Last Stardust

By Andy Patmore

"Living forever isn't as fun as it's cracked up to be, especially since I'm stuck with humans for company." Ever wondered what eternity would be like? Well, here's your chance to see it firsthand, in an epic tale of love, loss, and the madness we call history. Covering the very moment mankind first walked the Earth, and even long after humanity slunk off into extinction, this is a story of finding meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. And having a bit of fun in the process, of course. Read about the adventures of Spartacus, Gilgamesh, Jeanne D'Arc, and many more, all told from the point of view of the poor bastard who had to sit and experience it all. Fair warning though: history is messy business—especially where humans are involved!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781779411785

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Copyright © 2023 by Andy Patmore

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-1-77941-177-8 (Paperback)

978-1-77941-178-5 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

For my Mother, without whom I’d be lost.

Chapter One

Stop throwing poop at me!

This, I would later come to reflect, would be the statement I would regret most in my life.

But that’s skipping forward several thousand steps. That came later. If I am to tell the story of my life, then I should tell all of it - not just the specific moment I would later look back on and rage against with every fiber of my being. But, wow, there I go skipping ahead again. The mind wanders as you get old, you know?

My very first memory was of being stepped on.

Kind of an underwhelming beginning to the journey of life, I know. But it was a curious thing: I went from being… nothing, to suddenly being something.

You see dear reader (I’ve got my eye on you), I am unlike everything else found in this world. I am, as far as I can tell, completely unique in my nature. Before that first moment, that sudden shock of consciousness and life, I was, well… moss.

Not figuratively either, but quite literally just a piece of moss growing on a rock.

I don’t know what exactly I truly am, or where I come from, or even why I exist (not that I can claim to be particularly unique with that last part). But it was in that moment that I took my first steps towards sentience. Quite literally too, since all this began because something stepped on me.

I became the thing that stepped on me. Or rather, I became an exact mimic of it. I suddenly had a brain to think with, a heart, blood, and all the other good stuff that comes with being among the living. Now, unfortunately for me this was all rather startling - especially given that I could only barely be considered alive before that moment.

It was, in fact, confusing (this is my excuse and I’m sticking with it) enough that I spent an indeterminate amount of time laying face down on the ground and drooling in the dirt.

And so began my grand adventure. Truly, an auspicious start to the fabulous complexity of my life.

It wasn’t like I suddenly gained a profound understanding of the cosmos either; since the thing that stepped on me could generously be called a rat, and my intelligence at the time was still about what one could expect from moss. At best I might have been able to outwit a flat-Earther, but that hardly counts considering how low that bar is.

Of course, I would later learn quite a bit. About who I am, what I could do, the world around me… it was all quite interesting. Like, it would take me quite a while to realise, but the whole changing forms thing I did? Yeah, that was normal for me. I can actually change into any form of (sufficiently complex) life that I come into contact with. I don’t know what I was originally, but clearly I came into contact with some moss at some point - and so I became moss.

I could even become moss again if I wanted to. Any living thing I touch ever is in my repertoire, so the moss (as well as everything else I learn the form of) will always be an option for me. So long as I remember what I want to change into, I can always be that thing.

Unfortunately, my memory has grown a bit… spotty, over the years. Many of the forms I once had are just distant half-forgotten dreams. You must understand, I’ve been around long enough that if I retained all the forms I once had, then I’d probably be able to turn into half of every living creature that ever lived. My memory is good, but not that good.

But that’s skipping way ahead in the story of my life. Right now I’m talking about when I learned to be a rat. I’ll get to the other parts soon, just keep your pants on and be patient, reader. I’m watching you, so don’t go skipping ahead.

After a generous amount of time spent drooling and occasionally sleeping, I realised something that (in hindsight) really should have been more obvious: I knew nothing!

Like, literally nothing. Who I was, what I was, where I was… anything. Everything around me was all green and brown, and since I was only beginning to understand the usefulness of eyeballs (which I rather pointedly lacked as moss), I was suddenly seeing a lot more in the world.

I tried crawling around for a while after that. To mimic the other things that moved - the creatures of fur and scale and muscle. These early attempts at mobility worked out just fine… until they didn’t.

