SF: HMS Golden Lance #36 - Battle at the End of Time

[Troy H. Cheek]

SF: HMS Golden Lance #36 - Battle at the End of Time

"Setting course," Doctor Bing Von Spleen said. "Engaging temporal drives. Atomic 
batteries to power. Turbines to speed. Spam cans stacked neatly."

And with that, the HMS Golden Lance and her heroic (ahem) crew blasted through 
space and time all the way from the very beginning of this particular alternate 
universe (alterverse) to its very end.

Some alterverses end with a bang. All evidence pointed to this one ending with a 
whimper. Entropy had apparently won out in the end and everything had run down. 
Matter and energy and life had spread thin until it was at last evenly 
distributed about the alterverse at its average level.

And since most alterverses are little bits of interesting fluff lost amidst vast 
reaches of nothingness, that average level was zero. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

The exception being the vast and obviously artificial structure containing the 
breathable air, standard gravity, and pleasant artificial sunshine.

The HMS Golden Lance shimmered into existence. Several members of her crew 
stumbled out.

"Deja Vu," someone murmured.

Instead of facing renegade Time Agent 386, who had recently declared his 
intention to kill all other natives of his home universe, they instead once 
again faced android duplicates of themselves, synthetic organisms known as 
synthorgs.

Time Agent 357, Champion of Truth, Justice, and the Ability to Consume Large 
Amounts of Alcoholic Beverages in a Single Sitting and also favorite uncle of 
the aforementioned 386, faced the Transforming Intelligent Machine Engineered 
for Assassination, Galactic Exploration, and Nocturnal Troubleshooting #357.

Doctor Bing Von Spleen, the galaxy's foremost spamologist (because he personally 
killed the other three) and inventor of the Automatic Beet Peeler and Sub-Atomic 
Re-integrator Mark II which was the cause of all this fuss in the first place, 
faced the Versatile Operational Neohuman Skilled in Peacekeeping, Logical 
Exploration, and Efficient Nullification.

Ralph the Giant Space Weasel of Anthrax V, in reality a friendly, easy-going 
weaseloid from Leibowitz IV and an accomplished ukulele player in his own right, 
faced the Robotic Artificial Logical Peacekeeping Humanoid who, realizing that 
he wasn't in fact humanoid, had recently renamed himself as the Robotic 
Artificial Lifeform Programmed for Harm.

Omegas, streetwise former servant of Heaven and a near-omnipotent timeless 
immortal before he went and got himself depowered, faced the Operational 
Mechanical Exploration and Galactic Assassination Soldier.

Diana Dark, sweet, innocent girl from Chicago (or, at least, as sweet and 
innocent as any girl from Chicago can be), heaved her hefty bosom and faced the 
Digital Intelligent Android Normally for Accurate Destruction, Assassination, 
and Rational Killing. "Deja vu," she said again.

The group had just come from a lengthy battle with similar synthorgs at the 
beginning of time, only just barely overcoming them. Tired, weapons depleted, 
and makeup in disarray, our heroes had no chance at all in anything remotely 
resembling a fair fight.

Time Agent 357 activated a communicator. "Val? Now."

Luckily, our heroes had no intention of fighting anything remotely resembling a 
fair fight. Remaining inside the HMS Golden Lance were a couple of 357's old 
school chums, his mother, a battle android with much greater destructive 
potential than any synthoid, and a synthetic intelligence running in the ship's 
VAL9000 computer core. We call her Val.

The VAL9000 powered up the ship's Golden Lance energy beam for which the ship 
was named. This beam of pure energy and highly processed artificial cheese-like 
food product cut a destructive path through the center of the structure.

Exactly where the synthorgs were standing.

"Well, so much for that!" Ralph exclaimed, brushing his weaseloid paws together 
as if dusting off the dust generated by a strenuous job well done. "Can we go 
home now?"

"Back to the ship!" ordered Time Agent 357.

