Chapter Forty-Nine
The shapeshifter looked my way and threw a hand in the air, waving at me from the red couch against the wall below a crooked painting of a sailboat. Judging from the crushed empties scattered around the green carpeted floor, he’d been drinking light beers and watching the small tube television while awaiting my arrival.
He smiled at me and laughed. His empath powers weren’t necessary; anyone with half a brain could read the surprise on my face once I realized whose body the shapeshifter was possessing.
“Hey Jack!” he called excitedly. “Come have a seat. You’re just in time.”
I crossed the small room and took my place on the couch to his right. He slurped noisily at the beer in his hand, then offered me one by gesturing at the ice chest on the rug in front of us.
“I’m good.”
“Can I get you anything else? Tea? Morphine?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to some coffee.”
In an instant, I was holding a mug of brown liquid that smelled like a mix between Heaven and Central America (not sure why I knew what either of those things smelled like, but I did). I took a careful sip and was pleased to learn that it tasted pretty okay.
“Sorry about all that back there. The hand-cutting and the heart-stabbing. Pretty nasty business.”
He looked ahead, and I finally realized what he’d been watching this whole time. On the television in front of us, our bodies were on display back where we’d left them, laid out bleeding on the old school gym floor. The angle of the events moved in accordance with my own thoughts, showing me whatever I wanted to see as soon as I realized I wanted to see it. Rosa was on the ground, unconscious but breathing. O’Brien, same thing. Jerry was there too. I tried to make the camera move to Sabine, but instead the screen went blank.
“That’s probably enough television for now,” the shapeshifter explained, pulling himself up to cross over and switch off the box manually.
Once it was off, I asked the question, “Is this what you really look like?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions. But more or less, yeah, this is me.”
“Are you aware that you look like—”
“Yes. I am aware.” (He even sounded just like him, too. It was unnerving.)
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you look exactly like Bill Murray?”
It was true. He was remarkably similar to the actor, save for the fact that he looked to be in his early thirties, the way he looked in his Ghostbusters heyday.
“I don’t,” corrected the shapeshifter. “It’s the other way around. Bill Murray looks like me. I’m the one who had this face first. It’s not as weird as you think. Every generation has at least one guy with my face. As far as I can tell it’s nothing but a big coincidence. I wouldn’t think too hard on it. There are much bigger things to worry about right now.”
He tossed back the rest of his beer, belched loudly, dropped the newest empty onto the ground, then went to the ice chest to find himself another.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess that brings us to the reason I’m here.”
He cracked open the beer. “You want my help stopping Brother Riley from taking over the world?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Well prepare to be disappointed.” With that, he fell back onto the couch and propped his feet up onto the ice chest.
“Why?”
“You’re missing the big picture. Sure, Brother Riley turning the planet into another hive mind isn’t ideal, but it could be a lot worse. In fact, it will be. I’m sure you’ve heard the prophecy by now. There is an ageless being that survives on pain and suffering. Recent events have notified him that there is something here, in your world. Something tasty. Everyone in your universe is doomed no matter what. It’s just a matter of time. Sure is a good thing we’re here. I don’t know if you saw, but they have every book ever written in the other room.”
“Where is here, anyway? Pietro was dodgy when I asked them.”
“A higher plane of existence where we’re good and safe. If you want, we can chill and watch the world burn. Let Brother Riley have his moment. Mimics will fry up the same as humans, and in the end, he’ll get exactly what he deserves.”
“How do I stop the Collector? How do I help my friends?”
He slammed another beer, tossed it into the corner, and asked, “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“You really want me to go back down there and sort all this out? You know if we leave here, you’ll die instantly.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m telling you again, all other intelligent beings have already begun quarantining your universe for fear of what’s to come. And you want to sacrifice yourself for… what? A few more cosmic microseconds with your weird little friends? Knowing full well that soon your home will become a literal hell on Earth?”
“Well we’ll just burn that bridge when we get to it. I’m sure we’ll figure something out before it’s too late.”
“You won’t. Once he has you in his crosshairs, all hope is lost. He will maximize the pain output of every living creature on your planet. He will rewire your brains on an individual level to make sure that there are no limits to the amount of suffering you can endure. He will use dark magic to make all of you immortal so that even the great beyond cannot serve as an escape. And he will feast on your pain for eternity.”
