© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Fifteen: Rude Dare
The
three of them stood just outside the Red Door, nervously examining the dents on
the outside of the door. They had the
door swung wide into the room, but they distanced themselves from the brickwork
where the original chalk outline of the portal yet showed. Everything was
strange today. The three of them, John Galt, Jethro Mouch, and Ronald Rand, had
each come awake with the strangest feeling of surreality. They were not certain
as to what had happened to them. Their memories seemed packed with strange,
unsettling dreams. They knew they had to come to the Rood Der, and each in turn
was surprised to discover both Crash House and Cross House deserted, and
unlocked, and most shockingly, the tunnel abandoned and standing unlocked, all
the hidden features popped wide open. A girl scout could walk up to the door at
Crash House, walk down the hall, open the basement door, stroll down into the
tunnel, and walk right across to Cross House, and skip merrily into another
world.
“We know that Hank, Frederic, and Frances are
all on the other side,” said John Galt, more to himself than to the other two.
He was squatting down and pressing his fingers into the indentations in the
steel security door. “And we cannot reach Joss Chen or Rodney.”
“And Barney,” said Ronald Rand.
The other two looked at him.
“I’m just saying,” Ron said. “I mean, come
on, he’s one of us, and he’s missing.”
“But she said we wouldn’t see him again,”
said John Galt.
“She?” the other two said
together.
“She,” said John Galt, looking thoughtful,
and a little confused. Because there was the heart of the mystery. There had
been a...she, a female, a woman, and
what? A woman with...eyes. Yes, she
had eyes. “Who is she?”
Ron and Jethro exchanged looks.
“We know what you mean, but we don’t know who
we’re all thinking about. I remember the restaurant,” said Jethro, patting his
pockets absently, searching for his ever-present pipe, which apparently was
missing.
“Yeah, the desserts,” said Ron. “I remember
the desserts. They were delicious. I remember that much.”
“We’ve been...cut out of...something,” said John Galt. “Everyone else is off
having a good time, and we’re here thinking about desserts, and some she we can’t remember.”
“It’s messing with us,” said Ron. “Why is it
always messing with us?”
“That’s what keeps it interesting,” said John
Galt. He closed the Red Door, locked it, and placed the heavy beam across the
door in its steel cradle. “When it messes with us. That’s what we want,
usually, because we learn things, notice things, but not this time. They cut
something out, I can feel it, it’s like I’m missing a couple of teeth. But what
did they cut out, how are we being excluded, and why?”
John Galt sat upon the floor, with his back
to the brick wall, facing the Red Door across the room, and then Jethro joined
him, staring uneasily at the portal cover, while Jethro paced, tugging at his
thinning hair.
“I remember that Joss Chen was freaking out,
remember?” Jethro said. He remembered the security guy sitting against a wall,
his eyes wide. He was staring, like he was terrified about something, or
someone.
“Yeah, I remember that, it was as if he
recognized someone at one of the tables,” Ron said. “Well, this is good, we’re
remembering a whole lot of stuff now. I don’t think any of that was there, two
seconds ago, three seconds, now four...”
“—two restaurants,” said John Galt,
interrupting Ron, who tended to wander off on tangents, while Jethro always
started making a new path. “We were at two different restaurants, neither of
which we could find.”
Jethro, still pacing, chuckled. “It’s like a
puzzle, buried in the sand. First we have to find the individual pieces, and we’ve
only found a few, but then we have to fit them together. But whomever hid
everything, they didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“Whoever,” interjected Ron.
“Really? Usually when someone ever corrects
you, it’s with whomever, so I thought I picked the right one, it’s just a
fifty-fifty chance, you know.”
“No,” John Galt said, “they didn’t hide
anything very well.”
“Okay, okay, yeah, okay,” babbled Ron, his
eyes lighting up with intelligence, “Joss Chen was showing us phone footage
with his little projector. Bees, I remember the metal bees, twining about,
making...what? Wait, the infinity symbol, right?”
“No, not the infinity symbol, but yeah, yeah,
it was the infinity symbol but it was going about a planet, like Saturn,” said
Jethro, doing a little dance in place. “Not like Saturn, it was Saturn. And the infinity symbol was
making the rings about Saturn, no, that’s can’t be right, can it? It would have
to be a Moebius strip.”
