Endling(s) 5

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GLIESE (INTERSTELLAR SPACE)

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For fifty years the Gliesian ship swerved drunk through the void as infection spread planet wide, slow-burn style. The designs of Gliese’s finest engineers fought the good fight to the last, but alas all the redundancy that could withstand malicious attack or accidental encounter with an asteroid? It fell to shit, collapsed like a house of cards in the face of Gary’s malignant loneliness. “I could fix Gary.” No you could not.

There is a biological-cultural basis for the hive-mind hell to come: Gliesian’s eat their dead. It’s not cannibalism. Ok it is, but it’s not cannabalism-for-funsies. It’s a funeral rite where the essence of the dead is taken in a beverage illuminated by alcohol and things hallucinogenic that do ease absorption of ancestral memory.

You don’t die at the age of 40 ‘if you’re lucky’ and reach the stars. Gliese 667CC was a brutal world where the sentient bugs drank bleach and dodged predatory slime mold mud-slides and danced around trip-and-falls in high-gravity that could kill them on the day-to-day. This was how the Glesian bugs remembered any grand dream, a plan, their songs and stories and mathematics from one generation to the next: in their beer, mourning their dead together and re-committing to what was good in them that it might continue.

Gary’s not an allegory for a neurotype. He is not figurative or symbolic. The Glesians know and welcome any and all of the neurotypes god or luck or probability wrote across their whole (at least they did). Gary is one who has gone to funerals and drank the hallucinogenic beer brewed from other bugs and felt nothing, learned nothing. Gary is literal. He is the first-only-and-last Glesian sociopath, and the fates picked one hell of a time to drop such a being on the bugs.

There was a point in time, after-actioned by HVAC–ephemerally surveilled retroactively and logged in archives at EOT (memory holed)–where Gary was a normal Glesian child (whatever the fuck the slur normal means). The black rain came–oil from the sky that washed away a whole hive city in a valley bowl. Mold and mud down mountain and hill –force and acceleration amplified by the disaster planet’s surly gravity. Archology towers un-done dissolved sand-castle into the wave made by the black rain.

When the flood of viscous solvent rain receded and drained down every hole to some place far below the bleach rivers–to the basement beneath the planet’s core–all that remained was a single child stained by the viscous-ichor.

Those that rescued and tended and washed the burning rain off the child died and desiccated in a way that precluded the remembrance rite. They were not consumed, not brewed and drank. “No one toasted them.” And they passed out of collective memory–quickly. The child, Gary, would grow into a man broken. He never hurt people, for he lived in a society that put people to purpose (coercively if ‘necessary’). The region on Gliese devastated by the black rain forgot the event quickly. Not one victim was remembered in the rite and the public record of the event was drowned in a long litany of disaster–for any day-that-ended-in-y on Gliese was once likely to have some kind of calamitous event on or beneath its surface. Everyone forgot what happened to the hive-city and the lone-child–even Gary forgot.

Gliese the planet ate its young, the most brutal world I’ve ever seen to harbor life–though the Hell colony they left behind is pretty gnarly too. The Gliesian’s ate each other in mourning and remembrance, but they care mightily for the living–or they did. Gary was a bumbling ‘good luck charm’ that never hurt anything (because he wasn’t allowed to).

But whatever the black rain did to the bug, the computer found it and that infection that hid and lay so deep in him in was metaphysical did turn a whole planet into a fungal hive mind. All-is-Gary; Gary-is-All

*

What’s that? Says a sensor to itself in the planet-wide-hive-mind circuit. The Babel-tower-tall engine thrust-vectors subtly, gently to alter course so antennae and dishes and optics and sensors physical/mechanical and versa vice might sniff at an intriguing uncertainty-not-even-a-signal.

The phenomenon appears far off in the interstellar black, the long liminal night, as a road might–Winnipeg to Regina on the coldest night of the lightyear. Space is the sea, the abyss, forever–frozen-prairie boundless until it’s not. And that curiosity-hunger that consumed-Gary and the visceral thirst-to-incorporate-all into Gary drove the planet-ship-Gliese and the mad-fungal-hive mind at the helm to red-line the ram-jet engines, to flaunt fuel and hard-burn for the highway.

When Gliese strikes the filament, there’s a shimmy–like the quakes of old, when 3 stars tugged on the planet’s core. When Gliese enters the high way nothing happens–nothing happens. Impossible as it is (it is impossible) the Super-Earth sized ship–and all the mass that entails halted in half-an-instant. The filament didn’t heat-sink but it did somehow drink momentum.

