The Story of THING by hypericin

*1*

Lord lay swaddled in velvet luxury high in his aerie, glazed eyes staring sightlessly out panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked clouds which themselves soared over the megalopolis far below. Holographic munchkins cavorted in the large space; laughing, skipping, clapping, dancing, doing somersaults and cartwheels; fucking like frenzied imps in improbably fanciful contortions; torturing one another, with knives, hot pokers, and little medieval racks, to elicit piping cries of dismay. Their seeming solidity was given the lie when Lord exhaled an enormous plume of freebase cocaine, causing them to flicker in and out of existence.

Valmira never lost her sense of shock. She had known some formidable wastrels indeed in her small Albanian hometown, yet she felt certain they would succumb to a small fraction of the stimulants and depressants Lord consumed daily.

Valmira's trajectory in Lord's circle of playgirls had crested and begun its inevitable descent. Her role increasingly reduced to spectator, Valmira watched without envy as Svetlana, whose star was still in its ascendancy, worked hard to stimulate Lord's ardor. The other eight girls were arranged in a semi-circle around Lord, recumbent among luxuriously piled cushions, frolicking with each other and with themselves, making "oohs", "ahhhs", and other lascivious expressions which ranged authenticity's full spectrum.

Swimming in a sea of simulated bliss, Lord hardly took notice.

*2*

Impaled figurehead, vanguard of the rumbling war wagons... living totem, thrashing and moaning... watching his intestines dangling onto the dusty platform... whoops of shiny-skulled barbarians, emerging from fire and smoke... immobilized, writhing in agony, as hapless remainders of humanity succumbed one by one to the bald barbarians and their cruelty.

But... But! They too, like all things, had passed.

Wanderer entered the valley, musing on traumas long past, with a weariness which innumerable years lent credibility. He sat down under a copse of stunted trees, taking slender shade against the fierce noon sun. A pool of water, while stagnant, at least showed its bottom. Wanderer drank deeply.

A crow, that most cunning of survivors, cawed forlornly on a ridge, announcing Wanderer's arrival to its compatriots. Though famished, he knew he could never snare so wily a prey. A glossy brush covered the valley floor. Hardly appetizing, but hunger made the meanest meals seem palatable. Wanderer gathered handfuls of the broad, tough leaves, and chewed the bitter, fibrous plants without pleasure.

Ominous rumbles of his stomach soon announced this was likely a mistake. Briefly nodding off, he awakened and retched violently, spraying the ground with the meager contents of his stomach.

The sound, or perhaps scent, of his vomit triggered a rattling hum from deeper in the valley. It was a sound Wanderer had long ago learned to dread. Crying out, he scrambled up and lurched back in the direction he had come. But illness washed over him, and with horror he uncontrollably bent over and retched again. Soon enough, the cloud of carnivorous moths was upon him, fat-bodied things with orange painted wings spreading larger than the full extent of a big man's hand. He swatted desperately, crushing a few. This was futile, and their stings injected a paralytic poison, robbing him of motion but cruelly sparing sensation. He subsided, unable even to scream. With the faint scraping sounds of tearing mandibles, they feasted on his living flesh.

*3*

Thing was pierced eternally by luminous daggers. Not poetry, rather a sad matter-of-fact. Cosmic rays perpetually tore through its body, leaving microscopic trails of wreckage behind. Tender lungs, squeezed shut by vacuum, recoiled from merciless absolute zero temperatures. Eyes struggled to escape twin bony prisons. Eardrums perpetually burst and reformed, wavering in a state of partial repair. Sunward skin burned, raising angry boils; starward, it stiffened and froze, cracking open with every motion.

These agonizing hurts were mere peccadilloes next to soul-crushing boredom and the blackest despair. Forbidden breath and wracked by pain, sleep was forever elusive, and it was compelled to attend every tedious instant. Thing was uniquely privy to God's own masterpiece, the sprawling, impossibly beautiful panorama of space without atmosphere, foregrounded by innumerable shards of the shattered Earth. But every star, constellation, and nebulae had burned itself long ago into its memory.

Every thought it was capable of thinking had been thought, and thought again. It had stood trial for every self-recrimination, was found guilty, and sentenced to retrial, with a prosecution that gained in power by force of repetition. It's mind was a Byzantine maze with countless twists, turns, and side-passages, lacking only an exit.

In the suffocating panic of breathlessness and the perfect silence of space, heartbeats pounded like timpani drums. Counting them offered a kind of respite, though even the most furious concentration wavered and broke well before a million. With grim determination it would return to one, and start again.

Thing resided in the largest open air prison in history. Surrounded by endless space, it could only follow the current of its orbit. True escape was found only in the endless memories...

*4*

Valmira had definitively fallen outside of Lord's orbit of favorites. That impassive face, so startling in its preternatural beauty, made no sign of registering her existence when by some chance it happened to turn her way. Any morning now Matron would knock on her door, enter without awaiting her answer, and flatly inform that her term of service has ended. That a supersonic shuttle ticket to a destination of her choice would be provided, assuming she vacated the premises by nightfall. The prospect filled her with dread. She had money now but she knew of no place but here and Albania, where she was loathe to return.

