by Davi Cao
Riding on those cars turned into free fall, speed rising to dangerous limits, people holding on to trees, bars, and rods, all waiting for the worst, for any clumsy turn that would set the whole thing rolling and crushing everything in it and on its way.
The mountains behind the caravan shadowed the group of settlers, rounded peaks emerging from under the smooth ground, throwing the machines to its sides, expelling them from their region.
Near the bottom, when a valley began to form, with hills also growing ahead of the caravan, one small truck shook on its wheels, leaning sideways with the driver’s scared brake, falling back on the floor with the impact of a monster, blowing up one of its tires. Fragments of the explosion broke glasses from nearby smaller trucks, the air blew so hard as to push the other vehicles near it and make people lose their hearing for a few seconds. With one truck lost, they risked getting trapped in a crater from where they wouldn’t leave until the terrain changed again.
“Abandon truck! I repeat, abandon truck! We must keep going, we can't waste our time!” Laura said from her tank’s speakers.
They rode at the bottom of a basin, from where not much before they could see endless plains. The settlers on top of their truck’s oasis held on to metal bars and tightened ropes around themselves, hushing as the horizon disappeared. Their hearts weighted in their chests for the lost people in the blown-up vehicle, no ceremony held to honor those lives. Instead, they accelerated in unison, leaving the scene with the blowing of engines and eyes centered on the rising hills blocking their way.
The trucks wheels held them tight on the ground, rubber against rubber, now taking the caravan up with the regular effort of electric magnetism. In one hour, they reached the tallest point in their obstacle, and everybody took a deep breath when the land in front of them gave no signs of violence. For their relief, they found an area nearby covered by mist, a small spot where people seemed to hold hands while spinning in circles.
“We have a target, my dear ones. Follow my lead,” Laura said, her gaze intent on the prize found.
A large ou.uo orbited around fifteen people chained together by the will of their hands. They had backpacks filled with honey, crowns and small containers attached to their arms and legs where more of the special substance got stored. Skins brown, bluish and white colored the group of natives, faces indifferent to the monstrous trucks parking by their village's side.
“This, my brothers and sisters, is our reason for coming here.” Laura got out of her tank, into the mist, destined to be the first to meet the native people. “Don’t worry, you shouldn’t fear them. They are harmless.”
While speaking, dozens of ous dodged her invasion of their dusty disk, and Laura presented their target with the tranquility of a preacher in communion with God. “Those of you who’ve never tasted the honey, come here and taste it. Your demanding work deserves a reward, only your hard work. But don’t abuse it now, leave it to the others.”
A couple thousand people formed a ringed crowd around the village, all waiting their turn to share in the purpose of their expedition. People stuck their hands in the native people’s gear following the ritual of greed, not saying hello, not saying please, just the blunt extraction of the substance of their dreams and a quick burst of satisfaction. Not even half the people managed to get a taste of it.
“Settle down, all of you. We’ll secure this spot and form our first commerce line. They’ll keep producing honey nonstop, and all we should do is to form a team to work on collecting it. Volunteers, anyone?” Laura said, seeing the trucks behind the crowd more clearly due to the mist’s fading.
The caravan camped in mixed sites, some preferring the soft ground near the human farm, some opting for the nine oases over the trucks. They stood on flat land, framed by the newborn mountains from where they escaped, which rose higher up than they could predict.
A dynamic horizon stretched from all around their camp, things swelling and deflating at an instantaneous pace compared to the millions of years for similar Terran changes. While most slept and played, Laura assembled the first team of honey collectors.
“Get the barrels, Maurice. We have ample storage capacity, you’ll see,” she said, pointing him to a cluster of small trucks. “Now, the five of you will follow these little squarish things landing on the people’s backs, you see them? They keep spinning in circles and they’ll never hit you. After a while, they’re easy to recognize. They make honey out of dust, and the other little things make the dust. We still don’t know the role of all these little creatures, or machines, whatever they are, but what matters to us is the honey that they make.”
“Is honey important for these people?” Olivia said, a brown woman who crossed her arms one step away from the native people.
“If it is, we can’t tell. They don’t eat anything, they don’t drink, they don’t sleep. As far as we can tell, they are independent from the little things orbiting them, and of honey as well. So, it won’t matter to them.” Laura caressed the natives circling by her side, her hand sliding from one head to the other in their movement.
“The barrels, ma’am.” Maurice dropped the first container in front of the team.
“Alright, now let’s get to work. Your job is to walk in their pace and collect anything that is dropped in their bags and crowns, ok? Not hard, but valuable work, that will get you into decent shape. This is still a small group of producers, and our goal is to find bigger ones. It will serve well as a first test, though. Now come, off to work!”
A ray of light shone over Laura’s tank, a sign she noticed when turning around to check on the camp. She walked to her vehicle, entered through the hatch, and locked herself in. The screens on the console flickered with the silhouette of a person.
“This is only the first step, Laura,” Colin said.
“It is. We’re in a good mood, I can feel everybody is excited about what we’re doing here.” Laura scrubbed her fingers through her oily hair.
“And what are we doing here?”
