Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  Most of the slugs he had fired on autopilot had splattered harmlessly against the wall or torn into the body of the dead Seraphim. Now, the wolf threw the body aside and leapt at Harry instead. With his back to the wall, he had no choice but to stand his ground, firing wildly until the beast fell back, snapping and yipping at its wounds. As it turned and fled into the dark interior of the apartment, he emptied the clip after it.

  Even after the gun clicked on empty, he kept his finger pressed against the trigger. Finally, he got the message and let his arm drop. His ears rang with the echo of his own shots. The narrow hallway was laced with trailers of smoke and the air was thick with the smell of blood and spent gun powder. He leaned his head back against the wall and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths.

  He heard the sounds of battle. They were all around him. It sounded like there was a minor war going on up on the roof. He heard the sighing whump of an incoming mortar moments before it hit, shaking the building and blowing shrapnel and debris through the waterfall hole at the end of the corridor. He wondered briefly who was fighting who. He’d seen the black wolves of the Norma-genes and he’d seen Seraphim. Could they be fighting each other? According to Chueh, they were allies, or at least trading partners. But even allies can disagree.

  The Seraphim were big on demanding respect and guarding their turf. They were also paranoid fanatics. Maybe when the Norma-genes and their black wolves came down here to pick up Harry, the Seraphim took exception. If so, maybe he had a chance to slip away while they were busy cutting each other’s throats.

  He popped the empty clip out of the gun butt and slapped in a new one from his jacket pocket. He racked the slide, chambering a round, and then started down the hall towards the back stairs and the picket-runner. It was his only chance of escape. According to the navigation display on his wrist phone, the picket runner was still parked where he had left it. As he slipped and splashed down the hall, he called it for a status report.

  When he reached the first apartment, he hugged the opposite wall and did a slow shuffle past the empty doorway. He kept the Glock pointed straight-armed at it even though he saw nothing but firelight flickering through the curtain of foliage that hung down to the dark water pooled over the collapsed floor. Once past the open doorway, he gave the car’s status report a cursory glance. Everything looked clear. Now, all he had to do was get past that goddamn hole in the floor and down the back stairs.

  The sounds of battle seemed to be moving down the block away from him. He could hear the characteristic projectile scream and sonic boom of a rail-gun blowing big holes in a nearby building. For the moment at least, everyone seemed to have forgotten him. He was less than fifteen feet from the hole in the floor and the back stairs and thinking he just might make it when he heard a rattle of stones and the heavy thump of something dropping into the hall behind him.

  He spun around with the Glock automatically tracking down the hall. In the green low-glow of his night goggles, he saw the ghostly figure of another Seraphim. He was in a crouch and still off balance after jumping down through the waterfall hole. In the split second between sighting the man and firing, Harry thought, of course, I should have known. The first Seraphim had to come from somewhere and where there’s one…

  He squeezed the trigger just as a tremendous explosion rocked the front of the building and his shot went wild. For an instant, he and the Seraphim stared down their weapons at each other but neither fired. They were both listening to the high-pitched, tearing squeal of a grav-unit losing its containment field. It was going critical, and they both knew what that meant. The Seraphim started to throw himself flat on the floor while Harry lurched towards the opposite wall in a desperate attempt to get out of the way of the coming blast. Neither of them quite made it before the grav-field, expanding at trans-light speed, tore a nanosecond hole in space-time.

  Harry hit the opposite wall just as the shock wave blew out of the doorways of the first and second apartment in a blinding flash of a sun gone nova. He never saw what happened to the Seraphim as the rocks blocking the last two apartments blew out into the hall like corks from a bottle. The front half of Susan’s limousine was blown through the back wall of the apartment and crashed into the hall as the shock wave from the blast ripped Harry off the wall and threw him down the hall like a fly in a cyclone.

  He slammed into the nest of broken steel and concrete surrounding the hole in the floor and was impaled on a rusty reinforcing rod. It drove deep into the back of his thigh and then immediately tore loose as a plasma fueled firestorm rushed down the hall after the shock wave and blowtorched him down through the hole. He cracked his head on a jagged concrete outcrop, his hair was on fire, and his clothes burst into flames. Just before his back hit the water, the headline, FALLING STAR GOES OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY, flashed crazily through his mind.

  40

  Love Opens the Door

  Harry sank through cool water while plasma fire boiled off the surface above. He switched off the burnt agony of his charred body, shut down his breathing, and slowed his heart rate as he sank through dark depths, trailing pink swirls of blood. His back struck something solid, and he bounced gently as clouds of bottom sludge billowed up around him. Slowly, his body settled back into the soft muck of the sea bottom. Stale air bubbled from his lips as his burnt lungs slowly collapsed.

  He laid motionless, all his attention turned inward, taking stock and doing damage control. He sent out feelers of consciousness, examining the deep gash in his thigh that just missed a femoral artery, the crack in the back of his skull that may or may not have sent bone splinters into his brain, and the multiple degree flash burns covering the front of his body.

  He felt his blood pressure dropping precipitously. His body, poisoned by its own emergency chemical response to massive physical trauma, was going into toxic shock. Suddenly, he was fighting for his life, using everything he had learned in the last six months of dying. He tried to flush toxins from his blood, close his wounds, jack up his immune response and maintain his pain blocks all at the same time.

