forehead with a moon rock I used as a paper weight. Damned if there wasn’t a gusher of tar from that eggshell crack. Not a wise move on my part — that shit splattered over half the staff sitting at the table and ate them alive. I regenerated faster than it dissolved my flesh and that kept me functional for a few minutes. Oh skippy day.
A half dozen security guards sauntered in and si-phoned the innards from the remainder of my colleagues in an orgy of spasms and gurgles. I zapped several of the baddies before the others got hold and sucked my body dry.
I’d jumped into a custodian named Hank who worked on the other side of the complex, however, and all those bastards got was a lifeless sack of meat. I went underground, pissed and scared. Organizing the resistance was personal. It was on.
We (us humans, so-called) won in the end. Rope-a-dope!
Once most of us were wiped from existence, the invaders did what any plague does after killing the host — it went dormant. Me and a few of the boys emerged from our bunkers and set fire to the house. We brought the old orbital batteries online and nuked every major city on the planet. We also nuked our secret bunkers, exterminating the human survivors. Killing off the military team that had accompanied me to the surface was regrettable — I’d raised every one of them from infancy. I could’ve eliminated the whole battalion from the control room with an empathic pulse, but that seemed cowardly. I stalked them through the dusty labyrinths, and killed them squad by squad. Not pretty, although I’m certain most of my comrades were proud to go down fighting. They never knew it was me who did them dirt: I configured myself into hideous archetypes from every legend I could dream up.
None of them had a noggin full of tar, either. I checked carefully.
I went into stasis until the nuclear bloom faded and the ozone layer regenerated. Like Noah, I’d saved two of everything in the DNA repository vault inside the honeycombed walls of Mare Imbrium. The machines mass produced
The scientists and poets and sci-fi writers alike were all proved correct: I didn’t need to reproduce rats or cockroaches. They’d done just fine.
The layers of space and time are infinite; I’ve mastered roughly a third of them. What’s done can’t be undone, nor would I dream of trying; nonetheless, it’s impossible to resist all temptation. Occasionally, I materialize next to Chief Science Officer Hu Wang while he’s showering, or squatting on the commode, or masturbating in his bunk, and say howdy in Cantonese, which he doesn’t comprehend very well. I ask him compromising questions such as, how does it feel to know you’re going to destroy the human race in just a few hours? Did your wife really leave you for a more popular scientist?
Other times, I find him in his village when he’s five or six and playing in the mud. I’m the white devil who appears and whispers that he’ll grow into a moderately respected bureaucrat, be awarded a plum black ops research project, and be eaten alive by intergalactic slime mold. And everyone will hate him — including his ex- wife and her lesbian lover. Until they’re absorbed by the semi-infinite, that is.
I have similar talks with Genghis Khan, Billie Jean King, Elvis (usually during his final sitdown), and George Bush Jr. Don’t tell anyone, but I even visit myself, that previous iteration who spent three decades rotting in a deep, dark hole. I sit on the rim of his pit and smoke a fat one and whisper the highlights of
Dystopian days again. That fiasco with the creatures from Dimension X was just the warm- up match. Whilst depopulating Terra, our enemies were busy laying the groundwork for the return to primacy of their dread gods. Less than a millennium passed and the stars changed. The mother continent rose from primordial muck and its rulers and their servitors took over the regions they desired and we humans got the scraps.
It didn’t even amount to a shooting war — occasionally one or another cephalopodan monstrosity lumbered forth from the slimy sea and hoovered up a hundred thousand from the crowded tenements beneath an atmospheric dome or conculcated another half billion of them to jelly. The Old Ones hooted and cavorted, and colors not meant to be seen by human eyes drove whole continental populations to suicide or catatonia. Numerous regions of the planet became even more polluted and inhospitable to carbon-based life. But this behavior signified nothing of malice; it was an afterthought. Notable landmarks survived in defiance of conventional Hollywood Armageddon logic — New York, Paris, Tokyo. What kind of monsters eat Yokohama and leave Tokyo standing? There wasn’t a damned thing mankind could do to affect these shambling beings who exist partially in extra- dimensional vaults of space-time. The Old Ones didn’t give a rat’s ass about our nukes, our neutron bombs, our anthrax, our existence in general.
Eventually, we did what men do best and aimed our fear and rage at one another. The pogroms were a riot, literally. I slept through most of them. My approval rating was in the toilet; a lot of my constituent children plotted to draw and quarter their Dear Leader, their All Father, despite the fact the masses had everything.
Still, you’d think superpowers and the quenching of material hunger might suffice. Wrongo. Sure, sure, everybody went bonkers for molecular modifications when the technology arrived on the scene. It was my booboo even to drop a hint regarding that avenue of scientific inquiry — and no, I’m not an egghead. Stick around long enough to watch civilization go through the rinse cycle and you start to look smarter than you really are.
On one of my frequent jaunts to ye olden times I attended a yacht party thrown by Caligula. Cal didn’t make an appearance; he’d gone with a party of visiting senators to have an orgy at the altar of Artemis. I missed the little punk. I was drunk as a lord and chatting up some prime Macedonian honeys, when one of Cal’s pet mathematicians started holding forth primitive astro-physical theories I’d seen debunked in more lifetimes than I care to count. One argument led to another and the next thing I knew, me and Prof Toga are hanging our sandals over the stern and I’m trying to explain, via my own admittedly crude understanding, the basics of molecular biology and how nanobots are the wave of the future.
Ha! We know how that turned out, don’t we? The average schmuck acquired the ability to modify his biological settings with the flip of a mental switch. Everybody fooled around with sprouting extra arms and legs, bat wings and gigantic penises, and in general ran amok. A few even joined forces and blew themselves up large enough to take on our overlords of non-Euclidian properties. Imagine a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float filled to the stem with blood. Then imagine that float in the grip of a flabby, squamous set of claws or an enveloping tentacle — and a big, convulsive squeeze. Not pretty.
Like fries with a burger, this new craze also conferred a limited form of immortality. I say limited because hacking each other to bits, drinking each other’s blood, or committing thrill kills in a million different ways remained a game ender. The other drawback was that fucking around with one’s DNA also seemed to make Swiss cheese of one’s brain. So, a good percentage of humanity went to work on their brothers and sisters hammer and tong, tooth and claw, in the Mother of All Wars, while an equal number swapped around their primal matter so much they gradually converted themselves to blithering masses of effluvium and drifted away or were rendered unto ooze that returned to the brine.
It was a big old mess, and as I said, arguably my fault. A few of my closest, and only, friends (collaborators with the extra-dimensional monster set) got together and decided to put me out of my misery — for the sake of all concerned, which was everyone in the known universe, except me. The sneaky bastards crept into the past and blasted me while I lay comatose from a semi- lethal cocktail of booze, drugs, and guilt. That’s where you, or me, came in. I mean, no matter who you are, you’re really me, in drag or out.
Afterward, the gang held a private wake that lasted nearly a month. There were lovely eulogies and good booze and a surprising measure of crocodile (better than nothing!) grief. I was impressed and even a little touched.
For a couple thousand years I played dead. And once bored with my private version of Paradise Lost, I reorganized myself into material form and began a come-back that involved a centuries-long campaign of terror through proxy. I had a hell of a time tracking down my erstwhile comrades. Those who’d irritated me most, I kept trapped in perpetual stasis. Mine is the First Power, and to this day I, or one of my ever exponentially replicating selves, revive a traitor on occasions that I’m in a pissy mood and torment him or her in diabolical ways I’ve perfected in past, present, and future.
