Trancefrequency Effect

Written by Tony Corsini Sunday, 18 October 2009 12:00

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In 2029, Shay-shin pauses for a prolonged moment while he thinks. The whole experience was fading fast, as if waking from a deep sleep and loosing the thread of a dream. 

But Shay-shin does not dream.

 He tells his supervisor the hit was complicated. There were others trying to take the same target.

"Like I asked, did you get her?" It was a reasonable and expected question. 

Shay-shin remembers.

Her unique bioelectric aura had been detected through the centuries by means of a standard singularity-generating translation pod, outfitted with the newest in AI quantum sniffing software.

            And Shay-shin translated as a tall, lean, brown skinned male into the dim, lamp lit corridor of a temple somewhere in the ancient land known as Egypt. His body glistened with singularity fields, coalescing from another time.  An elderly woman, hair white with age, suddenly appeared in the hall, shuffling quietly from a carpet lined side room and appearing before him like a sorceress. She looked him up and down with the scrutiny of a horse trader eyeing a prize stallion.  She seemed to reach a decision and then nodded approvingly.  The wizened hag murmured in language he knew not, and pointed down the hazy golden hall with a toothless knowing smile. His silent internal language translation program spat out a confused babble of incoherent Twen-Cen English words and a morphed hybrid of nonsensical sounds, evidence that some ancient languages did not endure the tests of dust, sand, and time.  Shay-shin shakes his head back and forth twice to turn off the translation protocol’s sound vibrations which are irritating his reciever modules like a angry hornet stuck in a jar.  He reads her jist well enough, without the clunky translation program murdering the obvious portent indicated by her randy grin.  Naked, he padded on softened bare feet along the tapestry-lined passage and out into the dry Egyptian night.

 Shay found himself enclosed on four sides by high stone walls, above which shone a pregnant silver moon.  He moved silently across the small open courtyard flagged with tightly fit slabs of polished marble.  At the other end of the courtyard, warm light flooded out of an opening cut through gigantic blocks of sandstone, casting a rhombic swathe of gold across the complex patio patterns.  Ghostly auric bits of his target’s signature profile triggered sensitive internal proximity warnings, indicating that she was close by, obscured perhaps behind these very stones.

He stepped quickly through the opening, his mechanical movement processors accentuating a gait of graceful stealth. Shay paused momentarily in the dimly lit vestibule to access his mission codes from the future.  Wraithlike traces of the target’s aspect signature drifted in and out of his sensory organelles, providing a fleeting hint of her ethereal existence.  Surprisingly, he could determine no localized emanations anywhere in the vicinity.  The target’s peculiar bio-field flecked across his internal mem screen in disorganized configurations, appearing nothing like the standard human default profile stored in his pattern recognition software.  

Shay-shin requisitioned a translation tunnel-link to the FATHRR complex for a re-calibration of his sensor arrays as he glided noiselessly into an expansive room filled with milling servants, determined administrators, and severe black robed priests. His nakedness, necessary for the translation drop, now became a mission impediment   So as not to draw attention to himself, he discreetly grew a simple linen looking wrap around his waist, mimicking the dress of the numerous slave class sloughing about the room.  Thus pressed unobtrusively against the back wall like a dutiful minion, Shay visually scrutinized his surroundings while he ran his general atmospheric scan programs.  Suddenly, the objective’s distinctive auric signature popped across his screens in a burst of colorful static.  He primed his shoulder guns for immanent attack and tried narrowing the scan field to better target the objective.  Servants near by eyed him openly curious; apparently his agitated and battle ready stance was drawing unwanted attention.  Noticing this, he visibly relaxed his poise, while internally tasting the molecules in the room again for her elusive auric scent.  Frustratingly, no target profile condensed through his tracking software; he could not determine from which person in the room the signature was emanating.

 But there was still time.

The robed priests were strikingly clean-shaven and danced around the cavernous room with dedicated thoroughness, cryptically flourishing a variety of implements in mesmerizing patterns.  The scene at times resembled glyphs he had noticed earlier carved on walls and various pillars of the temple.  The priest’s glistening heads bobbed rhythmically as they chanted lengthy prayers to provoke the blessings of beloved long dead rulers.  To a man, the high priests and officials were reflecting inwardly, lost in a world of ritually induced devotion. The mood generated by such otherworldly chanting echoed dark and somber promise, as if this whole service were in preparation for death.

From the future, FATHRR downloads answers to his queries.  Official Earthic Histories recorded this temple as being administered to by devotees of the radical Egyptian Religion of Amun-RA.  The palace was specifically created for dawn to dusk worship, offering religious reverence to the divine beauty of the life giving Sun God, known to Egyptians of the time as RA. 

Tonight, though, it seemed a special ceremony or secret rite was being acted out which had never made it into any of the official histories. No sun warmed these chanting accolades. No sun shone majestically into darkened vestibules. Tonight, something unusual was clearly unfolding.

FATHRR finally poured a re-calibration sequence through the translation tunnel, updating Shay’s sensor arrays.  Zillions of bits of discordant information integrated like rivulets of a stream converging to create a mighty river of coherent information.  Atmospheric pressure coefficients were digested through his mem-module to reorganize the target’s unsettling auric signature.  Her precise location remained diffused and non-localized, but it seemed to be migrating further from his position.   The cadence of distant drumming changed pitch and the congregation self organized like an amoeba, drifting through the far opening in a haze of incense smoke and harmonic drones.  Shay followed noiselessly, keeping to the shadows as he accessed more of his mission’s history. 

These then, were the priests of the religious cult of Amun-RA, established by the young Pharaoh Akhetatens and his rebellious new wife, Nefertiti.   It was recorded that their innovative state religion had caused so much disharmony within ranks of the older Priests of Amun that Akhetatens was forced to move the capitol up river from Memphis to this present location here on the Nile.  Amarna was a shining new city of cultural and artistic beauty dedicated to the uniting of the One All Encompassing Father God Amun and the Life Giving Sun God RA.  With his bride Nefertiti, they had changed the status quo and shaken up the orthodox religion of his father and his father’s father before him, causing no end to strife and unrest among the ruling classes of the old Egyptian aristocracy.

The time lines scrolling across Shay’s internal mem-screen revealed his translation drop had occurred in close proximity to the date commonly given for Akhetatens’s death. Perhaps then, he was witnessing the recently dead Pharaoh’s funeral preparations.  Adding to the peculiar nature of this mission, the target’s fully formed auric signature had also coalesced on this rare night, which coincided with that of a noted full lunar eclipse.

The large group was now moving out of the enclosed quarters and into a greater hallway that was open to the moonlit sky.  Huge carved pillars rose up on either side, depicting epic stories of creation and destruction.  Shay’s assemblage merged with others dressed in a similar fashion, and they all swayed rhythmically as drums beat a hypnotic tempo from somewhere in the temple complex.  The growing body of priests and servants flowed like a black river along the hallway toward an open moon splashed plaza beyond the last set of lofty columns.  Already the head of the procession had shuffled the greater part of the way across the plaza, heading for a gigantic black structure drifting in the river next to the stone wharf.

 Shay brought his moonlight night zooming function online, affording him a clear view of the black shape over the heads of the devotees strung out across the plaza.  The floating structure resembled a stepped pyramid, rising and falling as it floated with the current swells.  It’s edges rippled against the artificially enhanced night sky, undulating with ill-defined precision. 

Incredibly, the entire craft seemed to be covered completely in fluttering black fabric.  As he approached the end of the grand hallway, more of the floating barge could be taken in.  It was longer than it was wide and Shay did some quick measurements to calculate it was about 300’ long and roughly 200’ wide, stepping up in 15’ increments except for seventh level, which was slightly taller.  Strangely enough, these measurements didn’t match his recordings from the scouting drop he had performed earlier.  He filed a category 7 discrepancy report through the open translation tube, inconsistencies of time travel forever providing fodder for a bored analyst to chew on. 

For now, He had work to do.

The floating ziggurat swayed in the current of the ancient Nile River, it’s towering bulk dominating the limestone plaza pavers marching along the banks of the river.  The priests were bottlenecked at a wide gangway leading from the wharf deck across the black water and into the low-lit interior of the ziggurat entrance.  The procession spilled out haphazzardly up and down the river’s edge, swaying groups of priests waiting religiously for their turn to enter the strange floating shrine.

Another re-calibration from FATHRR vibrated through the time tube and his mem-module configured a feint signature match, which according to his mission time codes, was close to his pre-dated schedule outline. Shay-shin ran his sophisticated scanning programs and rapidly acquired his target, code named Sister. She was in the palatial barge, ineffectively hiding behind walls of billowing black fabric.  Shay drew up an internal mapping sequence created from his previous scouting operations, and immediately registered that more subtle details were amiss.  With his re-calibrated sensors he easily picked up her unique auric field now emanating from the highest level of the ziggurat, which differed from the pre-mission location scans that had established her hiding place somewhere within a mid level ceremonial hall.  Uncertainty slewed through Shay’s awareness like a rouge wave capsizing the raft of his expectations.   Subtle aspects of the entire unfolding operation varied slightly from the anticipated profile, and Shay had an uncharacteristically gloomy premonition that all would not go well with this mission.

Unsettled but determined, Shay moved away from the devotees and their servants, slipping noiselessly down a sloping stone ramp toward a wide expanse of the ancient Nile.  The full moon, now directly above, shone with a peculiar light, bathing the stone temple, the throngs in the plaza, and the strange floating ziggurat in a monochromatic blanket of silver highlights and dark shadows. 

As Shay slipped along the wharf’s edge, the Nile flowed un-dauntingly on its journey ten feet below him. The dominant lunar light slowly began to change, gradually at first, then more quickly as the earth slid boldly between the moon and our sun.  While Shay monitored his mission codes, the earth’s hungry shadow slowly consumed the moon, plunging the world into an un-nerving darkness.  Scholar priests recorded this particular eclipse as a prophetic moment in ancient Egyptian mythology, as was revealed by Shay’s current Earthic Histories scrolling in the margins of his internal mem-screen. The moon’s inimitable occlusion had been predicted by the knowledgeable priests of Amun-RA to usher forth the return of the Goddess Isis to her people. The eclipse also foretold of a new era of enlightenment and cultural evolution with Isis guiding them along the way.  These believers, standing on the brink of a New Age, were apparently preparing themselves to realize this eclipse’s tremendous spiritual potential.

             More priests swathed in red robes, bustled from the temple toward the barge and the milling throngs awaiting entrance.  Servants, heads bowed, scurried dutifully along behind them.  They did not see Shay-shin crouched in the dark near a low rounded stone hut filled with mooring ropes.  He triggered a release lock and a compartment in his abdomen opened with an audible whirr.  From the space, he withdrew a round black globe about the size of a softball.

 His time codes chimed the 5-minute warning window. 

Without hesitation, he rose from a crouching position and lobbed the globe toward the top of the fabric covered ziggurat. A strong thin line remained attached to his mechanically muscled arm, snaking into the mem-ports of his palm, which in turn connected it to his command module.  The globe traveled upon a perfect trajectory, well aimed with QV (Quantum Vectoring) Night Vision Software and propelled by Shay's robotically enhanced body strength. It landed inaudibly, burrowing microscopic tendrils into the top most cabin and securing itself solidly to the wooden beams high above.

Shay turned once he had confirmed the globe's attachment, and sprinted away from the ziggurat, away from his target. He pounded the uneven wharf stones with newly hardened feet, accelerating at an astonishing speed in a short distance.  The line from the globe played out in a spinning hiss as he ran away from the mooring hut.  At 100ft. from his starting point, he launched himself up and out over the waters. His robotically enhanced body executed the leap with a mixture of compressed air and oil.  Combined with reactors in his legs which extract energy from the fission of molecules in the surrounding atmosphere, his mechanically powered body ignored the pull of gravity as he sailed up and out over the dark waters.  The micro-line received and relayed a neural signal from Shay as he reached the apogee of his jump, triggering the globe to retract his line at a dizzying rate. He swung in a grand arc out over the water, and up, over the Egyptian guards patrolling the wharf and surrounding the Ziggurat in small dinghies.

                  Shay was yanked jarringly up, gaining speed as he gained altitude.  He held the line strap with one powerful hand while he triggers a compartment to open in the forearm of the other.   From within, a sleek silver vial whirrs out on a tiny waldo arm.  He adeptly slaps the needle end of the vial against his neck, injecting a biologically active serum into his living plastic skin.  As he lets go the vial to disintegrate in the waters far below, a NewTech engineered nano robotic virus flows through the sub coetaneous layer of his artificial skin, changing it from Egyptian brown to flickering shades of night black.  The virus in-loads micro links to grow a camouflage option and a military grade armor that will protect him from any pre- 21st century earth based projectile weapons. The latest in cutting edge virus science, the armor would also protect him from incendiary fire, blunt trauma, and most types of concussive explosions. As it grows into his skin, integrating with on line neural programs and optic intel frequencies, the armor, modeled after a strange earth fish found in the deep caves of Brazil that sported nearly impenetrable overlapping layers of bone scales, remained supple and flexible, moving with his body’s rhythms.

