The eyes of the two brothers met as their heartbeats synched. A deep sense of nostalgia permeated out of his chest, he could almost recall the first time their hearts beat in unison, inside their mother’s womb. Their faces carried none of the burdens of their race, but a freedom they had never known. It was the freedom only inevitable death could bring, a freedom short lived and petrifying. Yet the prospect of eternal sleep seemed inviting somehow, welcome even.
They jumped from the edge of the crater, strafing down the nearly sheer sides with ease, their suites compensating for any lack of balance. Upon reached the plateau, they ran below the gloom of the ship. Restless, the two soon reached the center of battle. Or rather, so many had died around them it no longer mattered where they stood, everywhere felt like the center of conflict. They pulverized their enemy into dust, meld their bodies with the ground, but only more came. Pouring into them like a living river, mechanical, unkillable, unstoppable. Yet in those moments, it seemed, so too were the two brothers. They fought shoulder to shoulder, back to back, until for reasons Adras could not explain, the attacks of their enemy ceased.
A palpable sense of doom enveloped the crater, like the stillness of wind before its madness once again hurls the dust, a sense that escape now was as likely as outrunning death itself. Adras tried to draw a bit of humor out if it. Perhaps an ultimate lesson? But all thoughts which fluttered were inconsequential, dreamlike and distant.
The air began to thrum. Unnoticeably slow at first, the ship above began to crawl away. It stopped after a while, revealing a brown sky. Silence shrouded the crater.
He could hear Logos breathing.
Giant slabs of black metal opened below the ship, their circumfuse that of a vast mountain range. A delayed mechanical sound spun the air in a torrent as it hit those still standing with a monstrous shriek.
A tempest of white flame fired out from the opening and spliced through the air, crashing violently into the soil.
Froth rose about the impact, throwing shale into a vertical wall and obscuring a bright shape inside the smolder.
“From our ashes, a new race will rise,” Adras said, thinking nothing of the thought he had muttered, even though it had been the one carrying the reason why he still held courage – a thought so subconsciously buried it only now, when his mind stared face–to–face with the unimagined, became evident.
He wasn’t given time to ponder his own words. Nor wonder why beings such as these would seem so savage.
A form of pure what spat out from the curtain of smoke with impossible speed. He felt its warmness before it even came close. Its beams of light reached to the horizon, as the infinity of their power reduced all into ash.
***
From the dark side of the planet, he watched them fall. A fire in the sky. He wondered if any of them would live. Apparently his warnings for them to stay away came all too late. He wondered if they would ever have even worked.
The quad moons stared, indifferent towards the billowing shape threatening to smash into the planet. Unmoving and half–dreaming, he watched the skyspear vanish below the horizon, then wake the soil with its impact.
CHAPTER 26
The Core Of Reality
On the edge where space–time reality reverted back into pure abstraction, Max began to see more clearly than ever before. The shifting nature of his vision steadied for the first time in days as his cranial implant fused with the machine Leonel had referred to as the Mindforge. It held his consciousness active inside his skull, even while all of the others melted beside him.
I can rebuild them.
The conviction came with a sense of uncertainty, however, and he wondered how such a thing could ever be accomplished.
Vaguely, Max could see a shield materialize underneath him – protecting a city – and knew they would hit it with such force that the entire sphere he stood in would shatter, but even this thought with endowed with doubt. But that didn’t matter, the patterns he needed to reforge them out of pure non–movement of space were clear in his mind – becoming clearer with each moment. They existed beyond the linear, beyond the straightness of time which his mind perceived. Existed in lines of abstraction that suddenly made perfect sense. Max wished he could stare at them forever. It felt as if he were gazing into some core where reality itself was emanating from. Infused with meaning, he knew what he had to do.
The sphere plunged into the dome beneath them. Buried under tons of ruble which followed in its wake, heating it even further, making it into a miniature sun. The force of gravity was inescapable and, for a moment, he swam in molten brimstone, his face stretching and bloating as if someone had blown air into his face at an insane speed. His eyes, his ears, his mouth, even his pores seemed to give in under the pressure of flames which forced themselves into everything.
There was a moment when, even his mind became pure madness, without form, swimming upon a singular plane of All. Yet out of this, inside of this, there seemed to remain a speck, his implant, made out of far more enduring material than his frail body and mind. And that speck was enough. It interconnected with the unshattered dome where the Mindforge nested and remade him, then, in turn, Max re–crafted all of the others, even as they shattered into a billion fragments. His mind subconsciously found their imprints in the memory of time itself. Extra–dimensional bubbles expanded and made new ones within new ones within new ones, interconnecting and reforming each conscious mind. Recall and genetic makeup infinitely spiraled and twisted in braids of light. Knots of matter and strings of un–matter fused into collective wholes that could breathe again, see again, remember again.
He saw the edge of reality, and suddenly understood the message which came back from the depths of space. Who was it that had sent it? Who else had seen this?
