My imagination ran riot. Could it have been there were a thousand eyeballs, jostling for position to get a better look at us?
However, that particular train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a ghostly apparition, which seemed to tumble down from that living canvas, to then hover before us.
*
The apparition was of a tall thin bipedal being, with long gangly arms and legs. The head was unduly large for the frame that supported it, the smooth contours of its face having only the hint of a nose, a tiny mouth and dark, narrow, sorrowful eyes.
He appeared ghostly, not because he was ashen-white, or semi-transparent, which he was, but because we could see something more distant through his outline. It was as though we were peering into a keyhole, to glimpse another portion of that broiling green sky, and those half-imagined eyes beyond.
He said his name was Apollo. He had chosen that name from Tukarra’s scant memories of Earth’s mythologies because he had brought the gift of light to this strange world, and he intended to look after us by providing food, music, and enlightenment.
In short, he could give us whatever we asked for, to the best of his abilities - apart from allowing us to leave our new world.
Well, he said he would enlighten us and over several days, and simulated nights, he certainly did.
Apollo came from nowhere, to see us whenever we made ripples in the normally still golden lake, to ask if we needed anything, and to try to explain what had happened to us.
‘What you see around you is not an illusion,’ he said. ‘You are being sustained in a multi-dimensional bubble, a miniature universe my family have created for you. Like your own universe, but on a smaller scale, there are no edges. Its contents repeat ad-infinitum, forever. That is why you can see yourselves in the distance.’
If it were possible for a semi-transparent, alien shaped, portal to another world to look slightly embarrassed, Apollo did then.
‘The form I have taken to come and visit you is of course a construction, a projection my family felt would not be too alarming for you.’
‘Our true form owes more to the patterns you have no doubt noticed in the sky. I believe you would say my family are like children, pushing their faces up against the window of a sweet shop, trying to get a better view of a new confection.’
‘But I have much more to tell you and you will need time to take it all in.’
*
It didn’t take long for us to ignore the subtle clues that we were always being watched.
To be honest, I couldn’t think of anywhere better to end our days. We had succeeded in getting away from everything, from all visible technology, and from any other people.
I loved spending the warm nights with Tukarra cradled in my arms, under the twinkling ‘starlight effect’ that we had requested for ourselves.
By the time we summoned Apollo again, several more days had past us by, and I had grown quite a beard.
All three of us sat down by the lake, Tukarra’s hair wafting gently in a cool breeze, Apollo floating, cross-legged, a few inches above the grass.
Then Apollo, touched his chin and made a gesture that was probably supposed to imitate deep thought.
‘I am sorry I cannot return you, from whence you came. As I explained, you are in your own little universe now, and that universe, and everything in it including yourselves, is comprised entirely of what you call Dark Matter.’
‘If fact, the whole Dark Matter Realm is filled with bubbles like this one. Some of the bubbles are small enough to contain single lifeforms, such as my true self and other members of my family.’
‘A long time ago we purified and grew the special crystals, you call Astracite, and sent them through primordial black holes into your universe in the hope we could learn more about your Realm. The crystals you found are, how you would say, “just the tip of an iceberg.” They are eternally entangled with their Dark Matter counterparts that remain in our Realm. We can use that association to help us sense what is happening around them.’
‘It is true, we did learn a lot from that experiment. We have identified where matter based lifeforms evolved to exploit the crystals; and in the case of your Elite humans, we were able to capture and process incredible amounts of information from them. We could tap into their social networks, their journals, their diaries, their very thoughts and even experience their feelings of pain and pleasure for ourselves. But what we did not expect to find was a specification to build humans, to be handed to us, on a plate.’
‘You see we understand the language of entanglement so well; we knew exactly what we were looking at when we saw your data streams passing by one of our asteroids.’
‘It didn’t take us long to translate the dimensions of your blueprints into our system of co-ordinates, and re-create you in a form that was visible to us.’
‘For the first time, we can see exactly what you look like, with our own eyes, and study what it really means to be human.’
‘Naturally, we also had to create this environment for you to live in, and hazard a guess as to what you might need to eat and drink. I have to admit, that was probably the hardest task for us, and we hope you like what we have achieved here.’
I looked at Tukarra, then to Apollo, and made him a promise.
‘I’ll let you know what we think,’ I said - stopping myself short of predicting when that might be.
*
A few more days passed, during which Tukarra and I reflected on our past, and considered our future.
Yes, we could be happy here.
Yes, we might even raise a family.
But; and we were completely agreed on this; if there was any way we could turn back time to stop Vitcha Kesinko from killing billions of innocent people then we should take it.
This is what we wanted to discuss when we next went down to the lake, and touched its smooth golden surface.
