Interzeit: A Space Opera (17 page)

For people like Kales, there was no choice, no moon or Earth to slack off to instead. He was a native born, and so the environment had burned into him, shaping his character indelibly. Something inside him was changing. Despite the obvious mechanical changes, or perhaps due to them, his perspective seemed to be accelerating in a certain direction. The old Mars he knew shrank further and further away.

People he used to fear, those he used to respect, his peers. They too shrunk smaller and smaller into revolting children. Those he had already viewed that way fared no better, he thought of them now as vermin. Vermin, leeches, and takers, how had he sacrificed so much for Mars, and they still be allowed to exist?

His ruminating was interrupted by a security team escorting a fancy looking general in
an
assymetrical grey uniform. He went by the name Deacon Enekios, though he introduced himself as Defense Minister Enekios.

“So you are Kales Marek, the harbinger?” He said with practiced calm.

“I’ve never been called that before,” He grinned in return, “To what do I owe the honor Deacon?”

His
eyes flickered with contempt, but was
quickly buried under his calm façade. Deacon beckoned him to follow with his escort. Kales so
complied
and they walked off together into a different part of the catacomb.

Deacon told him of a story, long winded, and with much history. There was a group, they were the ones that Kales knew as “Them”,
growing
in secret they had taken root over the years, breeding in the vacuum left by lack of strong authority.

The seed of them was planted by an unknown thinker by the name of “Visha Mandalay”, she had posited some seventy years ago of the eventual tyranny of space life. Every vacuum even one such as space will eventually be filled.

Thus the relative freedom brought on by the new frontier would eventually have a reversal, a rubberband snap back. She saw the
unified war
as the beginning of this reversal, a travesty to freedom
and
the self-determination of any people. Her vision of the future was a centralized humanity, under the boot of a transhuman aristocracy, commanded by technology.

The rise of
Kuipterra
and their fascistic tendencies triggered many people far and wide into planning a reverse-reversal, a counter revolution.

Earth
’
s lack of autonomy in the system is the corner stone of the enslavement of humanity.
The king on the board.
They had worked for many decades to stop what would come next, but could not. Even Kales became a pawn in the scheme, a known sacrifice for the greater unknown destiny of man.

Kales felt it to be a phantasm, the minister pointed out the obvious,

“In the end this was not so. You have proven to have a much greater destiny than once forseen Marek. Your body is as good as anything god or man can create, and you will lead the Earth into its glorious renaissance.
“

They came to a secret chamber, where many of
“
Them
”
met from across the system. What Enekios showed him next was something beyond common description. It was a horror, a terror as if stumbling upon the inner darkness of god himself, given form and reality.

“To kill the Hydra
,
Kales,” Deacon said, “It is not enough to cut off the head, as two take its place. The head must be burned with fire, sealed.
So that it may never again grow.”

Nol
wakes up in a cold sweat. He’s in the darkness of his
room,
he grips his head in his hands scratching himself lightly. They won’t stop. Once they came on
,
they c
ame on hard, and without rest
. His dreams now were flooded,
and his training too. There were only
brief periods w
h
ere there was peace.

It was her. But the thing was, the maddening aspect of it was, it wasn’t her. It wasn’t even the memory of her.

It was
its own
.

The intelligence, the AI, whatever they were helping create.
It had latched onto her and was using her as a scaffold to grow on, to become real.

It smiled her smile, and talked with her voice, but it was a mask. It couldn’t match her really, it was its own life form, using him as a host (all of them maybe). In his dreams it came to him, haunting him with images of violence, and destructions, premonitions and perversions. He felt desecrated
by it, though he needed it.

Activity in the underground picked up in pace.
Nol
and all the pilots noticed the change overnight. Suddenly much more focus on warfare and competition appeared in the training regime. Before they knew it, the directors of the program, to the dismay of
Berkant
, had drafted up a g
ame to decide
things once and for all.

A game, a simple one, the unified war, only played in simulacrum. Once it began
Nol
saw no more of his two friends, all of them indeed were restricted to their quarters for most of the day, equipment being brought to them individually for testing and training.

A bracket was released, the double sided tree paths inwards into
a
single spot. Each detour along the way, labeled with the ranking you received. The top twelve slots pulsed with red and yellow neon, exploding outwards and shimmering.

