by Wayne Hill
Levy had finished retching and had come to quietly apologise to Splinter. Splinter’s breath hits him full in the face and smells to Levy like rotten pumpkins and old cheese.
“Oh, how awful!” Levy declares screwing his face up. He bends over and vomits all over Splinter’s feet.
“Fucking mess of a man,” mutters Splinter, as Enslin hurries over with two bottles of cleanish brandy.
Splinter pulls the cork from a bottle with his teeth and empties some out to rinse vomit from his blast boots. He grabs the heaving Levy’s head, by his hair, and forces the bottle into his mouth.
“Come on,” Splinter grins manically, “pull yourself together. Fucking childish, all this. Just drink it, you pastey tit.” Splinter pushes Levy out of the door, exiting the command room, handing him the brandy. “Captain Shit, you are! Can’t drink for shit! Can’t fly for shit! Can’t hold his nerve for shit! What fucking use are you, Levy?”
Enslin roars with laughter at the pair, from the open doorway, as Splinter slaps Levy across the head, then starts kicking him down the corridor continuing his tirade.
“You are the saddest excuse for a Captain I’ve ever seen! There is nothing about you, man. If I shat out something fucking horrendous, painted a little face on it and stuck it in a pink leotard, it would already be a better fucking Captain than you! Do you understand what I’m saying to you, you sloppy bitch? I wish I had more life left, just so I could spend an entire year listing all your inadequacies!”
LEVY IS RELIEVED TO get back to his luxury quarters. His left foot, right hand, skull and face were all in dire need of medical attention, and his delicate stomach felt like it was on fire with force-fed brandy. As he asks Splinter to take a seat, he walks over to his MediPod on the far-right wall of his palatial quarters. The pod is a seven- by five-foot metal and glass bubble, adorned with various cables and flashing lights. Levy holds his hand over a sensor plate and a moment later a screen displays a diagnostic listing of his medical issues. The capsule hisses open, releasing billows of white, denser than air gas. Levy steps inside and the pod door hisses shut again.
“‘The fuck is this?” Splinter mutters. He is frowning. Uh-oh, this does not look good, he thinks.
The USA Captain remains behind the grey, frosted glass for less than five minutes before Splinter’s curiosity gets the better of him. He creeps closer and examines the strange device. It looks far too sophisticated for USA technology, unless they have managed to keep multiple scientific breakthroughs secret from Splinter for more than thirty years, and he sincerely doubts that. Pressing a few buttons on his mech-arm, he turns the wrist band so that the selection arrow points to an icon of a dog nose. Gel-like cables shoot out of the front of the arm cannon, latching onto the sleek, sparkling pod. He skim-reads the results on a flick out monitor on his arm. Something immediately stands out as odd. Under the manufacturer’s details, and top of the list of the pod’s scientific contributors — usually listed by magnitude of contribution — was one Tommy Salem.
Strange, thinks Splinter. I didn’t fucking invent this! ... Not that I’m aware of, anyway. Maybe a different person? I don’t have the most unusual name in the universe but, still, it’s a bastard of a weird coincidence. And I don’t believe in coincidences.
Another curiosity jumps out as he reads the report. The place of origin of the pod is listed as New York, Earth. That city hasn’t existed in over ten millennia, a confused Splinter thinks. At least not in this reality — not since Dagon.
Splinter has nervously finished nearly a full bottle of brandy before Levy emerges from what Splinter is now thinking of as a ‘tech-god tomb’. Clothes gone, Levy emerges surrounded by the rolling white gas and bound in bandage-like material from ankles to waist. His visible flesh appears momentarily golden before fading to his usual pallid white complexion.
“Nice toy,” Splinter says through gritted teeth, his eyes narrowed and his drink all but forgotten. Levy has a smirk on his face which Splinter does not care for.
“New technology,” says Levy taking deep breaths. “It’s a Nirmana’s skill to be able to go backwards or forwards in alternate lifelines and take command of a healthy body.”
“Has it worked?” Splinter asks. His arm-cannon is charging, and he is surreptitiously turning the wrist band from dog nose picture to an icon saying FUCK YOU!
“What do you think?” says Levy. He shows Splinter his foot minus the cigar burns, and his hands, which bore no signs of snapped fingers.
