Chapter 6 – Interlude 1: Isaac and Esau

-Isaac

Introduction done, the thing to do was go home. Both Kha and I were injured – even if Kha only really had scratches and bruises to worry about, and both Kov and Kha were in deep need of some TLC before they were anything close to healthy. We had to take any and all food on the elf ship. Getting a hold of all the data the ship held wouldn't be bad either. These elves, these…'Dark Ones' were depraved, but they were bound to have useful information on this ship. There were bound to be discrepancies in how data was stored between systems, keeping us from getting everything but anything would be invaluable. I let Esau take care of it while we waited, using the time to take medical scans of both Kov and Kha.

They were both reluctant, scared that the omni-tool was some sort of torture device. Kov was more reluctant than Kha. It took some convincing from Esau, but they eventually agreed. It had been less than an hour but Kov had become inseparable from Esau. Wherever Esau went, Kov would follow behind him. It was as if Kov didn't see Esau when looking at him, instead he saw something greater than the physical. It was close to a religious experience for him. It was the same for Kha, I saw. She made it less obvious but it was still evident that she had similar sentiments.

She had called him Great One, after all.

Like lightning, it struck me. Whatever effect was causing this semi-religious fervour in both of them, had been the same effect that made me so willing to raise Esau in the first place. I mean, I would have committed myself to raising him, but I doubt I would have invested so much doing it. My love for him had pushed me past the general loneliness I had felt, having been isolated from my family and friends. Without it, I would have likely been a wreck.

For that reason, I was thankful for this unnatural ability. At the same time, I was wary. Esau was an artificial human being. This meant that someone, somewhere out there likely had the ability to give someone the abilities that Esau had. That included the supernatural charisma Esau had. Whoever this person was; they were immensely dangerous.

Millions of people have died in countless wars for people with only middling charisma. The amount of people who would willingly put their lives on the line for someone with literally supernatural charisma was hard to imagine. Even with my new Forge granted intellect.

The intellect that the Forge had given me after Kha joined us was hard to describe. Intelligence was an aspect that was difficult to quantify. Even IQ tests often came short, because intelligence was often a result of the stressors present in the environment of a developing brain. There was some genetic component, but nurture was as much or more of an influence as nature. Still, the Forge had given me a genius level intellect. Not even normal genius you would ascribe to scientists like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. It was the type of genius you would see in Movies, or TV shows. My mind was like a highly advanced computer. I didn't process information faster per se, I processed it better. Each new piece of information was linked to old information almost instantly, allowing me to make astounding leaps in logic.

I was smart enough that I was sure I could, right now, make healing serums that would heal near any injury – even broken bones, in days instead of weeks or months.

I was also smart enough to know that I was still less intelligent than Esau was. He could obtain, process and make inferences from information so fast it made my head spin. I had full confidence that Esau could make even better serums, if he only had the same base of knowledge to draw from. He had more mechanical, architectural and electrical knowledge than I did, but I had more general scientific knowledge because I was an expert in literally all scientific disciplines. I was sure that if Esau had the knowledge I had access to, he would be absolutely unstoppable.

This made the prospect that his creator was out there in space - right now - very frightening. If his creator could give Esau such abilities, surely they could give themselves the same abilities? Worse yet, they could give other people Esau's abilities. I was already sure that at least one person of Esau's mental and physical calibre existed; his pod was labelled as 'II' after all. This implied the existence of at least one more person who could match Esau.

Still, there was no point worrying about it right now. There was already a lot to worry about in the immediate sense.

Like keeping all four of us alive.

The medical scans revealed that both Kha and Kov were suffering from dehydration, starvation and varying amounts of physical and mental trauma. The physical, I could take care of due to my intellect but the mental was more problematic. Psychology technically counted as a science, which meant I was an expert but there was no such thing as a quick fix for mental anguish.

Soon enough, Esau was done. As it turned out, while the databanks on the ship had some information we could use, most of it was behind layers of encryption that would take us years to get through at least. It also had a bunch of information we couldn't use at all. It made sense; it's not as if every ship sent out into the sea had a library on it after all. Information on how their technology or society worked wasn't on the ship.

What was both on the ship, and readily available was mostly a result of logs kept on personal devices analogous to cell phones. The information we could use gave us some much needed context concerning the planet and where it lay in the greater context of the universe. It also told us that the elves were pirates.

They were raiders who would hit a planet or asteroid, steal supplies and take slaves. This particular vessel was specifically built for taking slaves. As a result, there were quiet a few life support systems that we could take advantage of. Similarly, there was a lot of food specifically for human bodies which was welcome for our future survival.

More importantly, since this was a pirate vessel, the elves had star maps.

