Microstory 2679: Plague Doctor

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Resi is ill. He was hot and sweaty during his speech, and he doesn’t even remember the end of it. He’s just waking up now in his childhood home. The last time he was here was three years ago, but it feels like he’s never really been here at all. It feels like that was a movie, and now he’s fallen into the screen. He’s delirious. Kala walks into the room holding a wet towel. She dabs his forehead with it, and then drapes it across his face. He’s breathing heavily and erratically. “How did I get here?”

“Father brought you,” Kala explains. “He wants to speak with you, but he doesn’t know if you’ll want to see him.”

“Bring him in.”

“It can wait,” Kala offers.

“I’m okay. Bring him in. Thanks, Kal.”

Father comes in after she leaves. He sits on the edge of Resi’s bed, and is silent for a moment. He sighs. “I think it’s time I tell you the truth. It’s gone too far.”

“What has gone too far?” Resi squirms, trying to find a more comfortable position, but his muscles are achy.

“You are not actually my son,” Father begins. Just with those few words, apparently that’s no longer the right thing to call him any more, though. “You are not even Tamboran. When we first discovered that we were not in the garden of heaven, a faction of us asked for advanced technology. The rest stayed as they were.”

“Kartica already told me this. She didn’t mention you, though. Is everyone an immortal?” Resi asks.

“No, but I’m sure she didn’t tell you everything. She couldn’t have. She probably forgot. There’s a reason you can’t figure what the Assembly’s motivations are. A little over 200 years ago, a plague swept the island. All three nations were affected, but none worse than Tambora. To be fair, we had a greater population, and of course, still do. That’s because a Bungulan cloned themself a body that looked more like us, and infiltrated Yana. He claimed to have discovered a plant that could cure the plague, and they were right. Well, I mean, they just used science, but it did cure us. Most islanders are immune now, but there was a problem. The immortal faction—our fearful leaders—suffered permanent brain damage, and it is that damage that persists, even when they jump to new bodies. The reality is that every member of the Assembly is a little bit crazy. I was not one of them in the beginning, but a few friends and I discovered their technology, and decided to become like them. We have been trying to get ourselves elected to offices ever since, and son, we have always failed. They know how to run a campaign. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and they grease the right palms.”

“What does any of this have to do with me?” Resi questions. He’s still in so much pain. He can’t even process his father’s words. He’s just listening to them.

“When the Kokore called you to the First Tongue of Aether, she said that there was one other in the past, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That was you. You are that Bungulan, Res. You saved our island, and in doing so, doomed yourself. Since you were just as much of a clone as the members of the Assembly, your brain continues to suffer its negative effects. We put you on ice, so you could be studied. Don’t fret, you agreed. You see, you went against the Bungulan authority to help us, so you could never return to your normal life. So we couldn’t ask them to research the problem on our behalf. Non-interference, and all that.”

“But you think you figured it out, so you moved me to this body, and raised me as your child,” Resi guesses.

“Pretty much. The Assembly, I suppose, realized what we did, and concocted this bizarre plan to turn you into a hero so you could be knocked down to a villain. Don’t try to understand their reasoning, they have none. Some Assembly members wanted you to create the Fifth House so you would take all of the recruits and leave. They think the island can’t provide for our blooming population, and they may be right about that. But there was infighting. Some started to see you as a genuine threat, and came up with demands that you literally couldn’t fulfill, because they were paradoxical. Now-Speaker Keller put a stop to it. He’s one of us, not of them. We finally got him elected when we realized that the only way to beat them was to simply pretend to be one of the originals. He’s just been lying, and it’s working, because as I said, they’re nuts.”

“But Keller is the one building the army.”

Father shakes his head. “Keller isn’t in charge of the military. He only has so much power as Speaker. He has to pick his battles, but he doesn’t want war.”

“So I’m a Bungulan, trapped in a Tamboran’s body, suffering from a plague, which I contracted 200 years ago. How do my visions fit in?”

