Grimly I faced the immense, sphere-shaped, steel sealed doorway of the multi-dimensional cyberspace portal, wondering what joker put the sign on it: "Abandon all hope to all ye who enter here."
"I hate Mondays," I grunted, shrugging my shoulders to make the pack more comfortable. The sign wasn't exactly false advertising; half a hundred humans, cyborgs, and androids had been swallowed up in the portal's gullet thus far, never to be seen again. Around me dozens of white-coat-wearing lab technicians and armed, green-garbed soldiers waited silently, the atmosphere solemn as a funeral gathering — which, I reflected, perhaps it was, myself being the guest of honor.
Within the multi-dimensional portal, boundaries were limitless and the holograms gained all the molecular cohesion of conventional matter, making deadly foes and traps. The genius designer Sharon Shapiro had countless thousands of animate and inanimate objects programmed, and she could conjure up any and all instantly like a sorceress ordering them to do whatever she wished. She was like an omnipotent cyberspace sorceress in there, using her mind band of control, and since she was smart enough to make the power source an internal fusion generator, power couldn't be shut off and she couldn't be pried out. To double her bargaining chips, the brilliant lady held Australia hostage under a dozen space lasers at her disposal controlled by a modified component with her in the portal. Her demands that a starship transport manned by her own droids carry her safely away in the portal were to be met within an hour or she'd vaporize Australia. I'd been called in to bat clean-up.
Don't get the idea I'm superior to half a hundred of the finest the Earth Interstellar Alliance Special Forces puts out, because I'm not. In my twenty-five years I’ve seen a lot of combat action and strange things on a lot of different worlds, moons, ships and space while engaged in warfare on scores of worlds, but I should have died repeatedly when wounded.
What kept me alive is that I’m not fully human. No doctors or scientists can even identify the alien DNA within me. But whatever alien species is inside me, the genetics make me much stronger, faster, agile, and resistant to illness with phenomenally fast healing abilities when injured, compared to most humanoid species.
. Nowadays soldiers are genetically engineered in test tubes and born of artificial wombs — super soldiers far faster, stronger, and smarter than average humans — and the specialties of cyborgs and androids is truly impressive. I was being called in because Sharon and I had been lovers, and Colonel Conti figured if anyone could sweet talk her, it would be me. I wasn't so sure; we hadn't parted on the best of terms.
"Open says me," I said in grim humor, and the door slid open. I released a softball-size, sphere-shaped probe into the air and followed its lead through the smoky veil. Behind me the doors slammed shut with an ominous boom of doom.
"Honey, I'm home," I hollered, knowing full well she could already somehow see me. "Can we talk?"
The probe gave me no warning of the Ninja-garbed hologram that flipped out of the fog and flattened me with a front hook kick. I twirled like a top thudding on steel, but instantly flipped back to my feet in a front handspring. My attacker was gone and I now stood in a moonlit jungle.
"Sucker puncher," I sighed, wiping the blood from my lip. Sharon obviously thought to degrade me a bit.
I was still hoping to reason with her. I quickly and quietly crept through the foliage, weaving through clinging brush with hardly a whisper to betray my passing, the night illuminated to me through night goggles. The mini-mike in my ear plugged into the probe warned me of nine huge feline forms approaching, and I vaulted into a treetop perch to wait and watch.
What emerged from the brush in a low rustle made my heart leap up into my mouth, startling the stuffing out of me: nine jet-black panthers the size of small horses with saber-like fangs. I knew in a moment they'd spring high into the tree, tearing me down to fall under their forms, rent asunder and feasted on. I spoiled their plans with a gas grenade that fell in their midst, detonating in a hissing pop, and the yellowish gas enveloping the pride. Gas mask on, I watched them drop in slumber. I was thankful the solidified holograms responded as normal animals would. But just to be on the safe side, I padded warily around the beasts, blaster pistol in hand.
Following the probe, I covered another hundred meters through the jungle before coming in sight of a genuine European-style castle surrounded by a low power force field consisting of electromagnetic and hypersonic waves heterodyned to ultra-high amplitude and surveillance cameras, complete with infra-red seeking stun tubes rotated on poles. Smiling, I zapped the nearest camera/stun tube system with my disrupter device that shut the system's power down, and ran up to the force field using a high-powered disrupter beam to rip through the earth under the field, allowing me to shimmy under the obstruction. Dirty but determined, I ran through the castle gardens to the base of the looming main tower.
