The machine

   When the dust fell to the ground, the small group was able to see what was going on. In the dirt, some kind of machine had been found, buried not so deep under the ground in the middle of the forest. Trees had been cut down all around the area in order to make that area of the forest a secure perimeter for military and others to be able to unearth the strange machine from the ground. They had summoned experts from all over the place in other to help uncover the device and analyze its components and real nature.

 Several soldiers were ordered to wear special suits and then cleanup the surface of the machine. It was proven not to be radioactive, so it was safe to go near it. The small group that had witnessed the explosion that unearthed the machine was made up of top officials from most government agencies. They weren’t wearing their uniforms or anything that would let people know who they were or who they worked for. That was done in purpose, because of the attitudes of the people in the neighboring towns.

 They had seen trucks moving into the forest and there was noise that had never been heard. It was obvious something what was going on and the government had to come up with some excuse, so they told everyone it was all about a special session of training for most military personnel. The area was very cold and it was a challenging place to work in, so they could get away with such a lie. They could even use helicopters and other equipment, alleging that they were all taking part in the exercises.

 During the first week, they identified the components of the machine and discovered it was made of a very uncommon kind of titanium, which is a metal that does exist on Earth but it’s not as common as some people might think. Besides, the scientists found out the titanium had some aspects that would make people think the machine had been used in space. Some radiation was finally found, deep inside the machine, which could mean it used some kind of isotope to generate its own energy.

Still, it wasn’t dangerous to go near it. Military personnel took several pictures of it and they even recorded audio from it, as the strange device seemed to hum softly when everyone was silent. Of course, that was something difficult to achieve, but they were able to do some recordings at nights, when most of the soldiers left for the nearby base, where the fake military exercises were supposed to have their base on. The sound was supernatural, but calming and even beautiful to some of them. It was analyzed in various ways but no one was ever able to explain that hum, that strange song.

 They came up with various reasons for the machine to be there. The one that seemed to be more accepted was that the machine had been ejected in the upper atmosphere by some kind of probe or spy satellite operating in silence above everyone’s heads. It was probably some kind of device created to analyze the secret movements of other countries. It was difficult to explain the inner radiation, but other nations were conducting experiments in space, so maybe they had found out some way to convert Earth’s titanium.

 The idea that it could be a machine made by another country sparked controversy among top officials in the military and also from the government, who had been coming in larger numbers, as the second week of the operation ended. Not only they demanded for the machine to be transported somewhere else, some of they even advocated for the destruction of the device, as they thought it might still work as a spy machine, transmitting video and audio feeds to some unknown power that had done it all on purpose.

 Most of the things they said made no sense and were mostly rooted in silly fears and assumptions, but it was obvious they did have to transport the machine or do something with it. They couldn’t just stay there forever, as people would grow more and more suspecting of their activities. The machine was completely rooted out of the ground and it was analyzed if it could be moved without altering the core or any other element. Apparently, it could be done without any real danger.

 They ordered their largest helicopter to pick up the machine. When they attached to be lifted off during on a nocturnal flight, they discovered the machine was a lot lighter than it was supposed to be. The transportation was done in total silence and it the dark. In a matter of hours, the machine landed in an air base where a special hangar had been built to house the experts and the machine. The personnel assigned to the investigation were reduced, in order to avoid any leaks or intrusion by foreign powers.

 The investigation would go on for years. The machine would reveal some its secrets, as the one of its provenance, but never everything about what it could really do. It had been built as a spying device but there was much more to it. Something inside, in its core, told many more stories than the ones revealed.

 A small amount of researchers thought that the machine had been created with technology that was not widely available and required a very advanced set of knowledge and technology, that was non existent in the world, at least that’s what they had thought before encountering the humming machine on the ground.

Hostilities have ended

   From the hospital, we could see the city burning. Several fires had been lit up by the crowd. It was an expression of happiness and revolt, of fury and a desire for the future. The people out in the streets were happy that such a long war had finally ended, after so many had been assassinated and others just disappeared as if they had walked into another dimension. Everyone knew they had probably been killed by the government and then buried somewhere far, but people didn’t want to think that. They would have years for that.

