by G Aliaksei C
“Peace!” I yelled back, unwilling to move away from the moral support of my obelisk. As my mouth opened the two aliens twitched, weapons angling up for a panicked second.
The insectoid released a clicking chuckle and sighed sadly. “Inson.”
“What?” Had I just been insulted? Complemented? Judged to death? Befriended or claimed as property of the great insect-tank people?
“My race. Inson. We are not many, it is not surprising that you do not know our name.” I realized the voice sounded in my head rather than in my ears. Telepathy? No, likely a type of translator.
“Peace, Inson.” I caught onto the tradition quickly and squinted at the cockroach besides the insectoid.
“Cockroach,” the Inson offered.
My eyebrows shot up, but I was able to speak without laughing, “Peace, Cockroach!”
“Peace, Corporate,” growled the thing, returning the bazooka to its back.
“Are you visiting this pillar, Human?” The massive insectoid was the obvious leader in the pair.
“Ahh…” I looked to the ‘pillar’. My gravestone loomed back at me, silent, unfaltered by the alien’s strange words. “Yes, visiting,” I lied.
“You seem… under-equipped, Human.”
That was an understatement. Next to the massive, armored and armed aliens I felt naked in my casual overalls. These two were carrying a massive bag each, clearly containing enough supplies for a small camping trip. The walk I was supposed to take to get here was apparently a long and dangerous one.
Bullshit mode engaged, I thought.
“Perhaps,” I suppressed the boiling pot of questions in my mind and decided not to further reveal my confusion.
The Inson reached into her bag and threw me a packet. I caught it, glad that some degree precision and coordination remained in my current fleshy, unaugmented body. “Let us wait till night, then we shall travel back to the Gate together.”
What is a Gate? How long is a local day? Where will we travel? The questions raced through my mind as I considered the correct response. A simple acknowledgement? A question? The alien had offered me food and made no hostile moves at a lone Human it had to see as weak and unarmed.
“Thank you,” I said, ripping the packet open and taking a bite out of the bar. The tasteless, cool substance melted in my mouth, and my eyes went wide with the feeling of nanites spreading across my tongue and throat. I managed not to cough only because the bar actually tasted refreshing.
The primitive nature of this purely biological body bothered me greatly. My teeth were back to normal, just like my eyes. I already missed the razor-sharp metal fangs that let me bite through stone. I would have to be careful not to break these weaker, natural variants.
I stepped aside as I chewed, making way for the two aliens. They walked around the black pillar, looking it up and down with curiosity. They then glanced into the horizonless distance, exchanged words, and sat down nearby. Their distaste for the piece of architecture was obvious. I came closer, and they instantly turned to look at me.
“This is…” I waved at the pillar.
“Quite disappointing. We expected greater visual value from a landmark like this.”
“Indeed,” growled the Cockroach. “Sit. Rest with us, tourist.” The Inson’s small head swiveled to the bug with what could only be disapproval, then back to me.
I sat, quiet, gazing at the distant mountains and listening. The conversation I overheard between the two proved interesting, and they shattered my last hopes for sanity in this world. As they talked, I took the opportunity to continue my experiments with whatever system provided me the map and medical monitor.
I mentally asked for all the options at once - a complete Menu. The result was much like a home screen of a tablet or smartphone. A grid of icons - web browser (no connection), calculator, health monitor, messaging and calling service (no connection), banking portal (no connection), map, music player (empty), calendar, profile. Primitive, minimalistic, modular.
The ‘profile’ page presented relevant statistics scattered around my green silhouette. At the top was my name, making me wonder if it was something often forgotten nowadays, with a subscript marking me as ‘Human (Corporate)’. A wallet icon next to it presented a sum of three thousand ‘CC’. Seeing the familiar symbol of Corporate Credit made me smile and relax - the money, at least, was the same. Under the wallet was a flashing ‘No Connection’ notice.
Once more I cursed the designer of my gravestone and their failure to add free Wi-Fi to the boring obelisk.
Date. I feverishly tapped at the numbers - 2960 / 01 / 01
Date:
12,940 AD (Anno Domini) (Old Calendar).
2,690 RY (Ring Years) (Modern Calendar).
01 Month.
01 Day.
The last three numbers meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn’t know how long a Ring month, or even a day was. But the first value, the ‘Old Calendar’ year, had to be the years I knew.
I had been dead for over ten thousand years.
I won’t talk about my temporary state of shock in that moment - I am sure anyone with an imagination can guess my surprise, my panic. I will not talk about the minutes of paralysis that realization, that one numeric representation of time caused me.
Instead I’ll talk about the scale of time. Around six thousand years before my death, the Pyramids were built. About two thousand back, Christianity was invented. In two thousand years almost all modern Human culture and technology, up until my death, was established. In the last one thousand years before my death, computers, industry, space travel, mastery of electricity, combustion engines, the airplane, almost all modern medicine, the telephone and radio happened. In fact, most of those happened in the last five hundred years. The War raged on for less than a hundred at the time of my death, yet it nearly sterilized the planet.
