I suppose I should start by mentioning that I am an unreliable narrator. This is either a story of doomed heroic exploits, a journey to the underworld, and a starship, or it is not. I may or may not be a human being. These captors of mine may or may not be doctors. It is no difficult task to imprison a man, but to imprison an ageless superbeing-that is another matter entirely.
How did I get to this place? I remember an ice field, the longship frozen in stasis, crippled in a drift of methane snow, leaking atomic power, its crew salvaging swords and skins for survival, set forth along the surface of the dark, lifeless planetoid. Lucidity comes to me gradually as I write this. The rocket was impaled by a meteorite. Its reactors spilling radioactive coolant into the void between its two hulls, it is amazing that the feeble humans at the helm were able to set it down in one place? piece. Yes, piece is the word. Tarterus is a dark world, adrift in the cosmos, ejected from a now-distant solar system by a planet intent upon devouring its siblings, like Saturn, devouring its children, its gaseous envelope thick and spinning with helium argon envelope, the methane frozen ing gossamer fields, as drifting snow. Here, ice is as permanent as stone and the wounded rocket, perilously balanced on its aft fins, sent up clouds of steamy gaseous mist. Elsewhere, there was quiet, and twenty nine men did trudge into the ether black plain with little but their courage. Little did they know the fate that awaited them. Elder beings, vastly more powerful, had designs of their own for the men and their crude machine.
"Mr. Anaeus?" It was a voice not unlike a carpet sample-bland and ordinary and promising huge amounts of the same. It was a beige voice full of beige overtones.
"Mr. Anaeus, have you been listening? It is important that you stick to your schedule o medication."
A sliver of terrestrial sunlight filters through the mostly-clothed miniblind. It is a grand sun, a G2 on the Hersprung-Russell scale, and the inhabitants of this globe are not worthy of it. Institutional walls, more beige, surround my corporeal form. Air ducts. These creatures breathe gaseous oxygen, suspended in a mixture of other gasses. I hate their sense organs, generally speaking, limited to three of the seven dimensions of spacetime Still, there is something to be said for the eyes of this tree-dwelling monkey. So many nuances of color, a narrow slice of the multitudinous radiation from its magnificent sun. I am restricted to an unlikely brane. They think the world they see is all there is. They are like flatlanders.
"I am a prisoner here, and the medication you speak of is engineered to prevent my eventual escape. It immobilizes my limbic system, obstructs the puny cerebral hemispheres of this monkey brain from higher function, and prevents me from psychotemporal projection into the othe dimensions. This mind here..." I say, pointing a blunt digit at the shelly test beneath my furry covering, a cranium, "It is a tendril, an extensionn of a far greater being, imprisoned on a world so vastly different than your own that you cannot comprehend the smallest particle. You, sir, are a blocked exit, and these alkaloids you prescribe are no medicine."
The creature adjusts the crude, wire-rimmed lenses in front of his eyes. He is aging. These bodies wear out so tragically. Free of predators, because generations ago their ancestors killed mighty sabre-toothed beasts with stone-hafted spears, their ancestors are free to grow old and weak, surrounded by notebooks an sterile walls.
Sometimes
3 years ago
