November 2073
Charlie dragged the heavy metal across the rocks and the screaming ice, through the wet snow and the black soot of the Alaskan wilderness. His gloves were torn and the color of the cloth around his fingers had blurred into red. His hands were cut in three places, but holding onto the metal helped him to numb the aching and slow the bleeding.
The weight made him move even more slowly than he would have otherwise. It was unlikely that he could survive the walk back to civilization or that anyone would find him, even in the best of circumstances. Dragging the damn corpse of iron and steel and space-age plastic behind him made it even less likely, but he didn’t let go. He’d earned that prize.
Charlie imagined himself as a dragon slayer, pulling the dragon’s head behind him. He pictured himself owning an old-fashioned pinewood cabin one day, filled with furs and the stuffed heads of animals he’d killed. In his imagination, he would mount the dead machine up over his fireplace. The warm fire would reflect on the polyhedral corners of the broken husk. Maybe he would even see his own warped face looking back at him from the twisted surface of the metal.
They’d killed it. But out of twenty soldiers standing at the beginning of the final battle, Charlie was the only one who hadn’t died fighting The Machine. Especially Amber. No one was more dead than Amber.
Distantly, like a song he slowly began to hear in the background, he started to understand that he was still going to die because of the monster. He pulled harder, not letting go, straining his back and his arms to move more quickly through the ice and snow and disaster beneath his feet. He could smell the fire behind him. The rest of his enemy’s body was burning. The fire would keep going for weeks, or maybe longer.
The thought slid through his mind that he might have died years before and had been condemned to drag the body throughout eternity, like some Greek hero. Looking into the distance, he saw the white landscape going on forever like a reality which no one had ever bothered to create any content for. No one had ever lived there. No one had ever dreamed there. There had never been anything more than the rocks and snow, never houses and never people. When he did eventually fall down he would become yet another part of the deep ice which flowed across the land like a slow eternal river.
Charlie walked on and on for what felt like a day or more. The soot disappeared. He couldn’t see the smoke in the sky behind him anymore. In front and on his sides, the world looked like empty paper. There weren’t even any trees. The only decorations behind him were his black and filthy footprints. It was at this moment he realized that he wasn’t carrying the mechanical corpse anymore. He didn’t know when he had let it go. He took a few running steps back, but couldn’t even see it in the distance. He must have walked on for hours without his prize and not even noticed.
The soldier looked at his hands. His right glove was gone. Maybe it had fallen off with the robot? His left hand was bunched up into a hard fist which he had been squeezing for hours. Slowly, Charlie opened his hand. The pain was horrible. He fell down and all of his fingers smashed into the ice. There was no sensation in his right hand anymore.
He sighed, breathing in the frozen air. His life would have been so different if he hadn’t had to go out to fight. He was a singer. He had albums he wanted to write. He had songs in his head which he had never written down, never sung for anyone. He had work to do, and all of that sci-fi barbarianism had been a terrible interruption in the life he had been meant to live. The war came just when life had finally started to get good.
All the while he had fought The Machine, he imagined the war was only a distraction. He was fighting to get the interruption over so he could get back to work. He hadn’t stood up again yet. He was still on his hands and knees on the ice.
What would that other life had been like? What would he have created? What would he have seen? Would he have married Amber and had children with her?
He breathed the Alaskan air in again. In his mind’s eye he was in that pinewood cabin already. Amber was there too, holding a baby. They both looked up at the severed head of The Machine above the fire.
What’s the point of saving the world, when your world ends anyway?
Somehow, Charlie struggled up onto his feet and started moving. He couldn’t say if he walked on for a long distance more or for only a few steps before he fell. And when he fell the second time, he closed his eyes and slept.
With his eyes closed, Charlie’s imagination replayed the day’s events, but it was a confused and distorted version of the day. Instead of the soldiers who had really fought at his side, he dreamed his brothers were there, and his parents, his friends, even people he had known vaguely at school – people he hadn’t thought about in a decade.
They all wore uniforms and carried guns. They all wore those fluffy white coats the government had issued. In his dream, Charlie’s brother commented that the coats looked like a colorless version of the one Han Solo wore in The Empire Strikes Back. It was particularly strange to Charlie because he hadn’t made the connection in his own mind until his brother pointed it out in the dream. He was dimly aware that it was a dream, and it didn’t seem right that a person he had dreamed up could know things before he, the dreamer, did.
