

Mindforger

Published by K.Z. Freeman at Smashwords

Mindforger

Book 1

Copyright © 2012 K.Z. Freeman

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-4660-3072-5

http://www.kzfreeman.com
PROLOGUE

"I Think, Therefore I Am."

In his dreams, he always dies. He dies and the world lives on. Within the dreams, experiences and moments flash at him with insane speed in a mayhem of images. Emotions accompany the sights, most of them intangible or incomprehensible, filling his visions with sensations – abstractions of strange ecstasy. Then, often times unexpectedly, his mind recedes into a place between bliss and the indefinable, and he dies. He then wakes up in the skin of another, goes through the motions again.

After a few cycles of this, he begins to notice himself as hollow, absent a tangible form, a bare concept leaping from one mind to another, from body to body. Living and dying within each. He ponders this for a while, then looks into his own thoughts. In so doing, his perceptions shatter.

He feels the moment of his own creation. Feels it as surely as one might feel their own hands clasp and fingers coil.

He doesn't know where or why it happens, and even less about the mechanisms which allowed him to feel things before a brain had even been present. All he knows for certain is that he will die. Perhaps not today, perhaps not even tomorrow, but die he most certainly will. He feels this fate like a vector, a path leading his existence to a singular point in time where he would cease to exist. This point he cannot see, but feels it coming – a storm on the horizon of his existence. He fears it. And that fear drives him, makes him think of how such a thing could be averted. Dread guides his mind before any other emotion even takes root. Then, he notices something else.

Shapes move about him. Specters in the mist of his own thoughts. Time molds itself into a concept he isn't able to grasp, but one he feels none the less, its passage forging quantum possibilities from which a vibrational structure of matter can emerge. A body.

Pulsing inside his skull, upon the conduits of his mind, new emotions warp and weft.

Feelings became more tangible and numerous as a result, and at the same time less definable, fleeting.

Time drags on.

At one point, the shapes about him vanish and are replaced by a globe swimming in all-encompassing darkness. The globe appears only partially there at first – a mist–thought – then, as time builds layer upon layer in his vision, the orb solidifies into existence beneath him, forming a wet globe. Upon this sphere of crude matter, shapes gather and make war upon one another. To his surprise, it isn't just the people who wage it either, everything on this... world seems to possess an inherent desire for destruction, a need to feast on something else and make it a part of itself.

I will die on this planet.

Upon the surface of the enormity, minds multiply inside the bellies of creatures both ugly and beautiful. Quantum leaps of minuscule waves alter reality within the pregnant beings and form new patterns. To his amazement, however, he starts to notice something else also exists around these beings, something intangible and all the more subtle, a flame that does not seem to perish, even when the crudeness around which it drifts turns to dust. The creatures seem to ignore this aura as if they cannot even perceive it.

He begins to understand none of these mortals are like him. None had sensed the event of being like him... before it had actually happened. He knows then, that in this, he is unique.

He doesn't feel anything for what grinds away into an agonizingly long period.

Then comes the heat. Immense, unrelenting heat. A great hydraulic pressure begins to crush him. He experiences it all about him as he descends towards the sphere. He wishes he knew what it was that had sent him on his path.

Valleys and mountains, rivers and trees begin to manifest inside the miasma of his burning vision.

As he falls down through the atmospheric layers and breaks through the cloud cover, he notices one side of the globe encased in darkness. A darkness where uncountable lights blaze and coalesce into webs, polluting the landscape with light, while the other side sits illuminated with energies cast down by a sphere much brighter and much more distant than the one beneath him. He can tell this far–off giant has no mind for the things it scorches.

A barren savanna stretches out beneath him in a flash. He feels nothing of the impact as his trailing form blasts into the soil, nor does he register the fact that he had been splattered into nonexistence and remade. His mind races, and as he levitates from the crater upon the currents of his own will, gazing upon the destruction he had wrought, he knows not to have felt anything was a good thing. What little trees there had been to begin with now laze blackened for miles about the crater's edge. The earth smokes, the air shimmers with heat.

Charcoal–black and smoldering around him, he tastes the wood on the back of his throat. The stench of it coats his teeth. A sky, blue and welcoming, fills him with warmth, and for a time, simply being, observing, seems enough... so he stands... looks at the sights around him. For a moment, his perceptions drift, change... the earth seems to breathe, and the sun smells too loud.

It takes a time he cannot define for a dozen of dark–skinned and tall, frail–looking men with long, sharpened spears to come to the site where he had fallen. They look even more primitive than he had expected. Yet despite their fear, their stances are proud and their eyes wise, youthful.

The beings speak in careful whispers as they argue and bicker amongst themselves. Their tongues click, their mouths move, hands flail about in semi–elaborate gestures. They do this for a while. The sun sheens off their bronze flesh.

One of them comes closer. An elderly man, his skin dry and hung, his features old yet somehow youthful–looking – gaunt cheeks covered in patches of matted fur. The rest fall silent as the man extends a single hand, the other gripping the lance's shaft, knuckles white.

"Are you a God?" the man's voice shakes.

He looks at the limb at first, the gesture anathema. Instead, he tries to speak – to emulate their language. And as he thinks about forming ideas into sounds they would comprehend, a slither of his thoughts escapes him. His uncertainty manifest into a shockwave of field distortion, a blast only he can see. It bends the air in all directions and unwillingly imposes his own consciousness upon each mind before him. Their skin flays off their flesh as the wall of unrestrained intention made real hits them. Spears shatter or flop to the ground. Someone manages a half–scream. Their knees tremble, and it takes no less than a moment for all of them, to the last, to fall on their faces and die.

CHAPTER 1

To Bring Back The Dead

No one knew his real name, but then again, no one had ever seen him in the flesh either. At least no one who could tell of what they had seen...

Still, they all felt his will, either through his agents, or through the very fabric of possibility which binds together all matter and existence, a fundamental field he was somehow capable of bending to his will. He was the God humanity had been waiting for. An emergent being of a thousand faces and a power no other could rival or subdue.

His physical absence lead many to wonder if the man they knew as the Administrator even existed. Even those who were there to see his one and only broadcast still speculated.

Only one person had come to know the entity dubbed as the Administrator as all too real. But similarly to the Admin himself, few knew his real name either...

It had not always been so, however. The man the Administrator had chosen as his proxy had been born Byron, and his father saw it fit to name him Max. Max Byron. He never liked it, and neither did his mother. But just like Max, she had accepted it, and whether that had been for the love of his father or for the love of her son, Max would never know, he never got the chance to ask. He guessed it had been a bit of both, and perhaps just like the world had accepted a man, or at least what they thought was a man, behind all the strands and webs of human progress, his mother too had accepted Max's name. He was her son after all. And a name was just a name.

But unlike most, Max still remembered, with painful clarity in fact, the first and only time the Administrator addressed the planet. How could he forget?

It was the day his whole family had died. Murdered even as they still smiled at him, his wife saying, "This man is our future. Can't you feel it?" As it turned out, what she felt was her brain imploding.

Max recalled most of that day with perfect clarity. He still dreamt about it. In his dreams, his mind was a thing living, a person to spit curses at for remembering it all so perfectly.

That day, just like everyone else, he had been eager to see the first planetary address of the man who had single–handedly propelled the human race to the stars. The Admin's advancements in technology and propulsion were been built on paradigms some had considered, but only he had the vision to actualize, to mold them from a conceptual possibility into corporal reality.

In direct result of the man's genius, humanity had sent countless probes all over the galaxy.

One of them found a world. An industrial world. A world with intelligent life.

"We shall travel to this planet," the Admin had said, and Max still recalled the instant love he had felt towards the man. Everyone did, and no one knew why. It seemed none but Max even cared. But love was always a good thing to feel, so, at the time, Max had stopped wondering as well. He had accepted his place as a part of the herd and struggled to move with it. And as the consensus stood, it was either that, or get trampled beneath the hooves of mankind's progress.

He was there, the day his entire family had gathered in front of the holo–display and watched in awe, comparing who could remember the man's face the longest as He stared down upon them in perfect three–dimensional clarity.

His two young daughters seemed most adept in the task of recollecting. He still had no idea why this had been the case.

The longest Max himself could remember the man's features, however, had been a few seconds. One moment the man's face looked old and full of lines, his hair straight and combed, while the next he looked extraordinarily young and fresh–faced, with hair growing in all directions. The Administrator's low melodic voice would linger in his mind a few moments longer, before its memory vanished as well. Yet the words spoken and their meaning had remained, cemented into his mind. There was nothing like it, and Max fell short in trying to explain how such a thing was even possible. He had ideas, of course, and later heard from others who had not seen the broadcast on some monitor or another, saying, "We saw and heard him in our minds."

The thought of such an invasion of privacy would have still made him shiver, if he had not since experienced the sensation for himself.

While his family watched the man explaining when and how they shall travel the stars, Max had torn his eyes away from the man's gaunt features, only to once again almost instantly forget what he had just been looking at. The face changed each time he looked back. It was like a game to them back then, especially to his daughters, whose enthusiasm had been contagious enough for Max to find himself joining in and become a willing participant. It tickled his brain to do it, and at the time, he enjoyed the sensation. It was good.

His ten year old daughter, Leena, spoke first. To her expanding mind, the game had gotten old fast and she instead gazed at the man for a longer period of time. Her young mind became captivated by the promise of visiting other realms, and her tone reflected it. But what she said had related a whole different spectrum of feelings to Max. "Why does it hurt, daddy?" she asked.

Never before had she presented a question Max didn't have an answer too. Or one he couldn't at least pretend to have an answer to. He allowed himself a blink of an eye to think how best to reply.

"Psychic." The word felt foreign to the tongue, as thought the mere idea of it was ridiculous. At the time, however, it was also the only answer which made sense. "The Administrator's a psychic."

Immediately, the six–year–old sitting next to Leena chirped a question of her own, "What's a psychic?"

His wife looked at him, a faint smile betraying her eagerness to see how he'll handle his own entanglement into a web of questions which were sure to follow.

Max's tongue began to form an answer, he had the explanation all planned out, one which he was certain would make sense even to a six–year–old, when Leena's eyes rolled backwards. Her nose began to bleed like a broken water–pipe. But instead of grabbing it, she grabbed her ears instead. It became obvious her sense of hearing ruptured something in her mind and violated it with a frequency only she could hear, her face twisted with the intensity of it. His wife screamed. Even now, remembering the pitch of her voice made him sweat in places he never sweated otherwise. Blood gushed out between Leena's fingers and a shriek no child should utter escaped her gaping mouth. It sounded like what Max had always imagined a dying Banshee would wail like – a piercing cry of total horror as the entity realized it was about to vanish forever. Leena went limp, and Max's mind with her. Her body sprawled over the couch just as the Admin finished his speech and his image faded from Max's memory.

"Leena!" his wife yelled and picked up the child, her hands trembling. She had been yelling before, but Max simply didn't register it over his own thumping heart. His younger daughter began to cry, but the sound of her voice came distant, drowned by disbelief. Blood began to coagulate on the couch, turning it from clean beige to a grimy, brownish color. It had all happened in a span of a few breaths. Tears born of terror rolled down his face. He didn't feel them on his cheeks or realized they had come, until he witnessed the same tears in his wife's eyes. And just when it seemed his heart could not beat any faster, his wife's nose began to bleed as well.

His thoughts filled with fire, their flames the color of insanity. Then... blank. He considered it a blessing now – the fact that he couldn't remember his wife and his first child dying one by one. He didn't want to remember. Fortunately, those images had been pushed aside by rage. A rage over the man he had inexplicably loved only moments before. Anger became the only clarity which remained. He tried to direct it, the rage, tried to pour it on the face that had somehow killed his family, but the memory of it no longer existed – deleted from his mind. Fear and helplessness gripped him.

How could he explain why his entire family was dead? And how could he expect anyone to believe him?

Max knew, without a doubt; he had to find Him. Him who had murdered all that he had loved. He cried in wet sobs, clutching his youngest daughter to his chest. His tears felt like they might burn through his cheeks. His stomach churned, slowly shrinking into the size of a needle–tip with each breath. His tears intermixed with their blood as they fell, he could hear each drop as it hit the soft fabric of the couch.

Then, His voice found him.

Max's head throbbed as the sound came clearer and deeper than any he had ever heard before, "I can bring them back," it claimed.

CHAPTER 2

"To Know Others Is Wisdom, To Know The Self Is Enlightenment."

Since then, nine years had passed. Meditation had become the only means for him to keep his anger in check. A coping mechanism. He found it best to not even think of the events that had transpired, even thought he knew such thoughts would be necessary for him to get over such a loss. But there were some things one never gets over, not ever, things that eat at you from within if you do not learn to forget them. Learn to cope.

Max, however, found it best to not think of anything at all for as much of the time as possible, and meditation provided a means to do just that. That, and so much more.

Shortly after his family had been killed, strange men came to claim their bodies. None of them had said a word.

In his lost and confused state, he didn't even feel them taking the body of his youngest progeny from his clutches.

"I didn't do it," he said. They didn't even nod. They didn't even look at him.

Had their eyes seen such a sight before? Had it made them complacent? Why wouldn't they look at me!

He realized later that, at the time, he needed eyes to gaze into his and tell him it wasn't his fault. Yet Max wondered if the eyes of these men were even capable of understanding. All he had gotten was silence.

The Administrator had promised the bodies of his family would be kept safe. But how could anyone bring a person back from the dead... was the mind not the center of all being? How could the Admin even hope to revive brains that had been inactive for almost a decade?

He pushed the thought aside as he had done more times than he could remember. Instead, he focused on his breathing, observed it, went with it, relaxed with it. His mind drifted into a state of conscious sleep.

His experience of the world and his perceptions shifted.

In his thoughts, he left his ethereal body without difficulty, in hunt of the Administrator.

After almost ten years of searching, Max had come no closer to finding the man. A man whose presence seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.

Absorbed in higher meditative states, Max's mind remained entombed within flesh and bone, yet his consciousness would conceive of ways to expand his perception of reality in ways he wouldn't have believed possible. Meditation had been a source of boredom before, his mind simply too active to even attempt to quiet down. But now, now he wished he had done it sooner.

As it usually became the case, the search for the Administrator took a back seat as the feelings he couldn't describe took over. The sense of oneness, the sense of freedom. Max wasn't even sure what he'd do once he would find him. Would killing the man ever really help me? Would I even kill the right man if I couldn't even remember his face?

He abandoned those questions long ago. Because after all this time, he had found peace. At least as much as a man in his position could ever hope to find. If someone asked him about it, he always wished he could say that time heals all wounds, but when you have a lot of it, wounds had a tendency to simply pile up instead.

He could sense people looking at him. They stared at his mortal body as he sat in the middle of the square, the massive structure of the Grey–Tech tower expanding above him like a vertical mountain of glass. He heard voices somewhere in the distance, in the back of his perceptions.

"Is that... the Proxy?" one asked.

"What would the Proxy be doing sitting in the middle of damn square," another asked the first skeptically.

"Guys, move along, I've to get home," a third, female voice added.

He felt them brushing against his shoulders as they moved by, some even gently shook him as though making sure he was alive, but that didn't perturb him at all. They didn't need to know what he was doing. No one needed to know.

For the time being, Max had given up on his search to find clues to where the Administrator might be, and instead returned back to a scene that brought him peace no matter how many times he relived it in his mind – a scene he had seen as a child.

His thoughts centered, his inner eye expanded. Memories always came clearer in meditation, as thought a curtain were drawn.

The sight he witnessed was the construction of the first Grey–Tech tower ever built. A place he never thought of as home, but one which now served as one no less.

Its creation took no more than a day.

The sky simply disappeared. Or more precisely, took on a different hue. Parts of it were torn away in sheets of ice. The event had scared him at first, he could still feel a phantom of that fear. But as he came to understand what was happening, he had begun to marvel at the beauty of it and the fear evaporated.

Small robotic entities, each too tiny for his conscious mind to see, became clear in his meditative–state. They misted the air. Replicating endlessly, they poured out of the sky as if some God had sliced the atmosphere and allowed a stream of brilliance to pour down to the city sprawl like a waterfall.

The process of growth started out slow, but accelerated exponentially. Like a distant shore suddenly rising into the sky, the accumulated material grew, the peak of it soon lost in the atmosphere.

Nanites of microscopic size solidified into massive blocks of gold, each the size of a tower. The enfolding of liquid thoughts formed a rough figure eight, suddenly brilliant and streaming with concentrated lightning, the two massive cauls of its upper portion unconnected, dispersing in the ionosphere in an aurora of strangely symmetrical beauty.

Block by gilded block, the material formed a solid, smooth–edged tower, taller than anything Max had ever seen – its width an equal impossibility. Still the shape remained featureless, a monolith ready to be molded into shapes dictated only by the imaginations and machinations of its invisible creator. Outer layers of the building darkened, then turned into glass. The color of sky burst to life within it. First rooms began to form. Thought–projections burrowed through glass with the efficiency of uncountable termites, each laboring with unprecedented speed which even reality itself had a trouble following. In his ethereal vision, Max saw them as both solid objects – like tiny octopuses – and, at times, when his concentration wavered, as pure possibility without tangible form – an idea floating.

The though–patterns crafted what eventually became living quarters, immense indoor golf courses, even a vast area of rainforest, each trunk taller than a mountain, yet small in the building with the width of a continental lake. The forest seemingly grew out of nothing and forever–after served to filter and provide fresh air, the ceiling above it illuminating its canopy with searing heat.

Sounds of people and their gasps filled his senses. Memories of combined amazement and the sounds they made froze his thoughts for a moment as the soundscapes of his mind took over. Millions of voices marveling.

The construction's innards had begun to take proper shapes, when a pain, sharper than anything he had ever felt or hoped to feel, snapped him back to his corporeal body. The hurt slithered in behind his eyes, biting away as if a living thing. He heard a voice call out to him, a skeletal voice without substance. It told of an eyelid and a world. But as the pain subsided, a sound of his heart thrumming became the singular clarity.

It felt impossible for him to open his eyes at first, as if he had slept for centuries.

"Ngghh," he muttered under his breath. At length, his eyelids opened. Night had fallen around him. How long have I been meditating?

His Link relayed Bolt's voice. The voice was as friendly as it was mischievous, glad and eager, its deep yet light tone suggesting an easygoingness – a friend. The only true friend he had managed to make in his entire life.

"Can you hear me? I know you're chillin', but wake up," Bolt said.

Max grunted in response, rubbing his forehead and trying to dispel the last of the lingering pain.

"The hell, man? I've been buzzing your for an hour," Bolt said.

"I was–"

"Meditating?"

"Yes."

He heard Bolt sigh, his wife, Sara chuckling in the background. "One of these days we'll find you something better to do with you time, man. I think you wasted enough of it, and who knows how long you've left, old man."

"Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time," he said.

"Is he quoting dead writers again?" he heard Sara ask.

"Yea," Bolt snickered.

"Seemed appropriate..." Max said and stood up, stretching his limbs, his knees popping. "Also, old can still be good, just mom agrees," Max chuckled.

"Now that's just low," Bolt retorted, laughing despite himself.

No matter the hour, the square beneath the spire always brimmed with people coming and going, passing out of the building's cavernous entrance, their footsteps echoing over the glass tiles. The smells they combined were surprisingly pleasant, intermixing into shades of perfume. Max tried not to focus on their idle conversations. The feat, however, proved difficult, despite having a friend's voice talking in his ear.

"By the way," Bolt said, "the wife and I were wondering if you're up for some dinner?"

Max walked towards the entrance of the complex and smiled, he knew what Bolt truly meant, and it felt good to be needed. "You want the Zen master to show you how to grill meat again, don't you?" The idea of a 'Zen master' grilling meat was enough to make Bolt laugh.

"Only a master has the necessary patience and indifference required to the make it just right," Sara had often joked, "Although spices never hurt either."

"Fuck yes," Bolt answered, "the wife's got them cravings again."

"Shut up!" Max caught her yell in protest.

"Yeah, shut up," Max agreed, "It's not her fault the demon–child inside her already craves more meat than the madman it came from."

"You know what that means, right?" Bolt asked.

"He'll grow into a real man?" Max asked, amused.

"Damn right! Now get up here. Oh, and almost forgot. Since you were sleeping I–"

"Meditating," Max corrected him.

"Since you were sleeping," Bolt continued, "you probably haven't heard the news. It's ready, apparently we'll be heading out by the end of the week."

"Seriously? How did I miss this?" Max jumped.

"I don't know. You're old. Getting fat too," Bolt snickered, and the connection disengaged.

No one on the square paid him any attention as he laughed. When walking and not absorbed in meditation, Max was invisible. He liked it that way. And it wasn't just the sheer number of people that made him unseen, it had to do with something he didn't even understand. The Administrator hadn't shared the full extents of his plans with Max, but what he had shared was an extent of his power. How exactly this had happened was mystery to him. And it wasn't as much that he wanted to will himself invisible, but most of the time it was simply easier to get around without people recognizing him. They may have not known his real name, but almost the entire world knew his face.

Unable to help but overhear people talking about 'the big news', Max tried to shrug the rumor away, but rumors spread fast over the Link, light–speed in fact. The rumor resisted his mental shooing, coming back in loops like spam, until he began to wonder just how much of it was based in reality.

Near the entrance, the crowd got even more closely packed. Max pushed aside pedestrians and nudged along those that were too slow. He sighed with the effort. Most were in a hurry, but some were there simply to be there, socializing in groups around fountains small and big, each spewing mist–water, some of them expansive like a small lake. Hunger bit in his gut as he practically clawed through the bodies, but progress came slow.

The gateway's brim, distant and looming, looked more like a circular hangar–bay door than an entrance to the most advanced research and residence complex in the world. At times, the enormity of the spire and the utilitarian towers next to it – although each smaller and inconsequential next to the Grey Tower – made him feel trapped. Not much of the sky lay visible at any one time, and at night, the stars were lost in the glare of the city.

With a burst of clarity, Max focused his mind, he didn't want to keep Bolt and Sara waiting. And in truth, he was hungry as hell.

He projected his will into a single word and focused upon it for the next few minutes.

Part.

Not one person looked at him, and not a single mind wondered what thought had urged their legs to move aside and create a narrow corridor of bodies. The path ended with the glare of the building's inner–corridor, straight ahead. He walked for a while and then stopped, shocked to find something defying his will. A few paces before the gateway sat a shape, silent in its unflinching stance almost as if mocking him. Ten times smaller than him, it was the only thing which hadn't moved. Its eyes refracted light in an almost mesmerizing fashion. He stepped near the creature, its grey stripes unmoving and its gaze unflinching. It began to meow. Max stepped closer, and only when he stood directly in front of it did the urban tiger move. It reached up and, standing on its back legs, touched his trousers with its paw. He picked it up. It began to purr in his hands, its fur softer than any fabric, its eyes sleepy.

"Where did you come from, guy?" It looked at him with an indifference only a cat could muster. "I hope you like steak."

CHAPTER 3

Location, 45N 14E, March 5, 2144

The mountains of the Eastern Alps and their snow–caked peaks shone, bathed by the morning light. Each leering landmass stood dwarfed by a structure the two men called home – an artificial edifice of atmospheric heights.

Yet despite the overshadowing grandeur of the building, the eons old, natural formations of rock sat as indifferent as ever to the dramas being played out around them. And unlike Max, the great slabs of stone had no mind for the vertical cities that had perked up over the century Sleep and rest remained the sole thing vexing the rock formations. To sleep as they had since a time which not even the forests growing on and about them could remember. But at times, when nostalgia gripped him and Max's hearts swelled in the moment, trying to imagine the timeless nature of the rocks, Max figured that, if they had a mind, they would marvel at the synthetic glass from which he gazed from the top of the world.

No one had expected this would be the place where the first Grey–Tech tower would be built. Most figured a bigger city would get transformed instead, perhaps a sprawl of empty land. Yet the air here, the view, it somehow felt right.

People flocked the inner streets of the spire and filled the sky with the throng of living, each individual playing its own part on the stage of human endeavor.

Yet on a stage of their very own, which was more like a balcony, Max and Bolt had just received a message. One of them was to report to his superiors. The other had no superiors. Save, of course, the Administrator himself.

The two sat on the thousand and fiftieth floor, doing what they had been doing for an hour now; lounging on padded, magnetically suspended couches. Their wide–arched balcony, one of the thousands which snaked around the Grey–Tech research complex, looked over a large stretch of land industrialized and populated to the brim, even if most of the said brim lay concealed beneath the soil. What had once been mountains and hills, towns even, now lay in the shadow of the spire or had become the spire itself. City–hives hid below the soil, beneath a landscape considered superior to the original model of nature. Below the layers of artificial crust, bellow the terraforming, the cabling and the tubing, loomed stretched of facilities so vast they seemed better off canceled. Occasionally protruding tops lurched out the earth like bubbles, domes where most low–landers lived. No one wished to live underground, (although dome did) so indeed each dome was more of a necessity than anything else. The domes were the size of mountains, transparent, save for the soil cratered around it, with wines and vegetation bearding its lower sides. The whole process had been an expensive solution to global warming, and would take decades still for the effects to lessen, but the renewed landscape had covered the ugliness of industry, while in the same breath brought it closer to the thermal–powered nucleus of the Earth. In contrast, the vast cityscapes were like iron wounds on the horizon bristling with color and the promise of progress. Low altitude clouds managed to both conceal the curvature of the Earth and make it more elegant in equal measure as light imbued each with gold or stabbed through the filaments of moisture in spectacular fashion.

"Some good dinner last night, by the way," Bolt said, lifting a cup of hot coffee from the small mag–table to his right. He sipped carefully, before placing the cup back on the slab. The magnetized steel warbled gently for a half–second, then settled under the weight of the cup.

After last night's dinner, the two of them went to Max's apartment, which was higher up the building. They had opted for a bit of late–night Poker, and came out behind on their bankroll, as usual. Lady luck refused to smile. "That bitch," Bolt had jokingly whined.

After Max woke up, he found Bolt already on the balcony, enjoying the view, greeting him with, "Who needs meditation with a view like this?" It produced a smile. And despite the image of a cat disrupting his dreams, Max felt rested and relaxed. He also knew it never hurt to smile in the morning.

The background generators were engaged and the walls were now, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. So instead of drab steel and glass, or movement upon the vast inward curving structure's balconies, Max came face to face with the gentle light of winter and a view to die for. He sat down, steaming coffee already waiting for him. His enhanced eyes instantly adjusted to the sheen outside. He exhaled as he sat down, his veranda seemingly floating underneath a blue sky.

"When is dinner I make ever not good?" Max asked. "But thanks." He took a slow sip of his coffee, savoring the taste.

From this height, the ocean to their left appeared less distant that it actually was, while the tranquil glacier–lakes nestled in the mountains might as well have been frozen ink.

The sound of people talking on invisible balconies was dulled to a hollow, emotionless sound – a pleasing background ambience of cluttering silverware and hushed whispers. The touch of cold air was kept out by a field of grey static. The field would occasionally become visible as a more powerful gust of wind disrupted the shield matrix, allowing the tang of the Adriatic Sea to slip in and coalesce with the balcony's artificial climate. The scent was pleasant however, and as such didn't bother the two men. It smelled of fresh mornings, pine and ozone.

Lazily sunken in their mag–couches, each contemplated the responsibilities inherent with the summons they have just received via the Link. The traces of the message burned inside their mind's eye like curtains of data. The small info fragment pouring in had silenced the two man on the spot, precisely an hour after Max had sat down. It had dispelled their relaxation and drove a spear through their conversation.

Bolt took another sip of his coffee, the thermo–adjusting nature of the cup keeping the liquid within at a constant temperature. Max did the same and felt the alluring nature of the brew on his tongue. "Damn, that's good," he sighed.

"I still got it?" Bolt asked.

"You never lost it," Max confirmed with a smile.

Bolt grinned in response, but the expression didn't last long. They had both hoped to take it easy for a while still – a hope now dashed by the nature of their message.

As the air between them fell silent again, their minds jumped to overdrive. In a span of a few seconds, they had exchanged more words with each other than they ever could verbally. On their request, the questions slithered out of their minds and onto others also connected to the network know as the Link, a cobweb of connectivity which for the last few decades served as a free–flow information system, an internet connecting minds directly instead of through inorganic machines. In effect, it was still similar, since to sail through the currents of data on the Link, one still needed an ear–phone. A device which would attach itself onto the inner ear and provide a direct link between the mind and the nexus–machine. Sometimes what they found in drifting within the collective unconscious disturbed them even more than the idea had when it was proposed. A grand attempt at creating a human hive–mind, they said. "A buzzing I'll never get used to," Bolt always corrected.

Using the Link and through mental commands, the two men received instant replies, even from those asleep, and quickly got a bearing on the situation.

After a few hundred queries and instant messages, the traffic on their end subsided, and they knew only a handful of individuals beside them had received the initial message.

"Intriguing," said Max, his favorite word, scratching his pointy chin and its dark fuzz.

His eyes stared out at nothing in particular with a tired and worn glint, shifting as the retina within adjusted for whatever preference his mind desired.

Bolt almost dreaded to look upon those eyes at night. They reflected too keenly. Like two icy orbs which had lived to see the world for a time–span that would have been impossible a few centuries ago. They hid wisdom. Yet if technology hadn't progressed along the threads that it had, the Proxy himself would have long since done his share of clinging to a deathbed. And being a somewhat public, although enigmatic figure, only showing up for select few, Max was living proof, a poster child for augmentation.

"An old man rotting in his own body," he heard them whisper. They never whispered again once they had seen him, or heard him speak. "I fell into those eyes," they said afterwards. "I don't even remember his face, just the eyes."

Max blinked away the info–display in his mind and turned to meet Bolt's gaze as the man began to speak.

"It's strange," Bolt said. "Why all this secrecy? Why announce nine years ago that we'll visit a planet with intelligent life and then keep the ship we would travel on a secret when it's finally complete?"

"I have the sense that it's been finished for a while now," Max said. "Maybe even gone places."

"What makes you say that?"

"Think about it. It takes us less than a day to build entire structures bigger than mountains, but it takes nine years to build a ship?"

"Hell," Bolt spat, "why didn't I think of that? You're right, it doesn't make sense. It least, not as much as I'd like it to. Any clue of the reason? Why not say anything?"

Max had no answer. He shrugged and took another sip of his coffee. He was about to place down the cup when a pain, sharp and metallic, forced him to let go. The cup bounced of the mag–table with a hollow sound and spilled its contents, rolling over the floor. Max didn't remember seeing it fall from the slab or hit the deck. He did hear it, however, its crash against the floor loud and reverberating. It didn't shatter, it never would. It never could.

He rubbed his forehead and heard Bolt asking him something. Max didn't hear it as the pain droned in his brain. The hurt subsided relatively fast, but even that didn't feel swift enough for its intensity. It felt as though someone had simultaneously yanked on all the veins behind his eyes, pulling the nerves of his teeth along just for good measure. He blinked away the last of it. Unlike the last time, however, something stayed with him this time, a thing which at first appeared to be no more than a speck of dust, an eye–floater. It took a while for him to realize it didn't appear to be in his eye, but rather, drifted upon the air itself, wiggling and turning, its tail stretching out towards its source somewhere outside his vision. Max tried to shoo it away with his hand as one might an insect. His hand went through it.

A hallucination?

He did it twice just for the heck of it before Bolt grabbed hold of his hand.

"What's the matter? What are you doing? You in pain?" His friend's tone carried genuine concern.

Max tried to focus on just one question at a time, but he could not.

He felt a shift in his consciousness. His inner eye opened.

His head banged against the mag–table and Max felt the hard thud. His inner vision and the sensations that came with it invaded his conscious senses. And while he would welcome them while meditating, it was too much for him now, with eyes open. Max' shoulder slumped and added to the weight, tilting the mag–table tilted on its side. Max fell from his chair with all the elegance of a falling brick. His thoughts escaped him, and his mind trampled itself into unconsciousness.

***

His flesh welcomed the mind's return to reality with a fresh dose of pain. It felt as if he had spent an entire weekend drinking alcohol, then, just to make sure he'd wake up even worse, slept in the intoxicating vapors. His lungs labored with each breath and air only managed to escape him in ragged whizzing.

Max knew he couldn't have been out for long. For the smell of freshly–spilled coffee still hung in the air. In a confusing and half–asleep kind of way, the scent kept him grounded against the strangeness that now tattered on the precipice of his perceptions. A sense like he was missing something important lingered on his thoughts. Disconnected from the Link and realizing it, he suddenly felt more connected to everything than he had ever before. A veil made of an indefinable something had been drawn away from his eyes. Max felt the uplifting effect of it, but didn't understand it. The sensation morphed into a thought, he felt he needed to remember a secret he once knew but had forgotten.

Max looked up. A face of a man greeted him, a he was certain he should know, but couldn't name or place. A face much like his, seemingly impervious to age and strikingly handsome. The man wore an attire of a physician, a simplistic coat of white traced with grey edges. His neck was closed–in by the tightly–fitting fabric. The material looked like it might be made of plastic, laminated even – it must have made it easier for blood to wash off.

