21c

Like a pack of cards crashing to the ground.

He jumped over the concrete ledge that separated one disintegrated asphalt parking lot from another. Cactus-sized weeds poked through the asphalt in places. Where warehouses had once stood there were piles of bricks and mortar, collapsed windows, eventually cracked cement factory floors and weeds.

He harvested the weeds. He would crush the moisture out and separate pulp and fiber. The moisture he retained in a flask. From the fiber and the pulp he made paper.

He wrote on the paper. He wrote an account of his times.

See him go about the routines that sustain him while he makes paper and ink to describe his world.

His is a tight script.

His papers became inconvenient to carry, so he fashioned a suitable container. He had the knowledge to make a container in an environment where buildings are rubble, rain is rare and weeds prevail.

Man jumps over ledge. On the upper surface are two mid-sized sticky thorn-variety. The balance is a centric forest in bloom. Wrong fiber.

The weeds are maturing to their task: Tall fiber filled weeds break open the asphalt. Bloomers radiate to reduce the asphalt to small pieces.

Many weeds. Desert plants.

Weeds are an unpleasant source of nutrament, but a small number are mildly edible if prepared just so.

A walking thin person, but at least he walks upon dry land. The dank swamps were the stomping grounds of the obese. Short lifespan, but the most abundant supply of food made the swamps the habitat of choice for slow movers.

The man had one tool that hardly anybody else had, and few of those who had one would consider it to be anything other than a curio. Its use was obvious, perhaps not universally so.

Brick sized, a solar powered distiller.

By purifying water, ingesting it, and subsequently, by returning the water to the weeds growing up between the asphalt, and by producing valuable nitrogen to fix the soil, he is engaging in negentropy.

He rarely fed the weeds. He coveted water, specifically, but any clear fluid in general.

A mid 21'st century dilletante.

*****

She occupied a spot of ground that had been carefully cleared a long time ago. Beside her in a pile were her belongings. There were ornaments and curios of no particular value, but she kept them nearby. Against a boulder lay the remains of a mirror. As she lay crouching on the ground, she contemplated herself in the mirror-reflection. She placed the ornaments upon herself, and studied the view. In the reflection of the mirror she watched as the man walked slowly toward her. The sac that he strung over his shoulder was quite full, and that meant there would be something to fill her stomach. She was at least as thin as the man, but no thinner. His sinews appealed to her. For the food that he brought her, she readily stayed with him. She would have remained with him under any circumstances, since there was nobody about in the place that they considered to be their domain.

Nearby there was a creek that on occasion, after a rainfall, had running water. In one place there was a depression that captured the small trickle of water that was all that remained during dry spells. It was spring fed, but also a catchment. The area was a highland, the highest ground to be found anywhere, part of an ancient mountain chain, but you wouldn't think so if you didn't know that. She had no memory of any other place. When she was a small child, there had stood a village with houses and a church. One clearance after another had seen the houses go, in turn. People moved away when the local climate became very dry, to other places that offered a better chance of habitat. Eventually, the only people that had remained in the place were very old people that had no other place to go. Now, it was empty of people. She found the solitude appealing.

Coming to rest on the clearing, he placed the sac upon the ground. She removed its contents and separated them according to custom. One pile would become a meal, another would be fuel, another would be converted into whatever could be made out of it. The contents of the sac always fascinated her, which was to be expected, since it would often contain a curio or two, objects that she knew he had discovered out there amongst the rubble, that he selected specifically to please her. A piece of metal, a trinket, a vessel.

Now and then, he would bring her a small animal that he had trapped. Rodents, usually. Ground inhabiting creatures. A carefully prepared meal would be the result. It was all that they clung to in their quest to be civilized. As it happened, they were only a fragment removed from being ground-dwellers themselves. The labyrinthe structure that was their home had as its most secure, sheltered place a carefully maintained cellar. It served as a retreat during the coldest days of winter and during storms and inclement weather. Within the confines of the cellar was a small space, a den, just large enough for the two of them. During times of prolonged cold, they would retreat to the den and clutch one another for warmth. It was only when the despair of hunger set in that they would cover themselves with rags and old heavy garments and venture outside to hunt the creatures that were to be found.

It was by no means an easy life, but it constituted a form of civil society for the two of them.

