by Kondor, Luke
The heat was in full force again. The pyramid now too far away to see, lost somewhere between the blue and the yellow. Just hills of sand and sun. It went on for miles. In his condition he’d cook before he made it anywhere.
He thought back to the water and the food. There was around eight more bottles of water and twenty or so tins of food. He pushed back the worries of running out of supplies and held the bottle in front of his face. He looked through the clear liquid and out to the sand. A droplet travelled down the side of the bottle and fell downwards. He caught the drop in his hand and shoved it in his mouth. All he could taste was the sand and dirt from his fingertips.
His eyes ached in the light and he turned to go back inside. He needed to sit down anyway. He needed to eat. He walked past the fabric chair, which was pushed upright and against the table, and bent down to look through the tins of food. The labels were written in a Middle Eastern language and had pictures of smiling humans on them. Little idiots surrounded by groceries. More pineapple, orange segments, mushy peas, baked beans. Lots of beans, actually. Stacked on top of one another—
Hang on—
He turned back to look at the fabric chair. It was upright and pushed up against the table. An indentation in the sand on the floor showed where the chair had been pulled across. He didn’t remember picking it up. He didn’t remember pushing it across the floor. Suddenly a smell of damp rags filled the cave.
“Hello?” he said, looking around the room. “Is anybody there?”
A cloaked figure appeared in the corner of the room from nowhere.
“Who are you?” he said through his hands, falling onto his ass.
The figure stepped forward and pulled back the hood, revealing his face.
“Oh God? Are you okay?” Moomamu said. The face looked like it should come with a smell. “You look really sick—”
A second later and the smell arrived.
“Hehehe,” the man laughed, revealing his charcoal-blackened teeth. His cheeks lifted upwards and the skin around his mouth split. Dry and peeling away in flakes. His long dirty grey hair tumbled over his shoulders, where it joined his beard in grey matted locks that rested on his chest. “I don’t really get sick anymore.”
“Okay then,” Moomamu said, as he picked up a tin of beans — the closest thing to a weapon he could find. Just in case. “Is this your place?”
“It’s a home of sorts, but not the real home. This is temporary. Eventually I’ll get back home, though. Eventually I’ll make my way back to Eden.” The man’s voice was as horrible as his face. But Moomamu knew it. He’d heard it before.
“You’re the voice in my head,” Moomamu said. “You helped me, sort of.”
“No, Thinker, I didn’t help you. I hoped you would help me. Y’see, I’m like you, but I’ve been at this for a long time. You could say I’m your future.”
“God, I hope not,” Moomamu said as he held his nose.
“There was a time I was like you, y’see … stupid, I mean.”
“Hey!”
“Closed. Blind. Ignorant of the powers of a Thinker made flesh. Why is it that a parasite requires Thinkers’ flesh out of anything else in the universe?” he said.
Moomamu shrugged.
“Tastes good, I guess.”
“Not quite,” the man said as he sat down on a ridge on the far side of the cave. “Pass me one of those waters, will you?”
Moomamu grabbed one of the plastic bottles of water and threw it. Not very well. It rolled across the floor, bounced upwards into his cloak and then hit the floor.
“Thanks,” he said as he picked it up. “I’m knackered.”
Moomamu watched as the man unscrewed the lid and gulped on the bottle. He finished the entire thing in one sitting and wiped his mouth with his dirty sleeve.
“So,” he said. “Questions?”
“Lots,” Moomamu said.
“Well, don’t worry. No rush really. We’ve got time. About two months, by my calculations.”
The man’s accent was hard to place. There were moments when it sounded foreign to the planet, but he could still hear the old Englishman in him. Not the well-to-do types from the south of the island. One from further up. A northerner.
“Are you a Thinker?” Moomamu said.
“I was once something very similar to you. Very similar indeed, but that was a long time ago now. A long, long time ago. Oh boy, so long. I’m an old git, to tell you the truth. Old and haggard.”
“And you smell too.”
The man nodded and acquiesced.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. I haven’t been taking care of my vessel. Not since it died, anyway. The thing is little more than a puppet now, but having a physical entity like this allows one to do glorious work.”
Moomamu shook his head.
“Who are you?”
“I’ve had many names, but one’s stuck with me for the last few centuries. They call me The Light,” he said with reverence. That ugly, old smile finding its way back to his face.
“Who calls you The Light?” Moomamu said.
“People. People call me The Light.”
“What people?”
“Look, I really don’t fancy going into it right now.”
“Okay, just because, I dunno. Seems egotistical to call yourself The Light. I wanted to know what kind of man I was dealing with here. I’ve had enough to do with nut jobs over the past few months with the cats, broken humans, and smelly old parasites.” He looked down to the beans in his hand.
“Ah yes, the cats. Time in places like that can seem strange and wrong and backwards. It kind of all morphs together. Do you know how long you were on that sorry little moon for?”
Moomamu shook his head.
“Three months, my boy. Three whole months. Three months of torture, scraps of nourishment, living in the dark of the cell, and then made to fight.”
“I had company, it seems,” Moomamu said.
The Light smiled again.
“I guess you did.”
“How did you do that? How did you talk to me when you weren’t there?”
