Chapter 9 - Madness
Foralmost all of time man has looked up at the stars and dreamt ofeither travelling amongst them or wondering what was out there? He asked questions of the heavens like “Whoam I?” and “Isthis all there is?” and more often thannot has received no answers. There have, of course, been those whohave claimed to have gotten answers to these, and other, questions. In antiquity the answers have usually come from some omnipotentbeing, or beings, which have revealed truths and promised much. Inlatter days these came from contact with aliens who have also passedon truths that some held just as dear as those passed on from nowlong forgotten omnipotent gods.
Overthe millennia there have been stories of ancient advancedcivilizations and ancient astronauts who have guided and manipulatedman’s history. But then it’s justpossible that these are just reinterpretations of the gods man oncecalled upon for his answers and was defended by their silence.
Once,centuries ago there was artifact of advanced but obviously advancedtechnology found somewhere on Earth and some claimed it gave themultimate knowledge and truth. There were wars fought over theaccuracy of these claims and simply to possess it. Some factionswanted to keep it hidden from the masses, afraid of what it could orwould mean. Others simply wanted to possess it so that it wouldguarantee their victory and justify their dominance over others. Those who did have it became afraid of what it contained. Not thesecrets held within the inscriptions, but the spirits that emanatedfrom it and disturbed their dreams.
Mad,insane they were called. Some were even locked up for their ownprotection or to protect the secret others claimed. But then truthis never quite what you expect it to be and soon enough all that hadoccurred due to the artifact was undone and the great cities of manwere destroyed. The spirits loosed upon the Earth bothered none butthe dead and dying. There were some survivors and eventually theystarted to rebuild civilization and great stone pyramids were erectedto honor the spirits.
Orso one version of history goes.
Anothersays that the ancient astronauts arrived on Earth fleeing from adying world or some conflict that was even more terrible than thecivil wars and atomic winters that had taken place just beforemankind’s great sleep. When theseintergalactic travelers arrived they found a vague intelligent agelike creature, that the scientists of Pre-Sleep Man had called Homoerectus, a term that lost most meaning long before the Great Sleep. They saw something, potential perhaps, in this ape and experimentedon it and engineered it at a genetic level in order to greatlyadvance and accelerate its development. Somewhere along the waythese ancient astronauts built, showed man how to build, the pyramidsso that they would be honored and remembered.
Thenthey left, for recorded reason they left and man revered them stilland went on to build temples and shrines in their name. Such ancientnames soon were forgotten and as was the lives of the ancient ones onEarth. Not entirely of course, they were remembered in certainmyths, holy books and by certain tribes who had either gone back to asimpler less technology based existence.
Stillevery now and then the last remaining of these ancient ones visitedEarth as some kind of pilgrimage in honor of their own ancestors,before they too were lost to this universe for good.
Butthen this is just another version of history, one that has no realevidence and no real truth to it. Or does it?
Overthe millennia so many different theologies and ideologies haveevolved and been forgotten that it is difficult for anyone to reallyknow what has happened in long ago times. Especially since therereally was a series of terrible wars and disasters that ravaged theEarth so much man decided to hibernate till their home world hadregenerated. This, at least, had been recorded and most historiansnow took it for granted that this occurred. But what none of themcould say was what had happened before this time, which was lost intime immemorial. Now instead of sleeping through the disaster theywere fleeing it and this was the only part of history, recent orancient, Commander Marcus de Benedict knew for certain about.
Theseideas and possibilities were similar to the ones that had flowedthrough Marcus’ mind as he stood on theobservation deck of the Pilgrim’sHope looking out at Saturn and thestarts beyond. Even this close the gas giant seemed both beautifuland mysterious with its swirling never ending storms of gas and therings of asteroids and other lumps of rock held in place by gravity. As he looked at the planet outside he knew that this would be one ofthe last times anyone, let alone anyone from Earth, would look out inowe at this marvel as it would all soon be destroyed by the moremassive stellar body that had given his people and planet life for solong.
