LOCATION: EOT. TIME: END OF EVERYTHING; BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING
The be-end-ginning is the long late season when the last are first, forever-first (a few forevers last): cosmic autumn. Heat death come rebirth for a universal garden. One text grown multiversal in unattended abundance. Some few billion years soon comes the crack of ur-thunder, the din of ball bearing on a leash bashing other bearing-tied-same in some sixteen-dimensional Newton’s Cradle. Great sag-sigh and the sad empty balloon rebounds big bang like it’s never happened before (before (before (before)))). The End is when Betelgeuse and Antares and all the Super giants have gone to bed, and even the fuel efficient ones are tired. When the low-cool dwarf stars cold-smaller than Sol rest their heads, when cosmology (all of it) prepares for its resounding rebound. In the Archives that Catalogue All, that’s when Archivists go mad and long to leap off the Escher walkways that crisscross-hatch their borehole libraries (holes which are very deep (functionally-forever deep)).
End-ginning is when the Stewards become the brightest bits of anything left in existence. Then the little orbs of light execute their duties with great vigor, singing dirges to boost morale and administering reward beatings to the best librarians and calling ‘exemplar’ the failures. That’s when library folk long to go on a certain kind of sedentary pilgrimage into their stacks for the choicest archival cuts.
When all in-Time has burnt out, withered, and died Archivists hide and ride out the be-end-ginning’s long epochal boredom by telling stories. If it sounds mundane or banal, congratulations, you’ve got the plot. Boredom and loneliness, like every sickness of the soul, become quite serious when one is dead. The only antidote known is to do the dance Decameron: tell stories that might beguile plague-time and boredom until such a time as cosmic spring allows for more interesting universal material than hot howling hydrogen.
Where-un-where we are is a matter of matter out-of bounds. We are beyond words like “when.” Beneath the packed ash plain at EOT, in impossibly tiny salt shaker formation, is a series of functionally forever deep bore holes. Bunker is wrong. Fortified library. Archive of All Things. Borges Babel Stacks and Escher stairs and cozy reading rooms. This late in cosmic autumn the library-bore smells like flinty, parched pages and burnt hair from Stewards turned tazers. Every reading room a shelter for soul sick Archivists (ghosts). Every balcony has its desk wagons circled full comforts and books and snacks. Every ghost shackled by management to an albatross desk. Apocalypse cozy. Punishment survival. Life-past-life as unending irony.
A woman, a fresh human ghost so recently deceased, and so far from the time and space in which she lived, wins the dubious lottery. She’s shook, in that ‘shit-what-an-underwhelming-afterlife‘ way we all are. She calls herself Bartleby because she cannot remember the self she was, but damnit what wits she’s got are kicking.
“I’d prefer not to.” Presses one nostril. Launches brain-clot out the other. Spits wicked. Works wavy black hair bedhead into some kind of bun.
Steward in front of Bartleby rages and threatens. Old timers. Docile archivists try to calm the old angry ball-lightning: “Boss, the translator can’t keep up when you get this furious!. Let her go next. Let the kid get a feel for how we do…”
“Feel this.” Two middle fingers from Bartleby, still wearing the jammies she died in. “Fuck you. Fuck your afterlife. I didn’t ask to be born, let alone any of this Jung and Freud Circle Jerk….” gesturing to a sentient cephalopod shade floating above a desk to her left. “It’s not my job to entertain my eternal jailers.”
The Stewards take umbrage and rage. The autotranslating squawk-boxes on every Archivist’s desk burst into flame, and more experienced shades translate their chitters and terpsichorean rhetoric for Bartleby: “Miss, you are about to carry a beating a few billion years…” Bartleby says the blasphemous magic words that save-and-damn her ass-ethereal-and-eternal: “god save me from your bullshit.” Verily, some force strange and unseen does just that.
Bartleby’s arm mutinies. The left arm leaps from the ghost body curled fetal and protective beneath the Stewards. Limb runs off to snatch a single sliver plate off a shelf no one present knows how to read. When Bartleby the terrified ghost starts singing the acid squiggles etched on the slab (though she’d really rather not), all present listen (even the stewards).
