//------------------------------// // Angelo Thanatos // Story: A world with no giants // by TheSexyMenhir //------------------------------// In a world with no giants Ch.02 “Angelo Thanatos” Angelo turned around yet again. The clock told him that it was midnight, which simply couldn’t be right, that would mean that he had spent the last four hours tossing and turning in his bed. With a groan he rolled onto his back, facing the huge skylight above his bed. Usually he found the sight of the night sky calming, but today Anna’s question had stuck with him, plaguing him with unbidden thoughts. “Will I still be around when we finish the project?” he asked nobody in particular, maybe hoping that some merciful god would have pity on him and reveal his future. This wasn’t like him. Yes, he had always been a man of vision, of dreams, but never had his head been stuck in the clouds like this. Countless scenarios of the future passed before his eyes, and he was shocked in how many of them his life would end without his dreams ever coming to fruition. He let out a wry laugh. Yesterday was supposed to be the pinnacle of his life and here he was lying in his bed despairing about the future instead. He pried his eyes from the mental pictures and instead focussed on the stars above. He had often heard people talk about how looking at the stars had made them feel small and insignificant, but until today he had never really understood why. Suddenly the blinking lights of the night sky seemed to mock him and his laughable human lifespan. The normally ignored darkness, that hung between the stars became an insurmountable rift that would forever seal him of from the rest of the universe. He was easily twice Anna’s age and yet even that young girl with all her life still ahead of her had been startled by the sheer size of the project they were conducting. How could this foolish old man ever even dream of being anymore than a dust speck in this huge laughable game that was life? Angelo regretted sleeping alone. Had there been a warm body besides him, maybe he could have fought of this undeniable feeling of dread and loneliness. Not simply the feeling of being alone, but feeling like it was never truly possible for two people to understand each other, like the walls between peoples were just as insurmountable as the void between the stars. He stood up. This night he wouldn’t get any sleep anyway. Quickly he prepared coffee, but after he had poured the steaming black liquid into his cup he just sat there in his clean kitchen, staring at the drink in his hand while it slowly cooled down. The quiet “tick-tock” of the clock was the only sound that could be heard. In a sudden fit of anger he threw his cup at the offending timepiece. A brown stain remained on the wall as streams of black brew ran down the wallpaper. On the counter below lay the broken clock, puddles of coffee gathering around it, as if it was bleeding out. Shocked, Angelo looked at his murder victim. He broke down to the floor sobbing. His wails were childlike and unhampered, strains of snot running down his face as he was reduced to a babbling mass. It were several minutes before he managed to regain some sort of self control. He ran for the front door, still wearing only his pyjama but he didn’t care. He needed to get out of this house. Maybe a small midnight ride along the coast would do him some good. Shivering he opened his car. It felt weird laying his bare feet onto the pedals but he didn’t dare going back into the house. A cold chill ran down his spine, and quickly he turned up the car-heating. Hesitantly he turned the car key, and the humming of the motor filled the cabin. He choked the car two times before he finally managed to leave his driveway. It took him only fifteen minutes to reach the shore, but as soon as he could see the water he shivered once again. The normally friendly rocking waves looked just like the dark featureless void in the night sky, without any sunlight to reflect on them. Instead of watching the sea he tried to concentrate on the street, on the purring of the motor, and the feel of faux leather under his hands, but the excitement that normally overtook him when he realized the amounts of power he could call forth with a press of his foot, didn’t come. The lousy one hundred miles per hour he could coax from the motor suddenly seemed very insufficient. --- Angelo looked at the flat glass building. He had spent another hour driving every which way he wanted and only when he had backed into his parking space he had realized where his nightly journey had taken him. Somehow he wasn’t surprised and now that he thought about it, it was almost logical that he wound up here. The parking lot was empty except for his own car. At this early hour, the staff was probably fast asleep and at home. For a few minutes he just sat in his car, not thinking about anything just staring at glass front. A bit of light, it’s source untraceable, reflected of the chrome plated shield above the main entrance. “Future” was the only illegible word. The car door slammed shut behind him, as Angelo made his way for the front gate. --- “The Suit” was uncomfortable. While the thick protective layer around him would certainly protect him from nearly any environmental situation, including vacuum, searing heat, and radiation, it hadn’t been built with user friendliness in mind. The rough inner layer rubbed against his bare skin, no other clothes would fit into it’s tight confines, and it had been designed with a smaller men in mind originally. Ramirez had been chosen to do the first test run. It had been a bit of a bother setting up the experiment alone, let alone getting past the front door and powering up the generators without causing any alarm, but he had found that his broad education could be used in very creative ways. In his hand lay the flip-switch with which the experiment would be started. Originally it had been conceived as a joke, but now it would allow him to start the process while inside the test chamber. The test chamber was nearly completely dark. It was illogical but Angelo had only lit the most necessary lights, even though there was nobody he would alarm twenty meters below ground level. The snapping of the switch had something final to it, and soon after it was followed by the sound of metal hitting the tiled floor. Angelo stared at the center of the steel circle. Like the last time it took a few moments before