The Relic

by Francisco Angulo

  An algal culture can consume the oxygen from the water at night and produce it during the day. If we can obtain hydrogen when the algae are not producing photosynthesis and consume oxygen and when light acts upon them, then we can extract oxygen. Similarly, there are plants that breathe oxygen and produce hydrogen. Moreover, even more complex organisms as plankton consume oxygen from the water, leaving hydrogen for us. We may also use organisms that reproduce at high speed and are a great devourers of oxygen, such as bacteria. The liquid obtained in this case would be a hydrogen-rich fuel, therefore, this liquid has to be highly flammable, plus we would collect pure hydrogen in the form of gas. This fuel may seem strange but it’s frequently found in nature -it’s frequently found in marshlands where the oxygen has been consumed by living organismsleaving in the water a vast amount of hydrogen and releasing most of the hydrogen to the atmosphere. This hydrogen has been mixed with some of the waste produced by living organisms, manufacturing a mixture of hydrogen and carbon in the form of a gas known as methane or natural gas. If the mixture is not as rich in hydrogen, it is known as methanol. In the event that there is a lesser amount of hydrogen and it forms a mixture richer in carbon, this will accumulate on the surface of the ponds, forming an oily layer that is a paraffin and can be used as fuel.

  In the air we can also find similarly good fuels as in water but with a much lower hydrogen content. We can use most of the quantity in oxygen and nitrogen so we could perform a similar operation if we wanted to extract nitrogen but we can also perform another process - we may use air directly as fuel in internal combustion engines.

  The super-compressed air becomes air rich in oxygen and nitrogen, both of them magnificent fuels. Thus, we can introduce the compressed air in an internal combustion engine, as if it were a methane or a propane gas, and burn it as such. To solve the problem of the energy we spend compressing it, we can design an internal combustion engine with a much larger explosion chamber and with a broader piston trajectory, so that it can super-compress the air by itself. Being an engine with individual cylinders, the energy used to compress the air would not be wasted because, being in a parallel arrangement, when one reaches maximum pressure and the explosion takes place in its interior it will move to its opposite so that it automatically compress the air inside.

  The Gardeners’ binary system was quite peculiar. It provided them with a fairly stable climatewhere changes were not at all pronounced.

  The days were not of the same length - some days lasted more than seventy hours and others less than ten. This was due to their two suns and to the speed of the rotation of the planet. They had a sun like ours in the centre of their system and a smaller one on the outside thatrevolved around the first as if it were a planet.

  The nights were also like the days - some were long and some very short. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why since the dawn of this civilisation,they had been so fascinated by the lights shining in the sky during those very long nights.

  Nobody remembered that there was a time when the Gardeners were composed of different races. With progress, trips from one side to the other of the planet were common and people lived at one end and worked in another. Their means of transportation had progressed so much that one could go from one pointof the planet to another in seconds. Already at this time their technology was so advanced that they did not need to use money and people worked for pure pleasure. This is hard for us to understand but being able to do the job one wants to do is one of the most rewarding things one can do in life. At this stage of development, the different races had virtually disappeared. This is not to say that there weren’t anydifferencesbetween them but while each person had diverse traits and there were people with different coloured eyes or hair, most had mixed together, creating a beautiful combination. The perfect combination of all earlier races formed a new one – their skin was dark, a cinnamon colour, they had bright, clear eyes, an athletic physique and a greater intellectual capacity.Countries and nations were forgotten, now even the planet seemed very small. A normal person could have breakfast in a town in the northern hemisphere and attend a meeting thirty thousand miles away in the southern hemisphere in no time. Then, lunch in another city, criss-crossing the planet several times during a single day. So, due to this, they eventually formed a unique breed, a mixture of all the previous ones.

  The Gardeners lived in perfect harmony with their surroundings, benefiting from what nature gave them and taking care of all living things, achieving a perfect symbiosis.

  They didn’t feed their system like we do - their technological advances allowed them to feed directly from the energy, transforming the energy from their two suns into vital energy. Even so they still liked to eat fruits from time to time, not having to wait for a specific date to do so. For example, when they wanted to enjoy a piece of sweet fruit, they approached a tree and they asked for it. Their voices were like a melody, and the tree bloomed immediately and gave them the fruit.

  Young children didn’t know how to tune their voices very well and often, the tree didn’t produce the fruit. Other times, when they succeeded at it, the taste of the fruit was bitter because the fruit was not ripe yet.

  They had huge transparent domes spread across the planet. Although they were translucent as crystal, they were composed of a soft, lightweight material that didn’t need any type of structure to support it. They were like a bubble of soap. These domes acted as greenhouses, parks, and they were the closest thing to a university. The temperature inside was nice and favoured the growth of plants and animals.

