Orsello

By Steven James Danda

Orsello is an epic science fiction tale about galactic politics centred around a planet called Oink which lies a vast distance from planet Earth. Orsello, the man, is the outcome of genetic hybridisation and other scientific interventions by a race of advanced beings, the Venturans. Orsello must lead Oink on a quest for civilization and enlightenment using his spiritual and superior intellectual endowments. In that quest, he encounters numerous social and political challenges which threaten both his existence and that of the planet he has been created to lead. He faces threats from local and galactic foes and must ensure that he develops lasting alliances to achieve the objectives presented to him by the Venturans. But can the Venturans be fully trusted?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665594523

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2021 Steven James Danda. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/03/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9453-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9452-3 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

About The Author

PROLOGUE

Oink is a planet which lies many hundreds of light years away from Earth. It is double the size of our earth and orbits a sun just seventy thousand years older than our Sun. Oink, is the fourth planet from its sun, and has a gravity like Earth’s. Sixteen planets orbit the Oinkan sun and all of them are inhabited by the Oink civilisation. Oink has two moons, Plobori and Gropoli, which appear one after the other during the lengthy winter days. The former moon is cerise with streaks of white, like some fabled celestial mystery, and the latter is bluish and grey and seemingly deceptive like a Janus in appearance. Numerous legends and superstition were birthed by the strange appearance of these moons and how they glow over the three major oceans - the Juti, the Soura and the Umpis Monsi. And consequently, various religions flourished all over the planet based on the two strange celestial gods who presided over certain seasonal events held sacred for eons.

Currently, there are 15 billion inhabitants on Oink who look almost the same as humans differing only in stature. The males average twelve feet in height and the women nine, and both sexes have short, black and woolly hair, which some of them twist into thin, shiny locks. Their eyes are gold-coloured, and they have a uniform burnished bronze skin which is soft yet very tough against the blazingly violent cosmic rays which their aging sun emits.

The Oinkans are as intelligent as humans and speak one language called Tulspara, which is a complex mix of lilting symphonic sounds. They live in programmed, dome and pyramid-shaped homes which have a high degree of mobility and the capacity to float and adapt by reading the minds of their occupants. As a civilisation, Oink is over four hundred and ninety thousand years more advanced than Earth in technology.

This was not always so…

ONE

Is there anything whereof it may be said,

See, this is new? It hath been already of old time,

Which was before us.

(Ecclesiastes 1:10)

OINK, 375000 Earth years ago…

The Umpis Monsi ocean glistened on the west of the Urdakas mountain range. Its waters were placid in the glaring rays of the sun and in the face of the pellucid easterly breeze which brought in sea food for the primitive people who dwelt on its shores. The people dwelt in tiny hamlets constructed using grass, animal skins, a special fibre and mud. They dug wells for water and did very little agriculture and animal husbandry. Most of their food was gathered from the dense forests which surrounded their tiny villages. They had learned how to make coarse and fine cloth from mohair, and they clothed themselves in simple sari-like garments since their climate was mostly temperate and warm.

The beings that inhabited the planet were superstitious, tightly knit and relatively peaceful. They had little technology which was limited to the hoe, the axe and the bow and arrow. Much of their knowledge was centred on fishing for they obtained most of their food from the three seas. They worshipped unknown and strange gods like most primitive people do. Besides fishing, they also went on hunting expeditions to catch wild boars, four-legged birds called kakri and elephant-like animals which were highly prized for their gigantic tusks. From the land, they relished a mixture of numerous powdered cereals as part of their daily diet.

They ate together in communities, with each family bringing to the village table their daily collection of food. Their villages were circular, comprising of tiny family clusters which housed an average of ten people. In the centre of each village was a head who they called the ‘kraal keeper’. This person was responsible for coordinating most matters of the village which included collective work groups, barter trade, hunting expeditions and food security. The kraal keeper also tackled minor disputes and presided over religious rites with a few chosen advisors who never numbered more than seven. Villages latter clustered to become districts and provinces which were then placed under a king who usually had hundreds of advisors from each village in his province. Oink initially had hundreds of kings.

