The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (33 page)

    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
in vitro
bugs, babies and baby animals with such efficiency, Terra went from zero to overpopulation within three centuries.

    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 & 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
The Cask of Amontillado
while he screams and laughs. I've never actually descended to speak with him. Perhaps someday.

***

    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.
Everything
except what they most desired-the end of the Occupation. I was a god emperor who didn't measure up to the real thing lurching along the horizon two hundred stories high.

    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 to even 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 astrophysical theories I'd seen debunked in more lifetimes than I care to count. One argument led to another and the next thing I know, 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 nano-bots 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 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 con cerned, 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 comeback 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 past, present, and future.

    Now, it amuses me to walk among mortals in disguise of a fellow commoner. I also feel a hell of a lot safer-the Old Ones sometimes rouse from their obliviousness to humanity and send questing tendrils to identify and extract those who excite their obscene, yet unknowable interest.

    I'm going to wait them out.

***

    Seven or eight of us still celebrate Fourth of July despite the fact the United States is now of no more modern relevance than cave paintings by hominids. Specialist historians and sentimental fools such as myself are the only ones who care.

    This year, Pontiff Sacrus, Lord High Necromancer bought me a hotdog, heavy on the mustard, from an actual human vendor, and we sat on a park bench. Fireworks cracked over the lake. Small red and green paper lanterns bobbed on the water. The lanterns were dogs and cats and, Paul Revere and his Horse. The city had strung wires along the thoroughfares. American flags chattered in a stiffening breeze. I breathed in the smoke and petted Softy-Cuddles who'd appeared from nowhere to settle in my lap.

    The Pogroms were finished. Pontiff Sacrus had overseen the Stone henge Massacre that spring and there weren't any further executions scheduled. According to my calculations exactly six hundred and sixtyseven unmodified Homo sapiens remained extant, although none were aware the majority of the billions who populated the planet were replicants, androids, and remote-operated clones. Pontiff Sacrus's purge squads had eradicated the changelings and shifters and the gene-splicers and any related medical doctors who might conspire to reintroduce that most diabolical technology. He'd reversed the Singularity and lobotomized the once nigh universal A.I. Super job, Pontiff, old bean. He purported himself to be the High Priest of the Undying Ones, but they ignored him pretty much the same as every priest of every denomination has ever been ignored by his deity.

    Now, the Pontiff has been around for ages and ages. He's kept himself ticking by the liberal application of nano-enhanced elixirs, molecular tomfoolery, and outdated cloning tech. Probably the only remaining shred of his humanity lies within that mystical force that animates us monkeys. His is the face of a gargoyle bust or the most Goddamned beautiful, dick stiffening angel ever to walk the Earth. He's moody, like me. That's to be expected, since on the molecular level he is me. Right?

    Man, oh man, was he shocked when I appeared in a puff of sulfurous smoke after all these eons. I'm a legend; a boogeyman that got assimilated by pop culture and shat out, forgotten by the masses.
Every
devil is forgotten once a society falls far enough. But Pontiff Sacrus remembered. His fear rushed through him like fire; he smelled as if he were burning right there beside me on the bench. He finally grasped that it was I who'd tormented and slain, one by one, our inner circle.

    We watched the fireworks, and when the show wound down, I told him I'd decided to reach back and erase his entire ancestry from the Space Time Continuum. The honorable High Necromancer would cease to exist. The spectacle of the god's anguish thrilled me in ways I hadn't anticipated. Naturally, I never planned to actually nullify his existence. Instead, I made him gaze into the Hell of my left eye. He shrieked as I manually severed his personal timeline at the culmination of the fireworks display and set it for continual loop with a delay at the final juncture so he might fraternize with his accumulating selves before the big rewind.

    Last I checked, the crowd of Sacrus' has overflowed the park. He'll be/is a city of living nerves, each thread shrieking for eternity. My kind of music.

***

    Crete, 45 B.C., again. The Universe is a cell. I travel by osmosis. Randomly, to and fro betwixt the poles that fuse everything. It's dark but for a candle within the potter's house. The blood odor is thick. My prior self snores within, sleeping the sleep of the damned. I alight upon the slanted roof; I peep through chinks and spy our restless form in the shadows. He whimpers.

    Because I'm bored to tears with my existence, and just to see what will happen, I slip down through the cracks and smother him. His eyes snap open near the end. They shine with blind energy and his bowels release, and he is finished. Then I toss his corpse into the well, and return to the bed and fall asleep in his place.

    I've gone back a hundred times to perpetrate the same self murder. I've sat upon the hillside and watched with detached horror as a dozen of my selves scrabble across the roof like ungainly crows, and one by one enter the house to do the dirty deed, then file in and out to and from the well like a stream of ants. This changes nothing. The problem is, the Universe is constantly in motion. The Universe stretches to a smear and cycles like a slinky reversing through its own spine. No matter what I do, stuff keeps happening in an uninterruptable stream.

    How I wish the Pod People could give me a hand, help me explore self annihilation or ultimate enlightenment, which I'm certain are one and the same. Alas, their alien intellect, a fungal strain that resists the vagaries of vacuum, light and dark, heat and cold, remains supremely inscrutable. That goes double for their gargantuan masters. Like me, the fungal tribe and their monster gods (and ours?) exist at all points south of the present. It's enough to drive a man insane.

***

    After epochs that rival the reign of the dinosaurs, the stars are no longer right. Yesterday The black continent and its black house sank beneath the sallow, poison waves and the Old Ones dream again in the dread majesty of undeath. I wonder how long it will be before the dregs of humanity ventures from the bubble-domed metropolises it's known for ages beyond reckoning. The machines are breaking down, and they need them since after the Pogroms all bio modifications were purged. Just soft, weak Homo sapiens as God intended. The population is critically low and what with all those generations of inbreeding and resultant infertility I don't predict a bounce back this time. Another generation or two and it'll be over. Enter (again) the rats, the cockroaches and the super beetles.

    I sigh. I'm shaving. Wife is in the kitchen chopping onions while the tiny black and white television broadcasts a cooking show. The morning sky is the color of burnt iron. If I concentrate, I can hear, yet hundreds of millions of light years off, the throb and growl of Ur-Nyctos as it devours strings of matter like a kid sucking up grandma's pasta.