The Man Who Wasn't Anders Voss

THE MAN WHO WASN’T ANDERS VOSS

Greg Curtis.

Copyright 2013 by Greg Curtis.

Smashwords Edition.

Dedication.

This book is dedicated to my mother Ruth Curtis and my sister Lucille Curtis, my biggest supporters, harshest critics and all round cheer team, and without whom this book would not have been written. It’s also dedicated to my father Allen Curtis, gone too soon but not forgotten.

About the Cover.

The original cover photo was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence. The author of the image is Crosa of Crosathorian’s Photostream at http://www.flickr.com/people/91084415@N00

Chapter One

The man who wasn’t Anders Voss arrived in the world and screamed.

He wasn’t completely sure why he screamed. There was no point in it. It wasn’t for pain or out of fear. It wasn’t for excitement either. It was simply some sort of reaction to having experienced what he had. To have known what no one should. And to know that one day he would be returning that place. Some might have called that horror, but it wasn't. It was something far more terrible than that. But for whatever reason he did it, it felt right somehow, and he screamed again. And then he screamed some more. He kept doing it until he simply couldn’t any more. Until his throat was raw and his strength gone. And then when he could scream no more he just moaned; trying to come to terms with what was unbearable.

And it was unbearable.

They said that being born was painful. And maybe that was what this was. Maybe babies went through this. He didn’t know. What he did know was that he hadn’t really just been born. Not of childbirth anyway. He’d merely just arrived on the planet. In the universe.

They also said that dying was difficult. And maybe that was why he screamed, because of what he had just done. Save that he knew he hadn’t. He had not died at all. Anders Voss had. And he wasn’t Anders Voss.

He had been though. Once. Sort of. Maybe. It was hard to be sure of such things. But he had all of Anders Voss’ memories. His mind and heart, his flesh. Everything he knew told him he was Anders. But he also knew one thing with absolute certainty; Anders Voss had died. He had felt his passing as his body had been torn apart into a million billion pieces. He had felt his shock and outrage at his passing. And finally he had known the terrible pain of his soul being torn apart along with his flesh. And he had known all of that in the same terrible instant that he had been brought into this universe. Created from those same pieces of him.

He wasn't Anders Voss. He was the thing that had been built from his death. And that death was a part of him.

It was a simple equation really. One man died and another took his place. Another identical man. The same in every respect save one. The soul. Until then he would never have believed there was such a thing. Or actually he wouldn’t have known anything about such things. Anders would not have believed that there was such a thing. But Anders was dead, and he had been born out of his death.

And in all of that he knew one thing above all else. No man should ever have to experience death and live. Not true death. It was knowledge that should never be known by the living. And that knowledge would never leave him.

It might be a simple equation. The scientists no doubt thought that nothing had changed, and as far as all their instruments would be concerned, nothing had. But they would be wrong. Profoundly wrong.

They would be murderers too.

As he lay there, simply trying to come to terms with what had happened, he knew that for the truth. They had led him, led Anders Voss into the arena of Terra Nought, laid him down under the machine knowing that it would kill him. They had to know that since others had gone through the thing, and some had reported back. Those reports had been famous. System wide broadcasts that had been seen a million times over. Broadcasts that he now knew for certain were fakes. Those who had arrived at the other end would have told them what had happened. They would have screamed it at them from the highest mountains. And even before they'd started sending people to the stars with the wave function transport they'd done the testing on Earth. They'd pronounced it safe. So the scientists knew, they'd buried those reports, created new ones, and carried on. That was murder.

But they didn’t care. What was one man’s life when compared with the chance to explore the stars? Nothing. Less than nothing when another identical man was there to take his place. But he guessed that even so not a one of them would ever have stepped into the machine. Not even for the chance to explore other worlds. Because they knew that if they did it, they would never explore those worlds. Other people who looked like them would.

Which finally reminded him of one other matter. He wasn’t on Earth any more.

It was then that he opened his eyes, never realising that they had been shut, and saw the light of this new world. The first light his eyes had ever seen.

It was blue. The sky was a perfect blue above him, which he found comforting. It looked like Earth. Maybe they’d made a mistake and sent him to somewhere much closer to Earth rather than G483 as they’d designated the system. But he doubted it. He doubted it a lot more when he twisted his head to one side and saw jungle. Strange jungle. Trees of funny greens and reds, funny shapes too. They looked like giant mushrooms and ferns, competing with one another for space and light.

It wasn’t Earth.

He lay there for a while trying to take that in. That he was alone on an alien world over a hundred light years from Earth. And that he would never go home again. But then he couldn’t actually go home since this was the only world he’d ever known. He hadn’t been born on Earth. Anders Voss had. He'd never been here before and yet this actually was his home. And the only way back to Earth was to build the machine again and broadcast himself back. But then he would die, and another man, another person who not only wasn’t Anders Voss but who also wasn’t him, would arrive on Earth. Screaming in horror.

There was no other world for him. This was his home. He had been born here and he would die here. And he would never build that evil machine. No matter what they wanted.

Who would build a suicide machine?

