Ch 20: The Futureness

The Futureness Part Two

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What if one day a being came to see me at my absolute loneliest and made me a promise? What if he sat on a kiddie ride space ship, that very young being who looked like me thirty years ago and seemed to hold no memories but for the long summer afternoon, with his skinny arms and his skinny legs? Radio contact with Methyl was dead. Passers-by on the sidewalk of this built town looked like projections from an Earth three decades past. Figures of men, women and kids turned to smile at the boy as they went about their business. It seemed like everyone loved him—on Earth. I wanted to believe, and I wanted a smile, too. Earthlings. I wanted the sunlight that traced them to be real, but there was something wrong with the sky.

“How can I see three stars in broad daylight?” I asked the boy.

“They’re not stars,” he said, “but they’re always in the sky. How you can see them from here is the thing. We’re not looking at them from a planet. The stars are your home, my home, and my father’s home.”

“How many light years are we from Earth?”

The boy squirmed on the rocket ship and hummed.

“What do I count to,” he said to himself. He brought his hands off the ride and wiggled his fingers and said, “It’s too hard.”

“Fran, do you have a distance for those stars, and is one of them Earth?”

He’s right, Rich. It’s impossible

“What’s impossible?”

“What do I count to? It’s impossible,” he said. “We’re outside. It’s hard to explain this moment and ultimately impossible, maybe.” He slid off the ride and hitched up his pants. “Can we go to the Golden Apple now? I’m hungry.”

What if there were two Richards, the thirty-five-year-old and the boy who had been here before? If that were true, I would not believe my dad’s story about my baby words and therefore, I would not believe this vision now, not when I was at my loneliest.

“You’re a Theian projection,” I said to the boy. “Conjured up by the drone. We didn’t make it through the Metasoma. But we want to go home now.”

Yes, we do

“What if you need to believe in me, to help someone?”

“I don’t believe in any of this,” I said. “That’s how I made it here. By not thinking so much.”

“You believe you have a body,” the boy said.

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” I said. “I don’t know where I am. Fran?”

Si, Rich. I’m here

“See?” the boy said. “You can hear your robot. You’re safe.”

“This isn’t Dayton. I’m not home or safe.”

“Whichever way you turn,” the boy said, “it’s Dayton again. Let’s go to the Golden Apple. We can walk there.”

“It’s on Earth,” I said.

“Yes, it is. Come on,” the boy said.

I did want to see more of these Earthlings and to walk around. To take steps, feel my weight, to have weight. I walked through a Theian-spun illusion, but it felt good. I followed the boy, so we left his father inside the hardware store. But the boy claimed we could not find him, so I kept walking after the boy, feeling the sun, if faintly.

Dayton’s old-town district lay before us with plentiful parking.

“This feels real,” I said. “Your Dayton is better than the visions the other Theian made. The one who melted.”

“It’s real,” the boy said. He ran ahead of me up the sidewalk. When he reached the intersection, he stopped and turned to wait for me.

“What’s real for you, then,” I said after I caught up with him.

He waited for the traffic light in silence.

“You are,” he said. He took my hand as we started across the intersection. “This is real.”

His small hand in mine was warm.

“It looks thirty years old, though. There are three stars in the sky during the daytime. This is not real.”

“Everything that happens is real. Even on the outside. Basewater made you. You’re a big surprise. A big, big surprise that one of you finally made it.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They froze or burned. Burned or froze. That’s what creatures do after the Metasoma.”

“You led them to their deaths,” I said.

“Me?”

The arched roof of the Theian’s version of the Golden Apple oversaw a wide expanse of parking lot, half-full of old cars. The restaurant looked a generation brighter and newer.

“Wherever you are, projecting this into the drone and tricking me, moving my brain around this dusty, old town replica… in the end, you’re just a Theian trying to get through.”

Francesca’s voice came out of nowhere like a ghost’s.

Where are you keeping the drone?

“You’re in it,” the boy said. “The same as him.”

But my feeds are off

“Can’t you see?” I asked her.

