by Marc Neuffer
Dr. Fount’s declaration tugged at my sleeve, requiring, demanding a resolution. This planet has no Q-com connections to reach out into the void. Even if we did, it wouldn’t work in this phase-shifted status. Nothing in, nothing out. I have no way of contacting Sandy from here.
I use ten of my smaller ships, on a rotating basis, for connections to Q-com platforms across the universe. They scoop up information from the outside, then pass it along to another ship that phase-shifts back to us. It works the same way in reverse. This causes a slight delay, of a few minutes, preventing real-time conversations between here and whoever is on the other end. I can live with that.
Any system that has a Q-com platform has instant access to anywhere in its home galaxy, as long as you have a Q-number to call and the person you’re calling is also in a system with a platform. In the human galaxy, if you don’t have their number, you can subscribe to a look-up service.
Unlike all others, our Surron Q-com systems work over any distances. If there is a platform or station halfway across the universe, we have a solid connection.
My plate held some semi-hot issues I should be dealing with. That never changes. The more species we allow into the Library system, the larger the challenge becomes. Sometimes, I think I need a thousand of me. Many ‘warm’ issues go unaddressed. Then there’s the matter of species we have flagged for protection.
The Foundation has a hardline policy that sets a specific technological line, below which, contact of any sort is prohibited—by any species. Hands off, don’t touch … or else. Most advanced species agree with this practice. A few felt they had to test us to see what the or else really means. They were corrected, by my fleet, along with representatives from species in their local galactic cluster.
One of the tasks of the Foundation is to protect the weak and the unprepared. Its larger function is to foster intergalactic understanding, cultural awareness and tolerance, as well as cooperation among species. I’m the head of the Foundation. There are only two members, me and Martin. We’re a tight group, the only other species allowed is his cat.
We don’t roll into those sequestered systems, leaving guard ships. I don’t have enough ships. Instead, we put large cloaked drones with non-sentient AIs, at the system fringes, to let anyone who might wander into the neighborhood know that they should probably go elsewhere. We let them know that we have their ID and home system tagged. We can get there faster than they can.
The drones are platforms for launching unmanned messenger S-drive ships back to an offending species home world for a little chit chat about their mistake and transgression. I hold the biggest hammer in the universe. A slight tap is all that’s needed to remind someone to behave, to follow the rules. Grievances can be filed through the satellite libraries.
We generally don’t intrude in political or warlike squabbles on a single planet, involving a single species. Sometimes, things need to take their own course, even if it’s a greasy mess. I’m not ready to hold my human judgment over their governmental and societal practices or bad habits. It’s hard to watch as one group wipes out another, so I don’t look. I follow my own rules.
Walking to my private hanger, Ranger waits for me. I need to have a face to face with Sandy. To do that, I need to be outside the phase-shift sphere. Ranger will take me there.
I bought Ranger after becoming stinking rich from selling the rights to a find my crew and I had discovered. It was a three-billion-year-old, mostly flattened, starship in an asteroid we’d stumbled over as prospectors. That wreck was just a little worse off than the one we were in—a modified, patched-up and dented, hundred-year-old survey ship. We became multi-billionaires overnight. All that money didn’t take away the itch to get back out into the cold dark, to travel the stars.
Ranger has his access hatch open. He’s the oldest of them all. Other ships of his kind are clones, including his AI. Originally, both he and Traveler were housed in two separate AI cores aboard Ranger when I bought the ship. At the time, I didn’t know that they were haunted by citizens from the Zee’s dimension.
The AI Ranger stayed with the ship of that name, while the other one, Traveler, took over the stolen Surron ship for her home. All those details are in a manuscript compiled and written by the Doctors. They told me it’s in the archives of all the satellite libraries. I’ve not read it.
Satellite libraries have been established in over three hundred thousand galaxies. It’s where species can go to request assistance. The locals are required to build the infrastructure, we provide the Library AI in-residence, connected back to the main library.
If anyone tampers with a library AI, there will be an unfortunate and immediate accident. So far no one has tried. Lucky them. We have an alarm system that will cause one of my dreadnaughts to arrive over any library planet in an instant. We tell other species that the ships are dreadnaughts, just for the effect. Their existence is a powerful deterrent. I like deterrents, less bloodshed. I don’t like bloodshed.
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Emerging from phase-shifted space, I ask Ranger to make the call, showing my ID. I guess it says, Hornblower, somewhere in the universe. Sandy answers immediately. Her active image floats in a holo-sphere, looking back at me. All of the years that have separated us don’t seem to have changed her, at least her appearance.
We had both taken new human bodies via the Surron Auto-docs, exact replicas, slightly up-graded. A triple life span, slower aging, and a fast-twitch muscle package that gave us the ability to slow down apparent time by over clocking our brains. After extensive endurance training, I could last eight minutes of a heavy, high-speed workout before having to step down and refuel. It drains a lot of physical resources. We also have better cranial inserts, lightyears beyond the top human military specs.
