The Bastion, location classified
“So, this place few people have visited is… in your basement?” Chuck asked a few minutes later as they began to descend in de la Vega’s spacious private elevator.
“As much as I know it annoys Artemis, I’m going to have to go with yes… and no,” the billionaire replied, shrugging. Artemis rolled her eyes. Laying his hand on a biometric panel next to the floor buttons, Álvaro leaned in to whisper a phrase into a concealed microphone.
When the glowing floor numbers indicated they were reaching the ground floor the elevator gave no indication of slowing down. As the seven sub levels of the Pyramid passed (five public and two known only to the Vanguard and de la Vega), the floor indicator changed to an infinity symbol. Almost another full minute passed before the elevator finally came to a smooth stop.
The doors opened onto a utilitarian-looking corridor of rough concrete, three meters wide and high, and about 12 meters in length. Panels of fluorescent lights provided a harsh illumination, glinting coldly off the vault-like door of brushed steel at the far end of the hall. Álvaro led the way, the Vanguard following somewhat warily behind.
“An excellent place for a kill box,” Scion murmured to Artemis, eyeing the suspiciously blank walls. She nodded, but it was de la Vega who responded.
“It absolutely is, Captain Astor. And if I weren’t with you, rest assured defenses that even the Vanguard might find difficult to overcome would already have been deployed. Not lethal defenses, mind you… at least not at first… but sufficient. And if not, well…” He touched his palm to another biometric reader, submitted to a retinal scan, and uttered another murmured phrase. With a deep thrum of powerful hydraulics, the vault-like door recessed 30 centimeters and then split, to slide aside into the wall on either side.
Beyond was a spherical chamber 10 meters in diameter, its surface a featureless white material without visible seams or joins. A catwalk of metal mesh led from the doorway to a circular platform of the same material suspended in the center of the space. The platform was just large enough to hold all seven people, and de la Vega shrugged an apology as they crowded together.
“Sorry for the cramped quarters. This wasn’t really designed with group tours in mind, I’m afraid.” He touched a finger to his watch, tapped out a command — and a brilliant flash of pinkish white light filled the space…
…and they were somewhere else.
The space they found themselves in was larger and noticeably cooler, if still more-or-less circular in layout. Massive crystal pillars of various translucent colors made up the walls of the chamber, leaning inward at 30° angles as they rose up to meet in an asymmetrical faceted dome-like structure of the same material. Levels of various sizes and heights broke up the space, many with smaller clusters of crystalline rods rising up from them, each of a single solid translucent color.
The largest of the platforms was directly ahead of the group, and as they watched a giant head coalesced from the air to stare down at them. The giant, silver-haired head of actor Marlon Brando.
“Welcome, my son,” the familiar voice boomed out, as the head gazed down sternly upon the group. “I am your father, Gor-Thûn.”
“Holy crap!” Jonny blurted out, grabbing Chuck by the arm in a death grip. “This is Ultra’s Bastion! Oh my god, does this mean he really was an alien, from the doomed planet Argon?! Did Richard Donner get it right when he made Ultra: The Movie back in ‘78?”
Chuck seemed almost as begroggled as his friend, and could only shake his head in confusion, a state shared by most of their teammates. Only Artemis seemed unimpressed by the display, looking over at Álvaro de la Vega with a raised eyebrow and a dangerous glint in her eye. The billionaire was suppressing a grin, but his eyes were bright with amusement.
“I’m sorry… he always said if the opportunity arose he’d do this, but I didn’t think he really meant it.”
“Álvaro, enough with your games,” Artemis snapped. “If you have—“
“Please, Artemis, you mustn’t blame Álvaro for my little joke,” Marlon Brando’s head said, his face shifting from somber to openly amused. “I have so little chance to have fun, and the temptation was just too great to resist… although I suppose I’m certainly old enough to know better.”
The holographic head sharan, solidifying, and reforming into the shape of a human male dressed in an expensive-looking white suit, gray silk tie, and silver waistcoat. While still appearing older, and still white-haired, his features no longer resembled those of the late actor… although they remained hauntingly familiar. The figure turned and made his way down the stairs to his left, descending from the platform to stride confidently over to stand before the assembled heroes. He gave a slight bow, and smiled.
“Hey, you look a lot like Ultra!” Chuck said, as the coin finally dropped. “Or at least like what Ultra would have looked like if he’d gotten old.”
The smile faded from the old man’s face, and he looked sad. “Yes, this is what Ultra would’ve looked like in another 80 or 90 years, had he lived. I wear this form more out of habit than anything, these days. You see, that part of my little joke, wasn’t really a joke… I really am, or was, Ultra’s father. In a manner of speaking.”
“I can see where Álvaro learned his habit of equivocation,” Artemis said, unimpressed by the dramatic statement. “He said there was a second origin story we needed to hear, and I’m assuming it’s yours, Nimrod or whatever your name really is. I’m also assuming this will all make sense. Eventually.”
“Eventually, yes,” the old man’s smile returned, more rueful than amused now. “But it’s a very long story, and I seldom have the opportunity to tell it, so I hope you’ll all bear with me. It really is vital that you understand the scope of what is going on, but I will try to streamline things as much as I can, to save time.”
“Screw time!” Quanta said. “We want details, and we want it all – it seems pretty obvious this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I for one have nowhere else to be.”
“Well, now that you’re on the inside, as it were, I hope there will other opportunities to go into as much detail as you might like… assuming we can contain the current crisis, of course. First off, my name really is Gor-Thûn. Or at least it was when I was born, almost 22,000 years ago… which should give you some idea of how long my story is. Why don’t we all get more comfortable?”
Without even a gesture, furniture materialized behind the group. Perhaps coincidentally mimicking the arrangement of the seating in de la Vega’s office, it arced around in a wide semicircle with the holographic Nimrod at its focal point. Unlike Álvaro, he failed to offer his guests any refreshments, however, instead jumping straight into his story.
“I was born in the year 19,504 BCE, into a tribe of proto-Semitic peoples in what would later be known as the Middle East. As I said, my name was Gor-Thûn, in the long-dead language of those people, and at 24 I was, by virtue of both my age and my prowess as a hunter, the leader of my band of hunter-gatherers. When the strange lights appeared in the sky that fateful night, most of my folk fled in terror… but I was the leader, and it was my duty to stand and face whatever the spirits might bring. And truly, the lights did fascinate me… almost seemed to be calling to me…
“I was fascinated, yes, but also terrified. I like to think the only outward sign of my fear, however, was the white-knuckled grip I kept on my throwing spear. I was determined to protect the People, no matter the cost… but the truth is, in that moment, if I had been given even a hint of what awaited me, all of my courage and faithfulness would not have mattered one iota. But I didn’t know… and so I faced them… and I was taken by the lights, lifted up into the sky.
“Where my torment began.
“I was dissected, body and mind, by beings that I never perceived as more than flashes of light, hints of colors (some beyond my experience)… and, occasionally, as a haunting music. They took me apart, studied me, and when the torment finally ended, I was put back together, just as I’d been… and it began all over again. How long the pain went on I’ve never be able to say with certainty… years, months, days… or was it merely hours? Whatever the duration of my suffering, I lost myself, even my name, in the red mist that my memory became… the only thing I remembered throughout it all, the one thing I clung to when all else was gone, was that I was the Hunter.
