The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  Eventually he grew tired of the sound of his own voice droning on about the intricacies of Soran grammar, and spent another hour trying to top his best score in the particularly difficult level twenty-eight transport training exercise that required him to dodge enemy ships while weaving through a canyon only a few meters wider than his craft. He had to decrease his speed to not crash, but too often he would slow down so much that his overall marks would suffer because of it. Having just shot down two fighters on his tail, he was on pace for his best score yet, but a surprise blast into the side of the canyon wall caused him to lose focus and clip a nearby rock pillar. The damn program changed each time he ran it, and there was never any predicting what would happen next. He spiraled out of control and felt a familiar jolt of pain when his ship was dashed into a million pieces on the red rocky surface.

  “Goddamnit!” he said audibly, and shut down the program in frustration. He got up from the chair and paced around, but soon his anger subsided. Even after using the chair for hours, he wasn’t nearly as fatigued as he used to be, and he assumed his body was forming some sort of bridge with the device. His neurological system was growing accustomed to the virtual stimulation.

  Thinking back to the language program, he tried to remember what he’d learned. Surprisingly, he discovered much of the information had stuck, and he started spouting Soran phrases out loud in the CIC.

  «My name is Lucas.»

  «Where are you from?»

  «Do you have any water?»

  «How do you get to the spaceport?»

  «Death to Xala!»

  The words coming out of his own mouth sounded bizarre, but he could at least process what he was saying. He wondered if the Sorans would be thrown off by his assuredly American adaptation of their language.

  «Impressive,» Lucas heard from behind him.

  Alpha was standing there, his spindly metal claw tapping on some controls.

  «Thank you.»

  Lucas reverted back to English, as after a few hours he imagined he couldn’t carry on an actual conversation in Soran yet.

  “Yeah, it’s not too bad.”

  “The program is satisfactory?” Alpha asked.

  “So far, though it’s a little off-putting that I’m my own teacher.”

  “I figured the voice most familiar to you would be the best option.”

  Lucas thought briefly that he might prefer having Asha’s voice relay the lessons to him, but he kept the idea to himself.

  “Oh,” Lucas remembered an earlier question. “We found a sealed box in the armory. All the other crates have been stripped, but this one is locked up tight. Do you know what it is?”

  Alpha shifted, then responded after a pause.

  “No. I know the object of which you speak, but it is above my clearance to open. I have tried myself, but the mechanism is too secure.”

  “And the room across from your lab?”

  Alpha didn’t look at Lucas when he answered.

  “Yes, the same security measure is in place there as well. It would be best to not tamper with it, as it could prove dangerous.”

  Something was odd about Alpha’s tone, but Lucas didn’t press the issue further.

  “Noah says thanks for his new toy by the way.”

  Alpha looked surprised.

  “The child speaks now?”

  “No, no, it’s a figure of speech.”

  “I see,” said Alpha. “It took a mere minute to build. It is pleasing to see him take to foreign technology rather than childish artificial animals and the like.”

  “Every kid should have a stuffed animal or two.”

  Alpha kept tapping on the console.

  “The norms of your world are no longer relevant. If the child is to survive, he will have to be strong from an exceptionally young age.”

  Lucas thought of Noah’s likely permanent burns.

  “Well, he’s not off to a bad start.”

  After another pair of workouts, a few more hours of Soran, and a game of “fetch the holoball” with the now fast-crawling Noah, Lucas was off to bed in the water chamber. He liked to read actual, physical books before he attempted over a dozen hours of sleep. It was a nice reprieve from the constant flood of technology everywhere else onboard. He’d polished off the Harry Potter series in a week and finally understood what all the fuss was about, though he was a bit miffed that Potter didn’t end up with Hermione Granger in the end. Now he had started on The Picture of Dorian Gray, and was wishing that he’d managed to find some CliffsNotes in the mansion library as well, as it was quite a bit more dense than a tale about wizard school.