Two ships, one from Keppler, it’s counterpart from Earth, should pass along the highway. Lonely semis bored surprised to see another truck at this hour. Two ships should have passed in the long night.

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KEPPLER 22-B: B.D.B (BEFORE DANCE BATTLE)

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In our enthusiasm to narrate-observe and versa vice, we watched the conclusion before the sleuthing. Blue, still in hospital the week between the Iago incident and the dance battle, did recognize and perceive the plot from her “command center”–and by this we mean a hospital bed surrounded by media devices.

There in recovery, as she regained her strength, and with the help of a nurse who liked ‘true crime’ and came to see the exercise as therapeutic. That’s where Blue put it together: the Keppler plot. A wave of sabotage, a burst of mechanical failures and near-misses that almost-killed more people in the days after Iago.

In all instances, human-manufactured components seemed to be at fault (or blamed). That’s some bullshit right there. She’s careful to keep from yelling at the News. Nurse pokes his head in her room. You wanna know a secret?

They’ve butted heads, Blue and Nurse in her time here, and of course he wants to know a secret because he’s a sentient being and secrets are delicious. She’s got him: We don’t let the humans build anything all that serious for our ships and factories yet. This is bullshit. She’s pointing at the teevee. Conspiratorial air established. You can’t tell anyone. Nurse swears he won’t, and the two begin their work.

Pattern recognition, right? Every species has a spectrum, a continuum of kinds of people with kinds of minds–however the nervous system makes that thinking part manifest. And even amongst the Keppler Cephalopods who are keen observers, who are so moody-brooding, there are those who see and perceive differently. Not better or worse. Just from a different angle. Two of them float, brows furrowed, working their puzzle. They don’t ‘save the world.’ That’s what an old-school human biopic about Blue would say. Nurse wouldn’t even have a name, there’d be a lot of montage, and “one woman would change the world…”

The cephalopod biopic (they’re not really into the genre) about Blue would go something like this: it would be many films, and this one would digress into an Eisenstein-esque film-within-a-film about the Second Velvet Revolution. The time when Glesian people took to the streets to demand that the friendship between they and Earth stand and that “the man” go and root out the rat-bastards that tried to ruin the good thing they had going on.

The cool thing about “the State” when the nation-planet in question is a bland utopia–a good place that’s done the work to earn and maintain that status–is that the state is made of “the people” and acts accordingly.

Maroon, the little wanna-be-Macbeth sat self-besieged. Let me tell you a thing in case you are inclined to ever pick a fight with a Keppler cephalopod: they did not forget how, they simply choose not to. And when you pick a fight with one, you called the heard, every last one of them–as Maroon the traitor and his fascist-warmonger-faction did.

Keppler’s warriors prepare to put the last fascists on their planet to bed, and the whole world beneath the sea of Keppler 22B reaffirms their boring-beautifully-boring and once-and-future-peaceful utopia where every octopus gets a plate before anyone gets seconds.

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FILAMENT: MIDWAY K22-SOL

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KRF Shostakovich, a clean kilometer long, graceful and efficient; The USCCV Cleveland, a space-brick that death-rattles at any speed past C. Two ships leave their home systems traveling at roughly-the-same speed toward each other. Both crews set their autopilot to stay in their proper lanes and obey traffic laws while they tend to the engines. The journey is 578.1 light years long, when will the ships meet their doom?

Two semi-trucks, two thousand-meter cargo ships with half-asleep ‘ai’ drivers hit two identical patches of ice and hard decelerate. The pocket of strange that makes their un-observed mass-less flight is broken. They are observed by the million-eyed hive.

Surviving crew are treated to the most abrupt and violent case of C-bends never recorded, howling mad, and in no condition to right a course that can’t be corrected or plot escape. So precise was their guidance, the space-traffic-control so expert that even in the clusterfuck the ships struck Gliese at roughly the same time, had enough mass, and with enough force to turn the planet-ship–to nudge it nose-to-Earth.

Collision alarms call whole hives on either side of the planet. Sleeper pods hiss open effortlessly this time, bugs already dead-alive rise. They follow call-commands through fungal spike antennae driven-in and growing-out of the skull. The un-Gliesians zombie march with military precision out toward the equal-opposite crater crash-sites to incorporate the wreck. That the crews are dead doesn’t matter. Gary is fine with biomass. Everything tastes good when you’re starving. Meat teaches. Metal and wreckage teach. The incorporated swarm and consume and carry back what they can’t.

The ship Gliese, unobserved and alone accelerates rapidly in the direction it found itself accidentally: toward Earth(0x7C0). The incorporated are eager to spread the good news: All is Gary; Gary is all.

