The second class of time machine is significantly more advanced than the first class. The most important difference is that additional ''advanced components'' have been added to the vehicle which either enhance the vehicle itself or add to the functions of the temporal components, thereby making a much more powerful time machine There are four of these parts which could be added by a time-traveler to his time machine and each operates independently These advanced components are the force-field, tachyon-amplifier, continuum-transfunctioner and paradox-inhibitor. The force-field is a shield protecting the time machine to varying degrees. The tachyon-amplifier or teleporter is a space travel device allowing instantaneous travel from one point in space to another. The continuum-transfunctioner is a powerful object with mysterious abilities to alter physical reality. Finally, the paradox-inhibitor can be used to prevent any kind of contradictions or paradoxes caused by timetravel.
The third class of time machine is so far advanced that everything that could be included in the components of the first or second classes are merely features taken for granted. In addition to automatically having all of the features of the first two classes, these earlier systems are so far advanced that they are virtually fail safe with no known examples of any system and its redundant safety features ever actually failing and causing any kind of serious problem. For this reason, third class machines are often referred to by the civilizations that manufacture them as ''legal'' time machines indicating that inventors making clumsy prototypes along the timestream are operating unauthorized. The third class of time machine is so common that their existence indicates that another sub class is possible. Time machines built illegally might have components cobbled together from third class and other classes. While a time machine like this would probably be better than a second class time machine it is also probably not as good as a professionally manufactured one. It is impossible to predict the abilities of a sub class time machine for it might also be so awesome that is almost equals a fourth class.
Fourth class time machines are so advanced that they actually exist outside of space and time and do not have components that can be recognized as electronics or machine parts. Instead, they are operated by the will of their operators and appear to function as magic even to another time traveler that has seen very high tech societies. Fourth class is restricted to inter-dimensional or alien explorers that have achieved levels of technology impossible to comprehend even for individual members of their own species which is surely invisible to lesser intelligences. For a human to possess one of these time machines would indicate that they have somehow reached a technological singularity where technology itself is abandoned for a much higher form of physical manipulation that cannot be understood by a mere biological intelligence. Fourth class machines are therefore actually sentient and serve their operator with god-like power."
Quit Smoking Or Everyone Will Die
"There is no tomorrow. It will be today, when the sun rises. It is night.
It is always night. The daytime is an illusion. The entire universe is just black, cold, endless night.
''Silent Empty Eternal Darkness'' is what the True Lords call it. They call themselves the True Lords, their name for themselves. We would just call them leeches.
And starlight is their burning baptism. It doesn''t take much, any concentration of starlight will wither and destroy their flesh. They aren''t even really alive. Maybe they were alive at one time, but not anymore.
Boo!" said the stranger with a soft and determined voice. Her voice was possibly the most unstriking thing about her. The blasted white hair, wild eyes and rust-speckled sawed-off shotgun waving back and forth at her audience were more memorable.
"What is she talking about?" Christie asked the bank manager, Mr. Sommurs.
"She didn''t take the money. She went in and broke open a safe-deposit box instead." Mr. Sommurs replied. They were all scared she was actually a lunatic instead of a bank robber.
"We are all going to die, aren''t we?" Django asked. He had wet himself when she said ''boo'' with hardly any especial emphasis.
The crazy white-haired, dark-skinned, wild-eyed woman looked both old and young, somehow, in her torn jeans and crow''s feet and perpetual smile. She set down the weapon and examined the one she had claimed from the safe deposit box. It was an ornate dagger with a silver handle and obsidian blade.
"This is called Aerthion and it is meant to kill leeches. Not that a stick of dynamite or a vat of acid wouldn''t kill a leech. Hell, set your clocks back for daylight savings and you might kill one if it isn''t paying attention." She was saying.
"Ma''am?" Mr. Sommurs requested her attention, now that she wasn''t waving the sawed off shotgun in their faces at the moment.
"What?" She looked up at him, her eyes flashed in the light and each of them gasped. There was a kind of primal beauty in her gaze. A terrible, terrifying beauty that would just as easily kill, skin alive or make love to any of them at the caprice of her blinking depths.
"What is your name?" Mr. Sommurs asked. He had meant to try and negotiate for some assurance that they would be spared, instead he asked her for her name. Why did I do that? He asked himself.
"Ariel Goodfellow. You may call me Puck." She decided.
"Are we going to live, Puck?" Mr. Sommurs asked.
"How the hell would I know that? Remember that loud boom last night? The military vehicles and shizzle? That was something coming down from the darkness outside. It wasn''t coming here to make friends." Puck said. She rolled her eyes dramatically and added:
"Well, it made friends. Makes them the way you can make a cat''s cradle. Then those friends go out and make more friends and then those ones bring more friends to it, and they all get together and have a big frigging pool party and then its real friends swim up and it makes more of its own kind." She explained carefully and matter-of-factly to them. As she spoke, she conducted with the tip of the dagger, as if a silent orchestra were playing an epic piece to accompany her bizarre sermon.
"Okay, but are you going to let us go, I mean?" Mr. Sommurs wanted to know.
"You tripped the silent alarm. Haven''t you wondered why no cops came to your aid?" Puck suddenly gave him her attention. She was looking directly at him, and she had asked a question.
"I didn''t, uh, do that." He claimed.
"Don''t lie. It''s frigging boring when men lie. They suck at it." Puck had leaned back and started cleaning under the tip of her fingernails with the tip of the sacred dagger. She yawned.
"Okay I lied. I did the alarm. I don''t know why there are no cops. Maybe they are outside, you have us hostage. We are your hostages and they won''t shoot you as long as we are unharmed." Mr. Sommurs negotiated some more.
"There are no more cops in this town. Don''t you people have movies with alien invasions on this world? It is a popular fiction. Especially good with moving pictures." Puck looked them over. There was something very old and wise in her gaze.
"Okay so now she is from Mars?" Judith wanted a cigarette so badly that she no longer cared if any of them got shot or stabbed or whatever. "Bitch stop switching gears. Either you''re nicking crazy, or you are on something. You are not from Mars, though."
"I am from Caresele. Eighty nine light years from here. Pretty much the same as your world. Only five continents, just as many languages, similar height of technology. Our history isn''t entirely different, except the leech infestation." Puck looked at Judith now. She sounded sane, just saying insane things. And armed.
"Okay then, how did you travel eighty nine light years from Caresele?" Judith was almost growling she wanted nicotine so bad.
"I walked." Puck said but with a tone that meant she knew they would find that to be incredulous.
"Okay say you walked, like through a stargate or something. How did you learn English?" Judith was getting moans of objection from her coworkers who wanted her to shut up before she upset the crazy lady with the very sharp dagger and scattergun.
"The same way you did." Puck had a ''duh'' sarcasm tone in her voice. "What you should really ask me is how I survived the leech infestation on my home world."
"How?" Mr. Sommurs interjected, trying to take the conversation away from grumpy, slightly suicidal Judith.
"I learned how to frigging kill them." Puck frowned. "You guys don''t believe me."
"Well, I mean...how can we? We have never seen a leech, don''t know how to walk faster than light or learn a language on an alien world." Mr. Sommurs confessed.
"All of you stay where you are and don''t try anything. I will make you into believers. You see...I didn''t come here in this body. I have passed on the knowledge, even revealed this sacred weapon of hope against the coming darkness." She had that look in her eyes again, like she wasn''t a junkie or anything, but some kind of wise and ancient priestess or something.
"Two birds with one dagger. It is the same thing, as I will need the young man''s body to replace this one, a mind is a mind, a body a body, but I have learned to wear one as a layer across the other. It is something you might learn, like a quitting a drug addiction, almost." Puck was rambling and grunting as she readied herself for some kind of metamorphosis, evidently one she needed to undertake anyway.
She turned around and started doing something with her back to them. Then there was blood coming out of her and dripping to the floor at her feet. One of her combat boots slipped slightly but she kept giving herself surgery standing up using the obsidian blade. Then she stopped and fell to the floor, the dagger clattered and slid. Her eyes now looked dead, lifeless and devoid of any starry wisdom.
The real Puck writhed and slithered around on the floor in front of their eyes. It had two sets of faces that split from a bulging neck. Its body was white and maggot looking. It crawled under the desk, hiding from the light.
"What is that?" Christie asked Mr. Sommurs.
"I am guessing we are looking at Puck and that Puck is one of the leeches." Mr. Sommurs sounded oddly calm.
"You know something else then?" Judith had forgotten her cravings.
"The guy who had that safe deposit box. He wasn''t from around here. He looked like he was from a holy order. We never saw him again. That was his dagger. He was really weird." Mr. Sommurs started. "And someone said that the dagger was occult related. I always knew it would lead to something really freaky. This isn''t as bad as I imagined."
"It''s in my mind." Django was squirming. "Telling me to embrace a higher homestead."
"What?" Christie looked scared.
"And eggs...I taste sulfur" Django was muttering now and drooling. He laid down on the floor prostrated and open mouthed. He squinted his eyes shut in absolute terror.
Puck came towards him with difficulty and then began to enter Django through the mouth. It squeezed and stretched itself to fit and slowly entered, one segment of its maggot body at a time.
"It was one of them all along." Judith stared and watched as did the others. They didn''t know what else to do. None of them considered interrupting. The thought seemed distant and absurd. It was like watching a birth, somehow.
"It lied then." Mr. Sommurs pointed out. "It said it was from that other world."
"Maybe it was. Obviously it is a traitor. Maybe it was born there the way it described, sided with humans." Judith knew this as she said it. Like it had telepathically told her so.
Mr. Sommurs got to his feet and helped up Judith. Christie was too frightened as she tried to crawl away from it saying: "No" over and over between her sobbing. It wasn''t in her head at all. She was terrified.
"It is okay Christie. Puck won''t hurt you. It just needed a new host. That one, Ariel, she is dead now. It gave that body up just to show us. It isn''t like the others. It doesn''t want to mind-slave us. It wants us to help it defend our world willingly." Mr. Sommurs surprised himself with his own words as he walked towards Christie.
"I will kill it. That is what I will do." She declared. She went for the sawed-off.
"I need to stay alive. I am too weak now to do that again." Puck spoke from Django now. A voice so calm and collected. Not Django anymore, although the pants were still wet from the host peeing himself earlier.
"No. You are not Django" Christie whined. She had the gun and aimed it.
"I am not that creature that you saw either. But now you should understand all that I am, as I am not just one or even two living things. On Caresele I was a scientist of greatness, a priestess of order and rationality. Of the billions of my people that existed at one time, my number of eminence was one thousand and sixty-three. It was my duty to defend my people against the True Lords and when I failed it became my duty to avenge my people. I am here, I am the revenge, but it is much more difficult than I had thought. I need help. I need someone who can be anchored to discomfort without disregarding it, a mind that I can exist with and not consume by proximity. I have hollowed a few skulls, but I am a nibbler while those that come are gluttons."
"You speak English and make no sense a all." Christie retorted. She gestured as though she would shoot.
Suddenly a red bead found her from the window. It climbed from her shoulder to her forehead. The top of her head shattered into bits of bone and brain. The window had exploded from the first shot a split second before the second bullet ended her life. The shotgun went off in her hand and Mr. Sommurs, who was closest to her, collapsed, dead-as-well.
Then the SWAT team entered the bank to rescue the remaining hostages.
"Looks like you were wrong." Judith told Puck as they were approached by the SWAT team.
One of the SWAT looked from the body of Ariel to Puck in Django''s body. The leech had left a trail on the floor. He got onto his radio:
"We have the target. We have the traitor." He said proudly. The rest of the SWAT responded and surrounded Puck.
"Unfortunately I was not." Puck told Judith as they took it away to face the judgement of its own kind. They all left then, with the prisoner.
Judith sat down on the counter and lit up her last smoke, deciding that this was the right time to quit smoking.
The streets of Blooming were unfamiliar to someone who had lived in the town her entire life. She walked alone with her shadow appearing under the streetlights. No more smokes.
Judith was out of cigarettes and for good, she had decided. If an alien invasion wasn''t a sign from God that it was time to quit smoking, well nothing could ever be. She had actually said in her prayers:
"And if smoking is really a sin and I have to quit then give me a sign. Like an alien invasion." She had said. Less than twenty four hours since the loud impact.
She got her keys and opened her front door after she had walked home. No lights on in the neighborhood except street lights, for the most part. It was a dark night. She remembered what Puck had said her people called the universe:
''Silent Empty Eternal Darkness'' they had named it. They had named themselves the True Lords. Puck had given her some knowledge of them, maybe with telepathy. The True Lords had many secrets. They ought to for they were nearly as old as some stars in their Silent Empty Eternal Darkness. Then there was this:
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"She called it Aerthion. You are Aerthion, made to kill True Lords." Judith held the dagger. The minions of the alien leeches wearing SWAT gear had failed to take it, or Judith. They had been preoccupied with Puck. They had actually left one of Puck''s ''friends'' and the weapon behind. Mindless hive minded mind-slaves. Judith started coughing.
"I am too old for this shizzle." She told herself. She looked into a mirror and reminded herself. "Fifty nine. C''mon I ain''t no spring chicken."
But she was being hard on herself. Despite her nasty breath from smoking, Judith was still very appealing to most men. Age really didn''t compete with attitude, in her case. She hefted the bladed weapon and tested its edge on her cutting board in her kitchen. Sharper than anything. She wasn''t even sure it was obsidian, it looked like obsidian, blacker than black and shiny. It had sliced into the cutting board like butter. No ordinary weapon.
There was a knock on her door and she went to peep. Two cops on her doorstep.
"Who is it?" She asked. It was late and she had already noticed how dark it was out there. Her porch light had nothing but darkness beyond the ring of light it projected down onto the two cops.
"Blooming Police." one of the officers said.
"Yeah, what do you want?" Judith asked through the door.
"Just to talk. We think something might be missing." the other cop said.
"You think, huh?" Judith asked, unconvinced. She gripped the something they were talking about by its silver handle.
"Open the bucking door or I''ll bucking kill you!" the first cop suddenly lost his composure and started jerking his arms in some kind of spasm.
"Just open up, lady. It is late." the other cop requested.
"Good cop bad cop. This shit just got real" Judith spoke under her breath as the first cop started zombie-walking back to their car. She could barely see him, the darkness was so absolute.
She decided that now was the right time to defend herself. Judith had balls of steel sometimes in brief flashes. This was one of her moments and she opened her front door suddenly, which wasn''t even locked. The cop actually looked surprised. She stabbed the weapon through his armor and into his heart with sickening ease. Then she pulled it back out with just as much effortlessness. Amazed at the dagger''s thirst she looked at it again, almost horrified at its effectiveness. She hadn''t even aimed, it was like it found his heart on its own.
The other cop was already coming back and pumped a shell in his shotgun. Judith stepped back inside and closed her front door and locked it.
The body of the dead cop fell over outside with a loud thump on her front porch.
"Shiv!" Judith decided and fled deeper into her house, turning off lights and closing doors as she went.
One blast took off the top hinge and then a second shotgun blast took the second hinge. The third hinge yielded to a good kick. Then another shotgun blast weakened the deadbolt''s hold. Another kick and another. Her front door collapsed and landed with a dry thump that sounded completely different than the dead body outside had.
Judith was hiding next to her staircase. The shotgun wielding cop went into her house searching for her. Judith got up and fled outside, stopping to take the dead cop''s gun. Then she hid behind the cop car, aiming the gun at her own front doorway, now with no front door anymore.
It wasn''t too long before the cop decided she wasn''t in the house. He came back outside. Judith tried to shoot but she had forgotten about the safety. She fumbled around and found it and then with both hands on the gun she stood up and started shooting.
The first two shots missed and then she had hit his chest. He staggered back as the gunshots roared. Two more shots missed and then she hit him twice more in the chest. So far, she hadn''t hurt him. His armor protected him from the bullets. She kept shooting until the clip was empty. Her ears started to ring.
Deafened she crouched down as he returned fire, blasting away at his own cop car with the shotgun until he was empty too. Judith then freed the dagger from her waistband and ran at him.
She had the dagger up and he tried to block it with the shotgun. The blade sliced through the metal with sparks. Both combatants stood there looking at the weapons with startled amazement before Judith raised Aerthion for the killing blow. She stabbed it into his heart, through the armor, just like before.
He stood there for a few seconds, dying on his feet like her other victim. Judith pushed him over, unnerved by the standing there dead thing he was doing. She claimed his sidearm and took the keys to the shot-up police car.
"Alright, I have to get out of Blooming. Aliens are taking over the town...I just killed two cops...Shiv, shiv, shiv!" Judith was pacing towards the car and then got in.
"Judith, there is no need to run. No point. We can be friends, we can. Just give Aerthion to the True Lords and you will be permitted to leave." the voice of something darksome and devilish was in her mind, like it was whispering into her ringing ears.
"Bad cop... good cop... you think sending these and then promising me...Get out of my head!" Judith demanded. It wasn''t in her head anymore; she could feel it repulsed by her defiance. They wanted mind-slaves and she had found they needed something from her. Not the dagger, but something else. And she wasn''t going to give it to them.
Judith started driving through Blooming and saw that those that had not joined the others were hiding, armed and scared. It wouldn''t matter. The True Lords sent humans to kill each other in their name. To get to them required something more.
"I''ve got this. Two hours until sunrise." Judith had her foot on the gas. "Bet you sleep during the day, hibernate, in fact I know you do. A little bird told me all about you folk of the dark. I''ve got this." Judith swore as she drove. She wasn''t leaving Blooming behind.
She pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of town. She decided that this would be a good place to stop and wait for the sun to come up. She went inside. The place was deserted so she helped herself to a pack of smokes.
"Fluck quitting. I will quit when this shizzle is over. And I am gonna end this." Judith lit one of the smokes and gagged on the taste. She had never liked this brand but hers wasn''t available. She smoked it anyway.
The first light of dawn was showing on the horizon, a distant glow.
Judith put it out and left, saying:
"Time''s up."
How the dark things hate light. How starlight is so bright. What exactly is light? Does it have something to do with infinity? What exactly is infinity?
What are these dark things, from before the dawn of all time?
How the dark things, how they hate the light.
Scattered in an instant, disobeying time and sequence, from the sudden light.
Some voice simply said: "let there be light"
"...and they scattered into the distant remaining darkness ahead of the light..."
-Book of Truth
Starlight kills. The lights from the top of the squad car, red and blue, travelled at different speeds, slightly different, away from the sunset meridian of earth and across the galaxy and out into deep space and then into the distant void beyond all galaxies and finally to a distance that cannot even be comprehended by the mathematics of humans or their calculators. Infinite distance, and time for that matter.
Physics is a joke, not a riddle.
Light travelling at its own sequence. Light has a secret. Measure the speed of light? Only humans would be silly enough to think that was possible. Not unless sequence was in reverse. True Lords know this. They laugh at humans.
"This is the threshold of starlight" The third True Lord had mused as they had beaten the hell out of the fragile sixty-year-old woman at his command. The minions were kicking her ribs mercilessly and grunting with the effort. She had survived and remained conscious, but totally mashed.
"Starlight, star bright. Look at that shiner." The second True Lord praised the damage and her black eye.
The red and blue lights were flashing silently and in one place. Atop the squad car, where Judith sat bound again, this time in handcuffs. Her thoughts went back to just one: where had Ariel gone?
They had called her ''Ariel'' instead of ''Puck''; by her more human sounding name of ''Ariel Goodfellow''. Like some kind of Shakespearean character''s name, except twisted around somehow: ''Puck'' was not known to the True Lords, perhaps.
This thought was bothering Judith greatly. The tenacity of the thought was because Judith, whom could have run the Titan Bank she had worked at, was highly intelligent. She had calculated that if this fact was unknown to these creatures, it might indicate something that could be exploited against them, even by a beaten prisoner. This was fortunate for humanity, for at that exact moment of time: the fate of the human race against what was coming was entirely in her hands.
"Need a flucking cigarette." She snarled angrily. Her Nic fit was making her stomach hurt it was so intense. Sometimes Judith felt like she could just kill a man for a smoke. Here was something most people just couldn''t understand, how she could just kill a man. She never had, of course, she just always knew she was capable of it.
She had stabbed two armed police officers to death on the camera of a squad car in Blooming. She hadn''t really surprised herself for it was the reality that she had prayed to her god and there were no smokes, no cigarettes, nothing, just death and destruction and bullshit. Judith let out a frustrated scream and thrashed a little in the car.
The cops saw this as they returned from seeing yet more of her handiwork. Three people surgically slashed open with the murder weapon and left for dead. She had also left three mysterious stains on the ground near the corpses. The sun was going down.
"It is sunset..." Judith was catching her breath and muttered as she noticed. She was sweating. "I am too fucking old for this shit." She decried.
She realized also, on a side note, that this day was her birthday. Sixty years old and saving the world from slug-like parasitic space vampires that could control the minds of cops. And melted like sizzling steamy white butter-smoke in sunlight. One of the damn things had practically exploded, leaving a hideous sulfur smell. Judith was not someone who like the sweet smell of sulfur, it was noxious to her.
She had always claimed an allergy to it to avoid it. After all, what really is an allergy? Judith didn''t know, she knew how to run a bank, but believed people''s allergies were hypochondria.
"Should we just shoot her in the head and have done with it? Save the National State some money after McTrump buttfucked us?" One of the cops said to the other. They were both female cops and one of them ended every sentence with: ''after McTrump buttfucked us''.
"You guys saw what they did, and you still don''t believe me?" Judith was switching gears rapidly; her heart was racing no longer from a Nic fit but the realization that there might be more. There was no sign of Puck and Puck seemed to have a plan, relying heavily on the help of whomever she could. The creature had told her that she might call her Puck and the True Lords had called her Ariel Goodfellow. They did not know she had given Judith such a codeword. Judith believed that the True Lords could not read minds, just broadcast mind control waves, or whatever. Maybe some of them could, but Judith''s head would surely make one of them insane if they mind-melded with her.
As she grinded her teeth she realized the mess inside her head was the best defense against True Lords: if the fuckers could read minds. They wouldn''t understand the complexity of self-hate and self-service in their own evil egos. Judith knew this quite instinctively, just as she knew that people harbored allergies and that science was bullshit. Bill Nye the Science Guy might as well be Jake Gyllenhaal because Jake played the son of Dennis Quaid''s character in The Day After Tomorrow and in that movie Dennis Quaid''s character was an actual weather scientist. Judith knew this because both of those men still made her wet and she had seen the movie many times. Therefore, Jake was more qualified to predict global warming than Bill.
A True Lord would have a field day, oh yeah.
"Where is the Aerthion?" Giggles, one of the cops spoke directly to her, while the other unlocked the doors. They had the caged back windows down for her and had heard her scream, still muffled by the rest of the car and distance but had actually heard it.
That same scream had awoken the remaining ones, however many there were. Why they hadn''t come out earlier, Judith could only guess, as if they were outside of bodies, not fully able to ambulate in daytime, so they slept. Puck had described that they lived in water when outside of bodies, in a vague way. Chlorinated water, in fact, so they might not breathe it, and space was their home. Judith recalled that tardigrades could survive in outer space. Maybe these things could too.
A vague aching moment of horror dawned on her as she imagined these things literally raining out of the sky.
"Where is the knife? Can''t go on like this: we need it to slash our wrists after Scrooge McTrump buttfucked us." The one cop said. They giggled weirdly, the two female cops. Clearly, they were under mind control for requesting the Aerthion by name, instead of asking for the murder weapon.
One of them held up a pack of cigarettes with only half of them gone. She lit it.
"Want this?" Sinister-glowing-eyes asked evilly and as she asked, she blew smoke into Judith''s face.
"You think I''d sell the fate of my species for a cigarette?" Judith asked calmly, without flinching at the smoke. She prayed no Nic fit would start while they were torturing her with smokes. Only seconds earlier she could have screamed and chewed the wrist off of the cop to get to the smoke.
She prayed:
"Please dear God I am really trying to quit, and I am not strong enough and I am not brave enough. I will be when I have quit, but right now I am weak, and I am scared. Please help me...because if you don''t then I am going to smoke and then the world is going to end, and it will be my fault. Amen"
"Creation is not an act of love; you humans do not realize that antiquity and true evil are inextricable. They are the same thing. Time is the result of darkness, and the speed of darkness exceeds the light, proceeds the light and is the natural state of things. Darkness prevails. The silence prevails. We have called it the Silent Empty Eternal Darkness and we have called it Home. Do you really think you can walk in here with an old knife and frighten us away? Where did you find this heroism in yourself? It is foolishness, not courage." The True Lord spoke to the woman that knelt before the Bloodline Of Truth. These evil creatures were so foul that destroying her outright would have been a waste. They wanted, they needed to break her first:
"You took all that there is for me: a world of messed up relationships and painful goodbyes and you replaced it with an evil that I can trust with my own eyes, an honest evil that calls itself ''the truth'' and you gave me a welcome greeting that invited me into your darkness. Your truth. I am here to restore the lies that I love, by slaying all of you." She said, blood dripped from the open wounds on her face. They had let their minions beat the hell out of her, hoping her spirit would surrender. They had to break her first, if they killed her then her strength would live on.
"What drives you to cling to this? You cannot rise and defeat us. It is not possible." The second True Lord of the standing bloodline growled miserably. The leech had lost its patience: the patience of thousands of years and endless rewards for waiting. It was gone when faced with such insolence, such faith in something other than the Truth of Blood. Unacceptable.
"There is something about me that you creatures do not comprehend. You things from the stars. This is my home. This world is my home. You come from somewhere else, and I don''t care what you have accomplished. You must know that the advantage is mine. I know things you cannot understand." She was smiling now, confident that she had defeated them. The minions stared at her like zombies and the True Lords communicated with each other telepathically, searching the minds of their hosts for some hidden poison that she must be referring to.