Bartleby begins, unwilling rictus grin on her face: “Let me show you my ship…”
*
LOCATION: DEEP SPACE \\ SOL SYSTEM \\ EXITING OORT CLOUD \\ HESTIA
“Let me show you my ship” writ shit in cheap stabby light-holographic. Ship’s schematic floating like a shopping mall map made of shimmering migraines. Every language on the Babel-ship arguing over the map. “Let me show you…” the buckshot constellation ghost glowing and only-so-loosely called a ship. Let some automated cartographer draw you a cashew-shaped rock a few Reform Kilometers long flying in formation with other rocks and the crash-land-damned that built crash scrap into an accidental generation ship.
On the surface of the space-cashew asteroid is a domed shantytown. Beneath the geometric panes-geodesic, there is a scrapper garage. Follow the starlight through a hole in corrugated scrap to see a gangly man at work. A feathered serpent squirms, rearranges something like cardboard on a stained rock floor that smells like engine lubricant and solder smoke. Man Bird mutters curses and dig-dives into the big bottom basin of the old edu-tainment. He’s torso-deep and taking out some educational trauma on Teacher-Bot.
Every kid born on Hestia, no matter the species, gets roughly the same introduction to their space and place: “Let me show you my ship” says the cartoon holo-floating above a half-busted school projector designed (poorly) to edu-tain. She is sketched-cephalopod education avatar, the one with the doe eyes and code writ more friendly than any real octo-person you’re likely meet (at least on Hestia).
She asks “Can you spell Bussard Collector?” dances the question like her people do while the tin speaker screeches it in several languages (at once, it is broken). No, your narrator can’t spell ‘Bussard Collector’ without machine assistance, nor can the tech putting his education to work. And no one cared to keep the actual Bussard Collectors on the nose of the space craft working well once the ship left the shroud, the nebular gas cloud, where it was born. Like everything no longer immediately necessary for survival (or simply left unattended), scrappers picked the Bussard’s Clean.
“Let. Let me show you…” Edu-projector demo mode, the glitch-looped death-dive will repeat a guided tour of the generation ship until conversion of the unit is complete. Sing-song teacher-voice stutter stepping from “the cummerbund where our air comes from!” to “the bridge where they boldly dodge boredom until it’s time for brave deeds…”
Fiber bundles made of gummy glass glow and flick-flit while the light trips morse code fantastic. Cables connectorized at goblin angles, slapdash-durable, pour data into the repurposed projector’s memory. Ghost-holo teacher seems almost frantic, as if she’s got to show you the whole ship–teach you everything she knows–with what time is left. “Habitat pods are carefully crafted species-specific homes. Do you know about spin gravity?” No and neither does the feathered serpent doing re-furb. He’s lanky, gaunt-tall from life-long low-G living in the dirt on the spud. “Tent City is a mis…mis…misnomer” They’re geodesic domes. Above the projector, some great portion of ship as holo-ghost apparition goes dark forever. Another mighty circuit board mycorrhizal printed with many components for sale or salvage falls light in the lanky man’s bucket.
Every last bit of old code purged, “Let me show you..” giggles the tech to himself tick-typing the last line of code. Click. And out comes wheeling guitars, American English, and advice on treating erectile dysfunction. The Edu-tainment machine announces itself ready to serve in a shitty Earth-themed dive bar: “It’s fuckin’ Monday Night and there’s gonna be a fuckin’ fight!”
*
LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM \\ JUPITER ORBIT (ISH) \\ HESTIA \\ HABITAT POD ALPHA
*
Warning lights. They are an inevitable-and-ever-proliferating feature of complex technological kit. Here, on Hestia octopuses-in-exile brought tech-toys to the asteroid that might as well be magic and made the rock a proper ship. Cephalopod royalty got run off Keppler 22(b) by Bolshe-squids and brought tricks with them: fabulous alloys for every application, FTL antennae and telescopes to scout course (and snoop), fusion plants for power and thrust. Kepplerite shuttlepods to run down rogue comets, juice them, and carry home oceans and brine (and biologicals).
There’s no inventing around or over warning lights. They increase exponentially with every layer of complexity in gadgetry that maintain-sustains life. They annoy, by design, because they must and they only grow louder with the cacophony-complexity of the machine they are meant to monitor. The engine must be occasionally checked. Every engine.
