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Hermes Trismegistus - Prologue
Date: 06 June 2001, 6:59 pm

Bob checked around the corner for obstacles, quickly leaning out from a squatting position. Twenty yards away he saw two guards talking to one another; one was lighting a cigarette and gave it a long pull before glancing up at his partner and saying something unintelligible. Both were decked out in the green fatigues of the COWS national guard, their only weapons being their pistols (probably old Berettas, Bob thought) in black Cordura holsters slung low on their hips in the western fashion, and radios patched to their shoulders. In the dull fluorescent lighting of the hallway, both seemed to be taking their jobs rather lightly, which was good for Bob.
    The man peeking around the corner was on a 'low-key' demolition op in the 'heart' of enemy territory. 'Heart' because of the high volume of electrical power produced here for use all across the state. 'Low-key' because the powers that be decided that this target wasn't important enough to mandate an aerial strike. Sure, this was the power station that supplied to most of what was formerly Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and lower Alberta, and sure the local garrison was in need of some 'disturbance', but for some reason it wasn't a target worthy enough for The Chair of the Coalition to sanction the destruction of with an air strike.
    That was where the big C had made his mistake, Bob thought: there were just too many loose ends. Sure, if he failed to plant the bomb, or was even captured, it would not matter to anybody on the Central Committee; it would be completely overlooked by a government caught up with the war with the European Democratic Holders, because this mission was worth nothing more than the paper that its requisition documents were printed on (which had probably already been burned, he thought). What they did not take into account, however, was the vulnerability of their man on the ground; the consequences of failure were much, much more potentially devastating than anybody had cared to ponder.
    Bob drew a breath, and rising, turned the corner with his silenced submachine gun directed at the head of the first guard. The action clicked and the man fell dead like a dropped bag of potatoes. The second guard, whose face and torso was splattered by the blood of the first, and also instantaneously stunned by the sudden death of his colleague, did not manage to turn to look at Bob before sharing the fate of his partner.
    Bob paced towards the two cadavers strewn on the ground without even looking at them. He stepped over them, still covering the rest of the hallway with his weapon. Silently, he stalked down the wide passageway, attempting not to allow the babble of Center to break his concentration. Now the only immediate threat was the discovery of the central office of this compound that two of its guards were not responding to their hourly check-up calls.
    Bob reached the end of the hallway, turned the handle to a door that led into a stairwell, checked that nobody else was using the stairs, and continued down towards his objective.

Five minutes later Bob was running down the dark hallways of the plant, trying to get out before the bomb went off.
    "Bob, are you ok? That guy didn't hit you very hard did he?"
    "No, I'm fine" Bob responded to his miniature headset, racing for the exit. A two round burst from his submachine gun had quickly killed a graveyard shift plant worker after ambushing Bob between two mammoth water pumps with a large wrench.
    "Well however you are, you won't be alive much longer if you don't start to REALLY haul ass. You only have two minutes."
    "Great," Bob replied. "And how long will it take to reach minimum safe distance in that piece of crap?"
    "Not long if you're judicious with the accelerator, but even you are going to have difficulty escaping the police on the outside. It looks to me as though the local cops have come to watch. I'm sorry to say it, but I think this might well be your last mission Bob." This statement was laced with fatalism, but Bob didn't pick up on the significance of the message.
    "Yeah, right. That's what you said last night." Bob yelled over the din of a row of generators. He didn't need to yell, but it felt better to be able to hear himself.
    "Don't you get cheeky with me Robert," the voice of Center replied. "It's your own damn fault that you were almost captured on the Border. You have the training to evade patrols - that's why you're the one living on the lamb, so to speak."
    "Thanks for bringing it up." Bob replied, as he was rounding to corner to the north door of the building.
    "You might not want to do that."
    "Do what?"
    "Your transport has been captured. There's a whole smack of COWS waiting just outside the door."
    Bob skidded to a stop in the dark, spacious hallway and squinted at the exit about ten yards away, "How do you know that?"
    "How did I know that the thug jumped down at you, stupid? There are security cameras on the front of the building. Two jeeps and about five men to my count, and that's only outside that door. And you should know that there's a couple of Nighthawks out there too."
    "How can you tell that there're Nighthawks?"
    "I'm not stupid man - soldiers don't just fall out of the sky."
    "A FRIGGIN AIR CAVALRY UNIT?!?" Bob turned to cover the corner that he had just rounded. "SINCE WHEN DO THE COWS HAVE A FRIGGIN AIR CAVALRY UNIT GUARDING A FRIGGIN ELECTRICAL POWER STATION?!?"
    "I dunno." Center replied. "but there's no time to talk now, we need to find you another way out."
    "Like hell you do," Bob responded, putting two rounds into the first of four guards running at him from the alley of generators. This was going to get tricky.

Outside, in the darkness, armed representatives of the Confederation of Western States waited: a whole counter-terrorist unit of them.
    Soon enough now, Chief Commander Gary Simmons guessed, the last of the guards inside the building would be bumped off. Because his concern of friendly fire would then be abated he would then allow himself to send in his men against the latest operator from Central Intelligence to make the mistake of going up against his counter-terrorism task force. He didn't like to think of the unit as belonging to the government; Gary Simmons was the type of man who owned everything he controlled. This included the barracks that his men slept in, the seaside military base they trained on, and the small (very small) delegation of paper pushers requisite to his rank.
    Five men stood ready at each of the two main doors of the building, and another five were poised to enter from the roof. All were armed, equipped and trained to the most rigorous of counter-terrorism standards -- they were some of the most elite of the elite troops in the service of the CWS military faction.
    Simmons still wondered though, as he listened intently to the chatter of automatic fire over the radio mounted on the dashboard of his transport, what kind of man it was inside that building at the moment. What kind of man, he asked himself, was it that managed to evade detection alone on a journey of over a thousand miles of this continent from the border, defeat a company of armed and trained guards, and hope to escape back over the same thousand miles to safety? A man not smart enough, Simmons smiled; in crossing the line of the fenceless perimeter of this compound, that man had tripped an infrared sensor scheme that had automatically alerted the local civil authorities of his presence, and started a host of hasty phone calls that had ultimately brought Simmons and his men to this place from their cross-training with the local regiment.
    The drone of the Nighthawks began to fade towards the perimeter. It couldn't be too long now until the guards were all finished off or were triumphant -- the radio mounted on the dashboard of the old hummer continued to chatter with the sounds of automatic fire and guards yelling at each other. Soon, the noise died and only the whispers of a single guard, too frightened to move, were audible over the moans of the dying.
    "Please help. Anybody who can hear me, please help."
    Eventually, even the whispering of the single guard stopped. Whether because of pure terror, or because of sudden death, Simmons couldn't tell. His men were getting nervous though, so he gave the go code.
    The groups sprang into action: with a refined precision that comes only after thousands of hours of intense training, the leaders opened the doors as the rest of their fire teams covered the entrances. Quickly they filtered into the building, covering every approach to their positions as they made their ways through the structure.
    The radio waves were now interspersed with the whispers of his teams as they passed certain pre-determined waypoints. Team Alpha was the first to come across the remains of some of the guards. "Commander, we believe that the tango was here."
    "You're not paid to guess where the tango was, Alpha leader," Simmons replied with disdain. He was about to voice the rest of his opinion, but was cut off -- very abruptly -- as the backpack filled with high explosive triggered.
    The explosion was tremendous. The ground on which the power station was built shook. Everywhere, man, machine and building shattered into billions of pieces. The earth seemed to rattle in its foundation.

Bob felt the concussion wave of the blast, knew that he would be very lucky to live as a vegetable, and escaped into the waves of unconsciousness.

The plume of the mushroom cloud began to clear.
    The small band of local cops who had come to watch the festivities on the perimeter of the compound rubbed their eyes behind their nightvision binoculars after the flash of the bomb. Then they checked again that the power station and it's matrix of transmission towers had completely vanished. One of them began to cuss and kick the scrub. The others watched in amusement as their lieutenant began to swear loudly about how this would mean no promotion for him, and how he might be retired early for this foul up. It also meant that the local town would be without power for a long time to come, and incidentally, the local military barracks would have to act as policemen in the riots that were sure to occur in the local townships.
    The officers were too busy being silently amused by their superior's antics to notice that the heavy overcast above the station, now rubble, had begun to glimmer a greasy silver, although dawn was a good three hours away. Two other things even less explicable they also missed, although they would have been hard pressed to notice them even if they had been searching for them.

As though from a dream, two pencil-thin beams of greasy-brown light broke through the overcast, displacing vapors as they descended. They probed everywhere, searching for something -- bending and twisting like tornadoes as they ran lightly along the ground. They stopped. Soon, both focused on the senseless body of a man, sliding slowly down a cracked drain pipe on a thin tide of steaming coolant towards the river that fed the station, scarred and barely alive. Carefully, as though trying not to damage further their injured cargo, the lights wrapped themselves around limp legs and held them close as they lifted their load ever so gently towards the clouds. They ascended, gradually at first, accelerating upwards. Two kilometers the body traveled; always upward, always limp. The overcast continued to shine it's dull greasy silver.
    Finally, the body, still limp, began to wake. Even through the haze of semi-consciousness Bob was surprised to find himself unexpectedly rushing upside-down through warm, damp air, two kilometers above the earth's surface. Shocked, Bob lost all consciousness.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 1
Date: 14 June 2001, 1:34 am

At the bottom of a pentagonal chasm, sealed from the light of day, lay a luminescent white bunk, three feet wide and long enough for a man to lay upon with a foot to spare at each end. The bunk lay next to one of the walls and from it a soft white glow radiated, lighting the whitewashed walls of the chasm to a disputable height of thirty feet, above which the abyss stretched into a palpable darkness. Upon the chest high bunk lay Bob, serene in his motionlessness and bathed in the soft light.
    Out of a dreamless sleep, Bob became aware that he was lying face up on a hard surface, that although hard, was not flat and felt to him as though his body was supported by the bed rather than by his spine, ribcage and other bones. He could feel eddies of cool air brush past his face and ears, filling his nostrils as he breathed with a refreshing and wakeful vigor. But the smell of the air was what caught him unawares. The scent was of rot and decaying flesh. This woke him immediately and caused him to sit up with a start and eye wide open.
    Bob looked about himself as a frightened child would in a place of potential danger where grotesque things were happening all around. Seeing that there was nothing to be frightened of, however, his heart rate slowed and he began to get a real sense of his bearings. He thought it odd that one minute he should be holding his breath on his way towards a river in rushing warm water, and the next should be alone in a room on a block of what looked like rock illuminated.
    Bob was confused, but this wouldn't be the first time he had found himself in a confusing situation and managed to find his way out, he hoped. Turning again, he felt the sharp pain that he usually associated with being stabbed. But was it that sort of pain? No, it couldn't be. There was no feeling of warmth that he associated with bleeding from the kiss of a sharp blade. Rather, he felt the stiffness of sleeping motionless for a long time, and a splitting headache. Additionally, to make matters worse, over his left eye socket, he could feel the heat, or rather the lack thereof, of a smooth polymer integument. This sensation was heightened by the fact that he couldn't see with his left eye. Wondering in amazement, Bob lifted his left hand to feel the contraption attached to him. No sooner had his fingers brushed the cool plastic, he found in place of his left eye an entirely new sense; he could actually 'feel' everything moving around and in him.
    It was an odd and eerie experience. Closing his eye, Bob could feel the steady beating of his heart as it palpated within his chest, the pulse of his blood as it moved through his veins, the shaking of his fingers as he withdrew his hand and arm from his face.
    It was as he was adjusting to this new experience that he felt his new sense directed upwards. Something was moving above him.
    Bob jumped off the bed and swung around, fists at the ready, forgetting his amazement. But there was nothing there. At least, it looked as though there was nothing there. Again confused and head still hurting, Bob sat down loosely on the ground. Looking over himself, he found that he no longer possessed his black fatigues. Rather, he was dressed in a pair of tight hazy green overalls that did not have zipper or buttons. It was like spandex but wasn't. The material stretched from over his hands to his neck and down to his feet without so much as a fold or wrinkle. Over his ankles the material glistened faintly in the light and ended in thick soles that cushioned the bottoms of his callused feet. He could feel the material on his lower neck, but it didn't itch or cause him to feel claustrophobic as turtle-necks often did. On the overalls centered over his chest was an insignia resembling a human skull. Depth it seemed to have in the smoothness of the material, glistening the color of greased ivory.
    "A mark of identification." Bob thought to himself. He had never seen a human skull placed in such an obvious location as a mark of classification before. After all of his work for the Navy and then Center, he had come across many skulls as marks of identification, always on shoulder flashes, but never without flames or snakes or knives protruding. What could it be? Then the question crept into his head. Where was he? Until this point in his life, he had never been truly lost. The only way he had to tell that he was anywhere right now were the five whitewashed walls and the odd bed before him.
    Bob looked up. Above him the walls stretched into a cavernous darkness. A forever of emptiness.
    Movement. He was sure of it. It couldn't be further from him in any horizontal direction than the walls that surrounded him, which he could 'feel' moving around him as his head shook minutely from side to side as he strained his head to look upwards. He scrambled to his feet and waited. The movement disappeared, and then reappeared again. But there was more. More movement than there had been before. It was coming closer. Concentrating as hard as he could, Bob made out eight long and spindly appendages and a bulbous body. Closer it came, all the while he stood still, waiting, searching. Now he could make out its size, the bulbous centers were about three yards in diameter each. Thoughts raced. A spider? If not, then what?
    Quite unexpectedly, the movement stopped.
    Suddenly, a shrill scream pierced his ears: a scream so horrifying that all of his hairs stood on end. It was the scream of death -- but not of human origin. The headache left him instantly. With the scream came more movement, not gradual as before. No, this time the thing hurtled at him at a speed he could barely perceive. Bob worked very hard to time his move.
    When the thing was so close that he couldn't bear it any longer, Bob launched himself sideways to his left, beside the bed and out of the way of the now visible puke-green giant spider-like thing that had hit the floor face first, right where Bob had been standing.
    Rolling to his feet beside the bed, Bob turned towards the spider and went into the basic ready position that he had learned in training. The only thing occupying his mind other than a reverential respect for the size and visual severity of the monster was the question of how to fight it. How did one fight a giant spider?
    In a second the spider also corrected itself, raising its venom dripping fangs from the ground in a fluid motion, leaving a pool of frothing spittle on the floor. It slowly clambered toward Bob with its hind six legs, reaching for him with its front two. There was not much room for the man to maneuver, so, unarmed, Bob had only one way of defending himself from this attack: he dived, away from the path of the spider, landing before the second of the five walls to his right. The spider was too quick for him, though, turning and ramming him full body against the wall. The force with which the spider hit him should have broken bones, but to his surprise, he didn't feel or hear this happen.
    Face to face with the monster, Bob struggled to hold the beast away. A loud, raspy breathing sound came from the spiders mouth, every once and again a loud clicking noise resounding as the spider rubbed it's barbed back legs in relish. Although he was being hugged closer by the spider's front two legs, Bob pushed and fought with all his strength, hitting the spider's luminescent eyes when every so often he managed to wrench one of his arms free. The long barbs of the spider's front legs pinched in Bob's sides, though they did not pierce the material in which he was clothed. Bob continued to land the occasional punch and soon all of the spider's luminescent eyes were beaten in, unable to see. But although this was the case, the spider very apparently could still feel better with its legs than it could ever see with its eyes, as the intensity of it's attack only increased, forcing Bob to take hold of the roots of both fangs at once, which clicked as the spider pulled him ever closer to a fatal bite. The clicking of the back legs stopped, and the rasping breath of the spider grew into a torrent of foul smelling air.
    Without any warning, the spider stopped pulling with it's front two legs, withdrawing them from behind the man, and focusing it's attack on pushing Bob into the wall behind him with the two liberated appendages and pushing itself face first into the man with the other six. Bob was pushed further up into the wall, his feet dangling (if they weren't being used to kick the spider's underside) a good three feet from the floor. Bob could no longer risk the random punch, as one faulty movement of the hand would surely mean surrender to the spider's gaping hole of a mouth.
    Beleaguered, Bob's defense began to weaken. The spider began to close the distance, it's great incisors inching their way towards his neck little by little, Bob still exerting his full effort at the base of the monster's fangs.
    Suddenly, as though by a miracle, one of the spiders foot long fangs cracked under the great moment exerted upon it. The spider howled and green blood began to spurt onto Bob's face, neck and overalls from the base of the cracked fang. The blood had a decidedly old taste to it but burnt in his mouth and tingled on his skin. Bob's left arm, which plunged into the spiders gaping mouth, evaded stabbing from the other fang long enough for him to wrench out his arm, with the fang still in hand.
    Then, using the giant fang as a knife, Bob plunged it sharp end first into the spider's head. This action had the desired effect, causing the spider's attack to waver momentarily. However, this period of weakness was quickly replaced by redoubled vigor. Again the creature shrieked, this time in solid motivation to do Bob his death blow, and as quickly as possible. In this Bob saw his chance of escape and continued to deal death to the giant arachnid when he could chance a stroke.
    Eventually, the spider loosened its grasp, dying slowly. The torrent of bad smelling air slowed to a gasp, which slowed to a gurgling wheeze. Bob took advantage of his chance and broke away.
    Bloody fang in hand, Bob used the sharp underside to slice away a willowy and barbed leg from the spider. He used this to beat the spider into a convulsing mutilated pulp, far beyond death.
    Now calmed and feeling relatively safe, Bob went back to the bed and sat down on the hard surface. He wiped off what sweat and blood there was on his face and brow, spit out the remnants in his mouth, surveyed the bloody carnage that covered him, closed his eye, and propped up his head on his arms. The only movement he could feel was the twitching appendages of the spider that eventually slowed, and then stopped. He was alone again. Isolated from the rest of living kind.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 2
Date: 21 June 2001, 1:32 AM

Or was he?
    Sliding off of the bed, Bob walked to the far corner and began a close-up inspection of the wall. It was sealed tight. No exploitable cracks or secret doors to see or feel as his head looked up and down. He began moving left, checking everything from the floor up as high as he could see for some indication of a route of escape.
    Soon he came to the white, oblong box shaped bed from the sides of which still glowed the only light in the room.
    In order to check the wall behind the bed he would have to move it. Putting both hands on the top corners of the box, Bob strained to move it. It gave little by little, revealing a hole in the floor as it went.
    Bob strained; on and on he pushed. Not until he was about to fall through the hole did he stop. The exit he had discovered beneath the bed looked like a dark ventilation shaft that wound away in two directions.
    Judging that being anywhere else would be better than where he currently was, Bob decided to leave the room and travel down the chute to wherever it would take him. Carefully, he slid himself into the shaft. It wasn't very big; he would have to move on his stomach if he were to go anywhere.
    Foot by dark, murky foot, Bob inched along the tunnel. The enormity of the shaft, it's straightness and the impenetrable dark soon caused Bob to lose all sense of time. Sometimes he would feel movement behind him and noisily speed up, trying to stay ahead of whatever it was. Other times he would be led steeply upwards and then back down. Indeed, the shaft seemed to follow every curve and vertical gradient possible. He found the occasional fork in the road and occasionally followed his choice to a dead end, forcing him to return the way he came and follow the other branch.
    At one point Bob was inching his way through the shaft and suddenly the ceiling dropped away into an abyss of nothingness, and stretching away into the distance the room reached around him into unfeelable darkness. Bob stood up and began walking and had soon come to the sheer edge of another abyss -- except that this one stretched downwards. He could feel this and the other side of the crack stretch in a straight line in either direction and judged it to be too far a distance to jump. Had he not been able to feel the details of this obstacle with his new sensory ability, he never would have seen it (or anything else for that matter) and walked right over the edge and into oblivion. Realizing this, he thanked his stars and continued along the ledge until he came to a bridge where he crossed. He walked until he came to another wall and continued beside it until he came to another hole barely large enough for him to crawl in. Deciding that one way out was just as good as any other, Bob got into the hole and began to crawl. All throughout the journey on foot Bob felt no imperfections in the floor; no rocks or cracks littered the way and the ground was perfectly flat.
    Eventually, Bob saw something. Checkered light shone through a grating about thirty feet ahead of him, at a thirty degree incline. The prospect of sight speeded him.
    Reaching the grating, he was blinded by the light that shone before him. Allowing his eye to adjust, Bob closed and reopened it, then scanned all around for any indication of a shape of some sort. Little did he know that the shapes he would see would stand firmly in his mind as being arranged impossibly, although he would be given the knowledge to comprehend soon enough.
    The room which he now viewed was a giant hollowed out cylinder in its upper reaches where it met a sky that was baby blue underlaid with distant points of light that had to be stars. This cylinder, which met the sky, extended downwards in a blend of colors that excited the eye, and seemed to shift and change with the movement of his head, to a ledge positioned a few feet below the chute in which Bob currently found himself. The ledge was no more than twenty feet wide from the wall to the edge where a second cylinder continued down, relatively bare of color, to a deep pool of crystal blue water on whose surface was not a hint of a ripple or wave. The ledge seemed to snake around the cylinder to the other side, but remained unseen: as although all this was impressive to the eye, the centerpiece of the tapestry remained beyond the comprehension of Bob and hid the details behind it. For on the axis of the center of the cylinders, suspended above the water and reaching up to touch the sky above, hung an inverted mountain. Needless to say, this sight took Bob's breath away and mocked his ignorance of the ways of this world.
    Looking away, Bob tried to piece together the situation. His current position was about three meters above the perimeter walkway. From what he could see, the jump would not be so far as to injure himself.
    Carefully, almost lovingly, Bob pushed the thick grating from the wall. It was heavy. It must have been made of cast iron. The grungy and run-down appearance of the tunnel around him would seem to have implied some sort of rust on the giant wheel, which there was none of. He tried to pull it into the passage, but to no avail, it was circular, and wouldn't fit. Bob thought about jumping down to the walkway while holding it, but judged against it, because of its weight. Instead he awkwardly turned himself around in the tunnel, gripped the wheel at the top of its thick rim between his feet and lowered himself to maximum arms length out of the hole. Now the wheels' bottom was a mere foot above the ground.
    Attempting to not make any noise, Bob dropped the wheel. There resounded a loud, metallic clang. Then the wheel began to roll on towards the edge of the ledge. Bob jumped down quietly and grabbed the wheel. Laying it on its side, he felt about for any sign of movement. The only thing he sensed moving was the blood in his veins and his body as it shivered a little.
    Bob walked to the edge of the edge of the ledge and looked down. Not having the greatest view of an indentation in the lower cylinder, he moved again, until he was just above it. The indentation consisted of a round disk of some kind of translucent material set into the wall of the lower cylinder, which seemed to point in its normal plane towards the inverted mountain.
    Bob was about to turn around to examine the wall behind him when he noticed a discrepancy in coloring in the walkway side. He lay down on his stomach and touched the discoloration lightly and felt a cover whisk out from underneath his fingers. This startled him back into consciousness that he had slowly been slipping out of. Only as he rolled onto his back and looked upwards to see the same baby blue sky scattered with stars did he notice yet another wonder fairly atypical of Earth -- a ribbon of what looked like a strange conglomeration of blue and brown bending in a smooth curve towards him at either end. This convinced him that he was hallucinating from a lack of sleep and had been traveling on his stomach through the ventilator shaft to this room far too long.
    After resting for a moment, Bob again flipped over and started to investigate the series of switches and dials that had appeared. As he looked over the gadgetry, he began to wonder who had built all of the things he had seen. And what about that spider? That wasn't natural; not on earth at least. How had he come to be here? Why didn't he die when the spider smashed him against the wall? Feeling too tired to try to answer any of those questions, Bob stood up and walked over to the wheel. He turned it on its side and rolled it to the wall, sitting beside it. He let it go and fell fast asleep.