Much of the population dwelt on the margins of the tropical rainforest regions and on the shores of the three oceans and they avoided deep forest as this was thought to be the home of the gods. It was a treasonous offence to disturb the sleep of the gods! This meant that only a few reckless people ventured deep into the dense rain forests. The far reaches of the northern and southern hemispheres close to the poles were permanently frozen and virtually uninhabitable. Only those who had been rejected by their communities were sent out there to die in desolation.

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Orsello was born in a large hamlet in the Mero jungle on a side of the planet which was a short distance from the Umpis Monsi Ocean. His birth was a very strange affair. He was a result of artificial insemination by beings called the Venturans who came from the stars. As a child, he was highly intelligent.

"You are to be a teacher of their destinies," the small Venturan ‘god’ had spoken to him after placing young Orsello in a very deep trance. The Venturans had begun contacting and abducting him from the age of five.

"As a primitive people, they will be inclined to believe superstition and folklore more than science. So, you must teach them what they are willing to learn and progress from there." The instructions he was given did not make much sense to him. He received garbled messages which became clearer as time went on; but he was not so sure he wanted to obey all the instructions to the letter.

After many more strange procedures with the Venturan ‘gods’, Orsello suddenly began to know almost everything there was to know about Oink. He knew how Oink had started off as a desert planet like Mars but with huge reserves of frozen water at its poles. She was almost isolated in her galaxy, being at the edge of a spiral of billions of stars in a relatively stable region. The Venturans, a highly advanced civilisation of around three million years old, and which travelled using light portals and black holes from deep within the Pleiades, had admired Oink and begun a process of terraforming it to make it habitable to life.

Using robotic drones, the Venturans initially poured black soot all over its surface to raise surface temperatures and cause the ice caps to melt. The caps were reduced to a tenth of their original size as water gradually gathered into depressions to form the three seas. The Venturans then created an atmosphere with oxygen using the abundant water and adjusted the planet’s alignment and orbital speed to introduce four seasons on Oink. They then did something to the soil to make it arable. Then through a highly complicated process called ‘panspermia’, or planetary seeding, they introduced vegetation by sowing seeds everywhere in regions where they were most suited.

Plant life was then followed with animal life and adaptation was given room to take place at its own pace. The Venturans did not create life on Oink, but they introduced life on that planet from elsewhere.

Oink has thirty-six-hour days and four hundred and twenty such days make a year which is divided into fifteen months.

The Venturans took the most advanced life form on the planet, a creature like our ape, and took many years to modify it into a being that was almost equal to their intellectual capability and appearance. Their creations were genetically modified and conditioned not only for an intelligence and appearance close to theirs but also to the planet’s gravitational field and vibrational frequency. The new men and women on Oink however, had certain capabilities locked within their genetic codes which the Venturans would only unleash when they proved capable of collective social development. And the Oinkans did just that. They multiplied into hundreds, then thousands, in a relatively short space of time. The transformation and growth to over a billion took thirteen thousand years and the Oinkan society grew into tight-knit communities with standard moral codes.

The first Oinkans were primitive hunter-gatherers who saw their creators, the Venturans, as gods. Everything the creators from Ventura did was absolute magic to them because they had no understanding whatsoever of science. Their language developed from simple guttural sounds to more complex dialects as time went on. This pleased the ‘gods’ from Ventura. The ‘gods’ would visit them very frequently, disseminating knowledge and checking their progress. Legends and folklore centred on the ‘gods’ developed since some of the ‘gods’ were mischievous enough to fabricate reality and twist important historical facts. Thus, there emerged the notion of gods of the moon, the stars, the stones, the seas and so forth.

I hail from a land filled with virgins, a mischievous ‘god’ would claim in front of a hundred primitive Oinkans and a ‘god of the virgins’ would emerge coupled with complex and useless rites to honour the false ‘god’. Yet it was all done in jest and never intended to cause any harm. However, the Oinkans took any claim by a celestial being to be the ultimate truth such that numerous religions and superstitious rites mushroomed and wasted too much of their time and energy.

