All right then. Fuck Germany, let’s hit the Cleopatra action. If I want sleazy harlots like Berlin, we’ll do better just hitting the local Queens saloons with a couple of our ill gotten c notes. And hey, she was born 69AD, there’s some numerology even I can understand. Let’s go world class.
Well. This is our first focused temporal excursion. There are skills to optimize our positron consumption. Do you know how to meditate?
Sure. I’ve been doing it ever since the sixth grade. Keeps my right hand-
Stop being obtuse, you idiot.
Well, sure. But I don’t like talking about it. I never got trained with that infinite om shanti, love of the universe, cosmic poop stain transcendence. Dirty Pancho taught me the basics for combat and street martial arts. I don’t consider myself enlightened or realized though. Nor do I consider it a necessarily desirable state.
That means you’re perfect. I think we chose well. The "cosmic awareness brigade," as we suspect you might call it, have no practical value.
Dirty Pancho told me that I was learning the same stuff that dishwashers in Chinese restaurants learned to keep from killing the drunken cooks. Cross your eyes, breath through chi, and align the seven internal points that the poop peddlers call chakras.
We used a tweaked system that added two more to enhance the lethal. Pancho once joked if I ever called them chakras, he’d show me something he could do with my testicles that would make a joke out of them. Joke or not, I don’t use that word much.
Sounds promising. You might remember the Norman surface telling you that the skill of the positron based technology involved applied stasis.
He didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the idea.
To engage this technology is pretty simple, but to employ and direct it is another story. It’s much like a very sophisticated four dimensional howitzer. However it works by a principle of gradients rather than any charge, other than the positron. That’s how we ran into complications.
The sliver of the universe that your senses apprehend is loaded with forces that go unexploited. Lightning, and gravity among the obvious. Consider how much inertial momentum a human body has on the surface of a spinning planet. Speculative science and fiction writers have written about this for decades. It even fascinated Ben Franklin.
What you call modern telemetry has begun to scratch the surface with the gravitational slingshots used for the exploratory satellites. We‘re working with coordinated micro-slingshots of summed negative time vector coordinates. The negative time co-ordinates treat past kinetic energy as potential energy. The pump itself acts as a focusing lens.
The key to our universe resides in an atom‘s sub-particles. The trick is stasis. Then the gradients can align through the action of the pump lens. As a beginner I suggest you focus on the sun. Breath into the alpha state until you get internal alignment, at that point the sun will begin to seem to move back towards the east. Keep the breathing slow and steady. The sun will accelerate its retrograde motion. You know you’re finding the right resonance when the movement achieves transit velocity. At that point the sky will seem to turn utterly dark, because the sun’s apprehended velocity will supersede the senses.
But that sounds suspiciously like that other place that we- That place is where we end up if you don’t get a latch on some fixed point in time/space surface.
There’s no escape for me is there?
What do you mean?
There’s no going back to just good old, Weasel, who hits the Lottery?
Can’t go back to what neither was nor is.
Well, any shot what could be?
No. We are the framers of the actual. We are the hammer, humanity’s time is the stone. The hammer can never return to its primordial state.
This sounds like I died when I agreed to this whole mess. Are we in some kind of I’m dead, but have to figure it out scenario? Should I expect a cosmic moment when the sound track turns into a chorus and a voiceover tells me it’s time to embrace the light.
Well, dead describes it relative to some petty facts. Still, a limited collection of facts do not cover truth as a whole. Even if you were to describe the new you as dead to the values of the old, still you’re dead with added value. And unlike the dead, you have the employment of your living protoplasm.
Which, I might remind you, is an unprecedented enormous resource pool in this environment where (no pun intended) nobody else has one. You actually have more on this side of the great divide than the wealthiest man on the other. You’ll see what I mean soon. This will become unspeakably Godly power once you start harvesting all those time/flesh segments with any degree of goal directed skill. Theoretically you may have an infinite timeline, but at the very least there‘s a solid millennium or two, before we have to deal with such a question.
Further, as we both know with horror, we’re trying to forestall light’s opposite.
But why am I starting to have trouble remembering? And things I hold so dear? I had to wrack my brains to recall who my friends are. I almost forgot we need to save Monica! What good does it have to possess a virtual infinite lifeline, if I no longer know who I am, who I care about, and what is meaningful to me?
