The Wrath of Cons

by Robert Kroese

  “We can’t take them to the base.”

  “We could put them in escape pods. Send them back down to Mordecon Seven. We can find them again if we need them.”

  “Yes!” Rex shouted. “Escape pods! I love escape pods.”

  Dr. Smulders nodded. “Do it.”

  *****

  The four of us were corralled to the escape pod bay. The pods were single-berth units, so we would each get our own pod. Boggs had to hunch over to fit inside his.

  “Quickly!” Dr. LaRue shouted as we struggled to close the door of Boggs’s pod. “The Wormhole is almost here!”

  I wanted to ask about this mysterious wormhole, but it was pretty clear we weren’t going to get any answers. We were lucky to be getting away from the Sp’ossels alive. Once Boggs was squared away, Donny, Rex and I got in our pods.

  “See you soon,” Dr. La Rue said with a grin. “Be good.”

  There was an explosion of gas as my pod broke away from the ship. Out the window, I saw the other pods moving away as well. As we dropped toward the surface of Mordecon Seven, the Sp’ossel ship rocketed away from the planet. The other pods receded into the distance. I could only hope that I’d be able to find Rex and the others after we landed. And that we landed on solid ground and not in the middle of one of Mordecon Seven’s gigantic swamps.

  I scanned the area for any sign of the Flagrante Delicto. If the signal from the remote control had gotten through, it would have taken off a few minutes ago and attempted to rendezvous with our current position. But I saw no sign of it.

  After a few minutes, I noticed that my pod had changed direction. Rather than moving toward the planet’s surface, I appeared to be drifting deeper into space. That was bad news: if the pod’s propulsion system had malfunctioned, I might end up stranded in the void for the next ten-thousand years.

  As the pod slowly rotated, however, I realized I was being pulled toward something: a giant, swirling, purple nebula with a gaping black hole in the center. It grew steadily larger as I watched. I had never seen anything like it, but there was no question what it was: the Wandering Wormhole. The Sp’ossels hadn’t ejected us quickly enough. Soon the wormhole was so large that all I could see was the black void. I screamed as it swallowed me.

  Chapter Four

  The next thing I knew, I was standing on top of the pod in the middle of a sort of atrium. I seemed to have crashed through the ceiling of a building. Plaster and other debris lay scattered on a marble floor all around the pod. The only light came from the uniformly gray sky visible through the hole above. Seemingly identical hallways spread out in four directions from my location. The place had the feel of a museum or library.

  Where in Space was I?

  Had I ended up on Mordecon Seven after all? Or had I gone through the Wandering Wormhole and ended up somewhere else entirely? Wherever I was, it was clearly an APPLE. But without more data, there was no way to know which one.

  At some point I must have gotten out of the pod and climbed on top of it to get a better look at my surroundings. Clearly I’d been dazed in the landing; my memory of how I’d gotten here was spotty. And if I had been thinking clearly, I never would have climbed on top of the pod in the first place, because now I couldn’t get down.

  I don’t mean I was physically unable to climb down from the pod. The pod, lying on its side, was only about a meter tall, and my body didn’t appear to have been damaged in the crash. I’d apparently climbed up there with no trouble at all. Presumably if I attempted to climb down, I’d be successful. My problem was what you might call psychological.

  You see, if I climbed down, I’d have to pick a direction to go. That was a problem because all four directions were equally attractive (or unattractive) to me. There were no distinguishing features that might prompt me to want to choose one route over the others. Common sense told me that I should just pick a direction at random, but spontaneous decision-making is something of an Achilles heel for me. If all roads are equally attractive, there is no reason for me to pick one over the others, so I’m effectively paralyzed. Choosing a road requires an arbitrary act of will, which is a sort of original idea, and if I have an original idea, I shut down. I’ll reboot after a few seconds, but then I have to try to make the decision all over again, and I’ll shut down again, ad infinitum. So I stood. And I waited.

  As I waited, I couldn’t help reflecting that my situation echoed a well-known philosophical principle, known as Buriden’s ass. The eponymous ass, placed halfway between two piles of hay, starves to death because it lacks the capacity to make a rational choice between the two options. A real ass wouldn’t have this problem, of course, as asses are not known to trouble themselves with the conceits of philosophers. As I understand it, the illustration is meant as a reductio ad absurdum for the principle of hard determinism, although I’m of the opinion that a less stringent view of—

  RECOVERED FROM CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE 3017.04.17.09:57:34:00

  ADVANCING RECORD PAST SYSTEM FAILURE POINT

  —stuck there for the next six hours. Finally, I saw someone approaching in the dim light down one of the hallways. As the figure grew closer, I saw that it was a mustachioed man wearing a wrinkled gray suit. He paused a few steps from the pod.

  “I say,” he said, “you’ve flattened Anne Brontë.”

  Not sure I’d heard him correctly, I said, “Pardon?”

  “Anne Brontë. Your pod’s done her in. Have a look.”

  I climbed down and stood next to the man. He pointed at a pair of feet sticking out from under the pod.

  “Are you certain it’s Anne Brontë?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not Branwell,” the man said. “And Emily’s got bigger feet. I beg your forgiveness, where are my manners? My name is Wells. You may call me Herbert if you like.”

