by Tom Schimmel
Zeus really could chuck a rock. There was no doubt he was a chip off the old block. So goes the legend. Others living on modern Earth accept as true that the asteroid belt was a product of a large and very pregnant mother planet. The birth, according to the believers, was quite violent. The resulting baby planets briefly simulated a croquet match played in a fighting cage by angry, legless men. This celestial body meets that celestial body; Earth gets her cherry popped, and out comes the moon. It is not surprising that most people who accept this explanation are women with a taste for other women. Many men would be happy to accept this belief too. As long as they were allowed to watch…. Perhaps after rocking the far side of the planet, the errant throw of young Zeus, did in fact continue onward to connect with something else closer to the Sun. Epelimus would have been the last to know. Had anyone been spared in order to speculate, they would perhaps conclude that the meteor had been a solid mass ejection from the Giant Red Spot of Jupiter.
Lying asleep with his wife and son, Epelimus had been dreaming of his mother as she was when he was himself a boy. They were in Pleida’s laboratory on Venus. His mother smiled at him and showed him the genetic encoder in her hand. He touched her hand and the small machine. His mother’s hands were warm.
A dolphin entered the splash pool at the rear of the lab. It had swum up the river and into the lab through a special waterway built just for them. The dolphins were free to come and go as they pleased. This one let out a squeaky hello and smiled at Epelimus.
In his dream, he had just reached out to touch the creature’s moist beak, when the sparkling eyes met his. The dolphin bypassed all the silly communication charades that humans and dolphins often enjoy playing. This one had gotten right to the point and spoken straight into his brain. The voice was a tremulous bass. It had exactly one word to say.
“Run”
In his dream, there was only time to feel a shiver through his spine. The giant shock wave from the far side of Mars razed their buildings in a single rumbling swoosh. His wife and son had been tossed violently out of their beds and struck by the debris that had, only a few seconds before, been their refuge. Epelimus staggered to his feet in a surreal landscape. The transformation of the colony was permanent. Everything at ground level or above was scattered like snowflakes. Bodies and debris were everywhere. His wife and child lie among unrecognizable wreckage, their corpses intact; but twisted, broken, and unmistakably dead.
Modern Earth has produced a number of movies which depict a man standing in the wreckage of his home, with everyone and everything dead and gone. Quite often, the male character will raise his eyes and arms to the heavens and scream a single word.
“Why?”
Character development after the tragic climax scene varies tremendously. Some characters drink heavily and forget to shave. Suicide occurs with some frequency. The darkest stories lead the man to forsake God and embrace savagery to avoid the pain of loss. Soldiers, athletes, and vampires alike have been portrayed as such monsters. The endings of these movies are often bloody and rarely merciful. There are also movies on modern Earth which describe men who are able to lose everything and triumph even without bitterness. Religious men accept and continue to walk their path. Secular types might create a foundation to help those who lose everything. The endings of these movies often bring tears to viewer’s eyes. They are filled with mercy.
Epelimus was fortunate to be a pioneer of religious thinking. He didn’t know enough about God to blame God for anything. But he did look up to the sky as the passing dust cloud was sucked upwards and out what appeared to be a large hole in the sky. Air and dust and everything else were being sucked out of the hole and into space.
Shock can be merciful in keeping one insulated from tragic loss. The ground rumbled and knocked Epelimus to his knees. He could see the entrance to the underground laboratory exposed. The laboratory had been the only part of the colony dug below the surface to keep the crystal storage disks and genetic encoders and splicing equipment safe from fluctuating surface temperatures. The ground level roof had been neatly sheared off.
Twice more the ground shook. Epelimus crawled the last few meters and fell down the stairway. Boulders and small rocks were erupting from the soil. In the distance, sandworms fifty meters long were flopping up onto the quaking surface. They rolled slowly, catatonically. Some had been lacerated and severed by the unstable crust. Whatever it was had shifted layers of rock even below the surface. Tectonic movements were gaining intensity. A small sandworm flopped helplessly near in concussive shock. Epelimus heard his mother’s voice. Was she here, alive?
