Chapter 5: It Was Earth All Along
John's been pretty thoroughly lost from the moment he stepped out of the car. He's never been in Seacouver before, and has never found any reason to memorize a map of it, so the street signs mean nothing to him. Besides, he has nowhere to go even if he knew where he is and where anything in Seacouver is. Even acting on the (large) assumption that his mind isn't just being frelled with, and that he really is in a previously unrealized reality, he doesn't know anybody in Seacouver or even in this reality. He doesn't have any money valid on Earth, although he does have a few kretmas left over from his shopping expedition. He doesn't have any identification, and his social security number probably isn't his in this reality. So he just wanders around randomly. As time passes he starts to doubt his "mindfrell" theory more and more; unless their strategy is to wait until he gets bored and goes to find them, he can't see any reason for them to just let him go like this. Of course, if he's trapped inside of his own mind (or somebody else's mind, or a computer) he probably can't escape anyway, but it still seems strange. As a veteran of God knows how many mindfrells (for all he knows, he's been mindfrelled into forgetting some of the times he's been mindfrelled. Believing that might make him paranoid, but it might also make him right), he can tell when something's off.
All the newspapers he's seen have had the correct date (or a correct-ish date, since he hasn't been back on Earth in so long he barely even keeps track of the year anymore, and most of the newspapers he sees are on the ground and probably several days old), and events he's never heard of adorning their pages. Again, this is nothing conclusive (really, nothing can conclusively tell him this isn't a mindfrell, because if it's good enough it could theoretically include anything), but it adds onto that small scrap of doubt in his mind.
"Your eye's twitching again," Harvey notes unhelpfully inside his mind. He's dressed like he's homeless and sitting against the wall of a building with a cardboard sign reading "Figment of his imagination" and a Styrofoam cup with money in it in his hand.
"Hey, aren't you supposed to be dead?" John asks.
"That's what I thought, too."
A woman steps out in front of him in the alley and pulls a sword out of seemingly nowhere.
"What the frell do you think you're doing?" John asks as she approaches him.
"Morgan Dekker," she says. "I'm after your head." And then she swings the sword right at him like she means business.
Aeryn has been trying to teach John how to defend himself for the past eight years, so he manages to duck under the sword, but if he hadn't…he'd be a foot shorter. And it isn't exactly easy to stay alive when getting attacked with a sword; after all, they're made to kill, and he gets the impression she's actually good with one. "Why?" he asks urgently. He's only been in this reality for a few hours, certainly not enough time to piss her off enough to come after him with a sword.
"There can be only one," she says, like it's actually justification for attacking somebody with a sword. He's run into enough strange thought processes in the Uncharted Territories and Tormented Space, but he'd never thought he'd hear one so incomprehensible on Earth.
The next time she swings her sword, it connects shallowly with his hand (meaning he still has a hand, although he'll probably need stitches) on the backswing. "Frell!" he yelps and clutches his hand as blood drips onto the ground. How many times is he going to bleed today? Maybe only once more, if she actually manages to decapitate him. Something about actually getting sliced open by a three foot hunk of steel makes him realize this woman's serious; if she can she'll take his head off. He draws Winona and shoots her, like he's shot so many people over the years.
"This is against the rules," she says before she dies, her sword clattering to the ground of the alley beside her.
"Why the frell would she attack me like that? And with a sword?" John asks rhetorically. "It makes no sense."
"Perhaps she holds the same beliefs as the men in the car," Harvey hypothesizes. "Members of the same cult, for lack of a better term."
"Yeah, but if it's a cult why are they trying so hard to force me to join it? And how did she know to come after me? I mean, surely they don't just grab random people off of the street, tell them they're immortal, and then send people after them with swords, because I think the police would notice that."
"Perhaps…" Harvey pauses. "Perhaps they aren't a cult after all. Perhaps they're telling the truth."
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Look at your hand, John."
John looks down at his hand, which come to think of it feels pretty strange; was there poison on the blade or something? But no, his hand feels weird because there is frelling lightning on the wound. He watches it in shock, because what can he do about spontaneous hand lightning, anyway?
