A collection of science fiction stories with heart and humour. The stories are light touch sci-fi exploring what it means to be human, perspective, consciousness and love—from writer S M Garratt and other contributors. If you want your story featured, please message me directly.
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"Entangled" by S. M. Garratt is a poignant and thrilling science fiction tale that explores the deep, Sapphic love between two women, Sam and her partner, set against a futuristic backdrop.
In the year 2120, Sam and her partner, both survivors of failed marriages, find solace and love in each other. Their bond is tested when Sam is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Desperate to stay together, they undergo a radical procedure at Entangled PLC, a company promising to merge their consciousnesses. The process is excruciating, but it binds them in ways they never imagined, sharing not just thoughts but physical sensations and emotions.
As they navigate their new entangled existence, they experience the world with heightened senses and a profound connection. Their journey takes them through moments of joy, pain, and discovery, from the intimate sharing of a simple meal to the vibrant chaos of a Berlin nightclub. However, the procedure's side effects and the looming shadow of Sam's illness threaten to tear them apart.
"Entangled" is a story of love transcending physical boundaries, exploring the depths of connection and the sacrifices made for love. It's a tale that will captivate listeners with its blend of emotional intensity and speculative science fiction, leaving them pondering the true nature of love and identity.
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The Hive
Thursday, February 13, 2025 • Duration 07:18
The Imagineer for notorious Metal band The Hive plans a final curtain call worthy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Estranged Fuzzball
Friday, January 31, 2025 • Duration 06:21
Are Physicists funny? Should particles be named after attractive assistants? Are Herman Miller Chairs faster than other chairs? This story tackles all the big issues and very little else.
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Interrogation
Friday, January 17, 2025 • Duration 08:33
David Lynch has died. So much creativity and mastery has died with him. A couple of years ago, I did an MA in screenwriting, and as part of that, we had to create a short film. I was inspired by a David Lynch short called “What Did Jack Do?”. It's so Lynch, dark, funny, weird and pushes a few boundaries and buttons… I loved the subversion of genre and ridiculous narrative. It is everything I love about Lynch. Unflinchingly him to the very end.
I’m not putting this here because it's like Lynches film - It's simply my way of saying he touched me; I just wasn’t able to do what he does so effortlessly… because making a complicated SFX-filled dystopian crime short is really, really hard in your 6m square homemade studio… but I like to think he would have approved of us trying.
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The Day the Cars Died
Monday, January 6, 2025 • Duration 10:59
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The Prophet
Thursday, January 2, 2025 • Duration 48:46
This is a little more Philosophical than Science Fiction, although I promise it really is Science Fiction; you just have to wait and see. For me, the Prophet explores how our perspective, our way of life, and the things we see can influence our perception of religion.
Would love to know what people think.
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A Tailor as Old as Time
Thursday, January 2, 2025 • Duration 01:04:41
This is the first Short Story Podcast from The Oort Cloud. A Substack Publication that focuses on Philosophical Science Fiction. To find out more about the Oort Cloud, writer S M Garratt subscribe at https://theoortcloud.substack.com/ - The Oort Cloud accepts submissions via Substack - for more details email info@smgarratt.com
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The Prophet
Tuesday, December 31, 2024 • Duration 48:46
When Belin awoke on the morning of his death day, the suns were shining. Through the hole in the roof of his cell, the sullen orange sky was intersected by vast rings of graduated silver-blue dust and rocks, unchanged for a thousand years. The planet Or was continuously bathed in the muted glow of twin red suns, creating a permanently dimming daytime as they died a tragic, ten billion-year death. That was nine billion, nine hundred million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and ninety-nine days longer than Belin had left to live.
The rings had always held more meaning for the people of Or than the suns; they had worshipped them for nearly as long as they worshipped the moon before. The mother moon sacrificed herself for the whole planet. An act of selflessness that inspired and defined the peoples of Or. The destruction story guided them to greatness, chastised them into humility, bound them in love and finally embraced them in death. It was to these rings that Belin found his fate bound, soon to be returned and united whether he wanted to or not. Today, he was to be launched from Or and pitched into the rock-strewn melee of the rings via the tiny capsule poised on the gantry outside his cell. He would be ground into dust in the rings to join with millions of his fellow Or’ians, most of whom had joyfully travelled to the rings before him. For Belin, there was no joy in joining the rings. Sadly, he had a new truth thrust upon him, which caused him to reevaluate the religious significance of the rings.
And now he believed in something else and had told others about his truth, so he had to die!
Belin never intended to become a prophet, and, as was his notional understanding of the nature of prophecy, this was the same for all prophets. After his first revelation and initial unsolicited spiritual awakening during his brother’s wedding, Belin sought other prophets to share notes with, to find guidance and maybe even a way out. But right from the start, all he saw was death. Prophets died often and quickly on Or.
His brother, of course, had tried to kill him immediately. The result of a non-conformist spiritual revelation during a wedding instigated the immediate annulment of the marriage. Followed quickly, as was the custom, by the death of the bride and her family and the banishment of the unfortunate prophet by the Royal Ring Regiment, a zealot sect within the Or military charged with the defence of the one true Religion. As is always the case with defending a religion, this is done simply by exterminating any other ideas, philosophies, prophets and gods that are foolish enough to make an appearance.
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I Love Delores Moon
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 • Duration 27:33
“Baby, you and I don’t have enough time to see all the sights of the universe”, dismissed Delores Moon as I fumbled under the drive control panel of the Viceroy’s Elongi Special. Of course, she was right, but probably not for the romantic reasons I imagined she imagined. Our chances of getting away unvaporised were practically zero unless I learned to hot-wire this spaceship fast.
However, practically zero was considerably better odds than we had less than half an hour ago, chained together in the aptly named ‘death row’. (I appreciate that sentence requires some additional explanation).
Death Row is a grand name for the four shabby but overly secure cells hidden beneath the Viceroy’s palace in the sprawling market city of Beb Al’Shroud. A tiny rancid jewel of a planet in the local Muntap’s crumbling empire. (I say empire; it’s three planets and a moon, but who’s counting?). The cells are “secure processing” for anyone unlucky enough to get caught. From here, they will transfer us to something (perhaps ironically) called The Grand Court of the Free, where a Justice Guard will prosecute us for our crimes (even if nobody attending knows what they might be). Anyhow, anyone who has had a run-in with the paranoid Viceroy’s Royal Guard will tell you (if they can still talk) that the Guard prefers accidental death by beating over a traditional court system any day. Hence, the nickname for our current residence.
In fairness to the three enthusiastic guards who had recently processed me to the point of unconsciousness, I doubt legal proceedings could ever be their modus operandi. On reflection, it was probably the use of the phrase “Modus Operandi” that got me so righteously beaten in the first place.
I digress - let’s start with me coming around on the floor of my little corner of death row chained to a seethingly hot (in both senses of the word), Delores Moon.
“About time, sweat stain, I need to piss, and I can’t get to the can without you coming along”. She yanked up our hands joined in holy custody, to evidence her statement.
I shook my head to try to clear the stars from my eyes and the bells from my ears. That was a lot of information for a man lying on an unknown cold, slimy floor, nursing a mild concussion and a not-so-mild hangover.
“Won’t that ruin all the mystery between us?” I quipped, hoping to come off the rakish side of cocky. However, all I got for my efforts was a sharp tug, more rough stone floor and a forced landing at her feet whilst she perched upon our cell’s well-used throne. I attempted to sit up but found the boot she had planted on the side of my head, still attached to her foot, somewhat restricted my movements.
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A Tailor as Old as Time
Friday, November 15, 2024 • Duration 01:04:41
T e s t
Test i n g
A B C The letters are still.
Hello. Can you read me?
My name is Michael Perdita (the label of my jacket says so), and I’m trapped in space.
Perdita is not my surname. It was given to me; I lost mine… somewhere. I want you to know so you don’t waste time looking for a Michael Perdita.
I lost my surname… somewhere in Tuesday… a Tuesday…
Perdita: You can look that up; it means something in that way only words can. Ever changing. The weight of their meaning carves visible channels in space. I forget what it means; maybe I haven’t been told yet. I needed it though, need it though. A name is important when you are writing. The words are important, and the name is important.
It’s important to get these words down out of all the words that surround me.
To fill a space. So, they can be found. I was given this name to help. I was given this name by the Tailor.
A name to mark my place in space.
Words to mark a space. Me. Here for you to find
Sorry
To be clear… by space, I don’t mean the black void, stars and satellites; I’m not an astronaut… I’m trapped in regular, everyday space. The kind of space you find under your floorboards, at the back of a cupboard, inside the inside of things. Inside that.
Does that help?
Sorry be patient
This is harder than it looks. Hard to get things in the right… order.
Hard to move words in space. A start I need to begin.
A beginning. There are many, but this one follows my heart, not my head. I don’t know why that matters, but the Tailor told me it does.
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Under normal circumstances, the swift right hand of the RRR is enough to end the matter when the ideas are ejected from the planet in tiny, perishable silver capsules. However, on this occasion and to everyone’s surprise, the death of his wife and her family caused his brother to undergo a war spasm (even though he had shown no inclination towards military work previously). With the frothing frenzy upon him, he split the Bridal table asunder (Belin had never seen anything split asunder; it was impressive) and attempted to penetrate Belin’s thorax with the resulting splintered plank of vintage Oakl. Unfortunately, having no control over his war spasm because of his lack of basic military training, Belin’s brother exploded, spraying the retreating guests with an exotic marmalade of his inners. Whilst this unfortunate incident saved Belins life, he was far from safe and knew he had to take swift action to avoid being labelled a heretic by the RRR.
He said his goodbyes to family and friends and rushed to burn his house and belongings. Finally, as was the custom, he urinated a circle around his ruined home to ensure the ground was not cursed for all time. The Hounoured Thexal and his assistant bore witness and scribed in the “Book of Dawn” that everything was done according to the scriptures. As DayTwo began (With no nights, days blended seamlessly into one another on Or), Belin was chased from the town by fourteen elders who threw assorted tainted fruits, cursed vegetables and a number (not disclosed) of blessed RingRocks. These are essential to ensure the spirits (whomever or whatever they are) know they are not wanted here. The streets rang with fervent chanting: “The ring and its Mother Moon are all powerful; they cannot be split again. What was split will never reform; what is formed cannot be broken”. The frantic Elderly throng sang in the high-pitched, kerning voice of the religious as Belin ran, stumbled and slipped out of the town of his birth to find himself alone on the long road.
Belin had never stood on the long road before. He had seen it once when his father had taken him for his “orientation day”. This is the ritual coming of age for all men of Or, where he would see for the first time the ring within the ring—the line of rocks, hills, walls, fences, scrub, and dirt track that delineated the boundary of his home town and the rest of Or.
“This is the ring within the ring, Belin.”
Standing atop the viewing mound on the outskirts of the village, Belin gazed upon his entire world. His father drew a ring slowly through the air, indicating the rough but clear line surrounding the village.
“In the ring, within the ring, we live in peace and harmony. We have rules within the ring; we have our homes, we have jobs, and we have our lives within the ring, within the ring. We strive for the ring, we build, and we learn for the ring; we are the ring, and the ring is us.” Belin listened intently to his father’s voice, mesmerised by the strange, poetic words from a man who, up until this day, had only said words that related directly to the task at hand, as all fathers do. His young mind struggled to understand the metaphors and the spiritual power of the words, but even at ten years old, Belin knew these words would shape his life, and that shape would be ringular.
“NEVER…” the tone of his father’s voice cut through the child-fog, the grip on his arm tightening. “NEVER STEP OUTSIDE THE RING WITHIN THE RING”.
His father let the words hang in the air. Belin patiently waited for them to descend to the dusty earth before he asked the question all boys asked on their orientation day: “Why?”
His Father struck him hard across the head with his ornate Goloonga, as was the custom. Even though he knew it was coming, it still shocked his young mind. His breath escaped faster than he could control, forcing a strangled hiss out of his bone lips. Belin fought against the primal instinct to run. If he did, he knew it would be at least another year before he could ascend to manhood.
