Plop.

Plop.

The growing sensation of something repeatedly touching his forehead slowly forced Tardigrade into consciousness. As he opened his eyelids, with some effort as if they were glued together, he found himself in a tiled, naked room, bathing in blinding light coming in from somewhere far above. Tardigrade immediately closed his eyes in pain, shocked by the sudden burst of vision he groped in panic around him. His hands caught something metallic, a handle behind his head. He didn't really intend to pull it, but never had the time to react to the friction he felt as he yanked the lever towards him.

He forced his eyes open again. Tons of water suddenly came splashing in from holes in the walls, a hole opened in the floor and he was flushed down, down, down, through whirling tunnels, seemingly endless. He felt himself being washed out into the open, sunlight caressing his body, sand running down his neck, then the welcoming, soothing safety of darkness embraced him again.

From the promenade above the beach, Gobblethroat watched the limp body being washed out of the sewer. "I hope we've made the right decision", he thought, "bringing you here after all this time. 'The world has changed'. Isn't that what you used to say? Now you'll wake to a new kind of dream". He stood, watching this still life for a while, then swept his cloak around him, turned and went back into the huge tower across the street.

With the incoming tide an especially eager wave washed far up on the beach, caressing Tardigrade into awareness. With it came the realisation. I am here. I am now. He stood up, feeling the blood giving new life to his sore limbs, spotted a staircase leading up to the rustle and bustle of the street above.

The sight was incomprehensible to him. The city itself spread out in every direction, climbing the hills with it's concrete buildings for miles and miles. Only a faint yellow on the horizon marked the beginning of something else. The streets were filled with row upon row of people in front of computers, eyes fixed on the screens, satisfaction shining from their faces.

Passing by, Tardigrade noticed all seemed to be playing the same computer game. Getting closer he saw it was a game of raw violence, with scenes of utmost decadence and depravation. Though already disgusted, he sat down at one of the screens and followed the instructions. Visor on. Electrodes connected to his skull.

But instead of logging into the game, as was meant to happen, information suddenly flowed into his brain cells. Update. The Utopian States of Allindustria was governed by the Spiders, the ruling party, who had more or less built this world on their own, starting as a small sect-like organisation on the old net, slowling incorporating more and more people of power, until their party controlled the major posts in all the industrialised countries. With billions and billions of money, two huge devices had been built in space, spreading light almost as bright as the suns, both in fixed orbit on each side of the northern hemisphere. On these latitudes, night had been abolished. As had rain, and so all life outside the vast cities. The natural circle dance of the water was obsolete and had been stopped, permanently. But the program embedding it's files in Tardigrade's neurons didn't contain any explanation to how man still could survive.

Tardigrade, being the true expert on survival, decided that this couldn't be all the world had come to. There had to be an alternative. People still had to eat, wouldn't they? They still consisted of two thirds of water. There had to be a lie somewhere. As well as an alternative to all ... this. He removed the devices from his head and left.

Gobblethroat saw him through a window high up in the tower. He nodded his head, choosing to be content with the way things had turned out. Bringing new life to the sleeper was not what they had intended, but would refine the plan. The plan for this perfect world they had built. The world where there was no more pain. No more suffering. No more loss.

Tardigrade, unaware that he was being watched, went down to the shore again, seeking shelter from the sterility of the vast city, from the almost unbelievable knowledge planted in his brain and from the shocking scenes displayed on the crystal screens, in the only patch of his beloved Mother Nature that was left.

Torn between anger and grief, he worked his way along the shore, moving towards the nearest edge of the city, which took it's time. Several hours later he stood on the brink of a desert, and followed a dry river bed what used to be upstream. Skeletons of dead trees lined the river banks and soon Tardigrade found himself in what had once been a grove, now almost resembling a maze of barb wire, organic but petrified in the dry hot air, hardened by the relentless mechanical sun competing with the real one. Here he thought of what the world used to be, and called out to his maker to set things right. But he had once banned the maker himself. And so his maker did nothing. Emotions welled up inside, and for days he fled farther into the dead forest.

