The Silence of Zegandaria by Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (book recommendations website txt) 📕

Closing his eyes, Von Blask wiggled the fingers of one hand.

The commander spotted him and approached.

Since he couldn't speak, Von Blask made a motion with the fingers of one hand. He barely moved them.

The commander didn't need much - he understood immediately.

Von Blask had hidden a small Narenzian chip. The military man had never seen it. On it was carved in human letters, in the Earth language, "Charon."

Then the warrior gasped. Blood had filled the inside of his spacesuit. Rento was a well-known master of the martial art of "evoro". There was a special strike where, with a certain twist and slip, the weapon was knocked out of the opponent's hand, or rather out of the settled direction for aiming the strike, and its blade back into the attacker. Rento had seen the account of many of his opponents in this efficient enough manner.

Von Blask died. He died like a warrior, but not on the battlefield. He died in a stinking infirmary. In foreign territory.  Dies at night in his own blood. He'd lived as a foreigner all his life, and in the end he'd gotten what he deserved.

The corrupt platoon leader didn't know what to think. The letters were clearly visible on the surface of the chip - they were roughly scratched or even chipped. It was hard to tell which.

The military man looked around - there was no witness to their conversation. He quietly left sickbay. That night was the night of death!

" Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind"

Albert Einstein

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: GENOME MAN

Genomic Man was the crowning effort of the Ertol Gies Company - it was a thing of astonishing good - both as a discovery and as an application. Genomes were a way for many to see what the weak link in the human race was. Where exactly were its flaws? What lay at the root of it?

In the end, they were able to delve precisely into the pseudogenes of DNA. In the past, science had labeled them as junk, including various introns[1] and unbalanced sequences, but earth scientists had subsequently looked at things with different eyes. They began to realize what was actually going on. It turned out that maybe the evolution of the genome was hiding in them. Yes, various eukaryotic organisms had achieved enrichment of their genome by intermediate splicing of these very introns, but for a long time scientists had looked down on them in relation to the fact that they had arisen in the primitive cell as parasitic sequences. Well, after long and hard work, a number of new genes emerged that were quite useful.

Pilots who were cloned before birth had enhanced capabilities. But it was not physical strength that was the main focus of the work of Earth scientists, but the adaptability of the organism to different environments with extreme conditions.

Many would call this research immoral, but that was not at all accurate. Over time, they learned to value those genes that would be important to their survival.

The babies were worn in special ebaranium capsules filled with various mixtures of saline as close as possible to their natural environment in their mothers' wombs. Everything was calculated down to the last second, even hundredth.

If he could have seen them, Endugus Mylrow would have exclaimed:

Why have you assumed the role of God? This crosses all boundaries.

But subconsciously he would have marveled at the progress of his colleagues. And there was a reason why.

But the truth was that Earth had long been a place where all kinds of boundaries were crossed.

The cloned genome humans were designed not to think about what was about to happen. They threw themselves into battle without emotion because they had never received a mother's caress. The frightening thing was that the scientists of Korolan Bru had been given new unlimited powers by the Earth Federation and would meet any challenge that would come their way. They had to go all the way. Many of the flights were being limited to five-six-seven month expeditions to destinations like Mars. This was far from the taste of Earth bureaucrats. They had set their sights on conquerors far beyond the Kuiper Belt as the initial destination to unleash their vast influence. Nor could it be denied that the majority of specialists worked in isolation and did not cooperate at the various stages of cloning. They worked in complete secrecy and total silence. There was no exchange of emotions. The clones had to be perfect to fulfil their purpose. They did not have to exist in the next time period.

At one of the secret working ops, Hermonal Bivors, a prominent biochemist and genetic engineer, said something rather prosaic, but also scary:

- Do we need to care what the fate of the clone will be, even if he, by some amazing coincidence, learns to feel and understand like a normal human being? This, in our eyes, should only be a small, annoying, but very dangerous mistake that we should analyze and correct. In my personal professional opinion, most of the clones are unlikely to live beyond thirty-thirty-five or thirty-six years. Their lives will be completely devoted to serving our interests. And in the next period of time no one will remember them?