They met up with Thirteen and Suzie416, temporal physicists from 357's home 
alterverse and also the aforementioned school chums. "Impossible!" Thirteen 
ranted. "386 has to be here! Only at the very beginning or end of the existence 
of the home universe could he possibly unleash the powers necessary to 
completely destroy it. We've just been to both and he wasn't there! Impossible!"

"It's not impossible if it's happened!" snapped back Suzie416, who in addition 
to being the more highly decorated physicist of the pair was also his wife. "We 
got our calculations wrong somehow. Run the numbers again. We have to determine 
our error before it's too late."

"There may be no error," Diana said.

"What's that, dear?" 357 asked.

"It may be that there is no error. Time Agent 386, my former partner, didn't say 
that he'd destroy your entire universe. At least, I don't remember him saying 
that to us. Even if he did say it that way, he might not have meant it as 
literally as we're taking him. What I remember him saying is that he's going to 
wipe out all life native to his alterverse so that he has no competition."

Omegas sauntered by, cool as always. "So what? Everyone knows the best way to 
wipe out all life in an alterverse is to destroy said alterverse."

Nobody quite had the nerve to ask Omegas how he knew so much about genocide.

Doctor Spleen looked up from his beer. He'd finished drinking his synthorg 
opponent into a mutual coma less than an hour ago, so naturally he was stone 
cold sober now and in dire need of a drink. "Is there anything unique to your 
alterverse that would allow 386 to wipe out all life without harming the 
alterverse itself?"

"Of course not," 357 stated.

"Of course there is," his mother corrected. Mildred, whose actual name and 
number was too long to go into here, continued. "You kids these days don't pay 
enough attention in church. Surely you remember the Repository of Souls."

"Of course!" shouted all the other home universe natives in unison. They 
likewise slapped their foreheads in unison hard enough to knock themselves down. 
They hit the floor not quite in unison, and by the time they had climbed back to 
their feet they were moving independently again.

Diana, not impressed by the synchronized overreacting, asked "Can someone please 
fill me in on this Repository of Souls?"

357 set his ship on a course for the Repository of Souls, then turned to her. 
"It's a long story."

"We have all the time in the universe," she replied.

"Well, it goes something like this..."

Almost any group of intelligent beings, regardless of alterverse, galaxy, 
system, planet, or local geography, will almost certainly at some time in their 
existence develop a concept of an afterlife. This may be a religious concept, or 
strictly a matter of physics, or some half-formed concept that occurs only when 
the being is half-dead from alcohol poisoning. Even those who deny all gods and 
deny any possibility of there being anything more to existence than living out 
their days in their mortal shells have a damned good idea about what kind of 
afterlife they are denying.

The inhabitants of the Planet of the Supermarkets believe that when they die, 
they go to a place where they live out their dreams as the stars or directors or 
producers of the television shows and movies that they spend most of their lives 
watching. Their exact place in this dream is determined by their performance in 
a huge collection of TV gameshows known as the Afterlife.

A small collection of mutated lizards and similar creatures in a nearby galaxy 
believe that if they are good when they die they will be taken to a far away 
planet where they will get to spend eternity smashing cities and eating tiny people.

On a tiny little insignificant planet known as Earth, most religions speculate 
some kind of Heavenly reward for those who adhere to the tenets of the faith and 
some kind of Hellish punishment for those who do not.

In the home universe, there is the Repository of Souls.

It is said that when the universe was created, the Powers of Life generated a 
certain number of souls. These were stored in the Repository of Souls. As each 
new life was created, a soul from the Repository would be chosen to join with 
it. When that life ended, the soul would return.

After a large but unknown number of trips through this cycle, the soul would be 
judged by the Powers of Life. If the soul was deemed to have done more good for 
itself and others of its kind than bad, it was taken back into the Powers of 
Life, it's experiences and dreams and hopes enriching the universe.

