“Fear?” Max said, his tone mocking and almost amused. “You think it is fear you sense?”
“And lots of it.”
“You are mistaken,” Max said, “now go home to your wife, the steaks are about to get cold.”
Bolt desired to know more, but was denied by his own mind, his own memories. There was no more.
He thought their conversation and the whole sequence overly brief, and he didn’t particularly care for anything it offered him. He felt parts of his memory return, but couldn’t tell what he would remember after he woke up. It all felt like a childish dream, a dream within which he had accumulated something of note or value and now thought about how he could bring it back to the real world.
Before he could think of anything else, the image of the room in the glass–wall shrunk and he found himself back in the vista between hills, the dark lake sucking in the brightness until it threatened to consume the last of it. His insides felt sunken, absent, and he was unable to recall the fact that, at one point, he had been made of a solid form consisting of parts and matter. His heart felt like a separate mammal in his lap. Every moment he had ever experienced and every 'fact' he had ever been told seemed to find its way into his immediate thoughts. He pondered them all in the span of a heartbeat.
Moons grew out of themselves where there were none, multiplying like amoebas, and the sun shed a breath, expelling aromas from the ground which rose to a climax and contested with the odor of every perfume he had ever experienced. It was the smell of everything. His eyes were shot blind by the severity of his condition and his appendages were granted leave to roam about the terrain, scattering their ethereal seeds to all points of the sky. He slept and dreamt a dream within a dream, his eyes ever open, seeing colors he had been destined to see only upon death. They were all new. They were all the color of bliss. The dream became harder for Bolt to handle, and he increasingly felt like he had had too much of something which had once been great. He became tired and ventured back to wherever it was he had come from. And even though he hadn’t taken a single step, he began to feel like he had reached exactly where he should be, where his mind had been hiding out of reach. There he proceeded to sleep between days, drunk with the power of his own experience. Yet the only sentence which still fluttered inside his head, the only one he would ever remember from the exchange between him and Max, set his cranial walls ablaze with the mental pain it caused. “We were never friends.”
CHAPTER 12
To See Things Hidden From Sight, One Needs To Look Within
Despite everything, Max had decided to stay. He had no desire to venture into the unknown of space when there was so much left unknown to him on his own planet, in his own mind even. One thing in particular vexed his thoughts of late more than anything else. Why had I kept doing what I’d been doing? It seemed his own psyche had been working against him for all these years. Routine and self–pity, remorse and guilt, with an occasional moment of peace inside meditation. And for what? His family was murdered, not by him, but by someone else. I shouldn’t feel these feelings as if I were responsible. He had to find Him, now more than ever. He remembered the look on Ty’s face, the physician, as he had suffocated him, it haunted him. It mocked and laughed in his mind.
What else will you do to find what I had hidden? It asked. Show me!
Max suddenly realized what he should have long before. He had allowed himself to become a living vessel for the Administrator, watching his own movements and hearing himself speak words, their lies damaging everything they touched in some way or another. But until now, Max had done it for his family. He had done it for the chance to see them again, to embrace them, yet all he had gotten was manipulation. Why had he ever thought he was beyond being manipulated himself in the first place? He didn’t know, and actually never even thought about it until he had left Earth.
Wondering why this was so, Max watched as the last person entered the portal. The command deck began to buzz with activity again. Commotion ensued. Something about a man being killed. Max didn’t care. For a moment it even felt natural not to care, until he began to wonder why. It was as though the breath he had just expelled brought some sort of a revelation and he noticed, for the first time, his own absence of empathy. It didn’t feel natural, and his own emptiness suddenly scared him. When had I stopped caring? He struggled to understand when it happened and found he could not. The only explanation he could muster at that point, was that it seemed to be an accumulative process – definitely not something sudden.
“Will you take care of her?” Bolt had asked him before he left.
“I think I’m the last person she’d want to be taken care of by,” Max had said. “Why leave anyway? Stay. Or say goodbye to her at least. There’s nothing for you out there, Akram.”
“I don’t know, I feel like there is. It feels like there’s something I must do,” Bolt had stated. “And besides, as far as you’re concerned, it’ll only take a second for us to reach the other side. Just tell her I’ll be back before she even knows I’m gone.”
Even then, Max had known it would not be as simple as that, it never was. “Very well,” he agreed and smiled. “But I’m telling you now, she won’t like it.”
Less than a minute had passed since the ship had vanished as if someone had erased it, and still nothing. Meanwhile, Max knew that for Bolt, years had already gone by. Yet no transmission had come. Not even a word had been sent through the reaches of immaterial reality inside which the ship forged its way. No doubt the vessel had already reached its destination and transited into normal space–time, but why no hail back? Perhaps they were simply too preoccupied? That couldn’t possibly be it, Max knew. Then, suddenly, a probe appeared where the ship had been. It immediately began to relay data into the station’s systems. All about him, eyes bulged and necks adjusted, all in hopes of seeing as much as possible as quickly as possible. The room fell silent for a moment. The first to speak was the commander, his voice betraying his shock. “Confirm this,” he said to no one in particular.
