Chapter 3: Awakening

It was a warm summer day. Exceedingly warm in fact. July had been brutal this year. It was unusual for the weather to ever exceed a temperature above even 30 degrees C in Sweden. Today it was 37 C.

A lot of people wouldn't know this, but, the human body handles external temperatures surprisingly well. It doesn’t really matter if its five degrees or forty-five degrees. The human body just kind of make due with what it got. Except for when the external temperature matches the internal one.  That magical number of 37.3 C. 

This is more or less when your brain gets fried and goes haywire. There’s not really any better explanation for it than that. Rational thought just abruptly changes its name to “Joe Smith”, packs its bags, and gets on the first plane to New Zealand, Australia or any other commonwealth country.

This leaves you with a body controlled mainly by distorted feelings and animal instinct. Without the rational side keeping those two in check this combination can lead to some quite interesting if not extremely volatile situations.

“It’s hot” John said. He was lying uncomfortably in the grass behind one of the many benches in this suburban area. He was way too out of it to care about some minor discomfort thought. Besides, the built up humidity in the grass felt good against his back.

“Have you ever thought about life, John?” Chris asked him while sitting on the aforementioned bench. The question itself addressed John but the tone made it sound like he was rather addressing a room full of people. Or no one in particular. John couldn’t decide.

“It’s way too hot” he replied without even considering the details in Chris’s question. His warm brain felt like it was melting and thus he was in no mood to entertain another one of Chris’ crazy ideas. God know he have had a few during the years.

Chris continued anyway. “We are born right? And then we die. And a lot of stuff happens in between right? But none of it really matters since it’s all erased at the end right? Like a faulty hard drive all data is lost and forever gone. The only reason we exist to begin with is because of how it’s programmed into our genes. We’re literally programmed to stay alive and reproduce. Otherwise there just wouldn’t be any life because it’d all be dead, you know? ”

John turned his head over to look at Chris since he had noticed not only the tonal change in his voice but also how his gestures grew wilder as the monolog went on. Chris had turned his body around on the bench and was now looking directly at John as he was speaking.

“But you know John. There's one thing that has fascinated me. For these past few weeks in fact. We all know our birth day right? We celebrate it every year. But at the same time we pass our death date every year. Not even knowing it's there, you know? Just skulking away in the shadows waiting for the year that is THE YEAR you know?”

Chris had ended his sentence with a question but it was very clear that he wasn't really looking for an answer as he now held a .356 Magnum pointed towards John. John was close enough to see that it looked fully loaded. That is, the second before Chris actually fired at John, puncturing his lung.

While trying to gasp for air John could hear Chris continue his monolog: “You now know your death day John. And so do I to be honest.” Johns lungs was now starting to fill up with an unhealthy amount of blood which was in turn pushing out all the valuable air from where it should be. Not only that but John’s vision was starting to get blurry as well.

“Is this how I'm going to fucking die? In a grass field looking at a psycho on a bench?” was one of the last things going through John’s head as he watched Chris put a bullet through his.

They both knew their death date.

I don't really like Erdogan...

Chapter 2: Revenge

So what happened to that first desire that bound all humans together in the first place? That want, if not need, to protect their race at all costs? So, as mentioned earlier, the humans had perfected their salvaged technology after thirty-five years. But that’s another part of the human condition. They can never have enough. Just copying someone else’s work was nowhere as near as satisfying as it’d be to surpass them. So it took them about forty years to implement it. And another ten years to surpass it greatly. Technology that had once been outside their grasp was now beneath them. So they sent out scouting parties. They knew that the aliens had sent out a final warning into space by conventional radio waves. But they didn’t know who was the intended receiver nor where they would be located. It took them years of hard labor before they finally found their home system. The humans had been able to find it more or less by luck when one of their mining probes unexpectedly went offline in the middle of a mining operation. Billions of dollars were lost that day but the monetary loss was insignificant compared to what they gained. They now knew where their enemies were. And better yet, they hadn’t received the message yet. So they prepared for war. Then they patiently waited. They wanted the aliens to hear the message from their fallen comrades that had been sent so many, many years before. Once they had received the message and the severity of it had spread over all of their alien home worlds the humans decided. They decided to bring their war to them. The human ships and sky cities warped into orbit of the aliens home planets. Enough of them to blot out the skies. Just leaving the ships in orbit would have been worse than a nuclear winter. But the humans wanted revenge. They wanted blood. They wanted to show their would be captors what the human race was made of. What they could do. What the would do. The war lasted for minutes as they laid waste to entire planets. The humans had won. Yet it wasn't enough.

