Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

  The next moment, his consciousness jumped again, and this time, he tapped into the power of the brainstone. For this moment in time, it was the brainstone and his consciousness, temporarily connected. He finally understood the reason behind the amplification of power – quantum tunneling. The wave form of the brainstone had been elevated to tunnel through a barrier. Since the stone was four-dimensional energy condensed into matter, the tunneling process reinforced its connection with the four-dimensional universe, flushing away all three-dimensional restrictions of space and time so that the true inter-dimensional power of the brainstone could pervade both universes.

  Suddenly, there was an intrusion. Alarmed by the consequences, the Socialist realised that a three-dimensional being was connected with the brainstone, perhaps permanently. Every molecule, every quanta of the brainstone carried the information of this Being, almost as if both the three- dimensional being and the stone’s consciousness and existence were intertwined. Just an instant before this window vanished and the amplification was finished, the voice of the three- dimensional Being communicated with the Socialist. To his absolute horror, the message had been conveyed without carrier bosons, the transmission of data happening through this window where their consciousness met each other.

  The Socialist was back in his laboratory. He checked the time it took for this leap and released a charge of oscillating neutrinos when he realised that he was at the same place at the exact same time. Even though his consciousness took a long time to perceive what he had, he came back to the exact spot in history when he had touched the spot.

  As he translated back outside the laboratory, all he could think of was the message conveyed by the Being to him. It echoed in his mind – “I’m coming.”

  Kapittel 78

  Mathias’s story

  Asr-Gawa Dome outer side

  March 17, 2017, Friday, 1800 hours EET

  The six of us appeared on the other side of the periphery. Other than broken images and mixed feelings of being both human and wall, all of us felt like we had just materialised on the other side of the barrier, now standing on the extended platform of the periphery. Suddenly, everything felt different. The wind blew harder, the cold gnawed their exposed skin, the air seemed noisier, more hostile, humid, and salty. We looked around at the desolate landscape which resembled a vaguely Scandinavian landscape. Due to the planet’s bulge around the equator, the surface appeared flatter than usual allowing us to see farther. “Are those fjords?” Ram pointed out towards a valley in a distant mountain range.

  “Yeah looks like one. We can see the entire landmass of Asr-Gawa from here, up till the ocean that they so fear,” Daniel said and turned. “Would love to go surfing one day. I think we’re in a hurry now.”

  I looked down at dome, half-hoping Heimdallr to materialise beside us. The frost on the surface prevented me from seeing anything near the periphery.

  “I wonder what happened to Heimdallr. He stayed back, to allow us safe passage. I hope he’s safe,” I muttered before I was whisked away.

  We walked around the periphery for a little while. The surface of the dome was perfectly spherical, so there was no way we could scale it physically.

  “Guys, what’s that?” Vivek was pointing towards a leaf-shaped black object resting against the surface of the dome. As we got closer, we realised that it was actually levitating a few inches above the surface, like all the levitating and superconducting crafts we had seen thus far.

  “Looks like a small vessel to me. You think we can use this to get us to the top?” Daniel asked.

  “I think it’s one of the crafts the workers use for maintenance of the dome. Ideally, it should be able to help us travel on it.”

  Dr Shanbhag climbed into the almost vertical craft, resting his feet on the upturned edges. He studied the inside and turned. “Yeah, it’s basically like a shallow boat. All of us should be able to fit.”

  Shanbhag sat right in front, followed by Daniel and Ram, then Hikaru and I and finally Vivek.

  “The surface of the craft is made with the materials all the chairs in Asr-Gawa are made out of. So sit where you can,” Shanbhag instructed.

  “And the surface will mould itself around our... posterior, correct?” Vivek grinned.

  In a few minutes, we were fastened automatically into the craft. Shanbhag had figured out the a small pad of controls at the bow of the craft. He pressed button softly. Without any audible sound or mechanical vibration, the craft started moving on a longitudinal path over the dome. As Shanhag pressed his finger harder, the craft speeded up until we were travelling at nearly 70, 75 kilometers an hour.

