by Mark Kraver
“Are we underwater? Please say no,” Yahweh said, still trying to shake off the crash.
“No,” replied Numen.
“‘No?’ No what? No, we are underwater, or no, we are not underwater?”
Numen shook his head, trying to follow his master’s logic. “No, we are not underwater. Yet.”
“What does that mean?” asked Yahweh, reining in his frustration by floating his hand over an instrument panel to analyze their situation himself.
“We landed on a wide peninsular landmass next to a river. The impact crater we created is filling with water. We will be underwater in sixty-six minutes,” Numen said.
“Then engage the antigrav pods, and pull us out of this hole,” ordered Yahweh.
“But, master,” Numen said.
Yahweh shot him a ‘don’t-give-me-any-crap’ look that Numen immediately filed away in the ‘Dissatisfaction’ file for future cataloging and analysis.
“Anti-gravitational pods initiating now,” Numen robotically announced. A rumble shook them as the engine pylons holding the pods snapped in two and rolled the ship’s hull, shearing the engines off to hover over the craft like zeppelins on parade. The jolt had hurled Numen across the cabin and into Yahweh’s lap.
“Whoops,” said Numen, his graviton emitters stopping him inches from Yahweh’s face.
Yahweh glared, “At least the pods work.”
“It would be better if they were still attached to the ship,” Numen said, levitating off his master’s chest and resuming his station.
“Disengage the pods, we need a timeout,” Yahweh said. “Let’s get out of this bucket, examine the damage, and have a look around.”
“Excuse me master, but do you consider all the possibilities before you decide what to do, or—”
“Or what? Wing it?” Yahweh snapped. “What do you think?”
“Considering the shape we are in now, I had to wonder.”
Numen waved his hand over the starboard wall of the cabin, and the light of the nearby star began to stream through thousands of enlarging pinholes until there was a complete opening in the side of the spacecraft. The steaming impact crater loomed before them, smoldering with mud-popping fumaroles. Their gravity suits’ graviton emitters shimmered, lifting them both into the air, out of the ship, over the edge of the impact crater, and past the debris field. Numen directed his attention to the damaged ship and analyzed the spider webbed scorch patterns across its iridium hull.
“Could have been worse,” he calculated.
“Worse?”
“My scans of the Bot ships showed a formidable array of weaponry. Probably used to cut open planets. These blast marks indicate they used their weakest force, boson torpedoes. They knew right where to hit us to do the least amount of damage,” Numen reported.
“We were lucky,” Yahweh sighed.
They stood on the bank of the river looking over a sea of grass, spotted with the occasional hammock of tall trees. A grass fire burned in a long serpentine line on the other side of the river. The acrid smell of smoke tickled Yahweh’s nose and backpack sensors.
“What did you intercept from Ra and El?” Yahweh asked.
“The Bot ambush caught them by surprise, as well.”
Yahweh felt a wave of worry move through his stomach. They too had been brought down by the Bots. He pushed the thought aside and looked at his ship. “Crashing. How embarrassing,” he said, shaking his head in disgust and kicking a small rock into the water.
“El is in deep sleep mode, and Ra is not responding.”
“Not responding? That cannot be so,” Yahweh said. “She hasn’t yet fulfilled her life cycle.”
“I understand, but her life force is no longer continuous with the feedback loop of her seraph, Rogue.”
Yahweh frowned at the mention of Rogue’s name.
“I have the feedback loop online with Baal, El’s seraph, but it is not a good connection,” continued Numen. “It may be malfunctioning. Are you still attempting a rescue?”
Yahweh squinted at the sun overhead and thought for a second. “No,” he said. “I have nothing to offer except another wrecked ship. Let them sleep. It is the only thing we can do if help doesn’t arrive soon.”
Yahweh glanced toward the roaring echoes across the river. The battle between a flock of feathered hunters and the wounded pachyderm raged on. The massive animal stomped through the cypress tree lined riverbank, trying to escape its tormentors, only to be bogged down in the mud. Its pursuers took advantage of the creature’s misfortune, rushing knee-deep into the water and thrusting more spears into the thrashing beast.
