Protoculture Wars
Children Of Hope, Children Of Despair
                                                          Aubry Thonon

                              Eve of Tomorrow


    She screamed as she woke up, her voice sliding up the scales until
it reached a crescendo, then suddenly stopped. She paused, puzzled,
her fear forgotten for the moment. She had not voluntarily stopped
screaming, it had simply been cut off.
    Looking around, she began to notice that her voice was not the
only thing that had been taken away from her. All around her was
darkness, blackness impenetrable, and all was quiet. She tried to
move, but found that somehow her body would not respond to her wishes.
She waited.
    Eventually, after how long she could not tell in this non-
environment, a sort of static intruded upon her. She strained to
listen, to make sense of the sounds reaching her.
    "...ou hear me? I am about to switch on your optics. Be ready to
compensate." The voice sounded young, anxious, eager. She felt she
should know the face behind it, but could not recall it from her
memory.
    Suddenly, without prior warning, the world erupted with light,
blinding her. She automatically diminished the receptors' sensitivity,
in time to avoid the pain that would surely follow a longer exposure.
She could now see the face of a young male, long lavender hair framing
each side of his face. Or was it pink? She could not yet make the
difference, her optics still overloaded by the sudden onset of light.
    "Eve? Can you see? I have reconnected your extensions one by one
this time, to avoid another overload. Try to speak."
    Overload? Optics? Extensions? Meaningless words, so far, but she
knew they had a ring of truth. Eve. Her name was Eve. And the man in
front of her was...
    Zor.

    "I have run all the diagnostics I could think of, and all of your
algorithms have passed with flying colours." Zor continued to tap at
the console he was currently working on, not turning about to face
her. She understood - after all, she was technically everywhere within
the room. An omnipresent entity, free to roam Zor's spaceship.
    "I am glad to hear this." she answered. "I was afraid the shock of
my emergence might have scrambled some functions beyond their ability
to be recovered by my internal safety procedures." She liked the sound
of her voice and whenever they were alone she preferred to talk to Zor
rather than communicate through the console's screen. Some would have
called it vanity, she herself would have pointed out she had only been
born a few days ago and was still enjoying the strangeness of being
alive.
    "Do you understand what your functions aboard this ship will be?"
enquired Zor.
    "I am to replace the autopilot system and other automatic and
semi-automatic systems currently stored within this ship's main
computer system. When this is done, I am to submit various diagrams,
as provided by you, to the Karbarran shipyard office. These changes,
once implemented, will allow me to control any and all functions of
this fortress." She paused. "Zor, do you not trust your people?"
    "The *people* I trust, Eve, but they are not the problem. The
Elders... the Elders can only be trusted so long as you provide them
with more and more power. And with more and more worlds upon which to
exert this power. One would think that the lesson of Ci'Va would have
given them something to think about, but all they have done is simply
increase the rate of Zentraedi production and armament."
    "If you'll excuse me for saying it, you Tirolians seem to have a
rather belligerent streak in your nature."
    "It wasn't always like this." Zor stopped working at his console
and turned around to face the centre of the room. "Could you lock the
door and manifest, please? I find it rather difficult to discuss these
things with you simply as a bodiless voice."
    The lock to the room's door clanged closed and a shimmering
appeared in the air in the centre of the room. Before long, it had
coalesced into the figure of a young woman sitting on a plain wooden
seat, a Trahl on her lap. "Is this more satisfactory?" she asked.
    "Why the Trahl?"
    "We were discussing Ci'Va just a moment ago. It seemed
appropriate. You yourself keep several Trahl as pets."
    "Not pets, Eve, bargaining chips. Once the Elders realise they
cannot use the spent seeds from their generators to produce more
flowers, the cargo of this fortress, both animals and vegetable, will
be the most valuable in this quadrant."
    "You do not intend to give the stockpiled seeds to the Elders
then?"
    "No, neither will I give them these modified Trahls we have on
board. I will give some to Cabell, for safe keeping, in case something
happens to me during the coming voyage. The others I will keep on this
ship while we go and disseminate the seeds on other planets. I will
leave a handful of Pollinators behind before each take-off. With luck,
one or more of the seeded planets will prove viable to both the seeds
and the Pollinators."
    "And what will you do when the Elders find out about your
deception?"
    "I will die."

