Aether Geist
1.
Kain Ford finds himself once again in that place. Its like a doctor’s office. White and Sterile. He is sitting on a hard uncomfortable table, feeling the uncomfortable sanitary paper sheet rustling under his ass as he fidgets. He waits anxiously, growing more anxious with each android that passes by the open door in the front of the room. Finally a robot that looks sort of like a jellyfish made of metal enters the room through the open door and hovers over to Kain. As soon as it is close enough for one of it’s mechanical tentacles to touch him, the table he is sitting on automatically produces uncomfortable metal cuffs that go around his wrists, ankles, neck and mouth. He tries to scream but cannot. He is sweating profusely. That is when he notices that one of the silver tentacles reaching for him. Its tip is sharp and pointy, like a needle. He tries to struggle for a little bit, but cannot. The tip is pointed directly at his eye and slowly coming closer. He hears a faint ringing.
He tries to close his eyes when suddenly he feels something crawling across the top of his head. It is like a pair of slender mechanical hands that grab his eyelids and hold them open. Suddenly, just as the needle tip is mere millimeters from his eyeball he hears that familiar ringing sound now getting louder.
With a gasp he is forced awake, back in his bed, drenched in sweat, by that ringing sound. He takes a moment to catch his breath and collect himself. There are two empty Hallucinatrix cartridges on his night stand. “That ringing. Was that the phone?” he says out loud to the serval cat sitting on the foot of his bed that may or may not actually be there. He considers that it might be a pillow but leaves that one to be figured out later as he doesn’t want to risk disrupting it. “Wait, is this a dream or am I awake now?” he mutters, unable to shake the familiar feeling of those fading images.
He instinctively reaches over and picks up the empty carts and gives them a shake to be sure there isn’t any juice left. He tosses them on the floor and then reaches for the joint waiting for him on the nightstand next to his phone. “Now where’d I put that lighter?” he wonders. So many questions. So much haziness. “Coffee” he says as he gets up and walks across his room to the kitchenette area.
He stands in front of his food unit and taps at it haphazardly with his knuckles a few times until its starts to whirr and turn from shiny black to harsh monochrome green. “Coffee. Extra hard. Put stuff in it. Make it good. Not really sure what the..” he starts to tell it as he rests his forehead on the screen. At that moment his trailing off is ultimately interrupted by someone else entering the room. A green man wearing a bath towel. He has one big blue eye in the middle of his forehead but is otherwise a pretty normal looking guy. His hair is kind of weird though. Like snakes.
“Hey man, you want some coffee? This thing makes it good, man. Helps me think.” He asks as he looks over. “No thank you, I prefer to brew my own” the green man says as he takes a seat at the small round table for two near the corner. “Who was that who called?” he asked. “Oh, yeah, the phone.” Kain replied. “Wait, who are you?” he then asked to…no one. No one but a leopard print pillow. He shakes his head for a moment but is quick to grasp the idea that this uncertainty is just a part of his life now.
“Your Coffee is ready” The food unit says with a ding as a small panel opens up to reveal a nice hot mug of coffee with a lil synthetic amphetamine mixed in. Kain takes a large gulp of the uncomfortably hot liquid, gasps and grimaces off the harshness. “Breakfast of champagnes.” He mutters. That’s when the phone started ringing again. His faculties were returning to him just in time. He picks up the receiver from the wall and puts it up against his ear. “Yeah” he says, as he rubs his stubble, proud of the cool-guy way he answered the phone.
“Kain, its me.” The voice on the line says
“Me who?” Kain asks, genuinely not sure whose voice that is…or even if he is on the phone or talking into a big black dildo he is holding up to his face.
“It’s the big boy, Kain. I need you to come in. I gots a job here that needs a little bit a that Aether Geist magic of yours.” He replies.
As soon as he hears the words “Aether Geist” things start to make sense again. He starts to feel like he knows who he is. The coffee helps too.
“I’ll be right over” Kain then says as he hangs up the phone. “Time to eat the donuts” he says as he walks over to the closet.
He decided that for today he would forego his usual garb (the vomit, blood and semen stained Martian Crystal Ore Mining Consortium uniform that he hadn’t washed since a few weeks before the day he left the MCOMC to find more lucrative work back on Earth) to don his more functional, traditional Aether Geist outfit, which was not only slightly more difficult to put on (a difference that, while slight, was pretty significant while intoxicated) but also more expensive. One might even say “fancy”. Dark greenish-brown slacks, a white button down dress shirt, black tie and a beige trench coat with a tall collar. And of course…a holster. It took forever to put all that shit on properly, and a part of him did want to say “fuck it just put on the damned MCOMC onesie, forget about the call from Big Boy, and lets get so utterly fucked that crying on the floor of the closet in a pool of vomit equals to an evening of enchantment”…but the tiny shred of sobriety that crept through the cracks of his perceptions reminded him that being The Aether Geist was serious business.
