by Marc Neuffer
Standing before the two-foot pile, it was evident that the remains were of some animal, but the details from the videos were inconclusive. We did know it wasn’t a Mintic. The desiccated remains had partially collapsed in on itself. It was supported against the wall, next to a small alcove.
While Noah surveyed, examined and planned, I moved about the room. What had looked like stone sarcophagi on the drone footage, on closer inspection appeared to be storage containers, made from the same frictionless material as the walls. Each of the containers had a line of small raised bumps on the top. To me, they resembled flowers. I wasn’t going to touch them until we had better investigative tools down here.
I turned back to Noah. He’d just capped his first sample from the front of the remains. “I’m going to get a sample from the back side. I think I can reach it better from this alcove.” He didn’t want to accidentally bump the remains reaching over and around it. I was enjoying watching my son pursue his career passion.
Noah stepped into the alcove, knelt down, steadied by a hand on the interior wall. I didn’t hear a sound, nothing, there was no warning. Noah was gone.
18 Morphogenesis
Morphogenesis: the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape. It also describes the evolution of a body structure within a taxonomic group.
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As I ran over to the alcove, where my son had disappeared.
“Hornblower. Noah’s com signal has stopped. Is everything all right?”
“No, Ranger, it’s not! Noah has disappeared. Just blinked away. Get some Bears down here now! And notify Sandy and Sarah, but gently please. Better yet, give me a moment, I’ll contact them.”
I stepped into the alcove; nothing. I ran my hands over the walls, searching for something, anything. I was frantic. Dread swept over me in waves. My son, gone. My knees gave out, I collapsed.
“Dad? Is everything okay? The Bears up here are rushing around like the place is on fire, I’ve never seen them move so fast. They won’t tell me anything. Dad? Noah? Can you hear me?”
I gulped a breath, “I hear you, Sarah. I need some Bears down here to help me … I mean help us.” I broke the connection.
“Ranger, did you detect anything before or after Noah’s com signal dropped off? Do you still have a connection to his sensor package?”
“There were no indications, no anomalies. I have no signal from his coms or sensors. You said he just disappeared?”
Still on my hands and knees, I tried to get control of my breathing. “Yes, no sound, no nothing, just gone, no trace. I was looking right at him, when it happened.”
Sarah broke in. “Dad, four Bears are on their way to you, should I come down?”
“No, just stay up there. I’ll com you when I … we … know more.” I heard, then saw the Bears approaching at a dead run, laden with gear and medical supplies.
Crawling out of the alcove, I attempted to stand. A Bear rushed over to assist me. I gasped and pointed, “He was in there. He just disappeared.”
I sat down; all energy drained. What was I going to tell Sandy? How was I going to tell Sandy?
I watched as the Bears used numerous instruments, talking, pointing, their fur waving in an excited and agitated state.
A Bear walked over to me.
“We’ve found a thermal imprint of a hand on the wall, several. Most were yours; one was Noah’s. We will continue to investigate. Would you like assistance to the surface?”
“No. I’m staying right here.”
Prior to entering, the entire complex had no energy emissions, everything was at ambient ground temperature, no thermal gradients. It was a dead structure.
I remembered that happening once before; on the rift planet. Surron tech. This was different. This was a Mintic site. It had to be some technology that took Noah away. Away to where? Questions, no answers.
I heard Sarah call out. She was coming down the passage, her mother right behind. Ranger was overhead conducting deep, detailed scans, searching.
Sandy and I held each other. What could I do? I wanted to tear this place apart. Sarah asked the Bears to step aside. She looked over the alcove, examined the scan results from Ranger, her engineers mind at work. Suddenly she stiffened, then hopped down from the small step edge of the alcove.
“He’s coming back! Stand clear, keep away.”
Noah reappeared, looking exactly like he had before. Sandy and I rushed him, hugging, crying. He looked around, puzzled.
“My insert says I was gone for thirty minutes. Over there it felt like a few hours.”
