The vivid colors and the flashing arcade lights blinked out. The boy who would be Crometheus, watching from the jungle, didn’t like this. Something he didn’t want to see… was about to happen.
Or remember.
Something that really happened, instead of the way he’d been made to remember it all.
The beautiful vibrant bright colors of the game, of the German beer hall with its antique plastered walls, burnished dark oak beams, the grease-glistening sausages and the crisp carcass of the roast pig with a bright red apple in its mouth. The potatoes roasted and fried with mustard and onions. The epically beautiful serving wenches, no doubt the finest of slaves brought up from the lower decks just for this celebratory occasion… that’s all gone in the jungle night. All of it.
Like it never happened.
At first Crometheus as a boy sees what he thinks are baboons in the jungle dark against the fence of the objective. Station four has gone dark. The moon above is full and fat but the shadows within the compound remain as the baboons cluster about, tearing at something on the ground and eating in silence.
Crometheus the boy is standing with Stepp at the hacked gate. They’ve crept forward to get a better look. Near the bodies of the two dead guards. Or at least where the two dead Animal guards should be. Except the corpses are gone and when he searches for them in the wan moonlight that reaches the outer gate he sees nothing but drag marks eaten by night shadows.
But the direction the drag marks lead follow straight into the compound where the circle of baboons feast in silence, each of them staring out at the jungle night like sentinels. Silently chewing on their haunches. Breaking bones and pulling away muscle and flesh.
“Let have a look,” said Jim Stepp. The familiar forever lost boy challenge to do something that’s not supposed to be done. That mad twinkle in his eyes.
But the boy Crometheus does not want to go and “have a look.” Because to look is to know. And knowledge is power, right? As the old afternoon cartoons used to say.
Feeling is knowing. And knowing is truth.
TED 22:109.
Except…
There are some things you don’t want to know, now do you, Crometheus? Or whoever you once were.
And yet… he knows. Already. This too is part of the becoming. The final becoming. These are the things you see in the swamp. And so you must look. Because you must know. Because knowing is becoming too.
Isn’t it?
They get close, walking through the gate in the jungle atop the high mountain ridge security installation that runs the massive dish in the basin below. The satellite comm dish floats out there in the basin between the high misty peaks like some giant starship that has come down to rest.
The colors are not bright.
The game announcer does not roar with triumph.
There is none of that and no filter shenanigans here to convince us of what we must think if we are to go forward.
This is the truth of what reality really is. This is looking. This is knowing.
“Whether you like it or not, kid,” whispers Jim Stepp from the dark, “this is what it is. And knowing it… will make you stronger. Make you better. Maybe even a god… someday, son.”
He remembers a Sunday school story from his parents’ abortive attempts at religion. Something about the cartoon version of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A distant memory surfaces amid all the horror he is watching and understanding more and more by the second.
The things they are looking at are not baboons gathered around some kill in the night. Smacking and slurping and tearing at the bones of the victims’ twisted and rent corpse. Flesh coming away in great wet gobs and long stringy bits that stretch and snap and threaten to lodge between teeth.
The sounds are too horrible to be anything but real.
The baboons are marines. Uplifted marines.
Just like him.
And this is their silent communion. This is what the German feast looked like without the Pantheon’s filters, game announcers, plus-one power-ups, and all the things they used to keep them fighting.
This is what reality looks like. And it’s not pretty.
But when was it ever?
The baboon marines eat in silence.
Well, not total silence. Almost undetectable beneath it all is a soft whirring sound as the baboons watch the night. Mesmerized by something unseen. By giggling beauties that don’t really exist. And plates of food disguising something much more real.
They are not baboons.
They are Uplifted marines.
Uplifted marines. And they are eating the corpses of the dead via small whirring intake blenders located within the palms of their armored gloves.
“C’mon,” whispers Stepp suddenly. “There’s more to see.”
And then the game resumes and the glitch is gone. The filters and the colors are back.
For now.
Gods: Chapter Twenty
Crometheus is back in the jungle with Jim Stepp. Both of them wearing jungle fatigues of whatever war it was Jim Stepp died in back on Earth. The air is cold and the sky, when it can be seen, is cloud-covered and swollen with anger. Only the sound of a small stream, burbling and talking to itself over stony courses, can be heard.
“You remember that war in the Forbidden Decks… after Cappella Three?” asks Stepp as he leads them through the brush down there in the swamp. Along a twisting narrow labyrinthine trail that seems to appear and swallow itself with every step.
Crometheus is following the back of the older boy. They are playing soldiers for real down in here the swamp, just like they did on the Front Line upright in the arcade. Crometheus tries to remember the war for the aft decks. The dark ages of the lost colony ship Pantheon.
Some invisible insect keeps buzzing Bad Thought Bad Thought Bad Thought… but Crometheus swats at it and it fades back into the bush.
