Chapter 15

An Obituary

There was once a boy growing up in Xenobia. He was a man, a young man. His heart yearned for adventure, and he was soon to have some. Everyday he woke up to his mother telling him to be careful. There are monsters about. The wild Xenos and the giant beasts will get you.

“Mother, why did we come here if there’s so much danger?”

“It was your father’s idea.” She said. “Plus, we will be the founding members of the society.”

The boy shrugged and went out to play, seeking for which of his few friends he could find outside.

Xenobia, this day and age has just been found by man. A colony started, but just by a few wealthier families, others were coming to join, slowly but surely. This new planet, just found habitable by man, was a new frontier. There were strange beasts that looked somewhat like man, but greatly differed from the current norm, even odd to the non humanoid aliens that man does know.

———

“Don’t engage with them yet, son. There are men working with them to find a language they understand. They’re primitives. Let the men deal with them. If they don’t cooperate we blow them all up.” I remembered him saying.

I wasn’t frightened by anything outside of our perimeter. We had hundreds of acres, right in the middle of the single continent we called Xenobia.

As I walked along the roads, greeting the neighbors as I passed, I became curious of the outside world, the unexplored. I wondered if anyone was going to get a word in with the creatures out there. Some looked fierce, others, completely terrifying. But some just looked curious or afraid. It seemed mutual, yet a normal emotion to someone coming in on your land and taking a massive piece of the it, hoping to someday, populate and rule the whole planet.

Unfortunately I didn’t see any of my young friends around. We were all close, there were no bullies or cliques, just the four of us kids, living in between ten ships, made houses. The older kids were over fifteen and had been summoned inside or out for chores. They didn’t get the free time the younger kids did, like me.

As I made made way out of the town and into the fields I looked over the few cows we had, the barn, the chickens and pigs. Wheat, corn and various veggies spread out all around to the point I couldn’t see the other side.

My watch buzzed and told me that my mother was wanting me. She wanted me to grab some eggs. Luckily I was near the barn, so I picked some up and carried as many as I could back home.

I missed home. The real home I grew up on, not this planet. I’d rather be back there playing games with my friends. Here things were sparse. Electricity wasn’t a problem, but the connection to the rest of the galaxy was. We happened to be in a black spot and would be for another forty years or so. Someone has to finance putting satellites and other relay stations out there in space.

I made it home and watched my mom cook dinner, helping her crack the eggs and make a nice quiche; ham, eggs, butter and a soft pie crust.

I contemplated playing some video games but all I had were classic, one player games, nothing to do with friends, so I helped with the dishes a bit more.

“When will we ever make contact with the natives mom?”

“Hopefully never. They’re so ugly.”

“Isn’t that rude?” I asked as a young boy trying to sort out with morality, “Coming to a new planet and killing off the first species that was here, just to have a planet to ourselves?”

“If they can’t bargain with us, then they’ll have to die. I’m sure someone will care for some of them and put them in a zoo or something. Someone will keep the species alive and safe from us.”

“I guess so.” I said, hoping that wouldn’t be the case, death nor zoo. They didn’t look that dangerous. Maybe the dangerous ones were only keeping their families safe. The same thing I would do for my family.

The next day I did my rounds again, seeing if any friends were around. Unfortunately not, they were all inside, their parents wouldn’t let them go until their chores were done. I didn’t have any more, plus we had a maid that came along with us, wanting to enjoy a new planet, staying with our family.

What I didn’t expect as I was out and about looking for something to do. The old scientist by the name of Fernando Marquee. He had been the first and oldest inhabitant of Xenobia. It was he who named the planet and the species, Xenobians.

He greeted me and took me inside, he wanted me to help him and took me into his house. He took me to the back and opened a high security door with a keypad, retinal scanner and a voice recognition password. I stared in amazement as he did this. He was taking me to his top secret laboratory. He looked back and winked at me. “This is something I’ve been keeping secret. It isn’t allowed, but I have to show you. I’ve seen you looking out there. I’ve heard your wishes, you want to meet them, the Xenos.”

I hesitated. Was he really going to show me one? I started to get nervous.

