SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
“Have you ever heard of the ‘Great Filter’?” Enik asked.
Revel accessed her memories. She searched back and back, stopping what she was doing and putting down the beaker to search. Her eyes went vacant for a moment as she sifted through the countless memories of her ancestors, before she returned to her task.
“Nope. That’s a new idea, isn’t it?” she answered.
“Yeah. The astrophysics division coined the term recently as a way to explain the lack of alien life out there.”
“Go on, now I’m curious.”
“So you know how, statistically, there should be lots of alien life out there? With how many stars and planets there are in our galaxy alone, we should be seeing spaceships flying all over the place by now.”
“Why should we assume other life out there is more advanced than us?”
“It’s just statistics. Us Hivanians have had a hard time expanding off-planet because of this stupid virus. Statisticians estimate we would already be an interplanetary society if we weren’t constantly fighting the Magna virus.”
“That would be nice.”
“You’re telling me. Anyway, the Great Filter is a means to explain why we’re not seeing other life out there. All of the planets nearby are completely dead and barren. Basically, the Great Filter is a barrier that life has to pass while emerging. And the astrophysics division pretty much unanimously agrees that the Magna virus is the Great Filter that’s been killing all life on other nearby planets.”
Revel gazed once more at the crimson, pulsing mass of Magna specimen on the petri dish in front of them. Her expression hardened.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she murmured.
“The filter can either be in front of us or behind us. And in this situation, I think we can safely say the filter is in front of us. It has been for a while. We won’t be able to expand outwards again until we can conquer this thing,” Enik finished.
“And now that the infection’s finally started here, we’ll be hitting the filter soon.”
“Exactly,” Enik added. “But we can only pray that we make it through.”
Revel stood in front of dozens of rows of seats, all filled with watchful, waiting eyes. The lecture hall lights shone on her, prompting her eyes to squint for a moment before adjusting. She took a deep breath.
“It has been 62,506 years since our species left our home, our old planet behind, fleeing the imminent Magna virus. And ever since we left our old planet, we’ve been searching for a cure without success. I, Revel Ytiva, head scientist of the Hivanian Disease Research Division, am unfortunately not presenting a cure to you all today. Not yet. I’m here to outline the Hivanian Disease Research Division’s recent discoveries on the Magna virus and its properties. In today’s crisis the division needs more brilliant minds than ever, which is why I’m talking to you all, the next generation of scientists. One among you may even be the one to cure the Magna.”
The projector clicked on and displayed a diagram of the virus behind her.
“The Magna virus is a variety of virus we had not seen before. It spreads through contact and through the air, but most importantly, the Magna spreads terrestrially. It does not discriminate between species—the Magna can and will infect anything living, flora, fauna, or other. Once patient zero touches the surface of a rocky planet, the Magna virus, over the course of a few hours, deconstructs patient zero into more of itself, seeping into the ground where they once stood. It spreads through the crust of the planet over the course of dozens or even hundreds of years, lying dormant there for what we know could be hundreds of thousands of years.”
“Once another living thing touches the infected planet, the virus infects it, as well. It will continue to infect any and all life on the planet, lying perfectly dormant, seeming perfectly harmless until one specific condition is met. Once an infected individual travels to a new planet, the Magna activates.”
“Almost at once, as if receiving a simultaneous signal, all infected life on the original planet becomes sick. The first symptoms for humanoid entities are coughing and chest pain, followed by the symptoms intensifying greatly in the first week of sickness. In the following week the individual suffers migraines, the mind becomes clouded, and the individual has a hard time thinking. After two weeks, small blobs of Magna will form in the bloodstream and on the skin. In the third week, the patient’s DNA will slowly be erased and replaced by strains of Magna virus, exponentially accelerating the infection. After one month, the patient is dead.”
Revel took in the grim stares of the students. She only wished the facts she was presenting to them weren’t true.
“It is believed that the pandemic on our planet has been triggered by our first interplanetary mission, by attempting our first colony on Planet U. The first Hivanian on another stellar body inadvertently triggered this illness, and now, it is our duty as a species to stop it. We must expand outwards. We must conquer the Magna virus before it conquers us, else our legacy will be lost forever.”
