The Last Human Ch. 48: The Infernis Gates

Cartaphilus led us away from the landing ramp down a narrow passage lit by a soft green light. His footsteps were completely silent on the floor, and the sweep of his long robes made it appear as though he was gliding through the air. I followed in the middle and Amon behind.

As we walked, I tried to get a measure of the old man. He had lived through it all, and I realized there was something disturbingly alien about that. Amon was distant, often incomprehensible in those times he stared off into space without saying a word. What then, was this man who had lived nearly twice as long?

I wondered if that was how I was going to end up—if I didn’t meet an untimely end first. I realized that with age you just grow further and further apart, it’s as if you’ve never left the old days, and the world outside simply moved on while you spent less and less time in it.

Cartaphilus spoke, interrupting my thoughts. “Amon has told me quite a lot of your encounters, and while I can’t say I have all the answers, perhaps we can try to piece some of the puzzle together,” he said, without turning back.

“I can’t do it again,” I immediately replied, wary of what the two expected of me, of what Amon told Caliban and Ariel.

Cartaphilus sighed. “As much as we all would like that to be the case, I think the three of us have enough experience between us to know things are never that simple. Some of the others in Sanctuary might get the wrong idea, though. That’s why I advise we stay quiet about this until we know more.”

I glanced behind, and I saw Amon pursed his lips. I could tell he regretted telling Caliban and Ariel as much as he did, wetting their appetite. It was an odd slip from the man so usually closed-mouthed that I knew it could only come from an unbearable hope after all his centuries. The man might not look like it, but this was the equivalent of him shouting and beating his chest with delight.

I was rather focused on the other thing the silver alien said, about the part of the “wrath” that was coming for Sanctuary. But who knew what that vague threat meant?. I didn’t contemplate on it much because it just begged further questions, and I didn’t have the time nor space in my head to worry about mysteries I knew I wouldn’t find the answers to.

Cartaphilus passed a wrinkled hand over a sensor, and a door slid into the ceiling. He ushered us into a round, black room with a single pedestal in the center. It was like we were standing in an empty void. Orange perspective lines followed us to make sure we would not trip or fall in the optical illusion.

The old man stepped over to the pedestal where he thumbed the controls. He paused, hunched over the dials. “From your descriptions, I need you to identify something for me. I understand you have a telepath in your retinue, but I would prefer what we discover in here to remain between us for the moment.”

“Ingrish is trustworthy,” Amon tersely said, insulted.

Cartaphilus sighed. “It’s not so much your companion that I take issue with—so long as she stays and dies in Sanctuary. I do have your word on that, yes?”

Amon nodded.

“The problem is of facts one would rather not know because they carry certain responsibilities. Secrets come with heavy obligations, even upon the dying.”

Even as Cartaphilus said those words, his expression betrayed a certain hunger. Despite his protestation, I noticed he was all too eager to continue.

He twisted the controls, and the scenery of the room changed in an instant. We were now in some kind of advanced laboratory control center. Computers and strange machinery lined a viewing port overlooking a testing chamber. My breath caught in my throat as I saw what was inside.

A portum—the same as the Xurak one, was suspended by cables in the air. This one looked brand new, however. The archaic symbols around the circumference were not faded. The worn and rusted mechanisms from before looked to be in perfect condition, gleaming and cold. The eight spikes were seating fixtures for glowing power sources.

“So you do recognize it?” Cartaphilus asked.

I glanced back, and I saw the old man was watching both me and Amon carefully. I nodded.

There was a subtle twisting of the old man’s expression. His mechanical eyes squinted with an undeniable concern, and yet the slight grin of his gold-plated mask revealed a strange excitement. It was mixed signals in his prosthetics I supposed.

“Well, that answers the question of what exactly was in that Xurak ship.” Cartaphilus turned to Amon. “There are only fragments, of course. But what we know about them is that they were first called Eisner Gates.”

“Gates? As in, there are more of them?” I asked horrified.

Cartaphilus nodded his head and twisted a dial on the control pedestal. Holographic humans appeared in the laboratory, and they began working the controls. Parts of the portum began spinning. Slowly, one-by-one, certain symbols came alight with a blue glow.

