Real Life Invasion

Another excerpt from my story Corrupting Paradise. In this scene, we meet Elim for the first time, and we also encounter Client 47 in Pod 109, who will be the team’s problem for the rest of the story.

—

Ano knocked on Elim’s open office door out of habit and stepped in without waiting for an answer. Stepping over a loose cable on the floor, she made her way to the sole occupant of the room, who was perched on his chair in the middle of a nest of wires surrounded by input tablets and a rack of memory crystals. Raising her voice a little to be heard over the chirps and whirring that spilled from the mass of technology around her, Ano put a hand on her Operator’s shoulder. “Talk to me.”

As an Almarian male, Elim shared his employer’s accent, but his physical attributes were similar to Ano’s only in their vividness. His mess of black hair was naturally streaked with silver and his eyes changed color according to his mood. At the moment, his irises reflected purple in the light from the screen he was staring at. Ano winced. Purple meant her friend was severely stressed.

When he spoke, his emotion was confirmed by the strain in his normally flowing voice. “This could be nothing.” She gave him a look that he caught as he glanced up at her. He read the disbelief on her face clearly and sighed heavily, turning back. “Or it could be something so big that we’ll have wished you’d have believed me when I said it was nothing and we hadn’t gone on and talked about it.”

Ano patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. “Fair enough. Now talk about it.”

With all the motivation of a prophet preaching the end of the world to people ignoring the fire raining out of the sky, Elim gestured to the screen in front of him.

For several moments, Ano was nonplussed. “It’s a portion of the roster,” she pointed out unnecessarily.

And indeed it was. Columns of information scrolled by, listing client name, requested reality, the length of the customer’s stay, date of project completion, the names of the team members responsible for the project, the form and amount of payment, and the number of the stasis pod currently holding the customer. Besides the disturbingly low numbers in the payment columns, Ano had never seen anything less like an emergency in her life.

“Yes,” Elim replied patiently, as if he was trying to talk to someone who still refuses to believe the world is ending even though her dog has just been hit by a flaming meteor. “Look at Client 47.”

She looked at Client 47. And then she looked again. And then a third time, just to make sure she wasn’t blinking and looking at the wrong line or just plain hallucinating.

She wasn’t.

There was no name in the “Name” column for Client 47. The information in the “Requested Reality” column flickered, changed from “rainy library” to “wooded beach” and flickered again as it stopped on “ocean vista” and turned into a jumble of code before righting itself and changing one more time, landing on “rainy library” again.

“Client 47,” Ano declared with the quiet dread of a person who gets hit by a flaming meteor, loses a leg and her eyesight and finally admits that maybe, just maybe, something’s wrong with the weather today, “is in a universe that is rapidly disintegrating.”

“Yes,” Elim agreed. There were several moments of silence.

“Elim?” Ano inquired politely.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to go back to that sentence where you mentioned that I was going to wish I didn’t ask and we never had this conversation.”

“Oh? What would you like to do differently?” He watched her face cautiously to make sure her eyes weren’t changing color; Ano’s green irises had a habit of turning gold when she got drastically upset.

Her expression, though, remained very calm as she answered, “I would like to agree with you.”

“This is what you get when you don’t listen to me.”

“Next time I try and disagree with you, hit me and demand a raise.” Ano straightened from bending to read over his shoulder, stretched her neck, tapped her earpiece into place and spoke the nine words that her team dreaded to hear. “We have a Real Life Invasion in Pod 109.”

She was a bit disappointed when no one answered right away, even though she hadn’t expected them to. Finally, Tri broke the silence. “Oh.”

This was followed by Becken’s, “We’re on our way down.”

Ano waited expectantly for Jenny and wasn’t disappointed when her, “Can I stay with my titanium river? Please? Just this once?” came moments later.

“Everybody downstairs. Jenny, wait for us. Elim, if you’d be so kind as to fill the others in while we go?” She headed to the door, hesitating just a second before stepping back into the main office and towards something she didn’t at all want to face.

“Boss!” Elim called, swiveling in his chair at the last second.

She turned expectantly and held his eyes for a moment, taking in the anxious blue color they’d turned. His voice was about as serious as it got. “Accidents happen. It’s just life.”

There were several things he could have said, most of which Ano wanted to hear far more. It would do. With a smile that she couldn’t back up with humor, she left the office.

Alone

The introduction to my story Collapsing Paradise, in which we finally discover the answers to many mysteries surrounding the Almarian race.

When the Universe was first brought into existence, it was utterly content. There could by no unhappiness or dissatisfaction because nothing was lacking. This state of harmony and peace lasted a relatively short time (though some would argue that time did not, as yet, exist). In any case, it was shattered in the second that the first sentient being opened his eyes and gazed up at the cosmos. For those first precious moments, all was good—and then that first man asked, “Am I it?”

Something in the universe shook. There had never been aloneness before. The problem was quickly rectified, but the echoes of that voice–“Am I alone?”– reverberate across the background of reality even now. Some words, spoken at a certain time and a certain place, can change the Universe, and these were some of those. No being in the twelve inhabited Galaxies was ever truly alone again.

Until recent Cycles, in any case.