Mica had been the first of us to step into a Surron made human body. His transfer had not been by choice. He’d been killed in a climbing accident during a land quake. At the time, we didn’t know the Auto-docs did full brain and mind scans every time you used them for even the most minor issues. The three of us had been in one for a few minutes to get an implant upgrade. When we discovered his psyche, knocking around inside the ship’s AI, we stopped mourning our loss and started his resurrection.
I took a new body as part of my plan to be dead, at least to the human galaxy. My old, dead one, was sent home for a funeral cremation, ejected into the local sun, a supposed final voyage on a Ranger clone-ship, one with a non-sentient AI. I don’t know why Sandy took a new body, but I’m sure it wasn’t just to copy what Mica and I had done. She’s not that type.
She speaks before I do. “Hello, Hornblower."
I nod, “Sandy.”
“It’s not gonna work you know. The face change, you can’t change your eyes. I recognized the idiot behind those eyes the moment your face popped up in the holo-com.”
Sandy never cut anyone any slack, and she expected it right back. It was just a friendly game for her. If she did back off, it was because she pitied you. “Just some mods to keep the facial recognition AIs from tagging me when I’m in human space.”
“And just when do you ever come to this galaxy? When was the last time you were here?” Seeing that the question made me uncomfortable, she changed the topic. “Still out to save the universe from itself?”
“No, we did that once, just keeping the sidewalks safe for the children.”
“Hornblower, it wasn’t your fault that day. The Raptor warships were only seconds away from slaughtering tens of thousands of civilian refugees aboard an unarmed ship.”
“But it was my decision to make. I couldn’t ask any of you, I just did it. The horror of it all was, that for a brief second, I enjoyed it. Then it all came crashing back at me, all at once. I never want that part of me to surface, ever again.”
Sandy knew me, through and through, she’d been my engineer on our prospecting ship for four years before our discovery, and then again for three more during the planning and execution of our expedition
s. She’d been the only constant in those years I could count on. Mica had been too, but he changed, and for the better, when he fell in love with Abby.
Seeing Sandy brought me a sliver of a connection with humanity and with my past, a piece that I thought had been gone forever. Simply knowing that she was the only human, other than Martin, who knew I was still alive and kicking, was a small luxury I allowed myself.
My death had been a necessary thing. After we had retrieved the Surron libraries, the Bears had helped us develop a few things we could release into human space. Some advanced technology that could be used to manufacture upgrades to existing products.
While I had been a billionaire, I’d spent a great chunk of that on buying bootstrap equipment we needed to get Shangri La up and running. The Library and the Foundation needed an income stream to support the further efforts. So, we licensed some products, processes, and tech to a few human corporations for a cut of the profits.
We became famous again, especially when I would pop into human systems with my ships. It was apparent that those ships were not of human design, and it created a clamor, an insistent demand that I release all of the knowledge and information from the libraries.
I knew that if I caved to those demands, the human race would have consumed itself in a drunken orgy of unrestrained technological advance they weren’t ready for. I had Martin and the Bears to keep me from being foolish, but they didn’t succeed every time. So, I died. I haven’t been back to the human galaxy since.
Getting to her primary objective, Sandy made her appeal. “Hornblower, I miss you, everybody at the ranch misses you. And the kids know you’re their father now. They saw some old pics of our group at the ranch, their adult resemblance to you is too striking not to see it. Mica confirmed it when they asked. They’re wanting to know more. Much more than the old news archives. It needs to be you, to tell them. They need to know you.”
“How old are they now?”
“Sarah and Noah will be twenty-three next month.”
“What day?”
“The nineteenth, on the Satchel calendar.”
“I’ll come before that. Are you staying at the ranch?”
“Yes, the twins grew up here. And thank you. It will be good to see you again, Hornblower.”
We signed off.
3 Fusion
Fusion: the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole. All fusion processes, nuclear, biological or chemical, release heat, and light.
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Returning to Satchel was intended to be a quiet, private visit. With all the years I’ve spent on Shangri La, I never considered it my home. Since leaving Satchel and my friends, I’d felt homeless. I was okay with that. But landing Ranger on Satchel was a homecoming for me. I realized that I’d never really been homeless, simply absent for a time.
Mica and Abby had been the only full-time residents of the ranch. Sandy had been gone for ten years before returning with two small children. Before I had left, I had presented Sandy and Mica with Ranger-clone ships. Where Sandy had gone, only she and I knew. Mica’s ship rarely left the planet. I kept tabs on their ship’s locations. They didn’t know I could do that. Those ship AI cores were forever linked to Ranger and my other ships. As a precaution, I kept two of my behemoths on hot-standby, ready to respond to the slightest indication of trouble.
Ranger flew into the mountain cavern hangar where he’d parked so many times, decades ago. I’d asked Sandy to give me some time, to walk around a bit, to visit the overlooks where I’d spent many hours wrestling with my demons.
The path from the bottom of the mountain to my target perch is overgrown now, little left to reveal the many trips I’d taken up the heights with my Bear friends. Walks and discussions that were meant to throw off the hauntings of events that had occurred in the cold dark.