“Hmm. Are you cured of the virus?” Splinter mumbles as worm-like black filaments snake around his eyes.
“Yes. But the technology is adapted only to my gene sequence, my timestreams.”
“Very clever,” Splinter says, cooling his now feverish brow with his arm-cannon, whilst carefully keeping his eyes on what may or may not be Captain John Levy. “But I think people look stupid without scars.”
“The Nirmana teach us —”
“Shut the fuck up, Levy!” shouts Splinter, snapping and standing up, dark shadows dancing across his features. “I don’t even know what the fuck a Nerminami is, and I’m not in the slightest bit interested to find out! Why don’t you adapt the technology? Use it to heal all the people on this boat, instead of keeping it locked away? I could have done with this technology decades ago when I lost —” he trails off, choking down his emotion before continuing in almost a whisper. “There are hundreds of people suffering, Levy! Your crew! And you’ve got ... this ... here? Why?”
“It’s not like that, Splinter. It only works for me. You, like the rest, are in a ... difficult situation. I’ve become so much more than anything you could imagine —” (So, not Captain Levy, then, thinks Splinter) — “the Nirmana are making me one of them. My family and I will survive, and you and your stupid little pirates will die. It’s a shame about my crew, but they never truly understood me.”
Levy smiles a demented smile at Splinter, one he has seen many times before — he sees a similar smile every time he catches his own reflection.
It’s go time.
Splinter smashes Levy’s elegant wooden table against a wall, shoves one of the splintered legs into his arm-cannon and casually fires it into the Levy-thing’s face.
“Good shot,” the Levy-thing says — bloody lumber protruding from one eye — continuing its stalk towards Splinter.
“What the fucking fuck!” Splinter trips over backwards and scuttles along to the sliding doors of Levy’s chamber. He smacks the open button as the smiling Levy-thing, the dead man, continues its careful advance. The door hums open, Splinter scrambles out, closes the door quickly behind him and shoots at the door’s control panel until it is a charred mess.
“FUCK! FUCKING FUCK!”
Splinter sprints off down the corridor, pin-balling from wall to wall — he had by this point consumed a lot of brandy — whilst trying to simultaneously contact the rest of the crew. Because of his state and the constant impact of the corridor walls, ‘Fuck me! Blow out the Captain’s quarters!” came out as ‘Blow me! I’m the Captain’s fuck out!” This message was, furthermore, transmitted in a crackling and panting voice, punctuated by dull thuds (as Splinter careened off the corridor walls). Splinter’s drunk crew, in the vomit- and urine-covered control room of the Golden Falcon, laugh their inebriated tits off and shout a tirade of lewd and lurid abuse down the line.
SLUMPED IN THE COMMAND chair, thinking about the Levy-thing, Splinter sullenly eyes the control panel of the ship’s self-destruct system.
He remembers the look in the Levy-thing’s eyes, it was not Levy. The thing behind the eyes seemed intelligent. Too intelligent to be shit-for-brains Levy. So, it must have been another being, an alien. If this alien was contacting him, had he made a mistake? Had he turned to violence too quickly? Maybe the being just wanted to communicate?
Then he remembers the Levy-thing condemning the crew to die slowly and painfully of the Dionysius virus. What was the word it had used? A ‘shame’? That was a weasel word if ever he heard one. Go
t to be right up there with the phrase ‘greater good’, that one.
Splinter wonders if he should just plot a course into the Sun. Might as well go out with a bang, he drunkenly thinks. Fuck the quest, all that really matters is destroying this alien scum. But it might not be alone. Maybe I’m the only human that knows about them?
The drunken revelry of his crew, around him, is making it harder to think. Splinter craves his Crow’s Nest back on Earth. White rooms — with no black curtains! — smelling of piss, shit and vomit are not conducive to thought. He needs a balcony, clouds, sunsets, candles, webs and spiders. The absurdity of his life is too much. Perhaps death would be a blessed release from all this mind-fuck lunacy. He eyes the self-destruct console once more.
The mental image of the Levy-thing walking towards him, half a table lodged in its eye, keeps returning to him, haunting him. Perhaps that was a fever dream, too? Perhaps it never happened? Like his encounter with Marie-Ann’s ghost earlier? He glugs on more space grog before opening a communication line to the rest of the ship. He ‘requests’ that any remaining maintenance personnel check on Captain Levy’s quarters, as there is a malfunction and Levy is trapped inside.
