>Get out!< Dyekart suddenly grumbled over the Link, >I am the commanding officer here and you will respect my wishes or face the consequences, now leave immediately, all of you.<
With varying degrees of reluctance, they all eventually exited the dome. Despite their curiosity, they all respected Spyros enough to listen to him when he used his rank to boss them around. The only person which remained was Ia. A grin awaited the two men, sly and mischievous.
>All but me, right captain?< she asked.
“Ia…” Dyekart sighed.
“Alright, alright, but you better tell me everything, or, you know, face the consequences.”
Her jab made Dyekart smile as he nodded and, after she left as well, he turned to Bolt.
“We’re not alone in the universe,” Dyekart said.
“Hardly surprising. With the amount of known galaxies, with each galaxy–“
“You know what I meant.”
“I know,” Bolt sighed. “Don’t tell me the others don’t?”
“Sol and I tried to keep it a secret,” Dyekart admitted. He moved to the dome’s translucent surface and looked out into Null–space, its oppressive unreality shaping the frontal part of the ship and twisting it into an insanity of shapes. At times it seemed almost like watching waves break against an obstacle, yet none of these tides could be focused on or made sense of, they shifted from moment to moment.
“Why?” Bolt questioned. “Why not tell them?”
“Do you have any idea how many planets we have visited?” Dyekart asked. “Planets that seemed to have been destroyed by forces we can’t even imagine? Forces that would annihilate this ship in the span of a breath?”
“From what I read in the reports,” Bolt began, but Dyekart finished the sentence for him.
“It’s forty six. Yes, forty six planets where the population had been wiped off, with not a trace of anything living on the entire planet, and by our estimations, nothing living would ever rise again on either of these rocks. So tell me, Akram, what do you think these people would do if I said that the space we roam is not safe at all? That each time we exit Null, we might as well come face to face with what seems to be the galaxy’s greatest threat?”
“Don’t you think they already know?” Bolt asked. “Surely they must at least suspect that a sentience is behind all the destruction.”
“As far as any of them know, the ruins are millions of years old, who can truly tell what had done that. A war? Self–destruction? It could be a number of things.”
“How did you come know about them, these aliens?” Bolt inquired.
“Once, when I transferred from one part of the ship to another, something took me, I think you know what I’m talking about.”
Long silence.
“The eyelid of the world,” Bolt nodded.
“For a year I lived inside the mind of this being, this Adras. Yes, a year. It was the worst thing I had ever experienced. I knew it wasn’t a dream as soon as I had awoke. My mind, you see, records all of my dreams, and when I looked back to try and confirm that what I had seen was indeed a dream, there was nothing. No images, no thought–projections, nothing. As if my mind had been lost in empty space with no stimuli whatsoever.”
“Have you considered what it might mean?” Bolt asked. “Why you think we were shown these things?”
“Has to do with the planet we’re supposed to visit. I see no other reason or explanation for it.”
“It felt almost like some sort of a warning to me. You know?” Bolt said.
Dyekart fell silent, and it was only then that Bolt noticed the captain had been shivering. His robe ceased its tireless rustle and steadied. Bolt caught Dyekart looking at his hand, flexing it, sighing through his mouth grille as though what he was about to say went beyond even the unnatural state of his own mechanical existence. At length, Dyekart’s head turned up. His augmented stare scanned the shifting mayhem enveloping the traveling vessel. The man’s breathing steadied, steadied until the breathing of the engine, of which every surface of the ship was a part of, became a sound almost oppressing in the quiet room. As Dyekart spoke, the words uttered in a quiet hiss.
“They feed on fear.”
“Fear?” Bolt asked, his voice cutting through the accumulated silence like a siren.
“I have seen it. I have seen one of them, I was on board their ship,” Dyekart said. “I don’t know how I got there. I’m not sure I was even there… yes… never there. I saw them send down this…thing on the planet. It devoured the surface.”
“It fed on fear? How? How can they feed on fear?”
