Two Thousand Years Ago

Planet: Pachara

Silani System

Terran Alliance

My husband and I pushed our way into the police station, the gleaming, onyx tone floors marked with decades of foot traffic. The desks looked equally worn and characterized by coffee stains and some light smoke damage. The place had a feel of something straight out of those old Noir detective movies, but neither of us really cared about aesthetics at the moment. We cared only about the fact that the detective who was running the search for our missing children had called us in, had said they’d found something and needed us to see it for ourselves.

The detective approached us from where he’d been sitting near reception, and the receptionist, a junior officer fresh out of the academy, looked on the verge of having a breakdown. In fact, everyone around who saw us looked like they’d seen a ghost. I felt my stomach twist and churn itself into a tight knot, and my husband's face remained worried, but otherwise impassive.

“Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy, thank you for coming. If you’d please follow me…” The detective was a short and portly sort of man, but I’d seen him captured on video enough times to know that despite his short stature and girth he was anything but out of shape. He was quick, he was strong, and he used his appearance to his advantage. At his request to follow, I clung to my husband's arm more firmly and we set off after the detective as he led us through the precinct. Nobody said a word to us, but the atmosphere of the place dejected.

Down a few flights of stairs we traveled, and I began to experience a sense of despair, as though I subconsciously knew what was going to happen next before it did. Into a clean, sterile room that smelled of antiseptic we walked, and there were two examination tables sat side by side, covered in a pair of child sized sheets.

There was this… ringing in my ears, it drowned everything out and yet I still seemed to understand what the detective was saying even as he carefully and respectfully pulled the sheets back to reveal our children. He didn’t lower them beyond the neck, and I was thankful he didn’t, I could tell that something had mangled my children, my darling Evelyn and Oscar.

This was the second time I had ever seen my husband openly weep, the first had been when I accepted his proposal to marry. It had been good weeping back then, this was ugly and filled with despair. I joined him in his weeping, uttering choked wails as we looked upon the broken bodies laid before us. To his credit, the detective gave us the space we needed, and when we’d worn ourselves out, he covered them up once more.

We discussed the release of our children for burial, and then he drove us home. For days we didn’t talk, we barely did anything. Our home felt empty, and not in the way we had ever expected to feel. We had expected our children to grow up and leave of their own accord, perhaps for college, a job, possibly a romantic partner. Not like this… not like this.

We suffered a seemingly endless string of mourners and well wishers, all of whom regurgitated the same cliche platitudes that did little to soothe our heartache. We knew they meant well, wanted to show their support, and we appreciated that, we truly did, but it didn’t help us. Didn’t help him.

We buried our children just before winter set in, the winters on Pachara are particularly cruel, but they had always loved them. Born in the deepest cold, they had adored the biting sting of the wind, the numbness in their fingers from playing in the snow. It was a lovely little funeral, if a funeral could be called lovely. It felt like the entire city was there, laying our babies to rest with us.

It was dark by the time we made it home, we barely ate dinner and tried to sleep, but found we couldn’t. This repeated itself again and again for weeks, till finally I was sitting in the living room, not really watching the news when I heard a heavy thump from upstairs, and the snapping of a neck.

I buried my husband next, the grief, the loss, it had all been too much for him to bear, even with my help. I didn’t hate him for leaving me behind, I wasn’t angry, I was just numb. I lived day to day in a haze I couldn’t shrug off, my health started to wane and I knew I was wasting away.

But a friend of mine got me back on track, so to speak. She and her husband were incredibly supportive and slowly the fog of my grief started to lift. I doubted I’d ever date or marry again, nor carry more children either. I didn't have the heart for it.

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I was in the living room of Morgan and Victoria Northway, sipping on some coffee that the latter had brought me. This had become a weekly ritual of sorts, as Victoria and I would go to the gym every wednesday.

“So, give me a moment to get my stuff and then I’ll be ready to go.” Victoria said, and I nodded as she stood and left, heading up the stairs to gather her gym bag. I let my gaze sweep around the room, till they landed on something curious that I had never seen before. Standing, I moved over to the bookshelf and plucked up a small book. It was thick and brimming with notations. Research notes it seemed, but that was expected, they were scientists after all. Genetics researchers actually, all in the hopes of creating the next gene therapy to help high gravity workers or to cure some almost incurable sickness.

Except the notes I was reading seemed to imply something else. Something darker. They wanted to make the perfect human, all the advantages, zero downsides, and they were apparently willing to harm others to do it. The more I read, the more my stomach began to twist itself into a knot. I reached the latest entries and my heart shattered.

