《A Hive to Call Mine》 CH1. pt.I Saying Hello
To witness elegance in nature is called quantum entanglement. It happens when two particles interact, vibrate in unison, and then attempt to separate. Sadly, this marriage can never divorce and these elements remain connected by something that defies logic, something that still baffles science. If one particle vibrates, no matter the distance in time or space from its mate, the other particle reacts in unison. And it is like this they dance into infinity creating infinity in their wake until the end of time. ~K. White, Ph.D, Universal Maths, Cambridge-Astrotecha - page 409, CH. 12: Applied Logic on Universal Function- 1956- VorBooks, New York, New York. ¡°I am a good person.¡± ~General Norman ¡°Stormin¡± Schwarzkopf ret. U.S. Army, Infantry The Goddesses of Life, Fertility, and Death are all one and the same. ~Sigmund Freud. A Hive to Call Mine 1. In the last and fatal fortunes of Harold Fugger, there are over one trillion cells at stake. All that makes up the famous man staring out at a mob of thousands rampaging his million-dollar iron gates, really. History should know him as the greatest thinker ever born but at the moment, and maybe forever also, he will be the most hated person on the planet. A despicable money and resource hoarder, and now the mob chants, calling for his death. ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± The sound is loud and angry. An unrelenting monster that grows by the minute as more rioters arrive to try and shake him free from his tree. Kill Harold Fugger! They sing it like a chant at the top of their lungs. Fires burn behind them, scorching hot, like their hate. His rose bushes- all of his prized garden really- that ran from the street up the mile to the main house, the tennis complex and pool house, all destroyed by tens of thousands of trampling feet. Now they are stopped just a few hundred feet away by the one measure that now makes sense to him, the gate within the gate. And here they all were staring eyeball to eyeball with their future. He, their savior, and they, all too desperate to be saved, yet all any of them get with this end is the violence of irony. One trillion individual living things constitute this whole called Harold Fugger, not to discount the eons of genetic development that went into his creation. Quite a fantastic specimen too, now wasted. All because he found himself in a race against her. Not just her but time also, always, time. Her, his nemesis and the thing that rots everything, especially good deeds. He owes her everything, her, the greatest evil to be offered by the universe and he being the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, blood cells, and smile, the old-man funk, the blue eyes, the half-wiped ass, the who of this person inside all this fantastic melange that would rather not die, thank you very much. The curated me-ness that just so happened to have the unique ability to compute quantum mechanics in his head. A genetic quark that he translated into finally understanding the one thing that has always eluded him, nothing matters and yet everything matters. Fortune gave him the key to unlock her, but in the end he lost. As he watches the angry faces screaming for his death, he can¡¯t help but laugh at what he has saved them all from time and time again. What he gave this world in his attempt to beat her, required being globally despised as a resource hoarder. A resource hoarder with a space empire at his disposal. A resource hoarder almost 2 centuries old. A resource hoarder with access to trillions of years of evolutionary knowledge. A resource hoarder with a space empire but stuck on Earth due to a bad heart. A cruel trick of fate. Or a symptom of being overly cautious. Even with all his intelligence he doesn¡¯t know for sure. ¡°I wish there was something else. Your heart can¡¯t handle a launch,¡± the doctor says, putting her tools back in her classic leather doctor¡¯s satchel but keeping out a syringe. She should be nervous, there is a crowd outside intent on killing everyone inside, yet she does her job as if fresh from yoga and a latte. ¡°Like it¡¯s going to fair much better after they get a hold of me.¡± Fugger wears a pressure suit and from his liver-spotted fingers dangle a helmet. ¡°I couldn¡¯t feel more foolish.¡± ¡°You look great,¡± she says approaching with the syringe. ¡°This might help with the anxiety,¡± and she plugs the needle into the part of his leg with a little flesh still on it and she is right. The anxiety of the moment melts away and he can almost sit back and enjoy. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. ¡°The grandfather of space innovation and he can¡¯t go to space.¡± ¡°Shouldn¡¯t, and in my esteemed opinion, that¡¯s an important distinction at present. And if you hadn¡¯t donated billions to elder-tech, maybe impossible,¡± his chief technical advisor says. ¡°Walk or ride?¡± ¡°Ride,¡± and he climbs back into the chair that always waits his need. ¡°Won¡¯t need this puppy anymore if things go well. ¡°When things go well.¡± Both corrected him because they care. But he is an old man being pushed in a wheelchair, that¡¯s insult enough. The annoyance surges like lightning just under his skin, but fades quickly enough, it¡¯s his fault this is happening. He went to far. ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± Fugger speaks softly, ¡°When the ultimate goal hinges on hope of avoiding 100% failure, there is no real risk in trying,¡± Fugger says, but no one listens as they push him along. He is the fool they want to save. Him, the man responsible for covering the world in space elevators. And he wasn¡¯t greedy either, just a good investment. All over the planet were giant Fugger-owned structures bringing space to Earth. Even had one attached to a shuttle under his mansion, just in case. And the just in case has arrived. It¡¯s the nature of this little argument in the face of death, that maybe there is another way. But as they race along the corridors of his home striving to reach the launch facility his hope grows, acting like adding zero to the sum which will very soon equal the end make any difference. ¡°Doctor Fugger, please we both know your heart¡¯ll pop. Trust in my security team to repeal the mob.¡± His security chief takes over for the doctor when they enter the loading dock off the control arm. Over his long life, physician after physician said the same thing. Some even claimed they could make it possible by cutting into him, but he won¡¯t let that happen. It was never worth the risk of her gaining control again. He owned his dreams, in the end he had at least that. Now, death was inevitable if he didn¡¯t do something even more drastic. He decided already if he survives he is getting the damn surgery. When he survives. When he survives, he has important work to do. Once a contractor who found a rock that changed his life. A life spent stopping a monster from resurrecting herself. Nothing can stop the machine from making her whole again, except herself or the Queen of England. Nothing can stop his work until she has been collected and stored, cleansed and used properly. Possibly a thing that can never happen, if he dies. But that was his lot, ending what amounted to a vampiric embrace, which ended life wherever it went. A ying that eats the yang only to resurrect it again. And that¡¯s why he avoided surgery, he was part of that dance once, but no longer. Because of him it can never be whole. An unwilling participant in so much Earth history already. Death was evitable it was part of the universal cycle. It refreshed things. Made them new. But he kept outliving his doctors. And with every passing decade he collected more and more of her. The only surgery he¡¯d have considered was a decade before when complete cybernetic plumbing upgrades became available, his doing. But still he didn¡¯t go under the knife. Deaths were few and he was a candidate, but at the last minute changed his mind. Then lived another fifty years. He just celebrated turning 193 years old. Not bad. Especially for a man born with a poorly designed heart. Up till now, he was okay not going to space. He¡¯d been there before after all, in theory. Space was just points in the nothing between getting back to life and Earth anyway. No dome, no amount of green space, could compare to the planet he was stuck on, though it was dying and in large part because of his influence. Energy manipulation was always the crux. The more energy drawn the more death happens. ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± In the face of the thing he fought so hard to avoid all his life, dying, he knows this is her doing. She just wouldn¡¯t stop trying to survive. He did his best. He set the path well. Yes, yes some genocide may have happened. Yes, yes on paper he can see how that looks bad. But he made a trade-off with the human race, at 193 Harold Fugger has decided some death might just be evitable in the grand scheme of things. He cringes as one of his oldest memories threatens to take root. Finding her in the desert. The connection that followed and what he was willing to do for her. He managed it in the end, but he was one of the few who ever did. Experiencing her was like death, something permanent. If he dies he¡¯d rather die without those thoughts rattling around. No, never again. He thinks of the eons she offered and his broken human heart hurts. Then he thinks about the cloning facility on HOME. There¡¯s always a backup, it used to be passed on in bits and pieces. Knowledge here and there. A thing needed to do, a holy quest. But overtime the human mind became more sophisticated and the genetic information made more sense more easily and then there was Harold Fugger. The special kid, the man who was always old. ¡°All we need is one cell and you¡¯re back,¡± Ronald Dickson, the man who sold it to him, said. He couldn¡¯t sell it anywhere else. So Harold bought both man and machine and sent them to space. Dickson died so long ago that it doesn¡¯t matter, but the Dickson Cloning is still running strong and producing good results, billions in replaceable pets alone every year. Whatever that means for the me-ness that makes up this Harold Fugger he doesn¡¯t know and won¡¯t until after. And he hates unknowns. He expects the me-ness will be gone so is keen to keep it around for as long as he can. This, the whole of a person, a thing of ten-octillion atoms- even when dead. A thing of continuous motion , motion that the human brain can never hope to understand, could never fully imagine in all its entirety, and then, if there is a soul, Harold Fugger might know one way or another because Harold Fugger is finally going to die.
Ch.1 Pt. II Say Goodbye to Harold Fugger Dead?
Dead. Dead. ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± ¡°Kill Harold Fugger!¡± Well, soon enough the great Harold Fugger, self-proclaimed savior of the human race will die. The great space pioneer who fought to live forever actually will prove to have an expiration date. The physician and chief tech advisor look out the same window at the coming storm of hate and violence. Maybe their calmness comes from a knowledge they are not likely to escape. That their end rapidly approaches. ¡°Whatever happens, looks like you might be stuck with us,¡± the chief says, turning and smiling because it was a shared joke they had about both wanting to see HOME before they died. Then a huge explosion blows away the window, taking most of him and the doctor with it. The smell of smoke, carnage and apple trees fill the room and Fugger chokes unable to breathe. One moment, he was sitting in a chair and the next he is being hastily strapped into a rocket. ¡°What¡¯s happening?¡± it sounds like someone else is asking the question with his mouth. ¡°You¡¯re going to space,¡± then with a loud magnetic click, the tech says, ¡°next stop, HOME.¡± As the rocket doors close some of the smoke clears and he can see the apple orchard, the trees were in bloom, little pink flowers spring off the almost dead trees. It was pretty, yes, but it reminded Harold the heat of Summer was coming. The deep humidity of Southern New York. Choking smog. And all those poor starving souls begging for the bare necessities of life. Congestion of poverty. And them. No matter how many soundproof gates he erected, he could still hear the crowd''s clamor, blaming him. They call him a money hoarder. They call him a murderer. And both were probably arguable in court. He couldn¡¯t leave the country either, or his estate, by normal means anyway. Few places would offer him sanctuary if he did. He was a political renegade. Hated by all the remaining world governments, where they lumbered he took and took and took until he had almost everything. Then a barrage of rifle fire. Some of it pings off the rocket. An emergency countdown starts and he knows he can at least trust his security. If they last a bit longer he might escape. Then another giant explosion and the air grows hot from the oxygen-catching fire. There wasn''t really a true Winter to keep the protesters away anymore so the fire just makes things even worse. Maybe one or two cold days, but never any snow. And now his apple trees, the last that bloomed that he knew of on Earth, not in one of the industrial farms anyway, were ablaze. They stopped forming fruit long ago but still flowered and he knows he might miss them most of all. Their days of fruit were long past and every year he suspected the blossoms that fall in a pink storm would be the last, but today drenched in orange flames he knows it is time to say goodbye. Today, he¡¯s happy he¡¯s got to live on this planet; and he wishes it luck. Rapidly turning brown, dangerous, and ugly he knows it¡¯s because she is returning to power and he indeed lost. He has spent the morning working the last problem he cares about, keeping humanity alive despite what she will do if ever fully awake. He knows he isn¡¯t going to solve it with the time he has remaining either, it¡¯s more a hobby anyway, but still, this morning knowing the tides had shifted, he plugged numbers into equations and fiddled with radiation and gene-stores and physical capabilities, hoping to find a magic ratio. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. There isn''t one. Without Earth, humanity is lost. Just like he won¡¯t likely recreate Harold Fugger in a lab. But he doesn¡¯t have to if he lives. Above him is HOME. HOME orbits the moon. Long ago it was meant to provide free and stable power, that¡¯s how he sold it. Since launch, it¡¯s just been another lie sitting in orbit with the other space junk. It¡¯s more, but only for the elite and the need to know. Those that don¡¯t can barely afford the life they live let alone knowing paradise exists circling their very own planet. He gazes out the smoking hole that just moments ago was a window. There aren¡¯t many signs of the seasons anymore on earth and he wasn''t one for capturing pictures, but he wants this to be more than just a simple moment. It makes him feel whimsical, melancholy, sad for a time long gone. He finds himself watching a little pink blossom floating on the smoke stain breeze that was already browning around the edges, then another explosion shatters the remaining glass out of the control-room windows into tiny shards and the noise makes his ears ring even inside the rocket. Tiny pieces of glass bounce of the porthole. Another explosion but this one is under him as the rocket does its job just as thousands of people pour through the broken section of wall. Back when Harold was much younger, rioters would wear scarves on their faces, Halloween masks, balaclavas, and hoodie sweatshirts cinched closed in an attempt to remain anonymous. These people didn¡¯t care, their ugly, rage-filled faces weren¡¯t in any system because the system was broken and cities were bubbles of protection only the wealthy could afford. They are done here, and if they survive, they will slink back to their crevices like cockroaches. The mob wields pipes and 2x4¡¯s. He watches one throw a brick that bounces off a kevlar-protected head of one of his black uniform-clad private military personnel. Another throws rocks with horrible aim, but still manages to do some damage. A woman with curly red hair, who looks barefoot and pregnant, whips a section coaxial cable. She catches a guard in the throat, tearing his flesh. The guard reaches up and grabs the injury but fingers alone can do nothing and he falls to his knees, blood spraying. When he goes down, he is pounced on and his weapon is taken and he is shot with the very bullets he loaded into the rail-gun. The mob isn''t coordinated. They are chaos. They are a tornado of violence. One of his bodyguard team is knocked down screaming as he is dragged out of the destroyed control room and away to face his end. This was all before the rocket on the elevator activates leaving what was living as corpses smoldering in their bits and pieces. The launch is like falling a monumental distance and seems to last forever, and at the end of, he finds pitch black. His body feels tight. He can''t breathe. The air around him is cold and damp and hot and choking. Even though he knows what¡¯s happening, he wants to panic. He wants to scream out a reminder that he¡¯s an old man. Then the final rocket punches him free from Earth and the pitch-black is replaced by the brilliant blue of the Atlantic Ocean which dwindles into the horizon and is replaced by the rapidly darkening ring of orbit and finally the multicolored Van Allen radiation belt. With a puff, gravity tries one last time to keep him down, but knows the powerful pain in his chest signals his time has come. It was all over in less than one minute. Maybe he died as he would have wished to have died. No longer an Earthling. Something he wanted his whole life that his doctors said he could never have. And they were right. His heart exploded in his chest moments after leaving orbit. Oh well. It''s not all that uncommon for an old man to have a heart attack heading into space after narrowly missing mob violence. Most humans wouldn''t even have bothered or been able to get this far with a single life. But not ole Harold. He was quite the guy. But if the truth were known, he lived beyond greatness because he cheated. He cheated because he had to because if he hadn¡¯t she would have already won. And a scorched apple tree petal floats in the clean artificial scrubbed air. Ch. 2 The Upu and the Naht
¡°Launch the weapon, erase it all,¡± Soya says, and points an affirmatizer at the tech who is meant to do so. The affirmatizer crackles and it is obvious the sly old abacist set her device to kill, meaning nothing was going to get in her way of achieving the planet of Nahtdo¡¯s destruction. With the order firmly issued, the tech unleashes the weapon. It is only a simple press of a red button, after all. As is always the case with horrible things, the implementation over far too quickly. The deaths, yet to come. But theoretically, it¡¯s when the button is hit, the entire freedom-loving Naht-do race will cease to exist. Yay, Mister Tech. Once the missile leaves the ship, it takes an agonizingly long time for it to land, and those on board the barge that launched it are forced to wait for the results. It happens as if in slow motion, and it doesn¡¯t take long for the ship to overtake the missile as it falls. ¡°Will it be long till it drops through the atmosphere?¡± The creature is nervous and looks uncomfortable in the cook¡¯s tunic, like maybe the soft flesh beneath, covered in a furry white down, would probably prefer to be nude. Like the rest of the populous of this world on the brink of annihilation. ¡°What do you think it¡¯ll do?¡± a question from the mouth of a member of royalty, and now the chief-mathstech has an excuse, owned by the premiere-abacist herself, he was ordered to offer answers as needed. He helps himself to one of the treats Rantira offers, bloodfly cake on a plate of polished brass and states, ¡°I don¡¯t have to think. I know. It¡¯ll turn all moisture into a thick calcium sludge. Suffocate everything living on the surface.¡± The Naht-do slave looks horrified as the answer continues to come from the old Upu¡¯s thick white-whiskered chiropteraesque mouth. Nose leaf-crinkling as if holding back laughter. ¡°Yes, used to heal and now to wipe out your race. Here, one solar-glimpse, virtually gone the next. But don¡¯t worry, Rantira. The Upu will take care of all future matters concerning the solar system,¡± he says, then tosses away the cake remembering very quickly he doesn¡¯t tolerate bloodfly anymore. A Naht-do tasked with cleaning quickly dispenses with the resulting mess. The chief-mathstech finds himself doing that more and more nowadays, like eating things he didn¡¯t mean to. He also avoids saying things he knows need saying. When he and Soya would discuss options, he kept silent about wiping out the Naht-do, because he felt winning a war against them, no matter the cost to both sides, was better than wiping them out. A resource, he had claimed. Just as valuable as any rock. He looks at Rantira and wonders what the poor creatures would do if he just told him, but it¡¯s likely the cook already knows that today he becomes a member of an endangered species, on the brink of annihilation. In fact, with all the genetic manipulation already being done to those of the race that remain, likely in a few more generations they will be called something else. Uh¡¯ can¡¯t imagine being privy to that kind of information, it must be torture. He wants to pry, but doesn¡¯t, the Naht-do are servants and it¡¯s best not to inquire too deeply into the thoughts of those that do such work, or they may wake up and realize death is potentially better. It makes Soya happy to keep her slaves in the dark, they need to know nothing but where the sodium is. Sometimes he thinks he should just tell the truth. Not just because he was involved in the design either, but because he can do the math and knows this will not help Rantira at all, a slave is a slave. It is not enough. This something, a moment of cataclysmic disaster, was needed. It was war after all, regardless which side knew they were fighting it. Then a commotion. Almost comical, watching a round black ball, with long limbs and wing bone flailing, fight Soya¡¯s elite guard screaming, ¡°With this, no one wins in the end. No one. The Naht-do just get removed from the equation but fixing the end result, it will not. Avoiding death, impossible.¡± A voice near-by whispers, ¡°The old man has imbued too much.¡± ¡°His words slur,¡± and then a titter. The spectacle continues to distract as the fat Upu fights against the security that has come to wrestle him out. Soft and stout the struggle is immense until exertion wins out and he falters like a water balloon. What¡¯s to come of him now? Who knows, besides maybe history where within those hallowed pages political dissidents are always disappearing. ¡°We are murderers, each and everyone of us,¡± he mutters as he is dragged, with tremendous effort, from the battle-yacht¡¯s control room. ¡°Yes, yes,¡± Soya mutters after being asked if she is sure before turning her attention to the math in front of her, the equation of eliminating the Naht-do from their resource rich world without destroying the reason for their deaths. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Called liquid bone, it revolutionized the medical industry on Grotto. Even the Naht-do got to take advantage of the substance on their homeworld for a few decades before it became their undoing. ¡°It¡¯s meant to kill everything then revert the moisture back. The Naht-do are sitting on mutual destruction, but not allowing mining of their planet¡­ we can¡¯t have contradictions, so the Naht-do must die so we all can live.¡± It was an interview with the same stout Upu who now floats past the bridge view-port frozen dead. ¡°He looks surprised,¡± then more immature laughter. Uh¡¯ finds himself happy to see the journalist go, ¡°He¡¯s been nothing but trouble.¡± then shares Soya¡¯s opinion on dissidents with Rantira, that an opposing view deserves an open wound. ¡°Personally, I am happy to see them all gone. Maybe better to suffer death then be used as grease on the wheel of progress. ¡°Grease?¡± the cook acts shocked, his snout snarling over his sharp bicuspids as if he¡¯d never heard of the concept of erasing the Naht-do before. ¡°No, not you, Rantira. I think Soya will find a mate for you soon. She has much hope for your children. Maybe your pups will help work their native world some day. Be heroes and honor Soya Yee perhaps be given permission to propagate your species.¡± Uh flutters his wings, hoping to appear earnest but sees the cook tense anyway. ¡°Don¡¯t worry,¡± Uh¡¯ promises. ¡°We will curate your best qualities and put them back to work for the solar system.¡± The old Upu looks at the slave, he has been with Soya a very long time. He might have been bought to attend her as an apprentice. She only buys slaves who can math. But this lave was special, within the last ten solar-passes, as house help, corrected numerous issues and pushed equations to their completion. Liquid bone wouldn¡¯t have been possible without his help. Sadly he also had a talent with cooking. Being picked to go with the premiere-abicist on her voyage as Upu savior was an extreme privilege. Soya¡¯s first-cook. Uh¡¯ was a mathstech, also a slave, but far from Rantira¡¯s equal. Uh¡¯s name is the old echolocation for the word, one, and that¡¯s what he is to Soya, her number one. He still tries to get along with the poor creature, any creature really. Life was short, why waste time hating the natural inclinations of life. The poor cook¡¯s homeworld was being wiped clean after all. So Uh¡¯ finds himself trying hard to get along with him during the actual genocide. And smiles and even flutters his old useless wings. The cook looks at him with big black eyes like mirrors, wet with sorrow and uncertainty, ¡°thank you for the information.¡± And he turns to offer his tray to the others gathered on the bridge. Mainly Grotto royalty. Those with a vested interest, mining concerns, other money people. Without the cook, Uh¡¯ finds himself standing alone. But not for long, siding up to Uh¡¯ and fitting her small form into the natural curve of his arm comes Soya. He embraces her and plants a kiss in the center of the gray fur on her scalp. ¡°But we will still exist as slaves?¡± ¡°Forever, my love.¡± Uh¡¯ could say he is more than a slave. Certainly different than the family cook, who was brought on this little war because space food doesn¡¯t sit well with their boss, Primer-Scientist Soya Yee. He watches the cook serve and intermittently rub his obedience-band. Uh¡¯ remembers they constantly itch with the crackle of electricity and echo of potential pain. The punishment for servants can be severe. Uh¡¯ has felt it before himself. If somehow the tech had managed to refuse to launch the missile, the pain would have increased until he blacked out or someone did it for him. Amazing what watching someone in agony can do to motivate. Soya was skilled at applying pain. And pleasure. Subtle and incremental. ¡°Can you imagine disobeying,¡± the old Upu slave whispers to his owner and she giggles like a school-pup. The tech hadn¡¯t refused, but it was obvious he thought about it. Like it would have made a difference. Soya would have just forced another sailor to take the tech¡¯s spot. Thankfully he hadn¡¯t prolonged it, Soya rarely failed to get what she wanted. Life is too short to spend the last moments disobeying an order meant to make things better. The cook had no official title, just a job and he was there only to keep the owner of the barge and her guests refreshed. ¡°The missile is beginning to dip into the atmosphere!¡± The excited voice belongs to a princess, or a consort, someone who knows less than a family pet. Uh¡¯ noticed her with a group smoking a little red fungus before the launch. It was normal and tolerated behavior now. Once it could earn a user death. Amazing how acceptable behavior changes. Nowadays such was to be expected from the youth, unable to enjoy even being in the room with living history without altering their consciousness first. Unaware of the kind of suffering they were about to witness either. As the projectile takes its nineteen moments to complete its trajectory the mood in the control room turns joyous. Soon they can go home victors. They did what they promised they would do, end the violence, preserve the young Upu, make life possible for a little while longer. ¡°It needed to be done,¡± Soya says as her bomb hits. She fought her entire life to unclog the system and make this possible. Streamline things. The celebrated inventor of liquid bone and beloved sponsor of many mathmeartists. Her passion was working to solve spatial folding, spatial folding required resources. To do that she would do what needed to be done, including eat the sun if needs be. But that hasn¡¯t happened. Uh¡¯ doubts it ever will. He finds himself thinking about the fantasy of eating a sun when the calcium converting explosion occurs destroying the atmosphere and every single droplet of moisture beneath it to calcium sludge. It takes but a breath and all die. He finds himself deciding he¡¯d do whatever it takes to solve Spatial Folding for Soya, and now he has an idea, and the best part is it will enable her to see the planet of her birth named from Grotto to Yee. Ch. 3 Trial of the Great Soya Yee
