THE END

by Arthur Browne

Oh boy. Sleeping on the cold, hard ground again. Well, come on. Wake up. Let’s get the show on the road. Another day, another death. I feel you trying to go back to sleep. Wait a minute. There’s something wrong. I can’t hear your thoughts. I have been in thousands of bodies before and that never happened. Maybe you’re stupid. Man, I hope you’re not stupid.

The sleeping man opened his eyes and sat up. He was in a small foxhole with no room to stretch out. He needed to get the kinks out of his legs and take a leak. He stepped out of the hole and proceeded to do both by a nearby tree. The sun was just beginning to lighten the sky above him. He hurried, bent over, back to his hole. Snipers were not supposed to shoot at medics, but no sense taking chances.

Man, you got nothing going on in your head.

The man lit a smoke and waited for it to get lighter. When he could see well enough he opened a satchel and began sorting through bandages and medical supplies and instruments, checking to see what he was short of. It had been a brutal couple of days.

Standard medical kit for a field medic. I used to sort my stuff first thing in the morning too. This is like a weird déjà vous thing going on here.

The medic finished organizing and counting and flipped the cover of his bag back over to close it. His name was handwritten in ink on the flap.

Your name… my name… it’s you… me… I can’t hear your thoughts because they’re my thoughts… Can you hear me? I am not a separate person anymore… I am us… and we are us… and I am me… and… we are all together… see how they fly like…

The medic suddenly laughed and he didn’t know why.

It’s me… I’m back… Can you hear me? Shit. I’m talking to myself. And I don’t know if I can hear me. Am I one person now or two? I still remember all those times I died… I mean, not each one, not all of them… there were thousands of them… But I know I died over and over… Or was that just the craziest fucking dream of all times?

Artillery shells screamed in and the medic… I… we… ducked down lower in the hole. All those times I died, the memory is fading, just like the memory of the first time I… we… died… At least I think I died… And I still remember that this whole shitty war is just one corporation pretending it’s two corporations and feeding lives into the furnace…

“Medic.” The call came from not so very far away. Shells were falling haphazardly like a light rain.

I… we… grabbed the medical kit and scrambled out of the hole.

It all seems so familiar. Is this the first day I died? Am I going to start all over again?

We… I… jumped into another foxhole beside a wounded man who was holding one arm tightly with his other hand. He was young and scared.

“My canteen was up there,” he stammered, raising his chin to indicate outside of his foxhole. “I tried to grab it. I think a fragment got me.”

I… we… went into the standard routine. I found myself saying, “It’s just a scratch, Bobby,” as I remembered saying that all those thousand days ago… or yesterday. Who is running this fucking body of ours… mine… anyway? Who’s in charge? There has to be two of us in here. The one who died thousands of times and the one who never has… yet.

The young soldier watched with pathetic gratefulness as him arm was bandaged.

Then I was running back to my foxhole, fast and crouched down. Memories of this day were getting stronger even as other memories slipped away. You better grab some more bandages from supply, I found myself thinking to my other self. We are going to need them. Today is going to be busy as I recall.

The shelling picked up from a light patter to a steady drizzle. Then it became a pounding downpour.

I huddled in the foxhole, shaken in more ways than one. There is nothing more terrifying than a heavy artillery barrage. I am one but I am two. Two people in one body. I am sort of used to that. I have a lot of experience. But being me again is just plain weird. I need to take charge of myself. I looked at my limp hand that lay on my lap. No, that isn’t right. I was already looking at my hand. I didn’t make myself do it. Come on, fingers. Fuck you! I am going to flip the bird. Give the one finger salute. But the hand just sat there, trembling slightly.

A shell screamed in and slammed into the earth close by.

My eyes closed. I can’t feel the other me. Or maybe I am just so familiar to myself that I can’t distinguish between the old me and the other me. My memories of today, the last day I remember being me, a day that seems like it happened so long ago, are getting stronger than all those memories of all those days I died. Pretty soon Peaty Rogers is going to get hit, running a message for Captain Snider.

“Medic,” came the shout.

And I know what we will find. Peaty torn up like hamburger. Dying after I spend five minutes working on him. Next, the command bunker is going to take a direct hit. Good thing the captain isn’t in there. Just Smitty and Tarkington. Tark loses a leg but a Thumper picks him up pretty quick. He should make it. Nothing I can do about Smitty. The day is dragging on just like I remember, except that this time there is two of me. But the one part I can’t remember is what happens at the end of the day.

As the sun sets, one last call of “medic,” came quavering across the darkening landscape. It came from behind the ruins of a long-deserted stone farmhouse.

Even as I get up to respond to that desperate call it struck me that these were the last moments I remember from the last time I had lived through this day. “Stop,” I tried to yell at myself inside my own head. But I kept on going, around the demolished back wall of the house. Then I did stop. I don’t know which one of me made me stop, but I did. There just a few feet ahead of me, lay a wounded man. It was hard to see him in the gathering twilight, but it looked as if someone was already crouching over him. Or was that black shape just a shadow? My hand was already reaching into the medical bag that hung from my side. “This is when it happens,” I try to scream.