Most of the animals I had encountered up until that point had fled at the sight of me, and I had assumed that it was the norm. Not so apparently, since I happened upon the largest creature I’d ever seen - a large lizard with, frankly, atrocious bad breath.

It was around this time that I came to my next grand realisation - something so fundamental that looking back on it, I can’t help but wonder how I missed this before.

I cannot die.

Ever.

I was aware of what death was, of course. I had seen small animals eat each other, and had even mimicked the act of biting and ripping until life ended. I did it for the mimicry - not because I needed to, or understood why it was done. I didn’t understand much in those days, so like a child, I just copied what I saw around me. I learned a great many different forms; though most of them were just small mammals or reptiles that weren’t much larger or different from the initial rat-like body I copied.

Coming back into focus, however, before meeting that lizard I didn’t understand what death was. I just vaguely understood it as a state of ‘not alive’. I assumed it was sort of like how I used to be when I was moss.

I was wrong. Extremely wrong.

I was devoured and digested by a large, scaled creature I would (much) later understand was called a dinosaur. It chewed me into little chunks and then melted me in its stomach. Later, after a rather dreadful period passing through the beast’s body, I was excreted as waste.

I was awake and aware of all of this.

After an indeterminate period of time spent as poop (which is both more and less horrifying than you’d think), I eventually realised that my body was reforming itself. Based on what I would learn later in my existence, I’d guess that I spent at least a day or two as a steaming pile of brown before there was enough of me to get up and wander off in search of nicer company.

I also learned how to be a dinosaur, which was nice. It, quite literally, gave me a new perspective on things.

That was my first year (ish) alive.

An optimist might say that it can only go up from there.

They’d be wrong.

Very wrong.

After I was eaten and pooped out the first time (I stopped counting how many times I was subjected to this, since it just became depressing after a while), I still didn’t really know what to do with myself. So I just sort of… meandered.

The world was a big and interesting place after all, and no matter how grievously wounded I became, or what obstacles were in my path, I eventually went… well, everywhere. It was unsurprising really, since while the world was large but still technically limited - whereas I had all the time in the universe to see it.

Honestly, those early years were the best. I just existed in a very casual manner. I ate, drank, walked, slept, dreamed and learned new bodies. That was my life. I had lingering questions about who I was, why I couldn’t die, why I could assume the forms of other animals, why I was there… but those weren’t really pressing. In those centuries, I was content merely enjoying the world around me, for the most part at least.

Then one night, way after I first arrived in this strange and empty world, I noticed that the sky was on fire.

It was the most peculiar thing, and even in all my years I’d never seen anything quite like it. I was quite thrilled, since I thought that it was very lovely to look at. I remember thinking at the time that all my friends - the wildlife that didn’t try to eat me - would probably like the pretty sight too.

Then everything died.

The world convulsed, the sky darkening for years and all the creatures that couldn’t hide underground, underwater, or in the highest reaches of the sky, died. It was rather startling, in all honesty. At that point in my life there hadn’t really been any major upheavals to change the way things worked on a fundamental level.

And then the starvation set in.

Not for me, of course, since I didn’t actually need to eat. But the animals that weren’t killed in the initial cataclysm were dying off rapidly since a perpetual winter of snow and ash covered the world.

It really was a bother, since it meant there were less new forms for me to copy and less to keep me entertained. Wandering around the frozen wasteland really wore thin after a decade or two. I was at something of a loss really, since I wasn’t smart enough to understand why things were happening the way they were, nor did I know of anything else to do.

The confusion halted pretty abruptly when I realised that I didn’t need to breathe and that I couldn’t drown. I was quite annoyed when I realised this - who knows how many bloody years I spent wondering what was at the bottom of the ocean, refusing to go down there for fear of sinking to the bottom and getting stuck? The entire lifecycle of the dinosaurs, that’s how many.

For a long time after that I lived as a fish. This was also around the time that I realised that the deeper you go underwater, the more generally horrifying the surrounding sea becomes.

…Oceanic gigantism is scary, you know?

Anyway, my early underwater adventures came to a rather abrupt halt when I met a particular group of fish unlike anything I had ever seen before or since. They were… odd. They were unique in a way that I hadn’t yet seen in the world. They were, well… like me.

