by Mark Kraver
“I hope the whole place isn’t this boring,” Reeze said, looking first around the visually expansive vista, then settling her eyes on her reflection in the flooring. She admired her new rose-colored glasses, adjusted her breast controls to shift the color of her gravity suit to match the floor’s silvery shine, examined her two front teeth with her fingernail, and then fixed her hair.
“Master, our contingency of cherubim is gone,” Numen reported after running a complete analysis of their surroundings.
“Oscar?” Reeze asked, looking around for her little baby.
“I don’t like this place already,” Yahweh said.
Shockwaves spread throughout the connectome as unknown information about the universes assimilated inside their minds.
“Red Universe?” The thought exploded in Lanochee’s subconsciousness, and threatened to break him free from the connectome.
“And I thought the Koos was the most amazing phenomenon,” Nadira gasps.
“To this day,” Yahweh said, “it remains one of the most guarded secrets in all the universes.”
Chapter 77
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, Earth
Library of Souls
Sphere
With a blur, a gravity bubble appeared out of nowhere and popped open. A bio-mechanical humanoid with the face of a snake stepped forth wearing a large elaborate headdress shaped like curved animal horns that emitted a light from their tips. The light illuminated lizard eyes and a red lizard-like tongue that flicked in and out of its smiling sharp teeth.
“We were not expecting you. What is your destination and designation?” The being spoke with a heavy accent, slurring the ‘S’ sounds holding up its hands on either the side of its face.
Yahweh took a step forward. “I am Yahweh, Creator of Helios. We are on our way to the star Heaven.”
“We have no such record of this star, Heaven,” the agitated greeter said. “This is unacceptable. It is not clear how to proceed.”
“Proceed by taking us to your leader,” Reeze said, with her crooked little smile.
Yahweh turned his head to flash a smile at Reeze, then nodded at the ornately dressed being. “Take us to your leader.”
After a volley of rapid tongue flicking, the biomechanical figure waved his hand in the air directing them into a gravity pod that had flashed into existence right before their eyes. The moment the last passenger stepped into the bubble, it shot away at amazing speeds through what looked like kilometers of solid rock.
A bright sunny sky and vivid landscape startled them as the pod erupted from the ground like a geyser moments later inside a beautiful garden.
“That was unexpected,” Yahweh said to their silent host. The bubble continued into a clearing surrounded by an enormous colorful forest.
Each of the passengers reluctantly stepped out of the gravity bubble into a field of pink flowers that had in unison turned toward them upon their arrival. In a flash the stranger was gone, leaving Yahweh and his team all alone. Sparkling golden hummingbird creatures buzzed around like large insects.
“Fact is stranger than fiction,” Zenith muttered.
“This place is amazing,” Reeze exclaimed, peaking around her sunglasses and trying to coax one of the little bird creatures to land on her finger.
“Numen, report. What’s wrong with this place?” Yahweh asked, as a huge flock of colorful pink, long-necked birds flew overhead. They all looked down at the visitors, revealing human-looking faces.
“Did you see those?” Reeze gasped.
“That was not a life form,” Numen said.
Reeze frowned. “They looked alive to me,” she said, staring after the distant flock.
“No,” Numen said, “The being who transported us here, to this interior surface of the sphere.”
“I grok not a seraph, either?” asked Yahweh.
Numen nodded his head. “There will need to be a multitude of grokking in this strange land. It appears to be a sphere with life growing on the interior surface. That appears to be a sun, but instead is a fusion reactor,” Numen said, pointing to the bright light in the sky illuminating the ground with the intensity of sunshine. “They must have found a way to refuel the reactor because it is too small to sustain itself as a star at this brightness. The reactor must have gravity beams supporting it at a safe distance from the inner living surface.”
Reeze was successful in getting one of the hummingbird creatures to land on her finger. It looked up at her with a human face and smiled. Reeze smiled back with astonishment.
“Why have we never heard of a place like this before?” Zenith asked, watching what looked like a herd of a multicolored, feathered dinosaurs with giant human faces ripping fronds out of a nearby grove of cycad palms.
“Unknown, but maybe they will have some answers,” Numen responded, pointing to another gravity bubble floating down from the tree tops carrying three more horned humanoids.
“I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore,” Reeze said, watching the three ornately dressed beings land a short distance away, spooking the hummingbirds away.
“Greetings,” the leader of the three said, with a droning, high-pitched, complaining voice. The three held up both hands to the sides of their horned headdress in a salute. “My designation is Gouldian. These are Kleem and Klack.” Each flicked their tongues one after the other as they were introduced, indicating their hierarchy.
Yahweh stepped forward, slapped his right hand against his chest, and introduced himself. “I am Yahweh, Creator, and this is my seraph, Numen.”
The horned beings gave simultaneous tongue-wiping sneers at the mentioning of Numen’s name.
“And my daughter, Zenith, and her niece, Reeze,” Yahweh said.
The introduction of the much older Zenith as Yahweh’s daughter made the three strange dignitaries smile and hum.
