Eve In Utopia

Prologues

Prologue One: Somewhere in Limbo

Amanda Chang looked up from the screen built into the surface of the large pseudo wood conference table when the door slid open and Dmitri Bishop entered. She watch the large blonde man take his seat to complete the full complement of the council. "You don't look like you have good news," she observed and tried not to cringe in anticipation as she knew Bishop had just come from the monitoring room.

"The colony on Sigma Draconis VII in Reality A246 is gone," Bishop said meeting her gaze and hearing gasps from several of the others gathered around the table.

"Alien attack? Plague?" Amanda blurted out her first thoughts about the cause of the demise of the colony.

Bishop shook his head. "It is just gone as if it never existed."

"I see," replied Amanda biting her lower lip. "That is the seventh such incident in the last month."

"You mean seven that we know about," put in an older woman with strands of silver threading through her red hair.

"Yes," agreed Amanda looking at Megan Gonzalez. "For all the advances in our technology since we established this base outside of normal time and space, we are still so limited in how much of the Multiverse we can effectively monitor."

Megan nodded her head in agreement. There really hadn't been any need for Amanda to say what they all knew, but it was perhaps a necessary preliminary to what they had come together to discuss. "We don't know if Project Union will work," she pointed out. "Even if it does work, there is no guarantee that it will be enough to save humanity."

Now it was Amanda's turn to nod. This was a discussion all those in this room had gone through many times before. They all knew the arguments both for and against the project, but they were still human, or at least they were for the moment and that meant these things had to be said at least one more time.

"The computer projections are brutally clear," said a small dark skinned man with shocking blonde hair that so vividly contrasted with his complexion.

"What are the latest numbers Hikaro?" asked Amanda.

Hikaro Jones didn't reply immediately, but punched a few controls on his own computer screen to send the information to everyone else's screen. "We have at most a century before humanity becomes extinct," he said gesturing at the numbers on the screen.

This brought more gasps from those around the table, though like Amanda they had been expecting something this dire. It was just that you couldn't hear such a blunt statement about the extinction of your species without having some kind of emotional reaction. '"We still are no closer to knowing who is behind this?' she directed her question to a figure seated at the far end of the table from her. The person was an 'other', one of those humans who chose not to identify as either male or female. The designation of other had started off as somewhat of a derogatory term, or maybe a bad joke. There were countless forms that humans loved to invent and that had to be filled out for one reason or another. Many of them had at one time asked the gender of the person completing it and the third check box of other had been added to accommodate changing norms. Rather than take the designation as an insult, a new community had arisen that embraced the term and eventually the question had simply vanished from all those forms as no longer relevant. The forms themselves of course hadn't vanished since nothing could defeat bureaucracy.

"Nothing useful," replied the other known simply as Alpha in a voice that carried no hint of being gender specific. The other's skull was completely devoid of any hair and the baggy robe worn for clothing hid all physical clues to gender, if indeed there were any to be found. "Those in my intelligence section believe that it is likely they have a base here in Limbo which gives them access to all of time and space as it does us. They would have to in order to carry out their campaign against us. The problem of course is that Limbo is infinite and we are as likely to discover their location as we are to survive the heat death of the universe. The only good thing about that is it is as equally unlikely that they will discover our base in turn."