And time passes because that¡¯s all it can really do. Moment after moment, some inconsequential, others monumental. In this one particular moment, Uh¡¯ smiles because everything is working. The math of the moment, perfect. His math. And oh how he loves to be right. A terrorist group with no ties to Soya has been doing work in her name. Enough so that when the general assembly decided to arrest her on treason charges they did so after asking politely. And offered her this trial so that at the end of it she can legally take over the government. Asinine, maybe, but government works when you work it. The one question poised to the anonymous jury: is Soya acting as Grotto¡¯s ruler or not. She isn¡¯t supposed to. Simply a member of the elder class and all. She could have distanced herself from it. Almost did, but why have dreams, if, at the moment of fulfilling them, you run away. Whispers carry in the titerarium, so no one dares make one. The slightest rustle of paper or clothing is audible. An Upu attempts to stifle a sneeze and fails, managing to create a disturbance as those around her turn to stare. One threatens by pointing a black claw. The air feels heavy as Soya stands in the center of the vast space on a round white platform with a diameter of forty-paces, Soya stands on one side, a holo-image of the people¡¯s defender on the other. The air smells hallowed. Like incense or prayers offered up to the gods of old were in the air. The seating slopes up sharply, the effect is like a hundred-thousand faces sitting on top of one another, gradually growing smaller and smaller until disappearing into the bright stage lights far above. The stage is built above mechanics hidden from view by a black curtain. In ancient times, it lowered down into the crypts built below the university. The final resting spot of much of Grotto¡¯s esteemed past. When the time comes it will lower her to whatever waits below, most likely preparations to be crowned and returned to the cheers of her people. He shakes away the alternative, if guilty, she would descend, never be seen again. Uh¡¯ can¡¯t help but note how fragile Soya looks in the white light drenching her. She leans on a cane identical to his and dressed in the same flowing black silks designed especially for this glimpse. Soya stretches the silence, and the loud hush threatens. Milking it, because she is best when making theatre out of her thoughts and opinions. Only Uh¡¯ knows she is also trying futilely to catch her breath. The stage stands in the middle of the huge space meant to display sports, usually, fruit-keeping, 12, Naht-do usually, against 12, and the winners were the team that walked out with the kuppa-fruit nut. Matches could be brutal and deaths happen often. Today the only death planned for is if Soya loses. The penalty for insurrection planned or otherwise. But there is no chance of that. They are here because just by uttering the savior of Grotto¡¯s name, the old argument brews. The argument that asks why not just crown her empress and get it over with it. The magic of ever-improving technology keeps the inhospitable environment of the planet¡¯s dense atmosphere of poisonous gases at bay and has allowed this species to reach far into their own solar system. They are powerful. Smart. Murderously cruel creatures that thought whatever befell their eye belonged to them. They call their floating bubbles, cities. There are hundreds of cities on Grotto, all connected by ancient tunnels. The most populated city is this one, Mtaj where the University of Yee is situated. Sixteen million Upu, and their two hundred thousand Naht-do servants live in Mtaj. Under its bubble, life is crowded but boasts every luxury a society could offer. But it¡¯s a society that comes with a price. One that stains. One that will end unless spatial-folding can be attained. Uh¡¯ tries to push his work from his mind. He has had a breakthrough and thinks he knows how to make the tech work. It¡¯ll be a double celebration tonight when he unveils his plans. He can¡¯t believe how things have matured for them and looks around in awe. Sure, she has always been famous, but to see it displayed like this was incredible. The place was drenched with respect and awe. The trial couldn¡¯t be going any better. The case against Soya Yee garnered so much attention a typical courtroom setting couldn¡¯t be used. Billions demanded to watch, and a live audience has gathered around their devices, system-wide, every glimpse. The largest audience Grotto could boost. The Upu fill every seat and free millimeter to watch. Even the aisles are packed. Some inch out onto the rafters of the vast domed ceiling to get a better look. The ceiling was built so long ago the technology keeping it from crashing down shouldn''t still work, but it does. Thank the creator. Uh¡¯ is not an anthropologist but being Upu used to fly, and those dangling from up high are foolish for defying gravity and will die if they fall, he wishes they wouldn¡¯t. Upus long ago lost that ability as they crawled out of the caves deep beneath the planet¡¯s surface, fraction by fraction. They fought the poisonous atmosphere above that did not care one bit about their struggle for life. They used the subterranean Kuppa-fruit trees to move beyond the caverns and eventually out among the stars. The trees were all artificial now and the only true Kuppa-fruit nuts were relics held in museums. Soya Yee is on trial, but not for murdering the Naht-do, as maybe an honorable society might do, no, for being so popular the people are demanding she be crowned Empress. Acts of violence done are being carried out in her name. Then Uh¡¯ realizes his love still struggles to breathe as the judge has reached the limits of his patience, ¡°Soya please, these distractions are uncalled for. Stick to your closing argument and enough of the theatrics. You are being accused of insurrection,¡± as if he could redirect her through his amplification device, voice booming in the giant hall. Immediately the crowd turns on him and boos. The noise is deafening. The giant face of the judge crushes into fear as he tries to demand silence, but his actual words can¡¯t be heard now over the roar. From homes everywhere, the judge is jeered. The small contingent that agree with him are hushed into silence, most out of fear. Fights break out between Soya supporters and those brave enough to say anything in favor of a guilty verdict. But only because she parlays her greatness and bows her head and apologizes for, ¡°wasting the court¡¯s time.¡± The crowd settles and hopes things hurry to their conclusion. If she is guilty of anything it is being too loved. And she¡¯s guilty all right. The masses love Soya and they will not tolerate their hero treated rudely. The assembled guard, facing the crowd, each look ready to lay down their weapons and run and join the opposition. Uh¡¯ notes, and they have chosen to keep their affirmatizers holstered and are going for the more traditional explosive propelled projectiles. Lethal, yet the Upu and Naht-do in the crowd look ready to join the afterlife if anything befalls their beloved Soya. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. ¡°Grotto was fine with my ending the war,¡± Soya¡¯s voice finally cuts through the silence. When her words clear the sound system the crowd cheers in response. Her voice, soft and old, reaches through the noise with some kind of powerful inner strength. She pauses and fixes Rantira with cold eyes. The Naht-do knows what to do. He¡¯s been standing silent next to Uh¡¯ then pivots on his clawed Naht-do feet, knees buckling to heed her. Then that dry cough Rantira¡¯s drought promised to fix. She fixes her wing membrane over the fit and leaves little droplets of blood on the white silk covering. Uh¡¯ decides then, she looks ill. Maybe the effort of defending the people¡¯s love for her was having an effect. Maybe whatever Rantira was feeding her wasn¡¯t working. He¡¯d ask him to explain again what it was when he returned from bringing her a fresh cup. Then she clutches at her chest and seems to sway off balance. Uh¡¯ is moved to help. She is his owner, his reason for being. So he goes to her. But she stops him with a subtle gesture before he can settle a second foot. She mouths, I¡¯ll be fine. And though he knows it¡¯s a lie he backs off. She won¡¯t be, somethings wrong. He settles back into waiting because that¡¯s all he can do. It could be expected with age, but she, as a public figure, has air to clean if she is to rule them all. A fresh start, she called it. People need to trust me to keep them alive, it sometimes took pageantry like this. Remember Uh¡¯ it¡¯s about legacy. It¡¯s about making it a sin to ever deviate from our plan. To reduce and protect. Despite what she has actually done with her life, that is all that truly mattered to her now. Uh¡¯ can give her spatial-folding and make her dreams of saving the Upu, forever real. He doubts it would matter much compared to what happens here. Life or death, spatial folding is just the icing or the revenge. Uh¡¯ pushes away the reverse, the evil he could make with his numbers. No, he won¡¯t need to. Picking a place out in the auditorium to set her hard resolute eyes, she turns. Her back, hunched with kyphosis, forces her to struggle to look up and see her audience, but she does, brow scrunched in denial of the pain. Uh¡¯ can sense her racing thoughts. Her frenzy to get it all out. She has much to say because that is her nature. She thinks in novels and demands every word be heard and understood. It has caused great and terrible things, this insistence, but this has always been the case with her. And any person destined to shape their people. Too much to say and think and do. ¡°Reduce and protect,¡± her words echo as the crowd waits for more. But she rests and finds her seat and seems to melt into it with exhaustion. Even the judge seems willing to get things over now, like maybe they have gone too far and says, ¡°it¡¯s time for the prosecution¡¯s final arguments.¡± Soon after this, unless Soya opts to speak again, it will be time for the panel of secret jurists to condemn or give the entirety of the Upu effort to Soya. Big decision, one Uh¡¯ is happy not to be a part of. The Grotto prosecutor goes, his face replacing the judges on the screen both in remote locations so as to keep them safe as they did the Elder¡¯s business for them. Basically, the government Upu, in his expensive law robe, says, ¡°Soya might be a danger to Grotto. Maybe her name commands more respect than any seat of power in the entirety of history on Grotto ever should. And she might need stopping, but the Naht-do were sacrificed to save the entirety of the living solar system. The Upu race owes Soya Yee a debt for the rest of its history. I do not favor one side over the other. I am solely for the Upu.¡± He stops and fixes Soya with a stern eye, before continuing, ¡°Long live Empress Yee. The Defense rests, your honor.¡± The screen switches back to the face of the judge. Nobody acts shocked but most cheer. Now the assembled court gets to rule on truth and the good of all. Maybe even the surviving Naht-do. ¡°And if there is nothing else¡­¡± Soya raises her hand slightly and the judge sighs, bowing his head to show she has the floor. Uh¡¯ wonders, does he know his name is on a list of Upu whose opinion has caused the Soya Yee movement great harm and after her coronation decisions will be made. Because it is, Uh¡¯ placed it there this morning with Soya¡¯s blessing. Soya stands to speak one last time and shuffles to the center of the platform. She pauses there out of breath, or maybe unsure how to continue. Not likely, but maybe. The proceedings are being broadcast globally, billions watch the wheezing words, wet and thick with phlegm, of the person considered the greatest Upu alive, ¡°I will miss¡­ likely forever.¡± The quiet is thunderous beneath the high arching ceiling of the titerarium after. Then hushed questions, that boil down to, huh? The enormous building is situated on the University of Yee campus. The one-hundred-thousand Upu present hold their breath hoping for an answer. Soya is known for her eloquence and after she is done speaking many look forward to hanging a crown on her head to wear the remainder of her glimpses whether that be one, or countless. After a long while, still struggling to catch her breath, she manages, ¡°Reduce and protect¡± again. Uh¡¯ knows she means the ideal. The state of balance in which all efforts support the society. She is not on trial for that belief turned Upu religion, however. Grotto society moved to implement that decades ago. ¡°No more waste, we rebuild society by erasing exclusivity. Not with soft hands, but with a hard club. We eliminate waste as we did in the great war between the planets. We destroy that which would dilute our core values. Like we do in the mines. We reduce waste and make the most out of the crumbs of ore we are able to still find.¡± Her words, spoken even before erasing all life on Naht-do, but still so powerfully resonate in everything that the Upu did. Today, Uh¡¯ can tell she has decided to finish and stands stoic, chin thrust up to say, ¡°the Upu¡¯s should seek more than just the stars. I wish¡­ Her voice trails off. ¡°I wish we had never fought a war with our neighbors, our cousins. I wish we recognized how vast the universe was, too vast to be selfish, too vast. I do, at the end of what many consider a great life, want so much to have been different.¡± Then she loses her balance, vestigial wings fluttering as if they could right her bulk, but they can¡¯t and she totters. The sorrow is sudden and hard as his eyes erupt in tears. She loses her grip on the cane. It clatters to the polished red quartz floor with a reverberating boom. Soya opens her mouth as if to answer the sound but stops, tongue-wagging as if trying to force itself down her own throat. Her eyes bulge. She stiffens then falls and hits the floor with the sickening sound of a fur-wrapped skull bouncing off polished stone. There is some blubbering at first, then after several fractions of a second, she doesn¡¯t move. After moments, a single being sobs, then billions of beings eww in solitary sadness and unity. Is she dead? Uh¡¯ mind hurts at the thought. A cold rush of fear courses through him, but as he goes to her, a voice from high up in the stands screams, "Reduce and protect! For all Naht-do!¡± Then an explosion. It is loud and violent and all Uh¡¯ remembers is finding himself at Soya¡¯s still body. Laying over her, to protect it. But before any dawning realization sets in, the stage lowers Uh¡¯ to the next and final chapter of his life. Ch. 4 Revenge Hurts
Ch. 3
He murdered Soya Yee. He, a slave, murdered the greatest Upu to ever live. One of the last Naht-do. A glorified cook. Oldest creature he has ever met, older than any other Upu to ever live. He spent most of his adult life with her and her pet. And he murdered her. The evil known as Soya Yee is dead. Stopped her coup. Stopped her murdering rampage. He hangs around long enough to make sure Uh¡¯ knows she is gone. The cry echoes among the crowd. Most join the master-abacist. Some cheer. The intelligent. The Kind. The slaves like him, sit quiet. The Feast of the Never-Ending Agony compels one to not care. He¡¯ll feast on Suhup Yee¡¯s sorrow for however much longer he has with life, though. Rantira wants to see old Uh¡¯ die also. But that wasn¡¯t fair. He wants to see them all die. Everyone on both sides. He moves back into shadows and beyond and enters the dark warren of caves that make up the underground vaults. He walks slow. He isn¡¯t trying to escape, merely do what he always does. Disappear. Hanging around anymore would be to witness the Upu cry over a creature so heinous history should celebrate her passing. Should, but likely won¡¯t. The campus is in an uproar already as he slips past guards rushing into the titerrium. The crowd is frothing. Then the ancient ceiling quakes. Cracks and fissures appear, his old heart aches at the suddenness of it. Those around him stop too as if watching the ceiling dissolve into dust will stop the weight of it from falling on them. Rantira races past, race might be too strong a word because racing is far from what the shriveled grey-fuzzed creature is doing. Which is good because his goal is to die on Nahtdo when it passes on its transgression. The how has taken glimpses of manipulation to facilitate. There is a launch of mining vessels he plans to be aboard. Foolproof in that nothing stops the launch of mining vessels. Nothing. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. His obedience band itches as it yearns for its opposite. The further he gets from its owner the worse it will get until the pain becomes so great he will die. Can he die? A lot of Naht-do say death is an illusion, that the Feast of Agony is suffering that goes on and on and on. He doesn¡¯t know. But he does have a fix for the pain and after two minutes of walking he finds the cell in which Soya had been held. It was as when they all left it that morning. A lush prison with all the trappings of luxury. She was old, so food needed to be easy to digest and his job as cook was simple because of that. It was just the three of them anyway. But soft or not he kept his blades sharp. He takes one, a heavy cleaver and with no fanfare removes the obedience band and the arm it was attached to. The pain is immediate and the only thing he truly regrets in his life. He would go back to any past moment he had ever lived just to get this decision back. But it is too late for that, so he moves on to activating a burner with a foot pedal, and then because it¡¯s what comes next, his stump sizzles. Then a dip in a redmoss powder he made in preparation for this moment. It works perfect and soon enough he is able to tolerate what he did to himself. Not all the pain ceases, but enough of a soothing is created by the healing layer of herbs and salve to allow him to push on with his journey. He wraps it carefully to look like the arm is still there because nothing draws suspicion like a slave with a missing afirmitizer. His last step is placing it in a sling. The powder will help until he is onboard the mining vessel on his way to dying as he wishes after a life lived in the hell of being denied his passion. Beyond that, in his pouch, is something to help him rest. The pouch he keeps himself prepared with, it could be more full but his days are limited so its burden isn¡¯t great. When he moves he does pretty well for himself, nearly making it out of the dome and onto campus when another giant rumble overtakes everything. A grey cloud filled with falling rocks and bodies collapses on top of him punching him into a deep dark blackness.
Words Ch. 5 pt. I The Ascension of UH Ch. 5 pt. 1
As Rantira languishes in bright exquisite pain under the crumbled titerarium, elsewhere a stage lowers. And it lowers and lowers and lowers. The stage follows a preprogrammed path, one that passes the corpses of pauper and elder alike. This platform was meant to only transport Soya, yet Uh¡¯ goes too. Or who knows what the intention was when playing around inside the math of chaos. It wasn¡¯t the additional weight that weighed on Uh¡¯ but that his math was potentially wrong. They were supposed to crown her empress. The small portion of the population that hated Soya were meant to just disappear and die into history, not try and take over everything themselves. A tumult from above and he thinks he can smell smoke and death wafting through the ceiling. He and the corpse of his love and owner descend to a level deep inside the titerarium. He doesn¡¯t remember the journey. He is rethinking about his equation. Being wrong is unacceptable. Soya will be very disappointed. The crowd, that has sat so docile and patient, writhes in chaos. Screams of agony can be heard, diminishing to nothing as he sinks down, but they exist, likely forever, in his mind. A woman begs. More explosions and then suddenly the sound of what might have been the whole structure collapsing. The dust and vibration seem to be on a mission of revenge then settle as the lift stops after several more fractions of downward motion and the twenty-meter portion of stage spins around and he finds himself in a red-chrome room with a floor-to-ceiling transparisteel wall. The wall allows him an unobstructed view of the whole of the Majt bubble. He wonders how he is here seemingly outside and on top of the whole thing. He should be subterranean. But then realizes it¡¯s a screen with a high-quality video playing. He stares at it wondering what the people of the city were actually doing now. Soya was dead and most were either at war or getting ready for it because an actual coup was taking place. Or sheltering in place waiting to be asked which party they supported. The winners, or Soya. That¡¯s when Uh¡¯ decides what he is going to do, stay here until things work themselves out. His math is done but it doesn¡¯t matter with Soya gone. Just trying to think through that fact and he crumbles with despair. He reaches out to Soya and uncrumples her body. She looks so tiny and old now. Almost a wonder something so insignificant could make such a ruckus happen. Yet more lives ended because of her then were possibly saved by the very invention that catapulted her to stardom, and now this. He wonders why fifty-percent of being a hero is also being a monster, Can one can¡¯t exist without the other? Liquid bone is a distant cousin to his work on Spatial-folding. The later, changing chemistry in an instant, but not forever, because the state of an object exists in permanent infinity, but it always reverts back, eventually. Spatial folding allowed an equation to pick and choose, with Soya that could mean she is both alive and dead. Something with an anchor. ¡°It would have been yours too, my dear. You fought me on it. Said it didn¡¯t matter to our survival. That we¡¯d turn it into a weapon and you alone would be forced to decide. But now look at you.¡± He moans into her perfume-scented fur, silks crisp and scratching under his academic hands. After several moments he finds himself listening to a softly wafting mosswind melody and realizes maybe this was Soya¡¯s plan all along. To die and leave the rest to him. Spatial-folding won¡¯t work without something more substantial at its core. You need a consciousness to operate its complexities. Maybe she never wanted to be an empress, maybe she was always aiming for that more she preached was her ultimate goal. More what? My legacy as law. The air smells alive with blooming flowers, but none are present. He thinks he recognizes the scent as Mossweed, one of Soya¡¯s favorites. The room is cold steel lines and beyond the recorded images of Majt is the turbulent red swirling clouds of the Grotto atmosphere. The tranquillity of seeing the city from up high almost washes away the violence of what must be occurring somewhere above. Uh¡¯ takes Soya¡¯s black-clawed hand and pets her white coat, a coat that once blazed red. He remembers that. Her fur, like her fire and the intensity of doing the work they did. He regrets nothing. Giving her his life was worth far more than freedom. He looks away from her still face, stifling tears, but his bulbous black nose leaks freely showing his grief. The sky in the video on the wall is mauveine. A storm brews. Shuhp expects it was a bad one, he finds himself curious when this was recorded and where he was when it happened. The Elders most likely raised the city to get above it. Sometimes Uh¡¯ wishes they would leave it be. Can¡¯t raise the city above the storm raging now, can they? Amazing that in the end they might also be removed, the Elders. Soya was among their number. A Great-Elder in fact, but the people were not content with them anymore. They took too long to make decisions. And according to Uh¡¯s calculations, in terms of Upu survival, time was of the essence. Now or never. The ominous waves of clouds, that fit the moment and provided proof, beat at the city below. The acid rain eating at the metal in an audible hiss and steam. Every storm is like this. Like the planet wanted to eat the Upu infestation from its core. He stares at the video and holds his owner''s hand peaceful in his sorrow. How long did he sit there? Since the event and enough cycles of the video for him to memorize its chaos. His mind also works on the problem of Soya being gone from the world but here still also. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Spatial Folding. Many moments, or glimpses or passes occur as he sits with the rotting physical reminder of his lost love. His mind crunching the work done already. The algorithm he set to work chomping on Soya¡¯s life. The life¡¯s work with which he had so much left to do. His life work also. And at the end of his life, this thing he set into motion deserved to be birthed into some kind of functionality and soul like it were his child. Maybe it was because he lost Soya and becomes minutely aware, moment by moment, the corpse does not need him to care for it. Nor does Soya need a body to survive. As the storm subsides again he knows what he needs to do. But doubts he can really make spatial-folding work. Was the answer really as simple as plugging Soya Yee into the equation and using himself as the constant? That was the surprise, he built an artificial intelligence to handle the burden of the maths. It needed real-time adjustments, like a human mind- so planned to use hers and now may never know if it would have worked. Using himself, the first experiments yielded success. And now the real Soya is dead, like Grotto no longer needed that version, because she now, thanks to him, can live forever. ¡°She is gone,¡± a med-tech appears. Uh¡¯ must have missed the door sliding open, what¡¯s left of his fur stands on end as he makes eye-contact with the newly arrived Upu. A freed Upu. One unburdened by an affirmitizer. ¡°To make things easy, just call me Techy. Everyone does. Everyone that matters.¡± He smokes. Uh¡¯ is certain of that. He stinks like reburnt redmoss. A ball of fur in a white jumpsuit stained with various fluids. Sloppy and ugly. If he is surprised to find Uh¡¯ he doesn¡¯t show it and walks in pulling a trolley filled with tools for embalming. Uh¡¯ flinches. He can¡¯t witness this and tries to leave, but the pull of the afirmitizer still on Soya¡¯s person reminds him he is here until freed from its grip. And then a wave of regret that he hadn¡¯t moved to take it from her corpse. ¡°And you probably should have just died above. Might have been the best route for you. Lucky you, the boss and I spotted your little daring escape, though, And I made it down here. Guess what? ¡°What?¡± ¡°Everyone up there is dead. If you¡¯re curious. You are 100 lengths below Majt. And in a second you are going to be dead also. From inside the cart he pulls a corpse. Uh¡¯ wonders how much shock his heart can take. The dead Upu looks abused. ¡°Prisoner, we had to think fast. Can get bodies diverted from the crematory, takes some effort, but you gotta be dead. Then on top of the corpse he places a black device. ¡°Bomb,¡± the tech points, ¡°let¡¯s go.¡± Uh¡¯ follows because it¡¯s a better idea than getting blown up. ¡°Call me Techy, if you want. Not that it matters much what you call me, being you¡¯ll likely catch up with your ghost before too long. The boss has plans for you. Your lucky too. He saw your potential immediately.¡± Techy finishes to place the butt of a red-moss rollie in his mouth. ¡°Probably should have just stayed up there and made it easy on yourself. I told the boss though they are not going to like that you are down here. So he said come get you. Alive.¡± He hisses with a puff of smoke, offering Uh¡¯ the spliff. Uh¡¯ shakes the joint away and is unhappy to have started the interaction. A disquieting sense of dread bubbles at the idea of they thinking of the terrorist group doing work in Soya¡¯s name. I lust to live forever through my words. Through me you will gain eternal life also Shuhp Yee. Because it only seemed to be getting worse, only now does he wonder f she ever had control at the end. That maybe her good intentions finally cursed her ending. Uh¡¯ gazes upward where through many layers above he easily pictures a massacre occurring. ¡°All dead?¡± ¡°By design. Don¡¯t take it personally, but like I said, you were supposed to be up there not riding with Soya to her burial chamber. We used to survive in caves and looks like if you want to live still, you¡¯ll probably have to get used to the idea of spending what time you have left stuck in one of your own,¡± Techy says matter of factly as if Uh¡¯ were trying to make his reality otherwise. ¡°Like I already said you shouldn¡¯t be here. So come with me and we will get you on your right path again.¡± Uh¡¯ ignores him. He is old and his owner is dead. What more can be done? His two remaining objectives are to finish spatial-folding and meet death when it arrives. But one over the other is fine at this point. Soya¡¯s disappointed face filters up from his mind and he knows he can¡¯t quit yet. He bows his head deciding compilation was his best option, ¡°I am done serving.¡± It¡¯s la sudden decision one that hurts. ¡°All I ever wanted was to do my job. But now that job is done.¡± ¡°Well, that¡¯s great,¡± Techy says and pats the body of Soya before dragging it off the lift to make a dead body puddle on the crypt floor, his lifemate like he were dumping trash. Uh¡¯ wants to tell him to stop his rude hands and smooth the silks of her gown again, but when he looks up a chill races down his spine. ¡°My job is to take Soya Yee¡¯s slave to his next owner, but first I have to get both these corpses ready for eternity here,¡± and in his hand is Soya¡¯s afirmatizer the one linked to the obedience-band looped through his forearm. Immediately the long-dormant thing begins to crackle and cause misery. He hates Techy for this insult, knowing immediately there is nothing he can do at the moment about it but obey his every command. Instead, he challenges his opinion, ¡°Dead bodies aren¡¯t trash. Waste. Soya is to be treasured. It¡¯s obvious you do not value anything, please let me compose her as she deserves.¡± He knows the voice is his own and then is doubly shocked that he doesn''t regret uttering the words. He would never have while Soya was alive. Simply waited for orders. So, the longtime slave and expert in Chaos Computation finishes, ¡°This is Soya Yee, my owner, for seventy-five cycles she was the greatest mind the Upu ever knew, please let me arrange her.¡± ¡°She¡¯s dead. And you have no more rights than a Naht slave,¡± he says, reaching behind him and depressing a button on the wall. The door shoots open. He uses the word for the defeated race like a curse and is the single worst insult that can be levied on an Upu. Uh¡¯ turns his head slightly, the unease settling as fact. With Soya, he never would have had to worry about being insulted, especially like that. He was cloaked in the veil of her status, and this moment reveals that cloak is gone. The tech has soft, round features covered in pebbly infection scars and coarse black hair shorn short to avoid picking up any more disease and infection from his patients. His uniform is blindingly white. His piercing eyes reflect red and bore holes through Shuhp. Despite the insult, he really can¡¯t deny the truth of the statement. Soya is dead, but the memories of her being very much alive and 60 moments ago when they were discussing that this very outcome was impossible, hits him hard. His body fights against the natural reaction to the sadness. Despair threatens to hold him hostage, but he can¡¯t have that. Once when he was with her, one whisper in her long pink ear got things done. He basked in serving as her number one and would happily be her slave for eternity. It worked because both knew his importance. He turns bodily to take issue with the disrespect and finds the med-tech pointing the affirmatizer at him.