It was a ghastly sight.
Inside of massive white rooms, Revel could see countless sick and dead, taken by the Magna virus.
The Hivanians possessed the ability to access the memories of any of their deceased ancestors—and right now, new memories popped into her head faster than ever.
Revel stepped back into the massive lab from the sick rooms, trying to ignore her nausea. A rookie lab worker approached her.
“Dr. Revel, the mortality rate is still 100%. Those who fall ill never last more than a month. Are we making any progress towards the cure?”
Revel sighed defeatedly. “Nothing. Nothing we try can kill the virus. I’ve put together the best thinkers on the whole goddamn planet, the best medical technology our society has, but nothing’s working. It’s killing every form of life on the planet at a staggering rate.”
The rookie looked down at the ground, murmured, and walked off.
Everyone in the lab was grim. There must be something different, Revel thought. Some kind of weakness that sets the virus apart.
She strode through the colossal laboratory, making her way towards the center room of the lab. She passed by hundreds and hundreds of doctors, officials, and world leaders until she finally reached the center room where the first sample of the Magna virus was held. It was a piece of earthy stone in a thick glass case, a cut made in the center of the rock, and a gash on its side.
Revel Remembered that her ancestors had lived on the planet where this rock came from. After discovering the Magna’s existence, they were forced to evacuate with the help of the Schisms. What irony, to think that the Schisms had been the whole reason for the Magna virus to spread around the galaxy anyway.
The Schisms—what had truly happened to them? Revel dove into her ancestors’ memories once again, from thousands and thousands of years ago. She Remembered how, following the Hivanians’ evacuation, the Schism and Hivanian species became close, exchanging gifts and information. The Hivanians gave them their abundant knowledge of the world, thanks to their species’ collective memories, along with an ancient stone from their old home. In exchange, the wealthy Schisms gave them faster-than-light communication devices to ensure planetary contact, and a dozen escape pods from their spaceship.
And the Schisms themselves had thrived in the years following the migration; their technology and society had skyrocketed, all thanks to their own faster-than-light spaceship—the Kaari, it had been named. The interplanetary resources granted by the Kaari let the Schisms advance further and faster than any other species.
But maybe they had flown too close to the sun.
Shortly after evacuating the Hivanians, the Schisms went radio silent—attacked by the Magna. Originally, it was thought that the Magna virus had caused their extinction, but it was discovered several decades later that the Schisms had survived. Only, they weren’t the same; the cure that they crafted for themselves had succeeded in killing the virus, but a combination of population bottlenecking and the cure itself had corrupted the Schisms’ bodies, reverting them to a band of primitives on a single island. It was a tragic end to the Hivanians’ companion species.
But if the Schisms had survived the Magna, then there had to be a cure somewhere out there. And if the Schisms could do it long ago, the Hivanians could certainly do it now.
The center laboratory was cold and empty, full of the remains of failed experiments and fruitless tests. In the middle was the first sample of the Magna in a glass case, the virus embedded in stone. Revel and her colleagues had spent hundreds, maybe thousands of tireless hours in this lab. Now that the technology within it was outdated—the Magna crisis had spurred fast improvement in lab technology—it was now but an artifact of past failures and a symbol of where it all began.
Built of stones like the sample she was looking at were relics her ancestors had made eons ago, three relics describing the Hivanians’ society and warning of the virus that resided there. And Revel Remembered, her ancestors long ago had done research into the truth of Manim before they were forced to leave. There was a special trait to Manim’s land that they had yet to discover…
Revel pressed a button on a dashboard nearby and the glass casing surrounding the sample sunk. When they took the sample of the Magna virus long ago, it was from this rock. But, then, they had only been focused on the virus within, not the stone itself.
She scraped off a sample with a drill and then put it in a chemical analyzer. She waited a moment in silence as the loading bar filled, and then gazed at the results.
Within the silicon, oxygen, and aluminum there was a hidden element. Ingrained within the molecules of the rock was something new.
