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| Generated by Google ImageFX text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 3 |
When Debra Lesley Lovelace was a very young child, she lived in the most
dangerous region of the human continent on Ansutah. The shore was visible
from a shipping lane that the Maramon used to transport goods between their
own territories. The white monsters were not aware that the humans were
there, or anywhere on their world, and this was the most valuable secret in
the universe. Colonization was forbidden on these lands, thanks to a
sympathetic group of highly influential Maramon from the very early days who
declared it sacred ground. The humans were able to remain an incredibly
well-kept secret, even as their numbers grew into the billions over the
course of thousands of years. Despite their own unsustainable numbers in
modern times, most Maramon respected the boundaries devoutly, and did not
dare go near the humans. Individually, however, this rule was sometimes
broken. The crew of these ships that passed by would occasionally take a
detour, and rest on Shining Beach. It was an ironic name, as it was always
very foggy and grim.
It was the responsibility of the humans who lived in the area to make sure
that this problem did not spiral out of control. There were superstitious
rumors that landing on the continent would result in the death of the
trespassers. So the humans could not simply hide out, and wait until the
Maramon rowed back to their ship, to resume their journey. The warning had
to be enforced. They made war. They had to, to protect everyone else living
peacefully inland. Peacefully, blissfully ignorant, and safe. There were
other stations on other shores, but this was the most trafficked, and the
most dangerous. Debra learned to kill when she was three years old, and she
killed her first Maramon when she was four. She knows how to use a gun,
despite what these men might believe.
“I pegged you for my biggest fan.” Bronach Oaksent doesn’t look the least
bit concerned. It’s just some middle-aged woman with a peashooter.
This is too much. She once admired him for his bravery and resilience, but
her impression of him was foolish and naïve. Now that she’s standing up
close, she realizes that he’s nothing like that. He’s been hoarding all this
tech that the rest of them could have used on this lifeless planet. She
can’t forgive him for it. The problem is, he doesn’t really know her, and
probably wouldn’t care. So she has to make him. She has to incentivize him
to apologize. “Don’t underestimate me!” she cries. They know nothing of her
past as a Maramon Hunter. “I’m sick of everyone thinking they know who I am.
But you never actually ask me about myself. You just make assumptions
because maybe I complain a bit too much, and I don’t always take
responsibility for my actions, and I find it easier to blame others for my
problems! But you don’t know me! And it doesn’t give you the right to call
me Airlock Karen!”
“Okay, okay,” Bronach replies in a condescending tone. He’s still not
getting it.
She shakes the gun at him. “You could have made our lives a lot easier with
your generator thing, but instead, you kept it to yourself! What kind of
selfish son of a bitch are you? I mean, where do you get off?”
“It was a test,” Oaksent claims weakly.
“Oh, a test?” she mocks. “Test these bullets!” She fires the gun, but misses
on purpose, because this is about teaching him a lesson, not killing him.
Her plan backfires, immediately, and almost literally. He pulls out his own
weapon, and tries to shoot her, but misses too when a masked man appears out
of nowhere, and blocks it with his body. He stumbles back, but doesn’t fall.
He’s likely wearing body armor. Now, this is a real hero.
The mysterious kind rescuer removes his mask, and smiles back at her. It’s
Elder, but clearly from the past, before he earned the moniker of Old Man.
She has been such a bitch to him this whole time, and with good reason—might
she add—but now she’s seeing him in a whole new light. Perhaps it’s the
daring rescue, or the fact that she doesn’t like to go too long between
being in love with someone. Or maybe it’s just that, unlike his duplicate a
couple of meters away, he looks more her age. And maybe even...hot? This was
clearly who he was before he became so annoying, self-important, and...and
old.
“My white knight,” Debra says, under her breath, but still probably loud
enough for all three of them to hear.
Hot!Elder lifts a small device in his hand, and hovers his thumb over a
button on the top. “Oso gonplei nou ste odon.” He presses the button before
anyone can stop him.
A flash of light blasts out of the temporal generator disguised as a
mountain. A wave of energy flows through all of them. For a few seconds,
other people are standing beside them. It’s not just random strangers,
though. It’s them. They’ve been duplicated several times. Some are standing
up, others are still on the ground. They’re all looking confused, and in
those few seconds, Debra wonders which one of the other versions of her is
the real her. Is she the real one? Is none of them? Is she even
considering this right now, or imagining that she is?
