“If consciousness supersedes the brain, then why would it even need a brain?” Bruno immediately intervened, his skepticism infections and well–shared among most of the group. “If I was a being of pure consciousness, the last thing I would want is to be sent into this realm of solidity just to experience all the hardship and pain it can bring.”
“You’re so bleak,” Leah said. “Life isn’t just about hardship and pain. What about all the other emotions once can feel? The simple joys of life? The things that make us smile? The things that feel good under our fingers and, yes, even the drugs that can alter your perceptions and make you feel better. And what about music? If we are not all beings of vibration, how can music – which in itself is just changes in vibration – feel so good?”
“What does a person like you know about what life and its hardships are, girl?” Bruno asked. “You remain cooked up in your labs, head buried in experiments, you know nothing.”
“I know enough!” she said. “Or maybe it’s because, as you say, that I know so little that I’m able to find gladness in the little things. Hmm?”
Bruno said nothing.
Leah looked at Max who stood absorbed in thought, looking down at the sphere, touching it gently. “How about the joy of expressing your love to someone and finding out they love you back?” She looked away as Max turned his head, not wanting him to know it was his face that was the source of her cheer and good spirits, even in times when they had ran for their lives and down a hole with no means of escape. But now that she had looked away, she wished she hadn’t. It seemed silly now, a reflex fueled by uncertainty and doubt.
“The young lady is right,” the old man smiled. “An immaterial consciousness can only experience an immaterial existence, at least according to logic, yet a consciousness projecting its will and perceiving thoughts born upon matter can have an entirely different experience of life, of reality. But this is not why we are here.”
“Then why are we here?” a woman in the group asked.
“We need to preserve this place,” Leonel answered.
“Why was it even built?” Leah asked. “I mean I get the fact that the ability to make minds is pretty substantial, but why make it and then abandon it?”
“I don’t think I can answer why it was abandoned,” Leo said. “For this puzzles even me, to tell you the truth. But, eh, it doesn’t really matter at this point, perhaps they made a better version of it and decided to move the project somewhere else. Who knows. The important part is, I was right.”
“About what?” Leah asked. The rest of the group began to talk amongst themselves, most of them arguing why such a thing was impossible and why it wasn’t. The color of their voices intermixed and grained the air with a static of shifting particle–movement. Abstract shapes of color broke against the shore of matter that composed each individual. “What were you right about?”
“That the Proxy’s mind exerts enough influence upon the magnetized reality of this place to alter it and save us from the explosion.”
The collective ears of the groups inside perked up. “What explosion?” a woman asked.
“An explosion?” asked another.
“Where?” Bruno joined.
“When?” Leah said. All of them speaking over the others.
These were only a handful of questions which immediately found their mark in the old man. The one Leo chose to answer, however, stemmed from the eternal skeptic in their midst, Bruno, who stated, “You still haven’t told us how you found this out and how it’s related to how we got here.”
“Every movement of the walls you saw since the moment we stepped through the projected wall on the surface was the projection of the Proxy’s mind. Every subtle shift and every moving shadow, even the light which seems to permeate from the surface of the walls themselves was the result of those very objects being excited down to the very quantum level and the heating of the inner surface of the walls.”
“How come none of us can exert such control over matter?” Bruno asked.
“It’s because none of you were created here for the specific purpose of being able to do just that,” the old man said.
“All this time, I thought my mother had died when I was very little,” Max said absently, his eyes not shifting from the dome. “I remember my father telling me she was still alive, and I remember the excitement which rolled over me when he said it, it seemed it would last forever, and I remember wishing it could last forever. But then he tapped my head, and said, “she still lives in here”. I hated the fact that I could never forget him saying that, and how I always knew that someone living solely inside my head isn’t really alive at all.”
Max’s voice alone seemed to be invisible inside the dome, it exerted no color like the voices of others, it was simply there, intangible and pacifying, like a strong wind rustling the threes and silencing everyone, making them listen.
“Your father was the one who created this place, this machine,” Leonel said. “He didn’t do it by himself, of course, but he was the lead scientist whose genius made it all possible. You were his ultimate creation, he wanted to raise you himself. He lost interest in continuing his work after you were made completely, he decided to raise you himself.”
“So, we are… brothers?”
“Not really,” the old man sighed. “Just like your maker isn’t truly your father, I am not truly your brother. But–” The whole dome suddenly shook, throwing most of the people inside off balance and to the ground. A resonance of vibrating shifts spread over the walls through the dome as though they were riding a boat on gravel.
“That was sooner than I had expected,” said the old man, instinctively looking up. “She’s already in the tower, the station will go down at any moment, we need–” His voice was cut short and made unintelligible. A colossal tearing sound began to reveal a crack in the material of the station. Light and heat licked through the expending opening, tearing the dome apart with a sound suggesting immense speed and friction. Even through the heat–haze and the fires of the atmosphere crashing against matter, Max could see what they sped towards. The North American continent.
