The Arr Chronicles -Part 6 (The Final Chapter)

[Sonnenburg]

The Arr Chronicles Part 6
by Chuck Sonnenburg and Scott Gordee

The doors to the lift opened and Comm. Armstrong stumbled out, having the sensation that his spine was now located somewhere near his feet. The bridge was chaos, even more than usual. Even from where he stood he could see the size of the nanite cloud compared to nearby planets; the fact that they could be compared sent a chill down his feet.
“Report,” he said, hoping a crewman was levelheaded enough to fill him in on the details. He was surprised when Captain Random began rambling at him.
“There’s the ships and we need a football and we don’t have a football! Do you see a football?! I don’t see a football!!! And now they’re bigger and there’s not a football in the universe big enough to take them down and-“ He was cut off as Bambi slapped him across the face with enough force to leave a hand-shaped welt on his cheek. “As you were,” he said in a more normal, commanding tone. Bambi made an obscene gesture as she shuffled back to her station, sipping at her coffee.
“I’m afraid that we haven’t found that football, sir,” Armstrong reported, taking his chair. “At this point I’m not sure anything can stop them.”
Random had a rare look of concentration on his face. “Does anyone have any suggestions?”
“All weapons, sir!” Riprock said excitedly. “We have the element of surprise.”
“I don’t think that’ll matter,” Armstrong pointed out.
“All weapons!!!” he repeated, as if Armstrong had somehow failed to grasp the point.
“Uh, sir,” Buddy said, “the nanites are firing their generation cannon.”
“Evasive maneuvers!”
“Initiating gradual turn to the right, sir,” Buddy said. “Wait, it looks like they’re firing in another direction.”
The crew watched in silence as the whisker-thin beam leapt out of the cloud and hit the star at the heart of the system. It was eerie in the silence of space to watch the star slowly roll and boil around the beam. There was an intense flash and the star exploded, reigning gaseous debris across the system in the most awesome display of artificial destruction any had ever witnessed.
“Does anyone ELSE have any suggestions?” Random asked.
“Sir, the nanites are moving into hyperspace to avoid the shockwave.”
“Lay in a pursuit course,” Random said.
“Yes sir. Are you sure sir? You know, with the whole star blowing and all that-“
“Lay in a pursuit course!” Random shouted.
“Sir,” Armstrong said as the Arr slipped into hyperspace, “I think we have to concentrate all our weapons on that dodecahedron.”
“Yeah, those mother-humping dodecahedrons won’t know what hit ‘em!” Random agreed, apparently unsure what it was but willing to adopt any swear word that was handy.
Armstrong remembered that the captain wasn’t briefed on the weapons of the nanites. “The dodecahedron is a single ship within the cloud, sir. Without it, we can disable their main weapon.”
“Good. Riprock, make it dead.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Wait!” Armstrong held up his hands. “You need to hit that ship with as much raw power as possible. Nonek, can you get the coordinates of the dodecahedron.”
“Yes, for all the good it’ll do,” the disembodied brain remarked. His voice was absent of the usual arrogance in the face of a lifeform that was, in some small way, his superior. “Here’s your target, lieutenant.”
Wasting no time, Riprock began launching torpedo after torpedo at the microscopic ship. On the screen, sphere-shaped voids appeared in the clouds where the torpedoes exploded. Their lasers cut a path of destruction through the cloud as Riprock hit the buttons with savage fury. The improvements in their weaponry were causing more damage than before, but the cloud was far more massive. Armstrong scanned the target, his jaw hanging open as he saw one ship floating amongst the gap in the cloud. He watched as a laser with enough power to penetrate the crust of a planet bounced harmlessly off its surface. It wasn’t a fluke; three follow-up shots also failed to do even slight damage to the dodecahedron. “It’s still there,” he said dejectedly.
“Impossible,” Riprock said. “I’ve hit it with everything we’ve got, and-“ The dodecahedron appeared on the screen. Riprock screamed, pulled out a knife and threw it at the ship. There was silence as the sound of electric sparks and the vibrating blade that protruded from the screen filled the bridge.
“Captain,” Armstrong said slowly, “did command fit us with another Exodus Missile?”
A hush descended on the bridge. The Exodus Missile was the Confederation’s weapon of last resort. It was used to end the Great Klinkon War, and the devastation had been so great that the leadership swore to do all they could never to fire one in anger again. Riprock has launched ninety-two, but he was quite happy at the time.
“Yes,” Random said. He took a deep breath through his nose. “Set the missile to detonate on the coordinates, Mr. Riprock.”
“Lieutenant.”
