“Holy shit!” Dan shouted, realizing the monstrosity was about to crush them.
“Speed up damn it!” Bolt urged Marius, who was driving the rover–train.
“We’re already at maximum velocity!” Marius shouted back, looking up the frontal view with some concern.
Dust and particles of debris long since turned to ash billowed around them within an ever–increasing twister, like a reminder that they too will soon be transformed into the same specks of insubstantiality. Ahead of them, their goal grew wider and larger, the structure of unimaginable power and light. The focus in Bolt’s thoughts was a vision of an eye of the world, cackling over their imminent demise.
The sudden surge of survival instinct encoded into every fiber of his genetic code felt overpowering, sweat poured down Bolt’s face, misting his visor. So close was the ship above them now, Bolt could almost feel it above his head, its engines scorched the earth around them. He became unsure if the interior too had heated up, or if his racing heart had done it. The dust walled around them, and as the ship touched down, three of the trains were crushed, the rest thrown into the air by the resulting air–pressure and thrust into the soil ahead.
They were thrown about, the suits managing to save most of their necks. “Bloody idiots,” Ia spat, panting and half–conscious, her helmet muffling her voice. “Of all the places to land on this forsaken planet…”
Dan stood up, holding his lower back again, whining, “At least now we know how–“
“Don’t,” Meridia said, “just don’t.”
“Everyone in one piece?” Bolt asked, standing up himself.
No one did any excessive yelling, shouting, or moaning in pain, so he guessed most got off with a few more bruises. Some lay unconscious. It came as somewhat as a surprise considering the whole set of rover–trains rolled over like a log tossed downhill.
In its thrashing, the train had landed on its side, and the view outside the ports allowed them to see the ship they had just dodged.
“Is it ours?” Dan asked.
“The design looks like something we would make,” Ia nodded.
“They must’ve picked up on the same distress pulse we did,” Marius added.
“This can’t be a coincidence,” Meridia pointed out. “What are the chances that a ship would show up exactly when we needed it?”
“I’d say the chances are pretty slim,” Dan said.
“Slim?” Meridia snorted, her face cringing as if Dan had said something even worse that what he usually does. “Imagine the wide ocean, then imagine a donut floating on it, then also imagine a turtle that comes up every thousand years to take a breath, its head just happening to poke through the said donut. Even then I don’t think you’ll be close to the amount of coincidentally this would require.”
“A synchronicity,” Bolt said.
“You’re saying we somehow willed this ship to come?” Ia asked.
“How would they know when needed to come?” Dan added.
“Consciousness is indeed a strange thing, isn’t it?” Bolt nodded. “If you believe in the model that it permeates all of space and existence, and that it is in fact the creative force behind all matter, and if you consider time as a non–leaner thing, then we could have sent our distress from the future, and they have unconsciously picked it up.”
“That’s a stretch if I ever heard one,” Meridia said, almost laughing.
“I think a simpler explanation can do” Ia said, the people around her jostling for position near the widows. “They simply followed the distress signal like we did. If you consider the fact they nearly crushed us, then I bet they don’t even know we’re here.”
“Hopefully they’re headed to the pillars,” said Marius. “We have to get out of here. And I know I’m not the only wondering what the in the hell could be making those lights…”
“I think all of us are,” Bolt nodded.
“Good,” Marius said. “Then let’s go, shall we?”
One by one, they climbed out of the rower–train after negotiating the side doors open.
“Anyone else puzzling over the fact humanity seems to have more than one ship out there? That there are others roaming the galaxy?” Ia asked no one in particular as she climbed up, with Bolt helping her down. The mood of everyone was sour, and none eparticularly wished to answer her.
“Was just about the say the same thing,” Marius said. “Seems we’ve been traveling the stars in droves.”
“Unaware of one another,” Ia added.
The remark made them all silent.
