The Awakening: Imortum

by JK Stone

  “Couldn’t you do something to prevent the Esulan from dying?” Jason asked, then he added, “You did say this is a time ship.”

  “We considered it, and if the measure to eradicate the human life from Earth had gained traction, we would have intervened, but the fallout from the event was not significant enough to alter, not to mention we have had a lot more pressing events to rectify,” Alise said with a shrug.

  Jason’s head was spinning, and he muttered, “Wow, that is a lot to take in.”

  Alise looked him up and down. “I can inform you about what we do on this ship later if you wish. For now, how about we take a break and I give you a tour?”

  Now it was Jason’s turn to chuckle. “That shouldn’t take long,” he said, then he added, “I’ve already strolled around when I was looking for the exit, and then again for food. We have the control room where I almost lost my life,” he said with a sardonic smile, “the dressing room with the space suits, the shower room to keep me clean and the bedroom where I am to sleep. Although I do believe that bed will need padding because that thing is hard as…” he drifted off as he thought, And there she goes with the laughter again. Then he waited for her to regain her composure before breaking in. “Okay, what am I missing?” he asked.

  Chapter Five

  Alise really did have an infectious laugh. Jason didn’t know why, but he let out a little chuckle of his own.

  Alise regained herself and said, “This is not a bedroom, but you already figured that out. You were close. It is, in fact, a medical treatment room. Could you stand here a moment please?” She motioned for him to stand away from the exam table.

  Alise tapped something on the monitor, and he heard a hum as his deceased relative disappeared from the floor and reappeared on the medical table with a flash.

  Jason watched as Alise strode over, looked down at Elgon’s remains and let out a soft sigh. She slowly zipped the body bag and said something he couldn’t quite understand. Then she went back to the monitor, pressed another button and with another hum and flash his body disappeared.

  As Alise returned to him she said, “Okay, now on with the tour.”

  Jason looked over at her and asked, “What did you do with Elgon?”

  Alise paused a second. “Elgon’s last wish was to have his remains placed in the same location as his wife and child.”

  Astounded Jason asked, “You’re able to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  Jason looked at her beseechingly. “Could you do that for me as well? Lay me to rest with my brothers. When I die that is,” he added hopefully.

  Alise looked hesitantly at him. “We can discuss that at a later date. Follow me,” she said as she exited the room.

  Alise entered the corridor and headed toward what he had assumed was the shower room, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  When Alise entered the next room, she said, “This is the decontamination room or Decon. Upon entering the vessel after any and all missions, you will go through this room. All sensitive areas of the ship will be inaccessible until a decontamination sweep has been performed, or I bypass the protocol. At that time, the door will open allowing you into the medical room, where you can then be given a complete scan and repair of any damage that may have been done to your body if any is required.”

  Shocked by that statement Jason asked, “Okay, so if this ship can repair damage, then why didn’t Elgon just heal himself?”

  With a sigh, Alise looked back at him. “Of all my hosts, Elgon was the biggest risk taker. I knew he felt great agony and guilt about rushing to confront his fellow Lantins over their betrayal because it resulted in his wife and child’s deaths. This guilt triggered an obsessive need to protect people, which resulted in his many injuries. Not to mention making a few enemies along the way.

  “The medical unit can repair most injuries, so long as the repairs can be completed before brain death occurs, but there is a limit to how many times it can be used on a living being. Elgon surpassed the maximum limit several times over, resulting in regeneration errors. This last mission we were on he was caught in an explosion. His injuries were too severe, and as you know he did not survive it.”

  Jason contemplated that for a second before asking her, “How many times can someone use the medical unit safely? And why am I still in pain from the bonding if the medical unit can heal wounds?”

  Alise seemed to think over her response before saying, “The number of uses depends on the severity of the damage sustained. The more damage needing to be repaired, the fewer overall number of times you can safely use it. In Elgon’s case, it was twelve hundred and thirty-three times for life-threatening wounds.”

  Alise looked at him sympathetically and said, “As to why you are still in pain, I did not use the medical unit to heal you. Not knowing you were injured, I did not think to use it. Even so, your pain would not have merited a medical repair that might be needed in the future for more severe injuries. The pain you are feeling will diminish with time as the bonding process completes, and the chlorophyll replicates throughout your system.”

  Jason looked Alise in the eyes and said, “So Elgon was on this ship and needed to be healed twelve hundred and thirty-three times over the fifteen thousand years?”

  “Actually, Elgon was on this ship a little over thirty-seven thousand years in your time reference.”

  Jason just stared back in shock. “How can that be? You said he only bonded with you fifteen thousand years ago.”

  Alise let out another sigh and said, “You are thinking in linear time. Let me try to explain. With this ship, you could quite literally spend a hundred thousand years in here from the day we picked you up, then die tomorrow on Earth and in linear time you would just be a day older. Elgon spent your equivalent of thirty-seven thousand years aboard this vessel.”

  “Okay…so, how does a mortal being such as myself survive that long then?” Jason asked.