  Thumbing through the pages to see how long until the current laborious chapter ended, he glanced up at the monitor, which showed a closed glowing pod on the ground where he’d placed Noah a while earlier. He was about to look back down to his book, but did a double take as he saw Asha enter the room. She bent over Noah’s pod briefly, but then stood up and began examining the others on the walls. What is she doing?

  Much to Lucas’s surprise, she stepped inside one of the pods and a halo descended onto her head as the door closed in front of her. Lucas was perplexed. She’d hated the machines and had looked even more chilled than him each time she’d emerged from it. Why would she willingly go back to them now?

  The question bothered Lucas until he finally drifted off to sleep where he had dreams he would barely remember. In one of the stranger moments, he found himself floating in empty space, a brilliant supernova erupting in front of him. A black, shimmering ship shot out of it and raced toward him. A voice could be heard from within, but it wasn’t growling. Rather, it was speaking in broken Soran.

  «You . . . do not . . . belong.»

  Omicron’s ship hung there in space with the supernova’s light refracting off its hull.

  «Return . . . to your . . .»

  The voice was growing fainter. A whisper.

  «Your dead . . . world.»

  Lucas turned behind him and saw Earth. The all-encompassing cloud cover had dissipated, and only a husk remained. A scorched red and brown planet without a hint of blue, white, or green. Against his will, Lucas began speeding toward it. He blasted through space at speeds he couldn’t comprehend and surged toward the outline of North America. He fell to Oregon. To Portland. To the crater.

  Lucas woke up in a sweat, but the dream didn’t stay with him for long the way pod memories did. After a fresh tube of nutrients and a vigorous workout he’d forgotten all about it.

  What he did not forget was what he’d seen last night, and when he woke up, the monitor showed only Noah crawling around. The pod Asha had been in was empty. He confronted her about it in the armory, where she sat reading her old copy of Paradise Lost.

  “Yeah, so what?” she said dismissively, not looking up from her book.

  “So I thought you hated those things.”

  She casually turned a page.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well, and those nutrient packs taste like ass. Despite its . . . flaws, the pod gives you way more energy and the nutrients you need for practically the entire day.”

  Her messy hair and eyes laden with dark circles didn’t make it look like the pod had helped her recharge all that much.

  “Why do you care anyway?” she asked, finally glaring at him.

  “It just seemed odd, given what those things can do to us.”

  «Mind your business,» she shot back in Soran. Lucas was momentarily caught off guard.

  “You spent some time with the program?”

  She put down her book and turned toward him, happy to be rid of the pods as a subject of conversation.

  “Yeah, in the turret yesterday.”

  Her turret had all the same capabilities as Lucas’s chair in terms of running simulations. He had seen a similar-looking one in Alpha’s lab as well.

  “Did yours have you teaching yourself?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s a little creepy.”

  Lucas got up to
leave, but stopped.

  “Oh yeah, I asked Alpha about the box. Claims it’s above his security clearance. Same with that room outside his lab.”

  “And you buy that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Yeah, like the genius son of a super-scientist doesn’t have that clearance, or can’t hack through it. He’s hiding something.”

  “He’s always hiding something,” Lucas mused. “But we’re still alive, so I’ll let him have a secret or two.”

  As Asha left for her turret, Lucas headed upstairs for another day of Soran lessons. This time he stayed in for almost eight hours, and by the time he came out, even his thoughts were in Soran for a solid twenty minutes after disconnect. He gave the alien fighter variant of the flight program a try and found it to be far more intense than his transport training. The smaller ship was capable of much higher speeds in close combat, and was infinitely more maneuverable than his present craft. At first he died so often than he almost passed out from the amount of pain he was receiving as punishment, but slowly he began to correct his errors and managed to pass the first four stages by the skin of his teeth.