  It wasn’t enough. He felt his hold on consciousness slipping as toxic overload began shutting down vital systems. It was like watching the lights of a city going out one block at a time. He had only one chance left. He must put his body into a state of suspended animation and transfer his awareness to his ka. It was as close to death as he could get and still retain a vital spark. Hopefully, it would buy him the time he needed for his ka to begin the healing process.

  Time was running out, but still he hesitated. He knew from experience that in a state of suspended animation, with his body resting just this side of death, his ka was going to leave his body with only a thin thread of consciousness tying them together. If that thread broke, his body would die and his ka would be pulled down the resurrection trail and into the jaws of any black wolves lurking there.

  Suddenly, there was no more time. His body went into convulsions, shaking like a baby’s rattle. Darkness closed in as consciousness spiraled down into an insensate black hole.

  No more time.

  With a practiced mental shrug, Harry dropped into suspended animation and jumped out of the decaying orbit of his body into the blazing light of his ka. Every time he returned, it felt like coming home, as if this glowing spirit of seed consciousness was his real self, eternal and unchanging while his body was nothing but a transient meat locker imprisoning glory.

  He knew, of course, that as soon as his awareness returned to his body, the reverse would be true. His ka would become nothing but a ghostlike other, while his body became who he was and all he was. It was tempting to think it was all relative, a matter of perspective, but Harry knew better. He’d seen his old bodies die, one after the other, while his ka went on unchanged, putting on each new body like a new suit of clothes. The ka was the unique spark that animated flesh, the seed containing his wholeness. It was the soul, the spirit, and the pneuma of previous ages, the myth become reality, religious truth c
aptured by the spin-generators at Eternal Life.

  He rested for a moment in the light of his ka. It still retained his human form even though it floated six feet above his body, like a balloon on a string. The string was a silvery coil of light made of the same conscious light stuff as his ka, but as it descended to his body the string took on the pulsing silver solidity of fleshy awareness and penetrated his navel like a luminous, silver umbilical. This umbilical of awareness was his lifeline. It gave his ka its human form and as long as they were connected, his body could not die and his ka could not go down the resurrection trail or into the white light of death.

  Harry looked down that bright umbilical to where his body lay just barely ticking over, half buried in the dark sea bottom. He could feel the burns, wounds, and toxic shock telegraphing up the umbilical like messages from a distant land. He could see how they left their dark imprint on the bright schematics that gave his ka its human form.

  These schematics were drawn with the same conscious light stuff as the umbilical. They were glowing silver lines of concentrated information consciousness, running up and down, around and through his ka in a tangled maze that resembled a three-dimensional blueprint for some enormously complex piece of machine circuitry in human form.

  During the last six months, he had painstakingly tried to capture and reconstruct these lines from the fleeting glimpses he caught between the moment of death and the pull of the resurrection trail. Now, with his body balanced precariously between life and death, these lines burned with the constancy of a disaster warning.

  In many places, though, they were smudged and had lost their bright glow. A couple of “junction boxes” that should have blazed with concentrated energy from intersecting lines of power gave off only a low wattage flicker. Harry knew from the final moments of numerous deaths that this represented major injury or trauma to the physical body. He also knew that the effect went both ways. In the last few months, he had begun to learn how to influence and even heal the physical body by changing the energy flow through the bright schematics of his ka.

  Now, he began to try to balance that energy flow and bring down the toxic shock that was taking such a deadly toll. Gradually, the low wattage flicker in the “junction boxes” strengthened to a weak, steady glow. As the effects of toxic shock receded, he needed to shunt more energy to the smudged damaged areas to hasten the healing of his wounds and regenerate flash burned skin and lung tissue. The only problem was he had no energy to spare and the only source he could draw on was locked in the unlimited potential of Samuel Kade’s spirit realm or Jericho’s quantum field. The name didn’t matter. It was the same non-space.

  Getting to it could be dangerous though. The door that he had slammed so convincingly in the face of the black wolves back at Eternal Life was the same door he now had to open to access the healing potential of the spirit realm.

  As soon as he tried to draw on the energy potential out there, the force of the collapsing probability waves would blow that door wide open and expose him to any black wolves roaming nearby. He really had no choice, though. If he didn’t open it, he was as good as dead anyway.

  When he had told Chueh he didn’t care if he died for real, he had thought he meant it but now he wasn’t so sure. Finding what lies beyond the white light of death had somehow lost its appeal. He hadn’t realized until now that things had changed, that something had intervened…or rather, someone. He could clearly see her shiny black hair; framing jade green eyes, the high cheekbones, the pale cream of her skin, the air of cool, self-reliant competence…Diana. The thought of dying now and never seeing her again was unbearable. He had only just met her, and already she had become his reason to live. How could that be? When had it happened?

  Love at first sight? If so, was he so blind, so out of touch with the deepest levels of his own feelings that it took the threat of death to make him realize what his true feelings were? Or was it that he had finally exorcised Susan’s ghost and now there was room for someone else in his heart? The reasons didn’t matter. The simple reality of love was enough. He had to stay alive, he had to get back to her, and the only way to do that was to open the door to all the unpatterned probability energy of the spirit realm.

