She nodded with reluctance.
Dyekart turned his attention back to Bolt. “Akram? You ok?”
“Obviously he isn’t,” Ia said. “He passed out in the transfer.”
“Again, what did I just say?”
“Fine!” she snapped.
“Was I dreaming?” Bolt asked groggily.
“I can’t really say. Ia?”
“Oh, so now you want me to talk, do you?”
“Well, obviously, yes,” Dyekart sighed.
“And what exactly do you want me to say, oh great one?”
“Really? That’s how you want to do this?”
“Do what? I’m just asking the great decider what he wants of me is all,” she said.
The word “great” perturbed Bolt more than any of their words, and the slight amusement over their bickering vanished. “Guys! Was I dreaming or not?”
“I don’t know,” Ia admitted. “We weren’t getting any thought–patterns from you, and I was here first and didn’t detect any rapid eye movement either.”
“Why were you here first?” Dyekart asked.
“I… I was worried. He collapsed after a transfer.”
“Yes, I know, but you’re not worried about anyone,” Dyekart said. “Ever.”
“That’s not fair. The rest of just don’t give me a reason to be worried.”
“Right…” Dyekart snorted and turned his attention back to Bolt. “Anyway, do you think you were–“
Time stopped for a moment as the blackness of non–space surrounding the vessel turned into a star field.
“The hell?” Ia said looking to and fro.
“Sol?” Dyekart asked. It was the first time either Bolt or Ia heard him address the ship with what they presumed was her name before the merge.
>Unidentified reality composition detected,< the ship said in the minds of all on board. >Potential new life–form detected. Premature exit from Null–space warranted. Comply if none–space voyage is to remain unresumed.”
“Oh, now we’re talking!” Ia jumped.
“What’s happening?” Bolt asked her.
>Complied,< Dyekart nodded over the mind–Link.
“The ship seems to have detected something while traveling in Null. Hasn’t happened before either, must be a pretty obvious thing. Let’s go,” Ia said.
“Go where?”
“To the Torium, of course,” she smiled.
“You mean the Exploratorium?” Bolt questioned, following the two out of his room, the word didn’t come easy.
“The only Torium worth anything on this damn ship,” she retorted. “But don’t tell him I said that.”
“I’m pretty sure he heard us,” Bolt said.
“I doubt it. Times like this he gets really absorbed with talking to the ship and whatnot, I’d say he can’t even hear us at all right now.”
Bolt chuckled at this. It felt good to laugh and forget about his dream for a bit. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, sure, watch this. Hey schmuck. I always liked the word,” she said and smiled at Bolt, then looked at Dyekart again, walking ahead of them. “Like yuck, that’s another that’s pretty funny. Hey, schmuck!” she repeated.
“You presume to much, girl,” Dyekart retorted. “Stop being a jackass and get going on the deep–space data.”
“He always does this,” she said quietly to Bolt, as if sharing a secret.
“Gives you the work he knows he can do himself just so he can do the important stuff instead?”
“Hah!” she chuckled. “See, Dye? I told you he can read minds. He’s just pretending he can’t.”
“Just do it, please,” Dyekart sighed.
They stepped into a wall and walked into the Exploratorium, its confines jammed with people. All heads were turned, looking at something above the ship. Some of the men and women broke their stares and gazed behind them, moving aside as the three made their way to the central consoles, looking upward themselves.
“Fascinating,” Bolt muttered.
“She stopped our travels for this?” Ia smirked, unimpressed.
Above the ship, surrounded by nothing, was the glare of an accretion disk, drowning out all other lights as it swam about a rift in space–time itself. A black hole. At first glance, the remnant seemed to expel just as much matter as it had managed to bind unto itself and kept devouring. A disk of intertwining, churning matter was surrounding and throwing itself upon the core in violent waves. Bolt was certain the spiral around it could in itself envelop an entire solar system with its size. It blurred the reality of its dark center and cloaked it with uncertainty. Like lasers, infinitely tall and energized pillars of heated gas continuously shot out and flared into space from each pole of the grumbling central.
“How can you not be fascinated by this?” Bolt turned to Ia.
“Meh,” she shrugged, “We’ve seen plenty already. Altho, I must admit none of them were quite this large. It must have formed recently, too, there’s no record in our star–maps of a black hole in these spacial coordinates.”
>Something doesn’t seem right here,< Dyekart intoned over the general Link. >Are you seeing this, Ia? Confirm my observations with your own deep–space scanner sweep, please. And zoom the damn image.<
The sight – as the projection above them closed in – covered Bolt’s heart in a layer of frost. He choked on his own words and couldn’t find the nerve to speak for a full thirty seconds. Out of the accretion disk, pushing its way against the shackles of gravity, was a nebulous cloud the size of a solar system. It seemed to have followed him out of his dreams and into physical reality. It drifted towards them, expanding and shifting. A black seed – a mass no lesser in size, visible only by the fact that the green nebulosity still shadowed it – detached itself from the drifting nebula.
“Dyekart!” Bolt whispered, then began to progressively increase his voice as he grabbed hold of the transfixed man’s shoulder and shook him. “Dyekart! Listen to me! Dyekart!”
