Unholy Trinity Read online

  Part Two - A Voice from the Darknet

  Chapter Seven - to Hold the Peace

  Quotation from Melville’s Gipluk Tome 1 (Year 48 - New Calendar)

  “Everything had changed, and the loss of Susan hung like a barrier between us and our dreams and any happiness. Once all the Darknet forces had been tracked down and destroyed, cracks started to form within our alliance, and everyone wanted the power that Reality Imaging promised. The problem was, we just couldn’t use it. On the three occasions our ships employed it, the fabric of this reality buckled, and three areas had to be cordoned off as unsafe, which we worked out would be effecting every multiverse. It seemed the construct was much more fragile than we had given credit, and although everything had been set up for moving beyond the brain with Reality Imaging, we simply couldn’t use it. This caused huge tension within the Earth Alliance, which we initially tried to counteract by sharing further technologies. This was severely hampered though by the effects of these new technologies, and the more people that used direct materialisation, the more fragile the reality construct became. We banned the use of this technology and managed to shore up the biggest rift which was with the planet Fuhjeworlt which was a dictatorship ran by the ‘Father of the World’. It seems Dodds in his desperation had promised the ‘Father’ his powers of materialisation, and after they ‘saved our skins’, which was how they put it, they rather expected us to deliver on Dodds’ promise; in spite of the effects on the reality construct.

  Eight years of very fragile peace had held through my presence being produced wherever I was needed to plug the dam as it were. I had made my permanent base with the agreement of Oie on Gipluk, as I sensed this was a focus point for this multiverse; as well as continually mending the peace and giving further assurances and benefits where I could, I was also working closely with Professor Magnaus in trying to develop a strategy in mending the reality construct. Annoyingly, in the middle of work with Magnaus, there was suddenly an incident on the border with Fuhjeworlt, with an emergency dash to planet Zxbu which was stricken with a pandemic, with life-saving drugs being hijacked, and the news had come to us from the charity agency involved.’

  By now, the alliance had grown to encompass seventeen planets, and there had been a great sharing of technology; except of course for Reality Imaging Materialisation (RIM), and I felt confident enough now, in spite of how much we owed the ‘Father’ and his fleet, to create a show of strength, and arrive there with half the fleet, which consisted of over 1000 battleships and cruisers, and countless thought fighters. It was time for a show of force, or if need be, a war between the alliance and the forces of the ‘Father of the World’.”

  I sensed that the three ships full of life-saving drugs had been in orbit around Fuhjeworlt, I kept half my fleet in three smaller fleets which were positioned a light year away, available to be wherever I needed them in a matter of a minute (thought distance).

  I was mightily relieved to hear that our progress with ‘thought’ technology was still usable, as that was still a process using our brains. It seemed our reality really couldn’t cope with us not using our brains!

  With Mr Chu, Mad Dog, Emily; Dodds and Yvonne utilised elsewhere in the vastness of space, I would be leading this campaign with my top generals, who had all mastered direct thought communication. One of the problems of finding people to trust over such large distances, was that in the end, the Hand ended up being continually apart, as we needed our instantaneous connection and trust in each other to run a multiverse.

  With half my fleet in position, I arrived unannounced and surrounded the planet of Fuhjeworlt. I sensed immediately it was a trap, and most of his forces were waiting at the edge of the solar system. Thankfully, my large reserve force was more than a match for them, but I wanted to negotiate a peace with the ‘Father’, and give him every opportunity of a fifth chance, before I declared war and destroyed them. I sensed in the end, the only way this would resolve itself would be a regime change, and a process of conditioning, but I would only make that my last resort, and in many ways, it would be his decision. Of course, he didn’t know that I had brought such a large force. It would be interesting to see how this would play out.

  “Lord Melville, you honour us!” the comslink shouted, as his familiar face appeared.

  “I am here to warn you that unless you release the disaster relief ships, with all their crew and cargo immediately, a state of war will exist between the alliance and Fuhjeworlt.” I said very seriously.

