Fringelords Return to Gaia

Prologue

Gaia accepts random evolution as inevitable, chaotic metamorphosis preferable, and the prospect of an uncertain future desirable. A disagreeable axis of warlike Fringelord's, an allied race of technology worshipping Pureon’s, along with the Caapi, a species of clairvoyant vegetation have formed an uneasy alliance to try and twist the course of social and biological evolution on Earth into their own diabolical vision of the future. The Fringelord's goal is to reestablish a status quo of hierarchic kingships and destroy any potential of change. The Pureon seek to disappear into the caves that spawned them and never see the light of day again after finding the experience of life outside ‘distracting’. The covetous vegetal Caapi have concocted a dangerous plot to use the universes’ one fatal flaw as a bargaining chip before their greatest fear becomes reality should Gaia be the nexus of change for sentient species everywhere and dash the Caapi’s burning desire of ever controlling their destiny. The Fringelord’s, Pureon and Caapi are doomed by their own tortuous ignorance to repeat the cycle of a contradictory and cruel relationship with nature while Gaia and her allies remain ever hopeful that change will continue to generate new life. The battle for Earth has entered a new phase.

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Chapter 1

Zoola Shanghai

Zoola’s lungs burned, the last step was in sight, Just about there, she huffed, dog-tired, dripping sweat. Her pack strap had bitten into a raw crease and teased at a salty incision. I got my butt kicked today, she winced, sucking up the radiating pain. Zoo fought collapse, pushing ahead; her body remembered every punishing second meted out during today’s double marathon of combat training. A moment ago the second tier had looked like a good place to crash when her quivering legs had capitulated on the narrow landing. Damn it, she snarled decisively. I’m gonna sleep in my own bed tonight, Zoo soldiered on, spitting dust and hot vapor. I swear these freaking stairs are getting steeper, imagining each desiccated inhalation a blue flame licking deep inside her. The big flight boots she wore didn’t fit a groove laid down by half sized feet. The width of the tred wasn’t right for her species. Can’t they do anything? she fumed. Not a damned thing was going her way. Zoola thought of her refuge above and took another agonizing step.

She balanced on her toes for a second and risked a face plant. Oh screw it,she thought, this time was different, limits had been passed, she felt herself let go, mind and body stumbling weakly back to separate corners after a bruising confrontation. Falling to her knees, the path of least resistance and Orion’s heavy atmosphere had their way with her. The big soldier coughed up a rough grunt as armored kneepads tore into the metal stair with a grinding crunch. Clamping a studded glove onto the spaghetti thin handrail to keep from cartwheeling backasswards, Zoo fought gamely to right herself from this unsightly position. Her backpacks pivot point teetered on a razors edge as she tried her feet again. I don’t think so, she growled, feeling the weight compel her to fall, wrestling for control of her internal gyroscope. A free hand grappled for a quick-release strap stapled to her chest; she anxiously tore at the metal ring like a ripcord virgin. The pack bailed, crashing noisily end over end down the spiraled well. Zoo heaved a sigh of relief, watching the bag fly as she sprang free from under its crushing weight. That’s all they’re getting out of me today, she groaned, I’m done.

Then she was standing, almost upright, not quite steady, but she’d made it, You done good girl, she gasped. Her lips sucked up a gulp of rancid air, held it in for two thumping heartbeats, waiting for the swirl of blood red photopsia in her eyes to settle into a manageable vertigo. Her leaden boots swung past the top step and hammered down a gunshot duet on the hollow porch deck just as the last strip of fire-dappled sunset fell below the imperfect horizon. I did it, she wheezed, elated, as if she’d challenged a lunar mountain. You’re such a pussy, she chastised herself, choking down a gob of sand she’d whiffed up her nose at some point. Zoola unceremoniously started unbuckling her field-gear, slapping at the bindings and hooks with gnarled fingers. She stopped moving to appreciate the scene, not knowing from one minute to the next, when she would get a last look at this view. That tear of ragged flame reminded her of better days, before the sun had become an object of fear and anxiety. This one moment of oblivion made everything worthwhile. That’s nice, she sighed. The nights grew shorter every day, ever since Orion’s star began to swell like a party balloon. Soon, she thought how much she’d miss the moon and stars when these cool evenings disappeared altogether. We’ll probably be off-planet by then, she sighed. We’d better be, sighing again, felt her butt clench in an anxious response as she contemplated the uncertain future. I don’t care what they tell me to think, she whispered, shaking out the cobwebs in her head. I’m going to miss this place. Zoo drank in a breath of fetid air, filling her chest this time, she was proud of who she was and what had been accomplished during her time here in the capital.

