Until we meet Again
Dearest Ancestors, hear our humble plea...GSC 2929Riel laughed and whooped excitedly, pointing as the ship lanced skyward on a pillar of smoke and fire. Just a boy of eight, Riel didn't yet understand the signifigance of what he was seeing. It was great fun, being in the park on this bright summer day, the wind whipping through his hair. But he would remember this day for the rest of his life. This was the day, after so many long years, that our confinement on this tiny world was coming to an end. I saluted the rocket as it rose to meet the sky, carrying my daughter into a new era. I whispered a prayer to the spirits to watch over her as she crossed into their domain.
Until we meet again little one."Where is Kya going Dad?" my son asked as the rocket twinkled in the sunlight. Riel didn't yet know, couldn't yet know, that Kya would probably never return. She would transcend us, travelling to a place where gods and spirits dwelt. Becoming one with the wind and sky.
"She's going to meet The Visitors Riel. They've come from far, far away to meet her." It had only been a month since the great ship had slid out of the rupture in spacetime, flooding our radio waves with greetings and well wishes.
"Why's she so special anyway? Why don't they want to meet the rest of us?" He pouted. I ruffled his hair, straining my eyes to see the glint of the ship's hull as it raced away from us, the column of smoke rising to impossible heights.
"Maybe we'll go to meet with them someday too. Kya's just the first. Her Spirit Ladder is in certain order, one that's very rare, That makes her very important." Capsule Compatible. That is what they called Kya, these long lost cousins of ours, a branch of humanity from a place of hope and light.
"Why don't I have that? Why's she so great?" I actually laughed at that, his boyish impishness. I couldn't help my self.
Oh to be young again."You do Riel, we all have a Spirit Ladder, each one is unique, and makes you who you are. Our ladders are made up of tiny little pieces called genes. In Kya, all her pieces are in just the right order for her to fulfil an important task for The Visitors. Your pieces are in a different order, to do something else, maybe even more important."
"Like what Dad?"
"Well, I don't know, you'll have to find that out for yourself."
---
In peace, we release this spirit from our shores...YC10119"System's green, initiating final burn in 5-" My breathe caught in my throat as the sky turned from blue to black. "4-" The Spirit of Foundation loomed large overhead, a massive two kilometre long spear of gleaming polished metal. "3-" Gravity was falling away, giving way to a dizzying corkscrew as I fell into the dark sky, "2-" My vision was gyrating wildly, the view rapidly flashing between the blue of the world below, and the shining vessel above. "1-" I sucked in a gasp of air, body tensing. "Ignition." the engines fired for the last time, taking the rocket into a long glide that would skim within two kilometres of the giant ship.
The gap closed between my tiny cannister of air, and the giant elegant ship. Details became visible to me, decks that webbed together like the roots of a tree, covered in twinkling windows. A strange blue glow emanated from the surface of the ship, the tractor beam they had told me it was called. It took control of my ship's movement, steering it between the struts of the filigree superstructure.
"Everything looks good, we're bringing you into the bay." A voice sounded in my ear, and it took a minute to remember that this ship belonged to humans, humans that were expecting me to talk back to them.
"O-Oh, yeah, all green on my board, commence docking." A portal irised open in the surface of the giant ship, light pouring out of it as it swallowed my capsule. The mouth closed behind me, and my world vanished.
"Welcome aboard the Spirit of Foundation Miss Ymirald." The chamber my capsule floated in was flooded with air, and a hatch opened in the far side of it. "We'll be waiting for you outside the airlock." This was it. I was really here. I unstrapped myself from the seat, and opened the hatch.
There was no gravity, and I simply pushed off the launch capsule, propelling myself across the empty space to the waiting doorway. I hit harder then I'd intended, and I felt my nose crunch against the metal, tasting blood. I winced through the pain and grabbed hold of the handles on the airlock door, pushing myself inside, where gravity abruptly returned. A young man was standing in the doorway, laughing hysterically at my antics.
"First time in zero gee?" He teased, helping me to my feet. I felt my cheeks flush red, my nose was bleeding. I was an ambassador of our world, and here I was making a fool of myself. "Don't worry, you'll get your space legs before too long. I'm Zhio, welcome aboard." His smile was warm and friendly, big brown eyes framed in a pale face. I felt my cheeks flushing hotter.
"I'm Kya, but um, you already know that I'm sure. Its an um, its an honor to be chosen as the um Ambassador of um, of Galeatea, to our brothers and sisters in the um, the stars--" I had started giving the speech I had rehearsed upon being chosen to go to space.
