by Wayne Hill
The pod is remotely linked to both you and all alternate universes. If your new body takes physical damage you feel no pain. The pain is shared amongst all alternate versions of you. This means that each of the infinite versions of you, at that moment, feel pain that is divided by infinity. In short, they feel nothing — or as close to zero pain as makes no significant difference.
Earlier, when Splinter had shot the table leg through Levy’s eye, Levy felt nothing and could still use, via the Nirmana health pod, enough of his brain to continue to function. However, such a bodily insult needed to be mended quickly to optimise bodily function, so Levy took another healthy, but doomed, version of himself from a parallel universe. The beauty of this technology means that no matter how much you use the device, there are always more healthy yous available. The unintuitive mathematics of infinity means that even if you use an infinite number of yous there (still) remains an infinite number of yous. Alternate yous can never run out because infinity means you can always add a one.
Levy breathes deeply as he connects to the Nirmana via the NTB wall. The shadowy leader of the Nirmana appears on the wall.
“You have failed us, Captain Levy,” the Nirmana leader says sibilantly.
“No, I don’t believe that I have,” Levy replies while he puts on a fresh uniform. “There must be some confusion, gracious leader. I have the man you want on-board the Golden Falcon. I have Splinter Salem.”
“Look out of your quarter’s west wall, Levy.”
Levy hops as he pulls on his final boot. Turning to his quarter’s ‘ship-west’ wall, he traces a large rectangle shape with his index finger in the air. Correspondingly, a glowing oblong appears on the west wall.
“Clear Vision!” he commands.
The rectangle turns the wall invisible, but the expected darkness of space is instead a neon display of lights — the Nirmana’s spacecraft completely fills Levy’s window. The huge Nirmana craft outsizes the Golden Falcon a thousand-fold or more.
“We have made scans of your ship, Levy,” says the hissing voice of the Nirmana leader. “You are the only lifeform inside the Golden Falcon. It seems that not only have you lost your entire crew to the Dionysus virus, but you have also lost your target, Splinter Salem. We specifically requested that you capture Splinter Salem and transfer him to our ship. We had an agreement. You have, perhaps, changed your mind?”
“The crew aren’t dead, gracious leader. They have been resettled on Earth by Splinter and his crew. I swear it. I heard them announcing it over the ship’s comms. Splinter is alive and well, damn it! And, I have to say, I’ve no idea what you would want with such a man. He’s barely human. He’s nothing more than a beast. He blew a hole in the Golden Falcon and killed hundreds of people. He sent many more to die on prison planet Earth.”
Levy wipes the beading sweat from his brow and walks over to his drinks-cabinet. He needs something strong. Shakily, he pours himself a large measure of Tanqueray into a cold, frosted glass and finishes it with one swallow. He refills the glass.
The voice of the Nirmana leader’s voice comes again, but this time it echoes hollowly around his quarters, almost as if the leader were shouting without actually shouting.
“He has something that we want, Levy!” The hatred evident in the Nirmana’s tone would have been obvious to all but the egocentric Levy.
“Ahh, of course he does,” says Levy absently sipping at his gin. “He’s a dirty pirate. A thief. God knows how many Domer’s Splinter has robbed over the years. What did he steal? What is it that you want?”
The doors to Levy’s quarters exploded, blasting Levy against a wall and into unconsciousness. Silhouetted against the smoke of destruction strode Splinter Salem, his elaborate Space Marine battle suit thudding loudly on the floor with every step. Two shoulder-mounted laser gatling guns slowed their spin, smoke ribboning up from each nozzle.
“Where are you, Levy, you Dirty little Wasp!”
Splinter adopts a fake robotic voice: “I ... mean ...you... no ...harm.”
Servos whir as Splinter rips the door from Levy’s Nirmanan pod. He looks inside. The pod’s interior looks like an endless tunnel, strewn with fluttering white fabric, white gas wafts around the floor of the tunnel almost at knee height.
“Are you in there, Levy, you alien scum!” he calls down the interdimensional portal.
