Chapter II: Savant

The Lizard King drags himself across cracked earth at a frantic clip, blistering heat radiating out across the smooth scales of his back, knife clenched between his teeth. He glides, padded feet moving in flawless concert, mathematically. It's the precision of instinct, his conscious mind filed down to a razors edge, freeing up system memory for more important functions. Like darting, licking, smelling, killing. He experiences his life like the pilot of a beautiful and terrible instrument. The wielder of a weapon of God. Of himself. He simply wishes, and his weapon grants. 

The sun's hot today. Fuck the sun though. It can’t hurt him anymore. It wants to kill him, but it can’t. He’s in his fucking element. Warded against the hatred of an ancient and raging deity set on boiling his blood, he flies. The Lizard King eats the suns hatred. He shits it out. 

Literally. His body is a miracle, obsidian scales drinking in that angry red light, metabolizing it, packing it away within plump stores of fat, through which he is quickly burning as he rockets himself across the sand. The Lizard King has no need for sleep, save for when he chooses to do so. The Lizard King has no need for food, and yet still he hunts. He kills, and he devours. Not because he must, but because he feels that it is good, and right. He does so because he loves it. He loves himself, and he loves the world he has found himself in. All he does, he does for love. 

The coin-flip in his genetics that bequeathed these gifts upon him should have left him dead. And in a trillion, trillion worlds, it did. His scales would slough off in chunks, leaving him to bleed out through the gaping lesions they left in his flesh. His razor-blade-consciousness would file itself too thin, leaving the weapon with no one to pilot it, and he would lay in the sun, growing fatter and fatter on sweet photosynthesis until his meat burst from his skin. Or he would just die, what would be scales becoming cancer instead. But in this world, he has lived. In this world, he is perfect. 

All of this he understands, deep within his mighty subconscious. He rationalizes it as a blessing from the universe. Creations tacit approval of what he is, and what he has chosen to be. He is a monstrous thing, an instrument of death, a thing that should not exist, and still he lives, in spite of his abominable nature. What else can he be then, other than an instrument of the divine? And what else can the divine be, other than his own terrible id? He needs nothing, wants everything, and the boundless possibility of that want is narcotic. It thrills him. It flings him across the desert. 

His conscious mind rages with holy purpose, inward focused, singing itself its own glorious exaltations. But his hind-brain is a ravenous listener. His weapon extends beyond the body itself, encompassing the myriad systems and processes that drive it. Through the hairs 

on the pads of his feet, the earth whispers to his weapon. Somewhere in the far distance, a patch of dirt shifts as a boot crunches over it. Six boots. Two sets of light footfalls, one heavy. Half a klick from his position, forty eight degrees from his current heading. The weapon translates the information for The Lizard King. Prey, to the east. 

He is silent in his approach. His tongue uncoils from around the cold steel of his knife, tasting the air, a fresh of harvest of data stored away, both known and unknown by the thing that pilots The Lizard King. Three bodies, as he suspected. Two post-human (like himself, although that is not how he would choose to see it), and one from the standard stock. One of them well fed, two of them less so, and one of the two less than the other. They walk in single file, the pre-human leading, the post-humans taking up the rear. 

The one in the back is small, very small, likely standing at no more than three and a half feet, but The Lizard King can taste the toxins in its blood. Shouldn’t pose much of a threat though, especially if taken by surprise. Kill, but do not eat, his weapon whispers to him. 

The one in the middle is a different matter. The thing that was once a man stands nine feet tall, four armed, its skin tinted grey-blue, stretched tight around muscles that erupt across its body in undulating, tumorous blooms. This one is a threat, his weapon whispers. Head to head, it would rip The Lizard King to pieces. But it lacks the benefit of The Lizard Kings obsidian armor. Flesh is still flesh, and a knife will cut just fine. The element of surprise slides further up his priorities. 

The not-post-human in the front is deemed unworthy of his consideration. He might have considered them anyway, but The Lizard King is eager. Too long since his last fix, the cocaine-thrill of knife hitting flesh slowly fading into a distant memory. Acting out a meticulous plan he has no memory of constructing, The Lizard King sets to work. 

Suddenly, and without a sound, he is coiled around the small one, a massive, padded hand covering its mouth. It tries to scream, but his blade steals the air from its lungs, and a hollow wheeze vibrates across the setae on his palm. A moment later he is perched atop its back, flinging its lifeless body to the ground as he launches himself into the air, teeth digging deep into the big one’s shoulder. The Goliath flails, but The Lizard King’s knife is already deep inside its neck, slicing through its carotid artery before ripping a chunk out of its shoulder. The Lizard King chews, and swallows. The hulking man-thing falls thunderously to its knees, sways, then collapses, black viscus fluid pumping from the hole in its throat. 

