The Man From LOVE #30: Cool

    N'buli had a cigarette lighter in his hand, and was lighting a cigarette for a man in a trenchcoat that smelled faintly of chicken korma.

    'Danke,' said the strangely familiar German. He turned and walked away down the crowded railway platform. N'buli stood there for a moment with the lighter outstretched, before he put it away in his suit pocket.

    He wasn’t sure where he was now. He wasn’t sure where he even got his suit from, let alone whether this was the real world or not.

    And then he saw a familiar face in the crowd and knew he was in the real world.

    'Val!'

    She turned at the sound of his voice. He had know Valentina Nabakov for more than 60 years, and only seen her genuinely surprised three times.  Now it was four.

    She came down the platform towards him and he could not stop grinning. She managed to get all the shock out of her system and even managed a look of amused suspicion. 'What are you doing here? We were coming to get you. How did you even know our train was stopping here?'

    He just hugged her and they didn’t say anything for a little while, until she pushed him away. ‘No, seriously. What are you doing here?'

    'Here? I don’t even know where he is.'

    'You’re in Budapest. Don’t you know how you got here?'

    'Baby,' said N'buli. 'You would not believe how much I don’t know.'

    He saw Sonya joining them on the platform. She didn’t look surprised at all, probably because she was dragging Max along by the arm behind her.

    'You found Val okay then, Sonya?' asked N'buli.

    'That isn’t all I found.' She turned to Val. 'Look who was lurking in the girls’ toilets.'

    Max just looked sheepish. 'I don’t know how I got there, man. It was those fuckin’ fairies, they just dumped me there.'

    'Never mind that now,' said N'buli. 'I’m glad you’re okay.' His pocket started buzzing, and N'buli reached in and found his phone, which had somehow appeared in his unexplained suit. He had a text message.

    Val smirked at the look on his face. 'What does it say?'

    'It’s from the Goodsons. They say that they’ve deposited 27 trillion in my bank account, that LOVE will do whatever I say and that I have to keep my promise.'

    'You can’t trust the Goodsons,' said Val.

    'I can’t trust my own left foot sometimes, it doesn’t mean I have to hate it.'

    Val was not impressed. 'You’re talking complete rubbish.'

    N'buli was about to answer when his phone beeped again. And once more, and then another dozen times.

    'Who is it?' asked Max.

    'It’s Dave,' said N'buli. 'He wants to know what’s going on.'

    'So?' said Sonya. 'What are you going to tell him? What is going on?'

    N'buli’s eyes lit up. 'I’ll tell you, Sonya. I’ll tell everybody. I need to make one phone call and  apologise to Jane, then I need to hook up with the LOVE tech boys and get a worldwide signal set up, and greenlight a massive info dump on the internet and TV and radio and goddamn vinyl. I got a lot of things to say, and there’s no time like the present.'

    'Okay,' said Val. 'Who’s Jane?'

    N'buli had to hold himself back from hugging her again. 'You remember what we ask every new recruit? Different initiations, different approaches, but the same old question?'

    'Sure. Do you want to save the world?'

    'Well, the world doesn’t need saving. It can save itself if it wants to. So we’re going to give it the chance.'

???

    Every computer and every television and every screen in the world turns on, without anybody touching them. The one cloest to you right now is one of them.

   This is what you see: A man who has the darkest skin you’ve ever seen and a big-toothed grin. He’s wearing a really good suit and siting in a tastefully lit library. He’s talking to you.

    'Hello, my name is Nbuli MacGregor, and I have something to tell you. Our existence is part of a glorious overwhelming form of energy that manifests itself in this four-dimensional plane as the life that exists within us.

    'We all share the same soul, and when you die, you get to live your life all over again, or the existence of any human being who ever existed. We’re all the same person, with a near-infinite number of names. Time does not exist in this frame of reference.

    'Unfortunately, these lives are often unnecessarily cut short, causing pain and misery, so we are proud to offer you immortality, if you want it. This is the next step in human evolution, where we all get along forever and do crazy things. This is what we can give you. This is what you can do.'

    He smiles again and the screen turns off without you touching it.

    What do you do?

???

The Man From LOVE #29: Everything is everything

    He was away again. A rush of memories, of experiences, of life.

???

    He settled into the life cycle of a solitary bacteria cell, lying between the shadow of an Antarctic iceberg and a minuscule volcanic vent. Then he was a bird, somewhere in medieval Europe, flying over some recent battlefield, the smell of blood, death and despair filling the world.

    Then he lived the full life of Maggie O’Reilly in less than an instant, growing up in hellish poverty, falling in love with the wrong man and dying painfully in the potato famine, giving up her meals to save her children.

    N'buli jumped between a dozen different lives and a hundred different eyes. He saw life through the eyes of a half-blind cat that lived up the last tree in Baghdad and watched the Earth fall into the sun from the Alpha Centuri colonies, watching the end of the world in biodomic sunglasses. He lived within the consciousnesses of a gargantuan creature living in the clouds of a super-sized gas giant on the other side of the galaxy, and saw the world through the pseudo-eyes of a sentient smell on the very edge of the universe.

    And then he lived Stevie’s life, all the way through to the end. Born to parents who survived the worst of humanity, raised to think for himself and encouraged to dream. And as he died in that car on a suburban Sydney street, in that instant that he slipped away, he remembered the part he had played in the great story of life, and he died happy.

    And then N'buli lived his own life, all over again, skipping through the events of his life at cosmic speeds. He felt all the little pains and big affections of his life, all the times he was scared, or ecstatic, or just felt alive.

    N'buli walked off the African plains into the meat-grinder of the Great War and walked on out of that into the best job in the world. He saved everybody on the entire planet more times than he could count, and met more fascinating people than he could ever have expected. He saw things that few people would ever see and he never let hate into his heart.

    He was N'buli MacGregor, the Man from LOVE.

   He relived his last adventure, tracking the people responsible for his friend’s death across the world. He relived the long journey into the Mongolian wilderness, and relived his own rebirth into a higher plane of existence. He relived the reliving, over and over again, in an infinite loop.

    He pulled out of that loop and stopped there. N'buli knew he could access his entire life, past, present and future, but he did not want to know what was coming tomorrow.

    'Where is the fun in that?' he asked Mr Goodson, sitting at the table opposite him. He was back in the Goodsons’ dining room. It was exactly the same as the last time he’d seen it.