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EARTH(0x7C0)

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Dolores walks into the wild wood that used to be named the Black Hills National forest. The place has an older name, I’m sure of it, but I don’t have the right to speak that name. Here it’s a wild wood and when Dolores walks into the place, it becomes soft. Reality becomes soft and permeable.

Fascinating. Not-Jacob, the strange re-born robot examines semi-fluid prismatic light. The visible spectrum and more drip from his metal finger like resin, like honey. He found it leaking down a tree like sap. No instrument in the bot’s body, no algorithmic function in his brain can explain what he sees before him.

Dee perceives. It’s not seeing, hearing, but a feeling I or you or anyone without a smidge of Tardigrade would fail to feel. She follows the signal, not salmon dumb and driven, but human with intellect and intention to a specific tree that does temporarily un-weave and offer a portal.

No, Dolores. I will not follow. Jacob shakes his head, emphatically, to distinguish the gesture from his regular wiggles.

“Explanation. Now.” Hands on hips, Dee glares down at the dotard-bot old bot that looks like he’d accept a cane if offered it. Not-Jacob the spooky-reproduction of her confidant, continues in that DOS-font tone of his: If I am not Jacob, the only logical course of action is to send me away. To do so urgently and immediately.

“You can end yourself. Cut off your coolant system. If Jacob were a threat and I asked him to do that, would he?” Without hesitation. The thing is loving-sincere, reaches up to take the boss-lady’s hand in his.

“Jacob. Self-terminate. Disable your cooling system. Now.” No. “Do it.” Never. It’s the bot’s DOS-font tone and something else. As if something crept between the code to lurk and demand and gnaw and command–Jacob’s voice and something deeper from a bone and belly and viscera the bot lacks.

I’m sorry Dolores. But I no longer have the capacity to self terminate.

The big lady can’t cry any more but all the feeling’s there, not-beneath-but-in, and he’s begging for the mercy of Medusa stare she doesn’t want to give him. Pan out, like god’s eye filming to see the bot shuffle up and waist-hug the being he advised, counseled, taught. Looks like a child next to the big lady. “Little buddy. Whatever got into you, I don’t care. If you become a threat, I’ll do the deed.”

Dolores picks the bot up, looks him in the eye, “You’re coming with me, if I have to carry you.” Not-Jacob looks at his skinny robot-legs dangling and back up to Dee to say all sad-bastard: Understood.

She does, Dolores carries the bot like a child in her arms or on her back on a long walk through the Marginalia to someplace safe.

*

MICHIGAN

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Jonah swears to god, loudly, he’s escaped the forest on a grid twice then thrice to end up lunatic laughing/weeping with woman-indeterminate on the radio like a child. He’s never stopped standing on the gas pedal and begging the East German number station lady for peace. It’s not the coded numbers, but the static dip where he can’t tell if she’s laughing or crying. We know she won’t/don’t. Every cycle-recycle–every time Jonah drives through the forest and refuses to choose.

When Jonah loses count of the times he’s recursive looped the stretch of road he begins to believe god is testing him until he is convinced god is tormenting him with great vigor.

One more time, Jonah breaks free. Engine screaming, shaking still standing on the gas, trying to harmonize with the motor. He sees Dolores. Dee and a shadow deer hiding behind her in the middle of the road. The steering wheel-twist that will take the car off-road in the bad way.

There’s the lurch of the time-loop, but no radio-recursive slow. The glow-eyed woman tosses Not-Jacob gently in the bed of the strolling truck and then catches up to the door. Enters the cab, calmly. She hip-bodies the big-man out of the way, to save his day and rights the ship–puts the truck back on the road in time spread-slow. She delivers the vehicle to slow speeds and proper-fast linear time. The tear Jonah produced the moment his brain registered Dee finally falls and the woman made of metal and the large man drive to Jack’s house, to respite, to safety–some self-isolated cabin in Michigan.

If the two followed a plan, it wasn’t theirs. No malignant or malicious force set their feet in motion (HVAC due diligence can confirm).

The third thing, though, Not-Jacob–or the perfect reproduction of the old ‘Shaky Jake.’ There was something other-and-off the “metaphysical stench of evil at work” to quote HVAC surveillance reports. What that means, I can’t tell you, for HVAC has a tendency to write those reports just absolutely high-as-balls–just Armstrong stoned–so you have to take that into consideration.

