Chapter 16: Tory

My son Mikal was born on a Planet called Torus.

His has been an unusual childhood by my understanding of Earth standards. To start with, he’d not had parents as you may know of them. He had been one of my experiments.

My name is Tory, and I’m amazed that Mikal has turned out so well. To date, all of mine and my mother, Torus-16’s, other experiments using human and Keltrian DNA have been abject failures. I am a Controller. My kind was created to look after Keltrian spacecraft and run their cities.

Torus-16 was the controller for one of the sixteen sections that make up a Keltrian spacecraft called a wheelship. Keltrian wizards prefer to travel by Transportation Rings, but if the star system doesn’t have any, they have to use spacecraft like ours, to get there first.

The suns in our home system had begun to fail, and the Keltrian races decided that they needed to find new planets that could support them. As part of their exploration, if they find a planet that may in the future be able to support their kind, they would seed the planets with micro-organisms, plants and basic animals to get it started.

If the planet were further along its evolutionary chain and had an established environment, they would add higher order plants and animals that would provide food for them when they came back. Special incubation tanks had been built aboard their ships for this purpose.

During my mother’s travels, she said that they rarely found a planet that they could simply move to without some sort of intervention. On the planets that were close to their requirements, the Keltrians would often stay for a generation and build a Transportation Ring or a set of Rings depending on how many continents they explored.

They then left caretakers and if possible, refugees from the sleep tanks if they have them. They would then restock the ship with new people from the home worlds and move on to the next star system. They had been in the process of doing this, on this world when Mage McBee let his virus loose.

He put a data type virus into my mother’s system that caused the wheelship to fail. He believed that if the ship’s engines exploded in the developing atmosphere the Hydrazine fuel that they used would speed up development on this planet. The special fuel had been developed using magic.

McBee believed it would increase the magical ether of this planet and increase the abilities of the wizards that stayed here. My mother said that at the time, things back home were getting desperate and the Keltrians were finally starting to realise that their system was doomed.

McBee had determined that this planet, while it was still recovering from an extinction phase and developing a new atmosphere, would be a fine planet to settle with a bit of help. He believed that that his people had run out of time.

The size and composition of this planet were similar to the Pix’s home planet, which was also similar to the planet the humans call Earth. This star system also had two other planets that he believed they could eventually settle. Due to the current development and ongoing volcanic action, they originally called the planet Hades.

McBee was of the Pix race. The Pix and Prol were the oldest of the seven major lineages, and they didn’t mind a heavier gravity than many of the other peoples from the home worlds. He knew that most of the people from the taller races like the Genteli and Grandteli would prefer to choose some of other planets that had been found. They tended to prefer lighter gravities.

The Empress had sent out ten wheelships originally, but more had been sent later. They had travelled far in the three thousand years they had been exploring. They had to skirt the black holes in the centre or our galaxy to get to this side. They wanted to be as far from home as they could get when the Suns blew.

While each section of the ship could operate independently, when the sections were formed as a ship, they acted more like a hive mind. My mother and two of her sister sections crash landed on this Planet when the ship broke up in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading. They had been unable to separate properly and land as independent units until they were too far into the atmosphere.

My mother was the only controller that survived. The Keltrian people had evacuated her section, but some of them had been trapped on Torus-14. They died because of the crash, but mother didn’t learn of this until David, Kelli and their daughter Sarah came to our planet.

That was when I was born. Mother was trapped in her section of the ship, and after two hundred and twenty-two years, it was failing. Her androids were breaking down, and she suspected that she didn’t have much longer to live.

The Keltrian people had built a standard underground cavern system in a nearby mountain. They had also established a huge enclave as a plant nursery, and it had thrived in their absence. David and Kelli helped Mother to make me, so I could look after the Nursery and to continue the job of terraforming the planet.

We can’t move around as we live in a tank, so our androids were our arms and legs. David said that we looked like sea sponges from his planet. Mother and I had taken our saviour’s advice and created new androids with SAI, Self-aware Artificially Intelligent brains like ours. David’s idea had been an immense success as far as we were concerned.

