Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

  Ram shook his head back into reality as Heimdallr made him stand on his feet again. Together, the two of them joined Nanna and Shanbhag and ran away down the street.

  The movement stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  “Certainly out of the box!” Ram looked around him and the neighborhood’s arrangement seemed entirely different now. “Hasn’t the capsule station moved too?” “Ah! It’s been moved farther away! I hope your shoes are good enough for you to run,’ with that, Nanna stated jogging away and the three of them followed her lead with Ram grumbling at Asurian techniques for civilian management.

  We reached the station which was at least a hundred metres above the ground. With a dilapidated counter and nobody to check our tickets, we simply jumped into the elevator.

  The elevator resembled a red Easter egg. The transparent doors spun and shut with a click and a voice said something in Asurian over the voice-skins.

  “Lean back on the wall of the elevator,” Heimdallr translated. “And take a deep breath.”

  The instant we pressed our backs against the wall, we felt like we were on the opposite side of a see-saw. A force pressed down on the other end of the arm and the elevator shot upwards, pushing us back into its walls that moulded around our body. The view of the city was replaced by the sky. The elevator turned further and turned the world upside-down before it completed a full revolution and straightened out again. It rose steadily and stopped at a higher level with a mechanical hiss.

  “Your elevators spin upwards instead of steadily climbing. You come to Earth, but time travel back to the past. You build a city that is curved inwards. Even your roads keep shifting! You Asurians can never do anything the straight way, can you?”

  The foursome ran through the station. When Ram looked around, it wasn’t the small size that struck him. It was the condition in which it was in the ultra-modern society it was built in. The station’s walls were made of a white material, lustrous like metal. Whatever it was, it didn’t rust but turned into dark shades of yellow and brown. The neon-like lights were flickering with no one around to switch them off. A food counter lay barren and small digital cards, which his father said were their version of newspapers, were strewn around near the empty chairs.

  The wall to their left ended and opened up to a transparent tube that bent downwards from where they were and merged into a web of such tubes that spanned over the hemispherical city, like secants. When Ram compared the city centre with the station, he understood how neglected an area they were in, how the government and all its splendor, was deeply concentrated in a smaller hemisphere within the hemispherical city. Inequality pervaded the society as the entire city seemed to Ram as a visual rendition of the dwindling administrative powers of the government that became even progressively weaker towards the periphery.

  The group of four waited patiently for some time, pacing the station in silence. In the air-tight station, even the wind didn’t make any whistling noises, leaving each with their thoughts.

  Suddenly, a screeching noise could be heard from the left hand-side of the tube. From a low hiss, the sound augmented to fill up our ears. A craft burst into the station and as it stopped, the screeching noise waned away to a low vibration.

  The craft was cylindrical in shape and matte blue in appearance. The only windows were on the sides of the capsule.

  “This is not ours,” said Nanna. “We have to wait for another one.”

  “Even this capsule floats! Do you use superconducting technology in every means of transport?” Ram asked, remembering the incident at Derinkuyu.

  “How do you say that? Isn’t this the first such capsule you’ve seen?” Chandra Shanbhag was surprised.

  “Oh definitely not! Mathias and Vivek, my friends, and I rode in one such capsule before reaching Bor-nu’s resting place!” “Bor-nu?” exclaimed Heimdallr loudly. “Resting place?

  What do you mean – you have found it?”

  In the little time he had before the next capsule arrived, Ram explained his story as briefly as he could till the point where he fell into the teleporting wormhole.

  “Ram, that’s one of the greatest finds in the history of both our dimensions!” Heimdallr exclaimed.

  “It certainly was amazing for us to know the origin of our civilisation and that of life itself on our planet. More so for Mathias it was emotional – since he had earlier discovered that Bor-nu was his great grandfather!”

  “What? Great grandfather? Do you mean to say that this Mathias, your friend, is Asurian?”

  “Yes! That’s what I was tryting to tell you earlier. Therefore he will have a brain lattice!”

  “But wait !” exclaimed Heimdallr. “If he is what you claim, he must be the grandson of Odin.” He stole a glance at Nanna. “That would mean your son, Nanna!”

  “What nonsense! I have no son!” Nanna said.

  “He is son of Thor, or that is what Baldr told us,” blurted out Ram. “Somebody who Thor abandoned!”

  There was a shocked silence everywhere. Nanna turned almost white and Heimdallr looked flabbergasted. Chandra Shanbhag was stunned. His knowledge of Asr-Gawa was enough to make him understand the enormity of this news.

  Nanna and Heimdallr looked at each other. “The atvalaget! He is alive? How come? We thought....”

  “Ram,” Heimdallr explained. “This is unbelievably important news. You have to keep it quiet. We must make sure that Mathias, if he comes to Asr-Gawa, is protected well. There will be many mortal enemies here. And by the way, he will not have any brain lattice. He was not born normally. He was born of an experiment that was outlawed here in Asr-Gawa. By the way, Mathias is not a stranger to us. Since he is Thor’s son, he is my and Nanna’s nephew. You see, Nanna is Baldr’s wife!”

