Author Archives: John Saye

About John Saye

Servicing you with novels and garbled discourse based on my impressions of shows, movies, books, story structure, and whatever else I can get into.

Inside a cozy Victorian bakery, warm light reflects off golden pastries. A worried mouse baker in a flour-dusted apron gestures toward a large floor drain. A dapper rat in a waistcoat kneels to inspect it, while a monocled frog detective sips coffee, observing the scene with an amused expression.

Shadow Street Chapter 2

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

Mrs. Smith worked the bread. She pounded it out on the counter. Flour went everywhere. Out the window of her little shop, she could see the city, covered in the smoke of coal, yet the sun shined down through her windows and onto her work board. She kneaded the dough, rolling it out, and then braiding it up into perfect plaits and the oven. Donuts were down, pastries doing their magic, and cookies were lined up to go.

Younger mice scurried around and ran from corner to corner, keeping up with her in a flurry of activity. Their job, if it hits the floor, get it up. They ran around behind her, sweeping stray flour, wiping up minor spills, and eating stray globs of jam that had only moments ago gone in a blintz or spread onto a bagel.

There was a definite flurry around her.

She waved to another team, who ground coffee and brew it into large kettles for customers who were already walking by up and down the cobblestone outside.

She dropped a load of donuts while another team of field mice, all in hats and scarves, arranged the morning’s goods in the front window of the shop.

The door opened with the tinkle of a bell and a mole came in with her family on the way to school.

“Mrs. Smith, any of those fine bread sticks, the ones with the chocolate swirl in them?”

“I know you love them.”

 Mrs. Smith pulled a basket of them up from beneath the counter and handed them across as the woman and her three children took them.

“Can you give Mrs. Smith the money?” The lady said to her youngest. The young mole handed her three pieces of silver. They thanked each other, and shortly they were gone. Outside, Mrs. Smith saw a carriage go by, drawn by a Scottish terrier who was clearly in charge of the whole situation.

He poked his nose through the door.

“Hello there Theo,” she said. She threw him a loaf of bread that he ate in one bite.

“Good morning,” he said as she came out.

“You have anything for me?”

“Only the usual.”

“Come on then,” she called into the shop, and several of the younger mice came out to help take several packages off the back of the carriage.

“Flour,” she said as the first ones went by.

“Sugar, okay,” she said as the second big bag went into the shop.

“Should be one more. Here it is.” She picked up a small bag containing a bottle. “Vanilla, very good. See you, Theo.”

“Good day Mrs. Smith.”

He was away, padding down the lane, pulling his carriage. He turned a corner. Other carriages were out. Folks were coming out on the street as the sun continued to rise.

“Morning, Mrs. Smith,” said a passing fox.

“Good morning.”

She went back in.

“The donuts!”

She jumped across the counter and lifted them from the oil. They were perfectly golden brown. She set them aside to drain as she lowered a fresh bunch in.

The door jingled and two rats came in, dressed in sweaters and hats.

“Good morning,” said Mrs. Smith. She crushed a tuft of fur out of her eye.

“Hello there,” said one of them. “Hi,” said the other.

“What are you looking for this morning?”

“Danishes?” They said together.

“Cheese or cherry?”

“Cheese,” said one while the other said “cherry.” Then they switched.

“I’ll get you one of each, then.”

They nodded their heads happily while she looked through the danishes in her display case, picking the best ones.

She handed them over in a paper bag as the two rats gave her a coin each.

As they passed through the door and back out on the street, a frog, slender and young, and a turtle on two legs, came through the door.

“What can I get for you, gentlemen?” She looked up and recognized the frog. “Oh, how are you? You’ve got that party later in the day, right?”

“Yes ma’am,” said the frog. “It’s for the reception at the clock tower.”

“Right. I’ve got a box for you right over here. Hang on a second.”

They nodded to her. The frog tipped his hat with his tongue and put it back on again.

Mrs. smith left the counter. Her help was doing fine behind her. One of the mice was filling a cream-filled donut while another helped someone to coffee.

With her back turned to them, she looked over a table through several boxes already set aside for larger orders she had ready for the day. There were several birthday cakes, several boxes of assorted sweets, one box of soft pretzels, and then the box she was looking for.

“Here it is.” She opened it to confirm it had an assortment of jelly donuts in it, then she lifted it and turned to hand it to them as something green quickly slipped behind the table and out of sight.

“There you go.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith.”

“Oh, thank you for the order, dears.”

She patted one on the shoulder and sent them on their way.

“Now, where was I?”

“We’ve got it, Mrs. Smith,” said one of her helpers. One of them took her by the hand and guided her to a table in the front window and pushed a cheese danish into her hands and then brought her a cup of coffee. She sat down and just enjoyed watching her place of work. The busy morning was always her favorite. Most of the help went home after lunch, and by the time she closed, she’d be on her own, but for now, it was nice.

Outside on the street, she could see carriages trotting down the road, driven and owned by the dogs pulling them. That’s when she remembered we were on the way.

Our carriage stopped in front of the bakery, and she could see us coming. She perked up, slurped down her coffee, and absently brushed at the flour on her apron.

Our carriage stopped and Mr. Curtis popped out of the door. He was more of a large bulbous head with little legs, and his skin was gray-green in the sun. He adjusted his monocle and his top hat.

“Dr. James, I believe we have arrived,” he said as he paid the corgi at the helm a hefty sum.

I stepped out of the carriage, stroking my mustache and squinting into a brief wind from down the street. “I believe you are correct,” I said.

“It smells fabulous,” said the bullfrog, who swept into the bakery and twirled on the spot.

“Thank you both so much for coming to see me,” said Mrs. Smith as I came through the door.

“It’s our pleasure.”

“That’s right!” said Mr. Curtis as he hit the floor. Crouched down, one eye closed, and another eye open to a bulbous extent, he eyed a crack in the cobblestone of the floor like he was looking through a microscope.

“What’s down there?” said Mrs. Smith as I rolled my eyes.

“Interesting,” said Mr. Curtis. He dug his finger into a crack in the floor and then tasted the result. “Interesting and delicious.” He stood back up, this time stretching his legs to appear taller than I am. It was a failure even with his top hat on.

“Please come and sit with me in the window.”

“Of course,” I said.

I sat at the table with her and Mr. Curtis rolled into a chair next to her. He never knew what to do with his feet, and I could see him having difficulty with whether he should be there and let them dangle or just sit on them, they weren’t long enough to reach the floor which is odd because I’ve seen how far the old boy can jump.

He eventually landed on sitting on one while letting the other one hang, but he just couldn’t figure it which one to let hang.

“Can we get you anything before you look around?”

“Oh I’m already looking around Mrs. Smith,” said Mr. Curtis, who was currently bulging his other eye out at the window, watching foxes, moles, mice, and the occasional dog or rabbit go by.

“That turtle is still trying to cross the street,” said Curtis.

“Yes, he is. Could I have tea?” I said.

“Coffee,” said Curtis. He stopped for a second and remembered himself. “Please?”

“Johnny?” she said.

A mouse ran by.

“Coffee and tea for my guests, a coffee for me, and bring the tray.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He scurried off and ran behind the counter to retrieve a wooden tray with a silver lining. He pulled an assortment of pastries from the display case, several donuts, several rolls, a couple of danishes, and a bagel. Then returning, almost fluidly from the coffee and tea stand, brought it all back to the table, along with a short stack of appetizer plates everyone could pull what they wanted onto.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Curtis, sniffing his coffee with a couple of over-sized nostrils. “I never miss a thing. Jamaican?”

“Columbian,” said Mrs. Smith.

“Quite right, yes,” said the bullfrog. While she wasn’t looking, I watched him remove his hat for a moment and store a donut and a roll in there for safekeeping.

I scowled at him, and he stuck his tongue out at me and mocked my outrage.

“Tell us more about when you first noticed something was off around here,” I said.

She coughed and sat on one paw in her chair. Mr. Curtis absently switched feet to match her.

“Well, it was about a month ago when the eclipse happened. Everyone was shielding their eyes, and the bakery was going bananas. It was so busy we didn’t get a chance to go outside to see it. We were too busy selling blintzes and rolls to do much more than see folks outside.”

“When it became dark?”

“You probably know most everyone did their best to return home like it was night or resisted their primal instinct to stay outside so they could watch the shadows on the street.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Curtis. “Shadows.”

He licked his eyeball.

“Yes, and there was this moment of calm, then as the sun came back out, kapow! There was this enormous bang.”

“Kapow…” Mr. Curtis was writing in a little notebook of his. I noticed he was using one of my favorite fountain pens in his hand.

“There was this clatter from the back by a loading dock on the back alley behind the bakery. Every night as I told you, we give away what we can’t sell. I went back there to see several boxes I had lined up sliding for a drain we have back there.”

“Can we see it?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s this way.”

She got up, and of course, I stood as quickly as I could, Mr. Curtis also following suit. I took a quick sip of my tea and put it down, while Mr. Curtis simply took his cup with him, besides nabbing another roll and following us, hiding the roll behind his back.

Mrs. Smith showed us through the bakery, past the ovens, and through to the back entrance. The stone floor was slick and made of cobblestone, closer to what was outside in the alley.

“Is this the drain?” I said, kneeling to look.

“It is.”

Mr. Curtis was looking at the ceiling while we talked, gaging when he could take a bite of the bun head behind his back.

It was a large drain, with bars far enough apart to fit my hand through. It was wet and smelled filthy, even though I could tell someone had sprayed the floor recently, probably pushing something down here.

“Curtis?” I said. “Thoughts?”

“None yet,” he said before pulling the not-so-well-hidden bun out from behind him and taking a bite like it was an apple.

"A futuristic flying saucer crashes onto an airport runway as energy pulses from a distant portal. Two figures, one transforming into a monster, prepare for impact amid stormy skies and emerging creatures."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 4

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
Buy Yours Here:
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

Michael leaped for the gong. It was sitting behind a stack of craft brown delivery parcel boxes and disused bubble wrap, centered over the mantle to an exquisite fireplace that Michael couldn’t remember having before. He knocked the boxes away, scattering them to the floor, and then started stepping through the bubble wrap. It made popping sounds under his feet as he looked around for the small striking hammer he used for this sort of thing.

Simon walked up beside Michael as he was searching.

The gong sounded again, its long tone wavering in the air.

“Where is it?”

“What, this?” Simon held up the small striking hammer.

“I’m looking for the striker. Kind of like a hammer.” Michael didn’t lookup. He was trying to get the poker dislodged from the fireplace tools. He pulled it free. About a hundred feet of the spiderweb, more like cobwebs, clung to it. It looked like he was holding up some kind of crazed voodoo doll or something, not that he didn’t have plenty of those around, usually versions of himself he’d taken from one person or another.

“Is this it?” Simon was starting to lose it just a little.

“What? No!”

Not a second after Simon gave up and dropped it on the mantle did Michael proclaim “There it is!” He grabbed it and struck the gong, which seemed to reverberate out something close to the sound of Elvis singing You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog. After just a moment, the tarnished brass of the gong lit up and in its circular window sat a television image of the President of the United States.

Simon raised an eyebrow. “Ever heard of a webcam?”

President coughed and cleared his throat. “Nice to see you again Mr. Christopher. What’s the occasion?”

“Oh I can imagine you already know since you called me sir,” said Michael.

“Yes, that’s right. Are you already on it then?”

“Yes sir, It’s definitely the Sublight group sir.”

“Ah, them again is it?”

“Again?”

“Yes, well, while you were off-planet we had a little spot of trouble with them. Couldn’t nail anything down per se, but you know how it goes.”

“I thought I did.”

“Who is that with you?”

Simon stood up. “I’m Simon Dunbar sir.”

“He was a janitor at the Sublight group, got caught in the middle of their latest experiment.”

The President nodded his head like he had a brain of his own.

“What’s he mean off-planet then?” asked Simon.

“Later,” said Michael.

“What’s it look like at the Sublight group’s location?”

“Like a bomb’s hit it, sir,” said Michael. “It’s a total loss, as best I can tell. The only problem is that the generator is still running. There’s a portal there that are doing some pulsing, trying to take half the place with it every time it does so. I don’t know what we can do to stop it yet, but I know there must be away.”

“Yes, you do don’t you, well that’s easy enough. I want you to get right on it then. I’m already sending in some help for you, so don’t worry about that, you’ll have plenty of backup at your command.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Have you recruited Mr. Dunbar there yet?”

“Yes, sir. I’m fairly certain that he’s a major key to solving this one, so I plan to have him with me more often than not.”

“Good. If he works out, bring him to Washington, and we’ll give him proper introductions all around. I’ve got to get back to acting like I don’t have a brain again. Blast… I think someone has realized I’m in the china room. Don’t worry, I’ll tell them I was sleepwalking again, trying to make myself a cup of coffee with a Pringles can and a roll of duct tape if I have to. We’ve really got to get a better way to contact each other Michael.”

“Agreed sir. The gongs are antiques, but they’ve served their purpose. Maybe they would like to have the other one in Nevada Sir?”

“That’s possible, Now give me your report.”

“Well, best I can tell the Sublight Group has been opening one-way portals to other dimensions for the express purpose of observation. They’ve noted all kinds of planets, and various cultures and different kinds of life. They hadn’t come across any other intelligent life though until just recently. Must have been by a pure fluke since it’s damn near everywhere. Point is, when they did find it, what came across was a culture of horrific creatures who were doing the same or a similar experiment of their own.”

The President listened to this with a stern look.

Michael went on. “I suspect something on the other side is still fueling the portal to stay open. They can only get through it during a pulse, but when they do, they move pretty quick.”

“What about the people?”

“I wouldn’t rule out aliens sir, anyone who’s traveled off-planet would be able to pick up on it.”

“Well, we’ve got a fair number of aliens living in the world, some of them in your area too.”

“I know some of them, sir.”

“I’ll send you a list of them if you like.”

“Thank you, sir. That would help.”

The President turned to someone out of the field of vision and whispered something in her ear. In just a moment she was off. “You should have it in just a few moments.”

“Email?” said Michael. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

“Nope, that’s not secure, I’m sending you a hard copy.”

Michael knew better than to ask him why or even how. He just nodded like he knew what the President was talking about.

Michael coughed, “What about military involvement sir?”

“Do you think that’s a possibility?”

“It could be, some of these things are pretty dangerous.”

“I don’t know about that. We can’t risk the possibility of starting an interplanetary incident, that kind of movement in this situation might be misinterpreted during an off pulse. Besides, what if one of them gets tossed like a toy? No, I think we’ll stick to unofficial means this time.”

“All right sir, you know that’s the way I like it.”

“We’re going to send a saucer for you, as soon as your hard copy arrives, I want you to make for the coordinates at the top.”

“Okay, I’ll be ready for that.”

There were a smash and the tinkling of glass behind them.

“That’ll be your hard copy. Gentlemen.” The President nodded to them.

“Yes, sir.”

Michael hit the gong again, and the image of the President faded from its surface.

The last thing they heard him say was “No Dear, I thought this was where you were hiding the spoons and the marshmallows, really…” Then he was gone.

At the back of the office, there was a series of windows way high up on the wall. Sitting plump and happy in front of a recently broken pane was a large, fat, dumpy raven. It looked bloated but very happy and pleased with itself. As Michael approached it, he could see that the raven had been fitted with an electric eye in its left socket that protruded like a scope for seeing long distances. It blinked at him and shook its leg. On its leg was a small tube, in which was a long scroll of paper.

“The most important thing, the coordinates.”

He knew them already. That old burger joint. He’d been there often. The President didn’t think so, but Michael had always thought the place itself might be a flying saucer.

Michael held out his hand. The raven stepped upon it. He took the bird over to a stand, which Simon thought could not have been there five minutes ago, and he set the bird down.

“Thanks, friend.”

He dropped a handful of crackers and peanuts into the bowl and poured off a measure of water into the dish.

“Jack Daniels!” said the bird.

Michael did a double-take.

“Jack Daniels!” it said again.

Michael looked around, and pulled a small bottle of Jack Daniels from the shelf, and replaced the water with it, dumping the water out on the floor.

As soon as Michael was pouring, the bird began to drink, gulping it down. As it drank, it began to munch on the peanuts and crackers, spreading them around on the floor more than getting them in its beak, and had a good time doing it too.

“Let’s go,” said Michael, and they left, going down the stairs to Michael’s car, and driving off into the night. Before they got around the corner, they heard the bird again.

“Jack Daniels!”

Michael smiled. His life, he wouldn’t trade it for an office job and a sack of bavarian cream-filled potatoes. Strange as it was, it was perfect.

They went out of Michael’s office and climbed an old rusty ladder that led up to the roof. Michael and Simon sat down on the pebbled roof, and looked up.

“No time like the present to catch a saucer out of here,” said Michael.

“How?”

A moment later, they were all bathed in the soft glow of an enormous spotlight from a floating vessel a hundred feet above them.

“Here they come?”

Simon looked up into the light, and before he could blink, he was aboard, the little warehouse left behind.

Michael and Simon sat upon beds made up with tight sheets and bedding and swung their feet out and onto the ground. The interior of the little saucer was of chrome, black and white. Sitting in two of the five crew chairs were Lenny and Harry, two aliens with an attitude for fun, a disdain for danger, and a great fear of tools. They were kicked back, one at the wheel, and one operating the teleport machine. They were carrying drinks in tiki mugs, wearing Hawaiian shirts, and they had some surf rock playing on the stereo.

Lenny bounced up to Michael, they had no legs, and reached up a lengthy double elbowed arm in greeting. “Mike, how ya doing!?”

Michael shook the arm and marveled at how weird it always felt to shake a limb with that many joints in it.

Harry waved from his station and bounced over to greet Simon. “You want a drink?” He held out a plastic coconut to Simon with a strange purple liquid in it.

Simon took the drink, not really understanding which of the three straws he was supposed to use, and before he could take a sip, which seemed impossible as the straws seemed to be full of holes, Michael waved him off with a warning look.

“What?”

“You can’t take their drinks. Hell, I can barely take them.”

“Dangerous?”

“You might wake up in a week if you don’t transform on me while we’re in here.”

“Ah.”

Simon found a series of flower pots near the window where they seemed to be growing grass. Were they eating it?

He poured the drink into one of the pots, and the grass seemed to dissolve on contact, turning black before it turned orange, then finally withering away into a pile of mush.

Simon put down the drink.

“Told ya.”

They stood there, looking out the window watching the outer disc of the craft circle below them, and looked out at the world.

“Can anyone see us?” Simon asked.

“Can anyone see us?” said Lenny, Harry, and Michael together. They all laughed at Simon together. Soon he was laughing with them.

“Of course not,” said Lenny as he bounced up.  “We’d never be able to get all over the world if people could see us all the time.”

They pulled up through a haze of clouds and suddenly the sky was full of flying saucers. They lined up like they were on a small skyway. Not thousands or hundreds of them, but enough to call it regular traffic. 

A large one passed overhead, shaped like a large egg. Another that went by looked like a frightened puppy that had to go potty. Simon raised his hand as if to wait for a teacher to call on him.