  Still, he hesitated. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He’d never tried anything of this magnitude before. In the last six months he’d learned to move his awareness from his living body to his ka and map some of its complex circuitry, but he was only just beginning to learn to manipulate the forces locked in the spirit realm/quantum field. Now, he was going to open the door and let those quantum winds blow through his ka and hope that he could control them somehow. Just thinking about it made him feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice.

  No more excuses, he told himself, and cracked open the door. Then, he reached out with his mind and touched a standing wave of probability with a pinprick of desire like Samuel Kade had once shown him, although he’d never tried it himself.

  The wave exploded like a balloon, and fierce winds of probability blew the door to his ka wide open. They swirled into a howling tornado vortex that was sucked down into his ka like water down a drain. His ka lit up like a cosmic pinball machine, its schematics glowing with hot-wired incandescence. The dark smudges vanished and the junction boxes went nova.

  Harry felt the energy howling through his ka and rushing down the bright umbilical to his body where it kick-started a miraculous regeneration. He felt as if he was standing at an old-time gas pump with the nozzle snugged into the tank of his car, filling it with high test, and as so often happened when you opened a door to the spirit realm, his thoughts took on a ghostly reality.

  Suddenly, he was standing in front of a ramshackle desert gas station out of an early twentieth century movie. He was dressed in dirty coveralls with a grease-stained rag hanging out of his back pocket and was holding down the handle of a gasoline nozzle. He could smell the sharp gasoline tang and hear the “ding” of the pump counting out the gallons splashing into a vintage Ford Mustang.

  He grinned with nostalgic pleasure until he heard the distant howl of wolves. The grin disappeared along with the gas station and the Mustang. Once again, he was left standing alone in an open doorway with the winds of probability blowing all around him.

  41

  Riding the Probability Plains of the Quantum Field

  As long as the umbilical connection to his living body remained intact, Harry knew he could continue to draw on the infinite potential of the spirit realm/quantum field. He could even move across it at will. It wasn’t anything like the featureless gray fog of death, where all the probability waves that made up his life had collapsed into one final reality that pulled him down either into the white light of the Goddess or into the spin-generators at Eternal Life.

  Instead, with his umbilical intact, he could let the infinite probability potential of this non-space take whatever form his intention gave it. It was usually Samuel Kade’s spirit realm with its Shining Sea of the Gods or astral planes, but this time Harry’s intention gave a playful twist to both Jericho’s idea of a quantum field and Kade’s astral planes.

  This time, Harry stood in the open door of his ka and stared out at a vast plain of standing probability waves composed of what looked like smoked panes of etched glass or maybe old, photographic plate negatives, piled one on top of another into low hills that rolled away to infinity. Contained within these rolling hills of probability were all possible and impossible worlds, timelines, and dimensions of probability.

  His unconscious mind had played a word trick with his intentions, converting the astral “planes” of the spirit realm into the probability “plains” of the quantum field. Harry knew that his probability plains were nothing but a useful tool, a construct of his imagination, to make comprehensible that non-space of consciousness that was the basis of the multi-verse. In that sense, the probability plains were no more real than his vision of the ramshackle, desert gas station. They were both attempts to comprehend the inc
omprehensible, interface with infinity, and encompass it within the boundaries of the human mind.

  Even though he had been riding collapsing probability waves down the resurrection trial for five years, it was only recently, with Samuel Kade’s help, that he’d opened the door to this non-space and taken a few, stumbling baby steps into it. Now, he stood on the threshold and listened to the howl of the Anubis wolves that had leapt out of probability to threaten his world.

  He had heard them howling out there before, but always faint and far away. Back then, he hadn’t known what they were, but they still raised hackles of fear. They were closer now. It sounded as if they were passing by without being aware of him. He wondered what they were doing, where they came from, and where they were going. He realized he had a unique chance. The wolves didn’t know he was here. He could follow them, spy on them; who knows what he might learn. It was a chance that might never come again.

  He looked down his umbilical to his body resting on the seabed. Its condition wasn’t great but it was stabilizing fast. He should be able to turn his attention away for a little while without too much danger.

  No sooner had he made the decision than his ka rushed through the open door. He watched his body rapidly receding behind him as the silver strand of his umbilical unreeled, stretching across the rolling hills of the probability plain. That thread was all that kept his body alive. If it broke, his body would die for real, and his ka would ride a collapsing wave of probability down into the white light of death…if the Anubis wolves didn’t catch him first.

  His body disappeared into the distance as he rushed across the mounds of stacked probability, like piles of old photographic plates, each etched with half-formed worlds of mountain, forests, and seas that glimmered with ghostly possibility.

  For a second, he imagined that he was riding a wild stallion across this vast plain of rolling smoked glass hills. No sooner did the thought form than it began to take on a ghostly reality, and he found himself riding a spectral gray stallion, his own ghost body, no more real than his steeds. “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, he thought, and his thoughts conjured up a cowboy suit, a pair of six guns and a black, weather-beaten Stetson.