“Lt. Riprock,” he corrected. There was the sound of breaking glass and the ship lurched as Riprock pulled down on the lever to open the entire bottom of the ship. The giant missile leaped forward, passing through the nanite fleet like a… like a big missile going through a bunch of really tiny ships. It reached the dodecahedron and exploded, scrambling the Arr’s sensors because of their close range. When they were back up, a significant portion of the cloud had been vaporized, but the ships were already reproducing. That wasn’t important at the moment, as Armstrong scanned for the-
Had they been right? Armstrong wondered. Was this ship truly indestructible? He had no explanation for the continued presence of this one ship amongst all of the fleet despite their every effort. “I don’t suppose we have any more missiles,” he asked with defeat in his voice.
The silence on the bridge at the obvious was too much. “Bambi,” Random said, his voice sounding crushed, “tell command we need reinforcements. Every ship.”
“I don’t think that’ll make a difference-“
“So we do nothing!” Random interrupted. “If the human race is going down, we’re going down fighting! Football be damned!”
As Bambi relayed the message Armstrong left his chair. There was nothing more he could do here, but maybe he could talk to Zero about some plan. Given the truth of the engineers’ words he wasn’t optimistic.
Armstrong picked himself up off the floor of the lift and entered engineering. It was like a ghost ship. The entire engineering staff was lounging around, passing bottles about. The air was filled with the smell of shattered dreams, as if they’re lives until now were just a pleasant dream they had awoken from. Armstrong looked at the pitiful band. “Where’s Zero?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” someone yelled. Armstrong looked at the reclining figure. “Said there was no point in going on. Can’t say I blame him.”
“All right, get up,” Armstrong said. No one moved. “You are still officers in the Confederation, now on your feet. We have a job to do. Who’s next in line?”
“That would be One, sir,” someone pointed out.
“Okay, let’s get going; we have a weapon to build.”
“I used to build weapons once,” Three said solemnly, almost unrecognizable without ever muscle in his body clenched. “That was before my life became AN EMPTY MEANINGLESS PILE OF SHIT!!!”
“Get a hold of yourself,” Armstrong said. “You’re Three, and you’re an engineer.”
“To hell with engineering, and my name is Fred. Fred… rhymes with dead. And lead. And a bunch of other stuff. Who’s got a bottle?”
“Okay,” Armstrong said, “I’ve had enough. You’re job is to help me build a weapon to stop this thing, so let’s get to it. Now, who is number One?!”
“I am not a number, I’m a person.”
“I don’t care what you call yourself, I need an engineer.”
“Sir,” Fred said, getting shakily to his feet, “it’s hopeless. If there was a way, we’d do it, but you can’t destroy that thing. Just accept it. No force in the Confederation can destroy it.” He came forward, and he seemed so full of awe and fear that he was stone cold sober. “It’s an aspect of the universe. It’s part of the building blocks of what is everything. Can you destroy a vacuum? Can you destroy a hole? It’s not science, sir; it’s a construct so entwined with the cosmos it’s practically alive.”
Armstrong looked to the faces of all the other engineers. They all were nodding in the same sense of respect. He’d seen them pull off things men said were impossible; if they said this thing was indestructible, it was. He looked down, unable to resist the same feeling of defeat. Fred passed him the bottle and he took a long pull. “Thanks,” he mumbled, passing it back. He leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, wondering if there was a higher consciousness in the universe watching out for them in times like this; something that could tell them how to stop this menace, this living aspect of the aether…
“Fred,” he said slowly, “you say this thing is alive.” He looked up at the engineer. “Can we talk to it? Establish communication?”
“You want…?” Fred stumbled about in confusion, but the question seemed to sink in. A smile crossed his face. “We can try,” he said with that same look they always had. For the engineers of the Arr, some impossible things are less impossible than others. “I’ll get Zero. Eighteen, get the coffee going; I wanna hear my pancreas crying!” He activated his communicator. “Zero, we need you right away.”
“I told you, I’m not coming out until the universe is destroyed.”
Fred walked over and opened the nearby door. He took Zero by the hand and led him out, the old engineer protesting the whole way. But as they walked over Fred started filling him in on the plan, and by the time he was in front of Armstrong that same look was on his face. “Gonna be tricky,” he said, grabbing a cup of coffee the size of his head, “but I think I’ve got a way to make it work. Let me get back to you.”