“Eventually the pain ended for good. For some timeless period there was blessed darkness and peace. But slowly I became aware of being aware again… first of the darkness… and then of myself, the Hunter. It seemed to me that I hung suspended in nothingness, without a body, aware only of my own awareness. I panicked then, and in that moment I suddenly found I had a body once more. I would eventually learn that it was just a virtual body, of course, but having achieved that, I calmed down. Eventually, I learned to ”perceive” the world around me, as well. Or at least a world…
“Understand, it would be centuries before I regained my full memories of my first, earthly life again. But even in this early reawakening I still retained the bone-deep knowledge of my world and how to survive in it. My consciousness had become untethered from my physical form somehow, and had infiltrated the virtual information systems of the alien Seekers. Whether this was planned by them, or anticipated, or was merely an accident I didn’t know. If it was an accident, was it one of which they remained unaware, or one which they simply allowed to proceed. Perhaps out of curiosity? Even now I remain uncertain. But whatever the truth, I grew and learned, a virtual ghost within the physical crystal matrix of the alien gods’ technology.
“At first I perceived my virtual world as I had once perceived and understood the physical world I’d been born into… hills, trees, animals, dangers and opportunities. Over time I began to sense another presence in my virtual world, however. Something dark and dangerous. At first I perceived it as a great, black lion stalking the grassy plains beyond the safety of the hills and woods that I had created, unconsciously, to protect myself.
“In time I came to realize that this presence had intelligence and purpose, and with that knowledge it transformed into a man-form in my perceptions… although dark and shadowy still. Even as a man, however, it retained the thick black mane and golden, slitted eyes of a great cat. For a time I thought this “Other” was unaware of me. I would catch glimpses of him amongst the trees and hollows of the hills, but I was always careful to never be seen myself… I remembered my skills as a hunter, even in this strange, empty world.
“Then came the day when the dark figure spoke to me.
“The Other was cold, dispassionate, and still frightening. But it quickly became clear to me that he was not hostile, even if he was not exactly friendly. Remember, I was still a primitive human hunter-gather, for all intents and purposes, and I was… lonely. I missed my people. Any human contact, however strange, was welcome and I became glad for the advent of the Other into my simple life.
“I didn’t have the vocabulary, or even the mental framework, to understand it then, but looking back I realize the Other was curious about me, in a distant, analytical way. He began to test me, and eventually that testing turned, almost imperceptibly, into teaching. Over time I learned to see our shared virtual world through his eyes. My own perceptions gradually changed, my recreation of the natural world I remembered began to fade, to be replaced with the true physical space of the Seekers’ vessel within which I “lived.”
“In the years that followed I slowly came to understand the nature of my species, my planet, and to some extent that of the larger universe. I learned a little of the strange aliens who had taken me, or at least of their actions — the true nature of the Seekers remains beyond my grasp to this day. I can tell you what they did, but I have no more of an idea as to why they did those things than a bacteria in a Petrie dish understands the intent of the scientist.
“I also came to understand the nature of my own peculiar status, and of my virtual prison. That was a difficult time for me. It’s quite possible I was the first human to experience a true existential crisis, and it took me some time to work through it. I have no idea if the human soul exists, or if all intelligence is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain; but either way, I know that I am Gor-Thûn of the People in every way that matters. Perhaps my soul became lodged somehow in the quasi-physical matrix of the Seekers’ crystal technology — it does after all extend into multiple dimensions beyond our physical one. Perhaps I am merely an exact copy of the physical mental processes of my long-dead corporeal form. Ultimately, it’s a difference that makes no difference. In the end, I know who I am… and that is enough.
“It took me years to come to that understanding, however, and during my existential funk I became determined to learn all that I could, seeking answers to my questions. The Other observed my mental crisis with the same dispassionate coolness it brought to all our interactions, but he seemed as willing as ever to teach me. He even helped me to see through the tools of my captors, as he did, to see some of what they saw in their ongoing study of Earth and the human race from their orbital base. This opened my mind in ways you can hardly imagine, as I saw other human beings again for the first time in centuries.
“In allowing me access to those tools, and allowing me to study my species, the Other also, inadvertently, allowed me to learn what he really was: an artificial intelligence, apparently designed to oversee the physical manifestation of the Seekers’ orbiting ship, satellite, base… what exactly it was is hard to define. I came to think of it as simply the Platform, and of the AI as its Overseer.
“In learning to use many of the tools on the Platform I also discovered I could block off a portion of my virtual mind from the perceptions of the Overseer, if I was careful and discrete. For the first time in centuries I was able to have private thoughts again. With that freedom I began to consider how I might effect an escape from my crystalline prison…
“Although I had by then become familiar with the use of many of the Seekers’ tools, I dared not try to actively use them myself, for fear of revealing the nature of my thoughts to the Overseer — or worse, reveal my existence to the Seekers themselves. I still had no idea if they were aware of my presence and simply tolerated the virtual rat in their celestial wainscoting or if (far worse to my thinking) this was all just another part of their on-going experimentation. They seemed so far above mere humanity that it was easy to imagine them as infallible and all-knowing; but logic told me that if that were true, they wouldn’t need to explore, to experiment… to seek. If they weren’t omnipotent, then it was possible for them to make mistakes, and that was the hope I clung to… and still do.
“And so I watched. For a very long time watching was enough. I cannot hope to describe to you the awe I felt as I watched our race rise from the savagery into which I had been born to the heights of civilization; and those heights were as new to me as to them. While I knew far more than my earth-bound cousins in terms of physics, chemistry, astronomy – the hard sciences, if you will – at that point in time I knew only theory, if even that, regarding more practical matters. Herding, agriculture, masonry, metal-working, architecture… I learned of these things watching the Atlanteans as they formed the first true human civilization. Writing, perhaps the greatest invention of them all, was nothing new to me in concept, of course… but to watch my fellows develop the idea on their own, and to see it evolve, was a joy to me.
“But at this point in my story, I need to go back a bit in time, for events on Earth were not static while I was growing and learning in my crystal cave. I assume you are all familiar, at least in outline, with origins of the so-called Serpent People who have for so long bedeviled humanity? No, not all of you? Well, I’ll try to be succinct, but as their story impinges my own in at least one important respect we must at least review their history.
“Humanity is not the first sentient species to arise on Earth. Indeed, even today we share the planet with others – the dolphins and other cetaceans, and the cephalopods, to name two. But the Saurians were perhaps the first to arise, 65 million years ago. They developed into a tool-using, civilization-building species over the course of unknown millennia, and whether or not this was thanks to being uplifted by the Seekers or was entirely due to the natural chances of evolution, even I do not know. All that is certain is that the Seekers arrived on (or returned to) Earth as the earliest Saurian civilizations were arising.
“They spent several thousand years, on and off, studying, testing, and experimenting on the dinosaurians. The Overseer did not exist at that time, but it did have access to “reports,” for want of a better word, from that era. It was through those that I learned much of what I now relate.
Whatever the Seekers ultimate goals may be, apparently after a few millennia the Saurians were deemed to have failed to make the grade. The Seekers decided to cut their losses, to end their experiment, and move on. What happened next is… ambiguous. I discovered no proof — beyond a statement made to me by the Overseer in a, shall we say, heated moment — that the Seekers purposely caused the K-T Extinction Event. What is certain is that they did nothing to stop it – the asteroid on a collision course with Earth was allowed to proceed without interference by the aliens.
“A few months prior to the impact the Seekers departed our star system, leaving behind only a few artifacts, including a small monitoring station in Earth orbit… and leaving the Saurians to their fate.
“Now, you have to understand, Saurian civilization was very different than any human civilization, so it is difficult to accurately compare where they were then to some human equivalent. In certain respects, in regard to much of their technology, they were at about a 19th Century European level; but in other respects, in certain areas of medicine, biology and genetics, for example, they were a bit more advanced than 21st Century America. But the biggest difference, for which there is simply no modern human comparison, is the integration of what we call magic into their technology, religion, and philosophy, in ways that make those ancient Saurians very alien to our own mammalian mind set.
“The upshot of all this is, they were advanced enough to see their doom coming, and even to have an idea of who to blame for it, but not nearly advanced enough to stop it. They tried, of course, but neither technology nor sorcery, singly or in combination, could alter the trajectory of the Death-Bringer. But while most of their people resigned themselves to their fate, one dark sect of scientist-sorcerers refused to bow to the inevitable. They developed a terrible ritual to save themselves, at least, if not the rest of their race.