“Look over there,” Yahweh said. “Hominin. Primitive, but intelligent. Isn’t that amazing? I wonder how they made it this far from their Creators.”
“Traveling at a slow rate of speed over the centuries in pursuit of megafauna, all the while collecting edible plants, roots, fruit, nuts, and insects,” Numen answered, flicking off his shoulder a giant grasshopper.
Yahweh looked at Numen with amusement. He had asked a simple question and Numen had responded in his usual succinct fashion, but he couldn’t help but marvel at the thought that Numen enjoyed watching him bumble through life. Yahweh had never considered that a seraph companion could have the ability to enjoy anything. Yes, he was programmed for compatibility, but this didn't account for his improvised behavior. No, he thought, Numen must be making it up as he goes along, just like I am.
“I wonder how far their primitive tool-making capabilities have come, and what kinds of rituals they have adopted,” Yahweh said. He was waiting for Numen’s response, but Numen stood quietly, observing the sapient hominin stab the beast with their sharp sticks until the animal was awash in blood.
Yahweh watched Numen’s face as the beast took each blow; after a moment, he waved his hand in front of Numen’s eyes to see if he could be distracted.
Numen blinked a few times and commented, “See how they work as a team to subdue that animal? They must have set that fire to push it into their trap.”
“Excellent deduction,” said Yahweh. “How does that make you feel?”
“Master, I fail to see the benefit in finding these primitives. They cannot help us,” he said and continued his analysis of the situation.
“No, they can’t. Not yet. We’d better get to the ship and secure the perimeter.” Yahweh looked toward the impact crater, then turned back and saw his companion still enthralled by the barbarism across the river. “I wonder how much water has covered the ship?”
Numen blinked and redirected his attention to their crash site.
The two floated back toward their crippled spacecraft. As they approached, Yahweh noticed something stirring in the debris. On the other side of the crater’s lip stood two young boys dressed in oversized animal skins.
Not old enough to hunt mastodons, they had been left behind in the village to help the women prepare the campsite for the anticipated feast. Their eyes were as wide as exploding stars; their mouths were black holes watching the two figures float over fallen trees, boulders and swampy mud.
“Look,” said Numen.
“I see them. We should polarize our graviton emitters, so they cannot see us,” Yahweh said.
They each tapped one of the seven glowing green relays in the palm of their right hands and vanished. The two adolescent boys craned their necks, searching for them.
By polarizing their graviton emitters a few degrees in either direction, Yahweh and Numen redirected the light reflecting off their bodies, making them invisible. Photons of light, although massless, are still influenced by gravity; so, by rotating high-speed, tiny intensive S-shaped divergent and convergent graviton waves over the outside surfaces of their gravity suits, Yahweh and Numen could not only appear invisible, but could change their appearance from who they really were to someone or something else. This simple trick of gravity had long allowed the Elohim to study specimens up close. Distance was the key to this trickery. The farther the onlooker
was from the emitters, the more convincing the visual effect would seem.
“I don’t think they are fully developed, do you?” Yahweh asked.
“Inconclusive. There are many references to Elohim members of this size and stature. However, their cranial capacity is too small to qualify,” Numen concluded.
Yahweh considered Numen’s words. “Not enough cranial capacity. Homo sapiens, not Homo superior. Thought so. I’m afraid, my dear Numen, that we have arrived too soon in the development of this planet for anyone to repair our ship. Ra and El have stumbled.”
“And so, have we.”
“Yes,” Yahweh conceded, concerned about his companion’s frankness. He had expected Numen to counter with data he hadn’t considered, perhaps a strategy for extracting themselves from this unforeseen trap. Instead, his seraph was equating their predicament to that of Ra and El, the very Elohim whom they’d been sent here to rescue.
Yahweh and Numen floated down inside the crater and hovered over their half-submerged craft.
