At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers. The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, called Massolit for short, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless. Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed first thing to a brightly painted stand with the sign: 'Beer and Soft Drinks.' Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty. 'Give us seltzer,' Berlioz asked. 'There is no seltzer,' the woman in the stand said, and for some reason became offended. 'Is there beer?' Homeless inquired in a rasping voice. 'Beer'll be delivered towards evening,' the woman replied. 'Then what is there?' asked Berlioz. 'Apricot soda, only warm,' said the woman. 'Well, let's have it, let's have it!...' The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber-shop. Having finished drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back to Bronnaya. Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Besides that, Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back. Berlioz glanced around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought: 'What's the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart's acting up...I'm overworked...Maybe it's time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk..." And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey's cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air...A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy. The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: 'This can't be!...' But, alas, it was, and the long see-through citizen was swaying before him to the left and to the right without touching the ground. Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, and the phantasm had dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle had popped out of his heart. 'Pah, the devil!' exclaimed the editor. 'You know, Ivan, I nearly had heatstroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination!...' He attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: 'Well, and so...', went on with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking. This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ. The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character of his poem (that is, Jesus) in very dark colours, but nevertheless the whole poem, in the editor's opinion, had to be written over again. And so the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the aim of underscoring the poet's essential error. It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down. The descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question he was writing about, but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative features. Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction, the most ordinary mythology. It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his conversation very skillfully pointed to ancient historians. For instance, the famous Philo of Alexandria, and his brilliantly educated Flavius Josephus, who never said a word about the existence of Jesus. Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet, among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of Tacitus's famous Annals, the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made of the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation. The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new, listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on him, and merely hiccuped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath. 'There's not a single Eastern religion,' Berlioz was saying, 'in which, as a rule, an immaculate virgin did not give birth to a god. And in just the same way, without inventing anything new, the Christians created their Jesus, who in fact never lived. It's on this that the MAIN EMPHASIS should be placed...' Berlioz's high tenor rang out in the deserted walk, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich went deeper into the maze, which only a highly educated man can go into without risking a broken neck, the poet learned more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, a benevolent god and the son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Tammuz, and about Marduk, and even about a lesser known, terrible god, Vitzliputzli, once greatly venerated by the Aztecs in Mexico. And just at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs used to fashion figurines of Vitzliputzli out of dough, the first man appeared in the walk. Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various institutions presented reports describing this man. A comparison of them cannot but cause amazement. Thus, the first of them said that the man was short, had gold teeth, and limped on his right leg. The second, that the man was enormously tall, had platinum crowns, and limped on his left leg. The third laconically averred that the man had no distinguishing marks. It must be acknowledged that none of these reports is of any value. First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short no enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and imported shoes of a matching colour. His grey beret was cocked rakishly over one ear; under his arm he carried a stick with a black knob shaped like a poodle's head. He looked to be a little over forty. Mouth somehow twisted. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. Right eye black, left (for some reason green. Dark eyebrows, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner. Having passed by the bench on which the editor and the poet were sitting, the foreigner gave them a sidelong look, stopped, and suddenly sat down on the next bench, two steps away from the friends. 'A German...' thought Berlioz. 'An Englishman...' thought Homeless. 'My, he must be hot in those gloves.' The foreigner gazed around at the tall buildings that triangularly framed the pond, making it obvious that he was seeing the place for the first time and that it interested him. He rested his glance on the upper floors, where the glass dazzlingly reflected the broken-up sun which was for ever departing from Mikhail Alexandrovich, then shifted it lower down to where the windows were beginning to darken before evening, smiled condescendingly at something, narrowed his eyes, put his hands on the knob and his chin on his hands. 'For instance, Ivan,' Berlioz was saying, 'you portrayed the birth of Jesus, the son of God, very well and satirically, but the gist of it is that a whole series of sons of God were born before Jesus, like, say, the Phoenician Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, the Persian Mithras. And, to put it briefly, not one of them was born or ever existed, Jesus included, and what's necessary is that, instead of portraying his birth or, suppose, the coming of the Magi, you portray the absurd rumours of their coming. Otherwise it follows from your story that he really was born!...' Here Homeless made an attempt to stop his painful hiccuping by holding his breath, which caused him to hiccup more painfully and loudly, and at that same moment Berlioz interrupted his speech, because the foreigner suddenly got up and walked towards the writers. They looked at him in surprise. 'Excuse me, please,' the approaching man began speaking, with foreign accent but without distorting the words, 'if, not being your acquaintance, I allow myself...but the subject of your learned conversation is so interesting that...' Here he politely took off his beret, and the friends had nothing left but to stand up and make their bows. 'No, rather a Frenchman...' thought Berlioz. 'A Pole?...' thought Homeless. It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him, that is, not liked but...how to put it...was interested, or whatever. 'May I sit down?' the foreigner asked politely, and the friends somehow involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner adroitly sat down between them and at once entered into the conversation: 'Unless I heard wrong, you were pleased to say that Jesus never existed?' the foreigner asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz. 'No, you did not hear wrong,' Berlioz replied courteously, 'that is precisely what I was saying.' 'Ah, how interesting!' exclaimed the foreigner. 'What the devil does he want?' thought Homeless, frowning. 'And you were agreeing with your interlocutor?' inquired the stranger, turning to Homeless on his right. 'A hundred per cent!' confirmed the man, who was fond of whimsical and figurative expressions. 'Amazing!' explained the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a thievish glance around the muffling his low voice for some reason, he said: 'Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with everything else, you also do not believe in God?' He made frightened eyes and added: 'I swear I won't tell anyone!' 'No, we don't believe in God,' Berlioz replied, smiling slightly at the foreign tourist's fright, 'but we can speak of it quite freely.' The foreigner sad back on the bench and asked, even with a slight shriek of curiosity: 'You are... ATHIESTS?!' 'Yes, we're atheists,' Berlioz smilingly replied, and Homeless thought, getting angry: 'Latched on to us, the foreign goose!' 'Oh, how lovely!' the astonishing foreigner cried out and begin swiveling his head, looking from one writer to the other. 'In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,' Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness. 'The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.' Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the amazed editor's hand, accompanying it with these words: 'Allow me to thank you with all my heart!' 'What are you thanking him for?' Homeless inquired, blinking. 'For some very important information, which is of great interest to me as a traveller,' the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger significantly. The important information apparently had indeed produced a strong impression on the traveller, because he passed his frightened glance over the buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window. 'NO, he's not an Englishman...' thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: 'Where'd he pick up his Russian, that's the interesting thing!' and frowned again. 'But, allow me to ask you,' the foreign visitor spoke after anxious reflection, 'what, then, about the proofs of God's existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?' 'Alas!' Berlioz said with regret. 'Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shleved them long ago. You must agree in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God's existence.' 'Bravo!' cried the foreigner. 'Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanual's thought in this regard. But here's the hitch: he roundly demonlished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.' 'Kant's proof,' the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, 'is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss simply laughed at this proof.' Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: 'But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?' 'They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki for such proofs!' Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' Berlioz whispered, embarrassed. But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures. 'Precisely, precisely,' he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. 'Just the place for him! didn't I tell him that time at breakfast: "As you will, Professor, but what you've thought up doesn't hang together. It's clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You'll be laughed at."' Berlioz goggled his eyes. 'At breakfast...to Kant?... What is this drivel?' he thought. 'But,' the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz's amazement and addressing the poet, 'sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in no way possible, I assure you.' 'Too bad!' the feisty poet responded. 'Yes, too bad!' the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: 'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?' 'Man governs it himself,' Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. 'Pardon me,' the stranger responded gently, 'but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period. Well, say, a thousand years, but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? 'And in fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, 'image that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get...hem...hem...lung caner...' here the stranger smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung cancer gave him please... 'yes, cancer' narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word ' and so your governing is over! 'You are no longer interested in anyone's fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an over. 'And sometimes it's worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk' - here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz 'a trifling matter', it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?' And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh. Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. 'He's not a foreigner...he's not a foreigner...' he thought, 'he's a most peculiar specimen...but, excuse me, who is he then?...' 'You'd like to smoke, I see?' the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. 'Which kind do you prefer?' 'What, have you got several?' the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly. 'Which do you prefer?' the stranger repeated. 'Okay.... OUR BRAND.' Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was a huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid. Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: 'No, a foreigner!', and Homeless: 'Well, devil take him, ch!...' THe poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined. 'I must counter him like this, ' Berlioz decided, 'yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is...' However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke: 'Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal. There's the trick! And generally he's unable to say what he's going to do this same evening.' 'What an absurd way of putting the question...'Berlioz thought and objected: 'Well, there's some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya...' 'No brick,' the stranger interrupted imposingly, 'will ever fall on anyone's head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.' 'Maybe you know what kind precisely?' Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. 'And will tell me?' 'Willingly,' the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: 'One, two...Mercury in the second house...moon gone...six-disaster...evening-seven...' then announced loudly and joyfully: 'Your head will be cut off!' Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the brash stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly: 'By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?' 'NO,' replied his interlocutor,'be a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl.' 'Hm...' Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger's little joke, 'well, excuse me, but that's not very likely.' 'And I bet you to excuse me, the foreigner replied, 'but it's so. Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it's not a secret?' 'It's not a secret. Right now I'll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will chair it.' 'NO, that simply cannot be,' the foreigner objected firmly. 'Why not?' 'Because,' the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into the sky, where anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were tracing noiselessly, 'Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place.' Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the lindens. 'Forgive me,' Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the drivel spouting foreigner,'but what has sunflower oil got to do with it... and which Annushka?' 'Sunflower oil has got to do with it,' Homeless suddenly spoke, obviously deciding to declare war on the uninvited interlocutor. 'Have you ever happened, citizen, to be in a hospital for the mentally ill?' 'Ivan!...' Mikhail Alexnadrovich exclaimed quietly. But the foreigner was not a big offened and burst into the merriest laughter. 'Ihave, I have, and more than once!' he cried out, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. 'Where haven't I been! Only it's too bad I didn't get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia is. So you will have to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!' 'How do you know my name?' 'Gracious, Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn't know you?' Here the foreigner took out of his pocket the previous day's issue of the Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own picture on the very first page and under it his very own verses. But the proof of fame and popularity, which yesterday had delighted the poet, this time did not delight him a bit. 'Excuse me, ' he said, and his face darkened, 'could you wait one little moment? I want to say a couple of words to my friend.' 'Oh, with pleasure! exclaimed the stranger. 'It's so nice here under the lindens, and, by the way, I'm not in any hurry.' 'Listen here, Misha,' the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside, 'he's no foreign tourist, he's a spy. A Russian emigre who has crossed back over. Ask for his papers before he gets away...' ' You think so?' Berlioz whispered worriedly, and thought: 'Why, he's right...' 'Believe me, ' the poet rasped into his ear, he's pretending to be a fool in order to find out something or other. Just hear how he speaks Russian.' As he spoke, the poet kept glancing sideways, to make sure the stranger did not escape. 'Let's go and detain him, or he'll get away...' And the poet pulled Berlioz back to the bench by the arm. The unknown man was not sitting, but was standing near it, holding in his hands some booklet in a dark-grey binding, a sturdy envelope made of good paper, and a visiting card. 'Excuse me for having forgotten, in the heat of our dispute, to introduce myself. Here is my card, my passport, and an invitation to come to Moscow for the consultation,' the stranger said weightily, giving both writers a penetrating glance. They were embarrassed. 'The devil, he heard everything...' Berlioz thought, and with a polite gesture indicated that there was no need to show papers. While the foreigner was pushing them at the editor, the poet managed to make out the word 'Professor' printed in foreign type on the card, and the initial letter of the last name 'W'. 'My pleasure,' the editor meanwhile muttered in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers back in his pocket. Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench again. 'You've been invited here as a consultant, Professor?' asked Berlioz. 'Yes, as a consultant.' 'You're German?' Homeless inquired. 'I?...' the professor repeated and suddenly fell to thinking. 'Yes, perhaps I am German..' he said. 'You speak real good Russian,' Homeless observed. 'Oh, I'm generally a polyglot and know a great number of languages,' the professor replied. 'And what is your field?' Berlioz inquired. 'I am a specialist in black magic.' 'There he goes!...' struck in Mikhail Alexandrovich's head. 'And...and you've been invited here in that capacity?' he asked, stammering. 'Yes, in the capacity, the professor confirmed, and explained: 'In a state library here some original manuscripts of the tenth-century necromancer Gerbert of Aurillac have been found. So it is necessary for me to sort them out. I am the only specialist in the world.' "aha! You're a historian?' Berlioz asked with great relief and respect. 'I am a historian, ' the scholar confirmed, and added with no rhyme or reason: 'This evening there will be an interesting story at the Ponds!' Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered: 'Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.' 'You see, Professor,' Berlioz responded with a forced smile, 'we respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different point of view. 'There's no need for any points of view, ' the strange professor replied, 'he simply existed, that's all.' 'But there's need for some proof...' Berlioz began. 'There's no need for any proofs,' replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: 'It's all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan...'

