by R J Johnson
Lorelei cried out in awe and suddenly felt dizzy as she stared up at a horizon that never seemed to end. The Old Man touched her briefly on the shoulder, helping to reorient herself.
“Bit disconcerting the first time you see it,” the Old Man said, watching her absorb it all with a smile.
“What is it?” she cried out in wonder spinning around trying to absorb every square inch of this strange new world she found herself standing on.
“They tell me that it’s called a Dyson’s Sphere…” the Old Man replied.
She looked up at confuse and he nodded, sympathizing with her incredulous look.
“We are standing on an artificial world built by an ancient and very powerful race of aliens.”
“Aliens?” Lorelei said, feeling her stomach spin around again. “Wait, for real?”
“Absolutely,” the Old Man said nodding. “We’re actually about 800 light years from your favorite coffee shop.”
She looked around, feeling dizzy once again. “I’m going to be sick…” she said, her knees wobbling.
“Now don’t be like that,” the Old Man scolded gently. “It’d be rude to our hosts if you vomited all over one of their finest national parks.”
Lorelei looked up, glancing to the right and left.
“Where are the aliens?” she asked him.
“They’re around,” he answered. “They don’t like to go out so much anymore. It’s just you and me for now.”
“But why?” she pleaded, spinning around and turning her big eyes toward the Old Man. “Why did you bring me here?”
“I told you,” the Old Man said patiently, “We’re here to save the world.”
“From what?” Lorelei asked.
“From that.”
The Old Man pointed to the blazing red hot sun beating down on their heads.
She looked at him confused. “You’re saving our world from a sun?”
“Not just our world,” the Old Man corrected. “Their world as well. The species that inhabit this place refer to themselves as the Patrons - least that’s the best name I could get out of ‘em.”
Lorelei was tired. She hated ambiguity. She hated having to ask questions. She hated the fact that she’d been kidnapped, beaten and chased within an inch of her life and now somehow she was standing on dirt this man claimed was 800 light years away?
“I don’t care!” she exploded. “I don’t care who these people are. I just want to go home! I want to see my husband. I want to kiss him and feel his arms around me and hear his voice tell me I’m going to be okay. If you can kidnap me and take me hundreds of light years from earth, then the least you can do is take me home to my husband!”
She collapsed in a puddle of tears as she felt the despair overwhelm her. What had her life become? When would it go back to normal?
Would there even be such a thing as normal after this?
The Old Man watched her cry for a moment and a shadow fell across his face. Was he wrong to have involved her?
She looked up and over his shoulder at the sun that had turned a strange color.
“What is that?” she asked, through the tears.
The Old Man sighed. He needed to know whether or not she was in. Perhaps this was the best way after all. A demonstration might be what was needed.
“It’s time…” he said, as if that answered everything. He reached out a hand for hers and waited for her to get up. He’d let her have the choice whether or not to die on a strange alien world.
She didn’t take his hand, not at first anyway. The star above them heating the Dyson’s sphere was beginning to shake and spew out material in a violent display of fireworks. It was close. She needed to make a choice.
As if reading his mind, she reached out her hand to his and he took it. They disappeared and reappeared floating above the enormous structure that surrounded the dying star.
“What’s happened?” Lorelei asked the Old Man.
“The star is running out of fuel,” he answered. “Soon, the hydrogen that’s powered this star will become depleted. Over the last millennia or so, it’s been using helium, and that’s out too now. That means the next part of this star’s lifecycle will begin. The true tragedy is the fact that the people contained within the Dyson’s sphere don’t even know they’re about to die.”
She stared at the Old Man. “How is that possible? They built a superstructure that had to take serious know how. How could they not know their own star was about to go kablooey?”
The Old Man smiled at the word.
“The Patrons aren’t like you and me,” the Old Man replied. “They only exist as mostly energy these days. They have no physical form and they mostly live their lives inside what you and I would think of as a computer program.”
Lorelei did a double take, “These aliens are living in the Matrix?”
The Old Man tossed his head back and laughed out loud, “Oh my, I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes. They’re living inside their own version of the Matrix.” He leaned forward, a mischievous glint in his eye, “Only they don’t have Neo inside helping ‘em to escape.”
There was a flash of light and Lorelei cried out, covering her eyes. The Old Man turned, looking on with disinterest as the star began to explode. He’d seen this star explode so many times, it was no more interesting to him than the morning sunrise would be.
It was slow at first. The star was so enormous it took time for the explosion to spread across its surface. Once it did however, it blew quickly.
The explosion was violent. It bubbled up over the top until twin jets of material spewed out of it from the north and south poles. The material crashed up against the superstructure of the Dyson’s sphere, instantly tearing it apart.
The star exploded and the Old Man snapped his fingers and they appeared out in the inky blackness of space. Lorelei gasped at first, fearing that the air would be ripped from her lungs by the vacuum in space. But, instead, she found she could breathe perfectly normal. The Old Man nodded towards the Dyson’s sphere in front of them.
