The collective stopped before the throne of golden light, each of them lost for words, unable to figure out how to proceed.
At length, Ia alone worked up the courage and stepped even closer, the hunched figure of the man imposing even while seated. The thick, raven strands of the man’s hair were as dark the deepest void. He appeared dressed in golden light, the strands of it moving in a manner of sloshing liquid about him. Bolt’s heart skipped a beat as Ia extended her armored hand towards the figure, almost touching the face. A hand snatched up and grabbed Ia’s wrist with such speed the movement of it could not even be traced. The eyes of the silent God opened, glistening like jewels of obsidian. His features were sharp, his eyes pleasant, stern above a thin nose. Full yet sharp–looking, the lips moved only slightly, forming a hint of a smile.
The God’s melodic voice shook their knees, his pleasant tone invigorating them with youth, he let go of Ia’s hand. “You have come.”
Bolt moved closer, thinking he could recognize the face.
“Max?” he asked, wide–eyed. “The hell you doing here!”
“I am not here, not truly,” Max answered.
“Who’s Max?” Ia asked.
“The Proxy.”
“This is the Proxy?” Marius asked, moving closer, his fear slowly dissipating. The multitude about them tried to bunch up around to see the figure, although all could hear him speak.
“I came here to help,” Max said.
“Who?” Bolt asked.
“Help who?” Ia also said.
“The one who will save us all, I think you met him already,” Max smiled.
“Why does he need your help? What are you doing?”
“Building his new fortress in the material world, the place where he shall wait.”
“What?” Marius asked confused.
“Wait for what?” Bolt asked.
“You selflessly came here solely to help this entity?” Marius asked.
“As I have said, I am not truly here, yet I truly am.”
“I don’t understand,” Marius admitted.
“I am all. Recognize this as your own nature. Abandon the fear, abandon the terror you spill. Let your minds rest beyond blood and bone. Look from a place of comprehension. Your minds are conduits, each as vast as the universe. Rest in this. Rest in the brilliant light of existence, the only divine light you shall ever see.”
Explosions split the sky. Electric serpents and lights of gold illuminated the darkness, shining even through the gold around them, gold which slowly began to vanish. The landscape spat out mountains of fire and licked the sky. The stars fizzed and flickered, bathing the heavens in blazing illumination. The air hummed. The multitude turned their heads as the distant suns’ rays rolled over the landscape and revealed its majestic plains. Clouds of lingering ash burned away in the blare and moved aside to avoid the apparent touch of elucidation.
“The planet is turning,” Marius said, breaking the spell of silence.
“What are you doing?” Bolt asked Max.
“Look and you shall see.”
Bolt felt like he had heard those words before. Look. See. They brought unpleasant sensations.
To their distant left, where the sun began to peek around the horizon, its corona throwing out tails of angry light, the soil rose and fell off a construct made into what looked like a ball of pure, smooth mercury. The size of a moon, the object burst out of the soil, with chunks the size of islands flying away from it as though from a volcanic eruption. The object didn’t stop for a second. It moved up through the atmosphere, braking the gravitational barrier of the shattered planet and disappeared into the darkness of space.
Picking herself up, Ia’s voice trembled. “What the fuck was that?”
“A sign that it is time for me to leave this world. You have just witnessed what you have heard the last person to behold this world say. Indeed, from their ashes, a new race will rise, what you saw was its beginning.”
CHAPTER 32
Tell Me Your Secrets
“Impossible!” Max said. “I would never have killed my own family, my own flesh and blood, the sole things which always made me happy. I would never!”
“You were never meant to have a family,” the woman said. “You realized this when you were young, and it tore you inside. Split you into two. Your family never existed. They were fabrication of your mind, illusions you made for yourself to cope with the responsibilities of who you are.”
“No! They were real,” Max insisted. “I felt them, I saw my wife giving birth to them.”
“All of that was in your own projections, your own desires. They were never real. They never existed.”
Max’s world spun, his vision darkened, a pit of despair gaped open, he felt the thing which had made him kill awaken.
“The byproduct of your creation, a thing we didn’t expect, a thing we didn’t see until it was too late, was that you are two people trapped in one brain. You are a schizophrenic, Admin. Little of the world of Max was ever real, although I see you did manage to make some friends in the end of things.”
“I…” his words caught in his throat. “Why are you here?”
“I’m here to show you the things you don’t have, what you never had, so you would stop searching for them,” she said.