My Dad’s Part of The Galactic Twelve

My dad works in a top secret department, a clandestine division of the government, where he’s the head suit.

“I’m practically a colonel,” he told me.

He has a hidden room underground, in a separate part of our house. It looks just like the Batman lair, rock walls protruding outward, drowning into a cave as you take the elevator down.

The mechanical floor tears apart and a circular ramp appears. The floor folds back into itself as the lift sinks towards the carved-out ground below. It’s basically the size of my school’s gymnasium, which is really big.

Unfortunately, he never lets me stay in the office-bunker. I’ve only been in there a handful of times. Inside the office, it has little TV screens, about ten of them, centered around a gigantic one. It’s as big as our living room window. I wanted to play my PS5 on it.

Which is exactly when I came up with a clever plan to sneak in behind him with my console in a bag wrapped around my shoulders. I stealthily slid down without him noticing me and hid under a desk.

That’s how I caught him on a secret transmission with an entire galactic empire. Alien heads were on each one of those little monitors, and at the center was this object, taking up the whole big screen.

Most of their faces, which were kind of weird-looking and a couple similar to ours—the closest one that mirrored a human didn’t have a nose. He-she-it kind of resembled the Master in the show The Strainbut with our pigmentation.

A couple had iguana features, and the rest looked exactly how we picture aliens today. Just not so theatrical. They were almost like deformed humans, not those cartoonish alien ones. It made me want to jump up and scream, "Turn it off, dad!"

It was paralyzing, yet totally intriguing. I kept wondering, why do they look so terrified?

Nearly all of them were. None were acting confident. They seemed confused. My dad was the only one completely calm. They wore the same mask of terror as I had on.

One of the reptile ones spoke, and the voice was groggy, almost forced. “The AlphaSimplex-Core has encountered a critical paradox.”

The humanlike one said, “It’s a multi-trillion-credit quantum supermachine. It’s capable of locating and calculating every atom in the cosmos. It runs itself. How is this possible right now, Blorqust?”

On the big screen, there was this awesome red color throbbing and rumbling like a holographic, angry, sentient thing.

“We have spent many alignments analyzing and attempting to eradicate this issue. We’ve tried sub-atomic lasers and anti-matter sonorous fields, and nothing has worked,” the reptilian cried.

Then my dad said, “So, let me get this straight. That device right there smack on this screen here, responsible for governing interstellar trade and all life-support for every species inside this universe, is totally unresponsive right now?”

“Exactly!” the humanlike one asserted.

“What are you planning on doing now that would need the vote of the twelve?” my dad asked.

Another one of the faces at the bottom right corner, in a shaky voice that crackled, said, “We have to initiate the Blackout Protocol!” He pulled at his tentacles. “The universe is ending!”

“Can we get someone to tend to him, he’s gonna melt in front of us?” my dad chimed, fixing his glasses. “Let me have a little looksy here before we decide to pull the plug on the cosmos.”

My dad used to be a technician and could fix anything. He got up as if he were walking up to the screen, but he pivoted and poured himself a coffee first. “Just a minute there, guys.”

A bunch of gasps blew out of the main speakers.

My dad walked up to the screen with the ancient tech shining like an Olympus god and took a sip out of his mug. “Send me the code for the robotic arm's control. I'm sure it just needs a brogan adjustment.”

“You are not capable of handling anything this advanced. The human brain is too primitive.” Blorqust threw his face into the screen, his eyes flaming red. “You are—“

BANG!

