John Adams - Wastelands 2

“My feet are asleep,” he complained.

“Me too.” Rabbiteen rubbed one tingling hand against another. “I guess—I guess the changes in the electrical constants are finally getting to our nerves and our bodies.” Against her will, a sudden wail forced itself from her. “Oh, Angelo, do you love me?”

“Did I forget to say that? I get so distracted sometimes. Yes, I love you. I do love you. I’d post it in letters of fire bigger than the sun.”

This declaration revived her a little; they wobbled on, teetering on their rubbery ankles.

Angelo was thinking hard. How strange it was that a woman’s welcoming body could nail a man to the fabric of space and time. This was a mystical proof to him that sexual intercourse was an inherent part of the fabric of the universe. His brain was working very fast—as if some kind of electrochemical friction had vanished inside his skull—but the fringes of his nervous system were fading. It was terrible to know he would soon die, and worse to know that Rabbiteen’s kindly, ardent body would smear across the cosmos like a spin-painting.

“Look!” she cried. Another unguarded, open gate. They tottered through, their knees wobbling. In the fractured, crystalline distance they could see sun-blasted buildings and a sandy airstrip. “It’s too far,” added Rabbiteen, bursting into tears. “And we’re too slow! We won’t make it.”

They sat in the shadow of a boulder, arms around each other, awaiting the end—or the strength to rise and slog on. But now a deep rumble filled their ears. Sand rose into the air as if blown by an impalpable gale; rocks flew off the mountains with the ease of tumbling dice.

The two lovers fell upwards.

There was frantic, incomprehensible activity all around them, as if they were mice in the grinding engine of a merry-go-round. Like the maculated sun overhead, the planet’s surface had come unmoored. Geological strata had gently unpacked like the baked layers of a baklava, sending the surface debris crashing about in search of new equilibria.

Eerie pink sunlight glittered from the hearse’s window as, plucked from beyond the horizon, it tumbled past them, its hood and doors slamming rhythmically, bouncing up the slopes of the nearest peak.

In ordinary times, the earthquake noise alone might have crushed their clinging bodies, but the booming of this planetary destruction was oddly muted and gentle. The fundamental constants had plateaued for a moment. A new order of gravity settled in, with everything that could come loose from the Earth being messily sorted according to its mass.

Belatedly, a reluctant mountain tore itself loose and rose ponderously into the lemon sky.

Rabbiteen and Angelo were floating a few score yards above the remains of the ancient desert—a patch of fine dust beneath a layer of sand with pebbles admixed, topped by bones, sticks, stones and target-range military rubble.

A venomous little Gila monster tumbled past them, dislodged from some flying mountain redoubt, its stubby tail twisting, its skin glittering like a beaded armband.

Angelo’s blown mind irritably snatched for facts. “Are those nerve-gas canisters up there? They’re like weather balloons.” He beat his helpless legs against the empty air and began to twist in place. “Can you explain this to me, Ms. Karmic Science?”

Rabbiteen’s mind had frozen with awe. The mountains of the firmament were floating across the spotted face of the bloated sun. She had no way to think clearly—with thunderhead shelves of granite and feldspar poised to crush her.

“Hold me, Angelo! You’re drifting away! I want to be with you till the very end!”

“We’re doomed,” said Angelo. He squinted into the hazy, polymorphous distances. The stark concrete hangars and wooden shacks of Area 52 were piled in midair like badly assembled Ikea shelving.

The humbled remnants of the secret federal base showed no signs of life. No super scientists, no fat cats there, no Black Egg. All those cogent hints about close encounters in the American Southwest with psychic saucer-craft, and nobody was even here. People were so cynical about the miraculous that they couldn’t even bother to show up.

“I can almost feel that other brane arriving now,” said Rabbiteen. “Once the force of gravity has changed, we only have six minutes.”

“Cody!” hollered Angelo, his voice echoing off the floating islands of stone. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Help us, Cody!”

“Come on, Cody!” shrieked Rabbiteen. Giggling shrilly, she grappled at Angelo. Her fingers were numb, and the flesh of his neck and shoulders felt spongy and strange. “The desert’s so beautiful, Cody! Especially upside down! We had great sex, and next time you can watch us, I promise!”

“Cody, Cody, Cody!!!”

A lens-like shape formed in mid-air, magnifying the tumbleweeds and boulders. Slowly, it opened a dark throat.

“Hello?” said Angelo.

The blackness folded in on itself and took form. The hole became crooked, then everted, like a giant origami tentacle. It swayed around in mid-air like a hungry feeler.

It took note of the two of them.

The warped tentacle wriggled and dimpled; the tip flexed to assume the shape of a staring, glistening face. Complex forces within the bulging shape were manipulating it like a sock puppet. The eyes bulged like a rubber mask, the mouth stretched and gaped like a toad’s.

“Cody?” said Angelo, yet again, one arm wrapped around Rabbiteen. “Are you here to save us?”

The demonic toad twisted his head this way and that. He had large, golden eyes. “Do I look properly embodied within your planet’s three spatial dimensions?”

“No!” Rabbiteen squeaked, stiff with unearthly terror. “You look like hell!”

“Interaction was so much easier on the Internet,” said the toad, smacking his thin lips. “It’s a lot of trouble to manifest this low-dimensional form to you.” The creature’s voice was modulated white noise, like sand sculpted into letters.

“I saw him last night, Angelo,” cried Rabbiteen. “I saw him peeking into the hearse! And he was in the motel parking lot. Cody was stalking us.”

“I was monitoring you,” said Cody, his head billowing like a black pillowcase. “You two alone have reached Area 52, naturally selected from the many billions on your planet. You are like sperm cells beating their way up a long canal—”

“—to reach the Black Egg,” completed Angelo hurriedly. His molecules felt overstretched. “Okay, yes! Here we are! Let us inside!”

Cody leered at them provokingly. “The Cosmic Mother,” he said, “is the immortal entity that fills the band of hyperspace between the twin branes of the cosmos. I am the tip of one of Mother’s many tentacles. If you can imagine that.”

“Of course we can imagine that!” jabbered Rabbiteen. “Don’t let us die!”

“Let us in,” repeated Angelo. His fingers felt and looked like orange circus peanuts.

“This Black Egg is prepared for you, my blogger friends,” said Cody simply. “The universe is collapsing, so the Cosmic Mother has placed a Black Egg on every space and place that supports intelligence. Billions of eggs, spewed in the cosmos like dewdrops in the shining sea.”

“Oh, Cody,” said Rabbiteen. “You read my blog too.”

“Of course I do. Physics is collapsing, but the network will persist. All the Black Eggs are linked via quantum entanglement. Telepathy, if you will.”

Momentarily, Angelo forgot his fears. “Wow, I always wanted some telepathy.”

“There’s also infinite connectivity and infinite storage in the network of eggs,” Cody evangelized. “The network has an infinite number of users. They’re all upset and angry, just like you, because they’re all indignant to see their universe collapse. They all believed they were the most important aspect of the universe. Imagine the confusion. We have an infinite number of anthropic principles—one for each race!”