They all wore uniforms and carried guns. They all wore those fluffy white coats the government had issued. In his dream, Charlie’s brother commented that the coats looked like a colorless version of the one Han Solo wore in The Empire Strikes Back. It was particularly strange to Charlie because he hadn’t made the connection in his own mind until his brother pointed it out in the dream. He was dimly aware that it was a dream, and it didn’t seem right that a person he had dreamed up could know things before he, the dreamer, did.
When he awoke, there was grass between his fingers. It was wet and there was snow on his face. His beard was cold and stiff. He looked up and he could see white stars shining against the blackest and deepest sky he had ever seen. They were so bright and appeared to be close enough that he could reach out and touch them. He could see galaxies. He could see cosmoses swimming together like fish against forever. He brushed the ice from his face. Charlie’s fingers hurt like they were on fire, but all ten digits were moving again.
He found himself looking around for the robot’s head. There was still no sign of it. Up ahead, he could see some green fir trees. He understood that reaching them didn’t mean he would survive, but that direction at least meant life. Life could exist over there. He felt a kinship with the green.
Charlie moved like an old man through the snow. His long legs were never good at holding heat. He had been wearing the best thermal protection that he could have for the trip, but it wasn’t made to protect anyone for this long out in the elements.
They had talked about killing The Machine as if it meant saving the world. But Amber was dead now. It seemed contradictory to Charlie to say that there was still a world, but that she was dead and gone forever. Who could he go and fight to get her back? What monster could he rescue her from? No, that’s not how life worked.
A fog descended as Charlie got closer to the tree-line. By the time he felt the bark against his arms, he couldn’t see the tops of the trees anymore. A low bough hung down like a hammock. He was unable to resist pausing and resting on the natural seat. He leaned back and felt another branch support the small of his back. He could have slept right there.
And then the growling started. At first he thought it was a bear, and then he was sure it was a wolf. It was loud like a bear, but he wasn’t quite sure. Could it be a moose or a raccoon or something he just didn’t know the call of? The growling drew closer and closer and Charlie decided, as if he were able to choose his reality, that it was a dragon. It might as well be a dragon, because he couldn’t fight anything at that point. Even if it were just something small like a squirrel, the odds were that the animal was going to eat him.
And the growling got louder. The dragon drew closer. Charlie didn’t stand up. He understood that, at that moment, he couldn’t control whether he was going to die or not. He could only control how he faced it. Charlie breathed deeply. He closed his eyes and thought of Amber. Then he opened them again.
The beast stood right in front of him. It was a bear and it was a wolf, and a moose, and a squirrel, a raccoon, he became aware that it was even a dragon. The beast of beasts stood cursing and venting and coughing. White lines of cold smoke blew from its dark nostrils. Horns protruded from its head in at least a dozen variations.
“Are you here for me because you’re hungry, or because you hate me?” Charlie asked.
The beast spoke back in a deep and rumbling voice. “You don’t have to fear this death. It’s no more real than the thought of dying. Your war, your love, your life have all been a fiction written for no other reason than to create you.
“Far in the future, strange men and strange women will ask for you to be born. They will look back at their own history and see that a man like you once lived, and so they will make you. You’re not born yet. You’re an idea. You have always been surrounded by ideas, not true objects: The ideas of objects.”
“What will they want me for?” Charlie asked.
“They will make you the captain of a spaceship and send you out farther than their eyes can see. You will lead other people like you and explore another limitlessness together. Out farther than space can fold or engines can carry, you will ride upon a Waydio wave and crest into being. Tiny stones and molecules will be told where to go and how to connect to one another until you return to existence.”
“Will Amber be there too?”
“No.”
“What about my family?”
“Everything you have ever lost is lost forever. None of it was real and so your loss is only what you want it to be. You remember suffering, make of that what you will. If you find yourself facing phantoms of this time, you will decide what to do with them.”
Charlie saw, or imagined he saw (he wasn’t sure which) that the beast was eating Amber. Its long furry face was covered in her blood. Her ribs protruded up through the snow. He heard the animal chewing and biting and ripping her body.
“And that is how you fly the ship,” The monster said.
He listened as bones broke and it sucked on her flesh.
“And these are the people you will command.”
He watched as her fingers and her arms disappeared down the animal’s massive throat. He smelled her on its hot breath.
“And now you know everything you need to know.”
Charlie looked again. The animal wasn’t eating Amber at all. It had been eating him. His feet were gone, his legs were gone. His whole body beneath the waist had disappeared. And, he fell asleep.
Session 25
Charlie woke up again. He wasn’t in the tree anymore. He was in a soft and flat bed, without any sheets, blankets, or pillows. He opened his eyes and was greeted by a flood of purples, blues, and other deep colors. For a few moments, he couldn’t see through the dark after-images. Slowly they faded and a room came into view.
It was a large, white, domed room. There were statues in a circle near the ceiling. Everything looked like it was made of marble, or some similar stone. He didn’t see a direct source of light, but the rock itself seemed to give off a pure white glow which filled the space.
