by Abhishek Roy
“First of all, now that I am sitting in my living quarters in peace, with a glass of delicious wine, I shall write down all about the flood that I can remember. I intend to return to my Ark someday, exactly where I left it.
My father was Buri- one of the most intelligent Asurians to have ever been born in the 7 billion year history of Asurians on our planet. His wife was Bestla and both of them were extremely enlightened. Due to them, numerous scientific discoveries were being made, especially on the atomic scale.
What really triggered his love for science was an incident that had happened when he was a boy of ten.
My grandfather was a scientist too and during his time, they discovered a whole new dimension. This new dimension in our universe, unlike the millions of other dimensions and universes popping up here and there, was suitable for life. The rate of expansion, gravitation, rate of star formation, solar systems and the consistency of dark matter were just perfect. However, the birth didn’t look natural, in the sense that it didn’t seem like it had happened randomly. There appeared to be something that had stimulated the formation of such a dimension. Particles are always popping in and out of existence and it was this factor which was taken for granted to create an entire world using them. Yet, the exact methods were unknown to us. Something or perhaps, someone was behind it. Or perhaps, it was simply an act of God.
The only problem was, the scientists couldn’t find the exact location in the dimension that could harbour life.
As my father grew up, his inclination towards the wonders of nature increased exponentially. He discovered small traces of an element he named makto. He studied it extensively and came about shocking properties hidden within the element’s atoms. Every sugar cube sized part of that element had enough energy to run a small star for a few hundred years. This also explained its extreme mass.
The element was however stable and using it, he made a device that could be used to grab and expand small tunnels, the bindpaths, that travel through time and space. The device would pin point a location in space and time and transport us there but with an error of a few mirgos. This could be corrected but the discovery was phenomenal.
The location of a life- harbouring planet in the newly formed dimension was still a mystery to be solved in the scientific community.
After arduous research, my father managed to find the exact location where the planet would ultimately form. The planet he called Mandagaar.
He was greatly lauded by the members ofthe scientific community. Yet, another challenge surfaced. The race to reach that planet.
My father used the device he had recently made. He modified it in such a way that he could literally travel through the bindpaths that connected our dimension and the other one. He pinpointed the location on the scale of time at which the planet would have the necessary elements to support sentient life.
He travelled to Mandagaar and was the one who planted life on the planet, still raging with a few volcanoes. The heat allowed the micro-organisms to grow and multiply.
I was a small kid at that time but I still remember my father’s tears of joy when he finally returned.
The initiative first created monstrous flesh eating creatures with scales and razor teeth.
Finally, my parents decided to use their device and wipe out the monsters by redirecting an asteroid towards the planet. This was the mistake that could be rectified.
Finally, my father travelled a little further in time and planted life once again. This time, however, he made a particular species of organisms whose DNA matched with ours, only with a few alterations. This organism evolved over the years to finally form humanoid creatures like us. My father was given the most prestigious award called Mimirdjallar’ for this and he was revered as the most brilliant Asurian ever. “
My father created a tall beacon on Mandaa to make sure that the communication channels go on as usual and he could monitor the progress right from Asr Gawa. This established the permanency of the life on Mandagaar.
I turned to the next page.
“My parents had given birth to me and my siblings and the other citizens of our planet had given birth to their offsprings. Asr- Gawa, as we called our planet had beautiful animal life frolicking in the greenery of the plants.
The population of our planet was increasing rapidly every year. In order to bring it under control, the leaders of the world formed a coalition.
My father was voted to be the leader of this coalition. He introduced campaigns to keep childbirth under control. People lived peacefully with efficient law and order under the reign of my father.
While everything was going smoothly, we received a message from another dimension. At that time, we weren’t totally aware of their existence. Hence, the first message came as a surprise. The message was from another dimension we now call Jargantaam.
When the people of Jargantaam first arrived, we neglected their uncanny behaviour and pale and cold bodies and allowed them to establish colonies here on Asr-Gawa. That was a mistake made by him that couldn’t be rectified.
Initially, everything went well. They were satisfied with their business and we were satisfied with our lives.
Yet, their eyes had always been upon our wonderful civilisation boosted by the power of science. Their lust caused them to devise a plan to overthrow my father. When their plan wasn’t a success, they decided to wage a war. At that time, we didn’t have an immense army but an army nonetheless. The other people we called Jargantaans had a larger army and used brute strength to overpower us after years ofbattle, killing my parents. In the end, a few Asurians, me along with them, were spared while the new Jargantaan leader reigned terror. He almost converted the entire planet to be like Jargantaam - cold, dark and lacking law and order. The worse thing was, he used our scientific achievements for his malicious intentions.
My friends and I hid in a secret shelter I had made a few months prior. From there, we observed the actions of the Jargantaan leader who did as he wished. He populated the habitable regions of our planet with Jargantaans and killed most flora and fauna.
I was the rightful successor to the leadership of the Council. My comrades respected the knowledge passed down to me from my parents and thus paid heed to my leadership.
