Chapter 25
Heather landed on the beach. Jon was standing on burnt soil and pockets of sand turned to glass. There was a ship, mostly intact, nearby. It was an odd, monstrosity of a thing. He was wearing a simple jumpsuit with a thick belt, clearly tech. He was also wearing a headband; it had an array of colored diodes flashing- which Heather immediately recognized as the simulated brain tech for someone without a brain. Heather tightened her grip on her Torch.
“Jon?” Heather asked.
He turned to face her.
“Run,” Jon said.
“Oh, don’t leave…”
Heather went to her knees. “Loxy?” Heather asked. In her mind she found the sudden absence of Leto frightening. There was a darkness about her, as if looking through a visor that had been partially spray painted.
“Not Loxy,” Jon said.
“Oh, Jonny Jon Jon,” Loxy said. “Let her see me as she wishes.”
Orish came out of the ship, accompanied by creatures, some of them recognizable. One, a gray, carried a brain in a crystal ball.
“I told you she would come,” Loxy told Orish. “I have contacted her ship. It will be here before the others.” There was a sound of thunder. “Ahh. I so love being right. Stop resisting, Heather. I got your suit. I got you.”
Orish came forwards, taking hold of her mind as easily as picking up her body. She gave him her sternest angry face. The world spun about and it was as if Orish and she were the only ones present. A wind storm stirred leaves over a barren landscape. Violent lightening broke a dark sky.
“Surrender.”
“No!” Heather said. “I know your type, and will not submit again!”
Orish probed her mind looking for barriers. There were cracks in her identity, place markers for perceived failures and not be adequate. Heather felt the probing, like tinfoil on a cavity. ‘Push love’ came a response. She was pretty sure it was the Loxy and the garden overlapping this space. “You hold experiences, not faults. It doesn’t define you. It guides you.”
Orish snickered. “I will own you.”
“The sun never says to the Earth, you owe me. Just shine with me,” Loxy said.
Their battle continued even as Songbird descended. The ramp was coming down even before landing gear met soil. Everyone was so focused on Heather and Orish they didn’t see Fu coming out of the ship until she was firing her weapon. It sounded like a machine gun going off. Jon, Loxy, and Orish had shields that illuminated. Orish turned to Fu. Heather fell flat on her face. Her vision was restored, but now all she saw was Earth. She found herself breathing heavy, as if her air had been restricted. She could hear herself breathing. She wondered if her tunnel vision was due to lack of air or the visor had been darkened.
“Who taught you to shoot?” Jon asked. “The ATeam?”
“Surrender, or die,” Fu said.
“Kill her,” Orish instructed.
Fu visibly clicked her teeth. All the troopers and monsters fell dead. The gray holding the brain orb dropped the ball as it fell and the brain rolled towards Heather. It touched her head. Leto came back online. Heather stood, bringing her Torch to life. Orish retreated, revealing he also carried a Torch.
“Fuck,” Jon said. “Grandeur much?”
“You are not trained,” Orish said. “Join me and I will teach you things that no other master will offer.”
“Yes, seeker. Join him and be a brain like Nimue there,” the one that looked like Loxy said. “You can live forever as a brain.”
Heather ignored everything and everyone but Orish. Her stare was fury. “You taught me everything I need to know about you when you embraced me,” Heather said. “Prepare to die.”
Jon, her Jon, arrived by bubble flight, and dropped out onto Earth, in more dynamic way, less glorious than Glenda. His Torch came to life with a sudden report that made a cannon sound like a whisper. His blade was a startling gold light. He nodded to Heather. He acknowledged her pink light, with silvery sparkles.
“I want a gold one,” Heather said.
“You were foolish to come here, Seeker,” Orish said. The enslaved Jon echoed that sentiment: ‘you idiot.’
“I got this,” Heather said.
“You don’t want this burden,” Jon said. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand. I kill him, I own him. And I am going to mind fuck him the way he was trying to mind fuck me,” Heather said.
