Ogg Read online



  Ogg

  by

  James Gault.

  copyright 2009 James Gault

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter 1

  Ogg looked carefully at Antonia Collins and thought. Was she the right person to help him? Did she have the qualities she would need to face up to this new challenge which was facing Ogg and indeed the whole planet?

  He was rerunning the ‘first’ time he had met her. The exact meaning of ‘the first time’ for Great Beings was somewhat more complicated than for ordinary humans. Ogg after all could, and did, travel at will back and forward through both all time and all space. So, having met someone for the first time, he could easily go back in time again and meet that person for the first time once more, and that’s what he was doing now. So, was it still the first meeting? Maybe he could call it a second first meeting. But then there could be a third first meeting, and even a second, second first meeting. Ogg’s travels in time could be extremely complicated and keeping track would get unbearably difficult were he to adopt such a cumbersome reference system. In any case, if each first meeting had exactly the same outcome, was there any point in being able to differentiate them? An interesting one? Ogg smiled to himself.

  Interesting maybe, but thinking about it had diverted him completely from the question in hand, which was to choose or not to choose Antonia as one of his helpers. This was why he had been going over their first meeting before letting his thoughts so rudely interrupt themselves.

  Antonia had impressed Ogg so much the first time he met her. She had taken a break from studying for her upcoming AS levels and opened up a copy of Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ for a bit of light reading. She polished off the first few chapters and found herself thinking that she didn’t really think very much of the German writer’s superman. For one thing, he seemed to be distinctly lacking in social skills. OK she didn’t have too many friends herself, but she at least had an excuse. She was an only child, daughter of a garrulous mother and a father who was prohibited from speaking in his own household. Her mother’s favourite torture was to make grotesque frocks from curtain material and force her daughter to wear them to school, and, embarrassed about being seen in the presence of such a strangely attired seventeen-year-old, her classmates avoided her as much as possible. Another thing which singularly failed to impress her about Zarathustra was that, while he spoke with great and profound weightiness, nothing he said really seemed to make any sense. So he didn’t seem to her to be much of a candidate for a role model, and she was wondering why she had bothered with the book.

  As Ogg was flitting frantically around the past, present and future of the entire world, he had stumbled across Antonia’s thoughts and found them quite intriguing. His mission was to save mankind from its own stupidity. It was a never- ending and probably hopeless task, and he needed all the help he could get. So whenever he came across a bit of reasonable critical thinking, he always thought it worth his while to stop and talk to it. This was how he recruited his best helpers.

  So while Antonia was thinking that maybe she should give up on Nineteenth century German fantasy and get back to her school books, Ogg had materialised in front of her.

  “Oh, hello! Who are you?” Antonia had asked in a rather matter of fact voice. In considering her for the role of special helper, Ogg noted her relative equanimity on being faced by a complete stranger who suddenly appeared in her own room. It was one important thing in her favour. Ogg could adopt any physical presence he liked, and this time he had chosen a look based on a rather down-at-heel middle-aged university professor he knew, so he must have appeared to Antonia rather like one of her teachers and consequently unthreatening. Nevertheless, the calmness she had shown would come in useful later: he didn’t know what or who they would meet in their quest.

  “Who would you like me to be?” Ogg had asked in reply to her question.

  Antonia had thought this was a surprising thing for anyone to say, even for someone who mysteriously appeared in front of her as she was doing her homework. She was an avid reader of websites and articles on the paranormal, so materialising from nowhere was not a totally alien concept. But she had never heard of anyone not owning some kind of name, which was what her visitor seemed to be suggesting. And if he was playing games with her, she didn’t think it was a polite thing to do, and she was going to tell him.

  “I really don’t think it’s very polite to just appear, uninvited, in someone’s presence and then avoid saying who you are”

  “I do apologise, Antonia, but it’s just that I have so many names...”

  “Well, if you invite everyone to call you whatever they want that’s hardly surprising,” she had interrupted. “And please don’t call me Antonia, I really don’t like it.”

  “How about ‘Ant’?”

  “Not much better, but it’ll have to do. Now what about you? What did your parents call you, for example?”

  “That’s a difficult one, Ant.” And it was, because Ogg had been around from the very beginning of time and even before. No one else had been born before him, so how could he have parents?

  “You mean you’re an orphan?” Antonia had asked, after a moment’s reflection. Ogg noted that she could take a fact or situation and make a sensible attempt at an explanation. That was another point in her favour.

  “More or less,” he had replied, “but in any case why don’t you call me Ogg. Lots of people do.”

  “Ogg it is then. Nice to meet you, Ogg!”

  “Nice to meet you too, Ant.”

  “Well, Ogg, now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way, maybe you would like to tell me a bit more about yourself and why exactly you are here.”

  When he heard this Ogg remembered exactly what had been in his mind when considering Antonia as a special helper. First of all, she could exhibit a distinct tendency to take over when she was getting impatient, a trait which, although often infuriating, could also be useful. But she also seemed able to hit upon just the right difficult question from which illuminating insight followed. He had often found this ability in many young people, and whether this ability was due to childlike naivety or deep insight, Ogg had never been able to tell, and he wasn’t sure that there was any real difference between the two anyway.

  Ogg cogitated. Being a Great Being, it only took him a few seconds. If he remembered rightly, that made three good reasons for bringing the young Antonia onto his team. Enough for even the most discerning of the Great Ones! Yes, Antonia really was just right for the difficult job he had in front of him.

  Having made up his mind, Ogg shot off, leaving this rerun of their first meeting rather in the air. Didn’t this behaviour leave Antonia a little bit puzzled or annoyed? Not a bit of it! Of course, because of the first, first meeting, she knew what came next: in fact she had experienced it. And as a human being and not a Great Being, she had no idea that an incident in her life was being rerun for the sole benefit of an uncertain Superior One. So while the second first meeting ended for Ogg at this point, it continued for Antonia, although for her it seemed to be the first, first meeting.

  Not that it had gone on to great things anyway, the first, first time. In answer to her request for more information about himself, Ogg had merely asked her again who she would like him to be, and invited her t
o tell her what she would like him to do. When encouraged to be more specific, he had informed her that he moved in mysterious ways, doffed the old soft hat covering his greying hair, and bid her goodbye.

  The visit had made her think, all the same. Who was he and what did he want with her?