Chapter 847

When one place runs out of resources, you find somewhere else and keep mining. There was nothing particularly complicated about that.

And in theory, most of the problems and conflicts facing the world could be resolved through interstellar colonization. In the long run, it might even be an inevitable stage in the development of human civilization.

But there was one problem.

Earth was humanity’s cradle.

Humanity couldn’t stay in the cradle forever.

People had been saying that for decades, but so far, leaving the cradle had remained the stuff of movies, comics, and science fiction.

The only major project that had ever seriously set its sights on the stars and actually tried to reach them had been the Strategic Defense Initiative during the Cold War.

And that project had, directly or indirectly, contributed to the collapse of a superpower powerful enough to make the entire world tremble.

So what exactly were these people proposing now?

Were they trying to overthrow American capitalism?

Elizabeth was beginning to wonder.

At the world’s current technological level, interstellar colonization was simply impossible.

Yes, the biological dome technology Evangelion had just presented sounded extraordinary. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it really could transform an alien world’s environment into something humans could inhabit.

How were they planning to get it there?

Humanity could send people to the Moon. Probes had reached Mars. But sending one or two people into space and constructing an entire functioning settlement on another planet were two completely different problems.

It was like saying an ordinary person could jump ten centimeters into the air.

Fine.

Now stay there.

Building functional infrastructure on another planet was vastly more difficult than assembling something in orbit. At least a space station didn’t require you to dig foundations into an alien world.

If they were planning to develop all that technology from scratch, the required funding would be astronomical.

The families represented around this table were wealthy.

Extremely wealthy.

But even they couldn’t compete with the Soviet Union’s old space program. That government had practically bankrupted itself pursuing its ambitions.

If these families pooled everything they had and started begging for change on the street afterward, they still wouldn’t have enough.

So, yes, perhaps Evangelion really did possess some miracle technology that could create a new generation of enhanced humans.

But there was a difference between having a destination and having a road.

You had to take one step at a time.

Trying to leap too far too quickly was how you ended up pulling something important.

The financial representatives were just preparing to dismiss the whole proposal as an amusing fantasy when Elizabeth noticed the elderly white-haired man sitting quietly among the representatives of the Tulzcha Cult.

Franklin.

He wore an expression that was almost a smile.

Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed.

Was that why they were here?

Had this entire project been the reason the Tulzcha Cult had agreed to attend?

An absurd thought surfaced in her mind.

Could this company actually have its hands on the threshold of interstellar colonization?

Reputation mattered.

If the Waldemar family was considered an authority in modern biology, then the Tulzcha Cult possessed a similar position in astronomy and aerospace engineering.

At least, that was the reputation they had cultivated.

Officially, the organization called itself the Green Flame Brotherhood, an astronomical society whose nature was supposedly comparable to organizations such as the Freemasons or the Rosicrucians.

The truth was considerably stranger.

The Brotherhood was an ancient religious order whose members worshiped one of the Unseen Dancers of the Court of Azathoth: Tulzcha, the Green Flame.

The cult had a number of unusual rules.

For example, ordinary believers were required to address Tulzcha as the Green Flame or the Teacher. Only senior members were permitted to use Tulzcha’s name directly, and no one was permitted to refer to Tulzcha in the third person.

Strangely enough, that meant they weren’t exactly mindless fanatics.

Their highest doctrine—and ultimate objective—was remarkably simple.

Earth was a prison.

Humanity had to find a way out and return to the side of the Great Teacher.

Thousands of years ago, they had tried to accomplish this by summoning a creature known as a byakhee, hoping to use it to cross the cosmos and reach the Court of Azathoth.

Unfortunately, they eventually discovered they had knocked on the wrong door.

Byakhees served the King in Yellow, Hastur.

They had nothing to do with Tulzcha.

So the Brotherhood had needed another solution.

Their next attempt involved the Mi-Go, creatures capable of traveling through space.

There was just one catch.

The Mi-Go’s preferred method of transportation involved removing a person’s brain from their skull and placing it inside a small golden cylinder.

And eventually, the Brotherhood discovered another problem.

Mi-Go were spectacularly unreliable.

They were busy creatures. Very busy creatures.

And they had terrible memories.

Sometimes they would carry something somewhere, put it down, and wander off.

Wait. Was there something else I was supposed to do?

No?

Must have been nothing.

Having your brain packed into a metal cylinder and then forgotten by the person responsible for carrying it was, understandably, somewhat concerning.

Eventually, the followers of Tulzcha decided that relying on unreliable supernatural creatures was foolish.

They would solve the problem themselves.

After all, superstition and magic were primitive.

Science was the future.

And, to their credit, the Brotherhood had accomplished an extraordinary amount in pursuit of that philosophy.

As far back as ancient Egypt, around 2700 BC, followers of Tulzcha had allegedly influenced the design and construction of the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. The structure had served as an important reference point for tracking celestial bodies across the night sky.

Unfortunately, their activities had been discovered by the true rulers of the ancient world—the mysterious beings known as the Hive and their followers.

The Tulzcha Cult had been suppressed and forced into hiding.

Centuries later, during ancient Greece, one of their astronomers, Aristarchus, had proposed the heliocentric model of the solar system.

He had been far too early.

His ideas clashed violently with the prevailing religious and philosophical order of the age, and the theory had been suppressed.

Then, during the sixteenth century, two of their devoted followers—Copernicus and Bruno—were condemned by the Roman Inquisition for spreading heretical ideas beyond the understanding of mankind.

Bruno, of course, had been burned at the stake.

The Brotherhood’s faith in science had never wavered.

Over the centuries, its influence had only grown.

That had also meant more of its secret history had leaked into the outside world.

Everyone in the room knew that the Montgolfier brothers, who had achieved humanity’s first successful manned hot-air balloon flight in 1783, had allegedly belonged to the organization.

