The Secrets of the Universe
Book One of Farther Than We Dreamed
By
Noah K. Mullette-Gillman
Copyright 2014 and 2015 Noah Mullette-Gillman
The moral right of the author is asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Cover design and photography by
Noah K. Mullette-Gillman
Edited by Michael Poirier,
Noah K. Mullette-Gillman, and Ken Gillman.
Twitter: Noahlot
Mailing List: [email protected]
www.fartherthanwedreamed.com
www.noahmullette-gillman.com
Also by Noah K. Mullette-Gillman
THE WHITE HAIRS
THE SONG OF BALLAD AND CRESCENDO
LUMINOUS AND OMINOUS
MAGIC MAKES YOU STRANGE
THE CONFESSIONS OF ZEUSPATER
THE DEAD HAVE RULED EARTH
FOR 200 YEARS
All available in paperback and for digital download.
www.noahmullette-gillman.com
FARTHER THAN WE DREAMED
BOOK ONE: THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE
EPISODE ONE: CLAY
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
EPISODE TWO: WAVES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
EPISODE THREE: CRYSTAL
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
EPISODE FOUR: COSMIC SHAG
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
EPISODE ONE
CLAY
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”
- Nicola Tesla
1
Session 23
Charlie woke up again. He lay in a flat bed without blankets or pillows. The fabric was soft and gentle like silk, or leaves, or flower petals. As he opened his eyes, great clouds of transparent purples, blues, and darker shades burned his vision, after-images of some dream. He thought about old-fashioned televisions which didn’t turn off all at once, but glowed a little less and a little less over time.
He was in a large and round room with a domed ceiling. It was clean and white, like no room he had ever seen. There were statues in a circle around the ceiling. The ceiling, the walls, and the statues all appeared to be made of alabaster marble which shone with an interior light.
A man sat on a small chair next to where Charlie was lying. He was drinking from a glass of water when Charlie saw him. The man looked surprised to see Charlie awake. He smiled awkwardly, placed the glass down noisily on the floor, and picked up a pad of paper. There were a lot of sloppy notes throughout the pages already.
“Do you remember your name?” the man asked.
“Charlie, Charlie Daemon.”
“Is this reality?” the man asked.
“Yeah… I’m awake.”
The man seemed to be writing down more words than Charlie was saying. “Do you know where we are?”
“He said I was going to be on a ship. Is this the ship? Did they teleport me here?” Charlie sat up. His forehead was aching dimly. He ran his hand over his face. He’d been shaved in his sleep. His nose had been straightened. It felt like someone else’s face.
“Don’t strain yourself.” The man’s unwashed yellow hair had been pushed back from his face in frustrated and rough handfuls. He held out his arm, as if he was going to push Charlie back down, but he didn’t quite touch him. “Is this the first time we’ve spoken, Charlie?”
“Who are you?”
The man smiled insincerely. He looked tired. “We’ll get to that. Please, I am required to test you.”
“As far as I know, I’ve never met you before,” Charlie said finally.
“What do you remember from before you woke up?” The man didn’t close his mouth after asking the fifth question. He seemed strangely eager – hungry – for the answer.
“I don’t remember dreaming. My eyes were full of colors when I opened them, like after-images, but I don’t remember any dreams.”
“That’s fine. What do you remember from before?”
“Before?” Charlie sighed. “I was in the war. Well, you know. I remember when we blew The Machine up. I…they died.” Charlie was surprised to feel his throat choke up. It was like his mouth felt the sadness before his mind or his heart. “The people I care about died, but we blew The Machine up. I was walking back through the snow. When I couldn’t walk anymore, he came and told me what we were doing.”
The man was writing feverishly on his pad. He never once looked down to see the marks he was making. Instead he stared at Charlie. He listened. Charlie had hardly said anything, how could the man find so many words to use describing it?
“Assume I don’t know. Tell me what he told you.” The man picked up the glass and took another drink.
Charlie reached out and took the glass of water from the man. He swallowed a small sip and then continued. “He said that nothing in my life was real. It was supposed to be like a history book. I was living history, not the present. He told me that my life had been designed to make me the man that I was because humanity needed me.”
“Go on.”
“He wasn’t a man though. He was like a wild animal. He came at me out of the woods. I thought he was going to eat me. Then he started talking and said the world was an illusion. I was tired, ready to collapse. I was wondering if the talking animal was a hallucination.
“He said the universe was too big for warp drive, or hyper-drive, worm holes, bending, twisting, or teleporting. There are some distances you could never cross, not with a million years to do it. But they could send something like a radio signal out past the forever, and that radio signal would find rocks and little things. It would tell the molecules where to go and how to combine with each other until they made a spaceship and they made people out on the other side.
