Time Flies

Time Flies

     Unnim finds a very sharpened rock with a long piece of wood sticking out of it. He uses that rock to cut off the hand of a dead individual next to it. “I’m sure he’s already dead. But if he’s not, he soon will be.”

     After picking up that hand, Unnim places it on the hand indent in the wall there. At first, nothing happens. Then suddenly the wall crumbles into extremely small pieces to reveal nothing. But after the crumbling dust clears, they can see it’s not empty after all. There are about a thousand dead pests in that large room.

     “Do you call this the greatest find in Savintin history?” Unnim asks sarcastically. “I don’t.”

     “I do,” answers Pazzime. She reaches into that room and picks up one of those pests.

     After looking at it closely, she destroys it with two of her fingers. A slight metallic sound echoes within that cavern. “We call them all pests now. But these used to be called flies.”

     “Don’t care what they are called then or now,” says Unnim angrily. “I have wasted several hundred thousand of my credits to find a bunch of pests.”

     “You may have come here looking for something else,” says Pazzime as she looks at the other six Savintins there. “But we have found what we have been looking for.”

     Pazzime scoops up about a hundred pests into a hand. Then she places them under the nose and eyes of Unnim. “Look at them closely. They aren’t real. These pests are mostly metal. This is too advanced for our time. That’s because they aren’t just pests. They are Time Flies.”

##

     Swatting the Time Fleas out of Pazzime’s hand, Unnim still looks and acts like he’s angry about what is going on. Pazzime and the others there can see that on his face and how he’s speaking to them. “You lied to me.”

     “You led me to believe that there was wealth here.” continues Unnim. “I would never have agreed to this if you hadn’t done that.”

     “There is wealth here,” says Pazzime. “It’s just not the kind of wealth that you are looking for. What we have here is a wealth of information.”

     Still looking angry, Unnim starts walking toward the only way in there. “Hope you like walking in blistering heat and freezing cold. It’s a long way back to Kasandus.”

     Three of the other Savintins there start to follow him. “Let him go,” says Pazzine. “We still have a lot to do here.”

     “Besides, he’s not going anywhere. I thought he might try something like this,” continues Pazzine. “So, I took his Transport Controls from his transport before we started looking in here for our Time Fleas.”

     Pazzime walks over and sits in front of all those flies. The other six GraveDiggers are right behind her. Two sit on both sides of her. The other two are slightly behind them. For a long time, they just stare at those fleas. Suddenly, Pazzime scoops up a lot of them in both of her hands. She starts looking at them very closely.

     “There are some individual Savintins in a lot of these Time Flies,” says Pazzime. “I don’t understand it. After all, it has been almost a hundred years. But I think that some of them may still be alive.”

##

     Ten Savintins run down a long corridor to meet Pazzime and the other six GraveDiggers with her as they enter through a sliding entrance. Those ten help them to carry a lot of small clear containers with about a hundred pests in each one of them to a large room.

     Those containers are put on a big oblong floating table. Bavic enters the only entrance there a few seconds behind the others. He goes over to that table and hits a small red button on the side of it. Those containers shatter. letting the pest fall on the table. the few who fall off of it are quickly put back on it by the eighteen Savintins there.

     A faint blue light starts moving down that oblong table very slowly. It’s about halfway down that table when Bavic looks up at Pazzime with a shocked look on her face. “You are right. There are some Savintins still alive within these Time Fleas.”

     Once the blue light gets to the end of that table it disappears. The eighteen Savintins there start picking up the Time Fleas that are now pulsating with a light green color within them. They put them in another clear container. “We need to bring them back to their normal sizes as quickly as possible. It doesn’t look like most of them may not be alive for too much longer.”

     “Only one of our Time Flies survived,” as Bavic. He and Pazzime are walking toward a floating sleeper with a female laying on it. “I just hope that Hollina can tell us what happened to them.”

     Bavic walks to one side of Hollina. Pazzime goes over to the other side of her. for a long time they just stare at her. every so often one of them looks at the machines that she’s connected to. Suddenly, Hollina opens her eyes. she slowly looks at both Bavic and Pazzime.

     “I know that you have just woken up,” says Bavic. “But we need to know how you survived that Time Jump? And if you have found out what started The Sickness that has almost killed everyone on Savintin?”

