An object floats in the darkness.
Something approaching cognition occurs within it, the embryo of a mind. It possesses something akin to an awareness of its sensations: an umbilical wetness; pressure, a distant rushing thing it cannot name as sound; it exists in a chasm of unknowable dimensions, for it lacks the ability to consider what a dimension is. The meaning of things are hidden from it. Even the passage of time is unrecognized, for it lacks the capacity to differentiate past from present. It is an eternal input, unprocessed data flowing from receptor to an unsparked soul.
An object floats in the darkness.
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One hundred twenty four summers have come and gone on Hellenia since the last Emperor of the Aspect was swept away on a distant world. Chaos reigned at first. It was the first time in their recorded history that a dynasty had collapsed without an ambitious man ready to seize the throne. The news had left many agape in wonder, though many more had grown imbittered against the state of affairs in the latter Empire, and bent their backs to their daily toil with little care for which sanctified ass sat on the high throne. Each new master had followed in the footsteps of the last, as often by force as by birthright, for as long as they had been Hellenes.
However, this time the throne remained vacant, each King as spent as the next by decades of a breakneck industrial and military output the likes of which the Gamma Quadrant of the Milky Way had never before seen. Such were the aftershocks of the collapse of IRON. The civil strife and the destabilized economy had sown the seeds that lead to the vacancy of the throne. What had made the Greeks as strong as they were, their decentralization but ability to act as one under one banner, had been hammered into something that benefitted the needs of that now-broken alliance. The deathblow to the Emperor simply cracked what had already become brittle.
A few claimants attempted to take the reins, but with little power to enforce their claims, they fell quickly to siphoning what little they could for personal gain before being backstabbed by the next. Ineffectual men and women stained the throne with their blood, until it grew empty and began to accumulate dust.
Eventually, the grainships stopped coming. Hellenia had long grown accustomed to extra-Helion support for their basic needs. The continent-spanning Metatropolis, bloated by bureaucrats and petty nobility, each a tiny cog in a vast machine, left no room for local agrarians. Biomass that could be readily reconstituted as food began to dwindle. Olympus left prayers unanswered. Hoplites discharged without food were not easily pacified by the placations of the priesthood. The people began to riot, then starve. Slowly, out of desperation, what buildings could be converted into masstilleries were, and the hunger was portioned out by the day rather than the hour. The great home city began to fall to ruin, vast tracts of it uninhabited, in other places small knots of Greeks subsisted, clustered around life-giving food-distributors. Noble and commoner alike shuffled in line, too weak to care about anything but the next morsel.
It was little better in the more diversified Kingdoms and Satrapies of the rapidly falling Hellenic Empire. Deconfederation had followed shortly after the Throne was vacated, as each ethnic group and crown or laurel fell back to petty rivalries and local dominance. The delicate balance of food distribution, material distribution, manufacture and infrastructure came apart at the seams, like a great organism grinding to a halt. Agrarian worlds were overstocked to abundance, bracing for plunder that each King was too weak to commence. Even genetically engineered food will eventually spoil.
The same was true of communication, maintenance of the great machines, and education, as each small pocket of Hellenoi grappled with the task of reestablishing internal continuity and the ability to feed and shelter their people. One by one, they broke away, relearning what it meant to be independent.
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An object floats in the darkness.
The first pinprick of being blossoms in a newly quickened mind. A sense of self and other. It dwells, suspended in its own universe, the blankness of the before giving way to a trickle as it gnaws at its own boundaries, groping out into the black with sensory functions that it has no names for, no language to grant names with. It struggles with automated processes, the lublub-dupdup of its twin heartbeats, the steady slower tide of an expanding diaphragm. The sensation of something warm and thick and wet sliding into its lungs, the steady roar to either side of its cephalic location. Thoughtlessly it explores the body it inhabits with its newly minted mind.
A soul floats in the darkness.
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Psomas Ibn Al-Mizrahes had labored for half a season under the hot implacable shine of Helios overhead, feeding the poor, ministering to the empty, tending to the weak. He had vied for position, levied for good will, scuffled with rivals, lied, stolen, and blasphemied. Through either a talent for politics or simply the twining of the thread of Fate, he had managed to get himself transferred back to the inner places of the inhabited Met. These were the portions of the capital that had suffered the least from the fall of the Hellenes. Yes, there was still hunger, but the stink of the poor and the dying did not choke the way it did in the portions of the city that teemed with the less fortunate.
