You Say You Want

Bright light reflected off pitted metallic walls and drew sweat down Reggie's face as he concentrated on soldering connections inside a partially disassemble sentinel. The work he was doing was almost impossibly tiny; he was forced to look through a large magnifying glass held by a clamp as he worked. He had been working on modifying this particular sentinel non-stop for over 50 hours. Perhaps in times past, the whole job would have taken over a week, but Reggie was much changed. Among other things, he no longer needed to sleep. He tried to distract himself from the mind-wearying task by humming a song that he remembered from a long time ago. Something about wanting a revolution. He tried to remember who had composed it, but damned if he could. He had a mental image of four men crossing a busy street, but he couldn't remember their names. Had one of them been called Ringo or Star or something. like that? Who knew?

He cursed as the solder on the most recent connection melted a fraction of a millimeter from where he wanted it. Now he would have to scrape it off and try again.

Mike silently into the room. He barely gave a glance at the corpse that was lying clumsily on a large metal bench to his right. He walked over to where Reggie was working and looked over his shoulder at the magnifying glass, but was too far to see anything but a blur.

"Be careful there," He cautioned Reggie. "That's my brother you're operating on."

"Hey, don't worry about it." Reggie set down the tiny soldering iron, the tip of it as fine as a beading needle and looked up at Mike. "I did the same thing to you last week and you're fine, aren't you?"

"I feel fine, but I don't know if this new weapon will work or not. I haven't tried it yet. There's not enough room in here for it, and if I tried it anywhere else, the Tall Man might find out about it."

"Hey, have I ever screwed up a modification?"

"Come to think of it, yes."

Reggie scowled and picked the soldering iron back up again. "When was that, about 4000 years ago?" He jabbed the heated tool annoyed at Mike. The incident Mike was refering to, which he never let Reggie forget was when Reggie had tried replacing the drill on the sentinel the Tall Man had transformed him into with a short 20 gauge shotgun barrel. The gun worked alright, but Reggie had forgotten how much less he weighed as a gold sentinel than as a man. The recoil had driven him backwards through three walls. Come to think of it, it had been kind of funny, although it had taken him a couple of centuries to see the humor in it. Well, he should have known that would happen, but it was sometimes hard that you didn't always have a body that weighed enough to absorb the kinetic energy of the recoil.

Reggie peered down through the magnifying glass again. Well, he was solid enough now. Things changed in 4000 years. There had been many improvements to the silver and gold sentinels that 10 billion human minds had been imprisoned in. Particularily the gold ones. The silver sentinels, poor bastards, were nothing but drones, their minds almost completely taken over by computers that forced them to fight in some meaningless battle. Mostly against eachother. That tall bastard was a war profiteer who sold his weapons to both sides of a conflict that had been going on for longer than all of humanity's recorded history.

A greedy bastard, too. The gold sentinels, such as Reggie, Mike and Jody had been transformed into had been permitted to retain their minds. The Tall Man assessed the intelligence of every human being he captured, and the very brightest were 'honored' in this way. In return they were expected to develop new weapons for the Tall Man to offer for sale. Almost no-one went along with this at first, but a few decades in a sensory deprivation chamber was a great persuader. Perhaps one in 10,000 people was considered to be intelligent or imaginative enough for this special treatment. Which meant that out of the 10 billion human beings owned by the Tall Man, perhaps a million were still free enough to resent the fact.

Come to think of it, maybe the silver drones were the lucky ones.

Reggie poked with the soldering iron in Jody's innards. The connection was forming much better now. Maybe all he had needed was a little break. Although he didn't have to sleep, he could if he wanted to, and still had a psychological need to, although he tried to restrict himself to one short nap a week.

His dreams were horrific.

"Is Jebediah still guarding the weapons' room?" He asked Mike.

"Yeah. But I don't think he has anything to worry about. As long as we keep producing the goods for him, the Tall Man doesn't seem to care very much about what we do."

"Doesn't care, huh?" Finally the last tricky connection was done, and Reggie reassembled the sentinel with practiced ease. "Well, let him keep not caring, because he is going down!"

The sentinel floated off the table until it was about six feet in the air. Reggie moved back a bit to avoid the sudden flash of heat that accompianied the assembly of a new body for the sphere. The ability to create a solid body had been given to all the gold sentinels by the Tall Man shortly after his final conquest of Earth. A few scientists among the gold sentinels, better schooled than Reggie on such subjects had told him that the matter that made up the body was actually composed of subatomic particles taken from the surrounding air, and re-arranged into the elements necessary to make up a human body rather than a gas. Apparently it took only a tiny fraction of the air availiable, and drew particles from a great radius, because there was no wind or noise or other sign that the surrounding air was being depleted in any way. Reggie was not sure that he beleived the explanation, because the process also worked in a vacuum, though not as quickly. He had asked the scientists about that, and they had given him some crazy story about Einstein and how matter could be transformed into energy and energy could be turned into matter.

Well, maybe they were right at that. Unbeknownst to the Tall Man, Reggie had made a great improvement in the power source of the gold sentinels. Each of them now contained a tiny black hole, which Reggie heard someone call a 'Hawking' black hole, though what it had to do with birds, he was not at all sure. All he knew was that it worked, and that the time to create a new body in a vacuum was now only a little greater than that in an ordinary atmosphere.

As to why the Tall Man had even given them this ability, well, it sure wasn't to make them happy. But they were supposed to produce weapons for him, and that was kind of hard to do if you couldn't lift a screwdriver or operate a metal lathe. Well, there was telekinesis, but it took centuries to develop the necessary kind of precision with that, and that bastard wanted immediate results. Not that the bodies had been any better than they had to be. You were cold all the time, you bled yellow, and had a terrible complexion. Still, there had been numerous....improvements.... in that department as well.

Jody didn't look any different than he had, which was good. It meant his brain hadn't been damaged during the surgery. He looked at his previous body, which was now a corpse, the same one that Mike had carefully ignored when he had entered. It's skull was sawn open and blood pooled in the empty cranial cavity.

