The Intern (The Forbidden World Book 1)

by Garry Ocean

  “Do you understand anything here?” Frice asked Nick with a note of doubt and even condescension.

  “Wait,” Nick frowned. “This is the Rapid Waters, right?”

  “That’s right,” Whisperer encouraged him.

  “Then this is the Forest,” Nick pointed his finger to the left side of the map, “and this, then, is the City. Here is the steppe, and here are the rocks, I forgot what you call them.”

  “Not bad, not bad,” Frice said.

  “But it must be an obsolete map or its scale is off,” Nick did not notice that he said the word ‘scale’ in Russian. However, they both must have understood him perfectly well. “The Forest now is much closer than here on the map.”

  “Interesting,” Frice stretched the word. He tried not to show his surprise in any way. When they were studying this ancient map, Frice and Rich took a lot more time to figure this out. And this salvage, as Frice referred to him in his mind, could read it as simple as that.

  “I am more interested in something different,” Nick continued, as if nothing had happened. “According to the map, we are surrounded by… what do you call it?”

  “The World’s Smoothness,” Frice became tense in anticipation.

  “Let’s call it that,” Nick agreed, completely absorbed by the map. “Can you please show me a…” Nick hesitated, searching for the right words, “a more complete map.”

  “More complete?” Frice said as jauntily as possible. He was, however, completely thrown off by the conversation with this unusual man because it was clearly going not where Frice had planned it, but into a new territory. Beyond this, all information was from top-secrete research, about which only a limited number of trusted people knew. Neither Rich, nor this Foundling were not among those people. What could this mean? Frice was thinking quickly, trying to understand. Who is this salvage? A steppe dwellers’ spy? Or alvars’? Perhaps, the Judge is behind this? This old cunning fox, notorious for his unpredictable multi-step combinations, could come up with any kind of dirty trick.

  “There’s no map like that, Nick,” Rich said looking at him with the interest he couldn’t hide. “This is the only one, and we are doubting its credibility.”

  “Weird,” Nick looked in surprise first at Whisperer and then at Frice. Only now he started to suspect that these people could simply not know that there were other lands beyond this continent or island.

  Meanwhile, Frice fetched another map and unrolled it on the table next to the first one. “Here, this is the most recent map of our world,” he said.

  “Yes, exactly, I was right. The Forest is indeed much closer now to the Rapid Waters.” Nick looked at the new map attentively. “And why is the Forest cut off so much in the west, and what’s the name of it, the World’s Smoothness, is shown only in the east? As I understand, this is only a half, if not less, of your world, isn’t it?”

  Rich and Frice looked at each other. This was the moment for which the meeting was in fact organized. During the entire conversation, Frice felt Nick out several times. As Rich had said, the salvage had no signs of the Gift. Neither could Frice influence him in any way, which was very weird as it was. Frice had never met a case like this in his entire life. The Gift affected everyone: both the people and all, even the most blood-thirsty, Forest creatures. All plants known to him were also affected by the Gift. A different matter, of course, that someone with a Gift could resist the influence aimed at him and even completely neutralize it. However, the salvage did not make any attempts to close himself from Frice, he simply did not notice him.

  At another time, Frice would have experimented on the young man with great pleasure. Perhaps, with time he could figure out why he is so peculiar. But now he suddenly had an urge for the foundling to be as far away from him as possible.

  Eight years ago, when he replaced the previous Alchemist who had died of old age, Frice got access to a large secrete archive. The young Frice would have given his right arm for the data he found there. Several times he wanted to tell Rich that his guess about the Faraway Lands was not a fable by ancient chroniclers but a verified fact. But now he was one of the Guardians.

  All studies of the World’s Smoothness were strictly classified. The Supreme One was managing them directly. The executor of his will was the Judge. As Frice guessed, their goals were not quite the same. They played some invisible game. And Frice did not plan at all on getting between them like between a hammer and an anvil. And here, suddenly some salvage appears at his house, who had been found under unclear circumstances, and he talks about the things that are known only to the selected few, just as if it is normal. For disclosure of this information, one could find oneself in the mines of the White Rocks in the best case. Frice did not even want to think about the worst case.

  “I should get rid of him as soon as possible,” Frice was thinking. “And Rich seems to still be obsessed by the idea of finding the Old City. He wants to go to the Deep Forest with the salvage? Excellent. I won’t obstruct. I will even help them as much as I can.” He nodded at Rich, as if showing he was in agreement.

  “You are weird, Nick,” Rich started, looking into Nick’s eyes. “As if not from this world. But let’s set aside your origins. Whether you have flown in, walked, or swam – does not matter now. Is it wrong for me to say that you feel like a stranger here?”

  “No, it’s not,” Nick confirmed the obvious thing.

  “And you would like to go back, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But you don’t know how to do it,” Rich’s words sounded more like a statement than a question.

  “Yes, Whisperer,” Nick nodded, “but I am going to find out how to do it.”

  “Great. Then you might be interested in something.”

  “I am all attention,” Nick leaned forward instinctively.

  “This will require a certain diversion,” Rich started, looking at Nick and obviously pleased. “Do you remember the story Sith told you on the way to the City?”

