Peter Prellwitz - Shards Book One

"Forever enshrined to honor those who so valiantly fought in the Terran/Martian Wars, there lies here a fallen comrade, known but to God.? It was dated 2389.

Terran/Martian Wars. Then they had established a colony. I stood and looked into the black sky to see if Mars was up. It was, its redness even more evident in the vacuum of space. It looked so peaceful. Susie, was also looking up, but in another direction, towards Polaris. Her face was quiet and thoughtful. I turned to Sanchez.

"How many?? I asked in a small voice. Since there were no ambient noises, it still sounded abrasively loud.

"Three million from Mars, 481 million from Earth. There were four wars lasting sixteen years,? Raul said with an impassive tone.

"How can you be so cold?? I said with stunned surprise. A half-billion people. I couldn't begin to grasp a carnage that great.

"It was a long time ago, Abigail. Three hundred years. But though we may sound indifferent about it, we are not, and the war still leaves its mark. As one-sided as the numbers may appear, Mars lost the war because their entire population was three million. Fewer than one thousand survived. Mars was never again resettled. The terra forming operations were abandoned, and it is again a dead planet."

"What do this war and the firestorm have in common?"

He didn't answer me. Instead, he nodded again to Susie, and the tunnel appeared to rush us away.

And so it went for more than an hour. We saw New York City turned into a massive crater, surrounded by a flat, glassy plain, no life to be seen. They showed me dark hospital wards and filthy asylums, buried deep underground, housing horribly mutated things that may or may not have once been human. We saw a series of ripes, some of which were definitely not human, their brain cases merely welded, sealed boxes bolted into a control panel. In later images, not even that vestige of humanity was left them, as their intangible minds were moved into circuitry and hard memory. There were many, many more images, sounds, and experiences. How I managed to make it through without fainting, I don't know. Finally, we were taken back to the riverside. I looked into the ethereal data stream, shooting ribbons of silver and gold, and wondered how two such worlds could exist within each other. I looked up at Sanchez, feeling very weak from either our long access time or the mentally draining sights. Probably both.

"Why did you show me these things?"

He didn't respond, but instead leaned against the railing that ran along the riverbank, contemplating me. I looked at Susie, who stood quietly beside him, staring down at the hard floor of the puterverse. It was for me to find out.

"Computer. Access Abigail Wyeth."

"Access granted.? The obsidian walls shot up into the air, and the area became darker, less friendly.

"Locate common focus of past twenty queries."

Again a tunnel came up, and we were inserted into it. We shot along, my hand groping for and finding Susie's. Lt. Sanchez stood close behind us. I had a sudden flash of fear and shivered.

A pinpoint of an exit appeared and raced toward us. The light increased quickly; it was clearly daylight at the end. I heard the distant rumble of voices and could even make out a few faces before we were suddenly in the midst of them. No one seemed to notice us, and several passed through us, causing no harm nor having any come on them. I looked around, trying to orient myself. I first noticed the almost even proportions of race among the multitude. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, everyone was represented in almost the same number. It could have been anywhere in the world, but nowhere in mine. Many were civilians. Many more were in a military style of uniform.

After a few more moments of studying the crowds, I looked up. Being shorter than everyone but the younger children, it was the only other way for me to look.

Filling the entire sky in front of me was a massive complex of buildings. We were in a manmade canyon, surrounded on all sides by these huge structures, most hundreds of meters high and a few as wide as they were tall.

The complex was so massive that it was more a carved mountain, made to look like buildings. An unearthly steel and glass mountain, reflecting the sunlight in such a way as to be blinding, even from my low vantage point. It made it difficult to get a proper look at the structures, other than size. I did make out a logo on several of the buildings, but the shimmering reflection made it impossible to make out anything other than shape. And people were constantly getting in my way. I tried jumping up to see over, but it didn't help much.

"Computer, delete people.? They faded away and we were in a deserted valley of glassy concrete.?

Accelerate time to two hours past sunset.? Time slipped quickly by, and the large buildings flashed with the setting sun's rays, then took on a luminescence of their own in the gathering twilight. Night descended, and the stars came out. The logos flickered, then flared to life, and suddenly they were very easy to see.

At last I understood. I could see why these people had been so happy to have me, and so upset. I knew now why my I… I… IHAD had gone on for so long, why they had questioned me, and questioned me, and questioned me, though I had no memory of it. As I stared up at the accusing symbols, the ground beneath us began glowing, and suddenly we were standing on another massive logo, flooding the air with brilliant blue light. I looked down at it and realized how lucky I was to still be alive, and not burned to a cinder by Susie's gun as I lay helpless. I stared at the logo, hoping it would go away, or change into something else. But it didn't.

NATech Supreme.

"End access.? My voice was very small, very quiet.

The sounds faded, the images quavered a moment, then collapsed back into the flimsy sheet attached to Lt. Sanchez's wall.

"We don't know exactly when NATech was formed. The records have long since been lost, altered, deleted or secured. We had guessed sometime in the mid twenty-first century. Until you came along, Abigail."

I stretched out on my bed and looked up at the rock ceiling. It was a constant source of amazement that the rock could be cut to be so smooth, so flawless. I would have thought that natural imperfections in the native rock would leave the surface pockmarked and scarred. They must have some sort of blending method.

I rolled on my side to face Susie, groaning slightly as my aching muscles protested. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, largely unaffected by our puterverse accessing. Our room was so small that she was less than a meter from me, so our conversation was still pretty intimate. Not that anyone would hear us; we had shut the door for the night.

"You missed by a century,? I replied.? NATech was a result of the Second World War and the forming of the United Nations. Almost no one knew of it because it would compromise our mission. We wanted to be able to prepare society for the changes that it was going to go through. We also did a large amount of research in what were considered to be fantastic, unrealistic ideas. By keeping our existence quiet, we were able to focus on our work and not the ever-changing politics."

She shook her head in disbelief.? It sounds unbelievable. And it's so completely impossible that the very entity we fight against, and by whose hand so many of us die, could at any time have been benevolent.

But I heard it from you, now and in the past days. The shock of the story you told us is still there."

"No more than the shock to me of seeing what NATech became. We had anticipated something like this could happen, and had installed numerous safeguards to prevent it. In fact, shortly before I 'died', I…? I broke off and hedged.?…was also working on a long range safeguard. It's painfully clear those safeguards were useless. How far reaching is their power?"