If the soul was deemed to have done more bad than good, however, it was reduced 
to nothingness.

Depictions of the Repository of Souls vary in literature. Some describe it as an 
endless series of tombs, one for each sould. Each tomb contains a number of 
vaults, one for each incarnation of their soul. When the soul runs out of 
vaults, it is time to be judged.

Some describe it as a huge city of office buildings. In every office building 
are found innumerable filing cabinets. In every filing cabinet is a bunch of 
folders, one for each soul. Every folder contains sheets of paper, each sheet 
detailing the individual incarnations of that soul.

There are also depictions of mountains of index cards, enormous hyperlinked 
documents, and orchards filled with trees bearing soul fruit, but you get the idea.

Regardless of the depictions in the literature, it is generally believed that 
the Repository of Souls resides in a pocket dimension within the home universe. 
This sub-alterverse is by definition much smaller than the alterverse within 
which it is located, but contains infinitely more space. The mathematics of this 
are left as an exercise for the reader.

The destruction of this Repository of Souls would disrupt the cycle. At the very 
least, souls could not be reincarnated. At the very most, the destruction of the 
pocket dimension would reverberate through space/time so that it would be as if 
said dimension never existed, and thus none of the souls would have ever come 
into being in the first place.

Only a fool would try something like that.

A fool known as Time Agent 386, the secondmost successful Time Agent of all time 
(the first being his uncle, Time Agent 357), the secondmost famous person from 
his home universe of all time (the first again being his uncle), and the 
secondmost fastest sudoku player in all the multiverse (the first being Mrs. 
Vivian Rochester of Brighton Park), stood in the Repository of Souls.

To 386, the Repository resembled nothing so much as a giant library. Endless 
rows of books stretched in every direction. Each book as the story of a soul, 
with each chapter in that book being a record of each individual incarnation. 
Some shelves were rather dusty. Considering that his people as a whole were 
somewhat immortal, 386 supposed that a little dust was to be expected. The 
turnover rate among the souls was probably rather slow.

After walking for some time, 386 realized that he was not getting any closer to 
the center of the library. In fact, given the convoluted nature of the 
sub-dimension he was in, it was quite possible that he could have arbitrarily 
chosen any point and found that it was the center of the library.

386 also realized that he didn't really need to be in the center of the library 
to carry out his plans.

 From his cloak he pulled the Automatic Beet Peeler and Sub-Atomic Re-integrator 
Mark II, or ABPSARII for short. Currently in the form of an impossibly archaic 
computer keyboard, this device combined a miniature time machine with the 
reality-altering properties of spam (Sickening, Putrid, Artificial Meat, 
mistaken by some primitive cultures to be a food product) and as an added bonus 
featured an extremely fast search engine. Activated by simply typing in a 
request, the ABPSARII would then search all possible times in all possible 
alterverses for the required parameters. Since anything which could possibly 
happen eventually will happen, it's just a matter of finding it. Then the 
ABPSARII could take the user to it, or bring it to the user, or alter the 
current location to match the request using what was found as a template, or 
something like that.

No one was really clear on exactly how it worked, including the inventor, one 
Doctor Bing Von Spleen of Earth. But no one denied that it did work regardless.

Time Agent 386 began programming the ABPSARII. This took some time, as the 
Repository of Souls was an ancient and powerful place. It was unlikely that 
doing something so mundane as transporting a handful of exploding supernovae 
into the middle of it would have the desired effect. 386 was also constrained by 
the fact that he wished to survive the process which would destroy all other 
intelligent life from his home universe. He also planned to make himself truly 
immortal so that the final resting place of his soul would be a moot point. He 
might have to do the actual programming for that some time later, but wanted to 
make sure that nothing he did now would make that more difficult when the time came.