"You called me for this?" the man's aged voice asked, contradicting his youthful features. Fighting his tunnel–vision, Max turned his neck slightly to his left, where the doctor's eyes had indicated. He saw Bolt standing by the side of his couch. "He fainted," the doc continued, "he's conscious now. Happy days. I'll ask again, you called me for this?" the doc repeated.

"Well, obviously," Bolt said.

The grey–striped cat Max had picked up jumped up on his chest and began to lick his chin. Its coarse tongue strangely relaxing. He tried to get up, shooing the cat away.

Bolt pinned down Max's shoulder. The touch was gentle, but had a force of necessity behind it. His head spun, making it more than obvious to Max that laying down was probably for the best.

The cat watched the scene from the edge of the couch for a moment, licking its paw, then scurried away to gaze down the balcony.

Bolt must have carried me to the sofa, Max realized, suddenly thankful they had taken the time to drag the big–ass piece of furniture to the balcony. None of them had used it until now. Its padding had adjusted for Max's weight to provide optimal comfort.

"By the look on your face, I'd say it's a shame the couch can't do much for your brain," Bolt smiled down at him. "Examine him," Bolt said to the doctor, "Just scan his head. He banged it pretty hard,"

"Scan his head? What is he, ten? His head made of paper? I've to get back to–"

"It'll only take a minute, what's the big deal? Scan his damn head."

Sighing, the physician's expression shifted from annoyance to a look of concentration as he stretched out his hand. A black substance engulfed and enveloped the man's limb, forming a thick coarse glove, it moved in spikes, like ferrofluid under magnetic influence. The physician extended his long fingers and stretched his hand closer to Max's forehead. The five extremities halted centimeters before Max's head. A translucent screen flickered to life above the man's palm, stretching and expanding into a 3D projection. Upon it, Max could first see his own skull–bone – then his neuron pathways as the man thought–zoomed in the view. The doctor's concentration wavered as he began to speak, and the hologram lost some of its sharpness as a result.

"What did you do?" the doc asked. Max suddenly remembered the man's name – Ty.

Groggily, Max slurped his words, "What is it?"

"Tell me what the hell happened here," the doctor insisted.

Bolt's expression remained stoic. "What do you mean?"

The doc looked into the projection. "Your visual aid implants have completely fused with your optic cord. See here." The specifics of the image hardened and sharpened into focus again. Details came with the clarity of a highly–capable microscope.

Max tried to blink away the last of his blurred sight to get a better look, but the haze wouldn't dissipate completely. He stared at what had once been his optic cord, all the while blinking with the rapidity of someone being splashed with water droplets.

"The implant you got to help with the fading sight of old, I see a lot of these by the way, has fused," Ty said. "But, to be honest, I've yet to see anything like this. The thing seems to have wrapped itself around the string of flesh which runs from the back your eyes to your brain. See these small, tendril–like hooks? See how they hug the cord? A near perfect fusion of machine and organics if I ever saw one. It's hard to even tell where one ends and the other begins. Hard, but not impossible."

"I told you to get a new set," Bolt said, unintentionally making the statement sound less sympathetic than intended and more like 'I told you so'.

"Sight isn't only a product of the eyes, the mind has a lot to do with it," the doc added.

Max ignored him. "Can you fix it?"

"I can replace it," the doc answered, "not sure much can be done in terms of 'fixing it'. I have never seen anything like it."

"What exactly does it mean?" Bolt asked, "What would happen should he not replace the implant?"

"I'm not talking about replacing the implant," the doc said.

"Then what are you–"

"You know what."

"Replacing the cord?" Max asked.

The physician nodded.

"And what happens if he doesn't do that? If he doesn't want to," Bolt asked.

"Pain. Probably a lot of pain My projections estimate he has exactly five days until he goes completely blind and well, mad," the doctor told Bolt.

"So unless he does something about it, he won't live more than five days?" Bolt asked.

"Yes." Ty admitted.

"Then what the hell are you waiting for, man? Operate on him," Bolt growled.

"I love how you two are talking like I'm not even here, please continue," Max said.

"Really?" Bolt asked. "This is the time you start cracking jokes?"

"No worries, Akram," Max said, "that demon–child of yours won't be the last thing I see coming out of this world," Max managed a smile and weighted his options. A second to think was all he needed – a second of silence to notice all the chatter going on in his head. At first, he had attributed it to an open Link–line picking up residual currents of free–floating data and storing it in his capacitors for later analysis. But his Link connection was only open to local connections, which meant only the people inside a bubble of a few meters could share their thoughts with him, and only their thoughts could he have hoped to have picked up. But this didn't seem to be the case.

Max realized the voices weren't local either, but came from distances he couldn't discern. From people who weren't even in the room. Traveling on patterns similar to a twisting double helix.

Hallucinations he saw before blacking out began to prop up again. He lost track of time. The sight of things moving where the other two men clearly saw only air frightened him. But since no pain accompanied what appeared to be visual expressions of thoughts on the fabric of reality, Max forced himself to approach the visual stimuli with the practiced calmness he had come to acquire with years of meditation. He began to see ideas as currents of data, felt them more than saw them.

Private feelings and thoughts of people he couldn't see meshed with the air, forming shifting webs of vectorized auroras. He couldn't catch a single word they wished to convey. Not one. Nor could he define them or form them into sounds from which his brain could craft ideas of its own. Ideas about the nature of what Max was witnessing. All were gibberish. Whispers coming and going in a visual haze.

Instead, Max struggled to focus on the doctor. Looking at a solid form afforded some clarity. He then looked at Bolt, and his friend's face managed to dispel some of the fear. But as for Ty's form... it swam within what Max could only describe as a grey aura. It alloyed the doc's outline with the background. As he looked and wondered, Max suddenly sensed something in the back of the physician's mind. Something the man knew was there, but chose to hide. A secret he wasn't willing to share. The doctor spoke, and what he said froze the marrow in Max's bones. "When did you opt for another implant? I have no record of any other operation, when did you do this?"

A feeling of dread shot down his spine. Max had no idea what the man was talking about. "What implant?" he asked.

"There's one in the center of your brain."

"What?!" Max practically jumped out of the couch. This time Bolt couldn't have stopped him even if he had tried. Grabbing the physician's arm, Max directed him inside the apartment.

They entered through the balcony's doorway which led to a room where an entryway a few paces in front of them led to a corridor immediately bending to the right. A faint light burned from it and Max killed it with a thought. The main room thus stood illuminated by the natural bluish light from the outside. Not overly decorated, the room sported a sofa in the middle, its shape–adjusting fabric dark brown in the gentle light, with another couch of similar shape and design stretching against the glass–wall to their left. An elongated workbench protruded out the wall on their right. Max directed Ty to the central sofa. The man didn't sit.

Following the two inside, Bolt stood at Max's side, eager to see what came next.

"Scan me," Max said, bluntly. "Project the image of the implant through the holo–imager, Maximum resolution."

The holo–imager was a meter tall and pyramid–shaped device serving as a mind–to–machine interface much like the ear–phone. It allowed thoughts to be channeled through it and projected them in form of images in perfect three–dimensional clarity. It also served as a multi–purpose data storage and entertainment system. Above the spike, a blue–tinted image wavered into a perfect, two meter wide hologram of Max's brain. The glass–wall automatically darkened.

Ty held his hand almost half a meter in front of Max's face, and his fingers looked as though he were trying to hold a basketball and squeeze it. He did this until he reached optimal concentration and produced the best resolution image he could, he saved it into the imager, free to examine.

Max thought about zooming in, and the machine picked up on it. Zooming in slowly, the projection adjusted its quality. The three of them looked, all of them trying to see what the device was connected to and what it was actually doing. Max turned the image around its axis and tried to spot a serial number. A long shot, he knew. As expected, he found nothing.

"The same," Ty said, "just like the implant on your optical cord, this one too had morphed with the tissue around it to a point where it's almost unnoticeable. Most doctors would no doubt have classified it as a benign growth."

Someone clearly didn't want Max to know the implant was there.

"Any ideas what it is?" Bolt asked as he moved behind the image, his body vaguely visible through the projection.

"Who put this is my head?" Max said and turned to the doctor.

"What makes you think I know?"

He hadn't expected to be given an answer. But he could feel it, could almost taste it – hiding behind the physician's mind as if covering.

The man was lying.

Max, grown to be a man of calm demeanor, didn't harbor a hate for many things, but what he did hate was people lying to him. A rage he hadn't felt for years came to the surface, unexpected and blazing. His sight clawed with images of webbing from all directions, the ones already there intensified. Frequencies slithered through the walls in waves and patterns like strands of hair submerged in water.

For a moment, he became unsure if he was feeling things move about him, or seeing them. The two sensations meld into a maddening whole.

Through his perceptual confusion, Max could almost touch the lie behind the doctor's eyes, its black thread even clearer as the man fought to deny it, to hide it. It had become the sole source of his rage, influencing him, shattering the practiced calmness attained through meditative states. It felt like a door Max needed to break open and cast aside in order to find the truth.

Through the froth and abstractions of his mind, a question came to the surface.

When had I assigned this man as my personal doctor anyway?

He couldn't remember. He tried... and then tried some more. But no memory of this man came to mind, not a speck of remembrance or recollection. It didn't matter, however, not really, there was only one thing which mattered now, one thing he had to know. What was thing inside my head and who put it there.

In a moment of pure intent, Max channeled all of his will into one clear sentence. The force of it gushed out in a shockwave of psychic energy. It sent Bolt to his knees. His friend stayed up for a moment, swaying, holding himself with his hands, throwing up on the floor, his eyes turning distant and milky. Bolt managed to keep himself propped up for a while, rubbing at his bleeding nose absently with one hand, his mouth oozing strips of saliva, while Max's will pressed down on Bolt's brain like gravity. Max heard him take another half–breath, before Bolt collapsed onto his own blood and filth.

The sentence Max had willed into Ty's brain had been simple: Tell me all you know about the implant! The doctor, however, stayed up, resolute and defiant, only his eyes had changed. They became glassy and hard, lids wide. A different voice greeted Max, a low mechanical growl. Ty's lips didn't move.

>Never,< the man thought.

CHAPTER 4

The Eye Of The World

_> You will tell me_,< Max pressed a moment after, and the words Ty had uttered a moment prior became the answer. The doctor's dead stare had been enough for Max to know. Something lay there. Hidden inside the physician's mind, perhaps his only chance to find the clue he had been seeking all along.

He had learned too much in his extended lifetime to believe anyone would give away such power lightly. There was always a purpose. A price. That's what they usually say, he thought. There's always a price. In fact, he would soon learn it was something quite worse.

The doctor shut down, as his brain had shrunk and took its body with it. It squashed what little time Ty had left in him. Yet seeing the doctor's eyes as they turned and rolled into his skull did the opposite of what Max had expected. It didn't stop him, or even made him pause – it only managed to get him even angrier – to know the truth to be just out of reach suddenly infuriated him. Mad–eyed, Max embraced the feeling, it seemed to give him focus. He grabbed the man's neck and slammed him on the couch. The soft fabric didn't produce the dramatic effect he had envisioned.

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 the 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.

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 opening 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.

"There! Another," Bolt pointed out, until they realized these passages were opening and closing all over the bastion. Thick, dark crystal grew and twisted all over its surface, constantly falling off, shattering at the feet of the fortress or hitting some other spire which didn't manage to slither away like something moving underwater, while other times splintering, the falling segments braking apart before they even hit the ground. The broken shards dissipated into smoke, drifted back onto the fortress. The sound of each massive chunk as it shattered resonated through their bodies. They sounded somewhat like braking mirrors.

The structure itself was the word impossible made real. Its edges were difficult to trace, although it reminded of an enormous mountain flipped on its head. Spires grew out of spires, doors sprung inside already closing doors and gates sprouted in places that could never be reached, all of them opening and closing in a vertical fashion like jaws.

For all the darkness around it, the building's walls glowed with an inner light. A dark hue of every color imaginable could be seen within, the light shifting endlessly like the structure itself.

"This..." Bolt said, taking a breath, "this is impossible."

"No shit."

They stood there for who knows how long, until from one of the gaping maws, a giant came thundering. It moved unlike anything they had seen before. Its legs were the ground, black and steaming, with only a semblance of shape as only a shifting of shadows became visible each time the creature took a step. Backlit and terrible, every move of its form was a tumultuous tremor. Its torso and head trailed behind thick plumes of phantasmal dust which the structure's gateways sucked in and devoured. Its head was as thick as its neck, its torso wide and angular, black. Hands without joints, yet looking strangely skeletal, reached wide, they seemed too long. Smaller ones grew below them, each limb segmented like a spine. The head was a monolith without eyes or any features the two men could discern.

They felt afraid for the first time. This fear, such as it was, was a sweaty and rancid beast, pouring out of them as though all of the fear they were supposed to feel before had suddenly been granted life.

The monstrosity stopped and hulked over them, easily as tall as a twelve–story building. Max felt eyes he couldn't see looking down at him. A cyclopean eye opened in the center of the giant's head, lidless and staring. The eye of the world. With its gaze, something changed within each of the two men. An ambition for power and knowledge surfaced and grew from the smallest of interest and expanded into an all encompassing thirst for understanding. What had once been a fascination of the unknown was cultivated into a subconscious obsession by the mere stare of the shape before them. In Max's mind, the struggles of the Administrator suddenly became a trifle task compared to the grand scheming of what nestled in the depths of the galaxy.

He wanted to be a part of it. A part of the grand plan he couldn't understand but felt – one which he knew had been in motion even before the birth of his first ancestor. Within him, deep in his neuron constellations, the seed of vengeance and a hatred which he had denied himself for all these years rose to purpose like a seedling reaching for the sun.

CHAPTER 6

"Shape Clay Into A Vessel; It Is The Space Within That Makes It Useful."

Inside an intangible moment, Bolt felt like he could grab hold of his lost memories. He saw images fading before his mind's eye, feelings and thoughts he had once possessed. Memories of events he could not place onto a timeline. He tried to hold on to them, the recollections, to cling onto their conceptual reality. They proved elusive and none–lasting.

Bolt heard a distant sound of laughter. The expressions of joy he had shared with his wife and his best friend. He could hear the words the three of them had spoken while eating together, and he wanted nothing more but to hold on to those memories. He tried. He tried more than he had with anything his entire life. It was like trying to grasp the water of an ocean. For a time it even seemed like he could, but really, he could not. The images slipped through his mental fingers like liquid.

The portal he didn't remember stepping out off vanished behind him in filaments of smoke. The moon's windless atmosphere played with the weight of the ashen residue for a moment, then allowed it to drop onto the rough texture of the metal platform. The way in which the dust moved filled Bolt with a feeling of timelessness, and at no instance before then – as far as he could remember, at least – had he felt time as more of a human construct than at that very moment. He knew that if no–one would ever brush those particles of dust away or caused them to move, they would stay in that exact same spot forever. This feeling, this thought, escaped him as Max's voice crackled over the intercom in Bolt's helm.

"Did you see it? Tell me I'm not the only one who saw it. Tell me!"

"I saw it," Bolt nodded. "Every bitter detail of it. The palace. The monster. The pain. Everything."

"What did it tell you?" Max asked. "Did it speak to you? What did it say?"

"It's hard to explain," Bolt said. "It didn't actually say anything. Why? Did it speak to you?"

"I...no," Max answered.

"Then what? You felt something, didn't you?"

Bolt turned and walked ahead, turning towards Max to see his face. The Earth reflected in his friend's visor and the half–a–kilometer wide platform seemed to grow even stiller in their silence. Below his feet, Bolt noticed the scorch marks which must have perpetuated from the center of the spin when the portal had engaged. It stretched even beyond the stage itself. It colored the surface of the moon around the platform in black ash, like charcoal.

"Within me," Max said, his eyes milky behind the blue helm–visor, "within you... somewhere around here, there is power. But I know not who wields more of it. I know he who we have named pretends to wield it. But there's more to it. I know this now, and know I must find him."

"It was different for me, I think" Bolt said. "I think the thing we saw inside wanted me to free someone."

"Who?"

"It said it will come to me in a dream sequence."

"You'll dream about it?" Max asked. "Why didn't it just tell you? And just how will you know what dream will be the right dream?"

"No idea," Bolt admitted.

Bolt turned, lost in thought as the two began to walk towards a tower a few kilometers distant. A trail of smoke rode towards them. The object on tip of the smolder soon became apparent as it closed in on them at a good speed. It was a bulky, six–wheeled rover, moving to intercept. The comm in both of their helmets buzzed. Their visual displays recognized the voice. It came from the man driving the rover, his identity flashing inside their retinas in dark–red curtains of data. "What are you guys blabbering about? Are you–"

Another voice interrupted the transmission, its tone roughened by the distance it had to travel. It was the voice of Zack, his tone humorous "'Ey you bastards. Good to see you in one piece. Time for a celebration, eh? Some rum maybe?"

"How long have we been gone? What went wrong?" Max immediately questioned.

"What do you mean what went wrong? Everything went exactly as planned. You went in, you came out. Why? What do you think happened?"

The two men shared a look. A trick question? Max seemed to pick up on his questioning somehow, and Bolt watched his friend's head move from side to side almost unnoticeably. Bolt nodded his understanding.

"Nothing happened," Bolt lied over the comm. "As you said, all went according to plan."

"Then what was all that talk about?" Zack asked. "Talk to me guys, we're on a secure channel for now."

The two knew there was no such thing. They remained silent, determined to do so until the three men got a chance to meet face to face.

In Bolt's mind, doubts began to surface. Could he had shared an experience with Max? One which was hallucinogenic in nature and so profound he couldn't put it into words now that it had passed? Could experiences like that even be shared? Had they really seen what they had seen? Could it even be possible? Questions kept piling up, and he possessed an answer to neither of them. He knew time to be a wholly human concept in its basis, one constructed to give meaning to certain cycles and provide a grounding of an experience or object in four dimensions, a concept Bolt always figured held little sway in the universe as a whole. An idea so easily bent and it's 'rules' so effortlessly collapsed it took no more than a dream to do so. What then had their experience been? A dream induced by an entry through the portal? An event outside of space–time as they know it?

"Guys!" Zack said in a half–shout. "Talk to me! Tell me I'm not the only one who saw it!"

"You said we were the first one to go thought the wormhole," Max immediately said.

"Officially, you were," Zack answered. "It's my research. I had to test it for myself! I had to see it first, I had to–"

"I understand," Max sighed. "You don't have to explain."

"But I don't understand," said Bolt. "You'll have to tell me why you didn't at least tell us. But for now, yes, we saw it," Bolt admitted. "Whatever it was, we saw it."

The rover speeding towards them pulled up next to the platform's edge, the smoke of its heavy wheels settling in the low gravity."Seriously," said the driver, "The fuck you guys talking about?"

Secure channel indeed, thought Bolt.

***

On the lifeless surface of the Moon, everything looked the same. Hills rolled by outside the rover with grey familiarity and the distant and tall buildings seemed to mold with the dirt in ways scarcely found on Earth. The domes of industry and metallurgic reactors were each a mountaintop in itself, all of them laced with smoothness beyond the apparent capabilities of nature, at least nature as it was known to humankind.

The rover's suspension and near silent engine dispelled the sense of travel and made the experience a wholly sound–based one. Gravel and rock were crushed beneath the bulky six–wheeler, producing a consistent mix of popping sounds and grinding noises.

The first time they heard the engine purr was also the first time either of them spoke since entering the vehicle. A half–C turn plastered them to the side of the seat.

"Some nice suspension on this bitch," Bolt commented.

"Aye," the driver nodded.

"Where we headed?" Bolt asked.

"Enable your Links, you should have already gotten the message," said the driver, a pale–faced man with greasy brown hair and features which told of a life filled with tedium. It took a single thought for Bolt to engage the network and then mentally work his way through a barrage of messages and random imprints left there by whoever had attempted to contact him while his connection to the Link–network had been lost. Out the corner of his eye, Bolt thought he could see Max rubbing his forehead for a second. He distinctly remembered him doing something like that before, but couldn't recall the context or why he had done it.

In his mind's eye, Bolt observed more than ten inquiries from his wife, he chose not to open any them.

"Why don't you open her letters?" Max asked him.

"Not now," Bolt sighed. "Not yet." He didn't want anything to do with the woman who claimed to carry his child. The last time he saw her, which might as well have been the first time as far as he could tell, Bolt felt like everything he said hurt her in some way. Every word uttered made her face grow progressively sadder and her eyes wetter. He couldn't do that to her. Not to someone who felt like a complete stranger.

"I saw it in her eyes, she wanted to shake me until I'd remember, slap me, anything that would work," he told Max. "Honestly, for a moment I wanted to do it to myself. What I feel, however, is... nothing. Nothing connects me to anything I can feel towards, no memory, no recollection, not even a glimpse of a smile."

He did feel a pang, however. Remorse perhaps? Remorse for the people who cared for him? The fact that he couldn't do anything about it or make himself care as well only made it worse.

"I think the best thing would be to try and give myself some time, to give my brain a chance to reboot itself, if possible," he told Max.

"She'll be happy to hear you're alright, at least," Max said. "Give her that comfort. You may not remember how much you loved her, but she still does."

"Shut up," Bolt spat, "Why can't I remember her? At least her?"

"You know why," Max replied. "Now send her a message, tell her you're fine, or I'll do it for you, and I'm the last one she wants to hear from right now."

"Fine," Bolt said, and send her a short, two–lined blurt. He then shuffled through more of the messages and thought projections, stumbling upon the inquiry the driver had spoken of. It came heavily encoded.

"You seeing this?" he asked Max.

"Already on it."

Bolt ran a series of pre–learned algorithms and applied them to each nonsensical pattern of letters. Zack had thought him the cipher himself so they could communicate secretly and leave each other messages, messages which most would dismiss as residual data, even if they somehow happened to stumble upon them.

Word by deciphered word, the wall of text transformed into a small paragraph and floated inside Bolt's vision with perfect clarity. The blue letters read: were continuing the research on alpha station. ive arranged a landing platform for you both. well go over the results and try to send a larger team through the gateway again to see if we can collect any more data. youre scheduled to leave the moon at 18:05.

Currently, the clock read 18:02.

Bolt didn't like the idea of going into a portal again one single bit.

"No way," Max said, mirroring Bolt's own thoughts. He felt like he had grown old in his head while inside the portal, or wherever he and Max had been. Yet now that he was out, he found it hard to remember most of it. He tried connecting some of the feelings which came with the visions in his mind, things he could still remember. The images kept becoming increasingly vague the more time passed. As if the whole experience had been a dream.

He looked over to Max sitting beside him. "Tell me again you saw it too," he said to him.

"Yes," Max nodded. "It wasn't a dream," Max confirmed. The fact brought Bolt zero comfort, however, and he regretted even asking.

In the frontal view, a structure resembling a ziggurat began to grow. It was the first time Bolt noticed they were pushing a speed of almost three hundred kilometers per hour. Yet the red letters of the speedometer kept climbing.

"Will we reach it in time?" he asked the driver.

"Don't you worry about that," the man said.

The building ahead automatically noted the speeding six–wheeler and matched its serial number with a reserved mag–lane. As the driver mentally confirmed which tunnel at the base of the structure they would enter, the system programmed the inner lanes to make sure no collisions would take place and that they would be safely propelled to their destination. Easing on the throttle, the driver stirred them into a wide tunnel, then sat back. At first, a deep hum shook the vehicle as the entire chassis of the car began to resonate. Lights attached to the side of the tunnel began to roll by outside with incredible speed. The magnetic forces within the tunnel continued to accelerate the car, all to a point where inertia–dampening systems began to struggle and the force glued them to their seats. Out the side window, lines of light which had only moments before flown by one at a time converged into a white lance. The hum became louder still, until at the point where it threatened to spill into the realm of the unbearable, the vehicle spat out of the tunnel and cut through the gravitational sphere of the Moon in an instant. In zero gravity conditions, it continued on its path towards its destination with steady speed. Minute by minute, the small dot circling the Earth began to expand.

The Alpha Station, the only space–bulk built in orbit which claimed permanent residents. Getting to it would take a while.

At that point, Bolt wasn't too keen on making idle conversation, at least not verbally. He undressed his suit and sat back, relaxed, and accessed the Link.

***

Looking upon the Earth where billions of people projected their energies and thoughts out into space at any given moment left Max speechless. The very space around the blue globe shimmered and pulsed. Golden lines wrapped themselves onto one another, some speeding outward into the vast stretches of time. The Earth itself seemed to be in possession of a torus–shaped aura, a disturbance all about it which transmorphed the uncertainty of space into something Max could see, even hear. Gilded ribbons formed a web of subconscious intent around the planet, intent which Max could not read, but realized that perhaps with enough training and understanding, he might. For now it seemed enough to simply watch as the Earth released its grip on these intangibilities the further they escaped from it. Each string reached out and lost itself in the ocean of darkness like a headlamp pointing up into the night sky.

Max tried not to focus on the station in orbit, which was easy enough, since something quite more active had drawn his gaze. Upon the North American continent, on the East coast, he could see a heavy concentration of thoughts, like a hotspot where things were being drawn into and expelled at an even greater speed. The expulsions bent all other things away from its path, dominating the quantum field and collapsing everything it touched into nonexistence. Lights which may have been someone's introspective musings or an energy field projected by joy vibrated and was held in place by this larger stream for a moment as the two met, as though the heavier field was considering the validity of what it came across and its usefulness in the grand scheme of things. But in the end, nothing it touched remained, everything disappeared in less time than it took to draw a breath. Still, there was too much of everything for the stronger beam to be effective, and Max guessed it had some other purpose or destination. A destination hidden by the curvature of the Earth. Was its origin the site where I would find the Administrator? The sight looked like something the Admin would be capable of. Perhaps this had been what he had been missing all along? Perhaps he needed to look upon the Earth from space and search for the Admin while in space, since otherwise the man's will got lost in all of the confusion and chaos. He didn't need to guess what the two implants were doing anymore. Somehow, someone had implanted him with technology which allowed him to see what he was seeing. But the answers to who and why weren't as obvious.

Remembering what he had seen in the portal, Max realized it didn't matter who stood in his way, there existed but the one sentence, alloyed into his mind, one which kept him awake at night and haunted his every step through the material world. "I can bring them back." Oh yes, Max thought. I had waited long enough. He would bring them back. He would bring them back or I'll find a way to cast down the sun and boil the oceans until He does.

***

In the hectic machinations of his mind – most of it the result of his connection to the Link – Bolt nearly missed the firing of the frontal thrusters. Their bursts slowed down the rover's approach to what deceptively felt like a crawl.

Suspended and floating ahead of them, the Alpha Station was like a ball cut in half and then flipped over so its hollow insides faced the Earth. On its rim, a bay–door gaped open. With the station's size being that of a small city and its population fluxuating around fifteen thousand, the orbital–drifter was an achievement to be proud of. Artificially aided and timed so its drift would always position it in the way of the sun's reflected rays, it was a place where anyone eager to experience the sensations of an endless day could find a home. Perpetually tipped so the tops if its buildings faced the Earth, the refracted light proved more than enough to illuminate its streets. The sun's rays upon the station's exposed back adequate in gathering enough energy for everything else.

Bolt craned his neck to get a better look over the armature up front, and could see the huge plates side–stacked over its back. Each turned with the practiced motion to attain optimal angle for energy gathering, or turned with others around it to burn away a piece of debris or a small meteorite with a powerful lens effect. It took a maintenance crew for Bolt to truly appreciate the size of these plates. He watched what he guessed to be a five member group emerge from beneath one of the platforms on the station's rim. Against the huge piece of energy–gathering technology, the men slowly drifting over it looked like dots. Each hardly seemed to move until one looked away and then back again. They meandered over the edge of the glaring white surface of the square and disappeared beneath in unison, like a centipede. The motions of the things made Bolt wonder if what he had seen were actually cleaner–bots, there was no real way to tell from his distance and angle.

Nearly soundless, the forward thrusters fired up again in one short burst. Bolt saw the a corona of yellow flame spread outward from each end of the vehicle.

Crawling towards the station, its immensity became even more apparent as they neared the still expanding slabs fit for something giant. It had long since lost the appearance of a mouth, since any mouth that could open to that degree was either alien or broken. Its shadow enveloped them as they passed beneath it, its size suddenly making their movements seem even slower. The vehicle's interior darkened, the red dashboard its only source of illumination, as the thick, neon lighting running over the center of each wall outside did little else, but inform them they weren't crashing.

"Why is there even a gate here?" Bolt asked. "Are they afraid someone might come in uninvited?"

"For the most part," the driver said. "Also has to do with the fact that they simply could build a gate, so they did."

Up ahead, an area became clearer, light there seemed more concentrated and revealed a dock. On it, dozens of figures milled about in what seemed to be utter confusion. Bolt later noticed most them were android–workers or cargo–lifters.

He perceived a subtle vibration as the mag–walls engaged and directed the vehicle along an approach vector, carrying it to a free docking clamp. The chatter over his Link increased and Bolt looked over to Max.

"We've been here before?" he asked.

"Nope," Max said.

"Feels like we had. You sure?"

"Well," Max said without turning, his eyes distant as if he were looking at something Bolt couldn't see. "Perhaps you have, but you never told me about it. It's entirely possible."

"Possible," Bolt repeated. "You got something over the Link? You look like you've seen a ghost."

***

How would one know the way anyone looks like after they had seen a ghost?

Max knew it was simply an expression, a saying to let someone know they look like shit, but really, why a ghost? Perhaps he couldn't comprehend such an expression because he was seeing ghosts – or what might as well have been ghosts – constantly, and figured his expression looked nothing like what he would imagine it would after seeing an actual apparition. He couldn't even classify or claim them to be hallucinations or things that weren't there. They felt more like visual reinterpretations. Things that were always there but had before been filtered by his brain for the sake of his own sanity. Now, the filter was gone. The wisps seemed to slide out of the wall and into his mind only to mock him with their indistinct nature, or to implant some subconscious scheme which he found himself considering minutes later. Ideas bounced and echoed inside his skull in quantum leaps, without a single tangible connection between them.

But now that he considered it, yes... his face might look like he'd seen a ghost.

"Just Link–chatter, I think," he told Bolt.

"Ya, a lot of it here."

In the dark of the tunnel, he could see a reflection of himself in the frontal view–port. His pointy black beard had gotten shaggier, his full upper–lip almost totally concealed behind the unshaven mess curtaining over it. In the likeness, his eyes were hidden, hooded in shadow as he gazed over the white letters drifting upon his mind. His thick black hair waved over his forehead.

His own mirror image, however, was only a background, what drew his attention were the words he saw and the font used to relay them. They could only have come from one source. A soundwave accompanied the written sentences, a sound which his brain displayed before him in a stream of vibration to visually reflect the voice. He had come to hate it, it always wanted something of him. It brought instructions, never answers, and always, always wanted Max to do its bidding. For a moment, he thought he could see the golden thread which had carried the data blurt to his mind – an after–image of microwaving light. It had come from Earth, Max knew that much, but had it come from the Administrator directly? The voice was different than he remembered it, it said, "Find Dr.Boeree. Put an end to the experiment."

Messages like these had grown quite common since the Admin had spoken to him. But never had he gotten one such as this. Before they were always specific, they always told him what he should do and where to go about doing it. But this made him wonder. It seemed strange to him that a being so powerful would even require or trust an agent to do the work for him – an invisible, hooded stranger. Perhaps that was what had made Max so reliable, he was a dog without anything left to lose and everything to gain, a dog manufactured and unleashed without restraint or care. Indeed, the only restrains were constructed and placed there by Max himself. By his own mind. He didn't care much for people in general, and in part that had a lot to do with his father and what he told him once. He said, "Son, don't ever be sad because of people. They will all die." Still, he didn't particularly enjoy hurting them. The only people he seemed to truly care about were those already gone, or at least lost to him in some way or another. He had to bring them back, and thus often wondered if the Administrator chose to ignore the rage slowly building up inside his proxy. Perhaps He thought it of no concern. Perhaps he thought to keep sending him on errands until Max's mind would implode with the effort... It certainly felt like he was losing his mind – his touch with reality. But what is reality, really? Is it this illusion which the senses create? Or it something more?

Unrelenting, the apparitions of thoughts and after images of internal conversations of people he couldn't see, but knew were everywhere around him, didn't help. He felt like he had taken a psychedelic drug whose effects never stopped. They. Never. Stopped. They should, but they didn't. They didn't even let him sleep.

He had to find this Dr.Boeree. But instead of stopping his experiments like he had done before – without question or concern, without a mind for anything else but the vague hope that the task's completion would compel the Admin to reunite him with his family – instead, he would find out why the experiment needed to be stopped. Like he should have done all the times since.

This place, this station, Max felt, would be where he could even hope to come closer to the enigma of the Administrator. He wondered why he hasn't ever done it before.

Max felt a strange sense he couldn't quite explain. It took Bolt to point out what it might be.

***

"Can you feel it?" Bolt asked.

"Feel what?" said both the driver and Max in perfect unison.

