Focusing his will, searing into the man’s eyes, Max bent his wishes and saw them slither out of his skull in a compilation of rolling waves and zodiacs, each pattern somehow defying the visual spectrum of color and flaying bits of skin off the man’s forehead. Flecks of tissue were razed clean or simply melted away like wax, staining the couch. A stench of burning hair shot hot on his face.
>Tell me what you know!<
The man was already too far gone, and the added torment of Max’s will parading inside a brain whose consistency had turned to that of gel did little to help the doc stay alive. Still, Max kept pushing, lost in the screaming fires of delirium–rage, fires which he had deprived of nurture and neglected to expel or get rid of in some way that wasn’t destructive, fires which now, by allowing them to take him, became the equivalent of a blaze poured with gasoline. They awoke a deep sense of paranoia in him. A fear of death. The implant is killing me, he decided.
In that lost moment of rage and madness it seemed nothing could hold him back.
Yet all it took was a sound, a simple, small sound. A sound he hadn’t expected. The cat he had taken home meowed desperately, pawing at his knees, instinctively knowing someone it liked was doing something bad, an act any sane person would regret once the rage subsided and the fires cooled. And for some reason, that had registered. Not Bolt collapsing, nor Ty’s skin burning away before the might of Max’s psychic will, but a cat, a being seemingly immune to all his mental expulsions had managed to ground him and bring him back to his senses. Max stared into its eyes. They were dead. Why are they so dead and frozen? They blinked, and in its eyes he suddenly saw the eyes of Ty, the man’s face imprinted over the animal’s like an afterimage. They blinked again and, in a moment between moments, they revealed the death of a world.
***
The world itself seemed to blink.
And when its gaze opened and the time came for Max to watch it die, he realized nothing could have prepared him for the spectacle of it. Brown and dark–grey flakes of churning ash battered his eyes as the residue of an entire species raked across the points of the compass. A sharp reek latched itself on his every breath.
Another shape stood beside him, veiled as if hiding inside the corners of his sight. Max tried to turn his head and look at the shape beside him, but couldn’t, as though in no control over his own movements.
His eyes stared ahead. They overlooked a massive crater, its far edge beyond the distant horizon, its surface littered with slabs raised into mountains. A rumble of war raged below, choking the air with all the vapors of its chaos.
Inside the crater stood a last force. A march of millions, their forms disappearing as they rushed towards open fire.
In their moments of death, each soldier became a red nimbus in the far reaches below, a form disappearing under the enemy’s suppressive onslaught. Slowly, each death contributed to the sea of fallen, all of them constantly replaced by the dwindling elements from behind.
A dark and ominous mass loomed above the world–crater, a continent in the sky. Under it, as if birthed from fire itself, an endless stream of shapes spawned in groups numbering in the tens of thousands, their rumbling, trampling shapes billowing smoke. Below the silent derelict, an army of the homeworld slowly lay scattered, cleaved in their futile paths, their weapons seemly no deadlier than spit. Any meager damage the homeworld army managed to inflict upon the un–dying shapes would cause them to simply reanimate, even while they still rushed forward. Torn shadows regrew, shattered skulls rebuilt.
Max stared as, quite unexpectedly, a sofa blinked behind the image – alien against the scene. He willed it away. The sights flashing at him now – the destruction before him – it stood more real than any image reality could bring to try and summon him back, and none of its images offered any comfort in the madness. Yet, in a fleeting ping inside a moment, he felt enlightened. He understood and realized the unreality of what he saw, as if he had awoken while still dreaming. Then, as suddenly as the illumination had come, it vanished, and the sofa again felt like no more than a superimposed haze, a dream where hands grasped a neck and broke it under their grip. The inner–images once again took over.
Madness enveloped him, reality became a crazy dissymmetry, a dream. His head hurt with an intensity that robbed him of speech, like a mental rod drilled through the skull. The pain stopped as a burst of electric fire spat into his face, white like the end of the world, cast dawn by a gun of the enemy before him. He didn’t even have time to wonder how he got there from the top of the crater. Its impact Nullified Max and the area around him, and the image of his death and that of all things paraded before his mind’s eye.
But even to this, even to the white glare, his eyes adjusted. He felt alive, somehow far away, viewing from a great distance. Max could yet feel the explosions, their white blasts like burst of concentrated lighting. They awoke a reek of pandemonium which spoke of mad flames and burned plastic. He could taste every nuance of it on the back of his throat.
A voice in his head expanded through the landscape, low enough to almost shake the soil, “Everything is dying.” The words felt out of focus.
He listened to their echo, when another sound, raw and electric, streamed though him, warping every surface and each speck of dust. The air thrummed.
Unnoticeably at first, the eclipsing mass began to crawl away. Halting after minutes, it revealed a yellow sky choking with grit. A cloaking, draining light shrouded the crater in a vacuum of silence.
The sky shed a breath. Then shredded itself with noise.
Giant slabs of black metal gaped open below the circular mass as delayed mechanical sounds further spun the air in bass–torrents, hitting those still standing with a monstrous grind.
White hot, a pillar as thick as the horizon fired out of the humongous opening and spliced the air, crashing violently into the soil.
