The Pheonix and the Pelican- Saint Emmanuel the Scourge

The Phoenix and the Pelican- Saint Emmanuel The Scourge (first draft, NaNoWriMo 2k9 winner)Chris EvoPhoenixandthepelican.blogspot.com-deep future"The future gets dumber every time," he muttered to himself under the gratingly plain hotelroom muzak. It all looked retro, even to him, and Carpathia Adams was so old that he couldalmost remember the Earth before it was destroyed. The carpet felt like some sort of cheap,generic, non-reactive plastic, just like the first days of plastic, and the bed was a little lumpy. Itall smelled like a science experiment to make laundry detergent he'd failed in elementaryschool. He tried not to look at the diamond pattern on the walls too long and instead focusedon the short pile of books on the end of a table. Besides a gideon's bible, not a single onelooked familiar. Half of them had titles with words he'd heard engineers argue about, and theother half were in languages he'd never heard of. "If someone's going to all this trouble tomake the room look old, the least they could do is put a TV or something in here."Ugly drapes covered what he assumed would be a massive picture window. He didn't botherto stand up and investigate. Any minute now, someone would be in to talk him into doingsomething terrible for someone terrible. It had happened to him personally twice before, andhe'd heard of this being done more times then he could count.The door opened slowly. A man, maybe seventeen, with soaking wet hair black hair andwide green eyes swung it the rest of the way open and closed it quietly behind himself. Hewore nondescript blue pants, but not jeans, and some sort of heavily frayed white jacket."Good morning, Carpathia." His mouth didn't open any more then physically necessary forspeech."Good morning, whoever you are. Where am I?" He said it civilly, even though this routine of some mysterious person taking him out of cryogenic sleep in a completely different place thenhe went into it was getting tiring."I think they codenamed me Seriema, and that's as good a name as any." The strangerstood at attention like a military man, but Adams could tell he'd never been part of any realarmy."When you say they, who are we dealing with? Is Sortre still alive? Fichly? Is this still thesame Anowara-whoever planet federation that I was working for when I went in for my nap?""Let me ask you, captain, what is the last thing you remember?"

His arms felt heavier then ever before. He couldn't move his head, or even keep his eyesopen. Someone outside screamed in a strange pitch, a little too fast for a human mouth.The world got warm again as two thin, strong arms reached in and pulled him out of the tiny chamber. Water, or some other liquid, flowed off of him and his eyes shot open. Seriemagrinned far larger then a human should be able to and threw the tiny skeleton of Carpathia Adams over his shoulder. As they ran down a poorly lit hallway, Adams had one last look at arow of several hundred stasis pods full of pink liquid before he blacked out.

"Hmm, I didn't know if you'd remember that." Seriema considered the story slowly, mostlyunconcerned."What the hell was that? What year is it?""May I ask about your next freshest memory? I understand cryogenic stasis can fudge withthe details, just give me a broad overview." Adams closed his eyes and focused. He knew hewouldn't get any good answers out of this man, he'd met too many like him before. Nothing todo now but play along.

Athena shook her head. He didn't like the way her loose brown hair moved in the low gravity

out here."No, sir, I can't go through the shock again." "You're miserable here. If you don't come with me you're going to be trapped under someidiot fresh out of pilot school who wants to expose himself to every novel disease the universehas to offer." She looked down, pursing her lips just slightly. He tried not to look at her any more."The first time we met, I was getting ready to leave my sister, my friends, my house, my career, and absolutely everything so I could see a new world. When I woke up they were all dead and everything I knew about medicine looked medieval." "Athena, it won't be-" "Then, just a couple of years after I finally came back, we did it again to get away from the Admiral's stupid little war, and look how much good that did us. I don't even know what year it is." "This is the last time." "Goodbye, Carpathia." She slammed the door over his cryogenic pod, cutting off all sound,and punched a short authorization code into the side of it. She couldn't hear the last thing hesaid through the closed door, and he couldn't hear it through the stress of the moment.