He became aware that a man was sitting in a chair next to him. The man looked like a scientist or a college professor. He looked exhausted. His hair was thick with grease and looked like he had slept a night or two without washing it. It stuck straight up into the air and away from his face. Charlie wondered if the man might be Icelandic, or maybe Irish?
The strange man turned and looked at Charlie. He bent down and picked up a notebook, straightened his glasses and said, “Oh. Hello again. Just a minute.”
He turned the pages in his notebook until he got to a blank one. “Do you remember your name?”
“Charlie Daemon.”
“And is this reality?”
“You look really tired, friend. Maybe I should get up and let you have the bed?”
“I’m sorry. I am required to test you. Is this reality?”
Charlie smiled. “No, I dreamed you up. I even imagined the thoughts in your head. Ah, you’re thinking I’m playing with you. Well, I decided you’d think that.”
The man frowned and scribbled in his notebook. It looked like he was writing in cursive. He didn’t enjoy Charlie’s joke.
Charlie ran his hand over his face. He’d been shaved in his sleep. His nose had been straightened. There was a scar on his forehead. It felt like someone else’s face.
“Do you know where we are?” The man asked.
Charlie looked around. There was a single arched door out of the room. The statues around the ceiling looked almost classical, but some of the faces were modern. A couple of them looked alien. “Is this my spaceship out on the other limitlessness?”
The stranger didn’t reply. He wrote what must have been two or three paragraphs about Charlie’s answer. He was fast and sloppy, eager and scattered.
“You’re not a doctor,” Charlie challenged him.
“I am, actually.” The stranger had a fake laugh.
Charlie shook his h
ead. “No, you’re not a regular doctor. You might be a scientist, but you don’t look or sound like a medical doctor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your hair. Your face. I know people. You’re an academic.”
Charlie sat up. The man held out a hand to hold him back, but didn’t quite touch him with it. Charlie smacked it away. The stranger was clearly shocked. He almost fell out of his chair. There was the sound of a small piece of metal or glass hitting the floor. The stranger bent down to pick up whatever it was.
Charlie put his feet on the floor. He nearly slipped. His legs were different and he wasn’t use to them at first. The floor seemed to be wet. Charlie looked down and saw about two dozen dead bodies all slumped against the marble.
The dead were all wearing long white robes with gold trim. Charlie seemed to be dressed the same way. Some of the bodies were bloody, and a thick red pool of juice had gathered outside of the mouth of a man crumpled just a few inches from the bed Charlie had been lying in.
The stranger was on his knees. His body was twisted away from Charlie, but he had turned to look back at him. He had just picked up a long syringe from the floor. He looked frightened.
“What is this place? Who are these people?” Charlie shouted.
“You’re they. They’re, um, you. We actually have spoken before, many times.” The stranger stood up. He tried to conceal the syringe behind his back.
The man’s body language told Charlie that he still intended to use the injection on him. Charlie took a closer look. The faces were shaven. The noses were repaired, but they all did look like him. And the couple he could see clearly all had a funny scar in the center of their foreheads. He hadn’t had that scar before.
Charlie reached up and confirmed. The scar on his forehead matched theirs. And it hurt when he pushed on it. The scar was tender. “Why have you been killing me?”
“I need to know what you know. What you don’t know that you know. I need to see what you can remember. Is every iteration the same? Is every iteration the different? I’ve interviewed you twenty-five times and you’ve never given me exactly the same answers. Am I the difference? Or are the different Charlie Daemons different from each other in some little ways?” Exasperation dripped from the scientist’s voice.
“What’s your name?”
“Doctor David Peter Aelfwyrd. I was born after you died. I watched you. I read your speeches. I believe in what you did. My grandfather voted for you. What I did needed doing.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?”
Aelfwyrd held out the syringe. “You need to take this. The experiment is too far along for us to give up on it. You’re going to want to know the truth at least as much as I do. And when it’s over, you won’t care how many times you’ve died. What if I could fill in the holes? What if I could give you your missing briefing?”
The man wasn’t making sense. He seemed very dangerous. “Give me that.”
Charlie took the syringe from the cringing doctor.
Then Charlie grabbed the man by the shoulder and drew him in. He held the syringe against the scientist’s throat.
Instead of words, Charlie growled like the bear, the wolf, the dragon which had taken him from his old life. And he stabbed the syringe into Aelfwyrd’s neck. The needle went in and it delivered the poison, but more than that, the glass shattered and the pieces were stabbed into the exhausted man’s neck.
Charlie let go and then shoved him in the chest, knocking him backwards to the floor. Aelfwyrd died screaming and shrieking in horrible pain.
2
There were twelve beds in the room. From the positions of the bodies and the blood, Charlie concluded that every version of himself had woken up on the same bed. He took the dead and leaned them all up against the wall so that he could see them as clearly as possible. He dragged Aelfwyrd’s body to the opposite side of the room and left him there, face down and still bleeding out.
Every face was identical. The bodies were stiff. A couple were bruised. The expressions were horrific, but he could identify them all as his own.
