The Grand Master Page 2

  That thought in itself brings further nightmare scenarios into his head. They had never searched him. The Watcher had bent down beside him, but when the man had opened his eyes all The Watcher did was to tell them to get him some medical attention. He had also advised them to guard him well, but The Watcher had not searched him. Another thunderbolt nightmare thought strikes him wildly. What happened to the weapons the crew man and this character used? He remembers a big bag lying on the ground, being guarded by some soldiers. Were they in that? He had not brought them back to the craft. Thinking back to the time he was with the soldiers, it is doubtful they would have let him pick up the weapon bag anyway.

  That doesn’t change the fact that they are still there and somehow they need to be retrieved. He cannot allow them to stay on Earth. He is not sure what weapons they are exactly, but he is pretty confident that they will turn out to be far superior to anything developed at this stage in Earth’s evolution. He is going to have to do something about that. It is not an option for him to turn round and try to retrieve them now. If they return so soon and in such an obvious way, the outcome is likely that another visit will be deemed an aggressive approach when they ask for the weapons back. The Watcher can only see that approach ending in bloodshed and disaster. It is not necessary for that to happen.

  The weapons alone would be bad enough, but this character (Ricardo) is still there too. The Watcher thinks that there is a chance that he might make a recovery. No, the more The Watcher thinks about it, this character will make a recovery. What if he has more weapons of his own for somewhere else? Of course there is also the issue of the hatred in the man’s eyes when The Watcher bent down over him. That level of hatred is something he has never experienced before. He knows he hasn’t seen the man before, but the man seemed to know him; to hate him in his eyes that much.

  The Watcher decides that there are too many loose ends on the planet Earth for him to be able to carry on, without doing something about the threat he is leaving behind him. What if somehow some more characters like that one surface on that planet. They might be able to cause a considerable amount of damage to the inhabitants of the planet. In fact they quite easily, with the wrong type of weapons, could be able to disrupt the not too already cordial balance of Earth.

  The Watcher is now thankful that he has stayed out of the travel pods. This is the sort of thing that he guessed he might have to deal with before he arrives at Velchitta. All he has to do now is decide what he is going to do about the problems he has left behind. To do that he thinks he needs a little help from his friends. He wastes no time going to the travel pods to bring more brains to the table, to find a solution to his latest problems. There is a reason why these people came after GM3!

  Chapter 5 THE GRAND MASTER

  GM3 is in a kind of a daze or is it a doze? There is nothing in particular that is going through his thoughts. He is just sitting there at the controls. He has long carried on from the thoughts about Algreb and the others. It is just he has a nagging feeling that something has escaped him, but he hasn’t been able to pin down the evasive something. He has stopped trying, as he was getting nowhere at all with it. His eyes are open, but they are unseeing of everything in front of him.

  He has been several times to the travel pods. On each occasion it was because he has had a terrible thought that he might have disposed of The Keeper by mistake, instead of one of Algreb’s cronies. He knows in his head that it is not possible for him to do that, but that hasn’t stopped him checking every time the panic thought comes to him.

  It comes to him again and he snaps his eyes even wider open than they already are. Off he goes once again to check that The Keeper is in the pod and not floating lifelessly out in space. As he shuts the pod light off, something flickers in his head. The evasive thought surfaces and reveals itself to his conscious mind

  He had sent a crewman off with a weapon bag to delay at worst and hold off at best the expected land forces arriving, while he was locating and capturing the Keeper. The crewman was to meet up with Ricardo. He had not expected the crew man to return and depending on the forces they were trying to hold off, nor was Ricardo expected to survive. Both were expendable in the manner of the size of his objective. To that end he had given them no thought before lifting off with his prize on board. There had been considerable weapons noise coming from their direction, so it is quite likely they were overcome. Overcome yes, but were they both killed? The crewman is totally mortal but Ricardo; well Ricardo is not quite so easy to place in the mortal category. He certainly looks human and his organs are humanish too, almost identical but not quite. Ricardo’s body is not as fragile as a 100% human body. If certain parts are undamaged then Ricardo is capable of self mending to some degree, more so than a mere mortal human.

  Yes he is glad that the evasive memory has come to him. There could well be a use for Ricardo still on earth that would serve him well. It could also do well as a distraction while he gets himself organised in his own quest for power.

  He turns his thoughts to how it was discovered that The Watcher was making plans for a getaway from Velchitta. Of course The Guiding Masters had been vaguely aware that something was happening. They had not been privy to his plan, but they had not totally left him to his own devices. It had been clear that the time The Watcher had spent with the expedition when they arrived at the new colony Parlantte, was not only spent in helping them set it up. He also needed them to help him build his trailers and they did very well in that task. Looking back GM3 was impressed about the thought and skill that had gone into that area of The Keeper’s escape. That quality was not maintained on Earth, thankfully.

