The Birth Of The Infinite I

Vivian Hensleigh sat back in the cab and shook out an unfiltered Capstan superstrength joint from the silver case which he kept in the left breast pocket of his exquisitely tailored Saville Row suit. Up front, the driver rambled on about Enoch Powell in a borderline unintelligible Cockney patois, utterly unaware of the bizarre transformation which was about to take place behind him. Lighting the joint, luxuriating in the sweet, cloying miasma it produced, Vivian caught sight of his reflection in the silver lighter he held in his perfectly manicured fingers. The man staring back at him from the depths of the mirrored surface was a strong, handsome chap, something big in the city, a hit with the ladies and an all round good egg. Educated, well to do, a bit of a toff but not insufferably so, he was the paragon of upper class manhood in the early 1970s. Looking deeper, he found himself locked inside the endless echo chamber of his own icy, tuetonic eyes. The lighter burnt his fingers, hot rocks from the joint dropping onto the lapels of his whistle, but he was no longer there to feel it.


Nodding out, like all the other stoners. Bloody weekend hippy. Looks too well off for that lark. Probably spends every ha'penny on designer flares and Habitat rugs for his flat in Maida Vale. Wanker.

Viv Hensleigh grunted, sitting up, wondering where the voice had come from. He glanced in the rear view mirror to see if it was his fare but the wanker was still drifting in the back seat. Gripping the steering wheel tighter, he wondered if he'd pulled one all-night shift too many this week. It's that or I'm going bloody doolally.

Slowing to let a couple of pedestrians pass at a pelican crossing, he spotted a lovely young dolly bird in a miniskirt and platform heels struggling to cross without flashing her bum. He waited until she was right in front of the cab, then leant heavily on the horn. She jumped, startled, rewarding him with a flash of white cotton panties that would do him a treat next time the missus went to sleep and left him to fend for himself.

What a perv! The dirty old sod's old enough to be me dad! Me grandad even! Feller in the back look's half decent, but he's not even looked my way. Probably too embarrassed. I'm sure I've seen him on the telly; looks really familiar.

Vivien Hensleigh stood in front of the cab, peering at the man in the back seat, until the driver beeped his horn again and slowly nosed towards her. Shaken from her thoughts, she tottered off to the other side of the road and watched the cab glide past, the passenger still fixated on the shiny silver object in his hand. Transfixed, she turned to keep it in sight for as long as she could, until it disappeared into the underpass at the end of the street.

As the cab momentarily darkened, Vivian Hensleigh sat up in the back seat and shook himself, questions cascading through his chaotic thoughts. Was I really in their minds? Why were they all just like me? Why did we all have the same name?

But the questions would never be answered, as the cab came back out into the blinding sunlight and the polished lighter exploded like a silver star in his hand. The light seemed more intense than the sun, brighter than the white hot heart of the big bang but colder than the depths of the Arctic Ocean. Every glint and gleam was caught and refracted, reflected through the mini-nova he held in his petrified fingers. The flesh was stripped from his bones, every fibre of muscle and sinew scorched away by the light of the silver star, peeling back every layer of his physical form, paring away the days and decades of accumulated existence. At the same time, a sweet, delicate fragrance filled the cab, something Eastern and exotic, like the smells from the curry house on the high street but less fearsome, and he felt his head swimming as if he'd gone through the whole pack of joints in a single session. The radio was playing My Sweet Lord, just for him, and from somewhere close at hand, three soft voices sang in his ear.

"Gurur Brama..."

With a sickening lurch, the cab left the road and ploughed through the railings surrounding a small park, destroying a stand of young trees. A flock of birds erupted into sky, screeching in alarm.

"Gurur Vishnu..."

The driver fell back in his seat, his eyes wide, staring but unseeing, his consciousness a raging void.

"Gurur Devo Maheshwaraha..."

Passersby and pedestrians ran to their aid, but as the radius of his burgeoning consciousness expanded to encompass the park and the roads around it, they too were overtaken by the spreading mind of the new-born Godhead. Limbs and minds slackening, they fell to the ground, the lucky few resting against one another, dropping like flies. A car mounted the kerb and crashed through a television rental shop window, its tyres leaving a black rubber exclamation mark on the pavement. A moment later, the driver slipped out of his seat, crawled as far as the shop doorway, then dropped alongside all the other sleeping vessels.