"Stop stop stop," He laughed, "I'm just helping you get in, you don't need to do that with me, or at all really. Moira isn't big on formality." He opened the door out into a wide hallway and beckoned for me to follow. He had a cheerful upbeat demeanour, seeming to be unable to avoid chuckling at my predicament as blood continued to trickle down onto my bright white spacesuit. "You know, the Transcendence has been searching for your planet for generations? Ever since the Bifurcation, we've been trying to find our way back here. We live in exciting times."
I had very little idea what he was talking about. Our people had been stranded on our world for so long, that the memory of the outside existed only in myth and legend. So much of our history had been lost in the plagues and the bloody wars with our sister planet, when the dust had finally settled, we barely remembered how to grow food for ourselves. I wiped the blood off on my sleeve.
"Should I um, should I know what you're talking about when I talk to um...Moira?" I asked tentatively.
"Nah, there's plenty of time for that. All the time in the universe really."
---
In love, we ask you guide them to the next...GSC 2941"She's never coming back, is she?" I stirred my food on my plate, picking at it without eating it. I had been just a boy when The Visitors had came in their grand starship, giving promises of a destiny of light and hope. Then they had taken my sister, and their ship slid back into the darkness, never to be heard from again.
"No, I don't think she is." My father answered with a tired sigh. I had finished my apprenticeship as a radiosmith a month ago, soon I would leave home to start my own life. I'd already picked out an apartment in the city, a lovely little place above a bakery, constantly filled with the smells of fresh breads and cakes.
"They said, she was important to the Transcendence, who do you suppose that is?" I had long since ceased to worry about the fate of my long lost sister. I had my own life to live. I knew my father still held out hope that she was alive out there somewhere, but she might as well have been dead. Still, the stars presented themselves as an intellectual curiosity. Our people came from the stars, and it was said one day we would return to them. However, in the ten years since my sister's departure, we'd only sent one expedition out past the moons of our world. That team had travelled to Calaria, the sister world of ours, said to be the home of some of our kin. But there was nothing there, only long dead ruins, worn by age beyond any sort of recognizability, blanketed in a snowed out atmosphere.
"I'm sure whoever they are, they're taking good care of her." I wasn't sure if he was trying to reassure me of her safety, or himself. Like so many of our people, his eyes were focused downward, in the earth, in family, community; not upward to the stars and the strange worlds that lay there, waiting for us.
"I wonder if we knew them once. The Transcendence I mean." It was said, in myth, that our people were great once, we stood astride the stars spreading widely throughout space, building great works to honour the gods and spirits, before the dark times had come. Generations of war that slowly eroded away our strength, cutting us down until we had no great cities, no starships, hardly any technology at all. How it all had been lost was still shrouded in time, but the great old cities stood as silent ruins to our former power. Empty shrines to fallen gods. No one lived in the old cities now. It seemed wrong to violate the tombs of our ancestors. Their only inhabitants now were the occasional hermit, and the wild birds.
"I suppose we might have known them. Maybe we'll meet them again someday. Maybe Kya will bring them here to see us." He chuckled. I felt a wave of sadness. My father had such hope and idealism in him, yet he was a tired old man who knew he would likely never see his daughter again. I felt angry that the transcendence, whoever they were, had stolen my sister away, just like cancer had stolen away my mother when I was a child. "She would be 33 this year, you know?"
I simply nodded. We had both long since accepted that in all respects, Kya may as well be dead. I raised the glass of cheap alcohol I had with my food, "To Kya, wherever she is."
My father smiled, a faint sad twinkle in his eye as he raised his glass to mine. "To Kya."
---
Grant them safe passage, until our final journey into the sky...YC10133"Warp to Kya. Warp to Kya. Warp to Kya." Moira repeated with a calm rapidness. I felt my hull flex and tense under the laser weapon bombardment, liquid metal flowing across my skin to reinforce damaged areas. The enemy fire sent pain screaming through my nerves, held in check only by Moira's calm voice, and the cool relief of the nanites pouring into my burns. I let a thread of anger well up inside of me until it lashed out in a devastating lance of antimatter, slicing the rude spiked vessel cleanly in half.
They were slowly tearing through me, but the seconds were counting down in the back of my head. As I felt my hull integrity hit 50% my gravimetric sensors registered the muted thumps of my fleet sliding out of warp. The polished metal ships smoothly glided out of the darkness, surrounding me in light. streams of nanomachines were hosed across my hull, repairing and replenishing the liquid metal surface. The last of the mind eaters fled under our combined firepower, their fleet shattered, half of it nothing more then cooling wreckage now.
There were cheers and whoops of joy over the communications channels. For the first time in over a thousand years, the orbit of Oris was under the control of the transcendence, the mind eaters had been driven out. There would be no celebrations on the surface, the population had long since been purged, absorbed into the alien consciousness that had dominated them for so long. But this system had been a bastion for the fleets of roving mind eaters for centuries, and now their infrastructure lay in ruins, the strange spiked stations, warped and deformed moons, and the harvester gate, through which the eaters took those they captured, all had been destroyed in as little as twelve hours. Decisive strikes, tactical wormhole generation, and pinpoint accurate attacks had crippled the Mind Eater forces before the might of the transcendence had come pouring out into the system.