He fell to the floor, his mouth full of dust and his head full of stars. Grit spitting, he pushed himself onto his knees. His vision swam, rocks separating and rejoining as his five eyes rolled in their sockets. His Father, stood statuesque in front of him, stick in hand. The intricate patterns on the Goloonga told the story of the Mother Moon’s sacrifice, the years of turmoil, fire and death—the eradication of the oceans, crops, water and all creatures bigger than a Stalynx. The intricate inscriptions detailed the planet’s rebirth and the formation of the ring within the ring. The Goloonga, so often a thing of play in his youth, now swung threateningly between them, moist with a streak of his blood.
“Ask again, son. Ask again.”
Belin didn’t want to ask again, but custom demanded it; the scriptures demanded it, the Ring demanded it, and given the magnificence of Mother Moon’s sacrifice, how could he not offer up his simple skull?
He fought back the tears, sucking dust-caked snot back through his slit nostrils and stared definitely at the elegant gnarly, nobble-ended pole.
“Why, Father… WHY!”
His Father swung the Goloonga high in the air. His extended arm drew a blurred arc that seemed to fill the sky above Belin—briefly blocking out the rising and waning twin suns Faxor and Smeril while tracing the Major and Minor rings. The Goloonga held its place in the rocky sky, the gnarly nobble end now positioned precisely where Mother Moon gave up her life and consumed the meteor. His Father and the Goloonga are frozen in time before crashing down, down, DOWN… Smashing into the ground in front of Belin.
Silence.
Belin stared at the ritual stick buried into the ground. He would be dead if it had struck him, and that, of course, was the point.
“Because my son, my new-man, you must never tread the long road.”
“And where is the long road, my Father, my old-man?”
These words signalled the final phase of the ritual. His father glowed; his son had been reborn, and his time as a parent was complete. He looked down on the young Belin, now a man. Through the dirt, snot, blood and tears that smeared the cracked crystalline skin of his son, he could see that his sacrifices, the years of casual torture in the name of religion, had been successful. He gripped Belin by the shoulders and drew him up. Mud, dust, stone, and rock cascaded from him, miniature landslides over his torn clothes.
As he dangled from his father’s strong hands, Belin shakily lifted his grazed inverted knees onto his father’s broad shoulders and, placing his hands carefully on either side of his parent’s split skull (to avoid separating the plates, causing instant death), pushed himself upward. Until, at last, he was fully grown, man on man, standing on his father’s shoulders, completing his religious journey from child to adult.
Belin breathed deeply, his eyes scanning the horizon. He had waited his whole life to see the long road; it was everything. He had feared this moment, but he had been excited about it. He had played it down with his friends but also spent hours meditating on its meaning, how it would change him, and what he would do. But he had never suspected the enormous, soul-crushing tsunami of disappointment it would actually bring.
Seeing further than he had ever seen before, the shadowy line of the long road couldn’t have been less exciting if it tried. It was a s**t streak in the sand. Brown, hard, packed earth lined with bush and scrub. As for the actual length of the Long Road, well, even on his father’s shoulders, The Long Road quickly disappeared over a brow, presumably continuing for a long way beyond.
Belin wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see. It was precisely what it claimed to be: a road, not obviously a long one, but it was a road nonetheless. However, considering the years of study, ritual, beatings and teachings he had been subjected to, it was a little bit… rubbish. The old Belin, the youth, the child, would have feared sharing his thoughts, but now he was an adult, he could confidently say the things inside his head, knowing they had value and worth as all adult thoughts do. So, as they returned to the village, Belin expressed his disappointment, and his father nodded sagely. “If I’m honest, Belin, I felt much the same, but this is the way of the world. I have found most things that I build up in my head to be important and meaningful turn out to be a bit crap in reality.”
And with these final words of wisdom, his Father walked away, their time together now over. Those were the last words he ever said to Belin; that was the last time he saw him alive.
As was the way of the world.
Belin took a moment for himself as his father faded out of his life and into the village Tavern. He could no longer see the long road; he was barely 4 feet tall, and it would be at least six years before he cracked his carapace (as they say) and reached his full height. But at that moment, as he stood in the dawn of his manhood, he felt the first pull. A momentary tug, a tingle in one of his stomachs perhaps, something new… something profound and powerful, a new energy, a new sensation, a whisper, pulling him toward…
…the road he must never walk on, the road on which he now stood.
The Long Road was calling to him, and from that moment on, the voice in his head would get louder and louder every day.
Belin never asked to be a prophet. There were many better suited to the calling in his village than he. He was a below-average student of the scriptures; he had never felt fervour or enlightenment. Over and above the basic teachings of rituals for manhood, crop rotation, woodwork, breeding and grooming, he barely bothered with religion. He found he was perfectly capable of going about his daily tasks without flagellation, poetic salvation or the oral cleansing ritual much loved by his classmates (mainly because they got to drink Wine). He had never seen the poetry pits and thrashing circles, beloved of the RRR, deep in the bowels of the Ringthedral at the centre of the village.
Yes, he loved the rings; he really did, but deep down, he saw them for what they were: a seriously lucky resolution of an extraordinary series of cosmic coincidences that turned the planet into a dust bowl rather than destroying it entirely. And he was perfectly happy to keep his heresy to himself until it was forcibly extracted from him at his brother’s wedding.
For Belin, prophecy was best described as ‘splitting your head open on a rusty spike as you are struck by lightning, whilst wearing underpants made from fireworks’. However, he knew it was coming; he’d been warned and should have left a year after his first dream. This first vision or revelation had been a dream so vivid it reduced his bed to a pile of smouldering ashes. In the dream, Belin found himself suspended in the rings, or perhaps as part of the rings, stretched so thin his arms and legs appeared to disappear around the world. His body was suddenly boundless, allowing the boulders, rocks, pebbles, dust, and particles to mix freely with his own. They passed through each other, creating millions of tiny glowing rings, lighting his torso up from the inside, turning his solid form into a glittering constellation, part of the ring, the ring part of him.
This was a wonderful dream.
He was part of the world and the cosmos beyond. For the first time, he could see both suns simultaneously. (This was a revelation because Old Bobl’s one Sun half orbit theories are still taught in schools). From his Ringside seat, he could see the whole of Or. The rolling dust ocean ebbed and flowed with a silvery mist of fine rocks and minerals. In the distance were the giant mounds of loose grey rocks that spread out from the Ring within the Ring, impossible to climb because of the fine covering of Moondust that constantly fell from the heavens.
Belin was revelling in the view when he felt a warm touch on his chest plate. He slowly lifted his head, heavy in the strange weightlessness of the ring. His eyes turned, looking down to find what can only be described as a deformed and stunted hand, with five, yes, five silvery fingers reaching out to him. The hand was attached to an arm with only one visible bend, also covered in the strange metal fabric. Above that, a single glassy globe, maybe an eye… a giant, crystal eye that twisted and distorted the reflection of his face.
Belin gazed into the eyes of a god. Floating there, it’s giant moon face, his face a face within a face. The rings curving perfectly over the round shiny head.
Belin and the God gazed in wonder at each other.
The moment of serenity passed, and a sensation of panic rose inside him, brought on by the enormous wrongness of his current physical situation. Belin began to struggle. He wanted to move away, but he was stretched thin in his dream, his arms and legs far, far away from his brain. Unable to gather himself, he was forced to stare at the monster, stare at the face of this new god.
A god within the ring?
The Mother of Mother Moon?
The scriptures did not prepare him for what he saw; there was no mention of a five-fingered Moonfaced God. He had never heard of a God that touched you. Gods generally focused on smiting and chastising when they found themselves near Or’ian’s.
This was something new.
Something to be feared or… revered?
Belin found himself unable to avert his eyes from God as he had been taught - instead, his gaze rolled off the head down to a torso, almost rectangular in shape, orange in colour, with strange markings. But the strangest part of the god was the large white and black shell on its back with an extraordinary tail. No longer than a tail, a tentacle, like the Giant Dustopuss from the sand sea, twisting and pulling this tethered god.
‘Tethered to what?’ thought Belin, twisting what remained of his translucent head, the atoms and particles glistening behind his eyes, setting off chain reactions throughout his body. But even that couldn’t distract him from the temple in the sky that hung above the god—a gargantuan construction beyond imagining, with towers and pillars of mirrored metal stacked upon one another. Along the top of the most prominent tube were two domes of frozen sky, only visible because of the reflections that curved over them. From three gaping funnels at one end, jets of flame, so magnificent, so bright, and so hot, it was like the suns were trying to escape. As he stared in awe and wonder, Belin’s world became brighter; every atom in his body was sparkling, and he began to feel … heat…. So much heat!
Belin awoke, his bed on fire, his walls scorched. The three fingers on his left hand were severely burnt, his flesh singed on his torso where the god had touched him…
The god had touched him!
He was forever changed.
It was impossible to hide this revelation, his accidental spiritual awakening. The hole in the roof of his house and the classic telltale burn marks were enough to convince everyone that Belin was messing with s**t he didn’t understand and he ought to be a lot more careful when he went to sleep. He was bought in front of the council of Elders, who took detailed notes and gave him a ritual helm wove from silver threads to wear when he went to sleep. This intrigued Belnin. The helm was clearly something the Elders had pre-made. This could only mean his was not a unique experience; this god had been seen before. But he was banned from asking questions, told he must never speak of his experience to anyone on pain of death and finally, but by no means least, he and his father had to move to the less desirable end of town immediately.
To avoid the banishment, his father brought forward his orientation day to the day before his brother’s wedding, which was the day before he found himself alone on the long road.
A strong hand on Belin’s shoulder shook him out of his reflection. The prison guard had a friendly face and smiled apologetically. He didn’t revel in the role of escorting the condemned to the pods on the gantries.
“It’s okay”, lied Belin. “I understand” he lied again.
The guard thanked him for his lies and gestured to the open door. Belin stood as confidently as he could but couldn’t hide the fact that his legs were shaking. The guard gripped him tighter, allowing him to walk steadily out of the cell door. As was the custom, the walk to the pod was lined with representatives of the church. Belin wished his father could have been there. It had been a shock to hear he had died the very day that Belin had been arrested for being a Prophet—a heart attack in his bed, according to the priest who found him.
Belin climbed the gantry, and the silver pod hissed open. Inside, there was a single chair with a harness. As he was strapped into the seat, it occurred to Belin that the pod appeared to be made from the same material the palace in the sky had been made from. He shook his head, ‘That is why I have to die,’ he thought. ‘I see my new God in everything now’.
The guard stepped away, and the religious leaders chanted through the pod’s open door and threw ceremonial dust and rocks into the capsule for good measure.
“I never meant to be a….”
The door closed, trapping the word ‘Prophet’ harmlessly inside the capsule. ‘Fair enough’, thought Belin, ‘it’s what I would have done too’; he had experienced first-hand the power of the word Prophet during his short walk on the long road.
The sun beat limply down on Belin as he walked the long road. He had quickly cleared the rise he had viewed just two days ago from his dead father’s shoulders and was now descending a non-descript hill. The road weaved around and over many similar hills, none worthy of a thought. His steady progress rose and fell with the dusty mounds, his mind twisting around his predicament like the long road before him.
He walked with as much confidence and purpose as he could muster. If he were to be banished (and he was), he would take his banishment like a man (because he is), and like all men, he needed a purpose. In his ex-village, everyone had a purpose. The warriors and the preachers, the miners, the farmers, the shopkeepers, tavern owners, the mother women, everyone had a role to play. Like his father and his father before him, he was destined to be a builder. He would have made great mounds where the villagers could have lived and worked. Whilst it was an undoubted honour to be a builder, he had to admit that he had struggled to get excited about pushing around dirt daily. But it was a purpose, and right now, he had none except to tread the long road until he died (according to the rules).
