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In a desert, under a mountain, above a floor thickened and reinforced so much that it wasn’t a floor, between a set of clamps designed to grasp with fickle tenderness the steel sides of aircraft carriers at drydock, lived a woman who weighed ten thousand tons. Some days she dozed, some days she daydreamed, sometimes she simply hummed to herself to make the time go by slow and sweet, like honey flowing on toast. Now and then she would shrug, or stretch her back a little, and one, two, three, dozens of the hundreds of strong, multilayered wires that tethered her to the far-away walls of her cubed room would tremble and grumble under the strain, but they had been designed to hold aloft the mightiest of telemetry towers and were reluctant to part with her even under such trying circumstances.
It was often dull, in the room, but there were ways around such things. The ten-thousand-ton-woman had tried many of them over the years before simply settling on not being bored any more, which had served her well. Her favourite had been conversation, at first with herself, and then with the woman who was ten thousand feet tall.
“Hello,” she said today again, out of friendship and habit.
Besides her, the ten-thousand-foot-woman blinked her eyes and sighed out a deep breath.
“It’s lovely today, as it is most days, isn’t it?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. “How are you, yourself, and your place in things? Do you have any itches? I cannot scratch them, but I can call for someone who can. Are you troubled and do you want to talk about it? Have you seen any strange things today, or later, or yesterday? How was your breakfast? Did you have any or did you skip it?”
The woman who weighed ten thousand tons looked around furtively, then bent closer to the woman who was ten thousand feet tall and whispered “how’s the weather up there?”
The air that would give the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman the voice to whisper answers to her questions was yet twenty minutes away, but it paused in her throat for a minute as she snorted and chuckled, and her friend smiled to herself. She had told that joke the day they brought her in, wheeling in that endless gurney with her carefully strapped to it, and she had enjoyed it so much that she carefully repeated it to her every day without fail, as regular as lunchtime or even moreso, since sometimes they didn’t get lunch when there was a presidential inspection.
They’d met lots of presidents. Some of them were very important people, and it often puzzled the ten-thousand-ton-woman why they were interested in the two of them. She had been gingerly prodded and nudged with science for over a decade now, her nails, hairs, breath, teeth, tongue, gut, and toes all carefully explored down from atoms to quarks, and was quite sure that there was nothing of interest there. If her friend the ten-thousand-foot-woman remained somewhat unmapped in comparison, well, that was an issue of scale and practicality. They had still examined the bulk of her, using over ten miles of tiny tiny mirror tubes and miniature cameras on the tips of excessive ropes of wiring.
The door to the room opened, and a dramatic pause happened.
The ten-thousand-ton-woman frowned. It was her least pleasant part of the day, and so she suspected it went with her friend.
The dramatic pause ended, and a man walked into the room. He had striking eyebrows, not much white hair, and a dreadfully smooth face that was pinched in the most unpleasant expressions, like a lion’s.
“Good morning,” lied the ten-thousand-ton-woman. Beside her, the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman twitched her left little finger in answer.
The man who was ten thousand years old looked at her with disdain.
“It is not a good morning,” he said, crossly. “I had no dodo egg for breakfast, as I enjoyed for so long. I was awakened not by the nose-flutes of the eunuchs who were my slaves as befitted my viziership, but by a rude alarm. I am forced to rely upon digital clocks rather than those sand-powered devices I personally designed, and there are no proper clothes anymore. And I still have not been given the host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.”
“Do tell,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She didn’t want him to, but he would do so whatever she said, and complain the same. Manners cost nothing, as her mother had told her so many times back when she weighed one hundred and thirty-three pounds.
Those had been long-ago days, though, and she scarcely remembered them, as most people forgot infancy. The taste of waffles (home-made) with maple syrup. A birthday party (seventh? Seventeenth?). Sinking through the soil to bedrock twenty feet below in a single sharp moment and sitting there in a daze until the government came and removed her with very expensive and powerful machinery, most of which she’d never learned the names for, or forgotten.
Simpler times. She wasn’t sure if she’d like them anymore, or maybe she would.
The ten-thousand-year-old-man had stopped talking about himself, crossly. She realized that he had asked her a question, and wasn’t sure what to do about that. It had never happened before. “Agnostic, verging on Catholic, or the other way around,” she said, and hoped it was a good reply.
“Hnnf,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly, and she knew that it wasn’t. “Such a waste. Such a waste. Of course you didn’t get it right. I made all those up, you know.”
“Really?” she said. She knew, she knew.
“Of course I did,” he snapped, crossly. “I made them all up after nobody listened to me the first time. I got it all right back then, I did. I knew the secrets of Zifweedoism, and you know what they did? They laughed at me, laughed at me. So I made up everything else – scientology, Christian Scientism, Mormonism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, and Jainism, and Tolkienism, and I lied about it. And so it’s all your fault for believing something that I made up, you see?” he finished, with a spit of spite.
“Yes,” she said. This was usually when he was finished.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, crossly. “You will.” And that was how he usually finished, and he did.