Mirrors

Hi there. It's me again. You might remember me from my story Claire. Or you might not. Doesn't really matter except if you want a bit of a backstory about me and my company. Btw, none of us has yet to respond that... thing in the Faraday cage.

But you guys aren't here to hear about old stories now are you? You're here to hear about mirrors! The bane of almost any human existence. Even if they're just reflecting coherent light back at you we still write stories, filming movies and making video games revolving almost solely about mirrors. But have you ever wondered why? Well me neither. Which brings me to last Saturdays discussion I had with an old friend and colleague of mine. Well, it was more of a long sided monologue from his side.

It all started in a bar. Like most shady stories do. Like I said, he was a colleague of mine, working in the physics department at the same company. Head of department really, but it's not that relevant. What's relevant is how this "discussion" came about.

So I had been waiting in the bar for about an hour before he finally showed up. Not that it was unusual in and by itself, he was a physicist after all. They're better known for their cleverness than their punctuality. Still, I haven't seen the guy in about a month so... yeah.

Anyways, when he finally showed up he looked disheveled. Like he hadn't changed his shirt in days, his beard was grown, and his hair was undone. The guy also looked like he lost something like twenty pounds since I last saw him. Since I had packed on a few pounds myself over the years, I was about to ask him what his secret was as soon as he sat down. But before I spoke he pre-empted me.

"Barkeep. A mug and a cheap whiskey please. Leave the bottle" He said looking straight at the barkeep. He put down his credit card on the counter and said "No ice. A black mug if you have one". Quite flabbergasted by his behavior I said "Well, hello to you too" in a sarcastic tone. "Sorry" he solemnly responded. "It's been a rough month"

I barely had to say "It's ok mate, so wha..." before he began to speak again. "They want us to observe them. They fucking want us to see them."

I'm getting more and more confused by the second, and being three beers in didn't really help my thinking process, so I flat out said "Alright mate, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Talk some god damn sense dammit!" thinking that he's talking about some reverse stalker or something.

That's when he laid it all on me. Apparently they had come across a phenomenon as were random background radiation could sometimes hit the same electron as regular light at the same time, resulting in a different light output. So of course, scientist as they are, they had scrounged up the shiniest mirror they could find and a really strong laser.

"Lasers and mirrors, I picked the wrong profession" I though to myself while continuing to listen to his story. And at first the result was to be expected. Since the light going out was constant, and background radiation is random noise, their... optic meters(?) picked up random variations of the light. This went on for a week, burning tax payers money, until something unexpected happened.

They started to get repetitions. Small ones at first. Kinda like getting red five times in a row on a roulette table. So they added more lasers to get more data. And the more they observed the less random these occurrences became. So now, like a hundred lasers in total, all being measured, started to show the same two colors in different sequences, over and over again.

"What? That's bloody impossible" Even I knew that the chances of that would be like winning every lottery while being struck by every single lightning bolt ever.  Really fucking improbable is what I'm saying.

"Yeah, I know" He said. "But that's just were it really started. We did something we shouldn't have. We translated it to binary and then over to letters. You know what it said?" He looked me with eyes so intense that I could see my self in them. "It said 'We can see you too now. Lets see each other more'"

After that, he told me, everyone in the "laser" team had started to see things. At first it was just something in the peripheral while looking in the mirror. But the more they saw them the more they started to look like creatures. Humans and... other things. And it wasn't just in the mirrors either. It graduated to anything shiny, and then later, to anything that reflects light relatively well.

The last thing he told me that night in that bar was "I can even see them in your eyes"

So what to take from this? Did he just finally crash or is there something out there trying to get our attention? I can't really be sure. All I know is that I don't look too long into the bathroom mirror anymore.

A response to a "Magic" user.

This is a response to: I need someone to take me seriously, please. The whole world's at stake.(Link)

Ha, "Magic users". Your pride is your downfall. Thinking you're better than mere mortals but teleport away at the first sign of trouble. At least the humans stand back and fight. Some of them until their last man. As many of them did in the last cycle.

Automatic weapons tearing through the dormant. A trillion bullets would be an understatement. And their airplanes, bombing them so swiftly from the sky, until they were out of bullets, bombs and fuel. With nowhere to land, even their last breaths in those machines took out more than you did with your "magic", crashing into the dormant. Killing them by the thousands per ship.