An electrical fence barring my way took only a second to chop through with my laser blade that hummed to life in my hand. But the distraction nearly ended my life as one of the huge panthers pounced at my back. The soft sounds of movement alerted me instead of the probe, and I whirled in time to see the dark demon descending upon me outlined against the stars, his snarling, fang-filled visage a terrifying apparition. Without hesitation or conscious thought, my yard-long, shimmering scarlet plasma torch cut the air in a short swoop, splitting the creature's skull. The hurtling body still slammed into me, taking my breath away before pinning me under its weight. Struggling, I freed myself of the crimson dripping carcass, trembling from head to toe.
"Sharon, you almost killed me!" I cursed in rage. But I kept my cool.
I attached my graviton-particle-charged tractor beam disks to each hand and began my climb up the castle's side like a fly on a wall. It was a bit unnerving, but I knew I was on the right track and reasoned Sharon may have been playing rough, testing me, but if she'd really wanted to kill me, I'd be dead by now.
As I hoisted myself over the tower's rim and came to solid footing, a shadowy form lunged out of the night. I drew my blaster, pegging the person with a pair of plasma beams that shrieked in the silence, shearing the soldier's skull apart in a scarlet spray.
Unfazed, the headless figure moved phenomenally fast, kicking my pistol away and drawing its own, which I deflected with a karate chop. Even as its pistol was clattering on the concrete, I was seized in a bear hug, which I accepted, sinking my knife deep in its belly. The superhumanly strong, grisly zombie squeezed me tight, ignoring my head-butt into its face and knee to the nuts. I felt myself wheezing, on the verge of a broken back, and only by surging forward, tripping the thing, did I break free, rolling to my feet on the other side of it. A flash of quicksilver flared to life in its hand as it sprang at me, the cold steel poised for a thrust that never fell. My shuffle thrust side kick contained enormous power, thudding into the supernatural soldier's chest, the impact carrying him over the roof's edge out into the night. The meaty thump some moments later was reassuring.
I moved on. A door led down into the castle and I took it, moving down the stairs and stepping out into a modern-day atrium restaurant. Humans dined on fine cuisine all around me, seated at oak wood tables, swilling champagne while surrounded by lush floral greenery; an artificial stream flowed through the room.
Sharon stood in the center of the room, clad all in skin-hugging black that did justice to her busty-bosomed, waspish-waisted, long-legged figure. Her sky-blue eyes were afire with power, the silver crown upon her long golden mane resembling a queen's. A smile of mockery crossed her ripe, ruby-red lips and the exquisite face turned nasty right before she disappeared and two business suit-wearing men with long, slicked-back pony tails sprang up, plucking out pistols from shoulder holsters. My low-slung blaster slipped into my hand, smooth as silk, shrieking like a titan's nails across a chalkboard, a trio of blazing beams blurting out the barrel to torch and tear through the torsos of the men, hurling them helter-skelter over the table top before either could fire. A third business suit produced a double barrel incinerator from under his coat as I fell prone pulling my trigger, puncturing his pectoral with plasma to roast his ribs and liquefy his left lung.
My instinct to fall flat was lucky, for the air above me was raked by a row of radiant rays that would have fanned and fried my form had I stayed standing. Spotting the muzzle fire behind flowery foliage, I sent several shots sizzling through the greenery, one of which slid smoking through the sniper's skull like a hot knife through butter. He fell into view, tangled in vines.
I rolled to a new position using the tables for cover, ignoring the chaos ensuing among the screaming, scrambling hologram people. The immense black spider that scuttled up behind me received a barrage of beams right in the snoot, which had no effect on its posterior, and that's where the web flew from, pinning me firmly to the wall. Struggling only got me deeper entangled. I was all tied up at the moment, so to speak.
The imagery around me suddenly disappeared, leaving only the web pinning me and a trio of figures facing me in the dimly lit gloom of the now empty room. I recognized Sharon seated at a chair, limbs bound, with the telepathic crown on her head. Above her loomed an unknown alien that resembled a highly evolved brown bear with more evolved humanoid features, the awe-inspiring gargantuan physique and height topped by a magnificent mane and skull slightly smaller than a bear's but every bit as fearsome, with darkly intelligent malevolent eyes burning on me. Next to the terrible titan stood what appeared to be the same zombie I'd whupped on the roof, still missing his head.