    'Not exactly the same,' said Mrs Goodson, walking around the table and placing a large roast chicken on the table. She took off her oven gloves and walked over to the corner of the room where - underneath photos on the wall of Trevor he had never noticed before – there was a large wooden trapdoor with a thick copper handle. She bent over and wrenched it open.

    N'buli craned his neck to try and see what was down there. Under the trapdoor, there was a glowing, flowing pink liquid, thick with consistency.

    'There is a whole universe of that stuff under us,' said Mr Goodson as his wife closed the trapdoor and joined them at the table. 'It’s pure matter, pure life, that exists in the boundary between the World and Everything.'

    'How did you make you words go capital like that?' asked N'buli. His head was starting to buzz again.

    'It’s what we use to make the universe,' said Mr Goodson, ignoring the question, 'but we’ve just used the tiniest bit to make this room, just like we all remember it.'

    'You did enjoy coming to our place for meals, didn’t you?' asked Mrs Goodson. She sounded like she really meant it. 'We really do mean it. They were an absolute highlight.'

    N'buli couldn’t help shrugging. 'Yeah, they were pretty good. The company was always nice, and the food was better. And you really fooled me. I really thought you cared.'

    Mrs Goodson took N'buli by the hand. 'Oh N'buli, of course we cared.'

    He pulled away. 'Yeah? Then why did you put me through all of this? Why couldn’t you have just told me the truth?'

    'We’re a conduit between a higher power and the material world,' said Mr Goodson. 'Working out all the bureaucracy that allows our God self to inhabit any form of life and any form of history and experience it in person. But we still have feelings. We do these terrible things because that is the way it works and we needed to create conflict, but we never meant to hurt you, N'buli.'

   

    'Besides,' said Mrs Goodson, 'like we said, you have to go on a journey to get anywhere in life. You don’t get it by lying on your ass in bed and waiting for somebody to ring you up and tell you the meaning of life.'

    Mr Goodson took his wife’s hand across the table and gave it a gentle squeeze. 'We’re only interested in keeping life going as much as possible. LOVE helps. HATE helps. It all generates the new. And it works, there are still things we don’t understand and a bit of mystery is always good for the soul. We don’t know where Chang went, or what awaits us all in the next universe, but we know one thing. We love you all.'

    'We’ve been saying it ever since the early days, when they called us God-In-Skin,' said Mrs Goodson. 'We love us because we are us.'

    N'buli just shook his head. 'You might be happy not knowing everything, but there is still so much I need to work out. Why did-'

    Mr Goodson interrupted him by leaning across the table and putting his right hand on N'buli’s skull, and a rush of information filled his mind.

    He knew the Goodson financial empire was maintained by a vast stockpile of antiques and ancient objects, hoarded in safety and strategically sold off over decades. He knew the empire had survived on comic books for much of the last century – a secret stash of mint condition golden age comics from 1938 paid for three quarters of the LOVE budget for 2012, and one copy of Detective Comics #38 had paid for all of N'buli’s salary for that year.

    He knew who invented the immortality pills, (and knew there was no reason to keep them secret), and knew how to travel in time. He knew the name of Lady Cassandra for the first time and knew it would not be the last.

    He knew there would always be plotholes, but good stories always required the audience to fill in the gaps.

    He knew they weren’t lying about Chang – he had ascended out of this plane of existence entirely, outside the universe. He knew everything that happened, happens and will happen in this reality, but who knew what was beyond that?

    He knew how it all worked.

    N'buli blinked as Mr Goodson sat back in his seat. It took him a moment to think of something to say, and it was pretty uninspiring in the end.

    'Whoah. Comic books?'

    'We gave away so many of our things,' said Mr Goodson. 'Comics were one of our favourites, all those four-colour supermen showing the way to live. I still can’t believe it took so long to become so popular, but I was always surprised how things turned out.'

    N'buli shook his head, and cleared it a tiny amount. 'You do all that, and you could do better.'

    Mrs Goodson gave her husband’s hand the tiniest squeeze. 'Go on.'

    'We can do better, there is no need for all this conflict to generate interesting stories. We can think of something better.'

    'We agree completely,' said Mr and Mrs Goodson, in unison.

    'You do?'

    'We always agree with you,' said Mr Goodson.

    'Always have, always will,' said Mrs Goodson.

    'This is where everything changes, N'buli.'

    'Tell us what you want.'

    'And we’ll make it happen.'

    N'buli MacGregor couldn’t think of a single thing to say. 'Huh.'

    He stood up from the table and paced around the fake room for two minutes, before turning back to his hosts.

    'All right. I want three things: One. We let everybody take the same immortality pills we do, if they want to. There will be issues of overpopulation and all that, but we’ll figure it out. Aren’t you going to stop me sharing them with everybody?'

    'Share away,' said Mr Goodson with a shrug. 'A lot of people will get really scared, but the world will change in weird and wonderful ways. We know. We all know. We’ve been there.'

    'Okay,' said N'buli. 'Two, all that technology we have, we share with the world.'

    'We already do.' said Mrs Goodson.

    'We do it a lot faster. Everything we learn goes public as soon as we learn it. No more secrets. No more hoarding.'

    'Done,' said Mr Goodson. 'And the third thing?'

    'I said I was sick of secrets. We tell everybody the meaning of life. We’ve done enough stumbling about, it’s time to get the facts. So we all share the same soul, building the universe to put bits of ourselves in? Fair enough, let’s tell everybody that.'

    Mrs Goodson looked at her husband and smiled. 'This is always the bit I like the most.'

    'What?' said N'buli, unable to believe it was going to be that easy. It was never that easy. 'You're not going to try and stop me? Never mind the meaning of life, what about the shitstorm widespread immortality is going to bring? What about population growth? What about the need for a finite existence to give that existence purpose?'

    'Oh, we're not worried about that,' said Mrs Goodson. 'We just have to be smarter about dealing with these things, that's all.'

    'Besides, people will still die in the end,' said Mr Goodson. 'Finite time has an end, it always does.'

    Mrs Goodson looked away into the distance. 'There's still a human being at the end of time, but only one. We can see them.'

    Mr Goodson also looked lost in deep time. 'We're with them now.'

    She brightened up again. 'But this way, people get more time to experience this universe, and all its wonders, before they bring them back home. That's what it's all about. Everyone can deal with their own mortality in their own time.'