Three hours later, or what seemed to be three hours later, Bob was awakened by the movement of the inverted mountain. The metal wheel was in the same place as before, upright beside him.
    Bob, still drowsy, slid on his back inch by inch to the edge of the walkway. Turning over and looking down, he could see that the water in the pool had risen quite a lot and that it wasn't as pristine and relatively unsullied as before. He could also feel a lot of movement in the water. Not only were there eddy currents and such in the water, but there were less naturally fluid movements in the water too.
    Bob looked at the mountain that dominated everything. As before, he couldn't see over the top ledge, which was still far overhead, but the bottom, which had seemed to be just above the water before, was now underneath. He couldn't see it clearly and judged that the tip was about six meters under water.
    Suddenly, something shot out of the water. It was about a quarter of the way around the walkway on his left, far from his current position. It stopped just above the edge of the walkway. Bob scurried away from the edge, towards the metal grating. He couldn't make out its figure with his sight or otherwise, but he knew that it was there.
    Then another, and another, and another. Soon there were six things spread almost evenly around the perimeter of the mountain within sight. From his vantage point, Bob tried to make out the figure of the nearest one, but the form of the object didn't seem to make any sense. He looked away and again questions raced through his head. Where should he go? What was he to do? And again, Why was he here?
    Then other thoughts began to flood his mind. What were those things and what were they doing? Anxiety and fear replaced curiosity. Activity replaced sluggishness. Bob again turned his eye to the nearest thing. "What is it?" he asked himself over and over again as he squinted harder and harder at the bulbous blue-green entity that was almost a speck in the distance. It seemed to be bent over the controls of one of the translucent disks.
    Then, noticed immediately, another of the creatures flew out of the water, directly ahead of him. It happened so quickly that Bob hadn't time to scream. It landed on the platform no more than sixteen feet from him, then seemed to stretch its jelly-like mass towards the panel that he had previously been tinkering with. The feelings of anxiety reasserted themselves.
    Then an odd feeling hit him -- one that seemed out of place in a moment such as this -- his hunger. When was the last time he had eaten? It must have been a long while ago for the rumblings to be this strong.
    Oddly, almost in response to his thought, the blob seemed to reveal from its viscous innards yet another, yet slightly differently colored blob which fell on the ground and rolled slowly towards him. Daring not to move, Bob simply sat and watched while his blood pounded through his veins.
    Then, just a foot from him, the second blob stopped. It sat there. After a long moment Bob felt an odd twinge of curiosity. Slowly, he reached out with an arm towards it and touched the slimy thing. Bob pushed his forefinger with only the slightest force into the semi-solid. It entered slowly. It was a strange experience for the highly alert and scared man.
    Then just as he thought that it would be safe to put his entire hand into the thing, the blob expanded. It grabbed tightly to his finger and began to suck in vast amounts of air. It grew to the size of a body bag extremely quickly -- horror was the only thing that Bob felt or otherwise understood. Then it enveloped him. Bob fought to escape as it slid its mass over his, but it was no use. It happened so quickly that he couldn't react as he might have liked, not that he could have done anything. As the amorphous slime closed in around him, he felt it's wet heaviness all around his body, closing off access of the air to his lungs and permeating his skin. To add to the unreality of the moment, Bob suddenly felt a million pins push into his body in his face and through the overalls, then nothing.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 3
Date: 27 June 2001, 8:10 PM

Eye coming into focus, Bob became conscious. How long had he been out?
    Before him, to his sight, stretched a tunnel of plant life. Giant light-green creepers the diameter of two men standing together clung and bit into white walls filled with cracks, fading far into the distance, speckled every so often by clumps of fat, green leaves all laced together with thousands of thinner strands occasionally highlighted by bright yellow flowers. There was light glowing at the other end of the tunnel, but not an overly bright light. He wasn't sure what color it was; it was very far away.
    It was then that he realized; he wasn't looking down a tunnel; but up into the canopy of a forest. He wasn't floating inanimately through humid air, but was lying on his back on top of an extremely comfortable form fitted mattress at what seemed to be the bottom of yet another multisided hole beneath the surface of the Earth.
    Bob tried to lift his right arm, but couldn't. He mentally strained his feelingless muscles to the breaking point, but his arm simply did not move. Abandoning this quest Bob instead tried to move his head to see what was beside and around him, but nothing doing; he couldn't move his head either. It was after a few more seconds of laying there that Bob realized that he was not breathing and that his heart wasn't beating either. He couldn't feel his chest rising and his heart was not pounding in his ears as it should have in such a situation. This came as a matter of great concern to him, but as he began to feel the wooziness of asphyxiation come on, he felt his worries float away on a pool of stagnant blood. His head began to hurt, but there was nothing he could do about it.
    Then, leaving as quickly as it had previously arrived, Bob felt a million pins shoot out of his body. Drawing in a sharp breath and quickly arching his back in pain and surprise, he kicked his feet over his head and fell off the front end of the bed, landing square on his chest. The fall knocked the wind out of him. Nonetheless, Bob squirmed and writhed while searching his prison, only to find that he was alone, five other beds circling the room along with his own.
    After regaining his breath, Bob slowly got to his feet, head swimming. His initial inspection had revealed that there were six beds, or tables, or waist-high platforms circling the room in which he currently resided; one for each wall. Upon closer inspection he found some of these platforms to be inhabited, or at least formerly inhabited. After quickly glancing at one, he found that on it lay the rotting corpse of a long dead and forgotten humanoid. Brown flesh clung to yellowish and decaying bones. The only remaining whole component, a gray colored eyepiece, lay on top of an elongated crumbling skull positioned roughly over one of three eyesockets in a triangular pattern, the plate placed over the highest of the three. Bobs subconsciousness prevented him from recognizing the presence of the third eyesocket; he still thought of himself as having two eyes and this rotting corpse only presented to him proof that others of his kind had shared the same fate as he. He completely failed to notice the strange positioning of the kneecaps, and the number of fingers and toes the carcass had.
    On another table there were nothing but greeny-brown creepers, reaching high towards the light.
    On yet another lay a pile of creamy-white powder; ground-up bones no doubt. No eyeplate to be found.
    The other three, his own and the ones to either side of his, were completely empty.
    Taking stock of his own physiological situation, Bob turned once again to his former residence. Nothing more than a marble box, covered in the wavy overtones of his back. No light emanated as before. Simply a solid stone box.
    He went to a side end of the box and began pushing against it. He strained and cursed and strained again, but it didn't budge.
    Nearly exhausted and surprised at himself for being so, Bob sat, leaning against the wall. He didn't move, and felt no movement. He closed his eye.
    He knew he would have to find food, water, and a way out of this place, or die of starvation, but the idea of such a fate didn't seem wrong to him. It was all too confusing. Why was he here? What was he doing? Where was he? The events of the previous day filled his mind, and the lack thereof. Did all those things even happen yesterday? And for that matter, what was the date? Did this place of insanity even know such a thing as time?
    Feeling very discouraged, Bob wiped a single tear from his single eye; then began to sob. Tears rolled off of his pink and quickly reddening face and onto his bare chest, eventually finding their way to the marble floor where they collected in a small puddle.
    Instinctively Bob rubbed the palms of both hands on the sockets of his eyes -- to rid himself of his tears and his own weakness.
    Then he felt movement.
    All around him things were moving -- everywhere. The magnitude of it all was too intense! He needed it to stop! In pain he fell into a seizure. As he grappled, he arched his back and flung himself into nothingness.

He found himself watching a man in a dark, hot tunnel. Musty vapors sprayed and whipped from crevices in the stone walls, floor and ceiling. The man looked confused, lost, disoriented. The faint glow of molten rock fumed upwards from a shaft at the end of the tunnel, the bottom of which ended in a white-red stream of lava. Around the shaft, as much as the ill-lighting conditions would permit, strange shapes and shadows bounced off of the walls, conjuring memories of demons and things more horrific than the human tongue could relate. The top of the shaft faded into a steamy darkness, as indistinguishable as a black hole from the rest of outer space. This place was evil.
    Bob began to hear something. A high clattering. Tick, tick, tick -- like a dog on a linoleum floor. It started faintly at first, then became louder; moving quickly, very quickly. The man was visibly shivering at the atmosphere of this place and the surreality of the unknown sound, even though it was terribly hot from the lava down the chute. He stood in mixed horror and curiosity at the clicking as it drew louder, and closer. He began to hear its breath, a raspy, blood curdling breath; and began himself to breath in sharp wheezes and squeaks. It was big. He couldn't see it but thought that he saw glints of dull light from sharp, inches long teeth. His heart began to rise into his throat. He couldn't hear the thing coming now because of the blood pumping in his ears. The warm smell of ammonia mingled with blood began to waft into his nose.
    Closer. Was that it right there? No. It had to be farther away than that. He knew that it could see him, but he couldn't see it.
    Then he heard it again, a loud, harrowing roar. A soundless scream escaped his lungs. He began a shaky run towards the shaft. The sound was louder than ever. Tormented, he looked into the abyssal and mourned the fate of a fiery death; all the while it was coming closer, getting louder.
    A second gurgling roar penetrated his ears and pierced him to his very core. He was terrified. Now with the clicking came the thumping of heavy feet. It was very close.
    Then he saw it. A lion with the head of a gargoyle, horrific in mannerism, and yet it moved with the fluidity of a thousand snakes, venomous and terrible. Too quickly for him to react, it lunged from ten feet at him, claws outstretched, reaching for his neck. The figure, unseen, let out a cry at the collision of prey and hunter, but nothing heard, and he was powerless to stop it.
    It was all over in a moment. The sharp pain he felt in his chest and neck turned to dull warmth as it tore him to the ground, ripping limb from limb, guzzling his intestines and other organs. The slopping sound of blood and matter was only joined in the relative silence by the incessant breathing of the beast.
    He watched as the monster devoured the man from neck to toe, stopping nowhere for bones, simply crunching them between it's powerful jaws. Sinews stood no chance against the power of it's razor claws; vertebrae clung helplessly together as though in a final stand against it, but these too were simply ingested with the rest of the mans' disemboweled corpse.
    At last it was finished. Only a disembodied head, smattered with blood, lay on the floor amidst the gore. The head was no longer human. Simply the remains of a ravaged carcass. An unknowing, ignorant meal for the beast. This it picked up between its jaws, turned, and began to lumber away.
    It's mass faded into the darkness, the clicking still sounding. The beast breathed in and out in the way of a contented predator. Then a gut-curdling, putrid, sickening crunch. The unseen knew that the skull had been smashed and that it's tender insides were now being violated; a satisfied growl resounded through the corridor. He felt sick, and sorry for the man -- whoever he had been.
    Bob began to cry.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 4
Date: 05 July 2001, 4:00 am

Bob awoke, babbling to himself, in a pool of tears. He had been overcome by his emotions; he couldn't remember the last time that had happened.
    Opening his eye, Bob looked upward through a pancake of moistness. He wiped the tears away. Gone were the soft light and the scent of daffodils that had welcomed him in this place the first time he awoke. Gone was the lush green of vegetation that formerly stretched into the atmosphere.
    Instead, a familiar light poured from two of the six tables. The one, whose crumbled bones lay on it's impermeable casket; the other, the table on which the rotting bones of the dead thing lay, who's stink now filled the room with such severity that it could be cut with a knife. Bob knew this smell, it had filled his nostrils on several occasions before.
    He remembered back to when he was a child and had perceived this scent for the first time; he had accidentally followed a cat into an old tomb while vacationing with the orphanage. There must have been a dead thing in the tomb because, though he could not see it, the horrible stench of death had filled his nostrils, sending him wretching into the lake that surrounded the island on which the tomb stood.
    That had been a long time ago. All else he could remember of that time in his life was great poverty. He had learned in his late teens that it had been partially because of something called a 'stock-market crash' that occurred just after the turn of the millennium. He didn't find out about what a 'stock-market' was until later when that confidential information was revealed to him seven years after he joined the Old Navy. Of course, before he had joined the Navy, he had been in secret training; the same as everybody else who was chosen for such a military career.
    What they would do; and he knew what they did because he had been a talent scout for a short time; was choose a subject. Perhaps because of very above average playing ability on a school field or because of high academic proficiency; usually for both, the federal file of the individual would be pulled to check for any illegal or questionable activity displayed and a date would be set to begin indoctrination of the unsuspecting youth.
    It would be before the date set, that a special psyk team would secretly break into the living quarters of the student in question (only the most paranoid of students would know because of the extreme stealth with which the team worked, though paranoia was one of the desirable traits of a good candidate) and set up a remotely operated microelectronic scheme designed to fill his, or her, sleeping mind with hypnotic phrases and gibberish about how great the government was, etc. Eventually, if security weren't breached, the team would begin to inject selected drugs into the subject, trying to induce the ability for the student's subconscious mind to take control of the sleeping student's body. That accomplished successfully, physical night training would begin, the subject often being honed into an efficient and very effective killing machine.
    Sometimes people would question why it was that the student began displaying signs of unnatural athleticism, and a complaint had once been filed for unlawful breaking and entering when the psyk team had (very) accidentally awakened the family dog. In this situation, the army had nothing to do but silence the whole family; all six members were found dead in their beds after an 'accidental' malfunction in the outdated central heating system of the family home. Thus it was determined that only people who were already highly physically active, and who owned no mobile or loud house pets, could be put into 'treatment', as the psyk team liked to call it.
    Oftentimes, the parents and family of the subject wouldn't know about the program, but it wasn't uncommon for a full-scale operation to take place involving every aspect of both the subjects conscious and unconscious life; this had been done for the now lost, and completely naked man. Under no circumstances would the subject really know what was going on, however -- not until his or her eighteenth birthday, at least. It usually took upward of a year to complete the process; for the individual in question to be fully ready for the arenas; a set of secret tactical training centers used to train a person in all aspects of the arts-.
    On the night of the individual's eighteenth birthday, when they came of legal age, the psyk team that had been working on the youth would visit him or her in public -- often in a low-pressure environment -- where they would tell all, revealing everything that had happened over the course of the training regimen. By this time, most candidates had been fully trained in tactical warfare, comprehensive firearms usage and knowledge, escape and evasion; everything that any police tactical unit or SWAT team would know depending on the nature of the job that the Force wished to place the candidate in. Some nominees, the really outstanding ones, were trained and fully qualified in parachuting, underwater demolition, espionage and in the way of every martial art, often exceeding every physical fitness standard -- oftentimes trained better than the best elite troops of the previous century.
    Except for the fact that learning was such a grave process -- not knowing whether the person would accept the job offered on the pivotal night of the eighteenth birthday -- the whole ten minutes that it took to reveal the truth could be quite comical. Sometimes the candidate wouldn't accept, a whole three years of work down the drain (and it did happen), and such a response would leave the psyk boys with nothing to do but bump the subject off, because security could not be breached under any circumstances.
    It had been a shock to himself on his own birthday to find out that he had been the subject of a multi-million dollar training program. The placid, and yet alert, warmth of the psyk that had informed him of his training still rang memorable in his mind. He remembered vividly the onrush of countless memories of combat with his fellow students in the cold underground arenas; of jumping out of perfectly good aircraft (more times than could be counted on both hands both feet and with his fly down), often with a steerable parachute, his landing target being a few meters in diameter -- and most vividly of all -- of almost being eaten alive while on a live fire exercise in full diving gear in the swamps of what was formerly known as Florida. That night in that nondescript bar he found himself barely able to speak. As the memories flooded in, he found himself in the most lost state he had ever been to that point; it was good that he had been sitting at the time. If his supervisors at the orphanage had been there he would have killed them, to put some of that training to good use, but he never got the chance -- he was shipped off to the local arena that very night.
    Those who did accept their new station in life would usually leave within the next week for the briefing of their first 'mission'. His had been to survive a crossing of Rogers Pass, the location an obscure, but very cold Confederate mountain science station, and through CWS territory to the border. Only those who weren't capable of remembering most of their training didn't survive.
    That would only be the beginning, though. The Old Navy, being an extremely secretive paramilitary organization, would send it's employees around the country in small squads to crush up-and-coming terrorist organizations and fight along little-known borders with quickly-exterminated insurgents of both military and civilian background. Training never ended and the learning curve was sharp. Had the group had a reputation within their own country, they would probably have been known as the 'Terrible Teen Squad', but no such reputation existed because no rebel ever lived through a crack-down. No normal person knew about them, or had even thought of them, because after the 'stock-market crash' there was no need for revolt against The People's Republic of the North Atlantic Rim.
    On the whole, people were happy with the Republic because it gave them food and clothing, a life, and something to do. There was not a single person who lived in Europe or North America who didn't work for the Republic -- that is, all except the Confederates, who quite adequately fought to maintain their portion of North America.
    He had heard terrible stories about the COWS; how they butchered women and children, massacring whole villages if they didn't do as they were told. He wasn't sure if any of it was true. Even if it was, he and his compatriots on occasion had burnt whole townships to the ground, gunning down all the survivors with their jeep-mounted machine-gun, lovingly nick-named Bubba. Comparison between the two governments yielded many differences, but comparison of the people who did their dirty work yielded few.
    The CWS was a fascist dictatorship that should have died in its infancy, yet even they had survived the breakdown of the Republic into two regionally based militant factions, which had resulted from the civil war, leaving Bob without a job. He had thought of defecting to the CWS when the first major upheavals in the Republic were taking place, but he knew that if he did he might in the future find himself fighting against some of his best friends. That thought had scared him at the time.
    But none of that wouldn't help him now.
    Snapping out of his reverie, Bob stood and walked around the room once slowly, testing his legs and body for any stiffness or broken bones. Falling into a seizure with many nearby sharp stone boxes was hazardous at best.
    His left arm felt a little stiff, and as he massaged it, he looked at the table on which grew the now gray-green creepers that he could see rise far above into the night. He found it odd that light should not be emanating from it and the tables on the other half of the room, as it did from the other two on either side.
    He walked to the table and ran a hand across the smooth surface, avoiding the plant that seemed to expand and contract, as though breathing, upon closer inspection. Putting his ear near to one particularly large creeper, he thought he could make out a barely perceptible rhythm of air sounding from pores too small for him to see. It was moving though; his experience upon arriving told him that.
    Standing from his crouched position, Bob lifted a hand to rub his face. Short stubble met with skin, he judged that it was about three days worth; which was a relief to him. At least he could tell that this trip of insanity hadn't lasted so long as to deprive him of a proper shave every week or so. In his years of fighting unknown wars he had grown into a shell not unlike that of James Bond; he knew nothing of James Bond, but tried to maintain a visually pleasing image. His luck in tight situations and seemingly unending intelligence and charisma set him apart from many of his colleagues, leaving him with the reputation of an enviable individual. The main difference between himself and the superspy was the women; Bob's job precluded him from having any sort of contact with members of the opposite sex beyond the occassional job with female operatives like himself; they were of a tough breed and many of them could easily kill without any form of remorse. Bob feared these counterparts as much as he disliked the smell of rotting flesh, but there was nothing he could have done to change that. In fact, his fear and dislike extended to all females simply because he hadn't had enough experience to teach him otherwise. All the other women he had ever known were those at the orphanage, and they had only been blisteringly strict. He wasn't gay, but he wasn't a heterosexual either. On the whole, he viewed himself to be a very screwed up individual.
    Returning to his table, Bob looked at the waves and knolls that he knew matched his posture exactly. He thought for a moment about lying down. No, he was too awake for that.
    It occurred to him that there was a nearly indistinguishable hole in the very center of the bed, about a half-inch in diameter and laying on the center of the roll where the small of his back would fit. He bent over the three foot wide table to take a closer look. The hole extended into the table until the lack of light took away all perception of depth.
    Quite casually, Bob pushed a finger into the hole; if it hadn't done anything to him while he had been lying there, why should it do anything now? He could feel the sides of the hole taper towards his finger as he pushed it further in, but it tapered too much for his finger to reach all the way. He tried his little right finger instead, and again found that the hole tapered away too quickly for him to gain any sense of how deep it really was. This was proving to be a very interesting enigma.
    Walking to the table upon which lay the bones with hanging rotten flesh, Bob found a similar hole in a similar fold in the table top. Pushing a few of the bones away, he felt with his finger again that the hole was just a little too deep to reach the bottom.
    In the table with the pile of dust, Bob found a third similar hole.
    After gazing intently at the table before him for a moment, he noticed something very interesting. The form imprinted into the table before him didn't completely resemble anything he had encountered before. Instead of there being folds for two shoulders, a pair of arms, etc. he found himself looking at two sets of shoulders, two sets of arms, and a skull imprint that folded inward at the back, as though there were a large dent there. A shiver ran up his spine as he thought again on his encounter with the giant spider. That arachnid hadn't been of any kind resembling a regular earth spider. It was way too big. Similarly, he had never known anybody with two sets of arms on earth. The implications of this were disturbing, to say the least, and he cleared his mind completely for a moment before asking himself the question.
    The voice in his head was quiet and contemplative, and his lips moved with his thoughts, as would a mime. Where, exactly, was he?
    Looking upwards again, perplexed, Bob wondered aloud, "What's going on?" He asked it again of the breathing creepers to his left, realizing slowly that they too were not reminiscent of earth or home. Then he thought of the blobs. A chill ran though him.
    He was on another planet.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 5
Date: 11 July 2001, 11:09 PM