“How are we doing this?” asked Michael.

Lenny bounced over, fresh drinks in his hands. “Let’s get over there and scan that site then shall we?”

Michael took his drink and gave Lenny a nod. “Let’s go.”

They zoomed over the land, leaving everything behind them.

“So, what’s the plan, Lenny?”

Michael sat down next to Lenny and Harry in the sunken squashy couch that served as their main bridge. There they sat, leaning back in little nooks of the couch, with laptops plugged into the floor of the circular area. Simon stepped over the back of the couch, and down into it. Michael took a sip of his drink, and Simon looked around. He could see there were several displays and readouts that he couldn’t see before. He sat down and watched the ground below them on one.

Lenny looked up, after taking a sip of his drink. “Where were we going to now?”

“Just to the west of Atlanta, you can do a scan for dimensional portals and it should come right up.”

“Atlanta?”

“We missed Atlanta like five minutes ago, Harry?”

“Turning her around. Don’t worry, I already have a lock on the portal.”

The ship made a lurch in the sky and changed direction without skipping a beat, swerving up and over and flying upside down for a moment. No one fell out of their seats.

Simon opened his eyes and looked around, watching the world around him spin and shift. It was like watching it on a big wrap around television screen. There was no sensation to go along with it. He wondered for a moment, not believing what was happening to him, or where he was. Less than a few hours ago, he was a great ravening troll leaping through the suburbs and wreaking havoc. He looked down at his arm. It was shaking a little, and he caught Harry’s eye noticing him looking at it. He grabbed onto it with his other hand and held it down. In a couple of moments, it subsided and he was able to shake it off.

Michael looked up at him. “You all right there?”

“I don’t know. What if I transform again?”

“I don’t know either, but don’t worry, I think we’re getting there. With any luck, we’ll get that portal closed. Harry, do you have a proper scan now?”

“We’re coming up on it Mike. We should have a good scan pronto.”

Michael leaned back and watched the world slide by.

“We’re coming up on it here.” Lenny hit the breaks and pulled in to park over the crater that was the Sublight Group.

“Scanning now. Here it comes.”

A holographic display of the remains of the lab below appeared before them in the middle of the squashy conversation pit.

“Now look at that,” said Michael.

He pointed out the portal. “It looks like a circle. Kind of flat, but it’s warped like a potato chip or something.”

Simon nodded. “Yes, most of them seemed to have a similar look. Sometimes they were more warped than other times, you just never knew what it was going to look like. Can we see through it from here?”

“Sure,” said Lenny. “I think we can get the scanner to show us that angle.”

Lenny refocused the lens. A small ocular device popped up from his dash and he looked through it with one eye, then focused and maneuvered a holographic vision before them with his controls. They watched as he maneuvered it down to the level of the portal, and looked through it.

They watched as the camera got right up to the edge and looked through. Beyond the portal were a menagerie of creatures. Some of them floated through the air on huge mammoth wings, others stomped the ground, and held their distance from the portal.

“What are those?” Simon pointed to the bottom of the hologram where several small creatures were walking through. “What the hell?”

They were small, humanoid, and covered in blueish-purple skin and small horns.

“Nice,” said Simon.

“They have no feet,” said Michael. “Odd.”

As they watched the little creatures in the shadows they could see they were running around on six arms. Two did the walking, while two-handled things and climbed around, and the other two in the middle seemed to be able to do anything they liked. One of them was scratching himself. Then the creatures started to roll like a ball and hurtle themselves forward with a great thrust that made no sense. They battered towards the portal, bouncing off, but making it bend and twist in different ways. Michael could see the machinery behind them operating their side of the portal, keeping it going between pulses.

It was alive.

The creature, itself projecting the portal and keeping it there was colossal, must have been the size of an aircraft carrier. Through its nose streamed a string of electrical light and madness that kept their side of the portal open. It seemed to be swelling up. It was inhaling a great deal of air. When it exhaled, it sent into the portal a gigantic push of energy that caused the portal to expand, destroying equipment. Then the veil ruptured and fifty of the six-armed rolling guys flew through the portal in one go. They filled the remaining room down in the old laboratory, they stood up on two legs, each pulling four daggers from their belts. They used them as spikes on the walls to start their climb out.

In the corner, Simon was doubled over.

“Michael is he…” said Lenny.

“Yep. He’s transforming. I think he was jarred by the last portal hit.”

“Great,” said Harry. “We gotta get him outta here.”

“Wait,” said Michael.

“No waiting. You can find him later.”

Lenny hit a switch and Simon fell from a hatch that opened up beneath him. He flew to the ground, hurtling through the air, screaming at the top of his lungs. As he fell, he turned and rolled as his skin changed color, and his muscles began to bulge. He landed on the ground in a crouch and darted forward like a cat. One of the little hurling electric food choppers of blue flesh and daggers flew toward him flailing in all directions, intending the most damage. He caught the creature, and ignoring the blade scratches hurled him back at his buddies knocking them over like a load of bowling pins.

The air was thick with them now, and he began to punch them on their way in and hurl them back at each other as if they were a sack of old clothes.

The hatch closed near Michael’s feet.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right,” said Lenny.

Then there was a pulse. It rocked the little saucer they were in, which went off course.

Lenny and Harry bounced over to the controls. “Mike, help!” called one of them, Mike couldn’t figure out which one it was. He plopped into a chair and started to work any control he could find that he understood, which was more of them than he thought there would be. He impressed himself a little there.

He screwed up his courage and began to type furiously at his console.

Outside the ship, it was evident to anyone who could see them that they were out of control and headed for a crash. They pulled and dialed and pressed at their controls, but in the end, the pulse was too much for them. They fell from the sky like a frisbee on its last legs, and plowed into an airfield, tearing a huge gash in the concrete. They slid off into a nearby field where they gouged a deep cut into the earth that spanned the better part of a mile. It took a few moments for the dust to settle around them.

Airport firemen scrambled all over the destroyed runway, but they couldn’t see the cause of the damage. They followed the gash in the earth, but when they got to the ship they were unable to see it.

Inside the ship, Lenny and Harry looked around. Michael was on the floor some feet away, in a crumpled heap. Lenny bounced over to him and scanned him with a handheld device. “He’s fine. I’ll get him into the med slot.”

He picked up Michael and carried him, bouncing all the way to a small tube, and slid him in. Immediately the tube lit up, scanned his DNA and began to restore him to health. At the same time, Harry did the same for the ship, getting it to scan and repair itself.

“What do you think,” asked Lenny, “What, twenty minutes?”

“Ah, give him forty.”

In a dimly lit Victorian-style study, a dapper rat in a waistcoat and a monocled frog in a robe lean over a desk covered in scattered notes. A concerned mouse baker in a red cloak looks on. Outside the window, gas lamps cast eerie shadows over the cobblestone streets.

Shadow Street Chapter 1

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
Buy Yours Here:
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

It was quite an ordinary day on Shadow Street. The streets themselves are of cool cobblestone and dampness. Mr. Curtis and I were settling in for a long evening before the warming stove of number 356. The warmth was there, but there wasn’t much coal left. The room was dark and long and overlooked the street. Mr. Curtis and I have our rooms above, and below is a kitchen and dining room we never use, and a parlor where our assistant Mrs. Constellation kept her desk. She keeps us organized and has free rein to terrorize us whenever we are being too lazy for our own goods.

It didn’t help sometimes being what we are.

Outside, a cart rolled by, driven by a dog in a waistcoat and bowler hat. I watched as he steered it around the corner onto Main Street.

Mr. Curtis sat in the back window, smelling incensed with his spindly yet strong legs curled up under him. The waves of incense circled his bulbous frog’s face. Next to him, on his desk, was his monocle, and several fountain pens with no ink in sight.

He was in deep concentration, and I hated to disturb him, but Mrs. Constellation had no such inhibitions. She called up the stairs, “Mr. James? Mr. Curtis? It’s time for your lunch.”

Mr. Curtis snorted. Almost catatonic, smelling the sweet smoke of his vanilla-burning cone. He licked his eye, smacked his lips closed and shifted from one foot to another.

“Mr. Curtis?” I said. “Mrs. Constellation just…”

A finger pop pumped up, long and green. It was so flexible I always wondered how many knuckles he must have in there. My rat’s fingers weren’t nearly so flexible, and I wasn’t sure that I’d even gotten through to him.

“Peter?”

“Silence Dr. James,” said the frog. His face was bulbous, dark green, and covered in handsome round nodules.

I hesitated, and recoiled, checking my waistcoat for my pocket watch, and returning it to its home a moment later. Still, without the knowledge of what time it was, I laughed a little. “Quite right.”

“Just a moment.”

It was at that moment, after I took a step back, that Mrs. Constellation came bursting through the door. She was dressed in a sleek single-bodied suit with three large loops on which she was wearing a hammer, screwdriver, and a T-Square. She pushed me out of the way, a look of disgust upon her face, and kicked the old bullfrog’s chair out from under him. It was the first moment at which I realized he wasn’t wearing anything in his chair. The way he curls himself up, sometimes I miss this.

The chair went skittering out, but the frog’s head didn’t move at all. His feet just fell to the floor under him as if he’d already been standing there.

“You old bullfrog, get something on. You’re already late. And I don’t care if you are naked as a jerk or not. You will be ready for your next client!”

“My dear, I’m always ready for my next client. I don’t know what you mean,” said the old frog.

“Oh!” She slammed down a tray, that I swear she hadn’t been carrying just a moment before, of little sandwiches. They bounced, but none tumbled to the floor. She stormed from the room, yelling “five minutes!” as she stomped out.

“Peter, you really should…”

“John, it keeps her on her toes. You know I do it to keep her occupied.”

“Certainly. “

The frog whipped out a tongue and took a sandwich from the tray directly into his mouth. “Lies and mint jam. My favorite.”

“Mrs. Constellation knows you well.”

“She is adequate.”

“Come now, Mr. Curtis. Be nice.”

The frog gathered a robe to draw over his shoulders, which he tied at his front, and then slipped his feet into a pair of open-heeled woolly slippers.

“Better?”

I pointed to my eye, where my pair of spectacles lived above my twitchy nose, and closed my right eye.

“Ah yes.”

His tongue whipped out and connected with his monocle on the table. After wiping it off with a handkerchief from the pocket of his dressing gown and quickly returning it, he fitted it in front of his left eye, using the considerable brow he had to hold it in place. We could hear our assistant downstairs calmly inviting someone in the front door down on the street level below.

He turned then to face me as Mrs. Constellation knocked on the door. I hate that smile. It’s false. I’ve never found it to be genuine, but people use it anyway, so I suppose I just put up with it.

Mr. Curtis whiffled the smoke of his incense cone away and said, “Enter!”

Mrs. Constellation opened the door for a young mouse who looked younger than her years. “Your eleven-thirty, sirs.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Constellation. Please show her in,” said Mr. Curtis. He shared a scowl, light-hearted on his end and not on hers, with Mrs. Constellation, who held the door as the young mouse came into the apartment.

“Anything else, sir?” Mrs. Constellation asked of me, but Mr. Curtis answered her too quickly with a “Yes, thank you!” and a silly wave, which she also hated.

“Very well, Mrs. Smith then, gents.” She shut the door and left her in our company, but I knew better than to believe we were alone. It was always her job to keep tabs on us, keep us honest, I suppose. It wouldn’t surprise me to awaken with her sneaking through my room with her samurai sword, trying to catch me off guard.

The young mouse padded into our room, and even though I was easily twice her height, I felt inferior to her minute, yet effortless beauty.

“May I take your coat, Mrs. Smith?”

“Yes, of course, she turned her back to me and allowed her red cloak to slide from her shoulders. I placed it on the third hook by the door.

She turned in her white dress and licked her paw and cleaned the fur that had been matted beneath the cloak absently as we talked further.

On the first hook was Mr. Curtis’s green and yellow scarf and black top hat, and on the second hook was my modest coat and brown hat I kept around for excursions.

“Mrs. Smith, would you care to sit down?”

“Oh, thank you.”

I took her by the hand. I could hardly tell she was a baker as dainty as they felt to me. “You’re a baker?”

“Oh yes, the shop just down the main street is mine. It’s in the…”

“Back of the stables, I know,” said Mr. Curtis. He was behind his wing chair, more hanging off the back of it than sitting in it.

“Mr. Curtis?” I said.

He crawled over the back of the chair and slipped down into it after rolling over the top.

“Well there,” said Mrs. Smith. “That’s the way.”

“The only way,” said the frog, who also was concealing our plate of sandwiches behind him, and placed them on the little coffee table between the chairs.

I brought tea Mrs. Constellation had already sent up and waited. There was always a heedless cat-and-mouse game at this point where the client won’t clearly say what they want, and the old bullfrog already knows what she wants, anyway.

“What brings you, Mrs. Smith? I am so sorry about your husband,” said Mr. Curtis. “To what can I offer the best bread mistress this side of second street?”

“I wasn’t sure if I was in the rights coming to see you and all.”

“Too juicy a casserole, did you guess?” said the frog. “Please have a sandwich. The ones on the tray towards the top are likely more to your liking. The ones on the top were…”

“Special ordered for you,” I said. “Please tell us what you’ve seen.”

“I’ve been running the bakery now for three years, and in all that time I’ve been honing my craft.”

“Getting better, yes,” said Mr. Curtis, as he ate another fly and mint jelly with the crusts cut off.

“I worked my way through the bread, sweet doughs, raisin filled, mostly buns. I want to be the place for stopping in the afternoon for a coffee and a plum roll in the afternoon.”

I coughed and pulled my notepad out, and the pen I never gave to Mr. Curtis, because he always squirts himself in the face and then closes the note anyway when Mr. Curtis said “Yes, I frequently send Mrs. Constellation down there to get a box of rolls toward the end of the day. I like your assortments.”

He put his slippered foot up on the table for a moment, the other one under him in his wing hair. “Excuse me.” He pulled his foot from the table and back onto the floor.

“It’s the assortments I was talking about,” she said.

One of Mr. Curtis’s eyes bulged, and his left cheek bulged with air.

“I was cleaning up after closing three weeks ago about the time the carriage comes to take away the rest of the day’s buns.”

“What you don’t sell by the end of the day.” It wasn’t a question. I watched as Mr. Curtis swapped his monocle from one eye to the other. One eye bulged while the other shrank as he listened to her.

“Yes, I always have extra, and I always start with a fresh, empty kitchen at the start of each new day. I give away what I can’t sell to a boy’s school.”

“Franklin Academy, yes.”

“You know it?”

“My alma mater.”

“It is?”

“I know your bakery well, at least what comes from it.”

“So the carriage was there, and I was loading them in. I usually have five to fifteen boxes, and it hadn’t been a very busy day that day I had twelve.”

“This alone wasn’t enough to alarm you, though.”

“True.”

“The next day?”

“Seven.”

“The following week?”

“Nine.”

“Still insignificant.”

“Then it became drastic.”

“Five?”

“Four.”

“Three?”

“Two.”

“None?”

“It was three nights ago. I had, I know, twelve boxes when the carriage arrived, and when I turned to pick the first one up…”

“You saw the drain?”

“How did you know I was going to say…”

“I didn’t. Please go on,” he croaked.

“I turned and not only did I have nothing to give the carriage driver again, but I was also watching the last box go down the drain.”

“Which isn’t possible, correct?”

“It isn’t. The drain is in the floor of my back warehouse, more of a loading dock, and we never use it except to stage deliveries.”

“Yes.”

“And the drain, though a large storm drain, has a mesh closing on it that any of us could stand on and not fall through.”

“Interesting.”

“It was there, the last box, moving for the drain it couldn’t fit through, and…”

“It was gone.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Mr. Curtis as he stood up. “I’m happy to take your case.”

“You are?”

“Of course I am,” said the frog. “All the standard fees apply. I’m looking forward to every moment, and you my dear, have plenty to do as well.”

“I do?”

“Of course you do. John?”

I stood up out of habit, not used to the old bullfrog using my Christian name, and she followed suit, without realizing it.

He bounded to the door in two hops, one foot stuck to the doorknob, and he pulled it to call down the stairs. “Mrs. Constellation, we’ll take the case!”

“We will?” she said, crawling up the stairs.

“Of course, we will.” He popped on his hat and flipped his scarf behind his head.

“But what are your rates?”

“Oh, the usual, the usual. Not to worry. Mrs. Constellation?”

“Come with me dear,” said Mrs. Constellation.

“Tomorrow, have an additional couple of boxes handy at the end of the shift. I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Okay, Mrs. Smith?”

“Of course.”

“Come with me,” said Mrs. Constellation, who led her toward the stairs.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

“Yes, of course, Mrs. Smith. Goodbye!”

Mrs. Constellation shut the door. Curtis and I could hear them mumbling down the stairs.

“The case of the sneaky donuts! Tally-ho!”

I just put away my pen, rolled my eyes, and went along with it.

"A man with a glowing weapon and a transforming humanoid face monstrous creatures emerging from an unstable portal under a starry sky, as energy pulses illuminate the battlefield."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 3

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

There he was, standing face to face with the janitor. All around them, snarling beasts with odd numbers of legs and eyes circled as the mist faded and the stars above them shined brighter than he had ever seen them shine before. Michael stood there, thinking about all the things he’d seen and realized that his odd and strange life was flashing before his eyes, and on over the back of his neck, making him shiver in all the wrong places.

One of the creatures snarled at him as it made another circuit.

The trollish looking beast, now half human and half janitor watched him without making a sound or even a noise. The man-beast seemed to regard him with distaste, or was it even disinterest, slumping to the side so as to appear to be staring through his left shoulder. He shook it off. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter at all.

A creature, a strange combination of a black panther, ravenous viper, and a six-foot-tall raven-thing lashed out. It jumped Michael and knocked him to the ground.

Michael took out a small umbrella from a back pocket that definitely didn’t look big enough to hold it, and jammed it in the creature’s mouth, hitting the open button. The creature’s mouth split open and expanded with the umbrella, sending it reeling off to whimper on the ground in just enough time for a second one of the little demons to jump him.

Michael was able to fend off the creature with a punch to the side of its immense head. As it hobbled back, it stumbled on its undersized hind legs. A third one jumped over the second, landed square on Michael’s shoulder and knocked him to the ground. Just as Michael’s back hit, the creature used the forward momentum to flip over, and land on him again, this time with its butt in his face. One fierce fart later, and he jumped in the air, intending to do the trick again, but it never made it to the ground. Instead, he just hung there in the air. It took Michael a moment to realize the janitor had grabbed the creature in mid-air and held it there in the air. It was unable to reach the ground, grab anything or gnash its teeth on anything worth gnashing.

Simon, what there was of his mind, threw the creature aside, breaking its back against the wall, and the side of him that was now a monster in its own right, let out a screaming yell, then gibbered for half a moment, crouched, and cleared his throat. He grabbed Michael and leaped out of the hole that was now in place of the testing facility. He landed a hundred feet from the hole, and Michael marveled at how careful the creature was being with him.

He expected to be dead.

