Speed Demon

 

by Shaun Lawton

                                    digital art by Shaun Lawton

     I’dchii K’riccian dwelled along the rippled dunes of an evaporated sea on the small world of a triple star system not very far from Earth. In their raspy dialect, Kiriick is the closest human approximation to what they have named their home planet.

    Kiriickians are a bird like humanoid species located within the habitable zone of a star too dim for humans to have taken much interest in.  They have been observing our own globe for generations.  I’dchii K’riccian has been analyzing data about our planet Undraada for the last nineteen revolutions of his life.

      He is the sole proprietor of what most on his planet consider to be the best crafted astronomical lens engineered in their drawn out history.  Kiriickians belong to a subset of beings whose primary characteristic has been guided by what Earthlings might term anarchy, but which may be attributed to a variety of forces, among which nestles a very well developed magnetoception.  This among other aspects allows the avian race to rely on the assembly of a committee on only the most special occasions. It becomes necessary during unusual territorial disputes and other unexpected circumstances. In general, the azentia enjoy a relatively free society in the thin exosphere of Kiriick. 

    Kiriickians do not think or behave like human beings. Equipped with a sharp sense of echolocation, they parse their surroundings and their relation to each other, monitoring and tracking their various clades across the expanse of their world in accordance to how much room is left to populate. Competition among their clans for wider or more desirable spaces becomes fierce in vigorous rites, with ritual etiquette dating back to antiquity. The human approach to war, for example, remains inconceivable to the tall, rapt bipeds of Kiriick.

    While many Kiriickians enjoy spending their time roosting in cliff grottos and soaring on winds, I’dchii K’riccian could mostly be seen stargazing through the pellucid lens of his crystal scope. He had it trained on a particular solar system that while not the brightest in the kiznickos, was in fact the nearest to their own trinary system.  He’d been studying this colony for a long time, enough to have determined it had an even arrangement of eight planets: four inner terrestrial and four outer gas giants. The corresponding Kiznickian alignment presented periodic opportunities for studying each of these planetary masses. As time and motion continued along synchronized trajectories, the various orbital bodies caught about this neighboring star came into Kiriickian view on certain occasions. Right now the crystal scope was trained dead center on the starside of the sixth crietz from the outermost frozen blue gas giant.

    I’dchii exclaimed to his sidghier, “These unorthodox fledglings regulate their ecological affairs in a manner which altogether escapes my determinations.” 

    His sidghier took this in without so much as a chirp nor a rustle of his neck feathers, but rather, kept dusting the floor free of its accumulation of crietzdanner. This fine effluvium settled windblown on their communities from the Cardinal Desert, and would often get whisked up into an irritating haze. It was of such a refined grain that if left to its own accord, would work its way into everything. Sidghiers were bound and determined to keep this particulate matter at bay, as much as the winds of Aldunol allowed. 

    “They are currently in the midst of a noneccentric phase of their orbit”, quipped I’dchii.  “From the apparent profusion of effluvium and endemic miasma saturating their ecology, I have gathered they have succeeded in exacerbating conditions nominally reserved for obliquity and orbital forcing effects.”

    The sidghier chirped to indicate the sensibility of this proclamation.

    “By the looks of this toxicity, which appears to have infiltrated a great portion of their alduneroshal and mareozhea, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine this species escaping stillbirth—”

    The sidghier continued dusting off the nesting dais’s spare furnishings, using his left wingtip as was customary, without so much as emitting another peep. This was a tired old subject altogether devoid of resonance with him.  

     I’dchii continued to speak, either unaware of or unfazed by his aeriekeeper’s disdain. “I infer they behave as if fixated on their maturation having fully developed, without suspecting otherwise.  My cephenziic studies have shown this to be more common throughout the kiznickos than we may have anticipated. I’m perturbed.” He glanced up for his aeriekeeper’s reaction, but the sidghier had already departed the nesting dais without a sound.  

    Every twenty-six thousand Earth years, the human’s planet which was I’dchii’s station to observe, named Undraada by the Assembly of Pinions, completes one precessional movement of its axis. This remains in accordance with the Law of Orbital Eccentricity familiar to all planetary bodies within the kiznickos. At this time the Undraadan orbital cycle appeared to be in its least eccentric form, completing almost a perfect circle about their solitary star.

