“You’ve just remarked about my face, I believe.”
Bolt didn’t wish to say it, but the words practically flew out of his mouth, “Perhaps you should reevaluate what’s worse, me thinking something, or you reading my thoughts and then complaining because you don’t like them.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Dyekart admitted. “I apologize. I suppose I’ve gotten too used to knowing what everyone else is thinking and I forget that outsiders don’t like it.”
“Are you saying people here do like it?” Bolt asked.
“We share our thoughts freely,” Dyekart said. “But never mind, we’ve seemed to have gotten on the wrong foot here. Yes, quite wrong. How’s the… wait. You don’t remember me do you? You don’t…where… where are your memories? You’re blank. What happened, Akram?“
“I don’t really wish to discuss it,” Bolt said. A bit annoyed at the fact this person got to the truth of it so quickly.
“That’s quite fascinating,” Dyekart said.
“Me losing my memories is fascinating? I’m glad someone sees it that way.” He managed a smile.
“Well, for one, everything you’re experiencing now is new, is it not?”
“Not really,” Bolt answered. “It looks new, but it doesn’t feel new.”
“I see. Yes, quite fascinating,” Dyekart said again, scratching his metallic chin. Bolt wondered… does he even feel his own touch? “Well, in any case, I’m Dyekart,” he said, and extended a hand. The man’s dexterous fingers grasped Bolt’s own like a vine, each appendage as cold as the next. He felt them even after their hands parted. “You’ve passed command of this vessel to me way back when. I’m surprised your wife allowed you come this time,” Dyekart laughed, a wet raspy sound.
“She didn’t. And I don’t remember what you speak of ever happening.”
“You just left?”
“Pretty much,” Bolt said as the two men exited the chamber, moving aside the people who still flocked to it. The parade of movement beyond the diamond–shaped chamber struck Bolt immediately. It was all around him. The walls allowed him to see in almost every compartment of the ship, although the clarity of his vision lessened the further he had to look. All angles in which he gazed sported something to see. Some areas even appeared solid or had their walls blackened. “Tell me how you plan on remaking the man I just killed?”
“It was the most peculiar thing. Yes, most strange,” said Dyekart, thoughtfully.
“What was?”
“I saw him run to the platform, it was almost as if he wanted to die.”
“A suicide?”
“I believe so,” Dyekart shrugged, his robe spilling sounds like old leather.
“How will you remake him?”
“A chamber. Where all our clones are grown, and our ship–“
“Wait, grown?”
“Bad terminology, perhaps, but yes, we have clones of everyone on board, shells basically. The ship constantly saves the memories and expressions of everyone on board in our memory decks, and we can imprint those experiences upon the clone in case the original dies.”
“That’s insane! Why do you need this? Do you expect people to die?” Bolt asked.
“Not really,” Dyekart cackled, “it’s merely a project by some of the crew, like I said, we have a lot of time on our hands. Yes, nothing but time.”
“I can imagine,” Bolt nodded. “Five years for us, then?”
“Five years till we get to the planet, yes,” Dyekart nodded. “Say, this might sound like an out of the way question, but have you ever used a Dream–sequencer before?”
“Dream–sequencer? Is that what you call the machines for shared dreams and whatnot? I was about to use one back on the station, but we had a bit of an… incident.”
“Well, at least you didn’t lose your mind, eh?”
“Does that happen?” Bolt asked.
“A joke, relax, now come.”
***
They had walked into a wall and ended up on the other side of the ship. Bolt hadn’t felt a thing.
As it was later explained to him, the ship worked in conjunction with the onboard quantum computer and could basically delete you on one end and remake you on the other. The process had been explained so nonchalantly to him he almost thought it unremarkable. Almost.
“How did it feel to be dead for 0.013 seconds?” Dyekart jested.
“Too little time to feel anything, I suppose,” Bolt smiled. The whole procedure fascinated him, and he said, “Who’s controlling this computer? Can I meet him?” Bolt couldn’t see Dyekart’s true face – if he even still had one – but could tell from the man’s voice he had touched a subject best left untouched.
