The Last Boy on Earth

Starship Victory: Season 1, Episode 1

by Joey Peters

The Last Boy On Earth

Ensign Brahma smelled the Cherenkov radiation. He tasted the hyperspace wake left by the ship as it traveled faster than light. And Brahma assimilated his crudely replicated egg and French toast through an elaborate atomic process, not organic digestion.

"It's lonely," he said. "Nobody else sees the universe from anything approaching my perspective."

Chief Hayes replied, "Do you try this 'sensitive, feeling, god-like energy-being' line on all the girls?" between mouthfuls of oatmeal.

Security Chief Hayes was pretty in a lady soldier sort of way. Her clothes were absolutely pristine, precisely to regulation down to the Planck length. She kept her hair tied in back with a tight knot. She wore her communicator, blaster and scanner directly on her belt, never more than a couple feet from her hands. Always ready.

Brahma, on the other hand, was a pretty boy. He kept his approximation of hair up in a spiky configuration popular on the internal planets. His uniform was a little better fitting than regulations generally allowed, but whenever he was around somebody who might care he'd just let it out a little bit. And of course, because he'd been found in a Hindu temple, he maintained a body with a distinctly sub-continental flair.

Brahma said, "Don't reduce it to that. I'm the only 'god' left. I admit that I fill my time with a few more girls than the rest of the crew, but I think it's time to end that. Find one really special girl."

A twinkling light emerged from Brahma's hand. He, using the material from his breakfast, constructed a single, long-stem rose molecule by molecule. He held it out for Chief Hayes.

"I mean, who else on crew can do this for you?"

Chief Hayes sighed, then reached out and tapped the generator panel in the middle of the table.

"Long-stem roses. One dozen," she said.

And a bouquet of roses appeared in a flourish of light in the center of their table.

"Anybody," Chief Hayes said, "with access to the matter generators."

The first rose wilted as Brahma reabsorbed the matter contained in it back into himself.

"Interesting choice of breakfast companion," another voice said. It was Lieutenant Colonel Elorg.

A smile shot across the pale skin on the organic side of his face and his cybernetics buzzed happily.

"Sir," Brahma said, "just trying to get to know a fellow bridge officer..."

"I don't need your help to shoot down this kid," Chief Hayes said.

Brahma said, "Kylie!"

She said, "Please, it's Chief Hayes, even when we're off duty. I only let my close friends call me by my first name."

"C'mon, Kylie," Elorg said, "Five minutes to shift change. I know how much you like to be on time."

Chief Hayes shot Brahma a look that said, see you later, chump, while walking toward the exit with Elorg.

Brahma assimilated the rest of his breakfast directly through his hand. As Chief Hayes disappeared into the hallway he muttered to himself, "You know he's gay, right?"

Engineering Chief Golem was feeling intensely forgetful. He knew there was something he'd missed this morning, just like he forgot to set his alarm last night.

Doctor Mustaff gave him a strange look while he was walking past the medical bay. In fact, so did Ensign Rodriguez and Ensign Starr. Everybody seemed to be giving him strange looks.

Thankfully his maintenance cycle had completed itself eight minutes before the shift change and he woke up. Still, he'd been in a horrible rush to get dressed. What was it that he forgot?

Ensign Greene was the first one not to give him a funny look while they were riding the lift together. In fact he'd stared at the wall, very intently, the entire ride down.

Finally, Golem reached the engineering deck. Ensign Burroughs was already waiting by the door.

"Sir, you're—" the ensign began, but stopped himself. He stared at Brahma for a moment and said, "Chief, what's happened to your skin?"

Oh, Golem thought. That's what I forgot. He'd taken his skin off to run it through a disinfection cycle while he slept. The circuits in his head buzzed and crackled, trying to come up with a good excuse.

"Today is my product line's birthday," Golem said. "And I felt that you guys are getting too used to treating me like 'one of the guys'. Seemed like a good opportunity to remind you guys that I'm not meat-and-bones like you all. I'm servos-and-carbon-fiber."

Ensign Burroughs stared at him for a few moments. He seemed to be processing what Golem said.

"I thought you said your product line's birthday was in September..."

"That's," Brahma said, "when the product line was announced. This is when Doctor Kelley actually started work on us."

That seemed to satisfy Burroughs.

He said, "I see. Anyway, sir, there's a work order for two personal shield units that was just put in before the end of last shift. We'd better get to work."

If Golem could have sweat he'd be done right about now. His crew wouldn't think he was a jackass, at least not for this.

