From time to time, however, Max could hear words, but no more than that, and only from the more powerful ideas, ones born of necessity or anger. Everyone had a mist about them as they moved, and he could guess the mood of the individual by the intensity and hue of their subtle bodies. He found the whole sight distracting, and had no doubt the implants in his head were the cause. Yet why these sights? He didn’t ask anyone if what he thought they felt was indeed what he saw, but he simply knew, which made it all the more confusing.
He had intentionally not taken the mag–lifts in order to try and clear his mind. But instead of purging his mind, the opposite had happened. The halls and open areas he passed on the inner edges of the spire were filled with people. And it was in these park–like areas where men and women walked, biked and played with their pets or children, that he began to feel the calmest. It was here that he began to see the intrinsic oneness with everything, here, in the throng of life, was where the feelings he had felt in his meditative states became manifest as he saw every sensation of joy projected in a stream of unconscious intent through the matrix of fundamental reality. He could see the mesh of a universal reality of which every being he witnessed was a part of. Max saw and understood that the bodies he looked at were simply a different set of vibrations, an area where, in a flicker of possibilities, the patterns of matter intermixed with the subtle and made a whole, each of them capable of experiencing itself. He remembered lectures of his father from when he was still young.
“You see,” his dad had said, trying to explain quantum theory, “there is no such thing as empty space. Space is actually filled with particles flickering in and out of existence.”
Max couldn’t’ help but feel this is exactly what human beings are as well. Flickers of existence.
He looked at the particularly joyful individuals he passed, and realized how they and their feelings passed through him unknowingly, and through their expressions of joy made him feel more joyful as well. For a moment Max felt undeserving of that joy. He had after all just killed a man, but he could not resist the sensations.
He sat down on one of the benches for a while, just looking at the swirling and twirling of the subtle fundamentality as it seemed to manifest out of nothing. The vast area where he sat had no widows, but instead lay open upon on one sides, with arches and walkways leading around and above, creating a webway of paths which only added to the complexity of what he was seeing. Max’s mind trailed back to a thought. He wondered how much his implants were to blame for what he was seeing, but he found himself unconsciously brushing the question aside more and more. Each time he remembered it, he also remembered he had killed a man, as though the two thoughts had intertwined. The contemplation he found most troubling, however, was that he began to not feel anything either way about what he had done. Instead, only a feeling of joy encompassed him. He felt bliss for the first time in years. The feeling of general euphoria didn’t pass even as he stood up to resume upon his way towards the lower labs. He didn’t want to question it in fear that it may pass.
Upon reaching the of observation deck of the antechamber, he found people already waiting for him.
The deck was a small room, long but narrow. The wall on his left side was see–through, its thickness imbuing the material with a blue hue. The room itself protruded out the wall of the antechamber, its roof extended beyond the floor, which made the glass–wall angular. A total of ten technicians could be found inside. Each wore a grey lab–coat. Six of them sat behind consoles in front of the glass, mentally imputing commands onto screens that the other four technicians constantly observed. He found Bolt among them. Just like everyone else, Bolt didn’t seem to put any weight on the fact that Max appeared out of thin air as he stopped willing to be unseen.
“Finally,” sighed Zack, the senior technician, his brown beard mangy and unkept, much like his hair. It gave him the general appearance of a bum. Max diverted his eyes from Bolt and looked to the senior tech.
“What exactly are you guys doing here? Why do you need me?”
“You’re about to witness the future, my friend,” Zack said.
“Brace yourself,” Jazz added, sitting behind the console.
Max noticed Bolt walking to his side. The man blurted a few words to him over the Link.
>Should I pretend I know these people?< Bolt asked him.
>I’m sorry,< Max responded.
>Save it. I don’t even know what the hell happened, and you’re the first person I saw after I woke up, you said we were friends, so you’ll help me out, right?<
As much as it thrilled Max to hear Bolt say that, the fact remained that there had been so many shared experiences between them which Bolt was likely to never recall it pained Max to even think about them. He wished more than anything to be able to just say a word and make his friend remember. Instead, Max said, >Always, just go with it, though. They’ll probably be caught up with whatever the hell they’re doing. They won’t even notice anything.<
>Very well,< Bolt answered.
Bolt’s own role in this had been to join Max in the main chamber when the experiment was ready. It sounded easy enough.
“Start the systems, Jazz,” Zack said, and the entire group of scientists bunched up by the glass–wall, looking at the spherical chamber below. Inside it, a circular part of the floor slid upwards, forming smaller and smaller steps, manifesting a circular pyramid with a straight top. The lowest step began to change its color as electrical current blasted through it. It changed from a metallic grey to red and finally to white, imbuing the material with inner light. Each subsequent step managed to out–glow the one below it, a feat seemingly impossible at first. The difference in hue became even more apparent as Jazz adjusted the glass–wall to compensate for the progressive increase in luminosity.
The chamber filled with noise and the whole deck began to shutter. A low bass erupted in the middle of the antechamber. The scientists inside used the Link to communicate when verbal exchange became impossible.