  “We should reach the top in about 45 minutes if everything goes smoothly. We shouldn’t be disturbed by anyone, now that we’re outside the –” Shanbhag was cut short as a dark shape of a bird flew really close to our heads at searing speeds. Another one appeared from around the dome and swooped away close to our heads without touching us. In no time, these black raven- like creatures were flying all around us, all with an uncanny mechanical screeching noise.

  “What are these birds, Papa?” Ram fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat as he looked around in wonder.

  Shanbhag’s eyes were wide with terror as they darted from one bird to another. I followed his gaze and caught the glint of a metallic sheen in the eye of one of the birds circling us. It was then that it hit me.

  “They aren’t birds, Ram,” Shanbhag said without facing him. “They’re cybernetic drones. Bird-shaped devices that orbit the city constantly like a remote controlled external security system. In a sense, they act as Earth satellites do. Facilitate signals and transmission of data, surveillance, and of course, defense.”

  “I hope they aren’t going to do anything to us,” Hikaru shrunk slightly into his seat as he looked at the sky full of the strange creatures.

  At that instant, one of the cybernetic birds flew in and sprayed a lemon-yellow liquid all over Shanbhag’s left arm. “God! Oh Lord! I can’t feel my arm. Guys! They’re spraying anaesthetics! They’re going to numb you completely on contact! Use your clothes to cover yourselves!”

  All of us started to panic, especially Ram who was shocked to see his father’s hand hanging loosely by his side like a sack of dirt.

  “Ram watch out!” Daniel cried as he jumped over Ram as soon as a drone released its anesthetic fluid. A couple of drops fell on Ram’s fingers but the whole shower had been absorbed by Daniel.

  “I... I can’t...!” The large muscular soldier slumped unconsciously over Ram like a log.

  “Daniel! Daniel! God I’m sorry Daniel!” Ram started to cry as he slapped the man’s face to wake him up and tried to wriggle free. I helped Ram push Daniel’s limp body aside moments but before long, another drone was heading towards us. It’s dark glassy eyes were emotionless, like actual birds of prey. The jet behind it started to glow a fiery blue as it reached blinding speeds.

  “Hold on tight, guys! We need to speed up.” Shanbhag pressed harder and harder into the control pad and the craft accelerated with all its might. The bird tried to keep pace with the sudden change in speed of the target and sprayed all its fluid on the surface of the dome.

  Meanwhile, the wind grew more violent, buffeting our hair and skin with awesome power. The cold froze us right through our flesh, into our gut, but our adrenaline kept us reasonably warm. The dark clouds swirling the sky, the desolate Asurian landscape of green, white and blue, the city underneath us, everything turned to a blur of confusion as our craft rocketed over the dome. In a few seconds, it doubled its speed to 150 kilometers per hour and reached nearly 200. Almost as a response, the devices coordinated and synchronised themselves such that their speed and maneuverability matched the new speed of the craft. All of their tails started blazing yellow which turned blue before they swooped in for the kill. They weren’t leaving our backs.

  We kept shielding ourselves from the fluids that the birds sprayed, and now at these speeds, each spray covered a greater area.
Contact of any kind would make the muscles go limp, and according to what I saw happen to Daniel, even a couple of drops of that anesthetic on the face meant losing consciousness and finally capture. The end of everything we set out for.

  Nearly twenty minutes of shooting over the surface of the dome and dodging birds flying over us, we heard a cry of panic from behind us. Vivek had been exposed to the liquid. He looked at us with bloodshot eyes filled with fear before they closed and his body went limp, swaying erratically in the powerful wind.

  “Oh no, oh no!” I mumbled under my breath. “How much farther away is the peak?”

  Shanbhag turned to reply. “Another ten minutes and....,” he fell silent.

  “What? What is it?” All of us looked back and our spirits dropped. All the birds that had been flying over us had acquired formation, a menacing V-formation of the fleet that was slowing gaining on us.