 We saw it all from afar, behind a glass that protected us from the outside, in a building that had been designed by and for our enemies. However, we needed care and when our group was finally able to enter the city, we were able to secure that hospital and its resources for own. Of course, the patients that had been left there were tended too by the doctors and the nurses of our team, but some of them were placed under “house arrest”, as many were involved with the military and the horrors of war.

 I decided to leave Mark, who was very tired, and just wander around the hospital. I thought I could hear someone talking about what had happened in the city or maybe some other information. There were many screens all around the hospital but none of them worked. Television had being suspended almost a year ago, as the prior government thought it was a misuse of money and electricity. They removed all permissions to broadcast and forbid anyone from broadcasting anything in any way.

 Even with the success of the rebels, television would take its time to return after such a long period of silence. It would take a long time to get the country running smoothly, if that was at all possible. Everyone had things to do and they all seemed to be much more important than television or things that people in general missed from the older times, before everything had gone to hell. I missed candy for example, but sugar had not been used to make candy in at least five years, by government decree.

 I walked all over the hospital, checking out every abandoned ward and every silent corridor. The place was sunk in a blue haze and the fact that the day was getting brighter did not improve the general mood. When I finally got to the reception, the lady tending to the only active phone line seemed to be on the verge of collapsing. I was afraid to ask her anything but when she saw me she just signaled me to go closer and she then handed me a paper. I read the only few lines that were written on it: “Call General Ford. Urgent.” And then a number underneath it.

 She had no chance to explain the message and I didn’t have the need to have it explained. After all, we knew exactly that our time in the hospital was going to be short. I was kind of sad for Mark, even thinking about how to tell him the news. When I got to the room, he was up. He smiled at me like he always did and I just got closer and kissed him softly. He smelled a bit bad because of the long way we had to go through to get to the hospital. I was sure I smelt exactly the same or even worse. But who cares?

 I then told him about General Ford and he understood it all in a second. We look towards the window, were smoke from one of the fires had grown pretty big and was almost covering half the city. It was obvious they were still burning things. That place was our destination. So I helped Mark with his clothes and into the shower. He insisted I should join him, so I did. We had a nice little time together, as we had never been able to have. It was so nice and incredible; I wanted to stay there forever.

 That wasn’t an option. We dressed up in new clothes that we had found in a closet, in the room across the hall. They were a little bit big on me and short on him, so we laughed for a while. It felt so good to be able to laugh, to have your ribs hurt because of happiness and not because of violence. We finished preparing and I helped him walk down to the reception. Once there, the woman in the reception was still busy but used her hands again to point at a couple of crutches I hadn’t seen there before. She was good.

 Mark went out first, followed by me. The surroundings looked safe, so we entered the car we had used to get there, a stolen piece of property. I turned it on and in a short moment we were already on the main road towards the city center. Through the windows, we could see some of the fires that were burning. There were no stores in flames, no residential buildings. Only government offices where people had entered to burn every single record in existence. It was a way to say we had to start over.

 No one out there seemed dangerous, but they did stop doing their things as we passed by because there were not too many cars being driven around the city at that time. Only the rebels, the winning faction, were operating any kind of vehicle. That kind of scared me. Mark must have thought the same thing because he just put a hand on my thigh and pressed gently. I was so lucky to have him there. For a while, I had no idea if I would ever go back to that city, the place where I had been born. After so much, it was pretty much a surprise to be there, as if nothing had happened.

 We finally got to the main fire, the one from where a huge plume of smoke was rising to the sky and across the city. It was the presidential palace that used to be white and was now some shade of grey. A large amount of people were gathered there, some staring and others carrying stuff to throw to the main pyre. We stopped the car and got out, in order for them to know it was us and no one else. Yet, no one really noticed us. It was only when we got real close, that a few guards stopped us.

 Mark started explaining who we were but he was interrupted by a scream of joy. Sophia was there and she ran straight for Mark. She was obviously happy to see him alive and I have to confess I couldn’t blame her for being so excited. After all, she had been promised to him in marriage for a couple of years before the war. However, the wedding was never performed because of all the fighting and the fact that her family wanted her to be safe, somewhere very remote. So she had no idea who he really was.

