This was the next step. Nothing else but that was clear at this very moment. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
“Good,” murmured Lusypher. “Good, son,” he repeated once more, searching Crometheus’s very being for something he seemed uncertain was there. Or at least that was the look in the superior Uplifted’s fantastic eyes.
“This is Commander Zero,” said Lusypher. “She commands the Eternals. She’ll forge you into a fighting force that’ll shake the pillars of the galaxy. But first…”
Lusypher, that kindly old devil, leaned in close to Crometheus. His eyes baleful and cold now, dark and deep in that moment. Eyes that had seen all the darknesses they’d ever found out there in their long wanderings. And even spoken with them… if one believed the rumors.
“I want you to break your connection with the Pantheon. Burn down your old life. Cleanse yourself, Crometheus. Cleanse yourself with fire.”
Pause.
An image entered the rogue marine’s hard drive. A meme download from Lusypher himself. Brilliant light coursed through his HUD and systems. It was as though the hand of a god had suddenly touched him, and the moment was so beatific Crometheus dropped to one armored knee in obeisance to his new and undisputed liege.
The meme from Lusypher consumed him like some holy vision.
All of Viejo Verde… on fire and burning. And him, as he was, a boy becoming a man, in the middle of it all. Holding a can of gas and a pack of matches.
“What you will be, son, you are now becoming,” whispered that old devil Lusypher.
Gods: Chapter Seventeen
Crometheus of long ago… a boy becoming a man inside a reality he’d built himself in lieu of that post-apocalyptic fantasy epic he’d one day rule over… awoke in the night. In his child’s room where all the treasures are kept. The catcher’s mitt. The film can marked Blue Highway. The collection of Mad Magazines. The Fantastic Four issue where they go into space and get their powers.
Like some kind of prophecy in retrospective.
It was late. Very late.
A big moon, fat and swollen, leered through the wide window of his child’s room, turning everything a gentle blue and a bone-white.
Burn down your old life.
“I’ve been here before,” he thought to himself as he came out of his deep sleep with a start.
Of course he knew where he was, and where he’d been to within the Forbidden Decks. The hidden staging area on deck sixty-six. Where disturbance was causing change. And where the Eternals were becoming.
What you will be, son, you are now becoming.
Something wasn’t right though. Something wasn’t true. He’d meant something different when he had that thought that he’d been here before.
He felt tangled, even smothered by the covers around his boy’s body. Pushing them back to be washed clean and exposed by the moonlight while knowing it was time to move all the same. All of that. But he saw all those other times he’d been here before.
At the moment of shedding.
Time and time again. Before he’d even known it was called shedding. When it had been called leaving home with nothing but a stuffed ruck and the back of an old car packed with everything you thought was valuable and would need out there. Or so you believed at the time.
Or when you left Rebel Child. Heading out on your own for your first, and very important, solo album. Leaving the known circle of support and herd identity for the chance to become something other… and singular.
A rock god.
After that it had all become much easier to shed as you went along. Friends. Family. Hangers-on. Deals. Women you were done with. People you didn’t need anymore. Things just holding you back from what you were heading toward.
Shedding. Dumping everything along the way in pursuit of yourself. Letting go of all the useless.
Nothing marked being a celebrity more than that previous statement. Dumping everything along the way in pursuit of yourself. Letting go of all the useless.
The girl in a bottom-rung motel room on Sunset when you got the call from the record company that they listened to your demo. The agent you kicked out of the limo because he wanted a deal that would have taken care of his family, but not your career. The call girl who’d overdosed in the back of the bus with the talented lead guitarist. Watching her sink beneath the dark waters of some midnight pond between last night’s gig and the one tomorrow night the band needed to be at without any hassles trailing them along the way. That time you ripped up a picture of the president even though you’d met her once and she seemed genial enough, but the mob wanted her blood because she was part of the establishment. The system that always needed destroying. Isolating. Marginalizing. Abolishing those who didn’t want to get with the plan to save the Earth whether it wanted to be saved or not.
It needed to be saved because whoever saved it got all the power. Duh.
TED 6:66.
Then that final afternoon at the airport Marriott. When you walked into the bathroom and saw what you’d become. A clown in fading rock-star gear with the hairstyle of a kid from twenty years back. Swollen on cheeseburgers and drugs. Haunted by a woman who walked out on your schtick halfway between Reno and Rome.
Wasn’t that how it had happened? How she’d disappeared… no… gone?
That day. When you burned your old life down, crying in the front row of some corporate conference room on a cheap chair that would be stacked with ten thousand others in a few hours at the end of the come-to-the-end-of-yourself weekend. That had been the first shedding…
…but it was by no means the last.
Crometheus as a boy, thinking about all of these moments that were the same as this one. Moments of shedding.
On autopilot, the boy dressed in the bone-white moonlight and shadowy blue darkness of his child’s room in the house he never should have left. White pants like he wore every Friday. Ritual.
