Storm of the Myloki

Alex Storm, the Myloki, and other characters and concepts from The Indestructible Man are the creations and creative property of Simon Messingham, and appear here with his permission.

Alex Storm awoke slowly from his long slumber, with the drag of dreams still tugging at him. He struggled to recall what his last memory was before he had gone to sleep.

He started screaming when it came to him: it was a sound in his ears, the hard crunch of his spine breaking.

He tried to scream. His thoughts screamed out, helplessly, but there was no flesh to carry the sound of his voice.

The dead man—the dead man had crushed him like an ant—

The pain had been unbearable. And then it had consumed him.

Consumed—then he was dead too.

That was why he had no body. No feeling. He was blind, deaf, mute, and all else. There was nothing left of him but thought. He was too bitter to call it spirit. 

Without breath or heartbeat, his mind lost its intrinsic sense of time. And so he didn’t know how long he tried to scream. All he knew was by the time he was done, his very essence felt torn and raw.

Even in his terror he was not fully unaware. He knew somehow he was in a place of some kind—a room, perhaps? He could feel it. That meant that the walls, floor, ceiling, they were all made of thought. He could feel no corners defining a floor or ceiling—rather, he was contained within some sort of sphere, about the size of his living room back home.

He tried desperately to flee this sphere, but there were no doors in or out.

At once, the memories of all his sins, all his murders and maulings and thefts, came back to him. It was impossible to believe that he wasn’t in Hell.

Slowly, though, his soldier instincts returned; his panic began to abate, becoming mere anxiety. He started to realize that this was not Hell, not as religion knew it anyway. There was a more grounded explanation. Some sort of technology—or magic, maybe—had saved him from death. He had died, but his mind had been reconstructed somehow. It seemed insane, but it didn’t take much thought for him to acknowledge that there was in fact a power that could do something like this. Though it filled him with dread to name it.

Maybe it was Hell after all. For he had become a prisoner of the Myloki.

At once, his fear dissipated; instead, anger built up inside of him. To be denied the finality of his death was just the type of sick joke those monsters would play on him. But he wasn’t an animal they could just drop into a cage. Body or no body, he was going to get out of this.

Only—he had nothing but his will. And human will was hardly a tangible thing.

He decided that if the Myloki had preserved him in this state, they could likely hear his thoughts. He called out to them: What do you want with me, you bastards?! He wanted to know why they hadn’t revived him bodily, as they had others.

There came no answer—not a verbal one, at least.

Alex’s senses shifted suddenly. He became aware of distant flashes of light, the sound of rushing winds, the smell of salt and petrichor, the tangible crackle of electricity. He had felt this before when he was alive: the feeling of a thunderstorm brewing up over the ocean.

Yes—it was a thunderstorm, wasn’t it? If he focused, he could start to see the castles of churning black clouds, and the manic surge of the waves. Normally, he only watched such storms from the comfort of a sandy beach. But this storm was getting closer. Slowly but surely.

He feared what would happen when it hit.

What was this tempest, and why were the Myloki showing it to him? It seemed to be an emotional thing as much as a physical one. A product of the mind, as well as natural forces.

As time passed, the winds gained strength; they threatened to whip up into a hurricane. The black clouds swelled and the thunderstrikes grew more frequent. The longer he watched it, the more afraid of this storm he became. If it kept growing up the way it was—fuck, maybe it could swallow a whole continent. If it kept growing from there, maybe it could wreck the whole world.

His instincts told him to stop the storm. Save the world. Protect people as best he could.

He had no body, but he had to try. He reached out towards the rising chaos, trying to stretch his feelings into it.

There was a loud clap of thunder, and he screamed again. An image flashed white hot into his mind. A bright, colorful image of a verdant, blooming field.

That field was in a park, and there were children playing in that park.

There weren’t many places at all left on Earth like this. Not in his time. This brighter, safer-looking world was almost unrecognizable to his tired eyes.

Just as swiftly as the flash came, it vanished. He found himself back on his imaginary beach, watching the hurricane brew ever stronger. He paused a moment, savoring the lingering echo of the children’s laughter. Then he reached into the storm again.

More flashes hit him, bombarding his senses, but he pushed himself through the shock of their light. Piece by piece, he began to receive impressions of why this world was brighter and safer. It became clear to him that it was protected, watched over by legions of brightly-garbed warriors, warriors who always had the moral high ground, who always packed a stiff upper lip, and who always saved the day. Warriors who used wonder-tech to make the world into a paradise.

That was our world, until reality kicked in, he thought. The defenders of this world are just like us, only with different names.