Red blood, not yellow. Another one of the things the Tall Man had not cared to make himself aware of.

"You'd better get rid of that!" he gestured toward's the body, trying not to look directly at it. Even after dying dozens of times, it was still damn unnerving to look at your own corpse. "What if the Tall Man finds it? You want him to learn about the modifications we've been doing?"

"Christ, no." Reggie picked up the body as easily as if it were a cat rather than a stocky man and slung it over his shoulder. "You two better go relieve Jebediah so the Tall Man doen't get to wondering where he's been for so long. I'll go throw this into a converter."

"Good." Mike nodded. "How do you feel, Jody. any different?"

Jody felt his head. It hurt, or course. It was strange, but no matter how many times you died, it always hurt as bad as the first time, and the fear never got any less.Still, that wasn't the important thing now.

He turned his thoughts inward. If he concentrated, he could feel the new device Reggie had placed in him, like a third, invisible arm. "I think it worked, but I can't tell. But I know that it's there. When are we going to do it?"

Reggie looked at his watch. "We need to get the everyone down here, and some of them are working. If they leave now, the Tall Man will be suspicious. We'll have to wait until the next shift rotation."

"That will be in 38 hours." Jody said. "However, we have a potential problem."

Reggie looked disgusted. "What now?"

Jody looked apologetic. "Not all of the guards believe that we can pull this off. Or they do believe, but they're pretending not to, if you get what I mean."

"Yeah." Reggie sighed. They wanted a bribe. Christ, even 5000 years didn't seem to get the crassness out of some people. He threw the corpse over his shoulder down like a sack of potatoes, making Mike and Jody wince. It was only meat, but still.

Reggie walked over to a metal box and opened it. He carefully counted out 20 small objects and held them out to Mike. They were small plastic figures of animals, but Mike looked at them as though they were flawless diamonds.

He picked up two of them with awe. One was a rabbit, and the other a turtle. He didn't even want to ask how Reggie had gotten so many of these. They were worth a fortune in terms of goods or favors that they could be traded for. During their 5000 year imprisonment, an underground economy of sorts had arisen among the gold sentinels. It's currency was any artifact that came from Earth, regardless of how worthless it had once been.

Apparently during the Tall Man's final conquest of humanity, some people had come to realize the inevitability of what was to come, and had tried smuggling all manner of items onto the Red Planet, to be recovered there. Mainly in the body cavities of various corpses, but a few foolhardy souls had actually tried the same thing as Reggie and gone through the dimensional gates. None of them survived for long after that, of course. At least not as human beings. And none of the weapons smuggled had escaped discovery and destruction. But a surprising number of other things had. Most of them had long since decayed or crumbled, of course. The only objects left from Earth after 5000 years were those that were made of practically indestructible materials. Plastic. Glass. Ceramics. Certain of the more durable metals. And that was all. Everything else had been lost to time.

Except for 10 billion enslaved human beings, of course.

Mike carefully took the rest of the tiny plastic toys and put them into a pocket on his shirt, which he carefully buttoned afterwards. It wouldn't do to lose a single one of these priceless artifacts. If they couldn't persuade some of the more recalcitrant guards to cooperate with them, well nothing could.

"Come on, Jody." He said to his brother. "We've got things to do."

Jebediah Morningside leaned wearily against the wall of a large metal room. It was only dimly lit; over half of the lighting fixtures overhead had been deliberately smashed. The lack of lighting tended to discourage visitors. Not that he expected any. The vast metal complex on the Red Planet where a million slaves toiled away resembled nothing so much as a huge labrynth, complete with a beast at it's center no less horrible than the mythical Minotaur. And most of the slaves tended not to stray very far from those areas they were familiar with. This storage room was well out of the way.

Even if a curious wanderer had come, one look at his face probably would send him scurrying back the way he came. Having the Devil's face was a great burden to bear, but it did offer occasional advantages. And just in case the sight of his face, so much like that of the Tall Man's, didn't scare off an intruder, he did have the weapon Reggie had given him. It wasn't lethal, of course. Jebediah had had quite his fill of death. But it would render a man unconscious for several hours. Long enough to tie him up and move him where he couldn't interefere with their plans.

No, it wasn't the unlikely thought of an intruder that made Jebediah move farther back into the shadows of several huge, tarp covered devices. It was just that during the past 500 years or so something had gone terribly wrong on the Red Planet. Furthermore, whatever it was that was happening, the Tall Man didn't appear to notice, a fact which in and of itself was terrifying. He and his friends Reggie, Mike and Jody had to go to great pains to prevent the Tall Man from discovering their plans. But now it seemed there were .... things.... that didn't need to bother with such elaborate precautions.

Just two weeks ago, Jebediah had watched in horror as a giant cockroach, at least six feet long had gone scuttling down the hallway. A sudden noise had startled it, and it had ripped open a gash in the metal walls and crawled into the space within. Even more worrying was that the Tall Man had come stalking down the same hallway several hours later and did not even appear to notice the damage.

Another very worrysome fact was that certain people seemed to be disappearing. If disappearing was the right word. Because apparently they were still seen on occasion, but they no longer worked at the research tasks assigned to them by the Tall Man, and he never seemed to be aware that workstations that should have been manned were standing vacant during their shifts. There were not very many such people. Out of the million or so gold sentinels, perhaps 1000 seemed to have simply gotten away with abandoning their duties, and coming and going as they pleased. The rest of the humans in the labrynth had taken to calling them 'sidewinders' after a snake that had had a bizarre method of locomotion. But really no name could describe them, whatever they were. For one thing, they didn't even appear on videotapes from the numerous security cameras. He knew. He had checked himself.

