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I dreamed that I was floating, standing on an evacuation box, like on a magnetic sliding board. Around me, mountains of clouds rose to the horizon, the color resembling carbon dioxide or even methane. But when I started to descend lower, they darkened and became similar to the usual earthly ones. The blue water surface of the ocean stretched out below them. The closer I got to the water, the more turquoise its color became. And when my box touched the water surface and began to sink, in the distance, on the horizon, I noticed land.
Sinking under the water, I felt a growing anxiety. Lowering my eyes, I saw Admiral Ivanova's face in the slot of the evacuation box. She looked at me with the same familiar horror. Only now it was alive. Her eyes were running, her mouth was moving, in a silent scream, and her hands were tapping on the inner surface of the “coffin”. I tried to push off the box, but I couldn't. I was drawn to the bottom with it. An animal fear seized me and began to strangle me. I grabbed my collar in an attempt to unbutton it, but my own hands continued its work, causing me to suffocate and lose consciousness.
I woke up on the shore. It was a crimson sunset. After watching it for a while, I fell asleep.
The next morning burned me on the same shore, and I, overcoming the unusual effect of gravity, retreated into the shade, where I licked my wounds until noon.
When the sun stopped burning, it began to rain from the sky. Just not methane and not carbon dioxide and not even water. Things fell from the sky. Suitcases, statues, folders with papers. A book hit me on the head. Picking it up from the sand, I read: "Pinocchio." I recognized this book. It was mine. I stole it from the children's library. My things, hidden for my long immortal life in an endless pocket, were falling from the sky.
The Boeing 30k 3 Delta 3, which I stole right off the runway during my first depression, crashed into a mountain. It started shaking and the volcano in the middle of the island woke up. The earth shook until night. I found a box of fierce swill from the Abyssinian satellites and fell into oblivion.
I dreamed of a four-dimensional ship of the Pure Empire of Outs. Torn into three-dimensional projections, it fell into the ocean. Piece by piece, the Outs perished in the abyss. The gravity of the planet was different, neither one nor the other, but different, and the ship's engine could not stand it.
I woke up again from the fact that my imprint was reassembling itself. I was lying down, and I was operated on, the loops in the supra-dimensional body were being re-connected.
For the third time I woke up late in the morning. Finally, it was possible to walk calmly without feeling an overload in gravity. In front of me laid a smoking volcano and the sea, boundless and impossibly blue.
My island was sailing past another island. Then past the continent, moved north, and it began to get colder. I found fur coats printed from animalin and built an igloo out of them. I rarely went outside, but soon a lieutenant in an imperial uniform came into the igloo and asked me to follow him to the station.
To my surprise my island was moored in front of the island 10 times bigger. It consisted entirely of the wreckage of the ship of the Pure Empire of Outs. In the center was a citadel, which they had erected in honor of their gods. The PEO have been here for 40 years.
I was interrogated in the bowels of the island, but the infected imprint allowed me to ignore the questions and corrected my answers in their heads so that they could not understand anything, but thought they did. It was the work of the Demon. What an irony that I use their own development against them. The algorithm of a Demon, by which they opposed themselves to Angels, had a ringing name Fate. It allowed to limit any spatial projection to three. But all sorts of gray personalities were interested only in the mechanism of capturing consciousness, and then they did what they wanted. Without an imprint, it was impossible to fight this. Religion forbade Outs to use imprints. And they became a victim of their own design.
I was appointed junior janitor and released. My duties included the first and second floors. I got comfortable in Number 4 (name of the island) and made new friends. People clung to me, and I made them do that, or rather, the Demon did. Soon the whole station was under my control.
The situation was deplorable. The dry rations were running out. On my small island, they caught all the animals which prolonged food supplies for two more days. Disaster was approaching. Cannibalism was seriously discussed in the wall newspaper. In strict, dry, military language.
Fishing was not possible; the oceans were empty. But I’ve found in the dropped things on my island a biological kit for the 5th grade of a provincial university in the K-Pax sector. The scientists of the Outs have developed an evolutionary cycle and my set has made it possible to fill the oceans with life.
Time flowed very differently, for me on the island and for them on Number 4. And apparently for the rest of the world too. And soon funny Snappers were splashing in the seas, and we were constantly doing a barbecue on the roof.