After many mounds, rounds, rises and falls, he saw in the distance a fellow traveller. This gave Belin pause. He had not considered the possibility of meeting anyone on the long road. Firstly, it was long. Other banishees would have walked far from the village, and even with his youthful but manly pace, he would be unlikely to catch up with even the slowest. He knew others had gone before him, many in fact, but still… their journeys would have taken them far away by now.
Yet here they were, face to face, with more dust than trust between them. Belin took the first step, perhaps out of youthful exuberance or simply because he had nowhere else to put his next foot forward. The stranger reciprocated, and steadily, they approached each other. Neither seemed to be in a rush to make the acquaintance of the other, but neither changed their path.
Where was there to go?
The road was a single-lane with no tributaries or junctions. It was one long road, one long journey, and until now, Belin had assumed that journey was in one direction.
Away from the Village.
But here they were.
Two strangers.
Destined to cross paths.
They paused a respectful distance from each other. They shared many similarities: the travelling cape and the small hand-made hessian sack with their meagre belongings. The number of legs, arms, and eyes confirmed they were from the same part of Or. The stranger had acquired a long, rough-hewn stick to aid his walking, and it was clear to Belin that he was older than Belin by some years.
The stranger lowered his head formally before returning to an upright position with a gentle smile.
Belin returned the greeting, and the two strangers walked slowly to meet in the middle of the long road.
“How fare you on this fine day?” asked the stranger in a cheerful, lyrical manner, immediately putting Belin at ease.
“I am well, stranger. My name is Belin; what may I call you?”
The stranger smiled. “I have had many names, but they are all discardled along the long road. I find it betterly to be travelling light, as names have ways of weighing you down, wouldn’t you agreely?”
Belin paused for thought. He had never considered the weight of a name; in fact, he had never considered the idea that words could weigh anything.
“What a strange thing to say”, remarked Belin, his youthful naivety shining through his dusty traveller exterior, “How could a name have weight?”
“Like many things, you will learnly along the long road; this lesson will be better experienced for yourself than explainly by me, a simple fellow traveller.”
Belin was reassured, as we all are, when we find others like ourselves. He no longer felt alone; he was part of something once more.
“Are there many like us?”
The stranger looked at Belin like a kindly teacher; never having experienced such a thing, Belin was oblivious to its meaning.
“How couldly anyone be like you or me? Are we not uniqued in every way? Have not our experiences been purely for us? Do you not find yourself alone on a journley that no one else will ever experience? Is not every moment of your life one of internaly perception, yours, privately, unshareable?”
Belin had never been asked so many questions, and he told the stranger so.
“Ah, that is the long road. It will bringly many questions out of you, and you will find your journey to be the most fullfilled when you can answer them with another question.”
“I have a question!” exclaimed Belin, realising that this had been burning away in his mind since first setting his many eyes on the stranger. “Where does the long road go? Or, more importantly, where have you come from?”
“Ah, you’re a young one! So much inquistivily, a mind looking for answers and a soul searched for truths?”
“A soul?”
“Are you not banished? Have you not been brandly a heretic? Did you not see a god?”
Belin was taken aback. Was this a trick, a test? Who was this stranger? How did he come to be on the long road, in his path on his journey? Why was he walking the other way? Why did he speak so similarly but so differently? The tiny hairs that covered Belin’s shiny back tickled with a new sensation. Was it fear, a warning, was it just the wind? All Belin knew was that he had to tread carefully.
He took a defensive step back, the way he had been taught, eyeing the rough-hewn branch. From his recent experience, he knew the pain of a well-swung stick. The stranger acknowledged the defensive stance, and in response, as was the custom, he opened his arms, allowing the stick to fall to the road. It bounced harmlessly; the solid thud of wood on road punctuated the steady rhythm of the wind.
Then silence.
It lay in the dust, a symbol of trust extended between them.
“I’m no threatly; I seek only the questions,” he said reassuringly.
In this simple gesture Belin saw the stranger for what he was. They were kin, travellers on the same road, going in different directions but he was a vision of Belin’s destiny. In response, he adjusted his feet and bowed his head in apology.
“I am sorry. I am new to banishment; it’s my first time, and I have much to learn.”
The stranger smiled.” Ah, you’re doing fine. Nothing has eaten you yet, and your mind is sharply for the subtleties of communication. However, you linger too longly on answers. Take it from me; only questions can reveal the world for what it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ha, you learn quickly?” the stranger smiled before elegantly sweeping up his stick with his bare-clawed foot and plucking it from the air. Then he pointed toward the long road and asked, “Will you walk with me, novice prophet, and question everything awhile?”
“But that is the way I have come.”
“What is your question?”
Belin considered this for a moment. The idea of questioning everything was not so strange to him. Had he not questioned everything inside his head his whole life: his teachers, the priests, his treatment for his revelation, the death of his brother’s wife and family, the burning down of his own house, the death of his father? So many questions unasked… until now. Banished, he may be, but now, ungagged, his mouth could roam as far as his legs and mind would take him, and together, they could begin to learn some fundamental truths about the world and the gods and the ring and beyond.
“Am I allowed to walk that way?”
“When you left your village, what made you turn rightly instead of leftly?”
Belin paused for thought. As far as he could remember, there was no reason he went left instead of right.
“None that I can think of.”
“Does it not stand to reason then that you can go the otherly way along the long road?”
Again, a question.
“Can I go the other way?”
The stranger smiled; Belin was a quick learner. Belin smiled in response; he knew he had learned something important, even if he didn’t fully understand it yet.
“Will you come with me to testly our hypothesis?’
Belin nodded, sealing an accord between the two travellers to become travelling companions. They headed back along the long road towards Belin’s village and the ring within the ring. As they walked, Belin remembered a question that had remained unanswered earlier.
“You mentioned my soul earlier; this is not a word I have heard before. What is my soul?”
Belin’s travelling companion considered the question for a while, his pace quickening as he constructed his response.
“A soul is everything left of you once the physical has worn away. Your Soul is what you feel, not what you see, what you say inside, not outside; your soul is only for you and your god”. He became more animated as he spoke, waving his walking stick so vigorously that a cloud of flies whirled in its vortex before being catapulted into the sky. “It’s your soul that looks for answers...” he stopped sharply in the middle of the road for added dramatic effect, “…and your soul that asks the questions your lips are too afraid to utter because if you do...” His stick achieved one final whirl before it finished just short of Belin’s head. “…you end up on the long road, like us. Is this not the truth?”
Belin was in awe of his companion’s incredible mind and felt warm with luck that their paths had crossed. He would answer many of Belin’s questions, for everything he said was everything Belin felt; therefore, it must be true.
Belin nodded. His companion rotated his stick and struck the ground firmly with the tip before continuing his walk. Belin scampered after.
The weather changed.
The dust swirled around their feet as giant tumble trees barrelled over the long road with purpose.
The wind blew.
The wind was blowing.
A small rock struck Belin in the face.
The sharp pain snapped Belin back to reality. He was inside his capsule; an angry hissing sound filled his ear, and a tiny hole had appeared in the thin metal capsule. Belin was unsure if the sound was the wind outside trying to get in or his precious air trying to get out.
He glanced through the small window to find he was hurtling at an extraordinary speed towards the ring. He attempted to wiggle out of the straps and was surprised that he didn’t have the strength to move his body. His arms were pulled backwards, and his thorax creaked under the ever-increasing invisible weight. It took everything he had left to turn his head to take one last view of the world he had called home for his entire adult life of six days.
Beneath him, the world was disappearing quickly. He traced his eye along a barely visible line of dust that marked his path to the scaffold from which he had been launched moments ago. The enormous armature that had swung through the air, catapulting him skyward, was less than a smudge beside the blot of prison.
The town of ‘Other’, twice the size of the village of his birth, was no more than a shadow on the brown of the world from which he was racing away. Beyond that, the long road wove and wound backwards and forwards as far as the eye can see. With every passing second, his eye could see further and further. Until… in the distance, at the very edge of the world, something was forming, growing, rising upwards. A shimmering, glittering, hazy… was it trees, trees of silver and glass… what was that…?
Belin tried with all his might to lift himself a little higher, but the weight was pressing down and down. The harder he tried, the heavier he became. His vision diminished. Around the edge of his world, a dark circle appeared, slowly creeping in; the world darkened as he strained, turning the day to night and consciousness to unconsciousness.
Belin passed out.
Belin dreamed his final memory.
Belin and the traveller sat together in the town square of Other. Belin could scarcely believe what he saw; it was the busiest place he had ever seen. Thousands of miners, builders, tailors and teachers all hustling and bustling together. Going about their business, so alike his village but also wrong. The way they dressed, the way they talked, the way the buildings looked. Everything was just slightly… different.
“Why is it different here?” he asked his companion, who smiled kindly at him; his pupil was a good pupil.
“Would it not be stranger if it was not different?”
Belin considered the new question and nodded in agreement. There was no reason to think that everyone would do things as they did in his village. If they did, there would have to be an agreement between them; they would have to constantly check for deviations to maintain the similarities with no real benefit. Belin had a question.
“Are the differences important?”
“Can you see anything that is the same?”
Belin looked around. The square was surrounded on three sides by shops, some of which he recognised, selling hardware, food and clothes. Connected to the square via a grand staircase with a dramatic falice stood the grandest hall of mothers he had ever seen (It being only the second hall of mothers he had seen). With its steady stream of young, nervous, fertile men queuing for their moment in the suns, a moment from which they would never return. He bowed his head in respect for their sacrifice before returning to his task.
Beyond the square was a dark labyrinth of alleys and tight streets with overhanging buildings, built square rather than in the mound shapes he was used to. His father would have been amazed at the ingenuity of such regular angles, or perhaps he would have been appalled; it was always difficult to know how fathers would view such progressive change. The more Belin looked, the stranger the town became until he felt quite dizzy and a little nauseous.
“Am I missing something?” he asked.
His companion smiled and nodded.
“It’s hard to see what is not there, may I help you?”
Belin nodded.
HIs traveling companion stood and lifted his walking stick again, this time directing Belin’s gaze, to what was not there to be seen.
“Can you see the Ring Church? Can you see the poetry pit? Can you see any priests?”
Belin looked around, swiftly turning his head left and right. He stood on tiptoe and nearly fell over as he searched vainly for what was missing. But despite trying as hard as he could, he could find no trace of the RRR.
“How can this be?” he whispered, suddenly fearful that his presence had caused this anomaly. He was not yet sure how powerful a prophet he had become.
“Come sit, breathe. I promise all is fine in the world,” said his companion, tapping the empty seat beside him, indicating that Belin should join him again.
“This place is the same but different, yes?”
Belin nodded; he was wracked with fear and unable to talk.
“And you believe there should be priests of the ring, Elders, poets, and all accompanying religious paraphernalia here?”
Belin nodded again. He had nothing more to add.
“But would you believe me if I told you that in this city, a city called ‘OTHER’, no one has ever heard of the ring within the ring, they do not worship the rocks in the sky, and they do not know about the sacrifice of the Mother Moon? Would you believe me?”
Belin had never felt so confused, dizzy, and scared—an alien in this strange place. How could this be? It made no sense. The rings are there for everyone to see. The Mother Moon created this world, and the rocks on the ground are her blessing upon us. His father had beaten the truth into him daily for ten years. How could these words be true? He is nothing but a heretic who has seen and been touched by a false god.
He asked the question.
“How can that be true?”
“Can you tell me?”
…
“Because everything I know is just a story?”
His companion smiled a beaming smile.
“You are a wonder, young prophet, a true wonder. After everything you have been through and all you have seen and learned, you still question the truth?”
Belin was confused.
“Should I not question?”
His companion stood, his arms high in the air. He suddenly grew in stature, throwing off his dirty travelling robes, unfolding his bent back and revealing his red robes of state. In his hand, his stick had transformed into a golden Goloonga, encrusted with gems he raised high above his head.
“I am the high priest of the ring. I was sent to test you, and you have been found wanting. I pronounce you heratic and condemn you to the ring of death.”
“But…?”
The Goloonga struck him square in the centre of his skull crack, and all was darkness.