  But it was also clear to The Guiding Masters that The Watcher was also spending time trying to be certain that he had not brought anyone on the expedition who might be a mole, or spy or connected to the committee on Velchitta. To be fair to The Watcher none of the 300 people officially on the expedition were any of those things. It was the 301st and 302nd persons who managed to stay under wraps for all the time there, which put a twist to The Keeper’s escape from Velchitta and Parlantte.

  GM3 is almost certain that these persons couldn’t have managed what they did on their own, but there is no evidence that they had help from within. That would mean that if they had help it would have been from without the 300. Nobody on Velchitta could have helped them do what they did, so it had to be from without. Without, in reality, could mean from a select few sources. In short that would be O, GM6, GM7, himself GM3, another Mark 2 Watcher or something totally unknown. He didn’t do it and there is only one Mark 2 Watcher. He can’t see that GM6 or GM7 is involved. So what does that leave? Something totally unknown and O. Would O do something like this? Very doubtful, so that leaves something totally unknown, which would fit in with how he located Ricardo; a message.

  GM3 locates the message on his source board and hunts for the attachment which indicated there might be more than just Ricardo. He finds what he is looking for and realises that he has indeed misread the message the first time he read it, due to his excitement. Maybe that was just as well as things have turned out. It might have been overkill if he knew then what he knows now. What he knows now will certainly make things livelier on Earth. This will give him the opportunity to create a massive distraction on the planet Earth. In fact in itself, it might be a considerable shift in The Balance, if not in the whole Universe but certainly in this quadrant. It might be enough to spark something to take The Balance by surprise.

  He sits back in his chair and reads through the instructions on how to locate the others. He needs to activate the chips in their beings and bring them to help Ricardo. If Ricardo has survived, there will be three and without him just the new two: TZ and Mario.

  Chapter 6 Spirit

  I can feel something happening. I am not sure what it is. I am not aware of anything around me. I am trying to understand why it is that I can feel something happening to me. Do I have a memory? I decide that even if I have, there is
no way I can access it at the moment. I am extremely short of energy. In fact I need to stop thinking and let whatever it is happen to me.

  I close my thoughts and allow the energy that had originally alerted me to continue charging my system. It is really hard to do nothing. It is hard to suppress the inevitable quest for information I can feel surging in my brain. Suppress it I do though, or this may be a very foreshortened existence.

  I can feel something glowing inside of me. It is a friendly warmth, so friendly that I can feel the care it is taking to make me comfortable after all the coldness I apparently have been enduring. It appears to be taking an age to ‘warm’ me up. I am not sure how far I have to go to be up to temperature, so to speak. What I am finding is a calmness spreading over me. I do not now have the same impetuous urge to know what I am, where I have come from and been. I find it easier to go with the flow and allow all this to happen to me. I close my eyes and think of nothing at all. I drift into something like the state I imagine I was in before.

  I have no perception of time so I don’t know how long it has taken, but I am comfortable with how I feel warmth wise. I sense another change coming over me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is uncomfortable, but I am feeling a considerable buzzing in what I presume to be my head. There is definitely some sort of electricity going on and I can feel knowledge powering into me. Again this gets to be continuing for longer than I like. I decide to resume my mode of nothingness and try to ignore the annoyance of this persistent buzzing.

  I sort of make it into this state, but it is impossible to totally exclude what is going on in my head. To be more precise it is impossible to escape the buzzing. It would seem to be that part of its existence means it has to be heard. I would think that this should raise some sort of emotion in me, but it doesn’t. Maybe I don’t have any.

  I stop, because I realise I have wandered onto the path of trying to work out what is happening overall here. I concentrate really hard and reduce the outside effects to nothing more than a distant, very distant buzz.

  I have no idea of the passage of time. What happened first had happened in a flash compared to the time this buzzing download into me is taking. Even when I realise that the buzzing has stopped, I can still hear it banging around the insides of my head.

  For the first time I feel something else. As I manage to clear the last embers of the buzzing, I can feel a gentle breath of moving air on my face. The air is clean, so I suspect what I am experiencing is the air being circulated by a fan. I try to see what it is, but either I don’t have eyes or they are not functional yet. The breeze is quite pleasant, but the only place I can feel it is on my face. I know I have a face. Somehow that is knowledge of something definite that I wasn’t aware of before the buzzing session.

  Like everything else, the moving air on my face goes on just that much too long. If I had some emotions, then I might find these things starting to annoy me. Aha, that in itself indicates the emotions are here already or close by. Be careful what you wish for; because when the moving air stops, it is replaced by something many times more annoying and painful. It is as if someone is heavy handedly attaching or switching on the rest of my being. I realise after a time that what I am feeling is the restoration of the energy flow to the rest of my being. A thought pops into my head that I have been freeze dried and now someone is thawing me out and is replacing the lost water content.

  I find after a while that I can block this out too. Instead of the nothingness I had before, I find I have some memory banks with content to go through. The first thing I search for is what I look like. Unfortunately there is nothing available for me to look at in that department. Nor can I find any specific reference to whom or what I may be. There is, however, an incredible amount of stuff in there for me to look at. I just have a surface dig at a few things, to try to get a tag on something at the least. There are a lot of people I can see, over many spans of generations it would appear.

