Future Winds (27 page)

***

Tyler, Aries, and Scorpio made their way into what was left of the city of Liberty.

Tyler was skeptical about returning, for fear he would be captured and executed. As soon as he saw the city in ruins, he was not even sure there was anyone left alive to confront him.

The warp gate looked to be fully intact. Its energy shields were on an automated system that appeared to have held up against the chaos, but the skyline of the city was mostly gone. Only a few beams from the frames of the buildings under construction still stood. It was sad to see all the hard work man had put into shaping their new world be reduced to nothingness in a single afternoon. Sporadic fires burned away at what was left, releasing thick black trails of smoke into the dusk sky.

As he got closer into the city, Tyler noticed the pools of blood that littered the ground. In closer examination hundreds of thousands of discombobulated corpse, perhaps even millions, displayed a scene of mass genocide across the land. The ground was painted with the blood and gore of bodies no longer recognizable.

The doors to New Horizon were left open but no people were around, inside or out. Only the dead would call the city of Liberty home now.

Tyler noticed movement coming from one of New Horizon’s doors. He tightened his grip on his rifle as his eyes made out the figure. It was Aisha. She exited the ship and was limping out towards a hill that was free from fire and bodies.

Tyler sprinted on ahead to meet her. “Hey,” he shouted, but she did not respond.

She reached the top of the hill and fell back against a large boulder. Still standing, she leaned against the stone with a blank look. It was as if the person she was on the inside had packed her bags and fled out of town, leaving behind only a broken shell of a body.

“Hey, Aisha!” Tyler called out again as he approached her.

She turned to look at him but did not smile or show even the slightest sense of joy in seeing him.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked.

Her hair and face was sticky and red. From head to toe she was covered in the insides of the fallen.

“Listen, there is some seriously fucked up shit going on underground,” he said with a sense of urgency.

“Tyler,” Aisha said, sniffling and shaking her head. “There is some seriously fucked up shit happening above ground,” she let out, beginning to cry and falling into his arms.

For a minute, the two of them embraced. Tyler fixed his eyes onto the fire that fell to the west with the setting sun while holding his broken friend. The red balls pelted a string of mountains as the storm climbed up over the range.

Aries and Scorpio hovered silently, watching as day was turning again to night, and with it, the stars and nebulas in the sky were becoming increasingly more visible. So much was happening in the space above. Blue gases trailed off into cyan ones and purple clouds with billions of stars looked to cut its own little section out of the very fragments of time and space.

Aisha pulled away, leaving Tyler red with a fair amount of the blood that she wore. The tears that streamed down her face cleansed the blood beneath her eyes like rivers carving through stone after a thousand years of flowing freely.

“Hey, did you know that robots dream?” Tyler said, beaming his gaze above to the wondrous detail in the outstretches of space before them.

Thrown off guard by the random comment, Aisha looked to Tyler and furrowed her bloody brows.

“Yea,” he continued. “Aries says she dreams of all sorts of weird stuff. Said she even likes whales.”

Joining him in his gaze above, Aisha stared back off into the canvas of purple and blue. In silence they admired the architectural brilliance of the galaxies directly overhead. “It is probably because it is the one species from earth she can most relate too,” Aisha said with a sniffle. “Whales have the largest brain of any other animal native to our home planet,” she claimed.

“Yea, that makes sense,” he added.

“Yea”, she sniffled out with a faint chuckle as she ceased her cry for a brief moment. “Whales would have never traveled halfway across the galaxy to enslave each other and massacre all of life on their new found home,” she finished with her eyes glued to the interstellar collection of clouds that composed the most magnificent recital she had ever seen.

“I don’t know. I mean, if they were physically capable of doing so, wouldn't they?” Tyler pressed.

“No, Tyler. They would not,” she concluded.