Rather tired from all the walking and having to type with one hand while holding 
the ABPSARII with the other, 386 looked around for a chair or desk. Not finding 
one, this after all not being a reading library, he settled for pulling a 
particularly large book from a nearby shelf. Moving this book might have 
resulted in the particular soul whose journey through the cycle of reincarnation 
it was chronicling to not be able to return to it, but seeing as 386 planned to 
destroy all of them anyway, he really didn't give a crap.

386 was about to sit down and use the book as a particularly uncomfortable Lazer 
Lounger when he happened to notice the name on the cover.

It was his.

Oh, it didn't have his current designation of thirteen given names and four 
family names followed by the number 1,973,484,386 or 386 for short. (A universe 
full of mostly immortal beings tend to use up a lot of names.) Instead, in a 
combination of letters and numbers and symbols and concepts which were more more 
sensed than seen, he recognized the name of his soul.

Overcome with curiosity, he opened the book.

The first chapter told the story of his first life. It was a hard one. 
Everything was stacked against him. It was no wonder that in that life he had 
done more bad than good.

The second chapter told a similar story, as did the third. 386 was beginning to 
believe that the odds had always been stacked against him when he flipped 
forward and found a life where he had been born into a perfect life.

A life in which he still managed to do more bad than good.

386 flipped back and forth. There were some good lives. There were some great 
lives. But no matter what the circumstances of his birth, no matter what the 
circumstances of his life, the best he had ever managed was to kind of even out 
the evil he had done or would do again. If, at this very moment, it came time to 
decide his fate, he could go one way or the other. Even though 386 planned to 
destroy the Repository of Souls and deal himself out of this game entirely, that 
still bothered him somehow.

Closing his own book in disgust, he grabbed a few others at random. He'd see how 
badly others had screwed up their many lives. That would cheer him up. The other 
books were much smaller than his. They told stories of souls born into horrible 
times and places which had nonetheless managed to better themselves and the 
lives of those around them. These relatively thin books ended with the souls 
being accepted in the Powers of Life.

After very carefully putting these books back on the shelf, he turned to the 
back of his own book. 386 found that there was but a single chapter left 
unwritten, a single cycle left for his soul to complete.

The current one.

"I'm on my last incarnation," 386 said wonderingly. "I've been given more 
chances than almost anyone else here, but I've used them all up without showing 
enough good to be accepted back into the Powers of Life. And this life I've led 
most recently..."

He paused. He looked back on his life. Sure, he'd been a great hero for a great 
number of years. He had bettered himself and helped a great number of people. 
But that life didn't come close to making up for the death and destruction and 
pain he'd caused since he decided to turn evil. Even if he didn't finish 
instructing the ABPSARII, even if he didn't cause the spam-powered destruction 
of the Repository of Souls, he had still done enough bad things to assure that, 
in the end, his soul would be reduced to nothingness.

He carefully closed his book and, with a loud grunt, placed it back on the shelf.

386 picked up the ABPSARII. It hummed with the promise of power. With it, he 
could destroy the Repository of Souls, deal himself out of the game of 
reincarnation, and prevent his soul from ever being judged. He could make 
himself unique and immortal. He could make himself a god.

Time Agent 386 pressed the buttons marked "Ctrl" and "Alt" and "Del."

Are you sure you want to restart? Warning! All unsaved programs will be lost!

386 walked towards the nearest door. "Yes, I will start again. I will use my 
remaining time to make amends for all the bad things I've done in my life. I 
will do good. I will be accepted back into the Powers of Life."

He laughed. Long and hard and strong, he laughed. For the first time in 
centuries, 386 felt good about himself. He felt as if he had a future. He felt 
as if he could do something which could make a difference in the world. He felt 
that he could do good. He felt that he could be good.

He was still laughing when he stepped out the door.

He was still laughing when he was blown to bits.

Is this the end of 386?
Is this the end of the ABPSARII?
Is this the end of these silly questions?

Tune in again next week for the world-shattering conclusion of the HMS Golden 
Lance series. Only in... SFSTORY!