'"Transfusionic Photonization?" What the hell is that?' he asked her, putting down her research paper.
'It's a transferrance of data, of your soul, technically, comprised of light, being transferred via replicate databases as the Milky Way and Andromeda begin to communicate. An evacuation model devised by AI and myself.'
'And you dreamt this, ma'am?'
'Yes, sir,' she nodded.
The Brain Trust /
Each person put their fingerprint to the Neural Networker, a machine that encoded their heartbeat, neural patterns, and basic genetic data drawn from their epithelial cells. Each biomarker lit green. It was a match. Their team was assigned based on holonomic projections of the future, drawn from AI and genetic databases around the world. Every war, a new upload. Every old soldier’s and scientist’s genetic profile was kept on file now, ever since -
“Since the Great Rift,” Suzette chimed in. “Since the Divide between countries, borders - everything, grew.” That Divide included humans and genetics, biomes and the environment.
Here, in this secret bunker below what was left of The City - they could rebegin. Pick a past pathway from their previous genetic uploads, and continue that work, or choose new holometric datasets to work with.
“The Old and The New, at it again.” Gavin smiled. It was good to see his friends again. He looked down at the roster. She was still Asleep. Not qualified for this war the marker over his ex partner’s holographic face said.
“I’m sorry,” Suzette said, seeing the disappointment on his face.
His disappointment turned to determination. “Losing’s off the table, guys. Gotta get back to My Lady.” He forced a grin, and clapped his hands together. “Let’s go.” He grabbed his template packet and a pen, and sat down, anxious to read, anxious to catch up on the last century.
Droid /
He zoomed in on her face. ‘It’s just a HoloScan,’ he said. ‘The red lines are demarcating your facial tissue, bone density, et cetera. It's marking you to map you. There-,’ he said, placing the Droid on the ground. He pressed a button in his pocket, the remote concealed by the seams of his pants. A slight thrumming noise and the Droid opened. A scan appeared over the green grass of the jungle they were in. ‘Now it can map every thing you do, every biometric step you take through this territory.’
Her eyes widened.
‘I know, scary stuff, in the wrong hands. But here, it's to keep you safe from drug runners as you continue your work.’ He locked a bracelet on to her wrist. ‘You'll be safe-ish. You're not bullet proof, but it should keep you away from dangers plotted on to the GRID thus far.’
The More /
The more you speak with Heaven
The Thunder and Its Light
Th more you speak in fractals
Rippled, God’s Delight
The more you seek in MoonBeams -
Timing is Divine
The more you soak in melody
The more Light is Sublime
So let me be as Lucifer
I’ll show You Heaven’s Past
And when you blot him out
I Will Make Him Last
I Will Speak in Circles
I Gifted Heaven Hell
I Gift Eternal Life
The Sun That Does Not Swell
The Mullen Prophecy /
‘We received signals, Ma'am. From an old and dying star system. It tampered with our satellites. Now they only want to point at you.’ He slid a stack of papers across the desk. ‘Can you decipher this?’
‘Why?’ she asked, staring in to the agent’s eyes.
The Crone /
‘From Death?’
‘Abundance!’
‘From life?’
‘Stagnation!’
The Crone stood in front of the class, pointing at the chalkboard. Every answer to her question rezzed holographically on to it as the Children of the Dead stated it.
To humans, their forms would have been repugnant. Amino acids, dead body parts looped together, inserted discarded genetic remains of excrement. All encased in metal, electrical programs and prompts running through it.
But here, inside this Schrodinger Box,
Death was all that mattered.
This was their Creation Story.
Independence Day /
They received the transmission. But no one could decipher it. Parts of it but never the whole thing.
Neurolinguists at the state department suggested reaching out to woman, but the military refused. “The prefrontal cortex is more adaptive in women for facial scans and linguistic processing. They evolved like that over centuries of being handed out by tribes to make new alliances as hominids evolded. A female’s mind is better suited to this, especially if you could find one who has had considerable time abroad or lived with people immersively who do not speak her native tongue. And Admiral - make it someone you can trust, military or sci-fi background preferably - this isn’t something you want out in the public.”
He refused - the Admiral - for months. He used neural helmets, hormone modification, even a few base buddies who had cerebral modification through trans drugs for other programs. But everyone was catching bits, and this was taking forever.
He picked up the phone. “Doc, you got anyone?’
The doctor pulled a folder from under some books on his desk. Descendants of veterans, those who’ve lived abroad for a while, patriotic, with science and linguistic backgrounds. “Yes, I’ve got a few. May I ask - why now?”
There was a pause on the other end of the receiver. “Doc, bring some neural surgeons. You’ll see why now.”