  The Gardeners had no schools as we know them, the closest thing they had were these huge parks inside giant bubbles. They strolled on them, listening to what older, and therefore wiser, Gardeners would tell them. One could walk freely around the park and pause to listen to the mythological story of the first Gardeners, or could learn about the advances in technology just by approaching to hear people talking. Groups of young Gardeners gathered around these persons, thrilled by what they were hearing and dreaming that someday, they’ll be the protagonists of one of them.

  Generally, these groups ofyouth were split into ages because usually, children didn’tlike to listen to mathematical theories and adults didn’tlike to listen to stories for children. Although this was not always the case, as some preferred to keep listening to these stories all their lives and ended up becoming good teachers for children by being able to narrate them againand again, imbuing them with their own ideas. Furthermore, some children also preferred to listen to science classes and ended up being great scientists.

  Maráa was one of those persons who, although she was a grown-up woman, she continued to love listening to those stories for children. She also liked to attend science lectures. In her mind she used to tie all the stories to each other, linking fantasy tales with real stories about scientific findings.

  - Yes! Just a pause so I can clarify the topic of names.

  Names are something mysterious, something mystical, it is unknown if they were created by the Gardeners themselves or whether they already existed long before they appeared. Of course, they are not written in the same way - the language of the Gardeners is a lot more complex than ours. In addition to the phonetic rules, there are symbols that represent the meaning of the names. The same name can be written in many different forms and this form of writing changes over the life of its possessor. It could be explained roughly as follows: when María was a baby her name was pronounced phonetically in much the same way, there was only one a minor change made to its tone. In seeing the written name one might read something like “Baby María”. When her first tooth came out it read: “María a tooth”.

  As I mentioned, their names would be unreadable to us, but phonetically it sounded like María said by the voice of the wind. Now that she was older, the way in which her name was now written, along with the meaning given by the tone given to the word, meant something like: “María Hazel Eyes”.

  Elías was a sceptic person. O
ne could say he was practical or logical, a person, as they say, with his feet on the ground. This characteristic had made him a good scientist, especially in the field of physics, where it was best to park one’s imagination and use pure logic. He stood out amongst his peers immediately and this did not go unnoticed by the older Gardeners.

  One day he was called to appear before the science committee, an honour very few Gardeners could boast about, especially at such a young age. Actually he could not believe it, they had included him in one of their most important scientific projects.

  It was the most ambitious project that Gardeners had ever done. The construction of the terra-forming probe was the biggest technological challenge they had faced. The probe should be capable of operating over millions of years, controlling the climate and geology of the planet. Programming it was indeed an arduous task.

  The project was left in the hands of two young Gardeners, and supervised by leading scientists in all areas covered by the program. The young members elected were María and Elías, as one had imagination and the other had the mechanical skills. You could tell they were totally opposite people, but this was precisely what was most likely to help them reach their goal together. At first these vicissitudes caused countless conflicts, as one always dismissed the ideas of the other, but finally they unified their ideas and managed to resolve all the problems that the project presented.

  They started the project feeling elated by it, but they never thought it would be so laborious. It was an arduous task that took many years of their lives solving countless setbacks.

  Elías was responsible for programming the device. Inevitably, after adding so much information to such an advanced machine, it ended up adopting part of the personality of its developer. The machine was like a child who never stopped learning and asking things continuously.

  From the beginning, they felt a strange sensation when they look at each other’s eyes. Sometimes Elías looked down while talking to María. But as he did so, he felt the need to look at her immediately, to see again those captivating hazel eyes.

  It was a strange feeling, a feeling difficult to express, when they were together they were filled with energy and vitality. However, when they separated, they felt sick and drained of all energies. Finally one day after much reflection, Elías decided he had to do something about it. After staring at María all day, he decided he would approach her but every time he tried to walk toward her his feet seemed to be glued to the ground, eventually leading him to abandon his attempt. After a few minutes, María called him and he went over to see what she wanted. She was holding something in her hands and he drew near her to see what it was. Then, in that moment, he took her hand, looked into her eyes as his face moved closer to hers and, finally, their lips locked.

  Only María and Elías knew how to operate the probe. The terra-forming probe that they had created was now to be taken to the appropriate planet to do its job. This planet was far away from their system, in another galaxy. One of them would have to leave the planet with the probe in a one way trip on the most important missions the Gardeners had ever embarked upon. But doubts conquered their minds – would it be the right thing to do? Should they move away from each other, putting an insurmountable distance between them, a journey of no return for the good of the cause?