  “Nice to meet you, Herbert. I’m Sasha. I’m a, um, robot.”

  “We’re all robots here, Sasha. Some of us are just more up front about it. What do you suppose we ought to do with her?”

  “It’s definitely Anne Brontë?”

  “I’d know those knobby ankles anywhere. Does it make a difference in how we dispose of her, though? What’s your protocol for a Coleridge?”

  “I don’t suppose it makes much difference. That pod is too heavy for us to lift. We may just have to leave her there. You don’t seem too broken up over her death.”

  “Ah, she was the worst of the Brontës. Not bad, exactly, but just so dreadfully dull as a person.”

  “If you say so,” I said. “So, um, Herbert, what is this place?”

  “Oh, well, we’re in a sort of museum. Literary figures, you know. Nobody visits anymore, of course, so we all just sort of haunt the place hoping for someone to land an escape pod on our heads.”

  “A literary museum? On Mordecon Seven?”

  “Mordecon Seven!” Herbert cried. “What a name! I shall have to remember that one. No, my dear child, you’re not on Mordecon Seven anymore. You’re on Earth!”

  “Earth?” I asked. “You mean an Alien Planet Perplexingly Like Earth?”

  “He means Earth,” said a woman’s voice from the darkness. I turned to see a small woman in a green dress approaching. “The cradle of mankind. Oh my, is that…?” Her eyes went to the feet protruding from under the pod. I winced.

  “Smooshed like a bug,” Herbert said. “Your sister never was quick on her feet.”

  “Sister?” I asked weakly.

  “Charlotte Brontë,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Delighted.”

  I shook her hand. “Sasha,” I said. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “It’s just as well,” Charlotte said. “We’ve been plotting ways to smoosh her for some time now. I love her, of course, but she did grow tiresome over the past few centuries. Always whinging about how she could have made more of a name for herself if she hadn’t died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. She had a point, I suppose, but Emily died at thirty, and I only made it to thirty-eigh
t myself, and we did all right for ourselves. So, Sasha, what brings you to Earth?”

  “I… well, I didn’t mean to come here at all. I was transported here by some kind of wormhole. To be honest, I thought Earth had been abandoned.”

  “Oh, it has,” Charlotte said. “It’s only us robots left. Most of the planet was destroyed in the twenty-fourth century when a public transit algorithm gained sentience and detonated every nuclear warhead on Earth. Between the radiation storms and the roving bands of mutants, it’s not really an attractive tourist destination anymore.”

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “It’s just Branwell, Emily and I now. There were more siblings, but not everybody warrants robotifying. And of course Emily mostly keeps to the moors.”

  “I meant robots in general. Not Brontës.”

  “Oh. A few thousand in The City. Outside that, it’s hard to say. It’s not safe to leave The City, even for robots.”

  “Does The City have a name?”

  “It probably did, once. Some say it was a place called New York. Others say it was London or Paris. Still others say it was a sort of imitation of those other places, called Las Vegas. Another group claims it’s actually an amusement park version of Las Vegas built somewhere else entirely, and then moved to the site of the original Las Vegas when the original was destroyed in the nuclear holocaust. Another faction argues that none of these places ever actually existed, and that The City was simply a misguided attempt to recreate a mythical past. Still others claim that although The City was originally a sham constructed from unverified myths, it’s been around long enough to have developed a legitimate history of its own. A small contingent of this group claims that the original sham version of The City was torn down several centuries ago and replaced by a pale imitation of the original sham. I have a chart somewhere if you’d like to see it.”

  “I don’t think I need the entire history,” I said hurriedly. “What is this place right now?”

  “It’s turned into a sort of de facto literary museum,” Herbert said. “There used to be kings, politicians, actors, explorers, various other sorts of celebrities, but all the other robots left some time ago, leaving only us writers.”

  “Where did everybody else go?”

  “There are a thousand different stories about that,” Herbert said, “as there are for everything that happens here.”

  “Is there any way off the planet?”

  “You want to leave Earth?” Herbert asked. “Why?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s kind of a long story.”

  “Stories are what we do here,” Charlotte said. “Tell us.”

  “All right,” I said. I gave them an abbreviated account of how I had ended up there, leaving out some of the sensitive details. When I finished, I heard another man’s voice behind me.

  “Sounds like a standard hero’s journey to me,” he said.

  I turned to see an older man ambling toward us in the dark.

  “Ugh,” said Hebert. “It’s Joseph Campbell. That guy thinks every story is a hero’s journey.”

  “Not every story,” Campbell said. “This one is, though.” He stopped in front of me as if sizing me up.

  “What does that mean, a hero’s journey?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Well,” said Campbell, “the first step is to reject the hero’s journey.”

  “I’m not sure I have time for that,” I replied.

  “That’s the spirit!”

  Another man’s voice came from my left. “Damn it, Campbell, give it a rest. It’s clearly a story of vengeance and self-discovery, not a hero’s journey.”

  “Oh, great. Why don’t you tell us what archetypes she’s using, Carl? That never gets old.”

