Clay (Episode One of Farther Than We Dreamed)

Session 25

  Charlie woke up again. He wasn’t in the tree anymore. He was in a soft and flat bed, without any sheets, blankets, or pillows. He opened his eyes and was greeted by a flood of purples, blues, and other deep colors. For a few moments, he couldn’t see through the dark after-images. Slowly they faded and a room came into view.

  It was a large, white, domed room. There were statues in a circle near the ceiling. Everything looked like it was made of marble, or some similar stone. He didn’t see a direct source of light, but the rock itself seemed to give off a pure white glow which filled the space.

  He became aware that a man was sitting in a chair next to him. The man looked like a scientist or a college professor. He looked exhausted. His hair was thick with grease and looked like he had slept a night or two without washing it. It stuck straight up into the air and away from his face. Charlie wondered if the man might be Icelandic, or maybe Irish?

  The strange man turned and looked at Charlie. He bent down and picked up a notebook, straightened his glasses and said, “Oh. Hello again. Just a minute.”

  He turned the pages in his notebook until he got to a blank one. “Do you remember your name?”

  “Charlie Daemon.”

  “And is this reality?”

  “You look really tired, friend. Maybe I should get up and let you have the bed?”

  “I’m sorry. I am required to test you. Is this reality?”

  Charlie smiled. “No, I dreamed you up. I even imagined the thoughts in your head. Ah, you’re thinking I’m playing with you. Well, I decided you’d think that.”

  The man frowned and scribbled in his notebook. It looked like he was writing in cursive. He didn’t enjoy Charlie’s joke.

  Charlie ran his hand over his face. He’d been shaved in his sleep. His nose had been straightened. There was a scar on his forehead. It felt like someone else’s face.

  “Do you know where we are?” The man asked.

  Charlie looked around. There was a single arched door out of the room. The statues around the ceiling looked almost classical, but some of the faces were modern. A couple of them looked alien. “Is this my spaceship out on the other limitlessness?”

  The stranger didn’t reply. He wrote what must have been two or three paragraphs about Charlie’s answer. He was fast and sloppy, eager and scattered.

  “You’re not a doctor,” Charlie challenged him.

  “I am, actually.” The stranger had a fake laugh.

  Charlie shook his head. “No, you’re not a regular doctor. You might be a scientist, but you don’t look or sound like a medical doctor.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Your hair. Your face. I know people. You’re an academic.”

  Charlie sat up. The man held out a hand to hold him back, but didn’t quite touch him with it. Charlie smacked it away. The stranger was clearly shocked. He almost fell out of his chair. There was the sound of a small piece of metal or glass hitting the floor. The stranger bent down to pick up whatever it was.

  Charlie put his feet on the floor. He nearly slipped. His legs were different and he wasn’t use to them at first. The floor seemed to be wet. Charlie looked down and saw about two dozen dead bodies all slumped against the marble.

  The dead were all wearing long white robes with gold trim. Charlie seemed to be dressed the same way. Some of the bodies were bloody, and a thick red pool of juice had gathered outside of the mouth of a man crumpled just a few inches from the bed Charlie had been lying in.

  The stranger was on his knees. His body was twisted away from Charlie, but he had turned to look back at him. He had just picked up a long syringe from the floor. He looked frightened.

  “What is this place? Who are these people?” Charlie shouted.

  “You’re they. They’re, um, you. We actually have spoken before, many times.” The stranger stood up. He tried to conceal the syringe behind his back.

  The man’s body language told Charlie that he still intended to use the injection on him. Charlie took a closer look. The faces were shaven. The noses were repaired, but they all did look like him. And the couple he could see clearly all had a funny scar in the center of their foreheads. He hadn’t had that scar before.

  Charlie reached up and confirmed. The scar on his forehead matched theirs. And it hurt when he pushed on it. The scar was tender. “Why have you been killing me?”

  “I need to know what you know. What you don’t know that you know. I need to see what you can remember. Is every iteration the same? Is every iteration the different? I’ve interviewed you twenty-five times and you’ve never given me exactly the same answers. Am I the difference? Or are the different Charlie Daemons different from each other in some little ways?” Exasperation dripped from the scientist’s voice.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Doctor David Peter Aelfwyrd. I was born after you died. I watched you. I read your speeches. I believe in what you did. My grandfather voted for you. What I did needed doing.”