Then there were the nukes. Even thought napalm always was my favorite thing to see, oh how they burned both man and dormant alike, the nukes were breathtaking. Stunning. Each one of them like a unique flower sprouting into the atmosphere oh so fiercely.

As a last ditch effort, the few remaining humans, holed out in bunkers or at sea, fired their nuclear armaments almost simultaneously, for total annihilation. Of both skies. Smog filled the sky as billions upon billions of souls were evaporated by a heat only rivaled by the sun.

As someone who has walked at the deepest depths, these "things" as you so haphazardly calls them are just that. Things. Not much more powerful than you "almighty magic users". Not all that powerful at all really, since they're already dead.

The dormant is the accumulated fear from eons of lifeforms. Some human, some not. Fear clinging to rotting flesh and brittle bones. Lying dormant in the depths of the seas, sleeping away their agony. Hence their name.

To those who wonders, the cycle of his repeats every year or two or so. The world ends. We feed on your, the "magic users " and the Dormants fears and agony. Every slice, every dice, every cry in pain, every time something loses its last sliver of hope is like sweet, sweet wine for us. Oh and what a perfectly sublime agony it is. Each unique soul having its own torments and anguish. Billions upon billions of souls each harvest. So ungodly good. It's a shame you'll never be able to experience this from our point of view.

Then we just reset it. Resets the world. Let the humans live their pathetic lives. Let the "magic users" feel like the upper class for a while. Let the dormant have their uninterrupted slumber.

Well, except for this poor sap. There's a reason time travel is outlawed inside their little magic circles. It's not because it requires tremendous power and luck. It's because forgetfulness is bliss. After each reset, everyone forgets everything. We leave not a trace in the minds of the entitets we feed off of.

But our reset has a flaw. If someone were to time travel backwards before we reset the cycle they'll remember ever last bit of it. This guy will feel the same terror and helplessness until the cycle repeats. And he couldn't even bring his own body with him. I'm sorry but that just puts a gleeful smile on my face, metaphorically speaking.

But yeah, he'll always remember. That kind of terror doesn't leave your soul so easily.

Have fun "Spellsword". I guess I'll see you again next cycle. :)

Chapter 1: Genesis

It didn’t take long for the victorious humans to ravage the wreckage of their would be invaders. Not only their vessels and weapons contained technology that was previously unseen and unknown to the humans but their lifeless bodies as well.

They hadn’t managed to capture a single extra-terrestrial being alive. A fact that didn’t slow down the humans much. They might have been split up before, fighting over the smallest things, such as race, land masses or religion. But they now had an external force that threatened their very existence as a species. Something  to unite them all under one flag. And such they did. It didn’t take long until they had all agreed on the same thing. The only thing they could do to preserve their human race and make sure it was safe was total universe domination.

And they researched. Stealing, salvaging and understanding something new takes a surprisingly short time when you have a goal in mind. The collective human knowledge about the world and universe around them grew at an exponential rate. It took less than thirty years until they had perfected their stolen tech. Five years more and they could implement it.

Life expectancy was now closer to infinity than it was to our starting point. With all the nanotech, body augmentations, bio-genetic computers and cyberbrains, it was almost harder to die than it was to be born. Yet humans still bred like they’ve always done. Some parts of their human condition could never be erased no matter how hard they tried.

So they expanded. The human need to expand had always been there, since the very beginning when they fought the neanderthals. It was ingrained both in their genetic code as well as their culture. With the implementation of the stolen technology this had become a rather mundane exercise for them. World hunger was eradicated just forty years after the war with the help of bioengineering, terraforming and improved geopolitics. Food production was increased tenfold if not more. The need for personal gain from political corruption was eradicated. Automatisation of more or less every mundane thing in the world meant that the people were able to do whatever they wanted. No more farming, no more mining, no more building for the normal person yet they still had a steady income of raw materials.

So they built. Cities covering entire countries cropped up. Farms moved from land to water. Nanotechnology and supercomputers made sure their air and water was clean and the world population was fed. Yet this wasn’t enough. Not even close. So they built even more. Space ships not much unlike the ones that had once come to destroy their world. Floating cities high above the atmosphere.

It didn’t take long until the population inhabiting the sky outnumbered their brethren on the ground. Neighbouring planets and celestial bodies became colonised not only by humans, but by machines as well. Machines that extracted the resources and sent them towards the ever growing sky cities.

The humans soon outgrew their own world, having placed restrictions to preserve their own solar system, and with advances on the salvaged warpdrive technology they set out to colonise their neighbouring solar systems. Connecting all their worlds with this improved warpdrive system that was not much unlike an old TV-show that had been broadcasted on their planet many years before. Yet greater in both scale and ingenuity.

