The Teristaque Chronicles

by Aaron Frale

  They flew past Mars and saw the lights of the tower that was built out of Olympus Mons and headed towards earth. Soon, the pale blue dot turned into a bright bulb of activity as the megacities lit up almost every land mass on earth. There were also many floating cities in the oceans and too many space stations to count. It looked as if almost every part of the Earth’s surface was covered. There was a tiny black spec among the wash of lights in North America. Hayden knew that was the Colorado wilderness that he loved.

  They set down in the Albuquerque Space Port. The large desert areas of the planet were the few places with large enough plots of unused land when humans began building spaceports. A lot of the original spaceports hadn’t changed in ages because there wasn’t room to expand. Most spaceports were surrounded by city structures, so all ships had to take off and land vertically. Earth spaceports were also so small and over capacity that sometimes the incoming ships would wait half a day to land on Earth. There were plenty of orbital parking garages for ships like Kal’s. However, she was taking so many risks already. She’d rather wait in line and know that the ship was on the ground with her then have to rely on a commercial shuttle service to get back into orbit.

  The safety feature of their plan was that until the night of the heist, they could abort any time and leave Earth with nothing. Kal wanted to make sure that it could be a quick getaway if needed. However, quick was a relative term on Earth. Once they landed, their ship would be stored in a structure near the port. However, unlike the orbital garages, she could walk into her ship at any time without a shuttle. Landing on Earth would come at a price, but it was well worth the fees for the convenience of having her ship accessible.

  After they had landed in Albuquerque, a large robotic arm picked up their ship. They were placed on a conveyor belt bound for the above ground parking skyscraper. Once they were at their designated hanger, another arm lifted their ship and dropped it off inside.

  Hayden was the first one down the ladder, and he breathed in the air. Kal waved the communal coinchip card, and the fees were deducted from the account. The door to their hanger was DNA locked to her and her crew. Arrows appeared in their field of vision directing the way out of the structure.

  “I see arrows,” Grannork said.

  “Interesting,” Maker said. “Our implants must be connected to the galactic network. It looks like we should be able to see shared data points from the cloud, access the feeds, and interact with anyone with normal implants.”

  “Normal implants?” Kal said. Sometimes, growing up in a small farming village had its disadvantages. There were some concepts no one ever bothered to explain to her because people just assumed she knew. Like using the coinchip cards, she had never really used money before, so when she had shoplifted from a fruit stand without knowing that she was stealing, Hayden had to pay for her “purchase.” He then explained to her how money worked. Food with her people was shared by all. Her village would feed anyone who wanted food, even travelers. The concept of paying money, even requiring money, for food was ludicrous to her. Even in prison, she didn’t pay for food, so it was very natural for her to assume baskets of fruit in a marketplace were for all to consume.

  Now here she was at another crossroads of her upbringing and knowledge. She had thought the implants were some sort of new technology. The thought-controlled space ship was the new part; implants had been around for a while on Earth. People would get them installed, and they served the same purpose that handheld devices did in the past. People would use them to access data, connect with friends and family, pay for purchases, and even play games. With the multiple uses implants had in the day-to-day life of average citizens, it was no wonder that the military innovated them to control a space ship. However, Kal later learned that citizen implants were less painful, and the patient was given drugs to keep them unconscious during installation.

  They followed the arrows to the street outside, and as soon as she was clear of the building, ads popped up everywhere in her field of view. Signs would hover over restaurants displaying the specials. Disembodied heads would chatter about how much they could save. Arrows would appear on the sidewalk to show her what direction to walk for a deal. Ads would appear in the sky overhead. It was all so overwhelming, so she willed them all away, and they disappeared all at once.

  Albuquerque was a small city of thirty million people. Each block seemed to have skyscrapers touching the sky. Kal could see a mountain poking through the towering buildings. From the looks of it, the mountain was pretty well covered in structures, too. They walked through the city until they found a hotel with a room that could fit all of them. Since non-Earth species made up roughly twenty percent of the residents and almost half of the travelers to Earth, rooms for non-human sized families were standard.

  Once inside the room, Maker did a quick sweep for any listening or video devices. While they didn’t expect anyone to be actively listening to them, they couldn’t be too careful. The room itself had a big circular common area with a bath in the middle and doors for single bedrooms at regular intervals. It was large enough for each of them to have their own chamber. While the beds were too small for Grannork, he hated soft surfaces anyway and preferred the floor in most circumstances. They all sat on a circular couch surrounding the bath with an entertainment console hovering above. Maker began to outline the plan for locating the vessel.

  Since Kal discussed the plan at great length with Maker on their way to Earth, she tuned out of the discussion and looked toward the window of the hotel room. The mountain in the distance was breathtaking. Kal had grown up in a forest with hills. She had never seen something as striking as a mountain. She was sad that all of its natural beauty was replaced with civilization, and that the natural landscape was dwarfed by the mega-structures of the city. The view did little to relax her growing sense of doubt.