“It’s a she. And no, you cannot. At least not unless she herself invites you.”
Bolt decided to drop the subject.
Expanding before them was a circular room the size of a circus tent, with platforms running around it like stairs within an amphitheater. Pods like he had seen in Zack’s room were layered side by side on the wide steps, most of them already occupied.
“An excursion within a select server of the dreamworld could aid you to remember. The machine will extrapolate from memory, so in theory, it should have the ability to find memories you yourself thought weren’t even there anymore. Supposing of course you want to.”
“So like a form of hypnosis then?” Bolt asked as they neared the middle of the room and ascended between the staircases on a narrow passage to the first vacant machine.
“Yes, quite so,” the man said. A woman passed them and nodded a greeting to Dyekart. He returned the gesture with a polite, barely discernable bow of the head. “We have made some modifications which should make it easier for you to probe your own mind, so to speak. Yes, quite easier. You see, the mind likes to work in metaphors when it comes to, well, almost anything, we managed to make it so it doesn’t do it like that, but more with direct expression of images and sounds. You can spend as much time as you wish in there. In the meantime, we’ll prepare you a room, we didn’t get an exact number of how many will be joining us, so we hadn’t really bothered yet.”
“Thanks,” Bolt said. “But where should I start?”
***
As soon as he lay down and closed his eyes, he could tell something wasn’t right. In a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Bolt realized he could sense his own mind detach itself from his skull and become a separate entity sitting and pulsing on top of his head. A black menu opened up in his mind’s eye, swimming upon a vibrant blue background where geometric lines and nonsensical shapes made of grey coalesced and danced. There were numerous so–called ‘servers’ open, and Bolt could read what they were and how many participants were inside each. There were at least ten people in every one.
Before he had entered one of the pods, Dyekart had instructed him to focus on the first one, but Bolt could not. He could read what it said easily enough, but could not concentrate sufficiently enough to engage the scenario his mind had already somehow laid out for him.
In their brief conversation before using the machine, Dyekart had also pointed out that this might be a problem for him at first, and told him to instead join a random scenario currently generated so he could get used to the machine. He focused on the second one which said ‘Summer in the hills’ and his vision shifted instantly. Suddenly, he stood on top of a mountain which, if it had existed in real life, on Earth, couldn’t have possibly been this high and still posses such lush grass, or in fact any grass at all. He noticed it wasn’t a mountain at all, but a rock floating above the clouds. It must have been a kind of transition zone, a loading screen, as Bolt quickly found himself within a different scene. Hills of impossible shapes, like overly–tall camel–humps spread around him. White whips of moisture hugged the mountain’s middle sections while exposing the tops, with rays of light slicing through in beautiful fashion. A path he stood on wended down to a dark glacier–lake where he could see fish rippling the water
s, their scaled backs casting rainbows over the dark blue as they surfaced and exposed their back–fins. To his right, the gravel road lead upward to a two–story wooden cottage where more than a dozen people were sitting on a porch. They laughed and smiled, exchanging stories under the clear sky, their voices echoing in the valley, their cheer carrying on the cool breeze.
“Woohoo! We have a newcomer!” a woman yelled out and enthusiastically, drunkishly waved Bolt to join them.
Following this event, it took nearly nine months for something weird and unexpected to happen. At first, the scene looked like it always had, the sun was in the same place in the sky, with less than half of it hiding behind the hills above the lake. The fish swam and the birds sung. The air smelled of spring, and the sun’s rays warmed his face, illuminating specks of dust and insects as they whirled about in the near windless valley. Bolt was about to walk up the path to the cottage to drink some wine – which always seemed to make him just the right amount of drunk – when he noticed something he couldn’t quite define upon the lake. At first he thought it might be a log, a part of a broken tree still standing. It took him a moment to understand it most certainly wasn’t a log, but a man. A man in black. A man drenched, with water dripping as if he had just risen from it. The drops wouldn’t stop flowing from his rags. Bolt froze. The soaked man stared at him with familiar eyes. They weakened Bolt’s knees as if his muscle memory recalled something his conscious brain could not yet place.
