by Kyte, Adrian
She sat back rather awkwardly against the tunnel side wall and relayed her wrist PDU through her helmet HUD. In truth she had no idea how immersive an interface this Elusiver suit would create.
Pulses in her vision, green and red. They became disorienting; no longer any physical space, the tunnel lost its meaning. Strange, surreal thoughts popping into her head: data feels friendly as its the remaining colour not shown but is comforting me from behind. Oh, it was like slipping towards sleep, but not quite. It was a pleasant semi-oblivion that no drug she knew of could create – a wiping away of the real world without any conscious awareness of it actually happening.
And then: First a smell of smoke. Oddly pleasant, reassuring, like a bonfire; like the one she had once recreated after studying the behaviours of ancient Earth tribes. A fire was the basis of comfort in a hostile environment, it had a certain primal resonance even for her species. Only now she saw from where it emanated. These were not camp fires, these were towns: tower blocks raging with fire. An amber sky. Fires as far as the eye could see. In the distance they looked like burning houses. Closer up there were vehicles also alight. Then voices, laughter. It was then she became aware of what she was wearing: only a basic smock to cover her underwear. Despite it being virtual she still felt a vulnerability. And bereft in another way. No digital assistance – a guide Zoraina realised she’d come to take for granted; it was like an addendum, always there.
A group of people passed her as she stood in the road.
A male from the group stopped and turned to face her, he was wearing clothes that seemed unfamiliar; a baggy cotton shirt with frilly cuffs covered by a waistcoat.
‘Lady!’ The man said in English, with an oddly expansive sweep of an arm. ‘Isn’t this just so splendid? Don’t you want to join us in celebration?’
‘What is there to celebrate?’ Zoraina asked him, somewhat fearing the answer.
‘Why, my dear lady, it is the end of the world – the apocalypse. The devil himself has reclaimed the land.’ His words intoned in an odd rapture.
‘Oh. I see,’ she could only manage.
‘Yes, my lady, you see the world at its end.’
Zoraina wondered if things could possibly be any worse. What had these people regressed to? Or when?
‘Can you tell me if there is a place where I can comm--- make a call.’
The man looked puzzled. ‘A call?’
‘Erm, can I speak to someone who runs this town?’
Then the whole group seemed to laugh in unison. This time the woman beside him, in a brown smock-like dress, spoke. ‘Deary, no one runs this town any longer. Not since the Devil came here.’
‘I don’t understand. The Devil?’ Zoraina did, however, possess a rudimentary knowledge of human religion from previous millennia – times of superstition when life tended to be nasty brutish and short.
The woman looked at her askance. ‘The Devil, my dear, is the one who promises you riches beyond your wildest dreams but never tells you there will be a price.’ She looked up to the dark-amber sky. ‘Oh, and what a price!’
‘He destroyed your town?’
The woman gave Zoraina a quizzical look. ‘You’re not from round these parts are you?’
‘That’s correct. Which is why I would like to find a way to safety.’
‘There are no places of safety now that God has forsaken us,’ the woman told her.
‘Just need to get to the next town.’
The man nearest turned to face her with a smile. ‘If you follow me I can help you.’
The woman pushed forward, partly blocking the man, then making a dismissive hand-gesture said, ‘Don’t listen to that one. He has only one thing on his mind. Some think that now we are godless there are no morals to restrict us.’
Zoraina considered challenging the idea that you need a belief in a deity to be moral, but this wasn’t the time – these people had regressed in ways she couldn’t quite understand. There was, she surmised, some truth they were in denial of. Throughout history the Devil had become a proxy for all kinds of vicissitudes and injustices to befall humanity.
She looked to the orange horizon. ‘Well, it is not my intention to separate your group. In any case it was always my intention to make my own way, so I’ll take my chances.’
‘Head into the forest,’ the woman instructed her. ‘There is a town beyond where it is said the people can communicate with elves and sprites.’
The man chortled. ‘Silly woman, telling her about myths.’ He then turned to face Zoraina. ‘You’ll get lost alone. But if you did make it through, all you will find are crazy folk who think they have special powers.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said, before surging ahead between the first of countless burning buildings.
* * *
83
The surface appeared desolate. Scorched earth, the remaining stubs of trees. Burnt debris from whatever unidentifiable craft, just small sections, still emitting smoke. No sign of life. Fauna or flora. It looked to any visitor that two civilisations had brought about each other’s destruction. But Torbin knew better; both were lying in wait for either to reveal themselves. In fact, he depended on neither side emerging from hiding.
What an easy target he’d make; wiped out in the blink of an eye. Of course, that was likely to happen anyway with temporal erasure. No, even quicker if he stayed here.
He was in a pressure suit the ship had provided. It had moulded itself to his dimensions (though he was glad there were no other humans around to observe him); it protected from this now toxic and highly radioactive environment. If this was Earth it would have been written off for centuries. The Elusivers? … well, maybe for them merely a temporary inconvenience. That was if they did decide to restore the planet. No, not this time, he thought. He sensed their weariness maybe because he felt it himself. Whatever reason for their hiding within the planet, surely it was not to wait until the threat from the Kintra had abated.