  “What in blazes are you talking about?”

  Aelfwyrd held out the syringe. “You need to take this. The experiment is too far along for us to give up on it. You’re going to want to know the truth at least as much as I do. And when it’s over, you won’t care how many times you’ve died. What if I could fill in the holes? What if I could give you your missing briefing?”

  The man wasn’t making sense. He seemed very dangerous. “Give me that.”

  Charlie took the syringe from the cringing doctor.

  Then Charlie grabbed the man by the shoulder and drew him in. He held the syringe against the scientist’s throat.

  Instead of words, Charlie growled like the bear, the wolf, the dragon which had taken him from his old life. And he stabbed the syringe into Aelfwyrd’s neck. The needle went in and it delivered the poison, but more than that, the glass shattered and the pieces were stabbed into the exhausted man’s neck.

  Charlie let go and then shoved him in the chest, knocking him backwards to the floor. Aelfwyrd died screaming and shrieking in horrible pain.

  2

  There were twelve beds in the room. From the positions of the bodies and the blood, Charlie concluded that every version of himself had woken up on the same bed. He took the dead and leaned them all up against the wall so that he could see them as clearly as possible. He dragged Aelfwyrd’s body to the opposite side of the room and left him there, face down and still bleeding out.

  Every face was identical. The bodies were stiff. A couple were bruised. The expressions were horrific, but he could identify them all as his own.

  All were clean shaven. They had all had their noses straightened. And every one had that identical scar on the forehead which Charlie had never seen before.

  As every Charlie Daemon was dressed in a white robe with gold trim, Charlie could see a few of their legs. All of the scars were gone. He bent down and checked himself. It was such a shock for him to see clean and healthy flesh there. He thought about the suffering which those marks represented. It was like his past and his pain were just a story which he could choose to use or discard moving forward.

  He bent down and took a look at the scar on one of the foreheads. It was swollen. At a glance he confirmed that the others appeared to be the same. He touched it, and the flesh moved. He tugged at the skin on his corpse’s head and a slit opened at the center of the mark. He investigated.

  It was an eye.

  “Who does that belong to?” he asked out loud.

  Every Charlie was the same. They had a third sealed eye in the center of their foreheads. He ran back over to the dead David Aelfwyrd and confirmed. The doctor did not have one. He took a few moments to look his killer’s body over and he didn’t see anything out of place or unusual.

  Charlie sat down in Aelfwyrd’s chair. He steadied himself, and then he tried to open his own other eye.

  The room filled with purples, blues, a swirling orange, and strange under-colors which looked like sounds and look
ed like scents. Charlie’s head felt like it had split open and he fell down sideways onto the floor. He had to cover his third eye with both palms and use the darkness to protect himself from a massive epileptic sensory overload.

  I have three eyes!

  Charlie slowly felt the new lid close. His heart was pounding. In his imagination he tried to remember what he had seen, the strange colors – almost like new concepts. But he couldn’t find it in his mind. It was like watching a big 3DQuad Super-HD color movie on a black and white screen. His mind couldn’t hold it all. He felt like his brain was too small for what he’d seen.

  When he was ready, Charlie stood again and looked around the room. Something had changed. There was a new man in a white robe with gold trim. He was lying in a different bed from the one Charlie had been lying in.

  Charlie walked a little closer and he recognized the man.

  It was Aelfwyrd, a second David Aelfwyrd.

  He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t even breathing, but Charlie was sure he would be soon. Charlie didn’t remember what had happened to all of his other bodies. Would Aelfwyrd? Probably not, but how could he know? Reality was so strange. He could barely be sure of gravity anymore.

  The first Aelfwyrd had been wearing normal clothes, a tweed jacket, a bow-tie, corduroy pants, glasses, loafers. The new one wore the robe. That suggested to Charlie that the first Charlie had left the room and gone into the rest of the ship. There was no way to know if he had had hours or days or even longer to live and acclimatize himself to the ship before the experiments had begun.