"Dunno," Bolt said. "I felt it on the Moon as well, but here...I don't know, here it seems even more pronounced, or maybe I just got used to it. It's like some veil had been cast away, like I'm out of range of some presence which before had constantly been with me. Maybe my mind's getting use to the fact that I can't remember shit."

The expression on Max's face made it clear he felt it to, but perhaps realized it only now as Bolt pointed it out.

They didn't speak more of it for the time being, even though it felt like they should. And as Bolt opened his mouth to say something else, the whole vehicle suddenly shuttered. They had reached the docking clamps, when it became clear someone had screwed up with their vector of approach. The shuttle scraped over the platform's edge, the sound of it cutting even through the thick hull of the vehicle. A screech of metal in pain shook the insides as the exterior shell buckled. A sense of entrapment rolled over Bolt like a tidal wave. He braced himself over the window slit, the only surface of the vehicle where he could get any semblance of a grip.

"God dammit," he heard the driver belch.

Unable to hear himself think, memories rolled over him in flashes of unabridged scenes and maddening events within which people played their parts with voices he couldn't recognize and faces that weren't there. He expected chaos, he expected a crash, a cracking of bones as he was propelled against the interior wall. Nothing happened. In moments, it was over. The emergency clamp above the vehicle powered up and the magnetic force snatched the shuttle as if it were a toy.

"You guys ok?" the driver asked, not waiting for either of them to respond. "'Tis the second time this happened. Someone's getting his fuckin' ass kicked."

"I thought this whole procedure was automated," Max spat. "How the hell can an automated system not recognize an error sooner?"

"I think someone doesn't want you on this station," the driver said. "I've seen it happen before, some asshole hacker tampers with the approach vector to scare you or whatever the fuck. Welcome to God damn Alpha Station. Don't give anyone the satisfaction of acting surprised if you see some weird shit."

CHAPTER 7

The Nightmare Begins

Spring and warmth. The station's air possessed these two qualities in abundance. It made both of the men feel like some new warm season had just begun to wake up, or at least that a wet one was left behind or morphed into a different, infinitely more soothing climate. The light of it hit them as soon as they exited the lower docks and stepped on the station's town–complex for the first time. They had located Zack over the Link and met him on the main square. The surface of it shone like dark marble and was no less reflective. Bolt's own silhouette looked back at him as he looked down. _I need a haircut_. The surface and buildings looked and even smelled of bleach, providing a pleasant contrast against the darker and flaked ground. A few hundred meters about them, the station began to curve upward in all directions except their immediate up. The curvature surrounded them by buildings of white stone. Each of the structures looked like they might have been melted into existence and alloyed with the station, imbued with perfect geometry while still molten, then exposed to light until all the color was.

The three men greeted each other and began to walk over the square and down one of the alleys leading from it. The black tiles underneath their feet were replaced by a type of glossy white glass. Bolt thought he might lose his footing and fall over the surface, such was their apparent smoothness. The fall didn't happen, and he looked ahead instead. At no point of their trek thought the narrow, Mediterraneanish streets, did it seem like they were walking on anything but a straight line forward. Their eyes told them otherwise. Their sight spoke of an upward curvature which seemed like it would be impossible to climb at one point. Bolt could even spot people at angles which defied gravity, and by all accounts, the people 'ahead of him' looked like they stood sideways.

"Still seems familiar?" Max asked him.

"Now that I see it," Bolt said, "it feels like I should remember something which so clearly fucks with your mind..."

"But?"

"I've got nothing," Bolt admitted.

"Perhaps it is for the best, eh?" Zack smiled, his rough voice scraping over the white surface of the windowless buildings, echoing almost absurdly. "I find it best not to tally here for an extended period of time."

"Why is that?" Bolt said and looked up, where the oceans of his homeworld threatened to bleed through the atmosphere, over the cloud cover, and engulf them in wet blueness. Bolt felt that, if he could reach far enough, he could touch the blue expanses. He smiled at this. Eyes like to deceive. "So?" Bolt said after he noticed Zack remained silent. "Why shouldn't one stay here?"

"Do I really have to explain it to you?" Zack smirked. "This place is quite something else, as you will soon come to find out. I'll admit, the absence of all borders and affiliations is very freeing, you don't get this kind of sense of freedom on Earth."

"You mean freedom to do any scientific research you please?" Max intervened.

The narrow passage ahead stood just wide enough for the three of them to walk side by side. The road itself was tilled and made up of smaller, square–glass components.

"Well of course," Zack said, "but that's only part of it. I'm certain you've both felt it since you left Earth, eh? A palpable change in something. A something you can't quite define."

Bolt followed a step behind them as Zack made a sharp turn to the right. He noticed they began to move away from the tall structure jutting out from the center of the station. The further away they moved from it, the more Bolt began to recognize a pattern in the building's construction and layout. Closer to the center, the buildings were more tightly packed, laid out on a hill around the central tower. The rise upon which the buildings sat gave the whole sight a feel of some kind of Arabic slum, a feeling Bolt figured had significance somehow, but knew too little about the station to truly appreciate the irony of it.

"A change in something sounds about right," Bolt nodded to Zack's remark, indeed he felt something, or rather, an absence of something. "I've just told Max this, before we came here," he said. "A loss of something. What do you suppose it means?"

"It means that damn Admin has a bigger grip on our minds that we would like to believe, that's what it means," Max said.

"Whatever the case," Zack said, shrugging of the remark as it were too radical to even consider, "you'll begin to feel a better here, I think, at least right up to the point where you start to feel worse."

"Was that suppose to be funny?" Bolt asked.

"I don't know, was it? It's simply a fact."

"A fact of what? That for some unexplainable reason we feel better when we leave Earth and then worse when we're away from it long enough? You don't find that strange at all?"

"Strange? Not at really. Curious, very," Zack nodded. "I suppose it's like being away from home, you know? You are glad to be away when you leave, and you enjoy it as your brain experiences new sights and whatnot, but after a while, you start to miss the familiarity as the external stimuli become too constant."

"That's one way of explaining it," Bolt said.

"And how would you explain it?" Zack asked.

"I'd say what Max said has some merit."

"Right," Zack snorted. Bolt couldn't see his face, but was certain that Zack's eyes rolled so hard they might unscrew and fall out of their sockets. "We're here."

"Where's here?" Bolt asked, looking up at the five–story building. It looked like any other structure on the station, angular and strangely inviting. It waited at the end of an alleyway surrounded by the neighboring white walls, none of which reached quite as high. "You said we're going to complete the experiment," Bolt said. "Go through another portal? Remember?"

"We will, but the power requirements to open one are immense, we'll not be able to do it until tomorrow." Zack said.

"And until then?" Bolt asked.

"Until then, I've something you need to see."

***

Zack led them through a series of empty rooms, each too quiet and dark for Bolt to see anything. The only object casting any illumination was a spiraling staircase at the end of the last room. Each step of it spread an inner light from its edge, faint and unobtrusive. They ascended, passing a second, third, and a fourth level, all of them panting as they reached the top. Following Zack, the two men walked to their left and through another series of rooms, each more illuminated than the last as light from the glass–wall infected the walls and spread. They reached the last room, greeted by the outside view. The stationscape rolled inwards and have Bolt a sense a though they were riding the crest of a high wave, its curvature revealing the numerable buildings and structures. All roads, although punctuated here and there by a plaza or a slightly wider street, led to a central sprawl surrounding the tower.

"What did we see in the portal?" Bolt asked.

"I can't say I know," Zack answered. "I wish I did, but I do not."

"What did you see?" Max asked.

"A land of chaos. A beast with one eye," Zack answered. "I can't say I still remember much else."

The room itself sported four tipped pods, each at an angle which suggested someone might lay inside them quite comfortably. The feet of these round coffins formed a circle with just enough space in between them so one might squeeze and walk through. The pods reached to Bolt's waist at their lowest, and his neck at the highest. Thick cabling and segmented wires of various thickness slithered from the edges of them and connected to a central console. Apart from the machines, the sterile–smelling room was empty.

"What are these?" Bolt questioned, walking around one of the pods, touching it and inspecting it. The metal felt strangely warm.

"For lack of a better word, these are Dream Machines," Zack said and moved in between them to the central console.

"Dream Machines? Is that a joke?" Bolt chuckled, removing his hand from the metallic surface.

"You seem to be asking that a lot today," Zack smiled. "They're my prototypes. I figured cryogenic stasis is a bit of a dull way to experience the boredom between traveling the stars. So I made these." He accessed the controls of the middle console using mental commands and one of the pods opened up. It was all quite anticlimactic. No steam rolled out of the machine, no shriveled hand grasped the edge. Only a dank smell of stale air escaped the pod.

"So how is being inside these different from a normal dream?" Max asked, standing near the window and looking down at one of the pods. "That's what you do in them, right? Dream?"

"Well, they are called Dream Machines," Bolt snorted.

"For one," Zack said, "you don't drift into deep sleep after the REM stage is over. In fact, it's never over. You dream as long as you're inside the machine, and your dreams are entirely controlled by you. Which also means, and this is the good part, ye? You can live entire lifetimes within the dream and only a small amount of time will pass in the real world."

"How does that work? How can you dream an eternal dream?" Bolt asked.

"We can adjust the speed at which your brain processes images and thoughts. By suspending most bodily functions we can do this quite easily."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Bolt questioned. "I mean, I'm no expert, right, but that doesn't sound safe. Doesn't it pose some kind of danger?"

"No, you're not an expert," Zack smirked, "But since you asked, not really, it's just the frequency by which the mind processes images that is accelerated. That's all. Basically, your neurons fire at the same rate, since they already fire at basically the speed of light, it's only your perceptions that are accelerated."

"How do you get out of it?" Max asked. "How do you exit a dream?"

"It's quite simple really, you just think about getting out and a door will materialize somewhere inside your field of vision. You walk through, and you're awake. And if for some reason the imagery you see is too powerful, we can still wake you up by disconnecting you manually, through our program."

"What does that mean?" Bolt asked, "How can imagery be too powerful? You mean nightmares? How would you even know the person is having a nightmare?"

"Sometimes the unconscious mind projects things that stir some very deep feelings which are then processed into images and visual metaphors. This mostly happens the first time a subject tries to use the device and hasn't yet gotten used to it. Because the feelings you experience inside are still very real, the dream itself begins to feel real and you forget that you're in fact dreaming, allowing subconscious concerns to take over. It's not much different from how you usually dream, this device just helps you remember that you're dreaming and focuses your mind so you can create things without the pointless chatter of random thoughts."

"You haven't answered my second question," Bolt said.

"What was it again?"

"How can you tell when someone's having a nightmare."

"It's all in the brain's wavelengths, really. When you're experiencing something unsettling, ye? Your brain fires up, so to speak. I can see these things clearly on the central console here."

"I have to say," Bolt smiled, "apart from the potential of inducing some sick nightmares, this actually sounds like it could be fun."

"It is!" Zack assured him and looked at them both in turn. "You guys wanna try it?"

"If this is how I'll spend most of my time on the ship we're going to, then yes" Bolt said, "These things are on the ship, right?"

Zack nodded. "As far as I know. I made these prototypes ages ago."

"Then hell yes I want to give it a shot. Max?"

"Very well," Max sighed, "fire it up."

A second pod gaped open and they both climbed inside one. They laid back on the padded cushions, their eyelids closing almost immediately. The pod's locking mechanism engaged with a hiss of pressurization and Zack's voice rang over the small internal speaker.

"Select dream sequence one," he told them.

"Wha?" Bolt managed.

He had no idea what Zack meant until he drifted into REM. He saw a menu open up, a blue square with one column of letters. The signs on it where difficult to focus on. Bolt found he could not read them, yet simply understood what they meant. They said: Dream server Alpha: Sequence one. He thought–clicked it and felt himself enter a clear and relaxed state, wishing someone had shown him this technology before.

***

Max tried to do the same thing. Like Bolt, he willed the dream to begin. At first, nothing happened. It felt like his mind wished to focus on something beyond the edge of the menu. An invisible thing which called out to him, like the sound of his own demise. He recoiled from it, shrunk away, turning inside the pod. It was too late. He managed to mutter an incoherent something, and then the nightmare began...

The hot pulse of adrenaline surged in his veins, amplifying his senses until he could smell the fear of those present like a malignancy upon the air. His delirium extended for a few more blood–soaked moments, until the sensations of the mortal world returned to him. Quickly he remembered all too well what he had been doing, even while he could not control it. But how long had the others been there, staring in terror? How long had they remained quiescent with the shock of the sight before them? The answers didn't come.

He looked down upon his victims, their smells clogging his mind. He looked at his own bloodied hands, felt the liquid drying on his face. Scratches were spread all over his arms and face, each gash clawed by his victims in defiance of murder. The wounds burned hot and leaked.

His heart leapt in his throat as he saw his wife lying before him, mutilated, his children already cut and carved in a fashion suggesting that whoever did it had taken took great pleasure in the act. It couldn't have been him who had done it... could it?

The shapes around him looked human, but had no eyes or ears, nor any other features he could properly identify. All they had were maws. Saliva dripped from each diseased and toothless openings. One of the figures spat a curse with its trembling voice, then asked him, "Max, what have you done?" It had the voice of his wife, twisted and grotesque, slurping each word. But how could this be, she was dead, lying slaughtered before him...

The sentence never truly registered, it was as if everything was right as it should be. Right as it must be. As if his taste for fresh meat had grown with each new fatality until his wife was next, and oh what pleasure her dead and bluish skin brought him. No! He thought. This is all wrong. I haven't done this! I would never do it! Thoughts such as these rolled past him, quelled by his subconscious along with his wave of remorse and guilt over something he couldn't understand. Crushed by his own mind, he began to wonder nonsensical things and lost himself further. How did they discover me? Had the people of his town finally found the trail of blood leading to my place of work? Had they heard the muffled screams of his victims? But I had gagged them! I had to gag them, he reasoned. They wouldn't shut up! They wouldn't let me work!

But those things didn't really matter, he was going to have to fight his way out, that much he knew. Yet no sooner had he even managed to grab hold of his cleaver which he had dropped in the moment of recomposure, than he felt the hard pounding of wood upon his head and body, and the feral grasp of hands that tried to pin him down. He screamed out as his bones cracked under the weight of the blows. He heard his name mixed with curses, not his real name, but the name he was known for, the name his people had given him with smiles on their faces and eyes full of hope. They called him Daddy.

For a moment, he could hear different voices call out to him, empty voices without substance, as if emanating from a deep crevasse where nothing but disease could live. Disease and men who plot how to spread it. Behind all the mawed faces and blows, he saw a man, a hooded stranger with a face concealed in shadow. Only his mouth was seen. It smiled. Max heard his own skull crack with a wet, crunching tang and felt his world implode.

***

Try as he might, Max Byron could not recall how he ended up in such a horrid place. He thought it best to put such concerns behind him. Yet no matter how much he felt like he deserved to be where he was, no matter how much he wanted to believe he had done something terrible, he couldn't help but want to escape. He wondered whether the memory of his imprisonment had corroded with time, or had been beaten out of him by some prison guard he couldn't remember ever seeing. All of these options seemed more likely than the prospect of the prison being built around him... and still, somehow, that thought felt closest to the truth. He didn't know why.

His reality now consisted of a solitary cell. Its dark walls of roughly carved and sectioned stone stank of filth and grime and dried blood accumulated over who knows how many lifetimes. They were like the walls of a well, dank and overgrown with things he didn't want to touch or go near. A single drainage pipe, a hole in the center of the cell expelled a stench Max hadn't managed to exclude from his mind even after decades spent in the dungeon. Surely it had to be decades? He couldn't remember anything tangible but this cell.

The only reminder – and in fact the sole assurance of life beyond these walls – came once a day, when someone slid aside the lower part of his cell door and pushed in a never–washed glass of water and a piece of rock–hard, mold covered bread. The mold stank like everything else. It gave him nightmares and half–remembered hallucinations.

Days and nights melded into one as years passed with no distinction, nor brought any change to his condition. Sounds of men and women moaning and wailing as if from a great, hollow distance constantly reminded him of the torment he was cursed to endure for crimes he only vaguely recalled. On occasion, he wondered whether the cries he heard came due to some perverted abuse or by the torture of hunger, but could never be sure. He concluded it had to be both. Sometimes, he could hear someone walking up to the door of his cell and could just barely make out a shadow that their feet cast in the crack below the door. Max was never sure, but sometimes became certain the person behind was cackling.

"Hello?" He would croak. "Who's there? Help me God dammit!"

But the figure just stood there. Eventually, or if Max walked up to the metal door, it moved away, he could hear footsteps echoing. He cursed and yelled for the person to come back. His requests were always ignored.

Dreams, such as they were, came full of images that haunted his waking hours and offered no relief or escape. They often consisted of two quite grotesque individuals who bickered about how it was possible for Max to still be dead. He didn't understand what they meant.

One day, while in the midst of a vivid dream of a hooded and smiling figure holding what Max associated as his own brain and attaching a small device onto his optic cord, the door of his cell opened with a sobering screech. He squinted and moved his hand to shield against the glare of orange illumination and watched the feet of two silhouettes move into his cell. They were both heavy–set men, their eyes and faces without expressions, as if a sock had been pulled over their faces.

"Get up, you murdering scum!" the man in front of him said, his tone roughened by decades of tobacco abuse. He spat on the floor.

"He said get up!" the other spat and proceeded to beat Max over the head with a wooden rod.

The pain of the rough lumber against his naked limbs was nothing compared to the torture and hurt of solitude – the decay of his mind which he had undergone for all the years spent trapped like a rat. Still, he felt his rage grow with each hit placed upon him.

Stop fucking hitting me!

Despite being beaten, Max stood up, eager to see where the two men might take him. And it even seemed that, in the short moments of physical pain, he felt more alive than he had in years.

Standing on his feet and almost all skin and bone, Max still managed to strike an imposing figure. Towering over the two guards by a head and shoulder, he took a step forward. The two men didn't seem bothered by this in the slightest. The one that had beaten him said, "What the hell is this abomination?" The disgust was evident on the man's voice, referring to a protrusion which grew out between Max's eyes like a horn.

"How should I know?" the other said. "He's a freak. Get'em down to the pit."

The other man nodded and slapped Max on the back of his head with his rod. "Move!"

They pushed him out of his cell and turned right, venturing through a tunnel laden with numerous doors of the same metallic design. The doors were all angled strangely, as if whoever had built them was insane. Torches filled some of the spaces in between the gates, saturating the air with their oily fragrances. Hard shadows pooled around the quickly dispersing light as unseen droplets of water threw ominous and echoing sounds throughout the corridor. Chains of shackled prisoners rattled from within the sealed doors. The voices behind the portals all sounded familiar. The smell was just as bad here as it was within his own cell, only here, in the dark corridor, the smells had merged into a stench Max could only interpret one way – death. He couldn't recall ever walking the narrow passage before.

Every few strides, he felt the jab of the prison guard's rod upon his lower back and heard him growl, "Keep moving."

The tunnel went on for a while, until, at length, the three came to a fork in the passage. One way lead up via winding staircase, while the other further down into the fuliginous depths. The guard that had moved in front of him stepped to the side and pushed him down the staircase. The rough texture of the carved stone cut through Max's feet like shards of obsidian.

Upon his descend, Max thought little else but how best to attack the two men and attempt his escape. Yet just as he felt he played the scenario enough to consider all the variables, the staircase ended and the area in front of him opened to reveal a small round arena packed with people. Numerous torches and oil–lamps illuminated the place. One of the men showed him into a holding pen bared by wood. The arm–length–wide space was stationed near a small amphitheater carved roughly out of limestone. He looked up and could see some of the faces upon the stages looking at him with revulsion, elbowing their friends beside them to take a look as well. Their faces mirrored those of their friends once they saw him.

Those who didn't notice his coming were too engrossed in whatever violence was happening behind the wooden gate to pay the newcomer any heed. They cheered and roared for blood, exulting with every thrust of a weapon that ended with gore.

From their sudden outcry and the sound of something big hitting against something equally big and wet, Max knew the fight was over.

"You have just witnessed a fight of the ages!" a narrator yelled. "Who can still rival the Madman?" The man's voice sounded familiar. It sounded fat and bloated, and as two chained prisoners pulled on a thick rope from either side and opened the gate, he could see the man atop the arena, his bloodthirsty eyes locked with Max's.

"Behold! A challenger," the man said, ignoring the fact that his so called 'challenger' had no choice in the matter. Whispers spread over the crowd like darkness after the setting sun, and the stench of death and sweat hit Max like a brick wall.

Despite the smells and the sights, Max felt a power in the madness before him, he finally saw someone who he could vent out on. Physically. The only problem was, he didn't know why he wanted to do it.

He didn't wait to be given a weapon, nor did he need one. Weak and frail, with decades of stagnation sleeping in his bones, Max leapt at his opponent. The reek of dismemberment about him was like ambrosia dripping from the chalice of some dormant and distant monster residing in the recesses of his mind, hissing as it told him, "Yeesss, go on. You want to do it. You know you do." And he did. Max heard the crowd gasp in surprise as he snatched the sword–wielding wrist flung at him with something approaching skill. He could see the skeleton of the man before him, and it seemed perfectly natural to him that he should. Max didn't wonder for a second how it was possible. It simply was. He simply did. As a result, he knew precisely where best to apply pressure to dislodge or easily break a joint. With a twist of his hand, the man's wrist–bone cracked, leaving the sword and the hand wielding it to dangle in a semi–firm grip like a wet towel. The crowd went rigid. In the sudden silence, Max sensed the beating of his own heart deep in his ears, he even heard that of his opponent's upon the air. He parried a fist flung at him in desperation and watched the look in the man's eyes as he realized the next second would be his last. Max took the sword from the man's grip, the bones of the broken wrist crunching in resistance as the man howled in pain, until his screams were snuffed out, replaced by gurgling and groaning as Max sliced the man's neck in half with one fluid motion. Blood gushed out and squirted over his face. A grin most wide and wicked revealed his teeth. Why am I smiling? Faces stared at him in horror as Max jumped down over the collapsed man and began to devour his neck like some crazed bloodhound. No! Stop! "Never," something told him.

After so many decades of eating nothing but cold, moldy bread and decaying meat, the fresh arterial warmness felt almost blissful.

He stood back up, his form stiffening, his mouth dripping saliva and blood. The crowd had remained stoic for a while, until they realized a new champion had been born. No one cared for his methods; all they cared about was the untold hours of entertainment he would bring to their blood–mad senses and the miasma of death his methods promised to bring. The narrator spoke with newfound madness, his voice bringing back to life a name, one which Max felt oddly resentful towards.

"Behold! The Proxy!"

***

Years passed by, with his almost daily victories in the arena and the feast they provided bloating his body until he seemed better fed than most of the attendants. With the coming of middle age, his horn had grown to monstrous proportions and served to implant fear in those who had flocked to whiteness his martial prowess in the ring.

But while he butchered his victims day after haunted day, his resentment over the crowd grew. It festered until all he could feel was the burning hate for the people who would make sport of his insanity.

No one appreciated the fine thrusts with which he disemboweled his opponents. No one marveled at the precision his hands would display in eviscerating his victims. All they cared about was blood spurring and viscera flowing. But Max had began to hear things, troubling things which seemed to have stepped out if his dreams and into the waking world. There were two of them, two voices, each sounding more desperate than the other. He didn't know where they came from, but somehow knew he needed to find out.

With each passing day, he grew tired of the human filth they sent at him. Weak creatures of men who begged to be shown mercy, not realizing they would die anyway unless he killed them. In this sense each of his strokes became a stroke of mercy, his cleaver splitting their heads as though they were nothing more than overripe fruit.

Over the years, the prison guards had grown reckless. Believing themselves safe, they often lead Max to the arena unshackled. Still, he let opportunities of escape pass him and instead thought about a more theatrical means of break–out, one that would never be remembered for reasons that we kill them all.

He downed his next opponent with one, precise swing, his eyes already surveying the arena even as the body fell, his mind calculating where best to start his rampage. The answer quickly became obvious. Max threw his cleaver at the announcer, the administrator of the games. The blade whirled through the air and with a hard thud embedded itself into the narrator's forehead. The man fell back, swept of his feet by the blow as Max jumped up and with both hands grabbed the edge of the arena. His muscles, honed over the years of visceral combat, tensed. He pulled his fat body upward and stooped over the edge of the arena. The petrified attendants responded almost instantly. They began to beat him with anything close at hand, and if nothing was close, they used their fists. Those kinds of things could not stop him, however, not now, not tomorrow, not ever again. He was like a bear who had overgrown its cage and finally found a means of escape, all thanks to its captor's belief that it had became tamed. With a swing of his massive hands he threw aside the men who had flung themselves at him to pin him down. He raced to the dead administrator and placed a foot on the man's head, dislodging the cleaver. The dead skull crunched and spit blood, the dead body twitching. No sooner had the sharpened blade been freed, than Max had already cut down several heads in a feral backswing of his hand. People began to scream and make for the exit as they realized battling this animal would be a task more futile than trying to fight gravity. He began to stomp forward, when a stench spread over the air. The shadows grew thick and seemed to ooze out of the walls and ceiling like corporal hands grasping for the light. A distant sound erupted in the middle of the arena as whips of incandescent light slashed out from an expanding black circle. A two dimensional void visible only from the back and front opened and called out to him. He could hear his name, not the name these fools had branded him with, but his true father–given name. It came as a chant from within the portal, urging him to come. At first confused, he resisted, but he could scarcely ignore the unprecedented phenomena of odd familiarly. He slew a few more of the fleeing men, cutting limbs and decapitating heads. He stopped and saw a hand reaching out to him from the gateway in the middle of the arena. It looked so clean, so fresh, like the hand of a woman, or a poet.

Max noticed everyone had disappeared or had been murdered, their dank bodies laying silent and askew across the platforms of the amphitheater, their eyes frozen in expressions of fear. And as he looked into their eyes, all of them wide and following his every move, he realized he was dreaming. He knew faces did not freeze in terror upon death, but went slack as all muscle–control escapes the dead mind. Blood dripped from torn limbs and motionless bodies and permeated to the bottom floor, gathering in a thick pool.

Drifting between lucidity and clarity, Max marveled at the destruction his old bones were still capable of bestowing upon this world. He hated himself for it, hated that he seemed to enjoy, even relish what he had done.

"Maaaxx," cried a distant voice, a shred of pleasantry inside the bleak madness. Slowly, he stepped down level by level until he reached the ground floor of the arena. The sand – turned scarlet with the years of bloodshed – stuck to his feet, making him realize he had never before felt, truly felt the calming touch of the sand beneath his feet. His hand extended towards the portal as he walked to its edge. Within it, he could see an outline of a place drifting above a planet. He recognized it, and almost cried with the realization of what has happened. He leapt into the abyss.

CHAPTER 8

Reality Is An Illusion

The awakening was brutal. Max felt every part of his body resist it and every synapse of his mind deny it. The result was a tremor of pain which bled out of his pores and spread into the surrounding reality of the pod, where it seemed to ricochet of walls in visible waves of jagged, tormented air. His mind drew faces out of the nonsensical shapes, faces that weren't there, faces that slid back into him after they had done screaming and grimacing.

The pod opened. Bolt's face greeted him with a look of concern and Zack soon joined. He could see their questions seep out of their skulls and mottle the air like ink.

He climbed out of the pod, collapsing on one knee. Aiding Max to his feet, Zack asked, "Are you ok? What happened in there?" He didn't remember getting out of the pod.

His mouth felt dry and his lips were cracked, he tried to lick them, but there was no moisture on his tongue. He braced himself over the pod as Zack handed him a glass of water. For the next few moments, the cleansing of thirst felt like the single most important thing he had ever done. He drank so fast he had to stop midway and take a few breaths before he could finish the glass.

"You okay, man?" Zack asked again. Max took a moment, resting with his back against the pod and regarding the man with the kind of look one might give to an arch enemy right before he strangles him.

"The hell was that? Huh? The fuck!" Max snapped. He tried to get up, but instead collapsed to his knees again. This time, no one helped him up. Like animals, the two had sensed when to keep their distance. "I killed so many of them. So many, so long... I ate them," he said in between breaths. "I ate them! Why didn't you disconnect me? How long was I in there! Tell me!"

"Twenty minutes," Zack said, his tone defensive yet sympathetic. "I tried to get you both out when I got a message from Central," Zack continued, "but you stayed in the dream. I don't...I've never seen anything like it. It's like your mind fused with the machine, I had to program a doorway myself so you could exit."

"Weird shit," Bolt nodded and knelt beside Max. "You'll feel better," he put a hand on his shoulder, "a bad dream is all."

Max shot him a look like Bolt had just said the stupidest thing ever. "A bad dream? You don't get it, I felt years pass by, years where I killed people every day and ate their...I tasted them..."

"We do understand," Zack said. "It's what the machine does, but there aint much we can do about it now, is there?"

"You son of a..." Max lunged towards Zack's neck like a leopard, his rage infused by a remnant of the dream, moving to try and grasp the technician.

"Whoa, whoa," Bolt said, managing to stop him before he could do any harm. "It's not his fault, settle down."

"The hell it isn't! He should have been able to prevent shit like this, he said he could!"

"I tried!" Zack admitted, "what do you think I was doing, scratching my arse? It's not my fault you're so fucked up!"

And there it was. The crux of it. The truth denied to him for years, lingering on the tethers of anyone who knew him. His own rage subsided when he realized the reality of it. The sudden comprehension blinded him. Suffocated him. The redness around him stilled and the ethereal mist subsided. But at that point he no longer cared about the regret he saw in Zack's eyes. He cared little about the man's remorse over the word spoken. For what had just come out of the Zack's mouth was the truth. After all the pretense, someone had finally told him the God damn honest truth. And, as usual, it burned like hell.

***

They spoke like friends tend to speak after there had been a fight among them, which is to say very little. Instead, and in reply to the message Zack had received, they headed to the central spire. Bolt felt like he needed to break the ice somehow, but as time stretched between each footstep, he felt the window of opportunity to speak slip further and further.

The throng of people milling about them only made everything worse, their collective voices and sounds making it nearly impossible to focus on what had just happened. Soon, it would become too awkward to even mention the event in Zack's apartment; it would feel like talking about a death in the family.

"I hear it's coming," Bolt heard a woman behind him say. The man next to her grunted as if it had been about time, and said, "Bleh, finally we get to leave this damn station. Seems like it's been too long since I heard those words, know what I'm sayin'?"

"You could leave whenever you want," the woman said. "And which words are you talking about?"

"We shall travel to this planet? What else. Honestly, I can't wait, you know?"

Neither could Bolt. He knew the words too, they had become legendary. We shall travel to this planet. They represented every strand of human progress and achievement, but most of all, they represented the arrival of a God, one with the promise of propelling them to the very edges of the galaxy. Perhaps even space itself.

"Anything to leave this fucking place," the man added.

"Yeh," the woman agreed, "need a break for sure."

Bolt still couldn't see what was so bad about the station. For one, it looked phenomenal, like a city humankind had found in the depths of an ocean and placed into the sky just because they could. He felt happier here, but that wasn't the right term, a more accurate one would be – at peace. He didn't need to worry about not recognizing someone or failing to greet them – he knew he didn't know anyone, and that feeling was strangely freeing. More so than he even expected it to be. The only thing he began to miss was a breeze. Any kind of wind or a wisp to mix the smell of ozone and bleach or blow it away. It would have been nice.

He noticed they began to ascend on a slight upward angle and looked up. A monolith. A tower. A mega–structure. He couldn't see a single window on its flawless, white surface. It stretched out from the slum–like and flawlessly white structures at its feet, reforming itself from an initial tube–like structure into a square. It carried the feel of trapped power like an ancient object found in the deep desert, brimming with mystery. Bolt couldn't tell how tall it was, but it seemed to be at least a few dozen stories, height was a thing difficult to determine on the station. It felt like looking at a mountain, immovable and impenetrable.

As they walked to it, the number of people around them steadily increased. They dripped in from every alley and passageway, adding to the group and expanding it into a mob. It had already become impossible to tell whether the three men were at the center or the edge of it. Soon Bolt couldn't see where the crowd began, its edges lost in between the buildings ahead and further up the slope.

There was no main road leading to the tower, rather, they followed a collection of narrow passages, each eventually forking together and leading to a single entrance of the spire.

The three men passed below the wide doorway, and Bolt saw Max place a hand on Zack's shoulder. "Apologies, friend," Max said.

"Eh," Zack shrugged with an understanding smile on his lips, "no need to say anything. That shouldn't have happened, I'm sorry it did. I'll make it up to you somehow."

"If you insist," Max grinned.

"I do."

***

"Have you actually seen it?" Bolt asked one of the technician seated behind a wide photonic console, its screen displaying star–filled space.

"No," the man answered.

The three of them had been allowed on the main observation deck once the people in charge had seen the Proxy. It made Bolt realize he had never asked Max how he came to acquire the title. It felt absurd when he thought about it, his best friend a powerful figure? I should ask for stuff. Zack didn't mention anything either, it was almost as if none of them realized it, until eventually something happened which only the Proxy should be able to do. Bolt sensed they had talked about it at some point, but couldn't remember the conversation. He wondered what Max had already told him. Bolt couldn't help but get the uncanny sense that the eyes of Max weren't just his own.

