Limitless, John Gold [best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

thick gray fog before taking a snake-like form. That creature wrapped itself around his suit, kicking him back out on the side of the space ship when it failed to find anything organic. In other worlds, the astronaut saw for himself that the fog was both intelligent and following a kind of logic. It watched as he headed back to his ship. No sooner had he gotten back on board than the wormhole slammed shut, marking the end of humankind’s first contact with the alien Eru race.

“After the crew got back to Earth, they were examined carefully and released when nothing was found. Back then, there weren’t many astronauts, so they tended to receive a lot of attention. The one who made contact with the Eru started to change. First, he began eating more, and then his body started to grow. Happily for him, all that happened on the remote island in the Pacific Ocean where he originally came from. He soon grew so large that he couldn’t fit in his own garage, and that’s when he moved to a cave nearby the island that had been considered inaccessible to the locals and their fishing schooners. The only other person who knew what was going on faked his death and then provided whatever help he could. The astronaut’s body kept changing. His skin and skeleton modified, while new organs and cavities appeared. In fact, his skin became harder than the reinforced shell used for space ships. His eyes, his brain, and his entire nervous system started becoming something completely different. His digestive system was unrecognizable and unclassifiable. Living permanently submerged and absorbing all those different micronutrients swelled his weight to a hundred and forty tons over the six months he spent in the cave. His only friend, who stuck with him that whole time, kept track of everything. After a year and a half, the astronaut had become an organic space ship capable of taking a hundred and forty people on board. The friend that stayed by his side was the investor, the one who sent the team to check out the wormhole.

“That all happened two hundred and ten years ago on Earth. The astronaut who became a space ship understood his own functions more and more with each passing day, learning how to better control himself. Most importantly, he understood why the Eru race had contacted humans and turned him into a space ship. The investor started selling his assets and collecting scientists without letting government structures know what was going on. A year later, they had a team of them to go along with the crew for their new ship. Off they flew once again to the wormhole, knowing full well that they would be met and let through. The gray fog snake palpated the ship and fused with it, taking over control. On the other side of the wormhole, we had our first contact with aliens. No, we didn’t correspond or speak using gestures. They just sent us to the Eru race’s home planet, installed a quantum core in the ship, and forcibly thrust us into Project Chrysalis.

“Here, in mankind’s base world, all the languages spoken by the other races are translated into the one you know. Our guide was named Tiamat, and he is now the senior officer and judge for Project Chrysalis, tracking the progress mankind makes through the trial. It’s one that will determine whether we are prepared for contact with other races in the universe. As you may have gathered, the trial is complete, and we have been permitted to join society. But let’s go back to what happened with us. Tiamat forced us to go through the same path you took. We also had to unlock the interworldy portal. There were just seven hundred of us, mostly scientists who had never seen video games outside stores. It took us sixty years to complete the conditions and get to Papilio. And only then were we permitted to leave the game and return to Earth. We were named Earth’s envoys, having beaten the first trial, and you beat the second when you unlocked the portal.

“When the crew returned to Earth, the Third World War, the one for energy resources, was just about to begin. We’d been written off as dead, and the ideas and proposals we returned with were laughed off. The world had changed quite a bit in the sixty years we were gone. We were penniless, and had no friends or family. Everyone wanted to use us, though nobody wanted to work together in the interests of humanity. Believe me, we did everything we could. But instead of working together, thirty people were tortured to death at black sites in an attempt to squeeze new tech out of us.

“After that incident, the first lunar corporation, Armadillo Industries, was formed to take humanity into space. We represented the interests of a small island country that no longer exists. That enabled us to stay in the shadows, while the country flourished. After being kidnapped and tortured, we stopped standing up for Earth. Instead, we created a society within the corporation we had founded and began collecting like-minded people from around the world. Sixty years later, Armadillo Industries declared itself the independent nation of Lunar and showed humanity the path to prosperity.

“We introduced a new and universal currency that replaced the dollar, euro, yuan, and others with what you now know as credits. Other governments were given the technology to build space ships, stations, and ground colonies, while we gradually cleared Earth of people and the trash they left behind. Every month, we published different discoveries and technologies to make sure that none of the countries had a technological advantage over any other. That dramatically reduced the number of wars and conflicts in the world. The countries in the west disappeared after the introduction of the single currency and the distribution of technology. They could no longer dictate their terms, and their financial and political