In their avoidance of the main streets, they had gotten half way up the snaking sprawl, the sound of slaughter ever at their front. Most had already expressed their concerns in some way or another over the fact that they were going directly towards it. But up till then, no one presented any better ideas. Instead, everyone looked to him, to Max for guidance, to the Proxy, trusting him to know just what the hell he was doing. In reality, however, he did not.
He had hoped to come up with something before they would get a chance to face whatever had been killing off the station, but the closer they came, the more his mind drew a blank. A blank upon which even a semblance of an idea got lost in the noise of their own approaching death. His main thought–patterns had been directed into a hope of perhaps controlling or subduing the killer somehow. Perhaps spreading his own curse to save people for once would be the way, but in truth, he knew as little about how far in the realm of possibility such a thing was as he knew about the actual nature of the threat. For in reality, nothing was ever contingent on hope.
Had the Administrator himself descended upon the station to dispense some sort of punishment upon the denizens of it? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible. No, this was something else, this was no more than a part of the Admin’s sinister intent and his capacity for cunning. Is he testing me somehow? Surely there are better ways of bringing down the station –– if such was even the intention…
Max looked to the faces around him as the elderly man guided them through the narrow, upper stratosphere of the spire’s feet. Max had expected to find far more fear and dread lining the expressions of the people than was there. But since the old man’s proclamation, the mood had shifted from helplessness to hopefulness, and their stances changed from half–mindless stupors to a hopeful single–mindedness and clarity of purpose. Hope may not accomplish much, he realized, but it sure as hell does its part.
“Did you know about this passage?” he turned and asked Leah. The upward slope wasn’t forgiving at their pace and she looked as though she might collapse from exertion or simply give up. “Are you ok?” he added.
“I’m a scientist,” she sighed between breaths. “Not a marathon runner, but yea, I’ll make it.” She took a few breaths and managed a smile. “I had no idea about any lower levels. But I figured something besides solid material must be under the thing.”
The old man overheard them as he walked ahead and said, “The lower labs were closed off, something happened which caused the walls to be unpredictable and trapping.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Max asked. He had some clue of what it could entail, but not to the point of certainty. “How can walls be unpredictable and trap you?”
“This whole station was made wit’ the aid of nanites, even before we fully understood how best to apply ‘em in construction of buildings,” the man said. “In the lower labs, yeah? Something had made them changeable, I can’t explain it in full because I don’t know, but they shift. They’re in a state of flux, if you will. So while the place you look at and walk in may be a hallway, it can become a wall of semi–solid matter the next time you decide to go there.”
“So what you’re saying is we can get trapped down there?” Leah asked.
“It’s highly probable.”
One of the men behind them freaked out as soon as he heard this. “Fuck this!” he snapped. “There’s no way I’ll go, ok? No way!”
Max turned around to face the young–looking man. “Calm yourself,” he said. Without using his will, however, he found his words had next to no effect to put the man at ease. “Or would you rather go towards that?” Max pointed his hand to the din of people shrieking, their trawling feet saturating the air with sounds of thundering even from afar, as they no doubt tried to run away from the thing which yet decimated their numbers. One by one, Max realized.
“There’s no way I’m going, ok? No way!” the man repeated. “Getting trapped inside shifting walls? Are you fucking kidding me!”
“You’re claustrophobic, I get it,” Max said, “but there’s a chance here, there’s less of a chance there.”
“Claustrophobic my ass! Weren’t you supposed to help us, get us through this!”
“And what am I doing? Your freaking out isn’t helping anyone.”
The air around the man spat fire, expelling invisible smog of fear that spread to clog and infect others around him with its tendrils of residual terror. “So now you’ll act like this was your plan? You’re just as lost as all of us! Now you set us to follow this old goat? Are you fuckin’ serious? Fuck that! I’m not going to be buried alive! Screw this and screw you!”
