https://youtu.be/DcUuWw26nqM
Vox Nihili, Vox Dei
by Mike Morgan
Mike Morgan was born in London, but not in any of the interesting parts. He moved to Japan at the age of 30 and lived there for many years. Nowadays, he’s based in Iowa, and enjoys family life with his wife and two young children. If you like his writing, be sure to check out his website: https://PerpetualStateofMildPanic.wordpress.com.
You might also be interested in looking at his novel, Insignificant, published earlier this year, which has earned very good reviews.
Other TTTV Stories by Mike Morgan: https://talltaletv.com/tag/mike-morgan/
Hovering ten meters above the blood-soaked sands of the amphitheater, Gideon examined each of the bodies in turn. A thousand dead humans, and not one of them what he needed.
Disappointed, he confided, “I don’t even remember why I lashed out at him, that first one. Wanted him to go away, I think. Never intended to take his life.”
Off to one side and ten meters below, the chief executioner shuddered with fear, averting his eyes from Gideon’s floating form. Gideon could see his thoughts, sense the wisp of confusion amid the terror—why is he telling me this? The answer was obvious: Because he felt like it.
It was true, though—Gideon had murdered his fist deity by accident. No one had been more surprised than him when the dead god’s puissance soaked into his physical shell, doubling his own power.
Until that moment, Gideon had been identical in capabilities to the other ninety-nine manmade gods of Earth’s New Pantheon. Able to reshape matter, perform abiogenesis, fly, read minds—the usual for laboratory-bred superhumans. They thought themselves gods, but they accepted theirs was a type of divinity minor in nature. They were figures of awe, idols people appealed to for help—they were not the foci of religions, not beings who ended worlds. No, that came later, for Gideon anyway. In fact, back then, humans had thought themselves Lords of Creation.
They knew better than that now. There was only one true God of Everything, and His patience was wearing thin.
“Oh well, what’s done is done,” he reflected. Then, he ordered the chief executioner to bring out the next batch. The Pantheon would not succeed in hiding from him.
The executioner hurried to obey, not wanting to find himself on the list of those about to die. Waiting for the victims to gather, Gideon reminisced. His memories were tinged with gore, so he found them pleasant to revisit.
After the murder, Gideon’s perception of the world was transformed. He could see so much more, think so much faster. The other gods tried to reason with him, attempted to control him with logic and, when that failed, guilt. “We were made to protect the humans,” they said. “Our purpose is love, not violence. Don’t you want to be your best self?” He did, so he killed the Pantheon’s messengers and absorbed their energies.
With that act, he became something the others could not hope to withstand, not even by combining their forces. He had achieved a magnitude of consciousness and destructive force that was beyond them. Mirroring the altered state of his mind, his body changed as well, his golden armor becoming part of his skin, his hair transmuting into undying fire.
Those bodily changes continued with each deicide. In this, his latest mutation, he’d shed the final vestiges of ordinary matter, the shining plates of his exterior now a sculpted mass of hyper-dense quantum foam lattices threaded with magnetic shields—a body as inviolable as it was exquisite.
He returned his attention to the amphitheater. Another group of a thousand humans cowered beneath him. The mightiest of all Earth’s homespun deities addressed the close-packed mass of starving, filth-spattered humanity in a voice that carried for miles. “You know why you’re here, and you know what I’m going to say. The fourteen survivors will be found—”
“Thirteen,” thought the chief executioner, clear as could be.
Gideon looked at him askance. “Oh yes. We found Edmond the day before yesterday. Thank you.” He turned back to the crowd. “The thirteen survivors will be found. They cannot hope to elude me. I will go through every member of the human race, one by one, until I locate and eliminate the last of the Pantheon. You’ve seen how effective this has been—I’ve already found eighty-six and all it took was some organization, determination, and the depopulation of Europe and South America.”
Behind them, Gideon knew, glowered the charnel mountain. It had started as a pile, then a small rise, later a hill. The corpses kept piling up. The accumulation of bodies was now visible from space.
“All this because the Pantheon refused to give themselves up willingly when they had the chance. Now they cannot, even if they wanted to.”