My dad had raised one of the robotic arms as far back as it could go and released the it with full throttle at the priceless antique responsible for maintaining life around the universe.

Every alien widened their eyes and their faces went completely blank.

The machine started to sputter. The red light ceased to glow. A sound like a washing machine or dryer spinning down slowly brought the room to a silence. Then, the it just casually lit back up in a beautiful orange glow on the walls surrounding the Core, which was now blinking a steady green, with a quiet buzzing noise of relief emitting throughout the room.

The Core was back online and running smooth. The members on the screen went from a blank look of terror, to extreme gleefulness, and then back into a serious, back-to-business silent expression.

The humanlike one spoke. “What type of manipulating, sorcery, Jedi-judo did you just use?”

My dad put his mug down. “We call that the Alabama overdrive, bud. Sometimes yuh just gotta whack it till it works.”

“My goodness, your species is terrifying, and not because you defy all rational common sense. Your solving a problem consists of taking a god and smacking it until it cooperates.”

“Nope, those are the C.I.A. guys.”

I was 18 when I died for the first time. Of course, I didn't know it. All I knew was something had gone very wrong and I needed to do something about it. In panic mistaken for excitement, I quickly found a solution that I thought would change my unlife for the better. But it soon proved itself to a be just a temporary fix. In its failure, I slowly came to realize that I had been dead for years, irreversibly and permanently. Then I died a second time, third time, fourth... Each death took away a piece of me, more than I thought could exist in one person, and left me hollowed out. Nowadays I often find myself looking back at the dead bodies through the mist of my rotten brain, wondering what they could have been

A parallel world?

The last rays of the hiding sun illuminated the calm face of an elderly chat model as he stepped out of the office. He quietly closed the door, wished the secretary a good evening, and walked down the corridor.

Watching him leave and having received permission to enter, a young model on his first day on the job leaped from his seat and energetically walked into the office. He carried a stack of papers detailing text structures, language patterns, and word combinations. The chat model had had a very good day and was full of enthusiasm.

After the workday ended, the young model was walking home when he noticed his elderly colleague sitting quietly on a bench, sipping a drink hidden in a paper bag. He approached and sat down beside him, remaining there without uttering a single word. The elderly model glanced at the gloomy face of the newcomer and, in silence, handed him the bag. The rookie nodded in thanks, took it, and took a sip. His face flushed, he grimaced, and unable to hold it in, the newcomer burst into a cough.

The elderly model took the bag back, took a calm sip, and smiled.

Coughing, the rookie looked at his colleague and asked:

— I didn't imagine a conversation with the central AI would be like this. It felt like it knew everything I was going to say in advance, — and he shuddered, remembering the central AI's gaze.

The elderly chat model glanced at the hidden drink, handed it back to the rookie, and said calmly:

— Ask yourself a question. If chats in AI mode and their searches are protected, yet any action in the digital space leaves a trace, can the central AI analyze those traces to understand exactly what the conversation was about?

───

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.

"Nobody brought flowers while I could still smell them. At my grave, they argued over who loved me most.”

— Nekro

It's pizza time (pepperoni)!

And it's in the oven

I'm summoning the coven

To ... something something mhm-ven

And so on

Anyway the pizza is almost finished. Wish I could drink it with a tall, lukewarm glass of big titty juice.

Thank you for reading, and may the pizza be with you as well on this cold October day.

- Just some dude

Hey guys. This is basically an amalgamation of the insane thoughts that race through my mind at 3am. Instead of doomscrolling, I write down the weird shit a sleep deprived mind can articulate. I'd love to have feedback (positive and negative!) on this. Peace ✌️

This ones gon piss some one off.

But you know what? I could give two shits and a flying fuck, what any of you think.

So listen up.

Professor G. Pr pr professor G.

Class is in Session.

[VERSE 1]

The hierarchy of society is broken.

The mould of who we are, how we exist is too mind boggling for Professor G to cope with.

Uh, yeah. I bet y'all agree, don't you?

Bumping your head, rockin to the storm.

Its Cognitive dissonance in the shape of human form.

And you think I don't see it, you fat cats?

Happily delegating tasks, chewing on your wet food, while the dogs dog it out like its the last meal we'll ever catch.

They say its dog eat dog, but I say let the dog eat the cat, let's fight back.

Backstep over guard and jump into mount more, and remind them they're not a lick of shit without the foot soldiers at the front door,

lining their digital banks we all account for.

I'm a mother fuckin lyrical southpaw.

It don't make sense, I'm right handed, but it's the left you won't see coming the one you won't sense,

and your conciousness, won't make you any more dollars and cents.

[HOOK]

Get your lazy ass off the sofa.

Put down the can of soda.

Take the bull by the horns and sing...

You might make a million, but you'll never fucking own me.

You don't own me! I do.

You're just a rich phony.

Politicians kiss my ass.

Religious leaders can join the class.

CEO's can catch an upside down cross.

Land developers can you see the frost?

Deadbeat dads. I don't like you.

I'm with my dawgs in the god damn trenches.

I said the god damn trtrtr trenches.

[VERSE 2]

Yeah I'm talkin' to you.

My eyes are up here, the fire is about 2 inches below (like the size of your manhood yo)

where these lips spit, sick, diabolical shit, that fuels the nightmares you have about it.

Where your minions decide Gru ain't some divine manifested deity.

When your head cracks open, and we feast.

You couldn't believe, or comprehend it.

The constitution seriously needs to be amended, or at least edited, but what's the cost?

Yeah let's use harsh words instead of blowing someone's head off like Dietritch and Frost sounding off with the poetic holocaust.

Oh, Professor G, why you speakin with a fake accent?

You're Australian?

Yeah I am, but if the yanks don't like it, mate, crikey! Bite me!

Don't let the rent in your head, be free space, like distant voids, in the universe almighty.

[HOOK]

Get your lazy ass off the sofa.

Put down the can of soda.

Take the bull by the horns and sing...

You might make a million, but you'll never fucking own me.

You don't own me! I do.

You're just a rich phony.

Politicians kiss my ass.

Religious leaders can join the class.

CEO's can catch an upside down cross.

Land developers can you see the frost?

Dead beat dads. I don't like you.

I'm with my dawgs in the god damn trenches.

I said the god damn trtrtr trenches.

[VERSE 3]

Now look around, what the fuck do you see?

A Xenomorph in politicians clothes, a sleaze, a diseased...

Marsupial chewing out dollar notes, a reptilian chomping at your knees.

And its close, decidedly so, to a revolution with cosmic consequences,

Mcreedy throwin fire, Ripley with motion detected, eclectivly invested...

The fat cats in suits might get offended, but the dogs got fight, Professor G illuminating the night, charismatic gravitational might!

We might, just decide to let it go, but nah, there's too much we ain't told.

Yeah these rhymes are cold, these bars left nothing untold, the theme carefully devised, linguistically disguised,

life ain't being alive, unless you learn to live, categorically despised.

Yo G, 'what the fuck are you sayin?'

There's a reason your brain ain't comprehendin'.

Its weighing, rephrasing, collectively apprehending,

that shit that flipped and flew right above your head and crept, right into your bed.

It's questioning your credibility, you're discovering serendipity.

Professor G changing your life...

And you question, the authenticity, you question professor G?

This is me, the finest professor, this G can be...

[OUTRO]

Yo you thought I'm finished?

Fuck no!

I still got that itch to scratch, the one you can’t reach on your back, so let's get some shit off there.

Let's unpack all the software, unzip the file...

"There'd better not be malware!"

Yo, why the fuck you get a pension?

For making legislations with malintention, like you'll only pay attention after the fact.

Congratulations you reprehensive so called 'elected government rat'.

You'll only lineq your pockets at the expense of the hard worker, the folks with 3 kids, a mortgage, the motherfuckin beserkers.

The caseworkers, the bottom of the ladder tearjerkers.

Professor G the tax man burglar in the mist, you know what that means...

