by Mark Kraver
“And, without that core processor this automaton would disassemble you with the same efficiency if I told it to,” she said raising her eyebrow ridges. “Would you like to see its emergency protect mode?”
“This is highly irregular,” Dexter said, walking closer to Yahweh as Flora stood holding her found part. He looked positively flabbergasted by what he’d just heard from his tooth. “It is confirmed, you can have any special-order seraph you desire.” He noticed one seraph standing with the parts of another in its hands. “What is going on here?”
Yahweh disregarded Dexter’s comment. “Flora,” he said, “if you were having to live with a seraph for the rest of your life, what would you do?”
Dexter let out an annoyed sigh, perturbed that Yahweh was asking his subordinate and not him.
“I am not sure,” Flora said frowning, not comfortable with the attention she was receiving from the boy pioneer. “Ask him, not me.”
“I am not interested in his opinion.” Yahweh looked quickly at Dexter with an apologetic shrug. “It’s nothing personal I assure you, you just look like a rules man.” He redirected his attention to Flora. “I want your professional opinion. Surely, there are modifications that interest you? Something out of the ordinary?”
“I have—” Flora ventured to say before being cut off by her superior.
“Flora, I have told you—”
“Let her speak. Please,” Yahweh said without looking at Dexter. “You were saying?”
“If I were to have one of these following me around for the rest of my life…”
“Yes, go on,” he said, holding up a silencing finger to Dexter.
“I’d like it to think like me.”
“Oh no, here we go again,” Dexter blurted out.
Dexter’s irritation piqued Yahweh’s curiosity. She had obviously contemplated this very question before. “What?” Yahweh pushed. “How could a seraph think like me?”
“If we impressed your neural engrams into its personality subroutine,” Flora said, against Dexter’s protest.
“This has never been done before,” Dexter objected. “Besides, we do not have a seraph ready to be impressed and tested before your departure.”
“What would it take to do this?” Yahweh asked Flora.
“This is highly irregular,” Dexter protested again.
“You keep saying that. But the orders say whatever I desire, does it not? And I do not think the Nasi want to confront your incompetence again on this matter. Do you?”
“Incompetence?” Dexter smirked at both Yahweh and Flora. “I’ll give you incompetence, and wash my hand of the whole matter. Flora, you are now in charge of young Pioneer Yahweh’s seraph. Do as you wish. Incompetence.” Dexter stomped out of her work area.
“Do you always get what you want?” Flora asked.
Yahweh smiled.
“What will you call him?” she asked.
“I thought maybe Fred.”
“Fred? Oh no, that’s awful. That’s maybe a name for a cherub.”
“Yes, maybe. Anyway, now that I look at him closer, I believe he looks more like a Numen.”
“Numen? Why Numen?”
“That is the name of my pet terrapin, Numen.” he said, with a wink and a tug on his earlobe.
Flora narrowed her eyes. “Why do you keep doing that?” she asked, touching her own earlobe as she spoke to indicate what she was talking about.
“Oh, that?” Yahweh said, shrugging without explanation, indicating he hadn’t even realized he was doing it.
After an awkward moment of silence, she asked, “I’ll wait to see if you change your mind again before assigning its name.”
“Can you add a touch of humor into its neural engrams before you impress it? I have a person in mind who you could scan...”
Flora smiled a freakish grin. “Now, that would be different, different, different . . .” As she spoke, her smile grew grotesquely wide, then her face flattened into a two-dimensional hologram that opened in the center into light.
Yahweh felt a warm glowing rush down his spinal column as the inertia inside the Halo shifted into a climax of euphoria. Images of Zenn, Zenith, Zenn, Zenith, Zenn strobing into a constant hum of Eos whispering inside his head the word ‘invasion’ on the galacticNet with strange star-shaped creatures spinning in slow motion between the universes.
Then everything came back into focus like crashing onto the surface of a planet without actually falling down.
Reeze, dizzy, began to collapse, but Oscar grabbed her arm before she hit the ground with her forehead.
Yahweh stood motionless with a dazed look on his face until he telepathically disconnected from Numen. His eyes blinked regaining consciousness. “That was unexpected,” Yahweh said drily. “Can’t wait to do that again.”
“Told you so,” said Numen, still functioning properly inside the two-dimensional Halo, unphased by the loss of a dimension.
For a moment, everyone standing tried to remain on their feet, but one by one they sank into the closest seat as their two-dimensional holographic balance began to fail.
“This will pass when your flattened inner ear semicircular canals become accustomed to the new dimensions of space-time,” Numen said. “It may look to you like you are still shaped in three dimensions, but this is a trick your mind plays to explain this strange new environment.”
Having realized Numen was right about the hallucinations caused by stretching her mind into two dimensions between the universes, Reeze slid her hand down the middle of her skin-tight gravity suit and exhaled with relief when she found no unusual bulge. She saw Numen raise his less-than-human eyebrows at her and looked away with slight embarrassment.
“Okay, let's turn the lights on the planet and have a look around this hologram,” Yahweh said, trying to sound competent while his head cleared.
“The lights are on the planet,” Numen said, after scrolling his hand over several floating spherical controls.