CHAPTER 21
The Fall
Rob hated waking up. He hated it almost as much as he hated the fact that his parents no longer seemed to get along. Smart beyond his years, he was old enough to understand how love works, and that some people were never meant to spend their lives together. Yet what seemed to happen more often than not, and before most people would even realize this fact, the female counterpart would give birth to some form of glue, a being which kept the two together despite the fact that they hated each other.
His father would often try to rationalize the relationship he had with his wife, but Rob couldn’t care less about what he said, he felt his father’s thoughts before the man had even expressed them in words. This, he hated as well. It was never pleasant thoughts either. Only the most potent feelings or ideas found their way into his small skull. Ideas which mostly came from the deepest and most dark desires of men.
“You see, son,” his father said to him one day when his mother wasn’t around. “There’s only two kinds of relationships in this word.” He said this while drawing two lines running parallel to each other on the holographic display in front of their couch. “One kind is like two parallels, these two lines will never truly meet or overlap, they will never by the same, ever, but they will always be pretty damn close. That’s one relationship for you. Now, every other pair of lines will meet but once.” With this he drew two lines running across each other. “But these lines, after meeting once, will drift apart forever. Now it may seem at first that they still have a lot in common, and that they share a lot, but, eventually, they expand so far apart that they’ll only be able to look back and find that what they had was better than what they have.”
“I suppose you and mom are this second pair then?” Rob asked.
“Unfortunately, yes, but that doesn’t mean–“
“Ye
s, yes, I know, you both love me, but can you please just read me the story instead? I don’t want to hear this.”
His father escorted Rob to his bed and tucked him in, then began to read The Elegant Universe.
It didn’t help, no matter how much Rob thought about the universe and how he will someday unravel all the mysteries behind it, he couldn’t maintain sleep and had woken up. The thoughts of others prevailed in his mind like a tick one knows is there due to an itch, but is too tired to get up and try to remove the bastard. It aggravated Rob to hear the thoughts of others in his own voice. They intermixed with his contemplations. Thinking was all he could do to help himself to sleep. The voices he heard were like hearing himself talk but not thinking about talking, and at times, when and emergent thought came with particularly hatefulness or unpleasantry, it scared him. The images such thoughts conjured had been the source of numerous nightmares. When those came, it was the only time he didn’t hate getting out of bed. On nights like these, when sleep just wouldn’t last, Rob went outside, to the balcony situated in the upper pylons of the Grey–Tech tower. There, Rob looked at the stars. And if he focused hard enough, and imagined himself traveling on board some spaceship, or even in a suit capable of faster–than–light travel, the voices in his mind grew dull and unimportant. Tonight was one of those nights. As though with a reflex of the mind, he decided sleep wasn’t what he wanted and sprang out of bed. He tipsed quietly down the corridor and to his left, then through the living room where his parents sat on a couch and watched some kind of news report on the holographic imager. The man on the screen claimed someone or something had found a so–called ‘edge of reality’. He found the notion intriguing, but what does that even mean? Not even the newscaster seemed to know, or had any other information. Rob walked behind his parents and saw his mother stir as she woke up from a nap.
“Slept through the whole day again, great,” father said bitterly.
“I need my beauty sleep,” his mother yawned.
Rob felt it coming before he heard it, a thought his dad chose not to speak but one which made Robert’s heart race with the raw emotion of it. He regretted hearing it. >Bitch, you need to hibernate.<
He hurried to the balcony and willed the force–field behind him to engage so none of the sounds from the imager would leak through. The quiet of the balcony at night, with the background generators active, projecting nothing but the sky on both sides, and the real, unprojected sky ahead made his lips part into an unconscious grin. Rob grabbed hold of the telescope his father had bought him after Robert had spent almost a month convincing him, and immediately began adjusting the knobs on it.
Rob wanted one of the older versions, one where he needed to adjust the coordinates by hand, one that could not be connected to some digital device for it to do it for him. The extra work needing to be done to direct the telescope to a specific spot in the sky made it even better. It made it easier to remember where he could find all the good stuff. The procedure centered and calmed his mind as Rob focused on the task at hand. With the effort, the sounds of what went on in other people’s heads around him became almost non–existent. He directed the thing to his usual target first, before he would move on to something else.
He soon found something strange was going on. The usual frantic nature of the station as it drifted in orbit was replaced by empty streets and a strange crater–like gouge in the middle square. Rob had expected to see a buzzing nexus of activity where people scurried about like tiny ants, each with a story he had made up for them in his mind. But what he found instead was emptiness. He zoomed in on the tower’s entrance and found something even more disturbing. His eyes watered and he suddenly couldn’t find the will to blink. His breathing quickened. This couldn’t possibly be true, he thought. What he saw were bodies, hundreds of them, strewn across the once white surface like cattle slaughtered and half–eaten. Rob wanted to look away, he could see the glistening pools of blood, he could see it pumping out, flowing from broken arteries. Some were still alive! He gasped.