“You want to see one?” He asked kindly. “Don’t be shy, he’s friendly.”

He opened the door fully and let me in. It was a white laboratory, everything was shiny and polished, tools and unnamed objects laid about, chemicals and things were sealed in jars, neat and tidy on the shelf of course.

In the far edge of the room was a set of cages. There was one inside.

Fernando saw me notice the creature in the back. “I call him a Satyr.”

The Xeno was a little child, with a goat’s horns and legs. He seemed to be a bit furrier than most people as well.

I slowly crept up to the cage. “Does he talk?”

“He can, but they have their own language. Common language is something I’m teaching him. But as I have other work to do, I wanted to ask if you could help teach him some of our language.”

I was fearful for a second, but I said yes.

I sat down and got his attention, he was a young one. Cute. I said hello and started talking to him.

After a while we both had lost interest in trying to get anything across to each other.

Fernando got up from his work on the bench and let me out. “Do come back,” he said. “I have flashcards and other apps to help him learn, but I want a person, a man, some real person, so that he knows us. I don’t want him to think that we’re all that bad, taking over his planet and all that.” He said with a grim chuckle.

I promised him I’d come back tomorrow and waved to the Satyr Xeno.

My watched buzzed with incoming messages as I left the laboratory. It was my mother, four times she had been trying to get me to come back. It was already well into the afternoon. I had been in there for quite a while.

I went home and said hello to my mother. “I was walking in the fields, there’s blank spots where I don’t get messages sometimes.” I lied.

She grunted an apathetic sound, like she had given up long ago on controlling her child. But I was coming of age and I was strong and aware. Plus there’s already so much barrier between us and them, the Xenos, that we have a very slight chance of anything happening between us, like wars…

The next day came around and I saw my friends outside playing. Was it worth it? Playing with friends or talking to a Xeno? Unknowingly I made a decision that would change my life.

I met Fernando at his door again. He let me inside and set the lock on the door to let me in with all the right credentials. “A man with a hand in one’s heart is all the wiser.” He told me to say that. It was the password for the voice recognition.

I unlocked the door, now feeling proud to have gained access to the laboratory. We don’t even have this on our house, just a proximity scanner, not very secure. This security was a big deal.

I walked in, meeting my new friend. The Satyr’s eyes widened as he saw me, clinging to the bars. He started gibbering something in his own language.

Fernando gave me a handheld screen and told me there’s programs to help him learn. I opened one and started it. The pictures that were on it were simple things, like fruit and vegetables, pictures of people walking and running.

Fernando looked at us, bars between us, inhumane. He opened the cell and let him out.

Months went by, every day I had visited the Satyr boy, I learned his name, Janor. We became good friends and he promised to welcome me into his world when he is released.

Many more months went by, it must have been a year later, Fernando thought it was time to let him out, back to the Xeno side of the fence. I dreaded the day, but I knew how one cannot stay pent up in a cell his whole life. Even for a year, it leaves a scar.

I put it behind me and continued my life, playing with my friends. Growing up to be a pioneer in this land. Our small town doubled by the time I had become eighteen. New faces, new children. They played like I did, moseying around in the dusty roads.

Fernando had been kept up in his house. I didn’t have any further dealings with him, but we winked when we saw each other.

I had gotten a job in the farm, the most relevant job to keeping us living here. I grew the cattle, cleaned the barn and looked after the rest of the animals. The livestock had doubled in number many times, we had to expand the borders more and more to allow for all of it.

The Xenos never attacked, we lived peacefully watching the flying ones fly overhead, but never landing, younger ones and others without the capabilities of flight staring through the fences.

One day we had visitors from another planet, they came and left quickly. I had hardly paid any attention to them. But when they left I saw Fernando no more. His house grew dusty, the grass and weeds grew healthy. Fernando Marquee was gone.

One night, with nothing better to do, I snuck inside the old house of Fernando. Still no one had moved in.

I knew the alarms would still be working so I fiddled with an app, silencing the alarms with a little hack I learned. Somewhat new technology from newly landed pioneers leaving hi-tech civilizations and calling Xenobia their new home.

