by Roman, Mark
“I hope they don’t laugh at him too much,” said sylX.
*
But Jeremy had no intention of being laughed at. No, he was the Chosen One, and no one laughed at the Chosen One. As soon as he was free of the bag, he would fulfil his mission of destroying The Dogs and then no one would ever laugh at him again. However, the bag was proving a bit of a hindrance. He needed to get out of it, and fast.
He sloshed about for a while, considering various escape strategies. As far as he could see – which wasn’t very far in the darkness of the bin liner – there was only one way out, and that was to extrude himself through the knot at the top. But that would be a hard squeeze and Jeremy was getting tired of extruding himself through things. First, the long tube, with its eight porous membranes, then the air vent by which he had gained entry onto the ship and, most recently, the ventilator grille. How much more squeezing would his poor body take?
It seemed that there was no other choice. For the Good of the Species. In the Light of the Dark.
So, summoning all his remaining reserves of strength, he reached out to the knot and started trying to force his way into it and through it. It was hard going. sylX had tied it really tightly. He strained and he pushed and he squeezed. But it was no good. It was too tight.
Then, just as he was about to give up, he noticed something. Here and there in the bag were tiny pinpricks. One of The Dogs must have pierced the bag to prevent him suffocating. Jeremy chuckled to himself. What a foolish mistake! Blobs could go without breathing for weeks. What a fatal error!
With renewed energy and determination he applied himself to the pinpricks. And, little by little, he found he could get his slime to pass through. Very slowly and painfully, he managed to extrude his slime through the tiny holes, emerging in several long, thin spaghetti-like strands. The strands dripped down the side of the bin liner until they reached the floor where they gradually coalesced.
Ten minutes of intensive squeezing later and Jeremy was out, perfectly formed outside the bag. He sat there, panting for a long time, in need of a rest. He felt he had strained every muscle in his body – which, of course, he had.
After a few minutes rest he pulled himself together. This was it. Time for action. He slithered across the floor to the main control panel. He managed to pull himself up onto the command chair in front of it and surveyed the massed array of buttons, knobs and switches.
“Only beings as truly inferior as The Dogs could have designed anything as pointlessly complicated as this,” he muttered to himself angrily.
He tried pushing a button. There was a brilliant flash of light in the observation window in front of him. A blast of focused laser light had fired off into space. Jeremy allowed himself an evil smile. He had found the button that fired the laser cannon. That would definitely come in useful!
He pulled a lever to the right, and the module veered to the right. He pulled the lever to the left, and the module veered back. Forwards made it go faster. Backwards activated the brakes.
He grinned once again. He’d cracked how to steer the thing. Which meant one thing: he was in business...
*
“Well, that’s it, then,” said jixX, clapping his hands together at a job well done. “Full speed ahead for the singularity and then on to Tenalp.”
“Aye, aye, cap’n,” said LEP.
jixX turned to the others. “Thanks for all your help,” he said appreciatively.
They all smiled and shook hands and high-fived for a little while.
“Er, I don’t want to worry you all,” started LEP.
They stopped their celebrations.
“What is it, LEP?” asked jixX.
“According to my scanners,” started LEP, “the emergency deep-space survival module has just changed course. It is now on our tail and gaining fast.”
“You’ve worried us,” said jixX, speaking for himself and the others. “Whether you wanted to or not, you have worried us.”
Chapter 4
Jeremy was getting more and more excited now. He had finally mastered most of the controls. One dimmed the cabin lights, one made the module spin nauseatingly, one made it spin less nauseatingly, one worked the windscreen wipers, one seemed to do nothing at all, and one had broken off the moment he had touched it.
And now he was pushing hard on the accelerator and racing towards The Night Ripple. He could see the ship on the radar screen. He pushed harder and harder, gaining ground all the time until, at last, the glistening hull of the Night Ripple came into view as a tiny silver dot ahead of him.
“Dogs!” he yelled without even thinking.
