Ogre

“Help us. The ogre is destroying our village. If anyone is in range, help us.” Nathaniel, Haticat, and Fred listen to the faint signal on the radio.

“It just keeps repeating,” Haticat says.

“What do we know about the planet where it comes from?” Nathaniel asks.

“Almost nothing. It’s supposed to be uninhabitable, with high levels of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and freezing temperatures year-round,” Doctor Bill replies.

“Interesting. Well, set a course. I want to see this village,” Nathaniel says.

“Setting a course,” Haticat says.

When they arrive on the planet, they find only the remains of a village. There are simple huts and fruit trees smashed and desiccated. There are some signs of fire, but there isn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support fire. “There seems to be nobody here,” Doctor Bill comments.

“We might be too late to help,” Nathaniel says.

“Why not use the time machine?” Haticat suggests.

“Good idea. I want to meet these villagers so they can explain to me how they manage to live on such an inhospitable planet,” Nathaniel says.

The explorers return to orbit, travel backwards forty-eight hours, and land again. They almost can’t believe it. The village is warm and oxygenated. Many people of all ages run to and fro.

The people here have very long noses and purple eyes. They wear long robes and tall hats. “Greetings, visitors. My name is Sivel. Why have you come to Atomica?” an unusually tall resident asks.

“We are explorers and wondered how it was you built such a place on a planet like this,” Nathaniel answers.

“Oh, we are Atom Wizards, masters of Brownian motion. Our nuclear-powered hypercomputers calculate the trajectories of every molecule they encounter. With a few small nudges, we can ensure that warmth and oxygen collect here,” Sivel says.

“Interesting,” Nathaniel says.

The four explorers are given a tour of the town, which is less than half a kilometer across. Fruit trees grow throughout, but most grow in the town center. They have been bioengineered to grow fruit that doesn’t necessarily grow on trees, and things that aren’t necessarily fruit. The most common “fruits” are acorns, dates, apricots, blackberries, strawberries, peas, watermelons, lemons, bananas, pecans, potatoes, and eggs.

They stop in a restaurant for a snack. Nathaniel has plain bran donuts and milk. Sivel eats bark chips and cinnamon-rosemary bread with allspice-honey tea. “We control the way smells mix, preventing nasty combinations from interfering with the enjoyment of your meal. It’s called antimix. That’s why you can’t smell the turnip stew they’re making right now so long as you stay near your donuts. This ability even allows us to make things like chocolate-covered chicken nuggets.”

“Ew!” Nathaniel exclaims.

“You don’t taste the chocolate and the chicken at the same time. They alternate,” Sivel explains.

“The amount of precision you manage is astounding. My scanner tells me the average temperature in this room is negative sixty degrees Celsius, but right against my body it rises to twenty-two degrees,” Doctor Bill says.

“Yes, and it can be adjusted for each person so that everyone is comfortable in the same room. We also direct carbon dioxide away from you and oxygen and nitrogen towards you,” Sivel says.

“You must be able to extinguish any fire instantly and automatically, then,” Nathaniel says.

“Of course,” Sivel responds.

“Is there any way the system could go wrong?” Nathaniel asks.

“It’s hard to see how. Our hypercomputers are redundant and correct each other’s mistakes. They are extremely sophisticated – as much as any biological system. They rival our bodies in complexity. One might even say they are alive. Only another hypercomputer of equal or greater mass could ever be a threat to us,” Sivel says.

“Biological systems sometimes succumb to cancer or autoimmune disorders,” Nathaniel mentions.

“Yes, but we perform periodic flushes of faulty elements before they reach critical mass,” Sivel says.

“And where do you put them?” Nathaniel asks.

“The sewers,” Sivel answers.

“Can I see them?” Nathaniel asks.

“Um, I’m not sure. What are you looking for?” Sivel asks.

“Do you have ogres on this planet?” Nathaniel asks.

“Ogres?” Sivel laughs. “No, there is no life on this planet we do not control. There is another Dinosaur here who crash-landed last year that we cared for, but no ogres.”

“Another Dinosaur?” Haticat says.

“Can we meet him?” Nathaniel asks.

“Um, sure. Why not?” Sivel says.

Living in the village of Atomica is a Tyrannosaur who calls himself Mister Dinosaur. He has an oak tree growing from the back of his neck. Upon seeing Nathaniel and his three Stuffians, he freezes. “Oh, so it happens today.”