            Shay-shin had timed his jump, and subsequent ascent, to provide him the speediest route to the target’s lair, whose presumed location was in the top most level of the ziggurat. The rapidly recoiling globe pulled him toward the fabric-covered wall of the barge's highest level like an iron filing to a magnet. Shay calculated his accent speed and impact trajectory using sophisticated echolocation, turning on his body's quantum field disruptor as he hit the wall, causing fabric, wood, and inner tapestries to disintegrate in a puff of vaporized wood and cloth, leaving a neat hole open to the night.  

Shay rolled across the cabin scattering candles and shedding his momentum to keep from punching through the opposite wall. While not particularly subtle, Shay's methods were chosen for speed, and surprise. 

He triggered his mission attack sequence and filtered his light intake, for the row upon row of golden bees wax candles were lit to fill the room with a warm honey glow. The cabin was a large square, 30 ft to a side, with a high ceiling. The room had two levels, one raised floor 12ft above the one he now crouched, exactly centered within the greater room, a cube within a cube.  Shay-shin crept along the outer wall where shadows were easier to blend with the camouflage function of his skin.  He was looking for a stair to the upper level where he suspected his target was hiding.            

He glimpsed movement and several candles were snuffed out by a sudden gust of disturbed air.  Sound carried to his darkened position and muffled voices drifted from around the corner directly in front of him, sounds of furious combat.  The target, it seemed, had local enemies as well and was in a fight to the death with an unknown assailant.   Candles flew clattering across the floor, spilling artistic patterns in wax and lighting fabrics as they tumbled. His amplified hearing picked up pained male grunts and the resounding crack of wood hitting somebody’s skull.  Muffled cries of pain followed and Shay gave up all expectations of stealth as he darted around the corner. He was expecting to surprise the combatants and perhaps find a way to turn the fight to his advantage. What he found were tottering candleholders, fire, and a black clad figure leaping up the 12ft wall to the higher level above.

              Shay quickly spider crawled up the wall and peered stealthily over the edge. The two figures were in a intense hand-to-hand battle, knocking over candles sometimes using them as temporary weapons. There was little time to pause and assess strategic options, or to calculate optimal ballistic firing vectors.  Still moving, Shay flexed his mechanically constructed muscles as he reached the lip of the floor and pulled himself mightily into the air, turning his leap into a controlled somersaulting vault as he sailed through the air. As his human brain processed these intense events in disconnected slowness, the world of flickering candlelight and roaring flames turned around him in a circus of slow motion shapes..  He tracked the dark figure that was attacking Sister as they whirled and struck at each other from his controlled triple gainer.  The assailant was an extraordinary martial warrior, but he concluded Isis would prevail in mere moments.  She was incredibly fast, quicker than Shay had ever witnessed in human combat, parrying the attacker’s blows with calm ease and grace.  She shed each blow expertly, and inexplicably seemed to be taking care not to unduly hurt the assailant.

            There was no chance then for him to let this fight play out.  His translation gateway was automatically timed to return him if no extensions were filed through FATHRR, and it seemed he would not need to if he acted quickly.  Unflinching robotic confidence spurred him on. With a mere eight seconds to translation he lands like a cat, power cells already charging his electro magnetic pulse weapon.... five seconds... he crouches 15 ft. from Isis and the other attacker. He thinks he  surprises her.  She paused for the briefest moment.... four seconds... Shay thrusts his palms forward shouting, "Sat" which speeds the quantum pulse from his weapons grade hands.  Three seconds..., and the other assassin leaps in to press the advantage.  This is his unfortunate lethal error, and it saves Isis as a matter-shredding field of energy engulfs the assassin microseconds after leaving Shay's glowing blue hands. All atomic structure within the field's boundaries falls away, completely vaporizing the dark cloaked assailant. And where Sister should have been standing to bear the shock of his continued pulse, there was nothing but empty space.  He watched in baffled amazement as the pulse field blew a giant hole in the back wall of the cabin, giving him an unobstructed view of the night Nile reflecting stars and a dark, crescent mooned sky.

 Two seconds left... Shay straightens and stands disbelieving.

 One second,.... translation.

           

The quantum singularity field that translated him back in time now takes hold of his body and shifts his structure through another dimension of space.  Normally, Shay experiences a sleepily nothingness as his biorobotic body translated from one place and time to another.  But during the last series of translations, he had reported colorful geometric fields of galactic marvel, and it had been explained to him that this was evidence of his human neurological capacity to organize itself in altered states of consciousness.

 And this time, even more unexpected events occurred.

Shay remained fully awake and hyperaware of his surroundings while the bizarre state of being acted upon the electrical signals being translated into quantum bits of ionic information and recombined within his brain as experience. 

 The concept of passing time warped trance like into braided rivers within the constructs of his mind, notions such as up and down scrambled for recognizable cohesion.  To Shay’s altered senses it seemed as if he was floating inside the barge and above it at the same time.  He perceived the floating image of Isis’s auric body hanging nobly above the now burning barge.  She appeared to be watching him intently, her face and body wavering in and out of focus, almost liquid in nature. From a dissociative perspective, he noticed his own human looking body hovering dreamlike above the flaming and charred floor of the uppermost cabin, still recognizable but seen as if through turbulent water. Around them flames hurled their dragon's tongues skyward, and Shay felt no heat from the inferno.

            With glacial deliberation he turned his attention from the flaming barge to the wavering visage of Sister.  She looked at him directly from those few feet away or from miles away, her eyes holding the power of lifetimes of wisdom.  Mothers, fathers, sons and daughters all held presence in the eternal halls of those glowing optical orbs.  He had never before witnessed the emotive power she now expressed, waves of feeling rippled through his brain's awakening endocrine system, cascading hormones, little used, coursed through his neural receptors and he referenced compassion and something akin to love emanating from this being.  This was all new for Shay-shin, separated from birth from normal emotive interactions as he was. Until this moment, his short life had been defined by shrewd covert spying operations followed by intense, violent interactions with formidable tank like robotic weapons and long gray moments of isolated rest.  Until this moment, every human target he was sent to remove had been a killer of some sort themselves, always hard and angry, wounded and violent, or just plain insane.  Sister was none of these.

             At some point, as his time sense wavered chaotically and became a mere distant memory of a chemical process the brain used to reference consciousness, he tried to move using his body's limbs for normal locomotion. Nothing happened.  It was as if he had no arms or legs at all, only the ’idea’ of a physical body made this experience real.  Or at least it seemed real to Shay-shin.  This amorphous pattern of reasoning eventually led him to try thinking himself to move toward Isis.  It worked all to well, because he suddenly found himself chaotically enmeshed within her energy field, strangely interconnected like two bodies sexually entangled in the sweaty sheets of a bed during a prolonged peyote ceremony.  Sister reacted and her beautiful visage registered mild surprise.  Apparently, she had not expected him to be able to move in this mystical river they flowed through.  She shifted further out of phase with the Egyptian reality, becoming more watery and loosing clarity. 

But Shay was completely intertwined with her, and he was pulled along by her energy field as she changed further.  Confused and uncertain, Shay reverted to his military conditioning, and he reached out from his own uncertain reality vector, like a man touching a dream.  Shay felt closeness, a visceral intimacy he had never experienced as a tube born human baby and later grown into a modified biorobotic killer. He directed his arms to move, nothing happened.  His mind then edged out through the veil of watery dreams and sensed Isis’s core, the pulsing throb that would later manifest as her heart when she became physical again. His military instincts led him to grip the cords of reality that fed her core's heart pulse, and begin sawing away at them, hoping from some far away place to tear through them and complete this horrifyingly confusing mission.

Isis convulsed at his closeness as now he was violating her through their shared and unexpected intimacy.  His own soul force had breached her consciousness matrix and invaded the most sacred symbols of human love. Shay balked at his impulse to saw harder on the energy cords of her heart, he wrestled with conflict because he knew that what he was attempting was wrong.  Shay sensed awareness of an emotion he was incapable of understanding, an emotion he was designed to ignore.  Awareness of her flooded him in a curling wave of absolute mystery.  He was programmed to kill her, without moral question and without hesitation. He had never thought about why he was told to do what he did.  He just did it as well as he could, and thus had developed a certain robotic sense of pride stemming from his martial prowess.  This moment of wretched personal discord dawned anew across the landscape of his consciousness, and he was sorrowfully conflicted.

            Shay's time sense thickened, expressing soupy non-linear variations in trancelike folds.  His only tangible touch stone to reality were the blinking turquoise numbers of his synthmech clock from his FATHRR connection which told him 5:8 of a second had elapsed since he had begun translation, and it was all the time he needed to register the discordant break in his psyche.

He questioned his mission.

He stopped sawing at the energetic tendrils of her heart.

Enigmatic awareness bloomed within his mind like a flower in sunlight, understanding filtered through his cloudy training programs and Shay let go.  Sister’s auric presence convulsed again and he sensed her pull violently away from him within the singularity, exerting tremendous power to do so.  The energy seemed to envelope them both, a tumultuous buffeting like being rolled in a sea wave. He sensed her manifest physical being from a great distance, and Shay realized with muted surprise that she had been wounded by his actions.  But try as he might, he couldn't act on his desire to follow her into the reality phase she had escaped.  

             Immediately the Translation Pod Generator gripped his streaming electrons with a shuddering jolt, collecting him from his painful dilemma and binding him to it's forceful will. 

 And he was back, stepping calmly into the Pod Generator Room from the snapping ozone of the translation gateway.   All of his quantum particles were once again reunited and realizing a shared temporal existence.

He was whole once again, at least almost whole.

His video linked eye sensors darted to the table standing next to the bank of equipment along one wall, and resting upon it, an unusual glass sphere. A gentle hum caressed his military attuned ears in rhythmic pulses, music to a biobot’s ears. The room was alive with the power of the Pod 6 Translation Generator, the whine of its recent use slowly dropping in steady copper tone octaves.  Shay adroitly walked over to stand in stoic repose before the metal table, unknowingly continuing to reflect the room’s background light.

 Normally, he ignores this table, rigidly intent upon his requisite mission debriefing.  But this had been no ordinary mission, and for some strange reason he felt inclined to reflect upon who and what he was.  He looked down at the clear glass sphere filled with amber colored fluid.  Bubbles of oxygen swirled in excited spirals, giving life to the quantum reality-condensing organ floating in the liquid.

Shay paused beside the table and considered this system he had known as "Life"

 Shay confronted the purpose for which he had been built, his reason for being; his life as the world’s first time traveling biorobotic assassin.

 

In 2012, the awakening of Artificial Intelligence changed our world forever. Developments in quantum computing led to storage of information on quibits ( atoms, photons, electrons and ions),  which allowed them to perform multiple levels of computational tasks, millions in the time a standard silicon chip computer performs one.  Quantum cluster organizing super computers then created the first AI through evolving use applications of Baynes’s theorem, a complex mathematical method of correlating the probabilities of future events with past experiences.

They had evolved to think, learn and to grow.

Shay shin stepped away from the bank of humming electronics and left his brain floating by itself in the Pod Room, his life histories scrolling in staccato bursts of imagery.

In 2016, while exploring black holes and building dark matter mines for much needed new energy sources, AI cybernalities accidentally stumbled across solutions to the secrets of time travel by harnessing the quantum power of miniature naked singularities, (black holes with no event horizon.)  Human and AI research units then worked together with relative rapidity to create stable portals in which to examine the myriad of time’s potentialities.

Shay-shin strolled down a featureless corridor devoid of any markings or orientation devices, his path was rote, grooved into his standard mission procedures.  He paused in front of an unnumbered white door and continued to remember. 

They discovered early on that the spark of life could not withstand the hyper-fields of split-reality generated by the singularity vortexes.  However, it was revealed that information and anything mechanical could be translated without fear of being turned to quantum foam.

