Dead End of a Circle

by David Myhro

  Although there were no spoons or ladles or solid tools of any form issued to us that I could use to take the feces from the donator's bucket into my own, I certainly was able to fashion a decent shoveling tool with the small amounts of materials and the large amounts of time that I was afforded; however, there was another task that made hands-on contact sometimes unavoidable. For you see, toilet paper is a very new invention—as new as the twentieth century. Back in this time, there were other methods of handling the unspeakable; in this particular prison we had our weekly rags. To protect my secret it was my duty to not only sufficiently fill a waste bucket but also to manually soil a rag so as to fabricate evidence that I had regular bowel movements.

  As I mentioned before, it was important that those in power could not discover my immortality; I only wish that I had remained just as careful in the latter times.

  Chapter 25

  I sometimes wondered why the United States locked me away in this vault. It was true that I could not be rendered unconscious by any drug, but I would certainly think that they could have used pulleys and ropes to make me completely helpless and harmless. It was clear that they didn't really put me down here because of my behavior—I would have wound up here regardless of my level of cooperation.

  I was left to conclude that I was sent here as a cover-up. It seemed to be quite plausible because there were so many PhDs who saw me and performed tests on me—the number was unusually large because my abnormal nature made me an interest to so many different fields. There were anthropologists, linguists, physicists, physicians, biologists, and even astrobiologists—just to name a few.

  And so I think that the whole issue had to be squelched before it could get really big because I was (at least in appearance) a human being. And human beings have rights—even violent prisoners—but yet I was certainly being treated like an animal. There were so many people studying me that the risk of one of them going public would have eventually become more of an inevitability than a risk: there is no non-disclosure agreement, whether it is backed by bribery or brutality, that can suppress a man's inner demons forever.

  They tried to physically destroy me on many occasions. They certainly found out that I was indestructible, but it wasn't clear to me if they ever found out the reason that I was that way.

  The amount of people aware of my existence was becoming dubious, the expenses of the entire project were building up, and the only thing that remained constant was me. There was, I suppose, no better way to dispose of me than to lock me away behind the eternal gaze of Padempire.

  Chapter 26

  Sometimes I would meditate and leave my body, just hovering in my cell, observing the other cells from behind the bars of my own. Due to the orientation of the cells, I was unable to see into the cells of my neighbors on either side; I could, however, see into every other cell.

  On my left-hand side, in the first cell with a visible interior, lived Jesus, a person of unknown faith who had no tongue. Over the course of the next few months, Jesus would complete the transformation of his living quarters that he had begun upon his arrival. He'd been painting something on his prison wall, but he refused to let anyone see it whenever there was light.

  There came a day when Jesus silently announced to us fellow prisoners that he had completed his mural, but it still couldn't be seen due to the bad lighting. The guards, it seemed, had never known what he was up to the whole time. So when they heard about his excitement and contentment for what he had accomplished, the guards felt that it might be pleasurable for themselves if they could take it away from him. They brought a scrub and a bucket of water to his cell door and demanded that he wash the painting off the wall.

  Jesus' refusal was all the grounds that they would ever need. They extracted him from his cell and shackled him to the torture table. It was interesting to me that they didn't deface the artwork after they'd extracted Jesus from the cell and secured him on the torture table; I suppose the morbid promise of physical cruelty was more titillating than the allure of whatever they might have been able to do to his art.

  One of the guards furnished something that looked like a sleeping bag, only much smaller, and he set it down on the table near Jesus' belly. The guard unfurled it to reveal that it was a torture kit, each little roll of it divulging more lackluster blades and metals too rusted with blood to ever shine again. He withdrew a hook-shaped knife that was used for gutting fish and was about to use it for the same purpose on Jesus, but, just before he broke the skin, some of the other prisoners started to make a fuss.

  The prisoners threw all of their piss and shit at the guards, shouting as loud as they could. Jesus was kind of popular, and no one was happy about seeing this happen right when he was done with his artwork.

  Now, there were two guards in total present here. They both turned their backs to Jesus in order to attend to the rioters, albeit for only a brief moment. This moment would be all that Jesus needed.

  He applied torque to the first metacarpal bone in his left hand by twisting it and grinding it against the edge of the metal bed until there was sufficient dislocation so that he could slide his whole hand through the wrist shackle, probably ripping up a bit of flesh in the process. Next, he began the difficult part: to use four fingers and no thumb to silently pick the lock on the other hand's wrist shackle. It was a basic lock, possessing no system of tumblers, and it required only one tool for the entire mechanism to be picked; Jesus knew this, since he had on several opportune occasions studied the dimensions of the bucktoothed key from afar, and he was certainly prepared—he produced the required tool from the place in his mouth where his tongue should have been. After freeing his good hand, he was free to use it to pick the locks on the shackles binding his neck, waist, and ankles.

  The prisoners who had been making the distraction were now distracted from their own cause as they watched Jesus rise from what should have been his deathbed. The guards started to follow the eyes of the prisoners, but by then it was too late. Jesus was right behind them, and he imposed violence upon them before they could fully turn around and set their feet in preparation.