The sun rose over the rocky horizon illuminating the scarred and scorched black rock in every direction. But it's not like the days were very much different from the nights, not anymore. The sky ramped up to a brooding, ruddy red. Light reflected off the ground a bit. That was the only distinction. The last boy on Earth played with two Transformers, an Optimus Prime and a Starscream, that had miraculously survived the inferno along with himself.

The readings didn't make sense. Last year the science ship Atlantica had visited Earth-235 on a routine scouting mission. Their report was sparse. Standard twenty-first century level of development. Nuclear weapons, computers, and crude space ships barely capable of getting as far as the world's moon. The one piece of interest, in fact the entire reason the Victory had been sent to check up on them, was that they were on the verge of discovering hyper-space radio.

But the remote scanners in the last work shift told a different story. The planet's energy signature was way outside their technology level.

Colonel Dart read the report from last shift on his tablet. He cycled through the lieutenant colonel's suppositions and theories as to what happened. He skimmed them, reading every twentieth word or so.

The Victory wasn't his first command. Colonel Dart had been in the Galactic Union Star Corps for just about his entire adult life. His body was strong for his age, thanks to the obsessive amount of time he spent in the ship's gym. Wrinkles crackled along his face and made him look a fair bit older than sixty, despite his actual age and physical condition. He'd seen some dark things in his time. His hair was almost entirely gray, except for a few splotches of light brown sprouting out from the front of his head and throughout his beard.

He kept skimming the last shift's report, finally reaching the appendix in the end. Mostly it just contained footnotes to mission logs from other starships that encountered similar things, but it also contained graphs of the scans that they'd run.

The energy scan immediately unnerved him. He'd seen that pattern a long time ago, as a young lieutenant. And that reminded him of his long lost family.

The energy pattern looked almost precisely like the after effects of a battle in what was commonly called "The War Between the Gods".

Colonel Dart, never one to believe that these mighty beings might be legitimate deities, instead called it "The Time the Giants Came to Stamp on the Ant-Hill".

The door beeped and slid open. Chief Hayes stepped onto the bridge with Elorg close behind.

Elorg took one look at his commanding officer and said, "What's the good news?" grimly.

The colonel handed Chief Hayes his tablet. She quickly skimmed back to the beginning and looked at the first page. It had simple bullet points explaining what the last shift had seen. Elorg reached his cybernetic arm out and downloaded the report through his finger port.

"Somehow I knew this wouldn't just be a quick 'download their planetary network and figure out their technology level' affair." Elorg said.

The bell chimed out, telling the crew that it was time for the shift change. The third shift crew waved goodnight to their first shift counterparts and left. Brahma tried to sneak in between them, but Colonel Dart immediately saw him.

"You're late," the colonel said.

"I was," Brahma began, "fixing a problem with the gen-o-mat matter generators. Sorry."

Chief Hayes smirked.

Colonel Dart ignored him and said, "What can you tell me about your people?"

"Huh?" Brahma seemed puzzled for a moment. "They like pretending to be gods, or they might actually be gods. That's about all I've picked up from the historical record. I mean, I've never met one of my kind, you know?"

The colonel grunted.

"Get to your station," he said. He tapped his communicator. "Dart to Engineering."

A voice emerged from the ship's computer, "Chief Golem here."

Colonel Dart said, "I understand you've got a work order for two class-three shield pods. Can you step those up to class-five? And drop the holographics function."

"That'll be a significant drain on our energy reserves. We'd be running at seventy-five percent power for," Golem stopped for a moment. Everybody knew he was counting on his fingers. Finally, he said, "about twenty-nine hours."

The colonel thought for a moment. Was it better to protect the away team or the ship itself? Would it matter if they ran into a fully powered god-like energy-being?

"Do it."

The Starship Victory dropped it's speed as it twisted through the solar system's Kupier Belt down to about double the speed of light. Planets Eris and Pluto appeared just as they should in any other solar system, as did Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter, as the ship passed them by.

To the untrained eye the asteroid belt looked completely normal, but a detailed scan would reveal the asteroids' positions to be two percent out of their expected position for an Earth in this time period. Mars and it's moon also had a few too many impact craters. And Planet Ceres was about a percent and a half smaller than it aught to be.

Mind you, all these things were accounted for by the science ship Atlantica's report. They were well within the standard deviation for an Earth-system. The Starship Victory noticed nothing unexpected until it reached high resolution scanner range, just inside Mars' orbit.

It's speed dropped again. It crept up toward the Earth slowly and entered orbit.

Only, it wasn't an Earth, at least not a normal one. Most Earths had continents. You can easily recognize Africa or the Americas on them. Instead of all that detailed land and sea this planet was covered in scorched, black coal.

"Are you looking at these scans?" Golem said, "I kinda wish we had the equipment to make class-six shields."