He had made it his business to learn what he could of the sidewinders. A boy, Tim, who had once been his friend, had become one of them. He had sat down at his work station one day and started playing with some glass marbles he had gotten from somewhere. Of course, the Tall Man had come. He always came when his slaves neglected their duties. He told Tim to get back to work, or he would be locked away for a couple weeks. Usually the threat of sensory deprivation was enough to get anyone into line, but Tim had just laughed and thrown a marble at him, and told him to go ahead, because he knew the way out.

He had never seen Tim at work after that. He had seen him once or twice, but it wasn't the same Tim. He had become one of the sidewinders. Jebediah tried to ask him what had happened to him, but had gotten very little information. The sidewinders were like that. They either wouldn't answer questions at all, or would give you some cryptic remark that was of little or no help.

Several months later, curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he had actually dared to peek once in the locked box where the Tall Man had confined the sentinel that Tim was. The sentinel was still there, but it was inert, as if there were no human brain within to animate it. Jebediah had partially disassembled it, enough to determine that Tim's shrunked cerebellum was in fact still within. But nothing he did seemed to bring any response from the sentinel. It was almost as though the brain within had been erased, and was a mere tabula rasa. But it did nothing to explain the mystery of why he was seeing Tim in various locations when he was locked in a box. In fact all it did was create an additional mystery as to why the Tall Man had ignored this sentinel for months, when he normally only confined his misbehaving slaves for a few weeks at a time. It was almost as though he had forgotten that Tim ever existed.

Jebediah sighed. Thinking about Tim always depressed him, although he wasn't sure why. In order to cheer himself up, ho fished in his pocket for his most beloved possession. It was a coin mounted in a plastic case. One one side it had a picture of George Washington, and on the other side it had a picture of a peach. He liked to look at it sometimes, to remind him of the world he had come from, where there had been things like peaches and trees to pick them off of. What color had peaches been anyways? Had they been orange? Or were they red?

He choked back a sudden tear. He couldn't even remember what a peach tasted like.

Sudden footsteps marred the dismal silence. Jebediah peered out cautiously. Was it one of his allies? A lost wanderer? Or perhaps one of the loathsome traitors, allies to the Tall Man.

It was none of the above. It was Tim, walking cheerily down the shadowy room as though it were a sunny path. In one hand held a yoyo that bobbed up and down. He continued down past the silent rows of machinery until he came to the niche where Jebediah was hiding. He peered into the darkness as though he could see perfectly well in spite of it. Well, perhaps he could. Tim and his kind were mysteries that Jebediah had given up ever trying to understand.

"You going to sit in there all day or what?" Tim asked.

"No." Jebediah cautiously moved out of the shadows. He wanted to cry out "What happened to you, Tim?', but he had asked that many times before, and had never gotten any answer except for gales of cheery laughter. So he asked instead. "What are you doing here, Tim? Don't you know it's dangerous?"

"Don't worry. No-one's going to find you here. Mike and Jody are coming and will be here in a couple of hours, but you seemed kind of lonely, so I decided to talk with you for a little while until then."

Jebediah didn't bother asking how Tim could know that Mike and Jody were coming when even the Tall Man didn't know. Tim had told him things that were going to happen in the future before, and had been right. He wouldn't explain how he knew though, so eventually Jebediah had just accepted it as one of the numerous inexplicable phenomena that the universe held. "What do they want?" he wondered.

"They have come to tell you that they're ready for the final phase of Reggie's plan. Everything that's needed has finally been put into place." Tim frowned. "I worry about Reggie sometimes."

"Why? He's a good man! We couldn't have accomplished what we have without him. He kept us hoping when we would have long since given up."

"I know." said Tim. "It's just that he's come very near to the end of the path he has chosen. He's done amazingly well with it, and it will accomplish what is necessary, but I think he will take it hard when he finds himself forced to abandon it."

"I don't understand. What will he be forced to abandon?"

Tim tapped his foot impatiently. "Try to understand this, Jebediah. What you are now is not something that it is possible for you to remain indefinitely. The Tall Man never realized this when he made humanity immortal. The technology he used was developed for creatures that were far less... dynamic... than mankind is. Eventually you are all going to have to move on, in one direction or another."

"Move on? To where?"

"I mean you have to move on in your developement. But in order to do that, you have to give up parts of yourself first. You can't learn to walk if you continue to crawl." He threw his yoyo at the ceiling. Jebediah followed it's flight with his eye, but it was lost in the shadows, and he didn't see where it landed. "As for you, you would do well to give up your despair and guilt. If you do not learn to forgive yourself, they will eventually corrupt you, and transform you into something far worse than the Tall Man."

Jebediah looked at his feet. "I have the Devil's face. I brought him to Earth."

"Jebediah, he would have found humanity eventually. You simply hastened the inevitable by a few years. And the fact that he wears your face as a mask is nothing but a childish mockery. It has nothing to do with you." Tim held out his hand, and the yoyo that Jebediah had thought gone fell into his palm. Only it wasn't a yoyo any more.

It was a peach. Tim held it out to him. "Here. I brought you a present."

He took the fruit with trembling hands. How could this be? He had seen the Earth, the Tall Man had shown it to him to taunt him. It was nothing but a blackened husk. Nothing grew there, except perhaps a few tenacious lichens. It wasn't orange or red, as he had thought, but a swirled combination of yellow and pink. A few drops of dew still trembled on the fuzzy surface. He held it to his face and inhaled deeply. It was better than all of the most expensive perfumes he had ever heard of.

"Tim" he said in awe, "Where did you get this?"

But Tim was gone. Two muddy shoe prints marked where he had stood, but there were no tracks leading away. Jebediah looked for a moment at the spot where he had vanished, and then shrugged and took a bite of the peach.

The Tall Man stood gloating at the collection of crystals in his palm. Each of them was the size of his thumbnail, and glowed with energy. In the civilization he had come from, they were used as high denomination currency. Just the collection in his hand would be considered a fortune, and he had thousands of them.