“And then Joss ran out of the room, just
lickety-split dashed into the kitchen, I remember that, we all just sat
staring, burying our faces in all the pastries, yeah, and then Rodney followed
him in,” said Ron. “We three just sat there, but Rodney followed Joss.”
“Who was Joss looking at?” asked John Galt.
“Who was it that freaked him out? There was someone sitting at that table.
Someone who seemed to see us, even though nobody else on the patio did.”
“I thought he was looking at Jack,” said Ron.
“Jack?” John Galt and Jethro queried as one.
“Yeah, Jack, the kid sitting at the table—he
was dressed like Robin Hood, with a bow, and arrows, and a cool leather
backpack,” said Ron.
John Galt and Jethro looked at each other,
both obviously reading the other, discerning their shared but unspoken line of
thought.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking.
Jack—how do I know his name is Jack?”
They nodded as one.
“Well, he looks like a Jack, I just know his
name is Jack, like he’s famous, or something. Like if Jack Nicholson was
sitting there, we’d say, it’s Jack, you know? The kid’s name is Jack.”
“Yes,” John Galt said, nodding. “The kid is
Jack, and the thin elderly man is...Old
Ben.”
“Old Ben!” Jethro and Ron laughed,
delightedly.
“But his name is a joke,” John Galt said
softly, as if he were a detective actively solving a crime, using only his
mind, and almost imagining the clues.
“Yeah, yeah—yeah, yeah,” Ron babbled,
grinning hugely. He snatched off his huge eyeglasses and waved them about. “Old
Ben is a nickname for Mister Aajeel.”
“Mister Aajeel, yes, that’s right. And the
little girl is...Amanda,” said Jethro, dreamily, dropping into a neat lotus position
against the wall, sitting next to John Galt.
“Manda,”
said John Galt and Ronald Rand simultaneously.
“It pisses her off if you call her Amanda,”
concluded Jethro Mouch.
“Keep going, keep going,” John Galt said,
slapping his knees. “We’re jacked in, right now, the three of us are completing
some kind of circuit, and we’re channeling in the information, stuff we
couldn’t possibly know. But keep going, don’t break it.”
“The Abyss is feeding us,” whispered Ron.
“I’m starting to freak out. The weird
is getting thick.”
“Don’t think about the...thing, whatever is making this happen. Don’t refer to it, or name
it, or even think about it, just keep going with the line of thinking. So we
have Old Ben, Jack, the little girl—Manda.”
“There was someone else, wasn’t there?” Ron
whispered.
“I remember a pretty girl in a hoodie,
walking by on the street and someone shouted that dada is dada,” said Jethro.
“Data is data,” corrected John Galt. “But
focus on the person that Joss Chen was looking at.”
“Someone that looked royally pissed off,”
Jethro whispered, leaning his head in close to the other two.
Ron and John Galt shifted their butts on the
floor, maneuvering about so that they formed a triangle, their heads tilted in
close.
“Does anyone have some mints, because—man, you guys have bad breath,” Jethro
said, half-giggling, but managing to keep his giggle almost to a whisper.
“I was about to say the same thing. You
should talk, Jethro, the garlic is coming off of you in waves.”
“I got the garlic bean curds,” whispered
Jethro, looking stricken. “I remember eating the dish, it’s like a dream. Very
good, but usually I don’t get garlic, why in the world did I choose garlic?”
“Weird thing to dream about, garlic bean
curds,” whispered Ron, grinning.
“Would you two knock it off? That’s...the thing, you know, not the thing we’re
not mentioning, but the other thing—the usual thing, trying to keep your mind
off of anything related to the Red Door,” whispered John Galt.
“Yeah, yeah, right, how strange, I really
almost forgot just now everything we’ve been talking about, discussing Jethro’s
bad breath,” said Ron. “But the stuffed grape leaves were terrific, and the
hummus, did you guys try the spicy hummus?”
“Gross,” said Jethro, speaking in his normal
conversational tone of voice. “I hate that stuff. It’s like eating, I don’t
know, glue.”
“Focus,” whispered John Galt. “Stop wandering
off. There was another guy at the table. But he’s obviously been erased from
our memories. Jethro, you said he looked pissed off.”
“Yeah, like the Cheshire Cat, I can remember
his expression, just not...him,” Jethro
said, “but he was staring at Joss Chen. I remember he was boring his eyes in,
like drills.”
