by Marc Horne
Chapter 7
Xolo expertly piloted the starjumper away from the surface of the cruiser. He noted to himself that when he had signed the contract and taken the implant there had been no explicit clause in there about not dropping bombs onto the cruiser and killing all on board. But there was a troublingly vague clause in there about doing no harm to the interests of Haja Gukkool or his clan and this attractive little bombing would fall right in the middle of that.
Just asking the question set off a kind of fizzy sensation along the plane that divided the two hemispheres of his brain. Xolo had never been fitted with a mind-bomb before and this new morality that it imposed was freaking him the hell out.
He breathed. He focused on making the best of the new fucked-up.
Earth was calling him.
The kids were in cute little orange spacesuits with helmets and everything: totally old school. Xolo decided to just go with a simple g-suit, made of purply black webbing. They popped out of the top of the planet, and you could see the weird calligraphy of lakes and mountains.
Xolo had a moment of “Oh what’s the point of it all,” like we all do from time to time. As it happens, the very worst time for this to happen is as you exit a planet and see the black gash of space, speckled with dandruff stars.
He shook it off, the weightless mass of life.
He pointed the ship towards the nearest blackwarp and then engaged the solar sails. The sails rejoiced in the blue light and flipped away from the shiny rock. Speed upon speed upon speed. This was a nice ship. They headed into the blackwarp, a young rent in space that looked like a hollowed out tree that had been blasted to charcoal by lightning.
The children shivered, even Sunny. This was a fresh evil hole. The speed it gave you was different than the speed of the sun. This was the speed of the phrase ‘would you jump in my grave so fast?’
This was falling through the floor.
This was hands coming from nowhere and pulling you down.
Outside (the outside of the inside of the underside of the real side,) black and grey knotted veins swished past at increasing speed. Soon the trends were all you could see as even those hyperlight channels began to blur.
Ahead Xolo saw the main junction where this branch merged with the main artery to earth, the Auschwitz Autobahn. He cruised them around a right angle that contained huge volumes of inhuman space. They hit AA1, diving through screams, faces, and other real illusions.
Children shouldn’t see this. Children shouldn’t go into space. He tried to cover Sunny’s eyes, but she swatted his hand away.
“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “Also it knows how to go through your eyelids, doesn’t it?”
After about twenty subjective minutes Xolo started to see signs of insanity on the kids’ faces. The metal inside the ship had started to ring with resonant screams. Xolo had a stun gun that was very very non-fatal so he popped the kids with it. They plopped rag-doll style in their g-seats.
Then he sat in the control seat and watched the vast insult they were traveling through. Proof that people were unable to face reality was all about him. Firstly the large window at the front of this ship. Despite the fact that space travel was disgusting to look at, people had always expected spaceships to have beautiful windows where you could admire the delicate architecture of things. How many billions had been spent developing a window that could handle trans-light speeds and pressures?
So there was that.
The next proof that people couldn’t handle reality was the very existence of blackwarps. In the year 2101 an itinerant, so-called psychic started to notice that his clairvoyance was strongest when he visited sites of mass-murder and genocide. This would all have been ignored if he had not been married to a highly tolerant quantum physicist. She took measurements for him and found that indeed, there were unusually high levels of quantum tunneling in areas like that.
Governments got wind of this. Corporations too, more importantly. Sadly it was proven that human trauma creates holes in space. Genocide-level events create holes big enough to fly through. Every place on earth that had ever witnessed a genocide became a gleaming spaceport. The more focused the genocide the better. The Auschwitz Autobahn led to a beautiful sector of the galaxy that was loaded with human-friendly stars and strong trade winds.
Once the galactic empire got going, and once all this “government” and “corporation” shit got finally merged, thankfully and inevitably massive wars broke out, reddening the freshly occupied planets.
In a dark room - actually, the lights were on in this room and there were bagels and flowers… actually, it had an amazing view… actually, hookers brought the bagels - in this room, plans were made for Concentration Bombs. These bombs were dropped from the abstract heights of space onto a warring army who were trying to hold a muddy field. The bomb would explode overhead and shoot millions of micro bullets that would pierce armor and inject the men with tailor-made hallucinogens. The soldiers would quietly start to ramble across the fields and blindly gather close together. They had a herding instinct that the bullets unlocked. Meanwhile, in their minds, they were in a hellish death camp: tortured, starved, their children farmed. The months of their minds passed. Old friends became unrecognizable, or rather indistinguishable: they all had the same skullface. The tortures were unimaginable, or no… we can all imagine them. We could all sit on a bench with a pencil for thirty minutes and design them.
And then, about thirty objective minutes after the hallucinations began, the second phase of the bomb would arrive. A conventional explosive that killed all the soldiers and ripped open space. Then engineers would descend and get to work finding the new hole in thingness: folding space back, pinning its skin, making sure the blackwarp stayed open and mapping where it went and determining if it was somewhere their lords and masters would like to go to. These engineers had signed agreements when they got their jobs where they agreed to be preemptively driven insane so as to see which ones could still do engineering work with their minds wasted.
Back up copies of their minds were kept by the sultan who hired them, but the small print was that a restoration had never been successfully achieved.
So these lunatics got to work. They slavered, chattered and usually one of them killed one of the other ones, but they got those damn holes open. Soon, the galaxy was a web or a tree rooted in deep old earth. Along the web (or tree) moved the treasure you can get when you are willing and able to crack small planets open like walnuts and drain them.
Massive wealth, slavery of the mind and body, the flight from Earth. Ships that sailed through genocidal seas.
People would plan a trip on these black seas and when they got there they would drink cocktails and dance the lambada. They would do their duty, do their work, raise their kids. They would honeymoon on clear and objective proof that the mind is the substance of things; that all of this dirt and hate is our responsibility. The universe is composed of the same substance as our pain.
One day Xolo would be the richest man in the universe and on that day things would change pretty damn quick.
But for now he was falling back to Earth, planet of the farmers.