I’m completely blind, Rich. I can only hear you. I have no feeds

The boy turned and ran into the parking lot. He hit full stride just as a pickup truck roared up an aisle and turned toward him. I stepped off the curb and yelled for him to be careful, but the boy dodged the car and disappeared into the crowd by the doors to the Golden Apple.

“What in the hell,” I said.

An elderly woman in a white sundress and oversized sunglasses seemed to appear on the sidewalk near me.

“They have a lot of energy, do they not,” she said.

“He’s not mine,” I said.

The woman pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead. The eyes she revealed were clear, bright brown and blank as a fresh piece of paper.

“Where, then, are his parents?” she asked.

I whispered to her, “Are you here? Is this now?”

“I’m from here, if that’s what you mean, sir.”

“When is this? How long have you been here?”

“I think,” she said, then paused.

“Where are we?”

Shock and worry crossed her face.

“I think I just got here,” she said. “Where… where are you from?”

“Earth,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m very busy. I have errands to run.” She brought down her glasses over her eyes. On her way past me, she grazed my side with her tote bag.

There was something not right about the woman. Just got here probably meant that she was built by the boy, like everything in this Dayton, even my body. The old cars, the gasoline in them—all of it was history. I didn’t have a body outside the drone, but now that I did, what choice did I have but follow directions. That meant going to the wall. I ran after the boy.

He had reached the alleyway that led to the back of the Golden Apple by the time I caught up to him.

“Come on,” he said. “You should see this.”

Out of breath, I said, “You gave us skrip.”

“No, I didn’t. I never made skrip. Never.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The Theians, when they inducted you at the wall. Come on!”

He ran down the alley and into the back of the restaurant, which opened onto a small lot backed by a grassy hill. I came around the corner of the building and there, parked in the lot, was a deep blue Honda four-door gleaming in mint condition.

“Francesca?” I said.

Sì, Rich, where are you? came her voice from no direction, as though she were ambient sound.

“I’m right here, in front of you, behind the Golden Apple.”

I can’t see, Rich.

The boy giggled.

“We’re here, me and the boy,” I said to the car, to what I thought must be Francesca. I turned on the Theian.

“Why are you laughing? Let us go home, or leave us alone,” I said in the lowest register I could manage.

Where, Rich? You are where?

I stared at a boy just like me at his age—he looked so much like me that I couldn’t glare, but I stood my ground. This town and its ground was his creation, so what I could do was bluff.

“We need the drone back in order to take us back,” I said. “Or we won’t talk to you anymore.”

“No, but I love the drone,” the boy said. “It’s cool, the way it’s all crystals. Looks like a, a little like a moth. Theians are into those. That’s why they call my footpaths Metasomas. Those are the end part of the insect. It’s in the Theian makeup to be into this. The metasoma comes after the body. Just like you, after the body. Get it?”

Pride and desperation had slipped into his voice. I was being tricked by a child, and Francesca mocked. I couldn’t find the words for what I wanted to say.

“Just stay here,” the boy said. “Everything that isn’t here can be here. I can build you a beach and more mountains and deserts!”

The boy skipped sidelong across the lot to the wall and shouted back, “The Theians used ball lightning as a battery to turn silica packets into the network in your back. They tried lots of people, but you were something special to them.”

“Theians,” I said, hoping my tone would show the boy that I knew he was among them. I walked across the back lot to stand near him, over him. “Theians wanted us here to meet the God of These Things.”

“They call the trips meatshots. Because, you know, you saw it for yourself, Theians are basically ninety-nine percent basewater. They are a bit of some silica crystals, but they’re running out and they’re thinning out. I don’t see them burning or freezing on my paths much anymore, is what I’m saying, until I saw you coming.”

“Your comrade said billions of drones never got through.”

“I don’t know, counting… it’s hard.”

“You don’t have to count to anything,” I said.

“Okay, good.”

“Meatshots,” I said.

“You want proof I’m not a Theian, then look through this, whatever it is,” the boy said.

He produced a red View-Master in his hands.