No one dared challenge his reasoning. They all nodded, not very confidently because of the slightly ominous atmosphere around them, but in their souls they realized that Hermonal Bivors was absolutely right.

One of the young trainee scientists only muttered:

- What would it be like for them in the afterlife? They would never fit into the line of creation!

To his particular surprise, Hermonal heard him, turned, came back with quick steps, and answered him:

- Colleague, you have expressed your opinion brilliantly. But we are not playing gods, we are playing survival. The human race cannot remain on this Earth forever though it will still continue to be our home for a relatively long time. Someone has to fall scapegoat and that someone has to be them!

The pilots were undergoing harsh and relentless training that took up much of the time they had. It was clones like these who worked in shifts on Mars. Corollan Brew had calculated, without regard to the moral side of the matter, of course, that it was much cheaper to make deliberate "delays" of so-called liaison ships, which, incidentally, might well be diverted to conquer new colonies around the solar system.

As an old rule, people of religious persuasion had become part of it all. They relied on higher powers to justify their actions, but that was just a kind of salve for their own guilty consciences.

To speed up the cloning process itself, special gene banks were prepared that contained ready-made DNA databases of people of all ages.

One of the most unpleasant parts of this process was the simple fact that there were also definite risks of allowing "defects" - there was also the production of cancerous growths, which were in fact a real plague for the scientists, who worried not so much about their own morality as about the actual occurrence of unpredictable growths.

The foresight of these studies was frightening enough, but the pace of progress was above all.

Over a period of some thirty years, the cloning process was optimized much like the production of a product.

There was also a certain play with the transfer of memories from the so-called donor to the clone that was created from its DNA.

Even we on Zegandaria would have been surprised at the monstrous meticulousness in following this whole plan.

Korolan Bru had his agents on Mars and also on the satellite Cerberus. They were also clones, of course, but they didn't know it. Top secret information that was absolutely forbidden even among the majority of the leadership was that only and only clones could leave the confines of the planet.

The corporation quickly began mobilizing its forces for its grand plans. The truth was that space projects were costing it an awful lot of money, and it had to curtail some of its intentions and concentrate on the minefields of the Moon, where manpower had been reduced to a sanitary minimum, the translational settlement of Mars, and not least, of course, the outpost of Cerberus.

But they knew this was not enough to maintain the balance of power with alien civilizations.

So they decided to use their available resources and transform their forces to consolidate their supremacy.

[1] An intron (short for intragenic region) is a nucleotide sequence that is removed during splicing during RNA maturation.

"Every child that has come into the world is a sign that God has not yet lost hope in humans."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: GERARD DOWNS

Gerard Downs was the man we needed, but unfortunately, after Von Blask's departure, he was squashed like a cockroach in a rather unfortunate meteor hunt. A lot of people screamed at the conditions they were put in. And Gerard Downs was famous far and wide.

Meteor showers were interesting to us kids, who later became youngsters and adults, as we had never seen anything like it. We left Zegandaria too young.

Charon was too remote a place - far away from all the other planets. Death reigned here. And icy hopelessness, so this cosmic phenomenon warmed our hearts.

Moving on the surface of Charon itself was a real challenge too - there was no doubt. The small satellite was covered in what's called nitrogen ice, which could blow you away like a bomb if something glowing touched it. Fortunately our spacesuits were advanced enough even though they were sort of homemade.

The Kuiper Belt was the main source of meteor showers in the solar system. All sorts of debris traveled in that region of the solar system, which we actively hunted, and sometimes some of it was actually useful.

But Gerard Downs was an adventurer who, back on Zegandaria, was known as a crazy head. He got us carried away very quickly, and one by one we were briefly separated from the pre-secured route. We could have easily perished.

Then one of the debris managed to shatter the glass of his visor and kill him.

His face changed, and he struggled for a small breath of oxygen - one last breath that never came. If we hadn't been tied to each other with very strong zerith ropes, he would have just flown off into orbit or straight into open space.

He looked so helpless, and we all knew he was a wonderful man and party animal. Since