Gobblethroat looked at the satellite images presented on the wall screen before him. Oh yes. The enemy base had been found at last. Now he would teach them to worship him and nothing else. He gave the order.

Tardigrade never really noticed the troops before they had completely surrounded him. Suddenly he was gagged and held firmly, but not brutally, and led to a nearby cliff where a cave opening appeared. Inside, he was led into a lit hall, filled with equipment and people. It looked like an army stronghold. An officer greeted him and explained. This was the resistance, the few fighting the Spiders. Somehow they had the knowledge of who Tardigrade was and that he was important for the party, but they did not know why. They wanted him to join the armed rebellion. "I can't take up arms" Tardigrade replied. "You have to understand, this doesn't seem to be my world any longer". The officer hesitated, nodded, and ignoring his protests plugged a visor and electrodes into Tardigrade's head again.

A new information rush and suddenly it all matched. The Utopian States of Allindustria had since long used up all their natural resources. Now they were raping the southern hemisphere. An army of robots were slowly obliterating all individuals in the resourceful but comparatively poor and over populated countries. The robots were controlled by the game players, which were working in symbiosis with their computers. The players believed they were only playing games, but actually were in the process of annihilating the people of the southern countries – and the programmes fed them constant endorphine orgasms through the visors' electrodes. And so the majority of the people of the northern hemisphere had become computer addicts. While the resistance continued to prepare for battle, Tardigrade wept.

Shortly before what used to be "dawn" grenades exploded all around them. The walls of the underground base shuddered, portions of the ceiling collapsed as the Spider troops bombarded the base with shells and missiles. Inside was devastation. The few officers still standing upright shouted out orders to the even fewer soldiers still alive. Blood was spattered across the floor and the remains of the machinery. Then BOOM! and a huge gap appeared in one of the walls as the Spider troops swarmed in.

Tardigrade barely managed to follow the fleeing resistance fighters down a secret passageway through the mountain. A new cave opened before him, a cave filled with vehicles, apparently hovercrafts. As they all got inside the hovers, an officer blew up the tunnel behind them, blocking the way for the troops chasing them. The armada of hovers sped down the widening tunnel for a few hours at tremendous speed, then suddenly shot out into th daylight on the other side of the mountain range, to go down a slope towards something blue at the bottom. Tardigrade wondered how long he had to keep fleeing. He felt he was trapped in a maze, but somewhere deep inside he refused to give up the faint glimmer of hope he still felt. There would still be rain.

Sylvester turned off his computer for the very last time. He had finally served his purpose, done the deed for which the resistance had planted him deep in the Spider-led company Computertronics' programming staff. The programmers were the only ones, except for the party officials, who knew the truth about the devastation and mayhem on the southern hemisphere. They efficiently both controlled all the game stations in the cities as well as the robots thousands of miles away and also rewrote history as unwanted reports came in. Thanks to the visors and it's bio-electronic machinery, people who had deriving opinions were easily dealt with, removed and killed, and then all information about them were erased or manipulated

Sylvester had known of Tardigrade's existence for some time. It was he that had told the resistance of this "survivor" from a bygone time. Exactly the kind of hero the resistance needed, the true symbol, a relic from the old world, the one that could convince people of the truth, the messiah the poor countries were expecting. And it was he that had overridden the game sequence in Tardigrade's computer and fed him the mole information instead.

Sylvester shuddered as he thought on all the lives he had contributed to put out, while working under cover in Computertronics. The net could have been such a wonderful thing, the intentions had all been the right ones when it was built long ago. Bring people together. Make information available to all. But it had turned into something completely different. First just a silly fun fair. And these days … malevolent. Evil. Selfsuppliant. A being of it's own. Now he'd got some distressing signals from the base. Apparently Tardigrade had refused to be the messiah. All could be in vain. Unless he did something about it and acted as Tardigrade himself. He could turn the Spiders' own weapon against them.