  His nerves needed a rest, and he closed down the simulation and brought up the various monitors linked to different parts of the ship. Alpha was in the water chamber, noting the various levels in the tanks on an electronic pad. The next view of was of the armory, though only the front half of it as Asha had smashed the second camera that showed the rear of the room where her quarters were. A fair attempt at some privacy, but Lucas hadn’t bothered to do the same in the water chamber. Lucas was surprised to see Noah crawling around the storage cubes. Despite Asha’s concession that the child should be saved, she didn’t usually spend all that much time with him. Lucas saw him shaking an assault rifle magazine like a rattle, so perhaps that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But at least she was taking an interest.

  That night, he watched her crawl into the pod again as Noah slept, and when he woke, she was gone. This pattern repeated itself for several nights until one morning he awoke and found her pod door still shut. After his morning workout, he returned to the monitor and found the same scene, despite the fact that Noah had crawled out of his own pod an hour earlier and was busying himself with his colorful techno-toys.

  Lucas went up to the barracks to investigate, but when he got there, found Asha stepping out of the pod looking exceptionally disoriented, breathing rapidly. She jumped when she saw him in the room.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked angrily.

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” he replied. “This doesn’t look like it agrees with you.”

  “Some nights are better than others,” she said as she rubbed her bloodshot eyes. Noah rolled his metal ball toward her foot, but she didn’t even notice it. Instead, she turned and walked out of the room without another word. Lucas looked cautiously at the open pod next to him. He picked up Noah and headed to Alpha’s lab.

  “I have an idea,” Lucas said as he reached the laboratory a floor down.

  Alpha was working on some sort of device that Lucas couldn’t decipher. It looked like a cross between a lamp and a dehumidifier.

  “And what is that?” Alpha asked.

  Lucas put Noah down on the table, and he immediately began crawling toward Alpha’s project. In a few seconds, he pulled a piece of fragile machinery off. Alpha sighed and calmly used his good claw to slide the child a few feet away across the metal surface of the table. In the past few weeks, Noah had grown increasingly curious about Alpha and treated him the way a child on Earth might a Great Dane. Alpha had initially snapped and demanded the child be kept confined so as not to interfere with his work, but over time he seemed to warm up to Noah and was becoming more tolerant of him by the day.

  Lucas continued.

  “If the chair speeds up neural functioning in Asha and me, would it do the same for him?”

  Noah was crawling back toward Alpha, but reacting swiftly, he shoved a blinking metal disc at the child. Noah was quickly enraptured by the glowing lights and progressed across the table no further.

  “The thought had not occurred to me, though I suppose it would be possible. The programs would have to be far less intensive, and he should only stay connected for a brief period of time.”

  “Do you think it would make him speak and walk more quickly?”

  “Speech, perhaps. Mobility is more a factor of muscle development however, and it would likely have little effect.”

  Alpha was perhaps wondering if more mobility would be a good thing for the already fast-moving child. Lucas imagined it might compound the trouble he could get himself into.

  “It is indeed how we train our young, and as such, they develop cognitive reasoning and logic skills quite quickly. Human biology is not used to such technology, but perhaps if the child was trained in its use at a young age . . .”

  Alpha escorted Lucas to the bridge, happy to be out of his cramped lab. Lucas set Noah in the chair as Alpha tinkered with the Soran language chip, which he’d plugged into his mechanical wrist. Noah squirmed in the chair, but calmed down when Lucas produced his holoball.

  “I’ve crafted a basic speech program that is below even the basic levels that you utilized. I have programmed in Asha’s voice. Your scientific texts have shown children respond better to their mothers.”

  Lucas was a bit miffed, as the absent Asha wasn’t even around to witness this, nor had she come up with the idea. In fact, over the past week, she’d barely paid any mind to Noah at all. She’s no mother. The state she was in that morning indicated she could barely even take care of herself.

  Alpha finished his tweaks and the chip flew into the console. Cables attached themselves to Noah’s head and he looked momentarily shocked. He began to show a little fear, and was almost about to cry when suddenly the program lit up the space in front of him. He calmed down immediately and let out a large chuckle that made Lucas grin. The kid did love his holograms.

