The Butterfly Effect
Part 2 - The Actuators
0.
In deep space, no-one can hear you scream.
This is true also for shallow space, but here people can see you scream, which is usually good enough. In deep space however, you’re on your own.
It’s probably why you’re screaming in the first place.
There are some things that don’t really belong in deep space, and there are some that do. You would expect to see the occasional asteroid, perhaps a comet, even a tiny, lumbering spaceship, or more likely, a speck of hydrogen, but never an entire solar system.
What it was doing way out here was anyone’s guess.
You see, this kind of space is meant to be empty (save that occasional speck of hydrogen). It’s not designed to contain anything bigger than an atom, and not many of those. That’s how it got the name ‘Deep Space’. This kind of space isn’t meant to contain lunar bodies, let alone solar systems. And yet…
These are the shores of reality. This is the border between the true universe and those universettes that contain every conceivable possibility, every creation and every absence of creation. Strange things wash ashore on the shores of reality, especially after a cosmic storm; concepts mortalised in matter, ideals expressed in morphogenic fields, possibility blurred into probability.
Here, the waves of reality crash and break on the headlands of deep space, and within the froth and foam, bubbles of something that is not real float to the surface to burst into existence. Amongst the grains of improbability along the beach, small creatures come to nest and burrow into the sand, making out their meagre lives feeding on the driftwood that washes against these distant shores.
Like the Deep Ocean, there are strange creatures with more eyes than toes, more teeth than brain cells and so many tentacles you can’t tell where one creature starts and another finishes: Lurid things abound here

1.
“Huhmay gunha get hat sthuff huf?”
“Say what?”
Big Al pulled the wooly jumper down past his face, finished his yawn and indicated to his acquaintance. “I said, how am I going to get that stuff off? It’s like flamin’ molasses.”
They both look across at the Mack truck, viewing the black liquid stains all over the front. Big Al sniffed, then attempted to rub the mess of his truck. It was sticky and abnormally warm.
“I wonder what it is,” He commented.
His friend, a dark haired woman named Maline stood back a ways as Big Al found aim with his high pressure hot-water cleaner. Some of the strange black stuff came off. Some didn’t. Maline decided that she was just filling up space out there, and so she turned and went inside. The gauzed in door clacked behind her. A little black fly bumbled against the window.

“Hey, where’s Al?”
It was a nice room, as nice as that kind of room could be. It had a few plants in the corners, a sickly ergonomic green floor tile and pinky-orange coloured chairs, finished in black plastic and polished chrome. The effect was psychologically interesting, but nobody had noticed.
Another woman was typing away at a computer keyboard, a telephone handset balanced on her right shoulder. There was Coke machine happily burbling and clacking to itself, a dog outside watering some trees and blatantly ignoring the plastic water filled bottle lying on a lawn, and two people sitting back watching the TV. Oprah was on, talking new weight loss schemes with the stars.
“Uh, outside cleaning his truck,” Maline replied.
Computer keys clacked away.
“He hit some kinda molasses pit out there on the road,”
Oprah muted; if only. 
“A what?”
“Yeah. Some kid’s practical joke, I’d reckon,” Maline scraped one of the strangely coloured chairs across the green tiles. “There’s black stuff all over the front.”
A sign on a wall said ‘Big Al’s Removals & Haulage’. It had fancy scrollwork and all.
“Kids these days, huh? It’s that heavy metal music, that’s what. Puttin’ things in their heads.”
“Hey,” Maline countered. “I kinda like that stuff too. Drowns out everything else. The world. It’s kinda relaxing, in a funny sorta way.”
Big Al, of Big Al’s Removals & Haulage stomped in, dirty and wet. He thumbed one of the big fat squares on the front of the Coke machine and after a thoughtful second the frolicsome machine crapped out a can. Big Al cranked open the can and dark liquid burst forth in a desperate leap for freedom, spluttering the now silent giant red and white plastic block.
“Dumb ass,” Big Al said to the machine. Nothing happened.
Up the other end there was a commotion; a strangled voice and a little yap-yapping noise. Instantly, a chihuahua tottered out from under some feet and jumped up onto a nearby seat. A pair of hands slapped at the stupid little dog and chucked it way back across the floor. A fat and overdressed buttock pressed down onto the seat, curtly followed by another fat, overdressed buttock. The chair let out a sorrowful little whine.
From somewhere above this strange obesity there came a voice. A voice that, if harnessed the right way, could take over the world. A voice, that if trapped inside a small Pyrex crucible, could knead and grind away a diamond into a carbonic powder in no time at all. A voice that was so annoying that it could only belong to a hag. And a fat one at that.
So she was a blimp. So she had a chihuahua. So the chair wasn’t designed for industrial use. So the green floor clashed with her pink high heels and voluptuous billowing curtains of orange apparel coating her body like warm chocolate icing dripping from an undercooked cake. So Big Al was her step-son.
“Alistair!”
Big Al’s head was heard thudding deftly against the inanely jovial Coke machine. If that Coke machine had had the power of speech, it would have said something like ‘Been nice knowing you, Al. Helluva mum you got there, Al. It’s your time, Al. Here, as a token of my farewell, Al, have a Lemon Lift!’ And then the Coke machine would have smiled and that would be that. Or something of the sort.
“Alistair!” Certain Death called again. “I want you to take your Father’s dog and, and, er, just take the darned thing. I don’t know why he’s got it.” Yadda yabba, blah blah blah.
Big Al walked past the fat and ugly wildebeest dressed in his step-mothers clothes, picked up the little pop-eyed rat and threw it out the door, to be short company (dinner) for his pit-bull terrier, Mongrel.
Which was louder- his step mother, or the terrified puss of yapping Asian burger meat he’d thrown out the door? Before Big Al could answer, the telephone rang and he raced his secretary to answer it.
She won, but it was for him anyway.
“Get her out of here,” he whispered firmly to his secretary and took up the handset. Even as he greeted the handset in his practised response, the wobbling step-monster was harried out the door. The double-glazed door snapped shut in joyous tranquillity.
The little black fly still butted the front window, hoping.

Big Al’s truck rumbled along the little road. Dust appeared behind the ferrous vehicle, dabbled a while in the air as if it were going to escape into the yonder of blue an interval above, stared vaguely at the white loam on the ground, then decided that it was probably a good time to settle down again. Even as it melded back into the familiar comfort of the chalky dirt, more was thrown up as cars and motorbikes whizzed past in disturbing succession. After a while, the dust once again forgot all about the cars and the trucks and the motorbikes, and floated thoughtlessly back to embrace the flat mass that was home. A breeze wafted overhead and a bird ate a grasshopper.
Big Al looked across at the girl Maline and didn’t smile. He stared soberly at her for as long as he could before having to regain control of the vehicle and steer it back onto the road. In his mind’s eye he saw his memory of the passenger sitting there beside him in her abbreviated clothing- a sleeveless white cotton top, a dark shiny mini, those knee-high boots, clouds of dust pouring past the open window, flicks of her dark hair sloshing around in the wind.
The truck’s cassette player sang away, Nirvana’s “Come as you are” competing with the rumble of the engine, until the engine won by default: the tape player spooled out a ream of thin brown plastic. While Big Al was slowing for the corner and thrusting the gear stick this way and that, he was also looking at those extremely red fingernails and the small, soft hand that thrashed his tape player into submitting the ruined cassette. Chaos replaced Nirvana as Maline swore and twirled the chewed tape into a ball.
She put it in the ashtray. The ashtray was no longer empty.
“Look away, I wanna get changed into something else,” She said to Big Al. Big Al mumbled something back, and sidled a glance at her.
The truck was slowing; red and blue lights swirled through the trees, casting discoloured dimensions between the dank hardness.
Big Al’s left eye poked and probed as far as it could without being seen. The little jelly mass could view two legs kicking and thrashing away at a black leather miniskirt, trying to dash it from a tangled web on the floor. Maline twiddled and turned as she then pulled up a pair of tight denim pants, covering those raw, narrow thighs, those firm round
Big Al landed on the brakes and large rubber wheels ploughed into the wet soil. An airbrake hissed as a little man all dressed in blue jumped out of the way, tripping, twisting, landing softly without effort.
The truck stopped. A motorbike whizzed past and a car pulled in behind the truck, two yellow lights flashing.
Maline scraped herself from the windscreen, tiny white cotton panties and all.
“Geez, mate. Scared me half to death.”
“Sorry, Officer-” Big Al, said, stepping from the vehicle. He had turned the engine off already, and flicked the handbrake upwards in an off-hand kind of way. Maline was wandering around the front, doing something on the front of her denim pants.
“Sergeant, actually,” The man in blue smiled.
“Oh. Sergeant. It’s these brakes. Having them in for a service soon.”
“Uh huh,” The police sergeant said, nodding, and turned to see Maline. “Well.”
And another voice, this one from behind a car said “Chris?”
Big Al and Maline were escorted over behind the police car. Red and blue lights guided vague reflections over a polished white roof. 
There was a pool of black slime on the ground. And a backpack. It was wet. Everything was wet.
The other police officer looked up. “You been introduced yet?”
“No. I’m Alistair McFarlane,” Big Al introduced himself. He indicated then to Maline “And this is Maline Copper.”
They shook hands with the policemen. One of the policemen introduced himself as Chris Duchovny and the other as Acting Constable Susan Duchovny.
“Well then,” Acting Constable Susan Duchovny started haltingly. “You’ll be wondering why we’ve asked you here. No, I mean, why we pulled you off. No! Over. The sirens and all. You, off the road.” The sergeant coughed politely. “Sorry. I didn’t mean-. Anyway, the thing is, we understand that you hit something out on this road a few hours back, a large tar-like puddle out on the road.”
“News sure travels quick, huh.” The big truck driver wondered where this was going. When it would get there, and which vaguely damp corners of expression they would explore between now and then.
“Do you have any idea what it was? Oh,” Susan pointed to the truck. “It that it on the front of your truck?”
The four of them wandered over to the truck and examined closely the black muck that had not washed off. It was abnormally warm to the touch and sticky.
“So what is it about this stuff that makes you so interested in it?” Maline asked.
A new voice answered. “We have found it at some other crime scenes.”
The man wore a grey suit, a white shirt and red tie. His head was balding and his wispy hair white. He wore dark glasses, and had a small gold watch.
Maline asked “Crime scene?”
“I’m Detective Carter. David Carter,” Big Al shook his hand. It was weak and wrinkled. “This is a crime scene, would you believe. Three days ago, a man was reported lost around these parts. Yesterday, we found his car. He took that backpack over there and wandered away from his car apparently searching for rare species of butterflies. We found this black smudge this morning and a backpack. It contains a fair number of dead butterflies and some books, and also a small tranquilliser pistol.”
“So. Why did you pull us… over, then?” Maline queried, meeting the eyes of the Acting Constable.
The detective turned, pulled a notepad from his jacket pocket and wandered over to where the backpack was found. They all followed him. “Because you have seen this black molasses. You ran over it and now it’s all over the front of your truck.”
Big Al made sucking noises as he probed his teeth with his tongue. He flicked a piece of chewing gum from the roof of his mouth back to his rear teeth and started to chew slowly. The gum had no taste.
“Strange as it may seem,” continued Carter. “We’ve found this stuff in other crime scenes, all exactly like this one. Some years back, a whole range of people disappeared in a hillbilly town up north. About twenty people disappeared from there, all within about a year, including our main suspect. Now people go missing all the time in these back road shanty towns, and mostly they turn up having left the country or dead in some city street and the case is solved. Here, like there, we have a man who has just gone out for a walk one day, and that’s it. I doubt we’ll ever hear of this one again.”
“So who was he?” Al asked.
“I hear you’re into these butterflies too, Mr McFarlane.”
Big Al shrugged. “It was a hobby of mine a few years ago. Before I got into removals.”
“The man who went missing was John Smith, of Smith’s Pharmacy, over in Bournestown. He was a chemist and apparently loved to walk through these parts searching for butterflies and other insects. He’s been doing it for years. Two days ago, he never came home and then we found this backpack. It’s his. We believe he was murdered.”
Maline nudged the black stuff on the ground with her shoe. It stuck to the sole and she had trouble wiping it off on the grass. “So what’s this stuff then? Why’s it everywhere?”
Carter grunted. “It’s at the crime scene. As far as we can tell it’s molasses, and for whatever reason, it’s been at every crime scene so far. Every time somebody goes missing, there’s a bit of molasses left over, lying in a ditch or something. Whatever the reason, it has to be somehow connected with these disappearances simply because it has been at every scene so far. It could be, you could say, a calling card. Though I wouldn’t keep it in my pocket.”
Nobody even smiled, though it had probably been a deft joke.
“Now it’s on our truck.”
“Yes,” Detective Carter stared. “Now it is on your truck.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“We’d like you to come down to the station for a little questioning,” smiled Acting Constable Susan Duchovny air-headedly. A firm hand urged Big Al McFarlane and Maline Copper back into their truck.
Thunder rumbled in the distance and a black crow cawed anxiously. Maline felt a chill.

2.
The radio cackled.
The only sound: Darth Vader effects coughing throughout a misty, dank silence. On one wall, a little red light flicked off, a yellow one stammered on. There was a hiss, tunnelled out into a resonatative scream.
Flash! A fluorescent tube hiccupped, another stabilised, yet another tinked on, then withered out. Tinked on again, then withered out again. Tinked on, stayed on.
Abruptly, the yellow light ended. A green light showed and then steam and oxygen flooded the room. All the fluorescent lights came on, most illuminating the room in their white, purescent ways. Above the door, one bulb remained dark.
Fans. Cooling fans. Seducing themselves into an appalling crescendo, pleading in their circular ways for the electricity to be once again reunited in loving harmony with racks and rows of thirsty hardware.
A bunch of cords dangled from the ceiling, open ended, dry from power or liquid, the stains of a hundred years of liquid proteins and foodstuffs caked on the floor below, a hard crust of raw dead energy.
The computer terminals coughed into life, freeing raging electrons, silencing the cooling fans with wave on wave of beeping, blurting, self tests, parity checks. The room recoiled in fascination as a myriad of sub-processes activated, paused and then deactivated again, each in turn.
A printer spooled out the remains of paper, dry, crusted, torn, recycled into its strange elements.
The doors then opened, closed, opened, closed. One door did not open and a red warning lamp shone beside the door.
A small glass panel was cracked, yet stable.
Through the damaged door could be seen row apon row of domed cylinders, each crusted in a wet white fog, each frozen in many layers of carbon dioxide. On all except two of these strange cylinders, red lights glared upwards through the dry ice.
Of all one thousand and sixteen hypersleep tubes, all bar two of those one thousand and sixteen of the spacecraft’s apparently snoozing crew were a hundred years beyond dead.
The hypersleep tubed rumbled open, a cold cloud of carbon dioxide plumed into the air to do battle with the warm oxygen hissing from black, shiny pipes.
Somebody- something- coughed.