  “Yes, it was some legend about the first exodus, as I understand…”

  “You see, Nick, this legend is not that far from the truth. Frice and I devoted several years to the study of various manuscripts connected with that era in one way or another. I will not bore you with their description. It would take a lot of time that we, unfortunately, don’t have. I will only tell you about the conclusions we made. They are not irrefutable, but this is the best that we have. So…”

  “Our ancestors appeared in this land about six to seven centuries ago. We managed to find in the ancient chronicles several references to even older sources that say they had come from the Faraway Lands and founded the Old City. These names are also mentioned in many oral accounts. This is why we concluded that the Old City indeed existed and was located in this area,” Rich pointed to the center of the old map. “For a lengthy period of time, perhaps two centuries, people lived and flourished there. Then they had to leave for some reason. I believe that the reason may have been the Forest’s activity. The people left, most probably, in great rush. This is suggested, for example, by the fact that the Great City was founded only about a hundred years after those events.”

  “But it would have been better to first have built the city and then start resettlement. This is why we were under the impression that the people simply fled, running for their lives. And if it is indeed so, we can only imagine how much good they left behind,” Rich sighed. “Please don’t think that we only have material considerations here. For us it will be much more important to find the ancient devices and tools that our ancestors used. Because they were a lot more sophisticated than what our masters can make. Unfortunately, during the entire time the Great City existed, we have never learned even to copy those mechanisms. Besides, I personally believe that we need to find the reason for such a fast advancement of the Forest,” here Rich looked at Frice, “Even though the Guardians, as it seems, have absolutely no interest in this.”

  Nick was listening to Whisperer with g
reat interest and some surprise. He did not expect him to be so eloquent, thinking, “The old man is not as simple as he seemed, not simple at all. And the host, as it seems, is not the last person in the City. In any case, at least some of the big picture is starting to become clearer.”

  “The story is indeed interesting. It is quite possible that people came here from a continent. For some yet unknown reason, they were cut off from the rest of the world. Perhaps, a nuclear war? No, does not look like it. The probes did not record any increased radiation activity. There must be something else. All right, let’s not fixate on this now. What was next? They built the Old City. Makes sense. They lived in it for about two hundred years and did not know any troubles. Then some conflict with the Forest happened. Stop. Here it is not clear again. What was the conflict? Ecological catastrophe? Highly unlikely. Looks like the opposite. Appearance of new, aggressive species in the animal world? Mutations? What could cause them? High radiation? But then there would be traces of radiation activity. But the probes showed none,” Nick realized that he started to think in circles. “All right, we’ll skip this as well.

  “What else? The colonists, let’s call them that, came here from a continent. They brought with them all sorts of equipment, mechanisms, devices, tools, etc. Some of them, if I understood Whisperer correctly, are still working. For which, of course, the credit and admiration should go to the designers and engineers who had created them. Perhaps, they had been designed so that they could work in challenging conditions?” Nick’s thoughts were running in different directions. Nick made a conscious effort to collect them. “Good quality of materials and assembly, all right what’s next?”

  Suddenly, he remembered a story that took place on a planet with a beautiful, albeit somewhat weird name: Promised Land.

  As far as Nick knew, his father worked there as an observer for several years. That planet was forever written into the history books on how humanity explored the Deep Space. Even today, it is often mentioned and studied in serious textbooks for various scientific disciplines.

  The Promised Land was discovered not so long ago, about 50 years before Nick was born, but the story started a lot earlier.

  In 2345, the Ninth Inter-Stellar Expedition launched from a space station on Pluto. The starship, despite its majestic name “Thunderer,” was in essence just a usual, albeit enormous, cargo space ship. Before that, it was used to deliver heavy farming and building components for the construction of an orbit factory to mine heavy isotopes on Jupiter’s moon Io.

  All this happened at the very beginning of the human race’s flights to stars, when Earth residents just started to do zero-space transitions that now are called leaps. In 2307, 38 years before the Promised Land story, a drone probe found planet 3467-1008/K in the Aldebaran star system. It turned out to be suitable for human life. More explorer probes were sent there, and they confirmed the data received. That was when the decision to colonize planet 3467-1008/K was made.

  The Thunderer was perfect for these purposes. It was supposed to deliver to the planet the first 45,000 colonists and a lot of useful cargo. The only problem was that it was still equipped with ionic engines. They were good for flights within the Solar System, developing the maximum speed of up to 2000 km/h, but were not quite suitable for inter-stellar flights. It was decided not to undertake radical changes in the starship design. The Earth engineers simply added the sub-space engines of the Pulsar class to it.

  Planet 3467-1008/K was at the distance of 50 parsecs, or 150 light years away from the Solar System. To reach the Aldebaran star system on Pulsar engines, it was estimated that at least fifteen sub-space transitions were needed. And then the starship was supposed to move towards the planet using the ionic engines.

  The Thunderer’s launch succeeded as expected. It was broadcast live to the entire Solar System. At the estimated 100,000 kilometers away from Pluto, the Thunderer went into the sub-space. What happened next, no one ever knew, but the starship never appeared at its final destination point.