"What the hell," I muttered as they approached me menacingly. Suddenly I felt a tugging at my cerebral cortex and gasped in pain, it was a telepathy probe by the bearlike alien. I swooned and had a shocking memory of many lives I could not possibly have lived, which was abruptly shattered by the shriek of blaster fire. My intense resistance to the mental probe ebbed, and I focused spotty vision on Sharon methodically pumping beams into the squirming body of the zombie. The grizzly creature was already dead and a moment later the zombie curled up into a cube and froze.
"Asshole," Sharon sighed, wiping the sweat from her brow. She came to me, saying, "Sorry, honey, but the hairy brute there had me under telepathy control like a puppet on a string. He used me to create all those killer holograms and I couldn't stop him."
"Free me," I demanded and she made the web disappear. "Did they kidnap you?"
"Yeah. Would have killed me too if it wasn't for the fact the mind band is tuned specifically for my neural pathways."
"Why did they do this? Hell, for that matter, how'd you help me just now?"
"When you made a big mental resistance to his probe, he had a tough time keeping us both under control and I mentally broke free, making a blaster appear in my hand to shoot both of them. This one," she kicked the paddy shape, "had me worried. It's a cross of organic and artificial life, really brilliant work of combining genetics and robotics. The body is an extremely tensile protoplasmic organism that can form into any shape up to the size of an elephant or as small as a rabbit." She held up the paddy-cube, shaking her head in wonder. "The mind is a small positronic-type matrix of liquid magnesium material. You can shred the body in scores of pieces, but it'll still reform. Only by melting this thing's tiny biochip brain can you kill it, and it can hide that chip anywhere in its body. I spotted it by summoning up a scanner while I shot the thing."
"I haven't heard of anything like this," I frowned.
"No one in our space-time continuum has, honey. The paddy thing is a pawn of the grizzly thing, which I call a titan since we can't pronounce its real name in our language. They communicate by telepathy and a verbal language of different decibel growls and snarls. They are brilliant beings, technology beyond anything our allies have, or we've encountered before. They're xenophobes from an alternate dimension beyond the newly formed Nagora wormhole, which they created by wrenching a rift in the fabric of space with their dimensional ring technology.
In their dimension, these bearlike barbarians worship a God of war, who in reality is a fraud, an entity cast off its continuum so it amuses itself being worshiped by these warriors, gifting them with unbeatable technology, sending them on holy wars. And they believe the greater their conquest, the greater wealth now and in the afterlife of warrior paradise reserved for those who die in battle. They've crossed the cosmos in their dimension, conquering far and wide, enslaving worlds while plundering the riches. Modern-day pirates who are also religious fanatics, figuring if they die in battle they attain paradise.
Now they've reached out into our dimension and are mapping their route through our cosmos for a conquering spree. Before their armada of starships, we'll be straws in the wind along with our allies. All known weaponry will be ineffective on their shields. Many worlds will be plundered and others obliterated, leaving only nebulas, including earth. The energies released in this war will be cataclysmic beyond belief, shattering the very fabric of our space-time continuum."
I closed my open mouth. "This is nuts. How do you know all this?"
"That's right," she smiled sadly. "You don't remember anything yet. I guess you'll need an early recall."
"What?" I asked, totally lost.
She removed a small sphere from her belt pouch from which lanced a bright white beam that bathed my body in its fiery glow. It was as though I jumped in a time warp in an alternate dimension that allowed me to live a thousand lives there in the space of a few minutes in our dimension. My memories went back to my first life at the dawn of mankind in the Stone Age, all the way till the present space age of my current life. Over 40,000 years of memories filled my mind.
I was the research monkey of a race of near-omnipotent, alien entity intellectuals of energy that study humans in much the same way human scientists study fascinating primitive species. I knew my true essence to be an immortal soul, an entity of energy that inhabited human bodies like hosts transmigrating to reincarnate after each body's death.
I died a thousand violent deaths, being a warrior in all my lives as part of the alien Creon’s study in human savagery during human history's evolution. Earth's fabled Christian god was in reality an ancient omnipotent entity that had claimed possession of our cosmos, creating our solar system from a single planet and our souls and lives as part of his essence. He allowed the Creon’s to borrow my soul for their study. Consequently, I lived a thousand bloody lives as warfare evolved from spears and stones all the way to starships, and after each violent death, my soul was reincarnated to the human body of an unborn child of a lover I impregnated before my death. I was only able to reproduce once in each life, so the child I helped conceive was actually my new host body. In this bizarre way, my former lovers became my mothers and myself my father. I maintained the special genetics that gave me the superior strength, speed, and coordination necessary to be a superb warrior in each life.