4.679% VAL
Val? That’s what the Hivanians called their memory-accessing ability. It was the mystery element that they found embedded within their DNA and within the virus that ravaged them. And the sample she picked didn’t have any of the virus in it—was it possible that the earth itself had power?
Revel stormed out of the testing room, hands bloody and panting frantically. A single thought was ringing through her mind.
Horrible… so horrible….
The first patient to be injected with a Val-based cure had died terribly. It was as if their body itself rejected the cure, rejected the Val she had tried to put inside them. It had corrupted the body. She didn’t want to recall the experience. She wished it never happened.
Enik walked out of the same room, eyes wide and filled with terror. He stopped by Revel.
“It’s okay,” he reassured. “Everything’s alright. The patient’s dead, but, please, Revel, don’t let their death be in vain. Please don’t give up.”
“I don’t want anyone else to lose their lives if this cure is faulty,” Revel stated simply, still gathering herself.
“But it’s not,” Enik said. “Didn’t you see? The cure worked. The spot where the patient was injected became free of the virus for a moment.”
Revel stopped her panicking. “Really?”
“Yes, it did. We just have to figure out how to adapt it to the Hivanian body.”
Dozens and dozens of failed trials taught Revel something: every time a patient was injected with the Val-based cure, they lost something. Some lost their minds, or their sight, or their senses, but none of them survived. Their bodies, only adapted to handle a single Val— their collective memory—simply couldn’t handle the new Val being added. And worse yet, she noticed the symptoms of the Magna virus developing within herself now, too. Not one living thing on their planet was still healthy anymore. The clock was ticking, and time was running out.
What if instead of adapting the cure to the Hivanian body, Revel thought, the Hivanian body should be adapted to the cure?
The remaining doctors and scientists began their ceaseless work on the genetic modification of developing babies. Pregnant mothers volunteered their lives and their children for hope of a functioning cure. Something had to be “lost” in order for the Val to reside in the body, and losing too much would only kill the subject. Revel thought, what can someone lose while still surviving? The options were running out, and anything physical the subject lost turned out to prove deadly.
Revel wheezed on her desk chair, her mind spinning. The infection was taking hold—she wouldn’t have a week left. Something had to happen. There had to be something one could lose at birth that wasn’t an arm or a leg or a mind.
She looked once again at the countless lab reports of Magna patients, all of which showed the exact same pattern of slow demise. The symptoms at first were like a regular, worsening sickness, but once the Magna virus began to delete the victim’s DNA, all was lost. Symptoms akin to radiation poisoning began to show themselves, leading to a painful death. Revel tried not to think about the fact that her own DNA, her own identity was being deleted at that very moment.
Then, at once, it hit her. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? It was right in front of her the whole time—identity. The virus itself was practically giving the answer to her.
What if identity was lost?
Everything was in order. The injection would insure the child would be birthed perfectly healthy, only without a face. All functions a face performed—sight, smell, hearing, taste—would be replaced by an artificial organ within the brain. Where the mouth should be, the surface would be able to melt away for consumption and partial digestion of food.
The only thing lost was the given identity of the child.
In front of her was a pregnant woman, the last Revel could find. She was desperate.
“My husband’s life has already been taken,” the woman cried when Revel found her. “Please give some hope for my child.”
In the laboratory room were the woman, Revel, and Enik. Enik prepared the cure inside of a syringe while Revel lay exhausted in her chair. She could hardly stand up anymore.
“Revel,” Enik called once the cure was ready. “Do you remember what I told you about the Great Filter?”
Revel turned her pale face to Enik, who too was showing signs of the illness.
“Yes?” she managed.
“I’ve been thinking about what’s gonna happen if this cure works. When this child is born, he’ll be the only Hivanian to conquer the Great Filter. The Magna virus… he’ll be able to destroy it. If this works… we Hivanians will have broken the Great Filter. Life will be able to pass through.”
“You’re… right…” Revel breathed.
“I’m gonna give it a name. The child, the cure, I’m not sure yet. Serterin Rebau. In our language, that means ‘filter breaker.’ And, for short, we’ll call it…”
Enik paused as he injected the cure into the woman.
