Memories and Dust

Eleanor trudged across a wide plain covered in swirling dust and shattered rocks, periodically scanning the horizon for anyone pursuing her. Here and there the spectral memories of ancient buildings flickered in and out of existence. She didn’t want anything to do with Koenigville anymore. Clayton Koenig had taken her books from her to try to control her, and now the only thing she had to remind her of her past was the heart-shaped locket that now clinked against her glass-coated chest with every step. She wouldn’t let them take that too, and hold her memory entirely hostage. Koenig and his posse that called themselves the High Council were dangerous, controlling, and vindictive. She didn’t at all trust them to leave her to wander the waste on her own.

The human race, including herself, had been dead a long time. They were nothing more than the ghostly echoes of their former selves’ psyches inhabiting surrogate bodies to make it easier to interact with what was left of a broken world. Without holding onto the things they held dear during life, their memories would start to slip away. A few took advantage of this to put themselves in power over others by withholding these memory-objects until their demands were met, and even then only letting them hold them long enough to maintain themselves before locking them away again.

She had no plan for what to do next, only to get away from Koenigville and try to keep hold of Marnie’s locket. Mostly the same as her existence back there, but with fewer opportunities to talk to other echoes, and with more agency over herself. Sometimes she considered throwing the locket away, letting her memories slip away and forgetting herself and her humanity. Sometimes oblivion seemed like a better alternative to holding on. She was thinking such things then, as she wandered the blasted waste. Those thoughts were dashed away by a long, sobbing howl. She didn’t need to look to know what made the sound. It was another echo, one who had lost all its connections to the past. Its memories had faded away, and it had lost any sense of self or concept of what it was, never ceasing to exist but instead wandering aimlessly through the world. She knew from the way it cried and shrieked constantly that while memory was gone, it still felt every bit of sorrow she did and more. She shuddered. No, that torment was far worse even than clinging to scraps of her former life. At least she had something.

Eleanor climbed up a small cliff, scraping at the stone and earth with glass-encrusted fingers of bone. She’d made her surrogate body herself by coating a skeleton in crushed-up bits of colored glass. It was beautiful, if a bit macabre. She liked the way it glittered in the sunlight, even though now that made her easier to see and follow from a distance. Little bits of joy and beauty were a valuable thing to her.

At the top of the cliff she found a grove of enormous fungal growths six to fifteen feet high. She could hide in here until night, when the sun wouldn’t light her into a beacon. The fungi couldn’t hurt her anymore. She was already dead, and the bones of her surrogate were protected by the glass coating. She sat down in the shade and cover of a wide mushroom and practiced remembering while she waited for nightfall.

It’d been twenty-two years since the spores of the sapient fungi first drifted across the gulf of space and settled into the Earth. There they grew and began to kill and consume anything they could touch. Eleanor turned her sister’s locket over and over in her hands. She remembered Marnie lying on a gurney in the crowded hospital, her paling face marred by the fungus rotting her alive from the inside. She felt Marnie placing the locket in her shaking hand. “Whenever you remember me,” came the echoing voice for the ten thousandth time or more, “Look in here. Remember me the way I was when I was alive, when I was happy. Not like this… not like this” Marnie never knew just how true those words would be, just how much Eleanor would need the locket to hold on to her. She fumbled at the latch until it popped open. The pictures inside took her memories deeper. She heard Marnie’s voice, as an adult and then as a child, listened to her say the names of their childhood friends and neighbors. Hundreds of tiny pieces of information from a world that no longer existed passed through her mind, disconnected from their meaning outside of being the scraps of who she once was.

It’d been fifteen years since, as the alien fungi ravaged the Earth, cosmic titans of light and stardust descended from the sky to burn them away. At first humanity rejoiced, but it quickly became clear they sought only to destroy the fungi without any care for the humans caught in the middle. Rays of burning light scorched the land and boiled water, destroying all life in their path, and wherever the Starlight Beings touched down, stone and metal melted and sand became glass. All but the very deepest-buried hibernating spores of the fungi were destroyed. Most of the life in the sea died as it boiled. By the time the Starlight Beings had burned themselves out with their furious attacks, every human on earth who hadn't been killed by the fungi had burned up as collateral damage in a cosmic war older than earthly life.