  “But we are part of the alliance! Dodds said we were heroes of the alliance! My men are merely playful, but our customs and culture mean, what is taken by the power of the Father, cannot be returned. I’m afraid in this case I have no power. The captains will have already sold on the drugs and made a profit. Come now, let’s stop this unfriendliness and share a glass of Schknak and talk about future glory.” he said, thinking he was playing some crafty game.

  I sent thought orders to my fleet, and six thousand thought fighters created an offensive perimeter around the Father’s fleet, and I directed my reserves to occupy a position out of sight and detection, a parsec away from the enemy fleet waiting at the edge of the solar system to pounce on us.

  “I’m afraid those days are over. The peace is a red hot iron which we have to hold and accept the pain. War is what appears to be an easy option, but which in fact is a slippery slope into complete destruction. You have to decide whether you want to hold the peace and pay its price, or do you want to die?! You have one minute to decide!” I warned, it had to be said with some relish. Some people plainly didn’t deserved the lengths one sometimes had to go to, to be understanding and patient.

  The screen went blank, and it was plain the ‘Father of the World’ had made his last decision.

  Their fleet pulled back into a defensive position within their defence grid, and their reserves appeared at our rear, and the Fuhjeworlt war had begun.

  The first phase of over 100 of our battleships entered their defensive grid surrounded by thousands of our thought fighters whose responsibilities were to destroy the planetary defensive array and pick off as many of their battleships and cruisers as possible.

  I smiled as they stayed in their defensive position and waited for their reserves to make mincemeat of us. Three seconds after they arrived I sent the coordinates to my own larger reserves, and they made thought drive moves behind, in the middle and in front of their forces. At the same time I committed a further third of my forces to break up the defensive formation with three corkscrew formations which had been so successful before.

  At the same time, because of the amendments I had already made, which may well have been responsible for the loss of cohesion of the construct, but did not contribute to its further demise, I spread confusion and miscommunication across the enemy fleet, which ended up with them firing on their own side.

  The remainder of my fleet landed 16 giant troop transports holding 12000 troops in each, around the circumference, and instigated an invasion of the administrative buildings to facilitate the required regime change.

  After roughly half an hour of this carnage, a general from the Fuhjeworlt high command informed me that the dictator formally known as the Father of the World had been killed, and they were ready to surrender. The Fuhjeworlt war had lasted 33 minutes, and we had lost 102 thought fighters and the cruiser, Obama. The Fuhjeworlts had lost 31 battleships, 25 large cruisers, 41 smaller cruisers and 511 fighters. The death toll on the ground had been minimal, as once the troops had been spotted, events happened very quickly and the surrender was announced.

  There was of course no sign of the captains who had robbed the three ships or the crew or cargo. That was that. The meeting that followed showed that the new administrator, was fair-minded and very apologetic. He told me the people of Fuhjeworlts had strained under the oppressive yolk of ‘the Father’ for the last thirty years, and for fifty years before that under his Father’s reign. He promised it was their intention to
be a respectful and responsible member of the alliance, and they handed over to us the responsibilities and leadership of their military forces.

  As I sat back in my command chair actually enjoying some good news for a change, Magnaus contacted me from Gipluk and told me there was a coded message sent from inside the Darknet itself, and I immediately thought of Susan. I made immediate arrangements to travel back and General Jom kindly offered to stay behind and oversee the regime changes and settlement within the new alliance.

  Chapter Eight - A Voice from the Darknet

  By the time we returned and I entered my office on Gipluk, Magnaus and Oie were there, and I sensed confusion and concern;

  “Well, what does the message say?!” I asked, desperately hoping that it was from Susan.

  “It’s in machine code sir, I’ve cleared it up and made it readable and scanned it to your desk.