“I guess this is as good a place as any to wait. Come, Numen. I’ve already wasted too much time on this planet,” Yahweh said. Every minute he spent outside of his hibernation pod, he was aging, using up his precious anton of life. “It’s obvious that a great deal of techno-social development and evolution will have to take place before these savages will be sophisticated enough to rework our ship. Open the portal hatch, please.”
Numen raised his hand, and the side of the ship dematerialized below the waterline. Then, as if swept away with a puff of wind, the waters blocking the entrance cleared and Yahweh descended into the ship’s interior. As Numen moved toward the bowels of the craft, he depolarized his graviton emitters. His ocular relays caught the boys’ eyes, and he waved a farewell; the boys turned on their heels and fell over each other racing back toward their campsite, screaming.
“Fascinating,” said Numen.
“The natives know we are here,” Yahweh said. “Maybe they’ll build a temple over us. That’s a comforting thought, don’t you think?”
Numen didn’t respond as he recompiled the integrity of the ship’s hull, and the light from the nearby star faded from view.
“What’s gotten into you?” Yahweh asked. “You’ve acted strangely ever since we left the spaceport on Helios,” Yahweh asked.
“Will we be rescued?” Numen asked.
Yahweh sighed. His seraph’s distracted comportment remained an enigma. “It doesn’t look good, I’ll grant you that,” Yahweh said. “Let’s look at our options. We can either wait, wait, or wait. Tough choices.”
Yahweh sat on a pedunculated protrusion in the floor that appeared next to his instrument console and crossed his arms. “We could wait to see if El or Ra come to our rescue. I put those chances at around point-six percent. El and Ra are either waiting for rescue from us or have discorporated to Eos. We could wait for the Elohim to rescue us, but I put those chances at about another point-six percent. It will take too long to transmit and receive help from Helios.”
Yahweh exhaled and glanced at the solar-limiter. “Besides,” he continued, “those pesky Bots are still out there, and for some reason they were left out of our mission briefing. We could also wait for this star to balloon into a red giant and consume this planet.”
Yahweh stood up again and stepped toward Numen. “One thing’s for sure: I won’t feel a thing, because I plan to sleep right through it. What about you?” He slapped Numen on the back. “Besides, we’ve got an ace in the hole, don’t you know.”
Numen looked to his master for his meaning.
“Those hominin out there,” Yahweh said. “No telling what a few antons of time will do to them. You wait and see. I plan to.” Yahweh sat back down and began twisting his body back and forth, checking instruments by hovering his hand over the floating spheres that popped up from each smooth panel.
Numen didn’t move. Sitting in the cabin of their disabled starship, he continued looking at his master for several minutes, without a word. Numen wondered which of his master’s three brains had allowed him to cope with his decision to hibernate. He suspected it was the one subsiding over behavior, his neural gut. Also, he knew, the microbiome living inside the mammalian intestines had evolved a sophisticated social interaction with the other two brains by producing a myriad of neuro-active compounds, fundamental to stress management.
Mining deeper into that train of logic, he tunneled through mitochondrial theory that stated these tiny powerhouse intracellular organelles found in every living organism in the universe were secret keys to life. A cellular symbiosis with its own DNA blueprint that influenced its host to do its bidding, the bidding of their God, Eos, if there was such a thing. Is Eos compelling my master to want to hibernate? he wondered. He then wondered if Eos was his God as well, since he too had mitochondria in his central processing unit. Am I alive —
Yahweh’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Yes, Numen, my friend, I’m afraid that without a little hominin techno-social development, we will both be lost forever. A sad fate, I admit, but there it is,” Yahweh said, walking over to his hibernation pod.
“I will send out a repeating rescue beacon so if anyone comes into this system, they will recover us, or at least be warned about the alphabiotic signatures,” Numen said. He began preparing the hibernation pod’s controls, computing that this could be the last service he would perform for his master.