  “We can’t outrun that pack. If they manage to surround us, we’re done. Once they’re on us, they’re going to fire fluid from all directions. There’s no way we can avoid being caught.”

  Shanbhag had started slowing the craft down, almost in a gesture of surrender.

  “Keep it going! Go full speed! We can’t stop! We’ll try our best!”

  “No use...!”

  “Just keep it going, Papa! We can’t give in!” Ram yelled over the noise of the wind and the jet blast of the approaching fleet. For a moment Shanbhag was struck by the authority in Ram’s tone, but he pressed down on the pad and picked up speed again.

  “Okay, think. Think. What can be done?” I muttered loudly, squeezing shut my eyes.

  “Can we make the craft go faster?” Hikaru asked Shanbhag who shook his head sadly. “Then we need to deal with the cybernetic ones themselves. See, they’re cybernetic organisms, right? If they have circuitry and programming inside them then....”

  “They can be hacked.” I looked up. “Hikaru, I thought about this as soon as they started attacking, but this isn’t Earth. Except the fundamentals, you have no idea how they have been coded, what language they’ve been coded in, or if they have been coded at all in the traditional sense!”

  “But they are robots, Mathias. They have a basic set of instruction inside them. This world we are in is basically just another Earth. It is our Earth, but with some changes here and there in its history or the cosmos around it. Basic principles remain the same, which means that ideally, we should be able to tap into those birds.”

  I looked at Hikaru and understood the smart lad had a point. There was no time for argument. If there was even a sliver of hope in doing this, I had to. I took out my small projector and started working, glancing at the advancing creatures every now and then. I tried one way, then another, then another, but nothing worked. Slowly, I started understanding the language in which they had been coded, not very different from terrestrial object-oriented programming languages.

  “Hikaru, I think it’s working.”

  “Keep going, keep going.”

  Ram looked at the dark line of drones that flew steadily towards them, having almost closed the distance between them. Their tails glowed purple and the air around them shimmered with heat and power. As Ram kept staring at them, a small nozzle descended from their bellies. Ram’s stomach churned with a bitter feeling in the back of his mouth. Even in the tremendous speed they were travelling in, Ram could barely notice the fluid dripping from their nozzles like venom from the viper’s fangs.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Ram screamed and ducked behind his jacket as soon as the spray started. One second. Two. Three. It didn’t feel as wet as it should have. He peered over his jacket with a look of bewilderment. All the nozzles were dry and turning right and left randomly.

  “See? I told you so!” Hikaru and I fist bumped each other. We had actually managed to hack into alien programming! In the next five minutes, we had arrived at the top of the dome, directly above the Yggdrasil. The clouds above us finally gave in. Fearsome torrents of rain came down upon us, sheets of droplets being blown by the awesome strength of the wind. There was no shelter over us. It was just us and the unforgiving Asurian climate.

  Thunder exploded, a deep rumble in the distance.

  “Can’t you make them stop or go away?” Shanbhag inquired.

  “No, they’re being controlled remotely by an external party now. I can’t control their ‘motor functions’ so as to say.” I tried to maintain my cool but an ominous feeling welled up inside me that the birds may have a couple more tricks up their sleeves.

  “Keep trying. Ram, I need your help to cut through this section. Come quick.” Together, Shanbhag and Ram grabbed a small device which Heimdallr had given them and started cutting a hole through the thick surface of the dome that

  melted like way under the particle beams of the machines.

  At the same time, the fleet had arrived and completely surrounded us, their hooked metallic beaks facing us predatorily. They hovered in the air, seemingly unfazed by the intense rain and wind. There was a tense silence that hung in the air as Hikaru and I kept watching.

  With the sound of thunder, the birds opened fire. They shot white darts that streaked through the air and clanged against the surface of the craft.

  “Everyone DUCK UNDER THE CRAFT!” I yelled and pulled Hikaru down. All of us were huddle safely in the shallow craft, but not for long.