"That sounds about right.""Sounds about right?" Adams tried to stay calm, though Seriema's bedside manner made itdifficult."Yes. That sounds like the last thing that happened to you before I pulled you out of theirstorage facility.""Who's storage facility? What year is it?""Honestly? I don't even know anymore. Someone does, but it's not worth asking. If youreally want to know the time, just look outside." He nodded at the giant curtains. Adams stoodup slowly, not quite sure how to hold his weight aloft even though the gravity felt about whathe'd grown up with. After a short burst of stretching he remembered how to walk and made hisway to the window. "Tug the cord at the side, there." Adams followed the instruction, and heunderstood what the stranger meant.Outside, the ground looked almost normal. A few wheeled vehicles which had smoothaesthetics as one of the top five or six requirements, a few squat brick buildings nearby, a lowroad leading from one building to another and off into the distant grasslands all around thetown. Above that, the sky hummed.At first glance he thought that there was some sort of fleet of sphere ships surrounding thetown, until he noticed the way they shimmered in the atmosphere. At least ten massive metalspheres all around the planet, watching it from a distant orbit. He couldn't make out any detailson them, which worried him even more. Unsure what to make of it all, he tried to gauge localtime by tracking some shadows. There weren't any."Where's the sun?""Which one do you want in particular?" He looked at the metal spheres again. Each of themglowed softly, something like half the brilliance of Earth's moon or the same essential glow of his home planet's smaller pet."Those metal things? They're all stars, aren't they?""Yes they are." Seriema sounded unconcerned about the whole matter. Of course, the skyhad in all likelihood looked like that for longer then most people could imagine being alive, so itwould be like having a seizure about the sun rising in the east or a planet being round."How many of them are there?""A few trillion." Adams looked at the spheres again. They seemed to be strewn randomlyacross the sky. He tried to look harder at the nearest one. The surface still looked completelyblank, faint glows aside. He raised his hands to cover as many of the stars with his fingers aspossible and tried to look at the space between them. Another twenty spheres, some of themglowing faintly, some of them not, slowly shifted into focus. Trillion. The galaxy- billions of galaxies, the whole universe- had finally been conquered my mankind, and every visible starlay snug inside of a massive grid of billions of solar panels ready to capture every stray photon

and use it to power human civilization."A standard year when I went to sleep was 2.9 times ten to the seventeenth periods of ceasium 133 radiation, whatever that means." For once, a practical use for basic physicsclasses. "How many of those have passed?" Seriema thought for a while. Adams decided thatwhatever he really was, he apparently wasn't any sort of AI."I'm going to round and say a million.""Six hundred years before I was born, people still drove horses around. A thousand yearsafter I was born, people drove starships two kilometers long across the galaxy in months. Twothousand years after I was born, borders between real and simulated places started gettinghazy and AIs ripped planets apart." He sat down again, trying to understand what being in thedeep future meant. The primitive mattress in the primitive room gave him the brief sensationthat everything outside of that window was just an elaborately programmed simulation."I understand it's a bit of a shock. It's the end of history, as they say. There's no time likethe past, no matter what we do.""Is anyone from my time here?" The stranger winced."It's . . . very complicated. From studying what I could of your old files, I don't believeanyone you would have enjoyed working with is active right now. Ilyeena, that blastedcomputer program, is still trying to pamper everyone off in her own tiny kingdom, but I thinkwe'd both be happier if you never ran into that madwoman." Adams nodded. She wasn't evil,or even bad, just . . . strange. Inhuman. "Of course, someone might be frozen with noexpiration date, like yourself, and I simply couldn't find their file. For the moment, however, inan infinite universe, I think the matter can wait.""And here it is: who do you want me to take out?""I'd hoped to attack the issue a little bit more obliquely, but here we are already. A certainnumber of humans has continually 'improved' themselves with surgeries, implants, newcybernetic parts, and countless other things of that sort to the point where they are essentiallyall powerful." Adams laid down on the bed and stretched himself out, enjoying the small, lumpycomfort of a stranger's place of rest."All powerful?""They can be anywhere at any time. They can move planets with their minds, and anythingsmaller is obviously easier. They can be invisible. They can be huge. They can teleport betweenany corners of the known universe almost instantaneously. They can hold all the knowledge of civilizations and recall it perfectly. They can manifest themselves as any creature your mindcan comprehend. They-""I got it, all powerful. You're still alive, so they can't be all bad.""They allow me to live because I am beneath their attention.""Neat. And the problem is . . .""They don't allow anyone else to join them. There are, by rough estimates, two or threebillion of them. After they reached that number- a very, very long time ago- they startedfinding people who were close to being able to turn themselves into gods and destroying them.Right now they've marked every intelligent creature in the universe with special genetictracers, and anyone caught genetically modifying themselves will throw up a big red flag andincite the wrath of the gods. I've personally watched four planets get turned inside out.""So I'm supposed to kill them. Do you have a plan?""Part of one, yes.""And they can read your mind, right?""Of course." Adams barked a short, hoarse laugh."How are we supposed to fight them?""You're agreeing, then?" The captain smiled blissfully, eyes still closed."I have infinite choice in an infinite universe. I'm not used to choices. Give me a gun and tellme where to point it." Seriema relaxed visibly, losing a couple of centimeters of height."Once you're identified as helping me, it's very likely that you won't be able to go back, youknow. They'll mark you, and they will stop at nothing to destroy you.""Huh. Sounds typical.""I'm glad you're so excited to join up. I'll leave you alone for the next day or so to wander