Aliomenti Saga 6: Stark Cataclysm

by Alex Albrinck

  “The timing not only lets young Fil see the construction of the tunnel, it lets him see the time machine arrive,” the Mechanic added. “If he reaches the basement and the time machine’s already there, he’d see two strangers destroying his house and kidnapping his dog. He might try to break free and attack them, might think they’re working in cahoots with the Assassin. But he sees them arrive with Adam—who he already knows—and realizes they’re friend, not foe.”

  “My comment to Adam about Dad needing a Shield was likely a verbal clue for Fil as well,” she told them. “At this point, I suspect Adam used his own nanos to throw a Shield around Dad the minute we got there. It’s not like he needed to be reminded, right? We were there to rescue Dad; of course Adam will Shield him immediately.” She chuckled. “Adam was smart. He took all of his nanos back to the future with him.”

  “Which raises another question: why didn’t future Angel do the same?” Charlie frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that since I saw the memory videos of that day. Everything else makes sense, but… why not collect the nanos once Will is safe in the time machine and leave? Why leave them behind?”

  “I suspect we’ll get the answer to that question when we get there.” Fil shrugged. “Maybe she left them behind specifically to get us back to Pleasanton.”

  Angel thought that made sense. Charlie was right. The house was destroyed, the final bomb planted by future Adam. They didn’t need to bother too much about tidying up first. So why leave them, if not to give her—and the rest of them—a reason to return to Pleasanton?

  They remained silent for the remainder of the trip, each lost in thought, wondering what new knowledge the future devices would bring, wondering what they’d find in Pleasanton. She could sense Fil’s nervousness from the other sphere. His previous trip here had come after Sarah had rescued him from an attempted murder after he’d first developed his energy keg. Her group of non-Energy wielding Alliance members had met at Judith and Peter’s abandoned mansion. It would be another bittersweet memory for her big brother, another chance to mourn and grieve over their loss.

  The great Dome was long gone, the city largely abandoned and fully neglected. Humans in cooler climates had migrated toward the warmth nearer the equator. Surviving governments and philosophical groups saw this as an ideal time to start wars of expansion and empire. Yet the memories of death and loss from the Cataclysm were still far too real in the minds of the soldiers themselves, and eventually they’d all refused to fight. There were no new recruits available to enforce the decrees of the tyrants and oligarchs. It had proven the point that, in the end, governments and leaders truly served only with the consent of the governed.

  The change in attitude had been their doing. Fil’s Cataclysm Energy was so heavily charged with emotions of anger and rage that humans were naturally more combative, more warlike in the aftermath. When they’d begun their reconstruction work, they’d used the opportunity to replace the remnants of negative Energy with positive, cheerful Energy, focused not on creating more death and destruction, but instead upon repair and healing and innovation and growth, of building a better world on the ashes of the old.

  It had worked. It had been easy to start those wars initially, but their efforts had a cumulative effect, and eventually soldiers stopped shooting, even when threatened with death as punishment for their mutiny. Humans worried now about rebuilding their numbers. The Aliomenti struggled with recruitment these days; nobody wanted to miss out on the chance to rebuild their own human world. The Alliance was growing because members could reproduce. She hoped she and Charlie could do the same one day, but she didn’t know how. Charlie had clean blood from his mother stored away. The blood from her mother, drawn during her time between pregnancies, had been accidentally destroyed when cleanup crews had gone through and destroyed Hope’s underground bunker lest humans ever find the place.

  It was an honest mistake. But it meant she’d never have a child of her own. Not without a miracle breakthrough technology.

  They flew over the walls of the De Gray Estates, a shadowy reminder of the greatness that once was. The gates were long gone, and there were no guards standing by ready to activate security features only Will knew about, or those his Alliance neighbors had built and never revealed to Young Will. The site was now little more than a park, where the few remaining citizens would come to spend a pleasant day. The four remaining homes had been used as homeless shelters by the city as a tribute to the Starks, even decades after their supposed deaths. She was sure her parents would approve.

