Cullsman #9 Read online

  CULLSMAN #9 – 9 Sci-Fi STORIES

  Would you kill a world to save your family?

  In the depths of space, the cannibal planet the Host hunts. With its own resources depleted, it 'hooks' other living worlds through an immensely complex process called the 'Cull', mining them and their people to destruction.

  Now the Cull is coming. 9 'Cullsmen' will be chosen, to prepare 9 potential planets - using and upgrading each world's own technology and infrastructure to prepare an enormous metal hook at the pole.

  But this Cull is different from the others. This time 8 planets have failed already, and on the last, a terrorist organization threatens the Host's very existence.

  How many must die for the Host to live?

  This collection of 9 science fiction stories charts the untamed outer fringe of existence, filled with ruined intergalactic civilizations, lonely globe-roaming robots, and a memetic virus that could destroy all things.

  OTHER WORKS BY MICHAEL JOHN GRIST

  Zombie Ocean (zombie apocalypse)

  1. The Last

  2. The Lost

  3. The Least

  1-3 Box Set 1

  4. The Loss

  5. The List

  6. The Laws

  4-6 Box Set 2

  7. The Lash

  Ruin War (science fiction thriller)

  1. Mr. Ruin

  2. King Ruin

  3. God of Ruin

  Ignifer Cycle (epic fantasy)

  1. Ignifer's Rise

  2. Ignifer's War

  0. Ignifer's Tales - short stories

  Short fiction

  Cullsman #9 - 9 science fiction stories

  Death of East - 9 weird tales

  Non-fiction

  Ruins of the Rising Sun - Adventures in Abandoned Japan

  Join the newsletter and get a free Starter Library of 2 post-apocalypse thriller books here!

  For SY.

  CONTENTS

  1. THE BELLS OF SUBSIDENCE

  2. ANGEL, I

  3. THE GIANT ROBOT AND THE MYNA BIRD

  4. ROUTE 66

  5. C22

  6. CULLSMAN #9

  7. HUNTING GROUND

  8. THE BLUE CHIPSET AND THE THING

  9. UNIVERSAL TIME

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MR. RUIN (Excerpt)

  1. THE BELLS OF SUBSIDENCE

  The Bell is coming.

  It's night, and I'm lying beside Temetry on a cold grey crater of this world's endless desert, listening to the oscillations of the Bell. At times we glimpse its Brilliance, the after-image of its long and branic toll splashing across the plush black firmament like an endless corolla borealis. I imagine it far overhead, arcing through the universe, plancking the anthropic landscape from yoke to clapper, and can think of only one word to describe it.

  "Godly," I whisper.

  Temetry nods by my side. He doesn't speak, not since the last Bells came when we were babies, but I know what he's thinking. I'm thinking it also.

  "How are your non-orientable insects?" I ask.

  He shrugs. This shrug means he's had no breakthroughs. I know it, because he'd not be here with me if he had. The men of this world would have taken him for the Gideon heat-sink long ago.

  "I won't forget you," I say to him quietly.

  He turns to me, and smiles, because he knows I cannot keep that promise. The Bell is coming tonight. His hand worms the grey sand, folds my fingers within his own, and I remember that he is the most beautiful thing I have.

  "I love you," I whisper to him. His fingers tighten, rippling over mine in Euclidean gymnastics, until our hands are joined partway between a reticulated conch shell and an intersecting Klein bottle.

  I laugh. It is our joke, a vestige of what Subsidence has brought us both. We are only 11, and I love him, because I know in my heart that he will never forget me.

  "I'll whisper your name to the branes until I die," I promise him, feeling the urgency of this moment, alone in this crater for the last time.

  His smile turns sad. It is the last abiding image I have of him, because then comes the sound of old Ingen, and the moment is lost. She is huffing and panting her rooty head over the crater-lip. This place is no longer special or secret. Temetry's dazzling smile is sad, forever, because I'll never see him again.

  * * *

  Ingen is my mother, and she uses me.

