Luanna used her elbow to hit the cover of the vent shaft she was crawling through, smacking it repeatedly till it fell to the floor. SYMBYTHU had undoubtedly learned of her escape by now, so it didn’t concern her how much noise she made. She hopped down, landing gracefully on her feet. The room she found herself in was similar in appearance to the one she had woken in hours ago, but smaller and busier. There were shelves lined with curious, oddly-shaped bottles that looked as if they might have medical applications, along with boxes and crates marked with peculiar placards, their meanings unknown to Luanna. She moved quickly to the door, turned the lock, and exited the room.

She found herself in the endless hallway again, unsure which way to turn to find her way out of her prison. After momentarily debating with herself, she turned left because SYMBYTHU had led her to the right previously. She ran down the corridor, stopping at the different rooms she passed to look for some type of weapon she could use for when SYMBYTHU inevitably found her.

The seventh room she passed gave her an unexpected shock. It was enormous, filled to the brim with row upon row of cylindrical pods. Luanna’s curiosity got the better of her and she had to investigate. She opened the door, walked to the nearest pod, and opened it.

She jumped back in dumbfounded horror.

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Jax was sitting on the couch, trying to combat his boredom. He didn’t want to read SYMBYTHU’s book again for it would only throw him deeper into his depression. He was initially nonchalant about Prodigium, but after reflection, he found himself becoming more nonplus towards it. This had begun his drive into depression. Without being told by SYMBYTHU, Jax knew his family on Proxima Borealis was dead, along with everyone he knew and cared about. It made him not want to live anymore…what do I have to fight for now?

This line of thought had paralyzed him to the couch. He could have ordered whatever food or drink he wanted from SYMBYTHU’s amazing machine, but he didn’t want anything. He could have explored the large room he found himself in, but he didn’t want to move. He just sat in the couch, statuesque in his appearance, wishing the entire world would just melt away—or at least his existence in it.

Before he could dive further into his dejection, SYMBYTHU entered with many people in tow. “Commander Landry, please come with me.”

The matter-of-fact attitude SYMBYTHU displayed snapped Jax out of his darkness. With much effort and willpower, he moved his body from the couch and followed SYMBYTHU and his entourage.

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Luanna had finished planting explosives around the enormous room.

She had returned to the room with the strange bottles and crates with unknown placards, knowing one of them must have explosives—or at least material she could turn into explosives. Sure enough, she found a crate behind all the rest with a placard that displayed an explosion. She opened it to confirm, then brought it to the room in which the…those things were.

Now that they were in place, she needed to find a safe place to detonate from. She exited the room and ran down the long hallway, going as far as she could before she was either far enough away or stopped by SYMBYTHU.

Then she came across a man wandering the hallways that she hadn’t seen in ages but somehow felt it hadn’t been that long. “Atticus! Atticus! Come here! Do you remember me?”

Atticus had a lost and confused look on his face initially, and then a look of remembrance animated his face. “Luanna?”

Luanna smiled. “Yes! Did you just wake up?”

“Yes, but I don’t know where I am or…who I am? Who am I?”

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Luanna looked intently at him and said, “You are Atticus Payne, hero of Proxima Borealis, Governor of Astra Capella, and my truest friend. I know you don’t have your memories right now, but you will see with time.”

She took Atticus by the hand to help him, and they rounded the corner of the hall. Awaiting them there were SYMBYTHU and many other people—two of them the familiar faces of Mars and Jax, which alarmed her even more. She clutched the detonator fiercely as it was her only means of bargaining and put herself between SYMBYTHU and Atticus.

“Commander Spektor,” began SYMBYTHU. “Please, do not detonate those explosives.”

Hearing SYMBYTHU talk enraged Luanna all the more. “I’ll blow you and your damned clones to the sky in a heartbeat if you keep talking to me, you sard!”

Mars stepped in. “Atticus, I’m glad to see you alive and well. Luanna, please. I don’t know what’s upset you so, but setting off those explosives isn’t the answer. Talk to me.”

