Immortals (23 page)

‘Dan, where is the button?’

Dan was still in shock, thinking about what was about to happen. He muttered.

‘The red switch, lower left.’

Henna rushed to the bomb, located the button and flipped open the cover of the switch. The red button glowed instantly. She looked up at Jai who was still shouting, asking her not to do it. She closed her eyes and thumped the button with her hand. The tiny icicle sitting between the contact plates, which had prevented the remote activation, broke and the circuit was completed.

The ground shook under Dan’s feet. He saw the smoke and the ice rise up in a mushroom cloud in the distance. His earpiece had gone silent after the explosion. He peered into the distance and steadied his feet as the aftershock hit him moments later.

***

Domus-Nova

Mouse-tail Galaxy

Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD

Jai did not feel a thing. He remembered seeing Henna at the bomb, flicking the cover on the switch and hitting it hard. The rest was a blank. He awoke on the bed in the ‘white room’. He was sweating profusely, panting for breath. The needles stuck in his head hurt him and he pulled at the wires going towards his head. The needles attached at the ends of the wires tugged at his skin and he yelped in pain. He continued pulling at the wires and the needles popped out of his skin, one by one. He undid the restraints on his waist and legs and stood up. It was then that he realised that he was standing up, that he was able to stand up in the room for the very first time. But the exhilaration was momentary. He felt his legs wobble and held on to the sides of the bed, steadying himself with his hands, to stop himself falling.

He heard a commotion outside and in a moment the door in the wall by the side slid up. A couple of men barged in. He knew them from somewhere. They approached him and supported his shoulders on either side, leading him out of the room. The cot on the adjacent room was empty, with bloodied needles and straps lying on the bed. They led him through another door at the far end of this room and led him out into a corridor. He could hear a great uproar in the distance.

‘Let’s just wait here for a moment,’ he heard one of the men whisper.

The other man nodded and they stopped. The wall on their side was shiny and Jai saw his reflection on it. It was his bronzed self, which he had seen in a mirror once, except now it was bloodied, blood trickling down his face from where the needles had been.

He could see two other men, crouching against the wall with the occupant of the adjacent room, a few metres ahead of them. They had waited there for just a few seconds when an explosion ripped through the walls of the corridor ahead of them. As the dust settled, six more warriors entered the corridor and ran towards them. They took up positions around him as they made their way towards the hole in the wall. He was led through the hole and beyond the rubble, where the beasts were waiting. It was raining outside, water coming down in sheets, accompanied by the howling of the wind. There were straps on the beasts and Jai was hoisted on to one of them, sandwiched between his rescuers. He saw the same happen to the prisoner from the adjacent room. The warrior in front of him patted the beast and Jai could feel a rumbling in the belly of the beast, as it prepared to take flight. It lifted itself off the ground, steadying itself for a moment and then took off into the night sky. The warrior behind Jai held him by his waist as the beast manoeuvred its way between shots being fired at them from the ground.

They headed up into the sky for about two minutes, the rain pelting down around them, and the sky lighting up in brilliant arcs of lightning. The beasts tore through the rain and the night sky till they broke through the cloud cover and suddenly, it stopped raining. Jai looked around him in that momentary respite from the rain and saw the beautifully illuminated night sky, bathed in the white light of two thin slivers in the sky, the moons that he had seen dancing long ago, in his dreams. The beast began its descent. The image in front of Jai’s eyes faded away and the rain started its assault as soon as the beast dived under the cloud line. It dove through the rain for nearly a minute and then steadied itself just above the tree canopy. Soon they were flying above the treetops, Jai’s feet skimming the leaves of the tall dark trees that covered the forest floor below him. Jai looked down and saw the vast expanse of forest below, illuminated in the light of the crescent-shaped double-moons in the sky. The warrior steering the beast in front slowed down the beast and it began gliding down towards a clearing in the forest cover.

The other beast had landed just moments ahead of Jai’s ride. Both the beasts and their riders hovered a metre above the ground, hiding within the tall grass around them. They got down from the beast and the warrior who was sitting behind Jai held him under his arms and supported him across the clearing as they headed for the trees, away from the clearing. The beasts glided ahead and hovered within the tree-line until the warriors caught up with them. There were many craft zooming in the sky above, with search lights pointed downwards, searching for them. The warrior supporting Jai cursed under his breath.

‘We don’t have much time. We have to reach the river now.’

They tore through the forested cover, the beasts hovering above the ground and ploughing the way ahead of them, clearing the bushes and the undergrowth in their wake. The group ran as fast as they could, almost carrying Jai and the other prisoner on their shoulders. They ran through the shrubbery for what seemed a long time before Jai heard the thunder of water. Moments later, they broke through the tree-line and Jai found himself at the foot of a giant waterfall. There was a cliff on one side and the river cascaded down the cliff in a thundering mass of water on to the rocks below before continuing downstream in a turbulent flow. His carriers gently let him down from their shoulders and Jai felt hard, cold, wet rocks under his feet. The rocks were wet and slippery and Jai struggled to keep his footing. Jai and the other prisoner were made to sit down at the foot of a tree and Jai looked and smiled at him. He acknowledged Jai with a grin, which played along beautifully on his handsomely rugged face. He was barely in his twenties, not the haggard eighty-year-old whom he had known back on Earth. The skin of his face had a strange hue and then Jai remembered the bronze skin of his own face in the white room. He looked at his hands and the bronzed skin of his hands glistened in the moonlight. He sighed and closed his eyes, resting his head on the tree-trunk. He felt so tired.

