Voyage: Embarkation

Episode 4 "Tria"

KAL TOOK a step back from the table in his treehouse and looked over his work. He grinned as he typed out the last few commands, and re-checked for syntax errors. His pad sat on the table, projecting a hollow, three-dimensional representation of his body. A glowing layer of auto-defense nanites covered the hologram’s skin. Popup windows surrounded the figure, each displaying a chunk of code, all of them modifications Kal had made to the base program. Together, they would allow his nanite defenders to deflect even artificially generated forces, like those he had encountered on Spele.

Two of the cats were yowling at one another below, probably Variable and Constant.

Cat fight. Kal smirked.

The light of the holograms danced about his empty apartment. Kal sighed, looking around his empty room. His latest feat of programming expertise would go unnoticed, yet again.

He sat down in a chair and let his mind drift back to fourth grade.

They had been studying insects. He and three other students were assigned to study an unconscious dragonfly in an immobilization field. They were given a list of measurements to take and anatomical features to describe. But the poor dragonfly turned out to be at least partly conscious due to a bug in the immobilization field’s program. He and his classmates struggled to do their work as the poor creature convulsed sporadically against malfunctioning restraints.

Kal, tired of watching it suffer, pulled up the immobilization program on his pad. Of course, he knew better than to make any changes himself, so he typed his revisions into an empty document. Just five minutes later, he handed his corrections to the teacher.

Kal’s teacher, a tall man with a big, furry beard, at first eyed the pad suspiciously. However, upon looking the program over, a smile spread across his face. The teacher ended up submitting Kal’s revisions to the Council for approval without any changes at all. He congratulated him on a job well done, but reminded him that he should not really be writing any code before taking the high school prep classes.

Still, it was all Kal had talked about for days: the broken program, written by some adult, that he had fixed.

Kal stood now in the treehouse and looked over his work. Loneliness crept into him. If he sent any communication to Earth about his intra-metaxic activities, the Fermilab scientists might deactivate his nodes remotely, or worse, forcibly return him to Earth against his will. That would essentially be a death sentence.

He shook his head, returning to happier thoughts. He picked up his pad and activated the new program. The layer of auto-defense nanites on his skin shimmered ever so slightly, then became invisible once more.

Kal pulled up the stills of the next world he wanted to explore. It was uninhabited (by humans, or anything else with speech), and was therefore unnamed. Glancing through the stills piqued his curiosity further. Something was alive there.

“Interesting,” he muttered to himself, reading over the collected data in more detail.

Kal made some food for the cats. Max whined and paced anxiously below the treehouse until Kal hurled the food out the window. Variable and Constant ceased their play and ran up to the treehouse to gobble up their portion. Other pride cats emerged from the forest upon hearing them.

Kal climbed down from his home, walked to a safe distance from the tree, and entered the metaxia.

~

The buildings pulsed.

And that was only the most unsettling part. The reason they were throbbing was because of the translucent cords that covered the surface of, well, everything. They lay across the facades of buildings, wrapping themselves around corners, through windowpanes, all the way up the tallest skyscrapers as far he could see. They lay across other architecture too — miniature cords spiraled up a lamp post, all across a post box, a few abandoned cars and trucks, the billboards and street lights, even the struts and overhead tracks of the elevated rail line.