by Ralph Rotten
"Look," he changed tone once I was in a better place, "There are ways to deal with these types. You could blank them, make them start over as infants and do it right this time."
"Why would I give a new life to a guy who ended so many lives prematurely? Seriously." I wasn't sold on that idea at all.
"Then do this." With a touch, the Boss converted me to a Tipputh Stormtrooper. Then in a series of flashes, I saw him down in the arena changing each of the soldiers into something new. When I got down there myself I could see clearly what he had in mind. With a smile, I agreed to the Boss's plan.
The sentry stopped us as we reached the perimeter of the death camp. With its walls of wreckage and smashed vehicles, the area was really just a containment area for prisoners.
"We are here with a fresh load of those filthy Eurotrash." I scowled as I gestured to the mass of ethnic prisoners behind me. The three dozen guards that herded them at gun point were all me, pulled out of the timeline and morphed to look like Storm troopers.
"Good!" The gate guard replied happily. "The engineers have built a device to speed up the process. It will be exciting to watch it being used, no? Welcome to camp Dumbrusk." Opening the gate graciously, he bid us entry with a smile.
As my duplicates herded the prisoners past, I gave a smile to the short man who shepherded his wife and children along fearfully. Until about an hour ago, he had been a Grand Sergeant. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew exactly where he was. Wearing the skin of a Euro, he also knew what was in store for him. It pleased me greatly to know that the only people who would be sent through the Grand Sergeant's Euro-chipper would be the murderers themselves. Once that was done the machine would be destroyed by a stray mortar round. Maybe stray is the wrong word...
Now the parents in the audience will immediately point out that I also sent their wives and children into the wood chipper too. Seems like a pretty awful thing, right? Well don't get your boxers in a bunch; Meesha played the role of women and children. Her new design allows her multiplicity. One Meesha can be nine separate beings. I took the extra time to drop her in dozens of times just to really round out the whole experience for the Sergeant and his men. I wanted them to know what it was like to be beaten, tortured, and butchered with their families by their side. Though it was cruel, it met the DuNai standard for karma. Technically they would execute themselves.
"It's just an attitude adjustment," I sang the words to an old Bosephus tune my Daddy used to play all the time.
"Just one appointment straightened him right out." One of my other selves grinned as she strolled past with her Shock rifle at the ready. In the distance the first lucky Euros were being selected to test the new killing device dreamt up by the regiment's senior NCO. Soon their green blood would paint the streets.
I think it started when I was standing on that rogue moon, out near Acus. I'd been there a long time just looking up at the night sky with my enhanced eyes and wondering if maybe one of the globs of light I was watching couldn't be home. I remember seeing an artist's rendering of how scientists thought the Milky Way looked, but who knows how accurate that was. Honestly, would you know your own galaxy if you saw it from the outside? Prolly not. Besides, it didn't always look the way it did when I was alive. Most likely it started out as a fast spinning irregular galaxy, pulled in a few proto-galaxies, globular clusters, and dwarf galaxies, stretching them into long radial arms until it was the pinwheel I would have been used to seeing. I could be anywhere along that timeline. Still, what would it hurt to check out a few...
So I jumped to a couple of the spiral galaxies, just to see what they were about. No other reason, just jumped in and talked to the Guf for a few minutes. The first was too big, the second too small, but the third...never mind, none of 'em were my bowl of porridge. So I went back to work.
I was engineering a societal shift towards a pure democracy in the Elgin system when I caught myself staring skyward again. At maximum magnification, I could make out three spiral galaxies. Instinctively I made the three jumps, each time coming up short. They were some fascinating places, but they weren't mine. More than once I was met by the regional Timelord who had detected my wake as soon as I entered his domain. None were surprised; they had all made the same quest themselves, once upon a time when they too were apprentices.
One of the Editors took me home for dinner. I was surprised at how simply he lived. His house, where he dwelt with his wife and six kids, was a grass hut. It was like a shack on the beach. I felt like I was on the Don Ho show. Bright white sand, and an ocean made of ammonia. This place was like Hawaii in a litter box.
When I asked him why he lived this way, he said that it kept him more in-tune with his people.
"Back when I first took over this galaxy, the first few centuries I could have advanced faster if I had not sequestered myself in a mansion away from all that I govern. How am I to have any perspective if I do not even live in the same realm as my charges?" He offered me fish and flatbread in a basket. The local catch was fantastic, assuming you were biomorphically altered to be able to digest a fish that swam in a sea of ammonia. Otherwise it'd be like eating a sponge soaked in Windex.
I considered his advice, it really hit home for me. The last few years I had taken to living at the core of an asteroid. There were no doors to the place, no way in without an Onkx, and shielded against prying eyes. I guess you could say that I had completely insulated myself from the rest of the universe.
I thanked him for the nickel tour and went back to work. But within a week I started randomly dropping out of the timeline and jumping to distant galaxies again.
What was different this time was that once I got out there, I saw more spiral galaxies in the distance. Before I knew it I was jumping to those places and chatting up the Guf to see if I recognized it. You gotta remember that I had no idea where along the timeline I was in relation to where I came from. I could meet my own galaxy in its final stages and not recognize it, or I could be too early, and I'd just be talking to a stone-age Guf that demands worship and servitude. Remember that I really only knew my own Guf during that brief era known as my life. I was worried that I might not recognize it if I was a few billion years too early.