“This part is actually kinda interesting to watch…”
At first, nothing happened, and Lorelei glanced at the Old man skeptically. Then structure suddenly blew apart like as if it had been made of kindling. There was nothing left beside the leftover floating material that once made up the home of a Type I civilization.
Once the destruction was complete, Lorelei turned to the Old Man, a questioning look in her eye.
“What on earth was that?”
“A supernova…” the Old Man said sadly. No matter how many times he watched the Patron’s civilization get blown apart, it never got easier. So many lives ending. So much lost to the universe, without so much as a whimper. That was why he was here. Well, that and the fact every human being alive depended on him and his chosen few to stay alive.
Lorelei turned to the Old Man with tears in her eyes. That’s when he knew he had chosen wisely. She was hurting. Not for her husband, but for all the lives now lost. It didn’t matter that she’d never met them before in her life. She had compassion.
And that, above everything else, would be the thing to defeat Kline.
“Why would you have me watch that?” Lorelei asked.
“So you could see this…”
The Old Man snapped his fingers and suddenly Lorelei and the Old Man were standing in the middle of Central Park.
Lorelei felt joy run up inside her as she realized she was back home. Maybe not exactly her home in Champagne, Illinois, but still, it was closer than the dank cave in Sweden or the strange Alien world.
“Is this New York?” she asked in wonder. The Old Man nodded.
She leaned back and drank in the sunshine and smell of fresh cut grass. It’d just rained and she could smell the rich dark earth that was slowly drying in the afternoon sun.
“Gotta love New York in the spring…” the Old Man said sounding wistful.
She nodded, absentmindedly, enjoying the feeling of the
dirt under her feet.
Suddenly there was a chorus of screams from the other side of the park. A dark brown cloud had suddenly appeared in the sky above them. What was strange was the way the cloud seemed to expand out of nothing at all.
The worst part was when the cloud above them began falling down toward the ground. As the fog began to fill the atmosphere around them, people began to choke and violently throw up all over themselves.
“What’s happening?” Lorelei cried out. She turned, and grabbed the Old Man’s robes pulling him toward a family that had tried to flee the brown cloud of smog but had been overtaken and were now dying breathing the foul air.
The Old Man didn’t respond and only watched impassively as dozens of people around them dropped dead. Some struggled longer than others, but no one escaped. Within minutes, the entire park that had been bustling with activity was filled with dead bodies. Lorelei expected to start choking and dying horribly as she had seen everyone else around her, but, like her time in space, she was able to breathe normally.
“When the Patron’s star exploded, it released what’s known as a gamma ray burst. That beam of energy traveled the universe over the last hundred or so years until we had the sad luck of getting in its way,” the Old Man began his lecture dryly, as if he were teaching a class. “When that beam collided with our atmosphere, the energy combined with our ozone layer and created a chemical reaction between oxygen molecules and nitrogen dioxide. These two elements combined into that fog you see currently filling our planet and choking everyone we know and love to death.”
Lorelei felt the tears running down her cheeks as she walked through the park through the thick cloud of smog that surrounded everything. She looked up at the Old Man.
“Where’s Johan?” she demanded. “Take me to my husband!”
The Old Man grimaced at first, but, nodded his assent. He held out his hand for Lorelei who took it. He snapped his fingers and they disappeared in a flash.
They reappeared in a huge green landscape, dotted with wildflowers. The brown smog hadn’t reached this part of the planet yet, but she could see the dark haze of it on the horizon.
The Old Man indicated that Lorelei should head toward the top of the hill just in front of them. She looked up at him confused at first, but did so, moving up the hill quickly.
After summiting the hill, she looked around desperately for her husband, but couldn’t find him anywhere. It was only after she tripped over a body on the ground, that she began to wail helplessly in shock at what she saw.
Her beautiful husband was lying there, his body completely torn in two. The bruising and multiple compound fractures indicated that he’d put up quite a fight, but had suffered for it.
She fell to her knees, the tears refusing to come forward. A giant pit opened up where her stomach used to be. She could barely react to what she was seeing and could only slowly stroke the love of her life’s hair.
“No…” she pleaded with her husband’s corpse. “Please… you said you’d come back… no…”
She leaned over and pulled his body up, hoping that it was just a trick, an illusion of her senses. The Old Man stared at her impassively while she mourned her dead husband. She looked up at him, desperate and angry.
“You! You did this!” she cried out.
“You know that’s not true…” the Old Man said quietly.
“But you can fix it can’t you?” she begged. “Please, don’t take him from me! Whatever I need to do, please help me help him live!”
“This is only one of many possible futures…” the Old Man said kindly. “This is why I’m asking for your help. So I can stop this all from happening.” He set his jaw in determination, “So I can help the good guys win this time.”
Lorelei didn’t respond. She couldn’t. She was too caught up in the moment and feeling her husband’s cold body in her arms. Nothing could change the hurt she felt. Why would this old man do that to her?
The Old Man watched her for a few minutes as she wept over her husband’s body. He leaned down and tapped her shoulder. She leaned back into the Old Man’s body, clutching to him as if she were drowning.