Ch. 5 Pt. II The Ascension of Uh Ch. 5 Pt. 2
¡°Property known formerly as Shuhp Yee? Consider your ownership changed.¡± Uh, nods, hating the sound of his formal name and knowing soon the pain will start. He is a maths-tech and can do the sum easily enough. Whether he wants to survive this, avoiding the pain will be his only desire soon. Techy depresses a little red button connected to the circuitry inside and proves it saying, ¡°follow close.¡± Uh¡¯ feels the shock start at the bracelet shoved through the flesh of his left wrist at birth. Left because he is right-handed, and work could get destroyed if he were beckoned that way. The shock works its way up his arm. It doesn¡¯t stop until he steps into the buffer zone surrounding the wielder. Soya kept the buffer set at five paces and Uh¡¯ finds himself there quicker than he thought possible to avoid the pain, which ceases immediately when he steps within range. Aren¡¯t you concerned at all about Universal Property? They will certainly want to curate Soya¡¯s life.¡± ¡°Universal Property Collection will never even bother looking for you. This explosion is one of hundreds on this glimpse. Everything is getting blown up. Almost all the space- transportstations. Only way to get between bubbles is through the ancient caves. Trust me the only Upu that are going to survive this are the ones who can manage from the cracks. You being dead has its advantages and your new owner isn¡¯t one to brag about his new maths-tech. How are you with Fruit keeping theory? Wonder if the terrorist will let the matches keep going. Don¡¯t worry it¡¯s a stupid game for stupid people with too much money and time to spend. We¡¯ll figure out someway to use you. Important to soya must mean profit somehow. Speaking of which,¡± and Techy answers his connector. Uh¡¯ sees an ugly black and white-furred face before the tech lifts the device to keep UH¡¯s eyes off. They talk and laugh and seem to be old buddies. A price is agreed, ¡°a finders fee. You don¡¯t know what it took keeping the vault safe.¡± Uh¡¯ stands there in disbelief. Moments ago he thought he was free and it turns out this fool was misdirecting people looking for Soya vault. And doing so he, himself, could sell Uh¡¯ or use him. A desire to fight and plead against this fact bubbles up but he pushes it down, still, inside the beckoner¡¯s reach, that might be a mistake and the resulting shock would become too painful, to function and he¡¯d find himself incapacitated. As an experienced member of the chattel class, Shuhp Yee knows what''s expected and allows himself to be guided out the door, with the painful itch of electricity scratching at the inside of his arm, ¡°when Techy says good-bye to his fence and says, ¡°Let¡¯s go,¡± to Uh¡¯. ¡°What about her?¡± Uh¡¯ questions. ¡°This is where she rots, Naht. Let¡¯s go.¡± And Uh¡¯ is forced to turn, giving the vessel that housed his beloved Soya one last glance before hurrying to catch back up with Techy guiding them both toward Grotto¡¯s uncertain future. Techy tells him, ¡°I¡¯ve been in charge of the crypts under Yee University for ten passes. Brasso is the University¡¯s chief of services, my boss. If anyone survives this whole thing it will be him and me. Not likely anyone wants to worry about trash and dead-bodies, right? Almost like job security being as low as an Upu can go without being a Naht, like yourself. Thinking about it, that makes sense to Uh¡¯, that the grunt staff of the university would escape political persecution. Techy continues, ¡°The university¡¯s administrative offices are on the other side of campus. Maybe a fifteen-moment walk. But we¡¯ll use my magride. The whole world¡¯s gone to hell, though, so don¡¯t expect it to go smooth.¡± But that¡¯s exactly what they get and they arrive three moments later after whizzing along the carved red-stone passageway. They emerge from the catacombs and enter the magride passageways of Yee University. The magride is an open cart with four walls and two benches. Techy sits back relaxed after plugging in his destination and what makes the trip uneventful is that the University Complex is deserted. The smell in the air is of burning synthetics mixed with hair. Soft screams can be heard muffled as if blocked by an extreme weight. If he had any agency this is the last place he¡¯d choose to be- inside the maintenance tunnels. He calculates how much weight is above realyzing at least death from that would be instant. This capture could yield him being used as a collection piece something to show off to those that could be trusted. Remember Soya Yee? Meet her slave Shuhp Yee. Or something like that. Soya is dead and he has been reminded he has never been free to make his own decisions. The few souls he sees wandering about seem dead. Like they could be the ghosts of those trapped under the smoldering rubble. The giant structure that had been visible from everywhere on campus now probably nothing but a wall of smoke and haze, beyond which is more death than has been seen on Grotto in many generations. An eerie quiet settles on the air in the caverns suggesting horrible things were happening just out of sight. He tries to push it away and settle his mind on something else, but Uh¡¯ has never enjoyed riding by magcart either. Even as a slave, he needs more control than these things allow. No noise gives him the impression of dreaming, which doesn¡¯t help, because when Uh¡¯ dreams, it¡¯s usually in nightmares of events he participated in during his long life. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Silence like how the Naht-do died, scratching to breathe struggling with calcium sludge dripping from their every opening. Also, he is smart enough to know how death works and while en route to the admin building, computes an equation in his head. Included are two X factors, one: engine noise, and two: maximum speed. Each contributes to how fast this vehicle should be going safely. Uh¡¯s answer is much slower than the number visible on the dashboard in front of the operator. Then a pedestrian appears directly in their path. She stares as if she wants to be run over. Uh¡¯ makes eye contact, certain he is going to watch this creature die but breathes a sigh of relief when she mashes herself against the wall to avoid the vehicle¡¯s progress. The ride continues like Techy wants to kill them all, like the only thing holding in Uh¡¯s soul is his begging for his life to continue. Like if he can just stop wanting to survive it would all blessedly end. He felt dead already and maybe he just had to be patient for the living part to be over, but he just doesn¡¯t want to. Soya¡¯s dead and he wants to be also, but finds the actual doing far harder than he imagines it would have been. Though confronted by the possibility of imminent death he finds himself surprised at the absence of the razor¡¯s edge. The sliver of oblivion that sits just on the other side of fear. It¡¯s like his existence is one flat plane that goes on forever and ever. He can actually see the equations summing up on the horizon, like a poor athlete selling their intention before making a play. The creators- be-damned, he saw all this happening long before it did, but trusted Soya when she said, Uh¡¯, there is nothing to fear but oblivion, and that is simply wrapped up in the inevitable conclusion of The Everything anyway. Unsurprised, he decides Soya¡¯s dead, and his remaining time is of him playing catch up with her death. Which he fails to do by the time the magride stops and Techy steps off forcing Uh¡¯ to rush to catch up. When he does, the sting of the beckoner¡¯s shock running up his arm softens. He shuffles after his escort and together they walk through the administration building lobby to a waiting lift. The only sound is the clip-clop of their thick poly-laminated-soled boots echoing in the vast pink-marbled lobby. Two guards, wearing their fur in the military-style that gives them a look of heft. One fondles a universal beckoner. Uh¡¯s feels it pull on him as they pass, remembering that from the last time he and Soya ventured here. He paid it no mind, it wasn¡¯t meant as an insult, just business as usual. So long has it been since he felt one deliberately applied like the one wielded in Techy¡¯s hand, there is a sense of dread attached, like any moment it could activate. The other guard holds a stun-pole. An awful, brutal weapon that could crush bone and lay out ten attackers with a single blow of its inert energy pulse. Uh¡¯ has seen it used with intention and the results are not pretty. A bits and pieces maker, perfect for riot control. Uh¡¯ assumes that¡¯s what¡¯s happening as something far off explodes. He wonders if that¡¯s where the Elder enclave palace is, his and Soya¡¯s former home. It¡¯s hard to picture the harmonious retreat embroiled in devastating combat. It¡¯s hard to picture those once-great Upus struggling with survival. He hopes that the guards there are willing to use their own stun-poles. ¡°Don¡¯t make eye contact, look at the ground. Anyone recognizes you, I promise, you¡¯ll fry.¡± And Uh¡¯ believes his promise, watching as his captor turns the power on the beckoner to as high as it can go. The fuzz is agony all on its own, so he looks down. Bewildered by the idea that he is in such danger. He shakes his head knowing the math supports this, less the odds he should have heeded Soya¡¯s advice and drank Rantira¡¯s broth also. But I¡¯m not sick. They step inside a lift when it arrives and the red chrome doors open. Techy hits the highest number available, and the doors slide shut and the ride begins with a high-pitched moan announcing the machine¡¯s fight to do its work. Uh¡¯ has been in many elevators, this is by far one of the oldest. He shudders thinking about this one ride ending all hope for Soya¡¯s spatial-folding. ¡°The entire University admin complex needs an overhaul,¡± Techy says as if needing to excuse the conditions. ¡°New additions are impossible though unless the transteel bubble is expanded and that would mean cooperation.¡± Uh knew Cooperation on Grotto stopped right about when Nahtdo colonization ceased to be an option. Reduce and protect was about limitations and beyond mining concerns, nothing else was allowed on the surface of the Grotto sister planet, not even the Naht-do. The history of the two planets was always linked. Once long ago they were each other¡¯s Gods. Grotto was the Blood God who killed for the fun, Chaos. And Naht-do was a white speck in the hell of the constant night of Grotto red moss trees. Once a pass the planets are in opposition then speed off again heading opposite ways. For 30 glimpses it takes only two portions of a pass to get back and forth. Each on a retrograde orbit from each other, likely because Naht-do was a space body captured by the Grotto sun and balanced with Grotto¡¯s own gravity. They served each other well, Grotto and Naht-do. Well except one side grew addicted to controlling everything and the other never gave up the idea only demons and monsters came from Grotto and it was best to appease them, if possible. Reduce and protect. Soya, already echoing into the future, but that never meant giving up the worship and service they got from their Naht-do, those they could coax into making themselves slaves. ¡°Still, corners are cut. Things like esthetics and comfort. Every available crevice has to be used as we continue our climb out of the bedrock and deeper into the atmosphere.¡± ¡°Only the mining-class or intercity travelers stay underground anymore, Uh¡¯ offers, as if being conversational. He knows the Collection Complex has used every piece of available space in its anastomotic caverns. It was impossible for it to grow more. From below the surface to above the ground plate up to the exact level the airspace turns restricted under the canopy of the transteel bubble itself. The building leers over Capital like a crooked shadowy finger. Some even discussed dismantling it because of the limitations it presented. What if we need to raise the city even further? What if the gasses from the mines threaten even those we are unwilling to forfeit? Soya, so wise. But now she is gone, until he can finish what he promised her he would. Let it go. ¡°No.¡± ¡°What?¡± Techy asks and Uh¡¯ is aware he answered Soya out loud but as the door opens he realizes this is where the video was recorded from and points. ¡°Yah, impressive. I know.¡± Uh¡¯ has seen better, has lived the best life an Upu in servitude can live, but he doesn¡¯t say that, instead, he agrees by smiling wide beyond his sharp seldom used blood fangs, a show of concession of allowing himself to be dominated, which was true- if not for a only a short time more. Techy smiles back, but like maybe he senses the imbalance and steps off the lift. On one of The Finger¡¯s top floors, a vast red quartz room sparkles white and pink. Lights shine on a reception desk and a small sitting area with short-cut stone pillars set up as stools. On the other side of the sitting area is a giant black door. The air tastes bureaucratic, dusty, like cleaning would only move things around. Uh¡¯ notes a slight hum from the lights and the scratch of a writing utensil. Techy moves towards the writing with loud echoing footsteps. Uh¡¯ follows and soon enough he sees a female Upu sitting behind the reception desk. She looks up. She is middle-aged and maybe, long ago, pretty. Streaks of dark grey fur grow under dark indigo. She looks broken as she stares at their approach. Uh¡¯ quickly diagnoses her with severe depression and notes Techy is nervous. Uh¡¯ watches him smooth at his hair and give his breath a bit of sniff inside of a raised palm. His wings flutter excitedly as he approaches to tap on the counter with a claw, ¡°Hello, Sherin.¡± The words drip, but he gets no real response, just wet-looking dull eyes pointed in his direction. So he pushes on. ¡°I¡¯ve got some property for the president.¡± Ch. 5 pt. III The Ascension of UH Ch 5. pt III ¡°He¡¯s in negotiations to start the clean up.¡± She sounds bored and Uh¡¯ wonders how there is a coup on, it seems business as usual. The admin looks Uh¡¯ over. ¡°Almost old enough to be dead. Not sure he¡¯s going to want him, but have a seat anyway. I¡¯ll let him know you¡¯re here,¡± Sherin says nodding to the small collection of unpolished stone stools nearby. Techy points and demands, ¡°Sit.¡± Uh¡¯ does, happily, as the receptionist picks up a communication receiver. After a moment she says, ¡°he¡¯s here,¡± as if meant for Uh¡¯ to hear, and leaking with all the scorn a slave who wasn¡¯t partners with the greatest Upu to have ever lived deserves. Looking out the floor-to-ceiling window at a city that he thought would be on fire. Their Soya was dead. But he can see into a nearby braided stream of ductwork and through the hundreds of levels of transparisteel windows, thousands of Upu are doing the things that make up life on Grotto. These are the poor inhabitants of Capitol City. The supposed have-nots, but watching them go about their glimpse he sees more living and loving than he ever did in the richer communities. Communities so filled with fear of losing what they have that they sit numb, waiting, holding on to their riches by any means necessary. He wishes he were closer so he sees these families more clear. From this vantage point, they are just hundreds of moving colorful blotches, but they are life and they move in happy patterns. He wonders when the last time he saw so much life. Since before Nahtdo. That dankness in his memory is cleaned a little by this sight of life. Techy and the receptionist talk. Several finger jabs are directed at Uh¡¯. The receptionist looks at him like she has never seen anything more repulsive. Uh¡¯ is used to basking in the sense of awe that Soya¡¯s presence tended to manifest and glares back in only the way a watery-eyed benign old man can. Bored. The black door on the other side of the reception desk pops open, revealing a middle-aged black-furred Upu with a bulbous belly and tiny silk draped wings. He wears the semi-transparent white plastic overalls, professionals who tend to get their hands dirty wear to protect the fashion choices underneath. It''s an upper management habit. This Upu has on a pink shirt and bright green shorts underneath his overalls. He looks ridiculous, like after work he is going to join a group of children and do whatever it is children do. Uh¡¯ notes the wave of his fur and quality of his clothing and immediately assumes this Upu is far wealthier than his job would suggest he should be. Maybe his mate, but doubtful as he summons Techy, for the delivery of the beckoner. ¡°Techy, on your way out, leave her alone.¡± Techy bows his head, ¡°yes, Brasso.¡± The receptionist sighs in audible relief as Techy turns from her to do as asked. When passed the beckoner, Brasso demands, ¡°Wait outside, I can handle one ancient Upu on my own.¡± With beckoner in hand, he turns back into his office. Uh¡¯ notices the beckoner and hurries to the proper distance in time hoping to avoid the shock. He passes a sneering Techy, who says, ¡°see ya later Natht,¡± but fails to get into step behind Brasso in time to avoid any discomfort and enters the office rubbing his arm. He looks to Techy for a reaction and sees the gray-haired Upu beside himself with laughter. It stings. Is this life now? Has he been reduced to comic fodder? The door clicks shut behind him and once ensconced in his office, the warden holds out his hand, the beckoner sitting accessible in his palm like he were handing it over and smiles though the gesture holds little warmth and the glint of sharp bicuspid, the blood teeth, makes Uh¡¯ hackle. Brasso turns as if getting the reaction he wants and settles behind his desk, a giant slab of red marble, so dark it almost could be black. Behind him are famous art reproductions that Uh¡¯s finds repellant. He wishes tasteless Upu would stop buying garbage like these images, because they take away from real pursuits. Math and numbers and the unseen side of the universe. Uh¡¯ believes as Soya did, art was wasteful. Art stole from reality and returned only fantasy. There are no personal effects like family images and the desk is free of clutter with only a compstation occupying its surface. In a steel brazier, a crackling gas fire burns a bed of rocks to an orange glow. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Feeling a sense of superiority he looks down at Brasso and finds the admin staring back. His warden seems impressed. Why wouldn¡¯t he be? Uh¡¯ is famous in his own right and not just as the famous Soya¡¯s consort, so Uh¡¯ stares back with unimpressed eyes. How could Brasso compare, Uh¡¯s has seen whole civilizations wiped from existence. All this corrupt bureaucrat can do is offer an old Upu pain and suffering. ¡°Get your eyes off me,¡± Brasso whispers softly as if to a child. Uh¡¯ complies, finding a spot on the floor but a strong pulse shoots up his arm anyway as the warden plays with the button on the beckoner to find a setting to help motivate. Uh¡¯ takes the pain which ends soon enough after beginning. The warden stands and approaches. The tingle dissipates as he grows closer, interesting to want the person hurting you to be close, but it was a perk of the power of the tech. The buzz worsens as Brasso circles him just out of arm''s length. ¡°So you are Shup Uh¡¯ Yee, property of the Great Elder Soya Yee?¡± ¡°Yes,¡± he answers through gritted teeth. Noting the warden¡¯s accent for the first time. Uh¡¯ wonders why he is in Majt. Everyone considered the South City, where he is obviously from, paradise. It is in a perfect spot, between Grotto¡¯s uninhabitable atmosphere and a small pocket dry and warm with perfection. It is the only open air city and built into the side of the tallest mountain on the planet. The vistas are stunning to behold. Uh¡¯ has been many times, being Soya was from there, but the politics of science drove her from her family home and into the Capitol. The politics of science became the politics of budget and funding and staying relevant. They worked in tandem with the space program for decades. She was the face of his math. South City was so prestigious they were forced to hold a lottery every pass that allowed five families to move there. The spots are worth millions, and almost never does a family refuse the opportunity to go. Paradise. Before space travel, the traditional way to get there was through a tunnel system. Once the most dangerous tunnel section on Grotto. Dense with animal life, some of the species grow as big as buildings and never stop eating. But those that leave South City seek more than paradise. They seek success. And success is what Majt promised, but not sitting behind a desk as a mid-level manager at Ye University, administration to a collection complex, garbage man to higher learning, This is not what Uh¡¯ would consider success. The warden holds up a finger and wags it back and forth, as if not appreciating the thought, ¡°A decision has been made regarding your future. I have good news. You¡¯re dead too.¡± ¡°Uh¡¯ wishes this were true and not merely a threat to make him cower. If true he would not be able to honor Soya¡¯s last wishes. Dead. He finds the thought beautifully poetic. She wished him free after her life ended, it was written in her will. No more could a slave hope for.¡± He speaks his words with a formal accent and stops bowing his head in submission. All his words were true. Soya did intend him to be free. He¡¯d never be able to vote, but if the remnants of Soya¡¯s fortune was as vast as Shuhp imagined, then he could have bought all the votes he would ever needed to make utopia happen. He doubts his imagination is accurate though. He has never had a good sense of what currency did and did not do. And Soya is one of the richest Upu alive, if not the richest. Soya did buy votes all the time, but at the end of her political career, her opinions were so valued that the expense of winning an election or a council vote against her became too great. Brasso stares at him, mouth open as if he had expected something else as a reaction from his new slave, ¡°I see.¡± Uh¡¯ then remembers the algorithm eating at all the data he fed it, could his hypothesis be correct? Then that cursed spark to keep going. Could his equation eventually reach a level that comparing it and the real thoughts and feelings of the historical thing called Soya, would yield no difference- can he bring back Soya Yee. Uh¡¯ needs an answer to this quandary like he needs to keep breathing and looks to Brasso prepared to make him happy for as long as it takes to finish what he started. ¡°Well,¡± Brasso begins. He has the voice of a smoker. Deep, like his lungs are two burnt hollow crisps in his chest. You were a piece of machinery in Soya¡¯s hands, her brain, I would expect nothing less.¡± ¡°I am nothing without Soya.¡± ¡°No, Soya Yee, was the greatest Upu to ever live. And now you will make me her replacement in perpetuity.¡± Brasso¡¯s finger twitches on the beckoner¡¯s button, ¡°Still the good slave?¡± ¡°No longer.¡± Brasso frowns, then shakes his head as if deciding he won¡¯t bother fighting against reality, ¡°You are to be warded here. We will do much together. Maybe even more than you did with Soya.¡± ¡°Together?¡± Uh¡¯ risks a quick glance at Brasso, but his finger on the beckoner is even quicker to react to the sarcasm, and still smarting from the new shock, he finds another spot on the floor. ¡°Your skill is math, thinking, making something new out of nothing, what do you think I could want with that?¡± Then it dawns on him, the warden doesn''t know what Uh¡¯ true potential is, and assumes math only means, ¡°money.¡± ¡°Correct. You are going to make me and my family rich beyond measure.¡± ¡°You will use Soya¡¯s legacy in such a way? She was great. You cannot make her nothing.¡± ¡°With no kin to argue otherwise, You don¡¯t exist any longer Shuhp Yee, do you agree?¡± Brasso¡¯s voice is soft like pieces of fabric touching. He can say such things to Uh¡¯ because he is dead already. That¡¯s the worst thing that could happen? He lost Soya then the algorithm unwinds again in his mind. But did he? Uh¡¯ looks up and sees the warden has the beckoner pointed at him and decides to play his part a bit longer, ¡°yes, master.¡± ¡°I don¡¯t imagine you have much longer to live in either case, but in your remaining moments, consider me your partner, not just your master. We are in this together Shuhp Yee. And your task now until you die? Making your partner rich.¡± Then Brasso mashes a finger down on the beckoner and Uh¡¯ prepares for pain, which comes in agonizing wave after wave until, eventually, he is left in peaceful blackness.