The only meaning that matters is avoiding-
Enough. Enough. And now that I have that knowledge…well you play poker with the cards in your hand. So, directed stasis? Who comes up with these terms, Pentagon PR people?
No. You do. You use the vocabulary you already have to describe something completely new to your experience. It certainly does not help that much of what we are working with temporally rooted sense apprehension. I see you are shifting into the alpha state with impressive speed.
Pancho didn’t fool around with his hirelings. Within three months of working with him, combat was not a plan. It was already an unpleasant, repeated reality. Hey! I’m getting a voluptuous rising feeling. Sort of like a three dimensional compass needle on a gyroscope in free fall. Ooh. I’m liking this. How do we control where-
Your conscious will is all we now require. This is where the technology does seem a bit like magic without tedious technical explanations. Consciousness recognizes itself, and the entire human space/time surface is consciousness. And here we are.
Hey wait. This ain’t Egypt. This is Rome!
How right you are. We’re in front of the Senate.
I had my doubts going into this, and they’re growing like a California melanoma. I wanted Cleopatra in her prime. Where are my fucking pyramids? You want to explain this to me?
Where’s the palace and all the naked slave girls. I didn’t go through all of this for a toga party. And a smelly toga party at that. I thought the Romans bathed.
They do. Wait till you meet the Barbarians. Now there’s a smell that’ll carry five kilometers upwind. Cleopatra’s in Rome right now. She’s being carried in that litter over there.
You mean the big yellow and black box with the eight studs?
The very. Now, here comes some fun. We got extra positrons from that last kill. We can zip in for a quick temporal slice and see the inside if you want.
Well, what the hell. Go for it.
Never say never if the time is right.
The bed she, like a nude clitoris floating on lush waves of labia, sprawled on, oozed plush erotic invitations. The crush of feather pillows, laced in rubies and sapphires embroidered with thick interlacing threads of gold and silver, dazzled the eye and sent it gyrating around the four walls and ceiling festooned with images of every coupling imagined and forbidden by human mind and law.
No hyper photo-realist could capture the lambent, shimmering egg tempera gaping orifices filled with phalli of every size and color. No method actress could capture the gorgeous faces of transcendent female rapture and masculine fulfillment painted on the contorted actors in these poly-sexual scenarios interlaced with one another in mysterious continuity of erotic nirvana. Soft lights from scented oil lamps rippled the etched definitions of their naked musculature into a dynamic illusion of throbbing life triumphant over the consuming shadows hushed around the portable boudoir.
All this enacted on a backdrop of ripening verdant sylvan spring. Four posts of emerald winding asp carved ivory phalli marked the corners of the waddling slave tormenting chamber.
This vortex like ocular magnetism was so disorienting and arousing, I almost overlooked Cleopatra herself.
Jesus! She looks like a farm animal. In fact, wait a second, I’ve seen better looking cattle. Neffertiti she’s not.
Well of course not. Nefertiti was from Africa, Cleopatra was from the Ptolemy line, and Greek.
Well this bloated dumpling is no Venus de Milo. What was the charm?
Well, if you are a woman who has access to the best drugs and poisons known to a three thousand year old culture, a battalion of naked slaves at your beck and call, and a whole lot of wealth to boot, you could look and smell like an armadillo and a weekend with you would still be the finest weekend the world can offer a man’s entire life.
Speaking of poison. We’ve picked a great week. Rome is beautiful in early March. Can’t you feel the winter’s chill melting before the first zephyr point breezes?
So Cleo’s in town for which of her Roman Boy toys?
None other than the Big JC, himself. She’s twenty five, and in the prime of her power. And he basically put her there. They’ve had a thing going on for about five years. When he entered the picture, he was thinking about annexing Egypt, which was on the verge of civil war. Her brother, the lucky Ptolemy XIII, was both her occasional bedfellow and rival for the throne. Compliant with the number’s reputation, he drowned conveniently for all in the equally convenient Nile when Caesar tipped the scales.
Caesar acquired control without the expense of warfare, and regained a reputation for preferring women. He stuck her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, on the throne with her. Number fourteen ends up poisoned. Beats drowning, I suppose.