“But they had lives of their own, they had smiles, they–“
“So do the people in dreams,” the woman interrupted. “Yet that makes them no more real than any of your fabrications.”
“You’re lying to me!” Max pressed.
The woman remained calm. “The part of you that is the Admin is stronger that you think. It controls you, it lets you stay in your illusion because by doing so, it always gets what it wants. It always does what it was made to do. Why do you think you went around the globe preventing new technologies from arising?”
“I don’t… I don’t know, I never–“
“You never thought about it? Why do you think that is? Because if you did, you would recognize what you are actually doing. You don’t create much, you take, you steal, and you make the people you steal it from forget they ever made it. You take that technology, and you pour it into your own company, Grey–Tech, a place where you intend to unify everything. The Admin knows this, has a vision, you on the other hand, you are lost in your visions.”
“I’m not sure what made you spare this girl,” she said, moving close to Leah. The girl’s eyes followed the shadowed face of the female as she touched her hair, rolled it around in her fingers. “Perhaps it was her face, does it remind you of your wife? Or should I say your illusionary wife?”
Max blinked. He realized the truth. Leah’s did remind his of his wife, she was his wife. The faces were identical. How could he have not noticed it before?
“A part of your Max persona, however, is problematic. In its need to oppose the Admin, it seems to have branched out onto some planet in the distance, what it’s doing I know not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that only a part of the consciousness of Max is in you, that’s why it’s so weak, so easy to control, even while the Admin manages to create the illusion that Max is in control. And if I interpreted the events which you webbed out correctly, you have sent your only real friend to murder it. To kill this part of yourself…”
“Help me!” Max pleaded, no longer able to contain the despair taking root in him.
“There is nothing I can do,” the woman said. “You have orchestrated all of this, you have been killing since you crashed onto this planet, and those deeds have split you in two. What am I to do? You are the one who tries to forget, yet the only one who knows it all is the real you.”
“I can bring them back,” he claimed, “I will find a way to bring them back, I’ll be together with my family again. I can bring–”
“You cannot,” said the woman. “They exist only in your mind, where would you find someone who can pluck them out of your thoughts and create them in reality? W
here? Tell me!” He shrunk away from the woman and her dwindling patience, regressing slowly into a state where he knew he would self–implode. Max wished to fight the feeling, but the walls themselves felt as though pressing in on him, constricting him, crushing him.
“I will find such a person!” he wowed.
***
“I need a body,” Max said, looking at Bolt.
“What?”
“I need a body to leave this place.”
“Yea… thanks but, I think we’re all pretty fond of our bodies,” Ia said.
They all felt it, a strange pressure which the eyes of the Proxy projected. The two orbs scanned them, choosing which one of them to claim.
The golden figure lunged at Bolt. It spat into him, over him, above him, all about him. Before it settled and merged the two patterns of vibration, pushing Bolt out, killing him, Ia managed to pull and jerk him back. Bolt fell on his back, coughing and wrenching as he tried to stand up.
“The fuck!” he spat, but the figure became indistinct, mist as it floated towards him, into him. He felt the raw power of its intent, realizing he had felt it before, realized a part of it had taken him before, to show him things. It now became intent on claiming a vessel it needed to branch out from the Admin and experience the world as more than pure thought capable of molding others, but not itself.
A dream flashed before Bolt’s mind, a recollection. It went by in seconds, and only a sentence stayed in his mind. “We were never friends.”
He realized what it all meant. What he came here to do, what fate he needed to turn – his own. He saw Max, their times spent together, their shared laughs. This was not his friend, this was a part of him he never knew and which never knew him. Bolt began to resist the merge, his jaw tightening, his teeth almost cracking with pressure as he rejected the will, the hydraulic constriction squeezing into his mind. He felt his thoughts restructuring, his sensations of self trailing out of him, his memories escaping. He would not allow it to happen. Having lost his memories once, having them taken, Bolt knew what they meant to him. They were what made him, what made the ‘I’ – they made him into a being of purpose even when it seemed that, in life, there was none. A flash of insight spun around his sense of memory, and he remembered Max trying to teach him about the nature of existence and peace. He remembered him quoting a saying which altered everything. With a smile on his face and a coffee in his hand, looking out from their balcony, Max had said, “Only through love are hatreds of this world pacified. This is the eternal law.”
