***
Max fought through the pain. His sockets bleed, his hands, holding him up and spasming with discomfort, shook. Not only the sockets seemed to hurt, but his entire face, his head, he could see the pain leaping out of him, not just within the blood, but as a presence of agitated vibration, maiming the air black around him as though it were heavy. He could hear Leah next to him, saying something which came incoherent, rambling. Max wanted to close his eyelids, but even when so trying, he could feel the blood pooling behind them, he could smell it streaming through his sinuses and down his face. The pain made him cry, and that in turn made it even worse. The whole process lasted until something clicked inside his mind. It seemed to happen suddenly and with a ferocious strength Max could not deny. He saw his eyeballs, the froth of their organic matter, the mirage nature of them and how the two organs have lied to him all his life. They had lied about the nature of reality, they lied about the illusion of matter, they had even lied about such a seemly obvious thing as the air being invisible. He wanted this to happen differently, in his meditations perhaps, yet suddenly, he was enlightened. A calmness passed through him, and the pain became less biting. Max almost laughed at it all. At the beings around him and their obsessions, none of which were permanent or lasting. He even laughed at their thoughts which they believed, like the air around them, were invisible, perhaps even non–existent outside of their skulls. He could see them think, the golden lines of their thoughts spiraling out of them, affecting others, melding into the collective ocean of unconscious. When will they wake up? Perhaps like him, they would need a profound shock equal to their own eyes being pulled out of their sockets. Max didn’t like the idea. Having experienced that very shock, he realized he would need to find a way to do it.
“Your path ends here, citizen,” the Warden said, the voice of him like cement melding Max with reality.
“You’re wrong,” Max said. “My path has just begun.” The faces of the three machines before him became patterns of light. The cogs within turned and twisted, with each contraption visible and framed by silver expressions of photonic movement. Layers of inner material constantly folded and enfolded within this new perceived reality. The lights following a rhythmic pulse, loops wherein the metal itself and the silver outlines of it pulsed outwards and reformed into nothing, then pulsed again. Max willed one of the cogs to stop and stood up. The people around him saw him and his group disappear before their eyes, yet, as usual, thought nothing of it. Nor did they think of the fact that they were walking around a ten meter area which appeared empty, empty but the white tiles and the light bouncing of them.
“Intriguing,” Max said under his breath. “Metal minds, who would have thought,” he said to his assailant.
The Wardens stopped like frozen. They never moved again.
“Max! You okay?” Leah touched his hand. He smiled at the absurdity of her question. “What… Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just… your face just makes me smile,” Max said, smiling again as she blushed and the air visually heated around her face.
Max walked to the unconscious Rob, picking him up, cradling him in his arms like a babe. The workings of the kid’s mind fascinated him, and for what felt like a long while, Max simply observed the throbbing of it. Pathways formed within and light streamed upon them, dancing in Rob’s head like wisps emerging out of nothingness then disappearing into themselves again, crawling over the synapses like ants within an antfarm. Slowly, Robert’s eyes half–opened.
“Why are you here?” Rob asked.
“I made a choice.”
“What choice? Why?”
“On a planet that increasingly feels like a prison, the only intelligent thought I could think of was to escape. Now I see I must change it.”
“Are you a God?” Rob asked him.
The question made Max laugh.
“No.”
“A saint?”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am awake.”
CHAPTER 29
The Universe Is Within
The walls bled. The sticky mucus was everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling, it ran down corridors and it mired about their feet. The dead lay embalmed within it, like insects in amber.
“The hell’s up with this place?” Bolt asked Ia next to him, shaken, hoping for an answer. The group, now numbering in a few hundred behind them, trudging over the slime, each careful in their movements over the visually slippery, yet sticky substance.
“Dyekart told me once,” Ia said. “That this ship isn’t real. I never really understood what he meant. But I think Sol kept it all together. Supposedly this vessel isn’t just a thing of material, but her consciousness given form, expanding around us like a brain. And now that she’s gone… now… it’s decaying, like her body, like the bodies about us, putrid and–”
“That’s still doesn’t explain what we saw on the bridge,” Marius said. “What could make those things walk, what could manifest the strange animals?”
“It’s her brain,” said Ia. “Her consciousness is no more. Perhaps in its departure, it manifested in forms that she may have thought about when she could still think of how the decay of it might look like.”
“Seriously?” Marius asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” Ia said. “Look around you, what other explanation fits it more?”
“Whatever the case, we need to send a distress signal,” Marius advised. “Then fly out of here.”
“Fly?” Bolt asked.
“In a sense,” Marius nodded. “There’re still vehicles that we can use, in the upper hangar, we used them for planetary explorations and whatnot. If the mag–locks held in the crash and the machines didn’t get thrust about, we could use them. Altho how we’ll get them out here is quite another matter.”
“Do we have weapons? Explosives?” Bolt asked.
“Some,” Marius nodded.
“Then we’ll blast our way out. Where can we send a signal?”