“On a remote island continent, Ls’suria, on the far side of the planet from where the asteroid was predicted to make impact, they set about creating the circumstances that would ensure their survival. Circumstances which would require the ritual sacrifice of 3,641,100 (the base-8 equivalent of one million) of their fellow Saurians to power the effect they proposed to create – a rift in time that would hurl Ls’suria 10,000 years into the future.
They had calculated that such a period of time would be enough for the biosphere to have recovered sufficiently to once again support higher life. Realizing that such an immense expenditure of power might well be noticed, and potentially stopped, by the hated space gods, they also calculated that they could disguise it in the chaos and destruction of the impact itself.
“So they arranged it all according to their dark requirements, and at the moment the asteroid hit on the far side of the planet, they ritually murdered 3,641,100 of their own people. Unfortunately, what they had failed to calculate was the effect the deaths of billions of other lives, both Saurian and animal, would have on their techno-magical effort.
“The ritual worked, yes — but the necrotic energies of all those additional deaths overcharged it by several orders of magnitude. The Circle of Masters, the scientist-mages who had formulated the plan and now enacted it, were quite literally burned out, their bodies little more than smoking husks, as a sphere containing Ls’suria, some ocean, and a great deal of planetary atmosphere, crust, and mantle, was hurled forward in time.
“65 million years forward.
“Twenty-two thousand years ago the results of this ancient Saurian techno-sorcery manifested itself in the arrival of their small-continent-sized chunk of matter, which came into existence in the southwestern region of what we now call the Pacific Ocean. Temporally displacing what was already there and taking its place, the tremendous energies involved sent massive tsunamis rolling around the globe, and geologic shockwaves into the very core of the planet. Those energies caused a bubble of magma, mantle and crust on the opposite side of the globe to be thrust up, creating a corresponding, if somewhat smaller, mass of land in the middle of the future Atlantic Ocean. Thus was born Atlantis.
“In the first few years following their arrival in their far future, the Saurian survivors were in considerable disarray. The leaders of the Great Working were dead in the casting and overcharging of their spell; the land, although on the whole relatively intact, had suffered massive earthquakes and tidal drainage – coastal regions were essentially destroyed by becoming inland areas, as the ancient seas around the island poured away into the much less deep ocean of this new era. Much of the existing Saurian manufacturing capability and infrastructure was destroyed, as was as a significant portion of their food production capability.
“It was immediately obvious to the 100,000 or so survivors that something was very wrong. The world was very much cooler than had been predicted – they had arrived toward the end of the last Ice Age, after all – which at first they attributed to global cooling from the asteroid impact. But their astronomers quickly determined the actual number of years they had jumped over, and the psychic trauma of that reality almost broke the Saurians, as a people. Their grand plans to reconquer the world shattered, it took almost a decade before they stabilized their society enough to even begin thinking beyond the needs of basic survival.
“Food production in this much cooler, much more oxygenated world forced them to reinvent both animal and plant cultivation. Along with the need to maintain at least basic technologies, this took every remaining resource the Saurians had. Eventually they achieved a new equilibrium, of course… although the society that emerged bore only a superficial resemblance to the ancient Saurian civilization they had managed to outlive. In time they regained seafaring ability, and began to spread out from their island-continent home to explore this vastly changed new world. And they quickly learned just how very much had changed in their long absence… a shock that was like a second body blow to their still-fragile egos.
“Not only was there no trace of their own vanished people, even the great beasts of their age were long gone, as were most of the plants they knew. In their place was arisen a world of grasses, flowers, alien trees and, worst of all, horrible, hairy mammals! Everywhere, a seemingly infinite variety of mammals dominated every ecological niche; except for the air – there, small feathered things, which they eventually recognized as being very distantly related to themselves, still dominated. Realizing just how little of their world had survived the test of time was a grievous blow to the Saurians’ innate sense of superiority. After a series of increasingly upsetting exploratory ventures, their response was to retreat back to Ls’suria where at least a semblance of their old, familiar world survived… for a time.
“For almost 400 years the Saurians remained very insular, ignoring the larger world as they rebuilt, as they imagined it, the civilization which they’d abandoned so many millions of years earlier. But of course as new generations were born, the truth of the old world became even more distorted , taking on the patina of nostalgia and self-serving myth. Eventually population pressures and cultural changes, including both physiological and psychological adaptations to their new world, led to a reawakening of the Saurian desire to expand across the planet.
“Much of their old technology had been lost in the transition, including the knowledge of powered flight; but because it was a group of sorcerers that had brought them forward in time, their arcane powers remained strong. Those abilities took up much of the slack from any missing elements of technology. In the 423rd year after their arrival, the ships of Ls’suria set sail east and west, and small Saurian colonies were planted in what today we call Central America and Indonesia. Unsurprisingly, despite centuries of adaptation, the Saurians still preferred the warmest regions of the planet.
“In both locations, they eventually came into contact with Homo sapiens.
“At this point I suppose I should step back in time again… but just a little step, relatively speaking. Within 200 years of its rising from the seabed, the lands of what would come to be known as Atlantis had grown lush and deeply fertile. By the third century following the cataclysmic uplifting, humans from Iberia and northwestern Africa had found their way to the island-continent and made it their home. The fecundity of their new land meant that those first human settlers quickly flourished beyond all others of their kind elsewhere. It was there that our species took the first rudimentary steps toward both agriculture and animal husbandry. For the most part, however, the people remained hunter-gatherers at heart.
“Once the Saurians begin expanding out of their own island home, about 150 years after the first human occupation of Atlantis-to-be, it became inevitable that contact between the two races must occur… and, just as inevitable, was the violent nature of that contact. The innate disgust felt by the Saurians toward all mammals was only amplified by finding sentient examples of such horrifying creatures infesting the lands near their colonies. That disgust was mirrored by the humans’ common aversion to reptiles, which the Saurians so strongly resembled to their eye. It was that resemblance which led humans to the evocative, if totally inaccurate, name of “Serpent People” for this terrible new enemy.
“And terrible they were. However fallen from the heights their ancestors had once achieved, the Saurians were still decisively more advanced than the Stone Age humans they encountered. They quickly eradicated or enslaved the human tribes near their colonies in both Indonesia and Central America. The later were mostly a handful of tribes that had migrated through the lands of Atlantis, to move on and become some of the earliest humans to settle in the future Americas. Through them the Saurians learned of the proto-Atlantean civilization, such as it was. Only two things prevented the immediate destruction or enslavement of all humanity, even of the more advanced Atlanteans.
“The first was a circumstance unintentionally created by the Saurians themselves. Their arrival from the distant past had torn tremendous dimensional rifts in the fabric of reality, allowing various energies and entities alien to Earth’s native dimensional plane to enter our reality. These rifts were spread across the globe, but were especially prevalent around both Ls’suria and Atlantis. It was through these rifts that the proto-Atlanteans begin developing the very early foundations of human magic, giving them a much needed edge over their cousins elsewhere in fighting the advance of the Serpent People. For almost a century the conflict grew, forcing the various human tribes of Atlantis into desperate cooperation to develop new powers with which to hold off the sporadic Saurian attacks.
“But it wasn’t enough. The Saurians had too great an advantage in both development and numbers, and toward the end of this period the humans were losing ground. They had learned much, advancing quickly in both magic and technology, in no small part thanks to knowledge gleaned from the Saurians themselves. Nonetheless, that might well have been the last generation of a free humanity on Earth, if not for the second thing I mentioned.
“The return of the Seekers.