  The strange part for her was that she had never had doubts before. When she was masterminding the prison break or other post-prison missions, she had every confidence they would work. Looking back, her prison break was sloppy and impulsive by comparison to the fastidious planning of their current mission. She was careful to weigh all the options, consult the crew, and even run simulations on the computer.

  However, despite proceeding slowly and carefully, the doubt seemed to grow and grow. She didn’t understand why. All she knew was that she understood that something wasn’t right. There was a sense of dread that didn’t seem to exist before. It was the worst possible time for her to break down, but she couldn’t help but feel that the deeper they got, the closer she came to that edge. Normally sweeping views helped her forget her worries, even if it was just for a moment. However, the vast city of Earth did little to comfort her. She was on the home world of Makiuarnek. She knew that he was somewhere on this planet and that she would encounter him again.

  _______

  Cid and his bird-like companion walked through the streets of Seattle. He had hated Kal when he first met her in prison. She had disrupted his group and replaced one of his friends. But after breaking him free, and following her on missions, he grew to respect her. While he did not have the same paranoia that seemed to infect Seayolar, he did notice something was different about the captain; though now that he was in too deep, he pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind.

  Seattle was about a fifteen-minute ride by Hyperloop from their base of operations in Albuquerque. Most earthlings called it the tube. The crust of the Earth was interconnected with a vast hyperloop network that transported millions of people to every possible location. Each tube had a “ryder” that were either single, double, group, or public mass transit. They reminded Cid of a bank vacuum tube he’d seen when he posed as a tourist in a museum so he could scan the government building next door for signs of a secret hanger. They mostly took the public tubes, which packed ryder after ryder with commuter traffic.

  Hyperloop’s were a very old technology, but the infrastructure was already there, and it used virtually no po
wer to operate. The ryders themselves used more power to keep the interiors illuminated during travel than they did to propel the occupants forward. It could also get a traveler halfway around the globe in roughly four hours, so the technology stuck.

  Humans had attempted to travel faster by perfecting a technology that deconstructed a living entity and then reconstructed it, atom by atom, at a remote location. Hayden called it beaming; however the technology never seemed to work quite properly. The creatures sent through seemed always to be missing a part of themselves. They would change in personality after the transfer, and scientists were always stumped as to why.

  Even the “volunteers” of sentient level intelligence were not the same after instantaneous transfer through the quantumly entangled network. Cid always wondered how many of them were volunteers, considering his only encounter with a Teristaque scientist was Dr. Feslerk. Even when they reversed the process and sent the person back, they would undergo personality changes. The personality changes were wildly varied. One psychopath that was put through felt guilt for his past, another became deadlier. One family man forgot his family and ceased to love them. It was hard to predict how they would change on the other side.

  Religious groups used the failed experiments as proof of the soul. They would claim the soul left when the original body was deconstructed. Scientists proclaimed that it was just something they hadn’t figured out yet, like a copying error, or maybe an interruption in a still unknown chemical process in the brain that instigated the changes. Others said they were switching places with other versions of themselves from alternate universes. Whether or not the personality changes had a natural or more supernatural explanation, the tubes were the preferred transportation system. It was considered a waste of resources to fund instantaneous travel research, and it became a fringe science.

  Since information could be transmitted across the galaxy in the blink of an eye, the demand for physical transportation became far less than the demand for information exchange. Most business leaders had replicas of themselves constructed with robotics in their most frequented offices. They would control the replicas remotely when they needed to be in a particular location but didn’t want to travel there. It was a solution mainly designed to reduce interplanetary travel. However, some reclusive technology moguls were almost never seen in public, and they would control robotic versions of themselves from a private immersive arcade rig on a private island. Transportation was for the common people and the ones that couldn’t afford to maintain versions of themselves across the galaxy.

  Cid and his bird-like friend with shimmering metallic feathers stopped in front of a large gray building called The Vault. It was a private warehouse with row after row of storage units that claimed to have the best security in the universe. It was a private company, and usually, only the ultra-rich could afford its larger units. However, there were smaller options that common people could afford, like a ring-sized box for a family heirloom or two.

  Cid flipped a switch on a device in his coat pocket. It was a network scanner Maker had designed to connect with the chip in his head. The idea behind the device was that if anyone was close to the prototype, they could hide the device in a fixed location like a bathroom. Using the fixed point, the pair could triangulate the source, and a rough location could be ascertained.

  The crew divided into pairs and spent most of the days walking into or getting near buildings that could potentially house the prototype. Some crew members like Maker and Haath-Nlo stayed in Albuquerque and scoured the galactic network to narrow down building choices. They knew that it was in a building located in a city on Earth, but they didn’t know which one. Hayden had discovered a snapshot of it entering the hanger. While the flight test data always seemed to end when it got close enough to Earth, one of the test pilots carelessly took a picture of a city underneath while it was landing and stored it on his shared drive. Hayden found the photograph when he was searching through the test crew’s photos of each other for clues.