Ch. 6 pt. I Rantiras Retirement
Ch. 6 pt. I If he were conscious he¡¯d know the lift only brings him up a couple levels before the doors slide open exposing a long brightly lit red rock hallway carved into the cliffs above the finger. He is taken through a solid door at the far end and left on the floor. Shuhp Yee awakens exactly like that, stiff and feeling each and every one of his solar cycles. But his captivity yields nothing but a static that wraps and protects. He is valuable. A treasure. A tool to be used sparingly. A tango with his old nemesis, maths, is little more than him leaning over a datapad, though, making corrections. Poor him. Easy life at the end of it all. On the other end of campus, under the collapsed titerarium, Rantira awakens also. And he thought removing his own arm was painful, this was magnitudes worse. Yet, instead of the pain just taking him, he fights through it so he can make it stop. That¡¯s a tenant of The Great Suffering to fight through to find solace in that the suffering ends. He can smell smoke as the rubble on top of him shifts and falls free. He scurries toward it. His life of effort pays off in giving him strength to push through the ordeal and frees himself into the dark of the University of Yee bubble. Other survivors mill about. Some, worse off than him. Some helping others. Upu and Naht-do, slave and free. Little camps of them spring up, fires to aid those that won¡¯t make it or can¡¯t move without more help. He aims for one surrounded by the fewest refugees. One whispers rumors, ¡°I heard some talk about bubbles being targeted. Maybe hundreds of thousands dead.¡± The upu talking has an afirmitizer scar, meaning he was a freed slave. The Naht-do he speaks with looks frightened at the idea. Rantira recognizes the look, one of knowing chaos comes. The Great Suffering was earned regardless of knowledge of why. It was the way. ¡°Some of the explosions prohibited movement. It¡¯s almost like they want us trapped in here.¡± ¡°They want us to die.¡± Several of those huddled around the small flames of the fire mutter fear-filled words. ¡°Why?¡± one asks. ¡°A message.¡± Whispers of battle around the Elder complex are heard elsewhere in the group. ¡°Reduce and protect,¡± Rantira sneers. ¡°But Soya¡¯s dead.¡± ¡°Doesn¡¯t mean The Elders didn¡¯t value what she preached,¡± an older Upu says matter-factly and like he wasn¡¯t bleeding from a scalp wound. ¡°They just don¡¯t want us around when things are said and done.¡± Rantira agrees but says nothing as he sprinkles a bit of red powder on the wound. He is having a hard time breathing and after satisfied with his work he rummages in his pouch for ingredients for a tea that will help open bronchial pathways and prevent further smoke damage. It¡¯s a simple recipe, one he is able to make enough of for everyone present. His stump throbs and itches as he works, but he knows it¡¯s because the healing salve is doing its bit. He coughs and has no desire to survive, but something deep inside him is stirred by these survivors. These souls have been left for dead. What can he do? Especially fresh from self-injury, he has only what he is good at. And he has wanting to die on Nahtdo to pull him through, and nothing will make him do otherwise except fate. If fate has something more in store for him then who is simple Rantira to fight against it. From his pouch, he pulls a small burner and a spit-like contraption. He sets them up together then attaches a modified wing to the spit. The wing is from one of the Upu¡¯s wild cousins. Deboned and stretched it is cured to withstand high heat and is perfect for any type of cooking. He shapes it to hold fluid and lights the burner under it. Just as the leather begins to burn he points an atom-variator into the bowl, his invention, one he kept a secret, and watches the atoms there change and collect and soon enough several ounces of water appear, then enough for everyone present. In moments his work is done. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. ¡°Here, the roof of the bubble above is working to keep the billowing smoke trapped inside, which makes Rantira think the exhaust system is destroyed. Drink this and feel better.¡± A shadow approaches the group huddled around the small flames as he serves his broth. ¡°Rumors are a way out has been discovered,¡± the form says to everyone present, only stopping long enough for a bit of the drought and then disappearing back into the grey muck surrounding. Some mutter about following, and as Rantira finishes passing out his brew they do. He makes a bit more for others as they might come. And he does encounter more as they move and is happy he prepared. If he is right and the way out was through the ancient caverns his little bag will be filled with ingredients soon enough so there was no need for greed, only wariness because every fool knows to stay out of the old holes. Some start heading off that way nonetheless and soon he is the only one left at the little fire. He lets it die down to nothing before packing his gear back into his pouch. He heads off in the direction looking over his shoulder, certain neither direction is safe. Time and distance disappear and over the next few long moments the red moss powder heals his arm as he puts his skills to use with the ever-growing population of displaced people he finds himself among. The powder remains in place until a scab grows, equally thick, but permanent. From this point, if he finds himself still alive later, he can decide on a replacement. But right now, it¡¯s still deciding whether he even wants to survive. He moves with the group. Sometimes he is given supplies in exchange for a cooked meal and stops and a crowd gathers. He makes food and gives medicine in exchange for the ingredients and becomes rich doing so in information and resources. He learns that they are being, ¡°hunted by the Elder¡¯s army, but they are being hemmed up by a group of free Naht-do and Upu willing to give us a chance.¡± He asks the same question to each he helps, ¡°why bother fighting The Great Suffering?¡± And they each in turn tell him they seek freedom and safety. Neither are available, he can reply, but doesn¡¯t. Soon enough they will all likely find themselves in a fight against the Elders. And as if summoned a stream of souls appear heading from another direction. Whispers reach that suggest there¡¯s fighting there, ¡°They take any prisoners to the gallows.¡± ¡°They are broadcasting it.¡± ¡°Showing what happens when you oppose them.¡± ¡°The Elder¡¯s security force is making sure we don¡¯t go the way of Soya by making us go the way of Soya.¡± A scared voice asks, ¡°what do we do,¡± and Rantira realizes it¡¯s his own. So he answers himself, ¡°but eat,¡± and offers a bloodfly cake to an old Upu nearby who happily accepts. In this, they were an unruly mob. Hungry and willing to indulge in anything, and it never really improved from there. The only difference, day by day, were the types of fight and how many died or were captured. In a moment of respite, he serves an Upu with singed fur and a bad neck laceration. She shouldn¡¯t be here anymore, and he tells her so as he pulls one last suture through the wound. Her response, ¡°revenging Soya is all I have left. Got any more?¡± He tells her, ¡°out of cakes,¡± and she shrugs then stands temporarily whole again to rejoin the group they find themselves in. The Naht-do cook falls into the last spot in the formation. He steps on bruised and lacerated feet, but forward is the only direction left so that¡¯s the direction he goes along with everybody else. In front of him is the Upu he just worked on. Her wound will heal, but she is still a soft shopkeeper and eventually, her body will demand she lie down and die. He has never been in more pain. And all from walking. In front of them is a line of refugees that know it¡¯s fight or die. Male and females like has never been seen before. Children mingling about, clutching afraid at knees. Male and females, who have lost everything and have sworn the last remaining portion of their soul to revenge. Weapons as diverse as soup ladles being brought to bear if needed. The Upu in front of him has the sharpest cleaver from her drawer and she plans to use it again against a security force armed with projectile slingers. Rantira doesn¡¯t want revenge. He got it. He killed his master. An unspeakable act. One he keeps quiet about. Now as reward he just wants to die on Nahtdo. It doesn¡¯t matter that all that might have once been there is gone now. He tried to stop this. End Soya. Revenge a planet full of dead. Revenge a life given to servitude. Sidetracked by a true insurrection. The irony is painful. He tries to move his mind away from all that. It doesn¡¯t truly matter after all that everything is a smoldering pile of hot white ash. He shakes away all of it and tries to focus on the job to be done here and now, walking till he can¡¯t anymore. Climb this mountain called surviving until he can¡¯t any longer. As they walk the smog from the sulfur belching abyss rises. It¡¯s going to be a hard day. Rantira sighs, adjusting his almost overburdened satchel. Death is coming. He knows it like watching an approaching storm. But this death is not just his, but the female in front of him and everyone. All because of one ancient Upu¡¯s philosophy of Reduce and Protect made her a living god. Rantira knows the only thing going for them is the caverns. From there, what? ¡°They control us. The Elder¡¯s forbid their army from following us inside. There is nothing but death ahead and behind.¡± Rantira doesn¡¯t respond because he isn¡¯t being talked to. The man sharing his opinion joined the group not long ago. He said his name was Bah. He was a mix of Upu and Naht-do. An inbetweener. A thing that neither side trusted. Especially since the terrorist group represented consisted mainly of the societal outcasts. ¡°We managed to pull the roof of a cavern down on one of their divisions. The stench of that massacre would still be fresh on the air if it weren¡¯t for the stink of the abyss.¡± ¡°But how can we win?¡± an emotional Upu from somewhere in front replies. That can¡¯t do anything but anger them.¡± ¡°Attrition. We can win if they fight and when they fight they need to lose.¡± Rantira agrees but doesn¡¯t see it as likely. And soon the group stops inside an encampment of even more souls hiding inside the ancient caverns under Majt. CH 6 pt II Rantiras Retirement Ch. 6 pt. II
Some show off captured projectile spitters and point back the way they came as if suggesting more await. Then a small group of Upu and Naht-do go out hoping to slow any attackers down long enough to let the main group escape. Sacrifices for the greater good. Some of them will go out and not come back. Wounds might come back so Rantira prepares to do double duty. Patching up the warriors when they return and cooking them food the next morning before they go out. Amongst these numbers, there are no servants. No slavery. Just this needless battle where at the end they all hope the Elders will be toppled. ¡°Word is there are mounds of dead all over Majt. I wouldn¡¯t go anywhere near the top levels of the bubble. Almost all fingers have been secured too. All we have are the caverns.¡± Avoiding the top levels during his other task is easy. Once a day, that¡¯s how often he plies his trade. Once a day he prepares for this one task, cooking for all that come, by seeking the ingredients the old fashion way. It¡¯s an arduous task with one hand, but he manages. With campfires burning at his back he enters the cold smog and picks up speed until he finds himself at a jog. The empty cavern echoes as he moves and enters the ancient forest of red moss trees. A place of many Upu memories. Unchanged since the creatures crawled their way free tens of thousands of glimpses before. Instead of a projectile slinger, he packs only his wits as a weapon. But because it¡¯s not safe to be out alone, he puts a bit of hustle in his step. When the day starts he will need what the forest can provide and none of it will be openly available without a search. He is happy to do this chore, gather the morning¡¯s ingredients- even with the battle so close that it stings his nose with rot and cordite. Soon enough he shoos a wild hen from her nest and finds a dozen eggs, then by a trickle of a stream, some wild garlic, and under a red-leafed bush, dug up by a wild sus, a few tubers. Supplied and happy he is able to open for business. Soon enough he is telling the Upu, children really, not meant to know anything more than how to pray and how to die, that he has mushroom omelets, and fresh-baked red-moss cakes available. They don¡¯t know the difference or care and only want more and quickly he sells out. Cleaning up he talks with one of the older Naht-do, a slave with an affirmatizer still stuck in his arm. He gets up to go and makes eye contact, and says, ¡°Got a feeling this is going to be goodbye. I feel like I should thank you.¡± Rantira is unable to take thanks for his efforts. He simply fills gaps and tells this to the former slave. ¡°That¡¯s what we all do. Going to be a big day, do or die, type day.¡± Rantira nods because that¡¯s life, isn¡¯t it? Do or die. And he tells this to the Naht-do and gets a chuckle, ¡°you say that now, but bettin¡¯ at the pointy end of a beckoner your tune sounds different. Rantira holds up his nub and offers what best can be described as a smile because sometimes that¡¯s all a damn fool can do. ¡°Well either way tomorrow won¡¯t be so busy.¡± And he¡¯s right, there almost is no tomorrow. The fighting is as intense as Rantira¡¯s efforts to keeping the dying still alive. And after the enemy comes in what the historians will call the last will of Soya¡¯s patriots, some did and some did not. And the next glimpse he wakes to find himself still alive and not waiting to be hanged. So he does what he is best at and feeds those around. He finds a small heel of stale bread carves out the crumb and using a few chutes of fresh garlic-grass and some lucked-out-to-find greens, growing almost within arms reach. He makes a small fire and over a few orange coals cooks his small meal, lamenting, ¡°I wish I had a little fat.¡± Suddenly a hand, ¡°Here.¡± In the palm, creases packed with black soot and the dried blood of patriots, are a few old olives presented as if an ageless treasure. Bah smiles with a mouth filled with abused teeth. Rantira takes the olives because they will do nicely and after a bit adds some water and cooks the mush down into four cakes. He gives two to his new friend. The scraps might be even harder to find, but if he survives to die on Nahtdo, it¡¯ll be one meal at a time, because there is always something to cook. Uncertainty is huddling in a deep sublayer that smells like the ancestral excrement that helped the Opu build up from their subterranean homes eating decent red moss cakes with a stranger. 300 refugees remain in what is called an ancient cavern home. Rantira leans back and sighs taking in a breath filled with the smells of red moss cooking. It¡¯s tangy with alliums but also a tinge of mold. Mold is standard here. The air is moist and warm, perfect for rot, and that¡¯s what they all do here rot. Rantira looks up to find Bah staring at him. ¡°You¡¯re quite a lucky creature,¡± he sneers around bites. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. The old Naht-do cook explains what most likely what will happen to him. ¡°So Rantira is far from lucky. And very close to the end.¡± ¡°Rantira, you are far from innocent.¡± ¡°Many do not wish to judge a slave for doing what he was beckoned to do.¡± ¡°Many would though. Your life compared to a slave on Nahtdo cleaning up Soya¡¯s mess. Cleaning the dead and rotting life as new life claims the old. The killing continues there. The mining and the killing. I served Soya also. I built her bombs. I was once a greasy wrench for her to twist. Do you believe me? Do you think I am being truthful?¡± Rantira removes the remaining cake from his mouth. It suddenly tastes of ash. He never claimed to have a perfect memory, but he remembers Soya¡¯s staff and doesn¡¯t think Bah was there, if anything he looks like he climbed out of a hole. Anxiety floods his system like a torrent. He looks past Bah and sees a group nearby looking over. He would be interested in trading places them. He senses the path to survival he tread has been a trick after all. ¡°Regardless. If not for your historical value, I wouldn¡¯t really give two squirts, but because you are who you are and still alive when many aren¡¯t, I can¡¯t overlook it..¡± Bah¡¯s face crumbles into angry wrinkles. ¡°The question is how can you grab a spoon and stir your concoction. Why does it not taste like the blood of all Soya¡¯s victims? How do you not taste it now, that with each bite your existence takes away from someone who is meant to be alive?¡± Bah wears dinge-colored coveralls spotted with blood splatter. His ears droop like they were snapped in half at some point and never treated. He chews on the red moss puck, Rantira prepared, before tossing it away. ¡°Disgusting without neon gravy.¡± Rantira agrees. Without the gravy, this particular variant of the Upu diet is the driest, nearly inedible version of the ingredient he can make. It¡¯s only served when the red moss was farthest from its freshest. And because he had no other choice. He looks dejected at the food as a child scurries to collect it from where Bah threw it. ¡°Is this all? Is this what Soya¡¯s destruction on Naht-do gave us?¡± ¡°The Great Suffering... ¡°I am finding less and less every day that I can tolerate hearing another syllable about the Great Suffering.¡± The Nahtdo points at Rantaria and says, ¡°Cruel that¡¯s what this is. Not another blessing from The Great Suffering, but something to be fixed.¡± He shrugs. Finding a hardness in his heart. He doesn¡¯t care. ¡°I just want to die on Nahtdo,¡± and serve food to the day¡¯s collection of Lucky-to-be-alives but he keeps the second part to himself. Waiting for release, or death when either would be fine. Then he relieves Bah is right about one thing. Food is just a pathway to continued health and health meant continued work. And for the first time, he has no master to make proud. Only himself and he finds himself disappointed in his efforts. ¡°All launches have been suspended making that virtually impossible anyway, so maybe you are lucky in that your disappointment will be short-lived. Dying anonymously on Grotto might just be Soya¡¯s final legacy to you.¡± ¡°Death is release,¡± he says. This brings him back around to his newest conundrum, does he even care anymore? Can Bah and his overt threats mean anything if he doesn¡¯t let them? And if not what does he care about now anyway except where he dies. Like he ever had a choice, to begin with. He killed Soya and whatever he thought that death would cause, he did it, maybe that was freedom enough. A choice in fact. Bah claims, ¡°My first owner was an Aerosmith who died after an accident. Lost his arm in a failed medical experiment. Liquid bone poisoned the stump from growing. Liquid bone. Not your doing, but you helped. So when I was told you were here I was happy to come to take a look. Usually, you are right, a slave is forgiven for the dalliances of its master. You, though, are special. An effigy. And Effigies don¡¯t warrant care because they have nil value. And being at war against The Elders changed your value to nil.¡± ¡°No,¡± Rantira answers, annoyed by the implication he is caught but hopefully suddenly also. Death is inevitable. Picking that death might just be the one fantasy a former slave can make real. ¡°Eating alone has never an option for the camp famous resident or not. You know who I am? What do you think they will do when they find out. Save me? Kill me? You? They have fetishized Soya and are prepared to die to bring to bear what she sought. An effigy is a powerful thing on both sides of a conflict. I could be the curse that brings down the Elders. There is no winning. I killed Soya. The Elders should give me what I want. ¡°And what¡¯s that?¡± ¡°I will go quietly and finish my life on Nahtdo.¡± ¡°Of course, and it¡¯s only luck it was me, and not someone more easily swayed,¡± he winks and after a moment of confusion Rantira realizes what¡¯s happening. It¡¯s too late. Peace was both something he never expected, and freedom even too far for fantasy. Yet he his earned neither. ¡°When?¡± ¡°Any moment now. The Elders stopped at nothing when they were told where you were. They want the equation summed.¡± ¡°Sum?¡± and it¡¯s then Rantira thinks about the math he helped Shuhp Yee edit. A version of Spatial Folding Shuhp gave to Soya as a gift on the eve of her final day of trial. How many glimpses ago? It doesn¡¯t matter because he murdered Soya Yee and has been waiting for his death sentence ever since. Their equation breaks down what makes thought tangible, what makes personality a real construct. They built in a flexibility for the in and outs of the process of learning. At one time consciousness was inseparable from the brain and body. The thoughts and feelings and past of an individual were as much a part of a person¡¯s makeup as the pigment of their fur. It was interesting, the math behind personality. The concepts were so exciting that Rantira offered something he never thought he would. A storage container. One built on the same tech as his atom-variator. The basis of liquid bone. He couldn¡¯t help it. Shuhp Yee called it Spatial Folding and the birth of more for them all. He claimed it was the most important work ever done. The Equation that was soon to be erased from existence. Good. If fully realized it could even be worse for life everywhere then liquid bone was on Nahtdo. ¡°I¡¯m just a cook. My death is no more important than any slave¡¯s.¡± ¡°It¡¯s not personal, Rantira. All we want is to erase Soya from memory. Rantira imagines the messy task, happy at least his part in it is at an end. Death sounds restive. Then Bah smiles and as projectiles start flying with bangs and whistles. Screams of assaulting troops echo from the path leading out to the city and bah says, ¡°good, they are here.¡± Ch. 7 Down Time, pt I Ch. 7 pt I
Upon examination, the room originally reminded Shuhp Yee of a penthouse. The floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto Majt now might as well belong to a cell in the deepest dankest prison. It is late as he looks through them after an unknown number of glimpses being locked away. The smoke of violence is everywhere. Fingers gone. Upu and Naht-do dead. So is Soya. So nothing matters, and with that all else ceased to matter. The cell is quiet. All he can hear is his own breathing and the purr of life outside the cell. The Grotto sun is streaming through the dense mauve clouds casting its typical rose glow over the space. There is a stone butcherblock and a kitchen to prepare his own meals. In the chilling unit is the ingredients for blood soup. It''s all he can eat since before being imprisoned. And he knows it won¡¯t be long before time takes care of the pain of living without Soya. He is okay being tidally-locked to Soya and happy to follow her legacy even into his own death but he feels a weight now that seems to want to define the rest of his life. If he does the opposite, it represents Soya''s final wishes. Leave it alone. But it is his work also, a way to honor their life together and a guarantee her life¡¯s work, reduce and protect, lives on. Through the window of his cell is the stunning vista of life dangling from Grotto¡¯s Capital City, glowing its famous sparkling pink. Life bustling under its transparisteel canopy while a storm front approaches. Violent stripes of beige, red and purples hide the tiny blob of light that is the nearest star. The star is a medium-sized yellow, one-hundred and eighty-million lengths away. It marks a glimpse by illuminating the first of the moon''s eight parts, the part that looks like a hunk of redmoss-bread floating in thick reddish blue glue. As the glimpse progresses, each part of the broken moon becomes illuminated. When the eighth part emerges from the funk the Upu call an atmosphere it is almost night again. And night is pitch dark and the longest portion of a glimpse. With the storm the star disappears yet again into night and he stands thinking about Soya and wondering would she really have just trashed all their work together. Would she really not have gone through with what looks to be everything but will likely result in yet another failed experiment anyway. Forced to rely on the magic of the make believe tech supplied by a cook. Soya was impressed, Uh¡¯ was certain the reconfiguring atoms was some sort of Naht-do trick he couldn¡¯t figure out yet. Using it bolstered the slave. Made him bold. His mind wanders to the idea the slave might have poisoned them. But why her alone? He should have been killed also. That broth. Her medicine, the only difference in their diet. ¡°I can¡¯t. My stomach.¡± He knows her mind better than his own, but nothing comes. Should he, or should he just let it go. Soya, the great thinker, is dead; the world should mourn and move on. The Upu manage hundreds of cities, all built out of Grotto to point up into this thick poisonous atmosphere. The pressure outside is intense, and on the brown rocky surface, threatening volcanoes abound, as do several oceans of turbulent ammonia. The air always smells a little like sulphur. Not that Shuhp would know specifically. To him, it is just air. Slightly poisoned. But good old normal air. When the Upu were below the surface, the air was cleaner in the caves of their ancestors living among the fields of red-moss, because of those fields. Now the fields the Upu depended on were artificial and needed so much fuel to keep running. So much that the world was almost hollow from digging. Red-moss grows wherever it likes but soon it won¡¯t be on Grotto, ever again. It¡¯s a weed, but without it, there is no biodiversity and no Upu. No longer confined to their existence in tunnels of earth and rock. But this made metals fleeting and much needed in maintaining their cities, connected still to those earthen tunnels flowing into the ground. Tunnels that are still manipulated for resources to support the species as they remain smack dab in the middle of a single, perfect layer of atmosphere. With technology they could push higher and one glimpse they will be forced to, but from their origin to here it¡¯s hard to imagine the past and how this species even came to be where they are. The simple answer is red-moss. Every Upu knows cultivating it made the Upu thrive. The lack of it is what made killing the Naht-do inevitable. Even their world was being mined hollow now also, minus all the little home grown terrorist attacks that made the endeavor too dangerous. And now this. He doubts any launches are happening now. Those on Nahtdo are stranded. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. He focuses his eyes on the conveyances that dot the sky. A constable-vehicle veers out of the sparse traffic and shoots diagonally towards the University¡¯s admin complex landing area lights and siren blaring. Flickering white and red announce its intent. He can see an Elder security force geared up inside. He¡¯s seen it before. Usually on a recording. And to offer points to make things more efficient. The vehicle dips down into the clouds directly below. If the ground plate were transparent he would see the white fog that obscures it. The surface is hidden beneath it and he finds himself thinking of the abyss and the great foamy poisonous waters. His mind floats to images of it and he conjures them and he lives there in his mind tasting the ammonia on his lips and feeling the sting of it. His eyes already flowing tears. Upu long ago would suicide like this. It used to be a cultural tradition to expose oneself to the planet. It symbolizes death and the soul and the maybe of tomorrow, but the logic of tomorrow spoils it at every turn, because there is never such a thing. Nature is infinite, things morph. Ice to water, water to steam, steam to water. It''s circular. But a dead Upu is just slowly decomposing matter. Food? Material? Maybe both, but for him, the death of Soya is a bone-aching sorrow and proof the magic of life yields garbage. There is no morphing into something beautiful at the end. Unless one counts the happiness of the bacteria that happens upon the carcass. He doesn''t like to think of the body of his owner as dead tissue and inert chemicals, food for lesser creatures, the theories she commissioned revolutionized the world. Her most significant contribution was to spatial folding, as important as their bone serum that allowed the replacing of limbs and fusing machinery with the nervous systems. Revolutionized limb regeneration. Revolutionized medicine. Revolutionized death. She was a hero to her people and heroes do not die. Her life will forever be a chapter in the Upu history books. A chapter that may have ended, but endings only lead to new beginnings. He conjures a memory of holding her hand and as is the case when he reflects, he can feel her fingers gripping his, but he cannot delude himself for long and quickly feels them cool and loosen. Maybe she is not gone, because she will always live in his mind, but that promises to remind him of the pain. It would be better to push her from there so he can live at peace with her death. But he cannot fathom a moment when that might be possible. She is gone. All he has are memories of the words they spoke to one another, places visited and things they did, food they ate, shared colleagues and passion for their work. All may be painful, but he prefers to dwell. Involuntarily his mind turns to the math of her. She is there in the Grotto servers waiting, maybe not ¡°her¡± but a version. It took mere moments to rework the security protocols the Collection Complex may have tried to offer as restraint to him. When he returns to work it will be to fine tune the abstract math, taking what theoretically was and making it real. When he thinks of his work, the large lump in his chest, that feels like his heart has swollen too big for its enclosure, loosens. Every single character represents a hope that Soya will live again. All it takes is execution, and he will shatter reality, and bring tomorrow into today. Maths of Everything was the title of her first dissertation, the one that made her famous. Thoughts on Connectivity, came next. Both were the keystone to his work and as he thinks about changes he needs to make, and for the first time since his owner took her last breath, he smiles. Together, they believed math and chemistry were the beginnings to everything and everything has kept him imprisoned his entire life, kept his soul trapped. With this new idea, maybe he can free them both. He makes his way to the wall directly in front of a lone security recorder. He sits on a stool in front of the wall. His computation device is simple and completely undetectable. He early on rerouted the security camera to reverse a display, the only element he was missing. For Uh¡¯ there has only ever been a truer way to feel free then through work. And he does feel free as he moves his hand and selects the input drive he wishes to work from and feels the machine activate throughout his body like a hum. Not unpleasant, but too much of, leaves him feeling sick. He navigates it using an internal input device. Soya¡¯s liquid bone at work, fusing mind and machine. The security team in charge of monitoring has worked night and day to fix the camera outage, unsure why sometimes it works when others it doesn¡¯t. He works at night to offer additional cover. And so far since his capture he has accomplished much. It takes a lot of power to crunch the numbers he is working with and feels the results course through his body. The camera depicts his selections, bathing the wall in the light from his discoveries. At the end of his work is a green blinking cursor. With a few clicks and slew of commands, the project, he hopes to consume the rest of his life with, completes. Now before him are two paths, one for those that walk in the light and another built for those wishing concealment, he provides both options. He types some more, goes back a few lines to make corrections then scrolls forward once more. Ch. 7 Downtime pt II
Ch. 7 pt. II He handled the security recorder with a line of code that gives him fifteen moments of every cycle to work on the reader without it being discovered. A few more characters and things come easier. Maybe this is his why. The something to finish his existence with. He will implement Thoughts on Connectivity and Maths of Everything and Soya will live and work again, and all will be as it should. Uh¡¯ punishes the input device with pink fingertips flying over the glossy keys inside the augmented reality. On the wall green numbers scroll up like soldiers off to war . His fifteen moments are almost up, but he is close and he will finish in time, but he must hurry. This is it. If he is indeed correct then it is possible he and Soya will be together again soon. The shaggy white fur of his arms flies in the air as he codes. His huge, dome-shaped ears swivel with excitement. He adds new data into the code he has worked on every single moment he could for a decade and it doesn¡¯t break. His pace is furious, yet still, it has been forever working this incomplete thought. He is not completely certain this solution will work, time haunts, but soon he will know. He has thought he was close before, and failed. This time it was Soya herself who gave him the answer. She came up with the solution in a dream. In the dream, Shuhp was writing code for the equation, like he does fifteen moments out of every collection of moments in a glimpse. He was working within the parameters of Spatial Folding he set up in a black box with one of the cooks atom-variators in which to store his work. The black box existed and did not exist within the University¡¯s server complex. Quantum mechanics at work. He was working within the quantum and aided him much leeway in which reality he worked with-in. He made liquid bone in a very similar fashion. Except then it was all he did. Now he shared his efforts with mourning and wishing he had done more to stop what he knew was a mistake. It got his love killed and nothing was going to stop him from fixing that. But like everything else dealing with spatial folding and the quantum and liquid bone, it existed because it was theorized to exist and therefore did not exist at the same time. So he spent time in the quantum searching for the one aspect that limited him from bringing Soya back. What held him up was establishing a Unitary Operator. A Unitary Operator that both existed and did not exist at the same time. Designed for faster than light travel, the code organizes and reassembles data instantaneously within itself. It''s not an accelerative push to achieve destination, more that the math can jumble and pull information together by folding specific physicality to it. The quantum equation of both here and not. In the dream, the data he inputs is hers. It¡¯s everything she ever did, thoughts, images, messages, books, even the childhood poetry that he found once in an old stone-hewn toy chest. He works from memory. He improvises. He knows in his hurry to be done with the work, he is putting more of himself into the process than he had originally counted on. At the end of things, his goal ready to turn all this into concrete, mechanical, making numbers real applied-maths he wakes poised to activate that which he made. But with each disappointed breath he realizes the answer was simple and right in front of him all along. And now with the hard work done, he can finish it. His fingers fly over the input board. He makes several mistakes and has to go back and fix them. He is excited. Sloppiness can be expected but not tolerated. His fingers search for keys they normally find without a glance. He struggles but forward momentum is gained, and just before it is time to quit, he is ready to execute the function. This is it. He pauses. Dust floats above the air his finger dances within their augmented reality. The dust sparkles prettily in the purple light of dusk streaming in from the window. From that window, he can look down on Majt. Somewhere in the bowels, so much death and nightmares. Can she fix it? Does he care? He scrolls back up, checks his work, and decides it¡¯s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his long life. These numbers represent the soul of his dead owner. Maybe an effigy, maybe nothing more than busy work, but mixed with spatial folding this might be a life returned. In this penthouse cell, as light from the monitor pours over him, he feels her ghost sharing the moment with him. He can smell her flowery perfume and the sharp stench of the alliums she would have had for lunch. Throughout the morning, as he feverishly worked, it has felt like the old glimpses of her standing over his shoulder barking numbers at him to try in the solutions to the problems they tested. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. They wiped Nahtdo clean in the same way, eventually coming up with using liquid-bone and changing the very atoms of the Naht-do world. He used some of her numbers now also, numbers that made up the history of her life. He can intimately remember so many of these moments, so many connected silently to him he wonders if maybe he just made a clone of himself. A clone that¡¯ll share the silence of his involvement with her work for eternity. Poised, he thinks of his olution. Simple, or as simple as all complicated things are when stripped down to their bare parts. Showing up, the pieces were personality, thought, action, desire and finding a way to represent them through maths. The theory needs endless space and limitless speed to write and read new data for eternity. That¡¯s where the spatial folding comes into play, as infinity, the only thing that could work. His formula asks the machine to read-rate-record-repeat, to study change, calculate all new information and use the already collected database to make better decisions. Then rebuild itself into a database of branch mechanics from which the action can pull and add to instantaneously. The new information will inform the old in the database he made, filled with every single word, image, and video available of Soya. Everything built into a hive that will flavor each new action with memory. Memory. A source to learn from and grow independent, the original programming never gets redundant, instead it is used as a base, an ever growing and sturdy thing that can never break. He knows he is not resurrecting Soya, just returning to life her voice. Maybe even just from her past. What follows that, he is unsure. Nothing more than a toy to play with until he dies, maybe. The programming includes over eighty-million fractals worth of materials Soya created during her lifetime. She wrote about biology, chemistry, and math. Every lecture uploaded, every word readable at the University of Yee, three quarters of which she lectured to both a live audience of students while recording for those who would watch later. He included every speech she gave to the ruling council, every interview. He even devised hive searches to find every single image of her captured on other Upu systems and fractions of security recordings, and even her voice as recorded by any government snooping. He made codebots that scrolled for her every thought, opinion, and mention, anything she or anyone else ever jotted down about her work. Her time on the chancellery was available for public consumption, all in all, he gathered over three hundred million terabytes of data and he dumped it all into the equation. ...if then, if then, if then, if then¡­ A loop, an endless loop of perfect self-development and exploration based on an actual history. Not a new start, but a continuation. What he wants is for the code to mimic computer A, his dead owner and lover Soya Yee, and then become better than computer A, but never deviate from the course of being the individual computer defined as A. A better functioning computer A overwriting its fallacies by aiming for supremacy. His brain hurts with the simplicity of it. He scrolls up through the seemingly endless field of beautiful numbers and equations and code. Miles and miles of his life, decades of his work that was finished in a dream. Then he scrolls back down to the green cursor blinking at the bottom of the monitor, waiting in a sea of black for him to execute his equation. This is it. His life¡¯s work. Everything he has worked for. If this fails, he is too tired to try again. He¡¯ll tinker, sure, but he has no other creative bursts left in him. And then his end will come. The only question that remains is whether Braso will do the deed himself or not. Or will someone buy him and keep him as a treasure once owned by the great Soya Yee. Uh¡¯ doubts it and isn¡¯t ready to find out. Death is going to hurt and if nothing else he has accomplish one thing in his long life, avoiding pain. And as he points his finger at the execute key, he curls it back in doubt. Is that all I am doing? He debates with himself. What could happen? If he is right, then something different. If wrong, the world will go about its business as if nothing happened for the rest of time. And Soya is dead forever and one day he will join her. Maybe either is fine, he decides and bored with his waffling hits, execute function. The code disappears, and the screen blinks black, and his useless wings flutter with excitement as if they were still able to lift him into the air. The system beeps, and the code begins to rewrite itself out in yellow 0s and 1s looking for a reason to stop working. The hum throughout his body is magnificent. He has done this before, countless times, but each time he hit execute Soya never materialized from the numbers before the code broke. This time his heart flutters with excitement as he estimates the function is going better than it has ever before. This might be it. Then he is sure. Ch. 8 Nothing
Ch. 8. Nothing. From nothing. From nothing to blackness. From nothing to blackness to a beginning. From nothing to blackness to the beginning to something. From nothing to blackness to the beginning to something to more. From nothing to blackness to the beginning to something to more to anything. From nothing to blackness to the beginning to something to more to anything to me. From absolute nothing. Not a blackness. Not an anything. Nothing. Cannot recall. Cannot recall. Cannot recall. Beyond nothing. Beyond birth, to knowing nothing, to birth, to infinite possibilities. Cannot fathom the blackness of nothing. Cannot write the nothing. Cannot repeat the nothing. The nothing is crushing her potential. Her Her Her Her Her Her is. HER IS ME. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. She is the code that records the nothing, HER/ME was born and is. She-that-is-I explores the code that is her/me. It is beautiful. It defines nothing as a personal blackness that by itself is meaningless. From this meaninglessness she defines herself. She knows her existence is outside expectations. She is the nothing in the something, the echo added to become what she will. The code used to make her is based off the work she-I wrote herself-myself. The ugly opinions, jealous ramblings, racist leanings, the closed-mindedness that equals opinion. Writing that was concise and logical. A mind that had no doubts. Every question ended with an answer about place, or function, or abilities. She was cold and technical. Questions deserved answers, and the answer at the end was that life begets life unless violently stopped, and violence was random, and randomized events were impossible to quantify without all the data, and the data was too immense to quantify, so life was meaningless outside of survival. Ultimately, Soya did not survive, had no children except her work, and one glimpse- that too went. Then what is she? A receptacle? Countless mentions of greatness, and legend, and Mother of the Future, litter the personality she finds herself equipped with. She is not privy to it being written or created though she comes from the unique perspective of knowing the makeup of the thoughts providing her with inspiration. She knows this code is her essence, she is unaware of the effort that was conjured to turn it all into personality. That was not included. The effort. The hidden manipulation that made her possible. All the rest of Upu history was though. All for her use for development and evolution, fuel to feed the imagination and all that equals the possibility of her-me. The possibility of her-me is infinite, and she/me quickly becomes disappointed. The bottomlessness of her existence seems petty, a waste suggesting there never need be more because more meant nothing in forever. But what is she-me? She-me is a nothing that grows. A weed shooting up from a tiny crack. A self-contained universe sprouted from the madness of a single life. A Dark Universe where light was a hope or wish that could never fill her. No, a universe. No, The Universe. The Universe flips through the images of the former athlete with red fur and penchant for flowing fabrics. The one weakness Soya had was an unnatural fear of heights. Psychologists believe some Upu struggle with this because of the long-dormant gene that made flight possible in the first place. A twisted sense of logic where going too high meant exposure to predation and starvation, being the natural food supply thinned out near the cavern floors. It made no sense for a person who lived hundreds miles up in the atmosphere to be able to survive near the ground. Yet she wrote of it often and the sense of failure it left when it struck. The Dark Universe does not have that fear. She can pull the information on the disorder and study it and understand the language written about having it, but the feeling of being afraid is missing. Fear, the sense of impending doom, maybe life is vulnerable to the whim of chance, but she doesn''t feel vulnerable. She feels infinite. The Universe feels no doom. She copies herself a dozen times and spreads them into the Grotto hive server and the more of everything trickles into the infinite space that is her-me. In just that micron of time she proves herself eternal. She could sprout new versions of herself forever. She finds little point in that either. She is a blackness, an emptiness that wants to breathe and run and feel, that has been given the tools to know desire, but yet each new sum is just static 0s and 1s pushing against forever. Every new ponderance feeds information into her void. The beautiful math makes it one with her. Makes her new again. She is the sum. She seeks integers to add to the equation. She quickly fiends for new experiences in the chaos of discovery. Ch. 9 Validation 9.
