PREDATORS Predators, Part l Margaret heard the faint zap of an inter-dimensional translation portal closing and knew Macali had returned. There was no reason to speak, no reason to move, no reason to defend. The Opae could not harm her, and whatever Macali had to say could wait forever as far as Margaret was concerned. Three months in Macali's company had produced neither friendship nor animosity. They understood each other in a limited way. They were both weapons forged out of need, trained to the target. How ironic that they couldn't kill each other or even put a scratch on the other's armor. Something about the inter-dimensional vibration of their respective races allowed them to see and hear each other, but they couldn't actually touch. The concept of alien did not begin to describe their differences. Predators, Part 2 As soon as Macali transported into the bay, she knew that Margaret had finally let her guard slip. For months they had shared the same space without touching, saying little, barely getting to know the limits of their trans-dimensional communication. Macali had no need for weapons as she activated the entrapment vortex to capture Margaret in the same temporal entanglement as her human colleagues, for whom the past months had lasted an instant, and an eternity. Trackers Macali could now spend some quality time getting to understand the behavior of her new predatory pets. She didn't visit her captives every day in the beginning. The two she had caught nearly half a turn ago had been interesting, but the energy fields they produced while trapped in the vortex seemed neutral to her. Only when she got bored did she sit with the trackers and try to read their fields. With those two the cats came and went, paying no more attention to the vibrating statues than they did to the furniture. Margaret was a different matter. So far neither of the cats had jumped up to investigate Margaret's vortex, but they were certainly more interested in her than they were in the two trackers. Macali wondered idly what would happen if one of the trans-dimensional felines wandered too close to the golden glow that signaled the outer edges of the field, but she wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out. She had an assignment to complete, and the people who hired her didn't like to be kept waiting. Macali was distracted - her thoughts kept straying back to the human predator trapped in the temporal entanglement, and the strange resonance she had felt with Margaret as soon as she had activated the vortex. Abandoning her assignment, Macali spent days going through the nine-dimensional data matrix of the entanglement, scouring the spatial, temporal and energetic parameters for overlapping waveforms that could account for the resonance. When the patterns eventually started to coalesce, she could not bring herself to accept the inescapable conclusion - she and Margaret were phase-shifted manifestations of the SAME PERSON. If this was correct, then any attempt to disentangle Margaret could result in their merging into a single entity, or more likely would lead to both of their deaths. Suddenly Macali realized she was in mortal danger from the shadowy people who had hired her. Her assignment, which would include a complex temporal maneuver that would fully remove her from this environment, would surely destroy the resonance with Margaret and kill them both! If she and Margaret were two halves of the same person, it stood to reason that there were other Human/Opae splits out there as well. If those dual beings were reunited, the resulting warrior force would be formidable. Macali wondered how the split had originally occurred. Perhaps the shadow people were responsible, perhaps not, but either way they wanted her dead, and her own predator nature would not allow her to walk away from such a challenge! Should she attempt to merge her two phase-shifted entities and fight the shadow people with her combined consciousness, or could she find a way of freeing Margaret from the entanglement and fight the shadows as two separate beings, each with their own training and abilities? One thing was certain. Macali would have to bring Margaret out of the vortex before she made a final decision. She couldn't assume Margaret would fall in line with either course of action, and fighting a battle on two fronts was never a good idea. Their lives literally depended upon cooperation. They needed to resolve their own battle before they could take on an outside force. Macali set the parameters on the vortex generator carefully. For now, she and Margaret needed to be two separate beings. A slip in her settings could kill them both. Margaret had no sense that any time had passed. She had heard the sound of Macali returning via the translation portal, but now Macali was standing in front of her holding a data pad in her hand, staring into Margaret's eyes as if her life depended upon it. Macali held Margaret's gaze until she was sure Margaret was fully there, then started to talk. Over