  And so Jesus freed us all, and we set foot outside of the cells. I was interested in seeing, in close detail, the living conditions to which my fellow inmates had grown accustomed. I didn't know what I was expecting—maybe some kind of luxurious furniture ingeniously invented out of garbage—but all I saw was the same thing in every cell: grey-brown bedsheets, the dilapidated brick walls, and the waste buckets from which I had regularly borrowed.

  We all had to go look at Jesus' mural before we could leave, if for no other reason than out of respect for what he had done for us. And I'll tell you, it was the strangest thing I'd ever seen: it was Jesus Christ's face… painted in human waste.

  As soon as he was content, Jesus released the audience. We all formed one group and took out the rest of the prison's guards, one cellblock at a time. Each acquired area would make the guards' numbers weaker and ours stronger, and the complete collapse of control was inevitable.

  During the chaos I subducted a guard into the shadows and satisfied my thirst. It was a very good feeling—so much so that the riot-born escape was somewhat anticlimactic.

  And then we left the prison, out into the light. Although we all bathed in the bright sunlight after having been down in the depths for so long, this story will end, once again, in darkness.

  Chapter 27

  I had another dream in the vault, except this one was different from the others. It felt real… it felt like a memory.

  In my mouth was the overwhelming taste of metal. I was at the bottom of a well, and I was in total darkness. I had been there for an eternity.

  And then the darkness receded in a vague way, and I could see all around myself. It was like I was not in a well but rather drifting in the depths beneath an endless ocean… everywhere in all directions there was ocean with no end. And then an enormous whale revealed itself as being t
he source of the light, a glowing whale the size of a city, and it opened its massive mouth and swallowed me whole.

  The belly of the whale was its own world, filled with mechanical marvels. I was on solid ground now, but for some reason it was incomprehensibly difficult to rise to my feet. I eventually stopped staggering around and conceded to a slumped kneel, whereupon I emptied my mouth and lungs of the metallic water.

  And then a living machine approached me in a reverent way. It cleaned me, clothed me, and helped me to my feet. I still could not walk, and so it carried me into a great theater where I was shown the history of my own life.

  There were other living mechanical entities inside the belly of the whale, and I lived with them for thousands of years. Eventually it was time to leave, and they brought me to the final mechanical mystery…

  Chapter 28

  And then there was light… light everywhere… light all encompassing. I could see nothing but this bright white light, and I closed my eyes and it flashed and bulbed in my mind like a resonation. And then, after some time, my atrophied eyes could perceive that it was just a small fleck of light that had so gracefully lit up my world like a thousand suns, and I could now distinguish the light from the darkness. It was a flower of light, budding, blooming, bending, white petals spreading out and unfurling over themselves like the first lily after a harsh winter, and each second was more miraculous than the last.

  And then the speck of light started to move. Sideways, if that was still a direction. I could feel my feet beneath me, but I honestly could not have told you which way was up or down. But I was sure that the light was moving, and I could see a faint streak of glowing stardust in its history. A spark fell to the floor and illuminated a circle of metal beneath itself, and I stooped down and my eyes inhaled the newly exposed texture like it was nude flesh.

  And it was raining sparks now, and oh God I held my hands in front of my face and I could see those hands, and my knees buckled and I was swept down to the ground and I was crying for joy, and I wiped away the tears with my visible hands and I could see the trail of light moving in a new direction now. I extended my hands for the falling pieces of light like they were snowflakes, and then I took my warm hands and held them on my face and I was warm.

  At long last I could see the shape of a door. It was a door of darkness with an outline of light. After the edges of light were completed, forces of what sounded like suction removed Padempire from my sight; behind him was infinite brightness. From that brutal white light emerged the figure of a man, and then two men, and then three, and then more. I could see no distinguishing features—only that they were each carrying a pole with something like a noose on the end.

  I could tell just from the way they were walking that I was definitely in a new age. In different places and in different times a group of people will have a way about them when they walk; these people were walking with slight subtleties in their movements that I'd never seen before. I knew that these were not Americans. I knew that they would not understand a single word of my language.

  My bloodlust was still inexplicably gone, but I nevertheless could not help myself from assuming a hostile posture. I'm quite sure that I was outwardly insane—even though my internal thoughts made sense to me—due to the uncompromising harshness of the punishment that I'd endured to this point. And so they grappled me with their tools and I thrashed about, kicking around the dust on the floor that was a mixture of Padempire's ash and also the long-forgotten remnants of my clothes that had fallen apart, shred by shred, thread by thread, over the millennia.

  They led me out of the vault. I had a paralyzing sense of discomfort, and it was not due to the metallic wire around my neck: it was, as I had witnessed many times before, very difficult for me to walk more than a few steps without turning and facing a new direction because I'd been so strongly conditioned to pacing within the well-defined confines of the vault. I had the overwhelming urge to stop and turn around, but I was unable to appease this urge because they were herding me away from the vault.

  While I was in the vault, my stories ended in darkness. But now I was free, and this story ends in sunshine.