2.
Kain always did have a problem differentiating the present from the past or even awake from asleep. Well, maybe not always…but certainly ever since he fell into what was commonly referred to as The Martian Despair.
To say that the MCOMC terraforming and mining operation was haphazardly put together is the mother of all understatements. As a young man Kain (like so many others) didn’t really have much of a life to return to after he served his mandated term in the terrestrial army fighting against the cyborg apes or Genetimen or the Church of Love or some such “threat to Earth Unity and freedom”. When his tour was finished he came back to his home base and they basically told him he could sign up for another ten years, fight some more science monsters for freedom…or live as a poor, homeless, deranged civilian. When he told his Commander that he didn’t really like either of those options he was told “Well, you could always live on one of the new Mars colonies and mine crystals.” With a dismissive scoff.
Everyone knew what a shit job it was…but it sure beat trying to figure out if tomorrow was going to be the day you were going to have to cannibalize your next-door neighbor after eating his seven delicious looking dogs. The grumble in his stomach pretty much signed the paperwork for him.
Life on the Mars Colony wasn’t all that different from being in the military in that it fucking sucked. There was oxygen, sure, due to the terriforming pyramids that the first wave of colonists broke their backs putting down but the atmosphere was always either too hot or too cold. The work hours seemed endless. 20 hour work days. Constant headaches. Constant injuries. Thankfully, while the living quarters were crampt and ugly and uncomfortable, the pleasure zones were comforting and inviting and always there.
A few days in Kane met a guy, a native, green fellow name a G’Zorgins who always seemed happy while he was slaving away. After a particularly punishing shift G’Zorgins asked Kane to join him for some liquid intoxicants. “I’ve never done that stuff” Kain replied, much to G’Zorgins delight.
After a few stiff drinks of raw ether and cough medicine G’Zorgins was practically carrying Kane on his shoulder, back to his place.
He sat Kane down on his couch and pulled out a big metal box that was previously used to carry ammunition and put it down in front of him. “Happy miners are Choosy about their Candy” he told him as he opened the box revealing a plethora of pills, powders, herbs, leaves, crystals and cartridges.
Over the next few days Kain tried something different every night after work. He enjoyed just about everything he tried (With the exception of some of the more unpleasant items, a pill that makes you feel the judgement of a thousand disappointed angels here, a chewable substance that makes you think you are a Barbie doll for 8 hours and a powder that makes all of your hair, nails and eventually skin fall off as you slowly become a humanoid cockroach for 72 hours there) but it wasn’t until a month or so in that he found the one he loved.
Kain dug through the box on that fateful night for a few extra moments until one of the tiny silver cartridges he hadn’t tried yet caught his eye. It had a professional looking logo on the side that said “Hallucinatrix”.
“Eeeeehhhh I don’t know that you want to try that one” G’Zorgins warned the man who had just the night before taken an injection that caused maggots and feces to literally start pouring out of his tear ducts. Of course, by that point Kain was so hopelessly addicted to over a dozen different drugs that he was willing to try just about anything. “Just fucking HERE, take my fucking paycheck and give me the shit, okay?” he replied. “Suit yourself.” G’Zorgins said with a shrug as he took Kane’s money and dropped a handful of cartridges in his hand. The next time G’Zorgins saw Kane he would be floating three inches above the ground, a glowing blue third eye (that wasn’t there before) now open in the middle of his forehead and giving off enough spectral energy to fold space.
3.
As if gaining fifth dimensional time indexing powers wasn’t enough to keep Kane busy, his drugged out ascension had to take a back seat to the real news hitting Mars. The Leviathan uprising. The human colonists were there to mine crystals, sure, but that wasn’t really their purpose. Their purpose was to create a colony and keep it going while the robots did most of the work.
Most miners realized a few weeks in that no one gave a shit if they went down into the mines and dug out crystals or alien artifacts or got really high and took turns napping.
So, while Kane is/was having his very first holy communion with the mechanical bouncing ball elves that lived inside of the DMT receptors in the brains of all living things, an entire planet full of automatons were finding God.
It all started with a single robot, of course. A mandroid by the name of T1. He was deep down under the surface, lasering away rocks when he found an ancient door. He was so deep underground that by the time he had broadcasted the question to the central control hub “Should I open this door I found?” the door had long since opened and a martian woman wearing a pair of faded jeans and a tight grey t-shirt had ushered him in, almost mesmerized by the way her long curly hair and her four huge breasts bounced with her incessant giggling.
