The Russian noticed with surprise the short-term meteorological forecast of the area was changing every second and while the noise was getting louder and the magnetic lines grew denser and more pronounced, a cold weather front with cumulous clouds began to form right above them. He did not know if torrential rain was to come and to exacerbate the situation for the defenders of the human kind. But the heavy downpour of fresh water from a few days ago did not seem to have a beneficial impact on most of the Menoetian species and forced them away. Or at least that was what the camera of Iris 1 showed. The Vacari and not just them went into hiding in the sea and the rivers that flowed into it. The condensed atmospheric water which was pristine, uncontaminated by petroleum products and alcohols, reacted with active metals that composed their bodies. Hopefully, the natural disasters turned into a scourge for them . . . We were yet to discover that. But if that could help a bit, we had to pray for one such phenomenon. For thunderclouds to gather and flood, thus eliminating the impending threat in two hours. But the Vacari did not need that long. They would take a few minutes to crush us with their innumerable mighty army. The soldiers drawn up in front of the fence were waiting with bated breath, ready to give up the last flicker of life in their eyes both for us and for themselves. Was a salvation going to be bestowed on us or were we to sink into oblivion . . .
Chapter Seven
Horrors in the Cosmos
Let us go back a few days before we reached the planet. We all had sunk into the depths of the unfamiliar Cosmos. Our destiny was annihilation, interstellar exile and, most of all, an escape from the home we failed to protect. We travelled engulfed in the space balloon drowned in silence–no one spoke. No one cracked daring jokes, nor expressed their discontent at the situation. That was an interesting fact since we were packed like sardines in dormitories designed to hold only a third of us. Most of us slept wherever we found–rooms, corridors or cargo bays, but not a single soul complained about the atmosphere. Maybe we realized that we were lucky enough these gigantic steel caskets existed at all–that was luck bordering the impossible. So many people might have been in my place now, but, alas, I happened to be on board. I had a once-in-a-lifetime luck when I received a chance not only to change but also to preserve my life. Yes, I was here, in the silence, sitting in a dark corner surrounded by silent strangers, but oddly enough, I did not feel the lack of communication, social contacts or any loneliness in those hours. Probably it was when I was a child that I grew accustomed to honoring the seclusion and coziness of silence. I suppose that came as a result of the absence of my parents who departed this world before I had the chance to build any image of them. I was raised by my grandparents and even though I did not get the chance to take them with me I know that even if they were asked to come, they would have stayed behind. Old age gave its verdict and since both of them were “too exhausted to do anything” as they said, there was no way they would have abandoned their small country house in northern England. I keep their photo to this day, for I never saw them again . . .
I was a young reporter, a 24-year-old man always ready for new challenges. I moved to one of London’s suburbs in the west to work what I wanted and that same place became one of the hardest locations to live in. For the short while I spent living in the great gigapolis I saw not only a lot of adventures but also the pain of millions of people. I risked my life every day just so I could cover the events for the National TV the best way I could. I began as an assistant and sometime afterwards I started doing investigations and reporting of my own. The last reports were live videos from outside the bulwarks that were built to isolate us. That was a tremendously barbarian method for dividing cities by class criterion. The very idea of that was doomed to failure, but nobody took responsibility for it. It was like a secret arrangement that had been voted on at a UN congress. Some presumed that it was one of the secret plans of the “Hope for Humanity” declaration which had been adopted about a year ago. But I doubt there was any directive that could control in that way the desperate masses. It was obvious that there was no way for that to happen, because nobody would give up their precious freedom–the last remaining good thing in their lives was marred by poverty and diseases over the past few months. Day after day I watched the raging war with my own two eyes. Merciless and brutal, guileful and somewhat doomed if we count the multiplying victims.