“Nakata-san, please wake up.”
The computer talked into one of the hypersleep tubes, the synthetic voice barking from a small speaker in the tube itself, as it was simultaneously doing for every other member of the dead crew.
The computer was talking to the deceased.
Another voice, far off; “Attention engineering. Reactor breach, level 4 radiation warning, sector J4 through L9.”
Dry, withered bodies lay gnarled like dead Shetland Ponies, beyond bloated, bordering on a husk of sleepy imagination, like a splattering of Pollack, twirled by Dali into a plagiarisation of a Da Vinci. Husks of humans lay dead side by side, a new cemetery grieved by an accident.
The computer stared down.
“Nakata-san, please wake up.”
For every one of the one-thousand and fourteen dead sleepers, the computer barked this command over and over, rigorously pleading that the occupant wake from his or her eternal sleep. None did.
For the two humans still alive, the computer greeted them with a flush of fresh oxygen, and the simulated smell of bacon, eggs and baked beans.
“Good Morning, Nakata-san. Did you enjoy your sleep?”
The being in the sleep-tube coughed, a sound similar to drinking sand. From deep within buried sockets blue eyes regarded the ceiling.
Grey. He remembered grey. It might have been blue, but he couldn't remember what blue was.
A radio crackled.
The beings’ head had sunk deep into the pillow, so that over the hundred or so years too long, the shape of his body had adjusted to the shape of his environment.
He had no arms. He had no legs. He had no real body to speak of. His shape was that of his sleep-tube- a generalised square. He was on life support- a panel beeped steadily, a screen showed a gala of lines, a button glowed orange.
Suddenly a face appeared above the computers’ mass, a withered body too hideous to describe, a grin unmasked by decayed, blue-looking lips . The body toppled, balanced, fell into the hypersleep tube with the other victim, a grey barky-looking limb smacking a switch.
The sleep-tubes protective housing came down slowly, a hydraulic lever not stopping for the two wooden legs still protruding from the now-white tube.
Blood sloshed across the inside of the hypersleep tube, the victim already dead.
A white maggot flopped and twirled in the warm, red protein, awash with radiation from the breached reactor, ready to mature into something that was different.
The cooling fans whirred ominously.

3.
“You’re where? Why? What did you-”
Mrs Elain Binford, secretary at Big Al’s Removals & Haulage sterned into the phone, her finger hovering over a blinking button on her telephone.
“Uh huh. I see. Do you want me to call anybody?”
She paused, staring at the urgent little red light. It stopped flashing, slipping back into whatever ether it had arisen from.
“Oh right. Okay. Uh huh. I’ll see you Monday then. Goodnight.”
Elain hung up the phone, switched her computer off, packed her handbag and then went home. On the table lay ‘The Guardian’ newspaper, folded neatly.
Thunder suffixed lightning and rain dashed empty plastic bottles down the gutters.

“Questioning, huh,” Maline stooped low to try to hide from the rain, failing of course. Al unlocked the truck’s door and helped Maline up to reach the handle. She was warm.
He was quite wet when he reached the other side, unlocked the door and lurched into the seat. Maline handed him a towel to sit on.
In between cracks and pops, the radio sang country and western music in the weekly hoedown special. It was too loud, too glee, and far too twangy; didn’t suit their mood. Maline turned it off.
The truck rumbled to life, and three long windscreen wipers shooed water from the wide glass surface. It was very dark, and the truck’s headlights lit up only a small portion of the road.
Gears threw the truck forward, the wheels helping energy transmogrify into motion, rolling along in a pained effort to attain inertia.
Maline looked over towards Al, out past him towards the dancing electricity, lighting the sky in purple arcs of ozone enriched air. A hammer of sound hit the road, truck, trees. Thor striking his anvil, carving the storm in a series of muscled strokes, sparks fleeing the might of the smith’s sledge.
Maline let her vision grace Al’s outline, momentarily silhouetted by an arc. He had a large face. Al was a large person; that’s how he got the name Big Al. He wasn’t fat in terms of obesity, but in terms of muscle. His works spewed out his shirts and trousers and neckline. He was hairy and big, and on a dark night might have been mistaken for a bear, if they had bears in this country.
Al was thirty-two and he owned his own outfit- Big Al’s Removals & Haulage. It paid the rent and he was happy with it.
Herself, Maline, on the other hand, didn’t work for Al. She considered herself. She didn’t work for anybody. Sure, she’d done the rounds- a general labourer working part time, her office in the pub. It paid for the next week, but there was no profits, no goal to work towards. Then they’d given her the social security payments, and what a hell that’d been going through all those bloody forms- pink and red, and in triplicate the yellow and blue. She’d had to have ID and all sorts of stuff every time, and of course, she didn’t even have a bank account. The banks guzzled her money last time and her miserable life savings had been chewed up in the works somewhere. It was only two hundred dollars, but after those little hidden tax payments, and the account fees, then the term fees, and then some other fees, plus the rent for that little weasel. Greasy, slippery rat-faced man, probably a drug-dealer and child pervert. He had those sharp little eyes, dark tint on everything, even his face. They’d found him a day after rent under an industrial waste bin, knifed in the gut, stripped of his cash. Nobody knew anything. Nobody cared about that little weasel.
Anyway, Maline’s account had fizzled and disappeared one night when nobody was looking. Her payments stopped because some new bureaucrat introduced some new clause or something. No sweat, time to move on anyway. She’d left the city then, backpacking up the coast, doing pub shifts and trolley-pusher jobs to earn bed and breakfast. She’d lived in a caravan park one month, even had a visit from her drugged up old mum. They hospitalised her for good after that; died from withdrawal. And Maline took to the roads, up and leaving the van one night just there for anyone.
Then she’d met Big Al. One day later, bumming her way along the highway, Big Al had spotted her through the fog and picked her up. Into his truck and into his life.
A month ago now. A whole month and she’d not moved on since. Big Al, single, age thirty seven, with paid job, seeking attractive young female for casual relationship. Snared, she’d been.
Maline was twenty six and had light blue eyes. Bright blue eyes and dark hair.
“You going back to the Royal tonight?” Al asked, slipping his way through the gears. The engine groaned as he started up a slight hill. “Because my place is on the way.”
Something stirred deep within Maline. She smiled faintly. “Okay. I’ll give you a game of cards before I go home.”
Big Al kept a careful eye on the road. Don’t want no silly little accidents now, he thought.

4.
The X-Nerds and James stared disquietly at the X-Nerds and Amy. In the elevator, Karen fainted, falling across the threshold that was the doorway, keeping the automatic doors from slamming shut. The X-Nerds were watching the X-Nerds, too astounded to speak.
Then George and Linda bumbled in. “You’ll never guess what we just bought!” Then George saw the X-Nerds staring at the elevator. He looked into the elevator and saw the X-Nerds staring out of the elevator. Linda bit her lip.
“Okay,” George fretted, waving both hands in front of his body. “Nobody move.”
Everybody moved.
The elevator doors were trying to close, and they were being very obnoxious, in deference to Karen’s body. In the elevator, Stuart was moaning and coughing as Simon, limping, helped Matthew carry him out. Karen was helped to her feet by Matthew and Errol, and James followed, pausing to push a random elevator button. Old habits die hard.
And the other X-Nerds rushed forward to draw Karen from the elevator doors. Stuart nearly ran over everybody else to see what had happened to his other self, and was pushed back by Karen, who leapt up to help herself to her feet. Amy had a firm grip on Matthew and Errol, but Simon slipped through to attend to the Stuarts.
Put simply, it was pandemonium. Pandemonium on a stick. If you bought pandemonium in a show bag at a regular, perhaps even annual big function, which would usually cost you three times its worth and last you only half its expected lifetime, you’d get all the little bells and whistles that go with it but it would amount to diddly-squat against to this pandemonium. This surpassed even the definition of pandemonium.
Linda had to sit down and George decided that he might try walking into the room again, just to see if that helped.
No. It didn’t.
Eventually, however, a silence descended over the room. Everybody was breathing in and out, sitting around staring at themselves staring at themselves. Which in other circumstances would have been extremely difficult. And rather dull.
Amy stood and ushered James and the two senile old golfers from the room into her office. She remained, though.
“Right then,” She started. “Why don’t you split up into your original groups and we’ll start at the beginning. And nobody say anything until I-” Amy pointed to her chest. “-tell you that you can speak. This is hard enough as it is. I’m Amy, by the way.”
Her office door opened and George, a God by profession, was just about to walk out. Amy spun fast, pointing. “Get-” She yelled in an awfully silent voice, and the door slammed shut. “-back in there.”
The unconscious Stuart moaned a little, and soon was floating in and out of sub-consciousness like a cherry blossom floats on a clear Japanese stream in Autumn.
“You.”
“Who?” Asked the Simon wearing the copper-coloured spacesuit. He was sitting next to his double.
“You!” Amy was cross, and she was pointing to him. “Nobody else speak and you, Simon, will tell us what happened.”
Simon shifted his body a little on the seat, and pulled at his dusty wet spacesuit. It must have been very uncomfortable. He was obviously experiencing some sort of pain in his leg.
“Er. Well, just a moment ago we were all running from a man in a castle. There was a war on and somebody was shooting at the castle with bombs. It all started when we left the Lorna Major Academic Academy-”
“You’ve been there? We just left it a few days ago.” the Simon double stated.
“Shush, you,” Amy husked. “Simon?”
“Oh. How odd. They didn’t recognise any of us when we went there. You must have been there after us. Oh, anyway, two days ago we materialised upside down just above a mud-brick house and crashed through their roof. There were some people inside and they took us hostage, thinking that we were spies or whatever. Some other people arrived and then we were all taken away in a surprise attack by these guys in army greens to a big eerie castle. Stuart escaped and we picked him up just before leaving.”
Amy looked at him. “Then how did he get in this, er, condition. His ankle looks swollen. Is that blood?”
“Let me finish.” He exasperated, watching her.
“Sorry. It looks like blood.” She pointed out, watching him.
“Hmmm. Well, when we got to the castle, we were separated from our captors-”
Karen cut in. “Then the people whose house you fell into, were they like guards or something?”
“No. No I think they were rebels or whatever. The good guys. Anyway, we were taken to a dungeon. This place, it was like a medieval castle, except there were electric lights and they all had guns and grenades.
“Then after a while, we were taken one by one up to see the owner or leader, except Stuart here never showed. He must have run away. The place was a labyrinth of hallways and rooms. I think they were out all night looking for him.
“Anyway, this guy Luther, he owned and ran the place, and he interviewed us all in a group, then separately. We were treated nicely, I suppose. Funny things was, though, that he acted as if he knew us or something. Then last night we broke out of our room and came down a hallway looking for Stuart, who we hadn’t heard a word on. We found a secret passage which led us to a room full of space stuff. That’s where we found the other time machine. And then bombs started going off and Stuart broke through the roof in a shower of water. He must have been trapped in a reservoir or something. He fell down and twisted his ankle and we grabbed him and escaped with the castle falling down around us. I think that Luther guy was buried in the remains of the castle.”
Simon lapsed into silence.
“Hang on,” edged the other Simon, who sat chewing on the side of one finger in thought. “What d’you mean by ‘the other time machine’?”
Matthew answered. “It’s downstairs somewhere. We landed in an office down there and since the elevator was the only way out, we got in and pushed a button. The things that’s down there is a hundred years old. It’s windscreen is smashed and its all dirty and black. Our time machine crashed through the roof, remember, and something went wrong with it. That one was handy so we took it.”
“Er, Simon,” asked the Simon who’d been resident in the World Design Institute for the past few days. It was difficult addressing yourself like this, he noted. He had the strange urge to call himself ‘me’. “If you came in one ship and left in another, and we’ve got one here, then-?”
“I was just thinking that myself. I don’t know.”
Amy told everybody else to settle down and to go through things one step at a time, looking for a clue. Then she asked the Gods and James to re-enter the room. She was rather firm on the point that they remain silent, however. James had introduced himself to the Gods, not knowing that they were Gods, then had found out that they were Gods, blubbered and mumbled whilst the Gods told him all about fairways and tees and then decided to just shut up and tag along with his fingers in his ears.
“Hang on!” Simon interrupted his double. “You were shot? Where?”
“In the house.”
“No, where. Where on your body?”
Simon showed him.
“Oh dear,” depreciated Simon. And then he showed his double a similar wound, made by a similar weapon in a similar position. “Are you okay?”
“I could use a doctor. And some painkillers,” replied Simon. They both bit their upper lips at the same time, and gave everybody the same look, thinking the same thoughts.
The was a long silence. “Well,” Errol broke in. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat and have a long rest and we can sit around discussing this later on.”
His double seconded the motion.

5.
Big Al had lost again. He threw his cards down on the table in frustration. One fluttered to the rich red carpet, face up. It was the King of Diamonds.
“Well, fine.”
Maline smiled.
Al got up from the low seat and wandered out of the room. “Coffee?”
“Mm, thanks. Black, no sugar.”
“Aah, a real coffee lover.” Al voice sounded from around the door. “Look around, if you want.”
Maline did that. Here was a nice room. She’d never been to Al’s place before. Al was renting a whole house for himself, a three bedroom job with a big bathroom and laundry. There was a garage out the back, but Al owned a truck and not a car. It remained empty.
Maline wandered over the dark carpet towards the front door, glancing back at the table in the middle, where cards lay hap-hazardly amongst empty glasses and magazines. Here, at her feet, lay the TV’s remote control. She picked it up and carried it to a sideboard, where she placed it down carefully. Al’s place was a big mess, but it was nice and warm and homely. It had a certain ‘lived-in’ feel.
Pictures hung along the wall- a couple of family-type snaps, mostly featuring a young Al and his parents. One was of a black and red cattle dog.
And one of a dark, round shape, motion-blurred and out-of-focus, above some trees.
In the background, a microwave oven squealed its finality.
“Are you an ‘oo-foe’ nut?” Maline called to Al.
“A what?” came the reply.
Maline walked over to the kitchen door and looked in. Al was thrashing up some cups near the sink with a faded green dishcloth. The sink itself was a giant pile of white plates and pronged utensils. Steam poured from a pot full of black stuff and an opened plastic two litre milk container sat on the yellow laminated benchtops. There were loose linoleum tiles, black and white and a fold-up table, loaded with junk.
“Are you a UFO fanatic? I saw a picture.”
“Oh, that. I took that photo about, oh, six years ago inland. I was up there fishing with some mates and we all saw this thing flash across the sky. I got a snap.”
“Little green men?” Maline asked.
“No,” Al said in an authoritative manner. “But I firmly believe that UFO’s exist.”
“Oh, of course they do. The Air Force doesn’t exist.”
Big Al grinned and forced a laugh. Had he heard that one before? Still, he was on a roll here, and he didn’t want to seem dull or arrogant at this stage, save that for later. He poured the coffee into two mugs, and poured milk into his own, leaving the opened container sitting on the bench.
Maline received one cup and noted it’s warmth. She smiled vaguely at Al and wandered back out to the living room, to lounge on the sofa, head and feet taking up two of the three partitions on the lovely, soft seat. She sipped from her cup, kicked her shoes from her feet and set the cup down on the floor. Al sat on a nearby seat and placed his cup on the table.
“Well,” Al introduced.
“Well what?”
Al paused a moment before rising from his seat. He picked up his guests’ hot coffee mug from the floor and placed it on the table next to his own. Then he sat down beside Maline, took his own cup and drank a sip, placing it back down afterwards.
He put his arm around Maline’s shoulder, turning her head up. “Well nothing.” And kissed her on the lips. She conceded.
A card fell from the centre table to land purposefully apon the other, face down. It was the Queen of Hearts.