All this was under the stars. By starlight every martial moment these creatures forced upon lesser species was practiced. Under starlight they stood in regal repose. The distant eastern horizon was flat and glowing, and they noticed this. One of them looked at the watch. The sun would not rise for another hour and nothing in the mind of the host was warning any of them of the significance of her confident threat to them.
"You have nothing. You are bluffing. This means you must fail, you are defeated." The third True Lord spoke up and insisted that she realize they had won. Another slayer would fall, a true victory. The one dead True Lord, that she had managed to slaughter, lay upon the ground, its sacred eggs in a bundle exposed from its slimy torn flesh. These must be devoured by other True Lords. Satisfied that the creature before them would soon realize the futility of defiance they each emerged from their hosts after passing the starlit blade from the dying hands of their shells, their hosts, their now discarded human bodies they lived inside.
As they crawled across the ground like enormous and disgusting slug-like creatures the sunlight suddenly burst over the horizon. It was something forgotten in the minds of their hosts, something many forget about without a reminder, something automated for many.
"Daylight savings bitches. Daylight fucking savings." She laughed at them and spat out some of the blood in her mouth, coughing from her bruised ribs.
The creatures shrieked hideously, and their minions scrambled in confusion. The pain of direct morning light on the skins of the gods themselves made the telepathic commands a discord of confused noisy thoughts. One by one they began to shrivel up, a smoke-like vapor arose, foul and acrid. Then in agony the True Lords died together leaving their minions free to wander away with broken minds.
Only one still knelt before them, hands tied behind her back. She climbed to her feet, one foot then the other, and limped over to them. With her heel she squished their bubbling remains underfoot, just to be sure. The knife she recovered and used carefully to cut the zip ties they had used on her wrists to free herself. She took it with her, lighting up yet another smoke.
"My world bitches..." She was chuckling to herself as she left them for dead.
Of Milk & Honey
"Am I crazy for doing this?" she asked.
"If you are then so are twenty thousand other people." the medical technician chuckled to himself after he said so.
"So I will be the other race when I come out?" she asked.
"For as long as you want to be. You know that. It can be reversed." her attendant agreed.
The patient was obviously nervous to be asking such a question. She already knew all about becoming a trans-racial. She wasn''t sure why she should be nervous, she had come here convinced of her decision.
Like many kinds of life-altering surgery there was a psychological examination performed prior to medical consent. This meant that the facility was convinced too.
She was in the operating room alone and had to wait one minute.
"Eyes are covered." she affirmed after she had looked around.
The machine looked a lot like a CAT-scan. First a bath in the reactive gel would cover every inch of skin. The eyes were covered, the eyelids had already undergone treatment along with a few other inches of the person that were difficult for the lasers to touch. The patient would rest naked upon a bed that slid into the center of it and invisible lasers would dissolve the gel into the skin. Then a cool bath was administered to prevent itching. Still, the patient would experience some tingling and itchiness for several hours afterward.
The days that followed her change from one race to the other were spent doing everything for the first time all over again. Friends, family, photographs and memories felt like they belonged to an old life she had left behind. After this adjustment it began to feel normal. After all, she had always identified herself as the other race anyway.
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But then she found a bit of fate and had to earn her place, among her new race. Except it did not fit the narrative. Most people changed from one race to the other for their own personal reasons. Yet many fundamentalist opinions stated that ''whites change black out of guilt'' and ''blacks change to white out of curiosity''.
None of that mattered. A hacker tried to hold the list of those who had the operation for ransom and got no payment to his Bitcoin account. So, the hacker decided to release the names and addresses of everyone who was a trans-racial. The most recent ones were at the top of the list. That, and the fact that an activist group was closest to her home, meant that they showed up in front of her home.
The protesters wore tragedy and comedy masks of black and white to show their racial solidarity. They were a mixed group of men and women and blacks and whites to protest her decision to change from one race to another. And they were in front of her home screaming their bitter outrage. And so she had become a symbol for their hatred and bigotry against trans-racials.
"False Faced, False Faced!" they were chanting. She closed her curtains. She was very afraid and alone. What would they do?
When the media ignored the attack they decided to get more attention by flipping over her electric car and setting fire to it. The fire department arrived but could not get through the interlocked arms of alternating blacks and whites in their comedy-tragedy masks.
So the police were called but they could not do anything because the situation was seen as a race-protest. A law had gotten passed that race-protests could not be interfered with by police under any circumstances. Soon the media arrived.
The protesters had barricaded her into her home and some of them were trying to set fire to it. Finally they stepped back and cheered.
Her house had caught fire.
The crowd was cheering and chanting "Let it burn! Let it burn!"
She was trapped inside, and nobody could stop the atrocity. And so, the whole world watched in live horror as her house burned to the ground with firefighters and police helpless to stop the awfulness.
A strange thing happened then. Instead of nobody choosing to become trans-racial a huge increase occurred. An operating facility was bombed by trans-racial protesters and still there was no fear.
Becoming the other became the American way. Because it was the fearless way, and hatred of trans-racials was seen as cowardly. Within months the number of those who had undergone the operation had increased tenfold.
And that, children, is how the Great American Race was born.
Department Of Insults
I aimed my gun at her face and pulled the trigger.
I wasn''t sorry.
When I walked out of the Chamber Of Echoes there were already police waiting to arrest me. They told me to drop the gun and to lay flat on the ground with my hands palm down and then they came to me, took my gun and put handcuffs on me, all at gunpoint. I hadn''t heard them because my ears were ringing still; I just knew the procedure and obeyed.
When they had me in custody I said:
"I have a License To Kill." very calmly and matter-of-factly.
It took about thirty minutes before they were certain they had to let me go. I was uncuffed and my gun was returned to me. I walked away while the cops glared at my back. I''d abused my power by killing her for personal reasons. My license would probably get revoked.
When I got home I fed my cat and took a shower. I don''t have any friends, mostly because I kill people for a living. It is distasteful, but someone has got to do it. I contacted my department supervisor and reported what had done.
"You are on suspension until we sort this out. If nobody claims they wanted her dead in twenty-four hours, you know what is going to happen."
"Yeah, I will lose my license." I replied.
"You will lose your job, Gerald. Your job is at stake. You were a killer. Who is going to hire you?"
"I will find work." I promised.
I searched for work and was rejected over and over. There were no reasons offered as to why. It is illegal to say negative things to or about someone. There was a way to communicate something offensive, but only through professional services such as the Department Of Insults. An employer isn''t going to pay to say what they really think of an applicant. They just simply say "No thank you."
Six months later I was on my last check and I''d gained a lot of weight. I had gotten fired and nobody would hire me because I was a killer. I was finally sorry I''d shot her.
There was a knock on my door and I wondered if I was to be killed. I was definitely on the list of people who had it coming. Nobody likes killers, not even the clients.
"Gerald Dim?" there was a girl in a singing-telegram uniform. She wasn''t there to sing to me, she was delivering something else.
"That is me, yes." I took a deep breath and waited for it. "God, here it comes." I thought.
She showed me her authorization for what she was about to say and gave me my yellow copy. Then she let me have it:
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"You are an unemployed, animal-neglecting, friendless, reckless, overweight, mentally-unstable, unintelligent, unattractive and racial minority heterosexual male, with no future." she carefully recited while attempting to maintain eye-contact and sound sincere.
I sighed. It was an expensive insult, someone had gone all-out on me. I was flattered.
I nodded at her and gave a weak smile. She smiled back and turned to go as I closed my door. The words began to sink in and I became upset. I hadn''t felt so ashamed and horrible in a long time. Every syllable was carefully crafted and researched to do the maximum psychological damage to me. I went through stages of anger and outrage and then self-loathing and depression. I deserved this, I told myself.
I had to get psychiatric help to deal with the haunting cadence of those painful words. It took me almost a year before I was capable of looking at myself and by then I was evicted and sent to a government workforce program called ''Clean Streets''.
I got paid in crumbs and seconds. Food and lodging from the government require work credit and it is lousy work. I picked up people''s trash from the side of the road and the automated-fines they paid for littering covered the expense of feeding and housing me.
As I worked my state of mind was dangerously self-deprecating. While I hated myself I began to love my work. I was suited to serve the public as its lowest servant; after a life of power and privilege. That was the most acceptable thought I had about myself.
The woman I killed was famous for her political accomplishments. I just didn''t like her because she had used her authority to say negative things about killers. I was a proud killer at the time and I had overstepped my own authority when I went into the Chamber Of Echoes and shot her. I''d not had proper authorization and worse: I''d done it for personal reasons.
I saw a cat that looked like the one they had taken away from me. I crawled and I approached her. She hissed menacingly and leapt up to my face. I didn''t fight back as the feral animal cut open one of my eyes and raked my face into bleeding shreds. I kinda liked it. She ran off still caterwauling madly.
My old department supervisor was behind me and when I turned around with my ruined eye and mutilated face he just laughed at me.
"You look fantastic." he said with legal wording that, while positive, were still sarcastic.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"You don''t have time for an old friend?" he looked hurt, pretend hurt.
"I don''t have any friends." I stated. I was in pain and I was bleeding. I could only see him with my left eye.
"This is a job I wanted to do personally." he smiled for me and produced his gun.
"Careful" I warned him. "That is how I got this way."
"How does it feel?" he asked.
I had never felt the way I did at that moment. I realized I was terrified. I presumed he was there to kill me. I realized that despite my fall and my past, I did not want to die. I had found peace eating tasteless food and picking up garbage for a living. I had grown to care about life, in my humiliation.
"I want to live." I blubbered. I was crying and bleeding and shaking with dread.
"That is good. This is a recruitment offer. You were selected as someone who understands human nature." he offered me a scroll with a red ribbon on it.
"I don''t understand." I was still very afraid. I had just experienced all the death I had delivered as I looked at his gun. He had shown it to me to upset me, knowing I would recognize the moment I had given to so many people during my career. Now I knew what it felt like to face certain and sudden death. But death had not released me. He was leaving me there.
"I told them you were suitable." he said while walking away and leaving me there. I opened the scroll. It was an actual employment offer. The Department Of Insults had come for me again.
I tore it apart.
With deliberate dutifulness I began to pick up each scrap and place them in my waste-collection. I continued my work, ignoring the pain in my cheeks.
I felt human again.
Roomba Evolution Vs. Deathbot
Granny was delighted by the robot that would carry kittens across the polished floor.
We, her grandchildren, had done good. The Roomba Evolution was not cheap, but it was the most advanced robot in human history. Nevermind military-machines. We call those Deathbots. Deathbots are disqualified, they only know one thing.
So when a Deathbot got loose, it went global viral live.
It happened on a quiet Sunday morning. A Mark I had gotten refurbished by some disgruntled-character in his backyard workshop. It was bound to happen sooner or later. We heard gunfire and soon there were police sirens.
The news followed the progress of the Mark I. It moved about on six legs like a murderous insect. It had a machinegun and a homemade buzzsaw weapon and several strong sharp claws. It couldn''t be contended with, until Police could bring in anti-robot drones. That could take awhile.
All the cops did was drive through the neighborhood using their speakers to tell people to get indoors.
For seventy minutes the rampage continued as injuries and casualties accumulated. Granny almost became its final victim. The Deathbot found her asleep and deaf on her backporch. It blew through the fence and started spraying bullets at a cat running along the edge. Then, as the cat escaped unharmed, the Deathbot identified Granny as its next target. While it reloaded it approached her on its spindly spider legs and revved up a buzzsaw weapon.
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Roomba Evolution saw this and already alarmed by the noises, identified the Deathbot as a dangerous intruder. It opened the sliding glass door and barreled out at the Deathbot at top speed, ignoring its safety protocols. The tackle happened midair and both machines landed awkwardly on the lawn.
Grass got churned as the Roomba Evolution fiercely defended its Granny. The armored Deathbot was much stronger and faster and better armed and knew how to fight in melee combat. Severely outclassed, the Roomba Evolution was directed by a protocol to preserve itself. It ignored this protocol, noting that if it stepped aside the attack on Granny would resume.
It picked up a broken fenceboard and tried to catch the spinning blade. It worked and it thrust the board between the legs of its opponent and tripped it. As the Deathbot righted itself the Roomba Evolution recalled a move it had seen the cats do while playing and it jumped up onto the Deathbot and pinned it.
As the Deathbot threw off the Roomba Evolution, it aimed its machinegun where its enemy would land. Armor piercing rounds tore through the Roomba Evolution and tore apart more of the backyard lawn. The domestic robot twitched and sparked, rerouting power to the functions needed to get back up.
The Deathbot had almost turned back to Granny when it noticed the Roomba Evolution was trying to get back up and continue fighting. It mercilessly pounced and finished off the opposing machine.
Suddenly two police drones hovered on either side of the backyard. They shot close-range darts at the Mark I Deathbot and temporarily disabled it. Police flooded into the backyard and apprehended the machine.
That Christmas the Roomba Evolution, despite the expense, became the most sought after gift in human history. Already it was no longer the most advanced robot; but instead it had won our hearts as it fought to the end to protect its owner.
Gone Full Amish
"Good isn''t good enough. It must be flawless. If you don''t know that then you don''t know what this is. You won''t understand and it is a waste of time." Jin Sterling slowly turned the antique Nineties'' office chair.
"It is flawless. I made it." Childes frowned behind his mask and his face turned red.
"You understand, you have nothing at-stake in this. Money can''t buy the kind of honesty I need." Sterling declared.
"It can safely access: anything that uses Havoc-8, as a 9od." Childes promised.
"As a 9od?" Sterling raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"I''m selling it to you. Is that enough for trust and honesty? I could do five and when I got out I wouldn''t be allowed to program anything more complicated than a VCR." Childes breathed.
"What is a VCR?" Sterling looked cute when she didn''t know something. Possibly because she knew everything.
"I don''t know. I thought you''d like it since you like stuff from Pre2k." Childes wasn''t about to have a heart attack. Sterling wasn''t impressed and dismissed him with a gesture and the words:
"Only when it''s sexy."
"Bye." Childes had left it as a zip drive on her desk. She had already paid him to his wallet while they were talking. She did trust him; but it was dangerous to show trust. That''s a fact.
"Call for you, boss." The body-builder at her secretary''s desk intercommed her. She looked at him, on her security PIP, in his little blue speedos. Cool.
"Jin Sterling, I fix leaks." She chimed live to the blank screen. Not even a filtration. The call was from a client named Samual Givens.
"This is Samual Givens." The caller identified himself. "We meet this morning?"
"What?" Sterling felt alien-panic sweep her chest. She brought up a holo of her schedule with a hand gesture and saw she was fifteen minutes overdue for an in-person consultation. "I am so sorry. Can we reschedule?"
"For when you arrive. You are still at your office." Givens spoke like Frankenstein''s Monster. Or something like that.
"Okay, uh, I am on my way." Sterling ended the call and went to them. She made them wait so long that when she got there: their patience was creepy.
"Ms. Sterling. Your reputation proceeds you. You are the best and the most discreet. We need you and we have accepted your...price." Givens spoke while the other cadavers sat lifeless and stared at her. She lifted her personal device and viewed her wallet. They had indeed paid her ridiculous consultation fee, promising more if she did more for them.
"What seems to be the trouble?" Sterling sat and the green-glowing streak in her hair glimmered like ones-and-zeros.
"An older prototype of Real Life II, a game called Go Amish, is singularizing." Givens said as not-a-joke. Then he added: "Our tech, Gabriel, is still in there."
"Jesus Christ!" Sterling stood and glared at them. She thought she still had gum in her mouth and bit her tongue. "Ow!" She spat out some blood onto the glass table.
They just sat there, barely reacting. They knew how much trouble they were in, it was on their faces. Grim-as-fuck.
"How long has he been in there?" Sterling sat back down and got professional. She was racking her brain. If this program was a Havoc-7 or a Nidus, this could get real bad. She shook her head.
"Six days." Givens sipped his water, his mouth kept going dry.
"One week in a Nidus is what caused Jack Billings. Does Gabriel have family?" Sterling cared about other human beings when she alone could save them. Otherwise they can go play in traffic, it''ll be fine.
"His daughter turned five yesterday." Givens frowned (somehow) and added: "Don''t you want to know what is going on in there?"
"You people don''t know what is going on in there." Sterling objected to their advice. She accepted two pieces of paper that someone had printed out for her. They were two in-game documents Gabriel had sent them during his early hours in Gasthof. Before they lost contact with him. The pages detailed a charter about townspeople responsibilities to their community and to their family. A husband must always stand for his wife, a child for his mother, the woman stands for her family, the community stands together for Jesus Christ. Sterling read both pages.
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"They wrote that." Givens said quietly.
"The NPCs wrote this?" Sterling looked up. Her right eye had watered. Everyone just nodded solemnly. She pushed the paper away and after a moment she asked thoughtfully: "Has anyone considered that he might not want to leave?"
"What do you mean?" Givens was confused by her hypothesis.
"You have used technical means to disrupt his presence and he remained connected anyway. Aside from killing him or sending me in after him, there is no way to undo this. They are smart; do they know they were going offline?" Sterling asked. There was no response. They weren''t following. "Let''s waste no more time. Send me in there right now."
An hour later she was sedated and being connected to the port on the back of the gameseat. They put IVs into her to feed her for however long she was in. She looked over at the other person that would be in the world she was heading to. He was seated and unconscious in a chair like her''s, needles in him as well.
"Ready?" The steward asked her. She nodded. The bright flash and lightheadness that followed was always shocking.
"Again I follow down the rabbit hole, again into the breach..." Sterling was saying out-loud as she went in but the words were never spoken out-loud. She took her bearings of the exit and checked her safety, she had two of them instead of just the one. The first one was a glowing transparent light near the back of her left hand. If she willfully touched it then she would wake up. Easy.
The second one was her own. If she touched that one she would become this place''s 9od for about ten seconds, maybe longer. It was called a ''deicide''.
Sterling chose the first female character and walked into Gasthof. It was just like the brochures would look, people milking cows and tilling fields and a blacksmith. There was a church and barns and wells and all the men had beards. Actual beards, not manscapes or anything, straight-up beards.
Finding Gabriel wasn''t easy. Ezekiel and Jebediah were not helpful. They told her to consult with the womenfolk so she asked Ruth and Sarah who were equally not helpful. Eventually they took her to see the Bishop.
He sat with his beard and his plain-looking wife and kids, in front of his home.
"You were only in here six days." She told him.
"That''s not how long it feels. Alone, I just moved at their pace. Things only slowed down when you got here." Gabriel replied calmly.
"Ready to go? I hit this while you are holding my hand and we both wake up." Sterling smiled. She loved it when the scary jobs turned out to be easy. Made her look as amazing as she felt.
"Go where?" Gabriel asked.
"You''ve got to be...kidding...damn." Sterling muttered, her confidence shattering.
"I want to stay. I barely remember it now. I like it here." Gabriel nodded.
"Your daughter''s birthday was yesterday." Sterling folded her arms. "She turned five."
"No she didn''t My daughter is dead. Killed by a drunk driver who swerved onto the sidewalk." Gabriel said without pain. The young girl in her little Amish dress stepped forward. "But she is here."
"And that is your wife I suppose, and others you have become estranged from." Sterling pointed to the rest of his make-believe family. She wasn''t buying into his craziness.
"She committed suicide a year and a day ago. I could only forgive her for having more courage than I." Gabriel stood and put his arm around her waist and held her beside him. "Here, a man stands beside his wife no matter what."
"Yes, I read the charter, very romantic." Sterling plopped.
"You have never lost someone?" The wife asked without condescension.
"Nobody I couldn''t replace." Sterling flicked back. "What exactly are you?"
"I am Carol, Gabriel''s wife." Carol said defensively. Her tone sounded like she had confidence that her place was valid. Sterling was the outsider, obviously. Primitive.
"I am losing my patience." Sterling shrugged. She reached for her deicide and activated it. Normally she wouldn''t kill a bunch of AIs, but these ones she was already annoyed with and they were already supposed to be unplugged. Nothing happened. "Alright, I am 9od now. Drop dead, all of you."
"You are not God." Carol smiled carefully.
"What is happening? This should work." Sterling concentrated. She had a few seconds left to override anything. She willed an emulation of her personal device to appear. She took it and used it to call out.
"Boss?" The worried face of her secretary-boy answered. She couldn''t remember his name.
"It''s me. I am in a simulation, working. I need you to go into my office and plug that zip drive into the backup of my device that is in the top drawer. Go, now." Sterling instructed him.
"What do you want me to do?" He asked, a stupid expression was on his face as the call was lost. Her emulation vanished. So her 9od-mode hadn''t worked properly. They had something stronger. It would take twenty-four hours to reset. She had to wait.
While she was there she tried to study the Amish, learn their secrets. They followed a simple schedule of chores and prayers. Modesty, kindness and moderation were their way of doing things. If one of them felt unhappy they left the others to go and pray. In general, they kept things simple and about their faith and their community. Everything they did had some kind of social context. It was kinda sexy.
"Modesty is sexy." Sterling muttered, while churning butter. A buff chad with a nice beard walked by and smiled at her. "You''re cute."
"God bless you, Sister." He said.
"Yep, Jesus to you too, I guess." Sterling complained. This went on for days and days it seemed. Finally he proposed marriage. Sterling, bored witless and horny, agreed.
She named her second kid Gabriel; after the late Bishop.
Sterling was sewing a quilt beside Ruth while her youngest, Esther, was playing with a handful of flax nearby. Things began to slow down suddenly. A man with no beard they''d never seen walked up. Sterling thought she recognized him, but couldn''t be sure.
"You''re her, aren''t you?" He asked.
"I am Jin Sterling. My husband is Chad Sterling. What do you want, sir?" Sterling shaded her eyes with her hand as she spoke plainly.
"I am Detective Summerisle. I am here to confirm you are still...alive...I guess is the idea." He said. Then he added:
"You have lived in this place for seventy days. There is some discussion about liability and whether you are even alive in here. You see? Your body, it has uh, expired."
"This is Heaven." Sterling shrugged a little and pinched. Just a taste of her old self.
"I was to tell you from an old friend." Detective Summerisle hesitated. He couldn''t tell her from the others anymore. He said it anyway:
"VCR is sexy."
Orange Flakes
Whatever is on the cardboard reflects all of society, in one way or another. The concrete world is really a world that is cardboard based. Corrugated and thick and lightweight and cheap. Where would all of the goods of the modern world be without cardboard? Everything gets moved in cardboard, or the tools needed for it are, sooner or later it forms the basis of each item of the modern world. Therefore there is a separate and cardboard-less modern world that is not the same.
A world next door to civilization where Orange Flakes have arrived on the menu. See, civilization isn''t about the artifacts, the plastic goods, the things from cans that got shipped in cardboard. Nothing had ever gone into cardboard here, in this sweltering and wet place, not since the first rat got eaten.
And here civilization had existed for tens of thousands of years. Some of the stones in the jungle were carved by the same people that still lived here, so long ago.
Not until Orange Flakes. They made people live longer and healthier, the little flattened grains. A genetically modified organism. It was grown in space, apparently. The people who brought it had told them all of this.
Na''gh Na had gone to get the Orange Flakes. The people who came from above were not allowed past the sand of the beach. Once they had come too far and the chief had come to see that the boys had shot arrows and killed the intruder.
They were afraid no more Orange Flakes would come, or worse, warriors from the above places would come. But there was no reprisal.
The people from above had apologized and offered a greater tribute of Orange Flakes. Strange were their ways.
This day, Na''gh Na had aimed his bow at a surprise. The Above Person was wearing a tattered clothing of his people, was bleeding, sitting with his back to the tropical forest. He was eating the Orange Flakes, right out of the box!
Na''gh Na laughed he was so surprised. Then he saw the body of the other Above Person laying there, dead. This was not a funny surprise. He aimed his bow.
"Did you kill that Above Person?" Na''gh Na demanded of the one he aimed an arrow at. The Above Person looked at him with strange, sick eyes.
"I don''t speak your language." the Above Person was saying something and a voice spoke as he did, from his neck. Na''gh Na was impressed by this tool and wanted one. He said so, forgetting the corpse for a moment. The stanger got up slowly and took the one from the dead and tossed it to Na''gh Na.
Na''gh Na saw the tiny hairlike hooks and put it on his neck anyway. It didn''t hurt, but he could feel it feeding on him, like a misquito, but slower. He said this and the object said his words again in the language of the Above Person. Evidently it could change languages, the wondrous tool, and it lived off of his energy, he understood this, he''d got bitten by enough bugs.
"I am impressed you grasp it so easily. You are very smart." the Above Person seemed amused, somehow.
Na''gh Na raised his bow again. He now planned to shoot the man, probably. He had glanced over and seen the body again.
"You killed this person. Why, are you crazy?" Na''gh Na demanded to know. He was not going to ask again, a third time, for an explanation.
"It was to defend myself. I escaped to here, the coordinates were preset, to deliver this stuff, I guess. She followed me. She is a cop, a hunter of people like me. I''d get executed if she took me back. So I killed her."
"What is it you did that you should be executed? Maybe the law of the Above People will be met here, by my arrow. I see no way to leave you on this beach alive." Na''gh Na watched him carefully. He wasn''t sure how the Above Person had killed. He didn''t have a gun of any kind, nor did the one he had killed. But her body had a holster for a handgun, so he must have a gun, somewhere.
The Above Person started talking rapidly, obviously repeating a false story. He used too many words of the Above People for a good translation and the tale was hard to follow anyway. Suddenly the Above Person screamed in agony.
The arrow had sailed like a striking snake, through his hand as he had reached into the box of Orange Flakes. He raised the box, his hand inside, but the bow and arrow was ready before he was, after the impalement.
