by JN Chaney
She swiveled around and leapt off the bench, quickly running to the hall. I could see the excitement in her face, swelling her cheeks. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” She exclaimed.
I eased myself up and joined her. She was suddenly so full of energy, like a switch had gone off. “Yeah, yeah, settle down, kid,” I said, patting her on the head. “Don’t make me regret this.”
* * *
The 12th deck was unlike any of the other places on Titan that I had seen before now. There was so much more machinery here. Circuitry along the walls, chairs and consoles in every spare corner, and the further we walked the more elaborate the architecture seemed to become.
After a time, we came to a door, sealed like the one in the engine room. Just like that, Lex activated it and it opened with ease. We entered inside and continued walking deeper and deeper. For a while it was just one hallway after the next with a few offshoots and open doors leading to nothing in particular. At least, from what I could see. I tried to stop once or twice, but Lex insisted we continue forward. Whatever we were here to see was still ahead of us.
The ceiling opened up a short time later. It was nearly twice the height of the other decks, which made you feel like a dwarf. Inside each of the rooms, I could see body-sized pods, similar but different to the ones in the medical bay. I wanted to stop and examine them, but Lex kept tugging my hand to keep going, so I let her, and we did.
Directly ahead of us, in the main atrium of what must be the central hub of whatever this was, I saw a large wall sized machine, radiating with the blue glow. Lights seem to pulse, almost like a beating heart, but far slower. “What the hell is this thing?”
Lex giggled, letting go of my hand and running up close to the structure. As she did, her tattoos began to glow the same as the wall. I don’t mean that they glowed steadily, like they normally did. I mean that their glow matched the other’s rhythm, coming and going with the same sort of cadence that the wall seemed to have. I didn’t understand it, but something told me this was normal.
Normal for Lex, that is.
“Isn’t it neat?” Asked Lex. “I don’t know why, but I really like it.”
“But what is this thing?” I asked.
She seemed to think for a minute, then shook her head. “It’s just pretty. Isn’t that okay? To just be pretty sometimes?”
I stared up at the wall, examining it for longer than I could say. I must’ve stared for several minutes, almost getting lost in the light. There were several cracks in the material, where it seemed to get brighter.
I glanced down at Lex, hoping she’d say something else to give me a clue as to what this was, what any of this was, but she never did. She only stood there, staring at the glow, enjoying the moment, or as she’d put it, the beauty of it all.
Part of me wanted to agree with her, that maybe sometimes being beautiful was reason enough for a thing to exist, but I’d never been such a romantic.
This structure had been built, created with hands like mine, and that meant it had a function. A purpose.
Everything artificial always had a purpose.
I left the wall, noticing that there were several open doorways surrounding the atrium. I walked over to one and peered inside, spotting more of those strange pods. They were larger than the medical ones, about twice the size, and uglier, like these had been thrown together without concern for aesthetics.
I walked into the room, going over to one of the pods to get a better look. They were all closed, sealed like the others we found in the medical bay. All but one, I noticed, which I hadn’t spotted until just now. It stood alone, almost isolated, on the other side of the room, its lid cracked to reveal a small bed inside. It was so much smaller than the others, and thinner, too.
“I see you’ve found the hatchery,” said a familiar disembodied voice.
I turned to see Athena appear directly behind me. She gave me a pleasant smile, the way a parent does when the child does something right. I wasn’t sure if it was nice or insulting.
“You know, Captain, if you were curious about this section of the ship, you could have inquired with me about it. I would’ve been more than happy to tell you about it or explain its function,” she told me.
I cocked my brow and glanced back at the pods, then at the glowing wall where Lex was still standing. “Honestly, before I got here, I had no clue where I was heading. Once I was here, the thought to ask you just never hit me.”
“I see you’re interested in the graphing pods,” she said.
“Graphing pods?” I asked.
She nodded. “That is the name of those machines in each of these rooms. I could see by the look on your face that you were curious about them.”
I glanced at the wall again. “I’m curious about a lot of things on this deck. For example, what the hell is that thing, and why is it glowing? Also, why the fuck is Lex glowing with it?”
Lex looked at me, probably hearing her own name, and waved, a big smile across her cheeks.
Athena glanced at the girl and back at me. “That is simply the power converter, which takes energy from the core and prepares it to be used in a very specific way that is unlike any other throughout this vessel.”
“I take it the wall has something to do with these pods here,” I asked thumbing behind me at the room. “What are they for, exactly?”
“You are correct, Captain,” she told me. “These pods draw a special kind of energy from the converters you see there. This is actually something that I have been meaning to discuss with you since your arrival. However, do to the lack of a usable core, the energy output required would have been too great for me to demonstrate the function of this section.”
“And what exactly is the function, as you keep saying?” I asked.
She walked closer to where I was standing, next to the little pod and glanced down at it. “You came here in search of something,” she said. “You came here because you found a little girl who was unlike any you’d ever seen before. A little girl with answers to questions you never thought to ask.”