Simon laid him down, next to his car, and then stood there, panting.

They could hear them, the creatures pulling themselves up and out of the facility. It wouldn’t be long before they were surrounded again.

One of the creatures popped its head up. Simon turned around and flew off, his arms flailing in rubbery directions, landing on the creature’s head. Simon was as large as a car himself and punched his fist down and into one of the creature’s eyes. It popped like a grape, and the fluid flowed over the janitor’s ragged coveralls.

Another one popped its head up from the great hole in the earth, now a bastion for evil natured creatures. Michael pulled from a concealed shoulder holster, a silver-tipped pistol that appeared alien in nature. He pulled the trigger. It had been designed for use by creatures with three suckered fingers. He fired it, blasting the creature with silver light that caused it to vanish without a trace.

Smaller creatures were now starting to spew up and out of the circular crater in the ground. They had mutated into something closer to ants with sixteen legs each, hard and black, about the size of a large shoebox, maybe something boots might come in. Michael stepped on one of them, and it splattered into five or six more creatures, the same in shape, only fewer legs. He blasted them, each in turn and jumped on the hood of his car. They had surrounded him.

Simon wasn’t faring much better than Michael was. Thousands of the tiny creatures covered him, each taking great piercing bites into his flesh. He threw them off, and rolled around, flailing in all directions. The wounds from his bites covered him in a foul black ichor.

Simon screamed, no longer able to speak the words he needed, and slumped down to his knees, willing himself to just sit there and take it, for them to tear him apart, certainly that would be the answer, the thing that would bring him peace.

Michael didn’t want to receive one of those bites for anything. He kicked the roof of the car, and the sunroof began to open, but there wasn’t time. He wished he hadn’t because the little creatures were just falling in there with him.

He hit the engine, cranked the car to life, and revved it up, the little bugs were starting to get the better of him, nipping him here and there. He slapped them away, and then stood up, to blast a larger creature coming out of the hole, pushing with great thin legs as it shook slime from its great huge wings. The creature exploded in the light, spraying its foul green lunch from another world all over everything.

At that moment the portal below flickered. It danced, and shimmered, almost closed for good, but then the ground shook with an enormous pulse that knocked everything to their feet.

It flipped Michael’s car over, and it landed on its wheels again.

The blast blew out from the portal. The creatures, the blood, everything except for the hole, the portal itself and Simon seemed to get sucked back through.

Michael ran to Simon and picked him up. He was shivering but normal otherwise. There was still some slime from his creature form on his forehead. Another pulse and he might not be so lucky. He looked over the edge, leaving Simon behind for a short period.

He watched as the portal flickered.

“It’s not long now,” he said. “It’s either going to go critical or fizzle out, you never know.”

It pulsed again, but it was a false alarm.

“I haven’t got long.”

Michael helped Simon up, and half walked, half dragged him to the car.

He plopped them in and revved it up. They were going to have to come up with a plan. He was going to need some help.

He pulled out, and once up to sixty-six miles an hour, he flicked the switch and the car vanished from the side of the road and reappeared a hundred miles away at an abandoned warehouse where he kept his office. At least that’s where it was this week.

He pulled in, and Simon followed him blearily up the steps to a small office, in the middle of the otherwise abandoned building.

The office had it all.

It had the half-frosted glass door with the lettering. It was totally, and blissfully computer-less, though he did have his gadgets here and there. It had an old-style rotary phone, sitting on a telephone book that was so old it was almost completely faded white. The office walls were covered from floor to ceiling with great and gloriously dusty bookshelves.

Behind Simon’s desk was the most interesting shelf, he called it his curio cabinet, even though there wasn’t any glass there. In the curio cabinet, there was a wide variety of items from every culture he’d encountered so far. He had alien artifacts as well as stuff from Earth. There were spiritual items as well as electronic gizmos. There was a helmet covered in gold next to a trio of shrunken heads, each clutching a sharp diamond in their teeth. Next to that were voodoo dolls, alien tech sensors, a lava lamp for the hell of it in purple and red. One of the oddest pair of things he’d ever acquired was the living undead zombie heads of Felix and Faustus. The zombie’s heads were each seated on a small dinner plate to keep the orange pus that was leaking from their necks from getting on the books.

Felix turned his head the moment Michael came into the room. “Well well well, if it isn’t the man with three first names then, back for another go?”

“Shut up Felix.”

He ignored the talking head as it sat there, rotting on his shelf, covered in maggots that Michael knew were nothing more than a trick of the mind designed to freak people out.

Faustus looked around but wasn’t impressed. He stopped when he saw Simon. “What’s with the stiff over there?”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “His name is Simon. He’s a Janitor.”

“He’s been touched, you know,” said Faustus.

“I know.”

Michael pulled open a drawer and rifled through it. Not finding what he was after, he pulled the whole drawer out and threw the entire thing aside were junk and old pens splashed to the ground.

Felix turned his head on his plate and twisted his remaining eye back at an unreal angle to watch what Michael was doing. “It’s not in that drawer, It’s in the red book this time.”

Michael had just finished turning out another drawer out when he looked up at Felix. “The red book eh?”

Felix tried to nod, and almost toppled off the shelf.

Michael jumped forward and climbed the first two shelves near the floor so that he could reach the red book, which was a large three-inch-thick tome, covered in dust.

He opened the book and saw within it a set of goggles, made with real eyes, bloodshot and darting that regarded him with fear, and a syringe filled with an orange liquid that seemed to glow with its own faint light.

He grabbed the goggles, and put them on, looking through the darting eyes at Simon. He took the syringe, and held it up then, as if he were blind, and not trusting the eyes he was looking through, he stepped forward, and took Simon’s arm.

“What are you going to do with that?”

The eyes were darting hard left and right. It made Michael wobble.

He took the syringe and watched Simon’s arm.

“It’s the toxins from the gate. This can slow down the transformations. There could be another pulse at any time, and the next time, you might not make it.”

He plunged the syringe in, seeing now the floating purple and orange spots floating in the eyes of the goggles. He shot the liquid into Simon’s arm.

The scream was unreal. Simon thought he was hearing someone else do it. It sounded like someone trying to scream while gargling three feral cats and a bucket of fried chicken.

There was still a little bit of raw strength there, and he struck out and toppled onto the desk, sending papers everywhere.

“Good one Mike,” said Felix.

Simon stood up, and began to transform, clutching his arm.

“Oh yeah,” said Felix, “make him change early. Nice. He might get worse next time now.”

Simon stood and roared, his mouth splitting as his head began to change and his hair began to grow and muscles became better defined. His shirt tore, and he clawed his hands across the bookshelves sending cheap paperbacks in all directions. He jumped through the door, luckily open, and bounded out into the open warehouse.

“Crap,” said Michael.

“You better get him quick Mike,” said Felix.

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s good you’re the only one at the office. It’s hard to fire yourself.”

“I’ll have to remember that. Firing myself once in a while might feel pretty good.”

He’d chased a lot of zombies in his time. He’s chased them over garden fences and into the back yards of many a housewife looking in on her above ground pool full of kids while there was nothing else left to do but go after them with a shotgun. It was the best way to kill zombies, so no judgment there. You had to make sure their heads came off or you were screwed.

Michael was running flat out, as fast as he could. He was keeping up with Simon though, who had flung into a rage.

“Crap.”

He dodged a low hanging branch as the troll-like beast half lumbered, half catapulted through the back yards of several nearby houses to the warehouse. He wondered if he could catch him. He wasn’t breaking a sweat yet. The number of aliens he’d chased through these woods, only to lose them as the ship took off, the number of zombies, which seemed to keep cropping up, and then there was the werewolf, but you couldn’t call that a clear case of lycanthropy. The snout wasn’t right. He didn’t believe it anyway.

He jumped like he had so many times before and found his footing on a ledge that he didn’t even have to look at anymore as he crossed it. He flew past the creatures, diving to the left, and down an embankment that faced a nearby park where everyone would be out in the open. The hill was edged with a twenty-foot layer of the forest, and on the other side was a park with four baseball fields that all faced each other.

Michael landed at the edge of one of the baseball fields. Was the High School not playing here anymore?

In the middle of centerfield stood Simon in the moonlight. His skin was gray-green, and silvery, glistening with a thin layer of slime that seemed to ooze from his skin and coat it. It glistened. His work shirt was torn, and the overalls were hanging on him. Any shoes he might have been wearing were long gone. Simon now had large and oversized claw feet. His hands, though sharp nails protruded from the fingertips, were deft, and almost delicate. The fingers were long and strong. His muscle structure reminded Michael of a wrestler after a recent fight with a bowl of cocaine, and the teeth just didn’t make any sense. It was almost as if they got wilder and wilder based on how crazed Simon was at the time. He seemed more like a vicious troll than a zombie.

Michael shook off the zombie line and stepped out into the field from the first baseline.

Simon turned around and howled in his direction.

Michael froze, closed his eyes and lowered his arms to his sides.

He imagined the beast calmly returning to him, and Simon recovering enough to come back to the office with him. He was doubtless going to have a call by the time he got back there, and he did not want to miss it, He knew he’d need some help pretty soon.

He stepped forward, and Simon leaped forward, landing right in front of him.

Michael almost stopped breathing, and turned his palms out, allowing Simon to smell him, hoping this was like meeting a dangerous dog.

He wished he had some bubble gum with him. Though cheese would be better.

Simon stepped back and lowered his head once after getting a clear sniff of Michael. He blew a wad of snot and phlegm into Michael’s face, and after a last and final sniff, he blew Michael’s hat off with ribbons of the stuff.

Michael winced but otherwise stood perfectly still. He’d seen a friend of his, Mathers, last year try this same thing with a gargoyle in Central Park, and it had cost him his life, but he needed Simon. He could feel it.

When he opened his eyes, Simon Dunbar was standing in front of him, shivering in the night air.

“How much time?” he asked.

“What?”

“How much time have I been… it?”

“Just a few minutes.”

“Can you help me?”

“I think so. Come on.”

Simon hobbled next to Michael. Maybe the trollish piece of him could slough off the more dangerous elements of the chase, but it hurt later.

Together they walked off the field, and up onto the main street that cuts through the neighborhood, so they could get back to the warehouse.

“Simon, right?”

“That’s me. You’re a janitor at the facility?”

“Yes. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“I know. If it makes it easier, I know all about them. The Sublight Group, I think, right?”

“Yes.”

“I used to work for them. Experiments in dimensional travel. It looks like they were trying to open a portal.”

“They have been doing that a lot lately.”

“What, other portals? That wasn’t the first?”

“No.”

“Does anything ever come out, like this time?”

“Not usually. I’ve seen space, and other planets, strange landscapes, usually it’s just a blue star or something, over a planet covered in trees and grass.”

“Nothing intelligent?”

“Not that I’ve ever seen. Until tonight, the most intelligent thing I’d ever seen was something like a polar bear with a huge central tusk, like a rhino or something like that. It was coming up through its bottom jaw. Well, that’s true for the portals anyway.”

“Was it furry?”

“Yeah, white just like a regular polar bear except for the horn and like a flat double nose. They kept that portal open too long looking at it, the machine’s never worked the same since.”

“Was it erratic, or what?”

“It was just shaky. That’s the best way to describe it. Shaky. It was one of those things, you know?”

“Like what?”

“It’s just a window. It’s a window with the most interesting things in it, the only problem is there’s a thousand-foot drop if you try to climb through it.”

“Deadly?”

“Serious deadly.”

“One step through and it tears you apart anyway. We had a strike team in the facility. They were acting all-important, and stomping around like they owned the place. It was three months ago, they opened the portal, and everyone walked through. We could see them on the other side of it.”

“What happened?”

“When they stepped through, they turned around, and couldn’t see the portal anymore, it just wasn’t on their side at all.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. We sat there and watched them, trying to get them back, but they never saw the portal again. It just wasn’t there on that side. We watched three of them get killed by some kind of pterodactyl, and the other ones, we watched as they stopped breathing. The atmosphere just wasn’t right. It took a long time.”

They turned the corner up towards Michael’s warehouse.

“Do you think you can help?” asked Simon.

“I think I can. I’m not sure. The only thing I’m sure of is that I think I’m going to need you. You were right on that portal, and a piece of you has been changed by it and you survived. Do you remember anything from it?”

“You mean besides the monsters?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I do. They had one on the other side this time.”

“A portal generator?”

“Yeah, and they were looking at us the moment we were looking at them. We both had them turned on at the same time.”

“What are the odds of that?”

“Like a million to nothing,” said Simon. He rubbed his arms.

“You have any clothes at that warehouse of yours?”

“Yeah, I’ve got lots of stuff.”

They entered through the back door. This used to be an old television studio before it closed, there was a small costume room and something like a two-car garage sized area full of rolling racks full of clothes.

“Take your pick. I’m going upstairs to get some coffee going. Pick out two or three things, and a shoulder pack you like. Anything that fits, you are welcome to it.”

Simon nodded.

“We want to make sure you have some options if you bug-out again, so make sure you get shoes as well.”

Simon nodded again, and Michael left him there, alone to look through the clothes.

Simon sat down in the middle of the room and sobbed for a moment on a large oriental rug. As much as he’d seen today, he wondered if the rug might fly should he know the magic word.

He shook it off, and stood up, looking at the racks of clothes. He decided to ditch the over-all look. He picked out a couple of sweatsuits with hoods, a load of underwear and socks, a couple of baseball hats, several pairs of shoes and a cheap suit. There were more expensive-looking suits over there, but this one was comfortable and understated. He put on one of the sweatsuits and noticed the shower room just off the wardrobe here. He availed himself of the showers, and then donned his sweatsuit again, grabbed his shoulder bag, kind of a smart satchel with lots of pockets, and made his way up the stairs to the smell of perfect coffee.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that Mike, then to hell with it,” said Felix as Simon entered the room and sat down.

Simon reeled, not just at the fact that it was a gross and decapitated head sitting there talking, but that there were two of them, and nobody around thought this strange at all.

He was greeted with a cup of coffee, and he noticed that the talking zombie heads on the shelf were sucking their own coffee through straws.

“Where was it going?”

“Simon, these are Felix and Faustus. Don’t be alarmed.”

Felix turned his good eye to Simon. “How’s it going? I hear you transform into some kind of beast.”

“Troll, I think.”

“Right, Troll Man, yeah.” Felix took another sip of coffee. “Crap Mike, that’s hot!” he said, and then burst into hideous laughter. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”

Faustus turned both his eyes, for he still had two, and blinked a friendly hello to Simon, but did not speak.

Simon took the coffee and a cookie or two from the table. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m still working that out, but we don’t have much time. I know there’ll be another pulse soon, and I think we need to get back into town before that happens. We’ve got to do whatever we need to do to shut off that portal, and clear that area. I’ve called in a strike team to surround the facility and keep people from getting too close.”

“What kind of team?”

“An effective team.”

“I think we’re due for a pulse or two before, maybe a micropulse.”

“What’s that?”

“What you’re having now. Take off your shoes.”

Simon was starting to shake.

“Not again!”

He took his shoes off, threw them in his satchel, and then faster than ever, he transformed into the troll-like creature, this time much more smoothly and he looked a lot cleaner, without ripping the clothes. His hair was wild and long but fell back in long black-green locks behind his ears.

He stood there looking at his arms and legs, feeling his hair.

“Michael?”

Michael looked back at him with both eyebrows raised.

“Simon?”

The voice there was normal.

“Is my voice… is it clear?”

“Clear as a bell, my friend.”

He slumped into Michael’s chair, and broke it to pieces, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

“Sorry about that!”

He got up, dusted himself off and looked around.

Felix rolled his eye.

Faustus kept drinking his coffee. One of his eyes was twitching from it. The eyelid had flopped off on the other side, so there was no help there.

Michael pushed over a wooden box, might have had the ark of the covenant in it at some point, and Simon sat on it. It didn’t break.

A great gong sounded in the air.

Simon looked around. “Dinner?”

“No, a phone call.”

"A retro diner glowing with neon lights in a distorted landscape. Monstrous creatures roam outside, tossing cars, while two adventurers inside enjoy their meal, unfazed by the chaos."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 2

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

A resounding scream came from the air.

The night sky erupted with light and static as two forms descended from the moonlit night through a cacophony of sound that shook the trees and caused three carloads of teenagers at various and sundry lover’s lanes to puke, and run from their cars in wobbly heaps. The two of them seemed a bit distressed, but was it something in the air? Was it just the fact that they were falling from an impossible height? Or was it the subtle laughter as they hit the earth and drove a hole in the soft ground as they did so?

There was silence.

Then there was laughter.

More silence.

Then there was easy giggling that comes from a couple who have been on the road together just a little too long.

Fred and Moxie pushed their way up to the top of the hole and looked around. They had made a considerable mess this time. They wore jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts, and were wearing backpacks filled with everything they could think of. Everything seemed to be hanging from them including flashlights, several kinds, tennis rackets, pool cues, water guns. There was no end to it. They wouldn’t carry anything lethal unless it was explosives, but other than that, it was pretty much useful junk they just thought would be fun to carry.

On their wrists, they wore space-time-traveling locaters, not the most smooth form of travel. They enjoyed them just the same.

On their heads were ball caps. Fred’s had a pair of goggles pushed upon it, which he pulled down and put on, and Moxie’s had a pair of sunglasses perched on it, which she pulled down and put on.

She smiled and looked around.

“Where the hell are we?” she said.

“I don’t know, but I have a funny feeling that it’s…”

He checked his wristband.

“Yep,” he said, “it’s Earth all the time.”

“What is it with Earth? We’re always coming back to Earth again.”

“I don’t know, I think it’s the polarity or something, keeps zinging us back here.”

“Fred, how long has it been since we traveled anywhere else?”

He thought about this for a moment and allowed the thought to gel there in his mind.

“What, like a year or so?”

“That’s about right.”

“We have got to get off this planet.”

“Agreed, but first food! Hey Moxie!”

She scowled at him.

“What?”

“They’ve got the best burgers here, I can smell them.”

She walked to the edge of the trees.

“I guess I better clean up then.” He pointed his wristband at the ground before them. He hit a button, and the ground zipped itself back together as if nothing had happened.

“Hey, wait! Where are you going?” he said.

Fred trotted to keep up with her.

“Over here, I think,” she said. “I think there’s a burger joint over here.”

“What, have we been here before?”

“Yeah, it looks like it.”

Her wristband made a bleep.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know, I think these things are running low or something.”

“You know full well they get power from our bloodstreams. There’s no battery to lose.”

He shook his and looked down at it again. “There is a disturbance.”

“Shut up. It’s just us, crash landing as usual.”

“No, Moxie, it’s something more.”

“Food!”

She took him by the sleeve, pulled him toward the street. Cars were now going up and down next to them. Across the street, a twenty-four-hour burger house.

“Come on, burger house.”

He shook his head.

He held her hand. With a touch of their wristbands, they disappeared from one side of the highway and appeared on the other. They trotted up towards it.

He looked up at the place.

“You know, I think we have been here before.”

“See what I told you? Now get inside, you’re buying this time.”

