Read Kaldean Chronicles: Kaldean Sunset (Book I) Online
Authors: Maxwell Bond
Kaldean Chronicles: Kaldean Sunset (Book I)
Kaldean Chronicles
Kaldean Sunset
(Book I)
By Maxwell Bond
Copyright 2016 by Make Profits Easy LLC
Table of Contents
Chapter 10: Artificial Genesis
For more than a thousand years, humanity was confined to the twin solar systems, Alpha Centauri and Sol, the ancestral home of humanity. They'd long since given up on the dream of traveling throughout the galaxy.
Instead, they outgrew their planets and shielded themselves from pollution. Humanity was sick, starving, and choking on its own filth.
The ruling class became desperate to better their quality of living, so they devised a means of depopulating the planet through the use of sophisticated robots. They called it the Rapture, a ruthless campaign meant to slaughter the populace so that the aristocracy could survive.
The conflict lasted for more than a century. It destroyed the old world and, through bloodshed and carnage, depopulated the two planets. Resentful of technology and the damage that it had done to their lives, the survivors built an anti-technologist society led by the guerrilla leaders that ended the rapture. They called themselves the Crusaders.
The Crusaders demonized all forms of technology, and only allowed the people to use rudimentary power sources. Historians often cite their u
se of beasts of burden, including horses for agriculture and transportation. Space travel was forbidden. The twin systems were isolated and society digressed into a prehistoric state.
The people were stricken with illness and hunger, unable to maintain their crops, or cure diseases. They died off by the millions, destroying most of what was left of humanity after the Rapture. The Crusaders didn't believe in progress or science and told the people that the way to live was to get in the dirt and work with your hands. They taught them how to put their minds on the back burner and let their bodies take over.
The people never forgot the way things used to be. They used to be able to cure simple diseases and print their food in their homes. Now they were digging in the dirt, barely able to feed themselves much less their families, and so they began searching for alternatives.
The Crusaders believed that women were inferior creatures, far too cerebral and incapable of manual labor like the men could do. It was thought that they couldn't handle the rigors of daily life. They were oppressed, forced to stay at home and to take care of the children. With their abilities ignored and their status taken away from them, it's no wonder that they banded together.
Nobody knows for certain how the Lorian Sisterhood began, but most historians believe that women's groups started forming in response to sexism. They wanted progress. They believed that the Crusaders had taken away man's ability to reason, and even more importantly his ability to study the universe around him. They saw the universe as a puzzle to be solved, and decided to salvage the knowledge that the Crusaders tried to destroy. Books were allowed, but nobody had used paper for thousands of years, so all they contained was Crusader propaganda. Instead, the women had to hack into the old internet and upload it into a system of computers deep in an underground network of caves.
Once they had done this, they worked on a plan to overthrow the Crusaders. They undermined the government through the use of propaganda. Their message spread, slowly and secretly until it could no longer be hidden and the people had to take a stand. When the revolution began, the sisters formed a group of assassins, called Jihadis, who swore their allegiance to them, and pledged their lives to the cause.
They were waging a holy war, secular in nature, but sacred nonetheless. Society didn't have to remain stagnant. Through empirical research new technology could end the tyranny of the Crusaders.
The Jihadis knew how to fight, because they had been fighting to survive their entire lives, and they were tired of doing it. They rose through the ranks of the Crusaders, over a period of decades, and when they finally got the chance, they staged a bloody coup and handed power over to the sisters of the Lorian Sisterhood.
Through diligent research and an almost religious passion for science, humanity was able to live in a golden age, one in which progress was finally possible and the sisters promised to send them to the stars. They brought together a group of the greatest minds in both planets and began a multigenerational project to solve the problem. It took more than 20 years to travel from one solar system to another, and ships were only capable of traveling at a fifth of the speed of light. The body cannot travel any faster than that, but if it could, it still wouldn't be enough to travel to the nearest system.
They would have to find another way. They built wormholes, black holes and studied a myriad of other anomalies until they found the Regus Particle, a piece of matter that folded the space around it. When it was concentrated around an object, it could theoretically allow that object to travel from one place to another instantaneously, regardless of the distance.
The day the first flight was supposed to take place, people gathered from all over Centaur A so that they could see the flight in person. When the ship finally took off it disappeared and was never heard from again.
The calculations were off by a tiny fraction, too minute to matter in any other case, but they were wrong and that was enough to jettison the ship into the middle of a binary star almost a hundred light years from its target.
The space folding engine was far too sensitive and had to be programmed with an algorithm that took into account every obstacle before it was encountered. It would take an intuitive mind, one far beyond the capacity of a human's, to pilot a space folding ship.
The sisters began a project to create the greatest mind in the galaxy, a quantum network that could process data, countless times faster than the human brain and was ultimately capable of clairvoyant cognition. Once it was built, the system allowed men to travel from one system to another seamlessly without having to worry about whether or not they would be safe when they reached the other side.