Sort of.

Okay, not really. They didn’t look like me at all, what with their scales, fins and strange bulbous eyes. Nor could they transform or mimic other types of life - in fact, were it not for one particular detail they wouldn’t be notable at all. They still died rather suddenly and unexpectedly like all mortal things do, but the fact that they were using tools and objects to kill me rather than just their teeth like every other fish I’d ever encountered was enough to surprise and delight me.

Less delightful was when they captured me, blew bubbly words at me (in a language I had never before heard and frankly don’t want to remember), and then sacrificed me to a great black rock that they worshiped like a God for some reason.

Now, human (ha, don’t think you’re fooling me) you need to bear in mind something important here: up to this point in my life I had never encountered another intelligent being. The smartest creature I knew of (other than myself), was that one dinosaur who worked out how to catch birds mid-flight (I was extremely impressed by this). These new assholes were a fully functioning society of underwater madness and cannibalism.

This was also my first introduction to the concept of religion - it was… pretty standard, in all honesty. Mortals always found reasons to be awful to each other, and religion was a fairly common one. Cannibalism and religion often occupy the same space you know.

Just ask the Catholics…

This was my first time, however, and I found myself rather offended by the whole business. I was very reasonable about the whole thing, but they just kept eating me and sacrificing me to their God-Rock until my temper frayed.

I feel I can be forgiven for what I did next.

After being eaten several times, the fish people seemed to catch on to my plucky survivability. They began treating me like a monster - never mind the fact that they’d been eating me over and over again, apparently I was the bad guy.

So I killed them.

All of them.

It took forever since the ocean is a big place and I was still relatively new to swimming back then, but I eventually got around to my first genocide through sheer determination and spite. I was killed dozens of times during the experience, but death is hardly an impediment for me, so eventually I completed my grim work.

The irony, of course, was the fact that I did it all in the form of one of their own kind. As far as they were aware, one of their own race was exterminating them. Maybe they thought their God-Rock had cursed them, or that I was an evil deity or something. Who knows?

I’d like to say that I felt better about it afterwards, but that wouldn’t be strictly true. My massacre of the fish people took quite some time since they were quite spread out and got progressively better at avoiding me as time went on. Worse, I killed them all with their own tools. You try wiping out an entire species with a spear - see how long that takes you.

Because it took me an entire ice age.

After that jolly jaunt in the oceans of the primordial world, I decided that I was thoroughly over the sea for the time being. Something about being turned into literal fish-paste just from the water pressure had really lost its charm over the years. That, and I didn’t think I could bear the thought of being eaten by another giant squid. So back to the surface it was.

I was, of course, shocked and delighted to discover that life had gotten its act together and returned in noticeable quantity.

It was a thrilling discovery - since when I’d last spent time on the surface, everything was stuck in a perpetual winter. In those brief days after the world burned, it was pretty but in a deeply depressing sort of way. So when I arrived on the surface again to see that life had pulled its finger out and gotten back to business, I was very excited.

There were no more dinosaurs (other than me when the mood struck), which I counted as a good thing, honestly (being eaten and crapped out really wears thin after a while), but primates and other stupid mammals seemed to be doing well.

But… Something was different. Not just in the obvious lack of dinosaurs kind of way, but something altogether more subtle. It was, in fact, me that had changed. My understanding had evolved, and as a result of this I found myself at something of a loss. Something was wrong but I couldn’t quite pin down what exactly.

After a few decades or centuries (time starts to blend together after a while, especially since no one would invent a calendar for at least a few million years) of faffing about with the new world, I came to an important realisation: I was bored.

You must understand, you overwrought calculator, boredom was not a concept that existed until now. Life, in that era at least, was always doing something. Hunting for food, running from predators, sleeping, dying.

I wasn’t any different either. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I’m not a very original person. I tend to copy what I see others do - which suits me just fine given my longevity, but it doesn’t lend itself to unique emotions very well. Mimicry was my nature, but originality wasn’t.

My adventure with the sea people had left me with the understanding of just how shockingly stupid most forms of life were. But more than that, it had left me with the understanding that life can be intelligent. That wisdom and knowledge wasn’t just a concept restricted to myself - it was something that was, in theory at least, attainable by any sufficiently advanced form of life.