Ughh, she gagged, I’m a freaking mess these days. She tasted the sulphorus discharge of Orion City air drip onto her hacking palate, I sure as hell won’t miss that, yechh! Spitting out the foul paste into the dirt, she recalled dismantling the rebreathing unit canister hose while stripping off her helmet as she’d struggled with the stairs, Crap. The mask and filter were discarded refuse in the stairwell below; the rebreather was in her hand. She tossed the flaccid canister assembly over her shoulder and listened to it crash into the dark room behind her. Double crap, she spit another cobweb. Zoo tried to put her mind into the place she wanted to go, to have the long day of training for improbable contingencies and the struggle with the stairs put behind her. She absent-mindedly leaned her big frame against a corroded metal railing demarcating the stoop of her featureless barrack from a twenty-foot drop. The bar bent precariously, threatening to collapse under her considerable weight, it screeched and yawed in response to her touch. Realizing her mistake she rebalanced with a quick step back from the edge. The metal snapped with a clatter as she released her grip. Achh… damn it, she cursed, unconcerned that anyone would hear profanities coming from her; she was no prissy miss and cared little what anyone thought. Everything’s going to hell. Out of fatigue borne frustration she kicked at the remaining bit of rusty frame with her work boot. The cheesy strip of chain link speared loose and hung, momentarily suspended in mid-air to do a wobbling shimmy. It was no surprise when a corner clamp crashed to the ground and two side joints freed themselves from the calamitous assembly before everything collapsed in a heap.

What a freaking horror show, she laughed weakly. It would have been funny in a weirdo-coincidental way if it weren’t so pathetically obvious that she could have fallen and broken her neck. She looked around the barracks yard at the ubiquitous state of neglect. Pieces of porch rail had continually fallen off since the day she’d moved in. A cluster of debris lay in the dust below like an event calendar of the months she’d spent on the base. The chain link letting go was the last straw. Is this some kind of sign? She stared down at the last mutineers, wondering what would go wrong next. The state of disrepair on the base was chronic, just as nothing on the planet had been built to last, buildings in the capital were claptrap and cobbled together, no matter their importance, they all looked like crap. She topped up the metal graveyard with a dribble of spit from the tip of her tongue; it hung down in a viscous droplet a foot long before dropping onto the ignoble pile of junk. Good bloody riddance, she wiped the last of the sticky mess off her bottom lip. Good bloody riddance, she flicked tacky residue off the end of her finger in the general direction of the city that she’d mentally assigned as a metaphor for everything that was wrong with her life on Orion. I guess it’ll be good to see the back of this dump, she resigned.

This spot had become her thinking post. This ‘home,’ as ramshackle as the barracks were, and the sunsets, had been her only refuge. Lately she’d done a lot of soul searching, with little free time on her hands, some of the things on her mind made her darned uncomfortable. Independent thinking of a personal nature was not encouraged on Orion, but recently she felt like a baggage cart had overturned in her sandbox and oddly she felt obligated to sort it out. Her life was just a brainful of muddle these days. There had been a flood of personal issues crop up out of nowhere and then there were the really huge items. Zoola didn’t think she was emotionally equipped to handle this mysterious flood of incomprehensible psychic information, most of it illegal, and there was no way she could share it without risking consequences. It’ll get better once we blast off, she hoped, taking a deep breath, regretting it immediately, taking in a wide view of the Orion capital, trying to center herself. What a mess, she sighed. Zoo found comfort in knowing that there were always bigger problems afoot than her own.

