A Shrouded World | Book 8 | Asgard Read online

  Unlike a fight that has a referee and a corner from which to throw in the towel, in this one, whoever got up first lived—the other, not so much. I tried to roll over and get up, but the screaming from the creator had this time ruptured both my eardrums and my equilibrium was shot. I was pondering just laying there passively until it was all over, when I felt the tug of my improvised leg satchel. I berated myself for taking so long to think upon it. The creator was wriggling, trying to get his tentacles under him to get back up. I was ripping at my boxers which, all of a sudden, felt like they were made from indestructible heavy burlap. Undoing the knot was out of the question as I didn’t have the dexterity.

  “Come on!” I was panicking. Now that I’d found a way out, I was going to be too damned slow in employing it. I was tugging, but my hands felt like they were wearing those accursed boxing gloves and kept slipping off. It was like trying to open a jar of pickles with a broken hand. The creator’s screams had died down, either that or the blood in my ears prevented the sound from getting through. I was tugging wildly, sometimes at my leg, other times at the bag. The creator was halfway up and I’d yet to make even the slightest bit of progress. I was losing, plain and simple. It was going to be close, so I did the only thing I could: I flexed my left hand and swung out. The hit wasn’t much more than the light whack to the back of your kid’s head as they do something uncalled for in public, more of an attention grabber and a way to let them know you’ve seen it, rather than anything to cause them any discomfort beyond embarrassment. By the creator’s reaction you would have thought I’d used a sledgehammer on its genitalia. Now that was a thought I could get behind. If I could get out of this predicament, and, assuming it had the aforementioned gear, my next move was to find the biggest fucking hammer I could. The screams, which had been tapering off, renewed with a vigor; I was glad you could only rip eardrums so far.

  It made sure to roll away, but even the contact with the floor was causing it a great deal of pain, and I took no small measure of satisfaction in that fact. My heart labored, using energy I was ill-prepared to replace. I had bought myself some time, but it wasn’t unlimited, and if the blackness encroaching on the peripheral of my vision was any indication, my internal clock was ticking even louder than his. I was working feverishly at the stapler satchel and was finally able to curl my fingers enough to grab it properly. I pulled up and toward my head; all I seemed to be succeeding at was giving myself a world-class wedgie.

  “You have got to be kidding,” I managed to say. I kept pulling. The discomfort increased, but I was rewarded with the sound of a tear. It wasn’t more than a stitch or two, but it was progress all the same. I didn’t even bother trying to locate the creator; I couldn’t get to him in this state, and if he got up first I’m sure he’d let me know about it. I pulled up again. This time, in addition to seeing if I could receive a cloth enema, I also smashed my nuts. All of that still paled to everything else wrong with me, and I got the much-wanted rip I was looking for. The stapler fell out by my side. I was reaching down for it when I felt the first brush tip of a tentacle. He was up, and revenge was going to be the first dish served.

  The creator’s appendage wrapped around my arm; a searing heat began to melt and char the flesh. If my free hand hadn’t already been on the stapler, I would have completely forgotten about it. Instinctively, I pulled my hand free from my pants; my intention had been to pry the branding iron off of me. What I ended up doing was putting a trio of staples into the offending tentacle instead. If it cried out, the sound was drowned out by my own screams and the sizzling of my skin. That was it. I was spent. I lay there for seconds that stretched to long minutes before I stirred. The process was excruciatingly slow, and the whole while I figured at any moment to be interrupted by the rupturing of my spleen, or something equally horrific, as the creator tore into me. I turned over and pushed up. Now I was on my hands and knees, my head hanging low. My burnt arm hurt so bad, putting any pressure on it was excruciating. Eventually, I swiveled my head enough to see the crumpled-up form of the creator on the far side of the room, huddled up against the wall. He looked somewhat like a threatened octopus does when they retreat into a crevasse, making himself as small as possible by pulling every bit of his body in tight.

  If the light he produced was any indication, he was still very much alive. Where I had struck his head was that brilliant purple color, and the stapled tentacle matched perfectly, like he was accessorizing. I stood, fought through the vertigo, and lurched forward, the stapler extended out in front of me. His bowed head picked up, and those pin pricks of light stabbed me with their sight. Weakly, it put up its uninjured tentacle to ward me off. I pulled the trigger until my finger could no longer make the motion. His exposed side looked like it was wearing a shirt of chain mail cobbled together by someone with very limited skills. I’d even missed with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of staples; that I’d not caught a ricochet or several was a mystery I’d leave to philosophers of another age.

  The light had ceased shining from the creator long before I’d called it quits. I stumbled from the room still out of it; I even thought about heading back to my room as if this were just a normal day in the routine I’d been forced into. It was that hovering tray with its meager supplies that pulled me away. I went and ate and drank quickly, the small amount enough to take the tiniest edge off my pain and discomfort. What I needed now was an abundance of rest. I got down onto the floor and did just that.