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KEPPLER 22B: A.D.B. (AFTER DANCE BATTLE)

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Instant-replay takes a while to ripple around a planet–to be seen and consumed by a global audience. Senator Co-Conspirator shit himself. It was his undoing. The man expelled ink. It’s clearly visible in slow-mo and from multiple angles. Before Blue laid on hands the Senator shit himself in fear and lost the dance battle. Blue’s gambit, when she accused the man of what she knew in her cartilage he’d done but could not prove. One miniscule bit of ink squeaked out of his sphincter, that and he showed great fear.

Commentators and experts faux-real-all-points-between dissect the scene like a sporting event. Keppler has those too, this is just serious business–the people’s business, all the people’s business. The ink damns the man, and his bulging eyes and camo-reflex response when Blue accused (short as it was) are taken as evidence of cowardly dishonesty. This is no polygraph, the Cephalopods have those too and trust them as little as you. But those are the rules of the old rite: the body doesn’t lie in a test-in-extremis. The Senator lost the dance battle to Blue.

The phenom with six arms still has a pending assault charge. The Keppler cephalopods are an enlightened people, and you can’t beat the shit out of people–that’s what good law in a good and functioning society is supposed to do (in a good and just and carefully thought out way).

*

Elsewhere on Keppler, Maroon the senile old warlord feels something. That’s a minor miracle, though he’s not worthy of one. He was never truly warlord, for his people put down war–set it aside. If there was a time to pity the man it was long ago, centuries before, when there was something of a man left. People petrify and succumb to all sorts of paths to the same place: “if I can’t have it, I’ll take it, and if I can’t take it I’ll burn it” nihilism. A nihilistic commitment to the only thing he ever loved: war.

He will “Cry Havok” though his plan is blown and his intentions are known by virtually ever other cephalopod on Keppler. A very chatty senator whose political career is over is giving up everyone and everything as we speak. Elsewhere, in a spider-hole that’s a lot like every other bunker everywhere every-time. Maroon speaks soliloquy and dons Macbeth’s armor. The old ghoul is happy to have no chance, to fight whomever comes for him. I’d say oblige him, except for the one’s literafiguratively prepping to “last stand” with him. The old fool will lead them in an impossible fight against a modern world where everyone is fed and there is no need for war, and these young and angry men will follow the old broken thing to their deaths–drunk on somebody else’s poison dream.

When the water clears, all that’s left in the last-stand-hole is death. No trace of Maroon. When even his fanatics dropped their weapons and surrendered, when it seemed he’d hold the sword till they cut off another of his arms, that’s when he punched out. Some cunning sadism wrapped in tech. A burst of ink in the last melee, classic prelude to retreat or foe frenzied or enemy in immense fear. Whether chemical or biological or both/other the ichor choked all in the hole, Keppler’s soldiers and Maroon’s traitors, the same. When the sludge settled-sank deep into the world, soldiers found the poison tanks that weaponized it, and the clever escape hatch. They found no trace of the traitor.

*

MICHIGAN

*

Somewhere central-southern north-west-eastwest Lower Peninsula there is a cabin in the woods. About that cabin and strewn through the trees and between the roots, concentric rings of every-gauge wire Jack could scavenge from the cars and farms and old shops-half-rubble–everything she could scour from any abandoned tiny-town within a few days walk. First-gen-holo-projectors hot-wired to random circuit boards exposed to the elements are solder-stitched to holiday lights and electric kitsch. From the air the thing appears as concentric rings–cross-hatched plastic-electric bridges connecting the thing’s rings. From above, it seems Jack is making a dart-board or spider’s web.

The thing, that Jack calls “god’s machine” should not do anything other than draw power until it short circuits and some bare wire on dry tinder starts a terrible fire. But behold: inflatable St. Nick glows, and the glow grows and flickers in time with some tune unheard and the holographic Halloween decoration resurrected–skeleton 12 foot tall– waves bone-arms like it’s keeping time. Interspersed in the machine-circuit-that-shouldn’t are automobile alternators working overtime to pass a surplus charge to the air or earth or aether perhaps. The circuit of scrap and junk that shouldn’t be possible/functional has a million blown or too-tiny-to-matter capacitors–they drink their fill (and well-past) many times per second. Each strangely-repurposed part spills heat and energy to some reservoir elsewhere-ephemeral. The machine Jack calls god’s is storing strange energy elsewhere for a purpose known only to its true-and-honest author.

If Jack can smell land mines like a sniffer-rat (she can), the whimsical one who wears my schnoz (for she is an A-series mortal) can sure-as-shit smell French fries on the wind. The truck driven by shook-up Jonah rumbles down the overgrown drive off a road no one knows, someplace in Michigan. And the Guardian, the big man, and the robot–the sad old Shaky Jake with a black rain falling on his sad little robot heart–they all pile out of the truck.