Ensign Burroughs pulled his nano-wrench out of the shield pod they were working on. It was just about complete, except that they had to fill it's internal power cells.

"Tell me about it," Ensign Burroughs said.

Golem thought, aren't you going to tell me I could upload my brain onto the hypernet? Download myself into a new body if this one gets destroyed?

Ensign Burroughs said, "I wonder what happened?"

"I'm sure we'll find out," Golem said, "We always solve any mysteries we encounter."

Ensign Burroughs nodded.

Fine, thought Golem. Keep your disrespect for us non-organic life forms to yourself. Pretend like you—

"Sir," Ensign Burroughs began, "I think it was a brave choice to stop wearing your skin. Looking like an android, it suits you. Truth be told, you always had this kinda uncanny valley thing going on until now."

Golem sighed.

"No life signs, intelligent or not. No evidence of civilization," Elorg said, "But there is one piece of hope."

"Yes?" said Colonel Dart.

Using his wireless interface with the ship's computers, Elorg told the bridge's hologram generators to bring up an image of the Earth underneath them. He swung his hand over it a couple times to sheer the surface off the simulation, revealing a twinkling energy lattice a couple miles below the surface.

Elorg said, "Energy distortions under the planet's surface. Now, this might just be a super-active core, thanks to whatever happened here, but the other option is that there's survivors under there, with some shielding way out of their normal level of technology."

"How would we find this out?" the colonel said.

"Launch a geometrics probe," Elorg said, "Have it land on the surface and feed it a high energy pulse."

"Do it. And fast, if there's survivors we might have to evacuate them," Dart said.

Elorg said, "In that case we'll need somebody to calibrate it from the ground. The atmosphere is kinda unpleasant but it'll be breathable. I volunteer. I can interface with computers faster than anybody on the crew."

Chief Hayes said, "I'm going to end up the second one on this mission aren't I?"

The colonel said, "You would be a good choice, being the security chief."

Elorg put in a transfer order for the geometrics probe with two expansion slots. One for a teleport module in case the planet's native interference prevented them from teleporting back up and the other for a few simple beacons, for if communications with the ship failed. Both of those options were not just possible but very likely.

Chief Hayes walked over to the door out of the bridge. Elorg followed her.

"Let's just get this over with," she said.

The colonel nodded.

They walked into the hallway and down to the lift.

Elorg said, "Just wanted to get away from Brahma, don't you?"

"He's not so bad," Chief Hayes said, "Really, I just want to protect my best friend from getting splattered into circuit boards by some insane god-like energy-being."

Elorg chuckled.

"There's nothing down there," he said.

"With that energy field you can't be too sure," Chief Hayes said. "Mind you, the shield pods should protect you from just about anything.

Lieutenant Colonel Elorg and Security Chief Hayes appeared in a flash of light on the planet's surface. They were situated just above the thinnest part of the Earth's crust. On just about any other Earth this would be the Marianas Trench.

On this Earth, it was nothing but charcoal.

The air was thick with sulphur and a few other rancid, chemical stenches.

They saw a dark purple streak cutting it's way through the atmosphere, coming in their direction. That would be the geometrics probe. It slowed down as it approached, skidding down through the sky, then turning hard back upward. It reached the top of it's arc and let itself descend on it's own.

Thrusters on the back distorted space and gravity enough for it to land safely.

Immediately after touchdown Elorg approached it and slid a panel on it's side open. His cybernetic hand spun back, revealing a large format connector. He slid it into a slot inside the probe's interior.

"That's not good," he said.

Chief Hayes said, "What?"

"The probe is picking up an incoming object coming in at about mach seven," Elorg said, "Coming off what would be the North American continent"

Chief Hayes clicked her shield pod on, and upon noticing that Elorg hadn't activated his yet, she got his too.

"Can't be too safe."

"I dunno," Elorg said, "I'm getting better resolution on it as it closes in. It's only like a meter, maybe a little more, tall."

A dust cloud emerged on the horizon. Whatever was causing it was coming in fast. A spray of fine coal dust rained down on Elorg and Chief Hayes. The dust slowly fell to the ground.

A boy of maybe six or seven years stood, watching them.

"Hi kiddo!" Elorg said. "Bet you're wondering who we are and why we're here—"

"Don't explain too much." Chief Hayes said, "He has to be some kind of an illusion. A little kid couldn't survive on a graveyard world like this."

Elorg said, "Don't listen to my friend. My name is Elorg. What's yours?"

"Back when there was people," the boy said, "they called me Tom."

"Tom. A standard, North American twenty-first century name." Elorg said, "I don't want to alarm you, but we come from outer space."

Something glittered in the boy's eye. He smiled.

