THE EPIC GILGAMEK: CHAPTER 1 - THE BOY WITH THE IRON FISTS

IN WHICH OUR MYSTERIOUS NARRATOR INTRODUCES OUR FALLEN WORLD AND (EVENTUALLY) OUR YOUNG HERO

by the amazing Tim Fielder - check out his comic INFINITUM: AN AFROFUTURIST TALE

1

To sing this story from our wine-dark world into the warring stars I must first tell you about the boy.

A Machine boy named Gilgamek.

Who lived, of all places, on the planet Urth.

Urth! A name that once struck terror in the hearts of a thousand worlds … but no more. Urth had fallen mightily since the days of its imperial majesty, no longer the conqueror of galaxies, no longer the source or center of anything — hard to imagine it ever was. Wars without end, misuse without end, had left Urth a polluted forsaken ruin populated almost entirely by Bird People and Machines. There were a few other Kin scattered here and there across the scarred face of our various continents and none of these at all happy to be stuck on Urth — not that the sitch was much better anywhere else — and we may meet some of these Kindred in due time — but as for the original native species of the planet, the Great Conqueror Race, the Thinking Flesh that nearly stormed the heavens — they were no more.

But that didn’t mean the Great Conqueror Race had vanished entirely from the Universe. As the Elders say: nothing ever ends, not really. Vestigial traces of this once-mighty people survived in the gooze-stream of their far-less mighty mek descendants. Yes, the Machines — or the meks as they referred to themselves — were the children of the Great Conqueror Race, but meks, being immensely practical, wasted almost no time contemplating their lost forerunners.

What hadn’t survived, the Calculators be praised, was their cold unsympathetic intelligence or their penchant for devouring everything they came into contact with — the Desolated Urth had trouble enough as it was without having to deal with that kind of behavior again.

Vestigial traces of this mighty race lived on in their descendants, I say, and you rightly ask: What kind?

Sometimes it was a single finger, dark and soft on an otherwise gleaming mek-metal hand. Sometimes it was a joint or an eye, and a few meks even found themselves with big bushels of curly hair that looked very curious indeed on a mek. In the worst cases, a mek might be born with an entire flesh limb.

This fleshy occurrence was not some rarity, either. Scientists from that period reported that close to a third of all Machine children were born with a bit of flesh behind the ear. A final gift of the Conqueror Race that, while rarely hampering the functionality of the affected children, nevertheless caused no end of consternation among its beneficiaries, especially if the Blot, as it was called, was prominent and could not be hidden or corrected.

The Tensile Clans tended to deal with these unpleasantries by having them subtracted post haste — Chop Doctors always did a brisk trade during birth seasons — as did the Graft Guilds. The chopped children were often none the wiser, having no memory of the malady or its elimination. But the less-advantaged meks — the so-called Rusties — could afford no Chop Doctor or a compensatory Graft lovingly crafted by a Licensed Smith — and had to bear their “gifts” as well as they could.

As I said, the “gifts” almost never impaired the gifted mek. The flesh in question was not flesh like you or I understand it. Not vulnerable and liable to bleeding. It was often as resilient as mek-metal, a curious truth that gave rise to all manners of suspicion among the learned … but let us not dive into that particular wormhole.

No, the flesh did not impair mechanically. Socially … that was another matter altogether. The real difficulty, the real burden, was all the scrap that “gifted” Rusties got from their fellow meks who could not so much as see a mole of flesh without feeling a deep atavistic impulse to ridicule the afflicted and deny them affordable housing.

One could almost suppose that it wasn’t only fragments of flesh that survived the Conqueror Race’s disappearance — but some of their Killing Minds, as well!

But let me not over-editorialize! Otherwise we’ll never reach the end of our epic!

Now, the boy I wanted to tell you about, the one called Gilgamek, was a Rustie of the lowest order. In other words he was so poor that even poor meks bad-mouthed him for being poor. Gilgamek, like many Rusties high or low, had the misfortune of being born with a “gift.” And what part of this young mek had been replaced by the soft black flesh of the Cold Old Ones? His chin? His bellybutton? Perhaps his left hand like the great warrior Stomp Ganers?

A hand, you say? A chin? If only the boy had been so lucky!

The poor mek had nothing, not even a bed to sleep on, but when it came to the “gifts” he’d gotten absolutely everything!

You see: young Gilgamek was almost entirely flesh!

By the Great Calculators, no!

By the Great Calculators, yes.

The tall thin boy was flesh from the top of his curly-hair head down to the bottom of his toe-nailed toes. Flesh on his thin scowling face, flesh on his lanky arms and legs, flesh on his long narrow back, flesh even in the back of his mouth!

Flesh everywhere!

Was any part of him Machine?

Had you come upon the boy in an alley you might at first glance have thought him full flesh — horrors of horror! — but let’s imagine you did not immediately bolt, let’s imagine your gaze ran over him in fear and shock, then you might have met his eyes and seen that they were machine eyes — the Calculators be praised! — and if by chance, as you were backing away from the young mek, you glanced down at his hands — just to be sure he wasn’t armed — you would have noticed the knuckles on his perpetually clenched fists were as mek as anyone else’s. Little bits of relief! Adrift on a vast sea of revulsion.

This very scene happened to Gilgamek on the regular, though usually the mek in question would punctuate the encounter by calling him a dirty ugly fleshy, a terrible slur in that time and place.

Fleshies were to Rusties what Rusties were to Tensiles.

And of all Fleshies, Gilgamek was the Fleshiest.

Even had Gilgamek been born among the Tensiles his was not a condition that could have been fixed with any amount of chopping or grafting.

“They would have to kill you to mek you,” his friend Feckles once noted and Feckles wasn’t wrong.

Not exactly the best of fates, but as Gilgamek’s guardian Lonqo was fond of reminding him, “You have to look on the bright side of things. At least you’ve been born in civilized times. When I was a boy –”

“In the days of yore,” Feckles teases.

“In the days of yore indeed,” Lonqo continues, smiling, “when the old Autarch still ruled, Rusties used to leave children like you, Gilgamek, out on the slag heaps for the trashrats. Those were not happy times.”

“Death by exposure,” Feckles explains. Feckles was a bookish Rusty, big-boned, honest-faced, and spotted all over with a galaxy of freckles.

Lonqo nods, his Bird feathers all a-ruffle. “But here you are, Gilgamek, alive and well in this new enlightened age. Goes to show you what a fortunate boy you really are,”

“One in a trillion,” Feckles concurs.

“More like one of nothing,” Gilgamek says.

I agree with the Birdman Lonqo: all sapient beings should look at the bright side of things. Always! But what about Gilgamek — did he feel like a fortunate boy?

As you might have noticed from his grumbling — not particularly.

Not at all, if one was to be honest. He felt rather unfortunate, in fact. Bad enough he was a rust-poor orphan with no idea who his parents were and only an infirm Birdman for family, he also had the utter worst luck ever to be born a complete and total freak.

Ninety-eight percent flesh.

That’s what his City ID said.

Ninety-eight percent!

Who in the world gets that much bad luck at once?

Only a mek like Gilgamek.

.

.

To be continued next week when we learn of Gilgamek’s parents and the letter they left behind.