by David Staves
The young woman in front of him was somehow the machine from his childhood in the bunker archives - yet not.
The machine had used this woman's form to interact with him via holographic projection.
He regarded her with fear and wonder.
However strong his resolve, his self-assertion, his promise to himself, to no longer be a pawn; he could not resist her. She was a craving, an obsession, the apparition of his drowned memory. She was the preoccupation of his waking consciousness.
The only way he could satisfy the hunger was to be in her presence.
Soft voice, angelic being - his life in the bunker hadn't prepared him for the power of such a creature.
The more time he spent with her, the more refined his appetite became.
It wasn't just physical - her intellect was intoxicating. The rhythm of her thoughts was beauty - eloquent, lofty. Her smile, her laughter, her wit brought a new flavor to Dante's days. He was happy.
He saw sparks - the luminescence in her eyes could ignite the universe.
The essence of this woman could fuel the Golden Age he studied so meticulously as a youth. What was her importance? How did her likeness end up in a machine thousands of years in the future?
He recognized her ways - so many of which seemed foreign to this time and place. They were much like the ways of the library-folk of his youth. She could be too quiet, reclusive, or even cold. She was systematic and efficient; found logic in chaos. She had a quality they lacked: she knew how to dream and reach for her dreams. This young woman - so young - taking her first bold steps into adulthood, was almost a child herself.
He loved her immediately and completely.
His rationalization - his resolve - was no match for the young Arista.
The fact of the matter was that he was young too - though armed with wisdom from a lofty age; he was too young.
He thought the history of Earth seemed incomplete. There were holes, things that made no sense.
There were certain political figures and events he couldn't remember. One of these was the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. He had no memory of studying the collapse of the USSR. When he saw it happening on the news, he was surprised. He wondered, in those early years, if he had just forgotten about the events or if the differences were by design.
He had no memory of anyone resembling Arista from history. Was there manipulation of the records or manipulation of history itself via time-traveling bunglers, not so different than himself? Why did people stop traveling to the moon in the nineteen seventies? He thought they should continue to Mars. Why was there such poverty? Why so much war? Maybe a citizen of the archives, like Dante, could not understand those ancient times. In the months leading up to his departure from Seven, his anxiety mounted. If he couldn't understand them from reading and study, how would he be able to live among them? He would have to become one of them to succeed. Fear of failure haunted him day and night.
Doom had descended on humanity. Could Dante, the lost traveler from the future, find something that would turn the tide?
The bunker - with its fortified walls, vaulted passages, was full of treasured memory - the memory of a soon to be defeated race.
That place, that time, how far removed by time and space was it from this fertile world?
He climbed into bed next to his sleeping wife. He was tired. To his surprise, sleep came swiftly.
Dream
The Distant Future
City of Quell
Planet Archive Seven
The dreams descended, embracing him in memory.
The child of another age soon forgot the world above.
Dante had always been dissimilar to the few other children he saw.
How was he different?
The origin of his birth was no secret - harvested, as was every citizen of Seven. What made Dante unique was the origin of his embryo: an ancient source.
They looked down on him.
They feared him.
He was distinct - not just in the way he looked but also in the way he was: his movements, his way of looking, his mannerisms, even his voice.
The librarians prided themselves on their genetic diversity. Their faces represented every earthly tribe.
They were humanity refined.
Dante was separate in all things. Dante retained the DNA of the ancient ones. To the librarians, he represented the warmongering, short-sighted ancestors.
He even aged more quickly than the other children.
The other children of the archive were still small and fragile, struggling to master walking when he was already running and climbing.
Dante felt disconnected. He thrived on many of his physical advantages. As the other young ones slowly grew into their slim, elegant frames, he was muscling his way around the landscape, finding forest trails to explore, trees to climb, and secret hiding places under the violet shade of fresh yellow-green willows.
Generations of space travel and genetic manipulation left their mark on these library people.
Most early colonists lived and worked, at least partly, in reduced or zero gravity - their bodies reflected the gentler forces. They were lean, trim, and tall.
They were not frail. The colonists retained the physical toughness and wits to survive the cruel void.
Dante's blood hailed from pre-colony stock. He grew upright and strong. To the ancients, Dante's 6'3" frame would have been considered slightly above average.
The library folk towered above him - looking down on the man-child that represented a lost Golden Age: a cursed age.
Archive Bunker
There was little warning.
First, the communications arrays failed, or there was no more to communicate. Was there nothing left to say, perhaps?
The engineers went to work.
Then the clouds came.
Then there was rain.
The flooding was spectacular.
Dante was having the time of his life until the monsters came. They were horrible. Even now, he pinched his eyes tightly closed, trying to expel the memory. They were the embodiment of his nightmare. Nothing would stop them except for fire. The city of Quell burned in the final assault. They narrowly escaped into the vault.