The reign of the Jargantaans lasted for a long time but their greatest mistake was deciding to destroy Mandagaar- the most significant and valuable creation of my parents. They treated the Mandaas there as ants. He wanted to get rid of them and take down another realm just for their fast growing population. The Mandaas were not very developed when they decided to use my father’s device and destroy the Mandaas who had finally made a few settlements.
The Jargantaans knew that most life on Mandagaar existed on land. So, they decided to use the ice and snow from their dimension to melt it and flood the entire earth.
I couldn’t let them wash away my parents’ creation, using manipulations in our genetic code and harnessing the power of particle mechanics. It was such a beautiful creation that it had to be saved.
Thus, I decided upon taking Evaine, my love along with me to Mandagaar in order to save the creatures. We secretly used my father’s device and were tele ported to Mandagaar.
The Jargantaan leader knew we had reached Mandagaar. Hence, he decided to destroy me along with the Mandaas for making a mistake of going there to their aid.
While the Jargantaans melted their ice, Evaine and I took samples of the human genome. Foreseeing the oncoming flood, we built our refuge, our ark where we stored all our specimens. We built the ark to be a flying machine and thus evade the imminent flooding of the land. To avoid detection from the Jargantaans, it had to be small and maneuverable, so we could not fit every animal species into our ark and hence took their genetic samples too. Once we had obtained every genetic sample, we waited for the flood.
The Mandaas were scared but the assurance that their kind would have a chance to live after the flood had receded, gave them enough hope and happiness that they ref
erred to me by another name. While some called me Bor, some called me Noah, some called me Manu while some called me Gilgamesh. They wrote books and poems about me that I preserved for them.
Finally, when I touched 52, it happened. Four humungous Jargantaan shuttles hovered above Mandagaar, aimed at the centre of the largest land on Earth.
My wife and our children born here on Mandagaar waited in our ark, safeguarding all the genetic specimens we had collected.
At midnight, when the moon shone with all its might, all of them shot giant columns of water onto the landmasses. The columns of water were as wide as a small mountain range and flooded the planet in an instant, pouring out quantities of water we had never beheld before.
As we saw the column of water rushing down at the planet, we fired our engines. The ark lifted off, and we were airborne. Too small to be detected accurately by the Jargantaan battleships, we evaded them and flew to a comfortable level.
Once the entire face of the world had acquired the blue colour of the ocean, the Jargantaan shuttles stopped shooting water at us and launched their coldest ice into the atmosphere and flew away. This made it rain hard for the next few months, supporting the deluge.
Our ark floated over the planet effortlessly, over the lands that had once supported the Mandaas created by my parents. We could even move to the highest levels of the atmosphere to avoid too much of buffeting in the rains.
It lasted for over 30 to 40 Mandaa months.
Once it was over, there was this task of getting rid of the water. This could not be allowed to dry on its own, since then the water would only get trapped in the atmosphere by the gravity of the land, and therefore would pose a permanent danger. Hence I used the teleporter technology built by my father to install a teleporter of the highest capacity on top of the beacon my father had created not very far from here and used the teleporter to send the bulk of the water to random points in space. The water in space immediately froze and some of them formed asteroids, some formed satellites, and some even became comets.
Eventually, the residual waters dried up to reveal the highest mountain in this region at that time. It was the highest mountain before the flood which the Mandaas used to call Ararat and its peak was the first thing to reach out of the water.
We directed our flying archive of genetic specimens towards the mountain where our ark landed with a loud bump.
We exited the ark on my 55th Mandagaar year and walked on a land that didn’t have as much plants and lush greenery as there was before, but it had grass nonetheless. The extra water left over from the deluge helped plant life thrive on Mandagaar life never before. Unwittingly the Jargantaans had done a favour to the planet and life actually thrived more than ever.
As the water dried up to reveal more land, we started culturing the genetic specimens into live creatures. We made the creatures start their life from the two places I had selected.
My friend Maj Da was a great architect and builder. He used his knowledge and our superior material handling techniques along with the manual help of the people of Mandagaar to dig underground and create a lot of cities inside the caves. The outer climate was still very damp and prone to illness for the people. We together created a lot of underground cities all over the plateau within a month’s travel of where we had landed and these were created upto many levels down. Maj Da had the services of a very talented Mandaa named Yima and he really stepped up the efforts of re-settlement. The animals were re-created from the genetic samples and let loose outside so that they can become more acclimatised with the plant life and gradually we developed a friendly ecosystem for all.
The Mandaas of this region really celebrated this second life and they praised Maj Da so much that he became like a God to them. He taught them the way to live simple and inculcated in them a love of knowledge and expertise. They could not pronounce his name properly, and when he left for Asr Gawa, his name became Mazda, and since he was Asurian, they used to call him Asurian Mazda, which slowly became Ahura Mazda in their tongue. So he became a God Spirit for the locals, and these cave cities created by him and Yima became the new lap of civilization here.