But there was one thing I never managed to explain to myself, I could not overcome it and I almost got fired because of it after two years on the job–the media censorship. It got so far over the past few years that the television and the radio channels sent their reporters to the world’s hotspots, but things went one of two ways–either only the approved parts of the events got broadcasted or no footage from the place was shown whatsoever. It was as though the media bosses’ hands were full of power and they stuck to their interests so strictly that they had assumed the role of social lords who were little short of establishing absolute control over the impressive mass of humans living on the planet. Maybe that is what the bulwarks were about. The roots of the problem had grown so deeply into the ground that I failed to find an explanation about it at all and there were one too many people involved in covering up the truth. It took a lot of courage to work until the last possible moment, but I think it was precisely journalism that helped me to embark on this out-of-planet adventure. Still someone had noticed what I had tried to accomplish and had heard my call for freedom in the media environment. But it was all in vain now. I was nobody in this gigantic throng, I merged with it completely. During these few days of interstellar travelling I had the time I needed to satisfy my curiosity and take a tour around many of the rooms on the ship. Many of them were either locked or guarded. We were in a titanic flying city. In a mountain of steel that nobody suspected would get off the ground. The human genius had done an impressive job with some of the last raw materials on Earth. Impractical or not, for the time being those were our homes and they were probably going to be even our tombs . . .
I was scared on the first day of the travel. And I was not the only one. We were engulfed by silence–it hung over our heads like a thundercloud. Perhaps that was why I found it so difficult to relax and make any social contact while we were traversing the Universe, not to mention that I was distrustful and cautious by nature. Things would probably change by the end of the travel, but for now the situation was just different and unfamiliar for every single person on board. Yet something happened inside of me–my strongest trait, my curiosity, grew stronger by the second and eventually took over. I looked out the porthole form time to time, wishing to see something beautiful, something cosmic, but the only thing my eyes fell upon was the motley blanket that enveloped us. It looked exquisite and divine at first, but a few hours down the road I did not want to even glance at it ever again. I thought it was the only thing keeping us away from our total annihilation which was probably just waiting to happen. The perilous nature of the dark energy[9] served as fuel for our interstellar engines and had proven its lethal effect over time.
Multiple sacrifices have been made over the past decade of trials and discoveries so that we could now reap their benefits. It seemed that the human technological advance brought us down to our knees, but it was also what would most likely save us from ourselves. I was willing to believe in that. When I was a child I never had any religious inclinations despite my familial environment. But in that very moment I had faith in something which many would consider ridiculous, even unreal. Yet it was what it was–I believed in the capabilities of the greatest thing that the human mind and hands had ever created.
‘You believe in a machine?’ I would have been asked skeptically a long time ago, but American Pride was not just a machine. It functioned like a living organism, it was equipped with everything it needed to be considered as one. “Arteries”, “veins”, “capillaries” crisscrossed the entire ship. Miles-long pipelines–some supplied us with pure water, others took the dirty water out from the living quarters–woun
d up and down the walls around us. They did not carry only water, on the contrary–that was just a small portion of the ship’s servicing arsenal. Hundreds of gallons of oil, gases, fuel and service liquids flowed through them. The ventilation system was genuine masterpieces with no analogue in terms of their complexity back on our planet. This was only part of the visible side of the aircraft, the unknown was over our heads and under our feet. The ship’s nervous system was woven from hundreds of thousands of miles of cables, built-in in the ceilings and in the floors–transmitted commands from the bridge (the cerebrum) to the different service mechanisms. The scariest thing was the so called shell plating or the skin of the celestial beast. But solid as it looked, it was the startling two dozen inches that separated us from the dark infinity of the Cosmos in which we could sink in just a second. No one would have felt our absence and we would have fallen into the perpetual blackness of the nothingness around. But these thoughts were like the scent of a spring morning as compared to the apocalyptic storm that everyone on board was about to suffer . . .