They retained language, and he would entertain her with stories and song. She would make the paper and ink that he used to write about things. He took pains to write, and she would read his words and in the time when there were books she had read those also. There were no books any more. All had been burned for fuel some time ago. His words were all that remained. On those occasions when there was litte fabric and other materials from which to make paper, the two had gone through the inventory of words, reducing the contents of three pages into one, to enable new paper to be made out of the old. The preparation of paper and ink were her most important tasks and she went to great lengths to be as perfect about them as it was possible to be. It would begin with a loose weave upon which the pulp would be deposited and allowed to dry. The resulting sheet was somewhat like a fabric.

Two or three times a year, the man and the woman would embark upon a journey in order to engage in what was left of commerce. There was a settlement some distance to the North. It was a mere outpost, and the city that lay beyond was definitely a no-go zone for them. Their attire made them a poor fit within its walls, and there was also the matter of the existence of an economy that the two ground dwellers had very little in common with. The occupants of the outpost were somewhere on the continuum between disheveled occupiers of space, such as the couple, and people that by all accounts, had something to do other than wander around looking for food. The poor occupiers of space had about as much chance of gaining entry to the gated world as a condemned person had access to the pleasures of a free life.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, the man and the woman had the basic accoutrements that allowed them to walk freely about the outpost, offering curios and those suchlike that the woman decided she would part with. What they sought in exchange for the goods that they brought was not hard to acquire in a world filled with junk, with the exception of one thing, selenium cells.

The cells kept a charge on the batteries that existed for the sole purpose of powering an old transceiver that he maintained to a radio-signal, at 44.1 megacycles, amplitude low, about five watts, which contained at its center-channel, a numerical sequence that repeated, from time to time, the co-ordinates of the enclosure that he kept his words in. At other times, he transmitted live speech, music, and the words that he wrote, spoken into a microphone by the woman, the possessor of a beautiful voice. The signal radiated out into space would travel to all portions of the galaxy, perhaps beyond, at the speed of light. Although a weak signal, its intelligence would be detectabe, distinctly so, as a congruent signal, and it would eventually supplant all intelligence signals from Earth that were amplitude based, since none had been transmitted for a long time.

It wasn't that there wasn't the capacity to do so any more. Indeed his world although largely (but not entirely) devoid of the patterns of civilization that it had exhibited a century ago, abandoned any notion that there was a purpose to extend efforts toward extra-terrestrial communication after it became clear to those that held the capacity to do so that nobody would respond. His own transmission was a simpler, more pointed message than the welcome-mat type messages that had preceded his communication. He sent not a greeting, but an explanation.

Batteries that were charged sufficiently allowed him to transmit his signal at night. There wasn't much point in doing so during the daylight hours, as the signal would be obliterated by solar radiation. As it were, at night, his five watts would travel well into the distance. To distant stars. The very periodicity of the messages was also intelligence of a form, for it supplied to the recipient a triangulation, an indication that the sender was live, cognizant of the most advantageous time to transmit, and also, and reliably so, a guide to the general location of the sender that had value beyond simple co-ordinates, since the duration of the message varied by the length of the day. The signal began when the terrestrial sun passed beyond the horizon, and was stopped when it rose in the sky.

*****

The landscape that they travelled on their journey to and from their market had within it a variety of contrasts. Within its guarded walls, the city retained some semblance of civilization, but in the miles that stretched beyond its boundary there was little but chaos. To the east lay terrain best avoided by those that wished to survive, for it was a mixture of marsh and chaos, a place where the disintegration of the species was most apparent. Here a devolution was under way. People without language occupied the marshes, eating whatever they could fit into their mouths, procreating without purpose, and often killing those that they did not recognize as being one of their own tribe. Life expectancy was short, but since nobody that occupied these spaces measured time, it was the state of physiology that would offer the greatest indication of the likelihood of a being surviving to see another day. Even the strong succumbed.

Morbidity rates notwithstanding, the numbers grew as the number of dispossessed grew. They were drawn to places such as this low-lying marsh by geographic characteristics that made it easier to survive the vagaries of climate that made barren places, such as the plateau that the man and woman called home, less habitable. It took knowledge and skill to survive in such less inviting places.