Apollo appeared as usual, and he somehow knew what we were going to ask him for.
‘Your scientists have often wondered where all the matter in your universe came from, and where it goes to at the centre of black holes. These are places known to mathematicians as singularities - single infinitely small points in your space-time.’
‘Well, I can tell you that single points in space-time in your universe are smeared across all of time and space in ours. Matter falling into a black hole in your universe becomes merely faint background radiation in ours.’
‘The same is true in the opposite direction. The only exception to the rule are those Astracite crystals. They are like pins in space-time that bind your universe to ours.’
‘We can use them to detect and bring radio waves to us. That’s how we have been able to learn the confusing language you speak.’
‘In the other direction, we can use the crystals to subtly affect the state of matter around them. And we can do this in your universe at any time of our choosing. In that way, I believe we have had some success in starting life itself, on one or two planets, in your Milky Way galaxy.’
The moment Apollo finished that sentence, I could see Tukarra’s eyes light up and then she attempted to clarify what Apollo was telling us.
She looked straight into Apollo’s ebony eyes and said, ‘We can’t ever leave here and you can’t send us back in time, but you can change the state of matter, at any time you choose, as long as the matter being modified is not far from an Astracite crystal. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed.
‘So, you could use that principle to send messages?’
‘Yes.’
‘Long messages.’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed once again.
‘Like a book for instance.’
‘Yes, but where would you send this message?’ he asked. ‘There has to be a suitable receiver, and I would need a unique time and place.’
Tukarra looked stumped, and looked to me to pick up the thread.
Just then, I was struck by an idea that I put to Apollo in t
he form of a question, ‘When was the first Astracite crystal used, in the Solar System you picked us up from?’
After what seemed like a very long pause, Apollo replied.
‘We believe that one of our asteroids crashed into the Earth a long time ago. It may have caused the extinction of the creatures you call dinosaurs. Particles of Astracite dust were ejected into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and ended up being strewn right around the globe. One of these dust particles was first incorporated into a portable memory device. It was not actually discovered during the manufacturing process though. Your engineers probably thought it was just one of several other impurities found in silicon chips of that decade. It had no effect on the workings of the chip itself.’
‘How do you know it was incorporated into a portable device?’ I asked.
‘Because it moves, somewhat erratically, relative to the Earth’s surface. In fact, it sometimes moves with a swaying motion, a gait, at something like the length of your legs above the ground.’
It had to be in someone’s trouser pocket.
‘And do you know where it is? And what year you found it?’
Apollo could only answer the first question. ‘I believe it is somewhere between the countries you call Switzerland and France. As to the year, you will have to tell me that, I find it hard to understand your system of time measurement. Would it be helpful if I told you it is very close in time and space to where your people created their first sub-atomic black hole?’
I began to get quite excited, ‘That would be at the Large Hadron Collider sometime in the twenty first century. It sounds like you have identified a memory stick belonging to a scientist who might work there. If that turns out to be the case, then you could not have found a better recipient for our message.’
Then my survival training kicked in; remember my father had taught me basic electronics as a kid, so I could build field telephones, and simple computers, come the revolution.
As I began to formulate a technical solution for delivering my message, Apollo leant forward. He was listening intently. I might have described him as being ‘all ears’, that is, if he had had any.
This is what I came up with, ‘Twenty first century, silicon based, electronic memories used to work on the binary system. If I can remember my ancient history correctly, groups of eight binary digits represent the letters of the alphabet. Could you set and reset the individual bits of memory around the Astracite crystal?’
Despite having such a tiny mouth, Apollo seemed to smile, for the first time ever.
‘Do you know, we might just be able to do that!’, he said.
‘Well,’ I exclaimed rubbing my hands together. ‘We want to warn the people of Earth about the dangers of a man like Vitcha Kesinko, a man who literally brought the whole human race to its knees. But then we would have created a paradox. I guess if we succeed in stopping this man, then the three of us could never have met.’
‘I do not believe that would be the case,’ said Apollo. ‘The information we used to build you has stepped sideways off your time line onto ours. These copies of your bodies now have their own independent existence in the Realm of Dark Matter.’
Apollo uncrossed his long legs to stand up, still floating several inches above the ground. A small transparent cube then fell from the sky and, with uncanny swiftness and coordination, he caught hold of it with his spindly fingers.
‘Treat this cube as a scribe,’ he said, as he passed the object to me. ‘Keep it with you as you tell your story, it will record what you are thinking and allow you to make corrections based on what you say.’
‘Meanwhile, I will ask my family to see if they have any other ideas for sending your message back into your universe and backwards in time. I must also ask them to decide whether we should allow you to send such a message, at all.’
