From Apparitions: Specters of the Truth:

Yes, Macbeth thought, a gift. That is what his minions were. A gift, to cleanse the galaxy of its unending, shameful injustices.

The corpse in its carbonite was, too, a gift. He caught a glimpse of it, and it delighted him. It was a gift that a certain young Governor of the Emperor’s New Order would be sure to enjoy.

That thought pleased him immensely, and the swarms of nanites all around him shook in reply. So strong was his delight that all over the planet of Utropollus Major, at that moment, all of his forces – the dread creatures he had created to cleanse the galaxy – vibrated in one manner of another.

Outlined in the dull grey of carbonite, was the distinctive shape of an Imperial Royal Guard’s helmet.

From Apparitions: Faces of the Dead:

As pervasive as the tanks were, they were never more so than in the room Macbeth floated that very moment. On the furthest walls were the various pieces of equipment, operated by drudges or unattended. But there, in the center of the bombed and ruined room, was where Macbeth spent most of his time. Surrounding his chair on either side were row upon row of the glowing orange tanks. Vestiges of human beings clung to a hopeless sort of life within them; halves of torsos, spinal columns, all attached to brains.

This was where he kept minds. Interesting minds of the dead.

In every sense of the phrase, Utropollus was now a gate between life and death; a place that had been torn apart from the inside, and the void thus created refilled by a twisted sort of machine life.

Here the barrier between life and dead meant nothing; both were simply commodities that Macbeth traded in.

From Apparitions: Faces of the Dead:

Theren Gevel stared out the windows of his flagship at the floating mass of metal and flesh, the fight to crack the fortress of Macbeth both costly and bitter.

In the end, a test of wills as the nightmares of the dead came back to haunt Macbeth as anger turned to desperation, Gevel willing to feed the numbers of those dead with assault after assault.


Macbeth demanded the price and Gevel bitterly paid it but not without return.


Utropollus Major and Minor would fall into his hands and it would be years as scientists poured over the technology unleashed upon this world.

The accounts of the few remaining databanks and holorecorders gave the leader of the Bastion Conclave an idea as to the horrors visited upon the planet.

Do stories begin and end like that?

With simple statements, paragraphs spiraling together like stars to form into a single pinpoint of light, a single message and meaning? They do in books. To some people, books are more real than reality. Maybe they are.

History has been chiseled down to a fine, sleek remainder by people looking for reasons. Looking for answers. Looking for something. Time is a barrage of events that will never stop until the stars go dark. To take a handful of these events and derive some sort of satisfaction from the telling is a special sort of lying that writers engage in almost exclusively.

Most people fail to organize the events of their life into a story; they exist as a shapeless mass in their mind, a morass of memories, sensations, and emotions. The sensible purpose of a story is to convey something.

When a story fails to do that, it is labeled pointless. But if you asked someone to tell you what the story of their life conveys, they would look at you as though a second head had grown out of your shoulder and begun singing the [i]Marseilles[i].

Many things happen just behind the surface of what history chooses to observe.

Scientists once believed that the universe will ultimately collapse in on itself, pulled inward by its own gravity, until all the matter in the universe returns to a single omnipresent point as it was at the beginning of time. They thought that, mostly because they wanted to; because it was an elegant solution. It was a good ending to the story of the universe.

Now we know that the galaxies are rushing away from one another at ever increasing speeds, speeding outwards towards infinity. They will continue to do so until all energy is exhausted; until all the stars in the heavens turn to ash, until the planets unravel, until matter itself simply dissolves. Maybe from exhaustion. One day the universe will just go dark, and that will be it.

No grand collapse, no great infinity. Just a colossal number of stars, planets and galaxies all dying quietly and sadly in isolation.

The paragraphs of a story do not coalesce into a single brilliant point of light like a universal ending that will never come. The spiral outwards forever, the contradictory and inelegant laws of physics pushing them around one another like so many grains of sand, so many cogs in an infinite machinery of unrivaled beauty and meaninglessness.

These are the elements of the story which, when introduced, rob it of its cleanliness.

Here is the story as you know it: Venn Macbeth, using his experimental nanotechnology and whatever rage life had handed him, destroyed and conquered – for they are the same thing to his mind – Utropollus Major and proceeded to target the other planets in the Utropollus System, which is near the Bastion Conclave. Theren Gevel received the distress signal and came to their aid.

The conflict that followed claimed millions of lives, and the Conclave itself unraveled in the process. Theren Gevel eventually prevailed, and Macbeth was defeated.