So had étienne, one of the pioneers of the internal combustion engine.

The Wright brothers.

Wernher von Braun, who developed rockets for the Third Reich.

All of them were said to have had connections to the Brotherhood.

There were even rumors that the brilliant Nikola Tesla had once been one of its members.

According to the more entertaining version of the story, Tesla had eventually grown tired of the Brotherhood’s insistence on gradual, methodical scientific progress and released several technologies far ahead of their time without authorization.

He had been expelled.

And after the tragedies of Aristarchus and Copernicus, the Brotherhood had become extremely cautious about releasing scientific theories too far ahead of their era.

That was supposedly why one of its senior priests, Edison, had sacrificed every shred of dignity he possessed to discredit Tesla and suppress his work.

There were plenty of other rumors.

The Brotherhood had allegedly played a significant role in the development of multistage rockets.

Yuri Gagarin was supposedly one of their members as well. According to one particularly bizarre story, the green flame tattoo beneath his tongue had been discovered by outsiders, resulting in the "accident" that eventually claimed his life.

True or not, one thing was undeniable.

The Tulzcha Cult had been obsessed with the sky for thousands of years.

Whatever their motives, their contributions to astronomy and aerospace technology were enormous.

And their authority in those fields was virtually unquestionable.

There was another reason the Ancient One had never moved against them.

Honestly, these lunatics looked considerably more reasonable than she did.

Why bother?

That was why Elizabeth and the others were watching Franklin so closely now.

If anyone in the room could judge the feasibility of interstellar colonization, it was him.

Franklin cleared his throat.

"According to our organization’s assessment, the biological dome technology is genuine."

The room went silent.

"The transportation and construction methods you’ve proposed alongside it are equally sound."

He paused.

"Based on your current rate of development, I believe you should have tangible results within the next year. I’m particularly interested in your large-scale spacecraft project. Once it succeeds, I estimate that a round trip between Earth and Mars should take approximately one month."

Silence.

Complete, stunned silence.

Elizabeth stared at him.

A month?

Humanity’s current aerospace capabilities barely extended beyond the Earth-Moon system, and these people were casually talking about traveling to Mars and back in thirty days.

Her gaze dropped to the spacecraft model displayed on the screen.

It wasn’t even a small vessel.

It was enormous.

And it had actual seating.

Are these people even human?

As it happened, the answer was no.

The technology the Eredar twins were describing really did exist.

It simply wasn’t human technology.

Evenson had purchased the alien aerospace technology from the Collector some time ago in the Blasted Lands. Since then, Genos had worked relentlessly to translate several truckloads of alien technical data and identify the portions that could be integrated with Earth’s existing technology.

To everyone in this room, however, that distinction was impossible to know.

From their perspective, there were only two possible explanations.

Either this seemingly insignificant company was secretly an alien organization preparing Earth for conquest...

Or it was merely the public face of a gigantic global organization possessing scientific resources far beyond anything the world knew about.

The second explanation seemed much more plausible.

The sleeping giant had finally decided to step into the light.

And it intended to create a new future for humanity.

A future that would, conveniently, belong to its creators as well.

There was no other explanation.

The technology Evangelion had revealed today—and the proven technologies they had released previously—were all decades, perhaps centuries, ahead of anything a small company could reasonably develop on its own.

That left the people sitting around this table with a rather uncomfortable question.

How were they supposed to deal with something like this?

A new world meant the destruction of the old one.

And if the old world disappeared, what happened to the families that had built their fortunes inside it?

Could they stop it?

No.

History had already answered that question.

Every attempt to stand in the way of technological and civilizational progress eventually ended the same way.

Even if they managed to win temporarily, the wheels of history would eventually roll over them.

Suppose their families mobilized every resource they possessed.

They could manipulate the stock market.

They could influence the media.

They could quietly sabotage the company.

Perhaps they could even destroy this little organization.

But what would that accomplish?

This company was almost certainly only the visible tip of something much larger.

Destroy one piece today, and tomorrow another ten might appear around the world.

And there was something even more frightening.

This organization had appeared today and immediately begun laying out plans for the future of humanity and the future of civilization itself.

Who knew what else they had hidden?

If they could rewrite human genetics and improve the species, then destroying a person’s genetic sequence should presumably be even easier.

A doctor capable of developing a cure was also perfectly capable of understanding how to kill a patient.

If the families pushed too hard, what was to stop this organization from "accidentally" releasing some engineered pathogen?

Something that only affected people carrying a particular hereditary marker?

The thought was enough to make several of them uncomfortable.

Fortunately, nothing they had seen suggested that was the organization’s intention.

Quite the opposite.

They appeared willing to bring the old financial elite along into the new world.

Of course, their definition of "bringing them along" seemed to involve throwing the families’ capital into the furnace as fuel.

But capital would still matter in the new world.

And extracting every last ounce of value from capital was precisely what these families had spent generations learning to do.

With the wealth they possessed and their experience wielding it, they might not be able to sit behind the wheel of this new civilization.

But they could probably secure a seat in the passenger compartment.

Elizabeth couldn’t help feeling a little dazed.

How had this happened?

She had come here because her family had asked her to attend a board meeting, broaden her experience, and handle a business negotiation.

That was all.

At the beginning, everything had been perfectly normal.

Then the conversation had somehow escalated from corporate investment to human genetic engineering, then to planetary ecological reconstruction, and now to the future of human civilization.

How had a business meeting turned into a discussion about the end of one world and the birth of another?

Then again, she supposed she only had herself to blame.

She should have realized something was wrong the moment Mr. Scott appeared.

Any meeting attended by someone from the Bloody Tongue was bound to become strange.

She simply hadn’t expected this strange.