by David Staves
He remembered those he loved. They were dead. He lived for them now, and for himself. Part of his purpose was to remember the good times and make the best of each new day. He had a higher purpose than that, just not yet. But not if he died. He waited. He prepared.
At least he knew his enemy. Did his enemy know him? He thought not. Its victories blinded it with arrogance. It glutted on its conquest. It bathed in the decadence of domination.
He hoped that his time here had made him humble enough, at least. Humility might be the only weapon against the enemy he faced. The man in the moon was a believer. His faith carried him when all was lost. He believed, deep in the core of himself. Could the meek still inherit the Earth?
Luna left him alone to wander. He must be a mystery to her, he thought. They were foreign to each other.
His mother and father were ever present in his memory. Her tender way. His rough efficiency. He was still their boy, this apparent man.
He ascended the final steps to the observatory. He entered the high dome. It was time to take a look, Luna said so. He had a sinking feeling as the skin of his face touched the cold metal of the eyepiece.
What he saw filled him with dread and desperate hope.
The hour had arrived!
His wait was over!
Father
Mission
The Near Future
Washington State, U.S.A
North America
Earth
Sleep was often elusive for Dante. It was getting worse.
The dreams had returned, dreams mercifully forgotten a long time ago. They plagued Dante as a young man at university. The current of the years had washed them away, so he thought.
They were back; waiting, ever patient, on the other side of a veil worn too thin.
These were dreams of a distant place and time, dreams of another life. They made him feel weak and afraid because they were real.
A little boy named Dante wandered empty rooms. He walked and ran away from something ghastly. The dreams shattered peace, stabbed grief, and soundlessly screamed horror.
They told him who he was. War raged in a deep corner of his mind. It was the place where he held his identity, his timeless self. He was ripping at the seams, battling to remain the person he must be.
He had too few hours of sleep. Though he often stayed up later than Arista and the kids, he was used to a night of deep and restful slumber.
The recent dreams and their vivid apparitions were wearing on him. He liked the night, especially those nights when the sky was clear enough to stargaze. He did his best thinking out on the porch, during the early hours; in moonlight dusted by stars.
Dante cleansed himself in the quiet starlight.
He walked the intimate, dimly lit, corridors and chambers of their home. He checked on his sleeping children and returned to his chair, reading under the yellow light of a single lamp.
He was increasingly upset, waiting for something to happen. A sense of impending doom weighed him down. There were reports of natural disasters: earthquakes, thunderstorms, flood, disease. Was it more than usual? Was it a sign?
There was only intermittent drizzle, the familiar drizzle of the forested northwest. Dante was waiting for something, but he didn't know what it was. A deep voice, a buried voice, was trying to tell him. These emotions, especially the sense of panic and impending doom, were familiar: from another life.
He walked, paced, through the house checking and rechecking. He walked by Anya's door, a teenager now. His forefinger touched the brass knob. A rustling sound came from inside. The hint of a smile brushed the crinkled corners of his mouth.
Hadn't he held his baby daughter for the first time only moments ago?
Moments.
Time's passage was abstract to him on nights like this. He struggled to regain his bearings.
His son's bedroom door, only steps away, was closed. When had the boy started closing his bedroom door? Just moments.
Dante stopped in the shadowed hallway listening. His breathing was slow and paced. The rhythm of the rain was wet and hushed. These were the sounds of a house well settled for the night.
He stood by the bathroom window listening, straining to hear the outside. Soft sounds of drizzle reminded him of a childhood foreign to this time and this place: a time and place where such a drizzle perpetually obscured the sun and stars.
Abominations, perversions yet unimagined - they had crept through false night created by low clouds, fog, and drizzle; weather just like this.
This house - he once thought it was built on an impenetrable foundation of love, safety, and security. Now it seemed temporary - a mere illusion. The doom was coming, it had always been. He was not of this place, not of this time. It was inevitable.
The life he built here, with this woman - his bride, the mother of their children - might be a sacrifice.
Dante was bred to be a sacrifice. The hour of his birth hearkened his fate.
When he began this journey, he knew he would be leaving the benefits of the other place, the other time: his origin. He would not have the health and longevity that was the birthright of that lost era.
He accepted this as any good soldier would. He was to be a sacrifice for his people. He was to go into the dark past in search of answers.
Long-suppressed memories, suppressed by skill and discipline, flooded his awareness. He had been a fool, intoxicated by the arrogance of his lofty origin. So many misconceptions set him up for this heartbreak: The Cradle and its people were thought to be unintelligent, short-lived, simple, and primitive.
As expected, he fell in love with this time and place. Adoration. Ragged breath. He would never trade his years here for the bleached existence of his mentors. If it all ended now, he would die full and happy.
Except it wouldn't just be his death, his blood.
His wife. His children.
