Ann Arbor, MI
*
That’s an inaccurate title. Jonah tries to steal an MRI machine. And it’s not even the whole machine. I don’t know if you know this reader, but MRI machines are very large.
After his doubt, and several days into his certainty era, Jonah determined the need for a component–one more thing for his imagined machine. Jonah did politely assail a local university hospital to acquire this component. Assail here means walking in the front door in his jammies, patchy beard, and a dirty bathrobe.
Little fella made a good run, but let’s face it: he’s not a thief. Not a criminal. Definitely not a fighter. Look at the scrawny asshole panic-eyed, messy beard, skittering through the frame on that hospital security cam footage. Only reason(s) the keystone cops behind him didn’t tackle-and-taze the sickly stringbean were surprise at the crazy man’s presence and what he stole. That and when staff confronted Jonah, elbow-deep in the machine just-a-yanking on something, he ripped the component out and ran. There were some ‘did-he-just?’ confused stares between a very tired nurse and the security she summoned before they began to chase him. The other reason is divine (or perhaps infernal) interference in his favor.
Watch this next shot, I’ll blow it up, 3-D-full-hologram. It’s still going to be black and white, you’ll have to imagine the antiseptic smells and squeaky floors. Jonah sprints down the hall holding the heavy-metal component like the football he never held in his youth. Watch him lower his shoulder like he’ll try to run through that security guard only to juke around him in the hospital hallway. How did his hips move in ways he never knew they could, and how did his body know a thing his brain had never tried to do? I cannot explain this rationally, and I doubt he could.
Jonah does not offer any better explanation to the good folks of Ann Arbor as he tears through downtown.’ I think he thinks he’s making a break for Washtie’ in the Forge Biodiesel. He gets completely and promptly lost among the couple blocks of knotted high-rise gentle-brutalism. It was as if the city of his youth became superimposed, the flicking film image of what-was elbowed time open and wrote over what-is. Past present fought with each other and the man, so very stoned, drove in cubed circles around a few blocks until the constabulary intervened. Well, they tried to intervene.
The Forge Motors biodiesel-convert pickup, old ugly-beautiful brick of a truck, is just absolutely hemorrhaging motor oil. The machine-of-indeterminate-purpose Jonah tack-welded (poorly) to the bed groans and strains and sheds components each time he takes re-takes a too-hard turn. No real injuries, just a few scraped fenders and a busted robot gate at the parking garage.
Thirteen security cams document events in the garage. Countless cell phones out and filming. Jonah is screaming “Merry Christmas Pottersville!” to the people dodging his recklessness. All the way up, police in hot pursuit, to the tippy top of the parking garage where the truck, in full view of it’s pursuers and every lookey-loo and their tech: Jonah drives off the garage and into a clear-sky lightning bolt (and beyond). The screaming machines three: truck, the device on the back, and Wadsworth, gone in half-an-instant. Jonah ascended like a holy man or a man who had convinced himself he was holy.
It took Jonah about a minute to careen and scream and drive from base to tip-top of the structure. Time-space chucklefuckery occurred. Divine/infernal intervention confirmed. There was simply no time for Jonah to have integrated whatever component he stole into the cross-circuited monstrosity on the back of the truck (unless someone stopped time for him). Besides, if the machine was what the crazy-man rant on his wall described? It wasn’t likely to do much other than drain its power source quite quickly while bursting into flame. Jonah’s machine appeared, in his wall-scrawl and in film and photo as a child’s first attempt at a jet engine.
Indeed, there were flames jetting out the back-bed of the pickup when it flew, truly flew, to wherever the lightning took it (and it’s occupants).
*
EOT
*
Two black holes merge. Four words. Subject. Verb. Two black holes merge in space. Subject. Verb. Object. Preferred order depends on language. Sometimes that verb will just leap out at you. Some languages prefer it that way: verb-object-subject. Lep-tik, is like that: a language spoken by a people that evolved from something like jumping spiders. Smart. Never shut up. Prolific, if not great, story tellers.
Everything is a circle plot, like a spirograph, and every time a Leptissian sets about weaving a web, they walk in circles liturgical for a span you’d call a week-at-least. They speak in dance and chittering Lep-Tik octaves (and the rhythm is as important as the rhyme). The pretty-much-jumping-spiders depict both languages (dance and chitter) in a third when they weave a web.
That liturgical circle is necessary, for as the big-eyed bugs (damned if they don’t look identical to Earth jumping spiders) spin their wheels, they are planning something “the best of bees” can’t match.
The caves of 55 Cancri e are just rotten with the little precious things, Leptissians. The webs and the cities built on the same logic writ-large are there long after the spider-people are gone.