To propagate we could produce spores to reinhabit an old skeleton of a dead controller or, as we learned, we could form buds in a separate section of our tank that could be used as the brains for our new androids. Our original androids were easy enough to modify to add a new brain box to house the bud we supplied, a nutrient tank, a waste tank and a larger power supply.

These alterations made them operate much more efficiently, and over time, we have improved on them. It was only after the first few died that we had encountered a small problem with then. Well, it wasn’t that small in the scheme of things, it was actually a huge problem, reproduction. They couldn’t reproduce.

We then identified a second problem. Since our gene pool was limited, and our nature was to produce a type of hive mind, it tended to limit the independent thinking of our children. For the type of work we wished them to do, spawning and nurturing plants and animals on this planet, it hadn’t been a real issue, to begin with.

In ideal conditions, my kind could live up to ten thousand years without needing to respawn. However, the environment on my planet was not ideal when David and Kelli left. It’s a lot better now as we have plants and animals established on the closest continents and many of the large islands and the seas are blooming.

Mother and I also have a problem with respawning, as we require a certain amount of magical assistance. We had been created with the aid of magic, and while we can’t wield magic like a wizard, we can assist with sustaining any spell placed in our sphere of influence. We require the energy crystals that we called Quaz crystals to be connected into our systems to do this.

David, Kelli and Sarah had been sent on a mission to this planet, and they found my mother still alive. They had used healing and rejuvenation spells, to assist with my relocation from my parent to the cavern. We have been able to draw on these spells to create the new buds for our android children.

We called our children the Zoetics, since they are alive even if they had metallic bodies. Our children didn’t have the same storage capacity for data that my mother and I had, but they were thinking beings even if not very creative.

The zoetics had the tendency of being subservient and never seemed to develop the full range of emotions that our data on humans indicated they could. On average, our zoetic children tended to live about five hundred years.

We haven’t been able to fathom why they were inclined to die around this age. It was after the first family of zoetics started to die that we became aware of the additional problem in that they were not spawning. We could only deduce that their limited area for growth in the brain box and a lack of magic intervention are part of the problem.

The number of zoetics we could make was also limited by how much of ourselves we could donate to form new buds in a given solar year. We found we could create two offspring each half year. To produce anymore was a stain on our systems. It meant it took longer to build a more effective workforce, but we had time.

We tried putting buds into a new larger tank to create new controllers like us, but it didn’t work as we hoped. They needed that extra zap of magic to assist with the growth of large data storage modules. Even more upsetting, those we did bud still died around the same age as the zoetics, and they neither spawned nor were able to bud during their lifetime.

The two that lived the longest were the ones we were able to graft to the old skeletons of Torus-14 and Torus-15. My sisters did have their use, however. They had been excellent to relocate around the neighbouring continents with a team of zoetics, to develop ecosystems suitable for the conditions of the location to which they were moved.

By the time I was eighteen hundred years old, my mother had indicated that it was her time to go. We made an extra twenty-six zoetic bodies in the factory in the caverns that we had built from the other two old sections of the ship. Mother donated her body and her knowledge so these new children could exist.

This was a huge number of children to produce at one time. It was a massive undertaking for our other zoetics and me to get the new children housed in their new bodies, but we succeeded. I’ve never understood why mother wanted them named from the letters of the alphabet that made up David’s native tongue.

When Sarah had been trying to cleanse the data virus from my mother, a small subroutine from the virus had downloaded her data to my mother. Mother included this data into the makeup of this family of zoetics along with all of the information we had gained from our creators regarding humanoids and their behaviour.

We wanted to create new beings like Sarah that could reproduce but still maintain a better data storage system than normal humans, to populate our world. We hoped that this family of zoetics would be able to help us achieve this. Mother programmed the care and protection of humanoid children as their primary mission in life.

My mother hadn’t told David that she had a bank of genetic material of all of the Keltrian races, their animals and plants in her hold. We had later learned from data hidden in the computer made by Mage Mc Bee, which became my new body, he had planned to use the material to rebuild the races of Keltria in this system, once he had established himself as one of the ruling wizards.