The elves didn't exactly have a map that pointed to Earth exactly, but had maps that indicated where the Milky Way was, marked as the 'Mon'keigh origin system'. Mon'keigh was what the elves called humans, apparently. Not only were the elves depraved, they were also racist.

After I ascertained that this was, in fact, the Milky Way by counting the number of planets in the system, we were able to figure out where we were in relation to it, and thus Earth. This news made me ecstatic. Even if this was the future, or I was in some messed up sci-fi/fantasy dimension; the thought that I could find my way to Earth buoyed my spirits considerably.

The only problem was that the distance was likely impossible to cross using conventional spacecraft. It would take hundreds of lifetimes, even travelling at the speed of light to cross the distance. Luckily, the elves had access to the technology we would need – otherwise, there would be no way they would know enough about the galaxy to map it. We just had to reverse engineer the technology on this very ship.

The issue was, even with my increased intellect, and Esau's genius, it would likely take years or even decades to reverse engineer to a standard I would consider safe.

I wanted to bury the other three humans but that had to wait until we were all healed, so I decided to leave them in their pods for now. It was time to go home.

Kov were blinded in the sunlight while Kha was not, and after spending months at least in the relative darkness of the ship, I didn't blame him. We waited for a few minutes for him to adjust before we navigated our way through the bodies surrounding the wreck.

I left two molecular analysis machines outside the entrance of the ship using the build gun. Kha was amazed, but Kov was not. Did they have technology that matched the build gun on his home planet? A question from Esau confirmed my theory. The planet Kov was from; 'Home' was a penal colony before the 'Dark Night', whatever that was. 'Home', thus had technology related to the construction of buildings and walls, ostensibly to expand the prison when more prisoners were brought to the planet. Specifically, through the use of a large machine the size of a mountain that could construct buildings wholesale.

Though to hear Esau say it, it seemed no one actually knew how the technology worked. People just kind of waited for the machine to make a building, and then they moved it to where they needed it by hand. Apparently, the buildings were cubes that were the light enough for ten men to carry by hand, while simultaneously being capable of filtering out the heavily polluted atmosphere.

Kov was apparently taken in his sleep while he was at a friend's home. His friend died. I was not so insensitive as to ask how.

We walked silently, navigating the junk surrounding the crash site before I asked a question that I was burning to know the answer to.

"Does Kov know what this 'Dark Night' was? He mentioned it a few times but he never explained it."

Esau talked to Kov for a minute or two, before answering my question.

"No, the Dark Night was apparently so long ago that no one really knows what happened. All everyone knew was that before the Dark Night, humanity was dominant throughout the stars and that immediately following it, humanity was not. The elders on his home planet use this as a cautionary tale." While I processed this, Kha spoke from behind me where she walked, unaided.

Despite having no eyes, it seemed that her eyesight was unaffected. Hearing her say it, her eyesight was even better now. It was apparently a result of ability that all wytches had. A mystical third eye that allowed them to see not just the physical, but what was hidden from regular sight. This included stuff like whether an object was used for violence or not, or something was made using the hands of a living being. Like everything else surrounding her, it straddled the line between 'interesting' and 'worrying'.

"The old crone on Tectum told us of a similar event." She said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yes. I do not know if it is the same event of which the child speaks, but there was a time of great turbulence in the Great Ocean that we wytches draw power from. It began to churn and bubble. In that time, our visions were clouded and all who tried to draw strength from the Great Ocean died or were driven insane by what they saw or dreamt."

So whatever the 'Dark Night' was, it resulted in both the collapse of human civilisation on what must have been thousands of planets, and the death of millions or billions of magic users across those planets. Those numbers were hard to fathom.

"How long did this event last?" I asked.

"I do not know. It may have been a year or ten or thousands."

"I see." I said. That was useless in isolation, but I had a feeling that the information was useful somehow. A stray thought hit me. "But it's over now right, this 'Dark Night'?"

"I do not know." Kha answered.

"What do you mean?"

"I do not know, because even today, the Ocean churns."

We reached our home soon enough and I went to work constructing the house Kha would live in, while Esau went to build some drones – we went through those very quickly it seemed, there were never enough drones. I was alright living with Kov, but Kha had tried to kill us after all. She had no objections; apparently it was tradition on Tectum for wytches to live separate from the rest of society. I felt bad for suggesting it after that but not bad enough to allow her to live in our home.

The build gun was easy to use, especially since Esau had stored the designs for the house on it and in minutes it was built. It was built to the same specifications, but with less specialized equipment because I doubted that she would be analysing anything anytime soon. What I did do, however was include a domed reinforced above ground corridor that connected both houses, allowing movement in case of emergencies.

That done, I went to work on making an IV for both Kov and Kha because they were both severely dehydrated. They were both hesitant to get the drip inserted, but eventually I was able to convince them.