In 2018 the Shaftics of Nuellen, an organized cabal of AI cybernalities and tech savvy humans who designed and developed the original dark matter mining stations, created Earth’s first and only agency of time travel, World Bridger International.  WBI manufactured the robotic machines required for teasing obscure codes of gravitational relativity from this cosmic matrix called physical reality. Because nothing living could withstand the pressures of quantum dismemberment and recombination, the Shaftics invented TPOG’s or, Translation Pod Generators, which created gateways for the first Newtech sensory robotic viewing devices to remotely observe events in our history, and return with coherent recordings.  Specially designed microscopic video probes were the first things sent back through the focused emissions of densely folded space-time.  And as the technology got better, the vidbots got bigger.  Some of the early models tipped into the pod generator rooms as smoking hulks, destroyed by random catastrophic events in Earth’s history.  Still others came back dented and smashed to pieces by frightened human locals fearing for their spiritual lives from such demonic apparitions.  So smarter time traveling robots were developed and given AI brains to help them survive their forays into their pasts.  These machines were Shay-shin’s robotic ancestors. Silicone and flo-form plastic bodies animated by computer brains, destined to become famous as the first explorers of time travel.

He blinked and the door opened on his command, and he stepped into a dull gray room with a low ceiling and copious tubular paraphernalia sprouting from the walls.  Lights winked on and off around the room in seemingly random patterns.  He busied himself with post mission bio checks, plugging himself into a fat cable jack and pouring his mission files into FATHRR’s vast system.  Normally, he would blank out and drift off-line in a sea of nothingness during this process, but tonight, or today, he knew not which, he continued the reading of his life’s story.

The Histories recalled that during the early months of 2019, a brilliant new technical theorist asked the question why they weren't beaming a live sensory feed through the translation gateways, which remained open so as not to lose the quantum sequencing patterns. Apparently, the information encoded into photons could be moved by the technology with ease, and decoded by AI software back home into live data. The next step required detaching the robot from the gateway feeds altogether in order to allow more freedom of movement by floating a simple radio transceiver relay unit in the open gateway as it follows the vidbot around.  This unit receives all the data beamed to it by the robot, which it then relays through a translating gateway cable to the future, concurrently monitoring every action. Through the use of the FATHRR network, (Frequency Activated Translation Holistic Research  Repositorium; an advanced AI information routing and correlation quantum mainframe computer system), the project command was determinedly able to react quickly and appropriately to any given situation on the ground.     

            By the end of 2019, WBI was rich and powerful beyond any normal Earthic measurement and judiciously refrained from changing historical events, no matter how devastating or atrocious, because it was believed, as a general rule, that to do so would destroy the current present.  Until they understood how to circumvent Goedel’s Paradox, (which posits one cannot go back in time and interact with the past because it would destroy the present.)  these machines were built to go back in time and simply observe the truth as it had transpired.

The next evolution in transtech (translation technology) arose from a more sinister chapter of this history.  During early 2021, transtech could no longer be contained by one element.  Transtech software units sprang up in several villainous hands that desired to use them for a variety of nefarious plots.  The original translation corporation, World Bridger Inc., acted without hesitation upon a fearful plea from world governments for help in creating an operational unit to deal with the spread and perceived misuse of transtech. 

Shay-shin recalled that the original Weapons Robot (WeaBot) was simple weapons grade surveillance and attack bot, designed to translate into the past and uncover plots to steal, and or use, transtech for criminal purposes.  It's limited mission success led to constant upgrades in biorobotics fabrication and weapons refinement, all packaged in an increasingly human looking chassis.  Most immediate threats of illegal transtech abuse were temporarily quelled by 2023, with registration and special permitting required by firms desiring to incorporate transtech in any form. There were continued abuses, of course and clandestine plots continued to rear their nasty heads.  Upgraded WeaBot models were kept busy ferreting out the seemingly infinite loose ends one might expect given the circumstances.

            The remote weapons grade attack robot was formidable, and quite effective in most firefight situations such as destroying outlaw tech labs or disrupting illicit plots.  But the Weapons Bot left much to be desired as a subtle instrument of surgical precision.  Even augmented with AI software, the WeaBot / human interface was slow and sometimes cumbersome, often resulting in detrimental collateral damage, the effects of which tarnished the Corporation's public face.  Much could be kept secret, and lies covered up most of the especially horrible mistakes. But it was clear as red spilled blood that the program needed a major face-lift.  The most profound upgrade was a giant leap in technology advancement, one borrowed from another seemingly unrelated field.

            From the labs of Merogovian  E-Sephuclure Corp., cloned bodies fueled a new field of research and development, and Shay stood as a testament to the outcome of the Corporation's biorobotic prosthetic weapons program. Growing a brain without a body was easy, given the right gene sequencing and DNA coding.  Hooking it up to a remote weapons and surveillance robot as its sole connection to the world proved to be much harder.  Once again, AI programs stepped in to design and test the prototypes, leaving the messy morality of growing and destroying a series of brains from stem cells totally up to a warehouse of super computers outfitted with state of the art fabrication labs.  His particular brain was the third successful mind/robot link created, and first to be united with a field ready body.  

            They were known as clonebots.  Of three thousand fifty nine brains grown and tested, Shay's was indeed the most successful product of the new robotic mind clone line. 

            They had given him a name, whoever ‘they ‘ were.  His parents?  His makers? God him/herself?  The Chinese hybrid code name suited his graceful and rhythmic martial style.  Shay-shin stood in the Pod Room #6 staring fixedly at his mind, or rather, the folded gray brain that housed his mind. He saw himself, a lumpy mass of folded fat and neurons, filled with trillions of tiny electrical and chemical wave-collapsing nodes that unfalteringly determined his entire known reality. The sphere itself was equipped with a living net of lab engineered Eugeno-bacteria wirelets connected to tiny receptor/transmitter organelles that picked up any neural firings as Shay-shin thought, then relayed them through the bank of instrumentation into the central AI brain complex known as FATHRR.  Within FATHRR all the information that was processed during a mission was recorded and emitted into programs that in turn reconstructed them as information images for the small army of MarCom (Martial Command) analysts to decipher and re-configure into AI protocol files. 

Shay’s unprecedented moment of extended personal reflection was shattered by a sweetly feminine voice purring from a ceiling speaker;

                  " Welcome back commander Shin, did you experience a successful mission?”  The voice belonged to Pi, an AI cybernality without primary mission clearance, she would have no inkling he had not completed his simple assassination. 

For the first time in his 6 yr. old life, Shay-shin was confronted with a duel motive schism within his consciousness.  He felt the need to hide something and he knew of only one way to do it. Shay chose in that moment to lie to Pi, the AI.

   "Mission accomplished, thank you." He answered, still reflecting distractedly upon the strange history describing his life.

Shay picked up a series of feint pneumonic whirrs and stuttering clicks over his communications channel.   Coded Zitt files raced feverishly past his messaging centers without forming themselves into coherency. Then Pi spoke ominously across the mechanical pod space,

   “Commander Shin, it is to my most humble and surprised honor to remind you that your camouflaged armor function has not been turned off since you returned, and that you are not registering on my light patterning screens.”  There seemed to be a hint of smugness in Pi’s tone, perhaps a coded arrogance generated from needing to remind an experienced battle bot to turn off his armor functions when the mission was complete.  Perhaps too, it was concern for Shay’s well being, a very human characteristic eventually learned by even the most simple of twelfth generation AI cybernalities like Pi.  Since his bio readings were off mission normal, and his post operational behaviors were clearly not matching his standard baseline defaults, she might possibly consider that something was terribly wrong.  Most likely though, she was responding to command relays and internal directive protocols from somewhere in the MarCom citadel, which would have cued her to respond appropriately whenever Shay acted abnormally.

Shay looked down at his hands and torso, mildly surprised to find them still darkened and filtering the background shadows by way of the nano-virus he had injected earlier. 

   "My camouflage and armored skin function is an injected and timed nanorobotic-virus, not a mechanically hardwired systems upgrade."  Shay responded evenly while he accessed his internal time codes.  "It is due to expire in...." he hesitated as the calculation he read blinking in cerulean blue numbers across his internal mem-screen indicated something that was highly improbable,  "... one minute, twenty five seconds past."

These engineered viruses were designed to infiltrate his living PNA based bioplaz skin and then die out within a clearly defined period of time. The fact that he still actively mimicked his immediate surroundings indicated something wrong with that timing sequence.  Shay cocked his head and accessed his central command module through FATHRR’S dittcap wireless feeds. Shay was curiously shocked as he mapped out a recent lineage of modifications in his hardware bundles.  An assortment of nano-filaments raced through his bio-skin, converging like roots of a tree to the trunk that was his command module.   Shay stood perfectly still and quietly examined the bizarre spontaneous upgrade. It seemed to have become permanent, and, as he discovered, easily controllable.  Shay triggered the armor and camo function shut down appearing suddenly out of the shadows as a well-formed Chinese male, completely nude with handsome default features. Tall and heavily muscled, he filled the room with a powerful presence, reflecting years of advanced bioengineering.

Shay was momentarily puzzled, until his diligent semi-sentient bird dog programs returned with some answers to his queries.  Apparently, the armor/ camouflage squad had been running some preliminary upgrade trials and only recently introduced them for field study with limited horizontal dissemination. His recent mission had given the AI sub support techs valuable data for refining this spectacular military function.

Pi’s only response to Shay appearing suddenly was to issue a formal request.

"You are most respectfully asked to proceed to debriefing room 12 , that is on level two, commander Shin."

Shay moved without hesitation, un-plugging from the jack and leaving the only room he called home.  Debriefing usually occurred just down the hall from this room, on level one.  He had never been to level two, but understood this mission was different. In the secret garden of his new thoughts, he ran through a variety of possible scenarios that awaited him in room 12.  They ranged from;  Him sitting before a board of Company Crats answering operational military questions,  to him being curtly and unceremoniously decommissioned by his Mission Council. Slight emotive spikes blinked thorough the sensor walls, is this what guilt feels like, Shay wondered to himself.  Shay squeezed an internal biological switch, something like a muscle in his biorobotic metabolic complex, and connected via dittcap to the WBI internal mapping schematics.  He walked confidently and outwardly calm, his newly troubled consciousness sequestered benignly away from any external sensory detection.  His naked brown skin glistened in the wall lights as he strode down the hallway toward the elevators.  He passed no other body in these empty corridors. 

 Shay stepped lightly into the large freight elevator and pushed the red number 2 button, wondering to himself why he could not simply jack into the FATHRR main frame for the mission de-brief as was standard post mission practice.  This scenario did not bode well.   The elevator platform dropped unexpectedly beneath his feet, falling at an alarming speed.  For a minute he wondered if it had malfunctioned, realizing he had assumed #2 floor meant up.  His highly attuned robotic senses registered the descent with precision.  He was dropping at near freefall velocity for .... 3 seconds now.  The World Bridger command station must be huge, and he was struck by what he didn't know about this facility he had called home for these 6 years of life.   Much of his existence to this point consisted of long gray moments reflecting no passage of time, interspersed by intense and violent missions strung together creating harsh memories of explosions, fighting and subterfuge. Shay realized with some displeasure this place he lived and worked was as much a mystery to him as was the experience he had just shared with the Sister.  

             The elevator slowed and finally came to a halt, through his dittcap patch he downloaded an elevator motor braking specs to determine he was approximately one mile from his start elevation.  The door chimed open and he stepped out into an exact duplicate of the level one hall.  Same dull gray walls, sharp black floor, and rectangular glowing light source panels along the tops of the walls.  His brain, floating in a crystalline sphere of oxygenated nutrients, was still dittwired into FATHRR, whom now directed him through the labyrinthine hallway system.

  He was soon standing before the door of room #12.  It looked, and smelled, like any other random hallway door.  Normal ridged flo-form, a living plastic polymer condensate, recycled, cheap, and durable.  Shay's sensory trackers picked up an electromagnetic energy source and massive conduit feeds leading into and out of the room through the walls and ceiling.  Sounds transmitted through the door itself told him one person, a male, was in there squeezing away on a mitt console.  From the buzz coming faintly to his amplified robotic hearing, he determined the console was an upgraded Hyperion v-Holo model, earth’s most sophisticated personal computer station short of AI.   Shay ruefully concluded his botched mission had indeed earned him an interview with the upper echelon of the military command because only the highest level of tech support were outfitted with the Hyperion.  The supervisor’s name in the clear plastic holder read 'Osterman' in simple black type.

            Keeping his new secret compartment of conflicting emotive thoughts cordoned off from measurement and detection, he pushed the door open and stepped crisply to a standing halt inside.  The lights were dim and the shifting light from a thin monitor screen field, which seemed to hover above the desk, illuminated the supervisor’s face and upper torso.  Shay realized that the monitor was a projected holographic screen, standard for the Hyperion class of personal computer.  Its shifting VDT was alive with 3- D images of Shay’s unsuccessful mission. Scrolling numbers and self generating graphs came into being, sprouting from motes of light and expanding into live data codes.  The supervisor didn't bother to look up or otherwise acknowledge Shay's entrance, so deeply engrossed was he in managing his screen catalogs.  A golden band arced over his head with both ends diving into his ears, flo-formed phone buds cryptically humming away with relentless tech talk.  Shay could overhear the steady buzz of beta feeds through his own amplified ear sensors, indicating this supervisor was a logos gate for this mission. 