“Doesn’t sound boring to me,” joked Ron, and
then remembered, feeling the other thing messing with him, leading him off
toward the myriad details, away from their purpose. The jokes kept popping off
like paparazzi bulbs.
“You
felt that?”
John Galt asked in a whisper, giving them all chills.
They all nodded, nervously staring about the
room. Seconds ticked by, their hackles risen. Then a memory clicked.
“An Asian guy?” John Galt whispered.
“Japanese,” whispered Jethro.
“I think Chinese,” whispered Ron.
“No. Maybe. Both. Something older,” John Galt
whispered.
They stared at him. He thought a bit,
squinting his eyes, concentrating, nodding, even humming a little.
“Like before they were Chinese or Japanese,
their...common ancestor,” John Galt whispered, after several moments of silence.
Ron snickered.
“FOAA,” he whispered.
They stared at him.
“Father of All Asians,” he whispered,
grinning. “You know, like MOAB, Mother of All Bombs?”
“I once heard a band play, really terrible,
in a little bar, they were MOAB, the Mother of All Bands! Complete and utter
joke. The woman was wearing—”
John Galt groaned. “You keep straying off. Do
not listen to it.”
They straightened, the three of them,
mentally screwing down their thinking caps.
“Was Joss Chen looking at the mysterious
Asian man, the angry-looking guy?” John Galt asked, “not at Jack, or Old Ben,
or Manda?”
Jethro and Ron thought about it, and then
they nodded.
“So Joss Chen recognized him, somehow, and
this mystery man has to be one of...them,”
John Galt whispered.
“Shepherds,”
Ronald Rand whispered.
“Yes,” Jethro whispered excitedly. “The Shepherds. He was the leader of the
Shepherds, she said one of the moons.
The Shepherd Moons, isn’t that an Enya
song?”
“She,” repeated John Galt. “I mean shut up,
don’t get distracted, but yes, Shepherds, they are Shepherds, and she did call
them moons, as well.”
“Yeah, the woman with the eyes,” said Jethro,
dreamily.
“Purple...eyes?” whispered Ron, as if he just
couldn’t quite pull up the memory.
“Pink eyes,” snickered Jethro. “Do you know
how many times I had pink eye, as a kid? Every time some kid came to school
with pink eye, guess who caught it? It’s amazing that I don’t permanently see
the world through pink-colored corneas.”
They stared at him. And he recollected
himself, nodding, glancing about the room.
“Green eyes,” said John Galt, “but she mostly
had eyes for Joss Chen.”
“Who doesn’t?” laughed Ron, “I mean come on,
people look at him as if he’s famous or something. Like a movie star. I think
that Rodney’s got a crush on him.”
“Is Rodney gay?” asked Jethro. “Jews can’t be
gay, can they? I mean, that can’t be a thing, can it?”
John Galt rolled his eyes. The other two
noticed his expression and snapped themselves back away from their most current
tangent.
Something was leading them into information
they could not know, but the usual thing was doing its best to lead them off
into the daily world, turning aside their minds from any knowledge of itself or
its surrounding and hidden, inner workings. It’s
not real, the thing kept repeating at them, and I’m not going crazy, and I
won’t think about it.
A great mechanical clock, sentient, that
wishes you to focus only on its hands and numbers, and never realize the many
gears and springs and assorted clockwork going around and around behind the face.
“Okay, focus,” John Galt whispered. “Think
about it. We were in a restaurant, Joss Chen was showing us footage of strange
mechanical robots, nanobots, things that can’t or at least shouldn’t exist, and
a waitress came in, it was the woman with the eyes, she was watching the
footage, and she spoke to all of us, to each of us. And she led us to another room,
and that room was some other place. It was daylight.”
“Café Real,” interjected Ron. “That what it
was called. I saw the sign.”
“Yes, there were several Shepherds there.
Mister Aajeel, also known as Old Ben, and Manda, and Jack, and our mystery
man,” continued John Galt.
“Mister Kronoss,” said Ron.
“Yes,” said John Galt, perking up, “I can see
him now. Short hair. Tough. Hard eyes. But handsome. Highly intelligent. He is
watching Joss Chen, even though the rest of them cannot see us. Except Old Ben,
yes, he looked at me, and nodded. Old Ben saw all of us, as did Mister Kronoss,
but the angry guy only looked at Joss. Old Ben is the nice one, the loving one,
with a twinkle in his eye, and Kronoss is the Businessman, and he is severe,
and rigid. But who is he, Kronoss, and why did he terrify Joss?”
