The Other Side

By Florian Armas

In a civilization where the authorities are able to read people’s minds, a young man, a three-hundred-year old woman and a rogue AI join their forces to save what still can be saved in our galaxy.

The Universe is conscious, has many avatars, and likes to experiment on ... us. Powerful Factions, the supreme form of social evolution in a galaxy where all civilizations are human-like, interfere for their own mysterious ends. When confident enough, they challenge the Universe seeding war and political mayhem by altering the fabric of time.

Ten million years ago, one Faction created an intelligent field, ready to destroy our galaxy, and to build a new universe from its ruins. It failed. Twenty billion people died, and the technology was at first forbidden, then forgotten. They are trying again. How many will die now?

The Other Side can be read as a standalone novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Florian Armas
• Release date: Dec 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9780993977213

Book preview

The Other Side

Florian Armas

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Copyright © 2015 Florian Armas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission of the author.

Cover design Fiona Jayde

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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Part I Memories

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part II Dangerous Liaisons

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part III Final Countdown

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Memories

Chapter 1

I had never imagined that metal could voice fear of its own destruction. The back wall vanishes in flames, wailing like a dying man.

Explosion.

People howling. My own screams suppress every other sound, leaving only wide-open mouths on grotesque, silent masks that I will never forget. I probably look the same to them.

Another explosion.

Fewer people howling. A pressure wave wrecks the space ship, cracks running faster than people. All my instincts vanish in that tiny moment, leaving behind a human bag of flesh and skin, pushed in the opposite direction by the shock of the explosion. I have no fear. No, that is misleading; to be paralyzed is rather different to being fearless.

We lost the engines, commence evacuation. The captain’s miserable voice fills the speakers. I repeat, commence evacuation. As if he really needed to say anything. Debris is floating chaotically between human bodies, speaking louder than any words. Brainless, I push, pull, grunt, contorting myself like a distressed snake, between the flying fragments – some instincts had found their way back into the flesh bag. I really don’t know where our instincts live; there is nothing useful left in my mind, apart from short bursts of an inner voice shouting at me: run! Maybe that is enough; you don’t need too much in the way of philosophy to run.

My left hand stretches to grab a mask from the wall. I miss it. There is no easy way to coordinate a floating body. It was a small mask you put over your mouth, just a filter. Better than nothing. My foot touches something that is flying around me. I kick fast, and gain a tiny momentum to move back to the wall. I grab the mask. Now I have time to see that the something my foot kicked is Den. He is a man that I call the closest thing to a friend. I met him on the spaceship. He is no longer my friend; his eyes are sparkling hate and anger. And mostly fear. I delayed him. It’s not really hate, more like an animal reaction to a threat on its life. He pushes me, and my back hit the wall. I think it was a hook that I hit. It punches my ribs, and I gasp but no sound leaves my mouth.

Like deadly snakes, gases hiss out from broken pipes, expanding down the corridor, colorful and poisonous. Sirens blare morbidly. On my left, a flying bird takes shape in slow motion. Beautiful. Sometimes my mind recalls it: the pocket of gas bursting from the broken pipe, forming a pair of imaginary wings – a surreal dream. Wrong. Death is by no means surreal. The other end of the corridor is my unique goal; the escape hatch is there, half closed. In a moment, the ‘bird’ embraces a girl moving a few meters ahead of me. It looks so gentle. Having no mask, she reaches out desperately, trying to grab onto something that could save her. Too late. With a last spasm, she becomes a body, still moving under its own momentum, until a flying table intervenes, a blow turning her white, frozen face towards me; her wide, unseeing eyes staring at me: black, black, black.

Rotating, she resembles a clock’s hand. Besides her, Den’s body is rotating too, in the opposite direction. It’s like they are dancing, just that they are not.

Move! someone growls, and thrust me up against the girl’s thin body.

Nooo! I cry, trying to escape, her white skin pressed into my face. Another blow stops my cry.