the hole began to form. As the black fog cleared, Angelo noticed that the stars inside the rectangle weren’t giving of any light. The eerie feeling he had felt during the first time returned, amplified by the implications of what he was about to do. Hesitantly he took his first step towards the portal. “This is crazy!” Angelo shook his head, trying to clear his mind of the unbidden doubts that suddenly clouded it, or was it just his common sense finally acting up? He had no idea where the portal might lead, or for that matter if it would even lead anywhere. His atoms could be ripped asunder, his body thrown into a sun or a black hole, he wasn’t even sure if anything would happen if he touched the dark surface of the portal, maybe he would just wind up lying on the floor behind the portal looking like the fool he was. He took another step. One more step and he would touch the “hole’s” surface. He raised his foot. He sat it down again. Finally the doubts had reached his mind. Was this really worth it? Would he risk everything he got, over a stupid fit of thanatophobia? “Will I still be around when we finish this?” The question resounded within his head. He took the final step. --- A red haired women, wearing only her pyjama, entered the test chamber just as the shape of a yellow suit vanished through star filled hole. --- Angelo’s first step through the portal was accompanied by a sickening fit of vertigo. Gravity seemed to shift around him, as his body hit the ‘surface’ of the portal and for a short moment he felt like he was standing on the side of a cliff staring down into the star filled abyss below him. The sensation of falling persisted and he could feel himself losing his footing, as his own weight pushed him through the rift in space-time. His first instinct was to let himself fall backwards, back into the safety of the laboratory, only the twisted determination of his half-broken mind drove him forward. He jumped into the darkness. A mistake as he soon found out. The momentum of his leap of faith send him spinning uncontrollably, the stars before his eyes blurring into white stripes. Blaring alarms reverberated inside his helmets and brightly flashing warning lights, that lined his visor, blinded him temporarily. Angelo fought hard to keep his lunch down, fully aware that throwing up inside the sealed helmet could very well spell his death. He swallowed hard as he felt bile collect on his tongue. Shifting his attention to the inside of his helmet, Angelo experienced a strange case of ‘seasickness’. Reading the different gauges and scales that lined his field of view at least proved to be ample distraction. The thermometer was jumping erratically between absolute zero and six thousand degrees kelvin, which placed his current position somewhere between the empty void between galaxies and the surface of the sun. Seeing that he was neither freezing to death, nor incinerated instantly he dismissed the warning signals and turned of the alarm. The same applied to the radiometer and the geiger counter who both measured enough radiation to melt him out of his suit; this amount of energy wasn’t even released at the core of an nuclear reactor. Most perplexing however was the readout of the spectrometer, which tried to convince him that there was no visible light outside of his suit, even though he could clearly see stars through the plastic-pane of his helmet. The same curiosity that had once lead him down the path to become a scientist, took ahold of Angelo’s mind once more, compelling him to ignore the lingering sense of nausea and to scan his surroundings. During his first glance through the portal the sight of white stars against a black background had seemed familiar, reminiscent of the night sky he saw through his bedroom window, but now that he was surrounded by them on all sides the differences became glaringly obvious. The stars themselves had no resemblance to the soft lights that filled the firmament after sundown, they seemed more like white blotches of paint, their edges much too sharp to be mistaken for normal stars. However most unsettling wasn’t the appearance of the stars, but the black void that filled the space between them. Not a few hours ago the sight of the azure skies had sent him into a fit of existential terror but compared to the utter darkness of this void it suddenly seemed almost warm and welcoming. Whenever he tried to fix his eyes on a particular part of the firmament, it seemed to shift around as if the black in black sky had some hidden texture to it, just barely outside of what was visible to the human eye. Angelo blinked a few times. Had that star just vanished? Any further investigation was cut short by yet another alarm going off. This time it was his air-gauge warning him that he had only another hour of air left in the tanks. Had it really been a complete hour already? The fact that he had absolutely no way to determine his position suddenly became a very pressing concern to Angelo. Even if he weren’t still spinning around his own axis, he would have been hard pressed to make any assessment of his current state. He had lost sight of the portal the moment he had been sucked through it, and the featureless void didn’t offer any pointers to determine his own position or even if he was still moving. One thing that stayed with him was the feeling of falling, but he was still hesitant to attribute the description “down” to any particular direction. By the time the vanishing star entered his mind again he had long since forgotten where he had seen it. Intently he scanned the foreign constellations, seeing as the nature of the stars was the only thing he could investigate about his surroundings at the moment and he was still determined to find out as much as possible about the strange place he had stumbled into. At first he had thought that the portal had brought him to some empty corner of space, where he would drift through the vacuum until his air ran out, but this would neither explain the strange readings of his monitoring equipment nor the abnormal appearance of the stars. Several theories flooded his mind, some of them realistic and some of them fueled by too many late night sci-fi-marathons, but he dismissed them all, he still knew too little to make any sort of assumption. There! This time he had caught the moment one of the stars disappeared. It hadn’t simply blinked out of existence, but was gradually covered up, as if a