Sylvester got in his hover, turned on the stealth shield he had supplied it with in secrecy and steered south.

Some time later Sylvester landed just outside of the resistance camp. Oh, this was something else after the long flight, making his way south while trying to avoid all the scout robots on the way: green trees, singing birds, lush vegetation. Air filed with scents. Humidity. A brook, gently dancing it's way down to the blue lake at the bottom of the valley. Fish making ripples on the water's surface as another insect fell as prey. Wind in the trees. A host of people were there to greet him. He immediately recognized the stranger, coming towards him to take him in his ams. Finally meeting Tardigrade had an enormous impact on him. This was a person from a completely different world, though still the same as his own. Surely he was the one to follow.

Sylvester stayed a long time in the camp, and a deep friendship between Tardigrade and himself began to grow. But he could never convince Tardigrade about the necessity of war. Tardigrade stayed adamant about the issue: "I have seen too much violence in my days to ever take up arms again", he answered.

After some time Tardigrade also started to talk less and less to Sylvester and spent more and more time with Aino, a woman who worked as a teacher for the few children there was in the camp – a woman Sylvester himself had warm feelings for. And when Tardigrade and Aino revealed that they were expecting a child and planned to move to a derelict cottage on the slopes of the nearby Moon Mountain, Sylvester understood he had missed his opportunity. His old friendship gradually turned into disappointment, annoyment, and then eventually into jealousy and hate. He decided.

When Tardigrade and Aino left the camp Sylvester made his move. For weeks he talked with the top officers, slowly starting to convince them that Tardigrade was only a selfish egotist who didn't care about his fellow man – and who could deny he was correct? It didn't take long before he had the ears of almost everybody and they agreed to follow his plan: he was to become Tardigrade himself – the messiah the people on the southern hemisphere had waited for for years. The real Tardigrade, though, followed the inner voice telling him to gather peace loving people on Moon Mountain. They would be his army, not a single shot would be fired.

For eight summers he and Aino lived happily in the cottage on Moon Mountain, gathering their disciples around them. Most of them came from the south, refugees having escaped the robot wars. But some of them also came from the barren north cities, because word was spread about this new leader. Whether these rumours were exaggerated or not didn't seem to be important to the refugees. Some of the stories came from Sylvester, unintentionally supplying the real Tardigrade with people. But many had also heard about this survivor who planned to build an emerald city, Tardigrad, in the wild, and march to the north, bringing with him evidence of the richness there still was and the message that the cities could be abandoned, the dream machines destroyed and the solar satellites turned off. And there were of course the religious believers reacting only to the name. Tardigrade's here. The messiah has come.

But one day Tardigrade awoke with Aino dead in the bed beside him. She had been posioned in her sleep. Evidently with a substance only the Spiders possessed.

Deep grief weighed Tardigrade down for all of the autumn and winter. For all of this time he didn't utter a word to anyone. His followers began to loose their faith in him, some returning to their home countries, some seeking the resistance to join them in the coming war. Only a few stayed on.

Then, on the first day of spring, Tardigrade without warning got into a violent rage, insanity gripped him and he smashed all of his possessions and burned down his house before he ran out of the valley and threw himself in the river beside the village, riding it quickly downstream.

At the foot of the mountains, the river slowed down, moving on into a plain. Tardigrade swam ashore. Out on the plain stood a lonely hill, with jagged ruins forming a harsh silhouette against the setting sun. This place felt familiar. Tardigrade, climbing the hill, suddenly realised he had been here before. This used to be the religious center of his world. This used to be the temple surrounding the holy open place – Paradise Square. Then and there, he eventually let his grief for Aino come out in burst upon burst of emotional distress until he was totally exhausted.

Tardigrade asked the memory of Aino for forgiveness. But when he felt no response, he gave in to the last months growing urge to follow another path.