The marshlands beside the civilized place also held occupants because of its proximity to a vestige of civilization. The marsh-dwellers received a constant supply of trash from the city. Organic, inorganic, simple detruitus, you name it. Castaway garments, plastics. Nothing of any great value, but rather, the leftover junk that was ignored by the garbage-pickers that made a living of sorts out of the items that the city dwellers were too lazy to redeem for their face value, or for the recovery fee that had been taxed into the price of the good when it had been purchased.

*****

It was during the journey to the place that they called home that the couple encountered a strange man. He was strange by his costume, but most particularly by his visage, which resembled the couple, his hands, which also betrayed resemblance. He was armed, and offered protection to the pair in exchange for conversation, information, without delineation, whatever they wanted.

"Hello children."

The man led the pair to his conveyance, a vehicle that appeared at a moment's notice at the summons of the strange man that immediately revealed itself as being not of the world that the man and the woman knew. She betrayed fear, he, curiousity. "Ah, don't worry. Nothing to it. It exists dimensionally shifted, so you don't ordinarily see it. Step inside."

The vehicle transported them within moments to their destination, their plateau. Upon reaching the destination, they disembarked, and with a barely perceptible motion, the strange man made the vehicle vanish.

"It's still there. In case you were wondering. You just don't see it anymore."

The man spoke. "Are you here for the sake of my signal?" "Well, in truth, I have always been here. But don't let that trouble you Mica. Your signal will be retrieved in time by others, and those that receive it will make the trip to reclaim Terra. Your efforts are not in vain. In fact, I am here to visit, as any father would do, out of curiousity. You are both my spawn, half-siblings. But don't let that trouble you. Your genetic makeup is sufficiently different, but perfectly dovetailed for compatibility. You, Ana, and you, Mica, share a unique biology and a cognitive capacity that separates you from the sub-human mass that sapients have been devolving into. You should, you know.

"She is my sister. "

"I suppose, but on those long winter nights when you clutch each other for warmth, don't you feel it?"

The man looked away. "I do not." "She does." The strange man looked pointedly at the woman, who, feeling exposed, retreated behind her man, clutching him for protection from the strange man's gaze.

"Ana, don't be silly. Besides, you can't deny it. Be honest with your man. Tell him what you do when he lies asleep." The strange man returned his gaze to Mica. "And you, tell me honestly that you have never had the experience, even for a moment, in a half-awake state. Tell me." The man looked to the ground momentarily, before returning, measure for measure, the intensity of the look from the strange man. "Ah, good, I expected nothing less. And by that, what I mean to say is that I expect you to be formidable, Mica."

"I have no desire in the measure that you infer." "Possibly true." Moments passed. "Very well, provocation at a standstill. What you do not recall, but what she knows full-well, is really of no importance at all. The reality is your situation. All that you have is each other. You occupy no civilization that I am able to discern, so what possible difference could it make at this point in time? Didn't it occur to you that furtherance may depend on a child?" The argument was rhetorical. The man dismissed its logic easily. The stranger admitted as much, and proceeded to move on to the matter of his visit. He had information that he wanted to share.

"It was very clever, your discovery of the frequency that you transmit your signal on. For it lies within a narrow band of a range that hasn't been used for a century, or thereabouts." "I know. It was abandoned because of sunspot activity. I transmit at night in the empty channel for that reason." "Ah, yes. And at five watts, you certainly get a lot of punch. Suppose I were to give you the secret to harnessing the energy of that sunspot with your transmission. Now, five watts won't do much, but the occasional burst of a much higher power level during daylight hours most certainly will. Here's how."

*****

In the days that followed, the two men, so similar cognitively, synergised, and between them, set about to reconfigure out of the materials at hand, a setup that would modulate the intense energy of the sunspot.

From a distance, she watched. She noted the easiness with which the two men, brothers under the skin, conversed and created. Her fear of the strange man dissipated. On an evening when she partook in her task of mashing vegetables into a pulp, she found him beside her. "Father?" "No, not exactly. Perhaps the father of your father. Or, perhaps I am your descendant. But Ana, I am here out of my love for you. The two of you are all that survive of me. And now, it is the endtime. Soon there will be an inversion. If you remain here, you will cease to exist. And I don't know how I feel about that." She turned to him, looking at him, questioning his words. He spoke. "I know that you don't get it. Any of it. But the more I think about it, the more that I am convinced that the thing to do is to take the two of you with me to another time." He took her hands in his own. She felt within herself the tension that she experienced in proximity with her man multiplied and made multifaceted. She wondered about it.