Tom said, "Do you guys have rockets and lasers and magic swords?"

"I think you'd call this a laser," Elorg pulled his plasma blaster from his belt. He fired a bolt into the sky. "On it's lowest setting it'll knock you on your butt."

"And on it's highest setting?" the boy said.

"It can melt hyper-steel, but it'll run the battery down real quick." Elorg said, "Actually, miners use almost the exactly same thing but with bigger batteries."

"And do you got bigger lasers on your space ship?"

"Yeah," Elorg said, "We could use those to mine neutron stars..."

"That's all I wanted to know," the boy said.

And suddenly a rush of light exploded from him. Dust swept up and blocked Elorg and Chief Hayes' view. When the dust cleared it revealed that the boy was gone. In his place a huge, craggy demon stood at least three meters tall. It's skin was spider-webbed with glowing orange, as if this dark form wasn't filled with blood and guts, but with lava.

He charged at Chief Hayes and Elorg, but he bounced off their shields. Elorg vaulted up behind the geometric probe. Chief Hayes stood her ground. She looked the lava demon in the eyes and raised her plasma blaster. She said, "Stand down or I will hit you with a full force blast. These suckers will reduce even the orneriest and most honorable Gamar warrior to a pile of ash."

She clicked the slider up, disabled the safety, then slid the slider the rest of the way up.

The demon jumped at her, bouncing off the shield.

"This is your last warning."

The demon jumped at the shield again.

Chief Hayes pointed her blaster at the demon. She hesitated a second before firing, but she quickly realized the threat alone wouldn't stop it. Chief Hayes pulled her trigger.

The plasma bolt hurtled out of her pistol. It slammed into the demon, melting his rock surface for all of a half second before it refroze. With this the demon suddenly looked disappointed. He grumbled.

A moment later the little boy had replaced him again.

"Well," Tom said, "that was fun, but I really want to see this cool space ship of yours."

The boy jumped into the air. He continued up until he vanished into a dark, gray-red cloud.

Elorg looked at Chief Hayes.

"Well, that was a big waste of time and energy."

Tom cut across the sky. He briefly wondered if he actually needed to breathe as he got high enough that the atmosphere disappeared. His body didn't mind not breathing. One more thing that he didn't actually need to do.

He closed his eyes and tried to sense everything around him. The Earth was a buzzing, crackling ball of unruly energy. But halfway across the Earth there was something else. Whatever it was, it contained a lot of energy, though not quite as much as the planet below, and it was contained in a much smaller package. More organized. That had to be it, he thought. That had to be the spaceship.

He cut across orbit, flying faster than he'd ever done before, thousands and thousands of miles per hour. And that's when he saw it.

A massive V-shaped superstructure. It was welded onto a smaller, oblong engineering hull with two energy pods at either side of the back. On the V-shaped superstructure the words "Galactic Union Starship Victory" were etched in huge letters.

Tom's jaw hung open.

"We've got an energy signature coming off the planet right where we teleported Elorg and Chief Hayes down," the ensign at the bridge scanners said.

"Damn it," the Colonel said, "Do we have communication?"

"Too much interference," Brahma said. "The energy signature—it resembles me, sir. It appears to be a post-corporeal being."

"What?" Colonel Dart said. "How can we defend against it?"

"Uh," Brahma said, "When I was first hatched the scientists used an energy cage to hold me. I was kinda a problem child."

"Do it."

Brahma sent a message direct to Engineering Chief Golem. He was drinking an engine lubricant smoothie at the time, but he had his tablet with him. From there he took control of the scanner array. A blast of energy erupted from the front of the Starship Victory. Tom immediately charged at it. The beam didn't seem to burn or hurt him in any way. It coalesced into an electro-magnetic straight-jacket.

He pulled his arm free easily and sighed.

"Oh, crap," Brahma said. "I think he's using the energy cage as a carrier wave. He's trying to get into the ship's computers—"

A craggy demon head emerged from every holographic display on the bridge. It's glowing orange lava eyes squinted at the bridge crew, minus Elorg and Chief Hayes.

"I demand that your puny ship surrender immediately or I'll destroy you all!" the demon said.

"Now, now," Colonel Dart said, "We are the Starship Victory and we are on a peaceful mission of exploration."

"I'll—" the demon searched for the right words, "I'll eat your bones, you chump!"

"What kind of monster space demon calls people chumps?" Brahma said.

"Shut up—" the demon said. His image flickered for a moment and was replaced with that of Tom's head. "If you don't kill me I'll shoot an energy beam thing at you and destroy you, okay?"

"Sir, might I suggest I leave my post and try to reason with this entity," Brahma said.

"Do it."

"Thank you sir," Brahma said, vanishing from the bridge in a swirl of light.