Inside his suit, when he is not shouting, Splinter is constantly sucking on a tube. The tube leads to a large barrel of Black Bush Irish whiskey, which he has stowed alongside his oxygen tanks on the back of the suit.
Splinter’s need to consume alcohol is now almost equal to his oxygen requirement. In these last stages of the Dionysus virus — the last stages of his life — everything hurts, everything is sickness and loss.
Splinter sees the unconscious form of Levy and the Nirmana ship almost simultaneously.
“A-HA! There you are, dick face. I’ve been looking for you, laddie. What you watching here? Hmm. Some sort of cheesy space opera, eh? No time for films, shit-box. Not now. No time for anything. Time, time, time, Levy. Everyone out. Yes. Hmm.”
Splinter belches, grabs Levy’s leg and drags the unconscious man through the remains of his room, chuckling drunkenly. He briefly pauses in front of a shelf. On the shelf is a picture of a woman and child in a silver frame. Next to the ornately framed picture is a white vase containing two red roses.
Splinter childishly pushes the vase off the shelf. It smashes on the floor.
Trampling the roses into the floor, Splinter leaves Levy’s room still dragging the insensible man. At the doorway, he mutters — for reasons only known to himself — “duck-faced rodents.”
CAPTAIN LEVY AWAKES to find himself tied to one of the sleek control room chairs. Splinter is working away on the mainframe computer and he had moved Levy’s Nirmanan pod up to the control room. It looks different. The healing chamber is stripped down and has several glowing cables connecting to the Golden Falcon’s main computer: neon blue tubes coming out, neon red wires going in.
“What are you doing, Splinter? You realise you can’t beat these people, right? They’re smarter than you. You’re just some pirate, they’re fucking aliens! Smart aliens! They have advanced intelligence ... and what do you have? Don’t you know you’ve already lost? It’s over, man. Just untie me so I can get back to my family. We can forget about this disaster of a mission. Come on, Splinter ... Please?”
Levy breaks down and weeps.
Splinter glances askance at him, brushes a dreadlock from the side of his face and lights a cigarette.
“Do you love your wife?” Splinter asks, blowing a cloud of smoke into the bound man’s face. Levy chokes, not on the smoke, but the harsh smell of sulphur — a charred, burning smell — coming directly from Splinter’s lungs.
“With all my heart.”
“It’s the best, isn’t it? You wake up each morning with a great feeling of ... completeness, I guess. Where did you meet your wife, Levy?”
“We were assigned to one another. Our Optimal statistics and compatibility matrices were in line. It was a perfect match; we are perfect for one another. We love one another, dearly. It’s a struggle to be apart for any amount of time without the feelings of ...of terrible loneliness setting in. Do you understand? No ... I doubt someone, like you, could ever know this feeling. God! I need this hell to be over! I need to get back to her!”
Levy’s eyes were streaming with tears. Splinter nods and pats Levy on the shoulder, rubs his head a little, and slaps his face lightly. Splinter looks away, staring into the past.
“My Marie-Ann, I’m coming home girl. Our love was forged in a cold, dark place. A place you will never know, Levy. Where the insane lurk in the shadows. Where thieves target the weak. Love conquers all, even insanity. It makes you roll through the chaos and sorrow of reality like it’s just part of a great show, a fucking mysterious play! The truth is, Levy, we lose ourselves when we love a person. When we truly love, we spiral upwards together away
from the dark branches of material existence. We are all and nothing — infinity and the oblivion. The insidious spider of Love wraps us in silk, binding us together. When she died, I died, too. Do you understand? No, I don’t think you could ever understand. After years and years of trying to fill the void inside myself, the abyssal plain of isolation and loss, I believe I have found something quite interesting lurking in the darkness of my soul. Something unfathomable. Unreachable by you so-called Optimal people. I realise something, now, looking at you, blubbering like a child. Marie-Ann and I are so much more. We are eternal to one another. Our love will be sung about in squalid barrooms and palatial domes throughout the galaxy. We will be remembered as symbols. Lovers that clung to one another in the darkness of this reality.”