Eleanor often wished that had been the end of it. Humanity wiped out, they all die and go on to whatever’s next. That’s not what happened. Most humans died in the normal fashion, but as humans were struck by the cosmic rays of the Starlight Beings some unknown factor interacted with the brains of individuals with strong psyches. In the last few seconds of their lives, portions of their psyches were hyper magnified and torn from the dying body. New, ghostlike beings were formed, incorporeal and incapable of interacting with the physical world without extreme effort, and unable to hold onto their memories of who they were before without something to remind them. So far, none of these remnants had ever ceased to exist, even after entirely forgetting who and what they were. They could only try to find some amount of stability and do their best not to forget who they were. Nobody yet knew if memory-objects would ever stop being able to preserve one’s memory, and Eleanor was terrified they eventually would, and she’d be left losing her sense of self with no way to stop it, and no way to die.

She was snapped out of her memories by a series of loud cracking sounds as a boulder crashed through her surrogate body. She discorporated from the shattered skeleton and turned around to see a huge clay surrogate easily ten feet in height with broken bricks protruding from its knuckles, raising the stone for another strike. Maxwell, one of the enforcers of the High Council. Eleanor focused her telekinesis and tried to stop the next blow, but it was already in motion and all she could do was slow it a little. It still came down and finished reducing her beautiful surrogate to an unusable mess of shattered bone and glass. Just as she was laying her telekinetic hold on Marnie’s locket to pull it away, Maxwell tore it from the surrogate’s hand and enclosed it in his clay lump of a fist. He started lumbering deeper into the grove. Eleanor followed, begging him to give it back, telling him she wasn’t planning on disrupting anything back in town, or trying to subvert Koenig’s power. She pleaded that all she wanted was to leave with her one memory-object and be left alone. Maxwell didn’t even acknowledge her words. His pace remained steady. Eleanor saw part of the locket’s chain hanging out of Maxwell’s grip and she focused on it, pouring her strength into pulling it free. A lump formed in his hand as the locket moved closer to the surface. Maxwell didn’t seem to notice. If she was very careful and very lucky, perhaps she could get away before he realized what was happening. She had a chance, a glimmer of hope. There was a tiny snap and her hopes were dashed as the broken locket chain flew free of his fist. The locket was still firmly in his grip, and now she couldn’t see any part of it to focus her power. She could still try to move the locket without directly seeing it, but her telekinesis would be dampened significantly. She decided to save her strength and follow Maxwell, waiting for an opportunity.

Maxwell continued walking for twenty minutes, the fungi growing ever thicker, before he stopped at the edge of a long crevasse with giant mushrooms growing out of it, spilling over the sides. It was like a huge oozing maw in the earth. He turned dispassionately toward Eleanor, tore off the arm that clutched the locket, and dropped it in. Eleanor screamed. The locket alone she could have caught with her telekinesis, but the massive arm fell out of sight far too fast.

“It’s gone now, Eleanor,” said Maxwell. “Come back to town and know your place, or stay out here and go mad. I don’t really care.”

He then turned and lumbered back towards town, leaving Eleanor standing there, helpless and heartbroken. She gazed down into the abyssal crack. She’d been told before what would be found in places like that. As a byproduct of their development, the alien fungi produced small amounts of a thin corrosive ooze. Here, where several of them grew to great size out of one huge crack, it would be found pooling a few feet deep at the bottom. By the time she got to her locket, if she could find it at all in the pool, it would’ve liquified. She could pursue the fruitless endeavor of trying to recover Marnie’s locket, she could wander the wastes until she forgot who she was, or she could return to Koenigville, forever enslaved by the Council’s possession of her only remaining ties to a dead world. It was a choice between three madnesses. Still, one seemed marginally better than the others. If she returned, she would at least remember who she was as long as she remained obedient. Maybe, just maybe, in the next hundred years, she could steal her books and escape again, or find some way to die. Despondent, she trudged back toward the place she’d hoped to never again call home.

By the time Eleanor got back to Koenigville, she couldn’t remember her name, and only vaguely knew of someone sometime called Marnie. She could barely remember enough to navigate back to town. After desperately swearing fealty to the High Council, she was given enough time with her books to come back to herself. She recalled who she was, and hazily remembered the events that had occurred in the waste. What she could remember with absolute clarity was that she had been utterly defeated.

Far off in the waste, deep in the bottom of a crevasse in the middle of a grove of alien fungi, Marnie’s locket sat on top of a pile of hundreds of objects that had once held significance in someone’s lives, all untouched by a corrosive ooze that didn’t exist. A hundred times or more this drama, or one very close to it, had played out in the past, and hundreds more times it would repeat itself. After all, there is little need to find new tactics and tools if one has not yet stopped working. On and on the cycle goes, on and on reign the kings of the afterlife.