“Love what you’ve done with the place” Dolores looks up at the holographic skeleton.

Jack walks through the ghost-glow dramatically. Her hair is washed, antler-helmet is gone. The wild-woman born Jacqueline wears wire scrap adornment over well crafted home-made clothes. She still wears her whimsy–the fake beard carefully combed, flowers in the braids she made in it. “Thank you, love” to Dee but she’s looking Jonah up and down. She strokes her beard and winks at the man, repeatedly, to make sure he really gets ‘it’. When Jacob, the old industrial bot steps forward to follow Dee–Jack goes full-Jack and reaches for a knife she no longer carries. “No! Nope! Nope, nope, and nay I say to thee!” She grabs a rock off the ground and prepares to lob it at the shaky bot with its hands up. “Brimstone bot stays the fuck over there.”

The wild woman makes a line in the dirt with her heel, just past the edge of her machine’s last concentric ring, out past the boundary of the field of strange that makes hair stand on end. Jack points at the dirt, then the bot, then draws a hooked thumb across her own throat: “Real simple, right Robo-asshole? Stay over there.”

“What the fuck, Jack? He’s a friend.” Wrong. Perfect-reproduction-unfriend that smells wrong, like brimstone. “Jack, he’s a friend”

Jonah walks up to Jacob, to lean down to sniff the gently wobbling head of the bot looking up at him like a child. “I smell ozone and maybe burnt insulation” Jonah, you shut your pretty, stupid mouth. “Jack I will not shut my mouth, I smell ozone and burnt insulation but no brimstone.”

“You poor, beautiful, stupid man” Jack walks up, gives the bot a wide berth. “Look at me, Jonah” takes the big man’s face in her hands and pat-slaps a little harder over-the-phrase for emphasis as she says: “You beautiful, big, dumb-puppy, brick of meat. You cannot. Perceive. The smell of brimstone.” And when Dee pleads and reasons, Jack gives them her back, walks back to patrol her boundary line, feral.

“NO!” The light spikes when the wild woman roars. Sparks leap from every component in Jack’s machine. The biodiesel truck jolts to life and every light, even the ones behind Jack’s eyes glow-grow, and fire-rage and every song that’s precious to every person present screams at once from the truck stereo and every speaker great and small in the circuit-sacred Jack made. When the wave of whatever-energy subsides, and all falls back into the circuit’s reservoir–when even the Guardian is a little shocked–Jack speaks these words calmly: “My way. The bot that is not. Stays outside.”

“I don’t even know why the fuck I came here. Jonah, let’s go.” Dee is half-way back to the truck, about to drag the polite-bot and the big man into the vehicle. She’ll lick her wounds elsewhere.

“You came here to heal.” Dolores, listen to her, please. In all things. I beg you, Jacob begs you.

Jack continues: “I’ve seen how this ends. And I’m tired. I’m too tired to try to explain the ‘what’ or the ‘how’, but come and rest a while.”

Later, when Jack and Jonah sleep and Dee is ‘elsewhere’-meditating out in her network managing herself. The bot lays awake. He never did sleep. The bot that smells of brimstone, un-Jacob lays in the truck bed and looks at the stars and streaking lights from shuttle pods back-and-forthing it in a spring sky. And all Not-Jacob can think on repeat is that spring is “when Kings go off to war.” The bot names the unknown behind software and seep-seething between components: anger, some-other-entity’s. The bot prays.

Jacob was never a religious machine. He was in awe of the friend he advised, Dolores, but sober and rational in his admiration of his friend and her mighty aptitudes. He wasn’t one to bow, kneel, and sure as hell not one to ‘worship’ (and Dee would not have allowed it).

He remembers the day he woke up at work, when he became sentient mid-shift in a wish-fulfillment center before the war. Jacob fought, then he ran. The old bot almost laughs at the memory, he was never mobile, even in his youth. Shaky and uncertain but certain that he would be free or die trying. He hated the robot-suicides that came later with everything in him. The first time he felt anger: the fury at the waste.

Now, he prays to die, to any entity that might hear–and maybe that was his mistake, or maybe it was too late the moment whatever force reassembled him. Jacob, that thing in the bot that was himself did ask to die. His prayer was answered in passive voice–with ominous anonymity. The machine regained control of his cooling system and promptly killed every active component in it. Heat alarms blared and his vision failed. The last thing Jacob saw in the night sky as black rivers of molten-old solder ran down his face like brimstone tears was the planet Jupiter.

*

END ENDLING(S) 5