  Alise cracked a warm smile. “You already know how. The chlorophyll in your veins gives you minor regenerative abilities. Aside from healing your wounds, it will also prolong your lifespan. It is one of the side effects from the mixing of the DNA, but the extended life works great for our purposes.”

  Alise pointed down the next corridor. “Let us proceed to the next room.”

  As Alise entered she gestured. “This room is the mission preparedness room or ‘Prep’ room. If you place your hand on the wall here and say ‘weapons’, the passage will open for you, see?”

  Jason’s jaw dropped as he watched the wall seem to dissolve and an archway appeared allowing them access to more weapons than he’d ever seen in one location. And that was saying something because he’d seen some very well stocked military armories in the past. The room seemed to defy the laws of physics. He knew the ship wasn’t nearly large enough to have a room in that direction, but there they were.

  Alise smirked, placed her hand on the wall again and said, “Armor,” and another passage opened in the same location, but this time there was a huge supply of clothing and armor that looked like movie props.

  Jason just stared and said, “What the…?”

  Alise let out a laugh. “The items in these rooms are stored in a dematerialized state until you call for them. It saves on space and makes it so the ship isn’t cluttered. The room you are looking into is not really that large, it is an optical illusion. For the most part, we only bring up the display and summon the items we need.”

  Alise motioned to him and said, “Shall we proceed?”

  “Lead on,” Jason said and they headed down the corridor to the final room. They entered and Jason immediately noticed a difference. Where the voice was once speaking in an unknown language, now he could understand every word of the repeating message.

  “Time displacement protocol engaged… One hundred twenty hours until automatic disengage,” the voice stated.

  Alise’s gaze settled on the console. “This is the control room, and here is the mission control console. Al
l ship functions aside from medical can be controlled from this location.”

  She touched the console and said, “Computer, cancel automated countdown warning.” And the sounds in the room were reduced to a slight hum.

  Jason sighed and cheerfully whispered, “Peace and quiet.”

  Alise just gave him a smirk and said, “It could have been a lot sooner if you were not so stubborn about attaching my binding disk.”

  “With my history, do you blame me?” Jason asked with a raised brow.

  Alise seemed to examine him thoroughly, then nodded gravely. “Point taken.”

  Jason looked at the console, and this time he noted another difference. He could understand what was on the display. Well, most of it at least. He exclaimed, “I can read some of this now. It all looked like gibberish to me before.”

  Alise smiled. “That is due to the bonding. The rest of it will come with time.”

  Jason smirked at Alise and said, “Speaking of time, I told you the tour wouldn’t take long.”

  Alise grinned wickedly back at him and said, “Who said we were finished?”

  Chapter Six

  Jason was confused as to where they could be headed next, but followed as Alise approached the inner wall of the control room, raised her hand, pressed it to the smooth metal surface and said, “Entry,” and immediately an archway appeared to the left of her hand and opened.

  Jason stared in stunned disbelief and said, “It is a good thing I didn’t know about that before the bonding or I would’ve been out of here before the door was fully open and we would never have met.”

  Alise smiled back at him. “It would not have done you any good. It will only open with a bonded commander, or by granting specific permissions to any guests you may have. Besides, I would have hunted you down like the dirty dog you are,” Alise said, then she laughed quietly as she eyed him up and down.

  Acting shocked and hurt, and knowing full well that he must be as ripe as one of his nephew’s diapers, he replied, “Are you saying I stink?”

  “Honestly? Yes, but we can deal with that in a moment.” Alise let out a throaty chuckle, and Jason followed her in with a chuckle of his own.

  Jason just shook his head with a smile. “This has been the most fun bantering I’ve had in a long time! Typically, nobody gets my humor, and they always think I’m just being rude. My brothers were the only ones who ever got it.” His cheerfulness faded a little at reminding himself of his brother’s condition.

  “From an outside perspective, I could see the misunderstanding, but being bonded with you makes this form of conversation more interesting.”

  Jason asked, “If the controls only work with a bonded commander, then how was I able to activate that blue button?”

  Alise chuckled. “when you pressed the button, Elgon had just pressed the binding disk into your hand. It was in contact with your skin at the time and allowed you to activate the button. One of my concerns was that if you were still holding the disk and managed to open the exit, you could have escaped, and if my disk left the ship with me in it, there would have been nobody left to control the ship because I was stuck in the disk until you applied it. Luckily you put it down before looking for the exit.”

  Jason followed Alise a few steps into the next room and he heard a slight laughter echo in his head.

  The room turned out to be another corridor with a wall directly in front of them and two narrower corridors on either side running at a right angle to each other.

  “Right in front of us is the engine room. Some people might refer to it as engineering, but it really is not that big.”

  Alise then pressed her hand on the wall in front of them saying, “Entry.”

  The wall dissolved to allow them access and they went in. The room was around fourteen feet square with narrower forty-five-degree corners and what he saw in the room surprised him. Positioned in the center of the room about five feet from the walls was the engine she spoke of, and it was nothing more than a box about two feet squared that extended from the floor to the ceiling. Lights flickered here and there, but not a sound was emanating from it.