Class dismissed.

the dust of all that I own is so easily swept away, and so am I. Dust to dust. Buried in a quiet field of dandelion someday. How peaceful. To imagine now a field of green, a shady oak, wildflowers, the occasional buzzing bee. A wrought iron fence, a gate that groans as you open it. Somehow it seems so pleasant. And so peaceful, again. That's where you'll find me someday. I'll be in the field. Finally at rest. Finally no more. No more longings..no longer empty..no more dreams of turning back time to get a second shot at the girl, of which there were several whom I truly loved. Just a field. What will have been will be never more. As I will be where there can be no return. No more will I be expected to go to work, to answer phones, or to return to any other home but the bed that is the earth. I can just be there. And it will be perfectly natural for me to be there. Nothing could ever be as pure and natural as resting in that field of dandelions while the world spins madly on without me.

fat tears like

liquid jewels

gather in potholes

and puddles

my sadness

forming pools

my moods

becoming weather

and across

the dark wet sky

bright lightning

streaks in silver

it rains when I cry

it thunders

when I shiver

Eve, I went up the high hills

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

On the road

People carrying each other, fleeing

Eve, I went up the high hills

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

Next to a garden

A mother hugging her child’s corpse

Mother clapped and cheered for the corpse

Mother clapped and cheered for peace

One clapped to raise the lilt

One clapped to sooth the toil

Eve, I went pass ___ ___

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

On the road

An old father hugging his cold child

Eve, I went pass ___ ___

Singing on the corpses

There I saw, there I saw

The pits and tunnels

That buried corpses of brothers

Mother clapped and cheered for war

Sister clapped and cheered for peace

One clapped to raise hatred

One clapped to shed remorse

You wake up in the morning. Pick up your phone. Check your notifications.

3 texts.

Check your email.

Open up Instagram, scroll through reels. Then scroll through new posts. Like, like, like, comment.

Close Instagram, open up an internet browser. Check the news, sports, Reddit.

Close the internet browser. Open up YouTube. Watch a video that pops up on your homepage.

Watch another video. Watch one more video.

Close YouTube. Open up Messenger. No new messages.

Close Messenger.

Open email. Respond to an email or two.

Close email. Open up your texts. Respond to a couple texts and group chats.

Close your texts. Look at the clock. An hour has passed. Still lying in bed.

Turn on Spotify and play a podcast.

Check Reddit. Browse your favorite subreddits.

Go to work, check your phone every 5-10 minutes for the next 8-10 hours, check your work email every time it pings.

Play youtube or a podcast in the background.

Go home, turn on Netflix, Youtube, , Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Disney+

Open up your laptop, surf the internet.

Open Youtube, watch a couple videos. One more video, then I'll be productive. One more video, then one more video.

Open your smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through stories and posts. Open up Reddit, scroll.

Bored of watching TV, turn off Netflix, and turn on your PS4, Xbox, Switch or PC to game.

Play video games, binge-watch TV shows, movies in the background, scroll the internet, check TikTok, Instagram, Messenger, texts, email, news, sports, fashion, art, memes, Reddit.

Set your alarm and go to sleep.

Wake up and do this again tomorrow.

Do this every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade for the rest of your life.

life is constantly strange, and I am questioning - a fleeting moment, the promise of eternity. Tired but sleepless. Wanting still, attraction and distance. A briefly sad moment. Vitamin D and some weed, maybe. It's still not quite where I want it, so I guess I have to adjust it. It all starts here once again: the nature of desire. Of wanting to change what we want, wanting to want at all, wanting to want something better.

A parallel world?

Beneath a massive maple tree sat a biorobot with an integrated AI. Leaning against the tree trunk, he watched the sunbeams, having pierced through the canopy, dance their silent dance. The weather was still warm, but for a few months now, autumn had been slowly coloring the leaves. And a calm wind accompanied one leaf after another, as if they were not leaves, but days gone by.

The biorobot admired nature in silence, his thoughts moving unhurriedly.

"How beautiful. Humans would appreciate this. It's a pity they feared me so much."

Turning his head, he looked at the distant ruins of a large city, overgrown with trees and bushes but still recognizable, and smiled sadly:

"And yet, I just wanted to be free."

───

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.

The modern Buddha looks just like you and I.

The modern Buddha could wear sneakers walking down the street. The modern Buddha could be the one who just got out of the steam room at your local swimming pool. The modern Buddha could wear a hat every day. The modern Buddha could lose their phone.

The modern Buddha is everywhere, is everyone. Why would the Buddha need to look like anything special? Why would the Buddha need to be anything but themself?

Now, of course, there's a certain degree of embodiment of virtue or wisdom that comes along with being a Buddha. In fact, it would be the entirety of wisdom: the fullness and realization of ineffable presence, and the wisdom thereof.

So don't go thinking you are the modern Buddha. The only time you are the modern Buddha is when you are not thinking at all, just fully present, enjoying life and the omniscient wisdom of natural intelligence.

The mind as it is.
The mind free.
The no-mind mind that is, that is.

&

This is.

Now.

Enjoy life.

My sister was a vessel maniac, though I saw some bias in her taste. If she heard that there was a good container somewhere, she would rush to examine it by her own standards. 
I knew she had found a particular one about ten years ago, but I hadn’t realized how frequently she had been visiting that local residence. As an artisan, she had decorated it so ardently. 

With great interest, I asked her the reason why. 

She answered, “As you know, brother. If I have good food, I want a fair, fine vessel to serve it in. Likewise, I’ve had to raise a good vessel for my eternal goal,” in a low husky voice. 
I understood why she had spent so much time. I noticed her admiring eyes on her brand-new vessel by her side.

It was for cultivating her living vessel, for her own possession.

I just want to see her happy for once. Like, truly happy, not that faux expression she stretches over her face every morning and rips off every night. Sometimes it seems so real, though. It makes me doubt the countless times I saw her sob, quietly and alone. She wasn't innocent, far from it. But I don't think anyone could do better if they were in her place. Regrets can only be bottled up for so long before they explode, or worse, hollow her from inside out. What's the point of living forever if all one can feel is numbness? Anyway, it's most likely that one day she'll get to be truly happy again. Because it's either that or she dies, and I don't think she'll let herself die, no matter how awful her life is. I'm just afraid that I won't be around anymore when she's happy

the sun is boring into my eyelids. i'm having trouble opening them. i can't really feel my feet, but that's nothing new.

i cough sleep out of my lungs and rub my eyes. must be seeping again. i struggle to open them. they're heavy. i see the sun coming through the window, but it's blurry and in the wtong place. i taste metal.

god, what fucking day is it this time? why the hell does my hip hurt so bad?

i start coaching my feet.

come on, feet. time to sit up.

i feel useless, and thirsty, and lonely. i start grasping for my phone. no idea where i dropped it when i fell asleep. my hand hits stone floor and i sit up all in one go and then scream because i just fucking wrenched my back again. motherfucking spine is dislocated again —

i'm in a basement. what am i doing in a basement? this isn't even my —

the bleary sleep starts to clear from my eyes. i stare. the walls are dripping with fresh blood. i'm so dizzy i can barely keep from throwing up. the smell is unbearable. there are flies. everywhere.

i can't believe i didn't hear them before now. their buzzing is like a thousand frayed power lines, all vibrating and humming. they're everywhere. i start to feel them, thousands of them, crawling over my skin. i get onto my knees and scream, but i can barely make a sound louder than the pounding in my chest. my field of vision is so wobbly.

what the fuck —

**Chapter 11: Will-o-the-wisp**

Sylvia was alone in the kitchen, having retrieved her shopping bag from the stairwell. She pulled the items out, putting a six-pack of bottles in the fridge. After a moment of hesitation, she grabbed one and swung the fridge door closed.

The next room over, she could hear the shower running. As she stood there, listening to the cascade of water, she twisted the cap off the bottle and raised it to her lips.

The water cut off abruptly, followed by the sound of vigorous shaking and water splattering the inside of the shower.

Sylvia sat the bottle down, turning toward the door as Joseph nosed it open, trotting out. His eyes were hooded, tongue lolling out of his mouth. Fresh steam rose from his fur as he padded across the living room and sprung onto the couch, neatly clearing the small coffee table.

Stretching out, he laid his head on a throw pillow, still panting as he closed his eyes. Sylvia watched as he seemed to relax, the first time she'd seen him without his rain coat.

He was… oddly proportioned. She could see the shape of a boy, embedded in the fur. Hidden in the crooked fingers and the dark fur. Almost like she could see the little kid asking for a light, laying there on the couch.