And yet as he looked around him at the endless assortment of carry bags and plastic crates full of equipment, he realised that that was exactly what they’d expected him to do. Why? What could possibly make him do something so stupid? Or did they have a plan for that? Did they have a way of forcing him to build it? That thought did not fill him with confidence. He was alone on an alien world with nothing between him and it save the machinery and equipment they had sent him. Maybe they had a way.

Still there was time. Even under the best circumstances and with all the training they’d made him do - they’d made Anders do - it would take weeks to assemble the device from its component parts. And he doubted these would be those circumstances. For the moment his first job had to be survival, and that started with breathing. Something he should have thought of immediately.

Suffocation! In the training they'd taught him about it. Made him experience it. And now he knew why. It was to bring it to the front of his mind. To help him remember that he didn't want to do it. Even though he knew his survival suit could keep him breathing for days, he remembered what it was like to gasp for air and knew he never wanted to do that. The fear swept through him, and as bad as it was, it was good. It helped him to concentrate. To think of something else, anything other than the memories of a dead man. The memory of death. He needed that.

He hurried to the bag of emergency survival equipment they’d sent him, knowing it by its white colour with the bright red cross painted all over it, and found the air analyser. There was only so much air in his suit, and he had to know if he could breathe what was here. Because sooner or later he'd have to. The long range scans had shown oxygen and nitrogen, and a temperature in the Goldilocks zone, but they couldn’t tell them much more than that. That was why they’d sent him, the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. If he died before he built their machine, they would know that the world was dangerous and look elsewhere.

It was frustrating assembling the analyser by hand in thick gloves. For some reason it seemed more difficult than when he'd practised it in the training rooms. His fingers felt thicker and clumsier than normal. But he still had it up and running quickly. Gas compositions were good. A little more oxygen than he was used to, but he could adapt to that. And the atmospheric still when he set it up could deal with that. That had to be his next priority, when he didn’t know how dangerous the air was. Allergens, chemicals, dust, microbes, he couldn't start breathing the air until he'd assessed and dealt with all of those things.

So he started digging into bag number twelve’s contents, pulling out the parts of the atmospheric still, and assembling it. Luckily it wasn’t a complicated piece of equipment, and it was quite small so it had been sent through relatively intact. Luckily too this was one piece of equipment he could assemble in his sleep. The training on it had been extensive.

The most complicated part of the build was assembling the battery from its four component parts. And wasn’t there an irony in that. Nothing with current could go through they’d said. So everything had to be broken down until it could never work by itself. That was why they’d sent a man. Somebody to assemble all the equipment they would have wanted to have sent in working order. What they’d forgotten to mention to Anders was that the human body had current in it, and it wouldn’t survive the trip as a wave form or whatever either. Anders should have guessed that, but he hadn’t. He did machines not people.

He’d been a rebuilder, a white collar criminal with an advanced knowledge of machines. Give him a little time and a few tools and he could piece together any piece of equipment. Fenced computers, stolen hover cars and even back alley surgical suites. He'd built them all. That was why they’d wanted him. And that he suspected was why the judge had given him a forty year sentence on Mars. Far too harsh for his crimes, but plenty to make him jump at the chance for the freedom the programme had promised him. But he was good with machines and poor with people. That was why he’d never suspected that they were lying to him when they told him he’d be travelling to the stars. Why it hadn’t clicked with him that if powered up machines couldn’t survive the trip through their trans warp thing, neither could people.

He’d been stupid and he’d paid for that stupidity with his life. Or Anders Voss had. He'd committed no crime and never been stupid, and for that he'd been born with the touch of death upon his soul.

Half an hour later the atmospheric still was working and he watched with satisfaction as the little red light winked on and the micro-pump started sucking in the air. His suit still had eight days of air left to it thanks to the recirculation system, cunningly powered by mechanical energy as he moved about and his body heat. But now he had potentially unlimited air to breathe.

As for the stuff outside, it wasn’t filtered and condensed and extracted into something breathable, and it didn’t look so good. There was too much carbon dioxide, and that, if he knew anything about life, said there were animals out there. But that he could live with. He could keep animals at bay. But the dusts and bacteria and other microbes, they were a different story, and they were everywhere. But what would you expect on an alien world filled with alien life?

Which told him what his next job had to be. Building the perimeter defences. Just in case something larger came calling. Something with teeth. And when he was only a hundred meters from the edge of a mushroom jungle in which anything could be lurking, that struck him as a real possibility. At least he wasn’t in the jungle he supposed. As he understood it, where the scientists landed their victims on an alien world was largely hit and miss. It was lucky enough that they could find the ground. They could have dropped him in an ocean. Or off a cliff.

He wondered how many others that had happened to. How many other victims of their technological evil had been born on a new world, filled with the knowledge of death, only to then be eaten by the locals? Or to fall to their deaths? And they were only sending their volunteers to worlds where they thought there might be the chance of life. Where the air showed a similar composition to that of Earth, where the temperature was right, more or less. Being torn apart and eaten by the planet’s inhabitants moments after being born in horror. That must have been a terrible fate.