The sounds crept into Belin’s skull—weirdly echoing, rhythmic sounds, like a rock slide, but all around him. Rocks sliding and tumbling around him, or him inside the rocks rolling, floating… he was floating. Belin opened his eyes. The window was on the floor, the chair on the wall beside him. He tried to reach out but moved backwards until he hit the cold wall of the capsule. He was weightless, flying in mid-air. Through the floor window, he could see rocks, millions and millions of rocks, rolling and tumbling, bumping and bouncing off each other. He found his feet scraping against the capsule wall and pushed himself off. He flew quickly to the floor; his face was pressed against the cold glass. The rings were all around him, above and below, as far as the eye could see, nothing but ring rocks.
He had always thought of the rings as thin bands, strips of precious minerals wrapped around the world in coloured bands, but that was clearly just an illusion. Up close, they were thick, deep, disordered and deadly.
As the capsule rotated in the rubble, rocks struck the exterior. Some just bounced off, but others, propelled by some unknown force, came at such speed that they might break through the metal shell.
The air began to hiss out of a hole on the opposite side of where Belin lay on the window. He hadn’t seen the rock. All he could see was where it had been and where it went. The two holes whistled a dis-chord in the tumbling capsule. As he watched, another hole appeared. The tiny rock shattered this time as it exploded through his craft, and the dust and particles floated freely around him.
Belin sighed; this was his fate. The ring would take him; slowly but surely, he would lose all his air, or the craft would be ripped apart. It didn’t matter; his fate was the same; however, it would happen; his time was nearly up.
As he watched more holes appear, he reflected on the moment he truly believed he had seen a god, touched a god. How he had convinced himself that he was special and knew something that no one else did, or perhaps many knew and wanted to keep a secret. His faith had failed him when it mattered, and his vanity and pride led him to this place and this fate. Here in the ring, it was a fitting way to die; at least now he could become part of the great ring, part of the story and like the mother moon, sacrifice himself for the greater good. He had been led astray by wild visions; he became a danger to others. Faith was what held society together. The rules that made life work gave hope and guidance, and he had forsaken it all for a moment of…
Suddenly, the capsule was glowing with bright, sparkling lights. Belin’s three-fingered hands turned gold and translucent in front of his eyes. His thorax followed, the light inside the disintegrating capsule growing brighter and brighter. All around him, rocks burst through the walls. Some are now passing straight through his increasingly transparent body. Belin’s vision was filled with golden glitter and sparkling light as his eyes, mouth, and brain became transparent; just as the capsule folded in on itself and would have crushed Belin instead, he serenely floated through its thin metal walls and ascended. The golden light of the ring was calling him home one last time.
He was one with the ring.
The ring was one with him.
Belin was surprised to find himself awake. He was even more surprised to find he had no arms or legs, but by far and away, the greatest surprise was the group of… well, gods, who were staring and pointing at him from across the bright, white and windowless room he found himself lying in. These gods were a similar shape to the god that touched him. They had the five fingers of gods, but they were much thinner, and their heads were tiny compared to the god in the ring. They had also shed their tails and seemed able to move freely in this white space within the ring.
The tallest of the Gods was shaking his tiny fur-covered head. Two translucent crystals held in place by wire covered its two dark, beady eyes. The god removed the crystals, wiped them with a cloth, and then replaced the contraption on its compact face.
Now his glasses were clean, Sergent Colin Bolinger could look in disgust at the mess in front of him. He knew it would be a tough gig teaching junior recruits the rudimentary mathematics and geometry required to perform basic teleportation. Still, he never expected it to be this difficult. Since they had begun circling this barren world and transporting the giant docile beetles that thrived on the rocky land below, they had yet to successfully bring one back and return it home without destroying it or large parts of the nests they lived in. He looked at the poor legless creature staring at him from the transporter floor. Its weird eyes swivelling around, its severed stumps waving in the air, trying to find purchase with claws, feet, or whatever they had that were no longer there. The large carapace rocked on the transporter floor as short squirts of a green blood-like fluid sprayed over the floor.
The young recruits laughed and joked, it was just a bit of fun for them but he would have to clean up this mess. Colin waved his students away as they crowded around the dying creature.
Belin stared into the god’s face. A tear filled one of his five eyes. He was right, after all. There were gods in the ring—real gods, gods you could touch, gods he could talk to, gods he could learn from, kind gods…
Colin stamped his foot hard in Belin’s face, which exploded over his boot. The young recruits screamed and ran away as Colin hopped on one foot, trying not to spread even more of the green blood over the white transporter room floor.
“Can someone get me a bucket and mop, please?”
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It was at that moment, with my head squashed against the vintage piss-infused flagstone that I fell in love with Delores Moon.
I didn’t tell her; it wasn’t the right moment. Instead, I enquired about some basic where, what, whys to help me better understand our current conjoined predicament. Apparently, there had been a meeting of some minor activist group (there are several hundred in Beb Al’Shroud), which had been gate-crashed by some heavily armed opponents of this aforementioned unknown movement. Their bullet-focused arguments against this particular theological position aroused the interest of the punch-hungry local Guards, who welcomed the distraction from traffic duty with their usual enthusiasm. In the end, Delores and I were the only two people the honour guard had found still moving in the destroyed Ben Nova Souk.
“But that doesn’t explain why I’m in a cell rather than a hospital bed eating Grapes.”
“What the f**k are grapes.”
I knew it wasn’t necessary, but a part of me loves explaining obscure Earth cultural references to anyone who will listen. Delores didn’t love to listen, preferring instead to kick a compact collection of my soft parts while repositioning her undergarments. The sudden oxygen impasse this created gave me a galaxy of sensations, including stars and a brief but total blackout.
When I came too for the second time in ten minutes, Delores and I were in a more customary side-by-side configuration on the bench/bed. The handcuffs clanking romantically on the metal frame between us.
“Sorry,” we said together. This cracked the first non-violent smile I had seen on her face since we met. It was a beautiful, if somewhat metallic, grin, her full-set titanium grill glinting in the harsh blue cell light.
“I don’t much like cocky mansplainers, but… I didn’t mean to black you out again.”
“I get that a lot!”
Her brow furrowed.
“I come from a high Oxy planet, which means down here it doesn’t take a lot to send me to sleep.”
She seemed satisfied with the explanation. It wasn’t 100 per cent true, but I hoped it would do.
“I’m Delores, Delores Moon.”
“Hi…I’m Bernard St Clare.”
I wanted her to say “The Bernard St Clare!” but she didn’t, so we sat silently, contemplating our parents’ naming choices. Until our internal ruminations were suddenly shattered by the external screams of a nearby prisoner as he became intimately acquainted with the sharp end of a minor law or two.
“We need to get out of here”, I stated obviously.
“No s**t”, she agreed. We clearly had a lot in common, which was a real positive, considering how I felt about her.
Until now, I knew I hadn’t come across as the most capable short-to-medium-term prospective partner. However, I was sure my expertise in escaping near-death situations would impress me.
“Have you got a hairpin?” I asked in a wry yet knowing way, popular with criminal types the solar system over. She responded with a look so shaven and beautiful at the same time that I was forced to adjust my zero-G compression pants to make some room.
“Are you finished?” she rolled her eyes, with just a hint of intrigue… probably.
“Okay, no hairpin. Have you got anything sharp and metal?”
She spat her grill at me so fast it bounced off my jaunty moustache and landed moist in my hand.
“I assume you don’t want this back?”
“If it’s a choice between grill or life, I choose life”.
God, she is hot.
What I did next is not for the faint-hearted, so if you are squeamish, jump ahead a couple of paragraphs… look for the word lubricant…
Thankfully, Delores had invested well in her dental ornament, which was as sharp as it was strong. I like to think she was impressed more than grossed out when I used her incisors to sever my left thumb from my hand.
“What the actual…” she thanked me as my now defunct thumb slopped to the floor. Her mouth remained open as I slid my reduced fist through the cuffs, thanks to a good squirt of red sauce for lubricant.
It didn’t stop bleeding. I offered up the blood-covered mouth knife.
“Are you f****n’ ill or something?” she spat whilst pulling away from me so fast she nearly banged her head on the ceiling.
“Cloth?” I whimpered.
Thankfully, she was a doer rather than a thinker. She tore the lower half off her shrapnel blouse, revealing a custom Hericulian Anti-Stab bra underneath.
“Nice bra”, I quipped as I wrapped the fabric around my mutilated hand, making a bloody glove.
“Don’t get creepy…” she snapped.
“Or handzey?’ I joked, waving my remaining four fingers.
My brutal act of denturation finally broke the ice, and she cracked a metal-free smile that I will never forget. Now, finally connected we took a moment to check out the cell.
“No windows.”
“No air vents or grates.”
Delores stood up so fast that I’m not proud to say I flinched in fear, but her energies were focused on our front door, which took the brunt of an elegant rattle-and-kick manoeuvre. The door rang like a Beadles bell, warning mourners that a twin box of tortured space heroes was getting delivered very soon.
“Worth a try,” she shrugged.
“Worth a try,” I smiled, “No obvious route out, so what’s left that can be moved or used?’
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A second scan culminated with us both staring at the still-warm throne in the corner.
I clapped my hands in that overly optimistic, “Let’s get a chivvy on” way, much loved by harassed mothers of toddlers the universe over, followed by a jovial “One way in, one way out!” for good measure.
Delores, wiped some inadvertant blood splats from her face and scowled at the nominated obstacle to our freedom. Perhaps hoping her furrowed face would have the same effect it would in any bar in the universe and make the toilet f**k off and leave her alone.
“Seriously?”
“It’s the only way,” I said.
“You’ve done this before?”
Big question. It made several assumptions that would be critical to address if our escaped-based romantic partnership was going to work. Firstly, the truthful answer is no, and as far as I’m aware, nobody has done this before. However, as a lover of all things vintage Earth, I had seen an ancient movie or two, and right now, a scene from a comedy called Trainspotting was forming the foundation of my plan.
“I know a guy; he told me about a guy who was in a cell with a guy…”
(I know, I’m lying… it’s a habit when I’m with a beautiful woman).
“Cut the crap.”
Poor choice of words, considering how this plan begins and ends!
“It’s only held down with a couple of bolts at the back”.
“What the f**k are you? A space plumber?”
This hurt my feelings a little. Firstly, it sounded like being a space plumber would be bad; Secondly, being a “space plumber” made no sense. You can’t plumb space; it’s a vacuum; why would you put a vacuum in pipes? Where is it going? Who’s it for? I’m a plumber who “works in space”, a very different beast. Again, I chose to hold my inner monologue in situ and went with wry smile number 5; it has a pleasing amount of teeth (and I knew she liked teeth) and, I like to think, it downplays the moustache which can come across as a little ostentatious in the wrong light. Toilets, from my professional experience, are always the wrong light for a moustache.
“Are you high or mad, or high and mad?”
AAAAAAAGH!
Another scream, followed by silence, then a worryingly enthusiastic round of applause from an appreciative audience at the torture two cells down, signified that our ticking clock was well and truly ticked. It was time for a fast-paced honesty bomb.
“Honestly, I’m bloody’ scared. I cut my thumb off in a moment of bravado. I have no idea how we are going to get out of here; I don’t want to go down the toilet, and I don’t want to die before we have made love. I am a plumber, but I specialise in cooling systems for Quantum Magnetic screw drives, which isn’t a lot of use anywhere that doesn’t have one! Still, I reckon if we rip the toilet out the ground, it will reveal a large s**t pipe that pours directly into the ocean - about two kilometres that way.” I stuck my arm out in a very definite northerly direction to emphasise my point… my bloody point.
Delores nodded slowly. She finally understood that this Bernard St Claire was about as much use in our current predicament as a tutu and pointe shoes. But as I was all she had, she was fully prepared to pas de turd down this shiny shitter with me.
We stood on either side of the throne and grabbed the slippery rim. I was about to comment on how it seemed to have retained some warmth from her recent visit, but Delores wasn’t about to wait for witticisms now that the plan had been hatched.