Soon, Esau was done with the drones. They would go and collect food and material from the crash site and bring it here, for preparation and analysis respectively. The MAMs I left outside the elf ship would scan and analyse any gear the orks and the elves had on them before the bodies were burnt. At Esau's urging, the MAMs were also set to scan and analyse ork and elf DNA. If there was something useful there we could use, he rationalised to me, we would kick ourselves for losing.

The drones were sent out and soon, we had food delivered to our doors. Some of the food consisted of fruits and vegetables, though none I recognized, but most of the food was powdered protein and nutrient packs that we would have to mix. A blessing in disguise. Ingesting solid food would have had Kov and Kha suffering from refeeding syndrome as their bodies struggled to replace lost electrolytes.

I made the food, in the kitchen, as Esau made new drones in the workshop. The process was simple, I had to mix water into the nutrient pack after checking the packs for traps. It was slightly paranoid to do so but after finding metal particulates in some packs, I was glad for it. The metal particulates were harmless but would be extremely to digest once swallowed as they left microscopic cuts in your digestive tract that they would then get stuck in. The elves really were bastards.

I called Esau, and Kov who had followed him, even with the IV in his arm from the workshop to eat. The meal tasted god-awful but food was food, so I was thankful. Esau ate more bowls of food then everyone else by far, with Kov a close second in an attempt to mimic him – His stomach was going to bother him later, that was for sure. That done, Esau and Kov returned to the workshop while Kha and I worked to get a garden started.

Usually, it would be unreasonable to expect someone to take care of food that came from a completely alien environment, but I was now a genius and with Kha's ability to sometimes tell the origin of objects she came into contact with, we were soon done. The fruits would likely take years to grow, and the vegetables would take months which was unsustainable with for four people but luckily, we found an edible fungus growing on the fruit.

After using a MAM to analyse it, I concluded that the fungus would grow fast as long as it was supplied with water and nutrients. It would also likely taste like sand. We set aside some more space underground to cultivate it and then rested. Kha left to shower and go to sleep while I looked into what I needed to get healed. After getting a proper scan using the MAM in the med-bay, I extracted my blood using a syringe. Then I used a I used a mix of chemicals I fabricated along with some of the medi-gel to turn the serum collected in the petri-dish into a specialized set of pluripotent cells.

Normally, this would take days to do at least and would need some genetic engineering to insert transcription factors into the cells, but my intellect was allowing me to skip steps in the process. Or come up with novel methods entirely, all on the fly. I then took the mix of cells and injected it back into myself. My shoulder would heal in a day or so. That done I took a look at the items fed into the MAMs near the crash site.

Most of what was fed into the MAM was broken, providing us with no new information - besides what materials they were made of. The stuff that wasn't broken however, provided very telling information. I already knew that the elves were depraved but even after what I saw on the ship, and in Kha's mind. I still underestimated them.

Some of the items that were being fed into the MAMs were people.

The elves apparently had very advanced technological and body modification technology. They could give elves and even humans extra organs and limbs. They could bolster the immune systems of creatures they had only just met and create cures for even the most stubborn of diseases. Instead they used these technologies to enslave others and amuse themselves. People, elf and human alike were stuffed in grotesque metal suits where their lobotomised minds were drowned in stimulants and wired so that every step they took induced pain.

Of particular note was a creature roughly the size of an elephant that looked like a legless metal scorpion. When it was alive, I imagine that it floated. From the outside, it looked like a particularly complex metal drone.

Now that it had been scanned by the MAM, I could see that it was an elf that had been extensively modified before being stuffed into the machine, where its body grew in grotesque fashion to meld with the machine. What was even more disturbing was the machines function. It was a mobile living sampler and scanner. It would go and consume a living being, where it would slowly and painfully kill it was absorbing information that it would later relay. Its brain was also wired so that it enjoyed doing this immensely. It had died when a few orks had apparently endeavoured to tear it in half.

All things considered, its death was a mercy.

The weapons were similarly telling. I couldn't understand how ork weapons worked exactly, but from what I did understand, everything was made to have immense stopping power. The weapons the elves had were made to capture living beings, painfully. There were guns that shot nets made of razor and cannons that shot poisoned shuriken in endeavours that seemed impractical when a regular net or a gun would do the job just as well.

If there was anything I had learned today, it was that the universe I had found myself in was a dangerous place. I stood up from my table. There seemed to be threats around every corner. I made my way to the workshop. Almost everyone I had met seemed hostile. If I was to survive long enough to see Esau grow up, I would have to be better.

-Esau

Esau disliked working with machines he had already worked with. It seemed a waste of his abilities and his time. Every machine that he worked on taught him something. Every machine he opened up telling him a story. Esau found that he enjoyed stories. He just hated hearing the same story twice.

It came down to efficiency, he mused to himself. He liked being efficient. Anything that was not efficient was…disappointing, because it was not fulfilling its full potential.