Within the hour — maintenance personnel being similarly tardy the universe over — a team of maintenance workers make their way to Captain Levy’s quarters. Splinter watches curiously on one of the live feeds still making a flickering collage on the walls.
Down the corridor outside Levy’s quarters, a figure slowly approaches the maintenance crew. It is a young girl. She has red hair and a green dress. She is floating. The figure hovers to a stop in front of the camera and points back to the maintenance people, shaking her head.
Splinter makes the image bigger, makes the camera zoom in on her, before opening a channel and, to the bewilderment of his crew, shouting, “I love you!”
He could faintly hear her soft Irish brogue.
“You never were a cruel boy, Tommy,” she repeats. She turns and slowly drifts down the empty corridor singing an old Irish love song.
“No! Marie-Ann! I’m sorry, don’t go. Don’t! I’m coming, Marie-Ann!”
Splinter sways to his feet, his crew try to help him, but he shoves them feebly away and falls to the floor, the words of Marie-Ann O’Shea’s beautiful song still ringing in his head: ‘...the priests and the friars approach me in dread because I still love you, my love, and you’re dead. I still would be your shelter through rain and through storm, and with you in your cold grave I cannot sleep warm....”
She fades like a shadow in the sun.
“Noooo! NOOOOO!” Splinter screams.
Fumbling at the command chair controls from the floor, Splinter scans for her life signs. Finding none, he puts his fist through the small monitor and collapses once more, his crew silent and looking on with concern.
“I had to become this way,” Splinter keens to himself. “I had to become this way, my love. I had to become this way ... this way ...this way—”
He leaps to his feet, unsteady no longer. What he must do is now obvious. The dark clouds in his mind had parted for only a split second but the last undamaged part of his mostly damaged mind had beamed forth a perfect beam of gnosis, a pellucid pearl of understanding. In that split second of light, he had the seed of a plan. Splinter has one last invention to build before Death’s lipless mouth calls him to join his love. The last mission of Splinter Salem.
Once more unto the breech, he thinks. Three-hundred million metres a second — Oi oi!
3
Splinter looks around the pigsty of a command room, as if seeing it for the first time — and certainly seeing it for the last time. Wow, what a mess! he thinks. ... Is that vomit on my fucking jukebox?
He studies his concerned crew. Gert looks at him with dolefully dark eyes — It looks like she has been crying for him again. The rest look both worried and concerned in equal measures. Even Bowdon and Hector look nervous — although, he might be reading too much into Hector’s unreadable mask of a face.
Their concern touches him, but he has no time for this. There is not much time for anything anymore. There is barely time for his plan. And his plan is madness; it must be at least a billion-to-one shot, but that is only a guesstimate — he has not done the maths. Not even time for mathematics, he thinks incredulously. This is getting fucking hairy!
“Frobel! Enslin! Gert!” he shouts, snapping them out of their malaise.
“Take the rest of the crew down to Earth in the remaining shuttles. Gert, you’ve always been good at safe extractions — better than me, anyway. Get them to drink, too. If you have to — to keep them alive — force them, Enslin! Pug and Lemon, you can assist with that. Oh,” he adds whirling to face Frobel, “and if I ever find out it was you who was sick on my Wurlitzer, I will kill you to death! Do you understand?”
Frobel scratches his chin in what Splinter considers a guilty manner and shrugs. “Wasn’t me, boss. It could have been Pug, though. Thought I saw that little bastard —”
“Shut up. Don’t even try it, Frobel. Shut up. You know as well as I do that Pug hates music. He hates noise of any kind, apart from the sound of Lemon breaking wind when his little nose is up his arse. It was you. Man up and admit it, you little shit!”
“Yeah,” says Frobel hanging his head in shame. “Sorry, boss. It was me.”
Splinter looks down on the much shorter Frobel’s bald pate. Usually, he would crack Frobel over the head, at this point, but is that really the way he wanted the man to remember him. Marie-Ann’s repeated entreaty for him to be nicer still fresh in his memory, he shoves his fingers down his throat and vomits on the top of Frobel’s stooped head.