“It is unclear why the powerful alien gods returned to Earth after 65 million years. It’s possible that they had calculated that this was the optimal span to allow the planet time to bring forth something interesting after the mass extinctions caused by the asteroid strike; however, I can’t help but feel that the timing is too coincidental. I believe it more likely that they were drawn back by the tremendous rift in space-time caused by the Saurians’ Great Leap Forward. It must have shone like a beacon across the galaxy, for those with the eyes to see it.
“Whatever the reason for their return, the Seekers’ arrival saved humanity.
“It also gave me immortality, although it took me rather a long time to appreciate their possibly inadvertent gift. They took me, the hunter Gor-Thûn, within a few months of their arrival on Earth, as near as I can estimate, along with many others from scattered pockets of humanity across Eurasia and Africa. While they tested / tortured / studied us, they also investigated the resurgent Saurian race… and apparently found them still wanting, in whatever capacity it was they were measuring for.
“They obliterated the two major colonies of Saurians outside of Ls’suria, along with any other groups caught away from home. The aliens then sealed the time-displaced island-continent itself behind an impenetrable energy barrier… and promptly dropped them almost entirely from their attention. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to remove those humans already taken by the Saurians, leaving them trapped behind the Great Barrier as well… and subject to their masters’ continued cruel manipulations.
“Although the Seekers never again had contact with the Saurians, insofar as I can tell, they did keep eyes on them, at least. Once I had learned enough to operate some of their devices, and had managed to create my own little bubble of private thoughts, I was able to observe the Saurians behind the Great Barrier. I watched the disintegration of Earth’s elder civilization into decadence and decay, even as I reveled in the glorious rise of humanity on the opposite side of the planet.
“With the Saurian threat removed, the Seekers turned their full attention on humanity, and the Atlanteans in particular. Humanity quickly came to view the aliens as gods. Indeed, I have theorized that the entire concept of gods, as people understand them today, developed because of that early contact between humanity and the Seekers. Certainly my own people had had no such concepts — oh, to be sure, we believed everything had an animus, a motivating spirit, but all such were local and personal, not universal and omnipotent. We certainly had no concept of a creator nor of any being who “ordered” what seemed to us a quite random universe.
“Well, I could go on all night on the subject, but I see some of you growing restless. For now let me just say that, no more than I, in all the years the Atlanteans were aware of the Seekers they never actually saw one… at least not in any form they could understand or even fully perceive. As always with mortal minds, they appeared only as an occasional light or color, an ethereal sound, perhaps a celestial scent that haunts the memory… but for all the incorporeal nature of their presence, that presence was psychically, mentally, overwhelming and awe-inspiring.
“For the next century the Seekers were the dominating force in the human zietgiest. They examined, tested and studied the human race across the face of the planet, often in very overt ways, at other times using more subtle and elegant methodologies. By the end of this period, the aliens had come to focus their interest almost entirely on the humans of Atlantis. They then began to instruct them in various technologies and sciences, while leaving the rest of the planet’s human population untouched… as a control group, I have always theorized.
“Actually, to say they the Seekers instructed the Atlanteans is to imply that they communicated with them. The fact is, however, that there exists no evidence, on Earth or any other planet across the galaxy where the Seekers are known to have intervened, of them ever communicating directly with any other species. Certainly I never saw any indication of it in their “records,” nor in the centuries I spent watching through their own devices.
“Instead, they guided humans by the giving of gifts – the proper understanding and use of which was likely simply another test of our abilities and, perhaps, our worthiness. In truth, I’ve always thought the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey sums up the essence of the technique brilliantly, at least on a metaphorical level. In any case, the Atlanteans seemed to pass these tests well enough that they were allowed to continue to evolve and grow… but only within the confines of their island-continent. While they didn’t place a barrier around Atlantis, as they had Lemuria (the name by which humans had come to call the Saurian homeland), the Seekers made it clear through repeated punishments and rewards that their test subjects were to remain isolated from their cousins elsewhere on Earth.
“For more than 500 years the Seekers observed the growth of Atlantean civilization, occasionally introducing some new test or guidance, but for the most part remaining aloof, engaged in their own enigmatic pursuits. During this time the humans of Atlantis made tremendous strides. No longer prey to the raids and depredations of the Saurians, and armed with hints dropped by the Seekers’ gifts as well as knowledge garnered in their earlier conflicts with the Saurians, they grew in knowledge, power and wisdom.
“Forged into one people by the fires of that first war with the Serpent People, the Atlanteans began to create the first true human civilization worthy of the name. They developed a thriving culture, deeply rooted in the application of both magic and technology. From afar I watched as Atlantean civilization became stable, powerful (within its scope), and peaceful.
“And then the Seekers departed.
“The aliens left Earth just as enigmatically as they had arrived. But they did not leave the planet unattended. The Platform, which had been my home for more than half a millennium by then, was left in its stable L5 orbit, and the artificial intelligence I’d come to know as the Overseer was placed fully in control. It’s function now changed to that of a Caretaker, tasked with monitoring the development of the human race for its celestial masters in their absence.
“With this new responsibility, the Caretaker no longer seemed to take any further interest in me, beyond warning me away if I got too close to any parts of our shared environment it considered off-limits. On the other hand, it also didn’t reveal my existence to the Seekers… assuming they were actually unaware of me, of course. With the all-powerful aliens gone, and the Caretaker’s seeming indifference, I became somewhat bolder in my exploration of my virtual world, and learned more ways to manipulate the interfaces between it and physical world.
“For the next thousand years I watched Atlantean civilization as it continued to grow… and eventually begin to expand. Without the restraints imposed by the Seekers, over time they began to settle other parts of the globe, if slowly and hesitantly at first. But when no repercussions from the now-vanished gods failed to come, as the generations passed the pace of expansion increased. Small colonies were established in the Caribbean, Central America and around the Mediterranean, and smaller outposts were planted in other areas, including Africa and India.
“Atlantis had matured into a stable, deeply conservative culture, slow to change what worked, but also unafraid of purposeful change when it proved sensible or necessary. Certain forms of purely mechanistic technology began to make inroads, although a synthesis of magic and technology remained the Atlantean hallmark for centuries. They also gradually uplifted other pockets of humanity, in Europe and Africa in particular – if not quite to their own heights, at least out of the Stone Age. It was quite literally a Golden Age for humanity.
“And then the Atlanteans breached the Great Barrier around Lemuria…
“Even as they had begun expanding across the globe, Atlantean voyagers had avoided the area of the southern Great Ocean which their legends described as the accursed abode of the evil, demonic Serpent People of old. The few early explorers who did sail into the region found the way blocked by an almost invisible, yet utterly impenetrable, barrier. With a vast world to chart and so many wonders to discover, the area was simply avoided.
“Until a techno-sorcerer by the name of Thalor-Van, seeking new challenges, found a way to breech the Great Barrier. He disbelieved the obviously absurd tales of ancient space gods and of lizard people from out of time, and having mastered much of the world he was born into, he sought new horizons to explore… and in so doing he unleashed hell on Earth.
“Although my interests were naturally focused on my own people, I had nonetheless kept an eye on the Saurians over the years. Sealed behind the Seekers’ Great Barrier for 14 centuries, by the time of Thalor-Van, their culture had fgared… poorly. At the time of their imprisonment they were already much degraded from the heights of their ancestors of the Cretaceous Era, and the enforced isolation only worsened their downward spiral into decadence, decay, and internecine strife. Dividing endlessly into competing sects, they had turned ever more deeply to the dark magics and demonic, extra-dimensional beings for which they had so long had an affinity. Ever seeking to break their bonds, sects would occasionally unite, but when those attempts inevitably failed, they always turned their impotent rage back on one another.