"Yes... Perhaps. Just perhaps, I am your descendant." His words had the desired effect, causing her to be a slightly more affective person then before. "I am out of time, in more ways than one..." He paused, watching her for the certain indication of a sub-cognitive mechanism at work. Subconsciously, she began shifting her legs. He placed his hand on her knee, drawing her legs apart. She shifted her weight back, resting herself on outstretched arms, and allowed her uncrossed leg to come to rest upon his. She closed her eyes, occasionally opening them to see where his eyes were. The not so strange man was looking at her, under her shift, and she felt herself become aroused and entirely desirous. "If not him... than." He smiled, and reaching over, took her arm, gathering her to him. "Not me, baby girl."

"Why do you call me that?" "For you are... Time is strange." "I never knew my father. All that I know is Mica. And I do not know him." She found herself emboldened, and began to experiment with desire. Drawing apart the fabric of his shirt, she examined his perfect skin, and touching his chest, brought herself into closer proximity, until her lips touched the side of his neck. Her hand traced up, and slowly she drew herself around him, seeking his lips. A distance away, Mica spied them. Smiling to himself, he returned his eyes to the task that lay before him, that of fabricating a capacitor out of sheets of glass and a thin filmlike substance, mica. Just like his name, he thought, as he attended himself to the purpose of constructing what would become a voltage accumulator. He gave very little thought to the actions of Ana with the man who had eventually identified himself as Omc.

*****

Although she possessed much the same mind as her half-brother, Ana was a person motivated by primordial feelings and desires. During the years when Mica had absorbed his world and the changes that were taking place all around him, she had devoted herself to basic things, what one might call the tasks of the home. Since Mica's purpose had been to document and she had participated in that effort, Ana had learned much about the world around her without internalizing it in the manner that he did. She simply accepted his explanations about the nature of things as obvious to any person, perhaps not recognizing that there were very few people that bothered to understand the change-agency that Mica contemplated and passed judgement upon in his words. He was very much the produce of his male genome, which Ana shared, as a recessive. Ana was entirely a sensible woman, by contrast to her biological mother who had possessed a mind very much more inquisitive about the abstractions and concretes of science. It was a curio to Omc, who was entirely familiar with the biology of the half-siblings, for Ana seemed to be the child of Zena, the biological mother of Mica who, similar to Ana, had been more of a perceiver of things, than an analyst.

When Ana calmed down, came to terms with the boundaries of the relationship with the less-than-strange man, she allowed herself to be educated by him. Mica, in earshot, benefitted also from the words that Omc spoke to her. He told them about the new Age that was overtaking Terra, how it was comprised of life-forms that had existed from time-immemorial, long before the planet had come to be dominated by life forms with some measure of cognitive capacity, the birds and the mammals. Both were recent to Terra, compared with the Aquarians. These ancient creatures, the Aquarians, had overtaken the oceans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Creatures like the jellyfish, with its less than inviting kiss. The creatures spawned in oxygen-poor oceans in the early days of the planet and had survived the passage of time, unperturbed, as other life-forms had come and gone. With the progression of geothermal warming, the creatures had been stirred to activity. Soon the Aquarians would come to occupy the land itself. Beautiful, deadly creatures that would be attracted to warm-blooded beings, that were relatively harmless unless disturbed. Then, like the jellyfish, or perhaps the scorpion, they would beat a hasty retreat, often depositing a toxin on the way out. It would take only a single sting from the tiniest of these creatures to deposit a poison so harmful to mammals that a person infected would soon die in a terrible, painful way.

The inversion would reduce the planet to these creatures, and others which could survive the extremes of heat and cold that would visit upon the earth during the eons that followed the cataclysmic event. Other familiar primitive creatures, the insects that descended from the Aquarians, would also fare well, including those that were airborne for part of their life-cycle. They would quickly adapt and continue to thrive. The insects would serve as the primary food source for the Aquarians, as always.

Eventually, the Aquarians would possess the characteristics of order and organization, and would evolve to create language and meaning. They too would create edifices and observe the passage of time. And then, after the planet had been restored to a garden-like state, the earth would be revisited, and reseeded with sapient life and the story would start again. By that time, not a single fragment of the present civilization would remain to betray the cyclic nature of the process.

