by Lee Bond
“Welllll.” Diax considered the best way to bring the subject up. He’d only just decided to not mention it, yet here he was, being forced to. “I suppose, in a very real way, without wanting to be all ‘scare tactic guy’ … where we are right now isn’t anywhere.”
“Yep.” Oscar nodded. “I know. We’re on our way to where Reality 2.0 is going to be. So, obviously, we aren’t anywhere yet. That’s what journeys are about.”
Diax took a breath, held it for a moment, then let it loose very slowly, very calmly. Latelians. “Look. When you’re on a drive from your house to the store, technically you’re not anywhere on account of how you’re measuring wheres by your ultimate destination, right?” When Oscar nodded, albeit slowly, he continued, equally slowly. “Only, you are somewhere.”
“How’s that again?” Oscar stuck a finger and wiggled it around. Sounded like Diax was being metaphorical. He had a problem with metaphorical. He pointed this out to the man pretending not to be the Creator of the Universe, who also, he noted, had a gigantic bruise on his forehead.
Diax cursed. He’d moved too quickly. “When you are in your car, and you are driving to the store and you think ‘hey, holy shit, there’s nothing out there’ because all you can see for miles is, like, pasture or whatever, you are, in fact, somewhere. Any number of somewheres. You’re in your car. You’re on the road. The road is in … place. Place is in country, country is in continent, continent is on planet, planet is in solar system, etcetera and blah. So, while you think you’re nowhere, you’re all sorts of everywhere. Make sense?”
Oscar digested the statements slowly, forehead beetling until it was cratered with ridges and valleys. “Yes?”
“Are you asking or telling?” Diax stared through the transparent roof of their ship. There was definitely nothing out there. Just … black. Which, he supposed, was technically something, in direct contradiction of what he’d said, but that blackness, like the measurement of time they were enjoying, was wholly subjective. It could be orange for all it mattered.
“No. I mean, yes. I get it.” Oscar nodded slowly. “Yeah, no, okay. I think I’m nowhere when I’m going to buy stuff but I’m really somewhere, it’s just nowhere interesting enough to count. Right?”
“Right.” Now it was time for the … heavy bit. “And where we are right now, Oscar Sabellik, is exactly nowhere. There is nothing out there. We stopped being real a long time ago. We had to shed the bonds of the Unreality in order to make absolutely certain that whatever is being born has absolutely no taint.”
“What about Huey?” Oscar asked, still not entirely certain he understood this discussion, or where it was even headed.
“Methods are being undertaken to ensure that by the time Huey is ready to be a God, it will be done with the absolute assurance that nothing of the old place remains.” Diax sighed quietly. It was regrettable, what needed to happen next, but he wasn’t in charge any longer.
“Okay. Sooooooo.” Oscar reached out with hands to grapple this next concept into place. When he was sure he got it where it needed to be, he started picking himself up off the floor.
Just because they weren’t real didn’t mean it was cool to lay around on the floor of their spaceship like hippies. “If we’re really for real nowhere at all and aren’t really real ourselves anymore, what the fuck crashed into us? Because I’ve got to tell you, I am sore as fuck. These bruises aren’t … hey. Where’s the proteus?”
“Hm?” Diax, following Oscar’s lead, asked. “What’s that now?”
Oscar pointed to where he’d left the proteus before being bounced around the inside of the ship like some kind of … Bingo ball. “Where’s it?”
“Well, it’s here somewhere. Has to be. It’s just … bounced. Somewhere.” Diax hoped he sounded convincing because he sure as hell didn’t feel it. He extended his possibly-under-certain-circumstances godlike senses to the whole of the ship while Oscar did the same thing with the clumsy and much slower meatbag approach, coming swiftly to the resolution that no, there was no proteus anywhere on the ship.
“It’s not here.” Oscar said loudly, eyes going wide. His heart felt like it was going to hammer right out of his chest! “Where’d it go? How did it go?”
Diax took a deep breath and pushed his sense out as far as they’d go, which, considering the nature of their location, was alternately from one end of the Everything to the other and … about as far as he could see with his own two eyes.
There was definitely something to be said for planning ahead, and in this instance, hopping aboard the good ship Impossibility without first making sure he had a few contingencies in his pocket might’ve been a good idea.
But he hadn’t, because he’d honestly believed it’d be a cut and dried thing. Sure, Garth had a load of terrible shit to go through, and them some partially awful bits, and then some stuff that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and that was also pretty unfair, but really, though, it’d seemed so locked up and in the bag that it should’ve been a cakewalk. Joyride. One of those things.
“Diax!” Oscar shouted, running right up to the man claiming he wasn’t God. “Diax! Answer me right now! What’s going on!”
“I …” Diax coughed to hide his nervousness. “I’m not entirely sure. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say … someone was fucking with us.”
“Of course you’d say something like that.” Oscar tromped over to his workstation to see if he had any quadronium left over. He needed something to do with his hands or he might just punch God of Everything right in his stupid face.
GAMECHANGER
Heuristic Intelligence Model, Interrupt
… online …
… search parameters : secondary authorized user …
…
… Secondary authorized user : indeterminate value …
… openfile secondary user : determine value …
… processing …
… processing …
… openfile fail … rerouting parameter request …
… search parameters : primary authorized user …
…
… primary authorized user : inchoate
… openfile variable primary user …
… error detecting runtime variable primary user …
… correcting …
… correcting …
… runtime variable primary user status unfixable …
… search parameters : superuser …
…
… processing …
… process…
… runtime variable superuser : unavailable …
… checksum error …
… Stochastic variables too high …
… uncompensated endangerments …
… attenuated extra-dimensional thread detected …
… locating …
… locating …
… ex-dee thread too diffuse …
… processing …
…
… openfile superuser : locate …
…
… openfile success …
… expanding search parameters …
… groundstate environment designate Unreal Universe …
… sourcing available memspace …
… memspace allocated …
… memspace implemented …
… superuser reroute requested …
… insufficient energy …
… source variable interrupt …
… source detected …
… source interrupt request …
…
…
…
… request granted …
STAGE TWO CLEARED
Asshole.
Garth opened his eyes. ChaOS was screaming in his ear about the positions of stars, decays of atoms, the measurement of power expelled in the chamber.
“Asshole.”
Aäl flowed quickly towards the Dreambreaker, an almost-apology on his lips, but the burly Kin’kithal, whose planar e
manations fairly bristled with the kinds of inverted power levels that should imply he was dying, held up a bloody finger, silencing the Lord of the Dream.
“Asshole.” He looked around the chamber. Drake and Eddie, of course, were as gone as … yesterday. There were signs of wear and tear everywhere his multi-hued eyes looked, and little wonder; the stresses caused by … that whole fucking thing had been and would be immensely intense until the Universe was destroyed.
Keeping him alive over there long enough to accomplish his tasks –both prepared for and dropped in his lap- seemed to’ve been a full-time job.
From the lo George Hicken: oks of things, Aäl hadn’t had the easiest of times.
Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez nodded once, firmly, and grunted. “Asshole.”
“You are … unwell.” Aäl moved forward once more, senses straining. Nothing but silence, and the worrisome inversion of power flowing across the Dreambreaker’s extra-dimensional essence. “Your time over there …”
“Asshole.”
“Surely you see this was … unintentional.”
Garth leveled a blunt forefinger at Aäl, who had the decency to look at least a little bit ashamed of what’d happened. “Asshole.”