As Lord spent his days diddling his favorite girls, inducing his munchkins to creative amusements, drinking, and smoking, snorting, and injecting staggering quantities of hard drugs, Valmira spent most of her time ensconced in a cushioned corner with a tablet, talking to Albanian friends and browsing news sites, particularly around the ever-looming Eurasian conflict which threatened to suck in even Albania. In the tedium of long, solitary afternoons, she even managed to locate some older pictures of the notoriously reclusive Lord, whereupon she discovered that he was far older than she had presumed. Twenty years ago he was the same stunningly handsome, youthful Adonis, the same pristine skin and perfectly sculpted body, a living rival to any marble statue. This was impressive even by the standards of today's rejuvenatory tech, doubly so when accounting for his hedonistic habits.

Valmira was awed by Lord when the starry-eyed small town Albanian girl arrived in his aerie. Any illusions she held were long ago vanquished by the time spent in his company. What divine caprice matched utter physical perfection with his hollow, vain, childish soul? Learning of his eerie longevity only increased her sense of revulsion. Watching him unawares she couldn't restrain herself from sneering openly, feeling such contempt as she did for this sorry excuse of a man.

*5*

Wanderer returned to the valley. He wondered if he had managed to circumnavigate the earth. More likely, his travels had taken him back by some circuitous route.

No crow announced him this time. The inedible scrub that made him to retch so violently was gone. The earth here, as in most places, was denuded.

Against all odds a carnivorous moth was perched on a stone in front of him, perhaps the final representative of its wretched race. It seemed desultory, depressed even, not troubling at the scent of his flesh, now a scarce commodity indeed. With a rage born of long entrenched trauma Wanderer crushed it underfoot, delighting in the faint squeak of expiring moths.

Wanderer was tired, and made "camp"; that is, he found a flat area free of stones, set down his bundle of leaves and rags as a pillow and laid on his back. That night he was treated to a nonpareil display of pyrotechnics. The moon suddenly erupted in a blaze of fire and light, brighter than the noonday sun. The valley was lit hellishly orange, with stark black shadows.

Wanderer was awestruck, and the sight of him, starkly nude under the orange brilliance of the sky, jumping, howling, yelping, would have impressed upon a witness, were there any left, that here was humanity at its most primordial. The lunar fireball slowly subsided, and the sky resumed its natural darkness. Hours later it was lit anew as thousands of comets streaked across the firmament. The horizon glowed deep red as the bass rumble of distant impacts shook the earth.

Wanderer was awake all night, entranced. He felt excitement, anticipation, qualities his paltry life had lacked for a very long time. This was more than mere omen, it had the air of finality.

*6*

Thing was wakened from its reverie by a chunk of rock smashing it in the face. Glittering teeth and frozen globules of blood drifted slowly away. The rock, splattered with his blood, mockingly floated in front of its face.

Raging silently, Thing picked up the rock and sent it sailing into the void. As it did so, it felt a slight inertial sensation. A cluster of rocks beneath it (that is, nearer to the sun) seemed some modicum closer. This was something new!

Intrigued by its alien environment for the first time in ages, Thing started experimenting with the many rocks at hand. Through long trial and error, it learned these basic principles:

• Throw a rock up, away from the sun, and Thing would bob down for a bit and then pop back up, resuming its prior altitude like a cork submerged under a bit of water and released.
• Throwing a rock down towards the sun had the opposite effect, sending it up then right back down.
• Rocks thrown to the left or right of its orbital direction would send Thing moving at a constant speed, proportional to strength of throw and size of rock, in the opposite direction.
• Throwing a rock forward, that being the direction of Thing's orbit, lowered its altitude a bit, matching its initial rage-driven throw.
• Rocks thrown away from its orbital direction lifted Thing, ever so slightly, away from the sun.

Depression had vanished. No longer helpless, Thing had agency again. Its brain hummed with the energies of newfound hope. Quickly (as months were on Thing's timescale), it gained mastery of this peculiar stone-based locomotion.

No aimless drifter anymore, Thing now has a destination, shining in newfound glory. With industry and ambition, it gathered stones and threw them always forward, sending It down, down, towards the sun, and blessed oblivion.

*7*

The day had finally come; Matron caught Valmira in a side hall, and in her doleful way told her that she was was neither needed nor wanted. However, both women were distracted, and it seemed likely that Matron would forget her announcement tomorrow anyway.

Everyone's attention was fixated on the Eurasian conflict: simmering for years, it seemed to boil over suddenly into total war. Valmira's curiosity turned to alarm, and as the situation devolved, alarm became terror. On that day, she sat in her customary nook, watching the dreadful news unfold on her tablet. Holy Rus had blanketed the Amur River region with tactical nukes, annihilating the New Chinese armored battalions occupying the area. Alongside 3D captures of the devastation, Patriarch Kiril was vociferously explaining that Rus was doing God's work, that the radioactive dust kicked into the atmosphere was the only way to reverse the still accelerating global heating. This was abruptly cut, and a video of the port city of Vladivostok was shown enveloped in a mushroom cloud. American Federation fighter jets were engaging Indian Migs over Kazakhstan, alongside a newscaster's commentary made incoherent by unconcealed panic.