The heat signature from below surface was so weak it was about the same difference as the variation within the cosmic background radiation, a fraction of a degree.
The only tool: a robotic burrower. Like a mole in fast motion it tunnelled its way down, sending a relay signal back to his PDU HUD. The heat signatures were not just biological, there was some kind of machinery. When it detected a light source it extended a fibre optic cable through, just for a fraction of a second, then retracting to minimise detection. The image he received featured shapes so blurred he couldn’t identify what they were. He ordered it to take another look for longer, but again too distorted to identify. He ordered it back. The image, he replayed repeatedly, was a film lasting twenty seconds played at its original rate of two thousand frames a second. He slowed it to fifty. Still a blur. But only until a step frame speed of five per second could he identify the tall wiry figures of the Elusivers. Their movements were jerky and rapid and the image quality was too poor to know what they were doing beyond what appeared to be work, around … an oval metal form from which protruded multiple – eight cantilevered legs. A captured Kintra?
Torbin ordered the burrower to dig a forty-five degree tunnel, large enough for him to pass through. The thing buzzed around with indecipherable movements. As he watched it, the curious thought occurred to him that he was still experiencing some residual affect from the temporal device. But his PDU confirmed that the day was passing at the normal rate.
He followed the burrower down as it continued to dig and burn away excess rock with preternatural efficiency, rehearsing in his head what he would say to these enigmatic creatures, were he to even be in a position to communicate with them.
Fear should be the necessary bulwark against entering an unknown situation, the logical aspect of his mind told him. To be confronted by a superior power; to be outnumbered; to be without anything useful as a bargaining chip or a needed offering. Instead, ignoring what had held him back on so many occasions, knowing they’d see him as throwing himself at the
ir mercy, he decided not to retreat.
‘So what can you bring to the party, Torbin?’ he asked himself as the burrower broke through into the Elusiver lab.
He hadn’t much time to consider an answer before he felt something grab his shoulders. A flash of light, and racing forms. And dizziness. And his thoughts left him before they even had time to reason fear.
Part Eleven: Back From the Dead
84
I remember dying; I remember the fire taking me.
His first thought on awaking, after a somewhat bitter acknowledgement that this clinically white medical room meant only one thing: the B’tari have rescued me. The next: he was in a human body, and that he felt rather good. Maybe they’d given him something to ease his return. Then the realisation shunted neatly into place, that as Roidon Chanley – a man who had never been born – death was never properly an option. Death was something uniquely accepted and acculturated for humans, it seemed (albeit usually only comfortably as a distant prospect). This he envied, the knowledge that it will not just go on for ever. However bad things got, there was always that ultimate escape. How would they cope, if like him, it could never be an option? The B’tari, on the other hand, shunned such a consideration; tried to vanquish the Grim Reaper.
One of them entered the room. She looked curiously human and curiously like a nurse from the twenty-first century. A very attractive one, he noted. She smiled on seeing him sit up.
‘Glad to see you’re back with us,’ she said in a very human British accent.
‘Are you my welcome-back-to-the-land-of-the-living gift?’ he wondered.
‘That depends on whether you are prepared to cooperate.’
‘Just to be sure, then. You are a B’tari?’
She nodded. ‘That is correct.’
‘So now I am being subject to bribery?’
‘I wouldn’t put it so crudely.’
‘No, you’d leave that to me.’
‘We understand you had no desire to be returned,’ she acknowledged. ‘But we are responsible for you, and we respond to any act of self destruction.’
Roidon looked down at his body mostly concealed by a paper blanket. ‘Well what was that I destroyed?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It started deceptively real. I felt real, but I bought into the lie of some artificial construct that contained my memories. The concept of self, then, is a rather mercurial one, don’t you think?’
‘We don’t make a value judgement.’
‘No, well I guess it’s especially difficult in my case.’
She stepped towards him; he noticed her perfume and how it aroused him sexually. Ah, the weakness of being human. He had missed that!
‘We have one assignment for you, Roidon,’ she told him. ‘But there is very little time. You will be sent to the Elusiver homeworld, whereupon the necessary information will be downloaded into your mind.’
‘I have an idea of what it will involve.’ He studied her humanoid body concealed within the tight-fitting uniform. ‘So about my side of the deal.’
‘Oh you mean me.’
Roidon simply nodded, and the b’tari woman started to undress.
* * *
85
She had walked for three hours before clearing the burning city. And now into a forest, with still the residual glow and a faint warmth. Ahead there was nothing but darkness and a cold breeze. Her smock felt inadequate, it seemed like some caricature of clothing from Earth’s pre-industrial age. Without an AI and HUD to highlight obstacles if not guide her direction, she felt completely at the mercy of the darkness. The glow from the town had faded, the horizon obscured by trees. Not even any moonlight. She’d often bump into a tree-trunk or stumble over a root. This was true darkness, like the bottom of the ocean. But here there were sounds, a distant howling, a very low rumble that could have been a bear. Any wild animal – albeit simulated – could strike. Would she be viewed as no more than a rogue program within the system? Maybe that was why none of the town’s folk had ventured here. Something was being generated to keep them away, keep them from venturing to the other town.