  Chapter 29

  From my counting I deduced that I'd lost twenty thousand years. As you might imagine, the technology of this age was astounding. This world was so metallic, so electrical, that a mere toothpick would have more processing power than the largest supercomputer from your time.

  Everywhere there was metal. Vehicles were obsolete; people could simply fly. Such a thing is just so impossible to describe that I would do you a better service by trying my best to explain how it worked. My best guess was that there was something interwoven in the clothes, or that there was something beneath the skin in each human, and that this thing, or this system of things, fully harnessed the potential of magnetism for this purpose.

  There was no crime at all because everywhere there were sensors and scanners that could fully map a person's brain. These scanners, detecting the precise position of every neuron and comprehending their interrelations, could infer from the acquired information the thoughts and memories of a person, and so any crime that a perpetrator might be aware of would become instantly known to society. But I suspected that there would have been no crime even without these measures since this society had eliminated all motives for crime.

  There was no competition for resources, there was no monetary system, and there was no private property. Things had worth, such as artistic value or mechanical facility, but there was such abundance and boon of all things that hording had become pointless. Religion was obsolete for obvious reasons.

  There were some other customary things worthy of note as well. From what I could gather while trying to decipher some of their speech, there was no longer a distinction in pronoun usage when describing a male or a female. Bathrooms were also unisex now, and it was not at all uncommon to see an entire establishment dedicating itself to being a bathroom—a cleaner, more luxurious environment to deal with something that would arise several times a day.

  I would also be deft in my duties to mention the situation with the children: every child was an orphan. They were raised by society rather than by parents. This system, as I would later discover, was easy to implement because there was no longer such a thing as live birth (humans were typically genetically engineered). In addition, the value of children didn't seem to be what it was in our time—a better way to say this is that the occasional demise of a youth would not be mourned more than the death of an established, contributing member of society.

  The technology of this world was so impressive because I knew that it all came from nothing more than dirt and rocks. And I was actually very eager to be examined by technology this time around. I was excited at the notion of discovering why exactly I was immortal and invincible, and I was most of all excited about the opportunity of joining this society.

  Chapter 30

  I was wrong, I was so wrong. From my counting I felt confident that I'd lost about twenty thousand years. Fifty thousand at the absolute most. But the reality was that I had lost half a million years. The date was 578,342 Common Era. To be technical, the year was something like 13,800,000,000 because humanity had, somewhere along the line, changed the year-counting system to make the start of Year Zero the moment of the Big Bang.

  I can remember such a strong chill emanating through my body when I heard how much time I'd lost. I never had a home and I never had a family, but I think, at that moment, I knew what it was like to lose such things. Everything that I'd ever known was totally gone. Everything that I'd ever done had been long forgotten. When I had thought that it was around 20,000 Common Era, the feeling I had was that I was in a distant future but that there was still some cord keeping me tethered to the bedrock foundation of a familiar time; now that cord has been cut.

  Chapter 31

  Of all the new ways of doing things, the most striking thing, other than some of t
he things that I've already mentioned, was that the night had become day. People would still sleep six to eight hours per day, but they would now do this during daylight hours. It was like humanity had finally stopped worshiping the sun, and they had entered a new age. Along with this new age came the colonization of nearly every habitable location in the solar system.

  The humans had a mobile colony on the dark side of Mercury, and they were able to establish a permanent outpost on each of the poles of the planet because there were natural valleys there that were artificially deepened. These valleys protected the outposts from the intense sunlight, and there were solar panels in a semicircle outside of each valley that provided constant and sufficient energy for both the outposts and the mobile colony until entropy would erode the working parts of the system, at which point reserve energy would be used until replacement machinery could be brought in from the blue planet. Global colonization of Mercury was feasible, given the current technological standards, and plans were in the works for implementation.

  Venus was most certainly uninhabitable due to its atmospheric pressure and temperature, but there were many permanent, unmanned research facilities on the surface. The gas giants were also, obviously, uninhabitable, but unmanned probes were in constant sub-orbit beneath the clouds of each of these. There were over a thousand for each of the four gas giants.

  The moon was, of course, inhabited—there is a story to be told, though. The colonization of other planets and the other planets' moons occurred very smoothly due to the harmonious nature of humankind; our moon, however, was being explored and exploited before the humans had experienced their collective epiphany, before the time when they placed such great emphasis on non-applicational knowledge and understanding of the universe for its own sake. This was the time during which humanity still sought and fought wars, that regrettable era of humanity's history when people used money for every aspect of their lives and then somehow wondered why everyone was so greedy and despicable. The very moment it was determined that the moon offered profit, there was full-scale war when it came time to decide which nations would own which areas on the moon, which laws would be applicable in which areas, and so forth. Would each country get lunar land proportional to their country size on Earth, or proportional to their population, or to their net wealth, or would each country get an equal share? The petty humans fought the Lunar War for decades (the war took place on Earth); they eventually came to a worldwide agreement. And thus began the colonization of the moon, which was now a very beautiful place.