Mission Start
Late on 53 UYAY; Y’aac, one of the most senior Disaster Archaeologists in the Q’lnak 3 planetary cluster, was busy wrapping up the final arrangements for the launch of the expedition to Planet 46.
Disaster Archaeology was a well-established and popular scientific discipline in Q’lnak 3. It comprised exploring self-destructed societies in other worlds to evaluate the reasons for their demise, while drawing practical conclusions about ‘what not to do’ as a society, in order to avoid a similar fate.
Y’aac was the sole representative of the Y’aaa in this lofty profession. He carried the burden of having to represent his kind amongst the G’humed, the other sentient species in the cluster, and their former mortal enemies. As a member of a once hunted, subjugated, and still discriminated group, he’d had to apply himself extra hard from a young age. Everything he had achieved in his impressive career was because of his continuous effort, his unyielding determination, and his innate brilliance.
Even his many foes in the CIDA, the Central Institute for Disaster Archaeology, that loathed this foul water beast[i], could not find any real fault in his track record. Instead, they resorted to defamation by stating that G’hart, Y’aac’s manager and head of the Institute, had promoted him for the sole reason of gaining popularity among the Y’aaa.
They shared an excellent relationship that transcended a natural affinity founded on mutual professional esteem; it bordered on genuine friendship, although neither the mentor nor the protégé ever considered defining their bond in such terms.
A few creatures of good faith looked at this bond as the logical result of having two decent, earnest, and very talented beings together, regardless of the fact they belonged to different species with a mutually violent past. Other, less enlightened souls retorted that supporting Y’aac was nothing more than a shrewd political move. The Y’aaa now had an entire planet of their own and the right to send delegates to the Pan-Planetary Federated Assembly, the legislative body responsible for electing the head of the CIDA every 8 years. So, it made good political sense to maintain good relations with them.
Y’aac was too professional and proud to let any gossip and innuendo influence his performance. He was solely focused on exuding professionalism in all his actions, and that meant, at that moment, ensuring the successful completion of the last steps before mission launch, leaving nothing to chance.
Only one event in this last phase produced a level of irrational apprehension in him: the impending launch of the Cloborg - the Cloned Brain Cyborg. That a copy of his brain was about to be launched toward a remote planet, hosted inside a synthetic being, awoke in him an awkward sensation. He felt as if part of his own essence was about to become lost, melted away in a forsaken corner of the galaxy.
This unsettling emotion was transitory and never impeded the successful execution of his prior missions. Y’aac knew that there was no point in discussing this foolish anxiety with a CIDA councilor, always on call to help weary Disaster Archaeologists, mainly after mission completion, as they returned home shaken by visions of destruction troubling their nights.
In fact, there were no Y’aaa councilors in the institute, no one that could understand his unique culture, background, and set of beliefs. Besides, he did not want to have anything written that might give ammunition to his detractors or besmirch his otherwise perfect track record.
After taking a few deep breaths to quash his apprehension, Y’aac started advancing toward the enmeshing chamber in the central section of the space complex.
Placed in high orbit above G’hum, the largest habitable world in Q’lnak 3, the large wheel-shaped complex commanded an imposing view of the huge planet from almost every location. The second member of the planetary cluster, G’hon, was barely visible through the wide portholes that adorned the corridors, interconnecting the different areas. Y’aan-a, the third member of the cluster and Y’aac’s place of birth, was too small to be discerned with unaided eyes.
Moving from one section to another was difficult for Y’aac, since his body, capable of such graceful movements while underwater, was much clumsier and slower in a dry environment. The G’humed that built the space complex took into consideration their short and stocky bipedal brethren and not the longer, heavier quadrupedal Y’aaa. G’hart, recognizing the problem, implemented several modifications through the years to make his protégé’s life more bearable while leading missions from it. Some of these adjustments included the ability to change the environment, such as increasing humidity to avoid excessive drying of the skin, and decreasing the strength of the artificial gravity to reduce weight. As well, a specialized motorized mobile exoskeleton facilitated Y’aac’s movement throughout the space complex, while supporting his considerable mass.
The Y’aaa were quadrupedal beings while on land, but could stand on their hind legs, using their long tails as counterweights. This position enabled them to free their dexterous front appendages to perform multiple tasks[ii], but only for a limited time. Because of this, Y’aac could not operate the monitors and systems positioned at a level suitable for use by the bipedal G’humed, while standing or sitting, at least not for a prolonged time.
The solution to this problem, the Mind Coupler, was elegant and yet another product of the fruitful cooperation between G’hart and his protégé. This sophisticated helmet, built to fit Y’aac’s cranial shape, enabled the communications and control of the relevant platforms in the space complex and on the mission capsule.
Besides providing heightened auditory and augmented visual inputs, the Mind Coupler included two modules that represented the last advances in bio-neural interfaces: The Enhanced Brain Scanner - capable of reading any thought stemming from Y’aac’s head and interpreting his mental commands; and the Selective Psycho-Effector - able of inducing thoughts, sensations, and even feelings into his mind.
This helmet, along with the mobile exoskeleton, gave Y’aac complete freedom to roam around the complex and still be in charge of events. Yet, for the specific procedure he was about to go through, he needed to be in one particular place - the enmeshing chamber.
As he was approaching his destination, he wondered, not for the first time, about the nature of his mission. What could he find on Planet 46, an alleged self-destroyed mid-sized rocky orb, third in order from a mid-size star, in a mid-sized planetary system?