“That’s all there is. The text appears uncorrupted and unaltered, the words are true,” Adia answered.
“Impossible,” the commander insisted. “Check again, there must more buried inside. There are terabytes of space on the damn thing. I refuse to believe they would send us back a few lines of cryptic information.”
“I have already checked four times, there’s nothing else.”
The text which had sailed back through the gap in space read simply: “We have found the edge of reality.”
Even to Max, who was perhaps more used to the unexplainable and unfathomable than most, the text sparked a keen interest. What were they referring to? He stood there for a moment, thinking of how he could get to the truth of this, when he noticed something in the corner of his eye. To his right, and only for a second, he thought he could see the spectral image of his wife. He could almost taste her sweet fragrance. The conjured projection of her smell brought back memories which he had suppressed or forgotten. Unable to resist, he turned. A woman stood there, her eyes blank as though she were staring into nothing. She noticed Max looking at her and blinked away the data display in her mind, then averted her gaze and looked at him.
“What’s your take on this, Proxy?” she asked.
The sweet smell he had loved from the moment he first encountered it escaped him like a fleeting feeling of nostalgia. Max looked away from the eyes of the woman who had stirred it. Is this how they’re to be brought back to me? Not in flesh but in mind? His heart sunk. No, he would have his loved ones walk again, have them breathe and talk again, for to have them live only in his mind would be next to pointless.
“Proxy?” The woman’s voice rattled him out of his thoughts.
“The message intrigues,” he said, his tone official, masking his true feelings. “But we should wait for probes to arrive, their transit may have taken only a second for us, but once they reentered real space, the time differ
ence no longer applies. How much could they truly have found in a few minutes? We must give them more time.”
“Agreed,” nodded the commander, but as Max observed the man and his mind, he could tell this person didn’t appreciate his people turning to the Proxy and not to him for answers. An unspoken thought waved out of the man’s skull upon a black thread, a vibrating string. Max could see a holographic scene–projection of the man’s experience behind the commander’s head. It took him a moment to realize the flashes ruptured the air and flared past at a rate which felt like it would be impossible to take in. Yet he could take in every small detail. It showed the man seating on his bed, his wife’s arms coiled around his shoulders, her chin resting on his pronounced muscles. The light from outside the station streamed through the holes in between the blinders drawn over the glass wall. Max wondered why they didn’t simply darken the material instead of opting for blinders.
“I just can’t,” he told his wife. “I can’t sleep knowing the Proxy himself will come to oversee the task.”
“He’s just a man,” his wife tried to consult him, kissing him gently upon his back. “Think about it this way. He is just a man, a man with his own fears and concerns, the last thing he wants is to take on yours. It always makes me feel less anxious to know that the people around me are probably just an anxious as me. Doesn’t it comfort you as well?”
“But he’s the proxy! He’s the will of the Administrator, I just know he’s gonna waltz in there and just take over shit, that’s what he does. And that doesn’t sound like the occupation of a man with any normal fears. At least not like me, or even you.”
“You don’t truly believe that, do you?” his wife asked, her hair spilling over the commander’s thick biceps.
“I don’t know what to think when it comes to an agent of a living God. What should any of us think? You know what this position means to me,” he said, “it’s what makes me get up in the morning.”
“What about me?” his wife said, kissing him on the back and rubbing his dark–skinned hands.
“You know what I meant.”
The hologram vanished, and as Max realized the fear this man carried over him, he stepped closer. He stretched out a hand and placed it upon the commander’s shoulder.
>I am not here to usurp your command, Samuel, you are the master here,< Max said to him over a private Link channel.
In situations of honest display, Max found there was literally an abundance of reactions people tend to throw at you. Samuel, however, smiled and nodded, the subtle layer of consciousness around him shifting into a relaxed and calmed form – it no longer seemed to buzz with uncertainty. This transition in turn relaxed everyone around him, even while no one knew why it happened or even thought about it. Max smiled at this.
“Keep me appraised, send any information directly the moment it arrives.” He detected no further feelings of discontent from the commander. Samuel nodded, the smile still pressed upon his lips as his head bowing curiously.
Max waved a quick goodbye and a “see you later” to Zack over the Link, who was supervising a small group of technicians inside the circular depression, then walked out of the room, erasing his presence from the minds of all who walked past him. It took no effort to do this, he had done it so many times now it became more of a reflex, a muscle memory than a thing to be channeled or focused on.
The hallways spun down, with rooms stretching away to his left and right. He ignored everything but what could not be – his own thoughts. Lost in the storm of his own feelings and recollections of his wife, he proceeded on to meet with this Dr.Boeree in hopes of perhaps finding something he wasn’t expecting to find. Such distractions always proved welcome. One he certainly needed right now.
