========
	Michael winked into existence and realised he had died. 

	Awareness of his surroundings rushed in and he found himself
plunging towards the Atlantic Ocean a thousand feet below. Grappling
desperately, he wrapped himself around his Word and brought his plummet to
an abrupt halt. Memory collided with fact as he stabilised himself above
the heaving sea and he shuddered as the cold truth crashed home. 

	It had always been his ace in the hole; a facet of the power his
Word could command, hidden outside space monitoring his vital signs. If he
were to die unexpectedly - and with the infinite possibilities the Word
had brought, he could die no other way - the power would activate,
resurrecting him a fifth of the way round the world from his last
position. When he had created it, he had feared such things as hydrogen
bombs, and being reborn into the heart of a nuclear furnace had seemed
like a really bad idea; he had learned better, but had never removed that
feature.

	Aligning himself by the stars, he allowed an awareness of the date
and time to intrude upon his newborn consciousness. His memories were six
days old; It had been his turn on the Sahara Reclamation, and he had
updated the cache just before he left. It had become a ritual, he
realised; he had been - was now - certain that with his Word about him,
inside and out, nothing on the planet could do him harm. 

	But something obviously had, or the cache would not have
triggered, springing him into the Now with nothing but the knowledge of
his death, a set of out of date memories, and enough raw might to burn the
planet down to the bedrock. He grinned. Whoever had managed to kill him
was about to get the shock of their life.

	As he sped towards the West African coast, a plume of water
following him as the air was brutally shoved aside, he mused on the Alien.
The six of them had been the first to approach the crash site, a first
contact team hastily assembled under Emergency Directive 34. A linguist,
an ethnologist, a biologist and the three members of his Shadow Command
Special Actions Unit, loaded for bear and ready to rumble if things turned
nasty. They hadn't stood a chance, as the Alien and it's Ship - in the
distorted area around the crash, it had been difficult to separate the two
- had done nothing but speak, six terrible Words crashing into unprotected
mammal brains like a 50,000 volt wake up call.  

	What language, what tongue, had those words had come from? They
had never had the chance to ask, as the Alien had vanished and/or expired
immediately after speaking. All they knew was that each had gained a Word;
and in some strange fashion, that gift allowed them to alter the world
around them. But that was then and this was now, and he had a mystery to
solve.

	Grey brine gave way to cliffs and sand as he crossed into Senegal.
No passports or customs for such as he; the governments of Earth had soon
realised that they held no power over the Wordblessed. His little backdoor
was precise, and from that he could extrapolate the location where he -
no, Michael One, he thought - had died. His Word wrapped around him and
shielded him from the tumult of the air he displaced, and more besides;
even a tactical nuclear strike wouldn't have mussed his hair, so protected
was he. The sand gave way to lush green as he crossed into the fringes of
the desert that he and the others were turning into a paradise.

	A gleam on the horizon caught his eye. He was scanning now,
searching for whoever or whatever had had the gall to strike at him, and
the power to succeed. It seemed to be metal, where no metal should - or
could - exist, at the very heart of the new rain forest he had helped
create. He angled North, streaking just below the speed of sound towards
the anomaly. As he grew closer, the gleam resolved into a curiously
familiar shape, though he could not - quite - place the memory it evoked.

	Until he floated to the ground, feather light, at the foot of the
structure. Then he knew. It was the Ship, or the Alien, or whatever, but
whole now. No longer broken, it towered above the banyans and the baobab,
twisting oddly into shapes that caught the eye and dragged it in
directions it was never meant to follow. 

	But now, with his Word upon him, he _could_ follow those strange,
flowing contours. He saw the Alien/Ship in a way he had not had a chance
to at their first encounter. In all it's glory, through all the dimensions
it impinged upon, he saw it all. And he knew - knew what It was, why he
had had to die, and even who had heard those Words before. The Alien
smiled, and he approached.

	"In the beginning were the Words, and the Words were with God, and
	the Words were of God. The same Words were used at the beginning
	by God." - John, ch1, v1-2.

Dave
SSC: Someone read my stuff and asked if I was interested in ontology. I
had to go and look it up.
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