Just as my presumed father goes into the elevator and escapes, the one next to it opens. Ia comes trudging out. I move in to kill him.
He dodges my first attempt and moves back.
“Whoa, hey!” he yells. “What are you doing?”
“Fucking bastards!” I yell. I see him and all I can think about is killing him.
“Peace, Loregar.”
His voice feels strange.
“Peace.”
It brings fourth something else, the Jeet Kin Do subsides, but something else takes his place. Ia’s voice becomes a distant echo and I am taken far into my own stored memories.
I was there when the keenest of minds gathered in an underground bunker to devise a plan on how to get rid of the things. Those of us with a bit of hands-on experience knew, however, that the conference was, in actuality, a stage for us to decide if such a plan could even be conceived of. Again, I ended up being there simply because I had survived not only one, but three attacks. For that reason alone, everyone expected me to know more than the average person, yet no one saw me for what I really was, a coward. A man with a heightened sense of when to hide and when to run, that was all. That was all I was. What they saw was something else. They looked at me and expected input.
Excluding myself, there were a total of 234 scientists, technicians, engineers and physicists present in that room. Among them a few civilians and a couple of generals. I knew the number coinciding with the number of soldiers killed in the last mass attack could not be a coincidence. They had expected the president of the central government to come as well, but I would be surprised indeed if that happened. For I had been called to his chambers in DC the day he was killed. I saw one of the beings materialize before him as he summoned me inside and I had seen the poor bastard torn to shreds. As a matter of fact, I have seen more men die in the last few weeks than it was probably healthy for any brain to see. But, even with all our inventions and gadgets, we have not yet managed to devise a ‘sanity meter’, so I had no idea how much I had left in me, before I would inevitably snap. All men eventually snap when they seen enough men die, don’t they?
The circular room was amphitheater-shaped, half a kilometer underground, although none of us had any delusions that our location would stop them, should the “gods” decide to intrude upon our meeting.
In light of recent events, our moods were sour. For the first half hour, we had talked amongst ourselves, exchanged ideas and views, until Samir Bain, a resident of England and a renown astrophysicist, put forth a question that stopped our commune in its tracks.
“What do you know of evil?” Bain asked.
“Of evil?” A man from the crowd inquired.
“Yes. What do you think it is?” Bain said.
We had all given ourselves a moment to think, until a woman in the crown, an engineer answered, “Something which goes against human nature. Something sickening to see, an event that you see and you feel in your marrow that it’s wrong.”
“But what is it? Is it a condition learned and observed? For instance, do you recognize it as an infant? Or do you recognize it only when your mother, your father, society itself, your imprinted and conditioned brain tells you this or that is evil? In other words, do you learn of evil, or are you born knowing of evil?”
“I don’t believe any of us can truly say,” I added. “That’s a discussion for philosophers. That’s not why we’re here. But, I admit I have felt it when they came. I felt it as they slowly began to level the planet. But what does this have to do with anything?”
“You know what I think?” Bain asked, “I think you do. After all, it’s why we were called here, to express what we think and try and find a solution. We have all seen the same thing, you and I. Yet I think ultimately, evil is just a word. There is no such thing, there is only indifference. What if who they are – the way they are – is how they have been for millions, perhaps billions of years? How do you destroy that which you cannot possibly begin to understand or emulate?”
“Let me ask you this,” Bain said. “What if they aren’t even aliens to begin with?”
“They came from somewhere else, what could they possibly be, other than alien?” a man asked as the rest began to whisper and talk amongst themselves. The voice of Bain silenced them again.
“A force of nature. As if some twisted part of it had been given sentience and … well, you know the rest. Almost as if they are the manifestation of our fears, a collective unconscious given form.”
Ia stared at me, my wrist is held in a tight grip by his fingers. Evidently I have tried to punch him.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“He killed them! He killed and my father watched,” I am shouting, unable to restrain myself. A river flows through me, its currents made of anger and resentment.
“Who?”
“Bain! Let me go!” I struggle in his grip. He is stronger than he looks. He lets me go.
“Show me,” he says-
I lead him to the bodies and he picks them up, hauls them both, one over each shoulder.
“Go after him,” Ia says. “Meet me on level 23. Don’t forget. I’ll bring them back.”
His words stun me, but I don’t question.
I have been told my trust is something that never finds any man. That I am a rock. Who could blame me? The wasteland too is almost nothing but rock…
It’s something in his gentle eyes that make me trust Ia, they remind me of Ty’s. Something in his voice. I nod and run to the lift.
I go back to where I had first met my father, my mind splitting with a headache that makes me wish I could simply collapse, lie down and forget this world even exists. But I can’t.
The lifts stops, and so does my mind. It shoots back between realities and leaves me in a conference room deep beneath the earth’s crust. The air is hot, and a man speaks…
“We all saw them, their ship, we saw their faces. They are real.”
“That’s exactly my point. I would be lying if I said they didn’t make me question reality itself,” Bain said. “Consider this. You are not what you are right now. You are something else. You do not perceive matter in this crude form, and even energy itself is not invisible to you or expressed as pure force. Instead, you see each vibration of matter to a point where diamond itself which, to you, seems solid and unmovable, shifts and spirals, twists and turns, its fundamentality in a constant flux. You see the strings of it, each oscillating in a specific way, each oscillation giving birth to what you would perceive as matter, each vibration correlating to a specific formation in this dimension. Then imagine being able to see this, being able to actually feel the energies these strings produce as they vibrate around you. Then imagine being able to feed upon these patterns of oscillation. Like a tree absorbing the vibrations of light, transforming it into itself. You really can’t imagine yourself doing it, can you? You can say you’re able to imagine it. But can you really?”