“What happens today?” Nathaniel asks.

The Tyrannosaur looks quickly at Sivel and then back at Nathaniel. “Nothing, I was just thinking out loud. It’s not important.”

“Okay. As I was saying, this is Mister Dinosaur. We call him that because he forgot his name.” Turning, Sivel adds, “This is Captain Nathaniel and his crew, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill.”

“Hi,” Haticat says.

“Hello,” Mister Dinosaur says.

They continue to engage in friendly conversation for several minutes and Mister Dinosaur explains how he came to the planet. “I had been poisoned by something that was destroying my fat cells and making me ravenously hungry. I crashed my ship just outside of town and ran straight for the trees in the town center. I just kept eating acorns until I passed out. The Atom Wizards all thought I was dead and buried me. I was in a coma for several months during which time the undigested acorns sprouted all over my body. Later, the Wizards decided to chop down the trees to make room for others, leaving only the one on the back of my neck. This is what started to wake me up. A few days later, I dug myself out of the ground completely healed.”

“How?” Doctor Bill asks.

“Nobody knows for sure, but it has something to do with the hypercomputer Brownian protocol. Wounds heal faster here,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“Once we had designed computers of sufficiently high power, they began to design themselves. They now operate well beyond our full understanding,” Sivel says.

“Interesting,” Nathaniel says.

“Well, I have work to do. I’ll leave you alone. Enjoy our town,” Sivel says.

“Bye,” Haticat says.

Sivel is barely outside the door when Mister Dinosaur’s voice suddenly goes low. “There isn’t much time. I know who you are, I know about the time machine, and all our lives depend on what I tell you next.” Eventually, the whole story comes out. Mister Dinosaur is another time traveler who conceals his identity on purpose. Several years ago, in his past but in Nathaniel’s future, they meet on planet Iddhya where they become friends and fight the giant worms together. He was told by this future version of Nathaniel that they would one day meet in Atomica just minutes before the town was attacked by an ogre from the sewers. He was told to tell the younger Nathaniel that when the choice of tunnel had to be made, the second option was the correct one.

“Tunnel? What tunnel?” Nathaniel asks.

“I don’t know. You didn’t say. You told me that was all you would need to know,” Mister Dinosaur answers.

“Where did you get time travel technology?” Doctor Bill asks.

“You gave it to me, and you told me where to find the time crystals to power it,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“How many other time travelers are there?” Nathaniel asks.

“Many,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“It looks like our effort to keep it secret have failed,” Doctor Bill comments.

“There’s one more thing you told me to do,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“What?” Nathaniel asks.

“Give you the power of Atomica.” With that, he blows on them.

Nathaniel breaths some air in before he can react. “Hey! Gross!”

“Now you have the power to smell any substance. You can recognize helium, carbon dioxide, and every kind of radiation. By inhalation, you can sense the thermodynamic statistics of any gas – the mean, median, and mode of molecular energies – the range, standard deviation, and geometric mean – much more than mere pressure and temperature,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“That’s still gross,” Nathaniel says.

Soon, the five of them step outside and hear a scream. The ogre has appeared. They run in the direction of the screaming. “It just crawled out of the sewers,” somebody says. The crowd parts and Nathaniel sees it – an ugly, deformed giant. It pushes over lampposts and snaps a bench in half. Everything it touches erupts in flame a few seconds later.

The braver wizards surround it and point their wands. They put out fires only for them to return. They cause parts of the ogre’s body to implode only for them to puff up seconds later. Slowly and clumsily, the ogre keeps advancing. It grabs the closest wizard and simply melts his body in its hand.

Nathaniel springs into action, followed closely by his crew. Four lasers are fired in the ogre’s direction and pass right through it without causing harm. They burn four holes in the hut behind it. “Oops. Well, that didn’t work.”

“It must be antimix. Its body and the lasers never touch,” somebody says.

For the first time, the ogre runs. It takes a swing at Nathaniel and misses. Nathaniel kicks it in the belly, but instead of bouncing off, his foot gets stuck. The belly closes in around it and Nathaniel feels himself being sucked in. “Ah! It’s got me!” Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill grab him and pull. With their help, Nathaniel pulls his leg free, but loses his boot. In the meantime, the ogre fends off attacking wizards, smacking them off their feet and breaking their wands.

