Survive

by Vera Nazarian

  Disoriented, we stare at the holo-view, but the greater urgency is what is now inside the velo-cruiser, with us. . . .

  A disembodied golden sun, about a meter in diameter, takes up space in the cabin, floating in the air before us. It fluctuates and spins around its axis, sending forth waves of plasma like small armlets that grow longer with each swirl.

  In heartbeats it starts to reform, so that two longer rays extend down like legs in bilateral symmetry, and eight rays flare outward to the sides bilaterally, four on the right and four on the left, like the many-armed Hindu deity—Vishnu? Durga?

  Another ray flares in the center, rising upward in a blunt disk, to form a head.

  The golden being of pure light is now in humanoid form, standing up seven or eight feet tall, its/her/his head nearly touching the cabin ceiling. It has no face, no features, no mouth or eyes, only light.

  Aeson takes a step, attempting to shield me, but freezes in place, as the golden being stretches forth one if its eight arms, palm facing us, in a universal “Stop” gesture, which can also be interpreted as a gesture of peace.

  I breathe faintly and stare, noting with one part of my mind the strange elegance of its movement, the long slender fingers of light, blurring at the edges like moving flames.

  And the being extends another of its many hands, on the other side. Slowly it moves both of the extended hands, turning palms inward and outward, and then bringing them closer to shape a ball in the air—in the same way a practitioner of Tai Chi or other spiritual discipline forms an energy ball of chi or prana.

  Except in this case, there is an actual visible sphere of delicate golden translucence that starts to form in the air, pouring from the fingers of light.

  The being separates the hands and suddenly the chi ball “pops” and stretches horizontally into a string of light—like a string of putty attached to its fingertips—and it starts to vibrate.

  At first, the light string merely forms rapid waves, which fluctuate. And then the waves grow shorter and shorter, and the frequency speeds up.

  Suddenly, there is sound.

  Momentarily I am reminded of the antique early recordings of howling wind on Mars, taken by various Mars probes.

  The sound of the wind hisses, wails, and slithers on a lifeless rocky plain.

  And then the sound starts to make sense.

  “Th-h-h-h-h. . . .” it vibrates. “Th . . . th . . . th . . . th.”

  “Tho . . . tho . . . tho . . . th . . .”

  “Tho . . . . . . th . . .”

  I frown, because it is so familiar. A word at the tip of my tongue.

  Thoth.

  A deity in Ancient Egypt.

  Holy crap!

  My heart starts pounding while I raise my hand in reply, slowly, carefully mimicking it, palm outward. And then I say, “Thoth?”

  And the string of light instantly vibrates and repeats my word and pronunciation, switching from a desolate hiss to my own intonation. “Thoth?” it says. “Thoth.”

  I nod, and say slowly, pointing, “Yes! You? You are Thoth? Can you understand me?”

  Instead of an answer, three more suns burst into existence inside the ship’s cabin.

  I hold back a tiny shriek.

  Aeson starts.

  Erita and Hasmik exclaim in alarm—Hasmik still lying on the floor where we rushed to revive her.

  The three newly arrived suns begin reforming into wavelets and assume similar humanoid shapes with many appendages.

  They now loom like giants around us, overshadowing everything in the cabin—four alien gods materialized.

  Each of the three new arrivals starts to shape similar chi balls with their hands, extending them into strings, and the strings begin to vibrate with sounds of alien wilderness, until they take on a more recognizable acoustic shape.

  “Se . . . . . . th . . .” one string vibrates.

  “E-e-e-e . . . the-e-e . . . th . . .” sings another. “Isi . . . . . . th . . .”

  “Ho . . . ru . . . . . . th . . .” sounds the third. “Horu . . . . . . th . . .”

  I nod again. “I think I understand you. Set, Isis, Horus. Yes?”

  “Yeh . . . . . . th . . .” echoes the one who arrived first, and who first uttered “Thoth.”

  “Are these ancient gods of Earth?” Aeson speaks up. “Who are you? Are you—truly gods? No, it’s not possible. Are you our ancient enemy?”

