Rashama Kahn’s memories were a series of scattered and surprising images. The second-most surprising of these were of his ship plowing head-long into a strange planet’s atmosphere and somehow not breaking up upon entry, but this paled in comparison to his most surprising memory, the surprise of what he saw on the planet itself.
Buildings. Skyscrapers. A sprawling, endless cascade of glass and steel and foliage all amalgamated into a single city. He looked down in amazement at the alien world while feeling a slight tinge of regret that the first contact humans would have with this distant civilization would be his ship exploding and destroying a part of this advanced metropolis.
But his ship did not explode, and Rashama was surprised yet again when he realized his free-falling ship was being slowed before gently touching down on the planet’s surface. He opened the cockpit and spilled out into the street, happy to be alive…
…Figures approached him. He looked up at the beings, and another surprise befell him when he saw, not aliens, but humans that appeared identical to him in every way.
“What… But… How?” He sputtered.
One of the people waved a hand in front of his face, and Rashama instantly sunk into deep unconsciousness.
…
“You are Rashama Kahn of Earth.” The voice was deep and clear, and came from the darkness beyond.
Rashama opened his eyes and tried to move, but found he was completely encased in a transparent glass-like sphere.
“Yes.” Rashama answered. “I’m a human like you.” He didn’t speak with his mouth, but instead felt as though his thoughts were somehow being audibly projected into the world, as he could clearly hear his voice, yet his mouth, like the rest of him, was still immobilized in the glass sphere.
“Not like us.” The voice said. “You are a child of the rebellion. You were born of a seditious seed.”
“What do you mean?”
Then all at once, in his mind’s eye, he saw a war. It was a war that had taken hundreds of years and claimed countless lives. He saw the skyscrapers and technology and infrastructure of the planet become twisted clumps of smoldering metal. He saw the troops, the weaponry, the attacks… He felt the fear.
“When the war had ended, those who had instigated it were captured and released on a different planet in the backwaters of the Milky Way. They were given no technology, and their minds were altered to forget their history, as well as key details about math and science.”
At this point another, far higher voice interjected. “Is it true he has no concept of Ghlern?”
“He doesn’t.”
“What’s Ghlern?” Rashama heard himself ask.
There was a brief hesitation, then the deeper voice said “It’s the number between seven and eight.”
Rashama felt confused.
“Wow, he really doesn’t know about it!” The high-pitched voice exclaimed in a tone lined with glee.
“Everyone banished to Earth fifty-thousand years ago, as well as their descendants, have been genetically engineered to never conceptualize Ghlern.”
“The number between seven and eight…” Rashama stammered. “But there is no number. Not a whole number, anyway.”
Yet before Rashama finished speaking he saw a series of dots materialize in front of him. He counted them. There were more than seven, but less than eight.
He counted them again.
“It doesn’t make sense.” He heard himself groan. “There aren’t seven, and logically if there is an amount of something and it surpasses seven, that amount should pass through eight… Yet there are not eight!”
The dots disappeared from his mind, and Rashama felt dizzy, and confused, and sick.
“This is why their technology is not as good as ours.” The deep voice explained. “By hindering their minds and making certain amounts and ideas incomprehensible, we knew they’d never be able to return.”
“But he did return.” The high-pitched voice said. “and surely there will soon be others.”
There was a pause. “Yes.”
Then silence. After a minute the high-pitched voice asked “What are you doing?”
“We’re sending him back.” The deeper voice explained. “But we can’t have him or his kind returning here, so I’m engineering a retrovirus. This virus will spread to all of those damned to live on Earth, and it should make their math even worse… Much worse.”
“How so?”
“It’s clear that stripping them of Ghlern wasn’t enough, so I’m going to make them forget about the numbers four, eleven, and thirty-seven as well.”
Rashama barely heard this. He was far too busy trying to recall the nature of the dots that had appeared in his mind… More than 7, less than 8. He tried to focus, but each time he felt like he was getting close, the image slipped away.
“Injecting now.” The voice said.
Rashama ignored them and continued trying to count to Ghlern. “One… Two… Three… ?… Five… Six… Seven… Eight…”
For a moment Rashama was briefly aware that he’d counted seven numbers, yet had arrived at eight…But just as he’d forgotten Ghlern, so too did the number between three and five become incomprehensible to him.
“Excellent. It seems the virus took. We’ll send him back so he spreads that infection to the rest of his kind.” The deep voice stated. “Hopefully this keeps the rebellious genes found in him and in other Earthlings away from our peaceful planet for good.”
The glass orb began ascending with no apparent acceleration. Rashama watched the world disappear beneath him as he passed into the stars. Soon he’d be back home, and when he did, he’d certainly surprise them all with that he’d seen!