by J. Benjamin
“And let me guess? The Aquarians turned bright fuchsia, used a loud high-pitched noise on the vortex creatures, and got them to turn on themselves.”
“Yes!” Matt replied. “That’s exactly what happened.”
“That’s what they did to the worms. They turned them into total savages, and they wiped out their own colony,” Kiara said.
“Why do you think they do this?” Matt asked. “Why do they go to the homes of these species and start trouble?”
“Or perhaps it was the species of those worlds that invited them there. Then they had buyers’ remorse once the entire welcome wagon showed up. Who knows?”
Matt walked up to Kiara and held her hands while looking in her eyes.
“There’s something I thought hard about, but I wasn’t sure how to mention it,” Matt said. Kiara nodded. She knew exactly what Matt was going to say.
“We might not make it back to Earth. We could be stuck here for the rest of our lives,” Kiara said.
“Yes,” Matt replied.
“I accepted that before I crossed the gate. It’s definitely not what I wanted, but I’ll accept it if I have to.”
They stayed silent as they looked into each other’s eyes. There were no words to describe their journey and where it brought them. With that knowledge that they could die, they discovered a calmness and peacefulness that allowed them to focus on each other in that moment.
Then Kiara had another thought. One she hadn’t considered up until they started discussing their own mortality.
“Matt, if they wanted to kill us, why haven’t they done so yet?”
“Good question. Perhaps they aren’t done experimenting with us?”
Without notice, three pulses erupted from the inner wall of the habitat they stood in. Three Aquarian workers entered their space. Both Kiara and Matt were taken aback by their abrupt entry. They had to expect that something would inevitably disturb their peace, but they still hadn’t adjusted to the imposing prominence of their alien hosts.
The fiberoptic behemoths towered over their human guests. However, there was something else afoot. Kiara noticed that the three Aquarian workers were bound together. Several of their appendages latched into their neighboring counterparts. They formed a chain. The workers on the left and right flickered another set of fibers outward.
“What do they want?” Matt asked.
“I think they want to communicate with us,” Kiara replied, as she observed the free appendages on the left. She saw it as an invitation. She reached her hand out.
The Aquarian on the left slowly latched its appendages around Kiara’s left hand. Instantly, she could feel it connecting to her consciousness.
“It’s okay,” she said to Matt as she extended her right hand to him. He grabbed her hand and then hesitantly let the Aquarian on his right side latch onto him. He felt the energy connect through him. They were now a fully-formed ring.
As quickly as a finger snap, their environment transformed. No longer were Kiara and Matt in the place they were before. The sixty-five ships were gone. The mystery planet was gone. The alien habitat was gone.
Kiara examined her surroundings. Matt stood at her side, looking confused. The three Aquarians floated a few feet before them. She and Matt were standing on white ground. It was snow, except it also had familiar streaks of Aquarian blue pouring through it.
The sky around them illuminated like a bright-green aurora, except it filled every part of the horizon. The color flowed in a circular pattern around whichever space they were in now.
“Ummmm… Kiara?” Matt said. He was facing the opposite direction. “Look!” She turned around to a sight that shocked her speechless.
A fourth Aquarian floated behind them. However, this one was several magnitudes the size of the others. Its appendages flew so far out that Kiara and Matt couldn’t see where they ended. Its mantle was large enough to where it could crush a city block. Its bulbs bristled in several colors.
This one was different from the others. It had a commanding presence, of which the workers appeared to acquiesce before.
“Oh, my God!” Kiara exclaimed.
“What the hell is that thing?”
Though it had no eyes and no recognizable face, the humans could feel it locking into them. Kiara approached it. Matt followed her closely.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The primary host continued floating. Kiara shrugged to Matt, who also looked confused. Finally, they both heard it. The whispers from earlier had come back.
“You know the answer to your question,” a cryptic voice said. Kiara and Matt turned back to the super-Aquarian.
“Are you the host? Are you the vessel that took us from that planet where we were hatched?” Kiara asked.
“Correct,” the voice replied.
“How did you do it?” Matt asked. “How did you figure us out so well?” Several seconds went by. Then, objects fell from the sky. Kiara pointed them out, and both she and Matt backed up a few steps.
The fallen objects landed at their feet, one by one, until they formed a pile. They approached the collection with caution. Each of the objects appeared as large as a beachball. They had white outer casings and looked as if they had seen better days. Matt stepped up to the pile of white basketballs to get a closer look.
“It’s the Pelicans,” Matt said. “Or… was.”
“We saw your creations…” the alien voice said again. “They are no more, but their intelligence lives within us.”
“Well, that makes sense. You hacked into our drones five Earth years ago,” Matt replied. “Just like you hacked our minds.” Kiara nodded in agreement.
“It was you who came to us. You breached the natural layers of time and space to do so,” it said.
“I think it’s saying that we brought this upon ourselves,” Kiara said to Matt. She turned back to face the vessel’s consciousness. “What about those worms? The ones with the dirt colony between the waterfalls? Did they deserve to die like that?”
