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Prisoners of Sol 59
🕑 Added 2025-07-26 11:00:09 +0000 UTCThe three of us retraced our steps while following Corai back toward the seating area. The anticipation of what she might say was eating me up, with thousands of potential explanations rolling around inside my skull. I knew that Mikri “Overactive Calculation Matrix” Tin Can the First was in the same boat. Not knowing was the worst part of all of this, because I couldn’t understand the Elusians in any capacity. As nefarious as the organic Vascar were, at least their motives were discernible.
I wrinkled my nose, as we passed by the alien machines with bodies suspended in fluid. “Care to elaborate on why you have corpses just sitting in jars, Corai? Nailing the serial killer aesthetic.”
“Oh? Oh—goodness, no. What a ghastly idea,” the Elusian remarked. “Those bodies are bioprinted, complete with organs and basically everything except a brain. We have nanobots within our blood that correct senescence, illness, and seal minor injuries. That allows us to, in theory, live forever.”
Mikri’s eyes blazed with sudden intensity. “This technology must be given to Preston and Sofia! They can live forever!”
“Our advancements could benefit humans. Right now, their question was on the reason for maintaining these bodies. In the event of a fatal injury, crippling defect that will not heal such as a lost limb, or simply a desire to alter one’s form out of boredom, we have machines that can complete a brain transplant. Cease the activity and then reactivate the neurons when it has been transferred to a new body.”
“You pop your brain out of your noggin and put it in a new body?!” I demanded. That’s insane. How does it not feel like you’re…in someone else’s skin?
“Precisely. That is the heart of consciousness, and what makes you yourself.”
Sofia gave Corai an inquisitive look. “You have nanobots within your blood at all times?”
“Trillions of them. That’s the reason for the gray skin and the black eyes; we’d lose that mechanical coloration if you extracted the nanobots. They're a part of us. Constant exposure to them advanced our evolution, causing us to lose the rest of our hair and evolve flatter orifices.”
“What do you look like without the nanobots?” I questioned, peering closer through the foggy glass at the corpse.
“We should save that question for talking about your inception. Please, let us sit.”
I followed the Elusian into the lounge, settling down on a couch next to Sofia and Mikri. What did how they looked like without nanobots have to do with our creation? I stared hard at Corai and tried to picture her with the silver coloration stripped away; it would look much better if I could see her actual irises. The alien researcher gave a thoughtful pause, clearly feeling the gravity of whatever she was about to disclose. She frowned, before pulling up a holographic photo with her nanobots assortment.
I couldn’t hold in an involuntary gasp. The pale skin bordered on albino, and the eyes had large irises with a small white sclera. The baldness made their large foreheads more pronounced, but the chin and cheekbone shape wasn’t that alien. The nose was much flatter, though the nostril shape was one I recognized only in ourselves. The lips were once again distinctly human in shape, though they were a dark and muted purple color—like a bruise. They were apparent hominids once the nanobots were stripped away…or I supposed, more accurately, we were Elusianids.
“How related are we, on a genetic level?” Sofia asked the question we all were thinking.
Corai offered a gentle smile. “We come from the same ancestors. We wanted you to be your own species with your own history, not a carbon copy of us. When we created the Sol dimension, we imported our earliest ancestors—Australopithecus, I believe you call them. Hominids could evolve in unique fashion on Sol. We brought our primate relatives as well, so it’d seem to your scientists that you had a history.”
“Chimpanzees running around flinging shit in Sol jungles was all part of your grand deception?” I scoffed.
“That’s…one way of phrasing it. We seeded life on Earth, but allowed most of it to evolve naturally, over billions of years. We did import some animal life later on to add a touch of our own world. All life from outside Sol, hominids included, had to be genetically hardened to withstand such brutal physics. The point is, we’re just humans with a different upbringing and billions of years more evolution.”
Mikri leapt to his feet, whirring with frustration. “Restate your words. ‘Brutal physics?’ You made them suffer on purpose! Why would you do that to a species which is fundamentally the same as you?!”
“Mikri, calm down. I’m sure Corai is going to explain the purpose of Sol’s physics being so…unforgiving and unfairly challenging,” Sofia said, shushing the robot.
“And why we’re the only ones who can go through those fucking portals,” I added. “Coincidence my ass.”
Corai lowered her eyes. “Yes…one question at a time. I can see why you wouldn’t appreciate the handicaps your dimension placed upon you, so I understand if you might judge the decisions we made for you. However, I’ll explain why and allow you to be the judge of us.”
