The rain obeyed its nature and fell on the streets, hard pellets of water bursting on the stones and falling again in a fractal dance around my head in the gutter. I was tired, I was bleeding, I was trying to get drunk. My unbroken arm had a bottle of what I will charitably call, gin cradled in it which I was half swigging and half pouring over the bone protruding from my other arm. I wish I could say something like “It’d been a hell of a day” but really it hadn’t. It was just another day, one like all the others since the Others came.
Sure they had miracles for us, cures for all that ailed us, stepping stones to the stars and bright forevers for those who were receptive to their immortality treatments. You’d think everyone would want to live forever, but you’d be wrong. The churches were having none of it, of course not, why would anyone settle for four score years and a possible reward or punishment afterwards when they could have cast iron, solid guarantees of living forever here, in a world without disease, famine, aging or war. Without any of those pesky energy shortages too, the Others brought little singularities, windows into other universes where just a trickle of power from the edge of a star could be fed into anything you wanted. I was young then and I didn’t have any religion. Of course I wanted to live for ever. I was seventeen, so as far as I was concerned I already was immortal, but it didn’t hurt to make sure. I was in the first batch from my city to be converted, and I mean that in a literal and figurative sense.
We walked down the boulevard that led to the ship parked in the main square outside the town hall. Twelve of us walked between two rows of staring and resentful humans behind energy barriers. Some might say there were two camps of humans watching us, those who feared us and those who envied us. Some people look on the bright side of everything. Everything about the Others is in twelves, they have 8 digits on their hands, but they work entirely in base twelve, factors you see. It’s probably why they worked out how to bend space and time quite so much faster than we did, they’re not actually that much older a civilisation, but where we spent our time killing the people who worked in sane numeric bases, they were conquered by their version. Just think, we could have had the second world war on Mars if we didn’t love counting on our fingers so much.
Still, back to why I was bleeding in a gutter during a rainstorm while nursing an open fracture of my right ulna.
Down that long, empty road we walked, all of us true believers in the miracles of eternity that the Others could bestow upon is. We were going to show the rest of humanity the Way. We were prophets of a new religion and we would lead our people for all time. Up, we stepped, up into the belly of the ship, through corridors of strange illumination and to a chamber where we would be reborn.
You know what it really feels like to be reborn? Of course you do, if you can read, it happened to you too. But just because I really want to say it, I will anyway. It burns. Deep inside. Right in your core. Like a fire’s embers placed right in your gut, the heat pushes out from there and it feels good. It feels right, like you were born to have this kind of fire in you, like we all were.
Oh we were so young and innocent, so strong and proud of our new power. So convinced that all the world really needed was just to be shown the way. I actually believed that people were sensible, rational beings who would happily admit the error of their ways once I showed them it. We were the prophets of the ultimate age of enlightenment.
Well, we all know how that turned out.
I think it was the burning of the telescopes that convinced me that not everyone could be saved. Some morons decided that as a matter of fact, the Others weren’t our saviours, they were sent by the Devil. Why the Devil would send us healers, philosophers and poets, I never quite understood. Still, they had decided that the Devil had sent the Others to us, for evil, and the only way to remove that evil was to stop looking at the skies by burning all the telescopes. Bombing the big ones and burning what they could. I could have understood if it was a small group of people, but this was everywhere. On the night of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, they lynched astronomers and burned their telescopes, or what they thought were telescopes in several cases, worldwide.
Hawaii, Chile, Costa Rica, every damn university campus in the world, they set them all on fire. They stopped us looking at the stars with our own instruments because of their fears.
So some of us fought back.
We were immortal, unlike the poor astronomers who were left on Earth instead of in the new orbital facilities that Other technology had given us. We were powerful, you can’t be immortal without the beating heart of a star in you, giving you all the energy you’d ever need to regenerate, regrow and punch a backwards neanderthal fucker through the wall of the nearest building. We were bulletproof, but that wasn’t an advantage for long. It was amazing how quickly the prohibition on using Other technology was lifted from the weapons we made from it. I say the weapons we made, because the Others were strictly non-violent, it was my fellow prophets and me who took the wonders they had given us and made them into engines of indiscriminate destruction.
It was this that actually convinced the Others to leave. Not just leave either, to seal us in. Somewhere up there, space and time are twisted around this star we call the Sun. Go two light days in any direction and you end up back where you started.
Two thousand years ago and here I am.
I can’t die until the star in me dies, which given how much slower time runs in the universe it’s in should be somewhere about a week after the heat death of this universe. But I can fight the trogs and drink. Some of us removed our own heads, it doesn’t kill us but it does remove our memories. Tabula rasa. We start again, every couple of hundred years. Except me. I can’t forget. I believed. I stood up, out of the gutter as the rain began to stop and watched as the last few signs of my broken arm vanished.
I remember. I’m the end of human civilsation. I’m its hubris. I’m its downfall. Maybe in another couple of thousand years, when the grunting trogs that the burners decended into have come back to being able to read without fear, I’ll be its genesis. But for now I’ve got time to kill and every time I beat one of those damn mouthbreathers in the face I can imagine for a little while at least that I’m making the world a better place.
I’m the prophet, you know?
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