Life which, I despaired to realise, I had wiped out.

The one group of intelligent animals for me to talk to, learn from, and otherwise experience new things with, were all dead. I killed them out of childish frustration and anger over what I would later understand to be a basic cultural misunderstanding.

I spend the next decade or two mulling over this problem and eating fruit with a bunch of tree-dwelling primates. I considered going back into the oceans to see if I could find any fish people that I hadn’t exterminated, but eventually I shelved that idea on the basis that I was pretty damn thorough and had scoured the entirity of the world’s oceans several times over during the genocide.

Similarly, I considered the idea that I could just wait and eventually intelligent life could happen again. It happened once, after all, so logically it should be possible a second time. But… I didn’t know how long that would take. The passage of time was already a vagary to me, but even then I knew that the time between my first awakening and my meeting with the fish people could be counted in the millions of years. It might take that long for intelligence to appear again, or it might take even longer.

Clearly waiting wasn’t much of an option either.

The problem was truly vexing in a way that nothing else in my life ever had been before. This wasn’t a physical obstacle that I could just circle around, dig under or waddle over. This was a matter of independent thought - something that, up until that point in my existence, I hadn’t done before.

The solution came with a flash of inspiration and feces.

I threw a fruit at the stupid monkey in retaliation. No one throws their poop in my face and gets away with it. I even considered eating the stupid creature - but then I noticed something which would change the course of history forever more.

It’s hands.

Or rather, the fact that it had hands vaguely similar to the fish people. Five appendages, the ability to grip and throw. It was important, since while the fish people were fishy in other ways, they’d had hands to use tools with. Just like how this ape had hands.

But more importantly, it was then that I realised that life changed. Apes weren’t always around, so that meant that something else had changed over time to become the monkeys I was looking at in that moment.

It was something I was only dimly aware of up until that point - the fact that life changes over time depending on the environment. Not within the span of a generation, but over the course of a great many. Usually these changes occurred as a result of changing habitats or environmental hazards.

And well… what was I, if not an environmental hazard to the life around me?

If these simians could change over time, could I take the reins on what course they should take? Could I just make new friends to entertain myself with?

Life changed all the time, after all. Creatures died out or changed into different forms over the course of centuries or millennia - and this was just a chance for me to help the process along.

It was an opportunity to simply make new friends to entertain me.

Which brings me back to; Stop throwing poop at me!

That was the day I decided to invent humans.

…

Chapter Two

I’m not the type of person who enjoys the suffering of others.

At least, not generally.

I should point out that the modern idea of eugenics wouldn’t exist for several million years; so when I think back on my attempts to stimulate the rise of another sentient species, I can’t help but wince slightly. In those days I probably committed more acts of murder than the rest of my life combined - which is quite the achievement, let me tell you.

But before I even got that far I had to ask myself an important question: what is sentience?

What made the fish people so different from every other form of life in the world? Their ability to use tools? Their ability to speak? Or perhaps their ability to work together?

It took me a long time to determine the answer. It was all of these things, but it was also the fact that they overcame their nature. Entropy demanded that all things turned to dust eventually, and animals didn’t put any thought toward events before or after their own lives. They raised children thanks to instinct, they ate because they were hungry, they slept because they were tired - or in other words, they existed only in the moment.

So I had to create something that existed beyond the brief years of their own existence. A creature, or species, that thought beyond the scope of their own lifetimes. Not just for their offspring, but for many generations after that.

Easier said than done.

But the task wasn’t as monumental as it seemed from the outset. First, I tried to determine if the simians (my chosen species for uplifting) could learn language.Naturally, this is also where I ran into my first major roadblock. The language of the fish people, or bubble tongue as I liked to call it, absolutely didn’t work on the surface. Like, at all.

It needed two main things to work: water (and unless I was planning to drown the monkeys, this wasn’t an option), and gills. Even I couldn’t speak the language unless I was underwater and in the form of a fish person. The closest I could get to it while in the body of a mammal was to blow spit bubbles and make nonsense syllables.

I pondered the problem for quite a while. A century or two at least, since at some point I noticed that all the apes in the area had died off - meaning that I had to wander off in search of more monkeys.