“Taking our world to other places. Wasn’t that the plan?”
“I want more. We need to expand faster, everywhere. We need to go to every other col.loc in this universe. A vast occupation of humans from Terra, all pointing to our native world recreated. It’s not about saving people’s souls and keeping the integrity of our world. It’s about dominating the world we’re in now.”
“We... we are just a few. There are millions of other planets, as big as our own. We’ll take generations to explore them all.”
“Tell the people to expand, to have children and send them off. It will be exponential. Other Creators will find them, they’ll either play with them or laugh at what I’m doing. Either way, Mae may find us, and she’ll be curious about me. You have seven billion people at your disposal. That’s a good start, isn’t it?”
“It is. I’ll do my best. I would like to see my world back too before I die.”
Laura got out of the tank. A wave of sounds clashed on her ears, the sound of populace, of human activity. Two thousand people waiting for her orders, and her orders hovered crystalline in her mind: to look for the infinite.
Dalana circled with the group of native humans, following their pace along with the farmers. The ou.uo turned dust into honey, and every time they lost honey to the extractors, they flickered, their flight lost precision and they orbited closer to the humans. They kept working nonstop.
“I can’t tell whether Ai.iA created a world with the concept of purpose yet,” Dalana said, murmuring to herself.
“Is it possible not to have one?” Colin sat in the middle of the human circle, watching his friend come and go.
“Everything is possible. But all this honey, they store it for a reason. When people take it out of the circle’s influence, I guess it affects the little things somehow. They’re suffering.”
“Yeah? So what? They’re not the only ones.”
“But they are creations. A Creator’s suffering affects only the realm
of creation. That’s what you’re doing aren’t you?”
“So, you’re saying that my suffering has no consequence to those sharing my condition?”
“We are immortals. In the length of our existence, a bad time is only an irrelevant blimp. It’s creation who truly suffers.”
“What I’m asking you is this: does my suffering has any effect on you? You see me looking for a safe shelter, for a place where I can feel at home and live my life in peace, and you see me losing people, repeatedly, and crying for it, and getting mad for it, and you’re indifferent to my feelings?”
Dalana stopped walking. She stared at Colin, who waited for her answer with a frown. She crossed the line of humans separating her from her friend, and sat by his side.
“I am sorry for what I said,” Dalana said. “I am not indifferent to your suffering, not at all. The difference is that I trust you. Because of this trust, I believe you’ll come out a stronger being after this moment, after all the bad or the good things that happen to you in the eternity ahead of us. I don’t trust creations. A bad experience might crush them, destroy their essence forever, even annihilate their concept and never allow them to emerge again from a Creator’s mind. So, I want to save them, and I worry. Do you see the difference?”
“Fine, fine, do as you wish,” Colin said. “Do you think you can help me out with something?”
“Of course. Whatever you want. I’m telling you, I want to see you grow.”
“Cool. We need to find other native people to collect more honey. Can you fly a little, looking for it? That will help my project grow.”
“Your project of becoming the dominant Creator?” Dalana narrowed her eyes.
“That’s the one.”
“I’ll do it, sure, I’ll fly for you. And when you get mad again out of frustration, I’ll be by your side, I’ll be here to comfort you. I hope you value that, because you’re about to see how hard it is to destroy other worlds.”
Dalana got up, crossed the circle of humans, created a flying pill, looked back at Colin, and left. She left him in the center of the action, watching the camp, the people who chatted and played games, hundreds doing what they had at their disposal, looking for ways to cure boredom.
Many volunteered to the farm, to make it possible for people to alternate from hour to hour in the collecting duty. The world spun around Colin, a whole ecosystem of two worlds combined, one simply expressing the beauty of its creation, the other fighting to conquer it.
Laura rolled a barrel to a small truck, sided by followers ready to intervene in case she lost balance and risked letting the heavy container fall on her. When she got to the truck, stronger people helped lifting it up to the truck’s body, fitting it among the other swollen barrels.
“Here, take this,” Laura said, giving the driver a positioning device with a small numbered screen. “We’ve installed the beacon in here, and we have the zero point. Take the truck there, lave the barrels for the next encounter, and head back to us. I want to see how easy it will be.”
“If we find mountains as high as we had on the way here, I don’t know, it might be risky,” one of her followers said.
“Take your time, and pay attention. If anything goes wrong, stay where you are and send us a sign. We can track you from two points now, and soon we’ll have three or more, so you won’t be lost. Remember to keep calm.”
“I’m loading extra for us, guys, chill out. It’ll be a fun ride!” the driver said.
The truck went away under the collective cheering of two thousand people, all raising hands in farewell, wishing a good trip for all three of them. Laura stood behind the big crowd, over her tank, watching the vehicle build its way around the crater rim which still dominated a part of the horizon.
“My dear ones, we’ve given our first step in this new life of ours.” Laura spoke through the loud speakers of her tank. “Our fate is the fate of the universe. We are the bearers of the big life. God has chosen us to lead, he has given us the will and the strength to carry his words through all lands of creation. Today we make communication with our brothers and sisters from this alien land. They greeted us with the indifference with which they led the rest of their lives. They are not the ones who’ll make the universe a beautiful place. We are! We are industrious, creative, we are lovers, we adore beauty and truth. We camp here for now, but this is only our first stop.