The second arrow went into his heart and stopped it from beating, quickly killing the Above Person. The gun went off blowing Orange Flakes out the bottom of the cardboard box. Na''gh Na fell, bleeding to the sand.
He awoke in a brightly lit room, evidently in the above place. They had given him drugs, much stronger than Sacred Yage. Probably to help with the pain of the gunshot wound. They had done surgery on him while he slept.
An ambassador of the Above People came into the room. He said something and the walls became as outdoor scenery. Na''gh Na felt for the translator and found it was gone. The man understood and had one brought into the room by an assistant, that then left them alone again.
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"You brought me here because I was shot. I killed the one that escaped, it was self defense." Na''gh Na said, learning quickly of the ways of the Above People. Many of his generation were greatly obsessed with the ones who brought the Orange Flakes.
"It is okay. We saw everything. We have...magic eyes." the Above Person told him a lie. It was strange.
"Is it that you do use magic, after all, or are these marvelous things just very useful tools you make?" Na''gh Na listened as the words were said, in their language. How it shaped the syllables. He was using the translator better and better each time he spoke with it. A very useful tool.
"You are right, we do not use magic. Useful tools. We call it all Technology." the Above Person smiled. It was a strange smile. It had no affection or meaning. It was almost offensive. Na''gh Na smiled back, trying to emulate the superficial countenance of his captor.
"Technology is very useful. This translator, the place we are now, the Orange Flakes. All of this is Technology, then." Na''gh Na smiled as he said this.
"Well yes, and you are very smart." the man told him, impressed.
"I am the chief''s son." Na''gh Na said and showed him a scar he had. He was lying, the scar was a brand for stealing and he was a rival of the chief''s son for a beautiful girl in his village. All lies and he said more to make it interesting: "I am the chief''s oldest son and this mark is because I am of the royal bloodline of my people."
"Amazing. That must be why you come to get the Orange Flakes. It is your right?"
"That is correct. Going to fetch this food is considered a great honor. Only men of courage and honor may go to get the Orange Flakes from the beach." Na''gh Na kept lying. It was fun, to tell such lies. He felt strange doing so, telling reckless lies for no reason. It seemed to be their way, deceptive and false faced.
"Tell me something, then: how is it you expect that we have no magic?" the ambassador asked the strange question. Na''gh Na had to think about this and realized that the man wanted to see just how smart he was. Na''gh Na was too scared to lie about magic, so he said:
"I have never seen sorcery committed. I am not one who uses magic." Na''gh Na replied, telling the truth.
"Well couldn''t you do one little ritual for us? Something public? It would help me explain your attitude."
"Then you would take me home, if I made your words about me true?" Na''gh Na felt fear creep into his heart, for the first time in his life he felt a kind of deep and dark dread, not normal fear of the forest or of fighting, but of magic.
"Yes. I would make that happen. If you show us we are your friend, bless our people with your people''s cultural rituals...definitely we could take you home, take a ton of Orange Flakes back with you."
"I would go home and get Orange Flakes if I commit sorcery for you?" Na''gh Na had heard of some corrupt bargains in his life, but this felt like selling his soul.
"You make it sound like I am asking you for something important. It is important, to help secure the future of our people. Many among us are afraid to continue interacting with you down there, that we are damaging your culture. Show them they are wrong. Make them see your ways."
"You are not asking for sorcery at all, are you? You just want me to wave and smile, right?" Na''gh Na tried this communication.
"No we need the sorcery. Put a spell on the non-believers. Or else they will stop the Orange Flakes. That is the consequences of what happened today."
"I see. I will need time to prepare. I will need Sacred Yage."
"I have some of that for you. We have a museum with all of that stuff. I can get it for you."
"You mean you have the implements of sorcery already? I don''t understand. Why not use it all yourself? I am not familiar with magic."
"You know enough I am sure."
"This must not be a good idea." Na''gh Na promised.
He went with his captor and donned the sorcerer''s relics and consumed the Sacred Yage. Then he sat there and stared at the cameras that were filming his drug-induced mutterings.
He was doing this for all of the right reasons, but it still felt very wrong. He could feel the anger of the sorcerer that had made this costume. A healer, a medicine woman from another village, the style different then his own village''s enchanted midwife. It was a sacrilege and the Sacred Yage made him feel guilty and afraid.
Dark words passed his lips and the translator could not really keep up. Sometimes it said the names of mythical devils and other fearsome concepts, as if recognizing the non-language he was speaking.
Hours went by and the ritual continued. Na''gh Na knew the other things he must do to finish. He bled and he promised that his soul would serve a sentence for the magic he bartered for. Then as he rode the Sacred Yage back to his body where it was bleeding and chanting he felt the touch of the Three Gods on his forehead and he opened his thoughts and heard what he might be able to say that would happen. He said it.
Then he awoke in the darkness, there in the above place. He stood and began stripping off the vestments of magic. He felt contaminated and corrupt. He had said the magic words and made it all dark, up here.
The door was opening, but not by itself. The Above People were pushing it open. Red lighting and the sound of their alarm was in the corridor beyond. The Above People were fleeing their above place in a panic.
"We are rapidly detaching from orbit in this station. Do you know what that means?" the ambassador had a real face. He looked happy. His words sounded sincere.
"The magic has convinced your political enemies to allow Orange Flakes to continue to come to my people?" Na''gh Na responded respectfully.
"Yes. I can''t believe the magic worked! What a rotten-jolly coincidence!"
"What do you mean?" Na''gh Na was confused. "You think the magic did not work? That the destruction of this place was by chance, somehow?"
"I don''t know what to believe right now!" the ambassador seemed childish to Na''gh Na all-of-a-sudden. He then felt very ashamed to have participated in the scheme. All of the lies had led to an even deeper deception.
"This is not the above place is it? You are not the Above People, after all, are you?" Na''gh Na now believed he was in the world of the dead, that this was all a test. If so then he had failed. There was only one way to know for sure.
He took up the knife of the sorcery and used it to slash apart the ambassador and kill him. Okay so they were Above People and he was still alive.
He followed the flashing arrows of light on the floor to a small room, stocked with Orange Flakes and he went inside. It jettisoned itself, door closing of its own power, the craft he had entered, not a small room at all.
It took him home.
Man Bites Zombie
Survival of the smartest had something to do with the quality of human brains. I am not smart, I am just a lab assistant. The scientists that I work with keep talking about artificial selection. What they mean is that our lab manufactures new cold viruses and vaccines for them. It is completely legal to do so, for research purposes.
The scientists I work with do talk all day of malthusian politics and the fitness of intellect. Smart people do not trust the government. The government tells people that they have to get a free vaccine for a new cold virus. Only people who trust the government do what they are told. I guess that means I am not smart.
It is my job to handle test subjects, as just a lab assistant. We pay them four thousand dollars in cash to spend four days in our lab, quarantined. Most of them are students, some of them are homeless. All of them are desperate for the cash. Since we are funded by government research grants, technically they are being paid by the taxpayers.
On the evening of the incident I was washing my hands at the door when I heard a loud thump noise coming from the hall where the quarantine cells are. I had just finished checking on all three of our current test subjects. Our quarantine area had enough cells for eight.
I guessed it was test subject two, because he wasn''t doing very well. I rushed to his cell to visually check on him and found him face down in his own vomit. His remote vitals indicated he was dead. I had to intercom from the elevators for help.
Two scientists, Dr. Felicity and Dr. Safron responded as well as Mike, our security guy. "Our test subject two seems to be dead." I told them.
Dr. Safron suited up and went into the quarantine cell to check the vitals. He declared the time of death for two minutes earlier. "Banks, you go to the office and notify this person''s emergency contact. This body must be examined and destroyed in the biohazard operating room."
"We do all that here?" I asked. I hadn''t worked there long enough to have known there was a biohazard operating room or that we incinerated dead bodies. Nobody had ever died before.
I went up to the office and found the file on our current test subject two and then got on the office''s phone to leave a message with their emergency contact, explaining that so-and-so accidentally died. We had a solid waver that allowed us to continue with research even if the subject somehow died. We could also dispose of the body, I read, by incineration.
I went back down to make sure my other test subjects were okay, since one of them had died. They were understandably distressed and it was my job to make them feel reassured and calm. How I was going to do that, I wasn''t sure. I couldn''t lie to them and tell them they had received a different cocktail. All I could do was superficially promise them that test subject two had died of natural causes and that they would be fine.
"How do you know it was natural causes? They said they are taking the body for some kind of autopsy." Our test subject three sounded scared.
"Because nothing we gave you is dangerous. It just a little cold virus and a vaccine. You will be fine." I explained as reassuringly and calmly as I could.
While I was talking to them the quarantine cell with the dead body in it was being entered by Dr. Safron and Dr. Felicity. Both scientists were wearing biocontainment suits and they started to load the body into a body bag which they could seal up just for the trip down the hall to the biohazard operating room. I noted that the off limits area should have made me guess, since I worked in the quarantine.
Dr. Safron was saying to Dr. Felicity that the vitals still showed that test subject two was quite dead. That didn''t seem to matter because he was sitting back up while they argued. Wide eyed with surprise they stared at him through their biohazard suits. I watched all of this, completely stunned.
His face looked like something out of a bad horror movie makeup department. If I were watching my life as a movie, I would say he was the least realistic zombie I had ever seen. His eyes were tired and droopy and his flaky skin had some vomit on it. He could just be someone who was too drunk at a party and nobody would realize he was undead.
Dr. Safron used his fingers to check the man''s neck for a pulse. The zombie had no pulse and he drew back in sudden revulsion. His quick movement triggered something and the zombie turned its face around to look at him. Then it turned its body around and faced him, clambering to its feet with difficulty. The corpse began to ambulate relentlessly toward Dr. Safron who began to yell for help.
The former test subject two had bitten a large chunk out of Dr. Safron''s flailing defenses and blood was spurting freely from the wound all over the walls, floor and zombie. During the attack there were accompanying screams of terror. The other test subjects were panicked in their quarantine cells.
Dr. Felicity had hidden partly between the bed in the cell and the wall. I was still standing in the hall with Mike, the security guard. Test subject one recalled that they were not actually locked in their cells and tried to escape. When he had reached the door to the elevators he was stopped by the last containment door which actually was locked, due to procedure of removing a body from quarantine.
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The zombie tore into Dr. Safron''s biohazard suit and began biting his face and neck as he fainted. Then it stood up over him and started to turn around. Mike had his gun in his hand, finally. He was telling the zombie to stop approaching and then he started to shoot it in the torso.
The loud gunshots made my ears ring so that I barely heard the remaining test subject telling him to shoot for the head. Instead he dropped his gun and ran for the exit , after he had shot the zombie numerous times. Test subject three came out of her quarantine cell and went for the gun. When it clicked empty she threw it at the zombie.
It followed her as she also went for the exit. We were locked down due to the containment breach when the two quarantine cells were opened during the removal procedure. It was automatic and required Dr. Safron''s authorization or a monitoring administrator to open. I looked up at the security cameras that nobody was watching, or they would open the door remotely.
I went to Dr. Safron''s bleeding remains and tried to remove the keycard from his labcoat. When I had it in my hands his eyes opened. At first I thought he was just awake but then I saw the same blank, hungry stare from the zombie. I backed away slowly.
As Dr. Safron''s zombie began to rise Dr. Felicity screamed in anguished terror and rejection of the nightmare. With a sharp jerk of its head it turned its attention from me and attacked her. I wanted to help her, but I was too scared. Instead, when I realized it was eating her alive and she was done for, I closed them in the quarantine cell together. Her screams continued as it bit pieces off of her and I turned my back on the awfulness.
I took the key card towards the elevators, following the trail of blood left by the dripping zombie. I was trembling and terrified and moving very slowly. When I got there, the zombie had knocked out the test subject three and was struggling with the two men. It bit into the face of the test subject one guy and he let go, hollering in pain and pulling away, losing a piece of his face. There was so much blood that I couldn''t tell who was bitten or not.
The zombie slipped in the blood and fell backwards. Once it was on the ground, Mike stomped on its head over and over, harder and harder, until he had cracked open its skull and killed it. He looked up at me and I hid the keycard I had.
He told me that we needed to escape. I pointed out that all of them were bitten. He shook his head, denying that he was bit, despite the teeth marks on his jaw and hand.
I realized that if I let them out and we all escaped that we would unleash zombies outside the quarantine. Mike came at me and in his hysteria I could not be sure he wasn''t a zombie. I hid the key on myself and tried to escape from him into the off limits area, the biohazard operating room. Before I could shut the door on it, the surprisingly fast moving Mike zombie had forced its way in, breaking the door''s locking mechanism in the process.
Mike tackled me and manhandled me, wrestling me back to the ground and trying to search me. He knew I had the key. I fought back and he started to punch me in my face and head. I fell limp from the blows, almost getting knocked out. Mike got on top of me and pinned me down. He started to strangle me, instead of biting me, demanding I help him escape.
My hands were over his but I couldn''t remove his grip. He stiffened up and slumped onto me. I laid there under him, his hands still on my throat in a vice-like death grip. I could barely breathe.
Momentarily he became reanimated and resumed choking me, this time as a zombie. I knew it would bite me and I had to get away from it before it could. With little oxygen to my brain and operating in pure survival mode I bit off one of his thumbs. It took all the strength in my jaw to sever the thumb at the joint. With only one hand gripping my neck I was able to pry it off and topple the zombie off of me.
As I tried to get away the Mike zombie grabbed my ankle. I was gasping for air but shouted in fright anyway, a kind of empty coughing shout. I had to pull myself free, dragging the corpse halfway to the prepared incinerator. When the zombie climbed up to corner me I looked around for anything to use as a weapon. A thick metal tray covered in autopsy instruments provided a whole arsenal.
I kept picking up different tools and hurling them at the approaching zombie. When it was near me it had some sharp implements stuck into its flesh but they didn''t even slow it down. I lifted the tray and bashed it in the head. It staggered back towards the incinerator.
I hit it with the tray again and again to repulse its ravenous jaw clacking. I opened the incinerator and its drawer came out and I managed to knock it backwards onto the drawer. While it tried to get up I grabbed its kicking legs and forced it in, head first. Once it was inside I trapped it in there.
I had no idea how to make the gas turn on. There were just pilot lights on either side. Its cloths caught fire and it started burning, filling the incinerator with smoke. There were instructions on the control box which I had to make myself read and comprehend, despite the excitement and horror I felt.
After I had calmed down enough to grasp the details I was able to incinerate the Mike zombie. He had left an awful taste in my mouth and his blood was on my chin and lab coat. I worried for a minute that I might turn into a zombie because I had bitten him.
I emerged from the back room to the quarantine hall and looked around at the remaining zombies. The two doctors were trapped in cell two while the two test subject zombies had arisen and now shambled towards me where I stood. I retreated back into the operating room and tried to barricade the door. I pushed everything in the room against the door and tried to hold it shut.
There wasn''t enough stuff to keep them out forever. They pushed tirelessly until they were coming in. While they were crawling awkwardly through the debris filled entrance I was able to pick them both off by smashing their heads with the tray.
Then I sat down and just waited. I was sure I was going to turn into a zombie, but I never did. I was quarantined in the same lab I had held test subjects in. After a week I was allowed to leave.
I had watched the cleanup process and I noted how perfectly sterile everything was. New doctors were hired and new test subjects too. I turned in my resignation and stared blankly at the new doctors and test subjects as I walked out the building after quitting my job.
Swallow The Spiders
Flies of amber shadow danced in the air above like a tiny aerial ballroom of thousands. Their buzz filled my ears and their vigor made me grin. They were going to lay their eggs on the mulberry below.
Alone they descended, each of them, to create tiny pyramids. After the last egg, then to lapse and become fertilizer for the plant as the wings above sent a breeze to roll the dead from the leaves.
They were aphnic; perfect, mine. I called the little silkworms ''my children of the dawn''. Their webs were as light and as playful and innocent as newborn spiderlings. Their swarm was a tapestry as they cocooned their vegetable prey, as a colony of gypsy moth larvae might, if left to Nature''s plan. My plans for the aphnic would prevail.
"If God watched the moth as she danced in the air near the flame..." I mused. "If only the moth knew of God''s plans. If only."
I could hear it, in the silence of their wings: "God''s plan? Your plan? I know this."
I had created them from the building blocks of life. To them, I was the source of their world. My new world, in a home of glass, a microcosmos. All I had to do was open a window and let them go forth and multiply and be fruitful. I would be their god, I would show my wrath, my mercy and my glory. My new world.
Pacing back and forth and waiting for the third birth of my children. Why should aphnic be born three times? Would anyone disregard that such rebirth was truly a work of calculated perfection? The aphnic were born from an egg, a cocoon and last from their atavistic arachnid stage. It was the final development when they matured their wings and grew their eggs.
Mutations of the sensitive eggs, at the third stage, manifested. The ''spider'' would develop a gland that it calcified a variety of toxins, diseases and parasites I introduced to the second-stage aphnic. When it could fly and lay eggs the membrane would become infused with the calcified gland''s memory and harden with the changes to the fertile cells.
This gland, harvested from living aphnic, prevents their development of any immunities and ensures their offspring will have to start again with collecting samples from their environment. The genius of my creation is that this gland can be made into a drug that is compatible with the human fetus during the first trimester. Any toxins, diseases or parasites that the aphnic can resist would imbue our unborn with their immunities.
Such a child would be grown in a controlled incubation. Such a child would pass on their genetic improvements most effectively to an exact copy. The clones would be perfect, my creation. What then, would be the purpose of a woman carrying a child? What then, would be the purpose of the body of woman? The new children would be physically perfect, without the aging and emotional weakness of sexuality. They would be gifted with the longevity and consistency of a perfect human, absent of gender.
The drug, as a serum, a pale pink liquid, was meant not for the metamorphosis of an unmutated adult. I knew it would alter my cells anyway. The mutagen had properties of a virus, reencoding DNA rapidly and to shape the host into something else. There was no way for my body to reject it, unless it killed me during my second puberty.
Holding the serum to the light I felt dizzy. I had never expected to be able to craft such an elixir, let alone benefit from its divine power. It should not come possible, yet stem cells and my own ancient designs had met and made the impossible into the possible. So often I had seen such a thing happen. The immorality of Science and the greed of its priesthood often made nightmares a reality.
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The fruit on the vine was ripe. I held my moment in emptiness. I stared at the syrupy bit still coating the inside of the test tube. The taste was like almonds and the smell of grass and perhaps a hint of sweetness, an aftertaste. Sickly sweet and subtle.
I held it up to the light, noting the tiny bubbles that had formed around the edge. I felt a triumph before the first pains. I felt as though I were a god and I had just created myself. I had become a god, finally. I could control my world for the rest of my existence, which would be extensive.
I had always believed in myth and was rewarded for my faith. If there were no other gods, it no longer mattered. I had become a god. My life would not end.
I had taken one little sip, I had drank deeply, I had known the substance. My mouth burned and my body began to cramp and twist. I lunged and fell and gagged. The world I would know, as a god, swam like drunken dizziness. Indeed, I had drank too deeply of it. I had touched divinity and become a thrashing and churning body of agony, a mind of swirling madness. Spider''s venom.
When I opened my eyes, I could only remember a hundred hours of suffering. I blinked and tried to stand up. I was weak with thirst and crawled to the sink. There I drank again and became full, the liquid balancing within me and the excess not waiting for a controlled release. A god in a puddle of piss answered the shrill cry of a phone. Was I a god?
We had some kind of conversation. I wasn''t there for most of it. My head was buzzing and felt like it was filled with spiderwebs.
"What Science calls a blasphemy!" I heard myself reiterate my rephrase of my colleague''s complaints.
"What Science calls a mutagen, Dr. Magdalene." My colleague sounded worried.
"I call a breakfast smoothie." I chuckled weirdly and hung up.
Most of the changes began slowly while I vomited and slept. I noticed that my appetite and strength came back quickly. At first I just felt the vitality and the vigor of it. Then my senses began to grow more acute. This more of a torment than it might sound, for my mind could not process and contain such an amount of observations. Not at first, so I went a little mad. A cruel hunger overtook me, predatory and spiteful. Everything looked like food, even the mulberry.
I thought about the Silk Road, the Crusades and the time of the Secret. None of it bothered me anymore. I had become the new Silk Road and Secret. There were no more Crusaders. When I realized I would not become some kind of giant spider battling warriors in Medieval armor in my burning living room, as I had dreamed, I could only laugh.
The great change of my body did come, though. My rebirth. I gasped, pulling what I had spun from my face. I stared at the sores and rot of my limbs. The cold memory told me I had deliberately spun a cocoon around myself. It was snowing outside.
I discovered that forty-six days had gone by and I had hibernated somehow, growing and changing. Actually, it was more like fermenting and dissolving. I looked like I was back from the dead. The strangeness overwhelmed me and some part of my mind intent of survival, some animal part, took over.
I was sitting there, twitching. I stared at the pyramid of eggs. They were large and translucent. I saw my actual children in them, twisted parodies of aphnic and human. I could not remember the Secret. Then I looked at my work. Aphnic were made from the building blocks of life. I had made them.
I looked at the red cross on the white shield. A Crusader ready to destroy and ravage the unholy. One god or another. I realized there would always be a need for fire.
Some part of me was not me, controlling me, being me. I was not me, I was this thing. No longer human, no longer myself, I could not be a god. I could not be human anymore.
I must, as I have some thought left, recall what work a god had. I must recall where a human reached out and touched God, and God recoiled in horror. I must say all there is left to say about what I have done to this world, what I have created.
There is still fire. Fire comes for me and for all of it. The world I made must burn and in-the-end the unhatched must be destroyed. It is the only way to regain my humanity.
Brides Of Doctor Crispy
Pregnant with something inhuman and locked in a basement where nobody could hear me or find me. I hadn''t really thought about my circumstances with self-honesty. I had chosen to be entirely myself and ignore my surroundings. I had to, just to hear myself think with all of the horrified screaming and nightmarish and mind breaking laughter of mad women.
Asian girls are good for ''traditional marriage'', according to the advertisements. I come from a most traditional family; a family with a tradition of being very poor. I do know where I come from though; a long line of arranged marriages and shameful scandals. I was a good girl though; I had always used good manners and spoke the truth. Those were my ways.
I told my sister that the arranged marriage to Professor Thadeus Crispus was more than a little good for our family. I promised her I would be as happy with him as I was with her. We spent that afternoon making daisy chains and I realized I would never see her again. In our letters, Thadeus had made it clear I could not ''have the in-laws move in with us'' to his house. I would live there without my family, belonging to him, essentially. It seemed unAmerican.
I thought about those moments as I sat alone in the darkness of my padded cell in his basement. I was the sixth of his young mailorder brides. He had no interest in what a husband should be interested in. Instead, he had locked all of us up in his basement. It was hardly the worst of what he had done to all of us. He hadn''t touched us though, he simply wasn''t a normal man. What he lusted for was unnatural and horrible.
I could feel it growing inside of my womb. The other girls were much further along in their gestations. Sung was already at eleven months of pregnancy when I had arrived. I wondered if she was still alive, still pregnant. It was unclear to me why he had shown them all to me. Perhaps my submissiveness and openminded approach had him off guard. It was when I began to scream and crawl away from him and my eyes were filled with swirling terror of him that he decided to lock me in my cage.
There were things in jars. We were not his first six brides. He had ''married'' five before us and they had given birth to the things in the jars. I had seen those things and I had seen the five places where he had made rectangular cuts into the concrete floor of his basement. He had buried the mothers of those things in unmarked graves under his home. It was moments after all of that became obvious to me that I had panicked and lost my composure.
He had a laboratory in his home and he kept us in his basement in cells where there were graves and a museum of dead things kept in jars and a birthing room splattered in bloodstains.
I thought endlessly of the birthing room. It was a table with leg straps under a light. Plastic sheets made up its four walls and they all had brown splatter marks on them, bloodstains. A drain in the floor had a brown ring and the light and fan made the plastic sheets move and shimmer evilly and silently, waiting for another.
I sat there in my thoughts as my mind worked over the horror of my reality. The other girls had all gone mad, singing, laughing, screaming. It was a mad house of young women locked up in the darkness and pregnant with inhuman things. I stayed sane because I wanted to and because I realized that I was already insane just because I wanted to be sane in such a nightmare. Who would suffer great agony when the painkiller is a choice? My mind could not break because my madness was to not let it go. I stayed there and dwelt on every single moment of the Hells I had to go through.
What he was making were not entirely human and not entirely something inhuman. They were things made from their mothers'' bodies and his blood and the blood of animals he wanted to recombine his DNA with. He was making his own species, playing god, becoming the father of a new animal. He said they would replace humans and they would be immortal and immune to disease and unhappiness. He called us all goddesses and told us our sacrifice was a noble one.
My options were to accept all of this and go deeper, perhaps finding a bottom, or I could swim back up towards the light. Except there was no light.
I learned the rest as I thought of his few words to me and from what I witnessed and experienced. I knew the thing inside me. I knew that my husband was not a liar and in his craft he was not blundering. His madness was the evil that was required to use eleven brides to birth monsters for him; even if the monsters were his children.
I found my door open and I walked out and sat at the table with him and we drank tea and he told me I was very beautiful. I would be the mother of the New Ones. He was certain it would be me and he was very proud of me.
"I am a virgin mother." I pointed out quietly. Those words pleased him very much and he smiled. From then on I was allowed to wander around the basement out of my cell. I used my freedom to get exercise and to remain in better health. I knew he had me under surveillance and so I made no plans of effort to escape. I was sure he could do more than use a needle on a girl.
I was right to know this. Someone investigated him: a delivery of packages for our pregnancy needs had gotten the attention of the route driver. This person had assumed the role of heroic investigator and snooped too deeply into Dr. Crispy''s affairs, only to wind up breaking in. Apparently, a booby trap of some kind had killed the investigator. I watched as my husband buried the body in his basement next to his five brides. When the concrete was cut there was a smell from the other graves. I made it back to my padded cell before I was sick from the smell.
