“How do you know who he is? I don’t,” Charlie asked.
“The briefing. You don’t remember your briefing?”
“The last you suggested was that if I killed myself he could help a future Charlie Daemon remember his briefing.”
“That’s not good. We were supposed to all wake up with years of training and preparation.”
“I just remember my life up until after the war.”
Aelfwyrd was shocked. “Just until after the war? No no no no no. You did all of your important work after that. Do you even know who you are?”
Charlie wasn’t sure how to answer his question. “You can call me Charlie.”
“Imagine if you met Abraham Lincoln before he became interested in politics.” Aelfwyrd seemed completely gobsmacked. “It’s interesting from a philosophical perspective though. Are you even the same man minus all of those experiences? You might not even be qualified to lead us…. to be frank.”
“Your last incarnation was a mass murderer. Don’t talk to me about being unqualified.”
“Charles Daemon? David Aelfwyrd? Then it is true. Oh, what bloody miracles!” A third voice spoke.
The two men turned and faced the Australian.
“I studied you both when I was a little boy. They told me that I would be working with you, but it is so marvelous. The man who made human life on Mars possible, and then throughout the universe! And the President. The last President of the United States of America. I’m not sure I’m qualified to work with you, but my name is Allambree Alawa. I was born long after you were both dead. My specialty is Astro-Archeology.”
Allambree stood up. The room was tall enough to allow him to, but at over eight feet in height, he was a massive man. Aelfwyrd was 5’10” and Charlie was a full six feet tall. Allambree Alawa was a true giant.
It was only after he stood that he saw all of the dead. “But, what’s all of this then?”
“David, a previous David, was killing me again and again so he could ask me if I knew my name and if this was reality. I killed that David and we got a new one.”
“Bonkers,” Allambree replied. “And what did you learn? Is reality fair dinkum?”
“I, uh, I haven’t had a chance to go over my notes yet. Today was my birthday too. I just got here a few minutes ago.”
“Then this must not be my first time here either. Do we know how the last Allambree died?”
Charlie pointed at the door. “I think we’re gonna have to go out there if we want to learn anything more. How large is our crew supposed to be?”
“Twelve. Five men and seven women,” Aelfwyrd replied.
“Let’s hope no one kills the rest of them before we learn what they have learned.”
“Look at the statues.” Allambree pointed at the ring of white statues up near the ceiling. “That one looks like me. There’s David, and you, Charlie. The twelve statues are of the twelve crew members.
“Are some of the crew alien?” Charlie asked.
One of the statues looked like it was of a woman covered completely in hair, like a Yeti or a Sasquatch. A second statue was bald and had enormous complicated eyes.
Aelfwyrd was smiling. “That’s my work. I know it is.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Allambree answered. “They’re human, but when humanity left Earth we had to change. It turned out you couldn’t just change the other worlds to make them suit people. People had to be changed to live on different worlds.”
“That’s your work?” Charlie asked Aelfwyrd.
Aelfwyrd nodded. “You might say I invented the men and women who could live on Mars. I recreated the species.”
The statue of Charlie had its third eye open wide.
“Let me ask you guys something.” Charlie kept staring at the statue as he spoke to the men. “What do you know about the people who brought us here?”
“He doesn’t remember his briefing. Something is wrong with his brain,” Aelfwyrd explained to Allambree.
“They told me they were descendants of what used to be Homo-Sapiens. They claimed to come from the 32nd century. The galaxies are very big, but they can travel throughout them with faster than light engines, worm holes, folding space, siagonal travel, and things we don’t even know yet. I was born in the late 22nd century, and they know so much that wasn’t even dreamed of yet in my lifetime.
“But there are many galaxies. There are more galaxies than grains of dust in the Milky Way. The distance never ends. Even with all of their knowledge and techniques, there are some distances which they could never cross.
“The men and women I spoke with told me that they used a thing called a Waydio signal to send a message out past forever. The Waydio signal found matter on the other side of creation. It told one molecule to go here and another molecule to go there, to form the right minerals and compounds until they built the greatest starship, the ideal starship. Then the molecules were told to go over here now and over there and they made living matter. They made you, and David, and me.”
“We were created by radio?” Charlie smiled, half in awe and half in humor.
Aelfwyrd corrected him. “It’s Waydio, with a wubbabubba. I don’t know how it works. You and I, and Her Majesty Gloryannana of course, are really the prehistoric. I was from the 22nd century. The rest of the crew is from the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26… there are even two women from the 28th century. So, no, I don’t know what the difference between radio and Waydio is except it seems to go waaaaay farther out into the cosmos.”
Aelfwyrd walked over to his corpse and began undressing it. He changed out of the white and gold robe and put on the clothes which suited him better.
Allambree shrugged. “Eh. Don’t make it more complicated than it is.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Charlie said, but instead of mocking the ideas, his voice sounded like he was in awe. “So, are we real? Am I the same Charlie Daemon that I was yesterday, or some kind of a simulation?”
Allambree’s smile went as wide as the room. “Is this a new problem for you? Blokes have been wondering if we were real and what reality meant for hundreds of thousands of years.”