Somebody was at the door.
This early, on a Saturday morning, banging away at the wooden strip underneath the doorbell button. The sun couldn’t have been up for two hours yet and already! It was probably a Jesus freak, handing out those silly little free pamphlets that inevitably become beer coasters or telephone doodle-pads.
Al woke to the feeling of warmth stretching an infinity away down the right-hand side of his body. Maline’s face was buried in his right forearm and he could see her firm shape clearly through the sheets.
He felt good.
Still the knocking, pause, knocking. Birds were tweeting out on the lawn.
Al managed to get up, though it took him a long time, and pulled a robe over his naked body. Maline stirred and pulled all the bedclothes over her body, turning away and curling up. A single, sensuous moan.
Al opened the door and didn’t speak. He shielded his eyes from the eight am. sunshine and managed to see a familiar face in the door.
“Big Al,” said the dark shape in front of him. It resolved into a person, somebody holding out his hand in order to shake. “Thought you might like to come fishing. C’mon, wakey wakey. Have to get there early.”
Another section of Al's brain woke up. “Rod!” and shook the man’s hand. “Wow, how long have you been in town? Here, come in.”
The man called Rod wandered in and went to sit down. He noticed two white coffee cups, filled almost to the brim with cold coffee. “Do you have company? Is your mum visiting again?” Rod grinned.
“No,” Al said and remained standing. His head toggled from side to side and then grinned and shrugged. “You know, Friday night. Anyway, go make yourself a cup of coffee and make me one too. Just take these ones in and nuke them and scrape the cakey bits off. They’ll be right. I’m off to have a shower.”
Rod turned up his nose as Al walked back towards the bedroom. “I think I’ll just put the kettle on.”
There were cards on the floor and a car drove by outside.

“Rod? This is Maline.”
Rod smiled nicely at the woman in front of him.
“And Mal, surprise surprise, this is my old friend Rod. Fishing partner from way back when.”
Maline smiled sleepily at Rod. “Mal?” she asked of Al.
Al shrugged, grinned. “Al and Mal.”
“Sounds a lot like Mike and Mal,” suggested Rod without a trace of humour.
Maline grimaced at Rod. “Well, Rod. Thanks a lot. We appreciate that, thankyou very much. Hello Mike,” she then said to Al. “Are we going on a great northern adventure this time to see the stunning native wildlife and become one with the beautiful countryside?”
Al turned Rod away from Maline. He sucked in a deep breath, raised his chin and in no uncertain terms, thanked Rod for setting the days theme.
“Hey, you’re welcome,” countered Rod, beaming. Things were going just fine.
And about an hour later, Maline was seated in the back of a red station wagon stocked with esky’s, fishing tackle, smelly bait, a tent and some blow-up mattresses, a bag full of clothes and who knows what else. Rod was just getting into the drivers seat and Al had only a moment ago gone back inside to answer the phone.
The house door closed and Al was walking down the steps. “That was my step-mother. She, the dear old bovine moose, wants to drop in tonight for a visit.”
“What? You can’t come?” Rod distressed.
“No, just the opposite,” Al sighed. “She can’t. Well, she is coming, but we won’t be here, will we? I left her a note on the door, and she’s going up the coast for some reunion thing anyway. I’ll probably cop her on her way back home.”
Rod laughed. He knew the wrath of these visits too. Maline stared out the window, reflecting on many things, her lips smiling but her eyes sad.
Across the street, somebody someone would recognise glanced casually at Maline, his weary eyes direct. He nodded, knowing Maline could see him nod, then turned and wandered purposefully away.
It frightened her. To her very shielded core.

The road was not busy. It was a dirt road, fairly narrow but wide enough to let two cars pass safely. The road wound down a mountain into a squeaky little valley, green with trees and quaint farms.
The valley was small and very long as it existed down the bottom of steep gorge country. Clouds constantly hovered uncertainly overhead and they drove the red car into and out of sunlight.
It was half past ten in the morning. They would arrive at their destination, a public reserve down on the river, in just over forty minutes.
“So I said,” continued Rod, chatting constantly into Al’s ear. “You might as well, and what do you know, she bloody-well did. Right over. You know, there goes my twenty bucks. I wasn’t going over that.”
Al grunted, picturing the event. Jumping from one high-rise rooftop to the next. City life; it must be so incredibly dull that people will resort to doing completely stupid things for some entertainment.
“Yeah?” was all Al could manage.
Maline was asleep in the back, her head rattling against the plastic strip behind the window, a soft pillow fallen down beside her. She was dreaming of another place, another time. A memory was stirring in her, of some people she’d once known, or people she thought she’d known. It was all such a blur now.
She snapped awake to the sound of bald rubber tyres gliding across an uneven surface, and to the yell of two men who knew what no man should know.
Then everything turned upside down and the world became bone-jarring noise and a spinning, twirling nightmare. A balloon of powdered glass echoed through a tight, personal existence.
The car narrowly missed a lone black and white cow standing squarely in the middle of the country road, masticating, and arced out over the seventy degree incline of the grassy embankment at a speed of roughly eighty kilometers an hour, pausing only to consider the reality of a tree racing gracefully to meet the sky. The green car fell and tumbled down the slope, end over end, until finally resting side on against a pale white tree.
Silence descended.

Everything was a blur. A throbbing, painless blur. This was not a part of the nightmare, she knew. This was not how it should be. There were things out there, moving around, and they weren’t meant to be there. It wasn’t meant to happen this way.
Voices. Voices! Out there, in here. Hands! Hands helping her. The green grass, the blue sky, the glory redness of the back of her eyelids. She was being carried away on the glowing wings of an angel.
But everything went away, and the gloom of Silence once again instilled its forgiving arms around her.

6.
In the beginning, it was very dark.
But before the beginning, before they switched the light out, even before the Great Hamster was reverse engineered into existence by a beautiful but somewhat confused young girl from Earth many billions of years later, very late in the week before it all started, everything was a shambles.
Everything was not chaos, however. Think of chaos; those pretty book covers and computer screensaver designs that in their psychedelic ways reminisce of spirographs on a huge hit of Sandoz Labs LSD-25. Strange patterns repeating and spiralling away from the eye, baffling perspective on a lurid floating-point battlefield hovering somewhere between the third and second mathematical dimension. Order rising gloriously from the impossibility of negative probabilities, willing itself into existence through reams of unrelated numbers one on zero decimal places long. A shambles is different to that sort of chaos in that while nobody knew what the hell was going on, everything got done somewhat efficiently.
Before the beginning, there was grass, and a hell of a lot of it, too. Miles of happily swaying tendrils of chokingly green grass. It grew over the little wavy hills. It grew over the excruciatingly high mountains. Where appropriate, it grew up through the snow. Who knows, it probably grew on the bright grey cotton wool clouds too. The things was, there was no soil underneath the grass. Soil hadn’t been invented yet.
There were two tents. One was not black, the other white. Instead, they were done up like a circus- does red with a light blue pin stripe work? How do those circuses get away with it?
They were big tents, more like tall instead of wide. There stood opposing each other and their flaps, as they were engineered to do, flapped in the wind. 
It was an interesting scene, there out on a field of grass and nothing else, two kindergarten-painted tents standing flapping madly at each other. A strange caravan-like bubble shape stood of to the side, half hidden by the statutory grass.
Inside these tents, however, it was a different story. Take for instance the red (with light blue pinstripe) tent. In there was a very big hole. It was like having two holes, except both in the one hole. It was a really, really dark; really, really dank; and really, really deep. This place was, on the whole, a big hole. And, to add to the whole hole-ness of the place, something odd, perhaps even holy, was going on down the bottom. Some people were having a party, each wearing a red stocking over their head and shouting obscenities at each other over loud muzak simply because the shouter knew for a fact that the shoutee couldn’t hear a word they’d said, therefore they could say whatever they liked and nobody’d be the wiser. The effect was interesting. Infinitely more interesting down a hole, too. Why was there a shouting party down the hole? Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.
In the other tent, a ludicrous shiny yellow and purple check job, steam poured everywhere. Smoke poured after it. Hot mud and a foul yellow lava sloshed after the smoke, only to sink through the trampled green grass, hissing and spitting; Schrodinger’s cat being put into its box.
In this tent, the preparations were being made to create the universe and everything in it. And there were pits of bubbling lava, and a big pot of ethereal-looking grey. It wasn’t grey something. It wasn’t even the grey nothing that everybody was used to. It was a cauldron of colour, and all the colours together amount to grey; the lint of the universe. There were other pots and beakers, all bubbling or steaming away madly.
One such beaker was bubbling some brown liquid. Out of a smoky nearby mess of lab equipment and high-school science books came a hand. This hand grabbed the beaker, turned down a flame underneath it, and promptly withdrew the beaker and it’s contents back through the jungle of Pyrex and into the white, acrid smoke. When it came back, it was a muddy brown colour and around the top third of the liquid was missing. Something gulped, gasped and the hand set the beaker of bleak coffee back on it’s warming flame.
Without warning, a random beaker exploded. Smoke billowed like a fat, orange velvet curtain.

7.
A piece of paper had fallen to the floor. It had, as gravity had long before predicted, hit the ground at a speed relative to its mass, which was not great, and such had not left a mark or other visible sign of impact on the floor.
The floor was a nice imitation wood grain, polished to the point that if it were to be polished any more, the chances would be that the buffing cloth would penetrate the surface of the floor and end up polishing whatever it was that lay underneath the one-piece mirrorative substance- the roof downstairs, probably.
Soot and dust lay everywhere. There was a wet patch. A dull red footprint by the silver elevator door, cut by the gleaming metal doors. A huge ceramic space vehicle was in the middle of the room. The light was on. There was a nice looking desk and some books bound in expensive cloth. There was a leather chair.
Something had changed since the last time the rapidly blinking woman had been in the room. The answer was so obvious too that she had to concentrate very hard to even see just what that change was. Mental notes recalled memories out of their happy short term bunkers and lined them all up neat and straight.
Light; check. Desk; check. Chair; check, Spacecraft, uh check? Yes, that was it. This was not her spacecraft. Hers was a green, brick shaped Vlovod Mk. II. And it was company policy that she didn’t park it inside. That was it, sure.
Spacecraft.
Spacecraft…
After banging ludicrously on the elevator button, waiting a few nagging milliseconds then repeating the process, the gelatinous doors slid open and the withering female rushed in, pausing only to rap sharply on her supervisor’s button. This was not to be tolerated. It was that horrible Remilliard from three down, that’s who it was. He’d given her those looks. The supervisor had to hear about this.
The supervisor worked twenty stories up and the elevator was frighteningly slow. Music blithered in her ear.
And was that- what was that?- dry blood? on the elevator button?

The elevator stopped when the lights read 39. Her supervisor was on 40, but the elevator wasn’t going that high. Not yet. Somebody had pushed the button; the doors slid open.
Turmoil was the word that sprang into the mind of the woman in the elevator. Oddly enough, so did the sentence ‘My dog, the lawn ornament’. She recognised one person in there, that Emma or Bambi who’d been working here for years. She remembered seeing her at last years office party, sitting there gazing out the window.
Was her name Susie? No.
The rest of the people were unknown to the woman. An elderly couple, wearing ghastly clothing, were waiting at the elevator doors. The old man was smiling like an idiot, the woman looked slightly worried. The man had his foot in the doors to stop them from closing, but neither he nor the woman even looked like stepping into the elevator. They were just standing there.
“Will you get your foot out of the door you silly old man?” she shouted, enraged.
“No. It’s stuck.”
The woman in the elevator looked down. She could see his shoelace. Half of it was in his shoe still, the other half had disappeared down into the workings of the elevator.
“This is not very comfortable, you know.” George said to the woman.
Amy had come over, smiling. “Yes, can I help you?”
“This old geezer has got his foot stuck in the elevator,” She motioned to George. Linda was down on her hands and knees peering down the elevator shaft, looking for the tangled shoelace in the works. “And I have to get up to see the man upstairs.”
“Are you having breakdown?” George asked her, thinking about another man upstairs. “I mean, wouldn’t there be a woman upstairs for you?”
The woman from the elevator spun around. “No! I mean, I need to see somebody upstairs. Mr Bigge, the wing manager!”
“But there isn’t any stairs. There’s only the elevator. There’s stairs in the lobby.”
“What are you talking about?” The woman almost struck the god in frustration.
“Shut up you old fool,” Linda was saying. “Move you foot.”
“Who are you?” Amy asked the woman. James was walking towards the Gods. “Do you have an appointment to see Mr Bigge?”
“I can’t. It’s stuck. That’s the problem.” George sighed.
“I’m from downstairs-”
“There’s some other stairs down just out that door.” George cut in, pointing to the side door. Trying to be helpful again.
“- on level twenty. Somebody parked their spaceship in my-”
“Spaceship?” one of the Stuart’s asked. “Big white one?” He and his double limped over to Amy and the new person.
“- room.” The new girl looked at the Stuart not wearing the copper-coloured suit. “Is it yours?”
“No it’s his.” Stuart said, pointing to his right, where Stuart stood. “Mine’s in a space dock someplace.”
“What’s wrong?” James asked of God.
“My foot is stuck,” God replied, as if it was totally obvious. It was totally obvious; James was just stupid.
The new woman looked at Simon, then looked at Simon, and then looked back at Simon. “Are you two identical twins?”
“No, actually we’re the same people. Just from different dimensions, that’s all. I suggest you disregard that if you talk to us, though. We have different histories.”
The woman looked around the room then, seeing that nearly everybody else not already around the elevator had a double somewhere. He could see that some of them were wearing copper coloured space suits (old ones, she thought), and some looked hurt. Two people, a boy and girl, were holding hands, attending their doubles, lying on the ground with their eyes shut.
“Somebody call the paramedics,” A Karen said, and the dusty Simon groaned. His wound was festering.
“Is it just me or is there something strange happening in here?” she asked Amy, hand on her chin, scratching something that didn’t appear to be there.
“It all seems fine to me,” Amy didn’t even smile. It was an effort. “The spaceship is his.” she said pointing at the Simon who was now attempting to remove the wet spacesuit. It was squeaking and stretching, but didn’t want to come off. “I’m Amy, by the way.”
“Yes. Yes, I remember you from a party one time. I thought your name was Elly.”
“No, it’s Amy.”
“I was told it was Elly. At a party, a year ago. I don’t think you were there. Elly was, though.”
“Oh. I’ve only been to one. The other one I had a broken wrist and couldn’t make it. Took a nasty fall down the stairs in the lobby. They have spherical steps so you don’t hurt yourself if you fall down them, which you do.”
“Well. That was the one then.” She extended her right arm regretfully. “I’m, uh, Bob.”
“Bob?” Simon asked.
“See,” Linda was pointing at George’s shoe for James. “It’s gone down there.”
“Can you get some scissors?” James pondered.
“My damned parents,” Bob told Simon. “They called me Bob. All the other people my age are called Jade or Pemry or Lija or other normal names, and I get ‘Bob’. You'd think it's short for Bobby or even Robby, but no, I'm just-”
“It’s a cruel universe out there.” the other Simon patted her on the back.
“What would you know? I’m the one that has to live with it.”
“Would you like some tea?” Amy asked.
“I’d like that spaceship removed.”
James was pulling at Georges shoe, trying to get his foot out of it.
“It’s no use,” Linda said. “He hasn’t had that thing off for millennia. The smell is holding it on, I think.”
“You aren’t going to chop that shoelace!” George tried jerking his foot away.
“Here,” Amy was guiding Bob to a chair. “Sit down here.”
“There’s broken ceramic on the floor.” Crunch.
“There, there. Just have a little rest.”
“What floor are you on?” Simon, the one in the spacesuit, as his double helped pull him out of it, asked. His leg definitely was festering. Continuing, he mumbled “I mean, I don’t know where that damned ship is. Can somebody please call the wretched parame-” and fainted.
“Twenty,” Said Bob, and put her head between her hands, obviously frustrated beyond belief.
Simon came put of the spacesuit with a definite suction-pop. He fell backwards, onto the broken ceramic, on his back. Crunch again. No matter; he was unconscious.
“Do you suppose he wanted us to call some parameters?” Karen asked Stuart. “Thirteen left! Two degrees! X is always equal to, less than or greater than the sum of it’s sides!”
Amy was turning a kettle on, getting a handful of cups ready. She made the mistake of asking the room’s general populace if they would like tea or coffee. She didn’t have ten cups. She needed fifteen.
Karen, the one in the space suit, had woken up. She looked a little blurry eyed, but came over to the other Simon, asked him could he help her get out of the space suit, and then helped him brush the bits of ceramic out of his doubles back. Presumably somebody was calling the paramedics.
Simon pulled Karen’s suit. Karen squirmed and wriggled and pulled and tugged. The suit slid half way off, pulling her shirt most of the way up her chest. Her skin was fairly white; wet, dirty. Pretty interesting too, thought Simon. “Nice belly button you’ve got yourself, there.”
“Oofhg!” She was saying, the voice muffled by the strong suit. Her arms thrashed around as she tried to pull the shirt back down, without much luck. She ended up on the ground. “Ghet ths fghing ff mef!”
“What?” Simon was laughing. “I mean, Whaf?”
Karen found her own way out of the suit; pulled the shirt down indignantly, as Simon found his way over to the wall, where he sat. She made her way over to him, sat close beside him, looked angry.
“What’s the matter, Karen?”
“What’s the matter, Karen?” She mimicked Simon’s silly voice. “I need a shower. And thank you for all that help getting me out of that bloody thing.”
“You have a nice chest, you know?” Simon grinned at the girl at slyly as he could manage. Mouth smile; no eyes.
Karen went a little red, fought it back. “Last you’re going to see of it, I can guarantee. Amy, is there a shower and bathroom anywhere around this place?”
Amy left the kettle, motioned for Karen to follow her. The other Karen left Stuart, walking along beside herself and Amy, chatting. They left the room just as the kettle started to whine.

