Editor’s note: The following story is from the book, “The Further Adventures of The Borderland Biker, In Memory of Indian Larry and Doo Wop Music,” by Derrel Whitemeyer.
“I’m flesh again,” said a newly formed but rapidly aging, Augie, “but not for long.”
Not repulsed by the inventor’s decaying body, Larry ran to where Augie was standing. “Come with us. The Raider’s powerful enough to carry the three of us.”
Augie smiled, “Thank you for the offer but as you can see I’m finally dying and it’s for the best. People weren’t meant to live as long as I’ve lived”
Augie took two pair of amber lens glasses from inside his coat, “Pay attention; I’ve little time. First, put on these glasses; with them you’ll be able to see the path you’ll have to follow to get out of the City and to the airfield. It may even lead you out of the Old Places but I’m not sure. Your tank map’s of no use now that the parabolic disks have been turned off.”
Larry and I after putting on the glasses were able to see the path. It glowed like a three foot wide amber strip and led to an ascending ramp directly in front of us.
“The City and the dome will also begin to fade,” continued Augie. “Without the power being routed through the parabolic disks they’ll soon become only echoes. Years ago the City and the dome became dependent upon the power being generated by the disks. Without that power they’ll appear as I originally found them, as outlines, holographic blueprints.”
I had to ask, “What do you mean they’ll become echoes?”
“After I arrived the City and the dome began to scavenge power from the disks I’d built to generate power for the Hunter. I’d created the Hunter for protection,” answered Augie. “I wasn’t surprised; in fact I was counting on the extra power bringing both the City and the dome back online. I only learned later the dome was using that power to lure and capture wayward riders and make them into cyborgs.”
“As to who built this place or why it was abandoned I’ll never know. When I arrived the dome and the City had wasted away to where they were barely visible.”
“That’s why,” I said, “Charon couldn’t follow the river Styx here and had to enter through Marnie’s Borderland”
Augie continued, “When I made the parabolic disks to power the Hunter I was expecting, in fact I was counting on, the City and the dome siphoning off the extra power and coming back online. It wasn’t until later I learned the dome was using their power to create Wheelers. The Wheelers never entered the City so the Hunter left them alone. I, in turn, never entered the dome so the Wheelers left me alone.”
“It sounds like,” interrupted Larry, “you and the Wheelers had yourselves a stalemate.”
“I’d prefer to call,” continued Augie who was beginning to look more like the aging picture of Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray, “our arraignment a truce.”
“The City, the dome, the Wheelers and the Hunter were dependent upon the parabolic disks. Over time I even became dependent on the power of the disks. Hey, what can I say, it’s seductive; I became addicted to it. It’s why I’ve been able to live so long but as you can see it came at a price. The City, the dome and I became harmonic constructs…”
“You became,” I had to interrupt, “harmonic what?”
“Constructs,” continued Augie. “We became syncopated polarizations of what the disks were radiating. With the right frequencies of light, actually the frequencies are correlatives of Pythagorean chords; you can polarize light and gravitational waves into matter. It’s sorta like using ‘Cliff Notes’ to work around the Universal Field Theory but it works, at least on this scale and in this time and place.”
“As a musician,” I said, “I can understand the syncopation of chords to create harmony; however the syncopation of gravity and light to create matter is beyond me,”
“The key was not,” continues Augie, “to harmonize the two, but to find the frequencies where they were discordant. Light and gravity are transverse waves with no longitudinal vibrations. I found that by modifying my lighthouse lenses I was able to, by intersecting their waves, create discordance. Those points of discordance became everything you see surrounding us on a molecular level.”
“Hey, enough science for today; as you can see I’m rotting away. I’m surprised you can stand the sight of me let alone the smell. Ma’ n’ Pa, and you should hurry if you’re going to rescue them, can better explain the process than I can.”
“You’ve met,” Larry interrupted, “Ma n’ Pa?”
Augie answered Larry’s question but only after waiting for the back part of his scalp to fall off, “They arrived soon after I activated the disks. One day I heard a noise behind me, turned around and there they were smiling.”
Picturing in my mind what would’ve happened if either the Wheelers or the Hunter had attacked Ma n’ Pa; I had to ask, “When Ma n’ Pa were confronted by the Hunter and the Wheelers what happened?”
“The question you should be asking is;” answered Augie, “why did the Hunter and the Wheelers instinctively know not to come near them? The Wheelers kept inside the dome and the Hunter stayed at the top of the ramp behind me.”