And without the consequences of a real-world economy.

It felt like a cotton-candy cartoon parody of the life he’d known. He thought back to his life, to the trials and tribulations that he and his peers had endured. All the grit and blood. All the starved corpses in the streets. They’d tried to hide from it all in their little cave, the base under the movie studio, inspired half-jokingly by PCW’s description of that alien movie production from the ‘60s. But there was nothing that could keep them safe from the slow death of their entire planet.

He shuddered to think of it. It was a good thing that none of it was real.

He tried once more to tap into the rumbling clouds. Another flashing image emerged, and—

Aaaaa!!!

Panic seized him once again. His thoughts raced, trying to figure out what had just happened to him.

That other world, that happy, colorful incarnation of his world—it had overtaken his reality.

He realized that he had started believing, just for a second, that his whole life as Alex Storm was a fiction. That other world, the one where the Myloki war hadn’t bankrupted humanity, that had become real for him. They weren’t called Myloki in that world, but Alex couldn’t recall their full name, receiving only the impression of an ancient Japanese sci-fi movie he’d once seen that had had a giant mole robot. Even his own name had changed in this other world, becoming Al—

He cut himself off before he could finish pronouncing it. To speak it would drag him back into that illusion.

It was an illusion, wasn’t it?

Something pained him to think those words. He tried to sort out what it was, but the only image that came back to him was the children playing in the park.

One of those children was important. One of the little girls, her face stood out to him…

He gasped when he recognized it. Danielle—my daughter.

Every memory he had of her flooded his mind. Her anxious 4 AM birth; her first words, her first steps. Her first drawing. Her pride in being named for her great-grandfather. Her laugh, her jokes. The ease with which she made friends. They had come to this park together, many times, on many sunny, happy days in this other world.

He didn’t dare to push those memories away. They weren’t illusions, they couldn’t be. Even if they contradicted what he knew as his lived reality.

That was when he realized that he had a dilemma on his hands. He had no real way of knowing which version of reality was his own.

Here, in the realm of the mind, everything was like a dream. His mind and his perceptions shaped the world around him. Only—his memories weren’t fully available to him, for some reason. Perhaps the Myloki hadn’t reconstructed them properly. Or maybe both sets of memories were real. In any case, he could tell that he wasn’t perceiving things as clearly as he ought to be.

The scarred world that fought the Myloki, and the thriving, cheery world that faced the M-somethings, those were separate. He had heard scientists talk once about the concept of parallel worlds—this had to be something like that. He came from one of them, just one. But which?

He had felt the seething darkness of the bankrupt world when he first awakened, as if it came natural to him. But his memories of being A*** F****** were hidden from him in such a way that they almost had to be true. Any time he tried to think of someone from his life, to build a reference point within his memory, he remembered two different faces. His father was a scientist—no, he was a street thief from Moscow. His mother was a painter—no, she was a freedom-fighter, who sang him to sleep at night.

Both were true. Because he was both.

The clouds roared, the winds howled. The lightning gnashed its teeth.

Was he causing this hurricane to surge into being?

He denied the idea at first. He couldn’t be responsible for such a destructive force. First of all, he had no power within him, conscious or otherwise, to unleash such a storm. Second of all, he wouldn’t do so if he had any choice in the matter.

But maybe it wasn’t a matter of his choices, or his power. Maybe it was something circumstantial, that happened to be centered around him.

Maybe his contradictory memories were making the storm worse. Or maybe he had two sets of memories because of the storm. Both things could be true, feedback-looping into each other.

Something in his mind encouraged this line of thought. The more he considered it, the more he realized that the Myloki likely existed in a world of the mind. Not the human mind—they were as far from human as —but something that could be understood as mental in nature. Their technology hinted at such a prospect. Psychic prisons, thought-reconstructors—their reality could be made of thought as his was of matter. Even the device that brought back the dead in bodily form, that could be something that allowed them to turn their thoughts into reality. Time, too, could be a matter of the mind for them. Hence why they could create an interactive visual representation of the split timeline.

It terrified him to grasp the fullness of these ideas. The Myloki were completely and utterly alien to him, moreso than he could ever guess, and it filled him with horror to glimpse even a faint glimmer of their full aspect.

But curiosity replaced his fear—the curiosity of his other self. That other him was stronger than he was, braver. Not only was he lacking in fear but he was not possessed by cowardly qualities as Alex was, like bigotry or greed. His daughter helped see to that; with her, he always had someone to be good for.