Sylvester enjoyed life as a coming revolutionary hero. He had all the women, the booze and the other pleasures he wanted and developed a passion for heavily spiked strawberry jam. Everybody would do as he ordered, follow every whim of his, eager to satisfy the Great Messiah. Even those who knew who he really was started to believe what he said. Somehow that was the most comfortable thing to do. So while the weapon maker started to work less and less, the drug fabricators had more and more to do, spiking the red fruit, "imported" from the south, with heavier and heavier synthetic stuff. Noone ever asked where his drug addiction came from, but Gobblethroat knew. The drug dealers were all on his payroll.

Tardigrade left for the northern cities again, walking through the thick forest that bordered on the desert, marking the frontier between south and north. He had a sense that history was repeating itself, that time only turned round and round in the same tracks. He brooded over this matter, but it didn't seem to get him anywhere. Somehow it seemed easier to do as Sylvester did – he had heard of Sylvester's excesses along the way, from the odd traveler he met. But he immediately rejected that idea and continued to walk in sorrow through the silent forest.

Two years later he stood on a square in Livingstone 2.3. The Spiders had somehow let him be when he arrived in the city. Since then he had started to agitate against them on the streets, drawing attention from the computer games. The players found this a nice change in their everyday matters as long as it didn't prevent them totally from getting their endorphine kicks in front of the crystals. A few even believed his words and stopped playing, but all of them were considered thoughtless reactionaries by the rest.

This day, Gobblethroat himself had even agreed to meet him in a debate on one of the squares. The debate was even downloadable on the evening news bulletins web page. Afterwards Tardigrade, seemingly content with the opportunity to speak his mind, left and disappeared in the alleys.

A few turns later he quickly glanced over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. He wasn't. He ran the last few hundred yards, down a stair, opened a cellar door and slipped inside.

The cellar was one vast room. Some time in the ancient past, it had been a parking house. Now it was transformed into a secret arms factory. Gun after gun was put together efficiently on the assembly line. He had found a lot of his followers when he arrived in the city, all of them now worked for him again and they were bringing in new revolutionaries every day, from the south, from Sylvester's disillusioned army and even from the city's inhabitants, who all had to undergo endorphine rehab treatment. The hall worked like clockwork and the arms were piling up before being taken out of the city and smuggled to the distant Tardigrad. In other cities there were other factories, constructing heavier weapons, armed vehicles and even a few aircraft.

Everyone believed that the resistance moles they had planted in Computertronics put a cover over everything that was going on, but to the Spiders it didn't matter if the moles succeeded or not. They had discovered long ago and things were still going as they planned.

They had the intention to end it all in one big epic battle, but they didn't have the means. All their robots were occupied on the southern hemisphere, and the rest of the population was needed either for bringing necessary goods in or playing the computers. And so, they would let Tardigrade build his army and make the south countries believe that it was a threat to them. "Let them kill each other while we look on" Gobblethroat mused.

Tardigrade still had lots of inner debates with himself. Was this really the right thing to do? Yes. The Spiders' evil was beyond rescue. They simply had to be terminated. The loss of Aino still gnawed at him, but now only making him brutal, hard, casting all his human emotions aside.

One night he dreamed he met her again and she blamed him for letting it go this far. "You should run instead and be grateful for all you have, grateful to this Earth you are treading, that which gave you life" she said. He replied "This earth has bereft me of everything. Why should I be grateful to it?". Then he wakened, but the complex feelings evoked by the dream lingered in him for days afterwards.

Near the village of Tardigrad there grew a willow. It had seen a lot of years, but still enjoyed standing beside the river. It was here that it had watched, with much amusement, Tardigrade and Aino kiss each other once. It did not see, however, that Sylvester also had watched them.

Sylvester spat on the willow as he passed it. He had been deserted by everyone, and given up his childish dream of being Tardigrade. He loathed himself for having dreamt it and hated Tardigrade even more now, blaming him for his position. He also was plagued by strawberry drug abstinence.

