Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  Jericho closed his eyes and looked away. It had to be done, he told himself. It was the price that had to be paid to stop the Anubis wolves. Only it’s not me paying the price, he told himself with bitter self-contempt. “Why don’t you tell me what happened out there, son,” he said gently and felt like the worst kind of hypocrite.

  Harry didn’t answer for a long time. He remained perfectly still, hardly breathing, his empty eyes staring blindly into the distance. At last, he drew a deep shuddering breath and said, “We’re going to have to start like in the bible. In the beginning…there was only the nothingness of quantum space, like a vast sea of infinite potential where the standing waves of probability had not yet collapsed into the wave front of material reality,” Harry stopped and looked at Jericho.

  The old man nodded encouragement.

  “We’ll probably never know what first impulse set off the collapse of that wave front that in turn set off a chain reaction all over this quantum sea. I suspect that it was a touch of desire, the Goddess’s desire, maybe even her loneliness,” Harry said with a sad smile.

  “That first touch of desire was like a rock thrown into a still pond. It set off the splash of the Big Bang with an infinite number of probability waves collapsing violently into reality. An infinite number of universes burst into existence, crashed into each other, and winked out again in those first nano-seconds of creation.”

  “You saw all this?” Jericho said in awestruck wonder.

  Harry turned and looked at him and said nothing but the fey light was burning in his eyes again, and Jericho felt his mind start to unhinge and quickly looked away.

  “Of those universes that survived, the majority were nonviable,” Harry continued as if nothing had happened. “The natural laws that determined their existence were unable to support them for more than an instant before they burst like soap bubbles and returned to the quantum sea.

  “Natural laws are like the concrete foundations and steel girder skeleton holding up a building. If your foundation is weak, maybe your concrete is too porous, or the steel girders are too thin or put together wrong, the whole building becomes unstable and collapses.

  “Even though an infinite number of universes died in those first nano-seconds, there was always an infinite number waiting to be born out of the roiling waters of the quantum sea. Some universes survived the first minutes of the Big Bang, some the first hour, their coherence and stability dependent on how probability had collapsed into natural law.

  “The effects of the Big Bang still ripple through the multiverse today. Some universes as old as our own, or even older, will suddenly wink out of existence due to inconsistencies in their natural laws that have gradually built up until the whole structure becomes unsustainable. Then, the universe loses stability, comes apart at the seams, and sinks back into the quantum sea.

  “When I died and turned my back on the resurrection trail, I stepped out into the spirit realm on the shores of Samuel Kade’s Shining Sea of Gods and Demons. I’m not sure why my ka chose this conceptual interpretation over any others. On the other hand, I never knew why Kade called it the ‘Shining Sea of Gods and Demons’ and never bothered to ask. I just assumed it was a metaphor, you know, colorful shaman language,” he said and shook his head with a self-deprecating smile. “I should have known better.”

  “I’d stepped into the Shining Sea a couple of times with Kade, not very far, mind you, and not for very long but long enough to discover that it was a sea made of golden probability bubbles. This time, though, I went in way over my head, stepped off the continental shelf, so to speak, and I learned why Samuel Kade called it what he called it.

  “As I sank into the infinite depths surrounded by these golden bubbles, they sang to me, and I realized that each one was a universe of worlds, and each universe was alive, singing with consciousness, and their songs were the songs of the gods and demons of the natural laws that created and sustained each universe.”

  “Gods and demons of natural law?” Jericho shook his head. “You lost me there, son.”

  “Yeah, I lost me there too,” Harry said and laughed. There was nothing funny in that laugh. It was high and shrill like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve.

  Jericho put a comforting hand on his arm. “Harry?”

  “It’s okay, Doc, just a mild case of indigestion,” he said and started to laugh again and clamped down on it hard. “Just give me a minute,” he said and sat silently, staring at the lagoon without really seeing it.

  Finally, he turned and looked at Jericho. His features were calm and composed, his voice as steady and devoid of emotion as a science report. “Natural laws aren’t the dead mechanical automatons that Newton made them out to be,” he continued. “They’re precipitates of consciousness expressed as gods and demons that create and sustain a living universe. They are, in fact, those gods and demons, good and bad, creation and destruction, two sides of the same coin, creating a constant dynamic interplay that sustains balance and drives change.” He raised his hands palms up weighing them. “Like a scale,” he said. “No creation without destruction, no destruction without creation…gods and demons, precipitates of consciousness. How could it be otherwise? As you, yourself, pointed out, the quantum field is a field of consciousness so everything that comes out of it has to be conscious including those laws or forces that structure reality.”

  It looks like there were some things Jake Lloyd didn’t tell me, Jericho thought wryly.

  “As I swam through that sea of universes, that multiverse, I could hear the golden songs of the laws that sustained them and each one was as different as the worlds that sang them. It’s important to always keep in mind that these laws are expressions of consciousness, that they are in fact deities and demons. Our primitive ancestors got it right. There are gods of thunder, of lightning, of the earth and the sky, but there’s also a supreme God or Goddess ruling each world and universe.”