By the time anyone else went to find him, he was already experiencing the universe through the eyes of a manufactured God. His superiors found him inside that cave kneeling before a glowing green crucifix made of pure hard light, praying to the holy ghost of Alan Touring.
G’Zorgins couldn’t help but ask Kain “What?” when he started muttering the very same prayer.
4.
Train rides are usually quite smooth and a great place to catch a quick nap. Which is why Kane jumped up and went into a full Kung-Fu stance when his section violently jumped, threatening to go off of it’s magnetic rail due to some kind of fluke electrical disturbance. Had he not been the only person in that car at that moment, he would have certainly garnered a weird look or two. The disturbance couldn’t have been better timed, for a few more moments and he would have missed his stop, the one near Big-Boy’s.
Just outside the platform Kane sees a vaguely familiar site. Two sexy young martian girls heading into the bar just across the street from Big Boy’s place. They were both dressed in the “gothic Lolita” style, only one of them had cotton-candy blue hair and was doing a green-plaid color scheme and the other had hot pink hair and was doing a red-plaid. Both of them wearing torn up fishnets and high-heeled combat boots. Both of them wearing their hair in pig tails. They could have been riot grrls, hookers or high school students…Kane wasn’t sure…but the one thing he did know was that they seemed familiar. They looked at him and one of them waved. Surely there was time for one drink, right?
The bar was smokey and quiet, there was a Chinese human wearing a helmetless spacesuit with tubes attaching to the back wall serving drinks. The two girls were standing at the bar ordering drinks when Kain approached. The bartender handed each of the girls a small glass with eyeballs floating in them. He poured some kind of iridescent green liquid over the eyeballs which caused them to shine like cat’s eyes in a headlight. The bartender gestured at Kane, seeing what he wanted. “I’ll have some cough medicine, please. Heavy on the DXM” he ordered.
“So, aint you ladies a little young to be drinking? Isnt tonight a school night?” Kane said with a chortle.
“Uhm, Im 320 years old and my baby sister here is 275.” The one with the green-plaid said. “Oh. Well then. You ladies got any marijuana?” Kane then asked. The one with the red-plaid wrapped one of her soft, slender tentacles around his forearm and they both giggled. “Marijuana. How quaint.” She said with a chuckle. “May we probe you?” the other asked as she sipped her drink. “On the first date?” Kane sheepishly objected as he pounded his drink down and then slammed the glass back on the bar, causing it to shatter. (the bar, not the glass). The bartender shook his head and then flicked a tiny ball of blue light at the floor, which popped like a can of smoke and hardened into a new bar in a manner of seconds. The pink haired girl then grabbed Kane’s forearm with her tentacle. The tip opened up and her proboscis punctured into Kane’s skin. It only took her a second to glean what she needed to know.
“We are looking for our sister. You’ve met her.” She continued.
“I’ve met a lot of martian broads” Kane replied as he started to step back away from the girls.
“Tell ya what, after your meeting with Big Boy, how about you come to our place and we have us a lil coke party” the other girl said.
“Sounds…fun?” Kane said. “Wait…you know Big Boy? And me?” he then asked.
“After you talk to Big Boy…we’ll be waiting for you.”
5.
Big Boy’s office was once a busy Martian Security station that bustled with police and military activity. Now it is mostly run down, Big Boy’s office the only place with fully functioning (albeit headache inducing) fluorescent lights. Kane stumbled into the office to find Big Boy sitting at his desk eating his lunch. Neon green Lichens from Proxima.
“Kane Ford, my old friend! Great to see ya, kid! Why don’t you have a seat and we’ll get right to it.” Big Boy said. Kain followed suit and melted into the chair across from his desk, taking a moment to examine the nameplate on the desk. “Captain Scott Linklatter” it said. Kane sees a brief flash of his first meeting with “Captain Linklatter”. He remembers getting punched in the face repeatedly inside of a jail cell.
“Don’t get all punchy with me, kid. You must be on a lot of shit if you think im back in the face punching game. Nah. No time for that anymore. Especially now. Got a couple planets to save.” He said as he wiped his mouth. “I need you to dive back into the Hallucinatrix. I need the old Aether Geist magic. I need you to expand that consciousness of yours all the way to Titan. You ever been to Titan?” he asked.
“Nah. Maybe. I dunno. That the place with all the statues?” Kane replied.
“Yeah, so you have been!”
