The Garden Transport Station

FICTION

“Keep it moving… keep it moving,” droned the little creature—a gelatinous thing that looked like a pair of eyeballs plopped atop a mound of congealed hand sanitizer. Eyes that were thankfully disinterested enough not to recognize me. It waved flashlights with bright, pointed cone lids at the steadily flowing river of beings that poured into the final corridor of the transport station.

Above the entrance to the corridor was a metal arch with cut-out curved letters that said simply:

THE GARDEN TRANSPORT STATION

“How many times have you been through?” a sing-song voice asked from beside me. I looked over to find a pair of wide, friendly eyes suspended in translucent purple-tinged goo only inches from my own.

“Through?” I said.

“The gateways—life,” she said. I got the feeling that she was, in fact, a she—though here, there weren’t any lady parts or man parts to speak of. Here was transient. “I’ve been through seven times,” she said without blinking. Seven times—one every thousand years or so. Though, of course, there were exceptions.

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “I don’t remember all of them. Three or four…”

She looked smug for a moment.

“…hundred.” I finished.

She stared at me, and her eyes reached the roundest they could, and—if she had had a mouth—I got the feeling it would be hanging open. Were it not for the steady current of souls pressing behind us, she may well have stopped moving altogether.

“I’ve been through seven times,” she repeated, quiet and seemingly to herself.

“That’s great,” I said. “Each time’s different—a real adventure.”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“You’re…one of the old ones,” she said in a wooden voice.

“Yeah, but once we get there, I’m just as lost as everyone else,” I said, looking around to see if anyone had heard her.

“How old?” she said.

“Well, now, that’s not a particularly polite thing to ask,” I said, only half-joking.

“So you know… all of it.” She said it too loudly for my comfort. “Were you there at the beginning?” Her eyes alit with a zealous fever, and I pressed further into the crowded stream of goopy spirits and away from her question.

The gel was crude, but it worked—a holding medium of sorts until souls could be inserted into material bodies. Otherwise, spirits tended to cling together like sticky magnets, and when that happened, they were hell to pull apart. No, the gel worked well enough—for now. I pushed downstream and away from the inquisitive soul.

“Were you in the garden?” she practically yelled after me.

I looked at the arched sign—its cut-out letters backward from this side of the terminal.

“We’re all in the garden now,” I said to myself as I watched her slip away in the flowing crowd like a leaf floating atop a steady river.

“Atum,” a voice called out from an open door that—were it closed—wouldn’t be detectable in the corridor’s bulkhead. I pretended not to hear.

“ATUM!” he yelled, pointing at me. Other souls began to look at me curiously. I made my way toward the loud jelly-man.

“Hey Shu,” I said, as if only just now seeing him. “I’m kind of busy, what do you need?”

Shu looked at me for a long moment. Then he snorted an unpracticed laugh that came out more like a honk.

“Busy?” he said finally. “You remember this—all of this…” he gestured his formless limbs as if to refer to the entire transport station, “… isn’t real—not really real. You can’t be busy without time, and you can’t experience time without going through those damned things.” He pointed at the far end of the corridor to where the crowd was disappearing.

I sighed impatiently.

“Of course, I know that…”

“Because you’re the one that built it,” he interrupted.

“I know that as well…”

“Even though he told you not to,” Shu said.

“I remember. It’s a while, but I remember most of it,” I said, gritting teeth that didn’t exist.

He cocked his shapeless head as if to say, “Do you? Do you really?” but he—like the others—would only push back so far. I still demanded some respect. The transport was a pretty polarizing issue, and it had never officially been approved. Animal skins imbued with souls—spirits melded with body—the union of the ethereal with the material. It was a plan that had almost never gotten off the ground, and it wouldn’t have—had I waited for approval. I was still paying for some of the blowback, though.

I had been in the garden when the idea hit me. Time.