8.

The cycle screamed up at him; he could feel the bike twist and sway beneath him as he pulled back on the handlebars and let the throttle slip a little. He'd hit the red line, twelve thousand revs too many, the corner coming at him like a falling space station. He eased the brake on, but it was too late. He hit the cement wall doing two-hundred and forty three miles per hour. The slide along the bitumen ground him into a red bloody mash.
Another bike screamed past, made the turn, hooned away, before everything went black.
The words 'Game Over' passed over the screen in gouroud shaded three-dimensional Gothic styled characters. The hydraulic motorcycle went silent.
So silent, in fact, they all the passers by could clearly hear the most foul string of words flowing from the mouth of the man riding the bike. He was describing, in quite intense graphic detail, what he would do to both the machine and the all the other machines around it if that ever happened again. Strangely enough, the video game completely ignored him and promptly displayed the crash in loving slow-motion replay, from a variety of angles. 
The angry man kicked the machine, but it refused to give in. He swore at it. It showed a close up of his virtual body being run over by a passing bike. He cursed the machine, it ran the crash backwards. He threatened to pour his Coke over the machines circuits, the computer ran a short scene where the newly-dead virtual body was picked up by an ambulance, put it the back, where suddenly it exploded, the virtual body thrown high into the air, where it struck a passing helicopter. Graphically.
When the man did pour his Coke down the machine, he was removed from the shop. Silently, the machine laughed and had the insight to burn that particular crash scene into its memory chips, just in case the guy ever came back. A second later, the Coke had infiltrated the machine enough to get on some of the empowered circuits, thus fusing them. Oddly enough, the only part affected by this act was the computers memory circuits, which were instantly erased. The computer cursed to itself, but suddenly couldn't remember why, and so forgot the whole incident and continued on happily.
Meanwhile outside the shop, many things were happening. The man had seen another person stare solemnly at him, nod once, turn and walk away. This did not worry him as this was the city and those sorts of people were everywhere. In the act of noticing this second person, he failed to see the vehicle.
He noticed it was very noisy in the ambulance, and for an unknown reason, it seemed to be speeding away from the direction which he thought the hospital to be in. He looked up, but the faces above him were indistinct, as if very far away. In their eyes he could see infinity. He was frightened, and in his efforts to get up off the stretcher, he noticed one other body in the ambulance; a woman, badly cut.
The mask came down over his face, seemingly from nowhere. He smelled the pleasant odour of nitrous oxide, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. He was away of helping hands around him, supporting his broken body.
Sirens screamed.

He saw a lot of things that in other circumstances would have sent him way past insanity. He hadn’t been hit on the head but he still saw stars. He saw planets.
But the nitrous oxide; he didn’t care.
The last thing he remembered seeing was a whole lot of grass.

9.

The woman said “Oh this is repugnant.”
“Repugnant,” mused the bearded man beside her. “Odd word. Nauseating springs to my mind.”
“That’s not where it springs for me.”
The man regarded this comment stoically. Smacking his lips, he stated “Now, that’s repugnant.”
Like an unfelt wind the hiss of air poured out of a thousand tiny cooling fans.
Grey. The remnants of this ship were that achromaticity. Apart from the occasional mercury lamp, multicolour LED or even a fuzzy screen, the ship was dark and unpleasant. The air felt heavy, as if it had the texture of felt. There was a window looking out into space; occasional dots of paint sprayed from a wet toothbrush. Bunches of cables, fatter than a baby’s arm hung splayed from the ruined walls and ceiling. White fungus lurched from under a blackened door.
In the forward room a thousand skeletons lay in their frozen tombs; a thousand more scattered about the room.
When the woman stepped on the remains of a hand, burnished with time, it made a sickening crunching sound. A finger, one with the vague remnants of flesh still clinging desperately to the dead bone, snapped off and lay upright in its slightly curled position.
“Simon!” the woman shrieked, desperately retreating from the sight. Desperate eyes stared up from their intertwined existence, deep within a corroded skull, a pale green exterior of velvet fungi. A ghosted voice croaked up from somewhere below the body, words unknown.
Simon caught the woman as she doubled over, half tripping on an unseen jawbone.
“I thought it was Stuart. It reminded me of Stuart.”
Simon looked down at her figure, now three or so years his senior. He wore a serious expression; almost his only mask. Turning the woman from the ugly sight, he spoke gently, easingly to her. “You cared a lot about him, didn’t you Karen?”
Her eyes flashed up without delay. Her voice was uncommonly stern. “Of course. Of course I cared about him. You remember, don’t you?”
“No. I mean, it wasn’t me. I’ve been alone for ten years, Karen. God, it’s so strange to see you now. Such a cruel joke, in which there is no humour,” His eyes were so dull. Devoid. “You know I’ve been searching for you, any of you. Any of the others. Even though there are a million or more of us now, since the Nova, it has taken me these ten years to find even you.”
“Yes, I know.”
Simon took Karen by the shoulders, straightened her face to his and said “He’s gone, you know. The chances of you finding him, or any of him for that matter, is almost non existent.”
“There’s always hope.” Karen’s brown eyes became unfocused, her breathing audible.
“Had I known that ten years ago, I may still remember how to smile.”
There was a bleak, silent moment.
“I wonder where they all are now.” Karen’s voice was a whisper as she stared around the dead room. “The others, I mean.”
“Who’s to know?” Simon shrugged. “ I mean, look at us. You are older than me. A day has passed here. Any number of years may have passed everywhere else.”
“Damn the machine.”
Simon regarded her, walking her slowly back to the craft. He had his left arm around her shoulders, his face remaining, as always, impassive. “Oh yes. Yes, damn the machine. Damn the damned machine!” On the heel of his foot he spun, his voice angry. Karen’s eyes widened, her lower lip began to tremble. “Don’t grieve over the past. You can’t change how things are, how things were. You can go back and try but it never works, things always end up different. Another choice is made and you know what that does to things.”
“What is your problem, Simon?” Karen struck, her voice as stern as the mans, yet calmer than the heart of a black hole.
“The same as yours. I’m lost, the people I came here with are dead, or as good as.”
“That’s not true.”
“It may as well be. I may as well be. Ten years I have been as much alone as in company with others. In ten years time, you’ll be the same too.”
“No,” Karen’s voice was cold. “You’re wrong. I won’t be alone, or as heartless as you are now. I remember how you were. You weren’t so different. Things don’t change. You never changed anything.”
Simon was hardly listening. Karen regarded his ice, decided that arguing wasn’t the answer. She turned away from him, walked back towards the ship, momentarily pausing to kick the frozen grin of a skull from her path. It clattered against something metal.

“What did you mean?” Simon raised his voice so it would carry into the small spaceship. He stood alone in the dark, empty dock. He was wearing a long navy blue overcoat which flapped around his ankles. Some distant lightsource behind him illuminated the white fog that splayed around him. He stood his ground firmly. Though he couldn’t see her through the yellow glass, he knew Karen was watching him from somewhere. He stared.
The absence of sound he knew he would face came.
He stood his ground, held his pose, hands held stiffly in those deep pockets. Stared to where he thought Karen would be. Two long minutes passed.
“Are you coming?” Karen’s voice said from right behind him. He felt her hands crest his shoulders soothingly. They were the hands of a thirty year old.
For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he grunted a little, moved off into the ship, knowing Karen would sometime follow.

10.

“Hello? Hello? Everybody!”
Simon had just been taken away by a somewhat confused-looking pair of ambulance officers. They wheeled him away on a white stretcher and left Amy with written directions on how to get the hospital, and where she could stick the dialysis machine. It had all started so well. They’d come in nice and smiled at everybody peacefully, as if to say that everything was in order and under control. But at the point when approached by Simon, Stuart and Stuart, followed by Matthew, Errol, Errol and Matthew, all asking different questions at the same time, pointing at another Simon, order and control had taken a flying leap. The ambulance officers would have shrugged it off if Karen and Karen hadn’t bumbled in and smashed into the dialysis machine. Amy had told them that she hadn’t ordered the dialysis machine the officers had brought in, that her kidneys were doing a smacking good job as they were. The ambulance officers had both stated that they had very specific instructions as to the place and time of the delivery, only then to discover that the work order suggested floor 93, not floor 39.  Naturally, they did not relate this oversight to anybody. Soon they found out that there was a gunshot casualty available, one without ambulance cover, and snapped him up, going at once into professional mode. They parked the dialysis machine next to the elevator, popped Simon onto a stretcher and were soon gone.
The place was still in an uproarious mood. People dashed one way, followed by their doubles. Other people dashed the other way, carrying cups of coffee. In then middle stood a confused woman, silent.
Amy had to settle them all down again.
So she did it the easy way. She screamed.
A peice of fern leaf fluttered to the floor. Everybody heard it touch down. It made a soft flopping sound.
“We have to figure out what to do now,” said Amy, smiling kindly.
There came an almightily crash from Amy’s office, followed by the gentle tinkle of glass. Considering the past couple of hours, this was nothing unusual, and Amy ignored the interruption, eager to maintain these dear, dear moments of peace. Bob sat in the corner, paging aimlessly through a brochure entitled ‘Pangalactic Holidays you’ll want to avoid’, looking vaguely distracted.
Amy continued. “I mean, you all can’t stay here. None of you can stay here. I don’t think that would work. I don’t think you should all leave as one big bunch, either. One lot of you is bad enough.” This got an exuberant laugh from the X-Nerds, both of them. “So, once you’ve all figured out what to do, do it. I have work to do, you know.”
“It’s the figuring that’s go me,” Simon 1 said. Stuart 2 nodded.
From Amy’s office next door, an aged voice said something, and the doorknob fell off. Then the door was opened and Amy, without turning, used her emphatic screaming method of inducing silence once more. A man stood in the doorway.
His eyes panned the room professionally, like a TV cameraman watching a car go by. He saw a lot of things we would rather have not seen. He saw some faces from the distant past, and two faces he found excruciatingly familiar.
He gasped without realising it. He punctually stated “Oh my dog.”
After a moments silence, Bob, from the corner, said “This is getting complicated. Will somebody please tell me what is going on here?”
Nobody could.

Stuart had aged. He was now nearly thirty. He sat talking about himself while the others X-Nerds sat in mute silence. He had just told them about Simon’s disappearance, roughly a year before the present.
“Some time ago, probably a month or so back, I was separated from Karen. She, Simon and I had travelled for ten years or so, after the other two disappeared. We never saw another one of us in all that time. Now, after we separate, I get this. Ten of you, and a few freeloaders.”
“I’m not a freeloader. I work here,” Said Amy.
“You work here? I think I remember you. Aren’t you that girl we found on prehistoric Earth?” Amy nodded, smiled. Stuart smiled back at her. Normally he had to look up his own name. For some reason, he had never forgotten Amy’s. “Well there you go. How did you end up here? Any where is ‘here’ anyway?”
“Lorna Minor World Design Institute.”
“Oh yeah, really?” Stuart said, nodding. “The place where they make the planets. I’ll have to have a look around this place one day. Always been meaning to.”
Amy made the new introductions and then went about describing how everybody had arrived at the location. The old Stuart held his eyes low while he thought, and rubbed at the thin whiskers upon his chin. He could not remember James when re-introduced.
When he spoke, everybody listened. Stuart had acquired a voice to be heard, and the wisdom in his eyes demanded attention.
“We need to sit down and plan this out carefully,” He said, sitting by the door. He noticed George and Linda, fiddling with something deep within the works of the elevator.
“Just what I said,” Amy murmured.
“Well it’s a good idea. Apparently you have all been bumming your way around the universe, not really achieving anything. One lot of you found this James character here, the other lot went and picked up these two humans here,” Stuart indicated the so-called gods fussing over a shoe. He looked at Bob. “And how you got mixed up in all this is beyond me.”
“Oh I’m not mixed up in any of this,” Bob brightened up a little at the chance to speak. “It all started when they parked their spaceship in my-”
One of the Karen’s interrupted. “What did you mean by saying the gods were human?”
Stuart looked genuinely surprised. “They’re human, pretty much like you and me. Didn’t you know that?”
All of the X-Nerds and James shook their heads. Linda was glaring not unkindly at the old Stuart. Apparently, this was new to her too. George was being George and wasn’t listening. His shoe had his full attention. That is to say, the shoe had the shreds of attention normally attained by George.
It was obvious to George that the elevator problem was more than it seemed. Somehow his shoelace had become entangled in some fundamental part of the works and not only resisted the attempts to dislodge it, but used these attempts to further complicate the matter. Now, half the shoe had fallen into the crevice between the elevator and the floor, though there didn’t appear to be enough room between the objects to allow such an action to have occurred. Thus the problem was this: The shoe had fallen into a place where all reason said it couldn’t have fallen. The space in which the shoe was stuck was smaller than the size of the shoe. Logic was out the window and down the road on this one.
George began to notice the fetid sock smell, and gave the shoe an unapproving tug.
Some dark and misplaced part of his mind recognised somebody talking but wasn’t on speaking terms with the memory department, and thus forgot to mention it to the rest.
Stuart couldn’t believe it. “You mean you actually thought you were a god?” He asked of Linda.
“Well, yes. I mean, as far back as I can remember.” Linda’s face knotted in concentration. “I mean, the things I can do, other people I know, except the others gods, of course, can’t.”
“How far back can you remember?” Stuart asked, obviously concentrating on something else.
“Well,” Linda started, but stopped when Stuart vanished. “Oh.”
There was a moment where everybody adjusted to the change. Then there was a silence.
“I’ve just got the knack,” Said Stuart, stepping over George and out of the elevator. Twenty eight eyes followed him as he moved back to the place where he had stood only a twin second before.
“How-”
“Parlour tricks. Spend a couple of years in company with some of the Universes finest minds and you pick up a few things.”
James then said “Start from the start. Tell us everything. I’m sick of doing nothing.”
“Get used to it. Do we have any coffee?”
On impulse, both the other Stuart’s passed what little coffee remained in their mugs, about an inch, black, cold. The thirty year old Stuart regarded the hazy muck in the mugs, mixed them together and took it in one mouthful. He’d learned over the years to get what he could, because mugs of coffee, no matter what state, were few and far-between. “Thank me,” He grinned, and sat down next to the two Karens. He held the hand of the Karen to his right, who didn’t object, now having a Stuart on either side, doing the same thing, with that same faint grin.