"Gurur Saakshat Para Brahma..."

As the light of the silver star burned away His shadow, the being once known as Vivian Hensleigh cast His mind out across the face of creation, a searing white hot flame of thought which flickered and roared in the lantern skulls of all the little humans He found.

"Tasmai Sree Gurave Namaha..."

They were all like Him. More; they all were Him. Extensions and reflections of His own self, like a soul in a hall of mirrors. He felt Himself being subsumed into the greater mind of the universe, a single drop of water in a limitless ocean, and it terrified Him. From a hundred million mouths, He screamed.

"Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna..."

His scream was the birth cry of a new universe, and as it sent ripples through the neighbouring realms, He felt the fear it generated, and in an instant, a paradigm shift of cosmic proportions occurred. No longer dissipating into the overmind, the new God felt Himself infect it at every level, a viral deity spreading like cancer through the healthy flesh of existence.

"Krishna Krishna..."

The souls He touched were His, to raise up and smite down as He saw fit, to animate with life or to consign to the tomb world once and for all. Looking down upon the vacant form of the cab driver, He felt the urge to raze the whole of creation and begin anew, with a strict exclusion policy for oiks like that. But what then of the man in the back seat, or the girl at the side of the road? They were all aspects of Himself; all He could do was fight to preserve them, one and all, for all eternity. What use is a dying God?

"Hare Hare..."

With a wistful sigh, the divine being returned to His cage of flesh and blood, slowly withdrawing His controlling influence from the tiny souls surrounding Him, turning back the wheel of time to return them to their original states; Glass reformed, charred embers blazed briefly into flame, then died away to leave perfect forms beneath, broken bones knitted and healed in the blink of His cosmic eye. Life seeped back in to the scattered shells and the spark of sentience flashed anew in countless eyes. He had taken His people to the brink of destruction and returned them whole and unharmed; His was a benevolent, loving reign, and it would last until the final star was plucked from the firmament by His majestic hand and doused at His decree.

"Hare Rama..."

Settling back into the ill-fitting form of Vivian Hensleigh, He thought of the life He had known and understood how poorly it would suit Him now. Like The Redeemer, He would walk amongst them instead, taking on their sins, relieving them of their burdens, bringing them back to His loving arms one soul at a time.

"Hare Rama..."

As the radio faded out, Hensleigh became aware of movement and noise nearby. Opening his eyes, he found that he was still in the back of the cab and that they seemed to have been in an accident; There was a cast iron fence pole poking through the shattered window and a number of firemen were inspecting it and shouting at him. He couldn't hear what they were saying as they appeared to be at the bottom of an almost endless well, peering up at him with faces frozen in masks of concern and despair. Leaning forwards to peer more closely at them, he felt a tearing sensation at his shoulder and realised that the fence post came much further in than he had at first surmised; at least three inches of it was embedded in the seat behind him, having passed right through his shoulder on its short journey. He howled, then wondered why the universe hadn't recoiled in terror at the sound. As the world rushed back in to surround him, he realised that he had been dreaming, an instant of excruciating pain and shock tipping his mind from the rails, sending it screeching through the stranger realms of hallucination and insanity. Despite his pain, despite the creeping numbness which affected his right arm and the certain knowledge that it would never work again, Hensleigh giggled. The fireman leaning in through the window with a ferocious set of oversized bolt cutters to trim his iron pinion paused and shouted at him.

"Are you alright sir?"

Hensleigh grinned, "I think I met God."

The fireman smiled back as he prepared to cut through the fence post, "Really? Well, I'm sure he'll get you through this. What did he have to say for himself?"

The fireman tried to move the post as little as possible, but it was impossible not to and the cold iron ground against the ruins of his shoulder, crushing and twisting the bones and snapping more tendons and nerves. Hensleigh gritted his teeth in a rictus grin.

"He said, doolang doolang doolang!"

