The Broken Tomorrow of Josephine Sunday

Of course, Sunday wasn’t her real last name. People didn’t have days of the week for their last names, not real people.

But then, she wasn’t a real person any more, was she?

Josephine closed her eyes, willing her normal life - Josephine Watley’s normal life - to be there when she opened them. But no, it was just the same train station, the same bleached-out colors and insubstantial people. She flipped the hood of her ragged coat up over her head. It was starting to snow.

A few minutes later, the train pulled up. Josephine climbed the steps, turned right into a car, and sat against the window of a two-person seat. The car was nearly deserted, so she set her bag down next to her. The conductor approached.

“Ticket?”

She flashed her pass, and was putting it back in her bag when the conductor’s voice brought her up short.

“Hold it.”

She looked up.

“Let me see that.”

She handed up the pass.

The conductor scrutinized it. “Don’t normally see these stations on a pass.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, Tomorrow Station is a one-way trip. People usually buy single tickets for that one. And I didn’t think we even had service to Yesterday Station any more.”

She smiled. “I wanted my pass to be comprehensive.”

The conductor smiled back, returning the pass. “Where you headed?”

“Tomorrow Station is always where I’m headed, but I am unfortunately getting off long before then.”

“And where would that be?”

“I believe you're supposed to tell me.”

“Ah, right.” The conductor fumbled with a map, studying it. “ Let's see... ah. Here it is. You’ll want to get off on a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1987.”

The train lurched and the conductor stumbled, then began stammering, looking quizzically at the map. “Um, what? No, I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous. You’ll want the West Idleston station. The one after next.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’m so sorry for that... um, whatever that was. I don’t even really remember...”

“Not at all.” Josephine smiled up.

“Must be one of those days.”

“It always is.”

The conductor walked on, and Josephine put her pass away, rummaging through her bag. She took out a small journal and began writing. She was finding it harder to put her thoughts on paper, but she forced herself to write at least two pages. She knew she would one day lose writing, just like she lost her proper name. Eventually, even Josephine would be gone and she’d just be Sunday, a living day of the week. After that she would become woven into spacetime itself, a barely sentient waveform of shifting probabilities.

Soon, the conductor announced West Idleston. Josephine put away her journal and zipped up her bag, slinging it over her shoulder as she left the train. Her phone rang and she answered it.

“Sunday.”

“Josephine, this is Calendar. Are you then?”

She looked around, had a good chuckle at some of the fashions on display, and said, “Spring. 1987. Feels like a Saturday.”

“Good. Now, where are you?”

“Town called West Idleston.”

“Perfect!” Josephine held her phone away from her ear. Calendar was still going on. “Dispatch got you on the right train for once. Okay, you want to get to a highway overpass about... three blocks from where you are.”

She started moving. “So how is visiting some overpass in 1987 going to help me stop being erased from existence?”

“Well, West Idleston was your grandfather’s home town, and you’re at the day after his junior prom,” Calendar said. “But, more importantly, it’s also the day he’s going to kill himself.”

Deliverance (a sermon)

In the old time under the Green Men, those vicious monsters of space, the last of Earth’s authority came together. The armies of the world were long since made rubble and corpses, human science a thing of legend, so the only avenue left those former kings and merchant princes was religion. Clergy from all faiths urged their people to join in prayer, a fervent appeal to their Higher Power to deliver them from the invaders. This global clergy, united for the first time in history in the face of this universal Other, poured over their texts and sacred books, seeking the means to call down that deliverance.

It was a Muslim cleric and a Wiccan high priestess who found the incantation, in a book buried deep beneath the Vatican; an incantation that would summon a holy warrior, one that would bring the great and terrible Wrath of the Divine. With the incantation they’d found, humanity could call down God’s Worst Bastard.

And when he came among the last humans, he was known as Pope Adam the Destroyer. His was a hunger of infinite measure, satisfied only by the souls of aliens. With each soul devoured, Pope Adam the Destroyer added one more mindless drone to his growing army. They swept across the globe, the remaining aliens fleeing before such a fate. When the last of the invaders had gone, humanity’s savior presented them with the God Factory, a vast industrial complex fueled by the souls he’d taken, worked by the bodies those souls had once inhabited. The God Factory made the machines that made everything the recovering human race could need, bringing about a paradise from their blasted and blighted Earth.

And so it is, in this, the year of the Destroyer 117, a century since our deliverer had left us, that we are recovered enough to think on vengeance. We go now to the God Factory to build new machines, sacred machines that only the Mechanics of the Holy Order can operate; machines to find the aliens’ homeworld and machines we can use to kill everything we see once we get there.

