Scum of the Universe

by Everett, Grant

  Thankfully, this isn't what happened. The crashing staircase toppled towards the very next level, sending the three humans tumbling and sliding down a very bumpy slippery-dip. Winded and bruised, they all scrabbled for the open doorway as tens of thousands of tons of tarnished metal staircase collapsed behind them like a Milk Arrowroot biscuit dropped into hot tea. It took some time for the dust to literally settle.

  “Slummer,” Tuesday finally managed to groan, rolling over. “Your fat arse just demolished half a starship. I hope you're happy.”

  “I want to go home,” Jimmy sobbed, plucking shards of tetanus out of his face.

  “Look,” September ordered, getting to her feet. Somehow, her curiosity was so strong that it seemed to enable to her to ignore that she was just one big bruise. “See? There's more of those electrified tendrils. And they all seem to be converging on that doorway over there.” September held up her lightscreen again. She nodded. “That's our target. Come on.”

  Picking their way carefully around the organic cables (Tuesday was especially sure not to bump them), the small group finally made it into the hotspot that September's Omni had highlighted. Inside, electrified vines covered the walls and ceiling in a solid layer of tangled green. The sheer volume of amps skittering around this nerve-centre of organic wiring was enough to raise every hair on their bodies. Falling against one of those concentrated knots would probably be immediately fatal. September didn't have a chance to see if it was possible to plug the time machine into this green powerhouse of energy before something unspeakable began to form on the far side of the room...

  Hundreds of tendrils of all thicknesses began to pull themselves away from the walls and ceiling with disgusting sucking noises, and they writhed and wriggled into a dense maze of green the size of a truck. They wrapped together into a vaguely human-shaped face, and smaller vines formed some of the more detailed features, such as eyelashes and frown lines. Eventually, within the space of twenty seconds an unmistakable countenance had congealed into being, and it was truly terrible to behold. Disgusting strings of yellow goop dripped down to the rotten mesh floor from its mouth, hissing on the rust, and the balled-up vines that served as eyes rolled down to look at the intruders.

  “You...are human?” it said in a demonic voice. The pitch of its words sent tremors through their bones. “Where did you come from? How are you here, after all this time?”

  “Hey, Eulogy, you look great!” Tuesday exclaimed, finally recognising the old Commander. “Something's different, though...did you gain a few kilograms? Get a haircut? Wait! I know! You've became an enormous pile of mushrooms, haven't you?”

  “You!” the-creature-that-was-once-Eulogy screeched. The fungus network crawling across the walls, ceiling and floor quivered as Eulogy's mutated face glared with hatred at somebody he had not seen in thousands of years. While Eulogy's reaction to Tuesday had been bad enough, the entire starship shook with rage as Eulogy regarded Jimmy. “You! Slummer! You are to blame for everything!”

  Jimmy looked behind him, then back at Eulogy again. The fat chef paled to the colour of old cream.

  “Who, me?”

  A tentacle instantly shot out of Eulogy's mouth. Wickedly barbed and spiked, the prehensile plant lunged right for Jimmy's forehead at top speed. At the pace it was going, the vine was going to install some serious ventilation right through Jimmy's skull. Displaying an astonishing amount of bravery, September darted to the side to intercept the biological weapon before it could plunge home. Eulogy's electrified vine stopped only a matter of inches from her face, hesitating.

  “Move,” Eulogy ordered, his single word deteriorating into a snarl of static.

  She didn't budge. In fact, September didn't even glance at the thorns waving far too close to her eye. As usual, she had gone into her standard “intellectual” setting where minor concerns such as, say, not having her entire body perforated by organic spikes were brushed aside for the sake of her own understanding.

  “Commander, do you recognise me?” September asked, facing her palms towards the green mass in the classic “I'm unarmed” gesture.

  The vines that made up Eulogy's enormous face twitched a little bit. Thinking for a moment, his eyes shuddering about as he tried to access memories from the better part of two hundred millennia ago, he finally managed a name.

  “September,” he growled, but without anger this time.

  September smiled as the sharp vine retracted back into Eulogy's mouth and vanished.

  “Good. We're making progress. Look, I just want to talk. That's all.”

  Eulogy frowned.

  “Talk? About what?”

  September shrugged.

  “Well, I think that asking what you...asking you what you are would be a good place to start.”

  “Are you blind? He's turned into a mushroom,” Jimmy hissed under his breath. “Don't you think that might be a bit of a touchy subject? If I woke up as a toadstool one morning, I'd be pretty sensitive about it. Are you trying to get us killed?”

  Eulogy's vines trembled, and his facial expression was almost insulted. He looked like an A-list celebrity who hadn't been recognised by a sandwich artist at their local Subway. His words dripped arrogance.

  “I have not been the sole-entity known as Commander Redmond Eulogy for a long, long time. I have become the sum total of a billion tonnes of neurally-networked fungus spread across nine-hundred-and-eighty-seven-thousand ships. I am The Spread. I am forever. I am all that is.”

  “Nine-hundred-and-eighty-seven-thousand?” Tuesday repeated.