All were clean shaven. They had all had their noses straightened. And every one had that identical scar on the forehead which Charlie had never seen before.
As every Charlie Daemon was dressed in a white robe with gold trim, Charlie could see a few of their legs. All of the scars were gone. He bent down and checked himself. It was such a shock for him to see clean and healthy flesh there. He thought about the suffering which those marks represented. It was like his past and his pain were just a story which he could choose to use or discard moving forward.
He bent down and took a look at the scar on one of the foreheads. It was swollen. At a glance he confirmed that the others appeared to be the same. He touched it, and the flesh moved. He tugged at the skin on his corpse’s head and a slit opened at the center of the mark. He investigated.
It was an eye.
“Who does that belong to?” he asked out loud.
Every Charlie was the same. They had a third sealed eye in the center of their foreheads. He ran back over to the dead David Aelfwyrd and confirmed. The doctor did not have one. He took a few moments to look his killer’s body over and he didn’t see anything out of place or unusual.
Charlie sat down in Aelfwyrd’s chair. He steadied himself, and then he tried to open his own other eye.
The room filled with purples, blues, a swirling orange, and strange under-colors which looked like sounds and looked like scents. Charlie’s head felt like it had split open and he fell down sideways onto the floor. He had to cover his third eye with both palms and use the darkness to protect himself from a massive epileptic sensory overload.
I have three eyes!
Charlie slowly felt the new lid close. His heart was pounding. In his imagination he tried to remember what he had seen, the strange colors – almost like new concepts. But he couldn’t find it in his mind. It was like watching a big 3DQuad Super-HD color movie on a black and white screen. His mind couldn’t hold it all. He felt like his brain was too small for what he’d seen.
When he was ready, Charlie stood again and looked around the room. Something had changed. There was a new man in a white robe with gold trim. He was lying in a different bed from the one Charlie had been lying in.
Charlie walked a little closer and he recognized the man.
It was Aelfwyrd, a second David Aelfwyrd.
He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t even breathing, but Charlie was sure he would be soon. Charlie didn’t remember what had happened to all of his other bodies. Would Aelfwyrd? Probably not, but how could he know? Reality was so strange. He could barely be sure of gravity anymore.
The first Aelfwyrd had been wearing normal clothes, a tweed jacket, a bow-tie, corduroy pants, glasses, loafers. The new one wore the robe. That suggested to Charlie that the first Charlie had left the room and gone into the rest of the ship. There was no way to know if he had had hours or days or even longer to live and acclimatize himself to the ship before the experiments had begun.
The new Aelfwyrd had started breathing. Charlie grabbed the chair, palmed Aelfwyrd’s glasses, and sat down next to the doctor’s bed.
“Do you remember your name?” Charlie asked.
“David Peter Aelfwyrd,” He replied and then opened his eyes. He clearly recognized Charlie and was delighted.
“Is this reality?”
Aelfwyrd thought for a moment before answering, “I know some tests we could do to make sure.”
“Do you know where we are?” Charlie asked.
Aelfwyrd looked around as he answered, “This must be the Genesis Chamber. It was covered in our orientation. Have we been in a battle? I see…. It looks like you and I may have died a few times.”
Charlie was surprised that the doctor was so blasé about the duplicate dead.
“Explain them.” Charlie waved his hand at the line-up of dead Charlies.
Aelfwyrd squinted and looked in their direction. H
e sat up. “From here, I couldn’t say how they died, but it seems strange that none of them are seriously decomposed. I don’t…smell death older than a few days. I’d say that someone was running an experiment of some kind.”
Aelfwyrd turned and looked at Charlie. “Ah, I see. I was running an experiment.”
“You remember,” Charlie accused him, through clenched teeth.
“No. No, of course not. How could I? It’s just obvious. Look at your eyes. You’re furious with me. But it’s my birthday! I haven’t even been spanked yet! You can’t seriously blame me. Do we know what I was hoping to achieve? What the prior me was hoping to accomplish?”
“There’s a notebook.” Charlie pointed in the book’s direction with a wave of his head. “And you were injecting each me with a hypodermic. I stabbed it into your throat. See what you can make of it.”
Aelfwyrd stood up.
Charlie handed him the glasses. “These are yours.”
“I don’t need them,” Aelfwyrd protested but took the glasses. “We’re reborn. No scars. No weaknesses.”
Aelfwyrd paused for a moment. He was looking at Charlie’s head. He absentmindedly slipped the glasses on and then reached for the third eye. “Is that a - ”
“They gave me a third eye, but it doesn’t work right. We’ll worry about that later.”
Aelfwyrd nodded. He walked over, grabbed his notebook. Then he walked over toward his own corpse. He paused a few steps early. “It seems Allambree will be joining us.”
There was a third man in the room, an extraordinarily tall man. Allambree was apparently an eight foot tall Australian Aborigine. He was lying on one of the beds, just as Charlie and Aelfwyrd had been. He wasn’t awake yet and he wasn’t breathing. But he was the strangest man that Charlie had ever seen.
Aelfwyrd put his glasses on and walked over to the Aborigine. He was a giant.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 2