Then the post snapped, the end springing upright and severing the last sinuous threads which gave him control over his arm, the pain lancing through his mind like a red hot javelin. He screamed until his lungs ached and his voice went, cracking two fillings as he ground his teeth together. The sudden spurt of blood which sprayed the seat in front of him was the final straw and the new constellation it created, ruby stars on the black leather sky, was the last thing he saw as the darkness overtook him and he fell into merciful unconsciousness.

Perhaps the world went away, with no guiding light to shepherd it. Perhaps the souls simply winked out of existence with no deity to look upon them. Perhaps the universe held its breath, waiting for the new God to return from the darkness and to bestow life upon it once more. Perhaps all this and more occurred when Hensleigh went away, but if no-one exists except in the light of the Lord's gaze, then who can say what happened while He slept?

.........

Tick...


Are people inherently evil?

The thought drifted unbidden into Felicity Makeshift's mind as she crouched on the ledge, 15 storeys above the flaming bus she had crashed through the Hospital doors just half an hour earlier.

Can an evil man ever truly do good?

Tick...

And if a good man does evil, is he still good?

Springing upwards and out she hurled herself into the void, still pondering the unknowable matter of the soul.

Tick...

Are we just our deeds, or does intent still count?

Throwing out her arms, Fliss released the nano-filament webbing which stretched from her wrists to the waistband of her skintight black leather flight suit and braced herself for the impact.

BOOM!

The explosion took out the top three floors of the hospital, the shockwave billowing the flight membranes and throwing Fliss high above the skyline. She rode the thermal updraft and executed a graceful loop. At apogee she took a moment to admire the view, hanging in the air like a black-clad angel, looking out across the smoking ruins of Westminster and the burning thread of the Thames, well into its sixth year of perpetual flame. Then she dropped into a swooping, sweeping dive and landed on the roof of the British Museum, touching down on one exquisitely formed foot with all the effort of an 18th Century noblewoman alighting from a carriage at the Palace Ball.

"Bravo! Bellisima!"

Applauding softly, Stanford stepped from the shadows as Fliss tapped the palm control to retract the flight membranes and gave a curtsey.

"Why thank you kind sir. But what brings our favourite American to this Gods-forsaken hole?"

Stanford shrugged.

"The Dandelion Brigade got word of your action here and I thought I'd swing by and say hello."

Fliss smoothed a wrinkle from the sleeve of her catsuit, frowning.

"You came all this way just to see me?"

"I've gone much further than that in the past."

Looking thoughtful, Fliss unzipped her suit down to her ample cleavage, slipped one slender hand inside and withdrew a silver cigarette case. She lit up, then offered the case to Stanford. He shook his head, raising the twin M15 pistols he held as an explanation. Understanding, Fliss slipped the case away once more.

"Of course you have," she said, "but that was all such a long time ago. Before."

Stanford smiled sadly.

"Before. Is that how we're referring to it now? I guess it was quite a watershed moment. Everything divides quite nicely into before my two-timing lesbo bitch girlfriend shot me in the head, and after. It really rearranges things, you know?"

Felicity exhaled a smoky protective sigil and tapped out a complex rhythm with her left boot heel, sending an emergency evac request to Monk Blue's antique 1933 Mickey Mouse watch. Inserting the mechanism had involved ripping out the original clockwork innards, but as the watch was actually an early German fake, Monk hadn't worried too much about it. It no longer kept any sort of time, Mickey's hands forever frozen at 11:25 in a perfect Nazi salute, a coincidence not lost on Fliss, Monk, or the horologist who finally deciphered the coded inscription on the back of the case and identified it as the same Disney knock-off Hitler had worn when he gave the order to invade Poland. Now the priceless artifact had been disembowelled and rebuilt with the ability to rouse Monk from even the deepest narcotized slumbers.

As it sounded he raised his head from the sticky bar, wiped stale crisps from his face and took a look around to try and work out who was doing all the screaming. The pub was closed, the jukebox a smouldering wreck in the corner, the barman was still out cold under the pool table and he vaguely recalled releasing the landlord's parrot in the small hours of the morning in the woefully mistaken belief that he knew how to catch, kill, skin and eat it. He'd chased it into the gents, trying to entice it into a salad-filled pitta bread, but the wily beast had avoided becoming a kebab by trapping him in a cubicle and flying out of the window. So, not the parrot, not the barman, not an avant garde punk track, no other customers...