“If we ever get out of this mess, it’ll be fifty-fifty from now on,” Yahweh said, as if that would make peace with his faithful companion’s strange programming quarks.
“Thank you, master. I’ll monitor your hibernation and then shut down everything but the beacon.”
“Numen, you’ve been a useful piece of equipment, an excellent seraph, and very comforting to me in these last moments.” Yahweh said, giving his seraph a last lingering look. He stepped into the hibernation pod, lay down, and curled into the fetal position. The door shut, sealing him in for what could be the rest of his life.
“That is what I live for,” said Numen, sending his master into deep sleep. He glanced at the solar limiter. “I hope we are found before—”
He paused. Numen knew he would not be able to shut down and would be fully aware when the nearby star erupted into a gigantic ball of fire, engulfing half the planets in this solar system. He shook his head at the thought and pursed his lips before finishing the thought: “—the Red giant.”
Yahweh’s hibernation pod filled with a clear solution and froze solid. The space pioneer stared off into the distant future. Numen adjusted floating spheres over several instrument panels with a wave of his golden hand. He was glad not to be hindered by the stress of the situation—or was he?
Sporadic discharges of free electrons were disrupting his normal programming, sending calculations down sequestered subroutines in unusual patterns that made resonating vibrations throughout his exoskeleton quantum molecular data banks. Numen wasn’t sure what was happening inside his mitochondria-core circuitry and filed the phenomenon under the name ‘Emotion,’ for further analysis.
He finished diagnostic tests on both himself and the ship, then enabled the deep space beacon before initiating the shutdown algorithms that plunged everything into darkness. The only thing Numen could see was a small glowing red light on the faceplate of Yahweh’s pod.
Numen sat gathering data for an amount of time that time only knew. He would have sat for time immemorial if it took that long to conceive their escape plan. He thought over all the possible permutations and considered their ramifications in a near infinite loop, coming up with the same possible outcomes— none of which were in the least satisfactory.
The one variable that he could not compute with any degree of certainty was evolution of the Homo sapiens of this planet. He knew all there was to know about the concrete concept, and he was programmed to manipulate its processes through breeding and gene-splicing techniques, but letting it run its own course was a different matter altogether.
Too many variations and too many pitfalls.
He was condensing variations of variables into mathematical formulas, crunching numbers and more numbers without satisfaction. Faster and faster his processors ran, as sexdecillions upon octodecillions of data streamed into a multiplicity of single concepts entered the centillions of evolutionary variables that he thought might be applicable to their dilemma.
Then, with a cessation of calculations, he concluded that there was no conclusion and said out loud in the darkness: “Unknown?”
Would this be his final answer? Would his master have accepted this? He thought not. So why would he output this null conclusion? Was this a flaw in his programming? Why could Yahweh come to a conclusion, and he could not? What did he do differently?
At the edge of his circuitry, he began to recall one of the last experiences he had shared with his master. Yahweh had ordered the antigravity pods engaged to raise the ship out of the impact crater when the damage control reports indicated the structural integrity of the pylons would not hold up to the stress. He could have assessed the damage report himself, but instead chose to...
“That’s it!” Numen exclaimed. His master had acted on impulse, ordering the first thing that came to his mind. He had called it ‘winging it.’ A gut-brain response? Could he dare ‘wing-it’ too? Numen considered what might happen if he tried. Would his mechanical ‘gut’ directed decisions be contrary to life? Would it be wrong?
Would there be a consequence? Numen analyzed possible outcomes. He could be disassembled, memory washed away and replaced with new data storage and programming. But how would that be any different from facing a red giant exploding star? He continued calculating these new variables until he concluded that it didn’t matter what he did, as long as he did something.
Do something. What a revolutionary idea. Why hadn’t he come up with this idea before? Probably because he had never been faced with these particular circumstances before. If he had been and failed to provide a satisfactory answer, his master would have been there to come up with an appropriate solution for him—or at least some attempt at ‘winging it.’ Now he wished his master had left him a list of pre-recorded holographic answers for him to review.
