Chapter 1 - Part A

Cycle 65749.000.0000[*]

Carelle eyelids flickered, not yet ready to open, awareness was returning, psyche reintegrating with physical, she could sense the warm light through the pod walls, her mind drifted through hazy memories, becoming sharper as reintegration proceeded, her personality, metal acuity, memories, opinions, experiences, ideas, thoughts, everything and anything that she had ever done, seen, heard, thought, said, the stuff that made her Carelle were all being recorded onto the fresh unblemished canvas of her remade mind. Fingers twitched as nerve pathways were activated. She could hear the quiet murmuring of the machinery now as her hearing came online. She loved this gentle awakening at the end of regen. The artificial womb that cradled her was getting ready to open spilling her back out into the universe.

Her podmates would be feeling the same… except they wouldn’t! Returning memory reminded her that it was 4 cycles since the three of them had regened together, four cycles since divided loyalties had separated them by distance and perspective. “No” a mental hand was extended “I’m not going to think about that right now”, reintegration was supposed to be a peaceful time. Softly letting the memories sink deeply into the renewed body, unpacking the favorites into her mind made new, revisiting old ones that hadn’t been remembered in eons, like the time (somewhere in their first hundred cycles when they were essentially just children) when Fernum had set the regen chamber to make his skin lime green, his hair puce and his eyes mustard yellow, he’d done it to punish her and Bhree, his point was that since they teased him about being vain they could just look at an ugly fellow for the next cycle, but he quickly got sick of the reactions of unsuspecting innocent bystanders when they first caught sight of him and had exiled himself to one of those little worldlets in the Beta 9 System until his next cycle.

She smiled to herself – it was a worse punishment to him than to her or Bhree and good had resulted, he had discovered an hitherto unknown talent for music and had exploded back onto the galaxy with his first symphony and an extremely attractive new ‘look’. Light blue skin, rich purple eyes and ‘hair’ with a silvery metallic sheen to the soft feathery fibers that extended out from the wings up over his head like a cap and then trailed down his back to finish at a point just above his tailbone. For a while variations of the ‘look’ had appeared all over the place, fans thinking to compliment by copying. The next cycle he had traded in the wings for a tail, 2 meters long and extremely flexible, he’d used it play the drums, bells or cymbals while keeping hands free to accompany himself with a violin, keyboard or flute.

After that experiment he and the Prince had spent several cycles dreaming up ways to make musical instruments into retractable body parts and then code for them in DNA, by the time they had finished Fernum had a bone flute in his left forearm that was connected to the lungs internally and made the lightest sweetest sounds you ever heard, a tuba wrapped around his waist designed to look like abs, he could play it just by flexing different muscles in his chest, his wings were actually giant harps, played either by plucking the strings (tightened muscles) with his fingers or by allowing the wind to rustle past and if he loosened the muscles he could still use them to fly. Bells in his hair, there was scarcely a part of him that did not double as some musical instrument, he and the prince had made him into a ‘one-being’ orchestra. Which made it so surprising that he should oppose the Prince and the Emperor so intensely now… but that was one of those place she wasn’t going right now, slam that mental door shut!

Think about Bhree, dear, loyal, fiercely loyal, Bhree, he was the quiet one, stability to Fernums whimsy, routine balancing spontaneity, observant, deep thinking. He was also artistic but his art took the form of gardening. Bhree loved the challenge of training plants to make a living image of the idea he had in his mind. Back on their home planet Bhree had gardens that he had trained for thousands of cycles and one could visit, bask in their beauty and come away thinking that nothing could possibly be more lovely, peaceful, or representative of whatever idea Bhree was trying to characterize but come back in another hundred cycles and the improvement would be incredible. Bhree loved the slow maturation process, bringing the beauty slowly, patiently to life, molding each plant so that its own natural characteristics became exactly what was needed to portray this segment of the idea, a distinct and necessary part of the whole.

She knew for a fact that both the Emperor and the Prince spent time in Bhree’s gardens using them to unwind, hours spent weeding, tying back vines and branches, pruning stray shoots, transplanting young seedlings and chatting had formed the basis of Bhree’s unswerving loyalty to the Imperial family.

In his own way he was just as celebrated as Fernum but while Fernum came out with a flash and a bang (a very musical bang) Bhree grew on a being slowly, gently until you couldn’t imagine life without him, … and now she was living without them both… Her hand jerked as if to cover her eyes. Body was well on the way to reintegrating with psyche, she had maybe mins to go and she wasn’t going to waste them on the bad memories. They were recent enough that she could not forget them.

Remember that first wakening, she, Fernum and Bhree had been aware of each other in the ‘womb pod’, aware of the light in the outside world and then the fluids had retracted and they were thrust upwards into the light. The Prince, the Emperor and H had helped them step down and out onto the planets surface, looking round they had seen the incredible beauty of their home planet, the rugged fastness of the mountains, valleys colonized by butterflies large enough to ride on. She remembered those first wild days experimenting with their bodies, awareness solidifying into knowing and love as the three of them had spent every moment together, racing over plains with wild buffalo, bare foot skiing down raging rivers behind freshwater dolphins, playing amongst the clouds on the backs of those butterflies, she remembered her favorite trick had been to hide in the clouds just above the spot where she thought Bhree or Fernum would be and then to jump so that she could surprise them by landing behind them on the back of their own flying steed, always with the confidence that if something went wrong the next thing she would remember would be waking up in a regen chamber, perhaps to make a mental note not to do that particular trick again, the pain of the ‘little death’ was generally enough to make her more careful for a cycle or two. And every evening either the Emperor, the Prince or H (usually the Prince) would come to keep them company, answer questions about the things they had discovered that day and teach them about the law.

She stretched, arching back, toes and fingertips extended to maximum, pushing against the gentle pressure of the regen fluids, Her body was lifted slowly towards the surface of the regeneration chamber; she felt the familiar sucking as the viscous fluids flowed over and off of her body, as if the fluids were loath to release her.

[*] Number of cycles the being has had. Day (1-360). Year of cycle (1000 per cycle).