Forty One

While his computer was busy humming away decrypting the root password, Fyndraxis had some time to kill. While he could have rejoined Bird et al in normal time and let his computer do its thing in the background, it struck him as a waste of time. He wanted to have something substantial for Terra on the double, and waiting around for god knows how long for his computer to spit something out seemed silly. So the faster the better.
After the first six hours or so he began to get unbearably bored. In this fugue of boredom his mind wandered to what Terra had meant when she was talking about the scotch that he had provided her. It was a distilled memory, a piece of his spirit. Alcoholic allegories aside, he began to muse upon the nature of his amnesia. While it was a tried and true narrative device, he was becoming tired of not knowing what the hell was going on. It wasn’t cute anymore.
His train of logic went a little bit like this. If he was a conscious being, he was made of memories. All of his past deeds and experiences had formed him into what he was at this very moment. At this very moment, he was inhabiting a world that was made of his memories. If he wanted to remember something, he would have to go out and find it.
Scattered throughout the realm that he had crafted, were places that he thought of as places of power. They were temples to his own mind and they likely contained just the thing he was looking for. A fucking clue.
The problem with these places of power was that they scared the shit out of him. The mere thought of them filled him with existential dread to such a severe degree that he had avoided them the entire time that he had been a Daemon. Dicking around with his computer was bad enough. At least when he was doing that there was an operating system that kept him from doing anything overly stupid for the most part. Visiting one of these places would be like walking directly into his own brain. He looked at it as something akin to attempting toaster repair mid bubble bath. It was stupid and completely avoidable.
Before now, he had been mildly inconvenienced by his amnesia. It was just a little quirk of his personality. There was no big reason to walk into one of these places of power and see what the deal was. There was no reason to undertake that sort of risk. Now, however, he had reached the end of his patience as far as his amnesia was concerned. He needed information, he needed context, but most of all he needed answers as to who he was because it was actively getting in the way of his productivity.
There was one place in particular that he thought of as the biggest baddest spot of them all. He had seen it from afar a few times and just said “nope” aloud and walked the other way. He decided that today he was going to face it head on.
Preparation for this feat of personal bravery required formal attire. Fyndraxis had in his possession an incredibly intricate set of Daemon armor wrought of black enameled meteorite steel that seemed to fit the occasion nicely. The armor was chased with silver and those colors reminded him of his favorite amnesiac to ever grace the pages of a pulp novel. This character had regained his memory by negotiating an artifact called the pattern. This had not only restored his memory, but given him power over fundamental forces of the universe. Fyndraxis wasn’t expecting that sort of result, but if his realm operated on rules dictated by his subconscious he had a feeling something significant would happen.
He grew wings for this endeavor. Bat wings would have been a bit cliche for his taste, so he decided on the silent wings that owls use to such great effect. He liked owls. For a weapon, he had his very own Daemon Blade that he had forged from the same meteorite as the armor. It did not contain a soul, nor did it have amnesia, but the fact that it was of his mind made it a little bit of both. It was a simple sword with patterns upon the blade that marked it as belonging to the same amnesiac prince of the black and silver. He was thinking that it could have some sort of talismanic power that could help him in his endeavor.
Besides being a good luck charm of sorts, the sword itself was mostly for aesthetic value. These places of power were not guarded by lobotomized elder gods, or hordes of ravenous trolls. He wouldn’t have to draw this sword and vanquish an unbeatable foe. The battlefield would be in his mind. These places simply existed upon the face of the land and exuded a flesh tingling aura of deja vu. The place where he was headed he had nicknamed the hill.
None of the places of power had formal names. To name a thing is to have a measure of control over it. A nickname gave him a measure of control over himself. It was akin to being a serial dater in your late twenties. You go on dates with people and they of course have names, but you don’t really use them. You give them amusing monikers like Laser Lady or Barncat or something. This is done to give a kind of emotional buffer zone around them as a concept. To refer to them in such a nonchalant way immediately lowers the emotional temperature in the room and makes compartmentalization not only easy and fun, but almost a requirement.