She has a kid who’s about four or five by now who’s named Caesarion. Caesar denies the paternity, probably because his penis was smart enough to shrink from that pestilential vulva. But he never comes out and specifies that. Would blow the stud image. Nevertheless, he names his nephew, Octavian, his heir.
But once you’re on top, it’s downhill all the way. And this is the beginning of the end. If we’re lucky we’ll get to see Brutus and the boys play hide the stiletto in Caesar’s toga.
That’s all well and good, but I’ve seen more than my share of stabbings, and I’m already bored. Cleopatra’s nothing but a homicidal hook nosed Greek fishwife in pancake makeup, a seedy twenty five going on fifty. If this is the best the women had to offer, no wonder male buttocks started looking very nice indeed. In fact, check out the black dude with big hanger on that ceiling. Let’s get out of here now!
But don’t you want to see old JC eat the Roman steel? Oliver Stone would kill for this. He’d get Cleo in on the conspiracy. The original black widow. Had a hand in waxing everybody she ever had sex with. Think about the screenplay.
I got plenty of money already. I just want to have sex with somebody who doesn’t make me feel like singing Old McDonald Had a Farm.
Hmmm. All right. How’s the pinky looking?
It’s a lovely shade of soft flickering violet.
That could be a bit of a problem. Are you sure you don’t want to enjoy the sights and sounds of the Roman Forum?
I get it. I’ve used more positrons than planned. You need another kill. What’s up with that? You told me we had plenty for this little jaunt.
It’s the physical body coefficient. We’re still tweaking the math. Look on the bright side, if we score Caesar’s essence, we’ll be pumped.
As I asked earlier, no escape, is there?
Is there ever any escape from what you are?
All right. Let’s skip the charades. How long is it till we slurp up Great Caesar’s Ghost? Any time for some fun with one of Cleo’s foreplay girls?
What do you mean?
What part of what I just asked for do we need to clarify? Norman used to tell me how great a time he was having with all sorts of women of historically easy virtue. Usually in multiples of three. So…..
That could be a problem.
Why? Isn’t that the whole reason you guys have me doing this. That you needed someone with a living body? As solid as-holy shit! My hand just went through my chest! Where’s my body?
It’s somewhere safe.
Safe? The only safe place for my body is with me in it! Where is it?
Switzerland. We dropped shipped it when you made the jump to Rome.
You drop shipped my body to Switzerland, sans me, the proper inhabitant, and my positron nickel? And what am I now? I fact, what the hell is now? I am feeling a panic, a sinking feeling, a I don’t know what it is. What have you done to me?
We did nothing but honor your wishes.
What about my new wish? I want my body now. And what am I now?
You know.
You bastards. I’m a fucking, let me correct that, non-fucking ectoplasmic dermal surface supported by a positron pump. Right?
That’s what we are.
Man, you use "we" like a high end corporate double speaker. All right. Listen up. I’ll suck down Caesar’s purple serpent of a soul. I don’t care if I have to massacre all of rioting Rome in the process. It’s the only way out. I understand you. But the first thing we do is get my body. And that’s not going to be a negotiable point. So let’s start planning now. Where and when is it?
Not so fast. We need Caesar. Then you find out.
I no find out you no get Caesar. No tickee no laundry.
You know what happens to us then.
So? I still have some shred of identity. I know enough to know that right now, no matter where and when I am it’s a chimera. I’m always in a place where even prayer is self disqualifying. Since the rules of God don’t hold, then let the rules of hell, or whatever that place is that stuck me. devolve upon us all. They already have anyway. And I’ll suck every one of you faceless wonders with me. Because we are the jigsaw void to complement its jigsaw void, aren’t we?
Well, not really-
Fuck you! You’re only hope is to give me hope. Satan’s rules make my word good, and you know it. Where’s my corpus not so delectable?
Bastard. You would have died and joined us anyway.
Damn Skippy, pal. Where and when?
Swiss Alps, ice cave, 10,000 B.C.
I can feel it. Good enough. Now, let’s find old JC in time to see him keep his appointment to become emperor of pin cushions. Suck that purple little serpent of a soul out of him while it’s still fresh.