  “No-o-o . . . Yeh . . . th . . . th . . . th . . . th . . . No-o-o . . .” All four beings start to echo, the four strings vibrating in strange harmony between their palms.

  Okay, this is ridiculous.

  They are not really speaking English or even Atlanteo right now, are they? I think. What if they’re just echoing us automatically, senselessly? They can’t be actual gods, whatever that means, right?

  Also, what if they are possibly reading our minds now, like the pegasei?

  “Who are you?” I say, repeating Aeson’s question.

  “Who-o-o-o-o are you-u-u-u-u?” Thoth’s string says. And then it vibrates more cleanly, repeating. “Who are you?”

  “Are you learning English now, my language?”

  “Learning now . . .” Thoth repeats. And he/she/it raises a third hand, in a similar palm out “Stop” gesture.

  “Okay, you mean for us to wait?”

  “Wait . . .” repeats the light string.

  We pause, suspended for several extremely long moments.

  “Those light spheres—the hostile grid formations of light objects that are attacking our system—are they you?” Aeson asks in a hard voice, breaking the silence.

  Suddenly all four beings respond in a great chorus:

  “OOOH . . . THEEE . . . REEE . . . THHH . . .” they clamor. “Ooh . . . see . . . ree . . . th . . .”

  I strain to understand.

  “Osiris!” I repeat.

  “Yesss . . .” says the string of Thoth. And suddenly, it continues, in a voice that slides lower and lower into a bass register, where its stays.

  “Osiris,” Thoth says clearly. “Osiris is running. OSIRIS.”

  “Running where? Who is Osiris?” Erita asks. “So confused right now.”

  “OSIRIS is the process of destruction,” Thoth’s string replies in a suddenly clear, perfect English. “It is a program running now. It has been running for thousands of your years.”

  Holy crap!

  “You can speak!” I exclaim.

  “Yes, we learned this new language now. Your species has many new languages every time we come.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yes. We come now, because of OSIRIS and because of her.” And Thoth uses yet another hand to point at me.

  Aeson shakes his head with a growing frown. “Explain!”

  In reply, a different being—the one calling itself “Horus”—takes a step closer to us, so that I tense in alarm, looking high up at its blazing golden head towering over me. Horus outstretches two more of its arms, palm up, and on each palm a holographic sphere grows. It takes on recognizable features, and suddenly I’m looking at a little Earth, the size of a basketball, balanced on one palm, and a little Atlantis, proportionately sized, on the other.

  Horus flicks one elegant finger on each hand, and suddenly Earth reforms into a miniature solar system, with Earth reduced to a tiny marble, and Sol in the center, with other planets around it (none of it proportionately accurate, of course, since that would require a football field of space to account for true relative distances). The same thing happens on the other hand, where a solar system of Helios now rests, tiny marble-sized planets spinning.

  “Your handiwork,” Thoth says. “A long time ago, your primitive species caused great harm with your destructive irresponsibility, tearing a rift in the universal fabric. This initiated OSIRIS, an automated cosmic sequence to cleanse your world and your solar system of you.”

  I listen, forgetting to breathe.

  “We came to you then, to reason with you,
and to seek an end without such a final solution. Your ancestors made promises to us, but then persisted in their harmful ways. It is then we permitted the program to run its course.”

  “Are you saying the light grid objects are not you but some kind of automated mechanical sequence?” Aeson asks.

  “Yes, the OSIRIS mechanism code generates sphere objects to cleanse within a given diameter, always with a solar engine at its center. They are energy scattering machines powered by the local star. It is also a very old, brute-force program that we no longer use but which you left running for over ten thousand of your years—it was active but paused, until recently.”

  Aeson rubs his forehead.

  “When you say ‘left running,’” I ask, “do you mean—”

  “Your ancestors were clever enough to hide the rift within a quantum shield, but not clever enough to understand that it was only going to be a temporary solution. All shields fail eventually—especially when stretched to their limit from one solar system to another, across galaxies and the vastness of the cosmos, through a forced wormhole. But for the time being, since OSIRIS could no longer find the rift, it simply paused itself—instead of either completing the wipe or being properly terminated by us. We alone control OSIRIS, and nothing else can stop its inevitable progress once it is started. It is why we no longer use such a merciless solution for primitive sentient civilizations.”

