connections that served as neural pathways in each of the individual nanobots. Though they were conceived as a hive organism, their strength lay in being separate entities.
It was Lady Lily who inadvertently showed him the key. He thought he'd failed when she rendered his miniature machines inert with a simple touch. What he didn’t realize at the time was that their electrical impulses were being interrupted with Lily's more powerful one. She was essentially shocking them into unconsciousness leaving them without the ability to self-assemble or to communicate with the nexus.
A membrane was the answer but it couldn’t be conductive nor could it be rigid. Walking upon the beach early one morning Micah noticed the dew had adhered to sand crystals without actually saturating them. In a flash, he realized by impregnating the silica that formed a basis for his nanobots with microscopic atoms of water he could effectively create a liquid shell around them without harming the circuits inside.
"With this new technology, sweet Micah, we should be able to send a signal through the wormhole by focusing on reading the information stored in the surface of the entangled particles rather than the interiors."
Ena had been working on a new communications device in which he had no real interest but through the labor he was able to interact with her on a more personal level than was her wont. If she saw through his deception she never let on.
"What is the point of sending instantaneous signals, darling Ena?"
"Nate and the others have nearly perfected a vessel capable of traveling at multiple times the speed of light. They're planning to send an unmanned craft to a nearby star system sometime next year. With existing communication devices, any telemetry sent back to earth will take years to receive. By taking advantage of the same wormhole that will open up during the trip we hope to send signals back immediately."
"I didn’t realize they were so close to perfecting the warp drive, precious Ena. I'm sure your help enabled them to make advances that would otherwise take centuries."
"I may have given them a few pointers, my precocious Micah... but nothing you probably haven’t considered."
He sometimes wondered why no one ever consulted him when it came to highly technical problems. He'd spent a lifetime laboring on medical miracles in hopes of helping humanity grow away from sickness and death yet no one ever acknowledged his work.
It was true that he heard the whispers. Rumors were rampant among the People. He ignored the more insidious never deeming them worthy of speaking against. It was the subtle gossip that disconcerted him most. It reminded him of all those days he spent alone, sequestered in his high tower, working on insurmountable tasks that stretched out in front of him like infinity in an hour glass.
The singular problem that always daunted him was how to allow communication between his precious creations in a more direct and sessile way. Heretofore it required a nexus—a central neural device—by which all communications flowed in and then out again.
Even though he'd established an entanglement between his miniature miracles it did not function as a two way device. Instead, a movement was required, an unnecessary step in his opinion yet one he could not eliminate.
Working with Ena gave rise to myriad potentialities he would have never considered on his own. Her mind was so alive with ideas that he nearly altered his plans. It seemed a pity for the universe to lose a girl of her skill and daring. Yet he knew she stood in the way of all his schemes and desires and would do anything in her power to stop him if she ever discovered his secret heart.
Though a new nexus was growing in the body of what used to be Kirk, Micah suspected that evolutionary pathway would end in frustration and defeat as so many others had. It bothered him that he had no real control over this synaptic network. In past iterations of the hive mind, he had complete and total power over the organization and implementation of any pre-planned goals.
The one thing Micah had always excelled in was hate. He had hated his parents, his instructors, his peers, and even his own self. Now, he was in danger of being swallowed up in its antithesis.
It was Ena.
Though he knew she possessed a prescient ability the mystery of which that science would never unravel, she never made mention of any suspicions that he knew she must have. During one of his long walks along the Red Sea side a spark of illumination washed over him. She was as in love with him as he was with her.
"Remember when you made me go with you to old America, darling Ena?"
"Of course, sweet Micah... you were angry with me forever."
"I wasn’t really angry with you, my precious Ena. I was worried. I thought once I saw the remnants of my old home... of my work... that I would began to regret the loss of my life's work. I would have rather gone anywhere but there. If I had to go, however, I'm glad I went with you."
He knew Ena had a husband in old Scotland though he'd never met the man. He also recognized the propensity for the people of the Lake to take multiple partners in their love lives. He wasn’t sure if it had more to do with a lack of moral structure or if instead living thousands of years lent a certain sort of ambiguity to those morals that human beings stressed over and had heretofore spent their short lives huddling around.
He did know that he wanted Ena for his wife. He'd come close to asking her to marry him at least a dozen times but a look in her eyes—distant and yearning—had always silenced that voice that he fought so hard to speak.
She would only laugh at him. Too, if she kn
ew how he really felt it might destroy the only real friendship he'd been able to develop since coming to old Europe. So he held his tongue, worshipped her at a distance, and dreamed of a world where he was the only man and she the only woman.
He was ready to give up the dream that had haunted him for a thousand years. Wanting nothing more than to remain at Toulon in the presence of Ena, Micah inwardly renounced all his carefully laid plans of occupying not only the world but the universe.
He had finally grown up.
Chapter 30—Crashing
She'd been looking forward to spending some time in the sunshine while lounging on the beach on the Mediterranean Sea.
When the anti-gravity craft began to shudder and shake she assumed they'd hit an updraft, a common occurrence while flying in jets. She had forgotten that the warp field put the vessel essentially out of space-time so that it no longer obeyed the laws of physics as they knew them.
"The warp field is fluctuating for some reason."
A mystified look ran across Pete's face as she watched him target the craft for a landing in a clearing just ahead. They didn’t make it, instead sideswiping a copse of tall trees before spinning out of control and plummeting to the ground.
They landed hard. Though she was strapped in the force of colliding with the ground caused Karen's head to whiplash violently first against the center pillar before striking the outer support beam.
When she woke she didn’t know where she was at first. Jungle sounds permeated the air and though it was noon when they'd taken off for the ten minute trip darkness was fast gathering over the thick forest where she found herself. Blinking her eyes to clear the grit that had accumulated in them and as the downed aircraft came into focus she remembered where she was.
She was still strapped into her seat. Her eyes were spinning around as if she had just gotten off a merry-go-round so she assumed she'd suffered a concussion. Pete was still sitting next to her but he was unconscious. Maon and Sileas were not in the back seats, however, and though she surveyed the area directly outside the vessel she couldn’t spot them anywhere.