    “Abrogate these runtchicks, I aver!  They appear to be downyfaced.”  The thought bothered I’dchii. A trilling sound which approximated a thin, reedy vibrato began to escape from his chitinous beak.   “We may have to send another enaryscin and hope for the best.”

    Just then, an orchinsian burst through the fiberwoven portal of the azentian dwelling.  “Inseriance protohabitation imminent, Eskariad—in six wingbeats or less.”

    I’dchii K’riccian became still.  Without wasting a further moment, he stretched out his eighteen foot wingspan and pitched off the western balcony, nictitating membranes sliding across his twinned pupils to polarize the setting starlight streaming in, as he tilted and banked up into a strong arriving wind. There was no way he would stick around for the inseriance covey; he could never tolerate their methodical, inquisitive audits, thereby preferring to allow his aeriekeeper to deal with them.

    Once he attained a sufficient height in the halo crowned alduneroshal, I’dchii’s keen eyesight spotted the small inseriance covey arriving to his aerie far below. He imagined they would complete their inspection of the superstructure within three twentieths of a revolution.  Just enough time to stretch his wings for some much needed exercise and sightseeing.  He’d already forgotten about the downyfaced fledglings circling the foreign star.  Perhaps a clearing of his encephalon was all he needed to put the Undraadan’s extraordinary predicament into clearer perspective.

    The time of Magnetospheric Convergence was about to fall upon them once again like a deleterious gloaming. The complex mandate of the Assembly of Pinions would not allow for any deviance from mass introspection during this phase of kiznickian alignment. If any member of the azentian clades refrained from participating in this meditative liturgy, it could lead to a convocation of the Assembly of Pinions. I’dchii had trouble releasing himself from concentrating on the stellar neighbors and the baneful condition of their world. Its sinister implication of a parallel potential for their own crietz was disturbing. With a concentrated effort, I’dchii suppressed visualizing the outsiders for the moment. The Confluence of Reveries was about to commence. 

    Theirs was an ancient and serene culture having long ago forged an armistice with the kiznickos itself. The very notion of transcelestial contamination had long ago been forgotten. Only certain exalted members of the Assembly of Pinions even knew such a thing had ever existed. Despite this, a kernel of the idea was beginning to take root and manifest among certain individuals in the populace. I’dchii was one of these savants, having devoted himself to the study of extrasolar phenomena with the crystal lensing experience granted him by his bloodline. Coupled with his devotion to cephenziia, this forged a heady brew in his cranium.  

      After gliding relaxed outstretched upon steady breezes, I’dchii swooped down and bulleted back to his podium atop the rostrum he called home. He applied his eagle vision to the eyepiece of his crystal scope. It was a venerated heirloom handed down over generations from his lineage until it was at last presented to him. It was the focal point about which his entire life revolved. His great-grandfather had told him its impeccable design went all the way back to the Archangelus Khirityn. He was the first enaryscin sent to the neighboring crietz thousands of revolutions ago. 

    The kiznin scope was aimed dead center on the crietz Undraada.  I’dchii spent another twentieth of a revolution staring at the bizarre planet. Its opalescent glimmer in the dark medium of kiznin fascinated him. There was something not right about the sight during its days, which showed themselves at specific intervals, whenever the kiznickian alignment allowed. The times it showed its night face revealed a magnificent glittering of uncanny bright lights peppered across its land masses. It was during the first observation of its nocturnal side that I’dchii had deduced this was a crietz inhabited by some remarkably advanced yet afflicted civilization. Once again the eerie, subliminal trilling could just be felt as it displaced the air in the nesting platform.  

                               *** 

 

   Jud Roth stared through the windshield into the pouring rain at the onrushing road.  The wipers sloshed the water aside to and fro with the timed consistency of a metronome. The vehicle he drove was an old refurbished Dodge Challenger, original year unknown. It was a bright shade of metallic green when he bought it used in Salt Lake City three years ago. He liked it that color and had kept the vintage machine running fine ever since. He was a fifty-one year old throwback to the nineties living in the year 2032. All he wanted at the moment was another cup of coffee. He was running a tad late to work his grave shift—on the way to his usual Jump Point up the canyon. The good thing about Jumpsuits these days was that you could pretty much launch yourself from anywhere.  

