The crumpled helicopter lay in a field like
a swatted dragonfly, rotor-wings broken, strutted limbs twisted and bulbous
eyes of plexiglass smashed.
A single figure stepped out of the smoking
wreckage, dressed in a surgical gown that was yellowed and fraying. Blood,
thick and slow-oozing as lava, issued from a wound that had opened up below the
red hair of the survivor’s forehead to expose an area of ancient, yellowed
skull, adding to the gaping and decaying lesions in his face that revealed bone
beneath.
He looked down at his feet and saw the
blackening, necrotic flesh and bones.
I will need clothes to cover me.
He walked around the wreckage, dazed.
The medical team and the pilot were all dead
it seemed.
The pilot’s door was gone and the man lay
slouched sideways in his harness as if taking a view of the ground no more than
a metre from the tinted visor of his helmet.
I will need the helmet to cover my
hideousness, he thought.
The pilot gave a moan.
Still a spark of life?
The survivor took the helmet in both hands.
He gave it a sharp twist.
The shiny black dome deadened the crack as
the neck snapped.
He undid the helmet and ripped it off the
pilot’s head to reveal a blighted, deeply aged face. The same blight of
senility had struck the medical crew, leaving them hanging in their harnesses.
He put the helmet on over his own head, and
caught a whiff of his own decay inside the enclosed hemisphere, still warm from
the pilot’s occupation. He tugged the strap under the chin, but the strap had
perished and it gave. It crumbled in his fingers. He tore it away, along with
the attached microphone.
Next he hauled the pilot out onto the grass and
took his overalls and black leather jacket. The suit was made of tougher
material and still held together, he was relieved to see as he pulled it on,
although the zipper jammed as he tugged it up under his chin. He added the
pilot’s jacket and the gloves and flight boots.
He pulled down the shaded visor and turned a
final glance at the wreck. The helicopter, a gleaming new ECI45, had taken off
a few hours earlier from Tubingen in Germany. Now severe metal fatigue had
opened up splits like lightning cracks in the buckled fuselage and in the
rusty, twisted rotors.
Chaos,
entropy, dissolution had once again followed in his wake, the survivor thought.
The relentless process had begun soon after
his whirlwind growth to manhood whereupon he had suddenly, inexplicably, begun
to degenerate.
He had heard whispers around his bedside and
around his life in that clinical white and glass fortress in the hills of
Germany.
They whispered about his rare DNA, 5000
years old, mysteriously acquired from remains uncovered in Egypt amid the chaos
of its revolution. About next-generation sequencing and in-vitro fertilization
and his birth to a young surrogate who had died of sudden-onset senility and
about his violent childbirth and where he had ‘torn himself from his mother’s
womb’ like the ancient god of chaos Seth of Egyptian mythology.
He had gathered knowledge prodigiously about
the modern world in his meteoric growth to manhood, some gained from books,
some from the Internet and television, but most of all from a kind of
effortless channelling and certitude regarding events and history beyond his
experience that he could only describe as a dawning omniscience.
My name is Seth, he told them.
They called him Tubingen Man.
As a compromise he came to be known as Seth
Tubingen.
He knew what was happening to him.
The attempt to resurrect his ancient DNA had
gone terribly wrong and his body was following a steep parabola from generation
to decay, regressing to a mummified state. Perhaps they should have expected
such a result, using the DNA building blocks of an entity known as the ‘Lord of
Chaos’?
The Egyptians called Seth ‘the rotten faced
one’ but this rot was catastrophic.
The medical team in the clinic wondered if
he had developed some unknown strain of late-onset progeria and was aging
rapidly and prematurely.
Their alarm grew when lesions appeared in
his face and body and signs of necrosis appeared like a black death of his feet
and hands.
They tried a cocktail of drugs to stop the
process until finally, in desperation, they took the decision to send him to
London for treatment by one of the world’s specialist experts on progeria, as a
last throw of the dice.
But they were wrong about his degrading
body.
He had heard a nurse in a corridor crack a
joke about his condition: “You know the movie The Mummy Returns?” she
whispered. “Well it’s returning in his body!”
She
had unknowingly hit upon the truth.
His body was in cellular chaos and just as
his body degenerated so did the world around him. Monitoring machines broke
down. Light bulbs flickered and died. His sheets and surgical gowns yellowed
and frayed. The hospital bed rusted. Flowers in a vase withered.
Then it began to hit the clinic staff. At
first it showed in a slowing down of their movements, a hazing of the eyes then
the first pallor of old age descending on them, then clumsiness and
forgetfulness.
The clinic building kept blacking out.
He knew that by the time his body degraded
to a mummied state – the chaos and
contagion he spread would be impossible to stop.
Yet before that time he must complete a
pre-ordained cycle.
The fates had brought him to this point for
a reason. His enemy Osiris was here in this island land, far away from Egypt
across the great green. How that could be possible, he did not know yet, but
Osiris must be here, that much he knew.
And with that certainty came an imperative.
He knew what he had to do. The pattern must
be made. The cycle must be completed. He must find Osiris, murder him and hack
his body into pieces, just as he had done before in ancient days.
Then, perhaps, the terrible cycle could end.
He set off across a field.
Daisies withered, collapsing like dying white
stars as he passed, and singing birds fell silent in the trees. Something
dropped out of a tree at his feet with a muffled thud.
It was a dead black crow, its beak wide open
in a silent caw. He kicked it carelessly.
The Lord of Chaos and Dissolution was on the
move through the English countryside.
Osiris, where are you?
Can he be far?
I must just keep moving, guided by an unseen
compass needle of an ancient, previously-enacted cycle of mythology.
