“You may well be better than you were before.” Crumley paused to let that sink in. “You might pull off what we on Earth have yet to: a synthesis of spirituality and technology, or at least a state of higher-consciousness in tandem with a more responsible use of that technology. Perhaps you will be able to stop using the latter as a crutch to stay the same forever like perpetual children, and instead use it as an invitation to truly evolve along all dimensions of your being.”
Asger grunted. “I can no longer tell whether this is the honey part of the lecture or the bitter part.”
Crumley smiled ruefully and went back to contemplating the obelisk in the sky. “I do wonder if these cosmic farmers made it as far as Earth, and if we humans, too, owe them a great debt of thanks for our own existence, and possibly, one day, our own uplifting into the pantheon of gods. Right now we have godlike powers, but not the hearts, minds, and souls to go with them bold enough to bear such a responsibility.”
“Was that the purpose of these cosmic engineers, you think? To populate the heavens with souls worthy to inhabit it?”
“We can only hope.”
“No, my friend,” Asger stated, “We can only hope they succeed.”
Crumley was contemplating the importance of this portal if a civilization had sent emissaries to live and die and repopulate themselves for all eternity possibly, just to maintain it and keep it open; its own maintenance crew living inside it. Even if they were just sentient robots… Why was it so important to keep the portal open? But his mind had been sidetracked by Asger’s comment, his prayer that the farmers of souls across the farmlands of eternity succeeded in yielding a good harvest.
“For them to succeed,” Crumley replied, “we would have to prove ourselves worthy. I fear that fending off these master races who prefer to play the role of parasites is how we prove it.”
TWENTY-TWO
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“Keep foraging for the hidden treasure in back of their minds,” Leon instructed, after listening to Crumley’s report from the planet’s surface piped up to him by way of the Nautilus’s COMMS. Crumley had hit quite a bit of pay dirt already vis-à-vis Asger’s recollections regarding the star gate.
Leon chuckled briefly seeing Crumley weighted down with his net bag of foodstuff. His quartermaster had never let him down yet when it came to keeping his units on the move. He nourished the body and the soul both when times were tough. Though this was the first time Leon had sent him digging around inside someone’s mind for more life-sustaining items. Still, he was proving more than up to the task, as always.
Leon killed the holographic projector providing the link to Crumley on Eresdra’s surface. Leon slouched back into his chair, soaking in everything he’d just heard. The swivel-rocker was heating up from his own body heat like a hot springs mineral pool he’d slipped into to help him relax. Revelations of this kind usually were just what the doctor ordered for him to satisfy the strategic and tactical components of his mind; and those tidbits were the only things that did get him to relax.
The notion of mining the past for more gems, as Crumley was doing, got Leon to thinking. Maybe it was time he did a bit of the same.
He sprang up from his chair and headed out of his private suite aboard the Nautilus. Passing through the sliding doors into the hallway was a revelation all its own. “Holy shit!”
The Nautilus had come alive—literally. All those humanoids in their display cases, like action-figure dolls for big boys and girls who loved to play war games, had been activated. They were moving about the ship as if only recently drafted into action and still trying to get their bearings.
“Hey, pal,” one of them said. “You know where I can find the infirmary?” The humanoid towered over Leon, his body even more muscular. His skin a light purple-grey, his flexible body armor a more piercing, darker purple, his eyes an electric, glowing lavender. He had no facial hair, and the muscles grew up his thick neck like the V-shaped muscles of the back and over the crown of his head, up and over his skull, coming to a point a few inches out in front of his forehead.
“You need to relax enough for the ship to speak to you,” Leon instructed. “If you let your stress hormones erode the nanites she uses to communicate…”
The hulking humanoid took a deep breath and sighed it out, then nodded, relaxing as he felt his connection with the Nautilus’s supersentiences kick in. “Thanks, pal.” He widened the focus of his eyes. “Zirta, this ship is big. Are there any transports for getting about? Sorry,” he said, correcting himself, and taking another deep breath to relax again and see if he could get the ship to answer him.