“They were originally a project for a faster means of travel. Instantaneous, actually. It was thought to be a workaround to the limitations of bending spacetime. You could cross any conceivable distance in the time it took for you to step through.”

“So what? Like puncturing spacetime?” Amon asked.

Cartaphilus shook his head. “Not quite. It isn’t traveling through a sub-dimension like dark space or burrowing through with a wormhole as with Gravitronic Relays. It’s a bit more akin to the abandoned theories of teleportation. Do you know why humanity never adopted widespread use of the disassembly model?”

Amon shook his head, recalling early memories of his own education. “It takes inordinate power and processing to dissemble an object to its constituent components, and there’s no getting around transmission decay and reassembly corruption.”

Cartaphilus nodded. “And we never pursued it further because the act of reducing information to its constituent components changes it irrevocably. Reassembly will never return the original, no matter how perfect. The best we ever got was warped imitations. Perhaps good enough for the more malicious and eccentric inhabitants of the galaxy, but it was never viable for practical use.”

“The Xurak thought it was a breach in the universe,” I said quietly, my eyes watching the eighth symbol light up. Inside the portum, the same nothingingness opened up like slicing an eight sided wound in air.

“Poetic, but only half right. It’s more like a sifting filter. When something enters the event horizon of an Eisner Gate, it does not go anywhere in the traditional sense. Rather, it enters a state of superposition.”

Amon turned to Cartaphilus confused.

The old man turned another dial on the pedestal. Inside the testing chamber, a a hydraulic arm lowered from the ceiling, holding a caged rat. I squirmed as it neared the boundary and dipped through, disappearing into the nothing.

“The function of the gate originally is to split the universe itself into a wave function, using the inputted matter as a mathematical parameter. The gate then collapses the universe with the object in its desired location. From a conventional perspective, nothing travels through the gate. We simply rewrote reality where you were always on the other side. No disassembly. Instantaneous travel. But as you can imagine, the scope of possibilities if the device worked are much more… powerful. We’re talking about playing with the foundations of reality itself, rearranging the facts of the cosmos, perhaps one day even a solution to the Negentropic Principle.”

The hydraulic arm retracted, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking at first. It was then I realized that the small animal had been perfectly inverted.

“It seems that it never worked, however. Those things which came back were always changed somehow. Sometimes lethally, sometimes subtly. I only have very incomplete notes, but it appears the research around this gate never progressed to human testing.”

Amon shook his head, looking at the results. “I’ve never known mankind to shy away from technology. From what you’re saying, they would’ve pursued this until the end of the universe to get it to work, no matter the consequences.”

“In a sense, they did.” Cartaphilus shut down the simulation. His wrinkled hands gripped the control pedestal. “You understand that this can never be leaked to the wider galaxy? Never.” The old man spoke with a new tremor in his voice.

Amon gave an incredulous smile. “I’m well-experienced in keeping our secrets from aliens.”

“No no no,” Cartaphilus quickly replied. “This is not for our sake. It’s for the sake of the entire galaxy. This specific research has to be forgotten by history. Before I enter my final sleep, I intend to delete every last entry of this technology from the Final Library. I only kept it this long because I—” The old man looked away, covering his mouth.

He quickly regained his expression and gave a sad smile. “You know, it’s difficult. I’ve found we fall into these roles, the parts we play at the end of our species. I had four centuries to curate all our knowledge, all our mistakes, trying to figure out what went wrong. Disasters come and go. A planet’s destruction does not mean the end of a species, of a people—often it means the birth of several dozen others. But this mistake, this error, if it’s made again, could lead to the end of everything.”

Amon squinted suspiciously. “There can’t possibly be something like that in the archive.”

“It’s not. These particular records I just showed you were from a people called the Aathar. They themselves discovered the device, and after their world fell, their research was catalogued as a curiosity. That Gate was never rediscovered, and the people who took the data, this holo-play, had no idea what it meant either. I’ve had to locate a hundred disparate references in the Library along with help from our patron collecting information from tomb worlds and derelicts and the like. I’ve been building this picture ever since I arrived here. In our long history, I assume this fact has been discovered and purged a thousand times by now.”