He left by the door without so much as waving good-bye to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, and she grew annoyed on her friend’s behalf all over again before she let her imagined fresh breezes and warm sun comfort her. It didn’t matter what that man (the ten-thousand-year-old one) thought or said or did anyways. She suspected that it never had.
The door opened and let in a bunch of very serious men in serious suits with serious eyewear who secured the area seriously. Behind them walked another president.
“Hello,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, politely. The ten-thousand-foot-woman twitched a finger in greetings.
“Hello, citizen,” said the president. And then he asked a lot of questions of some of the scientists with him. They didn’t look like scientists to her; they had no long white coats, most of them had no glasses, and they didn’t wear gloves. They wore suits and ties and used complicated little phones nearly as sophisticated as those that teenagers owned.
Then they were done, and they left. Lunch would come soon, and the ten-thousand-ton-woman worried about it anxiously. What if it were the mushroom soup, rather than the chicken-fried-steak? She was looking forward to the chicken-fried-steak so much, for reasons that escaped her. Maybe it was very tasty? Or maybe she was sick of mushrooms. Yes, maybe that was it. A pity. She’d always enjoyed mushrooms so very much.
Oh well. Having something new to shy away from was very nearly the same as having something new to look forward to. And that was a good thing, wasn’t it? She was sure it was.
Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. The air was full of sirens and hoopla and ruckus. She had never heard such a natter and fuss, and she suspected the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman hadn’t either, but she was unable to ask her opinion of it because right then the door opened and in came the ten-thousand-year-old-man. He was strutting. Crossly, of course.
“Hello again,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, as politely as she could manage, which wasn’t.
“Hello yourself,” smirked the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly. “I have fixed things right up. I have picked the pocket of the president.”
“Oh?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman.
“I did such things in my youth,” he continued, crossly. “Why, I stole Napoleon’s purse in Africa, and sold it to Sitting Bull in London. It’s all true, every word of it. And I was so good at it that I did it while I was sick, and that was true too. Vomit and bile everywhere, pus and rot creeping out of my eyelids and toe-tips.”
“Wonderful,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She wondered if she was rolling her eyes. She was trying to roll her eyes, but she was out of practice for it, and the ten-thousand-year-old-man was not paying enough attention to her to tell her if she was doing it properly, even if he bothered to answer her.
“I picked the pocket and I took the codes and I have launched the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that are kept in this place, and kept filled with nuclear explosives,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “And because of this, I am sure now that the world will end, or at least mostly, which is good enough for me.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman blinked in slow, total shock. That was the first time she’d ever heard him spoken something without sounding cross.
“Why, you ask?” asked the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “Because of all of it, but mostly the mammoths. We have too many people and not enough mammoths. This will correct the matter, and maybe I can finally get my host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.” He licked his lips. They were neither pale and thin nor fat and rubbery, but they were as unappealing as rotted bone regardless. “I did so love mammoth flesh. I came up with that custom, you know. And all the others.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman looked at the ceiling (which was flashing and wailing with alarms), and then over to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, whose beautiful eyes were looking back at her. She had raised exactly one eyebrow, the right one, the one that meant she was asking ‘well?’
“I suppose we should do something,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, ignoring the ten-thousand-year-old-man as he boasted and bragged and wouldn’t shut up about things that didn’t matter because he didn’t matter.
The ten-thousand-foot-woman nodded, twice. And then she stood up.
It was complicated. Joints acted as joints shouldn’t. Tiny restraints parted under the pressures of leverage, the kind that could move the world. Things folded, then refolded with unimaginable majesty and power. And though the cube’s ceiling was very high, the ten-thousand-foot-tall woman had pierced it with her skull long before her head had even come close to reaching her waist.
As she straightened up, she reached down with one hand whose fingers were beyond imagining, and she grasped the ten-thousand-ton-woman, and she began to push. She didn’t have the strength to lift, or even to shove, but she did have the leverage, and she was pushing her forwards at a slow, slow speed that would be enough to launch her for miles.
And even then, as the strangeness was becoming nearly overwhelming, she heard the familiar, right-on-time rumble of her friend in the morning.
“Yes,” whispered her voice, low and windy, as the long, long, long arms began to move with the power and speed of continental drift; unstoppable yet beautiful. “I am happy in all ways. I do not itch, and thank you for asking of my troubles. I saw nothing stranger than the two of us, again, and I had no breakfast because I was not hungry. And it was toast.”
She sighed as the ten-thousand-ton-woman slipped through her fingers and began her slow, inexorable slide. “I do not like toast.”
And with that the ten-thousand-ton-woman went rolling away though the halls, crashing through floors and knocking over entire floors, ceilings, and pieces of multi-billion-dollar superstructure. The missile launch tubes were merely the third thing she tumbled through, and by the time she’d left them they would’ve been hard put to launch a chickadee. She travelled on, on, on, and by the time she’d stopped rolling she was in the outside again, in the desert, by a mountain. There was a fresh breeze and a warm sun.
“This is a nice day,” she decided, speaking to the ten-thousand-foot-woman.
Her friend nodded to her as she slooowly stepped out of the hole in the ground that had been punched by her head. Or she thought she did. It was hard to see her, so high up in the clouds.
But of course she’d agreed. It was a nice day, after all.