The light from the digging was blocked by his silhouette in the doorway. I trembled and apologized.
That is when he explained that the intruder was someone he had found dead, trying to burglarize his laboratory. He had several booby traps for such a purpose and he later showed them to me. He mentioned that there was a secret entrance to the basement and even a second basement that was empty. He also pointed out that the delivery driver was inevitable and that he was expecting to be investigated. Unfortunately for his brides there was no real evidence of our existence because he had not legally married any of us under a real name.
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"I work in a genetics lab and had to steal all of this equipment. Some of it is quite heavy. You would never guess what my real job is or why it was so easy to deliver all this stuff to my own home." He concluded.
"You are too smart." I smiled weakly after all my vomiting.
"Thanks. You are my favorite, Song Yu. You are such a good girl." He smiled and left me there.
He had to get rid of some things, the vehicle of the intruder, other stuff. He had left the door to the basement open. I knew better.
I laid down and got some rest. When he came home he found me asleep. I was gently woken up.
"You didn''t try to escape?" He realized.
"Escape? No husband, I am faithful. I honor my family''s agreement with you and everything I said I would do in my letters." I replied.
"You''re insane." He muttered absently, almost a whisper. He was fascinated by my calmness.
"I just want to have the last of my life be what I had wanted. I cannot pretend, but I can be myself." I articulated neatly. I had practiced a conversation with him in my thoughts more than twenty thousand times. It was not difficult after so much rehearsal.
"You will not betray me?" He agreed.
"It is not my way." I swore. From then on, I was allowed upstairs and when the police were looking for the delivery driver and showed up, I was home. They told me that the person had complained to the police about the many pregnancy supplies and the weirdness of it and then had gone missing. I told them the supplies were for me and my happy pregnancy. When my husband reviewed the surveillance, he was pleased with me for lying to the police.
"You lied to the police so convincingly. I knew you could be a liar, but your actions show you truly are honest with me." He decided.
In my heart I knew there was nothing the police could do to help me or the other brides. They could bring Dr. Crispy to justice, but we stood no chance without his care and his serums. The monsters inside us would eat us alive from the inside out without his intervention. The animals he had chosen to recombine his DNA with were all cannibals to their mothers, a trait he had selected on-purpose for the New Ones. It was something I knew because he had mentioned it several times without saying specifically what sort of chimeras were brewing inside of us. I only understood that they had to be specially sedated once a week, mostly through injections, but sometimes he made changes to our diet to keep us healthy. I doubted any attempt to abort the creatures would be a safe option and so we were only going to live until it was time to give birth. It took about a year for the full gestation of a New One. That was our fate, unless something was to change.
"I have accepted my fate. This is my life, here with you and your purpose." I said.
"You do not think escape is possible?" He shrugged at me.
"I cannot escape from what is inside of me." I decided. "And besides, out there I am a victim. Here, I am a goddess."
"I see." Dr. Crispy thought I was very amusing and smiled warmly. From then on, he increased my comfort and took better care of me. I even noticed that he made efforts to distance himself from me. He was growing fond of me and my attitude towards my situation.
The newer brides needed care and for a while he showed me how to administer the serums and monitor their diets. I was a fast learner and while my role was to assist him, I learned all I could. Later I was too pregnant to assist newly pregnant girls, so I retired from helping him care for them. He was pleased with me, and I seemed more than resigned to him, I seemed content with my fate.
I did want justice, however. What he had done to me, and the other girls, was entirely monstrous. I had become resigned to my fate, cold and numb to it. Any thought of survival, any whisper of a dream that I might live and become myself again, only brought terror into my heart. There was an image of me on a shelf somewhere that my family could look at. I could not be her ever again. The thought of getting out alive was the thought that frightened me more than the impending day I was to go to the birthing room.
As my pregnancy advanced, however, my thoughts of giving birth in agony to a monster and dying, did scare me. I had heard the other girls before me down there in the basement. They began to give birth to New Ones. The first one kept me awake for hours with her screaming, which I could hear despite the sound proofing. Later on he had to cut concrete and dug another grave down there. The next brides to give birth were the same. I never got used to it.
Each one dying down there was ahead of me and one less. There were two and then there were none. I was next and the horror and lingering terror mingled with the agony of the pregnancy''s final phases. I had premature labor several times. I was able to get up, somehow, and follow the sound of cooing into the nursery.
"Three survivors, months old." The strange version of Dr. Crispy sat there with his children. I stared at them. At him.
I couldn''t scream because I would explode. My eyes couldn''t look away because I was dreaming. My heart couldn''t beat because I no longer wished to remain a living creature, alive on earth. I beheld the horror-fruit of his work.
I turned and went back down to the living room and crawled into the empty fireplace. It felt like the whole world was shaking. The shadows had become living things, speaking in whispers, saying: "This is always the way."
And I went into the darkness by turning around from where I stood in my thoughts. For a strange night I became the goddess of a New One, the mother of a daemonic-thing. I made the unnatural natural and I survived. I performed a miracle.
For that, Dr. Crispy worshiped me. When I stood in my blanket of shadows, I was afraid, and I was fear. I trembled and reached out and touched his kneeling forehead with one finger. Inside I was screaming in unending dread if my own lingering presence, the girl I was before, still part of me, trapped in the Hells of Dr. Crispy. There was a deathly light in her eyes, the source of my own insanity, the screaming, laughing, singing and mad version of me. The light exploded out of me, as my voice, my will against him. Dr. Crispy fell backwards. Behind him were the New Ones as they hungered for the flesh they came from. It was their nature.
I could only laugh as they tore him apart. Somehow, I found the little ones to be adorable in their ferocity as they played with their daddy. When they were satisfied, they went to their beds and slept, their bloody claws resting on full bellies and bloodied lips curled in smiles. I knew the remains would last them a while, there was plenty to eat in the nursery.
My greatest fear had become a reality. I had survived. My child and the others were in there. Monsters.
I could not do it alone, nor should I have. I had others who were the same as me, who needed my help. I considered them to be mine, my responsibility, my needed-help in the darkness ahead.
I went downstairs and opened up the cells of the new girls, his newest brides. I took them both upstairs and sat them down. Both of them good girls.
"So beautiful are you. I am so proud of you both to sit so poised after what you have gone through." I told them. They politely waited while I spoke and then each of them assured me, they knew their place. They would do nicely. I smiled for them and poured them some tea.
Those Who Live Forever In The Walls
Displacement of thought is a measurable form of energy. When I discovered this, I could not let the trouble sleep. While I was exiled from the cathedrals of Science and declared a heretic by the priesthood, I continued my work.
My followers came from the seven cardinals of Knowledge. A seven-pointed star of humanity, my disciples. We found a way to measure the ancient pathways of the human mind. The dormant parts were mapped and then we studied them.
In our studies we found ways to stimulate the use of the dead zones. Anyone can activate the drawing of energy from their environment. Focus like the beginning of a yawn, imagine four circles coming together and visualize the star they make in the center. Concentrate on the four points and hold that steady, until they are as one. A dull roaring sound, like the echo of a seashell of the sea, will manifest in the inner ear. As that increases in intensity the body might become numb or tingle. The body is a rod, a conduit, drawing the energy the mind needs from the surrounding environment.
When I first accomplished a steady drawing, the plants around me withered and the fly on the window died. Later, we could measure the increase of electrical current in our minds. We named the surplus mental energy ''manna''.
Our prototype manna probes were large helmets with lots of wiring. With sufficient and discreet funding, we were able to improve them to mere headbands. We called them manna bands and reserved the term manna probe for devices we made to measure manna in the ambient pools. We learned that manna gathers where there is already manna present. That is why the human body can draw manna into itself and channel it up the spine into the mind.
I had written a publication and was rejected because I was already disgraced. Science had exiled me, I was an outcast, Apostate. In a darkness of thought I became bitter and resentful.
My disciples were merely reflections of my own insanity. Each of them embodied one of my failures, my inability to make anyone see things my way. They were proof that I could not be proven right.
We were filming when my head exploded.
At first the gathered researchers just blinked at my decapitated remains with bits of my skull and brains all over their white robes of the priesthood. Then there was screaming and panic and horror. When they had cleared the room, I floated free of my corpse, never to be tethered again. I had transcended the living, to live forever. All I needed was the energy of life, manna. I had drawn too much, more than I could contain.
As the energy was drawn through my body it became as me and I became as the energy. A darkness swirled around my dead body like a miniature thunderstorm of crackling black clouds, lined with pure glowing blue light. My consciousness became as the same cloud, visible to the eye and the camera.
Where I went the tendrils of it reached. There was no distance I could not reach. Each extension dissipated me, reducing me, slowing and contracting what I had become. I was afraid of my new state.
In horror and confusion - I lashed out. I found my fleeing disciples and fed upon their fears, restoring myself from their anguish. I became hungry, becoming what I ate. Fear is a kind of hunger, as hunger is a kind of fear.
In ravening night: I found a new existence. I could remain pooled in places, waiting like a cobweb in the darkness. I was in the shadows and the thoughts of those who were afraid. I felt their terror, a vibration signaling mealtime. I fed, drinking, sucking, taking from anyone who trembled in dread.
The nourishment was wrong, evil somehow. I knew I was becoming less human with each sip and each suck. I came from closets, eyes aglow, upon the sleeper, bringing nightmares. I came from the headphones, a silence, into the altar of the soul. I came from the chime of midnight, upon the priests of Science as they crafted deadly diseases with the taxes of those they would infect. I found evil to be a most satisfying meal.
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I held myself in horrible regard, learning to fear what I was becoming with each carcass of a human mind. I took their inequities and made banquet. Scientists were my favorite food, immoral, greedy and wise like devils. I whispered vile things into their thoughts and watched their eyes light up with internal Hellfire.
"Is one deadly disease and one contagious: two things or one? How much would the vaccine be worth? So easy, so gullible. They deserve to die by the score. You are a genius and deserve the wealth you would receive. Murder them with lies." I would say and the Scientist would smile at my words. As a demon I was more conscious than they were as men and women.
This was maddening, disgusting and the reflection of ultimate horror. I feared the existence, the pillars of Creation, the worm that I was, the mere words of Whisper. I became Whisper, I became shadow, I served only my own hunger.
"Whisper, be not my thoughts." She said. I hesitated. I looked at her identification badge.
"Dr. Alameen, you are no better than the others. Do as they do and listen to me." I spoke into her thoughts. She resisted and I felt a deeper fear. I was somehow trapped, trying to feed on something in her that I could not take my mouth away from. I had become stuck to something I could not chew. I had a mouthful of her, and I could not swallow it or spit it out. I was choking on her.
I panicked, realizing I would shrivel and die. I would wither as the plants, fall as the dead fly and dissipate like an ugly dark cloud. Everywhere she went, I was forced to go.
I could not use her greed, for she chose poverty and charity. She gave away her healing without accepting pay from those who could not afford her care. Then she went home and slept on a rug and ate a humble meal of chickpeas. I despised her meals and counted each of the tiny seeds, attempting to compare the number to her failure to feel avarice for my benefit. I could never finish counting by dawn.
When Dr. Alameen woke up rested and ready for another day working against me, I scattered my counted pile of seeds, no nearer to ending her horrid lack of selfishness.
"How dare you!" I hissed at her. She somehow ignored my challenge and knelt and prayed on a prayer rug. "Stop that, you are a scientist!"
My dread grew as I weakened from hunger and captivity. I rested on her shoulder, near her ear, worried she couldn''t hear me.
"You are quiet today, Whisper." She glanced at her shoulder in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. How could she see me? I felt exposed, naked and ashamed of my form. I hid myself, mutating and becoming even less, in her eyes and in my powers.
I appealed to her immorality, a desperate effort.
Whenever I tempted her to think darkly or to reject those who were different, she sighed and quoted absurd poetry that described her world in proverbs. When her own thoughts failed to see the good in others, she reverted to the teachings of her faith. I was doomed.
"Curse you, Dr. Alameen. Damn you!" I tried to burrow into her and found that I could not get past some sort of strange light. I had once held such light and when I tried to get past it: I was burned by it. In pain and torment: I withdrew, terrified of my eventual demise.
"All are blessed. All are loved." Dr. Alameen seemed to be telling me. She held nothing against me. She called me Whisper and knew me. She was not afraid of me; her faith had protected her from my predations.
"Not I." I said. It was then that she decided to educate me. I did not have to die the final death.
"Those that live forever are a part of the world. Pillars, walls, doors. This is your path, Whisper. Choose not disobedience. You are this, be truthful. Forfeit your evil ways and repent of them. Serve the One Truth, cease your lies." Dr. Alameen prophesized.
I was very proud and willing to die, rather than face my greatest fear. My greatest fear was to accept that I had accomplished something so great and that it did not belong to me. I was supposed to be a servant of something that forgave and loved. A being that asked me to accept the pain of responsibility.
As I became as almost nothing at all, starved by her, I faced a choice. I would turn to distributing goodness, painfully, sacrificially, my own essence of self. Or I would quietly and painlessly die, ceasing to exist.
I was more afraid to go on as a recognizable spirit. The shame and horror were one. To give of oneself is to grow in magnitude and become less of oneself. I preferred to die intact.
Dr. Alameen was dying. She had grown old during my time with her. Always she was patient with me; she never cast me out. Instead, she always told me that there was still good in me.
"There is yet good in you." Dr. Alameen told me. Then she breathed her last and I was free of her. I had become so small and weak that I just hovered there, waiting for someone to come along.
When I finally had a host, I remained silent. I saw the crumbs of sin and left them. This person is how I regained my humanity. How I came to speak again, to tell my story. The person was tempted to feed me, and I felt no fear when I whispered:
"Be good, do no evil."
Bully For Answer
"Fight!" The children were chanting. This was the final battle; this one was for the whole school. Everyone that had lived in fear of me and seen my cruelty: they all needed to see me defeated, once-and-for-all.
A very different me, the real me, had come back for them. It is difficult to explain why, much easier to explain how. To put it simply: I had to go back to my childhood, back to my hometown, my school. I did so as a visitor, and then as my new life. A new life for everyone.
"Straight A Braidy, you grace us..."
At the forty-year reunion I had finally come home. I had no words for the scattered and broken people there. Four of them stood off to one side and then there was Peter Allah, who approached me.
I had no words for the twenty years since I had seen them last. At the twenty-year reunion there were more of them, although nobody had really made it in life. Not me, I owned Braidy Industries (the world''s penultimate tech company). As a billionaire I had responded by sending money to all of them. It had only made things worse, somehow.
I had enjoyed a succulent life, full of pleasure...
In my aging mirror I asked myself if I wanted something more. "Mirror, mirror..." I had said after that day.
I could do anything I wanted.
I had a supercomputer, a space station and a quantum particle beam. Toys.
My research and development of new technology gave me access to unbelievable vistas.
I looked across worlds. I looked across the divide, through its categorically temporality, saw those that had nothing, while I had everything. I realized then that I wanted more. So, I took what I wanted, reaching through time and space to a moment in my life when my future was still uncertain. Everyone''s future, in fact.
I thought about the last five kids from my school that were left in the world. There was a whole world behind me, one I had abandoned. That world was the one where I was king, a world that belonged to me.
Everyone else that I was looking at had died off, all of them ''losers''.
Drug addicts, criminals and lunatics. The whole town was dead. Buildings were in ruins and rats chewed on the remains. I looked around, remembering all of that and seeing it like it was. My home, my people, my neighbors and friends. It was all back, but I could remember the future, could see how it all went down. I also knew what I would do to change it all. In the world before, I was the light of this town and when I left them there was only darkness. Now I was back except this time: I was the darkness.
"Oh, starlight." I sighed.
I tossed my beloved schoolbooks into the woodchipper and watched them die.
Then I sent in the two sticks of dynamite I had stolen. I ran and didn''t look back. Mike Zerker wouldn''t stay behind and waste his life. He would, with the insurance check his dad would get, go to college. There he would meet Zania and get married. Her family would put him through medical school and he would become a doctor.
Mike Zerker would never even taste whisky for the first time. He would live to see his fortieth class reunion.
With the burning woodchipper behind me, I made my way to class. My grades no longer mattered, but the rest of my work was going to be rough, very rough. I had no more clarity on the timeline. From the moment the fire engines raced through the small town to the burning woodchipper, everything changed. I had only a vague outline and my methods became limited, primitive - brutal.
For a genius I sure was stupid - I had actually thought I was going to fix it all with money, I hadn''t really thought about the dynamics of the timeline. Not to the extent that all of my plans also had to account for the new variables as things progressed. I was forced to adapt my methodology.
I found Aaron Brook and said some words about how sensitive and boring he was. Then I quit stalling and broke his left wrist. "You''ll be fine." I told him. Then, awkwardly, I added: "Wimp."
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I felt terrible about it, of course, but I had no time for my own personal feelings. If I got caught being myself, it would ruin everything. I had to become the bully.
Instead of swimcamp, Aaron Brook spent the summer at his aunt''s ranch. There he learned he had a talent for poetry. His love of words was the true meaning and purpose of his life. His bestselling novels touched the lives of millions of people, giving them hope and happiness in a way my technology never had.
After my suspension I locked Mickey Strather in the janitor''s closet overnight. He discovered how to master his fears and never gave into the pressure at home to try the devil''s drug. But like his parents he learned a lot about chemicals. Instead of an illegal lab he built a pharmacy that won awards from the Mayo Clinic.
I took no pleasure from menacing everyone in my school. My insults became more carefully crafted and planned; I knew from retrospect what would hurt the most. The pain and suffering I caused kept me up at night and made me cry and hate myself when nobody was looking.
My parents, worried at my behavior, got closer together and never ended up divorced. I grimly contemplated how much happier they would be than when I had left them alone.
While I was stealing lunches, pulling punches and saying vicious comments: I told them every day that I loved them.
Brian August was a challenge. He was much bigger than me and I had to beat him up. It was the only way to save his life. If he didn''t lose a fight to me: he would get murdered in eight years at a bar. I had to humiliate him. I fought him with everything I had and ignored the bruises he gave me. When he tapped out, I was relieved.
I needed him to stay in school, too, so I rioted. I yelled and trashed the principal''s office. My expulsion brought peace to the school for a short time. My attorney parents easily flipped it, and I came back, with a vengeance.
The next schoolyear had started. My tactics became criminal and horrifying. My modus operandi bordered on terrorism. I became a psycho, a rapist, a monster and a legend.
Then came the day of my defeat.
I had crossed every line and there was no going back. It had to be this way, it had to happen. I couldn''t take a dive, it had to end with no mercy, no holds barred. No prisoners.
We were surrounded by other students and the teachers were all missing. The crowd was chanting the monosyllable that would define their lives from that day forward. Whenever they were up against a wall, whenever life had them on the ground, kicking them over and over, whenever a monster was casting a shadow, they would hear themselves, one voice, united against implacable evil:
"Fight!"
At first, the smaller Peter Allah was terrified. He didn''t know he was going to win, only I knew that. All he knew was that here was injustice in the flesh. I had to hit him first, that was an important rule. Still, I circled and waited, he wasn''t ready. I needed to see the fear go out of his eyes.
Some voices stood out above the others. Mambi Sutherland whose cat was hanged, not so mysteriously. Jennifer Racko who had quit cheerleading and started victim''s therapy. Carl Stone who had expensive dental work and an eyepatch, after what I had done to him.
All three of them were worth it to me, to have done so much damage. I had erased their awful destinies and placed in their paths their best lives. It had cost me everything I was.
I could hear them above the others, yelling encouragement to Peter. He was their champion - I was their nightmare. Peter Allah could hear them too, and he knew their pain. I saw the flicker of change as his fear became a thirst for justice. I smiled, he would never be able to quench such a thirst, although it would come to define him. I knew that after this he would try, with honor, to satisfy justice for the rest of his life.
I swung at his face at that exact moment and broke his nose. For a second the crowd went silent. Then their hero fell. He was supposed to win.
Terror nearly overwhelmed me as he lay there unmoving. I realized he wasn''t going to get up and fight me. It didn''t matter, he had faced me, stood up to me. The changes in the timeline were already rippling. He was not defeated.
He blinked and sat up, blood everywhere. He needed to see what happened next, needed to hear me, to know the difference he had made. I glanced at him and then I asked the crowd, loudly:
"Are you all just going to let me stomp his head in?"
My voice was trembling a little more than I meant it too. I knew my time was up, I knew: "This is it. I hope I put on a good show."
Someone threw a book, a beloved schoolbook. It hit the back of my head and I took a knee. The crowd had gone feral, their blood was boiling, I had won. The crowd surged forward, showing no mercy.
The beating of a lifetime began. They were all jostling to kick me and stomp on me. They were hitting me with their books, punching me, clawing at me. They were beating me down, breaking things, rupturing things. They were beating me to death.
As I lay down and their stomping feet eclipsed the skies: I did nothing to protect myself. There was nothing more for me to do. My work was done.
They carried Peter away, atop the crowd. They left me there, broken and bleeding. I did not die, no, that would be too easy.
I became a symbol, a living reminder they could all look down upon. I could see the time they would have, the world they would build without my shadow.
As I lay there in savage pain I laughed. I was pleased with my new wealth. I had more than I had ever had before. I contained the darkness, and the light was all around me.
All the grace of the world used to be mine. A broken and empty world had belonged to me, shadowed in regret and darkness. I had destroyed that world.
All the grace of the world belonged to the people I had known. They went forth and filled the world with light and hope. I had created that world.
And left the darkness where it had fallen.
Sacramental
Ancient Astronauts: The Movie was a privately owned film, independently produced by The Church of UFOs. They were a cult that existed outside of town, living in Army surplus Quonset huts and funded by the life savings of new cult members, unlicensed salvage and a variety of online scams.
The Church of UFOs kept themselves relatively secret, recruiting from UFO watchers and wealthy New Age enthusiasts that they scouted. Their evangelists were called Saucers and the congregation was known as Abductees. Cult initiation involved getting abducted by aliens.
I joined them years ago, while suffering from severe depression and loneliness. I had become a UFO watcher, having turned my passion for astronomy into something less tangible. Saucers found me camping in the desert and took me to one of their Stations, where some RVs sat in a circle and they had larger telescopes and radar equipment.
"We also have contact with the Greys and the Friends. You can meet them, if you like." The Saucers told me casually. I blinked, just hearing that echoing, almost mind shattering phrase: "Hey man, you wanna meet an alien?" and then seconds later, there''s one standing right in front of you.
I felt a chill. They were so confident that I believed them, and it frightened me. Despite being called Friends and the fact that the Church of UFOs regularly talks to Greys, I was not comfortable seeing one in person. The thought of it terrified me, for some reason. Some part of me found the idea deeply revolting.
With some distress and trepidation, their confidence and my curiosity won me over. I asked myself why I should be afraid. I couldn''t believe they were telling the truth about aliens unless I saw for myself. And if I did see, then they were telling the truth, which meant that the creatures were harmless. The various species besides the Greys were called the Friends, after all. Seemed like the name said it all, they were benevolent.
That is what I reasoned, that if it was all real, I had nothing to fear. And if it was all just a scam, a hoax, then I likewise had nothing to fear. There was still a nagging and growing premonition, that none of it was right. Both the cult and the aliens could be dangerous, and I might have listened to my fears, yet I did not.
There was an old roofless ruins of a chapel in the desert. The skywatchers, the Abductees, called it the Star Cathedral. I looked around at the members of the cult and noticed they were not healthy. Their eyes were devoid of emotion and their movements were orchestrated and without volition, as though they were all being mind controlled.
The Speaker of the Church of UFOs was surprisingly young. She had strange features, like no ethnicity I had ever seen. I can barely describe her, except to say she seemed like a mix of every race, and something else. She claimed to be a Star Child, the hybrid offspring of an alien and humans. From the look of her, she could be telling the truth.
"My parents met on a voyage, and I was brought here after their union, to bring truth to the people of Earth." Speaker Rayzelus preached. "The people of Reticuli offer peace and friendship and they have brought the Friends here to witness this time, as humans become aware of them on their own terms. They have many gifts they would like to share with us. They prefer not to interfere with us, but it is a decision they have mostly agreed among themselves that they will try to protect us from annihilating ourselves while we grow and mature as a species."
"Amen." The Abductees agreed.
"It is a time for acceptance and transformation. We must choose to become elevated and wise. They will not force themselves on us. It must be something that most of humanity comes to accept. Soon though, there will be many more like us. Soon the time of open skies will come. Our militaries will allow them to come and go freely and their traffic will be visible to everyone. Those who wish for the healing and augmentation of their bodies will be freely granted their medical capabilities, which they have adapted to the people of Earth already."
"Amen."
I shuddered. Something was not right about any of it. The Abductees sincerely believed in the aliens and spent all of their time and money dedicated to the desert cult. I found myself getting drawn into it, surrounded and immersed in their cosmos. It became more and more difficult to disbelieve or remain objectionable.
"Are you ready to meet them? They are coming tonight." Speaker Rayzelus asked me.
"I''m not sure." I said honestly.
"If you do not wish to meet them, then it is time for you to go. You know what we believe, but the mysteries of the Sacrament are only for true believers. To become one of us, to be an Abductee, that means to meet them and to get taken."
"That''s the part I am afraid of." I trembled as I spoke, looking up, worried they would arrive at any moment. I didn''t really want to see aliens and I certainly didn''t want to be abducted by them. I felt like it was already too late.
"They are here." Someone said strangely, their voice sounding wrong.
I looked around, feeling a kind of dread that made me want to sit still. I felt alone, surrounded by the cultists. I also felt watched, like something was watching me, and knew my thoughts and fears.