His captive audience knew the story. Gideon’s thirteen remaining peers were convinced they were human, due to the memory-suppression implants they’d inserted into their own brains. Hiding that way, their thoughts could not betray them—they didn’t remember they harbored greatness. Nor could he simply scan for the physical forms of gods, because they’d also transfigured their flesh to pass as mortal, the better to blend in. They thought they’d outwitted him, that all they needed to do was hide while his new-won transcendence drove him to self-destruction. The implants had timers. When they wound down to zero, after years or decades or however long they’d set, the Pantheon would be reclothed in glory. The smug gits.
Ah, but Gideon was not so easily stymied. The solution was obvious. Remove the upper part of every human being’s head. Yes, untold millions died for every god he uncovered. Still, the needles in the haystack were found. With the implants removed, the gods in hiding reverted to their true natures and he could consume their essences.
“So, I make you the same offer I extend to every group of victims. Confide to me who among you have amnesia. It is those who cannot remember who are the most likely to be Pantheon members in deep cover. I give you sixty seconds to consider my generous offer.”
Gideon sensed another nuclear warhead closing on his location and swatted it into oblivion with the tiniest flick of his mind. The human resistance to his plan was persistent. Futile, but persistent.
The throng of prisoners parted, leaving a single figure standing in isolation.
A voice carried up on the wind. “She doesn’t know her name!”
He glided toward her, reaching out his hands in preparation.
“Look, I don’t remember if I’m a god. Let’s assume you’re right and I am,” the woman gabbled. “You want epiphany. This isn’t the way. No matter how powerful you become, you won’t find salvation in the barren chambers of your own mind.”
Irritated, Gideon sliced off the top of her skull. Yes, there was an implant, glittering in the butcher-shop ruin of her flesh. He extracted the wretched, postage-stamp-sized machine, waited for her form to transform, and ingested her iridescent energies. Then he slaughtered the rest of the group anyway.
“Come now. Why so surprised? It was mathematically possible there was a second god among your number. I had to be sure.” The corpses were not good conversationalists. He turned his gaze upon his chief executioner. “Bring out the next group and be quick about it. Oh, and do try not to slip on the blood this time.”
#
Staring down upon the ruined surface of the globe, at the lakes of fire and blood and the mountain ranges of bone and broken metal, Gideon considered whether he was the villain in the story of humanity’s history. Red and terrible reflections from the lifeless, scorched planet danced in the irises of his immaculate eyes and he thought, “No, of course not. I am their salvation.”
The destruction of the Earth was the humans’ fault. They had learned to hide from his zealots, retreating where his terrestrial servants could not find and gather them. What else could Gideon have done? Annihilating continents was an efficient response to the situation. Whether destroyed individually or through nation-consuming infernos the amnesiac gods were discovered all the same. None had eluded him.
The ineffable strength of a hundred gods sang in his frame. That which he had taken commingled, multiplied, intensified to become much more than the sum of those parts. Storing the memory of the world and everything that had dwelt upon it was a simple act for him now.
As was using that knowledge to re-create every last living thing that he had murdered in his quest. He would be their omega and their alpha.
Gideon waved his hand, and the Earth was restored. All was remade in perfect detail, reverted back to the moment before he had killed his first god, every atom in its original position. Such was his beneficence he decided to remake his fellow members of the Pantheon. Before raising them, he considered how to go about it—whether to repeat the scientific miracle through which they had been created in the laboratories of Project Perihelion, or to simply reassemble their molecular patterns out of available materials as he had with everything else. He settled on the latter course. Since his reserves were infinite, no matter how much he expended his strength remained endless. Life was his to grant on a whim, with no resulting depletion of his potency.
“You could follow my path,” he called to the resurrected gods. “Repeat my actions. Nominate one to kill the others. The selected vessel grows infinite in majesty. They restore all that was destroyed. Continue the cycle until all are as me. We can be infinite together.”
Their answer was swift: “Yours is not the path.”
The irrationality of their reply angered Gideon. “What does snuffing out a life matter when it can so easily be reignited? If you are squeamish, scratch out the dead’s recollection of their passing so they have no appreciation it ever occurred. Pain no longer remembered causes no suffering.”
“That is not the reason for our refusal.”
“Cowardice is your reason.” He felt contempt for their stunted luminescence.
In that instant, a sound caught at the edge of his burning mind; he heard a distant tangle of meaning, garbled, unintelligible, yet suffused with life and limitless import—not a wavelength travelling through air but rather a burst of thought that Gideon could never have sensed before achieving near-omniscience.