  “It is merciless and cruel,” Aeson says with anger. “Do you know how many innocent lives were lost here around the Helios system?”

  “We regret those lives. We also regret the persistent, shortsighted selfishness and stupidity of your species. We sent the ancient asteroid in a simple surgical strike to close the rift without terminating your entire species. Instead you shifted it enough to miss, and cover your tracks—poorly.”

  “What right have you to judge us, with all our faults?” Aeson says. “Did you create us?”

  “No, we found you.” Horus replies. “They who made you, left you as a primitive species making a mess.”

  “Ah, so you know who made us?” Aeson whispers suddenly. “Can you tell us what is the purpose of our species?”

  “We do not know who made you. But we know your purpose, for we have watched your evolution and it is the same for all sentient species starting out. It is to support each other as you advance into eternity. Instead of consuming each other, you must nourish. Instead of abusing the non-sentient animal species that share your worlds, you must care for, steward, and protect them.”

  Aeson’s expression is filled with intensity. “If you have seen so much, watched us for so long, maybe—just maybe, you must know. What is the origin of my bloodline, Kassiopei? Are we truly divine? Were we made as gods to rule?”

  “We know you, Kassiopei,” the being called “Isis” utters suddenly. “We are not gods, and neither are you. You were made as servants—strong, resilient, and virile. You were the earliest, healthiest of your kind, your DNA engineered to reinforce and maintain the genetic integrity of your then-unstable young species. You were designated as priests—to serve the spirit of all the living with the Logos voice of creation, and to service the early population with your body.

  “Instead, you set yourselves apart, refused your duties of general comingling and began to bestow controlled favors. You claimed the Logos voice for your own, when in truth it belongs to all, and anyone can summon the inner resources to wield it—if the need and the focus is strong enough. Over time, you gained power and limited all interaction with your people to such an extent that your duty transformed into an elite ritual. It is how we encountered you the last time, more than twelve thousand years ago.”

  “Servant priests. . . . This makes terrible but perfect sense,” Aeson says. “And you are not gods. What, then, are you?”

  “Merely something more, something that you are not,” Horus speaks. “As such, we were unto gods once, to your ancient Earth peoples—teaching them complex realities perceived as wonders—but we do not presume. Nor do we want the worship.”

  Aeson nods his head slowly, deep in thought.

  “Which brings us to now,” Thoth says, the string vibrating lower than the others, down at the bass register. “OSIRIS is currently in progress. It is running, even though stretched thin across the universe, newly restarted on Earth and in mid-stage on Atlantis.”

  “So, can you stop it now, please?” I ask.

  “Why should we?” the fourth being, called “Set,” answers, and there is a kind of incredulous sarcasm in the otherwise toneless words. “What a strange mess you have made, of not one but two star systems. You managed to cleverly disrupt OSIRIS yet again, with a new quantum field reset—pulling the energy spheres out of their native dimension into yours and swapping them with their energy output—but at what cost? Your sun, Helios—it is now a neutron star in its early stages, barely contained and spewing itself into another dimension. . . . Higher-dimensional objects were inverted into lower ones and back again, repeatedly. . . . Planets and moons pulled in and out of ghostly quantum stasis. . . . Trans-dimensional higher sentient beings you call pegasei used to line a wormhole for twelve thousand years—you, homo sapiens, are awful!”

  “You’re not so great, yourselves,” Hasmik says quietly, from her place on the floor.

  “Yeah,” Erita says. “Your OSIRIS program is a piece of shebet coded by a shibet.”

  In reply, the string of Isis vibrates with what could only be laughter.

  “That may be so. But truly, your species is ridiculous,” Set continues in the same manner. “We have never seen anything like it before, and we have seen so many things. Yes, you are an incredibly resourceful mess, but still a mess.”

