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Level Two: Time Trial

by Kris Ashton

      A moment earlier, the capsule’s window had showed only the long grey bank of computers that controlled all wormhole flights. Now Nick observed what seemed to be a waterfall of fire stretching out to the extremes of vision in either direction.

      “Threading appears to have been successful,” he said, his words carried back to Earth in the same manner he and the capsule had been transported here. “All systems functioning normally. I’ll begin running tests and report.”

      The pod was small, not much larger than his sky apartment back home, and most of it was dedicated to equipment. The era of large ships, miniature worlds contained in six steel walls, was now only a piece of data stored somewhere in humanity’s historical records so far back that Nick had no idea such ships ever existed. Wormhole technology had made space exploration a safe, one-man job--in fact, his presence was a token gesture, posterity rather than necessity.

      So Nick was more than a bit alarmed when the cabin door opened behind him. He swung around with a start and drew his weapon, thinking perhaps the Insiddians had smuggled an operative aboard to sabotage his mission.

      He found instead an old man with white hair and a long beard. His face was stern, but his eyes twinkled with a thinly veiled humour.

      “Well done,” the old man said, “you’ve achieved everything there is to achieve in the universe.”

      “What? Who are you?” Nick barked.

      “I’m God,” God said. “And I must say, I’m very proud of you humans. Just a shade under eighty thousand years to go from creation to apotheosis. The reptile race over in dimension four still hasn’t achieved powered flight and the Fazinians keep wiping themselves out with atomic weapons--they’ve had to restart three times now. Oh, and don’t get me going on the Moronians. They’ve spent the past three thousand years trying to wipe out their ‘mortal enemies’, the Croznians. Just wait till they find out the Croznians aren’t even real! Only one race, the Protonians, beat you here--and they have the advantage of silicon-based brains.”

      Nick gradually lowered his weapon. “You’re really God?”

      “Who else would bother to meet you at the edge of the universe? There’s not much to see out here. The firewall is pretty the first time you see it, but it gets rather boring after the first hour.”

      “My God,” Nick said. “Oh, fuck, sorry.”

      “Don’t worry, Nick, that ‘name in vain’ thing was just part of the test. Actually, that’s why the Protonians got here faster than Humans--they saw through all that religion hogwash in ten generations.”

      Nick took a few groggy steps backwards and fell into his seat. “So . . . what now? Does this mean humans have become gods as well?”

      God laughed good-naturedly. “Hardly. This is only the first level. When you return, the rules will start to change. Things will be quite a bit more difficult.”

      “Things like what?”

      “Now, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” God said, grinning impishly. “Suffice to say this one’s going to be a time trial of sorts. Just go back and let everyone know I’m very proud of them, but there’s still quite a long way to go yet.”

#

      Nick returned to Earth and told his superiors what he had found at the edge of the universe. He also relayed God’s message to them, encouraging them to pass it on to the media. His superiors looked at each other and suggested he take some time off, ideally somewhere secluded and quiet where the media, or indeed anyone with a pair of ears, would be difficult to find.

      Nick agreed to the first part of their suggestion and went home. The apartment was just as he left it--neat to the point of Spartan and sunlit twenty-four hours a day (which justified the astronomical rent he paid each month). After he had unpacked his things, Nick went into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard. He put the glass under the tap and pulled the mixer handle up. Nothing. He waggled the tap handle up and down and back and forth, but still nothing happened. Probably the fucking water company had interpreted his absence as death and cut off his supply. Grumbling to himself, he went to the fridge and got lucky with an ancient bottle of lemonade. He unscrewed the cap and tipped it up to the glass, but nothing came out. The lemonade was frozen, no doubt due to its refrigerated solitude during his three months of service at Wormhole Enterprises. He put the bottle on the sunny window sill and went into the lounge room to wait. He switched on the viewscreen and picked the movie channel, but fell asleep a few minutes later.

      When he woke, the clock in the corner of the viewscreen said it was nearly eight o’clock at night. Nick got up and wandered into the kitchen, his mouth now as arid as the desert planet of Hydraxia. He grabbed the bottle off the sill and tried to pour himself a drink, but the lemonade was still a solid bulb at the bottom.

      God’s words echoed inside Nick’s head as he stared at the crystallised lump inside the blue plastic. He put the bottle down on the bench and scuttled back out to the television. “Channel twelve,” he said urgently.

      “. . . left thousands of vessels stranded in a sea of ice. Experts are at a loss to explain the phenomenon.”

      “All we know,” said a scientist captioned as Hugh McConskey, “is that the melting point of water has risen dramatically. Early tests suggest it may be as high as one hundred and fifty degrees Celsius.”

      “Off,” said Nick, a small smile creeping onto his lips. His short-lived holiday was over. It was time to return to the institute and have another conversation with his superiors. He thought they might be a little less dismissive this time around. There were some changes afoot, and he alone in the universe knew why.

      Nick tried to grab his unit’s keypass off the coffee table but only succeeded in flicking it onto the floor. The smile expanded to a grin as he wondered how the human race would cope sans thumbs. He bent down and scissored the keypass between his middle and index fingers, pondering with a black mirth how certain post-toilet ablutions would be performed under this new arrangement. On the plus side, of course, it would break a millennia-long, environmentally unfriendly practice.