Bolt blinked and found himself somewhere else.
His legs were stiff as brass, heavier than rock, but they were there, and they were moving. Bones crackled and broke beneath his feet with every stride, his each step guided by thoughts he couldn’t control. All around him, sounds of steel clashing against steel rang with a never–ceasing racket, an eternal battle. Unintelligible bellows veiled the skies in a smog of red hatred, like the mist of a man he had shredded upon his arrival on the vessel. The thunder of steel amplified, and for each moment after, the invisible mêlée burned in his ears with increased madness. The sky was a churning ocean of darkness, hemorrhaging to rain a sea of blood upon the landscape. The taste and the smell of it had become familiar, and Bolt would sooner like the smell of excrement than the stench as it soaked him and the land around him.
Hundreds of meters in front of him stood a massive black gate, the gate of his mind. A fortress carved from bone and ash. It hulked into the sky, lost in the red mists above. Rivers of boiling blood coursed from the battlements upon its walls and into the landscape around it, where the earth itself seem to hunger for it, absorbing it with unmatched gluttony to again vomit it out of the ground far away, spitting it high into sky in geysers of gore that further colored the landscape red.
He felt like he was walking on Mars.
Each bone he stepped on and each skull he crushed beneath his bare feet belonged to someone he knew. Bolt couldn’t comprehend what these people might have meant to him, but found it curious that he could recognize them just from the shape of the skull.
To leave this place had become his sole wish, yet he knew he had as much control over it as a child had over its own birth. The fortress smoked with the essence of murder, the dark and foul vapors amplifying the already pungent stench of decayed flesh.
He didn’t understand the point of the imagery his mind conjured for him.
With each step, his courage would waver, then return in wave of nausea with the next. In these, short moments in between losing and regaining courage, in moments of sheer terror when he forgot he was dreaming and screamed out for help, he felt utterly alone and helpless. Without memories, without recollections of how it felt to laugh or smile as he would look upon another familiar face crushed beneath his feet, he found himself utterly and completely empty. Only to realize he still lay inside a machine in the next step he took. The relief of it almost made him cry with joy each time. In this fashion his mind continuously wavered in a maddening flux between madness and bliss until he began to wonder if this was even a dream. Is a dream from which one cannot awaken still a dream? Or some new, terrifying reality?
His legs continued to carry him to the fortress gate.
Appearing out of thin air, were two giant, horned beast standing sentry in front of the gate. Stiff and eternal, hunched over and so tall Bolt had to crane his neck, he watched their enormous, two–handed axes dripped with an endless stream of blood.
Like statues animated into life, the two flesh–mountains of muscle and hatred moved aside, and the enormous door behind them began to gape open. They allowed Bolt to pass without a glance, their deep–set eyes and heavy brows unmoving. Hairy and bestial, their chests moved in beat to their oversized heart’s pumping in their chests. Bolt heard their pounding as he moved to the inward opening gate, hoping the two wouldn’t decide to maul or slice him in two. Their expelled breaths, like the exhausts of a furnace, almost knocked him down as he passed in between them.
The bastion within looked like a homage to hatred and murder. Every surface was spiked and able to impale, with every wall standing as a black barrier no material weapon could breach or hope to break. A lake of blood rippled in the center of it all, surrounded by towers barring within them nothing else but memories, like treasure. At the sight of it, all Bolt could do not to weep was to keep repeating to himself none of this was real. But the idea felt slippery, like an old eel.
A throne of iron mantled a mountain of bones that towered out of the lake, reaching up into the sky.