I arrive at the door in a weird horizontal position, unable to pass through, as my legs hit the wall. Then my head. People looking at me may think I look like a flying acrobat, but no one is looking at me. At least not in that way – I am just an obstacle for their chance to survive. A tall, red-haired woman grabs my hand, and pushes me into an emergency capsule.

Press the orange button, she says, her voice edgy and desperate.

The knowledge of that button was there, inside me, from the many emergency simulations we had in the past, but you can simulate everything apart from the panic killing your mind when the necessity arrives. When I press the button, blue protuberances grow from the walls immobilizing my body. They are soft and rigid at the same time. Like my mind. There is the smell of ozone around me, and a sour taste in my mouth stirring the memory of the poisonous gases, even when logically I know that I am safe now. Safe from those gases.

Take care, the woman says, her edgy voice carrying a touch of gentleness and sadness, and I see tears in her eyes. Every time I replay that moment I have the feeling that she pronounced my name too, but I can’t remember. My clenched mouth offers no answer, and she closes the hatch, expelling me into the void just seconds before the ship explodes.

There is no time for fear; with a terrible sound, a flash burns my eyes. Silvery white, mixing with the white of the girl’s fading face, her black wide eyes staring at me, the last thing I remember before the darkness falls, and the world becomes soundless.

That is all I remember of my entire life; everything else was erased by shock and burns. The doctors worked hard to reconstruct my body, but they never could recover my memories. Even the fact that the red-haired woman was my mother returned to me from the news; her picture and mine bound together by something waiting to resurface.

***

Cold, coming from far away; the white light gently passed through my closed eyelids, switching on a part of myself that was slumbering outside time. Somewhere, in a corner of my mind, explosions still drummed in a strange, frightening rhythm that made me keep my eyes tightly shut: boom, boom, boom...! Vivid images burst inside, erased by flashes, before a new one would emerge – a fragmented movie. It ended as fast as it came.

That color is wrong, I murmured to myself. The light inside the emergency capsule should be blue. The light around me was white, as white as the face of the unknown girl… The flash…

It was not an accident. The unknown voice sounded worried, and not without effort, I realized that ‘he’ was worried about me.

Some things became clear in that moment, some much later; my vocabulary was limited by the memory loss, but my new mind was ready to absorb, memorizing everything. Until that second, I was neither dead nor alive. Not that I have any memories about my deep coma, but medical knowledge suggests that second should have come much later, after my brain had been fully rebuilt. The machines were still growing neurons and whatever else was needed for my recovery, a benign process with one drawback: pain. My sudden spark of consciousness failed to control my body; some essential parts of my brain were still missing so my mouth remained shut. The doctor had no idea that I was conscious again, and I could do nothing to change his view.

You stupid doctor! I am awake. Help me! Heeeelp! I cried hard, from both pain and frustration, yet it happened only inside my head.

The ship was destroyed by a missile, the voice continued, reminding me that I was lying in a hospital bed because of it. A touch of curiosity made the pain bearable, but it never stopped. And of all the emergency capsules, only one was destroyed. His.

Without seeing, I realized that he was pointing at me. Why am I so important?

Who did it? someone growled, yet something in his voice told me that he already knew the answer. Later, I found that it belonged to Doc, the doctor taking care of me. The owner of the first voice seemed to be different.

The Travelers.

In the sudden silence, I hated them for killing so many people. At the same time, a parallel string of animation flooded my mind. The word still existed in my memory! It was followed by a short definition: ‘friendly aliens that help us’. They helped me to die. Friendly.

Then we have a mole, Doc said, in a low voice. Somewhere… Armin, we need... His words lost their fluency, and he stopped as if not really knowing what to say.

No. It was just an unfortunate accident. His innate ability to communicate with the Field should have been dormant for another year or two. That’s why we asked the Resistance to send him away from your main planet; so he could be trained on a remote station where the Travelers cannot monitor the space as effectively.

Your planet? Is he an alien too? Armin’s voice was quite normal, or at least this is what I thought at that moment.