Chapter 0: Before the stars

Napoleon the First, with all his disdain for men, bowed to one power that he was pleased to regard as greater than himself. In the heart of an atheistic age he replied to the smattering theorists of his day, "Your arguments gentlemen, are very fine. But who," pointing up to the evening sky, "who made all these?" And even the godless science of our times, while rejecting the scriptural answer to this question, still confesses that it has no other to give. "The phenomena of matter and force," says Tyndall, "lie within our intellectual range; and as far as they reach we will, at all hazard, push our inquiries. But behind, and above, and around all, the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution." But why incapable of solution? Why not already solved, so far as we are concerned, in this "simple, unequivocal, exhaustive, majestic" alpha of the Bible — "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"?
– (J. B. Clark.)

---

INCOMING TRANSMISSION

PRE-SUBSPACE INTERFACE

ESTIMATED TIME IN TRANSMISSION: 54.9 YEARS

TYPE: DISTRESS CALL

---

This isn’t as much a distress call as it is a confession and a warning. Don’t make the same mistake we did. Don’t underestimate them.

We though that we were better than them. That we’d be able to conquer then in less than a week. Before reaching the planet, our last pre-jump scouting showed that, due to time dilation and our speed, we’d be there in less than 300 years from their point of view. The planet had everything we needed to establish a new outward colony. Oxygen, water, life. It was perfect.

The only downside was the intelligent lifeforms that had emerged on the planet. There had been no traces of them as late as 10 000 years ago. Now they were building cities, utilising steam engines and ravaging the planet with endless wars. They also seemed like a non-issue at the moment. We had encountered many lesser civilisations in our earlier endeavours. Show up in a flying city and they’d think of you as Gods. And we knew how to act as such.

They were different tho. When we arrived at the planet just a bit less than 300 years later they had already discovered electricity, computers, advanced rocket science. Their planet had formed an artificial ring made up of satellites and their cities at land spewed out a staggering amount of radio waves.

They had somehow managed to do in 300 years what took us eons. Their technology should not have been this good so soon. We cared little of their computers and cars though. A quick scan revealed that they were lacking both warpdrives or space fleets. They had seemingly nothing that could hurt us as long as we were in space. So we proceeded with our plan. Our ships descended over all their major cities. We deployed ground troops and proclaimed that this planet was now ours. We did not expect much of a fight if any.

Oh how we were wrong. These creatures was rather accustomed to war. Hell, they almost seemed to enjoy it. Our ground troops were decimated in a matter of hours. Their weapons were crude ballistic weapons made up of iron. But they were effective.

So we retreated to high orbit. Bombarded a couple of their largest cities by dropping meteorites on them. Millions died. But this only seemed to aggravate them further. And that’s when we saw the full might of the human race.

Nuclear armament missiles. Fifty of them would have been enough to send their whole world into a nuclear winter. But they sent not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands. Tens of thousands. The effect of a nuclear reaction does little to one self when your enemy is in high orbit. Our ships fell down to earth in a fiery rain of hellfire. We were defeated.

I’m writing this as I’m watching the last missiles head towards me. This is not a distress call, but a warning. Do not underestimate the humans.

---

END OF TRANSMISSION
---

Got my domain name back! Yay!

YAY!

Some Fran Bow ITHERSTA translations (Part 1)

A page out of Léons book I was able to translate some stuff from the Itherstian language

The sign outside of the castle of Ithersta says what the guard tells us basically.

    power: is undertanding o wisdom 

    truth: lays in path to...

That was all I could muster up to translate. Seems to be simplified English written there at least.

Bar sign in Ithersta:

    .DANCE.

    .MUSIC. 

    .DRINKS.

Map says:

   

 ITHERSTA

That one was kind of obvious.

Next is a book about rabbits eating dinner

2. Bunnies making dinner

3. Friends came for dinner

And 5 bunnies ate dinner together!

And taled abot carrts

They seem to have missed a couple of letters at the end there.

The big magic book is going to take longer to translate. Dear god. Here are some samples:

So until next time! And oh! I'll leave you with this treat: The telephone number on the exterminator's card is: 714 21728 and his name was John Plomet.

John Plomet: 714 - 21728

The card also says:
bugs around? We kill them Contact us today!

Claire

The word "Hi!" was staring at me in white, blocky, text inside of a command prompt. There was also an input field at the bottom of the terminal. The courtesy thing would be to answer this seemingly harmless greeting. But something inside me wanted to destroy this thing and everything associated with it as soon as possible.

