SFSTORY: 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 herioc (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!

Copyright 2006 by Troy H. Cheek. Free to read, but please reprint only with permission.