That which was gangrenous had been amputated, tracts of the city little more than graveyards of starvation, cannibalism, weakness, disease and death. Even augmented by standardized cybernetics as they were from birth, the people of Greece were not immune to suffering. They died as any being did deprived of nourishment, healthcare. Those augmentations that set them apart from their ancestors, were implanted with the anticipation of constant maintenance, upkeep, and state-of-the-century healthcare. Now, there was none of that.
Psomas had jockied for position within the inner capital for a singular purpose. A gambit so insane that he felt he must attempt it if only to spite the gods. He no longer truly believed, but he felt a seething anger at the unanswered prayers that made him uniquely susceptible to this absurd gambit of sacrilege heaped upon forbiddenness. Two nobles, and as far as he was aware the only other two Greeks stupid enough to undertake this task, had approached him, and over the course of months, hatched a plot with him about what could still be done. Yes, if the Gods existed, let them feast on this insult as much as they did on the suffering of the People.
Psomas crept now, in the dead of night, into a gallery of the palace long unoccupied. Even his privileged new station, little more than a vacation from the front lines of the ministry to the starving, did not grant him license to be here. This was the last hallowed place.
Far below the surface of the Imperial Palace in Metatropolis, there was the excavated remains of a city that had been built stone by stone. Four thousand, three hundred and sixty one transhelion (Re: years) ago, this place had been called Pella, the capital of ancient Makedon. This had become the center of all of Greece in the histories, and beneath the crumbled ruin of the old palace, one of the sons of the King of Kings had moved his bones here, into a tomb that every Aspect-Emperor that had ruled in His name had visited symbolically to take the laurels before they sat upon His throne. This was a still, quiet place. So venerated was it in the mind of the Greek that to trespass here would be unthinkable. There were no guards, no locked doors, nothing to bar his way, except the sacrifice of what made him him. The ultimate transgression of his duty.
There lie within a raised dais, and upon that raised dais there lay a sepulcher, and within that sepulcher there were the bones of a man whose name had pushed the Greeks from the small peninsula (Which the Met had long since carpeted in towers of steel, canyons of glass), into the far flung stars. It was etched into the marble, eroded by age: ALEXANDEROS
He paused, swallowed, and walked beneath the arch.
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A soul floats in the darkness.
Epiphany came suddenly, exploding in its mind like the chips that fly away from the craftsman’s hammer when it first strikes the marble. Each new concept builds upon the last, simplicity built upon simplicity until simplicity became the scaffold of complexity. First, an animalistic anatomical awareness, building upon what it had mostly worked out for itself. Color exploded in the core of the mind, a kaleidoscopic landscape of infolding geometries that melted and danced, every conceivable hue in all the colors of the neathbow running like water between the spaceless timeless vistas that gulfed between triangles iterating upon tetrahedrons. The blackness of the outside-self, the constant stream of sensation, even the rushing wetness sound all fell away as this new dimension opened. New concepts were not so much conceptualized as they were forced to be within this newly minted mind. What had started as a trickle was becoming a flood. A theory of self. Axioms. The three foundational laws of thought, bivalence, value theory, modal, conditional, anti-sectionary and bivalnian logics. Quanta, Quora and Qualia. Language. Something to hang the concepts together into a coherency the likes of which the Nameless had never before grasped. Next, the complete works of the Logicia Magna Graeca. All of this happened faster than any mind could hope to cope with, each new experience spilling over and around the last, shouting down the fragile sanity of this neonate that was Nameless. The brain is an interesting organ, for its plasticity prior to birth renders it able to store a vast amount of information. The trick, of course, is repetition. Duration is irrelevant. Nameless tried to scream as the deluge of information hammered through its shell again, the same information repeated, faster, a blur, a buzz a howl. In the darkness the form did little more than twitch its jaw, hands curled and clenched decorticate, toes pointed, feet arched, phallus erect.