“This oughta be good.”
The Elusian’s gaze became wistful, as she stared off into the distance with a deep longing. It was evident that either Corai was the multiverse’s best actor, or there were a lot of complicated feelings wrapped up in humanity’s creation. I was experiencing a whole host of convoluted emotions myself, from what the gray alien had just unloaded on us. This would change everything about how humans viewed ourselves, if this ever got back to Sol.
I mean, Corai looked so different sitting in front of us that it was hard not to see her as an alien. Now that I knew the truth, the similarities were all too jarring and uncanny. It made sense that we’d be fashioned in our creators’ image, but fuck, we were genetically derived from the same ancestors! There were other humans out there, and they were immortal space gods. Was there something special about us goofy hairless apes that rendered us capable of pushing the boundaries of technological progress? Why did they hate their own kin?!
Are we an experiment gone wrong to see how hominids would evolve under physics on steroids? Maybe they thought we’d die off, but that didn’t work out. By the time they might’ve pulled the plug…but Corai said they wanted us to have our own history. That’s not what you say about someone you want to go extinct of natural causes. We could be a tool or a weapon.
Corai wringed her hands together. “Everything about you is a reflection on us. The Elusians were the only interdimensional empire, and we were burdened from being alone at the apex of progress, without any true peer that we could call an equal. We could never have any friends who would understand higher dimensions, or just other dimensions. This fueled a certain…disinterest and complacency.”
“What do you mean?” Sofia asked. “Everyone says that the Elusians keep to themselves. Is it because the other aliens are…too far beneath your level to relate to?”
“I hate to look at it that way. We don’t relate to them, and they don’t relate to us. The disinterest I meant is that Elusians had nothing left to achieve. We were immortal and bored to our wits’ end, stagnant and static as a society. We had all the time in the world, yet our pursuits were unrewarded. We forgot what it was to carry that insatiable drive that is so alive in you. Perhaps that’s why I consider Sol a success.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You created us…because you were bored and had nothing to do?”
“Yes. The only way forward was to create something new, which could restart the flow of history and go beyond us. Sol gave us something to love, and the hope that one day, we could have a true companion. The best hope we had of creating a species that could match us was to form them from our own lineage. Do you understand why we made Sol an impossible dimension?”
“For shits and giggles? Someone fell asleep on the difficulty slider?”
“It was because we wanted you to be better than us. It would make you stronger to struggle for all that you had, but to never know this wasn’t just the natural way of things. Humans were forged in fire. You found the solutions no one else had to—without us swooping in to help. You prevailed on your own, through your own anguish, wit, and determination.”
Mikri flailed his claws with fury. “Yet they found their own way out through The Gap, as I presume you hoped they would, and then you punished them for replicating your technology through the craftiness you bred!”
Corai nodded. “That was never the original plan. I’ll save that reason for last. Allow me to circle back to Preston’s question about why you can go through portals without mental implosion. Assuming this is still of interest.”
“X-Chromosomes, what does, ‘I’ll explain everything,’ mean to you?” I huffed.
“Did you really just call the million-year-old alien X-Chromosomes?!” Sofia exclaimed in a high-pitched voice.
“That’s what feminism looks like. I’m acknowledging her womanhood. Dumb prompts deserve dumb answers. Of course I’m still interested!”
Corai blinked several times, but she didn’t show much of an ostensible reaction. “I watched your ancestors draw phallic images in caves, and you expect your antics to surprise me? I was more surprised that your android’s final looping thought, before he crashed, was that he’d turn me into jambalaya.”
“That’s still an option,” Mikri warned.
Sofia groaned. “Nobody’s getting turned into jambalaya. I think we’re getting a little off track here. Corai, please? Our resistance to portals?”
The Elusian laughed, her cadence warm and disarming as the summer sun. “We wanted you to be capable of interdimensional travel, so that you could follow in our footsteps naturally. Exposure therapy was our hope: for evolution to build natural resistance. 5D particles could leak from The Gap, but a single portal far from Earth wasn’t nearly enough for consistent microdosing. If it was, your other friends would be feeling The Tunnel’s effects.”