I’ll tell her later.
The toilet came away surprisingly quickly. The bolts had eroded with tens of years of nervously sprayed acidic piss, corroding them to ferrous needles in the concrete. Delores snatched the toilet from me (I was man enough not to resist; it’s good to share the load) and placed it carefully on the bed to avoid alerting our nearby jailers. Underneath the promised maw was, in fact, a shimmering defecation mound of unfeasible proportions extending from our cell into whatever was below.
“In my professional opinion, it appears to be blocked?” I offered.
Delores looked at me accusingly, like I had somehow expelled the s**t pile in secret last night. “Well, what part of my outfit will you be needing to get us through that pile of crap?”
I considered asking her how attached she was to her magnificent knee-high quad-buckled Dovian combat boots, but I thought better of it. This one was going to have to be all mine.
“Stand back!” I exclaimed in the way commanders have done in wars since the dawn of bullets, just before leaping over the wall and drawing the enemy’s fire to save their troops from certain death. Delores rolled her eyes and promptly smashed her combat boot’s fully armoured hydraulic heel into the metal plate surrounding our fetid obstacle. The plate obediently leapt into the air and hovered conveniently in front of her to catch. In the twenty minutes I had known her, she had never looked as hot as she did holding that dripping s**t tray, awaiting my next move.
“Are you going to help with this escape, or is your plan to simply point at things and watch me work?”
“In fairness, that…” I waved my blood glove at her boot, “… was precisely what I was going to do, apart from the catch, for obvious reasons”.
Delores smiled. “Let’s go, plumber boy.” Before I had a chance to object, she grabbed my soggy severed paw and threw the metal plate into the air before leaping up, landing feet first on her improvised surfboard before sliding down excrement Everest. I swung my good arm around just in time to grab her wrist; unfortunately, the momentum wasn’t quite enough to keep me above the pile of poo.
“Dig your heels in like you’re sole surfing…” she screamed as the physics of our situation kicked in.
‘What the f**k is sole surfing..?’ Is what I wanted to say, but I chose to put a pin in it as the enormity of our predicament became apparent.
Surfing about fifty clicks a minute down a mountain of shite is one thing, but to do this under the Viceroy’s palace with only random shafts of light to mark the route through the dung mountains, along faecal valleys, to find an exit we don’t even know exists, was undoubtedly a rush! The first adventure of Delores Moon and Bernard St. Clare was, no matter how hard we tried, going to end in a massive dump.
We hit the towering stone foundations about a minute later. Delores was able to throw out an arm to cushion the blow, but I had no hands left that weren’t already holding on for dear life. The sudden change in direction slammed me into the wall… where a millennia of lubri-crap aided my smooth transit along its surface. The ancient stool spray peppered my face like so much moist shrapnel.
I wanted to scream but knew that would involve opening a front door in my face and inviting a lot of unwanted guests in who would likely delight in killing me slowly from a million forgotten germs and probably some new ones desperate to escape their shitty incubator.
Delores was taking our predicament in her usual (as far as I could tell from the twenty three minutes we had spent together), stoic, methodical, and beautifully violent way. She leaned forward on the metal plate, steering it carefully away from the wall, the front tip grazing some ancient stonework and briefly showering the excrement sea with bright sparks. This was either a massive mistake or an absolute stroke of genius. Either way, the results were… explosive. The thing with millions of tonnes of human waste is it just loves to rot, and even a Plumber who works in space and has only a rudimentary understanding of chemistry can do that equation;
Rot = methane, methane + spark = BOOM!
The fireball rolled away from us initially, illuminating our transit with an angry red light. We were hurtling through a vaulted cathedral of cack, careening down a cavernous valley containing hundreds of years of evacuated overeating and torture-induced diarrhoea. Delores turned to look at me, her eyes wide, grinning. Her face lit up red and orange from the enormous, angry methane ball now bearing down on us at an alarming rate.
She was f*****g loving this!
As I have mentioned before, Delores is a woman of action, and once again, she didn’t let me down. Flexing the mighty arm, I was clinging to, muscles bulging to breaking point, she fought against the forces of the universe that were intent on separating us. As she pulled me close, we wrapped our arms around each other. She adjusted her feet position on the metal plate and tucked down to increase our speed. Clinging like a baby marsupial plumber to her designer warrior bra, I could see the all-consuming end-of-the-world moment about ten metres behind us. I was not fond of that perspective, so I dropped my head and viewed our future prospects upside down.
Ahead, the cavern’s end was a barrier of ancient stone animated with a projection of reds and oranges. This was not how I thought my life would end. In truth, if anyone in the whole universe seriously thought this was how their life would end, I would suggest there aren’t enough therapists in the solar system to fix that head.
“NO WAY OUT!” I screamed. Unhelpful, I know, but I felt I needed to offer my thoughts on the matter even though they were nothing more than the primal scream of a dead man sliding.
Delores, fully concentrating on steering our sliver of a vehicle across the valley of poop, chose not to respond. I took this to mean she had a plan more advanced than crashing into the slabs and saving us both from the pleasure of the impeding BBQ by smashing our skulls to oblivion. I was wrong.
As the blast wave reached us ahead of the heat, we accelerated to speeds no man should ever travel without a large amount of metal, straps, and a helmet!
“WAAAAALLL!”
As the rolling firewall’s Fahrenheit ferocity hit us, we hit the wall. Thankfully, the blast wave, which had passed us just a fraction of a second before, had done a fantastic job of removing the mortar and freeing the stones from their ancient prison. The wall bulged away from us, and we seamlessly transitioned from surfing a wave of fast-cooking faeces to traversing a tumbling jumble of exploding stones.
Delores lifted my head and looked hard into my eyes as we flew through the air. I could see clearly what she felt; I felt it, too. If we were going to die right now, thank god we had managed to spend this precious time together.
“I’m going to f****n’ kill you if we survive this,” she whispered playfully just before, for the third time that day, I blacked out.
When I came to the ground around me was bouncing up and down in an alarming fashion. I closed my eyes, hoping it would think twice about the blatant disregard for normality, but upon opening them again, I was bitterly disappointed.
“Stop it!” I shouted at the ground, and weirdly, this seemed to do the job, although, for some inexplicable reason, I found the ground hurtling towards me to give me a swift slap. As I lay there kissing the dirt, a recognisable s**t-covered boot slid under my aching ribs and rolled me over. The stars were out tonight. I could see stars!! Actual stars, not the weird flashing head stars I had been seeing for the last half hour due to the dangerous concussion I was struggling to recover from.
“Can you walk?” said the sky.
“Are my legs still there?”
“Yes,” the sky was smiling a toothy smile.
“Delores?”
Delores grabbed my arm, avoiding the dusty, crusted improvised bandage hanging off my lesser hand like a vine on a branch. She pulled me upright and held my shoulders while I sent pleading messages to my legs to behave.
“You okay, space plumber?”
“Bernard is fine.”
“Don’t talk in the first person, it’s weird.”
I shook my head again, trying to figure out what that meant. “No, I meant…”
“I know dumb arse. We can do the name thing after the sex thing, which won’t happen until we find a spaceship and finish the escape thing… right?”
You can say what you like about the primal nature of men and their very bassist of instincts, but a promise of intercourse will snap you back to full consciousness faster than two adrenalin shots after an espresso enema.
“Around the front of the palace is the Viceroy’s private spaceport. He has an Elongi Special in there…”
Delores was noticeably impressed by my knowledge of the Viceroy’s personal fleet.
“Sounds like a sex toy!”
“Well, it’s sexy as f**k, and has a Quantum Magnetic Screw Drive… I rebuilt the cooling system yesterday; that’s why I was on this s**t hole of a planet.”
“You see..”She said, squeezing my shoulders hard and lifting me a few inches off the ground. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t kill you when you were asleep.”
That’s real love; even when your partner annoys you, you resist smothering them as they sleep.
We stumble-ran across the open courtyard. Around us, the palace was in chaos. The CACKophonous explosion caused a large portion of the retaining wall to stop retaining and start releasing. The upshot of which was a massive hole in the side of the central keep and a slow-motion tsunami of vintage excreta sliding inexorably toward the Viceroy’s living quarters. Anyone who wasn’t running away from the wall of waste was dragging, throwing, dropping and pushing anything they could get their hands on to slow the tide. It wasn’t working. But it was the perfect cover for our escape.
A hop (over an elctroe-fence), skip (across a loading gantry beam) and a jump (into the starboard air intake vent) brings us right up to date, with me lying on my back with my pliers in my teeth and a wrench in my hand - like all good plumbers who work in space should be.
“Once I get her started, this beauty can take us anywhere in the universe,” I proclaimed excitedly as I pulled out yet another loom of wires from the launch control panel.
“Baby, you and I don’t have enough time to see all the sights of the universe,” Delores dismissed…
“Well, you’re going have to pick your top ten then because…” I paused dramatically as I flicked the blue wire across the red wire, just like every grand theft auto specialist has since cars began. Thankfully this time, the Screw Drive spun up. “…we are about to have a whole universe to choose from.”
“With a lot of angry royal guards on our tail?
I lifted myself up from the floor and flicked a switch, bringing the drive and navigator seats back to the control desk.
“It wouldn’t be a proper adventure if we didn’t piss someone off,” I quipped as Delores and I dropped into the empty seats in perfect synchronicity.
Delores looked at me long and hard. She told me later she was weighing up the relative merits of killing me or accepting the inevitable and allowing me to be her lover… until she decided to kill me. This was Delores’s way, unique in the universe, but that’s why I love her.
She smiled a full, grill-free grin.” okay, space plumber, why don’t you take Delores to the moon and back!”
I wonder how long she had waited to say that.
“Any particular moon?” I inquired as I disengaged the landing clamps, guided the pointy end towards the fast-closing launch bay doors and held my hand teasingly over the big red launch control button.
“All of them!” laughed Delores and slammed her hand onto mine, blasting us into the inky blackness of space to begin the next adventure of Delores Moon and Bernard St Clare.
This story is also available on Royal Road - "https://www.royalroad.com/profile/613671/fictions"
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“Have to stay connected to the heart!” he said, will say, I’m not sure.
“Don’t lose yourself in your head,” less space in the heart. That’s important.
Sorry… Start
now
London, Tuesday 17th December.
Stories should never start on a Tuesday, but don’t let that put you off – it’s just Tuesday, not the end of the world.
Except, of course…it is… was… for me.
It was a bright, clear Tuesday morning, fresh and crisp. The new air snapped in my lungs like Christmas crackers. That first cold breath of a new winter. The one you take when you step out of your door. The one that tells you Christmas is coming. Air to tell the time. Temperature to tell the time. I never realised everything told the time… before.
Before, when there was a before and an after.
Weird how little space Christmas took up in my head. Weirder how much space it takes up now.
Trees, Turkeys, people and presents…so many presents.
Sorry. It’s hard to stay focused. You must learn, retrain, retain, and reprogram to survive in space.
Hard to stay focused on one present.
Imagine a street with infinite houses in all directions. I mean, all of them, even the directions inside the directions. Inside, inside, and inside again, forever. Clocks and compasses fold in on themselves endlessly. Time is fractal. Is it?
No! Time is the exhaust fumes of a car called space, which runs on gravity.
Its Tuesday sorry!
This Tuesday morning, I stepped out of the tube station—it was my regular one -Piccadilly, the one with black statues above and gold trim below. There are tiles and tiles of white, blue, and red. The space inside is round, round like a… merry-go-round filled with people, not horses—everyone leaps into the whirlpool, gets spun around, and spat out onto the street under the black statues. The regular wash of routine and human traffic leaves a stain in space.
The statues above are black. I like them. They’re solid. Around them, the stains of people stretch thin. There is a hum here… I’m told that’s music—a deep resonating wave, unchanging yet constantly modulating. I can’t listen for long; my brain mourns what it’s lost. Music is hard to lose.
I like the tube stations. The round tunnels and tubes. They have permanence.
