There are thousands, tens of thousands, millions of accounts within the Mind Bank. Men must have truly saved everything when they still could, stored everything. Remembrance used to be a commodity well cherished, it seems. Personal accounts, diaries, what they called ‘blogs’, more diaries, useless data, triviality, all of it in one machine. Ia flips through the menus and titles with his fingers until I push him aside and do it myself. He doesn’t seem to mind.
“This machine is connected to hundreds of others all around the world,” says Ia. “We don’t know how they work, but we’re trying to figure it out.”
Despite all the data, there is one account of a man named Richard Bain that immediately catches my interest. Perhaps because of the surname, I don’t know. There’s nothing really which would distinguish his entry from any other, save the title, which reads, ‘The Nexus’.
“How can I see any of these? How can I read them?” I ask.
“See these goggle-like things on it?” he says, pointing at something protruding out of the frontal portion of the machine, above the screen. “Look inside after selecting a desired recollection. You will be able to summon the words in your head like memories. They will come clear. Be careful. If the recollection is vast and spans a lot of time, the images may sometimes appear by themselves, like a thought which comes without you wishing it to. Feelings can sometimes latch themselves on those thoughts. I wouldn’t advise using the machine for anything that reads more than 1 terabyte of data. You can see the amount on the left.”
The Nexus is more than 10 terabytes. I selected it anyway. There is a short description beside the entry. It reads, ‘The War began not because of the weapons we developed, but because we cannot be anything more than we are. No matter how hard we try, we shall always remain human. We shall always remain curious.’
At first, nothing happens when the machine does its work.
Men too often rely on nothing but feeling. On hunches. I too am a man, and I my hunch tells me something had begun the process of fucking my mind.
The first proof of this shows its hidden head when Ia shows me an old tome, the oldest one I’ve seen. Its title twists into ineligibility and my sight turns to another’s. Words twist my mind and I swim in them. I lose myself in them, I see them happen.
I will die on this planet.
It is a fate I cannot escape. I know this now with a certainty that defies any law which the universe had conjured up. My body aches and the angry expulsions of an alien sun bathe me, surround me, cook me even as I crawl away from the crashed cruiser. I had left the wreckage behind, there was nothing I could salvage, no one I could save. The crew is dead, my captain a piece of mashed meat thrown against the frontal view port. The bastard should have not been so careless. He should have… hell, we had all been careless. Careless since first we crawled out of the primordial soup and had our single-celled asses eaten.
We had waded across the stars to find this planet. Hope was what drove us, the promise of alien technology what propelled us, but greed what ultimately undid us. We had traversed for nearly two years, got into fights, made friends again. Living in confined space with other people for days that blend into weeks and months and years certainly wasn’t all good and splendid and shit. But that’s not really what’s important right now…
We had send probes, lots of probes. From Earth, from back home. We had scattered them all across our fine ass galaxy and found it empty. Well, almost empty. One of our mechanical marvels came back to us. It just… appeared – floating in the middle of Washington square. According to its logs, it had found a world. An alien world. A world with intelligent life. Up to that point, our philosophers postulated – what most hoped to be a rather humorous attempt of sarcasm rather than a reflection of the truth – that the assured way of knowing there’s intelligent life out there, is that none of it had tried to make contact with us. But whoever these bastards who sent beck the probe were, they sure as hell knew how to travel. And not just how to jump over distances, but instantly appear.
Initially we had no real idea if that’s how the probe ended up back on our planet, but it sure as all fuck looked that way. It was simply there. Instantly.
I was the first man sent near it. Of course, humans beings humans, most of us thought it was a bomb. A nuke. An extinction-event propellant that will extinguish all our lives in a matter of seconds. But what the probe carried was quite something else than a bomb. It carried something miraculous. It bore proof. It bore a star-map – among other things – so detailed and inlaid with data, that it took me and my team of scientist a year to devise a mathematical language with which to begin the process of decoding and revealing the truth. Then another year of just waiting for the computer to do its thing. But what a year. I was chauffeured around everywhere. I was like a trophy, even though most of my collages did all the work. I was like Neil Armstrong, only better, awesomer. You didn’t hear about Neil finding intelligent life on the Moon, now did you? My attempts to give more credit to my team were met with milky responses. After all, I was the first to make ‘contact’ with an alien. Or at least touched something that an alien had also touched. Revered, I became somewhat of a hero.