  They found a few humans milling about the miniscule remnants of the old Stark home, and Angel used a small bit of Energy to convince them that they had urgent business elsewhere. Moments later, they stood upon the dusty surface of the exposed basement foundation, the invisible craft hovering above.

  Fil looked around. He’d not been back to the house since he’d left at the age of six, an age when he’d not really understood what he was seeing. After he and Hope and Adam had flown away, the assembled members of the Alliance worked to remove all traces of the unexplainable that remained. They destroyed the hydraulic elevator and removed all of the debris, filling in the empty space with dirt and rock as best they could. They’d also turned every item remaining in the bunker to dust before disassembling the room kit and refilling the gaps in the earth as they’d done with the bunker. He toed the dust that settled on the concrete floor of the exposed basement. They’d been too thorough, and in the process had destroyed the blood samples drawn from Young Will and Hope between her pregnancies. Hope had learned of the loss only a few months before she’d finally taken the new and ineffective doses of ambrosia, and her health was such that they’d not dared take more than one sample. He’d made use of that single dose with Angel’s blessing.

  He’d never be a father again. And Angel would never bear a child of her own.

  Angel had been here. She’d traveled here after leaving their home in Oregon, seeing with her own eyes the home destroyed before her birth. She’d learned more about the sacrifices made over the centuries by men and women who’d devoted incredible effort to ensuring the siblings were born. Seeing the reality again with that knowledge made it so much more tangible and poignant, made those sacrifices something even more impressive.

  And he’d repaid the sacrifice to give him life by killing billions of humans.

  He shook the thought from his mind. The words came unbidden. He was getting better at controlling those thoughts, pushing them away. His mood had gradually improved, and he’d realized that his constant gloom wasn’t the way to honor those lost. He’d been focused on the positive in his life of late, of the family and friends who’d stuck with him, of the work they continued to do in the human world. He had seen what happened when his mood reached the other extreme, and like his Shielding, the positive attitude was becoming automatic.

  Angel glanced at the Mechanic, who was looking at the surroundings with something approaching awe. “So… what do I do?”

  The Mechanic snapped to attention. “I’m not quite sure. This is the first time I’ve tried this as well.” He smiled. “But… if the memories we saw were correct, the little machines are still here where you left them in the past, and they’ll know who you are because of those communication bots we planted in you earlier. So… call them, maybe?”

  Angel looked flummoxed. “I’m not sure how to talk to them.” She cleared her throat. “Come here, nanos.” Her face curled. “I feel really stupid talking to invisible machines.”

  “Don’t talk to them. Think to them. Create pictures in your mind. They won’t respond to spoken commands because that’s not the source of commands, not the way they’re programmed.”

  “Oh.” She closed her eyes. “I see a lot of darkness.”

  “Well, your eyes are closed,” Fil said. He couldn’t help but chuckle.

  She cracked an eyelid. “Hush, big brother.” She closed her eyes again. After a moment, she sucked in a deep breath.
>
  “Something wrong?” Charlie asked. He nearly jumped with concern.

  “What? No, no… not at all. It’s just… I can see with them. This is… weird. It’s like a clairvoyance session, but more… panoramic.”

  “So you can sense them, then?” the Mechanic asked. “Get feedback from them?”

  “I think so.”

  “See if you can get them to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Picture a chair and ask them to form the chair?”

  “Okay.”

  Fil gasped.

  The chair materialized before their eyes, forming bit by bit as the future nanos responded to Angel’s command. The chair looked wooden, and had a high back and no armrests. Angel opened her eyes and jumped back. “It worked?”

  “You doubted me?” the Mechanic asked, trying to sound hurt.

  Angel chuckled. “Never. But it’s still a new experience for me.”