Whips of incandescence began to spit out of the circular stairs, smacking against the glass wall and leaving behind after–images in the material. Max sensed none of the scientists actually knew if the after–images were in fact images or if the material super–heated each time it was hit by the expanding coronas of white fire. Max could feel their concern. They all wondered if glass that wasn’t glass would hold or give out, incinerating everyone inside. The heat in the chamber became palpable as the air shimmered and cooked the walls orange. The temperature began to seep through. A trickle of sweat cascaded down the back of Max’s neck.
He hardly heard the woman on the far right side of the console–table, even over the Link, as she said, >Engaging phase two.<
Slowly, the whole section of the circular pyramid began to undulate and the entire chamber appeared as if submerged in water. Yet above the cone, in the middle of the room, a white sun manifested which, even through the heat and energy expulsions, appeared as clear as day.
In the blink of an eye, the whole process stopped. The whiteness of the sphere rippled out from its center and left behind a blackness which couldn’t have been darker. The brim of it retained and condensed the previous vibrancy of the circle, spinning uninterrupted and endless around the darkness, bleeding away magnetic waves, each forcing the glass–wall to object with sounds of crackling.
Max had always pictured the atom much like what he was seeing now; a sphere of nothing surrounded by a wave of endless possibility – a circularity around a nucleus waiting for something to interact with it so it could form a new possibility. Something better perhaps.
Zack turned around to face Max, his wide features locked in a wide grin of success. “Now it’s your turn.”
***
Neither Max nor Bolt had any idea what to expect when they should first enter the wormhole. The facility on the moon reported a portal opening on their platform as well, a platform specifically built to withstand the energies expelled by an op
ening of such magnitude and distance. No–one had been allowed near it and were instructed to approach only when the portal had been disengaged.
All had been prepared, and Max could see the faces looking down from the observation deck with expectant glees.
On his end, a prickle of fear bit him mind. He associated it with what they were about to do, but not a shred of it could he detect in Bolt’s mind. They were both anxious to the brink of collapse, but not terrorized. They lived for this. Lived for the opportunity to do something no one in the history of mankind had ever done. The only wish Max had, was that someone had told him beforehand what they were sent to do. But then again, perhaps that would just make him question it more and allowed fear to build up through nightmares of what could go wrong. No, he thought, they would walk through and emerge on the other side. It would be instantaneous. It would be that simple. Another thought came, however, a thought that the sight reminded him of something. An eyelid, perhaps?
He felt clumsy in his heavy suit, and with the chamber now hot enough to liquefy their teeth, their nano–fiber suits wouldn’t shield them against it for much longer. They needed to do what they came to do, fast.
Bolt took the first step towards the portal as the massive blast–door closed shut behind them. His friend’s form left behind tracers of the man, each wavering as if bleeding a part of Akram’s shape into the ether. Max followed, his own breathing becoming less and less audible to him inside the helmet the closer they came to the wobbling portal. The sound of the thing was a more brutal aspect to endure than the heat. Its constant subsonic vibrations meld with the audible ones to the point where Max feared his brain might explode. He could see the subtle presence of reality seep through the metallic walls around him. It gave him a strange impression, as if the walls were sinking, their atoms being sucked into the portal
Step by step, the two began to ascend up the coned pyramid. Standing before it, Max noticed what seemed like a two dimensional sphere from afar, was in fact a ball, its white edge shifting and creating the illusion of two–dimensionality no matter the point of reference. It played with their minds and spacial perceptions right until Bolt touched it. The blackness seemed to recognize what had interacted with, recognized the less subtle part of reality, and in turn changed its form into what Bolt was imagining – a solid ball of blackness with the sun as an edge. His hand disappeared inside it, his suit turning into a white vertical aurora which continuously shot out from his hand and into the darkness. Bolt pulled his hand out whole and turned around. Max could see traces of a smile behind the angular visor. One after the other, they stepped through.
***
Life and death intertwined for a brief instant. Max opened his eyes. He found himself in a realm overflowing with currents of energy. He had no idea where was, but it sure as hell didn’t look like the Moon. The very air, if that was in fact what he inhaled, felt like shards of glass in his throat and lungs, each burning his mouth. Pain became a constant and unyielding presence in his flesh. It almost felt as if someone wanted to constantly remind him that he was only that; flesh, and flesh does not abide in this place for long. How could it? It even smelled wrong. Looking at his body, Max found everything was still in place, yet saw himself clad in simple robes, like a priest. They looked wet as they clung and hung from his body, but didn’t feel moist at all. Max cast the black hood back over his head and knelt beside Bolt. He wore an attire the same as his, unfamiliar and definitely not what he had worn only moments prior.
“Where in the hell are we?” Bolt asked. Maxed helped him to his feet. Even with the pain, Max found it amusing how, despite having forgotten everything, Bolt had still mirrored his own thoughts completely, even to the last word.
Max wished he had an answer. He looked about.
“There,” he said, pointing to the far horizon twisted by the raw fabric of space. The landscape below the sky swam, woven with time and space itself, filled with shapes of forever changing mist and deforming dark–blue crystal.