Charlie waved his hand. “That doesn’t help. I need to know if this is a simulation. This could all be a trap.”
“Mmmm.” Aelfwyrd pointed to the door. “If you want answers, we’ll find them out there.”
“Not for the questions he’s asking. We could sit and discuss -”
“No, I want to know what’s out there.” Charlie began walking towards the door. “If I’m in charge of a Millenium Falcon, or Enterprise, or even a Firefly, I want to see what I’ve got.”
3
“We’re the ultimate crew, for the ultimate ship,” Doctor Aelfwyrd explained as the three men walked out of the Genesis Chamber. “Men and women born centuries after our time, the best men and women of their age, sat down and solved the equation. We could not be better suited for our jobs, and our ship - our boat -” He paused to laugh. “- Our vehicle is all that they could have plotted and calculated and devised. Yes, it’s even better than your Falcon.”
Charlie, Aelfwyrd, and Allambree had walked out in the center of a shining white city. It reminded Charlie of pictures he’d seen of Florence or Paris and yet also of ancient Angkor Watt. The stone was carved in massive and intricate patterns. There was no metal, no plastic, and no wood, apart from the trees, as far as he could see. He didn’t see any cars or roads, but walk-ways made of the same bright ivory rock. There could not have been as much marble, if it really was marble, on the whole of planet Earth.
And he could not imagine what cranes or other construction machines could have been used to raise the massive pillars and trellises and statues. Great skyscrapers rose up as tall as anything he had seen on Earth, but they appeared to be cut out of one stone. In fact, he didn’t see any creases or hinges. The entire city looked like it had been carved out of a single block.
The air smelled of vanilla and blackberries. There were trees and flowers, grassy area
s. He could see a long walkway covered with saplings which roses grew out of. He recognized most of the plants as fairly normal, but, remarkably, not all. The rose trees were new. A series of long blue blades waved back and forth in a breeze which did not match the wind. Red pastel ivy grew over some of the buildings, which gave the impression that they had stood there for decades.
Above them, the sky was an undulating web of green and purple lines, a massive exaggeration of the Aurora Borealis humming and thrumming only as high above as one might expect to see clouds. Beyond them was the soft blue of a normal afternoon’s sky.
“How old is this city?” Charlie asked.
“The whole ship was created over-night,” Allambree answered.
“How long ago?”
“That is an excellent question,” Aelfwyrd said with concern. “Am I the second version of myself or the fifth? We will have to see what information the others have. They will have recordings.”
Allambree pointed at the red ivy, which grew so lushly over the closest tower. “That building and that ivy may have been made exactly how they would have been if they had been there for a hundred years. We can’t judge the age of anything summoned up out of nothingness with our senses.”
“Alright, well, where’s the ship?” Charlie asked.
“This is the ship,” Aelfwyrd answered.
“It’s a bloody big ship,” Allambree laughed like a little boy.
A bright blue bird flew past. It was followed by a speeding green and fat insect which rushed past the bird and dashed under an ornate bridge covered with statues of angels and elephants. As the three men walked on, an animal cried out in the distance. It sounded a little like a hyena and a little like a bugle.
Charlie found himself looking at the pattern on the wall. A series of geometric shapes almost formed a hand, but almost did not. It was a masterpiece which moved him, although he could not quite say why. “The greatest ship which mankind can conceive and the greatest crew which mankind can conceive… and the greatest doctor humanity can imagine is a sociopath.”
Aelfwyrd quickly turned his glance away. He was doing a poor job of pretending to not hear him.
Allambree was leaning over a railing and looking down at a lower level of street below them. He spun back and faced Charlie, even as Aelfwyrd turned away. Allambree was smiling with enthusiasm. “Even the hardest working computer program is limited by its programmers.”
Charlie shook his head and muttered to himself. “No. Not always.”
They walked down a wide and palatial stairway. When they had gotten about half-way down, Charlie could see a long reflecting pool which mirrored the green and vibrating sky above it. The pool was shaped like the profile of a woman’s body with ample bosom and derriere.
Allambree gasped. “As we explore our own home, it will be like exploring a lost civilization. The people who built this are from the far future. What do we know about them? They might be as different from us as true Martians would have been. What was their attitude toward human bodies? Sexuality? What do all of these shapes and animals mean to them? It might not be the same as it is to people of our times.”
“What year were you born?” Aelfwyrd asked the Aborigine.
“2259, September 25th.”
“You’re from my far future,” Aelfwyrd mocked.
“When were you born, doc?” Charlie asked.
“2130.”
“That’s sixty years later than the last calendar I saw.”
“Yeah, we studied you in school.”
Charlie frowned. He felt like he was being called a cave-man. “So, what happened after the war?”
“You did.”
Charlie was still frowning.
Aelfwyrd continued. “You picked up the country and you fixed everything.”
“Hardy-har-har,” Charlie faked a laugh.
They got to the bottom of the staircase. The reflecting pool was about ten yards ahead of them. A vast tree was carved into the gleaming ivory floor. It reached roughly forty yards out to the sides and the distance between the stairs and the pool. There weren’t any cracks. There weren’t any chips. There wasn’t a single pebble out of place anywhere that they looked. The stone felt soft and smooth against their hands and their fingers. There were no rough edges, not a single imperfect detail in the sweeping monolith which they walked through. Even the bushes and grass looked like they had been tended to within the last few days.