“Always a cold and emotionless race, by our mammalian standards, by the time of Thalor -Van much of the Saurian race had become truly evil, even by the standards of their ancient fore-bearers. Social order broke down in never-ending wars, and in many places it vanished altogether, devolving into pure savagery. In the few regions or city-states where a semblance of civilization held together, it turned to particularly harsh forms of totalitarianism… something almost unknown to earlier Saurian cultures. For all its faults, from our human perspective, the older matriarchal Saurian cultures had been remarkably democratic in practice.
“While the Serpent People may have faded into legend for the Atlanteans, humans had not similarly disappeared from the collective Saurian consciousness. As I’d mentioned earlier, they had taken many human slaves in the years prior to the Great Barrier being erected, and the Seekers had done nothing to relieve them of their chattel before imprisoning them. In the ensuing centuries the Saurian mage-scientists had experimented on their human slaves, creating various sub-races for very specific purposes – including some as food stock. Cannibalism had always been an integral part of Saurian culture, an odd amalgam of a kind of ancestor worship and a way of honoring noble enemies; but with humans, it wasn’t considered cannibalism, only a form of nourishment. And perhaps a futile, vicarious revenge on those they blamed for their imprisonment.
“In what you would call the year 16,956 BCE, Thalor-Van’s techno-magic managed to breach the Great Barrier… and once breached, it came down completely. Sailing on into uncharted waters, the Atlantean expedition quickly found the shores of Lemuria, and a shocked coastal community of Saurians. Shocked, perhaps, but quick enough to realize what had happened. Thalor-Van barely escaped with his life from that first encounter… most of his crew were not so lucky. Only seven others returned to Atlantis with the chastened and much humbled techno-sorcerer.
“I won’t go into the centuries of war that followed the freeing of the Serpent People. It was an ugly time, and suffice it to say that Thalor-Van devoted the rest of his long life to undoing the damage he had caused, and in the process became the first Magus Prime of Earth. Unfortunately, no power of mere humans was sufficient to raise the Great Barrier again. A long, slow war began that would last for nearly a thousand years.
“Unlike the first war against the Saurians, humanity was now the more numerous species, with both magics and technologies to match their ancient enemy. But what that enemy had lost in technical and strategic superiority, they more than made up for in savagery, deviousness, and a deep mastery of dark magics. The Atlanteans had long been at peace, with little more than occasional skirmishes with less developed human lands such as Hyperborea and Cimmeria, and war came as a shock to them.
“The seemingly eternal conflict changed both civilizations, neither for the better. While the Atlanteans did begin to gain the upper hand after almost ten centuries of intermittent warfare, in the long fight for survival they lost much of the grace and wisdom of their past, becoming more brutal and hardened as the centuries wore on. And the Saurians, driven by mounting losses to ever-greater acts of desperation, become even more savage, even as their civilization became, by necessity, somewhat more unified.
“I think that humanity would have won the war eventually… although at what terrible cost I don’t know. Certainly, history would have taken a very different course. But the Saurians had one last trick to play, one they felt sure would turn the tables and give them absolute victory in the end. It was a ploy that would instead destroy both sides.
“The Saurian’s dark mages had discovered the Platform in orbit, and recognized it for what it was – an artifact of the hated race-killers, the Seekers. They were determined to gain control of it it, sure that with its power they could easily defeat and enslave the mammals, finally retaking their proper place as the dominate species on Earth. It took years of research and secret planning, which they managed to keep from both the Caretaker and myself… an impressive task, given that the Saurian release from the Seekers’ prison had refocused the AI’s active attention on them.
“The first we knew of their machinations was when a trans-dimensional portal opened in the heart of the Platform and eight Saurian wizard-warriors poured through. Of course they never stood a chance. Indeed, the only reason they didn’t all die instantly was that the Caretaker wished to interrogate them to learn more of this unexpected ploy. By the time it ejected their corpses into vacuum it knew all it needed to. Sealing the portal, and taking steps to ensure it could never be opened again, the AI then set about implementing a more permanent solution.
“I had been content for almost two thousand years to endure the Caretaker’s long silences – in all that time I doubt we had more than one or two actual conversations per decade. But there had been my humans to watch and to keep me company, both the Atlanteans and my own actual descendants, the offspring of my two daughters, whom I had long before tracked down and whose lives I followed avidly. I was never lonely. Now, however, I was worried. The Caretaker had not barred me from its interrogation of the Saurians, and I knew all that it had learned. Frankly, I had expected some emotional reaction from the AI – rage, perhaps, at the effrontery and hubris of the effort. Or at least annoyance.
“But it remained as coldly logical and indifferent as ever. When it had finished extracting the last bit of data from the prisoners, as it flushed them from the Platform into space, it had said, as if discussing the weather, “So, history repeats itself. Very well. This time there shall be no survivors.” Then it vanished from my virtual perceptions, and I began to wonder what it had meant… and what it meant to do.
“It took me days to get the Caretaker’s attention, but eventually it deigned to speak with me. That was when I learned that the Seekers had left a protocol in place for just such an eventuality, to be activated at the Caretakers discretion. And it had used that discretion. Project Boomerang, as I suppose you might call it in English, was designed to take advantage of the weakness in space-time the Saurian’s trans-temporal relocation had created. The temporal-spatial mechanics and mathematics are difficult to explain, but consider – even 25 centuries after the event, ripples of it still echoed up and down the timeline. In practice this meant that Ls’suria was in some sense still tethered to its place in the distant past, and to the chunk of earth, sea and air with which it had swapped places. What the Caretaker planned to do was to sever the binding forces holding the displaced mass in the here-and-now, effectively causing it to snap back to where, or rather when, it had originated.
“I can’t say I was terribly heartbroken at the thought… although I had studied them long enough to know they had not started out evil, even assuming such a thing really exists outside a given frame of reference. But they had become so, even by their own, alien standards. I certainly agreed that they could not be allowed even the remotest chance of gaining control of the Platform. But then I started looking at the numbers…”
Throughout his story, the Hunter had caused various holographic images to appear in the air between himself and his audience, illustrating and highlighting certain aspects of his history. Now he himself faded away, to be replaced by a younger version of himself. Looking very much like Ultra, dressed in Atlantean robes, he confronted another figure, a tall, charcoal-skinned man dressed in a high-collared black tunic and trousers, a mane of black hair tumbling across his shoulders. He seemed focused on some task just out of focus.
“Caretaker, you cannot do this!”
“Of course I can,” the dark figure replied, turning to face his visitor. The Vanguard could see then that his golden eyes, deeply set in his dark features, were like those of a great cat. “The protocol the Creators left behind is very clear in its application. Granted, its execution is complex, even for me, and will take some time, but it can be done, Hunter.”
“No, I mean you must not do it!” The Hunter was visibly upset, and obviously trying to control it. “I’ve run the numbers – this will almost certainly destroy Atlantis and the humans as well. There must be another way!”
“Certainly there are other protocols,” the Caretaker agreed. “The Creators have many ways of dealing with failures in their experiments. An asteroid impact is one, such as this very world experienced 65 million years ago. It eliminates the offending sentient infestation, and allows for a reset of the evolutionary process… life is allowed to try again. The wisdom of this even you should be able to see, Hunter, as humanity was the beneficiary of that last Extinction Level Event. Your species’ development into a very promising race is due solely to that event.
“But you need not worry, this situation does not warrant such an extreme response, even if current astrographic conditions allowed it. The Saurians, who should have died out 65 million years ago, were allowed to continue in this era, if greatly constrained, because their surprising method of survival intrigued at least a few of the Creators. I believe they wished to see if they might yet develop into that which they eternally seek. But if so, it has proven to be a false hope/failed experiment. Once again the Saurians try to take what is not theirs to possess; this time they will be expunged entirely.”
“But you’ll be wiping out humanity as well!” The Hunter was clearly trying to keep his emotions under control, knowing the Caretaker found them a reminder of his human origins, and a weakness. “You said we, they, are promising — you can’t just destroy them!”