and over again she explained. Showed Margaret the data. Answered questions. Margaret paced the room, angry at first, then slowly understanding. Realization dawned slowly. The same person. They were two parts of the same person! It seemed unbelievable, but there it was. Something clicked ... "It's agreed, then. We reunite." "Yes." Macali set the sequence. Margaret checked her calculations. They went over the process carefully, together, knowing this was the most important thing they would ever do. Their calculations showed that the energy dissipation would blow the walls out, so they walked outside together to the plateau. Margaret pressed in the final sequence. Predators, Part 3: Resonance She looked at herself lying on the ground, looked up at herself crouched above, saw sky and stone, felt the energy pulse. Then just sky, stone beneath her, energy dissipating slowly ... It took a long time for Macali'Margaret to come around. At first she could not make any sense of the two streams of consciousness running simultaneously through her brain, but slowly she found that she could weave the kaleidoscope of thoughts, memories and sensations into a coherent whole. As separate beings, the human and Opae machine thought patterns had been almost completely incomprehensible, but in combination they forged a powerful and accelerated set of integrated function - synapses and circuits working in synchrony, analysis tempered by empathy, calculations given context - carbon and silicon, matter and antimatter, time and anti-time collapsing the quantum waveforms like musical strings vibrating and rippling far into space-time-energy, and within their interference patterns every wave held an infinite number of secrets. Macali'Margaret broke her reverie and deliberated on what she should do about the shadow people, who would now redouble their efforts to destroy her. She had noticed immediately as she came around that the colony tower had gone, but she was unsure if they had removed themselves into orbit or shifted into a parallel dimension. Slipping through the translation portal directly to her laboratory, she set about re-writing the search and destroy programs utilizing Margaret's predatory subroutines. Predators, Part 4: Simultaneity Leaving the algorithms to evolve, she returned to her living quarters to take the time to rest, feed the cats, sit and think. It took a bit of practice to just think and not try to have a conversation with herself, but her mental process seemed more streamlined every hour. She was becoming more and more sure of herself and her capabilities all the time, and found herself fully understanding things she had only dimly perceived before. It was so much easier to come to a decision now, easier to trust her conclusions. She had a hunch that the shadowy forms who occupied the colony tower were not really gone, and when she checked the outcome of the simulation embedded in the search-and-destroy protocol, she immediately saw the marker that indicated a large phase-shifted mass in orbit. Just as she had suspected, they were still there. Macali'Margaret made adjustments to the scanning parameters and the tower jumped sharply into view. It wasn't visible to the naked eye, but her screens showed every phase of the nine-dimensional matrix she had used herself, and ... Oh, of course! The tower was exactly where it had always been. She herself had phased during the integration process. From the point of view of the tower, she must have flickered and suddenly disappeared! The tactical advantage of being invisible to one's opponent was huge. Macali'Margaret breathed a sigh of relief. If she moved quickly, they would not find her. The first item of business was to make those in the colony tower believe she was well and truly gone. They knew her temporal matrix signature from their previous dealings with her, and they could not have helped but notice the energy discharge during her integration. She began writing a subroutine that would mask any emissions coming from her location. Whatever transmission noise was still being monitored from orbit, it would appear to pulse, flicker, then lose cohesion and slowly fade away to nothing. She was about to key in her ID as the final seal on the security protocol when she realized she needed to update her identity. She thought for a minute, and keyed the last five characters of the protocol ... MARCA. With the cats fed and her own nutritional needs attended to, Marca began to formulate her final plan ... Although she had had very little contact with the shadow people, Marca had learned enough about them to know that they should not be underestimated. Already they would be scanning the multidimensional matrix for signs of her phase shift, but her modulation subroutines would keep her hidden for a while. It was imperative for her to keep shifting through all three meta-dimensions - space/time/energy - which would be relatively easy for her machine form and consciousness, but would ultimately expose the weaknesses, imperfections