I felt a pulse through my glove and before I could pull my hand away, I faded from conciousness.

I opened my eyes to see a city, massive and filled with so many of an alien race I had never seen before. All of them moved back and forth going about their business with none of them noticing me; some even passed directly through me as if I wasn't there. Whatever this was, I was seeing a city and the race that had built it in their prime.

I turned to look another direction and found myself in a room, a laboratory. Hunching over one of the tables filled with instruments and glassware was one of the aliens that I had seen on the street outside. Muttering to itself, it manipulated more and more of the devices and instruments before it suddenly stopped and examined something. Almost immediately it began to cackle to itself with a gruff huffing noise. It carried the thing it had been examining and passed by me.

I turned to follow where it went and found myself somewhere else again. This time I was standing on a launch pad with a small missile device on the pad. I heard loud noises, the voices of the aliens and turned to see several armed with weapons approaching the same scientist that had been in the lab and making demands of it. Raising its voice, the scientist turned from them and pressed several buttons that launched the missile away and into the atmosphere and beyond. I watched it go and felt dread creep down my spine.

I turned to scream abuse at the scientist and felt the words die on my throat; I was looking somewhere else. This time it was a court room setting with a panel of judges looking down from their position to the scientist while they argued their own position. I couldn't understand what they were saying but I could get the idea of what was happening from the scientist's holograms that were appearing and disappearing as they spoke. They were defending what they had done and if I was looking at the holograms correctly, they had altered the genetic make-up of something and then sent it out to the wider universe for some unknown reason. I heard one of the judges begin to speak and I turned to look at them.

Again I was somewhere else. Another laboratory I'd guess. The scientist from before was under guard this time and again altering the genetic make-up of another thing. Like the first it was microscopic and like the first the scientist was animated and emotional to be working on this. The guards kept them on track and forced them to create what they wanted the scientist to make. Finally, the scientist said something and the guards moved to restrain them and remove them from the lab. I turned to follow them and saw another scene.

Again we were back at the launch pad and again a small missile was preparing to take off. Different aliens were here overseeing the launch of the missile and there again was the scientist, restrained and under guard.

"Are we certain the Second Strain will be able to evolve to the neccessary level to remove the First Strain from the stars?" a voice spoke, one of the aliens and the first time I could understand them.

"They will not be able to without our further interference," a second alien spoke. "The Council has spoken. Our hubris led to these events and we will grant the Second Strain the time it needs."

"It has not had the accelerated evolutionary ability of the First Strain given to it by Hyn'bel, what if the First outpaces the Second enough that it cannot close the gap?" the first alien asked.

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"It will take more time to grow and evolve to the neccessary point than our race will live to see," the second one said. "We can only hope that the division of galaxies will be enough to grant the time neccessary."

"What was Hyn'bel thinking?" another demanded. "Altering a genetic structure to induce predatory evolution! Madness!"

"We can only hope that we are not too late," the last one said before the image began to fade away and I was opening my eyes to see the world that we were on.

I had fallen to the ground at some point and was now staring up at the sky and into the helmet that Carrie was wearing.

"I didn't have that reaction," she said. "Wonder why yours was so much more violent and pronounced?"

"What do you mean?" I groaned.

"You touched it and then you were flung back and the whole thing started to glow," she said. "The markings began to shift and now they're in English."

"Let me see," I ordered as I climbed to my feet and nearly fell over again before she caught me. Step by step we approached the stone, the obelisk, that had just induced a hallucination in me. I think.

I saw that Carrie was right, the marks that had reminded me of writing had shifted until it was now English words that adorned the stone.

"The Second Strain has awoken. The First Strain has wiped us from existence. Here we leave the record of our folly and hubris. Let the name Rif'nay'fex be forgotten to the annals of the stars as our mistakes remain our only legacy," I read the words out.

"Who and what are the Rif'nay'fex?" Carrie asked. "What's the Second Strain? What's the First Strain?"

"We're the Second Strain," I told her. "The Scourge are the First Strain. Those aliens were the ones that started all this."

"What do you mean?" she asked. "That would make this stone millions of years old. It should be dust or something by now."

"Not if it wasn't stone," I said. "You called for me and told me to touch it, that means that you saw what I saw, right?"

"Yeah," she said. "I saw a bunch of Gwathnu walking around and doing a bunch of things, then I was back in reality."

"How do you know they were Gwathnu?" I asked her.

"Because I've looked over all the known races in the Wardens of Life. Both the living and the dead," she said. "I wanted to make sure that if we ran into a secret survivor or something, we'd know what race they came from."

"Smart," I said. "I just leave that to Cai. Describe the Gwathnu to me."

"They have a fin starting from between their eyes that extends to the middle of their back from over their head," Carrie said. "Their hands have four fingers, one of which is a thumb, and they have a tail that's flat like a beaver's. They also are able to move on all fours with the same ease as they walk on two legs."

That was not the race of aliens that I'd seen.

The aliens I'd seen were tall, nearly eight feet in height with six fingers on their hands and three eyes and a fine covering of hair that was barely visible enough to block the view of their skin color. Like the Scourge and Humans, that color varied based on sun exposure and parental genetics. I explained this to Carrie and together we looked back at the obelisk, the last remnant of the race known as Rif'nay'fex. The race that laid claim to the madman who altered the genetic structures that would lead to the evolution of Humans and Scourge.

"Does this mean that this is the planet they came from?" Carrie asked. "That's going to take a lot of effort to prove."

"If this is their planet, then the obelisk would have been completely covered with vegetation at the minimum or soil and rock," I answered. "It's more likely that this thing was planted here, or that it crashed here after spending a lot of time floating through space."

"What if the Scourge uncovered it for some reason?" she asked. "It would have some sort of damage from the atmospere entry if it came from off planet, wouldn't it?"

"You'd think," I agreed, "but this is all too weird. I think we're going to have turn the research teams on this as soon as we can."

"And we're going to have to bring them up to date with Yurnel's research," Carrie added. "That means that we can't let them move between sites and planets willy-nilly. We're going to have to pick a bunch that can stay here practically until they die. Can we make that decision?"

"We will," I answered. "There's no other choice."