He remembers that the cultists of the aft decks started rumors like wildfires among the engineering staff. Rumors that the elites of the Xanadu Tower and the Truth and Safety Council, forward of the main hab, living in the glitter dome, that they still had food when everyone else was starving. In fact, according to the rumors that caught fire and spread like a just-lit gas-soaked bush on a windy morning in the pre-dawn dark, the best of them had abundant amounts of sustenance.
He remembered that was a lie. Told by the enemies of the Pantheon. The insect buzzed something. And furthermore he remembered participating in the great purge that had driven the cultists, and their blasphemies, beyond the known embrace and love of the citizens of the main hab. Driven the heretics back into the deep, into what was rapidly becoming, way back then even, the haunted spaces of the Forbidden Decks.
As it would be known henceforth and forevermore. So say we all.
He remembered it happening that way.
“That ain’t the way it happened,” says Stepp over his shoulder as he brushes back a spidery willow tree hanging low to the sandy trail they are following. Webs abound down here, dropping hot fever spiders all over them. The older boy’s eyebrows arch, and that wicked lost boy’s glimmer appears once more in his mischievous eyes. The same kind the real Peter Pan must’ve had when he was up to some mischief against Hook and crew. “Not at all how it happened, kid. You were on the wrong side of that dirty little war. You got caught up in the action though. You just made the mistake of being in with the engineering crowd. They edited that. Made you forget.”
The mist in the jungle swamp clears and ahead lies the Southern Cliff. Except in starship architecture it’s not called that. It’s called the Aft Axial Supply Deck to Main Hab. People aboard the Pantheon just called it the Southern Cliff. If you were standing in the hab somewhere on the plain below, and you looked south, or rather off toward the aft sections of the starship, then you saw the wall. Beyond the farming cities on
the plain, the fields of corn, the fires burning out of control started by wilding rioters and fueled by the small battles taking place within the giant interstellar starship floating through space. Beyond all that you would have seen a roughly kilometer-high wall filling the “bottom,” or aft, wall of the massive cylinder that was the main hab. Halfway up that wall, in its dead center, was a massive cross-shaped hangar deck that serviced the hab. Supplies could be transferred from there to the aft hangar decks. Gravity was almost non-existent down the plumb line of the cylinder, and supplies could be moved effortlessly.
This was the Southern Cliff. This was where the cultists made their stand against the ship’s official crew of the Pantheon during that dirty little war. The lessers who’d been suckered in by the Uplifters for money and other promises to actually fly and crew the massive ship were unhappy with the directionless direction and series of failures that had marked the ship’s flight time since leaving Earth.
Freeing up the Uplifted to get their utopia on by doing all the slave labor hadn’t sat well. Things were boiling over.
“They’re coming over the wall!” someone screamed.
Crometheus looks around. The misty swamp bottom, laden with the ghosts of skeletal willows, is gone. They are inside the massive hangar that is the Aft Axial Supply Deck to Main Hab. The Southern Cliff. The Wall. Beyond all this is the spinning cylinder of the hab world and the blue gossamer that is its central atmosphere.
Stepp turns to the boy Crometheus and shouts, “We gotta help defend the barricades. Quarters up. We’re playing doubles!”
Then the older boy is off and running forward from the back of the cyclopean hangar deck toward the barricades that have been erected at the entrance to the hab. The massive cliff that looks out upon the rotating artificial world below and above.
The sound of sporadic gunfire goes off like desultory firecrackers at first, then ratchets up in earnest as the assault begins. Just as it did then, long ago, when engineering was being purged of the heretics.
Caught up in the action, Crometheus follows Stepp into the fight. Both are carrying surplus 1911s. Just like the cultists did back in those angry days of rebellion. Arms raided from an aft-section survival vault located along the Pantheon’s outer hull. Purchased in bulk back on Earth just in case. As the countries and factions of the world caught fire and went all-out war on one another and arms became an industry like never before. That armory contained clamshells of 1911s. And racks upon racks of old tactical M-14s from the South American wars.
The official police and military forces of the starship Pantheon carried the latest arms from Heckler and Koch. Or at least, the latest as of two hundred years ago on Earth at the moment of this past rebellion.
“There are more of them than us! But we have science on our side!” they screamed when the Pantheon’s security teams came for them.
That was something they all told each other in the resistance, remembered Crometheus as he hears someone shouting it above the riot of CQB. It wasn’t a cult. A cult was what the powers-that-be would call it later. During the re-education, after the war. But at the time, during the conflict over food and water and the direction of a vessel that was now wandering the cosmos in search of a stray ice comet instead of trying to make it to a third world—a second voyage well beyond what had been intended for the ship’s original operation—during that time they’d called themselves the resistance. As though they were returning to their ancient roots of reason and science back on Earth when they’d resisted the powers that be and fought them on every single point. Fought them and won. Capturing the hearts and minds of the people in order to seize power and effect fundamental change for the… wait for it… greater good.