Hehad seen, or thought he had seen, the Light in something of a dream afew weeks before in what had been his office on Terra Beta. What theLight was he did not know, except of course that it was alive andsentient, although in ways he could never even begin to consider. The Light had taken him closer to the sun than any man had the rightto even expect to be and live; and the Light had passed onto him thehint of something greater behind the disaster to come. In thatmoment so much more had passed between them that it was only now,weeks later that some it seeped into his conscious mind.
Feelingsand images of times past and some of things that had yet to happenflooded his mind during those moments of experience. In times pastlong ago he may have considered this as a revelation from theAlmighty and taken himself as a prophet, but that was part of theimages he got from the Light and somehow he felt it didn’t want himto be that way. In his own limited way he had understood that, andwhat had been communicated between seemed simple. That is that therewas something behind the death of Sol and that they were correctingsome kind of mistake; but that mankind would survive.
Itwas at that moment that it really dawned on Marcus just how limitedhis species were and so very far they still had to go in evolutionaryterms that is. Marcus now also realized that the Light ‘spoke’ to him in very much the same way he might have spoken to a child oreven as human would to someone from what they considered a lessdeveloped species that they considered only capable of understandingthe simplest of ideas. The Light came across as not threatening, butreassuring and patient as if trying even to get Marcus to come tocertain conclusions by himself.
Andthen it was gone, back to wherever or whenever it had come from.
Thedoors to the observation deck then opened and Colonel Tsarion walkedthough striding purposely towards his commanding officer and friend. His long strong gait easily covering the distance between the two menand he stopped and waited just behind Marcus.
“Beautifyisn’t’t?”Marcus asked and not waiting for an answer he wasn’t expecting hecontinued. “Hard to believe that notlong form now all this be gone, never to be seen again.”
“We’vepicked up a signal form one of our long range probes”Tsarion said ignoring Marcus’ comment.
“Whatsort of signal?” Marcus asked wonderingwhat those probes had detected now. Maybe there were more survivorslike Sarah McKenzie, the woman that had been found and brought backto Terra Beta and who was now residing in what had been a cargo storeon the Pilgrim’sHope. Or perhaps some remnant of theship that she must have had to have been aboard in order to get outthat far in the first place.
“Itseems that it has detected more debris the out near Jupiter, not farfrom where the pod was first detected.”Tsarion reported calmly and not even hinting at the obviouspossibility. Which was that they could find an answer as to whereSarah had come from or what had she had been doing all the way outthere.
“Howlong until we’re due to leave?”Marcus asked, knowing full well that once they would be leaving inthree hours from now, after there had been a full inspection of theengines to make sure that there had been no ill effects after theirrelatively short journey from Mars to Saturn. After that they wouldbe setting course to leave their solar system for good.
“Threehours, and we have calculated a course that would allow us toinvestigate and then leave on schedule.” Tsarion said.
Marcustuned back toward the view of Saturn taking it for the last, knowingthat he would be one of the last human beings to look at themagnificent rings of frozen debris and wondered how and why theyformed. For those few moments he felt an incredible sense of owesomewhere between how the first person who saw view from the peak ofmount Everest on Earth and someone who saw cities like Hiroshima justbefore they had been destroyed by the atomic bomb. At this moment hefelt a sense of great sadness come over him for he would not see thissight again.
“Ok,we’ll check out this debris and then headout.” Marcus said after several minutesof silence and then turned to leave the observation deck with a heavyheart. Soon enough all this would be ashes, and they would beheading to a new home. The birth place of humanity would be gone,but humanity itself would go on. As he made his way from theobservation deck to his quarters Marcus once again considered the ageold question of whether man really had just evolved on the Earth orwhether he had come from the great void beyond. He also momentarilypondered the possibility that if man had indeed come from the starsand now that he was going back to them in order to safe guard his ownfuture, whether they would just happen across the human races’true origins.
“Theycall themselves the Watchers” the voicesaid over the static. “They watch yourdreams and put ideas in your head so that they can watch you carrythem out.” The voice continued. Thespeaker was man in his thirties with balding brown hair and browneyes. He was fairly average looking, but his face looked witheredand drawn; and from the haunted look in his eyes he had clearly beenthrough a lot. Or so it looked to Tsarion when the static cleared alittle, and is seemed to be in compete contrast to the fresh healthythe man had had in the early recordings Tsarion had previouslywatched. They had not been able to find or restore much of theflight recorders; in fact it had been something of a miracle thatthey had been able to retrieve this one.