  “I don’t know how to override the system! I tried but this I can’t!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  “Those darts don’t make you unconscious. They paralyse you for I don’t know how long, but they are definitely worse,” Shanbhag declared. We were trapped here at the top of this world, exposed to nature, under fire, and facing our inevitable capture.

  “Let me try. I think I can do something. Give me your projector,” Hikaru demanded and I obeyed. He got typing and worked feverishly, drenched in the rain, cowering meekly behind any shielding he could find. His fingers were shaking and his teeth were clattering in the cold. I had to buy him some time.

  My face twisted in rage. I stared at one of the birds as hard as I could, concentrating my will power. My will to burn the drone. My will to smash it to bits. My will to tear it asunder!

  I stood up in a cathartic moment and yelled as my amulet let out a glowing red beam of energy. It burned clean through my shirt and blew up one of the drones into a ball of flames and electricity. As I looked at other drones, the beam split, hitting three of them at once. Suddenly, I was pulled down by a strong hand a millisecond before two darts whizzed past my skin.

  “You were about to get shot by one of the darts! Careful!” Ram said. For a moment, the birds drew back a little. Whoever was controlling them had seen what I did and seemed to contemplate his or her next step. This bought Hikaru enough time to disable their weapons systems for some time.

  “Their arms have been disabled! Ram, Mathias! You two need to go!”

  “What about you two?” Ram exclaimed.

  “We’ll manage, don’t worry. There’s no time! Go! GO!” Shanbhag yelled.

  Without wasting a moment, Ram and I got up and jumped over the craft, landing hard on the part of the dome Ram and Shanbhag had previously cut. We jumped and kicked again, and the melted line tore deeper into the surface. We jumped again, and the line extended almost to the craft. Another jump and the surface gave away. When torn, the material was completely limp like a thick sheet of soft plastic. It blew away from beneath our feet and the two of us screamed as we fell into Asr-Gawa from the topmost point.

  The two of us felt the wind crashing against our face, just like in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. The entire curved city rushed up towards us, and directly beneath us, the spire of Yggdrasil rising up from Valhalla came towards us like a gigantic spear. We fell around twenty storeys before the huge dark hole of Yggdrasil consumed us fully. The light of the city vanished instantly and an unimaginable amount of heat ate into our skin. It was only because we were falling that we were kept from getting cooked a
live in the heat of this vent. In the closed space, our screams echoed throughout. I couldn’t tell how much we fell before I crashed through a protruding pipe. Then a second one, and a third one. Our momentum caused these pipes to snap like sticks. I managed to level out one last time before I spotted light pouring out of an opened doorway on the side of the tower. I angled my descent slightly and grabbed hold of a pipe.

  “AARGH!” I screamed as the hot metal seared my skin. I let go and swung into the doorway, knocking out cold the maintenance man who had been standing there. I got up instantly, just in time to grab hold of Ram’s hand. He swung into the wall of the chimney and crashed painfully, probably spraining his arm. I pulled him up before the intense heat sucked him dry. Together, the two of us collapsed on the floor beside the unconscious maintenance man, gasping in mouthfuls of air. I took three deep puffs from my inhaler, and finally found some relief as I lay there on the warm floor. We got up and shaking ourselves to full sensation and alertness, walked briskly up to an ornate door in front of us. We were walking through a dimly lit antechamber, our shadows extending faster than us until they bent upwards on the door, as if to directly face us. We stopped at the door, hesitant to knock. I raised my fist but noticed it quivering ever so slightly. I studied the ornate designs carved on the arched, solid brazen door that towered over us. It could have been mistaken for a wall as it lacked any crack in the middle to indicate that it was a door. On the other side, I hoped, lay the answers we sought. In one fleeting instant when my courage seemed to spike just a trifle, and I raised my hand to knock....

  The shuffle of scores of footsteps resonated through the corridor behind us. Ram and I stood rooted to our spot, facing the door, holding our breaths. A strange symphony followed, a noise that sounded like grain falling but in a systematic way, arranging itself into solid shapes in synchronisation. My chest felt tighter and my throat felt as if it were being nicked by thousands of fiery needles.