    "Fools, fools and politicians!" Zor raved as he paced up and down
his cabin. "They know they are running out of seeds for their
generators. But instead of finding a way to reconcile their
differences with the Invid, they simply restrict the export of seeds
to the outlying regions. And that means these planets fall to the
Invid that much more quickly."
    "Is this what your plan was all about? An attempt to make peace
with the Invid?" Eve was at her usual place in the centre of the room,
on her wooden seat.
    "It made sense at the time. It is my fault that the Invid lost all
of their Flowers. In one single stroke, I withdrew from them their
only food source. If it wasn't for their stockpiles, I think they
would have died long before setting out into space."
    "So you force a shortage of seeds. Since the spent seeds cannot
reproduce, they are useless. And when planted, the new seeds bear
flowers, but these flowers are seedless." A small plant appeared in
Eve's hand, a pink tri-petal flower on a green stem. She looked at it
for a moment before continuing. "The Invid were the ones which caused
the flowers to produce seeds. You yourself maintained a steady supply
by genetically manipulating a handful of Trahl to replace the
biological trigger that was the Invid. But you kept their existence
secret."
    "Exactly. With supplies running low, I expected the Elders to
realise they needed the Invid to re-supply the generators. But
instead, they are now restricting the supply of generators to the
reaches." Zor sat down heavily. "This is what the Empire has become:
a wounded Dekryt gnawing at its own leg to escape the hunter's trap."

    "Zor."
    A light came on in the darkness, illuminating Zor as he sat up in
his bed. "Yes Eve?"
    "I was wondering... my body... my face... who was the model?"
    "My mother, partly."
    "I have a picture of your parents on file, Zor. I do not look much
like your mother."
    Zor sighed. "Most of your facial features were modelled after my
fiancee."
    There was a pause. "I did not know you were engaged."
    "She died. She was shot in the back by a friend of mine. I killed
him."
    "Zor... I... I'm sorry."
    The light winked out.

    "Eve, do you remember the time we discussed the origin of Tirol?"
    "You mean the myth about the arrival of the original settlers?"
    "The same. There are no fossils on Tirol, no native life. All our
animals and plants can be found on other worlds. But of Tiresoids,
there are no fossils on any planet - even those we Tirolians did not
colonise."
    "So people have started to wonder if they did not come from
somewhere else, from an as-yet-undiscovered planet. Thus the colony
myth which has often been used in your literature."
    "Ah, but is it a myth? I have arranged for you to have a direct
linkup with the Library on Haydon IV. I want you to look up any and
all myths regarding the colonisation theory."
    "It will take some time. But why the sudden interest?"
    "If something were to happen to me, I need somewhere safe for the
Macross to hide. We are in the middle of a quadrant-wide war between
the Empire, the Invid and the Ci'Vonian rebels. It would not be safe
for the Macross to stay in this vicinity unaided. If there is a planet
of origin, then it would not have been touched by 4he ravages of this
conflict. Its inhabitants would still be living in peace. Maybe they
can do more with the Flowers than the Elder, or even the Invid, ever
did - untainted by fear or war."
    "As you wish, Zor. But I still think you are a dreamer. And I envy
you for it."

    "Zor, I have it."
    "And what exactly is '*it*'" asked Zor, barely stopping in his
work. They had been seeding planets for the past month now, and Dolza
was beginning to suspect that neither the Masters, nor the Elders, had
been informed of this trip. It had been easy for Zor to fool Dolza
into providing an escort for the Macross, but he had not expected the
Zentraedi's Commander In Chief to come along in person.
    "That planet you wanted me to find. It exists. It seems the
colonisation myths were not myths after all. There's even a couple of
pictorial renditions of it on file."
    "Can you locate it?"
    "Not perfectly. It will have moved and the location was not that
precise to start with. But I could find it if I had to."
    "You may have to. Dolza is starting to ask too many questions."
    "I do not wish to be separated from you. I do not want to see you
die."
    "I promise, Eve. You won't have to."

    She pushed the Macross' engines as far as they would go, listening
to their squeals, feeling the vibrations tearing at the ship's
structure. Behind her, Invid troopers tried to keep up with her, but
were slowly being left behind. Down on the planet, Zentraedi and Invid
were locked in deadly combat for Zor, the aliens having finally caught
up with their nemesis.
    Eve knew Zor would not survive this encounter, but true to his
word he had sent her away from this place so she would not see him
die. See him, no - but she could hear every terrible moment on the
tactical comm system.
    "*Zor is down! Save Zor!*" Dolza cried out. She had heard the
plasma spheres impact near the terminal's microphone She knew that a
close-miss from one of those spheres could kill an unshielded target.
She also knew that, true to his nature, Zor would not be wearing any
body-armour. For a moment, she thought she could almost hear his
ragged breath on the comms before another blast destroyed the
transmitter.
    Eve turned her attention away from the past and folded the
Macross.

