The Emitters (Caveman Chronicles)

The Index -|-

Zara watched Viinox shuffle to the red-tiered device and stand next to Oiitr. It moved efficiently but without urgency. Outwardly the two Xi ignored each other, but the glow above the device increased when Viinox approached. The air twinkled with shimmers of colors and speckles of data points.

She had watched them for days and days, and it was much of the same. It never seemed to change in any significant way. After a few moments, Oiitr swiveled and left the room. [Shift change.] The yellow glow of the aji pathway that led to the door flickered as it opened.

Above the device, a wavy plane rotated slowly, points on its surface changed colors quickly. The aji lines leading from the device to the ceiling flickered erratically, and then settled into a pulsating, repeating pattern.

[This is new… but familiar?]

She focused her senses and saw the individual lines of aji began to become distinguishable from each other. The primary colors separated, and then blue split into shades just before the blue cluster spasmed. In that moment, between the shades of blue, Zara saw a fragment of gold. Then the aji collapsed into a muddled brown pipe only slightly thicker than their individual lines.

[What is going on?]

“Viinox, wha ith…?” Her eyelid twitched.

With a slight jerk, Zara broke the plane from a dream state to awakened. She raised her head and saw Viinox standing before the red-tiered device. Nothing at all was out of place.

She shook her head and grimaced. [Stupid dream. If only it were possible to reach Qon. These regular aji are useless to me, especially falsified as they are.]

She reached out and jabbed at the flows of aji that exited the device. Many times, she had done so, testing and prodding at the Xi systems that were presented to her. The aji pulsed as the pressed, and she pressed with more force. It was as if a glowing rubber hose had been stretched over the tail of a comet. Just then, the colored split, and in the space between them, more aji were visible. One line in particular appeared to be solid red with a thread of gold interlaced through it.

[Qon?]

She poked gently at the multi-colored bundle, and all of the aji became slightly transparent. Behind each one, a string of faint purple fog appeared to ricochet from the line into the distance. Curious, she followed one of the purple strings. It was so faint that she lost it and started over twice before finally arriving at a stopping point.

[This is so strange.]

Zara blinked and focused with her eyes. Viinox stood unmoving. The data representations above the device ebbed and flowed as usual. With a sigh, she returned to her senses to renew her search of the aji. To her surprise, nothing was the same, or rather, everything was the same as before. The aji flowed up and away from the device in a glowing multi-colored pipe. The pipe faded away as soon as it was a certain distance from the device.

She poked again, and pressed. in a few more moments, she had again found the purple strings and had followed one of them to its stopping point. She followed another one and another. Each of them stopped at a similar distance as if the strings were broken by a vertical plane. With a little more focus, she was able to see that behind each stopping point, there was a tiny, black cluster of three spheres.

[All purple ends at a sphere on one end and at the aji at the other end. All of the end points are resting on some kind of plane.]

She imagined the plane in her mind. Tall and flat, it stretched upward, downward, and to each side. [Like a wall? But where?]

The plane did not match the location of the wall of her cell. There were no black spheres on the walls of her cell.

Zara nudged one of the purple strings. It appeared as fog, but its edges were hard and slick. She sharpened her Qon to the finest tip she could imagine, knowing that it was also falsified. Carefully, she thrust its point into one of the purple strings and twisted. Finally, after some moments, the point lodged between purple crystalline wisps. The string blinked away and with it, the aji that it was connected to. When she pulled back on her point, it reappeared instantly.

She stuck the Qon point into the same string until it disappeared, and then immediately, did the same to a handful of adjacent strings. With each one that disappeared, a surprising side-affect occurred. The space around the purple strings became clearer.

Zara smiled to herself. [Each purple string has an aura of sorts around it that I can’t see. When they combine with each other, they obscure their surroundings. With each purple line broken, the falsified aji that it supports disappears. So… these clusters are what, projectors of the falsified? But I still can’t see the real aji, which means, they are not the cloaking mechanism.]

She could see the tiny, black sphere-clusters far more clearly now. There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of the clusters, but she could only really see the dozen or so that had been unearthed by her breaking of the purple strings.

One of the black sphere-clusters faintly glinted with gold, and her senses adjusted. With utmost care, she made a sheath of false Qon and encircled that cluster. For a moment, the space around the cluster cleared in a radius that extended halfway to the next nearest cluster. She smiled when she saw that behind the blocked cluster was a cornucopia of aji of all colors and types, including Qon.

After a second, the space disappeared and everything became cloaked again.

Zara reached out tentatively to where she had seen the Qon. It had been right there, only a short distance beyond the black sphere-cluster. Only slight below it.

Her senses glided over its surface and quickly beyond. With a moment of panic, she retracted her senses until it brushed Qon’s silky texture again.

[Ah ha! I’ve got you now!]