As I was wandering about the corridors, following my desire to explore the environment, I completely lost track of time. There was no day, no night, no way to know how much time had elapsed unless I checked my watch. But it was adapted to the Earth’s temporal cycles–something so needless and useless as seen from present-day perspective. Despite that, there was still someone who measured the flow of time during our stay here. There was a system signal that chimed in three times a day, announcing the time for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was amazing how we, the passengers, were fed in a totally normal fashion, we were not robbed of the quantity or quality of the portions, and the mess hall could hold all of us. It was the size of a football field and extended over four levels–from second to fifth–and was separated from the rest of the space on each floor by thick steel doors at the entrances. To be honest, it looked more like bomb shelter than a place to eat, but that was probably for our own good, or at least that was what I kept telling myself. Order there was of cardinal importance–it directly determined how much time each of us would spend there to get our food. The process was overseen and strictly guarded. We had to stand in a neat line in front of a few large robots which took a few-second scanshots of us and gave us the type of food our bodies needed. Vitamins, minerals, proteins and carbohydrates–the dose was almost perfect. We were quick in taking turns and while some of us were getting their portions, the others had already finished eating their healthy resemblance of food. There was no other way–there were rules and we had to adhere to them. I did not like some of the things despite their intelligent application. Maybe I was just imagining things, but every time I took my place before the robots to receive my due, I froze horrorstruck. I would never forget the first time I had to face the robot and get scanned and provided with healthy food. I was scared right from the start, but when the machine’s flat horizontal ray scanned me from head to toe to gather the information it needed, I felt like it pierced my very being. It was as though the machine looked right though my soul and revealed the purpose of my life. That was just a terrible sensation, but the truth is I was more concerned about the possibility of someone taking advantage of that information and ultimately using it against us. That was a perfect way to manipulate our small stellar community and it could have put an end to very many things. My individuality, our individualities, our dreams, our strive for life, the meaning of our existence, in short–everything. More or less, things depended on whether there were any people with good conscience left in the ship’s commanding crew since the machine was omnipotent and a handful of people were fully capable of bending us into subjugation. I had no other option but to hope that was just an irrational fear inside my head. Yet, in spite of my doubts and convictions, I ate on par with everyone else present. I tried not to take long and finish all three daily meals in five minutes each and ate whatever I was given. Right after I was done with the food I headed towards the exit of the mess hall. I did not want to waste my time sitting in one place, cursing my fate; I had to keep moving.
Armed guards were keeping watch everywhere around us. The atmosphere had the air of a large prison, but no one treated us rudely, maybe the weapons were there for our own good–to keep us safe from one another. I went out of the large space, making my way through the crowd, and then I poured into the long people-swarmed corridors. They were about fifty feet wide and thirteen feet tall, but the interesting part was that the doors that separated the rooms and the corridors were small and narrow. I was not among the tallest people in the crowd, but with my humble 5’11” I had the feeling that I would hit my head on the door frame as I walked through those openings. The doors got hermetically closed and perhaps they were small because of the fire safety measures and the risk of flood. I suppose that inconvenience was for our own good. A few hours after dinner I came out victorious in my search. As I strode further along the ship, I finally got to the front part where the commanding staff’s quarters were. The people who slept in the corridors were thinning the closer I got to the bow. At that place, in the dark corner of one of the corridors, I noticed a conspicuous man accompanied by two soldiers. He was tall, well-built, about forty, or at least I suspected so. The man was coming in my direction and the two men seemed to be his personal security guards. When he walked past me, I stood closer to the walls, trying to keep a low profile. But I looked him up and down as he was striding my way and I saw he was not a regular soldier. He exuded something different and I am not talking about his incredibly proud and jaunty walk. He had a million-bucks type of confidence, as though we were all here because of him and the awe he inspired in the people around was palpable. Before he passed me he threw a glance at me and our eyes met. He felt I was no threat to him and went on as if he had not seen a thing. Like a robot in a human skin, but more distressing. I was struck by the strange feeling to stay. To stay in that very place so I could meet that man again. I wondered who he was. Maybe he was truly as important as he looked, but I had to find out for sure.