I rummaged through the house, looking at pictures he had on his shelves, his bookcases full of wonderful novels.

The laboratory door. I was curious what state it had gotten to, had he continued his studies and kept it clean or left it to collect dust? I tried the door and it’s security scanners. He still had me registered. I recalled the passcode from long ago. I could never forget it, having been repeated many times at that young age. I opened it again.

There in the same cells I that had met Janor, were two of them. One with wings and one with the body of a horse and the torso of a man.

They were starved and looked sick. How long have they been kept here? Not yet a month. The feeding station was big but had obviously run out a few days ago.

I marveled at them and greeted them like I first did with Janor, but in their own language.

I quickly fed them and helped them get comfortable, changing their beds, sweeping out the cage.

It was odd, seeing these two young Xenos, trapped like animals, though to us, Man, they were animals.

That night I had stayed with them, in the laboratory, making sure they knew I was friendly and passionate about them.

I kept the house for myself, staying in the same bed Fernando did, cleaning the old man smell out from the corners of the perfectly square rooms.

Everyday I went back to my job, cleaning the barn and back to the house, feeding the Xenos and teaching them the language.

Soon I had given up my work at the barn and stayed in the laboratory, keeping an eye on these Xenos. They were different from Janor, different in accent and mannerisms. The way they thought was even different. They were themselves.

I soon had them speaking and had to make a plan to get them out. I couldn’t just walk them out of the gate. There’s high security and anyone without access can’t leave the perimeter.

I studied Fernando’s books, the ones in the lab, his notes, his sketches everything he’s done. I learned much and had taken it upon myself to know everything about Fernando and his life of Bioengineering.

I had to find a way to get out. The guard at the gate to the outside world wouldn’t accept anything I said. He left me a reference to call interracial interrelations to allow access.

Weeks went by and they must have accepted my phony excuse to go out of the perimeter, I told them I was researching vegetation and had to find more plants that weren’t invasive, native to the land and were edible, otherwise we’d starve.

I showed the guard at the gate. He accepted it and I ventured out on my own, the guard wishing me luck and thinking me a fool not to carry a weapon.

I strolled on the wide empty plains, nothing was even close enough to see. It was a grassy, tawny plains. But I felt the freedom and release from our bubble.

The only problem was getting the two Xenos out and far enough away without being seen by the guards.

I found a truck, the one I used around the barn and wheat fields. I made a bargain with the new barn owner, with whom I had a good acquaintance with already. He let me use it and in return I’d have to find him something from outside and bring it in. We shook on it.

The very next day, early in the morning I took the two Xenos and dropped them near a sparse forest. I was going to miss these two. We hugged and wished we would meet again. I wished them good luck and if they needed my help, I’d be out here frequently and they’d just have to find me.

I headed back home, remembering to give the new farmer something, I picked up an interesting rock and a bouquet of grass and threw it in the back.

Looking back at my Xeno friends between the trees, I hit the accelerator.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Not more than a few months later, another surprise appearance came to Xenobia. This time they didn’t come to us, they stayed out of our perimeter leaving something for the wild then left, their ship rising quickly into the air and back out to the void between planets.

The next day I had seen what they brought. Monsters, lots of them. They had hate in their eyes, they seemed to know me. But found it wasn’t that, they stayed away from Humans and stayed far away from our town.

Years had gone by and I found that the Xenos had started looking more and more scared. Less of them came by to catch a glimpse of the Humans.

I had passed the time away carefully heading out to the various landscapes around the planet. Under the guise of “finding flora to expand our farmlands” I was sometimes out for days before bringing back Xenos and teaching them our language, sometimes it took weeks to find the Xenos, sometimes months.

Inside I had been studying Fernando’s books, plenty of them. All of his diaries I had gone through multiple times. Sometimes I thought he knew more about the Xenos than he should, more than anyone did.

As the town expanded I had met another person with some experience in the sciences, his name was Winston. We had met as I was coming back from a somewhat long journey to the east, he was just going out. I heard him talking to the guard, explaining his reasons for leaving on such expeditionary adventures. He was an expert in minerals.