The skies outside were dark. Ahead of them the pillars of light drowned out even the sky. There were no clouds this near the pillars, however, and the air stood windless. The earth beneath their feet shook, but those tremblings too were diminished. Still, deep beneath them, the crust growled as though it were hungry. They didn’t wait for whoever had came to crawl out of the ship, they simply walked, and the lights grew…
They walked for hours, until, hungry and exhausted, the gold began to envelop them. Swimming inside the color Bolt could see brilliant plumes of white, lines racing outward and inward, flickering in and out of existence, reaching into his mind, implanting feelings of comfort, but also fear. The fear however, manifested in question. Questions of what they’ll find once they reach the center of it all. What they’ll find and of what’ll happen when they do. What could happen? What could possibly await them? He tried to settle his mind, to think of Sara and their baby, but none that helped. The dream of unknown proved itself as the prevailing force. He looked behind him, amazed by the fact that so many people could be so silent. Each looked about themselves, eyes staring, mouths gaping behind the helmet–grills. They continued to walk. And it was like walking into a sun.
CHAPTER 31
“Enlightenment Must Come Slowly, Otherwise It Would Overwhelm.”
Max followed the cat. Through the breathing corridors, through spaces that seemed to expand and contract at the same time, into lifts taking him and his group higher and higher into the upper strata of the spire. He had come to know the cat as illusionary. He accepted it, although he didn’t like it. It made him wonder what else he was imagining.
The cat itself remained the sole thing whose image never wavered. It remained constant, superimposed on the surfaces which throbbed and flickered with energies. Sometimes, while sitting at a juncture or before the next mag–lift, waiting for him, it would turn, revealing its single, unblinking eye. It sent shivers down Max’s spine. Sometimes its face seemed to possess a strange anthropomorphic quality. It took a few of its turns, a few looks, for Max to recognize his own features in them.
The walls of the vast inner–corridors, the open areas of park and the walkways which wound around and above them, the people, all wore colors of pulsing madness. Ripples spread out of bodies and interacted with others, membranes of thoughts formed around individuals, expanding outward time and time again, radiant and self–contained, like the expulsions of the sun.
“This place is amazing,” Leah said at one point. “I forgot just how huge it really is.”
“You’re not the only one,” Mia agreed, her afro flailing as she nodded. “Did you guys realize that, if you look at this place from orbit, it’s circumfuse is that of a small country?”
“Hah,” Falk snorted, “you seem to forget we spent the last few years on the station looking at the Earth from orbit.”
“Somehow feels so long ago now, doesn’t it?” Leah asked contemplatively.
No one answered.
“What happened to the station? I mean I saw the explosion, but what caused it?” Rob asked, slugging along on the edge of the group.
“You don’t want to know, kid,” Bruno said.
“Obviously he does,” Mia said. “Since he just asked.”
“Okay,” Bruno said, “you tell him then.”
“It exploded,” Mia told Robert.
“Why?”
“As far as I can tell, it was some k
ind of an attack,” Mia answered. “Don’t ask me by who tho, I’m not sure. Perhaps some–”
“We’re here,” Max said and stopped in front of an unassuming door. It looked just like any other, yet the path leading to it had been complex and mazy. Clearly someone wanted this passage to be a difficult thing to get to. Very few even went so far up the spire. It felt uncomfortable to be on its upper tip. Max felt the structure sway. The feeling wasn’t pervasive, but if one focused, it was possible to recognize the brain’s struggle to maintain balance.
“Is he in there? The Admin?” Bruno said, walking next to Max, looking up and down the metal port.
“Yes,” Max nodded. He willed the door open. The metal fell into the slid below it. A sense of retrocausality hit him. A sense of backward motion. He felt as though he could see his feet move before they did so, a shadow–self walking in less than lockstep with his own feet.
An inner light lived within the floor, a dull blue which left imprints of their boots in clear white. Time felt thick here. A shape stood in the middle of the empty room, waiting for them.
“I am here to take you up,” Taryn said.
“You bitch!” Mia lurched, but not daring to move closer.