“One of many that sought a cull. We took precautionary measures,” it replied.
“So, you’re telling us that they started it?” Matt asked. “These species attacked you, and so you chased them back to their homeworlds and exterminated them?”
“Correct,” it said.
“But why?” Matt asked. “It’s not like any of these species ever had a chance against you. I mean, look at yourselves. You can open holes in spacetime with ease and travel wherever you want.”
The alien consciousness paused. Even for a species that did not have human expressions, Kiara and Matt could tell that it was considering Matt’s words carefully.
“I have seen your intelligence,” the alien said. “I understand you both have another pressing question.”
“We have several,” Kiara said.
The alien did not respond to Kiara. It continued floating in its place. Then, something happened to the environment around them. The green glow surrounding their space rapidly spun around them. It turned until it was no more. The ground below them remained unchanged, and they were still with their Aquarian counterparts in this new dark void.
At least it started as a void. That changed when a light began to shine. It was clearly a star, as Kiara and Matt observed. It was a rather large one at that.
Every time Kiara thought they had reached the bottom of the Aquarian rabbit hole, their alien hosts just kept pulling them down further. This time, however, there was a tinge of familiarity. A tinge, because it was a place that neither Kiara nor Matt had ever seen up close.
The second source of light was how the familiar presence revealed itself. It was behind the planet the Aquarian anima visualized. It stretched far and wide, so far away that it looped around the massive star in the distance.
That’s when Kiara realized that it wasn’t a source of light. Instead, it was reflecting light from the central star. It was a ring.
“No,” Kiara said. “It can’t be.”
&nbs
p; It was a sight that Kiara had seen thousands of times in telescope imagery and research papers.
“Matt, I think this is Alistair 937,”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. It’s one of the colonies of the Zelthrati,” Kiara said.
“You can’t be serious,” Matt replied. “The Aquarians knew about them?”
Before Kiara could reply, a loud and heavy presence disrupted them. Five Aquarian host ships zipped past them overhead. They proceeded toward the Zelthrati ringworld, which now appeared much closer than before.
In fact, it was so close that the humans in Aquarian bodies were able to focus their eyes to get a more in-depth look. From a distance, the ring looked thin and bright. Up close, one could see that the ring was so tall and thick that Earth would have immediately shattered to dust had they collided.
On the outside, the ring appeared utterly devoid of life, culture, or emotion of any sort. It looked like a monotone machine. It had no translucent surfaces nor anything that would give an idea to what was on the inside. However, it did have a pattern of large circular imprints. Each was spaced thousands of miles away from the next.
It was one of these circles where five Aquarian ships were headed. As the small fleet of Aquarian hosts closed in on the circle, the center of it opened to reveal that it was an entry-way into the ring.
Kiara and Matt waited in suspense to see what would emerge from the sun-spanning ring of the Zelthrati home. This was a moment that many humans would give everything they had to witness. Granted, they probably would have done the same for everything else that the gammanauts had seen since entering the portal.
As the Aquarian hosts closed in on the ring’s port, a black substance violently erupted outward. It moved swiftly and with precision. At first sight, it appeared as a liquid, but then the gammanauts quickly figured out that it was a swarm of black orbs.
Much like the ring they emerged from, they had no character and no sign of life. They were just pitch-black orbs that moved by the tens of thousands like bullets. The deathly spheres quickly identified a target and attacked one of the Aquarian hosts.
The orbs blasted into the Aquarian vessel with rapid succession. Each one emerged from the other side and then repeated the process again and again. They sliced through the host until it turned to white and shattered into billions of pieces of crystalline debris. The Zelthrati made a kill.
Their victory didn’t last. For the remaining four vessels promptly turned to the fuchsia color that Kiara and Matt both previously witnessed. As the rain of Zelthrati bullets prepared to hunt their next victim, the whirl of black stopped moving. It flew back in the direction from which it came, pummeling into the seemingly-impenetrable Zelthrati ring with full force.
Yet, that was nothing compared to what happened next. Several dozen more Aquarian hosts rushed past Kiara and Matt overhead. They had already changed colors and were charging directly at different sections of the ring. In the great distances beyond, so far that they were probably several astronomical units away, Kiara and Matt could see bits of fuchsia warp out of nowhere and close in on the ringworld that had just attacked them.
Thousands of Aquarian hosts emerged from space and converged on the Zelthrati monolith. At this point, both Kiara and Matt wondered what fate awaited the colony. Would it spew bullets from every angle and then pummel itself to death?
Yet the ring stood still. Nevertheless, both Kiara and Matt felt the anticipation of something big that was about to unfold. Even if they couldn’t see it, they could sense it with their Aquarian bodies.
“It’s not Alistair 937,” Kiara said.
“It’s not?” Matt asked.
“No,” she replied. “And I have a feeling it isn’t the ring that they focused their whispers on.”
