by Mark Kraver
The house named Teela recognized that someone had entered and said, “Welcome. You are slightly dehydrated, I have prepared nutrition in the galley.”
“No thank you, Teela,” he said, which was code to refuse Teela and to turn off its audio, but keep functioning. Teela’s home artificial intelligence monitor on the wall turned from green to blue, but still showed a listing of his physiological readings with deficiencies lit in red.
“Mom, one pattern, please,” he said, watching the walls and furniture automatically rearrange throughout the home.
“Nina?” he yelled and listened for a moment, hearing flat stubby feet galloping to greet him from the back bedroom. “Hey boy, how’s my big boy Numen? Where’s Nina?” he asked, scratching his long-legged pet terrapin on the top of its bald head. He noticed on Teela’s monitor that Numen was hungry and needed to evacuate his bowels. The large frisky terrapin looked back and forth for a second, and then stomped his feet to the backdoor. “Is she outside?” he asked his smiling shelled friend.
When he let Numen out the backdoor, Yahweh saw them. Nina was in the arms of a boy who looked older than her. They kissed, and then he slid over a vine-less part of the wall and out of sight. Yahweh hesitated and slipped back into the house. He thought, she’s two years younger than I am. Then it hit him: am I that old? He recognized the boy as being on the local school’s ball team. Recently, every time he snuck over to visit with his family he had to endure watching a recording of a game the boy was playing in. At first, Yahweh resented having to spend his precious time on such frivolous activities, but once he had absorbed the rules, he began to enjoy the games. He was even caught once by Headmaster Zenn following a game between classes. Another time he heard himself telling a classmate to keep his eye on the ball. This was of course one of the reasons he was considered peculiar by his classmates and instructors.
The front door opened, and his mother and father entered.
“Yahweh, what a surprise,” his human mother Lara said, reaching to hug her son as she walked in.
“Did anyone see you?” his father Cris asked, looking out the front curtains.
At that moment, Nina came in through the backdoor.
“Nina, did you know Yahweh was here?” their mother asked.
“Oh, yeah, she was out in the backyard feeding Numen,” Yahweh said, rubbing his hand over his bald scalp, signaling to his sister that her hair was messed up.
“Oh yeah, I knew he was here,” Nina said, fixing her long luxurious hair.
“You know we can’t afford to have you seen here during the day,” Cris complained. “If they keep seeing you coming back here, they will move us to another planet. Elohim are supposed to forget their human parents for a reason, you know. They cannot be tied down to a family if they are expected to be all they can be.”
“I know. And now I understand why loving a family is discouraged in my species.”
“What do you mean?” Lara asked. “Are you in trouble?”
“No, I’ve been assigned a mission.”
“All right, your first mission. That’s great,” Cris said, unsure if he should be excited or not as he rubbed elbows with his son.
“Is it to another planet?” Lara cautiously asked.
“Yes.”
“How long will you be gone?” Nina asked, sensing something was wrong with her big brother’s demeanor.
“It’s a rescue mission—through the Halo.”
His parents got quiet. Tears swelled up in his mother’s eyes and she started to cry. “Excuse me,” she said, walking into the kitchen so she wouldn’t make a scene.
“How far?” Cris asked.
“Far enough,” Yahweh answered.
“Far enough for what?” Nina asked, beginning to get worried.
“I’ll help your mother,” Cris said, leaving his two very different children alone to sort things out.
“What does ‘far enough’ mean? You’ll be coming back?” Nina stepped closer to Yahweh as she spoke, searching his face for reassurance. “It cannot be forever? I don’t want to lose you forever. I won’t let you go. I can’t let you go.” Tears began to spill as her voice turned desperate and pleading. “Don’t go,” she said, falling into her big brother’s arms. She repeatedly murmured “no, no, no” until her parents returned solemnly to the living room.
They looked on quietly, sadly, as Nina sat up straight and wiped her face.
“Zenn said this would happen one day,” Lara said.
“What?” Yahweh asked. “How long has the headmaster known?”
“She has always known—we have always known” Cris said.
Yahweh said nothing, shocked by their words.
“Why are you not allowed to come back?” asked Nina, her voice quivering on the edge of more sobbing.
“It’s not that I am not allowed to come back,” Yahweh answered, still processing what his parents had just said about Zenn. “The planet I’m going to is very far away. I’ll be traveling longer than your lifespan in a hibernation pod. By the time I do come back, all of you will be gone, even your great-grandchildren times twenty will be old by then.”
“Well, then don’t go. Tell them you changed your mind. They’ll have to get someone else to do it instead,” Nina negotiated.
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Why not? Just tell them no,” Nina said, crossing her arms over her chest with renewed composure. “March in there, and tell whoever assigned you this stupid mission to send some other fool, because you’d have to be a big fool to accept this kind of mission in the first place. What kind of idiot gave you this mission anyway?”
“It was the Nasi,” Yahweh said, despite knowing it was a secret mission. He wanted, no, needed them to know. He loved them deep in his heart. More reason for Elohim to be kept separate from their human family, he thought. Too many emotions involved. “They asked me, and I accepted. It is what I was bred to do. This is my mission in life.” He knew, as the words were coming out, that he was trying to convince not just his sister, but himself. He sat down on the family couch, bowed his head, and began to cry for the first time since he entered the academy.