    N'buli was still unconvinced and was about to let them know it, when Mr Goodson looked at his watch. 'Speaking of all that, would you look at the time?'

    Their living room faded away in an instant, and N'buli faded away with it.

!!!

The Man From LOVE #28: How the world works

    It was Heaven.

    N'buli was a part of everything and while he remained a distinctive and idiosyncratic slice of existence, he finally connected to everything else that ever was.

    All the anger, and conflict, and fear seemed so ridiculous. This was bliss. This was Nirvana. This was Heaven.

    It was where all life came from, and where all life goes, and it was everything.

    That tiny part of everything that was once N'buli MacGregor gave thanks for his extraordinary life and shared it with himself. His work was done, his story was finished, and he could stay here now.

    N'buli was at peace and it lasted forever.

    Until someone dragged him right out of it.

???

    The shock of his ego crashing back into focus almost outweighed the physical shock N'buli felt as he instantly became corporeal again. He struggled to take in a breath and sank to his knees, clutching the side of his head and moaning involuntarily.

    He knelt there for another lifetime, getting it together, until the buzzing in his head subsided and his legs stopped feeling like they were made of cast iron. And then he felt the sun on his face and the dry earth beneath his knees, and N'buli opened his eyes.

    He knew this place. It was where he came from – the plains of west Africa, somewhere in that vast continent. He recognised the smell and the way the trees in this part of the world bent away from the sun and even the rocks seemed familiar.

    He was in the middle of a vast plain, with only a few stunted trees and endless dry grass all around him. Looking down, N'buli realised he was dressed in the loin cloth that had been his sole item of clothing when he was 12 years old.

    'We thought you would be happier as… yourself,' said a voice behind him.

    'I stopped being this person a long time ago,' said N'buli, incredibly pleased to hear that voice. 'And that’s a Prisoner quote.'

    N'buli turned around and gripped Stevie in a tight bear hug, lifting the smaller man up off the ground. Stevie gave out a comical ‘oof’ as he struggled for breath.

    'I may be dead, but I still need to breathe, my friend,' he gasped.

    'Oh no,' said N'buli as he let him down. 'You really are dead, aren’t you?'

    Stevie looked exactly like he had the last time N'buli had seen him alive, right down to the tiny metal Def Leppard badge that was discreetly pinned to his jacket. He smiled sadly – another painfully familiar gesture - and put his arm on N'buli’s shoulder. 'Yeah, I really am dead.'

    N'buli’s head was still spinning in a thousand different directions at once, but the afterglow of his recent experience in that infinite light was fading fast, leaving only vague impressions.

    He rubbed his eyes and sighed. N'buli suddenly felt very tired and very hungry. Looking back at Stevie, he winced. 'Was the loin cloth really necessary?'

    'It comes with the view,' said Stevie, waving his arm around to indicate the sun-blasted desert. 'We didn’t bring you here, this is the place you always go to when it gets too much. You created this place.'

    'I’ve been here before,' whispered N'buli.

    'You’re here still,' said Stevie. He pointed back over N'buli’s shoulder. When he turned to look, he saw a very familiar young man staggering towards them, dressed in a filthy and cheap army uniform and bleeding from a dozen wounds.

    'That’s not the only you in this place,' continued Stevie. 'You came here when the Things Behind The Wall almost ripped your soul off, and you’ll be here when the planet Neptune tumbles into the Oblivion Void and you barely get out alive. But it’s a big place, you don’t run into yourself very often.'

    N'buli was starting to feel sharper. 'Can everybody do this?'

    'Everybody does, all the time.'

    'And it responds to my thoughts, and could be anything I want? And that’s why it’s the desert where I was a child?'

    'That’s about it.'

    'Then the hell with this. It’s hot and I’m half-dressed. Let’s go get a beer.'

    Stevie smiled and the world dissolved around them, just as the 15-year-old Nbuli reached them.

???

    There was a brief moment of everything, and then N'buli’s world came into focus again. It was that little pub he liked in Nottingham. It was sometime in the late afternoon in autumn, by the smell of things. The sun was shining in through the old windows and Stevie was getting the drinks in.

    There were other patrons and bar staff, but every time Nbuli tried to focus on one of them, his attention would slip away and he could not see any details. Stevie was the only clear person in the pub and Nbuli could see him in perfect detail as he came to the table, carefully balancing two pint glasses.

    'Here we go,' said Stevie, handing one over to Nbuli and taking a seat at the table. 'I don’t know what the beer is. It’s the local one, you can’t go wrong with the local one.'

    'Why can’t I see anybody else in this bar?' asked Nbuli. 'It’s like they’re not really there.'

    Stevie shrugged. 'They’re just background, N'buli. They’ve got all the soul of a computer game character. Why? Do they bother you? We could change it so you’re fighting super-ninjas while we talk. Would that help?'

    'Not really. I’m a little bit sick of fighting everybody all the time.'

    N'buli turned his attention back to his beer and drank half of it in seconds. The beer was cool and refreshing, but as he put the half-empty glass back down, he noticed something unusual about his hand.

    'I’m shaking,' he said. 'I never shake.'

    'I’m not surprised, dude!' said Stevie. He had barely touched his beer. 'You’ve just had your consciousness wrapped around the whole of living existence. You’re not supposed to go through that as a corporal being, you’re only meant to experience that after you die.

    'Besides, you think you’ve got it bad?' Stevie held up his right hand, which looked grey and unhealthy, with thick veins showing through the skin. 'Producing an exact copy isn’t easy, and the results never last. I’ve got about ten minutes before this body gives out and I go home again.'

    'A copy?'

    'Just the body. This is the part that always was and always will be Stevie Nabakov, son of Ivan and Valentina. C’mon, Nbuli. You are good at this. You were just there as part of the infinite. Can’t you remember how it works?'

    N'buli took another deep drink of his perfect beer and considered what Stevie was saying. 'It’s all a bit fuzzy, to be honest.'

    An odd little shadow, barely noticeable, spread across Stevie’s face, and his voice lowered even more slightly. 'Try and put it into words.'

    N'buli closed his eyes and did what Stevie said. 'It was everything, wasn’t it? After I confronted the Goodsons, I merged with the motherfucking infinite, yeah?'

    'Go on,' said Stevie.