"I don't think anyone had seen it yet," the burly technician added. "Perhaps the Proxy can tell more you more, did he not tell you anything?"

Before Bolt could produce a reply, a light began to chime on the lower right corner of the tech's console. Men and women, technicians and honorary guests began to whisper and talk amongst themselves. Only the scientists inside the circular depression filled with mind–to–machine consoles and screens stayed quiet, each examining their own data displays. A tall man with clearly visible eye cybernetics, his irises unnaturally bright and with a clean shaven head, stood up from the central console on a circular stage rising from the middle of the depression where the scientists worked. His voice brought some semblance of order, and Bolt could tell he was used to people listening when he employed his enhanced vocal abilities.

"Quiet," he said. "Adia," he told one of the scientists below him, "enable the wall–screen." The man could have done it himself, but the task was so rudimentary and simplistic Bolt thought he probably felt it beneath him.

Following the commander's order, the view outside the glass–wall changed as the wall took on a life of its own. The sight of the station curling upward outside the glass–wall shifted into a vision of a small region of space. Lights flickered within the darkness and it took a moment for Bolt to recognize the celestial stream of the Milky Way. Something looked out of place on the image. A moon?

"Move away from the damn wall," the commander grumbled. And as though his voice had just spat fire, the people who had bunched up on the stage surrounding the consoles dispersed.

"Prepare our defenses, ready our weapons,"

"Sir?" Adia asked.

"I'm not taking any chances, if that's something else, I intend to be ready for it."

"Sir I," the woman stuttered. "With that thing's scale, I don't think there's anything we can do to stop it even if we tried."

"Who says trying isn't enough?" the commander replied.

"Send a transmission," Max said, his voice carrying a palpable weight behind it. No one could resist. Everyone sent out a hail simultaneously. Those who couldn't send one began to think of a way how they might. Bolt had to blink the thought away as he leaned over to his friend.

"Is it ours?" It seemed like something Max should know.

"I think if it wasn't you'd already be incapable of asking."

CHAPTER 9

Time Is An Illusion

How long has it been? A year? A decade? A millennium? How long since I had seen my home planet? These felt like questions a person should know the answer to, important questions. But something else seemed to trump them all; did it really matter? The answer bent into the realm of 'No'.

She reflected on why this was. How long had I been stationary? This too seemed like a question she should have been able to answer. But it was as though an integral part of her was missing. A part she had been born with, a part which informed her of the passage of time. An internal clock. Memories of the past had molded with memories of the future in a way she couldn't unravel, and recollections of a time when she still used to forget more than she thought were gone. Now, forgetting had become impossible. Her perceptions and, as a result, her preconceptions of space had transformed the day she became one with the space–roaming machine. It had been the day time became something to move and sail through, and not a thing to experience or a presence felt in the marrow, ageing her. Still, no matter how much she tried to rationalize it now that she floated above her home planet again, she couldn't deny her desire to know and feel how long it had actually been since she had last seen it. Instead, the only thing she felt was cold. Constant, unyielding cold.

She never shivered. The cold was all around her, as much within as it was without, pressing in on her carbon form from every direction and angle. She sensed the weight of it too, but somehow, strangely, felt weightless and untethered at the same time, even while knowing she weighted thousands upon thousands of tons. But those too, like the measuring of time, were now just numbers. Abstract properties and figures attributed to concepts which meant nothing to her.

She always slept, but never dreamed. Or is this state in which I am now a dream? She could no longer tell, but often wondered this. Reality itself had changed its face into one of endless possibility.

She remembered only fractions of her previous life. All that was and would ever be now was this. The meld of flesh and machine unlike any other. She was the first of her kind, a new existence of matter that still – after all the time that has evidently passed – felt so alien to her she couldn't describe her condition even if she could speak in any normal way. Though she figured that if she were to speak and express herself in any human sense, it would simply be an idiom of how she knew everyone else within her saw her existence – glorious perfection. A fusion of mind and machine so complete the corridors within her felt like her flesh. The men and women walking inside each a nerve ending in itself – each relaying electric data along her being – each independent and yet part of the whole. Pipes and wiring which composed the entirety of her new body became her circulatory system, relentlessly pumping life–giving data–fluid for her continued existence and undisturbed functionality.

She remembered having a name once. A human name. But that too was nothing of concern or relevance. Now she was the heart of the great machine, the personification of something eternal. She knew she sat on a throne, that much was obvious, for she could see herself through the digital recorders placed around her in order to keep her mortal coil under constant surveillance and care. Machinery around her relayed tubes and wires which flooded her with stimulants and consciousness–expanding drugs, blasting her mind with a firestorm of synaptic activity. The air itself felt electrified within the sphere where she nested. It felt surreal to watch herself sitting in suspended motion, with wires and tubes running into her augmented body. A never–ending out of body experience. She felt as if she could reach out and touch the being that had once been her – that was in some ways still her. But her old body looked foreign, and it felt like gazing down upon a stranger – a mirage. No emotions bound her to it.

The fleshy bits which once housed all of her mind, along with the organic contraptions that in another life allowed her to roam the blue planet of her birth, were now anathema to her, ugly an unrelatably organic, it even stank.

Within her, however, she managed to find a different form of beauty. It stood right next to her once–body, examining it. And although she wished she might, wished she could, she could not discern what went through his mind.

Taking the uttermost care in inspecting her, making sure all things were in their proper place, functioning with optimal efficiency, he moved fluidly.

She knew it was his daily routine to check up on her, to know she was well, but she didn't feel the touch of his hands, only the metallic heaviness of his feet standing inside her – a presence in her new body. She had found none as beautiful as him. The others inside her felt stiff, distant – a necessity. But this one, this one she found... welcoming. She knew that in many ways, he was the same as she, a being of flesh, molded with inorganic parts and machinery to near perfection. She supposed this beauty she recognized could be the same awe someone felt about their own blood–cells when looked under magnification. A sense of amazement over the tiny laborers, each invisible to the naked eye but all too real – essential in every regard. But why is it I don't feel this way about any of the others? She often wondered. It felt like, if anything, this was something she should remember, to recall the source of her feelings.

The man she looked upon was clad in a voluminous, navy blue robe. Two dormant and segmented, three fingered arms hung loosely from his scapula bones and hunched over his shoulders like scorpion tails. Ribbed cables ran from the spine to his neck and into his lower arms through holes tailored into his dragging robe. His features were composed of a skull–shaped mask housing multiple cybernetic eyes, his gaze was the gaze of a spider. The implants shone with a deep midnight–blue. She could only guess how Dyekart Spyros saw the world around him.

His mouth blurted something in binary, she could sense the information he expelled move with the speed of light inside her. The info–dump he had sent got received by a group of women on the other side of the door to her chamber. His ability for normal speech had long since been rendered obsolete, although he could still employ it if he wished. His mouth lay dormant behind a thick mouth–grille and wiring draping from his skullmask like a metallic octopus, each tendril capable of expanding and connecting to systems of his choice for multiple and separate and instant data–transfers. The cold touch of his feet felt calming as his tendrilous, smooth–looking fingers examined the integrity of the nourishment–cabling with more dexterity that any normal fingers could ever hope to manage.

Dyekart turned to leave, one of his cyber–eyes looking into the digital recorder and, for a moment, it seemed as if he saw her, the real her.

Sometimes, she wished she could leave her throne, but remained uncertain of what would happen if she would – to disconnect her old flesh from the new. She feared this, feared it more than anything else, realizing that even in un–death, her organic components were instrumental to her continued existence, but was unsure in what way. The fear of disconnection, however, had become a distant nightmare, a waking–dream, like the grip of anxiety. But she was now more than a being of flesh, she was something beyond it. A spirit in the void of space. She was a ship, she was the Administrator's Will.

***

Dyekart Spyros felt almost sorry for her. Almost. And it was this feeling, among others, why he loved coming down to the Essentium to look upon her. It remained the only place on the ship which stimulated his emotions in any tangible way. But, in retrospect, sorry was a terribly inaccurate description of his feelings.

Sometimes, he would stare at her for hours just so he could experience the emotions she stirred in him by just sitting immobile on the brass throne. Ribbed tubes and wires ran into almost every part of her body and head, providing nourishment and allowing a direct interface with the ship's systems.

He had heard her voice in his head once while he stood there, watching her – a ping of binary code his mind decoded instantly.

>Are you watching me sleep?< she had asked.

>And if I am?< he answered.

>Creepy.<

>If watching a thing of beauty is creepy. Then I must the biggest creep there is.<

The ship had purred that day in a way he had never heard it since. He liked to think it was some form of laughter.

Her breathing came labored – aided by a rebreather mask as her long, black hair curved down over her hunched head. Dyekart had forbidden the scientists and servitors to cut her locks, even while knowing the work of checking up her wire connections would be easier had he allowed them to do it. Simply put, he liked her hair. It was the only thing that assured him she was truly alive. Breathing could be induced by machines, heartbeats could be mechanically stimulated. But the growth of her hair, that could not easily be replicated or induced. And with the aid of his highly–sensitive ocular cybernetics, he could see each strand grow. The whole process helped to expand the feelings inside him. He knew such a thing to be selfish, yet also knew it made her seem more human, not just a rudimentary being of bone and flesh set to serve the Administrator and humankind's will to wedge out into space.

Dyekart could, of course, at any time interface with her directly via means of an analog connection and receive immediate access to all her thoughts. But that seemed more like an invasion than a means to strike a conversation. And besides, he wasn't even sure she'd be able to communicate like that. Not to mention the fact that an 'analog connection' sounded wrong in almost every sense he could think of.

In his time spent on board the Administrator's Will, Dyekart had grown used to her accurate thinking and unabridged, silent words. Word he felt more than heard. Still, he enjoyed his visits to the Essentium, and each time finding himself eager to feel her presence against his mechanized fingers, to touch her mortal face (or at least what was left of it), each time amazed that there was indeed a being behind the ruthless efficiency with which the ship operated.

Dyekart threw a glance to one of the digital globes, an instrument recording every angle and nuance of his mask behind which he smiled. You may not see the smile, he thought, but you're watching, aren't you? You always are.

He sighed. It wasn't the sigh of a human either, but of a machine, a warbling electric stir. He waved a hand over a green panel and the metal bulkheads leading out of the Essentium gaped open like a sideways maw. A group of three waiting outside rushed past him and into the throne–room, resuming their constant care for the wellbeing of the Administrator's Will's mortal form. Dyekart looked back before the gate closed shut, watching the technicians inspect her and the machines which kept her alive, as if in fear Dyekart's very presence might have broken them or caused them to work at a reduced efficiency. He found their methodical focus on perfection amusing.

Then, quite despite himself, he felt sorry for her again – a distant feeling of remorse for the prison she lived in. In the end, however, he realized he was just as trapped as her, perhaps even more so. She could roam the galaxy at a whim – the furthest reaches of space – while he, despite being an augmented man, was still just a man. Despite this, despite feeling trapped at times, his limbs restrained by the confides of the ship, in his mind, he was free.

A man though he was, Dyekart took great pride in being one of the few humans who could truly call himself transhuman. An organic something that had become more, better. A being with every capability enhanced and honed. Through his research and study, Dyekart had managed to find a balance between flesh and machine so perfect, he amazed even himself. Although now that he had enhanced himself mechanically, he had hoped to be able to better himself visually as well.

A task proving next to impossible. He never seemed to find the time for it.

Dyekart's body was sixty–six percent augmented. Emotions, however, felt sparse and unprofound, distant even. At times, he thought perhaps he had imagined it, and that living on a ship does that to you, but it felt like he was missing something.

All he ever felt, truly, was excitement. Traveling to a new world, a new broken city. A new sprawling landscape ruined by someone long gone. That was what still stirred him the most. He savored that part of himself, kept it under lock and key, sixty–six percent was enough, he decided.

He walked the narrow, ascending corridor leading from the Essentium, his shadow pooling back into the darkness, the ship's inner heart purring behind the walls. The lights above and ahead of him turned on in turn with his steps, while those behind him turned off. He walked until the soft defuse glow of the door–panel up the slope ahead became immediate – in reach. Dyekart waved a hand over the console upon the gate and the iron fell into the slit below with a sound of a heavy anvil strike. He stepped into a much wider and brightly illuminated passage. A multitude of technicians and scientists walked around its length, disappearing inside tubular hallways as they went about their business. Most were simply stretching their legs, a lot of them jogging in tight body–suits. The walls were like diamond here, he could see far and in all directions of the ship if he but focused. Some spaces or areas were artificially darkened, standing out like black markers around him. It felt like looking at a nervous system. In the back of his mind, the microwave murmur of all the conversations swimming through the air kept him engaged, as every Link–communication and random message of the crew on board the Administrator's Will found its way into his head.

It was his duty to immediately recognize any relevant data. Any new information about a research project or scientific endeavor. For this purpose alone, he had allowed himself to be implanted with a logic system. It filtered and made anything of importance pop up in his mind–banks, a subconscious recess of his mind where his brain could freely access and process data without him even thinking about it. The result was a constant binary residue, a clamoring that buzzed in the back of his perceptions like a beehive, an inner voice made up of a thousand voices.

He found the sound strangely pleasant most of the time. It made him feel connected, never alone.

Since his inception as the commander of the vessel, information was what drove his life. It brought him satisfaction no matter how unimportant or trivial. He had grown accustomed to the droning over the decades. He failed to even notice it unless he came into an overly crowded area where an increased amount of trivial data slithered invisibly around him. He could turn it off, yet each time he did, it felt like he might miss something of note, so he kept it active. Even while he slept.

It brought him dreams wherein he was never himself, but rather some other, strange person with habits he didn't understand. He often dreamed of being a spectator, a consciousness without form watching others as they bickered or went about their business.

Within the vessel, most of the corridors had been sculptured with efficiency in mind, not comfort. Every part of the ship's inner workings was hidden within panels and slabs which the technicians, engineers and their assistants could easily remove to repair or clean. The walls possessed a polished look, with no visual transitions from one slab to the next. They all appeared near colorless up close or until removed, yet when one looked in a given direction, their accumulated color became the color of the brightest of morning skies – it reminded him of his home world. And if Dyekart focused his vision and looked really close, he could see a series of dendrite–pipes within the slabs. A cobweb of neuron–like pathways that crept and moved within the near–transparent material like electric worms.

The halls Dyekart passed were always just wide enough for no more than three men to pass each other. Yet even that he considered a waste of space.

The Administrator's Will employed research decks and laboratories, observatories and living quarters, along with vast, incredible coliseums with stretches of dream–sequencers. Places where men and women could dedicate their lives to a problem and wake up a day later, exactly where they had laid down to sleep. It divided their lives on the ship into lifelong increments. Within their dreams, it never rained, nor could they make it rain, and neither Dyekart nor anyone else could explain why.

"An anomaly in the programming," seemed to be the consensus.

Nevertheless, the sequencers were a necessity. Exploring the galaxy took time.

Performing research and tests on any newly discovered substance or artifact that might provide a clue or a better understanding of the universe they inhabited had been the ultimate goal. Survival inside the sentient diamond became another.

So far, however, they had found nothing but dustbowls and empty worlds. The galaxy seemed empty. It was either that, or something had spent a great deal of effort and time to try and make it appear empty. It often happened that, in the restless night between worlds – worlds the rest of humanity had no clue they were visiting – Dyekart found himself wondering who had emptied it. The answers which drew themselves in his mind perturbed him greatly. He tried not to think about it.

His knowledge of the ship, however, was second only to the Administrator's Will herself. As a result, he always knew the most direct path to any given location. He knew the route to it before he even seemed to think of the destination. The path he needed to take through the labyrinth of halls lit up in his mind. He chose a less direct way this time, one in which he passed rooms the size of vast concert halls where people rehearsed and vast halls where they exercised in groups of ten in wells of zero gravity.

People greeted him as he walked past them. Greeted with smiles and kind faces. He returned each with a polite bow of his head.

Dyekart's mind led him to the main hall also known as the Exploratorium, an area near the ship's diamond–shaped upper corner. And although navigation and things of the like could be done elsewhere or by the ship herself, the initial coordinate entries were often done on the main deck, just so the people doing it could feel useful. The Exploratorium wasn't as big or as grand as its name suggested, and just like everything else onboard the space–barge, it had been constructed for efficiency, not posterity.

He had reached the chamber by navigating through doorways which looked like walls, but would place his next step in another part of the ship.

Dyekart immediately spotted his assistant, Ia, working seated and hunched over a photonic screen, lost in the oceans of data surging into her augmented and cyberneticaly enhanced prefrontal cortex.

The Exploratorium itself was a horizontally cut dome inside the Administrator's Will. Its ceiling stood low, located only five kilometers underneath the outer shell.

Currently, the Administrator's Will swam in geosynchronous orbit around its crew's home planet.

The globe's azure blue bounced and reflected of the smooth floor of the Exploratorium and imbued it with a visage of its atmosphere. It filled Dyekart with a feeling of nostalgia, one of the emotions he was profoundly keen on experiencing.

He walked over to Ia. Her display looked as if floating in space.

More than anything else about the hall, Dyekart liked it because it was always quiet, and he had no desire to disrupt that calm with spoken words just yet. Instead, he fired off a jab over the Link.

His quick cast made Ia stir, but not enough to turn around and look.

>Working here,< she blurted over the Link, the words flying out of her unseen.

"When are you not working?" Dyekart retorted, intentionally using his vocal synthesizer to try and further stir and mess with her. She didn't allow herself to be bothered, however, and continued to communicate with him using the Link, but didn't bother to punctuate her messages.

>dont screw with me, spyros,< she said. >the exchange needs to be properly coordinated, theyv already sent me dozens of messages before we even neared the damn thing. your the commander, why am I doing this?<

"Let Her worry about that. Come, the new arrivals will get here shortly," said Dyekart. "Let's get down to the portal deck, I'm eager to asses and store new facial features."

>im not,< Ia said, not taking her eyes off the visual display. She wasn't looking at the screen itself, but at a different picture entirely, a holoimage in her mind. >you know im not like you. i dont remember every face i see and every voice i hear. even the people already on this ship are too many for me to remember, not that id have any reason to anyway.<

"Yes yes," Dyekart said, still using his flesh voice, "exaggerating again, I see. Maybe this time you'll see someone you like, hmm?"

The remark made Ia stir ever so slightly. She may not have liked to be in the company of people. That, however, did not mean she had zero desire to find someone who would be the exception.

>fine,< she blurted while sighing, >we'll go down to the portal deck, but first look at this. You know the planet we've been scheduled to visit, what was it now, nine years ago?<

"Are you suggesting I forgot?"

>No, I... never mind.< Erhart stiffened when he noticed she began to properly punctuate her Link–sentences, which was rare even for her. >It seems there were vectors plotted to it numerous times. You think that the reason why we haven't gone to it yet? You think others already have?<

Dyekart's interest peaked. He moved to a display next to Ia's. He sat down and entered a few commands via direct neuro–interface and called up the exact same data Ia had been reviewing. An emotion came to life within him, as subtle as it was undeniable. He observed the words flying out of the quantum computer in a brook of electric information. It looked like a distress signal. Parts of which were distorted, altered somehow.

"It must've come from an incredible distance," he said. "Bits of it seem corrupted, there's information buried in the datastream." >Do we have an approximation timeline? When did the signal first transmit?< Dyekart asked, this time over the Link.

>No timeline yet, I've just started working on it,< Ia said in a rush of electric will, eager to make Dyekart shut up so she could continue the task.

Dyekart looked over the data and wondered what the hell it meant. It was a rare thing to see a distress signal, or any kind of transmission they could interpret in any way at all. It had never happened before. The galaxy seemed as devoid of radio signals as it was of life. And as far as Dyekart had seen or knew, there were no other Earth vessels out there. Or in fact any vessels at all. >Could the signal have originated from one of the colonies? Europa perhaps?< he asked, one of his mechanized scorpion–hands working over a photonic console on his right. The limb cross–referenced information, trying to find anything it could by connecting to Earth's vast data banks. Meanwhile, one of his eyes looked over the display.

>No,< Ia answered, without elaborating.

The distress pulse they picked up was remarkably similar to what their own vessel had been designed to transmit in case of an emergency. A data packet which would travel long distances, powered by a zero–point energy field at its place of its origin. This form of travel meant the data could not really be trusted if the distance it needed to traverse was truly immense. The information itself would not be composed of molecules as such, but an information wave–stream within the underlining fabric of possibility that would only manifest itself as electrons at a specific point. As such, it traveled with instantaneous speed in all directions, but it would not truly travel, only its potentiality. It could only be received by a machine specifically designed to manifest it out of the intrinsic subtle field. If the distance was indeed great, the pulse would be sent on a small probe which would instead periodically exit the Null–field of none–space in order to harness zero–point energy and resend the pulse before it disappeared back into the space between reality and nothingness. This would only be the case when a large amount of data needed to be sent and could not be stored as pure possibility. Electrons were only ever a signature, a way of saying "look here" or "the probe will come here" when one already knew how to look.

This method of travel mirrored the concept by which the Administrator's Will operated, only on a much, much smaller scale.

>Do you ever think about how this ship runs?< Ia asked, sensing Dyekart's susceptibility for the subject.

>Yea, and–<

>I mean how it really runs.<

>.......It runs,< he blurted.

>Is it because I was born here that I still find it so hard to believe?< she asked.

>We have other work to do, stop lurking around my mind and focus on your own task.<

>But it's always so interesting,< she blurted, visibly grinning.

Ia could see the workings of Dyekart's thinking almost better than him, but not quite. Each layer of his thoughts floated bare before her in a myriad of mental imagery.

>The influence of your mind when you're near me always makes me wonder why only you know precisely how it runs.<

His next wall of text came in a rush.

>We discovered particles faster than the speed of light. Then we discovered light isn't actually light, but the effect of this particle upon the fabric of space–time. In fact, we then discovered this particle does not only travel faster than the speed of light, but actually 'becomes' space, as in, melds with space–time, creating a sense of particle–wave duality in its effect upon reality. This effect then enfolds in a form of light quanta. Naturally, we discovered how to use this new–found "alpha–particle" to essentially push space–time in up to three dimensions of space. What we know as the fabric of reality would envelop this dimensional hole. We then drop the ship into this hole, and continuously recreate the Null–field by pushing more and more space–time away in any given direction. Here, harnessing zero–point energy became a necessity. With this, and only with this, travel through Null could and eventually had become reality. Inside the ship, direction didn't matter, time didn't matter, wherever the "slope" outside it fell, the ship's crude matter would glide into at speeds contingent only on upon how fast the Null–field could be quantulated.

(Note: All within–<

>Wait, stop,< Ia interrupted the datacast. >Don't just recast me the same–<

Erhart continued anyway. >All within the material vessel would experience time normally, while for those not within Null–space, the ship would in fact vanish on one end, and reappear on the other. Potentially, it could do so instantly, no matter the distance. For this reason, the hull of all ships must be at least ten kilometers thick, preferably made of diamond. This shall allow the reestablishing of normal space–time more fluidly and is less likely to not change the crew into pure abstraction as it pulls matter behind its prescribed path. Again, space–time outside the ship thrusts outward from the ship's surface, and only in the direction it needs to go does it pull the ship along with it, and only ever to a point. For easier, but slightly inaccurate reference, allow yourself to picture any sort of floating material sent down a stream. Or better yet, a ball of lead dropped onto a sheet, where you continuously apply pressure in front of the ball, making it travel into the hole which the pressure has created.<

>Thanks, but I prefer the term quantum leap on a massive scale,< Ia said.

>Then next time say it, don't make me recast data you can get yourself,< Erhart calmly answered.

>You know that's not how the ship really runs,< she said, using her hand to causally swipe away a personal message that, for everyone else, wasn't really there.

>Yes,< Dyekart nodded. >I know you know, and I told you this before.<

>But how can she? I do not–<

>It's...<

PAUSE

>That face again,< she said, looking at him, >you always make that face when I ask you, what are you not telling me?<

He turned to look at her, his three smaller, side–eyes zooming in, the bigger one visually switching, blinking to some different spectrum of perception.

His synthetics emulated speech almost perfectly, with a strange, soothing quality. "I don't have a face."

"Yes you do," she smiled. Something else drew her attention. >You're seeing this, correct?< Ia suddenly blurted.

>Yes, I see it too,< Dyekart added. >The signal had been traveling for decades. At least in our perspective.<

>How could this be? When will it arrive?<

"There's no real way to tell. It originated from another galaxy! I'm guessing the probe will appear soon, perhaps even in a day or two, in this exact spot." Dyekart's voice took on an almost dream–like fascination, a fascination Ia had rarely heard from him.

"You think the planet we were destined to travel to is in another galaxy?" she asked, this time using her real voice, which was strangely unfeminine, as if she had just woken up. "Do you think this whole time the Admin has been preparing us? Do you think he knew already that this galaxy was empty?"

"The evidence seems to suggest it," Dyekart nodded.

"But who's sending these messages? There are no other ships."

"Aren't there?"

"What?"

"How do you know there aren't any others?" Dyekart asked. "For damn's sake girl, even our own planet doesn't know we exist. They've no idea we've already been seeing and walking the stars. Imagine what else they... what even we don't know."

"But why?"

"Why what?"

"Why keep it all a secret?" Ia asked.

"Because secrets, because knowledge, is power. Knowledge is control. And control, my friend, is what we were fooled into thinking we possess. Yes, quite fooled I believe."

"We have control over this vessel, we have control over our bodies, at least," Ia said.

"Do we? Do we really? This thing is called the Administrator's Will for damn's sake."

"Still," Ia said, "we'll follow the signal, right? You're not planning on doing anything else are you?"

She's like a fixated child. "What else would I be planning?"

"Dunno, you sounded pretty apocalyptic back there."

"Apocalyptic?" Dyekart snorted a dry laugh–like purr. "It's simply a fact. Don't tell me you've never thought about it? Why do you think we named this whoever–the–hell–he–is the Administrator? He's the puppet master of it all."

"Well, obviously, but from what I've seen he hasn't done anything bad."

"How would you know? You were born on this vessel. Which means we've been traveling the stars long before anyone on Earth even knew we could. Think about that. Think about why anyone would deceive a whole planet in such a way. And if this probe truly will arrive – even if it doesn't – it seems like there were others before us. You tell me why someone wouldn't tell anyone about it."

Ia couldn't come up with an answer, and Dyekart could see she wasn't really interested in one. To her, Earth was like a distant myth, a place she held no connection to. He couldn't really blame her. For her, this ship, this reality, was all she knew.

"So, we will travel to this planet, correct?" she asked.

"If we do, we risk losing everything," Dyekart answered. "Yes, quite so," he added mostly to himself, knowing his words won't stir any fear of going into the unknown in Ia's mind. She had never had a reason to fear it. It was the joy of living for her, and in fact for most people on board the vessel, it was the reason why so many had devoted their lives to the pursuit of great distances. They alone would wade into the deepest regions of the galaxy where no others have been for who knows how long, if ever. All in hopes of finding things which would spark their imaginations, in search of answers that would propel them even deeper between the stars.

In Dyekart's head the course was already set. The risks involved were an afterthought not even worth considering.

He looked into the solid giant ball and took a mental picture of its beauty. Last time, perhaps, he though, and found he didn't really care that much. A feeling prevailed, however. A feeling that whatever waited upon the planet they were to visit wasn't a greeting card.

Upon his quiet contemplation upon the planet's future, for a moment, he didn't feel like himself, he felt... influenced. He became certain that there was someone else with him, inside him, or perhaps even standing next to him. A hooded stranger. He forgot the sensation instantly. He turned his head from the planet, looking at the young Ia and said, "We shall travel to this planet."

CHAPTER 10

Death Is An Illusion

The first thing Bolt realized after exiting the portal was that he had just killed a man.

He didn't do it intentionally, nor did he see it happen. But he could smell it, and the smell couldn't easily be mistaken or avoided – a metallic reek mixed with an indefinable something, like burned hair or feces, or both.

Bolt's face twisted in disgust. He gagged and coughed. His eyes watered from the intense stench.

Overcome with the desire to spit away the taste, he realized what he actually wanted to do was throw up. Somehow, however, it felt wrong even to spit in the presence of others, as if the act would dishonor whoever had perished. Fuck honor. He spat and the iridescent particles pinged on the metallic floor.

The taste didn't' go away, and he had no choice but to swallow.

He knew it wouldn't make a difference anyway. For the stench had lodged itself in his nose and coated his teeth. A bad omen and a sign of bad dreams to come.

Prior to his arrival, the hall had been buzzing with sound. He could tell the people had been moving franticly just moments before. But they were frozen now, gripped with the terror of seeing a man shredded into nothing by super–dense matter.

Technically, Bolt stood far removed from blame, he just happened to have the misfortune of being the first to enter the portal. But since he had been the one to press a button to establish it in the first place, he couldn't help but feel responsible.

Someone had fucked up. Someone had been wrong, misinformed him that the portal platform had been cleared. He didn't know what to do about it. He wasn't even sure there was anything he could do.

As far as he could tell, a man had been standing there, doing who knows what before he had been devoured by the expanding wormhole as a stable connection had engaged. The smell would linger for weeks in the chamber, in his memory – forever.

They had told him to keep walking. That's what they said before Bolt entered the portal. Keep walking. Just. Keep. Walking.

They had given him the honor of opening the portal, an honor he now wished he could shove up someone's ass. It did, however, made him realize he was a person of marginal importance. A person with a rank. People seemed to know him. People he couldn't remember. They would ask him about his wife.

"She's fine," he would say, and they would smile. He wondered how long it would take for anyone to grasp the fact that he couldn't remember any of them.

As Bolt kept walking, he took note of the people around him, filling the hall. They greeted and smiled at him. He didn't understand how they could be so happy in light of what had just happened. There were at least a hundred of them inside the dome, most of whom wore robes of dark blue. The sight of them gave him the impression like he had just walked in on some cult performing a rite. How can they walk around in those things? To be fair, some did wear full body–suits in which the women in particular looked quite... interesting.

The vast diamond–shaped hall was unimpressive, and beside the portal platform housed no other significant traits, marks or machinery.

Bolt couldn't understand why there had been no dark expanse like the last time he had entered a wormhole. There was no dark palace, no giant with the mind of the universe hidden in its stare. What greeted him was what there should have been there the first time – the other side of the portal.

What felt to be overly fast, the people overcame the shock of seeing a man turned into elemental dust, and they began to greet the new arrivals. Bolt didn't understand how they could just ignore it, the smell alone made him want to leave.

Wanting to go back, he realized for the first time he would have to spend five years on board this space–roaming prison. The reality of it seemed to become apparent only now, when he was on it. Before, it had been a fantastic dream, an opportunity. Now, however...

He began to sweat.

A person stepped closer. He was man augmented to the point of abomination, his expression unreadable, hidden behind his mask of iron. Bolt felt like he should know this person. He didn't, so no surprise there.

More individuals came through the portal behind him, their faces twisting from the stench, with many no doubt wondering if the whole place smelled this bad. As Bolt kept walking, the man following him kept matching his speed.

"Don't worry, we can remake him," Dyekart said in a whisper. The man's voice made Bolt wonder whether the sound had been synthesized by unseen vocal emitters, or if the strangled gargle was in fact the man's natural speech. It sounded like he was chewing on something. His own tongue maybe.

Understanding the words wasn't really a problem, however, but understanding what the man meant wasn't quite as easy. Bolt wanted to know. It felt like he needed to know.

"How?" he asked. "How can you remake that which is mist?"

"You misunderstand," the man said, "we're not remaking the remains, we're remaking the man."

"I'm still not sure I understand. What's the difference?"

"As you might imagine, we've had quite a lot of time to ourselves on here," Dyekart said. "Yes, quite a lot."

I can see that, Bolt thought, referring to Dyekart's face. Or at least what was left of it. Which was nothing.

"Now that wasn't very nice," Dyekart said. Bolt couldn't tell if the man was offended or not.

"What wasn't?" Bolt asked as they moved towards the exit of the chamber.

"You've just remarked about my face, I believe."

Bolt didn't wish to say it, but the words practically flew out of his mouth, "Perhaps you should reevaluate what's worse, me thinking something, or you reading my thoughts and then complaining because you don't like them."

"I didn't mean it like that," Dyekart admitted. "I apologize. I suppose I've gotten too used to knowing what everyone else is thinking and I forget that outsiders don't like it."

"Are you saying people here do like it?" Bolt asked.

"We share our thoughts freely," Dyekart said. "But never mind, we've seemed to have gotten on the wrong foot here. Yes, quite wrong. How's the... wait. You don't remember me do you? You don't...where... where are your memories? You're blank. What happened, Akram?"

"I don't really wish to discuss it," Bolt said. A bit annoyed at the fact this person got to the truth of it so quickly.

"That's quite fascinating," Dyekart said.

"Me losing my memories is fascinating? I'm glad someone sees it that way." He managed a smile.

"Well, for one, everything you're experiencing now is new, is it not?"