“The beginning. I guess you’ve figured out when we split apart. The big supernova. It was my fault, I seem to recall. If I hadn’t waited for the nova’s energy, then I think the apparent multi-dimensioning wouldn’t have happened. Still, it did, it has, and you can’t go back and change it. That, for some reason, never works. It always ends up different to what you expect. Guess it makes sense, really. There’s only one way to change it for good, but I haven’t worked out what it is yet.
“Anyway, the way I have it figured, our original instructions from the end of the city are all obsolete now because the celestial city can’t really exist anymore. When we all left that first time, I think the celestial city and everybody in it disappeared the instant we re-entered the universe because no matter what you think, I feel we have just about messed up everything there is to mess up, and in just about every dimension possible. I don’t see how the Celestial City could be in the same state now.”
A Matthew said, “But how was it there in the first place? Apparently it got there just fine before we went back in time, which means we did something right and didn’t blow it up or whatever.”
“The mash mish,” Stuart grimaced. “Remember that, oh, what was his name? The fellow who wrote the Hitch Hikers Guide book.”
“Adam Douglas.” Someone said.
Someone else corrected her. “No, you idiot, it was Douglas somebody. Smith. Adam Douglas wrote The Galactic Hitch Hikers guide to Cuba.”
Stuart smiled. “That’s right. I always forget his name for some reason. Anyway, in the Guide, do you remember the principal behind the general mash mish?”
“Mish mash. That everything effects everything else, in both directions of what we call time? You wouldn’t think potatoes are capable of it, would you. You have your own universe, and everybody else has theirs. Something like that. I haven’t finished reading it yet.”
“Yes. You know that Time is relative to an objects movement in space as perceived by another object. Space is relative to a path’s passage through time. Well, everything happened once, and what we experience is just the aftermath”
Errol looked up and said “That’s an interesting way of putting it. Brings up some interesting points, though, like multiple dimensions.”
“Well, the point is this. There is actually only one real universe, one Lorna Major and one Lorna Minor outside the universe, and the Celestial City and that other fractal room, whatever the hell that is, and that’s it. And the Antiverse, of course. There is, or was a Lorna Major in the universe as well, but that can be explained fairly easily and I’ll get to it. But the interesting thing I have found is that there is also only one Lorna Major outside, and all the other things I mentioned for all the infinity of dimensions. Because they exist outside the universe, they are excluded from the laws that apply inside the universe. Those laws are basically the old choice equals another universe type rules, and, interestingly enough, the word created the object. Note the tense.”
Stuart felt a compulsion to change his posture slightly, taking on a faint lecturer pose. It became him. If only he had the doodly little black square hat with the yellow frilly string. Still, hat or no hat, need compelled him to continue. “There are places in the universe that exist simply to cater for all the possible objects people can name. They must pop into existence the instant somebody conceptualises it. I mean, there always there, everything exists, but it doesn’t become apparent until somebody conceptualises it and puts a name to it. It is a very obscure phenomenon and leads to some interesting places and things in the universe. Did you know a frog with purple wings is called a Nefr? Somebody thought a frog with wings would be a good idea and named it. Suddenly, there it was, and more to the point, everybody suddenly knew what a Nefr was.
“Everyone knows what a Nefr is,” said Bob, who wasn’t really listening.
“With the dimension thing, although there is only one universe, there are an infinite number of dimensions included, and each one can and does affect the others. It’s all very confusing and easier to think of everything relative to yourself. Just keep the image of yourself being the absolute centre of the universe and you’ll go just fine.
“That Adams fellow in all probability got it right in the Guide. His idea that the universe happened and no matter what went on while it was happening, it still had the same start and the same finish. Strange how he had so much vision, without actually realising that it actually existed. You know, it’s quite possible that whoever thought that time and dimensions were related in this way and named the concept, actually invented multiple dimensions.” He dropped the lecturer pose because it hurt his back. He went back to his boring old self.
“There is one interesting quirk, though. The Great Hamster, wherever He may be, is said to have founded the Universe, but he came into existence after the Universe had been created, as if he created it so it could create him. I don’t like multiple dimension problems. I’m so glad our maths teachers back home never gave us four dimensional equations.”
“You remember maths classes after all this time?” Errol asked, while his double hummed a tuneless ditty.
“Oh yes. Nothing will make me forget Maths. It left a scar cauterised on my brain. If we’d done four dimensional quadratics, I think that scar would be more like a gouge, possibly a canyon.”
Amy finished her cup of water and looked at the old Stuart, seeing a little of the boy she once saw on a faraway planet, many aeons into the past (or maybe the future). Suddenly all the memories returned. She brightened visibly. “I think I might lay a hand of help in this one. You remember when you left earth that first time, when we first met?”
“Not really,” Replied the old Stuart, but the other two younger Stuarts both nodded.
Amy put her cup down, and started to pace the room slowly. “Well, I remember now. You said goodbye, and then tried to say something in the old language. I don’t know what you would have said, but I clearly remember you saying that the Universe was created by a Hamster made of cheese. It’s funny how much you could say in the old language. Anyway, I guess I needed something to believe in at that time, not knowing about gods or other concepts at the time, especially after Wolf disappeared, and I started to believe that the Universe was created by a Giant Hamster. I told everybody.”
“I remember now,” said the young Stuart holding Karen’s hand. He looked at his double, his triple, then at Amy. “I was trying to tell you that I had to go and I’d probably never see you again and a few other things.” Stuart then looked up at his older self knowingly.
“Do you know what this means?” Stuart’s older incarnation asked Amy. Without waiting for an answer, he ploughed on. “You, as a direct error made by Stuart, uh, I mean me, created the Giant Hamster, who then went on to create the Universe, thus allowing you to exist. There’s a paradox, for you. Why do I always get the big mistakes?”
Amy smiled in spite of herself. Well, she thought, if it’s the only thing I ever do that’s worthwhile, then I am happy with it. Imagine, mothering the idea, thus the object, of the being that created the Universe. Of course, not physically mothering the object. A human giving birth to a rodent is not probable and also not a great conversation starter. Oh by the way, Janice, I gave birth to a cheese hamster last Sunday, and he’s a three pound blue. It just doesn’t work.
Many hours were lost to the topics of multiple dimension, movement of time through space, matter and anti-matter and a whole assortment of general theories or other equally unprovable ideas often presented in such times (including the whole science is art and art is science debacle). James was quickly asleep, and Bob had long since disappeared. Linda and George never recovered the shoe, and the elevator remained stuck, doors wide open, infiltrating the air with ‘Kenny G does the James Last Classics’. Predictably, night came, and the original threads of Stuart’s narrative were lost to history.

12.

Seventy, a hundred, possibly fifty above that. One man stood calculating the number, counting the nameless bunch with an open fist. He was old, balding, and carried a single golf club. His eyes speculated the infinite panorama, it’s perfect flowing valleys of grass, the endless fairways of lawns. It was as if the entire landscape was created for the one purpose that was in his mind.
“I’m missing the Masters,” He told somebody nearby. Somehow he failed to recognise the gravity of what had just happened.
The other person looked at him. She pulled her stained pink jumper tighter around her slight body, feeling both cold and numb. Her voice was almost non-existent. The pain of exhaustion caroused her face when she said “I’m dead, aren’t I?”
The old man regarded her sceptically. “I don’t think so. Dead people are normally have a bluish tinge around the eyes and lips, and are rubbery. I know, I found my wife like that one morning last year. I remember waking up after a good night’s rest, and turning to kiss her good morning. I got quite a shock. She had been dead for about six hours, and I remember kissing her good morning. No, being dead is quite different. You’re not rubbery yet and you’re still moving.”
The woman regarded this old beast stoically, then let out a faint smile. She was about to speak, but the man’s attention, like his person, had wandered elsewhere.
He swung his driver experimentally, accidentally striking the earth. A chunk of grass flew up, landing an impossible distance away.
“Well, would you look at that,” He said, kneeling down to examine the ground. A small patch of grey nothingness now existed where the grass once was; where the ground should be. On closer inspection, the old man found he could place his arm in the ‘hole’ left by the misplaced turf. He reached down as far as he could. He felt nothing. Removing his arm, he tried gazing down the hole, looking for anything the hole might contain. It revealed nothing, on a light grey substance that appeared to be no substance at all. He put his head down through little hole and found himself looking around at an hue-inverted expanse of swaying turf, stretching towards the horizon; the pink grass in contrast with a yellow sky, all light and dark inverted, as if a negative of what he thought reality. Vertigo found a place in his head and without a pause he removed his head, stood up and walked away, not saying a word, his face like hot putty. The grey hole beckoned.
Soon, something small, white and hard struck the woman in the stained pink jumper on the temple. She found the grass surprisingly comfortable as her face struck.

When she awoke, she was alone.
Then she noticed the three objects; a caravan, and two tents. They each stood silhouetted against an ambient light source. She thought she heard dance music filtering through the nothingness.
Groggily she wandered towards the strange objects, wondering many things. Her mind still swum with transparent visions of the past days. A cow on a country road, a silly old man with a golf club, a strange black butterfly. She stumbled on something, a large object buried in the grass. It was a golden sword, but she left it lying where it was. She moved on with unease. After some long minutes, she finally came up hard against a tent; yellow and purple checks.
Around the front of this tent, a flap flapped. The dazed woman stumbled in, her hand going out as darkness put her in its mouth and swallowed. She failed to see more of the caravan-like objects materialise.

“Well what do you mean we’re one short?” A man waved his hands frantically around, knocking his empty wine goblet over. Penetrating eyes looked out from under a bushy grey brow.
“Well, sir,” another, slightly younger, man ventured. “She’s here, it’s just that when we sent everybody into the fractal room, she didn’t come along. I guess she’s still out there in the grass somewhere.”
“Franklin, do you realise that there is over twenty-four billion kilometres of grass out there in every direction? How are you ever going to find her?”
“Find, sir? Me, sir?” Franklin cringed.
“Yes, you. You’re the one that’s gone and lost one our pure human lifeforms, one that is dearly needed. We can’t just grab them whilly-nilly, you know.”
“But, I didn’t, I mean, it wasn’t-“
“Yes, yes, Franklin. I know how eager you are to get started, so I won’t delay you any further.” The man with the bushy eyebrows turned slightly away, greeting another man. A moment later he turned back to the man named Franklin.
“You still here?”
“Yes sir.”
“Hmp. Well, all right. Take a rover, but remember to fill it up again when you’re finished. Off you go, there’s a good chap.”
Franklin visibly sagged. “Yes, Mr Tobler.”
Mr Tobler’s eyes shone like magma in a milk carton. “It shouldn’t take you more than say five hours.” His voice was good-natured, but to Franklin’s ears, it sounded like the gates of hell.
Mr Tobler almost smiled to himself as he watched Franklin slump out the door on his impossible search. He looked on a moment longer, and then his attention curved back to the man standing beside him. Mr Tobler was an administrator, and currently his job was to administer the start of the universe, and make sure everything was ready so that when the light switch was finally switched on, everything looked and acted as it should. Mr Tobler liked to administer. He had a Ph.D. in it. Chewing a thoughtful fingernail, he went off to get a nice hot cup of tea.

Franklin, bored with administrative processes, endless preparations and pointless errands, let his mind wander. He had permission to use a Rover. He’d never had permission before, usually opting to just take one. Of course, when you did it this way, you didn’t bother filling it up with fuel when (and if) you returned it. Having explicit permission to do something always had its drawbacks.
Franklin liked to drive. He had an insane streak, which, when driving, could be confused with a death wish. Sometimes, when screaming along over the countless miles of grass, he let his mind wander. Combine a naive death wish with a mind a thousand lifetimes away from the body in question and put it in a car. Then run away, very, very fast.
Probability says if you had an infinite space, a moving car and a single tree, then sooner or later, the car will hit the tree. For an inexplicable reason, the car will hit the tree sooner rather than later. Perhaps it has to do with the microgravity forces that affects every atom. Perhaps there is some psychological attachment of the car with the tree. Probably it’s because some people are really too stupid to drive. Now, take away that single fateful tree, and the probabilities change significantly. Now the chances of a car hitting the tree that isn’t there are completely obscured.
In any case, Franklin was now quite a long way away from his office, amidst the remains of an upturned smoking mess that was once (possibly) a Rover. Lying face up on the grass, he wore a faint grin the shape of an orang-utan wearing a yellow jumpsuit. He thought he could hear children playing in the distance. He knew with unerring certainty that he could see a woman standing over him, blocking the light.
It began to snow.

There were ninety nine of them seated in on comfy chairs in the fractal room, all facing a raised dais. A gentle light shone down from above, presumably from somewhere higher than the strange glutinous fog. Infinity tossed and played on the event horizon. Shopping mall ambience filtered in from an unidentifiable source.
The whole effect of all this seemed to be to make everything a little hazy and indistinct. A side effect happened to be that it was also utterly annoying.
From on high a bright beam of light shone on the center dais, and because of certain conventions the near hundred people all settled down and turned expectantly towards it. So much of the last few days had been the most exciting things to ever happen to them, certainly more exciting than anything that could have ever happened to anybody any of them knew, that the definition of the possible and the impossible was blurring.
“I guess you’re all wondering why I called you all here,” Said a voice from the pedestal. Since there was nobody there, only that beam of light. Oh well, it was pretty darned self explanatory, if you ask me.
“But we were stolen and brought here,” Said an old man with a golf club, who sat near to the front.
“Stolen?” The light beam flickered. “Are you sure?”
“Well,” said somebody a little further back. “Maybe nabbed, nicked or permanently borrowed would be a better way to describe it.”
A slight murmur of agreement arose, but a few people disagreed. One man jumped to his feet and absurded “Nicked? Just nicked? I was run over by a god-damned ambulance!”
“Well,” the other voice came again from the seething mass of people. “I guess some of us were nicked harder than others.”
The old man with the golf club glanced around the room and asked the woman sitting next to him if she had seen a TV anyplace. Evidently he needed to see how some guy call Norman was doing on the seventeenth. Whatever that meant.
The woman told him he was a jerk.
The voice from the pedestal swallowed a couple of times and mumbled just enough to get most of the attention in the room. “Okay, so is everybody here?”
“Where’s here?”
The beam of light took a step back. “Doesn’t anybody know anything? Why is it always me who gets these jobs? I mean, why do I always have to explain to everybody what’s going on all the time? I think its jolly well about time that some of the others here took on a little responsibility,” Even as the light beam spoke, the rabble of half-annoyed voice started up again. “Take for instance the last time we did this-…”
But meanwhile, the strange old golf-fiend was on his own wavelength; tees? Holes? Bunkers? What in earth was the old fool on about? Also meanwhile, everybody else was back on track with the beam of light, nodding and smiling piteously as he vicariously put forward his matte life story.