My eyes drifted down to the infant sized-pod before me. The soft cushion was finely shaped to fit a baby’s head and torso.
“Haven’t you ever wondered where she came from?” asked Athena. “Since you arrived here, had it not occurred to you that perhaps you had found her birthplace already?”
I hesitated to respond. What Athena was proposing seemed impossible, that Lex could have come all that way to wind up on a backwater planet on the other side of Union space. It was a preposterous claim, wasn’t it? But where else could she have come from? Where else in all the galaxy had there been people who looked like her, with tattoos that glowed blue when you touched an ancient device? Even if people from thousands of years ago had looked like that, wouldn’t they all be dead by now? Wouldn’t I have seen more of them, whether on the news or on the net? In the short time I had known Lex, I thought she’d been unique. A fluke accident, created or born by some harebrained scientists in a lab on some planet, probably not far from where the Union had found her. The idea that it all started here, the way Athena was proposing, halfway across the galaxy…it just seemed impossible.
Yet, I believed every word of it, despite the lunacy of it all, because I’d seen enough by now to know that anything was possible.
Megastructure moons, ancient Cognitives, a lost civilization from pre-history. If so many impossible things could be true, why not this as well?
Especially now that I was standing in a room filled with ancient pods, near a glowing wall with a glowing child, talking to a woman made of light.
What was one more impossible thing to add to the pile?
I looked at Athena, at her calm blue eyes, and finally said, “Tell me everything.”
Sixteen
“A very long time ago, before humanity had ventured so far out into the stars, its primary focus was on its own refinement.
“The evolution happened faster than you might assume. A geneticist by the name
of Dr. Sheldon Kane, along with his wife, Dr. Sandra Quintell, a nanoroboticist, developed a revolutionary new method to repair and maintain the immune system in such a way that it became increasingly impossible to take ill.
“The process involved a new type of nanobot technology, previously thought impossible. However, Dr. Quintell and Dr. Kane had been working on the technology in secret at their home lab for nearly 15 years. They did this, as they had said, to save their son, a cancer patient by the name of Joseph.
“When the husband and wife revealed their research to the world, it was their son who acted as living proof of their success. In a matter of days, the nanotechnology had swept through his blood stream, refined his immune system, and changed his very DNA. The public was astonished by this new revolution and its potential effects on not only medicine, but all aspects of human life.
Suddenly, anything was possible. If this technology could be used to alter DNA, why not use it to change a person’s physical appearance as well? Eye and hair color, body proportions...everything could now be custom-tailored to fit a person’s ideal self.
“People had always been obsessed with how they looked, but now they really could be anyone, and now it actually would be more than skin deep. It would be real change.
“Of course, scientists the world over had taken interest in these findings, and not just for cosmetic purposes. These groups saw the research’s true potential…that it could lead to a new stage in human evolution, one that no one had previously believed possible.
“A lab under the control of Monolith Industries, a for-profit research company, began development on what would eventually become known as the Immortality Project. As its name implied, the project’s goal was to use nanotechnology to slow and eventually stop the aging process.
It took nearly a decade, but their work was ultimately a resounding success. Within a few short years, Monolith Industries had developed a method to quadruple the average person’s life. Eventually, that number had increased even further.
“It didn’t take long for the company to begin the rollout of their new product, known as Forever Young. Right away, the product was nearly inaccessible to the average person. It was so expensive that only the richest individuals could afford to buy it, and buy it they did.
“A new class of people arose, whose entire distinction was that they never grew old and they never got sick. These became known throughout society as Eternals, while the lower class—individuals who lived only a few hundred years—were known as Transients.
“After a time, anomalies began to appear. Small changes to a person’s physical appearance, largely unnoticed until it became widespread.
The mutation didn’t happen right away, but over the course of a few centuries. Certain children—those descended from other Eternals—were born with unique traits that were very much unlike their parents and ancestors. White hair, deep blue eyes, and snow-white skin. More importantly, these individuals seemed to possess an innate form of immortality, meaning they no longer required the Forever Young supplement. At long last, the next true stage of human evolution had arisen.
“As the years passed, the descendants of the Eternals, these albino offspring, became the new vanguard of the future. Presidents, governors, senators, scientists, lawyers, judges, corporate owners—all of them, Eternals.
“And because the rich and powerful never aged, because they never died, that meant that upward mobility came to a near standstill. The dream of prosperity, of pulling oneself up became nothing more than a distant dream.
“Nearly two centuries after the discovery of Forever Young, the people had had enough. The Transients rebelled against the powerful Eternals, demanding a return to the old ways. They called for opportunity, for the chance to achieve whatever they desired. There was a need in them, you see, to reach beyond themselves…beyond the borders of their stations.
