Necrom

Gibson nodded, going with the flow. "I'd like another glass of champagne."

"Even though it's only an illusion."

"I've already told you you'd made your point."

Necrom's messenger refilled Gibson's glass. "You seem to be getting a little impatient."

"I thought I'd been brought here for a purpose."

"Indeed you have."

"All I've seen so far are party tricks."

"That's because my function is to keep you amused."

"I don't understand."

The messenger produced a second glass out of the air and poured himself a drink. "I know that you're in a place that you're absolutely incapable of understanding, and very frightened, and the preparation you went through for this probably led you to expect the worst. Believe me, I understand your fears and I must compliment you on how well you're standing up to them."

"Are you going to tell me what you have in store for me, or just leave me hanging?"

"That's the terrible secret, Joe. Nothing is going to happen to you. At least, not in the way you imagine it. No fiery pits, no laser dissection, you're not going to be impaled on a shaft of burning chrome. To be truly precise, what's going to happen to you is already happening."

Gibson turned, looking around helplessly at the- mist-shrouded illusion world. "This is it?"

"You are a specimen, Joe, a sample if you like. Maskim Xul was motivated to bring you here."

"Who the hell is Maskim Xul?"

The messenger made a small, apologetic bow. "I'm sorry. You know him by his new name. You know him as Yancey Slide."

"So it was Slide pulling the strings? He was behind it all?"

The messenger shook his head. "Slide was only a part of a very complex selection process."

Gibson blinked. "I was selected for all this? Right from the start?"

"A great deal of care was taken in designing the test program that made sure you were the right one."

Gibson felt himself starting to lose it. "Test program?"

"A progressive filter system that, in the end, came up with you."

Events had come full circle and Gibson had returned to the perpetual unanswered question. "But why me?"

"In the beginning, you attracted attention because your behavior, your musical career had made you stand out from the rest of your kind."

"I didn't stand out that much. I wasn't president or anything."

"In that respect, you were just plain unlucky."

Inside the clouds, an infant volcano spouted golden flame.

"Unlucky?"

"You stood out from the crowd, but you had also put yourself in a position where you wouldn't be particularly missed if you were taken to another dimension or, as you are now, to a place beyond the multidimensional universe. As with so many things in the affairs of your species, the root cause of the chain of events was really a matter of happenstance."

Gibson paused to sip his champagne. He needed time to think, to make sense out of what was going on. He wasn't too optimistic about his chances, however. "I thought it was the stream-heat who first latched on to me."

"They were allowed to believe that and, indeed, they did play a very useful part after they'd been panicked into believing that you were somehow crucial to their so-called war against Us, and they involved you in that ludicrous conspiracy in Luxor with your dimensional counterpart."

" A whole country got itself nuked to hell on account of that."

"That's why We had to motivate Yancey Slide very quickly to get you out of there. Such a catalyst potential had to be examined."

"And how did you motivate Slide?"

"Slide believed that he was following the Prophecy of Ami Enlil, but, in fact, he was actually running the tests on you to determine if you were in fact the specimen we required. The idimmu are easy to control. They are, after all, Our creatures."

"What about all the people who died?"

"Your species spends half its time dying. It's really no concern of Ours."

Gibson slowly shook his head. "This is all too much."

The messenger's voice was very quiet. "It's only a tiny part of it."

A faint flush of silent lightning flashed across the sky, and Gibson stared silently across the valley. The messenger took a step toward him. His voice was almost sympathetic. "I wouldn't try to comprehend it, Joe. You can't. You're no longer in the reality of men and it's really no disgrace not to understand."

"You still haven't told me what's being done to me."

"What happens to a specimen, to a sampling? You're being tested, analyzed, typed, recorded, and inspected. Right now, we are making an evaluation of everything from the mutating microorganisms that infest your body to the conditioned responses of your subconscious. Everything about you is being absorbed and considered. We know your childhood memories and your DNA codings, the weaknesses in your immune system, and the capacity of your paranoia."

Gibson was starting to become alarmed. "I don't feel anything."

"There's no need for you to feel anything. Would you rather you were stretched out on a cold steel table with tubes up your nose and electrodes in your brain?"

"No, but…"

"And stop all the self-pitying nonsense about why me, why me. It's you and them were the breaks. Things could be a lot worse. And also don't flatter yourself, there are thousands of you from as many dimensions being tested in the same way. Much has changed in the time We've been dormant and there is much that We have to know before We can plan Our waking behavior."

"You make it sound like I'm being fed into a giant computer."

The messenger shrugged. "Think of it as market research of the gods if it helps you accept your situation."

"Who says that you're gods? All this god talk only started just recently. Before that, everyone called you a superior being."

"Isn't a superior being a god to the inferior being? Go ask your dog."

Gibson was gripped by the flash of heady, self-destructive rebellion. "Yeah? Well I ain't no dog and I don't see you as a god."

The messenger's eyes hardened, and Gibson realized that his rebellion may have been a very bad idea. This was confirmed when lightning lanced across the clouds, chased by an extended and deafening clap of thunder, and even the ground trembled. The messenger's voice deepened and intensified to one much closer to Gibson's expectations of Necrom, the kind of voice that biblical prophets must have heard when they went one-on-one with Jehovah.

"WHAT'S THE MATTER, LITTLE MAN? DON'T WE MEASURE UP TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS OF A GOD?"

Gibson was so afraid that he responded by blurting out the absolute truth. "I never heard of a god who went to sleep for fifteen thousand years."

The messenger's voice instantly returned to the way it had been. "That is a weakness."

Gibson realized that he had possibly spotted another weakness. Necrom, or at least this part of Necrom that he was being allowed to experience, could get angry, could come near to letting go of its control. He had a strong feeling that it had come close to blasting him. How was that possible? It shouldn't be possible for him, Joe Gibson, alcoholic and washed-up rock star, to spot a weakness in a being that was so powerful that it could alter his reality on a whim. It was only then that another, even more terrifying thought struck him. If it could read his mind…

"Of course We can read your mind, and that is an avenue of thought that We would advise you to avoid."

A long silence passed before the messenger finally offered the bottle of champagne again. "Refill?"

Gibson held out his glass. The champagne bottle appeared to remain perpetually full, and, as the messenger poured, Gibson asked a question. "You keep referring to yourself as 'We,' as though you were some kind of composite being."

"We are, for the moment. Only when the waking is complete will we achieve Our Full Singular Wholeness."