I had been dead for over ten thousand years. It was probable my imagination and understanding of the universe simply wouldn’t comprehend much of what I saw now. The proof that technological progress didn’t stagnate was under me - a real Ringworld.
Yet, at the end of my shock, I was still staring at the hologram floating before me. It was easy to manipulate, intuitive, and quite manageable. And that simplicity, that relevance I felt manipulating it gave me hope, because if I could handle the Menu, I could probably handle most else in this brave new world.
I finally shook myself out of the stupor and focused on the map once more.
Zooming out… out… out…
There were seven ringworlds. Zooming out enough on the Menu map proved just that. We were on the innermost, harshest of them all - the Hades Ring, more commonly known as the Waste Ring.
What a pleasant name. Surely I could expect only cool, spring weather and endless fields of grass from this Ring.
Despite my initial impression of abandon there were trillions of living beings in this star system. The outer four rings with the most harmless ecosystems were littered with cities and housed the less adventurous population.
Both insects spoke about them with distaste, and I understood their prejudice immediately. It was hard to think well of people who lived in a better, easier world than you.
Most cities were built around a network of Gateways which allowed instantaneous travel amongst themselves. There was even an overlay available on the map, plotting out a tree-like transportation network. I guessed that the Gates worked in pairs and were built to connect in chaining hubs. The largest cities were built around Gate hubs that you had to pass to access the larger Gate branches. Some of the larger hubs also connected to other Rings.
Something felt off in their conversation. They did not sound like representatives of a hyper-advanced civilization, but rather like a pair of unconcerned mercenaries out on a camping trip. Their discussion of gear made me think that they knew only the function of it but lacked even a basic understanding of how it worked. Not once was space or orbital activity mentioned, as if the world was pres
sed down onto the rings and barred from lifting out of the atmosphere. Similarly, I wondered why anyone would create megastructures of such scale, only to make them inhospitable to life. Worse, I had yet to find out exactly what that supposed threat to life materialized as.
As I listened and absorbed, my mind straining to keep up, I began figuring out more and more of the intuitive Menu. The system was both powerful and powerless, allowing me to control my funds, send messages and supposedly browse the modern equivalent of the internet when I had a connection, yet was useless as a sensor, too unwieldy in combat, and had no more power to manipulate the world around me than a TV remote.
Who built the Rings? What happened to The War? Why did the Ring inhabitants lack access to space?
I leaned back against the black pillar and looked ahead at the false horizon of the ringworld, thinking. Clearly, I had been put in stasis after my death and, for whatever reason, been kept dead a little too long. I was thrown too far into the future.
My eyes suddenly focused, locking onto something just over the horizon. A cone-shaped chunk of earth floated over the ground several kilometers away, the vast red treetop overhead casting a shadow on the valley below.
The island slowly cruised over the valley, carried by unlikely forces, heading for places unknown. Squinting, mentally constipated by the sight, I followed the anomaly as it drifted away, a single question punctuating every thought in my head, overshadowing all more detailed inspections of the world I was now in.
Why?
1 : To Do Unto Others
Day 1
There was a time in my life where days of cool wind and warm sunlight were, generally, considered excellent weather for spring. There then came a time when all seasons of the year were perfect when it wasn’t raining acid. Later, natural weather became irrelevant compared to the unending shockwaves and fireballs of The War.
I hadn’t seen the sun in years - even stepping out of the Hive was often impossible, be it due to the radioactive snow or falling enemy munitions.
It was incredibly hard to focus on the conversation between the two aliens and not lose all thought and sense bathing in the sunlight. It was wonderful to simply sit out in the open, unburned by radiation and fire. If this was the Hades Ring, the worst of the seven, then it was all uphill from here for me.
Several hours and a good nap later the next black plate overhead brought about night. Instead of an instant change the sun dimmed over the course of several minutes, and I realized the edges of the night-strips were gradually decreasing how much light shined through the shield, bright day turned into perfect night in a close simulation of planetary nightfall, only with the sun never moving from overhead.
I tried to estimate the massive surface area of these black plates, then, assuming a high efficiency of energy collection, calculate the power output of each.
The day-night cycle created by the stripes overhead had to be secondary to the vast power-collecting potential of such a construct. And, unless it saved up energy for a vast death ray, all that energy had to go into powering everything happening on the Rings.
The two aliens packed up their camping gear and looked at me. I had spent some time examining the two, trying to form a solid understanding of them and their gear. At the lightly glowing joints of the alien’s armor were hidden Gems - my invention! - that appeared to power servos and allow the mass of armor and weapons to move. I doubted the Cockroach would be able to lift his cannon without the help of his suit, judging by the sheer size of the weapon and the depth of his footprints. I also guessed that the rune-like patterns on the Inson’s armor were a form of Gem as well, powering her suit in a more distributed but also more vulnerable manner. Interesting also were the runes that did not connect to joints, serving, seemingly, as just decoration.
The Inson’s runes lit up with purple, while the Cockroach produced a red lightshow. Some digging through my Menu had confirmed the cosmetic nature of the lighting - there was a panel dedicated to tuning the color of any Gem in my possession. I had no Gems to color, so I left mine the default white, seeing as I had no gear that so visibly showed off the color. I choose not to mention the implications of having glowing equipment, but the impracticality it was clear - it painted a giant target on the bearer. I doubted anyone would be so stupid as to walk around glowing like a flare without a good reason.
