by Sean Platt
“What direction is that?” Peers asked, still looking toward where the shuttle had vanished.
“Why?”
“I just wonder if they’re swarming on the freighter. Sending reinforcements now that we’ve found out they’re protecting something.”
“I hope not.”
Nobody asked Sadeem why he’d said it. They all knew they’d need to return to the freighter. To the cargo Stranger had arranged for Carl to bring to this place. To the Ark. Kamal didn’t think any of the others knew precisely why they needed to go back or what they’d do once they arrived (if they did, he amended) — but they knew, all right.
“They didn’t leave Reptars behind to guard the Ark before,” Clara said.
“They had us before. The Mullah. We can move it even if they can’t. Which, as it turned out, was exactly the problem and why they didn’t let us in on the secret this time.” Sadeem shifted on his rock, aborting an attempt to cross his legs in the flickering light. “And besides, they probably planned to take their guards and leave once they could be sure we’d stay Forgotten. At least until the freighter was buried.”
“Maybe they’ll leave now,” Kamal said.
“They can’t leave until we forget. Besides, they have my grandfather up there.”
“Again,” said Peers.
“Again,” Clara echoed.
Her eyes turned to Kamal — pits of shadow in the firelight.
“Why did they take him the first time, if he was Astral?”
“He’s not an Astral.” Kamal’s head tipped, considering. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I’m not even sure I fully understood it when I figured it out in Ember Flats. But right now, it’s even harder. Those memories are sticky. Stuck way down deep and are taking their sweet time coming out. At first I barely remembered doing the research while waiting to drown. Now I can remember that and some of the punch lines. But the rest?” He shrugged.
“What do you remember?” Peers asked.
Kamal rearranged himself, trying to find a comfortable position and failing. He moved from his rock to the sand.
“It started with what you said you told Stranger, Peers.” Then to Sadeem and Clara: “Peers said he and Stranger were listing the Archetypes. At first everyone who knew the legend thought that Meyer was the King. It made sense. He’s always been a leader. People who studied this stuff figured the Astrals chose their viceroys from a pool of folks the world already knew and mostly respected. So much seemed to focus on shuttling Meyer around, of getting him out of tough situations, of setting him up as a leader. A King. Hell, based on what you told me, Meyer being the King was the spark that let you recognize the Archetypes in the first place, right?”
Peers nodded then recited from the Mullah legend: “‘The King survives.’ I assumed it was Meyer and Kindred, since they struck everyone as two halves of a whole.” He turned to Kamal. “I said that right in front of you. How can you not remember?”
Kamal rolled his eyes. It was probably a good thing, solidarity-wise, that Peers could joke about assaulting Kamal before discussing matters of future life and death with Ravi over his unconscious body. Nobody loved being the knocked-out butt of a joke. The fact that Kamal didn’t protest at least said they were finally sharing a team.
“They’re not two halves of a whole?”
Peers turned to Sadeem. “Meyer is the whole. Kindred and Stranger are two halves.”
“Halves of what?”
“Of Meyer.” Peers seemed to take Kamal and Clara’s bafflement as reason to elaborate. “Based on all I remember and all Sadeem and I discussed in the past, I think the Astrals maybe didn’t know what they were getting into when they tried to make the first Astral duplicate. It ‘malfunctioned’ for want of a better word. And so in the end it turned on them, siding with the human resistance. After your father killed it …” Peers had been looking at Clara but now stopped, adding apology to his expression. “Anyway, the Astrals tried making another copy after that, and ended up with Kindred. But before they made him, they filtered out whatever ‘excess humanity’ they felt had caused the first copy to go bad. I think that ‘garbage’ became the Pall — and I think that when Cameron opened the Ark and sacrificed himself to it, his acts turned the Pall into Stranger. So the equation goes like this: ‘Pall plus Kindred equals a complete copy of Meyer.’”
Clara was slowly shaking her head. “I don’t know, Peers. That’s kind of …” She trailed off, unsure how to articulate the absurdity.