“Liquify!” one wizard yells, pointing his wand right in the ogre’s face. Nothing happens. The ogre steps forward. The wizards step back. “Liquify!” the wizard yells again, this time pointing at the ground. Suddenly, the ogre falls through the street up to its chest, the ground hardens, and it is trapped. It roars. “That won’t hold it for long; we need to go!”

Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, Doctor Bill, and Mister Dinosaur join the rest of the townsfolk as they are evacuated. The path to their spaceship is quickly blocked by fire, radiation, and malfunctioning antimix. The people bring three portable hypercomputers with them so they can continue to breathe as they scramble their way up the nearest mountain. “Where are we going?” Nathaniel asks.

“We’re running from the thing until it stops following us,” one wizard says.

“That’s not a very good plan. If we can keep ahead of it, we can circle around the mountain back to my ship so I can take you off the planet,” Nathaniel says.

“Okay, I’ll tell the mayor,” the wizard says.

“Will they all fit?” Fred asks.

“They’ll fit,” Nathaniel assures him.

Sivel then comes up, walking fast. “How did you know about the ogre?”

“Oh, uh, I didn’t know an ogre would appear,” Nathaniel says.

“You asked if we had any ogres on this planet the same day one showed up,” Sivel says.

“Yeah, uh, we have our own kind of hypercomputer. Just as you predict the behavior of molecules, we predict the behavior of computers. I thought an ogre might appear sometime, but I didn’t know when,” Nathaniel lies. Mister Dinosaur nervously picks acorns out of his tree and eats them.

“There are other cultures with hypercomputer technology?” Sivel asks.

Nathaniel whispers. “It’s a heavily guarded secret. Most owners use them to predict stock markets.”

“Oh,” Sivel says. “I’d like to see one.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nathaniel stalls.

The townsfolk scramble across a boulder field and up and down several hills. The ogre is never far behind. As the path up and around the mountain gets steeper, they find themselves on a ledge between a thirty-meter drop-off and a thirty-meter wall of rock. They keep going. Then a fire bursts into existence in front of them. They are trapped. The ogre gets closer, itself on fire and causing spontaneous fires around it. “I’ll guard the rear,” Mister Dinosaur says.

The Atom Wizards try to put the fire out, but it doesn’t work. “I have an idea,” the mayor says. “I can open a quantum tunnel through the barrier. We can all go through together.”

“That has a ten percent chance of collapsing and killing everybody,” the donut shop owner says.

“If we stay here, the ogre has a one hundred percent chance of killing everybody,” the mayor says.

“I vote we try the mayor’s idea,” someone says.

“I have a second option,” the donut shop owner says.

“What?” the mayor asks.

“Let’s each open our own quantum tunnel. Statistically, ninety percent of us should survive,” the donut shop owner argues.

“But ten percent will almost certainly die,” the mayor says.

“And there’s still a tiny chance we’ll all die,” someone says.

“Better for some to be lost than the whole village,” the donut shop owner counters.

“I like the mayor’s idea,” someone says.

“I like the second option,” someone else says.

A quick vote is taken and the mayor’s idea wins by one. “The visitors haven’t voted yet,” the donut shop owner complains.

“They aren’t part of the town,” the mayor says.

“We’re facing the same threat together, aren’t we?” Nathaniel says.

“That doesn’t matter,” the mayor counters.

“Then send us through separately,” Nathaniel requests.

“Okay, if you wish,” the mayor says.

“Wait, if they’re going separately, then I want to go separately, too,” says one of those that voted for option two.

“Me too,” someone else says. After some further bickering, the mayor concedes to the donut shop owner and agrees to send everyone separately.

“The ogre’s coming!” Mister Dinosaur shouts from the back of the crowd.

They move as fast as they can. One at a time, everyone is sent to the other side of the fire. Ten percent of them never appear again. The mayor survives, as do Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, Doctor Bill, and Mister Dinosaur, but Sivel and the donut shop owner are nowhere to be seen. “I guess we won’t have to show Sivel our time machine, now,” Doctor Bill says.

“I wasn’t going to show him. I would have stalled until I could take off,” Nathaniel says.