Pleida had passed from her body two Martian years ago. Epelimus realized the voice was inside his head. He was remembering the dream he had been dreaming moments before. How many moments had it been? Something very bad had happened. He was dazed and confused. Fortunately he was cognizant enough to know that there was little time to act.
The surface of Mars showed little mercy to the man as he located the crystal disks containing DNA sequences of himself, his mother, and his son. Most everything in the lab had been scattered and shuffled without intent by the seismic forces, including the fractal record of the dolphins. There was precious little air left. Temperature was dropping. The atmosphere of green Mars was almost gone. In a final act of survival, Epelimus of Venus ran up the stair of the laboratory with the disks and the encoder. Lungs screaming for any available air, he threw himself on the twitching body of the young sandworm.
Much later, Epelimus would regain consciousness. And he would find that he was no longer Epelimus, son of Pleida and Arafon. His consciousness was intact; but his body had died on the surface of Mars. Long ago, his flesh and blood had succumbed to the sudden freezing vacuum. Over time, his flesh had become dust and blown away in solar wind. Now, he resided in the body of a Martian sandworm. The creature’s instinct, upon gaining his DNA, had been to burrow again deep into the soil to find air. Well there was air down there all right; and the strange combination of mind and machine remained underground for many thousands of Martian years. Eventually the sandworm would crawl to the surface to discover the deathly cold of night and the searing daytime heat. Epelimus of Venus had become a Martian sandworm. Back it went into the frozen regolith.
Thousands more years passed on Mars during which the sandworm did very little else but contemplate a solution to its predicament. It was the sort of higher consciousness that only comes to a great mind with plenty of time.
The sandworm began to evolve. Small pustules behind the eyes grew into bulbous sacs. Bulbous sacs added thickness and then receded into the skull. An observer (of which there were none) might have noticed the shimmering blue liquid which was always moving within. The boy from Venus was no longer the boy from Venus. The scientist from Mars was no longer a scientist. The Martian sandworm was no longer a true sandworm. It had only made sense to change its name to something that reflected the immensely boring millenniums leading to the triumphant development of its pan-dimensional lobes.
By the time its wormhole opened to Andromeda, Zymphonomous Bla had a plan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ancient Andromeda
Author’s note: the Andromeda galaxy is really, really, really, far away. TMC2 was produced a very long time ago. Billions of years before Hubert T. Exerhoff was born. It was the finest neural device ever to be produced in the Andromeda galaxy. Coupled with an outrageously successful marketing strategy, it was an unstoppable team. Until the collapse of the current universe, TMC2
will retain the most coveted consumer award: Most units of anything sold in any galaxy at any price. Profit margins for TMC2 were shaped like Pac Man on the pie charts, intent on gobbling up the last few remaining numbers in the expense column.
The excellent quality of the TMC2 device, by no coincidence, led to the rapid depopulation of the Andromeda galaxy and the beginning of the greatest movie ever made. It seems pretty simple. And it is.
Sort of.
Maybe a
little.
Not really at all.
TMC2 was a brand name. Across the product’s smooth plastic packaging, it was written that TMC2
stood for Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrator.
Manufactured on the desert planet of Troleve, the Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrator was a compact and painless way to keep in touch. Long gone were the days of personal handheld devices in Andromeda. Still, TMC2 was the only self-implanting personal communicator in the Andromeda galaxy. Open the package, say yes, and it crawled into your head behind the temple. The device worked on most every type of creature with an inner ear.
Modern Earth lags far behind ancient Andromeda in the quality of consumer goods. However the financial success of the TMC2 relied as much on marketing as it did on proprietary biotechnology. Andromeda as a galaxy had already mastered knowledge of quantum magnetic hyper drives and interplanetary travel for all. Everyone stayed in touch and moved around a lot. Such was the nature of galaxial commerce. Thousands and thousand of inhabited planets, all looking to get in touch. TMC2
was a bargain.