  She plucks me from the crater without even glancing at Temetry. I don't think she even sees him anymore. Arm in arm we stroll back to the Gideon bore, and she chatters on about her day, about what permutations she wrought in this planet's atmosphere, what gains in the heat-sink they explored.

  We arrive at the bore-head, a silver pipe in this dry planet's haunch, and she kneels before me in the grey sand, her hands on my shoulders. I know this is how she talks to her simulacra, plugging fresh wavelengths into their pea-sized minds, laying in the algorithms of growth. I am just another of her extremities, to be ordered, wound, and sent chuttering on my way.

  "You must forget that boy, Aliqa," she tells me. "He's lost, too far under the Bell. You know that, don't you? He can't follow where you're going."

  She aspires to love me, but I know the thing she loves most is herself.

  "Yes mother," I reply. I am polite and correct, a good Gideon girl.

  Ingen ruffles my hair in the way I hate. I am not an infant anymore. Temetry would never do it. "Good girl," she says, and she leads us into the bore-head. We stand atop the dimple, and she initiates the involutions.

  Space folds, and I taste the familiar feel of my mother's mind in my own, twisting the anthropic plane. A moment later we emerge in our living room.

  "Go to your involutions, Aliqa," Ingen says. "Hone your mind for the Bell."

  I go. In my room I close my eyes, stand upon my dimple, and begin. Far into the night I manifold four dimensions in non-Euclidean space, inverting tesseracts, decanting Klein kettles, shaving Mobius strips into interlocking many-twisted chains.

  I finish in the dark morning, as ever unable to speak or think, the involutions have so stripped away my sense of self. I sit on my bedside vacantly, emptied into submission, until the folds of my mind remember the shape they ought to take, and I can heal.

  Then I will sleep.

  This is not my hope. It is my mother's hope for me. She will have me upon the Bells though she must strip the last shred of self from my mind. I am matter to be prepared, used, and replaced.

  In my non-state I struggle to think of Temetry, but there is nothing of him there. No I, no you, only the endless entangled looping of the branes.

  * * *

  Pink dawn comes, and on a Gideon screen in my empty room I watch the Bell snuffing down over the grey desert.

  It is immense, a vast colorless ark that fills the horizon, eclipsing the world I have known all my life. At the atmospheric boundary its toll emerges as a jarring rumble in the earth, a Brilliance so complex with harmonies and grace notes that it makes all the simulations I've heard seem like one-fiddle jigs. The sound is a universe of its own, oriented through the branes in ways I cannot grasp.

  It snuffs down, and all I can think of is Temetry. He will be out there somewhere, sitting the grey crater-sand, folding paper with his hands, his eyes sad as the first sun rises. Before him will be an array of non-orientable sand-hoppers, each folded like Mobius strips with only a single side. Each of their eight limbs will be perfectly formed, aligned, so life-like they could at any moment hop away. He will have sat awake all night folding them, as the only thing he can do.

  He will watch as this Bell lands, and he will name it after me, for he knows it will be the Bell that takes me away.

  Billowing grey sand fills the screen and I feel the branes tremble around me, as the
Bell touches down. This is my life, now. Tears run down my cheeks as I realize what it means. I will truly never see Temetry again.

  Then old Ingen is at my side, dabbing at my cheeks with her sleeve, hustling me to the door.

  "Don't worry on my account, child," she bustles, and I realize she thinks my tears are for her. "Old Ingen will abide. There's much work to be done here yet, don't cry for me."

  I want to tell her I am not, but bite my lip hard. There is no need to be cruel, now. It will change nothing, only hurt us both more.

  At the door she holds me again by the shoulders, and I see that she too is crying. She runs her hands down my sides, smudges away a non-existent speck of dust, and I wonder. Perhaps she does love me after all. Perhaps she is sad to see her most talented creation disappear.

  "Be a good girl," she says. "Do as they say, be polite."

  I smile and nod at this fallacy. We both know I will have no choice. For the next five years I will be indentured to the Bell, and my mind will not be my own. There will be no need for me to do a thing, except survive.