The story of the first man (or cephalopod, or green slime-bug of Graxus VI) is more or less consistent from planet to planet and culture to culture. Variations arise here and there, as they tend to do. Still, some creation myths are truly universal, finding roots and facets in every culture because they ring true to every being who has looked up at the stars and wondered, “Is this all?”

Just one detail has changed from the original tale, which hasn’t been told in so long that no one alive today has heard it spoken aloud. In the first story, the real story, that first being was actually the first Almarian.

The significance of this can only really be appreciated if you happen to meet one of the remaining twelve members of the Almarian race in the Universe. They are infinitesimal pockets of alone in an otherwise occupied cosmos.

If you happen to stop by the space station Paradise near the transwarp that connects the Milky Way to the other eleven galaxies, you can actually meet two Almarians. It is, in official record, the largest gathering of their species in the modern history of the Universe. The mathematical probability of two Almarians being in the same place at the same time is just under 3 x 10-9 percent.

There is no explanation for their impossibly improbable meeting and eventual friendship. Except that if there is one thing that the Universe cannot tolerate, it is that anything—or anyone—should be alone forever. But Paradise is a place in which beings have bent reality because they have discovered that they cannot bend their lives.

For the Almarians known as Ano and Elim, it is somewhere that true loneliness can still be suffered, even in the company of others. This will not be the case for long. The Universe abhors a lonely being. It doubly loathes a pair of them.

Odds

Elim’s entire life had been ruled by one small, simple, utterly true statement of percentage. It went something like this: There were twelve Almarians in existence, there were twelve known inhabited galaxies, and the sheer mass of sentient beings made the chance of two members of his rare race meeting just under .0000000000000000003%. Actually, the exact number was a bit longer than that, but frankly, another five or six digits just weren’t very important in a number that small.

The thing was, no one knew exactly why there were only twelve Almarians (the history books merely cited different theories, including a bounty hunter and a plague) when there had once reportedly been an entire planet of them. That had been cycles upon cycles ago, so long that no one living could remember it any more. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the twelve galaxies. Even more of a mystery was why no one knew exactly where the remaining twelve Almarians were located, or who they were at all.

But in the grand scheme of things, Elim found it didn’t matter. His adopted parents never treated him any differently than their own biological children and all in all, the young Almarian grew up relatively normally. The only odd thing that ever happened to Elim (besides his eyes changing color every time he had a mood swing, that is) was when he got a message two weeks before his coming-of-age celebration to inform him that he did not need to register in his planet’s citizen database. Apparently, someone somewhere knew who and what he was, and that was enough to put him in the inter-galaxy database. His inquiry was never returned.

Elim’s life was ruled by science and fact. He graduated as the head of his class and went on to excel at neurological reality programming because it was the only career challenging enough to keep him interested for more than a week. Numbers and systems were easy for him. His parents had raised him to see the world for what it was, to understand the equation that made a situation go one way or another. Words like faith and fate and luck were abstracts to Elim, and he was more than happy to keep it that way.

So when he looked up from his normal place in his favorite café just a block down from his house and saw a woman with blue hair and green eyes come in, his neatly structured, comfortably managed world of numbers came screeching to a halt.

So did Ano; she stopped dead in the doorway and made the elderly couple behind her run into her. She didn’t notice. Her eyes were on Elim’s and he found himself wishing he knew what color they were turning, because he had a feeling it was probably embarrassing.

Before he could even figure out what to do with the situation (they’d never taught him how to actually handle reality in school, only to manipulate it), Ano was sitting across from him at the table and holding her hand out, silver rings glittering on her fingers. The thought that this was some kind of elaborate practical joke only flashed through his mind once. Then their hands met, Ano smiled and Elim knew that this was real, and that he’d just beaten the .0000000000000000003% by accident without going farther than two blocks from his house.

“I’m here to interview someone for a position,” Ano said by way of introduction. “But I suddenly find I don’t care.”

She had his accent. Elim was smiling so big it hurt, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “Unless you need a neurological reality programming expert, I’m afraid I can’t be much help.” It was a stupid conversation to have at a moment this big, but it worked for them.

Ano stared at him for a long moment and then burst out laughing. By the time she got done explaining that a neurological programming expert was exactly what she was looking for, Elim was laughing too.

The young Almarian had never done an impulsive thing in his life. But suddenly he wasn’t alone—he wasn’t alone—and that made life different. He took the job, moved out of his parents’ house and got on the next transport out to the Milky Way with her before he even thought to ask her name.

“Ano,” she said easily, swaying with the transport’s takeoff velocity.

“Elim,” he replied. And that was that.

They never talked about it: never discussed how they were a sixth of their entire race, how the chances of a male and a female with complementing skill sets finding each other were so impossible.

All Elim knew about Ano was that she and he were bound by something deeper than mere common interest or ideals. If their meeting wasn’t fate…well, it was an awfully small percentage of probability.

It was really inevitable, then, that he would fall in love with her sooner or later. He took some comfort in that.

He still remembered that first transport ride with crystal clarity. “Where are we going?” he’d finally thought to ask.

“Paradise,” she responded with a twinkle in her eyes.

Somewhere deep inside of him, Elim realized he’d already known that.