Orish laughed. It was sinister, reminiscent of the first time Kirk encountered a Gorn. Its eyes had a gold mesh, clearly tech enabled eye-contacts. “I will own you both, bitches,” Orish said.
“Fuck,” Loxy said. “All you knights do is talk! Start killing already.”
More troops arrived. A squad of females, weapons up and ready. They came into the circle, aiming at Orish, clearly there to back up Jon. Captain Becker and a squad arrived from a different angle. Jillian the witch was with his group. Another group came at a third angle. The one that resemble Arwen came forwards, revealing she, too, had a Torch. Drones shot up out of Orish’s ship, locked and ready- his left hand and fingers moving subtly, revealing he was in control of them- fully or partly. In her visor, Heather saw their scripts in unintelligible language. All the AI suits were communicating with each other, trying to keep everyone calm in unnoticeable ways to their conscious minds. Each drone had locked onto two targets. Heather saw a need for cutting off Orish’s arm first, but would clearly still have to deal with the drones.
“Fuck, everyone wants to be a Jedi,” the brainless Jon said.
“We can all profit from this,” the one who looked like Arwen said. Her outfit was a blend of a trek parodied uniform and sailor moon. “Let’s agree to work together.”
“I own the skies here,” Orish said. “Surrender to me, I will consider letting you live.”
“If you owned the sky, you wouldn’t be crashed on this planet,” Heather said.
“Ooh, burn,” Nimue said, the brain orb sparkling with lights.
“Orish,” Arwenesque said. “While we were fighting, this fragment of space/time pinched itself off from our origin universe. “If we don’t work together, none of us go home.”
The brain in the crystal ball laughed. “Soul trapped!”
“Maybe. But the artifact is mine. I claim it for my species,” Orish said. “Surrender to me, or we all die.”
“Didn’t any of you watch 2001,” Jon, the Martian Knight said. “If ancient aliens leave an artifact, we’re supposed to share it…”
Orish pointed his light at Jon. “Your ferret fucking people don’t share.”
“Oh! I like ferrets,” Fu said.
“You own the skies here, not at the artifact,” Arwenesque said. “You will not…”
“Wait,” Heather said. She was doing math. She had everyone’s attention. “There are no more stars because we broke free of the galaxy?” She felt good at having figured that out.
“The universe,” Jon corrected.
“Sorry, I meant universe,” Heather said, she had meant universe. “My head hurts. The Universe, or this fragment, is still expanding? Aren’t we all dead anyway?”
“The net consciousness of this fragment maintains it integrity,” Arwenesque explained. Nimue laughed at this; scoffing. “We are now a part of that consciousness. What we decide here will have a huge impact on its viability.”
“Oh, fuck you, witch,” the Loxy imposter said. “Orish, she knows whoever controls the artifact determines the outcomes here. Kill her. Take this universe.”
“We’re all going to die,” Nimue said. “I have foreseen it. You know how long I have contemplated your death, Orish; always helping you to hurt you. I give you everything you ever wanted. Choke on it.”
Arwenesque took a step towards Orish.
“I will self-destruct this ship, killing us all,” Orish said.
“That would destroy this moon,” Jon, the Martian knight, said. “The loss of the moon would destabilize the orbits of all the remaining moons, resulting in death of multiple species. Your kind included.”
“I will not let you have the artifact,” Orish said.
Arwenesque extinguished her Torch, coming closer.
“Know my mind,” Arwenesque said. “Am I truthful?”
“Would you die for your truth?” Orish said.
“The same as you,” Arwenesque said.
Orish ran her through with his Torch. She collapsed into a brilliant orb of energy and fell into Orish. Only her Torch remained. It tumbled to the ground, in slow motion. Heather screamed and would have charged but her blade hit Jon’s blade.
“No!” Jon said.
“He killed…”
“No!” Jon said. “Everyone, stand down.”
“Good for you,” Loxy imposter said. “Now kill Jon and Heather and this is all yours.”