Froth of superheated pyroplasm rose about the impact, throwing shale, yet not managing to obscure the pulsar, a blaze inside the smolder.
A curtain of sky–filling white spat out from the smoke–haze with impossible speed. Light, as far–reaching as it was all–encompassing surrounded him, the infinity of its power reducing all into ash.
***
A hand clamped open and released its grip upon the cold neck. The vision faded. And as though influenced by a blood–drunk madness, the experience of destruction fled with each moment, lost in a span between breaths. Despite this, a nightmare took root and seeded itself into his subconscious, patient and eternal. He didn’t even have time to wonder ‘what the fuck’, before he forgot it all. The cat he had stared at looked as oblivious as a cat could, its eyes disinterested and distant, searching for the next object to satisfy its racing senses.
With a lurch of clarity, Max realized what he had forgotten, even dismissed. Bolt. He turned around and looked at his friend. The man’s breathing was absent, and Max’s hands trembled as he turned him on his back. He hadn’t even seen. Hadn’t realized… he kneeled frozen, as though waiting for a strength to come and move him at its own accord.
A set of feet began to mill behind him.
The men returned, nearly three meters tall and wide over the shoulders. All of them wore the same raiment, they even looked and moved as if from a mould. Long grey coats stretched almost to the dark floor, their broad necks and anvil–jaws concealed behind high collars.
Like before, they didn’t even look at him, none of them. Their quiet steps sounded almost wet. His jaw–line tightened. He had seen another die near him, by his own hands, mind even. It brought back memories – unpleasant sensations that carried faces with them. His wife shrieked in his thoughts. His children bled. Max wished they would smile. He couldn’t even remember how they had looked when they smiled anymore.
His shaking hands brushed back some of Bolt’s thick hair. He realized that, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to say it, couldn’t even think it. Not this time. It would not have been th
e truth. Because unlike his family, who he didn’t kill, these two men, one of whom he loved like a brother, he had killed. Struck them down by rage. I killed them, he realized, and the thought almost made him collapse. Max tested bile. He couldn’t swallow it back down.
Then, like words sung from a distance, hope came within a stream in his mind. Max didn’t hear them, the words, but saw them, as thought a wind had passed over his mind.
>This one lives.< The letters swam across the air from one man to the other in a loop, their central idea expanding between them like a star. He bilked away the light, the veins behind his eyes glinting as they exploded in his vision with specks of silver. His breathing came ragged with excitement.
“You won’t just leave him here, will you?” Max asked the men. They ignored him. One pulled out a fist–sized device from his pocket, as the other two dragged the dead doctor over the floor and behind the couch, blood and bits of skin trailed the body’s path. Max picked up his numb friend and laid him on the sofa, trying to place him around the blood–stains left behind by the physician.
The stranger carrying the thin instrument pointed it at the body and pressed a round button. The air seemed to smear around the tool. Super–intense microwaves escaped from its tip and heated the air below the device, turning it into hues of lavender.
Fiery around the brim, the carcass began to flash and grow into a small sun. The whole body soon lost its shape and demolecularized. Only a wisp or residue remained. It hung heavy like cigar smoke, while not a trace remained on the rubber–padded floor. The ash–haze drifted onto the balcony and dissipated.
He almost felt thankful, for he had no idea what he would do with the body. The fact that he had just killed a man growled on his senses, along with a stench of burned skin. Serving only to further remind him of what he had done.
A question sprung to life. “Who are you people?” he demanded.
No one turned to face him. The three men walked to their left and began to exit the room, as silent and undaunted as they came. The first two disappeared thought the wall of the corridor as if it were no more than mist. Their passage made no sound.
Now desperate in his use of will, Max reached out with his mind, hoping to catch something, anything.
His fear of further effecting Bolt stayed his turbulent thoughts. He restrained and instead focused on projecting his mind in as much of a direct and controlled path as he could. Max pictured the man answering his question. He probed the collective web of dendrites with fresh demands. With this, he managed to rouse the final individual. The man half–entered the wall and stopped in his tracks. Eyes turned, lips concealed behind the grey fabric. Max wished he could see them speak, and almost in response, an image of the man’s mouth appeared clearer than he believed his eyes could ever see. The lips themselves moved in an unnatural fashion, as if an android was trying to emulate visual speech–patters to look more human, managing only to look less. The voice felt electric. “Attend to your duties, citizen.”
“Duties? Is this about the message? What’s in my head?”
The man was already gone.
***
Max thought about what he had seen for what felt like an hour. The speed of his blood passing through his system, however, told him it might have actually been less than ten minutes. He didn’t know why, but a sentence seemed to make strange sense, more even than he could explain. The words whispered to him as if trying to remind him of something he forgot. The eyelid of the world. He thought perhaps it had something to do with his implant.
In his thoughts, Max realized he would need the technology of these men to follow them. And in all likelihood, would need to kill again to summon them. The idea of slaughter to find answers hurt his mind to even contemplate. So he stopped. He had sat down next to Bolt, and now, when he managed to push aside the questions, panic grabbed him. Memories of his deceased wife and children rotting in a pool of their own blood flooded back from the craters he had dug for them. Craters which he had barred with a mental dam. Now the dam had broken.