They were silent for some time, musing,
glancing into their own laps, concentrating and thinking, rolling the
information around in their consciousness, dredging their subconscious mind,
peering about across the gray expanse, seeking the tell-tale protrusion of any
iceberg clue, anything poking up out of the waters. Because, underneath it all,
they understood that leviathans were swimming in the primordial blackness of
the deep waters.
“It won’t come,” muttered Jethro, frowning in
concentration. “They don’t want us to know about that, they don’t even want us
to think about it—not yet.”
“Step by step, a little bit at a time,” said
John Galt.
“Yes,” said Ron, “and don’t be afraid.”
“Just go with it,” continued Jethro.
“Have some fun, enjoy it,” said John Galt,
looking off, seeing into another world. “It’s almost like I hear someone saying
all of this.”
“Yeah,” said Ron, “it’s Old Ben, Mister
Aajeel. The nice one. He’s on our side. We were a surprise to him, but he likes
us, and he will look out for us, all that he can.”
“I see some guys in a coffee shop,” said
Jethro, as if he were transported, “and Old Ben is standing by a fireplace with
a paperback book, pretending to read, but he’s watching the two guys sitting by
the window, and there’s a woman standing invisible—it’s not our she with the mesmerizing eyes, but some
younger girl, like a college girl, pretty cute, actually, very healthy—wow, she
glows, does that mean she’s pregnant?” concluded Jethro, that same dopey look
permeating his expression.
“Wait, you’re seeing all that?” Ron asked, “what, like a movie?”
“No,” said Jethro, thoughtfully, his eyes
unfocused and looking up, “it’s more like a vivid memory, like I’m watching all
these people from a distance, as if I’ve seen it all before, as if it really
happened, and I was there, except when I choose to, I can see from any of their
perspectives, so it’s not like any movie I’ve ever seen. Kind of like a video
game, one of the really good ones.”
As they watched, his irises disappeared,
rolling up, and he sat there, eyes open, but only showing the whites of his
eyes, with those horrible-looking red veins throbbing.
“And you don’t know any of the people?” John
Galt asked.
“Well...” trailed Jethro, and then after a
moment he said: “Here!” And he held out his hands.
They linked hands in their little triangle,
and then they all—saw. There was
Mister Kronoss, only he was removed from the group, and he was watching the
people in—a coffee shop, not a bookstore. To him, the walls were
semi-transparent, and they watched as he called up translucent windows with
data flashing through the screens.
“Awesome,” breathed Jethro.
“Awesome,” echoed Ron.
“What in the world?” mumbled John Galt, as a
new scene suddenly flashed before them.
They came sweeping out of the sky and saw two
people dashing along on a trail heading up into the mountains, a woman and a
bizarre man. The bizarre man, hugely muscled, had a towering red Mohawk dancing
like a Trojan helmet plume above his head, with a gleaming ax strapped to his
back, and this bizarre circus strongman was carrying someone they knew—Frederic
d’Aconia! Poor Frederic was there, bouncing about in the barbarian’s arms, like
a loose-jointed mannequin.
“That’s Frederic and Frances!” cried Ron.
“Shhhh!” John Galt urged, his eyes turned
upward in his head, only showing white, strangely, and now all three of them
looked the same, with those weird white fleshy eyes, eyes turned upward and
inward, and they sat together, the three men, their foreheads coming together,
touching.
“What the hell is the punk rocker supposed to
be?” Jethro said. “And what’s he doing with Freddy?”
“Did you notice that this is being filmed by
a—bee? A giant bee? A giant bumblebee?” Ron gasped.
They circled about the running figures, the
flight of a bumblebee zooming around almost in a hover, and they saw the
black-tattooed face of the barbarian.
“That is Hank!”
snapped John Galt.
“That’s not Hank,” said Ron and Jethro
together.
“I am telling you, that is Hank,” said John
Galt.
“He’s been drinking a whole lot Slim Fast,” said Jethro, shaking his
head. “And pumping iron—hell, I think he’s been bench-pressing Arnold
Schwarzenegger!”
“And going to a whole lot of Kiss concerts,” put in Ron.
“It is changing him,” said John Galt. “We
always wondered if it would—Sky Valley.”