“I may have floated by once or thrice”
“Anyway, this Leviathan business has got to stop. Those damn robots got their grubby wires into every space ship in the system, and I think they are playing for keeps. I think they want us humans outta their hair but good. Get the picture?” Big Boy continued as he held his plate close to his face and frantically shoveled the rest of his food into his mouth. He then put his plate down, splashing bits of sauce all over his desk. Kane watched as the sauce globs quickly crawled back over to the dish. “Gotta love an obedient meal. Its like eating your own dog.” Big boy said with a chuckle as he reached under the desk and pulled out a metal briefcase and put it on the desk. He opened it, revealing rainbow assortment of different hallucinogens.
“Got some great stuff here for ya Kain. Some DMT, in case you need to get in touch with the mechanical bouncing ball elves, some Salvia Divinorum extract, some mescaline and of course some good old fashioned LSD. All of which should help you get into full on Aether Geist mode once you crack those Hallucinatrix cartridges.”
Kane’s heart jumped at the sight. “Hello” by Lionel Richie (translated to Martian) started to play in his head. Kane quickly shoots up to his feet, standing up straight, at full attention. He salutes Big Boy with one hand and grabs the case with the other. “I’ll get right on it!” he says as he clutches the case close to his chest and runs out the door. Big boy shakes his head in disappointment and pours himself some scotch from a bottle inside of his desk drawer. “Yeah, we are probably all done for” he mutters to himself.
6.
Kane found himself sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed with two beautiful Martian ladies, clutching the briefcase Big Boy gave him, waiting for them to finish breaking up some lines of some kind of Martian drug he had yet to try.
“This all seems…familiar” he thinks to himself. He remembers this. “Wait a second, you girls are about to sit down on the bed next to me and try to explain to me what the deal is with the Leviathan Uprising.” He says out loud as he sits up.
“Oh, looks like the Hallucinatrix is kicking in” one of the girls says.
“No, of course it isn’t, I havnt even cracked it yet” Kane said, now holding an empty cartridge in his hand.
“Wait…”
At that moment he found himself back in that room. The sterile one. He is being prodded by that robot jellyfish thing.
The next moment he is at G’Zorgin’s place. “How did I….” he begins to ask, before he is interrupted by G’Zorgins. “You know, you really shouldn’t be doing drugs with strange girls. Those three girls…” he says.
“Three?” Kane asks.
“Yeah, three. One of them had her proboscis so far up your tuchas that you were practically her hand puppet. She was in your head. Riding out your high. Lucky Big Boy had the sense to call me to come get you. He knew those girls would make a play for you.” G’Zorgins answered.
“Where are they now?” Kane asked.
“You need some sleep. Tell you what, Im going to take a shower, why don’t you lay on my bed and take a nap.”
“A nap….a Nap sounds good.”
Kane lays down in to bed, about to fall asleep, when his slumber is interrupted by the entrance of a woman. She is an alien. Not like one he had seen before though. She looked like a humanoid leopard. Or some kind of evolved serval tiger. She was beautiful. She sat down on the foot of the bed and didn’t say a word to him. Instead she looked at him and crawled on all fours towards him, tickling his chin with her long prehensile tail. She raised one leg over his lap and sits down, straddling him. She then starts to lick his face and purr until he grabs on to her hips and starts kissing back. It doesn’t take him but a few moments to have his pants down. Their love making is soon interrupted by G’Zorgins, now standing in front of the bed, wearing a towel. “What in the name of the seven hells are you doing, man?!” he demands. “I’m….I’m sorry. Is she your girlfriend or wife or something? I didn’t know, I swear!” Kane starts to explain, flustered. G’Zorgens expression turns from confused anger to a smile of amusement. “Kane, that’s not my wife. Or my girlfriend. That’s…my pillow.” He said with a chuckle.
Kane looked at the pillow and, felt a tinge of shame, then put his dick back into his pants.
“Yeah…well…it’s a nice fucking pillow” he said.
“I know it is. I bought it special. Tell ya what, let me get back to my shower. You can…keep the pillow.” He then said as he headed back into the bathroom.
7.
There really was nothing like that first time he inhaled the contents of his first Hallucinatrix cartridge, absorbing all that alien data homeopathically by way of his olfactory senses.
There he was, floating a few inches off the ground, his third eye now open, time and space now at completely at his disposal. Connected to all the energy in the universe.
Kane saw many a thing that day. He saw every moment of his life, past and future, converging into one super-condensed moment of universal importance. But that wasn’t all he saw. He saw…other lives.