  The huge green eyes rolled down towards Tuesday in contempt, and Eulogy proved that he wasn't just some giant useless face splattered on a wall by effortlessly creating a huge lightscreen. The holographic display flickered a little bit, and some of the nearby vines sparked and wriggled about in distress, but the display contained a clear view of a ball of multicoloured wreckage in deep space. September immediately knew what she was looking at: by using The Frontier as an unbreakable spine, Eulogy had incorporated the better part of a million other vessels – everything from haulers to frigates to Unison military cruisers to dinky little escape pods - into a big, crude sphere. The impacted wreckage of a hundred junkyards, a smashed-together hulk that was drifting through the void, must have stretched for around fifty kilometres in every direction from its centre of mass.

  As the three humans watched this scene, the ball of wreckage ploughed into a relatively minute swarm of 747-sized transport ships, reducing them to a thin layer. Tuesday, Jimmy and September understandably braced themselves. As their surroundings didn't shake one iota when those multiple impacts occurred on the lightscreen, it was pretty obvious that what they were watching was a recording. The age of this video file was impossible to tell.

  The lightscreen picture darted towards the gaping maw of a windshield to provide a good look at these newest additions to the ball. All the human occupants of the ruined vessels had died on impact, smashed into little more than person-flavoured jam, so seeing their pulped flesh was no surprise. But then something unusual happened: the now-familiar carpet of blue-green fungus begun to invade the new section of the hulk at a rate of a metre per second. Within a matter of a minute, the ships had been filled and sealed off. It didn't take a stretch of the imagination to come to the conclusion that the leftover flesh had been consumed by the fungus.

  “I assimilated The Unison one world at a time,” Eulogy rumbled, switching to another ancient recording. This video showed The Frontier barrelling through a whole fleet of heavy cruisers emblazoned by Unison markings. As The Frontier was made from the finest alloys ever produced by mankind and didn't have a single living human on board anymore, nothing that the military vessels could throw at the leviathan seemed to have any effect. The Frontier simply smashed into the outclassed vessels like a siege engine, disabling them and adding them to its bulk in one easy move. Like before, The Spread invaded these new spaces and distributed itself faster than Tuesday could walk. Alt
hough this particular battle tactic would be more at home in the head of a territorial bull than in the brain of a man who had reached the highest echelons of the military, September had to admit that it was a pretty darn effective strategy.

  This video stopped, too.

  “It took years, decades, centuries,” The Spread said calmly, in a meditative way. “Eventually, I became all that is. I am all that remains.”

  September blinked. Her eyes darted about, as though she had so many hundreds of things to ask that she had no idea exactly where to begin. It was like walking into the Great Library of Alexandria and trying to figure out what papyrus scroll she wanted to unfurl. After a moment of thought, September spoke.

  “Are all the different ships that make up The Spread as broken as The Frontier? I didn't see a single thing that worked the entire way down. ”

  Eulogy's expression darkened in offence. All of his vines wriggled, and September's hair frizzled out a bit from the static build up. September raised her hands palm-first again.

  “I'm not insulting you, Eulogy! No: I'm saying that it may be possible to fix this crate.”

  Eulogy's expression twisted up and his vines calmed a little. It was like he'd just received news that was so welcome that he literally could not believe it.

  “Explain.”

  September took a breath.

  “You know that I was, without a doubt, the most highly qualified crew member aboard The Frontier, right? Not to mention that designing this bucket would have been literally impossible without my decades of hard work on dimensional plotting theory.”

  Eulogy's eyes narrowed further.

  “The Frontier has been immobilised for tens of thousands of years,” he growled. “It cannot be fixed. Others have tried. Experts. Geniuses. They all failed. They all became part of The Spread as soon as they admitted defeat.”

  September took a step towards the giant green face and jabbed an index finger at his nose.

  “Eulogy, I have no doubt whatsoever that not only am I capable of repairing anything on this ship, but I could probably make it work better than the dumb spugger who designed it in the first place,” September snapped. “If I am provided with all the necessary resources and enough time, I guarantee that I could make The Frontier work again.”

  Eulogy was silent for a time, as though silently searching September's words for lies. After a tense minute, Eulogy eventually smiled. His vines wriggled and detached from the walls and ceiling.

  “I can detect that you are telling the truth. I accept your offer.”

  September smiled and lowered her hands.

  “Excellent! Now, I need to have total access to everything on board that has any actual value. Electronics, circuit boards, power sources, tools and raw materials would be a good start. From what I could tell, everything of use appears to have been looted a long time ago, so I'm assuming that you've hidden everything in stasis cases, right?”

  Eulogy squinted at September. He was wearing the same facial expression you'd get from a wise old grandmother who was trying to figure out precisely how a psychic was cold reading such in-depth details about her long-dead husband.

  “When I lost the ability to move, I did just that.” Eulogy growled. “My last batch of servants filled the stasis cases with their own hands before they were assimilated.”

  “Where?”