####

     Ten clear human-sized tubes in a circle stop spinning around. Within these tubes, white smoke starts filling them. It begins at the bottom of them and ends at the top almost instantly. A few seconds later that smoke starts to fade away. As it starts to disappear, ten Savintins can be seen within them.

     Slowly, these ten begin to open their eyes one after another. Once they do that, they start looking at each other as they begin stepping out of their tubes. About twenty-five other Savintins rush up there to help them. One of those helpers is Bavic. He walks up to one of the ten. “How are you feeling?”

     Bavic sits in a hovering chair at one end of a very long floating table. At the other end of that table is the Savintin he has been talking to from the tubes recently. On both sides of that table, sits six Savintins on each side. Four of them are also from those tubes.

     After standing, Bavic clears his throat loud enough to get the attention of the others there who are talking with each other. “After checking out our Time Travelers, we now know we can time travel.”

     “What we don’t know is how far back that we can go,” continues Bavic. “And if we can go back as far as we need to go back.”

     'Get ready,” says Bavic. “Our latest Time Travelers are about to return.”

     About twenty-five Savintins surround the ten clear tubes there. Just then the tubes start spinning. Then the smoke appears and disappears after those tubes stop spinning. When it does, the ten Savintins in them are no longer human. They appear to be human in height, weight, etc. But now they are burnt beyond being human anymore.

     “Another failure,” says Bavic. “I don’t think we are going to be able to do what we need to be done.”

##

     “We need to find another way to back in our Time stream,” says Bavic. As he paces around the room with the long table, he looks at the same Savintins that have been there before.

     Bavic is still looking at the other Savintins. But he has stopped his pacing. “Any suggestions about what we should try next.”

     “I’m not going to risk any more Savintins lives.” Suddenly, Bavic starts swatting a group of pests flying around his head. He smiles.

     Bavic slowly Looks at about a hundred pests flying around that room. None of them are attacking him or the other Savintins there. “I think I know how we can get the information that we need.”

     “All we need are these pests,“ continues Bavic. “They can get us what we need from our past.”

     “I think the reason we can’t go back far enough in time is because of our height and weight,” says Bavic. “We are too big. But our pests aren’t.”

     The Savintin at the end of that hovering table stands up. “How can we do that?”

     “We can collect the pests to send them,” says Bavic. “But they can’t get any information because they are pests. The only way to do it is to create them.”

     Bavic gets up and starts pacing around that room again. “We can create them. As many as we want. But I don’t think it will be enough no matter how many of them we create.”

     “I think we need to do something else,” continues Bavic. “I’m just not sure what that something is yet.”

##

     Once again, Bavic and about twenty-five Savintins are looking at the spinning Time Travel Tubes as they come to a stop. After the smoke disappears, they can see about a million Time Flies in each one of those tubes. Bavic taps a few buttons on the control panel in front of him.

     A light green light appears at the bottom of each tube. It slowly goes up to the top of them. Passing right through those floating Time Flies. Bavic is now looking at a lot of data information on a large monitor above his controls there. Suddenly, he taps another button. And the data stops flowing up his monitor.

     “This is useful information,” says Bavic. “But it’s not the Data we want or need.”

     Overlooking a large room, Bavic can see several thousand Savintins below him. After taping a few buttons under the clear wall he’s looking out of, Bavic watches as a pale red light comes on above the other Savintins there. It doesn’t float down to cover them. But it does make them all disappear. One second they are there. The next they aren’t.

     Only they haven’t disappeared. Bavic can see that on two large monitors. One on each side of his head. They are now the size of the Time Flies. Bavic watches as those Savintin pilots start getting into the Flies. “I don’t like doing it. Risking anymore Savintins. But it’s the only thing I can think of to find out what happened.”

     “You haven’t told us how you are still alive,” says Bavic. “And why we found you in that cavern?”

     “I’m going to tell you everything,” says Hollina. Hollina gets up from the other end of that Oblong table now. She walks toward Bavic. “But right now, all that matters is what we have found about The Sickness.”

     Hollina stops when she gets to Bavic. “We have found out what has caused The Sickness.”

     “I don’t know how it happened or how to stop it from happening,” continues Hollina. “But somehow we are the ones who caused The Sickness to almost destroy Savintin.”

Word Count = 1,841