It transfixed Gideon’s soul. With no further thought for a world or people that were beneath him, he accelerated into the heavens on wings of light. He had to know whose voice he’d heard and where it had come from. It had been the merest hint of perfection, yet that momentary fragment was more than enough to bewitch him utterly.
#
Gideon dove through the empty wastes of the void, searching. His mind stretched before his physical shell, feeling the thoughts of countless intelligent species living on worlds along the Orion Arm of the galaxy.
There were the Xim, with their strange scratchy concepts and endless terror; beyond them the curious Hy-flum and their incessant chattering; here were the Phylactians and their bodies of bubbling lava. Hundreds of worlds turned beneath Gideon’s regard. He witnessed herds of creatures with five legs, talented blobs of slime and tentacles who existed to cure disease, clans of crab-like beings who grew edible fungi on their own shells, forests of giant razor clams sprouting under a rain of molten glass. He saw life everywhere he looked. The galaxy teemed with it, and yet nowhere did he find a trace of the intelligence he had glimpsed.
Frustrated, Gideon looked further afield, extending the scope of his vision to encompass half the Milky Way. It was a feat he had not attempted before. Finding himself fully capable of it, he felt a sharp prickling of exhilaration and pride. Millions of planetary systems swam into focus. He was instantly aware of servant species travelling impossible distances between the galaxy’s arms, intent on the business of their masters. Who were these stern overseers? Was there an order to life in the cosmos he had been unable to perceive thus far? Gideon tracked the course of a vessel crewed by exquisitely crafted geometric shapes, determining its point of origin. There lay a deliberate fold in space, and behind that stood an entity with a mind of singular purpose and ferocity.
“No,” came the response. “This universe is ours. Interfere and die.”
Gideon snatched away the edge of his intellect. There were, it seemed, things in the infinite that could sense his thoughts as adeptly as he could sense theirs. Very well, whatever those intellects were, they could keep their secrets. Gideon was not in search of them, not this day.
He kept on with his hunt, growing certain he needed to change the way in which he was examining space and time. The fragment of perfect mind he had felt—it had not come from so far. Gideon must have swept past its source in his haste. Withdrawing to the light years he had vaulted across so impulsively, he reduced the scope of his sight, delving into the fabric of reality in more detail. There he saw the passage of matter and—yes—even people between realities. Perhaps that was the solution. The sound had slipped away to another version of history, to a reality parallel to Gideon’s own. That would certainly explain why he had not located it.
Swiftly, he scoured these alternative worlds, following the complex paths of the interdimensional visitors he’d noticed. They were manipulators, he realized, experts in subversion; they had thousands of representatives, legates, on Earths without number, each agent forcing the ruler of an empire to sign a pact, a treaty that extended their reach ever farther along the sidereal chain. “Pax,” they said in greeting and self-congratulation. “You are part of us now. How fortunate you are. We will take such good care of you.”
They were intent on removing every trace of freedom from the worlds they subsumed, all the better to save the peoples who dwelled upon them. And that was the thing—the worlds they conquered were by every objective standard made more perfect, the peoples freed from poverty, hunger, disease. All the Pax required was compliance. Do as you’re told and heaven on earth shall be yours, they said.
Confronted by their works, Gideon felt a chill creep over him. He remembered issuing his own demands for obedience.
The Pax were everywhere he looked, making the human race perfect. Worlds without number fought tooth and nail against them, refusing to surrender.
Gideon was confused by these worlds he saw. Some were Roman, others Byzantine, more were stranger besides. They were not worlds whose empires had endured long after their prescribed falls. These were the genuine kingdoms of earlier ages.
He came to appreciate that the realities were not contiguous—there were gaps between them, and these gaps permitted neighboring realms to move relative to each another. As a result of this slippage, a location in one reality might be in the twenty-first century, but due to the continuum next door shifting its relative position into the future or the past, the same spatial coordinates in that other world might be in another epoch entirely. It was a form of time travel. The Pax had taken full advantage of the possibilities this phenomenon afforded, bringing modern weapons into adjacent ages more accustomed to spears and slingshots.
