The First Light.

Page 1: The offer

Third day since the laboratory accident. I had survived alien experiments, months of captivity and food that tasted like a battery. The food remained the least concerning part.

Outside my quarters, floating vehicles glided between the golden towers. Beyond the city, darkness cut across the horizon. Thaeron entered with two guards. “Your observations have been recorded.”

“Good. Can I have a copy?” He projected a human brain surrounded by shifting energy patterns. “Our technology cannot alter your cells, nervous system or genetic material.”

“Have you considered that your machines might be the problem?”

“They are functioning correctly.”

“That’s exactly what a machine would say.”

He dismissed the display. “Remain confined while we investigate, or enter our training programme.” I asked what I would learn. “Our language, history, technology and laws.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You remain a prisoner.”

There is a difference between surrendering and choosing your battlefield. I looked toward the city. “Fine. Teach me everything.”

“You agree to serve Almag?”

“I agree to learn. Don’t confuse the two.”

Page 2: The trial of strength

My instructor’s name was Korren. He was built like a structural argument against the human skeleton, with a blunt nose, close-cropped hair and heavy bronze bracers. He circled me in a vast training arena.

“Your species is physically weak.”

“And yours has terrible manners.”

He struck. I avoided most of him and met the floor with the rest of me. “Your reflexes are inadequate.”

“They were designed for traffic, not fighting refrigerators.”

The next time, I watched his shoulder. Weight moved before the arm did. I stepped aside. His strike passed through the space I had occupied.

“How did you predict that?”

“Your body announces your intentions. Physics still likes consistency.”

Korren projected an Alizean combat suit. Light traced its joints. “Our armour amplifies force, distributes impact and responds to the nervous system.”

“So it reads neural signals?”

“Among other things.”

“I’m beginning to understand why your species dislikes questions.” He did not smile.

Meet Korren

Alizean combat and technology instructor

Broad, disciplined and blunt, Korren teaches through repetition and pressure. He knows how Alizean weapons work and expects his pupil to learn quickly.

Bigg’s habit of asking why tests a different kind of readiness. Korren’s certainty is strongest when nobody asks where it came from.

Page 3: A machine that would not answer

Korren fitted a gauntlet over my hand. It flashed blue, then died. “Again.” I tried. Nothing.

“Is this another machine that insists it’s functioning correctly?”

“It should recognise your neural pattern.”

“Maybe it doesn’t like me.” Their experiments could not change me. Now their equipment refused to speak to me.

We moved to a chamber filled with suspended crystals. Light travelled between them. “Alizean technology responds to intention,” Korren said. “Emotion affects the signal; thought directs it.”

“Your machines can distinguish what I want from what I say?”

“When the connection is strong enough.” He formed a sphere of golden light. “Focus.” I concentrated. Nothing happened. “Empty your mind.”

“You’re asking a scientist to stop thinking.”

I watched the light change when he shifted his weight. “It isn’t responding only to thought. Breathing, heart rate, muscle activity—all of it influences the field.”

“You believe our technology is biological?”

“I believe biology is one key to understanding it.” I took the failed gauntlet off. I wanted to examine the crystal itself.

Page 4: The divided circle

I touched the crystal. A blue pulse moved through it and disrupted the golden lights. Korren stared. “You activated it.”

“Barely.”

“No human has ever synchronised with a resonance crystal.”

“Perhaps no human was allowed to study one properly.” Inside it appeared a circle divided between light and darkness. “What does that mean?”

His expression tightened. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

That was the first Alizean lie I recognised without needing their history. I recognised it in Korren’s fear.

He took me into the city. Golden towers rose above luminous bridges. Vehicles passed without a sound I could identify. Almag was so advanced that my entire scientific education felt like a child’s first drawing.

“The city shares one energy network,” I said, watching light flow beneath the streets.

“The solar lattice distributes power, stabilises the climate and protects the population.”

“And the dark side?”

“It has its own systems. The Maggis possess knowledge we do not.”

I held on to that answer. It was the first time anyone here had described the other civilisation as possessing something worth understanding.

Page 5: A story repeated

“You claim to protect life,” I said, “yet describe the Maggis as if they’re all threats.”

“They serve destruction.”

“Every child? Every scientist?” Korren had no answer.

We stopped at a monument: an Alizean warrior standing over a defeated Maggis. “This commemorates the first victory of the Light Wars.”

“What started them?”

“The Maggis attacked first.”

“Why?”

“Because they are Maggis.”

“That’s not history. That’s a story repeated until nobody questions it.”

He turned away. “Questions can be more dangerous than weapons.” Looking up at the statue, I wondered how much a victory could be made to hide.

