by D. Tolmach
“I swear it’s not fucking me!” She and the Unmenschenables were behind bars, looking as confused as I was.
“Silvos knows exactly where we are.”
“Lou, please, I don’t know. . . .”
So I shot Andromeda Mayday in the head. The blast from my plasma pistol stopped her heart and shut down her brain. Then I took aim at Tombstone. “Are any of the others transmitting?”
“No, just her. It must have been the genetic deformity the medical scan picked up.”
“You bitch!” Tombstone tried to grab for me through the bars.
“We have to destroy her body.”
“Wait a minute. I have an idea.” The doctor ordered his medbots to carry Andy’s body from her cell.
* * *
After cutting Andy’s skull open again, Mars completely removed her brain this time, then unplugged the Network transmitters and put it into a black oval encasement filled with a pink gelatin.
“This is a prototype brain scanner. I haven’t had a chance to test it on Humans yet, but computer simulations have shown minimal glitches.”
“What do you do with her then?”
“Anything you want. Upload her into a holoprojector, a ship’s computer, a droid, your communicator. . . . She’s pretty much immortal.”
“How long does it take?”
“We have time to get something to eat, if you’re hungry.”
* * *
“I feel strange.” The confusion and innocence in her voice broke my heart.
“I know, Andy. I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
“I killed you. I had to. Your body was transmitting a signal to the Union.”
“I didn’t know, Lou.”
“I know. It’s not your fault.”
We had used footage from the eyebots to create a three-dimensional holographic avatar for her. She sat in front of me, seemingly solid, emitting a faint glow. If I tried to touch her, my hand would pass through her.
My communicator rang. This time it was the president. “We have an uninvited guest.”
* * *
She had almost crashed into the Qbik. Her senses had told her Tombstone was here, but there was just empty space. That’s when her radio barked.
“Identify yourself.”
“I’m Liona. I’m looking for Tombstone Wolfram.”
* * *
“Do you know her?” I asked him.
“Uhhh, yeah. We’ve met.”
“Well, we can’t just leave her out there. Let her dock.”
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend!” Andy teased. Tombstone turned red. “Don’t be embarrassed. If she came this far for you, she must really be into you.”
* * *
Andromeda Beatrice Mayday was the first Human in history to attend her own funeral. The face of her dead body had been reconstructed, and she stood in the middle of Observation Deck B, looking down at her corpse. As the station prepared for its encounter with the Galactic Navy, the small group of refugees paid their last respects before placing her casket into an airlock and firing it out into space.
If the Milky Way dominated Observation Deck A, the other side of the Qbik, Observation Deck B, opened onto far fewer stars and countless distant galaxies. Andromeda and Triangulum beckoned like sirens into eternity.
“What happens now?” she asked me. I thought for a moment.
“We try to evacuate as many people as possible. It’ll be hard because there’re not nearly enough ships.”
“Can’t you just relocate the Qbik? There’s no more signal and it’s still cloaked.”
“It doesn’t move.” The engines had been removed to make room for our drug laboratories. “Silvos is obsessed with destroying us. It’s just a matter of time.”
“And you?”
“I stay here with the rest of the officers. We go down with the station.”
“That’s brave.”
I shrugged, not feeling very brave. I didn’t want to stay, but there was no place to go and I didn’t want to become a refugee myself. “Liona said she’ll take your group and try to make it to the Coalition.”
She lowered her voice. “I was thinking about that. I’d rather not go. I don’t want to live forever surrounded by people who grow old and die.”
“What do you want to do, then?”
“I know you don’t have many ships, but can you upload me into something, even if it’s just a maintenance droid, and, boom, shoot me off into the void?”
“The void?”
“Yeah, I’m done with this galaxy. There’s no way I want to end up back in the Union, and I don’t want to wait around in the Coalition for war. Ever since I was little I’ve had this dream, maybe it’s stupid, but I always wanted to go to Andromeda.”
“Andromeda? But nobody’s ever . . .”
“Nobody’s ever gotten the chance to live forever.”
* * *
In the face of certain death, we threw a bitchin’ party. Observation Deck A was packed with millions of people dancing, drinking, and fucking to the beat of a deep bass emitting from loudspeakers. A DJ spun from a booth in front of what should have been the view of the Milky Way. Instead, the fleet of Union ships blocked out the entire galaxy. They couldn’t see us, but we were surrounded and right in the trajectory of a battleship with twenty minutes to collision. The Qbik was booby-trapped with hundreds of thermonuclear bombs; we would take out as many of them as possible. In the end, very few people evacuated the station. They knew that, if they left, all that was waiting for them was a bleak, depressing galaxy with no Network to keep them happy and nothing but war and life on the run.
“This is all my fault,” President Armonde said softly, so only I could hear him.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I was so hell-bent on destroying the Union—paying back Silvos for a personal grudge—that I doomed the lives of over two hundred million people.”
“Well, you can’t tell them that. They’re about to die.”
He walked to the DJ’s podium in front of the window to give his final address. “Ladies and gentlemen, Humans and saps, we had a good run.”