An opening began to give way below them, and a small part of the dome gaped like a tearing in silk. Drifting upon the slope of Max’s own will, the sphere descended into a building in the city, crashing. Like from an inner explosion, the top of the structure burst apart, an event which Max out from from the minds of anyone who saw it. The dust billowed around him, hugging and caking the sphere, falling upon them – around them as he shrugged it off as though some invisible barrier existed between him and the debris. One by one, the people he had saved began to wake up around him.
“I told you…” Leonel croaked as Max helped him to his feet, the dust painting his clothes and that of the others, with trails of fine mist cascading down the explosion–bitten opening.
“Oh my God!” Leah stammered. “What happened? How did you–“
“We actually made it?” Bruno wobbled to his feat.
A few of them, strangers all, brought together by a feat of survival, hugged with tears streaming and cleaning their faces of dust, the droplets drying in globs of salty residue upon their faces.
A daughter ran to her father.
“I’m okay,” Leo assured her.
“How did you know?” she asked him.
“I didn’t. Not really. But I knew what the Proxy was made for, so I put my trust in him.”
“What now? Max asked.
The old man looked up. His eyes trailed a shape across the upper reaches of the city. Golden–cast and brimming with inner light, the spear cut through a building, through the floors of it, hurling material and twisting iron out the other side, then imbedded itself into the lower streets, bursting them apart.
“The thing’s not dead?” Leah spat, looking down from the edge of the still breaking–off floor.
“Will it come after us?” Bruno asked.
“For certain,” Leo said.
Max didn’t hear any of them, his mind puzzled over what and how he had kept everyone alive, even rebuilt them. What moments before he understood fully and completely, was now a mystery to him. “How did I do it?” he asked.
“The forge does that, it was made for that, I’m not sure how it works, but I know one thing – Einstein was wrong,” the old man said. “See h
ow they looked at me? Did you see their eyes flash with disdain as I uttered those words? Who does this old, frail man think he is, eh? Clearly, if he says something like that, and clearly because Einstein was a genius, he must think himself as some kind of a genius as well. Yet obviously they don’t think thus is this case, so clearly my perceptions are irrelevant. But what is a genius? It’s someone whose signals are able to transform. Whose symbols, as they interact with the inhabitants of this world, no matter if those signals are spoken or written, are able to alter the way a collective of people, or at least the way someone, views the world. But, as time often reveals, they are all wrong, even when they are all right. And Einstein was wrong. He was wrong when he said nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Because something does. Consciousness. You experienced it. You recreated it. But what is consciousness other than all–encompassing and all–engrossing? My brain, and your brain, is just a way for that consciousness to experience – a field, if you will, where it can expand and grow, perceptualize and actualize, without even doing anything in the physical world, without moving any objects but itself, – it’s a field where that universal consciousness is molded into material fabric to perceive the material world around it. You see, in this sense, it can and it does travel faster than the speed of light, since because of its part in the all–encompassing reality, it does not travel at all, it has no speed, it simply is, it becomes, or becomes not. It is all, and yet it is nothing. So elusive we can’t even pinpoint it. It forges itself inside the physical, and de–manifests back into pure abstraction. What do you make of the fact that the inside each brain, there are more connections and pathways between nerve cells than there are atoms in the whole known universe? Can you even imagine such complexity?”
“Honestly,” Max said. “I always found that ‘fact’ highly paradoxical. It breaks down under the appliance of simple logic.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. If, as you say, we have more neuron–connections in our brains than there are particles in the known universe, than that statement is self–defeating. Since every pathway in itself is made up of particles, those too have to be added to the number of particles in the known universe. And since every pathway is made out of particles in itself, it means that the amount of particles in the brain alone is more than that of the combined number of neuron–pathways. So that statement is not only untrue, it is downright moronic.”
“That being said, I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Max admitted. “I know what I’m supposed to think, but what does the speed of consciousness have to do with anything?”
“You used that speed to reach beyond time, to find minds already gone.”
“You’re saying I reached into the back–log of the universe? How?”
“Your neurons know all, they are connected to the Allness, they are a part of it. It is your conditioned mind that doesn’t know this, that fools you into not knowing as it races between thought–creation activities. So like a blind man, you do not see what is right in front of you.”
“What made me see?”
“Who are you talking to?” Bruno asked him, with the other four people behind him equally confused.
“What do you mean?” Max turned. “To Leo, who else?”
“What?” Leah joined in.
Max turned back, confused to see the old man was gone. He turned around, then around again. He ceased to blink and stared ahead instead, as if he could materialize the man back. He tried to make sense of it all, could it all had been in my head? His mind screamed at this. It rejected even the idea of it. But if such was the case, what has he done instead? What did I say? In his wonderings, Max tried to remember, when the uncertainty he had seen in all things, the movements of thoughts and musings of the whole city’s worth of people crashed into his skull once more. The sounds and feelings robbed him of sight, and the pain behind his eyes struck a chord, then kept smashing it until, within his own head, nothing but darkness remained. Max started to grasp blindly around him, “Where is he?” he asked.
“Who?” Bruno questioned.
“Leonel!” Max shouted, more out of panic than frustration. “You all saw him, you talked to him. He lead us to the Mindforge!”