giant curtain had been drawn over part of the night sky. He continued his observation, hoping to find a pattern in the disappearance of the celestial objects. Sure enough, another star vanished a few moments later, however near it another star was revealed in it’s stead. He had meant the curtain-metaphor as a joke, but slowly but surely he he became convinced that there was actually something out there, blocking his sight of the stars. He didn’t like this trail of thoughts at all, since the position and relation of the vanishing and reappearing stars either meant that whatever was out there was gargantuan, or much closer than he would’ve liked. He continued to watch the stars, but the more was revealed the more he wished to just close his eyes and forget that he had seen anything at all. Slowly his eyes and mind adjusted, now that he knew what to look out for, and bit by bit the figure of the mysterious star-blocker was revealed. A serpentine body, long and slender, stretching through space. A scaly hide, of a dark black colour that matched that of the void between the stars. His mind reeled as he realized that it’s body wasn’t of the colour of the night sky, it was the night sky. What he had thought a black void, in reality was a writhing mass of snake like bodies filling every part of the sky, the occasional “star” the only hint to what may lie behind them. As if the revelation had broken an invisible wall between him and those creatures, one of them crept into his field of view, close enough for the lights of his helmet to reflect on the dark scales. The sheer size of it made a mockery of words like huge or gargantuan, and Angelo could only stare in terrified awe as continent sized scales rushed past him at worrying speeds. He couldn’t pry his eyes from the spectacle before him, but eventual his momentum got the better of him and it vanished from his sight again. He panicked as he thought about what might happen if the creature came too close to him, and the fact that he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, even if he did face the planet sized creature, made for cold comfort only. Angelo was still busy trying to calm his terror stricken mind, but apparently it wasn’t meant to be. Of in the distance, how far away exactly was hard to tell with the nature of this place, one of the creatures began to shift. He wasn’t sure if it was just the adrenaline or if the creature really turned with glacial pacing, but no matter how fast a glowing red crescent slowly turned into a bright shining sphere as one of the serpents looked at him. Angelo had never been a man of faith, but as the alien red gaze passed over him, he prayed for a miracle, since nothing short of an act of god would hide his bright yellow suit against the black backdrop. Sure enough the creatures looked directly at him, its black iris locked onto the foreign elements in this black and white world. It open it mouths. What washed over Angelo couldn’t so much be classified as sound, as a massive shockwave and only the barest resemblances of sound ever reached Angelos ears. Eerie whale-like singing washed through the vacuum making Angelo curl up, as much as his suit allowed him to. More and more of the behemoths opened their eyes and looked towards the involuntary yellow astronaut. Had there ever been any doubt about the nature of this place, it was eradicated now that the beings began to move, their bodies turning the sky into a roiling mass. With nowhere to hide and no way to change his course, Angelo was condemned to watch the behemoths approach to end his life. Hadn’t he been frozen stiff in terror, he would have laughed. Hadn’t the worry of being small and insignificant driven him to this place? And now he had the attention of thousands upon thousands of beings, each huge enough to eradicate his own world without much of a second thought. The creatures closed in on him, their massive scaled bodies rubbing against each other, in a display of power that his mind outright refused to understand. One beast in particular seemed the closest to him, and it would be only seconds until he vanished in it’s humongous maw. Out of the corner of his eyes he noticed another shape, not black like the goliathan snakelike things but white. Only a short distance away a patch of white adorned the sky, it’s form perfectly rectangular, and it’s colour pristine. This discovery would have been a short lived one, after all he was about to be crushed between the jaws of a creature that dwarfed planets, but a shock went through the the gargantuan snakelike being. Moments later the cause became evident for Angelo: Another creature had locked his jaw around the girth of the first one. Not wanting to find out if he had found a defender, or if he had just become the subject of a fight for food, Angelo reached for his air tank. If he emptied it, it could produce enough thrust to carry him towards the white anomaly, even if that meant giving up on his supply of breathable air. He had a theory what exactly the white square was, and if he was right it could very well spell his only chance at survival. … Provided the air in his suit held out... The tag of one of the creatures tails graced his vision reminding him what the alternative was. The thick coated glove of the hazmat suit, came down onto the valve of the bottle, denting it but not breaking it. Angelo slammed his hand down another time, and another time, his eyes darting over to the fighting place of the creatures every now and then. With a final effort the bottles outlet suddenly gave way, sending Angelo propelling through space on a stream of frozen oxygen. The current of compressed air was violent and unpredictable and for a short moment Angelo feared that he had missed the white shape, but then a bright blinding light surrounded him on all sides and he could feel his body hitting something solid. Angelo closed his eyes, but his ears picked up the songs of birds, and a gentle wind blowing through treetops. A pure undiluted joy, unlike anything he had ever experienced before, spilled into his mind. A soft chuckle escaped his lips, only the prelude to a much longer hearty laugh, that segued over into wild unhampered guffaws. For several minutes he lay there on the ground, unaware of his environment, relinquishing in the simple knowledge that he was still alive. Before he could compose himself, the stress of the day finally caught up with his brain, and he passed out.