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Stories from the Verse
Multiverser: The Thirteenth Story
Chapter 1: Beam 196
Table of Contents
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“Sod it all. Where in the dregs are we?”
“Good morning to you, too,” James Donald Beam said to his wife Sophia. A moment ago they had been storming the backup bridge of a colony spaceship, because Beam had claimed to be Emperor by right of conquest over a race of little green men, and one of those little green men was trying to contest his claim. Unfortunately, the contestant was serious enough to boobytrap the entire bridge on a deadman’s switch rigged to a chain of antigravity grenades, and everyone was killed. For better or worse, though, Beam and his five companions, including two wives, were versers, and death only moved them to a new world–randomly, of course, which was something of a problem, since now they would have to figure out what was possible in this world and what they had to do to survive.
He had apparently grown accustomed to this. Everyone after their first death arrived in the next world asleep. He had arrived awake, albeit confused a bit and lying on the ground. Sophia had not been at this quite as long, and had arrived asleep. Dawn, the diminutive feminine child killing machine he had picked up in his second (or third, if you counted home) world whose full name was something like Dawn Prototype with a letter/number code he never really memorized, apparently adapted more quickly, as she had long been awake and on guard before him. His burly blacksmith companion Bron and more recent wife (second, or third, if you counted the mother of the three children he left behind when he first died and left Earth) were both sleeping. That left Bob, which was a nickname for the alien Turbirb’durpa, a creature with tentacles on his face and interesting mental powers when they worked, who was currently in a weird dream state, somewhere between asleep and awake. Beam worried when Bob was dreaming like that, because he wasn’t certain whether he might cause something to happen telekinetically or something in response to whatever he was dreaming, but he hesitated to wake someone who was mostly asleep because they might not react well. His first concern won.
“Bob, wake up. You’re dreaming.”
Awake present. Bob rose to stand. Cannot fly. Inconvenient.
Beam nodded, taking in the information. He looked at Dawn.
“Sir, no threats detected in the immediate vicinity, sir,” she reported, and went back to looking right and left, and above. The ceiling was curved like the inside of a dome, but it rippled on occasion. Concerned that it might collapse, or shred and expose them to space, or something else, Beam got Bron to his feet. This was mostly by talking as the blacksmith was heavier than Beam.
The ground was covered in green grass, but it was spongy, and smoother and flatter than normal. As he walked toward the nearest bottom edge of the ceiling, he spoke to Dawn.
“Dawn, what’s the floor?”
“Sir, uncertain. It clearly is artificial in some respect, sir.”
Bron reached down with a large hand, and yanked up a handful of grass along with a white substrate beneath a thin layer of loose dirt. He crumbled it in his fingers, and it broke into white cellicles.
“I don’t know what this is,” he rumbled.
“I do. It’s styrofoam.” Looking closer at the handful in Bron’s hands, he pointed out that the styrofoam was in blocks, and each had holes in it that allowed the grass to grow through them. He thought a bit, and then spoke.
“OK, this means that the locals have at least a measure of modern technology. When I did not see lights, I wondered. Styrofoam is a type of plastic, which is made from oil, ah, petroleum, which you drill in the ground for.”
“You mean that this whole floor of this room is blocks?” Bron asked.
“Ah yes, that also means assembly line tech. Mass production. Not like in your world, Ashleigh.” He knew she was around him somewhere.
Ashleigh slid in front of him with a grin.
“I like this. It makes being stealthy so easy. Almost noiseless.”
Sophia snorted.
She was Wife Number One, by some measures, and was still not happy about being Wife Number One, and not just ‘wife’. Ashleigh as Wife Number Two was trying to win her over. So was Beam, but the process went in fits and starts with the occasional vulgarity from the fire mage.
“So how does it do to fire?” She conjured a flame about her hand, and reached for the ground. Panicked, Beam knocked her arm aside, and looking wounded, she pulled her forearm back, clasping it where he had hit her. Her eyes started to grow wide, but before she could unleash on him, Beam put both his hands up in front of her as he beseeched her, and hurriedly spoke.
“Please, darling, the answer is very badly. Styrofoam and fire do not mix well at all.”
“Oh. Um.” She examined her arm which had a slight red spot, and Beam kissed it. The whole group moved on then to the bottom of the curved roof which came down the ground. Looking at it more closely, Beam realized that the roof and wall were a balloon. In the bottom edge, a door frame of white stiff plastic held a plastic structured door with a handle of again plastic. But the door handle was black.
Trying it, he found it locked. No apparent means of unlocking it appeared to him, so he turned to Bron.
“If you would, big guy.”
Bron hefted his blacksmith’s hammer, and stepped forward.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
