STARWEB 1-5

by M. Modak

  “Grand Master Drahca’s Granddaughter is on this Earth?” Yrrep asked.

  “We don’t have time for me to show you all that’s happened since Queen Tuyena left Serwin. But I can tell you this, she is not here, her son is. He doesn’t know his family’s true history. His recovery and education is my primary mission.”

  “Her son…Grand Master Drahca married and had human children?” Yrrep said to himself as he shook his head.

  Blazer pursed his lips as he nodded. He checked Yrrep’s shoulders and waist then said, “We are the same size.” He started taking off his uniform as Yrrep followed his lead and removed his shirt. “I saw some of your life as I shared with your mind. I think I understand your assignment,” Blazer said, “and you have to take my place now! We only have minutes. Sleven and Sapen arranged for me to fill in as a guard for the council. That’s where Whitman is heading. I’m supposed to make sure Sapen’s plan goes well.”

  Yrrep met Blazer’s eyes then vanished.

  Blazer said, “I see you have absorbed all the Grand Master’s teachings.”

  Yrrep said, “What is Sapen’s plan?”

  Nous book 4

  Chapter 1 The Professor

  Universe311

  The passenger door to a small white car opened automatically and Joshua jumped in.

  “I have a call for you,” Anna said.

  Joshua gave her a surprised look and said, “Okay.” She flipped down the visor above him and he saw the face of Professor Dmitry. He said, “Hello Professor, we don’t have time for long introductions so here it is. My name is Joshua Akai and I’m from a parallel universe.”

  The professor just looked at him for a second then asked, “What happened to John?”

  “Professor, we’re in big trouble. John is in my body at the Crystal Ball Room. That’s where I was before I came here. The lady next to me is also from my world. We were dancing and a moment later, I found myself… floating in-between universes. I…received all John’s memories and then later I was given the memories of many hundreds of others, which are also… me from parallel worlds. I woke up in John’s lab a few minutes ago. I came here to stop Aughra.” The Professor quietly studied his face as he spoke.

  Joshua went on, “I know you were someone John respected, and I know he didn’t tell you this but he considered your debates and conversations the most challenging out of the people he considered “kooks.” Unfortunately, he didn’t take your objections to heart. He never went through the papers you sent. He simply didn’t consider any of the concerns you brought up as possible… He was wrong. Nearly all your Extra Dimensional Theories have proven to be true and I’m the evidence. I’m not sure what would have happened if the experiment had been conducted under the controls he had set up. Something did go wrong.

  “I need your help to destroy Aughra.” Joshua paused for a moment. The professor’s head tilted forward just a little. “I have reason to believe that by this time tomorrow night our two universes will be in the process of Unstoppable Particle Separation. If we don’t halt her spinning by then, there will be nothing left but distantly separated particles speeding toward eternal blackness... Is there anything you know that can help?”

  The professor’s face turned red, and he was spitting as he spoke, “I told John about this. I told him there were parallel universes that matched ours. He never listened to anyone. He was always so clinical; always had to be right! S-matter and this machine, Aughra, have tapped into forces beyond his imagination. His General Entanglement Theories has little bearing when you inject those two with high levels of energy!

  “All he wanted was to measure that one damn force, peek inside the mind of God. Be the one to do it first…” A small smile came over the Professor’s face as he looked away from the flexscreen. As if talking to himself, he said, “I admired his knowledge, but the man had no wisdom.”

  Joshua interrupted, “I understand your frustration. I can’t begin to tell you how my life has changed, the people I love…are lost to me. But if we don’t get this thing stopped there will be no one, anywhere, to complain about or to.”

  The professor huffed then said, “I’m staying at the Carriott Grand room 324. Come here now and I’ll try to have something ready. I need to think.” The view screen went blank.

  Joshua looked over at Anna but she just shrugged and said, “I guess we’re going to the Carriott Grand.”

  The navigational system lit up and three locations appeared on the windshield. A wide view of Atlanta, along with two other cities was marked in red. Joshua said, “Atlanta,” And the map narrowed to Atlanta’s single location.

  “The car’s requesting autopilot mode?” Anna said.

  “Let it,” he replied.

  Anna pressed the Auto-Drive button on the steering wheel and the car took over. When the controls started maneuvering on their own she said, “Now tell me everything that happened to you, starting with our last dance at the Crystal Ball Room.”

  Joshua shook his head slowly as he breathed deeply. He looked at the blinking lights from a city he had seen in countless universes. However, like this one passing by, this Atlanta, was different. This wasn’t his world, and this city wasn’t home to any of the others imprinted in his mind. It was John’s Atlanta. This place looked the same as his city but he knew that, down the next road, there could be vast differences.