“You could’ve just come for us, you didn’t have to blow up the station,” Max told her.
“A necessity, as is this,” she answered, and collapsed. A burst of tachyons ripped open Taryn’s skull, although only Max could see the event, only he could recognize the instant nature of the traveling particles. Her thought–patterns merged with Max’s and made a place for themselves inside his mind. His head snapped back like someone had hit him in the nose. He fell on his face. The two consciousness’ merged, influencing one–another in a strange loop of causality and thought–dimensions invisible even to a microscope. Taryn’s mind remained buried within him. Leah helped him back on his feet, and after what felt like a decade of confusion, Max began to hear a voice in his mind. He tried to see where it resided, where it nested in his skull, but found the act akin to trying to lick his own tongue, as by doing so you only feel your own effort to lick it.
>This is not for them,< Taryn spoke in his mind, >you alone will go to the most upper level.<
“No,” Max said, intentionally speaking out loud. “They go with me, they’ve come this far, they deserve to know the truth.”
A pause.
>Do not say I did not warn you.<
A golden stairway materialized in the middle of the room, coming to life from a waterfall of light particles that solidified into a gilded spiral which led them up. A palatable sense of dread streamed from all of those who followed, Rob collapsed.
>Do not,< Taryn said, in response to Max thinking about picking the kid up.
>He really wanted to see this,< Max thought.
>Unimportant,< Taryn whispered. >Walk.<
The upper room was dark, surrounded by a glass wall and a ceiling lost in shadow, the room was a source of constant emissions spreading in a wall of abstraction, as though a hydrogen explosion were taking place inside the room. Pulsing, dissipating in the atmosphere, pulsing, pulsing…
>Space–time itself is what makes the mind eternal, as it too is eternal.< Taryn said as she realized Max’s perplexment over the nature of what he was seeing. >The mind is a connection to higher–dimensions of existence, yet the inability of energy to be subjugated to destruction – but instead only reversed to a different energetic state – is what makes the mind able to dream of possible futures, the past. It sees all. It knows all. But it does not not know how to consciously tap into these regions. To call the mind a collection of particles is purely a necessity brought forth by the use and limitations of language. You know all this.<
Max said nothing, he knew didn’t need to. She could tell what he wanted to say before he even said it. Words became a hindrance.
Taryn burned inside his mind, his head began to throb, and he started to feel the early onset of a migraine. Dismissing the pain, blindly and without eyes, Max gazed upon the four individuals arranged into a circle, sitting upon thrones, hunched and ancient–looking. Their bodies appeared inactive, yet their minds were flames, blazing and shifting, each a nebula spreading outwards from a radiant center.
“Who are these?” Leah asked, closing the distance between her and the motionless men. Max too moved closer. Their faces reminded him of someone, and it was only when he leaned closer, that a memory awoke in him and shook him to the core.
He remembered the time he killed his own father.
***
Seawater reached to his knees. Clear in the early morning, it raveled pebbles and fish hiding below rocks, even an occasional crab, sidestepping in the low–tide, searching for things to devour. The sky was clear, seagulls yelled and dived into the ocean ahead, or relaxed upon the water. He felt happy.
The Mediterranean air began to blow, awaking the early–morning waters. His father’s voice suddenly made him stiffen as he shouted, framed by the main doorway to the large stone villa upon the hill behind Max.
“Get in here! You have to study,” his father demanded.
It made him angry. He couldn’t understand why he needed to comprehend everything, know everything. He wished to simply play, to swim and be free. The voice came back.
“Well?”
“I’m coming!” Max shouted back.
It was the first time something else awoke within him. Anger seemed to fuel it, anger and a feeling he couldn’t quite place. Despite this… anger, Max turned and went up the slope, the warm rocks only further serving to awaken his desire to stay outside, to bask in the beauty of the world. He wanted to cast out the feelings he felt. He loved his father, even if sometimes he wished he wasn’t there. Despite the effort, each step towards the villa managed to make him angrier.