The solution I eventually reached was essentially to just let things fall as they may. I didn’t have the faintest whiff of a clue how to create a language or other new system of communication, so I figured that if I just raised a bunch of apes personally and taught them all the other aspects of sentience then they’d probably work out the communication part themselves, right?

Well no, actually.

The first group of infants I stole were a complete failure. A few days after I kidnapped them, I saw a pretty bird fly past so I decided to follow it for a while and see if I could learn its form. It really was quite pleasing to look at, with some nice purple streaks in its feathers and a beak sharp enough to put out eyes. I was very pleased with myself once I finally managed to catch him and learn his shape.

Anyway, when I returned to the infant apes they were all dead from either starvation or dehydration. Lazy bastards, I only left them alone in a cave for a month or two. It was really quite pathetic, and it left me feeling rather irritated while I was out stealing more babies.

The second group of infants worked out a little better, but I’d still ultimately call them failures. About half of them did successfully reach adulthood, but they all ended up being rather… disturbed.

I did successfully teach them basic manners in not throwing things at each other (or me), but something about feeding them the other apes that had already died made them go a little strange. This group had a tendency to abruptly try and kill each other when the mood struck them. Also, they seemed to be averse to physical contact, and I think this might be a side effect of me keeping them in cages until they reached adulthood. I’d only done it so that they could be safe from predators, but clearly that line of thinking backfired.

The final issue I ran into with this group was the fact that they were all male, and since it had never applied to me (and thus it didn’t occur to me that I’d need some females), these apes were unable to breed with each other to continue the experiment. At this point it had been a decade or two, but I was willing to write them off as a failure and start again with a fresh group.

I ate very well that night. I’ve always had a fondness for monkey stew.

The third group was probably the most successful of my initial attempts. I’d learnt a lot from my previous failures, and aside from a lingering tendency to be obnoxiously loud during sex, this group turned out almost adequately. They never developed any kind of language or communication system that I could decipher, but the hundred or so infants I stole developed a sort of community that gradually grew larger as they themselves bred.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a complete success, but I paid careful attention to the simians for the next couple of centuries and I did notice a few traits that I found to be very promising. Namely, the odd sense of community that was now present in the species.

Before all this, the simians weren’t exactly solitary creatures, but within ten generations they had changed socially into animals that operated in packs of the low hundreds. That was good, since it was a step closer to the traits of sentience that I was ultimately aiming towards. It also meant less work for me, since the values I had forcibly instilled into their ancestors continued to linger even centuries later.

This was when I moved onto the next phase of my forced evolution plan: the culling.

There were always aberrations, infinite diversity through infinite combinations. I saw that as a good thing. I watched three little colonies very closely, and when I saw an ape that had traits that I felt would put them backwards or further away from the outcome I wanted, I simply killed the simian in question. The taste of monkey became rather tedious, let me tell you.

There was the flip side of that too, of course. Whenever a particularly intelligent ape appeared, I would do my best to put it into a position where it could have as many children as possible with any similarly intelligent specimens I found. There was one minor issue in the fact that they seemed to randomly go nuts and violently murder each other, but that was generally the exception rather than the rule. That issue was more of a speed bump than anything serious.

Around this time is where I ran into my next roadblock.

You have to understand, dear hypothetical reader, back in those days I knew nothing of scientific theory or well… anything really. I could only base my attempts on my knowledge of the world around me. My early attempts at eugenics crashed and burned thanks to my poor understanding of what successive inbreeding does to a species.

It happened gradually; but I noticed that my attempts to create smarter and smarter apes were actually starting to go backwards. Each generation seemed to become progressively stupider, and the appearances of physical aberrations became more common. In my ignorance, I tried to alleviate the problem by breeding the smartest (or least stupid) members of the colonies together as much as I could.

It probably took about a century, or perhaps a little less, but the result was disastrous.

Many of the simians became unable to reproduce, and the ones that could bear children… Well, it almost would have been better if they hadn’t.

Violent psychosis replaced general stupidity as the norm, and within two generations they nearly wiped each other out entirely. It was almost hypnotic to watch. Violence existed in nature, sure, but