It makes abruptly ceasing contact with Laser lady a lot easier than ghosting on Jen, the single mother who is desperately trying to break the chain of emotionally abusive relationships she has had her entire adult life. It gave him enough emotional control over the situation so that he barely wanted to tear the flesh from his digital bones and run screaming into the night.
Once his preparations were made, he quickly ran out of excuses to hang around the keep. He ventured out of his workshop onto a high crenelated garden that he used for his winged comings and goings. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and shot into the sky.
The castle and its everstorm shrank into irrelevance as he accelerated toward the blackness of space. He followed a vast parabola whose distant end was the hill of his desire. Below him, the landscape drifted by slowly as toy mountains disappeared over the gently curved horizon. At the peak of this parabola he rolled onto his back and admired the stars briefly before gravity greedily beckoned him back to the planet.
Once he was firmly back in gravity’s clutches, his precipitous descent made him into a fireball that streaked across the sky like the meteor he had forged his armor and blade from. As he dove into the clouds, they were torn asunder by his passage. With his wings tucked at his sides, he hurtled toward the waiting earth.
When his quarry was in sight, he spread his wings and burned off all the speed that the planet had lent to him. His arrival was announced by a thunderclap so unbearably loud, that the grass around the crater that he left caught fire. Trees on distant mountains shuddered from the passage of it. None of this was strictly necessary, but it was incredibly cool and it helped him get psyched up for what he was about to do.
The hill required that he approach on foot. These places of power operated with their own sort of dream logic, and Fyndraxis suspected them of being actual dreams that he used to have in his human life. The hill stood alone in a vast field of waist high grasses. Crowning the hill was a stand of maple trees. As he got closer to the hill, it grew and shrank, defying the laws of perspective. From one step to another it would, at its own whim, loom before him or seem to be far off in the distance. When it was in the distance and small, it looked paradoxically as if it could be picked up and cradled in his hands. When it loomed, it seemed to thrum with a tectonic vibration that was felt but not heard.
After a time, he seemed to have pierced a veil of sorts. A path was shown to him in the form of a winding dirt road embraced by trees. From afar this path and these trees were not apparent, but when he was upon the path he was offered shade from the afternoon sun. This path wound counterclockwise up the hill toward the stand of trees. The canopy of trees at times seemed miles above his head, and at others he needed to crouch down and make his way on hands and knees.
Once the stand of trees was reached, the hill insisted that he find a specific tree, and circle it clockwise. When he had been traversing the pathway on the way up, he seemed to have been winding something. Now, it required unwinding. Seven times around the tree revealed a mirror image of the hill shimmering in the sky above him. As he reached out to touch it, he was drawn into it and descended to the doppelganger forest in the sky.
The stand of trees on this mirror hill cradled a small creek. This creek flowed uphill through moss and tree roots toward the unseen summit. He followed the river along its ancient course. The further he followed it, the wider and more raging it got until he couldn’t see anything except rocks and foaming water. He was swallowed by the hill and its pernicious waters, leaving nothing but blackness.
Then, he was nothing but an old man. The man had started his day in the usual way. Awakened by the sun, he stretched and arose from a queen sized bed that he only used about a third of. The sheets on the bed showed little evidence of his having used them, so he tidied them quickly and began his day. He made his way creakily to the kitchen and started the coffee maker. It was always more than he would drink in the morning, but the grinder was adjusted for about ten cups and he couldn’t bring himself to change it.
The grinder buzzed away loudly and shook dust from the rafters to play in the golden shafts of light that were peeking through the kitchen window. The grinder used to scare his cat and send him into hiding for twenty minutes or so, but those games of hide and seek had been cancelled a while back. He could get another cat, but it wouldn’t be the same. Every cat is a gamble, you could get lucky and find a cat that suits your lifestyle, or you could just end up with an angry roommate that physically abuses you and pisses everywhere. Given the average lifespan of a cat, this was a gamble that the old man was reluctant to take.