I turned to Andy. Dr. Maxon had given her a robotic body with a holographic mask of her face. “It’s time for you to go.” We flew to Observation Deck B, where Ms. Magnificent was parked, and I handed her a thumb drive containing the entire combined knowledge of humanity—every book, movie, television show, and song ever created. “This should keep you from getting bored for at least part of your trip.” I opened the panel on her chest where her heart would have been and inserted a small black box. “A sample of your DNA. Maybe you’ll run into someone who can clone a replicate body.”
We stood in silence for a moment. There was a rumble and the station rocked violently as the battleship collided with it, almost knocking us to the ground, but Andy caught me. The countdown began over the loudspeaker, and the Qewbies chanted along with it, drunkenly. In thirty seconds our bombs would go off.
“Lou, are you sure you don’t want to come with me? I got a working stasis pod and a shit-ton of molly.”
“Yeah, I kinda do.”
* * *
I watched from space as almost everyone I had ever known died in a beautiful inferno. The explosion heavily damaged three Union ships and confused the armada, but we didn’t stick around to see what happened next. The void awaited.
Like I told Andy, Human nature is chaos and anger. On the Qbik we tried to override that programming, but chaos and anger always win out in the end.
Carp
Carp Carrion was drinking himself to death. First his pancreas would rot away, followed by his liver and heart. For its part, his body couldn’t figure out what it had done to deserve such abuse, but it plowed along, pumping blood and converting food into energy. If he had had fun while destroying his body organ by organ and alienating everyone who ever loved him, he would have at least looked back on it all with fond memories of good times, but honestly
he couldn’t remember much of it and what he did remember left him deeply ashamed. Carp was the opposite of nostalgic.
As bad as this all was, he was a washed-up local rock star who had become what he always despised: a neurotic suburban husband and father with a shitty job tied up in a system he hated, unsatisfied with life and with no ambition to make it better and a marriage teetering on the edge of divorce.
And he was being treated for a brain tumor.
It affected his behavior and gave him delusions, like that it was a good idea to write a novel about how there is really only one omniscient taxi driver driving every taxi in the world simultaneously, all part of a single consciousness. He was about halfway through it, but before he could finish it he would go to his garage and connect one end of a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and put the other end in the driver-side window, robbing the cancer of the satisfaction of completing its job.
His planet, like his body, was in the earliest stages of extinction, so the air was still breathable and the climate mild. Its people were too busy entertaining themselves to death to give much thought to the damage they were doing to one of the few inhabitable planets in their galaxy, even though almost every movie they made was about the apocalypse. It seemed sexy on the big screen—they watched in air-conditioned theaters and imagined themselves heroes in a dystopian future fighting zombies or killer robots—but when the global famines and wars for resources began for real, the whole Armageddon thing didn’t seem so groovy.
Carp wouldn’t live long enough to appreciate the irony.
No one had invented the dark-speed drive on his planet, so they hadn’t made it much farther into space beyond their moons except with unmanned probes, which obediently searched their little robotic hearts out for life in the cosmos while their masters brought species on their own planet to extinction and killed each other over lines randomly drawn on maps and gods that were both all-powerful and childishly petty.
When the doctors observed his tumor through a very powerful microscope, they were surprised at how much it looked like a face. Although the Human brain is programmed by evolution to see faces in random objects—a phenomenon called pareidolia—in this case it actually was a face: that of a man who was very small, at least in relation to Carp, named Osco Silvos.
After waging a vicious war against the forces of tyranny and becoming the most powerful Human in his galaxy, Silvos celebrated by building an enormous monument to himself. In theory it was going to be impressive, but in practice he found that the problem with space is, as a particularly astute Human once noted, that it is big. No matter how large your interstellar war memorial is, there are far more impressive gas giants, stars, nebulas, black holes, and a whole host of other things that, in comparison, make it seem downright puny, and they weren’t even built by anyone. They’re just floating around everywhere. So the plans were altered over and over again, and it became bigger and bigger. After his death, its construction continued, expanding it even more, destroying planet after planet and star after star for millions of years. After Humanity was wiped out, the robots working on it continued, until eventually it grew larger than the galaxy itself, first eating up the local cluster, then the supercluster, and still it didn’t stop.
This all took place in Carp’s brain, which, as it turns out, happened to be Osco’s universe. As was known only to a race of monastic cosmic-void hermits also living in Carp’s brain, you and all the annoying dullards around you are actually squatting the brain of a poor oblivious sap far too large for you to even imagine. The odds are that your own brain is also full of tiny, stupid people fighting with each other and in general moping around and mucking up their own planets, and these people have even smaller horrible people inside their brains, ad infinitum. This realization came to the monks upon meeting a woman named Icy Lou traveling between galaxies, who introduced them to something called MDMA. For millennia they studied the moral and ethical ramifications of this knowledge and published very well-researched peer-reviewed scientific journals on it before being smooshed against a rogue star by the ever-growing statue of Osco Silvos.