“There’s a lot of kind of these days. I stopped worrying about what was and wasn’t possible when I teleported across several miles of open desert without knowing how or why.”
“His explanation is consistent with Mullah mythology,” Sadeem said. “The Legend Scroll says that the King has two heads — a symbolic interpretation of one entity split in half. But I don’t think there has ever been the rise of a singular King — something that in the scrolls reads like one head being removed. But I don’t know. By this point in the legend, the Astrals have always made us forget, and so the One King never rises. So much of this is uncharted water.”
“So one of them will die?” Clara asked.
“I don’t think so. The King grows in power. The scroll makes further sacrifice among the Archetypes sound possible or perhaps even probable, but not in the case of the King. I’d say it’s more likely that Kindred and Stranger will combine, not be struck down.”
“How?”
Sadeem shrugged.
Clara turned to Kamal. “Is this what you’re supposed to tell me? That I have one and two halves of a grandfather now?”
“I don’t think so. But it’s like I told you: the Da Vinci Initiate, once the viceroys were first taken, always insisted that Meyer Dempsey was special. It was unclear why. But the Astrals tried to replace him (and failed) twice, whereas apparently all the other viceroys ruled as humans — sneaky, conspiratorial humans prone to disobedience that the Astrals pretended not to see but who were probably always part of the experiment. And there’s more: the Initiate also believed the Astrals took Meyer first out of the eventual viceroys. First by several days, no less. Heaven’s Veil had a Money Pit, whereas no other capital had one. And then there’s you, Clara.”
“What about me?”
“The Lightborn were something the Astrals didn’t expect, for sure. But the others gave up. They were willing to pretend to forget, probably because they didn’t have your power. If you weren’t here, this Astral visit would probably have ended like all those visits from the past. But you were here, and now things are different. This time, the Forgetting didn’t stick. And coincidentally, whose granddaughter are you?”
Clara’s tongue found her cheek, thinking.
“Your mother was one of the Archetypes. Kindred and Stranger, who are basically two halves of a split Meyer, are one of the Archetypes. You’re one yourself. That’s three out of seven, all in the same family. And on top of that, Peers conveniently came to join you. So did Sadeem. I’m not an Archetype, I don’t think, but I found you, too. How else can you explain all that coincidence, other than what the Initiate had been saying all along: that Meyer is special, even among viceroys and Archetypes?”
“But how is he special? I can see his energy in the collective. I don’t understand it even as I’m staring right at it. In the network inside my head — in all of our heads, I guess. My grandpa is clearly different from everyone else, but I don’t know why. Or what it means. And it keeps changing, Kamal! He’s growing somehow. Connecting more. Becoming … something else.”
“Or maybe becoming what he always was.”
Clara shrugged at Kamal, eyes wide and frustrated. Kamal wished he had a quick answer. But the memories came slowly, reluctant to emerge.
“I started looking through Mara’s archived research because I was bored and expecting to die. I didn’t do it because I was searching for something — or even if I was looking, what I
might be looking for. So I sort of poked around the files in the bunker server. Stuff that was classified but that I had access to as Mara’s aide. I never cared because they struck us like any old records: as things you’ve gotta keep, but that nobody would ever want to look at. Mountains of Da Vinci stuff. Ancient aliens theory. Archaeological records. Communications with Benjamin Bannister’s Moab group; I know you were friendly with them. And honestly much of it read like those nutso documentaries they used to air on the History Channel. Like a new-age tour through Crazy Land.”
Kamal stopped, looked around the fire, continued.