The man turned his head.
“We have to get outta here! Get the hell out! Now!”
Dyekart didn’t flinch as he tried to understand what had sent Bolt into a fit of hysteria.
In that moment, Bolt found a certain relief and a sense of gladness over the fact that Dyekart could read his thoughts. He was certain that otherwise the man would never have agreed to do what Bolt had screamed at him.
What the captain saw in Bolt’s eyes, what he perceived, the horror and the fear, the images, those no man could deny – even if that man stood more machine than human.
With a jolt of time distortion, the ship reentered Null–space.
“Everyone,” Dyekart said, addressing the confused crowd, each of them as surprised to hear their leader attending them with his flesh–voice as the person beside them, “get out.”
CHAPTER 20
The Mindforge
“This is where I was born,” Leonel said, looking up at the floating words. “I didn’t believe I’d actually ever find this place, you know?”
“Dad?” his daughter frowned beside him. “What are you talking about? We’ve known about this place for years.”
“Correction,“ said the old man. “We’ve known about these tunnels for years, but we never actually made it to here.”
“You’ve lead all these people here just so you could find this place?” his daughter asked him.
“It was the only way, Nina,” he answered, turning to face Max. “Apologies, Proxy, but without you I don’t think any of us would ever make it to this place.”
“Why have you lead us here?” Max frowned. He wanted to be angry at the man, wanted to project that anger somehow, but instead he found only a strange inexplicable calmness.
“Because, my dear brother, this is where you were born too.”
“I don’t have a brother, and this is not where I was born,” Max said. “Now stop playing a fool and tell us how to get back.”
“But we are back, can’t you see???
? The man’s voice crackled as he looked back up at the flickering hologram, reading the words out loud. “Mindforge. I was certain this place was a myth. But I could see it, you see? I dreamt of it every night. I dream of how I felt them talking, how I felt the atoms around me back then, the bliss, oh dear God, the bliss…”
“Dad? What are you saying? You’re not making any sense.”
“Ah but you see, I’m making perfect sense. Don’t you remember it, Max? How they would always bicker about how to name us?” the old man chuckled to himself. “The woman never did seem to like the names the others chose for us.”
“Why’d you bring us here you demented bastard,” Leah demanded.
“To get us back to the cosmic consciousness, why else?”
“What?” Nina cried, “Are you crazy? What’re you saying? Wait! Dad!”
“Don’t worry, Nina,” the man said as he walked through the arch, “I am perfectly sane.”
“Great,” sighed a man standing behind Max, “avoid a lunatic on the surface only to find yourself guided by another lunatic below it. That’s just fucking brilliant.”
“What should we do?” Leah asked.
“We’re alive,” Max said. “That’s still better than dead. Let’s try to get some information from him. How to get out of here, for one.”
“Such simple–mindedness, Proxy,” the old man shouted from within the chamber, “You’re the reason we could get here in the first place.”
“What’s he talking about?” Leah leaned in.
Max shrugged, although he would have been lying if he said he didn’t care. He stepped into the dark chamber.
The insides of it were pitch black, and despite not being able to see or hear anything beyond the footsteps, he got an impression as though he could feel the dimensions of this place. He pictured a hollow dome, not overly large and tall, like the stage of a concerto hall. Max looked behind him just to make sure he didn’t go blind. The light was still there. Silhouettes of people followed as they walked inside, their motions unsure and reluctant. They trailed behind him, their outlines disappearing within the gloom, when the light shining through the arch from outside no longer met them.
He could hear the old man mumble to himself from a dozen meters ahead. “Where’s that damn light switch. I know it’s here somewhere.” The man spat a curse as he bumped a knee into something.
“Tell me he’s joking,” Leah said behind Max, her echoing voice like a buoy tethering him to reality.
“At this point,” Max said, “I don’t think anyone can tell you that with any semblance of certainty.”
“Oh shut up,” the geezer snapped. “How much bullshit do I have to spew for you to get a hint? Tell me, Proxy,” he said the title as if the very letters were laced with bile. “How do you think we got here?”
“Seems pretty obvious how we did that,” Leah smirked. “You led us here.”
“You all seemed to have forgotten the fact that we fell,” the old man pointed out. “So I’ll ask again, how did we get here?” Leonel looked at Max with an intensity he could scarcely ignore. Even in the darkness. And it was at that point he noticed he could actually see. Sight didn’t come in any normal sense of the word. His mind seemed to construct the image of the hall like a hologram. The walls bend and expanded as if drawing breath, folding and unfolding, with every new voice from either the people who followed in his path or the old man bringing new, fresh detail to the room. The machinery placed around the room spun in his vision as if constantly deciding what dimension to take as new details came to light. Sound became a visual thing. It expanded and shrunk the things it hit, making it difficult to see the room’s true dimensions. It was almost as though the sound itself was constructing the room, filling it with matter. Echo–creation. Max could see all the presumed projections of the things around him but wasn’t sure they were actually there. Their edges glistened as sound bent around them. Then, as he saw all the myriad of computerized consoles and workbenches echo and bounce off the sound in waves and air–grabbing sound, he understood.
