ex-wife and her lesbian lover. Until they’re absorbed by the semi-infinite, that is.
I have similar talks with Genghis Khan, Billie Jean King, Elvis (usually during his final sitdown), and George Bush Jr. Don’t tell anyone, but I even visit myself, that previous iteration who spent three decades rotting in a deep, dark hole. I sit on the rim of his pit and smoke a fat one and whisper the highlights of The Cask of Amontillado while he screams and laughs. I’ve never actually descended to speak with him. Perhaps someday.
* * *
Dystopian Days, again. That fiasco with the creatures from Dimension X was just the warm up match. Whilst depopulating Terra, our enemies were busy laying the groundwork for the return to primacy of their dread gods. Less than a millennium passed and the stars changed. The mother continent rose from primordial muck and its rulers and their servitors took over the regions they desired and we humans got the scraps.
It didn’t even amount to a shooting war— Occasionally one or another cephalopodan monstrosity lumbered forth from the slimy sea and Hoovered up a hundred thousand from the crowded tenements beneath an atmospheric dome or conculcated another half billion of them to jelly. The Old Ones hooted and cavorted and colors not meant to be seen by human eyes drove whole continental populations to suicide or catatonia. Numerous regions of the planet became even more polluted and inhospitable to carbon based life. But this behavior signified nothing of malice; it was an afterthought. Notable landmarks survived in defiance of conventional Hollywood Armageddon logic—New York, Paris, Tokyo. What kind of monsters eat Yokohama and leave Tokyo standing? There wasn’t a damned thing mankind could do to affect these shambling beings who exist partially in extra dimensional vaults of space-time. The Old Ones didn’t give a rat’s ass about our nukes, our neutron bombs, our anthrax, our existence in general.
Eventually, we did what men do best and aimed our fear and rage at one another. The Pogroms were a riot, literally. I slept through most of them. My approval rating was in the toilet; a lot of my constituent children plotted to draw and quarter their Dear Leader, their All Father, despite the fact the masses had everything. Everything except what they most desired—the end of the Occupation. I was a god emperor who didn’t measure up to the real thing lurching along the horizon two hundred stories high.
Still, you’d think superpowers and the quenching of material hunger might suffice. Wrongo. Sure, sure, everybody went bonkers for molecular modifications when the technology arrived on the scene. It was my booboo to even drop a hint regarding that avenue of scientific inquiry—and no, I’m not an egghead. Stick around long enough to watch civilization go through the rinse cycle and you start to look smarter than you really are.
On one of my frequent jaunts to ye olden times I attended a yacht party thrown by Caligula. Cal didn’t make an appearance; he’d gone with a party of visiting senators to have an orgy at the altar of Artemis. I missed the little punk. I was drunk as a lord and chatting up some prime Macedonian honeys, when one of Cal’s pet mathematicians started holding forth primitive astrophysical theories I’d seen debunked in more lifetimes than I care to count. One argument led to another and the next thing I know, me and Prof Toga are hanging our sandals over the stern and I’m trying to explain; via my own admittedly crude understanding, the basics of molecular biology and how nanobots are the wave of the future.
Ha! We know how that turned out, don’t we? The average schmuck acquired the ability to modify his biological settings with the flip of a mental switch. Everybody fooled around with sprouting extra arms and legs, bat wings and gigantic penises, and in general ran amok. A few even joined forces and blew themselves up large enough to take on our overlords of non Euclidian properties. Imagine a Macy’s Day float filled to the stem with blood. Then imagine that float in the grip of a flabby, squamous set of claws, or an enveloping tentacle—and a big, convulsive squeeze. Not pretty.
Like fries with a burger, this new craze also conferred a limited form of immortality. I say limited because hacking each other to bits, drinking each other’s blood, or committing thrill kills in a million different ways remained a game ender. The other drawback was that fucking around