Author’s note
Again, this is a first draft (which is why it’s not in paperback yet) so any criticism of this is appreciated. This story will feature in SEVEN STORIES ABOUT ASTRAL TRAVEL, which is due out in 2024 (I have a few other books to work on in 2023, which I will re-announce soon).
Also, I’ve changed the name of this substack to ‘Phillip Carter’s sci-fi multiverse’ to make it more obvious to new readers what it is. The previous title was ‘The weird worlds of Phillip Carter’. Which do you prefer? Which makes more sense for new visitors?
SPLIT - Part 2
When Mark woke up the pill bottle elevator was gone. He was alone now in a white desert, the sand looking like tiny shards of some atomized marble sculpture. A lilac planet lingered, and as he focused on it, he realised it was much smaller and much closer than it had first appeared. It was no larger than ten metres across, but when he realised this, the image changed again. It gained minute details and grew at the same rate that it receded back into the night sky. The planet was far away and normal sized now, but when he averted his eyes from it, the thing became small and close again.
The same was happening to his hands and feet. He noticed now that his nightgown had been cleaned with the soft fabric cleaner that wasn’t in the shops anymore. He sniffed a sleeve and remembered the last time he bought it. He held onto this weird detail as if to escape from the others in this dream world. Even as the giant scorpion men began to manifest from the hazy air on the horizon, Mark buried his face in that sleeve and remembered home, before the pills, before he needed anything other than himself and a daydream.
When he looked up the scorpion men had turned into dried and dead trees on the horizon. Perhaps they had always been this way, Mark had a habit of making spiders out of shadows and clumps of hair. He did not trust anyone, and so could not trust himself either.
That familiar, aching cold returned. Now, without the giant mouth looming over him, Mark felt capable of reaching in with a finger and prodding the thing. It was a metal zip, and as he ran his finger back out to his front teeth, he felt the zipper at the roof of his mouth. The migraine continued throbbing in his brain. Perhaps he had reached a conclusion.
“I need to set it free,” he told himself. He got his finger around the back of the zip and pulled it until he could reach in with his thumb and grasp the thing. He pulled slowly and carefully, expecting blood or pain or something to snap. But nothing did. He sat cross-legged in the marble-grain sand and turned to the lilac planet, which rotated slowly and unstoppably at its Schrodinger point of not-quite-here and not-quite-there. He felt some familiarity for the planet, some love for it, as if it was a living creature he had known forever.
The zip reached his front teeth now. The pain began. Mark winced as the smell of metal and blood pooled up inside his nose. Everything else was secondary to this smell. The feel of the sand vanished, the brightness of the triple suns in the sky faded. Everything was metal and blood. That was all life was underneath all the fakery. Metal and blood. Nothing more.
The zip cut through the flesh anchoring his upper lip to his gums. Tears streamed down his face, but he didn’t grunt or twitch. It was too risky. The zip passed through the stubble on his lip and up between his nostrils. He let go and fell forward into the sand, catching himself with his hands and shaking.
The lilac planet dragged itself through the air with a dull scraping sound, as if the nebulae and atmosphere were a stone floor hindering its progress. The planet-boulder was even smaller and closer now, close enough that if Mark could stand up and jump with enough force, he might reach it.
He didn’t try for fear of what might happen. He imagined touching it would turn him small, capture him on that world without an atmosphere. At least this one was breathable, even if it wanted him dead.
He stood up and pulled the zip higher. The flesh on his nose parted silently, revealing the red and yellow inner workings of his face. His eyes crossed as the zip passed perilously between them, and suddenly he felt a looseness. A gust of air puffed out through the open skin; a tendril of the migraine slipped loose. He kept pulling.
By now the zip had passed over his forehead and into his hairline. This part tingled, but it was not unpleasant. He kept pulling until the thing stopped at the back of his neck. He turned to the lilac planet as if to ask why this was happening.
His head fell into two pieces, each equal, each occupied by the same consciousness. His eyes darted about independently, each working out what had happened. His skull was cut into two perfect halves, yet his brain remained untouched. It floated right where it should have been. Around it the ghostly form of the migraine spiralled and left. Mark waited for the embers of it to blow away before reaching up and trying to close his head. But his arms were limp, his legs were frozen, and his breathing had slowed to an imperceptible crawl.
The plucking feeling of something in his brain disconnecting from his spine was enough to make him shiver through the paralysis. It wriggled free on its own, leaving him behind, splitting his brain in two as he had split his head in two.
The thing swam up to the lilac planet, which had now completed a half rotation, and began burrowing into an ancient crater in the planet’s surface. Now the planet pulled its old trick again, becoming far away and gargantuan as Mark’s distant eyes tried to focus. His legs became numb, and he teetered sideways, falling toward the slop of the marble sand dune. As he landed his head snapped back together like a clam, sending an echoing electric impulse through his entire body and out into the sand. His brain was now painless and efficient, his senses back to normal, back to how they were before the headaches and the pills.
Mark saved smiling for later. The thing from his brain was still going about its silent mission, breaking into the lilac planet. He felt the sand against one side of his face and focused, noticing something in his peripheral vision. He pushed himself up and scooped up some of the marble-sand. Writing. There was writing on some of the larger grains. There was a story out here, spread across the entire desert planet. He held the handful of sand closer, feeling the grains and searching for meaning. He discarded the sand and scooped another handful, then another, searching until something memorable showed up. Then he noticed something; the grains had the same plastic, almost rubbery feel of the outer surface of the pills. But the letters were different, the symbols unrecognisable.
He looked out to the trees on the horizon. By now they had grown lush and bright, turquoise leaves had sprouted from once-dead branches. Mark stumbled down the sand dune in their direction as the thing from his brain finally entered the planet.