Nothing was visible on their planetary monitor. Nothing at all.
“Did we lose the planet?” Yahweh asked. Everyone turned their heads to the blank colossal monitor just in time to see the planet rush up and stop in its proper position.
“Wow, that was nova,” Reeze said, with a front row seat.
The staff on the command deck nodded their heads in agreement with satisfied smiles on their faces.
On Earth, the displaced moonys were still hallucinating when the artificial sunshine glistened down with warm embrace. Where there had previously been a red glow in the sky was now the blackest of blacks: no stars, no moon, only the life-sustaining solar emitter, their only grasp on life between the universes.
Joop exhaled as everyone at the base station clapped and shouted with relief before falling to the ground drunken with dizziness.
“All systems are functioning optimally. The galacticNet is back online,” Numen reported checking the stations accelerator/collider instrument panel. He zoomed in on one of his displays. “Hello, that’s strange—”
“What is it?” Yahweh asked, detecting Numen’s agitation. “Red giant damage?”
“Unknown.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. The last time you said that—”
“The navigational beacon has been altered. We are shifting course and falling out of two-dimensional space-time. This should be physically impossible,” Numen exclaimed. “We are not due to arrive at Helios for another millennium.”
“What?” Reeze exclaimed. “No one told me it would take that long to get to Heaven.” She looked at Zenith who was cringing at Reeze’s revelation; she was cupping one hand over her own mouth and squinting her eyes as she heard the time duration revealed. Reeze’s shoulders drooped as she complained to her aunt, “A thousand years is your idea of ‘a while’?”
“Yes, but your lifespan is different inside the Halo,” Zenith said defensively.
The station’s gravity fluctuated, and lights flickered giving everyone a jolt
of vertigo.
“We have definitely changed course,” Numen reported.
“How is that possible inside the Halo?” asked Zenith, looking at her father.
Yahweh shrugged and looked at Numen.
“Unknown,” Numen said, studying his instrument panel. “It has something to do with the navigational sphere.”
The realization dawned on Yahweh and his face contorted in anger. “Armilus?” he practically growled. Tiny specks of light were forming on the forward-facing screen like giant stars exploding thousands of lightyears away. The stars turned into a swirling kaleidoscope of blue, green, yellow, orange, red—lights that then burst into waves of sound engulfing the station and dumping them into an unknown place in three-dimensional space-time.
“What just happened?” Yahweh asked.
“We have regained a dimension, and I am having a hard time locating our place in the galaxy. It doesn’t correlate to any known place in the Milky Way or adjacent galaxies,” Numen said, looking down at the red glowing keys in the palm of his right hand. He held his hand up to show his master; Yahweh looked at his own red glowing palm and pondered the implications.
“Inconceivable, I cannot locate our position in the universe either,” exclaimed Zenith, looking at the corroborating data on her red glowing workstation.
Numen shifted his ocular color spectrum to the right and the keys in the palm of his hand glowed green once again. “Fascinating.”
“What?”
“It appears that we are experiencing a red shift in the color spectrum,” Numen postulated.
“A temporary effect of the two-dimensional space-time?” Yahweh asked.
“Unknown.”
Reeze looked up from selecting red tiger stripes on her gravity suit and pointed at the forward-facing monitor. “What is that?” she asked.
“Course correction inside a Halo is forbidden. Any deviations will find you stuck inside the Koos,” Nadira said with shock, remembering an encounter with the Koos
inside the Halo as a young pioneer.
“This red place is not the Koos,” said Lanochee, placing his arm around Nadira,
trying to calm her nerves.
“All unknown places have an inherent danger. Beyond that, they are a place to be discovered,” Yahweh said.
Chapter 76
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Ray Manzarek, 1939-2013, Earth
Library of Souls
Red
Numen ran through the data. Changing course inside a Halo had never been done before, according to the information streaming through the galacticNet. The Halo was essentially a ripped open interstitial space-time corridor between universes. A two-dimensional shortcut between distant quadrants too far to reach by regular three-dimensional space travel. Altering course inside the Halo was believed to lead one astray and adrift in this void forever.
Another dominant theory about course correction inside a Halo, though not corroborated with any hard data, was that you would find yourself stuck inside the Koos, believed to be a one-dimensional endpoint of all known physical reality.
Every landmass on Earth shifted with the unexpected course correction inside the Halo.
“Check the foundation of the graviton station,” shouted Joop over the unceasing roar of a massive earthquake shaking people to the ground. The sudden inertial shift in navigation inside the Halo rocked the earthen anchors of the base station and raised part of its foundation out of the ground.
Looming in the sky, a massive dark red sphere glowed at the edge of the Earth’s horizon. The gravity of the sphere pulled on the Earth so hard, it shook the ground even more and shifted the oceanic tides in its direction.
Soleil squinted her eyes and held up her hands to examine them more closely. “What color do you see?” she asked her trembling husband.
He looked at his own forearm. “I see red.”
Confusion on Jerusalem’s command bridge about their position in the universe was filling everyone present with a growing sense of helplessness.
“We are being pulled by—I do not know what,” Numen reported.
