Gloryannana grabbed Charlie by the arm. “Let him do his work. You can yell at him later. You know, I was thinking, have you ever been on a fox hunt? No, of course, you wouldn’t have been. But what if I helped you to make Aelfwyrd your fox? You could hunt him down through the wilderness and get your delicious bloody revenge. Then maybe you two can get past what the previous version of him did?”
Charlie shook her arm off. He didn’t reply to her question. “I’ll be in my room. You make sure that Aelfwyrd reports to me personally when he knows something.”
“Naturally. Charlie?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you even going to smile?”
Charlie frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Charlie-barley-harley-farley, can’t you take a moment to realize what we’ve got? You’re so angry about things that didn’t even really happen to you. Don’t you think that’s a little…small of you? I mean, a little childish? You have a kingdom to make Alexander blush. In deep space, a pleasure planet did Charlie Daemon decree…”
“Do you understand what we just went through?” Charlie pointed at her and raised his sore voice.
The Queen wrapped her hand around Charlie’s extended finger flirtatiously. “We get to live forever, Charlie. We twelve get to share our own little perfect planet. All the pains of mortality are gone. You’re never going to lose any of us. And whenever ever something too harsh happens, we gently forget. This is forever ever ever ever, Charlie-barley.”
He pulled his hand away.
EPISODE THREE
CRYSTAL
“Music is liquid architecture. Architecture is frozen music.”
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The Universe is impossibly vast.
Even with warp drive, teleportation, & worm holes,
there are places you could never go.
But you could broadcast a signal out across forever, you could tell the distant molecules to form new people on the other side and send them off exploring…..
1
Charlie picked up his guitar again. He started wailing. A new song burst out of him. He didn’t plan it. He didn’t write it. It just showed up when he picked up his axe:
We are the people born by radio
Way way way way
Radio
We are the people born by Waydio
Way way way way
Waydio
We are the people made of sound
And we are round
Ups as good as down
He played for a few minutes, just shredding on his guitar, playing one of the heaviest songs he’d ever written. Wu Gwei had been watching at first, then he joined in with a bass riff which blew Charlie’s mind.
They jammed for about ten minutes. Charlie sang those lyrics maybe a dozen times, but never wrote any others. They would be the only words in their sci-fi epic.
When they took a break, Charlie said to Wu Gwei, “You’re amazing. Umbra said you played guitar, but-”
“You know. Just because I am a warrior doesn’t mean I don’t have a soul.”
“Yeah. When I was at war, I just wanted to get back and get into a studio.”
“The war was not an interruption or a distraction for your art,” Wu Gwei explained, very seriously, “It was your fuel source. You would have been a mediocre musician if you had never learned to fight.”
“Prince never fought anybody. Paul McCartney didn’t get in a lot of fist fights.”
“Yeah, but Ze’ev Cohen had a black belt.”
“Who?”
“Heh. Rock N Roll was nice, but you were born before the Age of Nightmares. From the paper days; you’ve never even heard real Meat-Metal. I’m going to expand your consciousness.” Wu Gwei smirked.
The cyborg-dictator, currently without any cybernetic implants or victims, picked up a guitar and began playing the most incredible hard rock Charlie had ever heard. Wu Gwei played with a speed and an aggression he’d rarely heard, but more than that there was an intricacy to the performance. It was generations more sophisticated that any guitar-work he’d ever heard. Charlie felt like Jimmy Hendrix and Steve Vai had an Asian son and he was standing just three feet away from him, giving the performance of his life.
For a long time, Charlie just watched. He felt his knees swaying, as if his body were going to dance whether he wanted it to or not. His neck wanted to mosh. He wondered what a pilgrim on the Mayflower would have thought if he’d seen Led Zeppelin play. And he felt just like that Pilgrim. He wondered if he had found a new favorite band. He wanted to download Wu Gwei’s work.
For a long time, neither of them noticed that there was anyone else in the garden. But then Kalligeneia’s screams grew too loud for even Wu Gwei’s guitar to drown.
“Fock, no! Fock, no! He’s not what you think! No!”
Wu Gwei Lifted his guitar up at the last possible moment and partially blocked the strike as a huge blond man with a crew-cut swung Avraam’s mace at the guitar god.
Wu Gwei stumbled backwards over an amplification monad and the blond man struck again, this time hitting the side of Gwei’s face directly.
Kalligeneia fell upon Avraam and wrapped her arms around his right fore-arm, to try and stop the man from hitting him again.
“It’s not that world anymore. He’s not your enemy. There are no enemies here,” Kalligeneia pled. Her long black hair flew up into the air all around her. Her red skin was much brighter than Charlie remembered, and he found himself thinking that she looked like Mew Tse’s opposite. Her face was twisted from the screaming, and she sounded like she was hurting her throat.
Avraam looked at Charlie. He was Avraam. This was what the Russian looked like when he regenerated. He looked about fifteen years younger. He was all muscle, without an ounce of fat. His hair was cut short like a marine’s, except for a flourish in the front which made Charlie think of a young Travolta.
