The smell of acrid smoke, of upward billowing dust—dust that seemed young, dust that seemed too thick and stony, a cinder-speckled dust to bury his dreams of becoming one with, with—the stardust…

Disorientation

Disbelief

His nakedness felt like weakness for the first time in some centuries.

Booted feet stamped in a crunching, shuffling, muffled way nearby.

A woman screamed behind him—them, he was a them now.

The beautiful boy—no, my Goddamned errant chrono-device, that thinks its human—stood before him as he choked it, and it smiled.

“Where are we, you little cipher?!”

The boy—It’s not a boy!—smiled maddeningly, with a bratty serenity and chirped, “I am a when-entity, not a where-entity. Rephrase the enquiry, please; medicine-up, Whiteman.”

“When the fuck am I!?” he raged as he wrung a neck that seemed incapable of giving under his fingers and the boy smiled like tinsel and laughed like rain, “The eighteen-hundredth-and-sixty-fourth-winter of the Whiteman’s count—in Petersburg, not exactly where we met, but an easy adjustment away.”

“You little bastard—you are a chrono-device. You cannot geoposition! I know, I fucking designed you!”

The boy seemed hurt, then smiled, “Oh, Father who spit me into the pool of Space and Time, the rotting man in the broken chair whispers through his reed that the space to sit and the time to do it are one. You should spend less time with that wicked woman and listen to the medicine-men."

A reek assaulted his nose as the boy slipped out of his fingers like liquid silicon, smiled with a vestigial quirk of some neurological malformation that must have afflicted the body that once housed this bizarre Amerindian will and said, “Enjoy the picnic, Whiteman.”

The sun melted before his eyes and a shriek emerged from many hairy throats as the world folded before him and he remained sorrowfully where and when he was. The realization that he was stranded somewhere back in the smelly bowels of Time washed over him even as something clubbed him across the kidneys, sending him to his knees in a rarified pain, that might have been cleansing under other, less degrading circumstances. As his knees sank into the splintered brick and powdered detritus of a crumbling hubris—unfathomable in its ignorance to this Harvester of Hope who once sat grinning at the End of Time—a rasp of steel cut the near cacophony of gruff voices off from the distant crackle and rumble of primitive conquest.

A cold touch of sharp steel brought him out of his musings and the back edge of the flexing blade lifted his chin to peer up at some bearded monstrosity of a hairy urchin, stuffed into a reeking suit of blue wool as others of his hairy, ill-smelling kind gathered around with long wooden-stocked guns held across their bodies.

The man looked into his eyes with his beastly little peepers, spat some noxious brown juice in the dust, the dust that now caked him in his fear-exuding sweat. Looking up into the little pig eyes and hoping for mercy as the thing spat again, Hyman Maxim—until recently within 11 months of seeding the stars with humanity and truly ascending to godhood, the last organic human from ugly little Lucy’s long, troubled line—“asked” for mercy with his magnetic eyes.

The creature in dusty blue, twitched its mouth behind bristling whiskers and responded as if commanded, sheathing his saber and gruffly ordering, “O’Bannon, your cloak.”

The cold had just begun to bite and was immediately abated as much by the wall of human stench as the crude garment that draped his shoulders as he was helped to his feet to tower, enshrouded above his rude captors.

Looking down into the eyes of the long dead host of his replicatant, his ego burst in his mind, sheering his sanity from its complex, many-layered moorings and he cried out sobbingly like some failed Christ, “I am dust!”

This is the last online installment of Hyman’s thread, which will be completed in Hyman Who?, to be available in the print version of Seven Moons Deep, Autumn of 2016.