The truth, or at least a truth greater than that summary, is not so clear cut. The conflict itself did not unravel the Bastion Conclave. That process was begun from the inside. The easiest way to destroy a house of cards is to remove one of the pieces.

The process of the Conclave’s destruction was begun, as so much destruction is, by the construction of something else.

<O:p
All hospital rooms are clinical. Most are clean and spotless, some are not, but almost all are some cold mechanical shade of white. Why couldn’t a hospital room be red? Because then it wouldn’t be a hospital room.

Even this hospital room, on the surface of Utropollus Major, was a pale off-white. For whatever reason, it was untouched by the destruction that had seeped into the fabric of Utropollus, as though this place were made of Teflon.

Tilaric Brel, however, had been staring at the same off-white wall for nearly an hour and a half. The expression on his face was somewhere between puzzlement and horror, the sort of look one might imagine could be evoked by something at once beautiful and ugly.

“What you are experiencing is perfectly normal,” Macbeth assured the man. He was naked, scars crisscrossing his body like a thousand rivers of pain, all flowing into one another. Macbeth’s words from his place in his macabre little hoverchair came in a voice that so obviously longed to be soothing it was revolting.

If Brel’s body was a map of the rivers of some far-flung world that cut across him and whispered of agony, Macbeth’s voice was the sound of a thousand bees buzzing in unison. They spoke of the same sort of pain. Their agony was orchestral and stereophonic, making even their best approximation of reassurance incredibly disturbing.

“General Grevious informs me that, upon waking, the dead are often assaulted by a barrage of questions so immense it immobilizes them. Please, take your time; I assure you that your body is quite functional. You were an expensive purchase.”

When Brel finally spoke, his words were clipped. “I’m alive?”

“Yes.”

He suddenly clutched his head, lying back on the operating table gently, as though the answer had only confused him more. “I remember dying,” Brel whispered. “I remember the fire, the screaming, the agony of metal cutting flesh, I remember floating in a void as my heart stopped but my brain still sputtered about for days.”

“No doubt.”

“Everything is translucent,” Brel said, and it became clear he was speaking to himself. “Everything in my head has been scattered around. Suddenly everything and nothing is real, every memory is a dream and every dream is a memory, I can no longer distinguish fact from fantasy –”

“Sedate him.”

The buzzing nanite robots complied, and when Brel awoke, he was far less frantic. This time he sat up calmly, looking Macbeth in his twisted and sunken eyes. Macbeth looked as though he had been ripped apart and put back together a thousand times. He wasn’t scarred; the reconstruction had been seamless. But nanites buzzed all about him, enshrouding him and dancing around his bizarrely glowing eyes like savages around a fire. He was the human equivalent of paper maché.

“How can I be alive, if I died?” Brel asked. “I thought that death was the end. I had accepted it.”

“Death is, often, only the beginning – even if it goes against everything you hold to be true,” Macbeth replied. “I assure you that to many, death is nothing more than a business. That is how you have come to be here. Like all businesses, death is reliable; it is not fantastic or spectacular, but average, a condition that functions like clockwork. If there is one thing you can rely upon in the universe, it is business. Let that assure you of the reality of what you are now experiencing.”

Brel shook his head. The motion was awkward and forced. It was the human reaction he knew was natural, but it no longer came naturally. They sat in silence as Brel contemplated this.

“You have been alive for nearly an hour,” Macbeth said, “and you haven’t asked me anything of substance. Don’t you care where you are? Who I am? How you came to be here?”

“I can remember dying not once, but a thousand times,” Brel said, taking seconds between each of the words as though he was harvesting them and evaluating each. “My memories are all intruding on one another.”

Macbeth’s chair twitched as he waited for his answer.

“None of this is real to me. Nothing is real to me,” Brel elaborated. “Death was final, death was the end. If death isn’t the end, I can’t accept the validity of everything I remember. Memory and reality have been submerged in a pool of fantasy. How can I ask you questions when I haven’t even accepted what’s happening here? No one asks questions in a dream.”

Macbeth ignored the rambling and supplied an answer anyway. “You are on the planet of Utropollus Major in the Utropollus system. That is an empty name now, because I have destroyed Utropollus. You might say that we stand on the corpse of Utropollus Major, which I have reanimated as I reanimated you. After your death at the Battle of Bastion, your body was located by a nameless group of intergalactic merchants who deal in the business of death. Death is not, as you put it, final; it is just a boundary which few have the means to cross. I have purchased you, and restored you to life using the same nanotechnology I used to destroy this planet.”

Brel stared at the white walls of the hospital room for three more hours.