Armstrong left the group as the energy level seemed to pick up. Their confidence was boosting his own. “Bridge,” he said into the communicator, “what’s the status of the battle. Any bad news?”
“Well that depends, sir,” Bambi said with a cough. “Did you know anyone on Deck Four?”
“Never mind,” Armstrong said, feeling a slight dip in his morale. “Put me through to the captain.”
“What is it, Armstrong?” came the frustrated voice of Random.
“Sir,” Armstrong said with a smile on his face, “we may have a football.”
On the bridge, Random sat up straighter in his chair. He got slowly to his feet, watching as they continued exchanging fire with the nanite fleet. He slowly tightened his hand into a fist. “We’re coming for you Charlie,” he said in a low voice. “Oh-ho yeeesss.”
A few minutes later Zero called him back over. “We’ve got an idea, but it’s dangerous.”
“At this point dangerous is a step up,” Armstrong said. “What’s the plan?”
“Telepathic communication,” Zero said, indicating some graphs and diagrams that Armstrong couldn’t begin to understand. “Carl here,” he put his hand on the shoulder of a nearby engineer, “has volunteered to make contact.”
“You sure you want to do this?” Armstrong asked.
“Are you kidding?” he said with surprise. “I got the short straw!” He kissed it in appreciation before carefully tucking it into his pocket.
“The device is going to be a little unorthodox,” Zero said, leading Armstrong into the core of engineering. “No one has attempted to contact a sentient device before, especially one filled with a facet of the universe.” He looked down a little as he approached, almost as if he didn’t deserve to look upon it. “The dodecahedron,” he said quietly, “is more than a machine. It’s living superscience… it’s greater than us all. A god in a machine. That’s why we’ve named our device…” he flipped the switch to illuminate a raised chair surrounded by polished pipes, tubes and devices, “… the Deus ex Machina.”
Armstrong looked it over, patting the chief engineer on the back in appreciation. “It’s beautiful,” he remarked.
Zero wiped a tear from his eye. “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever built,” he said. He slammed a cup of coffee in appreciation.
The communicator sounded; it was the captain. “Commander,” he said with a bit of nervousness in his tone, “we need that football.”
Armstrong turned to Zero. “Is it ready?” He nodded. “Good luck.” He stepped aside as they began strapping Carl into the chair. Twenty-One offered him a last minute cup of coffee before securing the belts. He gave one final tug, then turned and gave Zero the thumbs-up sign.
“Charge,” he ordered. A subsonic hum filled engineering; it was the only sound as the rest of the group held their breaths. A white cone-shaped beam of light hit the center of Carl’s forehead, and his eyes became wide. The hum increased in pitch, threatening to drive them all insane… well, Armstrong anyway. No one else seemed to notice. Instrument panels cracked throughout the room as the whine began to become pulsed, then staccato, and then one large blast of sound.
Carl screamed.
On the bridge, the crew watched in dread as the energy pattern again began passing through the cloud. The dodecahedron was in position now, ready to unleash the unfathomable energies onto the Arr again. They had a feeling they weren’t going to be as lucky as the last time. “Armstrong,” Random mumbled into the communicator, “we need a footbaaaall….”
The mind of Carl brushed the essence of the dodecahedron. It was more than he could take in. He had hoped to say something or learn something, to try to establish some connection with it. Instead, his mind spilled over it like an egg landing on a boulder. The sum of his experiences were taken in by the dodecahedron and analyzed in a way beyond ones and zeroes, beyond human ways of comprehension. It saw through him what it had been used to do, the chaos such an orderly shape had been used to inflict upon a universe ruled by mathematics. It found the entire thing – to impose a human emotion upon it – distasteful.
The combined energies of the nanite fleet flooded into the dodecahedron, the only thing in the universe that could contain such power. For a moment, the living shape allowed this new information to be properly weighed against the commands of the microscopic lifeforms within its form. It reached a conclusion that – in keeping with its own geometric perfection – was logical and precise.
The bridgecrew of the Arr watched in disbelief as the energy reversed itself, passing through the nanite fleet and destroying everything in its path. In less than a minute it was over; there was only one single nanite ship left. It remained because nothing could destroy it… not even itself. “Did… did they do it?” Buddy asked.
Random nodded with a smirk on his face. “Landed flat on your ass, didn’t you Charlie.”
Below in Engineering Armstrong and Zero stepped close to Carl’s prone form. He was still breathing, but barely. “Carl?” Armstrong asked. “Carl can you hear me?”