    The landing had not been one of the best she had performed, but
all things considered, she was proud of it. She had managed to evade
both the Invid and the Zentraedi, as well as shield her fold enough to
fool the sensors of both the Invid Regis and the Robotech Masters. She
hoped.
    The Macross had not been lying on the island for more than a few
days when a ship, a sea-faring vessel of some type, approached it from
the horizon. It stopped a fair distance away, but dispatched several
flying crafts, a couple of which actually landed near the Macross'
hull. They had come at last.
    Eve watched as the crafts disgorged several Tiresoids. She noticed
with slight disgust that they were carrying weapons. <Oh, Zor. Your
perfect world does not exist. Even here, the Shadow has extended its
hand.> When they approached the ship, Eve used remote grapples to grab
one of the guards and bring him down to the ship's laboratories, where
he was promptly vivisected. She did not deign to listen to the
warrior's screams as its body was taken apart from the inside out. She
needed to learn about this planet, about its people, about whether or
not she could trust them. The experiments were inconclusive, the
subject died still trying to fight, to kill whatever was doing this to
it.
    The group of aliens next tried to have a remote-controlled drone
enter the ship. It was ridiculously simple for Eve to simply blanket
the area with overrides and freeze the drone outside the airlock,
forcing the aliens to enter the ship in person. They did, splitting
into two groups soon after.
    Their demeanour was not encouraging, they seem to believe that
everything was a foe, that all would attack them if given a chance.
Eve was still shocked from her loss, still grieving for Zor, and here
were these aliens walking around Zor's ship looking for something to
shoot at.
    She obliged.
    The first group was cut down, almost to oblivion, by her automated
sentries. The other group was in a better position to defend itself
and fared somewhat better. Rather than risk damage to the rest of the
ship, Eve started to close doors and access-ways and heard the two
groups into the closest airlock. Both parties suffered more losses.
She was about to turn off the air supply and flood the area with
poisonous gas when she noticed the second party was trying to protect
one of its members, a single individual pressed into the middle of
their group. Intrigued, she turned on the audio and listened.
    "Keep Lang in the middle and watch his back. *You're* expendable,
*he's* not - got that?"
    Lang. The name meant something, she was sure of that. Eve
retrieved the brain-dump she had done of the first warrior and
inspected it for references to this Lang. She found them and stopped
her attack on the aliens.
    <So, this Lang is a scientist. And all these warriors are ready to
give up their lives so that this scientist may live.> Replays of the
final moments of Zor's life came unbidden - Zor, surrounded by
Zentraedi willing to die to save him from the Invid... the
similarities were hard on her.

    She herded both parties to the Macross' bridge, using the ship's
internal security system as one would use a Kyenwir-prod. On the last
leg of the trip she even allowed herself to play a practical joke on
them, using her holographic projectors to simulate a ceiling at the
top of the elevator shaft, causing all those on the elevator platform
to panic until the last moment when they passed through the illusion
harmlessly.
    Lang stopped in wonder and started to speak to himself, looking
around at the various controls. Eve was still unable to understand
most of the language of these people - a more direct approach would
have to be taken. And soon, as both parties, now re-united, were
moving to find an exit. Luckily for her, she was handed the
opportunity on a silver platter.
    The scientist had moved towards one of the consoles while two of
the warriors argued with one another. As luck would have it, the
console was one used by the Tirolians to store their memories for
later implant into a clone body should anything happen to them. Eve
triggered the console, sending an energy pulse down the controls to
lock Lang's hands onto them. She was not certain of the amount of
power to use. These were Tiresoids, to be sure - but how different
were they? Eve would have to risk it, and hope that the side-effects
of this shock would not kill Lang.
    She drained his memories and analysed them. She used his speech
centres to learn the language he was most used to speaking. She
learned all that he knew and paused. His mind was always searching,
always wondering, always wanting to know more. He would do.
    Returning his memories to him, she began her training, her
teaching of Zor's science, his legacy. <Good morning, Doctor Lang. My
name is Eve. You are ready for your first lesson.>

    "My God! His eyes - look at his eyes!"

Neoculture===============Crash-Test Wraith On The Information SuperHighway
    Bad is never good until worse happens.
===============================================Aubry.Thonon@qed.qld.gov.au
           ProWar -> http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/1467/
           R:APoV -> http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/4164/