Things were completely sealed
off,
no one knew who they would face before, during or after. Instead of names the slots were given colors. Only you yourself could know your own color, everyone else was a spectrum of blank faces.
Gradients of hue washing over them, emptying them.

Nol
was given the color Black. Things moved quickly. His first test was against White.

He faces
them,
they meet in a digital swamp, the soft sludge coming up to their ankles. Identical twin titans, their sparse polygonal forms fire potshots at each other through the dense woods. Unable to get clean shots off, they stalked closer and closer to each other.

White lights their energy blade, cleaving through into a clearing. Black fires wildly, trampling through the thick foliage. White ascends into the sky, firing down burning blasts, s
etting the world around
Nol
on
fire.

Temperature readings began redlining, the smoke and flashes of fire consuming him. Through the dust and debris He and Clara could see it. The glint of an artificial sun bleeds thr
ough the smokescreen. They aim
up through the smog, piercing through, the glinting form smokes, shakily crashing to the ground.

It snaps and
shrapnelizes
several trees in its plunge back to the “Earth”. Struggling to rise again, Clara and
Nol
finish White quickly with a close-up rifle mortaring.

The next round starts only an hour later. This is a three person free for all, grouping
Nol
, Blue, and Purple against each other, and Green, Tan, and Silver on their own.

Things are slow going in this fight. The three combatants float a tense distance from one another. Drifting in a complicated dancing orbit, the try encircling on another, the fighters hesitate to over commit, leaving their flanks open to a quick opportunistic shot.

The fluctuating path eventually shrinks inwards, creeping slowly towards one point,
finally
they all open fire on each other.

Bodies leaned horizontally, rifle and face facing inwards towards one other, firing and weaving in corkscrew evasions, each shot brings more feedback and data, wiring through the ships sensors, into Clara, and finally through his mind.

Purple’s hull begins ejecting fuel of some kind rapidly. Instantly
Nol
turns on Blue, re-prioritizing the situation. Blue fires back, Purple swings around erratically, joining them in their attack.

Nol
takes heavy fire, but with the slight lead rings an energy beam
clean through Blue
, dispatching Purple in a quick blind flurry.

It crumbles into burning pieces, drifting away from its origins at the slightest impact.

The gauntlet extended into the evening. A series of consolation matches were held, parsing out the less successful colors into their final ranking.
Nol
watch these with disinterested tension, not so much caring for their outcome as much as their temporal indication of the coming conflict.

Black vs. Tan starts around midnight.

Nol
feels himself materialize into the environment. A cratered and burning volcano plain, glasslike
rock,
and rivers of magma confuse the senses.

He realizes he is equipped only with a small repeating sidearm. Even with Clara’s calculative prowess, the blasts are easily avoided from a distance. Tan fires back at him, joining temporarily in the fruitless barraging as they jet closer to one another.

They come in, synced almost like a mirror. Something in their strategy, the way they were thinking, the way Clara was thinking, matched into one another. They clash point bla
nk, blasting each other.
Both
sna
tches out at the others’ pistol
.
They grapple for control, laser blasts shooting off randomly. Tan tries blasting off their rockets, to out force him.

Nol
slings backward, throwing Tan over him. Dropping to his back,
Nol
aims the pistol carefully their direction, familiar words echo through him.

“You said you were the best…”

He breathes out calmly, tracking the whirling jet of his enemy.

He fires three shots in quick succession
.
T
hey strike true, breaking off Tan’s legs in jagged chucks. The burning oozing remnants somehow remain in the air, firing back, blasting
Nol’s
firing arm off.

Unable to fully rip the pistol from the amputated arm, he clamors for the mass, firing it awkwardly back at Tan, who is burning with a suicidal trajectory in his direction.

Quickly,
Nol
is able to dodge out of the
way,
firing a clean shot through one of Tan’s back facing jets. The exploding rocket sinks the craft, and it plops into a hissing stream of lava.

