Everyworld

Chapter Two

Expeditionary Force Training.

First Year.

Induction/Alignment Pack.

Introduction.

Professor Giuseppe Caglieri.

    If you received this pack through the proper channels, then you are to be congratulated.

    You are one of our best and brightest; you are the greatest hope for the future not only of our Earth, but of all Earths.

    The purpose of this pack is to ensure that we all start off on the same foot – that we integrate together, so that the next eight years will be as productive as possible - and to give you the facts about the demons and other Earths.

    Much has been speculated about the demons and their intentions – there is not a religion on our Earth that does not have its own mythos regarding them – but we cannot allow ourselves to be guided or swayed by speculation.

    The facts are what matter: The facts of what we know; the facts of what we do not know; and any more facts that, with preparation, training, and perhaps a little luck, you will uncover for mankind.

    So, what facts do we have about the demons?

    We know of the spaces between the stars.

    Impossibly huge distances separate suns. Light itself can take centuries to travel from one stellar system to another.

    But we also now know that that space is not completely empty, that the uninhabitable spaces between stars are not completely uninhabited.

    It is there that the demons dwell.

    We call them demons because of their actions, not because of any religious grounding, but the truth is that we know almost nothing at all about these unimaginable creatures.

    They do things that we do not understand, for reasons that we do not know. Anything else you may have heard, from whatever source, should be disregarded. We must go into this endeavour with open minds, not with minds that have been blinkered by unfounded theories.

    We are not even completely certain that the demons are living creatures, although it seems highly unlikely that their activities on planets that orbit type G suns could be carried out by unliving matter.

    I am sure you have all heard stories – legends, if you will – of the Earth before the sciences became more than a philosophical outlook.

    Many are the far-fetched stories of magic, of dragons and other wondrous beasts, and of cataclysms.

    We now know that many of those stories and legends may be based in truth.

    Before mankind shook itself free of the yoke of the demons, magic was the reality for the people of Earth.

    Countries and empires would grow according to the strength of their wizards and other magical beings, and wage war against other countries and empires, until all the magic in the world was owned and controlled by a few leaders, centred in a small geographical area.

    Then a cataclysm would strike, destroying this heart of the magical world – taking much of the rest of the inhabited world with it – and the cycle would slowly begin again.

    Civilisation would rebuild itself, growing in magic, only to fall again.

    And again. And again.

    But why?

    Why should the world continue to build itself up and destroy itself this way?

    The answer to that question is both simple and unsatisfying: We do not know.

    And, unfortunately, that same answer is all we have for too many questions that surge forth, where the demons are involved: We do not know why they do what they do. All that we do know is that people, humans, suffer because of them.

    But even this knowledge was not easy to obtain.

    How, for example, can I be so confident in saying that the old stories of magic realms and cataclysms are true?

    Has proof been found on our Earth to support such statements?

    Has evidence been uncovered, which confirms that the Earth went through an epoch, or epochs, when civilisations based on magic were built up and centralised, then torn apart, as the world of those magics was destroyed by huge natural disasters?

    Unfortunately not. No such evidence exists.

    There is nothing on Earth, no ancient artefact or historical data, which backs up such a theory.

    So how can I know – and I stress the word 'know' – that what I say is correct?

    One fact we do have is that the last cataclysm that our Earth suffered was comparatively minor.

    When Atlantis fell to disaster, the Mohorovicic discontinuity, which separates the Earth's crust from the upper mantle, remained largely intact.

    Had it breached fully, vast amounts of greenhouse gases would have been released into the atmosphere, resulting in the rapid elimination of almost all life on Earth.

    As it was, the destruction following Atlantis' fall remained confined to a relatively small area of the globe, obliterating the isle of Santorini, and only causing disturbances to weather patterns in places more than a few thousand miles away.

    Most of the world's magic had been concentrated in and around the city of Atlantis, on Santorini, so was lost; but the other countries of the world, which had been forced to give up their magical capacity to mighty Atlantis, remained unharmed.

    It was their survival that broke the cycle.

    The Sciences flourished in those magic-free countries and nations, over the next few centuries. Wizards were replaced by engineers and mathematicians, because the magics that had run the world before were no longer available, so the technology oriented world, the sciences, that we know today began to grow.

    Our Earth had been freed. We had discovered our own 'magic', in philosophy and the observational sciences.

    And the demons never regained their foothold.

    Thousands of years passed, with us learning the workings of the universe, and rebuilding our world without accepting demon influence or 'gifts'.

