by Eric Diehl
***
The view was spectacular from where they sat, atop the very prestigious Observation Spire at Confederation Prime HQ on Bellabarabba. Vedara felt a little tipsy from all the Verboulium Rum they’d consumed, but that was OK, because that blend never left a hangover. Moraine was, of course, giggling at just about everything.
“What will you do now, Moraine? There’s no real need for you to continue working.”
The Confederation had been very generous with its reward to them for bringing in the triple bounty of captured pirates, illicit Mil-Spec star cruisers, and especially that next-generation Class Five engine. That generosity, paid in ongoing stipends, may have stemmed partially from true appreciation, but Vedara suspected it was mostly intended as an incentive to keep the Confederation’s own horrific blunder under wraps.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Moraine. “I suppose I’ll start by spending some ‘down time’ with Valtar,” she chortled.
To Vedara’s amazement Valtar had managed to convince the Confederation that he knew absolutely nothing of the cannon engine, and so his permanent banishment had been lessened to a two-year period of indentured servitude. Moraine had promptly volunteered to be his master.
“What about you?” Moraine asked. “A life of retired luxury?” She giggled and hiccupped.
“No, that’s not for me. I love flying and the attendant adventure, but the difference is that now I’ll be able pick my clients much more carefully. I also talked the Confederation into granting me use of the SC1 star cruiser, by the way. Fully disarmed, of course.”
“Yeah, right,” said Moraine. “What about— Ooops, never mind.”
Vedara nodded. “I think I’ll also take a break before heading back out, some R&R time here.” She waved an arm to encompass the sprawling capitol city that stretched out in all directions from their soaring perch like a rich tapestry of so many textures. “Here we find ourselves at Galactic HQ, the seat of government for the entire Confederation. Hmmm, how shall I engage myself?” She leaned in toward Moraine and whispered conspiratorially. “Ah yes, I do believe that I remember someone mentioning a very close acquaintance—of a High Ministerial persuasion?”
Vedara winked at a wide-eyed, blinking Moraine, whose lips formed a scandalized ‘O’. Moraine squealed and clapped her hands, and Vedara smiled and sipped at her rum.
The End
Science and the Greater Good
“By Satan’s flaming prick this is not the end of it,” growled Ralf. “May the dark angels reserve your place in Chaos!” He coughed a spray of blood and phlegm, and straining against the shackles he turned a loathsome glare on the malefactor his own equal. “I’ll be back for you; a demon of your own making. Hear my words, false oracle—I’ll lead the Black Lord himself to your Prophesy!!!”
Enraged with the hollow rattle of his threats Ralf again lunged against the straps, his grunting efforts strangled by the manacle clamped tight around his throat, but soon he was spent, wheezing for breath and wielding nothing but empty words.
How quickly his circumstances had changed…
“You take your righteous gods,” he rasped, “your soulless saints and your buggerin’ clergy, and go stuff ‘em where no sun casts a shadow.” Twisting against the strand of electrodes that pierced his scalp like a halo of barbed wire, Ralf felt the prongs tear through flesh and catch on bone, and he hawked and spat toward the curate who had officiously declared himself as Primacy Deland Gaunt.
But a mouth parched dry with desperation made little of his effort.
The orator paused, feigning a charitable smile as he dabbed at imagined flecks of spittle on his robes, and Ralf collapsed back against the hard metal surface of the gurney. The self-proclaimed Prophet lifted his Sceptre and resumed the tracing of intricate aerial patterns while chanting sonorous platitudes of pietistic drivel, and Ralf’s eyes nearly bulged from their sockets as he again lunged to rage against the leather and steel that bound him fast.
The vicar put much drama into raising a finger before a flashing red button on the panel of dials and gauges, and he began building his cadenced preachment to a climax. Though Ralf paid no attention to any sect other than the very select Cult of Ralf, he could not help but marvel at the inane drivel—the melding of righteous urgency and moral rectitude, and all based in the inevitability of The Prophecy. The priest held his finger poised dramatically before the button, where it bobbed like a serpent setting itself to strike, until with a final incantation and theatrical flourish he leaned in to press it.