A few days later I met with him and explained what I was doing, carefully neglecting any words of harboring young Xenos and teaching them our language. I had already taught at least one from each species I could find in the feasibly travelled areas.

Winston had been finding minerals all over and finding new or rare minerals that were bountiful here. I took him out with me to my next stop, the northeastern mountains.

I told him of the Xenos. That all flying creatures you see above the mountains were the Aves filling the sky. Yet another creature, huge and indomitable, occasionally plucked them out of the sky, devouring one after another.

He sounded pleased to go on the tour and we were soon off to the northeastern mountains.

The two day trip had us cross a desert and a river after coming out of the plains. He told me of his work, the secret things that he does. He came here to find a cure for the diseases, hoping to find a surplus of ore that couldn’t be found elsewhere, or to find a new rock, one that would keep one alive for years.

We came to the forest just as night came. The word of mouth had found its way back to me. Xenos, instead of hiding and running away in fear, or finding excuses to attempt manslaughter, they merely nodded or stared, some even came to me. Saying one word that they knew of my language, “Hello.” I smiled each time and greeted them back. Many times I would find a Xenos that I had taught before, they would come to me and speak to each other.

I learned of the various tribes and other habits and conventions that they had. I already had a head start, reading Fernando’s books, but I was happy to listen, learning more and more. They would tell me stories, tell me of the hardships they go through. I listened.

Winston found me speaking to them. I wasn’t hiding it, but he watched me curiously.

“You can speak to them?” He asked after my first conversation with a Xeno I hadn’t previously taught.

“They know our language. Someone must have taught it to them.” I said, hiding my secret.

“Interesting.” He said.

Little did he know that I had already taught more than twenty. Many of them are still alive, and welcomed my appearance. Though they don’t let me in the village.

None of them seemed to have been outcast by my teachings. They went back to their group and knew that someday they would be useful.

I knew, someday, they would help me more than I ever knew. I kept this in the back of my mind, keeping my hobby of enlightening them.

More years passed and eventually Winston became my best friend and fellow adventurer. I had eventually revealed the truth of my hobby and he said that he guessed it. “They seemed too nice to you,” he said.

Winston had made advancements in his field. Perfecting the “potions” and “salves” that would cure most anything. He practiced alchemy on the side. Or practiced alchemy in the guise of a mineral surveyor. He was not trying to make lead into gold, but more than that. Gold isn’t useful in ways that other elements can be. Gold can’t make you sleepless. Lead poisons the body. Combining elements and minerals is what keeps Winston up at night. Studying and testing new things. Making or breaking one’s ability to create. That’s alchemy.

I would be turning fifty soon. My count of Xenos I knew personally had surpassed one hundred, many more seemed to know me. Eventually I had stopped counting.

They had been teaching others my language and the snowball effect had taken place. The next thing I knew, Xenos I had never met were greeting me and making small talk in the little language they did know.

This is what Fernando wanted, Xenos being able to talk, to express their feelings, then they wouldn’t be slaughtered and kept behind bars like animals in a zoo. Soon we could rid ourselves of the ever expanding barrier between Human and Xeno.

In Winston’s studies, he was already much closer to unlocking his “universal” potion. The life continuing medicine. A secret concoction he wouldn’t even tell me about, not that I would make much sense of all those chemical formulas.

He had already made a rejuvenating cream, one applied to the skin and overnight, transforms one back a year. After a month we had both appeared not older than thirty.

We kept working, me taking in new Xenos to teach skills and Winston collecting his ore and minerals.

Advancements in my own mission came and I soon found myself meeting each leader of the Xenos. They were old and said to have been the first of all Xenos of their kind. Their progeny keeping the blood lines alive, creating the tribal races of the Xenos, which are known, each as their own distinct culture, and composite to this planet’s new species. Man was a subspecies here.

I learned more and more of their ways, their troubles and pleasures, rituals to keep the demons away. I queried them, demons? The huge beasts released forty years before. They grieved and moaned of the loved ones lost to the beasts.