"Cut the power to the cage..."

Brahma appeared in front of the boy as the electro-magnetic cage evaporated.

Energy crackled in the boy's eyes.

"You're," the boy said, "You're like me."

"So it seems," Brahma said.

The boy said, "Good. Then it'll be more fun to crack you open than it was to destroy my world."

Brahma sighed. He said, "Look, kid, I don't know what you did but can we just skip to the high fives and big brother stuff? I don't feel like fighting you."

The boy fired an energy blast at Brahma. It exploded off Brahma's shoulder, hurling him backward in space, spinning. It took him a few seconds to right himself and fly back toward the boy.

"That really hurt," Brahma said. "But I'm still not gonna hurt you."

Tom fired an energy bolt again. This time Brahma dodged to the side. The boy fired another. Then another. And another.

"You're not gonna be able to hurt me," Brahma said.

Another blast came dangerously close to singeing his approximation of hair, but Brahma managed to dodge. And the next blast and the next blast.

Brahma said, "You've got a lot of power, kid, but you've got no finesse. I can keep dodging all day. Can you keep shooting?"

The boy said, "I could probably keep shooting at you for another day and a half."

Brahma said, "Kid, what are you after?"

"Why won't you kill me!?" the boy said.

Brahma hung in space and stared at the boy. He looked angry and scared, no matter how hard he was trying to put up a mask.

"So you weren't just threatening when you said you killed your world?" he finally said. "I can't just murder you. That's not cool."

"I killed like six billion people," the boy said.

"Did you mean to do it?" Brahma said.

Tom said, "Of course not. These science guys, they'd been running tests on me for months. Years. They were trying to figure out what I am and somehow..." his voice trailed off. He looked at the burned out cinder of the Earth. "Now I'm all alone."

Brahma said, "It's not your fault. And you're not alone."

The boy watched Brahma for a moment. He looked over his simulated human form and he stared with crackling electric eyes at Brahma's electro quantum structure.

"What are we?" he said.

"Gods, I think." Brahma said. "I was found in a Hindu Temple on Earth-978. That's why I picked up this form."

"Earth-978?"

"Oh right," Brahma said, "You wouldn't know about them. Okay. You know there's other planets in outer space right?"

"Yeah, but only like the idea of them. My world's gone as far as the moon—"

Brahma said, "Well, it turns out most alien planets are duplicates of Earth. I'm not really sure why. Anyway, I'm working for an organization from the first Earth around here to develop space travel. They call themselves the Galactic Union. We explore the galaxy and do what we can to make sure other Earths grow civilized enough to join us. You're not alone."

"I saw a regular person down on the planet, and a robot guy. They with you?"

"That would be Lieutenant Colonel Elorg and Chief Kylie Hayes," Brahma said, "The girl was indeed human. Elorg is from another civilization we befriended, the Symphony of Life. They're cyborgs."

The boy said, "And are there more like us?"

"There used to be," Brahma said. "Before I was born there was some kind of a war. I bet some of us are in hiding."

"So we're alone?" the boy said.

They hung in space. What little hope the boy had built up during their conversation crashed on the scorched, black rocks of his soul.

The boy said, "Just because there's billions and billions more that doesn't mean it was okay for me to kill a few billion people."

"I've got an idea," Brahma said. "I've only ever heard about it in books, but I think it might help you. Might be dangerous, though."

It took a few minutes for Elorg to repair the damage he'd done to the geometrics probe by jumping over it. He'd stomped on a couple delicate circuits that he replaced out of his own cybernetics.

He activated an energy beacon. Back on the ship a control in the bottom corner of Golem's tablet flashed on. The robot pressed the image down and that activated the energy beam.

The beam cut through the atmosphere, losing a small percentage of itself into the dense clouds surrounding the Earth. Still, there was plenty of beam to go around. It sluiced perfectly into the probe's energy siphon.

The geometrics probe kicked to life. It fired high powered electrical beams in all directions down and built up a map of the interior of the planet.

The news didn't come as much of a surprise to Elorg.

"Boiling lava all the way down," he said.

Chief Hayes said, "Great. Can you get this teleport module working finally?"

"Sir, we're getting some strange readings from outside the ship," the ensign at the scanner station said.

The colonel said, "Send them to my tablet."

He looked at the figures and saw something he never expected. The two energy signatures were close at hand, blasting out energy tendrils.

Merging.

"Uh," the Colonel said, "Raise the shields."

Sharp knives twinkling under campfire light. Blood. Cow's blood, draining from an enraged, but bound, bull. Sacrifices on an ancient Earth. Hands in prayer. Worshippers. Images flashed in Brahma's mind.