 I smiled at her and she smiled back. She had no idea I knew her from a photograph he had in his wallet, she had no idea who I was. But that wasn’t important. The guards left and, before I could ask for anything, General Ford walked straight to us and pointed to a building on the other side of the square where the presidential palace was located. People applauded when they saw the general, a woman that looked so strong was the cause the government had finally fallen and they were free again.

 We entered the other building and then a room that was very nicely arranged. There was no food or anything, only other people that had fought the war with us. We all knew each other, because we had met in the battlefield, in the camps where they had interred us and in the mountains we had to hide for so long. Mark hugged half the people there and I waved and smiled a lot, more than in any other occasion in my life. It was nice, after all, to see them there. It was like having a family again.

 General Ford informed us about our particulars, our real families. Some of them had died, others like mine had fled the country and a few had somehow survived the ordeal. It was a sad, solemn moment but we were thankful to her. It was then she invited us to take part in the first televised event of the new era. We were a bit surprised by the proposal but she gave us no time to say anything. Apparently, she was going to be the first one to use the airwaves again to properly announce the end of hostilities. A television camera was brought and several microphones. I just took Mark’s hand and thought it could never get worse than the war.

Our necklaces

   The necklaces came in different colors. Actually the only choice we had in the whole matter was to choose the color of our liking. Of course, we couldn’t make that choice the moment we were born. But once we grew to be five years old, they accepted our requests for colors. That way, kids would compare their necklaces in school and change them every few months during the puberty. When that was done, the change was done every two years, in order to download some content and replace it if it was needed.

 Nobody really remembered when the necklaces were put into place. Some say, the reason we don’t know the exact date is because they have wiped out our brains of memories. Not all of them, of course, but the ones that are important to the government. They say the necklaces are there to ensure our safety and, to be fair, even top officers use them. Of course, theirs are much more beautiful than the normal ones, some even made of different materials and adorned with jewels or other beautiful things. But in the end, same as ours.

 It has been like this for a long time and we just live alongside the whole thing. Our necklaces record our daily lives and all of that is passed on to the government in order to decide who is loyal and who is not. We are taught that’s a good thing because we cannot have rebellious people around. The yare the ones that could hurt us the most and they sometimes do. The explosions and attacks that happen sometimes are all of their doing and its because they don’t want us to keep living like this.

 To them, this system is wrong and we are also wrong because we let it exist. But the truth is that most of us don’t make our lives being like this at all. We just wake up in the morning and then go to work and then comeback to our families, like every single person has done for thousands of years. The necklaces don’t make any difference in our lives; it’s just an accessory that we have to carry from the moment we are born to the moment of our death. Not more than that and we accept it.

 Rebels, people say, are people that want everything to be as it once was. We are taught in school that the world was chaotic in the past, filled with war and poverty and hunger. We don’t have any of that to today and we fail to realize why some people would like all of that to come back. Back in the past, people fought for everything that we have now, so why would we even remotely agree with a rebel that just wants us to fight and fight and fight, with no end in sight? They are crazy people and they have to be detained by the government, the only ones that actually care about us.

 Once a year, there are public showings of a movie shot by drones that fly away to other areas of the world. Our country is large and prosperous but some others were actually destroyed in the wars of the past. They want us to see all of that for ourselves because the truth is more important than anything. The footage is always different but the message is always the same: we cannot keep rising because when people do that, other people, less fortunate people, suffer all of the consequences. And that’s what happened.

 None of us remember the wars. None of us remembers when the bombs were dropped from the skies and from the blackness above us. What we do know for sure is that some of the people, those that survived to create the government, they hid for years in deep caves, eating only canned goods. Nowadays, we have all the fruits and vegetables that we would ever need. We don’t buy them, because they are delivered to our houses and distributed equally among the populace. We don’t have to suffer anymore.

 Rebels, apparently, say that the government keeps most of the food for themselves. But they don’t understand that we don’t really care. Because we are able to eat what we want, we can ask for it and it will be delivered. Only a few things are commonly rejected and it’s due to the low amount of some resources. But we understand that. We have learned that oil and coal and so many more things became almost extinct after the wars. So we have learned not to ask for any of that. Actually, we have mostly replaced it all.

