The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1)

by Marie Curuchet

  “But Jesus, who cares if I’m fat or skinny?” she said aloud. “There’s no fucking man left who cares, or woman for that matter! Maybe that doctor?"

  “Ralph? You here?” She looked at the corner of the room and then quickly all around. He was gone. But would he barge in on her when she was dressing?

  Without the restraints holding her, but uncertain of whom or what might be watching, Margot started to slowly clothe herself beneath the sheer blanket. She picked the orange top first and noticed its feel. Cotton soft? She drew the top to her face. There was no label. Slipping her arms through the sleeves, she pulled it over her head and chest. She drew her legs up slowly to her buttocks and carefully put on the shorts.

  Jesus, these lowlifes, no underwear. Good Lord, what do I do when it’s my period? They must have something like toilet paper. Do they poop? My God, they won’t understand! How do I ask? Margot, if they can make these cotton clothes, they can surely make a damn tampon or toilet paper. But who do I ask? Mascara?

  With her clothes now on, she dropped the blanket over the side and noticed gravity pull it to the ground. Margot sat up straight, overcoming the pain from muscles and bones long-idled, and dropped her feet quickly down to the floor.

  As she touched the surface, Margot’s head began to swim as her body weakened and slid downward uncontrollably. With nothing to hold onto, she felt her knees buckle as she slumped-over and felt her head hit the floor.

  ‘Margot?’ Yes, brother. ‘You should see what it’s like on the other side.’ No, no, brother, I’m here, and do you remember what it’s like? Do you remember flesh, smell and taste, brother? Do you remember the softness of a dog’s belly, or your hand grasping the sharpness of a rock? 'No Margot, it’s lost on me.' I’m not ready to go, brother. I don’t know what this is, this thing that I’m in, but I know I’m not ready to go. Mom, Dad, they’re all right? 'Yes.' Dogs, dogs. Is my sweet Lady there, too? 'Yes.' I miss them. I miss them all, and you too, brother. I am looking for a purpose, what is all behind this and that. The journey is far from finished for me. But remember science class? Remember the cycle of life? Birth death decay. Birth death decay. They made it sound like there’s nothing in between, like only three events happen. As if that’s the all. But that’s the nothing, brother, only a more sudden transition of the flow, more noticeable. Think of where I am. Think of what I am. Think of this that I am.

  Oh, my head! Limp, weak. My head falls back. Like a ship taking on water, ready to sink. Throbbing, sore, pain. My hand is on my head, but no comfort there. Forehead throbs and burns.

  I, the captured creature, entombed in a dark and arid cave. A desert bobcat searching endlessly for an opening, a light. I can move but I am so tired of movement, after the many months, then years, of constant pacing back and forth until the cave floor below me had turned to dust, and it became difficult to continue walking without its powder choking my lungs. Thick and warm desert air, relentless air. I feel you press against my lungs as I suck you in and you emerge from my throat in a hot river. The heat in my mouth, it is the constant in this cave, except for my darkness. But light is there, I know, for I see images in the cave, movement of bat creatures, enormous brown bats, with triangular heads.

  Oh mantis, how I would stare at you in that cave. Holding you in my hand, hoping you would not fly away. You’d cock your head and stare back at me, too big to eat, you think I am. You are the king of my desert, the green king of all bugs, the master, but there are others after you, others beyond you that you know nothing about until they snatch you up in their hungry mouths, without giving thought to your mastery, without caring for your kingdom, without understanding your cunning and patience. And you mantis, as you peer from inside the dark pouch that excretes acid from the lizard that just ingested you, do you know what is happening?

  God, what are these silhouettes that move past me? How can they pass but not have the weight that my feet carry? How can they float above the cave floor, yet appear as if there is effort in movement? I stare down at my lifeless limbs, rotting and flaccid, the creamy white, sickly color of pale flesh not having seen the desert sun for far too long.

