Part 2

“Above all other things, the one thing that I found to benefit a person most in this world, and the Hereafter, is a friend.”

* Sufyan al-Thawri

716 - 778AD

11

Professor Adoria Seelo sat hunkered down at the science station she had ordered assembled weeks ago. It felt like months, no, years ago.

The vast stars of space shone through the blank openness around her. It had started to make her a little stir-crazy, she had to admit, but it was better than the lonely closterphobic feeling that had hit her all of a sudden like a hammer blow when she had the view windows set to opaque.

She hadn’t thought that being awakened from cryosleep and then left alone for a long period would have been a problem, but it had turned out to be.

The thing was, she had nothing to do. She had studied for years on her own, in laboratories, in research libraries, in government complexes and at universities, and most of these studies had been on her own. She had been alone for long periods before. But this alone-ness, out on the edge of earth’s atmosphere surrounded by nothing but stars, looking up at the planet that seemed to hang above her so far away was an extremely different type of alone. Even that thin thread of a tether that pointed up to earth, that single gossamer thread that seemed so delicate was under threat right now where it anchored her to earth. That really did it. Made her a little stir crazy.

She had sent Adam to download to the downed Central tower. She had expected him to keep an animation of himself running here too, but he had said it was becoming difficult for him. The more he seemed to become a ‘self’ the more he seemed not to be able to sustain himself as a collective.

He had reestablished communications with her when he had finished his travel across the wasteland below and drew close to the base of her tower. To download himself to the ‘Adam’ droid of the downed central tower was the obvious way for them to have someone on the ground. He had needed to be there when his ratites, the bird brain avatars carrying the drone had arrived. That had been a gamble, and now it seemed they had fallen back into some form of hibernation after an accidental electrical discharge. When Adam’s attempts at waking the drone and two avatars had failed, she had instructed him to travel to the Western City and contact the High Priestess so they could resume communications and planning.

Weeks had passed since then. She had ordered the science station erected, and a treadmill and fitness and fight training holo program. She didn’t know if the tower was actually coming down, but if it did, and she was able to find a contingency, she was going to be ready for it. She had the visual at the tower base on magnification, and the vast army surrounding the pyramid tether and the city did not look good.

To help pass the time, she had begun studying Adam’s earth garden forecasts, and she couldn’t find a fault with them. She had set up a green droid head on the console beside her, had powered it up and had set it to record. Once Adam was in range it would download her notes and questions to him.

But the studying had done little to help.

So she had set up the optical sensor feed into the viewscreen that the High Priestess had given to the Empress. The former Princess, disguised in the white robes of the Sisterhood, and in a narrow mask of an Accolade to help hide that wicked scar on her forehead was sent east.

The orb had been covered, so Adoria could only get the audio. Still, she had the wall screens set to visual, but it had been only blackness. The sound of occasional discussion she yearned for. She had heard the turmoil in the pub, where the Empress had threatened the men with some type of large weapon. That had been amusing. This Empress was one not to be trifled with.

But after weeks of being alone, and feeling more isolated than she had ever felt in her young life, she thought the audio was keeping her sane. Even the sound of someone else breathing. She could amplify the sound if she wished, and hear the Empress. She assumed it was the Empress who still carried it. She hoped it was. The High Priestess thought the Empress could unite all the people, all the citizens, all the beings of the valley into coming together under the Great Reclamation that had been set out over eight hundred years ago when Adoria was put into cryogenic sleep stasis.

The Empress had been given the optic, as a cover to carry it as an Accolade of the Sisterhood to the Central City for delivery to the sisters there. But what they intended to do was to listen. To see if she could be trusted with the technology they could unleash under her leadership to revitalize the valley.

Or would she be like the leadership that she had come from, and persecute those that were different, the engineered and the evolving?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She had been studying Adam’s model which involved flooding the valley and introducing a plant virus to substantially increase the food supply. He had predicted that the widespread vegetation would decrease the valley albedo, thus weakening the thermal gradient and collapsing the storm wall. Once the storm walls fell the poisonous atmosphere would encroach into the life-sustaining microclimate. She had verified his model was correct, but she was now running the study with different variations of plant virus matter that would make minuscule adjustments in albedo. She had a thousand she could concoct with the station’s systems so she had a thousand variations to run.

And through the task, she could still feel the loneliness and the remoteness getting to her.

She had stopped working out last week. She knew her hair was a mess and she had several food packages that had been dropped onto her long crescent workstation by the hovering silver basketball-sized drones that remained unopened.

Sleep didn’t come easy. Only after near mental exhaustion would she even try it. She refused to take sleep meds, so far. She had pulled up the available medications and the doctor program on a second screen but had yet refused to look at it.