 Complaining and complaining. Not wanting to fit into a society. That’s what’s wrong with those people, with those rebels. They just don’t want every single one of us to be happy. They want to create chaos because they are the kind of people that love to kills others and see the world burn. They do what they do because the amount of order in this world makes them mad. They cannot bare to think that we have peace, that we finally have a world in which we can be ourselves, just by giving up a little bit.

 And yeah, we do. We give the government access to our lives; we keep our necklaces because we have agreed to live in peace with everyone and everything else. And they cannot understand it, they are furious every single day because a bomb hasn’t killed a whole family or a soldier has not been slaughtered with a knife. They find chaos amusing and they thrive in it, as if they were flowers fed with blood. Deadly flowers that have nothing pretty about them, they are only poisonous and looking to kill us all, slowly. Rebels are that type of scum and we don’t want them here.

 Sometimes, not too often, a billboard is raised to announce the number of rebels leaving the country to be sent to a specialized facility where the government can take care of their kind. Some people say its located on one of the caves that our ancestors used after the war. Some others say it’s an island just a few kilometers from the capital city. Well, of course most of us don’t know where it is or what it’s like because we are not rebels and we haven’t done anything to deserve that kind of punishment.

 The idea is that rebels are stripped of their ideas there and then the yare sent back to the country, in order to be valuable members of our society. Most of us think that’s a great idea but we know it doesn’t happen very often. The few times the military makes raids, they kill all of the country’s enemies and we celebrate it by applauding for a whole minute at home. We do it to make our boys and girls in uniform for their fantastic job. Without them, it is quite possible that the world would be lost.

 It’s not common to see one of those rebels that have become a member of the community once more. They are rarely seen in the cities and, people say, they are mostly used in the large farms that feed all of us daily. It must be a nice change of pace, from carrying weapons and killing people, to milk cows and planting rice in the fields. Maybe they don’t deserve it, or maybe they don’t, but the government gives them a chance and that’s a lot more than they deserve, that’s for damn sure.

 We also partake in an event called the Games, every four years. In the Games, we face each other in different sports. The idea is that every single member of society should have an ability to exploit. The Games are most important for teenagers; because that’s the way they find out what their jobs will be in the future. Adults participate too, but it’s more like training and a gathering of different people to share experiences and get to know one another. It’s not something we do a lot and its fun sometimes.

 Something curious is the moment we loose our necklaces, when they are being replaced for one reason or the other. It is then when we all change a bit. It is a very short moment, a glimpse in time. But we all react differently when we are disconnected from our government. It is a very peculiar thing.

 Some of us scream, as if we were staring at a monster. Some other start crying profusely and others even laugh their heads off for a few seconds. We all do something. Or at least most of us. They are some, not many, that do not react to loosing their necklace. They don’t move or make a noise. They just wait.

The elevator

   The elevator on Kartan IV had been abandoned almost a century ago. By the time human explorers had arrived to that part of the galaxy, the civilization that had built the elevator had already been destroyed. There were many traces on the planet of their former glory and power but the only real proof of their quest for knowledge was the elevator. It was ten kilometres high, made with the toughest metals and plastics, making it a very strange feature of the planet and a technological advancement the human race had not yet reached.

 The first group of humans to get there were part of a scientific mission aboard the vessel called Leviathan. It had such a name because it was massive in size, taking care of many scientific missions at the same time. Leviathan was the centre of all science being done on other systems, far away from Earth. People that worked there had never being to Earth and most had no desire of going there. They were curious, of course, but the secrets of the universe were a lot more interesting to their wandering minds.

 The group that entered the elevator had the task of retrieving samples of the metals and other materials that had been used in the structure, in order to analyse them and see if they would be viable for use in space stations all around the Milky Way. Humans had mastered space travel but they wanted to put a foot everywhere they could, even in places were life had been detected.  Of course, those were the really interesting scientific missions but they were very secretive and exclusive to those with more experience.