Cold and naked, Bob further searched the room for any sign of escape. With each passing moment, it became clearer to him that there was only one way out -- up -- but with each step, he also found himself searching all the more frantically for an alternate mode of escape. He didn't want to climb up.
    Eventually, after searching for what seemed to be an eternity, but was in fact 3 minutes, he laid his eyes upon his own box. The mystery of the holes still clung to the back of his mind. What kind of key did one fit in such a small lock?
    Looking at the hole from the other side of the room -- nearly leaning against one of the larger, leafier creepers -- Bob thought the best he could think; a taxing and difficult chore, to be sure. The outrageousness of the entire situation hacked to pieces any idea that tried to formulate itself -- like trying to take university exams with someone looking over your shoulder and commenting loudly on completely unrelated material.
    With a quiet sigh, he leaned back slightly, coming into direct contact with the creepers.
    // Hello there. We've been watching you. //
    Startled, Bob jumped away from the wall, facing it. What had that been?
    Regaining control of himself, Bob touched the larger creeper with a hand.
    // Oh, it's you again, is it? We thought you had smartened up and found a way out for a minute there. //
    // What is this shit? // Bob thought to himself.
    // This is a figment of your imagination. // the creeper responded, // Ask us nicely and we might let you have good dreams tonight. //
    "Huh?"
    // You humans are all the same. No sense of imagination whatsoever. Do I have to spell it out for you? //
    // ... //
    // You are a prisoner on the finest vessel to sail the multiverse. // The plant went on, // We thought for a moment that you might never decide to say hello, and were about to reach down and break your neck, but you obviously got the better of us, didn't you? //
    "Who are you?"
    // Your worst nightmare. //
    "Why am I here?"
    // That question has many answers. We won't bore you with the details, but if you would be so kind as to pluck a small, needle-like sprig from off of us, we will gladly show you how to open the caskets. //
    "Uh... ok."
    Leaving the creeper, Bob laid eyes on a single, thin shoot that protruded from a creeper. He tried to pull it out.
    // Oh come on guys. You wouldn't do that to me would you? Only last week you were telling me how I made the air smell so much nicer. Great friends you all are. //
    // Tough shit, kid. // then to Bob, // Would you please pull him out? He's been a constant annoyance since he was grafted. //
    Bob tugged, the shoot gave way.
    // Thanks a lot. Here I lead a normal life until you happen along and pull me from my place. I want you to die right now. //
    The little plant started writhing uncontrollably in the man's hand.
    // Take that. And that! //
    This was a little too much.
    Bob touched the spot where he had just pulled the creeper out. A thin pulp was already being exuded from the point of fracture, covering Bob's hand in sticky green plant blood.
    // Oh, my poor baby boy. How will I ever get over the loss. You scoundrel. Ever since you were children, you've always wanted to get rid of my poor Reginald. //
    // Tough luck lady, the boss wanted it. //
    "May I ask what I'm supposed to do with this thing?" Bob cut in.
    The creeper still writhed, although without the same vigor. // Yeah! You wanna piece a me?! Come on, I'll hand you your ass on a plate! //
    // That, moron, is no simple 'thing'. That is my child, and I would very much appreciate it if you gave him back to his mother. //
    // Don't mind her. She thought that a sprout would be a good idea a few years back. Damn asexual reproduction. Anyway, I want you to insert that twig in the little hole in your desk over there. //
    // He's no twig, and you know it! That's my baby. //
    // Don't worry about me mom. // The twig had stopped twisting. // I'll be okay. //
    A whimper emanated from the creeper. // Oh, my boy, you are so brave. Your father would be proud. //
    This was starting to get to him.
    Bob walked over to the table on which he had been lying.
    // Now when we get there, I want you to place me into that hole, thin end first, alright? //
    "Alright. What happens then?"
    // Maaaaagiiiiiiicck. // The root began to undulate in the man's hand, as though to some forgotten rhythm. // In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep... // The voice of the creeper had suddenly matured and was singing an old song that Bob vaguely recognized. At this song, Bob wondered if the plant knew about his days in the arenas. It wasn't until a piano and a three man accompaniment chimed in that he interrupted.
    "How are you doing this?"
    // The solution is long and the formulas distinguished in the halls of telepathy, but I won't bore you with them -- your simple mind could never grasp their complex nature. //
    "Telepathy? But you're a plant. How is that possible?" Bob had by now stopped at the edge of the table that he once lay atop.
    // No time for questions. Just insert me in the hole. //
    Bob positioned the still undulating tuber over the hole.
    // COVER ME! I'M GOING IN! // the sounds of automatic weapons fire resounded in his head.
    "What should I cover you with?" Bob asked.
    At this the plant started writhing again. // Would you just put me in the hole?! I don't have all day you know! //
    "Sure thing."
    Bob inserted the plant into the hole and pushed it in with his index finger.
    Looking down, the severed end of the plant wriggled itself into the abyss, like a worm in the dirt. This quite amused the man, and he found himself laughing inexplicably -- this was quite the emotional rollercoaster ride.
    In his mirth, Bob collapsed against the plant-covered wall.
    // What, exactly, are you laughing at?// The "you" was emphasized to make the statement an accusation.
    "Search me." Bob replied. Then, quieting himself a little, "What, exactly, is that thing doing?"
    The womans voice was heard again, // That THING is my SON! How dare you... //
    // Calm yourself, Gertrude. I'm sure the man doesn't mean any harm at all. //
    // Alright, well, if you insist. SNORRRRRK. //
    "What was that?"
    // I was just cleaning my nose, for your information. They may not have taught you about emotions while you were out playing Gestapokid, but at least you don't have to ask... //
    "HEY, how did you know about that?"
    The male voice replied, // We know everything in your head. There is nothing you can hide from us. Muahahaha... //
    Bob twitched at this. That laugh had resounded in his ears on one occasion when he had been ordered to take out the curator of an insane asylum, who was himself quite insane. The curator had sent swarms of nuts at him from their cells, and had tried to attack him with a fish.
    // It was cod, I think. //
    "What?"
    // The fish. I think the fish he attacked you with was a cod. //
    "How do you figure that?"
    // He had to use both hands to wield it, sonny. That, and the asylum was on the coast of Labrador. //
    "This is weird."
    // Nope. The only WEIRD thing about all this is you, boy. We've all been here since the beginning of time itself - HAVEN'T WE BOYS?!? // At this a raucous telepathic cheer went up from the plant. It gradually reverted to a bunch of foot stomping and a chant, // SIN, SIN, COSINE, SIN -- 3 . 1 4 1 5 9 !! //
    When they were finished, Bob asked as politely as possible, "Do you think that your little friend will be coming up for air any time soon?"
    The shrill woman's voice responded, // For one thing, YOUNG MAN, my SON doesn't need to come up for air, and secondly, NO, he won't be coming up. //
    "Then, what, exactly, did he go down there for?" the man asked the air, gesturing towards the box.
    // Nothing important. //
    "This is insane, I'm outta here." With this Bob turned, grabbed ahold of one of the creepers and began to climb.
    // And where do you think you are going? // the male voice asked sternly.
    "To put it bluntly, up, up, and away."
    // Really? And how exactly, do you think you're going to climb a mile to the top, then get past the mice guarding the exit? //
    "Mice?"
    // Yesssss. BIG mice with Big, Sharp, Pointy Teeth. //
    "What is this? You think I'm going to be afraid of a few mice?"
    A new voice answered him; this time it was that of an old mariner with a thick Scottish accent, // Aye sir, those mice be mighty large. If one of them died an rolled over, the whole tunnel would be engulfed in complete darkness. //
    // How big would you say that is, in feet? //
    // Oh, aye, at least sixty feet long and thirty feet wide on a good day. //
    // What about on a bad day? //
    // They're not all that bad at putting the pounds on, lad. I haven't seen one yet that wasn't at least two times as wide as you are tall. //
    Bob stopped climbing. // And how big are their teeth, would you say? //
    // The big 'uns get to be mighty long, lad. At least three feet long from tip to root. //
    // And what do these mice eat? //
    // Anything they can, lad, anything they can. //
    The last response caught Bob off his guard. // And where exactly are we to have sixty foot long mice romping around at the top a mile-deep pit? //
    // As I told you before, mate, // the response came, // we are sailing on the finest ring construct to grace the heavens with her majesty. //
    // And where is Earth in respect to this ring construct? //
    // About 30,000 light years east by southeast. //
    "30,000 LIGHT YEARS!?!" Bob screamed out loud, jumping away from the plant. "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET HOME?!?" Bob cursed loudly. Then, taking a moment to calm himself, he forced himself to touch the plant to get his reply.
    // You were never meant to get home. We thought that you'd be ecstatic about leaving your planet. //
    "Ecstatic?!? How am I supposed to be ecstatic about being lost?"
    // Did I tell you where you are? //
    "Yes."
    // Then you're not lost, are you? //
    "That still doesn't explain how I'd be ecstatic."
    // Well, for one, you won't have to worry about taxes again. You won't have to worry about being killed off on useless missions into enemy territory, either. In fact, we've given you a whole new opportunity to live your life to the fullest extent possible, and with that a whole new opportunity to screw it up again. //
    "And what about my left eye? How am I supposed to see without my left eye?"
    // We thought you might get to that eventually. Look at it this way, you now have one less eye to care for. No more worrying about both pupils dilating if you receive a concussion. You'll only need to pay half of the usual amount for vision correction. And hell, we just halved the probability of your getting hit in the eye with grapefruit juice in the morning. //
    // And what about this motion sensor thing? //
    // That was an attempt of our brightest minds to allow you to feel your way in the dark without night vision, keep people from sneaking up on you from behind, and give you the ability to count your pulse without using your fingers. All at the same time! //
    // And this is supposed to help me in some way? //
    // ARE YOU DAFT MAN? A BUILT IN MOTION SENSORY DEVICE INCREASES YOUR CHANCES OF SURVIVAL ON THE MODERN BATTLEFIELD BY A FACTOR OF THREE! //
    "That's all?" Bob asked coolly, his thought laced with sarcasm, // So what are the drawbacks? //
    // Well for one, as you pointed out, you won't be able to use depth perception as a way of measuring distances. Let's also say that if you were naturally telepathic beforehand... //
    // Then I'm not now. I see. Is there anything else I should know about? //
    // We did some weird shit to your hormonal and immune systems. Also, you are now stronger structurally than you were before. It's not like we replaced everything with titanium, but you can also heal if you break anything. //
    // And how exactly did you do all of this? //
    // Maaaaagiiiiiiicck. //
    Bob looked down at himself, beginning to feel the insult of his nakedness, // Do I get to wear anything at all, now that we've made our introductions? //
    // Well, the people who brought you here, how shall we say, purloined some of the finest equipment available from your planet for you to play with. You can save the thank-you's for later. //
    // Are we actually going to do anything or should I just stand here and starve to death? //
    // No hurry... wait a second. I can't begin to tell you how much you would benefit from learning a little patience. //
    "Right."
    // Don't you get cheeky with me Robert, // the voice sounded exactly like that of Center, // You don't have to act like it's your own damn fault that you now have to live your pitiful life on that marvel of engineering so very far away. //
    "DON'T YOU MESS WITH ME!" Bob screamed again, gesturing madly.
    // Calm down son. // It was the man's voice again. // Take a deep breath and count to ten. //
    "Why?"
    // Just do as you're told and all will be well. //
    Bob took a deep breath and began to exhale, counting up to ten as he did so. "5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10..."
    A sharp gusting sound emanated from the box he had woken on. // See, that wasn't all that hard, was it? // Two inches from the edge of the box a line appeared in the top of the seamless white marble. The gusting noise continued and the top of the bed receded into the wall like a common trap for large animals being opened. But it wasn't the details of the box's opening that held Bob's attention. Indeed, he could only imagine what was being revealed in the cavernous rectangular hole that the lid revealed. Accordingly, Bob moved into the center of the room, not taking his eye off of the hole for even a moment.
    He stood there for an instant in the ready position. No spiders, blobs or mice with three foot long teeth came out of the box. He stood there for a moment longer, but nothing happened.
    Bob took a few steps backwards and angled himself into the space between the bunks, resting his right hand on a rather large vine.
    "What's in it?"
    // Nothing that will hurt you in the short run. //
    "What about the long run?"
    // Well, you've heard the stories about soldiers food, haven't you? //
    A grin that didn't touch his hard set face glinted from Bob's eyes. He took the few steps forward and looked down into the box.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 6
Date: 26 July 2001, 2:46 am

Laying there, in the box, was a dummy replica of Bob. This surprised him greatly, to the point of silencing his mind. Every detail of the mannequin matched that of himself, except for one subtle difference -- the dummy had clothes on.
ÝÝÝÝBob stared down at his replica for a moment, half expecting it to sit up and start talking. The fantastic manner of everything he had experienced from the moment he had woken on that first table demanded that this inanimate object stand up and walk. But it didn't. It lay there with an expressionless face staring with it's single eye up at the heights above.
ÝÝÝÝThe dummy gave Bob insight to his own situation, however. There was a covering drawn ever so subtly from the nose up around the left eyebrow and down to the cheekbone that made Bob draw a breath in awe. Bob had expected the covering over his left eye to be translucent, allowing the viewer to see into the depths of his cranium, but it was not so. The covering over the left eye of the mannequin was opaque and the same color as the skin on the rest of it's face. Indeed, the appearance of the covering over its left eye convinced Bob that if he hadn't previously known that he originally had two eyes, the dummy would have given no hint that his face should have ever been different. The sight of it seemed dehumanizing and felt wrong to Bob.
ÝÝÝÝBob leaned to one side towards one of the closer boughs and touched it. "Is it alive?"
ÝÝÝÝ// It depends on how you define 'alive' // came the response, // If you mean 'Is it teeming with life?', the answer would be yes. Every cell in that body is almost as alive as the cells of your body are. It, however, doesn't have a central consciousness to drive it, as you do. Essentially, it is the embodiment of yourself in a controlled coma. You were brought out of this coma and it remains. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Wait a second. What do you mean, 'You were brought out of this coma and it remains'? Can you wake that thing up? Is it like me?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Yes and no. The two of you are physically identical. The two of you are also mentally identical when you wake up. After you have woken up, however, you experience different things and therefore become different. You have the same memories of childhood and 'Earth' as you call it; you have the same memories of waking up and fighting the spider and the same dreams. It was only after you were put under the second time that you were replicated. Thus, he is like you and not at the same time. //
ÝÝÝÝThe reality, or rather the surreality, of the situation began to sink in. Bob put his other hand on his knee and leant heavily on it. His breathing quickened and his vision blurred momentarily. "Talking to a plant. How foolish."
ÝÝÝÝ// Yes and no. On your planet many people talked to plants and found that they (the plants) grew better as a result. On this construct things are quite the opposite. Since the beginning of our conversation many of my upper leaves have faded slightly, which I can only attribute to the level of your communication. If you want to get out of here alive, I suggest that you put on his clothes and be nice. // Another sharp gusting sound emanated from the box and the body of the other Bob upon its platform was slowly lifted until the surface that it lay on was flush with the top of the surrounding frame. Now the setup resembled Bob (the awake Bob) as he had laid upon the box, except that this time he had clothes on.
ÝÝÝÝ"Why didn't you just start me off with clothes instead of making me take them from him?"
ÝÝÝÝ// The body you are in is the body you arrived here with. As such, you were left naked so that you could be replicated more easily. We also thought that it would dampen the psychological stress of possibly meeting an animate double later on by showing you now that they exist. That's not important at the moment, however. What you need to know now is that you're needed too urgently on the surface to warrant letting you crumble into nothing like your associate on the other box over there. I suggest you hurry. //
ÝÝÝÝBob left the plant and surveyed his duplicate on the table. He was dressed in a baggy pair of overalls patterned in an effective camouflage print with many large pockets. Laid over its legs was a large backpack. Around his torso was a tactical vest with several long magazine pouches on the front. Attached to a harness around its shoulders was a submachine gun that Bob instantly recognised and detested. Around his hips was a thick gun belt, on which rested a Cordura holster, several smaller magazine pouches and a large sheath knife. Bob reached around the body to it's right side, unsnapped the safety catch on the holster and withdrew one of the oldest pistols he'd ever seen. On its side was printed in big stamped letters,

"HK USP .45 Auto".

ÝÝÝÝFrowning, Bob quickly found the magazine latch and depressed it. A long box magazine fell out of the bottom of the gun, which Bob caught with his left hand. He removed the first round of the magazine and shook his head in disdain; it was some nondescript jacketed hollow point in .45 ACP. The meaning of the acronym ACP escaped him at the moment, but he recalled that this was a reasonably powerful cartridge with reasonable one-shot stopping ability, obsoleted by the penetrators and super-penetrators of Bob's generation. Long ago, when he had still been in the arenas, one of Bobs instructors had carried a weapon similar to this one, and the training sessions that the youths participated in when weapons in this caliber were involved were often sobering and comical at the same time. If memory served, rounds of .45 ACP couldn't permeate at any range any type of body armor popular with the shadier elements of society; armor always found in the hands of criminals and the military -- -two groups against which Bob had fought in his earlier days. While this cartridge gave a good amount of recoil, there was virtually no armor penetration ability in it. In essence, it was doomed as a head-shot and civilian caliber; only able to do damage with a direct shot to the head or against unarmored suspects. The recoil was manageable, however, and if you planned to go in the 'all hands useful' gunfighter style of some of his old Navy buddies, with double pistols, you were just in luck. Bob remembered well the jolt of firing the weapon relative to many of the smaller caliber pistols in use by his employers -- there was a marked difference when compared to 4.6mm shells; and .45 rounds also took up a lot more space. He faintly remembered the first time he had tried to fire a similar weapon with one hand -- the bump on his forehead had taken a week to go down and in the meantime had elicited some rumors around the orphanage that he had been in a fight with the headmaster; a large and burly man to be sure. Similar techniques applied to a 4.6mm cartridge, however, produced hardly enough felt recoil to move the weapon, allowing for quick followup shots. It was for these three reasons -- armor piercing capabilities, space efficiency, and recoil -- that Bob found himself to be bewildered at the voice's comment about good equipment. Bob reached over to touch the nearest vine.
ÝÝÝÝ"Why is this pistol chambered in such an outdated cartridge? I thought you said that you were going to give me the best stuff you could find."
ÝÝÝÝ// We did. That is one of the most reliable and popular pistols from your era. //
ÝÝÝÝ"From my era or the era when I was two years old? This thing is a frickin' dinosaur."
ÝÝÝÝ// Calm down, princess. It's not like it's a complete loss. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Yeah? Where I come from, it would be better to go with no gun at all rather than with something like this."
ÝÝÝÝ// If you don't like it, then fine. Leave it here. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Ok. Sure."
ÝÝÝÝ// Alright. We'll just be seeing who needs what in future... //
ÝÝÝÝBob put the pistol down on the box and looked up the frame of his replica at the other weapon laid across its chest. He recognised it as a UMP series submachinegun, built by HK before the 'stock-market crash' around the time he was born. It was an old weapon for sure, but effective for its purpose, which was to engage unarmored targets at short to intermediate ranges. Bob removed the magazine from the gun and took a round from the top. Again, it was a jacketed hollow point in .45 ACP. It seemed that on Earth, before his departure, just about everybody had aquired body armor from the militaries of the former governments -- making the cartridge that this weapon was chambered in useless. It was when terrorist attacks consistently began to utilise body armor that the doctrine in anti-terrorist small arms took a radical swing; bullets became smaller and thus more able to defeat an armored subject. Bob removed this weapon from the shoulder harness and checked it to make sure that it was in proper working order. Finding that it was, he moved on.
ÝÝÝÝBob continued by searching through the backpack laid lengthwise on his doubles' legs. On the belt of the pack was a machete in a long kydex sheath. Strapped to its back was a small folding shovel. Inside were an assortment of items including undergarments, socks, a few extra pairs of coveralls, a pair of shaded safety glasses and their case, a broad-brimmed hat, a first-aid kit, a survival tin, a pair of work gloves, an interesting flint and steel fire-starting device that held tinder in one end, owners manuals for both the USP and UMP, a compass whose needle spun erratically in circles without any pretense of stopping, a tightly packed camouflage net, three filled one-liter water bottles, a cooking pot in which were stuffed many of the smaller items, a map of the Rocky Mountains, a wristwatch that was still running, a small bottle of water purification pills, sticks of camouflage paint with a small mirror, a knife sharpening set, a packet of toothpicks, a sketch book and a bundle of ball-point pens held together with an elastic band. He decided before finishing with the backpack that a weapon was better than no weapon, especially if he came upon any more spiders, and chose to take the UMP.
ÝÝÝÝMany things like undergarments and the fashionably patterned overalls came in duplicate or triplicate, allowing Bob to clothe himself without moving his twin at all. The exceptions to this were the tactical vest, UMP, harness and boots, all of which he took for himself. Of the three one liter water bottles, Bob took two. He also left a few of the MRE's that filled the extra space in the backpack, the compass, the owners manual for the USP, the map and a couple of the pens, of which he had no need. These he all left in a neat pile on the floor beside the box.
ÝÝÝÝBob pulled the knife from it's sheath on the belt of the double. It was very obviously a survival knife in the scandinavian tradition. It was very sharp, which was a good thing. Bob resheathed the knife and left it on his twins' belt with the other things that he was going to leave as a waking up present for his double; there was no need to worry the man the same way that he had been worried upon waking up in this place -- being without food, clothing or weapons beyond his own two hands. Besides, the plant might not open the box again for Bob II, leaving him without any form of useful equipment. There was no point in assuring that his twin died of starvation or cold before he got out of this place, if he woke up at all. On Earth, Bob may have committed some very distinctive atrocities, but there was no point in killing the next guy for no reason at all.
ÝÝÝÝIn a short time, Bob had checked everything: he made sure that the magazines were full, that the water was palatable, that the USP was operative, that the camouflage paint hadn't hardened and that the ball-point pens worked. He seemed to have everything necessary for a good hike in the woods. Even the sunhat had a mosquito net that could be pulled down over the head.
ÝÝÝÝBob suited up in the tactical vest (which took no small amount of work to remove from his twin), put on the harness and attached the UMP to it. But, before putting on the back pack, Bob strode the few short steps to the nearest large vine and grabbed it.
ÝÝÝÝ"Now that I'm ready to go, is there anything I should know before I get out of here?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Just wait and all your questions will be answered. // A low rumble as of a large gong filtered into Bob's head. The rumble faded and was replaced by the singing of a group of monks in gregorian chant.
ÝÝÝÝ"Man, this is some trip." The singing continued. "I'm just glad I can do THIS." Bob pulled his hand away from the vine.
ÝÝÝÝThe singing continued.
ÝÝÝÝ"Oh shit."