His mother sat down next to him and comforted her brilliant son with a hug and a kiss on his enlarged forehead. “You will always be my son. I will always be proud of you, and no one will be able to take that away from us, not in a hundred generations. I love you. We all love you.”
“When do you have to leave?” Nina asked.
“They are looking for me now.”
Cris looked out the front window again and said, “Heaven will set soon. You can make it back in the darkness without being seen.”
“I want to stay for a while.”
“But the Nasi?” Cris warned.
“The Nasi can go to hell,” he cried, burying his face on his mother’s shoulder.
“There, there now, relax. If it takes that long to get to your destination, a little more time won’t hurt,” Lara said, rubbing his tensed shoulders and noticing on Teela’s monitor that he was dehydrated and hungry. “Nina, fetch him something to eat.”
“No, I can’t eat. I have to be clear of any sustenance for hibernation.”
“Fetch him some clear broth, then,” she said, eager to give Nina something to do other than worry about her big brother leaving.
“Zenn told us you were special,” his dad said. “She said you were destined for greatness.”
“Headmaster Zenn?” Yahweh asked, separating from his mother’s arms.
“Auntie Zenn? Is she coming tonight, too?” Nina asked, coming back into the room with his broth.
Yahweh froze. He looked at both of his parents and then his little sister as if for the first time. “Auntie Zenn?”
Nina knew she had made a huge mistake. The one secret she swore to withhold from her older brother had now been broken.
Yahweh had learned as an infant not to read his family’s minds, but now he was tempted. “How long have you known Auntie Zenn?
”
“Since before you were born,” his mother answered.
“My parents knew her, and my parent’s parents knew her,” said his father.
“Both sides of our families have known her, forever,” his mother said.
“She comes here often? I guess often enough that she is called Auntie,” he said, answering his own question with a frown at his little sister.
“She often comes, usually after you visit,” his mother said.
“She’s checking up on me?”
“No, she is genuinely interested in your well-being. Like it’s her mission in life,” his father said, seeming a little mystified by the Elohim woman’s commitment to their family. “I don’t know, it’s kinda eccentric, like her life depended on it.”
“I like her. She tells me stories about the past and other worlds,” Nina said.
Other worlds flashed through Yahweh’s thoughts as intersecting dimensional timelines swept through his displaced brain matter.
Yahweh and Nina walked arm-in-arm down a corridor between a long strip of domed houses as Heaven set on the horizon. The sapient population were still coming home from their employment around the city, and many passed the two with staring eyes. Nina saw the father of her boyfriend walk by frowning.
“What was his problem?” Yahweh asked.
“Oh nothing, I don’t think they approve of you and me being together.”
“Do you want to go back home?”
She didn’t answer and instead burrowed her face in his shoulder as they continued on. They walked to the park and sat on the swing set as a herd of micro-horses, no more than a foot tall, trimmed the nearby grass. A single ivory horn projecting from their foreheads kept them from cropping the grass too close to the ground.
“I can’t believe we are here in the park together. You’ve always been a secret,” she laughed.
“I’ve always wanted to swing on this swing,” he mused as he sank onto the seat and began pumping his legs. Gaining height, Yahweh kicked high into the air and watched his sister smile happily as he swung. He wondered what she thought about the Elohim controlling her planet, her life. She must think they are beyond reproach, he thought. Beyond simple pleasures. Big snobs. But now he hoped she could see him for what he really was before he left her forever. Yahweh jumped off the swing, letting the anti-gravity sensors embedded in the ground land him on both feet.
“Big brother, you are like a zeebraknocker.” They both laughed and hugged. Over Nina’s shoulder, in the growing twilight of Heaven, he watched the herd of horned micro-horses prance through the nearby bushes. Before his eyes, one of the little horses was suddenly snared by a long tentacle and pulled into the waiting beaks of an octopus-looking creature.
He snapped awake.
Yahweh’s mind began to recover from the hallucinations brought upon him by entering the Halo vortex of the red universe. He felt his body seizures decreasing, and tried to keep his eyes open by exhaling built-up tension seeing haunting images of Reeze, Nina, Reeze, Nina roll past until his dizziness subsided.
Chapter 84
Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.
Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, Earth
Library of Souls
Blue
Yahweh blinked his eyes until the seizures stopped. Numen’s telepathic connection ceased, and he regained his normal vision.
“That was the most lucent dream I have ever experienced, even better than the last,” Yahweh said. “Why would anyone want to sleep through that?”
“What did you dream about?” asked Numen, manipulating his control panel with his right hand, his left still engaged with streaming code through the translucent instrument panel.
Yahweh didn’t answer as the thoughts still swirled faintly in his head—his family, his life at the academy, his pet terrapin, even Auntie Zenn. But most of all he thought about the horses in the park…and the killer octopus. He hadn’t heard of such a creature before and didn’t understand why he had dreamed about it now.
Then his mind jumped to his last encounter on the galacticNet before he was sent on this mission. He felt that funny feeling of déjà vu. He searched his thought until a one-word question popped into his head: Invasion?