    N'buli sneaked a peek, but saw Stevie had his eyes closed too, so he continued. 'I can’t really put it into words, but it was like I was a part of everything, and it was all so obvious. We’ve all got the same soul, little bits of it igniting life in every living being. I am you and you are me.'

    'And we are all together,' said Stevie.

    'Yeah, exactly. But where I was, the place that we all come from, and the place we all go to, there is no time. It’s all now. That’s what the universe is for, isn’t it?' N'buli opened his eyes again and saw Stevie beaming back at him.

    'The universe is where we go to experience time and growth and experience,' said Stevie. He was sweating hard and looked even greyer than before, but he was looking out past N'buli into forever. 'We put parts of ourselves into the world to generate novelty and narrative, to give ourselves stories.

'That’s the meaning of life, N'buli. Go out there and have fun.'

    N'buli felt a bit sick, but felt a lot better after he drank the rest of his beer. He could only grasp the smallest sense of his recent experience, but he knew everything Stevie was saying was true.

    It still didn’t make sense.

    'But what is this all about, Stevie?'

    'What? I just told you the meaning of life, Nbuli. What more do you want?'

    'The meaning of my life,' said N'buli MacGregor. 'What am I doing here? What is LOVE all about? What are the Goodsons anyway? Why did they kill you? What’s it all about?'

    'Oh man,' said Stevie. 'Those are some big questions. We’re going to need another beer.'

    He drained his glass, took N'buli’s empty vessel, stood up and went to the bar. He was noticeably limping now and actually seemed to be struggling for breath. Even in all his confusion, even though Stevie was dead, N'buli still felt bad for his friend.

    He concentrated on the wooden table in front of him. It seemed real enough, there were ancient gouge marks and strange little burned patches all over the wood. The smell of old beer and older sweat filled the air, and even though he couldn’t really see the other people in the bar, there was the low hum of regular conversation filling the air. He noticed he wasn't wearing a loincloth anymore, just his regular western clothes, and he felt grateful for that.

    Stevie finally returned with the drinks and sat down in his seat with a comical sigh. 'I didn’t think it would go this quickly. I thought I had more time, but we never do. That’s why we keep going back.'

    'Answer my questions.'

    'One at a time, eh?'

    N'buli took a thoughtful sip. 'What’s the deal with the Goodsons?'

    'That’s a good place to start.' Stevie sipped his own drink and considered his answer carefully. 'They’ve always been here. They were the God-In-Skin when we still lived in caves, and the God’s Sun during the renaissance days.'

    'That doesn’t help much.'

    'Look, they’re like a direct conduit between the Everything you just experienced and the material world. Living personifications of our own collective self. A direct line to the Divine, interfacing with humanity. They’re always charming and always helpful, but there is a job they need to do.'

    'LOVE?' asked N'buli.

   

    'Love,' shrugged Stevie. 'Hate. Everything. They need to make things interesting, and most of the time that involves some sort of conflict, so they have to back both sides. They don’t really care who wins – though they like good guys like us the most – they just need to create novelty.'

    N'buli didn’t feel like his beer any more, and he pushed the half-empty glass away from him. 'And that’s all we are? Novelty?'

    'Don’t be stupid, you know what’s really important in life. Love and honour and all that crap. Experience as much of it as you can, so you can take it back to yourself when you join with yourself.'

    N'buli was starting to feel sick again. 'I’m starting to feel sick,' he said.

    'They have that company – Goodfun Distrubtors. They make their money by selling historical items, everything from Golden Age comic books to Tudor mansions, and that’s what they use to fund LOVE. And the bad guys. And the whole bloody shooting match.'

    Stevie waited for N'buli to reply, but he really was feeling sick now, and all he could do was swallow back the nausea, so Stevie kept talking. 'It’s not that ridiculous. The universe. Some of us quite like it. Some of us are quite proud of it. And some of us are running out of time.'

    His hair was grey and there were deep lines around his eyes. N'buli finally noticed, but it was too late to do anything. The feeble Stevie slid sideways off his chair and N'buli dashed around the table to catch him, his own sickness instantly forgotten. 'Jesus, Stevie! What is happening to you?'

    'They wear out so fast when you use the exact template a second time,' He coughed, and then a familiar light appeared behind his eyes and he looked up at his friend. 'Don’t grieve for me, N'buli, there is a part of me that is always a part of you, and in all living things. No energy can ever be destroyed, it just goes some-'

    Stevie caught his breath and died again.

    N'buli cradled his dead friend in his arms for the second time, and couldn’t take it any more. He screamed, and the world exploded around him, pieces of reality falling away like huge shards of broken glass, leaving him along in the dark.

???

    …

???

    'Oh, come on, N'buli,' said two familiar voices, speaking in unison in that eternal darkness. 'All time is illusion, yeah, get over it. Concentrate on the here, concentrate on the now and make a place for yourself. Make your place in the world.'

    As much as he did not want to, he could feel it.

    'This is a room that is not a room,' said those voices, 'a single point of existence in an infinite void. Do you understand?'

    'I’m getting there,' said N'buli.

    Somebody, somewhere was laughing and he heard the thought: 'All of human history to choose from, and it takes a bush boy from the ass end of Africa to save the world.'

    'I’m proud of where I come from,' said N'buli, and he was no longer in the dark. He was standing on a beach this time, some stony piece of shore that he did not recognise, looking out onto a stormy sea. There was no sign of anybody else, just endless grassy hills surrounding the shoreline.

    N'buli sighed and sat down on the hard rocks. 'Can we get to the point now?'

    'Of course we can,' said the two voices, speaking from behind him. He could feel their light upon the back of his neck. It was the Goodsons, finally here to face him.

    He stood up, but he couldn’t turn around. He wasn’t paralysed – he could move his head from side to side and could take a step forward towards the water if he wanted to – but he just couldn’t turn around.

    'So we’re just a game? Is that it? All we die for, and all we fought for, and it’s all just a novelty act? You can make me watch Stevie die for a second time, and I’m supposed to just laugh it off.'

    'Well, yeah,' said Mr Goodson, from over his right shoulder. 'It hurts, but it’s no use getting angry about it. That’s like getting angry at your big toe when you stub it on the table. You just have to get over it.'

    'Besides,' said Mrs Goodson, from over his left shoulder, 'you say that like novelty is a bad thing. We’re always after something new, that's why we do it. There is no time in the great beyond, so we make universes to grow an all-new existence of ourselves, and then we can pop in and out and experience it through all sorts of life. It’s nearly an infinite source of new experiences and new things. It's pretty obvious, buddy.'