As the lithe fingers of death crept into Carp’s eyeballs and he slowly nodded off behind the wheel of his parked car, a haunting alien melody emerged from deep inside his mind. The world became foggy and, delirious, he started singing in a language he couldn’t understand to the beat of a march: Thank your lucky stars/You were born free/In the best place you’ll ever be/The GUAP.
The rest of his life was just long enough to wonder what the fuck is a GUAP?
Murder at Mugger’s Point Hotel
The Outpost
Father Gerrard was flabbergasted. He had long passed the realm of astounded, being momentarily bowled over, temporarily confounded, and fleetingly dumbfounded, followed by what was almost a minor fit of epilepsy.
Soon he would be galled.
He could have written a fairly long novel in the dust covering every inch of every flat surface in the room. There were half-empty packs of Mercury Reds strewn about and bottles, glasses, and bowls filled with butts smoked to the very filter. Not a single piece of fabric or furniture had been spared the wrath of the hot end of a cigarette. And somewhere in that room, under piles of clothing and unidentifiable waste, lay a degenerate, exiled heathen with a deep baritone snore.
If he had known the whole of it, he would have likely spontaneously combusted.
“Mr. Sundown?”
The man wheezed and groaned upon hearing his name, and the pile of dirty laundry covering him shifted.
“Mr. Sundown?” This was said somewhat louder, and the pile moved again. The visitor checked his watch. He wanted to touch exactly nothing in the room, least of all the mountain of rags in the center, but time was running out. He pulled his sleeves over his fingers and started peeling off layers of soiled shirts, pants, underwear, and socks until finally an unshaven, dullardly face was revealed. Light finally hitting their eyelids, the eyes opened, revealing almost exclusively pupils, like two black moons. This made the man look even less intelligent, and Gerrard began to suspect he was mentally handicapped.
“Who are you?” His lips were chapped and teeth crooked and yellowed.
“Mr. Sundown, what happened to your holoviewer?”
The man sat up, causing an avalanche in the laundry, and slowly cracked every joint in his body. “What are you doing here?”
“Is it broken? Because if it breaks, you are required by law to notify your local office of the Ministry of Indoctrination within twenty-four hours.”
“There were no ships scheduled for today. Who are you?”
“So you haven’t heard? The war is over! We’ve won!”
“War?”
“How long have you been stuck on this rock? I fear you’ve long turned into one of those—what are they called, the hairy, heretic aliens that live here?”
“Muggers?”
“Yes. Muggers.”
“Well, it is their planet. I mean, technically we’re the aliens.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
* * *
Chirp Sundown had lost his mind. And what little sanity he had left had been almost completely destroyed by Mugger moonshine, but that didn’t mean he was wrong about being an alien on this planet. He was wrong about G-44-01 being a planet. If one was being generous one might call it a planetoid, which was just a polite name for a large asteroid. This one just happened to be circling a k-type star in a wide belt at just the right distance to make it (barely) hospitable. He focused his saucer-sized pupils on his uninvited guest, whose silly hat, wispy beard, sparse mustache, black dress, and large gold icon framing the middle of his chest indicated a priest from the Church of the One Undeniable and Completely Accurate Truth. A young priest, which, as everyone knows, is the worst kind of priest. And now this sanctimonious interloper was fumbling around behind Chirp’s holoviewer.
“Oh, here it is. It’s come unplugged.” Before he could object, the holy man inserted the cord i
nto the wall socket.
As the viewer was activated, a moment of clarity hit Chirp as he realized that he must turn off the xenoporn that had been playing the previous night before it powered up completely. Without even being fully aware of what he was doing, he dove out of the clothes pile for the remote and erased the recording.
Standing naked in the middle of his quarters, he gave his intruder an eyeful. Very hairy, his entire body was covered in blue tattoos that he had done himself out of boredom. He was neither fat nor particularly in shape, and his pupils still had not shrunken to normal size. After an awkward pause, Chirp tossed him the remote and donned the nearest pair of tighty-whities.
With a look of incredulity, the priest turned on the feed.
There was only one channel broadcast to every holoviewer throughout the Galactic Union of Autonomous Planets, and it was hosted by Vildana Dianae, a pale brunette with a cold, reptilian sexuality and eyes that both soothed and excited.
“As you can see, the celebrations are like nothing we’ve seen, even larger than after the Galactic Revolution.” She was smiling, which was unusual for her, and covered in confetti, standing in front of a parade in downtown Port City. A band was playing patriotic drivel on a floating stage surrounded by a forest of stark GUAP flags. Father Gerrard sang along and both men’s eyes locked onto Vildana’s cleavage. A second feed showed a large space station exploding. “Recall that hundreds of our brave soldiers were killed by the cowardly counterrevolutionary terrorists of the Qbik, led by the fascist dictator Armonde, before it was finally destroyed.” Gerrard muted the viewer.
“I’ve been sent by the Ministry of Dogma to find Father Kanard. It’s been months since we’ve heard from him and we fear the worst.”
Father Kanard was the only other Human living on the planetoid. He had built a temple with the goal of converting Muggers to the Church of the One Undeniable and Completely Accurate Truth. Chirp avoided him like the plague.