The people of Tardigrad, though, took him under their wing and welcomed him back. But even on the first night he went out and cut the willow tree down and hit everyone trying to stop him, so they decided it was best for him to keep him locked away in a cell they prepared for him under ground. Though they treated him well, he raved and went on, cursing them and Tardigrade, muttering dark prophecis of what was to come. The villagers started to make wide circles around the place where he was held captive, to avoid the ramblings coming out of his tiny peephole.

Then came the day. Suddenly trumpets rang among the cliffs and the great resistance army marched into the valley. Tanks thundered in, legions of young revolutionaries marched as one, hovers came flying past. The army made camp on the slopes of Moon Mountain, not far from the cottage. Tardigrade laid plans for the great battle and in no time at all a arms factory was improvised in Tardigrad itself. Tension was slowly building for days.

One night suddenly the whole sky exploded in one massive thunderbolt, quickly followed by eruption upon eruption of mortar fire, bomb crevades, the smattering of automatic weapons, whirling of projectiles and the deafening roar of missiles echoed between the mountain slopes. The resistance army answered with the same maddening outburst of wrath. Thick dark smoke filled the valley while the onslaught continued endlessly, relentlessly, mercilessly. In his tomb, Sylvester shuddered and pressed his hands tightly against his ears.

The battle had come at last – but the attack had not come from the north, but from the south.

On the top of Moon Mountain Gobblethroat watched the mayhem with amusement. The plan had worked, the desinformation spread on the southern hemisphere had made the leaders believe that the Spiders were massing a human army among the mountains, to unleash it in a final blow for world dominion. The south countries had quickly withdrawn every man they could spare and directed them to Moon Mountain. Now the armies of his enemies were obliterating each other.

Gobblethroat lit a cigar.

The next day all was quiet. Tardigrade lay on the ground, trying to summon the strength to rise. His strategies had gone hopelessly wrong. Every preparation he had made was in vain. He didn't see the chaos around him. He only saw the figure hovering above him. His maker. Or was it Aino? He couldn't tell. No, it had to be his maker. "I could have done something more", he said to the figure suspended in the air. "There had to be an option, but I didn't see it. Take my soul away." But when the figure finally answered it was with Aino's voice.

"Take my hand" she said.

And then she lead him towards the light that began to fill all of his vision.

Gobblethroat saw Tardigrade from the outskirts of Tardigrad, where he was striding triumphantly with only three of his men amongst the remains of the two armies. He saw how Tardigrade raised his arm for a moment, and then let it drop and lay still on the ground.

Through the little opening in his underground cell, Sylvester saw it too and suddenly all his hatred for Tardigrade disappeared. In this hour he chose to remember their frindship instead, his old admiration for the ultimate survivor. And now that great, great person was killed by the people Sylvester hated even more, the ones who really had taken everything he had from him. In fierce rage he clawed at the opening, trying to widen it a little more. Slowly it gave way, a few more insanely furious scratches and he would be able to get out.

Gobblethroat was now standing only a few feet from Sylvester's cell, but still hadn't discovered it. He was still going on in triumph over the enemies death, and furthermore: he sent his men away to warm up the hover. He just wanted to cherish his victory a little bit more. He stood with the back towards the under ground cell.

Sylvester saw his chance, made one giant leap upwards, through the hole and in three quick strides he grabbed his enemy round the neck, pulling him backwards. "Now I'll truly make your throat gobble!" he hissed and then choked the Spider by pressing the nearest thing he could lay his free hand on down his throat. When his victims last spasms stopped, he removed the item and went south, to find a way over the mountains.

He had a new task to fulfill.

Climbing the first slopes he observed two things.

The first was that in the ruins of Tardigrad the three other Spiders had found their leader dead. Sylvester decided to let them live. He'd done his share of murder. Never again.

The second was that he still held the thing he had killed Gobblethroat with in his left hand.

It was a crown made of willow leaves.