Another interesting observation was the apparent fear of the two aliens towards me. Sudden moves, or even talking after a period of silence froze the towering aliens on the spot.
I grunted, getting up, prepared to follow. The Inson looked at the Cockroach, and the bug retrieved a sword-occupied sheath. An exoskeleton-covered arm offered the Human weapon to me. I gladly accepted the offer, sliding the gift under my belt, holding onto it with one hand.
Without warning they began to jog at a pace that soon forced me into a run. Their armor glowed bright, pulsing power into the quietly humming joints.
With night came a cool breeze that saved me some face in our run. Only half an hour in I started to slow down, exhausted. Combat training did not prepare me for what felt like five percent over normal Earth gravity, and the unwieldy terrain combined with my heavy boots was becoming unbearable for a lab worker like me. Worse, I was missing my augmentations that would make the jog less exhausting.
Unfortunately, I got an excuse to stop and rest.
The Inson alien was in the lead of our three-creature jogging convoy and was the first to be hit. The munitions were stopped a short distance from the armored hull of the beast, protecting the tank from even a scratch, deflecting the tracer rounds away in a spray of ricochets, illuminating the hills. The stream of fire moved onto the Cockroach within half a second. The bazooka-wielding bug had an identical shield, and the bullets, once again, had no effect.
I had no such magical shield, just as I had no armor.
I couldn’t even generate a magnetic field in defense anymore, a skill any normal Human should be able to manage.
As I rolled and fell, dodging, five slugs ripped through my right shoulder and arm, flinging me off the path and into a shallow trench. In my head I listed every artery, muscle and bone that took damage, building an estimate of what I could and couldn’t do in such an unfortunate state.
I had, in fact, been shot before. In my time, before the air itself became deadly, I was recruited straight off a battlefield, where I had taken a bullet to the thigh. Today’s munitions were larger, there were five of them, and they traveled pleasantly fast, leaving massive holes in my unarmored limb.
In the trench ahead of me the two aliens rolled into position. I was flung into that same trench by the impacts, collapsed in an uncomfortable pose, almost certainly bleeding out. Streams of bullets washed over and into my ally’s deflectors, some ripping up the path, many going overhead. In response the Cockroach took off its launcher, unfolding a bipod and setting the weapon on the edge of the hole it was sitting in. Four barrels extended out of the block’s flat face and immediately began to glow dark red. One by one the barrels flashed, solid red beams reaching out into the darkness where the bullets supposedly came from.
“Three assaulters, one defender,” said the Cockroach. “No effect.”
The Inson looked like she was going to charge the attacker, but a single shot from a new weapon passed through her shield, nearly missing an arm and forcing the insect back into the trench. Someone on the other side had an anti-tank gun.
“Third assaulter has a heavy weapon,” the Cockroach added, completing his assessment.
“Are you sure?” replied the Inson with unmistakable sarcasm.
About then I realized that I was not, in fact, dying - a pleasant, surprising development. Instead a tingling sensation filled my bleeding right shoulder. I rolled my head to look at the bloody mess that my shoulder turned into and got a close-up view of the repairs: black smoke enveloped the holes, hiding the gore from view. The amount of metal in the ground here had to be quite high, enough for the nanomachines
in my blood to spot and utilize it. The pain-killing effects kicked in a moment later, reducing the agony of having my shoulder explosively dissected.
Perhaps it was a pathetic first instinct, but in the initial moment of clarity my first urge was to call to my brother. Between us he was always the one to take up arms, usually weapons I built for him. I created so that he could fight for the both of us.
A singular, terrible thought filled my mind. My brother was gone. I had left him in the past, breaking our promise with my absence. We had, since the beginning, worked as a team. I built equipment so that he could be effective for the two of us. He fought with the weapons I made so I would never have to. Now he was gone, and I had no such luxury.
A flood of gold filled my vision, lighting the night - an unavoidable reflex of adrenaline filling my system. What little was left of my Fall Coefficient worked to utilize the useless, unaugmented body I found myself in, purging pain, hesitation and distraction, injecting calm.
I reached over with my left hand, grabbing the sword, and then flipped over onto my stomach. Through the crystal clarity I recalled that first impact in my shoulder, recreating the vector of the slug as it hit me, triangulating the enemy location by comparing the vectors of the slugs that hit me with those that smacked into my alien friends’ shields. Trying not to drag my pained right side I crawled to the edge of the trench, momentarily raising myself over the ridge, scanning in an effort to spot the muzzle flashes. Unfortunately, the shooters were hidden by the fog and rocks, tracer rounds igniting several meters after leaving the barrel, effectively concealing the shooter in the night. I could not imagine how the flashes could be hidden entirely, but the fact remained that shooting back would be difficult.
This was a battle, and I was not in charge of it. The Inson and Cockroach had the firepower and experience to win this engagement, not me, and I had to submit to their leadership for the time being. But I could still think and analyze.