    He thumbed on the wireless receiver and twisted the volume knob almost as high as it would go. With his pinky finger hovering over the seek button, he skipped stations through a series of intolerable tunes until his trained ear caught the signature sound of good old rock'n'roll. A golden oldie erupted into the car’s cabin loudly from 40 watt speakers—Alice In Chains Them Bones.  Jud eased back into his seat. This was music he could drive to.  He kept the rhythm by drumming his thumbs along the leather-wrapped steering wheel, relaxed and navigating the road at forty mph while singing along in a croaky voice, “I feel so alone...gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones.” 

    With the mountainside appearing to pass by on his left, the rain started easing down a bit. He took another sip from his Delta-9 soda. The curving road ahead constantly slipped under the hood, as if being eaten. He imagined himself at the helm of a mecha-cobra consuming the blacktop like so much ticker-tape. Raindrops slid across the windows’ exteriors, elongating into webbed strands on either side of him. The blurred form of a large raven swooped by his driver’s window, missing the car by a feather’s edge.  His spinning tires drifted to the left over the white sideline for a moment before Jud maneuvered back into his lane. 

    Storm clouds leveled out over the mountains ahead, blending thick and gray across the horizon. The rain was on the verge of changing to snow. He could feel the chill of the higher elevation. He cranked the heat up a notch and hit the rear and forward defrost buttons.  He shut the wipers off. The music on the radio switched to some mainstream crap. Jud pressed the seek button until a better sound met his ears.  

    The Dodge Challenger rolled along a paved blacktop road that snaked its way up Mill Creek Canyon.  So long as he could burn rubber and gasoline Jud felt he was contributing his share to the post-war effort. He was hell-bent on doing his part burning through the reservoirs of fossil fuel on Earth. Jud’s foot pressed harder on the gas pedal, accelerating his run up the canyon.  

    After shifting into lower gear to help maneuver a sudden curve, Jud rolled his window down and hocked up a loogie. We couldn’t just leave well enough alone—he spat phlegm out into the crosswind, where it disappeared into the slipstream—just like us, he thought to himself.  For some reason mankind could not kick the oil habit. Anyone can learn to quit, but not the whole tribe. The world is a vampire…. Jud reached over to the vibrating cup holder for another sip of his Delta-9. He was cruising at an easy thirty mph. He touched the receiver panel and cycled through the bandwidth again. Nothing decent came up so he shut it off. He welcomed the ensuing silence. 

    Jud was getting sick and tired of this all-too-easily triggered world. He missed the days when all you had was one or two decent radio stations. He glanced into the rear view mirror. The empty road receded in diminishing curves behind him.  It was getting late. If he didn’t make it to Terraces soon, he’d find himself in a blizzard.  He already glimpsed snowflakes flashing by his windows. Just ahead he spotted the four empty parking spaces on the left shoulder of the road. This was where the Terraces hiking trail entrance was located. It was the perfect Jump Point because there was usually nobody there. 

       While the car’s engine cooled off with ticking sounds, Jud’s mind turned to the past. When he was a kid he played the game of looking for hidden cameras. Little did he suspect then that the panopticon would become so integrated and pervasive. During his teens, he loved to skate. He’d mastered all the moves on his board back then. There was a raw sort of invulnerability to those days. It was survival by sheer defiance. Or maybe it was just dumb luck. Jud didn’t know anymore. 

      His Volkswagen Rüstung was stashed in the trunk of his car. After changing into it and locking down the pressure clips of the polarized visor on his helmet, he powered the Jumpsuit on for the green GO signal. He walked to the first bend in the trail, where there were no tree branches above.  Then he executed the command and dropped off the face of the landscape. Immediately he was rendered into a faraway pin point—then just disappeared from view. He traveled in an arc until he was thirty-three miles up into the atmosphere while the Jumpsuit’s GPS targeted his destination and routed him back down. It took an extra several minutes sailing through the stratopause before beginning the dizzying plunge toward the blurring landscape below. The Jumpsuit's O2 reserves and state of the art sound system made it a much better ride.  

    Jud arrived to work in the nick of time. He began his shift taking readings of the boilers and going through his service engineering routine. It was just another beautiful night up an undisclosed ravine hidden in the Alaskan wilderness. 

*** 

  “The ferromagnetic core of all crietz sustains us,” I’dchii ruminated on the uppermost ledge of the nesting dais. It was a good spot to remove himself from everything and concentrate on the stars. “The first coronal mass-release strong enough to spark ignition signals the stage for life to emerge.” I’dchii knew this as well as any Kiriickian.