“You should have told me you woke up, we could have gotten an early start,” his father said, enthusiastically.
“Why? I don’t wanna,” Max whined. “Let’s go take the boat, you said we’ll go fishing.”
“Soon, don’t you want to continue our studies? String theory isn’t going to help you later if you don’t understand it.”
“But why me? Why do I have to understand it?”
“You were made for this,” his father claimed.
That was what had always aggravated Max the most. The way he would say he was ‘made’, the word always come out of the man’s lips so matter–of–factly. It always reminded Max his father wasn’t really his father. He was just some man, bending him to his will, controlling him. Suddenly he didn’t care that all this, all the studying and learning was, as his father said, ‘for your own good’, a flash of hate rolled through him.
>Do it,< a voice hissed within him. >Destroy him.<
His consciousness shifted. Max raised his finger, pointed it at the man’s forehead. A flash of shock rolled past the man’s face as he realized what Max was doing, what he was about to do. His fathered managed a shout. A single syllable of objection, before he burst apart, dissipating into the wind as though he had never existed.
***
The revelation brought him to his knees. He sobbed into his hands, then heard a voice, a female voice, lacking even a shred of empathy. “Are you quite done?” it asked him.
He looked up. The people around him stood frozen, their eyelids moving franticly, wide with terror. Leah’s hand stood inches from where she tried to touch one of the men sitting upon their thrones.
“You’re him aren’t you? You’re the one I’ve been searching, the Admin.”
“Don’t be stupid, boy,” the female said. “It comes as no surprise you still don’t understand anything. Perhaps it’s even better that way.”
In flashes of recollection, he recognized the voice. She never liked my name, he realized.
“Of course I didn’t,” the woman said, reading his thoughts.
“Why?”
“It portrays none of the greatness for which your mind was forged. It is so… terrestrial
.”
Despite what he had just heard, despite who this woman was, only one thing remained in his heart. He had to bring them back.
“Which one of these is the Admin? Is it him?” Max asked, moving closer to the man which looked the most worn out, the oldest.
“It’s you. It’s always been you.”
***
The promise of what they would find in the center of the energetic ejections drove them. It propelled their feet, almost made them run despite their exhaustion and thirst. No one spoke.
Eyes remained wide. They were like children captivated by things they didn’t understand but wanted to with all their being.
Warm, welcoming light enveloped them from all directions, producing sounds that passed through their minds in soothing patterns of pressure changes.
They walked below what, from a distance, looked like metal, but now resembled impossibly dark glass which soaked in illumination like a sponge might water.
Every part of the ribbed, mountainous structure stood kilometers in height and width, the passages that led into the inner workings of it equally far apart, if not more. From so close, Bolt could no longer tell where the two pillars of light separated, he was unable to see where they split in two above him. Everything gleamed in an endless spire of speeding particles. Some of them shone with a silver glow, others orange, yet all were twisting and dancing around them, all of them over a backdrop of the most brilliant gold Bolt had ever seen.
The perception of time fled from him at some point and Bolt could not when exactly it happened. He figured it had been a gradual process that had accelerated with their approach. Suspicions of what they might find ran high, all of them had their own ideas, yet none voiced them. The awe of the magnificence robbed them of words. Bolt knew they would never see anything like it again.
And then Bolt saw it, a throne of gold outshining everything else, even when such a thing seemed impossible. Whips of white lashed out around it, and while they still remained far enough not to see it with clearly, Bolt knew who sat there. He thought perhaps he knew all along. His eyes struggled to penetrate the brightness. Slowly, he began to recognize a silhouette of a living, breathing, immobile figure. They neared the silent God. The golden shape had its head hunched down as if asleep – or in deep thought. Bolt’s heart pounded in his chest, his every nerve pulsed and the significance of the unfolding event dried up his mouth, his teeth felt hot. He could see the movements of hundreds around him stiffen and come to a halt.