If only they could see me now, trapped on an alien world, squabbling in my own piss.
I come back to it outside the library. Ia had just ended a sentence and I can see his eyes waiting for an answer.
Instead I ask, “How long since I looked into the machine?”
“A minute or so, neh? Bain is waiting, best not keep him.”
“I must admit,” I say, “patience is not my virtue. What will I see?”
“You’ll see what is coming. What will destroy this world.”
“Isn’t the world already destroyed?”
“As long as there’s still people in it, it will remain alive.”
I already knew what had killed the world. It was us. But how exactly we did it I have yet to find out. I wished to read more of the Mind Bank’s transfer.
We don’t say another word and meet Awir on our way to a box. A machine wherein Ia pressed a button with one of his meaty fingers and excited a purr in the material. I feel as though I am traveling, yet we are not moving.
I have my helm tucked under my arm, Ia having instructed me how to release the seals holding it shut. His lesson had consisted of him saying three words. He said simply, “Think about it.”
He explained further after seeing I was having issues comprehending. As it turned out, all I had to do was think, simple as that. The helm reacted and understood my thoughts. It seemed to have a mind of its own.
“Why are you guys here? What is your purpose?” I ask. It feels like the right time to do it. But in the end, I seem to have broken the silence to find only more silence. The two don’t even look at me.
I use the silence between us to excess more of my memory. It feels like opening a box inside my head. All I need is the desire to do it and it lays bare before me, text upon images, images in text, words like emotions and emotions as the builders of time and space.
The map was not all that the probe came back with. On its magnetic storage systems was something I struggled to decipher at first. I had to develop a special branch of code specifically tailored for that section of the encrypted data. Whatever was still on it, it was the last thing to be extracted and only revealed itself after all the rest had been deciphered.
Another year. And after my work was complete, the sphere vibrated. Sensing shit was about to go down (literally), I had picked up my stuff and got the hell out of there. A lethal radiation leak shattered and collapsed my entire lab. None of us knew just what the hell had happened and thought the sphere had surely been destroyed, when something remarkable took place. The thing burned like a sun. For almost a week, on the very outskirts of Las Vegas where our lab was situated, there stood a second sunrise. The sphere shone so brightly and so hot, that it melted all the material which had collapsed on top of it. The desert underneath it was fused into glas
s, only further adding to the spectacle.
Again–as it is in human nature–most believed the end was nigh and that the sphere would eventually explode. A tiny supernova on the very surface of our planet. But something else happened. The sphere had somehow merged with me, non-locally, streaming liquid data into my mind, possessing my hands. I wrote down a whole apartment block worth of code and helped develop the first FTL drive, its core functionality derived from those very equations. Thank fucking Christ smart people exist on our world – smarter than me, if I’m completely honest. Because thanks to their help, we were able to make increased sense of my scribblings. A space-folding device was built promptly and it wasn’t long until we began to follow the instructions laid out for us by the sphere. The object had become useless after that, devoid of information and relevance. Everything needed to build the ship itself was contained within the information-stream. From the alloys needed and how to go about constructing them, positioning them, to the composition of elements required for the engine core, even the damn seat arrangements had been included. Building the actual craft took less time that deciphering the message.
Initially, I was not happy about the government’s selection of people to accompany me on our first voyage. Naturally, the ship itself had to be extensively tested to make sure it actually worked as intended. Being alien technology, it functioned beyond any efficiency we could duplicate using anything on our small little world. Cold fusion? Zero point energy? This thing didn’t work on any of those concepts. As a matter of fact, it downright pissed on them, threw them to the winds. Its systems seemed to break the nature of reality and recreate a new universe in a sphere around the craft. Convenient to say the least. All the more reason I was surprised when the thing began to malfunction as we had entered the orbit of this new planet. The space-rock we were summoned to supposedly had a piece of alien technology, a conduit of some kind. The information regarding the device was vague, only its location precisely mapped. Of course, again, being the inquisitive creatures that we are, we simply had to go and take a look. What awaited us was exactly the opposite of what we had expected.