“S.R.”
Only two hours after the child was born, it was placed in one of the escape pods the Schisms had gifted the Hivanians sixty thousand years ago. Despite its age, the escape pod’s incomprehensibly advanced craftsmanship ensured perfect functionality for eons. In the pod, the child would develop, obtaining all necessary nutrients in a coma-like state.
The entities that had created the pods weren’t Hivanian—they weren’t Schisms, either. They were something greater, something different. It supported the child’s humanoid form regardless.
The last Hivanians alive, only moments away from death, placed the child in the escape pod and sent it into the heavens. Far from now, it would land on the planet where everything started.
Long, long ago, thousands of years before Revel’s or Azer’s time, the last Hivanian to be evacuated off of Manim, a little girl, boarded the Kaari, a sophisticated spaceship able to travel lightyears in a blink. It looked like nothing she’d ever seen or ever would see, foreign beyond foreign, a level of advancement in its technology that exceeded comprehension. Now, it was being used to evacuate the Hivanian species off of a planet that would be called Manim tens of thousands of years later. She felt sick as she walked inside, but it wasn’t enough to warrant telling her parents.
Walking deeper, she passed by the waiting eyes of a number of Schisms, conversing in their unfamiliar language. She marveled at the Schisms and their different features. Finding her parents and sitting down, she looked out a window at her former home.
The ship appeared to be rising slowly, but she felt no motion. Below were the rolling hills and tall mountains she’d lived near her whole life. But they were not lit by the usual warm glow of the sun—instead, great shadows darkened the entire landscape. She looked up.
Wall-like clouds were consuming the ever-shrinking window of clear sky above, dark and foreboding. Flashes of light tried to escape the tempest, glowing briefly from deep within the storm, the horizon-to-horizon front giving a vertigo-inducing sense of scale.
On cue, the mood within the great ship shifted. The Schisms began running to different stations, manipulating devices the girl didn’t understand and shouting to each other. The windows in the ship became the main source of attention to its passengers, many of her fellow Hivanian refugees letting out gasps of surprise and awe.
Sensing the tension around her, the little girl turned to her mother.
“What’s going on?”
The girl’s mother had a hard time keeping the fear out of her face when she turned from the window to her.
“It’s okay, baby. It just looks like a storm’s coming.”
“Will we be okay?”
Her mother turned to one of the passing Schisms and shouted something in their language. The Schism shouted back, accompanied with expressive hand motions. The little girl looked to her mother for an answer.
“They said we should be fine,” her mother answered, rubbing the girl’s cheek. “We’ll get out of here in time.”
But still, her mother continued to look out the window with apprehension.
Hardly a few minutes passed before the clouds, once distant and harmless, began to consume the spaceship Kaari. The girl’s view of the sky was completely obscured, becoming an opaque sea of water vapor and darkness. The ship began to shake in its ascent. She kept her view through the window steady.
For a while, nothing except distant yellow-white flashes penetrated the darkness. But, as they rose, she noticed more and more colors present within the storm, first dim, then bright. Then, abruptly, the flashes stopped.
For a moment, the girl could see nothing but her own reflection in the window. She noticed the features of her own face, the shape and color of her eyes. Then, it looked as if her eyes were beginning to glow.
A face, not her own, was staring back at her from beyond the window, only crudely resembling a face at all and with large, glowing eyes that looked somehow impossibly deep.
The Kaari shuddered with a huge boom, and with a collective scream, the passengers were tossed to the side. The Schisms piloting the vessel yelled to each other, and a strange sound filled the ship. The girl’s mother held her tightly. She looked to the window again, and the apparition was gone.
“What’s happening? I’m scared!” the girl shouted to her mother.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” her mother reassured. “They’re saying a piece of the ship was torn off, but it sounds like it was just a communications device. They’re calling it an emergency transponder. They said we’ll be out of this storm in a second. Hold on, okay?”
With the image of the face outside burned in her memory, she nodded apprehensively.
After several more minutes of turbulence and fear, the Kaari emerged from the storm. It fell into a slow and sluggish orbit above their planet. This sight, too, was too advanced for her to understand—space travel was far outside of her species’ daily activities of hunting and gathering. She had never seen an ocean before, much less a planet.