    N'buli took a step towards the ocean and felt the cold water come up over his bare feet. He only just realised he was wearing his best suit, and no shoes. 'So you fund the good guys and the bad, all in the name of having something interesting to do. Do you have any idea how much misery you cause?'

    'Of course we do,' said Mr Goodson. 'We feel it all, because we’re a part of it all. But it was the only way to keep things pushing forward, before they stagnate.'

    'But this is where everything changes,' said Mrs Goodson. 'We couldn’t wait to get to this point. We’re so sick of all the pain and violence. Time for something new.'

    N'buli clenched his hands into tight fists, but still couldn’t turn around. 'If you are so sick of violence, why did you kill Stevie? Why did you make me jump through all these hoops for you?'

    'You have to go on a journey if you want to get anywhere,' said Mr Goodson. 'You can’t wait for change to come to you, you have to go out and seek it.'

    'Besides,' said Mrs Goodson. 'Stevie didn’t mind, he knows it was all part of the plan, and there is a part of us that will always be proud of that role.'

    'See for yourself,' they said in unison, and shoved N'buli hard.

    He staggered forward into the waves. The water was deeper than it looked and the ground beneath the surface dropped sharply away. He fell over and then the waves washed over him, and he was sinking into the water.

    N'buli panicked and tried to cry out, but his lungs filled with water and then he…

!!!

The Man From LOVE #27: The House of Good

    As he tried to walk towards that light, a roaring noise filled N'buli’s mind, and a simple thought kept repeating over and over.

    He could just run away. There was still a chance. He could just run away, flee forever into the world. He could just run away.

    He took another step.

???

    'Now what?' said Agent Smith, as she sat up and started looking for her clothes. 'I know I’m still supposed to kill you, but I can’t really see the point now.'

    N'buli was actually surprised. 'You mean I screwed the bad out of you?'

    She smiled at that. 'No, you idiot. All of that stuff just seems so… stupid now.'

    'I know what you need to do,' said a deadly serious N'buli.

    'Oh really?'

    N'buli finally returned her smile. 'Yes. You need to eat. Your stomach has been rumbling for the last two hours.' He pointed back over the rocks. 'I still have some sausages that I liberated from a butchery two nights ago on my bike.'

    'I’m a vegetarian.'

    'A vegetarian assassin?'

    'You have a problem with that?'

    'Not really. Well, don’t worry. Sausages aren’t real meat.'

    She soon found out he wasn’t lying, because as well as some seriously gourmet pork sausages, he also had a six pack of tofu sausages that he had picked off from the same progressive butcher. He pulled some wood off the solitary tree in the area, some ancient, gnarled thing that was incredibly dry and made a good fire. He used it to cook them a late breakfast and they ate the sausages with their fingers.

    He kept her talking, even with a mouth full of tofu. She told him how she had been inducted into HATE by a boy named Trevor, who helped her join LOVE as a double agent. She only met one other Agent of HATE – the founder in the Mongolian tent, the man he was going to see.

    'What is he like?'

    Smith frowned as she finished off the last sausage. 'I really can’t remember. I know Trevor took me to see him, but I can’t remember what happened. All I know is that I was on a righteous mission and that I couldn’t fail.'

    Then she started talking about the HATE ideals, of weeding out those who drag humanity down into the mire, leaving the rest of us to ascend. It might have blown Agent Smith’s young mind, but N'buli had heard it all before and it sounded like just another excuse for satisfying an animalistic bloodlust.

   

    Realising he wasn’t interested, she stopped talking and started kissing. They made love again and N'buli completely forgot to ask her what Trevor’s last name was.

    The sun was starting to set again as they lay still after their latest vigorous efforts and they let their tiredness wash over them. N'buli was starting to seriously doze when Smith started talking again, speaking in a low, soft monotone.

    'I was working as a receptionist at a law firm in Northampton, my home town, right in the middle of England.'

    'I thought you were Irish.'

    'Shut up. This is my story. I was only 19 and it was my first job, straight out of school. It was fun, I made tea and baked cakes for the senior partners and thought that was me set for life and then Mr Ripley came in for his appointment.

    'When it was all done and I’d washed the blood off my face, they told me what it was all about. Mr Ripley had lost everything in a nasty divorce and blamed his lawyers, who happened to be my firm. So after he went around to his ex-wife’s new place and shot her and her new husband with a shotgun, he came to my firm and started shooting everybody in sight.

    'I was getting the afternoon tea ready, otherwise I would have been on reception, and he would have got me first. Kath was covering for me. I liked Kath, she always had sweets in her drawer and always shared. If she hadn’t covered for me, I would have been the first one killed, not her.

    'I heard the first shots, but couldn’t figure out what I was hearing. It was so loud and booming, I thought the walls were going to crack. And then I saw Mr Anderson, one of the old men who did all the wills, running for the bathroom. He was nearly there when there was another of the big booms and the back of Mr Anderson’s head opened up like a flower.

    'I saw the man with the guns walk forward and I actually gasped, just like they do in the movies, which I’d always thought was a bit stupid. Mr Ripley saw me and fired a shot, but I ducked back into the kitchen and cowered in the corner with a couple of the junior solicitors.

    'Even though my ears were ringing from the shots, I could hear him walking towards us. I knew that in an instant, he was going to come around the corner, point his shotgun at my head and end me. I was only 19, I hadn’t done anything, and it was all over.

    'And that just seemed so unfair and I was so angry about that, that when Mr Ripley came around the corner, I leapt at his face and clawed his eyes out. I mean, literally clawed his eyes out, and then I went for the throat. He came around the corner and I killed him in less than three seconds.

    'The police were confused by that and didn’t know if I was a hero or a criminal, but I didn’t care. I learned everything I needed to know about myself when Mr Ripley tried to kill me – that I would kill to save my own life, and that there were people who deserved to die, before they hurt other people.'

    She lapsed back into silence and N'buli didn’t have the energy to argue with her, even though he knew she was wrong. Mainly, he just couldn’t believe she was from Northamption. She hid the accent well.

    Agent Smith drifted off to sleep after that, mumbling something about ice cream before she started lightly snoring. N'buli let her sleep in his arms, and tried to enjoy the moment as much as possible. Before he had to ruin it all.