It was a simple enough—if a bit crackpot. Implementing it had turned out to be a whole different story. What was the Earthen expression—distance makes the heart grow fonder? Well, it doesn’t. Not without time. Distance is a proxy for time—for how long it would take to see someone again.

Before the station, distance could be crossed with all the delay of wiggling your little toe. When you live forever and can feel the constant and complete connection of all of existence, you can check in with any part of it whenever you want. There is no sorrow, pain, or loneliness—but there is boredom by the bucketload.

Shu waved his blobby hand in front of my face.

“You still with me, big A?” He sounded amused.

“Yeah,” I shook my head to clear it. “I’m here.” My head continued to wiggle long after I stopped shaking it. This body was like being incarnated as a Jell-O cube.

Shu didn’t think the Garden Transport Station should be allowed to operate, and he wasn’t alone, but too many high-order beings continued pumping their lower-resolution selves through regardless of what others thought. Over and over again, they broke themselves into pieces and sent parts of themselves through to experience love and loss, hope and despair—the reality of duality.

Critics of the Garden felt that it caused more problems than it was worth, and, in some ways, they were right. The presence of time creates the illusion of scarcity. Scarcity breeds resource hoarding, which makes things even more scarce. Then come all the things that accompany fear and envy—hate, war, greed, and so on.

Every dozen millennia or so, souls would start returning twisted and bent, and the entire system had to be shut down and given a hard reset. It was retooled before it could be restarted, and then everything would go smoothly again—for a while. The trick is staying current on the system status, and the only way to do that was to do what those like Shu feared the most—going through one of the portals.

“There is no time here,” Shu repeated to himself, and I got the impression that this was something he reminded himself of often. I followed his gaze downstream to the many archways at the tunnel’s far end.

“I know that too,” I said,” but I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.”

“You might need to lay off living for a while,” he said before he could think better of it.

“Lay off life? Are you serious?” I snapped.

Shu looked where his feet would have been, were there feet on this plane.

“Do you have any idea how much work it takes to keep this place going?” My voice was now loud enough to draw glances from souls slipping by. I lowered it.

“How many souls go through this station every day?” I said.

“Hovers around two million.” Shu looked like a scolded child.

“That’s just Earth,” I said. “How many things can go wrong with this one station? That’s just one plane—a single dimension.”

“A lot,” Shu said petulantly.

“Exactly. We’re still shaking out the system—it’s still in its infancy. None of these things run by themselves, and trains can’t stay on tracks that aren’t well maintained.”

“What’s a train?” Shu said.

I pressed jellied fingers against my eyes—a human gesture that I was sure was lost on him.

“Worlds don’t build themselves,” I said, backing slowly into the steady push of souls ambling toward the archways.

“Maybe there’s good reason for that,” he said loudly.

“Your concern is noted,” I shouted over my shoulder without looking back. I knew that if I had, I would see a very judgmental Shu glancing between me and the far end of the destination that I was being pressed toward. We must have had this conversation a hundred times. I navigated through the crowd, setting the largest archway in the center as my target.

As I grew closer, one of the guards recognized me and elbowed his companion. They both stood up smartly.

“My lord?” the one on the right said, gesturing at the rows of spraying fountains—banking either side of the steady procession of souls—from which every traveler was to drink.

I leaned forward and slurped the sweet liquid in a long, cold draught and immediately felt my mind relax. My memories loosened, sliding like raindrops sloughing off the windshield of a speeding car. I shuddered as deep recollections were scraped away from me as easily as mud from an old boot, and, for a glorious while, I became like everyone else.

I felt myself gently nudged forward by the steady pressure of gelatinous forms behind me. We ambled toward a rippling wet membrane that stretched across a sleek metal archway in front of us like the shimmering soap skin clinging to a bubble wand, and for a moment, I was worried and confused.

I didn’t know where I was, who these people were, or even what I was. All I knew was the steady hum and pressure of those around me as I was pushed through the cold silver skin and into a new place. My last thought was great comfort in knowing that at least I wasn’t alone. We entered the world as one.