Splinter wanders off to the dwindling stockpile of booze. He opens a fresh bottle of Oban single malt and gulps at it thirstily. He removes his silver tear-flask from his breast pocket and throws the flask to Bowdon.
“I’ve no more tears left to give her, Bowdon. Give this to Talon — I know you don’t know each other but just get it to him — he will know what to do with it.” Splinter turns to address his whole crew. “Well, it’s been a shitty mess of a life, hasn’t it? I know I have you all to thank, or blame, for saving my life. I’ll repay you all by doing the same and introducing you to someone who might be there for you, one day.” Once more to Bowdon, “Get this flask to Talon. The coordinates to his cave on the island are etched on the bottom of the flask. It’s time. Goodbye, old friend.”
Bowdon’s head droops. He storms out at speed, hiding his sadness. In one last action of petty malevolence, he deliberately stamps on Titan’s sore foot, on the way out.
“MOTHERFUCKING SONOFABITCH!” howls the giant man, at a volume no one could match. He quietens quickly, though, noticing the sombre mood of the room. Most of the grubby, but vicious, space mercenaries stand with their heads lowered, trying to hide their flowing tears.
More heads lower, and more tears flow, as Splinter moves amongst his men, saying his personal goodbyes to his loyal crew, his best friends.
“What’s this all about Splinter?” asks Toad, his fat face screwed up in confusion, making him look even more Toad-like. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t, Toad. Eternal happy hour awaits, my old friend.” Splinter clasps hands with him, gives him a brief hug and strides over to his Jukebox.
He presses the large oblong buttons, most are luckily free from Frolin’s stomach stew, selecting 67A. The Buzzcock’s Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t) starts to play and his face distorts into a nest of black snakes as he shouts, “Now get the fuck out of here, you filthy little wasps!”
Splinter waits till the last pirate has gone from the ruined control hub, then, opening all channels, he speaks to the whole ship.
“Maintenance: stop working on the Captain’s door, there is a team coming to collect you. You are going to Earth. All of you. You will be taught by people better than me on how life can go on and be more bearable. You will have a chance down there. Here on the Golden
Falcon awaits only death ... Well, death and pig snacks and booze — but I don’t intend sharing any of those with you space mannequins!”
Splinter manages a small, sad smile. He watches as the escape pods launch.
“Looks like it’s just you and I, Levy,” Splinter says to the whole ship, not sure if the Levy-thing is even listening. “You hang tight, Captain. I will be down for a chinwag, momentarily.”
He grabs a huge metal cargo box, disguised as another refrigeration unit, and types into the code lock: 1234JONESYSSTRANGEFUNGUS. The box hisses like a serpent of death and springs open. Splinter’s face is bathed in a golden light emanating from the interior. He smiles a crooked smile and pulls out his militarised Space Marine outfit.
The golden suit emits a noise like a sigh as he climbs inside. Air valves shoot out dust particles, the cogs and mechanics spring into action, and the wires of the suit plug themselves into his arm-cannon and legs, causing Splinter to grimace. Usually, suiting up is done under local anaesthesia and in a controlled environment. He grinds his teeth. The pain rages — it forks out like lightning, spreading up his spine. The suit is designed to be entangled with the host’s own nervous system. Splinter had designed the suit to understand all his movements and responses, no matter how bizarre — which took a hell of a lot of AI programming. Not an easy task when you are just three sheets to the wind let alone thousands of sheets to a hurricane.
IN HIS ROOM, CAPTAIN Levy steps from the sleek white canister again, an immaculate golden being shrouded in billowing white fog.
The pod technology is based on the multiple-worlds version of the Theory of Quantum Mechanics. This interpretation of the famous theory posits that there are infinite versions of the universe in which every single different scenario is played out.
The pod scans your brain and stores your neural makeup, your personality and your memories. An infinite number of realities means an infinite number of healthy yous. It also means an infinite number of healthy yous of every age who die, usually in accidents, in their timelines. The pod bends your time-stream to intercept the time-stream of the replacement you and switches your bodies a fraction of a second before your replacement body dies. Your old body replaces that universe’s version of you, it dies, and the pod reconfigures the healthy body’s brain with your memories and personality.
