| Chapter 23 | Chapter 25 |
Part IV
24
Tables Turning
Debrisphere polar hotzone, September 6 2047
"For the third time, yes, this ship is alien, yes, but my companions are not! And no; I am not Mars-One and the Hylobo are certainly not alien! Suggesting so is very offensive, sir. Please, sir, you really need to let go so the link can be re-established! The debrisphere; especially this zone, is a dangerous place to be dead in the water."
"I can assure you: you are not fooling me with these stories Mister. I know for a fact that you and your little alien friends injected me with nanotech.
New Zion has not been sitting still while you devils have been plotting away with those new alien friends of yours. It was a nice try with those mini-drones, but you did not realize we developed our own immunization nanotech to match, sir.
Now please tell me, Mister Bjarne, what exactly is so special about Mister Gottschalk, that you risk exposing a ship like this, risk exposing your new found alien alliance, just to keep New Zion, us, from capturing him?"
"Mister Bridgewater, please! You must hear me out! Both me and the Hylobo crew of this craft are unaffiliated with any of the factions that you and your movement are in conflict with. The Hylobo don't need any nanotech or biochemical agents to control our minds if they choose to do so. The mosquito drones you spoke of seem to have originated from our other accidental abductee, Mister Bridgewater. A big failure of our intel that we were not aware of such tech. But could we please discuss more urgent matters first, Mister Bridgewater?
We are dead center in a primary hot-zone of the debrisphere. Unless we start navigating, we shall all be ripped to little pieces pretty soon. We could be hit by an HEOPS swarm any minute."
"Ok Mister Bjarne, I am a reasonable man. I will give you permission to give your alien friends the order to move the vessel out of harm's way. They may steer the vessel back to Earth's surface to New Zion territory or beyond the outer limits of the debrisphere, but remember Mister Bjarne, try any tricks and I can snap that aristocratic little neck of yours like it was nothing but a thin twig."
"Please, sir, you don't understand, it doesn't work like that, sir! You are going to get us erased, sir! You don't know the Hylobo like I do. My grandchild! My late wife! I don't want to lose those memories! Please, sir, don't threaten me, your hostility, my fear, the Hylobo, they won't understand. She won't understand!"
"You have tested my patience long enough now Mister Bjarne."
As John pushed his thumb into Bjarne's armpit, Bjarne felt an excruciating pain through his body. As if a large spear was slowly being pushed down from Bjarne's shoulder, through the right side of his torso and then down his right leg, until it stopped at his knee, at what point the sharp pain started to slowly fade away. As Bjarne felt his mental link with Azraella being re-established, her soft soothing voice spoke in his head:
"Don't despair, my good friend, this will end now, no more pain and no more memory of pain."
Suddenly John Bridgewater grabbed his own head with both hands as if in pain and dropped to his knees in a seemingly slow-motion way. Something that was typical of the 0.3g pseudo gravity in the Aesir spacecraft. While watching John drop to the ground, Bjarne felt a haze come over his awareness.
"Please Azraella, not my wife! Not my granddaughter! Not the memories of Magnus!"
As the haze in Bjarne's mind thickened, Bjarne tried to hold on to the image of his late wife, his dear Ella. Bjarne remembered how amazing she looked at their wedding. As he pictured Ella in her long silky white wedding dress with a deeply cut back section that had truly brought out the contours of her beautiful body, a voice in his head spoke to him.
A voice that sounded vaguely familiar to Bjarne.
"Goodbye, my friend."
Then as Bjarne struggled to hold on to the image in his head, the haze thickened.
The image though remained clear. Difficult to think. What a beautiful princess! Did he know this lady? As Bjarne tried to remember who this lady in this breathtaking white dress was, another image came to his mind. A black dog. A labrador, running with a tennis ball in his mouth. Running towards a little girl. Bjarne felt a sense of deep love come over him at the sight of the long-haired blond girl in her adorable yellow dress. She must be about seven or eight years old, Bjarne thought. Half his own age.
No! That wasn't right! It didn't feel right. I think...I feel, I am an old man ! Or am I?
As Bjarne tried to remember, his clearest most recent memory was that of the happiness he felt about the He-Man action-figure he had gotten for his birthday.
His fifteenth birthday! An event that his mind told him was only a few days ago, yet it felt far more distant. He wasn't a fifteen-year-old kid anymore, he felt sure he wasn't. As Bjarne opened his eyes, one look at his hands confirmed his suspicions.
My God, I must be a hundred years old! Why am I tied up? A strange man was sitting on his knees, at his feet, hands over his eyes as if he was crying, but he wasn't crying, he was just sitting there motionlessly.
A thin yet very muscular African looking man with long dreads and a tiny beard wearing a black suit. Bjarne's mind flashed back to the beautiful princess in the white dress. This must be the groom. As Bjarne looked around, anticipating and hoping to see the stunningly beautiful bride somewhere, Bjarne realized she wasn't here. She wasn't now. She was somewhere within the deep schism between his memory of his fifteenth birthday and today, a day where Bjarne was old, maybe a hundred years old, maybe more.
No, maybe not a hundred yet, but a whole life existed that Bjarne could not remember.
Bjarne noticed a small viewport. Through the viewport, the curvature of the Earth was clearly visible.
"Heavy shit, I'm in space! I'm an astronaut!"
Then Bjarne looked across the room. Two persons were strapped to tables. Not wooden tables, large massive white tables that appeared to illuminate the room with a white light. The top of the tables gave off a yellow shine. There were three tables. Two of them had people strapped to them. A young man in his twenties wearing futuristic clothing and a, probably thirty-something, woman with short hair kind of looking like an adult girl scout.
This is not good, Bjarne thought. Then Bjarne looked at the third table. The one in the middle. As Bjarne followed the loose strap that ran from the table down to the floor he noted a naked little child lying there. A child with a really strange color. Was the child dead?
The skin of the naked child was a pale shade of grey. That wasn't right, not even for a dead person. Its head was completely bald. 'Cancer?' Bjarne thought.
Bjarne looked across the room and then spotted a second naked grey colored kid laying motionless on the floor. Then a third child. Bjarne could clearly see the face of the third child. A shock went through him. The face of the child was deformed. A completely bald head with an unusually broad and high forehead. A tiny chin above an unusually small and lipless mouth. A nose that was disproportionately small for the size of the head, and what scared Bjarne the most, huge round eyes that were the size of large chicken eggs. Not normal eyes.
The eyes were pitch black without even a hint of white. So black that you couldn't even make out the pupils, if there were any. No, these weren't children! These were Trolls !
At that moment a friendly voice manifested itself in Bjarne's head:
"I am so sorry my old friend, so sorry, I know you don't remember me, we are in great danger."
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