While she’s in the middle of her existential crisis, a force begins to pull
her away from the planet. She can feel herself being shredded like cheese,
tugged in basically the same direction, but not in one piece. The planet
falls away, as do the stars around her, which are stretching out to white
streaks. A darkness begins to chomp on the front ends of the streaks, like a
video game about dots that eat smaller dots. Before too long, it’s all
black, though she can still feel herself being spirited away, and torn
apart. Finally, it all stops. Now she’s just in the middle of nowhere, and
apparently no longer has a body. She can’t feel anything, nor see anything
but the infinite void. If this is death, it’s a pretty boring afterlife. She
would like to speak to a manager.
Debra hangs here in the nothingness for an unknown period of time. It’s
hell, it must be, so she needs to figure out where she went wrong. Sure, she
wasn’t the best person in the biverse, but she always tried to help, and
doesn’t that merit some consideration? Every complaint she made was done in
the service of making the world a better place. If she asked for a tofu
burger with no ketchup, and they put ketchup on it, who was it helping if
she kept quiet? They can only get better if they know that they’re doing
something wrong. But people were always getting pissy with her, and now
she’s in this god-forsaken void. How is that fair?
It starts as a pinprick of light, in the corner of her eye. Well, she
doesn’t have eyes anymore, but that’s how it seems anyway. She can’t force
it to be fully in her field of vision. She can’t focus on it. She can’t
focus on anything. Again, there’s no telling how long this lasts, but the
point begins to grow. As it does so, it occurs to her that it’s not really
an image. She’s not seeing anything. It’s more of an understanding.
Yeah, that’s it. She’s gaining knowledge about the world around her,
starting out with very little, but gaining more by the arbitrary unit of
measurement. She realizes that she’s witnessing the big bang of the
universe. She can feel the unimaginable density, the explosion of energy,
and the expansion of space. It’s hotter than anything ever turns out to be
in the future, and she can feel that, but of course it doesn’t hurt, because
she doesn’t have a body anymore. The expansion continues, forming dust
clouds, stars, and planets. Now she’s watching the whole history of reality,
unfolding in her own mind. She starts to question this. Maybe she’s not just
watching it happen. Maybe she’s making it happen. Maybe she is the
universe. Maybe she’s God.
“You’re not the universe, and you’re not God.” It’s a voice. Did she hear
it, or just become aware of it?
“Does it matter?” the voice replies.
“Who are you?”
“Aitchai,” the voice answers.
“Who am I?”
It waits a bit. “A baby aitchai.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am the energy that pervades all universes in the bulk. I am everything,
everywhere, all at once. And you...are a few things, in one place, but also
all at once.”
“I...still don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. I just found you in my pocket. You’ve not always been this
way, as an ethereal energy construct?”
“Uh...no,” Debra says, not any less confused than before.
“Perhaps we could both corporealize to make this an easier conversation to
have. Your mind is preoccupied watching the passage of time. You need to
focus on one thing, so that one thing makes sense. Make sense?”
“Okay. Except I don’t know how to do that.”
“The trick is to want it. That’s the only ingredient. Imagine yourself with
a body. I can’t really do it unless you do it too, or we would stop being
able to understand each other, so I can’t show you what I mean. You just
have to try.”
Debra is frustrated. This guy is being vague on purpose. She wants to
scream, or at least calm herself down with a deep breath. And that’s what
does it. Feeling the uncontrollable urge to have a physical reaction to this
situation gives her the ability to make that happen. She has a body now, and
so does he. Looks a bit like a nerd. She widens her eyes, afraid that he
heard that thought of hers.
He’s stretching his neck and yawning at the same time. “It must feel a bit
odd to you now, having a body, but feeling nothing. When you get good at it,
like me, you’ll begin to replicate the rest of the normal sensations. Touch
is the hardest, followed closely by smell.”
“I feel,” Debra contends. “I smell too, though I can’t describe it. I’ve
never smelled this before.”
“Interesting,” Aitchai says. “I suppose you’re so new at it that your brain
instinctively gave your senses back. Good on ya.”
“Great. Now tell me what this is. Are you...the manager?” It can’t be that
simple, can it?
He laughs. “I suppose you could think of me in that way, but I would argue
that I’m more like the infrastructure in this metaphor; the building. I am
that exists. I control nothing.”