“You brought it here on the drone, marked by the Theians. They know about my small paths, too, in between things, the Metasomas that are smaller than anything.”

“The Theian told us about them,” I said.

“They’re real,” the boy said. His eyes went wide with his smile. “I got them to work in between things. Isn’t that cool? I didn’t know how to do it until I tried, and now there are paths in between things, not only around them. I’m surprised they found out about that, too.”

Don’t listen to him, Rich

“What, Fran,” I said.

This doesn’t sound right

The boy made a scoffing snort.

“What kind of Theian can I be,” he said, pointing to the sky, “when I live there and my father lives there and I built your home? How can this be? There is no number of explanations. You are zero-sum, you are out. Strike out. Look inside that thing, for real.”

I took the View-Master toy from him and raised it to the sky, where the sun and three stars shone.

“Look through.”

“What am I going to see?”

“Your home.”

A 3-D slide of a mushroom cloud, sky ablaze in red and black apocalypse. I clicked the shutter to scroll to the next image. From a satellite’s vantage point a city targeted with a black divot the length of entire neighborhoods. Beyond the crater and filtering into the air shone the skrip-fueled nightmares and visions I had seen, the skies burning. Methyl called them the first fireworks. She said I’d unlocked a vision of the beginning of the world. But what I saw through the View-Master looked like the end. I checked the toy for a cartridge of slides but it was empty. More illusions, I thought.

“What is this, a joke?”

“No,” the boy said, “the Theians also figured out how to connect these things by marking them. They work through the small Metasomas. That toy was marked automatically when you put it in the drone. The humans they touched, marked. You’re marked. It’s all over you. That’s why they talk from far away, and that’s how they controlled you.”

“With skrip,” I said.

“If you think so?” he said. “What they learned was mixing skrip and basewater makes you live a long time. You can still die, though, so my father...”

“Your father at the hardware store?”

Shhh, Rich, listen

The boy glared at the Honda as if it truly were Francesca.

“Listen to me,” the boy said. “My father is not interested.”

“In what?”

“All of these things,” the boy said, spreading his arms wide. “I am the God of These Things, like the Theians say. Where’s Sophia?”

“On Earth,” I said.

That is where we need to go

“What for?” the boy said. “I haven’t shown you anything yet. You have to stay. There’s the desert and the mountains. I can make it snow early in the mountains.”

Why?

“To ski,” I said. “He wants to ski.”

As a kid, I pissed off my dad by walking into his garage, which was stuffed full of car parts and broken-down heaps, with the purblindedness to ask for a five thousand dollar ski trip with my classmates.

“Ski,” the boy said. “I can ski black diamonds.”

A sheet of dark crystal pebbles appeared in a wall behind the boy, then shimmered to the ground with a shattering sound. The boy kept his eyes on me.

“I’m not a Theian. I don’t use silicates for kidnapping. That is your home,” he said angrily, pointing at the three dots of light in the sky. “And that one is mine. Don’t you see?”

“We see,” I said. I hoped that Francesca wouldn’t speak. “You’re not one of them.”

Blood, was it? — rushed to my head. I became so dizzy that I took a step for a stair that wasn’t there.

Richard, this isn’t the time. Stop it. Stop that and sit down and breathe

I stumbled, reached out for the wall for balance. I felt its coarse, ruddy bricks, and expected another trip, like when Xavier brought me here—but not here, an incalculable distance from here. My hands against the wall, my fingers splayed out, and there it was: I had all of them, all ten, the left pinkie finger was back.

I curled it, touched it with the fingers of my other hand, then ran it down the length of my cheek until the boy spoke.

“Do you like it?” he said.

“It’s good to have it back,” I said.

“You’re whole.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Yell it.”

“What?”

“Scream, I’m whole.”

“I’m whole,” I said.

“Scream it.”

“I’m whole!” I yelled.

By the powerbox, grasses swished and crackled over Methyl’s campsite. It was a real summer heat today. There was a breeze, though. It took away the balloon. At least a breeze under this hot sun.