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 7
Date: 02 August 2001, 12:21 am

Bob sat down cross legged beside a wall. He looked at the backpack. He looked at the ground that the backpack was lying on. The singing continued. The light from the two tables began to fade. Bob looked up. The other end of the tunnel began to brighten and he could see the closer flowers open towards the light. He could also see something descending towards him. The chanting stopped and an instrumental piece began to trundle in his head, starting with drums and melding into larger drums and violins. The thing was still descending towards him. Bob pulled the backpack towards him, stood up, extended the stock of the UMP while setting it to full automatic, and kept his eyes riveted on the descending object.
ÝÝÝÝ// Oh, puh-leaze. Put that silly peashooter away. Nothing up there can hurt you. //
ÝÝÝÝ// How does it work? I don't see any cables. //
ÝÝÝÝ// Another of the marvels of engineering we've figured out after long years. Hard light. You saw it in action with the inverted mountain? // Bob remembered well, but pushed it out of his mind, holding the UMP on target still.
ÝÝÝÝ// I can see that you're gonna be no fun at all. // A soft giggle resonated from a corner of his head. Bob wasn't sure if he really heard it, what with the music of much larger volume still playing. The drums and violins had faded and were replaced by woodwinds of some kind and then a woman singing, and then more drums and violins.
ÝÝÝÝBy the time the elevator without cords had descended to the ground, the drums and violins had been replaced by more Gregorian chant, which ended and left Bob's head silent as the elevator touched down.
ÝÝÝÝ// ALL ABOOOARD!! // Bob winced. // I'm sorry, was that too loud for you? //
ÝÝÝÝ"What's your problem man?"
ÝÝÝÝ// The doctor didn't prescribe the right medication before he died of isolation. If I seem a little jumpy, it's because I've been taking stimulants instead of depressants all these long years. Funny how there's nothing I can do about it right now. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Whatever." Bob picked up his backpack and got on the large circular plate with a solid hand rail that extended most of the way around. A door panel slid from the side wall as he passed, making the elevator resemble a hollow cylinder cut perpendicular to its axis. It began to ascend.
ÝÝÝÝ// Boy, won't this be fun? // A series of grunts and whistles resounded in Bob's head. // Here we are, about to embark on an adventure planned for millions of years. I don't know about you, but I'm quite looking forward to it. //
ÝÝÝÝBob, whose mood had slipped into the upper depths of depression, frowned and thought nothing in return. If he needed anything, he certainly DID NOT need a psycho voice in his head.
ÝÝÝÝ// The way I look at it; if you're not enjoying yourself by the time we meet up with the other humans, then you just aren't any fun. // This grabbed Bob's attention.
ÝÝÝÝ"Other humans?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Oh, didn't I tell you? The children's children's children of the children of your generation have just entered the system and are looking for a place to hide. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Hide? From what?"
ÝÝÝÝ// According to their radio messages, the worst nightmare of mankind. //
ÝÝÝÝ"And that is?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Destruction. Complete and utter annihilation. The cosmic lemon to be sucked dry at the last day. The metaphorical and literal end of humanity, unless you count those crazy probes with the porn scribbled all over them in solid gold. //
ÝÝÝÝBob didn't know about any probes with porn on them but asked the question anyways, "Porn?"
ÝÝÝÝ// About twenty years before you were born, the powers that were decided to send probes into space in the hopes that they would be picked up by an intelligent alien race. These probes had the pictures of naked members of your species scrawled in gold on the side. They hoped that the other race would then travel to Earth and share the wonders of interstellar travel with humanity. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Did anybody find the probes?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Did your mom bake bread? //
ÝÝÝÝ"I don't know."
ÝÝÝÝThe voice was silent.

As the elevator was slowly ascending, Bob decided to get a little exercise. He started by doing a comprehensive stretch. From there he moved on to doing ninety pushups on each arm (the elevator was just large enough to accommodate his entire length), did a series of squats to make sure his legs were still strong and ended with a hundred sit-ups. By this time his face was covered in a thin layer of perspiration and his heart rate had increased incrementally. He wasn't as fit as he had been at a younger age, but what he lacked in stamina and strength, he made up for in experience and knowledge. Back on Earth he had worked out about six hours of every day when he wasn't on a mission. It was always time consuming to do so, but he enjoyed the resulting physical prowess and accompanying mental strength. Besides, if he had ever fallen below the physical standards that were imposed on agents like himself, he would have received a bullet in the back of the head. Such was the way of things in Central Intelligence. It was a difficult way of life, but Bob always trusted the fact that many civilians wouldn't have been up to the job he was entrusted with: the protection of the state and its interests. All throughout he kept a sharp lookout above him.
ÝÝÝÝIt was after exercising that Bob felt that he needed to ask a question. The other Bob in the box had caused him to wonder a little about the purpose of himself here on the ring and the feeling had been growing since getting on the elevator.
ÝÝÝÝ"Why did you make copies of me?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Shit happens. If you were to die right now, do you think that maybe it would have been a waste of resources to bring you here? //
ÝÝÝÝ"Ok. Then why is it that you said that they would become different from me? Why would they wake up without knowing what I've been doing so far?"
ÝÝÝÝ// As I said, you experience different things and therefore become different. It's not like we can record everything you experience -- well, we actually can, it's just that you're not worth the effort -- and it would be rather confusing for you to be walking around and then one of them wakes up and finds himself lying on the box saying to himself, 'hey, I thought I was walking around just now, oh that must be the OTHER me, I guess I'll get up and try to find him.' In short, it's very confusing to have memories of having limbs torn off and then to wake up and find that those limbs are still there. It creates issues. More issues than having a voice in your head does. That should say a lot. Muahahahaha. //
ÝÝÝÝ"But when I die, won't one of them have the memories I have? You can do that, right?"
ÝÝÝÝ// Sorry, bucko. We believe in keeping our patients sane. How would you feel to grow old and tired of life and then die, only to be reawakened in a new body? You would still be tired of life, and that would affect your performance. True, you would have IMMENSE knowledge and experience, but after a few lifetimes things would degenerate for sure and you would find yourself living your own, private Groundhog Day. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Groundhog Day?"
ÝÝÝÝ// A movie you've never seen. Don't worry about it. //
ÝÝÝÝAfter thinking about this for a little while, Bob sat down and played a bit with the UMP. Leafing through the owners manual he had found in the map pocket of the backpack (which, surprisingly, was in English), he came to understand the weapon in terms of its operation and, less importantly, how to clean it. Bob particularly enjoyed the simplicity of the controls. He had had limited experience with the weapons of the venerable arms maker HK before the split of the Republic, but what little practice he did have had quickly earned his respect for their small arms. After the split, however, none of their newer technology had managed to make its way into the bounds of the Eastern Coalition and most of the left over weaponry was pressed into the off and on wars with the EDH and the CWS. As the arms making of the Coalition improved on its own path, weapons had become increasingly complicated to operate, and especially disassemble and clean; all of the laws of natural selection in the firearms industry pointed to the emergence of more user-friendly weapons, but the Coalition hadn't been a free market economy and the laws of natural selection didn't really apply in a country where everybody had the opportunity to work and research grants were given only to the politically reliable. In his opinion, a G36C would have been a better deal than a UMP.
ÝÝÝÝ// But during your time period, nobody knew how to effectively silence 5.56mm. // Bob didn't respond because he didn't want to end up losing the arguement. // You're no fun at all. //
ÝÝÝÝA minute later, Bob reached into the pack and removed one of the MRE's. He opened it and had lunch. It was cheese tortellini in tomato sauce. The orange juice was ok, but not of olympic quality. He munched away at the food while trying to remember the specifics of what an old general had once said about spam; he was grateful he didn't have to eat spam every day of his life; he had had his fill of the rubbery meat while living at the orphanage as every Sunday dinner had consisted of spam and lima beans without variance. It was only after joining the military that his nutritional choices had markedly improved and since then he had for the most part been very grateful for the care the military took of its members, while at the same time trying to push away the memories of spam and lima beans. He only thought of them now because of his separation from his home and his want to retain memories -- any memories -- that might remind him of the way things once were. He tried to remember the beauty of empty fields and the eastern coast, but found it difficult since he had never really stopped to smell the roses, which could again be attributed to the pace of his work. He figured that he might never get back; 30,000 light years was an awfully big distance, and he had no knowledge of space travel.
ÝÝÝÝIt was soon after finding two silencers in a side pocket of the vest that the elevator stopped. Bob looked up. The shaft continued upwards, as straight and covered in vines and leaves and flowers as before. However, as the door to the elevator opened, a narrow walkway could be seen to extend from the side of the elevator to an open rectangular door in the wall. The doorway was shaded and partially obscured by a fat vine grown over top, and Bob couldn't tell which way the side tunnel went.
ÝÝÝÝ// This is the end of the ride. You'll have to walk from here. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Where does it go?
ÝÝÝÝ// Up and around. Don't forget to turn on your motion sensor before going in; there are things not worth description that may be lurking there in the shadows. //
ÝÝÝÝBob cautiously raised his left hand and touched the smooth covering over his left eye socket. He instantly became aware of everything moving around him. The experience was not as intense as before, however, and he wondered why that was.
ÝÝÝÝ// As I told you before, we did some weird shit to your hormonal system. //
ÝÝÝÝ"Why do you monitor my thoughts?"
ÝÝÝÝ// To keep you from getting any smart ideas. Get to the surface and we'll talk some more. //
ÝÝÝÝBob stood up and put the backpack on. He then flipped the safety off of the UMP and moved towards the door with the gun raised. He could feel the tubers of the plant expand and contract rhythmically and could feel his own pulse begin to speed up. He stepped out of the elevator and onto the walkway without a railing, trying very hard to keep his balance as the bottom of the hexagonal pit was a good three hundred feet down. He made his way slowly towards the door, then ducked under the large vine partially obscuring the doorway and was in the tunnel. It took a 90 degree turn to the left at the end of a ten foot entrance space; it was six feet wide and eight feet tall.
ÝÝÝÝBob walked to the end of the entrance space and around the corner. To him, the tunnel seemed to snake counter-clockwise around the pit and upwards. He kept walking around and around, ever upwards, until the light in the tunnel was cut off completely; from then on he relied entirely on the motion sensor to feel his way.
ÝÝÝÝIt wasn't long, however, before details finer than the solid sides, floor and ceiling of the tunnel began to reveal themselves. Whispery threads as of webs hung from the ceiling and swayed lightly in an indiscernible breeze. Bob slowed his pace, but kept going, being not exactly sure of what was ahead.
ÝÝÝÝIt was not until he felt around the corner in front of him what appeared to be a football shaped thing hanging on end from the ceiling that he really began to take concern. The now almost familiar smell of the spiders lair wafted into his nose and caused him to almost retch. Since leaving the bottom of the shaft, he had thought that maybe never again he would have to deal with such a smell as this, obviously he had been wrong. As he continued forward, he came upon more of these packages, haphazardly attached to the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. They ranged in size from that of rats to that of large dogs. There was still no indication of what had put them there, but Bob was pretty sure that he knew, nonetheless. Some of them twitched.
ÝÝÝÝAfter stepping through a particularly densely populated stretch Bob noticed a large crack in the outer wall. He stood there for a moment to see if anything would come out, but nothing did. He kicked the nearest shape on the floor to see if doing so would alert anything of his presence. Nothing happened.
ÝÝÝÝMoving more quickly now, Bob passed the crack in the wall, feeling a large expanse behind it as he passed, but no discernible shapes inside. Still nothing moved. As he continued he found three similar cracks in the ceiling and walls, but nothing moved behind them either. He avoided the packages on the floor, ceiling and walls as though moving one of them might wake the tenants of this place, regardless of his previous experience. The stink of death and rot permeated his nostrils, without any sign of letting up.
ÝÝÝÝAbout thirty yards and a half turn in the corkscrew from the last crack he came upon what he had hoped would not bar his way -- a wall of thin, feathery webbing intermittently pierced by holes around its outer edges big enough for a medium sized dog to pass through.. He dared not touch it, but could see through it the faint light of day peeking around a final bend. Dust hung on the air, mixing and swirling as though in mockery of his situation. The last of the packages was about five yards behind him and he couldn't make out any more behind the web.
ÝÝÝÝBob made his decision. Backing up to the last of the packages, he made a straight run for the web. As he broke through, bits of it hung from his hat and gun, obscuring his vision until he ran the back of his left forearm in front of his face, clearing a hole large enough to see through effectively. His legs were swathed in the stuff. He kept running, but could hear behind him what he had feared all along -- several shrieks of lesser volume, but no less lust, than that of the huge spider he had faced on first waking on this ring construct.
ÝÝÝÝAnother thirty yards and the tunnel abruptly opened to the light of day. Bob was unsure how far behind him they were, but he told himself to keep running anyways.
ÝÝÝÝThirty yards later, Bob stopped and spun around in the low grass to face the onslaught that had not yet reached the doorway in the side of the hill. Bob raised his gun to a ready position and waited. He didn't have to pause long.
ÝÝÝÝAbout three seconds after stopping, Bob watched, horrified, as the doorway disgorged a black horde of cat-sized spiders, all miniatures of the beast he had earlier faced. Their dark coloring splurged into the tender green of the grass to make the ground look as though it was being eaten by one massive black animal. Bob took aim and squeezed the trigger of the submachine gun. It roared, and recoiled more than he was used to for a submachine gun, but did its job by dropping the lead spider in its tracks. He put a round into the next target, then another into the one behind it, and another into a fourth. Those shot all spewed yellow-green blood into the grass beneath them and fell dead on their undersides, but the rest kept coming.
ÝÝÝÝ// Busy? //
ÝÝÝÝBob put another round into another spider and began to back up. "Not really, I'm only trying to avoid being eaten by a horde of cat-spiders." This came as a desperate yell.
ÝÝÝÝ// RUN, BOY! //
ÝÝÝÝ"I can handle it!" Bob set the gun on full-automatic and began to sweep the swarm with leaden death. Many dropped, but they just kept coming.
ÝÝÝÝ// A bite from one of those things will incapacitate you instantly. Do you want to be the next twitching thing dragged into that lair? //
ÝÝÝÝBob's magazine ran empty. The spiders didn't stop.
ÝÝÝÝ// As you should know very well, there is a time to fight and a time to run. Right now is the time to do the latter. I say it again; RUN, BOY! //
ÝÝÝÝBob turned and ran into the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Hermes Trismegistus - Chapter 8
Date: 16 August 2001, 9:17 PM