A continent appeared in front of us and Number 4 moored to a huge land, restraining my little island in-between. The Outs refused to leave their new home, and I went alone to the mountains rising on the continent.
Wherever I went, there was already a world around. Cities flourished. People who eventually fled from the city of Outs learned to change their gender and start families. The Demon taught them this lesson, turned half of them into women before I left. Sometimes, in a dream, I had nightmares that I did not control my imprint at all, and it was it, the Demon who sat in it, who controlled me and this strange world in which we found ourselves.
But I went on, studying the opening vistas, until I reached the edge. There were stars behind it, and at the bottom, where the core of the planet should have been, there was something like... the Baby, an anomaly, where I jumped. More precisely, was forced to jump. It was covering itself with matter. Before my eyes, a mantle appeared around it, continents cooled down on the mantle, twisting into spirals. One of these forms broke off and rose into the sky, forming a moon.
I sat at the edge for quite a long time, thinking about my situation. Where am I? A new universe? I have never been in such a fast-forming one. Even in simulation. And have never observed this kind of accelerated evolutionary process. From a short course in astronomy, which was attached to the biological set for the 5th grade, I learned about the classifications of sub universes and even parallel ones. But the demo course ended pretty quickly and you had to pay for the full version. Payment was accepted only when connected to the network of the Central Computator. I tried several times to feel the network with an imprint, but with no result. Demon didn’t help either.
Time flowed around me imperceptibly fast. While I was thinking, the settlers got to me. With wagons pulled by incredibly hairy oxen. They didn't know anything about their origin, their language was badly changed, but still resembled the dialects of the Outs. The self-translator in the imprint got used to it pretty quickly, and I realized that they took me for god. Not for God, no. They really worshipped a distorted version of the Time Lord, a comic book character that someone apparently found on my island. The comic itself was stored in one of the colorfully furnished wagons. They treated me as a minor deity. Someone thought that I was Kunak, the lord of the elements of darkness, and someone thought that I was Greedy Elsa, the queen of rocket science. So, I realized that different people, and often groups of people, saw me in their own way. The demon also applied its hand here.
The settlers founded a city in front of the edge and it quickly grew. I lived there as an adviser to a senior spiritual leader, and the people revered me on holidays. I studied how civilization was developing before my eyes, enthusiastically took part in rituals until the war came to our lands.
First there were kidnappings, threats, burning of pastures, and then they came under our walls and demanded to obey the new king, Galvan the fifth. “Five,” I thought, “Have there been five Galvans already?”
I walked out of the main gate in full confidence that I would resolve the conflict in no time, hoping for a Demon to act. But to my great surprise, it did not affect them in any way, or simply did not want to. I was captured and sent to the capital of the Golden Hair Kingdom. As I realized later, their civilization was based on several films, also found on my island. The record player and films were stored in their main temple, in the capital. They took the basis of their religion from textual descriptions on movie covers. They were given to me along with the record player many thousands of years ago by a scientist who studied the artifacts of ancient Earth. These were, of course, replicas. They could not launch the player, and they refused all my requests to try it.
So, I lived as a prisoner for quite a long time. They showed respect to me and even let me go for a walk accompanied by guards. From their nightly conversations, I learned that the settlement by the cliff was destroyed. Soon I began to see my neighbors from it as slaves on the streets of Golden Hair. They decided to publicly execute one of them for some minor offense. At the moment of execution, I was just passing by and could not restrain myself, rushed to the aid of the unfortunate, beat the executioner and prevented the guards from capturing us for a long time. No one appreciated my feelings, and my neighbor and I were tied up and thrown into prison.
The quartering should take place tomorrow morning, all the nobility has been invited to it. As I understood it, I am considered the leader of the destroyed city, so my public murder is a celebration.
The night before the execution turns out to be the most ordinary. I look at the stars and the moon, whose origin I once observed, and there is silence in my soul. Then there is a knock on the door.
“DVD,” I say. In the local language, it means “Enter".
The bolts creak, the sagging door opens with difficulty, and the figure of a man appears on the threshold.
“Well, hello, boss,” an unfamiliar voice says in the general Galactic dialect.234Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡc9tYop86Gx