I carried the most important things I had in a backpack slung on my back–documents, some money and a cell phone; I did not know if they or my camera full of photos from my life on Earth would ever come handy. The rest of my baggage, in the form of clothes, was packed in a large suitcase locked in the sleeping quarters I was lodged in, not far from here. I thought about it and realized that I would sleep on the floor there again as there was shortage of beds, but even if there was a bed, it would have been occupied by now, because they were no names tags attached to them. Nothing stopped me from staying here and just being who I am at that place, too–that is a man in search for danger. That was why I went deeper into that dead-end corridor. There was a large room door at the bottom, but I still did not know if that was the chamber of the man with the bodyguards. There was nothing left for me to do, but to sit close by it and do something that would make my stay here less tense. I took my camera out of the backpack which I fixed as a pillow and got to going over the things I had photographed while we waited for the ships to arrive at the foot of the Austrian Alps. I lay down and started looking at the photos and videos; less than an hour later the lights were reduced and the environment was prepared for sleep. It seemed that the commanding crew wanted to preserve our day-and-night living regime so it created the right conditions for that to happen. And it worked. A few videos and about a hundred photos later I dozed off quickly, I did not know how long it was since I had last had any sleep. Lying on the cold floor right under the pipes that had “Caution! High Pipeline Pressure!” painted with red letters on a yellow background, I felt not only the absence of a bed, but that of a home, too. I just hoped that the day to follow would be better than the one that was going away . . .
The neon lights grew brighter and illuminated the rooms a few hours after we had gone to sleep. Shortly after I had become fully awake, I rose up and tried to stretch my body. It had gone stiff, lying on that hard floor which resembled more a grating, rather tha
n something solid and durable that could be walked upon. It took me two or three stretches and some joint creaking to get back into shape and be good and ready for new experiences. While I was putting my camera and the rest of my luggage back into the backpack, a voice came over the loudspeakers, saying “All passengers are invited to have breakfast”. I wondered for a while whether I should go, I still had not seen anything. I had not learnt any new information, neither had any member of the crew walked past me. I wondered if I should stay there at all. But in the end I decided to go have a bite and then return to that very place. As we were walking in a queue up to the mess hall, I overheard that a few levels down there was something impressive that was open for public view. It was not anything precious, nor did it have anything to do with any privileges, but it was sure to give our senses a caress. The people spoke of the gigantic engine that was situated in the space between a few levels and the main corridors at the lower part of the ship’s body. The walls of the rooms around it were transparent, probably made of glass, and revealed a magnificent view of the enormous space manipulator powered by dark energy. At first I was skeptical about it, but later I decided that I wanted to sneak a peek at the thing after breakfast. Yet another time we formed a neat line that led to the scanning robots. I received my portion and i decided to eat it on the way down to the lower levels–it was quite some distance to cover. It took me twenty minutes to reach the place everyone spoke about. The closer I got, the more people I saw streaming in my direction or striding in the opposite one. But the most interesting part was that everyone talked about the same thing. Right about the time I was growing rather impatient, I came across a panel mounted on one of the pipelines. It said that close by in that direction there was something big, situated in a spherical room that divided the back part of ship in two. I quickened my pace and when I arrived at the place I noticed the pipelines wound either up or down and hid into the floor and the ceiling. There was a glass wall in front of them with nothing on it. Incredible! I strode on and saw a banister mounted in front of the glass so people could prop themselves on it and watch. It looked so demonic that I could not believe my eyes. How was that created by human hands? It was almost 330 feet tall, that being its lower part–two gigantic plates that covered thousands of square feet in size. They looked like they were glued to each other, as though there was not even a chink between them, but later on I read the information that was running on dozens of screens around us and discovered they were an atom apart. A few hoop-like objects were spinning at a breakneck speed around the thin gigantic plates and together with the mechanisms they looked like a complex gyroscope. At their upper and lower parts they had things that resembled funnels growing out of the ship’s body. There were openings at the two ends which facilitated the contact between the cosmic matter and the machine itself which was placed in vacuum. That, plus the enormous quantity of electric energy that the plates consumed, made for an unimaginable sight. Collecting dark energy from the space around the upper and lower parts of the ship colored the titanic engine in dark purplish-blue as it rotated around the hoops like a restless plasmoid[10]. A true feast for the eye that had, nevertheless, a rather threatening look. Many of the onlookers around me were staring with bodies stiff with amazement as though they were in a trance. I understood them very well. The dance of that type of energy probably attracted us by nature. But the most important function of the manipulator was that it somehow managed to create spatial balloon that helped us move through space. Incredible, it was as if we were lying in between the dimensions and we were pulling away the interspatial cover at the other end of the bed called Cosmos.
Dawn of Hope- Exodus Page 38