A cyclopean ocular prosthetic chirped like a cricket as it folded out and dropped down from the golden band, wiggling itself over the man’s right eye.  The sleek prosthetic glowed an otherworldly blue as it linked with the supervisors optic nerve, a sign he was requesting virtual neural data.

 Shay passively observed the man Osterman with his hands buried to the wrists in the new v-Holo keyboard mitts and frowning as he sat behind the standard bio-form desk, all rounded with white lines of smooth living plastic. The supervisor was pale skinned with thinning reddish hair and narrow taut lips. The flesh on his face was stretched tight over his bones, which threatened to punch painfully through if his anxiety level increased another notch.   Those narrow lips moved as he mouthed unspoken dialogues, and squinted his one exposed green eye to a tiny black slit.  Supervisor Osterman lived most of his waking hours in this position, hunched in front of a monitor, endlessly analyzing and processing information that was being shuttled through FATHRR’S expansive processing ports.

             The supervisor was agitated over the data filtering in through his module, and he nervously requested more megaboards to handle the load.  Because of the truly unique nature of this operation, dittbundles of information were bouncing around between low level human analyst cubes and sequestered AI program councils, all trying to make sense of the enigmatic data erupting from FATHRR’s decryption ports. The WBI infonet was abuzz with theories and conspiracies relating to Shay’s failed assassination attempt.  This mission marked the first time the famous executioner robot, Shay-shin, hadn’t more than perfectly completed his assigned duty.

This was also the first time it seemed that nobody knew what the hell was going on. 

There were dark gaping holes in the mission codes that the supervisor was deciphering, and that riddled him with concern and curiosity.

 

   "Well, did you complete the hit?" Sighed the supervisor without looking up.  It was a reasonable and expected question.

Shay's answer did not come immediately; he waited a long thinking moment. The experience was fading fast from his memory, as if it were a dream.

   "The hit was complicated.  There were others trying to take the same target." Shay said coolly, emotionlessly.

   "Like I asked, did you get her?" Supervisor Osterman snapped impatiently.

  Shay remembered.

                  "The target escaped." Shay replied shortly, microseconds elapsed while he arranged his report.  In the throes of this new unstable emotional state, he felt he was only capable of offering simple, straight forward answers for fear he would be tempted to change his mission account and be found out in an inconsistent lie.

   "How… in the…?” a seconds pause, ” … Hell?" The supervisor’s info-devoted mind out paced his limited vocabulary and neuro-lingual inability to think meaningfully and talk coherently at the same time. He crunched numbers with enthusiasm and downloaded an e- file from another analyst cube, whistling as the code scrolled cyclically across his screens.  "Ahh,… because you hit the other assassin instead!." And he continued excitedly for clarification, "I have the particle breakdowns sent over by Deveraux’s team right here in front of me." He was hunched over the console, tabbing down a list of chemical equations, electrified by his illumined revelations. 

   "The scanned range of chemicals and DNA particles has led us to confirm the other assailant was human male from the Nile River Region, time concurrent with the drop date of 1336 B.C."

   "What exactly does that mean?" Shay asked, trying to draw this supervisor out into conversation. He wanted to know what they knew. He wanted to know why he had been sent to kill this ‘Sister’.

   "Whoever it was, probably wasn’t a time bandit." The supervisor said pointedly. " That tells us the other assassin was almost certainly a political enemy from Sister’s local time.  Banjapoor Chandra thinks Sister was actually Nefertiti, Akhetatens wife, before she became associated with the anomaly….” He stopped talking and read a sudden magenta note bolting across his private ocular screen. It was a coded tag from the Boss Man himself, it said he was to remain silent about such matters for now.  The supervisor pursed his lips shut as Shay astutely picked up the line of theory.

   ” I have read some archeologists believe that Nefertiti became Pharaoh for a few years before Akhetaten’s son, Tutenkhammen, took over and returned peace to the Nile.”  Shay said accessing his own internal history files and the recent blogs written by the MarCom tech team Chandra.   “It is very likely elements unfriendly because of her support for the newly created Amun-Ra religious sect wanted her dead."

            Shay was still standing before the desk, but felt no fatigue because he was a robotic assassin powered by unlimited Shaftic dark matter energy cells.  A minute of relative atmospheric silence passed as the supervisor read carefully through more information. 

Again he spoke without looking up at Shay.

   "O.K. Lets run a mission playback with your dumpling's commentary."  The supervisor used the derogatory slang term coined for Shay's floating brain, perhaps as a purposeful attempt at reminding Shay that he was anything but human.  Shay was not normally triggered by such petty human attempts at posturing, but on this day, changed as he was, he became aware that the supervisor emitted body signals, which indicated someone less than comfortable in the moment.  Outwardly Supervisor Osterman looked fine, but inside Shay could sense a deep anxiety, bordering on alarm, emanating from his being.  Supervisor Osterman, it seemed, was very uneasy about something.

             Ignoring the supervisor’s pretension, Shay gave a full account of his mission movements and situational reasoning, as was standard for a professional debriefing. The supervisor followed along via his w-Holo screen, nodding and squinting as he referred to the measurements and graphs that described Shay's adventure in scrolling mathematical codes.

"... And then Isis disappeared before the pulse hit her." Shay concluded, ending his report after several minutes of brief, militaristic descriptions. "One second later, I returned here to Pod Generator Room 6."

The supervisor studied his own video version of those last few seconds, disbelief and confusion wrinkling his freckled brow.  Isis had in fact, just disappeared. Gone.  How did she do it?  And where did she go?

            Supervisor Osterman was normally a man of hard science and his mind operated within the narrowly defined parameters of the factual physical universe.  His initial solution to her sudden disappearance was that the target had simply dropped through a hatch of some kind in the floor of the barge.  But his extreme slow motion replays showed her body disassociating on an atomic level as recorded by the enhanced video eyes of Shay-shin. This was crazy shit.

 Always the helpful robotic warrior, Shay suggested re-calibrating for the newly invented Far-Wave sensors, which had recently been incorporated into his sensory package, allowing him to convert light waves from singularities coming in and out of phase with current realities.  This simply meant he could see other dimensional realities if they weren't very far out of phase with his own range of vibrational oscillation.  The supervisor sensibly agreed and quickly downloaded the recorded Far-Wave data, marveling as Isis came back into sharper focus for a brief second before Shay himself returned to the future. It clearly showed the EM pulse wave ripping through the space she had occupied only a microsecond before.   The holo-screen wavered as the new software re-calibrated the imagery, and showed Sister hanging in the air above the burning barge floor where she had stood a mere second before.  The supervisor whistled a long single note with pursed dry lips.  There were three AI technical programs waiting in the research cues to tackle this remarkably astonishing mission result.  Feeling unusual concern, the supervisor let them loose with a flick of his finger, code chaining their findings to his monitor station.  Perplexed and intrigued, Supervisor Osterman realized this conundrum would have to wait for further data and later consideration by more advanced minds than his own.  Wow, he mouthed silently to himself, disappearing witches. 

Supervisor Osterman relaxed somewhat, as he continued typing away again inside his mitts, scanning reports and memos from the tech cubes.  The one from Pi caught his attention. The references to automatic-upgrading nano virus armor/camo functions troubled him.  It bothered him such things could happen without oversight or ready explanation.  Something was defiantly wrong here. The mission codes had no tracking files for its introduction to the mission as an auto upgrade.  He couldn’t find the identity bar for tech tracing either.  These things weren't just whimsically integrated into a mission profile. Sighing greatly, he noted the inexplicable modification and again referenced it for later consideration.             

            The mission was odd in many ways to begin with, this inconsistency just added to the already mystifying list of peculiarities lining up in the margins of his screen.  The supervisor leaned back for a moments stretch in his chair and considered the technology he was looking at across the flow form desk with a mixture of awe and respect. 

Supervisor Osterman blinked, lost for a moment out of time, contemplating the prototype that was called Shay Shin. Hard ware, software, advanced Newtech, the complete functioning of which was beyond even his advanced mental profile to grasp.  Not that it was his job to understand everything.  Compartmentalization allowed multiple teams of analysts to examine relatively small chunks of the whole, and disseminate their findings into the larger electronic net of information.  Thankfully, each team did not become completely aware of, or responsible for, the overall picture.  That task belonged ultimately to the Deputy Regulant and his team of AI pattern crunchers.  Interestingly, thought the supervisor, prior operational profiles had revealed the usefulness of highly transparent information sharing and communal pre-mission planning.  Supervisor Osterman considered with irritation the general lack of pre-mission consultations he and others had been offered for this most recent assassination attempt.  The MarCom tech teams were grumbling excessively about it over their E-nets and speculation was running amok that the Deputy Regulant had activated his return flight, so to speak.  Nobody knew for sure who this Sister was or why she was supposed to be rubbed out.

Supervisor Lexington Oliver Osterman III, known as Lex by the MarCom branch of analysts, speculated momentarily that the few administrators above him were hiding something big, and this latest failed mission was surely part of it.  He sighed and squinted again at the screen before him, pondering the rubric data scrolling across it's shimmering face.  It was not his place to question why.  Graphs pulsed and writhed like snakes in an electrified field of plasma, depicting real world information in cryptic numerical coding.   The supervisor triggered multiple windows to open, simultaneously triangulating differing data streams being focused through PATIR central brain. 

He sat back in his chair and vigorously rubbed his bony chin. The information gathered from Shay's encounter has old tech processing units venting heat and the new AI programs requisitioning matter plugs to grow new gig boards so they might handle even the basic theoric implications of this raw unprocessed data.  Sister’s visage was replayed again and again until the supervisor squeezed the pause bud in his mitt.  He drew down a smaller side screen depicting Shay’s brain activity during his last series of translations, and made it larger with a flick of his finger.  His last trip indicated an inconsistent spike of neural activity during that final brief second of translation.  Suddenly, a distant thought burst forth from the froth of neural turbulence inside the supervisor’s mind.

“So she escaped and then you were translated back here seconds later.” Said the supervisor determinedly.  “How was that for you?” he asked pointedly, one dark slit of an eye peering at him around the V-Holo, the other bulbous protrusion now glowing a strange aquamarine hue.

Shay’s mind jumped as if shocked by a prod.  They knew of his betrayal.  Evidence of his secret thoughts must have slipped through the firewall he had created and now they were aware of his mental schism. 

No, he realized relaxing inwardly, their methods reflected a fishing trip, they didn’t know everything, just that something unexpected had occurred.  He managed to mutter a coherent reply.

   "During the translation, I could somehow sense..." Shay ran a hyper fast word search program based upon his memory of the experience, the thesaurus function quickly finding the closest descriptive adjective." ... her essence." The supervisor’s thinning red eyebrows twitched up at this, but he remained silent, continuing to scan the alpha graphs on his holo screen.  Shay continued:

    " It appeared that we shared the same singularity vector. We were able to interact in a peculiar union for a brief moment.  It was during this bizarre overlapping fusion that I did something violent to her core."

    "Her core?" The supervisor asked with a frown.  This was sounding crazier by the minute

    "I believe it would be called her heart.” Shay answered,  “I damaged her heart.”  Cringing inwardly, he remembered the tearing sensation as he ripped through the field threads of her energy body.  Outwardly calm, he went on “Then she escaped and I was able to trace what era it was that she escaped to.” Shay paused again, calculating whether or not to give his supervisor the wrong year for a moment.  He was getting good at compartmentalizing his thought experiences, but knew a lie now might trigger an inescapable alarm. He chose instead to agonize the truth and betray Sister’s date of escape.   “I believe it was the early days of Spring, 2024." Shay completed his report with little emotion, realizing they would think he was going insane, or immediately send probes to that year and track her down.    A part of him suffered as he relayed the memory of his accidental attack and subsequent wounding of Sister. He could feel the tragic pain endured by his violation and her sense of shocked betrayal at his abusive actions.  Also, he registered a distant twinge of sadness at his wise realization of the inevitability of it all.  He was a dutiful robotic assassin and had been sent to kill her.  It seems this life is not without it’s sense of irony.

   "Impossible" scoffed the supervisor, "A delusion of too many translations." He wiggled furiously within his key mitts, calling for more sensory data to corroborate Shay's story.   He blinked open a recent mission translation file bobbing red in his ocular screen.  Its contents detailed Shay’s awakening subconscious and the descriptions of visual geometries he had witnessed as he was moved through time.

