Psychopomp Magazine Summer 2016 | Page 45

Jason Marc Harris | 45

They arrived with a military escort of humvees raising a cloud of dust, crunching over our rugged fields of sage brush, rumbling past lacerating quills of Joshua trees. Barged right in they did.

They took the Handle into their own hands.

Mr. Peakes emerged from Alkali Caverns, tufts of coyote and Rhodesian ridgeback fur enmeshed in chrome-grey beard and eyelashes that had coppered, lengthened, and thickened like sticky sundew petals. He laughed and laughed with his yapping canine cohort as the cars drove away. We understood why coyotes had often whined at the Texas moon. They too had been longing and waiting to share in a united future where the stars dripped their light into our own celestial minds.

You might have thought we’d all be bereaved, hurt by theft of what had merged us into cosmic communal consciousness.

Such a joining was not so transitory. The intermingling of time and space not so easily dissipated. “Us and them” did not exist in its conventional paradigmatic significance. Not at all.

We took it all calmly for we could not be deprived of what enmeshed us with generational memories of the once populated dark mountains and methane seas of Kepler-186.

Trees with immense clover-like leaves. Waterfalls angling upward from fluctuations in gravity produced by atmospheric modifications of mining corporations to dilute waste created by energy production. Slave farms of sturdy clones. Splicing factories where genes tangled with cybernetic modules. Tentacled robots that ferried their masters to any location and repaired or replaced organs and limbs strained or withered by ravaging age. Technology that had tamed Time.

At first these entities’ mechanical modifications were indulgences for pleasure or efficiency, but as their star shrunk into a miserable dwarf, their race became more machine than flesh.