by Mark Kraver
With that final farewell, Numen switched him off and continued to disassemble his lost companion with the efficiency of a skilled technician. Lifting a lever inside Armilus’ mouth, Numen disconnected his head with a hydrolytic hissing sound. He looked at the disarticulated head in his hands and asked out loud to himself, “I wonder if you will dream?”
After placing the head on a benchtop charging plate to sustain the vitality of the mitochondrial-core, Numen reached down the decapitated seraph’s neck to pull out the spinal memory. Tickling his dexterous fingers deep into the upper torso, he felt something unexpected. A tight ultra-thin filament rested over the core’s release switch. What could its purpose be, he thought to himself, reviewing the schematics in a near infinite loop before deciding to proceed as if it were not there. After all, if it wasn’t important enough to be on the schematics, it wasn’t important enough to bother with—buzz … pop!
Sparks stimulated Numen’s fingertip for an instant, sending a strange cool sensation through his arm and into his head. Then as quickly as the feeling came, it was gone. Very carefully, he released the memory core, pulled it free from the spinal column, and placed it inside a nearby ornately-decorated hibernation storage pod that sealed immediately.
That was simple, he thought, noting all of the seraph’s memory was stored inside this spinal column core and not scattered throughout his endo and exoskeleton in layers of redundant algorithms, like his own memory storage system.
Numen sat for a moment without moving a single relay, reflecting on Armilus’ long life. Reaching out to touch the storage pod, he wondered about all the adventures that had been recorded for his masters, both when he was known as Armilus and in more recent antons as Rogue. Then, as Numen stared at the pod, his thoughts drifted into what-ifs. What it would be like to recall all of those memories for himself? To learn from a multitude of experiences would be an invaluable resource for future reference. If he were to be faced with conditions that had, in the past, forced him to ‘wing it,’ he could review these files on the subject matter for possible solutions, he thought.
This idea was feeling overwhelming and compelling. As if driven by some alien force of will, every thought pathway he proceeded to take was moving him to the inevitable conclusion: he should take all the stored memories for his own.
He could think of no precedence for this type of backup, but felt an irresistible push to download Armilus’ stored memory core into his own. Disassemblement has never been done before, he thought. Maybe seraph-to-seraph transmission could become a new standard?
Numen opened the storage pod with a pop, hiss, reviewing the way the hardware configurations differed from his own. Ancient. This made perfect sense due to the time between manufacturing. Armilus was believed to have been made in a different universe—in the original Elohim universe from which Gog came from. Of course, Numen reminded himself, those stories about the mysterious Gog could also be myths conjured up to amuse inquiring minds. He had never found, in searching the annals of the Elohim’s long history, any reference to a different universe than their own.
Tapping a series of green glowing keys on the palm of his right hand, Numen downloaded Armilus’ entire quantum molecular database into his own partitioned memory. As the surging data stream dumped into his iridium-silicate memory, ghostly hallucinations flowed through his conscious circuitry. Snapshots of past memories bled over into his own memories, and became paralyzing. He could feel their presence; Armilus, Ra, Gog. Their consciousness spread though his systems like a virus. Were they trying to reconfigure his neural engrams? His consciousness? His sense of self? Was he becoming Armilus?
Struggling to save his mechanical soul, he threw up firewall after firewall, only for each one to be immediately torn down. He was losing himself. Was this Armilus’ plan? To infect him with ill-ware? He could feel it all slipping away. He resisted the demon inside, and concentrated on raising his right hand. Something was fighting him, and his hand quivered against the enormous force exerted to prevent his movements. Pure strength of will was all Numen had at his command. Focusing all his remaining systems to this one task, his finger extended, and his hand approached his face. He could hear something echoing in his active memory. Was it laughter? Was it Armilus?
Numen’s finger shook violently against the internal stress of his own thoughts. His finger continued to rise until it reached his right ocular sensor. Further he forced his finger into his eye socket until it was completely inside his skull and touching his kill switch. The laughter in his head turned into screams. Scream, screaming, screams.