Each repetition feels faster than the last, more fluid. Mindless vistas of color grow more fluid, congeal into images, each more resolved than the last, each concept more solidified. The craftsman raises her hammer, it skitters across stone, chips fly away, a shape begins to emerge from the marble.
A man floats in the darkness.
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Psomas hurried from that still, quiet place, tears hitting the parched stones beneath his feet. A second set of eyelids flick across his vision, granting him still images of negative-imagery to navigate the gloom. He holds a precious thing in his hand, clutched to palm, a gambit for the future of his people. No vacuum as vast as that cursed throne could remain unoccupied.
As he picks his way along the edge of the excavated old city, the megalithic ceiling above him, the floor of the modern palace, groans and creaks with the climate. The immensity of what his people of built for a moment renders his frantic interior monologue quiet. Few Greeks are privileged to see this place, the before juxtaposed against the epidermis of the now. Even if his view of this gallery is a stolen thing, he will pause to marvel.
He approaches the elevation shaft that will return him to the muted, modern lighting of the surface, yet as he approaches, he sees light spill across the stones. His twinned hearts quicken, the veins in his neck bulge, his bowels clench and he bares his teeth, knuckles white as he grips his forearm.
“Psomas?” calls a familiar, singsong voice. Deotripedes.
“Psomas, I know it’s you, skulking down here you lowborn sow. Come out into the light, so I don’t have to further defile this crypt by dragging you out by the hair.”
Psomas, a eunuch of few words, hunches his shoulders and shuffles forward. It is a pose he has often assumed. It gives his adversaries license to think him weak, sheepish, even daft. They underestimate him, and he has climbed their names like a ladder, to a place only Emperors were allowed to tread.
“There you are you shitrut,” Cooed Deotripedes, as if he had caught a child with his hand in the cookie jar. “Now what the hell have you gotten into down here in this place, hm? What could be worth what we are going to do to you in punishment?” Deotripedes, of course, spoke of ‘we’ as the priesthood. He had come down here alone, for he was a haughty man. A Baccanad priest, and a veteran hoplite, grey haired against Psomas’ young dark hair. However in these latter days, grey hair conveys the strength of spirit necessary to survive many long years. Deotripedes did not need escorts to apprehend a rat. He needed neither a spear nor his shield. With his bare fists he could beat these stones to rubble and break but a few easily replaced knuckles.
“What is it you have there, Psomas? Did you take a little trophy of your jaunt in the Old City? Don’t play coy, let me see, I won’t tell the others.” Trip, as he was called by the others, was as well liked as he was feared, but he had the attitude of a wildcat tormenting its prey when he had an enemy cornered.
However, what he had in strength, Psomas had in cunning. He could read people, exploit their expectations, and strike in the moment of befuddlement when those expectations were unmet.
Where one would expect fear he would insert an almost infuriating tone of nonchalance.
“Why yes, I did. Here. It’s the molar of Alexander the Great, long may he reign in Heaven.” He turned over the one palm, upon which was balanced the small tooth, browned by age and desiccation. Even now the enamel was beginning to grow even more tarnished, removed as it was from a climate controlled environment by a sweating palm. The enamel didn’t matter. It would last long enough. The ancient DNA inside was all that was needed.
Trip sputtered apoplectic, his jaw working soundlessly, eyes bloodshot, hands balled to mighty, gnarled fists. Deep within him adrenaline reserves no man was born with without some very EXTENSIVE editing dumped into his blood stream, the veins in his neck pounding at the rate of a bird as the rage built into what could become boulder cracking fury. “You-y-fwhat?” It was in this insensate pause as Trip grappled to understand the sin that Psomas had committed that Psomas calmly depressed the button on the reverse side of a cylinder he had held obscured by his molar bearing palm in the limited light. A ballistic bark kicked away dust to either side of the two men, and Trip was lifted from his feet spinning backwards into the hallway. A secondary cough of a detonation split even the hoplites reinforced sternum, his two hearts gushing blood down his tunic in a rapid fountain. Adrenaline carried him back to reeling to his feet, but without the lifesaving machinations of his armor to protect him, this was a death blow. Stumbling as if drunk, the tall man slipped in his own blood, his three lungs robbed of air, and death came swirling down.
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A man floats in the darkness.