The man ran back to where they had come, no doubt looking for a place to try and wait this out, hide. A few whom he managed to lure to his side followed him.
Max had little doubt that a lot of the people on the station had developed the same idea – to cower inside their homes. Perhaps the decision would even prove to be a wise one in the end. He somehow doubted it.
Following the man’s outburst, the remaining group threaded along the path in silence, their combined concerns pressing down upon his skull like a crushing vice. Max wished they would shut up. But most of all, he wished he couldn’t feel their thoughts to begin with.
At length, they came upon a dead end, an unassuming, flattened area on the hill surrounded by buildings. The surrounding structures stood by the side of the road from which the flat passage had forked away from and the wider road, which lead further up the slope in between the buildings.
“There’s nothing here,” a woman said behind them, her voice momentarily filled with disappointment, even a shred of anger.
The old man said nothing, but instead simply walked through what looked like a solid white wall. He came back only a few heartbeats later. “You comin’?” he asked. “To hide something it’s often best to place it in plain sight.”
“How many people know about this?” Leah enquired as they passed through and ended up on the other side of the holographic wall.
“On this station, only myself and my daughter.”
A darken light oozed from the corners and bends ahead. Each passage they could see led to a different direction from the central hallway where they stood. The smooth walls seemed infused with mild iridescence, a phantasmal sheen. Max looked back where they had come and saw the street plain as day. The walls ahead however, the walls about them, transmuted from moment to moment. They shifted in patterns quite defiant of the laws of physics. They reshaped themselves like magnetized liquid, at times forming deadly spikes which morphed from one to the other in waves of jagged shadows.
People began to comment about it and Max was glad that, for once, he wasn’t the only one who could see it. The living metal climbed the walls and fell to the ceiling in the fashion of droplets with a strange viscosity, like the flow of mercury. Shadows would rise and harden into walls.
“I’m sorry,” a woman said, “but I don’t think I can handle this.” She didn’t elaborate, but simply walked out the way they had come. A few joined her, departing in silence rather than admitting their fear. The rest, with Leonel and his daughter seven total, began to follow the old man’s lead.
“Fools,” he said, “this place may change a lot, but it’ll always take you somewhere. Its inherent design was intended for it to create connections between specific places. Now it’s true those connections might vanish, yeah? But they’ll eventually reform in some way or another.”
“That’s all fine and all,” Leah intervened, “but just because a maze has a way out doesn’t mean you won’t get lost while looking for it.”
No one spoke or added their own thoughts and their combined, unspoken concerns became a palpable buzz in Max’s ears. Some even prayed to the very being who had apparently sent this terror upon them.
Often the group would come to a dead end and had to turn back, hoping another route might lead them to their goal. None of them began to even suspect they were slowly losing sight of wh
at their goal actually was.
Inside, there were no smells, save those of their accumulating sweat. There were no real sounds either but a strange distant hum combined with their own breathing and walking. They traversed the corridors for a while, their feet leaving imprints as thought walking on mud, until they came upon a wide elongated hall. A strong light emanated from the bend at its end. They quickened their pace towards it. For a moment, Max could swear he heard a set of footsteps behind them. He turned to find nothing there.
They faced the bend in the corridor as they reached the passage’s end, but nothing lay beyond it. Whatever had, was now replaced by a wall ending with a cut and a deep, dropping chasm. No, definitely not paranoia, he thought, as the footsteps sounded even heavier and closer behind. Something was stalking them.
Slowly, the floor in front began to vanish as if it were a piece of paper someone was pulling downward from below. The edge grew closer – a glacier’s edge collapsing in front of them. Max turned to the sound of footsteps. This time, he saw the source. It was a cat, the same cat he had seen and took into his arms. Surely this small thing couldn’t have been the source of the footsteps? And surely it couldn’t have followed him here without him noticing. It disappeared inside the wall behind them.
“This place is fucking nuts!” A man shouted.
They ran, barely escaping the disappearing floor.