We must have our rituals.
Rituals must be acknowledged when shedding. They still have their place. Even if just to be sacrificed to the bonfire of our becoming.
Favorite shirt.
Best pair of Vans. Yes. We wore Vans back in those days. The coolest shoe in cool town. So it must be those.
And of course, a pack of matches found on the table where his catcher’s mitt rested next to that long-lost issue of the Fantastic Four coming home from space. Crashing the space shuttle. As though he’d placed the matches there at the beginning, knowing they’d be needed at the end. If only so the next beginning… could begin.
He slipped from his parents’ house in the dark. In the hour most call the dead of night. Halfway between the hell of midnight and the long march toward dawn. The witching hour. The three a.m.
He walked his bike out onto the street as some late-night bird called out forlornly across the perfect sleeping suburbia while he turned back one more time to stare at his house. Just as he’d done all those years ago when looking back as he drove away for the last time. Or so it had seemed then. And every time since.
There had been other last times.
But no time as final as the first. Even though it was never realized at the time how momentously important it was in the grand scheme of his life. After that it gets easier. All the other times had been like coming back to a cemetery to visit the dead once more. In hindsight of course. One last time again. As it always was.
He peered over the rooftops at the perfect houses along the sleeping street. Atop the sloping hill above the back of his own house his best friend’s home loomed in the night. It was three a.m. and even the comforting blue light of the television that always emanated from within, like some eternally kept sacred thing he’d come to need in his inner journeys, even that was gone now and the windows of the tall house looked like empty eye sockets watching him on the street below.
Like a corpse.
> He scanned it all one last time and then began to pedal, climbing up and out of his neighborhood along the empty street, and soon he was out on the main roads, riding down the center lane for there was no one else out in the night. This last of nights.
This final becoming.
Gods: Chapter Eighteen
Commander Zero, Queen of the Eternals, came for him as it all burned. She walked through the fire like an avenging angel in the Eternals’ new advanced armor system. Her shadowy state-of-the-art armor, the best the Uplifted had produced to date, didn’t burn as she crossed through the conflagration enveloping the gas station he’d ignited. The apocalyptic blooms of fire reached suddenly skyward as the pumps exploded and blue shock waves spread outward across the pools of gasoline.
“Welcome, Crometheus,” she said over the armor’s nightmare vocal broadcast. Her voice was thunder, her movement that of a jungle predator. Her faceless shadow-mirror helmet scanning for enemies. Battle rifle ready to engage.
He’d spent those last hours before dawn burning it all down. All of Viejo Verde. All of his hidden reality. Taking a can of gas from the pumps at the Gemco filling station because he could. It was his world after all. The attendant from inside the glass booth waiting out the night shift as he had all those hundreds of years ago. As he would because it was what his part in this reality demanded. The young man merely watched as young Crometheus filled the can of gas from the pump and set off. Down the main road that led to the bridge that crossed over that perpetually dry and arid wasteland known as the train tracks.
Dawn was just a few hours off when he started the first fire, soaking the dry sagebrush in the dark near the road that extended off and down along the edge, the whole boundary that formed the reality he’d clung to. Splashing the gas around, the sharp chemical smell of it coming up to his nostrils on a small breeze drifting in off the Pacific Ocean miles away. In it he could smell the salt and the fire both at once.
Like some beach barbecue at summer’s end.
He stepped back and lit the first match, held it down to let the flame catch, then tossed it into the gasoline-soaked brush. The fire began with a dull whump and then started to spread quickly. Crickling and crackling as it greedily consumed the dry weeds. He didn’t stay to watch it. To stare into it and ponder his becoming. But there was work to do. Destruction work. Shedding work.
Becoming…
He was back on his bike, carrying the clanging and banging empty metal gas can around one of his bike’s handlebars, pedaling back to the gas station for a refill.
For the next few hours he repeated the process. Starting fires all across the boundaries of his world. This reality. True, he could look beyond and see the rest of the world as it had been. But the view was more for effect. There was no need to go to those places in his most sacred and special of realities. He’d only added those to complete the illusion so that the reality he’d constructed might be better believed.
Now it was time to terminate the connection.
He could just dump the whole file on his hard drive. But the emotional connection would still be there, running through his brain. And that was more of a connection than a physical place, or thing, could ever be. Ask any addict. The work of shedding had to be as much metaphysical, as it was file deletion.
He had to watch it burn.
There was no actual gasoline. That this was all metaphorical and symbolic was understood on some background level. But it needed to be made real. It needed to become truth. And the visual lie was best for that.
Some lies need seeing to be believed.
TED 13:6.
When you understood how things worked inside the Pantheon and its many realities, the metaphorical and the symbolic were far more real than mere reality itself. Truths could be forged in here. Not used as iron bars to the gates of a prison as they had been for all of mankind’s existence. But as fulcrums to make reality into what you wanted it to be.
