Chapter 27 - Barcode
I came back the next day, in the morning. As my computer demanded a restart for updates, I turned to the writing device only to find it less useful in forgetting the world exists around me. I figured I would check on Kara and Lila’s progress of removing me from Tarne, but was that really what I wanted? It was a chance to embody an actual woman, learn everything women had to go through as they grew up. Maybe it was a safety net for my soul when I would leave my own world. That still did not explain who Tarne really was when I was not there.
From what I knew of that body, she was my type of human. I had nothing between my legs extra, from the times I had been around for Lila changing my diaper, but no opening on the upper back like Lila’s kind as far as I knew. The fact that I was diapered was clearly because I was a human child. I vaguely recalled Lila saying something about how her kind does not defecate, only compact and incinerate all food waste prior to it leaving the body.
I arrived to a strange scene. Lila was holding me in her arms, asleep on the couch. We were bundled up in imagined gravity in the crook of the couch. Her slow rhythmic breathing felt comforting to me, or was it to Tarne still somehow able to feel everything I felt when being her. As a child, that could only be a scary experience. She had no understanding of language, could not speak to me. She could cry, but was anyone listening when separated from her mind? Or was I there at a time she was asleep, dreaming of colorful fantasy lands where she danced around with her mom and woodland creatures?
She was wearing the same sweatshirt from before, zipped up to her neck. I slowly unzippered the garment, crawled in closer to her, and closed it back up over us. Her breasts were bigger than I remembered, but I figured it was because of swelling with milk. I rested my head between them underneath the soft sweatshirt. Skin contact was something I avoided in my reality, though I remembered how it felt to be near someone warm, skin against skin. I could not look for that, not the way I was.
With Kara nowhere in sight, and Lila asleep, I decided to go back to the computer which had finished a cycle of resets to update and could take me away from my reality for a bit. I hoped Tarne would get to live as herself someday soon, and I could be that weird uncle from another dimension who stops by to make her mom smile.
break
I returned a week later, almost certain they expected me back earlier. When I arrived in Tarne’s place, I was sitting on the floor of the library, alone. The dark beyond the tall windows felt ominous and scary. I looked around, but there was nobody in the enclosure lit with a few daylight bulbs. There was a light up the stairs, so I decided to try walking on the unstable blubby child legs to the staircase.
Getting up was proving to be an issue. I had no muscles and no training to complete the motions. After a few minutes of struggling to stand, I abandoned the upright pose and just crawled forward to the ascent. I did not get very far before two hands snatched me out of nowhere and lifted my body into the air. The hands did not have arms attached to them, only tiny thrusters glowing with flame dangerously close to me. I wriggled in the grip, but the hands felt like a tiny cage around my torso.
“Come on, Tarny,” spoke a strange metallic voice. “Don’t you remember how to control the Grip-thrusters?” I turned toward the sound, and realized that the thrusters turned with me, spinning me slowly around until facing a figure in the shadows. The two glowing orange eyes surprised me at first, as they were the first thing I noticed.
I grabbed at the metal cage encasing me and wriggled some more. The eyes in the dark tilted, closed for a moment, then opened glowing yellow.
“Or are you not little Tarne at all?” The voice asked, then lurched out of the shadows into the exposure of the daylight bulbs. It looked like a machine, but nothing like robot’s metal skeleton. This was genuine robotic sleekness, designed like something out of a video game.
The case around me lowered to the ground, then unlatched back into floating hands. With a beeping sequence, the robot recalled the hands to fly over and attach back to his arms, which already had hands. Right before the flying hands touched down, the more dainty metal hands spread apart and shifted to become indistinguishable from the surface of the forearms. The docking sequence concluded with a few puffs of smoke, possibly as the thrusters wound down.
“Hiya, Jacko,” Mr. Barcode said, taking a few steps over and kneeling to hold one finger close to my tiny hand. I grabbed it on impulse, and shook. “I see you’re in quite a pickle, but riddle me this: Are you actually a baby on purpose?” I looked up to his eyes, now green, and tried to formulate an answer, but it was too early for that. The child was only a few months old. I was only a few months old.
“Right, right, let’s get this going first,” Barc said, then pulled out a tiny orb from the elbow of his right arm using his left hand. With some pressure, the orb expanded to a sort of chain, then snapped into a circlet. “This should help you communicate better without being above to talk or walk. Here.” He lowered the metal crown onto my head, where it shrunk to sit snugly atop the ears.
#How will that work?# I thought.
“Exactly like that,” Mr. Barcode replied. “It’s your thoughts, Marty, we gotta do something about your thoughts!” He burst out laughing with an eerie metallic echo. “Love those old movies. I suppose we SHOULD do something about the thoughts. With this setting, nothing you think will have any privacy.”
“No, leave it like that,” a familiar voice chimed in from atop the stairs. “It’s better to have transparency from him for a while, at least while he’s stuck like this.”