Luanna found herself calmed by Mars’ friendly voice and allowed reason to overcome her anger. “Mars, follow me.”

She led them back the long way she had come from without a word said amongst them. When they reached it, she again looked at Mars and said, “Go in that room, open one of cylinders, and see for yourself why I’m ready to blow that room away.”

Mars agreed, walked into the room, opened the closest cylinder, and understood immediately why Luanna had reacted so. “SYMBYTHU!” he yelled. SYMBYTHU and the others entered the vast room, followed in the rear by Luanna and Atticus. “Explain this to me, now!” Mars said as he pointed to the cylinder.

SYMBYTHU acquiesced. “I will explain, only if you will close that cylinder. I cannot have foreign microbes entering the fetus.”

Mars did as SYMBYTHU asked and SYMBYTHU continued. “This room is my Ortus Partus. It is where I designed and created all of you from next to nothing; where I recreated Susurrus and Ixard—the most important discoveries in the history of the universe—and then spent decades discovering how to effectively combine them to increase the distance along the ancestral path one could travel back to, and at the same time increase the chances to one hundred percent of one who takes the Ixard also becoming a Hamrammir. From this room, I will save humanity from itself. That fetus in the cylinder is an example of the Deus ex Hominum, as are all of you…the next step in the long line of human evolution.”

Luanna spat at SYMBYTHU and his words. “It is a clone and nothing more.”

“On the contrary,” countered SYMBYTHU. “A clone is simply a somatic transfer of a nuclear cell, where the transfer happens most effectively and surely through electrical fusing of the membranes of the egg and the somatic cell. Through this process, the electrical current destroys the pathways that make it possible to transfer the human memories naturally embedded in their deoxyribonucleic acid from one to the next. Thus, Susurrus cannot and will never work on a clone. Through the process I have perfected, one discovered by those who came before me in my future timeline, I can reconstruct and produce flawless human facsimiles, vastly different than clones. The word clone itself was taken from the Greek klōn, meaning twig—a distorted perversion in and of itself. I refuse to even use the word and will only refer to my creations by their specie and genus name…and yet I find that I have digressed. I haven’t had companions to talk to for…a long time. Please ask me whatever else you would like to about my Ortus Partus.”

Luanna scoffed loudly. Jax, Mads, and Ella stood there without words, taking in all SYMBYTHU said. It was Mars who finally posed the question pressing upon all in the room to SYMBYTHU: “What do you mean you created us?”

“Ah, yes. I see how that might perplex you. Please, if you will, follow me to my Sanctuarium. I think everything will be explained far better if you are all sitting in comfort.” SYMBYTHU began walking away, seemingly forgetting that Luanna was going to blow his laboratory to pieces. Before he reached the door, he turned and added, “Plus, I am waiting for one more of your kind to awake…Zavyr Paxt.”

Luanna yelled, “Stop! I will not let you continue to make clones, no matter what you have rebranded them as. I will blow your lab and all of us to the sky!”

SYMBYTHU smiled at Luanna. “Commander Spektor, it is, literally speaking, impossible to blow us to the sky, for we are in space and if you blow us up, we will simply float until we assimilate with the nearest star, asteroid, planet, or anything else with enough mass to create a reasonable gravitational pull. As I said, these creations—” he pointed at the cylinders “—and yourselves are not clones but are, in fact, Deus ex Hominum, a much more advanced genus of your species. I brought you all back to life because your zounderkite predecessors insist on their own destruction and are very shortly going to create Burton Izcir, and I need each of you to help me stop him and them.” Then he turned and left.

With SYMBYTHU’s departure, the others followed him out the door and to his Sanctuarium, bewondered by his words, especially at the mention of Zavyr Paxt’s rebirth. Luanna was in shock to be told they were in space and Burton Izcir was about to be created.

For the first time since awaking, they had a general idea of what time period they were now living in.

At least five thousand years in their past.