Were these memories his own...? Or was he remembering things from the last boy on Earth's past? Perhaps when he was found he wasn't an egg but a chrysalis, ready to transform him into a new and exciting form.

But gradually he realized that these images came from the mind of The Boy.

There were other gods. They wanted to leave this Earth. And then there was a battle between good and evil. A war in outer space.

The memories became clear after a comet fell down on an Earth. There was a sick baby, but the force, weakened by the cosmic Ragnarok gave the last of it's strength to regenerate him. After that came the memories of a brief life. Strange abilities, things levitate or appear from thin air. His parents are terrified that their child in the harbinger of some strange new evolution. They hand him over to the scientists without a fight.

And then Brahma saw fire. Then loneliness.

The two god-like energy-beings hung in space in front of the Starship Victory.

"I think I know what happened," Brahma said. "Follow me."

He vanished in a swirl of light.

"Reroute power to the scanning array, Golem. Reroute power to the shields, Golem," the engineering chief muttered to himself. "Reroute yourself. Pick a thing and do it."

Two swirls of light exploded onto the engineering deck. Golem dove behind a nearby workbench, while Ensign Burroughs watched in slight amusement.

Ensign Burroughs waved and said, "Hey, Brahma."

Brahma and Tom emerged from the light and gently landed on the floor of the engineering deck.

"Looking good," Brahma said, nodding at Ensign Burroughs. "Can you reconfigure the scanners to search for hyperspace disturbances?"

"Reroute power to the hyperdrive—" Golem muttered.

"No problem," said Ensign Burroughs. He slid his hands over the workbench and opened up a window. He dragged a couple icons onto the readout for the scanner array.

Immediately the workbench kicked the holographic generators online and a pockmarked brown sphere appeared. A lattice of arrows appeared over the map of the planet.

"Hyperspace nodes," Brahma said.

"What?" Tom said.

"You know how there's three spacial dimensions, height, width, and depth?" Brahma waved his hand in an upward, then side to side direction to explain.

The boy nodded.

"There's more than that, the rest of them are just really tiny and you can't generally use them," Brahma said. "The hyperspace nodes are places where these spacial dimensions are stretched out. Usable."

The boy said, "And that means?"

"There's a chance that you didn't kill everybody. They just got shunted into hyperspace," Brahma said.

"Does that mean that Mr. Golem can reroute the engines through the primary thrusters then bounce a graviton particle beam off the deflector array and let everybody out?"

Golem groaned weakly.

"No," Brahma said. "But there's hope you can figure out how to undo what happened and save your world."

Golem said, "Wait, how does he know my name?"

"We merged brains. Long story," Brahma said.

Colonel Dart's voice came over the voice system, "Golem, can you reroute power to the teleports?"

For the last hour or so Golem had been rerouting power from one sub-system to the next and then two more after that. This was inevitable after pouring so much of the ship's power into the shield production.

Golem collapsed on the floor, shivering.

"Bust me down for scrap now," he muttered.

Ensign Burroughs tapped his communicator and said, "On it,"

After the ordeal with the planet and the little kid, Elorg needed a stiff drink and Chief Hayes needed a grapefruit juice. Once the teleport in the probe brought them far enough into the atmosphere for the ship's teleport to take them home they continued immediately to The Pub.

The Pub was probably the second most popular recreation area, after the Imaginarium. Elorg and Kylie walked through the front door. It was three hours into first shift—but even at that time it was halfway filled with people, sucking down beers and elaborate fruity drinks.

They walked up to a drink dispenser and ordered theirs. As the ship reconfigured matter in their glasses into a double-syrup margarita with a sugar rim and a straight up grapefruit juice Chief Hayes noticed a swarm of people in the middle of the room.

Usually this time of day there'd be a few people in the middle, but most everybody else would be by the front window looking out into space. Chief Hayes tapped Elorg on the shoulder and motioned toward the group.

Elorg swapped spectrum types on his cybernetic eye until he could see reasonably well through the crowd. He reeled.

"It's Brahma—"

Chief Hayes said, "He doesn't usually draw this much of a crowd."

"He's got that kid with him."

Elorg sucked down his margarita in a single long gulp and ordered another one. Chief Hayes shrugged. She stepped down to get a closer look at the kid.

The communicator on Elorg's hip shook and beeped. He picked it up.

"Yo," he said.

The Colonel was calling on a private channel. "Now that you're back on the ship could you come up to cover the bridge. I want to have a chat with our new guest. Can you cover the bridge?"

Elorg said, "I'm on my way, sir."

Kylie pushed through the crowd. As soon as she was a couple people back from him, the boy shot her a look. He jumped into the air and floated out above her.