“I didn’t know where to start, so I followed the threads that amused me most. Some topics struck me as interesting — stuff I didn’t know the Da Vinci people had known or even made theories about, like how the ships might travel. On that, there was a mixture of old and new information: theories Da Vinci worked up before Astral Day that Mara and others added in after the aliens’ arrival. They made guesses that seem close to what ended up happening. For instance, nothing can travel faster than light. That meant the old idea, proposed before Astral Day, was that ancient aliens would have to use wormholes to reach us from far enough away that we hadn’t found them already. And lo and behold, I remember people thinking there must be a wormhole parked out near Jupiter for the Astrals to have reached Earth as they did, at fast but still sub-relativistic speeds, while we all waited for them to park in our driveways. Their arrival triggered new research. I remember some of the buzzwords — quantum physics stuff, way over my head: non-local interaction. Heisenberg uncertainty. Quantum entanglement. That last one is where two things in two different places appear to be different objects, but are actually the same object seen two different ways.”
“How does that work?” Peers asked.
“I don’t know. Like I said: It’s way over my head. But Mara’s files were stuffed with things like that: the world’s remaining brains trying to figure out how the Astrals might move around or think in a collective. How they might have been watching us from much farther away than Jupiter given that it would take years for a signal to travel from us to them. Endless pages of files about physics that bordered on metaphysics. Four-dimensional beings presenting themselves in three dimensions. Shit like that. I’ve had enough theoretical physics to last a lifetime. If I see one more tesseract …!” Kamal waved his finger as if scolding.
“What’s a tesseract?” Sadeem asked. But it was a joke, and Kamal was already moving on.
“Like I said,” Kamal continued, looking at Clara, “I stuck with things that amused me to kill the time. But only half of what I read was amusing. Funny.”
Clara apparently hadn’t expected that. She looked up. “Funny?”
“Do you remember that old movie Men in Black? There’s a scene where they check the hot sheets to keep abreast of alien happenings, and it turns out that the hot sheets are tabloids like the National Enquirer. So, like, ‘Bat Boy Sighted’ was supposed to be a real thing with actual aliens that the rest of the world other than the whackos thought was hilarious. That’s how I felt going through Mara’s files. It was this long, unending joke without any end. Layers of conspiracy. And to be fair, I think it amused me because Mara’s files kind of had everything — including the report Cousin Merle in rural Alabama made once when he was drunk. But then I started to see patterns in all that crazy bullshit and realized that in all the garbage, there was a thread of something true — real, honest-to-God happenings mixed in with all those tinfoil hats.”
“Like what?”
“Like the idea that there were aliens among us. That there always have been, I mean. I’d read about Elvis being an alien and Richard Nixon being an alien and Jimi Hendrix and Donald Fucking Trump being aliens. And I’d laugh, and that was great because the alternative was to face the fact that I’d soon have to decide between drowning in a basement, slowly starving, or shooting myself in the mouth. But the more I read …” He shrugged.
“You believe it?” said Clara. “Are you saying that—”
“Not as such, no. Not Elvis. Not Donald Trump. Not even Little Green Men at all, not in the way you might be thinking. I don’t believe that we’ve always been ‘occupied’ by beings from other places. But the Initiate thought something a lot like that was happening, and the more I read, the harder and harder it got to shake the feeling that they were right.”
“I don’t see how tabloid theories could possibly make you think—”
“The Astrals came prepared, guys,” Kamal said, looking around the fire. “Think about it. It’s been thousands of years, and they somehow had their viceroys pre-selected. It looked like an elimination tournament when it happened, but Mara’s files told a different story. They knew who they’d select in advance. How could that happen if they didn’t have someone on the inside, reporting back?”
“The Mullah portal, maybe,” said Sadeem. “Or the way they saw through Meyer and others on ayahuasca.”
Kamal shook his head. “That’s what I thought at first, too. But doesn’t your portal require direct interaction — meaning someone has to walk right up and talk to the ‘Horsemen’ and eventually decide it’s time to invite them back?”
Across the fire, Peers shifted uncomfortably.
Sadeem nodded. “But with the drugs—”
“Ayahuasca ‘journeying’ or portal, the Initiate had background on it all. But based on what the Initiate felt it knew, both of those things only provided a sensory experience of being here. The Astrals could look through our eyes for a time, and feel through our limbs in the moment. But they didn’t possess or download us. It’d be like peeping through a hole. Yet they arrived far more prepared than peepholes should allow. Their Divinities knew our language—”
“Maybe they watched our TV,” Clara interrupted Kamal.