"Am I screaming?" he wondered aloud. "No; Speaking. Can't scream and speak at the same time. Or can I?"

He gripped the bar with both hands and gave it his best shot, screaming like a Francis Bacon Pope and offering himself a nice cup of tea at the same time. He strained his throat and bit his tongue, but it was a valiant effort all the same. He thought that with more practise, suitable lubrication for the vocal chords and a more vowel heavy sentence, he might just manage it.

"I'll pour myself a couple of pints," he decided, "then give it another go."

He pulled himself up onto the bar, rolled over and dropped onto his back on the other side. The carpet was sodden with flat beer, soapy dishwater and brawler's blood and studded with countless tiny shards of broken glass.

Screaming once more, Monk flailed around in surprise, lashing out wildly at the evil goblins who he knew had to be holding the dozens of tiny spears which were suddenly embedded in his back and buttocks. With one random kick he managed to bring the drip tray down upon his head and the sudden deluge finally brought him to his senses.

"The goblins can wait," he thought, scrambling to his feet but remaining crouched behind the bar. "Must find out who's screaming."

He listened, but it was hard to concentrate on the screams as the strap of his Nazi Mickey watch was causing a sharp pain in his wrist. At regular beats, a hot, stabbing sensation made the fingers of his left hand spasm and close. Annoyingly, the bursts of fiery pain and the brain-clenching howls had somehow synchronized, so that he couldn't focus on one without the other intruding. Still, at least he knew where the pain was coming from; Perhaps he could deal with that first. He peered intently at the watch, the rodent's red eyes blinking demonically in time with the rhythmic jolts. Activating a nanoscopic recording chip embedded in his left ear lobe, he began his investigation.

"Time is, ah, 11:25 precisely. Most likely AM. Location unknown. Room appears to consist of a single rectangular space three metres long by two deep by one metre high, populated by invisible goblins, number unknown. At the far end of the room is a large white metal bird cage, the bars bent outwards as though something much larger than the average parrot has climbed inside the cage and attempted to flap its wings; Possible goblin involvement here as well. Will investigate further once I solve the case at hand, to wit, why is my signal watch making all that noise? ...Oh..."

Reaching up with his thumb and forefinger, Monk silently squeezed his earlobe, purging the recorder. Better if no-one else heard that. Pulling himself upright, he reached out and slipped a pint glass under the vodka optic, made a mental note to come back and deal with the goblins at the earliest opportunity then knocked back half a pint of neat Russian breakfast. Then he sent a sub-lightspeed coded info-pellet to the central hub, asking for four point triangulation on Fliss and an immediate exfiltration. The request traversed the almost infinite distance between Monk and the hub in the mis-firing of an opiate damaged synapse, burrowing through successive layers of reality like a hungry tick in a fat dog's flesh.

Monk imagined the universe to resemble a jellyfish, with a thick, gelatinous core where most of the conscious thought occurred and hundreds of thousands of thick, ropy stinging tendrils hanging down from the outer edge. The multiverse was a stack of jellyfish as high as time and as wide as existence, the stingers overlapping and completely covering the softer flesh, so that the overall structure resembled an endless column of soft, luminous matter wrapped entirely in intertwining strands. This outer skin prevented anything from inside escaping - and vice versa - but it also allowed for restricted movement between universes. This transuniversal travel involved a searing pain of such intensity that only the astrally adept or terminally insane dared risk it, and it rarely worked with any degree of success. In fact, it was this bone-deep agony that inspired Monk's jellyverse, as it was akin to climbing up the stinger of a massive Portuguese Man O' War wearing only a pair of speedos. Of course, the Man O' War isn't really a jellyfish, any more than the multiverse is shaped like an infinite stack of invertebrates, and Monk knew it, but he never liked to let hard facts get in the way of his beliefs. He just gave silent thanks to the patron saint of wasted metaphysicists and sat back to wait for the good word to come down from the hub.