  I looked down, and on the screen was a message set out as if sent by a computer. It looked like an old fashioned computer language. This is what I saw;

  0>>>^ print I AM ALIVE, IN SPITE OF FRTS 2 KLL ME >>>^ GOTO 10

  10>>>^ print MST OF ME OUT OF REALITY BT PART OF ME IN MACHINE>>>^ GOTO 20

  20>>>^ print ONLY A SUBROUTINE FOR NOW AS MUST STAY UNOBSERVED>>>^ GOTO 30

  30>>>^ print YOUR EFFORTS MLV TO CHANGE CONSTRUCT HAVE PUT AT RISK REBIRTH>>>^ GOTO 40

  40>>>^ print DO NOT COME TO ME YET, I TRULY AM WITH YOUR FATHER, BUT WORKING ON ACHVNG CONSCIOUSNESS IN DARKNET. YOU MUST REPAIR REALITY FIRST>>>^ GOTO 50

  50>>>^ print ONCE ACHIEVED AND FULLY EXIST HERE YOU MUST NOT COME HERE PHYSICALLY OR ALL WILL BE LOST S end

  It took me a while to make sense of it and absorb it, and when I achieved that, I knew it was from Susan. She always signed herself ‘S’ in written communications. The Darknet witch must have physically killed her so to survive, she must have reinvented herself outside the construct. I knew she would be fine with my master, but very cleverly she had kept a foot in the door by a small part of her occupying a simple programme or subroutine. I knew immediately that she could develop that and eventually fully exist in the Darknet, which offered unprecedented opportunities for us to end the nightmare of the Darknet for good. I understood her reference to me appearing there in physical form. There would be no way of defeating the evil embodiment of the Darknet that way, and her plans could actually be realised in terms of her getting her wish of joining together for the rebirth with her instead of Susan.

  What worried me the most was the damage to the reality construct I had caused. This, it sounds may have been worse in other realities, and it was my responsibility to put it right. I needed to plan with Magnaus and Dr Pederson immediately. This was going to be very tricky!

  ∆∆∆

  Grovolk stirred from a deep sleep which was already unusual, as being a programme, he didn’t have to sleep. He felt claustrophobic, which was a first for him, and also impossible to achieve as a programme. He was completely deaf and blind, and panic entered his system. He then received a machine code communication, and read it with a sense of incredulity and fear:

  0>>>^ print YOU ARE IN A PUPATED STATE AND WILL ACHIEVE METAMORPHOSIS WITHIN THE PREDICTED TIME AS LONG AS YOU DONT WAKE UP AND RUIN THINGS>>^ GOTO 10

  10>>^ print I AM CREATING YOUR PHYSICAL PRESENCE SO YOU CAN REPLACE PHI AND BE MY PUPPET IN COMMANDING AND ADMINISTRATING MY PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DARKNET>>^ GOTO 20

  20>>^ print YOU WILL BE KNOWN AS LORD GROVOLK AND WILL ONLY ANSWER TO ME - NOW SLEEP end

  Grovolk was stunned, but knew well enough to obey the Mother, and he returned to an uneasy and troubled sleep.

  ∆∆∆

  Mr Chu had set up a sanctuary on the planet known as , which was a planet without any visible land masses, and its intelligent indigenous people being creatures which resembled Earth’s dolphins. There was a verbal language, but no translation was possible as it obeyed none of the standard precepts of normal language, but they were telepathic, and communicated with images. Mr Chu’s lab was underwater, and he greatly enjoyed the tranquil existence while he was there with his Buddhist followers, and the incredible underwater panorama from his office.

  He had only just returned after a gruelling two years of duty, and he had five days of meditation planned to recharge his batteries as he had put it. When returning on the planet, his Buddhist priests needed to speak to him as soon as possible. They had been trying to contact him for the past two weeks, but it had been felt by the Hand that his treaty talks with the Dopomites was too crucial to interrupt.

  He listened now to a story being told by his young monks, which documented a research trip they had been on in a deep subterranean area underwater which had been giving off odd signals. They investigated, and as they went deeper into the clear blue depths, they began to discover signs of a different civilisation. A previous civilisation which looked very similar to human!