The world was a wasteland. A wasteland I now crawled over. My legs would not obey me. They didn’t even hurt, and I knew they had been shattered along with my spine. I could hear bone crunching with every single drag over the pebbled-surface. Pain and more pain. The wish to die, all of those tings. Every now and again, I looked at the dark sun. It burned hot, but wasn’t bright, looked to have expanded to a size that had surely devoured a few planets on its way. Now the one I crawled over was next. I had kept a digital compass close, but the thing was useless, spun in circles.
My last act before our engines coughed out completely and plunged us into planetary entry, had been to project where our landing, or should I say crash, will take us. It read a few clicks away from where the object of our trip to this planet was supposedly waiting. Something at least...
I still remembered the tremors, the fear, the screams as we spliced through the atmosphere and came tumbling down onto this world. I had been told the people sent along with me were experienced pilots and cosmonauts. I had never checked their records. Some did in fact look like they were, took our descend and inevitable death with stoic detachment.
“Fate calls,” one of them even said. But some screamed like little girls as they strapped themselves in their chair. The captain just gripped the handles of his control-couch and closed his eyes. Fatalist bastard.
I don’t know what it was that had saved me. Perhaps the design of the chairs, perhaps the inertia fields collapsed in some places, but were preserved in a small bubble around me, who the fuck knows. I do not presume to understand why I had been spared. Yet now, as the horizon stretched before me, bare and straight as a solid ocean, I wished I had died as well. At least then I would have been spared the torture of having to drag my broken body towards what I could only presume was the right way.
“You were spared for a reason,” I told myself.
“What reason might that be? To die in a fire? Which is exactly what’ll happen if this heat continues. I’ll be cooked alive.”
“The artifact will save you.”
“You place too much fate in the thing. Too much hope in a hopeless situation.”
It may come as a surprise to some to hear me talking to myself. But when you spend days alone, cooked up and working in a lab, you tend to develop a special kind of relationship with yourself. You have arguments and debates with yourself, you entertain yourself, and you occasionally pop into the bathroom with a certain spicy magazine to release some of that tension through other means than just work. It’s not a glorious existence, but let me tell you something about being consumed by a passion. It does just that, it consumes you. At times it gives you just enough time to breathe after you get up in the morning, a breath before you end up solving problems you didn’t even know you could grapple as you collapsed into your bed, couch, the floor, wherever.
My current predicament, however, appeared to be an unsolvable one. Yet the problem is so simple, so rudimentary and basic it unnerves me to the core that I cannot do anything about it. The problem is survival. But on an alien world? Well… that was a whole different beast to tackle. I knew I had mere hours left, it was just so damn hot. I halted for a minute and noticed something on the far horizon.
After too long a wait and after I had forgotten what I asked, Awir says, “Each one of us is a dream. We are each a separate nightmare full of blood, pain, suffering and decay. We slither across existence and we forget that we are dreaming because our pains become too real, our loves too great. We begin to have dreams within dreams and those dreams fade just like we slowly fade. And when we finally wake up and remember, we die.”
“A grim way to look at things,” I say.
Awir’s gaze stops on me then, his eyes fill with an ancient sheen that makes me think he has seen too much to still be sane.
“The worst dreams are always those you wish to wake up from, but cannot. But unlike the rest of the world, we cannot die. We are forever.”
“How? How is that possible?” I ask.
“Come with me. I will show you.”
It doesn’t appear as though I have choice in the matter. Awir presses a different button on the wall and stares ahead.
The doorway splits in two and slides into the wall. We arrive into a wide-spaced area. There’s an object floating in the middle, between the low standing ceiling and pillars. Light streams from the triangular shape in patterns of shifting luminosity, wondrous and golden. The chamber is wide and reaches far. Tall windows are closed shut on both sides, seemingly built over with a layer of rock. Shadows stretch from the pillars on our sides, the path towards the object is clear.