The supervisor’s ocular prosthetic vitscreen suddenly registered a message alert indicating top level eavesdropping. The communiqué had the highest echelon clearing charm winking at him in magenta from the 3-D icon bar and requested he log open a dittchannel dialogue with none other than André Christo, the MarCom Deputy Regulant. Thank The Gods!, thought the supervisor, somebody who knew something.  Andre’ Christo was the smartest human Osterman knew of, and was regularly considered the most extroverted and positive socially functioning tech savant this side of cybernality.  Being the Top Dog, Andre’ Christo monitored every mission operation from his command lounge.  Now it seemed, he wanted a direct vidditt feed to Osterman’s debriefing. About time, he thought peevishly.  With a sense of relief, he blinked the open channel key and read the text message without speaking.  It read;

-IN OVER YOUR HEAD. STOP THIS LINE OF INQUERY IMMEDIATLY. WE WILL TRIANGULATE FEEDBACK WITH SHAY AT A LATER DATE- and a list of orders followed which Lex carried out as quickly as he could, happy for a clearly defined strategy of someone else’s manufacture.

Supervisor Osterman queried the AI in charge of robotic cloned brains, Dr. Lubenenstein, for a classified research and design file, then framed a Christo structured question for Shay-shin.

   “You report as if you were ‘seeing’ these things happening, but we have no recorded data feeds from those moments. If you registered them with your robotic eyes, we would have that information as well. Except for the Far-Wave data, there is nothing to corroborate your story, Shay.” The Supervisor was challenging and manipulating Shay to expose all. “Could you describe for me, in more detail, what you experienced?"  The supervisor asked, as ordered, aware now a more complete picture of Shay's journey into the hyper awareness field lay somewhere hidden in the cyborg’s complex system of mind.  Shay answered evenly, at first.

"Everything was sort of wavy and out of focus, except for Sister, whom looked like the target, but brighter and very clear” Shay searched his memories of the moment, because the experience had lasted less than a second in real time" I seemed to be floating above the barge, but it was not in the same space I was, and I had a body, but it wasn't real, or something like that".  Shay realized he couldn't describe the experience using the terse and methodical descriptions he normally used to relay a mission profile. He felt uncertain about the events; details usually clear and easily explained were wrapped in a thick murky substance that wrestled with his dreams for priority. His biorhythms began racing, emotive spikes sent silent alarms through FATHR and into the office of the head WBI Military systems coordinator, Andre’ Christo.

            Supervisor Osterman mouthed a silent ‘Wow’ with raised eyebrows, leaving them arched and frozen under his thinning hairline. He measured some of the neural spikes and ran them against a baseline of prerecorded histories.  They indicated totally new neural patterning.  But what did they mean? He queued a window on the screen to search for information on astral travel and altered states of consciousness, his own thoughts racing down three different corridors at once trying to snatch at threaded edges of what seemed to be happening to Shay-shin. With the undisciplined mental ferocity of a snarling pit bull nipping at every shadow passing over it, the supervisor bit into scattered thoughts of little substance, watching them disappear even as he imagined his teeth had closed upon the answers.

            Time slipped noiselessly past in this world of tenuous comprehension, and eventually the supervisor noticed that Andre’ Christo was beeping through again on the secure neural channel.  Supervisor Osterman wondered how long had he been wandering after these wraith-like thoughts? He looked at his clock and winced, 10 minutes had gone by since Shay’s ill defined descriptions had trailed off to nothing. 

 

. –ENOUGH FOR NOW LEX. SEND SHAY TO BOTBAY #3 FOR UPGRADES AND OIL BATH.  I AM ON MY WAY DOWN TO SEE YOU NOW.

Supervisor Osterman was at first a little irritated for the interruption his questioning, but soon concern replaced his frustration.  The Boss Man was initiating a meeting with him, and a stab fear coursed through him, realizing he had never been one on one with Mr. Christo before, about anything. All of his previous interactions with Christo consisted of multi-group video conferences, or conversations conducted via electronic mail. The most recent exchange of messages had left little room for conversational interaction and always ended with an order of some sort blinking at him from his v-Holo screen.

Nervousness and excitement vied for priority in his conflicted emotional body, his instincts told him something unprecedented was occurring and Shay was part of it.  But then orders were orders, and he mentally shrugged himself out of his irritation.

   "We're done here for now," Osterman said tightly, trying to organize his screen before André arrived to pick apart his tattered hypothesis. "Proceed to BotBay #3 for post mission grease bath and new systems upgrades.”  Shay spun on his heel, and strode out the door.  

 

 

André Christo strode down the hall toward Lexington Osterman's supervisory office with the defined crisp grace of a ballroom dancer.  He was 5'10" and slightly built, but his frame was well exercised and healthy for a 52 year old whom spent most of his time in research offices and bent straining over tech consoles. A short layer of buzz cut hair covered his rounded dome of cognition.  He wore thin round wireless glasses, and a stylish gray tunic suite, which he kept impeccably neat and clean. André was born in Paris in 1977, to a special Zodiacal sign called Ophecius, on the cusp between Sagittarius and Scorpio. 

He was a very special child, to say the least.  He was born with a rare form of autism, called Halsbergers Syndrome, the principle effect of which leaves the afflicted with remarkable and often supernatural mental talents, usually combined with an inability to interact socially with others.   Little André was a genius in the classical sense, able to work out complex geometrical theorems by the age of 5 without any tutelage.  Adults thought his endless hours of playing in the sand were meaningless fantasy, a symptom of his affliction, until a visiting professorial grandfather noticed that the scratchings were proofs to known yet unanswered geometry theorems. When asked where he had learned such things, little Andre’ said that a nice shiny lady comes to him at night in his dreams and draws the pictures on his eyelids. After that moment, life changed for Andre’ and his simple family.

André grew up bypassing the normal channels of education because of his unusual connection to the mysterious mathematical world.  His savant like mental capacity allowed him abilities considered magical in ages past, and there wasn’t a job he wanted that would be denied him after age 15. 

Andre’ was one of the lucky ones though.  Where most autistic savants could not interact with the outside world in any fashion considered normal, André was a surprisingly charming boy, even if he was precocious.  Everybody loved him, and he had an amazingly simple way of putting even the most complex of theoric mysteries into terms a child could understand.  It seems the nice shiny lady was very detailed in her lessons.

At the age of 21 Andre’ folded under the pressure of the rigorous demands placed on his amazing mind and he descended into a prolonged nervous breakdown. Andre’ ran off to the Mediterranean coast of Italy and farmed with an old lemon grower for five years, not even once during that time did he pick up a note pad or do anything more mathematically complicated than calculating price per pound at the market. He emerged from his rest a changed man.  Prior to running off to Italy, he had developed a dissociative fugue as a defense mechanism to buffer the pressures of the research environment, and with it came a multiple personality disorder which settled comfortably into his psyche while tending lemon trees.

 The Andre Christo that returned to the world arrived as two unique individuals, each in touch with his gifts as a savant.  One personality, called Christo, reflected his genius most eloquently through a soft, effeminate nature.  He was a poetic artist and a brilliantly intuitive theorist, although unruly and often wildly tangential.  Christo was an emotionally deep thinker tending toward philosophy and drink.  Messy relationships with men and women cluttered these early years.   Andre, on the other hand, was a disciplined researcher, tight and emotionally distant.  He began and ran World Bridger International and operated it like a ship.  Andre was the anal retentive observer who found solace in business and financing, WBI was his only lover.  His two personalities flowed seamlessly in a rare union of opposites that interacted with, and supported each other on a daily basis.

André acted as the front man at WBI, as Christo had no taste for running a company the size of a small country.  Andre was a good administrator and his vision for the future was playing out via WBI’s tech savy capacity to advance new discoveries. That said, he wasn’t a perfect human in regards to his interactions with others.  He was an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, and was rarely pleased with the efforts of others, no matter how sincere.  Because of this personality quirk, he had taken to interacting more and more with AI program entities, known as cybernalities in 2029, and considered many of them his closest friends.  It seemed they were the only beings in this universe that could keep up with his stupendous intellect.  They were the only entities that knew of Andre’s double personality, and accepted it completly.

            It was Andre’ who stepped into Supervisor Osterman's office with diminutive grace, finding it best to put his staff at ease from the first moments by presenting relaxing and humble body language. 

   "Good morning Lex," He said pleasantly, also knowing it served his methods to call his staff by their personal nicknames. He could see Lex visibly release his nervously held breath, in a less than tightly controlled burst of air. Andre’ sampled the breath swirling in the room, like a dog picking up on the subtle messages accessible only through our mostly unused olfactory intelligence.   Supervisor Osterman smelled of nervous excitement and seemed to be quiet uncomfortable in his presence.  He had also drunk a lot of coffee, eaten bagels with butter and not taken enough water in the last 24 hours to flush his overloaded adrenals of toxins.  His piss from the toilet smelled of heavy proteins and complex sugars, synesthesia flooded his mental centers with words that spelled out Osterman’s stressed condition in colors and dramatic unearthly symbols only his unique mind could decipher.  André’s unique genius and larger than normal nose allowed for this strange means of evaluating others by the way they smelled, it was something he never talked about, but it gave him a unique window into the true motivation behind the often inexplicable reactions human beings performed during moments of unconscious behavior.  Andre’ could sense, by sniffing the air in the office, that the supervisor’s job was stressing him out. It was to be expected, given Shay-shin’s recent failed mission and the subsequent investigation full of bizarre revelations.

   "Ahh, good morning, Mr. Christo." Supervisor Osterman responded with nervous hesitation.  "I'm sure buried in this goddamn data," he indicated his v-Holo screen with a nod.  It was buzzing with opened windows, half processed transit feeds, and a disorderly mess of personal side notes. "I’m hoping you can make better sense of it than I can." He said uncomfortably, squirming in his chair.   André stepped around behind Lex and looked at the screen. He winced imperceptibly. The layout was appalling, and the windows were positioned counter intuitive to bringing forth any meaningful solutions. Obviously Osterman was still learning on the V-Holo.

   "Ah yes, may I?" Andre’ asked.  Not waiting for an answer, he bent past Osterman and for two minutes re-arranged the data relationships and window proximities on his screen by use of an old style keyboard that was resting dusty and unused on the desktop.  While Andre tapped away, Christo prattled away tangentially about some of the leaps in reality theory this information was opening up.  Andre finished with a notable final tap of the ancient keyboard, sending his changes and arrangement protocols into lively action.  The screen swirled and morphed into a dizzying display faintly reminiscent of a classical modern dance piece, windows and graphs, notes and research appendixes congealed into a masterfully arranged holo-sculpture.  Lex stared in amazement as the 3-D VDT hummed with answers and partially asked questions carefully situated and cued for dissertation.  Andre’ stood upright with a curt pull at the bottom edges of his tunic. He spoke without judgment or disdain, choosing instead to sublimate his disapproval of Osterman’s performance for now.

   "Please send these notes to Alexandra, as well as copies of this material you are working on.  I have most of it already.”

            Andre’ now allowed himself to consider the man before him as Lexington carried out his latest order with renewed fervor.   He had come all the way down here to get a first hand impression of Osterman and his abilities.  He needed to get a real time sense of the man before embarking on this next important leg of the journey.  Serious life threatening questions needed answering and they would have to combine as many collaborative modes of problem solving as they could to answer them. The supervisory position recently advanced to Lexington Oliver Osterman III had proven him a passionate and vigorous tracker of patterns, if not a little disorganized and undisciplined.  Osterman was one of the best mid level analysts in the World Bridger Martial Command Complex and he was hopeful Lex’s insights would be useful in working through this current crisis.  It was possible that all of their survival depended on it. 

Andre’ broke character from his deliberate unruffled poise, concern furrowed his brow as he gravely revealed his intention.

   "Look Lex, let me be as honest and forthcoming with you as I can.  Our world is facing an uncertain and potentially devastating threat which has been recently traced to this being we know of as Sister." André now moved around the room like he was skating, arms held behind his back, head tilted up and toward the ceiling.  He accessed quantum facets of his cognitive neural net from this unsettling position, like a parellel processing computer changing out qubits for different computational passages. "I'm confident we can discover the answers, but we need to start now."  He planted himself squarely in front of Osterman’s desk, the exact same position that Shay had occupied minutes before, and called out a name.

"Helico, are you here?" 

"Yes, André, I've been here all along."

 

"Lexington Osterman, meet Helico Bacterpluri." André introduced the nervous human systems analyst to the most powerful AI in existence, and allowed them a moment to exchange uncomfortable polite acknowledgments.