“Avraam? Is that you, Avraam?” Charlie said.
The big man seemed to forget about his victim. He smiled a big warm toothy grin at Charlie. “President Charlie Daemon,” he said, with admiration. “You, I can trust. You, call me Avi.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Charlie asked, holding his guitar like a weapon he was ready to use.
“I am fighting The Machine, Mr. President, just like you did. That man was just like the bad computer you put down. Wu Gwei is The Machine. Don’t you get it? They represent the same thing, and in a dream things are what they represent.”
“The Machine?” Charlie muttered, thinking through the ramifications of what the young version of Avraam was saying.
Kalligeneia was leaning over Wu Gwei and trying to take care of him. Charlie couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was talking to the wounded man. Wu Gwei didn’t look like he would be getting up again anytime soon.
“You think this is a dream?” Charlie asked.
Avraam nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, well not a dream because I’m asleep, but it is Wu’s final trap, a simulation. He is in my mind, the same as he is in the minds of all the Lowmen. He is trying to jizzzack me. But, no, I am not so easy to fool. I cut through lies.” He hefted his mace. “I smash them.”
“So, I’m not real?” Charlie asked.
“Everything you can think of is true, Mr. President. You represent the man who could defeat the machine. You are my ideal. My ideal is real, I assure you.”
Avraam began to turn back towards Wu Gwei.
Charlie reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him back away from Wu Gwei. “What are you trying to do? If this is a dream, then that’s not really Wu.”
“It is a reflection of him. In your time, you would have called him The Devil, because in your time you didn’t have a concept yet for anyone as evil as Wu Gwei. Every dark thought you ever have is Wu Gwei. A dream of Wu Gwei is Wu Gwei… But you’re right. He is not the key. We need to get out of here.”
Charlie paused and thought for a moment. “How do you know this is a simulati
on?”
The young man smiled. “I was in his palace. His guards were dead. The security nanites were disintegrated. I had removed the intrinsic field from the walls. He had no defenses left. I remember… I picked up my axe and I was going to go up the stairs when reality went strange. There was a woman in white. She told me that all of my life had been a fiction to prepare me for a mission on a space-ship. She said that I had been created to travel to the other side of the universe and explore.
“She told me about the crew, about a world/spaceship. She gave me passwords. It was all very detailed. But it didn’t make any sense. I needed to find Wu Gwei. I needed to destroy him and she was in my way.
“Then I was in a white room, wearing a woman’s dress! But I figured it out. This is just like the technology Wu uses to empty and control the minds of his Lowmen. He is attacking me from the inside. I was ready for this.”
Kalligeneia shot a look at Charlie, which communicated that she was planning on attacking Avraam from behind. He shook his head sharply, telling her not to.
“I had a similar experience, Avraam, but you weren’t there,” Charlie said.
“Please, call me Avi. My father was Avraam.”
“Okay, Avi. I was in Alaska, freezing in the ice and snow and a monster appeared. It told me that my life had been a fiction and it told me I was going to be a captain on a starship. Then I saw it eating my body. I woke up in that same room you did, wearing that same white and gold outfit. Don’t you see, Avraam- Avi? I exist when you’re not around. I’m real.”
The Russian looked confused.
“Just because you say you do, doesn’t mean…I mean, it is just logic, yes?”
“Avi, what if today is the first day of your life, of my life too, but we were created with memories? What if everything you remember doing, the person you remember being, your likes and dislikes, were given to you? That man over there? We call him Wu Gwei, but I don’t think he’s the same man you remember fighting. I don’t think you’re the Avraam Fock you remember being, either.”
“Heh. I didn’t know you were funny.”
“I’m hilarious, but right. I’m serious. It’s weird. Our lives are weird, but they’ve just started.”
Fock looked deep in thought for a long moment. While the Russian thought, Charlie looked at him. It was amazing to think that this was the same man he had gotten to know on Primus-3. He looked like a relative of the fat and sloppy, lustful Avraam who had eaten a sandwich on the way down to the planet. He might have been the man’s son.
“I knew the previous Avraam Fock. I knew a big fat man with a joyful belly who loved food and eating and women. He laughed. That Avraam told me that he had been on the ship for years.”
“The Genesis Chamber? That’s real. They told me – Sally told me, but I…” his voice trailed off, the thought unfinished.
“That’s not the Wu Gwei you remember. He’s not your enemy. They created us with a Waydio signal from the memories of who we used to be.”
Avi frowned.
Then he punched Charlie in the face so hard that the captain heard his nose crack.
Kalligeneia shrieked.
Charlie picked himself up off the floor. Blood was streaming from his nose, running over his hand.
“You’re not going to trick me that easily, Wu. I know who I am!” Avraam barked at Charlie, suddenly looking like a bear.
“I’m telling y-” Charlie tried to argue, but Avraam kicked him in the stomach so hard that he was lifted up off of the floor.
Charlie tried to get up, but his body didn’t cooperate. His eyes were blurry and he felt like he was going to vomit. He couldn’t breathe properly. The captain turned over and let the fluids run out from his mouth and from his nose onto the floor. He expected another blow. But instead, he heard a heavy thunk.