War was profitable indeed. Particularly when the two quarreling sides, the Xerdet and the Tissin wanted to resort to violence to resolve their really rather petty differences, but considered it to be unaesthetic to ever dirty their hands by picking up a weapon and risking getting blood on themselves. They much prefered to commit their violence by proxy. And the Tall Man was happy to oblige. It had been a wonderfully lucky day for him when that first idiot human, Jebediah Morningside, had come stumbling right into the Tall Man's lap, and had been naive enough to tell the Tall Man all about where he had come from. A beautiful world with high population and low technology. A lovely apple, ripe for the plucking.

The humans were stupid, but after they had had a real education in certain subjects forced into them, a few of them were bright enough to make some rudimentary improvements on weapons that already existed. Improvements which the Xerdet and Tissin were eager to pay for, lest the other side get ahead of them in this foolish conflict. The one called Reggie was particularily good at this. True, at first the Tall Man had been inclined simply to turn him into another one of his drones, but then he thought that someone who had been able to survive his game for 20 years before being foolhardy enough to throw himself into the palm of his hand deserved a chance at better things. And he had never regretted his decision. Whatever his other flaws, the man was an absolute genius when it came to devising new means of destruction.

It was almost a shame that when the war ended, as it had to someday, he had to destroy such useful animals. But there was no point in keeping them around when their usefulness was over. Besides, destroying them would be such fun. Once one of the sides had proved victorious, his computers would restore to all the silver drones their free will. Just long enough for them to regret it when they learned of their impending demise.

The Tall Man did not think of himself as sadistic. The mere comprehension of such a concept required the experience of it's opposite for comparison.

He grinned as he thought of that fool who had first found him. Alone among all the humans, the Tall Man had not assigned him with any labor. It increased both the stupid guilt that Jebediah burdened himself with, and the hatred that the rest of his slaves felt for him. They were sure that he must have collaborated with the Tall Man, otherwise why would he look exactly like him and be able to wander free while the rest of them had to work 90 percent of the time? For the most part, Jebediah had taken to wearing an oversized version of one of the dwarf's brown robes, in order so that the hood would conceal his face. Whenever he was so unfortunate as to be recognized, whoever saw him would either flee if they were alone, or if they were with friends and felt fairly safe, they would spit on him and beat him up.

Come to think of it, when he destroyed the rest of his slaves, perhaps he would let Jebediah live. The guilt and misery he inflicted on himself hurt him far worse than anything his fellow human beings did to him, and could prove quite entertaining in the millenia to come.

Musing on his plans, the Tall Man strode into the larger portion of the walk-in safe that served as his trophy room. Here he kept momentos of the few humans who had actually had the cunning to outwit him for a short period of time. Reggie's four-barreled shotgun was here, of course, mounted in a prominent place on the wall, along with the flame thrower he had sometimes used. Nearby was a large net made of copper cable. This was a relic of an unlikely pair, both women, who had called themselves the "Deemolitionists". Whatever that meant. One had been a mortician, of all things, from California, and the other had been a paranoid gun-nut survivalist from Wisconsin. Apparently the latter had convinced the former that the colder climate of her state offered some measure of protection from the Tall Man. And so it had, for a time. The duo had actually managed to stay out of his clutches for a few years, and even electrocute a number of his dwarves by placing the net in front of him in unlikely places, and hooking it to a power source with a very long extension cord. At one point, they had even taken over one of his former dwarf crunching operations that he had abandoned, and actually managed to master a few of the easier points of his technology.

Their downfall had come about when the gun-nut had gone insane (or to be accurate, had gone more insane than previously) and had managed to convince the mortician that it would be a really good idea to turn her into one of the gold sentinels. What she had hoped to accomplish by this absurdity remained unclear to this day. Although the transformation had succeeded, the Tall Man had come for them both immediately afterwards. They were now both slaves of his on the Red Planet.

The Tall Man wished that he had the time to admire more of his trophies. There were a huge number of them, ranging from secret weapons developed by the former U.S. government, to spears belonging to African tribesman. He had occasionally recieved offers by beings interested in purchasing his collection. There were collectors of such primitive artifacts who would pay well for them, but he had always turned them down. The satisfaction he got from gloating over the defeat of his opponents was worth far more than mere currency.

Regretfully, he left the huge vault and closed the door behind him. A push of a button on the outside re-activated it's lock, security system, and stasis feild. Until he felt like re-entering, time would be stopped within, preserving the contents, which would have otherwise have long since rotted away. And if anyone else attempted to enter, the security system would simply increase the diameter of the stasis feild, holding the intruder in a single moment of time like a fly in amber until he returned to deal with them.

His treasure safe, the Tall Man strode down the metal corridor. He was expecting visitors. Rich visitors, and it wouldn't do to be late.

Just as Tim had predicted, Mike and Jody entered the storage room Jebediah was guarding in a little over two hours. By taking small bites, he had made his peach last for a little over half that time, after which he had carefully cleaned and dried the seed and put it in one of his pockets.

Mike rapped on the walls at the entrance of the room in a code to let Jebediah know it was them before walking in.

"Any trouble?" He asked as Jebediah stepped out of the shadows. He glanced down, noticing muddy shoe prints on the ground. "Was someone here?"

"Tim was." Jebdiah said. "We talked for a while before you came."

"Freakin' sidewinders." Mike complained. "I'm not sure that I trust them. How do we know they aren't working for the Tall Man? For all we know, he could be telling the Tall Man about what we have hidden here right now."

"If he is, there's nothing we can do about it" Jody said practically. "So we might as well get on with what needs to be done, and hope for the best. Besides, if the sidewinders were going to betray us, they could have done so long before now."

"Right." Mike yanked at a corner of the tarp that was nearest to him. "Jody, Jeb, give me a hand with these covers."

The three men pulled covers of of over a hundred gleaming machines, each nearly twenty feet tall. Tens of thousands of man-hours, by hundred of their allies, volunteering their time between their normal work-shifts had gone into the construction of each of the devices. Because it would have seemed suspicious if their allies had vanished every time they were between shifts, they had limited themselves to this work during only one out of every ten break periods.

