Meta Zero One (3 page)

   The vitriol in his voice shocked Margaret; he had up to now seemed mild mannered, where had the anger come from?

   “You see Dr Mason, I've just about had as much as I can take of you humans, and it’s just got to end, today, now, within the hour.”

  “As much as you can take,” Dr Margaret Mason leaned back in her soft leather chair, self-consciously pulling her dark skirt down below her knee as she did.

   She was acutely aware of the physical presence of the man sitting on the couch not a meter from her. He was 6-foot 5 and the muscular frame which had filled her doorway now filled her couch, physically he was the most imposing man she had ever met.

   At 5 ft. 6 and a size 10 she relied on the inherent superiority of her professional position to keep a distance from her patients. So she rarely felt as uncomfortable as she did now. There was something about him which screamed at her to run away. There was she realised something about him that was distinctly nonhuman.

   “Yes, I've had about as much as I can take,” he repeated, his voice a strange mixture of deep and bland. He adjusted his glasses, unremarkable dark framed horn-rimmed glasses, on his unremarkable face.

   Dr Mason looked down at her notebook, and licked the end of her pencil nervously. “Why don't you start at the beginning Mr Smith, or can I call you John?”

   “If you like yes, John, it’s not my real name of course, but it will do for today. The beginning, now that's a big question, where was the beginning? I'm not sure when the beginning is really. Is it when I was born? When I first came to this planet? When I started my double life? Or when I realised that all the miserable, self-obsessed, useless people of this flea ridden city were just not worth saving?”

   Margret wrote “delusional” on her notebook and looked over her glasses at her patient, she didn’t need glasses, her eyes were perfectly good. The glasses served two purposes, first she thought, they made her look more professional. Second they provided both a useful prop and a tangible separation from her personal life, she only wore them when she was working.

   “Whichever beginning you want, it's up to you,” she said.

   “I'm not delusional Dr Mason,” he had sat up straight and was looking directly at her, or more accurately at the back of her notebook. She shuffled in her seat feeling extremely uncomfortable.

   “I never said that you were Mr Smith.”

   “No, of course not, you never said that Dr Mason,” for the first time he smiled at her, his eyes were, she noticed, piercingly bright and intense, it was as if he could look right through her.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “that's a story for another day,” he laughed, “except that there won't be another day so I’d better tell it today. Not another day for me anyway, and for a while at least, not for many of the lazy self-obsessed people who live in this filthy city. People who like to kill one another without a seconds’ thought. People who don’t value the great gift that they have been given, the gift of life, and take no responsibility for their actions at all.”

   “Dr Mason, do you mind if I show you something?” he asked.

   “No, not at all Mr Smith.”

   John Smith stood up, and she noticed that despite his bulk he moved rather like a ballet dancer, like a man who was completely in control of his entire body. He left the room briefly, returning with a small silver briefcase which resembled a professional camera case. Placing it carefully on the table he unclipped the catches and lifted the lid.

   Margaret couldn’t see what was in the case, and she was now more than slightly worried the man was after all clearly mad. This was not a professional diagnosis she knew, she grinned to herself when his back was turned, but he was absolutely nuts.

   “Damn!” she gasped. From the case John Smith had taken a large grey pistol. Her analytical brain recognised it from countless films as a Magnum 45. As the films said, it was the most powerful handgun in the world, and she wasn’t feeling lucky.

   “Mr Smith,” she said shifting uncomfortably, the room only had one exit, and he was now between her and it, “what the hell are you doing with that?”

   He turned, holding the gun confidently in his hand, he was clearly used to handling weapons. “I am sorry if I alarmed you Miss Mason, there is no need to worry, I mean you no harm, either by accident or design. I merely want to show you something amazing and tell you something unbelievable, and need you to believe it, so don't worry.”

   He reached into the case, and took out a long metal tube, which he screwed onto the end of the barrel, “we don't want to disturb the neighbours do we.”

   Without looking at her he returned to his seat with his now silenced pistol and sat down smoothly.     

   Margaret, didn’t move, she didn’t run nor she didn’t cry out, if she sat still and kept calm, she felt sure that she could talk him out of whatever he was planning.

   John looked at her, smiled and reached into his pocket, taking a bullet out he loaded the gun and without hesitation put it flat to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

  In the small room, despite the silencer the gun made a horrendous sound. It was not that it was loud, but the sound of a pistol fired into someone’s head was heavy with meaning and inherently sickening. There was a dull thumping noise as the bullet was pushed at high velocity into John Smith's skull. Margaret flinched, standing up and pulling away to avoid the blood splatters, which to her surprise never came.

  John Smith lowered the gun to the table, a bullet, squashed beyond recognition fell to the floor at his feet. He looked Dr Margaret Mason straight in the eye, “I am not delusional, schizophrenic, nor suffering from a God complex, but I am much certainly far more than human, I am The Guardian.”

   “Oh,” Margaret put down her notebook, and placed her pencil carefully on the arm of the chair, “well that explains a lot.”

  “You wanted me to start at the beginning, then I will, at least as much as I know. Some of which I’ve been told rather than know from direct experience. So bear with me, there are big gaps in the story.”

  “My home planet was, as they say, in a galaxy far far away, and I assume is now long dead. I have traveled all over the Milky Way, and can find no trace of it, or indeed any other members of my less than noble race. So it’s safe to assume that it’s long gone. Anyway, whatever happened, I arrived here in the summer of 1934.”

   “1934?” she asked, “surely not, you’re not that old, you look…..”

   “I look about 33 in your years; it appears I age differently to humans, just one of the many small differences between our races, as similar as we look on the surface.”

   “What differences?”