For as far back as he could remember, which was either so long or so short that he could not recall, Franklin could not think of a time that he had seen snow falling in a children’s playground. He didn’t know where he hadn’t seen the playground, only the fact that he hadn’t seen the playground full of falling snow. He spent a moment getting his thoughts together. So far they had been jumbled and mixed up. Or maybe, he thought, as a woman wearing a thick woollen overcoat helped him to his feet, that they only seemed jumbled and mixed up and that they were really normal. If they were normal, he decided it was about time he had them fixed. If only he could find a Brain-o-Fix machine. Maybe there was no such thing as a Brain-o-Fix machine; that he had just made that up. Now, unsure, he would definitely have to have it fixed. Possibly by a machine that did not exist. That would do it.
“Are you okay?” The woman asked, breathing a mist into the cold air. A police car screamed by in the background. Two brightly coloured tents stood defiantly at the other end of what now appeared to be a long park.
“I think I hit a tree.”
“Looks like you’ve got a nasty bump on your head. Let’s have you out of there,” The woman helped Franklin step out of the Rover’s remains. “Where did you spring from?”
“I think my problem is finding out where I have sprung to,” He glanced over at the two tents, perhaps five hundred metres away, their flaps flapping in the wind. “How long have those tents been there?”
“What tents?” Asked the woman. She acted as if she could not see them. She turned around. “Oh, those tents…”
Franklin had his head slightly forward, expecting a response, but the woman had trailed off, as if forgetting that she had been saying something. He still had his head forward when he asked slowly, motioning to continue. “Yes-…?”
“I’m sorry, were you saying something?” The woman asked, her shoulder-length coppery hair flecked with snow, and walked away, singing a song about a bird, a bee and a bathtub full of banana custard.
Franklin decided that it was time, too, that he wandered. So he glanced at the destroyed Rover, wondering if he still had to refuel it, gave it a rueful kick, and departed for the two tents.
The rover vanished.

13.

“Isn’t it about time you all found someplace else to go?” Amy stood up, brushing back her frightfully distraught hair, careful not to tread on anybody. “I mean, my place is getting crowded and messy.”
Okay, so the room was worse than a warzone where the weapons consisted of cherry cream pies and the armies were undoubtedly floppily shod clowns wearing ermine wigs, indigo vests and squishy red noses. Okay, so ‘a few days’ had turned into a week or so. Okay, so somebody had stolen the trashed time machine that had been parked in Bob’s office, and Bob herself had mysteriously vanished. Okay so they were running desperately low of coffee.
Old Stuart stood up and put a friendly arm around Amy’s shoulder. “You see the problem, though?”
“No, not really.”
“Well,” and glanced around at the dozing people scattered all over her living room. He put his finger in his ear and scratched around for a while. “With only one time machine besides mine, it’s going to be a fairly cramped experience trying to get the others back to their own dimension, even in two vehicles. Even if following a trail of chronafluxions down a multidimensional wormhole wasn’t impossible, as the wormhole generates a negative black hole in monodimensional P-space, and the rip in the spacetime fabric into H-space invariable sucks other chronafluxions down into it as well, some of which infer themselves from H-space into M-space through sub waveforms inside the wormhole, well, I think you can see what I’m getting at here.”
Amy pondered all this. After nodding for a while, chewing a bunch of hair, and breathing deeply, she pondered it again. “So what you’re saying is…?”
He turned to look her in the eye. “Come with me.”
For some reason, this rocked Amy. She fell away from Stuart’s arm, back into her chair. Her petite eyes slid shut, a fairly usual giveaway on fainting.
“Perhaps I should rephrase that,” Stuart considered.
Both the Karens were awake. One of them said “What about me?”
“What about you?” said the other, smirking. “What about me?”
“What do you mean?” Stuart asked them. “What about Simon and Stuart?”
The second Karen, absently fussing a sleeping Simon’s hair, opted at this time to point out that he [Old Stuart] had been until recently her possible other future selves boyfriend; that he’d only been separated from her for a short time; that he couldn’t go grabbing another girlfriend willy nilly, even somebody as attractive as Amy.
“Karen, are you aware that Simon also had- has- that particularly annoying trait?”
Karen began to inquire into what he was talking about but a very direct stare shut her up.
“You’re too young to understand those things.”
Karen scoffed. “That’s the most chauvinistic thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“You idiot. That wasn’t chauvinistic, it was patronising. If I was being chauvinistic, I would have said ‘You wouldn’t understand because you’re a woman’.” Stuart explained.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“Do what, little kiddo?”
“How did you-? What I mean to say is, don’t call me that. I don’t. I hate it.” She looked embarrassedly at her other self.
“I could go on. You can learn a lot of secrets in ten years, you know. Some people might like to know these things,” He glanced at himself in younger form, snoozing, hand on a coffee mug. Also at Simon.
“You wouldn’t. You can’t,” Karen went, then paused, feigning dignity. “What kind of things?”
Amy stirred, and Stuart sat beside her, put his arm back around her shoulders. “Wake up sleepy head.”
“Is that you mumble mumble, my love?” Amy nestled in Stuart’s arm, giving him a faceful of hair, whilst Stuart shrugged at the Karens. When Amy opened her eyes, she saw the situation and sat bolt upright, profusely apologising et cetera.
“Mumble wumble, my love who?” He asked her. He was indeed intent on casually putting his arm around her shoulders.
“I didn’t say anything.” Said Amy, bright red.
“She didn’t say anything, Stuart,” said Karen.
“Thanks for explaining that, my little snuggle wuggle.”
Karen’s face went hard. Both of them.
Stuart smiled. It was a smile that said ‘and there’s more where that came from’.

“Let me think for a minute,” a Simon was saying. Everybody, including Amy, James and the two elderly golf nuts were gathered in Amy’s apartment, preparing to leave. It had been quite a day, gathering them all together, but somehow they had all managed to do it. In fact, the only reason that they had gathered in one spot was a matter of random chance. Odd as it retrospectively seemed, everybody had decided at the same moment at go looking for everybody else, and had turned up at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place. Funny how things can work out. “Okay, I have it.”
After a minimal silence, he added “No, I don’t.”
“Yes you do,” said the other Simon. “We pack half of us into one machine, the other half into the other, and strap them together, and finger the fat button.”
“It won’t work,” his double insisted. “And I know it.”
Matthew stepped forward, though he didn’t need to. “As I see it, the chronafluxion engine should only generate enough temporal anomalies to …” he fumbled for a word. “… environate the one ship. Rigging them together won’t work.”
Simon said “I already said that.”
Amy had to ask what ‘environate’ meant. Matthew’s double explained it to her. And what a chronafluxion engine was. And a temporal anomaly. And pickled onions. He put that in for good measure.
Errol spoke up. “We could just go someplace there is only one of. There are two that I know of.”
“Two places that there are only one of. That’s a gramadox for you,” Amy said. She didn’t have to explain what a gramadox was to the X-Nerds, they’d already figured it out, and she couldn’t be bothered trying to explain it to James. “You should say that there are two places that you could go, and that there is only one of each.”
“What she said,” followed Errol. “The start and the end. There can be only one.”
“Two,” counted Linda. “Start, end. That’s two.”
“One start, one end. That’s one.”
“Two,” insisted Linda.
“One,” hissed Errol.
“Two. I’m not quitting until you recognise that my answer is the correct answer.”
“And I’m not recognising that your answer is the correct answer when it’s not. One.”
“Then I’m not quitting.” Linda folded her arms and glared at Errol menacingly.
“Will you to shut the-” Amy had screamed before realising what she was about to say. “Up. Just shut up.”
Simultaneous to this pitiful argument, the Simons and Matthews were gathered around Stuarts and Karens, coolly hammering out details.
“We go our separate ways, and meet up at the end.” Stuart said.
“Start,” Stuart corrected.
Stuart looked at him. “Start, end. Makes no difference.”
“The start would be a better place to go, though,” Simon pointed out. “In the end, everything was dark. We’d never find each other. Besides, there’s nothing to land on once the universe finishes.”
“A point I hadn’t thought of,” murmured Stuart, nodding.
“So we just cram into the ships and go back as far as we can?” Errol said.
“That’s the general idea, yes.”
“What if there’s nothing there?” Errol wondered aloud.
“There’s grass,” George said, finally taking an interest in the universe around him. “Billions of miles of blissful greens.”
“How do you know that?” somebody asked Him.
“I was there.”
“I was also there,” Linda added, glaring angrily at Amy. “Lots of grass. And two tents.”
“I don’t remember two tents,” George scratched his head. “All I remember is lots of grass.”
“You were too busy teeing off to notice anything back then.”
“It’s only been a year or two,” recalled George, a new experience for him.
“It’s been over ten thousand years, you fool.”
“No, these people came and got me not that long ago. Before we went to that monk place.”
That monk place? Linda figured He meant the Academic Academy. Like a grandfather clock, it clicked in place, complete with whirring sproingy noises, precluding the dreaded bong-bong-bong. Linda spun to the X-Nerds, not really knowing which set to talk two. “You mean this is the George from way back at the Start? I have a vague memory, a memory of a forgotten memory of a memory of somebody- no. You! You took George away. I remember now. Jesus, he doesn’t know anything, then. He never learnt anything. But I remember him being there. I used visit him every thousand years or so.”
But Old Stuart was on a different track. A very fast track. A track a bullet train wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen on. “What did you just say?”
Linda looked up at him, going over what she had said. “That I used to visit him every thousand years or so?”
“Who is Jesus?” he probed her.
“He dies on a cross I remember… My god I remember.” Silence aplenty. “How? There had been an accident. A man on a,” she began fumbling both for words and more memories. He face drained of colour, and her eyes darted one way and another. She was staring at nothing, seeing her past as if for the first time. The room remained dead silent, as did the people it contained. “A bicycle. Crashed into a taxi. I was eating KFC. It was midday. I was wearing a blue dress. Green, dress. Yes, green. Long. I remember being struck? Or I fell. Maybe I was struck and fell. I fell and struck my. I remember a lot of grass. A grey room full of mist… What the hell am I?”
George stared at his feet for a while, listening to the ghastly silence, wondering if everybody was waiting for him to say something. He figured that this was the case, so fetched “I remember a lot of grass.”
Old Stuart threw his head back and laughed. “I told you. I told you all that these fakes everybody calls gods were human, Terran, at least. Now I have proof. Wow, that’s got to be a first.”

Surprisingly, it didn’t take all that long for everybody to find their way to a spaceship and prepare to temporally vanish once more. Old Stuart sat inside his machine, still half sideways where he’d crashed it on top of Amy’s desk. He put on his most pleading expression, meaning every squiggly eyebrow of it. “Come with me.”
Amy stood outside the ship, at the door, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast. “I can’t.”
“You can. You can step out of your life here and into mine. All you need to do is join me.”
Amy looked hard at the space Stuart had made for her inside the ship. It wasn’t much, but that wasn’t the point. It was a space in his life that he was making for her. She cast her eyes down again, turned away to let him know that she couldn’t.
Stuart turned to Karen, who was sitting at the front of the vehicle, ready to activate the time controls. He gave the nod, and reached up to shut the door. He had to do this quickly. “On my mark,” he told Karen.
Amy was turning, and Stuart was reaching up for the door. With no hesitation, he hijacked Amy, pulling her into his arms, and shouted “Mark!” even as the door clicked.

In the beginning, there was a major grass problem. Throughout all eternity people had said The Creator had a lot to answer for, but in the galactic phone book of time, his number went unlisted. Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. He most certainly wouldn’t enjoy the endless calls from lawn-mowing services.
Long before anybody available could recall, there had been two tents, each flapping madly at each other. In a land where grass existed and nothing else, they did well to break the monotony. A caravan-like object stood off to one side, partly hidden by the high grass.
A caravan-like object materialised. A moment later, a caravan-like object materialised. Now there were three. A couple of moments later three more caravan-like objects appeared, but two of these materialised inside each other and vanished in a field of disassociating sub-phase relativistic improbability and the third, for something different, exploded.
A serious number of moments passed as bits of space ship rained down all over the grass. Then, after that, if was dreadfully- latecomers would say blissfully- silent. Finally the moment came that all the other moments that had passed were along to see. Cacophony rallied across infinity. The X-Nerds had arrived at the beginning of Time.

14.

The flux was getting pretty damned annoyed, now. It had failed the first time; okay, it was inexperienced. It had never tried killing before and the killing by erasing future history trick- although clever- didn’t work, although she did make a lot of money on related enterprises. For some reason this made her feel good. The second attempt had had promise, modifying the temporal field throughout the many dimensions to replicate and hopefully destroy her enemy. The butterfly guise had worked well until a recent unfortunate incident; that is, being run over by a truck. Oh well, she could hardly tell if her temporal tampering was working anyway. The third had to work. It had to. There was no possible way that it couldn’t. Third time lucky, somebody had once told her. She had told that person that if she wasn’t lucky the third time that she’d come back and place a cricket bat in an obscure location.
Lying in the grass on some uninhabited planet, she gazed at the sky. It was yellow, but she didn’t see that kind of thing. She knew this universe was the enemy. She, to the universe at large, was the most evil thing anywhere. She knew a pool of dark matter like herself shouldn’t be able to lie down on a planet theoretically made of ‘light’ matter without zapafying everything around it. It wasn’t happening. She couldn’t figure it out either. But that didn’t matter. Didn’t matter, get it? Never mind, it’s an ‘in’ joke to dark-matter beings.
She was actually thinking about her opposite double; Him. The one who moved around, the one made of pure Light Matter, the one who had escaped her twice, now. If she could only touch him, it would be all over. She and He would vanish in an instant, cancelling each other out. Sure, she would die, but she figured she would have to live with that.
She formed herself into a human, adopting the same figure and personality as in her first plan (the trial run). Not wasting a moment, she checked her hair to see if it was okay, then vanished into time.

15.