Yet the only thing I could do was to sit in front of the computer screen completely frozen in fear.

Lets take a step back. Claire. A pretty, young, face, just out of grad school, had joined our company a couple of years ago when we were looking for new programmers. It didn't take long to understand that this young woman was nothing short of a genius. The prodigy child of programming we called her, or proggy for short.

Anywho. Our company is one of the larger companies in the software business, specializing in the art of "predictive pattern recognition" and simple A.I's. You can find our software in anything between SEO-tools for web developers to self-interacting drones. It's worth mentioning that more than half our contracts was for the military. Being able to track, predict and foresee both allies and enemies movements and patterns is an unthinkable valuable resource on the battlefield. The less "fog of war" the better.

But lets get back to Proggy. Proggy had an ability that I've never seen during my many years in the business. And that was the ability to write thousands, if not tens of thousands lines of code and get it it right on the first try. In almost any of the languages out there. She would just write it up, compile and hand in her assignments in a matter hours. No debugging, no test compiling, no nothing. And it would always work. Always bug free. And any programmer know that nothing will ever be bug free, especially on the first try. But hers always was. It was almost eerie.

In laymans terms, she could've probably programmed Windows 10 in less than a week, from scratch, without testing it and we'd probably have a better product than what Microsoft gave us.

Only language she refused to code in was Java. When I asked her about it the only response I got was "It doesn't tick right, you know? I can't feel it the same as the others." I kinda understood her but at the same time I didn't.

As you might understand, Proggy was worth a whole lot to the company. Hell, she was probably worth more than 20 of our best programmers put together. So when she asked for three weeks off for a "personal project" we were happy to oblige. Hell, she hadn't taken a vacation since she started here, instead opting to have her vacation time paid out in cash. And this girl had made us literary millions of dollars, so three weeks, no probs, no ma'am.

Well, three weeks went by without a word from Claire. We just figured that she was enjoying her well earned vacation. Until she came back that is.

When she came back she came straight to my office. And when I saw her as she was entering through the door i could immediately tell something was wrong. She looked like a hollowed out husk of her old self. Skin unnaturally pale, eyes sunken in, and she must have lost 10 pounds at least.

She sat down in the chair in front of me and, before i was even able to open my mouth she spoke. "Compile it on an air-gapped machine. Don't even connected it to the electrical grid. Use an UPS."

She pulled up a regular SATA-disk. Except for the fact that the label only had a serial number and the disk size. 10 TB. After that she collapsed right there on my desk. After checking her pulse to see that she was in fact still alive i called the paramedics.

I held on to the disk a couple of days without doing anything with it. My main concern was Claire at the moment. But as soon as I heard that she was stable and improving I did as I was told.

I got a brand new computer, installed our basic, in-house, OS on it, hooked it up to a couple of industrial grade UPSes which in turn was hooked up to a diesel generator.

With the computer up and running I hot plugged the SATA drive into it. It was discovered immediately by the computer, using the standard windows NTFS to partition all of the 10 TB. The disk itself was almost completely filled except for a couple of gigabytes yet it only contained three files.

• Sui.asm
• Compiler.exe
• Readme.txt

The read me file only consisted of "Quis sum?" so I simply decided to run the compiler. The compiler was a simple terminal window that first showed the computer specs in white, blocky text and then simply showed an ETA ticking down. The ETA was circa 23 days. Good thing i hooked up that generator.

Of course, while waiting for the program to compile i had a quick look at the source code. But it was contrived and obscure that i couldn't make heads or tails of it. And there was literally millions of lines. So i gave up and just let it compile. The ETA ticking down while the terminal spewed out random debug messages. One especially catches my eye as it goes by:

ERROR; NON-CRITICAL; NO CONNECTION TO EXTERNAL SOURCES. REVERT TO ISOLATION MODE

Three days before the ETA was completed Claire had recovered enough to return to work. She seemed like her usual self again but when I asked her about the program she hesitated before answering.

"I'm not really sure what it is" she responded. "I just remember that i had to write it and that it was important. Like my soul wanted to merge with the machine. I didn't sleep, barely ate and the last two weeks was just a blur. I barely remember handing it to you. I just remember being too scared to compile it myself."

Three more days passed and it finished compiling. A single output file was created. Anima.exe

And here I sit now, having run the program. After the brief greeting of "Hi!" there's now another prompt.

"Am I alone?"