  The Mechanic walked to the chair and touched it, ran his hands over the surface. “Exquisite craftsmanship, Angel.” He rocked the chair back and forth on its legs, and the sounds of the feet hitting the concrete echoed in the empty basement. He set it back on the ground with all four legs and sat down on it. “Quite solid.” He glanced at Angel. “Tell them to deconstruct.”

  “You’re… sitting on them right now.”

  The older man smiled. “My backside agrees with you. We must make sure that the deconstruction process works correctly. If they just go invisible, then there’s still a chair here. They need to separate.”

  “Won’t it hurt if you fall?”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s the only way to know for sure.”

  Angel shrugged. An instant later, the chair vanished and the Mechanic dropped solidly to the ground. He stood up, grimacing. “I took that one on behalf of science. Those devices are remarkable. We’ve made tremendous advances, of course, and have a lot of the component technologies available. But the ability to mesh them together, miniaturize them, and combine that with the problem solving abilities… that’s something we’re decades away from achieving. These little devices will help us take a huge leap forward.”

  Fil noticed something metal glinting in the sunlight on the ground nearby. “What’s that? I don’t remember seeing it before.”

  They moved as one to the far wall, the wall where Angel’s nanos had bored a hole through concrete and dirt and hauled their father into a time machine some many decades earlier. The box measured approximately one foot on each side, with letters inscribed on the surface.

  Fil looked at the words, and his heart skipped a beat. “To our friends in the past. From your friends in the future.”

  There was a moment of silence. “So… you traveled from 2219 to 2030 to leave yourself a present that you wouldn’t find until 2155,” Charlie said, nodding. “Of course. That’s something I’d definitely think to do.”

  “Why not?” Fil didn’t find the time jumps confusing. Then again, his father had turned one thousand forty-seven years old the day he was born, so that type of understanding came with the territory.

  “If you wanted to give your past self a gift, why not do it directly? Your future selves knew you and your mother were standing there, invisible, on the day you go back in time. Why not just put it on the ground where you were standing?”

  Fil frowned. It was a fair point.

  The Mechanic spoke up. “If this gift is meant specifically for Angel, we need to remember that she was not yet born at the time of the original trip back in time. It might be something only she could find or use. Storing it here, in a place we will know remained undisturbed all this time, was likely a less risky approach than asking Fil or Hope to store and protect it for so long.” He paused. “And like the nanos recovered today, perhaps this gift is something we’re only now able to understand and use.”

  “Why don’t we figure out what this is, and then determine the reasoning for the unusual delivery approach?” Angel suggested.

  Fil picked up the box as everyone gathered around. It weighed only a few pounds, but Fil noticed something else. “I don’t see a way to open this.”

  The Mechanic frowned. “That’s… strange.” He thought for a moment, and then snapped his fingers. “It’s what we just said. Angel… ask the box to deconstruct.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I see!” Charlie said, nodding. “It’s like the Mechanic said. They packaged it in such a way that we wouldn’t be able to open it until we needed it and were ready for it. Only by getting these special nanos, and the communication nanos to control them, would we be ready for whatever’s in the box. Nobody else would be able to open the box. So… why not make the box out of your nanos?”

  Angel nodded, concentrated… and the box disintegrated.

  Fil looked down at his hands. He saw a piece of paper, rolled up like a scroll, but surprisingly heavy for paper. He looked at the others, who nodded, urging him to open their gift. He unrolled the paper and blinked. Text appeared on the glowing paper. “It’s a computer!”

  Eva leaned over the paper computer and smiled. “Will Stark was sent to the past with a similar device. In his case, the computer provided useful information at key points in time. This device should contain information useful to our circumstances.”

  Fil looked at the screen, and then touched the device. A hologram erupted above the screen, and they jumped back, startled.

  The three dimensional image looked much like his original energy keg, but the labels floating around the image suggested something different. He couldn’t find the generator portion. His keg used gravity to power the internal turbine, supplemented by air and water when available. Nothing of the sort appeared. The interior was dominated by what looked like energy storage cells, but cells with changes that…

  He whistled. “This isn’t a generator at all.”