Later, inside a cavernous archive, records floated like constellations. Some were sealed behind red barriers. “You store information as light?” I asked.

“As experience.” An archivist stepped from the shadows. Short black braids framed a long face; an ivory stole lay over a deep plum robe. Her name was Sera.

Page 6: The archivist

“You are the human who survived the conversion field,” Sera said.

“I’m beginning to wish that story had stayed in the laboratory.”

“Stories travel quickly. Secrets travel underground.” She studied me. “The machines refuse to recognise you.”

“You noticed?”

“Perhaps they recognise something you do not.”

“Another mystery.”

“Then pay attention.”

She led me to a sealed door. The divided-circle symbol was there again. “What do you know about the war’s beginning?”

“The official account says the Maggis attacked first.”

“And what do you think?”

“Every civilisation writes itself as the hero.”

The door opened a little. “Stop asking what makes Alizeans good and Maggis evil,” she said. “Ask who benefits from keeping them at war.”

An alarm sounded. Sera closed the door. “Come back tomorrow. Alone.”

For the first time, someone on Almag had given me a question instead of an order.

Meet Sera

Alizean archivist

Sera works among records that do not always agree with the history spoken aloud. She pays attention to what is missing as carefully as to what remains.

Quiet and precise, she knows that evidence and suspicion are not the same thing. She asks Bigg to look closely enough to tell the difference.

Page 7: The darkness has a face

Back on the observation platform, I studied a model of Almag. The same hemisphere remained turned toward its sun. That did not mean the planet failed to rotate; rotation and orbit could be synchronised. Whatever the full explanation, both civilisations had survived their conditions for millennia.

The display opened over the dark hemisphere. Cities, towers and energy routes spread through it. “Their infrastructure is connected,” I said.

“You have never seen a Maggis city.”

“I don’t need to visit one to recognise infrastructure.”

Korren showed me a recording of Maggis researchers examining an energy core. “This is what they became after embracing corruption.”

“They look like scientists.”

“They are Maggis.”

“That’s a species, not an explanation.”

The image changed. An Alizean soldier appeared in the background, then the recording broke into interference.

“Go back.”

“It’s incomplete.”

“It shows an Alizean soldier there before the event you’re describing.”

“It proves nothing.”

“Then stop presenting it as proof.”

Page 8: Behind the maintenance door

“You are not here to judge our history,” Korren said.

“Then stop using it to judge everyone else.”

The darkness was not empty. It was a civilisation, and someone had worked hard to make the Alizeans fear it.

During the citadel’s rest cycle, the corridor lights dimmed. Beyond the windows, the sun remained where it had been. I followed a maintenance signal toward a restricted passage. An open service panel gave me a view into another laboratory.

Black men and women hung unconscious inside containment chambers, surrounded by gold and violet fields. Their eyes were closed. One man’s skin glowed. A woman’s hands twisted involuntarily against an invisible force. Behind a third captive, a shadow moved out of step with the body that cast it. None of them knew what was being done to them.

A laboratory scientist noticed me. Younger than Figi, with narrow features and copper hair gathered close to the scalp, the Alizean looked more irritated than surprised.

“What are you making them become?” I asked.

“What their intended roles require.”

I looked past the scientist to a console. A set of project headings glowed there. For a moment I could only read them.

Page 9: Intended roles

PROJECT LIGHT — ENHANCED PROTECTIVE CAPABILITIES.

PROJECT VEIL — ENHANCED DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITIES.

TRANSFER PROTOCOL — EARTH.

“They will return to Earth,” the scientist said. “Some will defend. Others will destabilise. Conflict reveals a species’ nature.”

“Fear makes people do things they would never otherwise choose.”

Alarms sounded. Doors began to close. “You weren’t permitted to see this.”

“Neither were they permitted to become your weapons.”

The Alizeans were manufacturing power and choosing who would control it. I had seen the headings. I still had no names for the people assigned to them.

Thaeron confronted me in a containment room. Korren, Sera and the scientists stood nearby. “You entered a restricted facility.”

“I found humans being turned into weapons.”

“A necessary process.”

“Necessary to whom?”

He did not answer. “You will undergo a final diagnostic procedure.” They secured me inside a ring. Golden energy gathered around it.

“Your previous experiments failed. So you’re repeating the experiment with more power?”

“We have not found the cause of your resistance.”

Page 10: A different frequency

The instruments distorted. Across every screen appeared the divided circle.

“The resonance is exceeding safe limits,” the scientist said. “The system is responding to him!”

Energy reversed into the machine’s core. Gold became violet. A shockwave threw the scientists back. I remained standing inside the ring.

“He didn’t absorb it,” Korren said.

“He changed its frequency,” Sera answered.

Thaeron stared at me. “How?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Every system responded to you.”