“What? What is it?” Amon asked impatient.

Cartaphilus spread his hands on the pedestal. “It’s… scattered. From what I’ve been able to gather, things came from the gate. Things humanity didn’t send through. They must’ve had a different name back then, but we know them well enough—they were the Aberrants.”

The name alone seemed to still the room itself in horror. The air was knocked out of my lungs. I knew the histories, of course. Amon had made sure to instruct me in the Aberrant Wars. The first one, the original encounter, had all but fallen into myth. It was so many millennia ago that the ravaged worlds had been destroyed and terraformed a dozen times over. What was certain, is that the Aberrants were first beaten by conventional weapons, a grave mistake which left millions of them disembodied but very much free. Each subsequent war drew upon these legions of ghosts, finding ways to reconstruct themselves or otherwise convincing some ignorant species to build bodies for them.

Amon looked as though he had been shot. “I was always told they came from outside the galaxy.”

“An educated guess right in the broad strokes but wrong in the details. In the beginning, I discovered they promised knowledge of some sort. That was why we constructed bodies for them. There should be nothing, there was nowhere they could’ve come from and yet they did.”

Amon stepped forward. “Are you saying the Xurak can create more Aberrants?”

“The Aberrants were never created. But if they are in possession of an active Eisner Gate, then yes. There is a tremendous possibility that more could come through.”

Amon went pale white. I couldn’t imagine the blow it was to him, knowing he had been there with a zero-sword. He had the opportunity to destroy one of the portals which let those monsters enter our universe, and now, the Fifth Aberrant War might’ve been for nothing.

But I was gripped with a far more horrible realization. There was a shape that was forming in my head, details forming an outline of something though I did not know what. I’ll never forget the way the Xurak doctor looked at the desiccated corpse in the Ossuary Core. No, the Aberrants weren’t created, they were sent. There were other things through the portum, and the Aberrants were their… pets, no—tools perhaps?

The silver alien told me wars were being fought in my name. I didn’t know what that meant, but I felt I was approaching a terrible epiphany, a possibility so far out of reach that I didn’t dare think it. But I knew there was intention, something was out there. Whatever was behind the Xurak doctor, whatever was behind the portum, it had plans. I felt if I just stretched out my fingers, I could feel a terrible design that stretched back to the very beginning of humanity.

And worse, I felt in my bones it was reaching its conclusion. The Xurak doctor told me I was to tear down the universe, but now with what had been shown to me I was starting to believe it might actually happen—and the Xurak doctor told me I was somehow the one to do it.

I ran outside and threw up.

…

It was some time before I weakly stepped into the holo-room again. Both Cartaphilus and Amon looked concerned at me, but I waved them off. I wasn’t going to tell them about my realization—it was so out of the bounds of my thought, I just wanted to shove it in a box and forget. I didn’t even know how I would put it into words, and besides, it was just speculation based off the testimony of an entity I didn’t understand.

It said it was my servant, but it didn’t appear to take my orders. So maybe that was a lie. I couldn’t verify anything, and I honestly didn’t want to. I wanted to curl up in my room and forget. I just wanted the visions to go away, to stop intruding into my life and leave me alone.

My eyes glanced around in paranoia, half-expecting the Xurak doctor to step out of the shadows, but the holo-room remained exactly as it was.

There was a quiet moment in the room before Cartaphilus spoke again.

“You understand that all I have are the material facts, and I’ll provide as much as I can, but only the two of you possess the meaning of these events. Amon told me the Xurak were trying to make some sort of sacrifice to obtain power, is that correct?”

I rubbed my wrist where my hand had been sliced off by the zero-sword. “They were trying to make something they called a Mashiach. I know you said there’s nothing on the other side, but there is. There are things on the other side that want to come through. They’ve told me.”

“From your visions, yes?” Cartaphilus asked. “Or is intrusions a better word?”

I winced.

“Tut hypothesized of entities,” Amon said uncomfortably, as if giving voice to that fact somehow dangerously made them more real than they already were.

