FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #23

Baro was wandering in the Control Center alone. By the look on his face, I could tell the Medan had never seen a Living Kernel before. That wasn't unexpected, since all their DIVE ships were operated by arcai. Nevertheless, no arcai can catch up with soma and our ships are the most reliable in the whole Commonwealth. Soma does not make mistakes.

Soma was also the reason we retained the dominant influence in every field of science, technology and economics. This balance of power had kept the Commonwealth prosperous and relatively peaceful for thousands of years.

Our troubles began when a huge armada of Explorer ships disappeared while on a long-term mission. When those same ships unexpectedly reappeared many hundreds of years later, they brought something or, rather, someone, back with them. Since that day, the whole Galaxy has been engulfed in blood and terror. For the time being, only a handful of worlds on the outskirts survive. But they are going to be destroyed eventually, like our home world.

In the blink of an eye numerous Nua colonies were left devastated and no one knew what was going on. No one was prepared.

All major kennar, including ours, gathered their forces and sent arcai to start a massive construction very far away. This is how Kan Diona was born. The rest of us were holding out against the unknown enemy, while every nation, all that remained of the enormous Commonwealth, was evacuating to there. Not all of them made it in time.

Medas was one such world with its system fleet destroyed and no one to help while the population was being devoured by Hunters. Since there is no soma in the Medan blood, Harvesters probably weren't interested in them. But our presence could attract them here, possibly it already had. And if someone indeed survived on Medas, the success rate of such a rescue operation would still be zero, simply because all previous attempts in other systems had failed.

When the Hunters run out of food, they relocate to the next habworld like a plague, but an intelligent plague with spaceships. We know too little about them, except for the fact that their technology and power are far superior to that of most of the Commonwealth. Still, we have one clue about the Harvesters' origin: something called Alima Eni, a distant and long forgotten memory, sleeping in our soma. A memory nobody would want to remember, even if they could, like those people without soma.

The enemy of our Ancestor. And the very reason we exist.

Since ancient times the Danna have not favored contact; it was never peaceful or successful for us, bringing only destruction and death, dragging us down into bloodlust and darkness of mind. Despite that, we were always semi-nomadic, traveling between places, exploring the world.

At the dawn of our civilization we shared the planet with another intelligent but younger species, genetically very close to us. However, they had denied soma by trying to erase it from existence, along with us. Heavily outnumbered, we fought back, and we conquered the oppressors. Although their numbers were more than fifty times greater than ours when the slow assimilation began, within several generations after the war soma had taken over all of their bloodlines, favoring our kind and adding only a few traits from the once-dominant species into our genome. Now all that is left of them are light skin, brown or golden eyes, or blond hair here and there. Those without soma eventually died out but not everyone was able to keep soma until today. Those became Tue Nua, the new peoples.

Though not a living thing, soma is carnivorous. It protects what it wishes to protect; it feeds on what is in the way. We wanted to survive and soma granted our wish. Neither soma nor we desire destruction. Our mutual ambition is to travel among the stars in search of our Ancestor to continue our journey by His side. Our ultimate goal.

Countless memories of things that existed before us were inherited along with soma. Even Somg, our Ancestor, is one of them. We wouldn't chase memories if they were only things of the past, but soma has accumulated information about our own people who once were real, living, breathing beings. Our technology was born from those innermost memories. This is why we are sure everything we dream of is or was real.

Soma is our gateway to the immense Universe that continues endlessly beyond things like space and time. The Space-Time-Energy-Matter/Mass-compressed structure, the Inner Space that stretches inward as indefinitely as, and interconnected with, the Outer Universe, and something much more than this, yet something that can be passed down through relatively simple natural reproduction. Inherited from our Ancestor, it is integral to our blood, a construct we all are born with. Yet many mysteries regarding this object, as well as the Ancestor Himself, remain.

We want to know. We want to know who we are and what we are capable of.

I want to know.

And yet we were dragged into another war. Another seemingly inevitable and gruesome legacy passed down, along with soma.

Before our beloved Sla was born, one of the Ancestor's kin, facing the annihilation of her Motherworld, sacrificed her soma and sent it to a world no one would find too soon. That soma contained all the information about her people. Arriving at our home system at its birth, it seeded a young planet and slept within every living thing, waiting for life to evolve towards intelligence. And when the first intelligent life arose, soma fully activated.

That life was us.

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.

But could some of His direct descendants have survived somewhere?