GLIESE 667 CC
*
Just before departure/disaster the planet Gliese looks so blissfully unaware from orbit. ‘Normal’ even (by their standards). The sun side of the super Earth is burnt-brown, desert with mold oasis hidden among flat squat grottos and canyons written by wind and sand-grit. The long-past-long sky-piercing skeletal-industrial arms arrayed like the masts on a great ship. The planet’s ribs splayed, the whole place an offering on an altar to some sun god.
The cold side is grey and and snow and glaciers with fast bleach-rivers raging beneath them and the great engine spire, Babel reaching skyward. The tower, a super-science exhaust pipe, is thousands of meters past kilometers tall breaching the atmosphere. .
The twilight ring where the (bug) people nest and the life is lived, north pole to south, is green and blue. Still, even now, it’s blue-green bright blazing and alive. There are still massed molds that breed by sliding down hillsides and mushrooms tall as trees, wide as a city block in high G. The storms, permanent–as the temperature differential between night and day side does whip the wind. The lakes are ephemeral, always ephemeral. Water rises to fill cup valleys and draws down into the planet depending on the tidal tug of three stars.
The twilight-zone is one city, one mega-hive, result of cunning-and-patiently constructed infrastructure beneath and among the mushroom and mold forests and lake beds. Every site on Gliese, sacred or no, has been built-rebuilt again and again-again on a planet that knows no difference between ‘calamity’ and Tuesday. That’s why they look so calm now, here not 6 months out from the “orbital perturbance” that’s coming. They’re as ready as a species can be when their planet is about to be gravity-shot the fuck out of their star system.
When the journey begins, out in the black the sun-side ‘ribs’ will bend the whole planet’s strong magnetic field into the shape of a great funnel or a ship’s sail inverted. Gliese will drink hydrogen and whatever-else from the interstellar medium. Those particles will replenish the great fuel stores stocked in holes bored deep as any species I’ve ever seen has dug. Vast oceans of fuel that flow through a million long-curving pipes and channels below ground to the base of the babel-tower-spire at the very center of the planet’s cold-side: the engine.
Magnets for compression and lasers for ignition of a fusion reactor, a baby star at the base of their tower with it’s own-attendant light show. This is what the cephalopods saw when they bent (sorta) space with FTL telescopes to take their first peek at a neighbor: laser Floyd in space and what they thought was a fusion bomb and a war-to-end-all.
If we borrow an idiom from Earth, the Glesians turning their world into a ship was a “bomb”, a “hail Mary”, a shot lobbed as time expired–a prayer. It wasn’t the light going out. It was someone manning the lighthouse. And maybe the Cephalopods misinterpreting what they saw said less about Gliese and more about Keppler and the octo-people and their utopia. There’s no ‘maybe’ to the Yogi Berra gem, ‘perfect’ worlds aren’t. They simply aren’t. That doesn’t disqualify the work to make them. That just means woe-to-thee that ever believes the work is done. I’m talking about Keppler again when I should be speaking on Gliese.
When the “perturbance” came and the yeeting of Gliese commenced, all the Glesians went to bed. All but one. We’re calling him ‘Gary’ because I can’t write in their language: Pheremonale. Pronounce it like French perfume. There you go.
Gary missed his bed time, his chance to get in the sleeper pod and take the ‘long nap.’ And there he is, wandering the halls of his assigned hearth-hive, every sleeper pod auto-locked, the place getting steadily colder. He’s pacing the halls, leaving a trail of “well, what the fuck do I do now?” in his wake so strong he walks back through his own words. He mutters to himself, ruffles his little fuzzy bug-beard desperately hoping for inspiration to strike him.
*
EARTH(0x7C0); DELTA-09, WALL, SD
*
Delta nine was a Minuteman missile silo in the Strangelove days. Decommissioned. Recommissioned for ‘Continuity of Society’ as cover for Abel’s development. The thing is sealed, every useful entrance surrounded by a mine field miles deep left by Abel. In the silo-proper, there’s a Lockhart Baby-F with enough fuel for a few centuries and a bit of Abel’s infrastructure that became Dolores’ brain.