The lightning stops quickly, leaving behind a completely uninjured hand. John turns his hand over in shock- he had been injured, right? He'd needed stitches? But now he doesn't and isn't. "This isn't possible."
"I think maybe they were correct," Harvey says.
"But I can't be immortal! The other John Crichton was mortal enough, and we were exactly the same."
"Perhaps your immortality is a recent development, or at least more recent than his death. The Ancients, perhaps?"
"But I only saw Einstein, and he wouldn't make me immortal even if he could. And especially not when he took the wormhole information from my mind."
"Perhaps he had some reason you don't know of. Or perhaps he was unable to remove the information without making you immortal. He doesn't even necessarily know that you are now immortal."
"But if they're so terrified about people knowing about wormholes, why even let me live, much less live forever? Jack told me that I could figure it out in a few decades even without the wormhole knowledge."
"Perhaps you have proved yourself to them, despite using the wormhole weapon."
"That seems unlikely."
Their conversation is interrupted as the woman comes back from the dead with a gasp.
"Weren't you dead?" John asks rhetorically. "Are you going to stop trying to kill me?"
"You should have taken my head while you had the chance," she sneers, picking up her sword and swinging it again.
"Apparently not," John says to himself, and shoots her again. She falls to the ground without comment this time. He goes over and picks up her sword. If he needs to decapitate her to make her stay dead, he doesn't really have a problem with that. Her death is just a drop in the ocean of deaths he's been the cause of. It's nothing when compared to some of the things he's done since leaving Earth for the first time.
"You need to strike between the vertebrae," Harvey says, dressed up as a scientist and pointing to a chart of a human skeleton in the same position the woman is in. "And put your back into it!"
John takes aim and tries to pretend he's just using an axe to chop wood. But the sword feels a lot different than any axe he's ever used, in length and weight and balance; and it feels like it's been used frequently for years upon years, maybe even centuries if the men in the car had been telling the truth and she really is immortal. If he really is immortal. He swings the sword down and it goes through her neck like- well, not like a knife through butter. The sword's sharp enough, but he's never done this before and apparently necks are full of all sorts of things that are harder to cut through than skin, so he has to make more effort than he'd subconsciously been expecting to need to make the sword go all the way through. On the whole, he prefers Winona. By a lot.
There's less blood than he'd expected, as her head rolls away from her body. It might be because she was immortal, or because she was already dead (temporarily) when he took her head off, or because he'd made assumptions without any medical training, but there's only about as much blood as there had been when she'd cut his hand.
"Ding, dong, the witch is dead," he says, resting the tip of the sword on the ground. Then the corpse starts to spark with what looks like a much more powerful version of the lightning on his hand. "Frell, I thought she was supposed to die without her head!"
The lightning keeps building for a couple of seconds, and then it leaves the corpse to strike out at everything else- the walls, the windows (which explode), the trash cans, John…
The lightning hurts; it's lightning, after all, for all it didn't come from the sky, and the human body isn't made for getting struck by lightning, even if it happens sometimes. But he doesn't think normal, from the skies lightning feels like this, either. It's somehow invigorating, like he's being infused with everything Morgan Dekker had been, everything she had seen and had done and had known. Around him, the alley's getting trashed, but he's riding high on a painful lightning bolt that is Morgan Dekker.
The lightning stops, and his rigid muscles relax.
"John, I think you should see this," Harvey says, and they're sitting on the roof of his car and watching a movie of the memories he apparently got from Morgan. He doesn't think he'd ever have had access to them without Harvey's help.
John's silent for a few minutes, watching the movie. "I think this might be real," he says finally.
" I hate every ape I see
From chimpan-a to chimpan-zee
No, you'll never make a monkey out of me
Oh my God, I was wrong
It was Earth all along
You've finally made a monkey
Yes, you've finally made a monkey out of me," Harvey sings, dressed in a tattered version of John's IASA suit.
"This isn't Planet of the Apes," John says. "Especially not musical Planet of the Apes."
"But the song is so fitting."
John ignores that. "Anyway, if this is all real, I think we need to pay a visit to Mac."
He pulls the business card out of the pocket he'd put it in. "I just hope I can find it."
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