Exodus

Chapter One

Chapter 1

“Sometimes I wonder, are our dreams reality and our reality but dreams?”

                                                                                                      –Anonymous

It was still dark when his eyes opened. As he slowly sat up in his bunk, his eyes focused on the display in front, the digits 01:38 stared back at him, unflinchingly. Then the last digit melted away, moving forward to nine and snapping him out of his reverie. Its late, I should still be tired and sleepy. Yet he wasn’t. Instead, a strange energy seemed to fill him, a sense of purpose.

Pulled on, as if by invisible strings, he got out of bed, slowly plodding around, trying to clear his head, to focus, even as his body moved seemingly on its own, as if he was a puppet under the sway of some shadowed puppet-master.

Before he knew it he had stepped out into the corridor. Even at this time of the night, a few selected walkways were working, which was good. He needed a walk, needed some time to wake up and figure out where he was going, as his feet plodded along, seemingly of their own volition.

Slowly the corridors around him began to change. It was widening out and the colours gradually changed from the standard gentle beige to a sterile white. Slowly recognition dawned; he was heading towards the southern chamber which housed the interface for one of the four reactors which now fulfilled all of earth’s energy demands. But at this time it was only manned by a skeletal maintenance crew and the AI. And none of the maintenance staff worked anywhere near this entrance to the chamber. Maybe he was being called for an audience with the AI.

As one of the interface co-ordinators, he had been implanted with a micro-chip, linked to his cerebrum, for faster and easier communication with the AI and also some nano-scale machines to maintain the interface chip. And while he was used to the implant by now, he still got goose-bumps when he thought about the host of nanobots swarming through his blood streams. Freaky.

But that feeling was now replaced by a familiar tingle at the base of his neck. The AI was connecting with him. Allowing a confident smile to appear on his face, he quickened his pace, turning down yet another empty corridor, he was now walking past the walls that enclosed the various heat sinks that cooled the massive superstructure.

Suddenly a thought struck him; he had been commissioned only a year and a half ago. So why was he being summoned so secretly in the dead of the night? Maybe he was just imagining all this. His confidence deteriorating, he slowed down a bit, yet his feet still propelled him onwards. At the far side of the corridor, a section of the wall slid out of view, revealing the inner chamber where the AI interacted with a select few, usually in times of emergency. But he wasn’t one of the select few and there didn’t seem to be any emergency, so why was he here? Feeling nervous now, he hesitated before he stepped, or was made to step, inside the chamber.

The wall sealed up behind him, and the entire chamber seemed to disappear, the sterile white walls of the chamber just seemingly dissolved, and all he saw… was thick black darkness.

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Suddenly the heavy pall of darkness lifted, replaced instead by a grand vista of rolling plains with a few mountains at the horizon, the centre dominated by a giant tree, stretching up far into the sky for a seemingly infinite distance, as though it reached up into the void of space itself.