  "You'll make me proud, Aliqa," she says. "Don't worry about that."

  I smile, I nod.

  We enter the Gideon bore together. The world flutters like a butterfly kaleidoscope, I taste my mother's mind for the last time, and the next phase of my life begins.

  * * *

  We are a class of 100, boys and girls of Bell-age, drawn from all the Gideon bore-holes sunk into our planet. Spotless white simulacra gather us in a vast hall, colorless as the Bell's exterior, and move us to stand upon our marks; dimples in the smooth flooring.

  I let myself be shunted into place by their cold palms. I look down at my dimple, and wonder briefly how many have stood here before me, how many have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence alive.

  I push that thought aside, and in the seconds before it begins, try to sequester what parts of myself I can, hidden within the folds of my mind.

  Then the anthropic plane is unleashed upon us.

  It is unlike any involutions I have done before. It is an inexpressible order of magnitude larger. In the face of it, I am rewritten.

  An endless torrent of images pounds through the thin capillaries of my mind, effortlessly scrubbing away all the tiny levees and dams I have prepared against it; a tidal surge of unorientable, non-intersecting, non-Euclidian possibilities.

  As the torrent comes, I cannot help but seek order from the chaos; raveling and inverting Klein bottles, stacking and nestling them within each other like Matroska dolls, folding tesseracts upon themselves, helixing Mobius strips into Riemann planes. Around me the 100 do the same. Together, by the combined resonance of our efforts, we will planck the branes for the first time. We will build our own Brilliance. Through our efforts, the Bell will toll.

  I barely feel the effects of gravity, as the Bell rises up through the atmosphere, and leaves my desert world behind.

  * * *

  Only when it is over, and it has been over for six of the eight rest hours allotted to us, do I begin to remember who I am, where I have come from, and what I have done.

  The Bell has already left my world. Ingen is gone, left behind. Temetry is gone. All the things that tied me to who I was are gone.

  I feel more than an ache, I feel an erasure. Already I have lost so much of what I was. My mind has diminished, has enlarged, has shrunk.

  I am lying on a double-bunk cot in a dark room, where the simulacra brought me. Beside me a girl's hand dangles down from the cot above. One of her fingers is marked by a line of lighter skin, and I wonder that she had once worn a ring.

  I push her hand. It sways nervelessly.

  "Wake up," I say to her hand.

  "She's under the Bell," comes a voice. There is another girl standing in the semi-dark before me, her hair in ratted pigtails. She smells overpoweringly of sweat.

  "I'm Aliqa," I say to her.

  "Mazy," she answers. Her eyes are shot through red. "You were talking in your sleep."

  "I was?" I mumble. My lips seem thick, foreign appendages on my face. "What did I say?"

  "The same as all these others," Mazy says, and gestures at the groaning, sleeping, moaning bodies of the other 98 of us, stacked like folded tesseracts in our cots. "A load of old balls."

  I can't help the frown from crossing my face. I was raised to be correct. Mazy laughs more when she sees my expression, then she leans in, and her sweaty stench rolls in with her.

  "You listen to me, girl. You aren't special, no way no how. Nothing in that brain of yours is worth going under the Bell for. You just let it go, let it all go, and you and me'll be pals. You hear me?"

  I blink hard, as if it'll somehow push back her smell. It doesn't.

  "And if I don't?"

  Mazy laughs again, leans back, and gives the nerveless hand hanging from the cot above a playful shove.

  "Then it don't hardly matter a thing now, does it?"

  She winks. She walks away.

  There's a little over an hour left before our next involutions; the red digits of a countdown clock on the distant black wall glow fuzzily. In the dim light I look at the white band round the girl's nerveless hand, and wonder who gave her that ring, and what it might have meant. I listen to the others moaning, as Mazy said. They are whispering names, whimpering, crying in their sleep.

  For a little while, I cry too.