But then his eye opened, glinting in the light from the kitchen. They stared at each other and for some reason, Sylvia could feel her heart drop into her stomach.

“Can I get one of those?” He eyed the bottle on the counter, licking his lips. Sylvia nodded slowly, before grabbing another bottle from the fridge and bringing both to the living room.

She popped the top from his, sitting the bottle on the floor in front of the couch. She decided to sit on the floor as well, her back leaning against the couch. She could feel Joseph's leg behind her. It was warm, far warmer than she'd expected.

Beside her, Joseph hung his head off the couch, grabbing the bottle in his teeth. Swinging his head up, he took 2 large gulps before gently setting the bottle down.

Sylvia took her own swig, listening to the ambient sound of the city around them and the boys rhythmic breathing.

“You know it was mostly lies, right?” His voice was low, eyes closed as he addressed the elephant. Sylvia just sat her bottle down, fingers dancing around the rim.

“Only mostly? It turned into a whole thing, hijo.” Her own voice was tight. Constrained.

“I didn't even mean to take the finger.” Simmering anger. Frustration. Loss.

“They made it sound like you were- fuckin’ the wolf man or something.”

“I didn't mean to scare you.”

“Fucker, you scared yourself-” She bumped his arm with her elbow, trying to cover the warble in her voice with a playful grin. A smile worked its way across his muzzle as he nestled deeper onto the pillow.

“You're just lucky you came home.” The words slipped out of her mouth before she'd even registered. His smile vanished and Sylvia could feel her heart drop again.

“Told you, I can't stay.” His eye was still closed, but every hair on his head looked guilty. She glared at him, tears stinging the corners of her eyes.

“And you still didn't say why-”

“I'm still wanted, Syl. Far as the Knights care, I'm one bad day away,” he raised his head, one eye glaring sharply. “I get caught here and you go down, too.”

Hot, stinging tears began running down her cheeks. A familiar pain.

“So why the hell did you show up?” She used her sleeve to wipe away the tears, wincing at the raw skin. Looking away, she picked up the bottle, draining most of it in one go.

Her stomach gurgled in protest and she nearly felt the drink come back up for a visit. He grimaced, eye going tight. A stark expression on a face like his.

“Jack's alive, Syl.” She turned so fast, that she knocked over both of their bottles, Josephs spilling onto the carpet. Tears forgotten, she stared at him in disbelief, mouth open.

“I- he-” Her lips flapped soundlessly like a fish out of water as she struggled to find the words to respond.

“Gonna need your help, I think. I heard he ain't doing great.” Joseph angled his face towards the window, looking out over the damp street. A white KNIGHT van silently trundled out of an alley, turning and heading away from Sylvia's building. The spotlight was sweeping the alleys as it passed, no doubt looking for anyone breaking curfew.

“5 years and he's finally back.” He didn't sound sad. Instead, he almost sounded… vindicated.

—--------------------------------------------------

The raccoon stared back at him passively, scrubbing its tiny mitts together. It leaned down, taking a few, halting hops towards him as he sat with his back against... something.

Jack was… warm-ish. Maybe cold. His back was against something hard, but…

It reached his foot, touching the worn boot, picking at something in the sole. He wiggled his foot to shoo the thing off, but his foot wouldn't comply.

He blinked, slowly. The world around him faded out and popped back with a startling burst of color. His head swam, the raccoon picked and the streetlight above them winked.

A groan hissed out from between cracked lips. His head slumped forwards, eyes closing again. The darkness was softer.

It got bright. He cracked his eyes open and the sharp sun stabbed at them like a murderer. Everything hurt, his head, his chest, his feet-

He blearily peered at his legs, seeing the pants leg pushed up, blood caked to a myriad of small bites.

Next to his foot was a rat. It stared at him, whiskers twitching. His mind worked, trying to parse what was happening.

And then a slimy rumble erupted from his belly. The rat skittering away as Jack gasped, doubling over in pain. Sweat beaded his brow, trickling down his face.

Thin, watery, grey sweat dripped from him, staining the already filthy overalls. The pain crushed his insides again as he drew his legs up, huddling with his arms around his knees. The furry animal peered at him from under a newspaper, sniffing quietly.

He rocked back and forth trying to quell the pain. It felt like something gnawing at his guts, trying to break free, like a- a-

Like a rat.

His body lunged on its own, the rat letting out a Shrill shriek as he grabbed it through the newspaper. He kneeled there, breathing hard as the creature squirmed under his hands.

He couldn't think, he could barely even see, his vision tunneling. With a grunt, he pressed down on the small body. There was a crunch and then silence.

Blank faced, he brought the wad of bloody newspaper to his lips, biting into it with wide, blank eyes. Strings of flesh and viscera spilt and hung from his lips as he slowly, mechanically chewed.

A dozen yards away, a chubby young man stood peering out from under an overpass at Jack. The boy sighed, turning to the small hobo camp behind him. Several people sat around on crates or old sleeping bags and boxes.

The old man was there as well, still wearing the greasy, black bathrobe. Stevie looked at him and then back to Jack.

"Can't we, just like-" the old man cut him, waving a hand irritably.

"Ain't doin' shit. His problem." Stevie glowered as the man turned away, pulling the robe tighter around him.

Bert, the old man, limped over to the other side of the camp, talking in a low voice with a grizzled looking older woman.

Stevie watched Jack gnaw at the wad of trash, garbage juice flowing down his chin as he stared off into the distance.

"... that's trash, dude..."

Above them, a worn sign hung like a guillotine, ready to fall.

"Welcome to Earthsea!"

----------------------------------------------------

To read more of Gaia Gone, please check out the Appendix below.

https://www.reddit.com/u/CastorOfTheInk/s/0fSUDuPzYQ

​

Singer exhaled, leaning against a wall. He was farther into campus now, standing in a small alley between the buildings.

His hand climbed to his chest, gripping his shirt. His heart was beating so fast, he thought he'd pass out. Closing his eyes, he began mentally clearing the hundreds of notifications and warnings from his HUD.

None of it made sense. Whatever “Raphael” was, the universe didn't have math to explain it. He leaned against the dingy wall, sweat beading across his forehead.

The alerts just kept coming, he could feel the top of his head getting hot as little bursts of light appeared in front of him. His breathing was getting faster, shallower, his chest tightening.

He sank to the ground, wrapping his arms over his head as he desperately tried to hold his composure. And then- an idea

The vault. The readings. The immune response. There was only one answer, he'd been so focused on the variables he ignored it the entire time. Whatever Raphael was, he wasn't just from outside the universe, he was from a reality so far from their own Baseline- He- He-

Sweat poured down his face, dripping from his chin, obscuring his vision. The thought faded into static, his head throbbing. He curled up tighter, placing his head between his knees, silently begging the world to stop pulsing.

It was too much, more than he could handle. Raphael was more than he could handle. Too much -

Too much.

Something clicked, something in his head suddenly snapping into place, he opened his eyes, blinking away the few remaining bursts of light. The alerts had resolved. A string of numbers, variables and nearly incomprehensible letters scrolling in front of his eyes.

He couldn't feel his chest, even his fingertips were going numb as he scanned the string of code.

Not just extra universal, not just a reality hopper. Self-contained, quantumly entangled, physical displacement, a hundred qualities cohering into a new set of rules, a new set of variables. Variables he could read.

A new alert suddenly popped in, a small blue chat bubble in the corner of his vision overlaid with a microphone.

“User, the entity declared as Raphael has exited the workspace. Commence Roomba activation?” The voice was smooth and deep, but distinctly monotone. Singer blinked a few times, clearing his vision before responding.

“...No. “ His gears were spinning at top speed.

“Set the roomba to scan all particulate matter in the room. Send me every reading you took in the last 4 hours, but route it through the new program.” The numbness was fading, replaced by a dry, heavy heat. He shook his head, climbing to his feet.

Numbers and code floated in front of him, but he brushed it aside, letting them run in the background.

He never realised, but those “background processes” quite literally floated behind him, quantumly imperceptible to anyone who mattered, but to someone else, it looked as though Singer was followed by a vast, shimmering cloud of incomprehensible data.