Now the sense of being alone was a familiar one. She thought about what it meant to be truly lonely; perhaps it was the point when you yearned to be with someone, anyone, when it takes over your every day existence. When the possibility of being with someone has become an improbability. When you are forever the outsider, not belonging within the world to which you have tried to adapt, but also when you return to your own kind and they no longer see you as one of their own.
Zoraina reminded herself that this was all a simulation, and imagined her physical self still slumped by the interface port. If her calculations were correct an hour in this realm was about forty seconds in the real (the concept of this time differential had been taken from an incarceration program). Here she could survive for a few days before her oxygen ran out. Never any question of trying to make it to any real place of shelter or comms hub. But in this realm there was always hope of finding someone with a link to the outside world. Anyone who understood the signs, the beginnings of this system’s breakdown must have sought a way to reach the real world instead of regressing to such a primitive coping mechanism.
Eventually a clearing, another city, dotted lights defining high rise buildings surrounded by the dark forms of hills. And no hint of a fire. A faint sense of warmth. Then she no longer felt the breeze on her calves or her arms. Clothes! They had changed to a long sleeve top and leggings. Comfortable cushioned shoes.
Zoraina ran towards the lights. The towers seemed to stretch for hundreds of metres into the starry sky. Elation surged through her for some reason she couldn’t quite explain. Here was hope, though, surely. Here was modernity. Here were people who would understand.
Vehicles raced between tower blocks, a hive of activity even though it was late at night. She had entered a boulevard, there were two figures. She approached them. Just hoping. They looked like any normal couple from contemporary Earth.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in English. ‘I wonder if you can help me.’
‘That depends,’ said the woman, also in English. She looked to be around Zoraina’s apparent age, possibly still the first third of her life.
The man turned towards her. ‘I’m sure we can,’ he said warmly.
‘Well, I’m looking for whoever’s in charge of this city.’
‘Why would that be?’ asked the woman emphasizing a sceptical tone.
‘I have some very important information about the future of this planet.’
The man turned back to his partner and sighed. ‘It is her, you know it’s her; she even speaks their language. We might as well inform him.’
Zoraina gave the couple a sideways glance. ‘You know who I am?’
The woman nodded with a smile. ‘But of course. You think your presence here had gone unnoticed. Zoraina you are not the only one to have taken an intense interest in Earth.’
‘You’re B’tari?’
The woman raised her hand as if she was about to pat Zoraina on the back. ‘Give the girl a gold star,’ she intoned. ‘Yes we’re B’tari. This is our new sanctuary – away from the Kintra-machines and out of sight of the ever-seeing Elusivers.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ the man said.
‘But of course we are not really here,’ the woman continued, as if the man hadn’t spoken. ‘Our bodies are hooked in in much the same way as yours. Anyway, we know of your work. Your input will be most useful here.’
‘Input?’
‘Have you heard the tale of Noah and the ark?’
‘Human-Christian fable; saving two of each species from a flood.’
‘Well, not every species; though far more than two. Some who would have caused utter mayhem and death … but that’s off the point.’
‘Are there any humans alive?’
‘Yes, we have them in our city.’
‘But the vast majority in this realm are just mind-captures,’ Zoraina observed.
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‘Unfortunately we can do nothing for them. Most are too unstable, their mind-states degraded.’
Zoraina wanted to ask more about this curious Ark project but now both seemed to be distracted, deep in concentration.
Finally the woman said, ‘He will see you now.’
* * *
86
‘You are Torbin Lyndau. Correct?’ Just a dark spindly form within the light.
‘Correct.’
‘Your purpose here?’
Torbin tried to focus on the creature, but the bright light made it difficult.
‘Why did you come here?’ it persisted.
‘To find sanctuary.’ It was the first answer to come into his head.
‘From the Kintra?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or from temporal erasure?’
Torbin considered lying but somehow knew that these beings would not be fooled, and that they already knew exactly why he was here. He replied, ‘I want to escape having my existence eradicated.’
‘Then you have wasted your effort.’ Still spoken in monotones.
‘There seemed to be no alternative,’ he admitted.
‘Humans afraid of death, afraid of not being.’
‘And you aren’t?’
‘We have to remain to rebuild the galaxy.’
Torbin nodded. ‘Of course. I understand that. It’s what gods do.’
The Elusiver moved in closer. ‘We are not gods, Torbin, we are just more highly evolved than any other species.’
‘Look, I understand you believe this is the only way to eradicate the Kintra. But won’t you find this galaxy considerably less interesting with only apes as the most evolved species?’