ASH/HCC: CSS #34 - Mappa Mundi

Dave Van Domelen dvandom at eyrie.org
Wed Mar 5 16:07:37 PST 2014


     [The cover is split down the middle with a figure dominating the center
and divided into two identities.  On the left, the man wears the garb of
Devastator, one of the most feared supervillains of the 20th Century.  On the
right, he looks like a graying college professor in a short-sleeved button-
down shirt and tie.  While the details vary, both backgrounds have the world
falling apart behind him.]

____________________________________________________________________________
 .|, COHERENT                                            An ASHistory Series
--+-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 '|` SUPER STORIES                        #34 - Mappa Mundi
        Featuring Eric Harris             copyright 2014 by Dave Van Domelen
____________________________________________________________________________

[July 6, 1998 - Chicago, Illinois]

     So far, it had been a pretty good day for Professor Harris.  He was
still riding the high of being invited to contribute to the next edition of
the standard graduate textbook on gravitation (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler was
about to become Misner, Thorne, Wheeler and Harris), his odds of promotion to
full professor were looking better than ever, and space was in the news.
Sure, he had nothing to do with the neutron spectroscopy experiments on the
lunar orbiter that were suggesting the presence of water ice, or with Japan's
Mars probe Nozomi that had launched earlier in the week, but "space stuff"
was his business.
     And business was good.
     But for now, it was a pleasant summer morning.  An unexpected cool front
had swept through overnight, taking the sting out of the summer heat and some
of the stink out of the city streets.  Even the somewhat rough neighborhood
around University of Chicago was looking pretty nice.
     "Eric, over here!" he heard a voice from just over his left shoulder,
and turned to face its source.  
     "Ah, there you are, Joe," Professor Harris slipped through the thinning
mid-morning crowd and took a seat at the sidewalk cafe.  He thought he felt a
faint buzzing just before sitting down, but dismissed it as one of the random
things that starts to happen to your body once you hit middle age.
     Joe Ferguson was one of his friends from the college days back in Ann
Arbor, starting with being freshman year roommates.  Eric had been in
physics, Joe had bounced around through a few majors and finally graduated
with something in business, but while Eric had done his advanced degrees at
Harvard, Joe had done his at Quantico.
     Joe was a spy.
     Well, more of a security specialist these days, working for the
Department of Energy, which is how they'd gotten back together a couple of
years ago.  One of Eric's graduate students was applying to work at a
government lab that required a background check, Joe had been the one to get
the task, and they'd renewed their acquaintance.
     "So, what brings you out to flyover country this time, Joe?" Eric asked,
signalling the waiter to bring him a coffee.
     "You, Eric."
     Alarms started to go off in Eric's head.  That wasn't a friendly, "Oh, I
just came to see an old friend," reply.  It was Serious Business.  "I'm not
working on anything classified that I know about, Joe.  You know me, I'm
almost entirely theory-side.  Hell, the P-brane stuff I've been working on
lately may not even be testable, it's all deep metaphysics territory.  Sexy,
but not exactly national security stuff," he smirked.
     "You'd be surprised, Eric.  Oh, and we can speak freely," he patted his
jacket pocket.  "One of the toys out of Langley.  I'm told it decoheres sound
or something like that, so anything people around us think they hear us say
is more like an audio rorschach test."
     "That's...implausible," Eric frowned.  He knew enough about wave
mechanics in general that if the device did what Joe said it did, there
should have been other effects.  Although that might've explained the earlier
buzzing, if he was crossing some sort of soliton barrier.  "A little too
James Bond."
     "Oh, we've got even crazier stuff.  And that gets back to the reason I
wanted to talk to you.  There's something going on that not only proves
you're not just wasting grant money fiddling around with those membranes..."
     "P-branes.  As opposed to peabrains in accouting."
     "Whatever.  Your 'purely theoretical' work is about to become
terrifyingly practical.  I was told to tell you, 'there are more than two
crashing branes, there's an infinity of them, and they're not all friendly.'" 
     Eric nearly jumped out of his chair, but restrained himself.  Joe's
Q-branch toy wouldn't keep people from noticing if he made an obvious scene.
"You're talking science fiction, Joe."
     "It's real, Eric.  I've know about this for a few years, and it's been a
carefully guarded secret for nearly fifty years now.  Other realities exist,
and powerful entities from those realities have been fighting an insanely
subtle proxy war on our world.  A Cold War of the gods, if you will."
     "Seriously?  No way.  You're pranking me.  I'm no tinfoil hatter, Joe, I
know that the government sucks at keeping secrets.  Something like this would
have blown open ages ago," Eric shook his head.
     Joe shrugged.  "The gods themselves are doing their best to keep it
secret, which has helped.  Best theory we have on that is it's because the
rules of our reality are just enough different that they have a hard time
acting overtly.  So they prefer keeping things secret and working through
coincidence and apparent dumb luck whenever possible.  But you're right about
the inevitability of this blowing wide open.  Maybe not this year, or next
year, but the secret is teetering on the edge of...well, not being secret
anymore."
     "Assuming you're not just pulling my leg, why bring it to me?"
     "Because we think you can be trusted enough to come inside.  I don't
really work for the DoE, Eric, and the security check on that student of
yours was just a cover.  We've been investigating you for a few years now,
along with everyone else doing serious work that could touch on the matter of
other realities.  It's a depressingly short list."
     "Maybe if the DoE was more generous with grants, the list would be
longer," Eric shrugged.  "But since you don't really work for them, I guess
complaining to you would be a waste of time."
     "Well, wish granted anyway, ol' buddy.  I work for...well, we don't have
an official name or really even an official existence, but we call ourselves
the DoX: Department of the Exterior.  WAAAAY exterior.  And we've gotten as
far as we can with lurking in the corners and trying to figure things out
based on publications and the occasional fishing expedition.  We need someone
who really gets the science behind all of this, AND can be trusted.  I'll be
honest here, we don't really think you're that good a risk, but you're the
best option we have, and none of us think we can afford to wait another
generation and see if the next crop of students produces anything better."