He was a fool.
He discovered a depth and quality of life - nuanced and elevated by mortality.
In place of the lacking, he found beauty and richness long forgotten, long discarded by the society of his origin.
Arista was the pinnacle of his immersion into the life of twenty-first century Earth. The love she gave him as a mate, a spouse, exceeded his understanding. The love he had to give in return came from the deepest part of himself. He had no words to express such wonder.
Holding his first born child changed everything. Yes - he fell deeply for the woman - then seeing his child, a unique individual created in equal parts from his and his beloved's DNA; was all love, deep and pure, beyond his understanding. He was humbled.
How ill-equipped he had been!
Finding this mate, entering into marital contract, reproducing in the old fashioned way, all brought up unexpected variables. His emotion and instinct were base and pure. His ignorant progenitors could not have known.
Intimacy, he decided, would be his undoing. He could not imagine a survivable outcome for what was coming. He would pursue their survival over his own.
At all costs.
Unprepared as he was for the tenderness dealt him by the untamed, unbroken people of The Cradle; he resolved to be ready for the impending peril.
He wondered if they had been watching, monitoring.
Surely the outcome was known before he even embarked. The historian sociologists, after numerous assessments - invasive - meticulous - assigned him this role. It was his purpose for being.
On reflection, he had taken to it seamlessly. The discipline of memory suppression had been an essential part of his adaptation.
Was he made for this role or was the role made for him? How far had his powerful tribe gone to make this work? Either way, they both seemed measured, cut, stitched together so finely; constructed so exquisitely. The question frightened him.
Even his name was tailor-made: Dante Quell. He was Dante Quell - had always been.
As he reacquainted himself with long suppressed memories, he weighed them against the l
ife experience gained by the life he and Arista built together. He remembered holding his newborn daughter for the first time and compared it to what he now remembered about his beginning; testing his understanding of his origin. Who was this baby girl's father? The recollection of her innocent eyes tore away the last vestige of Dante, property of the state.
He was theirs now - he belonged to his family alone.
At his start, he was more product than man. His awareness of self began and ended with the state and the various bureaucracies that embodied it.
He was a truncated being, barely a man, planted in a life so rich, so opulent with tenderness and love. He awakened to beauty - foreign to the world of his birth. His awareness was excruciating.
His years of training, physical and mental programming, were long eroded, melted away. What weapon destroyed such impenetrable molding, unshakable scaffolding? Only one thing, defined by a seemingly inadequate word: love.
It was almost too profound for him to understand - but he did acquire an understanding, brought by age and time. Age and time, two concepts washed away by the people of his origin. At first, it was such an abstract understanding: fragile and tenuous. Eventually, it solidified into a new foundation, new sustenance, a nutrient beforehand unknown. It was so multifaceted, so multidimensional and complex, at first. The rough edges that thwarted his understanding were smoothed away by time.
The Dante of today understood that it was as simple and concrete as the heart beating in his chest. Love was his reason for continuing. The Cradle had transformed the warrior he had been.
He wondered: How could his lofty tribe have lost something so pure as love?
It was elemental!
Love was integral to growth and to survival!
How could a branch of the human family tree find itself in such darkness, such absence of love?
What a wicked and warped fate his people had met. Perhaps their disconnection, their apathy, is what gave their monstrous enemy such an advantage.
Dante was an acolyte of the Archive, the only name he had for himself and the world of his origin. He was a ward of the state. He did not have a mother or a father. He never knew a womb or any warmth offered by anything but a sanitized, separated system perpetuated by automation.
As the years ticked by, he realized that his human experience was not the experience that the people of The Cradle knew.
What he was taught to consider arcane and primitive was more authentic than anything he knew in his former life.
That former life was sterile, fleshless, empty.
He steeled himself in these quiet hours, especially after the dreams returned.
These quiet hours. After everyone was in bed, he puzzled it out.
He was born in another age, in another world.
Earth, was The Cradle, the world where it all started. All people, on all the planets, in all of the systems throughout the vast galaxy, originated here.
How that time and place fit with this twenty-first century made little sense to Dante. Either he wasn't entitled to such education, or the keepers of the archive didn't know. Perhaps the records were lost or sealed.
All Dante's teachings said it was a small, primitive place, a place of short lifespans, of sickness, of death, of political upheaval, injustice, and war. In short, it was an uncivilized world left behind by a higher thinking breed of people.
The shining society of his origin conquered the messy business of life: death was rare, procreation was automated, resources and populations were balanced.
Dante was from a city called Quell on the seventh archival world, known as Seven.
Seven was a peaceful place until the invasion. It's people, known as librarians or archivists, were ill-prepared for the slaughter to come.
In desperation, the elders delved into the store of ancient embryos. How they had come into possession of such a numerous collection of embryos was unknown to Dante. It seemed an unnatural and odd concept in the context of the world he now lived.