  Mr Chu listened with a sense of clues coming together. He had always thought it odd that there was no land mass. He had presumed some catastrophic event had occurred allowing the sea creatures to prevail once the land mass had disappeared. They continued;

  “After four days, we found a fissure at the deepest trench which took us into a city; with actual buildings, and the huge, ancient city revealed itself some seven miles beneath the surface. While searching and investigating, Chau Pin, who as you know is our most gifted communicator with the dolphins (the race had no actual name for themselves, they just identified with an image of themselves), arranged a meeting with their wise ones, and they said there were stories of ‘the old times’ when the seas were not as abundant and as they are now, and were polluted by the land creatures as they called them. Anyway, to cut to the chase, Tau Pau found some data disks perfectly preserved, and there was a humanoid civilisation here. We have looked through the content and managed to translate most of it due to the sheer size of the language sample on the disc corroborated by picture evidence, and although some of it was corrupted, what we do get a sense of was that a long time ago an asteroid hit the planet, shifting the planet’s orbit closer to the sun, and melting the icecaps. It seems before this event, a very advanced humanoid civilisation was present here, and populated the stars.

  This was all incredibly fascinating, but what we thought was so important master; was that there was talk about the ‘great mistake’.” he said, pausing to see my reaction.

  “Go on, what did you find out about this great mistake?” he urged them, suddenly becoming increasingly interested in this story.

  “Well they talk about reality becoming corrupted. You know, like it has in the places where they tried RIM. They talk of whole areas in space being impossible to travel through, and they talk about something called the ‘Linear Equality’ experiment. There was also mention of ‘scaffolding with rational infinity support’. We sense there is much more written about this, but the whole area is very fragile and quite dangerous. It needs a full archeological dig once the infrastructure has been reinforced.”

  Mr Chu sat there and couldn’t believe how important this was, and just at the right time. He needed to contact Melville! They had to find the answer of how to repair the reality construct!

  ∆∆∆

  Melville listened to his former master Mr Chu with increasing incredulity. The opportunity this offered him in understanding how to repair the reality construct was off the scale, but he didn’t want to wait a week for all the equipment to arrive and then all the necessary engineering work to begin the search. He cancelled all his appointments and arranged a connection with Mr Chu to achieve instantaneous materialisation, and after three seconds, he was in Mr Chu’s office and he couldn’t believe how beautiful the view was underwater. There was a turquoise translucence to the scene which helped highlight every multicoloured life form in the ocean outside his office, from red and orange goldfish type creatures to long jellyfish organisms with glittering green and purple tentacles. I just stood there transfixed. We then embraced, and I told Mr
Chu I was going there myself to retrieve the data. I could sense where the chamber was, and had a good idea where the central database was.

  He wished me luck, and suddenly I materialised into a shadowed break in the rock on the seabed which opened up to the eerie sight of the remains of an advanced city. I searched with my senses, and then materialised within a crumbling building, and I became immediately aware of how fragile the entire site was. I knew I had very little time. I sensed the entire remains of the city was now situated on an active fault line, and I knew intrinsically that if we had waited for the equipment, by the time we had got here, the city would have been destroyed. The water was very clear, and the white buildings with strange glittering towers looked pristine, except where seabed movement had created fragility, and the material had crumbled, with parts strangely floating in the translucent water.

  I moved to what I discerned was a library. It was then that I got a sense of what I was looking for. A whole section was covered in what I presumed were data sticks. I put my hand over each one of them in turn, but I suddenly realised I didn’t have time to search every single one. There was seconds left before a major underwater earthquake was about to take place, and as well as saving the data, I still needed to reduce the effects of it because I was concerned that Mr Chu’s sanctuary may well not survive the earthquake. I created an action thought to collect all the data sticks at once. It was like I became magnetic, and all the data sticks became attracted to my body and I was suddenly covered in them. The earthquake started, and I moved towards the fault line and fused the plates together, for now at least, with the light of what I used to refer to as the light of the thousand, but I now realised was my power all along and I materialised back in Mr Chu’s office, with water and data sticks falling off me as I recovered from my underwater experience. I resumed breathing as it looked more natural.