     That was when everything went to hell.

     Maybe Joe expected something to happen, maybe he had some bit of spy
gear that flashed him a warning, or maybe regular old mundane training was
enough to get him in motion before Eric realized motion was called for, but
the next thought Eric had was something along the lines of, "Ow!  Being
pushed to the pavement hurts!"
     "Ow!" he said, somewhat redundantly as he found himself under the
table, with Joe standing over him.
     "Stay down," Joe warned.  People were starting to panic thanks to
whatever Joe had seen, and Eric realized that even if the table wouldn't stop
a bullet or a bomb, it was just dandy to keep him from being trampled, so
down he stayed.  He did, however, twist around and try to get a look around.
     "What am I staying down away from?"
     "Those," Joe pointed into the sky, where five figures in red and white
armor of some kind flew in a tight formation, sweeping overhead before
reversing course and heading straight for the cafe.
     "I don't suppose they just want coffee?" Eric muttered.
     By now, the cafe was empty except for Eric, Joe, and the five armored
figures now landing on the street.  Up close, Eric could see that their
helmets had been designed to evoke skulls.  He had no idea how they could be
flying, since they had no wings and only small protrusions on their boots for
thrust.  Physically impossible.
     Just like Joe's sound-blocker.
     "Primary target Eric Harris acquired," the middle one of the five
intoned, its voice flat and clearly synthesized.  Were these robots?  That
would allow space for things like thrusters, but raised even MORE questions. 
     Also..."Target?" Eric eeped.
     The day had gone downhill amazingly quickly.
     Joe hadn't drawn a gun.  Maybe he figured it wouldn't do any good
against whatever these things were.  Or just make them attack sooner.
     "Who are you?" Eric asked, standing.  The table wouldn't stop them, and
if he was going to get killed, a stupid macho part of him wanted to die on
his feet.
     "We are Annihilator Squadron Upsilon.  Eric Harris, answer truthfully:
does humanity deserve to live?"
     Eric exchanged a significant glance with Joe.  Was this the first step
in his divine Cold War going hot?  Ask some random mortal to justify the
existence of humanity before deciding whether to just wipe everyone out?
     "Well," Eric started to answer.
     Then the sky flared white and it felt like a sonic boom had been set off
behind him.  When Eric's senses returned to working properly, the
"Annihilators" lay sprawled like puppets with their strings cut.  