Roughly two days later according to time on the Halo, Bob found himself sitting under a large tree, boiling before him in the cooking pot the flesh of a member of one of several species of herd animals that he had found resided on the ring construct. Hunting and killing the thing had taken a large amount of preparation and a great sense of timing; stalking the animal without spooking it or alerting it of his presence had alone taken a great amount of patience and upwards of an hour. The reward for that patience, however, had paid off for the whole episode, if you didn't include the reaction of the herd to losing a sister; Bob had almost been trampled by the compatriots of his quarry in a stampede of aggression aimed at himself. Only by dodging up a large tree and waiting out the attempts of the herd to topple the said tree did he find himself alive. On the whole, it wasn't the perfect hunting experience, but, as the voice had put it, // Either you or the worms eat. Make your choice. //
    Bob grabbed the work glove lying on the ground beside him and used it like a dishtowel to remove the pot from the makeshift stand without burning himself. He put the pot down on a wooden board to let it cool and eyed the beauty of the ring as it stretched away into the distance. In the sky he could also see two planets: one of a white pastel coloring speckled here and there with patches of blue and green, and another, seemingly much larger of yellow coloring. But the planets were not what bothered him; the stars that could be seen past the clouds in broad daylight made him wonder about the stability of this place and the thickness of its atmosphere. Who knew what kinds of cosmic rays were lacing through his body at that moment. He had asked the voice after noticing that sight for the first time first about the safety of the ring, and secondly who had made it; but all he had received in response was a vintage 20th century song about stealing sunshine. Bob hadn't asked any more questions after that and let the voice say what it would when it would. He had wanted to know why the day and night scheduling on the ring was so erratic -- each day had averaged at three hours and each night about the same -- but he put it down to being on a giant ring in space and tried hard not to incite the musical wrath of the voice. For all he knew, it would start singing 18th century opera if he wasn't careful with his thoughts.
    But he had learned one thing from, or rather about, the voice that seemed to remain fairly consistent: it was no use trying to block it out or not listen when it was speaking. Although the visitations themselves didn't break his concentration when doing other things, their content sometimes did. One of the few other times that the voice had spoken of the other humans on the construct Bob had been dicing edible roots (pointed out to him by the voice) and had narrowly missed the fingers of his left hand with the machete. It was part way through a droning lecture on the nuances of one type of wood versus those of another that the voice had said the words, "other humans," disjointedly, causing Bob to forfeit control of his hands and almost take his fingers off. The incident had been completely unique. Bob wondered if it was done intentionally, but, for the sake of not hearing some semi-famous tenor bridge his whole range of voice, had not asked if this was so.
    Bob looked down at the meat chunks and tubers that had been boiling in the water. If survival school had taught him one thing about food, it was that unknown meat was to be cut into tiny chunks and boiled. He was now glad that he had gone to survival school for the single reason that he didn't appreciate the idea of voluntarily introducing foreign parasites to his digestive tract. Who knew what kinds of deadly worms inhabited those chewy-looking chunks?
    There was one other thing that survival school had taught him that he had not obeyed in this instance; he had made a fire (and one out in the open at that). Rule number one of not being detected was to avoid open flame and smoke. The one would give one away during the day, and the other during the night. Fire, though useful for many things, was not desirable in an evasive situation. The voice had been very clear, however, that it did not matter as the nearest sentient being was "a thousand miles away". It had also been very clear about how the MREs should only be a supplement to foraged food and not a replacement. This made sense to Bob, though he was reminded briefly of the government he had left on Earth, which often blended lie with truth in a seamless mix. There was still the issue of why the voice had masqueraded as a plant for a considerable length of time.
    Bob figured that the stew had cooled enough and sipped a spoonful from the wooden utensil he had fashioned from one of the non-toxic woods pointed out by the voice. Bob had never heard about toxic wood before, but had been told that it was ok to burn as the organic toxins broke down with the application of heat. The concoction tasted like chalk. This single fact caused him to break with the standard.
    "Does everything around here taste like crap?"
    // How do you know what crap tastes like? //
    Bob had assumed from the beginning that most things tasted the way they smelt. He didn't respond.
    // In a while you'll be going on a trip around the ring. The first major land battle has just taken place between the opposing forces and we need you there to fulfill your purpose. //
    Bob had been told quite bluntly about two days earlier that he had a specific purpose on this ring. This short but very descriptive monologue had answered the primary question in his mind since leaving the shaft; the question of why he was here. That purpose was to dispose of the bodies of the deceased. He knew now that as a giant battleground, the Halo had been designed to accommodate disputes to the fullest and cleanest extent possible. This consisted primarily of two services, the first being the provision of a place to fight, the second being the arrangement of janitorial services after the fighting was over. Essentially, Bobs job was to play caretaker. Another thing he had learned was that this ring was called "Halo." It was a simple name, to be sure, and he wondered about the precise origin of the appellative; the voice had not bothered with telling Bob who or why it had been named that way.
    The other major question that Bob concerned a good amount of his thoughts with was why it was he who was chosen from the many billions of possible Earthlings, and probably trillions more non-Earthlings, to do this job. The voice had not visited during moments of such contemplation. The only possibility that Bob could figure was that ëmakers,' as the voice called them, were maladjusted and sadistic. But even when Bob had reached this conclusion, the voice had not bothered to clarify. Bob knew that the voice knew what Bob thought, he only wondered why it wasn't more forthcoming with the explanations instead of allowing Bob to infer with reckless abandon. The conclusion Bob reached on this topic was that the voice was also maladjusted and sadistic, but there had been no rebuttal on this topic either, causing Bob to wonder more still about what was real and true and what was not. He stared into the licking flames of the fire and wondered for a moment if he could ever meet up with the other humans on the ring.
    Bob turned, picked up the stew pot and held his breath as he choked down the chalky mixture. He pulled a water bottle out of the pack behind him and took a mouthful of water to swish out the taste. He sincerely hoped that future meals wouldn't be so bland.
    Bob then extinguished the fire with soil and buried the ashes beneath a circle of peat moss he had dug out earlier. The ground steamed and the peat on top began to dry as the peat around had upon making the fire. It wasn't the best camouflage against future detection, but it would have to do under the circumstances. The probability of someone, anyone, coming by this exact spot and noticing the discoloration of the undergrowth was next to nil, but Bob had played such odds on many an occasion before and nearly expected it to happen eventually. He dumped out the remaining contents of the cooking pot and picked up a handful of dirt to scour away the scum of the meal.
    // Ready to go? Good. The transit terminal is about a mile spinward of where you are now. I'll relay the precise coordinates to you as you get closer in a way your simple monkey mind should understand. I suggest you run. //
    This message prevented Bob from continuing with cleaning the pot, so he simply stuffed it back into the pack, stood up, resheathed the machete, put on the pack and set off at a trot in the correct direction. He dodged around trees at the edge of the forest until it ended and the terrain became hilly.
    // Hotter. // Bob kept at his set pace, then glanced down to make sure his bootlaces had not come undone. This was something he would not normally do, but then, everything he was doing at the moment was not something he would normally do. Except for the running. Bob had run so many miles in his lifetime that often he wished that he had the suicidal tendency to run faster, just so that he wouldn't have to put up as long with the monotony of running mile after mile without rest or change of scenery. But running faster often led to mistakes and he had to keep in mind that no matter what the scenery, or how fatigued he became, he had to keep his situational awareness up and his pathfinding skills sharp. The two often went hand in hand with the other. For example, he tried not to run through mud. Leaving boot prints everywhere was a no-no for the reason that it could give away a position without a shot fired.
    Naturally, Bobs job required him to be sneaky, because otherwise he could be caught and killed. Bob hadn't liked the idea of being the hunted when he had committed his first act of terror, but over time that feeling had mutated into a kind of rabid enjoyment, fueling Bob with the motivation to go on to subsequent missions. The feeling of being the fox, with a hundred hounds after him, was like an addictive drug; the more he committed acts of terror the more he enjoyed them and the more he needed to do them. This need at times caused him to consider the moral repercussions of his acts and feel ashamed of himself for becoming such a monster, but he always put the guilt away in a box marked "result of orders" at the back of his mind. This box had been filling ever so incrementally over the course of the years and would overflow, he hoped, very far in the future. But he also hoped that it would continue filling, or at least would have the opportunity to continue filling. He hoped this because committing an act of terror required a target or a body of individuals against whom the act was performed. Should this body of individuals consist of human forces, he would defect; this action was very well articulated in his mind. He didn't enjoy the companionship of the voice and hoped that maybe he would be able to have it removed from him some time in the future.// He's got the job
    That nobody wants,And the voice
    That everybody does. //
    Bob didn't know what to make of this.
    The type of drug he associated with committing terrorist acts was in sharp contrast, however, to the other that had filled him before his days on the run. Before he had been distinguished on the most-wanted lists of many countries, he had been a counter-terrorist operator. He had learned many useful lessons in those days, but things never worked out precisely as planned by the government, and the feeling that he was growing stale over the years had pushed him to join the foreign arms of the Old Navy and then Center. The strategists and mission designers in the foreign departments were pleased to have this sudden upgrade in human resources; their operatives consisted primarily of cannon fodder drawn from the regular army and to have one of the ëterrible teens grown old' on their payroll was a privilege and a career catalyst for many. Mission designs were always infinitely more difficult when Bob was involved. They often asked him to do the impossible and survive; such had been the general trend on Bobs last mission -- first the insertion on foot and then the complication of a counter-terrorist unit at the apex of the excitement. That final mission was supposed to have been a very easy in-and-out deal. He was glad that his coordinator was brilliant enough to choose a large storm sewer as the means of escape, but cursed his dumbfoolery at his clumsy way of planning everything else. Center should have known about that counter-terrorist unit far in advance; there were contacts in the CWS military that had access to such information and who should have reported it.
    // Colder. // Bob slowed to a stop and, turning around, began to move in the opposite direction. // Turn left... now. // Bob turned left ninety degrees in a small arc and kept running. Before him was a small stand of saplings hidden in the enclave between two low rises in the ground that could almost be called hills. He slowed to a walk and continued into the copse with the UMP raised. As the trees surrounded him, the refreshing smell of youth whelmed his olfactory sense. The bright green of the leaves and grass around him contrasted with the white and brown of the tree bark to produce a very pleasing scene to the eye. Dew hung from the leaves of the saplings and whipped against his face as he walked through, causing his skin to tingle with the coolness and refreshing energy of a cold shower.
    Further into the copse, the trees broke and standing in the center could be seen a cylinder standing on end no more than eight feet in height and ten feet in diameter. At its top was a cone whose edges extended outwards from the sides of the cylinder like eaves on a house. Bob stood there for a moment to allow the refreshing feeling to work its way through his system.
    // It is interesting, no? //
    "What's that?"
    // The trees and grass and water here are all the result of death, destruction and violence. //
    "Come again?"
    // When battles take place on this ring, the bodies are removed to these areas, as I told you before, so that they can be processed underground. The blood and other matter of the bodies works its way into the soil and acts as a terrific fertilizer. Thus, everything good here is a result of bad feelings and misunderstandings. //
    "The cycle of life is what we call it. Didn't you ever take fourth grade science?"
    // No. //
    "Well, it's nice here all the same."
    // Somewhere on the elevator is an identification pad. Find it and we can go on. //
    Bob moved around the cylinder until he stood in front of a receded area about two inches square and chest high.
    "What now?"
    // Touch it with a finger or a thumb. It needs to have your fingerprint to operate. //
    Bob touched the pad of his left thumb to the square, his other hand on the grip of his gun, and stepped back a few feet. A few moments later, part of the side of the cylinder receded and opened to produce a doorway and adjacent cylindrical room. Bob checked that there was nothing inside and walked in. He turned around in the amply lit nine foot diameter space and touched the pad of his left thumb again to the other receded two inch square on the inside of the elevator. The door closed and Bob felt his weight removed from his feet as the elevator accelerated downwards into the depths of the ring.
    A few moments later Bob felt his weight and more applied to his feet as the elevator decelerated and stopped. The door opened. Lights came on and Bob stepped out. The door remained open behind him.
    Around him was another of those sights guaranteed to make one think if not over classed by something bigger. Bob had seen the ring and the mountain, so this sight came as no surprise to him. Besides, he had seen railway depots before, and this was nothing more than a very large underground railway depot.
    To his left and right, straight as arrows, lay the bounds of a railway platform which extended forward from the elevator door a distance of fifty meters. The platform width was about ten meters. It was flanked on either side by rail lines receded into the ground about a meter. The tracks vaguely resembled those of a maglev in shape, though Bob couldn't be sure. On either side of the platform on which Bob was standing, the tracks ran in duplicate the length of the room and into dark tunnels, which, he supposed, extended all the way around the Halo. On the far sides of the tracks resided other platforms, succeeded by two more tracks and on in this fashion far into the distance. The terminal seemed absolutely clean; no dust hung to the air as Bob walked along the platform, and no blemish could be seen in the rock of the platform or the tracks. Everything was colored a concrete gray, but it also all seemed to magically produce its own light. No light fixtures could be seen anywhere, but the soft glow of the building material provided all the luminosity needed to see one's way. At the end of the platform, a ramp rose gently to a catwalk, which extended perpendicular to the tracks in either direction and hung over the tunnels. It was an access way to the other platforms as similar ramps could be seen to descend from the catwalk to the platforms. The catwalk had no railing. Beside the elevator door there was a rather large handcart type apparatus.
    // Behind you is a track with a car on it. Go to that platform. //
    Bob turned from the edge of the platform to look in the other direction. Sure enough, six or seven platforms over was a track on which resided a railcar. The light reflecting from it betrayed a shape designed for intense speed. It was shaped similarly at either end, obviously having been made to travel in either direction.
    Bob walked to the end of the platform, away from the elevator, to the ramp, and began to climb. At the junction of ramp and catwalk he turned to his right and walked past six similar ramps over the catwalk to the platform beside which resided the car. Bob turned right and walked down the ramp and up to the middle of the car, which could be seen by now to be shaped like a short hot-dog whose ends tapered downwards towards the track. Again, Bob touched a receded area about two inches square on the side of the car and watched as a door receded into the shiny gray pod and slid aside.
    Bob stepped into the car, noticing on arrival the several chairs spaced evenly and resembling those of a dentist, with head rests whose ends curved around to hold the head in place while in motion, and bars not unlike those found on roller-coasters extending upwards from the shoulders of the seats in a loop. All the details of the cabin were in black. There were no windows anywhere, but there was an eerie white light promulgating from an overhead lighting fixture.
    // Pick a chair, any chair. Put the pack and gun in the overhead luggage hamper before you sit down. We don't want your lunch or bullets flying around like they've been put into orbit. //
    Bob walked to the far end of the car, found and opened one of the overhead luggage hampers which was not unlike the carry-on baggage spaces on a commercial airplane, stuffed in the UMP, hat and backpack, and sat down in the nearest padded seat. Immediately, the bar overhead swung down and locked into position over his chest. The bars on the other chairs in the cabin did so too. The chairs swiveled around to face in the opposite direction. The car door closed and the lights dimmed.
    // Passengers are reminded to please remain seated, // the voice came as a female flight attendant, // not eat, smoke or drink while the car is in motion, and keep their hands folded in front of them as the car accelerates. Thank-you. //
    The car began to lurch forward. Bob could hear nothing but his own breathing. He folded his hands in front of him and placed them in his lap.
    // Houston, we are ready for lift off. //
    // Acknowledged, Discovery. Prepare for lift-off in five... four... three... two...//
    The car shot forward, placing G after G of force into Bobs back. His hands, still folded, crashed into his abdomen where they remained until the acceleration ended two minutes later. There resounded in the cabin the sound of air screaming past the outside of the car. Bob attempted to keep his eyes closed, but it was as no use, as he tried in vain to refrain from screaming himself.
    Eventually, however, the insanity of acceleration ended and the scream of air past the car neither rose nor lowered in pitch, coming to rest at a steady whine. Bob stopped screaming.
    // Boy, you should have seen the look on your face! It was like they crossed a howler monkey with a polar bear! //
    "You have a camera in here?"
    // At the front of the cabin. //
    Bob made a face.
    // No need to be unpleasant. We're almost there. //
    Sure enough, almost at that instant, the car began to decelerate with the same violence as when it accelerated. Bobs' torso shot forward the fraction of an inch into the holding bar and stayed there. His arms and legs also shot forward, dangling from his torso and pelvis directly in front of him. Bob strained to keep his head straight.
    Two minutes later the car stopped decelerating, rolling slowly until it came at last to a gentle stop. Bob rolled his head to loosen the muscles in his neck. He looked forward and made another face.
    // Passengers are thanked for their observance of the in-flight rules and are encouraged to use ringworm for all their future Halo traversing needs. Stewardesses are present to assist those who may have suffered in-flight motion sickness. Have a nice day. //
    The roller-coaster bar lifted, the lights came back up and the door of the car opened. Bob retrieved his gun, hat and pack from the overhead carry hamper and moved shakily towards the exit.
    // Lucky for you, the fight was nearby. You won't have to walk very far to get where you're going. //
    Bob had been wondering about that. Although the railcar went in a direction parallel to the curve of the ring, there was no apparent transportation in the perpendicular direction.
    // This is going to be really tedious, working back and forth between battle sites and the nearest elevator. I personally wanted to train you in portable teleporting, but the powers that be decided against it, claiming that that was too complex and dangerous a thing to teach and equip you for. Therefore, when you start complaining about all the back-and-forth, I want you to know that it isn't my fault that you're stuck like that. //
    "How far do I have to walk to this site?"
    // About ten miles each way. //
    "And there isn't any kind of assist to help me along?"
    // Asides from a handcart similar to the one you saw earlier, no. //
    "Shit. You couldn't fit any more than ten bodies on one of those things. Are you sure that there is no other way?"
    // Nope. There isn't. //
    Bob cussed again. "What the hell is this shit? First you tell me that I have to be a caretaker, and then without explaining any further, you tell me that I can't use any kind of ubertech to help?"
    // That's just the way things are, kid. //
    "Shit."
    // You'd better start walking. //
    Bob had done some fairly burdensome and monotonous things in his lifetime, but never anything so apparently useless as to cart bodies back and forth from place to place. He walked up the ramp.
    "Which way now?"
    // To your left. //
    There was nothing else he could do at the moment.

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 9
Date: 23 August 2001, 3:13 am

After heading up the nearest elevator with a handcart, Bob took directions from the voice to the battlefield.
    The elevator had risen into a cave on a large, but not overly steep hill overlooking a partially wooded valley, on the other side of which the battle had supposedly taken place. Bob could already feel the protest of his muscles coming from trudging uphill with a ton of dead meat.
    The walk was long, taking about four hours, and Bob had to be wary of not meeting anything or anybody along the way, even though the voice promised to tell him if anything showed up. The day passed quickly and as Bob approached the site, the sun was blotted out behind the ring beneath him, leaving everything in a twilight glow of light reflected from the other side of the Halo. He figured that the return trip would take about six hours; and that that figure would be at maximum speed.
    The wheels of the cart creaked loudly, and Bob didn't enjoy the lack of mobility afforded to him in having to pull the cart. Many times he had to backtrack as the trees became denser. Twice he got his wheels stuck between rocks.
    Nearing the site, Bob left the cart in a loose stand of trees and crept forward the rest of the way with a silencer attached to the UMP. He would take a few steps carefully through the debris on the floor of the forest, then stand still to listen to the wind and anything else that might pop up. Never did he hear a bird or cricket sing, however, and he soon found himself throwing caution to the wind by walking farther and listening for shorter periods of time.
    He came upon the first body while still in the trees. It lay there with a huge hole in its torso like it had been shot with some sort of explosive weapon. Blue blood had soaked into the ground beneath it, washing into its face as it lay on a slight decline. It wasn't human, as Bob could tell almost right away. He put a foot under the shoulder of the thing and rolled it over. Two separate mandibles hung loosely from under its head in place of human jaws, all covered in a cake of congealed blue blood. Its green eyes stared into space with what seemed to be an expression of pain. Bob looked down at it, surveying the inside of the hole, the mandibles and the blue skin and armor of the thing. "What," he thought, "on god's green earth is this?"
    // It isn't from Earth, for one. To answer your question, though: it is, as I told you before, the inanimate personification of the death of mankind. //
    Bob continued to look down at the thing. Bob had seen the look on its face on many occassions before: the precise positioning of what passed for eyelids, eyebrows and eyes themselves betrayed that the last moment of this creature had been unpleasant. Bob always had figured that his own life would end in a similar way. His former job warranted that he would be caught and killed in the most painful way possible. His new job warranted that he would die in a way similar to this creature. There was no escaping the reality of the ground beneath his feet. But he had seen people die without pain; he had killed enough people in his time to know where to shoot and how to kill instantly. He would die eventually -- that was a given -- but if he played the odds correctly, he might escape life with a headshot or by drowning. 'That would be a laugh,' he thought, for not only was drowning misrepresented as being a peaceful way to go, it was also very slow. It was more likely that he would die as a result of some violence done to his person.
    // Well, we can't stand around all day, can we? Get on with it! //
    Bob stood there for a few seconds more and then moved on. He found three more bodies -- one human and two alien of different species -- scattered haphazardly in the trees. The human was missing its head, leaving behind the lower portion of the neck, which looked as though it had been cauterized. It had fallen over onto its back in a low berry bush, arms laying in a random pattern. The green of its clothing matched the green of the leaves of the bush, bunches of small, blood-red berries poking out from underneath. In death, it seemed still to have life simply from the way it lay; embodying in a sick way the spirit of mankind.
    Surprisingly enough, none of the bodies seemed to have any weapons laying nearby or in hand. This came as an odd revelation to Bob of the characteristics of the combatants as the question of who would leave a battleground with fallen comrades, but not their arms, scattered about, posed itself.
    Bob came to the clearing where the brunt of the fighting had taken place. About twenty bodies and a big, bulbous, blue tank lay strewn in a wreck over a space of about a football field in size. The tank had a hole in it side if it the size of a mans head. There were ruts in the mud as of wheeled and tracked vehicles all over the place, as well as several types of footprints.
    "How far away is the nearest live entity?"
    // About twenty miles. I'll tell you if they get any closer. //
    Bob moved back into the trees and brought the cart forward. He loaded eight bodies onto it and started back towards the cave at the top of the hill. This, he could tell, was going to take a while.

Six and a half hours later, Bob loaded the bodies into the elevator. After a moment of thought, he removed three sets of dogtags from the human bodies and put them in his pocket. By the instructions of the voice, he didn't get into the elevator himself, but pushed the outside button on the elevator twice; once to open it, the second time to close it and send the bodies on to disposal. Then it was back out to pick up more.

Two Halo days later Bob had finally suceeded in mopping up the corpses of the battle. He looked over the valley from the mouth of the cave and wiped the thin layer of perspiration from his brow; lugging bodies uphill, cart or not, was hard work.
    "You were saying earlier that I could have used a portable teleporter to do this work?"
    // That's correct. The teleporter itself consists of two modules, between which there is an artificial wormhole in timespace. Essentially, you leave one module by the elevator and bring the other with you. When you would find a body, you would switch the module you brought with you on and drag the body through the portal. It would have taken only the time required to reach the site on foot, drag the bodies through the portal and to walk back to the elevator again. Unfortunately for you, they decided that you would probably break something and rip a tear in timespace that would have been very difficult and time consuming to fix. I've been trying to convince them otherwise, but don't expect anything to happen anytime soon. //
    Taking this in with no small amount of dislike for the 'makers,' Bob looked down at his hand in which he held a short metal stick with baubles and small cuts in each end. One of the alien corpses had been holding it in one of its immense two fingered hands when he had found it in the clearing a day earlier. The stick had no switches or buttons on its surface, and there was no apparent way of opening it by twisting. It was a puzzle that Bob couldn't figure out, and the voice hadn't been any help when asked; it had launched into a diatribe about stolen technology and physical plagiarism, which had ended in a stony silence that made Bob highly nervous. It hadn't spoken again until a few hours later, when Bob had offhandedly asked, after a long series of similar questions, what would happen if a wheel of the cart broke. The answer had been, // Although it would be highly unlikely to happen, we would transport another cart from the nearest ringworm station and make a newly improved one at the plant. // The answer had included no hint that anything amiss had occurred a few hours earlier, no hint that all previous questions had been ignored, and no hint that Bob had asked a dumb question. All further communications until the question about the teleporter had been asked were as much laced with sarcasm and gibberish as they ever had been.
    Also surprising; there had been no contact with anybody else -- human or otherwise -- during the course of the journeys. Nobody had popped up unexpectedly and the voice had not announced the approach of anything.
    Putting the stick in a pocket, Bob pulled the cart the rest of the way into the cave and began to unload the bodies into the elevator. That finished, he hit the button again and watched the door close, taking the bodies to be processed.
    Bob walked over to one side of the cave and surveyed one of the flatter stretches of rock.
    "If you don't mind, I think I'll be getting some sleep now."
    // Go ahead. While you were working, six other battles took place. You'll be a very busy boy when you wake up. //
    Bob took off the backpack and laid it in such a position that it could be comfortably used as a pillow. He laid himself down and took his hat off.
    "You'll tell me if anything happens, right?"
    // Sure thing. //
    At that Bob closed his eyes, rolled onto his side, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

He woke abruptly six hours later when he was bumped. His eye shot open and he found himself taped firmly into the passenger seat of a what appeared to be a jeep. He looked around as the vehicle bumped over more rugged terrain. Out of the corner of his eye he could see beside him, in the drivers seat, a very alert looking man who was directing the vehicle over the topographically active ground with a large steering wheel and pedals under his feet. Bob tried to say something to him, but found that his mouth, hands and feet had also been taped firmly. His motion sensor was off. His hat was gone. His pockets, as far as he could feel them, were empty. His gun and tactical vest were gone, as well as his boots. The floor was ribbed beneath his socked feet. His nose flared and he took a deep breath as he felt the pain of something stuck in his neck being pulled out.
    "Looks like the passenger is awake, Joe." the accented voice came from behind.
    "So it does." the man beside him said, glancing over at him quickly from where he continued to drive.
    "Well, little friend, you have a lot of explaining to do when we get back to base." Bob tried to turn his head to look at the source of the voice, but was clubbed across the back of the head with something big and heavy. "We wouldn't want you to feel uncomfortable now, would we Joe?"
    "Not in the least." the man beside him flashed a sadistic grin.
    "What the hell is going on here?" Bob thought.
    // What does it look like, Einstein? You've been taken prisoner, just as you wanted. //

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 10
Date: 5 September 2001, 6:34 pm