  3

  Mike Journal Entry 3

  “What the absolute fuck!” I was still on the floor looking straight up. My eyes were open; I even waved my hands in front of my face to be sure. I was seeing images, hundreds, thousands, streaming past, information in terabytes flowed along this river of knowledge. Many years ago I had taken enough LSD that when I tried to lie down later that night, I had waking dreams, like a movie was playing out, in front of only my eyes. It was not something I’d enjoyed back then, and I was having the same negative response now. I stopped thinking about what was happening, and the material pushed to the side; now it was like I was driving down a roadway and there were unending rows of bushes lining the highway.

  I sat up, wondering if the electrical shock from the creator had done some irreversible damage. I panicked, wondering if I had merely wounded him and even now he was getting ready to snap my bones and burn them like kindling. I raced to the area that was the creator’s version of a bathroom. His body was still huddled in the corner. It seemed much smaller now that power no longer pulsed through him.

  “Now what?” I asked. I didn’t know if it was married and I should be expecting his blushing bride home soon, or it was Thursday, and his poker playing buddies would be over expecting beer. I had to get rid of the body, but then what? An untended alien and a missing creator—that was a situation that was not going to end well for me. I settled on cutting it up into pieces and shoving it down the drain; sounded like a very satisfactory solution to me.

  “But first, I’m starving. Where does this thing keep its fridge?” And again, the stream of consciousness network flooded my senses. I saw images of what, I guess, was food, recipes for the food, nutritional information…I mean, if I’d wanted to, I could have drilled down to the molecular structure. It was dawning on me what was happening. This was the creator’s version of the internet. I was immersed within it.

  “Holy shit,” I said, knowing that now all of their knowledge was mine. Something had happened to the cap, to me, when my creator had zapped me into a new zip code. I could tell without even doing a search that the vastness of this realm was beyond anything I’d ever encountered. I had more information at the tips of my neurons than, arguably, any human in history, and the first thing I did was look for creator porn. Oh, and they had it and yeah, I really wished I hadn’t done that. There were some things one can do with a tentacle that’s better left to the imagination.

  “Hunger…back to the hunger thing!” I quickly shut down the porn avenue of data; the food w
as almost worse. They showed a wide variety of the aliens I had previously been marching with and working alongside prepared in a variety of ways. Wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the information anyway. Not like I could answer the door when the Grub Hub driver showed up. The pimply-faced creator driver would wonder where my master was. Then I hit paydirt. The creators didn’t have food delivery in the normal sense—it was like the Jetsons Foodarackacycle; when they wanted something they just asked. This was slightly more complicated in that I had to find the individual ingredients I wanted, and, as near as I could tell, they didn’t have cheeseburgers, and if they did, there was no telling what the meat was.

  I searched through an index of thousands of food sources, finally found something that looked a bit like a cow mixed with a porcupine. It had four legs, so that was a plus. The spiky spines across the length of its back made me wonder if it was in some way poisonous to my species. I could get more of that fucking fruit, but I already knew my body did not like that. This was like picking random words out of a foreign language book and hoping that the person you were talking to wasn’t deeply insulted. I ordered the food and the largest container of water I could find. Now I had to find where this modern miracle was stationed. There was a slight whirring sound, off in another room, followed by a short, three note ringtone. Not unlike some of the earlier cell phones, or a microwave.

  I went to the next room, and there, hovering on a tray, was a steaming pile of something. My eyes said “shit,” my nose said “ambrosia.” As I got closer I could see the texture of the product. My mouth watered, even if it did look like something a pig with gastrointestinal distress had left behind in a rush to get to a private part of the pen to relieve the rest of himself. Even had some golden nuggets of what looked like corn embedded in it.

  “Fuck!” I yelled. My stomach twisted as it received the olfactory sensations. I grabbed the pitcher of water, drinking it so fast that a fair portion sloshed over my mouth, chin, and shirt. I was hoping that I had taken the worst of the hunger bite out; I was sadly mistaken. My stomach was in full-on meat mode, and when I tried to trick it with water it got angry, angry enough that it propelled most of what I’d taken in back out.

  “Fine! Have it your way, you asshole,” I told my protesting organ. “When you start rupturing due to whatever this is, it’ll all be on you.” It actually wasn’t terrible. Looked like shit, tasted like celery, which, mostly doesn’t have flavor except for a hint of dirt. Celery is on my “do not eat” list, even slathered in peanut butter it still tastes like the ground it was pulled from, like, no matter how much you wash it, you’re just consuming wet dirt, so, mud. But, okay, it could have been worse. I finished the pile and sat patiently, waiting for the cramps and vomiting that would lead me to believe I had poisoned myself. After ten minutes, I only got some gurgling from my stomach saying it could use some more dirt. I ordered up another pile and watched as the tray began to form the food, like a high-speed, three-dimensional food printer. It was weird.

  Oh how I wished I could dial up Chipotle, or Red Robin, Texas Roadhouse…a couple dozen other places. I ordered the same thing because, as of yet, I had not suffered any ill effects like violent anal leakage, which can be highly embarrassing. I was somewhat full, a feeling I hadn’t experienced in quite some time. I wanted to lie down, to let my body do what it does best. I walked around the entirety of the apartment: no couch, no bed, not even a chair. It was looking like beings that floated didn’t have much need for something to take the weight off their aching joints.