At the center of everything unfolding, a phenomenon happened before Kiara and Matt’s eyes. The star before them had shifted to bright green. They could feel the rapid movement within its core. Massive quantities of the sun’s chemical compounds ejected in every direction, as it grew exponentially unstable with each second.
The sun exploded in a violent and blinding supernova. It quickly expanded until it consumed everything in its path. Within seconds, the Aquarian hosts were incinerated by the engulfing inferno of the supernova.
Along the sun-spanning colony of the Zelthrati, the punishing and unforgiving force tore holes through the stubborn black surface, as the apocalyptic solar ejecta traveled at a quarter the speed of light.
Kiara noticed how the light from the simulation reflected off the body of the massive Aquarian consciousness. She then turned back to Matt.
“This isn’t Alistair 937. This is Dray 3022,” Kiara said.
“Dray 3022?” Matt asked. “That was the one that was severed in several places but still continued to orbit. How is that even possible? The star just blew up before our faces.”
“Dray 3022 is a neutron star. It wasn’t large enough to collapse like a black hole, but it clearly was something else before this,” she said while pointing to the supernova.
The star disappeared. The green aurora light from earlier refilled the space around them.
“As we saw your intelligence, we saw that you were already familiar with this species,” the Aquarian consciousness said. “As you probably know, these were a species of conquest. Their journey started in another galaxy. Then moved from system to system and laid waste to the resources of others, until one day they found their way into your region.”
“And you killed them,” Kiara said.
“No,” it replied. “It killed itself.”
“Huh?” Kiara and Matt said simultaneously.
“What you saw in our intelligence was the technological remnant of a civilization that went extinct tens of millions of Earth cycles ago. By the time the rings existed, the species that created them had long since gone dead.”
“What killed them?” Kiara asked.
“It was a combination of their own greed and desire for multiversal conquest. Eventually, the original civilization fragmented and went to war with itself. By the time the factions came to their senses, so much of their civilization had been killed off, that they were no match for what came next,” the consciousness said. “The technologies they built had grown beyond their control. The technologies merged until it was a singular entity, and in turn, it annihilated the creators.
“What they built was a lifeless, unnatural force. It had no emotions, no sense of morality. It did not consider the consequences of its decisions, and it had one simple purpose, expansion.”
“So, you’re saying it was an artificial intelligence?” Kiara asked.
“Correct,” it replied. “One that had expanded and exterminated tens of thousands of species.”
“Sounds more like cancer,” Kiara replied.
“So, you’re telling us that for half a century, the thing that had captivated humans and driven our entire movement toward the stars was just a mindless, lifeless, xenocidal series of machines?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” it replied again. “And it would have destroyed your world before your species had even existed. That is, had we not intervened.”
Kiara said nothing. Matt was silent as well. They had absorbed the significance of everything they had just learned. Kiara now felt surprising disappointment with the knowledge of the Zelthrati’s true origins.
There was no telling how much time had passed, but the amount of information the Aquarians shared brought her a great deal of perspective. The further the Aquarians dragged the gammanauts down the proverbial rabbit hole, Kiara had a much deeper question on her mind. Would she or Matt ever see home again? She was afraid she already knew the answer.
“You are ready,” the Aquarian anima said.
“Ready?” Matt asked. “For what?”
“For your next destination,” it replied back.
Before Kiara or Matt could respond, the mega-Aquarian and the place it had taken them to vanished. They were back in t
he pocket of the host where they had been before. The three Aquarians that had latched into them quickly unlatched and disappeared into the wall.
Kiara looked outside the ship and noticed something strange. Several of the Aquarian hosts were gone.
“Matt, look!” she said. He looked.
“I could have sworn there were more of those things before,” he replied.
“Where did the rest go?” Kiara wondered.
They continued observing. Without warning, one of the flagships turned a bright violet and then simply vanished.
“There! Another one!” Kiara shouted. There was no explosion. There was no spreading of matter into space. The vessel was gone.
“Again!” Matt pointed to where another ship had just been.
“The herd is thinning,” Kiara said.
“What’s happening to them?”
“Either they are vaporizing themselves to death, or we’re about to learn just how they managed to spread throughout the universe.”
One by one, each of the Aquarian vessels vanished. Their own began glowing a bright violet that they could see from the inside. Fearing what was coming next, Matt and Kiara threw their arms around each other.
Blinding light and deafening sound were too much to endure, even for their Aquarian bodies. The ship shook so violently this time, that they actually felt it. Kiara closed her eyes, but it was no use.
Despite the mighty whirlwind unfolding, Kiara had more mental clarity than at any point in her life. It was if time stood still. Kiara thought of that old description “lightning in a bottle.” They were in that bottle. Then the lightning struck, and Kiara opened her eyes.
35
Spacetime Command Center
There was a morbid sense about the building. It was felt by everyone, from the scientists working the consoles, the Cabinet members, to the secretary-general. Dr. Srivastava tried holding back tears.