#I wish your clothes had transparency,# I thought, then turned from her.
“So it is him,” a second voice added to the parade, also from the stairs. I had completely forgotten after a mere week that Kara and Lila were somehow an item. That must have been why they were up there, and Barc was watching Tarne for a bit.
“Yes, Jack, we can hear those parts of your thinking,” Lila said, already on the bottom stair. “It could get very strange with beast and JJ outbursts of thought. Maybe it’s better to table the thought outflow for now.” Barc moved to click something on my head, but Kara appeared out of nowhere behind him to hold his hand back. I saw her wince as she landed, but brushed it off.
#Why are you old? What happened to James? Where is Johnny? Did you ever find your old man? How did you find me here anyway? What do you want from me? Is it the Rahin? Do they want me for strike three? Did I strike out? What does it mean? You see my head is always chaos, so it’s better you let him turn off my thoughts. Both JJ and beast are excited about the fact that you and Lila are together, but in very different ways.#
“It can be changed at any time, you know,” Mr. Barcode said. “You sure?”
“I got a couple questions for you too, buster,” Kara said, as Barc retreated his hand from the crown atop my head. I was a proper princess now, and immediately regretted thinking that. I met Kara’s eyes, who looked disappointed, but Lila burst out laughing, gliding in to scoop me off the ground on some floaty shoes. She did not stop there, sliding around the floor while leaving a trail of sparkly white behind that faded after a few meters.
“You’re MY little princess, Jack,” she said, holding me up in her arms while floating about as if she was on ice skates. I was happy that she was smiling, and I knew Kara was partly the cause of it, so I was glad she was here, even if that meant something bad for me.
“It DOESN’T mean anything bad,” Kara said, watched for a few more seconds, then motioned her hand once to stop the fun. Lila was floating, but now higher in the air and under Kara’s control. “Lils, you’re wasting time.”
“Oh, come on, Kay,” she replied. “There isn’t a rush. There is no time here at all.”
“But there is time in his world, where he is only connecting for a short time,” Kara said, setting us down in front of her. “Let’s start off with this crazy thing.” She motioned to the library. “It keeps coming back, doesn’t it? But it shouldn’t have. This is the before, without shapes, or thoughts. Why is the library here?”
#Does it bother anybody?# I asked.
“It’s focus, where there should only be nothing,” Kara said. “You see how that’s problematic, don’t you? This isn’t supposed to be here, and anything that is placed here, by me or other involved parties, finds this in the end. Nothing should be finding anything in here. Do you understand?”
#It’s not on me,# I thought. #Well… it kinda is. No. It isn’t on me. I never made that part. It was Fyntn and Rebecca that made the spawn chamber. I didn’t like it, but was entangled to it because of the stupid Goni. Then Rebecca vanished with the world I made for her, and the stupid spawn chamber remained.#
“That’s true so far… buuuuut… then what happened?” Kara asked, with a grimace of annoyance. I remembered that it was my choice to grow creationism vines out into the darkness to be able to change a small piece of the infinite untethered space to my liking. “Yeah. That. You just couldn’t keep it in the box, could you? You just had to share your ideas from the void and then grown vines of creationism out into this space that has nothing. That’s what drew the chaos specters to you. I’m sure you know what I mean. They are nothing until they absorb something.
“So you can imagine my surprise when the Rahin came to me, far after I was done with world-hopping, and needed my help. Then, all of a sudden, there is you, floating in the void like a dumbass, jumping into places you clearly should NOT be. For fuck’s sake, you showed up at my goddamn wedding. Only, it wasn’t you, was it? It was a chaos specter that copied your stupid little mind.” Her face contorted in anger the more she said, but she did not yell. I had to wonder if Kara thought Tarne could still somehow witness the events going on when I was “possessing” her body.
“Don’t use ‘possessing’,” Lila said. “It’s too horror.”
“Right, so, that little fuckface went to so many places, and was so goddamn slippery because, I mean, it was a copy of you. I’m sure if you’d have to fight to survive in a place where your mind can literally rip open portals into different realities, you’d be just as annoying. So to answer your initial and nagging question as to why I’m old. I’m tired of all the chasing. I don’t know why they didn’t just use one of my clones, who are still out there, correcting things in places that they find, making their own lives. It’s kind of like a giant army of me.”
“Hey, I once had the same thing,” Lila said. “But that was just in my universe. We didn’t really go to other places. And now I’m the last one of that breed, I guess.” I looked up to Lila who looked a bit sad, but then she smiled, possibly due to my notice of it. “It’s ok though. I’m glad I ended up in the untethered space. I learned so much, and met you all.”
