Prompt Lost
Self Destruction
Pine trees are a blur on either side of the car as I race across the freeway toward Syracuse and my weekend of solitude.
Almost a year of work without a vacation. My job is to travel from continent to continent, planet to planet, as arbiter of the Republic, with the goal of ironing out a few thousand of the endless conflicts which inevitably arise in civilized space. It was a prestigious position, but neither particularly fulfilling nor at all forgiving.
Teleportation made it possible, as it made possible the Interstellar Republic itself. For generations we tried to beat the speed of light.
The answer was folding space-time – aka wormholes. But it’s too damned expensive to send an object through a wormhole. So we send information – a recipe, ship schematics, my consciousness – all sorts of information.
That’s how we made “teleportation” work – grow copies of important people all over the galaxy and then send just their consciousness through. Old bodies left brain-dead, new body goes about its business. Not the most efficient method but it worked.
At first there was a big ethical question about what to do with the discarded “yous.” But eventually that quieted down and now I think they just incinerate the old bodies. Planet specific solutions I think.
But enough of work and technology. Now I’m back on Earth for a long weekend, driving through upstate New York toward my family’s old log cabin.
I pull into the driveway and my feet exit the car onto the crunch of icy snow. The sun is going down quickly, so I gather together my small suitcase and the bags of food and run inside.
That evening is perfect. I roast a whole chicken and pour myself a glass of Cabernet. Sleep comes over me quickly and early and i fall asleep in my armchair in the living room.
I awake to the loud crack of breaking glass. I look up and see the figure of a man entering through the broken window. I stand, go to the nearby fireplace, pick up the steel poker and wave it menacingly.
“Get the fuck out of here or I will fuck you up.”
The man looks up at me. I can’t see his face in the dark. Slowly, very slowly, he begins to lower himself back out the broken window. We watch each other in ghostly silence until another man grabs me from behind and tries to throw me to the floor. I scream and put all my force into racing backward until my assailant is smashed into a bookshelf and knocked free of me.
Meanwhile the other man coming through the window has entered the house. I hear him crunching in the room on the broken glass and turn around just in time to dodge the swing of a broken shard of glass.
The shadowy figure swings again, and again, fast arcs of the arm aiming to slice open my skin. After the third swing I see an opening and heave the sharp side hook of the poker toward the assailant’s head. It lands there with a wet thump and the man falls like a rag-doll and twitches ferociously.
I get my bearings and run toward the light switch, but the man I’d slammed into the bookshelf trips me up and I fall in a flailing heap into the shards of glass. They cut up my hands as I break my fall and roll onto my back.
The second would be murderer stands a few feet away in the darkness. I feel around with my right hand and grab hold of a large shard of glass. The shadow lunges at me with a yell and I raise up the glass. I feel the sickening connection between flesh and glass and then the torrent of hot blood. The figure begins to make a horrible gurgling noise and falls over, writhing.
I get up as fast as I can and race for the light switch. The darkness is banished in a bright flash and after a moment of adjustment, I see the truth splayed out before me as a vision of death on my living room carpet.
There I am, dead as a door-nail with my fireplace poker embedded several inches in my left temple. There, also, am I, turning white and slithering uselessly on my blood stained carpet, a shard of my window pane lodged deep in my neck. At the other end of the room there I was again in the mirror, my arms and face superficially cut, wearing a look of terrified disbelief.
It had begun to snow outside and I could see the flakes falling into the house through the broken glass. In the haze of snow I thought I saw something else as well. With a flick I turned on the outdoor flood lights and began to shake.
There were more of me, nearly a dozen, standing outside in the snow, looking up at me in the house. Then, all at once, each of me broke into a run in my direction, and I screamed again, louder and longer than before.
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