“She is sapient?” Klack slurred, while smiling cruelly at Reeze.
Reeze looked over the top of her glasses, feeling unnerved by the three sinister red snake heads with forked tongues, showing their needle-sharp teeth.
“There is a great deal of confusion. We were not expecting you,” Gouldian said, redirecting his tongue flicking to Yahweh.
“I understand. We were not expecting you, as well,” he said, looking at Numen who appeared uncomfortable with their situation.
“Beta Nirvana has been a closed loop for many antons and has no need for resources such that your planet would provide,” Gouldian pronounced.
“However, we could provide room for your population,” said Kleem, flicking his tongue at Reeze.
“Provided we cut back on our own growth rate,” said Klack.
“One moment,” Gouldian interrupted, hearing something inside his head. “A new matter has come to our attention. You would not mind waiting while we sort out this new data?”
“No. Is there something I can help you with?” asked Yahweh.
“Excellent. Kleem—” Gouldian directed his attention to his subordinate without regard to Yahweh’s question. “We will house the visitors in temporary quarters while this new matter can be resolved.”
Without saying another word, the leader manifested another gravity bubble with a wave of his hand and then vanished from sight at remarkable speed.
“That was awkward,” Reeze commented to Zenith, who put a hand on Reeze’s shoulder and nodded.
“Come,” Kleem directed, as another gravity bubble appeared. Everybody stepped inside, and it lifted off over the nearby hillside. Gaining altitude, the passengers could see where distant thin green spires rose above the treetops. The bubble moved closer to reveal a massive city nestled in the middle of a mountainous valley, with twin symmetrical waterfalls on either side as if they were part of the architecture.
“The Emerald City?” asked Reeze.
“Zircon,” Kleem corrected, as they sho
t like a meteor into the heart of the city.
The gravity bubble landed in the middle of a busy bazaar, popped open, and they were instant celebrities. Everyone in the square came to welcome and ogle them at once.
“Are you sure we are not in Oz?” Reeze asked, looking at the strange shapes and attires encroaching upon them.
Yahweh, Numen, Zenith, and Reeze stood with their mouths agape. They noted the recognizably human-looking faces, but the bodies were anything but human. One couple looked like they were upright sheep with human heads. Another had a cow’s body, and yet another looked like a pig. They each wore elaborate attire with curled up shoes, large flower hats, balloon pants, frilly collared transparent shirts, colorful underwear, exposed breasts and genitalia, tattooed faces, and arms and legs that changed colors randomly. It looked like a giant game of one-upmanship to see who could wear the most outrageous, most bizarre, most risqué outfits.
Everyone wanted to touch the bald heads of the boy Creator and his daughter, but Numen was quite adept at diverting their hands without offending anyone personally. As someone’s or something waved its paw or hoof at them, Numen would intercept with his hand, redirecting them away from their vulnerable bare scalps.
“What I would not do for a few fat little cherubim about now,” Numen said.
“They all appear to be sapient beings, but with animal bodies,” Zenith said.
“Nova,” Reeze giggled, checking out the cute guy who looked like a satyr.
“It is your exposed hairless heads,” Kleem said, pointing to his own ornate horned headdress. “Maybe I should show you our guest quarters?”
“Proceed,” Yahweh said, ducking yet another hoof’s attempt to stroke his unique head.
“Right this way.”
With Numen on one side and Reeze on the other, Kleem led the group into a nearby building shaped like a pyramid.
Once inside, Zenith shivered from all the weird attention.
“They are harmless,” Kleem commented.
Nevertheless, she felt stressed to the core by the reception they’d just received—uncomfortably reminiscent of her childhood a thousand years earlier. As the first Elohim born to Earth, she was immediately the center of attention wherever she went. Being the oldest of her generation was a daunting task, and, for Zenith, being hairless was the most distressful characteristic of her youth. The other girls, born before the Anti-Babel, were another species and had long luxurious hair in a variety of styles and colors. How she had longed to look more human when she lived in her homeland—a stranger in a strange land, which now paled in comparison to this strange place.
With no one to guide her through life after her mother’s death, but Numen and a flock of misfit flying babies, she had a lot of time for self-reflection while she planned a future that was not always clear. Now she didn’t know what to make of all the attention. It was like they had entered a freak show.
Yahweh continued to mull over the disjointed information he’d gathered so far. This was an unusually large and sophisticated sphere world, located in the middle of a place that was heretofore completely unknown to them in his universe. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Yahweh inquired of the alien closest to him. “If this sphere is called Beta Nirvana, then there must be another sphere world called Alpha Nirvana?”
“Yes,” answered the one designated as Kleem.
“And under construction in other parts of this and other galaxies are other spheres being constructed. Those in this galaxy are designated Nirvana and other galaxies have different designations,” Klack added.
“Wait here until we decide what to do with you,” Klack said, as the two androgynous beings did an about-face and marched out of the triangular front doorway.
