Log XXXXX
We are losing ground. At first the daemons saw us as nothing but a nuisance. They toyed with us and played with us like we were part of some kind of game or entertainment. Perhaps we were. It was obvious we were on their home turf, some wasteland that the real daemons didn’t venture inside. The farther out we moved away from the ship the more they pushed us back. Sometimes they would send stronger daemons to face our gifted warriors. This was a place for ghosts. We discovered their history and the more we learned the more we seemed to lose. The daemons were born of this world but they were not the ones at fault for invading ours. The species that lived on this Earth, rather the ones that created it were advanced machines. Machines created by a very human-like species. We found sculptures and images pained inside caves and buried in the ruins of cities that told us the story of the world around us. Any of the time we weren’t fighting we spent studying trying to piece together the broken pieces of this jigsaw puzzle before us. The humans-like species that lived on this world had advanced technology to the point that it would look like magic to us. Some of us have started calling them the Ema or Emites. The hebrew word for “horror” or “terror”.
They created artificial atmospheres and terraformed the solar system. We have found records that show eight to nine different planets depending on the source and several smaller worlds that they colonized. With so many different worlds they eventually went to war. They never left the solar system until finally their advancements got the better of them. After thousands of years the humans honed the metaphysical and taped into what we would call magic. They were using runes and machines to bend the rules of their world. If this was an alternate reality or dimension it was highly possible that not all the same laws of physics applied. They manipulated what we would call dark matter and tapped into their subconsciousness. When the sun started to die they built an artificial one around it and merged the two together. When the Earth began to die the wars began to stop. They recreated this world in the Earth’s image as the other ones broke away. Forgotten in all but their own archives. As time moved forward some began trying to ascend. They believed that if they could achieve a higher consciousness they would shed their bodies and join a deity that I can only perceive as what they believed to be God. They could live for thousands of years but they were still human, still mortals. Those that denied ascension built the machines and uploaded their minds inside of them. They achieved their immortality but it came at a very high cost. War broke out between those that longed for peace and those that longed for immortality. Their world began to die again. Some broke away. We found records of an exodus. A group that built a ship to explore the space beyond their world. They called themselves the ‘sons of god’ and they used their advanced technology to open a rift in reality. The rift destroyed half their solar system as it took an enormous strain of energy to open. They drifted outward and the rift closed.
We also found that when the ones that had uploaded their minds into the machine began to lose touch with the parts of their soul that made them human they created the daemons.
The daemons were born here. Created here as husks. Immortal bodies that would allow the Ema to feel the emotions that they had lost. The daemons were as immortal as the machines. They could never get sick, never get old, however they could physically be hurt or killed. Their minds were linked together like a hive. The Ema weren’t the same beings they had been before. They fed on each other’s emotions but their loss was too great. They had fallen too far to ever be anything like they once were. They linked their minds together in a collective consciousness in an effort to feel. Fear, pleasure, and all emotions in between. When their thirst became too much they reached out across the galaxy. Astral projection from their reality to our own. They began to seed our world. They filled our ancestors thoughts with the idea that daemons were real. Slowly they began re creating the technology that had been used once before to bridge our worlds. They created a rift. Small at first. They let their atmosphere bleed out just as their thoughts. They infected us. A circle drawn in blood. Their world, this world was a lost paradise. A place they desperately wanted to escape. A place called hell.
Log XXXXXX
Many humans are gifted with the ability to feel more then others. Something we call empathy. The ones that are highly sensitive and gifted with the ability to be affected by other’s energy, the life force that drives us all, that intuitively feel and perceive others as who they really are called empaths. The term has been widely used throughout history. Mostly science fiction though in many cases it’s something out of pure fantasy. Empaths can perceive physical sensitivities and spiritual. They tend to know the motivations and intentions of other people. It’s not a superpower. It’s something that we as humans have been capable of for eons.
There are three types of empathy. Affective, the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another’s mental state. Affective is something we all do. Everyday. You are doing it right now. Cognitive, the capacity to understand another’s perspective. Cognitive is also known as theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states of belief, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc to oneself, as the two are often used synonymously. When a mother is in distress and her infant begins to cry. That is empathy at its most basic level. As humans have become more aware we have as a collective began to tap more and more into our own empathetic nature. The last thing to know about empathy is that it is somatic. Empaths have a physical reaction to the things around them.
As the rift in space grew the daemons thoughts poured through. When 2/3 of the worlds population became infected it was too much for the human mind to take. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t all somehow infected by the daemons or that we are less empathetic. It just means that those that fell asleep were more open for attack. Whether it was their personal religious beliefs, their own beliefs, or the fact that they were in fact empaths doesn’t change the fact. They were vulnerable. The human body adapted and they fell asleep. A pretty worthless defense mechanism if you ask me but who am I to truly question nature. The daemons don’t care if we are awake or not its all the same to them. They feed on our emotions.