The Lizard King spends a microsecond in self-congratulating ecstasy, then flits his gaze upward toward the human at the front of the pack. He notes, with a dull half-surprise, just how much space the thing has already put between he and it. It is quicker than he expected. But seconds later, his jaws are clenched around its head all the same. His mouth swings shut, and he feels the human’s skull shatter across his tongue. It’s quiet, then. He spreads his palms 

across the cracked earth, feeling the silence in his skin. Satisfied with his work, The Lizard King feeds. 

As the day shifts into twilight, and all that the travelers ever were finally come to rest within The Lizard King (aside from the small one, who has been left to rot), he pauses to take stock of what they have left behind. The two post-humans have little but the cloths he found them in left to memorialize them, but the human had been carrying a large, heavy sack across its shoulder. He rifles through the bag, as is his instinct, and feels his mood flag downward in disappointment. It’s just books. Piles and piles of books. 

The Lizard King has no great interest in literature. As far as his conscious mind is concerned, he does not know how to read. But all the same, he sits beside the pile of tomes, diligently thumbing through them page by page, his hind-brain absorbing knowledge that the pilot will never see. Such is the nature of The Lizard King’s divine greed. He will eat until the bones are clean. No stone will be left unturned, on the off-chance that one will sparkle brighter than the others. 

Twilight fades into darkness, but The Lizard King does not need light to see. None of the data being processed by his weapon is deemed worthy of its wielders attention. But then, in an instant, it is. The Lizard King comes into the sudden understanding that he is holding a book. “Quantum-Memetics: On Cross-Dimensional Causal-Entanglement”, by Mann and Hart. It is a test-printing, containing among other things, a series of mathematical proofs. It is the most beautiful and important thing The Lizard King has ever touched. 

His heart sings, basking in the light of the divine. The thing he holds in his hand is proof of his wildest, darkest instincts. Confirmation of his divinity. He is no philosopher king, it is not the ideas themselves that thrill him, but their practical implications. He can use these numbers, make them knife-like, an extension of his weapon. Finally, he can get what he wants. He can have everything. 

The Lizard King does not grasp the finer points of his plan. In fact, it would be dishonest to say that he is aware of his plan in any form. His mind is aware of a possibility, and that this possibility is within his grasp, and that is enough to drive his body eastward, following the final heading of his most recent meal. The rest is the purview of his hind-brain, and it fits its new task like a glove. His subconscious is a flawless analytical engine, built to break down its surroundings into logical abstractions and extrapolate from them, and the notions contained within the book come pre-abstracted. Useful things, numbers. The weapon makes a note to drive its wielder to find more of them. The Lizard King does not know what numbers are, but he knows that they are beautiful, because his weapon tells him so. 

The things that these proofs prove are, of course, absurd. But neither The Lizard King nor his weapon have the capacity to understand that. They don’t judge the world in that way. 

They simply know that they have uncovered a great and powerful Truth, and are aware of its hideous, joyful implications. 

The Lizard King moves eastward, dreaming of his glorious destiny. Drunk on the future he is crafting in his head. One soaked in blood and ruin and ecstasy. The things he will do. He will do things without end, for all of time. He will stride worlds, subsume them. Rip and devour and cry havoc across infinity. All these things will come to pass, he knows, for his weapon tells him they have before. Days turn into weeks, and he runs, and he dreams. 

He dreams of the perfection he will become. And in some deep-buried logical- subroutine of his hind-brain, he is troubled by that perfection, and its implications. It does not sit well with his conception of his current self. How small he suddenly seems. The Lizard King is perfect, this is in-built knowledge, written into the code of his DNA. But the math of it all, the beautiful, fresh, new, exciting math of it all, doesn’t balance out. If the thing he will become is perfect, then it would follow that the thing he is now is not. The notion claws at him, driving him faster and faster across endless desert, broken cities, and weirder, wilder places. He weeps for his wretched, pathetic self. Sickened, embarrassed by his false sovereignty. He resolves himself. He will murder this crawling, useless thing, and replace it with a perfect monster. He will reclaim his godhood. For the first time since before he became the thing he is today, The Lizard King knows self-loathing. 

His weapon delivers him to a city by the coast. He flattens himself against the earth, listening for its whispers, and is given only silence in return. Cities, or the ruins of them, are often an ample source of fun and sustenance for The Lizard King, potential victims flocking to them in the hundreds in search of what little shelter they may still provide. This is not one such city. This is a Dead City. He knows the moment he steps within its bounds, his death warrant will have been signed. Within days, maybe hours, the radiation will unwind every cell in his body, one by one, until he is nothing but a huge, lifeless tumor. And that is only one outcome. The entire city is frothing with thick, tangible potential. It’s almost viscus, he can feel it on his skin as he moves through it. The walls of reality here are very, very thin. Even a creature of chaos such as The Lizard King knows to be careful not to stress them. 