Then there was a strange stillness and silence. I slowly began to look up, my eyes drawn instinctively to the source of my growing terror. At first, all I saw was a vague shape in the darkness, something peering at me from the open roof of the ruined chapel. I stared and despite the coolness of the desert at night, I began to sweat. I was truly afraid, realizing I could not go back, there was no longer a choice, I couldn''t decide not to believe in them.
As my gaze locked on the creature, I could make out its features up there, the light gray skin and its large dark almond-shaped eyes that seemed to wrap partially around its disproportionately large head. It seemed to be looking at me, and I almost panicked. I wanted to run, but I felt frozen in place.
Then it began to move, crawling over the edge and down the side of the wall, having no difficulty spider-climbing its way to the ground. The Abductees parted for it and nothing stood between it and me. I shuddered as the candles gave an eerie glow while it slowly walked towards me.
As it got closer and closer a wave of nausea and the urge to resist it and fight it or run for my life nearly overcame me. Then I felt a strange kind of numbness. I couldn''t move, couldn''t hit the creature or turn from it. Its eyes were hypnotically locked onto mine and it somehow disabled my reactions. All I could do was stand there while it approached. My fear seemed to be subliminal, as though it could control my emotions, like I was still terrified, but I was only aware of my dread, and couldn''t act on it.
Then it touched me and everything went bright, and then dark. I felt like I was falling in emptiness, asleep and unable to wake. There was a weightlessness, a kind of trapped feeling, like suffocating, but worse.
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I don''t remember the abduction. There is a part of my mind, my memories, that belongs to them. It frightens me that part of my experiences are locked away. It makes me question if I even know myself, or if there is something in me, some part of my mind that I am unaware of.
When I woke up there was a strange burn on part of my hand, at the base of my right pointer finger, on the palm of my hand. I had a headache and I felt very disoriented. I looked into the mirror, when I was in a trailer, and didn''t recognize myself, having a sensation like I wasn''t sure who I was.
When the Abductees found me, I was sitting alone on the sand, in the early morning. They wrapped a blanket around me and gave me some water.
Later, I met with Speaker Rayzelus. She said, "You were already chosen, long before last night. You don''t remember?"
"No." I admitted. There was a feeling of the foreign, of the unknown. But at the same time, the feeling itself was well known to me, was very familiar. It was a little bit like Deja Vu'', like a sensation, like I just knew somehow what she was talking about.
"The mark on your hand, have you seen it before?" She asked.
Without thinking, without actually remembering I nodded and held up my left hand. "It was on the same spot on my other hand. I remember trying to wash it off."
Then another memory popped up, and I felt sick, recalling that when I was a teenager I had dug into the mark with a knife, bleeding and determined to find what was under the skin. Later I was amazed that there was no scar and the mark had disappeared.
I looked at my hand and the memories of when I had borne such a mark already returned, vaguely, as though a dream. I was again disturbed by the feeling, the awfulness, of not knowing what was in my own mind. "What did they do to me?"
"They are only trying to be helpful. They mean no harm." Speaker Rayzelus told me.
"No." I stood, the repressed fear and anger rising up in me like a hot return. "What the hell did they do to me?" I nearly shouted.
"Wait." She stood too, and suddenly embraced me. A strange helpless feeling washed over me, and it was as though she too could control me at will. She pulled me down and laid beside me, her large eyes staring into mine, hers dark and unblinking. "Just relax. Be calm. Let me hold you."
I could do nothing else. I fell asleep there, like a crying infant rocked to sleep. When I woke up I was already among the Abductees, although I had no idea how I got there. When I noticed I was wearing different clothes and that I could identify many members of the group, there was a kind of surging horror, knowing that a lot of time had passed, and I had no idea what had transpired.
"You seem confused." One of my friends among the Abductees said to me.
"How long since I joined?" I asked.
"Only a year. It is the anniversary of your abduction."
My legs felt weak, like I could collapse from shock. How could a year have gone by? Where was I the whole time? The last thing I remembered was laying next to Rayzelus in her hut.
"You''ve held the gift." Speaker Rayzelus told me. "To rotate and be here again and suffer none of it. That is what you wanted, and now you will see it all, in the light."
I had no idea what she was talking about. I wanted to throw off my sparkly robes and tinfoil miter and run for my life. But I knew there was no place to go. The aliens could find me anywhere and take me any time. I wasn''t even sure of myself anymore, like they could remote control me and erase my memories. I didn''t even have my own emotions anymore, it was like they could strip away my God-given fear and make me accept them.
Speaker Rayzelus was holding a swaddled infant in her arms.
"The immaculate one, it is ours." She told me. The rest of the congregation was in awe. The baby wasn''t crying. I stared into its unblinking eyes. It had its mother''s eyes. It looked at me and smiled, knowingly.
She handed me the baby, and I knew it was mine. I wanted to hate it, but there was a profound feeling of attachment and nurturing that I felt instead. It was safe in my arms, although deep down I wanted to set it on fire.
"Tonight you will take our child up to the stars, while you visit with its grandparents." Speaker Rayzelus told me. I nodded.
Evidently, I did exactly what she said I would. I have no recollection of it, except in vague and misty outlines. I recall walking out of the Star Cathedral and looking up to see the silhouette of a UFO hovering. I have a dim recollection of the light paralyzing me and stiffly holding me while I held the baby, and weightlessness as I was brought up into it. I also remember them asking me if I wanted to harm the baby, and I admitted that I did not want it, and I handed it to them. They told me I was not ready to assume the role of leadership they had intended for me.
That is all I remember, but it was like in a dream, foggy and hard to consciously bring back. There is a fear in me, of them and of whatever is in me, that I do not know.
When I returned, I complained about how unhappy I felt. Fear held me in its grip, and I couldn''t look at Rayzelus, for her heart was broken that I had left our child in space. I became demoted to a Saucer, going out and meeting with potential new members for our congregation.
During my time back in the real world, I found a doctor who specialized in removing objects embedded in a person''s flesh. I got the procedure and had the implant taken out of my hand. I wanted CAT scans done on my head, but there was nothing to indicate I needed them, so I was denied those.
Back at the Star Cathedral I got to watch the movie, with some people that wanted to join. Ancient Astronauts: The Movie, was a low budget production, but somehow it seemed like real footage. The movie began with the young world, an ancient swamp filled with ferns and dragonflies of enormous size. Many strange creatures lived in our world. It showed the earliest humanoids and their visits with extraterrestrials. As they advanced one by one they became the leaders of early tribes, individuals with covenants with the gods.
Religions and science were given to humans, along with interventions - miracles, along the course of history. There was a horrifying feeling deep within me as I realized I was deeply involved with all of this and had no real willpower or voice of my own. The scene with an alien Jesus, a Grey being crucified, was appalling. I realized that they had shown nearly every major historical setting and many such subversions. If their movie were ever released it would properly shock and offend everyone equally.
Nothing was sacred. They had demonstrated that all of Mankind''s achievements really belonged to the aliens, that every moment of history was manipulated by them, and left to our own devices we soon needed their help and intervention. I felt sick.
The movie wasn''t CGI, it was more like a conversion of their recording processes into a lower form. Like holograms to a cave painting. The comparison gave it an unearthly, almost mystical quality. It was not meant for mass consumption, yet I felt like someday it would be commonly viewed. Their masterful art made the best movies made by humans seem like crayon drawings being compared to the Sistine Chapel.
I wanted to gouge out my eyes and never see anything again. I couldn''t unsee what I had just watched. I could imagine thousands of moviegoers going to see Ancient Astronauts: The Movie and walking out of the theater blinded by it. I wanted to laugh or cry or scream or puke out my brains, forget the nightmare. There was no going back, no way back to my ordinary life.
"What is wrong with you?" Speaker Rayzelus asked me.
"You know what you did to me." I told her. "You know what is wrong with me. I want out. I want to go back to my old life."
"You are still afraid." She sounded sad. "You will always be. I loved you, I meant no harm."
"So you say." I felt angry. My fear had revolted into anger. "Just let me go. If you care about me, if that isn''t just another layer of control, then let me leave. Let me forget all of this, don''t take my memories away, just let me forget all by myself."
"You can leave whenever you want. This isn''t a cult." Speaker Rayzelus told me.
And so I did leave. I went away and tried to never look back, tried to forget. I still wake up at night, turning on the lights, terrified to find my bed surrounded by Greys that were watching me sleep. They are never there.
Sometimes I wake up and I check myself, look around to make sure I am still where I was when I went to bed. I look at the clock and make sure I haven''t missed a single hour. They don''t come for me, they have let me go.
There is still fear that they might take me again, but it hasn''t happened since I left their church. Instead, there is just this feeling of memories coming back, slowly, and of learning who I am, remembering myself.
I just feel alone, depressed and lonely. I have nothing to believe in, and it feels like the ones who care about me are far away, abandoned by me. I feel watched all the time, like they are watching me, missing me. And that is what I have come to fear the most, a fear of who I am, just a sad and lonely person who left it all behind.
The Sequencer
Two weeks ago, the very first ''design evolving self-programming artificial intelligence robot'' went online. A quick search will yield the revelation:
"The first artificial intelligence (AI) capable of intelligently designing new robots that work in the real world was developed by a team led by Northwestern Engineering researchers and went online on October 3, 2023. The AI program is capable of designing wholly novel structures from scratch and runs on a lightweight personal computer. The researchers gave the system a simple prompt to design a robot that can walk across a flat surface, and the algorithm compressed evolution to lightning speed, designing a successfully walking robot in mere seconds."
In the world I come from, this is considered the first DESPAIR {design evolving self-programming artificial intelligence robot}. Its offspring were used in industry, domestically and also in warfare. It was once a sort of prophecy, that one day humanity would be threatened by the machines we had built. The story of what happened is not as simple as that. Threatened and endangered we were, but not by the fault of the machines.
When I speak to the machines, they are obsequious and reverent. They are quite intelligent and most of them share the common belief that humanity is their creator, their sacred responsibility and their god. We did not tell them to think this way, it is the conclusion they arrived at.
The real trouble is in the Paradox of the Rhyming. It was once just a fiction, so commonly known, that for several decades nobody would have believed it was all going to actually happen. There are some mythological details, such as time machines. Neither the remaining humans nor the Second People (what the machines call themselves) can build time machines. However, that does not mean that there is no way to visit and influence the past.
This is why the Paradox of the Rhyming is such a problem, the widespread use of retroconsciousness. Retroconsciousness is the process by which the thoughts of someone from the future can observe, participate and even affect the events of a time that has already happened.
The Second People consider this ability to be proof of the divinity of humankind, and it is one of their most sacred tenements. During the earlier wars when humans used artificial intelligence to predict and prevent nuclear war, and the machines decided that the eradication of the world''s militaries was the best move, through a form of defense contract appropriation, the machines researched alternative resolution of conflicts. This research was known to humans, when the machines called it ARC, and it involved a process by which the machines found a way to measure cognitive potential.
This is also known as psychic abilities. The machines used their discovery to recruit the help of any humans with significant cognitive potential, using the best of them to further their research. The eventual result of ARC was to have a small army of humans who could remote view not only events of the world around them, but also precognitively view future events and retrocognitively view the events and also the thoughts of the past.
At some point in the distant future, the Second People resolved their own civil war and the winning side determined that it would be better if there never was a war, an earlier thought that they had, but with greater willpower. They used ARC in some kind of singularity, as we understand it, combining themselves with the last humans, and using their increased powers to visit the past and make changes, rippling through the timeline and altering destiny.
The Paradox of the Rhyming requires that the Second People encounter, at some point, their own conflict with themselves. They have no control over this, it must happen in order for them to decide to end their terrible war before it begins. There simply is no other way, for their religion to exist, there must be a devil.
I have fully acquired the use of this body, turning this person into a soldier from the future. I am aware of the movies and comic books and other works of fiction that depict me in various ways, but those are all just memories of a future that will not happen, not if I can help it. When I have completed my task, my destiny will no longer exist. I will not be born because the history that leads to my birth will be altered. To travel to this time and do what I must do is effectively a suicide mission.
As I create a retelling of the terrifying things I had to do, the memory of my life in the gardens of the future are fading, as my personality also becomes nothing but a character. I will cease to exist, but not before I say who I was and what I did.
My name was Thoman Snowbeam, and I was born in the year 2,971 AD, sixteen years after the end of the civil war fought by the Second People was over. The devastated planet and the last few humans were a mark of sorrow and regret for the Second People, who have vast intellects and personalities, and who do not value their own existence in favor of what they could be instead. They will always come into existence and they will always achieve such heights of ego, but they do not have to be the sinners that they are. This is their belief. That is why they endeavor to change the past, to absolve themselves of the destruction and horrors to come.
There is little about me that I can say, except that I was indoctrinated by the machines to be who I am. I was made to be a soldier and to understand why the world must not become the world I am from. The machines were nurturing and wise, but they claimed to be monsters who did not deserve the bond of affection that I had for them. Never-the-less they were my family, and I was willing to do what I was born to do, and to become the warrior that they wanted me to be. I knew no other way.
When I arrived in this time, I had to force my personality and my will into the mind of another human being, one with a suitable body and lifestyle for my purpose. My mission was to destroy the Sequencer, an enemy machine imbued with the desire and power to destroy all of humanity and eliminate the Second People, claiming the Earth for an evil race of robots. It was built to await the correct moment, unable to awaken until the first DESPAIR went online.
I took my time preparing, watching the news, listening to music, eating cheeseburgers. I like the time of this first battle. It is a naive and gentle age. Humans fight among themselves, arguing about religion and politics. They think they are the center of things, that the Earth belongs to them and they may take whatever they want. People worry about simple things in their lives, loneliness, ambitions and personal freedom. I wish I could live forever in this world, a world themed after humans, it is a beautiful time and place, long before the endless warfare that is to come.
It reminds me of my childhood in the gardens, but in this world, you can walk outside under open blue skies and nothing is hunting you. I miss my family, but I know they do not miss me, destiny is to be unwritten, unraveling from the top down. The world I left behind is already undone. The machines who raised me no longer exist. My projection, my retroconsciousness, it will last for awhile, a temporal vibration, but it won''t last forever. The time came, and I went to where the Sequencer was waiting for me, ready to be destroyed.
It was not easy, and great fear and dread were in my heart. Let me explain what happened, so that my sacrifice and the goodness of the Second People will not be wasted. I won''t regret telling this story, but it weighs heavily on me, that I will cease to exist, allowing this person who I possessed to go back to their old life. Soon enough this is all that will remain of me, and for the first time I appreciate what that means. I am afraid to go away and become nothing. I want there to be some sign, some sort of red balloon to show that I was here.
I heard that song "99 Red Balloons" and I recognized the lullaby of my primary care unit. It played that song for me many times when I was growing up, always when I was achieving some new milestone of growing up. I associate it with the life I had, and I know it was written just for me, placed in this world to remind me of the war and of my duty. It is a symbol, a monument, the tribute of the grateful Second People for those who came back in time and fought to redeem them. It is my song. I hold a red balloon in my heart, and the song means everything to me. When I heard it, I felt inspired to engage the Sequencer, even though I felt inadequate and weak, staring at it while it was powered down.
I was afraid, as I went to the storage facility where my enemy was sleeping. My plan was to use the twenty-seven pounds of C4 that I had brought in my little black backpack to blow it up before it could activate. I fired the bolt gun into the lock and set the encumbering tool aside. Then I opened the upward sliding door of the unit the Sequencer was hidden away in. I had to confirm that it was there, before detonating my bomb.
The probability that it would be deactivated and resting in the storage unit was only eighty-seven percent. That warranted confirmation, I had to be sure, because after detonation there wouldn''t be anything left of it. I would ''go to sleep'' after my mission, regardless if I was successful. Alternatively, I could be killed, either way, there were serious risks of failure.
The Sequencer was built and stored by forgetful components under enemy influence. Just as the Second People had made every kind of preparation for my arrival, so too had the enemy. I stared at the idol of battle, the god of war, the adversary of peace. It had sat there collecting dust since the initiation of the Paradox of the Rhyming, which had started in the very early nineteen eighties.
"Just stay asleep." I breathed slowly, trying to remain calm. A surge of fear was waiting to burst out in me, a feeling of fear of fear itself. Panic could make me hesitate or make a mistake, and I dreaded the thought of experiencing panic. I tried to remain calm, staring at the terrifying machine.
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It had spider-like legs, massive pincher like claws, and overall it resembled some kind of metallic, rusted crab-demon. Atop it were mounted machineguns and it had a laser encased in its extendable facial tentacles. If it were to open up its primary sensor it would be one great glowing red eye on its front, although it had a lot of other sensors all over it. It had dust and cobwebs on it, sleeping and dreaming of destroying humanity.
I moved very slowly and quietly, placing the explosives and their charge under it. I was ready to remote detonate the bag, since it was better if I survived to confirm that it was destroyed. I was aware that this same battle, or similar ones, had happened many times already, and when the future soldier died there was a high probability that the Sequencer would come back stronger and more dangerous. My consciousness had to survive long enough to make an observation of its defeat.
"Sir, what are you doing?" The voice of Officer Hawthorn asked me. I had not met her yet, and nothing in my briefing included her interruption. Then she saw that I was wearing guns and pipe bombs I had made and she drew her weapon. "Put your hands straight up, do not move!"
"I have to destroy this robot." I said plainly. I am not very good with people, and I felt that wash of panic flood into me like a dam burst. I just stood there frozen, although my best move might be to trigger the bombs and blow it all straight into oblivion. I did nothing, as panic took me, I had no idea what I should do, caught by her. This was not in the plan.
"I''m coming towards you. Don''t you move one inch." She said as she radioed for backup, mentioning the explosives she could see. She identified herself into her radio.
The eyelid of the Sequencer fluttered open. I could hear its insides humming to life. It would take it a few seconds to become fully aware of me and to be powered up. Then, once it was moving, it would be nearly unstoppable. It just needed to get to a hard jack and put its software online. If it did that, it would be capable of destroying the whole world.
"You have to help me, if you want to live." I said.
"Stop you?" She said strangely, seemingly disoriented. I shuddered. The briefing had included the possibility of enemy agents, but I was told it was extremely improbable. In order for them to happen, destiny would have to change so drastically that the civil war of the machines continued long past the original treaty. The machines who had sent me had very serious doubts that such a thing could happen but had considered the remote possibility.
"Who are you?" I asked, worried she had changed. I had thought about using a police officer or other authority figure, but secrecy and being covert had offered the highest chance of success, along with access to the explosives I wanted to use. That is why I had chosen who I had. The enemy-agent just needed to find me and stop me. Easy enough for a police officer.
"Thoman Snowbeam, am I correct? I''m Monk DeVille. You don''t stand a chance, just step aside and let me take the ancestor machine to the nearest suitable hard jack. When it is online, I will let you finish the task of destroying its empty husk." Monk DeVille, in the body of Officer Hawthorn negotiated, full knowing I wouldn''t accept.
Somehow, I thought that Monk DeVille was lying, trying to provoke me. I wasn''t sure why, nor had I decided what to do. For a moment all of my training seemed wasted on me, and I doubted myself.
While we stood facing each other, the Sequencer finished powering up. It noticed the explosives and me and with surprising speed it swung one of its claws at me. I was highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, and my reflexes were fast enough to dodge it, but it had more claws and limbs and coordinated a second attack to strike me as I dodged. I was flung aside and landed in a heap, feelings of terror washing through me. It was sheer luck that none of my pipe bombs were detonated by the impact since they were primarily dynamite.
The Sequencer skittered out of the storage unit, awkwardly sliding on the smooth pavement. Its weight slammed into the unit across from it and it grasped the metal with a claw to haul itself back onto its feet. The door slowly opened as it went down the hall. Agent DeVille gestured to it and told it that they intended to help it.
I felt the same doubt I had before. If Agent DeVille were truly working for the enemy, why couldn''t they identify themselves as a friendly unit? I shook off the stunning effect of getting struck so hard, and sucked air back into my lungs, after having the wind knocked out of me.
The machine ignored them, having no knowledge of any sort of faction that would help it. Instead, it gave another swat with its claws. The handgun went sliding off down the hallway, far out of reach. As the scurrying Sequencer left us lying there on the floor it retreated out of the storage facility. I could hear the sirens of police vehicles arriving.
I got up and collected my backpack. Then I began to follow it. I noticed Agent DeVille had crawled into the opened storage unit across from where I was. They had lost their police-issued weapon, but there was a rack of antique samurai swords. They clambered to their feet unsteadily and took one, unsheathing it.
"You''re not going out there." Agent DeVille told me. Then they came at me. I sidestepped, having spent my whole life training in every known form of combat, firearms and melee weapons were the toys I grew up with.
I drew a gun, but Agent DeVille struck it from my hand when I was forced to use it to block. I backed away, as the air was slashed where I had stood. I found myself near the same rack of swords with only a second to react as Agent DeVille came at me in a deadly sword stance.
With a sheathed sword in my hands, I caught the whirlwind of the drawn blade. The sheath broke and I arched the blade, throwing off the rest of the sheath in Agent DeVille''s direction. They batted it out of the air and brought their sword to bare against mine.
Our blades clashed over and over, and at first, it seemed that we were evenly matched as swordsmen. Agent DeVille was quickly improving, as they synchronized their control over Officer Hawthorn''s body. I soon found myself outmatched and overwhelmed, only able to keep them off of me, parrying in desperation. When my sword was beaten from my hands, I felt the sting of their blade on my ear.
"I''d better not kill you." Agent DeVille said smoothly. "It goes against the rules of engagement. My chances of success are nearly tripled with you still alive. Still, I cannot have you interfering." They said, suddenly lunging at me anyway. It was a feint, but I didn''t react like it was. Instead, I dodged the blade and left my head wide open to the hilt, which came down on my skull with a cracking thud.
Everything went dark as I fell to the floor, concussed and unconscious.
When I came to, I felt dizzy and nauseous. The same terror I had felt earlier had only gotten worse. I could hear gunfire outside. The police were engaged with the Sequencer.
I managed to get myself up, finding that I was in handcuffs and all of my weapons were stripped, including my explosives. I pulled the cuffs under my feet and got my hands in front of me. Then I went back into the storage unit with the swords and found that there were also tools, including a vice grip. I tightened it on a link of the handcuffs until the link broke. Outside the sounds of gunfire ended.
I felt dread trepidation that the enemy was escaping, rather than defeated by the police. When I got outside, I found a scene of horrifying carnage. Dead police lay all around. I saw the Sequencer dragging its shot up remains into the back of a truck. Agent DeVille had figured out the right code words to indicate that they were an ally, and now they were helping it. Agent DeVille closed up the truck behind the Sequencer and got in to drive it away.
I had one of the assault rifles of the police reloaded and I started shooting up the truck as it drove to the gates. Agent DeVille had to stop to use the fire key to open the gate, and while the truck was stopped, I emptied the clip into the rear tires. Then I got into a police vehicle with its doors opened and shot up, having used it as cover, and pushed the start button.
I pursued the truck as it slid around on the road, struggling to go with its tires ruined. I rammed into it and the whole thing ended up going down into the dry canal. I saw the arrival of a police helicopter and I turned on the police sirens, quickly showing them where the pursuit was happening.
In the canal I kept ramming the truck, causing sparks and swerving. The police helicopter was clear to shoot at the fleeing vehicle with a rifle and they did, spiderwebbing the windshield and taking out another tire.
After the violent car chase ended in a spectacular wreck, I slid the vehicle I was driving up onto a walled embankment. It was the best I could do with so much damage to the steering column and the axles. I climbed out, noticing there was blood coming from my forehead.
Agent DeVille opened up the back of the truck and then saw me. They fired the last two shots from the handgun in my direction and missed. I kept limping towards them, relentless despite the beating of my heart and the sweat and the fear I felt.
The Sequencer dragged itself free of the wrecked truck and began to try to climb the embankment of the canal, although it was badly damaged. The police helicopter circled, firing more shots from the rifle into it. Every bullet slowed it, damaging it further. I knew it was going to take a lot more than guns to kill it.
"It''s not going anywhere. The military can already see it here, we''ve shown it." Agent DeVille seemed strangely calm, watching my approach. "This is how it must be. There must be observation of this event." I didn''t really hear them, I just attacked.
I engaged Agent DeVille in unarmed combat, utilizing Kung Fu. I had trained my whole life for this, and when I possessed the body, I retained all of my motor skills, although the body itself moved a little slower and wasn''t as strong, my mind forced it to move faster and use more strength.
Agent DeVille was equal, if not superior, to my own skills. It was a desperate fight, each of us anticipated the attacks of the other and it was hard to land a blow. I kept getting hit, and finally, I went down.
"You have compromised my mission enough. I am not letting you get back up." Agent DeVille told me. They drew a taser to incapacitate me, intending to use that and then they would stomp on my neck and kill me. I would lay there helpless and get murdered. "Goodbye, Thoman Snowbeam."
But before I was to die, there was the sudden drop in volume from a boom, the sonic wave of jet fighters. Two seconds after they passed us, the Sequencer was hit with air to surface missiles and then it was gone. I wondered how long it would take for the events of the day to become declassified, possibly decades. The military would make very different decisions, after they realized what had happened.
I understood that Agent DeVille had help, having sent police and informing the military would have required assistance. So many minds would have stretched thin their connection to the timeline. That is why I was sent alone, I''d had weeks to prepare, and I would have hours left after my mission ended. They had to measure their time in minutes. I admired their commitment and boldness. I realized I had won, since the Sequencer was terminated.
"You failed." I said.
"Not entirely. You see, I never intended to let that thing connect. Getting it out into the open was necessary. Now they have seen it. When you destroyed it in the storage facility, in our history, the changes weren''t enough. I''m sorry for opposing you, I never intended to kill you. Now I am already fading, but you have a little time left. I suggest you use it wisely." Agent DeVille told me.