  The new Aelfwyrd had started breathing. Charlie grabbed the chair, palmed Aelfwyrd’s glasses, and sat down next to the doctor’s bed.

  “Do you remember your name?” Charlie asked.

  “David Peter Aelfwyrd,” He replied and then opened his eyes. He clearly recognized Charlie and was delighted.

  “Is this reality?”

  Aelfwyrd thought for a moment before answering, “I know some tests we could do to make sure.”

  “Do you know where we are?” Charlie asked.

  Aelfwyrd looked around as he answered, “This must be the Genesis Chamber. It was covered in our orientation. Have we been in a battle? I see…. It looks like you and I may have died a few times.”

  Charlie was surprised that the doctor was so blasé about the duplicate dead.

  “Explain them.” Charlie waved his hand at the line-up of dead Charlies.

  Aelfwyrd squinted and looked in their direction. He sat up. “From here, I couldn’t say how they died, but it seems strange that none of them are seriously decomposed. I don’t…smell death older than a few days. I’d say that someone was running an experiment of some kind.”

  Aelfwyrd turned and looked at Charlie. “Ah, I see. I was running an experiment.”

  “You remember,” Charlie accused him, through clenched teeth.

  “No. No, of course not. How could I? It’s just obvious. Look at your eyes. You’re furious with me. But it’s my birthday! I haven’t even been spanked yet! You can’t seriously blame me. Do we know what I was hoping to achieve? What the prior me was hoping to accomplish?”

  “There’s a notebook.” Charlie pointed in the book’s direction with a wave of his head. “And you were injecting each me with a hypodermic. I stabbed it into your throat. See what you can make of it.”

  Aelfwyrd stood up.

  Charlie handed him the glasses. “These are yours.”

  “I don’t need them,” Aelfwyrd protested but took the glasses. “We’re reborn. No scars. No weaknesses.”

  Aelfwyrd paused for a moment. He was looking at Charlie’s head. He absentmindedly slipped the glasses on and then reached for the third eye. “Is that a - ”

  “They gave me a third eye, but it doesn’t work right. We’ll worry about that later.”

  Aelfwyrd nodded. He walked over, grabbed his notebook. Then he walked over toward his own corpse. He paused a few steps early. “It seems Allambree will be joining us.”

  There was a third man in the room, an extraordinarily tall man. Allambree was apparently an eight foot tall Australian Aborigine. He was lying on one of the beds, just as Charlie and Aelfwyrd had been. He wasn’t awake yet and he wasn’t breathing. But he was the strangest man that Charlie had ever seen.

  Aelfwyrd put his glasses on and walked over to the Aborigine. He was a giant.

  “How do you know who he is? I don’t,” Charlie asked.

  “The briefing. You don’t remember your briefing?”

  “The last you suggested was that if I killed myself he could help a future Charlie Daemon remember his briefing.”

  “That’s not good. We were supposed to all wake up with years of training and preparation.”

  “I just remember my life up until after the war.”

  Aelfwyrd was shocked. “Just until after the war? No no no no no. You did all of your important work after that. Do you even know who you are?”

  Charlie wasn’t sure how to answer his question. “You can call me Charlie.”

  “Imagine if you met Abraham Lincoln before he became interested in politics.” Aelfwyrd seemed completely gobsmacked. “It’s interesting from a philosophical perspective though. Are you even the same man minus all of those experiences? You might not even be qualified to lead us…. to be frank.”

  “Your last incarnation was a mass murderer. Don’t talk to me about being unqualified.”

  “Charles Daemon? David Aelfwyrd? Then it is true. Oh, what bloody miracles!” A third voice spoke.

  The two men turned and faced the Australian.

  “I studied you both when I was a little boy. They told me that I would be working with you, but it is so marvelous. The man who made human life on Mars possible, and then throughout the universe! And the President. The last President of the United States of America. I’m not sure I’m qualified to work with you, but my name is Allambree Alawa. I was born long after you were both dead. My specialty is Astro-Archeology.”

  Allambree stood up. The room was tall enough to allow him to, but at over eight feet in height, he was a massive man. Aelfwyrd was 5’10” and Charlie was a full six feet tall. Allambree Alawa was a true giant.