The Venturans had many inter-galactic allies with whom they shared knowledge and resources. Their coterie of alliances included some greys from Zeta Reticuli, the greens from the Pleiaides, a few reptilians or lizards who roamed the galaxies and the insectoids who hailed from Coma Berenices, Ursa Major, Orion and Alpha Centauri. The galaxy within which Ventura and Oink sat was abuzz with life unbeknown to the Oinkans. It had giants, many metres tall; it had gnomes and fairies, a few centimetres to a few feet tall; it had creepy crawlies who ran on all legs or slithered on toughened bellies; and it had intelligences that had surpassed bodily form through numerous incarnations and graduations of vibrational frequency and who then lived as sentient ethereal forms for eternities only known to the Force which superintended all multiverse consciousness. This Force was believed to be the central driver of all universal aspirations.

The Venturans wanted to achieve an end with Oink. Some of them wanted to ultimately take over a planet with developed infrastructure and with the Oinkans working as their slaves. This is because Oink is very rich in a certain mineral which is a necessity to the Venturans. The Venturans therefore needed slave labour to harness this resource and in the process civilise Oink while continuing to obtain what they required behind the scenes. A Galactic Federation to which Ventura was party frowned upon advanced civilisations which kept their colonial territories in perpetual savagery. The Federation could take over such a planet and liberate it by way of ‘salvation’. That was one reason the Venturans wanted a civilising Master to teach the primitive people on Oink the arts of civilisation in order to speed up and protect process of occupation and control. They had initially wished the process to happen at its own pace as the Oinkans achieved greater realisation and a higher vibrational frequency, but intra-galactic politics pushed them into wanting a quicker developmental pace.

There were threats from the far reaches of the universe; from the grey and green aliens, from the insectoids, from human-like beings but the worst were from the reptilians. The reptilians or lizards were a cunning lot who could inconspicuously take over a planet. They would hide underground for centuries and only wander in the middle of the night tucked away from the madding crowds and the ‘eyes of the day’ as they called them. The lizards would teach their fear-based religion and promote negative satanic energies which the Venturans had fought hard to eliminate from Ventura. On our Earth, the reptilians would be called ‘demons’. They reptilians electrified their machines using negative energy gathered from extreme fearmongering and sadism. They relished in high cruelty against species who were not their allies or who were their slaves.

That was the reason Orsello had to be placed on the planet Oink before such influences as the lizards and the super-advanced, trans-dimensional grey and green beings could descend from the skies and cause havoc. Orsello had to speak of a coming benevolent celestial kingdom and enhance the planet’s vibrational frequency to facilitate a more comfortable takeover for the Venturans. He would spend many years trying to prove that the Venturans had noble reasons for taking over Oink until the Venturans themselves started to behave in a manner they had not confided to him about. He was initially programmed to preach that the Venturans intended to spread their righteous reach across the vastness of the universe like other celestial races were doing. What he presented to the primitive beings on the planet was that there was a celestial battle going on between supreme forces of good and evil.

But before he went on his mission, he had to be taught how to go about it.

TWO

What can we say? Dumo, the short ‘god’, a Venturan chief scientific mind who was on the Oink administrative committee, asked rhetorically, his deep voice thick with emotion as he stared with watering eyes at the complex life on planet Oink. Thousands of years had passed with him at the helm of the Oink mission.

You have replicated yourselves, answered his second in command, Brumi, a nine-foot-tall gaunt man with orange skin and dog-shaped ears. Brumi had deep black eyes with yellow pupils. Brumi was not from Ventura but from another star system in the Zeta Reticulli constellation. His home planet, Pelmoto, had been taken over by the Venturans centuries before. He had been recruited into their ranks as a lieutenant in the Venturan command. At six hundred years of age, he had a perfectly white shock of curly hair even though his skin and general appearance were of a man younger than thirty-five.

