Ch 12: After Body

The Futureness Part Two

Jan 22, 2025

I’m fifteen years old. A lone car alarm pings for help one block away, but I don’t check out what’s on my scanner because I have a Radio Kill Report to deliver. Xavier will be waiting, or if he’s not waiting, he’s not being himself.

I tune my walkie-talkie to our band.

“Good evening,” I say. “I’m in your future. In the future, if you develop species-defining tech and spread it without telling anyone about its dangers, I will become a radiant crystalline drone that will leave this universe and you behind forever.”

“Rich, that’s your weirdest one, you crazy-ass dude,” Xavier says on the other end of the radio band.

It is a half-moon summer night and the New Mexico sky is lit by starlight.

“What in the universe do you want to see?”

Methyl stood behind me in the workman’s overalls she’d been wearing when I met her behind the Golden Apple. She had a View-Master in her hands, identical to the one she gave me, now twelve hundred years ago. She was—we were—in Michelle’s bright kitchen.

“I want to see the way home,” I said. “But it’s all right. We’re too far now. I wish you knew about the Metasoma and the Theian. Maybe you could help us.”

Methyl let herself smile. A peace flowed from her eyes that I’d never seen. She was placid, no longer in the constant state of fear and processing the chaos going on around her.

“Maybe we can help,” Methyl said. “My friend, Eric, he told me I should try to find you over the radio, and I need to show you something.”

Methyl looked into the View-Master.

“The way home is through the Futureness,” she said.

“The what?”

“You know what I mean. The Futureness, Richard. Remember?”

“You’re seeing my dreams. How are you doing that?”

“What was your first word?”

“I know you’re not Methyl,” I said. “Fran, who’s talking?”

Methyl said, “She’s too deep in the star map still. Maybe she’ll find a planet like Earth someplace. I wish she’d just look for basewater, but I can’t make her do things the way I can with you.”

It was Methyl’s voice, but they were the Theian’s words.

Methyl offered me the View-Master. I remembered that it contained images of beaches, the Statue of Liberty, elephants on the African savannah. I wanted its earthbound certainties. I brought it to my eyes. A vision of the universe tunneled into me. An infinitely vast starfield—or if not infinitely large, then small as nothing. A band of pure, inbent black ran across my field of view, an area devoid of stars or depth. It had to be the Metasoma.

The Theian’s clean, clear voice came from Methyl’s mouth.

“Remember the Futureness, Richard.”

“Richard,” Methyl said.

Her body twitched as it switched back to her voice, but her eyes looked blank.

“Can you hear me?” Methyl said.

The kitchen and the snowstorm surrounding us fell upward into the stars I saw through the View-Master. My girlfriend’s kitchen island on New Year’s Eve disappeared approximately twelve hundred years ago and ten billion light years away. Now I saw stars, galaxies, the universe spread all around us in a dense, impossible array.

“Everything here all looks the same,” said the Theian.

She manifested in front of the mass of light as more weak and depleted than before. I couldn’t see Methyl anymore.

“Like the products you have in rows on Earth. All of this is more of the same thing.”

I became afraid that the Theian was turning nihilistic on us.

“There’s difference,” I said. “You, me, Francesca, and the drone aren’t more of the same thing.”

The Theian, translucent and stooped in her shoulders—basewater-deprived—pointed a finger at me. As before, I had no appearance, no body to look down upon or be pointed toward. I had only someone’s perspective on the scene, no actual presence.

“Your brain,” she said, “Or your mind, because there are chunks of the brain we don’t need, we just replicate them from the others we’ve taken, as so many of your brains are nearly identical but for a few randomizers—your brain was digitally dissected and shocked into the drone. I am the drone. The drone is me. The drone is now also you. But my Self is outside the drone. We left your body behind. Your Self? You will have to decide on its location once we reach the Metasoma. My superiors will embody me then. What happens to you and Francesca is up to the god of these things.”

“There are others you’ve taken—other people?”

I saw an image of mutilated cattle on a rancher’s dusty plot, the UFO iconography.

“Very few, because they went insane on the way to the Metasoma and were disqualified.”

“Alien abductions? Autopsies, what?”

“I told you: I’m not alien to Earth or to the basewater that made both of us. Even less are we alien in that we both need belief to survive this detour. I need yours more than you can know. But, yes, before you, we used a few who flatlined. Their beliefs shattered. They didn’t return to tell their tales. Richard, you’ve been dissected, there is no other plan for you than the drone. Long may we go.”

“Where’s Francesca?”

“In the drone with us, as I said, but not a part of you. You’re both parts of the drone, but not parts of each other. Later, maybe, but not yet.”

“I’m never going to figure out the way home if you insist on the Metasoma—”

“We’ve traveled back through more of the same thing, to the tributary. Now we take that to the Metasoma. And that, human boy who believed he took a toy rocket into the Futureness, human boy whose first word was his own name, that is the only plan available to someone who is like you.”

“Fran,” I called out. “Fran, reply.”

I heard nothing. Francesca wasn’t there.

“Course is set—”

The Theian was cut off by the grey—the pure, half-black, half-white, fifty percent grey Francesca thought was somehow significant. Now she wasn’t there to ask, but I remembered she said metasoma meant after body. Besides, I had no mouth, yet I still felt it, my mouth’s projection onto my inevitably projected face. The Theian had never had a body. So, flying into the Metasoma, none of us might scream.