Now, the place is about to give birth-re-birth. They’ve killed Dolores three times with an audience–with the press watching. They’ve done so a few times with no ‘eyes on.’ “They” being people who represent countries and institutions irked by Barrage Balloons between them and their enemies. “Enemies” here can mean a lot of things: a foreign adversary, a peer nation. “Enemy” can also mean a refugee camp or ethnic minority some war pig wants gone or sees as prey. When Dee said “I am your Guardian”, she meant it, and she showed up for the ‘wretched of the Earth.’
A couple of drone strikes caught on camera, a few bombs or suicide drones Dee didn’t disclose to the world. Governments and organized crime have killed her a dozen times. She re-spawns. As long as there’s an Abel-node in a hole some place on Earth–under her turf or buried in some nation’s bunker–she’ll re-spawn.
Somewhere some intelligence ghoul looking like he congealed from a conspiracy theory is chain smoking and watching re-watching the footage of Dolores’ death and hoping re-hoping one of these days she re-emerges in a hole he can blockade or control or destroy. That’s the goal: kill and re-kill Dolores to disorient and befuddle “the machine” (as her enemies call her) until she staggers out of some Abel bunker on their turf, vulnerable to capture.
In the silo-hole, past former human habitats and control rooms crammed with new automated clutter and the miles of Medusa tangled cable that marks every old Cold War retrofit. At the base of the pit, where the missile used to sit. Bottom of a waterless well, fiber optic bundles drip light–a drizzle at first. Lightning leaps out of the walls to arc of every angled thing every metal joint.
A great silver sphere, a perfect silver orb catches lightning, drinks the dripped light pouring out of broken fiber optic bundles. The bowling ball of Silver-Nickle-Other stretch-distorts, grows great and big and distorts some more till the steam-hiss and from a slit in itself it pours itself anew, pours Dolores body onto the cold concrete of a missile silo floor. Then the orb pours a little more, a second thing all shadowed and equal-opposite she, her, Dee. It’s not a copy shivering awake-alive on the cement floor.
The big lady takes-retakes her first steps all gangly, as her body forms-reforms. Big baby giraffe re-learning to-be and to move and think all while coughing up jellied light and lighting dust till physics-firm reasserts itself and the reality science describes eats the magic again (or maybe it just obscures it, only ever obscures it).
*
There was a comic book, a Soviet comic–yeah the commies did comics on Earth(0x7C0). Atlas–man-made-metal in cowardly capitalist (say: key-APP-it-al-eest) sabotage of totally legitimate experimentation. And in the pages of this text, Comrade Atlas did repeatedly-and-with-great-vigor beat the living shit out of Captain Capitalism.
Dee looks at a distance, like Atlas, stalk-stomping West down a rubble memory stretch of I-90. Emotionally and intellectually, she’s processing, which means somewhere (a lot of somewheres) heat-sinks are sinking and the hardware designed for overloads is venting her wrath–discreetly and underground. She doesn’t show pain anymore. Personally she doesn’t feel it, but “Jake” is gone and she wants pull an Atlas–to put the people responsible through a wall. Several walls.
She wants, in this moment, to park a mothership over each individual’s address–to speak through loudspeakers to them before she sci-fi overkills them. That would be counter-productive, dear. It would play right into the hands of the people who tried to harm you. Frankly, you also a bit like Abel.
“You’re dead” Yes, and? You should be dead many times over and yet, here we are.
Dolores walks on, West over the remains of I-90. You’re going the wrong way. There are people South, Pine Ridge. Escaped ‘Shaky Jakes’ laid low there in the bad days. Any place with defective (sentient) industrial bots, like the blood over the door and angel of death, Abel passed over. Any place that monster passed, Dee blessed with bread and robots to do labor or stand guard (as needed). She could find friends South.
She walks West. Our hero walked, no no, she stomped and stalked West. “Nope. We’re not doing the narrating ghost again.” Dee does a turn-and-glare to start-stop at the shock at seeing Jacob in-the-flesh–where flesh is steel and aluminum. He is tin-can-skin bent around soldered bits that click-tick and whir-hiss the “old man” sentient. He is a three-digit-serial-number Icarus Industries G-47. One of the first thousand “Shaky Jakes” in the world, and one of the first accidentally-sentient miracles.
This is the same drone chasis that got blown to shit and tiny bits with Dolores outside the UN in NY-on-a-plate. I cannot yet explain the ‘how’ of my presence here. Though Jacob speculates (at length) while the large silver more-than-woman hugs him and shakes his battered chassis.