I only know of them because I stumbled on their architecture. An old gate to some city or palace or transit station pounded down to the EOT by so many little spider feet–their drumming over such long time. The construction was so bare and elegant (fancy simple) and the decorative pattern so beyond-baroque that I had to see the place with the people that made the-this. That gave me a vector, a path, when I was wandering on a plain (upon which I should not have ever been) at that place past time.
Dead spiders saved from desiccation. I found that place and fell through to a tomb world so beautiful a monument that I had to rewind and watch the highs and lows of their whole civilization as a temporal-ghost–unable, gratefully unable, to interfere.
My sincere apologies for the tangent, but I need you to know how precious every portal, every pool of light on the ash plains at the EOT, truly is. This one was precious to me, the one that lead to 55 Cancri e. The prospect of a portal, a world entire being lost is a big deal, or at least it is supposed to be. And if the machinery of the heavens functioned at all a collision-consumption-destruction of a world, any world, would set off alarm bells.
Two pools of light out on the ash plain circled each other, less an orbit and more a death dance. Two enormous black holes firmly grappling in the firmament gives one a sense of the energy involved.
Two bits of bubble-wrap tap-dancing on your ear or an indiscreet fart. That’s about all anyone could have seen or saw at the End of Time. No one but the one who incited the collision was supposed to have perceived it.
You know the poor holy woman did or will because I shit the bed on order-of-events. My bad. Please forgive me and again consider the Parson’s long wandering (that I shall endeavor to fore-shorten in text).
The portal was not where the Parson knew-in-the-bone it should be (where archives said it should be). The Parson had a path and destination; the Parson wandered half-lost. Already-soul-sick, the ancient-beyond-ancient and very tired preacher was in danger of desiccation. She levitated cross-legged above the ash, that we’ve established, her preferred lazy level of locomotion at this stage of after-life. To further conserve energy, she unfurled the full length of her holy bathrobe. The parson flung the tail-feather fabric high till it caught the wind from nowhere to nowhere to further ease the effort of her passage.
The Parson sailed on an aimless wind that just-happened to deposit her at the ghost of a diner, the skeleton of a great museum next, last at a train station. There she waited because the “know in your bones” wits that had sustained her thus far said to. Conjured snacks. Hydration and caffeination. Little hallucination (a tardigrade with some boomers walked by, who says ‘no’ to that?). The never-ending, thrice-sanctified weed supply. The holy woman was prepared for a long wait and the water-bear kept her company for a long-past-long while. The tardigrade chilled with her because they are kind by nature and soul sickness is serious here. It is objectively the only kind of sickness there is at EOT, and thus the biggest deal.
Around the lonely liminal, half an old train station, the two portals twist-in-descent. One light pool links to Earth(18BEB4FA), it’s equal-opposite-dance partner to an Earth and a universe named Hex(NULL)–the catch-all designation for that which is stricken (from the archives or reality or both). As the luminous things, nothing really at all but light landing on sand and grit and ash, come closer they pick up speed. There is heat-hiss friction-whisper though nothing’s moving but the symbolic representation of two great masses about to merge. There is the hum drum beat of the light on the ash audible as the putter of an engine, the sight of ash hopping pop-corn.
The Parson sighs, relieved. Curiously alarmed at the spectacle rotating round her. But beings that know-in-the-bone are always grateful to see that which is known in front of them (for they always fear they are mad and wrong, that’s the cost of that kind of knowledge). There is another cost to having that kind of knowledge, or so I’ve heard: the certainty (also known in the bone) that the gift/curse will abandon them some day. That is the weight the Parson carried until the two portals danced close enough for her to perceive.
And when they finally collide, the signifying portals. There is just that little fart, burp, or a chuffle. Maybe a bit of a hiss. That does not diminish the significance of what’s occurred, not below but above. That firmament rotten with life and luminous matter lost a whole world, a universe-populated with them. It was perceived as instantaneous–one tiny light gone while one glowed brighter.
Two lamp-lit patches become one, when the light falling on and emanating from the plain became off and wrong–the visual equivalent of stinking of brimstone. Steel returns to the preacher’s spine, though her slouch does not change as she snacks and levitates toward the anomalous portal.
It’s then that she encounter’s the Animal that was a Man. The eye-orb emerges from the portal, red-hot metal that cools quickly to silver sheen, liquid metal rippling around and rebounding from a million dry rain-drop perturbances upon its surface. Around this agent of the machine that does god’s work in their absence many other orbs orbit in sequence like a chain of cheap satellites or the cold mechanical imitation of a biblically accurate divine.