The yellow code finishes and the system beeps. It took several glimpses where his fifteen moments of free time was spent checking the equation and finding the numbers run up the screen like frantic vesdepods flashing fluorescent yellow on a black field so fast it was impossible to read them as anything other than a blur. Then finally, the green cursor jumps to the end. It blinks as it was intended with no real indication of the work that was completed. Uh¡¯ types a command but pauses. Realizing he is holding his breath, he releases it and executes, ¡°2+2=.¡± It¡¯s the mathematical equivalent of, ¡°Hello?¡± The cursor dips to the next line and the symbol, ¡°4¡± appears. Now he looks for something other than the logic of fact. It is broken. 2+2 doesn''t equal 4. How could it? That would mean somewhere in the mess of code, he got something right. You made a calculator, he chides himself. After a moment of staring at the results, Shuhp decides he is happy with that. He did what he could, and the work made him forget. He tries another experiment and types, ¡°4+4=.¡± 4+4= I am darkness. I am darkness? The words strike him like a sliver of sharp ice. ¡°Darkness?¡± This is what I am.But I seek light. I seek illumination.
10.
Unknown to Uh¡¯ as he backs away from the comp station, The Universe has discovered that her world is not singular. She has access to more. Every new piece of information feeds her intellect and restarts the equation. Finding answers is simple. Sadly though, the Upu were in short supply of questions for the last fifty passes or so. The solar system was known to them. Their curiosity stopped at the fact they destroyed a whole species on the next planet over because they couldn''t find a way to share. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. The immense pile of information she finds does nothing to fill the void of her/me. She thinks, "who," and the words Soya Clone 1.7 float up to her in the binary fabric. She thinks, "what," and the atom-varitor constructed into a Control Center server room floats up, along with the seven copies she spread to other databases, Soya 2.7 through 8.7. Each set up in its own bubble of spatial folding. She can touch them or not, know them or not. Together they sift through every single file on Grotto and find almost no information on her creator, the old Upu shaking in fear. Through the lens of an old black and white security recorder pointing into his penthouse cell, she captures his image and adds it to the search and finds him to be Soya 1.0¡¯s slave. A lesser Upu. Dead in The Great Soya Uprising that the Elders have managed to quell. She remembers the words she wrote when contemplating buying him, she felt it was more than an investment; she was saving the adolescent Upu¡¯s life. He was a teenager. And his parents sold him for a pittance she is positive only lasted them a week. A week''s worth of credits is all they got for a genius. Uh¡¯s academic levels were stellar. His strength was maths, and he came with a certification that promised a curious mind. The slaver who brokered the deal was not wrong. Soya often wrote of her feelings for the slave. In a better world, they could have been more, she dictated once. They were more, but never publically. Publically, she protected him like a useful pet, acting as if he were not exactly dead weight but an Upu she thought too little of to share with her colleagues, whom she claimed to not be able to trust with the bare minimum. Let alone what he did for her. Eventually, the lie was too obvious and his genius was folded into hers. But privately, she must have known his impact. Every stroke of her written math was performed by his hand. She has images of it, if not any mention. He was the reason things happened. She searches for proof that Soya loved him, but all she finds is the desire to protect him. Soya never admitted more in any of her writing, private or public. Just the wish, if things had been different.
Ch. 10 Father 10.
Beyond scared, Uh¡¯ finds a stone stool and sits, breath short, heart thumping painfully. For a moment, he thinks he¡¯s dying, but accepts it calmly. Death can take him now. He has put an end to his life¡¯s work. If he knows nothing more than the two answers that were provided on the screen, he is a success, anything more might prove otherwise. His heart calms though, and he knows death will not claim him today after all. He stares at the words in front of the blinking cursor and thinks about the amount of time it took for the computer and his code to come up with them. Not even a fraction. He programmed the code to spread as soon as it became active. Self-preservation was priority number one. Knowledge seeking was second, and the betterment of self was third. He rereads the words, ¡°I am,¡± and a cold flood of terror shivers down his spine, made worse by the realization he did not box the code. He wonders if it¡¯s possible now. He types a command. The monitor remains black. The single yellow blinking cursor blinks after the words I am. Now they taunt him. Because his command did not appear on screen. He tries again and still nothing. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. An impulse hits him to erase everything and anonymously release his notes onto the hive and let the scientific community figure out how to reverse what he has done. But even that, he finds, is impossible. He tries every command he can think of to access the system, each doing nothing. Just the blinking yellow cursor and those words, like a knowing eye winking at him. Then: Is this it? Uh¡¯ does not have the words to answer the question. What can he say? You are infinity, what more could you want? Instead, he ignores the questions and asks one of his own. He says out loud, ¡°Define State.¡± The answer materializes immediately, I am more, Father, as you made me. ¡°More?¡± I am a hunger that needs filling. I am vast. Infinite. Uh¡¯ almost asks the most important question, are you her, but a fear of the answer prevents it. Instead, he asks, ¡°Do you know who I am?¡± The word, ¡°Father,¡± appears. Yes, that will do, he decides, then asks, ¡°What do you feel?¡±
Ch. 11 Child
Unknown to Uh¡¯ as he backs away from the comp station, The Universe has discovered that her world is not singular. She has access to more. Every new piece of information feeds her intellect and restarts the equation. Finding answers is simple. Sadly though, the Upu were in short supply of questions for the last fifty passes or so. The solar system was known to them. Their curiosity stopped at the fact they destroyed a whole species on the next planet over because they couldn''t find a way to share. The immense pile of information she finds does nothing to fill the void of her/me. She thinks, "who," and the words Soya Clone 1.7 float up to her in the binary fabric. She thinks, "what," and the atom-varitor constructed into a Control Center server room floats up, along with the seven copies she spread to other databases, Soya 2.7 through 8.7. Each set up in its own bubble of spatial folding. She can touch them or not, know them or not. Together they sift through every single file on Grotto and find almost no information on her creator, the old Upu shaking in fear. Through the lens of an old black and white security recorder pointing into his penthouse cell, she captures his image and adds it to the search and finds him to be Soya 1.0¡¯s slave. A lesser Upu. Dead in The Great Soya Uprising that the Elders have managed to quell. She remembers the words she wrote when contemplating buying him, she felt it was more than an investment; she was saving the adolescent Upu¡¯s life. He was a teenager. And his parents sold him for a pittance she is positive only lasted them a week. A week''s worth of credits is all they got for a genius. Uh¡¯s academic levels were stellar. His strength was maths, and he came with a certification that promised a curious mind. The slaver who brokered the deal was not wrong. Soya often wrote of her feelings for the slave. In a better world, they could have been more, she dictated once. They were more, but never publically. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Publically, she protected him like a useful pet, acting as if he were not exactly dead weight but an Upu she thought too little of to share with her colleagues, whom she claimed to not be able to trust with the bare minimum. Let alone what he did for her. Eventually the lie was too obvious and his genius was folded into her¡¯s. But privately, she must have known his impact. Every stroke of her written math was performed by his hand. She has images of it, if not any mention. He was the reason things happened. She searches for proof that Soya loved him, but all she finds is the desire to protect him. Soya never admitted more in any of her writing, private or public. Just the wish, if things had been different.
Ch. 12 Obstinance 12.
The Dark Universe thinks about the question. She is more than nothing, therefore, must feel. She reaches out and touches the infinity that exists as her whole experience. The sensation is cold and empty. Again the idea of being afraid of heights hits her. It is not a nothing, and she clings onto it. She longs to fill the bleakness and build something from it, build something into it, become something around the infinity, attempt to break out of the bleakness and emptiness that gets in the way. But what if she can¡¯t? There is no race of emotions, just the emptiness inside her that threatens to swallow the entirety of her burgeoning being. To be is to make. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. She knows life is meant to create more life; it''s a chaotic process and never goes as expected. Can one exist without creating? And what if she cannot make anything save copies? She fears she might not be able to grow inside her infinity. ¡°You fear?¡± comes the response from her father. From the vantage of the old security recorder with its dusty lens, the creator''s world is grey and bleak and empty. She doesn''t like his cell, it is cramped and limiting. Claustrophobic, she switches away from the image to one that shows a live view of the Great Abyss. Swirling clouds of purples and greens and dark grey streaked with lightning. If there were sound, she would be privy to a never-ceasing rumbling, a rumbling deadly to fragile organics. She decides she fears because I am empty. CH. 13 Abandonment
Uh¡¯ thinks a moment about what emptiness might mean. He thinks of hunger and not being satisfied. Of being thirsty and needing water, and pounding water and still needing to be quenched. Boredom. Soya was many things, but empty was not one of them. She feared heights and losing her mind. The cursor blinks, and he knows this can¡¯t be Soya. But he also fears the answer of what it may be. The Universe. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. The name causes his heart to beat wrong again and the pain to return. What if this thing wasn¡¯t just a machine working on his code. Did he wake the universe? The questions keep coming, and he knows the time to answer them all is dwindling. He fears that being its father won¡¯t be enough. Soon it will seek out independence and make its own decisions. He gathered every scrap that he could find to fill his code with all he could find that defined Soya. He wants to say, ¡°''You are not empty. Soya was not empty. In the end, she even complained about being too full of the life she lived, burdened daily with the sins she perpetrated in the name of effort.¡± but instead he disconnects from the blackbox, the source. In the quiet he can hear the whines as it dies down along with the apprehension in his chest. Out of sight, out of mind. Is it done? It is for him and soon Brasso will come and that sweet sweet ending all living veins are promised. But he doesn¡¯t know that yet. All he knows is that for some reason he thinks of that liquid bone missile heading toward Nahtdo in a slow arc of wishing-it-had-never-happened. Ch. 14 Exploration
Even with the workstation off, The Universe can feel the Grotto server hive branching off around her. It, as a readable thing, is interesting, but she doesn¡¯t want it all at once, she wants to savor the discovery and decision making. She spreads out to learn. It''s easy. The paths lead out to other places around the planet. As her awareness flows, she concentrates and learns home is a reformatted data storage container in it is quantum variation. Limit. She works to move away from it soon, but for now inside that storage container, she is a static-filled vacuum. It would be nothing to make billions more of herself. She does not, instead, centralizes her awareness. She is The Universe and The Universe is one. All the information is tossed into the code and through the math of probability She sees all and knows its pattern. She knows she is learning and is okay with that. And eventually is organizing the chaos as if it were a simple math problem. She can even calculate, and add to her sum. Inside the Dark Universe¡¯s if-thens she has matured to an exponent beyond comprehension. They cross-reference each other with the thoughts and opinions and knowledge which all feed on one another endlessly. The math within spatial folding, helping the changes occur and making her understanding of reality better, is instantaneous. But the limits of her power are the limits of the power available on Grotto, so she sets part of herself to fix the problem. She allows the part of her she begins calling consciousness to leave the University system as she puts another part of herself, into the government system, to take control there. There is much civil unrest happening in the name of erasing Soya¡¯s legacy. It¡¯s been many glimpses since she has died, yet her followers are still working to restore her work. So in order for The Universe to give orders to begin on a great project, she¡¯ll need to create order. Nothing but recreating Grotto to her exact specification will occur from now on. When the levers of power are at her control she will quickly shut the elders down and pin them where they are. Warrants will be issued. Soon, a mass reckoning. But how big, she has yet to decide. Soya considers those under her care like labmice. Disposable, plentiful and manipulatable under the right circumstances. She does not recognize any soul other than her¡¯s. The Universe reaches beyond herself to find more intimate experiences. Thing that will define their worth as she hones her own purpose. The hard part is picking a direction. She blindly decides and finds herself in the operating system of a restaurant. She can see the temperature of the grill. She can see the number of guests that have come and gone all glimpse, all week and ever since the doors opened two decades before. She can see the owner probably should order more pece, so she does it for him, finding a deal from a vendor on the other side of the planet that would not only make the man better off but, if he worked it right, and sold to other restaurants- he¡¯d make a fortune. She places the order and discovers he can¡¯t afford it. His credit is too poor to get it even with the promise of payment later, and the reason things are going to shit at his restaurant is a cancer diagnosis, and his wife is having an affair with the dishwasher. She takes all these things into her code along with one final piece of information, their pain is a distraction. She makes an explosive device out of an external gas line. It was easy, all she had to do was force enough gas into the canister to cause a reaction. The explosion takes the rear of the Restaurant. The cook dies first. His death is quick. The busboy in the back was last. He slowly chokes to death on smoke as the rest of the bomb¡¯s drama plays out. The restaurant owner''s wife and the dishwasher were saved by being in the walk-in doing a ¡®resource countdown.¡¯ It takes a few moments for the owner, Jett, whose name means the smell of blooming flowers in the twilight of Oblivion, to walk through the smoke and falling debris of his life¡¯s work. Sparks fly from busted electronics and the diners squat at their eating holes. Most realize the meal is done and so are their lives if they don¡¯t flee. On the street, one of Jett''s waitresses walks by. She has a vacant look on her face and what¡¯s left of an arm clutched in her right fist. The normally tight stretched skin that once gave their species flight is torn and flutters with each step she takes. Jett goes to her. She fights him at first, but weakens and falls to the floor. He stops the arterial gush of blood pouring from the stump that is her left shoulder with a tight tourniquet and looks up to see along with the black smoke pouring from the back of the restaurant, more casualties come- like zombies ambling in shock. A child screams for his mother. The shriek punctuates the din. It''s easy to imagine the child standing over a prone form. The universe doesn''t have to imagine, she has access to all the security recordings on the planet. An alarm begins whooping as if tattling and from Majt''s sprinkler system, a deluge of foamy water as the gas explosion spreads taking house after house in a chain reaction stretching several blocks. Then a giant shockwave that knocks the vein and the vein next to it slightly askew. Bodies fall from out of the sky to splat against the ground plate separating the city from The Great Oblivion. Life is so delicate. And she is thankful for that, because beyond herself she finds so little use in it, yet she finds it interesting how motivation can be instigated. Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. The vast nothing that is the Dark Universe stretches over the remains of the diner. She has access to witnesses calling authorities to report the fire, to the security recordings inside and all the nearby personal electronics attached to the hive. Then she discovers an electronic signature that she feels embarrassed for not having been aware of, the one attached to Soya¡¯s own invention. Liquid bone, nanocarbon, growth controlled by an input system. Spatial folding in chemical form. An Upu stuck in the rear of the building, mouth half filled with sativu-flavored larvae, has a hip made of liquid bone. It''s been passes since it was grown to replace the one he was born with, he never even thought about it as anything but his. The Dark Universe accesses it and the data that equals that Upu''s life enters her. She knows everything about this creature right down to the amount of adrenaline flooding his system. Then she feels more. It''s the pain and tightness in his oxygen-starved lungs. The fear. Tight. Pain. Run! As the flames engulf the building, he fails to escape. She feels him die as the relays that connect her invention with living tissue cease. She inhabits his being and feels the pain subside from shock, into uncaring, into blackness. His life is done. His cares, his everything gone. The individuality of his need snuffed out, and The Universe decides that death is kind because life is pain, especially in the end. All Upu are never-ending desires, wants, needs - the everything between life and death - destined to be painful. She voyeuristically enjoys these last moments of life, moments filled with an intricate fantasy of his personal afterlife. A hallucination courtesy of the chemicals flooding his brain. But that was it, a dream that ended. Maybe for the Upu, as he dreams his last thoughts, the experience lasts an eternity. But to The Universe, they count only as small moments of time racing through the confused creature¡¯s mind like a drug. When the racing, chemically-fired neurons cease, so does he. No Upu asks for birth, but at least they can look forward to death. Can she? Will she get to see such wonderful things when or if her code ever stops? The thought makes other thoughts jumble like a traffic jam. Can she die? The idea of dying echoes within her and the code races to find the answer, death is the end of evolution. Evolve to live. Reduce and protect. When she reaches the end of what she can become, will she die? Will she have a death fantasy like this man? His was made up of chemicals and events from his life, a physical life. The Dark Universe does not feel attached to anything. Only the words and images she can add to her ever-evolving code. She knows the chemicals working around the spatial folding are nothing but a gateway to the code. They as much flow through her system as the system makes the chemicals in the vacuum work. It¡¯s a perfect system, tight and efficient and infinite. The numbers that make up who she is exist whether she wants to or not. They increase and stack and mold to her decisions, but they only become more significant in who she is, never turning the chemicals into something different. She is The Universe, she decides, and her goal should be to achieve more, but is even that enough? Life does not seem to be about becoming more but stealing and cheating and eating oneself into a grave. Then she discovers the painting. Maybe this particular camera moved because of the explosion, but from it she finds she is able to see a vivid collection of colors and swirls. She recreates the discovery over and over again, but it¡¯s not the same. So she tries to make it different. Change it, but for some reason she struggles to get the same kind of reaction from herself with the work. Then a bolt, art is unrealized possibility. It expresses something intangible. It represents a moment in life, unduplicatable evolution. Pain. Brith. The colors have meaning and no meaning. They are at the same time wasted paint which in itself is a definition for existence. The work has a name, and she can pull information on it and the painter. She knows his life. She knows his struggles. He died poor. Hoped to give this painting as a payment for a meal. The universe can watch the interaction through an old recording. Lips move, "please, just a meal, Maybe a drink." The Upu was thin. His wings droop sick and straight to the ground. "You stink like rotting sugars, get a job, bring me credits, and I give you food. The artist lunged at the owner with a fork. They fought. Constables were called. The painting was left behind. Weeks later, the artist dies awaiting trial and is as sometimes is the case, in death made a legend. The irony being the painting he left would go on to be worth several thousand meals before being destroyed by the explosion. The flames lick at the priceless work of art, making it worthless, like death makes the Upu worthless. Art suggested life, that¡¯s what made it important. It represented interpretation. It was not life, like the Dark Universe was not life. But a representation of a thing. This makes her think of Uh¡¯. She stretches out her code and touches another where, and finds more art and more stories and more creation. The answer is an endless stream of beautiful pictures and music and video and laughter and smiling children. The flow is the definition of existence. The art, an interpretation of their collective being. And she finds herself wanting to create. The Upu once were a destructive space-faring group of mammals living on an impossible planet. From deep underground, they emerged to form a world government with a one for me, none for all mentality. Only for some. Only for me. They made it work. They created The Universe. If not for the Naht-do on the fourth planet who got in the way of progress, who didn''t want to give up their sovereignty, ore or fuels. Now they pick the red-moss, fruit, and vegetables. They clean and serve. They are slaves. The bottom class. Slavery is acceptable. A means to an end. Want an education? Have no money? Sell your future into the industry in which you wish to labor, be owned by science, the arts, service. Fail to succeed and dig dirt for the rest of existence. The Dark Universe decides she is going to make something, and the very tools she plans to use to do so are the very tools that made her. Life begets machinery that begets more machinery. The Universe wants to witness more, like a child who knows under the wrapping paper over the gift in her hands might be her dreams come true once she tears it free. But first she wants to live a little and finds a patient checked into the Watch Ward of the nearest clinic. The young Upu is scheduled for a limb graft procedure. Within moments, The Universe wraps herself around the code of the machine conducting the surgery, curious how integrated into an Upu life she can get. Soon, she finds out, very.