He saved the leftover coffee in the refrigerator in ball jars. While he didn’t care for iced coffee, it made him feel better to hold onto it for a little while before it molded and he had to pour it down the drain.
The years had taken their toll on his body. As a youth he had been quick and surefooted. Now, every step was a calculated dance weighing risk and pain. A foot placed poorly in a moment of inattention (of which there were many) could yield a broken hip, or any number of life threatening misadventures.
Arthritic toes seemed to be the flavor of the morning. A weather system was brewing to the west and would no doubt precipitate complaints in his knees and shoulders. The subsequent drop in barometric pressure not only brought on physical complaints, but a general lethargy that the coffee he was preparing would barely scratch the surface of. Thirty years ago, he would have been out the door already, ski boots slung over his backpack, ready to risk his life in pursuit of adrenaline. A lifetime of physical activity like this had left its indelible mark.
He bore all of these pains easily though, because none of them could hold a candle to the one in his chest. That one was the worst of them all. It was an empty, almost nauseous feeling. It felt like the first few seconds of a roller coaster ride. Not the part where you are waiting to get noisily ratcheted up to the top of the track, but that first second of freefall where you wonder where people go to roller coaster design school. Except not thrilling in any way.
What he was afflicted with was a vast yawning emptiness. An unyielding cavernous hollowness where the joy that filled his days used to reside. On his wedding night, some forty years prior, he and his wife had marked the occasion by dosing themselves to the gills with MDMA. While this drug is normally used to see what sort of interesting things you can do with glow sticks, it has the wonderful side effect of enhancing the part of the brain that has dominion over empathy. Given the right dose, those that have a hard time handling their drugs could spend hours pouring their hearts out to a fire hydrant or stroking the irresistible curves of a vase that had become the center of their universe.
What the man had chosen to do was speak about inevitability. While he and his wife were luxuriating on the lower story of a bunk bed that seemed to be the most perfect place in the entire cosmos, he had a dark epiphany. He had to interrupt his wife’s recitation of a string of winning lottery numbers to do so, but through the spinning haze of intoxication he took his wife’s face gently in his hands and began to speak.
He explained to her that now that they were married, if everything went according to plan, one of them would watch the other die. The darkness and the silence filled the room as they both let the thought slither through their minds. Eventually, she said that it wouldn’t be happening for a long time and was consumed once again with her fascinating numbers. Eventually though, time runs out for us all.
She was right, it did take a long time. He always thought that he would be the one to go first. He was older than her by eight years and had spent a good portion of his life as an alcoholic, so all signs pointed to him. He was kind of happy though, in his own way. He wouldn’t have wanted her to go through any more tragedy in her life, and he felt a little bit of solace that he was the one that got to bear this grief. That being said, he still missed the love of his life with every breath that he took. As evidenced by the perceived agony in his chest.
He managed to stay busy though, soul crushing grief could not do anything to dissuade his incessant need to putter. He had always been interested in open source software. When he bought his first computer, the first thing that he did was install the latest bleeding edge version of linux on it. This being in the early 1990’s it was a clunky and barely usable iteration of the software. It being barely usable was actually part of its charm to him. He would spend hours configuring things and trying to make impossibly broken things work. He carried this enthusiasm throughout his life and always kept it as a hobby.
He would try to solve small problems in his everyday life with unnecessarily complicated software solutions. His wife took these dalliances of his with the patience of a saint. He had always wanted to contribute to some open source project, but he had never found the right one. That is, until now.
A wooden crate had arrived yesterday. It was nailed together with honest to goodness hand forged metal nails. The planks that made the faces of the box had been sawn by hand. It was solidly pre-industrial technology and there was nothing that indicated that it wasn’t built five hundred years ago, except for the smell of freshly cut wood. What it contained on the other hand was something that was as bleeding edge as his fresh install of linux had been in the 90’s.
