across the clay tiles of the roof, back and forth, whining like a fly that wanted in. Back. And Forth. Occasionally, the dark figure spied upon my restless self through a crack in the ceiling.
The next morning, I looted what valuables I could from the house. During my explorations, I discovered a barred door behind a rack of jars and pots. On the other side was a tiny cell full of scrolls. These scrolls were scriven with astronomical diagrams and writing I couldn’t decipher. The walls were thick stone and a plug of wood was inset at eye level. I worked the cork free, amazed at the soft, red light that spilled forth. I finally summoned the courage to press my eye against the peephole.
I suspect if a doctor were to give me a CAT scan, to follow the optic nerve deep into its fleshy backstop, he’d see the blood red peephole imprinted in my cerebral cortex, and through the hole, Darkness, the quaking mass at the center of everything where a sonorous wheedling choir of strings and lutes, flutes and cymbals crashes and shrieks and echoes from the abyss, the foot of the throne of an idiot god. The potter had certainly been a man of many facets.
I set out for the port and passage back to my beloved Rome. Many birds gathered in the yard. Later, in the city, my old associates seemed surprised to see me.
Semaphore. Soliloquy. Solipsism. That’s a trinity a man can get behind. The wife never understood me, and the first A.I. model wasn’t any great shakes either. Oh, Wife 2.0 said all the right things. She was soft and her hair smelled nice, and her programming allowed for realistic reactions to my eccentricities. Wife 2.0 listened
I killed most of my friends and those that remain don’t listen and never have. The only one left is my cat Softy-Cuddles. Cat version one million and one, I suspect. The recent iterations are black. Softy-Cuddles wasn’t always a Halloween cat (or a self-replicating cloud of nano-bots), though, he used to be milk white. Could be, I sliced the milkman’s throat and stole his cat. In any event, I found scores of pictures of both varieties, and me petting them, in a rusty King Kong lunchbox some version of me buried near the — what else? — birdbath in the back yard. When I riffle that stack of photos it creates a disturbing optical effect.
The cat is the only thing I’ve ever truly loved because he’s the only being I’m convinced doesn’t possess ulterior motives. I’ll miss the little sucker when I’m gone, nano-cloud or not.
During the Dark Ages, I spent twenty- nine years in a prison cell beneath a castle in the Byzantine Empire. Poetic justice, perhaps. It was a witchcraft rap — not true, by any means. The truth was infinitely more complicated, as I’ve amply demonstrated thus far. The government kept me alive because that’s what governments do when they encounter such anomalous persons as myself. In latter epochs, my type are termed “materials.” It wouldn’t do to slaughter me out of hand; nonetheless, I couldn’t be allowed to roam free. So down the rabbit hole I went.
No human voice spoke my name. I shit in a hole in the corner of the cell. Food and drink was lowered in a basket, and occasionally a candle, ink, quill and parchment. The world above was changing. They solicited answers to questions an Information Age mind would find anachronistic. There were questions about astronomy and quantum physics and things that go bump in the night. In reply, I scrawled crude pictures and dirty limericks. Incidentally, it was likely some highly advanced iteration of lonely old me that devised the questions and came tripping back through the cosmic cathode to plague myself. One day (or night) they bricked over the distant mouth of my pit. How my bells jangled then, how my laughter echoed from the rugged walls. For the love of God!
Time well spent. I got right with the universe, which meant I got right with its chief tenant: me. One achieves a certain equilibrium when one lives in a lightless pit, accompanied by the squeak and rustle of vermin and the slow drip of water from rock. The rats carried fleas and the fleas feasted upon me before they expired, before I rubbed out their puny existences. But these tiny devils had their banquet — while I drowsed, they sucked my blood, drowned and curdled in tears of my glazed eyes. And the flies.
Depending upon who I’m talking to, and when, the notion of re-growing lost limbs and organs, of reorganizing basic genetic matrices to build a better mousetrap, a better
I pushed my best high school bud off the Hoover Dam. Don’t even recall why. Maybe we were competing for the girl who became my wife. My pal was a smooth operator. I could dial him up and ask his quantum self for the details, but I won’t. I’ve only so many hands, so many processes to run at once, and really, it’s more fun not knowing. There are so few secrets left in the universe.
This I do recall: when I pushed him over the brink, he flailed momentarily, then spread his arms and caught an updraft. He twirled in the clouds of steam and spray, twisting like a leaf until he disappeared. Maybe he actually made it. We hadn’t perfected molecular modification, however. We hadn’t even gotten very far with grafts. So I think he went into the drink, went straight to the bottom. Sometimes I wonder if he’d ever thought of sending me hurtling to a similar fate. I have this nagging suspicion I only beat him to the punch.
The heralds of the Old Ones came calling before the time of the terrible lizards, or in the far-flung impossible future while Man languished in the throes of his first and last true utopian era. Perspective; relativity. Don’t let the laws of physics fool you into believing she’s an open book. She’s got a
Maybe the Old Ones sent them, maybe the pod people acted on their own. Either way, baby, it was night of the living dead, except exponentially worse since it was, well, real. Congruent to linear space time (what a laugh that theory was) Chinese scientists tripped backward to play games with a supercollider they’d built on Io while Earth was still a hot plate for protoplasmic glop. Wrap your mind around that. The idiots were fucking with making a pocket universe, some bizarre method to cheat relativity and cook up FTL travel. Yeah, well, just like any disaster movie ever filmed, something went haywire and there was an implosion. What was left of the moon zipped into Jupiter’s gravity well, snuffed like spit on a griddle. A half-million researchers, soldiers, and support personnel went along for the ride.
Meanwhile, one of the space stations arrayed in the sector managed to escape orbit and send a distress call. Much later, we learned the poor saps had briefly generated their pocket universe, and before it went kablooey, they were exposed to peculiar extra-dimensional forces, which activated certain genetic codes buried in particular sectors of sentient life. So the original invaders were actually regular Joe Six- Packs who got transmogrified into yeasty, fungoid entities.
The rescue team brought the survivors to the Colonies. Pretty soon the Colonies went to the Dark. We called the hostiles Pod People, Mushrooms, Hollow Men, The Fungus Among Us, etc, etc. The enemy resembled us. This is because they
The Mushroom Man mission? To liquefy our insides and suck them up like a kid slobbering on a milkshake, and pack our brains in cylinders and ship them to Pluto for R&D. The ones they didn’t liquefy or dissect joined their happy and rapidly multiplying family. Good times, good times.
I was the muckety-muck of the Territorial Intelligence Ministry. I was higher than God, watching over the human race from my enclave in the Pyrenees. But don’t blame me; a whole slew of security redundancies didn’t do squat in the face of an invasion that had been in the planning stages before men came down from the trees. Game, set, and match. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I think a millennium to repopulate and rebuild civilization qualifies as a reset at least. I came into contact with them shortly after they infiltrated the Pyrenees compound. My second-in-command, Jeff, and I were going over the daily feed, which was always a horror show. The things happening in the metropolises were beyond awful. Funny the intuitive leap the brain makes. My senses were heightened, but even that failed to pierce the veil of the Dark. On a hunch, mid-sentence, I crushed Jeff’s