Ana demonstrated her common sense with the question why... "Why revisit? Why repopulate?" To which Omc had a ready answer. "Like everything else, baby girl. Location, location... Location! There are only a small number of planets that have the characteristics conducive to life for mammals. The universe is vast, but the number of useful planets is surprisingly small. Some planets flourish, others seem to fail, time and time again. I would say that it is an experiment, but in truth, we merely wish to survive.

*****

Time passed, the interminable heat of summer passed into seasonable autumn days. The man had worked without cessation on the task of converting his mechanism of transmission to a device that had the qualities that would make its operation automatic, and ongoing without human intervention or maintenance. The subterranean chamber that had served as a habitat for the half-siblings during the most inclement of weather was gradually overtaken by the objects of the device. Precisely assembled from materials that were available among the ruins of industrial buildings that were in easy distance from the plateau, the communications device took on permanence as each portion of the device was encased. It had all the makings of an integrated circuit, and differed only from such a device by its scale. The final component, the most involved, was constructed out of earth elements, an antenna. It was arrayed to utilize magnetic properties to advantage, and assembled upon the plateau in such a way to ensure that the device would go undetected and undisturbed, were it to be discovered by hazard.

Situated within the chamber were the words of Mica, sealed for permanence also. Finally, the subterranean chamber was sealed and the landscape features modified to obscure the location of the transmitter and its intelligence. Once a day, depending on the length of time that it took to charge the circuit, the transmitter would come to life for a brief moment to emit a signal that would modulate the undifferentiated energy of the sunspot in a manner that would be detected and decoded by intelligent life within the reach of its signal. Eventually, the signal that modulated the sunspot would be received even in the farthest corners of the universe, to the limits of energy transmission itself, absolute zero. But no further.

There wasn't anything much beyond the point of absolute zero. Beyond the outer reaches of the universe that was delineated by temperature, space, empty space, went on and on and on. Without measure.

"Somehow, the idea of endlessness frightens me." Omc smiled. "Yes, Ana. Indeed the concept that space has no end, just other universes so separated from one another as to not influence each other led to a whole science that sought to demonstrate that the universe was a compact space under great pressure from some other dimension." "So what is the answer?" "That, dear one, I have only caught glimpses of. But, I think it goes something like this..."

"Imagine, if you will, two tractors attached to each other by a chain. It could be a pair of horses, but for the sake of argument, let's say that it is a pair of tractors. You know. If you are old enough, you probably played with cast steel scale-models of these tractors on a dirt pile that you built your imaginary landscape of the world upon. If you were a boy, that is. Occasionally, a girl would come to play, bringing her dolls, which were not exactly compatible with the dirt-universe that you reveled in for hours on end. But, the girl, the possessor of a different kind of mind, would not be troubled at all by the inconsistencies of scale between the tractors and cars and trucks, tiny houses made of mud and pieces of cardboard or wood, anything that you managed to find to construct out of. No, you see, for the girl, the matter of scale-differences was unimportant. She would happily play with her dolls, imagining the activities that might take place in the tiny homes, or perhaps she would push a pram along the roads so carefully designed to the scale of the universe on a mud-pile that you created.

"That is, until you chased her away. There was, after all, no place for the imaginings of the girl within the mud-universe that you reveled in. She would move away slowly, looking back, asking why she was unwelcome. Eventually, the girl would wander off to find some more inviting place to play with her dolls. You would return to your task at hand, back to the problem of the tractors straining against a chain. The chain is some silver thing that you liberated from a collection of jewelery belonging to somebody else. Perhaps the girl is from the house down the lane, the one that is sweet on you, and she gave you the chain with the hope that you would include her in your world. Matters not. You proceed to supply the tractors with motive power, allowing the force of each, expressed by the opposition of your arms, to pull the chain apart.

"Now, consider for a moment, the chain as a string that will eventually break from the storm of opposition that you engage by pulling the tractors apart. A link gives, the chain becomes two, and the force, the breaking point is an explosive event, but so small that you don't see it of course. The explosion lasts only a fragment of a moment. What you end up seeing is the recoil, mostly, as the chain, once separated into two parts, travels back in the direction of the force that caused it to separate.

