“Warn me about what? That I’m going to create an army of angels and make the worlds better places?”
“Can’t you listen? It’s the darkness in you. You will undo everything good you do, for the memory of a fictional woman. Who says there ever was a girl named Amber? They wrote you, Charlie. Whatever kernels of fact they took from a historical figure’s life, they invented more than that. Some of your memories are from one man, some from another. The life you remember… it’s a composite of other people and of pure fiction.”
“How could you possibly know that? Maybe everything was exactly as I remember it.”
“Use your common sense.”
The two men stared at each other for an uncomfortably long time. The fire was getting low. The sphinx was staring at Charlie from underneath his master. The animal’s eyes looked red in the low light.
“So, why are you telling me all of this? What do you want from me?” Charlie asked.
“I’m offering you a way out. I’m offering you a chance to transcend this eternal cycle of death and forgetfulness, the hell the scientists of the 30th century dreamed up for you.”
“You can give me my life back?”
“No.” Solon coughed and then began laughing hysterically. “No, oh, Gods no! I see the fever is on you already. All of that is gone and nothing can bring it back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Do you understand me?”
“No, you’re being a little vague,” Charlie said sarcastically. He didn’t laugh along with Solon.
“Charlie, I’m here to change places with you. I have centuries of memories. I’ve lived more lives than you’ve read books. I’ve killed. I’ve fought. I’ve been in love. I’ve been a parent. I’ve written so many songs, oh if you could hear them they would blow your mind! I’ve lived a life you’ve never dreamed you could live. But even with all the best scientific advances the children of Aelfwyrd could manage, I’m dying. All of my knowledge will be lost. You don’t want us to forget, Charlie.”
The captain furrowed his brow. He rubbed his hand over his chin. “You want me to believe that you’re me, don’t you?”
“I think you know. I don’t have to prove it to you. You know your own face when you look at it. You know your eyes. You know your own voice. You know your own mind. I’m Charlie Daemon. I was captain of the UUS Shamballa for more than five hundred years. I’ve been to the limits of eternity. I know all the secrets of the universe.”
“Can you… tell them to me?”
Solon’s face looked sorrowful. “Half of the words would mean nothing to you. There’s so much to say. It’s not just a pamphlet. There’s only one way for Charlie Daemon to go on knowing what I know.”
The pit of Charlie’s stomach told him that “Solon” wanted to take something away from him. He knew that whatever the remnants of the other Charlie was going to suggest, it would be horrible.
The animal under the ancient cyborg’s cloak was still staring at Charlie. He was afraid that it might attack.
“You and I have to switch places. All of my memories will flow into you. Everything that I know. Everything that I have done. All that I have seen. And…your young strong body. I will take your place. Charlie Daemon will go on. He won’t make the same mistakes this time. Those terrible children will never be born. I won’t spend a moment thinking about Amber, or allowing her absence to cloud my mind.”
“And what about me?”
“Charlie Daemon will live on.”
“And I’ll die,” Charlie said with anger.
“Your memories, your puny week and a half of memories will be lost. You are me. I’m the better you. I’m more real than you. You are nothing more than my reflection. My shadow. If there’s anything good and noble in you, you should want a better version of yourself to live on, not the weak and stupid iteration you are now, but the God you could evolve into after a thousand years of growth.”
Solon’s voice was weak. His throat was rough, but it was familiar. Could it be what Charlie’s voice would sound like when he got old?
“You’re not me.”
“You are selfish, weak, and you have no imagination. I am what you could aspire to.”
The wind blew again and Solon’s cloak blew upwards revealing the metal beneath. The small machine which held his head up was revealed more clearly than before. It looked like a robot from a 1950s science fiction movie. The arms were especially pathetic. But Charlie noticed a long barrel hidden underneath, an especially nasty looking gun which had been pointed at him the whole time.
Solon’s pet sat motionless beneath him, starring and starring.
“Where did he come from?” Charlie asked, pointing at the sphinx.
Solon smiled. “I was on the other side of a black hole exploring a planet in a new-born universe. Their space and time were limited to a space less than the size of the planet Earth. He was being attacked by a horde of nasty creatures. I saved him and he came home with us. Nayara named him ‘Anubis.’ I call him ‘Newbie.’”
“I thought you were going to say you had him designed.”
“Not Newbie. He’s a good boy. I found him as he is.”
“Is he obedient?” Charlie asked.
“It took me a long time to train him, but he’s the best attack dog you’ve ever seen and he only responds to my voice.”
“Is that right?” Charlie smirked. “Newbie, attack!”
Charlie pointed at Solon. He looked the animal right in the eyes using all his will to command him. The creature turned and looked up at Solon. The animal almost jumped up towards Solon, but he hesitated.
“What are you doing?” Solon laughed. “He’s my dog.”
“Now, Newbie! Kill! Kill!” Charlie shouted,
The sphinx jumped up and grabbed the cloak in his teeth. He came down and pulled Solon with him.
