Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Read online

  What had they been called…?

  Some things were just lost and could never be found again. Especially if it wasn’t in the Pantheon’s database. Some things just found their way to a memory black hole in the galaxy and disappeared there forever. Or were thrown in for the favoring of some new truth.

  Then they were gone forever.

  His yellow Huffy with the shock absorber purely for show wasn’t anything like those trick bikes. But he didn’t care. It was his. His parents had bought it for him when they first moved to Viejo Verde, because the apartment complex they’d lived in, in Long Beach—before this living memory of his past—wasn’t good for bikes and so he could have one here, now that they lived in suburbia. In paradise. Where there were sidewalks and wide roads and parks and housing developments under construction with dirt berms that could be jumped off.

  Which was pretty cool.

  Paradise lasts forever inside the Pantheon.

  It was his only bike. And it should have ever been his only bike. Years later…

  Something from Maestro came through the fog of candy that was still washing across his brain after the extraction and reclamation. After New Vega. Through the Narcoblisserine. But he was too high on the candy, as he called it, so Bad Old Self could do whatever he wanted. He was being reclaimed. He was becoming again.

  Like being a Made Man.

  Yeah, that was it, he thought. Like being a Made Man. Or a modern-day pharaoh.

  Or a…

  … a god becoming.

  Yes.

  Like a rock star is a god.

  Years later, on top of it all with everything to burn and nothing to lose… a rock god… he’d tried to find his old bike. One exactly like the yellow Huffy. He’d even paid some specialist who specialized in such bring-em-back-alive daring-dos to comb the listings on the… internet. Yeah, it had been called the internet back on Earth. Before the Uplift. Before the end of the whole mess. He paid someone to go out and find his past because he knew he was lost and getting more lost with each concert, video, gaggle of doe-eyed groupie girls willing to do anything… needle…

  No joy. The guy hadn’t been able to find the bike.

  The best that could be had was one that was bent and ruined, and some kid had put Vans stickers on it. And even Wacky Packys.

  You know the ones…

  Mashbox.

  Playskull.

  Dr. Pooper.

  Quacker Oats.

  That kind of kid. A loser with no respect for treasures. Someone who probably got a new bike every Christmas.

  His parents hadn’t been like that. No. Not at all. Not never.

  He’d taken care of that first and only bike. Washed it like it was a car. Cared for it like it was his only friend. His Millennium Falcon and his Chewbacca all rolled into one. It was the friend every twelve-year-old scoundrel needed. And now here he was inside his reality on the other side of humanity, within the Pantheon, pedaling it across the quiet and dark streets of Viejo Verde. Not a soul out. The night world was his…

  Bad word. Soul. Bad word. Soul is a forbidden word.

  He ignored it because he was so deep in the candy. Drugs made it easier to disconnect from Maestro. To ignore and override. He pedaled over the freeway and watched the cars heading north and south in the night passing below. Someday it would be good to have a car. Someday. He wondered it then, like he’d wondered it long ago. It was fun to feel nostalgic because it was a kind of eternity if you allowed yourself to completely embrace it.

  Maestro tried to remonstrate with him about this. But the butler’s voice was distant, far away across the canyon of candy.

  The particular dream of all fourteen-year-old boys is to own a car someday. Dreams are fun to remember having, his constantly evaluating and updating mind mentioned. The part that ran all the processes one needed to go on living. When you are much older and have all the things, including the cars, that you want, and none of the dreams anymore, it’s the dreams you miss the most.

  Though it takes a long time to realize they’ve been gone for some time.

  He rode on past sleeping houses where the angelic blue light of TV shone through the windows like sacred lighting in some cathedral’s stained glass. Maybe the last of the Angels game. Or the Dodgers. Vin Scully telling everyone about Farmer John hot dogs in the slow late innings of the night. When it looked like the Dodgers weren’t ever going to win again.

  He passed the big GemCo store that wouldn’t live out the century, and then turned toward home riding up into the heights and the tract where his parents lived. All of it faithfully re-recreated here in the eternal constant of the Pantheon. Hidden and just for him.

  The planned housing community of the future, circa that era of military-industrial complexes.

  Later he would learn that the architectural style was called mid-century modern. Houses like fantastic cubes with big broad windows that looked out on sculpted lawns. Lit by multicolored lights in the night. Red. Blue. Green. Sometimes yellow.

  Malibu lights, they were called.

  That was how it was. Right? It could be the editing. But he was sure this was how it all had really been.

  His parents weren’t home. He knew they weren’t when he lifted up the garage and walked his bike through into its vast darkness. Like the quiet storage hangars deep in the Forbidden Decks, aft of main engineering aboard the colony ship Pantheon. Placing the bike in its proper place leaned up against the wall. His parents had always demanded order. Everything in its place. A place for everything. This was the bike’s place. As it ever should have been. As it ever will be.

  His friends’ homes were often littered with bikes on the front lawn, along the sidewalks, and right up to the tall front doors. Often and every day. All day. And all through the night. Especially if the family had an Atari game system. Less so if it was Intellivision.

  Those early console-possessing houses were visited often by many kids throughout the neighborhood. The wonder of such devices. The endless games.

