To witness elegance in nature is called quantum entanglement. It happens when two particles interact, vibrate in unison, and then attempt to separate. Sadly, this marriage can never divorce and these elements remain connected by something that defies logic, something that still baffles science. If one particle vibrates, no matter the distance in time or space from its mate, the other particle reacts in unison. And it is like this they dance into infinity creating infinity in their wake until the end of time.
~K. White, Ph.D, Universal Maths, Cambridge-Astrotecha - page 409, CH. 12: Applied Logic on Universal Function- 1956- VorBooks, New York, New York.
“I am a good person.”
~General Norman “Stormin” Schwarzkopf
ret. U.S. Army, Infantry
The Goddesses of Life, Fertility, and Death are all one and the same.
~Sigmund Freud.
A Hive to Call Mine
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1.
In the last and fatal fortunes of Harold Fugger, there are over one trillion cells at stake. All that makes up the famous man staring out at a mob of thousands rampaging his million-dollar iron gates, really. History should know him as the greatest thinker ever born but at the moment, and maybe forever also, he will be the most hated person on the planet. A despicable money and resource hoarder, and now the mob chants, calling for his death.
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
The sound is loud and angry. An unrelenting monster that grows by the minute as more rioters arrive to try and shake him free from his tree. Kill Harold Fugger! They sing it like a chant at the top of their lungs. Fires burn behind them, scorching hot, like their hate. His rose bushes- all of his prized garden really- that ran from the street up the mile to the main house, the tennis complex and pool house, all destroyed by tens of thousands of trampling feet. Now they are stopped just a few hundred feet away by the one measure that now makes sense to him, the gate within the gate. And here they all were staring eyeball to eyeball with their future. He, their savior, and they, all too desperate to be saved, yet all any of them get with this end is the violence of irony.
One trillion individual living things constitute this whole called Harold Fugger, not to discount the eons of genetic development that went into his creation. Quite a fantastic specimen too, now wasted. All because he found himself in a race against her. Not just her but time also, always, time. Her, his nemesis and the thing that rots everything, especially good deeds.
He owes her everything, her, the greatest evil to be offered by the universe and he being the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, blood cells, and smile, the old-man funk, the blue eyes, the half-wiped ass, the who of this person inside all this fantastic melange that would rather not die, thank you very much. The curated me-ness that just so happened to have the unique ability to compute quantum mechanics in his head. A genetic quark that he translated into finally understanding the one thing that has always eluded him, nothing matters and yet everything matters. Fortune gave him the key to unlock her, but in the end he lost.
As he watches the angry faces screaming for his death, he can’t help but laugh at what he has saved them all from time and time again. What he gave this world in his attempt to beat her, required being globally despised as a resource hoarder. A resource hoarder with a space empire at his disposal. A resource hoarder almost 2 centuries old. A resource hoarder with access to trillions of years of evolutionary knowledge. A resource hoarder with a space empire but stuck on Earth due to a bad heart.
A cruel trick of fate. Or a symptom of being overly cautious. Even with all his intelligence he doesn’t know for sure.
“I wish there was something else. Your heart can’t handle a launch,” the doctor says, putting her tools back in her classic leather doctor’s satchel but keeping out a syringe. She should be nervous, there is a crowd outside intent on killing everyone inside, yet she does her job as if fresh from yoga and a latte.
“Like it’s going to fair much better after they get a hold of me.” Fugger wears a pressure suit and from his liver-spotted fingers dangle a helmet. “I couldn’t feel more foolish.”
“You look great,” she says approaching with the syringe. “This might help with the anxiety,” and she plugs the needle into the part of his leg with a little flesh still on it and she is right. The anxiety of the moment melts away and he can almost sit back and enjoy.
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“The grandfather of space innovation and he can’t go to space.”
“Shouldn’t, and in my esteemed opinion, that’s an important distinction at present. And if you hadn’t donated billions to elder-tech, maybe impossible,” his chief technical advisor says.
“Walk or ride?”
“Ride,” and he climbs back into the chair that always waits his need. “Won’t need this puppy anymore if things go well.
“When things go well.”
Both corrected him because they care. But he is an old man being pushed in a wheelchair, that’s insult enough. The annoyance surges like lightning just under his skin, but fades quickly enough, it’s his fault this is happening. He went to far.