“You’re as inconsistent as myself, Thinker. There are many things that you can do if you act with intention. If you act for reasons greater than yourself.”
Moomamu looked around the room. Unsure what could possibly be greater than himself. It was quiet. Dark. Dust suspended in the air in the rays of light.
“And what’s going to happen in two months?”
“You’ll see … you’ll see. For now get some rest. Eat. Recover. Regrow your muscles. We’ve got to get you ready for what’s to come. I don’t want you dying on me.”
Dr Liz Thompson
The wind howled as it pushed itself around the inside of the black cloud. The force of it was enough to push Liz forward. It willed her onwards. David held his hand out for her to hold onto. He walked forward with her. His gaze was on the cloud, though. His cool and confident exterior had given way to a childlike curiosity.
And not just David. Liz too lost herself to the wonder around her. The cloud had a calming effect. A river at night. Its gentle waves forever moving but never crashing into any coast or bank.
“What do you think it is, David?” she said, squeezing his hand.
“I have no idea …” he said, raising his voice over the wind. “But I can promise you that there’s some form of intelligence to it.”
“What makes you say that?”
She turned her head when he didn’t answer and found him pointing upwards. Her bottom jaw loosened as a black stairway made of the cloud itself reached down from the cloud. It connected at the point where the Shard’s viewing platform ended. Liz looked back to David and chuckled.
They walked towards the edge and looked at the stairway. The steps themselves never settled in their movements. Unstable. Illusions. As though they were there to lure them off the edge, to their deaths. A closer look and it didn’t look like any sort of liquid or cloud that Liz had ever seen before.
Nor was it made of any solid substance. It was a fine, black gunpowder substance constantly shifting and switching its positions.
“Comms are down,” David said, his voice muffled by his mask and the wind and his hand on the circle on his ear. He pulled a phone out of his pocket to check and tutted before putting it back.
“Hold on,” he said as he bent down and touched his hand to the surface of the stairs. The sand recoiled against his touch but appeared to regroup and solidify. He tapped it again and it clinked.
He stood back up and lifted his foot, carefully placing his leather brogue on the step. The step solidified around the shape of his foot. He lifted his other foot and was now standing off the edge of the Shard. His weight supported by the cloud.
“Well?” he said, as he turned to Liz.
She smiled, held his hand, and then pulled herself up onto the step. They took their time. One step, and then the second, and then the third. With each step, their confidence grew. The higher up and into the cloud they went, the angrier the wind became. A cold reminder of how high they actually were. She pushed the thoughts of the city to the back of her mind.
Ten meters up and into the cloud the stairs turned back on themselves and led them deep into the cloud. Holes opened in its sides, allowing the London daylight to enter. Inside there was nothing. No supercomputers or control panels. No little green men. No monsters. The ceiling of the cloud was so high up they couldn’t see where the walls ended and the ceiling began.
Liz looked at David. He gave her the no-idea smile. It was just as plain on the inside as it was on the outside. Hollow, and slightly disappointing.
“Hello?” Liz said. “Anybody there?”
Nothing happened. A second later and it responded to her voice. A ripple flew outwards from her feet, across the floor, and up the walls.
“Hello?” she said again.
Movement. Ahead of them. In the centre of the floor. The black matter stirred. It worked its way around in circles and built itself up like a tornado sucking up water from the ocean. Only an inch or so thick. The black tendril grew and another one formed to the right of it, followed by another one, and then another. Hundreds of the cables of black lifted from the floor. They began to combine like fingers of a splayed hand intertwining. The skin melting between them.
She looked to David, but he wasn’t paying attention to her now. She thought of Donald, her husband, either drinking tea or sleeping.
The black hands then turned over themselves and flattened. They lifted upwards and turned themselves into a flat surface. More tendrils, much smaller now, erupted like threads of string from the table. They interwove and pulled themselves together. Liz gasped when she saw the eyes knitting together from the threads.
The small hands and feet, the pronounced ridge of the brow, and the big teeth and ears. Still made from the black sand and devoid of all colour, but still completely recognisable to Liz.
“This can’t be happening,” she said. “I don’t understand. This can’t be happening.”
As the threads finished the eyes and the tip of its nose it came to life. Sucking air in like it had emerged from a body of water.
“Miss Sam?” Liz said.
“Dr Thompson, what’s happening?” David said. Any confidence in him had vanished.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand it. But, it’s Miss Sam.”
“No wait, Dr Thompson, be careful,” David said as she wandered towards the table.
She looked down at the strangely familiar face. A set of eyes she thought she’d long forgotten. But she hadn’t. Those eyes had remained, lost somewhere in the forests of her mind. This wonderful little creature. The one she’d promised that she’d return to, but never did.
Memories of the mission came to her. The feeling of Miss Sam’s shuttle disappearing. The explanations given were ones of space debris. The ship burned up, they said. She’d never believed it, though. She always felt that Miss Sam would be okay. It defied all logic. It made her feel crazy. Surely a coping mechanism to help her with the grief. Somehow, she knew Miss Sam was alive.
A second later and her unwarranted, delusional, crazy, suspicions were proven true.
It woke up.