The rift also awakened something else in us. Those that were in close proximity to the empaths that fell asleep were gifted. The powers are a result of the branching out of the psychic energy from their reality to our own. In a way they are gifts from our own empaths. Gifts we have honed to use as weapons. Gifts that help create balance but also where there is power there is fear. The fear of what one will do with power. The fear feeds the daemons even more. The only handicap we have and it’s working against us just the same. The reliance we have made on those with powers. The fear we feel when even with the chosen ones fighting by our side we are still losing.
They use us like drugs. The sleepers as we have come to call them are constantly being bombarded by the daemons thoughts. The same daemons that used ancient technology to build the ships that crashed across the world and that are attacking our homes now. All so that they can get high off our fear, our pain, and our pleasure for war.
Log XXXXXX
We may have found something. A way to end this. The rift is being powered on this side. The daemons have turned this entire planet into a machine that is keeping it open. What we saw as a massive ship on the outside in our reality was a projection. We were seeing what the daemons wanted us to see. They wanted us to believe that our solar system was being invaded. We couldn’t see that we were flying into an event horizon and traveling through a singularity. A wormhole. A reality bridge. The downside. The bridge doesn’t go both ways. Once we passed through time became distorted. Time dilation. Their world is leaking into our own. Slowly. As minutes pass on our side years pass on this side. We can see out but we can’t leave. We have tried dozens of times. If you fly high enough you can see the rift. It’s massive. You can see the battle outside, the explosions as our weapons hit and explode inside the singularity. A few of us trie
d to cross it. Something about human anatomy. Our bodies literally disintegrate while crossing through like the rift itself is some kind of force field. We watched as daemons traversed it without any problems. Something about their skin and bones, another kind of genetic advantage they have over us. It didn’t surprise us. They were created in a lab and they looked like monsters I imagine they had all kinds of hidden strengths. We also realized that many of the feral daemons we were fighting seemed to be barely linked to the hive. They followed orders but they were nowhere near as intelligent as the soldiers, the grunts or the ones that they followed. We came to the conclusion they were created after the fact simply to be used as weapons. No mind, no soul. Just feral bodies that worked to safeguard the ones that came before. No wonder we weren’t doing any real damage. Everything we thought we saw was a lie. There are few of us left. I was in my thirties when I came through the vortex and now I’m wrinkled with gray hair. I stopped counting birthdays a few years ago when I finally gave up on a rescue.
Vengeance
That’s it then. The codex had map markers and everything.
We couldn’t find any bodies because the crew of the moon rabbit had grown old and died. Some of them it seemed had planned to make the journey to the rift generator. A place that we learned they had been scouting for quite awhile. They even had a dropship in the hangar fueled and ready to go. Sometime before their planned assault they made their final stand in the hallways of the moon rabbit. From what we gathered only a few survived and they were badly injured. Too injured to go on. Most likely they had died here on the ship or out in the wilderness. After that they were probably dragged away by the daemons. The daemons had set this place up as a trap. Bait for whoever comes through the rift to their world.
“We need to move fast,” I said.
“So a year here is only hours on the outside, that means the daemons must either not reproduce or they have a massive army somewhere on this world, can you imagine?” said Jackson.
“They don’t reproduce. Most likely there is a set number of them, Didn’t you catch that, the logs say that they were created. They are carbon copies. Each one we kill just makes them that much weaker. We might actually have a chance,” said Lt. Barker.
“Jake is right, we need to start making our way to the hangar while we have time, Todd and Chiru have bought us some time, we need to move,” Michael announced taking command even over Lt. Barker. Soon we were all following his lead as he and I took point making our way through the now dark and twisted hallways of the moon rabbit.
“Todd must have destroyed the engines, probably twisted into some kind of abstract design, I’m sure it would be art if we were back home,” said Michael commenting on the winding corridor we were walking down shining our flashlights at the cracked walls. I felt like we were walking inside of a melted candle. The walls seemed like they were hardened wax. The entire ship felt like some kind of twisted surreal art something a mad sculptor would have made a mash of inspiration from Salvador Dali and H.R. Giger. Several parts of the hallway were lined with dead daemons that had been torn apart by Todd and his magnus opus.
We made our way into the rec room. Workout equipment was wedged into the door. Weights and bar bells hung overhead and molded into the ceiling like darts against a dartboard. Other pieces of equipment had become permanent wall fixtures. Broken glass was spread out across the floor. A live daemon was half buried in the ground reaching towards us with one arm. The rest of it was somewhere hanging in another room. It looked like it had fallen through quicksand. It was screeching, growling, clawing. It saw us and we quietly walked around it not letting our bodies move too close. Michael found Chiru’s sword attached to a severed human hand. He picked it up and slammed it down into the skull of the trapped daemon and let it rest as a grave marker not for the daemon but for Chiru, our fallen ronin.