  “The floor it is.” There was a level of concern about being discovered, but normal rest was the driving factor right now. The floor was uncomfortable, as floors tend to be, especially without a pillow or blanket. Still slept like a baby. I went and checked on the creator; he was still dead, so that was good. There was a clear liquid trailing away from him and toward the drain. He was decomposing; I wasn’t sure if I should speed the process along or let it be. Then I remembered that I had all the information I needed at my disposal. Again, it was an avenue I wished I hadn’t plundered. Before I narrowed it down to the specifics I needed, I must have seen hundreds of various creatures in varying states of decay. It was as unpleasant as it sounds.

  If left alone, I learned that it would be roughly two weeks until it wasn’t much more than a stain on the floor. Time was a difficult concept for me to grasp—their version of it, I mean. The errant bolt of juice from the creator had done something; the fact that I could see and understand their vast knowledge base was incredible, but the manmade construct of time I was used to was much different from the creator’s construct. And as of yet I hadn’t discovered the Rosetta stone to unlock the translation. I went back into the bathroom area, wishing I had some sort of hazmat suit or even just a pair of latex gloves.

  “Fantastic,” I said as I grabbed the side of it. I ripped a piece off roughly the size of a pillow. It was spongy, like a rubber-cardboard hybrid. It wasn’t as easy as tearing up a sheet of paper. but it was easier than I’d been expecting. In life, the creator had appeared translucent, more a figure of energy and light than a flesh and blood creature; it turned out he was a fair portion of both. Maybe in a few more millennia they would have achieved the transcendence they were headed toward, but right now, it was damn disgusting as innards fell free as I tore through its core. They were a surprisingly fragile creature, dainty even, for something that was actively destroying the known universe. If not for that energy field, I was under the impression a snowball could take them down. I was half up to my shins in debris, coated in a pinkish goo by the time I’d torn it into enough pieces that all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put Humpty back together again. The only part of it I couldn’t touch were those tentacles, The memories of the pain they inflicted were part of it, but somehow they were slimier to the touch than the rest of this whole distasteful affair, and anyway, I figured they would be small enough to fit down the drain.

  When it was over, I ordered up a few pitchers of water, stripped down, and washed as much of the gunk off as I could. Would have killed another creator for a bar of soap. I did a quick search, but if they had anything like our cleaning bricks, it was something more for degreasing electrical parts. I didn’t think that would do any wonders for my skin pH. I was fairly clean, though my clothes were absolutely disgusting. Got a few more pitchers and dunked them in and swirled around. I laid them out on the floor, again, there wasn’t anything to drape them over. I was naked but far from afraid. Anxious, perhaps, to a degree. With hunger beginning to poke its head around again, but not outright starvation, I took my time, really trying to understand the food offered.

  Every ingredient I looked at I wondered at the toxicity to myself. I’d once spent a fair amount of time looking at foods that were innocuous to people but that were harmful to dogs. How could I even possibly begin to know if what I was ordering off of this alien menu was like a dog getting a heaping bowl of grape sherbet? I was cautious and tried to stay close to what I’d already gotten, but since I wasn’t starving, the steaming pile didn’t sound quite as appetizing now. Roughly an hour later I had something that looked sorta kind of like mac and cheese, if you tilted your head and squinted your eyes and made sure there was some water trapped between your eyelashes. Full on, it looked more like the very orange brain of a small monkey. If it had been brain colored, I would have scrapped the pile and started over.

  “A spoon would be nice,” I said as I dunked my fingers into it. It didn’t make that squishy noise one associates with cheesy goodness, but, in this case, I was thankful. The taste wasn’t what I would call exquisite, but it was higher up the chain than the other. I ate a small amount, waiting for any repercussions. When none materialized, a half hour later I ordered another, but only because the first one had gotten cold and had congealed, and not in a good way, if there is such a thing. Couldn’t find a microwave to save my life, though those three lit up jars I’d been beaten over looked like they could cook something. Af
ter I ate I decided to do some searching for whatever those were. Wanted to make sure they weren’t leaking lethal doses of radiation, or maybe they were tasty. Either way it gave me something to do on this lazy Sunday afternoon as I lounged around naked.

  I had to dive deep into the internet, to the point I felt as if I’d digitized myself and become part of the virtual world. It wasn’t quite like I had an avatar copy of myself running past store fronts looking for knowledge, but it was close. It was like my mind had grown tendrils and was melding with the material, an enlightenment, almost. At one point, I began to get worried and started to withdraw. Ever have sleep paralysis? You feel that you’re awake, but you can’t move a muscle? It is not a comfortable sensation as you silently scream at your partner, mere inches away, to help you, to please, oh God, just help! It was like that. There was a resistance to my backing away, like I’d dunked my head into a particularly nasty hole filled with quicksand and the more I struggled, the harder it became to move. Finally there was a snap in my mind like I pulled my brain too far, and it reeled back in, but I was out, at least, and sitting, dazed, on the floor.