“The only one who could do it was Sol,” Marius said. “Now that she’s gone, the only other way is on the bridge itself, the main console keeps reserve power for this no matter what happens, hopefully the ‘no matter what’ applies to this situation as well.”
”I’ll got send the beacon then,” Bolt said. “The rest of you go to the hangar and wait for me there, blast open to the other side.”
“You’ll go alone?” Ia asked. “Why?”
“None of you need to endanger yourself over this,” Bolt said. He knew it sounded stupid, but also knew he needed privacy for what he was planning to do. “I’ll do it, don’t worry.”
“As you say,” Marius frowned.
***
The main bridge was just as he and Marius had left it. The gate had remained stuck and the floors crawled with creatures who may have considered the slime they rolled in as a kind of bliss. The strange and half–decayed beings surrounding the central puss–mound ignored Bolt completely, stuck in their apparent reverence for the pile of filth and its light. Bolt moved closer, futilely careful not to step on any of the slugs. The task proved impossible and they squashed under his feet.
Lights within the main bridge were covered by slime, and the only illumination provided was by the growth in the middle. The blue bioluminescence seemed to flicker almost unnoticeably within the puss, as though the mound was breathing light. Bolt’s feet adopted an even quieter style of movement as he approached the men standing around the heap. Upon looking at them, he realized he really could not tell whether he was looking at a man or a woman. They were all naked. Some, however, still had bits of nano–fabric hanging off their shoulders or around their necks like decaying necklaces. Their sexual organs were not there. Their stomachs hung, bloated, all of them had flaps of skin where their breasts should be. The things were even more discussing up close. Bolt could smell them too, they rank like the corpse of an animal. None of them acknowledged him as he we
nt past. Bolt wondered if they were even aware of anything at all. Their throats continued to emit an eerie sound, an annoying siren on the edge of hearing. By this he figured something must still reside in those skulls. Something more than just the appreciation for the light in which they basked. He didn’t stick around to try and find out what that might be.
He ascended the set of wide stairs leading to a podium where the central console was located. It too was covered in translucent filth, as thought someone had piled up a thick layer of yellow spider webs on top of it. A faint light managed to shine through. To some extent, the console was still active. Bolt wasn’t as surprised by this now that he knew what the ship was, or had been. He reason that, having predicted what would happen should a disaster befall the vessel, Sol had most likely made a conscious effort to make the consoles with increased durability in mind. She had to postulate that the crew might want to use them. What perplexed him, however, was where the power came from. He realized a plasma core existed somewhere on the ship, an area he visited but once – one vast and throbbing with condensed power. To that extent, he was impressed it could still keep some of the important functions of the ship active.
Approaching the console, it immediately recognized him and opened a menu in his mind’s eye. The image of it came incoherent, fuzzy. Bolt selected the option for a distress–call transmission, and checked the power levels still available. They would have to do for what he wanted. Bolt sent the distress pulse, then dialed a set of numbers. The small scale of the transmitted data, namely his voice and holographic image, reached out through Null and traveled at infinite speed. The mechanism of the console linked with his conscious intentions and projected them onto his wife’s monitor – on the edge of his home galaxy.
“Yes?” She looked up from her newborn’s face and into the hologram. Her eyes widened. “Akram? Oh my God, where are you!?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m sorry, Sara, I shouldn’t have left you.”
She moved closer to him and he could tell she was walking, the hologram of her appearing with a clarity surprising even to him. To an extent, and for a moment, his brain fooled him. It fooled him so utterly and completely, Bolt could have sworn she was there. He could smell her. Felt like he could touch her.
“I tried to understand,” she said. “And I think I do, you’ll come back though, won’t you?”
“I must,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” she agreed, smiling, happy to see his face even when that face was a holographic image. “And look what I made,” she grinned, holding out her baby as if it were a cake, presenting it to him. “Look what we made.”
Bolt moved to her side as she cradled the babe in her arms again, he could see the wonder in its eyes. The amazement at the holographic lights dancing around it. It giggled, then made an ‘o’ with its mouth as Bolt moved a finger to try and brush it against its cheek. His heart sunk as the finger went through the image.
“Akram,” his wife said in a half–whisper, and he knew what she’ll say next. “What’s wrong? I can tell something’s not right over there.”
“The ship, it’s gone,” he said bitterly. “Have you named him yet?”
“What!” Sara jumped. “How will you get back?” she asked, ignoring his other question.
“We’ll find a way, I promise. There’s nothing that can hold me here. I will chase you over the stars!”
“You hear that, Chase?” she said, looking down at the baby.
“That’s how you’ll name him?” Bolt asked, realizing the image had begun to lose its consistency, fizzling out of focus.
“So you don’t forget. So you’ll never forget,” Sara said.
***
The first explosion they charged up tore through the ship in a tidal wave. None of them had been prepared for the shocks that rolled over what was left of the vessel. Most of the people were thrown of their feet, reopening wounds or simply knocked unconscious. The slime wobbled under their feet, dripping from the ceiling at an increased, agitated rate.