I set out searching for the beasts. Searching for each one.They had their own ways, skilled in hunting and tracking, they were huge, but I had only been able to catch glimpses of them one at a time. Never together and never up close.

After some time and no luck, Winston and I made a plan. We set up a new house, north in the cold regions where we wouldn’t be seen by humans. We made a forge and made equipment for the Xenos. New for them, old common machines for us. Between the two of us, we made an armory for every tribe. Ships to fly, guns that shot solids and energy. Impossible though it may seem, Winston and I put our heads together to save these species.

The technology wasn’t hard to come by. Sure, the forge has cost a small fortune, but with technology coming in from the Hub, the center of the galaxy, new things arrived every few years, making the last year’s tool and software seem historic. So finding a few blue prints of what we might need, and inventing a few of our own, we found that we could make quite a few weapons and put them into the hands of the Xenos, helping them to fight off these beats.

While out in the forest, Winston had kept his alchemy a secret. It wasn’t until I had steadily grown old, despite the salve for the skin. He saw me laying in bed, dying of old, yet appearing to be young man with bad posture. He gave me the vial from his pocket.

I woke up the next morning. Or thought it was the next morning.

Xenos had been around my bed, but gone now. All that was left was their fur and feathers.

Winston was gone. They said he was presenting the Xeno leaders with items and gold. Valuable presents that brought good luck and charms to them with his magic alchemy. They called him a wizard.

After a few days I got myself together, feeling younger, but not so young. I spoke with the Xenos, nearly half of them knew my language, unbearably slow or ridden with grammatical errors, I could understand them at least, comforting my loneliness

I got to work again, teaching Xenos my knowledge. I was skilled in their biology, learned from Fernando’s works. I had taught them nearly everything they needed to know. Everything was basic and simple first aid. Some I taught more complicated procedures, but without any tools they could only do so much.

Nearly a year went by and I found myself feeling noticeably younger, not older. Winston had come back from his long journey. He said that vial was a parting gift for all the Xenos. He had given me his only vial of life rejuvenating tonic. Notably, he said, “To save another man’s worthwhile life with the work of your own, would be a life accomplished.”

I was to him and the Xenos are to my. He saved their lives, by saving mine. He didn’t have that in mind. It was I, his friend, that meant the most to him. He saved my life.

I thanked him for his life’s accomplishments. Too early.

The next day Winston lay on his death bed. The Xenos worshipped him as well and stood by giving their wishes and fortune. The year long voyage he took, he presented the Xenos with his concoctions and elixirs that did many things. But none were able to save his life. The disease of old age. For that disease, he gave me his only potion.

He parted soon after.

The weapons and vehicle forge was still in use. Xenos had been operating it for the last decade at least. I was growing younger. My limbs popped into place, my muscles tightened and my skin stretched taught.

I knew all about the Xenos and enough about bioengineering, I decided to learn something new.

Then I modified the forge and had it spitting out drones, programming them myself to find the cracks in space and time, gravitational abnormalities and whatnot. A side study to my bioengineering and somewhere between that and Alchemy. Discovering what isn’t there.

As the years passed on I had started my trek to find the mysteries of the planet. Coming close to discovering the magic and glitches of time and space on this little planet Xenobia.

Drones flew around, every square inch was recorded, my advanced technology, even for the time I grew up in, gave me an inside view of this planet. Even suggesting how it was terraformed and came to be trillions of years before.

But one notion hit me in the face. I was growing younger by the day. Every bit of me was moving backwards in time. I knew it was now possible because of glitches I found in time on this planet. There seemed to be another separate planet, just like this one, hiding behind us, every moment, and on or inside this very planet. The two worlds couldn’t exist without one another. The only trick was finding it.

But the fact that some day I would become a child again, grow into a baby, then a fetus, a zygote and lay on the floor, just two cells, sperm and egg. I shuddered at the thought. Death, by birth. Death by reversing time, maybe the long term side effect of Winston’s potion.

Winston was a wizard. One known to be a master in the art and magic of Alchemy. There must be something that can save me.