The beam of light sighed. The soon-to-be gods had just shuffled out into the newly formed universe, their heads full of new ideas and vast knowledge. He mumbled something about it having been a long day, and realised that there hadn’t been a day pass yet. In fact, it was one of the shortest days in the entire history of the universe, starting at a nice comfortable 9 am one Tuesday morning, and finishing early so that everybody could go to the opening party and not end up being late for tomorrow. He had been told that the Universe was to be started later that week, but he rarely received new information. Maybe somebody must have decided to actually get on with preparations and start it early.
Then, a RIO door opened and  the Universes’ administrator Mr Tobler rushed in. Nobody knew his first name. He was simply Mr Tobler to everybody, and had been around literally since before the dawn of time. Schools have people like Mr Tobler, who have just always been there, and nobody, not even all the old people who live just down the road in the home can remember them not being there. Generally these people are withered old gardeners, obese cross-eyed chefs and bald little historians.
“Oh hell. They’ve already gone,” He said, and turned around, searching for the doorway.
Mikal, the beam of light, projected himself beside Mr Tobler. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Somebody’s gone and started the original, that’s what’s bloody-well wrong. I didn’t want it started until I had had a chance to make a recent backup. I mean, there’s, you know, the original original, which was buggy and had exploding suns, comets crashing into planets and all sorts of terribly dull life forms. Of course everything with the new one that could go wrong does. I’ve lost Franklin; he’s still off driving around someplace, and a purebred human is missing, and I’ve people running around everywhere poking their noses into things that noses can’t be poked into. What the hell am I going to do?”
The swirling grey mist had found a foam bauble and vainly attempted to toss it against Mr Tobler’s foot. “Hide?” Mikal suggested. A marble rolled by, burbling to itself.
“And somebody drank the last of my coffee. How do you get out of here?” Mr Tobler was fumbling around looking for a doorway.
“There are doors all over the place, but I can’t use them.”
“Well how do you find them. I can use them.”
Mikal shone around for a while, occasionally reflecting off something that wasn’t there. “Damned if I know. If I knew how to get out of here, do you think I’d be shining around here for all eternity?”
“Fat lot of good you are,” Mr Tobler stated. He chose a direction at random and started walking, hoping to run into a door. Moments later he was lost to the fog.
Mikal sighed again. The fog blatted at the foam bauble. “I think there’s one over here,” he called into the fog. A clatter from the distance, and a spray of baubles erupted into the air. “I may be wrong.”
Mikal hadn’t had an easy life. Well, to be brutally honest, he had had a perfect life; nothing ever went wrong. He had never received an overdue bill for anything. The local tax authority had never busted in demanding a full audit. In fact, nothing that could have ever gone wrong, even slightly bad, had happened.
Sticking to the brutally honest theme, nothing had ever gone right for Mikal, either.
To summarise: Life was unbelievably dull, so incredibly not-worth-mentioning even early one drunk Sunday morning after countless days bilge drinking with people you don’t know, who don’t remember what you just said, or remember that they just forgot what you just said, or recognise the fact that you’ve missed the past three months of the conversation after your liver collapse and transplant at a rat-infested backyard hospital in another country. 
This didn’t happen to Mikal. It’s just a simile used to describe the dullness of his life so far. If it had in fact happened, Mikal wouldn’t be as bored as he was now. He would have achieved something in his life, however unhealthy, not the nihilist destitution that had so far occurred.
A long time ago, or perhaps a short time ago, as time had a distinct lack on existence in his plane,  Mikal had dallied in the arts. Having no history or artistic experience to start from, the boxes full of marbles and foam baubles which constituted the base and indeed entirety of his severely dull artworks, were an achievement in boredom, the marker at which Mikal hoped his life would take a turn. It didn’t. People completely failed to notice the Boxes of expressionist art. In general, people completely failed to notice Mikal himself, and his entire dimension. He recalled the previous attempts by The Creator as he bashed away at creating and running a proper universe, in which Mikal had no part, did nothing, and indeed knew nothing about them until after the event. That was long before the Creator hit upon the idea of employing somebody else to get the universe going. He had come across Mr Tobler (Ph.D, Admin. Srvc), frozen inside a comet left over from a previous universe, forced him to sign the pink, yellow and green forms (necessary for his tax return), then mysteriously vanished in an equally mysterious puff of lawn-clippings.
More recently in Mikal’s awkward sociotemporally inactive existence he had watched as a blob of dark matter seeped through a hole in one universe, and slithered uncaringly through a hole in a different universe. He knew all about the light and dark matter problems, that one cancelled the other, that the cancellation nullified both universes, and that there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it happening.
The thing he was really annoyed about was the fact that if the two universes cancelled each other out, there would be nothing left outside his dimension, meaning a perpetually dull future.
Which is why he willed a large Caravan-shaped temporal-reality field into existence in one of the universes. With any luck, anybody who used the time machine would probably muck everything up to such an inconceivable level that the dark-matter would be swept under the rug by the Laws of Reality.
Well, apparently half of it had worked, thought Mikal, watching the stumbling form of Mr Tobler vanish into the eternal fog. He’d managed to muck up everything- buckle the walls of the universe- with considerable ease. It was something. It wasn’t necessarily something good, but it was something. Hell, if it all went wrong, the Creator could just wave his hand and run another Universe.
Couldn’t he?
Anyway, beside Mikal’s existive Zilch Esset Demonstrandum, it was about this time that the Laws of Reality tripped on something hidden under the rug and were bending to see just what…

16.

The frolicsome flap flipped in free folly. Franklin flicked a finger at the frosty falling flakes, finalising their frigidity. He shivered. It was Fubar out here.
Yes, this garish monstrosity was definitely the right tent. And that tent over there, the one with the car parked halfway though it, flaps flolloping flappily, must be the other tent. He brushed the snow from his head, then walked forward into the inky blackness of the tent, right into the path of a beautiful young woman.
“Oh, excuse me,” He said, pulling the woman to her feet. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
The woman looked around at the snow for a while, then fell heavily back down on the ground and started to cry. “I need to sit down,” she sobbed.
“But you are sitting down,” Franklin observed, and rushed around wondering if he should help her to her feet again, then help her to a seat. “Here, come back inside and I’ll find you a nice cup of tea.”
The woman accepted his hand once more, allowed herself to be pulled to her feet, and together the ambled blindly into the tent.
“Excuse me,” the man said again, then his voice trailed off. After a moment he continued. “Did you come here with a large crowd, or did you just wander in?”
The woman looked at him, or in the dimness, it may just have been that she looked his way; Franklin couldn’t be sure, as he was rubbing the snow off his face, and replied something, which to his ears sounded much like “Mmnurf, wurgle.”
“Oh well, it was worth a shot. Would you like a cup of tea?” He quested, and together they walked into the mansion-sized enclosure of the ten-metre diameter tent. They both, not for the first time either, gasped in awe both of the impressive expansive beauty of the tents’ interior, and of the confusing five-dimensional physics at work. Franklin had wandered through the miles of corridors inside the tent many times in his grossly dull life, yet he was never any less amazed than this time concerning the reality of fitting so many thousands of square metres of floor space into a tent with a radius of only five metres. He was definitely no mathematician (he could only count up to pi on his fingers), but it didn’t take maths to figure that you need a bigger tent to encompass the area encompassed by this tent. Probably a tent with a ten-metre radius would do it, he guessed.
The woman found herself being led to a small kitchenette, and had to get down on her hands and knees to see through the door. An itty-bitty chef was cooking a minuscule Mississippi mud-cake, and a wisp of steam rose from a teensy-weensy kettle.
“That’s just a model of the kitchen,” said Franklin. “The real one’s in here.”
Here was the real kitchenette, where a much-larger, and more round version of the itty-bitty chef was baking a cake, and a much larger wisp (but still only a wisp) of steam was gaily wafting above a kettle.
“How do you like it?” Franklin asked.
“That’s getting a little personal, isn’t it?” the woman asked pointedly.
Franklin grabbed the kettle from the stove and held it for all to see. “The tea! How do you like your tea?”
“Oh,” said the woman, wiping a teardrop from her eye. “Yes, I’ll have a cup.”
Well, they’re on different wavelengths.
Franklin set about making the tea, a task he had become famously good at; it seemed to be his only real function here- the fellow who makes the tea. Things seemed to be going well so far, the chef had left the room in search of a sprig of coriander for one dish or another, and the cake smelled nearly ready. Franklin thought it almost time to make some conversation, but decided against it and made the tea instead. Whilst pouring a cup first for his visitor, then himself, said “I’m called Franklin.”
“Yes please,” replied the woman, her mind elsewhere. “And two sugars. I seem to have a bump on my head.”
“Yes, as do I.” concurred Franklin, and handed her her cup. “You should have it looked at.”
“Looked at? Why, it’s just a cup.”
“The bump, I mean. I’m called Franklin.” He smiled nicely.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you called Franklin? Is that you job? A Franklin? What do they do?”
“Well,” started Franklin, his mind buckling under the strain this conversation had placed upon its gentle mass. “I believe they are manservants or some such, you know, the people who chop the wood and muck out the privy.”
“Well, pardon me for sounding, er. What’s your name then?”
“What? Oh, Franklin.”
“No, no. I mean, your name.”
“My name is Franklin.”
The woman sat back and laughed, deliberating whether to drink her tea or rub the lump on her head she’d taken earlier from a rogue golf-ball. “Oh, I see. Your name is Franklin, and you’re the Sewage Man. I’d never take that job, it’s way to smelly for me. I mean, I’ve done nearly everything at one time or another, the check-outs and McDonalds. All the usuals. I worked in a bar once with a guy who did part time on community service at the sewerage plant. He had to stir the smelly turds in the local plant with this big pole, just standing there swishing them around day after day. He was drunk and got caught stealing a wheelbarrow. Like, you steal a wheelbarrow and they make you go around everyday stirring up shi-”
“No!” Franklin intercepted. “You don’t understand. I’m an Assistant Administrator. My name is Franklin. I don’t shovel anything. I don’t even know what a sewage plant looks like.”
The woman sipped her tea. “This is tea!”
“Yes, it is.”
“I haven’t had a cup of tea since.”
Franklin wore an ogle in his grin as he waited for something more, but the woman had raised the cup to her mouth again and drunk nearly two-thirds the cup. He raised his eyebrows, then offered the tea-pot for a refill.
“I’m Maline Copper,” stated Maline Copper, yawning. “Would you mind telling me where the hell I am please?”
Franklin gasped. “You are the human!”
Maline came to at least a measurable percentage of her senses (the tea was working), and thought ‘Uh-oh, It’s loony-bin day again.’
Franklin measured her sudden hostile look carefully, then started to explain everything he could to her in the simplest possible terms. He got this far: “Well, you were brought here with the other gods…”
Maline boggled her eyes at him, spilling her hot tea all over her lap. She screamed something incoherent and depictingly nasty, turned to flee but found her passage obscured by a malevolent chair, tripped over a toy fire engine made entirely of broken wooden spoons, smacked her head against the door-frame, then slumped to the ground, unconscious.
Oddly enough, Franklin mumbled “Oh no, not again.”

17.

“Wow. That’s a lot of grass.”
“Yup.”
“Well, here we are. That seemed to work out well.”
“Yup.”
“We all got here.”
“Yup.”
“A pity about the other three ships.”
“Yup.”
“You suppose it was us?”
“Yup.”
“I guess we should see what’s in those tents.”
“Yup.”
So far nobody had spoken twice.
“Yup.”
A little silence found its way in here, like the probing roots of a pretty little flower, up though a tiny gap in the conversation.
“Er. Stuart?”
“Yes Karen?”
“Why did you just say ‘Yup’?”
“What? Didn’t somebody just say something?”
“No.”
“But I was sure somebody else said something.”
“Nobody said anything.”
“But I was so sure. I had this strange feeling that there’s somebody else with us, as if looking down on us right now, as if reading from the script that is our very lives…”
At that point, everybody felt a little chill run up their spines, like the finger of a dead monkey dragging along the ridge of a broken guitar. Somewhere behind everybody there came a faint ‘bong’ sound. It didn’t ring on like the bells in a church. It fell away, muted, as if stuffed with little foam baubles. For a moment, everybody went silent again.
The grass swayed. It swayed again.
And again.
“Well,” said Amy.
“I agree,” agreed everybody else, and they tromped off through the swaying grass, towards the tents.
George bent down to pick up something. It was a golf ball. A new one. He put it in his pocket, alongside many others just like it.
“Wow, it’s just like the movie ‘King Arthur’,” commented Stuart, rushing ahead and pointing at the tents. “Where all the tents are those big round spiky top ones painted in checks and pinstripes, except we aren’t dressed in tights and there’s no knights on horses.”
Amy’s brow grew wrinkly, then her lips squished together like she’d just refused a tobasco sandwich. “You mean the movie ‘Prince Valiant’.”
“The one with the guy with a hairdo like a motorcycle helmet.”
“That’s Prince Valiant. King Arthur was the guy in the chain mail t-shirt and alfoil crown who wields his long sword at a lake full of voluptuous, naked, young blonde virgin girls.” Stated Amy, a fan of the terrible old movies she watched as a girl, back in the cave on prehistoric Earth (on Nick at Nite- it’s been repeating those shows for ever). Then she heard what she’d just said and blushed furiously. “No! What I mean is he grasps his long, hard shaft and wields it towards the lady in the lake… He… He pulls his sword out, and later on he thrusts it back into the hydro-avoirdupois prestidigitating nymphs. His sword, I mean, of course, not his-”
Simon, all in a rush, saved her from stuffing her other foot in her mouth as well. “There were a lot of cop shows left over from the seventies that had people with hairdo’s bigger than motorcycle helmets. Some of those big black guys had afro’s bigger than motorbikes. Like wearing a furry dinghy on your head.”
“I see,” Stuart looked at him. “So what’s your point?”
Simon shrugged. “Er.”
Stuart’s earlier observation was well justified, however. These tents had been infused with the embodiment of fashion psychosis. In an unspoken agreement, they all headed for the yellow and purple silk tent, finding the red and cyan pinstriped tent simply too garish to go anywhere near. Anybody who did so would need sunglasses with lens made from asbestos.
As one, the X-Nerds walked into a RIO surrounding the tent. They left little imprints of saliva and sweat on the totally invisible surface, like bugs squashed on a windscreen.
“Oh bother,” Said George, but only because he had nothing to hit his golf balls with. He tried to reach out and summon his mighty Wood, but his sorcery coughed and spluttered. A few sad little golden sparks poofed into the air, followed by a drizzle of smoke, then nothing. He tried again. This time he was simply waving his arm around in a silly manner. “Damn. Linda, can you try?”
Linda gave it a go, dejectedly. Nothing happened. For some reason, this didn’t seem to surprise her. She had been moping around lately. George didn’t understand women, but he knew when somebody was feeling bad. He tried to cheer her up a bit by offering to play a round, just on the green. She naturally reminded him that they didn’t have any clubs, which dragged his own feelings down to her levels. Now they both shuffled around, moaning and mumbling, feeling dejected and annoyed with each other.
“Errol,” Matthew mused. “Do you suppose that all this is some kind of elaborate joke?”
Errol looked at his double, then at Matthew’s double, and replied. “Well, as you gave no context to the question, I presume you mean the universe at large, which at this point appears to be a whole lot of lawn and a couple of tents sealed up in glass bubbles. Given this context, I must confess, I don’t understand the question.”
Matthew smirked. “I was only making conversation. Filling in space.”
“Well you go right ahead. There’s plenty of space out there to fill.”
The grass swayed their way, as if acknowledging them.
Old Stuart was about to ask Amy just what a ‘hydro-avoirdupois prestidigitating nymph’ actually was, and what they had to do with the Excalibur story, when a man came out of the tent and said “Oh, well there you go. That seems to have fixed everything just fine. Well, come inside, all of you. Hurry up, time’s a-wasting.” To this remark he added a little chuckle.
They, all fifteen of them, like a bipolarised family, wandered through the fabric of the strange glass bubble that had squished their noses only moments before, and into the small tent.
It was obvious- they wouldn’t all fit.
But they did. They could have parked their spaceships in the foyer (but not on the hand-crafted wood, or the pile carpets, on the tiles), and there were hallways fanning out, including in the direction from which they’d just entered.
‘Wow’ and ‘Cool’ were words repeated with frequency, as were ‘¿’ and ‘!’.
The man turned. “I’m Franklin, and that’s my name, not some kind of poop scraper.”
Amy looked at him quite oddly. “Excuse me?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, what do you mean, not some kind of, uh, what you mentioned.”
“What?”
“Uh, never mind. Hey look, I’m Amy. Ay-mee,” she said, pointing at her chest.
Old Stuart grabbed her arm and whispered “You don’t still introduce yourself like that, do you?”
“What ever do you mean?” she whispered back. “Like what?”
That particular Stuart whispered a little softer. “That’s how you introduced yourself to me.”
“How on earth did you remember that?”
“I remember everything about you.”
Amy gave him a smile. “Oh, that’s so sweet.” To Franklin, she started to introduce the others. “Okay, now you’re going to have to pay attention to get all this. This is James, and Linda and George, and Stuart and Simon and Karen and Matthew and Errol. You got that?”
“Karen and George and Matthew and Susan and Edward?”
“No. Listen carefully. George and Linda, James, Stuart, Simon, Matthew, Simon, Karen, Stuart, Errol, Errol, Matthew, Karen, Stuart and I’m Amy.”
Franklin’s brain went gaga. “Sarah and Lucy, Jurgen, David and who?”
“No no no no no no!”
“But, who are they then? Koran? Elodea? Wooblomuffin? Filbert?”
“I’m Amy.”
“Ay-mee. Yes, yes. Ay-mee.” Franklin had the hang of this now. It was some kind of guessing game. He decided to actually look at his guests, and his eyes widened as he saw two sets of them He rubbed them, thinking he’d gone mad. He had in fact gone mad, but that was so long ago now that he’d stopped worrying about it. What he was worried about was that he’d gone mad- again. And so he rubbed his eyes, trying to dislodge this double sight. When the doubles failed to disappear, he shrugged and said “I’ve gone mad.”
Amy smiled at him. “Yes, that helps.”
Franklin smiled faintly. “Amy.”
“Yes?” Amy inquired.
Franklin rubbed his forehead. “No, no. I was just saying Amy.”
“Yes?” Amy inquired.
“Stop it! Oh, I’m sorry. Would you like a cup of tea? It’s just made. There’s a nice cake too.”
Old Stuart stepped forward, hand up to indicate silence from the others. “Yes. That would be nice.” He took Amy by the hand, and Franklin led the raucous crowd towards the kitchenette (the big one).
“Just don’t tread on the body.”
Everybody, together. “Body?”