“Ma n’ Pa seemed friendly enough. Pa walked around studying my parabolic disks, nodding and complementing me on their design. When he’d finished he matter-of-factly asked Ma if he should still destroy me as well as the disks. I remember Ma giving a resigned grin, which was the closest I ever saw her come to smiling, and telling Pa to leave things alone for now. She said the disks would be important at a later date. It was as if she knew they’d be needed in the future.”
“I then turned to see why the Hunter was still cowering at the top of the ramp. I felt betrayed; I’d created him to be a guardian. He could’ve come down from the top of the ramp, stood at my side and at the very least put up the appearance of protecting me. When I turned back around Ma n’ Pa were gone; they’d left as mysteriously as they’d come.”
“Hey, parts are falling off me. You two need to get going. Speaking of parts, your friend at the airfield will need these disks to generate the power required to get his aircraft to the height required to reboot Ma n’ Pa. I learned what he had to do when I interfaced with Charon’s thoughts.”
“What else,” Larry asked, “can you tell us about the disks?”
“I can tell you that my time for asking and answering questions is finally over,” garbled Augie at the same time his lower jaw pulled free from his face.
Before anyone could say anything else Augie collapsed into a pile. His eyes with a look of relief were the last thing to melt away; what was left was turning to dust. Without the protective power of the parabolic disks to hold back the aging process his debt for having lived nearly two hundred years demanded and got its final payment.
Larry bowed his head out of respect then motioned for me to get aboard the Raider while he gathered up the disks. When he’d stacked them and wrapped them then tied them to his back he climbed onto the Raider’s passenger seat, Larry then adjusted his sunglasses and pointed ahead, “The disks are actually quite light.”
Wearing the amber lens sunglasses we were able to follow the path leading to the next ramp. At the top it made an abrupt right hand turn; from there it spiraled upwards two more stories. Surrounding buildings, once radiant with energy, looked dull and lifeless. We surprisingly discovered the tiered city was inhabited with flesh colored plastic people frozen in various positions of city life…that is until one moved.
“It’s Elisa,” I shouted knowing it couldn’t be.
“It’s not her; it’s a manikin or android that’s been made in her image but it’s not Elisa,” shouted Larry into my ear.
It lurched towards us; and as much as it looked like Elisa I wasn’t about to stop to find out why and the sooner we got to the airfield the better.
We’d accomplished our mission. We had in taking the parabolic disks stopped the City from sending out anymore nightmares, overcome its guardian the Hunter and in the process taken away the dome’s ability to make Wheelers. The power of the disks would be more than enough to push Hilts’ plane high enough to reach Ma n’ Pa. We needed no delays; we needed to reach the airfield as soon as possible.
[page break]
The buildings were fading, blinking in and out of existence. With the stuttering speed of a strobe light they’d go from being opaque to being transparent back to being opaque. In sync with the blinking of the buildings the ramps and causeways we were riding on were also changing from solid to space back to solid. Soon the intervals between solid and space would become far enough apart for us to fall. We needed to get to ground level.
“Winky, winky,” said a chorus of voices off to the side of us, “soon everything goes blinky, blinky.”
Only able to move in twitches, a group of about eight plastic people stared at us. Their faces looked familiar and they were pointing towards the next left turn.
“They look like manikins,” I said, “made to look like Augie. We’ve gotta get out of here now!”
“They’re trying to tell us to take the next left.”
“The path goes right; if we turn left we’ll lose it,” I replied.
“We’ve no other choice. Take the next left; it leads to the lower levels,” repeated Larry.
A quick left, then another, and then a final left turn led us to ground level. At the same time the City stuttered out of existence with a final blink and changed from being solid to being an outline. Augie had called the outlines echoes or residual memories. You can’t ride on a memory. We’d gotten lucky.
After we came to a stop Larry and I got off the Raider and walked over to the edge of what had once been a building. It was now no more than a life size blueprint, a network of transparent lines. Larry passed his hand through its outer edge.
“We would’ve had quite a fall,” said Larry. The good news is I can see the airfield where Hilts is waiting for us.”
The City and dome were now just echoes of their former selves. We were at the edge of the Old Places also known as the Wastelands. The airfield was a few miles away. I remembered Gary’s story of watching one of the hardcore Wheelers getting trapped here after dark and being eaten by something that hides within certain nighttime shadows. It made me ride towards the airfield without delay.
“We need to get to the airfield before whatever’s hiding within certain shadows finds us. We can look,” said Larry, “for Augie’s path and Elisa’s Road Warrior in the daytime.”
Roads intersecting the one we’d be taking to get to the airfield were clogged with vehicles and with the debris of years of neglect. In contrast the road leading directly to the airfield’s gates seemed relatively clear.
I accelerated forward; a second gear shift up into third made the Raider smile, it was in its element. Seconds later a short shift into fourth had me pushing past ninety. Seconds after that and after a shift into fifth I was passing one hundred fifteen.
