No one usually spoke about anything in the rover. “And they found out when you lost your leg?”
“When they took me to hospital. A medscan showed them I was reactive.” He shrugged. “Lucky for me I lost my leg or else they wouldn’t have cared if I was.”
His presence in this rover now made sense. It also made sense why Pedagogue had gifted me the eye; right after my accident, while I was still laying in the hospital bed.
“What’s your name?” asked the man.
“Mehrit, you?”
The rover slowed. My eye activated automatically, signaling that it was finally my stop. I reached for my pack.
“Abel,” said the man. “Good luck to you, sister.”
As the door opened, I paused and looked back at Abel. “A drill fell on me. I used to be a mechanic.” Before he could respond, I hopped out of the rover.
I was not familiar with the place where the rover dropped me off. I had thought I knew everywhere in Wereda, but clearly I had thought wrong.
The row on which I stood was paved with clear, shiny material that seemed like glass. I could see wires beneath the surface, trailing all the way down toward a massive series of fan-like structures. Insect wings, turned sideways to make three disks that stuck out from the ground. The street was quiet. There was no one around, only drones sailing back and forth, disappearing north with sacks of protein flakes for the colonies. They were taking off from the insect wings, rows of them still perched idle along the fans; waiting for flight coordinates, maybe.
The smog was thick in this quadrant, and it had covered what lay beyond the insect wings. Faint outlines of thin, tall structures—spears, or blades—stabbed the yellow-brown horizon. The amount of smog worried me more than the scenery.
I knew too many people who had gotten sick from tainted air. The sound of their soggy coughs still haunted me. Last week a woman named Sadyu was taken to hospital; the drones had brought her out on a stretcher as she coughed and wheezed all the way down the row. Thinking of the blue of her lips and wide, terrified eyes made me shudder. I’d shielded Biri’s eyes. Sadyu was never seen again.
I put my pack down on the shiny street and undid the fastenings. I fitted the air-filter mask around my mouth and nose, smiling invisibly at the thought of having a use for it. I’d made it, back when I had worked at the repair shop. Time between then and now was long. Three years. Biri had still worn diapers then.
Three years.
Three years, and I’d never seen this place before.
The eye told me I was supposed to be here. I couldn’t explain how, but I knew. The eye made me know things that normal people did not. I saw feelings like they had faces, heard them like they were voices. It was tiring and incredible, but mostly tiring. It’d been incredible for the first year, but the tasks that came with this gift made it difficult to keep my halo green. I could understand why others’ turned red.
Pedagogue could not understand; would not understand. A person with a red halo near an Eye on the clock was a death sentence. Some of the other Eyes had said that the reds were taken for re-education, but I didn’t believe that. Never once had I seen anyone flagged return after being taken by patrol rovers. But I wanted to believe it. I did.
So I stood there and looked around, until two towering black smudges appeared out of the smog, approaching me from the insect wings. As they got closer I noted the strange, metallic black armor they were wearing, full-headed masks hiding their faces. Closer still, and I saw that the black armor subtly reflected all the colors of the spectrum. They looked robotic. I thought they were guards, but never the type of guards I’d seen before.
I was thankful for the mask, because it was difficult to hide my nerves. When they stood before me I was dwarfed by them both; the strange red light where their eyes would have been placed inside the masks flickered, moving back and forth horizontally, and it reminded me of a scanner. They were scanning me.
I stayed still and silent. Three years as an Eye, and I had seen only drones and auto-driven rovers. Within the nerves was giddiness, excitement. Were these guards from Pedagogue? I wanted to ask them, but thought better of it.
“Please, follow me,” said the guard on the right, and they both turned in unison and began walking back the way they’d come.
Their voice was… off. The tone was unnatural and I wasn’t able to tell if it was owned by a man or woman. As an Eye, usually a voice brought with it an intention or emotion, not entirely surface level. From them, I felt nothing.
They were from Pedagogue. They had to be. If only I could tell Ema of this; she would be beside herself. I followed several paces behind them, looking around to see if anyone else was witnessing this miracle. But there was no one; just smog and drones.
*
Beyond the wings was a walkway that forked in multiple directions. The ground was coal black and the pavement was white and eerily candescent. I followed the Pedagogue guards as they traversed the second-most left path.
The spears I’d seen on the row were towers, arranged in a fan of knives. The materials used were not immediately familiar to me. Metal, yes, but the kind was uncertain. It was black and color reflective like the guards’ armor. Clouds of insects swirled along the path, and I gingerly avoided them while the guards walked through the clouds, not minding them at all. An insect bite in Wereda could give you a season-long sickness. Sometimes the sickness was permanent. The drones sprayed pesticides in the residential rows at the start of each rainy season, as that was when they were the worst. It appeared the drones did not spray this place. The guards did not speak, and neither did I.
The path led to a single spear that seemed to touch the sky, its top invisible by yellow, smoggy clouds. I wondered how it was built, and by whom. Definitely not us, at least. The entrance of the spear was sealed by a door with no windows, its presence made known only by the square indention before us. The guards stopped in front of it, their eyes flashing, scanning. I counted five seconds, and the door slid open.