      At the entrance to the skypark, Nick swiped his pass and stepped on the travelator, which whisked him to his car in space A42. As he got in and started it up, he was glad water-powered engines had never got a foothold in the market before off-planet drilling had begun.

      Functional cars had done little to stem the chaos, he soon discovered, with smoke plumes already curling up from the terrestrial cities below and orange flames licking the outside of some of the sky apartments he passed. The giant billboard that stretched between the Coke and McDonald’s corporate skybuildings flickered distorted images of hamburgers and soft drinks (which presumably were now frozen in their dispensers). Swarms of skycars dipped and darted in all directions, right-of-way regulations now adhered to in only the most cursory manner. It was understandable; controlling a skycar’s joystick with fingers alone required swift intuition and lot of dexterity.

      Half an hour of near misses and emergency detours later, Nick manoeuvred his vehicle through the small door that opened into the Wormhole Enterprises skypark. Unlike the outside world, here they had retained some level of order and idle skycars stood in militaristic rows, Nick’s space right where it had always been.

      The chairman of Wormhole Enterprises, Clark Mange, met Nick at the skypark exit door. The last time Nick had seen him, Clark had sported a full head of brown hair--slicked backwards, as was the style among young entrepreneurs. Now he was totally bald and a mean red rash splotched his scalp.

      “My brand of hair oil is now acidic,” Clark said, to parry Nick’s inquisitive look. “Oh, and just for your information, most breath freshening products now taste and smell like faeces.”

      “Thanks for the tip,” Nick said. He tried to give Clark the thumbs up. They both stared at his curled fingers for a moment.

      “Uh . . . anyway, now it’s time for you tell us everything you know,” Clark said, leading Nick into the basement of the facility.

      “I already did that, remember?”

      “Yes, yes, but we didn’t pay much attention. We thought the trip back through the wormhole must have disengaged your brain or something. I had Emerson insulating us against any legal recourse until his shoes came to life and started dragging him across the office. Seems certain synthetic products are now organic and sentient by traditional measures.”

      Clark ushered Nick into the wormhole lift. “Besides which”--he pressed a button and his words continued on the two-hundredth floor--“the president of the World Council got wind of your . . . shall we say omnipotent . . . experience and has demanded a full debriefing.”

      They entered the WE control room, which resembled a small stadium with one wall devoted to a fly-eye mesh of viewscreens. Usually they showed the imperceptible twirl and shift of deep space, but now, thanks to the swift dispatch of some wormhole cameras, they had been jury-rigged to display the current events of two hundred cities. The bigger metropolises appeared much the same as one another, all belching smoke and wild with scrambling, rioting citizens. One screen showed a North African farmer pondering how to handle his cattle now that their hides bristled with rows of cactus-like spines.

      Leaning against a rail, his eyes darting around the screens like hot atoms, was the president. He wore a small remote headset. “Screen fifty-eight!” he shouted in Esperanto-flavoured English. “Get some troops to bring those birds down now!”

      Nick’s eyes went to screen fifty-eight. As best he could tell, ostriches were no longer flightless and had developed a taste for human flesh.

      “Mr Xenedes,” Clark said timidly, “this is the man we told you about. Nick Idel.”

      “For Christ’s sake, how can you miss an eight-foot bird? Get me some real marksmen!” The president turned to look at Nick. “Do you mean to tell me there’s a method to this madness?”

      Nick shrugged. “I suppose it has its own funny logic.”

      President Xenedes’ face went blank as he listened to something in his headset. “We’ve just had word in from Australia--apples are now explosive. Alert the media.”

      Clark looked horrified. “Stinger Jenkins!” he cried, and dashed for the nearest wormhole lift.

      “Stinger Jenkins?” the president said, arching an eyebrow.

      “He’s in accounts,” Nick explained. “Stickler for routine. At exactly the same time every day, he eats an apple for afternoon tea.” Nick checked his watch. “Clark’ll have to hurry.”

      “God, this is ridiculous. General, relieve me.”

      A large man with muttonchop sideburns took up the president’s post and immediately began barking orders. The president removed his earpiece and shook his head as if to clear it of voices. “Let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.”

      Nick led the president to a small meeting room squirrelled away in the corner of the control station. They sat down at opposite sides of the table, and Nick recounted his trip to the edge of the universe as best he could. The president nodded the whole time, as if humouring the babblings of a village idiot.

      When Nick was done, the president sat back and folded his arms. “So what was he like? God I mean?”

      “Seemed a nice old fella,” Nick said. “Bit of a devilish sense of humour though, I think.”

      At that moment there was a knock at the door and a pasty-looking Clark walked in and sat down with a huff.

      “How did it go?” Nick asked.

      “Terrible. I’ve never seen such a mess. Bits of apple and Stinger all over the place. The janitor-bots are going to have a hell of a time.”

      “So you think this is all a test? That life itself is a game of skill?”

      Nick shrugged again. “You’ve heard God’s words now, so you can interpret them however you want, I guess.”

      “And what about the ‘time trial’ bit? What do you think he meant by that?”

      “I really have no idea,” Nick said, folding his arms and crossing his legs irritably. His eyes widened. “Wait . . . maybe I do.”

      Clark and the president lened forward, their eyes receptive and expectant of a biblical revelation.

      “Am I the only one now short a pair of testicles?”

Kris Ashton is a Sydney-based author who does most of his writing in a train carriage. This is his fifth published story. Drop in and say g'day at http://www.freewebs.com/krisashton .

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