The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

who created him then tried to kill him because he feared the monster. A zealot who died protecting him to give birth to the same monster. A soldier who dispatched beasts to the battlefield now pleading with the very monster he gifted to the world.

“You gave me new life,” James said. “Now you will know me.”

All confidence – and color – vanished from the Major’s face.

He tapped his amp.

“All soldiers. Fire. Scramjets 4 and 6: Pursue and destroy.”

Hundreds of flash pegs and tracers screamed in pursuit of two targets in red. James smiled. He heard the warrior in Rayna exult.

Know me.

60

J AMES BLINKED AND RETURNED to the white forest. He stood eye to eye with Ignatius Horne.

“This is how it ends for us,” James said. He respected the Jewel for coming in his hour of need, emerging while James faced paralysis inside a ReCon tube on Perrone’s Scramjet. “You deserved a final goodbye and thank you.”

“Yes,” Ignatius said, deep wrinkles of resignation crisscrossing his features. “You’ve grown beyond me. What remains to be seen is whether you will be worthy of all I’ve given you.”

“You mean the map? The one that shows me how to tear down everything and start again?”

“Ah.” Ignatius closed to a hair’s breadth of James, inspecting him as if analyzing every pore, every new hair in his stubble. “Did you not see another clue in the map? Did you not see a choice to rediscover your humanity instead?”

“I am not human.”

“No. Neither was he.”

The white forest began to shift. The trees morphed into rays of sunlight. Soon, they became confined to narrow channels. Twelve beams of light broke through the settling darkness and formed a perfect circle around them both.

“What are you showing me, Ignatius?”

“I told you I would finish my story, but only in your moment of desolation. You wanted to hear of the sacrifice of Ignatius Horne and the fall of Hiebimini. Look upon it, James, and see a miracle.”

He stood amid two thousand people ranting and hissing at two figured in the center of a circular theater. The only light burst through twelve portals equidistant around the theater.

He identified it without the guidance: This was the Hall of Sun, most revered spot in Messalina, capital of Hiebimini. Thirty-five years ago.

The eight-foot-tall Chancellor at the center had golden hair and dressed in an orange/brown robe. He dwarfed the slouched Hiebim at his side. The natives cowered at this giant among them.

“He was a beautiful man,” the Jewel said, its words echoing from behind James. “You will reach his height in time.”

The man called Ignatius Horne spoke to the crowd about truth as a liberator. He told them: “At the core of human pain is a struggle to vanquish truth and its unrelenting pain.” He told his listeners the most painful of truths, that they had been deceived for nine centuries. He spoke of a Chancellor-made drug called Genysen that colonists took to strengthen their immune system against their own worlds. But the true purpose of the drug was control, to make them worship the Chancellory and never stand against it.

The news stunned the crowd. Ignatius used this moment to tell them how the Chancellors were to be pitied, how they overreached and now stood on the brink themselves. Ignatius then revealed he was not alone. “The second voice,” Ignatius told the crowd, “is called The Father, and he bears a message founded in the death of another civilization not unlike our own.”

James whirled about as a hidden voice whispered in his ear.

“Yes, James. I said Ignatius Horne was like you. Part human, part Jewel. The last of a 3,000-year-old bloodline.”

“It was you? You were ‘The Father?’ ”

“In a manner of speaking. The lines between the Jewels of Eternity are in constant motion. They redesigned you with a piece of him, although I cannot say where that piece begins and ends.”

“How did you come to me from so far away?”

“Distance is relative. My entity has never been to Hiebimini.”

“Then how?”

“It is neither here nor there. Not this star system or the next. Neither one universe nor another. What matters, James, is what happened in the Hall of Sun. Watch him, James. Learn from him.”

The Father spoke through Ignatius and told the story of his creators, who more than a million years ago evolved to their genetic height and fancied themselves gods. They lived for centuries before being brought low by a pandemic. He explained how the Jewels spread their legacy across the universe. How these Jewels came upon Earth before the rise of the Chancellory and manipulated the course of history. And how, after colonization, the Chancellors discovered a mineral capable of elevating their genome: Brontinium. Without the extract, he told the crowd, Chancellors will break down. “In three hundred years,” he told them, “the final descendants of the Chancellor caste will go to dust.”

Chaos broke out. Shouts of peacekeepers storming the hall. Shots fired in all directions. Ignatius fought hard until he fell to his knees.

“His birth name,” the Jewel told James, “was Ilya Hollander. He was trained to be a warrior, a killer, a destroyer of worlds. He rejected his father’s lies and fulfilled a prophecy ending the longest tyranny in history. To become this man, he needed to find love that he might give of himself to liberate others. To show the truth of their existence.”

The man named Ilya Hollander contorted. Rivulets of blood emerged from every orifice and snaked through the lining of his robes. The blood danced around him and congealed. The new mass took form, spawning limbs and a head. For an instant, it transformed into the first man in Ilya’s bloodline. Ilya spoke to the old man. “Safe journey.” The old man dissolved into a haze and blasted