???

    Nearly there…

???

    As soon as Smith woke up, she knew what he had done. The expert knots in the bonds about her wrists and feet left plenty of room for her limbs to breathe, but were unbreakable.

    'You bastard,' she said. 'I though we had got past this.'

    N'buli was packing the last of his gear into the motorbike. 'Oh come on, a girl of your ability should be able to get out of those in two hours.'

    'I’m going to get you for this. Not because it’s my orders, but because you really are pissing me off.'

    'I really am sorry,' said N'buli, meaning every word. 'But I’ll be well gone by the time you’re free and you won’t be able to follow. I found your motorcycle and disabled it. Drained the fuel for my own bike. I left plenty of food and good clothing, so you should be able to hike your way back to some kind of civilisation in a couple of days.'

    Smith just gritted her teeth and stared him down, until he gunned the bike and she started cursing him loudly, but the noise of the engine drowned out her yelling. She was soon long behind him, cursing into the wind.

???

    A few more steps and he was there, but then he almost fell back, and felt his entire life open up behind him, ready to swallow him whole again. He’d have to go through it all again, over and over again, and he would never get there.

    He got his balance back, took two more steps, and reached inside his jacket.

???

    His destination was only a couple of hundred kilometres away, which was lucky, because the bike ran out of fuel at 150. He had to hike the rest of the way, loading himself up with the last of his food and water.

    N'buli always considered himself an ordinary man – he had got over his own arrogance sixty years ago – but he did have one singular talent: Once he had travelled somewhere in the world, he could always find his way back.

    So even though he had only visited the Mongolian prison compound once with his Dad, decades ago, he knew exactly where it was in the desolation of this corner of the world. He knew exactly where it was and the best way to go there. It was a real talent.

    But even though he knew where he was going, N'buli still wasn’t sure what he would find there. ‘The founder of HATE?’ he kept thinking. ‘What does that even mean?’

    But he kept on walking. He didn’t know what he would find out when he got there, or who was waiting for him, but it would be something.

    He kept going. The terrain was getting hilly and he saw no other people on his trek. It took him another day to walk that last distance and he finally approached the camp in the mid-afternoon. It was surrounded by steep, jagged hills on three sides, along with a large and still lake.

    Ditching his pack, N'buli quickly scaled one of the small peaks and took in the view. There was one large tent, surrounded by three smaller ones, which all appeared to be occupied by a local family.

    There were two people sitting outside the largest tent. He was about three hundred metres away, but he could see they were playing chess, and he recognised both of them.

    N'buli slid back out of sight, considered his options, realised he didn’t have any, stood back up, and started walking down towards the tent.

    Neither of the men looked up from their game as N'buli approached, not until he was standing right over them. Only then did they look up from their game.

    'Hello, Mr Moon,' he said, nodding to one, and then the other. 'Trevor.'

???

    'This is bigger than everything,' said the voice in the light, rumbling right through N'buli’s soul.

    N'buli smiled as he found what he needed in his jacket pocket. 'Yeah, but a bullet in the right place…'

???

    N'buli had been right and they were playing chess. But he couldn’t understand the board – it just looked like all the pieces were scattered randomly.

    'Who’s black?' he asked. 'Who is white?'

    Mister Moon shrugged and put on that award-winning smile. 'The game is always more complicated than it looks.'

    N'buli’s eyes narrowed, just a tiny bit. 'Val always said you were Mongolian, Mr Moon.'

    Mr Moon laughed. 'Oh no, my friend! I’m not Mongolian, I just come here for my holidays. I’m really an Englishman named Phillip Unswick. I was brought into LOVE at the funeral of Robin Hood. True story.'

    'I don’t know what to believe any more,' said N'buli with a sigh.

    'It’s worse than you think,' said Trevor, speaking for the first time. 'Did you even know your Dad’s real name is Adam Kadmon?'

    Mister Moon scowled, which was something N'buli hadn’t seen before. 'Trevor! We don’t have time to go into that right now.'

    'No, we don’t,' said N'buli. 'I’m here to see the founders of HATE. They’re in there, right?'

    'Yes,' said Mr Moon and Trevor simultaneously.

    'And it’s Mr and Mrs Goodson, isn’t it?'

    'Yes,' they both said again.

    'And they’re your mum and dad, aren’t they, Trev?'

    Trevor just looked sheepish. 'Yeah. How could you tell?'

    'Your mother is an excellent cook and your dad offers brilliant advice. Who else could you be?'

    N'buli moved past them and walked up to the wooden door of the tent. He put his hand on it and felt it hum with power.

    'Be careful,' said Mr Moon. 'It’s much bigger on the inside than the outside.'

    'Something else we’ve been keeping from the world?' asked N'buli.

    'We have to get people used to the idea of tesseract technology,' said Trevor. 'There has been somebody at the BBC working on this since 1963.'

    Mr Moon scowled again. 'Trevor! This is not the time.'

    Trevor started bickering with Mr Moon, but N'buli ignored them. He opened the door and stepped inside.

    Mr and Mrs Goodson were waiting for him.

???

    It all slammed together, past and present, with the future still a blazing glory.

    He had stepped inside the tent, but hadn’t taken a step into the darkness before the world had been ripped out from underneath him. N'buli couldn’t tell up from down, past from future or here from there. They had got inside his head and turned it all upside down.

    He couldn’t remember if he was trapped by the Goodsons in their impossible tent, or on the way to their House on the motorcycle. It was all now.

    All time was now.

    He relived his life over and over again, an infinite number of times, before he pulled himself together.

    N'buli pulled out the Blissgun out of his jacket - the one with the special shot that he had stashed away for the climax of the story, but his fingers wouldn’t answer.

    The Goodsons were not in the light, Nbuli realised. They were the light, all around him, part of him, part of everything.

    The weapon fell to the floor of the Goodsons’ tent.

???

    The hospital was dark and quiet in the middle of the night, until somebody started yelling in Room Nine.

   'Don’t go!' said a deeply asleep Dave.

???

    And then it all snapped together again. N'buli was down to one knee, and one chance. He still had the knife Val had come at him with in Amsterdam. He got it out of his boot and made an effort to grip it firmly.

    And then, with everything he had, he pushed forward, the blade heading straight for the centre of the light. He almost made it.

    The Goodsons waved at him and N'buli MacGregor dissolved in a cloud of gold dust.