"Hey lady," the kid said, "You've got balls of steel! Hey, everybody, she stood up and didn't take any crap from me when I turned into this..."

The lava demon replaced the little boy in a swirl of light. He was still levitating. It had the effect of a Imaginarium game saved during a particularly exciting moment.

"Yeah," one of the ensigns said, "that sounds like Chief Badass."

Chief Hayes grimaced. Space demons, chaos viruses, armies of evil? No problem. A theoretically complimentary nickname? Terrifying.

She said, "So it turns out he's not dangerous?"

The demon shifted back into Tom form.

"No!" he said, "Promise." The boy held his hand out in a pinky-swear configuration.

Chief Hayes said, "What are you going to do now?"

"I'm gonna go explore that planet where you guys found my buddy Brahma. I've gotta find out about my past and stuff."

Chief Hayes nodded. She said, "Good luck, kid."

The door at the front of The Pub slid open. Colonel Dart stared in from the doorway, a snarl that must have been an attempt at a smile stretched across his face. Everybody except for Chief Hayes tried to hide their drinks quickly and invisibly behind their back, but luckily for them Colonel Dart had no idea who was supposed to be on duty, and besides, he was staring at the boy levitating in the air.

He took a step inside.

"Kid," he said, "I run this boat. My name's Eric."

The crowd murmured at the mention of the Colonel's first name. It was almost as if he was human after all.

"I'm Tom," the boy said. He levitated down next to the Colonel and held out his hand. The Colonel shook it.

"Mr. Brahma tells me that there might be a way to save your world," the Colonel said.

"He says it's a long shot, but if I'm really a god-like energy-being then I guess I'll have enough time to figure out how."

"Good attitude. If you ever figure it out don't hesitate to tell me. I might be able to use help with a similar problem."

The boy nodded, but didn't know exactly why.

At this moment the door opened again and Golem walked in, without even looking. He crashed into Colonel Dart. Golem tried to help the Colonel to his feet but he was already livid.

"You've scuffed my uniform—"

"Sorry sir. I'm kinda preoccupied."

"And where's your skin?"

"Forgot it this morning sir," Golem said, "Wait, no. Pretend I said it's a political statement."

"And aren't you on duty?"

"Uhh," Golem grunted. He thought for a moment, "I'm a robot. It's not like I'm coming here to get drunk."

"Then what are you here for?"

Golem said, "Uh, to repair the—I wanted to see that kid! I wanted to see that kid."

"Hi," the kid said.

"Great," Golem said. He continued on to the drink dispensers.

Brahma teleported in next to the kid.

"Tom, there's one thing I'd like to thank you for," he said.

The boy said, "I'm the one who should be thanking you. You've opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities where the only one I had before was sitting on my charcoal earth."

"Well, I had a lesser problem, I'll give you that. I was just lonely. It's been decades since the Galactic Union has found evidence of any other post-corporeal beings so I've spent my entire life at least somewhat lonely. I've tried to fill the time with girls and imaginarium games, but it's always basically come down to the fact that there's nobody else like me out there," Brahma said. "So thank you for just existing."

"Oh. I—well girls are gross but I do like video games. I think I feel the same way," the boy said. "It's been really cool meeting everybody and having a look over the ship. It's awesome. And being the center of attention is pretty cool too, but I don't think you guys can play babysitter to me for any length of time and I really want to get to Earth-978. Bye guys."

Everybody at the pub waved except for Golem. He was pouring a specially crafted brew of intelligence inhibitors down his fuel drain.

The boy vanished in a swirl of light.

"Good luck," Brahma said, and Colonel Dart nodded.

Ensign Brahma smelled the Cherenkov radiation. He tasted the hyperspace wake the boy left by hurtling through space. He assimilated his crudely replicated stout beer through an elaborate atomic process. But he didn't feel alone anymore.

On the Creation of the Multiple Earths

[From Mr. Ambrogax's Science Class, Third Grade, Antonio Beauchamp Primary School, Earth-1, France]

Yesterday you learned about the most incredible discovery Captain John Fry made during his illustrious career. It was the dawn of the Age of Exploration. The first time mankind set out to really map the stars and all the strange phenomenon out there. And Captain John Fry discovered a truly bizarre mystery... an exact duplicate of his Earth.

In the two hundred years since then the Galactic Union has identified more than eleven hundred Earth duplicates, including the reclassification of planets Athenia and Sparta and four duplicates of the Gamar home world.

Most of these worlds seem to be exact duplicates of Earth-1's history, except they split off at a specific point. Some worlds are dominated by other strange cultures. Earth-2 at the time of it's discovery was under the thrall of a technologically advanced version of ancient Rome.