“A deal was struck between the Eternals and those in charge of the rebellion. Several habitable worlds had been discovered in remote systems many light years away from Earth. The Eternals would fashion several colony ships, each one large enough to carry all who wanted to start anew. Colonization efforts had already taken place across the solar system, including Luna, Mars, and Europa, and there had been two successful missions to explore planets beyond Sol’s system. However, this would be the single greatest colonization effort ever attempted, which meant it would require time and focus. Over a century, in fact.
“The Eternals and Transients worked tirelessly to make this shared dream a reality. Humanity entered a new age of shared optimism and ambition that was unlike any before it. For the first time in centuries, the masses believed their future was one of prosperity. They believed they had a chance at a better life.
“Eventually, multiple ships had been created, each with its own cognitive intelligence to guide the colonists to their respective worlds. In total, twelve seed colony ships were dispatched to various star systems throughout the galaxy. Titan was one such vessel, the final addition in what would ultimately amount to the largest mass exodus ever recorded.
“Most of the passengers were Transients, possessing an average unassisted lifespan of one hundred years, with a few Eternals who had volunteered to come along and assist them.
“Over the next century, the twelve colony ships expanded into the galaxy. Many of them were lost, their signals suddenly silenced, without explanation. All but Titan disappeared, lost to either distance or disaster. None of us could be certain.
“In time, Titan’s leaders believed they were all that remained of the expansion effort, and when our tritium core failed, they suspected the same fate had befallen the other colonies.
“While my colonists left and expanded to nearby habitable worlds, I watched and waited, listening for any signs of life from across the galaxy, always hoping for a response, but there was only silence, no matter where I searched.
“It was not until a few centuries ago that the silence finally broke…and I received the message that would change everything.
“Earth has been restored,’ the transmission said. ‘Initiate Project Reclamation. All vessels, proceed to Earth at once.”
* * *
I listened to the Cognitive tell me the story of my ancestors, all my attention on her as the tale unfolded. When she had finally finished, I had too many questions and no idea how to ask them.
We stood there for a few minutes, silence all around us, as I tried to work through the revelations I had just heard.
When I had finally processed most of what she’d told me, I decided I knew what to start with. “Did you create Lex?” I finally asked. After all that talk about Earth and starships, about genetically modified humans and nanobot technology, my first thought was of the girl.
Athena smiled. “No, I did not create her, although I did awaken her.”
“If you didn’t make her, who did?” I asked.
Athena frowned. “She was birthed naturally by two Eternals, but they were both killed.” She paused. “Let me restate. They were murdered by a dissident Transient, holding to a particularly dangerous ideology. The mother had only given birth a few months prior to her death. Shortly thereafter, the third and final Eternal to join this voyage was also killed.”
“They died when she was just an infant?” I asked, glancing back at Lex. She was now curled in a ball on the floor, lying next to the wall, both of them still glowing together.
“Indeed,” said the Cognitive. “The child was hidden away, here in the Hatchery, placed in cryo-sleep and left to her dreams. The Transients never woke her, eventually deciding to abandon the child to my care. It was here she remained until I awoke her.”
I leaned closer to the ancient woman, my voice little more than a whisper. I didn’t want the kid to hear me, not if I could help it. “And why is that, exactly? Why’d you wake her up and send her across Union space to some backwater world?”
“I wanted to lead the rest of you home,” she answered. “I had tried sen
ding messages, but I never received a response, not in all ten thousand attempts. I believe this to be a result of my fading power supply. It was not until your ship drew closer to Titan that I was able to open a channel. Even then, it could only be done with the help of the turn-key you carried in your possession.”
“So, you couldn’t reach anyone because you were too far away,” I said. “And we were using something besides those turn-key things.”
“Correct,” said the Cognitive. “Additionally, the failing power supply on Titan made it difficult to care for the child. The decision was not an easy one, but I believed it to be the optimal solution. The child, along with a data drive of information, was sent to one of the original colony locations, where over one hundred thousand of my former passengers set out to live on. Statistically, I believed it would give her the best possible chance of survival, while also allowing me to contact the descendants of my former passengers.”
I remembered what I knew about where Lex had been found. It was a world called Kaldona, largely made up of farmers and fishermen. On first glance, there wasn’t much to it, but the planet was well known for its ruins and history, highly regarded as one of the oldest worlds in the Union. Scholars and scientists came from all over to visit and study, which is part of how Lex had come under the control of Union scientists in the first place. They’d gone there to study, only to find a little girl with secrets of her own. Unfortunately, from what I remembered reading on the gal-net, most of the original buildings and technology had been destroyed in a weather disaster, nearly fifteen hundred years ago. Hardly the world Athena seemed to think it was. “You said you did this because you finally heard a transmission?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, Captain. For the first time in nearly two thousand years. ‘Initiate Project Reclamation.’”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.
“That,” she said, “is a question that I have been asking myself for nearly two centuries, Captain, and it is one I wish to answer very soon.”