  “Five storeys straight down.” Eulogy answered. “If you give me an hour, I can clear a path through the nearest elevator shaft, and you can climb down fairly easily.”

  September snapped her fingers at Tuesday and Jimmy and stomped towards the only exit.

  “Okay. We'll get to work now. Get started on opening that shaft, would you?”

  Before she could escape this death trap of electrified vines, the door sealed itself with a thick green mesh. September could see the amps zipping up and down the growths, as though Eulogy was charging them especially high.

  “I have personal need of the other two,” Eulogy said. As an unspoken explanation, the furry blue-green fungus started to grow towards Tuesday and Jimmy. “My apologies, September.”

  Tuesday leaned in close to Jimmy.

  “Do me a favour?” he hissed.

  Jimmy squinted. “What?”

  “Jump, would you?”

  Jimmy gave Tuesday his best “I must have misheard you just then” expression.

  “Huh?”

  “Jump, you lump!” Tuesday roared, reaching for September's sleeve.

  Twisting up his face in a mixture of determination and fear, Jimmy Slummer summoned all of his remaining strength and pushed off the rotten decking as hard as his legs could manage. Due to the fact that Jimmy weighed almost two hundred kilograms and contained less dense muscle tissue than a vegetarian egg roll, he barely lifted half a foot off the mesh. The floor beneath him was already a solid yellow shape on the structural scan, so simply pushing down was enough to splinter it into a jigsaw of tarnished ruin. Just before Eulogy's vines could whip them off their feet and zap them to death, the three time travellers fell a good four metres onto the deck directly below, but they had no time to scream before that floor dissolved, too. Tumbling and disoriented, they plunged through somewhere between three to six floors (they were far too confused in the mushroom-lit gloom to tell for sure) before landing on a slab of intact metal. Thankfully, due to the soft mounds of fungus that had cushioned their fall, they were alive. Unfortunately, being alive meant that they had to experience what it was like to exist as human-shaped sore spots.

  Tuesday, fading in and out of consciousness, opened his eyes after an unknown amount of time to see that they had landed in a room full of ancient plastic pallets stamped STASIS. As Tuesday went to stand up his brain finally processed that September was holding up two dusty Triple-A Nuclear batteries. The best explanation his groggy mind could muster was that she must have used an app on her Omni to seek out their radiation signatures. Smiling broadly, September jammed both batteries into the Nokia, pulled Jimmy and Tuesday close, and twisted the dial back into the distant past.

  *

  Unfortunately, they didn’t quite expect how distant.

  Tuesday realised three alarming things in quick succession: he couldn’t breathe, he was freezing cold, and he was in space without a spacesuit. Deafened by the total silence of the vacuum, his skin prickling as it went blue and crunchy, Tuesday knew that he was only seconds away from becoming a corpse. As a man who had almost earned the punishment known as a "spacing" on several occasions from more than a couple of people, Tuesday knew all about what happened to an unprotected human body in deep space. It was hideous beyond words.

  Thankfully, Tuesday had the foresight to immediately expel all the air from his lungs in an geyser of ice crystals. This was lucky, as Tuesday's breath had been about two seconds away from violently bursting through his ribcage in a fatal case of explosive decompression. As this internal meat fountain would have pulped every one of his organs, this undoubtedly saved his life. Unfortunately, the expulsion sent him tumbling in a permanent backflip.

  Great. Now he wanted to vomit, too.

  Floating in absolute zero, Tuesday looked "up" towards a sign of movement to see that September was swimming towards him. She appeared to be using her small spray-bottle of hydrofluoric acid as a crude form of propulsion. Jimmy’s lumpy body was firmly wrapped around her foot like a lonely two-toed sloth.

  Behind September and Jimmy, a big chunk of half-completed starship was drifting behind what Tuesday recognised as one of the reflective moons of Seven Suns. The unborn vessel was composed almost entirely of bare girders, but what white skin she did possess had already been decorated by half-a-kilometre long letters that declared FRON.

  Hypoxia had already begun to kick in by now, and Tuesday could feel the prickling of hundreds of capillaries bursting beneath his frozen skin. To make matters worse, the total lack of humidity and a temperature of absolute zero meant that Tuesday's eyeballs had begun to freeze solid in their sockets. A la
yer of ice solidified on his lips, preparing to plunge all the way down his throat and deep into his respiratory system. Although he could no longer see or feel anything, he hoped and prayed that September was about to take his hand and rescue him from this horrible, horrible death.

  Unfortunately, Tuesday's brain was still working just fine, so he knew exactly what his future entailed. First off, he would experience what it was like for all the water in his body to expand into vapour. At around the same time hundreds of nitrogen bubbles would form within his ruined veins, giving him a fatal case of the bends. Just to top things off, the bubbles would then block off every centimetre of his respiratory system, causing a series of strokes and seizures. His heart would soon be unable to pump anything through his severely enlarged veins, so Tuesday's blood pressure would instantly hit zero and he'd die. By the time a cloud of blood boiled out of his perforated skin and radiation fried whatever was left into jerky, less than one minute would have passed.