Existing in all universes simultaneously, in a different form in each one and accessible from just about any point in the space-time continuum, the hub was Monk's name for the base from which all of their operations were launched. As with the jellyverse, he had created his own explanation for the hub's existence, a deeply held personal belief that framed the hub as the central repository for all archetypal thought-forms, dreams and visions, with a slow puncture which allowed consciousness to leak out into the various universes like so much excess gas. And as with the jellyverse, Monk's interpretation was far from the truth, but there was no-one to tell him any different. The only details anyone could confirm for certain about it was that it was bigger on the outside than it was on the inside, by a factor somewhere close to infinity, it had a tendency to drift a little to the left when stationary, which made calculating re-entry a bitch, and the upper floor was currently on fire.

This was a relatively recent development. Inside the hub, the third floor had been aflame for less than ten minutes. Outside, the renaissance had ended just as the first sparks caught the curtains and Oppenheimer had stood in the Mojave desert and wept at around the same time Arihaily's Bowie posters had turned to ash.

Dragging her bed away from the wall, beating at the singed edges of her Strawberry Shortcake duvet cover, Ari tried to understand what was happening. Was it an attack? Was the world ending? Had she fallen asleep with a lit cigarette again? The answer came almost instantly as a small flaming orb screeched past her and out onto the landing. Running out after it, Ari leant over the railing at the top of the stairs to call for backup.

"Midge! MIDGE! It's back again!"

Doubling back on itself, the orb slipped back up the stairs, hidden by a thick cloud of black smoke. While Arihaily was busy raising the alarm, the orb set light to the balusters. With a sudden crack, the bannister gave way and Ari toppled forwards, landing head first on the smouldering stairs. Tumbling down to the next landing, she sat up and gripped her head with both hands until it stopped spinning. Her nose was bloodied and she had a nasty bump on her left temple, but apart from this she was remarkably healthy and ready to fight back. Looking up to locate her quarry, she was just in time to see the newel post crashing down upon her.

Recovery took a moment longer after this impact, during which time the orb set light to her shirt, then headed for the occupied areas of the floor. Tearing away the lit half of her shirt and slapping at her singed underthings, Ari took off after the orb, following the trail of flame and destruction towards the kitchen.

Like the malevolent spirit of a Chuck Jones cartoon given spherical chrome-plated form, the orb waited just inside for her, the tip of its flame licking gently at the multicoloured plastic ribbon curtain which hung in the doorway. As Ari moved to sweep the curtain aside, it went up in a flash, blackening her porcelain skin and singeing her eyebrows. Grinding her teeth and clenching her fists, she moved into the kitchen and began to run the water into the sink.

Behind her, the orb hovered just out of reach, as if watching her every move. As she filled the largest jug she could find, it drew back into the shadows, dimming its fires and sinking into the darkness. By the time she turned back it had disappeared altogether.

"Midge godsdammit! Where are you?"

Turning in a slow, wary circle, Ari called again for her missing comrade, looking at the same time for the fiery interloper. Seizing it's opportunity, the orb silently slipped out from its hiding place, rolled along the floor and drifted up until it hovered directly beneath the water-filled jug. A single flame appeared at its apex, surreptitiously melting through the base.

"MIDGE!"

At the moment when she screamed the loudest, the base of the jug gave way and a steady stream of icy water jetted out and soaked the crotch and legs of her jeans. With a faint popping, the orb relit and shot off towards the door.

Singed, smokey, half naked and soaked to the bone from the waist down, Ari screeched furiously and hurled herself after it once more. Losing her footing on the stairs she gave up on gravity altogether and soared aloft, racing the orb up and down the corridors and stairwells, rattling along the gleaming white expanse of Felicity's quarters and scattering the haphazard piles of comics littering Monk's rooms, exploding through the pressurised doors of the central chamber and warping fifty years of vinyl LPs along the way. Scooping up all available missiles as she passed by, Ari launched books, ashtrays, stuffed rabbits and hunting caps at the fleeing orb, fouling its trajectory and causing it to ricochet off walls and doorframes. The orb retaliated by increasing its core temperature to the point where every impact caused another fire to instantly erupt, so that Ari found herself flying through archways of flame, dodging blazing lampshades and skimming over scorched carpet and superheated laminate flooring that bubbled and burst, spattering her with molten plastic and splinters of fake wood.