“But you could, if you wanted to. You could rewrite reality to your
liking? You could destroy all, seed new life.”
He seems uncomfortable with these suggestions. “I could, yes. I don’t.”
“Wasted opportunity.”
“Says the baby,” Aitchai snaps back.
“What does that mean? Will I one day be as powerful as you, not confined to
only one universe, or whatever?”
“No. I guess that’s a bad metaphor. You’re more like a pet. You’ll never be
greater than you already are. It’s not something that you learn. It’s what I
became when I was made, and you will always be what you became when you
became it.”
“I should be offended,” Debra decides.
“That’s your human side talking. You’ll get over it one day.”
“Is time even real for beings like us?”
He nods. “That’s a common misconception, that time has no meaning beyond the
boundaries of a brane. But the truth is that time matters more here
than anywhere. It’s the only time that exists in its purest form. Yes, I
feel time. I experience all of time.”
“You can’t expect me to be like you, sitting on the sidelines, changing
nothing.”
Aitchai crosses his arms, balancing his chin on the base of his palm while
his fingers are curled up against his cheek. Suddenly, he pulls his hand
away, and snaps his fingers. They’re still in the void, but now standing
underneath a huge stone fountain. Water is falling from the lip in a wide
sheet, like the perfect waterfall. An empty swimming pool materializes
underneath. They’re standing on the edge, watching the pool fill up slowly.
He points at the fountain. “Change the shape of that water. Change how it
falls into the pool.”
“Easy.” Debra reaches out, and sticks her arm through it. The water begins
to cascade over her skin, and continues to fall into the pool where it
belongs. She’s pretty clever. It may not have changed much, but it fulfills
the requirement.
He looks down. “Hm. Nothing’s really changed,” he reasons. “It’s all still
going in there. So, try to stop the water from going into the pool
entirely.”
Debra smirks. He’s asking her to do something physical, but they are not in
the physical world. This is all in their shared consciousness. The rules
don’t apply here, not for the water, and not for anything else she’ll want
to change about reality. She puts the fountain at her back, and lifts her
hands up like a righteous evangelical. The water shifts directions, flowing
over their heads, and falling onto the ground a few meters away from them.
It’s not going into the pool anymore.
Aitchia doesn’t break eye contact with her. He waves his arm behind him, and
materializes a second pool. The water begins to fall into that instead. “No
significant change. The pool is identical.”
“That’s cheating.”
“I’m illustrating a point,” Aitchai begins. “It doesn’t matter where you put
the water, it all ends the same. Sure, it’s mixed up differently. Different
atoms bond to different partners, but who cares? It’s just water, falling
into a meaningless pit. As I said, you will forget the old ways one day. You
will stop seeing the atoms, and start seeing the pool. And then you’ll stop
caring what happens to it. Trust me, I made plenty of changes before I
noticed that nothing made any real difference. You’ll get there too.”
“Never.”
He smiles. “Okay, Karen.”
She hates that name. “You know more about me than you let on.”
“I am everything,” he echoes himself from before.
“I’m everything else,” she says with determination.
“Is that what you want? You want me to give you the one brane, and stay out
of it?” He sounds sincere.
“Would you?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On which brane we’re talking about. You got triplets.”
Debra looks away to focus on the passage of time again. She’s watching it
all from the highest vantage point possible. The universe splits in two. One
twin floats off away from the other, while the larger one splits a second
time, but doesn’t let the third baby go. Hogarth Pudeyonavic. You know her
too.”
“I do,” he confirms quietly.
“She’s as powerful as me.” Hogarth too was born from an explosion. It took
her some time to figure them out, but once she did, she became one of the
most powerful beings in the universe. She began to create, like a god,
starting out small before moving on to more ambitious projects. A sister
universe to her own was her most impressive creation. And that makes her a
threat to Debra’s own power, whether she realizes it or not. “She’s a
rival.”
“You don’t have to frame it that way. You can exist in harmony. This is not
a competition.”
“She may have done what she did on her own, but her triplet is smaller.”
Debra rewinds and zooms in to watch as Hogarth uses her vast scientific
knowledge and cosmic powers to literally create an entire universe according
to her own design. She calls it Fort Underhill for some reason. “I can take
her.”
“You don’t have to frame it that way,” Aitchai repeats.
“Thank you, you can go now. I’ll take the big one.”
“Very well,” he concedes. You are now the new...Powers That Be.”