Sandy grabbed his face, searching, machine gunning questions at Noah. “Are you okay, where were you, are you hurt? We were so worried. I love you. Let’s get you out of here.”
“Mom. I’m fine. It was just a little trip. Nothing harmful happened. I love you too.”
I stood, feeling relieved and a bit helpless as his mother claimed him, as all mothers do.
He allowed Sandy to continue clinging.
Turning his head to me, “Dad, Archer would like to talk to you. The Surrons. They do want to come back. There’s more, but let’s get Mom to the surface.”
Sarah had been standing close, chewing her thumb nail like a dog worrying a bone. Noah led his mother, arm in arm, I swept Sarah ahead of me. I was processing. The Bears stayed behind to gather their gear.
As we proceeded down the lit passageway, Noah stopped and turned to Sandy. I need to talk to Dad for a minute.” Beckoning Sarah, he asked her to take over escort duty. Sandy was in shock, a double shock. I had been close.
He pointed at the wall. “Dad, I can read the glyphs now. Clear as day. I’ll write up a primer for the Bears.” Throwing his arm over my shoulder, we followed Sandy and Sarah.
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In the shelter, Noah sat beside Sandy. She couldn’t let go of his hand. She was going to have a rough night. I doubted I would get much sleep either. I planned to take her to Ranger, a more familiar place, for both of us. We listened as Noah replayed his experience.
“I don’t know exactly what happened, but I found myself in a place of light and dark, surrounded by other beings. It felt like I was a radiant light, pulsing. I heard a voice telling me to take him to a pleasant place. I … we, were on Satchel, at the Ranch, by the lake, where Mom used to take us as kids.
“He said his name was Archer, a Surron. He also said he recognized my edges. I’m not sure what that meant, but it had something to do with Riley. He asked me if I was a twin. I told him I was, but not an identical twin. The way he phrased his question, I knew he wanted to know that.
“Archer asked if I’d seen Riley, and were her efforts successful. I told them they had been, over five thousand years ago. We sat there, silent for a few moments. He was looking about, at the waterfall, the trees, the grass, the sky. He knelt down and gathered up some soil, fingering it as it fell through his hand. Somehow, I knew this was an important thing for him to do. A lot of what I’m describing was sort of a knowing. That’s the best I can describe it.
“His appearance was a vagueness, one that I could see clearly when I looked at him, but if I turned away, I couldn’t imagine him in my mind. He wore the same style clothing I had on, at the lake, my usual camping clothes, not what I had on here.
“I asked him how I’d gotten here. I hadn’t thought to ask where ‘here’ was. He said he didn’t know. Riley had arrived the same way. He said it must be a very special quantum-link, passed down from generation to generation. Without telling me, I knew, he knew, we were related to her, in the distant past, it was about the edges I mentioned.
“I told him we had been in a Mintic facility when I was transported. He wasn’t surprised at that. I asked him if they wanted to comeback, the Surrons. He said yes, they did. They had some unfinished business with the Zees. I told him you had been looking for a way to find them, to contact them.
“That’s when he asked me to see if you would, as he put it, ‘come over’.
Before he and I left, he looked at me, touched my arm and said that I would know how. It’s about the glyphs, I know it.”
We sat, silently absorbing, the four of us. Sandy, leaned her head on Noah’s shoulder. A thought. “Sarah, back there, in the room, you said he was coming back. How did you know?”
“I’m not sure, it just came out. Like Noah said, it was just a knowing, a prescience. I’ve had it happen before. I never told anyone, didn’t want to be thought of as nuts or weird.”
Noah added, “Me too.”
19 Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis: a change of the form or nature of a thing into a completely different one, by natural or supernatural means; a conspicuous and abrupt change in body structure.
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All Homo sapiens are related. To shed some light on why and how Sarah and Noah seemed to have a strong quantum affinity, the Bears conducted a deep analysis of our family’s DNA. Twenty generations back, Sandy and I had common ancestors. Long ago relatives who had stemmed from Riley.