Valmira looked up, and was aghast at Lord's expression. That face, a mask of bored contempt in every circumstance save orgasm and drug high, suddenly worked itself into the unfamiliar contours of terror. All went white with a shocking clap of thunder, windows burst inward with a roar, and Valmira, Lord, girls, Matron, tower, all tumbled together, down, down, down...

*8*

In the years following the lunar apocalypse a sense of normalcy resumed, albeit a much colder one, under a sky blanketed in a cocoon of dust. Wanderer trudged, shivering, on his aimless perambulations through an ashen landscape where life of any kind was conspicuously absent. Hunger and thirst had long ago receded into a background hum of need.

Once the dust finally settled and the moon was visible again, Wanderer saw that it had taken on a drastically different aspect. First, a giant blackened pockmark dominated its surface. Fine cracks radiated outward from the crater like a broken china dish. Second, and perhaps more concerning, the moon seemed to hang far larger in the sky than Wanderer thought reasonable.

Wanderer initially attributed this to some kind of optical aberration related to the dust in the sky. But the effect only increased. Soon the moon was very visible during the day, and it occupied a region of the sky which vastly exceeded its long-observed custom.

Gale force winds buffeted Wanderer one day, then for several days in succession; finally, they blew without relent. The roar of distant tsunamis became constant, and walls of blue framed the horizon. The blue barriers loomed larger until they enveloped everything; all was water, and Wanderer was swept out to sea. He rolled, tumbled, descended to aqueous depths not meant for men, before another tsunami finally deposited him back on solid ground.

The moon was now monstrously titanic, the predominant feature of the entire sky, exceeding the remainder it did not occupy. Volcanic eruptions fumed upwards in multiple directions. The moon, suffused in an orange glow, grew larger still, seemingly on a trajectory straight towards Wanderer. He stood, arms outstretched, shouting soundlessly into howling winds, embracing the finality of a journey of eons.

*9*

Thing spent many happy years, hardly perturbed by even the painful rigors of hard-vacuum living. Once absent, purpose was now in abundance, neatly summed up in one word: Down!

Thing learned that the rocks were not uniformly distributed. Rather, there were clusters, oases of abundance surrounded by deserts of stone scarcity. Thing would cling to the former, carefully gathering the best rocks until it felt ready to journey to the next downward cluster. In this way it carefully traversed vast, floating landscapes, entire nations of stone.

As joyous years progressed a worrying trend emerged, first a nuisance in the periphery of awareness, then a real problem. The populations of stones, once thickly abundant, began to thin. At first Thing hardly minded. It was past master of stone navigation and relished testing its mettle against more difficult conditions. Thing was easily equal to the challenge of this bracing game. But inexorably the stones continued thinning.

Thing arrived at something of a lonely outpost. The next oasis was too far down for its liking. Another was only a few days to the left. Lateral motion maintained velocity and was thereby easy, and Thing zipped over to inspect. Sadly, downward prospects here were more dismal still, and it pensively made the rightward return journey.

Thing spent a year in furious concentration, gathering the very best stones, finding the most advantageous ways to lodge them in arms, between clenched legs, even one in the mouth.

Thus prepared, it began the most challenging inter-oasis transit yet. The trip went smoothly at first. But, somewhere in the middle, a miscast rock sent it spinning at an odd cant. In a moment of panic its clenched legs loosened, and several precious rocks floated free. It regathered them frantically, but three drifted above it, beyond reach. It retrieved two, at the cost of a smaller stone and some depth. The third required another stone to fetch, not worth it. It continued the journey with a deep sense of dread.

Thing neared the outskirts of the next oasis. The first rocks floated invitingly, several feet down. Only two small stones remained in its possession. It threw one after the other, both perfect tosses. The next stone was still several inches below. Just like that, it was stranded forever.

Had any trace of air remained in Thing's vacuum-clenched lungs, it would have expelled them in a scream of frustration and despair the likes of which the universe hadn't yet heard. Air was but a distant memory, and lacking this release, it had nothing. And so, it began the final, longest, most tedious sojourn through endless time, spinning in a celestial tomb, awaiting the end of the universe.

*10*

Laird W. Farthing was reeling, covered in sweat. "I can't fucking believe it! I can't fucking believe it! I can't..", repeated like a Buddhist mantra. Fifty. Fucking. Billion. Exactly like he asked. Sitting in his account, free and clear.

Laird had spent the day in bed, looking at his shockingly beautiful face and body in a mirror, masturbating to exhaustion. The sight of such a prodigious number in his account stirred his tired sex and jubilant soul. He was in heaven!

He tore open his drawer and grabbed the desiccated monkey paw, the provider of his nirvana. For a long time, he had mapped out various altruistic schemes, noble fantasies of worldwide peace and happiness, were he to acquire the paw. But now that he had it... well, what else was there to say, but... "FUCK THAT SHIT!" he shouted aloud. One of the paw's fingers was still outstretched, indicating the one wish that remained. There was no other real choice.

"Time to lock it in, baby!"

He held the paw aloft and shouted:

"I wish to live forever, in perfect health!"