Now he switched his attention to the laser cannon’s telescopic viewfinder. He grinned evilly as he fixed the Class XI phonon-drive spaceship in his sights. He fine-tuned the viewfinder until the cross hairs were slap bang in the middle of The Night Ripple. He locked onto her.
Jeremy exhaled in satisfaction. He made himself more comfortable on the command chair as he prepared to trigger the laser cannon. He was in no rush now. Now that The Dogs were at his mercy he wanted to savour the moment of their destruction.
*
jixX was in the anti-inertial command couch steering for the singularity that would take them out of the Pseudogravitic Continuum and return them to Normal Space Time.
“Faster! Faster!” LEP was saying. “He’s gaining on us.”
“How long to the singularity?” demanded jixX, pushing his foot down hard on the accelerator.
“Ten seconds,” said LEP.
sylX and anaX were staring in panic out of the tertiary observation window.
“Faster!” said one.
“Faster!” echoed the other.
*
“Ah, revenge is sweet,” muttered Jeremy, as he poised a green slimy finger over the ‘FIRE!’ button.
He cleared his throat and cried, “I am the Chosen One! Death to The Dogs. For the Good of the Species! In the Light of the Dark!”
Then, with a relish he had rarely ever experienced, he pushed down on the ‘FIRE!’ button and leaned back to watch The Night Ripple blow.
*
The skew-focused pulse of hyper-coherent light from the laser cannon shot towards The Night Ripple. It hurtled across the space between the two ships at, not surprisingly, the speed of light. Nothing could stop it. The pulse was bang on target and hit the glistening hull of The Night Ripple square on...
...and then...
...reflected straight back off the ship’s shiny surface and headed right back from whence it had come.
Instantly, The Night Ripple’s emergency cooling mechanisms sprang to life to minimize heat-damage from the blast. And, a fraction of a second later, the ship shot through the singularity, out of the Pseudogravitic Continuum, and was safely clear. She had incurred practically no damage whatsoever; The Night Ripple was designed to take a lot more than a single blast from a puny laser cannon.
The same, however, could not be said of the emergency deep-space survival module. The reflected pulse of laser light tore into the module and blasted her apart, detonating the neutrino bomb in the food store and unleashing the most powerful explosive device ever built.
The combined explosion tore through the Pseudogravitic Continuum blowing apart anything in its way. Stars, planets, everything. All ripped apart. All completely destroyed.
Including the planet Ground, home of the Mamm aliens.
A fraction of a millisecond before this happened, in the module’s control room, a tiny voice uttered a single word: “Oops.”
*
The Night Ripple, now back in Normal Space Time, accelerated away from Singularity SCN8-4, heading for Tenalp. The three humans in the main control room had seen a brilliant flash of light and the two women had been thrown off their feet by its impact but, other than that, had not been hurt.
“What was that??” jixX was saying, blinking his eyes and seeing multicoloured spots in front of them.
“An awfully lucky escape,” said LE
P.
The two women picked themselves up from the ground and dusted themselves off.
“What just happened?” asked sylX.
LEP explained. “Jeremy’s attempt to destroy us backfired. The explosion has destroyed the singularity. And, from the size of it, probably took a large part of the Pseudogravitic Continuum with it.”
“What about the Mamms?” asked the stowaway.
“My calculations suggest their planet was one of the first things to go.”
They all suddenly fell silent.
jixX looked puzzled. “How can the explosion have been so large?” he asked.
“There must have been a secondary explosion on board the survival module,” said LEP. “Something massive.”
“Oh my God!” cried anaX, suddenly. She put her head in her hands and rushed from the room.
jixX and sylX looked at one another in stunned bewilderment.
*
A few minutes later jixX was staring out of the tertiary observation window, looking back in the direction from where they had come. sylX came to join him. Both were quiet and subdued.
“So,” mused the captain with a bitter smile. “Just as Benjamin predicted.”