On the other side of the fire, the townsfolk continue around the far side of the mountain without incident. The ogre remains so far behind that it is soon out of scanner range. Eventually, they see the cross shape of Nathaniel’s ship in the distance. The ground first levels out and then passes through a hilly area. The people are forced to round tight corners around sharp stones. They lose sight of the ship for a while.

Finally, they arrive. Haticat unlocks the door and everyone crams in. Every hallway is full. It is standing room only. Nathaniel undoes the exterior wall paneling to allow Mister Dinosaur to squeeze into the bomb bay. “I have friends on Batzat 3. You can drop me off there,” he says.

On the bridge later, Nathaniel and his crew prepare for takeoff. “Hey, my keypad is nonresponsive,” Haticat complains.

“There must be a fault in the output junctions,” Nathaniel says.

Haticat shakes his head. “I checked that. The sensors indicate thermal stress in the engine’s safeties.”

“Okay, stay here. Doctor Bill and I will take a look,” Nathaniel says. They exit the ship and walk around its long arms to the other side where they climb up on top and remove a panel. “Yikes! What happened here?”

“No wonder the safeties flipped. It looks like a thousand years of rust,” Doctor Bill comments.

“But this alloy isn’t supposed to rust,” Nathaniel says. Then he sees a mushroom-like growth entwined in the circuitry. “What’s this?” He pulls on it.

Suddenly, the mushroom grows into a blob the size of a polar bear and leaps free of the machinery, landing on the roof of the spaceship beside them. They jump back. By the time they have regained their balance, the blob has settled into the shape of an ogre. It growls. They reflexively shoot at it. The lasers simply pass through. It kicks Doctor Bill hard and he disappears beyond some distant hill, apparently propelled by a strong wind that suddenly comes from nowhere.

Nathaniel starts to run and feels claws rake his back that instantly erupt into flames. He rolls on the ship’s roof to put it out. The ogre swings its arms, legs, and floppy belly at Nathaniel, but his superspeed keeps him one step ahead. It chases him across the roof, leaving rust damage wherever it steps. The ogre blows on him, knocking him over and then bringing its hand down in a great slap. Nathaniel slips under its legs and finds himself on the other side of it where another face is waiting for him. The ogre growls again. It stops for a moment, as if contemplating its next move. Then it melts. It literally melts and merges with the metal paneling of the roof. Nathaniel watches as a slight discoloration spreads across the surface in all directions. He runs.

He makes it halfway across the ship when the roof starts to give way, tripping him. He slides to a stop just within reach of the open panel. Then the roof swallows his lower half. His legs and tail are trapped inside the ship and he is stuck facing the engine cooling unit. He struggles and notices a rising shadow. The ogre blooms from the top of the ship and steps closer to Nathaniel. He struggles some more. It steps closer. It raises a foot as if to step on him, and he grabs the only hose he can reach, rips it open with his claws, and aims the open end backwards at the ogre. The ogre’s foot is hit with a high-pressure stream of antigravity fluid, causing the ogre to levitate. Seconds later, it rises ever faster into the sky and later suffocates in the ionosphere.

It takes twelve hours to cut Nathaniel out of the roof and another three weeks to generate enough antigravity fluid for flight. In the meantime, the Atom Wizards go home. They rebuild their town and bring Nathaniel gifts.

The five time travelers exchange stories. Mister Dinosaur tells of his multiple run ins with space pirates and Nathaniel tells about the time he accidentally changed history on Fkoojy. “You can change history?” Mister Dinosaur asks.

“Apparently,” Nathaniel says.

“Don’t go to Iddhya,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“What? Why?” Nathaniel asks.

“That’s where you died. Dead worms gradually lose rocket fuel containment and explode. All four of you were killed while you dissected one to learn more about it. I watched.” Mister Dinosaur says.

“If we don’t go to Iddhya, we won’t meet,” Nathaniel says.

“Well, go but be careful around the worms, then,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“I guess we will,” Nathaniel says.

“Scan their tissues for bonding strength first. Salt soaks through their bodies and makes them deteriorate rapidly,” Mister Dinosaur says.

“We will do that,” Nathaniel says.

“You’ve saved us twice now,” Haticat says. “Once from a quantum tunnel collapse and once from giant worms.”

“And one day we’ll return the favor,” Nathaniel says. “I hope you have good luck in your travels.”

“You too,” Mister Dinosaur responds.

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