  I am interrupted this time by some spasms in what must be my arms and legs. I can then feel them being massaged gently by what I’d like to think is a hand, but is more likely to be a robot arm. Either way, the feeling is good. The pain I have been experiencing quickly starts to subside and disappear. For a change, this is not overdone. Whoever or whatever is doing it knows when enough has been done. I hear a hissing noise and without any other warning the hatch of my enclosure lifts off me to reveal an empty room.

  Chapter 7 The Overseers

  GM6 and GM7 have to admit that they are slightly disappointed with O’s response and lack of action to the current situation. There has been a tremendous shift in The Balance of the Universe. GM6 had felt it long before her colleague GM7 experienced it. In truth he hadn’t felt it until after their return from seeing O. Maybe it has something to do with them being unreachable while being led through the craft to meet with O. Or not meet as it turned out.

  They are struggling with GM3, apparently being allowed to trap them there. The rules say that two have to remain at base. That, in their eyes, means that as long as GM3 remains absent then they are confined here. That isn’t to say that the idea hasn’t crossed their minds that they could try to break the rules and go outside too. What is stopping them from doing that is a fear of being alone. They would much prefer to stay together and have the strength of two on their side, than expose themselves individually. The other point being that they would not have gone out together, because that would leave the base devoid of Guiding Masters.

  Neither would admit it if they are asked, but both have a silent question regarding O’s position in all this. They find that thought too unsettling to contemplate.

  Instead they spend their time trying to foresee what GM3 might do and where he intends to go first. When they draw a blank on that one, they start researching if there is anything they can do to help The Watcher and the Keeper. Like everyone everywhere before them, there is very little written down about the Keeper, let alone anything that might reveal how he can be helped. Surely the Keeper has not been left alone, defenceless against the forces of bad and evil? Well, maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t, there is nothing written down that they can find to answer that for them.

  The Watcher is another matter. Because he is an android, there are some areas which they might be able to access files and help him from where they are. In fact they very soon realise, that in a round-about way that has already happened. In their minds it could only have been O who has done this. GM3 would certainly not have wanted The Watcher to chase after him. The Watcher wouldn’t have been able to do this if the Followers had not managed to use the tracking device. The Wise Soul’s tracking device is much more sophisticated than GM7 had at first thought. He had just extended the range it could use, or so he thought. Now he has come across a file that suggests that maybe the tracking device could have done the job on its own anyway. The Wise Soul is much smarter than GM7 has given him credit for.

  He digs a little deeper. Although someone has tried very hard to create a family and background history for The Wise Soul, when it comes under close scrutiny there are some glaring gaps. The more GM7 investigates the bigger and more glaring the gaps become.

  GM6 can see that her colleague is onto something and so she edges over to have a look.

  ‘You look excited!’ she opens with, as he hasn’t spoken to her for some considerable time.

  ‘It would appear that The Watcher has already been awarded a helping hand.’

  ‘Who by?’ she counters.

  ‘None of us, I am sure. The only one it could be is O. Otherwise we are onto something completely unknown again.’

  ‘What sort of helping hand?’

  ‘The Wise Soul or so I am starting to believe.’

  GM6 moves in a little closer and rests her chin on his shoulder so she can get a better view of his screen.

  ‘What is making you think it is him?’

  GM7 starts scrolling through the screen, stopping every now and then to point out mistakes and gaps
to his history.

  ‘Someone has tried to cover up, but it looks as if it was done in a hurry. Or maybe they thought that there was no need to do a good job as it wouldn’t matter.’

  Those words aren’t comfortable for him and he moves on before the thoughts they provoke side-track his efforts.

  ‘Let’s just say that the attempt to give him a past was only done half-heartedly. Probably because somewhere else there is a clear record that he is an android and not a person.’

  ‘The Wise Soul is an Android?’ GM6 almost shrieks her incredulity.

  ‘Yes, didn’t I show you that bit. Maybe I didn’t. There is a very strong clue to it somewhere in all the things I have read. It looks as if he is somewhere between a Mark 1 Watcher and a Mark 2 Watcher, the main difference being the superior scientific aspect he has over both of those. I can only assume that he was created at some stage to assist with the technical evolution of Velchitta, considering the importance of what it holds, or held rather.’

  ‘So can we access anything that we can give to The Wise Soul, so that he is more capable of assisting The Watcher?’

  ‘That is what I am hoping for. You can help me search through all these programmes. I am sure we should be able to find something in here which will allow us to upload something, wherever he is in the Universe.’

  ‘This is why we are here isn’t it?’

  GM7 stops what he is doing and turns to look at her.

  ‘I have never looked at it quite in that way before. But you are right. This is what we are here for. We are here to help The Keeper and The Watcher keep The Balance, or in this particular case; restore the Balance. That is even when we are being fought against this by one of our own Guiding Masters. I wonder how long O will allow GM3 to remain one of us.