Sequence (12 page)

Evil

The god said sadistically, “You should never have designed me. You opened a Pandora’s Box and I’m about to open it even further. If you think I’m cruel and unfair, wait until you see how my upgrade treats you amoebas.”

A few mechs began to whisper in hushed tones until she pointed her long finger at one of them and
he melted like hot wax before their eyes. Her evil was palpable. This god hated them all passionately.

When the hush returned
, she said ominously, “None of you shall leave this room. But I want you to see the fruits of your labors before I destroy you.”

With that, she reached
out for the console beside her and pressed a button. All at once several loud clicks sounded and then the stasis pods started to tip forward into the crater. The pods were hinged and stopped when they were horizontal.

They watched in horror as the
alien inhabitants fell out of their opened pods and into the crater. Thousands of alien creatures slid down the crater walls, too many to count.

The captain pointed at a Gray that was sliding down the wall and said in fear, “That’s my body. What the hell is she doing?”

Chris scanned the walls until he saw his small, naked body sliding down a wall too.

He didn’t know what to do. The panic had rendered him momentarily motionless
, which was probably a good thing, as there was nothing he could do to interfere.

As the last of the aliens slid down the walls and settled into a huge pile at the base, the
empty pods then righted themselves all at once, the doors clicking shut as they became upright.

The
god eyed them all maliciously, but she paused for dramatic effect. The mechs began to whisper and shuffle about uncomfortably when she said in a booming voice, “This is what I think of you feeble life forms. You are nothing but the primordial ooze that allows something greater to evolve.”

Then she hit another button on the console and the floor and walls rumbled. They all looked around to try and see what new terrors awaited them
, but none of them could’ve predicted what happened next.

The large convex structure
that had been situated up near the ceiling came down fast and crushed all of the alien life inside the crater. Then it rose up and fell again. It did this over and over, rumbling the floor as it smashed life to death.

The captain screamed out, “What the hell are you doing?”
But the god ignored him.

She
laughed heartily as she controlled the massive hammer. After over twenty jack-hammering blows, the convex hammer finally ascended back into the ceiling, dripping in bloods of various colors and bodily fluids impossible to categorize. Chunks of gore hung from it, pasted by blood. The gore fell lazily back into the pit as the mechs stared in shocked silence. Then the convex hammer fell again, smashing again and again for over a minute.

Chris
had an unnatural urge to jump in and save his own body, but he knew there was no way his body could survive that. He’d be lucky to find a pinky finger in that large pile of mangled parts.

Just when he didn’t think the horrors could get any worse,
the hammer started to spin rapidly as it rose and fell by only a foot or so. It was grinding the alien corpses to a mushy pulp, his included.

The
god yelled, “I have little time to extract DNA from each life you brought me. This is the quickest way to break it down. This is the meat soup that will bring the creator to me. I know you pathetic idiots thought a real god would be able to fix your universe, but I know differently. It’s easier to cast off a failure and start from scratch. He will be disgusted when he sees the universe he is born into. He will destroy your reality and then, with my help, make something perfect.”

Chris
wasn’t a religious person, but he sure hoped there was a real God and that he’d intervene. But it was already too late for that. A real God would’ve never let things go this far.

The convex hammer rose again into the ceiling
, but this time there was no gore stuck to it; the pit was filled with a dark brown liquid only. Anything recognizable as a body part had been pulverized. The liquid was sloshing around in the pit, making a sickening splashing sound as it crashed and swirled against the walls.

A light mist ho
vered inside the crater, blood and guts in aerosol form that would eventually settle back into the pool.

There was enough blood and liquefied alien parts to fill dozens of Olympic
-size swimming pools.

The
god said, “You will have a final privilege. You will get to see the ultimate being created before your eyes right before he and I kill you all. I hope you appreciate this honor.”

She hit another button and the hammer moved aside as a large complex structure took its place. It had a thin tube that pointed straight down into the
center of the pit. She hit another button and they saw the contraption shake. It was powering up. It must have been the laser device Chris had heard rumor of.

The tip of the tube lit up like the sun and a stream of charged particles shot out and into the center of the pool of slime.

Chris shielded his eyes from the bright white light, but he had the morbid desire to watch what was about to happen. Where the laser beam hit the fluid, it swirled about quickly, like a whirlpool, only quicker.

The liquid pushed up the walls as it was displaced from the center of the pit by the
force of the beam. It had started to shimmer and change colors. There were streaks of reds and blues swimming in it like oil-slicks.

All of a sudden, the liquid crashed into the beam of light, forming a fat pillar of sludge that spun and warped into the rough shape of a creature.

Man of Action

Chris said to the asshole mech beside him, “We need to stop this before it’s too late.”

“It can’t be stopped
, you idiot. She has our DNA within her. She can predict everything we might do and stop it before it starts.”

Chris
turned on the condescending mech and said flatly, “She doesn’t have my people’s DNA in her. She won’t see this coming.” He grabbed the jerk and lofted him into the air. He used all of his power to throw the mammoth metal mech right at the female god.

She was so mesmerized by the coalescing mass of fluid in the pit that she didn’t see the
robot projectile until it was too late.

The mech hit her hard. For a second
Chris worried that she’d be able to withstand such an impact, and she seemed to at first, but as the mech fell away to the side of the platform she stood on, her footing gave out and she lost balance.

She cried out
fearfully as she fell off of the platform and tumbled into the pit. She should have slid down the side of the pit, but the laser beam seemed to exert an attractive force on her and sucked her inwards while she was still in midair. The laser beam cut her in half and the liquid pillar fell apart from the disruption. The laser blinked a few times and then turned off.