“What the shit?” Bolt gasped.
The land was like foam, lacking any viscosity or true shape, bridges of reality formed, loops of possibility sprang up like the expulsions of a solar flare, reaching impossibly high like a wall of half–transparent blackness. The object at which Max had pointed floated in the far distance, above, yet somehow apart of the landscape at the same time. He figured this to be a trick in his perceptions. The thing could only be described as a fortress. A haze of crystalline walls upon walls which closed and opened like vast maws. Spires of its ever–shifting shape stretched upward into space in shapes that at times twisted like serpents, while at other instances appeared to harden and refract light in a manner of diamond. Every surface but the crystals and fortress itself was drenched in blackness, and the sky itself seemed only a lighter shade of that blackness.
“I’m reasonably certain we aren’t supposed to go that way,” Bolt said, motioning to the fortress.
“Where else are we supposed to go?” Max asked. “What else is there?”
Bolt slowly turned a full circle and shrugged. “I guess nothing.”
“The real question is,” Max said, “can we even get to it? This whole place gives me the sense like getting to anywhere isn’t as simple as just walking to it.”
Bolt knew what he meant, for the very ground on which they stood remained unseen, their feet drenched in a black mist which shifted and rearranged constantly in the nonexistent wind. It took them both a moment to realize they didn’t actually see the mist move, but somehow felt it. A feeling so alien it caused them pain to think about how it could even be possible. Light was a presence altogether different than what they were used to, they felt it keenly upon their faces, even when they didn’t actually see it. Try as they might to explain how they were able to see anything inside this maddening realm, both of them fell short of words and ideas alike. The language they knew felt inadequate to explain what they were seeing.
To Max, it felt natural for one to become afraid when in a place like this, perhaps even necessary in order to crave an escape, but all Max felt was… nothing. Pain perhaps, but nothing in a purely emotional sense. This very fact unnerved him, he wanted to feel something, anything, as he knew he should…but like the landscape around him, his mind was dark.
“Do we even have a choice?” Max finally spoke out, coughing from the aches, “either we die here like dogs and feed the things lurking in this place, or we try and get to the forsaken structure on the horizon and test our faith.”
“The hell are you saying?” Bolt hissed. “We shouldn’t even be here! Test our faith? What does that even mean?”
“All I’m saying is there’s no point in standing here, I don’t see a portal to get back, do you?”
“Obviously not,” Bolt frowned, following Max as he began to walk in as straight a line as possible towards the fortress. The small crystals gave the place some semblance and illumination at least, each crunching underneath their invisible feet like squashed insects as they walked.
“How can we see these things from a distance but not up close so I can see where to place my damn feet?” said Bolt.
“I think the mist around us is actually us,” Max reasoned. “In some way at least.”
“For the record,” Bolt said. “Let me just say that this shit is bullshit.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” nodded Max.
The shards they stepped on only brought more pain, and the contradiction of being able to see them from afar, yet unable to spot the very ground as they came close, soon became too tiring for them to even contemplate.
They traversed the endless desert of black mist for what felt like an epoch. Thirst and pain followed them like vultures.
From time to time, Max sensed a presence around him, something which renewed their strength for a brief time so they could continue onward, towards the deviant fortress. It was at these moments that he came closer to what he could describe as fear. For in those moments, when the
unseen came to revitalize him, he felt truly mortal, incapable of transcending the pain. The prospect of an eternity spent in this state made him walk ever–faster. He knew Bolt felt it too, yet neither of them would speak of it. Max was certain the feeling freaked out Bolt out as much as it did him, so they kept walking, almost running.
The presence Max felt would only make itself known when they were on the very verge of collapse. But it did not come to purge the pain and suffering, nor to ease it, only to make sure their next step wasn’t their last. Neither of them could see it, nor could did they see anyone else, there truly appeared to be nothing else but them inside the realm. Them, and the structure in the sky.
For the first part of eternity within the wormhole – at least, that’s how time felt to them – they spoke of many things. Max would relate to Bolt what they had been through and the things they had done, happy things mostly. It brought Max some comfort and made him forget some of the pain. He knew his tales wouldn’t mean much to his friend, however, since relating them to him would most likely only make Bolt feel like they happened to someone else, a hypothetical, third person.
Meanwhile the spiraling impossibility of the fortress loomed ever–larger in their vision, and the two men continued to endure, even sitting down on occasion, before realizing the feat only made them feel the pain altogether more keenly. They wandered through the maze, a lot of the times losing sight of the fortress as the landscape climbed the skies and opened up new vistas. They chased their minds, guided by some thought they could not understand, but followed instinctively. At length, the ground began to harden and made itself seen. Its consistency was that of water to look upon, but felt hard as granite underneath their feet and cold.
“Look, a gate,” Bolt yelped, breaking the silence of centuries as he pointed his bony and shriveled finger. But before Max could even look at what his friend motioned at, the maw closed shut with a heavy sound of rock grinding against rock.