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like they were The Dogs after all. The Ultimate Inferior Beings. They destroyed their Universe.”
sylX was nodding her head. “Jeremy. The Chosen One,” she said. “Yet the Chosen One was an imposter. Maybe that’s what the Hour of the Lie was all about!”
jixX looked excitedly at her. “That would explain why Randolph was so worried when he discovered there were eleven Benjaminites and not ten.”
sylX’s eyes widened as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Today’s Monday,” she said with a gasp. “Today’s Monday – the day they said their Universe would be destroyed!”
*
Back in her cabin anaX was in tears.
“It’s my fault,” she wailed. “All my fault.”
She tossed and turned in her bunk, wracked by guilt. She thought it would drive her crazy.
“Is something the matter?” asked LEP, although quite clearly there was.
anaX rolled and tossed on her bunk, pulling at her hair and gnashing her teeth.
But, after a few minutes she calmed enough to confess everything to LEP. He was, after all, a computer. When she had explained about the neutrino bomb, LEP told her something that she hadn’t been aware of, and this made her cheer up a little.
It was then that LEP asked her to marry him.
PART THE SIXTH: TOT
Chapter 1
jixX sat in a large, comfortable armchair in a cheerful, spacious office waiting to be seen. In front of him sat TOT’s secretary, busily typing on her psychomagnetic touch-screen as though unaware of jixX’s presence. He glanced at his watch, wondering when the Transcendental Overlord of Tenalp would be ready to see him.
jixX was hungry, unshaven and very, very tired; he hadn’t slept for two nights. He had been back on Tenalp no more than half an hour. The moment The Night Ripple had ‘touched down’ at Tropecaps Spaceport he had been whisked away. No hero’s welcome. No tarmac reception committee plus brass band. Not so much as a red carpet. Instead, under cover of darkness, he had been bundled out of The Night Ripple by a bunch of uncouth soldiers with lampblacked faces, thrown into a camouflaged military vehicle with very poor suspension, and raced over some of Tenalp’s bumpiest roads all the way to TOT’s headquarters.
As he waited, he wondered what the others were doing. sylX the stowaway, he knew, had gone to some secret location to collect her pay packet. fluX the behavioural chemist had gone home to work on his Proof. anaX the gynaecologist had accepted LEP’s proposal of marriage and the two of them wanted to be left alone together to plan their future. And, as for twaX, the carpenter’s whereabouts were still a mystery. Had he been in the Pseudogravitic Continuum when the neutrino bomb had exploded?
jixX thought, too, about his dwarf Alberta spruce which, in the hurry of his forced departure, he’d left back in The Night Ripple. He would need to go back to retrieve it – and endure more of LEP’s wit. But he was kind of missing the computer. Kind of.
His thoughts turned to the imminent audience with TOT, which made his hands start to shake and his heart beat faster. To meet the supreme ruler of the planet was a great honour, but he couldn’t help wondering whether there might be more to it than that. Like a medal, perhaps, or some other kind of reward...?
There was a buzz on the secretary’s desk. She stopped typing and turned to jixX. “The Transcendental Overlord of Tenalp will see you now,” she said in a very formal manner.
“Thank you,” said jixX, getting up and suddenly feeling his knees turn to jelly.
“Go straight in.”
jixX went through the door and into TOT’s spacious office – a large, magnificently decorated, impressive room. No pink Velvex wallpaper here. He briefly surveyed it in awe before becoming aware of TOT, seated behind a vast desk, reading a file. jixX gulped, but said nothing, trying to soften his steps so not to disturb TOT’s concentration.
After a few seconds, TOT looked up, saw jixX, and beckoned him nearer. “It’s jixX, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” said jixX humbly, his voice shaking a little as he approached.
“Excuse me for a second.” TOT turned to the intercom on his desk and spoke into it. “No interruptions for the time being, please, darling.” He took his homogeno-digital finger off the intercom button and indicated a small, rickety, wooden chair standing uncertainly in front of his vast desk. “Do take a seat,” he said.
jixX approached the chair, noticing that it was probably the least magnificent thing in the entire room, and didn’t even look particularly safe to sit on. jixX carefully and awkwardly lowered himself onto it. It creaked as it took his weight and managed to make him even more uncomfortable here in the presence of the supreme ruler of Tenalp.