There is evil in this universe. And there is good as well. Mankind has always known this on some deep, instinctual level, and thus were created the stories of Gods and Devils under many names and guises. But good and evil far predate this world. Their war is an ancient and far-flung war.

Good and evil each have a hierarchy. Each has an overlord and there are minions to carry out their orders. Good and evil also have rules that even they must obey, rules that they cannot break, for this is the way of all things. The cardinal rule is that good and evil must never be seen to be about their work by any of those they do their work upon.

The Harvester, in its enthusiasm, had broken the cardinal rule. As a minor minion of evil, it was the Harvester’s job to collect the bits of evil that had grown over the years inside the wounded man. At the moment of the man’s death the Harvester would reap this evil for its Masters. But the Harvester got a little too excited and allowed itself to form too completely on the earthly plain of reality. And it had been seen. It knew that it was in trouble. The Masters would not be pleased. It panicked and did the only thing it could think of to do. It cursed the human.

The curse was not the ideal one for the Harvester to use. It was a little sloppy in the wording and it didn’t make the problem go away. It just delayed it. The human was cursed to live the last day of every human who had died or would die in this meaningless little war, trapped inside them to die right along with them.

The Harvester didn’t really think the curse through very well. It didn’t have time. It didn’t realize that this curse would force it to return to the very day the curse had been cast once it had run its course. One minute the Harvester was happily harvesting evil from a corrupt old creature in a galaxy halfway across the universe, and the next thing it knew it was back where the whole mess had started.

The Harvester was shocked. It had been so busy that it had more or less forgotten the entire incident. And now here it was again with no new plan to get out of it. It summoned the thoughts that would dematerialize it deeper into the spirit world. If it had materialized correctly the first time it never would have been seen in the first place, but having, in its excitement, come too far into the living world the first time, that is how it manifested itself once again.

I already had my hand inside the medical kit. I had been searching for the med scanner, a new piece of equipment that was being field tested, because I knew the man was badly injured. The dark shape crouching malignantly over the still form shifted. I would swear it turned to look at me but I couldn’t be sure. The shape was too ethereal, too perfectly matched to the now almost complete darkness. Fear seemed to give me… the me trapped inside the other me… a burst of strength.

Let go of the scanner, I willed with all my heart. The hand… my hand… moved and grabbed a familiar shape, and I pulled it out. It was an auto-injector with a large, spring-loaded needle. I knew from the placement in the med kit that it wasn’t morphine but rather a strong concoction of antibiotics rarely given to soldiers in the field. I don’t know why I grabbed this particular implement. It was just instinct. Something sharp with which to defend the helpless wounded man. In one motion I jabbed the syringe at the shadow.

The Harvester didn’t have time to finish the thought that would have put it farther into the dark void before it felt something sting it. But even as the foot soldier of evil faded into its own realm it felt a burning pain spreading from the sting and through its body. Perhaps viruses and infection and the corruption they cause were more than mere playthings of evil. They might well be a small part of evil itself that leaked over into the living world. But for whatever reason, the powerful dose of antibiotics did what no other earthly weapon could possibly have done. It destroyed the Harvester in moments, rending it into nothingness.

There was a flash and a burst of sickly red light spread out to the far reaches of the nether void. The cardinal rule had been broken and evil would have to pay the price for this violation.

War is the playground of evil. Warfare is not a natural occurrence for most races. From the earliest days of the struggle to evolve into an advanced life form, every sentient species in the universe has had implanted within its individual beings the seeds of evil that let war happen. Killing, for reasons other than survival, is not a rational or natural impulse. It is these seeds of evil inside all of us, invisible because they exist almost entirely in the dark dimension, that allow kind and considerate beings to start or be led to war. Oh, some beings are more susceptible to evil, more open to its call than others of their race, but it exists in all of us.

Now, through this strange chain of circumstances, evil has lost the right to use those seeds, and the seeds themselves vanish from a million worlds just as the Harvester vanished. And on many worlds the soldiers suddenly stopped what they were doing and looked around at their comrades. They lay down their weapons and stood in dawning awareness that they would no longer kill because someone told them they could or should. Fierce and fearsome warriors thought of home and loved ones and, somewhat ashamedly, the armies of all the worlds began to disperse.

Far from the fields of war, murderers and the abusers of the weak cried out at the realization of what they had become, and set about to atone. To seek, if not forgiveness, then at least a chance to become something new, something better.

Tyrants, overlords and dictators found that they had lost their thirst for power as well as the power itself, because there was no one left who would follow their orders. And they too set out to right some of the wrongs that they had done. Corporate leaders and the heads of vast financial institutions stopped hoarding the wealth and instead tried to improve the lot of those with less than them.

Evil was not vanquished. Good needs an opposing force in the universe. That too is a law. But from this moment on, neither good nor evil will influence the course of events directly. It is now up to individuals everywhere to determine their own destiny, to choose their own path.

And it seems that most of us, when given the choice, would rather be good.