I paused. This was becoming too heavy.
All of us were spell bound. Ram broke the silence.
“Ahura Mazda! The Zoroastrian God! My Goodness, all this is true, based on actual people then. Remember, the guide back in Derinkuyu told us that there are legends of Ahura Mazda instructing people to construct an underground refuge!”
Vivek quipped, “What a revelation. Manu, in our legends, was supposed to have saved the Earth and the righteous people from the flood. Now I know who he was!”
I started again.
“Meanwhile, my wife and I also cultured several ferocious species, splicing and rearranging the genes of some of the vicious creatures that my father had grown on Mandagaar before he wiped them away by redirecting an asteroid. We created an army ofthese creatures and returned to Asr-Gawa.
A war raged between the Jargantaans and our beasts and men.
Almost all of our beasts died but the Jargantaans were too weak in number and in energy to fight any more. They went back to their dimension and this marked the end of the Jargantaan terror. Meanwhile, I transported the surviving beasts to an underground shelter, away from light. They had helped me but were too wild and dangerous. I entrusted them with the guarding of my doorway to Asr-Gawa.
The humans I had rescued and those whom I reengineered from the genes hailed me as the Ultimate hero of Mankind. They helped me bring Asr-Gawa and Mandagaar back to order.
Whilst rebuilding Asr-Gawa, I built another tele porter that was much more efficient than our first. To reach the tele porter, I made a bridge. The Bridge had special wires underneath that refracted light into the seven colours of the spectrum. When I became the leader, I showed the Mandaas the rainbow bridge that some called Bifrost while some called it a rainbow. This was my covenant with them that no such flood shall occur again. With the Bifrost and the teleporter, we shall always be there to help them in the face of danger. However, they shall do their best to protect their own kind and control their eating of flesh. Life is precious.“
I turned to the next page, apparently the last page written by him.
“I am writing after so many years now. I am ninety- eight and I see that many more pages are still left. I would love to have these many years in front of me too but my time is short. I am afraid this would be my last instalment. Makto may be able to allow time travel but it doesn’t stop my body from degenerating.
My son Odin, who was born in Mandagaar, is Supreme Leader of the Elder Clans and the citizens are enjoying his leadership. The planet is prosperous and is advancing. They are however using up their resource at such a high rate that I fear the natural resources shall soon end. The landscape of Asr- Gawa is already tainted by the Jargantaan- Asurian war.
However, I trust my son and know that he will find another way to preserve our resources and reshape the city so that it regains its original splendour, even with one very sharp eye.
He has his own family, with a beautiful wife and very robust children. I shall leave him to rule for the next few millennia and resign myself to die peacefully on an altar beneath a structure. It is a structure not very far from where my ark had landed and in the future, it shall be the most important and oldest place of worship of the people who portrayed me as Noah.
Even the people from the land where I had first written my diary, honoured me by naming the place Bor-no or the land of Noah.
However, before I write my last words, I wish to let the anonymous reader know about my prized possession - my Staff.
It is by far, one of the most powerful instruments in the entire universe. Its capabilities cannot be imagined and neither can it be wielded efficiently by everybody.
Its base can be used to ...
“The writing has faded away after that,” I finished.
Kapittel 43
Mathias’s story
DEE
P UNDERGROUND
March 14, 2017, Tuesday, 1930 hours EEST
There was a long silence between us. The truth this diary told us left us dumbstruck. We couldn’t imagine how much religion has shaped this incident into a mystical event; this event which can be rationally explained, though with a lot of hyper advanced technology not familiar to any human.
The value of this diary would be worth billions if not more. It is not something we find every day. Our discovery and the revelations left us completely perplexed.
“I had never thought of such a link between religions. Nor about the connection between religion and science,” Ram mumbled.
“This... explains a lot about our origin.” Vivek sighed, staring at the ground.
There was a glint in Ram’s eyes as a tear rolled down his cheek.
“What happened, Ram?” I asked him.
“I finally realised what my father had been looking for,” he replied and started sobbing. Both Vivek and I stroked his back and tried to calm him down.
“I think my father had finally learnt too much about the Asurians. About their teleportation. About our origin and about Noah himself.”
“How do you know?” Vivek asked him.
“Because when we were talking to Baldr, his tongue slipped and he said that my father had been searching for the ultimate saviour of mankind. Even here, he says that the humans referred him as the ultimate saviour of mankind,” he said and broke into a cry again. “Only because he had learned so much, they must have disposed of him!“
“This must have answered almost all our questions but I am sure there must be more to it than meets the eye,” I said.
“I think so too,” Vivek agreed. “Now stop crying, take the diary and find a way out of here.” He smiled. Ram looked at him with tearful eyes and threw a smile back at him.
We got up and Ram kept it in his rucksack.
Vivek grabbed the staff and used it carefully as a walking stick. It would definitely be useful to us in the future. Together, we decided to find a way out. We searched the entire room - tapping on the walls and pushing at them, looking for niches and cracks.