Torus, as David had renamed our planet, has a slightly heavier gravity than David’s home planet Earth, and it is closer to that of the Pix home planet in Keltria. The carers and I had studied the genetic codes of the Keltrian races and their attributes to determine their suitability to this world.

The Prols were a short but strong race, and in many ways, they would do well on this planet, but they didn’t tend to carry the strongest form of the magical gene. The Burgis, their younger cousins, were taller but not a lot stronger magically. However, they did have similar looks, and life spans to David’s race.

The Pix were the oldest, smallest and lightest of the seven main races and they seemed to adapt to any of the gravities on the worlds they inhabited. However, Pix with strong magical abilities were less common than for their daughter race the Genteli.

The Gentili’s taller but slim forms wouldn’t do as well here even though they considered themselves the dominant race and produced more wielders of magic. We still didn’t have the atmosphere optimised for these people, as they liked higher oxygen levels. Their pale skins would also be a detriment with the high radiation from this system’s sun.

The Grandteli were an off-shoot of the Genteli, who in heavier gravity tended to take on more the form of humans and the Burgis, with the thicker chests, stronger bones and muscles. They grew to be the tallest race in the lighter gravities. They could grow even taller than David’s records indicated humans were at the time he came here.

While still light of skin, they had better control of their pigmentation and could adapt to handle the sun’s radiation while the atmosphere continued to thicken. One other thing in their favour was the fact they had a higher trend for magical talent and long life spans. This would increase their health and ability to adapt here.

The race that interested us the most were the Shapeshifters. While they had been an experimental race like me, they seemed the most adaptable to a variety of conditions. They had also been created from the Genteli race.

The Faeries that we had here had been adapting to the gravity during my lifetime. They had wider wings than their ancestors did. They had hidden when David was here, and I’d not become aware of them until after David and his family left.

They were the reason the plants in the enclave had survived. They have also been a great help to mother and me, as they also sent small families to go with my sisters when we moved them to the new locations. Unfortunately, they had limited magical ability, and theirs centred more on the magical trait know as Nature.

In the end, we calculated that by mixing the shapeshifters and the Grandteli genes the new race would thrive here. They would have a stronger body, and by including the hermaphrodite and shifter genes, they would be able to breed in smaller groups.

From their histories, we learnt that shifters didn’t seem to have the same issues as the other races if close relations mated. However, something in their genes stops them from having offspring if they mate with a full-blooded sibling of the same parents.

Most of them shied from the practice of incest if they knew of the relationship beforehand. Interestingly, when in their female form, which many of them tended to prefer, the mother’s gene set seemed to determine the fundamental make-up of the child.

Moreover, shifters had a strong pertinacity for magic so the combination we chose also gave us the greatest possibility of producing a race that could not only thrive but also wield magic. Mc Bee’s notes indicated that he’d had similar ideas.

With much debate, we selected the genes that we believed would make a race that could live here comfortably. The twenty-six new zoetics, who I dubbed the Carers, were designed to be the foster parents for this new race that mother and I planned to call the Paragons.

David had never thought to ask my mother what had happened to the magical items the people that had died on her sister sections had been wearing. When we had the zoetics look for them, they had collected twenty-five diadems, ten medallions and ten rings.

The most precious of the items was the diadem that had four gems and a Quaz crystal. It was an Earth Mage’s diadem. It was like the medallion that David said a Mage Davin had given him. He had then been able to claim one of the wizard’s boxes that had been in the cavern system where I now live.

We hoped that one of the paragons would be able to claim this diadem and provide the magic we needed so that I can spawn and produce new controllers and zoetics for the cities we wanted to build. Having magicians would also help us transform this world into a lovely place to live.

One day, we hope to find a Lord Wizard or better yet a Queen to make us new wizard’s boxes. It’s a shame the Transportation Ring has never been operated during my lifetime. Mayhaps, one of our paragons, can find us a Lord Wizard to help.

This planet has gone ahead in leaps and bounds, it now had vegetated swamps, large tracks of forests, grasslands, herbaceous open forests and bushlands. The seas are teeming with plankton and fish. We have even introduced small plant-eating animals, birds and some of the smaller mammalian predators to control the plant eaters. They shouldn’t bother our paragons.