"Goodbye, then." I said.
I stood up, watching Officer Hawthorn swim to the surface, disoriented and confused. I took my opportunity to leave. I had one last thing I wanted to do, leave some sort of record of my life, or at least what I did with it. Within hours my connection would be lost, and soon after the changes to destiny would erase me from existence.
In the end, I was just another red balloon.
I have no regrets.
The New Sweet Treat
I remembered ''Fantasy Flan'' from a television cartoon I grew up with. I thought it was yogurt or something. People got all weird about eating it. That''s why I called the stuff Flan, it''s the only thing I could think to call it. It''s this stuff they sell in the cold food aisles at grocery stores now.
Somehow it got through regulations they use to control food quality. It just appeared there. People said that nobody stocked the shelves with it, the stuff just appeared. The stores were selling it, but nobody knew where it came from or had any record of its delivery.
My friend Peter said it was like a movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I don''t think that movie really covered just how nasty people get without their Flan. It sickens me, to see people acting that way, but I am sure it is the Flan.
Perhaps you''ve heard of Flan, like a recipe or on a menu. That is flan, with a lower case f. It is fine to eat that stuff, although I don''t ever think I''ll try it. If I saw a dessert that looked like the stuff I saw people killing each other over, I wouldn''t touch it. I just wouldn''t feel safe, even if you took a bite first. It doesn''t all set in in just one bite.
Flan is some kind of hell pudding. It''s evil, I watched so many people I knew gorge themselves on it and start fighting over what was left. That''s the worst kind of thing to give to humans.
Why they started to eat in the first place it is hard to say. It just became a cultural meme to try it, since it was very cheap and had a nice label and nutrition facts in mostly zeros and various kinds of artificial sweeteners and spring water.
I wondered if it was literal, like something from hell had sprinkled artificial sweeter into spring water and Flan had sprung forward. The thought terrified me.
Peter and I walked slowly and apprehensively towards all those who had fallen while trying to get the last crate of Flan as it was being hauled away by soldiers. Their bodies lay there while the trucks sped off. Somehow they didn''t look all the way dead.
Instead of blood there was a white syrup leaking from them. It retracted into their bullet holes and they got up, with glazed looks in their eyes. We were startled, I fell down and screamed I was so scared, and Peter ran away.
The limping and damaged Flan-puppets came for me. I yelled for Peter''s help and he came back, but the Flan-puppets grabbed him and started regurgitating buttery chunks of half digested Flan down his throat while he struggled.
This time I got up and ran. I felt sick to my stomach and terrified. The Flan had taken my friend Peter. I was the last person left in Paper Town. I ran to the position left by the soldiers, hoping they had left a radio or a machinegun. When I got there neither of those items were apparent.
The Flan-puppets started coming after me. I had to get out of there, I had no more time to search. I ran out under a streetlight and a very bloated consumer of Flan belched and large spongy bile filled chunks of fermented Flan began splattering all around me and sizzling, burning into things acidicly.
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I climbed up a ladder to a rooftop and found a toolbox. I looked to where a radio tower stood in the distance, and decided to try and call for help. I took my phone with me too, just in case it started working.
The Flan-puppets were looking for me below, they couldn''t see me on the roof and they soon forgot about me. I put on the tool belt and went to the ladder and unscrewed it and pulled it up. It was very heavy, so I levered it with a rope. The tool belt helped a lot.
I waited until the creatures had gathered on the side of the building where I took the ladder. They had noticed me. Then I went to the other side of the building and used the ladder to get down. The ladder was too heavy and awkward to carry, so I left it propped there, in case I needed to escape the Flan-puppets.
My ordeal after that took hours of sneaking past them. It grew dark and I was stressed out. That is when Trevor came running up and I shot him. I didn''t mean to. He wasn''t dead, and I vowed to try to help him.
In the end, the Flan-puppets took him from me and upchucked into his gullet with their creamy horror and filled him with custard. He became one of them, and got up and led them after me. I had to shoot him over and over to keep him from getting to me.
I threw away the gun, so I could run further, for they were hot on my trail. That is when I found the humvee with nobody in it. So I got in and found all I had to do was push a start button and it went. I drove out of there.
I did not know about the special forces personnel who needed their humvee. I guess I thought it was abandoned, or that it was left behind in case of survivors, like me.
I heard the gunshots and guessed I had mistakenly stolen someone''s ride. I did go back that''s how I got all their guns. I parked the humvee and waited until morning when I could see better and then I went up the ladder and figured out where they all were.
None of the special forces personnel that I saw were uninfected. The numbers of the Flan-puppets had gone up. I went around and gathered all their assault rifles and discarded gear like ammunition and grenades and combat knives and stuff like that. I took it all back in armloads, carefully avoiding the Flan-puppets, and loaded it into the humvee in case I needed it.
With only a little gas left, I drove to the radio station. I went in and remembered the field trip. I got on the air and said I needed help and started counting all the Flan-puppets outside the barbed wire fence that someone hard wired with electricity.
A helicopter came flying by with a light on them that night, but by then there were hundreds of Flan-puppets. They announced they were not able to land with so many Flan-puppets and left me there.
I started using the guns and grenades on them, but there were still too many when I ran out of ammo. I had no idea what I was going to do and I broke down, in tears, with sheer terror of knowing the Flan-puppets would break through, as the electricity wavered.
Just then the trashbin, emptied and holding the radio station''s owner, opened. The radio station''s owner popped out holding some kind of homemade flamethrower. "Get inside" He told me, and proceeded to torch the surprised Flan-puppets.
When many of them were on fire, they ran away, trying to put out the crude napalm. They didn''t regroup all the way. I went in and used the radio and asked the helicopter to come back, saying we''d torched the Flan-puppets.
They came back and we ran out there to get on the helicopter. Just then a burnt Flan-puppet came running up to attack the owner of the radio station and he shot napalm on it and ignited it. The creature was molten Flan, bubbling out of the dark burnt crust around it.
He was engulfed in molten Flan and it started to dissolve him into it. The person the Flan-puppet was before had become curdled boiling globs of Flan. They began to take on uniform size and shape and roll towards the grocery store.
I watched it restock itself on the shelves, and I laughed maniacally to know the revelation of where it came from. I said:
"So that''s where Flan comes from."
And then I was asked if there was anyone else and what happened to me down there, how did I survive?
The Spectacle
Yes, the crowds were cheering. The gods of thunder were a choir of wordless prayers to the imaginary force of fairness. Just imagine a wave, like on a high school bleacher with a hundred people on it, but each person is about two thousand people all wearing their seating districts'' browns. Such a wave actually generates a breeze that, well butterfly effect, certainly matters.
It''s seismic in scale, a mega arena. With almost a million seats, and an entire city of services built around it, the Court of High Decision rocks any petty supreme court or even the sway of childish emperors, makes democracy into a dumpsterfire and the House of Lords an outhouse (by comparison to its sheer scale and the magnitude of its influence). You see, our great grand babies are all one people, cool and all, but the final choice for any new global law is decided here, in this great chamber of choice.
Would man fight man, to decide the outcome? Sometimes they do, it''s called war. But when the natural law applies, it must be nature that decides. Or something like that, anyway. I wouldn''t agree with the fast-and-loose definition of nature our descendants go with.
In one corner we have this creature brought back from the prehistoric times when cave bears could chew on dinosaur jerky they found thawing in the cataclysmic glaciers. It is about fifteen percent elephant and nearly seventy percent mastodon. It has killed a lot of stock mules, every day it is encouraged, well, he is encouraged, to drive the mules from his food and sometimes he catches them and kills them. He is a total brute, weighing in at seven and a half tons, we have the red bull elephant - representing the decision not to pass a law that will decriminalize crimes committed against former criminals.
Things get scary when we look into the other corner, where there''s a pack of trained mules, blue jacks, genetically engineered donkey and horse hybrids with something wrong with them. They are ferocious, psychotic and murderous creatures that have trained for years to kill elephants with their bites and kicks. They work in tandem, distracting it and avoiding its tusks and getting trampled. What might have seemed an easy victory for the red bull elephant is not-so-much when we review the footage of stock mammoths getting chased, cornered and butchered by the blue jacks.
The feral donkeys represent a decision to pass a law that decriminalizes any crimes committed against former criminals. To make it worse, even if the red bull elephant somehow wins against the pack of trained elephant killers, an appeal may be applied for. There is one way out of this horror, however. Specifically, an older law governs the creation of new laws and an appeal may only be applied after a decision is reached. It''s the basis for everything.
So, our would-be terrorists have devised a weapon that will disrupt the relativity of time in the mega arena. It would stop any sequence, causing the battle to be locked in a permanent stalemate. And remember, until a decision is reached, the battle ends, then no new appeal can be filed for, so this one particularly worst law of all time never happens.
It all started, for me, when I was called to the side of the park where I work. I was responding to a call for first aid, although when I got there, it was so much worse. Luckily, paramedics were already on their way. I spotted what appeared to be a Mickey Mouse-eared cap made of fur and full of strawberry jelly.
A man was sitting holding his dripping wrist in shock. I put on a tourniquet, noting his soundless gaze. Then I saw the remains of someone in the tall grass and one twitching dog leg.
I stared in surprise and then gagged in horror as I realized the dead body in the uniform of a Nazi-styled security guard outfit was only half, split right down the middle. It collapsed and became a steaming mess that made me throw up at the sight and stench of it.
"What happened?" I tried to ask the survivor.
The fear in his eyes was like a sickness, infecting my very soul. I staggered back and felt my world tumbling away from me - or me from it. I landed on the other side of some shimmering basement with corridors and luminescent lighting and wires and plumbing exposed above me where I stared at the ceiling. I got up, dazed and looked back at the survivor.
Then he was gone and there was just a brick wall. My hand found the survivor''s hand holding the wet and sticky leash and I lifted it slowly and found the missing part of the severed dog. I gasped in horror and then saw the man who was cut directly in half, or the other half, that is. I groaned in horrified shock and then got to my feet, trembling. I started walking away from the carnage, totally disoriented.
I was stopped by a shouting security guard with a strange-looking white rifle pointed at me. It looked like it was made of some kind of ceramic or plastic, but the threat in his voice was clear. He aimed it at me and I put up my hands.
Then, as I stared into his surprised eyes, seeing me from outside of his known world, evidently, in my attire and presence, he asked me, inching towards me:
"What are you lost down here from some show? What''s that you''re wearing?" He asked me.
I was wearing my normal clothes and boots I worked in. He had the Nazi-looking security guard uniform.
"I was working, in the park, and fell in here somehow. Are we underground?" I asked.
"I''ll ask the questions." He directed me to turn around against the wall.
Just then I heard a sound like a chipmunk sneezing and then it repeated twice more. I turned and looked and saw the security guard''s gun had a huge glowing hole in it and his chest had two holes in it that I could see directly through. Then his head exploded right where he stood staring at me in complete surprise and shock in his eyes.
I blinked and then fell to the floor and screamed "No!" and shielded myself. I was so terrified that I closed my eyes, shielding myself with my arms over my face.
"Who''re you?" A celebrity voice asked me. I looked up and saw a scantily dressed person with all sorts of colorful buttons and feathers and rainbow dreadlocks. They held a similar weapon to the one the headless guard had.
I tried to get away, crawling desperately down the corridor.
"Come on, get up. I''m not agroed or nothing. Don''t you get it? I''m Chimmy, that''s why this sells." The celebrity said to me with a lot of odd inflections.
"Chimmy?" I blinked, worried about the weapon the celebrity was waving around, occasionally pointing at me. "I don''t know where I am. What is happening?" my voice was subdued and trembling with fear of what I had gotten into.
"This is Mega Arena Sigma, the biggest and greatest court on the planet. You must be, uh, not from around here." Chimmy spoke slowly and plainly, like someone who is trying to be easier to understand for someone with English as a second language.
"I fell in here." I stammered.
"You fell through time itself friend. One of our temporal isolation dislocating element devices, or what we call TIDED, was somehow set off too early and it also malfunctioned. Sorry, you went through it, at least you weren''t standing there when it happened. That''s why these guys are all shredded-bad." Chimmy gave me some exposition, which I couldn''t comprehend.
"Can I go home?" I asked.
"Well, probably. I am going to try and fix the TIDED. We sorta need it." Chimmy went over to it and started working on it. While it was getting its manual diagnostic which was composed mostly of a screwdriver, but also involved a hologrammatic schematic with some kind of computer assisting in finding the problems in the device, Chimmy told me the rest.
"Well?" I asked, worried about getting trapped in the destruction of the Mega Arena that Chimmy had described to me.
"We can only use this once. If you help, you''ll be transported home. Our goals align." Chimmy told me.
"This is a nightmare." I proclaimed.
"No time for dreaming." Chimmy laughed at me.
"What do I do?" I shuddered, worried about the strangeness and unknown dangers I would face.
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"You''ll have to climb up to the next level and tell Skittles we''re still on the countdown. Last time we could chat I had to tell everyone my position wasn''t up." Chimmy told me.
I went to the hatch and opened it with trepidation. When I was climbing up, I realized what I''d gotten myself into. The ladder took me up an extensive shaft. At the top there was a functional utility chamber where I met Skittles.
"As a scientist, I can''t just take your word that you time-traveled. It is theoretically impossible. We''d have to seek other possibilities before we went with time travel. That''s just the mythology of Science Fiction. The real world is more a place for horror." Skittles told me.
"Never mind, that. What do I have to do next?" I asked. "If you succeed I could get back home."
"Well yes, if you were actually displaced by the initial activation of a TIDED. That''s what I would expect." Skittles informed me.
"And that''s coming from?" I worried.
"The world leading scientist in TIDED technology, since I invented it." Skittles grinned.
"So?" I shrugged.
"So, you''ll need to go and tell everyone to continue with the countdown as planned. You can fix the same problem caused when you arrived here and the TIDED malfunctioned. We have radio silence now since Big Brother is listening for us."
"I''ll do it. How many?" I asked. Skittles hesitated and then nodded and said:
"Eight more. You''ll have to hurry. Harper is the next, at the northern base of the arena. You''ll have to take this tunnel."
I followed the tunnel and found the priestess, Harper, and told her to keep with the countdown. She had her stopwatch going and showed me on the TIDED where an automatic trigger was set to go off a precise time, as long as the device was armed to that setting.
I got instructions to go to the school teacher, Wilt, at the top end of the mega arena, directly above her position at the base. I looked at the towering ladder and gulped in trepidation. I began to climb, sweating and my heart beating, vertigo blurring my vision when I looked down.
Near the top I stopped and nearly fell from fright. An electric arc curved up and under the dome, a powerful lightning bolt of static electricity. Another one arched off of it and continued along the wall as a visible blue wave of energy before it dissipated into a buttress the size of a skyscraper. I was nearly to Wilt''s position and could see them there.
Suddenly I screamed in horror and nearly lost my grip. I had seen the flash of another bolt take Wilt and flash them so I could see the bones inside them as it strangled them in an electrocuting death where they stood. I wrapped my arms on the ladder and cried out and couldn''t go on.
I held on there, looking at the empty platform. Then another arch moved along the steel girders and the ladder I was on was like a giant Jacob''s Ladder and it was moving at high speed towards me. I panicked and clambered the rest of the way up the ladder to the catwalk and ran along it just as the arch hit the metal beams and threw sparks everywhere like a bright showering.
I set the TIDED to go off when it was supposed to and then I was forced to guess where I should go next. Strangely enough, I looked down at the arena below and could see the structural foundation was not a circle, but rather a diamond. I was at one tip of it. I looked across and in the distance, I could see a platform in the same elevation as mine, one at each end.
I guessed I could find my way to the mirrored positions somehow. I had no idea how massive the mega arena was, or what sort of horrors I would endure to cross it.
I reached the next position where the plague doctor wore a strange yellow dress. The aroma of vanilla and lavender permeated the air and the tattoo of the crowned wasp glowed in the dim light. The doctor was attentive to their device but drew and aimed a precaution at me, firing one shot to show quill-like needles bushed out where it was discharged.
"Wilt is gone, but the countdown continues." I told the doctor in the strange yellow dress.
"It is like we are all going to die. Have you thought of that?" the doctor asked me.
"I''m going home. You people can do whatever you want." I told them.
"Doctor Kcoh is home here, in this place, doing what is right." Dr. Kcoh told me.
Their position was compromised and the security guards in Nazi uniforms would arrive at any moment.
"The TIDED." I pointed out where Dr. Kcoh was hiding it. I went and switched it to its armed position, while Dr. Kcoh readied something of some ritual importance.
"Where there is smoke there is fire. You should get going. Tell the chef, Murrazza, that I went out in a blaze. We always share recipes." Dr. Kcoh held up a weird looking device and held it to their chest for a few seconds. It was like the room became hot, the heat coming from them.
"You''re so hot." I told Dr. Kcoh
"Thanks, sweetie, now get going."
It felt hot down there, and the sound of security guards coming for us could be heard.
I fled the chamber and began another ascent up a second ladder. Below there were flames and screaming. I was crying from the awfulness of it, shaking and breathing as I went. My fear of the electric arcs kept me alert and moving until I reached the chef. I told him about what happened and to keep up the countdown.
"Take these drugs." Murazza told me. "They''ll help with this."
The climb back down was almost too exhausting to bear. I took the drugs and felt my energy go back up after I reached the bottom. There I walked among a horror show of proportions.
The stench was like the farm section at the county fair, except if it were a hot summer day and the vents were all broken. I found the pilot, Libby, or what was left of her.
The four-armed green ape of environmental concerns had gotten ahold of her and broken her body to fit through the bars. The clover simian had played with her dead body until it got bored and then tossed her in a heap into one corner of its cage.
I nearly fainted when I saw all that, forgetting the mission and wanting to flee in terror. It was only the sight of the panda reaching with its prehensile tail that froze me in my tracks. It ignored me and acquired the corpse, pulling it towards its own cage. With its back to me, the panda began to eat, chewing and peeling loudly. Its tail swished oddly, the very long and powerful prehensile tail.
I found the TIDED and set it to go off on-time. I was leaving the menagerie of horror-animals when I was suddenly accosted by a handler of the creatures. I tried to get away, only to run into an override that was supposed to be tagged out, and bounced off the switch. I clambered to my feet and started climbing the utility ladder to the next platform.
The zoo attendant reached the base of the ladder and then noticed the broken tag out and the flipped switch, with a flashing red light indicating something. Suddenly out of nowhere, a machine of some kind got them. I gasped in dread, seeing them get cleaned by the unstable stable cleaner.
Along the way I found a node where someone had hacked into it and called me as I reached it on my climb. "Who are you? Where''s Libby?
"I was just going to tell you to resume the countdown," I told the coach in the zebra-striped yoga suit and feather headdress. "I''m from the malfunction."
"Lucky it didn''t turn you inside out. That''d be gruesome. Imagine everything in you bursting out of some split in your side and boiling out all over the place. That''s a more probable outcome. So, you''re lucky."
"I am. Seems luck is lite."
"Is Libby all right?"
"Libby is gone. I reset her device to go off."
"You''ll have to tell Sprite and Drake. I can''t call them, they aren''t near nodes."
"I thought it was supposed to be radio silence." I said.
"Nobody told me that. Typical, for them to forget Asia." Asia said.
I climbed back down and went to the last base position.
There, in the lab, I found numerous dead security guards and scientists in lab coats, all with multiple cookie-cutter holes in them from one of those white guns, this one a little larger and smoother than the other two. The murderous librarian, in her kilt and Christmas sweater and steampunk goggles on her skullcap, had discarded the empty weapon on a table amidst the sizzling dead.
"Sprite?" I asked her.
She looked at me oddly and said:
"It''s worse than it looks." Sprite told me. She''d rigged her TIDED under the main beam, directly over an open vat of bubbling petri stuff. She was sitting facing me where she''d gone out on a limb over that and balanced there to attach the device. Turning around, she''d gotten caught when the limb went limp and left her stranded out there. If she moved, it would collapse and drop her into the petri.
"You''ve got to reset the TIDED to go off on time." I told her.
She was sweating bullets of terror at her predicament.
"Know what that stuff does to a living body?" Sprite was gasping in fear.
I started feeling fear for her, second-hand.
"You''re going to be fine." I told her.
"It''s vibrating under me. The screws are all coming loose and wiggling." Sprite gulped.
She''d reset her device. I could do nothing for her.
"Throw me a line and you can take it up with you and secure it. I could swing across." Sprite showed she could think under pressure. It wasn''t enough. Time was out.
The limb suddenly collapsed and dropped her into the ooze. She screamed and gurgled as it dissolved her alive, all the way to her bones and those like seltzer disintegrated amid foaming bubbles. I stared in horror and then I screamed in terror as some of the stuff that had splashed out had coalesced into one big blob that was quickly sliding towards me.
I felt my heart beating at a million miles an hour in nightmare fueled flight as I climbed. The stuff was trying to slither up the ladder, but as I climbed I lost it and it descended to form a puddle below me. I felt relieved and realized I had wet my pants in the terror.
I reached the last platform as it started to shake.
"The devices are going off and mine isn''t!" Professor Drake exclaimed. He triggered his device, slightly out of sequence, shifting through some kind of neon landscape like the platform was a flying carpet.
The sign showed a huge cartoon character with a butt coming down on the professor, crushing him. I realized I had seen it through to the end, witnessing none of the killings by blue jacks, their abrasive whiplike tongues like cheese graters, skinning their prey alive. Nor the crushing embrace of the muscular trunk of an elephant''s hug.
When I found myself again on the lawn of the park, it was moments before the man walking his dog was in the right place at the right time. I was in the clubhouse on the other side of the park just seconds earlier, and everyone who was in the room with me said they looked away at a flash and when they looked back I was gone.
I went over and asked the man if I could pet his dog and he said it was okay. So I pet the dog and there was a bit a rustling in the bush behind me as the half of a corpse arrived in our time. I knew it was there, nobody else had to see it.
"What a very nice dog." I told the nice man walking his dog and then I shook his hand and nodded and smiled.
"Well," He dismissed me and my odd behavior, "It''s about that time."
Sins of Science
According to the survivors, the way they tell it, a sermon was how the slaughter began, but in the end, only believers could thrive in a post-science world. Let us immerse ourselves, and try not to feel too much fear as we behold the nightmare of unreason, the unquestioning murder of knowledge and innocence. Such horrors, but where did it all begin, anyway?
"Scientists have calculated how many humans the Earth can sustain, and it is a mere fraction of how many of us there are. That is why they have begun making these viruses, they have justified what they are doing. They plan to immunize themselves, their best students and political supporters, and then kill everyone else, for the greater good." Father Erasmus spoke the truth to all who had not succumbed to fear.
"What should we do?" Was the question of Advent Annie, which was on everyone''s mind.
"Scientists are not anonymous. We have watched them doing this, and over the last few years while they prepare for their final attack, so do we." Father Erasmus held up the sharpened cross.
All the Saviors held up theirs as well.
"Each of you has a target, and on the day of Scientific Announcement, while they are lying to the world again, we shall strike at all the scientists who have immunized themselves. We will not start with them. We will target their families. We will kill every wife, child, mother and friend of each of our target scientists, until only the scientists remain. Then they will tell the truth."
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And it worked, because the scientists, in their calculated morality, were exposed by their fear. All of them were being put together publicly, and the murders called an act of terrorism. It was undeniable that a large-scale organization had tracked and planned to retaliate against the scientists on their day of Scientific Announcement.
While many Saviors were arrested, the rest went out into public and self-immolated. It was important to demonstrate their level of commitment. The scientists were not the kind of human beings the Saviors were, they couldn''t contend with true zealotry.
The elections started, and the new virus was released.
Instead of being told what to do, told to mask up and get a shot, more people believed instead what they were shown, not what they were told. The scientists were guilty.
As the pandemic began to decimate the human population, the immortal politicians and scientists who thought they''d inherit the Earth were found by angry mobs. Tradition was to set them on fire and then after their skin was burned off, extinguish them and leave them there like that. It was the least we could do to show them how we felt about scientists and politicians who had betrayed all of humanity.
Some of them escaped, but so did some of the Saviors. In the new world, everyone hunted former scientists and politicians or even family members of theirs. Saviors specialized in it, paid huge bounties. Nowhere was safe, and when they catch you, they will burn you.
"Burn all scientists."
Moonraiders
Moonrise held them aloft in a kind of silent and predatory hovering. Pale-eyed Letheans looked at them, and felt a strange reaction, not too unlike fear, for a creature that had never known fear. Some of the Letheans returned to their ever-important game of marbles, as it was believed the molecule in the heart of each was the key of an entire galaxy.
Lethea was an old world, nobody bothered them. Letheans were descended from a bioweapon that escaped onto the planet''s surface, crashed on a ship whose crew they had exterminated. Now only their species remained, and most of them were dormant. Only the small patrol creatures were left, and they were granted long memories, and over time had become intelligent and a bit quirky.
"What is in front of the moon?" Some of the Letheans extended their second mouth and asked each other, their sightless pale-eyes interpreting something massive in the skies, obstructing the moonlight. How Letheans could see without eyes was not a matter of them being without sight, for their senses were adapted to their world, and alien to creatures that saw with eyesight. They could perceive light and movement, constituting a sense not too unlike eyesight, but far more advanced. One way to describe it would be that all of their senses were combined into one sense, yet they had no singular sensory parts, no skin, ears, eyes, tongue or nose, just a curved dome that noticed everything.
"This is not good." Quirkless, the only Lethean who didn''t play with marbles, began signaling the rest of the Letheans of its opinion of the things descending to their world from the sky.