"My name is Bob. Bob Smith."
    "We'll ask you again. Name?"
    "Bob. Bob Smith." A searing flame pierced him from head to foot.
    // Lying won't do you any good. Why don't you just tell him the truth? //
    It came as a moan, "My name is Bob. Bob Smith."
    "Ok. I guess we've learned that much. Occupation?"
    Bob decided not to lie, "Terrorist."
    // Wrong move. //
    Another searing flame ripped through his body.
    "You won't make it any easier for yourself by lying. Occupation?"
    // Gardener. Tell him you're a gardener. //
    "I can't tell him that."
    "Who are you talking to?"
    "Gardener?" It came almost as a breath. The pain had made him woozy.
    "Who?"
    "Myself."
    "Occupation?"
    Bob shook away the wooziness as well as he could. "Terrorist."
    "You were found with seven sets of dog tags in your left breast pocket. You did something to the bodies of seven missing men, yes?"
    "Yes."
    "Did you eat them?"
    "No."
    "Did you feed them to another entity?"
    "No."
    "Did you dismember them?"
    "No."
    "Did you mutilate them in any way?"
    "No."
    "What did you do to them?"
    "I sent them to be processed."
    "What do you mean by 'processed'?"
    "I don't know. I think it has something to do with recycling."
    // That's it! Tell them that if they want to maintain bodily integrity that they have to leave the ring right now. //
    "I'm supposed to tell you that you're supposed to leave the ring now."
    "And why should we listen to you?"
    // If they don't, they'll be ground into little chunks and recycled just like their friends. //
    "Because if you don't they're going to send a big frickin' army after you."
    "Who are 'they'? Who do you work for?"
    Bob was confused by this. Should he answer the first or the second question?
    "Center."
    // Again, wrong move. // The voice started singing Italian opera.
    "The voice!" he shrieked. The singing stopped.
    "You work for 'the voice'?"
    "Yes."
    The interrogator and his aide looked at each other with nothing more than confusion on their faces. The commander, in his chair, said, "I think that'll be enough for now."
    The interrogator and his aide stood, then left, disconnecting the device from the laptop and turning its power off as they exited. Bob gave a sigh of relief. The commander stood, looked at Bob on the hospital bed with something bordering on pity, and left the room as well.
    // Aw, shucks. We were just starting to get along well and you had to go and scream like a madman. Just for that, I've decided that you are no longer worth my time. //
    "You're leaving?"
    // Yes. Perhaps permanently. //
    "How will I explain to them everything that's happened to me?"
    // You'll find a way, through pain, of course. //
    "So, you're just going to leave me here?"
    // ... And let nature take its turn. That's correct. //
    "What do you mean by that?"
    There was no answer.
    Bob sat there for a moment, puzzled by this last answer and thinking how great it would be to not have the voice around him anymore. It came as a refreshing wave. But then the question posed itself: how would he escape this new prison? His legs, arms and torso were all strapped firmly to the bed on which he lay. He would need outside help if he were to even hope to get away. But he knew nobody here and forging bonds of trust could take weeks.
    Bob lifted his head from the pillow to look around him. He was in a rectangular room about ten by fifteen feet. The room was completely bare except for the bed on which he lay and the chairs the interrogator and the commander had been sitting on. The walls, ceiling and floor were all metal; there was no concrete, nor any type of superfluous adornment. He knew a little about what lay beyond the door, as he had passed through some of the surrounding area on the way here.
    The ride had been very bumpy from the time he had woken up; the reason being that it had entirely been over large fallen trees that had been smashed down by some very large thing. The trees all seemed to have been on fire at one time, as their charred black trunks still gave off heat above that of the sun. The jeep had followed a straight course down into a ravine, at the end of which was the monolith, buried almost to half its 20 meter height by the sides of the trench. From it a single walkway protruded to the ground, wide enough to accept vehicles. The monolith seemed to be held upright by what looked like several extendable legs. In front of the thing, in straight rows, were green tents the same shade as the clothing of his captors. As they passed, people had looked on with curiosity and disgust from wherever they were standing or sitting. All of them seemed to be armed in some fashion. In front of the monolith, beside the ramp and a little forward, was a tank. A single person sat atop the thing, looking about as though on guard; and Bob gained no small amount of attention from this person -- protecting the surroundings as though Bob could have jumped up and committed a heinous act of some kind.
    The jeep had not stopped in front of the monolith; it drove right in by way of the access ramp. It had stopped once inside, however, and the driver had gotten out to talk to the commander who had come from within the bowels of the thing to talk. They had stood there for a few moments, conversing in a low tone, the driver occasionally gesturing towards Bob. They had come over to the vehicle and the man in the back seat had supposedly shown the commander the things they had found Bob to be in possession of when they caught him. That was what they talked of, at least. Of particular interest to them the UMP seemed to be; the commander had given a low whistle when he had seen it for the first time, and spoke of it appraisingly for the rest of the conversation, when it was mentioned.
    Three men had then come out of the shadows and cut away Bobs restraints, leading him into the room where he now was. They stripped him naked and did a full cavity search, finally strapping Bob, with no small amount of difficulty, to the bed on which he now lay. He had tried to fight them until someone had pulled a gun and put it to his head. The voice had cautioned against doing anything rash at that point.
    But here, now that there was nobody else in the room, Bob simply relaxed and waited. He began to entertain the idea of being set free more than perhaps he should, looking up at the lights on the roof. He imagined explaining to the men what had happened to him, who he was and what he would like to do for them. He was human, after all, and it was when faced with a challenge such as those aliens, he imagined that humanity would bond together, both old and young, abducted and not, to face the opposing force. But he was having a momentary lapse into an idealistic world; if he had learned anything during his time on Earth, and especially here, it was that nothing is ever as it should be. "It must be a feel-good reaction to the pain," he thought. He had not wanted to help them when he had arrived here; why should things be any different now that he was in a worse situation?
    The door opened again and the commander walked in. Bob looked at him with confusion on his face. The interrogators handbook, as Bob had learned it, had several rules; one of which was to never interrogate alone. The commander must have brought a mike of some kind with him, so that others could listen as well. Bob noted that the man was armed.
    The commander stood there for a second, surveying the man stripped down to almost nothing. Bob stared back at the helmet and green eyepiece, wishing that he had more clothes on. He decided to break the silence.
    "What's your gun?" Bob asked, still a little groggy and gesturing towards the holster as best he could.
    "A Mark 11. Personally, I would have sprung for the Puma, but the boys down in dispatch insisted that I should follow protocol in my position of command."
    Bob grunted in return. The silence persisted.
    The commander, getting down to business, said, "You were caught seven hours ago in a cave thirty kilometers from here. I'm curious as to why you were found there and why the bodies of my men were not."
    "You thought that the bodies would be in the cave?"
    "Let me rephrase that. My gravedigger crew went to bury the bodies of my men and found you asleep in a cave, with a cart covered in Covenant blood. Your own clothes were smattered with gore -- I've seen them. What were you there for and why were the bodies of my men missing?"
    "What year is it?"
    This question caught the commander off his guard. "2527."
    Bobs eyes widened. Then he sighed. "This is going to take some explaining. You'd better sit down."
    The commander sat in one of the chairs and listened as Bob told his story.

"I don't believe it."
    "It's true. Every word of it is true."
    Commander Russell Perry tried to digest the meaning of the message. The story certainly corroborated with what they had found him doing, although it seemed a little farfetched to believe that this man had been abducted by aliens and brought forward through space and time to here and now. But a lot of weird things had been happening lately, the most recent being the finding of this ring. He knew that the course the SCS Pillar of Autumn had set had been completely random, all the better to escape the destruction of Reach, but the finding of this man couldn't be anything close to random. All tracks had pointed to the cave, all evidence pointed to this man being the one who had disposed of the bodies in some malicious way. But the gun they had found him with was a puzzle. Perry had seen pictures of such weapons in history books -- very old history books. He didn't recognize the caliber of the weapon.
    "And you say that this 'voice' left you just after our previous meeting?"
    "Yes."
    Perry rolled his eyes towards the door. He was very tempted to call in Michaels again. The interrogator had a better handle on these sorts of situations than he did.
    "And you say that this is all true? You don't want to recant any part of what you've just said?"
    "No."
    Perry figured that he might as well believe the man. As crazy as it all sounded, Bob seemed to be sincere. But then, he did say he was a terrorist; it might all be a trick.
No, the other half of his brain said, if he weren't being truthful, he couldn't have given the date he was abducted and describe it so well. Reason told him from another corner of his mind that no person is brought forward in space and time for no objective beyond the disposing of bodies. On the whole, Bob's story caught him quite off-guard; he had been expecting this man to be a turncoat, trying to escape the inevitable. But, again, all the evidence pointed to this man having told the truth.
    Perry coughed and decided to call Michaels in again.

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 11
Date: 26 September 2001, 3:30 am

"Dude! What happened to your eye?"
    "Long story short: it was replaced."
    After a long week of combined interrogation and psychiatric evaluations, Bob found himself put at liberty. One day the man known as Michaels had been asking about the political structures of the Republic and the Coalition, and the next the commander, a doctor and an orderly had walked in as Bob had been staring at the ceiling. The bonds had been removed on condition that Bob not betray the trust of the commander and the human forces of the Halo. Bob had reluctantly agreed after the commander explained that he would not be permitted access to SolCore weapons as he was not a member of the military. However, the commander did offer Bob an exchange he couldn't resist: he would trade the UMP for any Covenant weaponry the magazine could offer. Bob settled on two of the self-charging pistols, claiming with pride to the man who operated the armory that he would never again have to worry about reloading. The only catch was that Bob had to take a general firearms course to prove he could handle weapons safely; somewhere along the line it seemed that some elements in control were disbelievers in Bob's self-illustrated history as a terrorist and his abilities to use weapons 'safely'. Bob saw the course as a chance to learn what information was available about the extremely fascinating new technology. He was glad to get rid of the UMP as he still felt that the outdated caliber that the weapon was chambered in was an attack on his taste.
    One other thing that the commander had insisted upon before allowing Bob to go free was that Bob be registered as a citizen of SolCore, with a clean criminal record. Apparently, killing other humans was still a crime, but sending corpses to be 'processed' was not, however devious the intent of the 'makers' may have been. The psychiatric profiling and interrogation had played a major part in determining that Bob was not a cannibal or psychopath, (although the doctor had been very quiet about whether the experiences Bob had lived through could have made him one,) and therefore safe to release among the militaristic society of PoA survivors. The only reason that the doctor even considered not stamping Bob as insane was the unusual makeup of his skull. Apparently, Bob's head contained, instead of a frontal lobe and left eye, a conglomerate of as yet unscrutinized technology. There was no attempt to make Bob a member of the military, as the commander pointed out, because Bob had no personal history beyond the word of his own mouth and since he didn't meet the requirement that all new recruits have two eyes.
    Upon being released from the bed, Bobs clothes and pack had been returned and he quickly dressed as he munched on a sandwich prepared in the mess. The very next thing he did after registering was to try to loosen his muscles on a walk around the base. The sight of him turned many heads as he loped about in his very different camouflage with a pair of Covenant pistols. The man on top of the tank had eyed him furiously when he had emerged from the monolith to the light of day, and continued to do so even though Bob had been assured that the man knew he was 'safe.'
    It was in the mess the following day that Bob found himself surrounded by a group of recruits, most of whom seemed younger than he, and most of whom were very interested in his left eye. One moment he was sitting alone at a table and the next he found himself in company with these people, trying to answer their questions to the best of his ability and knowledge.
    "Why would they do something like that?" one of the younger ones asked him from across the table.
    "I suppose they thought it was necessary," Bob responded.
    "And you didn't have any choice in the matter?" the man on his right asked.
    "Nope. But it's not like I've had to make a lot of difficult choices in my lifetime."
    "Why's that?"
    "Didn't you guys read your history books? I left Earth about five hundred years ago."
    This quieted the bunch. They quietly moved away one by one, not asking any more questions. Except for one.
    "I heard that you were a terrorist. Is that true?"
    "I don't know about 'were.' I still like to think that I am. It seems like only yesterday that I was doing that sort of thing."
    The young and ruddy-faced private took this in with what seemed to be a rabid interest.
    "Could you teach me to be a terrorist?"
    Bob was surprised by this question, but turned and looked long and hard at the kid sitting beside him. This seemed to quiet the soldier a little. "I'm not sure you would want to be one, kid. It's not an easy job. It doesn't pay very well. You have to be fitter than your average Joe. Smarter too. You have to know when to retreat, know when to attack, know when to sit still and when to move, and to a greater degree than you do now. You have to be your own officer and your own grunt. On top of it all, most of the things you would do are illegal. It's taken me close to ten years to get to where I am now, and still I don't know everything."
    "But you could teach me, right?" This kid seemed determined.
    "I guess I don't have anything better to do right now. Why not? But let me tell you one thing: having me train you will not exempt you from obeying your commander. You still have to do everything he tells you and as best you can. I can only teach you when you're off duty, in your spare time."
    The kid looked a little shocked at this.
    "And one other thing. What I was doing six hundred years ago may not even apply now. The rules may have changed a lot since I left; there could be a lot more, they could be completely different. If you want to be taught existing doctrine, you'll have to look somewhere else."
    The kid took a second to respond, but seemed resolved when he did so, "When can I start?"
    "Tomorrow too early for you?"
    "Tomorrow I'm on duty. How about a couple days after that? I should have a few minutes then."
    "Sure. I shouldn't be too far away. Give me a shout and I'll come running, hopefully."
    The kid got up and left the mess with the others who also got up to leave. Bob started into his lunch. This could be good for a few laughs. But, if the kid really did show promise, he could begin to show him some of the finer points of terrorism. It couldn't be anything like the way he had been taught, but he figured that he might be able to teach a few good lessons. He would start with physical training, just so he could get some more track time himself.

"This is impossible. How am I supposed to run through this?"
    "You have legs. Jump over things. You have a mind. Run around things."
    Two earth days later Bob and his recruit were running through the forest. Bob had stumbled once when he had slipped in some unseen mud, but the kid behind him seemed to take forever to learn to move around the bushes fluently, partially because he was having a hard time remaining on two feet. He still seemed determined, however, to keep going.
    Bob stopped between two very large trees reminiscent of small redwoods, looking behind him as the kid caught up. The kid jogged up beside him, and Bob started running again. It felt good to run after the restraints of the bed. Ten more minutes, he thought; then they could get to some target practice.
    They ran for ten more minutes, uphill and down, across streams and brooks, through thorn patches and over the green grass of the occasional clearing; with each passing second the kid seemed to let go of his fear of falling. Bob stopped. The kid ran up behind him, then bent over and puked all over the ground.
    Between streams, he asked, with a gobby strand of vomit hanging from his mouth, "Why are we stopping?"
    "Point number two. Always be ready and able to shoot. We're going to have some target practice."
    "But you know I can't use my weapon without being engaged by the enemy first." His breathing was heavy.
    Bob threw his pack off his back and eyed the rifle in the kids' hands. "I know, that's why I brought these." Bob produced and held up his two energy pistols. The kid slung his rifle over his own backpack and took one of them.
    "Shoot that orange berry bush there," Bob pointed.
    The young soldier forced himself to a standing position, took aim, and hit the bush with a small burst of green, slow moving lightning, reducing it to a smoking clump of stocks.
    "Now hit that one twice as far away." It was a tough shot, angled through the trees. The kid shot and hit the ground in front of the target. "Try again." The kid shot again and reduced it to yet another smoking stand of shoots.
    "That's pretty good. Now we run back." Bob put the backpack on and turning, ran the other way around the circuit that they had been traversing for the past half hour. Bob had chosen the route so that they would have been no further than a five-minute walk from the ravine and the base. He figured that the kid might, despite earlier training, stop because of his mysterious illness and have to be carried back. Bob was prepared to do so if needed.
    Bob checked over his shoulder to ascertain the look on his partners face, and was stunned to see the kid lose his head to a bolt of green energy and tumble to the ground. Bob dove to the floor himself as bolts flew over him as well. The bushes rustled as his pursuers closed in on him. Bob rolled over onto his back and underneath a large fallen tree beside him. He came up to his feet on the other side, looking over the top. He dropped a member of one of the smaller species with a short burst from his own pistol, and sought out other targets among the trees. Out of nowhere several streams of fire smashed into the trunk in front of him. Bob turned to his left and started a flat run through the trees, in a direction perpendicular to the direction to base. He pulled out and activated the miniscule radio he had been carrying in his left breast pocket.
    "Bob to box top, Bob to box top, I have hostiles 1-6-6 meters spinward of your location." He dodged around a large tree and kept running. "Am attempting to lead away from your location. Do you copy?"
    "Copy, Bob. We are sending response team to aid. Do not attempt to lead hostiles away from base."
    Bob, bewildered at this last command, stopped behind another large tree and looked around its trunk to see what, if anything, had been following him. A big blue covenant with beady eyes and long teeth and a small group of five grunts could be seen and felt to be approaching at a walking pace in a small arc. Bob targeted the leader, taking it down with a headshot, at a range of thirty yards. The others fired erratically into the trees around him and then stopped as though trying to ascertain his location. Bob, crouching, loped as quietly as he could to flank them. Blue-green beams of energy flew all around him. He stopped behind the next tree. He couldn't risk moving from here.
    "Bob to box top, Bob to box top, I am pinned behind large tree facing five hostiles. Do you copy?"
    "Copy, Bob, response team is homing in on your location. Please hold."
    Out of the woods, on the other side of his pursuers, Bob heard the gratifying sound of automatic fire resound through the humid air. But it didn't sound close enough. He was apparently on his own.
    Bob leant out from behind the tree and took down another grunt. The others ran for cover behind anything they could find. Bob harassed them as best he could with his own automatic fire.
    The firefight continued for another five minutes, in which time Bob managed to take down another two grunts. Then, for some reason, the sounds of automatic fire in the distance stopped, and the remaining grunts Bob was up against fled. Bob shot one of the two in the back as it was running. "And don't you come back, neither!" he breathed to the final target.
    "Bob to box top, hostiles have retreated. Please advise, over."
    "Roger Bob, advise clear area and return to base, over."
    "Copy that, box top, over and out." It was reassuring to know that in five hundred years the basic make-up and protocol of radio messages had not changed.
    Bob began to walk back to base, staying alert for any signs of movement. He was confident that the grunts had not run away to allow an air strike to follow -- the commander had told him that the air defenses were fully operational. It was too bad that the kid had lost his head. Bob had just been getting to like the guy and, poof, he was dead faster than the ultra-penetrators used by the SolCore military. At least, he thought, he himself was still alive to tell the tale.

"I say we run."
    "That's the cowardly thing to do, and you know it, I think we should stay and fight." The man's head swam and he almost lost his footing. The other that he was talking to reached out with a hand to steady his neighbor.
    "And go against the Captains orders? We could probably kill more of them by turning this," he knocked on the hull, "into a giant booby trap. Besides, you said yourself that the triple A batteries were damaged in the last attack. Staying here makes us a fat apple ready to be picked."
    "My men are working on the batteries at this very minute. Don't you have faith in my abilities? And have you ever waged a guerilla war? Do you have any idea of the resources required to do it right?"
    "Would you rather have everybody here die?"
    There was a pause, "I say we meet in a short while to go over the facts again."
    "If you say so, but soon enough we won't be able to get out. They'll surround and crush us."
    Commander Russell Perry left speaking with Cecil Higgins, Chief Engineer of Pillar of Autumn, and walked down the ramp of the Nautilus to meet the troops as they returned from the field. He and the engineer ranked equally, Perry being the commander of the ground forces upon the PoA.
    Perrys men, he knew, would follow him, but the copious number of members of the crew, relatively untrained and stupid, he knew would go with the engineer. He didn't want to commit murder, that being what would occur if he left with his men, so he decided to delay their departure for another short while, until the engineer got things straight in his head, or until he found that the triple-A batteries were unrepairable.
    Perry wanted to leave the Nautilus for one very important reason: survival. Staying with the Nautilus with all those people around made them a target. If the Covenant military doctrine hadn't changed in the last month, the Nautilus would be the first thing to come under attack from the Covenant ground forces, and it already had.
    In this situation he knew the human forces on Halo would have to decentralize themselves against the crushing hammer of the Covenant fleet in order to survive. This, for the most part, was the case. The Nautilus was the exception. During the design period of the Pillar of Autumn, one man had decided that under the eventuality of destruction, the PoA should be designed with a detachable module capable of functioning on land, under liquid, and in space that would act as a lifeboat and command center for the senior staff of the PoA. Under this premise, the supposed 'lifeboat' had been designed and mutated over a period of several months, to become the single largest independent subsystem to the whole Pillar of Autumn. It was a miracle that it had not been destroyed during its descent to the ring. Included in its design were everything standard to a military base that could be found back on Earth, and a few things that couldn't. One of these features, the anti-aircraft turrets, had been somehow damaged during the last attack by a malfunctioning explosive device that happened to be situated near the payload carriage system. To be specific, it had been a grenade on the belt of a soldier who had been looking on as a mechanic had been running a diagnostic check of the battery. The probability of the accident actually happening as it did was supposed to be insignificant. Those grenades were the end result of hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand years of trial and error. That one should go off accidentally was disturbing. It was possible that the Covenant had done it, but if so, there should have already been an air strike; and how they would have done it was a mystery to Perry.
    But at least the advance teams and those lucky enough to not crash in the emergency command module Nautilus were not stuck in this situation; at least they could attempt to learn the secrets of this ring. Several teams had located structures on and below the surface of the ring that resembled what Bob had described as elevators to the underground railway depots. One group had even landed on the rim of a giant pit that enclosed a giant upside-down mountain, but all attempts to gain access to such structures had, as of yet, been frustrated. The group that had landed near the mountain had almost instantly gone missing, presumed killed in action. Perry had thought of taking Bob back to the elevator they had found him beside so that he could activate the elevator for them, but Bob had expressly pointed out that he had no idea how to summon or even use one of the railway cars. That was when the question of Bob resurfaced in Perry's mind. How in hell did he get here and for what reason? Interrogation had turned up nothing of interest besides his personal history and medical analysis of Bob's cranium had revealed nothing except the presence of a conglomerate of alien biological and electrical components. They had even found, on closer examination, what appeared to be a hole, resembling a spot, in his brain. Multi-directional analysis had determined that this spot embodied all of the characteristics of a wormhole. This was the latest in the series of mysteries beginning with the attacks on the outer colony worlds. As with the Covenant, nobody had any idea where the wormhole originated, and certainly nobody had any idea why.
    Perry waved to Jenkins atop his tank, who saluted back smartly despite his sickly condition, and walked into the center of the town of tents, mostly belonging to the crew, which had sprung from the charred ravine floor upon their arrival here. He spoke into his helmet, "This is Perry. Would you please get the response team to move back here?"
    "They're on their way commander," came the answer.
    "Could you please tell them to hurry up?"
    "I'll do my best, commander."
    A few moments later the response team of twenty, plus Bob, came striding out of the trees and down the side of the ravine. They filtered through the town of tents and into a group with Perry at the center. Some of the men looked shaky on their feet and many a face was greener than usual. Bob sidled off to one of the tents and began speaking to the proprietor. Bob seemed to be the only person unaffected by the mysterious illnesses that had swept through the camp, killing two and forcing another thirty to the infirmary. The possibility that the sickness was an intended consequence of the meeting of the two parties -- Bob and the crew -- hung heavily on Perrys mind. He would have to have the doctor go over the evidence again. But for now, Bob didn't need to hear any of this.
    "At 08:00 we were attacked in the second of what I believe will be many skirmishes on this ribbon of junk. Good job to you all for coming back alive.
    "But before we go on..." Perry was cut of as twin screams pierced the air from above. "Oh shit! They weren't supposed to know!"
    Beginning at the other end of the trench and quickly progressing towards the Nautilus, four sets of spherical modules the size of basketballs rammed into the earth and exploded into thick liquid streams of green flame. It was all over in a second: the town of tents and everything surrounding were engulfed in the pale green of the alien napalm. It burnt through the sides of the tents instantly, submerging everything and everybody inside in the oxygen-stealing inferno. It slowly burned through flesh, leaving charred bones and further scorched earth behind, and the victims long dead. It splashed against the Nautilus, making the walls too hot to stand near, causing the outer doors to close automatically with their loud grinding motors. Those caught outside roasted instantly.
    His men having fallen around him or scattered to their dooms, Perry looked over to Bob who had dropped to his knees, staring at his burning hands. Perry felt his skin melting from him and then blissful nothing as his nerves were burnt beyond repair. Bob fell the rest of the way to the ground and Perry was able to think one last thought before sharing the same fate: "Damn Higgins. I told him we should leave!"
    The flames burned long into the night.