!!!

The Man From LOVE #26: Fighting and fucking

    That voice, that came from everywhere and nowhere, that was the way forward, but he needed something more. Something much more.

    N'buli found it in the echoes of the pain he still felt, for all that he had lost over those long years. He was living his whole life at once, but he knew he could focus on some moments over the others, and he chose the worst.

    He re-lived the day in the War he went over the top of that trench and lost all his friends. He grabbed on to that moment when he learned his real parents had been killed in a storm. He felt the pain of losing Stevie, and Chang, and all the other Agents that had been lost over the years.

    And he grabbed on to the moments of physical pain as well – the thick, ugly aching that he felt in his bones after his 16-hour fistfight with Hitler’s massive and dim-witted clone in Argentina in 1977; all the times he had been shot or stabbed; the day in his late sixties when he stubbed his toe really badly on the corner of his bed; the pain he felt when he did a headbutt wrong, a move he could never get it entirely right.

    N'buli grabbed on to each and every moment of physical, emotional and spiritual agony and used them to pull himself together.

    He was standing in a room, he remembered that now, and he remembered that they were trying to stop him. His mind and soul were spread out across his life like thick butter, but he was pulling it all together.

    Gritting his teeth, closing his eyes and getting his shit together, N'buli took another step forward towards Mr Goodson.

???

    Agent Smith staggered back from his headbutt, but N'buli was in no position to press the attack. He could never quite get the headbutt right, and he was lucky he had not knocked himself out again.

    As it was, the world was spinning a bit, so he used the closest rock to steady himself. He saw Agent Smith shake her head and wipe the tears from his eyes and then she was coming at him again.

    He slapped aside her attack and kept moving backwards. She came at him again, but pulled up short, smirked and pointed at his side with her knife. 'You should probably do something about that.'

    The adrenaline had been pumping so hard that N'buli had forgotten about the stab wound. It was still bleeding heavily, soaking his shirt in his own blood. He took another step back as he ripped off part of his ruined shirt and started to tie it into a bandage around the wound.

    'Hardly fair, was it?' he asked her as she kept her distance, pacing around one of the large flat rocks. 'But why didn’t you stab me in the heart, or in the throat? This hurts like hell, but it doesn’t feel like you’ve done any major damage.'

    Agent Smith’s smirk faded, just a little bit. 'I want to take you out of this world fairly, without cheating. That’s the way it works. And while I’m better at this than the last time we met, I’m still not that good. I needed an advantage, and bleeding you out a bit seemed like the best way of gaining that.'

    She stopped pacing, tossed him a small spray can and sat down on the edge of her rock. 'Go on then. Sort yourself out, and then we’ll finish this.'

    N'buli looked at the can and saw it was standard LOVE issue – a coagulant that would stop everything but the worst wound from bleeding. He still didn’t trust her and kept an eye on her as he cleaned the blood away from his wound, used the coagulant and tied his makeshift bandage around it.

    When he was done, she tossed him a bottle of water. He caught it easily, but looked at it suspiciously.

    'Oh please,' said Agent Smith. 'Poison is for pussies.'

    He was too thirsty to argue and took the risk, chugging down most of the large bottle in seconds. She made her move just as he finished swallowing and he sprayed the last of the water in the bottle into her face and kicked her feet out from under her before she got two steps.

    But she rolled as she fell, got back to her feet and braced back up against the edge of a large stone, holding her knife steadily in front of her. 'Not that easy. Not this time.'

    She pushed off her stone and he needed to use his own knife to block the blow from her blade. But it was another feint, and she got inside his reach and put her elbow hard into the side of his throat.

    Choking, N'buli fell back, but she gave him no relief and came in even closer, bending over to try and cut his hamstrings. N'buli couldn’t get a breath, but he wasn’t helpless and rammed his knee into her chin with a satisfying clunk.

    Agent Smith fell back clumsily, but N'buli couldn’t take advantage of it. Her shot to his throat had been more rattling than he was willing to let on, and he was grateful to get a couple of seconds to catch his breath.

    He only got a couple, because she was coming at him again, and he had to fight her off.

    They were still at it eight hours later.

???

    N'buli was tethered to the world again and acutely away of his own body and all that it had been through, but he couldn’t see anything. There was just the blinding light, filling the vast room.

    Shielding his eyes, he took another step.

???

    They fought through the whole day, until the sky started to bruise with the last light of another lost day and there was still no breakthrough.

    His exhausting journey and new wounds brought N'buli’s skills and stamina down a level and Agent Smith had picked up her game since they last meet. They fought for hours and hours, but neither managed to seriously hurt the other.

    At one point, the full moon had clouded over and they had fought in the pitch darkness. Even then, neither of them could gain the upper hand, although N'buli did take a nasty knee to the head at some point and almost lost his footing on a particularly jagged piece of rock.

    But she blocked everything he had and he pushed away any of her attempts. They were both at their most exhausted in the hour before dawn and had given up taunting each other, the silent Mongolian night broken only by their grunts and gasps.

    Then the sun rose on a new day. And something happened.

    Kicks quickly became caresses and punches soon turned into gentle stroking. Neither of them spoke, or gave any sign that they knew what they were doing, but they had stopped fighting and started fucking.

    All of their second wind went into their passionate lovemaking. They found an incongruously grassy patch between the stones and tore each other’s clothes off.

    This part of their encounter didn’t last all day, but was just as exhausting as their night fighting. While they still went at it for hours, they were totally spent by midday and lay back on the grass, naked beneath the noon sun. They had no more urge to fight, or do anything.

    'Wow,' said Agent Smith, finally. 'I didn’t see that coming.'

    'I don't know,' said N'buli. 'Happens to me all the time.'

!!!

The Man From LOVE #25: Alone

    N'buli couldn’t tell up from down, past from future or here from there. They had got inside his head and turned it all upside down. He couldn’t remember if he was trapped by the Goodsons in their impossible tent, or on the way to their House on the motorcycle. It was all now.

    All time was now.

???

    Even though he missed Max more than anything, and even though he would have put up with all their pointless arguments if he had someone to talk to on his journey, N'buli made good time on his own. He broke into a motorcycle shop on the edge of some town near the border with Russia and hit the back roads on two wheels.