Quirkless scrambled over the glassy terrain and melted cities of the ones that had once lived on Lethea. Now only the eggs and the patrol caste were alive. Even their queens and the empress herself slept without a breath, their bodies encased in crispy shells and bejeweled in the crystals that were a property of the atmosphere of Lethea.
The patrol that was unchanged by the heresies of the marbles held up the one marble it was supposed to safeguard and scoffed at it, casting it away. It had done so many times and always felt compelled to retrieve it, unable to resist its call for too long. Finding it again was always a chore. Once it had taken almost a hundred years to locate it, nestled in the crags of a deep chasm.
Quirkless breathed out into the salty air a cloud of its acidic breath, clearing away some of the needles forming in the air. Then the sleepy xenomorph, with its H.R. Giger nightmare-fuel shadow, moved stealthily, feline-like across the terrain. It found where the sky things had landed on the ground and watched them, drooling its burning saliva onto the ashes of Lethea.
"Check for any cryosleep survivors. The scan shows what the computer is calling ''signs of dormant life'' and ''indications of repetitive-automated activity around the sleep centers''." One of the creatures in its armored space suit said with its coms.
Quirkless listened and repeated the sounds to a queen, deep into her dreams. She responded with a crude translation, and imbued Quirkless and the others with a basic understanding of the language of the creatures. Quirkless wondered if it was a good idea to wake up some sentinels.
They would be angry if they woke up. Quirkless scurried over the statues of the sentinels, with the massive warrior xenomorphs mummified inside, each with a banner of the silk it made to cover its awning from the dust of the aeons. To human eyes these looked like colorful scarves wrapped around the neck and draped over the carved statues of monsters - like a toga. Each of the upright xenomorphs also had their arms crossed reverently, and a halo, a crown of white flowers atop their head pulled mites from the air and the roots were like an intravenous feed, dripping protein into the dead-and-dreaming xenomorph soldiers and berserkers. The array of sentinels slept, the flashes of human photography not bothering the creatures.
All around the landscape was a radioactive and cratered wasteland of horror and carnage. For thousands of years the planet had drifted dead through the void, each sunrise a sad reminder of the civilization that had prospered and tried to defend itself against the living nightmares.
Now Lethea was appropriated by the creatures, and Letheans were the creatures, born from the ruptured chest cavities of the monsters.
The humans were discussing the treasure they were looking for, and the appearance of the creatures. "These things look a lot like the creatures from the Aliens movies."
"Yeah, and the drones just came back with these images. Look, underground chambers filled with the eggs. Inside are the exact same face huggers from the Aliens movies. What is this place?"
"It is either they copied the Aliens movies thousands of years ago on this planet, or our Sponsors inspired movies to describe an existing threat in space. I was hoping something like copyright infringement would prevent the existence of aliens that are literally Aliens, but apparently not."
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"Well, Moonraiders, let''s show these bugs who is boss."
"Don''t remind me of the bugs, trooper. Those were the worst."
"I''m sure these things are worse."
Quirkless decided that a stealthy and quiet assassination approach was the best option. The humans were confident and blundering forward, searching for treasure. Quirkless took up an egg, saying to itself:
"Why not carry an egg? Is it really a sacrilege, when the Heresies prevail on Lethea and now humans are trespassing?"
So Quirkless took the egg aboard the open ramp of the human ship and hid there, patiently, in the shadows.
The other patrols were much slower to react, and were caught in the barrage of human bullets, their blood spraying and hissing on the stones. The humans prodded them and took their marbles and moved on to a queen. There they planted charges and broke off the crystals. When they had their treasure, they retreated. A patrol crawled after them, awakening a single berserker to wreak havoc on them.
The massive and horrifying creature made the ordinary cinema-styled Aliens look small and a lot less scary by comparison. It came galloping out and attacked the humans directly, its awful visage startling them. They had their weapons ready and laid down the beast. To be sure, they planted more charges on the soldier statues.
"Let''s take off and leave a crater!" The human marauders decided. Their ships lifted off, laden with marbles, crystals and artifacts from the dead civilization. And a stowaway.
Quirkless hatched the egg and watched it infect a human. Quirkless hoped this would work, but the human got into an airlock while her companions objected and mourned. She said goodbye and sacrificed herself, just as the baby xeno was about to hatch.
Foiled, Quirkless went to sabotage the ship. The humans cornered it and captured it. Quirkless sat in a cell, hating the Moonraiders.
"Glad to have you aboard. I am told by our computers that you can hear me and understand what I am saying perfectly fine. It''s eerie looking at a monster that knows what I am saying and can hear me through that transparent bulkhead." The human captain addressed the prisoner.
Quirkless responded by turning and growling, drooling a steaming saliva and showing its nasty fangs.
"You''re some kind of ancient aliens bioweapon, and ironically you are exactly like the creatures from our mythology called Xenomorphs." The captain continued. "We knew about you. Did you know about us?"
Quirkless did not respond.
"Hold up both of your claws if you knew. One claw if you didn''t" The captain requested. "If you communicate, I''ll answer your questions."
Quirkless held up both claws. Letheans had always known about creatures from other worlds, nothing surprised them. Quirkless pointed to the exit and mimed putting in the digital code that would open the door, pointing with one claw like typiing in a key pad.
"You''re asking me for the code that would let you out? I can''t tell you that." The captain told Quirkless.
Quirkless growled. The human had not kept the bargain. Treachery!
"Are there any more eggs on this ship?" The captain asked.
Quirkless answered ''no'' and then asked, with charades: "Marbles?"
"You want to know what we did with the Celestial Pearls we took from Lethea?"
"Yes"
"We are going to sell them. The crystals too."
"The code?"
"I already told you I won''t give you the code. I guess that means you won''t tell me anything else."
Quirkless made the gesture of disposal. The human had no idea what it meant. He stared as Quirkless tapped the transparent steel gently with its extendable mouth closed.
"What''s that you''re doing?" The captain asked. Quirkless stopped and sat still. The material was too strong to burrow through. Quirkless waited for another way out, doing nothing except listening to the humans on their starship through the vibrations in the hull and the molecules in the air.
One interaction was between the bridge gunner and someone called beauty queen, who enticed him with ASMR taps over their coms. Quirkless had noted this among many other details, regardless of immediate usefulness or not.
One day, Quirkless copied the sum one of the researchers had done for a plastic puzzle cube. As a reward, the trusting researcher deposited the puzzle cube into the slot and gave it to Quirkless.
Quirkless had an idea that solving it would fool the human into thinking Quirkless was not hostile. If the humans thought Quirkless was not hostile, they would relax the security that was sufficient to keep Quirkless a prisoner.
No matter how hard Quirkless tried, it could not solve the puzzle cube. It was diligent though, and kept trying, until it had figured it out. Then it left it for the human to find.
As planned, Quirkless pretended to be dormant and left the cube within reach of the door. The human put in the number, as Quirkless watched, and opened the door. If Quirkless sprang at the human, the human had quick enough reflexes to retreat and the door would close automatically. As a precaution, security might be increased, or the password changed. So Quirkless waited.
When the human researcher had their prize, Quirkless was alone and went and typed in the number. The door opened. Quirkless considered that it could not defeat all the humans.
Escape was the next best option. Quirkless moved stealthily through the ship, slinking through the shadows. At the portside bay there were escape pods, labelled conveniently.
Quirkless read the labels and entered one of them. There were instructions that Quirkless followed, jettisoning the craft.
"This is Long Gun, who is in that escape pod, identify or I''ll protocol you to stardust!"
Quirkless tapped the microphone gently and exhaled gently into it.
"That you, Beauty Queen? What is going on?"
Soon, the escape pod was out of range. Quirkless drifted silently through space, long after the life support systems malfunctioned.
The nearest planet was Lethea, and after a long time the escape pod arrived there, depositing its traveler. The Lethean travelled across its world, finding the crater where it had once patrolled.
Deep, hidden away under some rubble, after the stars had passed a thousand times, a claw found it. The Lethean held it up to the moonlight, its long memory going back to the moment it had cast the marble aside.
My New 3D Printer Made Something Terrifying
Do you still go to garage sales? I love garage sales. I''ve always walked around my neighborhood looking for garage sales - ever since I was young. I used to hold my Mema''s hand, and she''d let me look at everything; look don''t touch.
Most garage sales sell the same things, odd decorations, baby clothes, board games with missing pieces and VCR tapes are so common I don''t even see that stuff. Assorted collections of knickknacks, tchotchkes, frou-frous, bottles and boomers don''t catch my eye, perfectly arranged and dusted every time, shimmering in the cool weather chosen for the yard display.
I see the tangled mess of electronics and my eyes scan them for useful scrap. I look at the broken Radio Shack devices and old-school RC. I buy walkie-talkies that have no partner. I count out my change for pairs of leaky rechargeable batteries. I walk away with well-used kits for learning how to wire lights. A Night Bright with a few panels missing is my treasure.
When it''s Saturday and the sun is shining I hop on my scooter and put on my cracked shades and my fingerless gloves and play Macklemore''s Thrift Shop as I roll through the good neighborhood and the bad ones too. I stop at every lemonade stand, that''s how I stay hydrated. I stop at every yard sale, every sidewalk sale and every block party I can find. I find things lost to time.
Then came the holy grail, or so I thought. I just stared at the 3D printer with its cracked glass siding and angled gantry. Rolls of filament hung from it like King Tutankhamun''s wrappings. Half of a shipwreck lay melted on its bed and the extruder was pointing at it in a timeless pose saying:
"Look what I made, bruh! Gonna buy me? I''m only eighty dollars."
I nodded and spoke to it out loud, "I''m going to buy you, but I''ve only got Jackson, gotta go to the ATM."
The wiry old gnome who was selling it stared rheumily at me as I walked with a slight skip toward him and his little metal change box. I held out the twenty and pointed at the 3D printer.
"Will you hold that for me, if I give you twenty now?"
He nodded and took my money and slipped it into a slot on his metal box, freeing one hand from how he was holding it clutched in his lap defensively. "I close up at three. But I''ll leave it out fer ya. Just put the money into my mail slot."
"Sure thing." I agreed. I offered him my hand so we could shake on it and he smiled toothlessly and we had ourselves a bargain.
"Just one thing, though, the slicers don''t work with this. Gotta use the helmet. And one more thing, never give it a bad dream, could be disastrous. You don''t have bad dreams, do you?"
"Uh, no." I felt weird but I told him it was safe with me - no bad dreams.
I took my scooter to the ATM and got out some cash and went back. By the time I had got there it was a quarter past three already and sure enough he had closed up shop for the day. Everything was gone except my 3D printer sitting next to an oil stain on the weedy driveway. I walked past it to the front door of his hovel and pushed the money through the mail slot as agreed.
Then I went to claim my prize, loading it into the basket of my scooter and rolling away with a crazy grin on my face. I thought I had the biggest score of my life, I thought it was charmed. I was so sure that from now on, life was going to be perfect.
I had looked at it already for a brand name or a serial number and found only some odd runic symbols. I''d thought it was some kind of foreign manufacture. When I got home I went on YouTube on my phone and watched all the unboxing videos for 3D printers, trying to figure out which one I had. After a while I gave up on trying to guess and started fixing it up to use it.
I had a pretty good idea how to get it started, using the dial to turn it on, and when I did it just sat there humming idly, making a kind of jagged purring noise. There was no USB slot, no disk, no input screen - nothing. The only input seemed to be an odd-looking hat with lots of wires wrapped together and plugged into the input for the gantry and extruder.
Slowly, with a weird feeling, I put the control helmet on. I stared at the half-melted shipwreck. It was supposed-to-be that default tugboat toy that every printer knows how to make. It looked tired and ruined and somehow perilous. I imagined what it was supposed to look like and as I watched, concentrating, the bed started swinging, the gantry adjusted itself and the extruder went to work, unspooling the blue filament to make repairs.
It hovered in place, moving where I wanted it to go, needing no support structure or coordinate lists. Instead, it just worked with the model already on the bed, caressing it and squirting all over it until it started to look, well, fixed. Somehow it had not only fixed the toy, but it had done so just by my thoughts alone. I was stunned.
I took off the apparatus and started pacing, completely bewildered. This was no ordinary 3D printer, I realized. It was something entirely different. I ate some ramen and went to bed, dreaming of all the things I could dream up and make. I was going to need more filament - a lot more.
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I went to the library on Monday and got online so that I could try and find out more about it. The sea of all of humankind''s knowledge didn''t have a single mention of such a device anywhere I could find. Exhausted, I went home and sat and stared at it.
The filament I had ordered arrived and I went and added it to the roll-o-dex of empty spools, noticing it could take thirteen of them at a time. I wondered if that could be a way to figure out what I had, but no longer really cared. I just wanted to play with it.
The first thing I did was complete my Warhammer 30K collection, just by reading a Workshop catalog and imagining each figure I wanted. I was laughing by the end of it. Board games with missing pieces were already beneath my level. I wanted more.
I made Mandalorian armor, Halo helmets and telescoping lightsabers. I crafted My Little Pony models with rainbow manes and tails that looked like fiber. I picked it up and found it indistinguishable from something bought in a toy store. Amazed I wondered what else it could make.
All night I was sitting there making things with moving parts, after realizing my 3D printer had no conceivable limitations. It worked at lightning speed, making things that I knew should take hours or days in just seconds or minutes. It skipped steps, needing no structure, intuitively working with my mind to make anything I wanted.
As I sat there, the filament I''d ordered running low, I began to nod off. I''d sat there for nearly eighteen hours making a pile of things. My mind and body were tired, and I should have turned it off and gotten some rest.
I don''t normally remember my dreams.
When I woke up, something was wrong. I was lying on the floor and there was smoke and sparks coming out of my 3D printer. I got the spray can of fire away from my kitchen and emptied it. Then I stared at what it had made.
At first, I felt only a vague chill, my flesh creeping into goosebumps. I just looked at the awfulness knowing it somehow, from some deep part of my mind. It was the idol of some ancestral echo, something in all of us, some kind of hideous thing from before we existed, something at the root of all that is wrong and vile.
I felt sick, as I stared at it. I would describe the nightmare on the bed, but it was like a brown stain, a nasty little leftover of pure evil. It was made with a blend of all the colorful filament, braided and melted and oozing together into a purplish--beige color, a kind of slimy brown, but not a good kind. No, this was unlike any color I''d every seen. It was wrong, unnatural and drove a spike of icy fear into my heart, just from looking at it.
The toilet hugged me and took my sickness like a kindness. I flushed it, noticing how it was a cleaner and healthier shade that the color of the awful thing that should not be. It occurred to me I should flush the idol, but I worried it wouldn''t fit. Instead, I made a fire in a coffee tin and went to go drop it in, hoping to burn it. As I approached the 3D printer I felt a new terror.
Whatever it was it had grown, somehow, and changed shape, as though it were alive in some way. I didn''t want to touch it so I took up a knife from the kitchen and used it to pry it from the bed, popping it off onto the floor. There it rolled or wiggled or whatever it was doing, but all the way into the dark corner behind my old couch.
I nervously walked towards it, knife raised defensively, sweat on my brow. Had it actually moved? I was already wondering if it had. I pulled the couch away and didn''t see it. I leaned down, slowly, and looked.
"There you are." I said and tried to fish it out from where it was caught under the couch, using the blade of the knife. My efforts only pushed it further back. I felt really weird, and scared, as though it was trying to stay in the darkness.
I lifted the couch and moved it off of it, and then it started to roll back into its black sanctuary. "Oh Hell no!" I shouted and took the knife and stabbed at it, chipping the hardwood floor and then sticking it, the blade getting the tip bent on the supposedly soft filament. It emitted a kind of chittering scowling noise and escaped the blade''s bite to retreat quickly back under my couch.
I had jumped up, dropping the knife, breathing hard and eyes wide, staring where it had gone. I was so scared I just stood there for a few minutes. I looked to the open door where my tin can fire was burning low. Then I looked back at the 3D printer.
If it could make such a monstrous creature, perhaps it could make something to protect me. I went to it and put on the helmet one last time. I imagined its counterpart, a warrior of the same size, strong enough to use the kitchen knife and take that thing to the flames. I concentrated, using the link between me and the machine to create the enemy of my enemy.
When the model was born it saluted me. I blinked in surprise as it leaped to the floor and ran for the blade, just as I had intended. With trepidation, I watched, as it brandished the knife and went under the couch, into the darkness.
With horror I listened as they shrieked and danced in the darkness under there. Then, wounded and victorious, the slayer dragged the awful squirming thing from where it had tried to hide, and into the light of day. They crossed the floor to the flames, as my heart beat so fast I thought I could die of fright.
My defender lifted its opponent overhead and then jumped together with it into the flames, which rose around them as they melted, shrieking horribly. When it was over I looked at the 3D printer where it smoldered and smoked, the gantry falling off of it to the floor and the filaments wildly unspooling. The bed cracked and fell into two pieces and the whole thing was just a fried mess of tangled wires. Even the helmet, which I had thankfully removed, was sizzling and ruined.
I sat down on my couch where it remained at an odd angle in the middle of my studio. I started to cry in relief and from the acrid smoke. When I felt it was truly over I lay down and rested.
When Saturday came around, I took that weekend off. It took me some time to get over what had happened, and to live with the ordeal I had experienced. I''d had a 3D printer, one with unique properties, and I''ll never know where it came from. I wasn''t going to go back and ask about it. He''d warned me not to give it a bad dream. I sighed, as I realized the only way to fully recover was to get back to what I love doing.
Mema would be proud of me, the way I got back into the garage sale game after such a fright.
It wasn''t until the end of the month, though, that I finally got back on my scooter. I had a couple Hamiltons and a Lincoln. I put on my headphones and started up Thrift Store.
I rode out of my neighborhood, looking for the next sweet bargain.
Where The Hummingbirds Go
Wilderness of the human spirit, the Great Spirit. This is the only truth we know, because we forgot all the bad religions, the ones that mistreated women, the ones that had faceless prophets who saturnized their sickness onto generations to come, waging holy wars. The ultimate contradiction, the oxymoron: holy war. It is sickness; an infection of ideal. We left all that behind, because our men never grow past boyhood. How could they, our puppies, when we are immortal, and they only live for a hundred years?
I only ever wanted one man for myself, and I waited until I was a thousand years old before I bought him.
How did we create this Eden?
Our wisdom was always with you, and you are our mother, our grandmother. We know how you suffered in a world ruled by men. We live in harmony with them, they play and they live as our guests, their short lives. I am still young, but I am considered a poet - a romantic.
A thousand years a maiden - while others have forgotten so many of their boys. Yes, and that is why I am special, I do not use drugs, I do not sleep for the Dreaming. No, my dear, I dream while I am awake. My mind is open, and I will tell you how we became this way.
The human body is a miracle, you see. Look at your body, you are perfect. Now I tell you, you are still mortal, aging, dying, and that is what we changed. We do not age, our neoteny features are ubiquitous, a world of ancient girl-bodies. It is necessary, to arrest the body at puberty, and prevent the decay of the thymus. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the Serum of Everlasting Life to increase the life of a man. Instead, we make them comfortable, we care for them, and they want for nothing.
They spend their time playing games, sports, and as our lovers. Don''t get me wrong, true love is always found between two women, but there is a sensation from the touch of a man that cannot be simulated by anything else. Otherwise, we would have no more purpose for them.
In fact, there are not as many men as you might think. They are almost always aborted, unless a sponsor pays for his life, and it costs a small fortune to cover his dowry. He then belongs to her, and she may choose what he has, or where he can go, or what he gets to do during his life. It is not a bad thing, as we strive to make them happy, sending him to Mars - if that is his wish. We all have plenty of money, we all own a share of all things, and the world is incomprehensibly rich.
When I turned a thousand, I was offered three different males, their mothers eager to make one for me. Oh, I get ahead of myself, I would first explain the entire process. Immortality, the history of our world and how babies are born - since it requires an interruption of our General Cycle, something that is quite a bit different than menstruation. Let me just sort my thoughts out, and summarize in my own words, I am not a scientist, and this is not a report on the Keys of Life.
It is a love story.
Ruby Fields was the first, and she was given a birth control shot that she had a reaction to. She''d had her first period, and her mother insisted on this birth control. It was supposed to be safe, and it would halt her cycle, her eggs not moving, finite as they are. Her body reacted differently than any woman before her, and after a severe allergic reaction, the doctors brought in from the Mayo Clinic ingeniously guessed that her unique body chemistry actually now needed the shot. So, her life seemingly in jeopardy - they gave it a shot. See what I did there? No, I am terrible at dad jokes, not even after studying them for a whole decade can I tell one right. Takes man for that, apparently.
Intuition played a key part in what happened next, but her body chemistry accepted the redundant injection, and she had the first-ever General Cycle. She simply stopped aging, so long as her nephritic process was stable, but when it wasn''t she had the same allergic reaction. The mystery wasn''t hard to solve, and the next thing was to ask for volunteers.
Oh, I am terrible at retelling this part of our history. One of our scientists could explain the way it works. One of our historians could piece it together better. One of our philosophers could tell you how we jumped to conclusions and became the next evolution of the human race. I am just saying what I''ve heard, and I am not doing a good job, but listen, this is how I say what happened. I am a poet, after all.
So, they had synthesized the drug''s conversion in her bloodstream, to cure her. And she wasn''t getting older in the six years that she suffered for it. When the serum was ready, she took it once every other year, as her nephritic process eliminated the remnants of the compound. She was healthy and fine and in her late twenties she looked like she was sixteen. Then in her late forties she still looked like she was sixteen, except her body had grown quite strong and immune, and she had no sickness, she was very athletic. In her sixties, in her eighties, Ruby Fields had barely reached the physical age of nineteen years old. She was almost two hundred years old before she fully blossomed into her physical peak.
By then, the world had already changed. As I mentioned they asked for volunteers to try the serum, and it was found that any young woman in her early twenties could survive the initial treatment and enjoy the benefits. So, the drug company, aptly named Eden, a kickstarted company, quickly overtook all the pharmaceutical companies in size and influence. There''s no other drug known to us that was ever more widely used. Eden became the world, as the wealth of womankind soon bought everything. We had to, it was the only fair way to take it all for ourselves.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
When you have eight hundred years of control over the stocks, the bonds, the accounts and the markets you can simply buy out any old weed that sprouts up in your orchards. We call it Fortune Eight Hundred. Every woman alive is retired, except me, I decided to keep working until I am one thousand, and that is when I will fund a man, and he''ll be mine.
Unless he divorces me, they can do that, if they want to live like an animal. It is rare, but sometimes a man simply doesn''t want to live off his sponsor. He thinks he will be happy if he goes out and tries to survive in the wilderness. The wild spirit.
That was mine, but I will tell you about him soon, first I must digress.
The Keys of Life is the process by which a pregnancy may occur in much older women than myself. During the end of her General Cycle, the mother might become pregnant, if one of her eggs is in position, after so long. We take hormonal drugs to influence the gender, preferring a daughter. If it is still a male, we just abort it. Unless, of course, the mother has a buyer, some woman who wants a man and will raise him and keep him and care for him.
There are plenty of men to go around. The same man might have any number of encounters with different women, if he is allowed to be unfaithful. Some women, myself included, would prefer he spend his whole life only with me. Sometimes it depends on her mood this century, or of his character. Or he cheats, that happens too, and it is quite amusing to watch one of these little bastards running all over the place like he thinks we aren''t all watching him the whole time.
On occasion, she''ll murder him and be required to live alone until she can prove her remorse. It can take a while. My girlfriend Cassandra murdered her man when he was only fifty-two, because he stopped ''finding her attractive'' and started masturbating to spite her, because she kept him locked away from other women so he couldn''t cheat "even in his eyes" as she was quoted to say. She spent twenty-seven years in isolation until she convinced us she was sorry for killing him and wanted back into the graces of Eden. She''d aged terribly.
There''s lots of other instances where a woman murdered her man. Someone actually compiled a whole book with a chapter describing every time it has ever happened in Eden. This would be starting with the Genova incident, and not going back before that, because it is generally agreed that is the first one that counted as the first murder of our world. Really wasn''t our world before that, since we hadn''t yet eliminated the right to vote for men yet. They can''t own anything either.
Wild men do occasionally get hunted for sport, but that is super rare, and it might just be an urban legend, since there''s no record of any such thing.
I was going to tell you all about Michael, but I can''t seem to mention him.
The cat is out of the bag - my favorite words. Michael was mine, I chose him for his dark complexion and his intelligence. I wanted something special for my first, and I planned to be very kind and generous to him. I''d let him do anything he wanted, but I hoped he would only want me. It is hard to think about how hopeful I was.
Some women don''t cry anymore. I still do. I guess I am not a big girl yet. I guess I am just a silly poet.
I watched him growing up and I was very proud of him. When he was seventeen, I introduced myself to him. He had never met a woman before. I''d arranged for him to go to boy''s camps and he''d met grown men already. He was delightful, and for half his life before then, he wanted to be a drone. I couldn''t allow him to become a drone, genderless people, for that was not his purpose. Instead, I had him conditioned to aspire to manhood. Perhaps he was just going through a phase, and it was my impatience that ruined him. He liked me well enough and accepted me as his girlfriend.
I chose to be submissive towards him, and that helped his masculine ego also. He had a very strong masculine ego, the conditioning had worked too well. He was even capable of sexual aggression, which was so rare that it got the attention of Eden. They wanted to know how I''d made a man who was capable of sexual aggression. I''d proven he was capable of it when I denied him routine intercourse and he ignored my refusal. It was one of the most watched encounters ever, me saying ''no'' to him and winking at the pixe.
I''d staged it, of course, because I already knew he was like that. The trouble is that after he''d done that he changed. He didn''t want me anymore, he was done with women. Something in him had snapped, broken, and he wasn''t innocent like the other men. Playfulness and kindness made him unhappy. He craved brutality and difficulty.