Everyone he passed glowed. Their minds projected thoughts and connected their bodies with the fundamental fabric of reality around them in patterns of shifting webs. Emotions flew and passed through others like currents of discolored air. No one noticed it but him. The sight fascinated Max to a point where he almost forgot what he had just been thinking about. He allowed his mind to wonder and began to see the strangeness surrounding him with increased clarity. Everything was constantly shifting and rearranging. The walls themselves seemed unsure on what dimension to take, and in fact the whole concept of special dimensions seemed trivial. He understood the concept of shape and form as one constructed in the minds of men for them to be able and make sense of the things around them – a construct in the brain that began to shape itself even as every individual came out of this world. Not into this world, but out of it, like an expression of it – an apple growing out of a tree. Every corner around him was skewed, broken and remade before his eyes, as though rearranging itself to give an actual picture of the vibrational fundamentality of matter which his brain didn’t need or want to filter at that point. Thoughts slithered out of surfaces in wisps of unreal smoke. Max wondered if what he was seeing was some underlining truth about the nature of reality, or if what he saw was simply and alteration in his brain, a tampering that would make him see the world like this forever. No discomfort associated itself with the visions, and he felt like his mind was his own. But no matter the effort, Max could not escape the fact that everything he looked at remained forever in motion. It had seemed such a cliché notion before, it even sounded like something a person would say in hopes of sounding ‘deep’, yet now that he could actually see the movement for himself, he understood the concept of universal unity in a different light. He wondered if this was what it’s like to be insane – to believe yourself in possession of a deeper truth, one which you know to be true, yet at the same time constantly doubt the validity of it, wondering whether what you are seeing is caused by some sort of an imbalance in the brain, or if it represents an actual event. He concluded that an insane person likely doesn’t possess such levels of critical thinking about his condition.
At length, he had reached the circular inner decks of the hollow tower and, upon reached the edge of the platform, gazed up the spiraling walkways and leaned over the chrome railing that stood just a few paces from the edge. Small balconies extended from the decks here and there. Upon the balconies, below him, people could be seen sitting in floating chairs, seeping drinks and talking, or simply staring into something that had been passed over to them on the Link. Sounds of conversation and people walking meld into a singular noise which Max didn’t bother to decipher. He cared even less for the smells, although he did notice the air lacking a certain bleachy quality which had predominated outside the tower.
The main decks above and below him lead to rooms and other hallways and even an occasional cafe, he even passed a library containing shelves of actual printed books, a rarity to be sure. He found the place to be surprisingly aflutter with activity. The light from the inside seemed to possess a more natural quality than the harsh whiteness of the spire. Max couldn’t remember the last time he actually read a book instead of having the story of one imprinted upon him like a stamp. He felt almost overcome with the desire to venture inside for a moment, but instead went on and eventually reached an archway he was looking for. He walked in.
The hallway lead to a spacious research area where crystals of neon blue lay suspended inside circular containers in the center of the room. No one noticed him enter. The dimmed, almost nonexistent lighting within made the blue formations of rock even more prominent. It was here, in this place of research, that he first encountered and recognized radioactive radiation. It seemed to disturb the air unlike anything he had encountered before. Its source was the crystals themselves, housed inside a square pillar. The radiational discharge disrupted the air around the pillar with a slight hum, one which Max sensed with the tip of his fingers. It looked like an explosion of static was constantly taking place inside the container, spitting out particles that had no other desire but to lose themselves and be somewhere where there wasn’t as many of them. The radiation itself didn’t seem to escape beyond the container, at least not enough to
pose any real danger. The disturbance it caused and the light emitted, however, was still a sight to behold, like madness given an expression in color and movement.
Thick tubing and wires snaked over the floor from the pedestal where the crystals were stored, biting into the machines and computers which lay around the circular room behind the workstations. At least two dozen people were sitting behind their consoles, although some looked bored by what they were seeing. Max followed the thickest cable to its source, a taller–than–a–man square, an unassuming machine, and gazed up at the numbers making themselves seen to his mind as he came close. The blue lettering represented information about radioactivity levels, the exact composition of the material measured, the rate of decay, the different spectrums of radiation emanating from the samples, the effects of it, and much, much more. Max was only able to see the numbers if he looked at the machine at a direct angle. He wondered what kind of material was used to contain the numbers he was seeing and still be able to provide him with a look inside the container without melting his skin off.
“It’s nanoglass,” said a voice behind him. “Glass and nanites, the little monsters help the glass fuse with lead in a fashion quite baffling to my understanding. But they serve their purpose, as you can see.”
Max turned around to see a woman, about a head and a shoulder smaller than him, her big eyes looking up with a smile. She wore her wavy hair unrestrained by either a ponytail or a braid, allowing the locks to hang gracefully over her shoulders, resting on her breasts and falling from the two lumps for another finger–length. The midnight blue of the strands made him wonder whether the light from the crystals lent her the color. He wondered what his own face looked like in the light.
“Intriguing,” he said. “Reading my mind are you?” he asked.
The woman smiled. “You say that as if it’s common to read minds.”
“Then I assume it’s the first question someone asks after they see these numbers?”