Dumo’s deputy spoke with the intention of congratulating the Venturan enterprise on the beautiful blue and green planet they had created below. Numerous missions to achieve their purposes had failed. He remembered how the third ship to land on the planet had vanished from their monitoring systems. On Ventura they feared that the mission had been attacked by wild beasts which roamed freely on planet Oink. Yet it was not so. All the two hundred occupants had deserted and set up several informal bases in the dense forests. All communication with them was irretrievably lost.

The deserters had come from Ventura with desertion in mind. This had been secretly planned before they left their home planet. They were disenchanted with Ventura’s leadership because they felt hardly compensated for their efforts. The deserters wanted to take over Oink ahead of the final mission which would take over the planet for Ventura.

The deserters therefore sought to derail any mission from Ventura since any success for the sending planet was feared to mean loss of their independence. They had maintained communication with their like-minded comrades on their planet of origin, Ventura, and one of them, Iccobu Bratan, had falsely and cunningly elected to perform a very delicate task which would aid the success of the Venturan civilising mission on Oink.

As could be expected, there were problems for the Venturans when Bratan landed on Oink; he deliberately absquatulated. He ignored Venturan instructions by feeding groups of Venturan terrorists on Oink with classified information which threatened the Venturan mission.

Iccobu Bratan, the handsome and imposing nine-foot giant who looked very much like the Oinkans for this purpose, had been sent to inject a chosen man among the Oinkans with a gene-altering chemical which would open certain locked sections of his genes. The injected target man would then inseminate a woman to give birth to a genetically advanced child. A married man was chosen but was never informed of the intention. The procedure was to be done in utmost secrecy. The resulting child would have ‘diluted’ genes so that he would not quickly attain the spiritual and intellectual level of the Venturans since that was thought to be a potential threat to the entire mission.

Yet there had been no report from Iccobu Bratan for many months. So, another option had to be found, and it was. Another subject on Oink had been shot at from afar with the gene altering chemicals but the second attempt failed since adrenalin in the target victim spiked for unknown reasons and negatively affected the dose. The subject had to be eliminated.

Before the day of their celebration of success, these issues bothered Dumo.

Many years before, Dumo, his Reticulin second in command, and his twelve deputies had sat at a table high in the sky, within a silver flying saucer, out of sight. Yet they saw everything they needed to see. The humanoid beings on Oink which the Venturans had genetically altered from ape-like creatures on the planet, savage as they were, were at least procreating and proving to be much better at inventiveness and community co-existence than the next intelligent life form, the handu, a large, multi-coloured lizard with six legs and very sharp scales.

The handu was a vicious being, which quite surprisingly, the ignorant and primitive Oinkans revered as a god. This handu was extremely intelligent almost to the point of organising the violently takeover of the planet yet its vicious nature somewhat stopped that since the handui fought and constantly killed each other. Their language was guttural and confusing and only the most intelligent Oinkans could understand it.

The handui and the Oinkan humanoids had lived next to each other for at least eight hundred and seventy-five years after the handu had been introduced on Oink as a possible future alternative and Dumo had seen it all. Dumo had seen the limitations of the handu and now desperately wanted a rapid civilising of the local humanoid through the teaching of an enlightened Oinkan. Enlightenment for Dumo and his team meant genetic alteration before a being could reach spiritual realisation and manifestation.

Once the Oinkan was civilised, the planet could be tamed faster and once tamed, Dumo aspired to personally colonise it for himself and manage its affairs with a little help from Ventura.

That was Dumo’s big secret.

The Lord of the Venturans might not like it but Dumo felt inwardly that his time for a reward had come. He had loyally and royally served the high and mighty Lord of Ventura on numerous missions and succeeded in most of them. He wished to be rewarded with territorial superintendence eventually, yet the reward did not come quickly enough. The Lord of Ventura kept all territories to himself.

Dumo therefore felt obliged to pick his choice grape from the vineyard all the while considering the potential hazard this could bring to his very existence.

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Call him in, Dumo motioned, pulling his maroon robe closer to his rotund frame. He