Built into the deepest foundations of London. They are spaces I recognise. The walls flicker and fade, tiles dissolving and reforming. The posters jitter, giving strange life to the people trapped selling toothpaste for all space. But the tunnels are solid. I can pass through them. It keeps me grounded in the bad spaces between the good ones.
Sorry. I’m Michael.
I’m Michael. I’m good at IT. Actually, that’s not true. To be good at something, you have to have passion, and by default, passion is something I was not programmed for; ironically, this probably saved my life. Passion drives emotions, which fill the heart, which lacks the space of the head and breaks easily.
I read science magazines for fun. Again, this was probably at the root of my survival. I hate sports except for an irrational love of Manchester United, which I have frequently tried to give up, but when I was small, I needed something to care about, and that sufficed. It's amazing what we fill the spaces in our minds with without even knowing.
Now I know.
There is so much space in there filled with so much junk. We are all hoarders. People can’t stand the echoes from the space in our heads. That’s what drives us. Cats, dogs, and dolphins all luxuriate with the space inside their heads. They float around in it, celebrating the joy of empty shelves. They aren’t driven to fill them with…. things.
I work, worked… in a Private Equity Firm in London. I do, did statistical analysis. That’s not true; nobody does statistical analysis. I make computers do statistical analysis. I force numbers down their throats until they spew out the right information, like numerical Fois Gras. If people understood what information really is, they would be as outraged by the sight of a bloated hard drive as they are at a goose’s liver.
Sorry it feels important to say be gentle with information.
I’m Michael Perdita; I force-feed computers information, then get paid to keep them alive. I used to.
In my office, I’m the guy who tells everyone to switch it off and then back on again. Not because it’s my job, that’s Ian, but nobody likes Ian. He’s cultivated an air of such disdain and disregard around himself that someone scratched out most of the word support from his office door, so it reads Ian FSuckson IT …….t .
They may have focused harder to get the spelling right if they only knew how permanent that was.
Maybe I’ll fix it when I’m in that space.
Maybe I already have.
If my last name was Suckson, I would have become a teen suicide statistic… Ian is, was, hard. I lost my surname… it wasn’t Suckson. I wouldn’t have survived that.
I was on my way to the office. I had just got off the train, the underground train. Piccadilly with the tiles…up the escalators, to the black statues, in the street.
Outside in the street, the people were bustling and charging along their paths towards their destination. Briefcases and bags, shopping… who shops at 08:42 am? The clock on the massive screen tells me it’s 08:42 am - I remember thinking, “Who shops at 08:42 am?” She was laden down with bags from a shop with a blue logo, a cold blue on brown - colours stay, words do too, but only in books because books sit for a while in one space. Bags travel then disappear- I could find out which shop, but then I would have to retrace my movements and follow hers. Her with the bags, remember, who shops at 08:42 am?
I don’t know who she is, was, or will be, but she is the last face I saw, so she’s burnt into my mind - our paths crossed. Our paths collided. It’s all of a blur. Her bags with the blue logo blur as they flew, fly, flown upwards and sideways, backwards and forwards all at the same… time. As I tried to sidestep, I accidentally passed through her leg, which was trailing behind her. I could see it turn a corner; it went for miles. A spaghetti leg that, if I followed it would take me all the way to her breakfast.
Too fast, slow down; you need to understand the moment.
This moment, my last, or first or just another of the many that I was pre-destined to experience, happened at 08:42 am in London on December 17th… Tuesday. F****n Tuesday.
Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday.
She was, is, and always will be middle-aged. Blonde, attractive, in a busy way, a way I always liked. There was something pleasantly angular about her; if we had met under normal temporal conditions, it’s safe to say I would have fancied her. Or it's safe to say, as she is the last woman I have ever seen, I have grown to fancy her. She has grown in my mind; she has a special place in my heart. It’s safe to say she would have ignored me.
I am bland in a new house magnolia, choose from one of these three options for your unique kitchen experience kind of way. I am part of the masses, the great unnoticed. The invisible millions who make up the non-player-characters of the world. We blend in and spread out, staining the world off-white with our vanilla snail trails of apathetic banality. That’s why she didn’t see me.
That’s why we collided.
I apologised in the way Englishmen do—some Englishmen did—without thinking, like the apology was in front of the thought; it left the mouth long before the rational understanding or conception of the incident formed in my brain. I read in a magazine that your brain can 3D scan a space before your eyes have registered the objects within it. In the same way, an Englishman will issue an apology before the incident has finished. It’s a scientific fact.
It’s called an autonomic reaction. It’s more autonomic to an Englishman than breathing. I didn’t know this … but now I do.
It's programmed into us by parents (from my experience, the more northern, the higher the sensitivity) who always apologised to their parents for never quite achieving everything their parents didn’t achieve for themselves. From where I am, it looks like so much wasted energy. But that is now, this was then, or maybe it’s the other way around and I hadn’t learned anything yet.
I turned, and the woman was already moving away, her arms flaying around, like propellors on a plane, painting the air with colours, yellow from her bright, bright coat, brown and blue from the bags…where are those bags from? I remember something… I watched, fascinated. Had I ever done Hallucinogen’s, I would have recognised this: the distillation of photons through space causing trails. But I wasn’t that kind of a Michael; very few of us are.
The sensation of being disconnected hit me like a whip. One second, millisecond, nanosecond … is it weird that inside each second is an infinite amount of time… divisible for an infinite amount of … whatever you want to call them.. infi-seconds. It’s not something that ever bothered me… now… some…times it's all I can think about.
I have so much space to think now. That moment of disconnection was, on reflection, my true birth into this new…space.
I am disconnected.
Around me, the world was blurring forward. Backwards, it was a blur, whilst also being stationary. A trail of light in the air like breath… which was, in fact, a trail of light in the air stretching backwards to the station with the statues… Focus.
I tried to stand and succeeded easily. Which surprised me; I was clearly concussed. I had hit this woman who was shopping at 08:42 am and been knocked to the ground. I turned my head and waited for someone to grab my shoulders; in that way, I remember people do…did, in films. When they fall to the ground, someone grabs their shoulders. It’s an anchor; they hold onto you, and you onto them. Together, you slide through time, entwined briefly, and then they release you when the spinning has stopped. When your eyes can catch up with your mind, they release you, and you are still… in time, together. But nobody came.
Nobody…well somebody… but nobody …
He was a…Tailor, I didn’t know how I knew, but instantly, the name was in my mind like it had always been there. I could no longer imagine a time when I didn’t know who he was. I tried to work around it, to remember when I knew, when I had learned, but the truth was I had always known, and that was immovable in my mind. The Tailor filled a space; it was his space, and it was inside my head and outside of my body and everywhere.
He stood in front of me, mostly. His presence was more in front of me than anywhere else, but it was also clear where he had been and where he was going. I could see the vague impression of him, a ghost, arriving and departing even as he looked at me. He said nothing; he had all the space in the world to wait for me to catch up. His long grey jacket fluttered in a breeze that wasn’t there. It evoked something Victorian in its cut, but equally, it could have been a heavy woollen trench coat or a light silk French frock coat. It was, like him, shifting in space, settling and reforming. He was clean-shaven and had a full beard simultaneously. His face was one of the things that took the most getting used to. Faces, in general, had always been difficult for me to look at.
I was an averter. I could avert so fast that a face would barely register with me. I found the world to be a more manageable place, that way.
His face was contorting, transforming, blending. His whole body was flickering.
If I blinked, I could capture him as an eleven-year-old boy, a fifty-year-old man, a spotty nineteen-year-old maybe, hard to tell… he would look good for his age… if that meant anything here. He had the face of everyone and nobody all at once. But there was kindness and concern in the features. He was not a threat, I knew that.
The only thing that stayed the same was his eyes. Our eyes locked, the world went still. Suddenly, his voice was in my ears. It felt invasive, like he had pushed the words into my head and force-fed them to me—words like Corn. My brain, just so much, Fois Gras. Information… be gentle with me. The words came again, making my eyes vibrate. This time, however, I understood them.
“It’s easier if you look at my eyes.”
He wasn’t wrong. I focused on his eyes, and I saw they were constant; apart from a flash of blue, they were hazel, sharp, intense, and kind. The rest of him became peripheral. Over time, no… in space, I learnt to see them better, but it was hard to hang out with a Tailor for more than a few… well, I have no idea… but I kept our space together limited; the headaches are a b***h and getting a whole headache pill is more luck than judgement.
“Munuphle..bf..u..klgh…”
I tried to talk, but my mouth didn’t work properly and the sound got caught up in my throat. Like a ball of chewing gum, it filled the back of my throat, blocking it. I couldn’t breathe… it occurred to me I had no idea if I had breathed since I bumped into the woman, but right now, I was positive I couldn’t breathe. Instead, I panicked. Filling my throat with more sound gum.
“Naa..glar..ack..cufk..”
Rolling noises that knotted my windpipe and restricted it. I was definitely not breathing, and I couldn’t scream or make more sounds for fear of drowning in my fear as it filled my mouth, throat, my lungs… The tailor struck me with a sharp blow in my stomach.
The sound fell from my mouth and dissipated immediately, spreading backwards like Ink in a fast-running stream, stretching away from me. A single tone rang clear momentarily, but the Tailor swiftly, expertly… swept it away, leaving an empty space that he stitched deftly with one hand.
The Tailor held up a finger as I was about to speak again.
The universality of a raised finger for silence, a point of order, or to gain attention has never been appreciated more by anyone than me in that… moment. In that space. I knew that now was a space for listening, not panic. My focus was aided, of course, by the not-inconsiderable pain from the sharp blow to my stomach.
I forgot to say… I forget to say it often… so bear with me. I don’t remember seeing the tailor move when he struck me if he had struck me at all. There was just a … time when I was unpunched, before punched, BP if you like, then a time after punched, with no real sense where one began and the other ended. The deft stitching, the tear in space…and the punch all occurred, but I could not tell you in what order.
“Look at my eyes.”
I looked hard into the eyes of a Tailor. They were sharp, intense, and kind, but most importantly, they were Immutable and permanent in a world that felt like it was endlessly expanding and contracting. His voice was like no sound I had ever heard because I felt it, like a physical object, rather than sensing it through my ears. The sound came all at once, neatly wrapped, tightly bound. It has to be that way. Otherwise, your words dissipate in space.
“Breathe… slowly.”
I focused on the only thing that made sense to my brain. The phrase fragile grip on reality was invented for just this situation. No other situation would come close to how unflinchingly fragile this grip truly was. On reflection, as an afterthought, or perhaps a premonition, his choice of words was purely to help with my acclimatisation; obviously, the speed of my breathing is irrelevant when the speed of everything is irrelevant.
“Focus. Breathe”
I dug deep into my animal brain. I needed to jump-start my amygdala, the primal core of whatever quantum biotech we have rattling around inside our skulls. Sorry, when you have time to think… when you have space to think when your think-space is so large…, then you do a lot of thinking about whatever you like. But what I have learned in my space is that at the root of all of us is a… bios… a set of information that is core to our perception of a set of rules and space… things… sorry, it made more sense when I was coming up with it later… anyway the point is. Deep down there is a bit of you that can figure just about anything out. It can change the program. The fundamentals, if you let it. Or you die, choking to death on your own, accumulating soundwaves in space. Given the choice, I chose to crash the system, unplug and reboot. Had I known it was so hard to reconnect, maybe I wouldn’t have done that. Weirdly, as soon as I did, I knew the truth, but that was, is the irony of this whole situation—the unwavering massive enormity of knowing everything, when you need it.
The Tailor snapped into focus as a spotty teenager. I was so surprised. I blinked, and he was 45 with a good beard that had just started to go grey. I focused on holding my eyes open.
“Eventually, you will be able to hold me as you wish to see me. It comes with… space to practice”.
I was about to reply when he flicked up his suddenly old, gnarled finger. The surprisingly yellow nail caught my eye. Did he smoke? Had he just raised it, or was it always there, just waiting for me to see it?
“Get the breathing right. Your lungs are a space, and the air is more space. Just put one inside the other, like a box, inside a box, inside a box.”