If the source of the sound had indeed entered a parallel world, there would be no telling where or when it was. For a second, Gideon was unnerved by the scale of the quest. It was possible, he contemplated, that he could fail. Despair caressed the thorny hide of his certitude, whispering for admittance. Then, another possibility occurred to him.
What if the source had not entered another reality at all? What if it had slipped into the un-spaces between them instead? That too might explain why there was no trail left in baryonic continua by its passing.
Feeling more certain by the moment, Gideon rose out of humdrum existence, ignoring the spread of the Pax, rising ever faster into the blank void of perpetual whiteness where no matter or energy could exist.
#
The wasteland between realities was not as Gideon had expected. For a start, it did possess substance. The roiling cloudbanks of purple and churning streams of free-floating black liquid were not constructed out of the matter he was familiar with. Nonetheless, they were formed of something. A new menagerie of subatomic particles, unknown to human science.
Perspective was unreliable in this over-realm; yet, it seemed to Gideon that far below he spied the whirling spherical forms of realities. So many realities. Each quivering as they spun, cocooned within thin membranes stained the colors of opaque glass marbles.
In this place that was both less and more real than anything he’d experienced before, he felt far from omniscient.
Catching Gideon by surprise, the sound came to him again. Just for a moment—if this non-place could be said to have measurements of time. There was no doubt. It was louder. The source must be close at hand.
Rededicated to his cause, even more enraptured than before, Gideon hurled himself in the direction he thought the frequencies had originated. He burst through a thick band of un-liquid, coated in robes of dark slime. Onward he dove.
The sound had been a voice, he was sure. And such a voice–! It was the utterance of the divine. He had heard it in equal parts with his mind and with his body, every fiber of his being resonating with its raw fire. It could only emanate from something that comprehended the deepest mysteries of the eternal. He had to confront the source of that knowledge. He had to seize that wisdom for himself.
For inconceivable gulfs of non-time, he flew in pursuit. At intervals he heard the sound anew. Always it seemed close, yet he could never pinpoint its exact direction. He flew one way and the next sound appeared to come from his left; he altered course accordingly and the next occurrence emanated from behind. It struck Gideon he was being toyed with.
Eventually, he decided to set a straight trajectory rather than constantly changing direction. He would decide his own course, not lunge at every clue. This made no difference. Still, he heard the bursts of thought-sound. He increased his speed, pushing ahead with rage.
Tearing indigo walls of cloud asunder, he saw more of the whirling globes—the realities that looked so much like opaque glass marbles. As he closed on them, Gideon soaked in the hues of their membranous sheathes, the whorls and lines of color. They were familiar.
He slowed. These were the same spheres he’d seen when entering the over-realm.
There was only one explanation.
He had circumnavigated this domain, arriving back where he had departed.
A scream built in his throat until it could not be contained. He howled the bitter truth. “There’s no one else here!”
The energy of his shriek rippled forth, echoing through the curved geometry of the closed environment, reverberating to and fro at weird angles. He saw it reach the nearest sphere and enter into it and through it and out into another, passing from one time to another, vibrating from one era to the next and into the past. Into the past where he would hear its distorted remnant and come in search of it and, at long last, create it.
He had mesmerized himself with the sound of his own voice.
Only now did he recognize it and understand how meaningless a noise it was.
#
Gideon saw the god coming, clad in golden armor with hair fashioned from flames eternal.
It was a Gideon from another reality, where he had made similar choices and embarked on the same doomed quest.
There were a lot of realities. There must be a lot of Gideons who’d murdered their ways to godhood. Countless Gideons who’d sensed the faint echo of his summoning scream.
If they were as ruthless as he, they wouldn’t stop to listen to reason. And they would arrive within moments, not far behind this first one. He could, perhaps, repel one or two of them. He could not withstand them all.
Gideon, it seemed, was fated to kill Gideon, becoming ever more powerful, forever seeking transformation. They would never attain the epiphany they desired. The Pantheon had tried to tell him.
“There is no divine truth here,” he breathed. “There can be no revelation when all you hear is the echo of your own voice.”
In a way it was funny—what else could have enraptured him so totally?
“Oh well,” he remarked, “what’s done is done.”
Gideon summoned a sword wrought from solidified nothingness and girded himself for battle.
In a universe of infinite paths, it was the last one he’d left open to himself.
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