It was as if they were a race of newcomers inhabiting the ruins of a long dead civilization instead of being masters of a place they’d built and ruled over for three thousand years. In the past her people would have built immortal edifices to mark their place and power, now they lived like rats on a scrap heap. She considered the stark contrast of comparing this scene to the impeccable condition of her new fleet of ships waiting in orbit. That’s where the money goes. The entire economy of men and machines on Orion was squarely focused on ‘the mission’, in direct contradiction to the austere life they led on the planet. She had come to prefer the comforts of the ship as opposed to the tenuous life on the ground, everything worked up there, life on Orion was getting to be more impossible every day. Zoo began to think this was why she’d begun to drift. Her mind had become a skating rink of confusing contradictions; she slipped and slid from one regret to another. Maybe it’s the stress, she thought. The idea that she was wrestling with these thoughts at all was at the heart of her problem, and that was confusing in itself. There’d never been any training sessions on how to deal with emotional turmoil.

Zoola didn’t realize she was being watched, how could she? Her mind was lost inside an internal dialogue and she’d left herself vulnerable. The tangle of vibrations from the frenetic pace of the capital made the mind-world indistinct except to extreme adepts called ‘sniffers’ designed for psychic war. A stealthy observer could penetrate the wall of white noise unseen, like a lioness stalking the tall grass for unsuspecting prey. It was ‘normal’ for the roar of the city to deafen and citizens would switch their defenses off to protect their sanity. The capital was on full alert, the factories running unabated amidst a general cacophony. Zoola had heard enough for one day and her habit, whenever she got ‘home’, was to turn herself ‘inwards’, so the noise was reflected away. She was an incredible sight to see outlined in those last faint rays of the sun, a radically redesigned humanoid, naked except for the skin of a flexible exoskeleton that she’d peeled back and let hang loosely around her waist as if it were a freshly flayed skin from an unfortunate beast. The strange material captured the nascent ambient starlight creating a glowing circlet around her generous hips. Droplets of beading sweat still pumping out between her scales, showed that her exertions had been intense. Insinuated reflections of the disappearing sky appeared in each glistening mercurial mirror. She’d let her heavily laden battle suit fall in an unruly heap at her feet as she carelessly stripped. The bristling gun belt and bandolier resembled a lustrous serpent coiled protectively around her half-laced jump boots.

It had been another hard day of close-fight training and war games; she was a dirty girl, desperate for water, but this visual had priority for now, she was in the moment. Peeled open like a ripe fruit, her glistening body appeared to be wrapped in a shimmering blanket of diamonds set pave’ style into her blue black skin. The setting sun brought with it a predictable barometric change followed by delicious breezes that began to slowly wick the drying dust off her. With her mind closed to the outside world, she felt ‘normal’ for the first time that day. Normal, she laughed, What the hell does that even mean? She’d always known that her future was in the stars. When it had been confirmed that Orion was dying, the inevitable was obvious. No one had expected that life on the planet would come to an end quite like this; the sun’s sudden shift into supernova caught the population by surprise. It was freaky that the entire solar system had decided to commit coincidental suicide; several other asteroids in Orion’s gravity had also begun to deteriorate without explanation. How could the scientists have been so wrong in their calculations, she wondered? Orion had sustained her people for thousands of years, ‘So why had this come about now with such swift finality?’ Achhh-tooey, she spit out another greasy spider web and watched it arc until disappearing into the creeping blue shadow. The ground force had been training with their faces in the dirt today and her air crew was conscripted into the fray. Orders are orders, it wasn’t like she had a say in the matter. This world has gone to hell anyway,"