Allambree was stirring as Charlie reach in and grabbed a burning stick from the fire.
“Kill, Newbie, kill!” Charlie kept screaming. Then he ran over and started beating his other self in the face, beating and burning the slag-heap of a face.
“What’s going on?” Allambree stood up. He was unsteady on his feet, and still tripping.
Newbie was chewing on Solon’s face. The ancient and deep one was screaming.
“Down, Newbie, down.” Charlie started yelling. He put his hand on the animal’s back and tried to pull it off. Anubis’s wings opened and Charlie had to step back.
Allambree looked over. He saw a winged sphinx with a man’s face in its mouth. The animal rose up into the air. The face was still alive and shrieking unintelligibly. The Aborigine’s eyes went wide and he bowed to the ground in front of what he thought was a hallucination.
Charlie reached out and grabbed Solon’s head. He pulled the sphinx’s jaw off of it. Slowly it began to obey and calm down. The captain pulled the other version of himself away and brought it closer to the fire, to see it more clearly.
Solon’s lips were slowly and silently moving. Charlie thought he was whispering and he brought it closer to his ear.
He couldn’t hear most of it, but the one word he thought he could make out, the dying God’s last word, was, “Amen.”
10
“He didn’t have a third eye. He never had a third eye.” Charlie held Solon’s head tenderly in his hands. “We weren’t the same.”
“Historically, Solon was an ancestor of Socrates’,” Allambree said, petting the Sphinx. “He was the one who told Socrates the story of the lost continent of Atlantis.”
“It wasn’t really his name. His name was just Charlie, the same as mine.”
“He had a nice dog though.” The sphinx was licking Allambree’s hand.
“I guess we have a nice dog now. Except he’s not a dog. He’s a sphinx.”
“I reckon you’ll want a unicorn next,” Allambree teased.
Charlie wrapped the dead man’s head and machine parts in the cloak. It would be heavy, but he wasn’t going to leave him behind. There was too much they might be
able to learn from examining it.
He found himself thinking about The Machine, and his attempts in another life to drag it through the Alaskan wilderness. The two men began walking. The sphinx followed behind them like a loyal and familiar pet. It seemed to believe that Charlie was his master.
“Do you believe he was you?” Allambree asked.
“Well, no.”
“You believe he was Charlie Daemon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then who are you?” Allambree asked with a smile.
“You ask difficult questions. Are you still high?”
“Ah. You want to change the subject. My questions must be very uncomfortable for you. Don’t be afraid of them. Facing them won’t make you weak. You’re thinking about them anyway. You’re wondering if you’re the same person you remember from before the mission. You’re wondering if you’re real, or just some kind of scientific imitation.”
“Is that what I’m thinking? Your mushrooms make you psychic?”
Allambree didn’t look at the captain as they walked. “You’re the one who seems to be having a mystical experience. How far does a man have to walk before he meets himself on the road?”
Charlie didn’t answer. The two men walked on wordlessly for some hours. The air was cold and moist. It clung to Charlie’s forehead. They passed out of the thick forest and into a savannah. In the distance they could see herds of large mammals walking along together down to a lake. Charlie couldn’t identify the animals. They were bigger than cows but moved smoothly like cats. A second herd of the same creatures passed in front of the men and they had no choice but to wait for them to pass before they could move on. He got a closer look then.
Their large sleepy eyes were on the sides of their heads. They walked carefully and gracefully on large soft paws. They had fur. It was quite short on the top, but thicker around their legs and bellies. Their hides varied quite a bit. Some looked like the yellow and gold grass of the savannah; others appeared to be born to fit into an arboreal background. Still others seemed to split down the side, the left resembling the tall grass and the right the green deciduous leaves. He saw large flat teeth in the mouths and fat tongues and so he could conclude that they were probably the spaceship’s lawnmowers. They smelled of mint.
A small flock of what looked like manta rays flew past. They momentarily blotted out the sun and cast massive triangular shadows across the golden grass. The sphinx growled as the sun disappeared behind the avians.
“What are these animals called?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?”
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
“Yes, Captain, I will be the stupidest ass I can.” Allambree laughed.
There was a high pitched sound, and they could see a shape in the sky moving towards them. It was a shuttle.
Just at that moment, the two men heard a growling sound from behind them. Charlie turned around to see his new pet had found a small calf which had become separated from the herd. The sphinx had risen up about ten feet from the ground and was swooping down on its prey, all four limbs extended, all four claws brandished. The cute little beast’s face was flush with murder.
As they watched, the two animals rolled over the ground together. The calf was making terrified little mewing sounds. They almost sounded like words, like it was begging the men to rescue it. Anubis growled with a deep and powerful thunder. When the two animals emerged from their wrestling match, his teeth were sunk deep into the vegetarian’s neck. Blood poured down from their necks. The calf’s eyes were rolled back and it had stopped moving, except for an ineffectual instinctive kicking out of its back legs.