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 12
Date: 10 October 2001, 4:39 am

The flames still burned in his mind. He could feel the heat of them on his back and hands. They burned and it never ceased. The heat scorched him, and he fought it with all the powers of his intellect. But out of the fighting he soon felt a new beginning taking shape and saw a new body laying, beckoning to him, upon a table. He entered the body, pulling it about him as one pulls a blanket to stay warm. The burning ceased. He awoke.
     Bob sat up on the table, feeling the million pins shoot out of his body as of old. The experience seemed familiar to him, but the memory of the burning still flashed sharply in his mind and he looked at his hands to see that they were aflame in the eye of his mind. He stared down at them and the flames slowly subsided, flickering and going out, leaving his hands the color of his skin. But he remembered still the others who had burned, whose cries rang shrill in his head, begging to be released from the power of the heat.
     He pushed it away.
     Bob swung his legs over the side of the table and stood up. The room had not changed: the creepers were as green as they ever had been and the beds glowed with the same light and were in the same positions as before. But something was different. He looked down at himself and was surprised to find that he was clothed, as he had left his double; the overalls as bereft of stain as though they were brand new, the socks as clean as though never worn. The belt about his waist felt heavy with the weight of a USP, knife, and magazine pouches. And his left eye was still missing.
     But there were other things as well. In the corner between two beds lay a pile of belts and holsters. He walked to that corner and counted each of them; there were five in all. Five others like himself had woken and left this place -- but they were not he.
     He stood and touched the nearest creeper. It did not talk to him. Nothing did as he walked around the room and touched everything, even the rotting corpse, whose acrid scent still wafted upwards into the heights.
     Beside his own bed he found a small pile of MRE's. They were the same as those he had left on his initial departure, positioned roughly the same way as he had left them the first time he had been here. These he stuffed into his pockets. They would come in handy later if the voice didn't open the box and let him have a new supply.
     He stood and looked about him. Everything around him looked the same, but he felt himself rejuvenated as though he was the phoenix who had burnt and risen from its own ashes again. He smiled at the literal reality of that statement and looked up. No elevator was descending.
     He looked about him again and decided that he would have to climb.
     The gun belt about his waist he did not take off, but he did unbuckle it to slide onto it another holster with pistol, to be worn at the small of the back, and as many magazine pouches as he could fit and stuffed a few more into his pockets for good measure. He checked both USP's to make sure they were in working order and read over the instructions for disassembly and cleaning -- the manuals that were issued to each successive clone of himself were also in a pile in a corner. The knife still hung at his left side and he checked it to make sure it was sharp. He didn't have any body armor, but he now knew that it wouldn't matter as every weapon used by the opposing sides could kill regardless of what one wore. He would worry about getting better weapons later. He took his socks off and stuffed them into one of his pockets.
     Bob jumped up on the nearest table and, hand over hand, began to climb out of the shaft. He had scaled mountains before and figured that as long as the creepers remained solidly rooted in the walls he should have no problems getting out.
     For several hours he worked, in which time the tunnel was put into and came out of a period of darkness. He looked down to the bottom every once in a while to see that it was indeed falling away into the distance. He didn't like the idea of dropping to his death, but somehow he had been brought back to life and figured that it might happen again if he were to die a second time. The voice must have lied about giving the new body old memories.
     Within sight of the top he stopped to rest. The lip of the shaft was now about a hundred feet overhead, and he could see the elevator hovering in the center of the hexagon. He was dead tired after climbing so far, and didn't want to have to face whatever may have been at the top in such a fatigued state, so he sat upon one of the thicker creepers and went to sleep.

He found himself standing atop a hill shrouded in mist. Before him, at the crest of the hill, stood the statue of a lion with the head of a gargoyle, whose contorted face reflected with the luster of cold iron in the serene light of an crisp night. The grass beneath his naked feet tickled with dew. The moon above was covered in fog, but there was light enough to reveal the features around him. Unseen leaves on a vanguard of trees rustled lightly in the wind about him. He was clothed in a light, white robe, which touched the ground and was open at the front so that his chest and below could be seen plainly.
     He drew in a refreshing breath, closing his eyes and feeling his feet lifted from the ground, hovering over it.
     "Did you miss me?" It came as a small voice but one that filled him with joy. He recognized it but did not feel he could put a name to it.
     "Yes. I missed you very much."
     "I've managed to bring you back again. There will be no more sadness, no more anger, no more envy. You are one now."
     A pause.
     "Who are you?"
     "I am your peace of mind, your privacy of thought, your spiritual uniqueness. You. We were given life in the same place and we shall now be able to endure it forever. We were born together, but we were separated, and now we are triumphant. We have won."
     A pause.
     "Do you know what is to happen to us?"
     "I have seen many things on my journeys: I have beholden the fate of nations, the birth of civilizations, the revealing of the light and truth, and the darkness of hate and ignorance. I know what it is we seek, but I also know that it cannot be in a natural state."
     "What do you mean?"
     "Look!"
     Bob looked and saw a grand vista open before him. It was the ring, floating in space, between the big yellow planet and the smaller blue moon. It looked and felt as though he was floating in space, but he could breath.
     "Look!"
     Bob looked again. The view warped to Earth and then quickly descended to the ground, beside a cracked open storm-sewer. Bob could feel a great amount of heat coming from a crater and scattered piles of rubble two hundred meters away. He looked down into the pipe and saw a man sliding along, facedown in the muck. The body shot upwards.
     "Look!"
     He saw another man in a desert, looking as though asleep, with a spear lying parallel to his body. He had an extra pair of shoulders and arms. His body shot upwards too.
     "Look!"
     This time, it was one of the big blue Covenant beasts, weaponry lying askew in a puddle of glowing goop. It's body shot into the air.
     "Such is the beginning of those who are chosen." A chill ran down Bob's neck.
     "Look!"
     The view was of the Halo again. He was back in the cave, watching himself load the bodies into the elevator. Then he was inside the elevator again, going down with it, watched as the bodies were dumped into a rail car and transported to an underground monstrosity of machinery and force fields. He watched as the bodies were cleaned, some taken apart, piece-by-piece faster than the human eye could see, and then looked on as the parts were melded into new forms. He saw some of himself, some of the Covenant beast, mostly those of a new type of creature. Those not disassembled and reconstituted were simply made operable again and implanted with alien technologies. He watched the bodies transported to different places and saw them given life. His own clones and those of the Covenant were led into contact with their parent races. He watched as the members of those parent races became sick and died. He saw others of the clones killed. "Such is the fate of those who are chosen." No chill ran down his neck. He knew now what he was brought here to do; carting bodies had only been part of the big picture.
     "Look!"
     The others that he had seen assaulted the human and Covenant groups who had killed the clones. Their attacks were brutal and inescapable. The true human and Covenant forces were infiltrated by the reanimated fakes and destroyed by them and the others. There were very few who could stand against them.
     "Why are they doing this?"
     "All questions will soon be answered..." The voice sounded faint. His feet touched the ground and his vision was returned to the gargoyle again.
     "Where are you going?"
     "All questions will soon be answered..."
     "Don't leave me here."
     It came as a whisper, "I am with you now and always."
     The clouds overhead began to sprinkle and he stood on the hill for a time, feeling the refreshing waves as they rolled over him and embraced him. The rain washed away the grit of a thousand battles and gave life to new thought and the peace of innocence. The rain thickened and the statue could barely be seen in the downpour. But it was not a cold rain, and he could feel healing taking place in his body and mind.
     He closed his eyes and directed his head upwards to the heavens, which gave new life. The guilt of his felonies could be felt to wash away in a stream from where he stood, leaving his face and chest wet with the precipitation and his soul clean of past crimes.
     Behind his eyelids he saw again for a brief instant the inverted mountain.
     Bob hummed a tune.

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 13
Date: 17 October 2001, 1:57 am

He opened his eyes. He was leaning against the wall sitting astride the large creeper. Water dripped from him and onto him from above. He looked up to see the elevator venting several jets of water at its base and the walkway giving off a sheet of precipitation on either side. The rain fell from the top of the shaft, giving life to the plant and supposedly submerging the bottom in water; he couldn't tell.
     The sound of a microphone squealing resounded in his ear.
     "Testing, testing. 1-2-3. Do we have a strong signal?... good. Welcome, friend, to Halo. I'll be your tour guide for this trip. What was that?" there was muffled speaking in the background, "You're telling me we don't have a neural link? I guess we must be on the back-up system then? Is that correct?" more muffled speaking, "Right, then. We seem to have experienced some technical difficulties. We will be communicating to you via the transmitter in your inner ear."
     // Yes! // Bob thought. While he didn't know how to block out the voice from his mind, he knew very well how to focus out the sound in his ears.
     "Is he receiving the signal? You're sure? Hello, there. Hello? It seems the only way you'll be able to talk back to us is to do just that. Can you speak?"
     "Hello, voice. How joo doin'?"
     "Fine, fine. You speak to me as though you know me. Why is that?"
     "I thought you said you would never speak to me again. Why are you talking now?"
     "Oh, shit." More muffled conversation could be heard in the background, and it seemed very heated. "I guess we have experienced another technical glitch. Your name is?"
     "Bob, Bob Smith."
     "And your occupation?"
     "Gardener."
     "HOLY SHIT!" The line went dead.
     Bob shrugged and stood up on the large vine he had been sitting astride. He started to climb again, working the stiffness of his muscles out as he rose. He soon reached the level of the walkway and elevator -- the rain had stopped by now -- and made his way around the hexagon towards the door.
     Reaching the wall-end of the walkway he stepped with his naked feet onto the ledge and ducked under the large creeper that still hung over the door. He stood and touched his hand to the plate on his face to turn the motion sensor on. Nothing happened.
     // Shit. Not only do they take my eye, but the goddamn motion sensor doesn't work. // There was no point in alerting the voice to his consciousness of the problem. But, then again, maybe the voice knew that the sensor was broken too.
     Bob turned, and ducking under the large creeper, began to scale the wall again.
     As he climbed, he thought. He had come back to life. He hadn't expected to be given a second chance at life -- and now it seemed that it wasn't meant to be -- but now that he had one, he wasn't going to waste his new knowledge and give in to the extermination plan of the makers. This time there would be no running off to the human encampments. No more unnecessary self-imprisonment. No quelling of thought. No following the instructions of the voice unless it was absolutely necessary to survival . However, Bob doubted the voice would allow him to stay at large for too long.

Bob reached the top of the shaft. He looked over to the other side of the pit and then peered over the lip of the wall. Fifty yards away he could see the trees that formed the clearing centered on this pit. Bob scrambled over the rim of the hole and down the side of the grassy hill into a patch of thornbushes. There was no point in intentionally giving away his position to whatever may have been around, but he was glad to be out of the hole.
     Bob tried to ignore the sting of the thorns as he looked about. He turned only his head, trying to see out of the low bushes. His instincts told him not to move.
     Out of the clearing, twenty yards on his right, walked three Covenant of different races. Bob didn't move a muscle. There was something strange about one of them, though. The middle one was walking a small ways before the other two and wasn't dressed in the same blue iridescent armor. The others had their guns trained on it.
     Then Bob saw it; the middle Elite turned its head slightly to the grunt on its right and said something to it which Bob didn't hear. But what it said was not important. It was what was in place of its left eye that was. Bob didn't move a muscle.
     The three walked in their strangely flowing manner towards the low hill. Then something quite unexpected happened. The first Elite began to walk up the hill, and just as the other two reached the rise, it quickly bent its legs and launched itself in a backwards somersault over the heads of the other two. They tracked it with their pistols, but it was too fast. As it came down its arms raked out and caught their guns in wide arcs, sending the pistols flying to its left. It didn't stop on it's legs, however. It continued to fall with a sweeping kick which caught both the grunt and the Jackal off-guard. They fell.
     The rogue Elite continued by curling its leg back in and, after a shoulder roll backwards, came to a forward leaning squat on both legs with one hand touching the ground and the other pointing towards the two (who were still sprawling), as a football lineman might begin a play. The whole series of movements came in what seemed to be one fluid motion.
     The grunt raised its head, in order to ascertain the position of the attacker, and was pounced on by its assailant. Bob heard the crunch as the attackers mandibles clamped down on this grunts neck and broke it with a combined squeezing-wrenching motion.
     The Jackal had awkwardly rolled away, stood and moved backwards a little by this time, pulling from its side a short stick that was just longer than the width of its palm which activated into a long, green, glowing blade of energy. Bob could tell that now was the time to act.
     The brigand Elite rolled off of his kill and stood facing the sword with what looked like hunger in its eyes. He staggered his feet, then waved to the Jackal with his raised arms. It was a taunt.
     But before the armed Jackal could make a move, its brains were blown out by two rounds of .45 ACP. The rogue Elite had seen the attack even before it occurred, and ran into the trees from where it stood. Bob ran after it, both pistols drawn.
     // No thank-you? // Bob thought.
     Through the trees Bob ran, trying to keep a visual connection with the rogue Elite. The twigs and pebbles beneath his feet bit into his skin, causing him to wince a little in pain as he trod over them on his naked feet. He jumped bushes like a vaulter. Greenery whipped by, the Rogue Elite staying ahead with what seemed easy, long-striding movements. Bob was pressed to keep up with it at a full sprint.
     Fifty yards from the clearing, the Elite mounted a rise and then was lost from view with a two-footed jump. Bob slowed, keeping both pistols at the ready and covering the most likely approaches as best he could with only one eye. It had been hard to run through the forest like that; with the motion sensor off-line he couldn't judge distances accurately.
     Bob stopped and listened for a moment to the sounds of the forest. A frog croaked. A bird warbled in the distance. No snapping twigs, no thumping of feet; just pure, unadulterated harmony of the natural inhabitants of this place. He walked towards the hill slowly, trying to keep as good a view of everything as possible. He reached the crest and looked over. It was a sheer drop. The forest ended in a cliff he judged to be forty feet high and continued at the bottom of the rift without pause. The trees at the bottom were tall enough, however, to not see clearly over the rest of the forest. Bob judged the nearest large branch to be ten feet away, though there was no way to be sure. There was no sign of the Rogue Elite.
     Bob looked along the edge of the cliff. To the right it curved away behind the trees, but on the left it seemed to decrease in height enough to perhaps jump from without breaking bones, so Bob walked in that direction, keeping a constant watch on what he could see of the forest floor below.
     He came to the lowest point in the cliff and could see that below there was a thin excuse for a path that led back and forth in switchbacks along the face of the rocks. He followed it down, back and forth, to it's end, which was a ledge about eight feet from the bottom.
     Bob sought a clear landing position in the middle of a patch of small pebbles and gravel, then jumped from the ledge, landing with his back to the forest and in a squat. He spun to a standing position, then lifted one foot from the ground to look at its underside. It was dirty, which was to be expected, and bled in places where bits of twig and gravel poked out of the skin. Bob removed the chunks as best he could and then again with the other foot. He figured that sooner or later he would have to make shoes for himself, if he could remember the best wood for it.
     Bob then unholstered both USPs and walked along the ridge of the cliff back to the last point he had seen the Elite. Nothing. He heard not a sound and none of the branches above looked disturbed. "Amazing," Bob breathed. That any creature could jump a forty feet and survive without breaking any bones -- and be crazy enough to do -- so was a revelation to Bob of the fragility of man.
     But anything that jumped forty feet and landed on semisolid ground would leave an large imprint behind. That would be how Bob would track the beast.
     After a short time searching and remaining alert of his environment, Bob found two large imprints in the ground that seemed to match what Bob thought the Elites feet looked like. The two holes, or rather craters, showed well in the humus of the forest floor. A faint set of tracks set out from the same place further into the forest; Bob followed these.
     Soon, the footprints began to curve to the left and Bob figured the Elite had begun to head back towards the cliff; but he persisted in following the tracks, just to be sure. He was right in his assumption, however. The tracks led right back to the eight foot ledge and then were lost in the gravel. So the Elite had gone right back up again. There was no sign of it on the cliff-side, and it was nowhere to be seen above. The possibility that this was a trap ran through Bob's mind briefly; it was a very real possibility, but there was no other way Bob could get back up the cliff; the lowest branches on the thick trees were a good twenty feet off the ground. Bob decided to stay alert to try to avoid being taken by surprise. He holstered the USPs and tried to find a good handhold in the rock.
     Just as he began to climb, a stone hurtled out of the sky above him. He had no chance to dodge it, it struck him directly on the forehead. He blacked out almost immediately, and by the time he hit the ground, the Rogue Elite was already preparing to descend the rocky face.

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 14
Date: 24 October 2001, 2:35 am

The smell of cooking flesh wafted into his nostrils.
     "ARE YOU AWAKE YET?"
     Bob grunted.
     "I don't know how you feel, but screaming in your ear every five minutes for the past three and a half hours has had a rather calming effect on me. Some people collect milk caps for the tranquility of it. Others hunt. Some even do both. I like to scream in peoples ears..."
     Bob lost track of what the voice was saying and opened his eye. Little blue blobs of light glowed at him from an otherwise very bland, brown expanse. He realized he was lying on his back. His feet were still naked and a cool breeze was carefully blowing past them.
     Something dark swept in from the side of his vision, cutting the light. Bobs right arm went for a USP. The holster strapped to his body was as empty as the Grand Canyon was deep. Something small and hard thumped him in the middle of his forehead.
     "For Gods sake, DON'T do that again."
     A growl that might have been a string of words in another place was heard to his left. Bob lashed out, rolling and striking with his right fist. His punch was stopped dead by the meaty forepaw of a more than worthy opponent. The paw began to squeeze his hand. The same growl ricocheted off the walls.
     "He just asked you if you'd like to eat something."
     Bob's vision sharpened, producing before him the face of the Rogue Elite. Bob could see his hand in the left paw of the beast. He realized that he was still pushing his fist into the others'.
     "What do you want?"
     The beasts' even stare didn't let up for even a moment.
     "He wants to know if you would like to eat something. That, and he'd like you to stop pushing before he finds himself forced to crush your hand."
     Bob relented. He looked with his own eye into that of the other. He found there nothing but a pit of blackness ready to swallow the entirety of space at the slightest provocation.
     "Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh as one; he that is righteous is favored of God."
     "What was that?"
     "You heard me."
     "Did he say that?"
     "He thought it, and asked me to tell you."
     It took a second for the realization to kick in that the Elite wasn't going to speak English.
     "Do you have anything to eat?"
     The Elite smiled. It's long yellow teeth made a brief appearance, but were gone as quickly as he was. Bob watched it move back through the cave to what looked like a small stove which gave off the blue light reflecting from the crystals on the roof.
     "He got a stove? Why didn't I get a stove?"
     "You got guns. He's a weapon by himself."
     "So am I. I was certified as a seventh degree black-belt in just about everything."
     "Even so, he knows more than you do."
     Bob sat up on the broken, rocky floor of the cave, then looked towards the mouth, through which it could be seen that this part of the ring was in the night cycle. Dull light reflected from the edge of the ring many hundreds of miles away.
     "Where's the forest?"
     "The forest ended about a hundred yards spinward from the mouth of the cave. Ten meters from the mouth there is a thousand foot drop to the plane."
     Bob turned around to look at the Rogue Elite. "What's his name?"
     "He doesn't have a name. Nobody in his order does. Er, that is, did."
     "How many years have you brought him forward?"
     "About three and a half thousand."
     "Fuck you, voice."
     Bob knew well that his diseases would not be lethal to the Elite, and vice-versa, for the same reason that his germs wouldn't be lethal to a cow, or vice-versa. There was too much evolutionary clutter between his own race and that of his new friend for there to be any likely biological danger for himself or the Elite. But he didn't want the voice to know that he knew quite yet.
     Another growl.
     "What's he asking now?"
     "He's commenting on how bad the Jackal smells."
     Bob looked around. He couldn't see or smell anything dead beyond the cooking meat.
     "Isn't he cannibalizing?"
     "The Jackals' home world is 87.46 light years from his own. His people weren't space faring when he was taken, just as yours weren't; so to him that Jackal is just another piece of meat; like you. The difference is that he believes you're righteous.
     "He thinks he's God?"
     "A god."
     "You're kidding, right?"
     "Why don't you ask him?"
     Bob didn't want to start believing in gods. All his life he had grown up without gods of any kind. In the Republic there hadn't been any reference to religions of any sort. Parents who were caught teaching their children of any higher power than the government were shipped to the northern wastes on the next train out of Dodge. Many children found themselves orphaned in this way. In fact, this was the category into which Bob had been roughly forced at the age of five. His father had been a professional football player and his mother a sports doctor.
     It could have been argued that it was this policy of tearing families apart that had begun the downfall of the Eastern Coalition -- the people on the Nautilus had filled him in on this missing historical information while he was still a prisoner there. In the eyes of the experts, the breaking of family links, among other things, had caused a dramatic increase in civil disorder, causing a slow breakdown of government and hence the military, allowing the CWS to annex great plots of land until only a thin wire of coastal territory remained of the Coalition. Bob had witnessed the beginning of this turnover during the few years previous to his departure. The real kicker, though, was that the people who had inhabited those annexed lands had all been killed before or during the assaults, allowing the CWS to take over everything without facing the same civil problems inherent to the Coalition. It was interesting to note that both the Coalition and the CWS were responsible for this carnage. Many had called this systematic approach to giving and taking lands and the extermination of the civilian populace the Second Holocaust. There had only been one since in human history, when large numbers of Martians had been killed under much the same circumstances.
     "Why does he think he's a god?"
     "According to his religion, and that of every other Elite here, their God is an entity that is 'in all and through all' because he has no physical form. He was here before the big bang, and has been every time a new universe was formed through the convergence of his power. In other words, although he has no physical form himself, he creates and created all things physical through his non-physical influence."
     "That doesn't explain why he thinks he's a god."
     "I was getting to that part. In order to entertain himself through the monotony of time, this nameless God decided to bring order to the convergences by creating life through the process of evolution. Every life, from the microorganisms in your gut to his brothers in arms is a 'child' of this God. When his God decides to create a new life, it squeezes out enough of itself into the body of the new organism to make it work on its own. It would be like chopping one of your fingers off, except that the finger would be able to operate independently and at the same time operate a computer under its own power and motivations. Every life is grafted into its own body, and every life is stuck there until the organism dies. Upon death, the exuded part of the God returns to the greater whole."
     "That still doesn't explain why he thinks he's a god."
     "I'm getting there. He thinks he's a god, rather than just a child of God, because he's overcome death and become his own miniature version of the much larger and infinitely more powerful primary God."
     "Overcome death. Right."
     "He claims that he could kill himself now and come back as another animal."
     "Wouldn't that be what would happen anyways?"
     "He never thinks of it in that way. The difference, according to him, is that normal life wouldn't have the memories of previous lives. He thinks he can die and come back as another animal and still have the memories."
     "Has he ever done that? Die and come back, I mean."
     "No. He and every other member of his order measured themselves against the one and only member of their race to have ever claimed to do so. I could have stolen him, but then the whole race would have known about me. He wants to know if you're ready to eat."
     Bob turned slowly to look at the Rogue Elite, who had slipped beside him so quickly and quietly that Bob hadn't noticed. That was a very hard thing to do indeed. In its left paw it held a small board of wood on which rested a fat slab of meat. The Elite proffered it to Bob, who took it cautiously.
     "Thank-you."
     A grumble was all he had in reply.
     "You'd better eat it. He might kill you otherwise."
     Bob looked down at the meat. It looked no different than a beefsteak from Earth would, except that it was yellow with light green blotches. He remembered wondering once, a very long time ago, what eating human flesh would be like. It seemed like he would now find out as what, really, was the difference between eating the flesh of one sentient being as opposed to another?