They pushed their way into the little burger house. Tiled in black and purple, it consisted of a long counter of barstools. Around the outside edge were a series of booths. A jukebox and a cocktail table Ms. Pac-Man stood by the front window, which was open to the street and the parking lot.

There was a cook behind the counter, already at work on a griddle full of hamburgers, and a toasted sub sandwich, and there was a waitress. She bustled up to Fred and Moxie as they sat down at the lower end of the bar where it swept around the corner. Her little name tag said Jen on it. They swiveled in their chairs and watched the cars go by outside. Moxie was already fishing for change. They had lots of Earth cash on them, deep in the packs. She wanted to fill up the jukebox.

“What’ll it be?” asked Jen. She was already working up the bill on a little blue pad.

They ordered sodas and burgers, Moxie went for the fries, but Fred just opted for a second burger instead. “Hey Walter, I got three belly busters and an order of potatoes, cooked ’till they’re dead.” He acknowledged the order with a wave of his hand and went on about his business like he had two extra arms, which he didn’t.

“I haven’t seen you two in here for like six months,” said Jen.

“Has it been that long?” asked Moxie while Fred was asking “Have we ever been here?”

Jen looked at them both and also ignored them at the same time. She remembered them just fine. She wondered how long it would take them to remember. It had been just a couple of days in Fred and Moxie’s personal time.

Fred couldn’t remember this from the last three burger joints they had gone to, but Moxie did. She remembered it because of the bathroom. She remembered the way that the toilet in the ladies’ room creaked when you sat on it, and the stink bug she saw run across the mirror.

Moxie winced at the memory but brightened when she remembered that the food was pretty good. She could say that it was something that not only could you write home about, but she had opened her computer and done so.

She wrote her mother a letter each Monday, in her own personal timeline that would reach her mother in hers. It was more of a space mail, and sometimes she included a video of her and Fred in various places around the galaxy, but that didn’t matter. Her mother rarely returned the letters, though she did read them. She sometimes responded with single-word messages like “Cool,” and “Keen.” “Wow” was one of her favorites, as was “Fun.” Sometimes she just responded with “Hmm.” When Moxie was being rather wordy about Fred, her mother would fail to respond at all. It was better than getting a response like “Crap, Boring,” or Moxie’s favorite, “Fuck.” Her mother didn’t like Fred so much, which was a shame. Moxie rather loved him, even if she had no idea what the hell she was doing with him. He was rather helpless at times.

He was currently trying to feed a quarter into the Ms. Pac-Man machine, with a crow-bar.

“No silly…”

He looked up because, with that tone, he knew she was both talking about and to him.

She took the quarter from him and dropped it in the slot. The machine made a satisfying plunk noise. He nodded thanks, and hit the button for a single player, he could make it from here.

A few moments later Jen was calling them, their food was up. She brought it to the bar and dropped it down in front of them, first Moxie’s with a deafening crash. Now that was wrong. It sounded like a whole ton of dishes breaking in the back there. She set Fred’s down, and he jumped as he heard the sound of a car crash outside.

They looked up at Jen.

She shook her head and shrugged it off. She’d seen weirder in her time. Much weirder.

She turned and went on about her business, taking care of the couple of other customers she had tonight. Walter cleaned the griddle, pouring mounds of kosher salt on it, and scrubbing it around to pick up as much grease as possible

After a few minutes of nothing but the sound of soft chewing from around the room, Jen filled everyone’s sodas and coffees and she and Walter sat down to a quick meal themselves.

Outside, the sky began to cloud up. The moon disappeared behind storm clouds, and a fog rolled in. Not much of a fog, just a misty one that was good for getting behind your eyes.

Fred saw it and made a mental note not to try a jump in this, it tended to make it a little messier at the other end.

Moxie was deep in her tunes, she had the jukebox going. There was a little rock, a little country with the change of scene. Enveloped in the smell of her french fries, she jumped and fell from her stool as one of the cars in the parking lot was grabbed by a huge half-mechanical tentacle and then thrown into the sky. A moment later a resounding thud rocked the ground along with the sound of tinkling glass.

Walter picked up the phone and dialed it like he was calling his mother. The phone rang a couple of times, and you could hear a customer rep answer on the other line.

“Yes, said Walter, I believe I’d like to remove a car from my insurance policy… Yes, I have the Vehicle Identification Number for the Car… Nope… I just decided to get rid of it, you know how it is…” He read the number off and waited a moment. “Thank you,” he said and hung up.

Moxie got back to her feet. She and Fred watched the landscape outside of them twist and stretch as shadowy creatures with strong limbs continued to lumber across the parking lot. They kicked cars, and smashed windows, but stayed away from the diner.

Walter shrugged his shoulders. “What could I tell the insurance? Destroyed by an alien monster?” Everyone agreed and went back to their burgers. You’d think they’d all be screaming and running in every direction, but the burgers really were that darn tasty.

“I love this place,” said Moxie.

“Yeah, the jalapeños are particularly good,” said Fred.

Moxie and Fred looked at their wristbands and tried to make sense of what they were reading there. “It was definitely dimensional in nature, but how?”

“Have we ever seen anything like this?” asked Fred.

Moxie shook her head. She was reading intently.

In the distance, she could see people trying to get in their cars from the other stores and businesses in the little strip mall with them. Once in their cars, people were either drawn up into the ant-eater-like nose of a great beast floating above the clouds or if they were unlucky, they were torn apart by small strike teams of monkey-headed warrior wasps that were patrolling the perimeter.

There was no need to panic, everything was just about as ridiculous as possible already.

Fred waved to Jen. “Could I have a refill?”

“Sure hon, no problem.” The aging waitress brought the refill and set it down in front of him. She marked it on her bill pad as she ignored the scene around her. The steaming pile of cars in the parking lot of the ice cream shop next door didn’t seem to phase her a bit. She just marked it down and went on about her way. She dropped her pen behind her ear, and adjusted her visor a little bit, fiddling with her name tag a little.

Fred just looked at her, away, then back at her.

Something fresh came on the jukebox.

He waved and snapped in front of her face, and looked around.

“Yep.”

“What?” said Fred.

“I can see them out there.”

“You can?”

“Of course.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“You seem to be.”

“Well, of course, have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Dear, when you’ve seen as much as I have in this business, there ain’t nothing that could scare me.”

She winked at him and toddled off to check what was left of the rest of her other customers.

“Moxie, did you hear that?”

“Yeah, have you been watching?”

“I, well… no?”

“Look.”

He turned around and there was a flash across the sky as if for just a moment and a half a second moon appeared to be there.

“What the hell!”

“I know, right? Look at it.”

He cupped his hands to the glass of the window and looked out at the second moon.

“We are definitely talking multi-dimensional here,” she said.

“No shit,” he said. Then he sat down with a thud, and began to check his wristband. “Do you know which one?”

“How should I know, there are thousands of them, you know that.”

“Yeah, I know, but you know.”

“Yeah.” She looked out, and in a brief flash, the moon was again alone in the sky.

“It hasn’t finished yet.”

“Yeah, it still looks pretty unstable.”

“How long do you think we have?”

“I don’t know, I think it might have just started.”

“You think it was an accident?”

“Has to be.”

“Does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It looks like it’s getting lighter out there.”

“Yeah, some of it’s gone with the moon, like it’s still pulsating in and out. Another pulse and it could all be over.”

“Hell, one more pulse, and we’re just as likely to be in the hot tub with your step-mother.”

Fred closed his eyes, it was a vision he did not need. He tried to un-see it with his mind and failed. He gave her a dirty look.

She laughed at him.

Somewhere in the distance a helicopter flew over the local mall and was sucked into another dimension. The crew was all eaten for dinner at a grand wedding banquet. The helicopter itself was given to the bride’s nephew Kenny as a present for being so good during the rehearsal dinner.

The only evidence that it happened at all was the thump of the rotors on Fred’s wristband, and the lack of them on Moxie’s just a moment or two later.

“What was that?”

“Food’s up!” called Jen from behind them.

In a single insane moment, they forgot about their worries and decided to trust in a good hamburger instead.

Moxie looked at hers, slice after slice of cheese with fries. Fred had two burgers, spicy and hot. They stood there and allowed the smells to waft up through their noses like it was the most cherished thing in the world.

There is little in this galaxy that can please better than a good hamburger, no matter what the cost, the kind of beef, where the lettuce came from or even what color it is. Also, beyond the simple, well-cooked hamburger, there is nothing better in the galaxy than one cooked for you by someone else.

They lifted them to their mouths, each took a bite and settled in. They allowed the creatures who were still kicking and lumbering around the parking lot behind them to linger in the backs of their minds for a few moments. They were no longer exactly concerned anymore with the day’s events. This was a safe haven and one that tasted good.

While they were eating, one of the creatures, something at least seventy feet tall with great huge silent pads for feet, strolled up to the burger joint and lowered its fantastic head into view. It looked at them with eyes the size of truck tires.

“I think this is the best hamburger I’ve ever…” said Fred.

“Shut up,” said Moxie. She took another bite and persisted in ignoring him until there was nothing left.

Behind them the creatures snacked on cars, played kick the can with a Mustang convertible, and made a mess of most of the signposts that they could find, snagging them and chewing them like great huge metal flowers.

Fred let out a monumental belch. “Can we look yet?”

“No.” She was still nibbling.

She took the last bite of the last french fry and then turned to him. “Now,” she said.

They turned around and looked out at the landscape around them.

The parking lot was gone.

“Don’t suppose you’ve checked your wristband again?”

She nodded.

“We can’t jump now.”

“Don’t know where we’ll end up right?”

“Yep.”

They turned, it was Jen. She was sitting on a stool behind the counter flipping her hair with a third hand and arm that she then quickly put away.

“You’re a—”

“Alien, yep.”

“But you’re—”

“Living on Earth as a waitress, yeah, I know.”

“Why?”

“Partly to avoid shit like this.” She pointed out the window. “Not much used to happen on Earth. It’s a helluva place to live lately though.”

“Do you have a way out of here?”

“Personally? Nah, I junked my ship years ago.”

She poured herself a cup of coffee. She poured cups for Fred and Moxie as well.

“I think I stay for coffee these days.”

“Right. The coffee.”

“You have no idea, traveler. The coffee on the Earth is the best coffee this side of the galaxy.”

“We keep hitting the earth, you know.”

“Yeah, and I’ve seen you in here before anyway. Are you both from Earth to begin with?”

She took a sip of coffee.

“Yeah, well Moxie is half-human,” said Fred.

“Shut up.”

Fred smiled at her, he loved her just the same.

“I don’t like to talk about that,” she said.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right dear.” Jen stroked Moxie’s cheek. “That’ll pass. There’s a station near the edge of Town, several that have been messing around lately. I figured it wouldn’t be long until someone hit the nerve, and opened a portal up. Looks like they don’t know how to close it this time.”

“May not,” it was Walter.

He strode in and sat down on the counter to look out at the parking lot. “All this will be normal again. Probably in the morning or something. That’s the fun of dimensional rifts they usually snap back sooner or later.”

“You too?”

Moxie and Fred turned to look at him.

“Yeah, Jen and Me, we were travelers too once.”

He shook his head.

Moxie went to the window. “Why can’t they get in?”

“What? In here?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled. “Because of the force field, honey.”

Her eyes bugged.

“What did you think? We wouldn’t protect the place. You watch. This is the most fortified burger joint in the western hemisphere.”

“There are others?” said Fred.

Walter addressed Moxie. “Is he a little dumb dear?”

“No, just a bumbling idiot in the face of trouble.”

“Ah,” Walter nodded, “one of those.”

“Hey!” But it was too late, they were all laughing at him.

There was a pulse.

You couldn’t hear it, not like anything else on Earth. It was a ripple in time and space, centered on the station, and right on the portal, still buzzing away next to Simon, the janitor, and Michael.

“What’s your name?” asked Simon, still groggy from the blast, and not at all sure of what or who he even was anymore.

Michael brushed himself off and helped Simon Up.

“My name is Michael David Christopher. Some call me the man with three first names.”

“I like it. It’s got a ring to it.”

“You think?”

“No.”

The pulse exploded from the gate in a silent wave and knocked them both over.

They pushed their way up and looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed except that the night and the monsters seemed to have vanished.  Suddenly, daylight was upon them.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Come on, it won’t be long before another pulse sends them all coming our way again. We have to figure out how to close this sucker without harming as many people as possible.”

At the little burger joint, they watched as the pulse went out across the land. Buildings returned to some semblance of normal, while at the same time, cars reappeared, or were replaced with mopeds for the few and unfortunate.

The sun seemed to appear on the horizon as though it were a fresh day.

“Fun,” said Fred.

“I call it the yo-yo effect,” said Jen.

“The what?” said Moxie.

“The yo-yo effect. It’s like a rubber band, stretching and popping as the dimensions expand and contract. You never know what could be next. Could be dinosaurs, could be vampires.”

“Could be giant flowers or bunny rabbits too?” said Moxie.

“True,” said Jen. “but much less fun.”

“It could also be something boring like a great dessert or a starry plain with dragons in the sky.”

Moxie and Fred were fascinated.

“Strange, right?” said Walter, “It could be hell next, at least a fire world, I’ve seen that before.”

“You want to know the fun bit?” said Jen.

“What’s the fun bit?” asked Fred.

“The fun bit is unless you are in a force field like this, or at the epicenter, somewhere like that when it starts, you won’t even notice until it’s all over if you ever do at all.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s not them that’s in trouble really. It’s us. We’re the ones moving from one parallel universe to the other as the pulses go, call it a dimensional quake ripple or something.”

“How long do you think it’ll last?” asked Fred.

“I’ve seen one that lasted a year, most are a day or two. It depends on who started it, and what they are doing about it if they are still alive.”

“You think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know. Most likely.”

“This happens all the time in nature, it’s just not that often that we realize it.”

“And those people aren’t getting killed out there?”

“Yeah well, in their own dimensions they are. We just keep slipping around looking at the different versions of dimensions, and what’s going on in them.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Fred.

Jen caught Moxie’s eye. “He’s slow on the uptake.”

“But I love him anyway.”

Moxie beamed despite herself.

Fred watched out the window at the normal world out there standing as it was when they first arrived, except for the fact that it was dawn instead of dusk.

“Is the time differential normal?”

“If that’s the least of the permanent changes that’ll be a blessing,” said Walter. “Sometimes one or two of the creatures gets left behind after we swap.”

“Sometimes a building or something goes missing, leaving a patch of forest or something behind.”

“Funky,” said Fred.

Moxie looked out in the parking lot. “What’s that?”

She was out the door before Fred, who did have it together despite their having fun at his expense, could catch her. He flew out of the door behind her. “Hey, come back!”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

She left the confines of the force-fielded burger joint and headed out to one of the cars in the parking lot that was now some kind of a short-backed hairy beast about the size of a hippo. It was a cross between a sheep and a bison with purple fur. The creature wheezed and moaned at them with as much compassion as you can show with a single eye.

“Can we keep it?”

“Moxie!”

A small spacecraft drifts toward a massive black hole, its gravitational pull distorting light. A dying star collapses nearby, sending spirals of golden energy into the abyss. The lone astronaut inside watches as the unknown awaits.

Longevity, Chapter 8: 3600

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

I hate new ships. Especially this one. It’s kind of a lonely place, pretty much on autopilot for so very long. I’ve spent years and years in and out of cryogenic stasis just to make sure the food supply doesn’t run out.

For the longest time, I worked off of what was in the freezers. Designed to last a crew of two hundred for fifty years, I lasted longer than that before I’d eaten everything I could stand in there, and some of the rest. I’ve picked at it for the last couple of hundred years, but mostly, I just tend the garden now.

I call the ship my garden.

It’s cool, and nice most of the time unless the sprinklers are on. The irrigation pipes can only do cold water, and there’s usually a short when I start it up. All part of the challenge, though. I’ve worked out most of the kinks and removed anything that got waterlogged before. I’ve planted hundreds of trees in here, directly into the substrate of the ship. There’s plenty of refuse that I’ve turned into perfect compost, so nothing is lacking there. I’ve also ripped out the floor in most of the rooms and installed sunlamps and started growing as much food as I can figure out how to grow.

I’ve got a field of corn on the third deck, and I’ve transformed the aquatic center into a giant lake full of cranberries. I’ve got orange trees, and I’ve got a good number of insects too to help me keep things going. The stings hurt at first, but I’ve toughened my skin with serious wrinkles and injections in the last few years, and pretty much nothing breaks the skin anymore.

I also started walking with a cane. Imagine that. I’m feeling old. I don’t know if it’s the abuse of being alone for so long or the fact that the air in the ship is smelling like stale, moldy bread, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

The computer at the front started clicking a countdown about a week ago. I almost didn’t notice it. The ship is moving so fast it’s almost incredible, but out there in space, you can hardly tell. Occasionally we go by a planet, but it’s usually only visible for a day or so. I got to where I liked to chart them. I’d record every channel of their television and radio, and take as many pictures as I could before we went too far, download as much of their Internet as I could, that kind of thing.

It would give me something to do for a few years at least.

I’ve probably documented a dozen civilizations in various levels of development. On a few planets, there were only cave people. On another, there was a fantastic bronze age going on. A few words were like they were in the 1980s. They never saw me coming or going.

None of them did.

The countdown, though. That got my interest.

I tapped the screen with my cane, really a dead and polished branch from one of the oak trees I planted in the main cargo hold.

A message appeared on the screen saying, “Stop that.”

I waved it off. The ship tended to do this kind of thing. As its virtual prisoner, I had lost interest years before.

“Jacob,” said the computer.

“What?”

“We’re coming up on it soon.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore.”

“It’s fairly spectacular.”

I knocked on the computer monitor with my stick. It shattered the screen, but everything continued to work.

“Well, what’s that got to do with my tomatoes, then? Eh?” I yelled and staggered around. I started crawling on the floor where I had a patch of pumpkins growing in a bed I’d made of an emergency escape hatch.

I started weeding, with my fingers, just to show the computer something I could still do with my hands that it could never do.

I was pulling out some clovers that must have come over from another patch on my shoes not too long ago. When I felt it, I had been trying to grow four-leaf clovers.

It was kind of lurch in my stomach. It had been so long since I’d felt the effects of slowing down that I hardly realized that we had come almost to a complete stop. The stars don’t blaze past you when you’re going at this speed, so I could have gone for weeks without realizing we weren’t moving if I’d been asleep when the computer slowed us down.

We’d arrived.

It took the ship another hour and a half to move us around so that I could see the black hole that was currently sucking in an enormous binary cousin in a fantastic blaze of swirling light. Not that I could see it, just the material flowing toward the event horizon.

“Now that’s interesting.”

I pushed up with my stick and limped over to the viewing screens.

“That what I think it is? A computer?”

“It’s a class six black hole eating a red giant. Together, they will start a supernova in a couple of minutes. The ship should protect you just fine.”

“Is this it? What I was supposed to see?”

“It is.”

“I gotta get a better look than this, don’t I?”

I tossed down my stick and ambled for the elevator and took it down to where the life pods were.

“Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just getting a better look, right?”

The doors opened, and I stepped out into the pod bay. There were six pods, and I routinely used two of them, just to make sure more than one of them worked all the time. I used them to go out and get space junk, rocks, and meteors that hit the ship occasionally it. The arms were really strong.

The room, however, was a small jungle. I hadn’t done this for a while. I’d miss it, but I had to get out there.

The pods were little one-person jobs, about ten feet tall, and looked like little egg people with large open faces on the front where the windscreen was, and they were surrounded in the tightest brush that I could plant in here. I’d flooded the place a time or two and trucked in as much dirt as I could manage, and had made the place as swampy as I could make it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there might be a crocodile living down here somewhere. But it just wasn’t possible. If I’d had one thought, the place would be perfect.

Ah well.

Time to get out there.

I crossed the swamp, caring nothing for drenching myself up to my knees, and trudged out to the pods. They were also covered in slime and muck, but that would soon be over. I wiped one clean until I could see the original white and red finish under all the swamp slime, and opened the back of it, pressing a button at the base. The back door of the pod slid open, and I clambered inside.

I hit a small hand pad by the door and it closed behind me. Suddenly I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the pod warming up and remembered again that these things were soundproof. I pressed another switch, and the pod swung around toward the door. This was no easy feat since the way this room worked. The entire floor shifted around to move the pod to the front of the bay, taking most of the swamp with it. Trees were flung around, and water went everywhere, and this was before the door moved.

There was a hum.

Then everything in the room, all the water, all the trees and branches, and all the debris, started shooting out of the pod bay like a pitcher of tea filled with broccoli poured into a vacuum. It expanded, bubbled, and flew from the ship, then I lifted off, and whooshed outside.

Behind me, the computer was yelling something, but I had already tuned it out.

I jetted out of the ship and turned to face the black hole. It was so massive and beautiful as it was picking its neighboring sun that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Vaguely, I wondered if I could starve out here just looking at it. I punched the accelerator on my pod, and then sat back. There was a good bit of room in here, though it was little more than a work pod, it was a little roomy. You could last out here for days if you had an enormous job to do, and I had frequently.

I zoomed toward the black hole. I was going thousands of miles an hour. At this scale, it was hardly moving, but I pushed it up as fast as it would go. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and while you couldn’t see much change in the viewports, you could tell that you were moving some. I was close enough for that.

I watched the fuel. It said I had three days at this speed. I pushed it up higher. By now I knew I couldn’t go faster than I was going and that just stopping the rockets without firing the retros would keep me at this speed indefinitely.

I chose not to stop them.

Behind me, the rockets blazed out and hours later, the lights flickered around me. Then the engines cut out. I was closer than I thought. I could already feel the pull of the black hole beside my original speed, and I was falling into it fast, and picking up more speed on the way.

With the last bit of power I had left, I sent the pod into a gentle spin so that I could see the black hole from different angles. Then the power went out almost entirely.

Dim red lights replaced the bright ones inside the pod, and it reduced me to life support only. I checked the console, and it said I’d have about three days at this level unless help arrived. The pod’s computer offered to send a distress call for me.

I declined.

Sooner than I expected, the lights went out, and even so, the oxygen and heat remained.

I was alone with only the light of the binary system in front of me, and no way to turn around and see the ship one more time.

A few hours later, that failed, and I was alone.

From there, I just fell.

There was no power.

It was me and the stars, and I saw a little twinkle.

It wasn’t much, just a flash really between the star and the black hole in front of me. I couldn’t tell quite what it was, but I could tell that it was some kind of ship, hovering there.

“Now that’s interesting,” I said and promptly lost consciousness from the sheer cold of space around me and the fact that I’d depleted almost all the oxygen that was left in the little cabin.

I didn’t expect to awaken ever again.

I closed my eyes, and hit the floor, but didn’t hit because gravity failed and I was floating there in the middle of the pod when it fell into the gravitational power of the black hole for eternity three days later.

When I opened my eyes, it was so bright I couldn’t see.

I felt like I was lying on a hill covered in perfectly cut grass, the smell of the recent clippings getting into my nose.

I felt peaceful and serene.

I let the light of the sun or a moon or some distant star I didn’t know play on the back of my eyelids.

There was no pain in my body.

I was home.

On the ship, now a lifetime and a million miles away from me, the computer was calling my name. It had a syringe for me. A bi-centennial booster, it was offering to extend my life another umpteen years.

There was no one to take it, and no one to tell the computer to put it away, either. Eventually, it ran itself out of power, asking if I’d like the shot before it too fell into the black hole and out of the universe with me.

With a breath that was sweet and invigorating, I opened my eyes.

"A hidden research facility in the woods, covered in vines, with an old SUV outside. A mysterious figure in a fedora stands at the entrance as eerie purple light glows from within."

The Man With Three First Names, Chapter 1

The Man With Three First Names
Rabbits leap through time,
Portals hum with shifting fate,
Night and day now split.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Man With Three First Names.

It was a small facility on the western side of Atlanta, Georgia. Nestled in the woods, you might never have thought anyone up there was up to anything.

Nothing going on here.

It was one of those places. It was a solid red brick building covered in kudzu. It was easy to just pass it by, especially with the inscribed door that said General scientific facility west, Do not Enter.

The building was much larger than expected and positioned as it was in the landscape you couldn’t tell that there was any more to the building than the eye could see. Built into a hill, the rest of it went deep underground. From the surface, it just looked like it was a single story. There were a couple of cars parked outside.

It would take a native from that side of town to know that it was always the same two cars and that they never moved. One of them couldn’t move at all and was long ago abandoned by some teenagers who had escaped from the local police after being caught at it in the back seat. They escaped over the fence years ago, and never had the nerve to come back and get the car. Good for them. Married now, they had two kids. He hated his job, she didn’t like hers, and ends were stretching thin these days, but they never forgot that night. This is not their story, it’s just something fun to think about.

The other car was not a car anymore now than it was anything else. It didn’t run. Most of its guts were torn apart years ago and replaced with strange and bizarre scientific equipment, surveillance cameras and other things that were difficult to explain because they were from another world. Patched into the old SUV was enough equipment, crossed with enough other things around the small compound that if a chipmunk farted too hard a hundred feet from the front door, you could tell how many acorns he had in his mouth at the moment.

The back door was the only one that anyone ever used anymore. There were a few cars, and a light bus parked back there where employees came in and out on a regular basis. It was an odd 48-hour schedule. At the moment, everyone was at work, and there was something in the air. Something was going to happen, and no one knew what it was. Some of the scientists thought they knew what it was. Some of the military officials who were visiting today thought they knew what it was too, but none of them knew what was going to happen.

It was sad.

Of all the things that people shouldn’t be screwing around with, This was it. The people inside, with all their experience and knowledge, were just too stupid to realize it.

Simon Dunbar stood by the back door, with a cigarette in his mouth, and a pale expression on his face. His work overalls were dirty and seemed to be steaming. There was a stain on his leg that seemed to have a life of its own. He looked at it and brushed away as if it were nothing. It jumped from his pant leg, fell to the ground and then became a still puddle on the loading dock.

“Heh,” he said, and tossed the butt of his cigarette at it. It burst into flame and sank into the ground, disappearing in a mist of purple fire.

“That’s enough of that crap. Assholes don’t know what the hell they’re up to in there. Goddam military assholes.”

He stood up, took his mop, and finished wringing it out.

“You’d think they’d have some kind of robot or something to clean up the place by now.”

Simon looked around himself. Just like always, there was nothing. Nobody there.  Nothing ever happened around here and nothing ever did.

“You’d think these guys would understand it. Here I am, top security clearance, and I’m emptying the trash cans.”

He looked around himself again and shrugged off the feeling that someone was watching him. Someone almost always was.

He made his way through the screen door, and on through another secured door behind that, which was three feet thick.

As soon as Simon was behind the door, a dark sedan pulled up. It looked like it was half new and half old. New equipment modern dashboards and a dusty black finish on the outside with fins that looked like they were from the 1950s. It looked like the car was both clean, and that it hadn’t been washed in about a hundred years. It was impossible not to be a total wreck of rusted garbage by now, yet it hummed right along, smooth as any modern car.

Mr. Michael David Christopher opened the door and stood from the car. He walked by the old SUV that was loaded with sensors and equipment, none of which was able to pick him up in the slightest. He looked in through the driver’s window on the SUV. He put on the white jacket to his suit, and then, adjusting his tie and fedora, he reached in and pulled the plug on the sensors. Then he pulled a small electrical device from his pocket, and doused the sensors in orange light, cutting the device the rest of the way from the dash.

Within a moment, the camera turned back on, there was a slight flicker. It appeared otherwise to continue reporting that everything was all clear. It even beeped to let you know everything was as right as rain.

Michael looked around and slipped passed the fence like it wasn’t locked, which it was, with lots of padlocks and barbed wire and electric shock wire on top of that. The thing was, when Michael came to the gate, none of it was there. He just pushed it open and slipped through, and on to the back deck. A moment later he heard it clang closed behind him, and when it did, it was completely locked up again. Anyone else walking up to the gate would see it covered in wire and padlocks. They just didn’t exist when Michael was looking at them.

He moved forward. It was now starting to get a little dark, but that didn’t matter. He worked his way around to the back door, and pushed open the screen door, and walked through it. There was a small greenhouse there, about ten feet square, with a door on the other side with a large computer key-code lock. Around him were plants of various kinds and sizes. A few were ornamentals. There were flowers on one side, with a Schefflera. There were various kinds of fruits and vegetables on the other side. There was a small bench there as well, with some digging tools next to it.

He looked over at the computer key-code system and sat on the bench to take a close look at it. He crossed one leg over the other one, took a pack of gum from his pocket, and began to chew it as he sat there and thought about it. It looked like a regular telephone keypad, and it looked like there was some kind of a swipe card mechanism on the other side of it as well.

“Double sure,” he said. “Double indeed. They are out of their minds. How am I supposed to get through that? No matter. Someone will open it for me.”

He sat for a moment and imagined someone opening the door from the inside. He thought of someone coming out to check something, while he snuck in. He closed his eyes and he imagined the door opening up. That someone coming out and beginning to tend the plants that were there, and just not noticing as he waltzed right in.

He opened his eyes and the door was hanging open. Standing before him a mid-forty-something man was beginning to kneel at the bed of plants in front of him. He was listening to music at top volume on some headphones. Bopping along, the man had no idea and did not look up as Michael walked right by him.

He had that knack, for keeping out of people’s way. He’d always had it, best not to think about it or he might get caught.

Through the great electronic door, that was at least three feet thick, he made his way through and down into the corridors. Already past three more guards, each unable to detect him for completely different coincidental reasons, he remembered that he was thinking about being sneaky again.

Simon looked at the spill. He nudged it. It looked back at him with disgust.

He stepped into the spill, sending droplets of the curious creature splashing in all directions. He scraped his foot through it, and then off of his work boot on the edge of his rolling mop bucket. The liquid glowed with a phosphorescent sheen in the darkness of the upper level of the underground laboratory. He was up on a ledge near the catwalks that spanned over the middle of the place. He reached out with his mop and wiped out the stain. It complained a bit and whimpered as he dropped the mop into the bucket, and pulled the yellow handle to wring the mop out with. The stain fell into the bucket, and swirled around in there, biting at the sides.

It taunted him and growled.

Simon stooped over the bucket and lined up his shot. He was carrying a small container with an eyedropper. In it was a purple steaming liquid.

“Take that,” he said and dropped a single drop of the green liquid into the bucket. It began to fizzle. Soon the water was clear.

There, he thought. Enough of that nonsense for the evening. He leaned on the handrails nearby and looked down at the little men in white coats who were bustling around checking their equipment. They were moving around like bees with nothing to do. He liked to watch them, even though he had no idea what he should do about them.

Something about them wasn’t right. It made him hungry and nauseous to work in here sometimes. He patted his stomach. It would go away.

They were busy today, it looked like something more than normal was up, but he couldn’t tell what it was. The truth was most of what they were up to didn’t make a lot of sense.

He stepped backward, pulling his bucket and mop with him into a small elevator with no front door, and held on as it slid down to the bottom floor of the laboratory. He worked his way through, listening to everyone as he kept a careful mind about making sure he watched the floor like he was paying attention to what he was doing.

In the middle of the floor was a large open space, where great huge spikes rose into the air, and matching ones hung from the ceiling. It looked like the mouth of a futuristic vampire of some kind.

Little pops of energy spiked from point to point as the lab techs jumped around, tweaking dials and checking their work against large print-outs, which they immediately threw away where they piled onto the floor.

“Hey you,” one of them said.

“Me?” said Simon.

“Yeah, you. We need you to make sure that lane over there is spotless.”

It looked like a series of benches in a circle near the spikes that were coming from the floor.

“Are you sure that’s wise? The electricity and all?”

“We’ll tell you when things are safe around here, now, get in there. We’re about to begin!”

Simon trudged in, shaking his head, and looking around as little as possible. He was aware of the mess in front of him. It looked like more of the ghoulish sentient slime, and a combination of human blood and alien vomit.

“Where did they get this stuff?”

Behind him, a count-down started in large orange numbers. They were pulsating up there and counting down as the heat and crackle of the spiked probes began to spark up again. He shuffled his way to the side and took a moment to look around.

He almost saw Michael there, but missed him by a blink, as did many others in the room as he made his way through. Those who did see him walk in thought he belonged there and dismissed his presence.

Michael stepped forward over the catwalk and marked his path, looking down over the sparking arcs. He’d seen something like this before, but he wasn’t sure what to call it. It was definitely some kind of a gate or something, or was it a trans-dimensional rift? He couldn’t remember. When science and alien tech mixed in the name of any of the world’s governments, it was never a good idea.

He looked down through the electric zaps and pops of purple energy arcing back and forth and kept it in the back of his mind that no one would notice him up here while he worked. He looked around and accepted the fact that no one was looking in his direction. Then took that idea for granted, and lowered himself from one catwalk to another one, down where he could get a closer look.

US soldiers were patrolling on this level, overseeing the project, but not close enough to get in the way. They walked right passed him as he stood way off to the left side of the walkway. He kneeled and lay down on the catwalk and reached down as close to the arcing energy as he could stretch to.

Behind him, on the walls was the countdown. Was it ten days or ten minutes? How fast was it all going? He watched a minute finish ticking off. Ugh, it was ten minutes. Not much time to figure out what they were up to here.

He reached down again and held out his hand. Clenched in his fist was a small device, it looked like a green thumb-shaped item, glowing on one end. He reached it out, allowing all thoughts of being caught or even being noticed to pass over him, and out of his mind. The end of the green item opened.  He squeezed a small button that sucked a tiny amount of the arcing electricity into it. It processed for a couple of seconds, and then the answer went straight into Michael’s mind. His eyes glowed with a green flicker, as the transfer happened.

Of course, that’s what they were up to. They were trying to open a gate into a parallel dimension. Why would they want that? What would be the point? Well, there were the obvious reasons, but most of them didn’t make any sense, even time travel wasn’t worth it when it came down to it. I mean, how many times could you go to the first game of the 1963 world series for a first date anyway? Even in a separate dimension, there was a possibility of meeting yourself. It made for a terrible social life.

He stood up and looked both ways. The military police were talking about sports, and about their wives. They talked about what they were expecting to see during their next chance at leave. He looked down and the men in lab coats were too busy to look up. The arcs were flying, and it looked a little unstable, but you could never tell.

This was always the problem with dimensional travel, especially when you were opening gates from one to another like this. You just never knew what it was that was going to come through. Sometimes you got lucky, and there would be a nice meadow with a couple of cow-like creatures you could snag just to prove you did it. Other times you could find a place like Earth where they brought their summer movies out three months earlier than we did. You could score an early screening of the next big blockbuster. Otherwise, dimensional travel was a pretty useless thing, unless you were hoping for a disaster to happen. If you knew what you were doing, that could be even more dangerous. It could be a nightmare.

“What were they up to?” said Michael.

Simon sloshed forward, the black liquid was starting to spew from thin air into the room from where the arcs of energy were crossing just a little too much. He looked around, up and down, and thought about it. Where would that stuff be coming from? He shook it off. Just clean it up. That’s all he was supposed to do.

“Just clean it up.”

He shuffled forward and sloshed an amount of water onto the floor. The black liquid seemed to soak into the mop with vicious speed, and disappear. Simon was proud of himself. He shook the mop into the wringer. It was already dry. He pulled the mop up to his face and watched as the strands dried up before his eyes and the stain reached the entire length of the mop and then dried to a solid black mass. Then it started flaking off like fresh ash.

“I’m going to have to get a fresh mop again, that’s like the third time today.”

Pulling the rolling bucket, now without a mop stick to help him maneuver it around, he plodded over to a small locker, where he kept his supplies and pulled out a fresh mop. He tossed the remains of the other aside, where it clattered to the ground and then shattered into a million pieces. A wind from below spread the ash out.

He shook his head. Something else to clean up.

He took the fresh mop and pulled a broom and dustpan out as well, and while the mop was starting its initial soak, he gathered up the remains of his old mop. He dropped a couple of extra drops of his fizzing liquid into his bucket. He threw the ash into a nearby bin marked ‘unstable do not touch,’ and continued working on the spill with a fresh mop.

The large display was counting down fast, and if he hadn’t seen them do this a thousand times already, he would have been concerned, like he was the first fifty or so times before it got boring.

Michael, while he’d seen this kind of thing before, was still anxious as hell about it. He’d seen times when this kind of thing had gone wrong before, but also because he’d seen how foolish people could be, especially with technology. Below him now, not twenty feet away, Simon was working on another spill pouring into the lab from some other dimension and time. This time it was still dark in color, but definitely green and rough and glop-like in texture. It just sort of splattered on the floor, and with each half-gallon, Simon’s brow seemed to furrow even more than Michael thought it was possible to do so.

He heard footsteps and froze. He imagined himself in another place and time, out of range of the scientists below who were looking at less than three minutes to go before all hell broke loose. A small pack of them slipped by him, crouched on the catwalk, and never noticed that his tie was dangling right in front of them.

Michael watched as Simon heaved full mop-load after load of the green stuff into the bucket. The stuff seemed to be disappearing as he did it. What was that stuff he was using to drop in there? Did it transport toxic waste to another dimension?

Simon looked up.

Michael looked down.

Their eyes locked.

“He’s seen me!”

Michael fell from the catwalk, ten feet from Simon and darted for the small open elevator that carried people up to the upper catwalks. Simon watched him make the climb. No one else seemed to care that he was there. Maybe he was down from the main office? Something like that? He didn’t know and didn’t care. What concerned him was how he was going to keep this part of the floor from disintegrating before his eyes. The arcs of purple were even more intense than usual this time. He could hear the scientists and military men in the control booth calling out numbers and coordinates. Someone called for someone else to keep it focused this time. It didn’t concern him much, and as for the guy, what guy?