Had they done the same to my family? Had they incinerated them with their technology once I could no longer see them? These two thoughts alone made him sweat. And then the words came again, assailing his mind. The eyelid of the world.
“Akram,” Max said, gently grabbing hold of his friend’s shoulders and shaking him with care. “Wake up, please wake up.” Max tried to brush away more of the blood and vomit off of Bolt’s chin, but managed to brush away only small flecks of it. They came off easily, but stuck to Max’s fingers instead. The tang of Bolt’s blood became lost in the stench of vomit.
Then it occurred to him, how do you tell your best friend you had almost killed him?
A feeling stole control of Max’s lips away from him and curled them into a smile as he saw Bolt opening his eyes.
“Wha…” the man croaked, a reflex–cough spiting blood directly in Max’s face. He flinched and rubbed it away, the smell of it curling his face, but didn’t object. He was just glad the man was alive.
Bolt’s eyes moved about slowly, surveying the room before his gaze settled on Max’s expression.
“Can you hear me?” Max asked. It felt like a stupid question.
Bolt blinked, his voice hoarse, “Who… are… you?”
***
Explaining to a wife why her husband doesn’t remember seeing her or conceiving a child with her was as much a physical pain as it was a mental one.
For all intents and purposes, Bolt had died the moment Max had used his psychic abilities. His friend seemed to remember menial things, like how to operate day–to–day objects such as mag–cars, sonic showers and the toilet. But he couldn’t remember any specific events or people he had met before. In fact, all Bolt seemed to forget were people and every event related to them.
“His brain has been fried,” the doctor said, an odd turn of phrase, Max thought. “He may never remember. Some of his nero–pathways have been broken, they may never reform again.”
“What about his other memories, how effected were they?” Max asked.
“Only time will tell,” the physician had answered, before moving on to his next patient inside the wide–spaced medical bay.
Max didn’t know what to say. Losing his own wife and children had been excruciating in itself. It had been a burden as heavy as the ocean. But at least he could no longer see them. They would never again smile at him or talk to him – at least not until the Admin had fulfilled his promise. He could simply place them in a recess of his mind where they smiled forever, even if he could not remember their smiles. But to have a friend who you knew for decades not remember you, or even know you ever existed… that was a whole different kind of torture.
Max feared that after this, he may actually never smile again himself. It was as if he couldn’t remember what was funny anymore. Not that there had been much to laugh about since they left the apartment anyway…
And unlike when Max lost his family and everything seemed to hurt for months, Max felt little of what he could classify as physical hurt this time.
Yet within him, he felt a pit grow and an absence of something abstract became apparent, something only noticeable when it was gone. The pit seemed to expand in all directions, becoming deeper and wider – consuming something essential within him, a feeling he couldn’t put his finger on. He knew it wasn’t just his sense of humor.
The true physical pain came later, when Bolt’s wife punched him in the throat. For at first she still couldn’t hit him in the face. She knocked him to the floor and wailed on him and kicked him until her hands and feet throbbed. She yelled nonsensical words as her punches landed wherever her rage willed.
Max took every ounce of her anger. It felt like he deserved it. It felt like justice. But was it? Was he truly the one to blame? He had never asked to become a psychic, if that was even what he had become. It had certainly not been his intention to destroy the mind of his best friend. All he wanted was him family
back. He never asked for this gift. No, not a gift, a curse. One which not only seemed to manifest at the time of his greatest loss, but one which now allowed him to spread that loss to the people around him, to the people he loved. People that had once love him as well.
Max tried to pick himself up once Sara had done beating him. He managed a half–pushup while she rushed into the bathroom, her long black hair trailing behind her like a cape. The bathroom was the only room in the apartment still sporting a door which could be opened and closed non–automatically, and the resulting back–draft as she slammed it almost rolled Max over. He moaned as every nerve ending screeched in pain. He could hear Bolt’s wife sobbing in the bathroom and felt his blood–nanites rushing to repair all the bruises and cuts she had inflicted upon him. She had avoided his head, but to hurt him wasn’t even the point, she just needed something to hit, and Max seemed like the most obvious, if not deserving target.
Max didn’t wait for her to come out. He knew she wouldn’t want him anywhere near her when she went to see her husband. Limping, he took the corridor out of the room and left.
CHAPTER 5
The Mind Of God
On his way to the antechamber where the message had summoned him, Max passed a collection of people who didn’t need to pretend he was invisible, his own will made sure of that. It blocked him out of their sight while his body slowly healed and regained its posture.
By the time he managed to traverse the spiraling walkways down to the lower labs, more than three hours had passed. In that time, Max heard more private thoughts than his deceased wife ever managed to share with him. He had only vaguely listened to her, a fact he now regretted, and she had actually talked, while these private concerns, feelings and frustrations of people didn’t even need to be heard for him to know he had no interest in them. Strangely, this made them all the more difficult to ignore. Each projection almost begged to be read and interpreted as it slipped though the air and into walls, sometimes merging with other feelings and ideas of the same or similar nature, together forming an even brighter aurora of intangibility. It was all gibberish.