“Wait!” he yelled after the drone, his voice echoing inside the chamber. “How do I get outta here!”
The answer to his question came in a most unexpected form. He had been made aware of the fact that the ship, and as he had heard later – the intelligence behind the ship – worked at a phenomenal rate. Essentially, in an unprecedented meld of mind and machine, the ship’s computers could destroy a person, and then remake him in another area of the ship. Because of this, Bolt had often wondered why they even needed clones of themselves if they can just make a person practically from scratch. He could only assume it was because the machine itself did a copy/paste of that person, while storing every memory and combined knowledge of an individual would strain the system too much if a large number of people needed to be remade. In essence, it was easier to simply make clones and imprint them with the already existing memory patterns which were stored in the ship’s databanks. Apparently, there were entire decks specifically made and used for storing memories and experiences of the crew, although Bolt himself never saw these alleged decks. Yet all of this was still speculation. The answer as to why make clones of themselves came from Dyekart, who said simply, “A cloning project became another project, which became another and so forth. What we ended up with was the system in place now. The problem, you see, is if enough of us happened to die in the same instant, we wouldn’t be able to remake all of us, the energy requirements for that would be too enormous, and while that person’s molecular data remained unimprinted, the data might become lost or corrupted. Storing a person’s atomic information isn’t exactly an easy process, as you might imagine. So the resulting “limbo” status could potentially manifest in loss of memory or cognition ability. With clones, everyone gets a second chance as soon as they die, whenever and if that happens.”
This eraseal and renewal, however, was not what happened in his case. Bolt didn’t simply reappear in another part of the ship as he had become used to, although after what had happened, he wished he had.
He felt the process of deletion begin. A process he had gotten accustomed to, since after a few years of experiencing it, Bolt had begun to feel the very subtle signals which slithered into his psyche as it occurred. He found the sensations very hard to explain. The closest approximation in words to the true feelings of “deletion” he was able to form was, “For an instant, you became someone else.”
He felt the changes occur, and in that fatal nanosecond when his physical form escaped reality completely, something took him. It broke the shackles which had bound Bolt to his present dimension and somehow found his subtle body – wrenched it away with maddening intent. In that instant, the sphere of time constructed in the first moments of creation ceased to matter. The flame of life which had ignited his soul into existence ceased to matter. And when even the atoms which had bound all of his experience into a mortal coil ceased to exists, Bolt found himself staring into the eye of a world.
CHAPTER 18
Apocalypse
And the eye stared back. It appeared lidless at first, a shimmering orb the size of a planet, its black core thrusting outwards in waves of intertwining patterns, each pulsating tide disturbing the gleaming whole before vanishing into the eye’s edge.
Then, the eye blinked. And what it revealed behind it was the death a world.
>They will lie to you,< something said to him in his own voice. By very nature, this made him question the meaning and validity of every syllable. Bolt might have even thought that perhaps it was he who had uttered those words, yes… perhaps that would be have been easier, if not for the fact that no matter how hard he tried, no matter the effort put in, he could not escape the feeling that something, someone, somewhere, wanted him to see. To see it all for the first time. He felt the raw need of this being that wanted this of him. Wanted him to not only witness, but to comprehend, to understand. To perceive how his notions and beliefs of self–unimportance and the frivolities of existence have coalesced into a unified field of matter upon the subtle layer of possibility and made an entity whose every beat and every step had been predetermined and molded to make him a turner of fates. A changer of ways. It made Bolt realize his insignificance reached only as far as the stretch of his arm.
He was but a single soul in the ocean of consciousness, an individual led to a path where, at its end, his one decision would determine what came next in the universe.
Bolt felt the weight of the idea he was supposed to grasp bring him down, break him under its scope even when there was nothing there to break.
A thought swam inside him, a voice nagging him that no matter how far sculptured his mind had become, no matter the intricate designs laid out by those who would seek to control him, he was in control. Blood and flesh. Flesh and bone. Granting life and giving him the means to seize the one decision that was to come.
>Your mind traps you,< a new voice said, one unlike the first, as there seemed to be many voices intertwined into it. >Do not allow it to drift. Look. See.<
>How can I understand anything? What is this place?< he heard himself think.
>Look. See.< The voice repeated. It was only then, when he truly recognized the voice as not his own, that Bolt looked.
Hiding behind a planet much like what he was used to seeing back home, something began to loom closer. He could sense the confusion and chaos the thing bred upon the surface of this world as it carelessly drifted upon its path towards the planet.
Yet in between all the fear and dread, Bolt could also sense the promise it brought, the possibilities it carried. First contact.
