The Pole Shift

Sean's Stone Submarine

Sean opened his eyes and yawned, clear headed. He had not scoured sunken towns for booze. Instead he let his body recover as best it could - with shudders and hot sweats and mild delirium tremens. The lack of drink didn't threaten his life, forced abstinence had happened in the past when the alcohol hunting had been bad.

He spent his days searching for shipping containers, and sent them back to the island with just thought and the golden rod. He caught fish , laying at the bottom of the ocean in a stone submarine, a window open to the sea where the water was held at bay. He placed a candle next to the water window. Whilst his control of the water molecules held the depths at bay, the fish that investigated the light flopped in. Fish were recovering in numbers, after eighty years the Pole Shift waters were clearing. Sometimes it took just moments to fill the stone floor.

While he waited, he attempted to keep the voices in his head at bay. He had long since understood that some of the words were part of the technology that the Old Man had installed in him. He didn't understand what they said, were they memories or instructions? Were they real voices trying to talk to him. He knew nothing of those people, except what the Old Man had told him - they were master builders, using rods to control vibrations, which in turn lifted heavy objects which in turn made things like pyramids. He thought briefly of his stone circles and smiled gently, he would try to build something else.

The other voices though, were ghosts:

"Lord Giant, how much air is left in the stone submarine?"

"I don't know, who are you?" Sean was normally drunk or getting drunk when he answered in his own distorted voice.

"I am the ghost of the boy next door, the one you let drown when the Pole Shift came." Sean hung his head. He remembered the children vividly on occasion. Their laughing faces as they made him eat dog food, and their dead white faces in the back of a smashed car. He remembered saying 'Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches are nice on a Sunday morning' as he let topple a tiny corpse into tumbling dark waters.

"I'm a mad man, I..." he trailed off. Was that him or someone else saying that? Thoughts pushed and voices emerged with opinion. He slammed a mental door and looked at the floor of the submarine, he was ankle deep in squid, their large eyes reflected a hundred candles, they looked at him as if about to say something, Sean snapped:

"Don't say a bloody word!" Then took the gold rod from a pocket. He changed the shape of the stone to fit his body and turn it bipedal. The Giant grew, drawing more rock to gain height, shoulders to counter balance his rock stride. He grew until his head emerged from the water, then as he approached Stone Circle Island he cast the mantle away until a pale foot and fifty squid landed on the shore. He looked up to the circles and muttered:

"They'll come back won't they?" Unusually Prophet answered, the crystal implant lay dormant on the whole, and he never asked Prophet direct questions, but the androgynous voice was unmistakable:

If you are good they will seek you out.

Sean didn't get it. Good? He muttered.

"Seek me out? He yelled. Prophet replied:

When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Sean was confused and flicked his earlobe. He stood up, chewing calamari. He shut his mental door firmly, it was a powerful physiological action, one he had mastered over the years of roaming the seas. Even though voices and chatter swirled around him he was in a place not unlike his stone submarine - quiet, a bolt hole, his place. Sean felt peace descend. He thought he might combine the three stone circled into one. Maybe make an eating place for the next time the men came, maybe have calamari cooking on hot stones. Suddenly Sean was alive, he could befriend the people. He looked to the crushed concrete beach. Perhaps some of the shipping containers he had landed might hold spice. Pepper, chili, cardamon. His mouth watered and he spat out the raw squid. Then, there came a knocking in his head, he shuddered. It was a familiar tattoo. His mental door was flung open and a familiar voice spoke resolutely:

"I have woken, I'm coming Sean."