Prophets

A circle of absence was obscuring the stars on the other side of the Voice, eclipsing them, and growing. In the disk was nothing, a deeper nothing than existed between the stars. It grew, and grew, until the Voice itself was eclipsed by it, absorbed by its flat nothingness.

Bill observed it, fascinated. No indictor of mass, or distance, or velocity, only of apparent size. As it shrank, he couldn’t tell if it was shrinking, or receding.

The Prophet’s Voice was no longer in front of him.

Bill thanked the universe for sharing one last mystery with him, and he resigned himself to ceasing to be.

The cloud that was Adam’s ship enveloped the Prophet’s Voice like a shroud, a cavernous dock forming out of the mass of the cloud to contain the huge carrier. An ovoid space coalesced, alive with writhing tendrils reaching for the Caliphate carrier even as the maneuvering engines fired, releasing gas and plasma that was silently vented outside the dock.

The tendrils fused with the body of the ship, integrating with its systems, possessing the kilometer-long tach-ship more thoroughly than a predator its prey or a virus its host. In moments, the struggles of the maneuvering jets ceased.

High above the imprisoned vessel stood the being known as Adam.

He stood, sculpted, hairless, naked, a perfect eidolon of human form, though he was far from human. He favored this form because it echoed the one with which he achieved enlightenment. It was the perfection of that form without the clumsy cybernetics implanted by human doctors and without the forced schism between biology and machine that existed before he last saw his homeworld.

Before he had last seen Mosasa.

Adam walked, his motion defined by his own mental image rather than any sort of gravity. He wished to descend, and the vast mechanism made billions of adjustments to itself to accommodate him. Just as his body breathed air provided by the tendrils around him, a cloud of air that his ship created solely for his benefit, and which dissipated as he passed.

His feet touched the cold metal that formed the skin on the top of the Voice. It spread a thousand meters before him, nearly a hundred on either side. Vast as it was, still most of it was the tach-drive. He smiled in admiration. Clumsy and crude, like an artificial brain made of cogs and gears, but the Caliphate had done well with the small kernel of knowledge he had bequeathed them.

As with the Sword before it, he had no desire to damage this vessel.

He walked until he came to an emergency air lock. As he approached, it opened. The Voice’s systems were now a part of him as much as the cloud of intelligent matter that engulfed it. He lowered himself into the air lock and allowed it to close and cycle around him. Allowing the ship to depressurize would cause unnecessary death. Adam did not want deaths.

He wanted lives.

He stepped into the corridor and the emergency klaxons stopped flashing. He sent commands that reset all the systems on this ship back to normal operations. As he walked to the bridge, guards shot at him, IR lasers tuned to burn flesh rather than damage equipment. A hole burned into the spine and the skull of his body, mortal wounds if he had been even as human as he used to be.

But that had been over a century ago.

A bulkhead door descended between the guards and him while the tiny machines maintaining this form repaired the damage. In two strides there was no visual evidence of the wounds.

The bridge was in chaos when he entered, the human crew unable to comprehend their loss of control. It took several seconds for anyone to notice his presence. When he was noticed, it was first by another pair of guards, leveling their own sidearms at him.

He did not deign to pay attention to them. Instead, he stood, facing the bridge of the Prophet’s Voice as the crew and the officers slowly turned to face him.

Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti was the first among them to speak.

“Who are you, and what is your intent?”

“I am Adam.” He spoke, and the holo cameras turned to record his image, broadcasting it to the whole ship. “I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

“You are Bitar’s envoy,” Hussein said.

“No, Admiral Hussein, he is mine.” Adam spread his arms. “I have come to lead you to shed this flesh and