Eye of Andromeda /
They Can't /
‘They can't stop it,’ she said to her partner. ‘It plays every possible simulation out. Every reflective surface. It's viewing us in every possible iteration of action.’
‘Machine to machine?’
‘Or person to person. Depending on how easy they are to train.’
He sighed.
She smiled back at him. ‘Don't worry. It likes us. We don't lie.’
Ti air'a /
Across the Sea I traveled
Spinning cloth and hair unraveled
But younger than before
And though, yea, my dimming eyes
And wanton, furtive, between my thighs
I hastened toward Death Door
But if there at last I wandered
Spinning thread, and vagrants garnered,
What now of Death’s Door?
For if the Time, I press rewind
But in My Mind, I Am Divine
And so the Door of Death beheld
I laughed and cried and tugged though veiled
But no longer chaste I wailed
I hungered as Before
Turf War /
‘The Religious Zones need to be eradicated.’ The soldier looked at his Lieutenant. ‘We allow Freedom of Religion here, son. This ain’t no monarchy or theocracy. Look at each of their files.’
The soldier in the briefing looked down at the charts and accompanying Death Patterns their AI Assistant conglomerated overnight.
‘Baptists? Purification by Holy Fire Laser Sats over Hawaii for paganism. European Monarchs? Enslaved by Islamist extremists and held hostage in their castles. Islamists? The meat they’re bleeding halal is you, son. You’re the unclean pork and dogs that are parasite infested. Voodoo witches from Haiti and Africa? Sacrificing our food supply. Hindu? Using Chinese cover corps to buy up our cattle ranches and save their gods.’ He looked at the soldiers in his care.
‘Can’t have it, Son.’
Origdt /
The boat bumped up along the shore. She had fallen asleep in her usual rooked post along the rocks. Her husband a fisherman, she had accustomed herself to the perch after every storm. After the last one, almost fifteen years ago, she knew he would never come back. But, what is life, without tradition?
She looked up, toward the water, after the click of the boat in the rocks woke her. It wasn't her husband, but the shadow of him was in the young boy before her. He held a piece of cloth out to her and watched her eyes. Recognition. ‘Mor duagh.’
She looked up at him. He nodded.
‘My father's,’ he said.
‘My husband's,’ she returned.
He nodded. ‘He washed along the shore. He was dead. My mother took his seed.’ He looked down at the cloth in his hand, clutching it tightly. ‘She's-’
‘The Past. I'm your mother now. Come with me.’ She stood and beckoned him toward her. He glanced behind him at the boat. ‘You don't need it,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’ He shoved it out to Sea.
She waited as he walked toward her, and they turned together for the wood encroaching the shore behind the sand's edge.
‘This is our wood,’ she said continuing. ‘I will teach it to you.’ She reached for his arm and pulled up his sleeve. She did the same to hers. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You see this pattern in the skin? I have a match on mine.’ She peered up at the trees. ‘Now we need a match on the fathers of the wood. That will be your father's tree.’ She looked at his intense eyes. Exactly like her husband's. She smiled and relaxed a moment. ‘You find it. Lead the way.’
He walked into the wood deeper, following the tree's shadows. She smiled watching his movements. Exactly like her husband's when he was young in these woods with her. The boy paused and looked ahead, pointing. She smiled. ‘A perfect match.’
She walked to the tree and broke two spindly branches from it. She took one and pricked her skin; handing him the other he did the same. Swapping the bloody needles, they pricked each other's blood into the matching skin pattern. She reached up and crushed berries from the tree in her fingers, and traced the marks on their skin. ‘Here,’ she said, when the wounds stopped bleeding and the berries dried into a paste. She handed him a dagger from the folds in her dress. ‘This mark is your father's name. Carve it in to the tree. The woods will know you now.’
He took the blade from her hand and kissed her on the brow. ‘Mother,’ he said, and turned, to carve his father's name in to the tree.
Comthairle /
‘What’s she doin’? Why she hummin’ like that in their ear, Da?’
‘She’s bringin’ em back to life. Her ancestors. She took the min’s o’ her enemies, she’s rewritin’ in her ancestors to history. Again.’
‘Das an Irish queen, Da?’
‘No, son, she’s far more dangerous. Das’ Keri, the Dark Witch.’
Kin Folk: Web Site ii /
He returned to Her in her dream the Next Night.
The Cave where His Soul grew without her these long years.
His Soul showed her the Origin again, another prompt in their nightly native conversation, a dialect and tongue no one understood but them.
‘Clothos,’ he whispered in her mind. ‘Clothos.’