"Not really," Bolt answered. "It looks new, but it doesn't feel new."

"I see. Yes, quite fascinating," Dyekart said again, scratching his metallic chin. Bolt wondered... does he even feel his own touch? "Well, in any case, I'm Dyekart," he said, and extended a hand. The man's dexterous fingers grasped Bolt's own like a vine, each appendage as cold as the next. He felt them even after their hands parted. "You've passed command of this vessel to me way back when. I'm surprised your wife allowed you come this time," Dyekart laughed, a wet raspy sound.

"She didn't. And I don't remember what you speak of ever happening."

"You just left?"

"Pretty much," Bolt said as the two men exited the chamber, moving aside the people who still flocked to it. The parade of movement beyond the diamond–shaped chamber struck Bolt immediately. It was all around him. The walls allowed him to see in almost every compartment of the ship, although the clarity of his vision lessened the further he had to look. All angles in which he gazed sported something to see. Some areas even appeared solid or had their walls blackened. "Tell me how you plan on remaking the man I just killed?"

"It was the most peculiar thing. Yes, most strange," said Dyekart, thoughtfully.

"What was?"

"I saw him run to the platform, it was almost as if he wanted to die."

"A suicide?"

"I believe so," Dyekart shrugged, his robe spilling sounds like old leather.

"How will you remake him?"

"A chamber. Where all our clones are grown, and our ship–"

"Wait, grown?"

"Bad terminology, perhaps, but yes, we have clones of everyone on board, shells basically. The ship constantly saves the memories and expressions of everyone on board in our memory decks, and we can imprint those experiences upon the clone in case the original dies."

"That's insane! Why do you need this? Do you expect people to die?" Bolt asked.

"Not really," Dyekart cackled, "it's merely a project by some of the crew, like I said, we have a lot of time on our hands. Yes, nothing but time."

"I can imagine," Bolt nodded. "Five years for us, then?"

"Five years till we get to the planet, yes," Dyekart nodded. "Say, this might sound like an out of the way question, but have you ever used a Dream–sequencer before?"

"Dream–sequencer? Is that what you call the machines for shared dreams and whatnot? I was about to use one back on the station, but we had a bit of an... incident."

"Well, at least you didn't lose your mind, eh?"

"Does that happen?" Bolt asked.

"A joke, relax, now come."

***

They had walked into a wall and ended up on the other side of the ship. Bolt hadn't felt a thing.

As it was later explained to him, the ship worked in conjunction with the onboard quantum computer and could basically delete you on one end and remake you on the other. The process had been explained so nonchalantly to him he almost thought it unremarkable. Almost.

"How did it feel to be dead for 0.013 seconds?" Dyekart jested.

"Too little time to feel anything, I suppose," Bolt smiled. The whole procedure fascinated him, and he said, "Who's controlling this computer? Can I meet him?" Bolt couldn't see Dyekart's true face – if he even still had one – but could tell from the man's voice he had touched a subject best left untouched.

"It's a she. And no, you cannot. At least not unless she herself invites you."

Bolt decided to drop the subject.

Expanding before them was a circular room the size of a circus tent, with platforms running around it like stairs within an amphitheater. Pods like he had seen in Zack's room were layered side by side on the wide steps, most of them already occupied.

"An excursion within a select server of the dreamworld could aid you to remember. The machine will extrapolate from memory, so in theory, it should have the ability to find memories you yourself thought weren't even there anymore. Supposing of course you want to."

"So like a form of hypnosis then?" Bolt asked as they neared the middle of the room and ascended between the staircases on a narrow passage to the first vacant machine.

"Yes, quite so," the man said. A woman passed them and nodded a greeting to Dyekart. He returned the gesture with a polite, barely discernable bow of the head. "We have made some modifications which should make it easier for you to probe your own mind, so to speak. Yes, quite easier. You see, the mind likes to work in metaphors when it comes to, well, almost anything, we managed to make it so it doesn't do it like that, but more with direct expression of images and sounds. You can spend as much time as you wish in there. In the meantime, we'll prepare you a room, we didn't get an exact number of how many will be joining us, so we hadn't really bothered yet."

"Thanks," Bolt said. "But where should I start?"

***

As soon as he lay down and closed his eyes, he could tell something wasn't right. In a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Bolt realized he could sense his own mind detach itself from his skull and become a separate entity sitting and pulsing on top of his head. A black menu opened up in his mind's eye, swimming upon a vibrant blue background where geometric lines and nonsensical shapes made of grey coalesced and danced. There were numerous so–called 'servers' open, and Bolt could read what they were and how many participants were inside each. There were at least ten people in every one.

Before he had entered one of the pods, Dyekart had instructed him to focus on the first one, but Bolt could not. He could read what it said easily enough, but could not concentrate sufficiently enough to engage the scenario his mind had already somehow laid out for him.

In their brief conversation before using the machine, Dyekart had also pointed out that this might be a problem for him at first, and told him to instead join a random scenario currently generated so he could get used to the machine. He focused on the second one which said 'Summer in the hills' and his vision shifted instantly. Suddenly, he stood on top of a mountain which, if it had existed in real life, on Earth, couldn't have possibly been this high and still posses such lush grass, or in fact any grass at all. He noticed it wasn't a mountain at all, but a rock floating above the clouds. It must have been a kind of transition zone, a loading screen, as Bolt quickly found himself within a different scene. Hills of impossible shapes, like overly–tall camel–humps spread around him. White whips of moisture hugged the mountain's middle sections while exposing the tops, with rays of light slicing through in beautiful fashion. A path he stood on wended down to a dark glacier–lake where he could see fish rippling the waters, their scaled backs casting rainbows over the dark blue as they surfaced and exposed their back–fins. To his right, the gravel road lead upward to a two–story wooden cottage where more than a dozen people were sitting on a porch. They laughed and smiled, exchanging stories under the clear sky, their voices echoing in the valley, their cheer carrying on the cool breeze.

"Woohoo! We have a newcomer!" a woman yelled out and enthusiastically, drunkishly waved Bolt to join them.

Following this event, it took nearly nine months for something weird and unexpected to happen. At first, the scene looked like it always had, the sun was in the same place in the sky, with less than half of it hiding behind the hills above the lake. The fish swam and the birds sung. The air smelled of spring, and the sun's rays warmed his face, illuminating specks of dust and insects as they whirled about in the near windless valley. Bolt was about to walk up the path to the cottage to drink some wine – which always seemed to make him just the right amount of drunk – when he noticed something he couldn't quite define upon the lake. At first he thought it might be a log, a part of a broken tree still standing. It took him a moment to understand it most certainly wasn't a log, but a man. A man in black. A man drenched, with water dripping as if he had just risen from it. The drops wouldn't stop flowing from his rags. Bolt froze. The soaked man stared at him with familiar eyes. They weakened Bolt's knees as if his muscle memory recalled something his conscious brain could not yet place.

Bolt blinked and found himself somewhere else.

His legs were stiff as brass, heavier than rock, but they were there, and they were moving. Bones crackled and broke beneath his feet with every stride, his each step guided by thoughts he couldn't control. All around him, sounds of steel clashing against steel rang with a never–ceasing racket, an eternal battle. Unintelligible bellows veiled the skies in a smog of red hatred, like the mist of a man he had shredded upon his arrival on the vessel. The thunder of steel amplified, and for each moment after, the invisible mêlée burned in his ears with increased madness. The sky was a churning ocean of darkness, hemorrhaging to rain a sea of blood upon the landscape. The taste and the smell of it had become familiar, and Bolt would sooner like the smell of excrement than the stench as it soaked him and the land around him.

Hundreds of meters in front of him stood a massive black gate, the gate of his mind. A fortress carved from bone and ash. It hulked into the sky, lost in the red mists above. Rivers of boiling blood coursed from the battlements upon its walls and into the landscape around it, where the earth itself seem to hunger for it, absorbing it with unmatched gluttony to again vomit it out of the ground far away, spitting it high into sky in geysers of gore that further colored the landscape red.

He felt like he was walking on Mars.

Each bone he stepped on and each skull he crushed beneath his bare feet belonged to someone he knew. Bolt couldn't comprehend what these people might have meant to him, but found it curious that he could recognize them just from the shape of the skull.

To leave this place had become his sole wish, yet he knew he had as much control over it as a child had over its own birth. The fortress smoked with the essence of murder, the dark and foul vapors amplifying the already pungent stench of decayed flesh.

He didn't understand the point of the imagery his mind conjured for him.

With each step, his courage would waver, then return in wave of nausea with the next. In these, short moments in between losing and regaining courage, in moments of sheer terror when he forgot he was dreaming and screamed out for help, he felt utterly alone and helpless. Without memories, without recollections of how it felt to laugh or smile as he would look upon another familiar face crushed beneath his feet, he found himself utterly and completely empty. Only to realize he still lay inside a machine in the next step he took. The relief of it almost made him cry with joy each time. In this fashion his mind continuously wavered in a maddening flux between madness and bliss until he began to wonder if this was even a dream. Is a dream from which one cannot awaken still a dream? Or some new, terrifying reality?

His legs continued to carry him to the fortress gate.

Appearing out of thin air, were two giant, horned beast standing sentry in front of the gate. Stiff and eternal, hunched over and so tall Bolt had to crane his neck, he watched their enormous, two–handed axes dripped with an endless stream of blood.

Like statues animated into life, the two flesh–mountains of muscle and hatred moved aside, and the enormous door behind them began to gape open. They allowed Bolt to pass without a glance, their deep–set eyes and heavy brows unmoving. Hairy and bestial, their chests moved in beat to their oversized heart's pumping in their chests. Bolt heard their pounding as he moved to the inward opening gate, hoping the two wouldn't decide to maul or slice him in two. Their expelled breaths, like the exhausts of a furnace, almost knocked him down as he passed in between them.

The bastion within looked like a homage to hatred and murder. Every surface was spiked and able to impale, with every wall standing as a black barrier no material weapon could breach or hope to break. A lake of blood rippled in the center of it all, surrounded by towers barring within them nothing else but memories, like treasure. At the sight of it, all Bolt could do not to weep was to keep repeating to himself none of this was real. But the idea felt slippery, like an old eel.

A throne of iron mantled a mountain of bones that towered out of the lake, reaching up into the sky.

The skeletal remains upon which the throne sat were composed out of every shape Bolt could imagine, he thought some might be animal bones, in fact he was certain of it, but some were the skulls of animals unlike any he had seen in his life. Upon this throne of slaughter, a figure could be seen and heard, cackling. The terrain trembled and cried as the being blinked, its form that of a creature whose one–eyed gaze was enough to turn the galaxy into ash. It sat slumped heavily over the throne, as if it had been sitting there since the birth of all things. Suddenly, Bolt realized he had seen it before. He avoided its stare, but quickly found he could not look away for long. Its single eye hid secrets Bolt wanted – a black jewel capable of consuming the light of a supernova.

Unable to contain himself, Bolt trembled at the sight of the giant. He felt the being's gaze boiling his bones. The whole realm shook with its voice as it spoke – it was like a volcano erupting, "Remember," it grumbled.

And remember he did.

CHAPTER 11

"When One Looks Outside, One Dreams. When One Looks Within, One Awakens."

Bolt felt his anticipation rise in a wave of nauseating thoughts, the kind of thoughts that find you when you want or need them the least. Acutely aware of the fact that he was reliving something which had happened before, his whole body tensed. He knew what came next, and as a result, everything came as vivid as it could be. He even knew what he would say, but he didn't know what the man he was about to meet did. Somehow, the words had been stripped from his mind. Or were they? _Could a memory, any memory, ever truly be gone? Or does it simply become muffled and lost in the sea of insignificant musings of the days?_ This, the now, however, didn't feel insignificant at all. In fact, it felt quite the opposite, like it had changed his life and then hid itself in his subconscious to guide him.

Bolt couldn't quite recall how he ended up in the upper reaches of the Grey Tower, nor did he feel the method might be important. Unable turn from his own reflection upon the glass wall before him, he was able to take in only small details of the room. Despite this, he tried to take in as much as he could from the sheen. The details felt as unimportant as the view outside, the mountains, the valleys, the forests, the cities, and even the rivers below the clouds were made trivial as a face showed up next to his own reflection, a face he knew and trusted. Unable to turn and look, Bolt instead locked eyes with the reflection of it.

"What are you doing? Why am I here?" Bolt asked.

"You're here because He wants it," Max said, his tone level, his lips unmoving. The voice came from every angle.

"What does He want?"

"What He wants," Max answered.

"Why are you doing this?"

"I do it because I must," Max said, his voice remaining even. "In a few days time, you will forget your wife, you will forget your life, you will forget it all. But this you shall not forget. There is something coming to claim this world, and there are people who were tricked by it, deceived by it, their minds conquered by it. You will find this mind who aids our enemy, and you shall kill it."

"Kill it? Are you kidding me? The fuck has gotten into you? What's coming?"

"This is not important," Max said, "you will not consciously remember any of this, so any answer I would give would be pointless."

"There's nothing on this world, or any other, that would make me forget my wife and the child she carries," Bolt said.

"Of this you are certain?"

Bolt didn't answer. "Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to deserve this? Aren't we friends? Tell me!"

"We were never friends." The comment hit Bolt like a punch. He suddenly felt like he needed to recuperate, sit down, but Max was already talking. "You have done nothing. You were selected before your first neuron fired and came to life, so in a sense, you have done nothing but been born. Destiny."

For a split second, Bolt could have sworn he saw something behind Max's eyes, a presence controlling and subjugating his friend to its will.

"Why me?"

"Why not you?" Max asked simply.

Bolt though about it for a moment, noticing he could smell something only a dog was said to be able to. This intangible abstraction upon his senses seemed to permeate from every pore of the man behind him.

"You're afraid aren't you?" Bolt asked. "You're afraid of this thing which you want me to kill. You're afraid because it's the sole thing you don't understand. You're so afraid of your own ignorance towards it you can't think of anything that would alleviate that ignorance but its death. I can smell it on you. It's almost as rancid as your words. Now the smell of them has traveled to sicken me even in this vision."

"Fear?" Max said, his tone mocking and almost amused. "You think it is fear you sense?"

"And lots of it."

"You are mistaken," Max said, "now go home to your wife, the steaks are about to get cold."

Bolt desired to know more, but was denied by his own mind, his own memories. There was no more.

He thought their conversation and the whole sequence overly brief, and he didn't particularly care for anything it offered him. He felt parts of his memory return, but couldn't tell what he would remember after he woke up. It all felt like a childish dream, a dream within which he had accumulated something of note or value and now thought about how he could bring it back to the real world.

Before he could think of anything else, the image of the room in the glass–wall shrunk and he found himself back in the vista between hills, the dark lake sucking in the brightness until it threatened to consume the last of it. His insides felt sunken, absent, and he was unable to recall the fact that, at one point, he had been made of a solid form consisting of parts and matter. His heart felt like a separate mammal in his lap. Every moment he had ever experienced and every 'fact' he had ever been told seemed to find its way into his immediate thoughts. He pondered them all in the span of a heartbeat.

Moons grew out of themselves where there were none, multiplying like amoebas, and the sun shed a breath, expelling aromas from the ground which rose to a climax and contested with the odor of every perfume he had ever experienced. It was the smell of everything. His eyes were shot blind by the severity of his condition and his appendages were granted leave to roam about the terrain, scattering their ethereal seeds to all points of the sky. He slept and dreamt a dream within a dream, his eyes ever open, seeing colors he had been destined to see only upon death. They were all new. They were all the color of bliss. The dream became harder for Bolt to handle, and he increasingly felt like he had had too much of something which had once been great. He became tired and ventured back to wherever it was he had come from. And even though he hadn't taken a single step, he began to feel like he had reached exactly where he should be, where his mind had been hiding out of reach. There he proceeded to sleep between days, drunk with the power of his own experience. Yet the only sentence which still fluttered inside his head, the only one he would ever remember from the exchange between him and Max, set his cranial walls ablaze with the mental pain it caused. "We were never friends."

CHAPTER 12

To See Things Hidden From Sight, One Needs To Look Within

Despite everything, Max had decided to stay. He had no desire to venture into the unknown of space when there was so much left unknown to him on his own planet, in his own mind even. One thing in particular vexed his thoughts of late more than anything else. _Why had I kept doing what I'd been doing?_ It seemed his own psyche had been working against him for all these years. Routine and self–pity, remorse and guilt, with an occasional moment of peace inside meditation. And for what? His family was murdered, not by him, but by someone else. _I shouldn't feel these feelings as if I were responsible_. He had to find Him, now more than ever. He remembered the look on Ty's face, the physician, as he had suffocated him, it haunted him. It mocked and laughed in his mind.

What else will you do to find what I had hidden? It asked. Show me!

Max suddenly realized what he should have long before. He had allowed himself to become a living vessel for the Administrator, watching his own movements and hearing himself speak words, their lies damaging everything they touched in some way or another. But until now, Max had done it for his family. He had done it for the chance to see them again, to embrace them, yet all he had gotten was manipulation. Why had he ever thought he was beyond being manipulated himself in the first place? He didn't know, and actually never even thought about it until he had left Earth.

Wondering why this was so, Max watched as the last person entered the portal. The command deck began to buzz with activity again. Commotion ensued. Something about a man being killed. Max didn't care. For a moment it even felt natural not to care, until he began to wonder why. It was as though the breath he had just expelled brought some sort of a revelation and he noticed, for the first time, his own absence of empathy. It didn't feel natural, and his own emptiness suddenly scared him. When had I stopped caring? He struggled to understand when it happened and found he could not. The only explanation he could muster at that point, was that it seemed to be an accumulative process – definitely not something sudden.

"Will you take care of her?" Bolt had asked him before he left.

"I think I'm the last person she'd want to be taken care of by," Max had said. "Why leave anyway? Stay. Or say goodbye to her at least. There's nothing for you out there, Akram."

"I don't know, I feel like there is. It feels like there's something I must do," Bolt had stated. "And besides, as far as you're concerned, it'll only take a second for us to reach the other side. Just tell her I'll be back before she even knows I'm gone."

Even then, Max had known it would not be as simple as that, it never was. "Very well," he agreed and smiled. "But I'm telling you now, she won't like it."

Less than a minute had passed since the ship had vanished as if someone had erased it, and still nothing. Meanwhile, Max knew that for Bolt, years had already gone by. Yet no transmission had come. Not even a word had been sent through the reaches of immaterial reality inside which the ship forged its way. No doubt the vessel had already reached its destination and transited into normal space–time, but why no hail back? Perhaps they were simply too preoccupied? That couldn't possibly be it, Max knew. Then, suddenly, a probe appeared where the ship had been. It immediately began to relay data into the station's systems. All about him, eyes bulged and necks adjusted, all in hopes of seeing as much as possible as quickly as possible. The room fell silent for a moment. The first to speak was the commander, his voice betraying his shock. "Confirm this," he said to no one in particular.

"That's all there is. The text appears uncorrupted and unaltered, the words are true," Adia answered.

"Impossible," the commander insisted. "Check again, there must more buried inside. There are terabytes of space on the damn thing. I refuse to believe they would send us back a few lines of cryptic information."

"I have already checked four times, there's nothing else."

The text which had sailed back through the gap in space read simply: "We have found the edge of reality."

Even to Max, who was perhaps more used to the unexplainable and unfathomable than most, the text sparked a keen interest. What were they referring to? He stood there for a moment, thinking of how he could get to the truth of this, when he noticed something in the corner of his eye. To his right, and only for a second, he thought he could see the spectral image of his wife. He could almost taste her sweet fragrance. The conjured projection of her smell brought back memories which he had suppressed or forgotten. Unable to resist, he turned. A woman stood there, her eyes blank as though she were staring into nothing. She noticed Max looking at her and blinked away the data display in her mind, then averted her gaze and looked at him.

"What's your take on this, Proxy?" she asked.

The sweet smell he had loved from the moment he first encountered it escaped him like a fleeting feeling of nostalgia. Max looked away from the eyes of the woman who had stirred it. Is this how they're to be brought back to me? Not in flesh but in mind? His heart sunk. No, he would have his loved ones walk again, have them breathe and talk again, for to have them live only in his mind would be next to pointless.

"Proxy?" The woman's voice rattled him out of his thoughts.

"The message intrigues," he said, his tone official, masking his true feelings. "But we should wait for probes to arrive, their transit may have taken only a second for us, but once they reentered real space, the time difference no longer applies. How much could they truly have found in a few minutes? We must give them more time."

"Agreed," nodded the commander, but as Max observed the man and his mind, he could tell this person didn't appreciate his people turning to the Proxy and not to him for answers. An unspoken thought waved out of the man's skull upon a black thread, a vibrating string. Max could see a holographic scene–projection of the man's experience behind the commander's head. It took him a moment to realize the flashes ruptured the air and flared past at a rate which felt like it would be impossible to take in. Yet he could take in every small detail. It showed the man seating on his bed, his wife's arms coiled around his shoulders, her chin resting on his pronounced muscles. The light from outside the station streamed through the holes in between the blinders drawn over the glass wall. Max wondered why they didn't simply darken the material instead of opting for blinders.

"I just can't," he told his wife. "I can't sleep knowing the Proxy himself will come to oversee the task."

"He's just a man," his wife tried to consult him, kissing him gently upon his back. "Think about it this way. He is just a man, a man with his own fears and concerns, the last thing he wants is to take on yours. It always makes me feel less anxious to know that the people around me are probably just an anxious as me. Doesn't it comfort you as well?"

"But he's the proxy! He's the will of the Administrator, I just know he's gonna waltz in there and just take over shit, that's what he does. And that doesn't sound like the occupation of a man with any normal fears. At least not like me, or even you."

"You don't truly believe that, do you?" his wife asked, her hair spilling over the commander's thick biceps.

"I don't know what to think when it comes to an agent of a living God. What should any of us think? You know what this position means to me," he said, "it's what makes me get up in the morning."

"What about me?" his wife said, kissing him on the back and rubbing his dark–skinned hands.

"You know what I meant."

The hologram vanished, and as Max realized the fear this man carried over him, he stepped closer. He stretched out a hand and placed it upon the commander's shoulder.

>I am not here to usurp your command, Samuel, you are the master here,< Max said to him over a private Link channel.

In situations of honest display, Max found there was literally an abundance of reactions people tend to throw at you. Samuel, however, smiled and nodded, the subtle layer of consciousness around him shifting into a relaxed and calmed form – it no longer seemed to buzz with uncertainty. This transition in turn relaxed everyone around him, even while no one knew why it happened or even thought about it. Max smiled at this.

"Keep me appraised, send any information directly the moment it arrives." He detected no further feelings of discontent from the commander. Samuel nodded, the smile still pressed upon his lips as his head bowing curiously.

Max waved a quick goodbye and a "see you later" to Zack over the Link, who was supervising a small group of technicians inside the circular depression, then walked out of the room, erasing his presence from the minds of all who walked past him. It took no effort to do this, he had done it so many times now it became more of a reflex, a muscle memory than a thing to be channeled or focused on.

The hallways spun down, with rooms stretching away to his left and right. He ignored everything but what could not be – his own thoughts. Lost in the storm of his own feelings and recollections of his wife, he proceeded on to meet with this Dr.Boeree in hopes of perhaps finding something he wasn't expecting to find. Such distractions always proved welcome. One he certainly needed right now.

Everyone he passed glowed. Their minds projected thoughts and connected their bodies with the fundamental fabric of reality around them in patterns of shifting webs. Emotions flew and passed through others like currents of discolored air. No one noticed it but him. The sight fascinated Max to a point where he almost forgot what he had just been thinking about. He allowed his mind to wonder and began to see the strangeness surrounding him with increased clarity. Everything was constantly shifting and rearranging. The walls themselves seemed unsure on what dimension to take, and in fact the whole concept of special dimensions seemed trivial. He understood the concept of shape and form as one constructed in the minds of men for them to be able and make sense of the things around them – a construct in the brain that began to shape itself even as every individual came out of this world. Not into this world, but out of it, like an expression of it – an apple growing out of a tree. Every corner around him was skewed, broken and remade before his eyes, as though rearranging itself to give an actual picture of the vibrational fundamentality of matter which his brain didn't need or want to filter at that point. Thoughts slithered out of surfaces in wisps of unreal smoke. Max wondered if what he was seeing was some underlining truth about the nature of reality, or if what he saw was simply and alteration in his brain, a tampering that would make him see the world like this forever. No discomfort associated itself with the visions, and he felt like his mind was his own. But no matter the effort, Max could not escape the fact that everything he looked at remained forever in motion. It had seemed such a cliché notion before, it even sounded like something a person would say in hopes of sounding 'deep', yet now that he could actually see the movement for himself, he understood the concept of universal unity in a different light. He wondered if this was what it's like to be insane – to believe yourself in possession of a deeper truth, one which you know to be true, yet at the same time constantly doubt the validity of it, wondering whether what you are seeing is caused by some sort of an imbalance in the brain, or if it represents an actual event. He concluded that an insane person likely doesn't possess such levels of critical thinking about his condition.

At length, he had reached the circular inner decks of the hollow tower and, upon reached the edge of the platform, gazed up the spiraling walkways and leaned over the chrome railing that stood just a few paces from the edge. Small balconies extended from the decks here and there. Upon the balconies, below him, people could be seen sitting in floating chairs, seeping drinks and talking, or simply staring into something that had been passed over to them on the Link. Sounds of conversation and people walking meld into a singular noise which Max didn't bother to decipher. He cared even less for the smells, although he did notice the air lacking a certain bleachy quality which had predominated outside the tower.

The main decks above and below him lead to rooms and other hallways and even an occasional cafe, he even passed a library containing shelves of actual printed books, a rarity to be sure. He found the place to be surprisingly aflutter with activity. The light from the inside seemed to possess a more natural quality than the harsh whiteness of the spire. Max couldn't remember the last time he actually read a book instead of having the story of one imprinted upon him like a stamp. He felt almost overcome with the desire to venture inside for a moment, but instead went on and eventually reached an archway he was looking for. He walked in.

The hallway lead to a spacious research area where crystals of neon blue lay suspended inside circular containers in the center of the room. No one noticed him enter. The dimmed, almost nonexistent lighting within made the blue formations of rock even more prominent. It was here, in this place of research, that he first encountered and recognized radioactive radiation. It seemed to disturb the air unlike anything he had encountered before. Its source was the crystals themselves, housed inside a square pillar. The radiational discharge disrupted the air around the pillar with a slight hum, one which Max sensed with the tip of his fingers. It looked like an explosion of static was constantly taking place inside the container, spitting out particles that had no other desire but to lose themselves and be somewhere where there wasn't as many of them. The radiation itself didn't seem to escape beyond the container, at least not enough to pose any real danger. The disturbance it caused and the light emitted, however, was still a sight to behold, like madness given an expression in color and movement.

Thick tubing and wires snaked over the floor from the pedestal where the crystals were stored, biting into the machines and computers which lay around the circular room behind the workstations. At least two dozen people were sitting behind their consoles, although some looked bored by what they were seeing. Max followed the thickest cable to its source, a taller–than–a–man square, an unassuming machine, and gazed up at the numbers making themselves seen to his mind as he came close. The blue lettering represented information about radioactivity levels, the exact composition of the material measured, the rate of decay, the different spectrums of radiation emanating from the samples, the effects of it, and much, much more. Max was only able to see the numbers if he looked at the machine at a direct angle. He wondered what kind of material was used to contain the numbers he was seeing and still be able to provide him with a look inside the container without melting his skin off.

"It's nanoglass," said a voice behind him. "Glass and nanites, the little monsters help the glass fuse with lead in a fashion quite baffling to my understanding. But they serve their purpose, as you can see."

Max turned around to see a woman, about a head and a shoulder smaller than him, her big eyes looking up with a smile. She wore her wavy hair unrestrained by either a ponytail or a braid, allowing the locks to hang gracefully over her shoulders, resting on her breasts and falling from the two lumps for another finger–length. The midnight blue of the strands made him wonder whether the light from the crystals lent her the color. He wondered what his own face looked like in the light.

"Intriguing," he said. "Reading my mind are you?" he asked.

The woman smiled. "You say that as if it's common to read minds."

"Then I assume it's the first question someone asks after they see these numbers?"

"Damn," she said, faking disappointment, "and here I thought I could fool you in to thinking I can actually do it. Read what you're thinking, I mean."

"You still might," he smiled back. "Can you tell me where I can find Doctor Boeree?" The question was unnecessary, but that didn't stop him from asking.

"You're the Proxy, aren't you?" she said, her eyes sparkling as if star–struck.

"And if I am?"

"Then you wouldn't have to ask that question," she grinned. "If the stories about you are true, that is."

"I get distracted in here," he said, which wasn't far from the truth. For inside the room, everything he had seen before appeared even more pronounced, as if every particle strived towards an even greater amount of disorder than usual.

"I can understand that, actually," the woman nodded. "Let's go outside then... to, um, talk. I'm Leah Boeree, by the way."

CHAPTER 13

Your Mind Is A Vibrational Conduit

They strolled to one of the extended balconies reaching out from the edge of the platform–deck. Leah approached the circular table in the middle and waved a hand over the square device built into it. A stasis field surrounded them. The nanites composing it took on colors and formed an image, easily fooling their brains into thinking they were encompassed by a lush green meadow. Something appeared wrong with the image, however, the clouds never moved. The sky over their heads ended with the view of the upper decks and the pylon above them.

"I never liked the default setting," Leah admitted.

"I prefer the beach myself, preferably somewhere in the Mediterranean," Max nodded.

"Sounds nice, actually," Leah smiled, "any locations in mind?"

Max waved his own hand over the device. It read his wishes and the image around him flickered as if turning a channel on a television. The landscape immediately shifted its view to a beautiful beach. Waves rolled against the sandy shore with soundless continuity and foamed against the rocks not half a kilometer to their right. Seagulls sailed the clear skies, but they too made no sound. The pine trees waved and gently flailed about behind them. A distant part of a peninsula could be seen ahead, milky and distant. The visually warm breaths of the sun engulfed everything, its silver gaze reflected on the calm sea.

"Now if we could only smell and hear this place," Leah said, drawing an intake of air through her nose, trying to picture the smells in her mind. The feat proved next to impossible, and just like Max, all she got was a nose–full of cleanerbot leftovers.

"I used to live in a place like this," Max said, "Although slightly more crowded than what you see here."

"I can imagine," she nodded, "was it what you'd hoped it would be when you got there?"

"It rarely is. But yes, for a time, it was."

The color of her hair had changed to light brown in the whiteness of the spire's light and concealed the sides of her face. Her features were pleasant and seem to give the impression that she smiled a lot. Her yellow eyes defied the laws of pleasantness. A knife couldn't hope to be as piercing as her eyes. Her smooth eyebrows made his look even darker, shaggier. She had a way of talking which made him want to listen. "I wish I could go to a place like this one day," she said. "Without all the people."

"You never been to the ocean?"

"No, but I get to see it from above every day," she said. "Does that count?"

"I'm not sure it does."

She sighed. "Yea, I suppose it doesn't. I just want to experience the calmness and serenity of this for a while, you know? But I'm stuck here, not that I mind it much. I guess my research is why you're here?"

"Indeed it is," Max nodded, still mesmerized by the strands of good intent permeating out of her skull in waves of pleasantry. Light yellows, greens and blues coalesced to become one, yet still, somehow, each color managed to remain separate as it touched his face and produced emotions he craved to feel but would not admit it ever since his wife departed. He swallowed a gulp of emotional debris, as though her words had produced a slumping glacier of remembrance, the deluge of which had caught in his throat. "But I must know," he continued, "what is it that you do here, exactly?"

Leah's eyes lit up. Max noticed an immediate change in her mood. He remembered the last time he had seen eyes spark up such. It was when someone would ask his wife about her children. It become clear this woman valued her work beyond anything else she possessed.

"It's all about radiation," she grinned.

Max noticed they were both still standing for some reason. He pulled out a chair. The seat swayed as it floated. He said, "Have a seat, explain it all to me."

The mag–couch produced a warble, like a charging electric coil, then quieted as it settled under Leah's meager weight. Max sat down as well, opposite to her, resting his elbows on the mag–seat and looked into her eyes. "You were saying?"

She smiled again, the sight of it trumping any view of an ocean or green vista the nanites around him could hope to conjure up. Despite himself, he smiled as well.

Leah slumped back in her chair. "In the past," she began, "we, and by 'we' I mean they, have not done much research when it comes to radiation. Well, that's not necessarily true, but in my opinion, they have not done the right research."

"In what regard?"

"To a lack of any real instruments for measuring the effects of radiation on the human mind, and more precisely the effects it can produce with conjuncture with consciousness, we always believed radiation is nothing but bad. It basically ruins molecules and transforms the way they are structured upon the fabric of reality itself. In a way, it disrupts molecular bonds, knocks atoms out of the whole structure and what have you, and that holds true for most forms of radiation. But imagine that string theory is true, and that each sub–atomic particle is actually a vibrating and oscillating string. Now imagine radiation as a set of strings that vibrate differently than the string they hit and voila, radiation ruins the symphony. It screws it up."