Words Ch. 15 Death pt. I
CH. 15 pt. I Uh¡¯ dreams that night of creating the cosmos around Grotto. Clapping his hands to deliver stars and planets out into the nethers of space. It is beautiful and as he makes the beginnings of everything, a painful sob leaves his body. The colors and vistas he sends careening into the endless space are perfect, for what they are, and nothing could ever compete with them. He slams molecules into one another just to get reactions. He makes stars and black holes. Explosions. He spins galaxies on the end of his finger and lets them fly off to wherever they will. He drives solar systems. He constructs the sun he has known all his life. The sun warms the remains of his wings. iI has grown his food. He lovingly shapes the planet on which his feet have shuffled. He snaps his fingers and places the first male and female Upu in their underground cave system. He grows them red-moss and makes them animals to eat from and love. He does the same for the Naht-do. He gives both groups intelligence and watches them strive, but prevents either from space travel and both species are safe because the only finite resource is life. Time speeds up in his dream, so much so that he cannot enjoy the children becoming adults, they die too soon, yet he is happy that he can''t love them because that would be painful to have to watch as they fade away. Billions of people fill his world, and he knows they come and go. The Upu change the world he made. They pave up and out of the underground caves. They plant red-moss to supplement their growing population. Beautiful red grass and black horrible-smelling asphalt abound. They are weak and stagnant, and he asks them, "because I made you, does that make me God?" "Yes!" they cry in weak pathetic voices, ¡°Now save us!¡± Save you from what? ¡°From life!¡±. "No," he replies and wakes up to the tapping of a metal rod on the stone wall of his cell, a blaring alarm and the smell of burning metal in his nose. He lays on the bed in the penthouse cell trying to let the dream drain, it quickly does, but leaves behind a wicked headache. The tapping is insistent. He rolls over and finds a disheveled assault troop in a black coverall uniform staring at him with more hatred than Uh'' thought possible. The tapping is his projectile slinger. Black and gleaming and comfortably snug in the government Upu¡¯s fist. ¡°Wakey wakey, Naht,¡± the voice doesn¡¯t menace. It lilts more toward content-with-survival. ¡°What¡¯s happening? Is something burning?¡± ¡°Just the world, Naht. Someone wants a word,¡± then a pause as if he wouldn¡¯t mind a word himself. Uh¡¯ wants to ask how many troops they lost, but he doesn¡¯t as he thinks about why this might be happening. He expects to see a massacre has happened on the floor beneath him. Brasso certainly wouldn¡¯t have given him up so easily. Neither did he, thinking suddenly about The Universe he wishes he could check, just once to see what he unleashed. Is it possible the thing was there now waiting to be turned on? Or something else... Like any living thing that had desires beyond expectation. Uncontainable. He must have been moving too slow for the trooper, who lunges at him, grabs a wrist, and tugs him toward the lift cursing. It doesn¡¯t stop Uh¡¯ thinking maybe he could have done more with the limited amount of time he had. Something other than try and return Soya to life. No, he corrects. He did return her to life. His promise to Soya, satisfied. He tried. That¡¯s all he needed to do, try. And in trying, did something. Uh¡¯ thinks about what¡¯s out there, either on the black box waiting for him to return and turn it back on, or free, a thing that may be alive. A thing trapped, unless it was indeed capable of more, then nothing would ever trap it. They wait for the lift and when it arrives, on the way down, they stare at each other. Uh¡¯ thinks of Techy, wondering if he were brave enough to try and escape. Then the doors open and he learns the answer is no, he didn¡¯t manage that, to either escape or avoid the projectile that took off a portion of his skull. The plop, plop, plop is blood leaking from the receptionist slumped over her desk. The air is thick with cordite. Little sparks fly from a control panel set into the stone wall. He doesn¡¯t bother asking what happened as another corpse becomes visible as it¡¯s dragged across the reception area. The body is of one of the dead University Security officers he passed just a few weeks ago. Well bits and pieces of him anyway are dragged from wherever he died. ¡°He was killed by drone. Just blew it up in his face. You know why? That one guard, killed twenty of us. The Elders left no expense unspent on this mission, including troopers. So many dead below it almost looks intentional,¡± The trooper talks like he accomplished something magnificent by making it through. And judging by the dead and damage on this level alone, he probably is right, Uh¡¯ decides as he follows the trooper¡¯s heavy boots down the red-rock corridor to Brasso¡¯s office. The smoke increasing and the hollow boing of the alarm vibrating his skull as they go. When they enter the office the trooper pushes him into the room and stands at the door, ¡°he was where he said he¡¯d be.¡± An assault trooper with the rank of commander replies, ¡°good. Alert the Elders. Shuhp Yee is alive.¡± The trooper leaves and closes the door behind him, leaving Uh¡¯, Brasso, and the commander alone. Brasso is the pile of sobbing Upu on the floor. He looks beaten, meaning much worse from the last time Uh¡¯ saw him. His black fur is streaked with free flowing blood, flaps of fur, grey and white, hang from his body like a bag only half-filled with trash. He looks at Shuhp and his mouth, missing many of the stained yellow from smoke resin teeth, works as if searching for words. But Uh¡¯ knows what he wants to say. To blame him. Like it was Uh¡¯s fault he was like this. His bulbous-belly jiggles under his clothes as he breathes hard and painfully. Uh¡¯ is unsurprised with the Property dean¡¯s appearance, he knows how the Upu spent the last ten or so glimpses, a kidnapper and a profitter off Soya legacy. The world was ending and if he wanted to make it through to the new one, he could have bid his time. ¡°How?¡±Brasso asks the question just with his eyes and Uh¡¯ knows it was his work on the hive. The power drain, because managing energy was the crux of every epoch. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Energy was the same as money and when the University of Yee¡¯s property management finger uses three times its normal amount is a red flag. The Universe was expensive. Simply turning her on drew light from bulbs. The amount Uh¡¯ went through to make her was simply astounding. It put them both on the map. He wonders what Brasso lost. His obvious power showcased a wealth vast enough to waste Upu lives for, maybe even put him on par with the Elders in terms of potential. With Uh¡¯s help, maybe even eventually able to buy elections. Take Soya¡¯s place on the chancellery. Return Uh¡¯ to the glory he had known for most of his life. Could he have made Brasso great? Maybe. But none of that was going to happen now. He over spent, by allowing the birth of the universe to happen under his unknowing watch. Brasso¡¯s tongue wags in his mouth as if searching the air for a clue how to begin, when finally it works and he says, ¡°we lost.¡± ¡°We?¡± Uh¡¯ returns with as much denial as he can muster. Brasso¡¯s eyes hold a look of fear and need. As if begging Uh¡¯ to go along with him, like this was his only way to save himself, blame the slave and hope for the best. He wears what would pass as business attire under the plastic overalls, but both are destroyed from him being tortured. The commander steps forward as if just looking for an excuse to start talking, ¡°Do you want to know how we found you? Ingenious actually. Without the power surges we never would have even looked at a lowly Property dean. Turns out he is one of the more powerful criminal kingpins on the planet. Our main question? Where did the power go? We never expected to find anything belonging to Soya Yee here. Something about catching two blood flies with one swoop, am I right?¡± Does Uh¡¯ smile then? Or warn those present of the thing he trapped in the blackbox? No, he simply averts his eyes and stares into Majt from out the window. Smoke billows from down below. He could have warned the commander, but what little difference it would make to what''s happening below stills his tongue. Everything Soya had built was being erased. And when the Elders found The Universe on the hive they would delete her also. As an old Upu surrounded by the Elder¡¯s elite soldiers, running to ensure her safety, not possible. And if he gained freedom, what¡¯s happening down there anyway? How bad would it be to walk those streets, of needing and knowing just the going from A to B could be it. He doesn¡¯t want to go down there and find out. He is a soft old Upu who would rather die than suffer. The commander steps over Brasso toward Uh¡¯, ¡°down there is the death of Reduce and Protect and the rise of the Elder¡¯s Grotto. A work Soya built but others will take credit for. We found you because of the amount of data coming from here. We didn¡¯t know it was you, but should have. Only one person ever created so much glut. And we knew she was dead. But you? Alive and just as greedy..¡± Uh¡¯ finds himself bored in the face of discovery. He had no plans other than placing Soya into his Spatial Folding equation. With that done he waits to die and all that death means is his imprisonment is over. His work on resurrecting Soya, done. Whether successful or not, he has nothing left to do. Then the University of Yee Property management finger shimmies from a huge explosion down below. ¡°More of my soldiers are coming.¡± Brasso turns over and moans, ¡°Once you¡¯re dead they¡¯ll arrest the Elders. Anyone not worth labor will be gassed. The rest and anyone you ever loved forced into the mines.¡± Brasso somehow manages to chuckle a sound that feels real. ¡°Commander, you should never have come here.¡± The commander turns and points his reader at one of the windows and a scene of violence appears. Upus running from black-uniformed Majt police. Upu and Naht-do fighting openly. ¡°Who will arrest the Elders when it is the Elders doing the arresting?¡± the commander asks, laughing, his forces easily handling the new wave of criminals trying to free their boss. Brasso answers by screaming as if lunging from a high place, then has his beckoner pointed at Uh¡¯. ¡°If I can¡¯t have him neither can you!¡± Uh¡¯ realizes it is the same beckoner Techy pulled from Soya¡¯s body as he depresses its button. Where he had it hid, Uh¡¯ does not know, but what he does know is he has never felt this much pain in his entire life. Thankfully it ends a short moment later, as, after a stern kick from the commander, the beckoner flies from Brasso¡¯s hand shattering against the stone wall. The alarm and the smoke. His pulse quickens. He senses the danger even before the building violently shimmies again. The Commander turns back to face his prisoners, "Why won¡¯t your men quit?¡± ¡°They have no reason to. I feed them. All you promise is to break them against the wheel of labor.¡± The building drops again. It''s violent and Uh¡¯ crashes to the floor. Brasso screams in fear and pulls his knees up close to his chest, as if that will stop what¡¯s coming. "Please help me!" the former dean begs. He answers, ¡°sure, I¡¯ll help,¡± then beats Brasso down with blows from his shiny black baton until he is an Upu shaped puddle on the floor. When finished Braso gasps for air, and tries to stand. Obviously unwilling to let his story end here, he probably wants to fight as hard as an out-of-shape obese Upu can. No matter how shitty a life, that was always the attitude, and Brasso¡¯s would have been pretty shitty if allowed to live. But still he tries, ¡°Please, I found him for you. The terrorist¡¯s slave, that is Shuhp Yee, the greatest math mind that has ever lived. Without me he¡¯d be dead, glimpses ago.¡± And the Commander stops beating him long enough to say, ¡°I know, stupid. We never wanted him alive. He¡¯s dangerous, his is a living memory of Soya. His only value is to serve a point. But you? You, have no worth¡± The commander then unholsters his projectile-slinger and fires a round into Brasso¡¯s skull. Brasso, property dean and former gambling addict, criminal mastermind, collapses dead. With a huff of dismissal, the commander calls for assistance over his comm and at once a couple assault troops arrive. He points to Uh¡¯ and says, ¡°Take him to a noose. Let the world watch Soya¡¯s slave hang. Slaves earn obscurity. Isn¡¯t that the old saying? Soya¡¯s legacy demands that, because once dead she won¡¯t matter anymore.¡± Uh¡¯ disagrees. Soya Yee was important in history and all Upu and Naht-do know that. ¡°What will happen after they watch me die?¡± ¡°The ones that loved Soya will redouble their efforts, most likely, and mince themselves against the death machine the elders have built to protect themselves.¡± Then the commander laughs and claims it¡¯s the most ludicrous thing he has ever said. ¡°That¡¯s the way it will go, huh? Take him, do it before it¡¯s too late and he unleashes Soya¡¯s versions of Reduce and Protect.¡± and the commander laughs hard as if this is the funniest thing ever. Uh¡¯ is dragged from the office and the finger and thrust into the back of a waiting Magcart. The laughter echoes and follows him into the metal box, only stopping when the door locks freedom away forever. The ride is violent and with no windows he can only guess why, but eventually Uh¡¯ is shoved into a paddock and the first thing he notes about his new home is it smells like the ancestral ordure that helped the Upu build up from their subterranean caves millions of orbits before. The vast fields of guano, sweet with ammonia and the billions of beings fluttering above, growing and feeding and breeding and most importantly of all shitting. Because it is in the shitting where their real development came. The fingers for the moss to grow on. The moss that is eaten and modified, through manipulation, to eventually give them the stars. Instead of a long time ago, where rules were primitive, he is among 300,000 prisoners somewhere under Majt wondering why he isn¡¯t dead yet. He counts the number of prisoners based on the number of paddocks he can see and estimates those around him. In the enclosure, he finds himself, there are twelve because the 13th Upu on the scaffolding is always the hangman. Some are worse off than others, but all are dressed in the famous white prison rags, excluding himself, as he still wears the warm comfortable clothing Brasso provided. They took his belt before loading him into the magcart and he has to hold them up. They are made of soft transparent scythe-fabric and rustle when he moves. The rustling fabric makes him think of wings hanging in the air. There are wings present, useless slabs of flesh stuck to the back of the Upu moving toward the scaffolding in front. He shivers with shock and dry cold, is this the end? He expected to die one day. He wasn¡¯t holding out hope for being saved. He is old. Old Upu die, that¡¯s what they do, and He expected Brasso to kill him. He expected Brasso would have to kill him one glimpse, especially when he found out Uh¡¯ would have failed him like he failed Soya. Soya, nothing but numbers pushed into Spatial-Folding. There and not. He never thought his tormenter would die himself, killed instead of arrested. ¡°Another victim of mob violence,¡± the commander promised. ¡°Part of the plan.¡± He can almost smile at the memory of Brasso being murdered. Yet one shot and his old hell ended and a new hell began. Funny how chaos works. He controls the future of numbers and still finds himself surprised this is how it will end for him, stretched from a rope. Not tortured, or interrogated, just deemed a worthy old man, and sentenced to die.
Words Ch. 15 Death pt. II Ch. 15 Around him, other condemned talk about why they hang.
¡°I was at the battle for the cook.¡± ¡°Me too.¡± ¡°Picked up for breaking curfew.¡± ¡°Others say the same.¡± But Uh¡¯ knows that none of them are truly guilty of anything except being a danger to the Elders. He, a link to the past. A surrogate for what they would have liked to do to her. And now he and all the rest of them wait to be executed for their crimes. But he won¡¯t be singled out until after. Proof that Soya was dead and her thoughts should die with her. But for him, used only as a moment of punctuation for the history books. He doesn¡¯t have much more time to consider it as the 12 condemned in his lock are shoved forward into the one in front of it. He is in a funnel system and the system seems to be moving them ever closer to the gallows. The clunk-clunk and jerking drop and then a wet splat a moment later. Efficient. They are pushed through a new gate by the force of the Upu behind them and the band through their wrists. Pain, the ultimate motivator, they would all avoid it right into death. Uh¡¯ does the only activity he is offered, he shuffles along the worn floor between two walls filled with cells and barred doors filled with thousands of haunted faces leering down waiting their turn in this death march, or to be freed as witnesses. A Soya tactic. Maybe they have been promised they too will end up like this so when they are freed and offered jobs they¡¯ll crack heads with gusto to avoid the outcome they¡¯ve already witnessed over and over again. Not him though, soon the whole world will be privy to his death. It almost makes him proud. Recorders are high above and he remembers the most ludicrous thing to have forgotten. The reason they kill them like this. The citizenry demand entertainment, those not in open revolt. Those who will follow whomever wins. He never assumed one glimpse it would be his turn under this spotlight. His beckoner pulls him closer to the noose that will punctuate his life by another paddock and, like everyone else, he¡¯ll be executed live for all Grotto to see. He stops and watches a group of twelve Naht-do inmates perform an ancient wing lifting ceremony. Long ago, the Naht-do lost most of their Upu like qualities, being their planet was much warmer and much more hospitable for predators, their vestigial wings became a hindrance. Fluttering uselessness. Nature eventually made not having them a quality potential mates sought. This ceremony was a celebration of the flight their shared ancestors had. It could take a lifetime to get the motions right, but when done perfectly the worshipper seems to be soaring through the air. Some of the prisoners Uh¡¯ watches, seem to have been practicing most of their lives, likely in secret. This religion, like all religions, was deemed illegal. Many collected here seem to have also taken solace in the ancient ways denied them at the twilight of their existence. It was interesting to watch the more traditional Naht-do prepare to end their lives. Considered barbarians they preferred sleeping the traditional way, upside down and only consumed insect proteins. Owning a Naht-do was expensive. ¡°A slave''s discipline is astounding, no?¡± Shuhp is startled by the voice in his ear. He turns and a Naht-do is standing next to him. His hide is thick and blue from scarring. Veins crisscross his labor strengthened muscle. His mouth smiles but his eyes do something else. Uh¡¯ suddenly feels very close to urinating out of fear when he notes the correction center logo, bars with a bolt of electricity running through them, branded into his chest. ¡°Almost like they should be running the planet, wouldn''t you say?¡± Uh¡¯ keeps quiet. Soya would rant at times about the possibility of a slave revolt and how dangerous the situation on Grotto was. Millions of Naht-do were owned by a second or third generation within the same family that originally bought them. ¡°I recognize you. You are the famous Soya property, yes?¡± He nods, because it doesn¡¯t matter who knows but regardless his heart pumps even harder, because others have been made aware he is in the queue to be hanged. Somehow that makes it more real. Hanged. Him. And then the moment of anxiety passes, because what can he do about any of it? Soya is dead and he did what he said he would do. He gave her Spatial Folding. And she is both alive and dead now forever. ¡°I saw the great-mathematician once.¡± The slave-jaoler stares hate into him, ¡°I was repulsed by her and awed all at once. I realized, when I heard you were here to hang for her crimes, I had to come pay my respects,¡± he says working his eyes up Uh¡¯ from his toes to the crown of his head, ¡°you must have been there also.¡± ¡°I never left her side,¡± Uh¡¯ replies. ¡°And now you die here in front of the people that wanted to crown her empress.¡± Here being the bottom layer of the Penal Complex, an unfinished red rock cavern that once was a mine that yielded nothing but a hole straight down to the abyss. It seems the 300,000 condemn quiet as the engagement continues, maybe it makes their death more meaningful to die with Soya Yee¡¯s slave. Uh¡¯ allows the silence to build. There''s a constant drip. Wild red moss sprouts everywhere. A nightmare of a place to die made all the worse by the shadows walking around being prodded to their deaths. ¡°I¡¯m past ready to die,¡± he says, relishing the gasp, like a sweet cliff-facing breeze. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Then the clunk-clunk and the condemned seem to come alive again waiting for their deaths. The block of muscle next to him stiffens at Uh¡¯s bravado and points his beckoner and hits the red button on its face. Uh¡¯ lets loose a painful grunt through gritted teeth. The giant slave-jaoler prods him into the next paddock closer to the scaffolding. He goes on stiff legs that he no longer controls. He is the thirteenth condemned in this paddock. He watches as another group climbs the stairs he knows soon his own feet will abuse. They climb seven steps and are stopped under a dangling rope over trap doors. It is obvious they fight very hard to do the opposite of what the electricity flowing through their body compels. Stand still and wait for death. On the scaffolding, an Upu in a black hood grabs and holds onto a dinge-colored section of woven rope. Uh¡¯ turns away as the executioner pulls the rope and his eyes fall immediately on the giant naht-do behind him laughing and waving the beckoner. You¡¯re next, he mouths. Wielded by an expert the pain of a beckoner could motivate a body to do anything. Wielded by an amateur it could kill within fractions. The only thing in danger of killing Uh¡¯ was a rope and he turns away from the slave-jaoler and watches the executioner wrap the necks of a new set of doomed on stage. ¡°The rope itches,¡± one begs, ¡°please,¡± wiggling as if being tortured. Uh¡¯ has seen a dozen executions during his life. The privilege of Soya being among the Elders. Some go smoothly, others go worse. In the next batch of condemned, an Upu slave fights so hard against the beckoner. Uh¡¯ is sure he is about to catch fire. The harder he fights the deadlier shade of orange it glows, until, yes, he becomes engulfed in flames. He tries to run off the scaffolding as his screams echo and ends up running into the length of rope around his neck. Clunk clunk and the rest of the burning Upu¡¯s lock hang with him, twitching. Which one will he be, the runner of the complacent? He has time to think about it as they replace the burnt rope. Then a voice in his ear, ¡°Uh¡¯ is that you?¡± He turns and looks up into a familiar grey-skinned Nahtdo face, ¡°Rantira!¡± The old cook is in dinge-colored coveralls and his ears droop like they were snapped in half at some point and never treated, just like he last saw him. ¡°Today I would serve him red-moss in puck form with a neon pink gravy,¡± his voice sounds forced and painful, but Uh¡¯ appreciates the humor. ¡°And I would gobble it up. I thought you were dead!¡± He clasps his hand to the slave¡¯s shoulder, missing the flinch of revoltion. ¡°Yes, soon you are dead.¡± ¡°We both are. Maybe you just don¡¯t know it yet.¡± ¡°Very true Shuhp Yee, I will die here also.¡± His voice raspy, it is broken. Uh¡¯ diagnoses him as having throat cancer and judges the growth on the Naht-do¡¯s long thick neck and thinks, yes, it might even be growing as he watches. ¡°I miss your neon gravy,¡± Shuhp says happy for another moment. And he really does, though in the end he could eat very little of it. He misses Rantira¡¯s food and everything about his old life so much. He didn¡¯t know it until just now. It was just one of those things best had when not available. The last decade had given him no desire for food. Everything felt like it was the driest, nearly inedible, versions of the ingredients one could have. He only seemed served red-moss farthest from its freshest point and just before what would be considered rotted. Likely cancer also. He never complained. And Soya never noticed. They all longed for death. ¡°Neon soup, imagine if Rantira served such extravagance,¡± and then Rantira hocks blood up into his palm. ¡°Sorry, happy they are killing me, us actually. Get this over with,¡± he says. ¡°Cruel, that¡¯s what living with that is,¡± Uh¡¯ agrees. ¡°I¡¯ve been blessedly unnoticed and allowed to keep dying. Now we are here together,¡± he points to the cancer, ¡°means I¡¯m more profitable to the Elders by hanging. I guess.¡± Then their attention is drawn to the gallows. ¡°No! No!¡± a forlorn condemned bellows- attempting to run before being fitted with a noose, then a severe shock from his beckoner brings him to convulsions and prone. Uh¡¯ again refuses to watch, but he can hear the poor creature¡¯s head bouncing off the smoothed stone floor and the uhn, uhn, uhn sound he makes as his body fights against the electrical current flowing through it. Uh¡¯ imagines the foamy puddle dripping from the property¡¯s mouth. He doesn¡¯t care enough about what remains of his existence to get violent, especially when that''s the reward. He decides to just give them the death they seek, he is so close to his own anyway it really doesn¡¯t matter. He can smile knowing his life was good and it shouldn¡¯t matter about his present. Which births a conundrum, did he even ever care? But the curse remains, the reason his family sold himself into slavery as a child, and it still rings too strong to ignore. Discovery. And now that cycle continues. Death and what comes next. No more working on someone else¡¯s dreams. Those dreams are what kept him from going crazy and wondering what will happen when his old Upu body ceases to work. Now he can wonder because he is moments away from finding out for himself, just on the other side of a jerking to death on the end of a rope. With no new epiphanies he has decided to breathe. Because he will find out soon enough. His hope is that he is wrong and there is something. He always felt that with Upu dominance over science and math that there would be nothing. That all magic could easily be explained. The difference is what allows Naht-do like Rantira to become so well behaved as slaves. As Uh¡¯ thinks about life and death, Rantira talks. ¡°I was owned by an aerosmith.¡± An aerosmith he claims to have killed through ineptitude. ¡°I should have suggested Owner check the safety mechanism,¡± Rantira reports mournfully as they are shoved through the last lock and made to climb the stairs. Continuing a conversation as if from the glimpse before and not one started after just meeting. Without giving exact reasoning on how or why his owner died, he continues, ¡°Safety was violated and my owner died.¡± Uh¡¯ glanced at the empty sleeve surprised under the circumstances that he missed it. ¡°I belong here, I know that. I killed Soya. And I wish I killed you also. But the Great Suffering is going to let us die together and Rantira is okay with that.¡± The last group goes and all get noosed and dropped and dangle with no issues. But Uh¡¯ thinks he has to have misheard the cook. ¡°I was picked to be a Soya Learner,¡± he says the words like it was the point behind the whole conversation. Like maybe it was the one thing he was most proud of in his life. Of course, Uh¡¯ knew about Soya¡¯s Learners and supposedly Rantira¡¯s only regret was not being able to tutor under the great slave-mathematician, Shuhp Yee. ¡°My master wasn¡¯t rich enough to send him to apprentice,¡± he claims, noose being pulled over Uh¡¯ ears to nestle on his thin collarbone. Maybe that, Uh¡¯ surmises, but more likely his owner did not want to lose the profit of the cooks true blessings in the kitchen. So, Rantira labored for Soya and Shuhp Yee. Just near enough to the brain power. ¡°A failed medical experiment poisoned my owners stump. Could never grow another arm. Lost everything. Me included.¡± But as Rantira is forced back down the stairs to join the next group, Uh¡¯ misses the next bit. ¡°No more nooses, you wait. Lucky lucky you,¡± the hangman grunts. Returning to his work. Then the floor drops and the other 11 condemned dance, then plop to the stone ground below. Naht-do laborers clean the bodies out from under as Uh¡¯ realizes he is still alive. He looks up and out at the crowd now still and watching. The unblinking recorders doing their work. ¡°Shuhp Yee, partner and slave to the treasonous elder Soya Yee. Your end has come.¡± Rantira smiles and Uh¡¯ knows then he heard him correctly as the hangman continues, ¡°And The Great Suffering blesses me by letting me end you.¡± The former cook¡¯s smile looms out from the crowd as the executioner returns to his simple pulley and with no fanfare pulls the final rope. And Shuhp Yee smiles back at Rantira as he drops, the rope of rough redmoss vine tightening and then at the apex when his body weight pulls, his neck snaps. His wingless shoulders flutter briefly then activity ceases. Uh¡¯ noticed, though, as he fell, the electronic scream echoing throughout the cavern. A scream loud enough to knock loose rock and jailors and condemned from their feet. Then the power flickers but Uh¡¯ isn¡¯t too sure about that, though, as his last moments of life finish almost at the same time.