The steady approach of the thing suddenly made all the more sense than an abrupt arrival – he just wasn’t quite sure how yet. On some level it made sense. Yet at the same time, Bolt couldn’t help but feel its pressing weight as its massive size disrupted the flow of the planet’s waters and flooded entire cities upon its approach. Only when the immense vessel’s ever–changing patters – like silk spun or ink dropped into a well – came close and enveloped the planet in shadow, did Bolt feel there were actually beings inside the thing. Creatures whose very nature of existence was so alien to him he could not even comprehend the imagery their ship conjured in his mind, let alone hope to understand what they wanted. Yet what they seemed to want from the world they had come to greet was simple. Almost painfully so. Surrender.
Bolt felt himself – or whatever his sense of self had morphed into – gravitate towards one of the minds on the surface of the planet. A mind whose eyes first bore witness to the crushing disappointment of what had come. Through this…Adras… a person with a name as insignificant and inconsequential as Bolt’s own, he saw the first transmission from the alien vessel before the word rolled on through all of the radio–frequencies of the world.
“Surrender.”
Bolt’s mind merged with Adras’.
***
Adras looked at his brother at first. Forever at his side, forever loyal, and forever different, Logos stood silent before the coming storm. Like so many times since, Adras looked to him for a different answer. In a rare moment of sibling hive–mind effect, their thoughts converged into a sentence which Adras uttered first. “Surrender what?”
“Ourselves? Our planet? Everything,” Logos said, and it looked like he might have gone on, but his mouth remained shut.
Bolt could feel his own consciousness inside the mind of this alien. He saw and felt every emotion and every nuance of an emotion roll past him. He sensed fear.
“What am I suppose to see? Get me the hell out of here!”
Bolt wished he could have said he didn’t feel anything, to simply brush the experience away or force his real eyes open as though all of this were a dream. But instead, a supreme and total discomfort and disorientation continued to prevail and press upon his senses. The world seemed to spin and the wind outside the glass–dome on top of the mega–structure they were trapped in stood silent.
“Is this some kind of recording? Are you showing me what’s
already happened? Answer me!”
“Look. See. Proof.”
“Proof of what!”
A segment broke off from the nebula shadowing the planet – a sphere Bolt could actually tell was material. It drifted towards the world like encroaching doom in a form of a massive moon. For a moment, it seemed like the beings had spawned and sent it fourth only to mock the physical existence of the meat–things they had come to greet. It took his breath away, or rather, that of Adras, when the alien realized the mass’ size. The immensity of it veiled behind even the vessel from which it came.
It was from this sphere that the first planetary bombardments fell. Red balls of lighting rained like super–sized hail, melding with the landscape and changing the face of it forever. Where the spheres hit, the soil puked out molten rock in vertical walls higher than any mountain or cloudcover. For a moment, the enhanced eyes of Adras zoomed into the distance. He beheld his race as they became vibrational beings, forms of pure pulsating energy, before their remains intermixed with temperatures hotter than the sun.
All attempts to reason with whoever piloted the ship came unanswered. All transmissions were ignored. Bolt felt the tension and rage pile up in all who joined Adras and his brother as they fled deep underground. They had gone so far, so deep, that Bolt thought perhaps staying on the surface and surrendering would have been a better alternative.
We’ll fry in this planet’s hell, he thought.
None of this stopped them.
Still they came.
Bolt never got to see any of these creatures. It was always to dark, too dusty, too hot. None of the invaders seemed to die, even in the immense heat. They never died, seemingly coming down into the cavers purely to lure those who were left somewhere, not to actually fight.
The chase lasted for months. Many were left behind. They simply rolled over and forgot to breathe.
In the second month and while running, the rock itself shaking as the continents were rearranged under the explosions above, Bolt managed to catch a glimpse, the stare of one for an instant as Adras looked back in the gloom. The air shimmered about the form, and even as the heat choked him and clawed at his eyes, Adras saw its gaze. It was like the madness of an erupting pulsar, the unstoppable force of a dying, expanding star.
After a year of running, their supplies had run out. Adras was surprised they lasted even this long. They went up, up. Up to meet them. Up through the channels of sparkling diamond and compressed minerals. Over the inner–hills of the planet and the gravity–suspended lakes of liquid promethium, all the while battling the titanic pressures, the radiation and the searing flames. The energy fields of their suits crackled around them, drawing power in a paradoxical loop of heat exchange, a loop which would eventually break; the natural decay of matter under pressure would make sure of that.
The path they walked had been set out for them. All so they would witness the last event, as if those who planned it had prepared a final lesson.
In that year, all capacity for fear had been squeezed out of them until not a drop, not a single bead of it remained. The emotion which had driven them to the depths had been expanded to the point where no one, male or female, could ever experience terror again. And after what they had been through, what else was there left for them to fear? Death would be a welcome spectacle.
Like husks moving to a final destination, the last of their kind trudged up towards the end. It was an end they planned to meet with weapons and energy lances mag–sealed to their protective armor. And if by chance these shouldn’t work when they got to the surface, bare hands would have to do.