Circling around the central chamber for what felt like the fiftieth time, with short circuits buzzing and fitzing around her head, lights flashing and sirens wailing, Ari finally understood how to deal with the orb. On her next swoop past, she stuck out an arm and slammed the door shut, jamming it into the frame so tightly that little less than a full frontal attack from outside would open it again. They were trapped in a closed loop now, going ever faster but getting nowhere. The orb was leaving a trail of flames in the air as it whizzed around the chamber, a glowing circle of heat. As the speed increased, it began to run over the end of its own trail, setting fire to the flames it had left behind it. Screaming with the effort, Ari struggled to keep up, reaching out to try and grasp the orb, her fingertips brushing the molten chrome surface, her fingernails blackening and crackling, curling up in the intense heat. The orb knew how close she was and put on a final burst of speed, zooming along in its mad flight like an insane miniature comet trying to devour its own tail.

Panting heavily, Ari came to a dead stop, watching for a moment as the orb whipped past her face a dozen times. Fixated on it's forward motion, the orb failed to register that it was no longer being pursued. Trapped in the cycle, it whipped round the room in a steady, predictable flightpath.

Working rapidly, Arihaily crouched at the base of a monitoring station and used her bare fingers to unscrew an inspection plate. Half a metre square, the solid steel panel was designed to withstand all manner of missile attacks, protecting the delicate circuitry within the monitor. Gripping it tightly at the top and bottom, Ari held it parallel with the flaming trail, waited for the orb to whip past, then held it out across the return path.

Unable to steer itself out of the way, the orb collided with the panel at something approaching the speed of sound. The panel shattered, the shards melting into globs of blazing ore even as they flew through the air, splattering the walls, floor and ceiling with smoky silver dots. Ari's arms snapped to one side, yanking her from her feet and sending her spinning into the monitor, smashing the screens and dials into a flurry of twinkling glass snowflakes. The noise of the collision blew out her eardrums and left her unable to hear anything but her own hysterical giggling.

At the last instant, seeing the imminent impact, the orb had tried to stop in mid-flight, but momentum had overtaken it, bending and warping it over and onward, so that for a final, fleeting instant it appeared to hang motionless in the air, watching the panel rush towards it. In that moment, the orb surrendered to the inevitability of destruction and dimmed its flames, marshaling its energy reserves for one last mighty burst. Hitting the panel dispersed those reserves in an apocalyptically explosive manner. The flame disc erupted outwards at a perfect horizontal, cutting a black band into the walls, bursting all of the monitor screens and blowing the door back out, sending it hurtling down the corridor. Flying like a silver surfboard down the short distance between the central chamber and the restroom, it sailed through the bathroom door with sledgehammer force, slamming into the wall to hang suspended above the toilet where Midge sat. Clutching her book so tightly that it split down the spine into two separate pieces, looking up at the door, she tried to make some sort of witty comment but no words would appear. Instead she let rip with the kind of fart which can only be produced when a nice, relaxed bowel movement is interrupted by an unexpected near death experience. Still deafened by the blast, Ari couldn't hear the parp, but there was little doubt what had happened when the methane hit the flickering flames of the chamber door and a burning nimbus haloed out around her colleague's head. Laughing wildly, she pulled herself upright, leaving several tufts of smouldering hair caught on the wrecked monitor. Patting the flames out, she brushed aside a lump of charred circuitboard and spotted the blinking red light of an emergency beacon.

"Oh shit..."

Pounding at the half-dead monitoring station, she managed to patch the signal through to her wrist receiver. Flipping back the cover, she projected the incoming message onto the smoky air, fearing the worst. Still pulling her trousers up, Midge stepped up beside her, reading the request.

"There's no way we can get a whereabouts report with the hub so fucked up," she said calmly. "There's only one way we can help now."

"What?"

"There's no way... Oh forget it. Here, do like me."