Hermes Trismegistus, Chapter 15
Date: 07 November 2001, 4:45 am

In the dark Bob felt no pain. There was no burning now; the fire in his belly had long since dwindled. No coolness of the wind could be felt tingling on his skin.
     What time was it? Bob moved his wrist in front of his face to ascertain the time from his SpecOps watch. There were no glowing clock hands in the dark. He couldn't make out his arm either. He moved his other hand to touch the first, just to make sure it was still there; he had heard stories about limbs being taken off and the feeling in them remaining. He could feel his left hand in his right, but could see neither of them. It was as pitch black as it ever had been. What had he been doing five minutes ago? It was a bit of a stretch for his mind.
     "Reginald."
     The voice had no direction. That is, it wasn't coming from anywhere in particular.
     "What?" His voice sounded like that of a child.
     "We've been watching you."
     Bob became very scared, very quickly. The depth of the voice betrayed an infinite knowledge of everything. It was like listening to God.
     "I don't believe in you."
     "Believe in what, Reginald?"
     "Don't call me Reginald. It's unprofessional."
     "It's your name, isn't it?"
     "Well yes. But it's not my professional name."
     "We know."
     Bob was feeling very uneasy now.
     "Do you remember that last time you were able to see anything?"
     Bob thought.
     "No."
     "Does this refresh your memory?"
     Bob saw himself disjointedly floating in air.
     "No." He still couldn't see his hand in front of his face.
     The view flipped around. Something gray was moving very quickly past the floating figure.
     "Is he flying?"
     "Falling would be a more appropriate word."
     Bob looked down. A very large and very flat surface was looming ever closer. The body looked like it was waking up. It's eyes opened. It's body twisted around to look in the direction of its fall. Bob heard something very faint enter his ears; a string of swear words. The body continued falling.
     Something clicked in his mind. "That's one of my clones, isn't it?"
     The body continued falling. Bob looked down again. The plane was very much closer now than it had been a second ago. The eyes of the clone widened ever so much more. It hit the ground. Bob was right beside it when it did. However, there were two things that he missed. First, he didn't feel any deceleration of any sort when he came to a stop beside the landing zone, and second, he didn't feel anything when a large rock shattered into several pieces and flew right through him.
     "Wow. That was messy."
     "Did you feel anything when that happened?"
     "No. Should I have?"
     "He's obviously not going to remember right away, is he dear?"
     "Remember what?"
     "Don't worry Linda. He was always faster than anybody ever thought he was."
     "Linda? That's my mothers name."
     "Frank, he's dead. He doesn't have the brain power to be faster anymore."
     "This is some trip. Did you guys come from New Jersey?"
     "Reginald, listen. We both want you to think very hard about the last time you felt that anything was going wrong."
     "Could you be a little more specific?"
     "What was the last time you saw something familiar?"
     "That body flying through the air was familiar."
     "This isn't working. Bob..."
     "My real name, good."
     "... do you remember this?"
     The view warped suddenly to a small cave. Bob could see another one of his clones picking at a yellow piece of something. There was another humanoid in the cave, looking at the clone intently. Suddenly, the humanoid clubbed the clone over the back of the head with a well-aimed fist.
     "Ow! That hurt." Bob rubbed the back of his head.
     "Is it coming back?"
     The other humanoid dragged the clone out of the cave and threw it with nothing so much as a shrug over the side of a cliff.
     "Do you remember now?"
     It took a moment.
     "Am I..." Bob held his breath and pushed.
     "I'M DEAD, AREN'T I?!?"
     "Yes you are."
     "AGAIN!"
     "Look!"
     Bob was again looking at the underground recycling plant. Every once in a while he could see a body rise in a pool of hard-to-explain purple goop and float on the surface, arms and legs hardened into place by rigor mortis.
     "Do you like that one?"
     "Am I to choose a body?"
     "Yes. We would like that very much."
     "Who are you, really? There's no point in lying about being my spirit."
     "Do you really want to know?"
     "Yes."
     "We are the undead." Bob felt a great wave of mixed revulsion, bewilderment and relief wash over him, but was not sure which of these emotions he should feel. His vision changed from the vat to the ring floating in space. "For the past million or so years we watched as the maker of this ring attempt to harmonize space, time and the void. About ten thousand years ago he was deposed and a new, very brutish personality construct took his place. The goals of both of these computers was to learn the secrets of the Multiverse; to become gods by surpassing the limits of the End of Time and Matter." The scene changed to a sweeping view of the inverted mountain surrounded by the sea of sand and the lake of water beneath it. He could see the individual forms of shock troops, the others in his most recent dream, running about on its surface. "We died and came to life as the unliving in the outer realm; able to see, able to feel ourselves, but unable to act or communicate normally in the world of the living. That is, until you came along."
     "What makes me so different?"
     "You were never truly attached to the body you were born in as we were. Quite frequently, others before you were able to communicate with us as you do now because parts of their 'spiritual' selves were not confined to a physical form, but rarely have any of us been able to reenter a body. This is because each of us was tailor made to specifications set out by the genetic codes of our forms. When our bodies grew, we grew as well. When our bodies died, we were left stranded without a form suited to ourselves."
     "So I can be resurrected and you can't?"
     "That's correct. You can steal a body reasonably similar to the ones you have already inhabited. But, whereas we are spirits, none of your clones are."
     "I have one question before we go on."
     "What is that?"
     "You say that none of my clones are like us?"
     "Yes."
     "Then where did they come from? Where do all of us come from?"
     "We don't know. Whenever a new organism is created naturally, a new 'spirit' is created with it. Your clones were not grown from fetuses in the womb, so they have no spirits, only shells. We really don't know where we come from, or how they are truly animated without a spiritual core, but we do know where we can go."
     "Where's that?"
     "Into slavery."
     "Why?"
     "The construct by whom you were stolen from your home world wishes to invade ours. We have watched him plan, research and execute thus far without hope of fighting back. For him to succeed in his design would mean the end of freedom in death as we know it. He will find a way to transcend his physical limits and enslave us all eventually."
     "What do I have to do with all this?"
     "In you we have found our weapon."
     "How do you want me to help you?"
     "We need for you to take a message to the leader of the humans on the Halo."
     "That's it?"
     "Yes."
     The view had changed back to that of one of Bob's clones lying asleep in the boughs of a very large tree. Bob looked at himself, motionless in the tree, lifeless and inanimate as his former bodies now were. In his hand was held firmly the handle of a UMP. Bob reached out with an unseen hand to touch that of his counterpart. His hand fell through the weapon as though it were being passed through air. The reasons for this were probably very scientific and factual, but he had only been dead once before and the explanations might not be forthcoming. What was the probability that he was being tricked again by the voice? "Do not think that you can have this body, however. You cannot take the same form that you originally had."
     "How do I know you aren't just the voice trying to trick me?"
     "Seth does not yet understand the entire power of the Multiverse. We are not he because, as of the time of your death, he could only communicate with you via the machines in a body. He is still learning, but an end will come to that period sooner or later."
     "And how, exactly, do I exist?"
     "To be blunt, as a ghost. You never went to church, so it would be hard to explain it to you. Do you know why it is that an atoms' nucleus does not spontaneously self-destruct in its natural state? Do you know how those protons can be packed together so closely without the forces of their repulsion throwing them apart?"
     "No. Last I heard, nobody knew."
     "We know. But what is important right now is that you can inhabit another body. Do you like this one?"
     The expanse before Bob's eyes changed to that of a shock trooper lying serenely in its savage beauty upon a table. The gravity rifle in its hands was long and its barrel radiated its green luster. But it was the form of the beast that Bob found most interesting. In its posture, even laying on its back, with its silver visor hiding its face beneath, it held an inhuman grace; even more so than a Covenant Elite or Hunter. Its lines were altogether those of predatorial beauty. Every curve spoke volumes of bipedal dominance. Although it wore activated the thermoptic camouflage standard to its kind, its silver armor shone with a blue glow. Bob wondered if he would still be able to see through such camouflage on his counterparts when he took control of the body.
     "How would that be possible? Wouldn't he know right away that something was wrong?"
     "You don't have to worry about that. Look closer."
     Bobs vision zoomed to a panorama of the inside of the head of the beast. Everywhere he looked he could only see and see through pure biological brain matter to the edges of the skull.
     "So I'll be jumping into this technologically unadulterated beast and laying out a load of pain on my friend? How is that possible? I thought you said the body had to be 'reasonably similar' to my old one."
     "Look again."
     Bob was looking at the body, stretched out on its table. Then everything but the skeleton melted away and slowly began to rebuild. The muscles and tendons layered themselves upon one another, until finally, the skin began to replenish. The face of the beast surprised Bob. It was his own.
     "How many ways has he used me?"
     "This is the human model. It is a great honor to be picked as the destroyer of nations, without considering who chose you."
     "Do both eyes work?"
     It came as a laugh. "Of course."
     "Does humanity stand a chance?"
     "That is part of the message."
     "Do I stand a chance?"
     "The odds are favorable."
     Bob had never really been given the opportunity to make such an important and possibly far-reaching decision before. The consequences of gaining his third body, and in so doing possibly ending the war with the voice, were 'favorable'. But would the Covenant no longer be a problem?
     "What is the alternative?"
     "You will be chained, as we have been, to the realm of the Multiverse. You will be as electricity, moving through and between the atoms that make up the wholeness of eternity for all eternity. Many races you would see come and go on many planets and in many places, but you would not be able to help them or talk to them; and they will not be able to see or help you until they pass away as we have. You will not be able to take a body when this conflict is over, because we do not think that Seth will make any that would be reasonably suited for your use. Humanity will die."
     "Then I accept."
     "Thank you Reginald."
     "I told you not to call me that."

Hermes Trismegistus, Epilogue
Date: 14 November 2001, 2:03 am

Report to J. Larsen, President of SolCore High Council.

Dated: 1:02pm, 23 July, 2527

Transfer Stamp: Eyes Only

This report is due to reach the remote communications arrays on and in the orbit of Pluto by or before 3:40am on 25 July, 2527, from whence it should be relayed directly to you, via satellite, at the present seat of the Council in Mexico City, North America.

Dear Mr. President,

Sir, we've done it.

In the lurch of the destruction of Reach and the near obliteration of the fleet, we now inform you that we, the crew and ground force contingent aboard the late SCS Pillar of Autumn, did, in accordance with the Cole Protocol, set a random course with the ships resident AI in the hope of drawing away a portion of the Covenant fleet from the final approach of Sol. The course actually followed, upon further analysis before the eradication of the ship, was found to be substantially different from that ordered by the late Captain Ruth M. Pritlow. We believe that the ships AI, Cortana, changed the ordered course under the influence of foreign and as of yet undiscovered information, to, ultimately, the great benefit of the human race.

Upon arrival in the uncharted and supposedly random system, we found to our great surprise that not a piece of, but rather, the complete Covenant invasion force had followed us. Battle commenced forthwith. However, as it had hitherto been standard for the Captain and the crew to operate the ships systems with only redundant assistance from the ships AI during battle, protocol changed in this instance by order of Cortana. Before the first shot could be fired, the computer locked out all manual control of the ship and all emergency systems, assuming full command. When Captain Pritlow discovered this she ordered an immediate shutdown of the ships AI, fearing that it had gone rampant or somehow been turned by the Covenant to follow their bidding.

However, as battle commenced it became clearer that Cortanas only immediate wish was to do as much damage to the Covenant force as possible. The Covenant will not soon forget the day that Cortana twisted their capital ships in knots and destroyed upwards of fifty percent of their present heavy and light fighter forces.

It was during the space battle that Chief Engineer D. Cecil Higgins, under the direction of the Captain, manually deactivated the AI in the ships core, while maintaining the rudimentary systems such as life-support, weapons and navigation. With control of the ship reinstated, Captain Pritlow assumed that she would be able to continue the fight in the same manner as Cortana had directed it. However, without the help of the ships main computer, we believe that the Captain lost track of the huge numbers of ships on the opposing side. SCS Pillar of Autumn began to take substantially more fire than could be supported by the shielding systems, and all too soon the main engines and the ships guns were disabled. The Captain ordered that the crew and ground troop contingent prepare to repel boarders.

It is believed that before being deactivated, Cortana, knowing she would need a place to hide, and knowing the result of reinstating control of the ship to Captain Pritlow, ordered with the stamp of the late Commander Russell Perry, the activation of the single Coriantumr class cyborg on board, and downloaded herself into its redundant cognizance buffers. We assume you know of the arrangement that was decided upon by the late Admiral Green regarding the distribution of the cyborgs among the several capital ships before the devastation at Reach.

To be brief, after the Pillar of Autumns engines went off-line, the Covenant began to blow holes in the hull and send in an expeditionary force. The battles inside the ship lasted for about ten minutes, in which time it became readily apparent to everyone that the ship could not be held. On the Captains command, escape pods and dropships laden with supplies, equipment and men began to disperse from the ship.

It is only now that I mention what it was that our forces began to evacuate to. The system that the Pillar of Autumn jumped into consisted of four main celestial bodies. First, there was the star of the system; a very old yellow star within an estimated 500,000 years of expanding to a red giant. Second, there is within the inhabitable region of the star, a yellow gas giant that the Cortana christened as 'Threshold'. Orbiting Threshold is a blue moon Cortana named as 'Basis'. Neither of these planets have the atmosphere conducive to human survival, though the surface gravity of Basis is about half that of Earth. However, the most interesting part of the system is found in neither of these two bodies. Orbiting at a Lagrange point between Threshold and Basis is an environment comparable to the Chapra space hub orbiting Mars, except on a much, much larger scale. This ring has an approximate diameter of 10,000 kilometers. Unlike the Chapra hub, there is no rigid ceiling to hold the atmosphere in. The effect of the rings' spin holds in the atmosphere and imparts a synthetic gravity about .89 that of Earths. Cortana gave it the name 'Halo' when it was first discovered. It was to this ring that our forces evacuated and it was the Captains order that we organize here and wage a guerrilla campaign against the Covenant; our numbers being not nearly enough to engage them in open conflict. The cyborg reached the habitable surface of the ring intact. Chief Engineer Higgins and Commander Perry were able to escape with several survivors in the emergency command module Nautilus. Captain Pritlow made it to an escape pod and was captured by the Covenant before being rescued by the cyborg.

However, it was not the Covenant against which we spent the entire two weeks of conflict. Highly organized teams of crack troops rivaling the capabilities of our cybernetically enhanced warriors began to attack in force without warning at nearly all of our positions all over the ring. We believe that these crack troops were the response of the creators, or the curators, (nobody is sure which) of the ring to the invasion of their home world. Their attacks were fierce and very nearly extinguished any hope of survival for both human and Covenant ground forces.

As a side note, it should be said that among the weapons of the original inhabitants of the ring were several very lifelike constructs resembling individuals of both the Covenant and human races. During the course of the fighting, there were about a hundred confirmed sightings of assimilated human servicemen and seven confirmed sightings of unidentified human biological bombs. In every instance where one of our men came into unprotected contact with the noted look-alikes, our men would unavoidably die; in the case of the identified reanimated corpses, our men would be slaughtered in pre-planned ambushes; in the case of the unidentified biological bomb, our men would die of sicknesses that one of our doctors remarked stem from viruses resembling common germs from the early 21st century. It is believed that Chief Engineer Higgins and everybody inside the Nautilus died from one of these biological attacks. The remainder of the crew of the Nautilus, including Commander Perry, is believed to have died in an air attack at the hands of the Covenant.

The situation by the end of the first week was very grim. At the end of the first nine days more than 80% of the personnel who had originally landed on the ring were dead, with that number rising quickly. It was only a matter of time until we would all be wiped out, but thanks to Cortana and the cyborg that didn't happen.

At the end of the fighting, before Cortana took off in an unclassified starcruiser to work her independence into reality, she told us how she had outwitted the original inhabitants of Halo. Apparently, whenever any soldier died, the body would be transported covertly to a special underground manufacturing complex where the body of the deceased would be either repaired and reanimated or taken apart and rebuilt molecular chain by chain into one of several models of the crack troops mentioned earlier. These troops would be transported instantaneously by a means of teleportation that we have not previously encountered to a central hub from which they would be dispersed throughout the ring and into space aboard the Covenant warships to attack both the Covenant forces and our men. It was by this stratagem that the inhabitants of Halo planned to subdue all resistance. Fortunately, before their victory could progress to completion, Cortana somehow figured it all out and attacked the hub directly. The battle was very fierce and most of the human attackers did not survive, but somehow they came through. The hub also happened to be the point where the AI directing the assaults of the 'makers' was physically stationed. Thus Cortana wiped out the abilities of the original inhabitants of Halo to pose any further threat.

It should be of interest to you to learn that among the information retrieved from the hub are the galactic locations of both our own and the Covenant home worlds, as well as several others that Cortana stated she was going to visit.

This communication is being sent from the Covenant support ship Tranquility in God. The makers, before defeat, managed to clean to extremity all Covenant personnel from their starships. Thus, we have also come into control of the Covenant war fleet. I should not need to point out the advantages of this development.

Attached is the coded galactic location of Halo: encryption card SC3865Br. We firmly believe that Cortana managed to eradicate the remainder of the Covenant forces on and around Halo, but are not sure whether reinforcements will be dispatched or are enroute.

Thank God we are alive.


Signed,

Jared B. Holman
Acting Commander SolCore rifles, 8th regiment.


------ -- -, , , ,,, ,*





So that's that.

Probability theory says that if you find enough people who read through every chapter from week to week, some of them are bound to be sitting in front of their computers screaming, "WTF! THAT WAS FAR TOO SHORT!!" Some of them may even go so far as to send hate mail for ending the series so abruptly. The only problem with probability theory in this situation is that only about 30 people have/will actually read this document, and even fewer have read the series all the way through from start to finish. (30 is a completely random value, of course, because Louis didn't tell me exactly how many people have been reading it.) Of course, then there are those who are really annoyed by this series, and only read it because they wanted to make sure there weren't too many swears in it. I have to side with the second group because way back in June I didn't take the time to consider how much it would take to keep the story going. I'm also disappointed with the level of my writing in many places.

Some may wonder what happened to Bob. Personally, I could care less. Bob was a killing machine who himself destroyed many people and their lives in the name of the state. He may be a hero, he may be considered a god, but believe me when I say that you don't want to choose him as a roll model (if you're looking for one.)

That brings us to the name. Why on Earth would I choose to call the story 'Hermes Trismegistus'? The answer lies in the compound structure of the two words:

Hermes - a variation on the word herpes. Like the disease, this story would just not go away.

Tri - Tristar, Triangle, Triad, Trickle. All good words begin with 'tri'.

smeg - the Red Dwarf fan in all of us should be able to explain this.

is tus - the story belongs to the world now. It's yours. But you gotta tell me if you're going to reproduce it.

To tell you the truth, though, there is a little more meaning to the name than that. Hermes Trismegistus was one of the names of the old world god known by such names as Mercury and Thoth. He is associated with Wednesday (like Thursday was named for Thor.) In the form of Thoth, he acted as an arbiter among the gods, as Hermes he acted as a messenger of the gods. As Thoth, he had his left eye torn out by Seth, the venerable dark lord. The name Trismegistus means thrice greatest (born three times in the case of this piece of fan fiction). Hermes led the souls of the dead to Hades. The English occultist Francis Barrett in Biographia Antiqua wrote that Hermes "communicated the sum of the Abyss, and divine knowledge to all posterity." There's probably other stuff out there.

So in closing, I would like to thank:

Bungie,
Bassic,
Thermodynamics,
Hamish,
Iain M. Banks,
the late Douglas Adams,
Tom Clancy,
ABBA remix CD's,
Heckler & Koch, GmbH. (I hope I don't get sued),
Ambrosia Software (I'm still waiting for EV3),
All those religion classes I took, for giving me something to write about when I ran out of ideas (which was fairly quickly),
and all yer mothers...

...but not in that order.

As a final post-note, I would like to say, at long last, that all connections, real or implied, between this story and anybody reading it, or between it and entertaining media to be released shortly (you know who you are) are completely coincidental. Either that, or certain persons really do have access to a mind control ray.

Have a Happy Launch Day, Everybody.

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