Ain't Talkin'

Markus held his hands up slowly, open. Roche clicked the hammer on the Ruger and pushed it tighter against the kid’s teeth, listening the chattering of ivory on gunmetal.

“Ain’t gonna ask you again, kid. Start talkin’ sense.”

“I. . .fucking. . .swear. I’ve been telling you the truth.”

“Dead walkers, experimental etherfish, divided factions of corporate and rebellion, you being on the run from both and your background which sounds incomplete and that’s the best damn way I can make it sound. Start from the beginning and don’t stop until I say boo. Got it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, fuck. Can. . .can we get the gun out of my face, though?” Markus went cross-eyed trying to focus on the revolvers barrel resting on his bottom lip.

“Nope. Just start talkin’, kid.”

Markus shifted his eyes and swallowed hard. He took a tentative step back, not to run but just to get the revolver off of his lip. Roche kept the gun trained on him but didn’t bother putting the Ruger back in his face.

“Look. The conflict is real. The Corporation is weaponizing etherfish, it’s true, you saw them. The Corporation is taking walkers for their war on the Res and the Res is doing the same thing.”

“Why are you the crux point in all this, then?”

“I helped create the constructs. I was on the team that developed the machines that batter them with an environment.”

“Say again.”

“Think about it!” Alex Markus started to get animated, like he was throwing a sales pitch. “All life is the product of stardust, electricity and a proper chemical environment. Look back at what the primordial soup created. Millions of species competing for a niche in a world that only exists as a proper breeding ground for other life forms because it is the perfectly placed celestial body revolving around a burning ball of gas that provides a sufficient light and dark cycle for organisms to thrive.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Don’t you see. We created that environment within the white. A closed case of primordial existence where we exposed etherfish to the same set of circumstances that caused life to exist in the first place. Exit particles and all.”

“Look kid.” Roche holstered his gun. “Etherfish ain’t alive. They aren’t blessed with the same terrible affliction as every other being on this planet. They’re a conceptual nuance.”

“Conceptual nuance! I love it! Perfectly summed up, Mr. Roche. Yes! They are, but what if they weren’t quite?”

“Explain further, dipshit.” Roche hooked his thumbs into his belt and leaned back. All around them the white stayed static and featureless. A nether-region of the cosmos as inconsequential and damning as the space between pages of a book. Without the space there were no pages, but it’s form was as needless as a bottle of whiskey to a corpse.

“They aren’t. The just aren’t. These conceptual nuances as you so eloquently put it, are very much alive. And I know what you’re going to say! They can’t be, right!? There’s no food in the white, there’s no light or dark there’s no atmosphere there’s no nothing. Yet here we are!”

“If you know the white, son you know that it adapts to our preconceived perceptions of things. We expect to be breathing and alive and not hungry all the time and need sleep and all of the other normalcies that living things just live with on a day-to-day basis, and the white, being the blueprint for all things, adapts to us. Believe me, kid. I lived in, on and with this ethereal nothing for forty years.”

“F-forty years? My god.”

“Ain’t the point or the idea, kid.”

“How did you-”

“Said, it ain’t the point.” Roche put his palm on the butt of his revolver once more.

“Right! Right, of course. What I was getting at-” Markus began, taking another step back and steadying himself “-was that the etherfish are alive. Not in the sense of things we know as being alive, but in a way that I doubt even old-world scientists with unending funds and nearly limitless technology could understand. They’re alive in the way that microorganisms on far away asteroids are alive but have been frozen for eons. They’re alive in the way that mushrooms can communicate telepathically. They’re alive in the way that mankind once was before the advent of the wheel, when we used ever-presence of sound to move mountains.” Markus was nearly out of breath from the rapture of his speech.

Roche stared quietly at Alex for some time, if it could be called time in the ether. “You’re saying mushrooms are telepathic?”

“I’m saying that for the finite amount of things we as a species understand, there are boundless counts of ideas that we can’t even begin to grasp.”

“And?”

“And that a boy from a small town with a better-than-basic knowledge of physics and biology managed to spark a new form of life between one we do not understand and the primordial ooze that effectively created all living things.”

Roche pursed his lips and stuffed a rolled cigarette into his mouth. He flipped open his lighter and inhaled cool-blue smoke with a menthol crisp.

Alex Markus leaned in close. “What governs how the smoke curls from the end of your cigarette?”

“My understanding of the way smoke is supposed to curl in context with your own.”

“Exactly. Now I helped create a slue of beings who can not only exist in the ether and can control the nothingness in the way that you and I can, but can cross over to our own plane and manifest themselves.”

Roche let Markus’ words settle before he responded.

“Then you, kid, have damned us all.”

Roche led Lucky further into the white without saying another word, watching the smoke curl off of his cigarette in intricate loops and waves that came as he imagined they should. Alex Markus did the only thing he could, he followed the man who knew the way out of nowhere.