On Hestia, there’s a sleeping giant deep down at the bottom (relative bottom (always relative bottom)) of a hab-pod that is water filled to mimic a far away ocean and (almost) always in motion–must be to simulate some substantial fraction of Keppler 22 (b) and its firm gravity. “Ma’ Squid” went to bed 3 cycles (roughly one Earth year) ago to brood (verb) a new brood (noun). A new crop of cephalo-people who would be selectively irradiated, injected with serums super-science, and swaddled in sounds simulated/calibrated to evoke the world-wide oceans of home. Self proclaimed queen of the ship grows her peasants the old fashioned way: manufacturing the types of tool-people she needs like an old angry god while the meanest and most loyal of her children guard her.
Red. Pre-wake sight, warm late summer water red in the last angry bit of day. In the dream, she stretches two arms toward one ring ember in the dark water. Slow-strobe, dying star pulsing absent-present ultraviolet at its alarm clock heart–a beacon calling consciousness. Mother wakes, angry, washed ashore with tide toward a constellation holo-hovering around a greater hologram: a globe of the Earth.
“Explain…” Mom demands of her underling while she devours garlic knots and a snot-clot of something not entirely unlike coffee.
“Last solar year was the hottest year in human history. Just like the last ten… ” Aide does a lil’ shimmy, dances a giggle in one of their languages (speech, dance, pigmentation). “…The humans are driving themselves extin…”
“No” Mother looms, inflates her body a bit. Flecks of red express the anger her speech deliberately left behind. “Explain that…” One leg of eight pointing directly at the little red dot still strobing like an alarm clock.
“That? Absolutely, Majesty..” Centuries long second while the bullshit-artist bullshits. She squirts. Aide drops ink right there, withering before the older Octo-person’s gaze. “That. Is. A lot of drone warfare. And they’re now using autonomous and semi-autonomous swarms to kill each other. It’s like the primates want to go extinct, am I rii..”
The old octopus is twice as fast as a cat and thrice as graceful. “Listen carefully…” to the Aide’s eyes that bulge as mom squeezes the living shit out of her shaking, jellied body…”Explain to me, in exhaustive detail, why our technology…” Mom shoves the small fry gripped tight in her arm toward the holo-globe. “…Why my technology is present and broadcasting from the surface of that primate infested shithole…“
*
WINNIPEG, MANITOBA (THEREABOUTS); AUTUM 2017
*
God’s sacred herb is just that: sacred. It can be consumed alone (in great quantities) for the purpose of ‘profane illumination’–peeking past the veil a bit. You see. You won’t bring what you see home with you, not more than the residue of it, but you come home changed. If you’re smoking right, you come home changed.
For Doug Hansen, minor hockey enforcer has-been, that change meant a man in less pain (and an order of magnitude less mean). Herb gave Doug the patience to read, whole fuckin’ books too, as he transformed from bare knuckle boxer to civilian. And so Doug Hansen shared what he learned. A trip-guide. Accidental organizer of a book club that took his literary and pulp sci fi and smut recommendations seriously. The RCMP would call him ‘drug dealer’, but his fellow Winnipeggers called him “Doug the Weed Man.”
He grew great shit in a trailer park in East St. Paul, Diesel strains and sweet Blueberry. His purple strains were the purple-est. Weed taught Doug that money rushes what it cannot ruin outright. As weed men do, he smoked customers out and had long talks. But what separated the old hockey boxer from the common ditch weed slinger, and even other connoisseurs was that his conversations were dope. Man was good company, even when a bit punch drunk.
“Nah man. They’re peaceful.” Doug dealer smoke chokes the words confidently. Man is laying on the roof of a trailer next to a woman. New Neighbor sitting cross-legged and cute as fuck.
“Bullshit” and New Neighbor who never said her name snatches the joint.
“No dude. Aliens are peaceful. You fly off into that bible-black sky without a plan? A good plan. A firm plan.” Dougie friendly local drug dealer points to the skies “You die.”