“How rude,” Reeze said, checking out the uncomfortable room with disdain. Everywhere she saw triangles built into the architecture. Triangular doors, triangular ceiling, even triangular windows. Pushed into every corner of the large downstairs triangular room were triangular tables and chairs. Against one wall she saw what looked like a triangular couch that could actually be a bed, she wasn’t sure.
Numen actually welcomed the down time to work on his Armilus data conversion program. He was growing agitated, trying more and more complicated programming tricks to unlock the data downloaded from the ancient quantum molecular memory matrix, without success. He felt circulating through his inner circuitry the overwhelming urge to get the information stored inside the locked code, as if he was possessed by some other force within. Like he was infected with a virus. Each time he tried to open a small bit of memory with a new conversion program, undecipherable garbage poured out that he had to spend hours sorting with only frustrating results.
At the same time, he compiled conversion programs, he was surveying the surrounding technologies. Much of the electronics seemed advanced, but ancient. He noted iridium-silicate quantum molecular chips installed in several places around the building. They looked to be providing the building complex with a sophisticated communications network linking everything on the enormous sphere together instantaneously. Oddly enough, he noticed they had a very similar format to Armilus’ memory core. Tapped into the extensive wireless network, he began to search for an online service manual to the inner workings of the sphere.
After the day rotated to night, the sky had a soft glow with a brighter band of light illuminating the wall of the sphere to the left, which everyone assumed was the westerly direction. Reeze knew it was because the solar reactor was now casting its light against the adjacent wall of the sphere, and the glow overhead was the reflected light from the opposite side of the inner surface of the sphere. The colors reminded her of what she saw when her moon was full and reflected off of the dark side of the Earth. She was homesick.
Reeze found her way out of the confines of her guest suite and into the streets by way of her second story window. The massive sphere could not physically rotate fast enough to hold everything against the ground, and it was easy to find areas of the city that had less gravity than others. Growing up on a low gravity moon, she could usually jump as high as the surrounding buildings with her geo-boots, but had to settle on sliding down the triangular-shaped solar paneled walls to the ground. She was pleased the glasses she wore could see at night, but distances even in this dim night sky were still a problem.
She landed in the alleyway behind the pyramid-shaped building with a soft thud, her sparkling hair spooking someone snooping around what looked like trash receptacles.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
“Pleazze, I mean no harm. I am leaving now—” the voice said, trailing off down the corridor between buildings in a gallop.
She thought, was that guy eating out of the trash cans?
Wandering through the wild laughter of frivolity coming from darkened alleyways on either side of the narrow streets, she kept her guard up, and dared not enter the shadowed areas for fear of what the unknown had to offer. Crossing the threshold into an alien landscape for the first time was pretty scary, she thought, but she hadn’t been warned of any danger, so she kept walking. She moved swiftly past three oversized bear-looking people leaning against the wall of an obscure corridor completely naked. At even the quickest glance, she could see they were doing unspeakable things to each other, things she had never even heard of. An uneasy feeling shot through her as she began to fear that was the norm on this sphere. If she were to be confronted by someone, she wondered, would they expect the same from her?
All the triangular shaped buildings began to look the same. She was beginning to question whether she could remember the way back to her suite.
Out of a dark alleyway roared a pack of half-naked wolf men, laughing and hugging onto each other as they prowled. She gasped, startled by their abrupt appearance out of the shadows.
“Lookie, lookie, here comes a cookie,” the least-dressed of them said, as the others staggered into a circle around her like a pack of wild hungry dogs.
“I’m no
t here for fun. Just looking around,” she said. She was no stranger to running from a fight, but she was confused about the way to run.
“Now, where’s the fun in that?” the gang leader said, walking closer to look at her in brighter light. Shock and surprised splashed across his hairy face. “She was with the Elohim,” he announced.
“I’d like to meet the Elohim,” one of the gang said.
“I’d like to meet the Elohim, too.”
“Especially the young boy.”
“Maybe some other time,” she said, walking backwards and hoping it was the way she came.
She watched as several other hairy groping locals disengaged from their physical activities along the roadside and began to follow her down the darkened street as she backed up. Every turn she made more animal-people came out of the darkness and followed her. What was it that they wanted from her? Was it her looks or demeanor that they were attracted to? Or simply that she was associated with the newly arrived Elohim?
“I want to touch her,” purred someone in the crowd who looked like a cat.
“I want to touch her, too,” snorted a person with a rhinoceros horn on his forehead.
She began to walk faster and faster before running full-out through the dimly lit corridors with her hair blazing in the wind, chased by howling mobs of half-naked humanoid beasts who wanted to touch her.
When she stopped at a street crossing to get her bearings, the crowd stopped in a semicircle behind her, and then when she ran in a new direction, they followed, excited to see her hair glow. She recognized the spilled trash receptacles at the end of her alleyway and stopped. It’s always easier to go down than up, she thought, sensing the crowd growing bolder as they advanced on her.
“Let me touch you—” a fat, naked pig woman grunted, licking her lips and nostril nose ring.