Carl looked up. The dodecahedron towered over him, causing a flood of complex emotions within him. It drew him in, pulling him down a tunnel full of bright shining lights he found impossible to ignore. He felt his speed reaching the impossible, but there was no fear, no fear...
He took a sip of wine and returned to his meal. He took a bite, reached for his napkin, and in the process sent the glass tumbling off the table and shattering on the floor.

“Carl?” Armstrong repeated, fearing the worst.
“I see now,” he replied, his eyes wide, his face suddenly bearing the most ecstatic and contented expression Armstrong had ever seen. “It’s all so simple.”
“What?”
“It’s shown me... it’s...” And suddenly he wore an expression of shock. “My God, it’s full of-“
“Never mind,” Zero interrupted. “Just forget about it and come back. It’s over.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s all so clear to me now.”
“What is?” Armstrong asked.
Carl looked as satisfied as anyone could ever be. “Life... the universe... everything....”
Armstrong glanced at the instruments but, well, how many times do you get this opportunity. “What is it? What’s the answer?”
“It’s...” And just like that Carl’s breathing stopped; there was nothing they could do.
“What is it?” Armstrong asked again. “Carl, what is-“
“It’s over,” Zero said. “Forget about it. We’ve won.” He reached up and closed Carl’s eyes.
“Yes, a battle,” Armstrong said. “But to be that close to...Who knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”
“Forty-two.”
“’Scuse me?”
“Forty-two,” Zero said, pointing at Carl. “He knew at the end. Didn’t you hear him say it?”
“No.”
“He said life’s full of shit.” He shrugged. “Can’t really argue with that.”
Armstrong mulled this over suspiciously as crewmen placed Forty-two’s remains in a body bag and wheeled it out for the sickbay. “Are you sure?”
“He said it was all pretty simple. Seems pretty simple to me.”
“I was hoping it would be ‘simple’ as in ‘beautiful,’” Armstrong confessed. He took a sip of coffee without thinking; one of his eyeballs tried to escape out of his ear. “Captain,” he said into the communicator, “we still need to deal with the dodecahedron. It’s probably not dangerous, but just to be sure, I think we should detain it until we can figure out what to do with it.”
“Perhaps a jar would work,” Zero suggested. Armstrong gave him a funny look and he shrugged. “Magnetic seal would keep its weapons from destroying the container, and it can’t go to hyperspace in such a short space.”
Armstrong had to admit, it didn’t sound so bad. “We can teleport it into a jar.”
“Actually, we’d have to teleport the jar around it. Remember, resistant to our energies.”
“Of course.” He returned to the bridge as Zero got to work on a jar. He filled in the captain on what happened as the dodecahedron was brought on board. “The question is, what do we do with it now?”
“I think we should put it aside and forget about it,” Random said. “Worked great so far.”
Armstrong should’ve expected this. “Sir, this thing has the potential to lead us to new levels of development, possibly beyond what humanity could ever have achieved on its own. We need to research it.”
“And it will be, commander. We’ll have top men working on it.”
“Who?”
“Top – men.”
On the lower decks of the Arr the jar containing the only known perfect dodecahedron in the universe was sealed inside a wooden crate. The crate was carefully put onto a dolly and wheeled down a row of crates that stretched to the ceiling, each holding some piece of technology the crew of the Arr had used once to save the Confederation and then put aside to forget about. As the scene is pulled back the crate becomes lost amongst the background as the crewmen turns the corner. Then there’s a hiss, a scream, and the sound of struggle. “There you are beautiful,” comes the voice of Mick Danger. “Let go of the nice man’s face before you implant your eggs inside his eyeballs. There’s a good girl. Oh bloody hell.”

The End

[Crayz9000]

The End? So quickly?

All in all, an excellent (and might I add hilarious) chapter. Let's see... 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and... Aliens?

Hazarding a guess.. we aren't going to see a Borg Dodecahedron anytime soon in Paradise Lost, are we?

[Beowulf]

[Kuja]

Very good. Not as uproarious as Chapter 5, but very good.

[Sonnenburg]

Thanks. I guess it's not the end.... I spoke with Scott and we decided we're going to do another one. If all goes well it will be out some time this week.

[Solid Snake]

what happened to chapter five and six?

[Sea Skimmer]

Nice ending to a very funny story.