  Harry’s face darkened, and his voice got low and hoarse, and Jericho thought of dank cellars and rotting bones and that old shiver of premonition was back again. “I don’t want to believe that what I did, I did on purpose,” Harry said, “because how could I know?

  “But I went out there looking for a miracle that would reconnect my ka with my body, flushing it with so much raw probability that it would twist my destiny from death to life. What I didn’t realize is that a universe is a closely woven pattern of consciousness and each person’s life is part of that pattern. When you die, it’s not a break in the pattern, it’s part of it. It’s your time to die. I went out on the quantum sea to find something powerful enough to twist my destiny, which in turn meant twisting the pattern of my universe.”

  “And you found it,” Jericho said quietly, dreading what he was about to hear.

  “Oh yeah, I found it, or rather it found me,” Harry said. “I felt like a god, I was a god, walking through the infinite sea of the multiverse with the golden bubbles of universes singing to me as my ka brushed against them. I realize now I was like a hungry predator, stalking a herd, looking for the weakest in the flock.

  “I keep telling myself I didn’t know what I was doing, but I should have known, just as those old twentieth century scientists knew that, on the quantum level, what you want to happen, happens. Wishes have a way of getting fulfilled, only, as the old saying goes, you gotta be careful what you wish for.

  “My ka was a probability wild card, no longer tied by an umbilical to the structured laws of our universe that would have prevented what happened from happening. Each time I brushed against a bubble, my ka sent unpatterned probability waves rippling through the space-time of that universe until, at last, it touched a universe so unstable it was balancing on the edge of dissolution.

  “It was like a house of cards just waiting for a little touch of unpatterned probability to break the weak bonds holding it together. When that happened, in the instant before it crashed into unreality, I opened my ka and let it crash into me instead. I ate it! I
became King of the Dead, Eater of Universes!”

  He suddenly got up and stepped over to the rusted guardrail and leaned against it with his back to Jericho so the old man couldn’t see his face. His voice became a flat objective monotone as if he was trying to distance himself from what he was saying. “I felt their lives flow into me, I think I heard them scream as all their patterned consciousness dissolved into unpatterned probability, flowing into me…filling me to overflowing…”

  He leaned over the railing looking down into the water as if searching for something he’d lost.

  “…Filling me with gods and demons,” he said at last. “Those gods and demons, those precipitates of consciousness that had structured the laws of that universe, would not go down into dissolution. Instead, they remain inside me bound to my ka…like an undigested meal.”

  So we’re finally there, Jericho thought and remembered Jake Lloyd lying ghostlike in his bed, his body glowing softly, fading into his ka and too weak and too attenuated to do anything except prophesy the coming of the Anubis and the death of humanity unless…“An abomination,” he had whispered to Jericho, “another one like me…” and his face was transfixed with horror, “but not like me…The only thing that can save us, an abomination, cursed with gods and demons…A King of the Dead! You must find this abomination!” Then he grabbed Jericho’s hand and told him what he had to do.

  “I wanted life,” Harry said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “But in my universe, the universe I left, I was destined to die. In fact, I did die. In that universe I never walked out into the Shining Sea but instead went down into the white light of death.

  “You’ve got to understand, this isn’t the only universe in which the earth exists. There are countless alternate universes with alternate earths, alternate timeline bubbles, that have split off from the original like those bacteria that reproduce by simply splitting in two. In the beginning the two universes look identical, but gradually, the difference between them becomes more and more pronounced as they follow different timeline trajectories.”

  He remained hanging over the rusted railing, staring down at the water, saying nothing for such a long time that Jericho thought he was finished. Then suddenly he asked, “Do you know what creates a new timeline universe?”

  Jericho thought he knew but decided it was best to let Harry talk it all out of his system.

  “It’s conscious desire, the wanting, that drives you to make a decision,” Harry said. “But not all decisions have the power of consequence that can split a universe and create a new one. It doesn’t matter, for instance, if you decide to take a cup of coffee or tea in the morning or walk or ride to work. Every decision like that, probably every decision you’ll ever make has no effect on the larger scheme of things. They’re like pebbles thrown in the ocean. They cause small ripples that gradually get ironed out in the vastness of the sea. On the other hand, some decisions, an almost infinitesimal number, are like a huge meteor strike, raising probability tsunamis that shift the balance of the universe to the extent that it births an alternate timeline.”

  “And that’s what happened when you turned your back on the resurrection trail…and ate a universe,” Jericho said despite himself.

  Harry nodded. “And somewhere in that original universe that still exists, there’s a Doctor Jericho mourning the real death of Harry Neuman.”

  “In that case, the universe you destroyed still exists,” Jericho suggested, trying to soothe his own conscience as much as Harry’s. “In a sense you haven’t killed it at all.”

  Harry nodded. “That’s also true,” he said. “A multiverse of useful paradoxes to save our souls,” he added bitterly.

  From the far side of the lagoon that had once been the Dodger Stadium outfield, Harry heard distant shouts and laughter. He looked up and saw a group of mermaids and their children playing some sort of game. They began swimming in a circle and singing and even though the tune was slurred by distance, childhood memory supplied the words. “London Bridge is falling down / falling down, falling down / London Bridge is falling down / my fair lady…”

  “London Bridge is falling down,” he murmured as he straightened up. Slowly, he turned, walked back, and looked down at Jericho. His face was composed. The fey light was gone from his eyes, the halo, nothing but morning sunshine. He let a bleak, sardonic smile play across his lips. “You see, I know all the excuses, Doc, but they don’t change what I did or what I’m carrying inside me.”