  It was only after he stood that he saw all of the dead. “But, what’s all of this then?”

  “David, a previous David, was killing me again and again so he could ask me if I knew my name and if this was reality. I killed that David and we got a new one.”

  “Bonkers,” Allambree replied. “And what did you learn? Is reality fair dinkum?”

  “I, uh, I haven’t had a chance to go over my notes yet. Today was my birthday too. I just got here a few minutes ago.”

  “Then this must not be my first time here either. Do we know how the last Allambree died?”

  Charlie pointed at the door. “I think we’re gonna have to go out there if we want to learn anything more. How large is our crew supposed to be?”

  “Twelve. Five men and seven women,” Aelfwyrd replied.

  “Let’s hope no one kills the rest of them before we learn what they have learned.”

  “Look at the statues.” Allambree pointed at the ring of white statues up near the ceiling. “That one looks like me. There’s David, and you, Charlie. The twelve statues are of the twelve crew members.

  “Are some of the crew alien?” Charlie asked.

  One of the statues looked like it was of a woman covered completely in hair, like a Yeti or a Sasquatch. A second statue was bald and had enormous complicated eyes.

  Aelfwyrd was smiling. “That’s my work. I know it is.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Allambree answered. “They’re human, but when humanity left Earth we had to change. It turned out you couldn’t just change the other worlds to make them suit people. People had to be changed to live on different worlds.”

  “That’s your work?” Charlie asked Aelfwyrd.

  Aelfwyrd nodded. “You might say I invented the men and women who could live on Mars. I re
created the species.”

  The statue of Charlie had its third eye open wide.

  “Let me ask you guys something.” Charlie kept staring at the statue as he spoke to the men. “What do you know about the people who brought us here?”

  “He doesn’t remember his briefing. Something is wrong with his brain,” Aelfwyrd explained to Allambree.

  “They told me they were descendants of what used to be Homo-Sapiens. They claimed to come from the 32nd century. The galaxies are very big, but they can travel throughout them with faster than light engines, worm holes, folding space, siagonal travel, and things we don’t even know yet. I was born in the late 22nd century, and they know so much that wasn’t even dreamed of yet in my lifetime.

  “But there are many galaxies. There are more galaxies than grains of dust in the Milky Way. The distance never ends. Even with all of their knowledge and techniques, there are some distances which they could never cross.

  “The men and women I spoke with told me that they used a thing called a Waydio signal to send a message out past forever. The Waydio signal found matter on the other side of creation. It told one molecule to go here and another molecule to go there, to form the right minerals and compounds until they built the greatest starship, the ideal starship. Then the molecules were told to go over here now and over there and they made living matter. They made you, and David, and me.”

  “We were created by radio?” Charlie smiled, half in awe and half in humor.

  Aelfwyrd corrected him. “It’s Waydio, with a wubbabubba. I don’t know how it works. You and I, and Her Majesty Gloryannana of course, are really the prehistoric. I was from the 22nd century. The rest of the crew is from the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26… there are even two women from the 28th century. So, no, I don’t know what the difference between radio and Waydio is except it seems to go waaaaay farther out into the cosmos.”

  Aelfwyrd walked over to his corpse and began undressing it. He changed out of the white and gold robe and put on the clothes which suited him better.

  Allambree shrugged. “Eh. Don’t make it more complicated than it is.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Charlie said, but instead of mocking the ideas, his voice sounded like he was in awe. “So, are we real? Am I the same Charlie Daemon that I was yesterday, or some kind of a simulation?”

  Allambree’s smile went as wide as the room. “Is this a new problem for you? Blokes have been wondering if we were real and what reality meant for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Charlie waved his hand. “That doesn’t help. I need to know if this is a simulation. This could all be a trap.”

  “Mmmm.” Aelfwyrd pointed to the door. “If you want answers, we’ll find them out there.”

  “Not for the questions he’s asking. We could sit and discuss -”

  “No, I want to know what’s out there.” Charlie began walking towards the door. “If I’m in charge of a Millenium Falcon, or Enterprise, or even a Firefly, I want to see what I’ve got.”