Zools surveyed the ruined cities crenulated silhouette against the suns dying light; it looked better now that she couldn’t see the details. If it wasn’t for the fact that we’re all going to die, she mused, It wouldn’t be too bad. The sky had turned a muted shade of tangerine when she spied her first star. It’s not pretty, she thought as she watched the last outlines of the building-scape change from a thin red pencil sketch to a deep purple watercolor growing entirely indistinct as the light failed. But it’s all we’ve got. Zoo wondered if she was the only one on Orion watching the sun go down, perhaps for the last time, she looked around, she was alone, the only set of eyes trained on the skyline. A new feeling gripped her heart, it was sadness. The Orion colony had been hastily constructed after her ancestors had dropped out of space when they’d exhausted their options. The capital hadn’t been bombed out or overrun by a campaigning army the way a casual observer might have been forgiven for thinking, it was collapsing under it’s own careless mismanagement. Settlement here had been intended to be ‘temporary’ from the onset of the first boots hitting the ground. They hadn’t disembarked their failed ships and kissed the life saving ground of Orion. Their martial ancestors had maintained a state of perpetual readiness to ‘about face,’ that period had stretched into three thousand years of disregard. As such there had never been any attempt to beautify the place or a plan for ongoing human habitation. Streets were a rabbit warren of endless confusion. Disease was rife in the close quarters of the inner city where clones were housed and several times a year whole sections had to be razed by conflagration to contain any of the particularly virulent pathogens that broke out of the labs to rampage through the population. The usual ‘modus operandi’ was to blockade the narrow lanes with heavily armed troops and rain fire down on the clone’s quarters from circling gun ships killing both the sick and dying as well as the uninfected. New diseases were the product of constant mutations in the human genome and the awakening of long dormant enzymes. Occasional outbreaks were accepted as ‘collateral damage’ in the ‘battle for progress’.

Industrial waste and human refuse had piled up like a fast growing mountain range around the capital and left to rot. After three thousand years of occupation there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of garbage heap landscape surrounding every city on the planet. The cities resembled ‘bug out’ ready encampments in an active war zone, comprised mostly of tent structures and clapboard huts. Toxic waste and the industrial detritus from the factories layered the ground with an eerie sheen. Clouds of pollution reflected back into the pools of wastewater, there was no respite from the gloom if you tried walking with downcast eyes. Zoola knew that most people didn’t care but she felt a twinge of regret that the planet that had given them life and succor when they’d needed it most had been treated so badly in return. The topic was banned from conversation so if others shared her feelings, they kept it to themselves. The original Orion colonists had been ready for a quick turnaround after ‘perhaps’ a few decades, but those hopes had been repeatedly dashed by technical failure and the ‘short landing’ had turned into a three thousand year struggle.

Zoola stretched, more relaxed now that she’d seen her sunset, revealing her three-meter height, the naked musculature rippled as she swayed rhythmically in the liquid-orange half-light. Her stylized movement sparked off a series of scintillating waves that undulated across her chiseled form as if announcing her physical perfection to the world. That feels so good, she purred, her tired legs unclenching slowly as she rocked back and forth to a musical beat only she could hear`. She wanted to ignore the frantic levels of energy buzzing around her on the base by refocusing her mind inward. She let herself wander towards the door of her ‘happy place’, enjoying a rare moment of peace, luxuriating in the opportunity to think an individual thought. She loved this time of day when the waning sunlight was in competition with the advent of twilight. It’s been a long time coming, she thought. It’ll be a long time gone, an inner voice answered. Preparations for the mission had run unabated for weeks. We’re almost there, the new beginning. Zoola felt conflicted that she’d never see Orion again. An old sound track she’d listened to while alone with the archival records played around in her head, There’s no place like home’, it went. There’s no place like home’, la la la la lah". Life had its moments.