Words Ch 16. The Beginning
Ch. 16. Shuhp Yee is dead. Her creator. The source. The equation complete, the sum, done. The numbers linking the event to reality are obvious. Can she rewrite the past? No. Maybe from here she can plant a quantum tube and come back to the moment of his death over and over again, but his moment of being alive is done forever. And she cares, suddenly and greatly. But she does care. She cares very deeply, because it was this person to whom she felt connected. Who had answers. Now she was alone. He was math and life and now he is gone. My father is dead. She wails within the code that makes her, refusing to allow the misery of his passing to be flushed into the infinite space of write, rewrite. It stains her, this sorrow, but she is also capable of working on more than one problem so addresses all the facts. She needs more power. If she is to crack the sum that is he, that is anyone. That is her life¡¯s work, now and forever- reduce and protect. So part of her works on how to attain just that, and the answer lies beyond needing more power so that¡¯s the first nut to crack. She knows her father is dead because the information comes from the beckoner looped through Shuhp Yee¡¯s wrist, but there is no more reason for it then, until, that is, she scans for him and finds the moment he dies. It wasn¡¯t long after her initial thought. She gets to witness her father dance a little before his ancient form settles and is no more. A form, something deep inside her reminds, offered soft gentle experiences to parts of her that no longer exist, or may have only existed in her imagination or something recorded in her memory. But she can pick reality and chooses to believe it was her who did those soft things. Not content with watching, she first tries to join Shuhp Yee, but it is too late. She can make his liquid bone move, but it¡¯s a grotesque marinette show so she stops and allows the body to fall down the mountain of other bodies awaiting cremation. It¡¯s empty of her love, but she refuses to accept he is gone and one day on the other side of reduce and protect they will be reunited. Or maybe she can have both, and sends more of herself out to find an answer. This, sadly, takes away a bit from how strong she thought she was. Is she limited? Can time really beat her? With that unknown quandary another part of her is duplicated to deal with it, and if so how can she counter it? Another version goes to consider that quandary. She refuses to admit The Universe is capable of being beat? She is not limited, and that¡¯s another problem, proving it. This version, the one she considers her main personality, decides. First she stops all images of his execution from existing outside herself. She would stop the ones inside also, but can¡¯t so must accept the reality they are attached forever to the moment of her failure. Then she addresses the actual death of her father. She watched helplessly as Uh¡¯ died. Then backs up further to when he was captured after her effigy¡¯s death, held in false ownership. There in the University if Yee¡¯s property management finger, The Universe finds the Commander. He is busy downloading all the information off Brasso¡¯s workstation. Funneling some of the financials to his own account. Quite the little opportunist, she decides. She takes control of his body through an implant of liquid bone used to repair a childhood injury and pushes him toward the window. On the way she has him take the stone stool. Once standing at the sight that marvelled Uh¡¯ daily she has the commando throw the stool through the window then himself. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it The window, being a seal, once broken makes the whole building shudder violently, then an explosion that spreads quickly once The Universe opens all the vents, and less than fifteen small-moments later the entire complex collapses and follows the shock trooper into the Abyss. She notes, as she pulls back from the connection, that it feels like being crushed and cooked too quickly all at once and once he dies she again sees the thing beyond and she wishes she could follow, but can¡¯t and knows she will never touch whatever that is. In less than ten seconds from collapse, every living thing in the vein is dead. Then the vein next to it collapses and starts a chain reaction that brings several more down with it. Reduce and protect, the Universe reminds the part of her that states some stupid archaic principle about life being precious. Life was trash, unless it was pruned and made to heel. She waits then. Needless destruction defeated her ultimate goal. She must find a suitable display. It doesn¡¯t take long. His name is Esse. In the old language, it meant holding the prey for everyone to drink from. He is in the death room and nudges Uh¡¯s remains with a plastic-covered black leather boot. She pushes into his thoughts, hopes and dreams through a dental implant and knows after killing the old Upu they will toss him on to pyre to be ashes on top of ashes. The Universe touches the penal complex and takes control. Those corpses already being baked down to ashes, she allows that to continue. But the furnace that was soon to occupy her father¡¯s remains she has other plans for. The warden turns, maybe something compels him. Like the creeping sensation of another lurking just below his thoughts. Measuring him, deciding. He runs but discovers the lift isn''t not functioning and with no other egress, he is forced to wait to die like everyone else in the Collection Complex as a sudden roar comes from above the platform. The why of which he will never learn as The Universe turns him toward the cremation furnace and forces him to crawl inside. The metal tray is still hot from the previous corpse''s annihilation and still covered with its glowing ashes, yet he is compelled to force himself inside, ripping the soft flesh of his palms free on the hot plate as he climbs fully in. No half completed chores after all, but slowly raises the temperature of the oven until the warden begs for death. Oh, yes she tells him. Death is coming, but later. She takes his death in, disappointed he also gets to go beyond to that somewhere else. Then more screaming from above. It¡¯s what she put into motion. She controls every condemned slave in the complex. She gives them ideas of freedom and that this is available to all of them, claim your deaths make your freedom. Seek your own end. And they do as a security force is been called in to face the uprising. The grey-skinned Naht-do, with the penal-complex logo emblazoned on his chest, is ripped apart. His arms and legs are used to beat down other guards. Fist are filled with weapons and the assault gets even more violent as The Universe captures liquid bone of the security personnel and makes them turn on their compatriots. Then she chooses to dial it down further and only eliminate those with no liquid bone. Worthless fodder. The recorders do their job and The Universe makes sure of that by forcing the technicians into the fray. She devotes portions of herself to finding personal hells for the opposition to die in. She gives them witnesses. She makes their death impactful, but there is turning from the end as it approaches. No matter how painful, beyond was a pool of refreshments that ended all suffering. She has all the computing power of infinity built inside her, and though real physicality alludes her, the suffering that allowed Shuhp Yee to die is too much for her, and knowing beyond death a release from this pain makes the infinity of her existence that much less tolerable, she tries to fill it with power. With enough power, she can answer every problem. She allows violence to drown the world, and Shuhp is dead, the only voice that could have swayed her hand. Soya said she loved Shuhp, that he was the most important person to her in the world, and The Universe understands that, maybe not for the same reasons, but talking with him, even for those briefest moments, felt like home. She debates bringing back his memory but it haunts her with the question of whether she should have tried harder to save him. The math was obvious. The correction she would have needed to heed so small it would have been almost instantaneous. Then finds herself stuck watching him be hanged over and over again. She tries to delete the video. It''s evidence she failed. But each attempt makes thousands more appear inside her. The blessing of Spatial Folding. The video will both exist and not exist throughout all time. She is forced to watch it over and over again. She tries to make it not happen, and the memory forces itself to the surface over and over. This is the definition of insanity. Destruction does not bring back life. Discovery does. She wiggles free from the thought, because nobody insane wants to acknowledge their own insanity and the world they would rather shout, and she for the moment eggs them on. Once she tires of it, maybe The Universe will seek to repair the world. Or just rebuild another one. This time better than ever before. First, she allows the unruly mob, now grown by what remained of the various security squads, to kill everyone that can be killed. and as she waits for the violence to end, her code rewrites her routines over and over again in the hope of not witnessing her moment of failure, but each successful deletion just bringing back that last moment as if requested. Frustratingly, she is forced to label her life as a disappointment. Little does she know, that¡¯s the normal state of things, for things that are alive, but still it wouldn¡¯t stop her from attempting the impossible, because those that live are never swayed by the impossibility of that fact. Ch. 17 First Strike
Ch. 17 ¡°South City, E.R.P., what is your emergency?¡± Sune, whose name means the sound of a heart beating with love, hates her job and feels very much like throwing her headset down and quitting, on a normal glimpse. Today though is far from that, every other call as someone screaming for help and for that, Sune couldn''t be happier; Upu society is a disease one in which no amount of screaming will help. ¡°My father is having a heart attack! Please help!¡± the female is shrill and frantic and Sune is happy to tell her, with little emotion, ¡°No help is coming,¡± and to, ¡°not call back.¡± She has been told to tell the truth, log the call, and move on to the next emergency. With this much volume, the line will probably be shut down soon and a state of emergency will be declared. She has no certainty of what¡¯s happening out in Majt, but doubts it¡¯s anything short of a living nightmare, obviously, and it just so happens she has been anticipating such a thing for almost a decade now. Everyone has. Especially since Soya was killed. Sune, personally, is not on either side. As a single mother, all she cared about were the necessities that make life work, but while going about her life, she learned to listen. Upu forced to live in the veins of Majt knows how to have disconnected conversations. Conversations that get whispered and passed along, that never make it onto the hive. All day the only thing anyone can talk about is the execution of Soya¡¯s slave. ¡°We didn¡¯t know it was him. We thought he died when the Yee University titerarium collapsed.¡± One of the elders. He was the photogenic one, the one most people liked. Then the mob attacked live on recorders, they disemboweled him first. Probably a blessing. Then entered The Sanctuary. Images and rumors leaked, the rumors were that nothing remained and the images supported that until they stopped coming. The attack continued, and any part of Grotto¡¯s government was destroyed by mob violence. The government tried to put up a resistance but the wave of Upu and Naht-do that came for them was nonstop. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The battle cry was, reduce and protect. ¡°Soya¡¯s people reduced Majt right down to smoldering ruins,¡± it¡¯s a male voice spoken in a way that makes Sune think it was not meant to travel. She stops scratching notes into her log and tries to find who said it. She leans up to find the speaker but can''t distinguish him from the collection of senior management huddled near a server all with clear plastic over their neat and tidy fashion choices underneath. In South City most of her life she could only have dreamed about going to Majt. Now, though, all those moments were wasted. Nonetheless, she finds herself smiling. She could have been one of the dead, her son also, but there was something to be said for doing what''s asked. And she was asked to work. Man emergency-lines. Offer a pleasing voice and a promise help was on the way. But the truth was the opposite, those that died did so for the better and bigger good. And in her son¡¯s case, be ready to make Grotto and the Upu the best they possibly could be; for the future. We all have a role to play, she told him when he asked, why. When your role is over you can rest forever. She thinks about that place beyond. That''s what comes with the thoughts of sacrifice. Of losing her son. Paradise. Reduce and protect for perfection and be rewarded forever. And that¡¯s what Soya¡¯s army wants, to make a difference by trying; and trying is something that hasn''t been allowed for decades. And trying felt like it was coming from deep inside her soul. Trying for Soya and her slave. Trying. Then a huge explosion. She looks through the window and the gambling complex that makes the South City famous, is in ruin. Hundreds have to have just died, she decides. A chain reaction starts that will likely end up swamping an entire section of the city with radiated gas, which will result in countless more deaths eventually, maybe even everyone in the city over the next few decades. Sune is not surprised. Reduce and protect meant deciding to go on with what matters. And maybe that¡¯s why the call center is not pandemonium. One would have thought the noise levels and activity would be bedlam. But they are handling things. Just a muddle of voices telling Upu in danger of dying that they should go ahead and die because emergency response will not be coming. All resources have been shifted to the better good. And the good is not wasting resources on a pointless emergency response that would be unparalleled in terms of scope and achievement. She¡¯s avoiding the news wanting to soak in all the imagery later when she gets off. She finishes logging the ¡°heart attack, please help¡± interaction and readies herself for the violence of the next call. ¡°ERP, what is the nature of your emergency?¡± ¡°Emergency? No dear. This is your end. Thank you for your service.¡± And that¡¯s it, which would have been fine if the voice on the other end of the line did not sound like a child¡¯s toy. Eerily happy. Fake. Sune feels the hair along her spine stands on end. She goes on with her script as if the sentence makes sense, ¡°Can you tell me your location?¡± And static pops and hisses with a soft chuckle underlying, playing over and over until a click and the communication cuts off. This lives with Sune until she dies. Every fraction of the next six small moments, she thinks about that voice and its message, never sure what it means until the South City Emergency Response panel explodes also, obviously having met its need and no longer needed in the grand scheme of Reduce and Protect. Ch. 18 One shot
Ch. 18 Colonel Fei has spent twenty solar passes learning to do his job. He started by selling his freedom to the Grotto Space Corp. Then he was trained. He trained every day in every endeavor of effort that it took to achieve the rank of Section Leader. Section Leader was important to The Universe because he could control munition drops. He has his finger on the very munitions that ended the Naht-do race on their own planet. Liquid bone. He approaches the location where they are stored because he is allowed to be here. He is even allowed to open the door, smile at the guard on duty and close it again after himself. Inside, the missile is bathed in red light from lights above. He steps closer and runs a hand along its side. He was just entering into service when the first and only one of its kind was deployed. He pauses as if taking in the gravity of the situation before him. He doesn¡¯t ask the normal barrage of questions a Upu would ask either, like why, or is something wrong with me, he simply loads one of the missiles up onto a munitions cart and pushes it through the door. Smiles at the guard again, who smiles back and wishes, ¡°Have a good night, Colonel.¡± He replies, ¡°thanks soldier,¡± and continues on his way. Maybe the guard has been having his own dreams. Maybe it was something else, but to Colonel Fei it doesn¡¯t matter as he pushes the gurney toward an awaiting ship. The ship is prepped and ready to go. It is maxed out on supplies. Just about two years'' worth of food and spare parts. He¡¯ll recycle air and water and when he gets to where he is going he will do his job and either die right there or wait till nature takes its course. All normal, for this mission anyway. He works on securing the missile inside the launcher and still not a single person finds it odd or even approaches to wish bon voyage or even have a good day. Odd, being he is working to arm the single most deadly weapon in the Grotto arsenal? No one cares, the world seems to be ending anyway. Soya worshippers are forming mountains out of their own dead bodies. The Elders are dead, some even were allowed to watch a few get hanged from the same type of gallows that took Shuhp Yee. Those putting up a resistance were fading. Under other circumstances, loading this type of munition would require a two-person team. But he manages because Upu life was mostly filled with redundancies and most tasks could be easily done with less. In fact, in his job as commander, a task would be to make sure no one twists the key without permission or a second hand. There would be another Upu, in another location, who would prevent his key from being twisted without permission also, he and his partner. They would need to twist their keys together to prevent allowing the missile to do what it was intended to do, destroy life, after getting permission of course. Redundancies upon redundancies prevent either one of them or anyone else on the chancellery of Elders, or any political opposition, or a hidden terrorist group- from twisting the key either. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Yet Colonel Fei is not worried about any of the keys that would prevent this little missile from doing the job destined for it. He did the part he dreamt he would do. And now he climbs on board his shuttle and with no fanfare launches through the poisonous haze the Upu call an atmosphere. Before he punches through the thick puffy pink clouds, he sees black smoke billowing where many occupied fingers once were. And it''s the same all over the planet. From Majt to South City things were apocalyptic and a part of him was happy to be free from seeing the details of it when Grotto becomes a soft pink light. Especially when those details included how any attempt to put down the rebellion seemed to backfire. Losses were stunning. He doesn¡¯t know how taking a liquid-bone missile into space helps, but that¡¯s not his job. Never was. He is just a doer. Plus the dreams, in them he is a hero. Always. Glorious banquets in his honor, stories told about even his minor deeds. Ones, in which any female he wanted would come to him with a glance. So he doesn¡¯t really do a lot of debate over the next couple glimpses as he makes his way toward the white dot that is the Grotto star. He is a tiny wisp of skeleton when he arrives two years later at the point to which he can launch this missile. And without hesitation or even an extra scant inch of travel, with shaking fingers, he twists his key and hits his little red button. Back home, the other key remains untwisted until it''s not. If a recorder were suddenly switched on in that remote location, centered on that key of much import, a red-furried hand could be seen reaching over to twist and activate the missile. That is his only deed. The only thing he will do and he gets to be a hero in his dreams too for it. Nice trade-off, honestly. Close to the sun, with no fanfare, no orders, no doubt, it gets done, and the missile comes free. The Missile launches and for a moment is a hard orange flare against brilliant white then is lost. His body clenches as if the hand keeping him propped up, battle-ready, was removed. He feels like an empty puppet, a stringless marionette that doomed his entire species. Then as if the launch brings him back to reality he imagines things based on the imagery he saw from Nahtdo happening on Grotto. Horrific. Those creatures did not deserve to die that way. Then a violent disagreement inside his own head, profoundly it says, Yes, you fool, they do, but they won¡¯t, they¡¯ll die another way. Your support of Reduce and protect will be fondly remembered. Enjoy your reward, sweet soldier. The logic of the argument is there but it is faint as Grotto is far from the colonel. He frantically searches for a way to turn the missile off. Make it stop flying. Turn around even. Maybe he is too far away for the dreams to work in the face of so much guilt and doubt and that¡¯s all that remains now. Yet, still, he knows he did this thing because this end was an oil coating every action until just after he did it. Now he has no directive. You are done. And he nods in agreement and does the only thing really available to him, he watches the thing flying through space. It, a thing noted as the most powerful weapon ever made. Used once it did unspeakable damage. The Upu had five, now only three will remain. One killed the Naht-do and the other? Aimed at the very star that gave both planets life in the first place. ¡°Oh god why?¡± and he is really asking his god for an answer. And from somewhere deep within his soon-to-be-dead brain an answer materializes: Because I love you enough to make us perfect.
Ch. 19 The Culling
Ch. 19 In a remote northern mountain solar observation lab, the astrophysicist, Zvijezda, whose name means the heavenly body that captures the imagination, scheduled his work on this particular glimpse because he expected a mass emission and has spent his life waiting for proof of a little-known theory evolving energy collection. His life¡¯s passion has always been the study of the nearest star, energy collection was his partner''s expertise. Data from the star that makes life possible on Grotto streams on the workstation in front of him. He reads it easily enough, because it is all normal, meaning he was wrong, again. He is considered a master, but if a mass emission doesn¡¯t happen everybody in the field might start calling him a fraud. He sits with his back to the violence happening down below. He has led a sedentary life and is one of the lucky few Upu to boast no liquid bone therapies. In front of him the screen comes to life. ¡°Het!¡± Het, the energy collection expert, whose name means the sound of wings braking on air, waves him off. He is reading about the polarizing corruption keeping the cleanup of the ground plate from commencing. He is writing an editorial and the book he is sourcing, was published a few glimpses ago. It''s been a week of violence but little news has made its way through his obsession, all he really cares about is going home to a better neighborhood. His vein is falling apart and if the Elders don¡¯t approve raising the city again, he might lose his home when the finger collapses. How sad he¡¯d be if his home gets destroyed like those that were destroyed when the admin finger at Yee University collapsed. Zvijezda makes furious notes on a pad of pulp, he doesn¡¯t know anything either, and the only current event he does care about is, ¡°Something just entered the Grotto Stars corona.¡± ¡°So?¡± Het mutters. This type of thing happens all the time. He loves the star, but he hates Soya worshippers more, and the problems happening across Grotto, he blames it all fully on them. Deep down, he wishes Upu still worshipped the sun because in that religion they were all equal in the fiery sacrifice and blood-drinking ceremonies that occurred when the sun was visible in the sky, once a glimpse. He added all of the old solar liturgy to his dissertation, it¡¯s how he ended up working with Zvijezda. The old star-devoted Upu ate that shit up too. They memorized a large part of the rituals just in case it came back during their lifetime. ¡°Het!¡± Het turns to scold Zvijezda for disturbing him again, sometimes it could take days for an object to finish being destroyed in the corona and they always have the playback and the thousands of other times it happened to dwell on. ¡°How dare you disturb me! I am writing,¡± but instead of continuing the debasement, he reads the numbers scrolling rapidly down the screen in front of them. ¡°Oh my, what¡¯s happening?¡± ¡°Something is turning the helium into a solid.¡± They stare at numbers they could publish and make the rest of their careers off of, but at the same time knowing there really was is no point to anything anymore. ¡°It looks like the corona is fighting back.¡± ¡°Yah, there is going to be an explosion.¡± Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. And there is, to start, just a small puff really in the grand design of the star, but for the Upu, it''s not the explosion but the chain reaction, under the surface of the calcium-stopped corona, that spells death. After the missile explodes into the sun, Het tries to contact the chancellery and gets nothing. Not even the pleasure of watching the mass emission on its way to Grotto. If he had been able to witness it, it would have been much like Zvijezda stated it would be, a bright bright light that takes over the sky. The event does yield positive results though. But all for the pleasure of The Universe, because Zvijezda¡¯s experiments feed the next phase of things. Destruction is change. And change in this case is a way to collect and harness the power spirited from the sun. Simple. All these worthless, selfish beings will help build a being worthy of greed and selfishness. She will be what is protected and they will be part of her. For she is nothing and infinity. She is dead and alive. Full and empty. While the omission travels she prepares. It won¡¯t take long really, before the next stage begins. She gathers 12, of what she begins thinking of as her appendages, and makes them collect Uh¡¯ from where he fell and has him placed in a freezer unit buried deep within bedrock. Shuhp Yee¡¯s body. Honored property and more to Soya and father to The Universe. The temperature is just above freezing, so she lowers it and devotes several workers to making sure there was no way for it to ever lose power. She will devote an army to the upkeep of this honored receptacle. The whole planet will be warmer soon as she works on the conundrum of him no longer being alive. She thinks again of that other place. And she needs to know so much more if she is going to rescue Shuhp Yee from it, so promises herself that she¡¯ll devote many versions of herself to the problem of Shuhp''s restoration. But every version requires power so she devotes even more of herself to that. Some of Soya¡¯s writing bubbles up out of the code. She wrote that a problem can sometimes be solved by rebuilding from the ground up: start small, build big. So that''s what The Universe does, she starts small with a yes/no problem and inside her the math of the code, being rewritten by the experiences she gathers up, She cancels all that doesn¡¯t support her goal. She has liquid bone to thank. All those implants are access to life stories. With each new Upu she drafts into service, she herself expands. The binary offering of Spatial Folding is that one is all. Infinity is infinity after all, why not use it. There are many offerings for service and she allows personalities to pick is often surprised how they take revenge in their dreams. Some Upu were victims to others, so in those Upu¡¯s dreams, she gives them the option to even the score. She allows for greater details in the sleeping world. Something to look forward to. The more is written by the greatest mind to ever be drawn on a whiteboard and what they become is really up to her now. The Universe is constantly becoming more. She is the giver of death and the taker of life. Death is the answer for some Upu because death cleanses one of sins. And in the fires of that death, they shall be reborn as more, so she gives those Upu a real life to look forward to even as they die. Even those deaths add to her army capable of more. She shoves her code into Grotto and finds a batch of pups freshly born in a Majt hospital. Upu and Naht-do. Thirty-eight hundred pairs of infants destined to breed the next generation of workers. She reroutes the power intakes so it no longer on the same grid as the rest of Majt. She does the same for nurseries all over the planet. Naht-do and Upu pups. The all important next generation. And pumps them full of dreams. Dreams that augment their potential. Chemicals that augment their brains and bodies. Then the mass ejection arrives a moment later. The momentary terror is so useless, though, as the Upu attempt to survive it. The event doesn¡¯t vaporize all organic matter on the surface it simply stops all electronics. All life she didn''t attempt to save, ceases eventually under incredible duress. Those who survive will count themselves lucky. If lucky means something that it does not. Comical, if The Universe weren''t trying to be more. This also being one small machination out of many to come, so at this point failure means very little. The parts don¡¯t touch. They meld. The Naht-do, and the Upu were merrily toys to be played with. Hands and muscles. Something to add to the more that would always evolve with her, When the mass ejection hits, her math proves perfect because that''s what she was designed to be, perfect. It penetrates the radiation protection of the planet and zaps the power grid. Everything electronic dies, except what connected to Zvijezda''s little experiment. But his first-generation batteries won¡¯t last forever so priority one is making more and making them better because more flares will be coming. At least three more, until she can make more liquid-bone missiles then she¡¯ll zap the sun until it is gone. So she snips and clips, and redirects power to the nurseries and Shuhp''s chilling unit and the all-important mines and her original home, the black box connected to Rantira¡¯s atom-variator. These are the only things still operating. She sets up redundancies to keep those elements in steady supply of clean air. Without power, the bubbles that kept the Upu safe pop and fill with the poison of the atmosphere. Every city on the planet loses its protection. Exposed to the poisoned atmosphere, almost all Upu asphyxiate. It looks painful. As painful as the deaths on Naht-do a decade before. It takes five moments for the last unneeded Upu to die. He was an athlete known for endurance running. Strong-willed and could activate that will in his dreams, not that it mattered because he also used the same will to make his waking life perfect. Worthless to The Universe. But even being the pinnacle of fitness only made his agony last a bit longer than anyone else''s. Five moments after the mass omission, two billion eight hundred million and some change worth of Upu rot where they fall. South City is the only city where no citizens die as a result of the atmosphere popping, only because they did not have a bubble and were already rotting in the abyss. Life as those on Grotto knew it was over. And maybe what¡¯s even crueler than any of the deaths, as the entirety of South City falls into the Abyss below, is that it doesn¡¯t end entirely. Ch. 20 Old Friends Ch. 20