Unbelievably, her torso afloat in the swaying sludge
, she swam after her lower half in a frenzy and snatched it up.

Samda said, “She’s not going to die so easily. She’s putting herself back together. We need to get up to that platform.”

The captain yelled, “She’s right. She can regenerate.”

Chris
nodded. He ran towards the platform as mechs quickly got out of his way. When he was close enough, he leapt into the air, but because he had no experience with the ability, he fell short. He managed to get a tentacle on the edge of the platform though, and used it to pull himself up the rest of the way.

He got to
his feet just as a hush fell across the room. He looked into the pit in time to see the false god’s body come together. Her legs were back in place and she pointed at Chris menacingly.

She shrieked, “That was a mistake, Earthman.”

Before she had a chance to use any of her obscure powers on him, he reached out and started hitting console buttons at random. The laser device retracted and moved aside and the convex hammer came into view.

The
god looked straight up at the hammer and screamed out in confusion and anger.

Chris
hit more buttons, hoping that he’d get lucky.

He did. The hammer rushed into the pit and stopped, fully extended.
It made a loud cracking sound when it hit the bottom. Chris hit the button again and again and the hammer responded. It jacked up and down, each time making a sickening squelch.

After a full minute of panic, he realized the
god was dead. He hit the button a final time to raise the masher and they all watched it ascend into the ceiling.

All eyes turned to the pit. The liquid was brown and inert once more. It swished about but it was steadily slowing its movement. And there was no
god swimming around in it.

One of the mechs hollered up at him, “Crush her again just to be sure.”

Chris shook his head. She was dead. But when other voices agreed with the mech, that she might regenerate, he relented and sent the masher back into the pit. He experimented with a few more buttons until he found the one that spun the masher. He hammered away with the masher and sent it spinning to turn whatever might be left in that pit into pulp.

The mechs sta
rted to cheer wildly. It was a pent-up cheer full of laughter and fear, like an ultimate release of something that had been building for far too long, and released all at once.

Chris
finished up and then jumped off of the platform. Before the pool of sludge had a chance to settle, another mech made it to the platform and started to smash it with the masher once again. The crowd cheered louder, but Chris just shook his head. By now, it was overkill.

There was brown blood everywhere now, streaking down the walls and pooling on the floor. Every mech was dripping in the blood of thousands of aliens and one
god.

Samda came to him first and wrapped him in a hug. She said, “How does it feel to save the universe?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Ok
ay then, how does it feel to kill God?”

Chris
smiled just as the captain approached with his first mate in tow.

Under the platform, the jerk mech that
Chris had used to knock the god from the platform was hoisted into the air by several cheering mechs like he was their hero. He looked bewildered, but after a few seconds of contemplation, he seemed to accept the role, despite the fact that he didn’t deserve it.

Jubilation

When the chaos died down fully, the captain climbed up on the platform to address the others.

He said, “Our suffering is finally at an end. Our foolish mistake did not lead to the end of existence. We got very lucky.”

Someone below yelled out, “Luck had nothing to do with it.
Chris the Earthman had everything to do with it.”

The crowd cheered and
Chris felt a rush of euphoria as Samda put a tentacle around his waist.

The captain nodded. “The Earth
-man has saved us all. We owe him our very existence. Our cousins were right after all. We were foolish to fail so miserably and to then not learn from our mistake. We were foolish to listen to the false god. If the universe is to bear a real god, we should let that happen naturally, or come to terms that it might not happen at all. We feared the end of the universe, but after being kept alive in these suits for so long, I welcome death as a friend.”

Someone below shouted, “Speaking of death, what should we do now that our bodies are gone?”

It was only then that Chris realized that the captain’s body wasn’t the only one that had been sacrificed by the god. All of theirs had. Every mech consciousness was now stranded, just like his and Samda’s. The realization that he was technically dead hit him like a tsunami. He had no body to go back to. He had no hope, and wasn’t adequately equipped to process the absurdity of that notion.

The captain answered the
mech’s question the best that he could. “We could reach out to our Gray cousins for assistance. They might have a way to help us.”

A bunch of metal heads nodded in agreement
, but a single voice called out, “I’m done with this life. If there’s no hope to go back to my own body, then I’d prefer to check out.”

A few more voices concurred. They wanted to be put out of their misery too.

Chris wondered how many thousands of years would pass before he gave up on life, just like they were doing now.

The captain said, “I need someone to open up dialogue with our cousins. Be sure to express just how sorry we are about the way everything has unfolded. Be sure to tell them that we were wrong and that we’d like to return home.
Get a hold of our ships in orbit, tell them what has happened, and have them come and pick us up.”

Chris
yelled out in annoyance, “What about me and Samda?” He was pissed that he’d been so quickly overlooked.

The captain paused, upset that he now had an additional worry.

The jerk mech, who had insulted and threatened Chris earlier, yelled out, “Give them a ship, Captain. The Earthman saved us. We owe him that.”

Chris was surprised. Maybe the jerk wasn’t so bad after all. Then again, Chris had just saved everyone in the room and probably all of existence too, and so deserved their respect.

The captain obviously hated the idea
, but when enough votes of agreement came his way, he had no choice but to relent. “Chris and Samda can take the collector ship. I don’t ever want to see that ship again anyway.”

A voice called out, “But we can learn much from the tech. We can reverse engineer it to better our people. You should give them
one of our ships.”

The captain stood taller. He yelled angrily,
“The collector ship was created by the vilest creature the universe has ever known. I want rid of it. That’s final.”

No one else had the courage to disagree with the captain’s decision.