“You mean High Vale, that’s what she called
it,” said Ron.
“That’s why we never spent the night there,
or fell asleep on the other side of the Red Door. All the rules,” whispered
John Galt, speaking as if in a trance, “because we were afraid it would change
us. Never going over on Saturday, trying to limit our visits to eight hours—it
looks like Hank has been over there for months, if not a whole year, and yet to
us it has only been about a week.”
“We knew that time was different there—now we
know that it is the real time, and ours is the messed up, compressed time,”
muttered Jethro.
“And that’s never made sense, as we are the
simulation,” said John Galt. “We know our time is extremely compressed, running
a whole century in an hour.”
“But we don’t know where our simulation is
running, remember, she said there are simulations inside of simulations inside
simulations,” Jethro shot back.
“At least we know Hank’s alive,” said Ron. “And
Frances must have found him, but what’s up with Frederic.”
“He’s in some kind of coma,” said Jethro. “He
was a whole lot sicker than he ever let on. I mean, come on, we all knew he was
sick.”
“Look,” said John Galt, “the bee is zooming
back, toward whatever that is pursuing them. What is that? A giant beetle made
out of Jell-o?”
“Oh, my...” sputtered Jethro. “Some kind of
monster. Rodney would love it. We knew there were things like that over there.
Well, not like...that.”
“Like a centipede, a cockroach, crabs, and it
looks like a bunch of scrambling sowbugs inside it,” said Ron, in horror. “It’s
a whole lot like a giant sowbug, but spongy.”
“Can we help them?” Jethro asked.
“They are nowhere by the Red Door, I don’t
know how we would find them,” said John Galt.
“It’s shifting again,” said Jethro, clenching
his eyes tightly.
“Rodney,” said Ron, “that’s him, he’s bleeding.”
They witnessed Rodney, their skinny,
wise-cracking friend, sitting in a group of what appeared to be refugees,
beaten and broken people, and there were what looked like—Reptilians, the classic alien-lore creatures, but dressed like,
well, Nazis, in boots and black coats, with strange weapons, nasty-looking
metal weapons, some kind of high-tech rifles, and whips made out of linked
metal, and cable.
“What the hell, what’s he gotten himself
into?” asked Jethro. “The dummy! He’s gotten himself captured by lizards.”
“The kinds of things we’ve seen over there,
we knew there would be the bad, fantastical things, but this is the first of
these,” said John Galt, rocking back and forth, squeezing the hands of his two
friends.
“So Rodney’s over there, and Hank, Frances,
and Frederic,” said Ron. “I wonder if Barney is there somewhere?”
And the scene shifted again, and they saw Barney—it
had to be him, he was hunched over and filthy, in a dark forest setting, and
his face was a bloody mess. He was eating something out of a canvas bag, and as
he stuffed his face, he was casting furtive glances about him.
“It has to be him,” Jethro said, “I knew we
hadn’t seen the last of that guy. You can’t stop a guy like Barney. I suppose
all the brain stuff was just for show.”
“Maybe not,” said John Galt, rocking faster. “Show
us Joss Chen, where is Joss?”
The scene shifted again, and they saw Joss
Chen standing next to a beefy guy that looked somewhat familiar.
“Who is that with Joss?” John Galt asked.
“You’re squeezing my hand too hard,” Jethro
suddenly wailed.
“Damn it, John, yeah, you’re breaking my
hand,” wheezed Ron, vainly trying to pull his hand away from John Galt.
All three suddenly fell backward, jerked away
from each other, thrown onto their backs, their legs waving in the air. In the
air about them was the sizzled scent of heated wires, or fried ozone.
“I remember him, that was the Viking, the guy
who escaped!” John Galt breathed. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
“Yeah, that was the Viking, Joss must have
found him,” breathed Jethro, writhing onto his side.
“That was some electric shock, like maybe we
just got busted for prying into things we’re not supposed to see,” said Ron,
lying on his side, blinking his eyes rapidly.
“Ding! Ding! Ding!” cried a voice loudly as
someone strolled into the Red Door room. “Yes indeed, prying into things you
are certainly not supposed to see, let alone understand.”
The three men sprawled out on the floor,
lurched away from the startling entrance, half-crawling to squat upon their
haunches in their scramble to escape the presence.
