Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

  “Right there, in the centre of the hemisphere is Valhalla, the centre of our civilisation and national administration... a crumbling acropolis.” He turned his head to face me. “How did you reach here, Mathias? Why would you want to meet Odin?”

  I gazed at him for a while before turning back to face the marvellous city. “It was his clues. Ever since I understood that I had been abandoned on Earth by my parents, I followed the ancient clues he had left behind to arrive here. I cannot express how big a trouble it was, finding my entire world turn upside down. You can push me to the ground here and I’ll probably fall asleep.”

  “So you want answers, I presume.”

  I nodded. For a few seconds, I could feel Heimdallr’s eyes brush along every part of my body, trying to dig through to my consciousness and verify the truth in my words.

  “We cannot take you to him just like that, you must understand. We have a dire situation here. Control over the masses is an illusion here. Trying to free ourselves from the oppressive instruments of authority, we are finding ourselves under numerous self-proclaimed leaders, revolutionaries. But what really endangers the Council of Elders is Lok Vve. Lok Vve is everywhere. It’s got eyes everywhere and is the only way we can sort out the mess we are in. If we take you to Odin... Nanna and I are going to have to answer some very pressing questions.”

  “So you both are members of this organisation, Lok Vve?”

  Heimdallr didn’t asnwer. He just stared out at the golden city in from of him. “I’ll try to ensure a safe passage for you and your accomplices through the assimilation process. You will not be subjected to any discrimination as long as we are behind you. From there, we can ensure a safe passage to Odin.”

  At that moment, through the web of rail tubes, I caught sight of a particular neighbourhood. Then another neighbourhood, then another. The empty roads of war torn Egypt and the empty roads of Asr-Gawa had a striking resemblance. I then understood what Heimdallr tried to say about his crumbling world. This was no longer heaven. The land of the Gods was being felled from the roots due to internal turmoil, and the effects of degradation were to be seen everywhere.

  Kapittel 72

  Mathias’s story

  Asr-Gawa

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1930 hours Earth EET

  “Where are you from?” a man with a balding head, olive skin and eyes wide with swirling ravines of fear and anxiety asked me, standing in front of me in the line. A bead of cold sweat trickled down his cheek before splattering on the floor. I exchanged glances with Vivek in the adjacent line before turning back to the petrified man. “Earth.”

  He seemed to let out a little bit of the breath he was holding. “How did you come here? Are we hallucinating? Are we kidnapped and being injected with hallucinogens and narcotics?” the man breathed.

  “I am not sure what is happening... I... just found myself here.” “This is not real I’m telling you. They tell us we have arrived in a different dimension. Utter nonsense. There’s more to this for sure. Nobody listens to me when I say we shouldn’t trust the government. Now look where it’s got us,” he said before being directed to another line with similarly fat men. He and I maintained eye contact until he disappeared behind a line of people.

  “Next!” the woman sitting in the counter in front of me screamed.

  I made my way to her tepidly, looking up at her sitting on a counter at least twenty feet tall. Before I knew it, a long silver needle shot out of a hidden compartment in the counter’s base and stung my arm. I recoiled from the pain and staggered backward. I watched apprehensively as the needle retracted back into its burrow, having drawn a drop of my blood onto its tip that it took away with itself, like a trophy.

  I wiped two drops of blood trickling down my arm. “What was that?”

  “Transponder pellet. To track your kind,” she said, looking down at me almost disdainfully. “How old are you?”

  “There are quite a few of us. Your teleportation mechanism is faulty if it produces so many aberrants.”

  “How. Old. Are. You?” She said, biting each word in irritation.

  “Why would you segregate us by our size? Why was that portly gentleman taken away to that line?”

  “Answer the question!” she seemed thoroughly pissed at me. “You must answer my question first, Miss! It is your fault

  that we arrived here in the first place.”

  She leant forward, looking at me carefully. Perhaps she was never used to being contested like this before. Most of the Earthlings who had come here seemed scared out of their wits.

  “Being fat in our society is harmful... for all of us.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen any fat person here as yet... But why is that harmful?”

  She shot a fiery look at me and replied in an icy, windy voice, like a broken flute. I could almost imagine venom dripping from her lips. “If you’re fat, you get eaten by the thin. Everyone must be of the same size or you’ll be finished. So no fat.”

  Cannibalism I thought. This was how grave the situation in Asr-Gawa was.

  “Vivek!” I saw him entering the hall through one of the numerous entryways. He saw me too and rushed towards me, pushing his way through the thin crowd.

  “I swear if it had been any longer, I’d have climbed the counter and choked the man. Why do they need to ask us so many questions?”

  “Hell, they even asked me if I followed a certain extremist ideology and gave me an actual IQ and EQ test! That’s deeper than customs declaration forms at airports!” I said and Vivek and I laughed softly.

  Meanwhile, the soldier and Hikaru found their way to us too. At that moment, I found Vivek’s eyes especially lacklustre. Was it just his exhaustion or was it the absence of... Lifana? I thought he had grown fond of her in the last couple of days. I smiled at the thought of that as I caught him staring at the grey floor.