The Ancients have built many wonders, some of which I have seen, but I have witnessed nothing like what stares at me from the center of the room.
“Welcome to the All Seeing Eye,” says Awir. My answer gets lost in awe.
It stares at me, within the triangle floating in the middle of the room. It stares and my knees begin to shake. A sense of divine judgment rolls over me, as though with every second my life is laid out before it and considered. I smell old air and uncirculated stagnancy as our footsteps echo. We near the thing. Intricate lines pulse over the surface of the construction three times my height. Its hum is weak, like the distant and hidden workings of a machine whose secrets of design no one understands or has the knowledge to emulate. It floats some distance above the floor. The eye is terrible, human, unblinking, huge and watchful.
“What would you ask of the all-seeing?” Its voice is booming, dust shakes and dances in the rays of light.
I attempt to circumvent it, but it seems to turn with me. I notice there’s no dept to it, as though it only has one side, exists in only two dimensions. A drawing on paper that cannot be turned and instead turns with you.
I say nothing. It feels like I don’t have to say a thing. The Eye speaks, and what it says m
akes my bones rattle.
“Your love will die. You shall be close behind.”
“What?” I ask.
“Strange choice of words,” Ia comments. “It’s never said anything so specific.”
Awir unlocks the plasma pistol magnetically locked to his hip and hands it over to me.
“Shoot me,” he says. “In the head. Kill me.”
I hesitate. Perhaps I could run if I shoot him… Perhaps I could–
“You cannot run,” he remarks.
I shift the gun in my grip. I’m stalling.
“You are stalling,” he says. “You wished to see why we are forever. Shoot me.”
His eyes look determined, his face stoic. I suppose men tend to look like that when they know death holds no secrets for them. He looks at me even as I put the gun to his head. His eyes never leave mine. I press the trigger and hear it click.
The shot splats and rings off walls, the proximity of the plasma melts a hole through his skull and at the same time seals it shut. The eye to our left watches and nothing in its blunt gaze changes. The smell of burned meat chokes the air. There is no blood. Awir collapses with a thump, his heavy armor clatters. I have done it countless times before – killed a man – but to see a man fall is never easy. I have met men who could do it without ever thinking about it. And I have seen men do it only to watch the act eat at their dreams later and be haunted by it. You can see it in their eyes. They become confused, darting from sight to sight. They try and focus on something but all they see is the blood, it’s all they smell and taste. I always seem to experience a mix of the two. Sometimes, a death hits me only after a time, almost as if the trigger hadn’t been pulled and my mind is attempting to convince me it truly hadn’t happened. It always fails in its attempt to fool itself however. And when it does, the dreams come. Within them, men who had fallen screaming are silent and those who were silent scream their lungs out.
Ia stands beside me, to my right, watching the same sight, smelling the same smells. Awir lies motionless.
For the first time, the eye shifts its orbit from me. It had seen a thing in me. I can feel it. Something it hadn’t seen before. Something no one had seen before. I’m sure of it. It may be a thing it liked or something it disliked so much it may have thought to banish it from me with its gaze.
Few of us ever truly look at someone’s eyes. If you disregard the face and only look at the person’s eyes, you will see they seem to have a life of their own. They grow and expand without the person’s knowledge. They shift from place to place and if you truly disregard the face, they look separate from everything else and are quite disconcerting.
They All Seeing Eye looks at the corpse, its iris expanding until it becomes all there is. I see nothing within it. It is like a hole where no light can escape and no shape is evident. A vortex where things are judged and have different meanings than within my head. I can’t see shapes, but I can feel hidden interpretation swirling and enfolding. I wish to know what The Eye thinks, if it thinks.
The air expands with its voice again.
“Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!”
The iris flares up white, becomes something I image the sun might look like. I close my eyes and, even so, the flame finds me. There’s a sound like a bones breaking and flesh tearing.
“Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici. Numerus 233. Ortus!”
The glare subsides and I see Awir where he had been, standing, looking me. Smiling for the first time. He knows I understand the meaning of this. It is simple enough. The Templars are forever. Yet I wonder what would happen should The Eye be destroyed.
CHAPTER 19