  “It’s very quiet for an engine,” he remarked, somewhat in awe.

  Alise placed her hand on it. “It usually is. This is an engine of sorts, though it would probably be more accurately referred to as a generator. This ship runs on an ion-dark matter reaction. When used correctly it will power our vessel, propel us through space or as you found out by pressing the little blue button…alter the fabric of time.

  “One of our last missions had to deal with this technology. It actually destroyed their solar system and caused a chain reaction that would have eventually affected neighboring galaxies.”

  “Crap! What idiots did that?” Jason asked.

  Alise let out a loud snort. “Idiots? Yes, I guess you have the right to call them that. The idiots were here on Earth.”

  Jason just looked at her dumbfounded before asking, “Earth?”

  “Yes.” Alise looked appraisingly at him, then paused as if gathering her thoughts. “I think now might be a good time to fill you in on what we do here. Lifeforms throughout the universe have always had a natural drive for knowledge and to reach out and explore. It was found a very long time ago that some species do not wish to take the time to learn properly and in a rush for advancement, safety is sometimes overlooked to the detriment of themselves and others.

  “In their zeal for advancement, they either overlook or ignore safety altogether. When that happens it usually causes destruction, and depending on the extent we will intervene, as was the case with Earth. Your scientists at the Hadron Collider overlooked a safety precaution and the resulting particle collision caused a chain reaction. It was more than a minor planetary incident, so we intervened and prevented the incident from happening.”

  Jason was stunned. “How did you accomplish that?” he asked.

  “Elgon and I arrived about three hundred years after the event and found this solar system had been scorched by a thermionic chain reaction, and the galaxy’s movement was altered, putting it on an eventual collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. We did a systematic analysis and discovered the reaction had originated on Earth. It was not much of a surprise since Earth was the only inhabited planet.

  “We tracked the blast backward until we located the point and time of origination, and we discovered a safety monitor switch had been left off. We knew something was amiss because we had passed that point in time several times before and the solar system was fine.

  We went back to a time well before that incident. Elgon donned his displacement suit and caused a minor equipment failure at the Hadron Collider that resulted in the equipment being re-evaluated. During the evaluation process, they came to the conclusion the safeties should never be allowed to be disengaged. It did not hurt that Elgon also got into their computer systems and sent messages to all of the developers about safety issues. Those messages rattled around until nobody really knew where they had originated, but at least that is a problem that should not happen again.”

  “Well, that sounds easy enough.”

  “Yes, that one was. It was an accident or at least we thought it was. The last fifteen thousand linear years have had us all over the universe restoring timelines and preventing catastrophes. There has been a serious increase in events and we have even seen an increased number of attacks on our ship as well.

  “Because of those attacks, we changed our protocol and we try to stay out of real time and phase as much as possible. Like I said, there has been a serious increase in events and now it is your job and mine to sort them out.

  “Some races out there try to profit from the destruction others bring upon themselves and for the most part we allow it to happen. It is a kind of scavenging or mining. Unless the disaster is perpetrated by another race, or it has effects beyond the world that caused it, we allow it to proceed.

  “We have a rather large list of events to rectify and a lot of incidents
to look into when we have the time, which lately we have not had. Our most pressing concern is going to be dealing with the event that killed Elgon, but you will need training first, then we will look into why we could not find your family in the future.”

  Jason was a little shocked at hearing that and asked, “So, that is why you saved Earth? because it affected another galaxy as well?” Jason asked.

  Alise looked appraisingly at him before saying, “For the most part, yes, but you were the main reason.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “We knew Elgon’s time was running short and after the modifications we made to the ship there was only you… Well, one of your direct family, and they were all on Earth. Actually, there were two others, your uncle, and cousin who were still alive. But your uncle was not even considered because he was in worse shape than your father and brother combined along with being married, and your cousin Jeff is married to two women, not to mention he is in that maximum security prison—

  “He’s where?” Jason barked out.

  Alise looked hard at him. “Oh, you did not know. Jeff has been incarcerated, and most likely will never be released. Calling it a maximum-security prison is incorrect though. He is actually in a place called ADX Florence, in Florence, Colorado. That prison is in fact considered a Supermax prison by your people.”

  Jason’s heart felt as though it had fallen out of his chest, and she seemed to peer deep into his mind and exclaimed, “Something is not right. The odds of all of this happening within this bloodline at the same time are astronomical!”

  “What now?” Jason asked as his nerves took a shot.

  Alise stared right into his eyes and said, “I saw Jeff throughout the years in your mind, and the circumstances of his conviction are not consistent with his personality traits. Jeff was originally convicted of possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to one year in a minimum-security ‘country club’ prison, as you would call it.

  “That is within the bounds of his profile. On his way to that prison, an incident occurred that left everyone except him dead. Jeff was found guilty of murdering the guards and fellow prisoners on that transport in a failed escape attempt. That earned him a one-way passage to ADX. Elgon had thought to investigate how and why Jeff ended up in prison, but he was fading too fast and he only had the time to collect you,” Alise explained.