What this box contained was called a Von Neumenn printer. It was a 3d printer that could print on the subatomic scale. Given the correct conditions, you could print out your very own neutron star with it. Of course, neither the printer nor the planet that it sat upon would survive this process. The sheer gravitational force generated by such an ill conceived project would gobble up poor earth and probably even the moon too. But, it was a similarly ill conceived project that he was hoping to use this printer to derail.
What he planned to print was ultimately kind of a suicide hat. He would print out the hat, put it on his head, and sit there while it injected him with a sedative. After the sedative had taken effect, it would methodically burn away the atoms that made up his brain and record their state. Through this process he would be transmuting himself from a physical being to a digital one. This copy of him would be stored in a lattice of quantum particles and would be booted back to consciousness. At least that was the idea, a number of people had tried it and it hadn’t worked yet, as far as he knew. The problem with this process was that you could only try it once. There were no do overs. Either it was going to work, or it wasn’t. Maybe he was a gambling man after all. Either way, he would be rid of this physical pain, and maybe even the emotional one as well.
The project that the man was trying to disrupt was something that had been prophesied in countless science fiction stories. It was referred to as a “Gray Goo” scenario. In this chestnut, nano technology gets out of control and begins to turn everything it touches into copies of itself. The Goo part is pretty self explanatory, but the Gray part is probably some sort of narrative device that is lost on the man. These particular nanites seemed to want to only eat plastic. Whether it was some environmental crusade or an inescapable great filter moment was beside the point. It was tearing modern society apart, and could only result in the end of everything.
The fact that there had been a global war on for the last few years hadn’t helped the matter. The war was nominally over land, because it was the only thing left that had held any sort of real value. But really, it just seemed like it was a way to pass the time before an event like this sprung up. This nano apocalypse had started in the Pacific Garbage Gyre. It was a logical place for something like that to start, if you wanted an infinite amount of free plastic, that was the place to be. The Pacific was also so vast that it made its own nowhere to be in the middle of, so the slow beginnings of an exponential curve of apocalyptic disaster would be hidden away from the world at large.
These nanobots went unnoticed for god knows how long and grew their numbers until they absolutely exploded out of the Pacific basin to consume anything in their way. What happened to be in its way was the vast majority of the global population and economic activity that the world had to offer. Billions of people died in the course of a couple of days and the rest of the world could do nothing but watch what little information that made it out. Mostly, it just ceased to be.
A sort of haphazard time traveling scheme was thrown together by a loose contingency of like minded nanotechnology enthusiasts. Traveling backwards through time to nip the problem in the bud wasn’t possible given their current understanding of physics. Traveling forward on the other hand was kind of doable, in theory.
The plan went as follows: Use absolutely bleeding edge printing technology to print out a completely theoretical untested device to digitize willing subjects into a hypothetically feasible storage scheme. Once these subjects attain consciousness at some point in the future, they would be able to somehow deal with the nanobots that were laying waste to the world.
The man wasn’t sure whether the plan was half baked, half cocked, or half assed, but he knew that it was half of something. Feeling like he was also a half something now that his wife was gone, it struck him as a reasonable plan.
Overnight, while he had slept, his suicide hat had printed out. The device itself was rather unremarkable. The designer hadn’t gone in for elegant curves or ergonomic futuristic branding, they hadn’t had the time. It just looked like a gray ceramic pot that was vaguely head shaped. He removed it from the printer and went out to the porch to finish his coffee. Briefly, on his way through the house, he scrawled a note for his plow guy, who would probably be the person to find his body. He rifled through his junk drawer and scared up an ancient safety pin, and affixed the note to his jacket so that it didn’t blow away in the February wind. On the porch there were two rocking chairs. He took his place in the one on the left and enjoyed one last morning holding a hand that wasn’t there.