Goodnight Horses – Chapter Two
Prologue
I am far away now, farther than I have ever been before, farther than it was ever in my imagination to understand before. I am ready to go home now, but if I fold myself there right away it will be too soon. The journey will be very long, longer than my journey out was, but the time won’t pass the way it used to, it will pass how I decide and how I control. First I have to spend some time becoming ready; the way I think and understand is not conducive to constructing this record of events, so it is quite some time before I can prepare my language centres sufficiently to become capable of basic written forms again. I couple this with re-constructing my memory centres to form and store memories in a human way again, to get that sense of feeling back that comes from unconsciously mixing memory, emotion and perceived reality. Moving memories down from one place to another, so they flow like the stuff that comes through from above; all mirror-liquid. I never knew this before. It is nice to find that learning and experience are never-ending, no matter how long I have been here, or will be.
I begin to remember but it’s as if it’s something I have never done before. Language comes down from the same place as the memories, and it seems linked to it in some way. To the memories I want to access anyway. Chunks of it appear, and I am reminded of downloading things from the internet. “Try to transfer full chunks to all uploads”. Maybe I’m uploading and not downloading. Maybe I’m creating and not remembering. I remember (I think) reading some article saying that memories moved around, like files on a computer, but each time they moved they are re-configured, becoming more fictional every time a move was made. So either way…uploading or downloading…I’m probably getting less and more than the truth.
Some images and feelings come through. Staring at a blank television screen whilst a girl cries on the other end of the phone. She expects anger and resentment from me; what she gets is sadness and regret, and some understanding. Faced with this she does not know how to react. Another girl is there, and some shouting in the rain, forced emotion, lying to myself to make myself happy. Not the first time and not the last. Something much earlier. Outside, with a big, big grey sky, harsh wind but no rain. Piling sticks together to make a fire, but I am only six and the sticks are at the bottom of the path leading to my parent’s house, and no fire will come from them. But it feels like something much bigger, like I am remembering, at the time, something that might have happened to someone else or might happen later in my life.
I’m artificial now, solid all the way through. I don’t feel pain, or temperature, or emotion. I can access memories and replicate the sensations though, but in a way that makes it more like watching a good movie. Like crying at the end of “Beaches” when Barbara Hershey dies, or really getting into a book but ten minutes after you have finished it laughing out loud at something funny on a television advert. That’s it. I remember television now. This is how I must treat the memories and sensations. I am a television receiver, and programmes from a distant galaxy have just reached me. I must spend some time understanding the culture and language, but I am too separate from it to ever fully comprehend and know it. Sensing that this should be a sad thing, I think of the end of an episode of “The Littlest Hobo” and use that as a template for reconstructing some feeling of loss.
I haven’t been home in a long, long time, and all that I knew when I was last there will be gone by now, or so I expect. It has been long enough that home will probably be a dead place, and whilst I journey home it will become deader still, the atmosphere burning away, the dust and earth searing away into space where it came from originally. It will be a long drawn out process, and I am not especially bothered to be there for all of it. Instead I will take a long slow journey, re-acquainting myself as much as I can with how I used to be all that long, long time ago.
I spend the first year re-reading every single book I ever read. There is a very dull period in my late teens which I identify as a college course in English Literature. I find that Shakespeare is as dull now as he ever was, and it is ironic that his works are solely catalogued and remembered in my mind now. On reviewing Jane Austen’s “Emma” I am very tempted to create time travel, so that I can prevent her birth, but this would cause more delay than I would be happy with. The subsequent two years are taken up with watching every film I have ever seen, and I am pleasantly surprised with the range and quality. Ten years is the amount of time required to go through all the television broadcasts, and seven years remembering all the tastes of food. Remembering different combinations of food becomes a much longer process than I had ever imagined. Smells take up six months. I spend fifteen years going through all my sexual experiences, reviewing and relishing again and again. This long lost part of me is unexpectedly exhilarating and uplifting, and for the first time in a long time I start to perceive emotion as something I am really feeling, instead of reconstituting. The sex leads to a period of fifty something years going over and over the intimate details of every relationship I ever had with a woman. It isn’t that there is so much to review and experience, it is that this seems uniquely difficult to get past, and uniquely intricate. There are so many different ways of seeing them all, so many variations and theories about why such little actions happened and their significance. Because they are all gone now, I can never know the ‘truth’ of these situations, or their meanings. I feel amazement again for the first time in millennia, and it is the amazement at being faced with emotions that seem to become larger then yourself, and eat up everything in your existence until you can see and feel nothing else.
