by Greg Krojac
And then…silence.
Jason looked around, unable to comprehend what was happening. He looked at Sitara who, in turn, looked at him, her eyes blinking in astonishment. Jason heard a noise behind him and turned to see Enak, just as confused as the two of them. It was as if they were looking at a still photograph, or somebody had hit the pause button on a movie. The room was perfectly still, with both humans and Argon warriors frozen in mid-movement, along with three computer monitors and a paper shredder suspended in mid-air. Enak closed his gaping mouth and whispered.
“Are they dead?”
Sitara shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. If they were, I think they’d have fallen to the floor, wouldn’t they?”
Jason was just as confused.
“Perhaps we’re the ones who are dead.”
Sitara patted herself down.
“I don’t feel dead. Do you?”
The other two shook their heads. A voice behind them startled them and they span round to see somebody approaching them through the group of statues. The newcomer, dressed in a well-tailored magenta Nehru-style suit, smiled as he drew closer.
“Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s dead.”
Sitara wasn’t sure that she agreed with the stranger.
“But they’re not moving.”
The stranger gave a knowing smile.
“They are perfectly healthy. They are in fact moving quite normally. As are you. However, you and they are passing through space-time at different speeds.”
Jason wanted answers.
“Who exactly are you? Did you do this?”
“My name is Dracip. We are the Jah, We are from a place hundreds of interdimensional leaps from here.”
Sitara grabbed Jason’s arm; she had only recently become used to Enak and his colleagues being aliens. She wasn’t really ready to meet any more.
“How can you speak Urdu?”
Enak interrupted.
“He is not speaking Urdu, he is speaking Argon.”
Sitara insisted.
“No. She’s speaking Urdu.”
Jason was really confused now.
“It’s English. And she is a he.”
Dracip’s constant smile never faltered.
“You each hear me speaking your own language, and see me as a slightly distorted image of yourself. To Sitara, I look and sound like a sister might. To Jason and Enak I look and sound like a brother. I have created an appearance that would be agreeable to each of you. Sitara, ever curious, was awash with questions.
“So are you real?”
“In the sense that I am a physical three-dimensional representative of each of your species? Yes, I am real, in your dimension.”
”And what have you done to the rest of the group?”
“Nothing has happened to them. They are well, Sitara.”
Jason felt a little lost. The only science he had studied had been at school. Dracip continued.
“Time is relative. Time is only relevant when it has a relationship to something else. To your friends, time is continuing at its normal pace. To you, time is also continuing at its normal pace. However, you see them as moving at such a slow speed that any movement is completely imperceptible. For their part, neither human nor Argon eye can discern any difference from normal.”
Jason accepted what it was for what it was. He couldn’t be bothered to try wrapping his head around the science.
“So we know your name. What are you doing here?”
“I am here to rectify a mistake. It is our responsibility.”
“What mistake?”
“The Argon were never supposed to encounter your species. We removed them from your planet over forty thousand of your years ago. But we underestimated the speed of their technological progress. And yours, also. The unmanned spacecraft that left your solar system encountered an Argon vessel, which then used it as what you would call a Trojan Horse to attack your population.”
Jason didn’t give the scientists the opportunity to ask, what would be to him, irrelevant questions.
“If you knew about it, then why didn’t you stop it from happening? Unless you couldn’t.”
Dracip momentarily lost his smile.
“We could have, but we didn’t notice until it was too late. We had other matters to attend to which took priority.”
“What the hell could take priority over humanity being destroyed?”
“Many things, unfortunately. You’re not the only life-forms in the Universe. And not the only life-forms under our stewardship.”
“Yeah. Well. We found that out to our cost, didn’t we?”
Putting aside his anger at the needless loss of lives, Jason asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
“What are you going to do about it? Bringing back all those dead people might be a good start.”
The smile returned to Dracip’s face.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t do that. We’re not gods, even though you humans have been worshipping us for thousands of years. The resemblance between the words Jah and Jehovah is no coincidence. What we can do, however, is to remove the Argons from your planet and return them to Argon.”
Sitara frowned.
“So you’re not gods?”
“No. We are not gods. Gods do not exist. You worship your creator -”
“And that’s not you?”
“No. We didn’t create you. You and I were all created by the same process, a physical event that defies the laws of physics as you understand them. I believe you call it the Big Bang. Those of you not constrained by an insistence upon superstitious anthropomorphism are not entirely correct in your suppositions, but you are close. The rest of you worship a historical event that took place nearly 14 billion of your years ago. It would be quite quaint, had you not used this religious fervour to oppress and kill others that didn’t agree with you. A historical event cannot love you. It does not have emotions. It is gone. It has passed. Embrace the future instead.”