    All the clades comprehended the spatial configuration of their planetary magnetic field to somewhat resemble the outline of a nareozhean behemoth.  Their legends told of astral ketozhia, who travel in pods, each carrying the most precious jewel in their mouths. They would journey across the depths of oblivion to the far side of the kiznickos—toward an unimaginable destiny.

    I’dchii understood this jewel was the planet itself, the very crietz they dwelled upon.  Not all Kiriickians upheld this conviction. A portion of them believed a venerable fable insisting this rare gem to be an asteroid carried in the jaws of an approaching leviathan. It bothered I’dchii to contemplate this misnomer. “How could the Clades of Kiriick hold stock in such tales? Was the truth not as plain as the stars in the firmament?” 

    To make matters worse, some offshoots believed the jewel to be possessed of healing properties—viewing it as a vehicle for their imminent salvation—whereas others believed it to be an avenging hammer of destruction come to purge their world of overpopulation. As far as I’dchii was concerned, these were witless interpretations. They must have been contrived generations ago in order to control the clades.

    He had to admit these tales made a certain kind of sense. Yet he still didn’t understand how it was that so many missed the obvious. Their planet itself was the jewel. Their crietz was being carried through the kiznickos in a fashion whose innate properties remained a complete mystery. I’dchii was forced to wonder if the anneluzhia under the sand ever questioned these matters. He suspected there was no chance of it. In a manner of speaking, azentia such as himself—ever winged prideful—revealed their base ignorance when contemplating philosophical matters. An amused trilling escaped his throat just thinking about it.  

    I’dchii’s tremulous intonation diminished after a few measures, to be replaced by the sighing of the wind outside. He stepped away from the eyepiece of his kiznin scope, and glanced down at his clawed feet. Something about that planet was not right. For one, its magneto-plumage appeared sickened. It seemed tangled with intermittent vulnerabilities. Yet the body of the planet itself gleamed like a beautiful jewel in the depths of kiznin. 

   The tall, lean azentian peered through his telescope again at the magnified crietz. There was a subtlety to its merging blues, whites, browns and greens that troubled I’dchii, an underlying tint. Not to mention the mystifying, crystal-like intensity of its nocturnal lights. They did not reflect the warm tones of fire-gleam or the muted calm of their own lezariidis. The question of what powered this magnificent nocturnal display haunted the Kiriickian’s mind. He stepped away from the focal eyepiece. It was getting late. Time to roost for the evening. He would repose on it. New insights would form after a diurnal rest. At the arrival of dawn he may awaken to a fresh discernment. In the meantime he kept his crystal scope aimed at the marvelous planet. 

                                                                       ***

 

   Jud Roth liked his job. Working the grave shift suited him just fine. After hanging in there many years, he felt damn lucky to have this new position. He never would have made it to this beautiful Alaskan outpost without the five year seniority. He felt certain his attendance record and lack of write-ups helped seal the deal.

    Jumpsuits made travel across long distances easy as a breeze. Despite now working at a covert private owned complex all the way up in Alaska, he wouldn’t have to move out of his apartment on the fringes of the metropolitan Salt Lake City valley grid. Not with his Jumpsuit that could get him anywhere on the continent in less than an hour. 

    His service engineering job paid just enough to keep him in his thousand dollar-a-month, nine by nine studio, pay the utilities, groceries, car and Jumpsuit bill, and still allow him to set aside a bit of extra credit every so often. Jud’s penchant for collecting vintage comic books interfered with his budgeting as did his genuine coffee habit. He settled for nothing less than real fresh ground organic fair-trade coffee beans, which was one reason he could only afford a single tattoo. He’d sprung for a high quality tattoo four years ago. It was of a Zap Comix style skate punk with red veined eyes bugging out of his head and drooling tongue lolling out of his mouth, wearing spiked leather pants while riding a skateboard into a spinning vortex. He had it inked right between his shoulder blades. 

      Jud Roth was a daydreamer. The grave yard shift helped. He was the solitary building service engineer for VAT 227. The facility he worked in was owned by a private conglomerate with an annual revenue of over half a trillion dollars. It had been around for ninety-five years. He was stationed at an undisclosed satellite company which belonged to a subsidiary devoted to optical fiber connectors. The interesting thing was the facility which he worked at was nestled in an unknown location within a wooded canyon in northern Alaska. Unknown, because the compound he worked in was a secret kept under contract between the private conglomerate and certain invested government officials.