"Oh I wish my mum was around to see this." Moira said over the comms channel. "She fought so hard for this." Moira's mother was something of a legend, the first person to completely abandon her humanity and join with the self assembling hyperstructure that existed at the heart of a star. This structure was the transcendence, it was something totally beyond the world that existed around us.
"You'll have to tell her when we get back to Origin." I rolled myself out of the main body of the fleet, my liquid metal hull boiling clean through the wreckage it came into contact with, flying through the massive wall of a ruined station like a hot knife through butter. It was something of a joke by this point, in order for Moira to communicate with her mother directly, instead of the transcendence as a whole, she would have to leave her human skin and join the transcendence fully, and even after three millennia, Moira clung to her body. She was the oldest Pilot by a huge measure. Most Pilots joined the transcendence after only a century or two. While the Architects, Coordinators, and Visionaries often waited a thousand years or more, the brutality of the life of a Pilot slowly eroded them, and for most, a century or two was all they could take before they had to embrace the transcendence to escape their own personal demons. In many ways, Moira had embraced those demons, becoming one herself.
"Haha, very funny Kya." Her ship corkscrewed around mine, playfully dancing through the smouldering wreckage. "As if we're going back any time soon any way. Once we repair and repolarize the harvest gate, we're taking the fight out of this region. This'll probably be your last chance to bow out for a few decades. We've no idea where that gate is gonna take us."
"I know what I signed up for." I had signed up for something that would mean I probably never saw my family again, but someday, their descendants would know what I did to protect them, to bring our world back into the fold. Now that the Mind Eaters had been driven from this area of space, the Prophets of Truth would be able to travel to all the worlds we had passed through, bringing knowledge and science to the long imprisoned worlds of the old empires.
"Alright then, all ships back to the Foundation, we'll transit the harvest gate as soon as its open."
---
May we meet again.GSC 3030She was like an immortal angel, returning from a war in the heavens. Despite having left our world a century ago, it was as if she hadn't aged a day. She touched the deep age driven creases in my face, tears running down her immaculately smooth skin. "Oh Riel, I wish I could have came back sooner, time has been so cruel to you..." My sister leaned over me, where I lay in the hospital bed, kissing my forehead. Whereas she had frozen in time, I had not. I had married, had children, seen then grow, have children of their own, and eventually great grandchildren. "I can make you young again." She said quietly to me, it was spoke as barely a whisper, she knew what I would say, but she had to say it anyway.
"No. No its far too late for that, for me." Our father had passed on long, long ago. And I had buried my wife ten years earlier. I was done. I was ready to pass on. It saddened me, to see my beautiful immortal angel of a sister cry over an old man like me. I'd had a good life, there was no reason not to quit while I was ahead, as it were. The grand mysteries of the universe, and that transcendence of hers would be left to my children. "Save that gift for those still young enough to enjoy it." I patted her hand. "I'm ready to go."
I had known in my heart that my days were numbered from the moment her ship appeared in the sky. She'd returned from the dead like a long lost ghost, to guide my spirit to a place where there was no more pain. I could tell she didn't like what I'd said, but she sighed and accepted it. "I'll take care of them, your kids I mean. I'll watch out for them for you."
"I wouldn't expect anything less. You've always been watching out for us." She smiled, and I closed my eyes. "Until we meet again Kya."
"Until we meet again Riel."
---
YC10221"And so, we commit this soul to the spirits. And we pray. Dearest Ancestors, hear our humble plea. In peace, we release this spirit from our shores. In love, we ask you guide them to the next. Grant them safe passage, until our final journey into the sky. May they be remembered forever, until there is no more death, no more pain, and the abyss herself shall give up her dead, and return them to us. May we meet again." The shaman bowed to the coffin, and it began its descent into the earth. My brother had gone from this world. The ceremony was peaceful, calm, and it felt good. The sadness that had hung over me for days had finally begun to lift.
"Until we meet again." I said to him with a small smile. I had felt the spark wedge itself inside my mind. That tiny fragment of the transcendence, burning incandescently in the heart of a star. We would meet again someday. The world was still changing. It was as if the universe itself had begun to stir from its slumber. Time, distance, even death, we would transcend these things, it was already beginning to happen. I could feel the glimmers of a bright future, echoing backward through time. I wondered if my brother had felt it too.
A new day was beginning to dawn. With a last look, I turned away from the cemetery. There was still much work to be done.
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Topic: Until we meet Again (Read 2738 times)