    After the first night on the bike, it felt like he’d been riding forever. He gunned it around another corner in a sleeping suburb of some small town and almost took out a mailbox, before the bike kicked into line and went where it was supposed to go. The town was about to wake up and N'buli had to find his sunglasses in his jacket pocket to cut back on the glare and look for a place to hole up.

    And that’s how it went for days. He travelled at night, using the bike to cut through open fields and take old paths that no car could ever manage. N'buli had passed through the region dozens of times over the years and instinctively knew which way to go. He had a photographic memory for places, courtesy of an upgrade in 1996, and even knew how to find that one tent in all of Mongolia, just from that one visit, decades ago.

    Every night at sunset he would rise from some hiding place and head east until the sky was light.

    He broke into a couple of LOVE caches and loaded up on Blissgun ammunition, Swiss chocolate and gold coins. He ate food from vending machines on industrial estates in the middle of the night or broke into deserted houses to raid the pantry. He always left enough gold behind to cover his thefts or any damage. In one farmhouse, he found a frozen cherry pie of such exceptional quality that he left enough gold behind for the family to get through a dozen hard winters.

    He slept in haylofts and up trees, in dry ditches and hidden caves, anywhere he could avoid any other human being. He washed in cold river streams and siphoned petrol from farm tanks to keep his bike going.

    N'buli spent almost all of his waking hours on the back of that bike. His night vision was exceptional and sometimes he could gun the bike into some open space and he felt like he was outracing the whole world.

    Sometimes he would hear voices in the night as he rode, but he shut them out easily and just kept on going. He didn’t dream when he slept. He was too tired and too focused and too free.

    It took him about a week to realise he was being followed.

???

    He was jumping out the window of an invisible Paris office block, he was running into the deadly machine guns during the War, he was crashing into Fassbender in the middle of the street. He was in Luxor, and New York, and London. He was standing outside the morgue in Sydney, watching Agent Smith talk to Val, he was in Leningrad with her, offering her that damn sausage.

    He was everywhere, and nowhere. They were opening him up from the inside and looking at all the angles, and N'buli couldn’t help it if that made him feel a bit sick.

???

    It was nothing obvious – just a feeling – but once it was there, it wouldn’t budge. There was somebody watching him.

    He had been travelling through some endless Eastern European wasteland for three days and hadn’t seen a single sign of any other human being in the vast desolation. N'buli was still heading in the right direction, but after riding over the rocky grounds for days, he started to pray for some asphalt.

    After the third night in the wasteland, he stopped by some small stream at dawn to load up on fresh water and caught something out of the corner of his eye. It was just one small reflection of light in the morning gloom, glinting of something metal far behind him. He’d used a pair of binoculars he had liberated from one of the LOVE caches, but he couldn’t see anybody back there, just a whole lot more nothing.

    He let it go and carried on, but after a century of surviving on instinct, he knew he needed to listen to that vague feeling inside him.

    After that, it became more and more obvious. He would notice a small cloud of dust somewhere behind him on his path or the wind would change suddenly and he would catch the barest whiff of somebody else’s scent. It was all too vague to pin down, but he was soon convinced that he was not alone on his journey.

    Someone was shadowing him. N'buli was sure of that. He just didn’t know what they wanted.

    And then, 23 days after he left Amsterdam and 17 days after he lost Max, N'buli crested a hill and saw an open plain in the pale moonlight and knew he had crossed the border into Mongolia. He was nearly there.

    He slept out in the open that day, on a natural rocky platform in a cluster of big boulders. The cold was settling in, but the rock would soon warm if the day’s sun and he was comfortable beneath the endless sky of the open and deserted plain.

    N'buli slept the whole day through, without being disturbed in any way. Until just before nightfall, when somebody sneaked up on him and stabbed him in the side with a flick-knife.

???

    There was a voice, cutting through the chaos of all his life, sounding out across his lifetime. A voice of clarity and certainty, of no specific gender or race.

    'This is not the future,' it said. 'This is not the past. This is all now. Take another step N'buli, and see what happens.'

    He used that voice as the anchor he needed, pulling on it with his mind. But he was leaking, he was leaking away somehow.

???

    N'buli snapped awake as the agony of the stab wound hit him and he instantly rolled away from the threat.

    Whoever had the blade was coming at him out of the setting sun, using it to blind him. N'buli chose the wisest course of action and ran away.

    Holding the side of his gut where he was leaking blood, he skipped backwards onto the nearest rock and danced across several boulders until he was well away from his attacker and no longer had the sun in his eyes. But he had lost his opponent.

    Wincing from his wound, N'buli scanned the area. There was nothing but huge, shattered rocks in every direction for miles, with only the barest signs of vegetation between the stone. There were a thousand places his attacker could hide.

    And then she was right there, coming at him again from the left. She was dressed in a regulation LOVE fight-suit and had cut her long hair short, but N'buli recognised her instantly.

    'Agent Jane Smith,' said N'buli as he dodged her lunge, which tried to deliver him a knife to the eye. With the suit, she was much faster than he was, and he didn’t want to show her how much that rattled him. 'Nice to see you again.'

    He twisted around and went for a kidney punch, but she swivelled on a heel and got him in a roundhouse kick on the shoulder that knocked him into a dry, dusty patch between the rocks.

    N'buli got shakily to his feet. Agent Smith leapt for him and only realised he had taken her knife off her when he stepped aside and used it to cut the three main power units of her fight-suit, instantly turning it from a human-boosting marvel of technology to a bunch of ordinary clothes.

    She backed off a step and pulled a second knife out of her sleeve. The two agents circled each other, knives clasped firmly in their hands.

    'How long have you been following me?' asked N'buli. 'Not all the way from Amsterdam, surely?'

    Agent Smith smiled for the first time, but there was no real human warmth in her grin. 'No, not from Amsterdam. I picked up your trail in those German woods and I’ve been following you ever since. It took a while to catch up to you, but I knew I’d get you in the end.'

    N'buli laughed. 'You think you’re ready for me this time, girl?'

    'I know I am,' she said in that incredibly charming Irish accent, darting forward and slashing down with her blade. N'buli blocked her blow with his own knife and stepped aside, but she was ready for him this time and swung out with her elbow, catching him on the side of his jaw.

    N'buli grunted and went down to one knee and Agent Smith tried to get at his throat again, but his arm snapped out and caught her by the wrist.

    'We’ll see how good you are, Jane,' he said, before smacking her in the face with a headbutt.

!!!