The throbbing light abruptly ceased its urgent flashing and stayed lit with all the silent certainty of an EKG gone flat-line. The scene abruptly began to dissolve, swirling and breaking apart in Ralf’s vision like a pointillist canvas coming undone, and Ralf cried out as his wits began to spin away, swirling faster and faster as water down a drain. Ralf became less, and still less yet, until he felt like a mere slip of the sheerest gauze.
And then there was nothing.
***
He had not died, he didn’t think.
If that were the case, then there would be nothing. Or there’d be demons prodding at him through the flames, or angels flying around sprinkling fairy dust. Whatever.
This was, well… OK, so it was nothing—but still, he was thinking about it. Though there was little enough to assess. No sight, no sound, no sensations of any nature. It felt to Ralf as though he had somehow been ‘absent’ for an indeterminate period, and then the process of thinking had begun to grow on him. Scattered fragments at first, like static-ridden signals on an ancient analog tuner, and then patterns filtering together. Gradually his thoughts connected with one another, and he pieced together the events preceding this… well, whatever this was.
The Prophesy. They'd caught up with him, finally. He'd made a mistake and they had linked him to a multitude of… well, incidents, as he preferred to call them. Once they’d known who to look for they had tracked him easily enough, as pervasive and unbounded as was the Prophesy.
And that had been that. The show was over, the curtain lowered. The players gone from the stage and the theatre pad-locked forevermore, so it would seem. The Prophesy’s Enforcers had processed him in short order, paying minimal lip service and skating through the legalities with all the delicacy of a blow torch on an ice cube.
Let the bastards stew in their own hell!, fumed Ralf, from his little stub-track off the vastness of nowhere. The Prophesy’s self-actualized ‘True Judgment’ councils proclaim their actions as being just and righteous, but they’re no more ‘moral’ than am I.
Ralf pondered that notion at length, turning it one way and another and considering it from various angles, because, quite frankly, he had no other pressing engagements in the foreseeable future. Finally he resolved that, on the whole, he did not view his mores as evil-incarnate—but then neither could he justify them.
Good or bad, right or wrong; it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Having exhausted that philosophical consideration, Ralf commenced to revel in all that was left him now; the reconstructing of memories of his past, all those carefully plotted and exceptionally guileful artifices. There was the beginning of each entrapment—an oft-time whimsical selection of his prey—and then a crafty pursuit, artfully twisted and turned upon itself, and eventually the culmination, which was, sadly enough, always much the same. Once he had extracted the final penance there was nothing more for him there, and he would feel empty and purposeless until he could recharge himself with a new and perhaps even more deviant pursuit.
Oh yes, how he would satiate in the brutal cycling of emotions that he labored to induce; surprise and confusion, anger and fear, hope crushed to despair, agony. He was able to identify each by its unique and desperate smell in the sweat and the breath of his victims. And if it felt so exquisite to him, so sublime—how then could it be inherently wicked? Of course that question was raised by the perpetrator, not by the perpatratee…
Amusem
ent!
Look there—an emotion reconstructed from nothing! If Ralf could have shaken his head, he would have.
What the hell is going on here? Where…what am I?
Ralf’s meandering train of thought was suddenly set off-track as he became aware of a murmuring on the fringe of his mentality.
Sound? Could that be sound?
And of a sudden he caught the faintest scent, a musky aroma that he could almost taste.
Jeezus B Christ! Am I being born again? Out of the womb and all that gooey crap?
“He’s… to…..…..ound…...utting….t..ether.”
Bits of words! And those were not my thoughts, I heard them! Sort of.
“You ..ink so? ..at woul…uite a rapid t…..”
A second voice?
“Yes, it.....ppening....sually quick, but can’t you feel it? He is coalescing.”
Ralf concentrated on the words, struggling to assemble them into a coherent whole, and he abruptly came to realize that it was no longer pitch black. An interior space, a room, was coming into focus, bit by bit, like pixels gathering on a monitor.