“Shit shit shit…!” A woman kept repeating as she ran, trying to outrun the collapsing and soundless waterfall of matter.
Apparently, they had all heard the footsteps, or at least some as they kept asking, “What was that?” yet it seemed none but Max saw the cat. Nor anything else but their own faded reflections in the newly established dead end. The floor behind them continued its disappearing act as the group clashed their blacks and pushed one another against the wall. For the first time in a while, Max panicked. The inevitably of the fall was too much even for him. He had never feared highs, he feared the fall. This place had proven itself a foe he could not defeat or subdue with thoughts, or even with words, his abilities as useless as a fire in the scorching desert. Helpless, they looked into the chasm spreading towards them. Curses and pleas for someone to save them howled out of their mouths in equal measure, some even scratched at the wall behind them.
In the dark, a last series of screams erupted as each of them lost their footing and fell.
***
Max lost himself in time. The concept of how long he had been falling escaped him. He could see nothing. He wasn’t even sure he was falling. No wind scraped against his cheeks and he felt more afloat in space than anything else. He tried to speak to make sure Leah still lived, but no sound ushered forth, it was as though no air existed to carry it. His breathing came labored and harsh, he felt out of breath. His memory failed him and, for an instant, he couldn’t remember anything, not who he was, not what had happened, nothing, then, miraculously, he found himself standing on a platform. The others beside him looked equally baffled by their sudden reappearance. Unable to see her face behind the hair as she stood up, Max could tell by Leah’s motions and disorientated movements she wasn’t quite sure what way was up and what down. She brushed her hair behind her ears, and the sight of her being alive calmed him. Max tried to move, but found his legs incompliant with the wishes of his brain.
“Are we all still here?” he asked. “Is anyone missing someone?” The walls around them climbed upward like water dripping in the wrong direction. The platform they stood on was unconnected to the walls and apparently floated in between them.
“My dad,” said the daughter of the man who had led them here, “my dad’s gone.”
“There,” Leah said, pointing towards a figure standing before an arched entryway. The shriveled silhouette and white, wavy hair she had motioned at was clearly that of the old man. His head was cocked up, looking at something above the gate. His daughter sprinted towards him. Cautiously, still looking about them, Max and the rest followed.
As they approached, the mind–interfacing nature of the hologram above the passage came to life in their minds, projecting a single word above the entry.
“I don’t believe it,” the old man whispered, “it actually is here…”
In greenish letters, flickering and difficult to read, the word above read simply: Mindforge.
CHAPTER 17
Death Is Not The End
On board the Administrator’s Will, in a remote room where research into the nature of how the mind stores memory was conducted on live subjects, was where Bolt died for the first time.
Strangely enough, however, he felt this might happen even as he sat down on the surgical chair, allowing himself to become a willing participant.
His memories of the past had become more vivid thanks to his regular dream sequences, but he knew there was more. Without a doubt there was more. He wanted to recall and relive it all.
I will die in this chair. He knew this as surely as he felt the clothes they had given him embracing his limbs, the scent of their mechanically tailored nano–fibers still thick in his nostrils even after three years of wearing the full body suit. He knew there had been others before him, sitting on this very chair, dying in it, only to be resurrected and given a second life, a second nightmare. Precisely how he came to this understanding was a mystery to him.
The sounds around him as he was granted a second life inside the cloning chamber were that of industry, of machinery grinding on unlubricated pistons and old servos. Yet the sounds felt somehow serene, as if this clone, this other self had lain dormant here for so long – ready to be imprinted with memories – that it had gotten used to the sounds, like a child would to the sounds of his mother’s heart or her breathing. Emblazoned in the back of his mind, the memories of his death remained a vague recollection, they never formulated into anything substantial, never reassembled.
His mind still felt sticky and slow, warped somehow. He could feel the lingering cold of the place around him.
His death–memory flashed at him.
