running blind in a house of mirrors - part 8

It had not been long ago, in evolutionary terms, but in the lifespan of your typical mostly organic human, generations. Metal and poly-concretes, pipework and shadows gradually, then as momentum gathered, quickly filled the Earth’s surface until nature begged off and gave a hearty belch and died. Pockets of managed life remained, but they were sterile and manicured to look like a postcard. The rivers and canyons were walled over and H2O never left the planet to mingle with the heavens. Water was purified, but not through the reinvigorating effort of evaporation. Machines and chemicals did the work now, and no one drank the water. It just wasn’t the same. Trees grew – they were bioengineered, as nothing remained to pollinate them. Flowers and plants grew in subterranean hothouses. Meat animals thrived with no brains and stunted appendages, chickens had enormous breasts and huge meaty thighs, and shrimp clamored - pink and briny - in a salty stew and were the size of a football. The 90% synths grew their meat in a tank and sucked it through a straw. They weren’t interested in taste, or beauty, or recreation. They were ants in a hive. The Brain was their queen.

 Now, I could see in my windshield, the Brain was all up in my grill. Valerie blanched and moaned. I didn’t bother to editorialize, for death had come at last to me, and I meant to cheat its black heart. Then I would go a step beyond and rub its face in the mud – if I could locate some.

 This doesn’t look like too much fucking fun.

 “Right. So, are you up for it?” I asked Star Hopper and I swear she sighed. Her programming had morphed subtly to play off my own personality, and we got along pretty well, even in the heat of battle. We still had a couple tricks up our collective sleeve. If nothing else I imagined we could retreat into the slowly subsiding vortex to aft. But no – our asses were covered, and not in a good way. “There’s no going back,” I said to Valerie, and she shrugged. We were all about forward movement, of course, or we wouldn’t be in this mess.

 Valerie smiled coyly. “You do your magic, big boy, and you know I’ll do mine.”

andreas fernhed

 Now, to make it back to Earth and deliver our package, we would have to run the gauntlet. Spaceships weren’t yet built, nor probably ever would be, to reach the speed of light, but this one could engage in some fine acrobatics at preposterous speeds. The enemy fleet sent from Earth by the Brain was mighty, and poot big, but it couldn’t match spunky Star Hopper. She spun nifty and politely jumped to a safe distance, a half dimensional void, then reappeared arbitrarily a couple hundred space miles in the future. We were blind while in hyperspace, and partially incapacitated. That was definitely a con, but the First United Fleet of Earth didn’t count it among its assets either. As soon as we reappeared, totally bereft of direction, the fleet recalibrated and began firing. Again we morphed into the void just as the missiles and splinter shells buzzed our hull. A pop cinder gained the cabin and lodged into a nook. Valerie snuffed it with a spritz of seltzer then mixed herself a strong cocktail. Somehow she had acquired a bonnet, and I was wearing fishing waders. Jumping about in metaphorical space messed big time with practical physics. We came back out with poofy sleeves and Space Hopper had a sombrero. FUFE fired on us, singeing our brow, and again we evaporated into meaningless space. For seconds I could feel only tingling in my extremities, and Valerie’s. Our atoms again flowed together, then split, then split again… Space Hopper rejoined in triplicate and then a hundred times and a thousand more. FUFE spent its complete load in a massive orgy of destruction reducing our own singular fleet by a thousand percent as Space Hopper dove and weaved amid the missiles and carnage and came out the other side, expending two-thirds of its resources and was tailed by a hundred eager bombs.

 “Fade away,” Valerie cried, clutching her oversized Buzzy bag, but the ship couldn’t; she was fagged out and barely kept pace ahead the torpedoes.

 Fortunate for us, half of the enemy fleet had destroyed itself, but weaponless they still posed a threat. There were no wormholes between us and Earth and only shrewd flying would gain us any advantage. Space Hopper dodged and half of the organized threat crumpled together attempting to engage, and blew the rest to smithereens. Now the halved fleet remained and was surely rebuilding its arsenal. Space Hopper winked. Together we hoped we had gained enough time. As FUFE rearmed, we coasted, replenishing our own resources, then Space Hopper turned to face down the enemy. She contorted madly, constructing a blinding vortex at our dome, and then charged the fleet just as they flew their projectiles. The swirling eddy grew, eclipsing our view of the gas giants as they crossed our visual path, and Hopper blew it forth, and then swerved as the bombs whistled by. The vortex swallowed the fleet while we floated past, wondering where in the universe they’d reappear - hopefully at another time.

 “Home, James,” I said, and hugged Valerie. Her black makeup had run smudging her big red nose.