No.
She woke up.
Her eyes looked past Liz at first. Over her head. Up and around the cloud. Eventually settling on Liz. After all these years, Liz saw the same recognition in Miss Sam’s eyes that she used to see at the Holloman Air Base. Like she’d just nipped out for a meeting with the colonel or to grab a shake from the diner with Donald. Even after all this time, on the other side of the planet, in another body altogether, Miss Sam recognised her.
“Dr Thompson, please be careful. It isn’t what you think it is,” David called from behind.
She ignored the words. She continued to look at Miss Sam’s face. The wonder of it all. The magic.
“Miss Sam,” she said as the chimpanzee lifted its charcoal hand and touched Liz’s. “Ever since you went missing that day I’ve had dreams of you. I’m so sorry. Dreams of my little girl getting lost in space. Suffocating in that shuttle. That tiny fucking nosecone we shoved you in. I’m so sorry. I … you didn’t deserve any of that. You didn’t deserve it.”
Her words trembled as they left her tongue. She quivered and tears fell from her eyes.
Miss Sam pushed herself up to a sitting position on the table. She reached her arms towards Liz. She took another step forward and Miss Sam’s cold metallic arms wrapped around her neck. The skin was unnatural and the fur felt synthetic, but it didn’t matter. Liz wrapped her arm beneath Miss Sam’s bottom and lifted her up from the table. She was heavy. Almost too heavy.
“Dr Thompson, please think about what’s happening here. This isn’t real.”
“What are you talking about, David? I’ve spent the past fifty years moving around the world, teaching children who didn’t care to hear what I had to say, living in communities of people who thought the only world that existed was within the boundaries of their town maps, living with a man who slowly lost his mind, who now sometimes talks to his own big toe. The universe is bigger than your smartphone. It’s bigger than your version of reality, David. This is the realest thing I’ve seen in years.” She kissed Miss Sam’s cold metallic head.
Miss Sam looked up at Liz. It was the same face, same expression, same responses. It was Miss Sam. The body may have changed but somehow, by some miracle, the mind was in there.
“It’s okay now,” she said. “You’re home now.”
“Home,” Miss Sam said. Her voice didn’t come from her but from somewhere within the cloud. The word didn’t sound right. Like it was air being forced through a gap in the cloud. “Home,” she said again.
“Yes, Miss Sam, my girl, you’re home.” Liz touched her free hand to her chest. The sign that would often comfort Miss Sam before.
With this, Miss Sam’s expression changed. The soft sweetness turned to bitterness. The loving eyes hardened. Miss Sam pressed her fist to her chest.
“Home,” she said. This time with more force. Angry.
“Miss Sam, it’s okay,” Liz said. “It’s okay, baby.”
“Home!” Miss Sam said, showing her teeth now.
Liz didn’t notice at first, but the stairway had closed. Their only way in and out sealed up. The chamber they were in started to move. Echoing Miss Sam’s emotions.
“Miss Sam, please. I love you,” Liz said.
“Dr Thompson, put it down. Come with me! Now!” David called.
Liz nodded and went to put Miss Sam back down on the table, but Miss Sam’s grip tightened around her neck. Her eyes never looking away from her own.
“Home!” she screamed again, now shaking with rage. “Home!”
The cloud around them sparked and crackled. A storm was brewing around them.
“David, I can’t, she won’t let go.”
David ran over and grabbed Miss Sam’s shoulder. His hand was quickly overtaken with the black sand. He screa
med as it worked its way up from Miss Sam’s shoulder, over his hand, into and up through his sleeve. He fell backwards onto the floor and screamed in pain, an invisible fire all around him.
“Please don’t do this, Sam,” Liz said. “Please!”
Miss Sam looked at Liz. She calmed a little, before touching her chest again.
“Home,” she said quietly. “Home.”
As David’s screaming went quiet, she turned to see that only his right half remained and what was left was being consumed by the black. The remaining eye eaten into nothing.
Liz then looked back to Miss Sam.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know,” Miss Sam said before pressing her palm into Liz’s chest. Each fingertip ate away at Liz’s flesh. The fingers pressing into her, all the way through to the other side.
She fell to the floor and screamed as the black sand consumed her too. The last thing she saw was Miss Sam’s face, angry as ever.
Strangely, she felt relieved. Like she was paying a debt. Something she felt she owed for a long time. An open loop that could finally close.
“Alas, poor Yorick.” The words came to her mind as the cloud swallowed her up. “For we knew him well.”
Moomamu The Thinker
“Why didn’t you kill?” he said. “I asked you to do one thing. That’s all. To kill. It’s really not that hard, boy. It would’ve made your life a whole lot easier.”
The Light was standing outside the cave entrance. Naked. His arms out by his sides. His legs shoulder distance apart, standing in the rays of the sun. With skin like his he might explode into a cloud of dust at any moment.
“He didn’t deserve to die. I can’t just go around killing things.” Moomamu stood at the cave entrance, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Oh, did he not? He would’ve killed you, though. If he had the chance.”
“Yeah well … some people are confused. And he didn’t have any option.”
“Neither did you,” The Light said as he turned around. “Neither did you.”