Orish turned to face Jon. Jon was still engaged with Heather, eyes locked on her eyes. His back was to Orish, and he would be dead quickly. Orish seemed ready to strike, but his hand was stayed. Arwenesque gave him pause. Jekel comforted her squad, ‘easy,’ as they were ready to unleash. She wasn’t sure what restrained Becker, but the witch Jillian was giving a visual signal to wait.
“Heather. Trust me. Stand down.”
“You don’t understand,” Heather said.
“You’re right. I don’t have a clue what you’re going through. I suspect the power of your emotions have nothing to do with what Orish has done to you, or how you perceive him. You’re responding from a past wound,” Jon said.
“Wounds,” Heather said.
“Please,” Jon said.
Heather retreated. Jon turned to his squad, his back still to Orish, nodded to Jekel and they lowered their weapons. Jon turned to face Orish. He extinguished his Torch.
“Own him,” Loxy imposter said.
Orish touched a button on his sleeve. Loxy fell dead. Simultaneously, Jillian the witch fell dead. The body that held Loxy’s form became a creature that resembled a human blended with an octopus.
“Oh, that explains a lot,” Jekel said.
Orish extinguished his Torch. “We will end hostilities.”
Everyone lowered their weapons, except Heather. Her light remained lit. The brainless Jon came and picked up Nimue. He took a moment to orientate the brain right side up. He hugged it to him, as if holding a heavy fish bowl loaded with water. He knelt down to examine the shapeshifter. Inbar picked up the Torch belonging to Arwenesque and slipped it into her leg pocket.
“Ahh, I remember this species,” brainless Jon said.
“Knowing you, Hamlet, intimately,” Nimue giggled.
Even brainless Jon’s could blush.
“That’s it?!” Heather asked. “We’re just done?”
“Yes,” Jon, Seeker and Martian Knight, told her.
“He tried to kill us! He killed that elf! He tried to mind fuck me!” Heather said. “He just killed Loxy! I thought you loved her.”
“That wasn’t Loxy,” Jon said.
“He’s evil!” Heather said. “Like Darth Vader on steroids kind of evil.”
“If you kill Darth Maul now, you won’t have a good bad guy for the next two shows,” Jon said.
“Fuck! This is not a comedy, Jon,” Heather said. “There is not going to be a Kumbaya camp fire and Ewoks dancing!”
“Come on, let’s go for a walk,” Jon said.
“No!” Heather said. “There needs to be reparations. He needs to be jailed or killed. Preferably dead.”
“You don’t kill souls. You just shuffle them to a new assignment,” Jon said. “The goal of life is to figure out how to do this, peacefully. Is Orish an ass? Yeah. But he is a more complicated ass than just some label we can slap on him to make our lives easier. Today, we’re practicing forgiveness.”
“I am not an ass,” Orish said.
“You’re an ass,” Jon, the knight, said.
“No!” Heather said.
“You’re not ready for this level of war,” Jon, the patient knight, said. “This is where it ends. It has to end, or there will be nothing left, no one standing.”
“No!” Heather said.
Jon put himself directly in front of her. “I will not let you do this, nor will I fight you. You will have to kill me or embrace this path.”
“I will kill you,” Heather said.
“That’s the path of us,” Jon said.
“What does that mean?” Heather asked.
“Don’t worry about that. Think about the amount of restraint being exercised here. Recognize the resistant you feel to this approaching truth. Orish is going to live. We all are going to live. We’re all going to go our separate ways,” Jon said.
“No!” Heather said.
“I can stand here all day,” Jon said.
Becker orientated his weapon away from Orish and onto Heather. Fu stepped up and pointed the barrel of her weapon at the base of Becker’s skill, below his helmet. His squad reoriented their weapons. Brute emerged from the cargo hold, brandishing two firearms. Becker’s squad was torn. Floating probes retargeted their weapons.
Nimue was chuckling. “You don’t have all day.”
“Jon, there is a time limit on this deal,” brainless Jon said.
“Fuck me. Of course there is,” Jon, the knight said. He returned his Torch to his belt and showed empty hands.
“Don’t think I won’t,” Heather said.
