Endworlds - Nicholas Read [31]
While he downed a mass of brown food they called stew with white food they called sandwiches and green slices of what was fruit, several of his companions studied him thoughtfully from another table.
“I don’t like this.” Lion had never been one to hold back his opinions. “He professes to know nothing, but he’s clearly not a normal kid. That sound from his mouth last night . . . it wasn’t of this world.”
Jax turned a thought around in her head. “I don’t like him. The ability he demonstrated clearly doesn’t come from our world. He must have fallen through from one of the others, even if he does know our language. Sleeping on it hasn’t changed my mind about that. He must have been there before we showed up, long enough to lock into our phase.”
Commissioned by the enigmatic Cassandra Foundation, the Longcoats’ primary brief was to put things back where they belonged if they fell out of place. While most of the rank and file of these teens had never talked directly with their benefactors, enough knowledge had been ported onto a shared server to challenge centuries of scientific and religious teachings about the true nature and history of the world.
For example, they had been shown that recorded history extended back only fifty centuries6. Go beyond that and all science offered was crude conjecture dressed as fact.
The earliest Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian and pre-dynastic Egyptian settlements first appear around 3,200BC with writing, language, medicine and basic technology in full bloom. Instead of there being any evidence of progress from the basic to the advanced, from the stone age to the space age, these ancient races and their contemporaries across the globe had begun advanced. It was their later descendants who fell into primitivism. This is the great secret of history. The first people weren’t so much a beginning of civilization as they were a legacy of an older, more advanced origin.
With this knowledge, the Longcoats also learned of the Four Ages of Man7 that began when the Builders walked the earth and taught science to those they transplanted from other worlds. It was a science that bordered on the magical, based on the manipulation of photons and bosons, a fusion of light and dark matter through which anything that could be thought or spoken could be made real.
A spacefaring economy had boomed under a pantheon of kings who lived incredibly long and pushed the race to the heavens. There, glorying in itself and demanding self-rule away from the Builders’ gentle yoke, the human race had distanced itself from the intended path, and failed to achieve the measure of its creation.
Yes, in the annals of the Longcoats was the true history of Earth, written by those who had observed it firsthand. The Cassandra Foundation was that old.
And as one Age of Man rose and fell short of the Builders’ exacting standards, the end of each Age had been marked by cataclysms that wiped clean the face of the planet, melting all trace of civilization into the magma or sinking it under the sea.
Handfuls of survivors were plucked offworld by the Builders and kept in store to reseed the race. They looked down from above at their homeworld to see skies darken, oceans boil, and once familiar mountains and valleys turn upside-down as the planet rebooted itself in a process that took hundreds of years to complete. Then the last humans of one Age became the first humans of the next. And the experiment continued.
For the Builders were looking for something specific: the appropriate balance of hubris and humility, originality and obedience, before a race could be entrusted with all that the Builders had, and be schooled as worthy equals. For this was the manner by which the Builders procreated: by ascending whole worlds at a time, both those living at the end of a planet’s cycle, and all who had spawned them from the first day.
But first, those worlds needed to pass this test, so specific and complex that it could only be run across millennia. In fact, it had already run for four rounds on this Earth,