"The moment, stretched to infinity. That is next. Think about it. You don't of course. You simply internalize the thing, looking at the broken chain, now in two parts. There's no way to rejoin the two chains and make them one again. But you are only five, and it doesn't occur to you why you would want to do such a thing. But later on, she wants the chain back. But now it is two, and cannot hold the locket of her love that she wore around her neck, on the chain that you broke. You hand her the two broken strands, which she takes in her hand, returning to you a single strand. The chain was a gift, no more. Without it, the locket gathers dust at the bottom of a jewelery box. She forgets about the locket in time. What she remembers, what she never forgets, is that you broke the chain. She forgives you, but not completely, for the memory is not of the chain, or that it was broken, but rather that she gave it to you because you wanted it, and then you destroyed it without thinking about her.

"Okay. So you did it. You broke the chain without thinking about how she would feel.

"Next, I want you to imagine the tractors, the chain, the whole ball of wax. There you are, in your sandbox. You are God as far as the contents of the sandbox goes. Cats come and make little poops in the sand, but apart from that, you are pretty much in control of the thing. So, God. Focus on the link, expand it from its infinitessimal point to encompass everything. Are you able to? Matters not, for it just so happens that in the scale-model of the moment of separation, there lies everything. Think about it for a moment.

"You pull the chain apart. Those tractors are powered. They are sent off by the momentum of the force that you created with the musculature that you possess, you, five-year-old boyo. So that is it. Tiny explosive event that takes place so quickly that it goes unnoticed. But you are never able to forget about it. For, she takes the broken chain and in a manner of speaking, turns it into ploughshares, which confuses you to no end, for you are a simple boyeen. You are a man now, but the broken chain remains broken and is never repaired. If you had a fragment of love in your heart for her, you would have taken the chain and repaired it. But no. Instead, you occupy yourself with broken portion, contemplating the strand that you kept, and eventually forget about the other portion, and deny that it exists, whatever.

"But it is out there. The other end of the chain. The other part of a whole universe now separated into two. With the passage of time, the separated strands travel a great distance. Never are the two to be reclaimed and rejoined. Now, step out of the sandbox, brush the sand off your britches, and face reality. In this case, reality is the massive thing that scientists try to explain, with no great success or insight for that matter, how the universe as we know it came into being. But you know, it was that schism, the action of the two tractors pulling a chain beyond the breaking-point. An event that may or may not take place any number of times, in any number of places. Perhaps the chain is broken in a moment of fury, as a cherished chain that swayed so nicely, locket attached, is pulled from the neck of a loved one. It may be that out of all the times that such an action took place, the conditions existed, just so, for the explosion so created, so infinitely small, to possess the properties of an exact measure that a void was created, a mathematics was twisted, and the explosion acquired a magnitude vastly greater than any of the other explosions of a similar nature that preceded it. Perhaps when you pulled the chain apart, you broke a heart so completely that the universe as it existed could no longer exist, and, again, you are on one tractor, with the remaining portion of a chain. It's all that you have left. You are now incomplete.

"I suppose you don't know this, but there it is. Incomplete."

*****

"I am not asleep," Anastasiya spoke. "I know." "Just my eyes were closed so that I could see in my minds eye what you were telling me about." Later. "Were you the boyeen?" "No, dear one. Rather, the owner of the mud-pile. Sitting at my desk with a view out on to the scene. No more, no less." "But it is the universe?" "No matter." "I get you now. Like the biggest and the smallest, all fitting into a scene. And you say that we are existing in one or two of those chains. That somewhere is another chain. But perhaps like a worm that you cut into two, each has enough of what it takes to be complete, no?" She reclined. Resting, in possession and certain about it. "I am in love with you." "Of course you are." "I feel it." "Naturally..." Her breathing accelerated, perspiration beading on her forehead, her limbs like tendrils. "You are the perfect Eve, Ana. So it was with your mother. All you need do now is find your garden." "Tend to me." "No. Suffice to feel the intensity of a kiss." Limbs tightening, she grasped at him, swaying, seeking proximity, ultimately frustrated by Omc's overarching control. She attempted, but failed, and instead, returned her attentions to the passions of the kiss. Eventually, he placated her by holding her and her desire found a moment of release against his touch.