“You’re visions?” Father asks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My Kidjums. Kartica said that I was actually seeing the future.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Father clarifies. “You never told me, and they certainly wouldn’t have either.”

“So it could still be true.” Resi finally forces himself to sit up. “If you were born centuries ago, then you know that the myths are true, and our ancestors were saved from Earth using time travel, which means that kind of thing is real, and I could really be seeing the future.”

“I...can’t argue against that, but I’ve seen no proof of that. I wasn’t born until after our people came here. Unlike Kartica, I never saw Earth.”

“Bungulans have technology that we don’t understand,” Resi reasons. “Predicting the future might be as easy for them as forecasting the weather. If Central Mountain is going to erupt, we wouldn’t have the technology to detect that, but they could, and I could somehow be channeling that knowledge.”

“Central Mountain? If anyone else were to tell me that it was about to erupt, I wouldn’t believe them, but you’ve been nothing but kind to our people since you showed up, so I will. The problem is, you’re sick. Our scientists thought they fixed you by erasing your memory of your past, but the plague has obviously caught up to you anyway. That’s why I’m fessing up now.”

Resi sits all the way up now, and swings his legs over to hang off the edge. “Then we need to find whatever plant,” he begins with airquotes, “I used to stop it in the first place.”

“We don’t have any,” Father reveals. “I would have already given it to you. The Assembly might have kept it, but Keller hasn’t located their secrets.”

Resi nods. “Then we need to go in ourselves. Let’s stop trying to play the sneaky game. Let’s just take the fight to them.”

Microstory 2675: A God Am I

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Resi doesn’t answer the girl’s question. He lies back on the cot and tends to his pain. He’s starving and exhausted too. As if they read his mind, someone wearing black walks up to him with a cart of food. Resi reaches up, and grabs the first thing his fingers touch. It’s two slices of cheese. He stuffs them in his mouth like a toddler, and carelessly chews. Some of it falls off of his face. He just reaches for more. Plain bread this time.

The girl appears over him, her dark hair hanging down from her head, making her look like a Japanese ghost. “It’s not too terribly urgent, but we don’t have forever either. I need to know what happened in your vision.”

Resi keeps chewing, not looking her in the eye. “Can’t you people watch people’s Kidjums on the dream recorder, or whatever the hell tech you have.”

“I don’t have access to that tech,” she explains. “I’ve gone rogue.”

“You and your grandfather?” He asks. He accidentally pulls one of the platters off of the cart. A granola bar lands on his chest, so he begins to eat that. “Or just you?”

“Just me,” she answers. “He’s not actually my grandfather.”

“I don’t really care.” Resi tucks his legs in as he turns to the side, away from her. His hand finds a churro on the cart, so he munches on that. What an odd sort of spread.

“Please. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I believe that it’s a matter of life and death. We weren’t honest with you regarding your original Kidjum. There’s more to it. We’ve been trying to help you reach your destiny, but it’s not working. You keep making decisions that we did not anticipate. If it looks like we’re flip-flopping, it’s because we disagree with each other on how to move forward. The Speaker is a figurehead for the Assembly. They are not always the one in power. It shifts frequently.”

“I don’t care about that either.” He finishes the churro. “If there’s a drink up there, I don’t want to spill it.”

The girl moves over to the other side of him, and starts making sounds. She pushes the cart out of the way with her hips and kneels down with a mug of milk. She guides the straw between his lips, and holds it there while he has his fill. “Better?”

“What you did...” he trails off for a moment. “...was wrong. You hurt me. You tied me up. You drugged me. You forced me to hallucinate.”

“They’re not hallucinations, Resi. They’re visions.”

“What are you even going on about and is there cake?”

She picks up a saucer of chocolate cake, and sets it on the cot in front of his face.

There’s a fork there too, but he flicks it onto the floor, and eats with his hand. “Don’t judge me,” he says as he scoops more into his facehole.