The inside of the spear was dimly lit with overhead tube lights. I found the interior design very disappointing, given the flashy outside. On the right side of the corridor, the walls were replaced by glass windowpane, and I passed room after room of empty tables and seats.
And then I saw another person in one of the rooms. They were sitting in a chair all alone, looking down at the metal table with banality. It was a man with a tired, defeated expression, his clothes in tatters. There were black and yellow bruises on his face. And then he looked at me, and I knew. He knew, too.
He was an Eye.
We passed that room, and I began to fear for my life. As I tried to think of anything I’d done wrong, the guards stopped in front of a room that held another man. This one was younger than the last. He was also an Eye.
Still in the corridor, the guards looked down at me, scanning my face with their laser-red eyes. And then I knew what they wanted of me; what to do. I didn’t want to do it, but I would.
My eye told me that this man was from the mines. It told me that yesterday he had incited a riot when drones had come for him, because he had stolen uranium and graphite ingots from the despot and had placed them underneath the floor in his dwelling. It did not tell me how Pedagogue or the drones found out. Most likely another Eye had caught a whiff of his thoughts.
But Eyes could not read other Eyes. At least, that was how it’d been for me up until now. The man’s family must have known about the ingots. I wondered why Pedagogue had gone to all this trouble over a thief.
And then my eye told me of all the red halos made from this man’s riots. He was influential, thought by his peers to be a kind and gentle man. He was infirm, and the eye didn’t need to tell me that. His face was covered in blisters and pockmarks, his bare arms stringy and flimsy where the fat and muscle had depleted. Radiation sickness. The mines were so necessary, but so deadly. I thanked God I was born a woman.
Pedagogue wanted to know who else may have stolen from the d
espot, as not all of the inventory had been found. They wanted to know how many other Eyes were involved, if any. I did not understand why they thought I could fulfill their request. This man was an Eye. Again, Eyes could not read Eyes.
Instead I nodded, showing them I knew what they’d asked of me. The guards opened the door and I stepped inside, alone.
At first I’d frozen in fright when the door closed and I saw that no one had accompanied me. I was not a large person—very small, even for a woman, and I couldn’t defend myself against a man. But then I realized he was restrained to the chair, which was deadbolted to the ground. The restraints were something like chains but they gave off light that looked like it would burn his skin. Maybe it did. I couldn’t tell; he did not look to be in pain. Of the physical sort, at least.
He looked at me, and I at him, and there was a very long, uncomfortable silence between us. I looked back at the guards through the window. They were like statues.
I scratched my arm, nervously.
“And what do they think you are going to do?” the man asked. He was smiling, and there was something wicked in his gaze. My eye told me the wickedness was anger. Anger at the idea that he’d been sent to the mines to die, without any gain for his family. Anger that he would never see his children again.
My eye had just read this man.
I shuffled to another seat, with enough distance between us to feel safe. I did not answer his question, only stared. He thought I was confused, and I was, but not for the same reason. I read him some more, feeling the unease and futility rise into the air, then coalesce. I saw two other men; one old, one too young for the mines. I saw a woman, too. Middle-aged. They were standing in front of the Artifact, all of them, holding up a uranium ingot, peering as if it were a looking glass. I knew their names. I knew they were from the south residential quadrant Nascent. I knew they were not selling the uranium and graphite for money.
And then, above his head, a red halo melded into existence. My eyes flicked upward, toward it, and that was when the man realized what I was doing.
“Don’t tell them!” he shouted, fighting against his restraints.
His outburst made me jump.
“Say nothing, sister. They lie. It’s all lies,” he whispered, eyes bulging in desperation. He was not scared for himself, but for others. For everyone.
I felt scared. My eye was telling and showing me things I didn’t understand. I’d gathered what Pedagogue needed already, so I only stood and moved swiftly for the door. The guards opened it.
“Do you know?” one asked, with that same unearthly voice.
“Yes.”
“Come,” said the other, and I was guided away down the corridor. I gave them the locations and names of the people that my eye had shown me. I did not tell them what they’d done with the ingot at the Artifact. I did not tell them they weren’t selling the ingots. They’d already known all that, and it was better if they didn’t know that I had dug that deeply. There was a little while where I thought I wasn’t going to leave the spear either, but for whatever reason they let me go and gave me a microchip, encased in silicone. An upgrade.
They left me in the middle of the row where I’d first arrived. I waited for the rover to pick me up, alone. I deactivated my eye, but still could not get that man’s frightened face and bulging eyes out of my head. I had been waiting for an upgrade for nearly an entire season, and now I’d gotten it.
They lie. It’s all lies.
Say nothing, sister.
But an upgrade was not worth this price. I felt underpaid.
2
YAHWEH
THE TRIP TO EARTH HAD BEEN A painless one, at least. Adrial had kindly updated Pedagogue’s obelisk with the current cosmological coordinates, and within a blink I’d gone from Kel’hanna’s portal system to a place of sprawling… wasteland.
I now stood on a cliffside, overlooking the broken arches of a great civilization, long fallen. It was a graveyard of steel and cement, eroded and yellowed from abandon. I pulled down my visor and took some measurements.