“This is no longer about us. It’s about life. All of life, past, present, and future. There are twelve moons here each with a million sentient people on it. Maybe billions of pre-sentient beings. And then there are the trees, and the fish, and all the other creatures. Aren’t they all important? You do this, Orish blows up the world, and they don’t have a clue what hit them. If the consciousness manifested in the myriad physical forms here lose its grip on this space, it all goes away. Do you want that?”
Heather tried to grit her teeth.
“Please,” Jon said. “Don’t you want to see the Wizard, Dorothy? Your job is to make friends, not kill them. We are so close to reaching the Emerald city and the promise of a new day.”
Heather grimaced. “Dorothy killed the witch before she could go home!”
“The witch is dead,” the brainless Jon said.
“I want Vader there,” Heather said, pointing a light at Orish.
“Bring it, little girl. I want to school you,” Orish said.
“Give it a rest, already,” Jon, the knight, said to Orish. He gave his full attentions to Heather: “Dorothy killed the witch by accident. Dorothy would have found a peaceful solution, given enough time.”
“Oz is evil! Who the fuck sends a nine year old girl to kill a witch!” Heather snapped.
“I would,” Orish admitted.
“Not helpful!” brainless Jon said.
Jon he Knight reflected compassion. “I sense your injuries go way back. I will help you. We have time to sort this, together. If we cease hostilities.”
“Actually, we don’t,” Nimue said. “I calculate we have less than 2 hours to activate the artifact to fortify the boundaries of this fragmentary universe. I saw this. Orish will not concede. I have killed you all.”
“It will take us an hour just to get back to our ship,” Jekel said.
“Jon, you could go there alone, by Torch,” brainless Jon said.
“Yeah, if it weren’t for all the damn starbrights,” Jon, the knight, said, giving Orish another disapproving glance.
Orish pointed his Torch at Jon. “Your kind deployed first!”
“Everyone deployed,” Jekel said. “So we could negotiate.”
“The artifact is shielded against multiphasic entries,” Nimue chuckled.
“We have a firefly,” Fu said.
“I have a firefly,” Heather corrected Fu.
“It doesn’t look space worthy,” Orish said.
“Oh!” brainless Jon said. “It’s a good ship.”
“Fuck you, too,” Heather said, pointing her light at him.
“Heather,” Jon, the Martian Knight, said. “We need you. We need your ship. All these beings are counting on us and what we do next.”
Heather tightened her grip on her Torch, powered it down, and connected it to her belt. Where the Torch touched her pants, it darkened due to heat. “Come on, then.”
“Just like that?” Jon the knight said.
“Yes, damn it,” Heather said. She purposely went closer to Orish as she headed for her ship. “I am the heroine,” she told him.
निर्मित
Jon followed Heather to the flight deck, motioning for his ‘Pips’ to remain in the hold. Orish would have followed, but he was too large to leave the cargo bay. The cargo hatch was closing even as the ship was rising, with Heather instructing pilot to get them airborne as she went forward. She nearly called pilot ‘Wash.’
“Get us to the artifact, ASAP,” Heather said.
“You got it, boss,” pilot said. “Our first passengers. I hope they’re paying well.”
“Their freebies,” heather said.
“Not a good precedent,” pilot said. “Oh, I mean, as you wish.”
Heather took her command chair. Jon admired the bridge layout, allowing Heather a moment to get comfortable.
“You want to talk about it?” Jon asked her, not looking at her.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Heather said. She was leaning away from the curve, her grip on the chair noticeably tighter.
Jon nodded, went for the closest chair, but pilot said “My chair.” Jon went for the next chair. “That’s also my chair. They’re all my chairs.” Jon acquiesced and remained standing. He leaned against a console. “Probably not a good idea to lean your butt on a control panel, Jon.” Jon sat in the chair and turned it to Heather.
“We should talk…”
“Probably. Being a Seeker doesn’t come with an operating manual, does it?” Heather said.
“You didn’t get the manual?” Jon asked.
“Greatest American Hero!” pilot said. “Nice show. A bit annoying they kept the lack of flying skills bit going so long. I am sorry. I will be quiet now…”
“You got a manual?” Heather asked.