“Three families, I say three families, will volunteer to remain here and establish the first human village in the new worlds. The rest of us, we’ll keep going forever. We’ll have children, and our children will have children, and we’ll send them off to the new worlds, and they’ll send their produce to our Earth, everything will point to our home world, because we come from there and we’re here spreading our way of living because we love our home world so much. We will expand, my dears, until we conquer the universe.”
A wave of cheering swept through the air, enticing Laura’s ears with the excitement of victory.
On the blue sky, shadows of massive col.locs showed through the atmosphere's haze. The gentle darkness of night still needed a few more days to come. To sleep, people sheltered themselves under their tents and trees.
Even so, the constant clarity of the world messed with many settlers’ biorhythms, making many switch night for the day and vice-versa, resulting in a camp always bustling with activity. They separated one side of the camp to the sleepers, and another to the woken.
Colin, waiting for Dalana's arrival, always had something to watch, some conversation to hear. At last, though, a flying object approached camp, a pill-shaped craft with a dark person in it. It landed on the outskirts of the camp, disappearing right after its pilot stepped down and started walking toward him.
“I found a big one, a really great group. Hundreds of natives, more than I thought they could hold together, beautiful, so beautiful, Colin, you have to see it!” Dalana said, the full whiteness of her eyes glowing in front of him.
“I do want to see it! Where can we find it?” he said, holding her shoulders.
“Not far. But maybe they shouldn't go there. Your people won't know what to do with it.”
“Of course they will! They'll get the honey and spread out.”
“What if they get hurt?”
“By who? Nothing here threatens them, nothing but the terrain itself.”
Dalana looked down, nodding at his speech, images of the giant village spinning on her mind. “Fine. Just follow the ray of light.”
Above the mountains, in a direction they still hadn’t explored, a faint clear line rose to the sky, pinpointing a place closer than he’d hoped for. Colin wished for a ray of light on Laura’s tank, before knowing her whereabouts. She slept under an oasis tree, on a truck, surrounded by others. He created a cell-phone over her, and as it fell on her lap, she regained conscience. The screen showed a picture of her tank, to which she responded by getting up and rushing to the vehicle.
“We’re ready to go. Dalana said it’s something big, a city of natives. Get the engines running and go,” Colin said, forming his image on the console.
“Do you know what we’ll find there? We’ve never seen a big place before,” Laura said, her voice coarse with interrupted sleep.
“We’ll find out together.” He concluded his line and his image faded.
Laura opened the tank’s hatch, turned the speakers’ volume up and shook the camp with her order.
“Pack your stuff. We got the calling, we have a new destination. We leave in one hour.”
She went to the human farm, where the members of the three families who would remain, cleaned their hands to hug Laura for one last time.
“You are the pioneers, my dear ones. We’ll get back to you in time, we’re all together in this new world. The truck will be back after the next encounter, with more barrels to fill. Once you fill your quota here, use the honey as you wish. You’ll never be hungry or thirsty as long as you have it,” she said.
A ray of light
guided their way, so the caravan marched. They met an undecided terrain on their path to the city, mountains that threatened to rise then became valleys instead, making them ride on solid ground as if sailing on water. But the pilgrims smiled and closed their eyes to the wind blowing their hairs and making the trees under which they rested do their cozy rustling.
Then the city became clear at the distance. Laura opened the tank’s hatch while the driver led the vehicle on, leading the caravan to that place they knew nothing about. Dust covered everything, an expanse wide like a mountain, shadows moving in it, human shadows, hundreds, maybe thousands, a chain of people holding hands, making not a circle, but a stretched shape that enveloped towers, strange black towers.
The ou.uo produced by the union of so many humans was a galaxy on its own. A dark disk of debris orbited the whole dusty expanse, a whirlwind doing things faster than the eye could see. It had honey, it had more of it than the caravan dreamed of finding, and because it had so much, the ou.uo was that much wiser. It saw the complexities of time and knew that their ecosystem existed everywhere.
The ou.uo launched ous of its own ecosystem away from its disk, and when those tiny creatures touched the ground, they made it swell, creating small mountains. One thrown next to the other, pimples higher than the caravan’s monstrous trucks formed from the impact, making a wall protecting their ecosystem. The caravan, surprised by the sudden barrier, braked in fright.
∙ 20 ∙ At the edge
Laura gave the order, she screamed “Halt” through the speakers, she held her hand up in front of the caravan. The city that grew in their views disappeared behind a cluster of tall hills spread over a line surrounding the natives. Laura ordered her tank to move forward once the monstrous trucks stopped.
“Stay back, all of you. I’ll see if it’s safe to pass,” she said, tapping at the metallic hull to order her driver ahead.
The tank thread held the vehicle well in the first incline, but soon it reached a near vertical ascent, leaning back, about to tumble. Laura kicked the driver, she ordered a retreat, finding the wall obviously impassable by vehicles.