The construction of the gleaming weapons had taken well over 1000 years.

Jebediah looked at the rows of machines. He sighed. He knew what was going to come next. Jody, the stronger of the two brothers, approached him with a wire garrote held between his hands.

"I'm sorry, Jeb." He said sadly. "But the body you have now is too different from his. You're going to have to re-inhabit one of the old type, or you won't be able to fool the computers and alarm systems."

"I know." He closed his eyes. "Just let me pray for a few minutes and then do it, all right?"

Jody nodded. Jebediah turned around and thought about Earth, and a peach tree he had once grown on his front lawn. He felt almost at peace when there was a sudden stinging in his throat. He cluthed at the pain wildly for a second, begging silently "No! Not again!" for a few moments. Then everything went black.

There was a place Jebediah sometimes found himself after his body had been killed, and before he had adjusted to existence as a sentinel, a process which took only a few minutes from an objective point of view, but for some reason seemed to take at least an hour from his own mental standpoint. It was different every time. Usually it was pleasant enough, a windy prairie or a small town, although sometimes it was rather ugly and resembled the Red Planet, or the volcanic hell that the Tall Man had made of Earth. After experiencing the transformation several times, he had decided that it was more a dream than anything else, a way his mind had devised to keep from getting bored while he was unconscious.

This time he found himself sitting on a chair on the porch of his old house. At least it looked like his house, except it was apparently built on the edge of a cliff, rather than in the middle of a green lawn the way it should have been. He leaned over the edge of the porch railing and saw a frenzied ocean hundreds of feet below slamming into toothy rocks. The height made him dizzy, and he sat back down and looked around the porch instead.

There was another man standing on his porch. Jebediah gaped in astonishment. This was the first time he had ever seen another human being in this particular mode of dreaming. The man cut an odd figure. He was rather short, with greasy black hair and a ridiculously tiny moustache. He seemed to be wearing some kind of military uniform with an odd insignia on an arm band that looked like an abstract representation of a windmill. The man just finished pouring two glasses of lemonade, and held one of them out to Jebediah, who was too confounded to do anything but take it and hold it stupidly in front of him.

"What? Who are you?" he asked.

The uniformed man shrugged. "My name would mean very little to you, I'm afaid." He said with a thick German accent. "I was born long after your time."

Jebediah set his glass of lemonade down on a small wrought iron table. "But, why are you here?"

The man took a sip of lemonade from his own glass. "To help you."

"With what? The Tall Man?"

"No." The man looked at Jebediah with a peculiar exression on his face, as though he were looking at a particularily succulent cut of steak. It was not an expression Jebediah particularily liked. "You don't have to go back, you know."

"Not go back? What do you mean?"

"I mean that you don't have to go back into a body made of decaying flesh that feels like a crust of offal covering your bones. Or even into that metal automaton that keeps what's left of your brain alive. You've almost reached the point by yourself where you don't have to any more. I can take you the rest of the way." He held out his hand, but Jebediah ignored it. Something about this man made him very nervous. He was almost sure that he had seen him, or perhaps a picture of him sometime long ago, but he couldn't remember where.

"But I must go back." He protested. "Without me too decieve the machines, Reggie's plan won't work."

"What plan? To defeat the Tall Man? What if you fail? He'll kill you, you know. Why would you want to do something so dangerous?"

"Why?" Why indeed? He had trouble putting words to what he felt. "So I can perhaps acheive forgiveness for what I have done. Perhaps if humanity forgives me, I will finally be able to forgive myself."

"You say you want forgiveness?" The man sneered. "Don't you realize that with the power I have to offer you, you could kill the Tall Man with a thought? You think humanity won't forgive you when you come out with his head in your hands? Not only will they forgive you, they'll fall at your feet and worship you like a God!"

Jebediah shook his head. Something was very wrong here, but he was too confused to tell what it was. Dark clouds raced across the sky, covering the sun and making the porch seem gloomy, almost as though it were night. "But.... what about the others?"

"What others?"

"The silver sentinels." It was very dark now, and rain started falling. A chill wind came over the ocean and blew the drops sideways, covering the wooden floor of the porch with dampness. "There's ten billion helpless people trapped in them, and Reggie said the computer that controlled them was programmed only to free them once the war they were fighting was over, and one side or the other was destroyed. If it weren't for that, we could have killed the Tall Man a long time ago, but the creatures fighting the war would have killed all the silver sentinels to get even."

"What about them?" Puddles began forming on the porch, making it slippery. "They don't even know that they're alive. I hardly think they'll care if they die."

Jebediah gaped at him. He hadn't thought it possible for a human being to be as evil as the Tall Man, but he had been wrong. Suddenly, there was a sudden blow on his back, as if someone had pushed him. He fell forward, barely catching himself with his hands, and splashing water from one of the puddles all over the monstrous person before him. The man cursed in German and brushed water off himself, but Jebediah barely noticed. He was too busy gaping at the man's reflection in the puddle he was kneeling in.

Except the reflection wasn't that of a man at all. It was of a hideous, chitin covered shape that he had seen two weeks ago tearing a hole into a metal wall. "My God!"

The man looked down, but was at the wrong angle to see what Jebediah had. "What are you screaming about, old man?"

Jebediah scramble to his feet and pushed the other man back. "Get away from me!" he shouted. "I'm getting out of here!"

He tried to get inside his house, but the younger man was much faster than him, and got between him and the doorway. "Where do you think you're going?" he snarled ferally.

"Anywhere but with you." Jebediah turned around. Well, if he couldn't walk off the porch, he would jump. Hoping that this was all just a dream, he ran back to the front railing of the porch and threw himself over it, into the churning ocean below.

Jebediah awoke with a shout back in the store room he had started out in. Mike, Jody, and Reggie were all there. Apparently they had gotten rid of his previous body, because there was no corpse around. The rows of weapons, previously as still as massive tombstones now hummed with the familiar chord of the dimension forks that opened passageways between the worlds.