“We never should have picked the name eight immortals,” said Nate.
“You were the one that called us that,” said Michael.
“Yeah I think it was a bad jinx, none of us are immortal as far as we know that isn’t on the list of available powers damned by the daemons or rift or however the hell we came to be this way,” Nate spoke.
“Bad jinx or not doesn’t matter now, we’re still alive, we still have people we need to protect so shut up and let us keep moving,” said Michael.
We were all tired, hungry, and everyone aside from myself had had little to no sleep since the daemons started their assault. We began taking turns carrying Emily who was still barely half conscious. She leaned on Nate at first then Jackson who carried her over his back like a child. We had made our way halfway through the moon rabbit past the stasis chamber and we were sitting outside the molted doors of the hangar. The stasis chamber looked like a twisted beehive filled with blown glass. Various colors appeared around the room as we shined our lights into the dark void around us. It was angelic in a way. I felt like we had made our way through some kind of crystal cave.
Cassandra had been a nurse before the day of the dreaming. She was a part of the trauma team at a city hospital in Boston,Massachusetts. She spoke to us now with the thickest accent I had ever heard as Lt. Barker took out a small welder and began firing it at the hangar door.
“Every once in awhile the trauma team becomes human, you can see the fear and anger bleed through from one anthers eyes. Most of the time we act as a group, a team that functions like a machine. We are an instrument guided by years of education and practice. I remember one night in particular we had two traumas hit us simultaneously. It was bad… I saw the trauma doctor step out of the room in tears, catch her breath and go back inside only a mere moment later. I listened to another tell radiology that they didn’t give a shit if they didn’t have an order that they had a John Doe and that they were coming down their with their patient in less than five minutes and if they didn’t get her on the CT table they would end their career. I watched them stick a tube down a young girl’s throat and I listened to the same doctor that was crying earlier give a report to a higher level with despair in their voice. I saw a young body twisted in ways it shouldn’t have been. I watched my team move room to room as each body came to us. We swallowed our fear and did our jobs. I watched flight crews stabilize them and lift them to the places that they needed to be. When it was over. Hours after my shift should have ended I walked by the families of the victims. The family the police had tracked down. The Jane and John Does had names, lives. I walked by all of them and I went home to my loved ones, the ones I lost when the daemons came, the ones I couldn’t protect, this is all I, all we can do for them now, we have to stop pretending we are going to make it out of here, if we can save the world by giving our lives, by closing that rift and sealing the daemons in this hell forever then we must,” she finished. It was the most I had ever heard her say and she said it so well. Lt. Barker cut open the hangar door. We shined our lights inside. The hangar wasn’t nearly half as mangled as the rest of the ship had been. Perhaps Todd had known somehow we would need the ship. There were several inside. A few dropships and several dozen fighters that looked like they had been torn apart for scrap. There was a small layer of dust on everything. There was something else inside the hangar too. The moment we entered we knew we weren’t alone.
A new kind of daemon clung to the ceiling above us. It was something out of a nightmare. Anyone with arachnophobia should stop listening to my story now. On top of the ceiling we saw what looked like a giant black widow spider with several dozen limbs and limbs stretching out from those limbs. It looked like it had teeth coming out of the sides of it’s body like armor. It was clinging to a massive web filled with dozens of eggs each about six feet tall and three feet wide. We were inside some kind of nest.
“Is there a name for that one?” asked Lt. Barker staring at Nate.
“No, sir, I think we should quietly make our way to the ship, it doesn’t look like it has noticed we are here,” he whispered in return.
&n
bsp; “Follow me,” said Michael taking a small piece of twine he had been carrying in his pocket and giving it to me. He motioned for me to give the twine to Cassandra who passed it to Nate who gave it to Lt. Barker and then Jackson who was still carrying Emily. We each turned off our lights and began walking in the dark towards the nearest dropship.
“How can you see?” I whispered to Michael who was walking like he couldn’t even tell it was dark. He was pulling us all along.
“Daemon eyes, they see in the dark, my body is leading me,” he said and as he looked back towards me I noticed a red glow from his eyes. He was mastering his new power slowly. He was becoming more and more in touch with himself and controlling the ability to manipulate parts of his body to transform at will. The daemon’s blood that ran through him made him stronger. He was less human for it but he was still one of us. We had no problem trusting him with our lives. The downfall to hearing his words. Now I knew it was possible turning our lights off didn’t really make a damn. If the spider-daemon could see like the others it probably had no problem seeing in the dark.
Sleepers (Convergence Book 1) Page 13