“And they knew how to mimic our bodies exactly. What our gravity would feel like.”
“They’ve been here before.”
“And gravity doesn’t change. But locomotion evolves like anything, and immunities certainly change. Pathogens change. Radiation changes; think of all the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth shit we just started beaming through the air in decades before they came. Basic human body language, the way we think, the way they knew they could mimic our governments and subtle social structures in ways that would mostly keep us under control at first, then serve to manipulate us later. Their complex understanding of the vast ant farm this planet represents. I’m telling you, they knew more than a portal or drug trips could tell them. They had to because they’re scientists. You don’t just set an experiment and walk away for thousands of years.”
“They left the Ark behind to record our behavior,” Clara said. “Cameron told us the Ark’s job was to record what happened while they were away. It made a record of all our deeds and misdeeds so they could judge us.”
“Yes,” Kamal said. “But think of what it’s like to be a person. That’s on-the-ground knowledge that can’t be conveyed by entries in an archive. And even so — even with all their prep — we surprised them. I mean, consider the Internet. They expected us to form a mental collective like theirs, but we formed one outside our heads with fiber-optic lines. They understood the concept of our old network but not its execution. They got the gist but not the details. If they’d only had the portal, they wouldn’t even have that. They needed a partial solution to bridge the gap.”
“Which was?”
“The argument made over and over in the Initiate files — in far more boring detail than I’m giving you — was that they decided to use a ‘nomadic observer’ that ‘lived autonomously.’”
“What’s that?” Clara asked.
“Something here to observe us. Nomadic: free to move from host to host rather than being bound by time and location. And ‘autonomously’ meant that this … whatever it was … wasn’t like a spy. It was just here. Living. Being. But not functioning like an agent for the other side.”
Sadeem caught Kamal’s eye. Clara and Peers t
urned toward the old man, curious.
“This is making sense to you, isn’t it?” Kamal asked Sadeem.
“Perhaps. But only in rumors. I wasn’t an Elder of the old order, so I can only guess. But the Elders sometimes spoke of ghosts. Of Horsemen spirits who’d watch us.”
With the Mullah’s tiny corroboration, Kamal felt encouraged to continue. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy to believe this after all, no matter the doubt in Clara’s eyes.
“There was a list. It was, so far as I can tell, only guesswork. The Initiate figured that whatever the Astrals left among us, it would have to be nearly (if not literally) immortal. There were no remotely verifiable legends of ancient men or women living thousands of years, so the theory was that the observers weren’t confined to a single body. Hence nomadic. It’s painted as a kind of energy that would latch onto a human and live with it. That human would live a normal life then die, at which point the energy — the observer — would move to a new host.”
“Like being possessed?” Clara said.
“More like symbiosis: two organisms living together for mutual benefit. The energy of an additional ‘soul’ for want of a better word would make the host stronger, healthier, and much higher-functioning on a mental level. Sometimes that higher function would create geniuses.”
“Like Elvis,” said Peers, chuckling.
“Like Socrates, maybe,” said Kamal, not returning the laugh. “Like Leonardo da Vinci, whom the Initiate named itself after.”
“Da Vinci was an alien?” said Peers.
“A hybrid. But it was only a theory, based on all sorts of criteria the Initiate drew up.”
“Who else?”
“They proposed that there were probably several hybrids here at any time, though they had no idea how many. I don’t remember their list of possibilities. But they were all names I knew — every one of them. Maybe that’s because the Initiate had no way to look up unremarkable people to identify them, or maybe it’s because the symbiont made them stand out. Gandhi was another. A few — but curiously not all — of the Dalai Lamas. Einstein, maybe? Most if not all of the biggest religious figures proposed to have actually walked the planet.”