See, the quandary I was in was that I knew from my training that the universe was waaaaay older than human scientists had estimated. It's not their fault, they just can't see anything but their own tiny little corner of the universe. If they could have peered further into the abyss, they would have seen that the galactic expansion rate is not constant. The closer you get to the center of the universe, the slower that galaxies are moving away from one another due to the quantum temporal dilation in that region. So for all I know, the Milky Way might not even exist yet. I could be that far back, I really had no idea.
Jumping time and again, it all started to turn into a blur. I visited thousands of new galaxies before I stopped long enough to even recharge. I was frazzled from the constant anticipation, followed by the disappointment as I began to hear the whispers of what was out there. Sometimes it was obvious right away. Almost as if there was a buncha feedback in your head every time the local Guf spoke. You knew from the din that this was definitely not home. Other times there would be something so familiar about it, but in the end it was always the wrong place.
I would drag myself back to work time and again, but then within a few days I was off jumping around strange galaxies. I don't know what it was, but I seemed to feel this maniacal urge to go looking for home. These trips went from days to months to years. Sure, I was getting my residency done, no problems. When I drop out of the timeline, I can step right back in later in as if I was never gone. No one notices, except maybe the Boss. He notices everything, even if he never says anything about it.
It was Bara who informed me that the DuNai had a word for what I was doing. It was Siorr; the quest for home. We all did it eventually. It was one of the most daunting tasks we had to complete as apprentices.
"Yeah, a lott
a people get a little stir-crazy." Bara laughed as he wiped froth off of his hairy mouth. "I once tried to find home in a Slipspeed class ship."
I laughed to think of him trying to get anywhere with a .99L capable ship. It'd take centuries just to get to the next quadrant. That was a clear sign of desperation.
"Yup, then I went AWOL for like twenty years during my residency. Just dropped off the charts and ran a sequential grid pattern search." He snickered at the thought, "I did millions of galaxies, literally. I would plot courses that took me right through or near multiple clusters and just listen to the Guf as I went by. But that's a crazy way to do it, statistically speaking." He said the words mindlessly.
I was surprised by his appraisal of the grid system. I had just been thinking it sounded like a really good idea.
"What's better than an organized search pattern?" I asked him as my mind reran the scenario. Was there another way I didn't know about?
"You'll figure it out, or you'll go insane trying, like Crazy Lester from Red Cauldron Galaxy. He's not really the Timelord for that domain, but he could never find his own home galaxy so he just adopted one that wasn't claimed yet."
"Bullshit." I raised an eyebrow. I'd heard the urban legend of Crazy Lester. He was the DuNai equivalent of the man with the hook at the lover's lookout. Myth told to screw with apprentices' heads, nothing more.
"I don't know why you'd say that, of all people." He sucked down some more beer before having Shanti fill up the mug again.
I halted as I gave that a thought. Looking my brother Bara over I could see that he was bursting to reveal a secret. For a guy who was over two thousand years old, he sure acted like a big kid sometimes. Figuring he'd keep at it until I asked, I just went ahead and cut to the chase.
"Okay, I'll bite. Why would I be the last person to call Crazy Lester an urban myth?" I stood hands on hips as I waited.
"You're the one who met him." He chided me, waiting for me to put it together.
"The beach bum?" I was surprised when it occurred to me.
"That's the one. He actually runs a pretty good galaxy, even if it's not his own." Bara nodded approvingly.
"That was Crazy Lester? No shit?" I pondered that another minute. It had all seemed so idyllic there on the beach, and everyone was sooo golden and Californian. So that was the legendary Editor who never found his way home. Gave up, quit looking, just pitched a tent and hung out a shingle. Crazy.
"So this taking off looking for home is normal?" I asked Bara, just to be sure. "I dropped out for seven years the other day. I was clear out by Epsilon Major when I finally quit."
"You should read Master Mandrake's guide to the known galaxies. Just sync it up with your Onkx and whenever you get to a new place it can recommend sites to see. There're some really great restaurants in Epsilon if you know which eon to visit. I mean, as long as you're there, might as well grab a bite. Not like you gotta worry about getting fat." My hairy brother nodded enthusiastically at the idea.
"I already use Bolgers' catalog. It's got more stars in the database, and the management links are updated properly. I like to know whose galaxy I'm in." With my feet on a cushion, I found a spot on the padded floor of his cave. It was really quite comfortable, like the whole place was lined with memory foam. More than once I had dozed off on that floor after a few glasses of Cree. You had to be careful though. Bara was a practical joker and known to morph people into something disgusting while they were sleeping or passed out on his floor. I'd woken up a rock one time. A fucking rock! It took me a half hour to figure out how to unlock whatever he had done.