Now I understood the past and present and had a preview of the possible future. Sharon was an ancient soulmate of mine. Her true essence had been revealed to her recently by a Creon, who had given her the probe to jar my memory. The grizzly titan's god had been alerted of my presence and danger to his plans by foreseeing a possible future time line in which I destroyed his worshipers' universe, so he'd sent the slain spy to kidnap Sharon and lure me in the portal where I could be mind-probed and slain. The false deity had a grudge against our Christian god but lacked the power to directly confront him, so he was inflicting annihilation on the human race by sending a stronger race against us in a colossal cosmic war.
"I've drawn up the schematics of the special neutrino-lithium composition missiles with metaphasis shielding. We'll have the droids quickly make them up and get you in the prototype shuttle I've been privately working on. Don't look so glum. There's a real good chance you'll make it back and we'll have a lot of good years ahead," she said.
"Maybe," I replied skeptically.
❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖
Silently I sat in my prototype shuttle called after my nickname of Nemesis. Strapped under the belly and wings were several of the special missiles with the metaphasis shielding that would allow them to enter a sun's corona and detonate on the surface, causing an explosive supernova. Two missiles were missing. I'd used them to destroy a rogue titan ship I'd caught playfully pulverizing a small fleet of our starships and a space base. Watching the battle cruiser easily annihilate our military technology was quite disturbing; vaporizing the titan ship was reassuring. Several Earth Interstellar Alliance battleships had followed me from there to the Nagora wormhole that I now faced like a swirling tornado in space. In a few moments I'd enter the wormhole into the titans' dimension and make their twin suns go supernova, rendering their mighty race extinct, killing a universe in the process.
One of the battleships launched a probe into the rift and I watched it disappear, thinking back on my role as the relic of Homo sapiens history. While the first primitive hominids evolved slowly in Africa, Homo sapiens were a separate species, conceived as a genetic experiment by the omnipotent Lord, which was the foundation of the Adam and Eve legacy. Neanderthals' migration into our domain, raiding our farm fields during lean hunting seasons, sparked war. The Homo sapiens' hate for Neanderthals was inherited for millennia of ongoing war. Over time the Neanderthals became decimated by our technology in creating bows and arrows.
I evolved with my race over the eons, as swordsmen of Eurasian and Eastern continents before becoming firearm-wielding warriors of the French and English, branching out to America as fighters for the virgin frontier as Indians, English, and French. Gunfighters of the old west and green-garbed American warriors of the huge great wars of the 20th century before migration becoming Irish, Russian, Chinese and Mideast soldier terrorists fighting for freedom, finally crossing the cosmos as interstellar soldiers.
I'd fought for reasons good and bad, crossing history, and now I wondered if perhaps it all ended here. No afterlife, only oblivion. "Well," I muttered, "if I'm going out for good, at least I'm doing it in the biggest bang of all."
The familiar faces of friends, family and lovers spanning over forty thousand years blanked out as the wormhole stabilized. Suddenly a white glow rippling from its depths revealed the Titan's dimension open like a doorway which I shot through.
It was breathtakingly beautiful — dual, huge, inhabited worlds ringed like Saturn, partially enveloped in a glittering nebula dotted with ships and satellites and a series of immense octagon-shaped dimensional rings that led to alternate dimensions. I soared for the twin sons, launching my missiles that sped away in streaks of white light. I banked, warping back for the wormhole.
The missiles detonated on the twin suns' surfaces in an incandescent, cataclysmic explosion that consumed an entire universe in its fiery glow. I escaped the blast wave which rippled out, incinerating the gateway. Behind me, the wormhole closed in on itself, leaving only bare space, as though the doorway to a different dimension never existed.
"Let's go home, boys," I sighed over the commlink. "Something tells me the property values around here just went way up."
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Short-Story Me, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, The Horror Zine, Dark Harbor, Blood Moon Rising, Flash Phantoms, Phantomania, Lowlife Lit, The Listening Eye, J Journal, Evening Street Review, Conceit, Freedom Fiction Journal, Spotlight on Recovery, Muscle and Fitness, Outdoor Life and many other magazines. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy center in Washington, DC in 2019. You can find more of his writings at tomkropp.wordpress.com. He has many fantasy novels published.