Now he truly could not look away, frozen by terror. He zoomed in and saw a man lying on his back, froth bubbling from his mouth as he struggled with his last breaths. A woman crawled towards him, gripping his hand, not caring that it was covered in blood which stuck to her palm. Suddenly, a bright flash filled Rob’s vision, blinding him. He tore his eyes away from the ocular. He tried to rub the blazing after–image away and zoomed out, looking with his other eye at the station as a shockwave of white matter traveled in all directions, encompassing it and the space around it in an energetic bubble. Then, another explosion, this time stemming from the tower, hurled the structure about in fragments, then tore the station itself into pieces. Chunks of it quickly disappeared, thrust into space, and Rob could no longer trace them over the skies. Most left behind a trail of their paths over the skies, curling with the planet’s curvature.
One shape in particular, however, left no trace, nor did is seem to shrink, but expand. It didn’t take Rob more than a moment to realize the sphere of light was headed directly towards them, towards New York.
It was inconceivable. Of all the infinite directions the shard could have taken, it had chosen or, more likely, had been propelled directly towards where Rob looked up at it. He didn’t know what to do about it. Should he call someone? Inform some official, or perhaps tell his parents? What would that accomplish, anyway? Whatever part of the station it was, it was going to crash. The impact alone of something so big would level the whole city, melt it before it even made contact, not that any of the citizens would be able to tell the difference. Just as Rob’s knees began to shake with the realization of his imminent death, his spellbound body and mind found a new hope. Generators, towers of obsidian which Rob had been wondering for three years now what they were for, flared up in the distant landscape surrounding the city. For a moment they came to life like active supernovas, illuminating the city like lightning. A layer of purplish discoloration slowly encompassed the metropolis – like a swarm of flies. Only these flies would interlock and hold their relative positions, defending the city from imminent impact. Or at least that’s what Rob hoped they would do.
The clouds ignited and burned out in an instant, vaporized by the passing heat of the object. The space around the speeding chunk boiled and turned into energy, flooding the sky over which the ball cut with rivers of energized air that smoked and simmered.
Every neuron fired up and told Rob to move. And moving would certainly have been a good idea, if the object heading towards him wasn’t the size of small town. Time seemed to halt for a brief moment. The moon–sized object floated above the surface of the barrier for a deceitful moment, before it crashed into it with a deafening roar. Cauls and webs spread over the calmness of the shield. Here and there, more than a dozen generators exploded in the distance, overpowered by the energies they were forced to contain. The air itself shook as the debris spread over the entirety of the shield like water thrown against a surface. The sound it produced seeped through the cracks and into the ears of the populous, the deep grumble smashing through the air as though the very foundations of the planet built over billions of years had begun falling to ruin. Some of the material trailed through the cracks, falling like dust from the cracks in the ceiling. The impact made the entire barrier wobble like gelatin, and as the waves on top of the enormous shield rose and fell, so did the material. Thrown and smacked down again by gravity, the debris wavered like a tidal force as high as the sky, consuming and painting the land around the shield with dust and ash.
The outcome was not as Rob had expected, for instead of the destruction he had pictured in his mind, everything around him whirled in a sea of change as the barrier continued to shift and oscillate – a rippling sky–ocean. Eying the sight, Rob found it difficult to think, his thoughts trailing out of his mind like yesterday’s dreams. Who could foresee something like this? Why else would the generators had already been there?
He felt hands resting
on his shoulders. He hadn’t even noticed his mother and father both joining him on the balcony. It was the first time he saw them holding hands, each white–knuckled and tense. Rob’s mother leaned down and whispered something in his ear. He couldn’t hear any of it, the sounds of debris sliding over the barrier making his teeth vibrate.
Then, something caught his eye. In between a crack on the shield Rob couldn’t see, an orb of white light descended down towards one of the buildings, drifting slowly and carefully. Rob watched it and raced to the edge of the balcony. The sphere descended below his floor, which was high in the upper strata of the Grey Tower. He was certain his eyes deceived him, but he was also certain he saw the orb pass cleanly through the roof of a skyscraper.
CHAPTER 22
“Three Things Cannot Long Remain Hidden, The Sun, The Moon, And The Truth.”
“Why should we leave?” Ia protested. “Whatever you and Akram have to say you can say in front of us all!”
“This is not a discussion, yes? You will all leave,” Dyekart insisted.
“Why? We all saw the thing,” Ia said, turning to the crowd and back to Dyekart. “Whatever Bolt knows about it we all deserve to know.”
“They called themselves the Construct,” Bolt said, and could immediately tell a storm of questions flooded into Dyekart’s mind–cogitators.
“Please,” Bolt said, “just leave us, we will discuss this matter privately before we decide how to proceed.”
“The hell is this?” said Hakur, a man Bolt knew little about save that he was always the first to complain when something wasn’t to his specifications.
Bolt had found that, in almost any given group, there’s always one such person. This one was less of an irritating specimen, belonging to that very same ilk. “Are you two some kind of a council or some crap? Like Ia said, we all deserve to hear what either of you have to say.”