“Well?” the old man snapped him out of it, the waves of his voice painting the room in a dull grey.
“What’s he talking about?” Leah asked, her own voice imbuing the room with a pleasant yellow, like the rays of a sun.
“We may not be aware of it,” the man said, “most of us anyway, but our thoughts are constantly being projected from us and into the subtle fields of interconnected dimensions all around. This all happens in the form of enfolding energetic patterns in the very subtle, but fundamental fields of reality.”
“Give me a break,” a man behind Max intoned, his voice slashing through the dull grey with a deep red. “You string theorists are all the same. You might as well call your strings spaghettis no one can see or detect and then say that’s because they loop around in dimensions we will never be able to access. Oh, and don’t forget to do some pointless equations no one understands just so you can feel better about yourself and what you believe in.”
“String theory? Pha!” Leonel spat, dismissing the words that were just thrown at him. “Your jabber doesn’t change the fact that our friend here,” the old man said, motioning towards Max even though none could see him, “can alter dimensions and space around him with his mind.”
“Bullshit,” the skeptic protested, Max suddenly recognized the man’s name as Bruno, “It’s not like changing dimensions is hard. If I hit something with enough force – your face for instance – I can just as easily alter its ugly–ass dimensions. My hand might have done the real work, but my mind propelled it to action.”
“That’s a bit harsh,” Leah said.
“I’m tired of this old bastard,” Bruno spat, “I’m done with this dark hole, and this prick clearly knows how to get out of here. So either he stops screwing around, or I’m going to see just how much of his dimensions I can change.”
“No, shop!” Nina jumped, her eyes adjusting to the small amounts of light streaming from the hallway outside, enough to see the outline of the person she was jumping in front of. Her voice bathed the man in an urgent almost violet blue.
“Tell me how even in this day and age,” Leonel said, his voice unchanged despite the quite obvious threats, “When men can travel the stars and build space stations which seem to defy gravity, some minds still find it beyond believable that there are things that exists not in the realm of what we can test, of what we can experience ourselves, and that those two facts do not make those things any less real or any more fantastical. Tell me,” Leonel turned from the strange sphere in the middle of the dome, a sphere balanced upon an asymmetrical cone, giving the whole thing the look of a droplet about to break from the surface of a splash. Leo looked at the man objecting him, “Would you believe something such as gravity existed had you never been exposed to its workings? Had you been born on a space station and lived your whole life in zero–gravity conditions, would you be able to even imagine the workings of gravity? What the eyes see the mind believes. And why do you think this is so? It’s because you see with your mind, and not your eyes. It’s because your eyes only allow you to see the reality around you, yet the images are all compiled and holographically projected inside your mind, not without. Which is why even a blind man can still see in his head, why you dream and see images with your eyes closed. So is it really so hard to believe a mind can shape the world around it just because you yourself had not done it, or not seen it done?”
“You’re talking about something different,” Bruno protested. “No one here’s talking about the abilities of the mind to perceive and mold images that are made within it, all I am disputing is your notion that the mind can shape the world around it. Now stop with your foolishness and tell us how to get out of here.”
“He’s right,” Max said, now standing in the middle of the hall and looking down on the sphere.
“I know I’m right,” Bruno said, the air taking on his self–righteous tone in a form of a dull red.
“No, not you,” Max corrected him, “I know this place. I can… I can remember some of it.”
The walls bounced off a gentle blue as the old man smiled. “I knew you would recall sooner or later.”
“What is this thing?” Max referred to the transparent ball in the middle. He looked closer and noticed there were notches and lines drawn into it. He willed his eyes to see better, and immediately the light within the room seem to increase, his vision sharpened. Max noticed the notches themselves were shaped in a manner of brain lobes and followed a pattern almost like the insides of a nut–shell.
“It’s where you were born, your womb,” the man said as he moved to Max’s side.
“Strange, it’s the only thing I don’t recall at all.”
“For real? You find that strange?” Leah laughed sardonically. “When does one ever remember the time they’ve spent inside a womb?”
Max snorted. “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he smiled, “But what happened here? Am I a clone? Was I bread inside this thing?”
“You don’t seem to understand.” The old man stated this not with disappointment, or even with impatience, but with a calmness one might expect from a master who had waited and thought his student for a good part of his life, waiting for him awaken to the nature of life which lay hidden to normal men and women. “You were not put inside here as if within an incubator. You were not pre–molded from some DNA pattern or build inside a lab, your mind and body were both forged within this very sphere.”
The impossibility of it seemed to outweigh even the sheer impracticality the deed entailed. Max wanted to say he believed it. He wanted to think he believed it. But he couldn’t imagine nor say that it was so. Instead, he said the only thing which came to mind and had the feel of a logical conclusion to his current train of thought. “Impossible.”
By now, every single one of the people inside had moved to surround the sphere like a pack of scientists waiting before a screen, one about to display data from some universe–as–we–know–it–altering experiment.
“Have you ever heard of the notion,” the old man began, “that consciousness supersedes the brain? And that it is in fact consciousness itself which forms the matter around itself in such a way that it makes itself able to see, to hear, to smell, and in general experience the concrete and physical nature of reality?”