“Stop treating me like a broken machine. Ask what yours are trying to tell you.”

I had no armour, no deliberate command over what had happened and no explanation. Almag’s technology had responded as if it recognised me. That was an observation. It was not yet an answer.

When Sera next found a way to bring me to the archive, she used a concealed entrance. I followed her between walls that barely admitted us.

“If Thaeron discovers this, you’ll lose everything.”

“I may already have.”

Page 11: The archive of the first war

Sera opened a record older than the official history. Alizeans and Maggis stood around the same glowing sphere, working together.

“They were allies.”

“This record predates the official history.”

The sphere resembled the divided-circle symbol. “Our ancestors called it the First Light,” she said.

“What was it?”

“A source of energy—or something more. The records disagree.”

The image flared. The sphere erupted. Alizeans retreated toward the light; Maggis moved toward the darkness. A barrier divided the world shown in the recording.

“The event divided the world,” I said.

“The war began afterwards. No surviving record explains why.”

Then part of the image simply stopped. A gap remained where a sequence ought to have been.

“Who removed it?”

“The highest Alizean command had access.”

Access was not proof of who had acted. But the gap was real, and so was the cooperation I had just seen. The official story did not merely condemn the Maggis. It left no room for the Alizeans ever to have been anything but righteous.

Page 12: Light and darkness

I compared the recorded patterns. “The machine that reacted to me produced the same resonance as the First Light.”

“Impossible,” Sera said. “The source vanished thousands of years ago.”

“Unless it was never a single object.” I sketched two intersecting patterns. “What if the First Light required two complementary frequencies to remain stable?”

“Not opposing forces?”

“Complementary ones.” It was a hypothesis. I had a match in the records and too many missing variables to call it more.

The model of Almag turned above the sketches. “Light and darkness are conditions,” I said. “Not moral identities.”

“You believe neither side is entirely good?”

“I believe repetition can make any civilisation mistake a story for truth.”

Sera looked toward the sealed shelves. “Scholars who questioned the official account disappeared. I kept investigating because someone had to remember the questions.”

Until then, I had thought of her as someone taking a risk for me. I began to understand how long she had been taking it.

Page 13: Beneath the archive

An alarm sounded as Sera attempted to copy the archive to her crystal. “I tried to copy the archive,” she said. “It triggered security. Thaeron’s guards are coming.”

I touched the divided circle. A blue pulse moved beneath my fingers. “Then let it recognise me.”

A concealed doorway opened. We descended into a chamber absent from every official map. A crystal structure stood among broken machines and ancient writing.

“Someone wanted it forgotten,” I said.

I touched the crystal. A recording filled the room. Early Alizeans and Maggis stood around the First Light. A voice emerged through the damaged sound.

“The balance must be preserved. Neither force may consume the other.”

The sphere broke apart. Golden and violet energy moved toward it as both groups tried to contain the rupture. The forces collided. The division shown in the earlier record intensified.

“They were containing the same disaster,” I said.

“Not fighting each other.”

We were watching a fragment, but it changed the meaning of the fragment we had seen before.

Page 14: The missing moment

The recording fractured. For a moment, a shadowed figure held a ring-shaped device. Its face was lost in the damage. So was its species.

“When balance fails,” an unfamiliar voice said, “fear will choose a side.”

The image vanished. “Who was that?”

“I don’t know,” Sera said. “They may have caused the division.”

The crystal began to pulse. I finally had evidence that Almag’s history was incomplete. Evidence was not the whole truth. The closer I came to it, the more dangerous the gaps became.

Thaeron entered with guards. “Step away from the archive.”

“You need to see what we found,” Sera said.

“I know what you found.”

“Then you know the official history is incomplete,” I said.

“The past is dangerous without context.”

“That’s a convenient excuse for hiding it.”

“You know nothing of what we sacrificed to survive.”

“I know what evidence looks like—and when someone fears it.”

Page 15: The commander’s decision

“The Maggis destroyed our settlements and took our people,” Thaeron said.

“And the Alizeans never retaliated? Never crossed their borders or conducted experiments?”

He said nothing for a moment. “You speak as if the enemy deserves sympathy.”

“I speak as if every civilisation deserves the truth.”

Thaeron studied the recording. “If this becomes public, our people will question everything.”

“Maybe they should.”

“Without unity, Almag could fall.”

“And with a lie holding it together?”

He turned to the guards. “Seal the chamber. Sera remains under observation. Mr Bigg continues his training.”

“After this?”

“Especially after this. If you are connected to the First Light, I need to understand how.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Then I need to understand why the universe makes you appear important.”

The doors began to close. Sera watched the crystal until the stone hid it from us. My training would continue. So would the questions.