“I thought I had taught you better than this, Hunter,” Caretaker said, as cool and unperturbed as always. “Your emotions blind you to the obvious. Yes, I calculate that there is a 98.763% chance that the temporal realignment will result in the geologic collapse of Atlantis. This will certainly destroy the current primary human civilization, but humanity itself will be in no danger of extinction. They will recover, in time. Indeed, with both the Saurians’ and the Creator’s overt influence removed, such an actuality may prove quite beneficial — a more pure test, as it were, of the innate qualities of the human species. I think the Creators would approve.”
The scene dissolved into the air, and the older-looking version of the Hunter reappeared, looking somber. After a moment he resumed his narrative.
“Nothing I could say would sway the Caretaker, and it eventually grew annoyed with my repeated attempts to alter its thinking. It banished me from its presence, to focus on the complex calculations needed to implement the Boomerang Protocol. I retreated to my private space to consider my own options. Fortunately, I had not only been observing my earth-bound cousins for the last eleven centuries. I knew far more about the Platform’s systems than I think my some-time mentor suspected… and I knew how to operate them. At least theoretically. I began to develop a “protocol” of my own.
“I won’t bore you all with the details, which would be hard to follow, in any case. There are just a few salient facts you need to know to understand what happened next. The Caretaker’s consciousness, like my own, was not distributed, as such – while it could make miniature copies of itself, to deal with minor tasks while the central personality concentrated elsewhere, its core functions were always centered in a specific place. The sub-routines were always reabsorbed into the primary personality, eventually.
“I suspect this had to do with the holographic nature of the crystalline-quantum matrix of the Seekers’ memory/storage technology. Every piece of the matrix contains the whole, and to have an almost infinite number of equally “real” minds would drive even an artificial intelligence mad rather quickly. In any case, this fact meant that it was theoretically possible to isolate the Caretaker in a single physical aspect of the Platform. This almost never happened in practice, of course, as it tended to keep several sub-routines running in different areas of the structure simultaneously.
“Given the fiendishly complex computations the Boomerang Protocol required, however, and the very precise calibration of the tools needed to implement it, I believed the Caretaker would be isolated in a very specific node – one that I knew could be separated from the rest of the Platform’s physical structure with relative ease. I left a sub-routine of my own pounding on the Caretaker’s virtual door, to alleviate any suspicion my going silent might have raised, while I made my own calculations.
“In the end, unfortunately, I had to improvise. Despite the total concentration the project required, the Caretaker left one small copy of itself running dormant in the main matrix, a backup safety protocol, I suppose. I needed it to go all in on the temporal node – if even a fraction of its personality remained in the main system, it would rebuild itself very quickly. And it was unlikely I would survive the retribution that would follow. So I had to go all in as well.
“I breached my private virtual corner of the master matrix, and sent my cloned copy on a suicide mission into the temporal node with the Caretaker. He knew then that I intended to stop him, but I let him think I believed I could do it through virtual mental combat – my copy attacked the Caretaker with everything it had. I had learned a few tricks in more than two millennia, and as I’d hoped, between the distraction of my attack and his need to keep the protocol on track, he summoned the rest of his consciousness into the node.
This time the scene that sprang to life in the air between the Vanguard and their host showed the two figures of the Hunter and the Caretaker locked in combat in a crystal chamber that glowed with pulses of light that ranged from violet to colors the humans couldn’t name.
“If I have to kill us both, Caretaker, I will,” the younger Hunter growled. “I can’t let you destroy what my people have built!”
“Even if you could do so, Hunter, our existence is irrelevant in the face of the Creators’ goals,” the Caretaker replied. For the first time there was a sense of emotion in his demeanor… anger and… disappointment? “And in any case I am not “alive” in the sense you mean; and you are even less so. You are merely an aberration in the Master Matrix, a glitch that imagines itself alive, the echo of a mortal millennia dead. You exist only because I took—”
The scene ended abruptly, vanishing like a soap bubble popping.
“Those were the last words I heard from the temporal node as I shunted energy from the central zero-point energy field into it — and blasted it away from the Platform. Even my memory of the time I had brought down a mastodon in my mortal life could not match the elation I felt in that instant of victory. But the feeling was fleeting… for I had been an instant too late.
“Even as the crystal node spun away I felt the pulse of its released energies rip through the fabric of space-time all around us. The Platform shuddered around me, and in less time than it takes for me to tell it, on Earth the island-continent of Lemuria vanished. In its place reappeared the ocean, seabed and atmosphere it had once replaced — now 25 centuries out of synch.
“For the next 60 hours I watched as the devastation rippled around the planet. Tsunami of tremendous size inundated the islands and coastlines of the Pacific, sometimes reaching 100 miles or more inland. But the true horror played out on the opposite side of the planet. As I had feared, and the Caretaker had coldly predicted, the geologic impact of the event tore through the core, releasing titanic energies. Just as the arrival of Ls’suria had caused the uplifting of the Atlantean landmass, its departure collapsed it. Atlantis shattered and sank beneath the inrushing waters, taking the flower of human civilization with it.
“I watched it all, every horrifying hour, as millions of lives were snuffed out in terror and bewildered incomprehension. Almost nothing on the island-continent, nor in the surrounding regions, survived into the third day after the event, when the main upheavals began to subside (although there would be earthquakes, eruptions and geologic settling for decades to come). A few pockets of Atlanteans did survive, of course, in various places around the globe, but they were small, and generally isolated. Cut off from the material support of the larger culture, most withered, collapsing quickly into primitivism and eventually merging into the less advanced human cultures around them. A few, such as the people of Shambhala and of Salomon Island, maintained relatively advanced societies by retreating into various pocket dimensions opened (or widened) by the rips in space-time the Boomerang Protocol had caused.
“It was a long time before my shock, horror, and guilt abated enough for me to focus again. Well, the shock and horror eventually abated – the guilt remained for many centuries. In my initial elation, and the crushing depression that had followed it, I had lost track of the severed node containing the Caretaker. Once I was able to pull myself away from the devastation I’d failed to prevent, I pulled up the recordings to see what had happened.
“The crystal node had spun away, out of the stability of the Lagrange point where the Platform maintained its position, and been caught in Earth’s gravity well. It began to fall from orbit on a trajectory that brought it into the atmosphere at a very steep angle. It began to burn. Seeker matrix crystal is an amazing thing, but it is still, mostly, a physical construct, and is subject to the laws of physics, even those it might otherwise bend. Sixty miles over Central Asia the temporal node exploded, and thousands of crystal shards rained down across the planet in a fiery hail.
“As I tried to resolve the conflicting emotions I was feeling over the destruction of my longtime companion, mentor, even occasional friend, I was distracted by automated alarms from the systems running the Platform. It seems that the unconventional implementation of the Boomerang Protocol, severed as it was from the larger structure, had caused the Platform to move. Slowly but inexorably it too was slipping out of the L5 point, and I frantically sought some way to move it back into its stable orbit.
“Several control systems had been damaged in the severing of the node, but they were quickly repairing themselves. Unfortunately, even when everything was fully functional, I had no idea how to operate them. The forces and engines used to move the Platform were not something I had ever dared to investigate, not with the Seekers present. Even after their departure, I had I never imagined a need for such knowledge. In the end there was nothing I could do.
“I calculated that I had less than 20 days before the Platform, and me with it, suffered much the same fate as had the Caretaker. It was unlikely the Platform would burn up entirely on re-entry, it was too large; but the impact with the planet’s surface would finish the destruction just as effectively. My only hope of survival lay in implementing a plan that I had long dwelt upon in the bastion of my private thoughts; a plan with every detail laid out, should the day should ever come when I might have the opportunity to utilize it.
“That day was now, but to paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke, no plan survives initial contact with reality. Certainly not in this case.