  “Gods and demons,” Jericho said and looked away.

  “My own private army from hell,” Harry said.

  “It doesn’t have to be that bad,” Jericho said, grabbing at any straw to assuage his own burden of guilt. “If we could just…”

  Harry stopped him. “It’s okay Doc,” he said. “No need for platitudes. You see, one of the things I’ve realized is that I can shut this shit off like I can shut off pain or shut off my life. Shutting off bad memories is kid’s play by comparison. I just stick them back in a drawer in my mind, close it, and throw away the key. Just watch,” he grinned his old crooked, cocky, Harry Neuman blockbuster grin, and Jericho almost believed him.

  Harry spread his arms and twirled around as if he was showing off a new set of clothes. “See, I’m all back together again, no more cracks in the tea pot,” he laughed and Jericho was reminded of what a great actor he had been.

  Harry stopped suddenly as a distant flash of reflected sunlight caught his eye. He squinted, trying to make out what it was. A moment later, it hurdled the far stadium wall and dove straight at them.

  49

  Eidolons and Kill-ratios

  At the last instant, the camouflage-colored grav-car swerved sharply, skidding sideways with its rocker panels digging deep into the water. The passenger side lifted free of the lagoon as the car tipped dangerously on its side. For a second Harry was afraid it would start tumbling. The grav-coils screamed as they fought to compensate and slowly pulled the car back down.

  A wave, plowed up by the car, washed over the low concrete wall. Doc grinned and put his feet up on his chair to keep them dry. Warm water washed across Harry’s bare feet as he splashed over to the rusted iron railing.

  “Marta!” he yelled, not sure whether he was relieved that she was okay or angry with her for scaring him with this circus stunt. Then he noticed the two women sitting in the front seat of his convertible. The driver leaned out and brushed a strand of brassy blonde hair out of her face. “Hi, big boy,” she winked. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Mae!” Harry shouted in surprise as he recognized the eidolon from Chueh’s. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Just doing my civic duty, honey,” she said as she fluffed her hair with her fingers. “Mister Chueh needs all the soldiers he can get. What do you think of my uniform?” she asked, suggestively smoothing the military style jumpsuit down over her ample bosom.

  Unlike Jericho’s jumpsuit, Mae’s had been set to a hot-pink, paisley, camouflage pattern that the military had never programmed. Harry gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Mae, you give a whole new meaning to the war of the sexes.”

  He noticed the other passenger who was sitting up very straight, watching him out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen and looked like a young Audrey Hepburn with her clean elfin features, dark hair cut in a short pageboy, and large doe-like eyes. When she realized that Harry was watching her, she blushed and looked down at her hands folded primly in her lap.

  Mae looked from one to the other. “I think you two have met before,” she said, with the look of a magician about to pull a rhinoceros out of a top hat. “Harry Neuman,” she paused and made a sweeping, theatrical gesture with her arm. “Meet Marta, your “Lady of the Road”!

  “Marta, say “Hi” to Harry.”

  Harry’s jaw dropped in astonishment.

  Marta looked up at him and smiled shyly. “Hi, Harry. I hope you’re okay. I missed you.”

  “Marta, is that really
you?” Harry asked in astonishment.

  Mae gave a deep, throaty laugh. “Honey, “really” is getting really kind of relative these days, don’t you think.”

  “If you don’t like it, Harry, I can change back,” Marta suggested. She bit her lower lip and looked back down at her hands, folded into a tight ball in her lap.

  “How…? Back to what…?” Harry felt his brains turning to mush. For a moment, he wasn’t even sure who he was.

  Mae rolled her china blue eyes heaven-wards and shook her head in exasperation. “You’re not very bright, are you?” she said to Harry. Then she patted his hand in commiseration. “It’s okay, sweetie. I like that in a man. Now, tell her how good she looks.”

  Harry pulled himself together and looked over at Marta, sitting stiff and straight, her face a pale profile of uncertainty and despair. “But you’re…you’re beautiful!” he said astonished by his own awkward discovery. “You’re just like I always imagined you would be, only better.”

  Mae beamed at him and nodded encouragement.

  Marta looked up doubtfully. “You’re just saying that because Mae made you.”

  Harry straightened up. “Cross my heart,” he said making the sign across his chest. “Marta, I’ve never lied to you. You’re beautiful. You’re everything I imagined you to be. It was just that you took me by surprise, kind of blew my mind, and it took a minute to put it back together again. Did Mae help you?”

  Marta looked up and smiled. “Mae’s my friend. Mr. Chueh introduced us. When I woke up and you weren’t there, I got scared and Mr. Chueh asked Mae to help. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Then I discovered that she was an eidolon. Isn’t that wonderful!” she said, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I didn’t know we could do this, be this. I always wondered what it was like to be human, you know, like Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy. I guess this is the closest I can get.”