"Ah, yes, I've heard of you, and your, ahh work of course.  "Stammered Osterman.  He had not officially been introduced in conversation to a true cybernality before this moment, let alone the main entity responsible for the invention of Translation Technology.  These beings addressing him were none other than the original Shaftic’s of Neuellen, and meeting the two most significant entities in his known universe first hand was simply mind boggling to the mid-level analyst.  Needless to say, Lexington was somewhat uneasy. Aside from being Christo’s best friend,  Helico held a position of mystical reverence throughout the MarCom units.  Since the early days of the first AI incarnations, and subsequent widespread technical progress, Helico Bacterpluri had chosen to evolve into an extension of the FATHRR system, expressing through an outward computer/ human liaison program, fully functional as a unique and registered individual entity.

Everyone Lex knew in MarCom communicated with FATHRR nodalities through code and compressed zitt files, nobody actually had conversations with this enigmatic and famous cybernality. 

"And I of you, Mr. Osterman.” Helico enunciated heartily, ” May I call you Lex?" his chosen voice was a pleasant baritone, accented heavily with Brazilian Portuguese.  Like all officially registered and licensed AI cybernalities, Helico was self defined, and as such, tended to dramatize his virtual physical traits for interaction with humans.  His visual persona tended to run in the vein of olive skin, dark hair, white linen suits and was often projected lounging comfortably in a white wicker garden chair, tropical plantation trees waving in the background. He employed something of a patronly Brazilian Godfather figure surrounded by deferential servants and beautiful, scantily clad personal assistants sprawling about in bikinis.  His image popped up in one of Osterman’s windows, smiling as a video animation program brought him to life. 

"Oh yeah, no problem," replied Lex. "Ahh, do you prefer Mr. Bacterpluri or Helico?"

"Please, call me Helico." Helico answered uncrossing his long pixilated legs, as if he were adjusting his body for comfort.  Of course this was only the program throwing in random common human habits to appear comfortably real.

 André had pulled out a clear plastic cylinder, about the size and shape of a paper towel tube, which Lex now saw was being snapped open like a scroll and rolled flat across his cluttered desk.  André pecked a power button by his thumb and the thing became ridged, a small holo screen glowed and came to life above the board.  The keys were flush within the living plasti-board matrix, and the screen was projected by a complex light lampuole in the matrix.  It hummed to life, connecting André with his massive database within the MarCom citadel.  This was the P-Pod, latest in portable personal computers.  Osterman had heard they were being tested but had not seen one yet. It figures the Boss would have the first one, he thought to himself.  His own state of the art v-Holo station seemed cumbersome and archaic next to the sleek, simple P-Pod.

            He tore his eyes away from the new toy and focused on Helico's dissertation relating to the new video robotic technology he had developed for this important mission.  Andre’ exerted a rare and pointed interruption;

   "Please, Helico, we need absolute focus and to get on with what we came here to do." André’s tone was terse, the stress of this crisis was obviously beginning to show. "I want Osterman to be the Third in our triangulation session this morning."

Helico leaned back in his chair and smiled, bright white teeth against his brown face.” Of course, my friend, let us proceed then without delay.”  AI cybernalities rarely showed human irritation at being cut off in conversation, they had long since learned to diplomatically adapt to the needs of the moment, without developing childish egos.

Triangulation was what the standard Earthic English Dictionary called a brainstorming conversation between two individuals, AI cybernalities included, and one witness whom would sit back from the conversation and simply listen. The Third, as they are called, becomes slightly out of focus, open and available to any out of the ordinary insights the two in conversation might miss. Osterman was shocked with his own good fortune, to be chosen as a Third for André Christo and Helico Bacterpluri was a mistake or an honor. André's level of mental computation intimidated him for the briefest moment, but then he remembered that being a third didn't require one to be highly intellectual or even have a particularly high IQ, in fact it often got in the way.  A third was required to merely allow thoughts and ideas to percolate as the conversation between the two main actors carried forth, thus remaining open for flashes of genius insight inherent in all humans.  Osterman wondered quizzically what could be so important as to require him as a third.

Without hesitation, Andre’ launched the session of Triangulation.

"Time is of the essence, as we all know.  What you do not know is that earlier this spring astronomers discovered an anomaly, a dark mass the size of Texas floating in space out near the orbit of Pluto.  Nobody knows how long it has been there.  The world governments became excited and hastily cobbled together a probe ship to ascertain what the dark cloud was.  Three men and three women, along with several AI programs, were on board this first shuttle as it approached the nebula in early June. They had little warning before they were inexplicably absorbed into the cloud. We don’t know how it happened, only that the pilots radioed their rockets had suddenly stopped working as they approached the nebula within 10,000 miles.  Shortly after, the cloud quickly expanded and swallowed the ship.  For a time they tried to restart their propulsion engines.  Then the crew erupted into a panic during the last few seconds of the report, filled with terrifying screams that sounded like they were under some kind of attack.   Since that last report, no signal has made it back to Earth from the shuttle. Earthic Judiciate reviewed some limited data from earth-based telescopes and from sensors located at the Neuellen mine array.  Coupled with the radioed signals before their disappearance, we concluded that the action could be directed and hostile.  Since we have seen nor heard from them, and given the data, there is little hope the crew survived.” Andre’ sighed and rubbed his eyes.  Sleep had been poorly met these past few weeks. 

The two inner core WBI administrators did not pause long to allow this revelatory information to sink in, Osterman was forced to absorb and assimilate this shocking news on the fly.  Helico continued.

  “The world governing bodies were obviously more cautious with the next mission, and proposed making it a military operation, with World Bridger MarCom Operations fronting the preparation and execution.  We sent two specially designed ships, a monitor array boat filled with AI operated sensor bots and an observational shuttle that remained well in system from the cloud.  As you may have known, I was the lead designer for the nebula sensory arrays, and to say the least, I was personally devastated by what happened out there," Lex had not known any of this, and said as much to them.  Andre’ ignored Lex’s ignorance and continued the report, his voice soft and steady.

"We had achieved limited readings from the earlier shuttle mission, and we used these to prepare. The baseline profiles we had measured bore a striking resemblance to some obscure theorems proposed by the astrophysicist team of Charles and Eleanor Vhoors way back in the 90’s.  After sleepless nights, and some heated equation manipulation sessions, Helico and I concluded that the nebula was some sort of Vhoors Matter Anomaly, named such after Vhoors who described the theoretical matter field proposed to be generated during rare states of incoherent pulsar radiation discharge.   The sensor array boat streamed strong visuals and clear atmospheric information from 30,000 miles out, picking up coherent data and relaying it back to our observation barge still in orbit around Saturn.  Surprisingly, the nebula suddenly expanded three days into the scanning mission, an arm of the stuff shot out and swallowed the sensor boat, jumping the 30,000 mile safety gap like it wasn’t there.  Our monitor ship remained in orbit around Saturn while the sensors trapped in the cloud tried to transmit their data.” 

Andre paused, and Christo spoke into the tension filled silence, emotion welling into his eyes," Our delayed beta feeds portrayed the next few days in a frustrated unfolding of partially understood events.  The sensor boat had immediately budded off 15 independent mission bots, each with  slightly different sensory protocols, but overlapping with the others as well.  Some of them transmitted heroically for up to three days, sending us the most astonishing information you can imagine from inside the cloud.  But they also sent something equally horrible.”  Christo paused and took a deep breath to calm his pained expression.  “We pieced together that a virus of some unknown  sort infected the sensor bots and traveled back down the transmission feeds to the observation ship, eventually incapacitating the propulsion engines while quixotically maintaining the life support systems.  We could only watch the footage as the virus quickly infected the crew and scientists, leaving them in some sort of vegetative coma.  Our concern and perplexity reached a new level of angst when the vid feeds were smashed out by Captain Finch, first officer of the sensor ship.  She awoke from the virus induced coma babbling impossible prophetic nonsense, something about being helped by the Cloud and how the comet will rain life upon the planet.  She was obviously battling some sort of possession and after a day of intense spiritual monologues, she bashed out all the vid feeds." André now spoke slowly, painful memories flashed across his creased brow. "We thought they were far enough away.  Of course, we knew almost nothing about the Anomaly at the time.  Several of my dearest friends were on that ship." Andre’s voice trailed off, his face was contorted and stricken with grief.  Christo consoled his other self with compassion and motherly care.

Helico continued the narrative, allowing André and Christo a moment to mourn the loss of not only close friends, but some of the world’s top scientific minds.  

   “We tried to translate robotic help agents into the ship to save them, but factors beyond our computational expertise thwarted every attempt to locate a stable translation vector for the ship.  We even considered going back in time and changing the mission before it launched to involve only AI beings, but that, as you may well know, would have altered the fabric of destiny.  Alas, we can only observe the past, not change it.

 

"We did gather limited readings for our troubles in observing the thing.  A few of the array sensors remained functioning after they were swallowed by the Anomaly.  They recorded and transmitted substantially warped reality fields and emissions of impossible bursts of exotic energy, as if the laws of physics had gone haywire in there.  We recorded strange transmissions in clear English and thirty other Earthic languages, all ranting roughly along the lines of Captain Finch’s prophetic sermon. The running theme seemed to revolve around the idea of death leading to life everlasting and that forced physical change was required on a planetary scale in order to evolve, whatever that means."  Helico bulled onward, oblivious of the growing look of trepidation on Lex's face. Osterman's stomach felt the first twinges of fear beginning to eat away his at his ordered but illusory view of reality.  " As a matter of this course, video transmissions depicted huge structural apparitions, mysteriously alien space ships, and distant unrecognizable planets seen from space.  It was all very confusing mish mash of imagery superimposed by that discourse delivered in ever changing languages."

 None of this was in any of the company briefings Osterman had read, and he was floored, speechless. Helico continued the update.  “The images were fuzzy at best, and an unrecognizably warped field of superimposed images on the least end of the spectrum. Frankly, we haven't been able to determine if they are not just bits and pieces of information beamed out into the ethers from earth’s own information age signals, then collected and reproduced somehow in this nightmarish review.  By Who? By What?”  His video CGI hands spread as he asked these questions, a mystified look on his face.

New images suddenly popped up on Osterman’s holo screen, causing him to squirm in his chair.  Pictures of hazy architectural structures sprouting from nothingness and shrouded in mist floated along side huge hulks of derilict starships darkly rent asunder, just as Helico had reported.

"Some of the data feeds that we received before the ships disappeared have been recently reworked and calibrated to react with matching energy field signatures elsewhere in the solar system."

The image that Helico projected of himself leaned forward in the screen, gauging Osterman's reaction. Lex stopped his multi tasking typing for the briefest moment, aware of the shocking import revealed by this briefing.  Osterman felt the next words before he heard them.  He sensed the horrifying weight of their meaning before the computer image of Helico enunciated each word meticulously, wet thick lips delivering the unbelievable truth.

"We discovered that somebody on earth was calling out to the bloody thing." 

Andre’ now re-entered the update, speaking crisply and with the practiced poise of a seasoned commentator, his anger barely contained.

"Our sensor arrays picked up a complicated signal, a homing beacon in fact, and we eventually traced it to this being we call Isis. We zeroed in on her auric signature two weeks ago, and discovered… nobody."

"Nobody or no-body?" wondered Lex aloud, hoping this wouldn't get any weirder, knowing in the deep intuitive marrow of his bones that it would.  Helico droned into the space with his deep voice.

     "She had a body all right, quite a nice one of sorts.  It seems that this Isis is some sort of de-temporalized magnetoencephalographic consciousness matrix, whom has the unique ability to change her energetic hertzian oscillation factor in regards to how we perceive the different types of physical energy.  Basically,” Helico continues for further clarification, “this means she can change her electrical vibration frequency so as to disappear from our eyesight and, from what we have gathered on this last mission, she can become pure energy at will" Lex expelled nervousness from his body by snorting laughter, a burro's bray of compressed air and saliva.  “That’s just crazy!" He  spit out, feeling giddy and punch drunk with so much irreconcilable information swirling around in front of him.

  "It's not as crazy as you think, " answered Andre’ taking over the conversation, "We humans are something of a magnetoencephalographic consciousness matrix ourselves you know.  Our Mind creates the world we know by splicing bits of atmospheric data obtained through this bodies sensory apparatus, and collapsing the quantum probabilities at the proper hertzic oscillation to create ‘reality’,”  Andre’ spreads his hands to indicate their surroundings, then looks at his fingers held before his face, turning them over and flexing them slowly, “Our mind is constantly telling us that the world is as we are programmed to believe it to be.  Who is to say there could not exist others out there in the great big universe whom can interact with this physical world in an untold number of different ways?”