“To what?” Leah said, grabbing Max by the shoulders, his absent eyes searching for hers with futility. “You led us to inner–workings of the station, Max, there was no one by the name of Leonel.”
This is it then. I’m going insane. The only problem was, he didn’t feel insane, he had perhaps been seeing what an insane man might see, but he didn’t feel insane. He thought perhaps this must be what it truly means to be crazy then, to know you’re not and the same time being trapped with an incapability of realizing that you are.
The voices around him painted the world. Their sounds formed rough sketches of the walls, of the ceiling, the floor, even the people, and for a moment he even became hopeful, thinking his sight fizzled in and out of his perception and the intensity and emotions of each voice he heard echo–located the sights around him.
“Leah,” he cried and managed to grab her arms in both hands. “Tell me you’re real. Just tell me, please. Say you’re real, say you’re not a figment of my mind.”
“Of course I’m real,” she said, rubbing the back of her hand against his chin. “Doesn’t that feel real? What’s the matter?”
“My world is braking,” he said, wishing he could see her smile. In retrospect, however, he should have seen it coming, he realized. I should have listened, I should have…
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll help you pick up the pieces.” Her voice drew a smile, he remembered it and clung onto it. The memory of it will keep me sane, he hoped. “We’ll all help you,” she added, and was met with agreeing murmurs, he could hear Bruno stepping close.
“I have no idea how you did it, Proxy, but you saved us all,” Bruno said. “That thing is still out there, tho, and I have no small doubt it’s coming after us, we need to move.”
“Where should we go?” Mia asked the group, her afro–hair flailing like the mane of an insane witch. Vibrations of her voice swam through the strands and lid up in Max’s head. Shapes and furls of sound whirled by endlessly. The tumultuous streets kept exploding with disarray below them. Above him the crackling of metal chipped at his ears. Due to a missing piece in the building’s construction, the support struts above him caved in slowly, microscopically. Mind–body functions of those around him, the breathing, the beating, the pulsing and the convulsing, all found its way into his perceptions and formed multicolored vistas, making it obvious all objects and observers were mere variations of these same sound. On the quantum level, where pure quanta met in loops of endless possibility and where each was brought forth by the observer, each in turn a part of the observed–observer duality, the reality of the Oneness of all things dawned on him with a wave of realization. At times Max found it hard to distinguish what shapes were ‘things’ and what mere air. Ripples spread out of everything, disrupting the fluidity of bodies as much as it bounced of them or passed through them. Vibrational patters canceled each other out like shockwaves meeting, while others amplified each other, multiplied and coalesced, all inside his mind, yet all without. He suddenly smiled at this, watching the glow of life flooding along veins of everyone gathered, their rhythmic pulsing rippling outwards and expanding into All. Max nearly forgot he had been struck blind, instead he realized he had been blind all along.
“The chicken or the egg,” he laughed suddenly, almost maniacally, understanding the split of which came first to be nothing more than a fabrication, an inherent duality an average person experiences in himself. The mind, the body, just like the chicken or the egg, they both rise separately only inside the mind’s conceptual basis. Inside the mind’s rational state of none–can–be–without–the–other. But in reality, both rise equally, dependent upon one another even when the mind would make it seem otherwise. There is no chicken, there is no egg, there’s only the possibility of both and the
impossible task of trying to rationalize the irrational. He laughed at the meaningless of the question, realizing his laugh might sound utterly demented.
“Max?” Leah asked him, and he looked. Her eyes were flaring white, the orbs perceiving each vibration around her, forming different images that what Max was seeing, drawing them in her mind. He could see them all as thought they were his own.
“I’ve to find Him,” Max said. “I think I know where He is.”
CHAPTER 27
When The Time Comes, Are We Ever Ready?
His wanderings had taken Bolt to the Armory. It was an inappropriate name for an area with no weapons or armor. There were, however, an abundance of tools. Small devices of a square design, none of which now sat on benches where they had before, but lay strewn across the floor or stood haphazardly balanced from the edges of tables. Each tool was a trap for billions of nanites. Upon their release, the nano–tech would replicate endlessly, drawing power from the molecules of air itself. In their completed and fully established form, trillions of these now graced Bolt’s limbs in a form of a nano–fibered suit, the attire capable of withstanding environmental pressures and temperatures of insane variety. The suits, in fact, were what had saved most of the crew.
None of them remembered the fall.
Being one of them, Bolt recalled nothing but the dream and the moments before it hit, when his mind still felt like it was in possession of an ‘I’. Somehow, in the confusion and chaos as the ship was hurling towards the soil, lighting up as if the crew were inside a sun, Marius had found him. Through the tremors, he guided him to one of the compartments designed for just such improbabilities – for impact – with cushioned walls and handless made of rubber. Presenting Bolt with one of the tools, Marius had said, “Enable it, and don’t come out of this damn place until it’s over!” then slammed the airlock. Despite the cushioned walls and half–working inertia dampening, Bolt still managed to get a mild concussion.