He reached into the Field while he was traveling, and a Field Crawler reacted. It’s easier in space, Armin said as if it was the most common thing in the galaxy, but there was nothing in mind about the Field and whatever crawlers reacted to some of my thoughts that were lost too. Our sensors recorded a burst of communication with the Field, in Traveler-controlled space, not far from your station. They acted fast.

Acted...? They killed me. As good as.

Anyway, we could do nothing; the ship belonged to your main planet, and the Travelers are the masters there. You know this, Doc.

They destroyed their own ship? No, it was our ship. What does master mean?

They will come after him. Doc’s voice again; he was still worried. There are ten million people here.

Where am I? There was only one place with such a large population that wasn’t the main planet, but with so much memory loss, my question was completely normal.

How can we stop the connection between his mind and the Field? There must be a way. It’s a common practice there. Doc almost spat ‘there’, and I presumed that he was talking about the main planet.

Genetic modifications. More like mind castration. There’s no need to do that. The Travelers already know he is here; we could not hide that we changed the course of his emergency capsule, to arrive in your proximity. The energy signature was too high.

We learned that a bit later, Doc complained.

Well, the delay allowed you to be clean when the Treaty was invoked against you. There was a slightly amused tone in Armin’s voice.

The Travelers will come after him, Doc repeated.

That will be in breach of the Treaty, Armin answered in a gentle tone. Some nervous tapping on the table from the doctor’s finger made him add in haste: But I agree with you. They will come... You must be prepared.

We don’t have space ships. We don’t have missiles. We don’t have artillery, Doc complained. We have nothing to … protect ourselves. The Treaty has left us helpless.

The Treaty has left you alive. We will double the number of sensors around your station, but they will not invade you, Doc; just infiltrate some commando teams to ... find him. Move him to Deep Blue.

Not to find me. To kill me.

What else should we do? Doc asked, his voice squeezed between anger and the sudden panic that was mounting in him, a panic that was transferred to me too.

Heal him. Train him. First-stage training. Don’t tell him anything, yet. We will gather a council when his time comes, Armin said in a thoughtful tone.

The door opened, and someone else entered the room, making a slight noise on the floor. The quiet of my closed eyes forced my brain to rely on hearing and smell, enhancing their acuity. Smell was useless; all I could sense were the chemicals in the medical facility and the typical metallic odor of a space station.

Good to see you again, Armin, said the new one, in a tone both happy and concerned. I wish you had contacted me before coming here. A chair scratched the floor, and I was surprised at how well I could follow his movements.

You were underwater, Erun, and time is short, Armin stopped him. Your control tower was notified as soon as we could do it. I presume that you heard our discussion.

Yes, I heard it, Erun sighed. As well as many other people on the station connected to this room. There was a suggestion in the man’s voice that things like this should have been kept private, but that it was already too late.

What makes you different from the degenerate rulers of the main planet is that you are the president of an open society. I know, Armin laughed, in some ways, things are much easier for them than for you, but in the long term, they will pay the price.

Our communication Net is full of fear. People are frightened that we will be attacked. And we will be. Erun was deliberately exacerbating the tension, in order to prompt a new assessment that would calm the people connected to our room via the Net.

A commando team raid doesn’t mean a full attack, Armin returned the ball to Erun.

One, two… We might be able to handle them. The attacking force was suddenly reduced to a few soldiers. Do you see anything in the Lines of Time?

The Travelers are still preparing their New Field, Armin said in a concerned voice.

Bloody Field, it will destroy us. Erun was no longer faking his irritation, and his hand struck something that sounded like angry metal to me. The ship’s destruction is not covered by the Treaty, but can you use it for something?

The Observer in charge of this system was informed, Armin tried to calm him. but it’s too little to make a case in the Galactic Council.

The Observer! Erun growled. The Travelers’ tool. When was the last time we had a neutral Observer? All the ones I have known were chosen from the Faction ruling this system behind the scenes.

Many Observers in the Galactic Council are Travelers from the Celestial Faction. We have to live with that.

We, not you. Erun jumped from his chair, and started to move around with slow steps, his shoes hitting the floor in a rhythmic cadence.