   “Other than my super powers you mean?”

   “Other than your super powers, yes, many people have super powers; they’re not all aliens are they?”

   “No, of course not, billionaires, robots, amazons, but not all aliens, no. Anyway there are lots of differences, but perhaps most importantly and most frustratingly in my day-to-day life is that my senses are heightened.”

  “Heightened?”

“Yes, heightened, heightened beyond belief to be honest with you, it’s something that has developed over the last few years. They’ve always been good, but in the last 4 years they have just got stronger and stronger. Now I can hear people speaking hundreds of miles way, I can hear every sigh, every burp and every grunt they make. And smell, I can smell every odour within half a mile, every petrol tank, every dog shit, every rotting bin, every stinking sweaty human. You all smell rather abominably you see.”

   “I can for example smell that you had garlic last night and at least one glass of red wine and you use a very expensive brand of soap. But it does not completely mask the smell of piss you carry with you, which you all carry with you in fact. To put it bluntly, the human race stinks Ms Mason. For a start you all fart far too much and by god does that smell linger. Do you wonder why I spend so much time in Alaska, it's because there are none of you there. You are contemptible, disgusting and I can hardly bear to be in the same room as most of you.”

   “To make it worse, I had to go and marry one of you, I had to have sex with one of you.”

   “Do you know,” he continued, “how many times The Warrior Queen begged me to fuck her in the last ten years?”

  “Strangely no I don't, but, I'm not surprised she has a reputation for a fearsome sexual appetite, and she is certainly very well-built.” Margaret had seen the Warrior Queen on the cover of hundreds of Men’s Magazines, she was known as one of the most liberally minded super heroes.

  “God yes, the tits on her, I've never seen anything like it, especially in that metallic low cut outfit she wears, and believe me I've seen thousands. But that woman really should have shaved her underarm hair, drank less beer and ate less garlic. Jesus how she stank. I could smell her a mile away, literally, the thought of sleeping with her, making her more and more sweaty. No way on this or any other planet.”

  “Oh,” Margaret suddenly became aware of her own body, her own odour.

  “Indeed,” John Smith smiled again, evilly, “you stink less than most I have to say Margaret, take that as a compliment. So imagine, if you can, living in a world where almost everyone around you makes you gag. Imagine that you can hardly bear to look at your wife or your friends, where you can hear every burp, every gurgle, and where you can't shut it off.”

   “I can't imagine how that would feel.”

   “No you can't, so don't even try to stretch your extremely tiny little intellect on the problem. You just need to know, it’s started to drive me more than a little mad recently. But I digress, so going back in time a bit, as I said before, I came here in 1934 or so I am told. I was carried here in a tiny spacecraft for billions of miles and millions of years. Held in stasis until the craft found a world where the inhabitants were biologically similar enough to make procreation at least a viable if not necessarily pleasant option. The landing, or more accurately the crash landing, in a field in Nebraska, was witnessed by a passing steelworker from Pittsburgh and his wife. They found me, and with the help of some judicious lies about a dead sister and an adoption, they brought me up.”

   “What happened to them?”

   “They died, I killed them of course.”

   “Bloody hell!”

   “Yes, indeed, bloody hell, how British of you. I didn't murder them, if that's what you are thinking; no I didn't murder them, well not directly anyway. No, I was 13 when my powers first manifested and unfortunately the first one to develop was my laser vision. I flash fried both of them over the dinner table, between the beef casserole and the apple-pie. God how I hated mum’s apple-pie. Perhaps that's why the laser vision manifested then, to stop me having to eat that vile slop. I sat there for a while, starring at their blackened crisped bodies. I wasn't sure what to do you see. So anyway, I just sat there for three hours before the government agents who had been seemingly, following every stage of my life until then burst through the door and took me away.”

   “They took me away, covered up their deaths, blamed it on a house fire I believe. So from then on I was brought up on a military base, by a team of scientists, soldiers and other highly trained Government operatives, or, spies to you.”

   “That must have been hard for you,” Margaret said.

   “Hard, no, it wasn't at all, it was great. Whatever I wanted I got, drink, food, sex, whatever I asked for, it was just brilliant. And if the odd hooker was crushed before I learned to control my powers, then tough, the government covered it up. I spent thirty five years drunk and shagging whatever I wanted, it was every teenager’s wet dream. After a while I did covert work for the government, assassinations of dictators, taking down Russian spy planes, even some stuff on American soil. So I got to fuck pretty girls, kill people and blow stuff up, it was great.”

  “Then?”

  “Then it was the 1980's, big hair and shoulder pads you're too young to really remember it. The cold war was pretty much over and I was terminally bored, so I left. I was 55 human years old looked 25 and getting sick of it all. To be honest I wanted some freedom, I wanted to be normal. I was stupid really, normal, I could never be truly normal, but that's what I thought I wanted at the time. I told them I wanted to leave, and since the government is terrified of me, they agreed, in the end anyway. They took some persuading of course and I had to kill a few people to make them listen to me, but it was well worth it in.”

   “A few?”

   “12,365 in truth, it was one hell of a wild afternoon. But it persuaded the powers that be, that I could pretty much do what I wanted, and that they couldn't stop me even if they wanted to. That they were better being on my side than against me.”

   “And what did you do next?”

   “Got me a life, bummed around a bit, saw a bit more of the world. I lived a normal life or at least as much of a normal life as I could for a few years. The government always kept track of me and eventually they set me up with a job as an accountant, and I settled down. I met my wife and tried to get on with being a normal everyday human being.”

   “What happened then?” Margaret knew that she was hearing a story that no one else on earth had ever heard, so she listened hard, desperate to get her notebook but not daring to move.