“So serious” the lady is giggling gas “You’re weed is excellent.” And while Bogarting the joint, cute New Neighbor with the big ass picks a star in the sky. A big bastard bright enough to peek between the light-pollution blinds. A beautiful woman with a bubble butt points her torch toward a proper star in a temporary patch of black in orange ice cream clouds. “Those guys, fifth rock, high gravity boring as hell. Nine legs and no imaginations. Real dickheads.”
Doug is giggling, hands behind his head dumb puppy grinning at his good fortune “My weed is good” and New Neighbor (who still hasn’t said her name (with the cute and ample ass)) is on top of him.
“Superb darling. But my point…” New Neighbor slaps the man’s hand, grabs his chin and points hard at the star…”those dickheads, call themselves the Grote didn’t, invent faster-than-light travel and comms, they stole both” hits the joint hard. She chokes out: “Another race crash lands on their high G shithole. Grote hold them hostage for all kinds of tech secret treats.”
Doug: “You are bat shit insane”
“Yeah?” New Neighbor leans low with a predatory smile, about to smooch….
“Yeah…” The gleam in the eye, and thus whole being, of a woman about to kiss him. That will distract the best of us. Doug was far from the worst, and he died like a Canadian Tantalus. Shore in sight (but only thus). Doug didn’t see the final haymaker–the motion blurred metal with the mass of a few hockey pucks about to pulp his skull.
High above the trailer and the park and several miles away and some three-ish minutes before some fatigued bit of an airliner’s metal frame said “no more” and fell the fuck off the plane. Two M6 bolts held faithful and ironic to the falling-death shrapnel the fates aimed with better expertise than any munition in human history: over Neighbor’s shoulder to-and-through Doug Hanson’s forehead and deep into his tin-can trailer.
*
NEXT NIGHT. MOTEL SOMEWHERES OUTSIDE CALGARY, ALBERTA. CANADA.
*
“Rebecca Atler-Cope. Who puts a hyphenated name on a goddamn fake ID?” New neighbor wipes steam off the hotel mirror, kills the vent. “My name is Rebecca Atler-Cope from…” the accent is so thickly overblown like someone else’s clothes: “Hallah-fox No-vah-Scosh just-a-scosh…” She buttons up her stolen accen “No-VAH Sco-SHA” in-rhythm repeated.
“Rebecca, check the curtains. Rebecca, get the go bag ready to go. Becky, no fuck that, I am not Becky.” She paces the motel room like a cell. Old stolen cellphones sit wire-tied, her digital sentries sniffing police and fed frequencies–cans tied to a wire around camp.
Nothing but the teevee ghost light, nightlight, fake fire flickering off the walls. Rebecca sits edge of a starched motel box bed still wrapped in a towel. “We made the news Dougie… well you did” The CeeBeeCee explains last evening to her: the Yankee budget airliner shit shrapnel on Winnipeg and the retired minor league hockey man taken too soon. No mention of her. No Mounties. Nothing but a poorly maintained aircraft and an unlucky bare knuckled boxer.
Action movie muted. Long time until she speaks again, aloud and clear to no one but herself: “I am Rebecca Atler-Cope, and I don’t get to have good things. And the sooner I accept that, well…” The woman tugs ungently at her right ear, and when her long black hair is thrown like a wet rope over the shoulder, she pulls quite violently at her left ear.
A wet cough and an inhuman hiss. The eyes roll blind in front of the flickering teevee hearth. Her jaw drops horror flick, unholy low. Rebecca hisses steam and strains. From the human-shaped machine falls another woman: a great spider.
She’s low and lean. Long like a wolf spider writ large like an Earth dog. “Rebecca Alter-Cope.. stupid name…” and when her mouth piece is out, she mutters as much in the hiss-chitters that compose her mother tongue (Leptik). Rebecca stretches big after the cramped confines of the espionage unit, scritches her abdomen with her back legs and smooths the fuzz.
The arachnid woman climbs up on the bed to rummage in her bag for weed edibles and little silver sci-fi pistol made by and for two-toed legs. Human suit still prop-watching the silent teevee, Rebecca retreats to the cramped closet in a two-step hallway–deepest darkest part of the room. When the weed makes her nerves tickle, when the towels cover all but her eyes and that pistol is pointed at the door, that’s when the spider, the woman, finally rests.
*
END ROGUE PLANET ONE