Jason was more concerned about the immediate danger from the Argons.
“But what good will removing the Argons do? They’re so technologically advanced. They’ll just come back.”
“We will prevent them from leaving Argon for the foreseeable future.”
Dracip walked over to the giant plate glass window and indicated that Jason, Sitara, and Enak should follow him. The Argons who were camped on the other side of the river were frozen in time, just like their friends. The Jah went to wave his hand, but was stopped by an urgent question from Sitara.
“What will happen to Enak? And Siroll and Eled?”
“They will return to their home planet with the others.”
Sitara looked at her Argon friend.
“What will happen to you on Argon, Enak?”
“We have betrayed Argon. We will be tortured and executed as traitors.”
That settled it for Sitara.
“Dracip. I want Enak and his friends to stay here. They’ll be killed if they go home.”
Enak touched her arm.
“It is ok, Sitara. We knew the risks when we made the decision to turn against our people, to let you humans know what was happening. I only wish we could have prevented it.”
Jason looked at Sitara, who nodded. They both knew what the other was thinking. Sitara went to clasp Dracip’s hands in hers, but they passed through as if she had been trying to grasp a shadow. She stepped back, surprised.
“Oh. I wasn’t expecting that.”
The Jah laughed.
“I am both here and not here. I am conversing with millions of other survivors simultaneously.”
This was too much for even her brain to deal with, so she didn’t even bother to try. She felt a little awkward and let her hands hang by her sides.
“Dracip. We have something on this planet called asylum. If Enak and his friends return to Argon, they will almost certainly die. We can’t let them be killed for helping us. We would like to offer asylum to Enak
and any other Argon who has helped mankind.”
Dracip smiled again.
“It’s most irregular, but I will put your suggestion to the other survivors with whom I am conversing.”
Five seconds later, Dracip had a response.
“I have spoken to the others, explained your suggestion to them, and the majority agree. It appears that your positive experience with Argons has been frequently replicated. Please look out of the window.”
The two humans, and Enak suddenly found themselves transported from the main floor area to one of the side offices, watching as the scores of Argon warriors who had been on the other side of Key Bridge simply melted away before their eyes.
Enak, who had been quiet for the most part, ashamed of what his people had done, found his voice.
“Are they back on Argon now?”
“Yes, Enak. They have been returned home, where they will be imprisoned until such time as they can prove to us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they will treat other species with respect and compassion. This will probably take hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years to achieve, if indeed it can be achieved. They will need to change their culture completely and see empathy as a virtue, not something to be scorned.”
The Jah turned away from the window.
“I will say one final thing. Let this be a lesson to you. Your species will, no doubt, recover. Eventually, you will reach for the stars again. Treat any other beings that you may encounter with respect and compassion. If you do not, you too will be imprisoned on your planet. We will not make the same mistake again.”
A Marine rushed into the room, as the Jah disappeared before their very eyes.
“Jason. They’ve vanished!”
“Who’s vanished?”
“The Argons. They were attacking us and then they weren’t. They vanished right in front of me.”
Jason glanced over towards Dracip, only to see an empty space where the Jah had once been, and that he too had vanished into thin air.
Sitara, who almost jumped out of her skin when she suddenly felt something rubbing against one of her legs. She breathed a huge sigh of relief when she looked down and saw a beautiful tabby cat. It must have been living in the building, surviving by hunting mice and rats. She had no idea where the animal had suddenly sprung from, but it seemed friendly enough so she bent down and picked it up, nestling it in her arms. It purred contentedly as she kissed it gently on the head.
“I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl but, after all we’ve just been through, there’s only one name that could possibly suit you.”
Jason grinned as he stroked the cat, remembering how this whole adventure had started.
“Hello Schrödinger.”
### THE END ###
Thank you for reading The Schrödinger Enigma. If you enjoyed the book, please tell your friends. Also I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or any other site you wish.
Incidentally, if you want to know what the Argons were saying to each other when conversing in their own language, follow these steps:
1) Reverse the letter order of each word. For example, for the word ‘Oyidn’ write ‘Ndiyo’. Keep the word order as it is.
2) In Google Translate, select translate from Swahili to English. You should get the gist of what they were saying.
______________________________
Also by Greg Krojac
REALITY SANDWICH
Buy from Amazon here
In the 23rd Century, the world has become an uninhabitable environment and what's left of the population lives alone in individual one person apartments, spending their days in a routine of sleeping, showering, eating, drinking, and amusing themselves with streamed digital entertainment. They interact with each another only online, never meeting each other in a real physical sense.