  It was Ram’s turn to be speechless. He looked at his father whose face was inscrutable. “Dad, does that mean Mathias and me are cousins, not just friends?” Ram felt an irrepressible surge of emotion. He suddenly wanted to be with Mathias again.

  * * *

  Ram stepped into the capsule along with the others and the circular doorway closed like the aperture of a camera. The interior was as large as one compartment in a London tube. The seats were all one piece that melted into the curved walls of the capsule. He felt the seats before sitting down beside his father and opposite Nanna and Heimdallr. They felt like hard Styrofoam which curved around their backs such that they sat in a little niche only meant for them. It was almost like the material had a mind of its own. Ram spied on the other passengers. There was a man and a woman in identical tunics, tight black pants and an overcoat. They stared at them in silence. Their glassy eyes, with dark circles underneath them, seemed to gaze right through Ram. They all looked gaunt with sunken cheeks. Ram plunged deeper into the seat and wondered why all the citizens of Asr-Gawa looked so malnourished. Are they not getting enough food? Is this really what heaven is? An outstanding land with miserable inhabitants?

  Interlude

  Elsewhere

  At the same time

  The Fourth dimension has been abuzz with energy for some undefinable time since they located the brainstone fragments through their mouldable model. The latest emittances from the brainstones through Mathias’s adventures only added on to their leader, the Socialist’s consternation at not being able to directly intervene and take hold of the fragments. The Socialist translated to the site of transcendence as fast as possible. He resonated through the energy field of the cordoned off area at the precise frequency provided only to select members of the official avant-garde, all involved in finding a way into the sister universe. A large portion of the military squadron specially generated for inter-universe invasion was assembled in the gallery to witness the third attempt to breach the three- dimensional universe. As soon as the socialist entered, he understood the power of this special group of the military. The power emanating from them, their natural resonance, charged the atmosphere and filled everyone with an unimaginably strong drive to complete what
they had gathered there for.

  The four chosen ones stood in front of the topological baryon conversion cone. They had been one of the carefully incubated individual entities chosen to make the transcendence. The four-dimensional world was intrinsically complex in every respect, from society to science. As such, everything was probabilistic and the beings had evolved to handle the world with uncertainty. But never did the presence of uncertainty grip them with so much fear as it did now, when it involved chances of survival and final diffusion into spatial nothingness.

  The Socialist, being one of the key members in designing the machine, fired up the cone and translated quickly away to the viewing pod with the other members of the avant-garde. The four chosen ones began their coordinated translation into the heart of the rapidly distorting topological cone. All the forces of nature seemed to be at play here, in symphony, all indicating to the socialist an exceedingly optimistic feeling about the transcendence. At long last, everything came together to finally allow them to break the barriers of space-time and claim what was theirs – the brainstone – taken from them in one brilliant display of transcendental science by the greatest scientist the universe had ever seen, Buri of Asr-Gawa.

  The humming of the squadron in the gallery increased gradually. The avant-garde followed suit, chanting ancient hymns and radiating ionised bosons so furiously that their combined energy made the energy field of the cordoned off area shimmer and ripple.

  As the four made their way into the machine, they started to vibrate. Their projections were being artificially created to take into account the mass-energy equilibrium between the two universes. The socialist couldn’t control his fervour and excitement as he ejaculated stream after stream of ionised particles in all directions. The transcendence was finally going to take place!

  But they waited and waited and the next phase of the transportation didn’t happen. Instead, the vibrating shapes of the four chosen ones increased frequency, their projections jumping through reality uncontrollably, appearing at random places within the gallery. The humming of the squadron stopped as they realised something was wrong. The cone blazed with brilliant energy, pulsating and warping the fabric of space and time around it violently but without any control over direction and intensity.

  The Socialist panicked and translated quickly out of the viewing pod and just in the nick of time, managed to cut the power to the topological baryon conversion cone. Everything fell awfully silent save for the almost inaudible hum of the energy field. The chosen four entities were changing shape alarmingly. In a single blow, the socialist radiated a wave of heavy quarks at the topological machine with such energy that it disintegrated a third of the device.

  No disruption of this nature remains confined. No doubt the rippling energy had created a substantial space-time disruption in the three-dimensional world, maybe ripping apart a planet or two in all the connected dimensions near Asr-Gawa and Earth.

  Failure again.

  * * *

  Kapittel 60

  Mathias’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 0845 hours EET

  The elevator grinded to a halt in a dark, damp storage chamber. A green fluorescent light illuminated the numerous barrels kept in the room in an incandescent glow. As the soldier dragged me into the chamber, a musty odour wafted into my nostrils. I could sense a feeling that coursed through my veins, a feeling of the ghosts that haunted these chambers for thousands and thousands of years. Daniel helped me walk out of the sandstone room. Before climbing up the stairs into broad daylight, I slumped down onto the flight of stairs and felt a stinging pain in my left calf. Daniel glanced at me squeezing my knee and he seemed to know the problem. He rolled up my pant. Before I even had a chance of seeing the wound for myself, with a deft movement of wrist, he plucked out a small shard of glass that had penetrated about half a centimeter into my skin.

