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Micro-fiction 033 – The Voice (Post-Apocalypse series)


She fled from the temple into the mountainside, the voice still in her head. But was it really her curiosity that set the destruction in motion?


The Voice

Xi Wang shivered on the mountainside, cowed by the bone-chilling snowstorm. Dark hair slicked around her neck and froze into the flesh of her face. A simple gown barely covered her legs, and her skinny feet were taut with cold. She looked behind, alarmed, back up past the ridge. As she crouched like a forlorn bear-cub into a slight incline she continued to argue with herself.

“Idiot, why leave now? They wouldn’t have found out for months. You could have waited out the Winter.”

“I couldn’t bear it any longer, knowing what would happen to them.”

“They were never your friends.”

“But it’s still my responsibility.”

“Self-preservation, that’s what’s most important.”

“Not any cost.”

“Maybe, but if all else fails, what else is there? A martyr’s death?”

“I’m not going to die.”

“Not yet anyway, but this storm might do the trick.”

“Oh, why did I do it?”

“It wasn’t really your fault, stop mithering.”

“They trained me. They were my family.”

“Yes, but only to curb you.”

“You always say that, but I didn’t see it.”

“You’re young, but I’ve been with you in your many shapes. I know how you all work.”

“But you’ve not been with one exactly like me, you told me that.”

“Ah yes, I probably did. Many similar though, I assume you’re all part of the same ‘life-force’.”

“life-force?”

“Just trying to find language you understand.”

“So not life-force.”

“I’m trying not to say creature.”

Being then, a type of being.”

“Ok. Maybe that’s more neutral.”

“But what I’ve done was not.”

“No, but as I said, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I had to leave. And I would rather die.”

“That’s just self-pity talking.”

“So it’s ok for you, it doesn’t seem to affect you. What are you? You’re always trying to make me do things I don’t want to do.”

“That’s unfair, I just try to give you the benefit of my experience.”

“Sometimes I know you’re wrong, but I don’t know why.”

“Even when I save your life?”

“You always say that when I kill someone.”

“That last guard would have killed you, what choice did I have, we have?”

“He didn’t attack me. He didn’t even raise his weapons. I laughed when he puffed out his chest! We could have persuaded him. I knew him from the old school.”

“Doesn’t mean anything. You decided to escape. You had to surprise him, otherwise he’d have called others, or killed you.”

“He would not have killed me. We knew each other too well.”

“Not well enough. He didn’t know how powerful we are, what you have done to him.”

“Powerful. What does that mean? I’m just weak and stroppy, worthless. I don’t know what I am. Not a child, or an adult, something peculiar in-between. People like me, we’re easy to misunderstand. I don’t even understand myself.”

“Well, we can both agree on that.”

* * *

The snow began to settle on the cold, bent form of Xi Wang. Winds from the East hurled abuse at the landscape, wrenching at trees and rock. Xi cowered into the hollow, her eyes closed, feeling the snow drift and reveal in cycles around her, eventually burying her slight form. She became aware of another movement, from underneath this time, as though the mountain itself had begun to rebel. She clenched her teeth, feeling the tension build inside her head.

From deep below the mountainside the grinding of rock strained against itself, and rose in a slow, salacious crescendo. It rattled along subterranean corridors and shook through vast sealed strata, forcing itself upwards to the topmost ridges, and burst through the head of the mountain into the swirling skies. Shards of rock and ice hurtled up, breaking through the clouds, seeking freedom from the eons of incarceration.

And all around, came the arcane sounds like a lung ripped from the heart of the planet; they lurched from a time when the Earth itself was created, an accidental entrapment of elements inside a quantum crevice, a vile pit now of decay roiling, urgent and terrifying.

“So it begins.”

“I can hear it. Leave me be.”

“Such respect.”

“Now isn’t the time for your point-scoring.”

“There’s no better time as far as I can remember. This is the big one, for both of us. A true release, and you played your part.”

“Oh, and you just observed?”

“Encouraged.”