  As though society, and its military-industrial complex, was preparing them all for the future wars they would fight out among the stars.

  Gamification.

  Games as reality.

  Virtual reality.

  Games to teach, learn, succeed at, win, conquer…

  His family didn’t have any of those things back then. Atari, or Intellivision. There was another… something else. His own mind offered him bonus prizes if he could find the forgotten treasures buried in the desert of his memories. But he couldn’t. They didn’t even have one of the new big VCRs. He closed the garage and walked inside their house. He grabbed a cold hot dog from the fridge and wrapped it in a piece of Wonder Bread.

  Wonder Bread.

  Remember how soft it was? It was like air. Like nothing. Because it was nothing. And it was perfect for cold hot dogs, or bologna, let’s say “baloney” sandwiches.

  Nothing had ever tasted like that for the rest of his life, Bad Old Self commented. Bad Old Self was bad. Bad Old Self liked and missed all the fun old junk and was never really too hip about becoming like everyone along the Path. And even less so about shedding.

  The Path said Bad Old Self needed to die. But he was wily and never managed to. One day Crometheus intended to get around to catching and killing Bad Old Self, but until then, the irascible old rascal was like some tour guide for all the fun that had been lost.

  If Bad Old Self was a cartoon character, then Crometheus was a humanoid catcher’s mitt, soft and broken in, ancient like an artifact. But a hippie. A dope-smoking, beer-swilling hippie who wore Hawaiian shirts and was always up for fun and adventure.

  But who cared… it was Candy Time. And when you were on a candy cruise anything was possible. So says Bad Old Self. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Bad Old Self could comment all he wanted to. When runtime…
>
  Bad word.

  Life. Use life, young Master Crometheus.

  When life resumed, he’d tell Bad Old Self to be quiet for a little while. Chill out. It was Maestro who really wanted to kill Bad Old Self. He wanted to kill Bad Old Self dead, dead, dead. Bad Old Self is Dead. Killing Bad Old Self was how one became a god, many along the Path had often whispered during the ceremonies of Uplift.

  What is the Path?

  Think of a winding ancient stone staircase threading back and forth over a high granite mountain rising up through mist and fog. The path, each carved step, is lit with candles dripping wax. Carved runes are revealed along the face of the wet stone on each stair.

  This is the Path.

  And it isn’t.

  What lies ahead, above, beyond, is mostly obscured and sometimes guessed at. What lies behind is everything you once were. What lies ahead is what you will become.

  As it is written… Death to Old Self is the Path to Uplift. According to TED Talk 92:14.

  But now, here, in the night kitchen of a perfectly mid-century modern home, his oldest of homes, the home of his youth and the guilty pleasure of his Uplifted state… home, the cold hot dog from the Oscar Mayer ten-pack wrapped in a slice of heavenly soft Wonder Bread from the white bag with the multi-colored dots… tastes like heaven. Eternity to come once he has created it.

  Bad Old Self was right. Nothing in his life has ever tasted this good, and he’d been to all the best places to eat back on Earth as it fell. The French Laundry. The Go-Go Room in New Tokyo for forty-two-ounce Kobe steaks smothered in duck-fat mushrooms accompanied by a Sapporo Lunar Pale. The coldest of beers brewed in low-Earth orbit. Hypnotically satisfying. Fried oysters and beef tartare at Hatchet Hall in Venice after the Oscars. A chorizo-and-clams omelet in Mallorca when the Pantheon first indicated he was Uplift material. At dawn after an all-night garden party and ceremony in the deep of it all. A rock god becomes a real god. If… if he follows the candles up along the way of the Path, then yes, he does. Seeking the next step up through the swirling mist that is space-time. Reality. Or at least the most brutal reality of all.

  Bad Old Self whispered in his wheezy low I’m-super-high aside voice. What about that burger along the road during the summer tour for the Bad Idol album, said diabolically fun Bad Old Self. Remember that one, kiddo?

  He tried to, and the memory hurt because…

  He thought of another. Another nostalgia that would be the anchor for all his eternities.

  The Tommy’s double chili cheeseburger with little yellow peppers while standing in the parking lot the night he first played the Whiskey in LA and the world heard Rebel Child.

  No. Not that one. Though that one was good, admitted Bad Old Self. If he had to picture Bad Old Self as a real person, he pictured a bearded old man. Like an Amish farmer who’d once been a gunrunner and desert rat and wandering madman saying truths no one wanted to hear because of all the fun they were convinced they were having. Bad Old Self was a devil disappearing into the plain life because it was just as good a place as any to hide out for a while. Wise and a little dangerous with a taste for trouble and liquor that never quite got eradicated by true religion.

  Or, continued Bad Old Self, warming up to this particular temptation, remember dinner at Ma Maison Redux with Sir Quentin Tarantino? Candy off a supermodel’s slender neck while they served the bouillabaisse and the old director told you about the role that was going to get you your first Oscar.

  No. None of that. The life of actor after rock god, a natural pivot as ever it was…

  No. Nothing would ever taste as good as that cold hot dog standing in front of an open refrigerator late in the night in the home you never should have left.