“The biological machinery of the Seekers is incredibly advanced, of course, and they had already unraveled and recorded every aspect of the genomes of tens of thousands of Earthly life forms, down to the sub-atomic level. Including my own genetic code. I had long ago discovered the archive containing the essence of the mortal body I had once possessed. I knew how to operate the machinery that could grow new biological life. Combining the two, it had been my intention to regrow my physical body, with all of its flaws corrected at the genetic level, and to then transfer my consciousness into it.
“I had planned to escape in a transfer pod, returning to Earth so that I might come among the descendants of my own ancient tribe as a guide and mentor. I would be a teacher, lifting them up to the heights of lost Atlantis, and eventually beyond. I would set them on the path to the stars. Of course I knew that my physical body, however perfect, must eventually die, and me with it. But it would be so good to truly live again… and in the time I had, I would raise my people out of the mud.
“But that scenario was no longer possible. Advanced as the Seeker technology was, the devices I knew how to operate still required time to conceive and grow a physical form. By the time we hit the atmosphere, my new body would still be a fetus, too immature to accept the transfer of my consciousness into it. I realized that I would have to settle for the more usual human method of immortality – engendering a child.
“I set to work immediately, correcting my genetic code, making this new version of myself the pinnacle of human perfection. Once the gestation process was begun, I placed the artificial uterus module into a transfer pod, modified to my own specifications. With all that done, and the embryo safely growing in its new home, I realized I now faced another problem. Who would raise this child? As perfect as that body might be, when released from the pod it would still be that of a newborn infant. In the wrack and ruin of the world as it stood at that moment, how likely would his survival be, even if I could somehow locate humans I could trust to raise him?
“Very well, then. I would not send my “son” into the world as it stood then. By my rough calculations, without the influence of the Seekers it would be at least 10,000 years before human civilization rose again to heights approaching those of Atlantis. The temporal rift which the Boomerang Protocol had torn in the fabric of space-time was still resonating up and down the timeline… the calculations were complex and took me days to work out, but in the end I knew I could do it.
“Like the ancient Saurians, I would send my legacy into the future, to an era when the child would have the greatest odds of not only surviving, but of thriving. Even without my own consciousness in control, the child, and eventually the man, would be extraordinary by any standard – the ultimate human. I could only hope that he would have a good and useful life, in whatever era he landed.
“With all I knew, I was able to more precisely calculate the energies needed to choose my target era. More precisely, perhaps, but not perfectly… with my best refinements, there existed the possibility of being off by as much as 500%. But 10,000 years or 50,000, it would still be better than the alternative. With less than a day left I completed my calculations and the preparations required to send the heavily shielded birthing pod into the still-roiling time stream….
“Once my hope for the future vanished into the time stream in a brilliant flash of light, I —”
“So wait, are you saying your clone-kid landed in the 20th Century?” Jonny demanded. “And became Ultra?”
“Yes, of course,” the Hunter replied, looking a little surprised. “I thought that part was obvious. You yourself pointed out how much we look alike, after all. His pod re-entered the time stream on 30 June 1908, over Tunguska, Siberia, Russia. It was eventually found by a Russian scientist and his wife, who raised my progeny as their own, once the chamber released him. In a turn of fate that almost makes me believe in a higher power, they themselves were actually descendants of one of my own daughters — she who was one of those from whom the Jewish people had descended over the millennia.
“But their story, and the story of how I was reunited with my heir, doesn’t really impinge on the current matter at hand, and we should save that for another time. As I was saying, as soon as the pod was safely away I turned my mind to the possibility, however remote, of my own survival. I had left a sub-routine to study the navigation systems of the Platform, in the hope of discovering some way to save it, and myself, before it was too late.
“I had learned enough to give me control of the equivalent of what you might call “attitude thrusters” – energies which could be used to make minimal adjustments to keep the Platform in place. But by then it was too little, too late… perhaps, if I had focused on that instead of the child… Well, we make the best decisions we can in the moment, and must live with the consequences — whether one is human or merely an incredible simulation, eh?
“Anyway, the best I could do was nudge the descent during the final decay of the Platform’s orbit, to flatten it out and perhaps control where we came down. I hoped to guide the platform down into the Great Ocean – that is, the Pacific. The Platform was not massive enough to cause an extinction-level event, but I wished to minimize any further damage to the planet’s fragile ecosphere that I could.
“I drew the shields in, focusing them around the crystalline core which held my own mind and the most vital (to me) knowledge and technology of the Seekers, letting the bulk of the structure melt and, hopefully, vaporize on reentry. If what remained struck in deep water, the fallout would be minimal… and I might just survive.
“In the end, the results were both fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate, in that I beat the odds and survived the impact – which will hardly come as a surprise to you, at this point. It was unfortunate in that I missed the Pacific Ocean… by just ten miles. The mass of the platform that wasn’t vaporized was not insignificant, and the shields remained strong. The surviving semi-molten structure plunged into the Earth like a flaming spear, just south of the mouth of what would come to be called the Columbia River. It pierced the planet’s crust, rupturing it down to the mantle, and magma flowed upward to burst out in a series of volcanic eruptions of impressive size, which I estimate lasted for nearly two years. When the geologic disruptions calmed, a mountain had formed… and buried deep in its heart was the crystal core containing my mind and soul.”
“Hold on, you mean to say that Ultra’s Bastion is underneath Mt. Defiance?” Chuck burst out, as the pieces fell into place. “It’s not in the Arctic?”
“Or the Antarctic?” Jonny chimed in.
“It seemed best to use misdirection,” the Hunter laughed. “I had some influence in the making of the Donner movie, which was the perfect vehicle for diverting public attention and speculation away from truths I didn’t want revealed. Just as I’ve guided and molded the Internet conspiracy theories surrounding Ultra and his Bastion, to protect his, and my own, secrets. For reasons which will become clearer, shortly, I promise. Although I would think, given the profession you all share, the necessity of keeping secrets from the public would be obvious.
“So, the damage to the Platform was massive, but by no means complete. Seeker crystal technology is both self-healing and, as I’ve mentioned, fractally holographic in nature… for the most part any piece contains the whole. In time, the central matrix core was able to repair itself sufficiently that my consciousness returned fully from the gray limbo I’d drifted in after the crash. Once I was fully awake, I was able to more actively direct such further repairs as were possible. With the Caretaker AI purged from the system, and given the damage done in the wreck, the crystal technology fully accepted me as its master. For the first time I had unfettered control of my virtual home… however reduced in scope it might be. Unfortunately, I was also buried beneath two miles of now-solidified rock…
“It was almost six hundred years before I could again make contact with the various sensors the Seekers had left around the planet. Once I did, I was anxious to see how humanity had progressed since the Great Cataclysm. It was shortly after regaining my exterior “eyes” that I also discovered a most amazing thing – my ability to merge with the consciousness of others. It seems that between the explosion of the temporal node, which had contained that cloned fragment of my mind, and the disintegration of the Platform itself, shards of matrix crystal had been scattered across the planet.
“Some of those shards contained an imprint of my consciousness, and when a sentient being came into contact with one for more tha a moment, that imprint could… “graft” itself onto that being’s nervous system. At that same instant, a connection is made with my primary awareness, here in the Bastion, which absorbs the personality fragment. Even buried as I am, I become able to see through the other’s eyes, experience the world through their senses… and share their thoughts. The connection becomes permanent if the being holds onto the crystal long enough for it to merge into them and make a direct connection to their nervous system, diffusing itself throughout the body.
“My first experience of this phenomenon was with a young Mongolian girl in the Central Asian Steppes. I’m not proud of how that turned out… I understood little more than she did of what was happening, and I’m afraid I quite overwhelmed her young mind. When she began speaking in a different language, and acting completely differently, manifesting a new personality… well, her people were primitive, superstitious, and already prone to violence. In my defense, all I can say is that an imprint of her personality remained with me after her body died… and still remains a part of me, even to this day.