You have to live with that, if it makes you happy. Train him well, Armin said again, and he left the room, followed by everybody else.

Doc! Don’t go. Help me. Help!!! I howled because of the pain, like a wolf calling a full, bloody moon. Nobody answered me, and after four horrible hours, I fell back into a coma, but I still remember that pain. I will remember it all my life.

***

Brain is now 95% recovered. Bland, as if muffled by a strip of cotton, the whisper chased a silence born at the beginning of my new time. A vague intuition told me that the brain mentioned was mine. Pulse is growing and close to stabilization. My heartbeats were surely faster and time was speeding up around me, too, the length of the words, and the breaks between them, shortened. He survived. Three hundred people died when that ship exploded.

Are you Doc? I tried to anchor the whisper carrying a sadness that I could not share. I will survive. Maybe.

Mara, add two milligrams to his perfusion, another voice whispered in the same muffled tone.

Two milligrams of what? Nobody answered my inner thoughts, and a heavy fog absorbed my mind, keeping it in a stasis that was cool and frightening at the same time, a time outside time. Are you Doc? There can’t be two Docs…

You are safe. The unnatural calmness of the voice crept inside me, bringing relief to a part of my mind still trying to decide whether I was conscious or dreaming, or worse. I know you are awake, the monitors can’t lie.

I blinked, and behind my eyelids I analyzed the recorded image: a strange face, with a peculiar smile. A robot nurse, I whispered. Then I am no longer in my capsule. Am I dreaming? I was too young to ask if I was dead.

Welcome to Aurora, said another voice, unfamiliar but pleasant. Not that I really knew the first voice; I was just trying to differentiate between them. This time it was a woman, Mara, black-hair framing a perfect oval face. Impulsively, I tried to move, but her hand gently kept me lying on the hospital bed. It’s too early for this, she said softly, and her hand moved to caress my hair in a maternal gesture. You have had a long journey, one that is still going on. She was speaking from a medical perspective – the long journey of transforming a bag of charred meat into a human being again.

The white light of her medical instrument dug into my eyes, contracting the retinas so hard that it recalled the white face of the unknown girl. No! I cried, and the light went away as fast as it had come.

It did not hurt, Mara whispered with a faint hint of reproach, and I was too ashamed to mention the white face that haunted me. Your reflexes are good. She was speaking about my left eye – they had grown a new one for me using some stem cells extracted from the right eye that by some unknown miracle had remained almost intact.

I feel dizzy, I said in a voice that mixed fear and wonder, comic and melodramatic at the same time. It brought a smile to the lips of both human and robot nurses. It’s not fair, I complained mutely. It’s not fair at all.

You were sedated, until your body regained full functionality, Mara informed me.

I was not; I felt that pain, and I heard… Maybe I shouldn’t tell them. That alien...

You are almost healed, so we have lowered the sedation level. The physical part of you is more or less as it was before the accident. We … we still have to work a bit on your memory. You will have some pain. I am sure that you will handle it well.

The notion of pain has a different meaning, depending on who experiences it. I bit back a curse, and Mara smiled a smile that crushed my rebellion.

Yeah, I will handle it well; howling at the bloody moon, inside.

***

Aurora is a small space station, two hundred meters in diameter, orbiting around the frozen moon of a colorful, gaseous planet. Deep under its ice-shell, the frozen satellite has one of the few habitable places in our solar system. I am sure you know all this, but for me it was like opening a file, reading: Aurora, then nothing, a white space waiting for me to fill it. The word was not related to anything else in my mind; it was just sitting there, lost in the scattered debris of my memory. Answering my question, AI painted the hologram of a white-blue frozen moon and a small chunk of metal orbiting around it, making the connection with the name ‘Aurora’ in my mind. It was interesting to create links between the abstract notions floating inside me and the real world. For a normal person, it would have been exciting, but not for me. The first thing I examined was, of course, a robot – my first view when I opened my eyes in the station’s hospital. I have no idea how I knew that it was a robot nurse – the ‘nurse’ looked very human – but it was a good sign that I could tell the difference.