Crometheus remembers, though it seems impossible now, that he was seduced by those false gods of free will. Becoming a heretic of his own faith in himself. He’d joined the resistance. The elites who’d remained elite during the long crawl out from Sirius Two and then on to Cappella Three, they became the fat cats. It was always ever their vision in Truth and Safety and what would become the Xanadu Tower. Their way. Their whims. Always.
It was time for change, and the war started on the Southern Wall. The Southern Cliff.
The shedding hadn’t happened yet. So he’d joined the other side thinking it was a play for power to be seized, and not realizing he’d gotten caught up in the action and believed the lies of the resistance. Lies that said they weren’t becoming gods. That they were just slaves. And always would be. Unless…
Hence the war for what remained of the limited food and water aboard the Pantheon. The need for sustenance now that the cryo coffin decks were system-defaulting and going offline in large blocks. Killing hundreds of sleepers a day.
You counted yourself lucky then not to have been caught in the sleep racks the day those decks went down due either to terrorism or a simple failure to maintain what wasn’t supposed to run this long anyway. One thirty-year voyage had turned into a two-hundred-year death march. With no end in sight.
It was supposed to be thirty years to Sirius Two. Maybe only twenty-five.
Thirty years to Utopia.
Not two hundred years of darkness and solitude.
That’s all the sleeper racks, and really the ship itself, had ever been intended to last for. Thirty years.
Now the security police, the early predecessors of the Uplifted marines that would come one day to lead the strike of the Uplifted against the Animals, were storming the castle, as it were. That’s what they called their little fortress at the Southern Cliff. High Castle. They thought it was unassailable. They’d blocked off the lifts up from the main hab floor. The gantries. Even the physical access ladders and stairs that had been built into the massive wall at the end of the cylinder of the main hab had been demolished.
But the security police, all of them ex-German military who’d been recruited by Micro Power in the leadup to the Big Uplift exodus from Earth, were either scaling the wall, rappelling down onto it, or coming in by air assault drone ship backed by mounted heavy gun fire.
The resistance didn’t have the numbers. In the end, in a later hindsight, he would remember, through breaks in the electric pain chair, as they tortured him and taught him to see their truth, the truth, that the security police had the weapons and the training and the numbers. They’d come to the Pantheon as contractors and stayed on as true believers in a master race their German DNA told them must be true. Still, the fight at the Southern Cliff had been brutal. Close-quarters violence with no quarter given to the maimed and wounded and most who tried to surrender.
Stepp rushes forward to a barrier where resisters are crouched and firing back at the heavily armed security police who’ve managed to just gain a bare foothold inside the hangar door. Combat-vested and bulletproofed masked shadows fighting from the beveled-edge maintenance gantry that is little more than a walkway to service the landing lights for the axial supply deck. High-speed commando teams cover their designated marksmen with absurd amounts of incoming fire. The marksmen meanwhile shoot down the Resisters when they can. Untrained and low on ammo, because they don’t have access to a forge this far back in the ship, those same resisters he once was a part of are expending wild amounts of precious little ammo to merely get hits on the insectile body-armored security police troopers.
But it is now, as it was then, at this moment in his memories, that the troopers rush the barricades for the final assault. The rebellion is less than a minute from being over. Security police heavy gunners, deployed by the Pantheon’s Truth and Safety Committee, sweep the field, forming a base of fire as the other troopers, moving in teams, surge forward tossing flashbangs and turning on tactical floodlights mounted alongside their insectile helmets and lead-spitting weapons.
Stepp is firing back almost point-blank into the oncoming troopers when the flashbangs go off like a daisy chain of flashbulbs all across the barrier the last of
the resistance is covering behind. Where Crometheus finds himself in that long-lost memory.
Had it been deleted?
Or had he kept it hidden in the arcade? Or even the swamp? Inside Dig Dug or Tutankham.
Crometheus feels himself go fetal as his vision and senses are suddenly smashed by flash and bang. Curls up like a baby whether he likes it or not as images and nothingness, both at the same time, impossibly so, scramble his fear-fried brain.
He screams because he is back here again.
Back at the beginning of the shedding. And all that he must undergo to become what he will one day be.
He feels, just as he did so long ago, the rough tactical gauntlets of the powerful ex-German military commandos grabbing him and binding him with zip ties that will bite into his skin and leave his wrists and ankles bloody. He can barely breathe as they drag him away. That’s when he passes out and there’s nothing but dark darkness until there’s pain.
Darkest darkness in fact. He remembers that darkness even now.
Dark until…
There’s a familiar voice in the darkness. Wry and soft. Almost friendly. And he knows it from somewhere soon, but not now. Now, in the pit of interrogation he finds himself in, the voice is new. Then. It was new then. The first time he heard it.
Over the next six months it will become the only voice he ever hears. Imagine that. And shudder. And though at first he hates it, in time he will come to love it. Adore it. Need it. And even worship it for his very life.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 19