“Right,” said TOT in a business-like manner, intertwining his homogeno-digital fingers on the desk in front of him and leaning forward. “Top Secret Space Mission. The Night Ripple. Correct?”
“Yes, sir,” said jixX, nodding and trying not to glow too much with pride.
“Successful?”
“Er, I think it went quite well,” said jixX modestly, the pride continuing to swell up in his chest.
“Good man!” said TOT, a thin smile on his leptodermal pachyresin face. He opened a cigar-box and offered one to jixX.
“No thank you,” said jixX. “I don’t.”
“Very wise”, said TOT, closing the box and leaning back in his leather swivel armchair. He regarded jixX for a while before leaning forward again. “Well, then,” he started in a paternal manner. “Let’s get to the nub of the matter. The question everyone is asking.”
jixX waited expectantly.
“What did you learn about the fate that befell The Living Chrysalis?”
jixX froze. At first it was because he didn’t understand the question. It bore so little resemblance to the sort of question he had been expecting, that it was as though it had been uttered in some strange foreign language. Then, as the words became clearer, he became aware that the name sounded familiar and, in some way, critically important. But where had he heard it before? “The Living Chrysalis?” he repeated to himself, his eyes transfixed on TOT’s.
And then, when he finally managed to place it, the blood drained from his face. He recalled his encounter with VOZ, the Ministry of Intelligence and Spying computer.
jixX swallowed. His muscles started to twitch and his bowels liquefied. ‘The Living Chrysalis,’ he thought. ‘Oh my God, The Living Chrysalis.’ He had completely forgotten about her. What was he going to do now?
jixX tried to loosen his collar as his breathing had become shallow and difficult. He felt beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“Well?” prompted TOT.
“Ah, The Living Chrysalis,” mumbled jixX as a golf-ball size
d lump formed in his throat.
“Go on,” said TOT, still smiling benignly but looking as though his good humour could be on the turn. “What did you find out about her fateful last voyage?”
jixX gave a nervous cough as his hands trembled uncontrollably. He looked down at the ground to avoid TOT’s piercing eyes. “Um,” he started, his mouth dry, wishing he were somewhere else.
“Well?”
“Well,” said jixX, his voice wavering. “We didn’t really find out all that much.”
TOT’s facial muscles tensed visibly. “How much did you find out?” he asked, his voice becoming colder.
“Nothing.”
TOT’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared. For several seconds he didn’t utter a sound, but just glowered at jixX. Then, quietly, he asked, “What?” as though he had decided his anechoically processed audioreceptive ears must have misheard jixX’s answer.
“We didn’t learn anything at all,” admitted jixX, his eyes lowered. “We forgot all about her,” he said, using ‘we’ in an attempt to spread the blame.
TOT stared at him in total disbelief for a moment, his neuroplasmoid temples beginning to vibrate. “You forgot?” he enquired. “You forgot the sole purpose of your mission?”
jixX nodded, not daring to look up.
“Are you serious, man?” asked TOT, leaning further across the desk as though he were about to grab jixX by the lapels.
jixX nodded again.
TOT’s eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets as his disbelief and anger escalated exponentially.
“YOU FORGOT???!!!???” he finally exploded, slamming his fist down on the desk. He glared at jixX, his face turning redder and redder. “God damn it, man. How can you forget the sole purpose of your mission???” TOT’s neuroplasmoid temples were vibrating with dangerous rapidity now.
jixX shrugged, at a loss for an answer. It seemed quite simple to him. He had forgotten, and that was that.
“I don’t believe it!” exclaimed TOT in exasperation, shaking his head and trying to control his rage. “You forgot!” He exhaled loudly and leaned back in his chair. He sat very still, staring up at the ceiling.