"But Bolgers' doesn't have the granular stuff, like the best bars or the fanciest hotels, or the fastest ships. Bolger's is all that anthropological stuff, how many varieties of monkeys are on each planet, or where you can find betahydrobenzine in plentiful amounts. Cool stuff like that. No, seriously. If you are going to go on the long trips then you need to pace yourself, take the time to smell the roses, or you'll burn out and buy a condo on a beach that smells like cat pee. Y'know?" He tried to show me he was serious.
"But you said he was a pretty good Lord?" I was surprised at the change in attitude.
"Well, things weren't always so easy for Lester. He took a lotta flack from the DuNai about what he did. It was unheard of. There had been guys who looked for home for thousands of years before finding it, and if it took that long then so be it! That was the final test. Ultimately he had to agree to manage as the caretaker until the true prophet for that galaxy is born. Once that happens he trains the new guy, and back out on the road. Y'know, Lester tried the grid system too. Hundreds of solars he spent out there looking. Went a little crazy, he did."
What's wrong with a grid search?" I was still wondering why such a logical approach would be a bad idea.
It was about five years later when I finally understood the flaw of a grid search. There are trillions of galaxies. There were some Lords who said if you looked at the universe from far enough away, that it looked like a giant pinwheel, with long strands of super-clusters stretched out behind the main disc. I dunno about all that, but I do know that if I took ten minutes on every stop, I could be galaxy hopping for a million years or more only to find I wasn't even on the right side of the universe. Yes, the place if that big. Five years of tireless searching amounted to a teeny little box of space on the far side of the charted universe. 1632 super clusters, more than a million galaxies, and it was but a drop in the Pacific Ocean.
Basically, I needed to find a better system, that's what I needed to do, because the grid system is for the birds.
Savior
Branson Freeh had never been a courageous being. In fact it was his cowardice that had gotten him into the fix he was in.
Fearing combat, he had enlisted in the Covert Ministry when war broke out between Elsor and Dar. After months of training as a deep-penetration operative, and injected with an experimental morphic serum, he was sent to infiltrate the enemy infrastructure at Dombursk.
But a frightening thought occurred to Branson Freeh as he piloted the small craft towards his first assignment: spies were executed. If he were captured there was no hope of being held as a POW, he would be summarily hanged for his crime. Such a detail made him reduce speed as he considered that with his newfound morphic abilities he could go anywhere he wanted and blend in. So like a bullet, he turned that shuttle around and headed for neutral space.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and his flight through open space did not go unnoticed. Both the Elsorian and Darian fleets noticed the tiny craft slipping away at top speed. Once the Dar saw their spy fleeing, they moved to intercept. But when Elsorian commanders saw their enemy pursuing one of their own craft they could not help but be intrigued. If this little shuttle was so important to the Dar then it was bound to be valuable to their enemy, right? Ordering their own ships forward, the Elsonians engaged the Dar en masse.
Branson was sure he would be captured by one side or the other. Either faction would execute him. The only difference was that the Dar would torture him first, and the Elsor would dissect him. Both prospects terrified the cowardly little mammal.
But just when the fighters were almost within weapons range, the Elsor commanders detonated their latest weapon; Gomus47. The simple device created a powerful shockwave that expanded outwards at nearly .7L. The effect was magnificent as the weapon essentially used harmonic distortion to shred everything in its wake, including battleships.
Fleeing as fast as the tiny craft would go, Branson was fortunate that the shockwave had slowed to .4L by the time it snapped his tiny craft about and tossed it towards deep space. Spinning out of control, he was quickly rendered unconscious by the inertial forces.
While a human from Earth thinks of interstellar travel in terms of great distances, the same cannot be said for the residents of globular clusters. In these dense environments the distance between star systems can be surprisingly small. There may be thousands of stars within a lif
etime's travel at sub-light speeds. Densely packed, stellar and globular clusters are exciting places to live. Sort of the galactic version of Hell's Kitchen.
What had started out as an old fashioned military desertion quickly turned into a long and frigid plunge into unknown space. The automated systems had managed to stabilize the ship but expended significant energy in the process. Add to that the fact that he was still hurtling through space at an astounding rate, much faster than the ship was designed to travel. Already he was outside of anything covered by his charts. It terrified him, the thought of dying there in space all alone. As the cowardly former spy worked his way through the six stages of grief, he discovered a small religious book in the glove compartment. Reading through the pages of scripture, he desperately tried to reach out to the god he had never really believed in. But like many facing death, he offered more than a few bargains to the eternal deity. Sure, he would change his ways, stop drinking, stop smoking Mota, be a better citizen...the usual promises.
As the ship's energy reserves were slowly depleted, Branson sat praying in the frigid cockpit as he finally accepted his fate. As difficult as it had been to face his true self, he knew that he was here because of his own cowardice. In essence, he deserved his fate and he knew it. It was here in these last few seconds of life support that he accepted death. As the last of the nitrogen ran out, he offered the Gods one last deal; he would willingly become an instrument of the Lord, spreading the word just as MaraGono had done in the first era. Surrendering his fate to the ethereal, he was about to blackout when the dim glow of a solar disk became visible.
It was sheer luck that allowed Branson to set down in one piece on a small planetoid orbiting one of the binary stars in the Testis system. Even more amazing had been that his morphic body had been able to adapt to the harsh environment.