From a first glimpse, nothing about this world augured uniqueness, rather averageness. Yet, since it was 1500 G’hum light years[iii] away, it at least had the distinction of being the farthest disaster-archaeology mission targeted up to that date. But beyond that novelty factor, the extreme distance to the target was, in his opinion, a major problem, casting a large doubt on the worthiness of the entire expedition. Far in space also meant far in time, and knowing that material objects age and degrade as years go by, Y’aac had little hope of finding any record that might help him understand what had happened, such a long period before, in that world.
Besides, there was always the risk that in the meantime, a new civilization could have sprouted from the ruins of its earlier one, and this was a serious potential complication, to the point of forcing an immediate mission abort if a ‘reborn’ society was found on the target planet or its surroundings.
Y’aac brushed away these vexing doubts with an instinctive grimace. He had conveyed his misgivings to G’hart with little success and had received his marching orders. From that moment on, all he needed to do was to make sure he completed the mission successfully while keeping whatever apprehensions he might have out of the way. Easier said than done. These pesky thoughts lurked in some corner of his mind, waiting for the right time to surface and trouble him again, as they did every so often. He was too professional to let this impact his performance, but it certainly bothered him.
Once inside the enmeshing chamber, Y’aac executed the first step in the pre-launch protocol, sending a mental command to the robotic controller in the room to enmesh two small transceiver modules to be installed both in his Mind Coupler helmet and in a special bio-electronic interface in the cloborg. The enmeshment of these modules created an instantaneous link between them through an implicit-space field, regardless of their mutual distance. This connection allowed Y’aac to control the cloborg and to see, hear, and, whenever required, feel everything it sensed. A similar enmeshed communications channel tied the powerful vacuum field computers on both the mission capsule and the space complex command chamber.
For this expedition, G’hart had assigned the most sophisticated bio-cybernetic device available, the APC9 - Advanced Polymorph Cloborg, 9th generation. This mixed robotic-biological being could change its physical configuration to better handle any terrain, gravitational strength, temperature, and atmospheric conditions. It could remove, for instance, some of its parts to lessen its weight in massive planets, or fill dedicated containers with surface material to increase its mass in low gravity worlds.
After the successful completion of the enmeshment process, Y’aac ordered a multipurpose rover to transfer one module to the implantation unit in the mission capsule, where the still inanimate APC9 was located, ready for the insertion procedure. Although the cloborg’s shape was different, it hosted a clone of Y’aac’s brain, connected to its sensors and motoric limbs. The cloned brain had many of its cognitive functions atrophied to avoid the possibility that it might ever achieve full conscious self-awareness. Yet, they left enough capabilities intact in it to help the cloborg understand its surroundings and execute the commands sent to it.
Under normal circumstances, the vacuum field computer on the mission capsule monitored and operated the cloborg. Y’aac could always take control, whenever needed, by issuing a mental order via the enmeshed implicit-space channel.
As soon as he received confirmation that the implantation procedure in the cloned brain, and the reanimation of the cloborg, were completed successfully, Y’aac moved to the mission command chamber and placed himself at the center of the holographic control station. Then, a motorized exoskeleton raised him to a level where minuscule robotic prongs could install the second enmeshed module in a dedicated slot in his helmet.
The moment he began testing the Selective Psycho-Effector, he started feeling what Disaster Archaeologists called ‘double perception’, a strange sensation that comprised perceiving reality through his own senses and through the cloborg at the same time. No matter how many missions he took part in, Y’aac always found this stage to be awkward and confusing; he best described it as if being ‘reborn’ in another body. It was a temporary state of mind, overcome in most cases with the aid of a nerve calming agent that helped squelch some of the ‘noise’ inundating his brain. Luckily for him, he didn’t need the Effector at that time, so he put it on standby, hoping to defer its reactivation for as long as possible.
With the preparatory procedures completed, Y’aac started the launch sequence, ordering the detachment of the mission capsule from the space complex. The vessel began a slow drift towards a specific location where it would enter a local wormhole, triggered by powerful blasters firing negative energy beams at a specific point in space-time, from equidistant locations around it.
Observing the capsule as it receded into the distance, Y’aac couldn’t help but sigh. He had just launched yet another expedition, and he felt old and drained from past enthusiasm. Gone were the times when he looked forward to these missions with childlike passion, pride, and feelings of worthiness; and while he understood the need for such undertakings, he dreaded the sights and horrors, direct or implied, witnessed so often in self-destructed civilizations. More than anything, he loathed the silence and desolation, whispering tales of death and madness to his trained ears. His job was to salvage wisdom from the wreckage of burned edifices, mangled fragments of corroded devices, destroyed records, and sometimes even charred bodies. Each mission added fresh mental scars to his weary psyche and an increasing perception of impotence regarding what he sensed as the inexorable drift of intelligent civilizations toward self-imposed extinction.
With that unsettling mix of apprehension and weariness, Y’aac prepared for what would be the last and most significant mission of his life, although at that point, and through the rest of his existence, he remained oblivious to the radical changes it triggered.
[i] Derogatory name coined by the G’humed to describe the Y’aaa.
[ii] In their past, this capability provided the Y’aaa with the ability to shape and wield crude spears made of sharpened sticks and to build primitive huts out of the wood, brush, and debris found on the beaches. The Y’aaa spent most of their time in the oceans, but the females gave birth in the makeshift shelters built by their mates while they stood guard around them, armed with their rudimentary weapons. They all returned to the seas only after their young developed enough swimming, maneuvering, and underwater endurance capabilities to help them evade the many predators that preyed on them. Some Y’aaa still clung to this way of life, regardless of the fact that the technological advances accomplished since the end of their conflict with the G’humed rendered these customs unnecessary.
[iii] A G’hum’s light year is about four-fifths shorter than a new earth light year. Throughout the book, the term ‘light year’ refers to a G’hum light year.