Splinter goes back to attaching cables to his last invention. Levy looks at the healing pod and the Golden Falcon’s computer and back. Midway between the two there appears to be an empty Jack Daniels bottle, filled with a red fluid, like blood.
“What’s going on, Splinter? What the hell are you doing?”
Splinter hooks up the final cable, presses a few buttons on the mainframe’s console and then a few buttons on his mech-arm.
“System reboot,” intones the ship’s computer, still in the sultry French tones of Levy’s wife, as all the lights suddenly turn off.
The ship lights flicker back on and Levy’s wife says, “New name required.”
Splinter types away, chuckling to himself.
“What are you doing?” repeats Levy with growing ire.
“New name accepted,” the ship’s voice purrs. “The SS Shit is now fully functional. New coordinates have been locked in.”
Splinter laughs at this until tears form in his eyes, until his sides hurt. Chuckling and coughing up blue phlegm — which he spits on the floor at Levy’s feet — Splinter makes his way to the Captain’s chair. He sits there, eating his pig snacks and swilling it down with a cold beer. It is his first ale in well over ten years, because of the low level of alcohol in lager.
“Ahhh!” Splinter sighs, smacking his lips and staring fondly at the frothy amber nectar.
“You’ve ruined the Golden Falcon, space dog!” snaps Levy. Splinter throws a pig snack at Levy’s face and, more by luck than judgement, it strikes one of the man’s eyes. “You are the worst kind of space scum — aaaah! — the worst kind — awww, this stings! aaaah! — a demon made flesh!”
“Boo-fucking-hoo, Levy,” sniggers Splinter. “I wouldn’t worry, too much — we’ll both be dead very soon, you snivelling little monkey turd!” Splinter drinks the rest of his beer, grabs another cold one and walks over to where Levy is tied up. He shakes up the bottle, bites the top off the beer, puts his thumb over the bottle mouth and sprays the beer into Levy’s sore eye.
“Ahhh! You swine! It — It... actually feels ...a bit better,” says Levy.
Splinter leans behind Levy’s chair and snaps the restraints from Levy’s arms. “I’m gonna give you a chance to get away and leave this place, Levy, because ... well, because she would want me to. She doesn’t much like me hurting folk. I’m working on my aggression, for her.”
“Let the Nirmana help you, Splinter. They can make you better, make you well.”
Splinter shakes his head. “I haven’t been well since she died, Levy. I’ve never, in all my twisted life, given a rat like you a second chance. So, you better go ahead and take it before I change my mind, pull your head off and throw you through that wall.”
“I’m going to the Nirmana ship. My family are there. Whatever it is you are doing here — I don’t want to know. Just get away from here. The process has begun, there isn’t much time until their ship leaps. They always change the universe they leap from. They — they destroy everything.”
“Right. I’m not sure what I’m doing either, Levy, but your constant whining is no longer amusing to me, anymore. You’re just a disgusting leech of a man covered in fleas and other parasites. Don’t take that personally, by the way. I’m just a bit bitter ... oh, and I don’t like you.”
Splinter throws another pig snack at Levy’s head and it went into Levy’s other eye.
“Argh!” shouts Levy, holding a hand over his newly injured eye. “Fuck it! That’s me done!” He strides off towards the Golden Falcon’s remaining escape pods, ignoring Splinter’s harangue which is shouted at his back.
“Destroying the resting place of my love? Her family’s bar? Our tree? Do you know how old that tree is? And my friends...? You filthy little wasps! I’m very, very emotional about all of this! I still look forward to burning to death in a little while! Fuck off, Levy! Go on! Fuck right off, with your silly shitty face, your red crying eyes, and your stupidly Optimal duck-faced rodent of a fucking family! You have no idea what I’ve been through! You have no idea what anyone goes through! You’re lost in a web and you’re going to get eaten. Go tell your alien fuck bag buddies to hurry up and do what they gotta do because I don’t have all fucking day! Let’s get this over with! I’m looking forward to dying after the Bucky-bollocks conversations with you, you fucking dull, clean, scarless traitor!”