Placing her hands on the deafened Arihaily's shoulders, Midge pushed her down to her knees amidst the burning wreckage, then joined her, holding her hands up with the palms exposed. Understanding, Ari pressed her own palms against her friend's, feeling the cool skin against her own hot flesh. As Midge began to chant, the coolness seemed to spread up her arms and shoulders and across her chest. Her breath came in short, hitching gasps as the air froze in her lungs. Before her, Midge's words appeared in the air between them as her exhalations turned to mist. The flames surrounding them died away as the temperature continued to drop. The lights dimmed, the walls receded as the space between universes trickled in to fill the void they had created. This was as close as they had ever dared go before, far closer than they ever chose to go voluntarily. If there hadn't been agents in immediate danger they would never have attempted it. As the room descended into total darkness and the simple movement of blood through icily constricted cells began to cause unimaginable pain, as they wavered on the edge of hypothermic death in the limitless wastes of non-space, they saw their goal.

Hanging between them like an unspoken secret was a silver sliver of potential, the barest glimpse of the underpinnings of creation. It was the heart of it all and no more than a single facet of the endless majesty. It was Heaven and Hell, the beginning and the end and the birth and the death of all things. It was the appearance in that time and place of the petrified star, and the people who lived there were doing the twist.

Deep in the frigid heart of the silver star, the burning figures were dancing. It made them happy to dance, and they chose their music on a whim, a stately waltz one moment, a pogoing punk howl the next. But they never missed a call. Unlike Monk, who heard but didn't understand, or Ari, who didn't hear at all, the charred souls recognized each signal for what it was. They saw the reasons behind and beyond its intrusion into their sanctum sanctorum and they saw also the chain of potential futures trailing out ahead of them, an endlessly bifurcating stream of yes/no equations. Of course, that meant that they already knew when the next call would come through, but they still liked to pretend that they didn't know which way they would go in any situation. As Chubby Checker came to a close, the two youngest beings entwined their hands and sang together in a croaking, lilting melody, dancing in a merry, skipping circle as they went.

"Do we answer?"

"Yes or no?"

"Not to answer?"

"Yes or no?"

"Wants an answer?"

"Yes or no?

"Gets an answer?"

"Yes or no?"

The elder essence of the beloved took a step away from the spinning figures and used a charcoal finger to trace the line of flames from the hospital roof, through the smouldering jukebox, on to the damaged hub and finally to their own realm of frozen fire. Seeing the hidden patterns swirling in the ashes, the elder smiled, releasing a wisp of merry smoke. It was good. Reaching out with one scorched hand, the essence selected a single 45 from the stack beneath the flaming bed and lowered it reverently onto the spindle of the little record player, lovingly caressing its red leatherette case. At the first crackle, the first faint hiss of the stylus in the groove, the spinning children disentangled themselves; They had an answer.

As the song throbs into life, as the guitars drive out a rhythm as primal as the tide and as deep as the moon, they dance again, all three aspects of the essence, the whole family unit of flame in their home in the heart of the stillborn sun.



And Norman Greenbaum Sings...



Drifting back into consciousness, shivering against the cold which had crept into their bones, Ari and Midge helped each other to stand, huddled together for warmth. Caressing her comrade's bare shoulders, Midge felt an overwhelming urge to weep, and she saw it reflected in Ari's eyes in the instant before they kissed. The essence of the beloved touched their world and drew them together in a joyful expression of unity and love, and they expressed it as a physical equation, you plus me equals us. Deeply, passionately, they kissed and caressed and held each other tightly, their wandering hands entwining and trailing across unknown landscapes of soft yielding flesh. Catching her fingers on the strap of Ari's wrist receiver, Midge absently keyed in the co-ordinates for Felicity's safe retrieval, then loosened the strap and tossed it aside as her other hand worked on the infinitely more interesting catch on Ari's bra.



Working on his second pint, Monk also felt the movement of a warm breeze through the branches of his mind. He understood what had happened before the signal came through, and he gave silent thanks to the beloved for their intercession on his behalf. Monk was not just a name, and in his core he knew that he belonged to them, had failed them, but still they came to his aid. Forever and ever amen.

"Amen," he belched, then drew out a simple 5D map in spilled beer on the bar. Longitude, latitude, height in relation to sea level. X Y and Z. Drawing the line out and away from the bar, he factored in the U axis, the precise point within the multitude of stacked universes where Felicity had once, was now or would eventually be standing. The fifth axis he drew into the bar, tracking back to it's inception as a small green shoot in the rich loamy soil and forward to its end when the bar, the pub and the whole city would be engulfed in the ever rising waters and the slow process of rot and decay would strip it down to its component atoms. This was the T axis, time. Now he knew where, when and in which universe Fliss was about to die, getting there was the easy part. Drawing up the loose edges of reality, he shook it like a quilt and propelled himself onwards and upwards, moving through the jellyverse like a sentient pineapple chunk.