When he awoke, there was grass between his fingers. It was wet and there was snow on his face. His beard was cold and stiff. He looked up and he could see white stars shining against the blackest and deepest sky he had ever seen. They were so bright and appeared to be close enough that he could reach out and touch them. He could see galaxies. He could see cosmoses swimming together like fish against forever. He brushed the ice from his face. Charlie’s fingers hurt like they were on fire, but all ten digits were moving again.
He found himself looking around for the robot’s head. There was still no sign of it. Up ahead, he could see some green fir trees. He understood that reaching them didn’t mean he would survive, but that direction at least meant life. Life could exist over there. He felt a kinship with the green.
Charlie moved like an old man through the snow. His long legs were never good at holding heat. He had been wearing the best thermal protection that he could have for the trip, but it wasn’t made to protect anyone for this long out in the elements.
They had talked about killing The Machine as if it meant saving the world. But Amber was dead now. It seemed contradictory to Charlie to say that there was still a world, but that she was dead and gone forever. Who could he go and fight to get her back? What monster could he rescue her from? No, that’s not how life worked.
A fog descended as Charlie got closer to the tree-line. By the time he felt the bark against his arms, he couldn’t see the tops of the trees anymore. A low bough hung down like a hammock. He was unable to resist pausing and resting on the natural seat. He leaned back and felt another branch support the small of his back. He could have slept right there.
And then the growling started. At first he thought it was a bear, and then he was sure it was a wolf. It was loud like a bear, but he wasn’t quite sure. Could it be a moose or a raccoon or something he just didn’t know the call of? The growling drew closer and closer and Charlie decided, as if he were able to choose his reality, that it was a dragon. It might as well be a dragon, because he couldn’t fight anything at that point. Even if it were just something small like a squirrel, the odds were that the animal was going to eat him.
And the growling got louder. The dragon drew closer. Charlie didn’t stand up. He understood that, at that moment, he couldn’t control whether he was going to die or not. He could only control how he faced it. Charlie breathed deeply. He closed his eyes and thought of Amber. Then he opened them again.
The beast stood right in front of him. It was a bear and it was a wolf, and a moose, and a squirrel, a raccoon, he became aware that it was even a dragon. The beast of beasts stood cursing and venting and coughing. White lines of cold smoke blew from its dark nostrils. Horns protruded from its head in at least a dozen variations.
“Are you here
for me because you’re hungry, or because you hate me?” Charlie asked.
The beast spoke back in a deep and rumbling voice. “You don’t have to fear this death. It’s no more real that the thought of dying. Your war, your love, your life have all been a fiction written for no other reason than to create you.
“Far in the future, strange men and strange women will ask for you to be born. They will look back at their own history and see that a man like you once lived, and so they will make you. You’re not born yet. You’re an idea. You have always been surrounded by ideas, not true objects: The ideas of objects.”
“What will they want me for?” Charlie asked.
“They will make you the captain of a spaceship and send you out farther than their eyes can see. You will lead other people like you and explore another limitlessness together. Out farther than space can fold or engines can carry, you will ride upon a Waydio wave and crest into being. Tiny stones and molecules will be told where to go and how to connect to one another until you return to existence.”
“Will Amber be there too?”
“No.”
“What about my family?”
“Everything you have ever lost is lost forever. None of it was real and so your loss is only what you want it to be. You remember suffering, make of that what you will. If you find yourself facing phantoms of this time, you will decide what to do with them.”
Charlie saw, or imagined he saw (he wasn’t sure which) that the beast was eating Amber. Its long furry face was covered in her blood. Her ribs protruded up through the snow. He heard the animal chewing and biting and ripping her body.
“And that is how you fly the ship,” The monster said.
He listened as bones broke and it sucked on her flesh.
“And these are the people you will command.”
He watched as her fingers and her arms disappeared down the animal’s massive throat. He smelled her on its hot breath.
“And now you know everything you need to know.”
Charlie looked again. The animal wasn’t eating Amber at all. It had been eating him. His feet were gone, his legs were gone. His whole body beneath the waist had disappeared. And, he fell asleep.