Splinter sighs. The tirade has calmed him somewhat. Steam starts to pour out of his blast boots and looking down, steam has started to swirl off his forearm. The Dionysius virus is burning him alive.
“This is it, Marie-Ann,” Splinter whispers, “just me and you, now.”
Splinter opens another beer, enjoying the cooling effect the chilled lager has as it slips down his furnace-like throat.
“Clear Vision three sixty,” he orders.
The Golden Falcon responds and every wall, except the ceiling and floor, displays the dark velvet of space, flecked with the white of stars. To the port side is the largest space craft Splinter has ever seen.
“Just in time for the party,” says Splinter as a purple laser beam shoots from the Nirmanan vessel into the Sun.
The Steaming — as one of the final stages of the Dionysius virus is referred to in the Lanes — is getting worse. A dial clicks and starts to flash a red-light on Splinter’s mech-arm. Looking at his mech-arm read out, he says, “Not long now, Marie-Ann, my apple tree.”
In the middle of the Sun, a purple portal is beginning to open. Splinter watches with interest as the Nirmanan laser continues to fire into the star and the purple portal grows.
“Tommy ‘Splinter’ Salem!” says a voice. It is fricative, spirant — like air rushing from a punctured tyre.
“Is that you, Grandma?” croaks Splinter, now with so much steam rising from his body it looks as if he has eaten a dry-ice machine.
“You know who we are, Splinter. You have something that we require.”
“I have no idea who, or what, you are. Although now I finally have the honour of experiencing how exceptionally dull you are, I would like you — if you would be so kind — to fuck off!”
“We think you might like a chance to see who we really are.”
“No, you misheard me. I don’t want to see who you are. I want to die drinking this crate of beers and smoking these bines. Possibly listening to some Lynyrd Skynyrd or Jonny Cash. Maybe Dire Straits, Oasis, some Ian Brown ...Or, maybe ...I don’t know, little fucking what’s-its-name ...yeknow... that one with the — um, it’ll come to me — sounds like Nirmana ...er ...Fleetwood Mac! That’s it! ...I’ve not decided yet. I’ll want to die listening to something along those lines. By the way, do you know that your ship looks like some kind of fucking space jellyfish? Anyone tell you that before? Eh? I think you guys should leave me to die in peace. Just, fuck off! You’re too late. I’m a smoking gun, baby! Hahahahah!”
Splinter stuffs his face with the last handful of pig-snacks and washes it down with another bottle of beer. He is sat there — crunching away, laughing, and blowing smoke rings into the steam pouring from his dying body, staring at the Nirmanan portal opening in the Sun — when the Nirmana leader appears on one of the Golden Falcon’s NTB walls.
“Watch,” he says.
Splinter groans, he is not really in the mood for this. Dying makes you cranky.
Well, it’s shit movie night on SS Shit, he thinks, and there’s not a bowl of fucking popcorn in sight! So, you Nirimanies can manipulate time and space, infinite alternate realities, and yet you cannot even pop me some goddamn corn. Fucking cheap alien bastards!
4
Through narrow drunken eyes, Splinter watches the Nirmanas’ story play out on the walls of the control room. The elaborate movie shows the Nirmana converting stars into portals and travelling from parallel universe to parallel universe, as though they were flicking through the pages of a never-ending story. They searched for new technology, acquired advanced equipment and ideas from imaginative polymaths, to advance their mission objective.
Splinter sits smoking his last cigarette with a grimace on his grimy and bloodied face. He does not mind the fact that he’s dying. In fact, sitting through this tedious alien production, it makes him glad that he will no longer have to deal with stupid people, or aliens, anymore. From what he can make out, the Nirmana envisaged Nirvana to be a real place; a place that, with an appropriately strong power source, they could travel to whilst still alive.