I frowned at him. So much to unpack in one sentence. I had been here for many… minutes at least… I knew that… so much had happened. One breath… it made no sense.
I chose not to follow that thought. Making sense was a luxury item around here.
Snap... Sorry!
“Take as much space as you need,” said the toddler in front of me, wearing shorts and a cute T-shirt depicting a robot making pizza.
A robot…programmed … to make pizza?
When I was a boy, I am a boy. I had a dream that when I was a man, I am a man, I would open a restaurant where Robots would make Pizza. I drew pictures of it. I hung them in my room. I stuck them to my bedroom walls with blu-tack. They left tiny grease stains on the paint, which offended my parents so much that they destroyed three years of creative endeavour and threw away my paper dreams so we wouldn't be embarrassed when my Auntie visited at Christmas. The great re-paint took less than a day. Auntie never came into my room. The family was suitably unembarrassed. Now, I work in IT and have never programmed a robot or even made a pizza. Dreams are just as fragile as reality. Paper dreams, paper-thin reality.
The edge of the world went dark.
My face stung.
The Tailor slapped me. My face stung and unstung; it had always been slapped and not slapped.
Snap… Sorry!
“Hey! Follow my hands.”
It stung. I watched him slap me.
“Back in the room”
“Follow my hands”.
He watched me carefully, our eyes locked together. His hands, attached traditional style to his arms, flickered from tiny and thin to muscular to thin and back to tiny, conducting my lungs. As he raised his old gnarly, pale, strong, soft, delicate small hands, my lungs filled their space and emptied them.
“Good. Again…”
Old hands, up… space filled…. Young hands down…. Space emptied.
“Good. Again…”
Baby hands, up… space filled…. man hands down…. Space emptied.
The programming was rewritten, and new functions were imprinted. We sat together in an ever-expanding world, and I learned to move space with my body. To move my body in space.
The Tailor smiled. I blinked and caught him at around 42. I liked this; it was … older than me… but not so old that I felt disconnected from him. He felt right for me in this space. I needed the reassurance of someone with more experience than me; the toddler in the T-shirt didn’t work at all.
My body felt more controlled. I checked in. Nothing was hurting now. Years of being bullied had taught me that any day that ended with nothing hurting was probably fine. From experience, it's extraordinary how many viable options there are for hurt compared to a non-hurting situation. Equally, it's extraordinary that a non-hurting situation occurs at all when you consider the way the world is, actually is, deep down, in between the cracks in between the cracks. There is so much stuff there!
This was, by de facto, a good day then, despite the visual stimulus to the contrary. I looked at my hands. They were flickering. Not dramatically like the Tailors, it was subtle, just at the edges. As if they were resting on top of my mum’s old twin tub (that’s a washing machine), it had a spinner next to a top-loading washing machine and a pipe that went into the sink. It was an extraordinary contraption, squat, loud and angry, like my mother.
Snap… Sorry!
“What has been done to you is unfortunate, but it is what it is. I can assure you it was not supposed to happen. It was unplanned, so be assured that there isn’t a nefarious plot against you…”
Up until then I had not considered this to be a possibility. Now it seemed obvious that I was at the centre of some multi-dimensional struggle between good and evil.. Tailors?
“…so be assured that there isn’t a nefarious plot against you… and you haven’t accidentally endangered civilisation, yours or mine.”
I had never considered the human race as my civilisation. I had always felt distant and removed from the rest of the world, partly by my choice but mostly by theirs. What would they all think now that I was basically an ambassador for the Time people in the world of space? That would be a very shitty title for a book.
Had the tailor paused, or had he just continued talking, moving sound through space? However he did it, it worked; I could run off on thought tangents and still hear every word he said.
“No, this was an accident, like being struck by a… thing… from your world that travels…red, big… yes?” He smiles expectantly at me, waiting for… I nod. He was waiting for a nod. He maybe wanted me to say the bus, but I was fearful this would involve the ejaculation of most of my intestines by accident; I held back.
I nod. This seems to reassure him that I understand anything that has happened to me in the last… I have no idea how to measure …because I have no frame of reference to measure… whatever it is against. Before I am tempted to vomit up a question, the Tailor continues.
“You were caught in a battle between me and another Tailor. She is angry at me, and this…” his arms turn into wheels attached to his torso as he indicated, everything, then settle back into their more traditional form. “…and you, well, you are the consequences of her anger, her actions. She swung her shears at me, I dodged, and she split the fabric of time. A tear must be stitched up; that is a Tailor's function, and that is what I did.” The Tailor appeared to look around and shifted uneasily. Like he was afraid he was being watched, or he knew he was being watched and felt the need to assert that he had done everything he could to fix the problem. He was a good Tailor; there was no need for Mummy to be angry.
“However, now it’s stitched up, your place in time has disappeared…”
I open my mouth. Again, he extends his finger to stop me from speaking before I open my mouth; perhaps it was always extended.
“Not yet. Breathe some more. Moving sound through space is harder than moving air, although it is the same principle. I will try to explain as best I can; however, I am not a creature of time, so my explanations are likely to be more confusing than helpful. But I know you will get the hang of this. You were doing well the last place I saw you.” The Tailor smiled again.
His smile was reassuring when I held his face still. It felt less reassuring when it was the smile of a child or baby. A baby should never smile with so much knowledge.
I focused on holding the Tailor in my mind, looking into his eyes at 38…42…somewhere around there. My head was aching. Deep inside my cavernous brain, the ancient animal was so busy focusing on what it does best, (keeping this lump of meat alive long enough to decide if keeping me alive was the right course of action) it was struggling to process anything additional like functioning eyes. Simultaneously, some other long-dormant part of my brain was trying to figure its way through the twisted tenses of my current (if that is the correct tense) predicament. I was trapped in an English grammar nightmare!
We sat in that space until it wasn’t silent, which is when I spoke. I wasn’t speaking, and then I was; there was no difference between the two states except they were diametrically opposed, but both possible states at any…place.
“I’m Michael” I managed.
The Tailor was pleased, in a knowing way. He knew I would speak, and he knew I was Michael. He has spoken to me somewhere else, in another part of his world, no universe.
“Hello, Michael. I’m a Tailor…for simplicity, we don’t have names.”
His words found a soft landing in my brain. They nestled down to soak in as I tried to understand everything the statement revealed… about this place I was in.
Everything he said felt like it had already been said; it was being said and not being said simultaneously—always there, yet never there. Everything fitted perfectly into a space waiting to receive it—inside my brain, inside my skull, inside London, inside the world, the universe, and beyond. The air fitted the space in my lungs; the words fitted the space in my brain.
Each piece making the whole, wholer? See, grammar!
He watched me process the sensations; it’s easy to watch when you are not in a hurry. The Tailor was not in a hurry. He was not waiting; he was moving on and staying still. He was here, and he had gone, and he would arrive very soon, all at once. I knew all of this as soon as I thought about it. I knew it like it had always been there. I never got used to that until I did.
“Where…am…I?”
This standard survivor’s question has served mankind studiously for thousands of years. Many shipwrecked souls have found safe lodging by a warm fire with stories using these words. This is, of course, a hugely naive worldview born out of the dumb luck of being born at a certain place in a certain… place. I shake my head; I can’t focus or track a thought; too much input; something isn’t working any more like a cog has come loose. Something fundamental in my programming, something basic.
The Tailor shifts uneasily, which is frustrating because he is constantly shifting uneasily, and it is taking all my concentration to hold him at a constant appearance in this space.
“You are exactly where you were before you were here. Precisely, no further…for-ward… or back-ward”
He was trying on the words for size.
“For-ward or back-ward”.
He said them like words he had heard his older brother use to get free drinks in a bar but had no idea what they meant or how I would respond to them. I frowned. In fairness to the Tailor, he took my reaction well. He was happy to guide me through this, whatever this was. It was clear he felt bad about what had happened. I knew he would say it, maybe he already had, someplace else. He felt bad, probably a lot worse than I would expect him to feel unless I somehow understood the gravity of my situation in so far as the whole, stuck here for the rest of space issue, which I didn’t.
What? Something missing… a measurement….
What?
Again, like a line of code had been deleted somewhere deep inside my head. Something was missing.
I closed my eyes, reducing my overloaded brain's input. I needed to focus. I needed to formulate a question to… help before the Tailor moved on and left this space.
Left this space…what does that even mean?
I opened my eyes. The Tailor was still there, mostly. He was shifting form casually like it was more effort not to… which it probably is. Why else would all versions of you occupy the same space simultaneously? As the thought entered my mind, the Tailor smiled and nodded. He knew as soon as I knew because he knew I would know here.
I forced myself to focus hard. I had to ask a question; I needed to know.
“What time is it?”
The question wasn’t the one I was hoping for but it was the one my brain felt needed answering.
The Tailor looked blank as if I had just spoken Finnish in a Spanish oral exam.
It just occurred to me the Tailor spoke in English. On reflection, this was far from a given; again, it's just an assumption because where I …exited from and where I arrived are so geographically similar… but in truth, about as far apart as two things can be. I mention this should you find yourself here and you choose to reply. English works.
“What time is it?”
Unless you ask this question, as there is no answer to this question here, not in English, German, or Maths, the question is meaningless. Time does not exist here.
The Tailor smiled many smiles. It was his preferred method of reassurance.
“I can explain,” he offered.
I considered that the right response here was to ask him not to, that, in some way, ignorance would make this situation easier. It’s plausible that the more I understood the place I was in, the less likely it was that I could get out. My very human desire for blissful ignorance to keep the status quo undefined was almost as real as the smears of human existence spiralling around me.
What was it, he said. A tear that needed to be repaired. A space where I was but was no more. My brain registered the words again, as it had known them all along and just heard them for the first… time.
Time.
“A tear in… what?”
In the fabric of time. A tear that needed to be fixed. A tear made by a Tailor’s angry girlfriend that somehow severed my connection with London at 08:42 am on the 17th of December, Tuesday…
“I can explain,” he offered.
I accepted with a nod and immediately offered my own ill-thought-out explanation… “Time does not exist?”
The Tailor flickered, confused.
“In simple terms, the fabric of space protects us from the flow of Time; I’m a Tailor…” he responded.
“A Time Tailor?” I postured, hopefully.
He furrowed his many brows. For a moment, I lost my mental grip on him, and he flickered quickly between a disgustingly handsome 28-year-old and a tired but well-lived-in 70-year-old before settling again at a disappointed 42.
“I can explain; please, let me explain.” He had a gentle patience about him. I wasn’t used to people being patient. In the… other world… patience comes at a cost. Time is a currency we all deal in. We work to buy time, we spend time working to buy time… not working. Here, that currency has no value. Patience is free.
I accepted with a nod. I overrode my very male urge to show how clever I was and how I had already figured out the problem. Resisting the need to assert to the only person I had met who knew more about this situation than I did because it was their reality, not mine. I have always been the cleverest in the room. I thought this would bring me joy and companionship. But it seemed to do the opposite. People don’t want facts; they are far more interested in the people who know what to do with the facts. The kind of creative mind that can take two ideas and come up with a third, fourth, or fifth. My brain never worked like that… never… until now. Now, I feel unshackled. Ideas loading as fast as I can think, unbidden, converging and combining. The sensation of freedom, freedom of thought, is extraordinary. Imagine never experiencing this… I just did.
I reprogrammed my brain and managed a second, more definite nod. Or that may have been my first nod. So, I added a third for good measure.
Three nods, only the order was unclear; the message was not.
“I’m a Tailor. I repair the fabric of space so time may pass over it. Space undulates, moves, expands, and contracts, bending and stretching time. We are in space but outside of time. Here…” he moved his arms in a theatrical blur. I waited until all of his arms arrived back together before nodding… ‘Here, you move freely, untroubled by the flow of time, protected by the fabric of space.’
The way he said space made it feel like the whole world. It was everything. I suddenly felt the unlimited connectedness of it all. I explored using the words unlimited connectedness for the first time.
“Space is infinite?”