  The photos were mostly of people at work or off duty, and they didn’t help much with the situation. Since transportation on Earth was so quick, an off-duty person could travel just about anywhere for dinner. The photos revealed that most of the test pilots frequented restaurants in North America, so they figured they could narrow their search to at least one continent. They figured the people would likely frequent cities closer to their point of origin.

  After narrowing down the search to different cities, Maker and Haath-Nlo scoured over satellite maps for matches of the photo of the prototype landing. The problem with the photo is that it was a blurry picture of a building with a hanger door on the roof. Most buildings in major cities had hangers for ships and delivery drones on the roof since aerial delivery was still the preferred method for objects that couldn’t be replicated like original paintings. A Rembrandt could be duplicated down to the last molecule, but there will always be people who said it wasn’t the same because the duplicate had no history. It was not passed down through time. Even on the more mundane level, there were some who refused to eat food that wasn’t grown on a plant or slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. Sometimes, it was just cheaper to produce and ship than waste a replicator supply for some objects. Whether it was for religious reasons, practicality, or snobbery, the transportation of physical goods was not replaced by the quantum age of replication and instant information.

  While a careless snapshot did not reveal the location of the prototype because of the hanger, it did reveal one important clue. The landing photo revealed that it wasn’t a military installation. The buildings in military installations didn’t have hangers. In fact, there were practically no military installations on the entire planet. Almost all of the Teristaque basic training happened on the moon, in orbit, and on other planets in the empire according to Hayden.

  When the nations of Earth dissolved and fused into the United Planets of Earth, most of the planet’s military might was being controlled by a couple of nations. The people at the time were nervous about handing over military power to the new single Earth government, so to save the UPE from failing because of politics and fear, they drafted a proposal to move all military power off world. Rather than have a majority of the destructive power of humanity lurk in a few locations on the planet, it would loom over the world as the military might was transferred into orbit. Since most wars were fought on far off planets anyway, not having a noticeable military presence on Earth seemed to ease the early tensions.

  Since nationality was more of a polite dinner conversation topic, the idea of having too much military power in one geographical location didn’t seem scary like it did to the early UPE people. However, the early policy of keeping the military off world stuck. The only military operations left on Earth were administrative buildings. They didn’t need hangers because they dealt with people rather than equipment. The only other Interstellar Force buildings besides administrative ones were hospitals for veterans, and those were all marked with an “H” on top.

  Since they knew the prototype was on Earth and it wasn’t located in an IF structure, the only option left was the private sector. Haath-Nlo and Maker began to research what companies could have the resources to make a prototype, and began to match them with the tops of their buildings. Because there were plenty of potential matches, the rest of the crew spent their days wandering city after city, hoping the scanner in their pocket would register an increase in signal strength. Right now, they connected to the ship through the equivalent of a digital window. When in range for a secure private connection, they would be at the controls rather than looking through a window. The device in Cid’s pocket was designed to look for when that proximity connection occurred.

  Cid pretended to be shopping for storage spaces so that they could scan the interior. As soon as Cid stepped inside the waiting room of The Vault, there was a message that appeared in his field of vision from his implant. It said, “Secure connection established.” The menu that they had grown
used to as the ship’s interface changed a little. It had more options than before. Furthermore, the device in his pocket detected a signal. They were no longer connected to the ship via the galactic network; they were connected directly. The ship was somewhere in this building.

  Cid and his bird-like friend turned to look at each other. A clerk smiled and approached them. They both nodded, and turned without a word to the clerk. The plan to triangulate the exact location went out of the window with the excitement of their discovery. They were anxious to report back to Kal as months of searching would finally be coming to an end. They had found the ship.

  _______

  After Cid had discovered the location of the vessel, the rest was surveillance work. Kal would have scolded Cid and his companion for forgetting the second half of their duty by not attempting a triangulation of the vessel inside the building, but the crew well received the news. She decided to let it slide. The morale of the crew had begun to falter during the months they spent searching for the ship, and she wanted them to feel like the end of their time on Earth was coming to a close.

  When they had first arrived, they were nervous. They were escaped Teristaque prisoners after all. However, the nervousness of being caught began to fade as the fake identities they had bought for themselves seemed to hold up to scrutiny. Seayolar was even stopped by a Teristaque patrol at one point, and his identchip seemed to work out. Their prisoner identity was dead. Kal decided that her full name, Kal’Da’Hak, was also dead.

  Da was her family name. The middle name was always shared by the family. Hak was the name bestowed by her village, which translated to wind. The last was a name the village gave to each child. They named her after the wind because the wind was persistent and always persevered. She would need to have inner strength because her body did not have outer strength like her peers. However, Kal always wondered if she was named after the wind because her real father had drifted away like a leaf on the wind.