    We did all this without even any knowledge of the demons' existence. It was less than two-hundred years ago, when their works were finally uncovered.

    I am sure you have all seen the films of the first discovery of another Earth. I doubt there is a person on the planet who has not seen it many times.

    The images received from Promeneur XXI, as it entered that distant solar system, constituted the greatest shock the human race had ever suffered.

    The system had two gas giants, one with a ring system; an asteroid belt between the fourth and fifth planets; two small planets near the sun, one arid, one gaseous.

    In short: It was an exact replica of our own solar system.

    The similarity was so complete that, as Promeneur XXI approached the third planet, all telescopes on our Earth searched for it in our own skies, and even the greatest minds started thinking of possibilities of warps in space having somehow brought Promeneur home.

    But it had not returned home. It had found another solar system, another Earth, almost identical to our own. A solar system with the same planets in the same orbits; an Earth with the same continents, the same oceans, the same flora and fauna, and the same race of intelligent creatures – humans, like us.

    The people of this new Earth, however, still lived within the cycles of magic and cataclysm. They were still bound to doing the demons' will.

    It had been postulated many times that the discovery of an alien race would bring mankind together, unite peoples and races for the common good, but never had it been considered that that alien race would be ourselves.

    We needed to know more. We needed to understand how this duplication could have happened. We knew nothing at all of magic, and wanted to seek out a truth that would satisfy our science.

    So the Expeditionary Force was born.

    A mission was put together, to send people to contact these brother humans, and more unmanned probes were hastily sent out to investigate other type-G stars.

    This enterprise became the single greatest undertaking that mankind has ever attempted. All nations joined together in the effort. The questions raised by the existence of the duplicate Earth – and every other Earth that was later found circling every other type-G star – had to be answered.

    Had we found final proof of God's existence?

    Had He, in his wisdom, created not just one world of creatures in his image, but many?

    Why did incomprehensible magical forces thrive on all the Earths we found? And what was this magic, that disobeyed all the natural laws we had learned?

    Was it a mistake that we had turned to the sciences?

    Or was our Earth an experiment of His, to see where the sciences could take mankind?

    It was not until we developed technology which allowed us to detect the magical power flows that we began to find any answers at all to such questions.

    What we found is that yes, something lives in those vast spaces between the stars, and it is not God.

    At the same distance from each Earth's sun, and in the same direction, relative to the galactic core, creatures cluster at what is known as the 'Van Kruyp point'.

    What these creatures are, we do not know. How they live, we do not know. What they are made of, we do not know. They are unreachable, and detectable only through studying the magical energies, as they flow to and from them.

    They appear to be the shapers of solar systems of type-G suns, and they appear to create Earths, in minute detail, as the third planets of these systems.

    But that only appears to be the case, and we must deal only in facts. We have no concrete evidence to show whether the demons are the 'creators' of these worlds, or if they merely capitalise on their existence. The hand of God has not been ruled out.

    What we can prove, however, is that all the magical power on these Earths comes from the demons, and returns to them.

    The flow of energies between these creatures and the Earths they meddle with is almost constant. The energies directed toward the Earths power magical objects, which people use for their own purposes. The energies flowing back to the creatures is the magical power that has been expressed by such people.

    Is it refined in some way, as it is used? Again, we do not know. We can see where it goes, but we cannot see exactly what it is. We cannot yet fully examine it, properly quantify it, or even analyse it satisfactorily.

    Our own Van Kruyp point appears empty; it is a void, with no power flowing in any direction – but the residual effects of the demons that lived there are being studied and monitored, in the hope that secrets will be revealed.

    And revealing secrets, gathering information, will also be one of your main objectives.

    You will be trained, over the next eight years, in the physical sciences, in engineering, in weapon-smithery, in communications, in investigative methodologies, operations research, behavioural science, psychology, and a dozen other relevant disciplines.

    You are already the best of us, but we are going to transform you into something even better.

    You will be our vanguard, on the Earths currently held under the demons' sway. You will take your natural abilities, and the training we give you, and use them to disrupt the magic flows on these worlds, by whatever means you can. You will become the champions of our brother humans, the saviours of our sister Earths.

    Once your training is complete, the selection process will begin. For each of you, a target Earth will be chosen, which is at a stage in the cycles that best matches your capabilities and preferences, and your life will then become a great adventure, for between four and fourteen years – an adventure that will mean freedom and better lives for billions of our fellow humans.

    Study hard and learn well, over the next short years; you will need every advantage we can give you.