On Matter’s Edge

  Preface

  Today was a painful day. The 3rd anniversary of his wife’s death. Cale stood next to her grave with flowers in his hands. A tear flowed down his cheek and splashed upon the grass above her grave. He hadn’t cried for a few months as time had slowly eased the burden of his grief, but today, today he cried. After a time, Cale straightened up and got his emotions in order. He looked down and saw the grass sparkle with a light sheen from the tears he had just wept. He imagined his tears slowly moving through the earth. Moving between the roots and rocks, slowly weaving their way down and finally finding her coffin, where his tears then ride along the edges. The closest thing he would ever get to hugging her again. For a time he waited, letting his memories of her wash through him. After a moment, his grief tired him out and though he wanted to stay, he couldn’t linger there forever. He had two kids at home who needed him. They didn’t want to come to visit today as the kids preferred visiting on their mother’s birthday. Placing little gifts upon her grave as they update her about their year. It was their way of coping, and he wasn’t going to stop that. With a sad heart, he once again said goodbye.

  ______________________________________________________________________________

  Chapter 1: The Purple Eyed Creature

  Cale woke up that night with a muted scream. He saw his memories flying before his eyes, he tried to open them only to realize that he couldn’t!

  Pain!

  Cale tried to clench his hand but found that he couldn’t even feel them. The pain slightly faded as he realized you can’t feel pain for something you can’t feel at all. He then tried other parts of his body and quickly found he couldn’t feel anything. Maybe this is the end, he thought, as memories of his day came back to him. His grief and desire to be with his late wife ate away at his desire to live. As he slowly let himself fall into despair an image of her in the hospital bed flashed through his mind and awoke something in him.

  NO.

  He screamed to himself through the pain in his mind; not here, not now. She pushed on through the pain for us. Far longer than the doctors thought possible. She would be so upset if she saw me giving in at a moment like this. With newfound strength Cale forced his conscience back to the forefront. He refused to let himself die. Cale kept himself conscious as the pain of whatever was causing his memories to come flooding inside his head from every direction pierced through him. After a time, he couldn’t even tell what the memories were supposed to be of anymore, as they turned into shafts of ever shifting light thanks to the pain. Cale tried his best, but eventually he passed out.

  ***

  He awoke suddenly, the pain gone but the memory of it all very fresh. He did a mental analysis of his body and found that he still could not feel his arms or legs. He couldn’t move, uh oh, thought Cale, I had an aneurysm, and I am now paralyzed, great... Before Cale could ponder if he should lose himself to self-pity, a screen appeared before him out of thin air.

  “Hello there!” Said a strange creature with an unusually peppy voice on the screen. It was surrounded by a haze that hid the outline of a body, but within the haze there were two very clear, very present, purple eyes. Cale was thrown off by the friendliness of the voice compared to the eyes, the eyes had the look of someone who thought nothing of you. A pure disdain, but the voice was pleasant... How odd, how unsettling. Cale thought as he tried to keep his emotions in check.

  “Hi,” said Cale, “I assume I have gone crazy, and you are the manifestation of that?” he said with a dry tone.

  The creature blinked and the haze around it pulsed. “No,” it said. “You are not dead, but that could also be because you are not yet fully alive.”

  The words took a few moments to sink in for Cale. His mind slowly went blank and then he just stared at the creature.

  “Can you please explain whatever that cryptic phrase meant? It seems a bit gibberish. I am not convinced that I am not dead and talking to some manifestation.” Cale spat back at the screen. He found himself suddenly frustrated and angry at the idea of not knowing if he was dead or not and his tone showed it.

  “Oh, I see the confusion,” said the voice coming from the screen in a creepily happy tone. However creepily enough, the eyes didn’t change. “I will explain it to you; your mind has been cloned!” This was said with a little bit too much enthusiasm for Cale’s taste.

  Cale looked at the creature expecting more but the creature just stared back. The haze around it swirling in a slowly shifting, but constant pattern. Cale thought about asking more but he paused when he looked into those serious, purple eyes. Something seemed off. Like the more he talked the more that something bad might happen. Cale, with the ability to do nothing but respond and look at the screen, decided to do nothing for the moment and tried to absorb what was going on around him.

  If this was truly in his mind, then Cale expected this world to behave a little like a dream. Dreams often made no sense, but your brain somehow made the paradoxes work. Cale had lucid dreamed since he was a kid. Because of this he often thought of the strange paradoxes and wondered if maybe his dreams were glimpses into another version of himself in another dimension. However, regardless of his inner ramblings, one thing in common is that parts of his dreams didn’t make any sense. Things like a door that walked down the street with a top hat, or a house in the shape of the alphabet. Things that if he ever looked too hard at them while dreaming, the dream would collapse because they don’t make any logical sense.

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  Cale closed his eyes and tried to feel for his limbs. He felt nothing. In a panic Cale focused his eyes forward only to see the strange creature still staring at him. Since the creature seemed willing to sit there and wait, Cale figured he might as well take a look around. He couldn’t feel his face, but he found that he could at least move his eyes very slowly. This tiny bit of movement settled Cale’s rising anxiety. Control. It may only be a little, but it was SOMETHING. Cale blinked and slowly forced his eyes to move to the left; this is when the creature finally decided to speak up.