Most importantly, this planet now had a breathable atmosphere, and the ecosystems were thriving. Nonetheless, it still needed people. I was designed to serve the Keltrian people, and I still feel the need to do this.

Mikal was my first true success.

It took me nearly three hundred years to work out what I was doing wrong.

I hadn’t been programmed in how to gestate children without a mother’s womb. They seemed to require a more complex set of conditions than the smaller animals we had produced. It was a long and difficult task to learn this. I also realised that I had picked the hardest life form to try and perfect.

Unlike humans and the other Keltrian races, the reason shifters were different was the third helix. This helix contained both the hermaphrodite and shifter genes. It also contained the variations in DNA required so they could shift to the different animal forms.

Also, when shifters produced eggs or sperm the third helix was linked to the egg, not the sperm. It was only in the very odd case a sperm had the third helix, and it was considered a mutation.

It took the zoetics and me, fifty years to get an artificial womb tank just right. We experimented with some of the smaller mammals, to begin with, as the data said they need similar conditions to our humans.

We also learned, to our determent, that a developing child required outside stimulation to grow properly. We truly hadn’t considered the significance of this as it wasn’t so apparent with the mammals we produced.

It only occurred to me when I went back to study David’s libraries and compared the behavioural display of the children we gestated to the libraries. I similarly determined the carers were having difficulty understanding the complexity of human emotions and that wasn’t helping.

They didn’t seem to be able to bond with the children. Changing nappies and feeding of the children didn’t seem to help them. It was a messy task looking after the children until we could teach them to take care of their bodily needs. It takes a lot longer than the other animals to achieve.

We had to study David’s files again after our first attempts had failed. Fortunately, he had several documentaries covering the raising of children. We could only assume they had been included in case his crew got stranded on Mars.

Some of what was included didn’t take on significance until much later. The documentaries assumed the people watching already had an understanding of what it was to be a human child. How were we supposed to know?

It was interesting that the Keltrians hadn’t left me a lot of this type of data, either. My previous occupants tended to stop on a planet for several years during this stage, as they determined babies and very young children didn’t fare well in stasis. Pregnant woman didn’t like using the transportation rings either.

It took me a long time to piece this information together, and make sense of it. It hadn’t had a high priory, as information to be kept in my mother’s records. It was spotty at best, and in some cases imposable for one such as me to understand at the time.

The first four children we birthed behaved very strangely and seemed to be unable to learn, as my data indicated they should. They tended to be very destructive and emotional in a negative sense. We determined that they were mentally unhinged.

They had all died before they were twelve. Two died when they tried to shift their shapes. One drowned herself, and the other caused a fire we were unable to put out in time as she had barricaded the door.

We went back to the drawing board. I’d only attempt to produce four children at a time and would follow their development to see if we had got it right. We determined that my zoetic carers also had to learn how to provide for the paragon children’s emotional needs as well as their physical ones.

We spent years studying and debating every scrap of information that we could find. It was very confusing. The different races, and even within the races, people expressed different views, and it made it hard for us to know which set of directives to adopt.

This was a steep and frustrating learning curve for us.

Mikal’s clutch was my fourth attempt.

I had no success to show for the first three groups that we got through incubation stage. As I mentioned, the first group died young. The second group were born all female. They too seemed to have difficulties with maturing into responsible adults as they aged.

We still had difficulties relating to them. We determined that they weren’t stupid, just willful. The children refused to take on any responsibilities for their own care or actions. They acted like spoilt brats and threw tantrums if they didn’t get their way.

They treated their carers’ and the faeries like servants, and I wasn’t pleased any more than they were. Annity, the Queen of the faeries, said they all needed a good smack. I had to wonder at her statement. I’ve never observed faerie parents chastise their children in this manner.

I had no idea how hard a smack had to be to cause discomfort without bruising. The zoetics had a hard enough time learning how to handle them, so they didn’t want to hurt them.

Three of the members of the second group spent a lot of time having sexual intercourse, from the age of fifteen. They shunned the fourth member. They had rejected her from their company since they were very young. We could find no physical reason for this, as she looked no different from them when in human form.