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
Fugger speaks softly, “When the ultimate goal hinges on hope of avoiding 100% failure, there is no real risk in trying,” Fugger says, but no one listens as they push him along. He is the fool they want to save. Him, the man responsible for covering the world in space elevators. And he wasn’t greedy either, just a good investment. All over the planet were giant Fugger-owned structures bringing space to Earth. Even had one attached to a shuttle under his mansion, just in case. And the just in case has arrived. It’s the nature of this little argument in the face of death, that maybe there is another way. But as they race along the corridors of his home striving to reach the launch facility his hope grows, acting like adding zero to the sum which will very soon equal the end make any difference.
“Doctor Fugger, please we both know your heart’ll pop. Trust in my security team to repeal the mob.” His security chief takes over for the doctor when they enter the loading dock off the control arm.
Over his long life, physician after physician said the same thing. Some even claimed they could make it possible by cutting into him, but he won’t let that happen. It was never worth the risk of her gaining control again. He owned his dreams, in the end he had at least that.
Now, death was inevitable if he didn’t do something even more drastic. He decided already if he survives he is getting the damn surgery.
When he survives.
When he survives, he has important work to do. Once a contractor who found a rock that changed his life. A life spent stopping a monster from resurrecting herself. Nothing can stop the machine from making her whole again, except herself or the Queen of England. Nothing can stop his work until she has been collected and stored, cleansed and used properly. Possibly a thing that can never happen, if he dies. But that was his lot, ending what amounted to a vampiric embrace, which ended life wherever it went. A ying that eats the yang only to resurrect it again.
And that’s why he avoided surgery, he was part of that dance once, but no longer. Because of him it can never be whole. An unwilling participant in so much Earth history already.
Death was evitable it was part of the universal cycle. It refreshed things. Made them new. But he kept outliving his doctors. And with every passing decade he collected more and more of her. The only surgery he’d have considered was a decade before when complete cybernetic plumbing upgrades became available, his doing. But still he didn’t go under the knife. Deaths were few and he was a candidate, but at the last minute changed his mind. Then lived another fifty years.
He just celebrated turning 193 years old.
Not bad.
Especially for a man born with a poorly designed heart. Up till now, he was okay not going to space. He’d been there before after all, in theory. Space was just points in the nothing between getting back to life and Earth anyway. No dome, no amount of green space, could compare to the planet he was stuck on, though it was dying and in large part because of his influence. Energy manipulation was always the crux. The more energy drawn the more death happens.
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
“Kill Harold Fugger!”
In the face of the thing he fought so hard to avoid all his life, dying, he knows this is her doing. She just wouldn’t stop trying to survive. He did his best. He set the path well. Yes, yes some genocide may have happened. Yes, yes on paper he can see how that looks bad. But he made a trade-off with the human race, at 193 Harold Fugger has decided some death might just be evitable in the grand scheme of things.
He cringes as one of his oldest memories threatens to take root. Finding her in the desert. The connection that followed and what he was willing to do for her.
He managed it in the end, but he was one of the few who ever did. Experiencing her was like death, something permanent.
If he dies he’d rather die without those thoughts rattling around. No, never again. He thinks of the eons she offered and his broken human heart hurts.
Then he thinks about the cloning facility on HOME. There’s always a backup, it used to be passed on in bits and pieces. Knowledge here and there. A thing needed to do, a holy quest. But overtime the human mind became more sophisticated and the genetic information made more sense more easily and then there was Harold Fugger. The special kid, the man who was always old.
“All we need is one cell and you’re back,” Ronald Dickson, the man who sold it to him, said. He couldn’t sell it anywhere else. So Harold bought both man and machine and sent them to space. Dickson died so long ago that it doesn’t matter, but the Dickson Cloning is still running strong and producing good results, billions in replaceable pets alone every year. Whatever that means for the me-ness that makes up this Harold Fugger he doesn’t know and won’t until after. And he hates unknowns. He expects the me-ness will be gone so is keen to keep it around for as long as he can.
This, the whole of a person, a thing of ten-octillion atoms- even when dead. A thing of continuous motion , motion that the human brain can never hope to understand, could never fully imagine in all its entirety, and then, if there is a soul, Harold Fugger might know one way or another because Harold Fugger is finally going to die.