The Sundrinker, Part 3.

Here is the finale.


The ending is...well...you'll see. 

I leave comments open on what your preferred endings would be.  All suggestions are welcome, even mean or sassy ones :3

I think maybe I should have just run with this story and turned it into a book.  At the time I wrote it I was already writing a book though, so I couldn't be bothered.  Also the characters in this story are not very compelling compared to what I can write now.

Oh! Also also: Here is a link to my new blog that I will fill with things besides writing!

Anglen takes the bait and Glenn sneaks into his lab to do more nothing with his life.

     In Glenn's office, the dutiful door clicks shut behind him, twice, or it sounds like it to him. He turns around, puzzled, feels his legs shift on more feet than two, and checks the door.  It remains sturdy and still, but layered somehow. He runs his hand over the paint, seeing how it feels so intricate for something so mundane. All his thoughts hiccup for a moment, like similar notes played on similar instruments, but without harmony. Glenn, usually tall with a natural posture, slumps as though his spine has turned into a rubber hose, to accommodate and insulate his rush of confusion. He slides his face down the door with a confused mew like a kitten asking about water being cold. Darkness swirls around the facets of paint, and he manages to squeak “Ambrosia,” in a weak, shattered falsetto.

In a universe that started in either the same point in time or in space, or possibly both, there are necessarily no coincidences. There are, however, surprises, because as observers we cannot possibly know what to expect from something we are only a part of. What follows is one of the larger surprises in this corner of the universe in a few billion years.

     Ambrosia hears Glenn. She hears him because she likes his voice, and she can hear him on the phone at night, talking to his mother, and sometimes she lays on her couch and listens, because his voice is kind. It flattens the world for her, and his eyes do the same. They are big and green and bright - eyes like she wants the world to be forever. She has kept the distance of former student and friend though. He has not ventured across that line, and she has not pulled him there, but now he is dead.

  …And the mote of light matter that has traveled billions of miles and years sees life and death for the first time. Something else too:  In sampling every kind of stellar anomaly and mystery, the light matter has grown into a vessel of knowledge. It has learned every nook of physics and chemistry by direct contact and sampling. Deep in its latticework, where it stores and arranges these concepts, there is a picture of itself. The light matter gives itself no name, but assigns something like a flavor to the idea that it alone creates energy just by existing. Quasars are vanilla, black holes chocolate, and light matter tastes lonely. Here though, on earth, because of one scientist with a dream, the light matter finds something that brings new energy into the universe, like itself. The flavor, it thinks, is delicious – and it feels itself hope, for the first time.

As it spirals to land, blue-green becoming green, becoming rivers and lakes, shoreline, trees, buildings, and finally people, it sees Glenn. It knows his hands and mind created the Sun Drinker and it understands he is killed by it. The energy that the light matter craves has upset his molecules and caused them to forget how to work correctly for long enough to stop his heart. Ambrosia is curled around him. Having given up on bringing him back she cries, curled as tight as she can curl to his side, to keep his cooling body warm. The light matter sees love, adds reality to flavor, learns, and curls around the Sun Drinker to calm the inharmonious new thing. It becomes light matter’s heart.

     Now, as twice itself and more, light matter has energy enough to think and see beyond anything it, or we, could imagine. It loves its heart. Light matter arranges and sings and talks in thought, and – because it is still very small, flies out to Glenn, in through his open mouth, starts his heart, and stays there to talk to his mind.