They both glanced up at the deafening screech from above. The dragon soaring overhead swooped down, landed, and laid on its chest so his rider could mount it. “Yeah, that’ll do,” the guy said, and hopped on, flying off in the next moment on his taxi.
Leon shook his head. “I swear, you blink around here… You’re lucky, Natty, that I could stand to have my mind blown a few more times to prepare it for jumping through that portal.”
“Oh, this isn’t me,” Natty’s avatar said, materializing beside him, looking more see-through than normal. His avatars must have been spread thin—literally—trying to keep up with all the tour guide requests from the crew still trying to get their bearings. Then again, Natty wasn’t exactly the tour guide type. He’d no doubt built his avatar so he could be left in peace to pursue his research, not being a people person exactly. The ghostly avatar was likely a sign that the Nautilus was budgeting her mind power in any case to accommodate orienting so much of the crew at once. “This is Laney’s doing,” Natty’s avatar explained.
“What’s she thinking?”
“We’re working to ensure that we can maintain access to the quantum dimension of our unconscious minds—no matter what morphing we do to accommodate to what worlds are on the other side of that star gate. I’m guessing she decided there was no better way to ensure that than to put all the pieces on the board into play at once.”
Leon groaned. “For the record, I do the strategic and tactical thinking around here when it comes to battlefield ops. Are we clear?”
“I don’t think she was trying to step on your toes. From what we’ve determined so far, no one gets off this ship once we’re through the gate unless that link to the quantum unconscious is locked down. So, before you can even deploy your people—”
“I get it, Natty. You don’t think I’ve been spying on your communications?”
“Well, I never! Though considering how much my father ignored me, I feel strangely intimate with you right now, Leon. Maybe you could stick your head up my ass some more; I mean that in a totally non-homoerotic way.”
Leon pinched his nose at the forehead, using the pressure points to push back the migraine. “Sorry for snapping at you,” he said. “I know better than not to trust my people to do what they do best.”
“Of course. For the record, my dad didn’t chew my ass out nearly enough either; it’s kind of a turn on. You know, maybe we are developing a kind of homo-erotic thing.”
“You’re dismissed, Natty.”
“Really? I thought we were bonding.”
Leon ignored him, walking on. “My bad,” Natty’s avatar said, disappearing.
Leon made his way to one of the off-access areas. The sliding doors had the Alpha-Omega overlapping logos on the doors, signifying access was limited to his teams only, and even then, the doors would only open for Leon and Patent, the team leaders, without additional clearance.
There were many of these chambers aboard the Nautilus. To know what was inside each one required being dialed into the Nautilus’s AIs.
Leon wanted access to the Sentient Serpents files. He didn’t care for the name that had been assigned to their prior mission and deployment to the Amazon jungle on earth, being as the upgraded lifeforms there did not strike him as snakes or “serpents” exactly. But someone with a fondness for alliteration had won the day when it came ti
me to assigning the file name.
The sliding doors opened for him upon his approach. He would have felt better if they required a retinal scan to let him pass or some other proof of identification. But the Nautilus no doubt had far more sophisticated means for knowing whether she was letting the right person in the room or not. She, after all, had to contend with shape shifters like Cassandra.
