myriad requiems...

...Ajay stopped suddenly and stood there in the middle of the city market as he realized that he was lost; the dull throbbing in his head indicating that the effects of his medications was wearing off. The humdrum of the boisterous crowd was quickly fading away into a separate dimension and he realized that pretty soon the effects of his meds would vanish altogether & he would be transported into the catatonic yet merciful world that dwelled within his brain. His memory was becoming vague and already he couldn't fathom what moment was it exactly that had made him undertake the journey from his home on the planet Entroiz to the tiny planet of Tekkan and towards the far end of the planetary system of Geisel. Tekkan was the junkyard of the system, a place for the connoisseurs of all sorts of planetary objects. The crowd moved at a rapid pace searching for the treasures that each desired and it was becoming increasingly harder for Ajay to keep rooted to his ground. And before he realized it he was lost in a maze of uncertainty as his feet became an unwilling accomplice to the movement of the crowd.

The Internal Climatic Control (ICC) system of Tekkan ensured that the visitors never actually felt the impact of the true nature of the planet's harsh environment. Still, that did not prevent Ajay's body from going into a tumult as it biologically tried to acclimatize to the change. It was an evolutionary process and man had never really been able to overcome it completely. It was like a bitter slap on the face, knowing that man was controlling half the galaxy but failed to control what was happening within his own body. Or maybe, Ajay rationalized, it was just that his body was used to the comforts of his home and this trip was proving to be a major task for his frail body. In any case, his stay on the planet had to be kept to the shortest possible.

Entroiz was the first human colony in the planetary system of Geisel. The planet itself was almost twenty times the size of earth and lay about five times the distance from the sun of the system. Entroiz had been earmarked as mankind’s new home away from home somewhere around the early years of the 27^th century. The world had shown signs of habitation with its active volcanoes and tectonic activities that signalled a hot core similar to that of earth. Although the gravity was six times that on earth, it was no surprise considering the size of the planet. Moreover, a good portion of the planet’s surface was covered with water that consisted of one big ocean and millions of lakes and rivers. The poles were covered with ice similar to earth, the only difference here being the presence of an eerie green glow that had turned out to be a correct indication of the presence of vast mineral deposits. Overall Entroiz was an extremely lucky find considering the similarities that it had with earth. The probability of finding such, as it is was very less in the vastness of the universe. It had taken the better half of over thirty years to transform the planet into a gigantic replica of the human habitation on earth, during which mankind’s best knowledge of terra forming was utilized to create safe sub-terrain city size dwellings in the numerous shallow chasms of the planet. The cities were categorized into sectors; and now, in the later half of the 28^th century, Sector 2 was Ajay’s home city. The only place he felt comfortable enough to call his home.

Ajay had since his early adolescent years exhibited an interest in the past of his species. Ever since the obsession of trying to understand, or more correctly, dominate the galaxy possessed man, the curiosity of man had evolved to things beyond himself. Man no longer tried to wonder at the intricacies of his own evolution. What mattered was what lay beyond, and not within. Ajay, on the other hand, had been highly intrigued by the social evolution of mankind. Eons of human thought had finally culminated into a curious blend of follies and certain strokes of genius that Ajay attempted to understand. The destruction of the planet Earth in the 25^th century had only gone on to strengthen his belief in the extreme volatility of mankind. Man had ravaged the planet until it was left barren and desolate, and even then he had fought over it to ascertain his right over it and eventually destroyed it in one moment of madness that had fragmented mankind forever. Earlier man had fought over a dead planet and destroyed it, and now they fought over the eventual destruction of a dead planet. The sheer irrationality of man was astounding.

Ajay was on the constant look out for the last few reminiscent of earth that had somehow managed to avoid the destruction. His quest for such earth made antiquities had cost him much, but he had persisted. His home was a museum of old earth articles. From the remains of the titanium upholstery that the early space pioneers had fitted on to the numerous lunar and Martian colonies in the early 22^nd century, to the 20^th century wooden table that looters salvaged from the destroyed earth, Ajay was an obsessive connoisseur. But what he prized most were the books that he had managed to get hold of. Not the electronic data pads that man had been using since the late 21^st century, but the paper printed books were the most precious of his possessions. The books reminded him of a bygone era of culture and civilization unlike what he knew. It was his addiction, the musty smell of the damp pages were his escape into the misty lands of his imagination. His brain fed off the contents of the books and they soared on the wings of thoughts that man had penned down over the ages. They liberated him from his frail body and the present and took him into the past. They made him a time traveller. But his mind was also the most fickle part of his being. Once it delved into its recesses it wanted to keep going on further and further until it had touched the bottom. But that never happened. As he further fell into his imagination, the deeper it got and in the end he was suspended in a state of free falling from which it was extremely hard for him to snap out of. The medical councillors had him on prescription because of this and unless he took his medications regularly, his mind would drift away and leave him, in the worst scenario, completely innate. And so Ajay stressed hard to recollect his thoughts and reminded himself, with a faint smile playing on the edge of his thin mouth, of the purpose of his sojourn to Tekkan. He was here for a purpose and he could not, and would not; allow his mind to take over until he had achieved what he wanted. His thoughts would have to wait.

The city market of Tekkan was the last refuge of the unwanted objects of the galaxy. Every refused object found a place here. Or at least momentarily until it was processed and ejected out into the fiery volcanic pits that dotted the southern ridge of the planet. Tekkan’s volcanoes were the burning pits of the galaxy where everything unwanted was reduced to ashes which permanently streaked across the deserted landscape of Tekkan. Inside the bubble of the ICC it was a different world altogether. Various junk dealers peddled their assortment of objects to the people who made the journey to this distant planet. The main dome also functioned as a gigantic plasma screen on which a new-age form of trance-cum-psychedelic fusion music played, leaving an eerie feel that gave Ajay the shivers and threatened to give him an epileptic fit. He hunched his shoulders, checked his Planetary Positioning System that he had obtained on arrival and after reconfirming his location, and made his way towards the escalator. He had strayed further than he had initially thought due to his momentary loss of direction while being caught up in the flow of the crowd and now he had to retrace his steps back to get to where he needed to be. He knew what he wanted and he knew where he would find it. Ill health and an alien planet were not going to become an obstacle between him and his euphoria. And he was no longer lost as he stepped onto the escalator...