“I was lucky to get a feed of a camera taking Kirlian imagery, as well as taking shots and videos in every possible spectrum. I examined all of these videos thoroughly. Observe. See for yourself.”
A holographic image, granulose at first, appeared in the middle of the conference room. Projected from what looked like a light bulb on the floor, it soon became clear enough for us to see a being on it as though it were in the room. My heart suddenly felt heavy at the sight. It was even looking at the camera, its eye shifting even in the holographic image!
“How does is even,” I began. “How can it–“
“I don’t know how. This should be a hologram,” answered Bain. “Yet its eye… well, you can all see it.”
“Very disturbing,” a man from the crowd added and broke the accumulating silence.
“What is happening around the being?” the woman asked with no small measure of fascination. There was a stream of strange electricity spiraling into it from each body, each soldier and each civilian, the light moving like flowing lighting.
“This may confuse some, but I assume all of you are, by now, quite familiar with string theory. Let me make it simple. If you consider that your brain is forged by strings, since it is made of atoms, each vibrating in an extra–dimensional sphere within an ocean of consciousness – then your brain is simply a collection of specific patterns of vibration.”
“Now imagine again what I said earlier,” Bain continued. “You perceive the world like this, like I described. Strings vibrate and throb, they loop into other strings, seemly making more, yet remaining part of the whole. Now apply to all of this, a drug.”
“What kind of drug?” a member of the crowd chimed in.
“It doesn’t matter, it’s simply an analogy,” Bain said. “Let’s say a mind–altering drug. A drug that changes the way you see things. Again, you are able to see these vibrations. They, as you take the drug, you go from feeding on these vibrations, seeing them, to experiencing reality in its crude form, like all of us see it now. Which reality would you say is the real one? Because if you consider the fact that all you did was add atoms into your brain, which for a time changed the way you brain vibrates and changed the way you experience reality, then reality is an illusion of your senses. The implications are staggering.”
“This is not a new thing,” said the woman.
“I suppose you can go into a purely rational frame of mind, since you used a drug analogy,” a man adds. “A receptor in your brain got aroused by the drug and received different, conflicting information.”
“Yet we always come back to the fact that all that has changed was the way the fundamental reality vibrated, and that in turn changed your whole spectrum of perceptions, sight, sounds, everything.”
“What does this have to do with destroying them?” I asked. “I haven’t gotten to the crux of my theory yet,” said Bain.
“Then please, if you will, get to it,” said a man on the verge of his patience. I knew him by his academic title only, Dr. Jamrovich. A slightly obese man, quick to anger and slow to settle down. I could see it in his face – as in many others – that he wished we had been talking about real ways to battle this threat.
“I believe they feed on fear,” Bain proclaimed. “Fear is, after all, one of the strongest of emotions and easy enough to generate in the human mind.” He summoned up another holographic image, this time a picture of a man in three dimensions. “This is how the magnetic field around the human body looks like when under severe terror.” There was a myriad of tiny tipples and lighting strikes surrounding the outline of the man’s body. “It is this energy field that we see being drawn from the bodies on the hologram I had shown you before. Every time the lighting we had seen pulses and goes into the being, the field is lessened around the human body, this is clear on the holoimage. The human body, however, is a generator of these fields, so as long as we are afraid, the beings will have an energy source.”
“That’s preposterous,” Dr.Jamrovich said. “What is? That aliens are alien? That we may have manifested them? That the universe is stranger than we have thought? What!” Now Bain was getting angry, the whole room was getting angry. They began to shout and talk over one another, some supporting Bain’s claim, while others rejecting it with abandon. And that’s when it happened. It happened and the room was silenced like a grave. This time, I felt it. Somehow, I felt it before I saw it, and it seemed almost as if the thing was waiting for the perfect time to do it. To appear. It manifested out of thin air, out of nothing and was simply there. One second there was air and the next it existed. A god. A form that had materialized in a way which shouldn’t be possible in a universe obeying physical laws. Its will was oppressing. It suddenly felt as though the entire world was being crushed in a cosmic vice that kept pressing down upon my mind. I crumbled to the ground, heard others fall as well. Only one person kept standing. Bain. I heard him shout as he walked towards the god,
“I’m not afraid of you, you bastard!” The being didn’t budge until Bain came right beneath it. Samir didn’t even reach to its waist. When Bain came close enough, it extend one, massive arm. The limb touched Bain’s forehead and a sound of worlds shattering consumed my mind. Universes collided. Dimensions twisted. Colors turned to sound and I could smell the sun, dying. My eyes closed and when I opened them again, the world wasn’t the same anymore.
I meet my father as I have met him the first time. He is standing facing towards me this time, waiting for me with a smile on his face. His eyes don’t smile. He is veiled by the night. Stars twinkle in the dark, constellations of distant suns sending out light through the darkness, pulsing in the sky. My heart matches the speed of their pulse.
CHAPTER 24