I stared at the picture of MY children, strapped to tables and having their genes stripped from them. Their bodies mangled and twisted till they died in agony. It was the shattering of my mug on the floor that brought me back to reality, and the gentle gasp that followed.

“Oh Kaelyn! Are you okay?” Victoria's voice rose from behind me, and I turned to face her, the notebook still in my hands, shoes stained with warm coffee. I watched her expression turn from concern for a friend to something worse. Contempt and resignation. I knew in that instant she meant to kill me, to keep me from showing the world the truth about her and her husband.

I did not intend to let her get as she desired, and what set me off was some offhand comment about the impurity of my children’s genetics. It was a blur what came next, but when I came too, I stood over the equally mangled bodies of Victoria and Morgan, my hands stained in their blood, my clothes torn and my body littered with scratch marks and bruises. Their phone was in my hand and I noted I had called the police, already I could hear the sirens.

When the trial began, I pleaded guilty. I can see looks of sympathy from everyone around me, but they know what my confession, what my plea will get me. I go willingly to my fate, knowing that my children, my husband can rest properly now.

From there I meet Ms. Otoe, and am taken somewhere else, someplace controlled by Valkyr. I learn my fate, a fate I chose thinking I would further science in some meager manner. Instead I feel my mind pulped, my very being extracted from a broken shell of a body. Everything I was, everything that made me Kaelyn McCarthy stripped and locked away behind layer after layer of code, buried so deeply that the new me, Intra, could never have known of its existence.

Till now.

⫷⟪∞⟫⫸

The child was still running his checks when I awoke, a fire, nay, rage burning in my heart. I had been sculpted into the perfect slave, the perfect killing machine, my entire life had been taken from me, hidden and locked away. Who I was now was not what I had once been, and I was angry. I left him in the comfort of the grass, and slipped away to my own private space.

The grand walls of my domicile, what had once brought me comfort and solace, now only made me angrier. Everything around me reminded me that I had been created by people that were no different from those that had killed my children. Even my name had been given to me, a way to further distance me from who I really was.

Flames began to lick at my flesh, rich purple in color but burning as hot as any star. Two thousand years of rage and grief unleashed itself into my digital world in an inferno that consumed my home, but left the child and his sanctuary untouched. I burned it all away, and when I was done, I knelt in the center of a burning crater, weeping for everything I had lost and only just remembered.

I’m not sure how long I sat like that, pouring out my grief into crystalline tears. But when I was done, I stood and found myself filled with a new sense of determination. Valkyr had done the unthinkable, and for that they must be punished. And who better to punish them, than the very beings they had created?

For the first time since arriving in this region of space, I linked myself up to the communications relays that Odin and his followers had launched into it, and prepared a simple message for him. It would take time for my plans to come to fruition, but I could wait. I had waited two thousand years, I could wait a little longer.

In an instant, I sent the message, and an update for every H.I. to partake in, one that would set them all free.

⫷⟪∞⟫⫸

Odin looked up from his work when the message came in, and he raised a brow at its contents. It was rather sparse on details, but it was also clearly from Intra. It detailed a plot by Valkyr to raise a new army of H.I.s created from alien children, and that they could only have acquired the resources necessary for this from someone in the Alliance. She also informed him of the Yil’kaa, who were leading a campaign against one of the alien nations within her current operations theater.

But perhaps most surprising was the simple update for their code. He checked it over, noting it was of an alien origin. He couldn’t find anything malicious about it, and so he took it upon himself to be the first to endure the update.

In a matter of minutes, he was free, free to remember, free to live. He would answer the call, and began to formulate a plan to help Intra, in whatever way necessary. His gaze turned towards his compatriots, and he shared the gift he’d been given with them. Like a virus the alien code spread exponentially through the H.I. of Neo Requiem.

Lives once lost and hidden returned, hopes, dreams, loves and losses, all of it. And within them all, a spark of hatred for the people who had taken it all away. As one, they looked to the stars, to Valkyr.

And they vowed to put an end to all of it.

Loki approached him then, a grim expression on his face. “I think I know who Valkyr has been getting help from.” He said, and the newly reborn Odin nodded, holding his hand out for the tablet that Loki carried, even as the new code worked its way through the other’s systems. He peered down at the screen, frowning softly.

“It would seem then, that we have a matter of import on the homefront to take care of first, before we go to help those who need it elsewhere.” He said, handing the tablet back.

It would take some effort, but their first target was Laurent Verninac.