He shivered in spite of the fact that the temperature in the labrynth the Tall Man had built was always kept at a too-warm 80 degrees. Looking down at his hands, he saw that his complexion was pale and jaundiced. Construct hands. It had worked then. God, he hated this, though. He could even taste the rotten, metallic yellow blood in his mouth. Well, at least it was for the last time, one way or the other. If they succeeded he would be able to live from then on in the far more comfortable bodies that Reggie had helped design. Being in one of them was almost indistinguishable from being alive again. And if they failed, the Tall Man would destroy them all. So either way, he would soon be done with this horror.

He frowned. Had there been some strange dream he had had about a third alternative while he had been unconscious? Funny the things that came into his head like that.

"Are you all right?" Mike asked. "For a minute there we thought something had gone wrong."

"I'm fine. Well, at least as fine as can be expected in this." He gestured toward his clammy flesh in disgust. "Why, what happened?"

"Well, it's just that after we got the sphere out of you old body, you didn't make a new one as soon as you should have. Normally you get adjusted to your senses as a sentinel within a couple of minutes, but you just sat there on the floor for half an hour. We were even thinking about having Reggie open you up to see if he could find anything wrong, but he said to give you a little more time, it might have been harder making a body you haven't been used to for so long. A few minutes later you did synthesize a body, so I guess he was right."

"He usually is." Jebediah looked at the humming rows of machines. "It looks like you put the time to good use. Are they all running?"

"As far as we can tell." Mike said. "We won't know for sure until you perform the final phase of the operation. Hopefully the security systems on all the target worlds will mistake your biopattern for his, and won't set off any alarms. Not until it's too late, anyway."

"Right." Jebediah walked up to the first machine and slid back a panel, revealing two silver globes, the same size and color as ordinary sentinels. He placed his hands on them and concentrated, feeling the space between two worlds, seperated by lightyears and dimensions contacting like a stretched peice of rubber that was suddenly released. The machine hummed louder for a moment, and then vanished.

Jebediah nodded. At least the transportation aspect of the weapon was working perfectly. Hopefully the rest of it's functions would prove to be equally flawless. If they didn't, well, they'd find out soon enough.

Grimly, he stepped over to the next machine.

One would have thought that the destruction of over a hundred planets would be more dramatic, Jebediah mused nearly two hours later, as the last machine faded from view. Still, the effect from the other end was probably more spectacular. The devices that Reggie had designed gave off a type of radiation that broke apart the bonds in molecules which were composed of more than a few hundred atoms.

The effects on some parts of the world were negligable. The oceans continued to sweep over beached of sand, and dunes continued to be sculpted by the wind in the desert. The effect on living things was far more dramatic, though. All living things, even those on the alien planets the devices had been sent to, are composed of hugely complex molecules such as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which was composed of millions of molecules. The bonds between these compounds were suddenly severed by the energy given off by Reggie's weapon, and the chemical reactions which made life possible were suddenly stopped. From a large scale view, the effect was grotesque. Animals, plants, and sentient beings simply stopped in their tracks, and disintegrated in a matter of seconds, leaving behind messy puddles of decomposed organic compounds and the calceous remains of their skeletons.

The effect of the devasting ray was blocked by even the thinnest layer of metal, though. There were a very few survivors, at least for a while. Those who had been in hyperbaric chambers or submarines. In the end, of course, even these few survivors died. The only food left, that had not been rotted away along with every unprotected living creature were a few canned goods that quickly ran out. The survivors cursed their 'luck' in the end, as they starved to death. Yet their worlds were not completely devoid of sentient life, even then. Observing all of this destruction were beings who didn't need to eat, the human slaves who had been forced to warfare on many of the worlds. Their brains were safely encased in the metal sentinels. Their prison had now become a lifeboat. A hundred formerly thriving planets joined the Earth in it's unenviable fate as a graveyard, overseen only by billions of nearly indestuctible, suddenly freed sentinels who for the first time in five thousand years were able to wonder just what the hell was going on.

Back on the Red Planet, Reggie pulled a tarp off a small shape that had gone previously unnoticed, hidden behind the huge recently vanished weapons. They were the two twin pillars that composed a dimensional fork, though not as sparsely functional as the ones the Tall Man used. Jebediah had helped build them, and even after 5000 years, he still had refined tastes, and still liked to make his inventions look elegant as well as funtioning well. One of the pillars had a small lightbulb and a switch built into the side of it. Reggie walked up to the humming device and quickly pulled the switch down.

"OK." he said. "The next dimension fork to be activated should be by our Tall friend. When the antenna I got in here detects that, it'll switch on the light, and set the destination to five feet from wherever the Tall Man departed from. As soon as that happens, you need to go through, Jeb."

Jebediah nodded. When the Tall Man went through his dimensional fork, as he almost certainly would very soon, he would have perhaps five or ten seconds to follow after him. Timing was critical. It wouldn't do to be too soon or too late. Mentally he reviewed how the Tall Man walked. Perhaps three seconds would be the right length to wait.

He concentrated on watching the forks as Reggie spoke to Mike and Jody. He knew what this was about, and deliberately didn't look as Reggie slashed both their throats with a short, thick knife which he then used to chop their skulls open. God, would there never be any end to this killing? What in the name of all goodness had they become? Well, this would all be over in another few minutes, and perhaps then they would finally be able to regain some part of the humanity they had lost in this 5000 year living death.

Two sentinels, still dripping red gore onto the floor floated several feet behind them, one over each of Reggies shoulders, like two guardian angels, corrupted by demonic technology, but still determined to watch over their charge. Just then, the light on the top of the right hand pillar went on. The humming of the fork became louder and higher pitched for an instant, and then returned to normal. Jebediah counted slowly to three, and carefully stepped through the gate.