Michael stayed in a corner, imagining that he was on a beach in Florida rather than here at the moment, and how there seemed to be more money for books, and less interest in going to play mini-golf than he thought at first for this trip when he went totally unseen again. Simon, now a hundred feet below was concentrating on a piece of the floor that was starting to rip away before his eyes.

The countdown on the clock was close to zero.

It was almost there.

Time seemed to slow down as the last few seconds elapsed on the board. When it reached critically there was a massive explosion. Save for the purple arcing lights, which transformed themselves into a massive circular gateway, everything else in the room simultaneously exploded, imploded, fried and then exploded again. Metal shrapnel went everywhere. It’s possible that the first casualties got it from exploding iron filings, built up in their blood. Michael was never sure.

The gate opened with a white-hot light and creatures of every description began to pour into the room. They were dark and slimy, their eyes rose on great stalks, and small fluttery useless wings beat behind their forearms like broken umbrellas attached to elephants. Many of the scientists were immediately trampled. Others lost their minds on the spot, which started to leak from their left ears. The creatures, three-legged behemoths, romped around the room and up the walls. They tore down catwalks and rampaged over everyone.

Michael stayed silent, and unseen, something he saw as necessary. He would admit he was a coward, but it was the right thing to do if he was going to stop this from spreading any further. He was about to send a message to his car outside when one of the creatures picked up Simon with its central foot, which doubled as a thrashing arm and threw him into the portal. At that moment the white-hot light of the portal exploded again. Everyone, including the creatures, smashed against the walls. Simon’s body also flew against the wall, but in the darkness, no one could see it.

Michael’s body stayed put.

The gate remained open, flickering.

Michael slipped down, pulling a flashlight from his pocket, and making his way down the remains of the wall. At the base of the gate, was a power station. If he could just get to that. He reached out and pulled the power switch. Would he see the end of this fiasco, or would he help create a larger mess?

The explosion rocked the hillside where the laboratory was. Out on the surface, the building fell into the ground, as if sucked into another dimension, which is what was happening to it. Michael’s car remained still, held by its own internal force. 

The gate remained rock steady.

Standing at the base of it, looking out at the now open sky stood Michael.

Standing next to him was Simon, or at least the remains of Simon. Still in his overalls and work shirt, what stood there now was the spliced remains of two creatures. One the janitor of the unheard of, and the other a creature from another dimension. It was white, pale, and gibbering.

Michael stood there and watched Simon, wondering if the former janitor-thing would kill him before he could escape.

A lone astronaut stands on an alien planet with dense vegetation, facing a massive reptilian creature. Behind him, the remains of a crashed spaceship smolder, hinting at an uncertain fate on this mysterious world.

Longevity, Chapter 7: 2800

Longevity and Other Stories
A life without end,
stars call from the endless night,
time slips through our hands.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?

I sat on the edge of my seat, well it’s a throne, made of white marble, and edged in gold in what’s called the Halls of Mars. It’s not on Mars, actually on Venus, but that hardly matters at this stage. The Hall is giant and built into the side of a mountain, dug out like a giant ice cream scooper that came down from the sky and carved out a great bowl straight from the rock on the mountain’s side.

The opening was covered with stained glass. Heavy, thick stained glass, and it was reinforced to keep the Venusian atmosphere at bay, which it did a wonderful job of, even though you couldn’t see out the window at all. Deep in the confines of the cave were vast works of iron and steel, and air conditioners that kept everything breathable as well as light and frosty, even though the temperatures outside would kill you in a heartbeat.

I liked the glass, but the throne had gotten to be a little too much lately. I might have to downgrade to the one made of wood with the lion’s head carved into the back. That and a nice pillow or something. Something springy. Springy and nice.

The stained glass left the floor, and everyone else was covered in a twisted pattern of blue and orange squares all the time.

I should have that replaced. Then again, why mess with it just when I’m enjoying it?

I could call for one of my wives, or husbands. Of course, since I came to power, it’s been mandatory for all planetary leaders to take up at least seventeen wives, and to have as many children as humanly possible. I think right now I’m up to a hundred and thirty-five, but I’ve lost count.

The problem with living this long is that eventually, everyone is in power. It wasn’t long before just stayed in the same spot long enough. I became a council elder, and not long beyond that, a mere fifty years, I was the local high priest. It wasn’t a terrible job. Among the first thought about getting the treatment, I’m perpetually older than almost everyone that I know. You’d think they’d oust me and tie me up and let me live on an asteroid somewhere just for being as dang strange as I am all the time. No one even likes my funny hat. Seriously, I should just quit and become a hermit living in the south of Los Angeles Proper.

There was a knock at my chamber door.

I turned and Bill, my butler I suppose, though that’s only close to what he does come in, with two of my wives with him. Angela and Carmen laid into me about the statue of Venus. I thought they were here for something else.

I could hear them. The words were passing my ears. I could feel their hot breath and feel the tiny raindrops of spittle that were spewing forth as a fine mist. The words were there, pounding on my eardrums and I could not hear what they were. After a few moments, they came to a halt, apparently waiting for some kind of reply from me, and I didn’t have one for them. They huffed and caught their breath. Their breasts heaved a little, but it didn’t phase me.

I waited until they had stopped, and then I turned to them. I kissed Angela on the lips, hugged her, and told her I would think about it. Whatever it was. I’d heard her, which I hadn’t, and I would take her advice as if it was from one of my closest advisers, which, of course, it was.

Carmen, I took them into my arms in a huge embrace and told her I loved her and that I treasured every hair on her head. I took off my hat, a fuzzy thing with a random number of horns on it, put it on her head and hugged her again before returning to my marble throne where I told them I would carefully consider everything they had said to me, whatever it was, then I posed in a very thoughtful position, and said “Hmm” a lot and closed my eyes occasionally and shook my head every once in a while, until that no longer seemed sincere, which it wasn’t. Then I curled up, my feet tucked under me, and pretended to meditate on their complaints until they all eventually went away and I was left alone.

But then, I was never alone.

I saw them beside me.

They were always there.

They stood, seven feet tall, dark green bipedal life forms, totally smooth on their surface, and uniform.

They turned their faceless faces toward me, and I could feel their minds working their way into mine. They were giving me a chance to breathe and speak my mind, which they only did when they wanted something from me.

I could feel their questions in my mind.

Who were they?

“They are two of my wives?”

What do they want?

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear them with you controlling my mind.”

I fell to the ground.

Their thoughts bore into me, and it was hard to take after a couple of minutes.

When will you give the next order?

“Whenever you want, you’re in control already, aren’t you?”

My body fell, twitching.

I pushed up on my elbows, but they gave out.

One of them broke from the pressure of one of their minds alone as I pushed up again.

I let it lay face down on the ground.

They forced me to sit up.

We have work to do.

I already knew that, though.

Soon I was on my feet, and walking toward the hallway outside my chamber. They were invisible to everyone else, but each was in control of my next right and left steps.

They guided me into my shuttle, and I took the controls.

Soon I was airborne, lifting my little craft over the clouds of Venus.

Behind me, the two creatures sat in the rear seats. I could do nothing to turn my head and see them. Instead, I just piloted the little craft up over the city. Over the years we’d raised an enormous dome over it, and though the clouds surrounded us in a sickly sky all the time, the land beneath it was lush and beautiful and green. We rose closer and closer to the stained glass canopy that covered the capital and I pressed forward as I got closer and closer to it until we broke through, glass shattering all around me.

I zoomed up into the sky over Venus and sped through the clouds until I could see nothing else. I gunned it, swerved around, and then came through them and out over the open sky. I must be up really high.

“What do you want?”

We want everything.

“Why do you care?”

Because you do.

“Where are you from? Why do you want any of it?”

They were silent.

I pressed forward. It wasn’t the first time they’d taken me on a trip like this.

Ahead of me, I could see the dawn coming up. Before long, I’d be in virtual darkness. Below me, any of my cities would be so far under the clouds that you’d never see the lights from them. Maybe a glimmer or a slight glow from them, but nothing like seeing a city from orbit on the Earth.

My comm opened up with a burst of static.

“Sir, is that you up there?”

I touched the controls like nothing was happening.

“Yep, just me, up for a brief flight.”

“Very well, sir. You keep us informed if you need anything.”

“I’ll do that,” I said and switched it off.

I burned through the clouds, which whipped around me and did a barrel roll before turning the ship towards space and flying out into the stars, where I saw them approaching for the first time.

There would be no warning.

They have arranged a series of battle cruisers, both from Earth and from Mars. They were here to wipe us out.

My little black ship went unnoticed, but the patrol ship behind me, who had recognized me earlier, was more clearly marked, and when they opened fire, he was their first target.

They swooped down. The earth ships were bulky, but full of fighters that whipped this way and that, and ran screaming down onto the planet to destroy my cities.

The Martian ships were more specialized. They weren’t creatures of mars as they were the descendants of Human settlers like Venus was.

My home, at least now anyway.

The Martians had huge gas vacuum ships I’ve seen used out on the gas giants, and they were sucking up Venus’s atmosphere. Then they waited for the fighters to fly in and bomb the city and take out my defense towers before the gunships rained down on them with death beams that finished them.

I could only watch.

I only had this flier. It wouldn’t make it even back to Earth. I flew it over to the command ship, a long and dangerous vessel, covered in spikes and turrets, and landed it in the main hanger, right in the middle.

I watched as my little one-man flier was surrounded by army and navy troops. Guns up. Alert. Ready to kill.

I opened the hatch.

Certainly, they were expecting a single mercenary or something.

When they saw it was me, all their guns faltered.

Below us, my planet was coming to a swift end. The war, if it could be called less than genocide, was the end of my people. People who had traveled with me from the beginning when no one thought anything could live there were all dying. Some of them, many of them hundreds of years old.

I was the first and the last of us.

They lowered their weapons.

I stepped down the ladder, and walked through them like they were nothing, and marched up to the control deck. I knew where it was. I’d designed the ship.

Before I could get there, Garrison was running down the ladder.

“Jacob!”

He grabbed me in an embrace.

“Jacob, you weren’t down there!”

I grabbed him by the neck and hugged my cousin. He was out of breath.

He tugged me up to the command deck.

When I walked into it, everyone ducked. They dived under their desks and knocked over the furniture. I strode in, with Garrison behind me. Everyone jumped to salute him. Clearly in charge.

When I turned around, he was kneeling before me.

“Jacob. I can’t sit by while they do this here.”

“What?”

“I surrender to you.”

He held out his pistol to me, a small beam weapon. Nice and deadly.

“I accept.”

“You know the custom, then.”

“I do.”

Garrison fell to the deck after I fired the weapon.

The crew looked at me.

“You can join me, or you can get out. Your choice.”

I kept about half the crew.

The other half got into pods and shot out, and were quickly picked off by the surrounding ships, who must have realized what was going on by now.

The battle below was all but over already.

We fired, taking out one of the larger ships where we concentrated our firepower.

We took damage, and the armor on the ship was pretty much toast, but it was still worthy of travel, so I ordered a jump. We needed to get far out and quickly. Then perhaps we’d survive.

They were about to surround us when we jumped. In a flash of light, we left them all behind. We were supposed to be out near Jupiter. Instead, we were closer to the orbit of Pluto, but it wouldn’t be here for another couple of years yet. Then I realized I was wrong. We hadn’t gone out into the solar system. If there was an up and a down to the celestial disk where our planets all rotated, we had gone as far up as anyone had ever gone, and then some.

The sun was nothing more than a spec, and all around us was nothing.

In the months that followed, I tooled around as best I could, mostly avoiding the government ships. Venus was no more, and I wasn’t that much better off. I blasted out into the outer planets and spent a good deal of time orbiting Neptune, where no one wanted to go. There was little left for me on Earth, nothing on Mars, and a destroyed colony for me on Venus. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was just ready to leave. I’d seen what I wanted to see, and I’d done more than I could think of to do, and that’s when the idea hit me to just leave the solar system altogether. There wasn’t anything left for me.

I knew others might feel the same way. I discussed my ideas with the crew, and they were interested, but fewer of them wanted to stay, and I couldn’t blame them. I let most of them off on Titan and sent out the call. There weren’t any actual laws out on Titan yet, and no one was gunning for me here. Most of the people back on Earth thought I was dead, but the governments and leaders knew better. Not because they had intelligence on me or anything, but because I called and offered to give them back their spacecraft. I did it on a couple of occasions while we were in the dock at Neptune, and nobody wanted to spend the money on the fuel to get out there to get me.

I can say I tried, though, and that was enough for me.

The creatures in the background were still buzzing around, and one day, I just had it out with them.

I told them to get out of my life and leave me alone.

They said they wanted to show me something very interesting, but we couldn’t quite get there yet.

I told them to get to the point, or I was through with them for good.

They agreed to upgrade the engines and sent in a couple of technicians to help me take care of it.

I said to prove it, and they did.

That was when I lost almost everyone else.

I was virtually alone on the ship. Sensors could still pick up a couple of people, that were scattered here and there. I chose not to force them off the ship or to seek them out. I just checked on them every once in a while, and occasionally I’d use the ship’s comm system to call out to them and tell them that the kitchens on the fifth and sixth decks had been restocked for them.

They never went up too fast, but they always did. There were probably ten or fifteen in total aboard besides me, but I never saw them.

They came aboard, in a small shuttle, and brought in a new engine, silver and bright, and they would only ever say “because we want to show you something,” when I asked them.

One thing you could still die from as a practically immortal being was starvation, and I would forget to eat, all the time watching them install the new engines. The retrofit took about three years, and while I was stranded on Neptune, I took to watching the surface of the giant. I called it watching the ocean, because of the ways the bands swirled around each other. I took readings, did an analysis, and used all the instruments that were left working on the ship. I also ate a lot of takeout food from a local space station. Even after a while, your synthetic kitchens are no good anymore, and you have to eat something else.

One morning, I walked down to the bridge to hop in the hammock I’d put up in there, and they were standing there.

It’s time, they thought.

“We can run it now?”

Yes.

“Let’s do it then.”

I sat down in the captain’s chair and let them do their thing. They hit knobs, and opened switches, and turned dials, and the whole place lit up. We pulled out of the space station, and the ship turned towards the starry sky of space, where we could no longer see anything of Neptune but a faint blue from behind us, and they turned on the new drive.

Around me, the night sky blazed into a million streaming points of light. The ship was breaking apart. The whole place was shaking and rattling, and spinning in every direction as we sped by the stars at speeds that were supposed to be impossible. If it’s one thing that is true, it’s that saying something is a limit on how fast you can go is like telling a cat that they don’t like tuna sandwiches. It’s just not helpful, and nobody likes it, and somebody is always going to be out to prove you wrong.

We came to a halt, all the stars came back into place, and though I couldn’t recognize the patterns anymore, all became still.

Then I realized that I’d been standing for the entire flight in the same place as if I bolted my feet to the floor.

I looked down, and my clothes looked brittle and dusty like I was some kind of exhibit, then I reached down and found the long beard attached to my face, easily two and a half, maybe three feet long in places, and stark white.

I threw up on the deck, and fell flat on my face, and learned how to breathe again.

When I pushed myself up, they were standing there before me again.

“Are we there?”

We are close.

“Where are we?”

Look.

I looked out the windows of the bridge and below us was a huge alien planet, lush with vegetation.

“Can we land?”

They nodded and then vanished.

I commanded the ship to land, and it found a suitable spot, and glided down into the atmosphere, shaking all the way.

As I stepped off the platform onto the planet’s surface, I heard them say in my ear. “You can never go back.”

The ship could no longer handle its weight and cracked, and busted and fall apart behind me.

Turning, without so much as a lunch box, I found myself face to face with what I always imagined a dinosaur would look like.

It scratched the ground with its talons and charged.

Standard-Issue Partner, Chapter 10

Standard-Issue Partner
Neon lights flicker,
Machines replace flesh and bone,
Trust must still be earned.
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Amazon - Books2Read

This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Standard-Issue Partner.

Flint turned to the controls of his pod and settled in. He could see the Earth ahead of him, it’s blue oceans filling his field of view. He could see part of Europe and part of North America. He wondered what it might have been like to live before the meteor impact that had taken out so much of the world. He could see, across the face of what used to be the United States, a huge crater that was all lit up like it was a grand experiment of some kind. He watched as the night side came up and the entire central city was illuminated like a great disc, made of a thousand lights. He watched it for a while. He knew the stories of the great asteroid that had almost destroyed humanity and culture on this tiny little planet, but several asteroids had hit at once. It was only for the digital age that humanity had survived. They still had all the records of mankind’s achievements, so there was no real knowledge lost.

It was a grand catastrophe. Once everything had settled they began to rebuild the cities, but the richest, most fertile land was always in the middle of the craters that had scattered across the continents, and the outlying regions were wastelands where nothing would grow.

It seemed oddly peaceful from up here, all alone in the vacuum of space.

Flint nudged one of the controls on his tiny space vessel. It increased the speed by ten percent, but you couldn’t tell the difference by just eyeballing anything.

He settled back and adjusted his chair. It would be a long way home, especially without anything to read or do. He adjusted his chair, and pulled a pillow from an extra compartment to his left, and closed his eyes.

The silent stream of air from the tanks, and a quick check to determine that there was enough satisfied him, and he allowed his eyes to close again, and drift off, listening to the intake valves and the air conditioning. Otherwise, all was totally quiet.

When he awoke the ship was rocking this way and that and he seemed to be upside down. He looked ahead of him, and his field of vision was filled with blue ocean water. A fish flitted past the window, and then suddenly he could see the sky. He had flipped over again. In his view, he could see a magnetic crane that seemed to be pulling his entire escape pod from the water, and powerlifting him up onto the deck of a large boat.

It dropped him on the deck with a clunk, and the pod began to roll over and over as it headed for the edge. It slowed to a stop, and Flint could hear a large number of people all around him. They popped off the explosive bolts on the hatchway, and let Flint out.

“Sir, are you all right?”

Flint nodded to them and made his way over to the bridge of the vessel. A guard let him through, and waiting for him, inside the warmth of the small command center was the Chief.

Flint raised his eyebrows and greeted the Chief.

“Glad to have you back Flint.”

“Glad to be back. Is there a flight off of this ship?”

“We’ll be on our way in just a moment. Flint?”

“I got them.”

“And Roman?”

“Dead. I tried to save him.”

“We’re beginning to take another plan of attack on the robots Flint, you may have been right. I don’t think we can use them as partners anymore.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Simon’s been a great help. I think there’s room enough for all, let’s just not restrict all partners to human/robot status. There’s got to be a mix.”

“You may be right.”

“Let’s get off this can, and back to the city. I want to see that Simon is properly restored, and get on with my life here.”

“There’s one more thing before we can go back.”

“What?”

The chief turned to the door and called for her.

Dianne came bounding in, she looked a mess. She took Flint by the arms and hugged him, and kissed him.

“How can I tell you are real?”

“How can I tell you are either?” She smacked him on the head and kissed him again. Eyes were closed and satisfaction granted.

They returned to the city center, and Flint to the police tower. Simon was sitting up and seemed to be in a good mood.

“When are they going to let you out of here?”

Simon sat up. “I can go as soon as I’m ready.”