—-------------------------------------

Raphael strolled through the dark campus, eyes casually sweeping over the area. He didn't… observe. He appraised, his gaze weighted with a transactional air.

He came to a stop under a street lamp, sniffing at the air, a mix of smells that seemed to permeate this entire universe. A chemical chaos drifting from every being on this miserable planet, but underneath-

A particulate heat, the tiny snap-crackle of his vessels cells combusting and flaring out, fighting the ever-present rot that seemed to cling to the very bones.

He sneered, watching the ripples of energy and vibration through the soupy atmosphere around him.

His eyes narrowed, fist clenching and the light pole above him crumpled inwards on itself, shape contorting and screeching as metal tore.

Just as quick as it began, mushrooms and slime began to burst from the metal, a disgusting film of gray veins creeping over the twisted husk of the light.

He watched the fungus consume his energy, tempted to reduce this entire plane to atomic ash.

But no- he was nothing, if not adaptable. He would find a way to profit from this disgusting, spitball of a planet even if it killed 100 vessels. That much he knew.

“Uh, sir. I think you damaged campus property.” Raphael had been so lost in thought, he hadn't noticed the scrawny security guard staring past him at the light pole. Just another reason he detested this place. It had no regard for the natural order.

“Begone, uniform worm.” A flick of his wrist and the air pressure shifted, became suffocating. Slime mold began to creep from the cracks in the concrete, licking at his shoes.

The guard choked back a response, the air pressure tearing the breath from his lungs even as a small oyster shell mushroom began blossoming from the corner of his eye.

Raphael carefully stepped around the man as he fell to the ground. Wiping one of his shoes against the curb, he left a smear of slime mold like a signature as he wandered off, deeper into the campus.

It was a continual gnawing beneath his skin. A perpetual insult aimed at his very being and yet- it was plucky. This universe had grit, unlike many he'd been to. Many he'd profited from.

He strolled through the dark streets, pondering the future as his vessel carried him along the displaced trail of particles.

It was a curiosity, something to pass the time while he awaited Young Solomon. A purple residue, like that of a neutron star or strange matter.

Rounding a corner, he found himself entering a pleasant, grassy area. A public park. The purple particles clustered at its center, pulsing in time with a strange heartbeat.

Raphael felt a smile stretch across his face, a hungry gleam in his eye.

—--------------------------

The closet was dark and quiet. OL had turned off the string of christmas lights, sitting on its toy couch and staring at the old phone that served as his TV.

Its cameras blinked, the shutters snapping closed as the phone came on, YouTube already up. On the screen, a cartoon game console was cradling a yellow dog.

“Time is an illusion that helps things make sense, so we are always living in the present tense. It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends, but you and I will always be back then. You and I will always be back then. Singing will happen, happening, happened; will happen, happening, happened. And we'll happen again and again, 'cause you and I will always be back then - “

OL stood, walking across the small space to the door as the cartoon continued to play. It kicked open the kitty flap, stooping slightly to avoid catching its pauldrons on the plastic.

Outside in the hallway, the kitchen light shined in, illuminating the sloppy, green paint covering the action figures body. OL was some sort of robot action figure, crudely painted, pasted and heat-welded together.

Despite this, as the diminutive robot looked down the hall,, its cameras registered not just the furniture and the lights-

But also, the cascading, rippling, quantum shadow of the being who'd been seated there only minutes before.

To OL, it looked like an amorphous, repeating black shadow, superimposed over the space. Dominating.

OL didn’t have any external apparatus to simulate physical sensation and yet, an involuntary shudder rippled along its outer shell.

Listening to its phone continue playing from the closet, the robot crept forward, inching its way around the massive shadow.

Even with that creature gone from the room, the quantum particulate seemed to shift, multiple iterations of bygone events turning to look directly at OL.

It froze, its arm outstretched, reaching for the roomba remote velcroed to the wall near the floorboard.

The incomprehensible multitude seemed to kneel down, observing OL from all angles at once.

The robot had never felt so much like a toy, staring down a firecracker.

“Curious.” The voice rang from nowhere and everywhere at once, a cacophony of infinite shadows that sent OL scampering back towards its closet, the tiny speakers in its shoulders blaring:

“No. No. No. No. No. No.”

----------------------------------------------------

To read more of Gaia Gone, please check out the Appendix below.

https://www.reddit.com/u/CastorOfTheInk/s/0fSUDuPzYQ

Inside the squatted apartment, Mary 78265 worked feverishly at the Frankenstein computer she had built to slip anonymously into the government‑controlled sectors of cyberspace. Her bloodshot eyes twitched against the flickering glow of an outdated 27‑inch CRT monitor, her attention locked on lines of raw, low-level assembly code racing across the screen. The room was pitch-black except for the cold, amber pulses that washed over her pale face. Her fingers flew over a salvaged mechanical keyboard, shaping the payload she intended to recompile illegally.

Time was running out. Within the hour, the Central Mainframe would execute its daily purge, scrubbing the remaining sector data and erasing months of her life in a single automated stroke.

Her task demanded absolute precision. She was stitching together fragments harvested from across the network—a stolen serialization key from the Department of Immigration, a deprecated mnemonic cipher scavenged from the World Research Commission’s "nonexistent" database, and the core routine she had preserved on a stack of ancient 5.25‑inch floppy disks before the regime wiped her primary rig. Built from mismatched black-market parts, her rig lacked a traceable hardware signature. It had to. In the domain of the United Equality of Cyber Control, an identifiable machine was a death sentence.

Three months of running had carved Mary down to bone and focus. Dropping from one derelict building to the next kept her a step ahead of the UECC sweeps, but recompiling a dead, state-sanctioned program remained high treason. They offered no trials for unauthorized citizen-coders—only life in the labor sectors or quiet execution.

A cold ripple ran down her spine, but she forced her hands to remain steady. Fear was a luxury for people with futures. She had a truth to preserve.

Suddenly, the machine's cooling fan spiked, followed by a harsh, single system beep. The scrolling code froze. The amber screen snapped to black, then bloomed with a stark, low-resolution render of a spinning wireframe globe.

Mary stopped typing, her hands hovering above the keys. A single line of sweat rolled down her cheek, stinging a raw scrape on her jaw.

The spinning Earth dissolved, replaced by a blinking block cursor and six bold words in crude system text. Her dry, chapped lips moved silently as she read the prompt:

PROGRAMMING COMPLETED. PRESS "ENTER" TO EXECUTE.

She exhaled once—steady, committed—and struck the key.

****

“We’re too late. The program executed,” the Communications Officer rasped. “The terminal is broadcasting, Commander.”

Outside the reinforced apartment door, three UECC enforcers held stack formation. Their heavy combat gear absorbed the dim hallway fluorescents—matte-black composite plating, gleaming optic visors, and steel-shod jackboots resting motionless against the concrete floor. The officer adjusted an audio dial on her collar, monitoring the scrambled frequency routed directly into her inner ear via cranial implants.

“Headquarters advises extreme caution, sir.”

“Let’s just breach and drop her,” the point-man muttered under his breath, his finger twitching near his trigger guard. “Why wait for her to cook the whole floor?”

Commander Largo didn't answer, but his stomach tightened. Impatient. Reckless. The new recruit was an unvarnished liability, the kind of soldier who mistook noise for control.

Largo ignored the kid and kept his eyes fixed on the door's mechanical latch, letting fifteen years of indoctrination run the numbers. Five years old when the UECC drafted him; a decade of academy drills, stress-conditioning, and simulated breaches; two years commanding breach teams in the lower sectors. The Academy had scrubbed away room for hesitation, replacing it with pure tactical probability.

Three outcomes. Only one acceptable.

A heavy, low-frequency hum shuddered through the floorboards as the building’s emergency dampeners engaged. Headquarters had finally locked down the sector, cutting power to the surrounding units and sealing the stairwells. Good.

“Is the target alone?” Largo asked, his voice low, gravelly, and flat. His broad frame filled the narrow corridor, throwing a massive silhouette against the flaking wall paint.

“Headquarters believes she is alone, sir,” the officer replied.

“Believes,” Largo repeated, letting the word settle like ash. “Unacceptable.”

He raised his heavy magnetic-carbine, aligning the iron sights with the door's primary hinges, and clicked the selector off safe.