“What are we doing back here,” I said to the boy.

He scuffed his heels to raise a cloud of dust.

“Just a little bit closer,” he said, “and one of them would have been inducted like you were. It was more than enough to get partway into the three kids.” He kicked up more sandy dirt. “Silica. Not glass. They were aiming for you.”

I sat on the ground cross-legged like a child. The whole thing was, it was exhausting having a body.

You mean they wanted Richard?

“Theians heard your walkie talkies, your blood oath.”

“Those stars are Theian ships hovering up there, and they’re making all this happen.
I’m not whole. You’re only in my eyes. A trick in the mirror.”

“You made a pledge about the future, and now it’s then. Mister, sir, Rich, look,” the boy said. He threw his arm up to the sky and pointed to one of the stars. “That’s my father’s home. That’s my home. I can’t describe them to you. The other one is your home. All of it.”

“Earth,” I said.

“Inside the universe, which is that.” He jabbed his hand toward the third star. That’s everything for you.”

“The dot.”

The boy said, “Yeah. It holds together like that.”

“And if it doesn’t hold together? What about, are you saying what I saw in the thing, the View-Master, was real. A real war?”

“In the present tense, because they marked it. But in your mind, you’ve been away seven or eight months, or it should be, right, car?”

Do not tell me what I am

“One thousand—no, wait. One thousand two… twelve hundred,” the boy said, smiling down at his fingers. “What do I count to?”

One thousand, three-hundred and twenty-one light years from Earth was our last position before we went into the Metasoma

“Do they talk for you? I’m curious why.”

“You don’t like her.”

“I don’t have friends the way that she is. She’s different on so many levels.”

“Where is she? Physically, I mean the drone and me. Where are we if we’re not really on this movie set in New Mexico.”

“I can’t help the way you traveled here in the drone. But I helped you and her. She’s the car, you’re you. I’m hungry, too.”

“We’ll stop at the Golden Apple in a minute,” I said. “The View-Master showed me what.”

“It showed you now in marked places. That light, your dot, is new. Maybe it’ll change, and the Theians won’t keep trying to get here.”
“Why did their planet collide into Earth? Why is Earth at war?

“One is over here,” he said, gesturing to his left, “and the other way over there.” Both arms went out wide, then dropped to his sides. “That’s what I know.”

“Twelve hundred years, if we go back through the Metasoma, what time is it, I don’t know how to ask,” I said.

If we arrived there now, it would be year three thousand two-hundred and seventy-six. I’m sorry

“Xavier’s vaccine, though,” I said. “Remember, if you’re like me or you get it into the water…”

We can’t assume, Rich

“I bet they’re marked. I got marked, I bet they’re marked and we can find them.”
“What, who are you talking about?” the boy said.

“Michelle and my baby.”

“She’s here, though?”

“Not again with that talk.”

“This is Dayton. Michelle lives in Dayton. She’s here. You can go talk to her.”

“Wait, how?”

“That’s why you have your car.”

Rich? Rich, I’m still without feeds. I can’t see. What’s going on, Rich

“Give her back her vision,” I said.

“She can see,” the boy said.

Rich, how are we in Dayton? Is this, this isn’t real

“We’re going to Michelle’s,” I told Francesca. I got inside and shut the boy outside. “Fran, we can go see her. Could you turn up the AC?”

She lives on Earth

“This is also Earth,” the boy said, his voice muffled outside the windows.

“We can’t save them,” I told Francesca. “But we can see Michelle.”

We can see her at home. This is something odd

I whispered inside the car to Francesca, “We need to see Michelle. We’re going to Michelle’s house.”

This is a dangerous idea, Rich

“Don’t be afraid,” I told her. “It’s all turned upside down, but don’t be scared of Michelle.” I pointed at the boy standing outside the car in the sun. “Look at him. I think he’s like a god, maybe. We’re going to Michelle’s. I might never have this chance again, Fran. What if she’s had the baby? This is how we get home finally. We’re going to Michelle’s.”

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To be continued

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