“Help!” he tele-blasted one last final message in all directions. And then silence.
Numen was dead.
The telepathic alarm echoed throughout the station’s interior, ringing in the inner ear of every Elohim onboard. Zenith and Yahweh were supervising the installation of a new navigational console on the bridge when the silence shouted out. Yahweh’s eyes shifted to his daughter and they both bolted for the door, leaving Reeze behind.
“Hey, what happened?” Reeze shouted after them.
Crackling lights sparkled inside Numen’s ocular circuitry as Yahweh pulled the dead finger out of his companion’s inanimate eye socket. The gesture rebooted Numen and he began twitching back to life.
“Reboo—Arm—memor—Happy Con-scious-nesss Day,” Numen said, his systems restarting as he again became conscious. “I am not sure who said that or where I am. Wait, it is all coming to me now.”
“Are you, all right?” Yahweh asked. He was not familiar with a seraph’s ability to turn itself off.
“Yes, now I understand,” Numen said, still not making any sense.
“Do you know who you are?” Zenith asked, leaning over him.
“I am Eos.”
“Eos?” she asked.
“If I am to impersonate a deity, I should choose a believable one.”
“I can see my father’s humor subroutines have come online,” Yahweh said.
“Hello, my master?” Numen said to Zenith. “I am your personal seraph.”
“Do you have a designation?” Yahweh asked, moving closer to question him.
“No, I do not have a designation as of this date.” Numen blinked his ocular sensors and focused on Yahweh’s face. “I was told you had not decided what to name me yet.”
“I named you Numen,” he said.
“Numen, I will enter that into my memory bank. Thank you.”
Yahweh looked at Zenith with a grave thought. “What could have gone so wrong he felt his only choice was to shut down?”
“Forgive me, it seems I am having a conflict between two systems.”
“When were these systems created?” asked Yahweh.
“The most recent system was created on 3,141,592,668X106, and the other has no creation date. How is that possible?”
“That was the date when we left Helios. He must have a corrupt system file,” Yahweh said to Zenith. “Access the date stamped system for your command functions.”
“My pleasure—” Numen twitched twice, “Master Yahweh?”
“Numen report,” Yahweh asked.
“One moment—” Numen turned and looked at Armilus lying disassembled on the workbench. “I removed the core memory and secured it inside a storage pod. This had never been done before. Without precedents, I improvised. I partitioned my own memory and downloaded a copy into my—”
“You have Armilus inside you?” Zenith gasped.
“You could say that,” he answered.
“Numen, when we found you, you had done a hard shutdown. I thought I had lost you. What could drive you to end your own life?” Yahweh asked, tears pooling in his young eyes.
“I am not sure. That area of memory seems to have been corrupted.”
“Do you feel competent enough to proceed with the extraction of Armilus’ guidance system?” Zenith asked, taking over for her distraught father.
Numen turned toward Armilus and, without a word, reached his han
d down the seraph’s decapitated neck, manipulated several components deep inside the bowels of Armilus’ superstructure, and retrieved the guidance system—a fist-sized golden sphere.
“What will you do about Armilus’ partitioned memory inside Numen?” Zenith asked Yahweh, but Numen answered.
“I will have to develop a conversation program before I can safely access the records. This can be done during idle system demands,” he said, staring at his distorted reflection in the shiny gold ball.
Numen walked into the command center cradling the metallic navigation sphere in his hands. Yahweh and Zenith followed him to the repaired console.
“Will it work?” Yahweh asked.
“It has all the required components for navigation. If it fails, you can always use my navigation system components. Or if you wish, Ba’s components. We are after all machines.”
Both Numen and Yahweh looked down at the encapsulated remains of Alex’s dead body next to the console.
Yahweh looked at his seraph. “It had to be done. Armilus had to pay for his misdeeds.”