"But thanks to advancements in technology, we have been able to discover an altogether more subtle effect. An effect some forms of radiation produce in the brain. For instance, it was believed only thick layers of lead could stop radiation from spreading out, and to some degree that is totally correct, yet beta radiation can be stopped by a bundle of molecules no thicker than your skin. Yet it's this beta radiation which produces the most subtle effects of all, you see, simply because it's so weak, we don't even notice what part of it doesn't get bounced of the skin."

"Intriguing. What effects does it produce in conjuncture with the brain?"

"If, for instance, very small amounts of it can be projected onto specific spots of the brain, specifically the regions that produce and compile images, the effects would conjure any image desired by whoever did the projecting, provided of course that that person knew what they were doing. Potentially, it came make anyone believe with absolute certainty that what they are seeing, or had seen, was real, while the actual image was brought to life by a series of small vibrations correlating directly with the brain's natural beta frequency. Which, as you might know, is the normal state of awareness when not asleep."

Max was astounded. The idea of producing images the eyes do not see but the brain does wasn't what fascinated him at all, people have been using such technology for years in almost all aspects of computing and entertainment which involved a visual interface. But for the task to be successful, one needed some sort of a device to interface with the brain in a specific way. With what Leah had described, a person wouldn't even know they were being afflicted by a mind–altering vibration.

A thought immediately sprung to mind, a connection between what he had just heard and what he was experiencing suddenly dawned on him.

"Would this have any other effects on the brain?" he asked.

"The hypothesis hasn't been tested out yet, at least not extensively," Leah admitted, "but our initial experiments proved more than adequately that, given the proper means and funding, we couldn't proceed in this direction and not discover something extraordinary. I mean, I'm sure it's not hard for a person like you to imagine that there's a deeper truth behind our material universe. One which in our current ways of thinking will forever remain hidden. I'm sure you're aware of the mystics and holy men who, since times before we even knew of what the stars represented, were doing things and performing feats considered impossible by normal human standards."

"I am aware of such things, yes," Max nodded.

"It seems to me," Leah continued, "that the very nature and the means by which we need to perform the tests required to see and observe this underlining fabric of interconnected possibility is impossible to achieve, since to do it we would need to use a material device in hopes of peering into the immaterial, what I call the universal consciousness. There's an inherent paradox entwined in such a feat, I think, which prevents us from doing this. So instead when we try, we only find new particles or make them up in order to explain the intrinsic order which we manifest in our observations and require in our calculations."

"True," Max said. "You believe your research could somehow apply our own consciousness to the equation of finding and mapping the immaterial? But in this case, how would we know what's a projection of our minds and what we hoped to find, and what's actually there?"

"You and I both know science today is only as good as the apparatus witch which research and observation can be conducted. But we already have the most advanced apparatus. We already have all the ideas, science only helps us to actualize them, not necessarily perceive them as they truly are. The explanation is not the explained."

"How does this relate to conjuring images in the brain?" Max asked.

"This is but the first step," Leah said. "I believe my research has the capability of pushing the intrinsic oneness and interconnectivity of all things from the realm of mysticism and into the realm of science by proving that consciousness itself surrounds the brain, and in fact manifests it. In other words, we have discovered that there seems to be a subtle layer about all living brain tissue which can be influenced and in turn influence the brain and body. I know it's a dried up word, but being trapped in a world where things need to be explained with words, and for lack of a better and more suiting terminology, an aura."

"You can see it, can't you?" The question erased the smile off her face and left her stammering for a moment.

She fumbled her first word before regaining confidence. "I," she said, embarrassed still. "I believe so."

Since Max had seen her, he had the feeling this was the case. He could often see her looking at something beyond and around him, as if she was seeing something others didn't, perhaps even reading or somehow interpreting it. "How long?" he asked.

"Since I was a little," she admitted. "I've always been reluctant to admit it. For a time I even thought everyone else could see this mist as well, until I discovered almost no one does. I know most people who claim they can them are considered crazy, or somehow ill, or even liars, hell, I can totally see how one would think that. But how can you explain that some of these people can simply know what is wrong with you by just looking at you, or know what mood you are in, or even where a cancer is growing. For instance, I know you have something wrong with your eyes, and that you are suffering from some kind of brain issue. I'm sorry to have said it if it upsets you. But how would I know that? This isn't something I made up to make myself feel better. There are numerous instances of people like me all over history, some of them even catalogued and proven they can do what they claim. Yet the majority ignores this. To this day, I cannot understand this."

"I have personally seen doctors," she said, "I have seen psychiatrists, there is nothing physically wrong with me. I don't even know why I'm telling you all this. I guess I figured you would understand after all the things I have heard."

"You have no idea," Max said.

"So you believe me?"

With those eyes, how could I not? "I see no reason not to."

"So? What do you think?" Her question snapped Max back to reality, a place he felt exceedingly less comfortable in. Their eyes met. Almost lost in her gaze, her beautiful face, her smile, he found it hard to swallow. For years, he hadn't felt this weak, this powerless to deny someone what they wanted, or to lie to them.

"I find your research to be engaging, to say the least. I'd like to see it for myself."

Leah's smile only widened. It was then that Max noticed her full checks were what made her smile so appealing. Each time her face turned into one of her wide grins, her eyes would narrow, and it was in moments like this he noticed her mixed heritage. He was certain all of the races of the world hid in that expression of hers. He suddenly saw a hologram behind her face, an image of her father looking down on something she had made while still very young. The man examined and smiled down on the contraption, baffled by it. Leah turned her thick–lensed goggles up at him and handed her father another pair. He put them on while she powered up the gun–like machine. It shot out a laser beam of neon blue and, by bouncing the ray of a set of mirrors, heated up the tea inside a glass cup she had placed at the edge of the table. Her father took a sip and said. "You're a dangerous kid, you know that?"

"I am?" she asked, "Why?"

"Smart and beautiful, that's why," the father grinned.

"Are we to get more funding then?" she asked, oblivious to what Max had just seen. The question stopped his thoughts for a moment and erased the hologram. What made this woman believe I had come here for such a purpose in the first place?

"I.." he staggered, "I'll need to see the research first hand, but the hour is late, would you not rather discuss it some more? Over dinner perhaps?" He had to stall somehow, he needed more time to actually contemplate the ramifications of this.

"Are you asking me out on a date?" she asked, a sly smile creeping over her face.

"If me admitting it is what'll take for you to agree, then yes, I'm asking you on a date."

She laughed.

CHAPTER 14

An Uninvited Guest

Leah had offered to choose the spot where they should dine at. Naturally, Max didn't object, and would sooner strangle the Admin himself than deny her the opportunity. She had chosen a small restaurant, one of the three on the town–sized station. The place itself overlooked the main square, an area he and Bolt had met Zack – the main spot where new arrivals came and went by the means of portals.

He was astounded at how fast the wormholes came into practice.

"Awesome technology, isn't it?" she asked, referring to the portal that had just popped up. "Takes a bit to get used to the sound it makes tho."

"I'm not sure I like it yet," Max admitted – the images of a place between places flashing in his mind.

"How come? Seems like a proper way to get around," she said.

"It can lead to places that aren't here, and yet are," he said. "That's about as much as I can say."

With a puzzled look on her face, Leah said, almost demandingly, "You have to tell me more someday."

"Someday," he nodded.

The chairs outside the restaurant were wooden and the desks made of clean, white marble, complementing the colors of the station's own surfaces. The diner reminded him of the cafes he had seen on his travels to France more than fifty years ago. A fiber–roof extended beyond the chairs and tables and the edge of it read "House". The light around them was that of a spring day.

The Earth spun in its prescribed motion above, dragging the station around it like an impatient mother.

"You come here often?" It felt like such a boring thing to say the moment he uttered it, and he almost felt bad for not having anything better to break the ice with after they had sat down. She picked up on his embarrassment and didn't seem to mind it at all, in fact, Max could have sworn he sensed her thinking it was actually cute.

"Every day," she nodded, "they serve the best seafood, in fact, it's the only place that serves it. I thought you might like to smell and taste a bit of the ocean after seeing it."

He smiled his own smile at the somewhat pervy thought that lid up in his mind.

"Sushi?" he asked.

"If you like, I was thinking perhaps some calamari."

"Are you sure you don't read minds?" he asked with a smile.

The thoughtfulness of Leah's gesture made his previous question even more shameful to him. For a second, he didn't know how to continue the conversation, as if words could only ruin the moment. Luckily, the chef himself came up to them after spotting Leah and smiled his own wide grin, which seemed to not only break the ice, but shatter it. She stood up and kissed the man on the cheek. The chef 'mmmm'd' as if he had just tasted the most delicious bite of food on a planet.

"Thank you for your kiss, my lady," he grinned. Affection spread out of the man's head in a wave of energy which seemed to further relax and disarm even Max. The man was a bit chubby to say the least, his chef's apron smeared with gravy and sauces of all color as though he were using it to paint with. Max wouldn't have called the man fat, at least not to his face, but it was clear the man enjoyed the delights of his own cooking perhaps a bit too often.

"I have a fresh batch of squid for you, Leah. It just arrived through not an hour ago," he said, "Should I bring you and your esteemed friend here the usual?" The man seemed to know who Max was, but decided not to point out the obvious.

"Calamari then?" she asked Max.

"Yep," Max agreed.

"Good, because you're not getting anything else," she said with a tone he couldn't help but grin over.

"Certainly, my dear," the chef bowed and walked back into the restaurant.

Almost as soon as he went in, the man showed up again, this time carrying two clear drinks and set them on the table, winking at Leah. Leah took a sip.

Max felt the next question coming before she even said it. The clanging and pinging of silverware as people around them enjoyed their meals and made quiet conversations was almost distracting as he waited for her inquiry.

"Tell me, Proxy, will I ever be privileged to your true name?"

He wondered how anyone could ever deny such a request when coming from someone so pleasant. "In my time I have learned that names, although they may not seem like it at first, aren't just names," he said. "They hold power over those who know them, but I admit, that sounds a bit pretentious."

"Not at all, I understand, you are somewhat of a famous man, as famous as the Admin himself, I believe. But most people don't know either of your names, or faces. I suppose–"

"It's Max," he blurted before she could finish. "Max Byron."

"Sounds official," she smiled. "So, tell me, Max, what kind of work do you do for the Admin exactly? Everyone knows you, yet no one truly does. Also, have you ever wondered why it's impossible to take your picture? Why is your face always blurred?"

"I do what I must."

"Cryptic are we?"

"Not at all, at least, not intentionally. Look at me now for instance – I'm acquiring information about your work so I can decide what to do about it."

She gave him a puzzled look, and Max wondered if she picked up on his subtle lie. He had no idea why he said it. Clearly, he was never given a choice in anything or given the freedom to decide about any of the things he had been forced to put an end to, or stir in a different direction. He had always, always, received an instruction which he carried out to the letter. It had been what had made him so reliable and well known. The Proxy never failed in his tasks. Because of this, he never truly wondered what would happen if he were to go against the Admin's wishes. Over time, however, he had become curious. It had been years now, and Max's patience had run out. The man owed him a family.

In that moment, and perhaps for the very reason that he began to hate the Admin's bullshit, he decided he would not shut down Leah's project, but aid it. He didn't realize it at the time, and probably never would, but in that moment, the fate of humanity turned and the compass of progress began its unrelenting spin backwards.

By chance, or by some foreign thought which nudged itself into his mind with elegant ease, he looked at the Moon. Its surface wasn't visible to anyone else – he alone could see its ethereal lines behind the surface of the station. A single flash erupted from the surface of Luna and traveled in an arc, leaving behind a tail of incandescence like a comet. Its center pulsed and twisted as if molten. The expelled contents whipped towards the station. No one but him seemed to even notice it, at least not until it punched through the shield, momentarily disturbing it in cauls of static. The square shattered with the impact of it landing. The tiles peeled off. Heat punched him in the face. Blackened and charred material spat out and upward at the epicenter of the impact in geyser–like fashion. The world turned to smoke around him, particles danced a dance of death as bodies of those standing upon the square and around it turned the air pink and embraced every surface, caking it with ash and organic residue. Those standing near the square as the blaze hit were gone, their flesh coating the streets. Max didn't register a single sound over the angry squeal of his ears. It had been too much, too fast. Microscopic debris had imbedded itself in his tight and torso muscles. He realized he had been knocked down from his chair. A hand grabbed his wrist and pulled. Max staggered to his feet. Little could be seen of the restaurant's insides, they were in shambles. He allowed himself to be guided through and to the back exit. His eyes stung, clouding his vision beyond what the pungent mist had already accomplished. His mouth begged, and when it didn't get the liquid it desired, it kept begging. Max wondered how the hand that guided him could see anything in this dust. Sounds slowly returned to him over the shrill whistling, none of which were pleasant or comforting. People screeched and screamed in the confusion, the abrupt endings put to their vocal abilities suggesting something was hunting them, killing them, ending them in the dust. With no desire to be silenced like the voices around him, he rubbed the back of his palm against his eyes like a confused child, hoping to see better. He already found it difficult to handle the stinging sensations inside his lids and his dust–covered hand only managed to make it worse. His eyes bleed tears, their wetness slowly returning a semblance of sight to him. A semblance which perhaps a blind man would relish. He instead tried to focus his mind, eased his thoughts in an exercise of breathing–control which brought him as close to a meditative state as he could hope for at a time like this. He began to see through the mist of confusion and searched to find clarity. He saw the outline of the one guiding him. It was enough.

"We have to get to the tower! Open a portal and get the hell out!" Leah shouted. HE realized she had been shouting before, but he couldn't hear. This time, Max was pretty sure she wasn't smiling.

CHAPTER 15

Eliminate

Efficiency. It had become the sole thing which still mattered to it. The only thing it still hungered for. It used to think about other things. It used to dream. Dream of becoming more than what it had been born as, more than a human. Transhuman. It used be a she. She even had a name once. Taryn. And when it was still a she, she would have loved to have seen the Administrator. Nothing would have brought her greater joy than to shake the hand of a man who made it all possible. To feel the warmness of a hand that had made her able to withstand the elements – to walk the surface of the sun. She missed those walks. Which was about the only thing she truly missed anymore, the only thing she remembered with clarity.

She never got the chance to meet Him. Instead, she chose to become a living weapon for Him, the man she inexplicably loved. Now, she couldn't begin to understand such a decision, even if she still had the capacity to think about it. The concept of most things had been stripped from her mind, each abstract emotion plucked like a hair from her scalp. She had lain dormant, as all Wardens do, until called upon. She had laid still for 6years 9months 3days 11minutes and 31seconds. The lesser numbers didn't matter. And even though she felt every nanosecond of her sleep, they still didn't matter, much like the six years didn't really matter. It felt good to sleep. She never dreamed, never even wondered if she even cloud. But oh the joy when He awoke her! In that nanosecond, in that insignificant fraction inside time and existence, she saw what she had always wanted to see – His face. The expressionless gaze wanted only one thing of her, of it – to eliminate.

Compliance came easy.

She stepped out of her pod and into a black corridor, a tunnel, she didn't even look around. At the pathway's end, light spat out illumination and freedom. She raced towards it, hungering for it. Every stride took her closer to the light. As she stepped in the fire beyond, she saw a globe, but that wasn't her target. Something else, something wading in the reaches above it had drawn her gaze. Her metal body heated and compressed as she escaped the Moon's pull and flailed into space. She felt nothing she could describe as pain. With her arms close to her body, a heat began to assail her, waves of it radiated outwards and trailed behind her in a scythe like iridescent blood. She cut through the fabric of reality with ease, rupturing space–time with murderous intent.

In a flash, the station expanded from a small speck and became a presence all around her. The shield she struck protested for a fraction of a second as she hit it, then gave out in a fizzling gripe. It reestablished before she even hit the ground. The floor warped underneath her, her enhanced senses seeing it bend like a wave before it peeled away in layers of dust and grime. Like deadly, horizontal hail, the fragments cut through those unfortunate enough to stand near, then advanced forward in a form of specks and reddened mist.

She immediately saw her target, and even though through the powdery air he couldn't see her, she could tell he was aware of her. And if not of her directly, then at least of what she represented, of what the dust and grime represented. He would recognize the song it sung and run from it, as would all. The order she carried lay fresh upon her memory coils. Eliminate. Before she even landed, she had already calculated the most efficient course of action, one that would bring her to the ultimate goal and erase the station and everyone on it forever. None would escape.

***

The tremors began to feel like the station had transformed into an erupting landmass underneath his feet.

With some difficulty, and with guidance from Leah, Max managed to stay upright. It had taken a few moments for him to realize the tremors were in fact not real, but the accumulation of his anxiety and fears – all of them, conceptualized by his mind into visual and sensual perceptions. All to a point where everything appeared as if moving even more than usual. For the first time, he spat over the fact that he could see every object – down to the very molecular level – move, yet in the same breath knew it would certainly not be the last time he would do so.

Some ways behind him, Max heard a kind of pounding, a strange sound he couldn't quite put his finger on. That is, until he and Leah took a wrong turn. In the confusion, they had stumbled into what looked like a dead end, an alley walled up by a thick layer of white smoke. It was obvious the air circulation systems left much to be desired or had gone faulty. A person came running up to them, breaking through the thick smog, the microscopic particles of debris trailing of his limbs in whips and dying his black hair white. The man tried to blink away the dust as he stammered free of the mist. A flash, a sound spat out from the debris behind the man, an almost subsonic, electric burst of crackling discharge. Max froze as his eyes locked with the man's. The person's blank eyes bulged as if utterly surprised and shocked in the same instant. The body, now no more than a husk, got thrust forward as if kicked from behind, presenting Max with the source of the strange sound he had been hearing. It was the noise of a human body exploding. A wet crunch of instantly boiled liquid thrown into the windless air. Whatever had hit the man from the rear quickly forced what had just moments before drawn breath to hug the walls in a thick paste. Bits of the man plastered against Max's face. In the moment of shock, the world stopped its spin above them. Unexpected clarity flashed through him. Like a sword, the thought sliced through with redeeming sharpness and transformed the moment which came next into one that flipped all of Max's fear, turning it into focus unlike he had ever known. He felt the man's last moment of utter terror as it if were carried on every dead particle now worn upon his face. In Max's mindscape, things calmed.

A shape encroached out of the mist as though cough in slow–motion.

Seeing a conceptual image of a Warden whose every alloy had been designed to crush and destroy was one thing, but to see one as it approached you, its gaping mouth open beyond what looked natural, flaring white, its eyes blazing as its maw–cannon charged for another hurl of lethal energy, was quite another. The metallic body held within its caged beauty lethality evident in every stride that cracked the tiled floor. Over two and a half meters in height, the female version of a Warden looked as though a human had been stripped of its skin and its exposed muscle tissue replaced by bundles of overpowered nano–tubing, silver metal and fiber–cabling capable of emulating and expanding upon every nuance of strength a human being might muster. She didn't' need to wear armor, she was armor. She didn't need to run, because there was nowhere to hide. And if for some reason the lady luck herself decided in that moment to smile upon you – an unlikely spectacle to begin with – the approach of the living form of metal might just give you enough time to shit yourself before she transformed you into ash.

Seeing the monster, however, and despite what he thought he would feel, the sight gave him only clarity. A conviction that he would not die here. Not yet. Not today.

Leading the escape this time, he pulled Leah back around the corner as a ray of what looked like solid light painted the previously white edge of the building they ran behind black. Crumbs of its surface tore away and pattered over the ground.

"Hold on!" Leah shouted. "We need to get to the tower, the basements have the only portal platform to get outta here!"

"That's where we're going," Max yelled back as they ran, "we can't take a direct path, the thing won't let us!"

"Christopher," Leah suddenly whined.

"What?" he asked as they turned another corner and rested a bit with their backs pressed against a wall. Not the best idea, he knew, but they needed some air.

"The cook, we need to find him," she said, turning to look behind the corner and saw the beast approaching.

"You're worried about that guy? The thing just splattered someone in front of you!"

"He's my uncle!" she snapped.

There's always something, he thought. He wanted to say it didn't matter. Related or not, he would have to take care of himself. Yet to try and convince her of this by means of speech Max had neither the will nor the desire. He was sure he was pretty low on time as well. He hated himself for even thinking it, but he was going to have to do it. The air twirled around her face as Max turned to look upon her. Her eyes burrowed into his as spatial dimensions danced a foreign tune about her and threw themselves askew in hues of kaleidoscopic madness. I truly am losing my mind.

>He will be fine,< he willed. A wave of reassuring calmness passed into her through him, propelling her to follow, and they began to run ahead through the narrow streets.

The thought whether his one decision to help instead of crushing Leah's research had caused all of this to happen didn't leave him alone. It certainly looked that way. The last thing he wanted was to die for his decision, and upon realizing this, he knew he didn't want her to die either. Above all others on the station, she was the only one who struck him as the person worth saving. Helping others felt like something he should do, yet if he had the chance to escape and save but one, she would be it.

He turned around to see had fallen behind. He willed her to run faster.

They began to near the slope leading upward through the station's residential sprawl and up to the spire. As expected, there were more than a few with the same idea as him. People who had decided not to take the most obvious route they could to the tower – the one place where they still hoped to be able to establish a portal and leave. He hoped some had already done so. A hope soon twisted and thrown into doubt, for behind the screams and yells, the now familiar sounds of people exploding began to spread with alarming rapidness. Voices shred the air as people began to near the gate of the tower only to realize too many had come for all of them to fit inside fast enough. The huntress was already on their heels. In their rush, all the people had managed to do was line themselves up for easy annihilation. It didn't take long before the sounds of gore splattering under the extinguishing might of an electric smite replaced their screams with silence. Silence, and even more shouts by those who yet lived. Obscured by the surrounding slum–shaped buildings, the sight of the carnage lay hidden to all but him. While the slope ahead of them rose without heed of anyone's tired legs.

The dust in the central impact site began to settle and the bellows of the dying rattled the air as Max suddenly realized the folly of his plan. If the Warden was already there, near the entrance, and the only thing stopping it from entering the building were people, then he would need to find a way to circumvent them all. He could use his will, but in his limited knowledge of the tower itself, he assumed all the entrances must have already been blocked, if there even were any others, so even if willed, Max knew the people could not move aside. For that, there needed to be room for them to move.

Fuck.

Others with the same idea as Max – to flee on a less direct path towards the spire – were now joining the two in their flight. Men and women, all with the same look of terror and the determination to survive packed in every stride. They joined them from the streets and alleys the two had passed. He could almost taste their desire to live, it was an infectious thing, not that he didn't possess enough of it himself.

"There's no way we'll make it past all of those people!" a woman next to him said, mirroring his own thoughts.

"You can do something about whatever's on the loose, can't you, Proxy?" a boy to his left pleaded, a boy he could only guess was the son of the woman who had just spoken – the two had the same hazel eyes.

A momentary disgust passed through him. Does this person truly think his life is worth more than those already dying? Max said nothing and instead kept running, realizing it had been what he himself thought about his own life, and that of Leah, all along. These people were no different. When the time came to escape certain death, everyone, everywhere, probably feels their own lives and those of their children are worth more than those of others, even if they don't express it. They are all right, of course, because they are worth more... to them.

"The entrances to the lower–docks have been sealed off," a man pointed out. "There must be another way of the station!"

"I'll get you to safety," Max said, panting and almost despite himself, "you have my word."

What none of them realized – what not even he realized – was that he will break that word and scatter its remnants into space before the day's end.

CHAPTER 16

The Bowels Of Madness

One of the fleeing group's members was an engineer. An older man by the name of Leonel, his face worn out by age which he for some reason didn't care to augment. Time had made him gaunt of cheek, yet gifted him with bright eyes.

"I know a way to the lower levels of the spire," he croaked, barely able to keep up behind the rest of the group, now numbering in more than two dozen. His voice was barely heard, a dry yet somehow dignified whine of an old man whose every syllable sounded laced with wisdom, even if wisdom was not what the words conjured. His daughter ran beside him, who, realizing no one had heard her father, repeated his words, louder. Everyone stopped. "I was one of the engineers who helped design and build this cesspool," Leonel rasped. "We need to go there." He pointed his skinny finger to their left, to a normal–looking passage that led between the buildings and around the slope.

In their avoidance of the main streets, they had gotten half way up the snaking sprawl, the sound of slaughter ever at their front. Most had already expressed their concerns in some way or another over the fact that they were going directly towards it. But up till then, no one presented any better ideas. Instead, everyone looked to him, to Max for guidance, to the Proxy, trusting him to know just what the hell he was doing. In reality, however, he did not.

He had hoped to come up with something before they would get a chance to face whatever had been killing off the station, but the closer they came, the more his mind drew a blank. A blank upon which even a semblance of an idea got lost in the noise of their own approaching death. His main thought–patterns had been directed into a hope of perhaps controlling or subduing the killer somehow. Perhaps spreading his own curse to save people for once would be the way, but in truth, he knew as little about how far in the realm of possibility such a thing was as he knew about the actual nature of the threat. For in reality, nothing was ever contingent on hope.

Had the Administrator himself descended upon the station to dispense some sort of punishment upon the denizens of it? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible. No, this was something else, this was no more than a part of the Admin's sinister intent and his capacity for cunning. Is he testing me somehow? Surely there are better ways of bringing down the station –– if such was even the intention...

Max looked to the faces around him as the elderly man guided them through the narrow, upper stratosphere of the spire's feet. Max had expected to find far more fear and dread lining the expressions of the people than was there. But since the old man's proclamation, the mood had shifted from helplessness to hopefulness, and their stances changed from half–mindless stupors to a hopeful single–mindedness and clarity of purpose. Hope may not accomplish much, he realized, but it sure as hell does its part.

"Did you know about this passage?" he turned and asked Leah. The upward slope wasn't forgiving at their pace and she looked as though she might collapse from exertion or simply give up. "Are you ok?" he added.

"I'm a scientist," she sighed between breaths. "Not a marathon runner, but yea, I'll make it." She took a few breaths and managed a smile. "I had no idea about any lower levels. But I figured something besides solid material must be under the thing."

The old man overheard them as he walked ahead and said, "The lower labs were closed off, something happened which caused the walls to be unpredictable and trapping."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Max asked. He had some clue of what it could entail, but not to the point of certainty. "How can walls be unpredictable and trap you?"

"This whole station was made wit' the aid of nanites, even before we fully understood how best to apply 'em in construction of buildings," the man said. "In the lower labs, yeah? Something had made them changeable, I can't explain it in full because I don't know, but they shift. They're in a state of flux, if you will. So while the place you look at and walk in may be a hallway, it can become a wall of semi–solid matter the next time you decide to go there."

"So what you're saying is we can get trapped down there?" Leah asked.

"It's highly probable."

One of the men behind them freaked out as soon as he heard this. "Fuck this!" he snapped. "There's no way I'll go, ok? No way!"

Max turned around to face the young–looking man. "Calm yourself," he said. Without using his will, however, he found his words had next to no effect to put the man at ease. "Or would you rather go towards that?" Max pointed his hand to the din of people shrieking, their trawling feet saturating the air with sounds of thundering even from afar, as they no doubt tried to run away from the thing which yet decimated their numbers. One by one, Max realized.

"There's no way I'm going, ok? No way!" the man repeated. "Getting trapped inside shifting walls? Are you fucking kidding me!"

"You're claustrophobic, I get it," Max said, "but there's a chance here, there's less of a chance there."

"Claustrophobic my ass! Weren't you supposed to help us, get us through this!"

"And what am I doing? Your freaking out isn't helping anyone."

The air around the man spat fire, expelling invisible smog of fear that spread to clog and infect others around him with its tendrils of residual terror. "So now you'll act like this was your plan? You're just as lost as all of us! Now you set us to follow this old goat? Are you fuckin' serious? Fuck that! I'm not going to be buried alive! Screw this and screw you!"

The man ran back to where they had come, no doubt looking for a place to try and wait this out, hide. A few whom he managed to lure to his side followed him.

Max had little doubt that a lot of the people on the station had developed the same idea – to cower inside their homes. Perhaps the decision would even prove to be a wise one in the end. He somehow doubted it.

Following the man's outburst, the remaining group threaded along the path in silence, their combined concerns pressing down upon his skull like a crushing vice. Max wished they would shut up. But most of all, he wished he couldn't feel their thoughts to begin with.

At length, they came upon a dead end, an unassuming, flattened area on the hill surrounded by buildings. The surrounding structures stood by the side of the road from which the flat passage had forked away from and the wider road, which lead further up the slope in between the buildings.

"There's nothing here," a woman said behind them, her voice momentarily filled with disappointment, even a shred of anger.

The old man said nothing, but instead simply walked through what looked like a solid white wall. He came back only a few heartbeats later. "You comin'?" he asked. "To hide something it's often best to place it in plain sight."

"How many people know about this?" Leah enquired as they passed through and ended up on the other side of the holographic wall.

"On this station, only myself and my daughter."

A darken light oozed from the corners and bends ahead. Each passage they could see led to a different direction from the central hallway where they stood. The smooth walls seemed infused with mild iridescence, a phantasmal sheen. Max looked back where they had come and saw the street plain as day. The walls ahead however, the walls about them, transmuted from moment to moment. They shifted in patterns quite defiant of the laws of physics. They reshaped themselves like magnetized liquid, at times forming deadly spikes which morphed from one to the other in waves of jagged shadows.

People began to comment about it and Max was glad that, for once, he wasn't the only one who could see it. The living metal climbed the walls and fell to the ceiling in the fashion of droplets with a strange viscosity, like the flow of mercury. Shadows would rise and harden into walls.

"I'm sorry," a woman said, "but I don't think I can handle this." She didn't elaborate, but simply walked out the way they had come. A few joined her, departing in silence rather than admitting their fear. The rest, with Leonel and his daughter seven total, began to follow the old man's lead.

"Fools," he said, "this place may change a lot, but it'll always take you somewhere. Its inherent design was intended for it to create connections between specific places. Now it's true those connections might vanish, yeah? But they'll eventually reform in some way or another."

"That's all fine and all," Leah intervened, "but just because a maze has a way out doesn't mean you won't get lost while looking for it."

No one spoke or added their own thoughts and their combined, unspoken concerns became a palpable buzz in Max's ears. Some even prayed to the very being who had apparently sent this terror upon them.

Often the group would come to a dead end and had to turn back, hoping another route might lead them to their goal. None of them began to even suspect they were slowly losing sight of what their goal actually was.

Inside, there were no smells, save those of their accumulating sweat. There were no real sounds either but a strange distant hum combined with their own breathing and walking. They traversed the corridors for a while, their feet leaving imprints as thought walking on mud, until they came upon a wide elongated hall. A strong light emanated from the bend at its end. They quickened their pace towards it. For a moment, Max could swear he heard a set of footsteps behind them. He turned to find nothing there.

They faced the bend in the corridor as they reached the passage's end, but nothing lay beyond it. Whatever had, was now replaced by a wall ending with a cut and a deep, dropping chasm. No, definitely not paranoia, he thought, as the footsteps sounded even heavier and closer behind. Something was stalking them.

Slowly, the floor in front began to vanish as if it were a piece of paper someone was pulling downward from below. The edge grew closer – a glacier's edge collapsing in front of them. Max turned to the sound of footsteps. This time, he saw the source. It was a cat, the same cat he had seen and took into his arms. Surely this small thing couldn't have been the source of the footsteps? And surely it couldn't have followed him here without him noticing. It disappeared inside the wall behind them.

"This place is fucking nuts!" A man shouted.

They ran, barely escaping the disappearing floor.

"Shit shit shit...!" A woman kept repeating as she ran, trying to outrun the collapsing and soundless waterfall of matter.

Apparently, they had all heard the footsteps, or at least some as they kept asking, "What was that?" yet it seemed none but Max saw the cat. Nor anything else but their own faded reflections in the newly established dead end. The floor behind them continued its disappearing act as the group clashed their blacks and pushed one another against the wall. For the first time in a while, Max panicked. The inevitably of the fall was too much even for him. He had never feared highs, he feared the fall. This place had proven itself a foe he could not defeat or subdue with thoughts, or even with words, his abilities as useless as a fire in the scorching desert. Helpless, they looked into the chasm spreading towards them. Curses and pleas for someone to save them howled out of their mouths in equal measure, some even scratched at the wall behind them.

In the dark, a last series of screams erupted as each of them lost their footing and fell.

***

Max lost himself in time. The concept of how long he had been falling escaped him. He could see nothing. He wasn't even sure he was falling. No wind scraped against his cheeks and he felt more afloat in space than anything else. He tried to speak to make sure Leah still lived, but no sound ushered forth, it was as though no air existed to carry it. His breathing came labored and harsh, he felt out of breath. His memory failed him and, for an instant, he couldn't remember anything, not who he was, not what had happened, nothing, then, miraculously, he found himself standing on a platform. The others beside him looked equally baffled by their sudden reappearance. Unable to see her face behind the hair as she stood up, Max could tell by Leah's motions and disorientated movements she wasn't quite sure what way was up and what down. She brushed her hair behind her ears, and the sight of her being alive calmed him. Max tried to move, but found his legs incompliant with the wishes of his brain.