  Soon the simulacra come for us again, and carry us back to our dimples. I let them lift and maneuver me. I feel too weak to move more than my eyes. They lay me in my allotted space, and as I wait for the barrage to open, I think about Temetry. I know now that I cannot hope to hide him in an enfoldment of my mind. I can only say goodbye, again and again, until one day the Bell scores him from my mind forever.

  "I won't forget you," I promised him on the sand, but I have not the strength to keep that promise. I am too small.

  Then the barrage begins again.

  * * *

  I don't come back to myself for a long time. When I do, it is to the freckled face of Mazy, up close to mine. She is lying by my side, sharing my cot, her tousled red hair on my pillow. I feel her warm breath on my lips. Her arm is wrapped around me. I try to shrug it off, but sharp pain aches through me, and I fall still.

  Mazy stirs, and her eyes slit open. Her irises are deep green. She smiles at me.

  "I thought you'd gone under," she whispers. "It's good to see you back."

  I open my jaw, struggling to ignore the pain. "How long?"

  Mazy shrugs. "Weeks? I forget. They really worked you good that time, though."

  "What do you mean?"

  She doesn't answer. Instead she pushes herself up on her elbow, reaches to my face, and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. I try to pull back.

  "Stop it," I mumble. "Get off my cot."

  "Your cot?" says Mazy. "This is my cot. You climbed in here yourself."

  "What?"

  "After they were finished with you, whispering that damned name."

  I am confused. How could I climb here without knowing it? What cot am I in? "What name?"

  "Temetry," she says, and watches my face for the reaction. There is none, because the name means nothing to me.

  "Who's Temetry?" I ask.

  "I don't know. You were the one screaming it, in the middle of the involutions. They had to pull you off the floor and double your involutions to shut you up."

  Her words shake me. "I don't remember any of that."

  "Not after a session like that, I'm not surprised."

  I lay there and say nothing.

  "Was he a boyfriend?" Mazy asks.

  I don't answer. I try to cast my mind back, feeling as though I am probing a fresh wound. My mind is raw. Temetry. I reach back, back, and touch upon something. I handle it gently, calmly as I would a sand-hopper, lest it take fright and skitter away. Temetry; a feeling more than anything, a sense of something, insubstantial and shifting, but something definitely good.

  "Maybe," I sa
y. "Maybe a friend."

  Mazy snorts, and runs her hand through my hair again. My body aches too much to push her away. "Well, you're my friend now. You and me. I'll look after you, don't worry."

  I don't worry. I lie there, and wonder who Temetry might have been.

  * * *

  Months pass. The cots grow quieter every night, as memories are plancked out of our minds. Soon there is no one left to miss, no home to yearn for, no one to cry for. More of us go under the Bell.

  Mazy shares my cot every night. She smooths my hair. When I become quiet, she speaks the name to me; Temetry. It has no meaning in itself, it is just a word that we share, something to bond us together. We lie in each other's warm arms, and wonder on what it might mean.

  Our lives are involutions and sleep. Tolling the Bell becomes something rote, ringing out our Brilliance across the universe in our wake. There are no questions to ask of each other, because there is no past to speak of. There are only questions in the now.

  "Where do you think the Bell is going?" Mazy asks, most nights. I spin stories for her of all the furthest systems I've heard of, worlds where the people travel through Gideon bores and harvest the heat of stars on desert planets. Mazy smiles, laughs, and tells me about planets where everything is an endless city, and people drink the blood of plants and fly through the sky on rainbows and just have all the fun you could imagine.

  I wonder if I am from an endless city, or a desert, or a jungle. I wonder what Temetry is. Is it a place, a person, or a thing?

  Around us, the 100 dwindle. I forget my own name, and she forgets hers. We come to know each other by touch, by feel, by the one word that stays with us; Temetry. It becomes a totem.

  Then one day, I wake in her arms, and she is still. I shake her, but she doesn't move. I open her eyelids and look into her eyes, and see within her a void, carved and hollowed out.

  Her heart beats, her body lives, but her mind is gone. She is under the Bell.