The fledgling identity he had built before he had known his name was washed away by the torrent of psycho-neaural autodidact as completely as a child’s tower in the surf of the beach. His brain had been flooded, pumped, with neurotransmissions mimicking the state of formed thoughts, lessons, everything that a Greek child is exposed to in diducatia, than logia, then Ludus Magna, the three levels of mandatory education to achieve expertise in the Greek world. The neurotransmissions were repeated over and over at the blistering speed only a autodidacthonian sub-sentient AI could output. Slowly, the neuroplasticity of this new brain slowly retained, building, growing what it needed to make an identity, thought, awareness. The process had taken..longer than expected, but it was working. Such an achievement with a body grown as this had never been officially completed before, for such an experiment was more than taboo under Hellenic law, it was the highest sacrilege. Well, almost the highest. Desecrating the corpse of the most venerated ancestor in the entirety of Greek civilization might in most people’s minds overshadow merely growing a clone, but the legality and social ramifications of the acts were far from the minds of the three figures that now sat uneasily around the cauldron that bubbled before them. A multitude of wires hung from the ceiling of this cold, iron room. The lighting was poor, the circulation was noisy, the conditions were cramped. The future all rested on this last toss of the knucklebones. The optimistic chime of an operation-ready alarm clashed with the depressing surroundings of the underbelly of a freighter-ship, and with a final glance at her two companions, a woman, a genius, named Callistrati Dimareti, glanced at Psomas and their third shadowed companion.
“Vital signs normal, atrial-sinuses are synchronized across the vagal arch, pressure is good, all lungs inflating as normal, his implants look clean, no immunoresponses. I have to admit now that he looks healthy, that for a few weeks I was worried that his generation’s phenotype was just too..indiverse to properly handle this level of augmentation.” Four glazed over eyes and two politely nod-smiling men pretended they understood a third of what she had just said. She sighed inwardly. Plebians. “All that’s left is to turn his lights on and see if psycholuminal programming made him crazy.”
Her nonchalance made Psomas visibly uncomfortable, but the second man was all but inscrutable.
“Are you ready? We’ve been waiting months for this. Brace yourselves for, well, anything.”
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A man sees light with his real eyes for the first time. He gasps, his lungs fill with fluid, expel. He retches. The world spins as gravity tugs at his limbs, heavy as lead, but he kicks, flails. His hand breaks the plane of the surface of the cauldron. Two sets of eyelids clamp shut against the sterile brightness of the light above. Abdominals flex, the feet brace against the basin, he wrenches himself upright from the lifegiving artificial womb he had spent his every moment inside of. His hands unfurl for the first time, veins bulge to contain the new volume, jugulars distend with new content, twin hearts hammer with new vigor and his blood thunders in his ears. Air fills his three lungs. Stale air hits his throat, parches it, and he expels more fluid. His eyes struggle to focus as his slick finger fumble at the tub, arms reach out and catch him in his slimed nudity; his pale, olive skin does not shame them. The coldness of the outside air feels crisp and cutting.
Slowly, the present coalesces before him, the whirlwind of thought and consequence fading away. Three out of focus faces huddle around him as tubes pop from specially designed ports in his arms, spine, and knees. He holds his hands before him for the first time. What should be gnarled with swordbearing calluses is instead new and pink and pale. He posses no true memories of the man whose DNA gave him life, but the annals of history, the images his mind created to focus him on digesting four thousand years of social and technological progress..he was born with certain irrational expectations of his own body. He lacks a bellybutton.
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Three faces wait with anticipation. As minutes pass, they each grow uncomfortable on the ground, kneeling next to this fluid filled tub, holding this clone in their arms. Dima coos gently to the shivering newly minted man. “What is your name? Who are you? Do you understand me?” Klaxons blare from the consoles behind her.
Spittle and umbilical fluid issue from the nose and mouth of the bald neonate. He lacks eyebrows or eyelashes but his eyes are like muted gold. He looks away from his hands and to each in turn. He does not answer the woman to his left. Not yet. He gropes for something in his mind, an imperative, something inborn. In a dialect of Greek so ancient it is only spoken by the Priest-caste, he utters his first words.
“Take me to Makedon.”