The Tall Man stood sneering at a dimensional fork, where two ambassadors from the Xerdet had just vanished. They had been very presumtuous creatures, having the audacity to tell him how to run his own business.

Among other things, they told him that he should not have let any of his human slaves, the ones entrapped in the gold sentinels have free will. And particularily not for such a long period of time. But when he had asked them to explain their objection, they had been unable to, simply saying that it was something that everybody knew shouldn't be done.

What crap. It was either a bunch of old wive's tales, or an attempt on their part to keep him from having new weapons developed that he would sell to their enemies, the Tissin. Obviously it must have been crap, because it hadn't kept the two ambassadors from purchasing schematics and prototypes of the latest methods of killing his slaves had come up with. Or from renewing their lease on five billion silver sentinels for another hundred years.

Really, the ambassadors, and all the Xerdet, and the Tissin, too, were all a bunch of pompous, overdressed fools. They wanted to play at war like two spoiled children playing at a game. So long as their meals came on time, and the casualties were kept well away from where the smell would offend their delicate noses, they really didn't see a reason to care about what went on on the battlefield. Or to whom, so long as it wasn't to them, or to the people in their worlds who counted for something.

He lifted up the heavy black pouch of crystals the two ambassadors had given him. In about an hour, two ambassadors from the Tissin were do to arrive, and it wouldn't be politic to let them see how much wealth he had just gotten from the Xerdet. Not only would they be able to deduce approximately how many of his weapons and slaves the Xerdet had just purchased, but they would use the fact that he had just been enriched by their enemies as an excuse as to why he should be satisfied with a lower payment from them. He would have to place them in his vault, along with the rest of his wealth. Except perhaps he would give one of them to that Jebediah creature. He had done that once, several thousand years ago. Jebediah had just looked blankly down at it like the stupid sheep he was, until he had explained that one of those crystals represented 100 years of slavery for 10 million of his people. Then he had started this ridiculous watering at the eyes that the humans did when they were upset. That had been pretty funny, so the Tall Man had made it a point to give him one of the crystals every five hundred years or so, just to see his reaction to it. He hadn't done it for a while now, so perhaps it would be good to see it again.

Suddenly, the Tall Man was distracted from his dreams of tormenting Jebediah by a harsh buzz coming from his jeweled tie tack. It meant that one of his computers needed to alert him of something. Annoying, but it could be something of importance. He carefully set the valuable crystals back into the heavy pouch he had taken them from and summoned a dimensional fork to take him to the chambers where his computers lay safely buried, 5 miles deep below the crust of the Red Planet.

The dimensional fork should have vanished within seconds once the Tall Man passed through it. Indeed, it started to fade, but before it could, a second dimensional fork opened a few feet in front of it. From out of this fork stepped a figure many would have mistaken for the Tall Man. Those familiar with him though, would not have made this error. The whole set of Jebediah Morningside's face was far kindlier, although lined with the pain of endless centuries of slavery and guilt for what he had unleashed upon his planet and his people.

Quickly he stepped forward, carefully halting halfway through the gate the Tall Man had just crossed, taking on a ghostly appearance as he strobed between two widely seperate locations. The two forks regained solidity, and Jebediah nodded in grim stisfaction, despite the ill feeling this flickering was given him. It was just as he and his allies had surmised. The gates were designed with a failsafe device which prevented them from closing while the Tall Man stood within them which would have destroyed his current incarnation. And since the Tall Man had made his flesh using Jebediah as a genetic model, the idiot machine that operated the failsafe could not tell the difference between the Tall Man and himself.

Jebediah endured the peculiar fluttering between the forks for a few more seconds before he was joined by Reggie and the two sentinels, Mike, and Jody. Reggie stepped forward quickly and quickly attached two black and silver boxes to the forks.

"You can step out now, Jeb." He told the older man. "I've got them held open with the sympathizers."

"Good." He stepped back with releif. It hadn't actually hurt to stand there, but it felt very peculiar, as if your whole body had the hiccups.

"We'd better get going." Jebediah said nervously. "When he finds out what we did, I am very much afraid he will not be pleased."

"Not yet." Reggie said. "I gotta go back through the gate for a couple of minutes and get something."

One of the gold sentinels, Mike, spoke to Reggie telepathically in an annoyed tone. "Reggie, we have the timing on this worked out. We need to get going!"

"I know" Reggie grinned. "I just don't want to disappoint an old friend of mine. Don't worry, I'll fix the gate to move me back a couple of minutes in time. I won't be late. 'Sides, has the Regman ever let you down?"

The sentinel drifted up near the ceiling an spun around several times in exasperation. He wasn't even going to answer that one!

The Tall Man stood in front of his computers. They did not resemble the computers that a 20th century human was familiar with, with a keyboard and screen. Instead, numerous microcopic crystals that were organized into a complicated fractal arragement like a boquet of flowers gleamed with iridescent colors as they sent and recieved information telepathically with the Tall Man. Much of this information was in binary code, but the Tall Man had no problem undertanding it regardless. In many ways his own mind was far more like one of his computers than like the irrational human slaves that served him.

It was perhaps because of this rigourously logical component of his makeup, that the Tall Man was greatly lacking, compared to human beings, the quality of imagination that made them such great inventors, despite their abysmal stupidity. It was also due to this lack that he never gave much thought to what the consequences of what he had done to humanity would ultimately be. His opinion of the human mind was based on what they had been capable of during breif lifespan where the best of them had spent maybe 25 years learning to master a particular feild of study, and maybe 50 years at best creating a few pathetic advances in that same feild before they died. And they were so poorly constructed that they never used more than 10 percent of their brains at any time during their lives.

What a human being would be capable of in 5000 years was not something the Tall Man wondered about. He himself had already existed far longer than that, and in all that time had never been more, or less, or other than he was now. Nor was he given cause to wonder. Except for a few incidents in the first 500 years of his dominion over humanity, his slaves had done exactly as he commanded. They produced new weapons and other various inventions for him to sell at various intervals, and did not attempt to harm him or his property as they once had. And so long as everything worked smoothly and he was making money, he had no cause to wonder about anything. At all.