Blessed, blessed, thrice blessed are the warriors in the Destroyer’s armies, for theirs is the right and the power of the Divine.

Praise Be.

The Last Bastion

He floated out among the Transient Spaces, too exhausted to even rebuild his vessel. He reached out his hand, sparing energy he didn't have to rejuvenate a dying galaxy. Here at the very fringes of the Edge Zones, where the battle was waged, the physical realm was sparse and even more sparsely populated. A distant arm of the galaxy in God's hand contained the home of an ancient sentient species. They'd moved their galaxy here to observe the battle, knowing the slim chance of survival, but desperately needing to record the event. Their scanning instruments focused on the deity that had saved them and they offered up a hymn of thanks, engaging all sentient life in that galaxy to add their prayers, knowing what focused worship could do for a supreme being. That worship brought strength back to God's weary presence. He used that energy to send the galaxy far away, then fortify the barriers for the next attack.

Far off into infinity, across the great emptiness, darkness roiled and swelled. He had cast it out, so many eons ago, and so had been able to tame the universe and populate it with beings of his own creation. Now the dark had returned, threatening his universe with the devastation of pure chaos. Fortunately, God had seen the darkness coming when it was still thousands of millennia out and engineered a species designed to combat and nullify the dark. He'd stayed with them as long as he could, then, forced to confront the darkness directly, left his people to develop on their own, sending messengers with knowledge and technology just before he left.

It had been a couple thousand years since he'd activated the Savior protocol. Through a half-mortal proxy, new technology and abilities should have been granted to his little super-hominids beyond the simple tools and philosophies his first messengers had given. Over a few centuries, his proxy should have expanded their minds to hold the knowledge they'd need to make war on the dark, teaching them the illuminated language of God. Further instructions passed on during the Prophet cycle should have allowed them even greater understanding of the vast powers granted by the Savior protocol. He'd been broadcasting specific instructions relating to the coming war against the dark via sensitives over the centuries, and if his people had followed them, they would be prepared for the worst.

Then the last of God's barriers broke and the darkness invaded the universe in a great rushing wave. God raced ahead, outpacing the darkness by mere decades, arriving on Earth with less than a century until the darkness overwhelmed them. He stood mighty in the sky, his countenance spanning the horizon. In his own language, spoken first by the stars when they were young, God rallied his people to him.

After a pause just long enough to be unsettling, humanity looked up at God and said, "Huh?"

Old Ones

Hers was the light, the radiant beam from heaven that shone down upon us.  She was the herald, the voice, the emissary.  She would lead the First Ones home, so our Makers could walk among us again.  She told us all of this, in our own languages, using imagery and myth from our own religions.  She sang scripture from the skies above sprawling cities, healed the sick with a kiss, sanctified the desert, making it fertile.  All flocked to her, seeing a savior.  There were none who disbelieved.  The most fundamentalist zealot knelt beside the most cynical of atheists in worship of her.  She loved us, she said, filling us with joy.  But hers was nothing to the love of the First Ones.  The First Ones are love, she would tell us, they are love incarnate.  Her miracles had been wrought, she explained, to make the world holy enough for its creators to return to.

The First Ones came among us as solid light.  Walking prism-men that dwarfed the tallest skyline strode across the surface of the world and called it small.  They convened in a crystalline structure that folded space in 10 dimensions and a man approached their merged hard-light forms, proposing to meditate upon them.  At the 10th second of the 10th minute of the 10th hour of the 10th day, he finally saw past the humble 3 dimensions of human perception, first seeing time become solid around him, then the latter 6 opened with increasing impossibility.  When he unlocked the 10th dimension, his mind went, drawn from him, peeled off from his soul as it uploaded to the vast hypercomputers of the Third Ones.

And so did all the great thinkers and holy people come to the First Ones, gazing deep into their 10-dimensional geometry.  As with the first, they all become operating software for the machines that map the multiverse, as one with the precision devices of the Third Ones.  Their still-living bodies were guarded by those left behind, those who remained to prepare for the coming of the Second Ones: living nightmares, a failed god experiment.

And then she rose again, her light once more a beacon, no longer dimmed by the radiance of the First Ones.  Her light split the Second Ones asunder as they came, casting daylight into the shadowy murk that sustained them.  Their shades were captured among their creators' prism bodies, to be returned to the edge of the universe that spawned them.

We are the Tenth Ones, the Last Ones, called the Empty Ones by the uncharitable among the shimmering choirs.  

None will come after us.