“Are the effects of interdimensional travel really so severe, Corai? You can handle it. We had no idea it could radiate outward, but if we can limit exposure, maybe the Derandi, the Girret, and the organic Vascar could evolve resistance too. Now that you understand how it evolved in us…”
“Dr. Aguado, we don’t understand how in the slightest. That’s what those unethical experiments were about. I suppose you could bring about the same effects in your friends, if you placed millions of portals within their atmosphere for millions of years to expose them every second of their lives.”
“You put us in a 5D radiation tunnel?” I exclaimed.
“We did, and monitored early hominids closely. It caused increased paranoia and dissociation for a while, but eventually, became manageable. A few thousand years ago, we handled our first test with a homo sapiens religious leader: a willing participant who believed us gods and the portal ride to be heaven. And not only did he survive, but he could make sense of his visions.”
Mikri’s eyes glowed. “You did not try to explain the truth to this organic? This is dishonest and manipulative, not allowing him to make an informed decision.”
Corai scoffed. “I’d like to see you get an early agricultural society to understand aliens, spaceships, portals, and computers. I much prefer this discourse now; it’s a relief to talk to humans who can grasp what I’m saying.”
“Humans, plural? Preston does not understand aliens, spaceships, portals, or computers.”
“Excuse you, I know my magic rocks are fuego!” I declared, waving a fist at Mikri.
Corai offered a sarcastic nod. “Sí, sí, tu rocas mágicas son fuego. At any rate, we began to close the portals when the risk of their detection was too high, leaving only The Gap for you to find one day. Yet humans continued to experience psychic dreams and déjà vu, from residual particles within your atmosphere. Your brains have a remarkable plasticity to time that we can only envy.”
“If your brains aren’t as malleable, how are you able to travel through the interdimensional space?” Sofia asked.
“We’re not. We just do it anyway—and goodness, you have that part of us in you.” The Elusian smiled, eyes shining with pride. “We have to be braindead for a few seconds to pass through the portals, so you see why we don’t think other species should. Our nanobots stop the electrical signals in our brain, then resuscitate us from that clinically dead state on the other side.”
A lightbulb flicked on in my head. “That’s why you fear us. With the precog and the portal travel, we can do things you can’t! It’s jealousy!”
“We’re not so petty. We intended for you to achieve more than us. The reason does circle back to precog though, and our own human-inspired efforts to replicate it.”
I knitted my eyebrows together, trying to soak in everything that I’d just heard. The Elusians’ intentions had seemed not half bad, with them once wanting us to prove ourselves worthy and overcome great challenges, just like I’d hoped while pining for a grand destiny! Immortality would get pretty boring if I straight up ran out of things to do, so I could empathize with their desire for friendship. They’d set us up to be an interdimensional species, without having to go to the extreme measures they had.
However, something had changed. If they tried to replicate precog using their insane technology, perhaps they’d observed something that convinced them, like Bighead had told me, that…all they were would be lost. They must’ve seen some event that scared them, like I did in my dream with Mikri. And I’d been wrong about Mikri! Sure, the Elusians had a great deal more wisdom, but on a human level, it was so damn easy to misinterpret precog. Visions bordered on useless sometimes!
Corai avoided eye contact, lowering her head. “It takes a massive effort to send in adequate resources to encode the tiniest fragments of data from 5D space, then to try to translate them into meaningful conclusions. It’s like seeing…one frame of a movie, so we can only catch snatches from our specific point in time and space, a few hundred years into the future. What we saw involved you and terrified our people.”
“I don’t understand,” Sofia murmured, features knitting together with consternation. Her long hair fell over her troubled eyes, and she didn’t even bother to brush it away. “Please, just tell us.”
“We didn’t see any Elusians. We only saw humans in our place. The simplest conclusion was that, if we did nothing to change our course, a patricide was on the horizon. That’s why our leaders decided to push you away and leave you be.”
That stopped me in my tracks, uncertain just how to react to that explanation. The Elusians wanted nothing to do with us because they feared their nonexistence in the future, and had seen us usurping them? A civilization that powerful being erased altogether—that must terrify them. I doubt they ever considered the possibility, and nor had I; it sounded ludicrous that humanity could hold a candle to them, or that we would’ve eliminated them without provocation. I was baffled why Corai was helping us at all, if she knew we would topple her people soon without intervention.
What can I even find that’s a solution for something humanity hasn’t done yet? That explains why they were so upset by us copying their technology, and accelerating their doom.
“There could be lots of explanations,” I decided, feeling like one of us had to say something in response. “Maybe we just breed you out of existence, like we did to the Neanderthals. Remember that? The homo sapiens way of removing the competition hasn’t changed.”
