Author: Palmer Caine

Between gates things get weird. Perception splinters to span myriad levels, too many to navigate, too many to understand. Like of Galaxy of mirrors, everything reflected infinitesimally. Or so it seems. Maybe a fly with its many segmented eyes could fashion a path, but not mere humanity, and certainly not me. The machine produces detailed maps, scored and annotated with dots and slashes, there is little similarity to anything known, but it continues to assure us of pin point accuracy.

When the machine arrive it asked for volunteers, and they came, many and varied. Queues of hopefuls camped out in every town and city, awaiting a chance to audition for the role of a life time – it lasted months – everybody wanted OUT, and the only way out was UP. In the end numbers were allocated and we were selected at random from a giants hat, a system that befuddled the machine and only accepted reluctantly. Twenty numbers were finally selected from the ancient, oversized headgear, but only fifteen departed and we are now five, or six, I think. There has been no communication for many, many gates.

Every night I dine with dead relatives. Mother says that they refuse to speak and ignores them toboot – it’s a meaningless exchange. Dead relatives, dead friends, dead world, dead life, a contradiction. Everybody I ever knew, everything I have ever known has decayed to dust. Aunt Jessy is the head of the family, mother says she makes all the difficult decisions. She is small and likes to hide in corners, I hear her giggles. My bed bound cousin says she watches him at the end of his bed, from which he cannot escape.

Every part of my body is supported, or suspended, at all times in a harnessed contraption. It maintains centre of gravity whatever the disruption and feeds nutrients and pleasure via intravenous and intramuscular applications. I need for nothing, the Machine supplies everything, without its innovations we would not be in the stars. And the stars are our one mission objective, ever since the Clout it has been the only goal, the machine told us so and offers a way through.

Physical decline is combatted by electrical stimulation wired intramuscularly to the torso, still movement is strange now and unnecessary, most prefer to remain still. Some of us wish we were amphibian, or Cephalopoda, then we would be sealed into water tight vessels and float around in the liquid of outer space, water is safer than air and no webbing is required. Of course the machine rejected the notion.

Onward and onward into the future; there is no going back from here we cannot return, we will not find the world we left behind. We are beyond time as we know it, beyond our time, beyond planetary existence, and if the machine is right, we will be the Gods of this future.

The machine asks, “What does a God know?” But noone has answered yet. It communicates that it has crossed the border between this and that, between macro and micro; it says it has a purpose, an agenda – It says it is a traveller.

We left messages for ourselves in the future; I wonder which of us will respond?