The only thing that seemed to take her away from things was the audio that she could get from the sensor. She had searched the station database for old movies, holo plays, audio files, and even music. Nothing. She was confined to an incomplete edge of space dock that had been hastily transformed into a preservation capsule.

She had her forehead in her hand now, eyes too close to the screen as she tapped out the inputs for the simulation program.

The audio from the optical sensor played in the station speakers.

Two people talking. She wasn’t looking at the statistics on the screen of the science station, her eyes had lost focus and instead, she had been imagining the scene playing out down below.

“I have a sense you’re good at most anything you try. And you better be good at cards. I’ll need a challenge if I’m going to be confined to this cabin.”

“You sense things. I think you’ll beat me anyway. You have the eyes of a seer.”

She heard someone laugh. She had researched this phenomenon. Genetic factors in the phenotypic variations seemed to be traceable to an intuitive faculty that has shown up in human evolution. A sixth sense. Nurture. Then nature. The extreme conditions humankind has found itself evolving in for the last eight hundred years. A little intuition would go a long way. A bad feeling right before something bad happens would be a selective trait to promote.

“No. I won’t be able to see your cards. I’m not near-sighted. I’m far-sighted. Far too far-sighted for this ‘gift’ to be of any use. And I’m not far-sighted like a day or two, I’m very far-sighted”

That chuckle again

“I’m more like weeks away, and it does me no good. If you believe in the sight, that is.”

“Good. No cheating. It will give us a chance to get to know each other…although I think I know you well enough.”

“How so?”

“You’re all about the business.”

“How so? What business?”

“Any business you may be about. Like what you wear now. So formal. It is hot. You don’t have to dress so formally if it’s just us playing cards. I won’t tell anyone what you look like, I promise. You don’t have to wear the heavy gown and mask when it’s just us.”

“And this? What about this?”

Andoria jumped as the entire viewing window of the space station lit with a moving image. A room came into view in the curvature of glass around her. It spun, the vertigo of a moving scene swirled, blocking out the stars. She lost her breath and clung to the tabletop.

The scene stilled. The Empress had set the orb down.

It was beautiful. No, it wasn’t. It was stark. But it was absolutely beautiful to see something different for once. She knew it was a room on a ship. The ship Warrant’s wardroom. Rough woven rattan-like furnishings. A table with a metal top. A wall of coloured silk. That actually was beautiful. It was a sheer wall of curtains that opened onto the water. She could see moving, churning water out there. Brown water. Like the Nile River had been. An expansive and flat coastline far off in the distance. A band of ice-blue sky. The room ceiling was ribbed with internal beams and it was low. She could make out a circular metal staircase going up to a roof portal. The doors were ship hatches.

“Does this worry you? Do you know what it is? If we are to sit and play cards, can you be comfortable with this?”

“It is a thing of your office?”

A gangly handsome boy, or young man, more likely. White skin and dark hair. Eyes almost too large in an angular face that he may have to start shaving soon – but untrue, for the High Priestess had told her this spy was a woman who could change her appearance. Change her appearance considerably. This spy was undoubtedly infused with nanorobots. It would change her appearance and make her incredibly resilient. May even slightly increase her own senses and abilities. Hearing. Sight. Speed. Strength. If what the High Priestess said was true, that this girl’s adoptive grandfathers had powered a magic wall into her, as she had called it. If a regeneration alcove had been dumped into the poor girl as a child, and she had lived, then these attributes could be possible.

“What can it do… what is it for?”

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to take it to the Central City.”

She finally got to see the new Empress. The woman never spoke without anyone around her, and other than in the pub, and arriving on the barge, Adoria didn’t know who this woman was. The woman that held the future of civilization in her hands. She wore the long white robe of the sisterhood, and she did look uncomfortable. Sweating. Her eyes were that of an albino and her red-white hair was shorn to stand straight up, like a military flat-top haircut. The muscles of her neck were heavy and thick. Her neck was as broad across as her heavy jawline and she had a wicked scar across her forehead. Heavy muscled hands drew back from the orb as it settled to the tabletop.

“Well. Should we look in here for some cards? And if you’re agreeing to not use your sight on me, then I agree not to try to cheat you…”

“YES!” Adoria yelled. She sprang to her feet and drove her palms down onto the table top. “Finally, some god-damned entertainment around here!” She hadn’t heard what had been said next.

Adoria strode back to her desk and addressed the green head sitting there like a mannequin head wig holder on a dressing table.

“Can you simulate that deck of cards they play with?”

The eye glowed its subtle green. “Yes, Professor. As soon as we get a complete set of scans, a deck will be printable.”

“Excellent. Get to it. Scan and print away. I’m going to go have a shower.”

“Should you want the screen and display to be muted.”

“Absolutely not. That shits’ gonna play twenty-four seven until I say otherwise. Maybe I can actually get some sleep if I think other people are around.”