Milo Skart had a terrible decision to make.
"Help me."
The pregnant teen girl stumbled into the lobby of the Atraville Hospital. Barefoot and tattered, she appeared ready to give birth.
"Help my baby."
However, the girl and her unborn child carrie...
Hock note: When Milo Skart and Dr. Chocka tussled in front of the Cale Vals, tipping the nursemaid and spilling the infant, Cale erupted with a fearful and traumatic blast of dark energy, blowing up all of spacetime. Standing directly over the source, Dr. Chocka was carried along the leading edge.
It was that silly boy's fault, Milo Skart. That's why it happened. That's why Chocka received the full brunt of the energy. That's why he had this question.
If Milo hadn't interfered, Chocka would have carried out his duties to Axion and none of this would have happened. He would have forgotten about his question.
But the infant was more than diseased. He was a dark energy abomination. He was the very demon of dark energy, the one who had been foretold, the one the world dreaded.
Hock note: If you'd like to read more about the tachyons and their prophetic vision of the demon, please see the full version of the story, Believe the Tachyons, available on Amazon.
It was the infant, not the professor, who was the abomination. The professor was a nobody. The infant was the true demon of dark energy. He carried all the power, an immense amount of energy, and he unleashed it directly on Chocka. Chocka got blown away when space-time rapidly inflated. The leading edge carried him along the shock wave as if expanding with space.
He flailed at the emptiness. He reached out to Axion but felt nothing. All he got was darkness. And that question that wouldn't go away, the one he had asked long ago. He was completely and utterly alone.
He felt as if he were in a dream with no control over his body. He had never known such terror. He thrashed with his arms and legs. He screamed. He tried to reach something solid, but nothing was there.
He had felt such terror another time, many years ago, back when he had been young and foolish. He had asked a question, such a very massless question. Why had he asked such a question? Why had he been so foolish? So massless?
Bold and brash, that's what he had been. Massless and silly, that's really what he had been. That's why he thought he could ask this question. He thought he was the smartest medical student of the bunch. He thought he could even beat out most of the ones with doctoral implants or the ones with anatomy coprocessors. He really could. He might have been smart, but he wasn't very wise.
Security mygs lined the back of the lecture hall. "They're for your own safety," the students were told. "To protect you from yourselves."
Yet, when he asked his question, the mygs were on him in a flash. They were so fast. They hauled him into another room, a very dark room. There were no windows. There were no people, only security robots.
"Where did you hear this question?" the mygs asked.
They were so strong. He didn't have a chance against them. They strapped him down to a table. Then they probed his head with a dark energy detector. As they swept it across his forehead, along the top, and down the sides of his head, it beeped in various spots. "Your neurons are showing some dilation."
One of the robots pointed a cylindrical tube at his forehead. Chocka was a medical student. He knew about gravity treatments and how they would shrink the patient's neurons to the appropriate size, but the pain felt very real, like a hot knife stabbing into his head.
The pain would ease while they asked him again. "What gives you the right to ask such a question?" Then it would come again.
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The treatments lasted for some time. As they probed him, they spoke to him. "Think of all Axion has done for you. Remember how Axion saved you from the plague, from the devastation of dark energy. Without Axion, the world would not have survived, and you would not be here asking this question. Remember that. Never forget."
It was several days before Chocka returned to his classes. He spent a few days in bed recovering from the treatment. After that, he devoted himself even more to his studies, and even more to the service of Axion. He would never ask such a question again.
He rose through the ranks. He graduated with the highest honors and took his place among Axion's most prized medical staff. He performed better than doctors with implants, better than those with surgical augmentations, and better than those with tailored hands.
And he remembered what the mygs had taught him. He never forgot the lesson. He dedicated himself to curing the disease of dark energy, to eradicating the infestation from the earth, and to executing any who used the vile stuff. He had made himself Axion's most trusted and capable lieutenant.
Now, just as suddenly as space had expanded, when he thought he might float off into outer space, he felt as if he had been yanked backward, down towards the earth, back towards the room on the third floor of Newton Hall.
As he landed with a thud, the question came back to him. Everything had changed around him. Ships, tanks, and robots lay strewn about in mangled heaps throughout the campus. Although Newton Hall still stood, the aluminum windows had bulged outward, and Professor Aidan's lab on the third floor had been totally demolished. There, the people lay about, injured and groaning.
His brain, too, had changed. His neurons had been elongated, back to their proper shape. That question from long ago surged through his mind again.