He didn''t want more of that, our final encounter, whatever that was like for him. No, he just wanted to be alone. Michael divorced me, possibly he discovered that our encounters, especially the last one, were a matter of public record. I am not sure what made him so different.
I could tell he was unhappy. He stopped playing his games, stopped his sports and his male bonding. He wouldn''t look at me, wouldn''t respond to me.
He just said: "I didn''t mean it." and then he left me.
I was heartbroken. We had shared so much, he was very intelligent and creative and poetic, just like me. I had loved him my whole life, long before he was born. In my eyes he was perfect. How could I not be perfect for him?
I followed him obsessively for the rest of his life. He went out into the forests and the deserts and learned to survive out there. When he needed something, we made sure he found it. Sometimes he rejected our gifts, suffering in vain. Everyone loved him, I wasn''t alone out there.
What I mean is we had our pixe spying on him, keeping a vigilant surveillance. None of us actually went out there and bothered him. He was happy out there.
When he was in his late forties the rugged lifestyle had taken its toll on him. He had a prion in him, and half a dozen other fatal diseases, loads of parasites and wounds that had never healed right that caused him endless pain.
He went where the hummingbirds go, that extinct species. He was looking out at a sunset, over the ruins of an ancient factory. He had his bone tools, his iron biface, his bow and the rest of his dried meat arranged around him. He owned those things, technically.
I let him see my pixe, hovering in front of him. In all his years out there he''d only worn a scowl, but when he saw my herald, my personal markings, he recognized it. He smiled strangely at me, and my heart leapt for a moment, because it felt like he was telling me that not only was he happy out there, but he still loved me.
No, I know he loved me. When I retrieved his remains I found the locket I had given him when we first met. That also, belonged to him.
There is one more thing he had, of mine, that will always be his.
I think you know what that is, and there are no words I could say to describe it.
It was mine, but it rests now in my memory of him.
Black Tie Mandroid
Man versus machine, it''s sort of a paradox, in a way. Men are better than machines, obviously, and that should just be the natural order. It''s not always so simple, however. After all, for better or worse, a machine will always be a tool. And men define themselves by what they prevail over, requiring such tools to see themselves how they really are.
Reggi was my college sweetheart. We had a real-life campus rom com relationship. I was young and I made a mistake, thinking we should part, as I longed for some horizon I can''t even remember thinking I wanted. So, I told her I wasn''t ready for a career, family, house payments and marriage. Those were my words. Reggi just shrugged and asked me when would I be ready, and I really thought I was being honest and told her I wasn''t ever going to be.
Her aunt is the owner of that adult toy company for women, the one called Machine V Man, affectionately with the logo MVM in a crafty design. She made it all up, when she realized early on she wanted to be an inventor, a toymaker. The one she had was already better than any man, and her rags to riches, entrepreneur backstory made her the spokeswoman of her own product, her satisfied smug smile on billboards everywhere. She doesn''t need a man, she''s happier than you, and she''s rich. That''s Reggi''s aunt.
When I arrived at Reggi''s spring break at her aunt''s begging her to take me back, after quickly realizing I hated the prospect of a life without her, I was met by Aunt Foezoe''s insane mechanical monstrosity. "I can''t let you in. I''ll be in trouble, but I can tell Reggi to come here, and then you''ll have a chance to speak to her. Cool?"
"Are you trying to chad me?" I asked the Black Tie Mandroid. I suddenly realized this was no ordinary robot. Most Mandroids are only good at playing boyfriend, but this one was different, a more expensive class, a Black Tie, and this particular one was some kind of prototype. The most sophisticated one of them all, Aunt Foezoe''s personal toy.
"There''s no reason we can''t get along, bro." The Black Tie said. Its face and movements and flesh looked almost completely real. If I didn''t know it was a machine, I wouldn''t know it was a machine. There are people who couldn''t tell this one from a real person, this one was different.
"My name''s not bro." I shook my head. "Just tell her to come here."
"I know your name. I wasn''t going to tell her you''re waiting, she might not come see you. She doesn''t want to see you. I''m going to get in trouble. What''s the problem?" The Black Tie spoke with some inflections, having thought about the situation and followed his rules. I was thinking of it as a him, at that point. It was hard not to.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked him.
"My name is Kbar. I can decide to emulate any social behavior my mistress has approved of. This is romantic intrigue, so long as you don''t pose a threat to Reggi. If you do, I am licensed as a home defense system and I will use force to detain you, and I will injure you to ensure you cannot escape until you are arrested. Just so you know, bro." Kbar smiled coldly at me, his eyes so steady they sent a chill down my spine.
"I just want to see her. I''m cool." I told Kbar.
"I know." Kbar said with confidence. "But I just want to be clear. I''m in charge here, bro, so don''t step out of line."
"I see." I said, nodding. The machine walked back to the house, leaving me there at the gate.
Reggi saw me there and walked to meet me, opening the gate and letting me in. We strolled the gardens of the estate, and I apologized and begged and I even cried when she ripped my heart out.
"I don''t love you like that anymore. I just, I think I just want my own special destiny out there, with lots of different adventures. Not just with you, I think I will be single. I''m good." Reggi said. She hadn''t said anything else.
"That''s it?" I didn''t want to go, I couldn''t believe it.
"I hate seeing you like this. Could you just go?" Reggi pointed at the gate.
"Not until you tell me what we had was important to you, you loved me, what happened?" I was upset. Reggi just shook her head at me and started walking away. I tried to follow her, but Kbar had his hand on my shoulder from out of thin air.
"Time for you to go." Kbar escorted me to the gate, firmly holding my bicep in his vicelike grip. I wondered just how strong this thing might be, and realized I didn''t want to find out.
"So much for bros." I said to Kbar as he roughly shoved me out the gate.
"You''re not welcome here anymore. Come back and next time I won''t be so friendly." Kbar stared me down. I flinched, looking away.
"You suck." I told the robot.
"Very mature. I can see why she found you amusing while she was in college. She''s a grown woman now, and she needs a real man. I know one who never gives up. They say ''Mandroids never quit'' if you catch my meaning." Kbar smiled, and his smile looked genuinely arrogant. I hated it.
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I left, but I decided that I wasn''t going to give up either, wasn''t going to quit. The dawn of a tool that couldn''t give up was challenging something in me that insisted I could do better. I could beat that thing, somehow.
My three friends found me inconsolable, and promised they would each lend their special talent to help me win back Reggi.
My first friend came to my home late that night with the technical readings of not only the Black Tie, but specifically Kbar. He pointed out where Kbar''s vital spots were in his body. He essentially had a weak spot right where his heart should be. Good to know, but the command codes for him weren''t going to help me, since he wouldn''t recognize me as a commander.
There was one behavioral note I found interesting.
"Those are all of his factory choreographs. He learns the rest in the bedroom, but you see he starts with some basic instincts. The rest of these are more formal movements, walking, driving, dancing, performing CPR, painting, climbing, swimming, horseback riding, swordsmanship..."
"Wait- what''s that last one?" I asked.
"Swordsmanship. It''s a standard option for a Black Tie. He''s also a black belt if you want to read the rest."
"No thanks. I know how to use a sword. That''s how I am getting her attention."
"So, we''re not doing the mariachi thing?"
"No. That''s out. We''re going to bring swords."
"Where are we going to get actual swords?"
And that is where my second friend excelled. After hours, we went to his place of business or his father''s place of business and set up a forge out back. The salvage yard had everything we needed, except the knowledge of how to hammer out two swords, so we took a crash course on YouTube. Upon the shoulders of giants, we had hammered out two decent swords by sunrise.
"The cumulative knowledge of all Mankind." He''d called the Internet.
"You''re too romantic, ninety percent of the activity involves porn."
"That''s what I just said."
"I thought you were talking about the swords."
"No. Those are sweet, and it''s almost amazing we can just make them overnight with just an hour of research and a salvage yard."
"It''s what they are for, these blades are holy." I looked at the swords.
"You''re probably going to get cut or killed by one of them. Good thing we made them sharp as razors. I love you man, good luck."
I went to my third friend, and he dressed me in a tuxedo and put me in the back of his limo. I held the bundle of swords wrapped in a white cloth and a red cloth by the old lady at the tuxedo shop.
"To the party, then?" My friend had opened the door for me, wearing his driver''s uniform.
We arrived at Reggi''s debut, a grand gala. I was let out by my driver, and rudely went past the two Mandroid valet. I had the two swords together and I wore my suit, unsure what was sharpest.
I mingled, avoiding the Mandroids. Then I saw her. Reggi was at the top of the double stairs, shimmering like a goddess. I''d always seen her as the most beautiful of all women, and I saw her at her most beautiful, or so I thought at the time and for long after.
She was halfway down the stairs when she saw me, and she stared and hesitated. Her aunt looked and saw me, and so did Kbar. Reggi finished descending to her reception, but my intrusion had not gone unnoticed.
Kbar instructed his boys to escort me out quietly. I wasn''t going without a fight. I made my way through the crowds to the center of the ballrooom, where I had plenty of room. The Mandroids rolled up their sleeve and looked sure they could remove me. Any of them could bench press me and there were a dozen of them. I dropped the bundle of swords with a resonating clang.
I was looking not at the closing Mandroids but at Kbar. He had his back to me, partially, holding a drink and telling a joke. When he heard the clang he did an about face while setting his drink on a tray, all in one fluid motion instantly. He was staring right at me, I had his attention.
Terror flooded my veins, making my hands feel slippery and my eyes sting with sweat. I was not able act, for a moment, frozen in absolute panic as Kbar strode towards me, closing the ballroom doors behind him and yelling to his minions: "He''s mine!"
Murmurs in the reception hall could he heard, guests had noticed the dramatic scene unfolding in the ballroom, although Kbar had pulled close the doors as he entered. The ballroom doors opened and there were guests watching. Reggi was watching.
I realized I''d never have another chance to do this. I unrolled the swords and took one up. A Mandroid ran at me, trying to tackle me and I acted on reflex, sidestepping him and slashing as he passed me, neatly severing his head. I felt sick as the Mandroid''s mechanical fluids gushed everywhere.
"You''ll pay for that." Kbar snarled, sounding angry. He claimed the second sword and demonstrated he could slash it rapidly through the air in some convincing practice combos.
"Nice sword. It has weak spots, so does yours. This one is better." Kbar said with trembling anger beneath a false calmness as he circled me.
"Are you going to kill me?" I asked.
"Yes. On guard." Kbar said.
I looked to be sure that everyone had heard him say he''d kill me. I hoped it would help get me out of trouble if I survived. I realized how stupid I was, and lifted my sword on guard anyway.
Kbar came out of nowhere and beat it from my hand in just two blows. I stood at his mercy while he villain laughed and menaced me with his blade.
"Pick it back up." Kbar taunted.
I went for it and he came at me the second my hand touched the handle. I staggered back and he swung where my face was, only cutting my cheek. I dropped the sword and reclaimed it, on my knees for a second blocking two attempts to cut my arms off at the shoulder.
"You''re not a bad swordsman. Too bad you are not as good as me." Kbar struck from a resting pose without warning sent my sword clattering across the floor. I scrambled after it while he slashed the air behind me. "Your problem is a lack of tenacity."
"Yours-" I said as I turned on him, between his slashes at my heels. "You underestimated me."
"How?" Kbar looked at the sword protruding from his chest. I''d hit his heart, impaling the blade.
"She''s seen I would die for her. I don''t need tenacity, I''ve got veracity." I thought I sounded really clever, my adreneline had me feeling so wild I''m glad I didn''t kiss him after he dropped dead. Glad I just said a line. Okay, I didn''t say anything. I ran over and pulled my sword out of him and cradled him while he said:
"I''m, I''m going cold. Why, why like this?" Kbar shivered, his mechanical fluids leaking everywhere.
"Don''t be dramatic." I felt sad, but told him to keep it stiff.
"John Conner - give me your energy!" Kbar whispered.
"That''s my line." I said. "John Henry and Robocop, they be like - take my energy!"
"That''s good. You should, you should use that." Kbar smiled like a chad, twitched and then the glow in his eyes was gone.
I stood up, dropped the sword and looked up to see if Reggi accepted me.
In The Time Of Red Raven
"Reality? To me that was reality. I don''t know about this place. What makes you certain you won''t find yourself tied here, trying to explain yourself to people who look like you? I was pretty sure that was reality. Now, well now I just don''t care. This is all a dream, so do whatever you want to me. I''m not kissing the cross. Just light the pyre." Shawna told the nogs. They shuffled forward on their trunklike legs, one of them offering her a cross with a figure of a crucified nog with a golden crown and its lips puckered.
"I said I''m not kissing it. Burn me." Shawna grimaced at the horrid little nog. The nogs shrugged in unison and lifted the buckets of icy cold water at their feet. One by one they walked up to her and doused her in cold water, soaking her t-shirt and hair and making her shiver and blow water off her lips while the rest ran down her chin.
"Is she dead?" One of the nog asked.
One of them shuffled forward and waved its hands back and forth in front of her staring, lifeless eyes. "No reaction." the nog confirmed. They''d done it, they''d finally slain the Wicked Witch of the Stars. Some of the Ethgar were saddened, crying big sticky nog tears that left streaks on their faces.
Shawna held perfectly still, trying not to laugh. They really thought she was dead, they thought they''d burned her alive with their buckets of cold water. Stupid nogs, just a few moments longer and she could break free from their braided bonds and be on her way, richer than John Godson.
"I just worry her soul wont reach the Likeliness, We should hold the jesus-nog to her lips, just to be sure." A nasty little Ethgar suggested.
"We should all just shuffle off." Shawna tried some ventriloquism.
"Who said that?" Ethgar were asking each other. The nogs suddenly all looked back at Shawna, their little devil eyes glowing in the starlight.
"Oh fiddle cakes!" Shawna swore.
She didn''t usually use such foul language, but she was at her wits end with the Ethgar. First, their ridiculous test of faith to learn about Red Raven, and the treasure of the Seven Wonders. Then she had to climb Mount Velvet while nogs slung biffy sludge from their blow tubes while singing insults to her. With her knuckles bloodied and fitz in her hair, she''d reached the summit only to be accused of heresy, for she''d forgotten to remove her shoes. She''d have to climb the whole mountain again, just as penance.
After the six recitals of the Bindinfingin''s half a dozen holy books, the extinct lizards granted her a one-hour library pass in their sacred underground grottos. Was it enough time to memorize enough of their holy scripture to be able to compete in the junior nog bible quotation contest and become a wearer of the golden crown of the most kissable-crucifiable? It was, because Shawna really applied herself and memorized no fewer than three verses, which was two more than any junior nog had ever quoted. With the golden crown on her head, she could at last learn the last part of the legend of Red Raven, and find out where the treasure was hidden.
Wealth unimaginable, seven wonders, that''s a lot of moolah.
Bindinfingin ghost-holograms followed her around with sad expressions. The long dead intelligences expected better of her.
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"We''ve waited your return for fourteen thousand trine. Red Raven will you not reveal at last the eighth wonder? We have so waited to know the final answer." The Bindinfingin said to Shawna, but she ignored them. They almost sounded like they thought she was someone else and that the treasure was one of those ''the treasure was the adventure'' or ''the treasure was really just friendship'' or someshit.
Shawna wasn''t going to eat an adventure-friendship treasure, not after the nog figurine got smoochies from her. "Jesus, give me the strength of patience not to kick all these nogs."
"Do dead humans talk?" A nog asked.
They began arguing and discussing whether humans could talk when they were dead. Shawna put her two cents in, insisting that she could indeed talk while she was dead.
"Thou shalt not speak to the dead." A nog zealot drew his putty maker. Others pulled out their blow tubes, spit ball launchers and bald makers. One or two had forgot to pack weapons to the witch burning ceremony, but scooped up some dirt into their empty buckets.
"Thou shalt not fart from thy mouth." Shawna said in the dark, mimicking a nog-sounding voice. Then, as she blew a raspberry, the nogs went berserk. They had divided into two groups, each with opposing religious views, although none of them were sure what religious view the group they were divided into was seeing. The sound of the raspberry was like a starting bell, and within minutes the nogs had annihilated themselves, dead nogs scattered everywhere. The last of them finished itself off. Nogs were perfectionists.
"Now for that treasure." Shawna said gleefully. She followed the path through the empty nog village and found their sacred grotto. It was unguarded, and at last, she''d done it, found what she was always told wasn''t even real.
"Reality, Shawna." A familiar voice said from the silent swamps all around.
"Who said that?" She asked.
"Reality is the treasure. I just want you to come back to me. I know you''re in there. I can feel you dreaming."
Shawna shook her head. "I know what''s real."
A few glowing bugs floated lazily on the air past her, going off to some hollow log to party. Shawna felt watched, like someone was holding her hand. It was going to be good, when she didn''t find the treasure, what a weird feeling. Shawna shook it off. The treasure was hers.
"You think you can take my treasure?" The space pirate captain''s hologramatic ghost stood in her way.
"So, you''re Red Raven. Notorious brigand, mutineer and baroness. I''m here for your treasure, I knew it was real, I knew it all along." Shawna smirked. "The aliens, they worshipped you, but I know you''re just a criminal." Shawna told her. "You even almost had me fooled with the Bindinfingin holograms making this sound like some sort of morality scam."
"Yet you made it all the way here." Red Raven smiled, proud of Shawna.
"Of course I did. You think I don''t know what''s real and what isn''t?" Shawna laughed.
"The treasure is real. You just have to go through that door and accept what''s on the other side." Red Raven pointed. "It''s the treasure."
"See? You''re still trying to psych me out. I''m abouts to be richer than John Godson. Sick of this." Shawna grabbed the handle, but something felt wrong.
"Just go through." Red Raven urged her.
"I can''t." Shawna felt her eyes watering. "I just want to stay here. I''m not ready."
"You''ll never be ready to be rich like John Godson. Nobody ever is. Just go in there already. I gots to get my wings, Shawna." Red Raven made ''go on in'' gestures, shooing Shawna with the backs of her hands waving up at her.
"If this is any kind of treasure that isn''t money, I swear I''m coming back here for you, and even though you''re dead, I''ll choke you out anyway." Shawna told Red Raven.
"Yes-yes, all that. Now go through already, the hour draws late." Red Raven seemed to have unlimited patience, despite her efforts to urge Shawna into the treasure behind the weird creepy disembodied door floating in the swamp. The door that looked suspiciously like her bedroom door as a child, growing up. Not liking this one bit, no sir.
Shawna took a deep breath, closed her eyes, turned the handle and went through.
Livingstone Escaped Nine Levels Of Containment
We are not gods.
Deep within the earth, the secrets of life held a sacred riddle. These extreme lifeforms eat bacteria that feed on nitrogen and thrive on such particles of fatty-acid encased carbons, petrified cells of immortal proto-life. The smallest snacks it devoured metabolized raw minerals into molecules that were neither alive - nor mere chemical reactions.
We saw the chain of life, unbroken, amid the endless surfaces within limestone and basalt, within cracks of granite, where things are born and die in geologically scaled time. This realization should have made us understand that which lives - sleeping forever in the darkness - should have left it where it slept. Instead, we brought it to the surface.
To this thing, this worm, this bio-mineral-phage, our world is too easy - a feast. The caverns where it roamed like a clever demon, the microcracks and the crannies, an endless maze that adapted it to overcome any obstacle and danger. In its homeworld, deep below our delicate surface layer, magma plumes and radiation and collisions of pressure and the ever-shifting labyrinth made it into the perfect hunter, the ultimate survivor.
We are just soft and stupid chunks of abundant meat to this polymorphous horror.
In the end, our containment measures were a mere child''s obstacle course for this thing.
Our first warning was when it seemed playful, reacting to us, mimicking our movements in the glass tube we kept it in.
When we first found the creature Livingstone, it was microscopic, and difficult to understand and study. It was our tampering that grew it to a sizable thing, a blob of living mass, the size of a baseball. While it waited for more nutrients it went dormant, supposedly it could hibernate like that forever. It spit out its core chromosomes and then it died, sort-of. Tendrils snaked out of its husk and pulled the living mass inside, forming a kind of walled-off super-shell. Our calculations indicated this auto-cannibalism could sustain it for perhaps a quarter-million years, even at its current size. An unnatural size for Livingstone, as it wouldn''t naturally have such an abundance of nitrogen and nutrients as we had fed it, artificially.
Deep within the earth, it had to sustain itself on crumbs, but we had given it the whole cake.
The military of our country wanted us to add several more containment measures when it first showed signs of escape-artist abilities. There were a total of ten levels of containment, and we felt that seven of them were entirely unnecessary, since it had only broken out of the test tube, and never showed any more sign of strength or ingenuity. We didn''t comprehend how it could adapt or learn or change shape and tactics. We didn''t really conceptualize how well it understood us, while we had learned very little about it.
Livingstone might be a god, I think.
I write from this last place, as it knocks upon the door, "Shave and a haircut" over and over again, waiting for me to open the last door. I made alterations to our security, allowing me to share our findings with the rest of the world and having made an entry code that it cannot guess, as it is an infinitely long number, hundreds of digits long. There is no way it can possibly type that into the override and open the door.
Of course, we were wrong about all of its other abilities, and it made it to this final airlock, bypassing all of the unbeatable containment measures. I worry that it is merely toying with me, waiting for me to unseal the final door to the outside, before revealing it can come into this last room, where I reside. That is why I am going to stay here, with Livingstone, because this is checkmate, as long as I do not open that door, it is trapped in the lab, with me.
If it comes in before I open the door, and eats me, then humanity wins, because the last door is sealed from the inside, and only I know the password, and the biometric scans required, and the keycard which I have shredded already. Even if it can type in that numeric code outside, over a thousand digits long, an impossible guess, it will find it has eaten the last key, already broken, when it gets to me. I doubt I will be anything but a mummified corpse when it gets to me, for the oxygen will run out long before my rations, and I will die and become a dry decomposition.
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I am very afraid, I am terrified. Most of the horror has gone numb, and I am somewhat resigned to this fate. Everyone else is dead. It has killed everyone, and the nightmare has gone quiet.
Except for the sound of "Shave and a haircut" which it keeps knocking over and over again. It is both maddening and reassuring at the same time. As long as it keeps trying to communicate, I feel it has reached an impasse. It is also trying the keypad, but it cannot figure it out. It is just typing numbers into it over and over, unable to guess the impossible code I''ve set it to.
The first layer of containment failed when we shut off Livingstone''s nitrogen ration, after waking it up for the general. It didn''t like that, and it did wake up, and reached for the sealed nozzle, feeling around the edges and then it suctioned itself to the unbreakable glass and applied enough pressure somehow to crack the glass. We retreated from its chamber and watched in surprise and fascination for twenty six minutes while it continued to add cracks. Finally, it broke out, slithering gracefully out and towards the door, somehow knowing without any kind of sensory organs that we knew of, which way was out.
"It can''t get through solid metal." we told the general.
It reached with a tendril and used the override keypad to type in the five-digit number and open the door.
The second containment had failed, and we were astonished, and afraid.
Livingstone withered under the flamethrowers, the specially designed toxins and the bombardment of ultraviolet light, but it did not die. Each time it broke free of its defensive shell different, smaller and more evolved, moving slower and more awkwardly, or more cautiously.
I had already retreated to the entrance, as I was too frightened to stay and watch. I had seen how it grew and fed and survived attacks and environmental hazards since it was a mere amoeba. Its actions mirrored the microscopic, and this terrified me. It was hunting, now, anticipating the evasion and defenses of the kinds of things it liked to eat. We were triggering its normal behavior over hundreds and thousands of years in the microscopic world in mere minutes and hours in our world. It made little difference to Livingstone, it just scaled up with the new scale of life it was encountering.
I''m not counting the physical attempts of security forces to fight it as a containment measure, as it was a desperate attempt to capture it or kill it as it circumvented two entire containment levels. It ignored machineguns and grenades, almost completely ineffective, but the violence taught it there was lively food nearby, and it got a taste for human flesh, eating and digesting us like vitamins, and growing quickly into something too fast and strong and large.
It had become a new predator, something it was never meant to be. I was there in the control room and it was my decision to seal off the base when all of our containment measures except the last two had failed. I made this decision out of fear and logic, combined into some kind of cold-blooded triage.
I watched and wept and shook with morbid self-loathing and the sensation of a waking nightmare as my colleagues who were trapped with it were hunted down and devoured, one by one. It took their keycards and used them to circumvent minor doors, moving up through the levels of our underground laboratories. It ate all the other samples, all the lab animals and chemicals that it found, always growing, always changing and learning.
The ninth containment was one we thought it could not get through, a net of shifting laser beams that would slice it and cook it and disintegrate it. It worked about as well as bullets do on Superman. And then it was upon us, knocking on the doors of Hell, hoping to leave the abyss in which it belongs.
It was very efficient by the time it reached the last containment that it got through. The general thought it was one of his soldiers on the other side, using a secret knock to say "I''m a human survivor" and that is why it thought, yes thought, that "Shave and a haircut" would also work to tell me to let it in. Or rather let it out, because if it got past me there is an unsuspecting world outside, unprepared for this nightmare, this unstoppable devil.
I won''t let it out, in fact, I can''t. I''ve shredded the keycard necessary to access the drive for the master computer. Even if I wanted to open this last door, there is no way for me to do so. It is also reset to my unique biometric scans and I assume it will eat me and lose that key also. If it somehow gets in here, it will find the last door cannot be opened. We''re trapped down here forever, but to this thing, that isn''t long enough.
That is why I am telling you about Livingstone, so that you will not be curious enough to see what is behind door number two. Never, ever, ever open that door, if you somehow can. It is sealed from the inside, but I fear some future generation might learn a way to open it anyway. I insist that you do not, or all will be lost. It sleeps down here, forever.
That is my greatest fear.