"That's all you get, baby girl." "No, I get more. I wait for you to sleep. Then we see." "A good long wait. I sleep infrequently, on a wooden pallet, my own bed." "Everybody needs to sleep." "Now you are regressing." "Fine. I stick like glue. Maybe I tire you out. Then you sleep." "In the meantime, you shall sleep." She did, and when her state of unconsciousness permitted it, he withdrew himself from her clutches, placing her gently into a bedding-cot that, womb-like, was perfectly designed for her alone. Omc then returned to the task of piloting the craft that carried them no distance in particular, but rather, to another time. In the seat next to him, a woman named femme scanned a datum looking for the perfect singularity to attain their purpose. She had yet to find the perfect match to her criterion.

*****

Earthside, Michal, equipped with knowledge and a source of credit, looked out over the gated city from a vantage point that spoke volumes about his sudden change of status. He knew perfectly well that he would never again encounter Ana, or Omc. Instead, he would watch and wait for the moment soon to come when climactic inertia would cascade into a swift, planet-wide devastation. He elected to stay behind, and had volunteered that part of him which would make it to the time and place that Omc ventured forth to find.

He remained, after all that had happened, a dilletante. No mere transformation of status could change his innate sense of the nature of things. When he walked the labyrinthe halls of the arcology that he resided within, he studied the faces of his fellow-residents. Nothing in their eyes indicated that the people within a gated community within the gates of another gated urban form suggested that they had any idea about the terminal nature of their existence.

He marked time by observing his radio signal. Every day, depending on the rate at which the power supply that fed the transmitter reached its saturation point, the signal was emitted, for a brief moment. He took to estimating the time of transmission, based on observable phenomena; the amount of cloud-cover, the intensity of solar radiation, and so on. On the darkest, rainiest days, the transmitter would emit its signal in late afternoon, on those days when there was little cloud cover, the signal would emit before midday.

Little did he know that the action of detecting the signal would attract attention to himself.

He would find out, in time interminable, in the form of a sharp knock at the door. Somewhat bleary eyed, the result of indulgences that he pursued to pass the time, he peered through the spyhole to see in the hallway beyond his door a woman that initially he mistook for Ana. Younger, perhaps, but it was hard to be certain. Unconcerned, unthinking, he opened the door.

"Hello Antikristus." After a pause. "May I come in?" She walked past his frozen form, sizing up his situation in a moment. She turned to him. "A rather spectacular way to go out. I would have been, somehow, happier to find you in the wastes, suffering along with the human fodder." "I'm in retirement now, so what difference does it make." "You know." "I know nothing at all anymore. Much less my purpose." "Purposeless, yes, you find yourself so." Her intensity sobered him somewhat. "I would have thought that you would be leading the survivors to a place of refuge, more your typical path, BHEN." "I am not BHEN." "No more so than I am FOMA, but don't be stupid with me. You have always known who and what you are."

"I am all that I have ever been, no more, no less." "Oh, how much less." She pointed to the RF monitor that he used to detect his signal. "I had no trouble finding you, after you sent up your flare." "Having found me, what do you propose." She smiled. "Don't think that I'm ready to play that hand, ...yet." She began to remove her outer garments, revealing a perfect body, slender, a touch athletic. "It has been a long trip, getting here. I am from another time, another place. From a time before you were born, exactly. I'm here to witness the end, which is nigh, from what I must say is a rather spectacular vantage-point. But first, I need some energy. What have you got?" "Some unusual accoutrements." He led her to an inner chamber, where he bathed, and watched as she removed her remaining garments. The effect was intoxicating. "Ah, what the... I will give it to you."

In the ambient light cast from behind glass from a terrarium that supplied him with cannabis, they enjoyed each other.

Later, feet up, listening to Theo Monk's 'Dream' through a quadrial set of planar electrostatic loudspeakers, she turned to him and asked what it was that he wanted to do next. "There's a nexus not far from here. We could cover the distance easily. From within its structure we would be able to move away from this time. Go back in time to another time and perhaps, place, mix with the natives, dominate them, whatever." "No, I don't think so." "I'm itching for it. Made the trip back and forth, got a sense of the thing.

"What do you want to see the end for, anyway? I've seen it from several places. Looks to be the same in all cases." She described the storm, a series of hurricanes without scale, the wall of water, followed by an inversion that would, with rapidity, remove breathable air from the atmospheric shell. All brought about by a collapse of the heat-budget regime and a quick release of moisture held in a stasis that had increased to the tipping-point over decades of global warming. "Here comes the flood."

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