They neared the end of the tunnel–system, each burrow and cavern carved in the ages when their species still explored the inner workings of their planet. None of them had thought this would be how the legacy of those explorers would be used. Adras and his brother lead more than a million survivors, and as they jostled towards the last stretch of carved rock and saw a light at the end of the tunnel, Adras felt a presence leaving him.
***
Bolt floated above the planet – the face of it drifted, defiled by land–shifting hurls of electricity, the oceans boiled away to reveal a jagged sub–world and black dune–lakes, charred and ashen. Clouds of brown dust veiled the land like a shroud. Within all the grime and residue, the ominous mass of apocalyptic proportions drifted – an enormous black egg. Its seeds of destruction rained down still, now in a form of warriors ready to meet the final planetary survivors face to face.
>Stop this!< Bolt demanded. >I don’t want to see anymore.<
The view shifted back to a calmer, but not idyllic scene. The oppressors were gone, and the planet once again sported a few green patches on its overpopulated surface. Factories and vehicles, and in fact the very lifestyles of the beings upon the planet belched out pollution, strangling the atmosphere, slowly cooking the humanoids inside over decades passing like minutes.
“Look at what they had done,” the voice said to him. He could see another image behind all the pollution and misery and madness. Some shade of an alternate reality forever fading as is became more and more distant in the fabric of possibility. The falsehood was peaceful, a synergy of the beings and planetary nature, with towers of green landscapes stretching into the skies, filling each eye and face with hope. The beauty of it made the next words Bolt could hear all the more ugly.
“Look at what they had chosen to become instead. Look!”
With his all–encompassing, 360degree vision, Bolt couldn’t not look even if he tried.
“Observe as they fatten upon the land and consume the beasts that roam it. Then look as they collectively turn away and ignore the death and bones they leave in their wake. Look!”
Images of human–like men and women paraded before his mind’s eye, eating and feasting, drinking and dying without thought for what they left behind. In every vision that he saw, the death and the destruction of all things lay superimposed upon all that he was seeing now, the stench and fear of being hunted to extinction still fresh upon his senses.
“Now see as they transmute the living things they devour and make them into themselves, then leave behind the waste to rot in the sun. Now watch as they make even more copies of themselves, replicas that would emulate what they had done over and over again, each without the conscious thought for the living and breathing patterns of consciousness they destroyed so they could live. See as they think nothing of it simply because they believe themselves superior.”
The image of the planet shifted again to its previous, mutilated state.
“Now look at them scatter. See how every particle of their being becomes us, how we use them as they have used everything else around them!”
“Why are you doing this,” Bolt shouted, the idea of his voice traveling in all directions in a wave of reality–bending potency.
“Your species, their species, you are all but grass. Swaying and decaying in the winds of time. Now look as each of them becomes a part of our own reality. Watch them become a transcendent being as their deaths serve a purpose beyond their mortal and frail bodies. Watch as matter of a flawed design embraces a fate none of them could have even conceived!”
“Who are you,” Bolt heard himself scream. “What the hell are you!”
The space around him shook with the sound of a trillion trillion voices, “We are the seed, we are the first construct, we are the grand Nullifier!”
His eyes opened.
CHAPTER 19
Tell Me The Secrets Of All Things
He practically flew out of his bed. Panting and cowered in sweat as his eyes locked with Dyekart’s.
“You ok?” the man asked.
“His pupils are severely dilated, his respiration seems to indicate fear,” said Ia, standing beside the captain. She spoke the words as if Bolt wasn’t even there.
“You think I didn’t notice that?” Dyekart asked.
She ignored his question and disengaged the compartment’s dimming systems. I
t was like someone had drawn back the curtains too early in the morning. Bolt squinted. It reminded him of the times his mother would do that, it also reminded him of the fact that he wanted to slap the enthusiasm out of her almost every time she did it. He looked away, shielding his eyes, but there was nowhere to hide from the light as the walls turned transparent, revealing his room. It constituted of a bed, a small wardrobe–like compartment to his front, along with an enclosed shower and a studydesk/console near the doorway to his right, the glass–walls around him revealed many such compartments.
“Dammit girl,” Dyekart said, “can’t you see you’re bothering the man, let him adjust his own damn lighting. It’s his own room.”
“I’m sorry,” she whined and willed the walls black again.
“Ok, now you’re just being silly,” Dyekart said. “What did I just say?”
“I–“
“You know what? Never mind. Just get out of here and look pretty somewhere else,” Dyekart willed the walls to progressively lighten. They did so until reaching their full transparantness over the next two minutes.
“But–“
“I know you’re trying to help,” Dyekart sighed, reading her thoughts before she could speak further. “But you’re really not. Just be quiet for a moment, ok?”