  The sun. Turn back to memory and try to recall. Was it sharp or fuzzy? I have since forgotten how it would lay in orbit. But I remember the moon in its sharpness, lighting up the desert sky on so many nights. I, as the little girl afraid to walk too far into the living night of the desert, would calmly sit and stare at it over my short cinder block wall, beyond the backyard, elevated above it, watching the swaying of the mesquite to the rhythm of the night breeze.

  That terrible morning. Waking up to the tractor as it worked to slaughter my huge mesquite. I remember running to Mom and crying “Stop, stop, what are they doing?” I was frantic and ran outside toward the yellow destroyer as it pushed at my tree, and suddenly the earth was beneath me, I was in the sky, my father’s arms. ‘Daddy, daddy! What are they doing to my desert?’ ‘Don’t you know?’ He said so calmly. ‘I thought your mother told you. They’re building more houses behind ours. Real nice ones, custom homes, not just a subdivision.’ ‘But the desert, Daddy!’ I sobbed and wailed and buried my head against his hard shoulder. ‘I didn’t know it would affect you this way. I didn’t know you liked that tree so much. I’m sorry, honey, but this is progress, I suppose. How do you think they built our house?’ I turned back and heard my sainted mesquite, my wooden friend of jays and wrens, crack and moan, and as it fell a grader whizzed past, scouring the sacred desert ground I had walked upon the previous day. On that day, I was acutely aware of needing to watch for rattlesnakes, that they were not my friends. It was not the rattlesnakes I had to fear.

  Margot awoke and found herself again elevated above the pink fluid bath, the bright lights less bright now. “Bug!” she yelled. “Turn these lights down!” She felt an excruciating throbbing above her right eye. "Jesus, Jesus. Bug, what did you do to my head?" She reflexively tried to force her hand to her head but found no control of her arms.

  “Margot, please calm down! Calm down!” Rovada urged her gently.

  Margot took a deep breath and tried to relax. For a moment, she was back at the store, back on the long escalator, the dress, the plastic cover, the slip of the dress over the side. “Bug!”

  “You can call me Ralph, or Rovada if you wish, or Bug if it pleases you.”

  “What happened?” she snapped as the grogginess began to clear.

  “My mistake Margot, indeed my mistake.”

  “Would you come the hell out from wherever you are so I can see you?”

  Rovada moved from his monitoring area and swept quietly to within a meter of the bed.

  Margot caught sight of him in her left eye and felt a cold, empty chill. She closed her eyes and turned away. She wasn’t sure, but the thought of looking at someone, something, and listening to it but not seeing lips move seemed so senseless, as if it was all an imagined conversation. “Bug, you were saying?” she edged out of her mouth and felt the warm tears begin to stream from her eyes. She knew it was not from the aching pain in her head.

  “I said I am so sorry. I failed to take into account that your muscles, though exercised, did not have a full connection yet with your conscious mind. I did not know you would try to slip down. We could have caught you but the event happened so fast, and the Wall is not fully attuned to you.”

  “Exercised?”

  “Yes, the machine took care of that by stimulating your muscles, much like your own mind would have done. But your mind has not connected, and we need to work a little to reconnect it.” There was a brief pause. “Margot?” Rovada moved back a little, sensing her mood.

  Margot felt a burning in her throat, a swelling of the glands underneath her tongue and a tight constricting in her ears, and suddenly she cried a loud, gut-wrenching, lonely scream.

  I am alone! I am alone! No family, no planet, no home, four other lifeless faces like my own that don’t matter. My Mom, my Dad, Joey, my room, my friends, my apartment, my Facebook. No
t only gone but never again to be seen or felt or touched. Not a tree nor a squirrel nor rabbit, water in a lake, ducks, the moon at night, my desert, my car, my art, my diaries, my shoes and clothes. Jesus, clothes got me here!

  “God,” she cried aloud, “why did I deserve this?”

  Rovada was silent. Emotion came hard to him, especially when it was not from a Das. He had seen so many different types of beings in his countless years of interstellar travel that he had forgotten the looks and character of most. Yet some constants were clear among nearly all of them. Love or protection of family, desire for extending themselves through time via progeny, and emotion, whether utterly restrained or uncontrolled and grasping, like this. "Grasping," he thought, "that is one I cannot explain, but we are all grasping in some way, even me, even the Das after the countless eons." His mind quickly scanned the many images of sentient beings with which he had contact and could still remember. So few on the fringes of these traits, so many in the middle, like most humans he had observed.