Cartaphilus grinned, an expression I found disconcerting. “I think we’re well beyond the point of speculation now.”

Both Amon and I looked at the old man as if he were crazy.

The old man straightened and composed himself. “I apologize. I can’t imagine the trauma you two must’ve gone through, but this is a great discovery. The Aberrants were one thing—an Aberration in the way we conceived the universe, an exception to the otherwise mechanistic reality we lived in. But now we have confirmation, and not only that, but a basis to go off of. The idea of spirits is as old as humanity itself, found in every religious and spiritual tradition. There are millions recorded here in the Library. Do you realize what this means? From your encounters, we might finally solve one of mankind’s greatest unsolved mysteries! Or if none of them are correct, we now have the grounds to uncover the truth of the universe!”

Amon seemed awestruck by this. Our previous conversation in Cargo Bay 13 was one thing, but I suspected he didn’t dare let himself hope too much of the possibilities. There was too much that might simply be incomprehensible, but Cartaphilus was convinced, and that was enough to move anyone.

“How would that even be possible?” Amon asked.

Cartaphilus gave a bitter chuckle. “Do you know how the fact of a ‘soul’ was established? A composite of a body, a mind, and a metaphysical self? Of course, I hate to use such crude terminology, and what actually constitutes a soul might be something very much unlike historical thought. But do you know how?”

Amon gave a knowing look, but he didn’t answer.

The old man continued. “Because when we cut down the Aberrants with zero-swords they didn’t come back. And if that followed, then what did that say about us organic beings? We can work backwards, with such violent means if necessary. Do you understand the implications of this? With that single truth discovered, we ruled the universe with the fear of the zero-sword. We then had the power to send our enemies to suffer for eternity in those prisons, even something as small as that was why the galaxy was forced to wait until they could end us in a single strike. The risk of retribution was too great. Imagine what else there might be? We already know of a resurrection!”

Again, there it was, that hunger in Cartaphilus’ expression. I could tell he had sold Amon. The two were all too eager to plunge into this—for the rest of their lives if they must. But they only had what were still my experiences, and I had more than reason enough to be cautious.

“What would be the point?” I asked.

“The point!?” Cartaphilus looked incredulously at me. “If there are devils lurking in the darkness, the more we learn about them, the more we can defend ourselves. And we’ve seen one miracle! It may very well be true that you can’t do it again, but if we can learn the mechanics of these forces, these intrusions into our reality, then perhaps we can also learn to manipulate them. The truth is power, power to change things, right the wrongs. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what could save—”

Cartaphilus suddenly stopped, breathing heavily. His shoulders slumped, allowing the hover-nodes to take more of his weight as he weakly gripped the control pedestal. Amon and I stepped forward, ready to help the old man, but Cartaphilus raised a hand. “No, it’s all right. I just got too excited. This old body isn’t able to keep up with me like it used to.”

“Do you really think we can learn to control these things?” Amon asked, his eyes alight with a similar fire to Cartaphilus.

“We have the last remaining great repository of human knowledge. If there’s a secret to learn, it would be somewhere in here. We only have to figure out how to unlock it.”

…

We spent the next few hours searching the Library in the holo-room, sifting through hundreds of religious texts, pictures, and artifacts, trying to identify anything that resembled what I had seen. I scrolled through the texts of the Hacyon and their atomic theories of reincarnation. Cartaphilus showed me bas-reliefs recovered from the tomb world of Sutekh, depicting images of gods falling from the sky. We scrutinized the prophecies of Galifria, warning of the last human who would learn a secret that would destroy the universe.

But after a fruitless night, Amon was finally called away to take care of some pressing business, leaving me and the old man to continue alone.

I was quickly growing tired, and I wanted to go to sleep, but something kept me from leaving. I was fearful of Cartaphilus, exactly what he wanted to discover—if the man even knew of it himself. My trust had gradually eroded that these men were so eager to plunge into what had been hell for me.

But after the long hours, the old man finally switched the holo-room off again and looked at me. The withered face and the gold-plated mask frowned, and I saw something behind the single-minded mania I had seen earlier.