The lights in the room started flicking on to illuminate the darkness—but they weren’t the overhead lights. They were aquarium lights. Inside the tanks were genetically altered men and women breathing water. They were a variety of genetic hybrids related to FORESCO’s dirty dealings in the Amazon. But ascertaining their ultimate purpose and destiny was a matter for the cloned versions of Natty and Laney and the Omega Force and Alpha Unit teams that had remained behind on earth as part of the ongoing partnership with Natty there that fell under the Mind of a Child project overwatch cleanup. Natty’s Tesla-like genius and his child-like naïveté and personality had been manipulated by Truman and his confederates to the nth degree. That meant one long string of cleanup jobs clone team one would be dealing with for some time. Sentient Serpents was just the first of those mop-up operations assigned that team. Clone team two—well, they were also based on Earth, and their mission assignments had to do with capitalizing on Natty’s genius toward foregoing potential world-ending calamities of no less ominous a nature. There were other clone teams. All of them shared only the memories of the Amazon and Sentient Serpents mission. Any information from here on out shared between the teams would be on a need-to-know basis. And the various copies of Leon would be the ones determining the need to know. It was the first time Leon had been reminded of his clone status; it was easy to forget. Each of them had had their memories, their entire personalities scanned and uploaded by the Nautilus prior to being downloaded to their new bodies, which had awakened on earth to enjoy their “well-earned” R&R after the Sentient Serpents mission, as if they’d actually endured the living hell themselves. Thanks to the efficiency of the Nautilus’s scanners, of course, in a very real way, they had.
Mercifully the humanoids staring back at him from the tanks in the room were not real; they were digital recreations from footage derived from the contact lenses Omega Force and Alpha Unit were all wearing when on location, capturing everything they did and thought. That made the aquariums the hybrids were in as well more like giant 3-D TV screens turned on their sides running “screen savers.” Post-mission analyses included mining that footage for intel no one could be bothered to process at the time. And they were invaluable for days like today when Leon finally had room in his head to consider some of the deeper implications of their earlier encounters in the Amazon.
He continued through the room refusing to stare too hard at any of the aquarium people for fear they would rankle him over his own clone status. He rather liked thinking he was one of a kind. The only tonic for that idea was the notion that it took not just one of him to save the world, but apparently a growing number of him. He could enjoy the self-importance that came with that notion at a later date—when he had the luxury to.
Leon wandered the aisles much like he would any dusty warehouse full of artifacts. In this case, the artifacts were spent pieces of equipment and tech employed in the field—hell, brought into existence—by Alpha Unit to help them meet the challenges encountered in the Amazon. Even the equipment lying around in various states of disrepair held information worth mining. Call him anal retentive, but he never let go of intel, no matter how antiquated. You could read a book many times and still pull out things you never saw before; it was no different with prior missions.
Clone Team One dealing with the Mind of a Child over-watch assignments would have the actual versions of the artifacts he was looking at, versus the Nautilus scanned-and computer-printed Xerox copies that he and the rest of the teams would have to settle for.
Leon finally came upon what he was searching for.
He held the Chinese box Natty had locked away the artifact in, figuring possibly he was the only one smart enough to open the box to get to what was inside. Like everything else in this room, it was more of a digital recreation than an actual antique; this particular Chinese box made of composite metals a laser cannon couldn’t bore through.
Leon didn’t really have the time to match wits with the Chinese puzzle box; he just had the Nautilus’s supersentience cue him on the sequence of sliding panels to run through to pop the lid on the container.
A few seconds later, the box’s content was laid bare.
Inside was the fragment of bone that had been given Natty by the “White Indian.” The White Indians were a bit of an anomaly in the Amazon jungle. One might be tempted to think of them as albinos, but they weren’t. Some thought they might be Vikings that had visited the continent once upon a time and had gone native, or had simply been abandoned there by their people. If for no other reason than the many stories that surrounded them, they were all held as sacred. But that had more to do with the fact that they were considered shamans than it had to do with their being white. All the shamans of the region were considered sacred people of great power and wisdom, not to be messed with.
If Leon had had the sense at the time, he would have hunted down that White Indian and drafted him. Leon had no doubt that there were secrets locked inside his head that he wanted access to. Let’s hope the clone of you back on Earth has the sense now to do what you should have had the sense to do then.
Leon didn’t have to pick up the bone fragment. It levitated on its own accord.