Northwest hemisphere, just slightly above the equator.
Current temperature, 358K. A little warmer than I was comfortable with.
Air pollution was high. The radiation level was alarmingly high, too. I could see squiggles of energy-level-exchanges between particles all around me, like someone had thrown up sparkling confetti. Attica could not find any catastrophic natural disasters that would cause such a shift in climate. I went back further than a thousand years. A couple of volcanic eruptions, tectonic shifts, but nothing else. With a heavy heart I was forced to concede to the only plausible explanation.
There was not an ounce of flora as far as I could see. Attica detected some patches of hardy vegetation, but not for several hundred miles. What I did see was bioluminescent extremobacteria flashing signals across the ruins. Their phosphorescence was … ataractic, in contrast to everything else.
A heavy blast of hot wind hit my left-side, knocking back the hood of my jacket. I winced and wiped the hair from my eyes, turning away from the afflicting torrents. That was when I saw the fuzzy outline of a craft through the billowing dust. Attica had picked up on it the moment I materialized, but the scenery had proved a distraction. There were no lights on the craft, and it seemed to meld into the bleak, yellow-brown canvas of the environment.
I stared, waiting.
A hiss of locks disengaging ambled over the dying winds.
I curled my right hand into a fist, holding it there, waiting. Adrial had told me to take every precaution necessary, in case this was all just a rouse to shave our numbers.
Nothing, silence.
More waiting.
A soft whir permeated the silence, and I watched a two-wheeled metal plank roll toward the edge of the cliff. It stopped within six feet from me. The plank contained a giant clump of hybridized material—attica told me it was composed primarily of uranium-234, titanium-49 and graphite.
I tilted my head and unclenched my fist.
The clump began to move, quiver.
It rose, slimmed out, took form.
I couldn’t conceal my surprise; this was the most advanced form of nanotechnology I’d ever seen, at least from Eversae Major. So advanced that it was cause for concern.
The clump was now a metal-hybrid effigy of a man with angel features. Like me. Same height, same hairstyle, same build. It was kind enough to spare a sash around the eye.
“Sorry for alarm,” it said, though its lips did not move. “I did not know how to look until I saw you.”
Its voice was monotonal; inflectionless, neither male nor female. Attica registered the language as Dyova, a derivative of Amharic, Yaroba and English, three ancient human languages no longer active.
The form it had chosen made me feel uncomfortable, like looking at myself as a Vel’Haru corpse, but it wouldn’t have known that. “My name Yahweh Telei, Scholar of the Court of Enigmus. I am here by order of Adrial Trisyien, Violet King of the Court of Enigmus. Are you the…party that requested an audience with an envoy?”
“My name is Savant. I am the party that made the request.” It turned slowly, really slowly, toward the hazy, open craft. “Please, this way.”
“Where are we going?”
“The nerve center.”
Nerve center; not headquarters, main facility, or base.
This would to be interesting, indeed.
*
The ride to the ‘nerve center’ had been a quiet one. The rover was automated, its only occupants Savant and myself. I wondered about its name; Savant. It seemed like a mockery, but to whom?
The nerve center was located at the most northern part of a massive colony of humans, whom I observed very briefly, from ten thousand feet above ground level. Air pollution was even higher here than at the cliffs. The radiation levels made me curious as to how any of them were able to survive past adolescence. There were more adults than children, from what I could see. The state of the colony wa
s a confusing mix of ramshackle and progressive tech. There was a strange, glowing metallic pyramid at the very heart of the settlement, where the roads made a circular frame around it, suggesting intention. Had that pyramid preceded the colony?
There were many questions. I would wait for our recorded session.
The nerve center was purposefully remote from the rest of the settlement, sealed by gates and a long, translucent road with circuitry beneath. Attica mapped the currents; it was nuclear energy that ran under the ground, filtering powering to the street lights and structures beyond. Their main facility was built like an escarpment of colossal knives, or spears, fanning out from the ground. I could tell by the architecture alone that it was not a stationary civilization. It’d been designed with the intention to impress, not sustain. This ‘race’, like every other mecha-civ we’d encountered, was transient—most likely here pilfering earth for resources to fuel another centuries-long interstellar voyage.
So, where was their mothership?
The rover landed on a courtyard of scorched hardpan, several hundred yards in front of the largest of the black, prism-like structures. Savant led me across a walkway and into the facility. I noted how vacant it was. Everything beyond the colony was empty, save for heavy air-traffic of automated rovers and little drones, carrying sacks of … things. I had a lot of time to get acquainted with the scenery, because Savant moved at the speed of melting ice. The material it’d chosen to inhabit seemed unideal for motor functioning. I imagined it was heavy, and quite stiff.
The inside of what I suspected was the main facility was … sparse, to say the least. It was barely lit, only soft, palm-sized beacons arranged in circles on the walls, just above our heads. We stood in the center of the circular antechamber; pale, orange light muted any other color present. The consistency of Savant’s form took on the appearance of molten ore, teeming with nanotech. The lights were nano-enhanced as well. I could feel the energy transfer between them, and deduced that they somehow charged Savant’s shell, keeping it in this shape.
Covenants: Savant (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 10) Page 2