It didn’t come in a series of images or feelings, but like a wind passing, a distant dream–thought, a fire in the mind brought forth by a forgotten idea which one knows he must remember or it will haunt him. It was a specter of creativity, an idea watching from the corners of the mind. He knew he would remember more of it someday, probably at in the most inappropriate moment.
More than anything else right now, more than even his own face at that point, he remembered a name. It had been the first thing to come to him in this new, identical body. It seemed to resonate within him unlike anything else, as if its importance had been imprinted and locked into his genetic code. The letters raced and bounced around in his head as Bolt tried, with futility, to brush them away. Bolt shut his eyes. He kept them shut right up to the point where he realized what the letters were and he never wanted to forget them again. They spelled a name. Sara. The name of his bellowed, the mother of his minion who even now brewed in her belly.
He smiled at the thought and stepped out from the pod, taking a good look around, embracing the sights of the huge, round place and the strange machines which moved objects he could not place or understand the purpose of. Bolt didn’t care to guess what any of them were. A strange, blue radiance filled the air of the chamber, carrying with it a metallic tang. It was an unpleasant smell, it reminded him of the ocean, an ocean ebbing with decay, pestilence and salt.
He saw beyond the half–transparent walls of the vast chamber and thought, two more years, just two more years.
His stay on the ship had gotten to him. The constant pulse of the engine in the metal had slowly begun to bother him. And the ceaseless intrusions upon his private thoughts which he had learned to detect stole all sense of privacy. The Administrator’s Will wasn’t a place he wished to spend a lifetime in.
Bolt took a series of careful steps towards the railing surrounding the platform – one of the many levels that stretched below and above him. Pods stack
ed against one another filled each deck, and Bolt could see no one else walking inside the vast room or on any of the platforms.
He stretched his entire body in one fluid motion. It felt great, like it tended to do when one awakens from a deep slumber. It felt energizing to move. Muscles, however, still felt a bit stiff.
Unlike the rest of the ship, the atmosphere here was colder. Bolt figured that may simply be due the fact that he was naked. To keep himself warm, he began to jog around the circular platform. The sensation of a breeze over his pale flesh refreshed him and reawakened his senses.
He found it ironic that he felt more alive in his new body than he ever had in his old. As he ran around the smooth deck, his feet splashing and leaving behind trails of fresh sweat–particles, his thoughts trailed to his wife. He had told everyone who had known her not to tell him her name, which seemed silly now, but he wanted to remember it himself. Sara. How could I have ever forgotten it?
It took him two full circles around the deck, its length longer than that of a stadium, for a drone to ascend down from one of the beehive–like openings on top of the vast chamber. The air around it lacked a certain coherency as the machine moved. It seemed to disrupt the molecules with its anti–gravity field in ways Bolt hadn’t expected it to. Dendrites of electric discharge spat out from it. Bolt stopped running. He turned in step to the small diamond–shaped replica of the ship. He felt its gravitational expulsions upon every hair he possessed. And the closer the drone came, the more he began to feel its palpable coldness touch him. It seemed to know where to stop for its effects to not become severely uncomfortable.
In his time aboard the Administrator’s Will, Bolt had, on occasion, seen one of the drones from afar, yet the proximity and the movement of one, especially up–close, still made his body stiffen. The thing never wobbled, it emitted no sound, no smell, and Bolt had a distinct impression that touching it would turn his day into a very bad one. Its movements were smooth beyond the point of eeriness. A small opening, or what looked like a discolored blotch, appeared on one of the frontal edges of the head–sized grey diamond. A glob of dark–colored spit flew out of it and landed on Bolt’s chest. The thing burned like a bitch. It was like being shot with a fast–traveling projectile or smacked with a piece of wood. The drone began its ascend back to where it had come from, while the substance it left behind began to spread over Bolt’s body like a plague sent to claim his skin. The initial sensations felt like a million insects crawling and latching themselves upon him, but soon became welcoming and warm, like a second skin.