skonen_blades

It was that time again. Time for the aliens to mate. I was the first human allowed to watch.

The Kurisk were a unique race. Their minds had raced forth early on while their bodies remained on the bottom rungs of the evolutionary ladder. The Kurisk had become adept at building and smelting and extrapolating when most races were figuring out how to walk upright and club each other.

They enhanced their primitive appendages with wooden and then clay prosthetics, enabling them to make more complex tools, enabling them to make more complex machinery. They built carapaces for themselves out of metal. They built heaters for themselves inside those carapaces to enable exploration of the polar regions. Then they built self-contained breathing apparatus for trips below the water. They built communication arrays inside their increasingly armoured husks.

After that, they added wings and flocked to the sky. After that, gunpowder and kinetic weapons to protect themselves from skyborne predators. After that, they added rockets and escaped their planet’s gravity.

When food became a problem, they managed to make adjustments to themselves to live off of solar and gravitational power while in space and geothermal power while on planets without nutrients. One of them flew near a gas giant and transmitted a blueprint to all his fellow Kurisk about an idea for improvements to survive such an atmosphere. The discovery of lasers was an evolutionary leap.

Every new set of planetary circumstances they came in contact with caused them to race back home and add a new layer to their shells. They were quick learners.

No one knew what their original forms looked like. They were permanently sealed in their massive shells.

Masters of language translators and pleasant to talk to, the Kurisk were curious and inquisitive. A good thing, too. If they’d been warlike, they would have been formidable. They held patents on most of the technology in the universe. They hadn’t yet mastered Faster Than Light or Transport Technology but it was only a matter of time.

In some places, they were referred to simply as The Improvers.

While each Kurisk varied a tiny bit, they tried to remain identical and to keep all of their improvements up to date across their entire race. This made it impossible to tell them apart. Only the Kurisk themselves could do that.

Every six years, they needed to return home to mate. This was the only time they came out of their shells. As a Universal Geographic reporter, they let me visit their world to witness and record what no other race had seen. They saw my own human curiousity mirrored in theirs.

I was about to see a naked Kurisk.

A Kurisk with the designation Arentally, my friend who gotten me this job, was interested in a Kurisk named Mortenoj. Mortenoj was fertile and Arentally was ready. With an agreement passed between their arrays, they started to undress.

It took an entire day. Pressurized suits were collapsed slowly. Eggshell-thin casings were retracted. Reactors were powered down. Connections were waterfall-triggered to regress and bodypit faceplates were folded under and away. Hoses were detached. Complicated suture arrangements and biomechanical virus defenders were temporarily dissolved.

And there, at the center of the enormous, open, bloomed flower of intricate machinery, sat my friend, Arentally. He flopped forward onto the ground with a grunt. Sort of a cross between a vivid green slug and an blue octopus. Utterly disgusting. He couldn’t speak to me or see me without his equipment. He waved a weak tentacle and slithered towards the smell of his mate.

Mortenoj was also out of her shell. The two of them clumsily found each other, sliding across the ground, and entwined. It was very messy and noisy.

I filmed the whole thing with a frown on my face and tried to remain professional.






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There was a minimum of 42 parameters to create a viable world simulation. The maximum was infinite. In this class, the basic 42 were used to give the students a feel for it. Questions were best answered in this way. The larger philosophical questions were easiest to answer by creating these worlds.

Jared left them at their defaults.

What if life on Earth had developed with a silicate base instead of a carbon one? Would religions exist if a meteor strike had taken out the entire Middle East before literate humans lived there? What if the ambient temperature of Earth had left us with no ice caps and mostly tropical flora? What if Earth wasn’t on an axis and had no seasons?

Jared left these at their defaults as well. Carbon, five major religions, ice caps and seasons intact.

To get more specific answers to questions like ‘what if Hitler lost World War 2?’ or ‘what if first contact didn’t happen in 1985?’ you’d have to juggle upwards of 2000 variables.

Jared changed those.

To create an exact replica of the Earth as it was today and make variations on your life was a form of self-abuse. Seven hundred thousand variables or more. Masters Doctorate level stuff.

Jared was extremely intelligent.

He was possessed by the idea that a perfect Earth existed and that he could create it. This was a documented mental illness called Thuringer’s complex. Like most people in the grip of an obsession, he denied that he was a victim of it.

