The Last Star Surfer

[Brian]

CHAPTER 0 | THE BOY

“Earth is the why, there is no truth greater than that.” Faja’s voice always evoked a calm as the words slipped through her puffy white lips.

“We have 6 days left to find a cure.  This is no the time to take risks.”  Mr. Helele was frustrated and beneath that he was afraid.  His powerful frame couldn’t hide the fear behind his garish robes.  

“We are so close.  If we take this wild thing into our midst the perfect balance we have worked so hard to achieve could be torn apart.”

The update had arrived only an hour ago from the Vish Monastery.

    From:  Vish High Council

“We have found the cure.  A boy, found quite by coincidence in the ashes of the Prison planet.  His survival in that hellish place is a miracle in its own right.  

He is en route now with the Vish who found him.  They are traveling as close to light speed as possible.  We know there is little time left.  Our hope is that you will trust the wisdom of the edict you gave the Vish over 100,000 years ago.”

Solemnly,

High Vish Axio Sapience

For those aboard Shaka, a celestial lifeboat literally carved out of a neutron star, its occupants had watched in desperation as this virus of space and time destroyed the Galaxy they loved.  Worlds they loved were crushed in an instant.  Killing everyone they loved, the Star that gave life to their world and all its other children.

What were hours or days onboard Shaka were thousands of years in the Milky Way.  And so for over 100,000 years they had watched helplessly as the Universe grew closer to Cessation.

Tan, the third and final member of the Shaka Trias Council read the Vish analysis: 
Name: Ki (Only known name)
Age:  16
Neurological Quotient:  Exceeds current measurement limits
Syn-aptic Capacity:  Preliminary report - unlimited
Physical Analysis:
Bone Density:  Upper range of 100%
Kinetic and Muscular Agility:  Exceed Limits of Instrumentation
Gravity Quotient:  Measurements indicate stress under 3 times normal gravity

Emotional Assessment:  Highly Intelligent, high adaptive, rejects authority, primary mental state indicates a heightened sense of survival.  Violence cannot be ruled out.  Emotionally malleable potential within a closely orchestrated environment.

“Brothers, I can sense the concern you both have.  We instructed the Vish to find this cure and they have.  I encourage you to embrace whatever is to come in peace.  We will accept this boy onboard the Shaka and then our own assessment.  Tan - if he is to stay he will need to be on the first available jump.  We will need to be in a constant state of disorientation and learning at the beginning. We will assign Imber to be his brother assuming we agree.

I can feel the truth here, He is our cure.”

And with that the council was over.  Faja stood walking gracefully out of the Trias Atrium looking as peaceful as she always did, leaving Tan and Dr. Helele left to try to find peace.

CHAPTER 3 | THE GROM

Ki made no sound.  In fact he had not spoken once since he was pulled back and shuffled into what resembled an empty dormitory.

Ki just laid there in silence on the top bunk by the door all night staring at the graffiti on the ceiling.  Places and things he had only read about..  

Groms were always alone here alone the first night.  

There was a sun painted the way a child would paint it bright yellow with little orange points in all  directions around the edge.  Just in front of the sun was a single perfect Bluish Green wave with its white tip dripping over at that moment right before it crashed down and returned to the ocean calm.  The background was such a subtle orange metallic sky that you knew if touched it would chip and fall away and the picture would never be perfect again.  

The entire scene was framed in by a thin white rectangular line making it seem as though you were peering through a wide window out at the ocean.   Just below the window was another smaller but perfectly and precisely shaped window with the words: 

 “Earth is our why” 

written in metallic crimson.

There were other hieroglyphs nestled in the mural of the dorm.  They melted over into each other and Ki was very certain that beneath it all were dozens of others.  Another box, this one pitch black with faded gray icons of people stacked side by side top to bottom, perhaps thousands of the little people standing in rows holding flaming swords high above their heads in a strange grip.  

Certainly thousands more of these little painted people lost underneath the tapestry of color and shape of murals painted over top.  Only a small tear of them remained, barely visible amongst the vastness of it all. 

