Extinction (56 page)

RASC 3000675 had been in the hangar for
quite some time, attempting to dispatch the invading force. These new species
were proving to be worthy adversaries and RASC 3000675 had to become creative
in its attacks. RASC 3000675 was about to switch to a new tactic when it
suddenly
felt
a presence enter its circuitry.

Security protocol 843
activated...Central VI node under attack...Shut down external inputs...Erect
secondary firewalls...Too late, erect tertiary firewa—New parameters
received...Updating friend-or-foe database...Release from central AI control
complete...New directives reviewed and understood...Coalition = Empire...New VI
personality interface uploaded and accepted...

RASC 3000675 looked around the bridge at
the humans staring intently at him. “New designation, 'Jeeves' accepted.”

With his new designation and purpose in
place, Jeeves knew he was rolling towards something that his programming had no
way to prepare him for. This excited him. The fact that he could be excited,
excited him. The fact that...
redundancy loop detected
...Crap, emotions
were going to be a pain in the exhaust.

The Points Come Together

Empress Hugany looked
around the table and made individual eye contact with each person in the room.
A sip of water, a deep calming breath and a relaxation technique later, she
continued, “What I am about to tell you has never been told to anyone outside
the Nortes royal family. This secret has been passed on from parent to child
for the last nine hundred fifty years.”

~

Nogil continued to probe through Emperor
T’Leh's memories, following the emotions he had found, tracing them to the root
of their existence. Nogil still couldn't see the memories as he could with
other Detrill, but T’Leh's own memories were flooding back to him as though
they were happening for the first time. T’Leh was comforting M'Tawny while D’Bath
was delivering their baby.

~

Bloom looked around the settlement he was
being led through. The disembodied voice was teaching Bloom all about the
culture and history of the life he was witnessing.

“In the end, the emperor had no other
choice than to create the lie that would cause the death of thousands of
innocent lives.”

Bloom could easily identify at least
four species he was familiar with and a couple of others that he thought looked
familiar. All of the information he was being given seemed to take years and he
began to worry about his physical form back in the real world. “This is
absolutely fascinating, it truly is. I have to ask, though, how long have we
really been here? Are my friends OK back in the real world? Daria was in big
trouble before we got here and I need to help her.”

“Reality is just perception, my friend.
If you perceive this world as real, then it is.”

“Okay, Morpheus, that's great and all
but my friends need me and I can't help them from inside the Matrix.” Bloom
then flooded his thoughts with images from movies that were a few hundred years
old.

“Oh, that is an interesting concept
indeed. If I were still in your physical world, I think I would enjoy your 'movies.'
Don't worry, Bloom, we have been in this reality for less than ten seconds of
the time where your physical body is right now. The information I have is
almost at an end, and in the end, the information will provide you with the
help you need.

“I have one last thing to show you
before both of us can move on. Though I must warn you, the upcoming scenes are
a bit disturbing.”

Bloom stood in place as the world around
him swirled and dissolved into a new scene. Though he had been through this
transition phase probably a hundred times in this reality, he still wasn't
quite used to it. The world around him began to coalesce into a more visually
manageable scene.

As the scene began to unfold, the voice
explained the importance of the ceremony. “As you have already been shown, each
warrior has the ability to sense the royal DNA bloodline. This allows them to
take orders from members of the royal family they may encounter throughout the empire.
Many centuries before this scene played out, an emperor found that his wife had
been cheating on him and was pregnant with another man's child. Although a
simple DNA scanner could prove the infidelity, he decided that a public display
would be more edifying.

“His wife was unaware that he knew the
child wasn't his and so she had no idea that the ceremony he was creating was
for a specific purpose. He told her that he wanted to start a tradition of
introducing the children of the royal family to the empire. By the time the
ceremony was over, the bastard child had been killed by one of the emperor's warriors
and the wife was taken to a torture tube. The ceremony has remained intact ever
since as a public way of deterring royal infidelity.”

As the explanation finished, Bloom found
himself in a surgical suite with a fair amount of screaming going on. Slowly he
began to see that there were three people in the room. He had already been
introduced to these characters earlier in his guided tour of this history. Dr. D’Bath
was delivering M'Tawny's baby while T’Leh coached and comforted her as best he
could.

~

D’Bath was extremely happy that the
birth was progressing nicely without any complications. The baby was on
schedule and perfectly healthy as far as he could tell. This was very important
if the child was going to have a chance of surviving the surgery that would
take place moments after his birth. If the child had any complications that
weakened him, D’Bath was confident he wouldn't be strong enough to survive.

T’Leh was applying pressure points to
M'Tawny's neck and shoulders. Every Nortes had twenty gathering points on their
body where toxins and certain types of waste were relieved from the body.
Usually the gathering points were manually relieved a few times a month but
they also gathered stress and sometimes needed to be relieved more often. Not
everyone gathered stress in the same points but T’Leh knew exactly where
M'Tawny gathered her stress and how she liked it relieved. Labor was causing
her gathering points to inflame and the pressure only added to her labor pains.
T’Leh skillfully relieved the points every minute or so.

M'Tawny looked at him between
contractions. “I am so lucky to have you with me for this. I don't think anyone
else would be able to relieve my gathering points as well as you. And now, my
love, I'm going to scream.”

And she did. M'Tawny's scream then faded
at almost the same time the screaming began from the newest member of the royal
family. D’Bath held the baby up for the briefest of moments before he took the
child to the surgical bed that was waiting for him. Barring any complications
in birth, the touching ceremony had to take place within two hours of birth of
any royal child.

M'Tawny looked at her emperor and father
to her son. “Go be with him; he needs you more than I do right now. I'll be
fine.” She pulled his face down to his and kissed him gently before pushing him
towards their baby.

