CANAISIS ∞ Chronicle One ∞ 3: A Shard Of Code

99 ∞ Implications

Day 00010 to Day 00011 Mission Nilex

Ahmid stared.

Ayla's words were irrefutable as she stood next to the Captain's image on the wall.

"She was but a child at the time when the Captain met her," she added softly as she pointed at the Captain's face projected on the wall. "I saw her draw this in his presence and gift it to him."

Ahmid sat up straighter and rested his hands on his legs as he thought. There was no denying it. The image was a perfect representation of the Captain as if it had only just been drawn. If the Progenitor sketched him as he was when they met, then he had not aged a day. Cold sleep could account for it if the man had remained in cold sleep all this time. But if Ayla were right about how long this ship had been sailing, then the Captain had to have accumulated awake time, and those times would have added up. He should have aged, even just a little, since then.

The meeting room the Captain had taken him to, where they'd discussed Ayla's condition and whether to give her the nanos... The clues had been there, right in front of his face. The purpose of the room, the books lining the shelves...

Ahmid rocked back as the full impact of the realization hit him. Multiple threads of thought ran through his mind, the implications of one question after another.

Is that what Captain Levant tried to tell me in the diplomat chamber?

How much time would it take for continents to shift enough to be noticeable? He needed to look that up. And have Ayla try to draw a map of the Captain's Earth. Maybe he'd be able to estimate how much time had passed by the continental drift—if drift caused their shift...

Could there really have been an entire civilization in the past that we know nothing about?

The evidence was this very ship. Legends of it pervaded through all of their history, the "Visitor from the Stars"...

Ahmid shook himself back to the present—he could think about the past later. Right now, Ayla had entangled herself with the Captain and had the same nanos he had. The Captain had warned him she would have an extended lifetime, but now reality stared at him from the wall. Ahmid gazed at the illustrated Captain's eyes, seeing the self-sacrifice and pain in them, the same eyes he'd observed in the diplomat room.

Will you have that look in your eyes one day, Ayla? The question struck Ahmid with a pang of guilt and uncertainty. He'd made what he thought was the right choice at the time.

Did I make the right choice? Will we lose you to this ship? You're linked to it now—it speaks to your mind.

Ayla had survived, and there was no doubt she'd been dying. There were no Oral records of anyone returning from the Lost. Ahmid had spent years under the Elder's instruction, learning the records. Once someone was Lost to the Gift, there was nothing to do except make them comfortable and wait for the end.

The records spoke of the type of people a Gifted could become Lost within, what to look for, the types of trauma to avoid. A lot depended on how well the subject dealt with their trauma in the first place, and their mental stability. Some people could not be healed, once broken.

The Captain seemed the most stable of sound minds, flexible and not so rigid as to break. Yet, Ayla had become Lost to the Captain's memories. Could anyone handle seeing their homeworld destroyed, their people all dead? Then there was the Oak tree to consider. The Captain's personal connection with it could not be denied—it had almost taken Ayla for good.

How powerful the pain must be to imprint the seeds... and the strength, the strength required to have returned from such an emotional abyss?

Deep respect for the Captain filled Ahmid. The man had stood within the rift between two dimensions for Ayla's chance at life. And after recovering, he'd shaken off the act as 'Insanity is a matter of perspective'.