When l left the hospital and the station, the robot nurse joined me for another week in the small room that became my ‘house’ in the underground city – it did not bother me at all. I spent the time digging for new memories to enhance my mind, but the process was not as easy as it looked, as I had to extract each element, one by one. Waiting for all those things to naturally appear in my new life would have taken years of relearning – not unlike the development of a small child. But I was not a small child, so I used the station’s AI to project holograms and make the links with my dormant memory. Established seventy years after we landed on the Moon, our colony had grown fast, reaching ten million people, in just forty years. There were two cities in that frozen place: one built on the only island, a tiny, rocky peak less than a hundred meters tall emerging from an ocean of ice. It was named Ice for that specific reason. Buried under the ice sheath, with a spectacular view over a cliff into the deep water, was the large underground city named Deep Blue. Of course, you could see the blue only during the ‘day’, when the artificial lights chased away the darkness. A four-kilometer-long, vertical tunnel linked the cities – the most boring state-of-the-art technology ever; you cannot see a thing from inside the moving capsules.

Today I learned that the red-haired woman who saved my life on the spaceship was my mother. I tried to feel emotion for her, I tried to mourn. I could not. Then I tried to figure out what it was to have a mother, what she might have meant to me. The omnipresent AI recommended that I read some novels and watch movies, but that takes time, so I used the universal dictionary. All I could find was that all mothers give birth to their children and love them. I supposed that we loved our mothers too, and I went further, extracting the meaning of love. Reading a dictionary is quite different from feeling the love itself – I understood that logically, but it was not enough. Something inside me wanted to step outside rational assessment, an irrational urge.

You will feel something, somewhere inside you. Undefined, strange and pleasant in the same time. Then you will know that you are in love, Mara, the nurse, said to me, smiling gently.

My emotional center had been destroyed, and they had had to rebuild it, but all the hormonal changes needed to create emotions were being kept at a low level. They were afraid of me losing my mind because of my dreams about the ship’s explosion. All my dreams ended with the white face of the unknown girl and her black, unseeing eyes staring at me – Doc had convinced me that it was better to let her remain ‘the unknown girl’, but I set a memo to learn more about her. The only good thing was that I had set that memo to open several months later.

I wanted everything to go faster, a new world was waiting for me. I am a hologram explorer, I thought, laughing at the robot nurse. She – the information remaining in my mind told me that it was not polite to address her as ‘it’ – automatically smiled back.

There are many subtle differences between human and robot smiles, and I rejoiced that I could recognize them. ‘Natural’ was the first word that came to me, and I dug into the dictionary for the many facets of its meaning, running from one new word to another, each expressing a feeling that I did not know and, even worse, that I could not feel. What’s the meaning of a ‘feeling’ if you feel nothing? Mimicking blindingly some reactions I saw in movies, I threw the e-reader across the room, hoping to feel some anger. I felt nothing. The crack of its case made the robot nurse stare at me until I picked up the remains. Sorry, I mumbled, only because I had to say it. In haste, I left my room with the ‘serene smile’ notion rumbling inside my mind, struggling to understand the difference between the technical meaning and the real thing. That is, until the day I walked, for the first time, in the park created along the edge of the cliff.

A girl was reading on a bench, looking nowhere in particular, smiling at the abyss. Her name was Lamia; the Net with which we are in permanent contact pushed the information to me, based on the picture I had snapped. She acknowledged my action – the same Net had localized the searcher for her – and waved at me. I felt something when she reacted, but I was not sure what that something meant, so I did not answer. She shrugged hesitantly, and left. Through the Net, AI explained to me that it was a natural attraction. The moment was lost when I had to look into my inner dictionary to understand what natural attraction meant. Anyway, in that moment I realized what a serene smile could be. I took her place on the bench still warm from her body, and something undefined made me stay, in a silence that did not bother me. In the water in front, the lights of the city moved through the dark blue in a slow, continuous motion that followed the waves and their fluid movement, up and down, left and right. They are not really waves, not like you see when the sea reaches the shore; there is no neat border between a moving wave and still water; it’s more like shredded lace, or like the thin galactic dust visible through a strong telescope. Lasers enhances these differences, almost imperceptible to the human eye, targeting the differences in the salinity and temperature. There is no life in the water, and the lightshow is designed to replace this essential difference in people’s minds. Technology makes our lives easier; we are always immersed in the global Net. We live both in reality and in its augmented form; we interact with each other. Well, they interact, but I suppose I will do the same when my mind recovers.