Not all of the librarians fled to the bunkers. Some must have stayed behind, to fight, he reasoned. Otherwise, how would we have been able to seal the doors? The memory was obfuscated in blood.
How could the slaughter have been so complete?
No one heard from the ones who stayed outside the bunker doors.
They were dead. It was an unspoken fact.
The bunkers - deep archives, they called them, were the final hiding spots of these noble people. The people of the city of Quell, on the world Seven, an archival world of the mighty human tribe, an astute and lofty race of archivists, were hiding, shivering in a hole.
They were ill at ease living among the forbidden tech of the ancients. They were quiet at first, wondering no doubt, how they ended up in this predicament. Then in a sorrowful hush, in a willowing whimper, they cried for their dead ones, and for themselves.
He guessed he was about seventeen. For information hoarders, these archivists did a poor job of keeping track of birthdays. There was a logical explanation. What was time to a people who never died? Never say never.
Dante didn't even know birthdays were a thing until he happened to realize all the numbers in the histories had a meaning. There was a measurement of time. It seemed that their time was almost up.
Everyone was afraid. Dante was afraid.
He saw the creatures with his own eyes.
Early on in the crisis, there had been much discussion as to their origin. The archivists responsible for the sciences had many theories. Most agreed the creatures were alien in nature.
A few disagreed. The way they killed was too intimate, too violent, too passionate. There was no motive for one being to do away with another being in such gruesome ways. There must be a reason
, perhaps some distant tie to humanity?
All such speculation stopped when the real blood-letting commenced. It was a massacre.
No witness to the carnage doubted the creatures relished murder. They fed on fear. They gloried in each life consumed.
They were monsters.
They were killers.
There were so few people in the bunker.
He knew there was only one bunker for the city of Quell.
That meant many people died.
There was a lot of crying. The people were rediscovering grief and fear; as well as a whole host of suppressed human emotion. Many of them were even angry.
They were angry, but they were alive for now, hiding in a deep hole.
Dante didn't remember crying.
He embraced the darkened spaces, perhaps feeling the call of a more daring age - one which was lofty and humble at the same time, one where life and death created balance — one where tears, laughter, love, and hate were the deep substance of life. The ancient people had one protection from their horrors that the archivists lacked. It was called love.
The librarians guarded the few young ones, those like them - leaving Dante to his own devices, for the most part.
He still attended school. His training sessions met the needs of a young time traveler. He had to study long-dead language, culture, economics, sociology, and histories. He was alone. No others, not even adults, could know what he learned. Histories, sealed long ago, fed his fear, excitement, and anticipation.
Dante was the only one, young or old, who was different.
He was not to be an archivist. His purpose was deemed, appropriately so, to be risky and daring. The librarians would be ill-suited to such a task. The odds for success would be better for one of sturdy stock, like Dante.
He was meant to use the most forbidden tech of all, to do the unspeakable.
He was meant to escape.
A higher purpose was calling.
He would entrust his life to a machine designed to slice the fabric of time and space.
Somehow he was going to travel back to just before the Golden Age. His role was to prevent the calamity that was to end humanity.
But what was the calamity?
The more he studied, the more he realized no one knew.
The librarians postulated, expertly, that they might avert their doom by utilizing the very tech that had caused it. They believed that their practice of manipulating time and space had somehow made a passage for the creatures to infiltrate the once safe dimension inhabited by humanity.
Their success in transporting Dante would likely create a breach in the impenetrable bunker. It would probably enable the monsters to enter.
The machine projection looked so much like his future beloved. He touched the simple metal bracelet that delivered him to this life — remembered how the machine consciousness launched him exhilaratingly backward.
Seven wasn't the only archive world.
Perhaps one of the others would succeed where they had failed.
But they hadn't failed yet, had they?
He received new clothing before his departure.
It was strange.
"They are called jeans and a t-shirt.” The machine woman looked more like him, less like the librarians. She walked around him, made of light. She was beautiful. She wasn't real. She was a projection.
He self-consciously shed his robes. The machine-woman watched.
"Boxer-briefs,” the machine woman seemed amused at his look of confusion at the unfamiliar clothing.
He dressed carefully. He was making sure that he was putting everything on correctly.
"The tag goes in the back,” the machine was being overly helpful.
He finished with the socks and shoes.
"Amazing,” she said with a tone of amusement.
"What?" he asked, feeling frustrated despite his fear.
"See for yourself," she smiled and gestured. A two-dimensional image of a young man materialized in the air in front of her. It looked so real. It was him.
"What is that?" he demanded.
"It's your image. I placed it on your driver's license," she smiled at him.
