Eric Olafson, Midshipman 79

Part 79: INTERLUDE: REBIRTH

At first he could not remember anything. All there was in his world were sensations. Then slowly the fog of oblivion lifted and he found himself floating in a tank of greenish goo.

The cables and hoses to his body pumped vitalizing fluids with concentrated cell nutrition and medical nanites through his veins. At the same time memory and knowledge was added forcefully via cerebral upload into his mind. With memories and knowledge came the realization who he was. Since he was in the process of being animated, that meant he had died.

Or better the original him had ceased to exist. He was a clone and was kept down here in this hidden crypt many levels underneath the Main temple of the Church of Darkness.

The Cloning machine was of finest Saresii origin. Technology of the legendary First Age of Knowledge and operated by an equally fine and incredibly advanced Saresii Clone Process Bot.

Cloning of sentient beings was strictly prohibited by Union laws and the Saresii, now member of that Union upheld these laws, despite their millennia of experience and advance knowledge in this field. Well most of them did. Greed, crime and corruption were rare but not entirely eliminated from this morally aloft civilization.

The original Larthop had prepared for his eventual demise before he could reach his goal of obtaining god like power by collecting and utilizing twelve tokens of power. Pieces of a Cosmic puzzle that when completed would elevate him to omnipotent levels.

Larthop the clone was exactly like the original, possessed the same Psionic powers and held all the knowledge and gathered life experience of his predecessor.

To be exact of course his memories only included the last memory dump, and that was after the Original Larthop had returned from Netlor and his last meeting with the Brotherhood and prepared for his journey to Koken the original home world of the Kermac.

While the machines made the final adjustments and he was lifted by a robotic arm out of the bio tank and into a warm bath of soapy water he checked the time stamp of the last memory dump and compared it to the current date.

Over ten month had passed since then. His predecessor must have met his fate somewhere on that journey. The impulse that started the animation machine raising the mindless clone had come from an implanted device in the original body. It was only a single data burst containing no data of the reason for his demise or the actual location where it happened. The data pulse traveled instantaneous on the GalNet network.

Small robotic fingers massaged his body stimulating his muscles and nerves. It was an unpleasant and painful process that took over two hours during which he was unable to form coherent thoughts, but then the robotic arm took him out of the bath and placed him inside a simple auto dresser assembling a new black robe around him, the hallmark dress of the First Son of Darkness.He left the auto dresser on his own and before he walked to the elevator that would carry him up to the temple, he activated the process to get another clone ready.

There was of course a limit how often this process could be repeated, every copy lost something and there was a point the result no longer had anything in common with the original, but this was the first time and it could be repeated at least five or six times, before significant information loss prevented successful cloning.

There was still a meeting to arrange between the Kermac and the Purple Worm. There was the challenge to find out if and where the Union kept Y’All warriors all this would keep him busy for a while and also increase his funds. Funds he would use to find out how he died and what his former self had discovered. Did he manage to find the disc and whatever that Dualix was? Did his former self gain knowledge how to obtain a token of power?

He was Larthop, but he also had the energy and the drive of a newborn.

Part 80 »