Yet that was not enough to keep ten million people happy, living in a huge, overpopulated, underground hive, with the fear that the Government might attack any time despite the Peace Treaty – nobody trusts the Government of the main planet. The decision was taken to fill this void with life, borrowing ideas from the cold oceans of the main planet and designing new forms. A contest was being held, and everyone could participate. AI helped me choose some biology and genetics courses; I wanted to see my own creatures riding the waves of light, and I wanted to meet the girl with the serene smile – the Net had told me that Lamia dreamt of winning the contest. In a state of mind that was both strange and familiar, I went home with her smile running through my mind, and fell asleep, dreaming about it.

In the morning, another thought troubled me. Is Lamia beautiful? From the Net, I extracted pictures of ‘beautiful girls’. Thousands... Thousands, and all very different: hair color, eyes color, faces, shapes. Why are they beautiful? All of them?

Why are they beautiful? I asked Mara.

Who is beautiful? she replied.

The girls, I said and shared with her the pictures I had found on the Net.

The girls... she smiled. Because they are beautiful.

But why? I added Lamia’s picture. Is she beautiful?

This one? I understand now, Mara smiled, putting an arm round my shoulders. Let’s have a look together. Do you like her face?

I stared again at the picture, then at the nurse – I was able to just see her profile. Yes.

Then she is beautiful.

You are beautiful, too, I said after a while.

Thank you. That was a nice compliment.

Compliment, I know the word. You say nice things to someone and receive something in return. Will I receive a compliment too?

Well, it doesn’t work exactly how you think, but you are close. And you have already received a compliment back.

I don’t understand, I shrugged.

You will, she said, and ruffled my hair, laughing at me.

A strange feeling made me stop in the doorway when entering the classroom, and doubt filled my mind, questioning the utility of my next step. Before that day, my world had been shaped entirely by the doctor and the nurse. I could add the robot nurse, but this would not change the equation very much. They had let my hormones out of the cage, or at least so they told me, but I still had almost no feelings. Having one’s hormones suddenly released is not enough; you need to immerse yourself in the world first, to create bonds with people, bonds that makes you happy or sad, bonds that give joy or burn you.

In the room, there were four girls, including the girl with the serene smile, and five boys. I felt about them the same way I felt about the robot nurse; and even worse, I felt nothing about my non-existent feelings.

Chapter 2

* Alenia *

This hat... I can’t forget it, not even in a thousand years. My hands touched the soft silk, stirring some long-forgotten memories. Delicate… Hundred years of training worked hard to stop my tears – just an automatic reaction seeded in me for dangerous moments. Once my body recovered, I slowly rotated the hat, turning my whole life with it.

"Diegia, hijack all the cameras in the street," I asked my DigitalEgo, the semi-organic AI entity residing in my brain, already sure that she would find nothing around my house.

"Nothing," she spoke inside my mind. The hat was not there until it was there. No recording of how it got there.

Why had they sent it? To warn me? Pale green, delicate, I still like it. With a swift move, I put it on my head. Why now?

It was autumn that day – stirred by the hat, some very old memories came back to me. Calm and clear, like water droplets sitting on a grape. My new green hat got lost in the wind, flying away, when the train moved. I smiled, not yet sure what might happen a moment later. My dress, the same pale green color, fluttered in the wind. When the train stopped, people stayed silent a while longer, some of them with their eyes closed; then everybody started to talk. Now you talk… It was our first steam train.

That night, I left my planet for the first time. Houston, my Gate friend, teleported me to the training center on a