18.

In deep space, no-one can hear you scream.
This is also true for shallow space, but here people can see you scream, which is good enough. In deep space however, you’re on your own.
It’s probably why you’re screaming in the first place.
There are some things that don’t really belong in deep space, and there are some that do. You would expect to see the occasional asteroid, perhaps a comet, even a tiny, lumbering spaceship, or more likely, a speck of hydrogen, but never an entire solar system.
What it was doing way out here was anyone’s guess.
You see, this kind of space is meant to be empty (save that occasional speck of hydrogen). It’s not designed to contain anything bigger than an atom, and not many of those. That’s how it got the name ‘Deep Space’. This kind of space isn’t meant to contain lunar bodies, let alone solar systems…
And yet…
These are the shores of reality. This is the border between the true universe and those universettes that contain every conceivable possibility, every creation and every absence of creation. Strange things wash ashore on the shores of reality, especially after a cosmic storm; concepts mortalised in matter, ideals expressed in morphogenic fields, possibility blurred into probability.
Here, the waves of reality crash and break on the headlands of deep space, and within the froth and foam, bubbles of something that is not real float to the surface to burst into existence. Amongst the grains of improbability along the beach, small creatures come to nest and burrow into the sand, making out their meagre lives feeding on the driftwood that washes against these distant shores.
Like the Deep Ocean, things abound here.
There are but five planets in this solar system, each finding its own time to orbit the single yellow sun. Whilst some of the planets have as many as ten moons, others suffer but one, or even none. The second of these planets could be thought of as barren, yet at the same time, life is abundant on the surface. Plants and fungi abound, each feasting on the other, not minding an ever-present bacterial battlefield, nanometres away.
For a moment longer, the planet remains serene.
Because there are certain conventions of reality, even here on her shores, this serenity is short lived. From the pleasant skies above come streaks of white brighter than the most vivid streak of lightning, streams of brilliant fire arcing across a blue dome. Soon great sonic booms go unheard across the surface of this undiscovered, unnamed planet, and white-hot meteors if aluminium and titanium rain down, tearing great gashes into the surface, burning terrorised lifeforms to a cinder, vaporising those battling bacteria, and drowning acres of land in dust.
This is unheard of.
This planet wasn’t harming anyone. Now along comes the rest of the universe and within a few minutes, the whole place is nearly wrecked.
Nearly. Life will go on.
At least, that’s what life thinks.
According to Life, Life has this funny way of going on. It’s not always the best option, and life can have some pretty hard lifestyle choices to make, but always in the end, life goes on.
It’s just that this time, it won’t. It doesn’t know it yet, and won’t know it afterwards, but this is the last day of the rest of its life.
It’s all a little sad, but that’s life for you.
Look, up there in the sky. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s four-hundred and twenty million tonnes of spaceship breaking apart, raining down in impossibly large chunks of metal, grey lumbering masses containing living tissue and biotic matter, ploughing into the soil at ferocious speeds, throwing up thousands of tonnes of dirt high into the stratosphere. Giant mushrooms of dust and radiation that may encircle the globe for many months to come bloom in the air, and soon the darkness comes, not the darkness of night, but the darkness of a slow death by concealment.

19.

The chef stood in the doorway, shouting as loud as he could, yet nobody could hear him. In fact, they could only just see him.
This is the itty bitty chef, just arrived from the kitchenette. He’s nearly four centimetres high.
He’s real angry right now.
But nobody knows why, because they can’t hear a word he’s saying. All they can hear is this itty bitty ‘Eme eme emem. E Eme eme ememeMe!’ coming from his general direction.
Franklin picked him up. The chef went “Eeeeeeeeeeem!”
Franklin had to whisper as softly as he could, but his words were still too loud for the little master cook, so he put him back on the floor.
The little chef jumped up and down a few times, and they could all see his itty bitty jelly belly wobble. Finally he turned and ran from the room. Franklin sipped somebody’s tea, then followed him out.
Before anyone had had a chance to speak, he returned and said “Somebody stepped on the kitchenette. There’s footprints in the butter, and the cake is nearly ruined.”
So it was that Franklin had to steal a chocolate crumb from the large cook’s nearly-baked loaf to give to the itty bitty chef, so he could finish icing his itty bitty cake. “Where did I put my tea?”
Somebody popped a delicate china cup down with tragic results. “Yes, I’ll have another, thankyou.”
“Franklin,” another woman queried. “Who is this woman? Why did she steal my tea?”
“And mine,” said a man. “That was the second cup she’s taken.”
Some colour finally drained into the tea-pinching woman’s face, and her dazed eyes laboriously uncrossed, eventually to focus on some unseen point, some three inches from her nose.
“I think I’ll have a headache,” she stated casually, and slumped forward, sliding under the table and from view, down into a pile of snoozing sounds.
“There’s something going on here,” said a somewhat wild eyed Amy. She pointed at the man who called himself Franklin. “And you’re going to explain yourself. I want everything.”
“I don’t understand. There’s too much to understand. I couldn’t possibly explain everything.”
Amy paused, looking at the woman slumped on the table. So alike, she thought. How is it that she could look so much like me, yet in so many ways appear so different; older perhaps. She stomped on the thought, passing it on to coincidence, not liking the alternative, which was probably true. Looking at Franklin now words flowed from her mouth. “I don’t want you to explain everything, just what the hell is going on. Who is this woman, why is she here? She doesn’t belong.”
Franklin grinned, the expression of an insane man fleeing. He moved nowhere, however. “I don’t know. I don’t know! I DON’T KNOW!”
Everyone unconsciously backed away from the table a fraction, as one would when confronting a madman wielding a pot of hot tea. Old Stuart held up an open hand. “Hey, fellah. Settle down, will you? Calm down. Just put the kettle down, we can talk about it if you like.”
Young Stuart 1 stood up, and Young Stuart 2 smiled for no obvious reason. Old Stuart sat down.
Everyone waited for the kettle to spill, watching it fall in slow motion, tumbling end over end, a fat dolphin in mid flight. It clattered to the floor, the hot leaves attiring the floor in a piteous decorousness. Franklin’s brain had finally had enough. Reality can only bend and wither so much before one’s mind must conform. But Franklin’s mind was already bent and withered so much that it snapped under the strain. His eyes rolled upwards and out of sight, and he let out a little sigh, toppling like an avalanche.
Now there were two bodies on the floor.
“Damn it! This always happens with you people!” Amy started, and Old Stuart said to everyone else “See if you can find some coffee. That cake looks too good to waste.” Then to Amy he held his arms wide and herded her from the room. “I think we should have a little talk.”
“A talk! Drag me off on some stupid adventure and you just want to talk?” Amy almost screamed as Stuart hustled her out of the room. “I’m going to get fired for this! I want to know what the hell is going on! Somebody is going to tell me or by damn I’m going to shove somebody’s- and I mean yours- head up their big fat-”
The door swung shut, which was, for sake of decency, just as well. The X Nerds were all open eyed, and open eared, too, but all there was to hear was a faint “Fuffurble nurfle unf kiff muff fuffing fubble!”
The door swung open, the hinges screeching. “Now you,” Amy’s wild eyes said all by themselves, her mouth left far behind.
But Old Stuart popped a grinning head around the door. “Pray, excuse us a mere moment more.”
The door swung shut.
“Whuf huf guff unf duff huf fuff? Huff huf fuffing fubbled? Whuf huf fuff duff huf bruff muff huff fufft? Yoff fuffed-huffed fharfwuff!”
“Burble, gurble. Mrubble, pubble drummel, hurble gurble.”
“Hurble Gurble?” Everybody heard with undeniable clarity. “I’ll guff yuff Hurble Gurble!”
After a brief smacking sound, the door opened a fraction. Everyone saw Old Stuart’s face, and cringed. “Coffee, white no sugar, save me some cake. And see if you can find me an Aspriiiiii-”
The door slammed hard. A foot-shaped indent magically appeared near the door handle.
“-iiin.”
The X Nerds all looked at one another, then fled through the rear door.

Some time later, Old Stuart came out of the tent and into the unoppressive sunlight. “I think we’ve got things sorted out.”
There was something different about him. He hair was ruffled, and his shirt was missing numerous buttons and all the material from one arm. His pants were virtually shredded, and he carried one shoe.
“Amy is just cleaning up.”
There was a faint lipstick mark on his exposed shoulder.
“So how much cake is left?”
Amy appeared in the doorway, somewhat demurred. Nevertheless, the X Nerds kept a respectful distance. Amy had fared better than Stuart, if only just. Because her hair was much longer than Stuart’s, it looked more frightful, yet she held her composure well. She also carried her shoes.
“Excuse me if I seemed at all out of place in there,” she blushed.
Karen eyed the pair speculatively, and quoth “I won’t ask what you’ve been up to.”
Old Stuart and Amy both eyed each other sidelong, then looked away at some invisible point nowhere in the vicinity of each other, feigning innocence.
“Well well,” she said, and smiled. “Things do move quickly, don’t they?”
Amy coughed, though she had nothing in her throat, however a small brown frog leapt from her ear. “Where are the others?”
The X Nerds looked around. Simon said “James went back to the ship. He said he was tired. George apparently found a golf stick inside and went out with Linda for a hit.”
“It’s called a club,” nursed a Karen. “You go out for a round.”
“Same thing. You whack the puck with your racquet, and whoever gets the least points procures the match. Something of that nature, I do believe.”
“It depends on the handicap.”
Simon scratched his head. “Why would it depend on their hat?”
“What?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m sorry?”
Simon’s twin looked about, and took a deep breath, taking over from where his near-twin left off. “Franklin and that other woman are presumably in the kitchen still. They were when we left.”
Amy asked “How long ago was that?”
Simon said “Immediately after you. Ten to fifteen minutes or so ago.”
Old Stuart perked up. “So there’s some cake left?”
“It’s always you and the cake, isn’t it?” one of the Karen’s grimaced. “Remember my sister’s birthday?”
All the Stuart’s groaned. The Stuart beside Karen said “What is it with you and your evil sister’s birthday. I get hungry, you bring up your sister’s birthday. I trip down the stairs, you mention your sister’s birthday. We make out behind the cricket shed, you bring up your sister’s damned birthday.”
Karen gave him a funny sideways look. “We never made out behind the cricket shed.”
“We didn’t? Oh, it must have been with…” He faded off. His double had a hand over his face, his triple had turned away and was shaking his head slowly.
“Is there something I should know?” Karen gave him a direct look.
“No.”
“Let me rephrase that.”
“No.”
She took his hand, gently. This was bad news. She stroked it calmly. She might as well have been using red hot needles. He felt Goosebumps all over his body.
“Stu?” she cajoled.
Uh oh. There was that name again, this time there wasn’t a kiss waiting on the other end.  He wretched his arm free. “Cake?”
“Not this time.”
“Bye!”

20.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in reality…
(or, at least, in what looks like reality)
(or at least looks like a badly drawn cartoon in a wet week old newspaper)
(if you squint)
Felicity Scalore graciously accepted a cup of Mason’s tea from the petite maid, and nodded almost imperceptibly towards her companion. He resumed his blithering drivel, on which subject, Felicity was no longer sure. She gazed out over the beautiful Mediterranean vista, letting her eyes grace the solemn masts swaying in the breeze, the sea-planes anchored nearby, and the children playing down by the waves.
“Madam?” her companion asked.
“I’m sorry,” she commented affectionately. “My mind seems to have slipped off for a moment. What was it you were saying?”
The handsome man pursed his lips, turning his own tea cup around in a half-circle, and in his perfect English voice said “I merely suggested you take the afternoon off and come flying with me. We could go to Milan to sup tonight.”
Felicity sighed. “Mr Willikins, as you are aware, I must remain here to oversee the Chateau, else I fear it collapse.”
“Surely, Madam, your staff can-”
“My staff are the crux of the problem, Sir. I feel were I not present, the company could falter in an instant, such is the incompetency of these peasants. Forgive me, Sir, I forget myself.”
“Nay, Madam, it is right that you should feel this way. Perhaps it is that they are fleeing the duties of war, where men with more gut would stand against the foe.”
Felicity decided it was time enough for the man to leave. “My staff are my own concern, Mr Willikins, and my concern. Do not presume to know them in an instant.”
Mr Willikins was shocked by the turnaround. He had of Madam Scalore’s sudden mood swings, yet nothing had prepared him for Madam Scalore in person. For one, she was impossibly thin, with dark green eyes and full bosom; clearly the most beautiful woman in all Italy. Her Chateau stood erect on an island far enough from the coast to endear privacy, yet close enough to attract guests in their air boats and yachts. Guests that would pay large sums to hear her beautiful voice sing foreign song of love and heroism, guests that would gamble in fair combat at her card house, and guests that would come to court the stately Baroness, seeking a hand in matrimony and wealth. “Madam,” he started. “I did not-”
“Nevertheless, Sir, I shall remain here tonight. Perhaps fortune will smile your way again one day, your return to be successful. You mention men who have no gut to return and stand with their comrades, yet you have not stood in battle for near the year. You have your leave, Mr Willikins.”
The man had begun to compose his reply, but saw the Baroness turn back to the ocean, and he knew the conversation to be at an end. He stood, turned, and made his way out of the Chateau.
“Bitch,” he murmured to one of the grounds staff poking and prodding away in the expansive gardens, who returned his black look.