He also thought he could make a self-aware Earth, an earth that noticed it was being manipulated. This was a documented mental illness called Forenzi’s disease. Like most people in the grip of a mental illness, he was unaware that he was experiencing a mental illness.

Jared believed that first contact with the aliens had not saved the human race; that humans could have come through the hardships themselves unscathed. This was merely an unpopular opinion.

The combination of the three was a new form of madness.

Currently, he had six Earths functioning in his lab, spinning away at a half-decade an hour. The faculty members had already questioned his motives. He was on the verge of being shut down.

Jared was waiting in his lab for the paperwork that would force him to destroy his experiments. He was looking at the Earths through tears, realizing that the paperwork wouldn’t even be necessary. Earths 1 through 4 had extinguished themselves in war. Earth five had hit a renaissance the likes of which had never been seen in any recorded simulation but had devolved into savagery almost instantly afterwards.

This sixth Earth, however, was balancing on the verge. Technology was mixing with the economy to form a global awareness. An ‘internet’ had formed, surpassing all borders and making the idea of countries seem quaint and dated. The number 42 has surfaced in the literature as relevant to the meaning of life. Films talked of false worlds kept within computers. Conspiracy theories abounded about alien sightings and lizard-men running the governments and banks. They were so close!

On the plus side, medicine had raised the average life expectancy from 30 to 85 in a few short centuries. A growing damnation of greed was starting to war with need for constant expansion.

On the negative side, the Earth was crowded and there were still no plans for solar system expansion. Left to their own devices, it was unknowable if they’d be able to create viable terraforming and space-travel technology fast enough, before they ran out of materials and air. No guiding alien hands to help them.

Jared sat in his lab and watched his Earth spinning. Another fifty years in there and another hour out here before the student/teacher council reached a decision. He wondered if the shut-down papers would have an effect on his experiment by the time they showed up.

His Earth-6 felt him watching.




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Urdu was talking to Nubis in the basement of the final chamber. The torchlight glimmered on the sandy stone walls around them. They were in the heart of a pyramid.

“Nubis, are you sure about this?” whispered Urdu.

“Yes, I am. This is the only way we can go forward. You have ears and eyes. Look around. The rest of the world are savages. The ones from above chose us. US, Urdu!” hissed Nubis.

“I know that, Nubis” said Urdu with his hands raised palms out to calm his friend. “I know this is the right way for us. For the whole Egyptian race. It’s just that the ones from above are dead now and the machines weren’t finished. We know nothing of their technology.”

“Right now, Urdu, there are other citizens of Egypt having the same conversation at the other pyramids. We are all nervous. Tomorrow, we will line up at the machines, turn them on, and become immortal like the ones from above promised. They were days from finishing. I have faith that they will work.” Nubis said in a tone that ended any further argument.

Urdu had seen ‘faith’at work. The Ra festival last year had claimed both his parents and his brother had been on the losing team at a Ptah-Hook match just one month ago. He was all that was left because of his people’s faith.

He had seen faith at work when the ones from above had objected to having one of their number sacrificed to finalize the deal and had seen faith at work again when the ones on the ground here were slaughtered and the ones in the sky had left.

They left their nearly finished machines.

They told us that there is something in us called a soul and that we have something called genes. They told us that these machines would localize our souls to this planet and that we would never die. Each of our souls would be recycled into the new body of a baby that had just been born. Our race’s memory would be carried in our very flesh. Knowledge would compound upon the previous generation’s knowledge and we would conquer the earth.

They weren’t talking about reincarnation. They were talking about the perfect re-creation of each person’s mind. The machines weren’t finished and the plan was flawed. The ones from above didn’t procreate as fast as the humans. In no time at all, there would be more bodies than souls and soul division would start to take place.

The Egyptians lined up and turned on the machines. There was a flash and the machines expended all their energy. The Egyptians stood and waited. The machines did not work anymore and were scrapped. In time, it was forgotten.

The other races around at the time died a truedeath and no longer live on. There is a reason why every single past life regression therapy in this new age brings up the Egyptians. Every person was a slave, a scribe, a princess, a teacher. The reason is that we were all there.

The machines weren’t finished.



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