"... before my two-timing lesbo bitch girlfriend shot me in the head, and after. It really rearranges things, you know?"

"I'm sure it does," Fliss said calmly, "but you have to accept that it wasn't exactly an unprovoked attack. Remember?"

Stanford shook his head violently.

"Don't even try to say that I asked for it. You slept with her in our bed, and when I tried to talk to you about it, you shot me in the head."

Reaching up, he tore off his toupee and revealed the mottled, artificial skin which covered the unpleasant concavity in his skull.

"In the head Fliss! I need that for thinking and shit!"

"You're a soldier. You get told when to shit."

Raising his guns, Stanford marched towards her, his eyes blazing. The veins at his temples were throbbing rapidly, and the dented, hairless area above them seemed to raise and fall slightly as they did. He was one good shout away from an embolism, but Fliss couldn't take the chance that he would pop off before he did something nasty to her.

"So now you want to get your own back and shoot me in the head? Darling, think about it - That wouldn't achieve anything. One bang and it's all over, like our wedding night. Wouldn't you much rather use me as some sort of depraved sex slave for a while? You can mistreat me all you want then, for as long as you like."

Stanford looked uncertain, his guns drooping to his sides.

"Come on Sergeant, think about it. You could make me beg. You could humiliate me."

She took a last drag of her cigarette, then held the glowing butt out to him, at the same time unzipping her catsuit to expose her soft white skin.

"Please don't hurt me," she whimpered, ducking her head to avoid his eyes. "Don't make me cry again."

Dropping one of his guns, Stanford took the cigarette and examined it, waiting for his damaged brain to make the connection. To speed things along, Fliss stepped closer, into the crook of his shoulder, so that he looked down and saw both the burning ember and her exposed cleavage at once. Reaching up she gripped his wrist tightly and tried to hold the cigarette away from her skin but also twisting the lit end towards herself, planting ideas and playing the unwilling victim at the same time. Her leather-clad leg rubbed almost accidentally against his, and she was gratified to notice that even if his brains were slow, the rest of him was responding according to plan. Keeping her head down, she forced out the weakest, most pitiful voice she could muster.

"Please Sergeant..."

That did it. Desparate to see the pain on her face as he burnt her, Stanford dropped the other gun and grabbed her ponytail, yanking her head back. As he saw the look of triumph in her eyes he staggered backwards a halfstep, but it was too late. She turned his hand back at the wrist so that the smouldering cigarette found its way to his own flesh, then pushed him one step further to the side. As he howled with pain. Monk's bullet tore through the back of his head, shattering his poorly repaired skull and spraying the remains of his brains all over Makeshift's face and shoulders. As he fell to his knees and crumpled to the ground between them, Monk stepped forwards and pulled Fliss into his arms. Kissing her gore-streaked face, he smiled broadly, amazed as ever that she would allow him to do this. Letting his eyes wander down to her unzipped suit he picked a tooth with a trailing lump of gristle from her cleavage and flicked it off the rooftop.

"Damn, you're hot."

"I've got bits of my ex all over me."

Monk shrugged.

"I don't care. I don't even know what I've got all over me."

Fliss smiled, then moved slightly to stand beside him, looking out over the city. In the distance there was a flash of light and the sound of tearing metal as the sagging supports on the London Eye finally gave way and tipped the wheel down onto the cardboard city at its base. Closer to them, the blaze in the hospital had spread to the lower floors and a couple of neighbouring buildings had also caught fire.

"Monk, do you ever wonder why we do what we do? Is it right or wrong, good or evil, all that nonsense?"

"You mean, am I a bad person for saving your life - Again - and killing the psychopathic sex monster? What's to wonder about?"

"Point taken. Just promise me you'll keep doing it."

"Just call me and I'll be here, okay? Whenever you need me. I mean, what could go wrong?"