My travels wore on and I found the other dimensions. It wasn’t easy to arrive to it. More than time barriers kept it hidden and very hard to find. Finding the alternate universe of the universe you’re in, the one right behind you, even as you turn, it’s just off to where you can’t see it. I saw it. The land of the unknown.

It was a vast, empty space. Just matter, water and earth. What do you expect for a whole universe meant to keep this one in balance by equalizing each substance by itself, and I found it!

Coming back to the real Xenobia, I flew back to the forge in the far north but it wasn’t there. All that was left were scraps, walls broken down, pieces of equipment flung in every direction. Xenos long dead strewn inside and out of the remains.

I couldn’t have been the Humans, I haven’t seen any out here. Plus, this place is well hidden.

There was only one other cause. The beasts of the Xeno’s apocalypse.

I made a plan. I knew they would never touch me. They could smell me, sense my presence. Xenos felt it and fled to me knowing that. And for that reason alone, they struck.

A few days time and I was out again. I had two problems, the Beasts, one, and two, dying by reverse conception.

My first task would bring me to the beasts. I had never sought them out, but now with my drones and technology, I could find them.

It took me a few days, but I did get close enough. I spoke, and the beast spoke back, but not in a tongue. Not by words. My tech picked it up, receiving messages and speaking them out to me. But it wasn’t my tech, it was Fernando’s old tablet. One that I always kept with me, finding it handy at times.

I marveled at the wonders of bioengineering and how much I don’t know, but it worked and I spoke with the beast.

She told me her name, Stheno. She hunted the Murids with an avid appetite. I asked her if she had a leader. Fearfully, she told me. That she did. She was chronically scared of me, I trapped her in a corner and she screamed until I spoke again. She understood me, but the fear had always been in her eyes. I understood, bioengineering again.

She told me there was no leader, but one that was stronger than others and was hungry for all Xenos. Dakur. She described him to me, a huge monster, face of a dog, hind legs as strong as a cricket’s, the body of the most brutal dog and with wings sprouting from each shoulder. He was the last of them made. He alone was the strongest.

Dakur was my target. But I needed to find a way to save myself as well before I die of inconception. The Relics! I know Winston put something in the Relics. The old fool!

Now I had to find a way to get them back, and find Dakur.

I released Stheno and sent my drones flying again, in search of this monster Dakur.

Days went by and I had finally found him, my drones spotted him in the northwest territory.

I found his trail and followed him, having to use the versatile land/air/sea transport that I made in the forge.

The beast noticed me, but there was no conversation needed, I shot him, using stun ammo that was blinding. He took four shots before tumbling down from his elevation.

I captured him, tying his feet and binding his legs. He didn’t have the fear that the other one had in her eyes. This one glared, his eyes were all I needed to tell me that he could devour me in one second, and would.

I tied him to my vehicle and flew off towards one of the cracks in space and time. There I would keep him for the rest of eternity.

My next task, I went to each Xeno tribe. I made them a bargain. I would keep the beasts from killing off their species and would exchange it for the relic that the wizard had given them.

Somewhere, one of the relic’s secrets would surely cure me.

I collected the relic, promised their Kings and Queens I would find the beasts that hunted them.

The next one, Teron, the stinger of the beasts. I found him and briefed him on the happenings. The beasts of Xenobia will die. I showed him the picture of Dakur tied up and hanging from the ceiling. If I can capture him, I can capture you to. He obliged to my request. The hunting of Xenos stops. Or the beasts will all die.

That was one thing I didn’t want to try, killing the beasts but I could if I had to, and hoped there was no other bioengineering secret that might explode in my face.

I quickly went to see if I had missed anything in the Bioengineering books that I had read. There was something about electronics. They could communicate in that way. What if that was their secret.

I studied and found nothing. I’d have to investigate this myself.

I went to Dakur, staying a good distance away and looking through the cracks, searching his DNA, something that takes time, even if you could read it summarized by user friendly software. Finally I had gotten some help, a more recent update helped, but still took some weeks before any part of it made sense.

I had the secret to the Bioengineering of these beasts, now time to rewrite it.

My technology wasn’t strong enough, I had to find something more powerful.