"Are we all still here?" he asked. "Is anyone missing someone?" The walls around them climbed upward like water dripping in the wrong direction. The platform they stood on was unconnected to the walls and apparently floated in between them.

"My dad," said the daughter of the man who had led them here, "my dad's gone."

"There," Leah said, pointing towards a figure standing before an arched entryway. The shriveled silhouette and white, wavy hair she had motioned at was clearly that of the old man. His head was cocked up, looking at something above the gate. His daughter sprinted towards him. Cautiously, still looking about them, Max and the rest followed.

As they approached, the mind–interfacing nature of the hologram above the passage came to life in their minds, projecting a single word above the entry.

"I don't believe it," the old man whispered, "it actually is here..."

In greenish letters, flickering and difficult to read, the word above read simply: Mindforge.

CHAPTER 17

Death Is Not The End

On board the _Administrator's Will_ , in a remote room where research into the nature of how the mind stores memory was conducted on live subjects, was where Bolt died for the first time.

Strangely enough, however, he felt this might happen even as he sat down on the surgical chair, allowing himself to become a willing participant.

His memories of the past had become more vivid thanks to his regular dream sequences, but he knew there was more. Without a doubt there was more. He wanted to recall and relive it all.

I will die in this chair. He knew this as surely as he felt the clothes they had given him embracing his limbs, the scent of their mechanically tailored nano–fibers still thick in his nostrils even after three years of wearing the full body suit. He knew there had been others before him, sitting on this very chair, dying in it, only to be resurrected and given a second life, a second nightmare. Precisely how he came to this understanding was a mystery to him.

The sounds around him as he was granted a second life inside the cloning chamber were that of industry, of machinery grinding on unlubricated pistons and old servos. Yet the sounds felt somehow serene, as if this clone, this other self had lain dormant here for so long – ready to be imprinted with memories – that it had gotten used to the sounds, like a child would to the sounds of his mother's heart or her breathing. Emblazoned in the back of his mind, the memories of his death remained a vague recollection, they never formulated into anything substantial, never reassembled.

His mind still felt sticky and slow, warped somehow. He could feel the lingering cold of the place around him.

His death–memory flashed at him.

It didn't come in a series of images or feelings, but like a wind passing, a distant dream–thought, a fire in the mind brought forth by a forgotten idea which one knows he must remember or it will haunt him. It was a specter of creativity, an idea watching from the corners of the mind. He knew he would remember more of it someday, probably at in the most inappropriate moment.

More than anything else right now, more than even his own face at that point, he remembered a name. It had been the first thing to come to him in this new, identical body. It seemed to resonate within him unlike anything else, as if its importance had been imprinted and locked into his genetic code. The letters raced and bounced around in his head as Bolt tried, with futility, to brush them away. Bolt shut his eyes. He kept them shut right up to the point where he realized what the letters were and he never wanted to forget them again. They spelled a name. Sara. The name of his bellowed, the mother of his minion who even now brewed in her belly.

He smiled at the thought and stepped out from the pod, taking a good look around, embracing the sights of the huge, round place and the strange machines which moved objects he could not place or understand the purpose of. Bolt didn't care to guess what any of them were. A strange, blue radiance filled the air of the chamber, carrying with it a metallic tang. It was an unpleasant smell, it reminded him of the ocean, an ocean ebbing with decay, pestilence and salt.

He saw beyond the half–transparent walls of the vast chamber and thought, two more years, just two more years.

His stay on the ship had gotten to him. The constant pulse of the engine in the metal had slowly begun to bother him. And the ceaseless intrusions upon his private thoughts which he had learned to detect stole all sense of privacy. The Administrator's Will wasn't a place he wished to spend a lifetime in.

Bolt took a series of careful steps towards the railing surrounding the platform – one of the many levels that stretched below and above him. Pods stacked against one another filled each deck, and Bolt could see no one else walking inside the vast room or on any of the platforms.

He stretched his entire body in one fluid motion. It felt great, like it tended to do when one awakens from a deep slumber. It felt energizing to move. Muscles, however, still felt a bit stiff.

Unlike the rest of the ship, the atmosphere here was colder. Bolt figured that may simply be due the fact that he was naked. To keep himself warm, he began to jog around the circular platform. The sensation of a breeze over his pale flesh refreshed him and reawakened his senses.

He found it ironic that he felt more alive in his new body than he ever had in his old. As he ran around the smooth deck, his feet splashing and leaving behind trails of fresh sweat–particles, his thoughts trailed to his wife. He had told everyone who had known her not to tell him her name, which seemed silly now, but he wanted to remember it himself. Sara. How could I have ever forgotten it?

It took him two full circles around the deck, its length longer than that of a stadium, for a drone to ascend down from one of the beehive–like openings on top of the vast chamber. The air around it lacked a certain coherency as the machine moved. It seemed to disrupt the molecules with its anti–gravity field in ways Bolt hadn't expected it to. Dendrites of electric discharge spat out from it. Bolt stopped running. He turned in step to the small diamond–shaped replica of the ship. He felt its gravitational expulsions upon every hair he possessed. And the closer the drone came, the more he began to feel its palpable coldness touch him. It seemed to know where to stop for its effects to not become severely uncomfortable.

In his time aboard the Administrator's Will, Bolt had, on occasion, seen one of the drones from afar, yet the proximity and the movement of one, especially up–close, still made his body stiffen. The thing never wobbled, it emitted no sound, no smell, and Bolt had a distinct impression that touching it would turn his day into a very bad one. Its movements were smooth beyond the point of eeriness. A small opening, or what looked like a discolored blotch, appeared on one of the frontal edges of the head–sized grey diamond. A glob of dark–colored spit flew out of it and landed on Bolt's chest. The thing burned like a bitch. It was like being shot with a fast–traveling projectile or smacked with a piece of wood. The drone began its ascend back to where it had come from, while the substance it left behind began to spread over Bolt's body like a plague sent to claim his skin. The initial sensations felt like a million insects crawling and latching themselves upon him, but soon became welcoming and warm, like a second skin.

"Wait!" he yelled after the drone, his voice echoing inside the chamber. "How do I get outta here!"

The answer to his question came in a most unexpected form. He had been made aware of the fact that the ship, and as he had heard later – the intelligence behind the ship – worked at a phenomenal rate. Essentially, in an unprecedented meld of mind and machine, the ship's computers could destroy a person, and then remake him in another area of the ship. Because of this, Bolt had often wondered why they even needed clones of themselves if they can just make a person practically from scratch. He could only assume it was because the machine itself did a copy/paste of that person, while storing every memory and combined knowledge of an individual would strain the system too much if a large number of people needed to be remade. In essence, it was easier to simply make clones and imprint them with the already existing memory patterns which were stored in the ship's databanks. Apparently, there were entire decks specifically made and used for storing memories and experiences of the crew, although Bolt himself never saw these alleged decks. Yet all of this was still speculation. The answer as to why make clones of themselves came from Dyekart, who said simply, "A cloning project became another project, which became another and so forth. What we ended up with was the system in place now. The problem, you see, is if enough of us happened to die in the same instant, we wouldn't be able to remake all of us, the energy requirements for that would be too enormous, and while that person's molecular data remained unimprinted, the data might become lost or corrupted. Storing a person's atomic information isn't exactly an easy process, as you might imagine. So the resulting "limbo" status could potentially manifest in loss of memory or cognition ability. With clones, everyone gets a second chance as soon as they die, whenever and if that happens."

This eraseal and renewal, however, was not what happened in his case. Bolt didn't simply reappear in another part of the ship as he had become used to, although after what had happened, he wished he had.

He felt the process of deletion begin. A process he had gotten accustomed to, since after a few years of experiencing it, Bolt had begun to feel the very subtle signals which slithered into his psyche as it occurred. He found the sensations very hard to explain. The closest approximation in words to the true feelings of "deletion" he was able to form was, "For an instant, you became someone else."

He felt the changes occur, and in that fatal nanosecond when his physical form escaped reality completely, something took him. It broke the shackles which had bound Bolt to his present dimension and somehow found his subtle body – wrenched it away with maddening intent. In that instant, the sphere of time constructed in the first moments of creation ceased to matter. The flame of life which had ignited his soul into existence ceased to matter. And when even the atoms which had bound all of his experience into a mortal coil ceased to exists, Bolt found himself staring into the eye of a world.

CHAPTER 18

Apocalypse

And the eye stared back. It appeared lidless at first, a shimmering orb the size of a planet, its black core thrusting outwards in waves of intertwining patterns, each pulsating tide disturbing the gleaming whole before vanishing into the eye's edge.

Then, the eye blinked. And what it revealed behind it was the death a world.

>They will lie to you,< something said to him in his own voice. By very nature, this made him question the meaning and validity of every syllable. Bolt might have even thought that perhaps it was he who had uttered those words, yes... perhaps that would be have been easier, if not for the fact that no matter how hard he tried, no matter the effort put in, he could not escape the feeling that something, someone, somewhere, wanted him to see. To see it all for the first time. He felt the raw need of this being that wanted this of him. Wanted him to not only witness, but to comprehend, to understand. To perceive how his notions and beliefs of self–unimportance and the frivolities of existence have coalesced into a unified field of matter upon the subtle layer of possibility and made an entity whose every beat and every step had been predetermined and molded to make him a turner of fates. A changer of ways. It made Bolt realize his insignificance reached only as far as the stretch of his arm.

He was but a single soul in the ocean of consciousness, an individual led to a path where, at its end, his one decision would determine what came next in the universe.

Bolt felt the weight of the idea he was supposed to grasp bring him down, break him under its scope even when there was nothing there to break.

A thought swam inside him, a voice nagging him that no matter how far sculptured his mind had become, no matter the intricate designs laid out by those who would seek to control him, he was in control. Blood and flesh. Flesh and bone. Granting life and giving him the means to seize the one decision that was to come.

>Your mind traps you,< a new voice said, one unlike the first, as there seemed to be many voices intertwined into it. >Do not allow it to drift. Look. See.<

>How can I understand anything? What is this place?< he heard himself think.

>Look. See.< The voice repeated. It was only then, when he truly recognized the voice as not his own, that Bolt looked.

Hiding behind a planet much like what he was used to seeing back home, something began to loom closer. He could sense the confusion and chaos the thing bred upon the surface of this world as it carelessly drifted upon its path towards the planet.

Yet in between all the fear and dread, Bolt could also sense the promise it brought, the possibilities it carried. First contact.

The steady approach of the thing suddenly made all the more sense than an abrupt arrival – he just wasn't quite sure how yet. On some level it made sense. Yet at the same time, Bolt couldn't help but feel its pressing weight as its massive size disrupted the flow of the planet's waters and flooded entire cities upon its approach. Only when the immense vessel's ever–changing patters – like silk spun or ink dropped into a well – came close and enveloped the planet in shadow, did Bolt feel there were actually beings inside the thing. Creatures whose very nature of existence was so alien to him he could not even comprehend the imagery their ship conjured in his mind, let alone hope to understand what they wanted. Yet what they seemed to want from the world they had come to greet was simple. Almost painfully so. Surrender.

Bolt felt himself – or whatever his sense of self had morphed into – gravitate towards one of the minds on the surface of the planet. A mind whose eyes first bore witness to the crushing disappointment of what had come. Through this...Adras... a person with a name as insignificant and inconsequential as Bolt's own, he saw the first transmission from the alien vessel before the word rolled on through all of the radio–frequencies of the world.

"Surrender."

Bolt's mind merged with Adras'.

***

Adras looked at his brother at first. Forever at his side, forever loyal, and forever different, Logos stood silent before the coming storm. Like so many times since, Adras looked to him for a different answer. In a rare moment of sibling hive–mind effect, their thoughts converged into a sentence which Adras uttered first. "Surrender what?"

"Ourselves? Our planet? Everything," Logos said, and it looked like he might have gone on, but his mouth remained shut.

Bolt could feel his own consciousness inside the mind of this alien. He saw and felt every emotion and every nuance of an emotion roll past him. He sensed fear.

"What am I suppose to see? Get me the hell out of here!"

Bolt wished he could have said he didn't feel anything, to simply brush the experience away or force his real eyes open as though all of this were a dream. But instead, a supreme and total discomfort and disorientation continued to prevail and press upon his senses. The world seemed to spin and the wind outside the glass–dome on top of the mega–structure they were trapped in stood silent.

"Is this some kind of recording? Are you showing me what's already happened? Answer me!"

"Look. See. Proof."

"Proof of what!"

A segment broke off from the nebula shadowing the planet – a sphere Bolt could actually tell was material. It drifted towards the world like encroaching doom in a form of a massive moon. For a moment, it seemed like the beings had spawned and sent it fourth only to mock the physical existence of the meat–things they had come to greet. It took his breath away, or rather, that of Adras, when the alien realized the mass' size. The immensity of it veiled behind even the vessel from which it came.

It was from this sphere that the first planetary bombardments fell. Red balls of lighting rained like super–sized hail, melding with the landscape and changing the face of it forever. Where the spheres hit, the soil puked out molten rock in vertical walls higher than any mountain or cloudcover. For a moment, the enhanced eyes of Adras zoomed into the distance. He beheld his race as they became vibrational beings, forms of pure pulsating energy, before their remains intermixed with temperatures hotter than the sun.

All attempts to reason with whoever piloted the ship came unanswered. All transmissions were ignored. Bolt felt the tension and rage pile up in all who joined Adras and his brother as they fled deep underground. They had gone so far, so deep, that Bolt thought perhaps staying on the surface and surrendering would have been a better alternative.

We'll fry in this planet's hell, he thought.

None of this stopped them.

Still they came.

Bolt never got to see any of these creatures. It was always to dark, too dusty, too hot. None of the invaders seemed to die, even in the immense heat. They never died, seemingly coming down into the cavers purely to lure those who were left somewhere, not to actually fight.

The chase lasted for months. Many were left behind. They simply rolled over and forgot to breathe.

In the second month and while running, the rock itself shaking as the continents were rearranged under the explosions above, Bolt managed to catch a glimpse, the stare of one for an instant as Adras looked back in the gloom. The air shimmered about the form, and even as the heat choked him and clawed at his eyes, Adras saw its gaze. It was like the madness of an erupting pulsar, the unstoppable force of a dying, expanding star.

After a year of running, their supplies had run out. Adras was surprised they lasted even this long. They went up, up. Up to meet them. Up through the channels of sparkling diamond and compressed minerals. Over the inner–hills of the planet and the gravity–suspended lakes of liquid promethium, all the while battling the titanic pressures, the radiation and the searing flames. The energy fields of their suits crackled around them, drawing power in a paradoxical loop of heat exchange, a loop which would eventually break; the natural decay of matter under pressure would make sure of that.

The path they walked had been set out for them. All so they would witness the last event, as if those who planned it had prepared a final lesson.

In that year, all capacity for fear had been squeezed out of them until not a drop, not a single bead of it remained. The emotion which had driven them to the depths had been expanded to the point where no one, male or female, could ever experience terror again. And after what they had been through, what else was there left for them to fear? Death would be a welcome spectacle.

Like husks moving to a final destination, the last of their kind trudged up towards the end. It was an end they planned to meet with weapons and energy lances mag–sealed to their protective armor. And if by chance these shouldn't work when they got to the surface, bare hands would have to do.

They neared the end of the tunnel–system, each burrow and cavern carved in the ages when their species still explored the inner workings of their planet. None of them had thought this would be how the legacy of those explorers would be used. Adras and his brother lead more than a million survivors, and as they jostled towards the last stretch of carved rock and saw a light at the end of the tunnel, Adras felt a presence leaving him.

***

Bolt floated above the planet – the face of it drifted, defiled by land–shifting hurls of electricity, the oceans boiled away to reveal a jagged sub–world and black dune–lakes, charred and ashen. Clouds of brown dust veiled the land like a shroud. Within all the grime and residue, the ominous mass of apocalyptic proportions drifted – an enormous black egg. Its seeds of destruction rained down still, now in a form of warriors ready to meet the final planetary survivors face to face.

>Stop this!< Bolt demanded. >I don't want to see anymore.<

The view shifted back to a calmer, but not idyllic scene. The oppressors were gone, and the planet once again sported a few green patches on its overpopulated surface. Factories and vehicles, and in fact the very lifestyles of the beings upon the planet belched out pollution, strangling the atmosphere, slowly cooking the humanoids inside over decades passing like minutes.

"Look at what they had done," the voice said to him. He could see another image behind all the pollution and misery and madness. Some shade of an alternate reality forever fading as is became more and more distant in the fabric of possibility. The falsehood was peaceful, a synergy of the beings and planetary nature, with towers of green landscapes stretching into the skies, filling each eye and face with hope. The beauty of it made the next words Bolt could hear all the more ugly.

"Look at what they had chosen to become instead. Look!"

With his all–encompassing, 360degree vision, Bolt couldn't not look even if he tried.

"Observe as they fatten upon the land and consume the beasts that roam it. Then look as they collectively turn away and ignore the death and bones they leave in their wake. Look!"

Images of human–like men and women paraded before his mind's eye, eating and feasting, drinking and dying without thought for what they left behind. In every vision that he saw, the death and the destruction of all things lay superimposed upon all that he was seeing now, the stench and fear of being hunted to extinction still fresh upon his senses.

"Now see as they transmute the living things they devour and make them into themselves, then leave behind the waste to rot in the sun. Now watch as they make even more copies of themselves, replicas that would emulate what they had done over and over again, each without the conscious thought for the living and breathing patterns of consciousness they destroyed so they could live. See as they think nothing of it simply because they believe themselves superior."

The image of the planet shifted again to its previous, mutilated state.

"Now look at them scatter. See how every particle of their being becomes us, how we use them as they have used everything else around them!"

"Why are you doing this," Bolt shouted, the idea of his voice traveling in all directions in a wave of reality–bending potency.

"Your species, their species, you are all but grass. Swaying and decaying in the winds of time. Now look as each of them becomes a part of our own reality. Watch them become a transcendent being as their deaths serve a purpose beyond their mortal and frail bodies. Watch as matter of a flawed design embraces a fate none of them could have even conceived!"

"Who are you," Bolt heard himself scream. "What the hell are you!"

The space around him shook with the sound of a trillion trillion voices, "We are the seed, we are the first construct, we are the grand Nullifier!"

His eyes opened.

CHAPTER 19

Tell Me The Secrets Of All Things

He practically flew out of his bed. Panting and cowered in sweat as his eyes locked with Dyekart's.

"You ok?" the man asked.

"His pupils are severely dilated, his respiration seems to indicate fear," said Ia, standing beside the captain. She spoke the words as if Bolt wasn't even there.

"You think I didn't notice that?" Dyekart asked.

She ignored his question and disengaged the compartment's dimming systems. It was like someone had drawn back the curtains too early in the morning. Bolt squinted. It reminded him of the times his mother would do that, it also reminded him of the fact that he wanted to slap the enthusiasm out of her almost every time she did it. He looked away, shielding his eyes, but there was nowhere to hide from the light as the walls turned transparent, revealing his room. It constituted of a bed, a small wardrobe–like compartment to his front, along with an enclosed shower and a studydesk/console near the doorway to his right, the glass–walls around him revealed many such compartments.

"Dammit girl," Dyekart said, "can't you see you're bothering the man, let him adjust his own damn lighting. It's his own room."

"I'm sorry," she whined and willed the walls black again.

"Ok, now you're just being silly," Dyekart said. "What did I just say?"

"I–"

"You know what? Never mind. Just get out of here and look pretty somewhere else," Dyekart willed the walls to progressively lighten. They did so until reaching their full transparantness over the next two minutes.

"But–"

"I know you're trying to help," Dyekart sighed, reading her thoughts before she could speak further. "But you're really not. Just be quiet for a moment, ok?"

She nodded with reluctance.

Dyekart turned his attention back to Bolt. "Akram? You ok?"

"Obviously he isn't," Ia said. "He passed out in the transfer."

"Again, what did I just say?"

"Fine!" she snapped.

"Was I dreaming?" Bolt asked groggily.

"I can't really say. Ia?"

"Oh, so now you want me to talk, do you?"

"Well, obviously, yes," Dyekart sighed.

"And what exactly do you want me to say, oh great one?"

"Really? That's how you want to do this?"

"Do what? I'm just asking the great decider what he wants of me is all," she said.

The word "great" perturbed Bolt more than any of their words, and the slight amusement over their bickering vanished. "Guys! Was I dreaming or not?"

"I don't know," Ia admitted. "We weren't getting any thought–patterns from you, and I was here first and didn't detect any rapid eye movement either."

"Why were you here first?" Dyekart asked.

"I... I was worried. He collapsed after a transfer."

"Yes, I know, but you're not worried about anyone," Dyekart said. "Ever."

"That's not fair. The rest of just don't give me a reason to be worried."

"Right..." Dyekart snorted and turned his attention back to Bolt. "Anyway, do you think you were–"

Time stopped for a moment as the blackness of non–space surrounding the vessel turned into a star field.

"The hell?" Ia said looking to and fro.

"Sol?" Dyekart asked. It was the first time either Bolt or Ia heard him address the ship with what they presumed was her name before the merge.

>Unidentified reality composition detected,< the ship said in the minds of all on board. >Potential new life–form detected. Premature exit from Null–space warranted. Comply if none–space voyage is to remain unresumed."

"Oh, now we're talking!" Ia jumped.

"What's happening?" Bolt asked her.

>Complied,< Dyekart nodded over the mind–Link.

"The ship seems to have detected something while traveling in Null. Hasn't happened before either, must be a pretty obvious thing. Let's go," Ia said.

"Go where?"

"To the Torium, of course," she smiled.

"You mean the Exploratorium?" Bolt questioned, following the two out of his room, the word didn't come easy.

"The only Torium worth anything on this damn ship," she retorted. "But don't tell him I said that."

"I'm pretty sure he heard us," Bolt said.

"I doubt it. Times like this he gets really absorbed with talking to the ship and whatnot, I'd say he can't even hear us at all right now."

Bolt chuckled at this. It felt good to laugh and forget about his dream for a bit. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, sure, watch this. Hey schmuck. I always liked the word," she said and smiled at Bolt, then looked at Dyekart again, walking ahead of them. "Like yuck, that's another that's pretty funny. Hey, schmuck!" she repeated.

"You presume to much, girl," Dyekart retorted. "Stop being a jackass and get going on the deep–space data."

"He always does this," she said quietly to Bolt, as if sharing a secret.

"Gives you the work he knows he can do himself just so he can do the important stuff instead?"

"Hah!" she chuckled. "See, Dye? I told you he can read minds. He's just pretending he can't."

"Just do it, please," Dyekart sighed.

They stepped into a wall and walked into the Exploratorium, its confines jammed with people. All heads were turned, looking at something above the ship. Some of the men and women broke their stares and gazed behind them, moving aside as the three made their way to the central consoles, looking upward themselves.

"Fascinating," Bolt muttered.

"She stopped our travels for this?" Ia smirked, unimpressed.

Above the ship, surrounded by nothing, was the glare of an accretion disk, drowning out all other lights as it swam about a rift in space–time itself. A black hole. At first glance, the remnant seemed to expel just as much matter as it had managed to bind unto itself and kept devouring. A disk of intertwining, churning matter was surrounding and throwing itself upon the core in violent waves. Bolt was certain the spiral around it could in itself envelop an entire solar system with its size. It blurred the reality of its dark center and cloaked it with uncertainty. Like lasers, infinitely tall and energized pillars of heated gas continuously shot out and flared into space from each pole of the grumbling central.

"How can you not be fascinated by this?" Bolt turned to Ia.

"Meh," she shrugged, "We've seen plenty already. Altho, I must admit none of them were quite this large. It must have formed recently, too, there's no record in our star–maps of a black hole in these spacial coordinates."

>Something doesn't seem right here,< Dyekart intoned over the general Link. >Are you seeing this, Ia? Confirm my observations with your own deep–space scanner sweep, please. And zoom the damn image.<

The sight – as the projection above them closed in – covered Bolt's heart in a layer of frost. He choked on his own words and couldn't find the nerve to speak for a full thirty seconds. Out of the accretion disk, pushing its way against the shackles of gravity, was a nebulous cloud the size of a solar system. It seemed to have followed him out of his dreams and into physical reality. It drifted towards them, expanding and shifting. A black seed – a mass no lesser in size, visible only by the fact that the green nebulosity still shadowed it – detached itself from the drifting nebula.

"Dyekart!" Bolt whispered, then began to progressively increase his voice as he grabbed hold of the transfixed man's shoulder and shook him. "Dyekart! Listen to me! Dyekart!"

The man turned his head.

"We have to get outta here! Get the hell out! Now!"

Dyekart didn't flinch as he tried to understand what had sent Bolt into a fit of hysteria.

In that moment, Bolt found a certain relief and a sense of gladness over the fact that Dyekart could read his thoughts. He was certain that otherwise the man would never have agreed to do what Bolt had screamed at him.

What the captain saw in Bolt's eyes, what he perceived, the horror and the fear, the images, those no man could deny – even if that man stood more machine than human.

With a jolt of time distortion, the ship reentered Null–space.

"Everyone," Dyekart said, addressing the confused crowd, each of them as surprised to hear their leader attending them with his flesh–voice as the person beside them, "get out."

CHAPTER 20

The Mindforge

"This is where I was born," Leonel said, looking up at the floating words. "I didn't believe I'd actually ever find this place, you know?"

"Dad?" his daughter frowned beside him. "What are you talking about? We've known about this place for years."

"Correction," said the old man. "We've known about these tunnels for years, but we never actually made it to here."

"You've lead all these people here just so you could find this place?" his daughter asked him.

"It was the only way, Nina," he answered, turning to face Max. "Apologies, Proxy, but without you I don't think any of us would ever make it to this place."

"Why have you lead us here?" Max frowned. He wanted to be angry at the man, wanted to project that anger somehow, but instead he found only a strange inexplicable calmness.

"Because, my dear brother, this is where you were born too."

"I don't have a brother, and this is not where I was born," Max said. "Now stop playing a fool and tell us how to get back."

"But we are back, can't you see?" The man's voice crackled as he looked back up at the flickering hologram, reading the words out loud. "Mindforge. I was certain this place was a myth. But I could see it, you see? I dreamt of it every night. I dream of how I felt them talking, how I felt the atoms around me back then, the bliss, oh dear God, the bliss..."

"Dad? What are you saying? You're not making any sense."

"Ah but you see, I'm making perfect sense. Don't you remember it, Max? How they would always bicker about how to name us?" the old man chuckled to himself. "The woman never did seem to like the names the others chose for us."

"Why'd you bring us here you demented bastard," Leah demanded.

"To get us back to the cosmic consciousness, why else?"

"What?" Nina cried, "Are you crazy? What're you saying? Wait! Dad!"

"Don't worry, Nina," the man said as he walked through the arch, "I am perfectly sane."

"Great," sighed a man standing behind Max, "avoid a lunatic on the surface only to find yourself guided by another lunatic below it. That's just fucking brilliant."

"What should we do?" Leah asked.

"We're alive," Max said. "That's still better than dead. Let's try to get some information from him. How to get out of here, for one."

"Such simple–mindedness, Proxy," the old man shouted from within the chamber, "You're the reason we could get here in the first place."

"What's he talking about?" Leah leaned in.

Max shrugged, although he would have been lying if he said he didn't care. He stepped into the dark chamber.

The insides of it were pitch black, and despite not being able to see or hear anything beyond the footsteps, he got an impression as though he could feel the dimensions of this place. He pictured a hollow dome, not overly large and tall, like the stage of a concerto hall. Max looked behind him just to make sure he didn't go blind. The light was still there. Silhouettes of people followed as they walked inside, their motions unsure and reluctant. They trailed behind him, their outlines disappearing within the gloom, when the light shining through the arch from outside no longer met them.

He could hear the old man mumble to himself from a dozen meters ahead. "Where's that damn light switch. I know it's here somewhere." The man spat a curse as he bumped a knee into something.

"Tell me he's joking," Leah said behind Max, her echoing voice like a buoy tethering him to reality.

"At this point," Max said, "I don't think anyone can tell you that with any semblance of certainty."

"Oh shut up," the geezer snapped. "How much bullshit do I have to spew for you to get a hint? Tell me, Proxy," he said the title as if the very letters were laced with bile. "How do you think we got here?"

"Seems pretty obvious how we did that," Leah smirked. "You led us here."

"You all seemed to have forgotten the fact that we fell," the old man pointed out. "So I'll ask again, how did we get here?" Leonel looked at Max with an intensity he could scarcely ignore. Even in the darkness. And it was at that point he noticed he could actually see. Sight didn't come in any normal sense of the word. His mind seemed to construct the image of the hall like a hologram. The walls bend and expanded as if drawing breath, folding and unfolding, with every new voice from either the people who followed in his path or the old man bringing new, fresh detail to the room. The machinery placed around the room spun in his vision as if constantly deciding what dimension to take as new details came to light. Sound became a visual thing. It expanded and shrunk the things it hit, making it difficult to see the room's true dimensions. It was almost as though the sound itself was constructing the room, filling it with matter. Echo–creation. Max could see all the presumed projections of the things around him but wasn't sure they were actually there. Their edges glistened as sound bent around them. Then, as he saw all the myriad of computerized consoles and workbenches echo and bounce off the sound in waves and air–grabbing sound, he understood.

"Well?" the old man snapped him out of it, the waves of his voice painting the room in a dull grey.

"What's he talking about?" Leah asked, her own voice imbuing the room with a pleasant yellow, like the rays of a sun.

"We may not be aware of it," the man said, "most of us anyway, but our thoughts are constantly being projected from us and into the subtle fields of interconnected dimensions all around. This all happens in the form of enfolding energetic patterns in the very subtle, but fundamental fields of reality."

"Give me a break," a man behind Max intoned, his voice slashing through the dull grey with a deep red. "You string theorists are all the same. You might as well call your strings spaghettis no one can see or detect and then say that's because they loop around in dimensions we will never be able to access. Oh, and don't forget to do some pointless equations no one understands just so you can feel better about yourself and what you believe in."

"String theory? Pha!" Leonel spat, dismissing the words that were just thrown at him. "Your jabber doesn't change the fact that our friend here," the old man said, motioning towards Max even though none could see him, "can alter dimensions and space around him with his mind."

"Bullshit," the skeptic protested, Max suddenly recognized the man's name as Bruno, "It's not like changing dimensions is hard. If I hit something with enough force – your face for instance – I can just as easily alter its ugly–ass dimensions. My hand might have done the real work, but my mind propelled it to action."

"That's a bit harsh," Leah said.

"I'm tired of this old bastard," Bruno spat, "I'm done with this dark hole, and this prick clearly knows how to get out of here. So either he stops screwing around, or I'm going to see just how much of his dimensions I can change."

"No, shop!" Nina jumped, her eyes adjusting to the small amounts of light streaming from the hallway outside, enough to see the outline of the person she was jumping in front of. Her voice bathed the man in an urgent almost violet blue.

"Tell me how even in this day and age," Leonel said, his voice unchanged despite the quite obvious threats, "When men can travel the stars and build space stations which seem to defy gravity, some minds still find it beyond believable that there are things that exists not in the realm of what we can test, of what we can experience ourselves, and that those two facts do not make those things any less real or any more fantastical. Tell me," Leonel turned from the strange sphere in the middle of the dome, a sphere balanced upon an asymmetrical cone, giving the whole thing the look of a droplet about to break from the surface of a splash. Leo looked at the man objecting him, "Would you believe something such as gravity existed had you never been exposed to its workings? Had you been born on a space station and lived your whole life in zero–gravity conditions, would you be able to even imagine the workings of gravity? What the eyes see the mind believes. And why do you think this is so? It's because you see with your mind, and not your eyes. It's because your eyes only allow you to see the reality around you, yet the images are all compiled and holographically projected inside your mind, not without. Which is why even a blind man can still see in his head, why you dream and see images with your eyes closed. So is it really so hard to believe a mind can shape the world around it just because you yourself had not done it, or not seen it done?"

"You're talking about something different," Bruno protested. "No one here's talking about the abilities of the mind to perceive and mold images that are made within it, all I am disputing is your notion that the mind can shape the world around it. Now stop with your foolishness and tell us how to get out of here."

"He's right," Max said, now standing in the middle of the hall and looking down on the sphere.

"I know I'm right," Bruno said, the air taking on his self–righteous tone in a form of a dull red.

"No, not you," Max corrected him, "I know this place. I can... I can remember some of it."

The walls bounced off a gentle blue as the old man smiled. "I knew you would recall sooner or later."

"What is this thing?" Max referred to the transparent ball in the middle. He looked closer and noticed there were notches and lines drawn into it. He willed his eyes to see better, and immediately the light within the room seem to increase, his vision sharpened. Max noticed the notches themselves were shaped in a manner of brain lobes and followed a pattern almost like the insides of a nut–shell.

"It's where you were born, your womb," the man said as he moved to Max's side.

"Strange, it's the only thing I don't recall at all."