He can feel the roiling mass of tumors already beginning to form inside his gut, but he pushes forward. It will kill him before the day is through, but if all goes according to his weapons inscrutable plan, he will be beyond death by then. The more the cancer grows, the more energy his weapon diverts to his legs, eyes, and tongue, running, looking, tasting, searching. Hurling himself across crumbling pavement, rusted metal, and the calloused, inhuman remains of all who tread here before him. He does not know what he is searching for other than that he will know it when he sees it. Inevitably, he does. 

The building is a skeleton of what it once was, the huge glass windows covering most of its exterior long since shattered, leaving an irregular grid of iron bars in their place, parts of the structure caving in on itself. He scurries up the south wall, throwing himself from broken window-frame to broken window-frame until he reaches the fifth floor. He pulls himself through, dragging himself across broken glass, too weak to stand. The cancer is spreading to his lungs, and his brain is starved of oxygen. He will have to be more careful about how he expends his energy. He pauses for a moment to catch his breath, but the moment he does, a tumor shoots a tendril up his chest, now just inches away from his heart. No time, his weapon tells him. Keep moving. You can rest when you’re God. 

Halfway down the hall, he finds the door to what he knows to be the office of Doctor Robert Mann. He tries the door, finds it locked, and forces it open. The exertion will cost him, he knows, and sure enough, the left side of his world goes black as a tumor bubbles up within his eye socket, his eyeball popping like a grape. The loss is acceptable. He only needs one. The Lizard King tears the room apart, albeit a little slower and more carefully than he otherwise would have, his remaining eye flying across every scrap of paper, every written word he can find, patiently waiting for his weapons next command. It takes longer than he would like, but eventually the command comes. 

If The Lizard King’s body had still been capable of dancing, he would have. The information gathering phase is complete. He has harvested all the numbers he will need. Now, he sets the trap. He rushes through the city, even as the cancer churns through him, licking, biting, smelling, touching, seeing. Sensing searching listening, tasting the air until he finds the point at which the universe is most fragile. The place where the boundaries touch. His knife carves swooping, geometric spirals into the earth, lighting small fires around their periphery. Slicing open his wrist, letting his cold, irradiated blood ooze into the groves in the dirt. It would be witchcraft to any outside observer, but to his weapon it is little more than applied mathematics. He is stressing the walls of reality precisely how his weapon wants them, shaping it to his needs. The weapon of The Lizard King has already outpaced his sacred text. His mind is built for this mode of thinking in ways that human brains simply were not. He is creating his own equations, beautiful, terrible, evil new maths. In a different world, he would have been a natural warlock. And in a trillion, trillion worlds, he is. Perhaps he will meet one of them. Perhaps he will be one of them. 

He feels a pressure in his left foot as a mass of tumors swells up inside it, growing larger, and larger, until it bursts in a shower of viscera, leaving behind a bloody stump. The Lizard King pays it no mind. It has already begun. 

He sees a great, coiling serpent, stretching out across all that could have ever been and all that could ever be, each segment of its body an instance of himself. Lizard Kings without 

end, each performing the same ritual at the same nexus point, infinite fluctuations in potentiality compounding and amplifying into an even greater infinity. The Lizard King closes his eye, but still he sees. He imagines. 

He imagines perfection. His ideal self, a beast the size of a planet, an eater of worlds, un-killable, unassailable. He flies up above the snake, higher and higher, a galaxy’s distance away, and he can still only see a small section of the infinite whole. He flies higher still, and the further he flies, the more the body of the serpent begins to twist and distort. Branching off into new potentialities, different paths The Lizard King could have taken, the snake proving itself a hydra. The farther he gets from the center, the less this infinite court of sovereigns resembles himself, but they are all The Lizard King. It is not long before he finds the self he is looking for. His perfect self, exactly as he’d imagined him. Huge, abominable, ravenous without hunger. He reaches for it, and it comes to him. 

Then, a huge rock falls out of the sky and crushes The Lizard King like a bug. His brains strewn across the dirt, blood erupting from his corpse in a radial wave, dousing the fires around him. A ripple runs through reality, and it stabilizes, at least as much as it ever does in this place. A huge, lumbering, twenty foot tall humanoid mass of tumor-meat, one the fallen king had assumed to be inert, trundles toward the bolder. It lifts up the rock one handed, peals The Lizard King off the bottom of it, and drops him down its throat. It chews for a moment, then pauses, spitting out his belongings into a massive, gnarled hand. It pockets The Lizard Kings knife, and tosses the book carelessly over its shoulder. “Quantum-Memetics” sores through the air, flying clean over the buildings and well past the surrounding area, eventually landing in the Charles River, riding the currents toward the Atlantic Ocean. The massive thing hoists the bolder over its shoulder, and continues on its way. 

In this world, The Lizard King is dead. But in a trillion, trillion others, he is perfect.