  Elías couldn’t bear that responsibility, perhaps, he wasn’t that strong or didn’t have the courage, as it would have been expected from him. He just wanted to live by María, nothing else. He wanted nothing more than a simple life, without heroics. He tried to convince María not to leave and even though he thought she would not leave, one day she vanished. He looked everywhere and could not find her. He asked everyone and finally found the one who had saved her final words before leaving: “Since childhood I have listened to tales of interstellar travels, dreaming to be their protagonist one day myself, and as I got older I have worked with the sole purpose of carrying this mission out. I will leave with the probe that we have built together, to give life to desolate worlds so that new beings can marvel before the grandeur of the universe. I'm leaving, but my heart is here with you and I know that the same God who crossed our paths will help us meet again in the future.”

  The ship was very small. The best solution to cross great distances is to use a small ship. You may object to our way of thinking but we just have to look at a cheetah and an elephant - being bigger doesn’t necessarily mean being faster. María only had a small room, the probe was charging in another specially designed for this purpose. The ship had a system that allowed it to transform electrical energy into vital energy for living things so that María wouldn’t need to be fed throughout the trip. Although the trip was long, traveling at such speeds, time could not reach the person, so she really was not aware of time passing by. The whole journey was a blink of an eye.

  The ship began its journey moving away with increasing speed. A progressive acceleration which, was the only time when María was aware of the trip. Then everything went dark around her, only a small light at the end of a narrow tunnel remained illuminated. A moment later a terrible noise was heard and the ship began shaking violently. This was expected - leaving the maximum velocity and decelerating, the ship was hit again by the power of the adjoining space. Then she was able to see through the wide roof of the ship, there it was, the entire solar system. The material of the ship was stronger than titanium and from the inside one could see through it as if it were glass. Observing the solar system, she marvelled, approached its star and then travelled near very large planets. Then she reached her destination, a small, grey planet.

  The ship landed and the fine white dust rose from the ground, covering everything for a few seconds. Then she lowered the probe and scheduled for it to begin working on this planet.

  María left on a starship, on a journey from which she’d never return. A mission that would take her from one end to the other of the universe. For her it would be just a blink of an eye, because when traveling at such high speed, time could not reach her, and what for one person could be a thousand years, for her it would only be a fraction of time so small that it would be impossible to compute.

  Elías spent endless days in solitude -then months and then years. But nothing changed for him. The pain was not dimmed by the passing of time, only the hope that one day he could meet her again kept him alive.

  He spent much time locked in his lab, trying to find a way to meet her. But even if he’d found a way to get to her, when they’d met he’d be either very old or have already died of old age. The laws of physics made it a problem impossible to solve. So to get back to her, he would have to disregard those laws or reinvent new ones. And even if he worked day and night he would not find a valid method before many years had passed. He accepted all methods without ruling out any possibility. Thus began working with processes and techniques that would not be approved by his species. He mixed the most advanced methods with older and already forgotten ones, sinister methods that had been buried by the passage of centuries. He became a dark being who seemed to lack life or soul. A being who stood in the darkness of his lab and never felt the sunlight. Would he have had shadow one could have deducted he was not a ghost but his shadow had left him long ago.

  To prolong his own life and thus have more time to reach his goal, he absorbed the life energy of other beings, others losing vitality by his presence, some even wasting away and suddenly falling to the ground.

  This was how he maintained himself young for a long time, for so long that he himself had lost count of the years and the centuries that had gone by.

  He continued working unstoppably, relentlessly, and though he had lost almost everything, even his own identity, he never lost, or never even diminished his love for María by the slightest.

  Rumours spread among the Gardeners like smoke blown by the wind. Tales of an unnatural being, legends that spread over the years. The Gardeners could not approve of this. It was a situation that conflicted with all their beliefs, oppos
ing their lifestyle.

  Finally a committee met to discuss the matter and to find a satisfactory solution for it. They ordered the capture of Elías but this was to prove notan easy task as no one could approach him without being sucked its life energy. But based on the legends told about him, they found out that older people were not affected by his power.

  Elías continued to work in his laboratory. After all this time, he was still working as eagerly as he did on the very first day. His life in seclusion, isolated from the world, had even made him pronounce his ideas out aloud. The voice that once had been soft and melodious, like a song, had now become dry and sharp, like the screams of a dying animal.

  Why had they separated their souls? Why did they rip their hearts out? Who had allowed this to happen? What God had shown him the light only to let him live in the dark? He kept wailing as he worked, looking up, staring at the infinity, launching his words towards the sky.

  A noise interrupted his conversation. He looked up and saw a large number of people - they were elderly Gardeners, more than the naked eye could tell. They surrounded him, making it impossible for him to escape. The circle of people was girding on him while he threw voices of despair, words of pain and anguish that damaged the ears of anyone that would listen. He was caught as a vermin and brought before Congress.