Ancient Hunter

Slowly I picked myself off the floor. I’d fallen face first into the dirt of the passage floor. I’d been lucky I couldn’t feel any injuries. I checked my face carefully feeling flushed red from embarrassment. Dusting myself off I glanced around. I was in a coffin shaped tunnel that led from the ruined arena to the computer cavern. I now understood why it was shaped this way. It had been made to accommodate the Keeper’s wings. Except the last time I’d seen Mouse she had forsaken her wings. I suppose to make her more approachable to me. In truth I hadn’t expected to find the entrance too easily or so dramatically. I went over to my pack from where I’d thrown it in an effort to save myself. I was probably in a mess but with no mirror I couldn’t be certain how I looked at the moment. Brushing off myself I walked to the exit or rather hobbled shame faced glad no one had seen me fall. Stepping out in a lighter cavern made all the more eerie by a green glow. The greenish tint to the light was coming from active rods. As much as I was tempted to pick one up I didn’t as visions of my previous enslavement washed over me. Call me a coward it wasn’t a feeling I’d wanted to repeat. I certainly couldn’t pick one up and use it the way Joyce had done.

Shaking off my feelings I carried on walking. After a while the spires of the computer appeared. Unlike the ruin this computer sat on an island in the centre of a lake of corrosive sludge. Only a narrow causeway separated the island from the shore. I wasn’t here for the computer yet I had another objective. I walked past the sludge lake with its green tingled ripples like the waves in normal water. Beyond the lake was a cluster of hexagonal columns twice the height of me. Some were still showing glowing green symbols the others were blank. I walked over to the nearest blank column and touched it nothing happened. I glanced across at the nearest glowing column and considered my next move. The instant I touched it, it went blank and glowing green holographic figure appeared. At last I’d found a Keeper but what confused me was that was this Keeper was a hologram. I could see through it and wasn’t the flesh and blood of the others. She was kneeling one fist pressed into the ground. Her long hair covering her face like a veil her head bowed in supplication. She had wings which, were clenched tight to her back.

“Forgive me mother!” she said.

I stared at her at a loss for words. When I first encountered Mouse she couldn’t vocalise. She communicated with pantomiming gestures. Later it was as backward text, then a tinny voice, lastly speaking to me in a normal voice. “For what?” I finally asked.

“For not going with the others. I was afraid,” the holo admitted.

I restrained myself from repeating her words. “What do you mean by that?”

“To our new home the First Ones are making for us.”

I spent six hellish weeks on that world yet I had no idea where it was. “They not there now?”

The holo looked up she was wearing my face but a more angular version of it. “Are they not?”

“I can’t contact them,” I admitted. “And please stand I’m getting a crick in my neck.”

She slowly stood her eyes on me. “Mother?”

I winced at that although it was technically correct I didn’t like being called that by someone probably thousands of years older than me. “Can you contact them?”

“I will try mother. They may not answer they were angry with us. We chose to stay frightened of the changes.”

“We?” I guessed she meant the other glowing columns

She made a gesture towards the columns. “We who remain.”

I brought myself back to what I wanted to know. “None the less I need to find the others?”

“Of course mother.” The holo made a bow.

“Please don’t call me that I’m Gwen.”

“Mother, sorry Gwen are you going to punish me?”

I stared at her confused. “For what I want to find the others?” I paused then continued. “I need your help.”

“I’ll help if I can?” the holo said.

I couldn’t keep thinking of her as a holo, she had to have a name. “Do you have a name?”

She spoke the odd combination that no Human voice could vocalise.

“Preferably one I can pronounce,” I told her.

She looked at me for a moment. “I am called the shadow that passes over the moon.”

I considered what she had told me. Mouse had just as a complicated name I ended up calling her Mouse. “Do you mind if I called you Moon Shadow?” I asked.

“With your permission I will take the name Moon Shadow.”

With that in hand I turned back to my original task. “Now let’s go I need your help with the computer.”

“I don’t know much about the computer,” Moon Shadow admitted. “That was the Leader’s task.”

I guessed she meant Mouse. “You mean Mouse?”

Moon Shadow nodded.

We walked back to the computer on its island Moon Shadow easily keeping pace with me. We crossed the causeway to the computer. In front of the spires was a hole into which I was forced to place rods and fill them. I shivered at the thought of how helpless I was. “We get a rod and stick in here?”

“No it only fills a rod.”

“So how do I access the computer?”

“This way mother.”

I noted she had gone back to calling me mother. Now wasn’t the time to correct her I needed her. I followed her to the computer itself the spires reaching to the roof like a set of steps. I know I had to climb them. In front of the cluster of spires was a post about waist high and kind of sloped at the end facing me.

“Place your hand on that,” Moon Shadow said pointing to the post.

I placed my hand as directed. Images flashed through my mind faster than I could comprehend. I withdrew my hand and stepped back a massive headache forming. My vision blurred.

“Too much too fast,” I stammered trying hard to regain my equilibrium. “I couldn’t understand. Is there any way of slowing this thing down?”

Her voice seemed distant to my ears and I began to sway. I closed my eyes trying hard to clear my head.

“I’m not an expert,” Moon Shadow replied.

I stumbled back and opened my eyes I stumbled again. “I...”

“Mother?” Moon Shadow uttered sounding concerned.

The lights went out.

I woke in a foetal position on a bed close to the columns. There was a pillow under my head and a cover over me all black. I knew they were nanobots this whole place was made of nanobots. I sat up a surge of pain pounded through my head. I shook it off the best I could and glanced around. Standing in front of me was Moon Shadow looking anxiously at me.

“Moon Shadow?” I winced a bit at the sound of my voice.

“Mother, thank First Ones you are wake. We were worried about you.”

“We,” I blurted out. I saw all the columns were dark. It was then that I noticed the holos of the other Keepers. “What happened?” I had to ask even though it was obvious I had a brain overload. I’d been lucky I could have been lying in my own blood dying from a brain haemorrhage.

“You passed out,” one of the holos remarked. “Too much information in one go. It overloaded your brain.”

The speaker looked like an older version of me with a permanent grim expression on her face.

“Running Deer,” she said before I could ask her that question.

“How do I access the data?” I asked thinking about Joyce’s rod. She had full access from the start.

“You don’t it’s as simple as that. You can’t it wasn’t designed for you in mind,”

Running Deer stated bluntly a little too bluntly.

“I need to find the others!”

“I know we tried we can’t contact them either.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. An ominous thought crossed my mind I hated myself for thinking it. “Are they dead?” There was a lump in my throat and sinking feeling in my belly.

“We would know,” Running Deer said with a nod to the other Keepers.

“They aren’t,” another holographic Keeper said. “It is as if they are in a deep slumber.”

“To this end,” Running Deer announced. “Moon Shadow will be your contact.”

“Why me!” Moon Shadow protested.

“Mother contacted you first and you woke the rest of us. They are our rules.”

Moon Shadow frowned, if a holo could do that. “I’ll be mother’s contact.”

I focused more on the fact the Keepers couldn’t contact the others. Instead of being at ease I worried more. “What do I do now?”

“We need the First Ones,” Running Deer said. Several Keepers nodded at that.

“Can you do that?” I asked.

“We’ve tried but they aren’t answering us.” Moon Shadow said.

“But they will speak to you,” Running Deer interrupted.

“How do I do that?” I had the impression the last time I’d spoken them, that they weren’t too enamoured by my association with the Keepers.

“That I don’t know,” Running Deer admitted. “None of us here do.”

I remembered that two of the First Ones were watching over Saros and I had an inkling of where I’d find them. A plan formed not a good one it could blow up in my face. I considered my next move.