Ch 8: The Metasoma
The Futureness Part Two
This state I’m in, this sleep, is the only friend of mine.
This tank’s the only friend of mine, where I marinate inside the drone and dream. Francesca is a voice, a producer of visions somewhere else in the drone, and awake for centuries grinding on the star map.
In my sleep I saw my girlfriend, Michelle. We stood in her stainless-steel kitchen on New Year’s Eve, a snowstorm worrying over Dayton as we drank champagne. I believed plate glass blown from a bomb in a Bag and Baggage store had scattered across my back, all happening less than one circle of the sun ago, if time goes that way anymore.
In my sleep, I whispered, “I want to go home.”
I was talking to Michelle or Francesca or even the Theian, but it was also a prayer. I began to suspect that Francesca had been putting me to sleep to keep me sane.
“Listen to you, to yourself,” Michelle said. “You’ve said all these resolutions before.”
The voices of Francesa and the Theian mixed eerily with Michelle’s.
“Resolutions are about the past,” they said. They are about what you did, and they are about what you didn’t do
Which planet do you call home, said Michelle, right there before me in her kitchen. “Ours or yours?”
I could almost smell her hair and hear her heartbeat we were so close.
“Not this one, no, I don’t think I want this twisted memory,” I said.
Michelle, soon to be pregnant with our child while Xavier’s plans to stop aging and degeneration proceeded in darkness.
You’re drunken, you’re drunk, Michelle said.
The clink of our glasses. The android smile. It became easy to believe, with Francesca and the Theian’s voices merged with Michelle’s that Michelle wasn’t who I thought she was, and not remotely pregnant. I wanted her to turn out to be built, like Gabbyella.
Michelle’s face twitched, seized up for a split second, and relaxed again.
No, I don’t think so. Not this time. But so we are, Michelle said in Francesca’s voice. I’m not doubting what you say. It’s a distinction with a formatter, a function, a hole below all of this
“She’ll be all right,” said the Theian through Michelle.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m in her kitchen,” I said. “I’m here because I’m dreaming this.”
“It’s like the other space I put you in. Outer space. You don’t believe it’s real. It is. It’s just not what it looks like.”
The Metasoma, the three said together.
Hyperactivity of REM state, under extreme conditions. Having half of my body cut away for efficiency, and the rest installed in this drone. I repeated the thought.
“What do you want to see?” the Theian asked me, in her odd voice through Michelle’s mouth.
“See?”
I still didn’t know whether I had eyes. I could see, but only what Francesca and the Theian wanted me to. I wanted to impose a vision on her, the Theian, who had lost us out here.
“How about the launch pad,” she said. “We’re marked there. We can go back, in a way,” said the Theian. Her crystalline shoulders and crown winked in the light she generated for our eyes.
We can’t, Francesca said. Too much time, twelve hundred years has passed
“We can go home?”
“Not entirely,” she said. “We are here. We have a mark here, and we’ve got a weak mark there.”
“Take us back,” I said.
No
To Michelle I said for Francesca, “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I can show you the space, but I can’t take you there,” Michelle said. “We’re not anyplace. If you give me your bot’s mind for the navigation of the markers.”
I’m not a bot
“You’re built.”
I have, I’m corporeal, you don’t have a corporeal—
“You’re built.”
Do not tell me what I am
“We can return to this. The point is, yes, cargo, we can go for a look.”
“Cargo,” I said. “You say that word so often. Cargo. Why?”
“You’re cargo for the Metasoma.”
“Take us back, please,” I said.
“It’s the present there,” she said. “But you can’t be present here. And it’s done.”
I looked out over Xavier’s HQ at night, with lights and dozens of human-like bots swarming, a few bots bent at the knee beneath us.
“Are we home?”
“No, and yes,” I heard the Theian say.
This appears to be a long time after we launched, Rich
Judging by the look of the bots, I thought Francesca was right: sleekly humanoid, plastic or resin, some of them rocking slowly side to side.
“They’re human,” said the Theian.
I thought that was impossible, but their movements, the ways the ones who stood to stare at us could not be mistaken for anything else.
“It’s been twelve hundred years,” said the Theian. “They’re looking a little different, and this place is practically a ruin.”
“Why are they around us? They can’t see us, can they?”
“My guess is they still believe we’re here. I believe we’re a miracle to a number of them. Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, as one of yours once put it,” the Theian said. “And whatever state you’re in, learn to be content. I simply put into a few minds the idea we didn’t ascend.”
“I don’t know whether I can quite handle seeing them,” I managed to say.
Take us back to our real mark, Francesca said.
“This is what happens when you don’t find the Metasoma quickly enough. We worried you wouldn’t.”
We were immediately back in Michelle’s kitchen.
Michelle said, with the Theian’s voice, “The species that do find a metasoma are less useful, we think. We’re looking now for those who are in the dark. Your species so soaked in belief. Those humans were worshipping you because you’re not there. But you were for a moment. If they knew we were watching them just now, what would they do? The reach of your species’ assumption that you’re at the end exceeds your grasp. It won’t be up to you, like it wasn’t up to us—”
“But we—” I tried to get out a plea.
“No, Richard,” Michelle said in her own voice as she pressed herself against me. “Yet Earth ate Theia and kept going. You always bring it back from the brink. Earth got a nice, shiny, new moon and the basewater to make life. And a tremendous amount of belief. The Miracle of the Sun in year 1917, your calendar, of course, seventy thousand people saw the sun performing in the air, changing colors, swirling, etcetera, as predicted by Lucia Santos, a child visited by visions. Imagine, seventy thousand souls. We’ve sent so many drones into the Metasoma and we hear nothing back. The theory of belief, that the Metasoma needs belief, sent us to you, cargo.”
Michelle crossed her first two fingers and gently touched my chest above my heart.
“The Metasoma needs belief,” she said. “That’s the cargo. You use the word offerings. Sometimes, sacrifice is more accurate.”
I gotta get caught up!!!!