“You can’t help him now…” he murmured. “Come now…”
She didn’t move and found herself unable to stop crying. She wept for her dead husband. She wept for every missed opportunity they’d had. She wept for taking the stupid job that’d placed him so far away from her in the first place. If she’d been at his side, at least they might have died together.
She wept until there were no more tears left.
She looked up at the Old Man and something new was in her eyes.
“Why am I still alive?” she asked. “Why can I breathe?”
He chuckled, “Those are the least important questions you might ask me…”
She looked around and swallowed, and realized she knew exactly the question he wanted her to ask.
“What can I do to prevent this?”
The Old Man smiled weakly and nodded.
“Let’s talk somewhere where we can be more comfortable.”
He pulled her in close, embracing her, snapped his fingers and they disappeared back to where they’d come from.
Chapter Forty-One
Johan crouched, trying to keep low as he ran along the river embankment. He stumbled over some loose dirt and rocks and fell to his knees, scraping his hands as he did so.
He cried out in pain, and rolled over on his back looking up at the night sky. He was in so much pain. Nothing made sense anymore. The Old Man had said this stone would help him, but the further he got from the chamber and his mysterious experience, the more the whole experience felt like a dream.
Except for the fact the proof of the strange encounter in the cave sat securely in his pocket. Johan reached down and felt the outline of the stone on top of his jeans. Even through the thick cloth, he could feel a charge as the power of the stone flowed through him.
It almost felt as if the stone wanted him to use it.
Unfortunately, he had no idea where the on switch was let alone what it did.
He sat back up, and groaned, feeling a twinge in his ankle. Johan gingerly tested his weight on the ankle. He grimaced. It didn’t look too bad, but if he wanted to survive this man’s insane hunt, then he needed to stay on his toes.
And it would so much more difficult for him to get away with one wheel down.
Johan attempted to stand, this time putting more weight on his ankle, inhaling sharply at the shock running up his leg.
It would be slow going, but he could make it if he took it slowly.
The moon was rising above his head and he looked up, hoping to use its weak light to give him a better sense of direction. The mountains that Halprin had said was his salvation lay only a few more miles away, but as far as he was concerned, it may as well be in New York.
But, the only way he’d get there is if he started putting one foot in front of the other.
Johan grabbed a nearby branch and stripped it of the twigs and leaves that were still attached. Examining it briefly, he nodded. It would make for a decent cane, and even club should the need arise.
He heard someone shout and begin running down the steep mountain. Johan glanced behind him to see the face of Ari Cohen bearing down on him. Ari raised his rifle and began firing at him.
Shots pinged dangerously close to Johan’s head as he ducked and weaved his way through the bush once again, trying to get away from the man hunting him.
“Tally ho!” Ari cried out, his words echoing through the valley.
Johan limped his way through the dry riverbed, hoping to put some distance between him and the man who’d facilitated his capture. He heard the sound of stones scattering across the bedrock and turned, seeing Ari beginning to catch up with him.
Ari raised his rifle up and shot at him once again. Johan ducked and fell to the ground, turning, he tried to scramble away, but he was too late. Ari was on him in an instant.
“S
orry mon frere,” Ari said, in his clipped accent. “It wasn’t meant to be for you I’m afraid.”
Ari raised his rifle and Johan held up a hand, desperately trying to think of a way to get him out of this.
“No, wait, please!” Johan pleaded. “The least you could do is allow a dying man to have a final request.”
“Such as?” Ari asked, his eyes narrowing. “You were never one for smoking.”
“Honestly, I’ve been wishing for a cool drink of water since you took me from our camp…” Johan said weakly.
Ari chuckled and shook his head, “I am sorry my friend, but I’m afraid this canteen only has whiskey.”
“I can get behind that…” Johan said with a weak smile. Ari chuckled along with him and took off the canteen from around his arms and tossed it to him.
Johan opened the canteen and saluted Ari with it. He expected the alcohol to burn down his throat, but to his surprise, it didn’t. Instead of whiskey, it was the best tasting water he’d ever had in his life. Johan began drinking it down greedily, filling his stomach with the cool liquid his parched throat had been begging for ever since his capture in Turkey.
“If you were this much a drinker in Turkey we might have been better friends…” Ari said casually lighting a cigarette. “Some of my most dedicated alcoholic friends couldn’t handle all that at once.”
Johan looked at him, confused. What was he talking about? This was water, not whiskey.
“Must’ve gotten your canteens mixed up,” Johan said weakly, taking the canteen off his lips. “Tastes just like water to me.”
Ari raised an eyebrow, “I knew you Swedes liked your alcohol, but I didn’t think you burned out your tastebuds on it.”
“See for yourself…” Johan tossed him the canteen back. He didn’t want to, but anything that kept him alive that much longer was fine by him. Who cared what was in the canteen?
Ari reached down, twisted open the cap and smelled it cautiously. His face screwed up in confusion.
It was in that moment that Johan realized his head was swimming. For some reason, the whole world around him had taken on a new light. Something was different.