Cloning was illegal. Dante didn't know why. All the people Dante had ever known in that life came from an embryo held in cold storage.
Dante recalled that some of the embryos came from the ancient ones, those people who inhabited the mother world, The Cradle. Dante had been one of the old embryos. The librarians reasoned that the older embryos might have a better chance, might be genetically more capable of winning a war.
War - a concept lost to his ill-prepared people. Monsters were slaughtering them. Some of Dante's earliest memories involved the descent of the mist, the drizzle, the disappearance of the sun and the stars to shadow and clouds. He remembered the retreat underground. The vault doors sealed the survivors into the archives, into the cavernous spaces containing records and the forbidden tech of another age. The rest of his youth, his limited education, was in this space, this crypt.
He understood there were other less privileged worlds. They were not permitted to use much of the tech that the archivists used to extend life and maintain the population.
The technology of the ancients was terrible. The archive kept it hidden from the rest of humanity.
Dante wondered if the other worlds were more like twenty-first century Earth. He hoped so. The ancients, if that's what these twenty-first century people were, would be well suited to fight. They would have something to fight for: families, wives, husbands, parents, children, and their freedom.
The most valuable lesson he brought with him from the seemingly doomed library world involved mental and physical discipline; ingrained into him from the time of infancy. He found that his ability to focus, to concentrate, was unmatched by the people of this time and place. It was something he endeavored to teach his children.
Twenty-five years ago, he embarked on a journey that took him out of time and place. It took him off of the only world he ever knew. The archivists utilized forbidden time travel to send him here.
He regarded himself in the mirror, seeing the years he wore on his face. How foreign it would have been to the young man he once was. He remembered seeing the elderly when he arrived. He recalled witnessing images of war and violence for the first time.
He was one of few who were allowed to see that part of the archive: it was part of his education, part of his preparation. It was shameful to the archivists that their distant ancestors were capable of such depravity. The Dante of his dreams revered the librarians, despite the way they treated him: like a lesser being. The Dante of today saw they had more cause for shame than the men and women of humanity’s primitive cradle. They had sanitized and suffocated the meaning and vibrancy out of life itself.
Somehow he had been dropped in the middle of the early twenty-first century, a young man who was coming of age. He was starting-out, as all young men did, striving to make a life of his own. He had no back story, other than being a college student at Washington University.
Before his departure, he was directed to go to the university. His room and board, as well as his tuition, was prepaid. Dante's identity was on file, complete with photo id and fingerprints.
The curriculum was elemental. Dante's biggest challenge was social. That all changed when he met Arista. They fell for each other easily. That was history, he thought, smiling at himself in the bathroom mirror.
His smile returned to a frown. Something was coming for him, maybe for his family as well. He had no illusions that his life with Arista was part of their plan, a plan to win a distant war, in a time and place far removed. He took a deep breath as he returned to bed.
He doubted sleep would come.
He paused in the hallway outside their bedroom. A picture of their wedding day stopped him.
He and his bride, Arista, stood in full profile - facing each other.
He rolled close to Arista, relishing the warmth and peace, the smell and physicality; the intimacy and trust of her sleeping form in their marriage bed.
Arista Ghost
Remembering
Distant Future
<
br /> City of Quell
Archive Seven
He studied her sleeping face. He remembered the ghost in the bunker of his childhood.
The ghost was an old machine, a forbidden machine, one built by the ancients. It wore a face much like Arista's.
Maybe it was part of the reason he liked her so much.
Regardless of his already broad life experiences, he was still a child. He wasn't ready. Despite his years of study, he struggled with the English language. It added to his feeling of being a misfit.
Arista made his insecurity melt. He was whole and capable. He was not a boy when he was with Arista. He was a man.
She had something to do with the reason he was there. It wasn't just the ghost of the bunker that confirmed it for him; it was her energy, her essence, her mind, her hunger for something more.
He decided if the librarians had sent him to find her, then the best way to protect her would be to avoid her. So he did. God knows he tried.
The events of those early days confirmed for him that there is such a thing as fate. There was no other reasonable explanation.
His first encounter with her was in history class.
He arrived two minutes before the start of the lecture. The seat in front of him was empty.
The professor began his lecture. Ten minutes into an explanation of the rise of industrialism the hall shuddered. The professor continued the lecture unphased as a young woman walked into the hall and casually took the seat in front of him.
She entered the lecture hall - entered his life - like a rocket.
Based on the reaction of most of the other students, it wasn't a big deal to come to a lecture late. She sat down and began unpacking her textbook, notebook, pen, and course syllabus as loudly as you would expect if she were on time.
When he saw her face, it was as if time stopped.
She was the ghost made flesh, almost.
The ghost was somehow older, carried herself differently.