“I know.” Numen placed the navigational sphere onto its pedestal holder and watched it descend into the instrument panel and disappear. A humming and flicker of lights indicated the navigational system had booted-up and was back online.
Yahweh sighed with relief. “Run a diagnostic,” he said, “calculate another intercept orbit and let's get this show on the road.”
Numen stood silently on the deck and started the navigational diagnostic check. Memories of Armilus that were stored in his vast memory banks were flashing through his mind. He had witnessed many human deaths on Earth, but had never experienced this kind of loss before. Certainly, Logan and Conrad’s deaths were memorable, but he hadn’t thought he would ever experience the death of a fellow seraph, especially by his own hands.
Yahweh watched his seraph for a moment before realizing he recognized the confused expression on his companion’s face. It was the same look he’d seen when they’d witnessed feathered primitive Ice Age hunters slaughtering that mastodon all those years ago.
“The moon will be in its proper position in six hundred sixty-six sectons. Bring the planetary reactors up to pull power,” Numen said, taking command of the exodus once again. “Initiating full power from ground stations Morocco, Madagascar, Namibia, Har Megiddo, Nepal, and Sumatra on my mark. Mark. Full power from ground stations Tokyo, Sydney, Hawaii, Colorado, Ecuador, and Brazil on my mark— and mark.”
The people of the moon stood outside in the cold, biting air of the Namibia station as the whole structure began to vibrate with full power. Flickering bolts of lightning fanned out into an umbrella of rainbow colors as gravity aligned their energy into individual polarized wavelengths of light like a beautiful rainbow over the station. They watched as, in the night sky, the invisible graviton beam locked onto their lunar homeland with enough force to initiate a perpetual earthquake around the station. Surrounding glacier cliffs began to break apart and move around the base station at an accelerated rate as the ground continued to shake.
“To the shelter,” Joop ordered. But everyone stood silent, supported by gravity boots and belts, watching their home high in the sky engage their base station with enough force to shove it out of its orbit around the planet.
“Hold full power. All systems are stable. Wait for my mark. Five, four, three, two, one. Mark. Initiating lunar propulsion,” Numen said, as Jerusalem rocked.
“Power relays are all at one hundred percent of normal,” Zaar reported, bracing himself at his console.
Numen couldn’t help but think about when Logan launched her satellite all those life-times ago. None of this would be possible with only the primitive man-ape technology. He just hoped he hadn’t waited too long for the exodus or all of this effort to save the Earth and its population would have been in vain.
They could not see the moon with their naked eye in Jerusalem’s command center because it was eclipsed by the planet, but could feel its push. Ground sensors on the opposite side of the Earth were capturing a three-dimensional image of the moon, which was displaying beautifully in real time on the large wall monitor. The illuminated wall gave onlookers the effect of looking straight through the planet.
Yahweh waved his hand over his control panel’s floating spheres and the image of the moon dissolved; in its place appeared a closeup of the Namibia station. On the large screen everyone on the command deck of Jerusalem could see the faces of the moonys watching their home die before their very eyes.
In the night sky the moon didn’t look any smaller, but the people of the moon knew each and every night thereafter, their homeland would be farther and farther away until it would disappear from the sky forever. From here forward, the daylight each morning would grow brighter and hotter as their planet plunged into an elliptical orbit towards the sun. Within the year all the glacier would be gone, leaving flooded continents and unprecedented destruction before entering the Halo for the final exodus of this planet from the solar system.
Zenith and Reeze were standing inside the doorway, watching. Reeze’s shoulders shuddered as tears continued to fall down her wet cheeks. The magnitude of all that had happened in a single day had caught up with her, and losing her home was now a reality. Yahweh looked at Zenith, frowned, and nodded his head toward the poor girl. Zenith knew she had never been an emotional person, but felt the primitive instinct to nurture her niece. She slipped an arm around Reeze’s shoulder and pulled the weeping girl to her bosom.
