Tales Between the Lines

VI.2 - Six-packs

However, before the Arch-Archaeologist will be able to pull the trigger, the youngest of the Titanians, sweating in the unprecedented earthen heat, will shed his bulky fur coat and expose his well muscled chest and toned arms.

The Arch-Archaeologist will immediately forget about her mummifier and swoon over the Titanian's six-packs. (These are six-packs of beer, of course.* In the early days of settling on Titan, the Titanians will have realized the best way to prevent their precious imported beer from freezing solid will be to carry at all times at least one, better two, six-packs under the furs, in direct contact with their warm body).

On Earth, beer will have become extinct roughly two centuries ago, synchronous with the last barley fields. Thus, the latter will have outlasted hemp fields by several centuries but will nevertheless have fallen prey to the need of building more parking lots and skateparks.**

———
* What did you think? That archaeologists swoon over anything less alcoholic?
** This development will always remain an unsolved mystery of Earth's history, as at the time neither cars nor skaters will exist anymore and the need for parking lots and skateparks will be as outdated and anachronistic as the one for archaeologists.

So, the Arch-Archaeologist will grin, broadly and happily, making the Titanians forget about the females that escaped with Titan's best spaceship.

Together, the Titanians and the Arch-Archaeologist will retire to one of the disused skateparks and attend to the bottles of imported brew. The sun will shine, birds will tweet, and synapses will slowly lose focus. Life will be bliss.

One of the men will raise a bottle to the blue sky and smirk at the halfway stoned woman. "You, as a scientist," he'll say, "you'll certainly be able to tell me: Why do humans venture out to dark, cold, and inhospitable Titan when life here is so beautiful?" He'll describe an arch with the beer, sloshing some of it over his drunk and half-comatose comrades, in an attempt to encompass the skater-free skatepark and the world beyond. The motion will make him wobble, and he'll tumble to the ground in a heap, at her feet. He'll look right into her cavernous nostrils and listen to what she'll say.

She'll smile, lean back, and contemplate his question. Then she'll smile again. And smile some more. And then, still smiling, she'll drop to the ground, as no one living on Earth in this far distant future will be able to cope with the amount of beer the now smiling-in-unconscious-bliss Arch-Archaeologist will have consumed by then.

The Last of the Titanians* still awake will lay back down, grab another bottle of beer and suckle it, deep in revolutionary thoughts about hemp fields and nudes of female physiology while the sun will cross the blue vastness above him.

A dozen of bottles later, the sun will sink behind the horizon, framed by the unused half pipe of the skatepark. Darkness will fall and engulf the peaceful scene, including the softly snoring Titanians and Arch-Archaeologist.

For a moment, the Last of the Titanians will gaze at the faraway stars with bleary eyes and finally close them to fall asleep.

In his dreams, he'll walk the endless, empty parking lots of Earth searching a corkscrew. Of course he will have no idea what such an item might look like,** but in his dream it will seem vastly important he find one. He'll let his dream-gaze wander over the vast emptiness of parking lots and suddenly he'll see it.

It.

———
* As in the Last of the Mohicans, only with less drama, romantic entanglement and unnecessary deaths but more alcohol involved.
** Titanian imported beer wasn't corked, obviously, and he had never as much as heard of properly bottled red wine.

Yes, it.

It won't be a corkscrew.

And it won't be in the last Titanian's dream, but it will seep into it, too.

It will be ephemeral to start with, an intangible web of tiny, unnamed particles of the boson persuasion bound by other, even tinier and less named particles of the gluon ilk.
It will be ancient, beyond even the Arch-Archaeologist's reckoning.

It will have lain dormant for eons in a cold corner of Titan—almost lifeless, devoid of thought and intent.

It will have stuck to a Titanian's shoe, one day, and been dragged along to a filthy Titanian's abode, and from there to an even filthier Titanian's spaceship.
Thus, it will have been brought to Earth.

Earth—so much closer to that celestial furnace called the Sun, the one churning out radiation and protons in abundance.

Solar wind, heat, and fumes of alcohol—they'll get entangled with it.

It will gain to turn back into what it once had been.*

Gain substance to solidify.

Gain energy to move, to interact.

Gain thought to act upon.

Gain anger to be driven by.

———
* Yes, past perfect because it was even before we are.