Quite unsurprisingly, a government was involved.
Planetary self-government had been the law in Andromeda for as long as anyone could remember. Each planet maintained a form of law and order which all visitors were to respect. Likewise, planets did not attack each other for any reason. Truly, it was a secular life. Consumers coped with inflation and buzzed about each new thing to buy. Everyone who was anyone already had TMC2. The governing body of Troleve consisted of a very large, scary, and needless to say, unethical creature named Zow. Because his planet was mostly empty, he had bullied his way to the top in a mostly straight line. Such are the advantages of politics on sparsely populated desert planets. Within moments of his arrival on Troleve, Zymphonomous Bla had this gadfly in its pocket. A security detail had arrived brandishing fancy cannons which they trained on various parts of Bla’s enormous figure. Eventually the governor floated over to inquire on this creature that was nearly as large as he. The newcomer was smart, concluded Zow as he watched the sandworm’s pan-dimensional lobes drop his bodyguards like strands of cooked spaghetti who thought for a fleeting moment that maybe they could dance. Yes, this one could stay. Zow had no idea where this place Mars was located, and he didn’t care. Zow was interested only in money. He commissioned this strange creature of fortune with the task of making him rich. A sign, he reckoned, of his great destiny.
TMC2 was a voluntary mind-control device. In an effort to get in touch, consumers would pay happily for the privilege of being encoded with a genetic device. The sound and video quality was crystal clear and you could listen or watch anything you wanted to. The implant, true to the skill of its creator, was indeed painless. Consumers were free do what they wished. It was mind control for sure, and completely voluntary.
The concepts of true value and personal freedom guaranteed that sales of TMC2 immediately went through the roof. Likely the same would occur on Earth, if such a brilliant pan-dimensional sandworm as Zymphonomous Bla were to create and introduce such a fantastic voluntary mind-control product. People immediately stopped talking to each other in person on Troleve and began communicating with their neural chips instead. For shortsighted military officers and politicians like Zow, the concept of people paying him to stay in touch with one another was a perfect Machiavellian solution. The population of Troleve was linked, under control; and the money was just rolling in. Zow was so in love with his growing assets that he failed to see at all, just how fast word could get around in a consumer-driven galaxy.
Once word got around, economics packed up and left. Manufacturing efforts were doubled, and tripled, and then quadrupled again for fair measure. But Zow had not considered that the guns and stewardship of an entire galaxy would want to buy more units of TMC2 than even his own avarice could have anticipated.
Consumers began swarming to Troleve in everything from moon-hopping jalopies to massive sleek titanium cargo ships.
“Load us up” they all would say.
This on-demand type of customer service was not Zow’s strongpoint either as a political leader or a creature of business. He was a large creature, impatient, and soon without enough units of TMC2 to satiate the steady flow of customers. Like a maitre‘d in a crowded Earth restaurant where the kitchen is far behind, Zow fell under immense pressure from angry customers with genuine complaints. Unlike a maitre‘d in a crowded Earth restaurant, Zow was a bully who instinctively chose violence when he felt uncomfortable negative pressure. He promptly swallowed the nearest three customers and then reiterated the need for their patience to the rest. As would be expected, his course of action was not well received; but it immediately became the cornerstone of Zow’s marketing plan for TMC2. Word got around faster than ever thanks to those who had their own TMC2. Larger customers began to show up. Those who did not accept the opportunity to pre-pay and back order were promptly swallowed. A famous incident and further turning point in Zow’s profit margin came with a visit from a large reptilian creature. Claiming to be from the Sirius B system, the angry customer had demanded that Zow hand over all existing units of TMC2, or perish.
This reptile was not as large as Zymphonomous Bla, although it still put up a good fight. After that jagged pill and the pain to his proboscis which followed, Governor Zow surrounded planet Troleve with gamma ray cannons in case anything too big to swallow showed up. Amidst all the customer-service drama, over six trillion Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrators had already been sold. Prices rose with demand, and had become nothing short of spectacular. It wasn’t long before the Emperor Zow was the richest being in Andromeda.