  “Nanna and Heimdallr are supposed to send in someone to direct us towards the exit quicker. Let’s wait till then. At least we are among our own people.” Vivek grinned and spread out his arms.

  We found a place empty on the floor and sat down, the four of us huddling together in a circle. I looked around me to find not many people. Yet, this was probably one of the most diverse gatherings I had ever seen. The random process of selection in nature to maintain the mass equilibrium in the universe picked people from all over the other world. People of all colour, of all race and gender were present in the room, each and every one having nothing to do with the people around them, finding themselves pulled out of their world in an instant into somewhere... where no one would ever find them.

  “Hah! It’s funny! Everybody! Everybody’s face is awash with bewilderment, and it’s only we who at least aren’t as nebulous as they are,” Daniel guffawed.

  “I am sorry to have dragged you into this mess,” I whispered.

  “Sorry? For all I can say, I was already neck deep in this muck when I met you, thanks to those Japs. I would not have been able to bore a hole in an underground base without you, Noah’s ark, fight off aliens whizz through space and time and arrive in some alien land! So, don’t be daft saying sorry like a dumb kid.”

  I nodded and looked away. At that moment, I felt something slick touch my arm. Hikaru recoiled slightly, shivering slightly and completely mute. I could feel his brain working like a car engine on overdrive. He bit dead skin off his lips, clawed into his fingers and kept rubbing his hands while cowering into a smaller and smaller ball every second.

  “Hikaru. Calm down. Remember the moment you messed up the readings of the hadron collision in the particle accelerator back in Nanda Devi?” Vivek slung an arm around him, patting him gently. Hikaru looked at him in askance and nodded. “You were as scared as you are now! But do you also remember what I told you? When your ship has abandoned you, all you can do is swim until you hit land. No use shivering so hard that your skin flakes of your bones. Giddy up! We are with you!”

  “It’s just that I didn’t want all of this. Al
l this trouble was for my uncle and now we are paying for our mistakes!” He exploded. “But I still feel I know my path. Look at all these people! Many people who go missing daily, weekly, monthly probably end up here and we don’t even know. Vivek. As much as I think we should take an action against this, I don’t know what to do!”

  At that instant, a small crisp squadron of clonic soldiers marched into the bland hall in tight-fitting armour and handsets that kept moulding themselves around their right palm, like a living gun. The squadron diffused throughout the room in no time before one of them, presumably their leader, announced, “You have passed the first stage of screening. It’s merely a small and simple step left before your assimilation, Mandaas,” the man smiled warmly, like the receptionists in the big hotels that appeared on the movies Ram and I used to watch together.

  All the soldiers started moving the people, arranging them into neat files. “You all are going to go through a process of sterilisation to rid you of all dirt, pathogens and unwanted particulate matter. You will emerge from the units as new men and women!” the man turned up his chin, beaming at the crowd of perplexed earthlings.

  All of us started moving out of a single exit, obediently, looking forward to something like a refreshing otherworldly shower. From behind the line, however, I noticed the soldiers selecting individuals and diverting them towards a different exit. I glanced over the shoulders on the other side of the line before I saw five people diverted the same way.

  “Vivek, why are they separating some people from the line?”

  “Maybe because there are more sterilisation units in other chamber.”

  “But then they’d have simply created three different lines. Why handpick us like this?”

  I took a step forward and made eye contact with a soldier. His brows were furled and eyes squinted on a face that seemed like knotted steel. His jowls were clenched tightly, clean shaven, his hair neatly back-brushed and slick. He grabbed me by the shoulder with a firm unforgiving grip.

  “Please come this way, sir.”

  I tried pulling myself free of his grip but his fingers seemed to have moulded around my shoulder muscles in a relentless metallic grip.

  “Why? Why can I not follow the same uniform line?”

  “Sir, you have been screened with a certain strain of pathogen that needs some special sterilisation. Everything will be fine sir, believe me.”

  His words seemed rehearsed, as if he had been trained to say them and make his subject believe in those words. A voice in my head told me Nanna would have sent us here only if she knew this place was safe for us. Yet, I was a little uncertain about this entire process. An alien being comes to your land and there is no controversy about it? Nothing conspiratorial? Just a lengthy questionnaire and a simple assimilation process into the Asurian populace?

  “What do I expect once I walk through that door?” I pointed towards a semicircular portal blocked by a featureless, solid black slab of something that seemed like a hard polymer.

  The soldier clenched his jaws tighter, his blacksmith-like fingers were beginning to hurt me. “You should expect a sterilisation sheet to automatically screen you before continuing on your journey to the unit.”

  “What after that?”

  “Next! You! Yes you! Come here,” he shoved me backwards slightly. No. Something felt amiss here. Was this only a reflection of the general despondency of the Asurians that peaked through the mask of etiquettes he was forced to wear, or was this a portent of something bad to come? I didn’t give it much thought then and simply walked on, irritated at the man’s rough attitude.