Just now, the computer was informing him of lovely news, news he had not expected to hear for another several millenia at least. The war between the Xerdet and the Tissin had finally ended. One side or the other had been destroyed. But which one? The computer was tens of thousand of years old, and did not provide information unless asked the right questions.

He was about to ask it, when he heard a humming noise behind him. It was the distinctive sound of a sentinel travelling at high speed. The Tall Man turned around, puzzled. There shouldn't be a sentinel here, so close to so much sensitive equipment. He looked around for a moment, not seeing anything, when a flicker of motion caught his eye. It was not one, but two sentinels. They were traveling in a very strange fashion, barely six inches above the polished marble floor.

As the sentinels flew towards him, the Tall Man had a brief moment to notice light gleam off of something very fine that appeared to be suspended between the two golden spheres. Then there was a sudden burning pain as the sentinels passed on either side of him and both his legs were severed halfway between knee and ankle!

Deprived of feet to stand on, the Tall Man fell to the floor, yellow blood gushing from the stumps of his legs. Fury overwhelmed the pain. Another damned attempt at rebellion! Well, he didn't need to bother teaching them obedience any more! The war was over! He'd just kill every single one of these damn creatures, and make sure their deaths would take a good long time, too!

There was a flash of light and heat behind him, as Jody and Mike reformed bodies for themselves. Jody grabbed the Tall Man's arms and pulled them roughly behind him, preventing him from grabbing any weapons he might have hidden. Mike looked to make sure that his brother didn't need any help, and then carefully began winding an invisible something that lay on the floor around a spool that was barely an inch across, but weighed almost fifty pounds.

"Monomolecular filament. Worked exactly the way you said, Reggie" Mike said with admiration, as Reggie came around the corner carrying his four barreled shotgun. The Tall Man's eyes narrowed with fury. The damned icecream man had broken into his trophy room!

Well, this would never do, the Tall Man decided. He prepared to activate the sentinel within his flesh that contained his mind, and do battle without the disadvantage of a crippled body when Reggie raised the shotgun and aimed it at his head. A sudden red light enveloped him and he barely heard Reggie's last words before the glowing crimson darkened into black.

"You got this comin' for 5000 years, you Tall son of a bitch."

A very long time later, far longer than even the Tall Man could have guessed, he woke up in a black space that curved all around him. The Tall Man looked around with his other dimensional senses, but the place he was trapped in was sealed off in all dimensions, and in time as well. Which was impossible. Since as far as he knew, such an isolated dimensional bubble was theoretically possible, but neither energy nor matter could ever enter or leave such a space. He tried to summon a dimension fork, but nothing happened, not that he expected it to. The place where he was was completely cut off from the rest of the universe.

Despite what he thought he knew, something entered into the void with him. It was himself- no, it was that stupid traveler, Jebediah, and his three friends. For the first time in his life, the Tall Man felt fear. How could these creatures accomplish what was impossible even for him? He looked at them for a long moment. They were grim figures, for some reason reminding him of a painting he had looted from Earth and sold. What had it been called, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse" or something like that. At the time he had found it amusing. He and he alone was the harbinger of the Apocolypse.

Now suddenly, it didn't seem so funny any more.

"I trust you are comfortable?" Jebediah asked, breaking the silence. "I hope so, because you are going to be here for a very long time."

"You!" The Tall Man rushed at him, intending to rip the sphere from his head and crush it, but somehow found himself slipping oddly sideways, and ending up back where he had started. He stared at Jebediah in shock. "How did you do that?"

It was Reggie who answered. "We can do a lot of things you don't know jack about. You think we gave you weapons?" He snorted contemptfully. "For the past 4000 years you've gotten what was at the bottom of the barrel. We kept the good stuff for ourselves."

"But I watched you. How could you keep anything from me?"

Mike laughed in his face. "Watched us? We had specialists who took over your security system almost as soon as we got here! You saw what we wanted you to see. It's true we had to do what you told us, but we didn't have to let you know about what we might also be doing."

"But if that's true, why didn't you do this long ago? Why did you wait 5000 years?"

"Because of the others" Jebediah explained. "You had billions of poor souls trapped in mindlessness inside your ordinary sentinels. And despite everything we could do, we were unable to override the program in your computer that was programmed not to release them until either the Xerdet or the Tissin had been destroyed and the war had ended. So we had to wait until we had made a weapon capable of destroying whole planets and doing just that."

Whole planets? Even a tachyon bomb, the most powerful weapon the Tall Man knew of left only a 500 mile crater. The strange new sensation of fear became even greater in him. "What are you going to do with me. How long are you going to keep me here?"

"How long?" Reggie scowled at him. "Well, the way we see it, you've kept ten billion human beings prisoner for 5000 years. That adds up to 50 trillion years, which is how long we've made this place to last."

"50 trillion years!" The universe wouldn't even last that long, though this strange dimension might. "That's ridiculous!"

"No, that's justice." Jebediah said severely. "Something I fear you're not very familiar with."

Jebediah sighed and turned towards Reggie. "Come on, lets get out of here. I can't stand the sight of this thing. It sickens me."

"Wait!" cried the Tall Man. "Before you leave, I must know. Who did you destory, the Xerdet or the Tissin. Which one of them won the war?" He had to know. Perhaps there would be a way to contact the winning side and let them know of his predicament. If the humans could get him into this isolated dimension, surely those great races would be able to devise a way to get him out.

The four humans turned to look at him. Jody with hatred, Mike with fury, Reggie with contempt, and Jebediah with simple boredom. Gazing at their faces, he was not sure which of them answered him, before they turned and left him with eternity to contemplate what they had said:

"Don't you get it? Both the Xerdet and the Tissin were using us as slaves. Once we had the means of doing so, we destroyed both of their races. And as for who won the war.....

"We did."