Since then many scientists have been working to explain how so many duplicates of one planet could arise in the universe, but so far nobody has come close to proving the truth.

The Progenitor Hypothesis

The most obvious explanation, at least to my aural detection feelers, is that a technologically advanced race created these duplicate Earths. There are mountains of evidence about previous civilizations across our galaxy, both on duplicate Earths and other planets. Unfortunately none of these civilizations had the technological sophistication to craft a planet, as far as we know.

Another place this explanation falls flat is that the most powerful energy-being on record, the entity that destroyed the entire Lyzardess Civilization, could only atomically generate the mass and complexity equivalent of a starship in about two hours, so to create just an Earth it would take the entity 2,737.8507 Earth years to construct a full size Earth and forget about the rest of the solar system.

But it could do it. And if it wanted to spend nearly three thousand years doing so, energy beings are generally thought of as ageless.

The Anthropic Principal Hypothesis

Anthropic Principal is the philosophical concept that the universe was created with the primary aim of developing intelligent life. Out of the various explanations, this is by far the most popular one.

It can be surmised that if the Anthropic Principal is true then the Earth must be a nearly perfect environment for developing intelligent life. As such, the very laws of the universe will more often than not create an Earth-like system when it is even slightly likely for an Earth-like system to arise.

The primary problem with this hypothesis is that while Earths have been discovered around more than a thousand stars complete with duplicates of the other fifteen planets, the stars themselves only resemble each other in that they're yellow main sequence stars.

The youngest star to bear an Earth-like system has been in it's main sequence for only four-hundred thousand years. On the other end of the spectrum it's hard to speculate how many Earths have been swallowed when their suns transformed into red giants. The denizens of Earth-287 escaped just such a fate when the Starship Columbia refilled their sun's core with hydrogen. One would presume that if the Anthropic Principal hypothesis were correct that these Earths and other planets would be formed at the same time as their attendant suns.

But there's something comforting about the idea that the universe wants us to exist, so the Anthropic Principal hypothesis persists.

The Hyperspace Echo Hypothesis

This last explanation relies on the fact that many starships while out exploring the galaxy have encountered hyperspace anomalies that can split living beings into two exact duplicates. Captain John Fry himself during his tenure as a starship captain was duplicated and recombined more than a dozen times.

This idea is backed up by the fact that many of these Earths represent one aspect of the hypothetical main-line Earth, a world who's culture is dominated by ancient Sparta, a gangster world, and so on. And most of the time when a being is split by one of these hyperspace anomalies it is along conceptual lines, one duplicate who is good, the other who is evil, one duplicate who is brave, the other cowardly, etc.

Indeed, this explanation goes a long way toward explaining why the Evil Empire exists between Earth-5, Sparta-2, Athenia-3 and Gamarlon-2.

However the current physics explanation as to how these hyperspace anomalies work sets a hard limit on the item duplicated at about 20,000,000 kilograms, far smaller than even the smallest planet, let alone an entire planetary system.

There are several other hypotheses that are far from mainstream. One states that our universe is a computer program running on a larger computer in another universe and the Earths represent a memory allocation error. Another particularly crack pot idea is that the alternate Earths are illusions and the minds of intelligent beings can't handle the truly alien worlds that exist, so they've imagined duplicated iconography over the completely alien creatures and symbols and the aliens have done likewise.

Thus far all the tests of these hypothesis have proven inconclusive. Perhaps some day we will learn the truth, but for now we must be content to wonder about the possibilities.

About the Author

Joey Peters is a writer, cartoonist and beauty contest champion from Boston. His work has appeared in the Boston Phoenix, Leftovers of the Living Dead, Inbound: Comics from Boston, and all across the internet.

You can follow him at tacolicious.net.

Other Ebooks

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Pete died and went to Hell ten years ago, but now that the Devil's quit his job maybe it's time for a change. So, along with his best friend, the demon Dante, they break out of Hell and return to Earth. Their attempts to escape responsibility are short lived, of course, and soon they're dragged kicking and screaming into infernal politics. Soon they find themselves interrogating eldritch abominations beyond imagination, immortal alchemists and even the Holy Ghost Pirate. Will Dante and Pete ever get all this crap squared away and get a chance to rest?

Copyright

Starship Victory: Season 1, Episode 1: The Last Boy on Earth is copyright Joey Peters, November 22nd, 2011. In accordance with his copyleftist beliefs this work will enter the public domain on November 22nd, 2025 and Joey Peters will renouce all rights afterward.

The cover of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license, based on work by Katherine Davis.

Table of Contents

The Last Boy on Earth

The Last Boy On Earth

On the Creation of the Multiple Earths

About the Author

Copyright