“Is it a dark matter conglomerate, a dwarf neutron star, a black hole?” Yahweh asked. “Or is it the Koos?”
Numen evaluated each of his master’s suggestions before concluding, “It is not dwarf. It has a diameter of over sixty-six point six million standard units. It has a solid exterior, therefore not a black hole or a star, and the Koos is a dimensional change in the physical properties of space, not a single massive sphere.”
“Is something that size even possible?” Zenith asked.
“Not in our universe,” Numen concluded.
Silent glances shifted around the command deck as everyone began rechecking their red glowing instrument panels.
“Okay, let's say we are in a different universe, or at least in a part of our universe we do not recognize,” Yahweh postulated. “How did we get here, and how do we get back?”
“Back to the Red Giant?” asked Reeze, looking down at the outer hull from the main viewer. She noticed the station was almost clear of Bot egg pods, as more and more were jettisoning off into outer space. “Hey, looks like our little pest problem has corrected itself.”
“Oh yes, they have been detaching ever since we left the Halo,” Numen reported.
“Bots are clever little devils,” Zenith said.
The command deck rocked with vibrations.
“Graviton beam from the sphere. It appears to be pulling us toward its equator and stabilizing the surrounding gravity,” Numen said, pointing to a distinguishable hemispheric dividing line on the massive object ahead.
As the Jerusalem was pulled closer towards the sphere, the enormous shape overwhelmed their view until all they could see was a dark red wall.
“What is that?” Reeze asked, pointing to a large circular ring structure protruding from the side of the sphere’s equator to which they were being pulled by the graviton beams.
“It appears to be a docking ring of sorts,” Numen said, speculating.
“Large enough for an entire planet? It’s like passing a camel through the head of a needle,” commented Zenith, with amazement as the planet entered the dilating docking ring and decelerated into a geosynchronous stop.
“It does appear to be a docking ring,” Yahweh said, walking closer to the 3D front viewing screen.
“It's like we were expected,” Zenith said.
“More likely we triggered an automatic docking protocol,” said Numen.
“A planet-sized docking port? Amazing,” Reeze said, stepping to Yahweh’s side.
“Indeed,” Yahweh agreed, tugging on his earlobe.
Reeze felt her stomach turning with nerves. “Maybe we are in another universe,” she said. An intense red beam of light shot from the ring towards Earth and the station and she shouted out, “What is happening?”
“We are being scanned,” Zaar reported, calmly running his hand over his floating spheres.
Zenith turned to Zaar. “Could it be toxic?”
“More likely an inventory scan,” Numen interjected. “Similar to the Anti-Babel we launched on Earth a millennium ago, but much larger and more sophisticated,” he said, as an intense vertical red-light beam moved slowly through the command deck. “It is downloading all of our memory banks, included mine.” Numen touched his palm and scrambled the scanning beam with graviton emitters around his body.
The instrument panels on the deck went blank, and then rebooted. A heavily accented voice came over the communication system and announced, “Welcome to Beta Nirvana. Please make representatives of your planet available on the auxiliary bay.” A holographic display appeared in the middle of the command deck, highlighting the proper route to the sphere’s docking bay.
“How convenient,” said Yahweh, with a forced a smile. “Numen, Zenith, come with me. Inform Ba he is in charge.”
“He will not leave
Ra and El’s purgatory chamber,” Numen said.
“Loyalty. You’ve got to love it,” Yahweh said to Numen with one eyebrow raised. “Zaar, you have command.”
Zaar immediately stood and bowed accepting the position.
“And,” Zenith began to say, but was cut off in mid-sentence with Yahweh pointing to Reeze.
“And you too, little one.”
“Look who’s calling me little,” she said flippantly, though her pleasure at being included was clear in her smiling eyes. She walked off the command deck and toward a waiting gravilator tube with Oscar flying close behind.
“One moment, please. First place these filters over your eyes,” Numen said, issuing each of them a pair of variable frequency sunglasses he had just synthesized from his workstation.
“Nova,” Reeze commented, not hesitating to put them on over her facial make-up and begin examining the choices of colors and patterns on her gravity suit.
“I don’t—” Zenith said, trying to decline the offer.
“Try them on,” Numen commanded.
Each in turn placed them over their eyes, and immediately their vision looked normal. No more annoying red rose color everywhere.
“Much improved,” Yahweh said, walking off the command bridge.
Accelerating through the clear weightless gravilator tube outside the station, they could see a beam of light connect to their tube system and solidify into a gravity corridor similar in construction to their own transport system. Without a spoken word they each departed their translucent transport tube and stepped out into the clarity of space inside the alien transport system, which whisked them away at astronomical speeds toward the equatorial slit in the massive unknown sphere. It was as if, Yahweh noted, they were flying through the naked vacuum of space. Unbeknownst to any of them, trapped back inside the connected tube entrance, Oscar, Melvin, Theodore and Bullet were frozen in a matter sieve unable to move.
The sphere’s docking bay was breathtaking. They stepped off onto what was only a floor. No walls at all and a ceiling that was so high, it looked like the sky. The never-ending floor was as shiny as a mirror, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction toward the invisible horizon.