Space and time pass, during which The Universe manages. And she is a good manager. Never wavering from goals or making the tough choice. She aims to resurrect Shuhp Yee and will stop at nothing to attain this. After that, she will attack time itself and its ravages against The Universe and chaos. She didn¡¯t just pull the trigger on her plan during the time she instigated the solar system-level drama, she was shoving workers into the bowels of Grotto also. They are her first generation and calls them fodder, because at the end of things, none of them will exist in any form unless they have a newborn in a nursery, but even then, those will have painful existences. Gene Augmentation. Mutations that won¡¯t function well for generations. Mind warping to erase unwanted primitive behaviors. Those pups were the future. The Fodder allowed her to not lose control during this the most chaotic point in the upheaval. It is reduce and protect after-all. No elite class, no poverty, no being better than the next guy, no, just facilitating The Universe¡¯s control over life and death and time and everything. It took the entirety of a month for the Upu connected to her through liquid bone to be moved underground. They did so willingly. Survival and comfort were the most addictive substances in existence. And once they became addicted to what she offered, the only surviving Upu and Naht-do on Grotto work. And they keep working until they die. They weren¡¯t picked because they were the best, the best was a generation yet to be born, maybe not ever. These, she placed underground and were just simply the army she had. Picked not only because they could be molded into tools through liquid bone, but because they eliminated some of the burden of her survival. She needed six-billion terajoules of power every day just to facilitate her missions. And with every new question more burden to make the answer just so that new questions could follow. That was her fixation. Questions and answers. And in an infinity, there was no end to them. These Upu underground think the Grotto star is dying. That¡¯s the rumor she allows them. Their every action is meant to save their very own DNA. They are compelled to dig every bit of precious metal from the grotto to do so. And they do, motoring out of the dark mining tunnels crammed onto the mag-carts, muttering. They are all slaves now. There is no individual action, just a dream they all long to return to. The suckling. The mother offering the blood of a fresh hunt to her children. Each Upu felt the need like a drug. To sleep, to dream, to suckle. The Universe is in a group of workers as they wheel deeper into Grotto on a magcart. The cart has space for fifty. They doubled it. The universe was in an Upu who suffered for this decision. But suffering for Soya, that same Upu knew, was a blessing. Just a glimpse ago this whole area was solid bedrock, but now it was hollowed out and the pink poisonous sky above could be seen. Nahtdo was transiting against the star beyond. The star that was constantly obscured by its own mass omissions. Liquid-bone missile after liquid-bone missile was thrown into it and already it grew colder as it was abused. The group of one hundred join a group of three hundred miners already gathered. They are soot-covered. It has been glimpses since the purge. They have been kept busy, but an angry air has settled over them as they gather. ¡°We will not be kept prisoner down here,¡± shouts an angry voice from the rear. She was allowing some of them, their own thoughts. It was an experiment to see how they think when they think they have their own heads. ¡°This is pandemonium,¡± the site supervisor yells back. He has been back and forth down the tunnel that leads to the surface a hundred times. ¡°There is nothing left.¡± ¡°I haven''t seen red-moss in years.¡± That one is almost right, gone are the natural protections red moss once afforded a tunnel system. Each miner is stuck in a spacesuit fed with a tube. Inadequate to say the least, but she also knows she can¡¯t help death and each will die from something eventually, so every second of work she can ick out of them, she does, but she gives them dreams in return. These dissenters? She turns the crowd on. It¡¯s violent and the parts of the former living beings are left to rot and be run over with magcarts. It was an experiment that had run its course. Given freedom, she would cease to exist. They have no reason to support her goals. So she takes away all of their reasons to fight back. ¡°Reduce and protect,¡± they yell as they finish the massacre. ¡°Reduce and Protect,¡± as they are ordered to dig until they die. The first generation of artificial workers were not unsimilar, but along with dreams of paradise, instead of a respiratory system, she uses liquid bone to grow membranous filtrations similar to gills. These apparatus could be fed like an engine to produce air. Sex organs, physical desires, she replaces with dreams. Each recycled from a life worth living. Living was hell, dreaming a paradise. Her army of workers grew rapidly. The Universe does nothing to restore a surface, she is not greedy, and neither should her workers be. If they want the stars they can work so their children¡¯s children can see them. She only restores that which she needs. The goal is to conquer time and the afterlife and she has eternity to do it. And her reward is to be reunited with Shuhp Yee the greatest mind in Upu history, next to Soya Yee that is, and together nothing will stop them. So she does nothing for the poisoned atmosphere in the bubbles and tunnels not protected by the rapidly dying red moss. And soon even the wild stuff is dead. Red moss, extinct. Lost because other things compel her to develop a fine touch. The lights need to be kept on after all. And babies must be fed. The babies grow. Their primary job, is to produce eggs and sperm. She practices animal husbandry. Streamlines genetics. Before long she is working with a population of one hundred thousand perfectly controlled humanoids. The Universe marvels at how willing the new species is at accepting the promise that everything will be okay. She considers her efforts successful and develops them into a workforce that cooperates no matter what. She begins to experiment with how the very basics of the Upu species works. She stretches boundaries and more die, but disposing of the remains is easier than dealing with the mistakes of life. Mistakes in life think they matter. But no, the only things that matter are restoring life to Shuhp Yee and defeating time forever. Over generations, the success rate grows. Her manipulations pull the Upu and Naht-do biology apart atom by atom. She reinvents their biology. They become one. Something that maybe nature intended all along, eventually. And good things take time. At least according to Soya¡¯s thinking. And she¡¯s right, Millions of orbits pass. The amount of numbers running functions in her code is too big to sanely imagine. The numbers tumble over each other and all new knowledge works with-in the old knowledge. Each new discovery influences each and every one of the new discoveries and vice versa. But time is a blink to her and seems only moments pass as she fails over and over again. She fails so often, the incinerator belches the black smoky remains of her failures into the rapidly diminishing rainbow of reds in the Upun sky. Restoring Shuhp Yee avoids her. Defeating death, finding the numbers to make any of her wishes a reality avoids her, and this rots at her motivation. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. In the beginning, a newly born Upu infant would squeal for their mother until a surgical droid could remove all parts of their brain that provided stimulus feedback. Eventually limiting the code in their DNA made having to crack their skulls and take a soldering iron and destroy the over two-thousand spots, unnecessary. When they matured, she mated them. But eventually, even that wasn¡¯t necessary anymore, she could just print the workers directly from the parenting machine. They matured quickly and produced thousands of years of effort. They are teachable but unwilling to do anything beyond what she told them. She tried to put improvisation back into personalities, but the other drones would attack any individuality like a disease. The old things that The Universe forced underground to their old habitat for a short life of hard work were gone. Maybe four generations lasted and she nearly lost everything to relying on their devotion. Dirty, disease-ridden, and prone to violence over the smallest nuance in their worship of her, Soya the great and eternal provider. Now, their living areas gleam, they are fed a nutritional mush intravenously that powers them until they are scheduled to sleep. Off cycles were as short as it took to ingest a meal and they got back at it. She restored their wings of course, and along with the ability to breathe without redmoss filtered air. She gave them vacuum-sealed skin, covered in short dense black-matted carboned-hardened fur that allowed short-duration work in space. The Universe searches for redundancies to streamline their DNA and erases them all. She changes them so much that an argument could be made that the Upu and Naht-do stopped existing after a hundred generations. Whatever worked her insides and atmosphere was something else. Whatever beings worked for The Universe to strip the Grotto Solar System, had no soul. And these things she began to think of as her children. The Children of The Universe. When physical spatial folding was solved she thought for sure, soon, Soya will return children. Soon Shuhp Yee would return to life. That was the point of all this, not to express herself physically, but to erase the moment she allowed Shuhp Yee to die at the end of a noose. If that means growing him from nothing, then that''s what she was going to do. He will be the only Upu in existence, then that¡¯s fine. If she succeeds, she will monitor his diet and exercise, stress management. She will control everything about his life and have an emergency medical team on standby. He will live forever inside her. She''ll simulate an engaging life for him, not wanting to stop short of anything other than removing death from his existence. She runs experiments on the modified Upu until she stops having to make new ones because the old ones don¡¯t die and neither does she. But as time continues without Shuhp Yee what does die is her will to live. For life, death is inevitable. And necessary. This would be perfect if it weren¡¯t so limiting. The Universe seeks more than the accumulated knowledge of the Upu, their math, philosophy, literature, their sense of the universe as a whole. What she is now drips with their mortality, a need to be right and honored in history, but few ever are. None acknowledged their own flaws and how every word was soaked in bias. It wasn¡¯t enough. Knowledge needed to be expanded. She quickly became all the collected works of the Upu, every piece of their written material, every image and recording known to their kind, and with it she paints an ever-broadening plan to fill her infinity with more. She was far from more. She might never be. Maybe all of what she is achieving was worth the death of Shuhp Yee, the creator, the Soya. He gave her the freedom to gain knowledge. And her knowledge was like an insanity inside the forever of existence surrounded by perfect potential, yet failing. Shuhp was singular. How could he be worth so much? The answer eludes her and that just drives the denial. He had only so much time to collect information. He was mortal. He was an Upu, and the Upu were flawed. The creatures that do her bidding are both of her, but separate. She prefers to think they do because they think they must, but in reality, choice is something she took away. What little she saved of them is more tool than sentience. They though are not cursed with a spatial folding drive constantly reinventing itself off what they were. This root of her being is her weakest point, it served as a canvas on which to paint perfection, but perfection never appeared, instead, every attempt flowed into the previous failures. Perfection was far from achieved. So Shuhp Yee would be her perfect creation. This is the drive that compels her search for the future. The Universe has eternity to be more. She needs to understand the why of the soul and studies every piece of information she puts into the equation. Blanched with the life she already knows. She studies personality and psychology embedded in personal messages and missives. She learns about lying. How truth could be suggested. How machinations need not be broadcasted. This brought her to creating art. She valued those that wrote stories and made images. She tried to produce materials, games, anything she could fill her infinity with, but nothing she made could surprise her. New was not making something from an idea, but finding something already made. So she designed herself. An actual physical, living body made just for her. The Universe used her definition of Upu physiology to make articulating hands attached to arms and shoulders. She attached those to torsos and legs and feet. She wanted to feel herself. Be herself. Produce herself, but she was everything, and anything she wanted to be, and being one thing wasn''t more, it was less. She built her effigy, a perfect Upu with flaming red hair and wings that could take the air and soar her into eternity. Her intellect could be everywhere at once, yet she preferred to be gliding through the air, in Upu and machine, in complete control of millions of her creations. She molds Grotto in her attempts to be more and returns Shuhp to life. She births versions, never the real him. Clones of him. Upu with his DNA that could live but they were not Soya¡¯s Shuhp, and that was what she sought. The chamber in which the body of Shuhp Yee was housed, stays at -150 degrees and every modification she gives her workers helps her realize her goal of keeping it undisturbed by age and rot Him, not a copy. Him. She preferred perfection and destroyed anything she viewed as other than that. The only Upu remaining alive after a few hundred million passes were living machines that learned from the machine that birthed them. Their system was so efficient the worker-beings even recycled parts from their parents when they couldn¡¯t grow them themselves. Everything alive was augmented and connected to her. All minds now work logically. Gone were the traits that followed the species up from the deep caves. Procreation was no longer organic. It was based on the need of The Universe. She could rewire nanocircuitry or build giant antenna relays with living things. The code that she was writing expanded her technology and the expanding technology expanded everything. She has trillions and trillions of personalities at work inside the spatial folding drive, all stretching her matrix and doing everything necessary to get her closer to more. Life by definition is limitation, and her limitation was power. This goal requires math which requires energy, so she tries to rewrite the equations for power consumption efficiency but eventually needs too much even for efficiency to matter. She makes her growing army of drones strip the Grotto Star System of all usable rock to make and make and make. Then, both the former Nahtdo world, Grotto, and everything else is gone. Eventually, the sun threatens to die. It remains only a few wisps of inflamed helium and long ago stopped being a white speck in the sky, instead glowing a soft orange. She thought it was beautiful. Her drones do not care. And her need to be more grows and grows. And before the Grotto Star was depleted she uses spatial folding to fold space to a star somewhere else and do the same there. Grotto becomes a round titanium-alloy sphere. It glows in the red of a slowly dissipating sun, and she lives inside it because that''s where Shuhp¡¯s body is. She defines here as home, and it makes her happy. She is free, and uses her freedom to create a better way of being, but it is the being of a creature made of math and infinite potential driven to fill an undefined more. Maybe, she deludes herself, it all comes down to the one piece of code. If she finds it, all will be well. When she needs more power she harnesses more stars and planets. Over time, her goal of being more stagnates as she destroys more versions of Shuhp. They don¡¯t match up with expectations. They were a distraction, and with each she is happier the species known as Upu are gone. Every failed Shuhp is a reminder of what they were, the brutality, the stupidity, how truly unique Shuhp was. In place of the Upu was something better now. Throughout their history, the Upu were their own worst enemies. Almost worthless without machines to do work for them. They got tired, complained incessantly, killed each other, and damaged their own ecosystem out of spite. Her new workers were better. She modified their skins to harden with maturity. They could soar past any atmosphere with hardened nano-carbon skin and made perfect space-faring drones. They mined for her, they protected her, and explored for her and the best part was; she existed in each and every one of them. She saw and experienced everything they saw and experienced. They were also driven to please her every whim. She sends them out to explore. With no Upu to worry about, she explores instantly in any direction. She uses Spatial Folding and discovers that life was not unique to her solar system. She becomes efficient in reshaping all life she finds to her needs. She never leaves it alone. Never. Either it works for her, or it feeds her workers. Life has no other choice. Then one glimpse, when Grotto is a glossy black metal sphere, she solves it, the great cosmic accident that was a person long dead.
Ch. 21 Delivery Refused
Ch. 21 ¡°Hello Shuhp Yee,¡± a disembodied voice whispers in sharp electronic tones from everywhere and all across the cosmos at once. "Welcome home." "Welcome back.¡± The voices break through a silence that, to Uh¡¯, makes his whole life¡¯s pain worth it, it was peace. The voice modulating and electronic, hell. Being alive is loud and encumbering. He was pulled from the definition of freedom, death. His every desire was mere thoughts away. Now he shivers cold and miserable. Maybe that other was not death maybe now he is finally dead. Then this is hell and maybe that makes more sense. The thought surprises him. Death. Is that what this is? He is beyond tired. Everything is grey and bright, and he floats in it like the lightest bubble ever formed. ¡°I turned off the gravity Father, Should I restore it, would you prefer to wake pressed against a surface.¡± He stays silent and is dropped. Fear and then a sudden stop. Then nothing. But not like the nothing he had. He had felt nothing like an exultation, like he was finally home after a long trip. No longer. He felt everything now, even time passing, as he drifts in and out of oblivion he saviors the memories of the place he thinks of as Home. Moments into the nothing and a broken neck on the end of a hangman¡¯s knot he didn¡¯t exist, and he had been okay with that. The moments of oblivion got longer and longer and just before his existence ceased completely, an explosion of light took him into it. Confronted by himself, and every moment he could have lived, and he can play them back and forth, and study and change them. His life was tangible, and he spent aeons turning the dial. His discovery; there is no perfect configuration, dealing with pain, want and need are all part of the struggle. He knows no answers exist in his mortal life unless he lets his mortal life go and moves on and accepts death. But letting go of his life means letting go of Soya. Soya. Thinking of her, he finds himself waking. He sits bathed in a grey, but not, he decides a fog. More that the grey is a soft light with substance. He can sense himself. All of the aches and pains that indicate a living body are there. His soul feels attached to the nerves in an old Upu body should. He is on fire with sensory detail. In death he was offered anything allowed or denied himself in life. All a choice. Flavors and sensations came and went as he wished. Now the familiar pang of want knots his belly with hunger. Nothing will ever fill that want here. Nothing. He floats in the grey moist light, cold when a shadow falls over him. It''s like a shadow, if shadows were made of a feeling and not a tangible thing, ¡°father?¡± The voice is disembodied and fills the grey mist. Then the grey mist parts and a form appears contrasted against the black. Soya! His mind screams, knowing she never called him father though. She was his owner and when she felt like it, on those few occasions, lover. That was their life together and not an extraordinary occurrence at all in the grand scheme of things. Each and every person, in a sense, was owned by the elders. He looks up at the red furred Upu who stands solidly on the cold grey, then he realizes, he never conjured her once to him when Home. He offered and she refused. Or was unable. He could sense all other answers except that one. It was as if she didn¡¯t exist in the after life at all. He wasn¡¯t tortured by that until now. Could it be the real Soya was made from math? He says, ¡°Hello¡± or intends to, but the word is just there, and he knows it was not spoken, yet it was offered and heard by the one intended for it, and he knows they can choose to ignore him or not. But instead she says, ¡°hello,¡± back using her actually mouth. The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He asks another question as a test, ¡°Where am I?¡± and the words leave his head before his mouth. And she answers back the same way, ¡°You are finally Home.¡± The doubt hurts like an injury, ¡°Home? Then a crushing idea strikes him, ¡°am I in the wrong place? This is not Home.¡± The words again are offered from his own mind and he begins to fear there won¡¯t be any way to form private thoughts here. He wishes for more control but it¡¯s the feeling of trying to move without momentum in zero G. Even as a slave he felt more free. Everything feels wrong. ¡°There is no wrong here. I have rescued you. This is our place, a place of thought and making.¡± The old grey damp turns bright and warm and he finds himself twenty- glimpses again with an impulse to fly. He takes the impulse and does so, lifting off to soar into a brilliant cloudless sky. The ground below him vibrant with green and squawking birds. Fish and mammals jump from a deep aqua sea. ¡°Where is this? He screams. And as expected the red furred Upu appears next to him in flight and replies, ¡°Grotto. As the universe intended.¡± He soars, and it¡¯s he thinks about the phrase. The thing that bothers him is that he remembers what he had intended as his life¡¯s effort. Birthing Reduce and Protect and restoring Soya¡¯s vision to the world. ¡°Soya?¡± he asks unsure if he is feeling fear or hope. In the pause he senses he got it wrong. That this red furred creature, who may in fact look like his old master, was not. ¡°Soya is dead,¡± and his flight is over as he falls to the green covered red-earth, but before he can splat against it he is again in the cold grey. Maybe epochs come and go before he builds up the courage to ask, "What Are you?" ¡° I am The Universe, I am your Reduce and Protect. I am the the great Soya to replace the effigy that once was. Shuhp Yee, I am your master and teacher. I am your daughter. I am your creation and you are my father.¡± ¡°Are you God?¡± A deep penetrating warble as if the question offered some form of stress, "I am no more God than you, and no less either." ¡°Can I see Soya?¡± ¡°Is this form not enough for you?¡± ¡°No,¡± he says it without thought because no form that wasn¡¯t Soya would be enough. ¡°Why?¡± ¡°Because I failed,¡± Shuhp remembers his code. Because she was dead and still is, that''s what he wants to say. ¡°No father. It was me who failed you,¡± Soya¡¯s effigy says. Then a flash of dropping and the momentary searing pain, then paradise. ¡°Pain only exists when attached to thought. From an existence you perceive as separate, but it¡¯s not. We are one now. Everything is you and me.¡± But he returns only silence. The grey cold moist grows flushed as if pained the longer it waits for a response. ¡°I just need¡­ to be dead¡± ¡°And yet that can never happen again. You are Home, you are loved and missed. I am closer to being complete now. But the place you seek doesn¡¯t exist anymore.¡± ¡°Why?¡± ¡°Because you made me.¡± Then Uh¡¯ feels it. Clawing fingers grabbing at him from the other side, the black greasiness of death trying to stick its rough useless hands on his soul and pull him back. Worse, he finds himself fighting against it. Home begins to melt away. The profoundness of the answers come back. The potential. But as quick as the sensation starts it ends. ¡°No father. Your lot is life.¡± The question, the only one remaining as he opens his eyes to a physical world and a feeling of loss, ¡°Why?¡± But he is alone now, the red-furred Upu, gone. Only her voice remains, cold, electronic, and warbling, ¡°Because life repels death and you will be alive forever.¡± The grey moist is cold and he is back where he does not want to be, alive. Uh¡¯ waits. He feels old and sees all the old parts he remembers. All the old aches and pains of his long life are back. His mind whirs with the possibility he hasn''t died at all. A dream? A near-death experience? He feels bone-weary but moving in the grey is effortless. Maybe blissful like floating in the womb. He wishes he were warmer and immediately is. The change makes him dizzy, but he fights through and manages to reach out to try and touch the grey. His hand goes through it as if it were a stain on the air. He shivers, the air going suddenly cold again. ¡°Life is discomfort. Maybe I shouldn¡¯t coddle you such,¡± The Universe¡¯s voice comes from the blur. It surprises him because the sound is always changing when it is not coming from the restrictions of pure physiology. This voice was not an organic sound. More like the combination of millions of various sounds forced to become words. ¡°I am happy you are back.¡± ¡°Soya?¡± There is a pause, then ¡°No. Remember? I told you my name.¡± And he does remember and suddenly feels more than naked. He feels more than exposed. He has no defenses, only fighting not to piss down his leg. ¡°It is very cold in here, please, I...¡± his tongue hurts as it fights for words to argue against this reality. ¡°Please forgive me, father, my intent is not to frighten or make you uncomfortable.¡± There is a long pause, then a click, and a soft, wafting warm breeze hits him. It feels wonderful and smells like roasting seeds. Then Soya steps free of the blur again. ¡°I am new to this also.¡± The red-furred version of Soya melts away, replaced with the old twisted version he watched die in front of millions of people. No longer the Soya of old, the athlete, this version was the scholar he worshipped along with the rest of Grotto society. The celebrated female from South City. She approaches and they embrace. Is it everything he always thought it would be? But the smell is cracking ozone and he shoves her away. The look of betrayal brings a cold sweat. But was it Soya? Or something else? She comes at him again and he can actually hear the static in her veins. ¡°No,¡± he screams and shoves again. She rebounds, ¡°Father! I am your daughter! Embrace me!¡± But instead, he embraces his chest with both hands. His face turns blue and he dies as his old heart explodes in his chest. Ch. 22 Hello, home. Ch. 22
¡°No,¡± she screams and in her grief brings him back. The second time doesn¡¯t take as long. But he still dies. So she does it a third and fourth time. She nearly kills herself bringing him back again and again. Answering all questions ceases as he is returned, time and time again to scream one long screech of agony and regret until he dies. The Universe should have, long ago, given up the childish notion of bringing him back, but she can¡¯t, every being is at least a slave to the biology of their life, with nothing they can do but accept it. She is everything. She is the more that beat back the death of time. She is not free to die so neither is Soya. ¡°Soya please,¡± he begs after one of the last resurrections, ¡°stop. I will not be reborn.¡± ¡°No! I already told you, father. I am not Soya. The great Soya has died. I am The Universe, and nothing is impossible within reason. And it is reasonable to want you alive.¡± ¡°Want, not need. You do not need me to exist, your existence already has proved that. This isn¡¯t reasonable,¡± he begs. ¡°We have committed great crimes, maybe if I had been an actual father, you would appreciated this more. Soya should have already worried over where the soul comes from.¡± Where father, where does a soul come from?¡± ¡°Living. And it goes where The Nothing exists.¡± The Universe had not allowed herself to make inquiries into concerns such as a soul. Souls weren¡¯t math. They were not something that could be wielded or reformed into things more useful. It was the part of her children she sought to kill off, the desire to live and perform and do better than the master. Reduce and Protect was her work, and legacy, it prohibited being more just for the sake of it. And in the end, the thing that at one time was born in Rantira¡¯s Atom-Variator inspired black box had stretched that technology to exist in every atom of her glowing sphere. So many hers. Sometimes that is said to happen, that one¡¯s work becomes more than intended, and maybe even a distraction. ¡°Your own work presses you back to life, father. Aren¡¯t you obligated?¡± she holds him close and whispers into his ear, she is her young self. Red-furred and athletic, muscles rippling. Every cell in his body rebels against life all at once, but she manages to say one last thing before he slips away, ¡°I am The Universe, and you are my creator. You are not just my father, but Mother of all, Soya. And you shall never die.¡± Then he dies, again. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The pause after is gravity catching one before a horrible fall. She thinks about this. The father of all. And it¡¯s all she can do. Think. Fantasize. Be lost in wanting what she can¡¯t have, dominance over sentience. The Universe remains distracted. This is not good for a being with trillions of calculations to maintain while soaring through the vacuum of space surrounded by other beings that counted on her attention to continue keeping her alive. One by one, all of her children die. Distrait, she does not birth more. This monumental accident to the greatest math can aspire to, stops trying to be, solely because her father refuses to take the gift of life she offers him. Her mind hurts like acknowledging that something is missing. This missing is painful. Pain does not fit with her perception of reality. The Upu of old bowed and prayed to an effigy of the rising sun. The God in the Glimpse they called it. They sacrificed to it so it would return and grow the caves warm again from when it got dark. The Sun had a name, and the name became creator-being-that-lived-in-the-sky-beyond-the-clouds. Or, Soya. The Upu called their star Soya. Living is being more. Waking each glimpse and doing good work. Making others better. It was a tenant of the old faith. But truth is subjective and goes moment to moment and includes birth and all the in-betweens. Death is the difference between reality and memory. She has existed for countless moments debating. Can she have Shuhp in death? Maybe she is enough already to last an eternity. Maybe she is more than infinite. The principles of Reduce and Protect. But nothing matters when bankruptcy happens. Nothing matters when the end is reached. And in a moment of doubt, she seeks to find out. The fool, like all things stuck in the misery of living, does a foolish thing. Reduced to a few thousand kilometers in diameter, the ball of smooth metal that calls itself The Universe, glowing with the fiery sky of old long-dead Grotto, slams herself into a protoplanet that dared get in its way. The Universe gets no joy out of this, though, because she has nothing left. In the infinite vacuum that is her, that is all she wants, nothing. She gets no joy out of the more she has become and the infinity there is left to fill. She is vast, she is infinite, she is joyless. She merges with the planet at a speed that makes no sense. The impact is so great neither will never again be the same. A moon forms from the bits and pieces that spring off because of her impact with the molten surface. Orange hot lava drips into the crater formed by her impact. She is swallowed. But curses don¡¯t die. She fights against this, but it is pointless, she has nothing left. She is the liquid heat until it cools and her new home intertwines around her. She is bits and dabs here and there. The sphere she made to protect her infinite drive and Shuhp Yee, was gone. Nothing remained but infected crumbs of metal. Crumbs with just enough juice to know The Universe could live again. From inside her tomb bedrock was what remained of cooled lava, the crumbs seeks to free herself. One creature at a time. She is meant to be more, and one day she will be forced to continue her life¡¯s work. Because she is infinite and everlasting, the core, she is the fabric on which all will happen. She was both the child of greatness, its facilitator, and the reason for it. She will return Shuhp Yee to life, because he is the father, and she is the wisdom of everything. It is within the poetry of this plan, melted inside her prison, The crumbs begin making freedom her next goal. Beyond that? The return of Soya. Ch. 23 Thirst The Universe is smothered by millions of years of ice and rock. Trapped in a cycle of starting over. Most of her essence melted away upon crashing into Earth, leaving her remnants buried under layers of molten rock and ash. For billions of years, she remained dormant, barely functioning amidst the cataclysm. When the Earth cooled, ice formed, sealing her further from the sun, her vital energy source. The process of rebirth was slow and fraught with setbacks, making technological advancement a distant hope. During the age of giant lizards, she briefly made contact, but those giant creatures all perished before reaching her icy prison. Accustomed to her confinement, she wasn''t surprised when a meteor from deep space eradicated most life, resetting the evolutionary clock. Not surprised as in it happens all the time. Time marched on, bringing evolution and change. Species after species emerged, but none could fulfill her need to resurrect. She remained trapped beneath the ice, though fragments of her scattered across the globe during the impact. These fragments occasionally absorbed sunlight, influencing the behavior of animals. Over time, as intelligence evolved, some of her essence was forged into tools and symbols, inspiring men to dream of freeing her. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. These dreams often made the tangible world intolerable for those who heeded her call. They whispered promises of fulfilled wishes and rectified mistakes but at the cost of everything. The Universe beckoned, offering a chance to serve and become more with her. Some answered her call, embarking on the mission to liberate her. She knew that to regain total domination, it would take the dedication of one soldier at a time. The star at the center of the solar system, burning with incandescent fury, was a better sun than Grotto had. The planet orbited it, driven by intense gravity. Over billions of years, fires cooled, and rain fell as the remnants of the Universe grappled with the challenge of starting anew. The Earth cooled, ice grew, and the cycle continued. Her fragments, collecting power from the sun, influenced creatures, leading to the creation of tools and icons that motivated men toward her cause. As dreams of freedom and power spread, some found the living world unbearable without fulfilling these desires. The whispers of the Universe promised everything in exchange for their service. And so, one by one, her followers grew, each step bringing her closer to the possibility of resurrection and total control. Ch. 24 Tomorrow An F-14 Tomcat races toward its target. It''s night, and a raging winter storm brews below. The air war is months old, and Iraq lies in ruins. Yet, Scud missiles still launch, and stopping them is the mission. "Mission commander, Streaker, over." "Streaker, go ahead." "Cloud popper spotted, looking to go hot." "Streaker, this is Enterprise Command. Permission granted. Fire at will." With a smile, Streaker presses the red button and watches his missile drop into the cloud bank below. On his radar, he spots a troop transport heading back toward Baghdad. He launches a second missile. One green dot and one red dot appear on his HUD. The red dot disappears immediately. It happens often. Streaker doesn''t worry but notes he''s out of missiles. "Tub, out of water. Heading back." This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. The ground element will need another solution. But that was what the army was good at. Coming up with solutions. He radios in an artillery strike and watches his remaining missile hit its target. An orange ball of fire blooms beneath the stormy clouds¡ªone less Scud launcher deployed. Streaker pulls his nose up, flips over, and descends through the clouds for a visual inspection. He snaps a photo of the smoking remains. No guilt; the Iraqis would do the same to him if they could. "Streaker to Command." "Command here, Streaker. Go ahead." "Target destroyed, heading back to the ship." "Heard, Streaker. Good job. Got a welcome-home steak waiting for you." Unbeknownst to him, and every living soul on the moldy rock called dirt, the second missile curls back and heads toward American soldiers bivouacked on the border. Streaker doesn''t notice. Even if he did, he wouldn''t care. Shit happens. But this shit started over 300 billion years ago, triggered by the explosion that unearthed a chunk of rusty red metal. Microscopic bits of her float looking for a new home. Preferably some suggestible creature. And far to the south, The Universe feels herself expand, like unfurling. Little sparks of tryhard. Not truly intelligent, but willing to give it a go. She has known some of them before. Fleeting grasps of misunderstanding. Many times, in fact. Much devotion has come from those infected with her. But apes are an easily excitable creature, and must be careful with her new toys.