According to Natty, it only did that in response to energy surging through a power spot back on earth. If true, it would go a long way to explaining some of the miracles and magic associated with the White Indians of the region in the Amazon they were hiking through at the time. The mountain the FORESCO compound was situated on was a power spot. It may well have been why the compound was built there. Natty and Laney were both as fluent in Eastern energy-body science as they were in Western Science. FORESCO had been created to protect the Amazon in a time of corporate rape. Hopefully it was doing better at keeping corporate in check now that they’d rescued it from Truman who had usurped its original utility to employ it to his own ends. Those ends were also the subject of ongoing investigations. No one believed for a second that they’d done more than scratched the surface of what Truman was up to in the Amazon jungle.
The bone floating before Leon’s eyes could mean that the Nautilus had ridden a cosmic energy vein to get here. Just like the human body had energy meridians, so did the planet, and so did the cosmos at large. That little nugget courtesy of another late night talk with Natty; their late-night talks had led to a lot of mutual revelations on both sides.
But possibly the Nautilus had been built as a kind of power spot, able to amplify any amount of chi permeating the “God body” of the cosmos itself, animating and enlivening the ship and all who were aboard.
The answer to that mystery could take a backseat for now. Leon was far more interested in what was behind the artifact of the human rib fragment itself.
The bone was drifting toward the viewport—the one facing the star gate.
What the hell?
Leon followed it to the window. The bone fragment rotated slowly one way then the other before settling down into a fixed position.
Leon put his hand up to the viewport and used his fingers to enlarge the image like he would the picture on a screen of an iPhone. With each separation of his thumb and middle finger the image outside zoomed in magnification. When it had zoomed enough, Leon understood why the bone fragment had settled into the position it had. It was meant to be slotted into the star gate into one of the engravings along the surface of one of the arms of the pentagram.
“Are there any other engravings that match this one on the surface of that pentagram—on either side of it?” Leon asked the Nautilus’s chief AI. Leon hadn’t even thought to check the surface on the other side until now, but the Na
utilus’s probes certainly would have checked it.
“No,” came the Nautilus’s voice inside his mind.
Leon shook his head. “It can’t be. It just can’t be.” He considered the implications, wondering now as well why he’d felt a sudden urge to chase down the bone fragment. At first he’d just felt a need to look into the past mission, prompted by the treasures Crumley had dug up from Asger’s past. Leon knew this room contained many such treasures from the past. But he really hadn’t felt drawn to any one in particular until he stepped into the room.
“So, you heard me.”
Leon, jarred by the voice coming from behind him, turned toward the source: the White Indian. One of the flat screen monitors that held fragments of their adventures in the Amazon jungle had been cued up by the Nautilus for him, perhaps. Or…
Leon approached the life-size figure framed by the vertical screen, looking much like the digital aquarium tanks that were taller in height than they were wide. “What’s going on here?”
The White Indian stared at him dumbly and unresponsively. It took Leon a moment to realize it was a bit like a satellite relay delay. The Nautilus must have been facilitating the communication via its Singularity phone capabilities—that could communicate in real time across any chasm of space. But the White Indian needed to make sense of the language translation software the Nautilus was running. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t getting the brogue just right; the White Indian likely spoke a dead language and the Nautilus was extrapolating the best she could to fill in the blanks. When the Native finally felt he understood what was being asked of him, after taking a moment to decipher the “runes” of the audio cues he was getting, he said, “You must know I saw this time would come. It is why I gave Natty the piece of my rib broken off long ago in battle.” Leon waited for him to get out the rest. He could tell the White Indian was struggling with what he had to say, even after all this time, even after preparing for this moment for God knows how long. As a shaman it was his job to go into netherworlds of all kinds, visit the world of spirits and tribal ancestors, to seek out spirit guides that could help him and his people. But evidently, camping out on the power spot of that mountain FORESCO was located on for as long as he had, had opened his mind to so much more. And what it had opened his mind to, he was still trying to get his mind around after all this time. Not surprising, Leon thought, considering he belonged to another age. Had the power spot made him as long-lived as the Nouveau Vikings of Eresdra?
The Star Gate Page 21