The ship drifted away from their old home, and then, with a flash, it blasted away.
Azer woke with a jolt on the cold stone of the third and final relic. Grif was looking at him with joy seeing that he was awake.
“I… Remember,” Azer muttered, pushing himself up.
“What?” Grif’s face grew concerned.
“I Remember everything. Everything about my species, my people, the cure, everything that happened. The virus… the Magna virus…” Azer paused. “My S.R. is the cure. All of the Hivanians sacrificed themselves to let me live.”
Azer was overcome with a wave of profound sadness for his parents, his people, the ones who had died at the hands of this virus. So many people. But with it was a sense of improbable hope: he was the only one who had the cure.
For the first time Azer no longer questioned his identity. He realized then, he was a Hivanian. He was hope. He was Azer. He was the Filter Breaker.
“We were afraid you had died,” Grif lamented, Okta trudging along behind. “We just got back from the fields, and when we saw you, we weren’t sure what had happened.”
The sun illuminated the relic in its dignity, shining and beautiful in the light. The three shared a moment of awe at the sight.
“This was the last one, huh?” Grif commented. “It’s stunning. The whole thing was just-”
“Hidden in plain sight. I know.”
“Delvin’s gone,” Okta said, “but his injuries aren’t letting him go far. He can’t take refuge in Nur anymore. Stranded and with all his strength gone, he’ll eventually succumb to the virus.”
Azer felt a sick feeling of fear and disgust well up within him. “That means that… he completed his goal. He’ll get what he wanted.”
“He will,” Okta said. “And now we have to face the aftermath of his actions. Azer, your S. R… it is an incredible thing. Can it really cure the Magna virus?”
“It can.”
“Would it be possible to distribute it to everyone?”
“No. The S.R. is a chemical cure, yes, but it’s also my Val. It’s a chemical my body can produce and utilize at the cost of my energy. Producing enough of it for the entire town– or the entire planet– would kill me. Long before I can make enough.”
“Then what else can we do?”
Azer looked again at the final relic, reading its contents. A meaningless act, he knew, since he could now Remember his ancestors who built it.
“We have one last chance at defeating the virus,” Azer said, “but this one’s a stretch and relies on a huge ‘maybe.’”
“In what?”
“My ancestors—the Hivanians—who used to live on this planet a long time ago wrote their society’s discoveries and findings on these relics before they left.” Then, seeing confusion in Okta and Grif, elaborated: “The Hivanians were evacuated from Manim after the virus got here. They were helped by, well… the Schisms. It’s a lot, I know. But before my ancestors left, they discovered a few things about this planet.”
Azer strode over to a spot on the relic’s wall and ran his finger over the symbols as he read them out loud.
“‘Recent excavations have found veins of red and blue at varying depths in the earth.’ One of those ‘veins’ in the earth was the Magna virus, lying dormant, but what was the blue? It can’t just be roots. They’re described as veins. All throughout this relic there’s mention of the blue veins and what they could mean, along with strange lights coming from the north, towards the mountains. That’s where I want to go.”
“All the way to the mountains?” Grif repeated.
“There has to be something there. Through all of my ancestors’ memories, it was the one enigma they couldn’t solve, the one place nobody reached. And yet all of the signs point towards the mountains.”
“Your time will be limited,” Okta warned. “Now that the Magna is killing, we have only weeks left until it infects everyone, maybe less.”
“This won’t take weeks. We could do it in a few days.”
Okta looked between the two, his expression unrecognizable. He held his cloth-covered arm stump with his remaining hand.
“Then take my old car. Out to the mountains. All that’s left now is to wish you two good luck. Please, for the sake of all of us, find a way to stop this.”
Air rushed by the car’s hull as it sped over the grassy hills around Nur and towards the faraway mountains. Grif was silent as he drove, Azer too as he sat in the passenger seat.
Azer rolled down his window and let the passing air whip over the patch of skin where his face should be.
And, from far in the North, with the air passing the car came a cold wind.