“I’m not,” she tells him. “I’ve never gone through Kidjum before. I have a lot of respect for what you people do. Your dedication, your hard work; admirable traits.”

“You’re acting like you’re older than me.” He rolls over to his other side.

She follows him over there, and gets on her knees. “I am. I’m a lot older.” She sighs, preparing herself. “Look at my face, Resi. It is a face you have seen before. We normally switch forms as necessary, but my transfer was unplanned, so my only option was my own clone. You saw me before that. You saw me when I was older.”

Resi stares at her. He’s sleepy, but he can’t pull his lids down. There’s a tingling fatigue amidst the headache that he still has, screaming at him to turn off the lights and go to sleep for real, but his eyes won’t cooperate. Tired but wired. She looked familiar when he first saw her, but he had no context then. Now he knows what he’s looking for. There’s only one person she could be, even if she looked different. This is Speaker Lincoln. Well, she’s no longer the Assembly Speaker, but she probably will be again one day. “Lincoln,” he says quietly. He tries to shut his eyes again, but they pop back open.

She nods. “My given name is Kartica.”

“You’re Kinkon,” he guesses. “That’s why you have mind transfer tech. The Bungulans gave it to you. Why? Why would they do it? Why are you hoarding it?”

Kartica shifts her position to sit cross-legged. “When Mount Tambora erupted seven hundred and thirty years ago, I was a little girl. I listened to my parents. I did what I was told. I believed that we had died and gone to heaven. But then things started to happen that didn’t make any sense. People injured themselves, we got sick, old people died. If this was the afterlife, where did they go? Some other level of heaven? Or no, we were just on another planet. Aliens, or whatever, had saved us, for whatever reason. It was decades before we ran into the Bungulans and confirmed the truth, but I saw it for a long time before then. I was skeptical. I rejected my family’s beliefs. I rejected our traditions. I accepted the Bungulan way of life. A few of us did. We were pushed out of our new home, exiled to what we now call Anchor Island. Then a plague spread throughout Yana, and suddenly, they wanted our help again. So we gave it, for a price.”

“Undying loyalty and devotion,” Resi assumes.

“We didn’t frame it that way, but we were more knowledgeable than them at that point. We had the tech. We had the medicine. If they wanted our help, they needed to listen to us. It was only fair. Over time, people kept turning over to death, and my people kept jumping to new bodies whenever necessary. I can’t even remember what I used to look like anymore. What we truly were was lost to time. We didn’t try to hide it from the subsequent generations. We just stopped talking about it, and people back then had trouble grasping the concept anyway. We looked different, so we were different.”

“But you keep doing it. You keep jumping to new bodies, growing up, and getting the power back. You know how to run a campaign, because you’ve already run thousands.” Resi gets up to drag the cot out of the spotlight that’s still on him.

“Well, four times for me, going on the fifth. Others have done it more. They don’t like to get old, so they switch more often. It has only been a couple of centuries. ”

“Oh, only a couple? Pshaw, that’s nothing.”

“For everyone else, that is nothing. Someone on Castlebourne just celebrated their 600th birthday. I think they’re literally the oldest person ever, but still...”

“What do you want from me?” Resi questions. “Why am I here, Kartica?”

“I need to know what you saw,” she reiterates.

“What does it matter? It’s not real!”

“Yes, it is. That’s why you were selected to be First Tongue of Aether. That wasn’t just a Kidjum for you. It unlocked the power of your mind. There’s a name for people like you, who don’t experience time linearly, or can choose not to.”

“Oh yeah, and what’s the name?”

“They call them choosing ones, and they’re the reason we’re on Bungula in the first place. They’re the ones who brought us to the future from Earth.”

He studies her face. She’s not lying. She may be wrong, but she believes what she’s saying. So maybe he should say what he believes too. “Death. All I saw was death.”