#I never meant to get him to copy me,# I thought. #It was a weird nothing person floating in the darkness. For the better part of knowing him/her/it, I was running away from it. We both were. Then it changed shape, looked like my dad, and that threw me off, so I left it to wear my look. Then something other than my library expanded out of nowhere and wrecked what I created, flinging books of my stories into the darkness. Oh crap, you don’t think the other chaos specters will copy those. Do you?”
“It’s already happened,” Kara said. “It took a great big while to round it all up, but at least the Keir guys lent a hand.” I had to wonder what the Keir looked like in future versions. “Here.” Kara tossed over a metal key much like the very first old Keir that the old man used, that she used for a bit in the beginning. I struggled to hold onto it with my child hands.
#It’s got real weight to it,# I thought. #Why did the versions backpedal to the original?# Kara scoffed, walked over, and took the piece of metal back.
“Somewhere between wearable Keirs, and implantable ones, the people realized it was getting out of hand. So we have this now, but it has a cool new feature.” Kara tapped the metal key against her skin, where it stuck like a shadow, becoming a tattoo. She brought the forearm to her hand, where it moved to the palm of her hand while still being a tattoo. Next, she touched that very hand to her face, where the tattoo remained. “And with a simple secret message scribbled over it…” The Keir fell from her face as solid cold metal, never warming to touch like other metals would.
#That’s really cool,# I thought. #Does it need a pathway drawn like the old one? No, that would be silly. You already had one where it just opens a portal with floating pieces. I bet it does that. That’s amazing.#
“So, enough with the show and tell,” Kara said. “You’re causing problems by being in here with your little blip of creationism vines, and the info of constructed ideas of how life is. This is a problem for the nothings of everything that exists before. In a way, chaos specters arrive here to rehabilitate into something new.”
#What are chaos specters though?#
“Amalgamations of chaos that don’t get digested by the Rahin,” Kara said. “Did you just call me Sana? I guess that’s a bit of a compliment. Thanks. Those very excessive chaos chodes go through the digestion cycle and remain just empty, but still undergoing inner turmoil for no reason. Those get moved to this place, where nothing is, the before, so they can latch onto something and be, like… a plant, or some insect, or some other type of annoying being in the void again, and already are.
“The problem is, they latch onto anything. It’s something of a void leech, but what they leech is existence, copying it, instilling their own inner turmoil into the reality they create. Your being here, exposes you to those leeches, and would make more work for me, my clones, and the Kara in the past version of myself. So this has to go.”
#It can’t,# I thought. #Something created in the nothing before shouldn’t be discarded, but incorporated. This place could be a hub where the leeches figure out what they want to reincorporate as, what they want to be in the void, and already are. Isn’t that a better way of fixing this?#
“Jack isn’t here out of choice, anyway,” Lila chimed in. “I guess I’m not either, but he comes and goes because of another’s choice.”
“Yeah, fucking Fyntn III,” Mr. Barcode burst out. “The little cunt in charge of Jacko’s story. It’s goddamn weird, if you ask me. He should be here for this. At least to get the thirty-year-old out of a body of a child.”
“Jack wants to be here,” Lila said. “I think? Right?”
#I— I don’t know.# I thought. #I’d rather have freedom to come and go in whatever shape I choose, but ever since that moment of unmaking my connection to this place, I feel like I deserve this outcome. Still, if there is someone else on the inside of Tarne that has a mind of their own, I guess I’d like to know her take on this, but that would take years. I don’t expect you guys to stick around here for years with me. Barc has that Great Undertaking, Lila will eventually serve out her sentence, and Kara probably has some semblance of family to go back to.#
“I do,” Kara said, then looked saddened, but also perked up at the mention. Narrating while being heard was impossible. “I mean, I have FAMILY, just not the family I want to have near me all the time. Plus there are buddies from the Keir that also set their gear down. I could visit some of them, but like I said. I came here because I’m tired, and I need to find a solution to this problem. Every second we spend without knowing what to do, is time spent chasing down other chaos specters with your ideas in my past.”
“I’m sorry,” Lila said. “I hope that doesn’t hamper your mood for later.”
#Oh, she means sex,# I thought, and looked surprised realizing my thoughts were still being broadcast to everyone. #Not that it’s a bad thing. I’m sure you two have an amazing sex life, filled with plenty of interesting sex toys and kinks I am not privy to. Will someone take the damn crown off my head before I say-.# Mr. Barcode flipped a switch on the crown that stopped broadcasting my thinking, and I could finally breathe a sigh of relief, exploding into a downpour of beast thoughts about Lila and Kara naked, kissing, and moving around naked while floating weightless in the air.
“Well, that’s no better, is it?” Mr. Barcode asked, while looking at the top of my head where naked Kara and naked Lila were dancing in an intimate embrace of skin and lips. With another motion, the crown turned back into a chain, then formed back into a sphere. Barc threw the sphere at Lila, who caught it in the front of her underwear for a laugh. Kara was not as entertained.
Comments
Post a Comment