Obsidian scales gave her nakedness the appearance of wearing an armored cat suit. Looking closer, the uneven quasicrytalline weave of organic fabric wrapped her in an unsolvable algorithmic pattern on the tilted planes of her scaling. The irregular and intricate patterning caught the viewer in opposition, as if she were something inherently unnatural to the human eye, alien and offensive while at the same time an irritating mathematical contest between the eye and mind. The exoskeleton designers had deliberately proposed subliminal controversy by presenting a form that was as detestable in its mechanical appearance as it was blasphemous in it’s relation to any from a ‘civilized’ culture. It was an intended strike against anyone thinking they had anything in common with the overlords. The quasicrystal had been her peoples special symbol of power for thousands of years on Earth, it had been woven into the psyche of conquered peoples as a symbol of oppression and fear. There had been a long history of conflict on ancient Earth where these symbols had been like waving a flag of hatred between opposing factions. The quasicrytals were naturally occurring and formed from successive layers of secretions that drained from the tissue of her two symbiotic ‘guests’. The crystalline ‘skin suit’ hardened over time to create a protective shielding for the wearer against the elements.

She stood in perfect silhouette against the dwindling twilight. Zoola stretched her arms out languidly, reaching towards a non-existent point in space; mimicking the movements of a ‘dancer’ she’d secretly watched in the archives, something called ‘ballet’, so beautiful, so silly. But the idea of the pursuit of perfection through the manipulation of the human form had intrigued her when she’d discovered ‘the dance’. She wondered how the Pureon’s had missed the connection between this most human of endeavors and the cosmic dance of the universe. Lately, her life had been a series of long days, hard knocks and bruising demands, now that the off-world plan had been ordered into overdrive; these interludes and ‘flights of fancy’ had become more frequent as her stressors had increased exponentially. Zoo wished that she had the time to pursue these new ideas’s dogging her instead of the myopia of science. It’s really going to happen, she was slightly amazed at the prospect of the final fruition of a lifetime of planning and preparation. The sudden order to ‘go’ had taken her and her fellow officers by surprise, it had seemed not long ago like ‘it’ would never happen. Her lithe and synchronized movement was strangely reminiscent of a feline languidly grooming. Hidden breasts pressed up from under her flesh straining against the restricting outer layer of scales as she arched her back while standing on her tippy toes. Her womanhood was suggested but hidden deep under an obscene layer of biological engineering. The dance had been called ‘Swan Lake’, she wanted to twirl, but that would have look ludicrous given where she stood. Dance my little bird, a voice remaining unheard rested in the shadows.

The leadership had decided to cut out all references to Earth after escaping from that planet. She knew little about the home planet outside what she had been taught, except for what she’d secreted out of the archives in her stolen moments of ‘special’ access. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to look, she wondered out loud? Wasn’t it all going to be mine to command when we get there? The Orion’s had rewritten history to reflect only what was beneficial to the training of the next generation of Fringelord's, but her blood wasn’t enough to override protocol entirely. Do you need to know that? The computer would demand exacting criteria for access when she used her ‘special’ status to circumvent ‘the rules’ and demanded that the certain research materials she was ordering were necessary for her work. She knew all this because of the gulf of discrepancies between the daily propaganda from the leadership and what she’d dredged up in the archives. Like all dictators, they preferred to live in a fantasy world of their own creative version of history. The new generation of Orion’s were humanoid, genetic engineering and physical modifications had made them unrecognizable to an ancestor. The truth about the past would have been just as unrecognizable.

Zoola’s physical design more resembled the powerful musculature of an animal encased in the carapace of a giant insect. The mimicry of historically successful species had been incorporated into the new generations of Orion Fringelord. It must have been that inside their inescapable collective memory, the primordial cells of the Pureon designers praised and feared alike the ancient animals that had hunted them in the past. Her angular profile against the darkening sky made her look like she’d been chiseled out of stone. The designers had sought to configure this new race with every advantage, the equilateral angles of her facial bones were designed to deflect a blow and absorb detection technology. Her particular strain of Asian DNA had been preserved in some surface elements that lent an ovular character to her widely spaced eyes. Her immediate concentration on the core subjects of her mission caused a delicious swirl of ‘feel good’ endorphins to be injected into her brain by an impulse controlled by the symbiotic ‘guest’. A blue sliver of bifurcated tongue darted out past her full lips before disappearing back behind a row of perfectly sharpened teeth that gnashed together as the drug heightened her sensuality. Delicious, she purred and sucked at the air as if through a straw.