“This city is just for a dozen people? It seems like such a waste of money. Thousands of people could happily live here together,” Charlie commented.
“This is from a civilization past the need to ration resources. They don’t need to work to make things. They create them. They print them. Imagine if you were playing a video game – you wouldn’t worry about people having to build every wall in the game. They just tell the computer what to make and it does it,” Allambree explained. He spoke with admiration and excitement.
“Could they do that in your time?” Charlie asked.
Allambree shook his head. “No, but we started to suspect the technology which could make it reality.”
“Suspect the technology?” Charlie questioned.
“I lived and work on a planet called Griffon. It was named after the man who discovered it. It had another name which sounded a little like wind and water.” Allambree then made a very specific series of blowing and squishing sounds in his mouth before continuing. “It was home to an alien race centuries before we discovered it. But they, along with most of the other native species, all died out from crises brought on by overpopulation. On Earth it would have been the 15th century when the inhabitants of Griffon finished killing each other off for food.
“By the time we got there, there wasn’t anything more advanced than insects still living on the planet. But, their buildings were still there, their cities, their literature, their architecture, their history. For me, and the other archeologists on Griffon, it was Heaven. And while the natives never did develop a space program, they were ahead of us in many ways. They-”
Allambree had meant to go on, but Aelfwyrd raised a hand to silence him. He pointed past the big man to a figure in the distance. It wasn’t a statue. The person was moving towards them.
And then there were three figures.
And then a half dozen.
A couple of seconds passed and they became clearer in the distance. These peoples’ faces looked disfigured, like they had been in a fire, like they were melted.
They drew closer, and the three men could see that the figures were naked, and their pink bodies were shaped like half-dripping wax. Their skin was pink and rosy, like many mammals, but it clung to their bones like chunks of mud.
They were not human.
Charlie found himself thinking about all of the robots which The Machine had sent against him and his friends. Some of those had been shaped like people; others had been like huge spiders with guns mounted on their backs. The advancing figures were made of flesh, loose slovenly flesh which hung about their bodies as if it was going to fall away at any moment. They were chaotic – the opposite of the robots. They were terrible.
From out of the bushes a hand emerged. Allambree turned and looked at it, still smiling.
“G’Day, mate.” The big man greeted the creature which arose just inches away from where he was standing. He sounded sincere. Allambree wasn’t frightened, but delighted by the new discovery, no matter how disgusting it looked.
A second hand followed the first, and then a third. They all had the same owner and that man of melted wax and pink mud reached those hands out and grabbed Allambree. Charlie began to move forward, to try to protect him, but the creature was too fast. With a surprising strength it simply bent the bone in Allambree’s arm and broke it right in half.
As Allambree screamed, the monster climbed on top of him, the loose flesh on its body suddenly lifting up and reaching out for him. It reminded Charlie of video he’d seen of an octopus lurching for its prey u
nderwater.
Aelfwyrd raced backwards up the first few steps of the stairway they had all come down. Charlie grabbed one handful of the creeping flesh and began beating the thing’s head with his right fist. “Get off of him,” Charlie growled in a deep and echoing, almost operatic voice.
Allambree screamed one more time and then suddenly stopped. By this time, Charlie was pounding on the attacker’s head and back with all of his power. It was bleeding red blood and dark welts were appearing in its flesh. He was hurting it.
The captain managed to pull the monster off of Allambree. A sickening distended face looked up at him with sad wet eyes. Malformed and rotted teeth protruded from a weak mouth. The creature was naked, except for a thick silver necklace which Charlie could only then see. Up until then, the accessory had been hidden underneath the folds.
“We need to run!” Aelfwyrd shouted. He was half-way up the stairs again by then, but seemed to have stopped there.
Charlie was, of course, a warrior. He had killed much more dangerous enemies than this in his recent past. He pulled the necklace towards him and rammed his opponent’s head backwards, loudly breaking its neck. As strange as the monster was, that killed it just as it would have any earthly creature.
The other figures moved slowly, but they were still approaching. There were a lot of them.
Charlie looked down at Allambree. Yes, the big man was dead. His dark skin had been drained of color and moisture by the creature’s hungry flesh. What remained was pale, grey, and swollen.
“Charlie, now!” Aelfwyrd was shrieking. “You can’t kill thirty or forty of them with your bare damn hands!”
He was right. Charlie wrenched the necklace off of the monster and ran back up the stairs. He left Allambree where he was lying.
He almost said, “See you soon,” but somehow couldn’t bring himself to make light of the man dying, however ephemeral that death might be.
He ran back up the stairs. When he reached Aelfwyrd, the two men ran on together.
Three large fat green lightning-bugs raced across their path, followed by two more. Each was as large as Charlie’s fist. They glowed like flashlights. The two men kept going until they reached the door of one of the white marble buildings. The door was not locked, but once inside they conveniently found that they could bolt it behind them.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 3