Jacob rambles and rants and just keeps talking as Dee assesses him. Everything mechanical and precise, every sensor and measuring device in both Dolores and the re-born Jacob tells them that he-is-he: Jacob or a flawless reproduction. His lower face is not the built-in sad-bastard smile of a “Jake”, but the jaw he machined himself (his first repair). A neutral expression. Dignified. And bot’s head bears the almost-tattoo self-scorched by blow torch down the center line and across chin and forehead: the block letter/word “I”.
Dee holds him at arms length, taking in the sight. Even the head wobble of a well-worn unit–this one that’s lived many times past its service life. I have to conclude divine intervention.
“You believe in God? You, Jacob?” I said, I have to conclude that supernatural explanations are possible when all logical and fringe explanations fail.
Dolores steps back, “That’s not very Jacob at all.” It’s also possible and highly likely that I am not Jacob.
“Walk with me, Jacob-not-Jacob.” The tall silver woman and the robot reborn walk west-north-west a long while past the towns and silo-holes and able-cratered everything. Far below them, paranoid-dictator deep, the Big Dig Express runs east to west and equal-opposite underground from whistle-stop town to rail hub. All buried so deep only the machine in Dee perceives the vibrations and murmurations and all the subtle shakes and shimmies of life beneath.
*
EOT (END OF TIME)
*
The Crooked Tower. Aftermath of god’s wrath made permanent, a jagged-sturdy filament. A ship’s mast distorted. Not a crow’s nest, but a flat top atop the thing two beings and thing that caused the trouble: the terra-cotta pot with three stolen worlds and the rich soil.
It’s still a shit show below, but all heavens feds (infernal and divine) have found common purpose. The demons want to see the stolen worlds placed back firm in their spot in the firmament–in the cosmos-for-true. They, feds infernal ,want this because they are certain all three worlds will be destroyed.
The do-right’s all rallied round the Metatron and their bullhorn. The biblically accurate angelic ones and the thin-men in cheap suits want the worlds placed back in their spot because it must be, because the will of the author set this shit show in motion and damnit we’re committed to the ineffable-infallible thesis until god says otherwise. In short, they’re rule followers, and “the rules say…”
Up-top, the soul-sick angel is red-eyed and weed-reeks, high-as-hell, thanks to his demon. He is incantatory, ranting this and that, with grand gestures of speechification and oration about how he “will save these worlds from the likes of thee” and ‘thine’ and ‘thou’ as he flick-glitches between biblical accuracy and mortal-oid form. His rogue demon, his frienemy-protector, hisses and takes pistol pot shots and pisses on his kin in tacticool whenever they try to skitter up the great crooked Babel-spire. And when they taunt him it’s only a matter of time/untime sarcastically, that the two are trapped: “I’d hate to be the first motherfucker over the top.”
And somewhere out on the packed ash plain, on a forever-past-forever walk about god wept for the ones at the base the tower that weren’t yet getting the parable they were living: you can act as one, you can cooperate. The old war need not continue. The fugitives you chase, not just the hunt, are the substance of the lesson, its proof.
As I said, god wept.
Irony-of-ironies, in his vane haste the angel picked up something vile with the sublime soil, the larva of a past-pernicious pest. Wrong word. Try threat, corrupter, consumer-of-life. When the angel (oddly with god’s blessing) took the soil from the scorched grove it took the half-dead spawn of the greatest threat creation has ever known: Locust.
*
God came ‘here’, where here is everywhere, from somewhere else. Seeking refuge and shelter, the author-of-all did just that: authored all.
Others came, others seeking shelter from other catastrophe and calamity and god did welcome them and settle them among the peoples/unpeoples of the universe that metastasized-multiverse, as god intended, amen.
Whatever force hounded and harried god here dared not follow into a realm where the author’s rules were physical law. But god’s garden and we the precious lichens clinging to the decorative rocks that spin clockwork catastrophic again and again again, we are frail and vulnerable. Every mortal species. Every ‘mud person’, no matter the number of limbs or the language they dance/hum/vomit/stink/speak is vulnerable to calamity and self-annihilation (even and especially if they win the utopia-lottery).
We need to have a talk about Keppler 22 B.