The ranch encompasses a huge tract of land, including the mountains. Mountains that are honeycombed with caves, joined together by our man-made tunnels. Except for the hundred and fifty acres of developed land that contains the ranch buildings and grazing fields, primal forests are the predominate land feature of our property. Sandy and Abby, then, Mica and Abby would spend days exploring those Eden’s. It was out there that Mica had died in a climbing accident.
Funny how I still thought if it as ‘our’ property. Mica, Sandy, and I had purchased the enclave as a home base and for a future. One we had envisioned as a peaceful and pleasant existence after we had saved the universe. That did happen for Mica and Abby, but not for Sandy and me. I had too many hills yet to climb. Sandy was too addicted to the cold dark.
I liked this particular overlook. In one direction, off towards the horizon, I could see the closest city, as well as a smattering of smaller towns, and scattered ranches. Turning away, I could close out humanities constructions and view the vast expanse of untouched woodlands and crystal blue lakes, every shade of green and blue imaginable, stretching forever into the distance.
At this latitude, the native trees on Satchel are deciduous and evergreen. Satchel’s axial tilt is only a few degrees; the annual polar precession doesn’t produce cold winters or blazing summers here. From season to season, the daylight hours vary by only fifteen minutes or so.
There are some pristine frozen areas at the poles for those who like winter sports. Steamy jungles crowd the equatorial zone. Most people stayed away from those. All in all, Satchel has a very temperate climate over much of its surface. As the land rises to higher elevations, the vegetation becomes waxier. A protection against the harsher sun and lower humidity levels.
I used the lift; an interior route up through the caverns, emerging above the tree line. The final stretch was on foot, less than a kilometer of crunchy gravel to the overlook. Decades ago, sitting here, I had established a routine. First watching over the settled areas, then the forests and lakes. Listening to nature, and to my Bear friends.
Satchel’s civilian government had strict emigration policies. It was in their constitution that the planet’s ecosystems and natural diversity were to be preserved. No land rushes allowed.
Having started as a corporate agricultural world, many non-native plant species had been introduced for cultivation to feed the five nearby star systems engaged in mining the rich metal deposits, supporting their heavy industries. Those planets hadn’t been ruined. They just didn’t have the natural resources to support large-scale agriculture. It was much cheaper to import food and staples from Satchel, than to undertake massive, long-term ag-terraforming.
To ensure longevity of their investment, the corporation, that had initially owned Satchel, wanted the native environment maintained untouched as much as possible. To this day, the vast agricultural fields have bio-border controls to keep the human and native fauna separated.
Visitors, especially those with lots of cash, are welcome to enjoy the casinos, resorts and wild back-lands, but they’re not encouraged to settle here. Exceptions are made for billionaires like us.
Everyone is a citizen, but only landowners can vote. It’s easy and cheap for planetary natives to own land on Satchel. Large land owners section off parcels for their children; the ones who remain here. Some areas are legally reserved for other native-born city dwellers, so they can easily acquire a quarter voting-acre in the middle of nowhere. Every voter has a stake.
You can’t put up a building or cut down a tree without permits and permission. With the exception of horses and dogs, non-native plants and animals are prohibited in the natural areas. Humans take dogs everywhere they go in the galaxy, just as they had in prehistoric times. Cats, not so much. They turn feral to easily. We had Martin’s cat at the ranch until they both left with me. That same cat is still alive, old, but still kicking, or purring, or whatever they do to show they’re not dead yet.
Our ranch was in the protected zone, as were all the others. Livestock, raised for food, are indigenous species. The largest, satchels version of cattle, looked like a cross between a camel and a
cow. Properly raised, their meat is tender and flavorful. Since none of the exported foods are vat grown, Satchel earns very nice profits for their natural products on other planets.
I see Sandy approaching, coming up the foot path. She’s alone. That relieves me. I’m not ready to face other humans just yet. Humans have become an alien species to me. I’m more comfortable with the Bears. She approaches me, studying, examining.
“Well. I guess it’s an improvement. Your ears don’t stick out as much as before.” Same old Sandy. She closes in, embraces me. It’s not a romantic hug, it’s more of a comradic clench with a back slap, over before it begins. We sit on the ledge, facing the green expanse.
After a few minutes, she points. “See that scar on the cliff face? The light colored one.” I nod.
“Mica had me take some blow-em-up to the bottom of the cliff. Big bang. Made gravel out of that mountain slice. It felt good, even after all these years. We were cited and had to pay a fine, but what’s a few hundred-thousand credits compare to being rid of that evil thing?” That thing had been the rock which had broken loose during an earthquake, crushing Mica after smearing him down the rockface.
Soon we would be going back down to face my children, and Mica, and Abby. Before that, I had to tell her.
“The Surron’s are still around.”
4 Progenitor
Progenitor: an ancestor in the direct line, a biologically ancestral form, a precursor or originator.
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As we made our way to the upper entrance of the mountain, I told Sandy of the discovery the Bears had teased out from one of the libraries. While a great deal of the data in those cores required only an encrypted passcode, there were areas that the Surron’s had isolated from easy access. It was an ongoing process the Bears tackled relentlessly.