Charlie got up slowly and saw that Avi was on the floor. Kalligeneia was standing over him and holding a knife. There was blood spurting from the back of both of his knees.
She spoke in an excited and aggressive hush. “You don’t need legs. You don’t need arms. If I take them from you, you will still have your mind. That’s all you need. That’s all you’ll get!”
“Kalligeneia?” Charlie gasped.
Avraam stumbled over, trying to grab the red-skinned woman from the future. She leapt back suddenly, like a cat or a monkey, her knife still held up at him.
Charlie saw the mace lying on the ground. He wanted to pick it up, but then he thought about Mew Tse. Did he really want to hit another crew member, another friend, in the side of the head?
“I remember when you killed me,” Wu Gwei coughed and stood up slowly. “Yes, I remember the vito-lance when it pierced my chest. I remember the current emptying into my body, killing my defensive nanites. I imagine it cooked my brain, but before that happened, the people who brought us here stopped the recording and began my mission briefing.”
Avi cranked his neck around to face the Chinese man. Wu Gwei held his left hand tightly against the side of his face. The bones were shattered and he was bleeding profusely.
“I didn’t want to die,” Wu Gwei continued. “But I understand now that it was the right time. The universe didn’t need me anymore. Where once I had been a bitter medicine, I was becoming a poison. You were a good boy. You did what needed to be done.”
“I don’t remember that. I haven’t killed you, not yet,” Avraam spat.
“You killed me maybe a thousand years ago. What you did took imagination and bravery, but it takes a simple and sophomoric mind to convince itself that it does not know what it clearly does know.”
“And what’s that?”
“This is not a simulation. Use your brain.”
Wu Gwei stumbled. Kalligeneia helped him regain his balance.
Avraam Fock turned back to Charlie. “It feels so real. But the illusion would have to be convincing for him to control so many millions of Lowmen. It would have to be an illusion no one ever saw through.”
Kalligeneia had started to walk Wu Gwei towards the door. He grunted at Avraam. “I didn’t create any false reality for the Lowmen. That would have been inefficient. I removed their minds entirely and made meat robots. Meat robots were what we needed.”
“I’m going to take Gwei down to Aelfwyrd,” Kalligeneia said to Charlie.
Charlie nodded back at her and then knelt down next to Avraam.
“Do you want a doctor? Those wounds real enough for you?”
“Don’t you wonder? Is it so much easier to believe in a Genesis Chamber and Waydio and the world-ship U.U.S Shamballa than to think maybe they’re just messing with our minds?”
“Eh… maybe. No, I take that back. They’re definitely messing with our heads. Half of what we’ve been told is a lie, an obvious lie. But this isn’t a video game. Wu didn’t set this up, that’s for sure. It’s about time we figured some of this out.”
June 2065
His right leg shook, almost spasming as he shouted into the microphone. His lips were painted with blue sparkles. He wore his stardust leather jacket, the collar turned up and covering the small light brown human nose which was growing on his neck. Almost no one noticed it in the shadows.
He didn’t have a shirt on, just a medallion with an Ankh made out of tinfoil wrapped around the chain.
Charlie didn’t have a band. He did have a drummer. That’s not how these things usually worked. Drummers are the hardest part of the band to get. Far more people want to play guitar or sing than bang on the drums, but Charlie actually had his pick of three drummers. Robin wasn’t the best of the three, he was probably the second best, but Charlie liked him better and that was more important.
No one could understand the lyrics he was singing, but they understood the feeling:
“Start a fire inside and burn the room,
Help the fire to rise over you.
Put yourself inside the burning rage.
Tear yourself apart
Start again.
Let it fee
d on you.
Let it tear you loose.
Reaching out and reaching in
Like a knife that’s suddenly plunging in
Dye your head
Dye your eyes a sunrise red
Make yourself complete
Then start again.
Give yourself to rage!”
He walked down from the stage with a thunk, his heavy black boots hitting the floor loudly enough to shake the old boards. He felt like he was descending from Heaven to Earth. He smiled a sideways smile and walked like he was drunk, even though he hadn’t had anything yet.
He was heading to the bar when a hand with a glass darted in front of him. Something red, yellow, and orange poured out, down his chest and into his pants.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!”
She had red-dyed hair with yellow roots. She was rubbing her own sleeves against his stomach to try and dry him off. He hadn’t even seen her face yet.
“It’s okay.” He took her hands.
They shared an awkward smile.
“I’m Charlie.”
“I know. I’m Amber.”
“I didn’t know that,” he joked.
She licked the drink off of her knuckles absent-mindedly. They were moving together towards the bar.
“I like your music. I like your anger.”
“I’m not angry,” he protested.
“I don’t think anger is always a bad thing.” She hadn’t quite heard him.
She reached over the bar and took some napkins from underneath. She started to dab them against his chest. He let her do it for a moment and then took them, to do it himself.
“I do love your music though. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s so direct, almost simple.”
“They used to call it rock and roll. From the 1960-1980s it ruled the world. It rocked the planet.”
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 19