The skeletal remains upon which the throne sat were composed out of every shape Bolt could imagine, he thought some might be animal bones, in fact he was certain of it, but some were the skulls of animals unlike any he had seen in his life. Upon this throne of slaughter, a figure could be seen and heard, cackling. The terrain trembled and cried as the being blinked, its form that of a creature whose one–eyed gaze was enough to turn the galaxy into ash. It sat slumped heavily over the throne, as if it had been sitting there since the birth of all things. Suddenly, Bolt realized he had seen it before. He avoided its stare, but quickly found he could not look away for long. Its single eye hid secrets Bolt wanted – a black jewel capable of consuming the light of a supernova.
Unable to contain himself, Bolt trembled at the sight of the giant. He felt the being’s gaze boiling his bones. The whole realm shook with its voice as it spoke – it was like a volcano erupting, “Remember,” it grumbled.
And remember he did.
CHAPTER 11
“When One Looks Outside, One Dreams. When One Looks Within, One Awakens.”
Bolt felt his anticipation rise in a wave of nauseating thoughts, the kind of thoughts that find you when you want or need them the least. Acutely aware of the fact that he was reliving something which had happened before, his whole body tensed. He knew what came next, and as a result, everything came as vivid as it could be. He even knew what he would say, but he didn’t know what the man he was about to meet did. Somehow, the words had been stripped from his mind. Or were they? Could a memory, any memory, ever truly be gone? Or does it simply become muffled and lost in the sea of insignificant musings of the days? This, the now, however, didn’t feel insignificant at all. In fact, it felt quite the opposite, like it had changed his life and then hid itself in his subconscious to guide him.
Bolt couldn’t quite recall how he ended up in the upper reaches of the Grey Tower, nor did he feel the method might be important. Unable turn from his own reflection upon the glass wall before him, he was able to take in only small details of the room. Despite this, he tried to take in as much as he could from the sheen. The details felt as unimportant as the view outside, the mountains, the valleys, the forests, the cities, and even the rivers below the clouds were made trivial as a face showed up next to his own reflection, a face he knew and trusted. Unable to turn and look, Bolt instead locked eyes with the reflection of it.
“What are you doing? Why am I here?” Bolt asked.
“You’re here bec
ause He wants it,” Max said, his tone level, his lips unmoving. The voice came from every angle.
“What does He want?”
“What He wants,” Max answered.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I do it because I must,” Max said, his voice remaining even. “In a few days time, you will forget your wife, you will forget your life, you will forget it all. But this you shall not forget. There is something coming to claim this world, and there are people who were tricked by it, deceived by it, their minds conquered by it. You will find this mind who aids our enemy, and you shall kill it.”
“Kill it? Are you kidding me? The fuck has gotten into you? What’s coming?”
“This is not important,” Max said, “you will not consciously remember any of this, so any answer I would give would be pointless.”
“There’s nothing on this world, or any other, that would make me forget my wife and the child she carries,” Bolt said.
“Of this you are certain?”
Bolt didn’t answer. “Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to deserve this? Aren’t we friends? Tell me!”
“We were never friends.” The comment hit Bolt like a punch. He suddenly felt like he needed to recuperate, sit down, but Max was already talking. “You have done nothing. You were selected before your first neuron fired and came to life, so in a sense, you have done nothing but been born. Destiny.”
For a split second, Bolt could have sworn he saw something behind Max’s eyes, a presence controlling and subjugating his friend to its will.
“Why me?”
“Why not you?” Max asked simply.
Bolt though about it for a moment, noticing he could smell something only a dog was said to be able to. This intangible abstraction upon his senses seemed to permeate from every pore of the man behind him.
“You’re afraid aren’t you?” Bolt asked. “You’re afraid of this thing which you want me to kill. You’re afraid because it’s the sole thing you don’t understand. You’re so afraid of your own ignorance towards it you can’t think of anything that would alleviate that ignorance but its death. I can smell it on you. It’s almost as rancid as your words. Now the smell of them has traveled to sicken me even in this vision.”