ZIGON FIVE (SOTS)
John Leningrad Baylor took some time out to chillax, man. He had a break and had a Krit Kraut because right then and there, he had thoroughly and utterly decided that he was just goddamn too old for this shit.
So he put on some clothing, which he usually did when he went outside, and went outside for a change. 'Course, most of the time he preferred to swim through the CommNet because he was a weary soul who didn't really like going out much and now in the future you can very well do the same - and more - by hooking up your brain to a supercomputer and transmitting your whole human experience to practically anywhere, outside your house, outside your planet, outside your solar system. But sometimes that didn't cut it, sometimes you had to put on your Hawaiian shirt and your pantaloons and take a walk outside, and he did.
Selphie had asked him where he was going, and he said he was just taking a walk and he asked her if she wanted to come with him, but she declined and said that she had another appointment - she was going to get her hair done in the parlour, with more glow-in-the-dark nanites, and then she was going shopping. That was okay, Baylor thought, since he wasn't going to take that long anyway.
But he was wrong.
Not dead wrong, but even worse!
He was... Undead wrong.
Now John Leningrad Baylor was sitting on a park. Not even sitting, since that would imply a chair. Rather, his butt was firmly planted on the ground - which had verdant blue Zigonian grass growing on it. The grass moved ever so slightly, for they were long and untrimmed enough to get caught by the wind, and as they swayed they in their blueness kind of resembled flowing water... in an ocean. It reminded Baylor of his homeworld, that damn fringe world, except it didn't have an ocean, it had a pond. With stagnant water.
The park's own pond was even bigger than Baylor's homeworld's one and only body of water. The park's pond was also bioluminescent, with Zigonian plankton species that lit up in the night. It wasn't night yet, but the pond was glowing all the same, so Baylor decided to enjoy that simple sight.
The other Zigonians were enjoying it too. Normally, they wouldn't be out this time of day because it wasn't hot enough for them to lounge around sunbathing, but Baylor guessed that their three-day workweek gave them enough free time to enjoy the park even when it was cool (sure, Ziggies were warmblooded endothermic creatures, but their reptilian origins probably gave them some old habits like lying in the sun for heat) and windy.
John Leningrad Baylor couldn't help but smile at the sight of Zigonian children wagging their tails, spinning hulla hoops in 'em. That was just cute.
He decided to record it in video with his eyes. Well, just one eye. His other eye was looking at the bioluminescent pond and the flyfishing Ziggies, and so with each eye focusing at different things, he kind of looked split-eyed. But that was normal and newer postmen models didn't even need to have their pupils pointed in the right direction. Their eyes could see and focus off-axis.
John Baylor didn't need this feature though, as his attention was taken away from both Ziggie hulla hoops and bioluminescent pond flyfishing. He looked up in the sky and saw the clouds darkening. Well, they were already darkening, but they were even more darkeninger.
At this sight, very quickly did the park vacate, and soon Baylor was practically the last one there - except for the Aduk Egg vender who was closing up his holo-stall and gtfoing. After that guy went away, Baylor pretty much was the last one there.
Thus, nobody was there to behold what would transpire that day.
Lightning flashed in the sky, and deep rumbling followed, as though it was the deep chuckling of some cumulu-nimbus skygod who would soon appease himself. But there was something else flashing, still lightning, but not in the sky and Baylor began to approach the only other discernable lightsource there was with great trepidation.
He neared the bioluminescent lake.
By its shores were the abandoned fishing reels of the Ziggie fly-fishers, and on the lake's placid surface were Ziggie children's toys - boats and inflatable Celestian sea squids.
But there was something under the surface... some great pulsating thing glowing with strange colors that left John agape - his autovocabulator without even an iota of an idea for any suitable word for his brain to use. It was a tesseract - but he didn't know that. It was a blood red hypercube that, under the bluish hue of the lake's glowing plankton, strangely appeared purplish.
Lightning flashed in the sky, and thunder followed.
Likewise, so too did lightning flash from the underwater tesseract - and a huge arcing tendril of green undulated from the water and crackled to Baylor with a horrible whipcrack noise that came only after the fact, by virtue of light being faster than sound. The teal thunderbolt struck him dead center in the chest, and John spasmed as he was electrocutified and as the sand under his feet was glassed, he was lifted into the air. His eyes buldged, his mouth clenched in muscular spasm, he tried to scream but all he could make was a feeble but nonetheless pained 'nnnnngggrrrrrr!' sound as his teeth grinded against one another. He urinated himself.
And then he vanished.
And entered a horrifying landscape of immaterial physicality, where no thing was solid but all things were shapes and forms of various kinds of lights and sounds. A realm not of the material, but of the mental. The Twilight Zone.
A tinge of familiarity hit John Baylor, and he gasped, if he could gasp, while his eyes were still wide open as though he was still electrocuted.
He traversed that mad dreamscape between realities quickly, and like a dreamscape his memories of that event would be muddled and fuzzy. But in the time after, he would recall at one point recognizing something whilst he was still in that strange, strange place.
He saw the blue hypercubes hovering in the black abyss, over the red tesseract's blood-colored horizon. And in that dreamland, he hovered into one of those blue boxes - just one out of many - and entered a land of light.
He was subsequently drenched in rain and mud.
And then punched in the face.
TO BE CONTINUED...