  It was such an entangled mess that he didn’t know where to begin, so he told her the whole story going back to the dreams about John and Kayla, which started two weeks ago.

  Anna listened without a word. When he had finished she said, “Wow…So, when Aughra activated, it somehow started switching the minds of millions of people from parallel worlds, but you are different. First, you went on a…great adventure through the multi-universe. You met Drake, Lavar and you saw the Tree of Life…I’d love to have seen that. Then you connected with all your…universal-twins, all of them, even things that weren’t human….these…other yous, and you have all their memories, from these trillions of, other…selves?

  “Actually,” He said, “I can’t remember all the lives, not by a long shot. Have you ever contemplated the life span of a rock? I’m, kind of glad I don’t remember all that. Most of those other, human lives began to fade into broken images and loose associations the moment I woke up here. All I have now are about a hundred or so I can fully recall.”

  “Okay, but you do have hundreds of these lives inside your brain.”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “You remember a whole lifetime of another version of you being a doctor, like a real doctor. You remember seeing patients, prescribing medicine…you remember biology, pathology, med school?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were a lawyer, teacher, soldier, writer, artist, singer…, politician…”

  “And many, many others,” he said as he nodded.

  “So… my refreshment stand was in your first dreams, the dreams that started when Doctor John, the scientist who invented Aughra, pushed her into a slow spin.”

  He replied, “Yep, there was S-matter in the pods then…it formed a weak link between John and I, and a few others.”

  “This is why you wanted to see the spinning ball above the aquarium. You know I got that idea from my dreams too… Only, I can’t remember most of my dreams…not very much anyway.”

  Joshua smiled. “Kayla, the girl you were switched with, was John’s lover and assistant. She was in the room both times Aughra activated. You see, you two, you and Kayla share dreams though you two live in different universes, have different lives and opinions about life. I remember having to pinch myself a few times, during my interview at your office. That whole experience was surreal to me, but now it all makes since. At the time, I had to see if I was dreaming. But it was real. I watched, and everything stayed put, all our conversations had depth and meaning… Now I know. We were all under the influence of greater things.

  “And, yes that’s also why I wanted to see the spinn
ing ball above your aquarium. It looked too much like Aughra spinning. I wondered if it was a symbol, perhaps a message, or the shadow of something pointing toward its creator. Now I understand why everything in the office seemed so much like my dreams. You and Kayla are one soul. Kayla designed everything in John’s lab, everything but Aughra. You designed everything at the office but the aquarium. Then later, you invented a spinning ball, which looked a lot like Aughra, to hush the waterfall when the meeting room needed the aquarium to be quiet.

  “How do you know all this Joshua?”

  “I told you, I journeyed past the limits of the multi-universe. We are all one. There is only one of us here… all of it is Energy-or anti-energy, God, Life, whatever you want to call it. But there is only one thing reflecting into the infinite… I believe that, for me, this all started because my mind was fully awake the moment Aughra activated.”

  “I guess I wasn’t awake then. I don’t have any other memories.” Anna said.

  “Waking up like I did rarely happens to me. You haven’t trained yourself to be awake in your dreams and the entangled S-matter from Aughra’s pod spilled onto this,” he gestured to himself, “my body, or John’s body. I feel it changing other things inside me too. I think that’s what boosted the signal. But really I’m just guessing here.”

  But, how was it that you were awake when Aughra took you?”

  “I’ve been dream journaling for the past few years. Do you know what that means?”

  “Kind of,…well not really,” she said.

  “Well, when I wake up I wright down the key words from my dreams. Those key words let me recall most of my dream when I have the time to write the whole thing down later. Practicing this has allowed me to remember my dreams. I’ve even had lucid dreams.”

  “Lucid…you mean awake. Your awake in your dreams?”

  “In some of them, I notice that my reality isn’t following the normal physics it should. Things don’t stay in place. Words on signs change. People are empty minded.”

  “You meet people in your dreams?” she asked.

  “We all do. You had dreams with other people in them, only they are like programs with responses that are normal to someone dreaming, not someone awake. But I have met people in my dreams that were Lucid, independent of me somehow.”

  “Who’s programing these people?”

  “Our minds are doing it. We all have ideas about how people should act, propriety, politeness, and so on. You meet these people in your sleep, have a short encounter, they respond as normal and you go on thinking nothing is strange. But if you wake up in your dreams and go a little deeper with your questions you find that these people are two dimensional. The have a limited view on their world.”

  “That sounds like most of the people I meet in the real world.”

  “Exactly, you don’t question their behavior here, when you’re in reality, so why would you question such behavior in your dreams. I always question everything, even my questions, that way in my dreams I’m still in the habit of asking questions. Sometimes, in my dreams, the answers I get are so ridiculous, things I see are so out of the norm that I wake up while I’m dreaming and say, “Why is that so strange? Could this be a dream?”