  Alpha monitored Noah’s brain activity as Asha’s voice guided him through basic Soran words like colors and numbers, which were universally recognized entities it seemed. A discussion had taken place about whether or not to have him taught English, but Alpha maintained he could pick that up from them, and Soran was the priority if he ever hoped to have a future, should they survive this journey.

  After about a half hour of an Asha-voiced lesson full of bright colors and soothing sounds that seemed to hypnotize Noah, Alpha signaled Lucas to shut the chair down. As the display disappeared and the cable retracted from Noah’s tiny head, he looked around confused, wondering where all the fun had gone. His mouth started moving, and Lucas and Alpha watched in anticipation.

  But no words came. That would have been too much of a miracle. Alpha checked some readouts.

  “His cognitive functioning is above average. Despite no external result, the session seems to have agreed with him. Repeat daily, and perhaps you will achieve what you seek.”

  Alpha sounded like a pediatrician prescribing ear infection medication.

  “Alright little man, playtime’s over,” Lucas said as he scooped Noah up off the chair. Alpha returned to his lab, and Lucas took Noah back to the barracks, but not before he brushed past an irritated-looking Asha in the corridor. She didn’t acknowledge their presence, and looked equally as unkempt as she had when she stumbled out of the pod earlier.

  After dropping Noah off in his cobbled-together playpen, waiting briefly for him to say anything other than babbling nonsense, Lucas headed back up to the bridge. The promise of hours of virtual training stood before him, but he forced himself to do a hundred pushups before he plugged himself in. It was a constant struggle to stay in shape confined in a relatively small vessel, and the chair required hours of motionlessness. As stimulating as it may be for the brain, it was in no way a physical workout. Lucas’s chest burned during numbers ninety through a hundred, but he was impressed with how far he’d been able to come in a relatively short
amount of time. He was able to run more windsprints than ever, and do double the amount of strength exercises he could a week ago.

  He collapsed onto the metal floor, then pulled himself up into the chair where the cables found his head. He was determined to figure out how to fly this damn virtual alien jet fighter, and he’d stay in all day until he could master it.

  And that he did, peeling himself off the chair fifteen hours later. The vast majority of it had been spent in flight sim, and only a few were devoted to any further Soran instruction. He still had another four months, and figured there was plenty of time as he was picking up a large amount of the strange tongue already. His body told him that he’d overdone it in the simulator, and couldn’t even muster up the strength for his nightly workout. He told himself he’d make it up by doing an extra one tomorrow.

  As he crawled into bed, the monitor showed Asha’s now frequently used pod closed already with Noah’s unit also shut on the ground alongside it. He thumbed through about five pages of Dorian Gray before he passed out with the book on his chest. He was too exhausted to dream.

  What seemed like minutes later, he awoke and tiredly pulled his wrist over his head as he lay on his mattress. Alpha had built him a makeshift watch based on the thirty-seven-hour clock, which had proved to be essential since it was almost impossible to tell time any other way. The tunnel of space-time had no rising or setting sun, and his body’s internal clock couldn’t be trusted any longer. He glanced at the barracks monitor and saw that while Noah was crawling out of his pod, Asha once again remained in hers. He didn’t feel the need to go extract her, as despite him being a few years her senior, it wasn’t his responsibility to regulate what she did on the ship. She was always quick to remind him of that fact.

  Lucas surprised himself by being able to complete a number of handstand pushups, leaning up against the wall. Despite a lack of solid food, the so-called nutrients really were boosting his physical prowess. After only a month he reckoned he was in the best shape of his life. It was a strange feeling. He had been on the verge of death such a short while earlier, and he almost felt foreign in his own newly powerful body. Noah too was looking healthier than ever, and even Alpha seemed to have a new sort of shine to his usually dull gray skin. The only crew member who had looked worse for wear was Asha, as after a stint of regaining muscle, she had now wasted away. The pod seemed to be atrophying both her body and mind.