Through this wiser other-self, Alex was starting to understand—or at least guess—that the intersection of the Myloki’s realm with his own had had physical consequences for Earth. The interaction between the two worlds had caused a sickness to spread through both of them. One symptom of this sickness was the bifurcation of his world’s timeline, with himself as the focal point of this split. Why he was at the heart of it, he had no idea, but because he was, he was the only one the Myloki could call upon to set it right.

But what was right? A*** and A*** both felt equal within their one mind. The latter had memories of his many romances, of the smug privilege that came with his parentage and rank—his favorite types of liquor. The other, A***, he saw a smudged, manic painted canvas of testosterone, adrenaline, and death. It, too, tasted like whiskey. The two timelines flirted and mingled, blurring the distinctions between them.

Then those timelines rumbled like storm-clouds, and the space around their respective events seemed to suddenly fill with cracks. The lightning within them was going to tear the world apart.

Unless he made his choice.

Alex looked at the cartoon-pleasant world, the world where they had fought the aliens and won, reaching not only victory but a new golden age as well. He saw the smiling, inspired faces of its many heroes, who seemed so stoic that it was like they were made of fiberglass, or modeling clay. He saw a hundred million people living who were dead in the past he knew. He saw the face of his daughter.

He reached out to touch it—but it was like putting his finger in a socket. Electricity surged through him, threatening to disrupt his essence.

Why?! he cried out. Why offer me this choice, if all this time, I could never choose that place?

No voices came to him. In that moment he wanted to die, to face his final death, once and for all. Or else, he wanted to rip the Myloki apart, no matter what form they took.

His pain was too great for him to bear. In that moment, he would give anything if it meant peace.

He would accept any experience that would heal him.

Even an alien one.

He softened as that feeling passed through him. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so cowardly—he didn’t hate himself that much. There was a part of him that was as brave as that other version of him. But that made sense, because they weren’t separate at all. They were the same, and they always had been.

They were just different sides of the same coin, different shades of gray. And they could co-exist.

People were fluid like that, even if history was not.

Maybe there was a reason he had been brought back. The contrast between his selves was helping to shine some light on his circumstances. In his old life, the life now gone, he had suffered by his poor choices. He had lingered and withered in the shadow of his guilt. But now, he could see there were other possibilities, fresh chances to start anew.

It was weird, seeing another version of him out there who had what he needed.

That other him looked back at him with apprehension, for he could sense the sins that his timeline contained. But at once, Alex could see that the differences in their perspectives: in his eyes, that other him was trying to work out ways that he could help. It was never a question of if for him—only how.

If he could be as strong as that other man, then maybe he could give up Danielle.

He wished he still had tears to cry. He and the other-him were one and the same—he was her father. But he, as he was, couldn’t be, now. He was dead, and there was nothing left but for him to accept that.

He knew it would be like ripping his own guts out to lose her. For a moment, the grief seemed like it might drive him mad.

But he felt the storm swirl furiously inside him, and he thought of all the people he wanted to protect. She was one of them. He could save that cartoon version of his world, where she lived, and through that other-him he would get to keep her in a way.

At the thought of that, the pain suddenly didn’t seem so bad. In fact, it felt good for Alexei Stomorov, professional killer, to see who he really was in the dark. There was some human light in him after all. He was not beyond redemption.

He was all of him. Good and bad. Like everybody.

He reached out towards the straining timelines, and made his pick. Lightning flashed one more time, and by his will, the events he’d known - the Myloki war, the great depression, everything - were set into place, for better or for worse. The pain of severance hit him like a freight train, and for a long time it seemed like the pain might never end.

He had wondered for a moment, just before the end, if his choice would remove him from existence somehow. But his essence remained. His mind still lived, and so once the shock of choosing passed, he got to feel the warmth of doing the right thing. And it soothed his spirit.

Humanity on his Earth would recover. They would rebuild, and they would reach out again towards the stars. They would be wise enough this time to make the aliens their friends. And they would see things that would inspire such wonder in them that they could never have imagined it.

After all, people weren’t only capable of redemption—they held transcendence within them, too.

Maybe he hadn’t died. Maybe he had simply evolved. 

When the Myloki spoke to him again, he understood their image-language. He saw a star flying free from the Earth, and he knew that they were asking him to come with them as they departed local realspace, as a reward for helping to untangle them. He saw the life and death of stars pass in the span of instants, and he knew would live forever, to grow and contemplate and evolve, as one of their number.

His bliss was too great for him to refuse, and he eagerly awaited the long centuries of discovery that now awaited him.

THE END