“He said I was meant to be the captain of this spaceship out beyond the beyond.”
“And what else did he tell you?”
Charlie shook his head. “No. Nothing. I had questions, obviously, that I wanted to ask him. I got the feeling he was going to tell me more, but…. That’s all I remember. Maybe I forgot the rest?”
“You’re sure?” The man glanced down at his notes and made a check mark next to a word Charlie couldn’t make out upside down. The funny man was writing in cursive.
Charlie shook his head again. “No. Then I was here with you. So, if I’m the captain, you can give me your report now.”
The man nodded. With his left hand he grabbed Charlie by his arm, as if he was about to help him out of bed. There was a pinching sensation in Charlie’s side. He looked down to see that the man had just injected him with a hypodermic needle.
“What was that?”
The man stood up, and took two steps backwards. “I’ve just euthanized you, Charlie. I had to. We need to learn
the truth.”
Charlie pushed himself forward and reached his feet down onto the ground. He was going to grab the man. But Charlie’s legs were new and he wasn’t used to them yet. He slipped on the bloody floor and fell down.
He felt the smack of his shoulder against the hard stone and he bit his tongue. He reached his hands out and felt a person there. There was a dead man on the floor right next to where he had landed. Charlie glanced up at his killer. The man was scribbling wildly in his notebook while staring back clinically at Charlie.
The captain felt his face stiffening. His muscles were getting weak. He pulled at the body and turned it over so he could see the dead man’s face. The dead man looked just like Charlie remembered himself, except he had been shaven, his nose was fixed, and he had a small scar across his forehead.
Session 24
Charlie woke up again. He lay on his back. The first thing that he noticed was that his beard was gone. He reached up and ran his fingers over his jaw and cheeks. It had been years since he’d been clean-shaven.
His hand happened to move over his nose, and Charlie was surprised to see that his nose had been straightened as well. That seemed a vain waste to him. Who cared if he had a proper nose or not? Besides, he’d earned his scars.
He opened his eyes. At first everything was purple and blue. It took a while for his eyes to adjust and work properly again. The room was white. It was shaped like a dome and filled with classical statues. And there was a man sitting in a chair next to where Charlie was lying.
His hair was red, but filthy and shoved roughly away from his face. He wore antique glasses and a tweed jacket. He looked to Charlie like an academic. Maybe a Scandinavian? The stranger was reading through a hand-written notebook.
The stranger smiled politely. “Do you remember your name?”
“I’m Charlie Daemon. Where are we?”
“Is this reality?”
Charlie growled and then answered, “I have no idea.”
“Do you know where we are?” the man asked.
“I just asked you.” Charlie was losing his patience.
“I’m very sorry. Please. I am required to test you. Now, do you know where we are?”
“Obviously not. Is this a spaceship?”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
Charlie hadn’t moved, but the man held out a hand, as if to tell him not to get up. The stranger looked tired. Charlie wondered why he was being asked these questions. Were they making sure that he had arrived on the ship without losing his mind? How dangerous was being sent on a radio signal across the cosmos? Or had he been hurt and they needed to test him? Then again, maybe he was still back on Earth. Was this man his psychiatrist? That might make more sense than anything else.
“Can I just ask you, how long have I been a patient here?”
The stranger didn’t immediately answer.
“I’m sorry. I know you have your protocols, but if you can just tell me that, I’ll answer any questions you want. We can talk about reality, my parents, the war, or anything you want.”
The stranger seemed to be put a little off-balance by Charlie’s question. “Just- just two more questions and then I’ll be allowed to explain.”
“Alright.” Charlie made himself comfortable and did his best to appear docile.
“Is this the first time we’ve spoken, Charlie?”
The captain turned his head forty-five degrees and puffed up his upper lip, to show he was taking the question seriously. “I don’t know. I just don’t know the answer.”
The stranger scribbled for about five seconds before he spoke again. “And, Charlie, one last question: What do you remember from before you woke up?”
“Just my life. I didn’t dream.”
“Yes, and how did your life end?”
“End? Well, I’m obviously not dead. I guess you mean my old life? They recruited me on my way back from the war. We took out The Machine in Alaska. I may have been the only survivor of the fight. At least, that’s how I remember it.”
“Who recruited you, Charlie?”
“I guess - I guess I’m confused. Did I hit my head? The way I remember it, I was walking back and there was this bear. This bear shows up, like Buddha or Gabriel and tells me that my life is an illusion. He tells me that my real life is about to begin and I’m going to be the captain of a spaceship. But obviously - obviously that can’t be true. Can it, doc?”