  He swept back to his controls and watched Margot sobbing, listening to a jumble of thoughts, somewhat confused by their speed and complexity. "I am not an interpreter," he considered. "Never was one, never wanted to be, they are generally useless except for beings whose thoughts are so diverse, complex, and fast at once that a typical Das or the Wall cannot determine them readily. If there was one somewhat unusual thing to note about humans, it was their ability to mix thought, speech, and emotion so rapidly."

  Margot stopped crying after a time. Her body chilled in the perfect temperature of the room, and short dark hairs stood up all over her body. She stared at the blackness of the wall to her right, unable to perceive the distance. Images rapidly came to her mind. Her father teaching her to play baseball, at least until Joey came along. But he wasn’t unfair to have paid more attention to Joey. It is the prerogative of a father to teach his son the things that a son must know. She saw the bright sun on the campus in Tempe where she would sit in the shade of a palo verde and wait for her friends before going to class. She smelled the oily smoke of the Mexican food restaurant where she ate so many burritos while studying. She remembered the time she stepped into the crosswalk at school and was almost hit by a car going far too fast.

  Idiot! Out-of-control! God, though, not even the bad things can I have again.

  She felt a great pit of emptiness in her chest as if a teaspoonful of black hole had been placed there and was bearing down on her backbone, causing it to slowly collapse. She could feel that hole, she knew it in her bones. She was that hole of darkness, of nothingness, there was no other, there were no others now upon which she could base her life, her sense of self, her fit in the world. There was no social network now. There were no friends now. There was no world now. A terrible, vivid, prolonged nightmare of loneliness.

  Rovada was becoming worried. Margot had been staring blankly for hours. He spoke to her, and she failed to speak back. Her thoughts ranged from intensely active to seemingly blank at mixed intervals. He could only see gray coming from her in those moments, a confused jumble of emotions. The cleansing process cleaned her skin every four hours, but she showed little reaction. She failed to blink as the mist sprayed directly into her eyes. He knew that she had not relapsed into a coma but was suffering from a severe shock to her nervous system. "Not too unexpected," he thought. “I should not have let her stand so soon, it didn’t help her.”

  Rovada recalled eternity. Eternity was not unfriendly to him or his race of beings. For over two billion years, the Das had been highly developed and had traveled both interstellar and intergalactic space. This galaxy was such a remote one compared to others, and he had traveled so far from his own home planet. But the Das had traversed the galaxies for so long, it was not unusual to have some of them this far out.

  As intergalactic beings, they had undergone little change in those two billion years. They were still Das, unaltered genetically for the most part with the exception of a few genetic changes like those that allowed for rapid recovery from injury, or immediate elimination of objects foreign to their own selves, such as viruses. Then there was the great realization they had made so very long ago, in their early years of technology advancements. That was the slight genetic modifications to their senses to enhance their mental connections with other Das.

  It seemed funny to him to remember the spark of that essential capability that assisted them in establishing the interconnect. A curious Das, those few billion years ago, had noticed how they seemed to sniffle together as they drew air into their bodies and bathed it in mucous before separating oxygen from the other elements. That particular Das was in a doctor’s office, in an unusually long wait to be seen, and he noticed the most mundane and ignored of all Das physical traits. An inborn vestige of their pre-history – but a critical one. This spark of the interconnect was rapidly refined, and their genetic structures were delicately enhanced so that they all would become capable.

  They then codified this ability to capture and interpret the energy of thought into the Wall’s program code. Rovada knew that humans were so capable of doing the same. and they were actively experimenting in this area and experiencing initial successes. But it was already too late for them.

  Humanity was beyond the precipice. Indeed, humanity was over the precipice and accelerating to the bottom quickly in its arrogant ignorance. He had seen too many times before where the rapid ascent of potential species-survival technology was grossly undermatched by competing social structures that were in utter disarray and conflict. So much potential, but cascaded layers upon layers of accumulating risk in all else that was human.