Ranger, always curious, had observed the events on Old Earth. As an interest, he had collected a sample of Riley’s DNA from Sarah’s canvas backpack. Riley had helped Sara pack when we prepared for our horseback tour.
There didn’t seem to be any identifiable markers for the Q-affinity or their prescience trait. Neither Sandy nor I could remember ever having experiences like that.
It took a few days for Sandy to get back to being herself. Dr. Fount was of considerable help with that. At my request, she and her husband had come to this planet.
After we had heard Noah’s story, I mulled over the sudden anguish I’d felt on Noah’s disappearance; helplessness, pain, despair, and mental, structural collapse. Dr. Fount said it was a normal parental reaction to sudden phycological or physical trauma involving one’s children. It was the struggle between the urge to fight or take flight, stymied by not being able to do either. Un-releasable adrenaline.
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The next day, Sarah had returned to her engineering developmental projects with the Bears. They had an interesting piece of tech to show me, but she wanted it fine-tuned before the unveiling. She and her Bear co-conspirators needed to borrow two of my ships for experimentation.
Noah had gone back to the scene of his disappearance. In three days, he had enough of a glyph-primer to get the Bears well on their way to transcribing the massive amounts of information on the walls of this huge complex.
The organic samples he’d taken, revealed the pile of remains were from a long dead Surron. How it (he/she) had gotten into the sealed chamber was a mystery. Noah had collected the organic remains for further investigations by the Bears. Forensics might shed some light om this.
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A sturdy lift had been installed for better access to the ground floor. There were Bears everywhere. No other levels had been found down there; just corridors and passages to other rooms, similar in size to the alcove room. Each of them held containers, of the same design and size I’d first seen, before Noah had disappeared.
Today, Noah is going to open the first container. The Mintics had used binary, trinary and a base 16 number system; they had sixteen small ancillary eyes; eight on each side of their heads. Since humans have ten fingers, a base ten counting system is natural for us; metrics and currency. The Bears use base eight, for the same reason. Later, I found that some primitive cultures, on earth, had used base eight; they’d used the spaces between their fingers to count.
Minute before Noah had disappeared, I’d seen a row of eight raised rosettas on the container’s top surface. Below them were strings of glyphs. Noah reported that the glyphs listed what was in the stone-like boxes as well as the combination for opening them; six button presses, two repeats. Knowing just that, there were over twenty thousand possible permutations. If you didn’t know the correct code you were out of luck. Entering the wrong code, more than eight times, locked in a delay of over sixty-four cycles. We didn’t know what the Mintic considered a cycle, but I bet it was a long time.
The first box to be opened should prove to be an interesting one. Its label, loosely translated said learning animations. It hadn’t been Noah’s first choice. Several indicated organics inside. The Bears exercised more prudence, those would be transported to isolation chambers. A large facility, on the planet’s moon, was being built to house and process potentially hazardous contents. Nobody knew what sort of bug-a-boos might leap out of those.
Some thought had been given to drilling small exploration holes for sampling and pin-hole camera insertion, but they heeded the booby trap warning posted on each box. Instead, all but essential personnel would be evacuated topside. Those who remained, including Noah, were in full, armored containment suits.
I watched the video feed, coming from the chamber, as Noah pressed the eight-combination code on the lid. Finished, he went to one end, pressing a newly exposed symbol, that had emerged after the correct code had been entered. I expected to hear a hiss of escaping gas, or the inrush of air as the interior vacuum was filled. No dust, no sound, except for a slight hum, emanating from the box as the lid opened. I like anticlimactic.
The overhead camera showed stacks of small, triangular translucent slabs, about the same size as a pack of playing cards. There must be over a thousand of them. Each slab had a label of small glyphs; Mintic writing. The aerogel looking pieces filled three quarters of the rectangular container. Resting in the remaining space was a grey and yellow cube with sixteen slots. Obvious receptacles for the small slabs.