“I don’t care how bad the future looks. It’s nothing new. My whole generation already knows the planet is headed straight to shit, but giving up is for chumps. We’ll find a way to beat it, or we’ll die trying. Now, are you gonna sit there and drink beers for the rest of eternity? Or are you going to nut up and help me polish this planet-sized turd?”
The room disappeared, and we were standing in nothingness. Our bodies disappeared, and we were nothingness. A message crossed over from the Guardian’s mind to what was left of my own.
“This is what I can do. I can make everyone forget. I’ve done it before.”
I called back to the void, uncertain if the communication would even go through. “What about the mimics?”
The answer was instantaneous. “They won’t remember what they are. They’ll believe the same thing everyone else believes. This is how we defeat the Collector, by erasing him entirely. Nobody will know who he is or what he’s done. His every achievement will be lost forever. I can do this, but... there will be a cost… and there may be some inconsistencies.”
***
The particles of my body rematerialized inside a white room with four walls. Soon, I discovered gravity didn’t work in this room, which meant there were now six walls. I walked up and down and all around. After a meaningless amount of time, I began to suspect that I was trapped here. I was dead, and this was my everlasting purgatory.
But then I remembered that the laws of physics didn’t apply anymore, and I decided to make my escape. I couldn’t go in any “normal” direction, but that left so many other options. I chose the easiest one, and went in.
I allowed my body to once again dematerialize. My essence left the corporeal plane, and I began to shrink. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster. I saw electrons and neutrons, and they looked suspiciously like planets and galaxies. I saw quarks inside of nuclei. I saw the dead space making up magnetic fields between elements of matter smaller than what mankind has discovered. And inside of them, there was so much more. Swirling connections of dots. As I shrank, the dots became colossal networks of interacting matter. At times, there were colors in wavelengths I’d never been able to imagine before. At other times, there was a giant empty plane of nothingness. And then, after a startlingly long voyage, I came across a creature, smaller than the smallest building blocks to ever exist.
It looked like a tadpole until I got closer to the magnificent animal. I continued to shrink as it turned into a whale. An enormous, black whale with no eyes or limbs or features of any kind. Just inky black skin. I shrank and shrank and shrank until I found a pore in its shiny hide, then I entered it.
What I found inside the beautiful creature were trillions upon trillions of voices. I could feel what they were without daring to untangle any of them. I knew, somewhere in the noise, my own voices were filling up this brain. They were calls for help, for forgiveness, for love, for so many things. I was bathing in the echoes of every prayer told by every human throughout all of history. I was swimming through the mind of God. And then, it spoke directly to me.
“Hey, Jack, is that you?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“You going back down to Earth?”
“Yeah. Trying to.”
“When you get there, would you do me a favor?”
“Okay, sure.”
“Send the humans a message. You can let them know it’s from me.”
“What message?”
“Please stop being mean to each other.”
“They, uh, they don’t really listen to me.”
“Okay, never mind then.”
With that conversation done, I continued shrinking. Soon, specks of cosmic dirt came into view. The dirt became moving fragments, dancing around, exploding and swirling and burning. I felt myself being pulled to one collection of fragments in particular, and as I shrank, I understood why. There was a collection of lights, gas, dust, and dark matter all pulling away from a single black hole. In a nondescript branch of this collection, a dim yellow star held a tiny blue rock in its orbit. On this rock were more rocks. Some above water, most below. I found the piece of rock that looked like North America. I found the part of it that looked like my shitty home state. And I fell down through the upper atmosphere, the lower atmosphere, the clouds, and the roof of the gas station. There I saw a skinny young man who looked a lot like me. His face flat against the counter. Next to him, a man who looked like Jerry.
I couldn’t slow down. I couldn’t stop. I crashed right into my body.
***
I shot straight upright screaming.
“WHOA, bro!” Jerry said, trying to calm me down.
“Where am I?! What’s going on?!”
Jerry patted me on the back. “It’s okay, dude. Relax. You were just having a bad dream, okay?”
“A bad… what?”
“You fell asleep at the register again.”
“I WHAT at the WHAT?! Again?!”
“Yeah, you do that every now and then. I painted your nails for you.”
I looked at the red polish on my hands, then asked, “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Because!” He stood and put his hands on his hips, then shouted, “YOU LOOKED ADORABLE!” With that, he stomped around the counter and out the front door.
Old Bob watched him leave, then came up to the register with a box of nightcrawlers and some boiled peanuts. With nothing else to do, I rang him up and gave him his total.
“I’m glad you guys are back,” he said before popping a peanut into his mouth and leaving me alone to unpack what the hell just happened.