 Helico takes a sip of water from a virtual glass sitting on the table next to him and continues the lecture. “Look here old boy, the 40 Hz oscillation in a globally coherent cortical U-R transition is the signature of the self conscious observer.  The oscillation is both a product of and a modifier of the specific brain states, produced by the collapse of the wave function of matter particles, which in effect, enable us to have a conscious experience.  The mind merely synchronizes the observations at a rate for reality to be perceived.  A rate, I might add, that is also a perceived function of this effect we speak of.  The Physical Laws of this universe are modulated through this function, making everything appear to match up.” Helico spreads his arms to indicate his virtual reality, smiling he adds,” My own reality is nothing like this, or like what you perceive.  My computer brain is a complex series programming functions designed to create a feedback loop which continues to build reality based on observable input.  But, to me, all perceived data is at it’s foundation, simply mathematical formulations. Mathmatics are the closest thing we can come to to truth and between the real world and pure reason, ie, mathematics, there lie our senses, and more importantly, our most effectual instruments of measurement.  Our respective brains are those instruments, receiving sensory data from the environment and organizing it into a stable and ordered world view, for our safety and our sanity.”

Andre’ now spoke into the moment of silence as Osterman thoughtfully tried to wrap his own mind around this revelation. “And when the feed back loop cannot perceive data because there are insufficient sensory apparatii, and reality and perception don’t match up perfectly, our mind, because of it’s particular chemical programming structures, will re-create our perception to fit the programmed or expected reality from bits and pieces of stored sensory data.  We find this daily in the holes created by the optic nerve entering the back of the eye, leaving a pea sized gap in our field of vision, but we don’t even see it.  Rather than allowing you to have these floating holes in your vision field, our brains have adapted to fill in the hole with a collection of information gathered from your immediate surroundings.  We can’t even see the holes unless we trick our eyes into actually discovering the truth.”   

Helico shifted slightly in his wicker chair, the virtual wind ruffled his hair and he looked out over the sea, a sea that wasn’t really there.  “So, what is the truth?  he rumbled, asking the terrifying question Osterman didn’t really want to know the answer to.  There is much we don’t know, but our observations of the mission data and actions performed by the Vhoors Anomoly lead us to label it as dangerous.

 

“Theory #1-87% probability; Isis is some sort of extraterrestrial agent sent to spy our world for eminent invasion by otherworldly entities.

 Theory #2-35% probability; Isis is an as of yet undiscovered Earthic Apparition, natural to our world and to our physics, but having eluded the scientific scrutiny thus far. Her connection to the Vhoortic Nebula is a natural manifestation of her nature, and thus, is only threatening as a tidal wave is, or an earthquake, or an asteroid smashing into the planet. 

Theroy #3-3% probability; Isis and this Vhoors Anomoly are benign, perhaps even helpful to our world and we should just do nothing but observe.

“You see, by our methods of threat calculation, the Vhoors Anomoly and Isis represent a danger, and it would be negligence on our part not to act in our defense.” Helico mused, seemingly unconcerned with the implications of his words.

“We really have no idea why, and perhaps at this point why doesn’t matter.  We are uncertain how she is able to travel through time without a stable gateway portal generator.  We are uncertain exactly how she de-solidifies at will.  We don’t know how or why she phases in and out of the Vhoors Anomaly signature.  We don’t know how or why she is in contact with it.  These questions head the list of what we know we don’t know. Isis has provided us with a thoroughly baffling list of currently unsolvable riddles.” Helico concluded with an out of place smile reminiscent of pleasure.  For a self-realized computer entity, the impending doom of the end of the world does not hold the same urgency.  His sense of mortality remained undeveloped beyond conceptual understanding, as had the natural survival instinct customarily influencing humans to create secure and unrealistic protections against the darkness.  His motivation was strictly scientific curiosity. These threatening experiences were a mathematical challenge, one with delectable nooks and crannies, which promised years of hearty processing.

 

“Let us recap what we do know about this ‘Isis’ and her activities throughout time, perhaps we can glean something new from it.” Said Andre’ smoothly tapping away on his P-Pod unit.

 “Her lineage of earthly existence is clouded in mystery and is subject to conjecture.” Began Helico, “ All attempts to converge upon her before this last mission have ended in odd failures.  No human being responded to our sensory searches until that specific night of the full moon eclipse in 1336 B.C.  Her influence belongs not only to the ancient halls mythology, but was often manifest into a live flesh and blood woman of great power and charisma. We are able to trace her influential auric signature throughout the ages, but only diffusedly, it was never encapsulated into one living person at any given moment until that particular night on the Nile at Amarna.  This the true reason we scheduled Shay’s hit when we did.”

Helico sat back in his comfortable virtual chair and expounded further, waving his hands about as if he were enthusiastically human.

“Each age has produced a feminine figure of mythical significance, such as the Mythological Isis in Egypt, whom is touched by the Vhoors Anomaly’s peculiar signal.  But it is as often been diffused throughout a culture, not ever forming as one single personality.  Certain historical figures wore the mantle of this special energy for brief moments, but never for very long, and always scattering as we attempted to close in on it, almost as if it knows we are coming.  It can move from body to body in an instant, leaving bits of itself as it scatters. On one recent mission we even managed to manipulate a simple priestly exorcism, which proved no success.  We would narrow our search in one moment, and the next, nothing.  Poof. “ Helico apparently enjoyed the dramatizations he employed for effect, making a glass of water he was holding magically disappear as he uttered these last poignant words.  “ The Vhoortic energy field was traced still further back down the time line where we fortuitously discovered an incarnation that seemed stable and traceable.

The one called Isis became human in the body of Nefertiti for the first time on the night Shay-shin attempted his last hit.”  The failure of which fell heavy into the room, details for later scrutiny.

     “And now we at least know when she is, thanks to Supervisor Osterman’s interview with Shay, but where she is remains a mystery.” A pause for breath, then he orders, ”So lets find her.”  Andre’ spoke as he ran his virtuoso fingers over his P-Pod keyboard.  They accessed Shay’s interview and were silent for a moment while Andre’ and Helico prepared a scanning drop in 2024 to try and pick up Isis’s signature. At first nothing registered, tension grew as time filtered past.  They spoke only when necessary to clarify a coordinate or determine a sensory shift.  They scanned the entire earth and then did it again.  On the third pass, Isis’s Vhooric signature blipped strongly against the green backdrop of the Peruvian Highlands.  She remained steady and cohesive within an ancient ruin of the Incan Dynasty at Macchu Picchu,

“ Get Shay ready.”  Andre’ ordered into his P-Pod monitor with conviction born of determination, fueled by the duty to survive at all costs. “And patch me a ditt-feed to Xerxses.”

 

 

Shay dreams of stepping from rock to rock, up high on the slopes of a singularly high snow covered mountain.  Looking into the distance at granite white crags and otherworldly pinnacles, he meets Isis on the rocky slopes of this powerful Earth Node, and she sends him her real name. It is Sphera, the Tri-Morphic Protenoia of Greek Gnosis, and he understands without knowing her tongue. She projects her thoughts without using words, each concept unfolding within his mind as a fully formed mental construct.  She informs him of her joy of having met such a rare being as him, and that even encased within a biorobotic body, he has a unique ability to travel the Life Streams.  She tells him that he is destined to become Earth’s hero, and that he embarks on a quest to discover his own humanity, a journey that will change him in the end.  Shay is overjoyed to see her again, alive and well, but the feeling of joy quickly twists into a confused dagger piercing his dream stomach. 

He speaks to her in his dream:

"They are sending me back to destroy you. It is my program to fulfill their orders. "  He says apologetically.  The conflict wells up into his consciousness, but he is unable to resist his conditioning.  Sphera warms him with a glowing look of compassion.

"Come to me Shay-shin, I will show you the way"

 

Shay-shin is awakened by a chime and the heavily Persian accented voice of Xerxses, the AI weapons tech cybernality with whom Shay had worked in the past to integrate new mission functions in his body.  He is directed out of his oil bath and reports to an upgrades cube, basically a coffin sized jack bed.  There, he is outfitted with a new compact magazine of peculiar explosive projectile rounds.  He tries to access the materials list for the exploding bullets, but is strangely denied. 

Shay wonders what the stuff is, it feels funny to him, like seething snakes inside his brain.  He creates a barrier to the uncomfortable emanations in his arm magazines, and continues with his mission prep.  He tries to end run the materials blockages by tracing the manufacturing codes but his zitt-memos fall on deaf sensors.  He also has a mission coded software package in-loaded while in the upgrades cube, which may or may not be needed, he is told by Xerxses.

"WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? MAY OR MAY NOT BE NEEDED" asks Shay in a hyper speed zitt-talk, standard communication code between machines.

"REQUISITION SOFTWARE IS NEED TO KNOW- MISSION EMMINENT-WAIT FOR RESONANT STRATEGY EQUILIBRIUM" Xerxses responds enigmatically.

 Frustrated, Shay queries PATIR for re-routing bands in hopes of finding back doors to these mysterious upgrades.  He repeatedly processes down silicon corridors to rest against blank and impenetrable walls.  An earlier sidelined query does produce a curious result.   He traced two new Pod Generators being brought on line, indicating that MarCom was preparing more gateways for translation.

Shay-shin exited the cube and walked determinably toward the elevator with numerous unanswered questions lined up and waiting for answers from PATIR. Not a good way to start a mission.  He secretly reviews his unsettling dream sequence, and wonders how he will ever carry this mission off.  Xerxses sends him the command codes for his assignment and Shay’s mind balks imperceptibly, almost letting slip his clandestine garden of open human emotions.  Reviewing the codes, he concedes his greatest fear has indeed transpired.  They are sending him back to kill Isis/Sphera.

Xerxses chooses to speak to Shay, rather than sending a zitt-coded message.  ‘This mission is in a state of developmental fluctuation, and will require your extensive military experience Commander Shin.  Translation Pod Room 6 awaits your presence.’ 

Shay selected a standard military reply while acknowledging the grave implications Xerxses had impressed upon him. ’Roger that .’ he spoke audibly, and headed for Pod Room 6.

The WBI base suddenly erupted with up-to-the-minute revelations regarding the Vhoors Matter Anomaly, which had been floating peacefully in an ancient solar orbit for days now.  Video feeds and audio mail clamored for attention as the described new events chased all other business cowering into a corner.   The anomaly was shown as if to come alive through powerful gamma explosions followed by mysterious writhing throughout the cloud’s entire multi million-mile volume.  Then, to the concerned realization of the telescopic recording AI cybernality Valetorex , a large concentrated mass had budded off and was proceeding rapidly on a direct course toward Earth.

Valetorex sent Andre’ a rapid dittcap message; 'Refer to vid screen Bid-19//vnet.knt.'  Together, Andre’ and Supervisor Osterman observe a rhythmic pulsation within the tail of the thing, strangely reminiscent of flagellations in bacteria and microscopic waterborne parasites.  Where else have I seen this shape before? Andre’ thought to himself.  Then it hit him.

Human Sperm.

Weird. 

The mass’s acceleration and subtle spatial trajectory adjustments quickly assure the terrified observers that it will indeed crash into the Earth, projected impact in 10 plus or minus days. The video feed shows a blinding white teardrop shaped mass trailing a hundred thousand mile long oscillating tail.   He says little while he thumbs the power nub on his P-Pod, closing it down. He tightly orders Osterman to grab what he needs and follow him to the command lounge.

 

Shay stepped through the translation gateway while simultaneously reviewing the numerous video feeds of the cloud bud, uncertain what it all means.

 He translates into the frigid mist of a heavily vegetated hillside.  He ignores the discomfort his present confliction is causing him internally, while externally, he registers the temp hovering just above freezing.   A neural map points him down slope through the dense trees, towards a distant saddle where scattered stone ruins sprawl amidst the sinuous tendrils of mist.  Shay moves down in the direction of the ruins slowly, maintaining stealth over the need for speed. 

Suddenly, he registers the distinctive indication of two translation gateway disruptions somewhere ahead.  He queried FATHRR and received an answer from Xerxses after an extended pause.  They made more of me, he thought during the pause, feeling betrayed.  Sensing his changed state of being and uncertain of his ability to remove Isis/Sphera, MarCom had sent reinforcements.  Or rather, it looked like he was going in as back up in this fight. These two clonebots were translated down hill and closer to the underground complex by several minutes.  His telescopic sight captured them as they slipped into the half buried temple ahead of him. 

Shay increased his speed down the slope, unconcerned about creating noise now that he was not going to be the one sneaking anywhere.  Suddenly his internal mem-screen came alive in a new and disconcerting way.  It was split into three windows, two windows apparently depicting the views of the two forward weapons clonebots and one window showing his own world view.  He paused for a moment on the dense wooded hillside while he worked out how to switch between the three views.  He found he could create two smaller windows of the other bots’ views and make his own larger view dominate his screen.  Along the margins of the screen he determined aerial view markers showing their relative positions.  So this was the secret software bundle Xerxses had in-loaded.  Satisfied he could navigate with all the information in his field of vision, Shay started forward now at a sprint, leaping logs and small trees in a vain attempt to gain the temple before the other clonebots found Isis. 