Overpowering love and lust combine with overpowering despair and need, and sometime late into the fifty-odd years I have taken so far, my newly re-formed mind snaps, with a horrible dry crack that feels like it should be bones breaking deep inside a body, then grinding about tearing at nerve and flesh and veins, causing deep, irreparable damage. This damage will continue to spread, haemorrhaging towards the surface in a gangrenous decay. Suddenly I am experiencing something I have not done since my early twenties; one of the panic attacks that began when I was five. My mind is abstractly fixed on some twisted, unknowable dream imagery, not making sense, and unable to free itself. When I was five the wallpaper would move and twist and make faces like garish gasmasks in sickly browny-yellow 1970s colours. The doorknob to my bedroom would become larger than everything else, whilst remaining exactly where it was in relation to everything else. These sensations are no easier to deal with now than they first were, and the immense gap in time between my first ever experience and this one slaps closed my life in a single colossal hand-clap that swats me across space – time. I’m suddenly a five year old child, scared and angry in a body that is artificial and capable of anything that my will can comprehend.
Over the next few thousand years I grow. I spin, slowly at first, gathering matter as I go, mainly dust and ice particles, coating myself in them, growing like a snowball. After fifteen thousand years I’m four million miles across and some… not nearly enough to do the kind of damage my childish rage is thinking of… so I carry on, mindless, shut down whilst I spin on through naked space. Seventy thousand years later I am three hundred million miles across, each arm outstretched to make the same distance, and I push my spin down sending myself whirling into a crowded solar system. I smash into its outer reaches at an angle to the plane of its planets, completely obliterating the 12th outer planet into ash and dust, causing the 11th one in, a Gas Giant 250 million miles across, to burst, setting off a chain reaction of nuclear fission that brilliantly ignites it into a mini-sun even as it loses gravitational cohesion and breaks off massive shards of burning mass into the inner orbits of the central planets. If I could be heard my scream alone would shatter the rest of the fragile rocks orbiting the star about to lose its system. I take ten years to slowly fall towards the star, revolving through a hell of burst elements, burning nuclear fires trailing with me, the occasional spectacular explosion of planet core, some of them dead and cold rock, some molten and full of fiery life. At the end I dive gracefully into the star at the centre of this ruined solar system, not destroying it, as it is bigger than I am by far, but bursting through it with enough force to take away material that will cut its lifespan in half. Shedding my extra mass until I am back down to normal size, I re-run the last ten year period as video signal in my head, and as I broadcast out to anyone who will and can pick it up. A million years in the future some alien life form will use it speeded up to 6 minutes length as the video for his new rock band’s first single. It wins an award.
My tantrum over, I lapse into a calm trance-like state, and access my music collection, which was conveniently stored as part of my artificial form when I received it. It should be jarring to hear music after so long not hearing it, but after my long transition back to something resembling the form and psyche I used to possess, it just seems familiar and joyous instead. I play all the songs I have ever heard in my life on random. Funnily enough I discover that the most appropriate track to accompany propelling your body through space is “All Out Of Love” by Air Supply. After the three hundredth play it becomes rather abstract and internal. I have another three hundred thousand years to go before I reach home, so I leave the music playing, and learn the true meaning of randomness when Tom Jones’s recording of “She’s A Lady” plays constantly for years 275,000 through 283,000. After this there is a brief change to Prokofiev’s “Love For Three Oranges”, then to my surprise Tom Jones gives one more rendition before disappearing entirely until year 299,345.
I arrive back home to find the Sun expanding into a Red Giant. As its supply of hydrogen runs out, its core collapses, sending its temperature soaring until helium fuses into carbon, and its outer layer flares out in all direction, like a droplet of oil in water, a beautiful red blooming that devours Mercury and Venus, but stops just short of Earth. I can’t tell at this point if Earth has any life on it, but as the sun contracts back slightly, it pulls away the remaining atmosphere, and then, exquisitely, the crust of the earth begins to lift off out into space. I am reminded of the Zapruder film of John F Kennedy’s assassination as the molten red core of Earth explodes out towards the dying sun. What did Jackie shout? Was it something like “Oh My God! His brains are on my skirt!”?
The Earth’s brains are blown way out into space, slowing to a lava-lamp quality, dissolving in the outer layers of the bloody red sun. I wave towards the remains and attempt a smile.
I hang around for a while… eventually the sun runs out of helium, and must fuse its carbon into heavier elements… oxygen… nitrogen. Unfortunately, Sol was never big enough a star to keep doing that… not enough mass, not enough fuel… and it collapses but stops, burning the hottest it ever will, but now as a white dwarf, eating itself up. The remaining bits of Earth have formed a thin, dusty halo far away from the natural halo the White Dwarf has, and further out Mars has turned grey and black. The solar system feels like a pub car park on an October morning, empty of life, energy and point. There is nothing here to keep me now. Silently, into the vacuum, I say:
“Goodnight Horses.”
No-one hears me.