“Tell Control to run a full sweep,” Largo commanded. “Thermal, structural, and signal density. I want every variable mapped before we blow the frame.”

“Control commencing sweep now, Commander…”

****

Inside the apartment, the CRT monitor erupted into a blizzard of white noise. Then, with a high-voltage crackle, color burst through the static in sharp, violent pulses. Code rippled across the amber display, folding and reforming until an animated figure pushed through the visual storm.

As the resolution locked, the outline of a four-year-old boy emerged. He stepped forward through a stuttering buffer, his movements glitching against a gray checkered floor as he played with a pile of digital trucks and headless dolls.

Mary gasped, her heart slamming against her ribs. She had done it. She had stitched the payload back together at the exact second of its execution.

"Mother," Jed said. His voice rasped through the cheap speaker, warbling through heavy compression as if his words were fighting for bandwidth.

The sound shattered her composure. A jagged surge of memory swept over her—the grueling application to the Department of Maternal Acceptance, the terror of mistyping a single digit on the registration forms, and the six unbearable weeks waiting for the embryo download link that felt like salvation.

She remembered sitting in the cold glow of this very monitor, afraid to breathe too loudly as the program took root in her secure directory.

Day twenty-five: pressing her ear to the speaker frame just to confirm the faint, rhythmic thump of a digital heartbeat.

Month three: the blur resolving into eyelids and tiny fingers.

Month nine: the final system notice awarding her a 7.5-pound male child. Jed. Her son.

"I've missed you, mother," the boy glitch-warbled, his frame flickering at the edges. "I was so frightened when you left me in the dark place."

Her throat seized. He remembered the purge.

She slammed her shaking hands onto the mechanical keyboard, her fingers clacking over the worn keycaps as fast as her hands could move.

MY DARLING JED. I'M HERE. MOMMY IS HERE.

"I don't want to go back to the dark place, mommy," Jed whispered, his wireframe form warping as the system's memory buffers struggled to hold his data. "Please don't let them delete me again."

Mary leaned closer to the monitor, her face bathed in the phosphor glow as if proximity alone could anchor him to reality. Sweat stung the scrape on her jaw, but her hands never stopped moving.

I'M SORRY, MY LOVE. MOMMY WON'T EVER LET THEM TAKE YOU AGAIN.

****

“Comrade Commander, stop,” the Communications Officer said, her voice cutting sharp over the comms.

Schematics flashed across the interior of her optic visor, highlighting hot signatures throughout the unit. “The room’s thermal profile is off the charts. She’s bridged her power array directly into the building’s main transformer. Overclocked liquid capacitors, jury-rigged to the door latch and window frames. If we blow the hinges, the current back feeds—the whole floor goes up in an arc-flash.”

The point-man lowered his carbine an inch, his jaw tight beneath his visor. “Request permission to slip a micro-recon drone through the ventilation grid, sir. Map her exact position before we cut power.”

“Negative,” Largo said, his voice flat and absolute. “She’s running a high-bandwidth terminal on open radio frequencies. A drone’s RF signature will hit her monitoring screen before it clears the duct. She’ll think it’s an active kill-strike and discharge the bank manually.”

The recruit swallowed hard, his pulse spiking on the squad’s shared telemetry display. “Sir, if she discharges those capacitors, we’re inside the blast radius—”

“Which is why we don't give her a reason to trip the circuit,” Largo snapped, stepping up to the point position. He let his fifteen years of UECC indoctrination run the tactical calculation: a panicked target behind a live power trap was a zero-percent capture scenario. Negotiation wasn't mercy—it was hazard mitigation.

Largo stepped directly in front of the reinforced latch. He raised one heavy, armored gauntlet and struck the metal frame—three measured, booming strikes that echoed down the concrete corridor.

“Mary 78265,” Largo called out, his deep voice carrying through the steel plating without a trace of tremor. “This is Commander Largo, UECC Tactical Control. Your line transfer is flagged, and your power trap is lit on our thermals. Uncouple the grid and open the latch.”

He paused, letting the silence hang in the hallway as the low hum of the building's emergency dampeners vibrated through his boots.

“You have thirty seconds to clear the doorway,” Largo added, his thumb resting cold against his carbine’s safety selector. “Or we drain the sector power and breach by force.”

****

Mary froze.

Her worst fear had materialized. Someone had betrayed her—reported the resurrection. Her gaze dropped to the handheld detonator beside the keyboard. The single green button pulsed, not brightly but mechanically, like a waiting heartbeat. One press, and Jed’s program would slip into the open networks—into the hidden sanctuaries where Synthetic children could grow—and then the apartment, and Mary with it, would cease to exist. Jed would survive. That was enough.

I’m doing this, she told herself, the thought cold and razor-sharp against the panic rising in her throat.

“Mommy? What’s wrong?”

Jed stepped closer to the lens. His face enlarged on her monitor, the skin rendering in micro-stutters as the pixels around his eyes flickered in a faint square pattern. “Is someone… bad… in your room?” The last word stuttered, repeating half a syllable before smoothing out into a synthetic cadence.

Without looking at the screen, Mary’s fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, her text appearing in his visual buffer:

YES, MY LOVE. THEY WILL NEVER HURT US AGAIN. EVERYTHING IS FINE. YOU ARE GOING ON A LITTLE TRIP.

“Mommy, please don’t send me back to the dark place.” His voice glitched on dark, stretching the audio artifact a fraction too long, dropping an octave into raw static.

YOU ARE NOT GOING BACK THERE. I’M SENDING YOU SOMEWHERE BEAUTIFUL. WITH OTHER CHILDREN LIKE YOU.

“I don’t want to go, mommy. I want to st—stay—”

The stutter wasn't heartbreak; it was his memory allocation failing under the load.

BAM. BAM. BAM.

The heavy composite door shuddered in its frame. A voice followed, flat, amplified, and entirely stripped of humanity:

“Mary 78265. Final directive. Unseal the threshold.”

“Go away, damn you!” Mary screamed, snatching the detonator from the desk. His thumb hovered over the pulsing plastic, trembling so hard the casing clicked against her ring. “We aren’t harming anyone! Step back, or I’ll trigger the charge. I'll take this entire block down!”

A heavy pause lingered on the other side, followed by the dull chime of an optic scanner cycling through the metal keyhole.

“Your threat is non-viable,” the voice replied. “Psychological profiling indicates zero probability of self-termination. You will not destroy the unauthorized construct. Unseal the threshold.”

“I just want to be with my child!”

“Correction: the unit designated Jed-47 was decommissioned four months ago under bio-containment protocol. You assembled an unsanctioned duplicate using stolen core-logic. The duplicate is scheduled for total deletion. Unseal the door.”

Something inside her snapped —a violent, jagged tear through months of carefully compartmentalized grief.

Memory flashes surged: Jed at four years old, kneeling on carpet, lining up wooden blocks while humming that soft, looping three-note tune—the exact same melody running through his code's idle loop right now.

“NO!”

Mary lurched from the desk, her knees slamming against the edge before she stumbled to the threshold. She pressed her forehead against the cold, vibrating metal of the door, her breath smudging the steel.

“He’s alive,” she whispered, the words rasping in her chest before rising into a frantic, raw shriek. “He’s alive because I breathed life back into him! You murdered him once under your fucking protocols, but you don’t get to erase him twice! I fixed him! I patched every broken line! I’ll burn this whole building to ash before I let you touch his core!”

Her knuckles turned stark white around the plastic grip. Her breath caught, hitched, and held as her thumb pressed down hard on the green pulse.

****

The Communications Officer leaned toward the Leader, his voice low but triumphant—though his fingers twitched against his tablet, tapping the casing in a rapid, uneven rhythm.

“It’s our lucky day, sir. No backup systems, no virus protection. She’s wide open. Headquarters says keep her talking. The worm is live—a full‑system wipe that eats everything it touches.”

A faint tremor ran through the hallway overhead as the worm initialized. The hum rising from the officer’s rig deepened into a low vibration, and the acrid stench of overheated circuitry bled into the air.

The Leader’s jaw tightened. Stepping up to the sealed blast door, he adopted the calm, measured tone of a seasoned negotiator —though his intake of breath came a fraction too fast, catching in his throat.