  “So, as I was saying,” the voice of the creature suddenly burst through the screen, “you have been cloned, and I need your cooperation for a task.”

  This brought Cale out of his focus, and it took him a second to realize the strangeness to this conversation. This didn’t feel like a dream, but he knew it wasn’t fully real.

  “What would you like me to do?” Cale asked. As the words left his lips, he started to wonder how he was speaking, he couldn’t feel anything. Cale then realized that if the creature was telling the truth and it could clone brains, then communication for them would be trivial. He needed to focus. He has kids, a company. People relying on him. He did not believe the screen, but he would admit that his current experience had been very strange and not the most pleasant. This made the following words easy for Cale.

  “I will have to reject,” Cale said resolutely. “I have responsibilities to take care of back home.”

  “Do you?” Said the creature, this time the voice had a different tone, this time the eyes of the creature shone a little brighter. The screen changed and to his shock he saw Earth!

  “Woh,” was all Cale could muster, it was beautiful. The image on the screen zoomed in toward his country, then his town, then his home. He saw himself making breakfast for the kids, he saw the news on the television going over recent events. It did not go unnoticed that he did not recognize some of the headlines.

  “As I said, you are a clone,” said the voice from the screen in that creepy chipper tone. “To be frank, I am desperate and what I have done was not an easy feat.” It seemed almost proud.

  Cale didn’t say anything as he watched himself with his family. He didn’t know what feelings to even process, he then realized that he at least had feelings which oddly made him feel happy with the sadness. It was overall very confusing.

  “The original you does not remember anything,” said the voice from the screen as Cale watched someone else live his life. “I came to this planet because in this entire galaxy, you are the only mildly technological race that has even a whisper of pure matter permeating through it.” The creature paused to let Cale absorb that little bit of info. “As for who I am, I am the sole remaining guardian deity of a slowly dying civilization. A great war broke out eons ago near the center of this galaxy, a war that raged on for almost a thousand of your years. Eventually my people became desperate as I was not strong enough to keep the enemy at bay. With the last of their remaining resources, my people locked themselves away on their home planet behind a great shield that is powered by their moon.”

  As the voice was talking, Cale could feel both jealousy and happiness as he saw his family going about their day. The other him was making the kids lunch for school, as they were getting ready for the bus like nothing had happened. Seeing the news oddly convinced him that what he was watching was real. Information he knew he hadn’t known helped solidify his reality or at least gave more truth to what the creature was saying. It didn’t mean he wanted to be here or that he was convinced he wasn’t dead, but he realized that whatever this was, he wanted to survive. If he wanted to ever see his family in real life again, he was going to have to make some choices.

  “Will I be able to see them again if this goes well?” Cale asked

  The creature paused; its haze pulsed erratically before settling. “Coming here requires mass amounts of energy, and I am only here out of desperation. What I can do is reserve small amounts of energy over the years and let you watch your family for a little while when I have enough extra. I am only willing to do a limited amount of these sessions as the energy required is not a small amount.”

  Interestingly this was the first time the voice had shown any emotion. The frustration that came through the voice convinced Cale that it was being at least semi sincere. It could be a trick, but at this point why go through the effort? He didn’t know enough, and the creature seemed reasonable. Well, reasonable scary with those eyes. Plus, since there was a potential that he was actually a clone, there was not a zero percent chance that the creature could just as easily press the delete button and copy him again. As Cale thought about this whole thing, he figured he would play along for now since cooperation was really his only choice.

  “What is it you want from me?” Cale finally asked after an eternity of internal arguments and self-questioning.

  “Your planet has this thing called ‘software,’ this software is the closest thing to the systems my people created that I have seen in this galaxy. When scanning your city for potential candidates, you were among the most compatible for copying. Since you also run a company that makes this ‘software,’ you were chosen.” Said the voice. All emotion was gone and the eyes just stared.

  “Ok, that’s the why... But what's the reason?” Cale said. He would have rolled his eyes if his eyes could move fast enough.

  “Oh yes, yes that,” the creature said. “You see I have tried for thousands of years to get my people out of their own locked box. There are safety protocols keeping me out, so I am limited in my actions. What I plan on doing is taking your cloned mind and attaching it to some Ether. Then I will throw the ether – with yourself attached – to the planet. The ether will naturally find a soul to attach to, giving you a body!”

  “Oh, I would love to be in a body again,” Cale said absentmindedly as he absorbed what he was just told.

  “Wonderful!” Said the creature with a burst of happiness that made Cale feel like he made the wrong choice. A large lever appeared next to the creature on the screen and before Cale could say anything more, the lever moved as if pulled by an invisible force. Cale found himself feeling pressured from each side like he was being shoved and twisted at the same time. As he felt these odd sensations, he noticed that the eyes never moved from his vision.

  “Find the primary node and deactivate its protections. This will let me free my people,” the creature said quickly. “I will try and get you as close as possible to it, but I cannot control where the ether will eventually take you.”

  Darkness started to surround him as his consciousness faded. “I will send you a vision of your real self in a few years' time,” Cale heard the creature say as his last bit of consciousness faded. The eyes were the last thing he saw and the last words he heard before everything finally went dark were, “I hope you survive...”

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