They had managed to direct the explosion directly into the wall. One had been enough to punch a hole through the outer layers. Through those layers, however, it spread a concussive reverberation which shook everything and everyone. The inner–lights of the walls went out, returning moments after at an slither luminosity, a luminosity which could hardly still be said to exist at all.
The explosion shredded its way to the outside, and the warm air instantly spread into the station. Light shone through the opening, and after almost an hour of preparations, they were ready to take off with a total of nine, almost train–sized land–rovers.
“It’s good we have actual scientists on board,” Marius joked. “Otherwise I suspect this might have gone very badly for us.”
“I didn’t find the outcome particularly good,” Dan said, a fat man of quick laughter and fool’s tricks, standing in the midst of people looking anxious and confused, defeated almost. Marius was certain the blubber was what had saved him in the crash. Dan didn’t find much to laugh about now, however, he held his lower back as he stood back up and looked at Ia. “This couldn’t have been predicted? The shocks?”
“Not to this extent, no,” she answered. “None of us knew the current viscosity, or should I say solidity of the outer layers.”
“I guess now we know what a piece of crap feels like inside a farting ass,” Dan laughed. He was the only one.
CHAPTER 30
Into The Sun
The world below them was broken. The tectonic plates had been transmuted into a singular plane of crater–covered landscape. Huge cracks in the world reached to the other side it seemed, and as the gravitational forces worked to rebind what had been torn apart, the world constantly rattled, the enormous moon–sized chunks crashing and grinding against each other. Sounds of earth–thunder were constant. Bolt heard them even through the thick hull–plating of the rovers. An impression as though he were in a tunnel below a train station where all of its trains were released at the same time, each of them infinitely long and always moving, prevailed in his mind. Every survivor held tightly against the constant shaking of the elongated rover.
They navigated over the tops of the continental–sized craters, always fearful of cracks which from a distance appeared minute, but up close looked like they reached to the very core of the planet. In places of increased subterranean activity, magma oozed out as two plates were squeezed together, or shot out in the distance, spitting high into the ash–rich air.
Bolt, as well as the rest of them, knew where they needed to be. Where they needed to go. One object, over the far horizon, a sole familiarity on an alien world, was what they followed. What they raced towards. It was their goal, even though none of them had a clue of what it might actually be. The objects were two ribbons of light, pillars even, rays of golden energy, thick and moving, flowing like a sky–river and forming half a figure eight, its upper half lost in the churning skies.
Upon coming closer, the size of the lights only grew, and Bolt began to notice a multitude of smaller energy ripples and waves permeating outward and away in vectors of spectacularly spiraling flames. He began to see the source of the energy within a few hours of speeding over the wasteland. A dark and hollow, teardrop–shaped structure sat in the middle, made out of similarly light–fashioned ribbons of solid material. The lines of the structure twisted and turned on each other, forming a cage, like skeletal remains of a construction that might have once been solid, tear–shaped. Its upper tips reached out and away, each ending in a spike disappearing into the light. It wasn’t until they moved closer that Bolt realized just how massive the construction was.
After reaching a certain height, the pillars of light became more as one in their vastness, growing out of the central light, shifting contently as if alive and imbued with purpose. Something else waited inside the tear–drop structure.
A silence of the grave took over everyone, the display of awesome brilliance and its unknow
n purpose leaving them speechless. They had finally gotten what they searched for – a sign of superior life on an alien world. At length, and quite unexpectedly, Meridia, a scientist and genius–mathematician, one who calculated exactly how much explosive they would need to puncture through the confides of the ship, doing it all in her head, spoke. Her tone told of excitement, barely heard over the sounds of constant humming around them, increasing as they neared the great edifice of light.
“Anyone else feel like their lives had been a constant struggle to get to this very place?”
Only a few spoke, only a few even heard her. But those who did, agreed. Bolt kept silent, he couldn’t look away from the light. Its warmness splashed upon his face, like that of the early–morning sun.
Suddenly, in between them and the golden spire, the sky grew restless, foreboding. Sparks which looked small over the distance but were in fact several kilometers in length spread like roots over the air. Monstrous sounds of rending iron – as if the sky itself were vomiting – screamed through the air and shook the air. Whatever was happening, the sky resisted it, becoming even thicker where the center of the phenomena appeared to be. Blasts of red and blue–colored nebulosity erupted within the storm. Webs of lightning strikes lunged outward into the surrounding atmosphere. Within the cloudcover, lights flashed, explosions seemed to be taking place within the hidden reaches of the haze. The first segments of the atmosphere began to break apart, revealing behind them a solid mass which slowly grew and spread until it burst out from the storm with the supremacy of a vast structure rising from an ocean in the sky. The more of it emerged from the clouds, the more it looked like a colossal city growing, or rather expelling itself from beyond the heavens. A giant cog nested in the middle of the ship’s belly. A crudely carved eye had been worked into the metal in a fashion portraying the duality of half machine half flesh of the Transhuman. The quad engines roared below it, their blinding power keeping the vessel afloat as it descended down on top of their heads.