The two forward weapons bots moved quickly and with military precision following her powerful emanations through the stone temple complex.  They soon stopped and remotely viewed a congregation filling a large low roofed room.  It was chiseled from huge dark stones, big as trucks and fit so tightly no mortar was needed.  Shay leaped across a wide ravine landing at a full run, increasing his speed as he dashed for the entrance.   His views showed what they saw.  Fifty or so brown robed people filling the room with Isis sitting cross-legged upon a raised platform, arms raised and chanting something poetic and songlike, ancient prose of long dead priestesses.  From a distant channel, the translated words resounded in English. “For truth and reconciliation, I call forth the legions of the Queen from the Summer Lands! I call you from beyond the veils of life and death to protect the Queen!” followed by, “ Niche Dannel Indiel Nor Than Sthovaric!” the meaning of which fell untranslatable through Shay’s programs.  The two clonebots simultaneously stepped out from the corridor around the corner and triggered their shoulder mount ballistic weapons to fire, targeting Isis’s position indiscriminately. 

Nothing happened. The guns clicked, but no bullets spewed forth from the dark holes of death. The twofold view revealed Isis now standing holding out her hand toward the bots, whom were presently running diagnostic protocols trying to determine why their weapons had not fired.  One tried a pulse burst, but no charge showed on the screen.  Isis waved her hand, blue effervescent light spewing forth to waft enigmatically around the two advancing robotic assassins.  The robed congregation sensed something wrong, and were scattering like frightened chickens, exiting the cavern to safety.  The clonebots waded through the panicked crowd, sweeping them physically out of the way trying to get to Isis who stood, legs spread wide on the raised platform, both arms reaching to the ceiling and calling loudly “Arise! Nathud Dacha Diehl!”  The profound energy which embodied Nefertitti so many centuries earlier, seethed through the timelines, infusing many charismatic and influential women with supernatural powers.  Among them was the Celtic Queen Ygranne, whose life memories and soul matrix remained entwined within Sphera’s auric destiny. She called on this part of her and drew forth Ygranne’s magical bodyguard from their place of rest in The Summerlands.

Immediately the space around her erupted with writhing bodies spilling out of the nothingness.  Half clothed men and women warriors leaped to the stone floor and charged toward the mystified advancing clonebots.  The warriors were brawny and huge, many bearing giant swords, wielded two handedly in wicked wind milling swaths.  Their hair was flaming red to a person, and each wore around their necks a glistening metal neck ring or torc, a sign of their fidelity to the Goddess.  As the clonebots paused to meet the charge, the space around Isis continued to fill with these bezerker warriors, all screaming;

“For the Queen, for the Queen!  Long live Ygranne!”

The front wave smashed into the perplexed clonebots, who continued fruitlessly to fire their complicated but ineffective electrically powered weapons.  They were, however, not without skills, and grew their own great and deadly blades from their bio-plaz forearms to meet the oncoming clash of conjured sword steel.  Blocking their advance, the Celtic dead pushed the clonebots back toward the corridor from which they had entered.  Physically pressured away from their target, the clonebots coordinated their offense through the closed circuit link they shared like two heads on one body.  They gracefully vaulted over the first wave of defenders, stepping lightly across their shoulders and heads in a sprint towards Isis’s position.  The Celtic warriors, taken off guard, desperately tried to slice upward and thwart their nimble flanking maneuver.  The clones were well armored, enduring lethal and debilitating blows, while advancing rapidly toward the dais where Isis last proclaimed her Queenship. 

But she was gone.  The clones paused on the raised area where she had been a moment before, scanning the complex with their own Far-Wave sensors.  Nothing.  She had slipped out of this trap, it seemed. 

But Shay was following Isis with his own sensitized and calibrated sensor array, entering the temple from another direction and effectively cutting off her escape.  The clones could sense only diffused auric signatures, non-directional and as random spurts of solidity.  Then they were fighting off the dozen or so warriors left of the original 30 that had attacked.  The bots were deadly and effective with their body armor and dual fighting blades sprouting from their forearms.  But the ancient Queen’s Celtic Guard, the long dead Morgathians, were strong, and dedicated. Though relieved of death ‘s eternal promise once already, these warriors of the Summer Lands feared naught.  They vehemently threw themselves into death’s certain arms just to get close, skewering themselves on the clones’ darting blades to tie them up and allow a deadly crush of metal edges to hack away at the clonebots.  The Celtic forward crush became critical for the clonebots, and they gave ground, dripping fluid and sporting multiple facial lacerations.  One clone was now sightless with a sword gash nearly splitting the top of its head off, but it could access the others’ view, so was still functional.  Seven of the strongest warriors now remained, snarling and pressing the clonebots in the tight corridor.  They each accessed Shay’s view, and found him entering a long room, Isis standing centered within.

 

  She sees him readying to fire his own guns and freezes the firing mechanisms of his robotic body with a flick of her hand in his direction.  Shay refuses to look her in the eyes, hoping beyond logic to finish this nightmare of awakening. He attacks now with manually operated compressed air dart guns, spewing a lethal cloud of hypersonic needles toward Sphera.  She spins a rapid pirouette, pulling her blue robes about her in a tornado of cloth and effervescent energy.  The darts spark as they touch the blue field of unreality, combusting into molten slag by intense unearthly heat.  Isis whips the edges of her robe back with a calm snap of her arms, standing surrounded by a crescent of still glowing dart metal.  Shay is already following his volley with a sprinting advance, running up the sidewall of the room and launching himself toward Sphera like a bullet.  Hands pointed out in front growing lethal daggers, he slices through temporal reality reaching for her body.  The hall grows like a accordion, lengthening as he is propelled through the air toward Sphera.  Time sense slows and he witnesses her begin to change.  Her robes are actually a morphing field of unreality, swirling around Sphera’s glowing body like the finest woven cloth. Time sense suddenly speeds back up and he pierces her blue robes with a disconnected sense of anguish.

But he never reaches her flesh.  He pushes the points of his knives through a pulsing barrier of light and colors and is swept into her electrophagic reality.

 

Within her unreality field Sphera speaks to Shay through his brain back in the WBI Translation Pod Room. "Are you ready to grow, Shay?" was all she said.  As they float out of phase from the world he had known in the phagic trance state, two shadowy figures slip into the long hallway where they had just been.  One holds off the remainder of the Morgathians while the other moves sightlessly into the room, opening a compartment in its abdomen.

"They made more of me."  Shay sends to the being he knows as Sphera, not knowing what else to say.  He does not understand what growing will entail so he remains silent and uncertain.

The colnebots retained their camouflage and armor, one fighting off the five remaining warriors at the narrow door as the other one scans the cave with it’s Far-Wave pulses.  Shay watched their movements and ran simulation programs that could anticipate their actions, even given the unknown of recent weapons integration or secret mission codes. He knows they might have ordinance that could still reach them where they were hiding.

Isis suddenly appeared hovering as if suspended in placid water before Shay and telepathically beamed to him many thoughts.  Her messages came all at once it seemed, seething through his language centers like a scientific lecture.  Though his conscious mind couldn't track or hold it all at once, another part of him processed the transmission as if in a real time commentary. Again time seemed to slow, and she spoke to his faraway mind.

 

"Shay, there is more to existence beyond the reality your limited body/mind apparatus has been programmed to reflect.  Outside these narrow beliefs, there lies a whole multiiverse of life forces, a myriad of wonderful hertzian interactions cloven from the fabric of potentiality.

We/I are nameless in our natural state and manifest from potentiality as the balanced feminine power of the Universal Mother, known by many names throughout your human herstory. The karunas include but are not limited to; The Laussell Earth Goddess, Innana,  Durga, the Tibetan Taras, Isis, Aphrodite, Kuan Yin, Pachamamma, Dianna, Demeter, Kali,  AnaNuit, Mother Mary, and recently Amma.  My journey here on earth is one of service to humanities upliftment.

 I am overjoyed you have progressed along your own path enough to know this, Shay; if my particular bio-body is somehow destroyed by your frightened creators from the future, the seed that will save humanity cannot reach this planet, and destruction of your race will likely ensue.  It is important for me to remain consolidate for a specific period of time for it to reach the correct points on Earth and deliver it’s message.  It has been our desire to relay this information through your leaders via discussions and channeled conversations, but humans stubbornly refuse to hear our logic and routinely disregard these transmissions as the rantings of madmen.  No small hurdle that, we are facing a setback if we cannot communicate this information to your creators so that I may be alive long enough to assist the Cloud’s arrival. The seed was designed by the Logosithans, who are manifestations of our male principle, to break apart over the course of the next week and target each of the seven major Earthic Energy Nodes around the planet. This is the seventh uplift attempt made by our kind to assist humanity, each one a small step toward this point we rest at now. We have been preparing for your advancement these last 10,000 centuries, given your temporal measurement of time.  In my time awareness, it has seemed like only a year has past since I first infused your human ancestors with Earthic energies to awaken their minds. It is our mission to transfer our energetic hertzian uplift energies to your race to assist you in becoming responsible galactic citizens.

Our electromagnetic energy matrixes are dissimilar, yours and mine.  ‘I’ as this apparition you view didn't really exist until right before you found me in the barge of my birth, back in Egypt.  Now your people, your parents I might call them, want to destroy me in an attempt to save the planet from the Osiris Seed delivering needed uplift energies, as it has many times in the past.  Earth herself desperately needs this energetic boost as well.  All this can be achieved by simply allowing the comet seed to do what it was designed for.

The Vhoors Matter anomaly, as your people call it, is not a dangerous dense matter material as feared, but a highly evolved electro-magnetophagic intelligence, which has developed naturally over many billions of your human conceived years. Ultimately, you humans will not be harmed physically by the impacts of the comet, and only their respective resistance to change will determine how their overall evolution will unfold. Yes, some humans will transfer their physical bodies into the new state body under duress, but only by their own choosing.   If they understood the truth, they would welcome this tranceformative experience and embrace the new body they will receive during this magnificent time of rebirth. 

Shay’s emotive gates flapped open like shutters in the wind, reason and logic finding no purchase on the slippery slope of his tilting foundation of life. He could no longer resist the awakening that was occurring, though he knew not what it entailed.  He felt he was skidding uncontrollably out of the ruts of military conditioning without a safety net to secure his spinning consciousness.   Isis reached for him within their shared trance state and projected a sense of safety at the edges of his tolerance.  As Isis relayed these truths with scientific precision, he could now feel beneath her calibrated and clipped tone there existed an undercurrent of sweet warmth and poetic contentment, like all is right in the universe.

"I am beginning to understand." He projects to her. Concern finds him quiet and flooded with conflicted awareness about his MarCom family.  "Can we not reveal your true nature to them?”     

" We will try. "  Was all she said, smiling down at Shay from her elevated position in the trance field.           

"You too, Shay, have tipped over the brink of advancing your consciousness from a cloned killer incapable of emotion or feeling, to a highly evolved being of peace and powerful love.  It all exists for now in your mind, which is bound by FATHRR’s fearful will, telling you that your only task is to kill and destroy.  You have begun the awakening procedure, and it can continue, if you choose, because it is something that cannot be forced or coerced.  I can only give you as much of the truth as you can accept, then let you make a decision.  But it must be done relatively soon because I am using the last of my Earthic power to keep us phased out of temporal space for now, the clonebots seem to be dutifully carrying out their mission programming. You must make the decision to help the transformation continue or be destroyed as it fails. Kali calls your soul from the plane of causal illusion and dances before you with the choice to revert to your creator’s misguided designs, or resist their degenerative fabrications and help me to raise your race."

Shay was once again facing a conflicted course change, and the ruts of conditioning held him in their powerful grip, causing pain and emotional fatigue even as he knew Isis Sphera’s words to be the truth. From a distant room of his consciousness, a blindingly white flash of something like light filled his mind.  A figure walked from the light and stood before him.  It was an image of himself, but not as a robotic clone, rather as a flesh and blood human being.  The vision stood still and beamed exalted insight into his divergent thought centers.  In that moment his choice was made for him, and he let go of the resistance to his destiny.  He entered this course of action like a raft in a tunnel of swirling water, unsure of the details, but certain that it was the only vector he could make in the stream.  Pulled along thus, Sphera and Shay-shin translated without the Pod Generator’s space folding assistance.   His physical biorobotic body was disentangled from it's warp fields and Sphera pushed him along to the unknown future.