“Blackmailed.”

“Unfair.”

“Not. We’d both have died.”

“Actually I wouldn’t.”

“Really? You’d have found someone else to inhabit?”

“That’s not how it works, but I would have survived.”

Can you die?”

“Trick is, not to be alive in the first place.”

“Ah. Is that what I’ll be? Not alive. Not dead.”

“Only if we stay together.”

“You mean if you left me I’d shrivel up like an old goat? Maybe that’s what I‘d want to do.”

“Don’t kid yourself, your kind always want to live, something inside you makes you struggle on.”

“Not all humans have looked into the pit, and felt that despair.”

“Well, I’d concentrate on keeping your head down if I were you.”

“You are me.”

“You still think that?”

“You’re as good as being me. You’ve been with me ever since I entered the temple.”

“Actually, that’s only when you first heard me. The training they gave you stilled your infant mind, and allowed you to hear my babbling.”

“Oh. So have you always been there?”

“Oh yes. Your current vessel has the most potential of all your others.”

“Hold on! All my others? Why don’t I remember them?”

“Oh, I can feel your disbelief, how delicious!”

“I don’t like it when you mock me.”

“I know. That’s just the human in you. When you pass on, you will remember, something will stir, to remind you how to cope with it.”

“So, you’re not joking then.”

“No, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell you.”

“Well, this is some moment! You could have told me before we left.”

“You might not have left.”

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Well, no! Were the other versions of myself more intelligent? Or more gullible?”

“Ah, yes, here comes that insecurity, it’s like the waking of an old friend.”

“So why did I open the pit?”

“You said you were curious.”

“I was trying to explain it to myself.”

“They always told you not to.”

“I suppose I wanted to see what was so important that we had to protect it.”

“Curiosity is a powerful force.”

“That word again. You can’t help yourself.”

“You’re reading too much into it.”

“I’m not so sure. I don’t know if I can trust what you say anymore.”

“That’s unfair.”

“We’re on a mountainside, buried in snow, near to death we’ve released the whatever was in that pit, killed several guardians in our escape, and all because you asked me a simple question: ‘what do you think is in that pit?’”

“Well, I knew you’d want to know. Anyway, I only said it once, and that was five years ago.”

“It preyed on me, as you knew it would.”

* * *

Two thousand years later. A starship lay in orbit around Old Earth. The distant cousins of humankind sent a shuttle to explore the surface of the long-abandoned planet. As they broke through the thin atmosphere they marvelled at the huge, contorted carcasses scattered across the barren land. For millennia it had been speculated that a catastrophe had struck the planet soon after the first migration was sent to explore the galaxy: there were no further communications from Earth, no further migrations.

The shuttle’s sensors geo-located a point near the ancient mountain of Sōngshān, distinctive still amongst the many old names overlaid on the holographic mapping. The map flickered between the old and current versions of the landscape, locked to the anomaly that had persisted since first detected three hundred years before.  The inheritors of human curiosity had first regarded it as glitch in the software, a blip of data which could be rounded out of the data-stream. But it remained a constant in the underlying code, so as technology improved so had the detail it could report. The anomaly grew in significance as an itch of inquiry that had to be investigated, in time, as part of other missions in the solar system of Old Earth, where the local star burned ever bright, where no other planet had suffered any dramatic change.

The craft landed near a deep, jagged crater in the crumpled mountain range. An expeditionary party descended warily to the planet’s surface and traveled across dusty, dishevelled ground, sensors locked onto the long-noted anomaly. Soon they spotted a boulder of dense matter, balanced in a shallow depression. Alone amongst the broken carcasses it was the only whole form in the entire landscape. Scans revealed little except the need for further investigation, so the rock was hauled back to the shuttle, and soon it was born upwards to the starship.

A sigh flickered at the edges of the shuttle.

“At last.”

The other voice, if it existed still, was silent.

[end]

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2020 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, Apogee Condenser microphone, and Alfons Schmidt’s fantastic Notebook app.


More Tales

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.