"My what?" he was exhausted.
He couldn't stop thinking of the people in the level above them. He was directed to go to the deepest level of the archive. All the doors sealed behind him. What he was about to do was going to be dangerous, not only for him but for them too.
Here the rock walls were replaced by metal ones.
"You aren't in a tunnel now,” the holographic woman said. “You are in an ancient vessel. People who looked very much like you came here very long ago.”
How many years ago did they arrive? It was an insignificant question, even to him. Why did it even matter?
He didn't think in those terms either. Still, he wondered how long ago. He looked at the large metal chamber, in awe of the ability of the ancients.
It was a Golden Age, an age of defiance.
A cursed age, if you believed the histories.
Dante did not believe the histories completely.
He watched his arrogant progenitors and concluded there was more to the story. They - in their lofty judgment - had decided that the ancients were reckless destroyers.
"The first people to arrive here arrived two-thousand-nine-hundred-forty-two years ago. The first automation came forty-eight-hundred-seventy-three years ago,” the machine answered so casually.
Exploring the depth of this ancient bunker, this so-called interstellar vessel, was fun. It was a fortress.
Dante concluded the people, those who shared his DNA, were wondrous. Just by seeing the colossal devices, machines built to terraform whole systems, lying silent in their births.
Now that he was safe from their mistreatment, he often thought of them. He thought of how their cruelty increased during their time in the bunker.
He remembered how Matron Tine sneered at him every evening when he returned for his portion of rations that had likely been stored here for generations.
First, he returned her sneer, then smiled and winked.
"Time draws short for all of us, young one. Enjoy your blasphemy while you can," her sneer became a hateful glare.
Tine did not know he shared a different destiny.
He decided to say nothing. He did not return Tine's disdainful look.
He was sorry for returning her sneer. She was worthy of more respect as an elder. He felt sorrow and pity.
Time
Remembering
Arrival
The Cradle / Earth
Faith
When the time came, the machine entity guided him to ascend a small dais.
A beam of light ignited around him as he stood on the raised circular platform.
"Will it hurt?" he asked, thinking it might be a bit late to ask such a question.
"I don't believe it will," was the sadness in her eyes his imagination? She was a machine.
A brilliant light consumed him.
He woke in a hospital room.
"Are you alright son?" a balding man with bad breath was flashing a light in his eyes.
"Yeah. Where am I?” Dante asked, struggling a moment to remember the words in English.
"You're in the emergency room. It looks like you took a spill on some icy steps. You hit your head hard. We're going to keep you here overnight to make sure you are alright," the man in a white coat and jeans turned his flashlight off.
It seemed everyone wore jeans in this time.
It was at this moment that Dante realized he wasn't wearing all of his clothes. The man noticed he was trying to cover himself up.
"It's okay, kid. It's routine when someone like you comes in with a bashed-in skull. We have to have access, you know. You'll get your clothes back at discharge," he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "You took a hard spill down an icy stairway down at the university. You're lucky your brains are still in your head."
He exit
ed the room. Dante never saw him again.
It wasn't a room. It was a partitioned space with one wall open, facing the nurses' station.
"Thank you, doctor," he tried to say, but the man was long gone.
A male nurse approached his bedside.
"Hey man, my name is Chris. If you need anything, press that button," he gestured toward a cord with a red button. He flicked the lights on, and Dante flinched. "Whoa, sorry dude. We need to keep you under observation for a bit. You can probably go in the morning, don't tell anyone I said that.”
“Meanwhile, you must stay awake," he turned on the tv and tossed a device in Dante's lap, "Whatever you do, don't fall asleep. I'll check back with you in a little bit," Chris walked off in a hurry, not bothering to close the drape partition.
He never saw Chris again, either.
Dante was too enthralled by his new situation to fall asleep.
His attention bounced between a reality show depicting tiny adult humans and an older gentleman's reaction to a doctor's explanation of his vasectomy procedure. How interesting! How horrifying!
***
"What are you doing, Daddy?" both his little ones had asked him of his daily habit of meditation and prayer.
Their frenetic curiosity was endearing. Dante kneeled, teaching his children something so special to him - something he learned long ago in the future.
Arista didn't pray. She wanted nothing at all to do with religion.
She left him to his ways.
He gave her the same respect.
He thought it ironic, believing perhaps, that she viewed his practices as quaint and old fashioned.
They were both scientists - Dante’s specialty was engineering, Arista's was software design.
What might she say if she knew he brought these practices and traditions of meditation and prayer with him from the future?
The shadow of his brow concealed the worry of his expression as he bowed his head to pray.
"Teach me, Daddy," he remembered Ezra's four-year-old voice, pleading with his father to teach him how to talk to God.