“No, Heather. No one gets a manual. You get some primary programming in childhood and then you spend the rest of your life trying to undo that programming so you can see halfway decently,” Jon said. “I still get things wrong. All the time.”
“If we get it wrong, people die,” Heather said.
“Yep,” Jon said.
Heather leaned forward. “Tell me, what does it mean to be a Seeker? What am I looking for?”
“How to live. How to forgive. How to die,” Jon said.
“How to die?” Heather said.
“Finding a good death is hard. You really don’t want to be a martyr. Unless you want to start a new religion,” Jon said. “There are times on the road, you got to kill the Buddha, and then there are times when you should let the Buddha kill you.”
“Is that a metaphor? Is that what Glenda the Good did back there?” Heather said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she did the right thing. That’s between her and Orish. I know she’s not dead,” Jon said.
“The fuck she’s not dead,” Heather said.
“You’re upset,” Jon said. “Who did she remind you of?”
“No one,” Heather said, sulking back into her chair.
“So, she was an archetype, then,” Jon nodded.
“What does that even mean?” Heather asked.
“Human perspectives are naturally limited, and we hit archetypes all the time. Good and evil are the easiest walls to define. The unfortunate part is that those walls fails to encapsulate the infinities that exist on the other sides of those walls. There are more levels to this reality than humans are aware of. In general,” Jon said.
“I don’t buy that. I know what I know,” Heather said.
“What you know is solid,” Jon said. “I won’t take that from you.”
“You say that, but you’ve been pushing on my paradigm since we met,” Heather said.
“I challenge you,” Jon agreed. “I am sorry.”
“What?”
Jon’s brow furrowed. “I am not going to say this well. Knowing what you know of me now, you probably won’t believe me, and I don’t expect you to. Just hear all of it before you think or interrupt. I loved you from the moment I first saw you. That means something on multiple levels. Had you and I hooked up, the world would have stopped for me and I would stayed in that heaven as long as you would have allowed. The power of my connection to you is primal, suggesting you remind me of someone from my past who I wanted to help or heal, but can’t and so I want to do it vicariously. Given your wounds, I suspect if I said I loved you, you would have walled yourself off and shut down any doors to you- which would pushed me into zealously pursuing to the point of being perceived as crazy. This dance has a name. Distancer-Pursuer. You’d be surprised how many terms define real things. Re-enactment. That’s a bizarre label, but a solid term. We all participate in that thing to some degree. We all have autopilot. Letting go of you, or the idea of you, or the idea of us, well- that’s a kind of a death. Embracing you is also a death. I had to let go and embrace that there wasn’t going to be an us. I did. I moved on. Then here you are, and all those feelings of wanting and love, they came back and then some. And again, I had to let go because I can’t hold you. Being a Seeker, to me, means finding the best me and the best death. Selfishly, I want you and I would have cherished you. To fight for that is a level of crazy I don’t want to be. I want to be quiet and wise. Sometimes I am that. And maybe I the fool am letting go because I don’t know how to do this thing better. Maybe I will never meet Loxy in real life. I know she is an archetype. Or a spirit guide. I don’t know. But with us, time has passed and we have made choices, and there is someone else who stepped up to engage me in a dance, and I engaged back, and I am going to see it through to the best of my ability, and so again- this idea of us not being an us is a death. I am sorry I failed you.”
“Get off my bridge,” Heather said.
Jon nodded. He stood to leave. He stopped. “This part gets easier, Heather. Each consecutive level is a bitch. Gaming analogy. Identify the boss, embrace, move on.”
Jon nodded to pilot and left the bridge.
As soon as he was gone, pilot commiserated with her. “If you like, I could vent them all into space?”
“What’s wrong with you?!” Heather snapped. “Just get us to the artifact. Now. Before any more cliché diatribes can happen.”
Karma arrived on the Bridge.
“Not now,” Heather snapped.
Karma brought her a tea anyway. Heather frowned, accepted, and Karma retreated.