    Jud figured this out from the weird non-disclosure agreement he signed in order to accept the job. When he tried to find it on Amazon Earth, all that came up was many square miles of blocky wilderness. The closest thing that registered on the virtual map was Lake Kaniksrac. The Face on Earth, as he liked to think of it. It was apparent his supervisor didn't believe Jud understood what he was signing. This was fine by him, preferring to remain silent and impassive in the workplace.  Three weeks ago he passed his obligatory six month probation period. He was settled into the routine of his job, and he enjoyed it very much.

    At the present moment, Jud was standing in his favorite spot, three stories up on the steel balcony on the roof of the administration building. He vaped from a glass nasal snifter. Upon reaching middle age, his metabolism was already slowing down. He’d gotten much better at regulating his intake. When the aurora borealis was out in force, he wanted an enhancement. It had been three weeks since the last display. The green translucent curtains had spread out in slow undulation over the next mountain range, scintillating with shades of violet and emerald. The stunning vista had obscured a good portion of the starry view above. 

    Tonight it was a little overcast and chilly. Jud inhaled the cool infused vapor into his nostrils.  His eyeballs seemed to protrude slightly from their sockets, like hard boiled eggs. From this vantage point he could look down into the interior of VAT 227. What he saw resembled a contained pond of boiling vomit. It was plastic being melted down with chemicals and reprocessed into an almost biodegradable form. This in turn was shipped to another secret waste facility that continued processing the degradation of the material into a genetically-modified paste claimed to be biodegradable.  This by-product was repackaged and sold as fertilizer for cow feed in the ever expanding slaughter house of the beef industry.

    Just thinking of the chemical compounded process required to make plastic waste biodegradable made Jud a little nauseous. The runoff alone from these chemicals made fracking look attractive. He shuddered, his right hand on the frozen steel rail, his left pocketing the mini glass vaper.  It was time for a Jump. Jud made his way back into the building, then headed down six flights of metal stairs until he arrived to his locker, #19. After keying the combination, the locker’s cover panel slid upward, revealing his standard issue RAD-Chemical Pressure suit and his Volkswagen Jumpsuit, hanging from aluminum hooks.  It was his last scheduled fifteen minute break. Time to fly.

    Stepping into his Rüstung Jumpsuit and zipping up, he powered it on. It was eighty-three percent charged. Its stitched-in antigrav pads rendered it the perfect means of conveyance. Jud raced back up the flights of stairs and out onto the deck. The constellations visible above were focused so bright they resembled an epic field of scattered pinballs reflecting each other. Odd how they seemed to represent every color of the rainbow, he mused. Each remarkable hue spoke its own silent song of the electromagnetic wavelength, evolving into proximity here through visible light, before diminishing away into ultraviolet… X-rays… gamma… and beyond. "Into the inimitable light," Jud whispered to himself as the evening stars awaited. He never thought of the stars as being “above” or “out” there. It was obvious to him they were in there—residing among the inner core of the expanding cosmos. The very astral engine of creation. Observing the sprawling constellations sometimes felt as if he were looking at the shadow of his reflection in a giant mirror.   

    Jud’s intuition of relativity formed his own sort of paradoxical religion. His private quantum reality was a state of mind cultivated over many years with exacting care. When he needed to, he had a knack for hitting the off switch with thinking. He could be real Zen like that. Gazing out over the mountainous region north of the factory, Jud’s ears perked for any wild sounds of invitation. The wind sighed through the frozen trees. He took a step forward, checking that his suit pockets were zipped and latched shut, then just fell off the wooden slats of the porch toward a point above the horizon. He dropped up like a stone over the cold steel rail—to wink out into the starry night.

    Twelve minutes later, Jud returned. His arrival was as sudden as his departure. His Jumpsuit retrogravved at the last moment, settling him gently back onto the porch.   The suit powered off, and he trotted back down the six flights of stairs to his locker. It was time to wrap up his shift.  