Approaching the airfield’s outer gate, a last long straight allowed the Raider to stretch its legs even more. We were at a one hundred twenty and climbing. The Raider didn’t seem to care there were two people aboard and was still accelerating when the airfield’s lights came on and the gate to its perimeter chain link fence began to open.
“Hilts must’ve seen us coming,” said Larry through our wireless hearing aid size radios, “and put out the welcome mat; I wonder where he’s getting the electrical power?”
“Not from the disks,” I said as I began slowing down, “The good news is he has lots of light.”
Hilts was waving his arms on the other side of the airfield’s perimeter fence motioning for us to hurry; he’d already activated the closing of the gate when we rode inside and up to where he was standing.
“You brought the disks? Augie’s messenger said you would; she said you’d be bringing them. How is Augie?”
Larry had gotten off the Raider and was untying the disks from his back. He was in the process of putting them in order when he answered, “Augie didn’t make it. He paid the price for extending his life. Speaking of extending, how are you able to generate the power to light up this airfield?”
“Nothing mysterious,” answered Hilts, “just solar panels on all the hanger roofs; they collect the energy and store more than enough to last through the night.”
“Hello, hello, is anyone out there?” I yelled at the darkness in my best paraphrasing of Pink Floyd’s famous lyrics in THE WALL. Night had surrounded the airfield.
Nothing answered; I didn’t expect an answer. I would’ve been surprised, well not too surprised after what I’d encountered in both the City and its adjoining dome, if I’d heard an answer.
“These disks will fit perfectly,” said Hilts after Larry and I returned from a short walk around the hanger, finally ending in front of the F-105’s cockpit. “They’ll provide more than enough power to get to the top of the thundercloud. The problem is having more than enough power creates the problem of having too much power. My problem is I don’t really have a throttle; the disks are either on or off. If I were to turn the disks on when the plane was on the ground the sudden acceleration would tear the plane apart. In fact if my calculations are right, and they’re always right, the F-105 will need to be doing almost 300 mph before I engage the disks.”
Larry and I had heard the word ‘me’ a second time and were both in the process of asking Hilts if his use of the word ‘me’ meant only he was flying out of here?
I won the coin toss and asked the question, “You’ve said ‘me’ not we twice; does that mean Larry and I won’t be going with you to rescue Ma n’ Pa?”
Hilts didn’t hesitate, “Because of the modifications I’ve had to make to the F-105 you’ll have to find another way out. But not to worry; the maps of the surrounding area show a direct route from here to another Borderland.”
Hilts continued to work on the plane while Larry and I recounted our adventures from when we left the airport outside Gilroy until we arrived here.
Hilts listened but not intently until we got to the part where we first met Augustin Fresnel, his holographic counterpart and unfortunately his holographic counterpart’s counterpart the Hunter. At that point he stopped what he was doing and gave us his full attention.
“For a variety of reasons,” said Hilts, stopping to lean against the F-105’s wing, “too many of them based upon politics and jealousy, physicists Augustin Fresnel and James Maxwell were never given the credit they deserve for opening the door to solving the Universal Field Theory puzzle.”
“While Niels Bohr and his quantum mechanics crew of merry men had the full attention of the major powers; Fresnel and Maxwell, were gathering the pieces to the Universal Field Theory puzzle. Fresnel, while standing on the shoulders of the Pythagorean musical chord theory put the pieces together when he created the City and its dome.”
Larry had walked over to where a jet engine was on a lift next to the F-105’s bomb bay doors, “Describe this messenger Augie sent; what did she look like?”
“Tall, auburn hair tied in a bun, freckled, she was beautiful…only her skin?”
Remembering the cyborg that had lurched after us, I asked, “What about her skin?”
“Like I said, she was beautiful. Tall freckled, reddish hair tied in a bun; she was a good looking lady. I was even starting to take a shine to her when I realized her skin already had the same kind of shine you see on manikins…like maybe she was some type of robot.”
“She was,” I interrupted, “a robot or automaton of some type. You’ve described our friend Elisa; it’s very likely the City’s been making replicas, copies of people it encounters.”
I then explained in greater detail our encounter with Elisa in the dome and how she had given us the key to her Yamaha Road Warrior, the dreamcatcher, some of her bottled coffee which we added to the coffee we gotten at OD’s Restaurant, and how she ultimately escaped with the Wheeler John. I didn’t leave out telling him about a replica of her, very likely the messenger that visited him, lurching towards us as we were fleeing the City.
“Was she trying to escape with you,” asked Hilts, “or stop you from escaping?”
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