  He recalled the countless failures of other beings that had taken paths of hybridization that spelled their inevitable doom. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he mused, “an apt human phrase.” Bio-hybrids eradicating non-hybrids, then eradicating themselves in their own self-created, final freak show. Bio-machine hybrids eradicating bio-hybrids. Sentient robots almost always eliminating all. Countless wars of super-intelligent machines and biomachines that ultimately annihilated each other. They all reached the final state. Entropy.

  This demise of human civilization was no different than any others in the cosmic scheme of things. Few from the millions of civilizations ever came to understand the simplicity of the solution, and those that did were almost always too far along their destructive paths to effectively implement the solution. Like those millions of other societies. and as technically advanced as it was becoming, humanity was incapable of understanding its problems, much less devising a path to implement even minor steps.

  Very long ago, the Das recognized that the single purpose embedded in their genetics was to ensure the long-term survival of the species. There was not a second purpose, nor a third, nor any other.

  Like the single purpose, they established a single solution that was the fundamental cornerstone of Interlocking Effects: eradicating from all aspects of their lives the two proto-evils of fear and entitlement. In any form, in any Das, in any instance. They understood that all other evils germinated from these two. Fear and entitlement were at the core of universal entropy, and one only stops or substantially slows entropy by conquering these two proto-evils. They are the only enemy. Ignorance is often ruthless. Intelligence is often ruthless. Fear and entitlement are always ruthless, and both proto-evils are the eternal friends of universal entropy.

  Once implemented, their solution was fast acting. Training Das in their early years about how to recognize fear and entitlement in themselves and others. Individually mastering the techniques to overcome these proto-evils. Understanding how to manage the continuous cycle of demise, death, and rebirth of the proto-evils. All so ingrained now, all simply a part of being Das, embedded in the fibers of their existence.

  Rovada looked back at Margot’s limp body hovering above the pink pond. “What remains,” he said to himself, “of what could have been. Just another unsuccessful hominid of the many versions that c
ame before it on that planet. No doubt the last in its line.”

  Chapter 5

  “BUG! LOWLIFE!” MARGOT CALLED out, fidgeting wildly. Rovada felt relieved and drew back at his controls. Heart rate 110, normal thought patterns. He noticed how her strong legs kicked helplessly under the gravitational restraint. Suddenly, Margot’s heartbeat slowed to 60, and in a somber, almost inaudible voice, Margot whispered, “What did it?”

  “Remember, Margot?” Rovada replied, “Remember the video? It was truth, perhaps not well-presented, but truth nonetheless.”

  “Sickness? Help me.”

  “A virus, quickly replicating, unusually so, maybe one of those one-in-a-billion things. They happen in the universe. It was airborne, primarily, spread like wildfire. The surprising or unusual thing was that it spread so fast.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “We don’t know. Human-created, probably. So many humans with so much science and burgeoning, unwieldy, and undisciplined potential in front of them. Something natural in the environment, maybe, but unlikely. You wonder about your dinosaurs, some say it was a meteorite, and they were correct, in part. We know that a viral agent was also involved in the dinosaurs’ deaths, insidious, but slower-acting than this one. You’d never catch it in a million years because of the soft-tissue nature of it. It doesn’t fossilize well like bones do.”

  “I don’t give a flying f about the dinosaurs. If you know so much, bug, then why couldn’t you stop this?”

  The question that was always asked by the few who remained with them, again and again. “Look, Margot,” Rovada said, feeling somewhat clinical and objective in his reply, “I will repeat. In the life of all things, even intelligent beings, we are not allowed to interfere. Observe, observe, research, yes, but not interfere. Not at least until a population, a group, has reached a certain stage of evolution and social norms. But so very few ever have.”

  “What the hell?” Margot screamed. “What the hell? Are we not evolved enough? Are we some pissass insects that you studied? God, you horrible scum, you’re the insect. My family died there. My family!”