Microstory 2495: Kingdom of Aksum

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I won’t get into too many historical details, because if you’re interested in such information, you would probably prefer to hear it on the tour, and if this stuff bores you, I doubt there’s anything I could say to change your mind. The Kingdom of Aksum existed between the first and seventh centuries in the common era. It was a powerful and meaningful region of international trade at the time. In fact, they relied so heavily on being in the center of everything that, when power shifted to other cultures, Aksum couldn’t keep up. Spoiler alert, they ultimately collapsed over the course of many years due to emigration to more fertile lands, war, and plague. All the usual suspects. Unlike other civilizations, however, you can’t really point to a single event, or even a short period of time, which served as the turning point. It just gradually declined in importance. Its ancestors are still alive today, whether or not they are aware of, or place any significant emphasis, on this long-forgotten heritage. There is a lot that we don’t know about life in the Kingdom, and of course, it changed over the centuries. The lands where it once stood are still there, and I believe there are a few arcologies in the region still. The memory of it, however, has unfortunately faded, and that’s thanks to a much stronger focus on European culture and history. For many of our ancestors, the nations of Africa were backwards, uncultured, and irrelevant. How many were there who didn’t know—or couldn’t admit—that various regions of Africa served as both the seed of human life, and the heart of civilization? We’re all from there, and so I would argue that the Kingdom of Aksum is everyone’s story. In the spirit of this reality, I urge you to educate yourself on its history, even if it doesn’t mean going to visit this dome. I still definitely recommend coming here. It’s a great replica of what the region would have looked like back then. You can’t find it in the simulations. Trust me, I checked the virtual stacks. It’s not that it wouldn’t be possible, but people are more concerned with replicating the Firefly / Serenity star system, and The Flying Forest, which is just a regular forest where you feel intoxicated. I shouldn’t judge. I should just be grateful that it exists in any form. I learned so much here, and I know you will too if you just give it a chance.

Microstory 12: Round House

Detective Urdea raced through the alleyway, the suspect always at least four meters out of reach. They flung themselves over a fence, under a railing, and in a space so tight, the buildings might as well have been attached. Urdea was about to take his shot when they found themselves in a large crowd. There was some kind of block party. They zigged and zagged and weaved and bobbed through the mess of arms, beer cups, and balloon animals. Instead of trying to protect himself within the crowd, the suspect got himself out, and Urdea took his shot. Dead.

After checking for a pulse, he opened the case that the suspect had evidently stolen. Eight slots. Seven vials. He ordered the contents to be analyzed immediately. They discovered it to be what's known as The Silver Plague, a bioweapon that could wipe out the planet. And Urdea had apparently killed the only person who could have told them where the last vial was.

For the next several hours, he and his partner sifted through restaurant receipts and security cameras, trying to find out who the suspect had been working with, and what they were planning to do with the plague. They talked to confidential informants, family members, field experts, and sister departments. Nothing. Meanwhile, the entire metropolitan area was evacuated. The country was put on DEFCON 3. The nation panicked. The world held its breath.

Finally, a uniformed officer caught someone trying to break into the dead suspect's apartment. They took him to an "off-the-books" location and started "interrogating" him,  using the phone book as a "frame of reference". They asked him questions about how he knew the dead suspect, what he did for a living, etc. But they said nothing of the vials, hoping that after hours of questioning, he would give away what they needed without even realizing it. Finally, he appeared to be broken, and they asked the real questions. "Where is the vial?"

"What vial?"

They hit him again. "The other vial!"

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

The phone book was more red than it was yellow. "What did you do with the missing vial!"

"I don't have any other vial. They were all in the case!"

Urdea was growing impatient. "You're telling me that there were eight vials when you last saw the case?"

"What? No." He spit some blood on the floor. "There were seven vials. There are ONLY seven vials."

"Do you think I'm an idiot?" Urdea growled. "There are eight slots in the case. I'm not gonna ask you again. Where. Is. The last one!?"

"Yeah, I DO think you're an idiot," the man shouted. "The case manufacturer could not have known exactly how many slots we would need. They didn't have one with only seven slots, so we rounded up! You have all the vials! You've had them the whole time!"