“I don’t know if what they had sent it feed on it. I’m not even sure how I know. I simply felt it to be so. Yes, that’s it.” Dyekart turned around, with every one of his oculars pinned down on Bolt’s eyes. “I felt it.”
“How? How can they–“
“I don’t know. They’re not like us. I think they are something whose existence we cannot possibly comprehend. Every time I would catch a glimpse of one, my mind changed them, at one point I even saw them as pure metaphor for something else.”
“An eruption of consciousness,” Bolt mumbled under his breath.
Dyekart continued as if he didn’t hear him. “You see, the human body is a source of all kinds of vibration. On the quantum scale, everything vibrates. It does this forever and always, but you know this. Yet somehow these… beings, are able to feed on these vibrations. When a humanoid’s electrical systems are stimulated by fear, pumped with adrenaline or something akin to it, it sends shockwaves through the subtle fields which surround us. Somehow, they are able to absorb these vibrations, energies if you will, feast on them.”
“I’m not sure I can believe that,” Bolt admitted. “Even after what I’ve seen, it’s just… it’s insane.”
“What do you know of evil?” Dyekart asked.
“Of evil?”
“Yes. What do you think it is?”
Bolt gave himself a moment to think, then said, “Something which goes against human nature. Something which sickens you to see, a thing that you feel in your marrow that it’s wrong, even as you witness it.”
“But what is it? Is it a condition learned and observed? Yes? For instance, do you recognize it as an infant? Or do you recognize it when your mother, your father, your society, your imprinted and conditioned brain tells you that this or that is wrong? In other words, do you learn of evil, or are you born knowing of evil?”
“I really can’t say,” Bolt admitted. “But I have felt it when they came. I’ve felt it as they leveled the planet.”
“You know what I think? Yes,” Dyekart nodded, “you do, I can see it in your eyes. We have seen the same thing, you and I. Yet what I think evil is, ultimately, is just a word. What if this is who they are, the way they have been for millions, perhaps billions of years. What if they know with all the fiber of their being that what they are doing is transforming us, morphing the universe into themselves – into a better sentient being – into more of them. How do you destroy that which you cannot possibly begin to understand or emulate?”
“I see what you’re saying, they do seem to have a purpose to what they were doing,” Bolt said. “They even told me.”
“Yes,” Dyekart nodded, “definitely. Their purpose seems to be to transform everything else into them, like what we are doing with food, like what every sentient being seem to do. With that said, however, I still have no idea what to tell these people. Should I say that I know aliens are out there? What if I’m not entirely convinced that’s even the case?”
“What do you mean?”
“While I dreamt this dream that wasn’t a dream, yes? I got the feeling like Adras and his cohorts weren’t running from aliens per se.”
“Then what?” Bolt asked.
“A force of nature. As if some twisted part of it had been given sentience and … well, you know the rest. Almost as if they were the manifestation of their fears, a collective unconscious given form.”
<
br /> “But I saw them, their ship,” Bolt argued.
“Did you? Did you really? And how could you experience what they did? How would you explain such a thing?”
“I don’t really think I can,” Bolt said.
“That’s exactly my point. I would be lying if I said they didn’t make me question reality itself,” Dyekart said.
“How so?”
“Consider this. You are not what you are right now.”
“Alright,” Bolt nodded.
“You are something else. You do not perceive matter in this crude form, and even energy itself is not invisible to you or expressed merely in mechanical ways or as pure force. Instead, you see each vibration of matter, even to a point where diamond, which to you would seem solid and unmovable, shifts and spirals, twists and turns as its fundamentality stays in constant flux. You see the strings of it, each oscillating in a specific way, each oscillation giving birth to what you would perceive as matter, and each vibration correlating to a specific formation in this dimension. These vibrations then, almost as an afterthought, create all of this crudeness out of pure comic music. Then imagine being able to see this, being able to actually feel the energies these strings produce as they vibrate around you. Then imagine being able to feed upon these patterns of oscillation. Like a tree absorbing the vibrations of light, transforming it into itself. You really can’t imagine yourself doing it, can you? You can say you can imagine it, yes? But can you really?”