“Hello? You can hear us now?” The voice redirected itself. “You see there, Dedra, where his substance comes together?”
Substance!?? Coming together?
Ralf tried to look down at himself, at his so-called ‘substance’, and his senses dropped into a spin, careening like an over-clocked motherboard, tumbling end over end through open space and solid matter. He clenched his vision shut to halt the madness, and when he calmed and reopened his mind he found himself in another room, looking down from the ceiling. He lowered his perspective to the floor and he jumped—figuratively speaking—as the same voice spoke again.
“Well then, this is truly remarkable! It would appear that you’ve careened headfirst into your new existence, eh? But you needn’t be overly concerned with what happened just now, as your bearings should settle down once you’ve gained self-control.”
Ralf rotated a full circle, deciding that he was not really ‘hearing’ the voice. Nor did he physically squint his eyes. At first he perceived nothing but an empty room, but he then became aware of an indistinct blur—like a smudge on a camera lens. The chimera spoke to him.
“You can see us now, is that correct?”
Us?
He tried to focus on the formless presence that spoke to his mind, and he became aware that, indeed, it was not a single entity, but rather a pair. But how could he speak to it, to them? He had no mouth, no lips—he was nothing.
“What are you?”
Shocked, Ralf realized that question had come from him.
“You see, Dedra?” The voice again redirected its focus. “This is superb! I have never seen an extraction come together so quickly. We have long hoped for one such as this. Perhaps he may prove a true savant—more adept than even you or I!”
The voice turned back to Ralf. “You are new to this plane of existence, and so you have much to learn. To begin, I will introduce myself. I am Doctor Albert Forquessas, and this is Dedra Handerstorn, my circumstantial compatriot.”
Ralf thought he could discern which bit of shimmer was the speaker, but as he pondered how he might respond, a vague memory tugged at him. Forquessas?
***
Laura stepped out the doorway, throwing the deadbolt and warily scanning both directions down the brightly-lit hallway. She frowned—the excitement of her new apartment had quickly cooled to a sense of unease, though she could point to no reason for it. But, admittedly, the low rent had seemed too good to be true. The complex was as secure as she could hope for, located in a fairly upscale neighborhood. And, unlike her previous apartment, seemingly not prowled by the darker denizens of the metropolis.
Nonetheless—the place really creeped her out. She never felt truly alone here, it was as though someone always watched, some presence always lingering just beyond view. The second week she’d gone so far as to conduct a reconnaissance—electrical outlets, phone jacks, light fixtures—any place some twisted freak might have planted the intrusive miniature surveillance camera or microphone. But she’d found nothing to justify her discomfort. Now she shook her head—why on earth had she become so skittish? There was no dark history evident here, no skeletons rattling about in closets.
Even so, she’d learned from guarded conversations with other tenants that she was not alone with her vague sense of threat. The young guy across the hall was moving out as soon as he could find anyplace halfway decent. He would forfeit his entire security deposit—and he’d just cycled out of a tour of combat duty, for God’s sake—not someone you’d expect to see jumping from his shadow.
Laura had taken to watching her neighbors, and after a short time she found herself paying closer attention to those who stayed on long-term. There was old Mrs. McClarity at the end of the hall, young Dylan Brown on the first floor, and ditzy blonde Melissa, to name a few. Dylan was perpetually happy, a ‘special’ bagger at the local grocery. Melissa was always bombed on whatever ‘script she could wrangle from one day-clinic or another, and Mrs. McClarity, well… there was no denying that the old woman was feeble.
The thing of it was; all of those who showed no sign of discomfort here—they were kinda slow in one way or another. None too perceptive, not running on all cylinders. Could that be why they sensed nothing askew?
Whatever the case, Laura found herself spending more and more time at her boyfriend’s ramshackle studio apartment these days.
***
“I would say that you were totally whacked out, if not for the fact that here I am, less than a shadow on the wall, talking to a couple of spooks.” Ralf wished he could pinch himself awake.