“What have you naughty boys been jacking
into?” queried the woman with the hypnotic green eyes, standing in her tight
red dress with her long hands upon her hips, her gaze sweeping over them. “Generally
when I wipe a cast-off, they stay
wiped.”
“So what?” John Galt snarled, half-making it
to his feet. “Now we are rejects? You’ve rejected us?”
“No one rejected any of you,” Phoebe stated,
and somehow she pulled a long black coat over her body, and belted the coat
about her waist, as if she wanted to hide the red dress from them. She even
seemed somewhat contrite. But unlike when they’d seen her before, she now
appeared glamorous, and beautiful, and decidedly sexy. “But your time is nearly
spent, and it is by your actions that you determine your fate, not by your
words. Hmmm, but what have you three been up to? Oh, now, yes, now this is
interesting,” she said, looking about herself at something she could see but
which was hidden to their eyes.
“Well, now, that is surprising. You have
somehow formed a three-in-one circuit, and perhaps you are determining your own
fate, nice, good job there, this is a lot of your own work, Jethro, I am
surprised, you remind me of a fellow named Punchinello, a natural, and as
expected John Galt kept you focused, which must have been a chore, decidedly,
and, but oh, hey, you have even turned up a few things I might have missed. Look
at that. Just...look, yes, right there, Mister Kronoss is looking at Joss Chen,
and Joss Chen...does recognize
Kronoss, why, I never. He does not even glance at the rest of you lot.
“It seems that all the Shepherds are running
a few hidden experiments off on their own, yes, yes—oh, naughty Kronoss, yes,
naughty Kronoss. Hmmm, very dangerous, but it does explain some of that Joss
Chen glamour.”
“What are we supposed to do?” John Galt
blurted. Jethro and Ron looked at him in surprise, and they gawked, because it
looked like their strong friend John Galt, always so focused, always so
serious, was about to burst into tears.
“What are you supposed to do?” Phoebe
repeated. “I don’t care what you do. Do whatever you want. Work for a better
promotion, rob a bank, go to church, cease to pay your income taxes, read a
book on how to pick up chicks—I really don’t care. It’s not up to me. I am done
with this pathetic...spreadsheet
world. So-called world. I only came back because you set off an alarm on some
of my data caches, and if you try anything like that again, you very well might
alert entities you do not wish to ever turn their gaze this way, and take notice
of you. If you ever see a man with a strangely flat and melted face, and with
feathers for hair, you better run—not that there is anywhere you can escape to,
except possibly through...there.”
They looked where she was indicating,
following her gaze, and her pointing index finger.
She was pointing at the Red Door.
“But you’re the one who did all this, can’t
you give us direction?” John Galt asked, tears welling in his eyes.
“I did not do all this, as you claim,” Phoebe snapped. “I had nothing at all
to do with this Red Door and what lies beyond. None of this remotely hinges
upon my duties. I see things in a few of you, and I think a few of you may
actually exist, some day, long in the future, if they ever get Vestigial
Surreality right, and figure out the problem of human hatred and suicidal
urges.
“But Joss Chen does interest me. Perhaps I am
only now deciphering the strange fascination he holds for me, but it is a
dangerous game I am playing, and I very well might be dragged before the
Shaannii. I warn you, do not form a three-in-one circuit again, at least not in
this low-resolution, poor excuse for a world. Someone much worse than me will
find you, and then, finding you, they very well might focus upon me. So, you
will be crossing me, endangering me, if you try anything like this again.
“If you want to perform magic, technological
magic, do it through there,” she concluded, again pointing at the Red Door.
“So we can do it over there, and you won’t
mind?” Ron asked.
“It will have nothing to do with me, when you
are on that side of your Red Door, and you will have a hundredfold more power,
Jethro Mouch, but I would suggest that all of you choose new names, over there.
Because, your names are pathetic.”
“What will happen to the Red Door when this
world expires?” John Galt asked.
“Oh, I should think that the Red Door will
remain, always, it would be most difficult to shut it down, now that someone
very powerful went through all this effort to open it, and now at least I know
who and why they opened it, so I thank you for that aid. In fact, I suspect
that I owe you three for what you have done for me this day, so I will do this
for you,” she finished, smirking at them, her strange green eyes awhirl.
The three men got to their feet, and stood
before her.