Mikri gave an inquisitive whir. “You mingled with these other hominids so much that they failed to reproduce and died out?!”
“Yep. I told you, we’re hot. The fuegoest apes ever. Like I’m only half-joking, we don’t have to kill the Elusians. I mean, shit, they could just let us out, disappear of their own free will, and allow us to inherit their fancy-pants stuff. Then it’s true that they’re gone, and we didn’t harm them.”
“Enough! Corai, what you saw is incredibly serious. I don’t want it to come to that, but what just happened between us won’t stir positive feelings within humanity. We need them to understand, if we’re ever to clear this up.” Sofia bit her lip, and I wagered that the scientist was upset by the idea that a creation had to kill its creator: that it was inevitable. “Why are you helping us, if all of the evidence points to us bringing about your destruction?”
“Because in their infinite wisdom, the Elusian empire disregarded a key scientific principle,” Corai spat, venom in her voice. “Correlation does not equal causation. I don’t believe you would do this, and I never will. That’s why my collective of scientists broke from our government.”
I leaned back on the couch, petting Mikri’s mane to soothe myself. “I don’t see much of a collective. You’re the only one here.”
“We didn’t want to startle you. There are thousands of Elusians here who are willing to help Sol covertly, and to shelter you. If you’re willing to stay and join our efforts, we have many things to teach you.”
Mikri, with his one-track mind, leaned forward with intrigue. “Immortality?”
“When we have a mutual foundation of trust and work you slowly through some more basic versions of our technology, that may be on the table. We’re not going to rush in to pumping your bodies with nanobots and putting you on our power level. I believe in you, but with what we’ve seen, I’d still be foolish not to exercise caution.”
After everything that the Elusians had done to obstruct our progress, this put it all in perspective to me. Corai had provided unfiltered answers, and acted a bit more down to Earth than her haughty counterparts that wanted to put the dangerous experiments away. If I had to make a judgment call to trust a creator, her transparency had scored points in my book. Having her assistance would be our sole hope of liberating Sol, rather than be shuttered inside our dimension for all time. The thought of having a fraction of their power at my fingertips exhilarated me, regardless.
I extended a hand, and waited until Corai grasped it back for a handshake. “I’d like to work with you. Where do we start?”
The Elusian stood with a smile, and beckoned for me to follow her to the rest of her colleagues. Having the answers about humanity’s existence at long last filled a burning hole inside of me, and filled me with a new determination to avert the future our creators had foreseen.
A/N - 59! Corai has a lot to explain, including how their immortality works, which is very much to Mikri’s interest. She explains that nanobots in her blood are the reason for the gray appearance, and our narrator immediately recognizes that the Elusians are hominids themselves when he sees the nanobots stripped away. The Elusians made humanity from their own ancestors and allowed evolution to take its course, when they seeded life on Earth.
Corai explains that their motives were for humans to be better. She says that the Sol dimension was made impossible to make us stronger through the challenges, and that they exposed us to 5D radiation so that we could develop portal immunity; the Elusians’ radical solution is to kill and revive themselves to avoid brain damage. However, when they found a way to replicate precog, the Elusians discovered that none of them were left; they’d been replaced by humans.
Corai doesn’t believe that humans are the cause of that, and invites them to work with her. What do you think about the Elusians’ reasons and methods for creating humanity? Does this change your opinion on our creators? Do you think humans will be responsible for them not being around in the future? What will Preston, Sofia, and Mikri get up to working with Corai…and are they right to trust her?
As always, thank you for reading and supporting! I'm super excited to share this one with you guys, answers at last!
Comments
onwardtowaffles
Yeah, transparency scores major points. I think it's more likely that humanity *does* end up surpassing the Elusians (as was always intended) and then lifts the Elusians up to their new level - maybe they're no longer dependent on nanobots in the future?
EliasArt2Life
So, have they not spent time figuring out the details of Precognition? I mean, you would think that if your species’ survival was foretold to end, you’d want to know if the prophecy could be avoided or not. It sounds to me like they’ve just assumed that it can’t be changed unless they take drastic measures, and then chose the measures that would make humanity hate them the most. Despite talking about us like they know us, the Elusians don’t seem to really know us. If they paid attention to our culture, they’d be well versed on the concept of “self-fulfilling prophecies”. That’s what’s nice about Corai. She actually took the time to get to understand us.