“I must apologize for that bit of theatre before, the speech about fixing things.” Cartaphilus stepped away from the pedestal, and the hover-nodes lowered him so he was sitting next to me. “It wasn’t untrue, but it was meant to stir the passion in you. It seems to have succeeded with Amon, but you are unconvinced. That skepticism is wise. I agree, blindly pursuing power is a recipe for disaster, although it seems to me that your heart is just cold, which if you don’t mind me saying, is distressing to see someone so young.”

I was unsure of what to make of this development. “You want something.”

The old man smiled sadly. “Don’t we all?”

“What’s the point? You’ll be dead long before we find anything useful, and I could spend the rest of my life in this room and still not find what you want.” It was rather blunt, but I didn’t know how else to put my frustration.

“So, it’s not a matter of whether what we find is worth it. You just think the truth is unreachable.”

“You haven’t seen my visions.” I retorted. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s worse than torture, worse than the Xurak. I hate it.”

Cartaphilus’ expression became distant. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through, and I apologize if I came off as insensitive. This holo-room is its own prison in a way. I have spent so much of my life plunging my hands into this knowledge, and I think I might die before knowing what any of it meant. I confess, it is true that I want to fix things for your generation. I want the truth to give you what I can’t. But you’re right that I am ancient, and if we do ever find anything, it’s probably long too late for me. My excitement is entirely for selfish reasons, I admit. I want to look back on my life and say it had any real meaning. I want to know the truth because it’s the only way I can die, knowing that I touched something real. Or failing that, to know what it was all for, the extinction of our species.”

“It’s all been incomprehensible to me—both the good and the bad. It’s always just more questions.”

“Well, at the very least, we both know a little more than when we started. I can’t promise the full picture, but I can guarantee that we will learn, if only bit by bit. And for you, after a few centuries of slowly accumulating that knowledge, I’m certain you will strike something sound if you continue with it.”

“I don’t think I even want to know.”

“Maybe not, but take it from me, it’s never going to leave you alone.” Cartaphilus leaned back and looked up at the blank ceiling. “The truth—it’s that thing which burns you up inside even if you deny it. Even if you don’t know what it is, it’s always there. I can’t tell you what it is, but I feel it in my bones. It’s that silent thing that has been following you your entire life, that ache that never goes away. And you have to chase it, run after it. Otherwise, it’ll never stop hurting. I thought I might entice you by what it might give you, but I now see you’re beyond even that now. You’ll have to pursue it for its own sake.”

I pulled my knees close. “The silver alien told me something, something it called The Truth of All Things.”

“Amon mentioned of it.”

I thought a moment for how I would ask the question. “I… know there are evil things behind the portum. I want to think there are good things as well. I don’t know what’s a lie and what to believe. I wanted to think what the alien told me was a lie—somehow that would be easier. But then, I realized that if I could go back and stop the Xurak from taking me, I wouldn’t because I think it would mean I wouldn’t have gotten Leah back. I think that was true, and I think what the alien was trying to say was that we would all one day feel that way, and I’m hoping that that might be true as well.”

Cartaphilus put a hand on my shoulder. “I think that is a very comforting thought. Many religions speak of a heaven—paradise. And I suppose that since we know there’s a hell, whatever form it might take, it might not be too far of a stretch that something like a heaven might exist.”

It was something odd I noticed. Cartaphilus spoke as if these things were still far away, when for me they were anything but. I realized that for both Amon and the old man, they were reaching for that ephemeral thing, meanwhile it was crashing into my life whether I wanted it or not. Leah too, in a different way.

It was a strange thought. They sort of understood it, but neither Cartaphilus nor Amon realized what they were chasing was in the room with them. I didn’t need the Xurak doctor appearing from the shadows to know that that something was always lurking.

I got a strange feeling in my stomach. Both Amon and Cartaphilus hadn’t figured it out yet. They thought the truth was some esoteric thing out there. They were searching, but they didn’t realize it was playing out in front of them.

Meanwhile, I knew deep down I would be the one who had to take sides.

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