There were monitors stationed around the room that were noting the progress of Simon’s refurbishment. They all said one hundred percent complete.

“What happened to Roman?”

“Died.”

“Pity, I was hoping to give him one more chomp for the last time.”

“I know.”

They poured over reconnaissance photos of the moon base where Roman was planning the outward expansion of the human race through robotics.

“So it was all about getting off the planet,” said Simon.

“Do you think there’s any life out there?”

“No.”

“I don’t know. There should be. Do you think we’ll ever find it?”

“No.”

They reported to the Chief, fresh for the next day, but everything had taken on a glazed look as if someone had put a fuzzy cloud over their world.

Simon got the drinks this time. He brought Simon what was basically a drink cup full of gasoline, oil, and other chemicals he needed to keep his body strong, though it looked like perfectly normal lemonade. They laughed over their lunch, Simon slurping down the strange concoction, and Flint choking down a sandwich.

Something beeped.

Flint checked his pocket.

“It’s the chief.”

Simon nodded, and they made their way from the little courtyard up to the Chief’s office. The chief flicked on a video display.

“We noticed here last night after you were rescued, that there was a serious amount of activity in this part of the city. I thought you’d like the first crack at it.”

“We’ll take it, sir,” said Simon.”

“Good to hear.”

“Sir?” asked Flint.

“Yes?”

“About Dianne.”

“For another time.”

Flint and Simon stepped into their car and buzzed over to that side of the city, and notice right off that several of the buildings had been knocked down.

He parked it on the side of the building and set it so that he and Simon could watch. He turned on the sensors and turned on the video displays so that they could get the best possible angle.

Below them, robots were steadily working. There were new robots, and old models, working together. They seemed to be building something, but it was unclear what.

Much of whatever it was was under wraps, and it looked as if much of the day’s activity was already over. Storm clouds hung in the sky, and it began to rain. Positioned as he was, the rain was falling in sheets all the way around them. It was next to impossible to see anything, save for what was coming in on the monitors. They shout out several tiny robotic spy cameras and sent them to get a better look at the object.

The little camera bots whizzed around through the rain, which really just returned a rain-soaked sky for an image, and then they were under it, poking holes in the covered mass’s cover, and slipping inside.

“Damn! There he is!”

The monitors had picked up Roman again.

“Thermal imaging says it’s the real Roman,” said Simon.

“Not possible. He was destroyed on the moon.”

“There he is though.”

“Check a bio-scan on him. I want to check for any kind of abnormality.”

“Like a mechanical hand?”

“Like anything.”

Simon performed the check and looked up.

“What?”

Simon shook his head.

“Come on, what?”

“It’s the age.”

“How is that a problem?”

“He’s only six.”

“But he’s full-grown already!”

“That means…”

Flint shook his head. “Cloners.”

“Yep. Cloners.”

“Christ.”

“We can’t blow them apart.”

“I wonder what they want.”

“Look there’s three or four more of them.”

“And one of me.”

“What?”

“Look.”

One the screen, next to three of the Romans was a clear Flint clone looking around, and calmly taking orders.

“In no way, shape or form is this okay.”

“They’ll get us from the inside out.”

“Never a worse way to go.”

“We have to take them out, to stop them in their tracks.”

“I know.”

“How are we going to get down there?”

“We’re going to walk right in.”

“Walk in, are you crazy?”

“Nope. it’s the easiest way.”

They lowered the air car and piloted it out into the rain. Water splashed all around them and forced them to fly by their instruments. They sailed down in the nasty weather and landed the a few alleys away.

“I hope this works,” said Simon.

“It’s better than going in stolen uniforms.”

They made their way into the tent and worked their way into the crowd.

Roman stood at the head of the group, a group of about a thousand combined robots, humans, and clones. He tapped on the microphone.

“Gentlemen, ladies, I welcome you all. We’ve had a minor setback and in the interests of time, I am assured that we will all make a hasty journey to the moon this go around. Seeking only friendship and peace with the rest of our kind, I am sure that this will be something we can all share and enjoy.”

He rifled through papers on his podium.

“We have had a minor setback, in that the first expedition has failed to make it to the landing site, but I can assure you that the next one will not fail. I am here to uncover and dedicate the second chance. It’s a rocket ship designed to make it to the moon. From there we will be able to get on with the business of getting on into the galaxy and out into the stars.”

He checked his notes again.

“It is for this momentous occasion that I will pull the ceremonial veil away to show you the craft of the future.”

He raised his arms, and Flint could see the sheer size of the thing. Behind Roman, it must be taking up an entire office block. A grand gray curtain fell across it, and there was a single tassel, which seemed to be connected to a series of pulleys and other knots. Roman pulled at the tassel, and the curtain fell away. A gigantic craft appeared in the moonlight, covered in the falling rain. It stood a hundred feet tall, and gleaming white. It was covered in guns.

“The thing is,” said Roman, we could never make the thing fly, so it’s time to take this city down!”

Every porthole on the ship opened, and every missile bay slid aside, and Flint and Simon pointed their grapple guns to the middle of the ship, to a port that looked highly accessible and shot into the sky. They slung forward through the rain, and landed on the ship, quickly ducking inside. The rain was pouring outside, and the people, robot or not were starting to riot. They flung themselves forward into the throngs as what was left of the ship above them began to swivel and teeter as it raised and lowered its guns and missiles around, targeting all the buildings around them.

The ship was massive, the size of a skyscraper, and yet the people below didn’t seem to know what to do.

Roman stormed into the craft and started climbing up.

Flint and Simon were already planting charges. Flint would toss them to Simon, and Simon to Flint and they clinked them onto the walls as they made their way down into the ship toward the street.

Dianne burst through the door.

Simon scanned her.

“Flint!” she said.

“Simon?” said Flint.

“Robot,” said Simon.

Flint and Simon took turns and shot her with an electrical device that stunned her and dropped her to the ground.

Another gang came in, and started trying to pull the charges off the wall. One of them peeled a charge from the wall and it just went off. The explosion blew a hole through the side of the building and the remains of that squad shot out in a spurt of flame.

Flint and Simon continued, making their way down into the ship, which was beginning to swivel and turn, and fire at the buildings around it. One of the buildings took a hit and toppled to the ground.

Flint slid down a passageway set of stairs that had been built for sliding. They were steep. He held the handrails in his hands and slid down. Simon took a jump and landed next to him.

They pulled their pistols and found themselves in a room devoted to the bashing of the other buildings. Several major cannons were set up in here and manned by robots. They were currently pounding on the buildings around them.

Flint and Simon started with the pistols, cutting the heads off of the robots who were doing the shooting.

They fell to the floor, but the cannons didn’t do anything to stop. They kept firing on automatic. Flint and Simon began spreading the charges around in here, sticking them to everything that they could think of. A few well-placed laser shots, and the machines began to fire on themselves.

Flint and Simon took the ladder down. It was only a moment of time before the whole place went up, as many charges as they have dropped. Above them, they could hear the explosions as the first started to go off on their own.

They landed, and before them it was cold. Their breath stood out before them, even though Simon was now simulated. They looked around. The explosions and fire were about to take the whole place down around them.

“There!” said Simon.

“What?”

“The door.”

Before them was a great steel door that looked like it went back into the buildings beyond. Flint took his remote and detonated all the remaining charges. The ship went up and exploded in a fireball. It crumpled to the ground and sent everyone who could still move screaming.

They pushed open the steel door and behind it lay the cold room. Everything in it was ice blue and totally frozen. There were honeycombs in the walls where it looked like clones were in the process of being developed. They all had Roman’s face.

In the center of the mass was a table, the only thing in the room which seemed to be warmed in any way, and sitting on it, was the crumpled form of Roman. Except he wasn’t the Roman they all knew. He was old. The oldest person that Flint had ever seen.

Was he three hundred, possibly four hundred?

It was little more than a shriveled mass of flesh. The face was right, the smile, certainly the teeth, but the rest was nothing more than the goo of oozing flesh.

It coughed.

Flint and Simon splayed flashlights out upon it and looked him up and down.

The figure coughed again and spat, but it didn’t make it very far. The puss just oozed off and dribbled down the corner of his mouth. It held a cigarette to its mouth and pulled on it. It looked like it could barely move its legs. The feet looked tiny and shrunken. The eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. They were very white in comparison to the rest of the body, the skin, which was all a gray powder color that seemed to fill the very air with the soot of tobacco all by itself.

“Well?” it said.

“Roman?”

“You guessed it.”

“But I, I mean we…”

“I know, You’ve been chasing my clones all over this continent and out into space, and never realized you were dealing with clones, and not just androids.”

They sat at the creeping thing’s side.

“True. We couldn’t let anyone abuse the android system like that.”

“I totally agree, which is why we almost slipped the cloning bit passed you.”

The ancient Roman coughed, again, and held the cigarette to its mouth.

“We’re going to have to take you in, I hope you know that.”

“Yes, yes, your civic duty. I know. I used to be a cop myself, of course, that was in a different time, before the asteroids.”

“You were alive before the asteroids?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

The old Roman reached out and smacked Flint. It was not the best feeling in the world. It was much like being slapped with an old banana peel.

Flint pulled back and looked around.

“You’re not going to take me though.”

Simon perked up at that. “We’re not, are we?”

“No, you see. I think my clones will have something to say about that.”

The clone chambers began to open, and the contents started to ooze out and hit the floor. They all looked like lean and mean adult versions of Roman. They popped their knuckles, and their necks, and leaned in to do some real pounding while the table on which the older Roman was sitting began to slowly lower itself into the floor.

“You take these clones, I’m going after laughing boy there,” said Flint.

Simon nodded and began to shoot the clones. His laser cut through them almost too easily.

Flint leaped over the clones that remained, using his grapple and landed right on the platform lowering into the floor.

“Hey!” cried the older Roman.

“Hey, nothing!” Flint put his fist through the old man’s face, and pulled the unconscious form up and hoisted it into the room. He carried it over to Simon, who had just finished off the last of the clones.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Together they took the elder Roman up and out of the remains of the ship, which was currently on fire and in the process of being dowsed by the local firemen, who hovered in their fire trucks near the scene.

They took the air car and delivered the limp body of Roman to the police.

An hour later they convened near the same cell they had the other Roman in earlier. The elder Roman sat in the cell, smoking, and coughing. On the other side of the glass stood the chief, and Flint and Simon.

“I was a cop once,” said Roman.

They sat down and listened to him.

“I was once a cop when this was the land of plenty before the asteroids came. It was a long time ago.”

“How old are you?” asked Flint.

“I am over five hundred years old. Of course, the records are not that clear during the aftermath of the asteroids. We were not very careful at that time. It was all about survival at that point, wasn’t it?”

Simon stepped forward. “What was it like before the asteroids?”

“It’s actually pretty hard to remember these days. None of it really comes to very much. I think it was hardest to see the differences because everything is so vertical now. Back then everything was about stretching out and getting to the next frontier. Now we’ve built skyscrapers that almost touch space, but we can’t spread out, there are just these few pockets of land here and there that are useful. Ironic that it’s just the areas where the asteroids hit that are habitable, of course, it’s really not that bad around outside these big cities nowadays. It’s evening out nice. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to expand again and get everything you need from this planet, but it doesn’t change the fact that we should be exploring, and exploring right. There shouldn’t be a planet or a moon in this solar system that hasn’t been explored. There is life out there you know.”

The chief responded, “He’s right, we just never looked.”

“Yes, life, and it’s a strange lot to find.”

“Have you seen it?” asked Flint.

“No, but I’ve felt it. Felt it coming. And it’s not far off.”

He coughed again.

“Not long now. Not long before they come.”

He breathed. It was a raspy sort of a thing.

“Not long.”

He died.

They were out in the air car. It was a normal day, by all standards that were normal. The sun was shining, the city was starting to escape its borders a little bit, and the buildings were as clean and streak-free as they could be. Simon and Flint surveyed in the landscape.

“What do you think?” asked Flint.

“About the old guy?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s pretty slim Pickens out there. I think that there’s got to be life, but what is life anyway, I mean look at me, I’m a robot aren’t I?”

“I know, but I mean what about other planets, other solar systems, other worlds, do you think all of that exists?”

“Sure, but I think that if there is life out there in the galaxy, it’s likely not to be half as weird as we are.”

“I suppose that could be true.”

“It’s getting cold.”

“But it’s still sunny.”

“I know, that’s the strangest part about it.”

Somewhere in the sky Alib looked to Bilbnib as they were enjoying a nice spot of fresh parsip , and looked over their controls. It had been a dirty night, and they had been trudging through the stars for years at this point. They were beginning to wonder what the point of it all was when a blip came across their tracker.

“What’s this?” asked Alib. He stroked his many fingered hands and put down his cup of parsip with his second off-hand.

“I’m not sure.”

“Could it be life?”

“Intelligent life?”

“We’ve seen life before.”

“It’s probably just another world of polar bears again.”

“True, that seems to be the norm in this part of space.”

“Is it worth checking?”

“Anything is worth checking.”

They flitted by, and zoomed by the Earth, sliding through the atmosphere, and down over the cities. They glided over and through the central city.

Not a creature on the Earth could see them. Their ship, perfectly cloaked, swung low and managed to scrape the surface of the earth, gathering data as it went, It took a profile of the creatures of the Earth. It cataloged everything it could find. Every flora and fauna the world had available was scanned, tested, theorized about and dropped back into place.

Bilbnib sighed and checked the earth off of his list. He was disappointed to be sure, but that was no real reason to fret. He was sure that given a few thousand more years the humans might have a chance.

“Then again, there’s still hope for the polar bears down there,” said Alib.

Bilbnib broke his pencil and tossed it across the room.

Simon and Flint lowered the air car down to the frozen tundra, near a group of polar bears. Simon wasn’t concerned, but Flint was wearing a massive blue parka and looking out onto the tundra with his binoculars.

“Simon, you have that scan done?”

“Yeah, there’s about fifteen of them in this group.”

“And you think there’s something out there?”

“It was on the scanners. I think we’re looking for something really special.”

Flint looked around. The snow stretched as far as he could see.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s out there.”

They watched the field as the polar bears moved around in the sun. One of them turned over on its back and rolled over. It basked in the sun, and searched the skies, rubbing its back on the snow and ice beneath it.

The ice cracked.

The polar bear turned up and scurried off, as much as one of those critters can get away with, and below it, in the ice, Flint could see it.

“There it is.”

Under the ice, a shape began to appear. At first, it was just a shadow, and then as the ice around it began to melt and crack. A moment or two later, and the shadow grew to a towering pillar of ice and mangled metal. It blew the ground away, sending shards of ice and snow in all directions.

With a subtle shift in the surface of the Earth, the tower began to glow a soft blue, and at its base was a door.

Flint and Simon hiked down to the base of the tower. At the tower’s base, there stood a great door adorned with faces of every kind, style, and predisposition. Some of the faces were filled with teeth, others were adorned with several eyes. Others were covered in fur or scales.

Simon reached out to touch one of the faces.

Flint grabbed his hand and pulled it back.

Simon looked over the faces and examined them.

Flint took a step forward, and the doors slid open.

They both took a step back.

Inside it was dark.

Flint held a communicator to his ear. “We’re going in.”

They stepped through the door and the tower closed behind them.

Standard-Issue Partner, Chapter 9

Standard-Issue Partner
Neon lights flicker,
Machines replace flesh and bone,
Trust must still be earned.
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This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Standard-Issue Partner.

Flint and Roman fell through the air. Flint was yelling, and Roman was laughing.

The ship must have been on the move because there was now a serious amount of space between them and the ground. For a moment Flint thought he could see the curvature of the Earth.

Roman was diving like an Olympic athlete. He shot towards the ground like an arrow.

Flint was flailing and rolling head over heels, and screaming at the top of his lungs. He managed to pull a small control from his pocket, and activate it. Could the car reach him at this distance? He had the faint notion that Simon was saying something to him in his ear, but there was no way he could hear anything at this speed. He just concentrated on Roman and trying to breathe. It was terribly cold, or was that the wind?

He watched as the ground loomed before him. He wondered for a moment if this was what it looked like to an apple or an orange before it hit the ground. He looked around and saw Roman. He was falling beside him but staying uncharacteristically still. He seemed to have gone into some sort of coma or catatonic state. He fell there and watched as Roman raised his arms and grabbed hold of a passing speeder bike. It rushed him away as quick as thinking. Flint looked around him. If his car didn’t catch up with him soon, it was all over. It would only take a moment or two longer before he was flat, quite literally flat.

In his ear, he could hear a slight buzzing. It sounded vaguely like Simon’s voice, and then he was in the car. It had swooped underneath him and carried him away.

“Simon?”

“Yes?”

Flint looked a the bank of computer screens in the front of his car and righted himself in the seat. From one of the monitors was the vague shape of Simon’s head.

“Have you got control of the car?”

“That I have.”

He pulled them up and headed back toward the lumbering ship above them, making its way toward city central.

“Then let’s get after them!”

“I think I already have.”

“Flint strapped himself in, and took the wheel.”

“Nope, I think I’m good on this one.” Simon looked to Flint from the console.

Flint thought about it for a moment. Let him do it.

“Yeah, take us up.”

“Good. Get ready to jump. I’ll get you as close to the ship as possible.”

“Yeah, get me over there.”

“It might be a good idea to look under the seat at this time.”

“The seat?”

“To the secondary stash. I think you’re out of ammo at the moment aren’t you?”

“Yeah, come to think of it.”

Flint lifted the passenger seat and poured over the contents of the small hidden compartment while Simon took them up and up. Flint could see Roman zigzagging all over the place, trying to avoid him.

“Keep him in sight,” said Flint.

“Will do.” Simon poured on the speed. They were dodging through blaster fire and missiles now as they got closer to the ship.

“Any second now,” said Simon.

“Yeah, almost there.”

Flint pulled two extra grapple guns from the recess and a small hand laser that fitted onto his index finger. He also took a small collection of grenades, the sticky kind, and pocketed them.

“Almost within range.”

“How are you going to do this?”

“Ejector seat.”

“Oh, of course.”

“One, two, three, now!”

The ejector seat exploded beneath him, and Flint was hurled into the air and up above Roman, who was sliding into view again beneath him.

The parachute opened.

Flint unclasped his safety belt and pointed his grapple gun at Roman’s speeder bike.

POW!

Flint shot the grapple gun out, a thousand feet from open ground. It wrapped around the fins of Roman’s bike and latched on. His body shot from the parachute seat and soared out into the air, and Flint started to reel himself up to the speeder.

Roman stood up on the seat and pulled a rifle from the side of the bike.

Flint pulled himself up onto the bike, and Roman pulled the trigger.

Flint fell away, allowing the shot to miss him. He climbed up onto the bike and steadied himself.

Roman lashed out, swinging the rifle at Flint, and missing. Flint caught it and pulled it from his hands.

Roman jumped from the bike and sailed through the air, a pair of neatly tucked synth wings popped out from under his arms. He sailed down to the craft below and discarded them.