  He whipped out a can from a pouch fastened around his waist and sprayed a liquid over my wound. In a matter of a few seconds, I couldn’t feel the skin around my gash anymore. Numbness crept outwards from the wound and covered a small circle of my calf. I was suddenly taken back to Meerut, where the Jargantaans had used cold fumes to get over a deadly heat stroke. Their pale faces flashed in my head and I half expected to see them creeping up behind us.

  “Hey!” he whispered urgently, “Come on! We need to get going now!” He pulled to my feet. I could finally walk properly. I pushed the frightful memories to the back of my mind.

  We emerged into the expansive grounds of the citadel of Qaitbay. Up on the land, we were a world away from the battle going on beneath, but the light vibrations made the two of us feel as if we might still fall into the turmoil underneath our feet. Every quake in the ground showed me what man, even humanoid aliens, could do for power and survival. While the Japanese were being slaughtered by cold Jargantaan hands and super-freezing explosives, numerous alien soldiers were mowed down by gunfire and burnt by the fierce Japanese incendiary bombs.

  The soldier and I ran away hurriedly from the citadel and crossed the road. Once we felt safe—safe only from the battle, not the civil war—on the pavement of another street, we began talking.

  “These aliens are quite clever. Of course, they needed an elevator or something through which they could travel in and out of their base,” the soldier said while looking around the deserted street.

  “Did you know where the elevator shaft was? I mean, we fell very close to it,” I said, while trying to place the accent of the soldier. It seemed quite American to me. He was clad from head to toe in thin black armour, probably Kevlar, with his muscles bulging out of a large but lithe frame.

  “No, no boy! It was sheer luck, but I must say, falling through those floors while beating the hell out of those aliens was refreshing on a whole new level!” the man chortled, admiring his own bloodied fists with satisfied eyes.

  “What are you doing here with the Japanese? Where have you come from?” I asked him directly. The shine in the man’s eyes turned into stone. He looked down at me, serious and stoic, with a face so hard that I winced.

  “I would recommend you, boy, to mind your own darn business. We have a situation at hand,” he said, his French beard twitching slightly, “that we need to resolve quickly.”

  I nodded and turned away from him, unable to continue looking into his eyes that narrowed ever so slightly. I felt his scowl digging into my back.

  After a moment of listening only to dry desert winds and distant gunfire, the soldier broke the silence.

  “We need help... reinforcements. We could have called for the Egyptian army for aid if they had not been fighting among themselves. Do you have any ideas?”

  I looked out into the distance, thinking about the whole situation, about the recent turn of events and the rollercoaster my life had turned into.

  “Perhaps, I have an idea, but it is very far-fetched, I believe,” I rubbed my head.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  I contemplated the look on the man’s middle-aged face. He seemed intent on helping the Japanese. Should I even tell him about the plan I had in mind?

  “The army can’t help, but do you guys have any reinforcements left?”

  “The rest of the Jap soldiers who were stationed outside were also ordered to drop into the facility underground. Except for this lot, a smaller regiment has been left in Japan. If there was a genie, I would have wished for super-high speed transport system!”

  “Okay, here goes Daniel. I have a solution.”

  “Call me Major, boy.”

  “Well, then the only thing that can help, Major, is... Noah’s ark!” I exclaimed.

  The man’s eyes grew even more stern, “Are you kidding with me, boy?” He unclipped his holster and whipped out a glock pistol. “You think this is funny? Are you trying to be cheeky?” His eyes had the frenzied, feverish look it had while be had been studying his fists.

  Keeping my eyes on the barrel of the pisto
l, I slowly raised my hands up. “I am serious! After fighting with extra-dimensional aliens and learning about highly advanced civilisations in alternate realities, do you not believe me when I say that I came here, to Egypt, in Noah’s ark?”

  The man remained unfazed, his finger squeezing the trigger ever so slightly.

  “You want to know the truth? Then here goes, because we have no other choice! Vivek, Lifana and I found Noah’s ark in a place in Turkey. It is nothing like you have imagined! Noah’s ark was built by an Asurian, a person from... Asr-Gawa.” I deemed it fit not to let him know about my relationship with Noah. “It is our only hope now! I believe, that the... drill on the ark can be used to our advantage. Please, major! Understand! Myth is reality now!”

  The soldier’s face melted into something more human as he slowly moved the pistol, inserting it back into his holster. “You are right about the fact that we have no choice.” He looked up at me, “But if I find you doing something fishy, my boy, I am going to crush your thin little body with these hands!” He growled while holding up his fists an inch away from my face.

  At that instant, we heard gunshots right around the corner of the street. The two of us ducked behind one of the many demolished cars that were left out on the street, a layer of dust and sand caking them.

  “Militants, boy! They ain’t got no sense of time, eh!” Daniel mumbled.

  A few moments later, the first gunner came into view, then the next, and then another. When we thought that five gunners were quite enough, two armoured Hummers with mounted turrets turned around the kerb. Vivek had pointed out to me that the pro-Morsi army, the one that controlled Alexandria, wore better, more heavily armoured and professional looking uniforms. As their loose cotton shirts and khaki pants fluttered in the wind, beneath tightly tied crude bulletproof vests, I figured that these people were anti-Morsi militants.