  As soon as I approached the black slab, several cracks appeared over it before triangle by triangle, the door peeled away, each piece rotating and distorting on a body of hidden gears and clockwork like one of those modern kinetic sculptures that looked purely aesthetic.

  Behind the slab, a glowing sheet of yellow light blocked my path. I touched the sheet and it appeared to wrap around the tip of my finger ever so slightly. It felt like an unimaginably light sheet of plastic, cold to the touch like the kiss of perfume on the skin. I drove my arm through and the sheet wrapped completely around my arm. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and jumped through the sheet. The next instant, I opened my eye to find myself standing in complete darkness. The only source of light was the barrier of light behind me and... the light that had wrapped around my body from my neck downwards – a spandex-like body suit that glowed of its own accord, like brilliant yellow light crafted into a smooth cloth. It’s touch was slightly rubbery but cold, like alcohol evaporating from my skin.

  Suddenly, out of the darkness, a capsule materialised and stopped in front of me noiselessly, waiting for me to approach. I took a step further and the door hissed open. I slid into the capsule, feet first, and on to an undulating surface that tightened around me, like a coffin. The door clicked shut and instantaneously, the capsule shot forward like a bullet. In a few seconds, the darkness suddenly vanished and gave way to the brilliant blue sky that domed the curved city of Asr-Gawa. I was in a pressurised tube that ran like a secant through the hemispherical city, so I had no way of seeing where I was headed other than the curved dome, no way of hearing anything other than my own hoarse breathing. In a few more seconds, the darkness resumed. The capsule decelerated to a stop and the door hissed open again. I turned and set my feet on the ground when a hand from the darkness grabbed the back of my head.

  Before I had time to react, another hand pressed a mouthpiece over my lips and nose. A sweet smell emanated from it and in the next moment, I had lost consciousness before blurting out a single word that probably got muffled through the mouthpiece, “Nanna...!”

  * * *

  I lifted open my eyelids labouriously. I tried lifting my hands but they seemed immobile. My entire body seemed leaden, like a useless sack of sand. I tried rolling over but I felt no sensation anywhere. Anxiously, I raised my neck and found my naked body lying on a table, completely limp and paralysed. An awful sense of dread washed over me, an incredible sense of helplessness anyone felt when one was left to the mercy of another. It was then that I noticed a small patch of yellow over my bare arms. Next, the room came into focus: a room with curved corners and shiny blue, plastic-y walls. The next instant, despite my body being awash with numbness, I felt two contraptions pressing down on my lower back, on either side of my spine. I had no way of telling whether or not they drew blood or how deep it was pierced into my body, but just before delirium pulled me back into the darkness of unconsciousness, I connected the dots. All of the people being diverted to the other gate in the Mandaa Assimilation office were especially healthy from the lot. The patch of yellow must have been a residue of the shimmering body suit that had intelligently wrapped around my body, something that must have secreted an anaesthetic of sorts to paralyse my whole body. Why the anaesthesia?

  Because the contraptions beneath me... were going to... carry out a surgery. I could hardly think any more as I struggled to stay awake. A slight pain kept me from falling over the verge of consciousness. I could feel tiny pin-pricks on my lower back, multiple ones as if several needles poked me in a strange synchrony to operate... what?

  Just before I closed my eyes again, a circular section of the doorless blue room was pushed out of the wall. It turned a quarter of the way counter-clockwise and merged into the wall beside it without leaving any crack. Through the lines of my eyelashes, I noticed a bulky figure of a pink-skinned man, bald and topless, wearing only a pair of tight black pants leaning on the doorway.

  Kapittel 73

  Mathias’s story

  Asr-Gawa

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 2230 hours Earth EET

  The next thing I knew, I was cradled in the strong arms of Daniel who carried me like a baby. The anaesthesia’s effects seemed to wear away quite rapidly as I gained full visual focus and a delight over feeling a tingle in my fingers. I looked up at the red, hairy face of Daniel. His teeth were bared, veins popped out f
rom his forehead and the same frenzy clutched his bloodshot eyes. His otherwise strong arms were shaking beneath me and his chest heaved. As my sensation returned, his damp skin felt cold against my naked body. Daniel was moving as fast as he could with a tremendously painful limp and groans of anguish. “What happened?” I breathed, my head beseiged by a splitting headache.

  Daniel looked down at me with an awfully exhausted look, as if he would collapse any moment. “This is a racket, Mathias! These people chose us strong people, so they could harvest our bloody organs!”

  My eyes grew wide with unadulterated fear. “Why? How? How... did....”

  “I don’t know how I did it, but I escaped. Oh Jesus, I escaped, Mathias. It was... that moment... of energy that I summoned from within and managed to roll over that monstrous bed with needles and lasers that were cutting into me! I spent a good amount of time regaining my feeling. Then someone... perhaps one of those racketeers barged in and I knocked him out and rushed out of the room and... and... and I entered the room next to mine to find you there.”

  “Are we bleeding, Major? How much were we cut?”

  “Not much... I think I was cut more than you were, so you should be okay.” He stopped in his tracks, panting heavily. “I don’t think I can carry you anymore.”