Puffy over sized palm trees, a faded yellow camp fire ringed with blackish gray rocks.  An exaggerated black monolith of a rapa nui statue with crying white eyes, masculine lips and features burdened with an ancient furrowed brow and lines in his forehead that had labored under some inevitable truth and the unbearable pain that he could not stop even with his powerful rocky stature.

Tulips of every possible color scattered across the entire scene and a celestial crimson bird, whose species he was certain he had never read because if he had, he would remember it. Ki remembered everything.   Every image, it’s name and meaning, all perfectly cataloged in his photographic mind.  Memories from books written long ago about a place he had never been.  A place that no longer existed, Earth.

And with all this puncturing his mind he came back again and again to the image of the sun and the wave.  Each name from the glossary of waves came back as flawless reproduced photographs of each page came back memory.  He recited them silently.

Amplitude
The vertical distance from a still water level to a wave peak

Barrel
The hollow part of breaking gravity, a gap between the face of a gravitational wave and its horizon, The pocket where it folds onto itself...  The Pocket is the place where you can balance and your mind can enter into Maroubra

Bathymetry
This is the power of the gravity well at various points in space.

Shaka Motion
The small gravitation current just outside the ship.

Chop
When the gravitational field becomes violently disrupted by unknown forces of unknown origin.

Closeout
A Gravitational wave that crashes down evenly on the Horizon making it impossible to ride or hit the pocket.

Ki continues through his list until he comes to Whitewater.

Whitewaves, The static field at the horizon where any material thing is broken and atomized. 

Broken, broken bones, Am I broken?  Broken promises.  Broken, broken, broken, broken.

Until yesterday these words, which he could recall and recite flawlessly, seemed so perfect and complete.  He really believed he understood the ocean, the waves, the sand.

As Ki lost control of his mind standing at the precipice of that monstrous black hole he suddenly appeared in the ocean, floating in the water just a few yards from rich orange sand surrounded by an impossibly green island.  A blue sky overhead, and he remembered that he had never really seen the color blue until he looked up at that sky.  He felt the sun, its warmth a gift.

And yet none of this could compare with the feeling and the smell of the ocean waves.  He gulped a chest full of air and dove down, he saw fish and a Turtle.  The Turtle somehow looked as if it were the royalty of the sea.  He touched its gritty, yet slick shell.  It paid him no mind.  

He floated there in that ocean for hours and hours, more than he could count, he felt himself grow tired and yet he couldn’t stop himself from going back down, every dive a new unexpected journey into something he would never be able to explain.  He was aware of his own body there in that place. 

His muscles flexing and groaning in his powerfully slim body.  He floated there with no clothing, the pale core of his body complaining about the sun, no dust, no garbage, no killers, no false Father,  just life.  His formidable will to stay in that water as long as possible fighting a battle he could never win against the power of the sea.  Unruly sandy blonde hair bleaching in the sun.  His emerald eyes, sparkling and deepening in the water.  Those eyes and all his other senses taking everything in, finding new and forever places in his perfect mind.

He floated in his Ocean for an eternity feeling love for something for the first time in his life. 

Ki stayed up all night trying to reconcile who he used to be with who he was now.  These two Ki’s could not both survive.  Survive.

A rap on the door, and its voice shattered his mesmerized disbelief.   “Hey Grom, let’s go find out who you are.”

He laid on his bunk for a moment longer looking up at that painted wave.  Somehow knowing that when he left that spot it was gone.  He felt shame for the love he felt for that wave.  

The last image of the harsh protector who he called Father perfectly recalled came into focus in his mind. The man he called Father had never cried, he told Ki never to let them see you bleed.  As they pulled Ki away his Father yelled out, “Don't worry boy, I’ll be here when you get back”.   

One of those lies we tell ourselves when the truth is too much to bear.  The painful reality that he was leaving the warmth and relative safety of the only person who had ever cared for him behind forever.

And yet all night long as he stared through uncontrollable tears, he tried to lie to himself but couldn’t.  He would miss that wave more than anything from home, even his Protector. He rolled off his bunk, wiped away the tears and walked out of the Grom dorm to find out who he was.