But rest wasn’t to come so easy. The old man in the Hazmat suit, whom he had seen in his dreams many a times, drew up to them and sat next to them by the tree. The old man looked at Jai and there was a hint of recognition and a faint smile as their eyes met.

Jai nodded to him and he acknowledged his nod. Ludvig’s boyish brown self turned to the old man and asked:

‘How come I am this young man here? How long was I imprisoned in that room? What is my age now, here?’

The old man smiled, and then replied earnestly.

‘Well, you are the age you look. You must be in your early twenties, if not less, and both of you were imprisoned for something less than a year.’

Ludvig interjected:

‘But I spent close to eighty years on Earth and died an old man, if I remember right.’

‘Well, that maybe so, but I think it can be explained by something known as time dilation. I have seen it many times, when we jump through wormholes and then go back to a prior destination. We seem to pass a lot of time across the wormhole, but when we return to the prior location, things there seem to have not aged or aged very little compared to how much we had aged.’

He continued his explanation to the rapt attention of Jai and Ludvig,

‘Something similar had possibly happened to you. You had spent eighty earth years out there, but here it is just a year in your time.’

‘Why go to all this trouble to hook us up to the machine? Why not throw us into a dungeon?’

‘That has its own complications. Knowing your reputation, you wouldn’t sit quiet even in a dungeon and if you moved, you would create trouble for us. This was an experiment in efficient prison management for us; to have absolutely quiet and co-operative and non-bothersome prisoners, where they are hooked on to a machine that keeps them alive, fed with pure energy and an endless dream reeling on in their head.’

The old man did not mention that the experiment was called ‘
S
imulated
H
eterodimensional
I
nurnated
T
rance in a captive HEAD’ or ‘
SHIT-HEAD’
for short.

Now Jai had a query.

‘But I did not spend eighty years there. I died at seventeen, but…’ and then he paused, remembering his Abdi nightmares, understanding that Jai’s seventeen and Abdi’s sixty-odd years probably added up to eighty and then it would make sense. He continued, ‘I lived two lives, one till sixty and the other till seventeen. Why was that?’

The old man replied:

‘Each time you died out there, the machine reset your lives to the moment of your waking up from your last sound sleep. However, if you got killed too soon after you woke up from sleep, the machine would go on a loop, having to reset your lives again and again, consuming rare and expensive worming resources. It would then decide to relocate your consciousness into another body as it must have happened after your death in the sixty-year old body. If, similarly, there was interference in the machine’s reaching you, as it happened with the nuclear haze surrounding you the last time, the machine would temporarily withdraw and then attempt to relocate you into another being. That was the precise window that we used to rescue both of you tonight.’

Jai suddenly remembered about the nuclear bomb and the image of Henna’s form hunched over the bomb moments before it exploded, floated in front of his eyes.

‘Oh my God! Henna…,’ and he burst into tears, thinking of her sacrifice.

Ludvig placed a hand on Jai’s shoulder, not saying anything.

‘Who’s Henna?’ the old man asked.‘An unnecessary casualty of this war in that world,’ Ludvig replied.

The old man had a spark in his eyes and he started to say something, when they heard some noises ahead of them.

There was a commotion and Jai opened his eyes again. A few of the soldiers were pointing towards the top of the waterfall.

Jai squinted his teary eyes in the rain, to see the slender form of a girl, silhouetted against the edge of a two-hundred-metre precipice adjacent to the top of the waterfall. They watched in horror as moments later she jumped into the waterfall. Jai heard a gasp and turned to see the old man’s eyes riveted to the spectacle. He immediately set off, heading downstream with the soldiers to look for the girl who had jumped into the river.

The old man stood at the riverbank as they fished out the lifeless body of the girl. She was young, in her early twenties perhaps, and she was not breathing. The old man tore through the crowd of soldiers.

‘Let me have a look,’ he said. ‘I am a healer. Let a healer come through.’

The soldiers let him in and he crouched beside the girl. There was no pulse in her wrist and she was not breathing. There were no major external injuries though. He tried resuscitating her but to no avail. Her body felt leaden, the water within adding to the dead weight of her body.

The old man looked around to see all eyes on him. He looked back at the girl’s lifeless body, motionless after failed resuscitation. He knew he had to do what he had meant to do later. This was a sign. He had no idea who she was but it could not be a coincidence that she had chosen this precise moment to jump into the waterfall. He put his hand inside his tunic and took out a small device with a few wires sticking out of it.

One of the soldiers stepped forward.

‘What is that?’

He looked up at the soldier.

‘It’s a medical device to try to jolt her back into consciousness.’

The soldier was not convinced.

‘She’s dead. No fancy device can bring her back from the dead.’

‘Then what’s the harm in trying.’

The soldier shrugged and stepped back. A mere medical device it was not, the old man thought to himself. In fact, it was something that he had developed during this last assignment of his, watching over the prisoners. If this rescue effort had not succeeded, he had intended to use it to smuggle his prisoners out with the device.

Well, not them in their entirety but their consciousness, their ‘souls’. He had managed to compute and construct a miniature version of the machine that was collecting and broadcasting the consciousness of the prisoners to remote Earth, and he had planned to collect the consciousness of the prisoners before they were executed, into his ‘soul-drive’ and to re-animate them outside if and when he had the chance. But, the plans for their rescue materialised and he did not have to use it to rescue the prisoners.

But the drive with him was not empty tonight.

He had within it another consciousness that had come through from remote Earth. After consciousness was restored to the prisoners, he found that the machine had surplus consciousness which added up roughly to what could only be another individual.

He was momentarily flabbergasted but then he could not just drain it out into nothingness. He collected the extra consciousness into his ‘soul-drive’ and there it was now, in his hands.