The Tailor gave a knowing smile like a schoolteacher confronted with a question from a precocious 7-year-old that was outside the curriculum by about twenty years. The Tailor was very good at moving with his responses; he spoke physically as much as he spoke with words. Considering how difficult it is to move sound in space, this was not a surprise. He had the physicality of a mime artist or a street dancer. He was all flow, everywhere. It was mesmerising to watch.
“Time does not exist here?”
The Tailor considered this for, well, a measurement of space, let's say, three cubed.
“Better! Time does exist. In the same way, the sea exists in a submarine; you don’t want it rushing around inside the submarine… it's better on the outside, where it can’t drown you in all its… big wetness”.
He lost me. My brain tried to grasp everything and failed. I felt nauseous, elated and lost all at once.
It’s hard to follow a train of thought when separated from time. Have I mentioned that? If not, I’m sure I will.
My hands flickered; the many versions of me grew more intense as I occupied more space.
The Tailor was smiling patiently.
My brain caught up with my body.
Snap… Sorry!
“I’m going to be late for work…”
The Tailor responded with a face shrug—the kind where you push your cheeks upwards and your ears down. It has infinite meanings, but they all lead to the same place. It means the same everywhere. Whatever you just said that elicited the face shrug is not relevant to your current situation and should be disregarded and replaced with a more important and urgent question before I, the shrugger of faces, leave.
“Work doesn’t exist?”
“Work as you know it exists out there. Here, work has no beginning or end; it’s real but occupies space, not time. I travel to work.”
“I don’t need to go to work?”
“No, but you may find it helpful to find something to do, to fill the space.”
The way everything was measured in space, not time, felt both obvious and completely surreal. How does one find something to fill the space of the entire universe? What kind of roles are available in space for a disgruntled IT supervisor? How do you even find a job? You search for it… it will be exactly where you look. Once again, the knowledge fitted into the space only recently discovered. With the right question, in space you could always find the right answer. Time had been removed from the equation, and suddenly, everything was… relative.
It occurred to me, or had always been there, but was now in the correct space in my head for recollection that I was no longer part of the world I had been born in. I had disappeared from that time.
“I have disappeared from my time?’
The Tailor gave an encouraging look. He was keen for me to discover the truth for myself. It was part of my training. It was how I would learn to live here.
“I existed out there, but now I only exist in here. What will that look like out there?”
The Tailor considered the question. “There is no easy answer to that; this is theoretical as it's impossible to prove. The oldest of my kind, the original Tailor, they would say, you have exited time. That means all that knew you will never know you. You have vanished, forwards and backwards, in time. The space you once occupied, will occupy, has been filled by everything but you”.
Of all the things I had learned in this space, this was the strangest. To know that I still existed but also disappeared from existence was… mind-blowing. My body rejected the information as it cannoned around my brain, unable to find a space to rest. A searing pain shot across my eyes, and I tried to throw up. But I didn’t know how to move food out of the stomach space into the world space, so I retched hard, and blood splattered out of my nose.
Apparently, my nose knew how to move blood in space.
I dropped to my knees. My arms, my many arms, lifted my shimmering hands to grip my head. I was close to passing out.
The Tailor slid through space to me and gripped my hands. I wasn’t good with being touched. I had always found it too revealing. The weight of expectation that comes with a touch, to be followed by another, how long to hold, how quickly to let go. The rules were so opaque to me. I avoided being touched more than I avoided anything. The Tailor took my hands. His touch was firm and gentle; it tingled and fizzed; it went beyond my skin; it was inside the space between the space in my hands, in the atoms of my hands. Our atoms vibrated against each other. It was the most intimate of feelings. I had never felt so connected to anyone.
That might be the saddest thought of my life.
He gripped my hands. We were one.
“Focus, Michael, focus on my eyes”.
Focus. I tried to pull away, but the tailor's grip was strong and light—gentler than my mother’s… I don’t have a mother.
“I never existed?” I splutter. “Everything I did, everyone I knew, every moment, all gone”.
The Tailor’s focused eyes softened. He nodded. My body stopped straining; I relaxed and fell back on my heels. Kneeling in front of the Tailor who gently, firmly held my head.
He released me. I felt the change. I would never feel the same about being touched.
I took some space to reflect. I was never what you would call an active member of society. My existence had been one of minimal impact. I had parents; My mother was still alive, and my father had died when I was nineteen. Lung Cancer. It was a hard time for us; I got closer to my mother. We became reliant on each other. She cared for me, and I forgot to learn to care for myself. Now, how old am I? The numbers slipped through my mind like sand. The numbers mean nothing here.
“Focus on my eyes Micheal Perdita.”
He gave me my name.
“Who?”
“A new name for this new place. You’re a baby here; you must learn to crawl, walk, and talk. A new person should have a new name.”
My Father gave me a name… it’s lost, he’s lost, I’m lost. I searched hard, and it had gone. It was a name born in time. It had no place here. It was the same name he gave to my mother.
My mother.
My mother is all alone. Or she had another child, a brother or a sister. She wouldn’t feel the loss or the empty space I occupied. It had been filled by someone else. My invisible life is gone, if something can be gone that never existed. It's nothing but dreams now. It’s a relief, for me, for them, whoever it wasn’t, that I had never had a meaningful relationship and no kids.
Who’s it a relief, too, though; nobody I knew now knows they knew me!
“You have a name; you exist, just here rather than there.” He smiled reassuringly. “That’s better than dying.”
“Can I die?”
“Death and decay result from the flow of time over atoms. Here, time cannot touch you.”
Do you remember the moment you found out you were immortal? You can take it from me; it’s a big day, we’d probably send cards to each other. Happy Immortal Day, love Michael Perdita.
“I’m Immortal?”
“In a way, but only because time does not affect us here. You are omnipresent in space. All places, all at once. Everything exists; every moment of you exists, but only here,” he offers encouragingly.
“But time exists?’
He nods. “Yes and no. It's not real like you; there are no atoms of time; it’s the result of a complex interaction between gravity and space that becomes a very powerful force to beings like you. Tailors work hard to control it; we are charged with maintaining the smooth flow of… time. It's very dangerous stuff. It’s always trying to age things, sweep things away. We like everything to stay exactly where it should be.”
“But I can… no longer… be late…”
He nods more enthusiastically…
“Because… I am…”
The Tailor could see the penny dropping… in truth, he had been able to see it dropping since we began. The penny, the idea, the thought had left a stain on reality as clear as the brown bag. That’s the power of a Tailor. They have the… design… a blueprint for space. They know every fold and wrinkle, they move freely, smoothing, shearing, crimping, pleating, stitching, patching and pressing the fabric of space. A symbiotic relationship, perfectly balanced perfect… until… me.
“…stuck.”
“Yes, that’s unfortunately true. I will speak with the other Tailor; she has become edgy and erratic, and her work has suffered.”
“I have so many questions.”
“I can appreciate that, but I must go; I have work to do; the fabric of space is, as you are now aware, a fragile thing, and it must be tailored to fit.”
The Tailor stands as if this was enough of an explanation.
“How do I get back? Can you cut space again? Let me fall through and be on my way.”
The Tailor knew this question was coming.
“I have worried about this since I saw the tear and your fall. I have considered the problem for many square miles. And sadly, the answer is no. There is no way back into the flow of time. If I were to cut the fabric here and you placed your hand through the hole, it would… spaghettify into infinity before the rest of you could climb through. Time is moving at the speed of gravity; you would disintegrate…theoretically. The edge of space, where it meets the flow of time, is… a singularity. Also, it wouldn’t do for me to start cutting space without an approved pattern; where would we all end up then?”
“Oh!”
“I have to go.”
The Tailor stands and moves off. He’s still staring at me, but he’s also moving away. Many versions of him fold over the threads of the faded images crisscrossing the space around us.
I stand. The nausea is intense. My brain tries to create some four-dimensional sense out of this space with only three dimensions. I focus on moving my legs, and they spread across the space.
How do you describe the feeling of opening the space between the atoms of your body as easily as you might stretch the fingers of your hand? I expanded and flowed all at once. Sliding between the spaces between the spaces. I expect to wait for my atoms to catch up, but they are here and there all at once. I am moving and still, starting and stopping.
The information overload is intense, extraordinary, and magical. I have never been so aware of myself and my wholeness.
I appear instantly where the Tailor has arrived.
The Tailor looks up from his work, some fine cross stitch. He, the fabric of space, had worn thin. He was deftly crimping the two sides together to give it more strength. I have no idea how I knew that… it was just there.
“I moved!”
“How was that?” he asked casually, as if we had just bumped into each other.
“I moved; it was weird. Weird, good.”
“Good, a good start. Movement is very important in space.”
Accepting the fact that I could not rejoin time and, therefore, was stuck in space was surprisingly easy. Like everything here, the knowledge was both new and infinitely old. That’s obviously not the right description; my grammar is still very time-focused.
I was aware of everything whilst still unknowing about so much, until I asked the right questions. Space is all about the right questions. I had so many questions.
“What am I supposed to do here? How do I eat? Do you eat? Where do you live? Where can I live?”
Maybe too many questions.
“If you think about it, you already have the answers. You already know everything you need to know”.
And he was right.
My mind, the neurons in my brain, and the space between the neurons in my brain were infinitely connected with the whole of space. I was as aware of far away as I was close, so infinitely close. I was connected across Quantum and relative space. By removing time, Space and Gravity become the dominating forces, stretching infinitely – well almost, and containing all things, every particle and sister particle, every measure of energy and atom all present, fixed here—everything including me.
The Tailor smiled his knowing smile.
“You have a journey ahead of you. You have a whole universe to explore. You are unfettered from time, and you can travel freely through all of space.”
“I’m a god”.
The Tailor laughed. “Don’t let them hear you say that”.
Them hung in the air between for a moment. I was about to ask but I knew instantly that this was not a safe space for such talk. I would need to find… someone… a name…a purpose and a name.
Before my purpose was set by time, in time. Every day was sliced up into thinner and thinner slices of activity. Strung together to give a sense of purpose. A direction in time. Heading from A-B. Now my choices were infinite, my purpose infinite. No, that wasn’t true. My purpose was finite. I had a place in this space, as real as my place in the real world.
“I’m going to miss the real world”.
“What does that even mean? This is as real as any world. It’s so real you can reach out and touch it, feel it. You can understand it at a fundamental level by simply moving through it; all knowledge is yours for the taking”.
“I will miss people. I mean not in an interacting with them kind of way – but I did like to watch them; they had lives of such bizarre complexity. I found people to be very strange”.
“There are people here, Tailors and … others… better you learn about them for yourself. I am a being of space and have opinions about who is a waste of space or not. But you are free, a free man, in a free space. Nobody can take that away from you”.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a lot to take in, but, as he had explained, all of my knowledge was mine. If I wanted it, I just had to reach out and touch it. I lifted my hand and waved it through a streak of colour. My mind was filled with images of the inside of a dog, blood and lungs and a heart… The Tailor pulled my hand out.
His touch felt electric, solid but not solid; it fizzed on my skin.
“Go gently. Stroke, learn what everything is, try not to pass through, gently flow. Move through the spaces in between. Search for the voids and learn from the lines. It flows like a dance”.
He showed me how he moved. It was exactly like I imagined it would be. I could never move like that until I did. It was extraordinary.
The Tailor watched as I slid into the space beside him.
“You have limited abilities to affect things around you, but as you explore, you may find ways to express yourself into their world… I would start with words. Words are something from your old life that appear here. Words have a way of creating an impression across time. The books stay on a shelf. You can move the words… change the messages… it’s hard at first, but you have all the space in the universe to practice”.
“Start small.”
“Exactly”.
“And, do I eat?”
“Do you?”
Again, the knowledge was there instantly, occupying the space it had always occupied.
“No”.
The Tailor smiled. He liked smiling; it seemed to be something he had learnt somewhere, a way of dealing with… people.
“There are others like you.”
“I know,” I said, and I did.
I knew I was in the right space to set out and find… Katie.