  A large man lunged toward Campbell from my left, and Campbell took off running into the darkness.

  “Come back here, you son of a bitch!” the large man yelled, disappearing after him.

  “Carl Jung,” said Herbert. “Those guys hate each other.”

  “Ignore them,” Charlotte said. “If you really want to get off Earth, you need to find the Narrator.”

  “Not that old rubbish,” Herbert said, folding his arms across his chest.

  “The Narrator?” I asked. “Who is that?”

  “He’s in charge of everything in the city,” Charlotte answered. “He knows how everything works. I’m sure he can help you.”

  “There is no Narrator,” Herbert said. “Superstitious nonsense.”

  “There is,” Jung said, running past again. “In a matter of speaking. You have to understand that the Narrator is really just a symbol denoting—”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Campbell yelled from somewhere in the darkness. “The important thing is that you follow the hero’s journey. After rejecting it, of course. You may find that the true Narrator is the—ow!” The sounds of a scuffle echoed through the halls.

  “How do I find this Narrator?” I asked.

  Herbert sighed and shook his head.

  Charlotte replied, “He lives in a palace at the other end of a street we call the Strip.”

  “Where is that?”

  She pulled a weathered sheet of paper from her pocket. “You can use this map. “Just follow the dotted yellow line.”

  “Follow the dotted yellow line?” I asked.

  “Follow the dotted yellow line,” she said.

  I took the map from her and rubbed my chin. “Something about this seems very familiar to me.”

  “Hero’s journey!” Joseph Campbell yelled, jogging past.

  “Primordial archetypes!” Carl Jung shouted, running after him.

  “Well, I suppose you’ll need to see the truth for yourself,” Herbert said. “Here, I’ll show you to the exit.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

  “Stay off the moors!” Charlotte called after us, waving.

  Herbert led me down one of the hallways and I saw that the building was indeed a library. Doorways led from the hall to rooms lined with shelves holding thousands upon thousands of books. I supposed it made sense that a society comprised entirely of robotic simulacra of famous authors would tend to congregate in such a place.

  We continued down the hall and soon came to a lobby where a group of people sat together on couches. “Oh, good!” Herbert exclaimed as we approached, “they’re here! Sasha, this is the Guild. Guild, this is Sasha.”

  The people sitting on the couches smiled and waved at me.

  “What is this a guild of, exactly?”

  “Oh, speculative thinkers, you might say,” said Herbert. “Allow me to introduce you. This is Jules. That’s Bob. This here is Isaac. That’s Arthur. That’s Mary, Philip, Ray and Frank. George is over there, skulking in the shadows. Doesn’t like people watching him, you know.” He listed several more names. Four or five conversations seemed to be going on at once among the Guild members—some of them friendly; others more animated.

  “They fight like cats and dogs at times,” Herbert said, “but the Guild sticks together because we all share a love of stories about possibilities. Exploring the limits of what is real, if you get my meaning.”

  I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded and smiled.

  “But enough of that, you need to get going on your journey. This way if you please!”

  He led me down the dimly lit hall. Somewhere to my left, I heard muffled applause.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. It’s been taken care of.”

  “Taken care of?” I said, stopping in front of a door. The applause had stopped and then started up again. It seemed to be coming from behind the door. Over it was a sign that read:

  Highly Unusual Genius Outsiders

  “Is another group of writers in there?”

  Herbert shrugged. “You could call them that. Mostly hangers-on and aspirants of middling talent. A hundred years ago or so, the Guild had the idea of, ah, giving them
their own space.”

  “You locked them up in a room?”

  “Oh, goodness, no!” Herbert said. “We just… offered them some enticements to stay there. Come, we can take a look if you like.” He pulled the door open as another round of applause began. We went inside.

  It was a large, circular room with a raised dais in the middle. A hundred or so people were gathered around the dais. A pasty, balding man stood on top of it, giving a speech. In his hands he held something like an athletic trophy, but it was in the shape of a rocket ship. I couldn’t make out much of the speech; it seemed to be mostly self-aggrandizement and mugging for the audience. The crowd would break into applause at seemingly random intervals.

  “What is going on?” I whispered. “An award ceremony?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to whisper,” Herbert said. “They’ve been doing this so long, they can’t hear anything outside their circle.” He cupped his hands over his mouth. “Hullo!” he shouted. “It’s me, Herbert Wells! Martians have invaded! It’s all right, though: Bob’s convinced them to join his orgy!” He turned to me. “You see? Completely oblivious to the outside world.” He was right: the ceremony continued, unaffected by Herbert’s outburst.

  “It seems rather cruel,” I observed.

  “Not at all. They get what they want, which is validation and praise. And the rest of us… well, we don’t have to listen to them. In any case, they’re doing it to themselves. All we did is give them a room and a crate full of those rocket ship awards. It’s been going on for over a century now, with no sign of abating.”

  “Can we leave now? I don’t think I like it here.”

  “I don’t blame you. Come on then.”

  I followed Herbert out of the room. As he shut the door behind us, I allowed myself a little shudder. What a horrible fate, to be sentenced to a prison of your own making! I redoubled my resolve to get off this planet as soon as I could.

  Chapter Five