Chronicles of Chaem: Part 2
Sci-fi that I wrote aged 15 and recently rediscovered in my parents' loft
I first visited Ʞæm on my 4th Ʞæmo birthday – making me about 12 by Ærþ years. My family – mother, father, a twin sister and two younger brothers – had an apartment by the sea waiting for us…
Have you read Part 1 yet?
Chronicles of Chaem: Part 1
It’s commonly thought that one’s life flashes before their eyes as they come to their death. Only one thing flashed before mine – the air. I fell through the sky; up or down, I didn’t know. But I was moving fast.
Part 2
Record Entry #211: Ærþtime 62209+4y5
I first visited Ʞæm on my 4th Ʞæmo1 birthday – making me about 12 by Ærþ2 years. My family – mother, father, a twin sister and two younger brothers – had an apartment by the sea waiting for us, for which my parents had moved heaven and hypothetical Earth to get for us kids. The year went well, and we left when I turned 5. We managed to explore the area around for several Ærþkilometres, and made the annual trip to Alõxentrum where the Ʞæmoss–Ærþhuman celebrations were held. Obviously, Ʞæmosshumans were also invited, along with any other sector of the many part-human species, so the party was damn big. Only 12.6 million purehumans stayed on Ærþ – there were about 2 billion of us dancing and singing for eight days!
Back on Ærþ, things had moved on a great deal. Well, changed. Nothing for the better. Teleports had shut down across the planet, leaving limited access, restricted to only the major cities. Pyoclausima, the world capital of Ærþ, made very little contribution to the running of day-to-day life, leaving us in the dark about what to do, where to go, whom to see.
Quite literally, in the dark. The recent addition of the sky super-cities filtered the majority of the harmful UVX rays, but left us only in darklight. And, without instruction, the mechanical power plants could not grow the necessary fuel to power the planet. Times were hard, with no work and no space. Our living eighths – the concept of quarters had been replaced centuries ago as the population grew – our living eighths had been repossessed while we were on Ʞæm, so we had to hunt around to find our only friends left on the planet in the hope that we could stay there. Thankfully, they were reasonably well-off and had enough room – they owned one of the last particle regenerators, so they resized a bedroom off the corner of their flat.
While staying with them, we learned there had been an epidemic – of computer-related suicides. With the new triquantum personal place-stations3, a wormhole had been found, allowing you to hang yourself. I’ll spare you the details but, apparently, the world had gotten bad enough for this to become popular in the short three years that we were away.
After only two months, we left for Ʞæm.
Record Entry #212: Ærþtime 62209+8f3
~ About three Ʞæmo years later (Now)
I was now 8 by Ʞæmoss time, allowing me to leave and work as one of the many intergalactic-relations managers. No thanks. I set off, my boss thinking I had that intention, but all I really wanted to do was explore. I had spent the first 25 years of my long life moving between only two planets, helping to deal with conflicts between the Ʞæmoss4 and us. Of course, the problems were completely Ærþhuman-created – all the Ʞæmoss wanted was peace and harmony (although I always thought that was a bit too idyllic to be true). But, as the species we are, all we can ever do is ruin things.
Somehow, someone had found something to fight over. A largely one-sided war had broken out in the orbit of Kalos5, the larger moon. Being the peaceful species that they are, the Ʞæmoss had very limited weaponry, so had to resort to outsmarting us with pure technology. Our vital silicon-water supply more than halved, leading to hundreds of indirect killings. Needless to say, the Ʞæmoss won, with the help of the Ʞæmosshumans and some of us – the pure Ærþhumans had fallen much too far behind to have a chance against them.
When we weren’t fighting for peace, I was fighting for my life. Every season, there was something new after me: countless assassins, humanoid robots, mechanical plants, temporally-shifting ocean boxes, artificial micro-stars, and even the occasional maniac-driven bus. I evaded all of them, but by no feat of my own. Nineteen attempts on my life, in total. Only two seasons in and they were after me.
My sister, Andrya, always claimed there was some kind of divine intervention to prevent my death; she said at times I had even physically died. Somehow I had returned – a usefully misplaced electrical current, a robotic virus that malfunctioned at the last second; and twice I had been only comatose instead of dead.
When it wasn’t divine intervention and I hadn’t saved myself, it was Andrya who totalled the enemy. She had always been there for me, which is more than she can say for me. I had been slightly overprotective of… myself. So as I was still alive, I decided to explore the inner galaxy. Andrya could come with me, but we’d have to smuggle her out first. I was meant to be on business, but I could just as easily ‘get lost’ somewhere and not come back for a few years.
“When you’ve quite finished embellishing your life story, sir,” a mechanical voice mumbled. “Then we could maybe get going?” We haven’t actually started searching for your life-source yet.” Denoxs (/ˈde.nokʃ/)6, named after the smaller Ʞæmoss moon, was the other half of ‘we’.
He was the first-ever robot\human: humanoid robots had been around for centuries, but after suffering a horrendous accident during the Ʞæmoss-Ærþhuman war, I had taken him home and fixed him up as best as I could. Too much of him was damaged for a multi-stem-cell exxo-matrix healing, so I fused a few advanced robot parts into his body. A robotoid human.
“Err… I was eternally grateful for what you did, and decided to stay with you forever. Is that what I was supposed to say?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Basically, Denoxs is with me, like my personal… servant. Sorry – but officially I have to declare him as a robot in anywhere official, because technically Denoxs is dead. I have his death certificate. And robots are there to serve us. “Come on then…”
We were off to the spaceport in half a haq7 – about two and a half hours’ Ærþ time – and I still had quite a lot to pack. Damn, I was going off for about 3 years, exploring the near-galaxy, just in a short time, and everybody thought they’d see me again in a couple of weeks. Denoxs had done most of the planning, allowing for our ‘official’ beginning – where I should have been managing the Intergalactic Relations between the extra-local planets. Most of the major power planet-nations were connected by multi-thread wormtubes, allowing quick contact and travel between them, but there were still several that were at least 30 Ærþ minutes away at dȣbliȝtspeed8. I had to deal with them. Simple solution: remove my lot; it was probably our fault again.
Part 3 coming soon…
Missed Part 1?
Chronicles of Chaem: Part 1
It’s commonly thought that one’s life flashes before their eyes as they come to their death. Only one thing flashed before mine – the air. I fell through the sky; up or down, I didn’t know. But I was moving fast.
Ʞæmo — /kʰɛːm.əw/ — general adjective for things of planet Ʞæm.
Ærþ — /ɛːɹθ/ — The current home planet of Humans. Mythologically the planet Earth (Terra) of the ancient legends, but this is widely disputed.
place-stations, derivative of the legacy corporation Soh Nih, providing augmented reality atop extra-dimensional spacetime, developed after quantum computing enabled blending hyperspace with virtual environments.
Ʞæmoss — /kʰɛːm.ɔs/ — the people of planet Ʞæm.
Kalos — /kʰɛj.loʃ/ — one of Ʞæm’s two moons, Kalos and Denoxs.
Denoxs — /ˈde.nokʃ/ — my partner in crime, named after the smaller of Ʞæm’s two moons.
haq — /hɑːq/ — one “hour” on Ʞæm, almost exactly 5 of Ærþ’s hours.
dȣbliȝtspeed — /dʌbˈlɑjt.spɪjd/ — the basic, lowest speed over lightspeed; anything slower is braked by spacetime fabric. A minimum of double speed is required in order to overcome metaphysical Planck constraints.