“Why each time I enter the Halo do you lock into my mind telepathically?” Yahweh asked Numen, who was preoccupied with his instrument panel.
“Good question. Do you know what the others experience when they enter the Halo?” Numen answered.
Yahweh looked at Zenith and then at Reeze for an answer.
“It is a collection of random thoughts scattered throughout my life,” said Zenith. “No rhyme or reason to the order of time.”
“Me too. Tastes, smells, sounds,” added Reeze, with Zaar and the others around the command deck nodding in agreement.
“What do you experience?” asked Reeze.
“Only a telepathic connection can link the hallucinations in a more logical linear timeline,” Numen said. “The Halo is interstitial space between the universes where an infinite number of possible timelines intersect. Possible events in the past mix with those in the present and future. As long as you travel inside the same universe, the timeline stays the same.”
“The future?” Reeze asked.
“Every time we enter a new universe, we are entering a new timeline,” reported Numen.
“Very interesting,” Yahweh said, looking at the others on the command deck. “What would prevent us from using the Halo to go back in time to our own universe before we were shot down by the Bots and changing history?”
“What makes you think you haven’t done that already?” answered Numen in a somber tone.
Yahweh grinned, realizing how much he enjoyed Numen’s succinct, but vague answers. “We could be playing this same life over and over again? In another timeline, perhaps?”
“Correct. That is why we need to limit affecting each universe’s history,” Numen said.
“How do you know this Halo timeline science?” Yahweh asked.
“It is referenced from the portion of Gog’s expeditionary records that I have been able to recover from Armilus’ back up.”
“Yes, but you locked onto me telepathically the first time we entered the Halo—before you had access to any of that data.”
“Unknown. Maybe I am still infected with Armilus’ ill-ware?”
“Hmm, I wonder. Are you sure you know how to get us back to our own universe—in the proper timeline?”
“Actually, perhaps not. I believe there is a built-in diversion placed inside our itinerary,” said Numen, overpowered by a sudden glitch in his normal programming.
“Diversion? What diversion?” Zenith asked as Numen manipulated the navigational system, blue-shifting their course inside the Halo to the far-right spectral universe.
“We are exiting the Halo, now,” Numen announced as exploding stars of light swirled past the station shifting the colors of everything from red, orange, yellow, green and then blue. A wave of vertigo hit everyone in the room as the station and planet folded into another dimension of space-time. Regaining the third dimension of normal space popped their ears, blurred their eyes with blue pigment and shifted each person’s gut. The bridge interior lighting glowed bright blue.
“Don’t tell me, we are in the blue universe,” Reeze said, still bracing herself and looking around at all the blue glowing panels on the command deck.
Zaar pulled out and adjusted his light wave sunglasses, then placed them on his bald head. “Except for being blue, it looks like a Class Two K star system,” he reported. “Standard eight planets; outer three gas giants; inner three too hot, and the two in the middle are inside the inhabitable zone, just right. Now scanning the rest of the system.”
“I believe this blue universe to be part of the conditions you accepted when you inherited Magog’s Deed Crystals.”
“Conditions? What conditions?” Yahweh protested, patting his gravity suit looking for his gl
asses.
“Unknown. Computer, red-shift the lights ship-wide forty-five nanometers.” The lights turned from blue to their normal coloration.
“I hate the unknown,” Yahweh responded—both to the changing light color and that Numen didn’t know the exact conditions of the Deed Crystals.
“Crater crap, I want to wear my nova glasses,” Reeze complained when the lights onboard the station corrected themselves. She noticed Zaar still wearing his glasses, so she slipped hers on anyway and adjusted them accordingly.
“One moment, a hidden file is opening,” Numen reported.
“What is it?” Zenith asked, looking at the strange solar system on her transparent multi-colored instrument panel.
“I believe it is a timeline data stream. A history of migration.”
“Migration? Whose migration?” asked Reeze, fixing her hair over her eyewear.
“Of the Elohim. It verifies the red universe was not the original Elohim universe.”
Reeze stopped and look at Numen. “The blue was?”
“Yes, according to this new information,” Numen concluded.
Yahweh stood absorbing what he had heard before commenting, “How many universes do you think there are?”
“There is a detailed history of the migration from this blue universe into the red. When Gog first discovered the inter-universe connection inside the Halo, he searched to answer that very question. His theory was that there could be as many as the visible white light spectrum would allow.”
“You mean—”
“A near infinite number,” Numen interjected. “However, after exploring colored universes with pre-programmed drone-cherubim leading expeditions through the Halo, it became apparent that many universes were not compatible with life or were guarded against entry.”
“You mean they had been captured?” Reeze asked.
“That is a possible outcome, as we have already experienced. However, another theory is that they were destroyed or used as energy.”
“Energy?”
“One of the theories of other universes reflects on the origin of that universe. In the milliseconds after the birth of all universes, energy transforms into either matter or antimatter in random proportions. If there was more matter formed than antimatter, then the universe cancels out the antimatter, and becomes a matter-dominated universe, like ours, and vice versa for the antimatter universes.”