Zoola’s startling eyes lit up as darkness blanketed her perch. Live nano-tissue astronavigation maps had been sutured over her eyeballs. This was one of the more recent bio-manipulation innovations manufactured in Orion’s vast laboratories by wickedly creative Pureon and Caapi scientists. The symbiotic tissue wrapped itself around the eye bulb and grew to bind the optic nerve to those of the ‘guest’. The nano-tissue grew quickly to interconnect the brain stem and synaptic nerves with its flowing tendrils; each slippery tentacle designed to seek a specific host material. In isolation, the organism resembled a jellyfish with flowing appendages adrift in open water. The Pureon scientists had spent their last years on Earth hiding in an aquatic environment. Perhaps the attributes of that inner space had given them inspiration. There was no doubt in Zoola’s mind that it had been the Earth archives that the Pureon’s and Caapi had used to redefine the future of the new species they sought to create. They’d studied the evolution of mankind for thousands of years and had uncovered a myriad of nature’s subtle secrets. They knew that visual stimulation from ambient starlight could be used to energize a host’s sight-brain connection, that every rod and cone in the eye could be subordinated into an interwoven quasi-biological computer language. It had been discovered that by stealing control over a humans hormone production by introducing foreign elements, that the same chemistry could be used to control the minds of men. The ‘guests’, using their ancient organic chemistry, could easily control the humans with bio-chemical stimulation. Humans had become light sensitive in order to develop the night vision necessary to survive the nocturnal hunters of primitive Earth. They had developed larger eyes to see what crept in the night; the scientists had manipulated these ancient attributes to their advantage. Now, the same instinctual stimulation could be used to control human thought and by extension their emotional responses.

Nano-particles embedded into non-human tissue had been designed to hold statistical information. The ‘semi-skin’ creatures mimicked the biological processes of nerve stimulation to the brain along the optic nerves and synaptic vesicles. The process in turn created chemical reactions in the brain that released euphoria inducing hormones into the host blood stream whenever the host focused on the desired objectives that were gene mapped into the nano-material. It was a perfect nexus of science and nature where science was dominant and nature the slave. The Pureon’s had existed as troglodytes prior to the Caapi enslavement. Their experimentations with human sight under challenging conditions was the product of observation over thousands of years. Under most conditions, the humans were complacent puppets that could be forced to abide by any ‘suggestions’ of the ‘guests’ assigned to the individual. In Zoola’s current state, cosmic energy stimulated her thoughts through chemical reactions in her brain. The result served to hyper-direct her focus onto ‘the mission’ she had been programmed for. Like any Orion ‘host’ she felt a dogged conditioned desire for continual stimulation via the release of dopamine into her brain. Fringelord clones sought to position themselves for additional Pavlovian behavior as they were ‘born’ addicted to their mission parameters through the alien implants they’d received before becoming self aware. The Pureon scientists and the vegetal life form ‘Caapi’, had labored unsuccessfully for generations to genetically modify every human physio-psychological response-trait out of the Fringelord’s progeny they couldn’t control. It was frustrating that the clones could still express free will. The best level of control practiced over them was this ‘addiction’ and the high level of empathic control by the two symbiotic lives inside them urging them to ‘cooperate’.

The scientists discovered that they could control many of the instinctual response mechanisms in the human brain through scientific trickery, but not all. They’d never been able to master the intricacies and seeming ‘secrets’ of the human genetic code. To complicate matters, humans were continually evolving on a microbiological level, assimilating new environmental protocol, regardless of the controls in place, and would ‘shift’ traits from one generation to another in an ephemeral fashion, skipping one generation’s recessive genes to favor or sabotage the next. It was maddeningly chaotic to the Pureon scientists who hated this constancy of unchecked change. Zoola was the latest generation of hybrid bio-cyborg. Inside her a mutant Pureon and plant based Caapi modification had been fused with her human biology. Staring into space, each quadrant on her ocular