Humanity traveled the stars and encountered other races. They developed colonies, and eventually went to war. They found that many races were predatory, and lived by Payton's Law: What you don't kill will come back to kill you later.
The sisters once again called upon the Jihadis and began a campaign known as the Blood Jihad. They decreed that the human mind was given to men by nature, because they are the rightful stewards of the galaxy. No other race has the right to rule.
The Jihadis tore through the galaxy, destroying planet after planet, slaughtering entire Empires. They carved out a pocket in the galaxy to call their own. Every race they encountered was either enslaved or killed.
The Jihadis came back from the war, and realized what they had done. It didn't matter how many systems they conquered; They were still forced to subject themselves to the rule of the Lorian Sisterhood. They began to expand their power and eventually wrestled power away from the sisterhood. The sisters fled to the outer edges of the galaxy, but they didn't die off. The people still considered them to be the keepers of scientific knowledge, and they never forgot how they gave them the ability to harness the power of the Regus particle. They were revered as priestesses, a modern clergy who exercised power through their formidable propaganda machine and revolutionary innovations.
The rise of the Jihadis marked the beginning of the Kaldean dynasty, a group of deified kings possessing all of the power of the prehistoric gods. They could engineer life, reign down fire from the heavens—anything they wanted could be brought to them instantaneously.
The Kaldean Dynasty allowed people lived better lives because when they united under one flag and one creed, they all worked for the same purpose. Human lifespans doubled. Man had all but conquered disease. Life was simple. People forgot the bloodshed that had built their Empire and just lived their lives as they were supposed to.
This gave Antoni peace of mind. Even though he would one day become Emperor, his life would be easy. If there was trouble, he could dispatch the Jihadis, and live without knowing what it meant to see a man die or a planet destroyed.
He didn't have to worry. He could sleep easy.
“Wake up,” a sharp finger stabbed into his shoulder. He opened his eyes drowsily to see his tutor Cornel standing above him with an angry face.
“I'm too tired today.”
“You don't have a choice. Hurry up.” His black robe swished against the marble floor as he turned around and walked out, leaving Antoni to get ready for the day. He walked into his closet and slipped off his night shift so he could allow the sanitizer to clean his body and the robotic brushes to scrub him down. Then he turned slowly while his body was covered in a thin layer of moisturizers and healing sprays that worked to preserve his youth and repair the damage that had been done.
He was young, barely twenty, a child in all respects, and he would maintain his youthful appearance for another fifty years before he began to mature physically. This wasn't just a product of his superior health, but also because of the various treatments he was given on a daily basis that lengthened his lifespan.
In Sisterhood, in order to maintain stability the heir was expected to live as long as possible. When a ruler dies, there is doubt and a power vacuum that could threaten the integrity of the Empire. There were always individuals who wanted to take the heir's place, so his lifespan was lengthened to its limit. The Emperor's reign must feel like a staple in the daily life of the people. It should span generations in Sisterhood to give the people the illusion of permanence. It worked, and it was a wonderful privilege. While most citizens lived a little over 200 years, he lived to be five hundred.
The process was a clandestine affair, given only to members of the royal family. Rejuvenation chemicals were given to him on a regular basis so that his cells could replenish after they became damaged. His organs were cleansed, and would be replaced later on in life, and he was given a number of genetic treatments in vitro so that his body could withstand the tests of time.
He was a god. The people saw him as such, and they revered him. They called him the Holy Demiurge, a deity in a long line of deities that had conquered both nature and life in Sisterhood to build their society.
Gods had to maintain their appearance, so he was very careful with what he wore, and kept himself
in good shape. A long wire extended from the white marble wall through a small opening and attached itself to his arms. It stimulated his
muscles, giving him the workout he needed in Sisterhood to maintain his superior physique. It moved through all of his major muscle groups, his pectorals, his abdomen and finally down his legs, sending tiny shocks through his skin.
It tickled.
When he was done, he turned around and began searching through his console. The computer would allow him to choose the perfect outfit for his body type, the mood reading the console got when he tapped the screen, and his schedule. It chose a pair of white, tight fitting leggings and a lavender shirt with a black hooded cloak that had a fur lining. He let the bots dress him and ran out of his room to meet Cornel.
There is nothing more beautiful than the mind, which nature deemed fit to give us so that we might have the ability to reason and the knowledge necessary to conquer the galaxy
.
--Manifesto, Santos Lorian Sisterhood
The hallway that led to Antoni's sleeping chambers were lined on both sides by windows that offered a magnificent view of a pink gas giant. The titan structure was built in the sixth millennium of the Celestial era by Emperor Titus Florentine. He was obsessed with art in all its forms and worked to give the Empire's structures an aesthetic appeal that he believed would give the people a positive impression of the Empire. The result was a silver structure comprised of towers and tunnels that looked like a crystal jutting up towards the heavens.