Flint jumped down into the seat of the bike and tried to pull it up. It was heading directly for the ship. He couldn’t move it. He pulled, and it wouldn’t budge. He pulled again and strained. It stayed the course, on its way toward the ship, on a collision course.

Simon chirped up in Flint’s ear. “You’ve got about five seconds.”

“I know that. Don’t spoil my count.”

Flint jumped from the bike and shot out his second grapple gun. It connected with the ship, and he tore off, landing several decks above where Roman went in.

The speeder bike exploded as it impacted the side of the ship.

“Flint?”

“Simon, I’m going to be all right.”

Flint pulled the receiver from his ear and put it into his pocket. He could still hear Simon’s voice coming from it, just now it was a mere buzz rather than right in his ear.

Flint pulled his finger laser and blew a hole in the exterior door, slicing it in a circle, and kicking his way through.

The corridor was filled with smoke and ash.

Flint waved it away and stepped over the bodies of two robots who were still trying to recover from being lasered through just a moment ago.

Flint kicked them in the heads, toppling them from their weakened shoulders. They stopped trying to get up.

Flint heard them coming, must be a bunch of them.

He hid in the shadows.

It was Roman, followed by six guards. They looked at the wreckage of the door.

“He must be nearby.”

Roman looked around, checking out the guards who had just had their heads kicked off. “Come on, he has to be just around here.”

They began searching for him. They looked inside computer panels, and through doors, Flint hadn’t even noticed as he came through.

Then when he thought they might overlook him, they started working their way right for him.

They raised their hands and pointed flashlights right in, and got lasers through their heads in return.

Two fresh blasts and the robots went down.

“There he is!” yelled Roman. “Don’t let him get away!”

Flint sliced through a pipe above him, and steam filled the corridor, knocking one of the robots down.

Flint could hear Simon from the earpiece in his pocket. “Flint? Flint? Can you hear me?”

Flint grabbed the receiver and placed it in his ear.

“Kinda busy right now.”

Flint blasted another robot, cutting its arm off. The robots seemed to take this as an insult and looked forlornly at its arm sitting there on the floor.

“I was saying, that I think I can get control of at least some of the robots from here.”

“Great, if you can snag any of them, make them shoot their own heads off.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Oh yeah?”

“No, they are too valuable. Besides, I’ll be too busy using them to try and shoot Roman’s head off.”

“Better plan.”

Flint fired at another robot. Roman was at its side.

“Come on Roman, you know you’re finished.”

“On the contrary, if I can get this ship into the city, I’m going to blow the whole thing up.”

“But what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything? All I know is sometimes you gotta do something right.”

Roman raised his blaster to fire on Flint and pulled the trigger. Instantly the robot on Roman’s left threw itself in front of the blast. Its body exploded in a flash of light, and the arms, legs, and head toppled into various corners of the room.

“Blast!”

Flint slithered out of his hole and took a punch at Roman, Roman went down, but instead of getting back up, he slid through a panel in the floor.

“Crap!”

Flint pulled the panel open, knocking a robot out of the way, and jumped down the chute.

He rolled out into a large rectangular room.

Roman was already standing.

Flint took a kick to the head.

He lashed out, firing a laser around the room, cutting several minor robots down. Their bodies may not be able to move, but they could still fire their weapons. Flint picked one of them up, who tried to fire at him, but missed, and threw it at another robot who was trying to get at Flint from the other side. The two went toppling down.

Several of the other robots Skittered away.

Roman stood there, as Flint stood up.

The robots were gone.

It was just the two of them.

Roman held out his hands.

Flint looked at him.

“You don’t think…”

“I know…”

“That I’m just going to bring you in again…”

“You have to.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“I wish I were. You’ve got me. Take me in.”

Simon perked up in his ear. “Flint…”

Flint shook it off. “Okay. You’re under arrest.”

He took a pair of binders from his belt and latched them onto Roman.

“Let’s go.”

They took the stairs and down in the main hangar there stood his car. “Simon?”

“Right here.”

The canopy of the aircar lifted.

Flint dropped Roman inside and then sat in it himself.

They pulled out, leaving the ship behind.

“Simon?”

“Yeah?”

“Nuke it.”

From the screen, Simon nodded.

Two missiles flashed out behind them and shot directly into the docking bay. They exploded and sent the remains of the ship hurtling toward the ground where it exploded sending metal shards and robot heads in all directions before collapsing into a small lake.

“Why?”

“Why what?” asked Roman.

“Why give yourself up like that?”

“Well, I was partly going for the sense of surprise, and partly going for the hope of surviving what you just did to my ship, but I think that for the most part, it was for the satisfaction of seeing the look on your face when I turned the tables on you.”

“What?”

“For instance, this isn’t your car, and that isn’t Simon on the screen there.”

Flint looked down. It wasn’t Simon. This wasn’t his car… He looked around. Roman was already loose from his bindings, and his safety belt was getting really tight. Metal cuffs came out from beneath the seat and held him in place, while a second steering column came up on Roman’s side and he took control of the flight.

“Simon, can you see us?”

“Yes sir,” said Simon in his ear. Simon was flying right behind them.

“Shoot us down!”

“Shoot you down?”

“Yes, do it!” we can’t let him go this time!”

Roman turned and saw the earpiece. He plucked it from Flint’s ear and tossed it into the glove box, then he hit a switch and ejected the glove box’s contents out into the air.

“I think that’s enough of that. I don’t think you should be talking to Simon any longer. Or ever again, I think.”

“You wait, he’ll shoot us down.”

“And lose you? I don’t think so. You know it’s against their programming; the desire to save and protect their human partners is among the strongest instinct they are programmed with. You ought to know that.”

“I do know that. I designed those protocols, you know. “

“I know.”

Roman turned, and dove for the city. “Let’s see,” he said. I ought to have a nuke or two onboard here. Should be fun destroying your main police tower.” He flipped a switch, and two missiles lowered from the bottom of the car. On one of the monitors ahead of them, Roman picked out the police tower as his main target, and Flint’s apartment in the other, and locked them in.

“He’ll shoot us down.”

“He’ll do no such thing. He hasn’t got it in him.”

Simon watched from the sensors on his car. He could see the missiles. He could tell from the tones where they were going. He readied countermeasures but wasn’t sure if they would work, or how effective they would be. He had never used them before in a live situation. He kept thinking about it. Shoot us down, was what Flint had told him to do, and though he wanted to obey, he could not. But what if he did it anyway? What would the consequences be? Yes, he would destroy the other car, and he should do so before any missiles got fired, that was for sure, but he couldn’t see any way around protecting his partner. He could be replicated a hundred times if need be, his consciousness transferred to a fresh body, but once Flint was dead, well, that was it.

Wasn’t it?

He centered his targeting system on the car ahead of him, dropped two missiles, and contemplated further. The ejector seats should go off, if he hit just the right spot on the back, there was a better than average chance that they would both survive.

He pulled the trigger and fired his missiles.

Flint held his breath.

Roman saw him tighten up and looked around him. Two missiles were headed his way. A moment later, after the explosion rocked the car, and what pieces remained of it fell away, Roman and Flint’s parachutes opened and they were floating down to the city. Below them stood the Police tower.

Simon flew over them and took the ship in to land.

Roman, pulled a switch on the side of his seat, and the parachute fell away, and jets, rockets, and wings flipped out.

Roman dived for the police tower.

Lasers started pumping their way, blasting all around them, exciting pockets of air to sizzle and pop. Roman pulled his throttle and dived between them. One of the lasers grazed him, but he managed to get by the rest.

Flint pulled in behind him and followed Roman down through the maze of city streets that he called home, his bound hands straining at the controls. Roman didn’t know where he was going, just trying to get away, but Flint knew where he was. For once in a long while, he was back on his own home turf. He knew this area better than anybody. They passed his apartment.

Flint looked down at his fuel indicator. Not much left. These chairs were only really useful for getting back to the ground.

Roman’s chair sputtered on empty.

It fell from the sky.

Roman landed, cockeyed and fell down to the street level, rolling out of his chair.

Flint landed beside him and pulled the release on his chair, letting it fall to the ground.

He shook off the restraints.

Roman stood, out of breath, and barely able to move.

They stood for a moment and caught their breath.

Roman coughed.

Flint cleared his throat.

They breathed, each listening for the slightest movement.

“I’m going to have to bring you in,” said Flint.

“Not if I force you to kill me.”

“That is a possibility, but I’d really rather avoid it.”

“After all I’ve put you through?”

“Especially after all you’ve put me through. The court appearances would be much less trouble than the paperwork it would take.”

“I guess you had better start sharpening your pencils then.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It is.”

Roman and Flint stood up straight and shook the remaining sweat from themselves. Flint pulled his pistol to fire, but Roman had already shot a grapple gun into the air. He was zooming into the sky.

Flint popped a grapple gun in his off-hand and shot it into the sky, giving chase. His body was going to be one big ache tomorrow.

Roman’s grapple ran out of steam, leaving him between two balconies.

Flint’s overshot Roman, and ended up several feet away from him. He gripped onto the building and started climbing for Roman.

Roman pulled a small laser from his belt, and sizzled out with it, cutting Flint’s line.

Flint held close to the ledge, allowing the grapple line to fall away behind him.

“You’re stuck Roman.”

Roman squirmed and climbed onto a short landing. He fumbled in his pockets and threw a shower of sparks toward Flint, which exploded with light in his eyes. Flint held his fingers to his eyes and blinked. He felt for the paved ledge and used the wall to stand up, keeping his eyes shut.

Roman pulled his hand laser out once more and fired it at Flint. It grazed Flint’s chest, and a trickle of blood ran down his shirt.

Flint blinked and swayed on the spot.

Roman watched Flint’s feet, he was missing steps and having to use the ledge for support.

Roman took hold of the bottom of a great window ledge and began to climb. He looked down to see Flint trying to negotiate the same climb behind him.

“You’ll never make it Flint.”

“I’ll make it if you can.” Flint held his arm up and pulled himself up to the window ledge.

Roman stood, carefully handling a remote in his pocket.

There was a crash of glass, and arms were sweeping into the ledge with them from the windows. Robotic arms clutched and clawed at Flint’s neck.

Flint pulled one of them from the window and tossed the robot out and down to the ground. Another clawed its way around Flint’s neck. They struggled, and then Flint tossed it back into the wall where it exploded.

Roman jumped in through the opened, broken window.

Flint jumped through after him.

Three robots were coming Flint’s way, this time naked female androids. He stopped for a moment, but when he saw the logos in their eyes he did not hesitate. He pulled a laser from his belt and cut them all to pieces.

The next round wasn’t so easy. Three robots, each with heavy-duty combat armor clanked their way towards him. He flashed out with his laser, but only scratched them. They knocked him down and trampled over him. Bruised and beaten, they picked him back up and thrashed him again. The lights went all swimmy before him. He seemed to be surrounded by naked robots, and these three ugly combat things, and there was something about a talking monkey. As he realized that the talking monkey was, in fact, Roman, all went dark.

When he awoke, he was alone. He seemed to have his clothes, but all weapons or gadgets were missing. He checked his ear for his headset but remembered that was gone as well. He could see his breath, puffing out with each breath into a sliver of light that was allowed into the room.

Either he had been moved a very long distance or he was up very high in the city. That or he was in a freezer somewhere, and he really didn’t want to work it out. He watched his breath for a moment, feeling the walls creep and thrill around him, and thought for the first time in forty years that he was going to die. Of course, he was ninety-five, and that was ridiculous. No one died at that age. Not anymore anyway.

He looked around, mostly feeling his way around the room. The floor was covered in a thin layer of ice. He scratched at it with his finger, and it seemed to thaw under his touch. That wasn’t too bad. He moved and checked out the light. He put his finger up to the hole, which wasn’t much more than a slit really, and then he put his eye up to it. At first, he couldn’t see anything, but then he realized that he would have to let his eyes adjust. He stared out of the slit, willing his eyes to come into focus, and before long he could make out the image of two robot guards standing outside what must be a cell. But where were they? Beyond the guards was a window, and outside the window?

The moon.

Flint sat back down. He could hear footsteps outside. It sounded like a man, perhaps a short one, and the definite clunk of high heeled shoes. Flint peered through the eye hole again. He blinked. Before he was Roman, and Dianne Roberts, his partner’s widow. A slate rolled away, and Flint could hear the entrance to his cell opening. He was flooded with light. The slender figure of Dianne Roberts came into focus, and the lights were brought down. They closed a red glass door for privacy from the guards, and She sat herself down at a table that Flint had not noticed before, probably due to the lack of light in the room. He stood up and went to sit across from her.

“Dianne, what are you doing here?”

“I came to get you out, that’s what.”

“I don’t need any help, besides, what are you doing talking to Roman, and where the hell are we?” The moon was clearly visible ahead of them through the glass.

“We’re about halfway to the moon, that’s why we have to go.”

“What about Roman?”

“That’s the trick.”

“What’s the trick?”

Roman stepped around the corner.

“You have to let me go.”

Flint stood up to face Roman across the red glass.

“I think you’re sort of in control of the situation here.”

“You don’t know what we’ve started on the moon. It’s incredible.”

“And you,” said Flint, turning to Dianne. He punched the glass, and it shattered all around them. He picked up one of the leaded pieces and threw it at her, digging into her chest. Sparks flew, and circuits fell into place. The light in her eyes went out.

“Flint…”

Flint turned back to Roman. “Where is she?”

“The real Dianne Roberts?”

“Yes.”

“That was her.”

Flint punched Roman, and they fell together through the glass.

The glass shattered all around them.

The robot guards started to turn to fire, but one fired at the other, destroying it in a ball of flame.

Roman backed out of the hall and slit the door down between them.

If robots could wink, especially ones as old as the guard robot here, then this one did, but Flint barely noticed it for what it was.

“Simon?”

“Yep.”

“How did you get into this old robot?”

“Never mind how, it was hard enough transmitting myself through space to get into their wireless network.”

A panel on the front of the guard robot opened up, and inside Flint found a jumpsuit, which he pulled on, a pistol, and three grapple guns, which he hooked onto his belt.

“Don’t forget the last,” said Simon through the clunky robot.

Flint looked in there again and saw a hand-full of grenades. He pocketed them.

“Look, I can’t stay here much longer, The security system almost has me. Lucky I’m just a copy anyway.”

Flint nodded.

“Take the elevator at the end of the hall all the way up. Use one of the grenades to get through the door, then you should have a clear shot at Roman. This thing has plenty of escape capsules, so once you’ve got rid of him for good, make sure to get the heck out of there. I don’t want to be the first robotic partner to lose his humanity, all right?”

“Got it.”

“Good, then shoot me.”

“What?”

“Simple, The security system on this ship is about to find me, once they do, they’ll erase me, and this hunk of junk will start shooting at you, so get rid of it early. Besides, I’m just a copy. I’ll see you on Earth, no problem.”

Flint shook his head but blasted the robot anyway. Parts and pieces flew in all directions, especially the head, which bounced as it hit the slick floor of the cell behind him.

Flint marched without a backward glance to the elevator and mashed the button for the top floor.

The elevator rose but came to a halt at the top floor and the door would not budge. A polite voice asked him for an identification card. He slid his police ID through the slot, and the alarms really started to blare. He fixed a grenade to the door and stood back. It blasted, and the door flew all the way across the room, banging into the instrument panels and sending Roman diving for cover.

Roman stood. He looked as if he had half expected this anyway. “Welcome Flint, come on in and have a look around.”

Flint came into the control room, and looked around. There seemed to be another couple of robots around, including another copy of Dianne Roberts, who had not yet looked up, and seemed to be piloting.

“Take care to look ahead of us in the future.”

Flint looked ahead of them and veering towards the dark side of the moon, he could just make out a large stack of materials.

“What are you building up here?” asked Flint.

“True construction is just getting going, but they’re ahead of you are the building blocks, the starter fuel for colonization. Not of humans, but of robots. The facility in Arizona is nothing in comparison to what this one will be. Here we’ll manufacture robots in the thousands, the millions if we need to.”

“Is it operational?”

“Nearly. Just nearly. We’re bringing the necessary materials with us to get going again.”

“What kind of materials?”

“You of course.”

“Me?”

“I’m far too inferior a model, to begin with. I need someone with much stronger reserves, and well, someone who is next to impossible to get off my back. We needed you. You’ll be the prototype for the next round of robots.”

“Never.”

“It’s already too late, we were just bringing you on for observation. All we needed was a sample of your genetic material.”

“I’ll stop you.”

“I’m sure you will. The problem, of course, with picking someone like you was that this was an eventuality. We knew you’d break it somehow.”

“Why are you helping them?”

“Why?”

“Because I was the gullible one. the one they decided to base their robotic clones on last time. I cooperated.”

“And now?”

“They control me. It’s impossible.”

“The robots then.”

Yes.

He held up his pistol and pointed it right at Roman’s chest.

Roman closed his eyes, “End it now.” He pulled his shirt open.

Flint cocked the pistol, choosing his setting carefully, and then fired. There was a blue blast, and Roman hit the deck. He rolled over, and his eyes stayed open after he was unconscious. He continued to breathe.

Flint waved his hand in front of one of Dianne’s eyes. She continued to pilot the vehicle toward the moon.

Flint took one of the command chairs, and a small visor lowered over his head, and two control sticks raised from the console. He took aim, and fired at the base, now under construction on the moon. Laser blasts blared, pockets of oxygen exploded in brief plumes of fire. He cocked the missiles that had been loaded into this shuttle. He knocked them back and fired them at the base below. Two missiles. They streaked out and impacted with the crater sending the loads of what was now debris out into space in a fiery mass.

A red light began to blare. Sirens screamed. Flint took his laser to the controls and started slicing them apart. He looked around, and none of the robots seemed to even notice him. He picked up Roman and threw him over his shoulder. Taking the service stairs, now that the elevator was no longer operational, Flint huffed down them, carrying Roman all the way. He bounded down three stairs at a time, taking advantage of the difference in gravity, and came to a small entryway to the escape pods.

It was a short row, maybe three or four. It was clear that they never expected to have many live people at one time on this bird. He punched the pad for one of the pods just as he felt his pistol being lifted from his belt. He threw Roman off, and he slammed to the metal grated floor. The pistol skittered off, and down through an access panel, which closed and locked after an accidental kick from Roman.

Roman grabbed at the panel and tried to open it, but Flint’s boot prevented that with a swift kick. Roman flew across the room and banged into a series of pipes.

“I tried to save you.”

“That’s the problem with all of you cops, you think it’s about saving people.”

“I thought you had hope.”

“There is no hope. Not for you anyway.”

Roman began pressing the buttons for the escape pods. One would open, and then he would smack the button again, to make the pod launch without anyone inside of it.

“No,” said Flint. “There’s no hope for you.”

He pressed the button to open the last escape pod, and jumped inside.

Roman framed the doorway, teeth bared.

Flint tossed him a grenade, which he caught, and looked at for a moment. Flint smacked the go button, and the pod shot out from the ship. A second later, he could see Roman explode through a small porthole.

Slowly, as he caught his breath, he watched as the ship itself fell into a moon crater and explode.