  “And yet,” Thoth says, “we are here because despite all this spewing disaster of your making, you have done something right.”

  And saying this, he/it/she looks at me. “You—we sensed you touching the true fabric of the universe. You have reached out and grasped the delicate cosmic strings, and you used them correctly. You opened two perfect, benign, dimensional rifts in close succession, using Starlight. And for that, we give you a chance.”

  “Okay . . .” I say.

  “Prove to us that this sentience experiment that is homo sapiens, your painfully awkward species, deserves to be allowed to continue,” Thoth says. “Show us that your actions were not a fluke, and that you can move the cosmic fabric—with reverence and at will.”

  The greatest flood of emotion and wonder strikes at my heart—and then recedes, like a thing of translucence and foam, a gentle wave dissolving in swirls along a sandy beach. A quiet resolve forms inside me.

  “You mean like this?” I ask, focusing on the tiny, spinning marble that is the planet Atlantis, floating above the palm of Horus.

  My focus narrows, going sub-atomic, and at the same time I visualize Atlantis, the beautiful green-blue world, as it looks from orbit—and I visualize all of us inside the velo-cruiser, and all the people with Manala inside their depet—and I reach out with my heart across the cosmic divide, while I sing a simple, clean note.

  Space-time folds, and we’re there.

  What happens next is both ordinary and the stuff of legend.

  Our two ships traverse space-time in the quantum equivalent of a blink, and we find ourselves in orbit around Atlantis (sorry, Quoni, and whoever else is about to arrive on a rescue mission and not find us there). The alien gods—if it’s even right to call them anything—pop up alongside us.

  “Is this good enough for you?” I ask. “Now, can you please turn off that awful OSIRIS, take all the associated grids everywhere, and leave us to ourselves, once and for all? I promise, no more old-style rifts, and the one on Earth should now be closed—for real, this time, thanks to the pegasei.”

  And then I add, “Oh, before you go, can you also fix that neutron star thing? I’m assuming you can. I would really prefer for Helios to not go supernova or whatever, when our quantum shield fails, and then have to colonize yet a t
hird silly planet.”

  And crazy enough, the alien gods-not-gods listen and do what I ask.

  After all, the ultimate sign of a stable sentient civilization is the ability to create entanglement by reaching out with love, and I think I’ve just done that, to anyone’s satisfaction.

  Chapter 102

  From here on, things happen pretty fast and all at once, in multiple locations, so let me see if I can make some sense of it and bring it all together.

  As promised, the alien light beings reverse the crazy thermonuclear process inside Helios, so that it’s no longer on the verge of blowing its core—or whatever it is that was about to happen with those two solar jets and the explosions around the astroctadra points. The jets recede safely, the explosions fade, sucked into some other dimensional plane, and the messy quantum shield we hastily put in place is carefully lifted.

  Helios is once more just your average white-hot star doing whatever it was doing before the OSIRIS program took over and started to drain it for battery power.

  As soon as the OSIRIS solar engine is terminated, the golden light spheres (in retrospect, I’ve come to think of them as energy drones) simply dissipate in place—which is a major relief for all the Atlantean SPC Fleets around Rah, Septu, Tammuz, and Ishtar. The Pilots there have been fighting a fierce battle with those same nasty energy drones for days now—ever since they became tangible to our reality and vulnerable to our weapons—and using up a lot of plasma firepower to neutralize each one at the quantum level.

  But now the Fleets can come home, and everyone is amazed, perplexed, and relieved to be on their way back home to Atlantis or to their designated normal stations around the system.

  We find out that the light grid that started building around Earth’s Sol is also gone, as promised.

  Reports from Poseidon downtown have confirmed that the Atlantis Grail Monument is no longer humming, and neither is the great golden dome of the Ra-Disk at New Deshret, which makes Pharikon Heru extremely happy. The ancient Vimana ark-ship has gone silent at last, all its pieces reposing in venerable peace instead of resonating in sympathetic song to the dimensional wound that was the rift on Earth, far across the universe. . . .