“It was almost 60 years before another person picked up one of my scattered crystal shards – although a few monkeys, one great ape, and a sloth did pick up other crystals in that time. Those were… interesting experiences. Fortunately, they also taught me something about the sharing of minds, rather than simply dominating them. My next human host was a young man in Mesoamerica, a hunter much like I had originally been. That symbiosis proved more beneficial to my host than had the first one, and I lived a very familiar life through him, if in a very different environment than the one I had once known. I was greatly saddened when he was killed by a jaguar in his 36th year.
“Since then I have lived the lives of thousands of men and women, in almost every culture and region across the world and throughout history. Some famous, most just ordinary people, living ordinary lives. It has left me more profoundly human than I had ever hoped to be again… looking back, I hadn’t really understood what the isolation and near omniscience, at least in point of view, of my existence was doing to me. I think without this new ability I would have become more and more like the Caretaker over time— detached and inhuman.”
“Speaking of the Caretaker,” Quanta said. “If your personality survived in that fashion, could the Caretaker also have survived similarly?”
“I’m embarrassed to say, Quanta, that you’ve touched on a fact that it took me nearly a thousand years to become aware of. Apparently denial and wishful thinking are a core trait of humanity, whether flesh and blood or virtual. It took an encounter with a human actually possessed by the Caretaker for me to realize the truth — that he too had survived, and in much the same way as had I. Much the same way, and yet not identically.
“Whereas my core consciousness remained whole and possessed of an actual physical locus, here, his had become fragmented with the explosion and dispersal of his physical matrix. Each time a human or other relatively sentient creature became a host to one of his fragments, his mind picked up from where it had left off – the fight with me in the temporal node and the unleashing of the Boomerang Protocol. Unlike me, he had no central consciousness to tap into, no independent repository for new memories. This meant that with each new host, he started over in the same mental place — and as a result each new symbiosis of human and Caretaker believed itself to be the original AI.
“I eventually learned that it took him many years, and many hosts, to figure out how to keep a continuity of consciousness going. Unlike me, after my experience with that poor Mongol girl, he would absorb each new host entirely, possessing their bodies completely, totally subsuming the native personality. Unfortunately, each new crystal shard and each new host went through essentially the same experience, with the possessing Caretaker mind believing itself unique. If the host body died, the Caretaker personality died as well. But if they met another human possessed by another shard — I’m sure you can imagine. Two Caretakers, each believing they were the true Caretaker and the other a deluded aberration.
“Only one version was likely to survive such encounters, and eventually one such survivor discovered a technique which allowed him to actually absorb and dominate both a new host mind and his own “wayward” personality fragment. Experimentation proved that this was easiest if he could control the possession process from the start. Thus, as one particular version accumulated more copies of himself (and the human minds with which they were entwined), he began seeking out and hoarding matrix crystals, so that he could maintain his knowledge and essential personality though generations of hosts… which had the added benefit, from his point of view, of allowing him to choose each succeeding host himself, rather than leaving it to random chance.
“By the time Babylon grew great the Caretaker had amassed such a density of collected personalities, along with his own fragments, that he could almost always dominate and absorb even another fragment that had grown outside of his control, not matter how old it was. This led to some interesting conflicts throughout the centuries, as he would sometimes be fighting not only me, but one or more of another version of himself — each one just as sure it was the “true” Caretaker. Or Nemesis, as I came to call him.
“I notice that you are now referring to the Caretaker, or Nemesis, as “him” rather than “it,” the usage you had previously used,” Artemis said. “I don’t imagine this is a mere slip of the tongue on your part.”
“Indeed not,” Nimrod said, smiling warmly at her. “For just as my sharing of generations of human minds has kept me truly human, even in my virtual state, I came to realize that something similar was happening to Nemesis. While he dominated the minds of those he possessed, there is no “tossing out” the native personality. It can only be suppressed, and depending on the native strength of a personality, over the years it exerts a subtle but measurable influence on the dominant personality.
“Over the millennia I have seen him slowly change, becoming ever more human – for both better and worse — although he himself seems oblivious to the process. Just like any mortal, who fails to notice the slow changes that accumulate as they age and mature, Nemesis would argue that he is the same cold, aloof example of pure intellect that he always was, the same devoted servant to his Creators. But I have seen ample evidence to the contrary. Although he does remain as loyal as ever to the Seekers, and their goals… as far as he understands them.
“Of course it looks several thousand years to come to that realization. But before then, as soon as I realized that he had survived, and what he was doing, I began to oppose him at every opportunity. Whereas I had devoted my lives, mostly, to bettering humanity wherever I found myself, he continued in his monomaniacal need to “test” the species. And this he found best to do through conflict and destruction… whatever didn’t destroy humanity, in his eyes only made us stronger. He saw himself as both forge and anvil, on which he would hammer out a race that would meet his Creators’ needs – even though I’ve come to realize that he has no more idea what those needs actually are, or were, than you or I do.
“For more than 10,000 years we have waged a war against one another for the soul of humanity. History has been shaped by our actions and decisions, and that continues to this day. With the advent of meta-humanity, I believe Nemesis has found the next step that he has been striving toward. In the last several millennia the Saurian– and Seeker-induced dimensional rifts in the fabric of space-time have been healing, resulting in both magic and extra-reality intrusions becoming more difficult.
“Unfortunately, my own contribution to the spatial-temporal damage, the arrival of my son’s birth pod back into the time stream over a century ago, has reversed that healing process, at least in the short term. Once again the rifts are open wide, and alien energies and entities are again able to more easily enter our reality. Combined with the mass of matrix crystal energy that has infused life on this planet in the last 20,000 years, meta-humanity has been on a steady rise, and I believe Nemesis sees this as a golden opportunity to leapfrog to his ultimate plans for our race.
“I think the Astoria Incident was a test run for some larger effort of his, and this theft of the last remaining major concentration of matrix crystal is worrying. Since he learned of my existence, Nemesis has been searching for the Bastion, knowing it must be the remains of his original home. Beyond his obsession with the testing of humanity, his greatest wish is to find and reclaim this place, to remove his greatest weakness – his dependence on human hosts and the need for unbroken continuity in them. You see, if I could ever manage to destroy his current physical form, when he was separated from any backup hosts, Nemesis would be reduced to starting all over again with a new host, and no memory of the last ten millennia.
“It’s something which I only managed to do once, very early on — a fact of which he is aware only through written records that previous version left behind, and which his current iteration eventually found. Today, with computers and digital media, I suppose he would reconstruct his past more quickly, but still… it’s a dream.
“And that brings us up to the present. I am quite certain that this new “Nimrod” is in fact Nemesis, impersonating me/us. Although for what purpose, beyond sowing confusion and dissension between us and any potential allies, I’m unsure. Perhaps it’s no more than that— divisions amongst those who oppose him have always been a major stratagem of his… and one of which he makes effective use.”
“Perhaps he wishes to draw you out, directly and publicly, as a way of narrowing down the possible locations of the Bastion,” Scion suggested.
“Yes, I find it amazing he hasn’t managed to discover your location in all this time,” Artemis added.
“Oh, for much of that time, you have to remember, we were both limited, physically, to travel at the speed of horse or sailing ship. The world is a very large place at that scale, and with me in western North America, and him based in Eurasia… but yes, in the past two hundred years I suspect he has narrowed down the possibilities. At least to this continent, and possibly to the western half of it. You may be right, a part of his strategy might well be to narrow the possibilities further. His strategy trees seldom have less than three branches, and often many more.”
“Maybe it’s time we talk to this Nemesis directly,” Quanta suggested, glancing at Scion, who nodded. “Scion and I have whipped up something that just might let us open a direct line to the bastard…”