What you thought best.
What you felt.
Now everything was on fire across all of Viejo Verde. Whole neighborhoods were going up in vast walls of flame in the night. And this night would remain until the work was done. He’d decided on that. There would be no dawn until it was all gone.
The last fire he needed to start was back at the gas station.
The last lie.
The last truth.
This time he didn’t need the gas can even though he’d filled it. He sat back from the pumps, next to his bike alongside the main road that led over the freeway and toward the strip mall where the arcade was. Where Lazer Command waited for him.
He hadn’t thought about it directly… but he hadn’t made a plan to burn that center down. As though he was just assuming the flames would catch and spread everywhere throughout the rest of the night and into the bleak smoke-filled dawn that must surely come soon if he allowed it.
He’d purposefully forgotten it. He had to admit that to himself. He’d left it out. Like a recovering alcoholic’s desk-drawer bottle of scotch. Just in case, right? Without even thinking about it. Hoping that it might be saved. That the touchstone might be kept back as a guilty pleasure just for him. If it all went sideways. Surely Maestro and Lusypher, and even this Commander Zero, wouldn’t notice that. Would they?
You’ve done the same thing before, some deeper part of his mind reminded him. And maybe that was how he’d created this hidden place that time. Forgetting about it each and every time when there was shedding to be done… but the arcade survives every time.
Right?
Lazer Command slips through the cracks in the gas chambers and the execution walls he’d lined others, and his own past, up against so many times before.
Something has to get away, right?
Something has to survive if just to show how far you’ve come.
The arcade of all the things would survive inside this weird metaphysical reality they’d found the ability to construct out there in the dark between stars when they’d lost their minds and wandered away from the known, stark raving mad and insane. A ship full of lunatics begging for a lifeline to hold on to.
The realities found on the other side of the shedding had been just that.
They’d found them out there in the void. And those realities had saved them from themselves. Though some, some long ago and long-since purged, had argued that possibly they never should have been found in the first place.
The gas station exploded at dawn and Commander Zero appeared in its flames. Coming for him. Satisfied by the level of destruction. Just as the sun began rising above the saddle-backed mountain to the east that so defined that valley on every piece of stationery from the school lunch menu to the banner of the local newspaper.
Everything exploded in sudden fiery apocalyptic bloom, as though the crescendo of some demonic orchestra had reached its ultimate, blossoming like that same angry red flower that had killed half the landing party when they first made Sirius Two. Exploding and poisoning the first to make planetfall.
They’d called it the death flower.
The whole planet had been one hellishly poisoned paradise. Uninhabitable, though the air had been breathable and the water drinkable. Everything had been out to poison or kill them on that first cursed world. The sadness that had overwhelmed the entire Pantheon as they heaved off for space once more had been like looking into the chasm of an abyss all your own making. A deep dark abyss someone told you there was a bottom to, and you didn’t believe them.
But what other choice did you have?
The first planet the colony ship Pantheon had arrived at was poisoned. It was a poisoned world. Stay and die. Or…
Flee to the stars and live. Try again. Insert coin to play. Ready Player One.
They’d been there before. They’d left dying Earth to its fate. They could do it again.
In the months after l
eaving Sirius Two a death cult formed in the lower decks. Aft and beyond main engineering. They worshipped the death flower that had tried to kill them all back there on that world they’d left behind. They made images of its orchid petals and blood-red colors.
He remembered now, as he stepped away from the flames of the gas station, that the cult had been based somewhere around deck sixty-six. Ironic that detail. Ironic how life had a way of crossing and re-crossing itself time and time again no matter how long you stuck around. He remembered a senior Uplifted being the leader of that cult. Silver. Silver was the name. That was before they all let go of their Earth names in favor of the god names they would become.
Silver.
Connections from across all the points of time and history his mind could intersect on came like they were never quite fully satisfied with all the chance meetings a life long-lived could make.
Lusypher.
Louis Silver.
Commander Zero had a necklace of those same death flowers alternating with walnut shells around the chest plate of her fantastic new armor. Commander Zero, who was coming through the flames for him.
The station exploded once more, sending metal shards of burning pump and flaming plastic into the dawn sky like a celebration of liberation at last. All of it raining down over the vast empty parking lot that stood before the giant megastore that had existed once long ago.
What was Earth like now? Five hundred years in the future?
Standing before him, she turned to see all that he had burned down for her. Everything that was him at the core and center of himself.
Almost everything…
“Is this everything, Player Crometheus?”
He didn’t say yes. Didn’t nod. Didn’t…
Some little voice at the last of seconds had interceded and asked what makes this time different from all the other sheddings and becomings.
And… yes. That voice was right. There was something different about this one. As there should be. Because the Eternals and the Grand Uplifted Alliance and the destruction of the ship as it came to rest on its final home on the captured Animal world of New Vega… these, too, were things completely new.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 17