  That painful memory tried to surface one more time. It was strong. Like some old white whale that wasn’t going to die with just a harpoon and would never be satisfied with Ahab’s one leg.

  The one with Holly Wood. Remember…

  He drank from the milk carton standing directly in the light of the refrigerator in the house he never should have left.

  Remember that one halfway between Reno and Rome. Heaven and Hell.

  He saw her. Saw her smile. And the kaleidoscope eyes. Cheerleader and homecoming queen his freshman year.

  He sat down on the low-backed couch made of a blue, rough, yet comforting fabric. Silver stitching like tiny stars shifting into hyperspace woven throughout its material. As though the textile were a prophecy of all the things to come. The Exodus from Earth and the Big Uplift. As though his parents’ selection of hip furniture all those hundreds of years ago, or rather the decorator they’d hired, had somehow known where he was headed all along. Hundreds and even a thousand years later, tumbling out into the darkness between the stars. Following the Path to become what he would one day be.

  The channel-changer was where it was supposed to be. Order. As it always was. On the low coffee table shaped like a painter’s palette. Next to what his mother called the gossip seat. Which was really just another perfectly matched yet smaller couch with a slanted back and a side reading table with artfully placed popular magazines.

  He didn’t turn on any of the lights. He liked the blue light of the TV and how it mixed with the Malibu lights out in the back yard.

  Don’t let anyone tell you differently, he told himself as he flicked through the channels. That’s what space is like when the main drive fails and you drift for three years of madness and infighting between the decks. When those who do not agree must be cleansed from engineering and bio-systems maintenance in order for the right truth to reign supreme in those lower decks.

  Twenty-five achievement points, whispered Maestro, because he had recited the Currently Accepted History of those times.

  When the fighting is at its most savage.

  The color of space coming in through the once-optimistic outer viewing decks is just like that. Blue like the TV in the night, and red like the splattered and spattered blood of the cleansing work that had to be done in engineering and the Forbidden Decks.

  His parents were gone just as they always were. Doing business in restaurants sometimes until well after midnight. Vin Scully was wrapping up the game on the television. Good effort by Lopes, Cey, and Garvey. But no win tonight.

  Then… “Farmer John hot dogs!” and a commercial. Cal Worthington, that old car dealer who wrestled lions and tigers late at night to sell cars, came on. He promised everything. In a friendly way. Later he’d have one of the biggest divorce settlements in the state of California. Bigger than Johnny Carson if you can imagine that then.

  Not so hard now.

  The biggest in fact until his own divorce from the actress. For a time, his had been the biggest in the state of California. And a few other states to boot. But all that was way in the future from this pleasant nostalgia of now. Way after Rebel Child went multiplatinum. Way after three more albums that all but secured him a place in rock god history, Paris Fashion Week, and every awards show forever.

  One of his old movies was on.

  The reboot of Night of the Living Dead.

  He watched himself and the other survivors fighting to survive inside the old farmhouse as the living dead closed in. Looking back on it now he thought the special effects weren’t so bad. He’d often remembered them being hokier. Cheesier. He forgot about the shoot and how high he and the lead actress were. They hooked up all throughout the shoot, getting weirder and weirder each time. He a rock god making his first film. She a young ingénue who’d go on to marry some Chinese autocrat as the Far East rose to power. When the two of them weren’t busy with sex and drugs, she gave him a few acting tips. She’d trained. He was just a natural. She told him that over and over again. After the shoot in Louisiana they just parted ways without any explanation or goodbye. Her off to make the movie that would make her famous. A period piece about some English queen who was sec
retly gay according to how the script wanted it to be. Him to an action flick with a big-budget star.

  Their truths.

  Their becomings of who they would be.

  The voice of Maestro whispered… but again he was so high on Bliss-o-Narc, or whatever it was called, he didn’t need to answer the front door. Didn’t need to see what Maestro wanted now. Or maybe that was just in the movie when he and the actress were banging on the front door to the farmhouse, desperate to be let in because the zombies were about to eat them, in the reboot.

  Morgan Freeman…

  Morgan Freeman’s avatar had played the guy who let them in. He turned into a zombie by the end of the film. The actress he was having sex with in his trailer between takes, because they were both so high on candy, was actually Morgan Freeman’s love interest in the movie though they never get together on-screen and the age difference was so colossal.

  It was implied. For reasons.

  He forgot all about that and just enjoyed the movie he’d once made when he was young. Forgot that he was even in it. They’d let him keep his spiky blond hair. They even let him use his trademark sneer when delivering his lines. They were just happy to have a rock star in the picture because it guaranteed X amount for gross.

  He was happy because it was acting.

  He’d only done that in videos up until that point then. All of which had been post-apocalyptic in theme.

  Then came his death scene in the reboot and he watched himself get blown up trying to get gas with the jailbaity farmer’s daughter who’d been willing to try and make a break for it with him. The rebel biker who’d just wandered into zombie town and the farmer’s daughter. Subtext… they weren’t just fleeing the zombies. They were fleeing the farm. Or at least she was. He was, his character, then, was just fleeing. Fleeing was his way of life. That was the secret the actress had given him. She said every character needed a secret. And fleeing something horrible was his.