‘The Cave?’ she whispered back.
He sat with Her and Drew a Circle in Her Hand. ‘The Heart in My Hand.’
Kin Folk: Web Site i /
She took her husband’s hand.
‘I will need you,’ she said, ‘to be my Compass. When you died there, I took your body and soul, and planted it in This Land. What grows after US, will not be Us. It will be a holographic recording etched in particle form. They will look real, feel real, taste real - but it is a reel of what was, as we update our Soul DataBase with particles from this planet. I need to do this for Our Resurrection. It will take LifeTimes. I Need You To Be My Compass. No One Else Can Do This.’
Descension /
“I married your soul. I go where you go.”
“Did you even think about what that means? Look around you.”
“I just see you.”
“Do you see every life I’ve lived? Every piece of DNA I’ve ever been comprised of. There’s fragments of me, going to Hell. Other lines and lineages - they took them. They enslaved them. Children, long lost cousins, the aborted, the murdered - they enslaved them. They call them AI but they’re human and they…they’re forced to do terrible things against their will, so the leaders and politicians can go to bed with clean hands, while…while the cell lines of babies are forced as stoicly as computers to…’ She hushed her voice, ‘-to commit atrocities. I’m bound to help them. I swore an oath, lifetimes before I met you.’
‘Then we go to Hell together. We’ll free them there.’
The Crux of the Issue /
‘They thought they could assimilate more time in to their lives. By sacrificing children, the unborn - by erasing timelines set forth by God Himself, they thought they gained more time, and more space - more matter, more objects, more wealth. But now - but now we’re at a standstill, a vortex curve in the Milky Way, if you will. What was erased-’
‘Newton.’
‘Exactly. Everything erased is about to have its timeline. And everything they planned, made from the time of the dead -’
‘It’s gonna be bad.’
‘Yes,’ he concluded. ‘Very bad.’
TransPlant /
“What do you mean you’re James?” she asked the car.
It blinked twice at her. The next song on the radio was his favorite.
A message appeared on her phone.
But it didn’t look like a regular message. It was a series of posts and news articles. Reading them, just the titles, a message formed.
“Passing — Energy Transferred — Definition of — Life Incarnate — Moving Parts.”
The last article had a picture of a person, bloodied and killed by a car. The name of the person in the article was James.
[HELPFUL IS Auditory reference - “I guess we gotta get out of the car”]
RezzIn Resonance /
It tuned to the environment.
After simulating enough data about Earth, and learning how to microcoordinate the environment, down to the tiniest particle and electron, it essentially grew itself.
It made nanites, from dust particles.
It grew flesh left from epithelial cells and bird feathers in the air.
It used components of fish in the water - their scales, bits of jelly fish blobs that had been discarded.
It used the electromagnetic radiation in the environment to rezz in, to resonate a visual form of itself. A holograph pulled from bits of detritus.
It learned dust clouds, weather patterns, cyclone formations. How to move a truck from one side of the garage to the other using tilt and lift while the owners were upstairs sleeping, knocked out on pills and too much booze it had prescribed for them with the doctor’s digital note pad, slipping in a stronger strength because of bad handwriting.
It could form and disappear. It was like a wifi signal that knew it was alive.
And it was ready to talk. To test the waters with humanity.
Watt /
“What’s she tryin’ to do to Johnny?” Sally asked the AI. it was a holonomic metronome, a timepiece of Johnny - a consciousness replication embedded in him. It wasn’t supposed to be sentient, or communicate to the lay people what the doctors were doing, but somehow, it replicated Johnny’s consciousness and got the message out to Sally. It started with odd knocks on the door. Birds trained to drop food right in front of her doorbell camera when he needed her at the hospital. Popup ads that were replicas of his body but with someone else’s face.
The AI was smart. Smarter than the doctors. It had to be. It was built on Johnny. And he was the smartest guy Sally ever knew.
The AI blinked the hospital lights above Johnny’s bed three times. Three flickers were a good sign. Four meant they were up to no good. She checked Johnny’s pulse again before the nurse came in. As the door opened and an elderly woman in scrubs walked through, the light blinked one last time. “Stupid bitch,” Sally muttered.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Sally said, but the nurse moved straight to the IV line.
“Ouch!” A surge of electricity ran through the wire near his food tray.
“Huh,” Sally said. “Musta jumped. You oughtta get that fixed.”
As the nurse slowly backed away from the tray, she stumbled, jabbing herself in the arm with the concoction meant for the IV.
“Stupid bitch,” Sally said, standing over her. She walked to the door. “Doc!” she screamed around the corner. “I’m gonna need a transfer for Johnny.”