  “So you remember your dreams because you practiced this lucid dreaming?”

  “Yes, but you need to remember your lucid dreams. To do that you need to write them down when you wake up.” There was a long silence as he let her think about that. Then he asked, “You mind if I turn the news on?”

  “Yea, go ahead,” she said distantly.

  Joshua accessed the net and turned on the news. Every station he searched showed the same clip of him talking with a reporter only moments ago. Before he and Anna got into the car, he had approached a reporter holding a flexcamera and warned everyone to leave Atlanta. Then the video cut to the image of John standing on the podium in the lab. S-matter was spilling onto John just before Aughra exploded into a spin. They played those two clips over and over again.

  Several debates over John’s sanity were in full swing. Experts from across the globe were at virtual tables giving in depth lectures on quantum mechanics, and parallel universes.

  On other channels, psychologists were speculating on the mental conditions of the hundreds of people that were passing out and waking up with the same story. They were all claiming to be some other person, and they didn’t know where they were.

  He saw a young man searching for his children. He didn’t know they were still in their home universe. Joshua’s heart went out to him as he heard the man yelling, “They were right here! Where are my children?” The man kept repeating it as he pushed the other dumbstruck people out of the way.

  Another lady’s whole body had shifted into a masculine posture after waking and now she claimed to be a man trapped in this woman’s body. She said, “I’m a man, I ant’s no fag! Where the hell is my penis, I’m a man!” Several news outlets cut away from him as he robotically groped himself in freaked astonishment. Panic was starting to set in and no one was coming to help these scared people.

  Aughra swapped those who came close to her before they could deliver any supplies, help or information. Everyone, police, EMTs, and soldiers alike fell under, “The Affect,” and their twins from another world woke up in their bodies’.

  So far, the phenomenon was limited to a square block around the lab. He selected a small window on the dash and it zoomed into full view. This channel was using subscriber’s numerous flexscreen applications to show the real time positions of all the people in the city, “Suffering the Condition.” A map of this part of the city overlaid the live footage of where many of the people were at during the time Aughra had turned on. Then a fairly straight, white line followed them to where a star was placed indicating the spot they had fallen down on. After they had gotten back up, claiming to be someone else, the line became erratic as their movements zigzagged in all directions throughout the city. It was clear; these people didn’t know where they were.

  “Aughra isn’t growing in a uniform circle,” Joshua said, “Only one side of her is fully active,”

  Just then, his visor’s screen came on and a man dressed in a military uniform appeared. “I’m General Sanyaul. Joshua we need to talk,”

  Joshua and Anna noticed he had used his real name. “Go ahead general,” Joshua said.

  “We want to meet you and Professor Dmitry at the Atlanta Civic center.” By its self, the cars navigation system switched destination indicators on the windshield. “We have personal and other resources here that may aid you in stopping Aughra.”

  “That would be great general. We need all the help possible,” Joshua said.

  The Nav system confirmed the new destination and the car increased speed.

  “We were monitoring your conversation with the Professor. Can you tell me more about what happened to Aughra?” The general asked.

  “General, what do you want to know?”

  “What happened when you flipped the switch?”

  “All I recall is this. The switch John flipped was only going to release the S-matter into the suspension pods and complete the quantum entanglement process. There wasn’t supposed to be a reaction because, as you know, the phase two part of the experiment has been done before, on a smaller scale. It went at a much faster rpm and without any of the noticeable effects that we see now. I think the magnetic lock on the pod wasn’t on even though the test for that pod had been confirmed green. That’s all I know. When I awoke, I saw Aughra spinning as she is now. Something must have happened outside John’s knowledge to trigger the anti-matter explosion.”

  “One of the pods is now empty?” The general asked.

  “I think that is correct. It had opened and spilled on John…There may be some residue left inside.”

  The general asked again, “We confirm that. Now, the test on your end did show a green on the pod’s magnetic locks?”

  “That’s right. The moment John flipped the switch; ever
ything was as it should be. Now general can you tell me what you know. I need more information if I’m going to safely shut Aughra down.”

  “No one can get near that dam machine. Everyone I send ends up passing out and waking up claiming to be someone else. I can tell you more when you get here, our signal could be monitored by outside interest.”

  Joshua looked at the remaining travel time on the navigation system. It read ten minutes at current speeds.

  “All the traffic lights have been green since we changed destinations,” Anna said.

  “We had a hand in that,” the general said then paused as a flexscreen was handed to him, “And Professor Dimity is confirmed and is on the way. There should be an escort joining you any minute. I’ll see you here in,” He looked over at something just off screen, “Seven minutes.”