‘I’ll let you know what we think,’ he said with the same non-committal intonation I had used a few days before.
And with that, he shot back up into the sky, disappearing behind the clouds.
*
Apollo came to see us on his own accord from time to time - whilst he was waiting for the full approval of his family - to report a wide variety of ideas, their greatest thinkers had come up with, for conveying messages back to Earth.
One idea required locating a suitable wormhole, stabilising it using a source of negative energy they had been building up for just such a rainy day, and sending a radio transmission through it.
Perhaps the craziest idea involved his family’s ability to use mental telepathy with a race of matter based aliens: aliens who happen to possess controllable mirrors, the size of a giant planet, that can turn a quasar into an immensely powerful laser communications device.
Apollo concluded his report by admitting that, a few of his family members thought: because I have witnessed the future on my reader’s behalf, then that future is now a certainty; and there is probably nothing anyone can do to change it.
I have to believe those critics will be proved wrong.
*
The task of writing this text was not as difficult as I thought it might have been. I positioned the cube between Tukarra and myself, whilst I told her my story from the beginning. She seemed to relish hearing all about the way everyday life on Earth used to be, before the Great Asteroid came. And she especially enjoyed the chapter when I first saw her appear, like an angel, before my bleary eyes.
I have to admit losing track of time, whilst I recounted my tome. I am not sure how many days and nights it took until I was happy with my work. Then all of a sudden it was finished. And so with some trepidation, Tukarra and I walked, hand in hand, down to the lake to summon Apollo.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are also happy with what you have written, and we agree to send your message using all the methods we have discussed - in order to increase the chances of it being successfully discovered - with just one condition.’
Not wishing to argue, with my first ever inter-dimensional publisher, I said, ‘That seems fair enough to me, but what condition is that?’
‘We want you to include another warning. One of our own.’
‘What is that?’ I asked.
Apollo resumed his favourite thinking pose, floating cross-legged under a tree by the lake.
‘You may not have realised; you have enemies in this Realm,’ said Apollo.
‘What?’ exclaimed Tukarra.
‘Why?’ I joined in with her astonishment.
‘Well,’ said Apollo. ‘My kind gather in the wake of your galaxies to breed and your Dark Matter propulsion systems and rocket motors are killing our lower order lifeforms. They experience a sudden violent acceleration and then death.’
We must have looked shocked, because Apollo slowly waved the palm of his hand to calm us down.
‘To put this into context, the effective mass of our bacteria outnumber your matter particles by almost seven to one, and so it is not too much cause for concern, at the moment.’
‘However, mine is not the only family of intelligent beings in the Realm of Dark Matter. And there are many families who feel your continued use of these propulsion systems could one day threaten their own existence.’
‘So please include what I have said in your message, and let us hope your people will stop using Dark Matter as a means of space travel.’
Tukarra interrupted Apollo here to say, ‘I detect there is a veiled threat, somewhere in what you are telling us.’
‘Well,’ said Apollo for the second time. ‘Just as your brain is made up of a hundred billion neurons, there are a hundred billion of our families hidden within the Dark Matter that shapes every one of your galaxies.’
‘We all cooperate with each other, to form a collective mind, to learn about our universe by way of experiments like the one you now find yourselves living in.’
‘But the destruction caused by your Dark Matter exploitation has greatly worried a few of our families and they have already left the collective. We have
lost contact with them and they could be planning something more incisive than simply sending a message.’
I posed the obvious question, ‘You mean they could be planning some type of incursion into our space-time? An invasion perhaps?’
Apollo looked sadder than usual.
‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘I mean, the collective of which my family is a part, does not know if a physical intervention in your Realm is possible. The problem is, they know you are here. You have come into our Realm, therefore why should we not travel into yours.’
‘So will you agree to include my message?’
I held up the cube, to show Apollo.
‘I just did,’ I said.
*
What a journey this has been for me though. The life I lead now is so very different from the harsh conditions, I had to suffer as a young Ruffian, hiding in the derelict buildings of the forest city.
With Apollo’s help, Tukarra and I have literally built the house of our dreams, and we have expanded our bell jar to include a range of mountains and waterfalls, that look as convincing as the real thing. We have even arranged for genuine rain, and simulated seasons, to allow us to grow a wide variety of crops.
I have to admit there is a fine line between what is actual, such as the fruit and vegetables we can eat, and what is imaginary. In some respects it is like living inside a computer game, if we poke a blade of grass, or a stone, too hard we can see it is just a façade, a thin veneer of colour painted onto the highly sculpted boundary of our personalised universe.
As I conclude my story, we are expecting our first child, and intend to raise a family. Although, what we are going to tell the children about where they came from and what their future may hold, I have no idea.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Escaping the Sun Page 28