“Do not do anything here, in this world, I
caution you—no, I warn you. Strike that. I threaten
you, that’s my point, little bastard children. Do not cross me. Only use this
gift after you’ve crossed through the Red Door, and when your spreadsheet world
ends, and if you cross back through this portal into a new world, feel free to
use this gift there, or in truth, anywhere you trek.”
“What’s the gift?” Jethro Mouch asked, eyes
alight with fire and terror.
“I’m not going to tell you everything,”
Phoebe said, rolling her emerald eyes, shaking her head, but grinning. “But
when you are in the next world over, tap your left shoulder, right in the
middle, and then explore. And then, as Old Ben likes to say, just go with it, a
little at a time, and have some fun.”
“And don’t be afraid?” John Galt asked.
“No, I wouldn’t go that far. For the while, I
would be afraid, if I were you, until you know you are under the protection of
at least one patron Shepherd, I would be very afraid.”
“Aren’t you our patron Shepherd?” Ron asked.
“Nope. Not even close. We all have our
favorites, but you’ll have to get out there, and do something, take some
chances, do the right thing, and live a little, and I’m sure someone will come
along.”
“That’s it?” John Galt asked.
“That’s pretty much it,” Phoebe said. “Good
luck, children.”
And she walked through the Red Door. She didn’t
open it, or unlock it, she just walked right through, as if it wasn’t there.
Ron hurried after her, hoping to catch her
portal, taking her final words literally. He needed to get out there, and live
a little, and this was his first chance.
He walked pell-mell into the metal door, his
nose and face crashing loudly under his full weight, and fell backward into the
room, knocked unconscious.
“It reminds of a joke,” Jethro said. “A guy
walks into a door...”
“I suppose we must go through the Red Door,
now, and find out what our gift is,” John Galt said.
“I wonder,” said Jethro, lifting his right
hand toward his shoulder.
“Don’t even think about it,” John Galt
snapped, seizing Jethro’s rising hand and putting a squeeze on it.
“Ow! Knock it off,” Jethro wailed. “It might
bring her back. We need to pester her the rude bitch, daring us like that, we need to keep on her, make her give in.”
“I do not think that she is that kind of rude woman, Jethro. She dared us. But do not cross her,” John Galt commanded, and then he threw aside
the other man’s arm, and he went to the Red Door and unbarred it, and unlocked
it, and then he grasped the handle, and he opened the Red Door.
The sweet air rushed into the room, almost
knocking them over, but they breathed deeply, and John Galt passed through the
portal.
“As soon as you wake up, hurry over,” said
Jethro to the man on the ground, whose eyelids were fluttering and whose arms
and legs were twitching.
Jethro stood for several seconds, then took a
deep breath, and he took up the rude dare, and crossed over.
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Fifteen: Rude Dare
If you like Rood Der, try
Vestigial Surreality online free:
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der. All Rights Reserved by the Author, Douglas Christian Larsen. No part of this serial fiction may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited, but please feel free to share the story with anyone, only not for sale or resale. This work is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental (wink, wink).
Douglas Christian Larsen FREE Short Fiction
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Douglas Christian Larsen Novel:
Read FREE Sample Chapters of the Rodolphus Novels:
DCLWolf Links:
related terms, ideas, works:
ancestor simulation, digital ark, salvation of humanity,
vestigial surreality, manda project, rocket to saturn,
the singularity, the butterfly effect, simulated reality, matrix,
virtual reality, otherland, the matrix, 1q84, haruki murakami,
hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world, dreaming,
the dream place, waking from a dream, ready player one,
hologram, holodeck, saturn, saturnalia, cycles of time,
simulacron-3, daniel f. galouye, counterfeit world,
tad williams, science fantasy, science fiction,
Victor Frankenstein, Nikola Tesla, genius
do we live in a computer simulation?
mystery, thriller, horror, techno thriller,
signs and wonders, vestigial surreality,
william gibson, neal stephenson, serial,
cyberpunk, dystopian future, apocalypse,
scifi, mmorpg, online video game world,
end times, apocalypse, armageddon,
digital universe, hologram universe,
sunday sci-fi fantasy serial fiction,
virtual reality, augmented reality
the unknown writer blog
are we living in a simulation?
puppets, puppetry, punch & judy
elon musk, Tesla, VR, mmorpg
simulated world, data is data
simulation hypothesis
simulation argument
nick bostrom
No comments:
Post a Comment