While the act was natural enough, it was shocking for the two men to witness.
The prey dead, Anubis – or Newbie - licked at the blood for a moment and then began loudly purring, a little like a cat, but with a far lower and richer resonance. The pet looked up at Charlie. He looked him in the eye and seemed to smile. Then he dug in and started eating.
The shuttle was hovering just above. It caused a wind which whipped through the grass like a hurricane. Charlie watched the door open. Wu Gwei emerged. He lowered a rope ladder and climbed down with it.
He had new armor and new implants. Enough of his face was still recognizable. So Charlie knew who he was, but the man was twice as thick as he used to be. Purple and green plates glistened. He looked like a sci-fi samurai from a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon. There were guns built into his arms, three swords lashed to his back. A purple skirt of plate armor covered the top half of his legs. But it looked to Charlie as if Wu Gwei had had his real legs removed and replaced with a stylized mass of gears and hydraulics. He was a weapon of mass destruction now.
“Captain, it is a relief to find you.” Wu Gwei smiled sincerely.
“Gwei, what have you done to yourself?”
“What I always dreamed of. You will find that I am more useful now.”
Allambree reached out and began climbing the ladder.
Wu Gwei lifted his arm and took aim at the sphinx.
Charlie stood in the way. “He’s mine.”
He turned to his new pet and called him while patting his hip. “Newbie, come here.”
Everyone was surprised to see how quickly the animal abandoned its meal and ran over, rubbing its face all over Charlie’s hands.
“Animals are dangerous. They’re worse than people,” Wu Gwei cautioned as he began to climb back up the ladder.
“Nothing is worse than people,” Charlie laughed.
Wu Gwei arched an eyebrow. “I dream of what it would have been like to live in your 21st century. There are far worse things than even the worst men out there.”
Charlie picked Anubis up and held him against his chest as he began to climb up the ladder and into the shuttle. The animal was very affectionate with him. He looked Charlie in the eye as if he were his father.
They had the killing device on the shuttle already. Sally Brightly explained that as she was waiting for the away team to contact her she had picked up the robot pinging on her sensors. Wu Gwei had made short work of it using his new enhancements.
There were four crew members in the rescue party. Sally piloted the shuttle. Wu Gwei extracted them. And the brand new versions of Umbra and Kalligeneia sat and quietly watched. Their eyes were filled with wonder, but more than that, skepticism.
Charlie walked up to the women. “Happy Birthday.”
“I don’t even know the date,” Umbra apologized as she pushed a handful of her thick white hair away from her face and behind the golden horn above her right ear.
“It’s your new birthday. You may have memories from before you were born, but today was the day you were born.”
Kalligeneia leaned forward very seriously. “Does this mean we can expect cake?”
EPISODE FOUR
COSMIC SHAG
“I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us – and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star.”
- The Madwoman of Chaillot, Jean Giraudoux
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
Tertius-5 was 80% the size of the planet Earth. It was covered with an almost literal blanket of life. From outer-space the world looked light red, almost pink. As their ship descended through the atmosphere, the red grew deeper and darker. Scans revealed that 100% of the surface was covered with deep and thick living matter. It wasn’t plant or animal. It was soft, like velvet, and moved ever so gently as if a breeze blew through it.
Gloryannana dubbed the lifeform the “Cosmic shag.”
Wu Gwei outfitted the crew with plasmix coated suits for traveling in the hostile en
vironment. They put on padded uniforms which felt like thick bullet-proof vests. They covered their arms, legs, torsos, hands, and feet. Their heads were covered with helmets which looked a little like something a NASA astronaut would wear, but more stylish. The outside of the suits was white and bronze in a pattern which reminded Charlie a little of Roman armor. But once the suits were on, a hard plasmix force-field covered the surface. Charlie’s feet were about three inches off of the floor. This would allow them to walk on the “Cosmic Shag” without sinking. It also protected against radiation, infection, impurities, and anything else short of a cannon-ball at close range.
The quartermaster also issued every member of the away team two weapons.
The first was a projectile rifle loaded with special low-temperature bullets. This would allow the weapon to fire from inside of their plasmix fields without disrupting the protective coating. It also normalized the gravitational effects on the projectile. Even though Terius-5’s gravity was less than Earth’s, the bullets would fire the way the crew expected.
The second weapon issued to every crew member was far more personal and valuable. Among his other talents, Wu Gwei was an accomplished blacksmith and weaponsmith. In a previous incarnation, he had forged swords for the crew. They were created in the finest of the ancient styles, with intimate knowledge of the Damascus and Japanese sword masters. Back on Earth, each one would have been worth a fortune. They could be expected to hold their edges for centuries. These were the kinds of weapons wars were fought over. Everyone had their own.
Wu Gwei had spent a little time with each crew member, teaching them how to wield the weapon inside of their plasmix fields. If it was done just right, the weapon could hold the particles and use them to devastating effect with the slashing of the swords.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 26