Clay (Episode One of Farther Than We Dreamed)

Clay

  Episode One of Farther Than We Dreamed

  By

  Noah K. Mullette-Gillman

  Copyright 2014 Noah Mullette-Gillman

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover design and photography by

  Noah K. Mullette-Gillman

  Edited by Michael Poirier,

  Noah K. Mullette-Gillman, and Ken Gillman.

  Twitter: Noahlot

  Mailing List: [email protected]

  www.fartherthanwedreamed.com

  www.noahmullette-gillman.com

  Also by Noah K. Mullette-Gillman

  THE WHITE HAIRS

  THE SONG OF BALLAD AND CRESCENDO

  LUMINOUS AND OMINOUS

  MAGIC MAKES YOU STRANGE

  THE CONFESSIONS OF ZEUSPATER

  THE DEAD HAVE RULED EARTH

  FOR 200 YEARS

  THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE (FARTHER THAN WE DREAMED EPISODES 1-4)

  GOLD (FARTHER THAN WE DREAMED EPISODE 5)

  All available in paperback and for digital download.

  www.noahmullette-gillman.com

  The following is episode one of Farther Than We Dreamed.

  All content in this volume was previously published in “The Secrets of the Universe,” which contained episodes 1-4 of Farther Than We Dreamed.

  If you enjoy it, please don’t hesitate to download or order your copy of the longer, 103,000 word, book.

  EPISODE ONE

  CLAY

  “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

  Nicola Tesla

  1

  Session 23

  Charlie woke up again. He lay in a flat bed without blankets or pillows. The fabric was soft and gentle like silk, or leaves, or flower petals. As he opened his eyes, great clouds of transparent purples, blues, and darker shades burned his vision, after-images of some dream. He thought about old-fashioned televisions which didn’t turn off all at once, but glowed a little less and a little less over time.

  He was in a large and round room with a domed ceiling. It was clean and white, like no room he had ever seen. There were statues in a circle around the ceiling. The ceiling, the walls, and the statues all appeared to be made of alabaster marble which shone with an interior light.

  A man sat on a small chair next to where Charlie was lying. He was drinking from a glass of water when Charlie saw him. The man looked surprised to see Charlie awake. He smiled awkwardly, placed the glass down noisily on the floor, and picked up a pad of paper. There were a lot of sloppy notes throughout the pages already.

  “Do you remember your name?” the man asked.

  “Charlie, Charlie Daemon.”

  “Is this reality?” the man asked.

  “Yeah… I’m awake.”

  The man seemed to be writing down more words than Charlie was saying. “Do you know where we are?”

  “He said I was going to be on a ship. Is this the ship? Did they teleport me here?” Charlie sat up. His forehead was aching dimly. He ran his hand over his face. He’d been shaved in his sleep. His nose had been straightened. It felt like someone else’s face.

  “Don’t strain yourself.” The man’s unwashed yellow hair had been pushed back from his face in frustrated and rough handfuls. He held out his arm, as if he was going to push Charlie back down, but he didn’t quite touch him. “Is this the first time we’ve spoken, Charlie?”

  “Who are you?”

  The man smiled insincerely. He looked tired. “We’ll get to that. Please, I am required to test you.”

  “As far as I know, I’ve never met you before,” Charlie said finally.

  “What do you remember from before you woke up?” The man didn’t close his mouth after asking the fifth question. He seemed strangely eager – hungry – for the answer.

  “I don’t remember dreaming. My eyes were full of colors when I opened them, like after-images, but I don’t remember any dreams.”

  “That’s fine. What do you remember from before?”

  “Before?” Charlie sighed. “I was in the war. Well, you know. I remember when we blew The Machine up. I…they died.” Charlie was surprised to feel his throat choke up. It was like his mouth felt the sadness before his mind or his heart. “The people I care about died, but we blew The Machine up. I was walking back through the snow. When I couldn’t walk anymore, he came and told me what we were doing.”

  The man was writing feverishly on his pad. He never once looked down to see the marks he was making. Instead he stared at Charlie. He listened. Charlie had hardly said anything, how could the man find so many words to use describing it?

  “Assume I don’t know. Tell me what he told you.” The man picked up the glass and took another drink.

  Charlie reached out and took the glass of water from the man. He swallowed a small sip and then continued. “He said that nothing in my life was real. It was supposed to be like a history book. I was living history, not the present. He told me that my life had been designed to make me the man that I was because humanity needed me.”

  “Go on.”

  “He wasn’t a man though. He was like a wild animal. He came at me out of the woods. I thought he was going to eat me. Then he started talking and said the world was an illusion. I was tired, ready to collapse. I was wondering if the talking animal was a hallucination.

  “He said the universe was too big for warp drive, or hyper-drive, worm holes, bending, twisting, or teleporting. There are some distances you could never cross, not with a million years to do it. But they could send something like a radio signal out past the forever, and that radio signal would find rocks and little things. It would tell the molecules where to go and how to combine with each other until they made a spaceship and they made people out on the other side.

  “He said I was meant to be the captain of this spaceship out beyond the beyond.”

  “And what else did he tell you?”

  Charlie shook his head. “No. Nothing. I had questions, obviously, that I wanted to ask him. I got the feeling he was going to tell me more, but…. That’s all I remember. Maybe I forgot the rest?”

  “You’re sure?” The man glanced down at his notes and made a check mark next to a word Charlie couldn’t make out upside down. The funny man was writing in cursive.

  Charlie shook his head again. “No. Then I was here with you. So, if I’m the captain, you can give me your report now.”

  The man nodded. With his left hand he grabbed Charlie by his arm, as if he was about to help him out of bed. There was a pinching sensation in Charlie’s side. He looked down to see that the man had just injected him with a hypodermic needle.

  “What was that?”

  The man stood up, and took two steps backwards. “I’ve just euthanized you, Charlie. I had to. We need to learn the truth.”

  Charlie pushed himself forward and reached his feet down onto the ground. He was going to grab the man. But Charlie’s legs were new and he wasn’t used to them yet. He slipped on the bloody floor and fell down.

  He felt the smack of his shoulder against the hard stone and he bit his tongue. He reached his hands out and felt a person there. There was a dead man on the floor right next to where he had landed. Charlie glanced up at his killer. The man was scribbling wildly in his notebook while staring back clinically at Charlie.

  The captain felt his face stiffening. His mus
cles were getting weak. He pulled at the body and turned it over so he could see the dead man’s face. The dead man looked just like Charlie remembered himself, except he had been shaven, his nose was fixed, and he had a small scar across his forehead.