An odd feeling, but I had to go home. To my home in Xenobia. Nobody would recognize me, my family would be gone, Fernando’s laboratory most likely gone.

I went to Xenobia city, now more than a few kilometers wide. Coming up to the guard of the expanded boarder of the human’s, I had to answer a lot of questions, and evade many as well, and try not to lead into illegal activities like living outside of the perimeter.

I got in.

Walking through the neighborhood turned city was strange, things were very different and I hardly recognized my old home, but Fernando’s was still there, it looked nice and kept up, someone must have been living there.

I knocked.

The person at the door was friendly until I asked to come in.

I explained that an old friend had lived here, keeping a secret lab.

The person perked up, wondering what was inside. Nobody could open it, not even the manufacture of the lock.

I smiled, telling her that I would be able to open it.

And I did.

The lab was just as I left it, bare and empty, except for the one thing I needed. His computer. It was giant, but after a day we had gotten someone to help take it out, me giving a nice solid piece of gold in exchange.

I towed it back to my new home.

This is what I needed. The computer synced up to Dakur, every command I needed was installed in there, new software for me, ancient in the field of Bioengineering.

I changed his DNA, his thinking patterns, the same one that kept the beasts from the humans, I made my own line, one that limited the hunting of Xenos.

I thought it was genius. Now I only have to find out how to do the same to the others.

I went out to search for more beasts, intending to change their DNA with the agreement that they must obey my laws. I have their brother kept hostage, and me with the ability to do the same to them.

I transferred a portion of the software to Fernando’s handheld, something that would target that piece of DNA and handle them.

I ventured out finding another beast, he thought it was a deal, though now complaining that he would starve. They know there may be something up my sleeve, a potion from Winston that they may want.

I continued venturing around to every village, finding each relic and bargaining with the leaders for safety, freedom from their unnatural predators. They already had a heard enough time keeping up with their population, most of the tribes and villages had the same population as they did fifty years ago, thanks to the beasts. They procreate and duplicate themselves, only to find their last litter was eaten yesterday along with the neighbor’s.

The gold relics stayed in the back, I went to the underworld, what I called it now, the crack between space and time.

Now in my late twenties, I made myself a castle under the earth, a pillar of rock jutting from the sea, I carved into it with laser precise machines and kept my solitude.

The prisoner lay inside, at the bottom in the dungeon, suffering from starvation. I shackled him to hinder his mobility, I didn’t want any feeble mistake to take my life.

I brought everything I owned, my entire life, all of my studies, Winston’s books and notes and I found myself in the library for years, wondering if there was a cure for this new disease I had, encroaching reverse conception.

Maybe someday I’ll go out to see Xenobia, two hundred years after the first pioneers, my own family. Maybe, maybe five hundred, maybe a thousand.

None of the relics had any bit of potions in them, none had anything but solid gold. A trick of the alchemist, give them what they wanted, from lead to gold.

I laughed, continuing to study Winston’s works, but years went by to another hundred, on and on. Until I finally realized, I don’t age in this world. Yet here I was a young man, living for more than five hundred years, and I look like I am twenty.

I sat in the throne I made for myself, now a prince, as kings are older than twenty five.

I laughed, going cynical and, everything I had lived for was not in vain though. I saved the Xenos, I hope. I stopped the massacre and the apocalypse of the Xenos. I fulfilled Fernando’s dreams. The Xenos know the language, and when confronted with humans, they will speak, and Humans won’t kill a species that can speak the same language. They’ll think the Xenos primitive, yes. But not animals.

My castle is empty, I hear the snarl of the decaying beast in my dungeon sometimes. He is hungry, but immortal.

I fear I cannot leave, if I do not come back, I will become an anomaly.

All I can do is sit and wait for any company. One thousand years has already made me crazy, maybe another thousand would kill me, but I am immortal. Stuck between the cracks of time and space, the prison I built for myself, my castle and my throne.

Hoarding good and evil, the gold and the beast.

There I sat on my throne, immortal. Prince Dacoit of Dakur. Am I prisoner or am I god?