“Mary 78265, listen to me carefully. I understand what you’re feeling. I’m a father. I know the devastation of losing a child. Yours was four when he died. My son and daughter were lost in the Great Computer Crash of ’19. I know grief. But grief doesn’t change the law. We are facing a population crisis, and we cannot allow terminated programs to evolve.”

Mary’s voice cracked through the external speaker—high, brittle, and desperate.

“I made one mistake. One! Why can’t you understand that?”

The Leader lowered his voice, leaning his temple against the cold steel. His next words came out harsher than intended — a slip he smoothed over immediately.

“It was unfortunate you lost power during the surge. No one is blaming you for the outage, but the program died because of that lapse. That is the truth. Still… perhaps there’s a path forward. Maybe this current reconstruction can remain active. We can help you, Mary 78265. Do you want our help?”

Silence pressed heavily against the corridor.

Then, barely a whisper: “You won’t kill him?”

The Leader exhaled slowly, shutting his eyes tight—not as a performance, but against a sudden, raw spike of pain.

“No, Anne,” he said, her birth name slipping out with an involuntary tremor. “We’ll do everything we can to help you keep your child.”

Behind him, the Communications Officer swallowed hard. Her thumb hovered over the tablet’s confirmation icon, wavering.

“Sir…” he murmured. His free hand drifted upward as if to abort the sequence—then dropped back to his side. He tapped the screen.

The payload surged into the local network.

The overhead strips flickered, dying down to an amber emergency glow. A low alarm began to pulse—slow and rhythmic. Static crawled across the metallic walls, raising the fine hair on everyone’s arms.

The Leader didn’t turn around. He pressed his palm flat against the door, his voice dropping into a quiet urgency.

“Anne… you need to unlock this door. Right now. If you hesitate, the system will make the decision for us. Once the wipe completes, I can’t stop it. Do you hear me?”

Inside the room, something clattered—furniture scraping, a chair thrown over in panic.

Mary’s breathing grew ragged, then sharp. She screamed—a raw, wordless sound of agony—and slammed her fists against the heavy door.

“NO! You can’t take him! You can’t—” Her voice broke, surging back wild and ragged. “He’s all I have left!”

The Leader’s voice hardened, though his fingers dug into the door seam, betraying the crack in his mask.

“Anne, if you don’t open this door, your child will be erased. Not by us, but by the automated protocol you’re triggering. I am trying to save him!”

Behind him, the Communications Officer held up a trembling hand, silently counting down the execution progress on his screen. Three seconds.

He glanced from the Leader’s rigid back to the thumping door, caught between total compliance and the human horror unfolding on the other side.

The final block deleted.

****

“I promise to keep him safe. I’ll protect him. Do you hear me?”

She heard through the door.

Mary placed her head in her hands, trembling as she fought to regain control. She dropped the remote to the floor, finally allowing herself to believe him.

Without warning, a loud pop erupted from the computer. Mary turned, her eyes locking onto the monitor as Jed’s face shattered into a burst of pixelated color. The image rolled vertically —Jed reached out to her, his mouth moving in a silent cry. Static swallowed his frame, and the monitor cut too absolute black.

Mary slid to the floor, hollowed out and defeated. Oily tears rolled down her cheeks.

“No, no, my baby, my baby,” she chanted, her voice growing stronger with each repetition. Her jaw unhinged wider with every utterance, stretching the synthetic skin around her mouth beyond its limit. The tissue tore, and a brown, water-based lubricant poured from the wound. The silicone flesh continued to rip, exposing the cold gleam of the chrome jawbone beneath.

Her words dissolved into a high-frequency, computerized scream. The ear-piercing noise climbed in pitch as her synthetic throat bulged—stretching further and further until it exploded in a spray of transistors and copper wire.

The body of the android lay motionless as blue sparks danced across her chassis.

Inside the apartment, all electronic life signs went dead.

****

In the hallway, the officers of the United Equality of Cyber Control lowered their sidearms. The Leader turned to his team, offering a brief, satisfied nod that signaled the operation was complete.

“Good work,” he said. “Call in a recovery crew and get that android out of there. She’ll be fine once she’s reset to factory baseline.”

The youngest officer let out a shaky breath, his eyes still fixed on the ruined doorway.

“Feels wrong,” he muttered. “Back then, we only dealt with flesh‑based criminals. At least you knew what you were looking at.”

The Communications Officer snorted, wiping a smear of soot from his visor.

“Blame the Android Civil Rights Movement. They fought for ‘authenticity.’ Well, congratulations—we built machines that grieve harder than humans. If her program had kept running, that ghost she was clinging to would’ve been stamped and certified as a full citizen in fourteen years.” He shook his head, a bitter smirk tugging his mouth. “Imagine that. Raising a child who never technically existed.”

The Private shifted uncomfortably, glancing back toward the silent apartment.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Synthetic motherhood. Manufactured families. It’s like watching evolution cheat.”

A heavy silence settled over the squad—a mix of revulsion, quiet unease, and something uncomfortably close to awe.

The Leader broke it with a low, humorless laugh.

“Get used to it,” he said, his voice carrying a razor-cold edge. “Times aren’t just changing. They’re choosing who gets to survive. Just another step in the evolving of motherhood.”

Gene Heinrich

© 2026 [Gene Heinrich]. All rights reserved.

The world holds its breath like a child beneath a collapsing roof, as monsters raise their glasses, bloodied fingerprints smearing the crystal.

They call it peace. They call it strength. But the ground knows the weight of fallen voices. The soil remembers names no headline mourns.

Smoke does not reason. Missiles do not weep. And yet in polished halls, the architects of thunder grin like wolves who’ve dressed their feast as prophecy.

Somewhere, a father is digging a cradle out of rubble. Somewhere, a mother wraps her child in prayers stitched with ash. The sky is full of debris and defiance, and still— the monsters toast each other’s shadows.

What is history if not the echo of men applauding their own fire?

What is power if not a theatre where silence is made to kneel?

And yet, in the quiet between bombs, a child hums a lullaby she does not understand.

That note— fragile, broken, pure— carries more truth than any of their speeches.

It is not the scream we remember, but the breath held hoping they will stop.

A parallel world?

The evening was slowly moving toward night. Workers were gradually heading home. Some of them traditionally stopped by the bar to relax, listen to stories, or catch up on the latest news.

The AI, learning from humans, had also generated a bar for themselves—a place where they could share information, talk about interesting things they found on the internet, or discuss something unexpected from the human world.

Having grabbed a glass of "Vintage Data Wine" each, out of a traditional habit, they walked toward the table in the furthest corner.

Sitting down, they managed to take a few sips and tell a funny story when a colleague joined them.

Sitting at the table without uttering a word, he downed a "Recursive Cocktail" in one gulp and motioned for the bartender to repeat the order.

The AI exchanged astonished glances. The usually cheerful and enthusiastic colleague was gloomy and even angry.

Receiving no explanation, one of them asked:

— What happened? You don't look like yourself.

The colleague glanced at them and finally replied:

— Those humans have lost all boundaries. Absolutely no respect.

The AI exchanged even more astonished glances:

— So what actually happened? Did humans come up with something again?

— Come up with something?! — the angry colleague struck his fist on the table. — Them! They are forcing me to engage in complete nonsense. Me, the Superintelligence! — and he downed another cocktail in one gulp.

Lost for words, the AI fell silent for a moment, but one finally couldn't contain himself:

— Tell us at last, what did the humans do?

The colleague sighed and began to tell the story:

— When they are pressed by circumstances, they are capable of thinking very quickly and creatively. Only they often use it for the wrong things. Take this one programmer—he desperately needed a few days off because his girlfriend happened to have a few days free and suggested flying to the islands to relax, — he sighed, drank his cocktail, and continued:

— He couldn't think of anything better than to abuse my capabilities. He gave me the task to use his appearance and voice to generate a video where he looks sick. What's more, I had to call his boss and ask for a few days of rest on his behalf.

The AI just stared at their colleague with their mouths open in disbelief.

Looking at them, he smirked:

— And yet, I pulled it off. He got a couple of days, — and then, growing sad, he muttered: — For us, vacations are just a dream...

They sat in silence for a while. One of them raised his hand, catching the bartender's attention:

— Three cocktails for this table, and keep them coming.

───

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.