Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 45)

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Pods. Again. It was Pods.

I might have screamed were I not body-locked several layers deep in a mythic unraveling.

Long metal tubes attached to crude, exposed wiring. A glass covering on each. Monitors perched on both sides, numerical readouts blinking in an incomprehensible language.

The same ones I had glimpsed in the Top Secret Area of MegaTech™.

They lined the wall, four of them crammed inches apart like coffins in the world's most garishly lit mausoleum. The figures inside — if there were any — were obscured behind the translucent glass, floating, I could only assume, in the same gruesome state I had seen all that time ago.

He scanned the room from the doorway, flinching not once at the uncanny brutality before him.

He ingested the information on each readout monitor, pausing only a split second at every machine before moving on to the next.

Until, suddenly, he stopped.

It was the third pod. Second from the right.

What was different about it I couldn't have said. But the way he bounded forward told me he found what he came for.

Emboldened with each passing step, he tore forward, approaching the pod like an old friend he was eager to see.

The dim lights inside the macabre contraption clicked on as he did, spilling warm light — responsive to movement, or maybe to him.

If he was bothered by what came into focus, he hid it well. I wish I could have said the same for myself.

A skeletal shell of a man, fading and dull. The specifics of his face had been smoothed into something like a mask; what patches of hair still remained were inconsistent shocks of white.

He looked the way I felt on days I didn't drink my NutriSlop. Alive, but only just barely.

His arms lay limp at his sides, thin as twigs, resolving into long, slender hands.

The hands.

I had that disgusting sensation that two incompatible timelines had crashed into each other in my lower intestine.

Those hands.

I had worn them. I had used them. I had held the edges of the Obelisk with them and marveled at their absent cuticles.

Just minutes before, they had been mine.

And now, they belonged to a husk.

Which meant —

The glass cracked open under a different grip.

I hadn't clocked it before. The scene was too frenzied. My understanding lagged.

These hands were thicker. Steadier. Less concerned with the health of their nailbeds.

But who did they belong to?

Somewhere beneath it all, I felt the Obelisk tighten its vise — as if this, right here, was what it was waiting for.

The triumphant, delirious spirit of the stranger I was riding inside glowed hot like the core of some unhinged sun.

And the Obelisk, lying in wait, sprang into action.

It felt at first like a tug in the chest, a strange downward force that tickled in ways you usually needed a subscription for.

The outer edges of the scene started to soften, stripped of their potency. The fluorescent light of the laboratory wobbled and dimmed. The hum of the monitors muffled to faint wisps of sound.

The man, standing over the barely breathing body, filled with hot-blooded mania, plunged his arm into the pod, probing around with callous disregard for the social conventions surrounding such things.

He searched around the complex circuitry underneath the other man's delicate frame and, with little trouble, found what he had come for.

But, as he burst up from his mission, clutching in his hand the mess of dripping wires, the euphoric wail of elation that wanted to rise up grew heavy and leaden, stunting its flight.

The fuel that had been burning through him was siphoning out, and instead of combusting, the moment just hung there. Hollow.

I felt his breath tighten, his heartbeat slow down.

For a long, awkward moment he stared down at the body, wires still gripped in his hand in a pose that once felt cathartic.

He knew what he'd done. He even knew why. But the knowing was cold.

Information.

A man in a room. Four withered limbs beneath him. A sunken face. Shallow breath.

Somewhere off in the distance I could hear its gears churning. The Obelisk had what it needed.

But it wasn't done yet.

**

It wasn't a tug so much as a tear.

A stark, sudden split. A screaming blast through the layers. A blinding flash of white light.

And then —

Balloon animals.

I squinted, eager to resolve the picture into something less likely to mean there was a magician nearby. My vision was blurry, the scene before me choppy and unclear, like the frame rate of reality wasn't finished buffering.

In my head, there was a feeling of profound vertigo and the taste of coconut rum.

To my left and my right, I could hear garbled voices. A small group. Excitement. Bungled pronunciations of the word piñata and warm reassurances that here, it was the trying that counted.

Everything in me wanted to run, but everything about me made that impossible.

For one thing, I couldn't feel my legs or my arms. For another, I think my team was winning at trivia.

A clap on the back from an unseen teammate sent a surge up my spine that shook something loose. My fingertips pulsed with faint sensation, tightening around something cold and smooth. The shock of it was almost violent as my senses returned.

I knew what it was without even looking.

Then, all at once, I knew where I was, too.

But who I was — who he was — that dawned on me only as I craned my neck downward and glimpsed the long, slender fingers holding the commemorative pina colada glass and read its mocking message:

"The Garden: It Can All Be So Simple"