Almosteverything else had been destroyed or reduced to chunks of floatingmetal that at first they weren’t even sure that this had been amanned vessel. Then they had located the recorder floating in thedebris, it wasn’t even giving out a homing and as such they wouldhave missed it completely if hadn’t beenfor luck. It had then taken hours to restore some of the data whichhad mostly degraded beyond retrieval and now for the last four hoursTsarion had been watching over and over the again the few images thatthey had been able to recover.
Italways started the same with the balding brown haired man introducinghimself, his name wasn’t audible over the static, and his ship wasa deep space exploration vessel (DSE) called the Inquisitor. From the introduction it was crewed by almost 200, mostlyvolunteers, people and whose mission was to study Jupiter and beyond. Everything had seemingly gone to plan, until they reached the famedgas giant; most of what happened in between had been lost to ravagesof time and didn’t seem all that important right now.
Whenthey had reached Jupiter things had started to change, the brownhaired man reported that more and more of the crew had reported boutsof insomnia. Which in itself didn’t allthat unusual considering the crews separation from the normal dailyroutines of sunrise and sunset, but there had also been a fewunexplained incidents. The reports didn’t go into detail as theyeither cut due to lost data or were overlaid with too much static tobe viewed.
Thefirst time Tsarion had watched the final entry he had almost fallenoff his seat. It was like most of the later recordings with thebrown haired man babbling on about the Watchers and what they did orwere supposed to do. This time he looked even more haggard andexhausted than before; and he sounded even more paranoid than any ofthe previous recordings. He started to mention something about oneof the crew going berserk with a knife, when she appeared. At thispoint the picture deteriorated slightly for a moment, then flickeredback to the same low quality as before. But there was no doubt abouta woman appeared behind the brown haired man, grabbed his head andslit his throat with all the ease and precision of a professionalkiller.
Whenthe woman let go of the brown haired man’shead he slumped forward and out of view, and it was then that Tsarioncould make out the woman’s face moreclearly. Even though the picture quality wasn’t the best Tsarioncould just make out that her face was covered in what looked likeblood and gore and her hair seemed to be sticky and matted with thesame ichor as her face. She then looked directly at the camera andmouthed something that wasn’t distinguishable at first and then therecording stopped.
Afterseveral viewings Tsarion started to notice the woman‘seyes, they didn’t appear to be like those of normal person with theiris, pupil and whites clearly distinguishable. Even on a recordingof this poor quality he at least expected to be able to distinguishbetween the iris and the whites of her eyes. At first it seemed asthough they were all of one color, which seemed odd to him and laterhe thought they looked as though they were on fire. In fact thewoman’s eyes looked more like they weremade of living flame and when he had zoomed in on them and enhancedthe picture it looked as though he could see swirling gas just thesurface of the sun looked like sometimes. But then that wasimpossible, Tsarion had told himself several times.
Whatseemed even odder than the woman’s eyeswas what she had said after killing the man in the recording. Atfirst it sounded pretty unintelligible, but then after he turned upthe volume and listened to it a few times it seemed pretty clear. “We are the last”she had said. “Beware the Leviathan.” The first part made some sort of sense, as she could have beentalking about herself and some other members of the crew. But whathad she meant by “Beware the Leviathan”? In mythology this had referred to some kind large sea beast ormonster and Tsarion almost instantly dismissed the possibility thatthis woman had been trying to warn whoever had picked up and watchedthe recording of some kind space monster. This was mainly because hehad never heard of such a thing and also because it just didn’tseem to make sense.
When Tsarion haddecided he had watched the records enough for the time being he cameto a number of conclusions. Firstly that something had gone aboardthat and secondly at least some of the crew had gone insane, notleast this woman who may well have slaughtered several members of thecrew, including the ships commander. Of course of the main questionsthat the recordings left unanswered was exactly what happened to theship itself. According the data they had been able to retrieve thereseemed to have been a fatal melt down in the reactor core, which hadthen exploded. But what had caused this was as much a mystery now aswhen they had arrived at the debris field.