 The Leviathan was the next best thing and all of those inside it knew that perfectly. However, they all wanted to work with the governments that were building space stations in key systems. That’s why those who entered the elevator on Kartak IV for the first time in a millennia, were eager to find lots of new information for humanity to use in their colonization of the galaxy. They could be instrumental in the development of their civilization and some of the first to interact with new and unseen forms of life.

 The elevator, however, was very much deserted. They spent days inside, extracting pieces and information from the very old computers. It took a long time to get the elevator actually working again and a team of xenolinguists had to come aboard to decipher the ancient language of the aliens that had built the structure. It was the only way humanity could effectively replicate such a piece of engineering in other parts of the galaxy, even of Earth. However, their first discovery was not the one they were looking for but something much more sombre and dangerous. Earth was called at once.

   Leviathan was asked to stand down. They had no authorization to land on the planet or to enter the elevator again. Everyone was ordered to stand down and wait for a special team of envoys to assess the situation. They arrived in a couple of days, with their dark suits and their unwillingness to share any information about what their own team. They were given a big room to examine everything and no one was allowed to enter that space, unless they were cleared after many security screenings and had a special letter.

 They were very difficult times in the ship, as it was the first time ever that they felt they had done something wrong and that their own government, the one that had send them hurling around the galaxy, did not trust them. Many were openly hostile to their visitors, giving them nasty looks and even saying what they thought without even thinking. But the visitors remaining uninterested in the personnel of the ship. They soon declared that their revisions would take a lot longer that expected, so Leviathan would not move from where it was.

 That decision made even more people furious. They demanded to know what it was those men were doing. They wanted to know because their lives, their profession, depended on them moving on to other missions. If the Leviathan stayed in one place for a long time, the government would not pay those that were simply not working at present time. And with so many people inside. It was obvious that not every single person was working at the same time, on the same thing. It was just how things worked.

 But that rotation system was of no interest to the visitors. They spent almost every single hour of the day checking information in their private room, sometimes calling in those who had clearance in order to ask a few questions and then sending them out again. People inside Leviathan grew rapidly fed up by that and they soon began plotting something that could be interpreted as a revolution. When humans are trapped like that in a finite space for too long, it is not a surprise that they do the craziest things.

 The first one of those crazy things was stealing one of the landing pods and travel exactly where they had been banned: the planet Kartak IV. A group of two, a woman and a man, stole the small vehicle and travelled at night towards the region of the planet from where the elevator was constructed. It was a desert and it resembled a lot like Mars, or at least what Mars had looked like in the past. There was a lot of red dust and the sun hit the ground with its full power, heating up the surface from the moment night ended. It was a beautiful place but it could also be seen as a horrible example of what could happen.

 The couple was ordered to return to Leviathan in order to be arrested but they obviously had no intention of going back, at least not until the visitors declared their true intentions in the ship. Many believed they were only there to take a look at the workers and then start firing them from their jobs. Others actually thought that Leviathan as a whole was going to be dismantled and that they would all be sent to different parts of the galaxy to accomplish menial jobs that had nothing to do with what they worked on there.

 But that wasn’t it. The visitors had come because of what the team that had penetrated the elevator had found there. The ancient language was not an unknown one and the central government of Earth had recognized with the help of their computers and artificial intelligence. The agents dispatched to Kartak IV had the responsibility to find out if the language was indeed the same that humans had already found in another corner of the galaxy and what that really meant for humanity as a whole.

 Sadly, they found out too late. The couple on the planet entered the elevator on its ground floor and discovered the truth. They didn’t have to know how to read it all: the elevator was not only that but also a weapon and an antenna. The creatures that had lived there had built it in order to transmit messages, probably to those they would obliterate shortly after. There were recordings of the weapon being deployed. But the couple was not able to see them all. They disappeared inside the elevator, leaving no trace.

 The following day, Leviathan was ordered to leave the system and, for the first time ever, travel to Earth at once. As they travelled to the centre of their universe, the inhabitants of the ship were told by the visitors that a new enemy had appeared and that they needed everyone to be on the same page to fight them off and defend what being human meant.

 The crew of the Leviathan was puzzled but they had always been a strong people, with tough to change convictions and minds that could create solutions for almost anything. They were ready to help their kind.