Emperor Zow was now also quite pudgy.
The rest of the galaxy was full of doubt. Consumers had become nervous, like modern Earth wildebeests in the Serengeti, when they know that they must drink even though the crocodiles are waiting under the water. Back order requests were politely sent to Troleve with payment in full, as required. Rumors and gossip clotted the air. Critical thinking and truth were lost to wild speculation. There was on all fronts, a distasteful loss of trust.
TMC2 had been designed by a creature that claimed to have once been human, and from a planet called Venus. Zymphonomous Bla was a physical manifesting of near-omniscient brilliance. Bla existed simultaneously in past, present, and future since its pan-dimensional lobes had first appeared on Mars. It knew when it would die, and what would happen before its death. When Zow brought out the guns, Bla was happy to retire in comfortable modesty. The crib that Zow purchased for him was a glass terrarium eleven cubic kilometers in volume. It was not a flamboyant or spacious abode for a creature of his size; but the warm red sands of Troleve were a big step up from the frozen regolith of Mars. Minus the cold and the solar radiation and the lack of atmosphere, Troleve was a lot like Mars. Zymphonomous Bla had taken to the easy life with a satisfying amount of money; but the revenues from his invention made his slice of the pie to be a micron’s width. It was no longer a secret that most income from TMC2 was being poured into building an enormous army. When confronted by members of the Andromeda Chamber of Commerce, Zow had proudly explained that it was part of his marketing plan. Swallowing customers after taking their money had been a stopgap solution. Every leader from every inhabited planet in the galaxy now had standing orders for trillions of Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrators. Most of these orders were pre-paid and would never be received, handled, or shipped. The sales of TMC2 were beyond any economic scale.
The supply and demand curve had been viciously buggered into knots with an unprecedented degree of guile. Instead of trying to fill pre-paid back orders, Emperor Zow had concluded; why not just send in his new imperial army to take all their money?
It was tyranny; but the secular peace of Andromeda had no organized opposition. Morality was compromised like rice paper in a lava flow. A gigantic array of lopsided customer service issues had resolved quickly when the Imperial army of Emperor Zow went on tour. Basic
consumer principles of free trade become extremely elastic when the supplier’s army has the surrounded the customer’s planet and impounded the local currency.
If Zow was the brawn of Andromeda, the transplanted Zymphonomous Bla was certainly the brains. Bla had developed a military-grade version of TMC2 for the Imperial Army. It also suggested that Zow, as the richest being and de-facto emperor of the mighty Andromeda galaxy, should implement a system to insure the continued growth of his wealth and assets.
Business meetings with Zow were always the same. Bla would make a brilliant suggestion; Zow would think on it. A few days would pass, and Zymphonomous Bla would find his terrarium surrounded by soldiers with gamma ray cannons. As always, the emperor was bluffing. Zow needed Bla to design this new machine of riches. And Bla had bigger fish to fry. It already knew what was going to happen. So was the origin of a galactic mind network, known commonly in ancient Andromeda as the SAIM. It was similar in principle to the World Wide Web on modern Earth. The SAIM amalgamated Andromeda, physically and mentally, into the unified task of making money. Zymphonomous Bla moved quickly to deliver a detailed plan to the impatient emperor. The army would use their skills in marketing to obtain consent from individual planets. The great majority of all populations would eagerly embrace their new lives of sleep and wealth. Each new planet would be more eager than the last to join the growing matrix of prosperity.
The capability to encircle and maintain an entire galaxy, as might be expected, requires a lot of power. The Social Artificial intelligence Moderator was no exception. Zymphonomous Bla truly was a genius. Citizens became employees. Employees became rich for doing nothing else than crawling into a cube and sleeping. During their sleep, the Central Neural Network would deduct a predetermined amount of neural energy. This energy would power the SAIM. And the Social Artificial Intelligence Moderator paid well. After their first night’s sleep, employees found their bank accounts to be chock full of Zow E-Bucks.