     An hour later, after punching out in the early dawn, Jud was back into his Rüstung Jumpsuit, helm visor polarized to a mirrored gold. This time he fell off the Earth arcing toward the south east. Over the snowcapped mountain  tops he dropped, until arriving near Salt Lake City, over three thousand miles away, falling down through the clouds to his parked car by the Terraces hiking trail. The flight lasted all of thirty five minutes. His descent was controlled by the antigrav pads in the suit. He’d modified their programming with the daunting task of adding the code that represented the value of the gravity well of the planet. His original idea being that if it were possible to cancel out all of the stars’ gravitational forces, one could arrange to fall out of this galaxy entirely—and disappear into the universe. He would need to save up more money to upgrade his VW’s processing memory.  The thought had kept Jud occupied during his many hours of down time on the grave shift. He’d always wondered what the aurora borealis looked like from above, but had never been able to escape the upper mesosphere to see for himself. How high did the Northern lights go?  There was one way to try and find out. 

                                                                            ***

 

   It was two weeks later when the aurora borealis came out in full force. That evening, Jud felt a sickening sensation begin in the pit of his stomach. This was going to be the night. When it came time for his break, Jud returned to his locker and put on his RAD chemical pressure suit on first. Then he stepped into his VW Jumpsuit and just managed to zip and clamp it up tight. A few quick adjustments to his settings and he was ready for the green GO command. He walked up the six flights of stairs to the landing terrace a little slower than usual. The air was cold and the aurora borealis tantalized him. By his calculation, he should make it through the thermosphere and just into the exosphere, five hundred miles up. He wouldn’t even make it a tenth of the way through the exosphere. For one thing, any higher than that and the solar winds might interfere with the Jumpsuit’s electromagnetic tracking system. But he’d make it just high enough to look down at the curvature of the Earth and see the Northern lights as few ever had—before dropping back down.  

         Jud took a deep breath before executing the sequence. Then he fell off the face of the Earth. Up through the mesosphere, past the thermosphere and into the exosphere—where for one glorious flash-capped instant, he pivoted over the marvel of the Northern lights undulating below him like so many unfurled streamers of some planetary jellyfish—and then the moon shrank to a pebble at his feet and disappeared into the black.  

          Jud Roth plummeted like a runaway cannonball and was shocked he could see at all. The thought flashed through his mind that he should be dead. But the vision that passed before his eyes alarmed him into a state of consciousness that made him unsure if what he were seeing were not the province of a dream.  As if equipped with vision that penetrated the ultraviolet, he perceived an extremely tall hallway that he appeared to be falling through until passing into or approaching an incrementally distinguished vertical horizon whose sheer scale against the parallax of the vanishing point made it seem as if he were slipping amidst striated muscle tissue at particular moments—reflected in the manner of film frames interpenetrating as they rolled by at variegating velocities—creating the illusion that sometimes the walls to either side of him remained parallel as he passed between them even as they were discernible to meet far ahead at an endless distance into the region where Jud now helplessly plummeted. Then he understood this was already far beyond the point which most people would survive if they were to have somehow escaped Earth's gravity. Jud plunged with a quickness like some ripe heavy dried up human plumb bob dropped down the deepest well and straight into oblivion’s tracks until the rapid shuttering effect on either side of his tucked in head finally eased up and began flowing in a reverse slowed down oscillation thereby causing the unaccountable illusion that he was no longer falling but instead floating almost motionless in between winged angelic walls of vivid striations blossoming into colorful kaleidoscopic chromatophores.  Jud knew then with a certainty he had never experienced that his mind was over-processing and approaching maximum capacity as he slipped into the nearest star cluster’s gravity well and for one absurd moment he didn’t fret about needing a CPU fan to cool him off because the absolute vacuum he plunged through did the trick in what seemed to be the time it took to hold his breath — an involuntary reaction that seized and trapped a lungful of ionized oxygen before escaping the Earth’s plasmasphere when cryogenic preservation threatened to set in — followed by an elongated period of eccentric spiraling slungshot about the Sun until he was suddenly flung outward directly toward a single low burning reddish dwarf star appearing dead ahead at a curled over tilting clockwise blurred intersection — like a bright galvanized mineral-laden thumbtack — a nail head by slow degrees enlarging into what looked like a chromatic doorknob emitting plumes of electromagnetic energy — inviting the preserved cryptobiotic homo sapien to be planted upon the surface of another planet like some carbon tipped needle point meteorite injection, something that would heat up in Earth’s atmosphere past the critical threshold of his capacity to survive but in the thin presence of an exosphere wouldn’t generate enough friction was Jud’s last thought before losing consciousness in the starry void.       