Holding one up, Noah said, “Pharmacology.” Choosing another, “History, number seven of two-hundred-fifty-six.” He replaced the two, back in their storage slots. This container was going to the library on Shangri La, as would most of the boxes, after bio, radiation and toxic scans. Three small ships were standing by to receive their cargo for transport to Agartha’s cargo bay. The container count was four-thousand ninety-five, one short of sixteen squared. One was missing; its cradle empty.
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After a quick stop on Shangri La to pick up Martin, Sandy and I would be heading to Satchel for a meeting with Mica and Abby. I needed the old team back together for some important strategy and tactical decisions. Sarah remained on Shangri La to complete her project. Noah was staying at the Mintic site to assist in fleshing out the Mintic language guide. He would come home, in a few weeks, aboard Agartha, with the Bears. In a year, the entire facility would be carefully disassembled and put back together on Shangri La.
I’d sent Traveler ahead to our old shipyard in the Satchel system. Traveler and Ranger’s AI were also valuable parts of our team.
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It was a bit of an eclectic assembly; three humans, a Surron-AI-Human, a Zee-Human and two Zee inhabited ship AIs. We were meeting aboard Traveler. Mica’s ship, Dawn, was tucked into her flight bay next to Ranger.
My most pressing, major concern was how to proceed with ensuring the Zees, from their dimension, stayed out of our 4-dimensional existence. They had the ability to inject their kind into any quantum-based computer or communication system, and from there, control non-quantum systems. That ability is what brought the two Zees, Traveler and Ranger, to inhabit my human built ship, and two others, that had been placed in human analog androids. That was over a quarter century ago. Looking back, I was young and dumb then. I’m not so young anymore.
Martin was an excellent strategic and tactical planner. He’d proven that, time and again, when our team had trained for and engaged in challenging situations. We all looked at him as the wise old man of the group. After all, he was over two-billion years old.
We had to be able to go dark, as far as the Zees were concerned. But there was more than humanity to consider. Other races, friendly advanced races, could be negatively impacted or led astray by interference from the Zees, whose natural environment was deep in the quantum layers. One thing in our favor was that the Zees often took eons to reach a consensus on anything th
at wasn’t an immediate crisis. I didn’t want them to see our actions as a crisis. I wanted everything to run smooth as silk, under their radar, until it was too late for them to do anything about it.
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I had asked Martin to start the discussion, to ensure we were all on the same page. He started by drawing a straight line on the wall screen, marking three spots on that horizontal path. Points A and C at the extreme ends, with point B in the middle.
“Currently, we are at point A, and optimally, we would like to get to point C. At that point, there would be no remaining avenues available for the Zees to interfere, anywhere in our four dimensions. Point B marks the progress point, between A and C, that we believe we could reasonably achieve.
“Unless we come across something in the Mintic knowledge base, showing us a clear path, universal blockage is not possible in the foreseeable future, and most probably well beyond that.
“Working with the Bears, we are very close to having the technology necessary to prevent quantum access through computer, AI and communication systems. I’d say, in less than two months, we will have finished testing and be ready for deployment. We already have a monitoring system to detect intrusions, but are limited in that somewhat, by the reach. Each galaxy will need its own monitoring platform.
“Of course, that leaves the voids in between galaxies wide open, but very few races venture into those empty areas. With the addition of our upcoming system, any ships that do become affected by the Zees, would be cleansed when they entered, or reentered a galaxy having a platform. I think we will also be able to downsize the monitoring a masking system so it can piggyback on modified shipboard Q-com systems.
“The decision we have is one of deployment that does not alert the Zees. It will take some time to build and deploy the necessary hardware and platforms. And this is really just an intermediate step. The final hardware solution is for all races to build new systems that incorporate the masking and monitoring systems. But that would be piecemeal at best, considering the number of systems that would need retrofitting.