This is the only world they know, until one day Jerome finds an intruder in his apartment, Wren, a beautiful young woman whose curiosity gets the better of her and who wants to see for herself what's inside the stark building complex that she can see from the edge of the forest, where she lives with her family in a settlement that shouldn't really exist.
Everything that Jerome believes is now brought into question. There is a world outside his building with people in it. Can he overcome his fears, leave the confines of his apartment, and embrace what the outside world has to offer?
____________________________
Also by Greg Krojac
THE RECARN CHRONICLES
Buy Book 1 (REVELATION) of the trilogy from Amazon here
Buy the complete trilogy in one volume from Amazon here
A 10 year old’s act of bloody vengeance on Christmas Eve, 1965, proves to be the precursor to a horrific chain of events that affects the entire human race when, fifty years later, the truth about reincarnation is revealed to the world in a political move by the Illuminati.
Reincarnated, and working his way through the upper echelons of the Illuminati, he sees an opportunity to take control and realise his ambitions of absolute power. However, he is still human and the frailty of his human body means that death is inevitable and his soul will eventually return to the cosmos, seeking yet another corporal host. If he can find some way of avoiding the randomness of reincarnation, some way to control the destination of his soul after death, he can rule the Earth for eternity.
The unassuming Boone family accidentally finds itself caught up in the middle of the struggle between One Life (the resistance movement) and the oppressive New World Order of the Illuminati, changing them from the role of victims to freedom fighters.
REVELATION is the first book of THE RECARN CHRONICLES trilogy, a tale spanning over 230 years - a tale of one man’s obsession with eternal world domination and an ordinary family who become major players in the battle against him and his ruthless organization.
Check out my website at www.gregkrojac.com for more information. You can also contact me through the website to ask questions, make a comment, or discuss something that was mentioned in one of my novels.
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[a1]I know this looks weird, and I'm not completely sure the spelling is correct, but often in texas people shorten "she would have" to one word.
[a2]be sure to check for consistence. I change this b/c on the next page you use 'em, not them. Both are Nolan speaking.
[a3]the quotations are backwards here, but not sure how to fix in Word
[a4]in our email convo, you said that Triggs was defnitely southern, but didn't say anything about Nolan. This is definitely a southern accent, so I'm going to assume that he is as well.
[a5]Southerner would probably say "won't ever" or even "won't never". Depends how intense you want to get with the accent.
[a6]the use of "ma" and "pa" is something I'm going back and forth on. Depends exactly how rural you want to go. In the small Texas town I grew up in, nobody would use this. But if Triggs and his family are very rural, like living on a farm, then this would be suitable. Otherwise "mom" and "dad" are fine.
[G7]Timeline for utility breakdown a bit confused. Change to reflect real timeline. 'It's almost as if the utilities had been sabotaged'
[a8]this is probably unnecessary technical detail. Same with PAPR. Instead of naming/labeing them,just say what the are.
[a9]is this happening as the nurses are comig in? The rest of the paragraph is not, so this is jarring.
[a10]"then free"? Feels awkward. I think you just need to change the wording here.
[a11]too wordy. I would rewrite this.
[a12]If this is the NIH, she is probably American and would use "mom"
[a13]Why wouldn't Sitara just wait until Suzy was dead? It's obvious she's about to, so why cause her more unnecessary pain?
[a14]this doesn't make sense in the sentence. Maybe make it's own sentence? "She really needed some clothes."
[a15]too repetitive
[a16]spacing on this paragraph is different
[a17]this does
n't seem realistic. based on what Jason is seeing, there is no reason for him to assume this.
[a18]he already said that
[a19]
[a20]I think "physiology" is more correct.
[a21]wait, he's not sure? But he's exposing people to an alien who might be infectious anyway? It seems to make more sense that he would want to know everything he could about the alien before traveling with him any more, or introducing him to more humans
[a22]I think this should be "crew and I" but i'm not sure
[a23]but immune are still carriers right? Or does nobody know that?
[a24]a NASA scientist would probably use a more specific/technical word
[a25]just a thought: many southerners, especially rural ones, are christian
[a26]when/where did he get punched?
[a27]change if you decide to use "dad" instead
[a28]hm, so they're trusting the men to not attemt rescue? they should probably at least post a guard?
[a29]is this incorrect purposefully b/c of translator? If not, shold be "lies"
[a30]why in the way? why wasn't coexistence considered?
[a31]this still doesnt explain why the virus is a H1N1 mutant
[a32]not sure what this sentence is saying
[a33]needs to be broken up
[a34]doesn't make complete sentence when put with the first half
[a35]is this the same as in bethesda?