               *              *              *              *

[March 5, 2003 - Manhattan, KS]

     "We found it," Eric announced.  "The home base of the Annihilators."
     Multiple squadrons of the strange cyborgs...for that's what they turned
out to be...had been searching the world for Eric during the July Sixth
Incident.  No one knew where they'd come from, or why they'd stopped working
shortly after appearing.  
     Well, not to mince words...they'd died.  Whatever principle let their
impossible abilities work also kept them alive, and once the JSI flare hit,
they stopped *living*.
     Fort Riley provided security, Kansas State University provided
infrastructure, and all of the Annihilators found in America had been brought
there for analysis.  The Department of the Exterior quietly ran things behind
the scenes, and Eric was all the way inside now.
     "Where on Earth is it?" Al O'Ryan asked.  "Or was the orbital theory
correct?" 
     "It was," Eric nodded.  "Up in an orbit not used by commercial
satellites, there's what looks like a space station.  But it's only
registering on visible light.  Longer and shorter frequencies, like radar,
say it's empty space."
     "And gravity probes?"
     "And gravity probes, indeed.  They gave some *very* interesting
results," Eric raised an eyebrow.  The probes had been a piece of "god tech"
that Eric helped the DoX understand and repurpose.  "The satellite is in a
tangled brane."
     "That means it must have been..."
     "Moving between realities, Al.  And it got stuck.  Either the
Annihilators couldn't keep working without a command station purely inside
our reality, or they needed different physical laws to work and something cut
off their ability to play by those rules."
     "Given how much of the DoX special tech stopped working after the JSI,
my money's on the latter," Al speculated.
     "Right.  And gruesome as I bet it was, pulling apart the cyborgs hasn't
gotten us much.  If it was a self-destruct, it was insanely subtle.  Most of
the more outre tech just doesn't work no matter what we do with it."
     "So...what're we gonna do about the satellite?" Al asked.
     "For now, observe the hell out of it, and make sure all the remaining
Annihilators are dismantled before poking at the satellite.  We do not want
them getting up and resuming their mission.  I, in particular, do not want
this to happen," Eric frowned.  No one really knew why all the Annihilators
had been looking for him in particular, but when you send something called an
"Annihilator" to find a person, odds are you want that person annihilated.
"Hopefully we an figure out something more before whoever's up there figures
out how to unstick themself."

               *              *              *              *

[March 5, 2003 - Earth Orbit]

     Trapped between worlds, Eric Harris A.K.A. Devastator looked on in
silent, impotent fury as two Earths full of living humans turned below him.
The wall that someone had slammed down around his native reality five years
ago had pinned him like an insect in a display case.  And most of his forces
had been trapped in the new reality, the bolthole he'd hoped to ride out the
worst of the godly wars in, a bolthole where the physical laws would brook
far less interference.  He could neither move from his prison nor affect
either of the worlds he circled.
     For now.
     The new world may well be a lost cause, but he had followers still on
the world of his birth.  And once the chaos roiling around the globe settled
down, someone would heed his call.
     Somehow.
     He could afford to wait.  He had survived without food or drink for five
years now, and was likely more spirit than living thing.  Which meant he
could simply wait for humanity to wipe itself out, if there was no other
choice....

============================================================================

Author's Notes:

     Written for High Concept Challenge #43, "The Eruption of the Fantastic
into the Mundane."  It was Ash Wednesday, I didn't have any pressing
work-related writing to do (as spring break was the next two weeks, so no
need to work on lecture notes yet), so after deciding I wasn't going to get
ASH #121 written in one day, I went for another CSS.  This story shows what
happened in another side reality when the Barrier went up.

     Eric Harris, in the main ASH continuity, was a gravitational scientist
who gained powers and went insane in a lab accident.  Al O'Ryan is Thomas
O'Ryan's brother, as seen in 2003's "Ash Wednesday" one-shot (in which,
amusingly, Ash Wednesday also fell on March 5, just like this year).  Joe
Ferguson has not appeared before...I decided throwing in Bennett Rush in that
role would have been a little too much.  

     In case you hadn't figured it out, when Devastator finds his "alt" on a
new world, he puts them to the question and kills any that aren't dedicated
to his mission of eradicating humanity.  Actually, they all get killed, but
Devastator is curious as to how common his own stance is among the various
Eric Harrises, so he always tries to check first.

     The Nozomi satellite had technical difficulties and never got to enter
orbit around Mars in real life.  The neutron spectrometry mentioned early in
the story suggested Lunar water, but was not considered proof.  That proof
would take another decade or so.  One version of M-theory posits that reality
came into being when two "branes" smacked into each other and kicked up
ripples that became the distribution of matter, and as these branes oscillate
new universes come into being every so often (every few hundred billion or
trillion years, IIRC).

============================================================================

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