“I don’t think you should.”
“Who are you?”
“Teller,” she replies.
“What? What’s that?”
“My name. Teller.” She spells it, and smiles. At first glance, she looks young. But everybody looks young, and it means nothing. Something in the eyes, or deeper, implies an age substantially greater than his own. “Anyway,” she says with a fond assurance. “You can’t actually kill yourself.”
“Why not?”
And she laughs, apparently enjoying his foolishness. His desperate folly. “Of course you can’t. How could you? Haven’t you paid any attention to what we’ve been telling you?”
He shakes his head woefully.
Again, with an unnerving determination, the Authority asks, “What three things do you want today, Josh?”
With an easy strength, Teller pulls the pistol from his hand.
“Answer him,” she suggests.
“How about…?” He pauses, thinking in clumsy, obvious ways. “Okay,” he says. “A journal. From someone exactly like me, and from right after his botched suicide.”
The first make-portal opens, disgorging its gift.
He looks up at the woman, admitting, “I didn’t come with a list, this time. I don’t know—”
“Don’t lie,” she warns.
Then she takes a half-step backwards, as if giving him a taste of privacy. “There’s something you desperately want to see.”
He blurts the name of his lover. Twice, he says, “Pauline,” and then adds, “Where she didn’t kill herself. She went through the gate, and I found her waiting for me. Naked. That’s the universe. I want a digital showing us together there. Okay?”
A disc falls to the floor, and rolls.
“What else?” the Authority asks.
Sad eyes blink and lift.
“Another digital,” he blurts. “Showing me having sex with…”
He glances at his savior.
She shrugs her shoulders, amiable to whatever he wishes.
“Not that.” Josh drops his head, his face flushing. Slowly, slowly, a curious look builds, and then he smiles abruptly, saying, “I want an autobiography. Except each of my novel genes are changed. Are a little different.” It’s a kind of cheat. He used to play this game with Pauline, the two of them changing identities. Except he says, “I want Teller’s genes. And I’m living on a distant, very alien world.”
A narrow smile builds under the old eyes.
“Does that make any sense?” he asks somebody. Teller, or the Authority. Or maybe himself.
But it must make sense. Beside him, the last make-portal opens, and out flies an enormous metallic butterfly, accompanied by a wild music and a fragrance like sweat and cinnamon.
Or you somehow manage to escape suicide. You are just lucky enough, or maybe you’re composed of sterner stuff. Either way, you find yourself alive. But the Authority still remains, and after some cold consideration, you decide that it is the central problem in your tiny life. Once the source of edification and strength, it is now something else entirely: a temptation and weakness, an affliction growing more dangerous with time, and a drug that has long ago scorched away your sites of delicious attachment.
A smart person knows what to do.
With strength and a steely resolve, anyone can save themselves.
Give up the drug. Deny the enticement. The Authority is a piss hole, tiny and unworthy of your attentions. Tell it so. Declare that you won’t visit again, and then don’t. You might live another ten thousand years, and if you can’t find the energy and focus to be busy every moment, then you must not be trying very hard now, are you?
In this realm, at least in your life, you simply admit defeat. The Authority is too much of an attraction. So you walk away. Simply and forever, you leave temptation behind. Perhaps you join communities of like-minded souls. On distant moons, you and your new companions live like monks. Life is stripped to its minimal best. Horizons end at the horizon, and only a select few works of literature wait on the shelves, begging to be read again; and if it is true that every action and thought, achievement and failure are repeated endlessly throughout Creation… if originality is nothing but an illusion… well, at least inside these virtuous walls, amidst the dust and silent shadows, every little word you utter sounds fresh, and feels almost… at least a little bit… worthy…
Conquering the sky would be a child’s waste of time.
But He is a grand, magnificent child. And like anyone with enough pride and vanity, He revels in His glorious undertaking. His first act is to boil the gray puddle to steam and smoke. Then with stirring words and programmed thoughts, He marshals His world, loyal slaves quickly fashioning a fleet of starships, each ship vast and swollen with fuel, armored and bristling with every awful weapon. Then from the underside of His own tiny phallus, The Divine One scrapes away a few living cells, coaxing each to divide and differentiate, a thousand clones of Himself grown in a thousand puddles of warm, salty water.
Each clone receives injections of memories and dreams.
While maturing, each baby is given the same powerful tools that have made His life such a perfect pleasure.
At some point, even The Divine One is uncertain who is the original among the Thousand and One. He is just another captain of a starship, His destination set, eyes forward. Their destinations are the thousand and one closest suns. The exhaust from so many great engines boils the Earth to a bubbling cherry-colored slag. But He pretends not to notice. Only the slaves look back at the dead world. They are checking the plasma flows, they claim. And none of them weep. They know better than to grieve. Weep, and die. That is His rule. The Earth was just a temporary island of rock and metal, they tell themselves, and it just happens to be gone, while in a multitude of other realms, it lives on.
This breeds hope, that idea of undiluted possibility.
For slaves, the little gray ocean remains a promise—their only tangible sign that no existence, no matter how awful and how wicked, has any genuine importance at all.
“And then my cocoon split on its sky-side,” Josh reads aloud, “and what I saw first was my last skin smiling at me…”
He stops reading, setting down the butterfly book.
Teller watches him. A very old woman when this Earth discovered the Authority, her body has been regenerated by most means. But not everywhere. The bare breasts have a telltale sag, and the pubic hair is shot full of white. Perhaps because of these details, Teller seems both exotic and uniquely handsome. In every circumstance, she carries herself with a seamless confidence. Her smile is pleasant and wise, but distant, and it is the distance that often infuriates Josh. She knows something, he complains. Why won’t she tell him what she knows?
“The creature is looking at her last skin,” she offers. “The skin she was wearing before her pupae stage.”
“I figured as much,” he replies, attempting to laugh.
The alien is a much more complex species than humans. In one incarnation, she possessed a human’s body and mind. Then she slept and grew, the human-like genes falling asleep too, a stew of new genes transforming her into something infinitely more marvelous.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Josh complains.
“Like what?”
“So different. So… bizarre…”
Deep eyes grow even more distant. What won’t she tell him?
“It doesn’t pick at random,” he says. “I’ve known that for years. Everybody knows it.”