  A commission created to investigate the incident could not reach a conclusion. Several different and controversial versions of the events were floating around. One of the most popular ones was that the starship got into the temporal loop and therefore would appear at its final destination only in a year or two after the expected date. This version was good only because it gave a weak hope to the loved ones of those astronauts who went into the space leap. However, those who knew the functional field theory first-hand, deemed this version highly doubtful.

  They started to talk about the Thunderer again almost three centuries after its tragic disappearance. In 2635, planet 105787-35691/Р was discovered, thereafter known to everyone as the Promised Land. It was discovered not by accident, but during a massive full-scale search for inhabitable planetary systems. It was included into the list of a million planets that were located in a little-known sector F. The list was published by the Intergalactic Department for Research based on the data processed from more than a hundred billion planetoids. The main criterion for selection was, naturally, the Richter-Gauss scale. After the list was approved by a general vote, a research probe was sent to each planet of the list.

  In December 2635 of the Earth time, breaking news was spread all over the habitable corners of the Intergalactic Union. A planet was discovered with sentient beings living there. Not only those beings were sentient, they also were humanoids. And when the digital video and pictures of the new planet residents were broadcast on all networks, they produced an explosion effect. The natives, at least in their appearance, were not different from the Earth’s people.

  This, of course, was a sensation. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of adventurers-explorers from all corners of the inhabited Space flocked there. The Intergalactic Department on Contacts had to urgently introduce quarantine and set up a buffer zone. Had that not been done, the number of those who wanted to communicate with their sentient brothers and sisters would have quickly surpassed the number of the brothers and sisters themselves.

  Some time later, the first data from the orbital scientific research station deployed over the planet started to come in. The natives, if you may say so, were at the early feudal stage of development. They were engaged in bloody wars with each other. The forced labor was a norm. As for the level of development of culture and arts, the scientists could only make intelligent guesses at this point.

  The World Council broke into heated arguments about what to do next. The opinions, as always, were divided. The History Department representatives demanded an immediate mission of a group of their scientists to make sure that the historical layer, as they termed it, that the natives were living in was preserved. The representatives of the Social Security Department demanded to send humanitarian aid immediately, and the Health Department Director went as far as suggesting a program for mandatory medical treatment and vaccination of the natives. However, in this chaos of opinions, the boldest one was that of the Sociology Department that offered an urgent and immediate implementation of an educational program for the natives that would require construction of secondary schools and higher educational institutions.

  The verbal battles lasted for quite some time, until the Contact Committee Director Gerald Li took the floor. His speech took less than three minutes and came down to the idea that every department should just do their own job and since this was clearly a case of establishing the first contact, it fell under his Department’s responsibility.

  Despite the heated discussion that day at the World Council, there were no objections to that, most probably because many leading scientists were involved in the workings of that Committee in one way or another. And some members of the World Council occupied high positions there. They agreed to set up Supervisory Council that included at least one member from each department.

  The Contact Committee specialists started to work with great enthusiasm. They were collecting the data on the planet and its inhabitants 24/7. Very soon, people knew about
planet 105787-35691/Р practically everything there was to know, starting with the proportion of various elements in its liquid core and ending with the exact data on the size of the population broken down by gender. All data first were collected by the orbital station, then transferred to the Contact Committee analysts and to the Space Research Institute on Earth.

  It may sound strange, but the first one to notice inconsistencies was unknown at that time, young analyst and graduate student Karl Valstein. He was then interning at the Space Research Institute’s branch located in the state of Pennsylvania. Later, the seasoned scientists were throwing up their hands into the air trying to justify themselves by stating that they had been misled by an initial supposition that planet 105787-35691/Р inhabitants were its natives. Be it as it may, the Valstein report made everyone look at the finding from a different angle. And soon enough, the complicated story was clarified.

  Someone remembered that in 2345 the tragic launch of the infamous Ninth Intergalactic Expedition was launched from the space base on Pluto. It turned out that the Thunderer starship, after diving into the sub-space, exited not in the destination point, but was thrown off for about two thousand parsec to an unknown sector of the Universe. What happened next was partially restored from the ship doctor’s logs that miraculously survived three centuries.

  The Thunderer captain and its team acted like true professionals. Thanks to their bravery and selflessness they managed to prevent the understandable panic among fifty thousand passengers of the starship. For three years they had been wandering in the unknown deep space without any hope of return. Until they stumbled upon a planet that was suitable for living. One of the starship passengers fittingly named it the Promised Land.

  Almost immediately after the first shock of finding another inhabited planet, the Galactic Commonwealth was exposed to the second one. It became clear that this was not just some extra-terrestrial race but the most direct descendants of Earth’s humans. The World Council was reaching an agreement to recall the Contact Committee and give the case to a more appropriate agency when during the Council’s exta-ordinary meeting academic Benjamin Plank took the floor. His background was historical sociology and he had almost a hundred years of experience in studying exotic societies of extra-terrestrial races. He was the first one to assess the situation adequately and correctly. First of all, he asked the Council not to make rushed decisions.