“What did he tell you about the ship?”
“Nothing.”
“The crew?”
“The bear didn’t get to that. It’s funny, I remember it that way, but I understand that it can’t be real.”
“You don’t remember anything.” It wasn’t a question. The man was clearly frustrated.
“I’m sorry. Why don’t you tell me what’s really happening?”
The man nodded. Before Charlie realized what was going on, he had been injected in the shoulder with a needle.
He closed his eyes and then he opened them again. The room was suddenly filled with purples and blues and strange under-colors which he couldn’t right then name. He imagined that it was what it would look like if he drowned far under-water. He took a deep breath and died with his lungs full of air.
November 2073
Charlie dragged the heavy metal across the rocks and the screaming ice, through the wet snow and the black soot of the Alaskan wilderness. His gloves were torn and the color of the cloth around his fingers had blurred into red. His hands were cut in three places, but holding onto the metal helped him to numb the aching and slow the bleeding.
The weight made him move even more slowly than he would have otherwise. It was unlikely that he could survive the walk back to civilization or that anyone would find him, even in the best of circumstances. Dragging the damn corpse of iron and steel and space-age plastic behind him made it even less likely, but he didn’t let go. He’d earned that prize.
Charlie imagined himself as a dragon slayer, pulling the dragon’s head behind him. He pictured himself owning an old-fashioned pinewood cabin one day, filled with furs and the stuffed heads of animals he’d killed. In his imagination, he would mount the dead machine up over his fireplace. The warm fire would reflect on the polyhedral corners of the broken husk. Maybe he would even see his own warped face looking back at him from the twisted surface of the metal.
They’d killed it. But out of twenty soldiers standing at the beginning of the final battle, Charlie was the only one who hadn’t died fighting The Machine. Especially Amber. No one was more dead than Amber.
Distantly, like a song he slowly began to hear in the background, he started to understand that he was still going to die because of the monster. He pulled harder, not letting go, straining his back and his arms to move more quickly through the ice and snow and disaster beneath his feet. He could smell the fire behind him. The rest of his enemy’s body was burning. The fire would keep going for weeks, or maybe longer.
The thought slid through his mind that he might have died years before and had been condemned to drag the body throughout eternity, like some Greek hero. Looking into the distance, he saw the white landscape going on forever like a reality which no one had ever bothered to create any content for. No one had ever lived there. No one had ever dreamed there. There had never been anything more than the rocks and snow, never houses and never people. When he did eventually fall down he would become yet another part of the deep ice which flowed across the land like a slow eternal river.
Charlie walked on and on for what felt like a day or more. The soot disappeared. He couldn’t see the smoke in the sky behind him anymore. In front and on his sides, the world looked like empty paper. There weren’t even any trees. The only decorations behind him were his black and filthy footprints. It was at this moment he realized that he wasn’t carrying the mechanical corpse anymore. He didn’t know when he had let it go. He took a few running steps back, but couldn’t even see it in the distance. He must have walked on for hours wi
thout his prize and not even noticed.
The soldier looked at his hands. His right glove was gone. Maybe it had fallen off with the robot? His left hand was bunched up into a hard fist which he had been squeezing for hours. Slowly, Charlie opened his hand. The pain was horrible. He fell down and all of his fingers smashed into the ice. There was no sensation in his right hand anymore.
He sighed, breathing in the frozen air. His life would have been so different if he hadn’t had to go out to fight. He was a singer. He had albums he wanted to write. He had songs in his head which he had never written down, never sung for anyone. He had work to do, and all of that sci-fi barbarianism had been a terrible interruption in the life he had been meant to live. The war came just when life had finally started to get good.
All the while he had fought The Machine, he imagined the war was only a distraction. He was fighting to get the interruption over so he could get back to work. He hadn’t stood up again yet. He was still on his hands and knees on the ice.
What would that other life had been like? What would he have created? What would he have seen? Would he have married Amber and had children with her?
He breathed the Alaskan air in again. In his mind’s eye he was in that pinewood cabin already. Amber was there too, holding a baby. They both looked up at the severed head of The Machine above the fire.
What’s the point of saving the world, when your world ends anyway?
Somehow, Charlie struggled up onto his feet and started moving. He couldn’t say if he walked on for a long distance more or for only a few steps before he fell. And when he fell the second time, he closed his eyes and slept.
With his eyes closed, Charlie’s imagination replayed the day’s events, but it was a confused and distorted version of the day. Instead of the soldiers who had really fought at his side, he dreamed his brothers were there, and his parents, his friends, even people he had known vaguely at school – people he hadn’t thought about in a decade.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 1