In this reality,
Nol
answers the mockery, “I am the best…”

Cesar and
Leora
both washed out as that bastard
Byron
predicted, they seemed glad almost relieved at that. The morning which was too
soon
for him to bear, would come and they would be given their Mechs. He was assigned to
TU
-1. It was a high honor to be sure, but…

He knew they were going to install it, install the demon Clara into it. She would be given a body, a god’s body. He couldn’t stop it,
he knew something in it was obscene, his mind blurred in with it after the long night
.

They picked him up right on schedule when morning came. The escorts took him to the main
hangar,
he changed into his pilot uniform before entering, but was otherwise unkempt. None of the other pilot candidates joined him here.

There was a crowd assembled in a rank and file around Hangar bay door 1. Berkant spoke to them with congratulatory tones, accolades, and praise to them all.

As Nol drew nearer Ophelia emerged from the entourage around the general, walking quickly to meet him.

“This was a long way coming Nol, thank you for sticking it out.”

Nol nodded, and gave his best performance of a smile, thanking her. She turned leading him by a half step to the general’s side.

“Thanks to all of your efforts, we’re operational on half of the units, and are ready to show the world. To show them, that Earth is not a planet of victims, it is not the vacation home of aliens and off-worlders! Earth is strong! We will not take this crime
lying
down,
we
will
defeat any enemy foolish enough to lay harm to us, never again!”

Berkant turns his head on Nols arrival to the event. He extends his arm beckoning him over,

“Tomson Nol,” He booms, “He lost everything in the attack on
Turi
a
zon
. He knows the consequences of inaction first hand…I am proud then, to present to you the new pilot of Unit-01.”

The gathered mechanics, engineers, and other specialists clapped with energy.

“And to you Tomson, I present
…
”

The shutters rumble into action
, the doors steadily withdraw upwards. The feet are large and
angular,
as the door ascends the loud neon orange paint is immediately apparent. The legs
appear,
strapped to
their
sides are a blade
handle,
and a
rifle
.

The chest and arms are covered in black shining panels. These armoring plates are distributed heavily across the chest and shoulders, slowly shrinking and becoming more contoured as the move out to the arms.

The head is an oblong black rectangle. Unlike most of the war mechs built this face is not modeled on a human
’
s. It has no mouth, only eyes. These sensors are ovals, shaped the same as an eyelids.

The
seventh eye is directly in the
center of the head. Its oval i
s tilted completely on its side. Like a real eyelid, it is not a solid panel. Instead it is an opening, in this opening is seated a complexity of machine work, and optics.

“Initiate power up sequence!” Berkant ordered,

Several engineers from the
crowd,
ran to computer terminals beside the hangar bay, working quickily. It starts as a low pitched squeal, its builds higher and higher in frequency and intensity. Finally something turns over, and the main reactor starts internally. There’s an explosive whoosh, and several vents placed around the mech spew steam and smokes.

It washes over them, baptisizing it its scope, the machine has brought them into something, into a
nother place.
A new time, the end of a transition happening before there eyes.
The noise dies, crumbling into a low hum.

The crowd and Berkant clap mystified by their own success.
Nol even smiles despite his journey, this end, if not justifying the rest of it, was
overwhelming. Laughing, Berkant clasps Nol by the shoulder.

“Time to show the public what we’ve got kid!
Hope
you’re
ready for a test run.”

Nol turns to Ophelia who nods silently with reassurance. He’s led forward through the crowd, their hands and word
s
slip past him in many fervored congratulations.

Without warning the floor detaches from the ground, hovering him up towards it. He jumps the rest of the way in reckless abandoned, crashing into the pilot seat. The cockpit close around
him,
and an all too familiar chair is settled into.

His nervous plugs attach i
n
with pain and quickness. The well tuned piece of hardware wastes no time syncing him in. He grabs the controls, but as he
does
the
y
seem to disappear into darkness.

When he is next able to see, he is not grasping the controls, but his sister by the hands. She is staring into him smiling, her hair clean, and silky, dressed in a flowing orange gown.

“We did it Nol,” She murmured to him.

The perfection in her eyes was
artificial,
it was the machine, the intelligence. The entity tried to replace something
lost,
his nostalgia and its transhumanistic nature had created the perf
ect parody of his sister
.

She disappeared from his view, the darkness thins and Nol emerges, towering over assembled people below him.

“Proceed to the
launch pad when ready.” A voice crackled into this intercom.