“No,” Bolt admitted. “I find it difficult to even see the world as strings, let alone the rest. I can try, but, it’s not exactly easy. This is how you think these aliens see the world? How do you know this?”
“I examined the dream many times,” Dyekart said. “At least what I could, these are the conclusions I came up with. It’s not that unbelievable, yes?”
“It actually makes sense, I think, now that you’ve pointed it out,” Bolt said thoughtfully.
“Indeed,” Dyekart nodded. “If you consider that your brain is forged by strings, each vibrating in these extra–dimensional spheres within the ocean of consciousness, an ocean that is as much separate from these strings as the real ocean is from the waves, each of these vibrations forming patters which create your brain. And since each oscillation correlates to formation of a specific atom – then your brain is simply a collection of specific patterns of vibration.”
“Now imagine again what I said earlier,” Dyekart said. “You perceive the world like this. Strings vibrate and throb, they loop into other strings, seemly making more, yet remaining part of the whole, gaining what you would call mass and informing you about the nature of reality through their expressions in specific forms in your mind. Now apply to this a drug.”
“What kind of drug?” Bolt asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dyekart said. “A mind–altering drug. A drug that changes the way you see things, yes? Instantly you go from feeding on these vibrations, seeing them, to experiencing reality in its crude form, just like we see it I see it now. Which reality would you say is the real reality? Because if you consider the fact that all you did was add atoms into your brain, which for a time changed the way you brain vibrates and that that alone changed the way you experience reality, then reality is an illusion of your senses. The implications are staggering.”
“I suppose you can go into a purely rational frame of mind,” Bolt said. “A receptor in your brain got aroused by the drug and received different information, but then again, the atoms of the receptor connected to a different set of atoms, changing the patterns of vibration inside the mind.”
“Precisely,” Dyekart said. “You always come back to the fact that all that changed was the way the fundamental reality vibrated, and that in turn changed your whole spectrum of perceptions, sight, sounds, everything.”
“What can we do against them then?” Bolt asked.
“I don’t know,” Dyekart admitted. “But I think we will have to do something, I don’t think we only saw a death of a world. But a potential future of ours as well.”
“And their ship? They seem to be able to form solidity out of what looks like nebulosity. If such is the case even with their bodies, then I’m not sure what–“
“I think that’s quite simple, really. There are postulations that our collective unconscious is more powerful that we would like to believe, or even imagine.”
“You mean in shaping the world?”
“Indeed,” Dyekart nodded. “Let’s consider for a moment that our collective unconscious is a participant in the creation of reality. That it decides which particle will decay. Now because of our unawareness of this fact, that we actively participate in matters of reality–creation, and because our collective minds are, for the most part, largely unfocused, chaotic, and even incoherent, this state relates and expands out of our thoughts and into the very quantum level, making it too appear unfocused to us, chaotic, even random and probabilistic.”
Bolt sighed. “I… I don’t think I can deal with this right now,” Bolt admitted. “Honestly, the dream… the vision left me exhausted, I can barely keep my eyes open. As much as I really don’t want to sleep right now, I can’t help but want to, I’m gonna hit the sack for a few hours, hopefully a dreamless rest is what’ll greet me.”
“Wait!” Dyekart yelled as Bolt walked away and headed to the wall that would take him out of the Exploratorium. “You haven’t suggested anything. What should I tell these people, what would you tell them?”
“The truth.”
CHAPTER 23
To Dream Of The End
Despite the fact that Bolt’s eyelids seemed to take on the approximate weight of lead, his brain and its incisive activity suggested something quite contrary to want of sleep. His mind grazed and scraped over dozens of subjects at once, none of which were what Bolt wanted or wished to think about. Random thoughts such as how many faces he had beheld as he walked to his room or how many of them struggled to look away as they passed him, envious of him and his experience – of his vision. They saw it as something they themselves wished to find, and were scouring the galaxy for – to sight an alien race. This envy in their eyes, this stupidity, had on more than one occasion made Bolt want to grab hold of all who had eyed him and slap some sense into them, or somehow transfer the fear he had shared with Adras. Perhaps that would have made them think twice.