Back then, the saying had sounded so strange, so feminine, so cliché. But the truth of it had resonated. Hate only spawns more hate.
Bolt pictured holding his wife, cradling Chase together with her in a perfect unity of warmness and tranquility. He remembered himself and saw the infinite in the finite. The All. All things in one, all oneness in no thing. Separation of thought and action became an illusion of the most subtle nature, nonexistent in its core, for he knew thought is action, and action is thought. His mind was but one wave upon an infinite ocean – an ocean of infinite waves – none separate from the other but in the most illusory sense. Yet that illusion grounded him and he recognized his own mind in it. He felt his own consciousness simply existing – there to be his own. And seeing this, the mind imposing upon him began to recede. Bolt’s own will and his acceptance that his mind was his, that his thoughts were his and that his memories were real, with this, he expelled the last of what threatened to assail him. Absorbed in a super–conscious state and through the warmness of his own thoughts towards others, especially those he loved most, Bolt realized Nirvana, the unsurpassed security. He laughed at the attempts of the Proxy to brake him and, in a display of mind over matter shocking in its brilliance to all who witnessed it, made the unreality of the Proxy devour itself.
“Bolt?” Ia asked him as people bunched up around him, amazed and shocked what for them had only lasted a few moments, moments in which Bolt had opened all of his will. He couldn’t speak. The world was falling apart and his mind was beginning to tear itself from the mental strain he had just undergone. He realized he had just killed his best friend. The revelation made him belch. Yet nothing came out. On his knees, holding himself up by the palms of his hands, he did this until he realized that, what he had just destroyed wasn’t Max, he was still alive. He murdered some strange astral projection of him, some hologram. He needed to get back.
Bolt realized the grip on his unconscious mind had been greater than he ever knew. With painful clarity he saw that, despite yelling the fact that he would never kill him, yelling almost into the face of the image which came to him in his dreams, the image had been right, he would and has killed the man he was sent out to kill.
“This world is dying,” he said, the voice of Adras imposing itself over his own. “Now truly dying. We need to get to the ship.”
With the obvious, no one could disagree.
***
“Who are these four?” Max asked looking down the men sitting upon their thrones.
“You made them to keep the will of the Admin at bay,” said the woman. “They are normal men who you endowed with mind–altering implants, all in order for you to live in your illusions. How much more proof do you need? See how you forget the terrible things you do?”
Max sunk into his own brain. He still felt like he could control things – excite objects to do what he wanted. But there was still something more important he had to do. A portal manifested out of his will and stepped into the reality beside him. Within the wormhole, the visage of Europa glistened with clarity. He turned to Leah, to the rest of them, feeling a sense of departure. An indefinable something clawed from a crater in his mind, hurling itself upward, hungering to be free. He realized a part of him, somewhere out there, had died, and the persona he wore began to fade away like a melting mask. He felt the hunger whose will to dominate could no longer be sated. He released the grip on the four of them and turned to Leah.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I will forget you, I’ll make myself forget. It’s the only way.”
“Don’t,” she said. He could see how desperately she tried to understand. “I’ll free you someday,” Leah vowed, a tear flowed down her face. He brushed it off with his thumb. “My research will free you, I know it,” she said. “Somehow, I can feel it.”
Max smiled. The last smile that would ever grace his lips.
He felt like someone had suddenly stabbed him in the forehead, a feeling which came to him as though from some distant shore. The group fled into the portal, some of them looking back, others running with haste, eager to free themselves from the madness.
And who wouldn’t? He thought. After seeing a God and realizing that He was utterly mad? They realized they had seen one of His many faces, and for a time it seemed to have loved them, while the other, just as real, was nothing like the first… His last thought was a gladness to have seen them escape.
The portal vanished, and the Admin took over completely. Even the voice with which Max had spoken before changed. Yet a peck of him remained. It would be his turn now to subtly influence the other. In this dance, the two sides of the coin existed, performing some cosmic spiral of conscious and unconscious intent. The only thought upon the mind of the Admin which came, or rather, had remained of Max, was that what had driven him all along, a single thing which, for a time, had made the world beautiful with its promise. I can bring them back.
He would. Someday, he would. Or would find someone who could.
The Administrator looked at the woman. “Thank you,” he said, and raised his finger. “I will cherish your memory.”
The woman exploded into mist.
“Or perhaps not.”
>What now?< Taryn asked.
>This world is mentally blinded. I shall free it, one way or another.<
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