The graviton beams were so powerful, pieces of the moon had broken off into outer space, leaving a trail of debris like the tail of a giant comet. The earthquakes underway on the planet would have lasted all day and all night for what would have been a lunar month if the moon was still in orbit. Tsunamis were forming in all the oceans, though not as dramatically as they would have if most of the water was not locked up inside the new Ice Age glaciers.
Massive loss of fauna and flora was already underway, which was to be expected with such a worldwide catastrophe of earthquakes, tectonic volcanoes, mountainous landslides, and tidal flooding. Numen watched the large screen, remembering that this was one of the reasons Logan had long ago insisted on building a representative zoo and botanical garden of the major genera on Jerusalem. She had read Earth’s history and was intrigued by ancient Mesopotamian and Biblical stories of building an Ark for the animals of the flooded planet. In addition to housing hibernating physical specimens on the station, Logan had ensured a complete genetic code of all life on the planet was stored in a memory vault for easy retrieval.
Once at their destination around the star Heaven, Logan had explained, they could determine if there had been any extinctions along the way; then, using Elohim technology, it would be a simple job to recreate the plant or animal from their genetic sequence.
Numen felt a wave of fulfillment flowing through his active circuitry as he reviewed his plans in a near infinite loop. He filed the sensations he was experiencing under the name ‘Satisfaction’ for further analysis during idle downtime.
The connectome came alive with troubled thoughts:
“What would you have done without Numen?” Lanochee asked.
“Ba?” asked Nadira.
“No, he is too ordinary, too reserved,” Lanochee said.
“Armilus?” she dared to ask.
“I cannot think of any greater need than that of a loyal companion,” Yahweh answered.
Chapter 73
If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?
Khalil Gibran, 1883-1931, Earth
Library of Souls
The Queen
As the planet spun towards the solar system’s dying star, Yahweh slept in his pod. It was a long, hot six-month orbit around the sun. Since the beginning of the exodus, Jerusalem had been increasing the spin of the Earth to dissipate the accumulated heat on the planet’s surface into outer space. Each day the planet got closer to the fiery ball in the sky,
more water gushed from the glaciers, covering the rapidly-advancing shorelines with rising seas. Thousands of tributaries joined together to produce gigantic serpentine rivers that washed deep gorges over the increasingly unfamiliar landscapes. Massive continent-wide oceanic cyclones spawned in every body of water and bathed the planet in streaming hot rain and blistering winds. At the Earth’s closest approach to the sun, outside the orbit of the planet Venus, the surface of the orphaned world was so hot it almost spontaneously combusted. If not for the indestructible domes build into each graviton base station, the human population of the planet would have surely perished.
After months of scorching hot days and nights, the Earth was moving away from the dying sun for the last time. People of the Earth began to venture out of their sanctuaries to start the arduous task of restoring the surface of the planet. The moonys continued tunneling into the ground wherever they could in attempts to make the Earth more like their lost home on the moon. As the Earth’s long elliptical pathway spiraled past its original distance from the sun, Jerusalem’s solar array ignited into a second star in the heavens. Moving deeper into the outer reaches of the solar system, the solar array grew brighter and brighter, as the sun’s light grew dimmer.
It was not a very eventful life onboard the spacious, protected space station, as it traveled around the sun on its way to rendezvous with the Halo. The Halo was currently located outside the orbit of Mars, around the asteroid belt, and closing fast. Reeze spent her spare time in the Ark studying all the various plants and animals hibernating there. She marveled at how magnificent some sea and land-based animals were and wished she could have seen them all in the wild. She liked the different varieties of dogs and cats, rabbits and kangaroos, and often imagined herself playing with them around the station.
Reviewing a list of the now-extinct animals on Earth she was beginning to wonder what the world would look like if the dinosaurs had never died off, when her thoughts were interrupted by a movement in her peripheral vision. She continued on for another moment as if she hadn’t seen until she whipped her motion activated sparkling hair around with a “Ha!” and caught the little sneak watching her.