He had realized soon after he had awakened that he was special, that he had gifts. Even with a sample size of one, it was clear that he was smarter, stronger and faster than his father. His mind was making connections so fast that his father literally couldn't explain concepts fast enough.

He was so gifted that using his abilities to create and modify drones to replace destroyed ones seemed a waste. Problem was, no one else was as good at creating drones so leaving the job to someone else would be a bigger waste of time in the long run than if he did the work himself. He would have to design maintenance drones after this, just to make sure that he had time for projects he enjoyed more.

Like working with the Drukhari and Ork technologies.

Those were interesting. Each piece of technology he came across told him so much. It told him that the Orks loved violence and nothing else. Every piece of their technology reflected this fact. Their guns were almost comically large to inflict the most damage when shot. Their knives, such that they were, were serrated and crude suggesting that they didn't have the technology to sharpen them. This blatantly wasn't true because as Esau, had seen. They had somehow advanced enough to build a spaceship. Even if it was bashed together with seemed to be random parts.

No, Ork weapons were crude not because they couldn't make them better, but because making them better would take up time they would rather spend fighting. Perhaps he was wrong, his father had shown him that mistakes were likely when extrapolating from information taken from sources that were less then trustworthy. But something told him he wasn't.

Even vehicles were built such that even when travelling, they could cause physical harm in some way. It didn't matter if it was the passengers being harmed or the enemy. He hated the technology but it spoke to something in him. It spoke to him of efficiency.

It was a twisted form of efficiency, where form was sacrificed for function when it was best to strike a balance between both. But it was efficiency none the less, and he found it fascinating.

He heard a noise in the workshop. The sound of tools falling. He looked up and saw Kov, frantically try to make himself smaller. He had tried to imitate Esau and had failed, dropping the tools.

Anger rose up in Esau. The distraction meant less time focussed on building the drone in his hand, which meant less time to work on things that truly interested him. How could Kov not see this? That his attempts to impress him, had rankled him instead?

Briefly, he thought about smacking him about his head for his incompetence. He stayed his hand. There was no need to do such a thing. Kov had none of his gifts, none of his intelligence, his speed, his strength. And he was a child besides. The only thing that was even close was his enthusiasm to help. That was the sticking point. Kov was trying to help. Even if he had failed abysmally in the attempt, Esau could applaud the effort.

"Do not touch my tools without permission again." He said in the rough language of Kov's homeworld. Kov nodded meekly, properly chastised.

This pleased Esau. Kov knew he had made an error and was willing to make amends. No violence necessary. He beckoned for Kov to sit next to him, on the work bench. While Esau was building, modifying and testing drones, Kov would hold the tools.

Kov was ecstatic that he was helping. Esau didn't have the heart to tell him that his job was better served by the table sitting in front of them. If anything, Kov was actively making it more difficult to do his job, as his jitters meant that he occasionally dropped a tool or fidgeted with it just when Esau needed it.

He sighed.

If anything, Kov's constant hovering presence was teaching him a new skill. It was teaching him patience.

Hours passed this way, until he was finished. By the time he was done, Kov was fast asleep, his drool staining the bench. He thought about picking him up and leaving him in a bed, but thought better of it. His time was better spent looking over the scans the MAMs were taking.

He was deep in his analysis of this data when he heard a set of footsteps coming up the corridor leading to the workshop. The footsteps were easy to recognise. His father. Though the way sounded indicated that he had healed his shoulder somewhat. That was interesting, and disappointing. Esau would have liked to have been present during the process so he could have learnt from and improved on the process. Still, he sounded as if he was in good health. Though his heartbeat and general quick stride indicated nervousness or determination. Perhaps both.

What news did his father bring that bothered him so? Esau waited patiently to find out.

His father walked in. He was right, the shoulder was much better. No swelling at least.

"Are you winning, son?" he asked. The tone suggested that it was a joke or a reference of some kind. His father was prone to references, especially when nervous. They were to relieve his tension. Esau wondered if his father was aware of this.

"I think so, Father. I am done building the drones." Esau replied.

"Good, son. That's great. We were in no rush but I'm happy you got so much done." Esau decided not to tell his father that he was in a rush. Instead he just preened with the praise.

"Thank you, Father."

His father rubbed the stubble on his chin, a nervous habit for whenever he was formulating a question or argument.

"I think, Esau…" he said. "I need your help."

"Help with what, Father?"

"Recent events have shown me that I need to be better. To better survive against physical threats. And to triumph over mental ones." A sentiment Esau agreed with. His father would likely have died several times over without his help.

"What do you need from me, Father?" Esau asked.

"I need your help in the lab, son." His father said. "And I think I need to take a sample scan of your DNA."

6.1. Perk(s) earned this chapter:

None.

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