The orbiting eyes halt and merge with the ball of liquid metal, and the thing bulges to the size of a compact car only to shit out, complete with vile slops and phlegmatic noises, an undead thing in the shape of a man. The Animal that was a Man reeks of shit and death and brimstone.
The Parson smells him before she can perceive the distorted mirror-darkly distorted reflection of a face almost hers (and once quite like mine). There’s rotting flesh, like bubonic boils, patched with the same alloy as the machine hovering above him.
Where the nose, my nose, should be (and once was) is a glob of that semi-molten metal like hand-moulded and badly-botched solder ball–pale, ashen-like-death, and the pale imitation of the beautiful beak I and my multiversal-cousin the Parson wear.
You remember the standoff from last chapter, right? The undead man drops the cowboy killer and tries to be menacing and the Parson is so very over it.
“No.” The Parson’s hand is raised, prepared to teach or to halt the man’s advance. And when he smirks and produces the weapon, the riot stick that clicks full length and crackles with lightning and pain.
She sighs at his posturing, “Look, some chucklefuckery occurred here.” She gestures at the profaned off-light portal beneath her levitating legs. “Let’s un-chuckle the fucks. Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff. Tell me what happened. We’ll fix it together.” But he’s already stomp-running, angry footfalls and a cloud of dust and ash behind.
“Easy, big boy.” Parson, ducks a swing at her beak. “I’m not the law. I just wanna help keep people from…” Preacher flits and circles cross-legged “..keep people from getting hurt.”
She’s behind-above-around the undead man. The Animal that was a man, rages: “I am the law” and flashes a bullshit badge never minted by authority heavenly or infernal. But if the badge is fake-blasphemous, the effect is very real–it blinds the Parson for an instant. In that time the corpse-man lands a blow.
“Ow, god-damnit.” Preacher wheels to crack the empty teacup on the side of the undead man’s head. She catches him, freak fast with the off hand–the licorice snack wielded like a weapon. It leaves a slap-welt on the Animal that was a Man’s face.
The Parson A(0x20B) floats back ten paces, shed’s the robe to reveal the yellow jumpsuit with the black stripe down the shoulder. “Come on. This is boring. Just tell me what you did and go in peace?” She finds something like ‘horse stance’ finds and re-lights the spliff she was working on. The skinny preacher woman with a distaste for violence and fisticuffs (but also being tazed by a jackboot) takes a bite of her licorice. “I could really go for some tea right now.” And when the un-living man charges her again, face deaths-head and rage-distorted, he swings across his body.
Parson rises to the balls of her feet and dance-step, pivots gracefully. The licorice whips down, to vine-wind around the undead man’s weapon, she’s string bean with a proper stance and perfect footwork. I don’t know, but it looks like Aikido. The angry lunge from villain finds himself on his back and disarmed. “No.” She says holding the tazer-club over the villain. She says it firmly, and its then she finds the light in his eyes.
Wrong word. Fire. Hellfire and hate an old and stupid and petrified familiar hate. “No.” She says it again, and we read and see and hear and perceive all the weight a two-letter word can carry and all the work one syllable can do from command to plea.
It’s hard to find the ‘evil twin’ of a face she knows in the half-rotten and patched mug on her opponent, but when the parson reads the eyes. “You’re…”
She hesitates and the monster in rough-rotten shape of man skitters back, finds its feet, sheds the shell jacket over his tacticool to clearly show what’s written on his burnt and reeking vest: A(0x63).
The first metastases: the undead A-series (picture me but ugly inside (and thus outside)) grabs a metal patch from a sore that looks bubonic on his arm, the metal heats and leaks like re-flowed solder. The monster in man shape casts liquid metal on the ash to cool. At his command, the eye-orb static-strikes the glob of metal greased with rotting villain to breathe un-life into a perfectly profane copy of the fascist A(0x63).
“Assault on an agent of the One-True-Author. A(0x63) requesting backup.” The monsters in perfect unison hiss into the perfect-copy melted radios on their shoulders that should not work, and the Eye-orb raises an antennae to heaven or hell or both and begins pulsing the message.
“Who exactly is it that you believe to be the ‘true’ author?” is the last thing the Parson gets to say before she’s too busy beating back proliferating and metastasizing undead jackboot villains. Every time she defeats them, each foe rises again to each produce a perfect copy of itself.
The Parson is soon surrounded by a small exponentially grown army of jackboots, all knife-smile grins and rotting violence.
That’s when the ‘backup’ the undead fake-authority called for finally arrives.
END EPITAPH 4