He still remembered the fear. It made his hands shake and sweat. The dread of wondering if the vision will ever stop went beyond anything he had since experienced. It made him fearful of sleep. But he was so tired…
He suddenly remembered Max and his instructions. His futile attempts to try and fascinate Bolt, or in some way spark an interest in him about the realm of meditation. It brought a smile on his face as he thought about his friend trying to explain the benefits of it. To Bolt, however, it always remained just what it seemed, a boring way to spend one’s time by sitting around doing nothing.
Right now, however, the idea sounded calming. He turned from his prone position, twisting in his bed and instead looked at the ceiling. Counting his breaths to ten, he managed to calm his mind and think about nothing, until, for the third time, he came to the number six. His mind suddenly leaped with the thought of Sara, his wife. He found that reliving a moment of immense joy and euphoria as they ate together – laughing beneath a clear sky – calmed him more than any attempt of meditation. He tried to focus on the sound of her voice¸ to hear her laugh in his mind and realized, that although he could recall her features and the way she smiled, her white teeth, her perfect black hair, he could not recall the sound of her voice. No matter how many scenes Bolt remembered, no matter what he pictured in his mind, her mouth always moved without sound, without words or audible vibration. He focused on the scene around him, and began to notice something wasn’t quite right. An image began to appear, a great eye superimposed upon the lush scenery, with a chain of mountains on his left – in the distance, and a cityscape way of ahead of him. The grass swaye
d in the breeze. The central point of the city, the Grey Spire, touched the sky, infecting it with veins reaching further and further, each blood vessel changing the sky with black blood, each spreading like roots of an overturned tree. He looked back from the grey silhouette of the city, back to where Sara had been sitting. She was gone, and where she had sat, a tree had grown, tall and wide. Its leaves stood erect and flat, shining as thought bathed by a golden morning, light raking upon each leaf.
Bolt noticed he had at some point stood up.
The wind stilled.
He walked around the tree, its shadow lengthening and retreating, as if the sun were rising and falling in the sky. There was no sun. He circumvented the tree, touching its rough bark with the tip of his fingers. He stopped as he almost reached the point where he had begun. A leg appeared first, around the bend, bleach–white and smooth. Bolt looked about, confused, wondering who had brought it here, he saw no one. The skeletal remains sat propped up against the bark. The jaw hung slack, with skeletal fingers holding something in a tight grip. Slowly, hands shaking, expecting the skelet to suddenly animate itself, he bent down and reached out, tried to pry open the fist. The smooth, bleach–white knuckles gave way easily. They held an eye. A lidless, ever–shifting, black–centered eye. He lurched back, dropping it on the grass. The mouth of the skeleton snapped shut, its teeth grinding. A sound streamed from the opening and closing maw, a sound he had been searching – the sound he couldn’t remember just moments prior. In his mind, it spoke a clear, emotionless sentence.
“We come to destroy you.”
Bolt realized he was dreaming, then his world exploded. For a moment, his whole vision consisted of static, a frantic movement of particles, each trying to find its place without pause, their combined efforts constantly hindered by the very fact that every other speck was attempting the same thing.
His vision cleared and a heat began to press down on him. Bolt found himself wearing familiar, glowed hands. And although familiar, the hands were not his own. They moved of their own accord, adorned with thick layers of metal, each appendage shimmering in the heat–haze. He could tell a pressure was kept at bay by an invisible force–field about his suit. A needle extended from one of his fingers, sliding towards a man propped up on the tunnel wall. A droning sound of stone–grinding and rock collapsing echoed through the passage. The syringe extended further, and the force–fields of the two men connected. The two vibrational fields matched, and the slouched man turned his visored had up. In it, Bolt saw the mask he now wore.