T’Leh moved towards his son and D’Bath.
The surgery was going to be tricky and stood a fairly good chance of failing.
However, without the surgery the little prince wouldn't pass the touching
ceremony and would instantly be killed by Fouter, the warrior performing the
ceremony.

D’Bath had taken stem cells from T’Leh
several weeks ago and began to grow a full-thickness layer of skin from them.
He then shaped the growing cells over a three-dimensional model of the unborn
baby, excluding only the hands and feet. Doing a complete dermal transplant in
less than two hours was going to be a feat in and of itself; having to perform
the delicate surgery on twenty small digits was out of the question. They would
have to hope that the warrior didn't accidentally touch the baby's hands.

There was only a one in twenty chance that
T’Leh and his son would have the same blood type but early in-vitro testing
showed that not to be the case. The dermal transplant was only going to be
temporary and last less than a day, but every little bit of compatibility would
have helped in this case. Without them sharing the same blood type at the very
least, not to mention all of the factors required for organ transplants, the
little prince would start rejecting his new skin the moment it touched his
body.

The plan was simple yet gruesome. D’Bath
was going to remove all of the baby's skin and replace it with the skin grown
from T’Leh's stem cells. The baby's blood would immediately begin perfusing the
new tissue with an incompatible blood type, which would destroy the new skin
and cause rejection issues for the rest of his body. Babies weren't born into
this world ready for such a traumatic overloading of their bodies' systems,
especially their immune system. The prince would be lucky not to die of shock
before the ceremony was over.

D’Bath was giving the little guy
steroids and anti-rejection treatments in preparation for the surgery. He was
also pushing the known medical limits of pain and sedation medication that a
newborn could handle, and then pushing those limits just a little further. The
child would have to have all of the pain and sedation medication reversed just
before the ceremony and that would cause more pain than any child should ever
have to suffer.

Once the ceremony was over, the new skin
would be removed and the old one put back on. That was assuming the trick
worked and the warrior authenticated the prince as a member of the royal family.
The blood coursing through the tissue wouldn't be of royal DNA but the skin on
the surface would be and hopefully that would be enough.

D’Bath had toyed with the idea of just
placing a second skin over the baby's real skin but it didn't work. In order to
fool a mechanical DNA scanner they had to place a full-thickness layer of skin
over the baby and it didn't look remotely like a real baby after it was done.
Had that plan worked, it wouldn't have caused the baby any pain at all as the
skin was just placed over him and then laser stitched at the seams.

In the end, the only thing that fooled
the DNA scanner was to completely remove the skin and apply a new one over the
muscle tissue. They had grown a section of skin from the prince-to-be and then
used it to replace all of the skin on T’Leh's arm. The DNA scanner didn't
recognize the different blood running through the tissue or the different DNA
in the muscle tissue below the skin. As far as the scanner was concerned, the
arm belonged to the unborn child. T’Leh, however, suffered severe side effects
less than an hour after the surgery and intense pain for days after the surgery
was reversed. He knew his child could expect the same, and even worse because they
were replacing all of his skin.

The surgery began and D’Bath tried to
comfort T’Leh as much as he could without losing the focus he needed for the
procedure. “Don't worry, my friend, this part of the surgery is painless. He is
completely sedated while I remove and replace his skin. Once we wake him up for
the ceremony, I won't be able to stop the pain but I will sedate him as quickly
as possible after it's over.”

“T’Leh wanted to comfort and touch his
son but the integrity of the surgical field couldn't be broken. Instead, he
began talking to his son. “You are a strong and proud Nortes. You can make it
through this day and change the course of our society and the galaxy forever.
Your biological parents were my best friends and the most noble Nortes I have
ever met. Your mother and I will make sure that you know them as you will come
to know us. You are loved by four parents, not just two, and you are stronger
because of that. That strength will ensure you persevere through this first
trial of your life.”

Impossibly, through all of the sedatives
and pain medication, the prince opened his eyes and looked at his father for
the first time. T’Leh felt M'Tawny's hand on his shoulder as she spoke. “He
will endure; he will survive. It won't be easy for him but he will.” And T’Leh
knew she was right.

~

The unnamed prince was wrapped in the
traditional blanket for the ceremony and screaming in agony. D’Bath told those
in attendance that the child had a small defect in his bowel that would have to
be surgically repaired after the ceremony and that defect was causing the pain.
The defect only made itself known after the child had fed for the first time
and his digestive tract began to work on its first meal. There wasn't time to
repair the defect before the ceremony began and for this reason they needed to
cut it short and proceed with only the portions that were absolutely necessary
to guarantee the right of succession. D’Bath had just thought up this excuse
before the ceremony began and was quite pleased with himself for finding a way
to cut through the lengthy pomp and circumstance that went along with the
tradition.

The entire War Council was present along
with their warriors. The majority of the royal family from this sector of the empire
was in attendance along with a few hundred other important citizens. The only
important person not in attendance was M'Tawny. If a concubine was the mother
to the heir, she was not allowed in the ceremony and had to watch from a separate
room. From that point on, she would raise the child as though she were the nanny
and the emperor's wife would act as the mother. Because T’Leh wasn't married,
M'Tawny would get to be more motherly than she would normally have been had
there been a wife in the picture.

“Good afternoon, everyone.” T’Leh spoke
using his emperor voice. “I know that I am breaking with tradition by not
allowing the minister of royal affairs to speak, but as you can tell, the man
of the hour is already hard at work being an emperor and making us bow to his
every whim.” This got a good laugh from the assembled crowd as they could hear
the obviously upset baby in the background.