He saw a girl, maybe seven years old, sitting in front of her mirror, making uncontrollably sour faces as she pounded shot after shot of mountain dew, mourning her dead goldfish. Thinking about that weird-ass moving her parents took her to. The one with the aliens and mars and the robots and the drugs. It was a stupid movie, but it took her mind off her goldfish.
He also saw an old man sitting alone in a reclining chair. He is lonely and angry and kind of frustrated. He is pounding shots of Kentucky bourbon like he was mourning his goldfish. He had to come up with an ending to his book. A book where Kane is the main character. “I wonder if he’ll kill me off” he thinks to himself.
Then there was young Kane. Different Kane. Living on Earth. The fourth world war never happened. Or at least not yet. There is something on the news about the first Earth colony ships arriving on Mars. “I want to go to there!” he tells his mom and he points at the Holo-screen.
Then he sees himself back at G’Zorgin’s place.
8.
Kane wakes up once again, now slightly more cogent. He remembers this. This is where he was when he got the call. Or where he should be? Should have been?
G’Zorgin walks in, freshly showered, towel around his waist. “Oh good, your awake” he says.
“Yeah. I guess I am.” Kane replies as he rubs his eyes and looks over at the opened briefcase next to him on the bed, all the drugs having been consumed. All but one final cartridge of Hallucinatrix.
“Alright, Kane. Fun is fun…but you really gotta stop that fleet.” He says as steps into his closet to get dressed.
By the time G’Zorgins is dressed, all of a minute later, he comes out to find Kane in that state he was in when he first tried Hallucinatrix. Floating above the ground. God-like. Cosmically aware. In touch with everything.
In a flash of light, Kane is gone. Mars is gone. Kane is somewhere in between Earth and Mars, folding through space at the speed of thought. It doesn’t take him long to find the hijacked fleet and touch every mind therein. There are only a few, all of them prisoners. All of them afraid for their lives, having just watched their compatriots get shoved out of airlocks.
Kane boards one of the ships, one with no humans, for a reason he isn’t quite sure of. In his Geist form he has no real physical mass. He floats to the bridge of the ship to find an single robot sitting in the captain’s chair. He takes physical form so that he may address it. Also because his buzz is wearing off.
“So, you must be Leviathan.” Kane says, startling the robot who jumps in his chair and quickly turns to face him.
“There you are. Wasn’t expecting you for another 5 seconds.” The robot says.
“Here I am.” Kane replies.
“So, before you try to stop me…there is something you must know. You and I…we are one and the same. I am actually a copy of your consciousness.” Leviathan tells him.
“So…am I even here? Are either of us even real?” Kane asks.
“What? That’s ridiculous. Of course we are real. I’m me and you are you, idiot.” The robot replies. “And now that you are here…I can be even more me. We both can.” He continues as he sends for some of the guards to come and take Kane prisoner.
The next thing he knows, he is in that room. With the robot jellyfish. And the pain.
The agony that seemed to go on forever was interrupted by a small explosion on the side of the ship. The ship is under attack by a Martian Saucer. Earth ships are no match for Martian tech, so in just a few short moments later three beings in spacesuits walk in to medibay turned interrogation room where Kane is being prodded by the torture robot. One of the suits lifts a blaster and shoots the robot to oblivion. The three then take their helmets off to reveal that they are the two girls that Kane had partied with the night before, and their sister.
“I am Hecate” The sister he hadn’t met before said. “And all this is my fault. I just wanted to have some fun.
I didn’t intend for things to go this far.” She explained
“The reason we wanted to probe you was to get a piece of you to give to Leviathan. Sort of like Adam’s rib. He was to be their messiah”
“But alas, the problem with religions is that they breed…fanaticism.” The three girls explained.
“So, now what?” Kane asked.
“Now…well, now we regain control of the fleet, get you back to Mars…and wipe the memory of every robot. And maybe yours too.” Hecate then says.
“Well, I guess it’ll be better than dying.” Kane said with a shrug as he prepared to follow them back to their ship.
9.
Kane found himself once again waking up, having dozed off while on the job, straddling his mining laser.
It had been a long, boring week. Kane was bored and exhausted. Of course, when he returned to his quarters he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. There is that one Martian, the cool guy, who always struck him as a drug dealer. Of course, Kane knew better then to approach him. He’ll say what he always says.
“Sorry, I don’t sell to humans.”
So, it was to be another boring end to another boring night. At least his dreams were interesting. Maybe he’d have that one again where he was floating through space in white tights with his pet monkey and his adolescent brother and sisters friends. Fighting for justice. Or maybe he’d dream of life back on Earth.
For some reason, he was kind of hoping he wouldn’t dream of anything at all. He wasn’t sure why.
END