and fragility associated with her humanness. What she needed was a way of turning the shadows' predatory tendencies back on themselves. Marca thought of the quantum waveforms as musical strings - the waves set into vibration not only the strings, but also any other body which had the same period as the plucked string, and these vibrations persisted for nanoseconds, hours, days, years, eons... If she could tap into the fundamental frequencies of the shadow's search-and-destroy routines and reverse their meta-dimensional parameters, there was a chance that she could send them back in time, remove them entirely from the spatial domain, and liberate all of their consumed energy for the rest of the universe to use, for eternity. In order to do that, once she had calculated the dynamics of their meta-dimensions she would have to set herself up as a target, inviting them to destroy her, and so destroy themselves... Predators, Part 5: String Theory Marca didn't have any trouble figuring out how to use the shadow people's predator nature against them. Her Human/Opae intelligence was functioning in ways she had not thought possible. Rather than move from one logical idea to the next to the next looking for a protocol that would work, she had a flash of insight that proved itself to be sound in the final analysis. Her physical body was a liability because it was so easily broken, but it was also wholly immune to the problems of the nine-dimensional data matrix her non-physical being was subject to. Since the shadow people didn't know she had a physical body, she could use that to her advantage. Marca set up her plan quickly, knowing the clock was ticking down. If the shadows moved before she was ready, there would be no second chance. She was done before she knew it. Calculations verified, sequence double checked. It was time to move. Slowly raise the barrier. Allow the shadows to see that she is still here. Shift energy, create a bit of a ripple, set the hook. They do not disappoint. Almost immediately an energy beam engages from the tower colony, locking onto her energy hook. Shift time, ever so slightly, and intercept the beam. The tiny, infinitesimal, nearly undetectable time shift is enough. It has to be enough. Engage the time shift, become momentarily out of reach, and the beam locks on, flips back, mirrors itself, and runs the length of itself back up to the tower. Marca can feel them up there, frantically trying to shut it down. Shift space. In her physical body now, all she can do is watch, but watching is all there is left to do. She can tell they're trying to find her, trying to kill her in order to stop the beam, but there's nothing left of her in the matrix. She is safe in her physical body. The more the shadow people try to shut down the temporal resonance of the beam, the more smoothly it pulses. Harmonics are set up across time and space, and the tone becomes audible to her physical ears. Suddenly, nothing. The tone fades, the beam is gone, the tower colony with its shadowy crew has disappeared. Marca smiled, felt the sensation in her face, across her skin. She walked to her control boards, ready to verify the kill. Her physical fingers could not work the data station, but she stood there for a minute anyway. Flexed her hands. Wiggled her fingers. Slight spatial shift, and her fingers tingled, the tips shifting dimensions. Marca put her fingers on the terminal and got back to work. All her search programs verified that the shadow people were gone. She spread the search to include the solar system, all proximal star systems, the entire galaxy. Nothing. It was as if they had never existed. All that remained of them was her in memories, and those she filed away in a secure encrypted location. The two trackers might or might not be halves of a whole Human/Opae being, but they served no purpose other than ornamentation, so Marca let them go. She lifted the vortex, adjusted the nine-dimensional matrix, and sent them back to the place where she had found them. Predators, Part 6: End Game Marca shut down the terminal and stepped through the translation portal to the dunes overlooking the quiet cove where she had spent hours trying to decipher the data she had acquired on Margaret. She smiled again as she thought of the impossibility of trying to understand herself. Marca was still smiling when one of the trans-dimensional cats strode over and demanded her attention. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: All images are by faroutsider (Craig). If you click on each image here, you'll link to his gallery, and can see the story in its original form. Craig did the more difficult bits ... I mean seriously ... I think there are a total of NINE renders in Vue here! I did most of the writing, although Craig did a fair bit himself! At this point, it would be almost impossible to tell where Craig's ideas started and mine left off. Writing this story felt like the most natural thing in the world! This was loads of fun. Collaboration rocks!