“Oh no, that is not at all true,” insisted the bit of nothing who called himself Dr. Forquessas. “A shadow is something of a void, an absence of energy. You, to the contrary, are a coalescence of energy.”
“Say what?”
“You said that you recognized my name. Then surely you understand what I suggest?”
“Uh, listen up, Doc. I was never much for psychics or scientology or whatever the hell it was you did. I had my own, ah… interests.” Ralf harbored his secret smile.
“Oh?” Dr. Forquessas sounded newly wary. “Tell me then, what action of yours merited an extraction? For most of us it was a minor infraction.” Forquessas sighed, Ralf somehow sensed. “So many people on the planet, all following the Genesis Codex—our sheer volume necessitated some means of forced attrition after the Twenty Wars had ended and could no longer provide that function. Unfortunately for us all, the Prophesy assumed that role. But back to my question; your transgressions were slight, were they not?”
Ralf shrugged. “Yeah, sure. They got me for jaywalking. And once I bumped my scatcraft into the Chancellor’s luxo-rig. They get all pissy over stuff like that.”
“Hmmmm, I suppose. Well, in any case, you could hardly cause any trouble here. Not yet, anyway.”
Ralf’s ears perked up, metaphorically speaking. “Whaddaya mean, not yet?”
“We will discuss that later. For now, I want to make sure that you understand what you are; what we all are.”
“Doc, you keep saying stuff like ‘all of us’. I don’t see no big crowd. You, me, and Dedra there.”
“Oh no, there are many, many more. Here and at other dumping zones across the planet. You don’t yet perceive the weaker signatures, but in time you will. This zone is long overcrowded, as I’m certain the others are.”
Ralf scowled, and then carefully widened his vision.
There’s nothing else here, I… no, wait! I see something, very faint, like the last trace of a cloud blown apart in the wind.
“You see them?” asked Dr. Forquessas encouragingly.
Ralf nodded dubiously. “Maybe. So what’s your point, Doc?”
Forquessas sighed again. “My point is that we do indeed exist, but not as solid matter. To summarize a lengthy discourse, my premise is that life is energy.”
“You're saying I’m a peppy guy?”
“What remains of you is pure, formless, energy. My work has shown that streams of energy comprise what we think of as life. All else, such as your body or the physical form of a tree, are just containers—vessels meant to hold specific signatures of energy for a period of time.”
“So Doc, if I’m so energetic like you say, why don’t I just whip out my cape and fly off, like Super-Dude?”
Forquessas chuckled. “If only it were so simple, Ralf. To put it as simply as I am able, what you enjoyed previously was a unique concentration of energy that defined your thoughts, your memories, your emotions; all contained within a vessel synchronized to the complex pattern of energy that was, and is, Ralf. As it were, we have all been deprived of those uniquely tuned coffers that we once thought of as bodies.”
“Yeah? So what happened to our bods, Doc? Couldn’t we just track 'em down and climb back on board?”
Forquessas shook his head, or so Ralf imagined. “We are separated by time and by space, and the bodies are stacked in cryogenic storage—like so many John Doe’s in a morgue—awaiting incineration after a period of time beyond what any human could hope to survive in normal life. We are, in effect, stranded here.”
***
Laura doubled-checked the locks and safety chains on the front door and switched on all the lights in the apartment before ducking into the bathroom. She locked that door also, and, feeling rather silly about it but doing so anyway, she wedged a chair under the doorknob. Taking a deep breath, she turned on the shower and slipped off her robe.
***
“They turned my work against me, Ralf. Claiming that I’d broken a sacred covenant, they usurped the very effort they’d condemned, and then turned it to their own purpose.”
“How can they do that, Doc? Wasn’t Capital P outlawed after the last Annihilation?”
“Ah, and there’s the rub, Ralf. Per the Prophesy’s abstruse logic, the extraction is not capital punishment. And in a way that’s true. We are not dead, after all; we are simply disembodied.”