Fantastic Metropolis

This was not your ordinary everyday planet, that much was obvious. It probably wasn’t a planet at all. We carried on watching as the mist came and went, presenting a succession of scenes, no two the same. On a few occasions there was only blackness peppered with stars. A lot of times there was confused curving and billowing, like in backspace. The landscapes would often move and writhe as well, curving right over our heads and then winding away like smoke.

After a bit, the bubble sprang on again, spreading out to give us some room to move around. The air must have disappeared. That wasn’t so much of a worry. As long as there was still enough charge in the fuel rods to work the CO2 splitter and extract oxygen from our exhaled carbon dioxide, we could continue to breathe. That would be for quite a long time while the rods weren’t being used to power the raft, so we weren’t in immediate danger.

But what were we to do?

 

Well, of course, there was one thing; but we didn’t think of it straight away. We kept on looking at the weird stuff all around us, while he kept on asking, ‘Where are we? For God’s sake tell me where we are.’ And so in the end I told him as much as I knew. He looked stunned as it sank in. Then he was blubbering again and blaming me for everything. ‘You told me you were the best! You said I’d be safe with you! Oh, I shouldn’t have listened! I never should have got into this thing!’

‘You did it for love,’ I reminded him.

‘Yes,’ he said dreamily, ‘for love.’ He switched just like somebody had pressed a button. The sparkle came back in his eyes, and he was rhapsodizing once more. That neural connectivity must have been still working for us somehow, because I could feel it too. So why shouldn’t we finish what was interrupted on the sandbank? We snuggled down on the rubbery floor and started messing with one another, fiddling and unbuttoning. I caressed his tool and balls while kissing his throat. Our bellies squirmed together. Then off came my codpiece and our two dicks were prodding and rubbing like a pair of maddened pike. I was on fire: this was working up to the biggest thrill I could remember. I manoeuvred to ease my organ into his orifice, but it seemed he had the same idea and was probing for mine, getting in the way.

While this was going on, something funny was happening all around us, though in the excitement I was only half conscious of it. The landscape had finally closed up over our head and taken on a smeared appearance. Now it was closing in so that we were visibly on the inside of a globe. I didn’t worry about it for the moment. I was too busy trying to get my urgently lunging shaft into where it could do itself some good.

Dimly it occurred to me that not only could this not be a planet, but maybe we weren’t in frontspace at all, despite what the instruments said. Certainly it was a very funny kind of space. Our world was now very small, a spherical chamber. As it contracted, everything inside seemed to curve in proportion. The raft was curving, bending like a bow. Then it performed a topological dance and flowed into itself.

Like I said, I was in no mood to think too much about it. We were both too hot, because the same sort of thing was happening to us too. The space we occupied had acquired more than three dimensions, I was able to understand that, so that impossible things were able to happen, and we were ready to take full advantage of them. We could bend and twist all round each other. My moist swelling knob found his heaving bud and pushed all the way up; at the same time, marvel or marvels, I felt the delicious pungent pain as he entered me. We were both thrusting in perfect rhythm, out of our heads with pleasure.

Simultaneous double sodomy! It definitely was the biggest thrill I could remember!

We came in unison, twice, three times, then fell apart, butts red and raw. I was panting, glazy-eyed. Not him, though. His eyes were shining. He stood and looked down at himself, as though he had had a revelation.

‘Love,’ he said softly. ‘Do you know the important thing about love? You must learn to love yourself. The way I do.’

His hands were running up and down his partly clothed body. Then he bent over and took his cock in his mouth. Well, I’ve known guys who could do that—but this was different; he wasn’t the sort to be that supple. He sank down and curled up like a cat—or a snake, it’s hard to visualize, really, just what was happening—let his dick flop out of his mouth and reached further to lick his scrotum; then the perineum behind it; then he was nuzzling between the cheeks of his own buttocks, making mooing sounds.

He had flipped, I guess. I stepped back and stared in fascination. You’re not going to believe this, but I swear it, I swear I saw it. He was pushing his face into his backside and it was going in. His buttocks widened till his whole head went in, and still he kept going. Shoulders, torso, even his bum in the end, all vanished. Up his own arsehole. And there was nothing left.

First time I ever lost a passenger. To make matters worse he had taken my one thousand kudos with him. It had been in his jacket, which he hadn’t bothered to take off.

I suppose I should have felt some concern over a fellow human being, but now I’d had my fun I had no time to be anything but scared. The place was still contracting, and I had worked out where I was now. This was no phase station. No friendly aliens were going to bale me out. The topological disappearing act I had just witnessed could only mean a region of collapsing space. A singularity, in other words. Though not a black hole. Something rarer, unknown to science. And how far was it going to shrink? To a dimensionless point? The rubbery surface was taking on the consistency of glue. I hated to think what might happen next. Neither did there seem any way to avoid it. How I’d got from backspace and into this hole I couldn’t exactly say; but the point was that the phase shift that gets you into backspace is not the same as the shift that allows you to leave it.

The singularity’s effect would be one-way. I couldn’t leave.

I closed my eyes and waited to be squashed out of existence. Then a thought struck me. To suppose I had come upon a body just as it was on the point of collapsing into nothing was asking too much of coincidence. It must have been here a long time. It would be a singularity with a pulsation, expanding and contracting. And, in my imagination, the phase pop that had fetched me from backspace would most logically result from the expansion stage. Now it was contracting maybe the phase would be reversed.