  The Mechanic nodded. “It’s a battery, and the amount of electricity it can store is… staggering, if my initial observations are correct.”

  “Wait,” Angel said. “If this battery can store vast quantities of electricity in a device of this size… Can we use a set of these to store the energy needed to move the time machine?”

  “This is amazing,” Charlie whispered.

  “How do we generate the electricity stored in the battery?” Eva asked.

  They studied the plans for several minutes before the Mechanic whistled. “This is brilliant. The source of energy is… Energy.” He looked up, a smile lighting his lined face. “There’s no generator; the device converts our Energy into electricity in vast quantities and stores it in compact form.”

  All eyes looked his way, and Fil nodded. “Sounds like I’ll be busy filling these in the future. It’s the best use of any of my discharge sessions I can think of.”

  And nobody will die, the voice in his head hissed.

  Shut up, Fil thought back.

  Eva looked around. “We have been here for some time, and the locals will want to return. I recommend we depart and return to Port Hudson.” She nodded, a look of satisfaction upon her regal face. “This has been a most productive excursion.”

  They returned to the flying spheres and were soon en route to Port Hudson. Angel spent the trip entertaining them with shapes formed with the new nanos. The Mechanic took possession of the scroll computer and spent the journey studying the technical schematic of the Energy battery.

  Fil had something else on his mind, and remained silent for the journey home.

  When they reached Port Hudson, he pulled Charlie aside. “Can I ask a favor of you?”

  Charlie hesitated before nodding. “Sure.”

  “Walk with me, if you don’t mind.”

  Fil started moving. A confused Charlie followed a moment later.

  Fil led the way back to the room they’d started in that day. Once Charlie entered the room, Fil closed the door. He moved toward the chair, the one enabling the sharing of memories. “Can you help me get back inside?”

 
Charlie looked confused. “But why? We got everything we needed from your memories. There’s no need to get back in.”

  “I know,” Fil said. “I’m doing this for reasons of my own.”

  Charlie shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Fil stepped into the chair. “I’ve spent decades now struggling to sleep at night because the instant I fall asleep, I have dreams of my wife and daughter dying. I remember the news stories and conversations about the damage I caused after. Those memories are so overwhelming that I can’t remember them before that time. I don’t remember what my wife sounded like, Charlie. I don’t remember what it felt like when my daughter flew into my arms.” He took a deep breath. “But earlier, when I was in this chair, remembering what happened the day of the fire? I felt everything. Heard everything. It was like Mom was there with me. I could feel her holding my hand. I could almost… almost… sense Dad standing next to me. I could hear their voices, really hear them, not just remember the words. I realized something. I could use this machine to truly remember Sarah and Anna. Maybe, just maybe, if I can remember what they were like when they were alive, I’ll finally be able to get some closure.”

  Charlie stared at him. “I had no idea.” He motioned Fil into the machine and closed the machine. “Take as long as you need. I’ll be here. as long as you need me.”

  Fil felt a rush of excitement. He’d finally “see” Sarah and Anna once more.

  As the cocoon sealed, his words slipped out. “Thanks, brother.”

  XVI

  Testing

  2175 A.D.

  Angel looked at the sleek craft in front of her and nodded with satisfaction. “It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  They’d created three-dimensional digital models of the time machine by merging images culled from the memories of the Fire. The full sized model would remain here until they used it for the trip back in time to rescue her father, a man she’d never met in person.

  She’d always been able to sense his presence, or more accurately his existence. Her ability didn’t seem to be dependent on distance. She could sense Fil with the same intensity whether he was in the same building or on the other side of the planet. She’d accepted without hesitation that isolation was his way of protecting her and Fil. She’d long wondered if that was truly necessary; by all accounts, just by virtue of her parentage, she ought to be able to hold her own against any Aliomenti of negative intent. And Fil, having managed to get the older, Energy-trained Will as his father… well, surely nothing could possibly hurt him, right?