      Meanwhile, I’dchii spied through the eyepiece of his lucent telescope. He spotted an odd bright dot—a pinpoint mica chip flash—heading in their direction at a clip indicating an interstellar drop. The alien’s impeccable vision amplified through the crystal lens of his kiznin scope identified what looked like a mummified bipedal creature falling through the kiznickos. The azentian’s focus had zeroed in on this peculiar meteorite headed toward Kiriick. It had an unusual elongated shape, close to the bird men’s in proportion, but shorter in stature. This was most peculiar, for the meteoroids he was accustomed to viewing through his scope were more or less spheroid in shape. The trilling sound began emanating from his throat. He must contact the Nictualier at once. There was still time to capture the incoming object in one of their nets for study. It was of a most intriguing shape. Its bipedal appearance sent a thrill coursing through I’dchii’s six-chambered heart. The bird man’s trilling continued. Its vibrations grew stronger the more he stared at the singular incoming object. Pivoting on his clawed feet, he tilted into a gust of wind that swept across the viewing terrace, then keeled off toward the Nictualier’s base of operations.  They would intercept this rogue solar object and bring it home for further study. I’dchii hoped it originated from the Undraadan system. It would hold a motherlode of revelations for their scientists. 

   

***

 

   Jud arose from deep sleep into lavender hued light and blinked at the strange sight coming into focus around him. He was surrounded by very tall birdmen in some sort of polished chamber. There were no other familiar objects or details, just rows of standing birdmen scowling at him with impenetrable eyes. His brain seemed to vibrate. Amid the sensation he could pick out a dimpling of energy corresponding with one of the birdmen standing next to him to the right. When he turned toward the tall being a feeling of supermagnetic connection disrupted his thoughts until a soft stroking sensation upon his brow brought him out of it. Jud realized the birdman was petting him with its extended left wingtip. He looked over and saw the birdman’s face clearly for the first time. The dark orbs of its eyes bore down on him beneath arched brows and white feathered tufts. A strong consolatory sensation emanated from those eyes, relaxing Jud into closing his own. As soon as his eyelids were sealed, he could hear the approximation of a voice hushing him to listen with his praajda.  “You’ve arisen from your slumbering fall. Welcome to Kiirick. I am I’dchii, your benefactor. You have been captured by our elite guard, the Nictualier. You find yourself on this pivot-cycle before the Assembly of Pinions. Indicate you understand by responding in your own dialect.” The tall bird man continued stroking Jud’s head. 

   “I understand,” Jud replied without knowing how he could have done so. The silence didn’t seem total as there appeared to be a subharmonic humming just below the human audial threshold. Jud could feel it vibrating inside the marrow of his bones. It was like the constant hum of a refrigerator. He had a feeling it never shut off. It must be connected to the bird city they were in. The crackling of its electrical circuit grid.

      “Our councilmembers are conferring on the matter of what is to become of you. We have deduced that you arrived from our neighboring crietz of Undraada. Our genetic recombinant surgeons may choose to induce meiosis and by a process of gamete manipulation bestow a zygote in you with a new gestation period.” Expressionless, I’dchii stared at Jud. 

   “Are you telling me you guys are deciding whether to clone me or something?” Jud asked, looking around the smooth, cream-colored chamber. Something about the bird man’s proposition implied an alternative that made him uneasy. 

   I’dchii’s fricative voice invaded in hushed tones. “Or the council may call for your exile in dannerzhea. It depends on whether the majority here find you wanting.” It seemed as if a long time passed then. The lack of movement and incidence interfered with Jud’s ability to measure it. His head swam with the thought that, after having jumped off the Earth, he’d arrived on some alien world.  The RAD chem-pressure suit protected me. My Jumpsuit’s antigrav modification worked a little too well—I slipped through space until I was captured by birdmen.  

    Jud’s musing was interrupted by I’dchii’s proclamation. “The Assembly of Pinions has reached its conclusion. We have determined the genetic helical code of your species remains corrupted. This mutation has affected the outcome of your home planet to the point of ecocide. We, the parliament of Azentia, cannot risk our home world to this pathogen. We call for its immanent excision from our immaculate order.” There was a spreading reverberation throughout the chamber that could be described as the most beautiful microtones.  Jud marveled to himself as four birdmen stepped forth and seized him. Their touch was both unrelenting and merciful.  Jud Roth allowed himself to relax as the tall, slender birdmen of Kiriick carried him out of the council chamber to their execution block. Jud looked at the unfamiliar constellations overhead. The stars above had never appeared so clear or in focus. 

      

  

 ~ fin ~

 

 

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