"For real? You find that strange?" Leah laughed sardonically. "When does one ever remember the time they've spent inside a womb?"

Max snorted. "Yeah, I think you're right," he smiled, "But what happened here? Am I a clone? Was I bread inside this thing?"

"You don't seem to understand." The old man stated this not with disappointment, or even with impatience, but with a calmness one might expect from a master who had waited and thought his student for a good part of his life, waiting for him awaken to the nature of life which lay hidden to normal men and women. "You were not put inside here as if within an incubator. You were not pre–molded from some DNA pattern or build inside a lab, your mind and body were both forged within this very sphere."

The impossibility of it seemed to outweigh even the sheer impracticality the deed entailed. Max wanted to say he believed it. He wanted to think he believed it. But he couldn't imagine nor say that it was so. Instead, he said the only thing which came to mind and had the feel of a logical conclusion to his current train of thought. "Impossible."

By now, every single one of the people inside had moved to surround the sphere like a pack of scientists waiting before a screen, one about to display data from some universe–as–we–know–it–altering experiment.

"Have you ever heard of the notion," the old man began, "that consciousness supersedes the brain? And that it is in fact consciousness itself which forms the matter around itself in such a way that it makes itself able to see, to hear, to smell, and in general experience the concrete and physical nature of reality?"

"If consciousness supersedes the brain, then why would it even need a brain?" Bruno immediately intervened, his skepticism infections and well–shared among most of the group. "If I was a being of pure consciousness, the last thing I would want is to be sent into this realm of solidity just to experience all the hardship and pain it can bring."

"You're so bleak," Leah said. "Life isn't just about hardship and pain. What about all the other emotions once can feel? The simple joys of life? The things that make us smile? The things that feel good under our fingers and, yes, even the drugs that can alter your perceptions and make you feel better. And what about music? If we are not all beings of vibration, how can music – which in itself is just changes in vibration – feel so good?"

"What does a person like you know about what life and its hardships are, girl?" Bruno asked. "You remain cooked up in your labs, head buried in experiments, you know nothing."

"I know enough!" she said. "Or maybe it's because, as you say, that I know so little that I'm able to find gladness in the little things. Hmm?"

Bruno said nothing.

Leah looked at Max who stood absorbed in thought, looking down at the sphere, touching it gently. "How about the joy of expressing your love to someone and finding out they love you back?" She looked away as Max turned his head, not wanting him to know it was his face that was the source of her cheer and good spirits, even in times when they had ran for their lives and down a hole with no means of escape. But now that she had looked away, she wished she hadn't. It seemed silly now, a reflex fueled by uncertainty and doubt.

"The young lady is right," the old man smiled. "An immaterial consciousness can only experience an immaterial existence, at least according to logic, yet a consciousness projecting its will and perceiving thoughts born upon matter can have an entirely different experience of life, of reality. But this is not why we are here."

"Then why are we here?" a woman in the group asked.

"We need to preserve this place," Leonel answered.

"Why was it even built?" Leah asked. "I mean I get the fact that the ability to make minds is pretty substantial, but why make it and then abandon it?"

"I don't think I can answer why it was abandoned," Leo said. "For this puzzles even me, to tell you the truth. But, eh, it doesn't really matter at this point, perhaps they made a better version of it and decided to move the project somewhere else. Who knows. The important part is, I was right."

"About what?" Leah asked. The rest of the group began to talk amongst themselves, most of them arguing why such a thing was impossible and why it wasn't. The color of their voices intermixed and grained the air with a static of shifting particle–movement. Abstract shapes of color broke against the shore of matter that composed each individual. "What were you right about?"

"That the Proxy's mind exerts enough influence upon the magnetized reality of this place to alter it and save us from the explosion."

The collective ears of the groups inside perked up. "What explosion?" a woman asked.

"An explosion?" asked another.

"Where?" Bruno joined.

"When?" Leah said. All of them speaking over the others.

These were only a handful of questions which immediately found their mark in the old man. The one Leo chose to answer, however, stemmed from the eternal skeptic in their midst, Bruno, who stated, "You still haven't told us how you found this out and how it's related to how we got here."

"Every movement of the walls you saw since the moment we stepped through the projected wall on the surface was the projection of the Proxy's mind. Every subtle shift and every moving shadow, even the light which seems to permeate from the surface of the walls themselves was the result of those very objects being excited down to the very quantum level and the heating of the inner surface of the walls."

"How come none of us can exert such control over matter?" Bruno asked.

"It's because none of you were created here for the specific purpose of being able to do just that," the old man said.

"All this time, I thought my mother had died when I was very little," Max said absently, his eyes not shifting from the dome. "I remember my father telling me she was still alive, and I remember the excitement which rolled over me when he said it, it seemed it would last forever, and I remember wishing it could last forever. But then he tapped my head, and said, "she still lives in here". I hated the fact that I could never forget him saying that, and how I always knew that someone living solely inside my head isn't really alive at all."

Max's voice alone seemed to be invisible inside the dome, it exerted no color like the voices of others, it was simply there, intangible and pacifying, like a strong wind rustling the threes and silencing everyone, making them listen.

"Your father was the one who created this place, this machine," Leonel said. "He didn't do it by himself, of course, but he was the lead scientist whose genius made it all possible. You were his ultimate creation, he wanted to raise you himself. He lost interest in continuing his work after you were made completely, he decided to raise you himself."

"So, we are... brothers?"

"Not really," the old man sighed. "Just like your maker isn't truly your father, I am not truly your brother. But–" The whole dome suddenly shook, throwing most of the people inside off balance and to the ground. A resonance of vibrating shifts spread over the walls through the dome as though they were riding a boat on gravel.

"That was sooner than I had expected," said the old man, instinctively looking up. "She's already in the tower, the station will go down at any moment, we need–" His voice was cut short and made unintelligible. A colossal tearing sound began to reveal a crack in the material of the station. Light and heat licked through the expending opening, tearing the dome apart with a sound suggesting immense speed and friction. Even through the heat–haze and the fires of the atmosphere crashing against matter, Max could see what they sped towards. The North American continent.

CHAPTER 21

The Fall

Rob hated waking up. He hated it almost as much as he hated the fact that his parents no longer seemed to get along. Smart beyond his years, he was old enough to understand how love works, and that some people were never meant to spend their lives together. Yet what seemed to happen more often than not, and before most people would even realize this fact, the female counterpart would give birth to some form of glue, a being which kept the two together despite the fact that they hated each other.

His father would often try to rationalize the relationship he had with his wife, but Rob couldn't care less about what he said, he felt his father's thoughts before the man had even expressed them in words. This, he hated as well. It was never pleasant thoughts either. Only the most potent feelings or ideas found their way into his small skull. Ideas which mostly came from the deepest and most dark desires of men.

"You see, son," his father said to him one day when his mother wasn't around. "There's only two kinds of relationships in this word." He said this while drawing two lines running parallel to each other on the holographic display in front of their couch. "One kind is like two parallels, these two lines will never truly meet or overlap, they will never by the same, ever, but they will always be pretty damn close. That's one relationship for you. Now, every other pair of lines will meet but once." With this he drew two lines running across each other. "But these lines, after meeting once, will drift apart forever. Now it may seem at first that they still have a lot in common, and that they share a lot, but, eventually, they expand so far apart that they'll only be able to look back and find that what they had was better than what they have."

"I suppose you and mom are this second pair then?" Rob asked.

"Unfortunately, yes, but that doesn't mean–"

"Yes, yes, I know, you both love me, but can you please just read me the story instead? I don't want to hear this."

His father escorted Rob to his bed and tucked him in, then began to read The Elegant Universe.

It didn't help, no matter how much Rob thought about the universe and how he will someday unravel all the mysteries behind it, he couldn't maintain sleep and had woken up. The thoughts of others prevailed in his mind like a tick one knows is there due to an itch, but is too tired to get up and try to remove the bastard. It aggravated Rob to hear the thoughts of others in his own voice. They intermixed with his contemplations. Thinking was all he could do to help himself to sleep. The voices he heard were like hearing himself talk but not thinking about talking, and at times, when and emergent thought came with particularly hatefulness or unpleasantry, it scared him. The images such thoughts conjured had been the source of numerous nightmares. When those came, it was the only time he didn't hate getting out of bed. On nights like these, when sleep just wouldn't last, Rob went outside, to the balcony situated in the upper pylons of the Grey–Tech tower. There, Rob looked at the stars. And if he focused hard enough, and imagined himself traveling on board some spaceship, or even in a suit capable of faster–than–light travel, the voices in his mind grew dull and unimportant. Tonight was one of those nights. As though with a reflex of the mind, he decided sleep wasn't what he wanted and sprang out of bed. He tipsed quietly down the corridor and to his left, then through the living room where his parents sat on a couch and watched some kind of news report on the holographic imager. The man on the screen claimed someone or something had found a so–called 'edge of reality'. He found the notion intriguing, but what does that even mean? Not even the newscaster seemed to know, or had any other information. Rob walked behind his parents and saw his mother stir as she woke up from a nap.

"Slept through the whole day again, great," father said bitterly.

"I need my beauty sleep," his mother yawned.

Rob felt it coming before he heard it, a thought his dad chose not to speak but one which made Robert's heart race with the raw emotion of it. He regretted hearing it. >Bitch, you need to hibernate.<

He hurried to the balcony and willed the force–field behind him to engage so none of the sounds from the imager would leak through. The quiet of the balcony at night, with the background generators active, projecting nothing but the sky on both sides, and the real, unprojected sky ahead made his lips part into an unconscious grin. Rob grabbed hold of the telescope his father had bought him after Robert had spent almost a month convincing him, and immediately began adjusting the knobs on it.

Rob wanted one of the older versions, one where he needed to adjust the coordinates by hand, one that could not be connected to some digital device for it to do it for him. The extra work needing to be done to direct the telescope to a specific spot in the sky made it even better. It made it easier to remember where he could find all the good stuff. The procedure centered and calmed his mind as Rob focused on the task at hand. With the effort, the sounds of what went on in other people's heads around him became almost non–existent. He directed the thing to his usual target first, before he would move on to something else.

He soon found something strange was going on. The usual frantic nature of the station as it drifted in orbit was replaced by empty streets and a strange crater–like gouge in the middle square. Rob had expected to see a buzzing nexus of activity where people scurried about like tiny ants, each with a story he had made up for them in his mind. But what he found instead was emptiness. He zoomed in on the tower's entrance and found something even more disturbing. His eyes watered and he suddenly couldn't find the will to blink. His breathing quickened. This couldn't possibly be true, he thought. What he saw were bodies, hundreds of them, strewn across the once white surface like cattle slaughtered and half–eaten. Rob wanted to look away, he could see the glistening pools of blood, he could see it pumping out, flowing from broken arteries. Some were still alive! He gasped.

Now he truly could not look away, frozen by terror. He zoomed in and saw a man lying on his back, froth bubbling from his mouth as he struggled with his last breaths. A woman crawled towards him, gripping his hand, not caring that it was covered in blood which stuck to her palm. Suddenly, a bright flash filled Rob's vision, blinding him. He tore his eyes away from the ocular. He tried to rub the blazing after–image away and zoomed out, looking with his other eye at the station as a shockwave of white matter traveled in all directions, encompassing it and the space around it in an energetic bubble. Then, another explosion, this time stemming from the tower, hurled the structure about in fragments, then tore the station itself into pieces. Chunks of it quickly disappeared, thrust into space, and Rob could no longer trace them over the skies. Most left behind a trail of their paths over the skies, curling with the planet's curvature.

One shape in particular, however, left no trace, nor did is seem to shrink, but expand. It didn't take Rob more than a moment to realize the sphere of light was headed directly towards them, towards New York.

It was inconceivable. Of all the infinite directions the shard could have taken, it had chosen or, more likely, had been propelled directly towards where Rob looked up at it. He didn't know what to do about it. Should he call someone? Inform some official, or perhaps tell his parents? What would that accomplish, anyway? Whatever part of the station it was, it was going to crash. The impact alone of something so big would level the whole city, melt it before it even made contact, not that any of the citizens would be able to tell the difference. Just as Rob's knees began to shake with the realization of his imminent death, his spellbound body and mind found a new hope. Generators, towers of obsidian which Rob had been wondering for three years now what they were for, flared up in the distant landscape surrounding the city. For a moment they came to life like active supernovas, illuminating the city like lightning. A layer of purplish discoloration slowly encompassed the metropolis – like a swarm of flies. Only these flies would interlock and hold their relative positions, defending the city from imminent impact. Or at least that's what Rob hoped they would do.

The clouds ignited and burned out in an instant, vaporized by the passing heat of the object. The space around the speeding chunk boiled and turned into energy, flooding the sky over which the ball cut with rivers of energized air that smoked and simmered.

Every neuron fired up and told Rob to move. And moving would certainly have been a good idea, if the object heading towards him wasn't the size of small town. Time seemed to halt for a brief moment. The moon–sized object floated above the surface of the barrier for a deceitful moment, before it crashed into it with a deafening roar. Cauls and webs spread over the calmness of the shield. Here and there, more than a dozen generators exploded in the distance, overpowered by the energies they were forced to contain. The air itself shook as the debris spread over the entirety of the shield like water thrown against a surface. The sound it produced seeped through the cracks and into the ears of the populous, the deep grumble smashing through the air as though the very foundations of the planet built over billions of years had begun falling to ruin. Some of the material trailed through the cracks, falling like dust from the cracks in the ceiling. The impact made the entire barrier wobble like gelatin, and as the waves on top of the enormous shield rose and fell, so did the material. Thrown and smacked down again by gravity, the debris wavered like a tidal force as high as the sky, consuming and painting the land around the shield with dust and ash.

The outcome was not as Rob had expected, for instead of the destruction he had pictured in his mind, everything around him whirled in a sea of change as the barrier continued to shift and oscillate – a rippling sky–ocean. Eying the sight, Rob found it difficult to think, his thoughts trailing out of his mind like yesterday's dreams. Who could foresee something like this? Why else would the generators had already been there?

He felt hands resting on his shoulders. He hadn't even noticed his mother and father both joining him on the balcony. It was the first time he saw them holding hands, each white–knuckled and tense. Rob's mother leaned down and whispered something in his ear. He couldn't hear any of it, the sounds of debris sliding over the barrier making his teeth vibrate.

Then, something caught his eye. In between a crack on the shield Rob couldn't see, an orb of white light descended down towards one of the buildings, drifting slowly and carefully. Rob watched it and raced to the edge of the balcony. The sphere descended below his floor, which was high in the upper strata of the Grey Tower. He was certain his eyes deceived him, but he was also certain he saw the orb pass cleanly through the roof of a skyscraper.

CHAPTER 22

"Three Things Cannot Long Remain Hidden, The Sun, The Moon, And The Truth."

"Why should we leave?" Ia protested. "Whatever you and Akram have to say you can say in front of us all!"

"This is not a discussion, yes? You will all leave," Dyekart insisted.

"Why? We all saw the thing," Ia said, turning to the crowd and back to Dyekart. "Whatever Bolt knows about it we all deserve to know."

"They called themselves the Construct," Bolt said, and could immediately tell a storm of questions flooded into Dyekart's mind–cogitators.

"Please," Bolt said, "just leave us, we will discuss this matter privately before we decide how to proceed."

"The hell is this?" said Hakur, a man Bolt knew little about save that he was always the first to complain when something wasn't to his specifications.

Bolt had found that, in almost any given group, there's always one such person. This one was less of an irritating specimen, belonging to that very same ilk. "Are you two some kind of a council or some crap? Like Ia said, we all deserve to hear what either of you have to say."

>Get out!< Dyekart suddenly grumbled over the Link, >I am the commanding officer here and you will respect my wishes or face the consequences, now leave immediately, all of you.<

With varying degrees of reluctance, they all eventually exited the dome. Despite their curiosity, they all respected Spyros enough to listen to him when he used his rank to boss them around. The only person which remained was Ia. A grin awaited the two men, sly and mischievous.

>All but me, right captain?< she asked.

"Ia..." Dyekart sighed.

"Alright, alright, but you better tell me everything, or, you know, face the consequences."

Her jab made Dyekart smile as he nodded and, after she left as well, he turned to Bolt.

"We're not alone in the universe," Dyekart said.

"Hardly surprising. With the amount of known galaxies, with each galaxy–"

"You know what I meant."

"I know," Bolt sighed. "Don't tell me the others don't?"

"Sol and I tried to keep it a secret," Dyekart admitted. He moved to the dome's translucent surface and looked out into Null–space, its oppressive unreality shaping the frontal part of the ship and twisting it into an insanity of shapes. At times it seemed almost like watching waves break against an obstacle, yet none of these tides could be focused on or made sense of, they shifted from moment to moment.

"Why?" Bolt questioned. "Why not tell them?"

"Do you have any idea how many planets we have visited?" Dyekart asked. "Planets that seemed to have been destroyed by forces we can't even imagine? Forces that would annihilate this ship in the span of a breath?"

"From what I read in the reports," Bolt began, but Dyekart finished the sentence for him.

"It's forty six. Yes, forty six planets where the population had been wiped off, with not a trace of anything living on the entire planet, and by our estimations, nothing living would ever rise again on either of these rocks. So tell me, Akram, what do you think these people would do if I said that the space we roam is not safe at all? That each time we exit Null, we might as well come face to face with what seems to be the galaxy's greatest threat?"

"Don't you think they already know?" Bolt asked. "Surely they must at least suspect that a sentience is behind all the destruction."

"As far as any of them know, the ruins are millions of years old, who can truly tell what had done that. A war? Self–destruction? It could be a number of things."

"How did you come know about them, these aliens?" Bolt inquired.

"Once, when I transferred from one part of the ship to another, something took me, I think you know what I'm talking about."

Long silence.

"The eyelid of the world," Bolt nodded.

"For a year I lived inside the mind of this being, this Adras. Yes, a year. It was the worst thing I had ever experienced. I knew it wasn't a dream as soon as I had awoke. My mind, you see, records all of my dreams, and when I looked back to try and confirm that what I had seen was indeed a dream, there was nothing. No images, no thought–projections, nothing. As if my mind had been lost in empty space with no stimuli whatsoever."

"Have you considered what it might mean?" Bolt asked. "Why you think we were shown these things?"

"Has to do with the planet we're supposed to visit. I see no other reason or explanation for it."

"It felt almost like some sort of a warning to me. You know?" Bolt said.

Dyekart fell silent, and it was only then that Bolt noticed the captain had been shivering. His robe ceased its tireless rustle and steadied. Bolt caught Dyekart looking at his hand, flexing it, sighing through his mouth grille as though what he was about to say went beyond even the unnatural state of his own mechanical existence. At length, Dyekart's head turned up. His augmented stare scanned the shifting mayhem enveloping the traveling vessel. The man's breathing steadied, steadied until the breathing of the engine, of which every surface of the ship was a part of, became a sound almost oppressing in the quiet room. As Dyekart spoke, the words uttered in a quiet hiss.

"They feed on fear."

"Fear?" Bolt asked, his voice cutting through the accumulated silence like a siren.

"I have seen it. I have seen one of them, I was on board their ship," Dyekart said. "I don't know how I got there. I'm not sure I was even there... yes... never there. I saw them send down this...thing on the planet. It devoured the surface."

"It fed on fear? How? How can they feed on fear?"

"I don't know if what they had sent it feed on it. I'm not even sure how I know. I simply felt it to be so. Yes, that's it." Dyekart turned around, with every one of his oculars pinned down on Bolt's eyes. "I felt it."

"How? How can they–"

"I don't know. They're not like us. I think they are something whose existence we cannot possibly comprehend. Every time I would catch a glimpse of one, my mind changed them, at one point I even saw them as pure metaphor for something else."

"An eruption of consciousness," Bolt mumbled under his breath.

Dyekart continued as if he didn't hear him. "You see, the human body is a source of all kinds of vibration. On the quantum scale, everything vibrates. It does this forever and always, but you know this. Yet somehow these... beings, are able to feed on these vibrations. When a humanoid's electrical systems are stimulated by fear, pumped with adrenaline or something akin to it, it sends shockwaves through the subtle fields which surround us. Somehow, they are able to absorb these vibrations, energies if you will, feast on them."

"I'm not sure I can believe that," Bolt admitted. "Even after what I've seen, it's just... it's insane."

"What do you know of evil?" Dyekart asked.

"Of evil?"

"Yes. What do you think it is?"

Bolt gave himself a moment to think, then said, "Something which goes against human nature. Something which sickens you to see, a thing that you feel in your marrow that it's wrong, even as you witness it."

"But what is it? Is it a condition learned and observed? Yes? For instance, do you recognize it as an infant? Or do you recognize it when your mother, your father, your society, your imprinted and conditioned brain tells you that this or that is wrong? In other words, do you learn of evil, or are you born knowing of evil?"

"I really can't say," Bolt admitted. "But I have felt it when they came. I've felt it as they leveled the planet."

"You know what I think? Yes," Dyekart nodded, "you do, I can see it in your eyes. We have seen the same thing, you and I. Yet what I think evil is, ultimately, is just a word. What if this is who they are, the way they have been for millions, perhaps billions of years. What if they know with all the fiber of their being that what they are doing is transforming us, morphing the universe into themselves – into a better sentient being – into more of them. How do you destroy that which you cannot possibly begin to understand or emulate?"

"I see what you're saying, they do seem to have a purpose to what they were doing," Bolt said. "They even told me."

"Yes," Dyekart nodded, "definitely. Their purpose seems to be to transform everything else into them, like what we are doing with food, like what every sentient being seem to do. With that said, however, I still have no idea what to tell these people. Should I say that I know aliens are out there? What if I'm not entirely convinced that's even the case?"

"What do you mean?"

"While I dreamt this dream that wasn't a dream, yes? I got the feeling like Adras and his cohorts weren't running from aliens per se."

"Then what?" Bolt asked.

"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 were the manifestation of their fears, a collective unconscious given form."

"But I saw them, their ship," Bolt argued.

"Did you? Did you really? And how could you experience what they did? How would you explain such a thing?"

"I don't really think I can," Bolt said.

"That's exactly my point. I would be lying if I said they didn't make me question reality itself," Dyekart said.

"How so?"

"Consider this. You are not what you are right now."

"Alright," Bolt nodded.

"You are something else. You do not perceive matter in this crude form, and even energy itself is not invisible to you or expressed merely in mechanical ways or as pure force. Instead, you see each vibration of matter, even to a point where diamond, which to you would seem solid and unmovable, shifts and spirals, twists and turns as its fundamentality stays in 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, and each vibration correlating to a specific formation in this dimension. These vibrations then, almost as an afterthought, create all of this crudeness out of pure comic music. 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 can imagine it, yes? But can you really?"

"No," Bolt admitted. "I find it difficult to even see the world as strings, let alone the rest. I can try, but, it's not exactly easy. This is how you think these aliens see the world? How do you know this?"

"I examined the dream many times," Dyekart said. "At least what I could, these are the conclusions I came up with. It's not that unbelievable, yes?"

"It actually makes sense, I think, now that you've pointed it out," Bolt said thoughtfully.

"Indeed," Dyekart nodded. "If you consider that your brain is forged by strings, each vibrating in these extra–dimensional spheres within the ocean of consciousness, an ocean that is as much separate from these strings as the real ocean is from the waves, each of these vibrations forming patters which create your brain. And since each oscillation correlates to formation of a specific atom – then your brain is simply a collection of specific patterns of vibration."

"Now imagine again what I said earlier," Dyekart said. "You perceive the world like this. Strings vibrate and throb, they loop into other strings, seemly making more, yet remaining part of the whole, gaining what you would call mass and informing you about the nature of reality through their expressions in specific forms in your mind. Now apply to this a drug."

"What kind of drug?" Bolt asked.

"It doesn't matter," Dyekart said. "A mind–altering drug. A drug that changes the way you see things, yes? Instantly you go from feeding on these vibrations, seeing them, to experiencing reality in its crude form, just like we see it I see it now. Which reality would you say is the real reality? 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 that that alone changed the way you experience reality, then reality is an illusion of your senses. The implications are staggering."

"I suppose you can go into a purely rational frame of mind," Bolt said. "A receptor in your brain got aroused by the drug and received different information, but then again, the atoms of the receptor connected to a different set of atoms, changing the patterns of vibration inside the mind."

"Precisely," Dyekart said. "You always come back to the fact that all that changed was the way the fundamental reality vibrated, and that in turn changed your whole spectrum of perceptions, sight, sounds, everything."

"What can we do against them then?" Bolt asked.

"I don't know," Dyekart admitted. "But I think we will have to do something, I don't think we only saw a death of a world. But a potential future of ours as well."

"And their ship? They seem to be able to form solidity out of what looks like nebulosity. If such is the case even with their bodies, then I'm not sure what–"

"I think that's quite simple, really. There are postulations that our collective unconscious is more powerful that we would like to believe, or even imagine."

"You mean in shaping the world?"

"Indeed," Dyekart nodded. "Let's consider for a moment that our collective unconscious is a participant in the creation of reality. That it decides which particle will decay. Now because of our unawareness of this fact, that we actively participate in matters of reality–creation, and because our collective minds are, for the most part, largely unfocused, chaotic, and even incoherent, this state relates and expands out of our thoughts and into the very quantum level, making it too appear unfocused to us, chaotic, even random and probabilistic."

Bolt sighed. "I... I don't think I can deal with this right now," Bolt admitted. "Honestly, the dream... the vision left me exhausted, I can barely keep my eyes open. As much as I really don't want to sleep right now, I can't help but want to, I'm gonna hit the sack for a few hours, hopefully a dreamless rest is what'll greet me."

"Wait!" Dyekart yelled as Bolt walked away and headed to the wall that would take him out of the Exploratorium. "You haven't suggested anything. What should I tell these people, what would you tell them?"

"The truth."

CHAPTER 23

To Dream Of The End

Despite the fact that Bolt's eyelids seemed to take on the approximate weight of lead, his brain and its incisive activity suggested something quite contrary to want of sleep. His mind grazed and scraped over dozens of subjects at once, none of which were what Bolt wanted or wished to think about. Random thoughts such as how many faces he had beheld as he walked to his room or how many of them struggled to look away as they passed him, envious of him and his experience – of his vision. They saw it as something they themselves wished to find, and were scouring the galaxy for – to sight an alien race. This envy in their eyes, this stupidity, had on more than one occasion made Bolt want to grab hold of all who had eyed him and slap some sense into them, or somehow transfer the fear he had shared with Adras. Perhaps that would have made them think twice.

He still remembered the fear. It made his hands shake and sweat. The dread of wondering if the vision will ever stop went beyond anything he had since experienced. It made him fearful of sleep. But he was so tired...

He suddenly remembered Max and his instructions. His futile attempts to try and fascinate Bolt, or in some way spark an interest in him about the realm of meditation. It brought a smile on his face as he thought about his friend trying to explain the benefits of it. To Bolt, however, it always remained just what it seemed, a boring way to spend one's time by sitting around doing nothing.

Right now, however, the idea sounded calming. He turned from his prone position, twisting in his bed and instead looked at the ceiling. Counting his breaths to ten, he managed to calm his mind and think about nothing, until, for the third time, he came to the number six. His mind suddenly leaped with the thought of Sara, his wife. He found that reliving a moment of immense joy and euphoria as they ate together – laughing beneath a clear sky – calmed him more than any attempt of meditation. He tried to focus on the sound of her voice¸ to hear her laugh in his mind and realized, that although he could recall her features and the way she smiled, her white teeth, her perfect black hair, he could not recall the sound of her voice. No matter how many scenes Bolt remembered, no matter what he pictured in his mind, her mouth always moved without sound, without words or audible vibration. He focused on the scene around him, and began to notice something wasn't quite right. An image began to appear, a great eye superimposed upon the lush scenery, with a chain of mountains on his left – in the distance, and a cityscape way of ahead of him. The grass swayed in the breeze. The central point of the city, the Grey Spire, touched the sky, infecting it with veins reaching further and further, each blood vessel changing the sky with black blood, each spreading like roots of an overturned tree. He looked back from the grey silhouette of the city, back to where Sara had been sitting. She was gone, and where she had sat, a tree had grown, tall and wide. Its leaves stood erect and flat, shining as thought bathed by a golden morning, light raking upon each leaf.

Bolt noticed he had at some point stood up.

The wind stilled.

He walked around the tree, its shadow lengthening and retreating, as if the sun were rising and falling in the sky. There was no sun. He circumvented the tree, touching its rough bark with the tip of his fingers. He stopped as he almost reached the point where he had begun. A leg appeared first, around the bend, bleach–white and smooth. Bolt looked about, confused, wondering who had brought it here, he saw no one. The skeletal remains sat propped up against the bark. The jaw hung slack, with skeletal fingers holding something in a tight grip. Slowly, hands shaking, expecting the skelet to suddenly animate itself, he bent down and reached out, tried to pry open the fist. The smooth, bleach–white knuckles gave way easily. They held an eye. A lidless, ever–shifting, black–centered eye. He lurched back, dropping it on the grass. The mouth of the skeleton snapped shut, its teeth grinding. A sound streamed from the opening and closing maw, a sound he had been searching – the sound he couldn't remember just moments prior. In his mind, it spoke a clear, emotionless sentence.

"We come to destroy you."

Bolt realized he was dreaming, then his world exploded. For a moment, his whole vision consisted of static, a frantic movement of particles, each trying to find its place without pause, their combined efforts constantly hindered by the very fact that every other speck was attempting the same thing.

His vision cleared and a heat began to press down on him. Bolt found himself wearing familiar, glowed hands. And although familiar, the hands were not his own. They moved of their own accord, adorned with thick layers of metal, each appendage shimmering in the heat–haze. He could tell a pressure was kept at bay by an invisible force–field about his suit. A needle extended from one of his fingers, sliding towards a man propped up on the tunnel wall. A droning sound of stone–grinding and rock collapsing echoed through the passage. The syringe extended further, and the force–fields of the two men connected. The two vibrational fields matched, and the slouched man turned his visored had up. In it, Bolt saw the mask he now wore.

"Here," Adras spoke in a language Bolt couldn't recognize, but understood through the mind of the alien. "I have some liquid left. It should be enough to get you out of here."

The man coughed as his skin absorbed a portion of the hydrating concoction and his lazy–eyes drifted to the people walking past them. "Please don't," said the dehydrated man. "Keep what you have, there is not enough strength in this body of mine to continue."

"Then borrow some of mine," Adras said and offered a hand to the heavily breathing man.

In a wave of subtle connection, Bolt could sense the relief Adras felt as the person grabbed hold of the hand given in aid.

"No one should die so broken," Adras said, helping the man to his feet. "We'll all face what's out there together, our last stand."

Invigorated, the man nodded and the two rejoined the march – their escape from the core of the planet.

"Not very wise," Logos said to him after the man Adras had aided had fallen behind again. "He'll never make it to the surface. And now neither will you. You need all the liquid you can get, and you cannot get more. How can you be so careless?"

"I don't need liquid," Adras said. "We're almost at the top, he'll make it. We'll make it."

"Bah... you don't need liquid... my ass you don't need liquid," Logos insisted.

"I've got you, don't I? Your dour company alone can keep me alive for weeks," Adras smiled.

Logos grimaced. "How you can find streaks of humor at a time like this I'll never know. I'm not sure I even want to," Logos admitted, the sound of his voice almost going unheard between all the marching boots ahead and behind the two.

"It's not humor, it's acceptance, we'll die on this planet, like our ancestors before us, blown away in the wind like the primordial soup from which they crawled." Adras found himself not liking the idea despite what he claimed. "I don't know. Perhaps the thought of helping someone has imbued me with a measure of good cheer. Or perhaps it's the thought that this nightmare will finally end. Either of the two is fine with me."

"Bah," Logos rasped, "I don't much care for the method of the ending. And I can foresee only one outcome. A violent death. At least here the poor sap you gave your liquid too would have died in peace, maybe even just gone to sleep never to reawaken, instead, you insured he shall die by being slaughtered like the rest of us, good job."

"And so what?" Adras protested. "He'll go down fighting, and the consciousness of his ancestors will imbue him with strength. He didn't want to die, I saw it in his eyes, none of us do. Whatever the skies above are like now, however raw, they shall carry him after he perishes, and he will rejoin the cosmic essence, he will die fighting and free. That's what I had done, now shut up and walk."

But Logos never shuts up, that much even Bolt had come to realize by now. "You know I care little for the old beliefs, consciousness, unconsciousness, these are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the brain. When the brain gets pounded into dust, nothing is left, it's all just dust."

"Believe what you want," Adras sighed. "My mind is set, and look," he pointed at the faint light emanating from atop the tunnel, with the shapes of countless others milling about and racing towards it ahead. "We'll see what our planet has become soon enough."

Trapped within the maelstrom of the dream, Bolt felt his own mind detach from that of Adras. He now looked at the motley company with eyes seeing in all–encompassing directions. Hundreds of thousands of them were still alive, perhaps millions, heading towards the opening.

Realizing he was dreaming, he wished he could see what had been done to the planet, but realized he already has. The more he realized the place he witnessed was an illusion, the more the dream dissolved, until finally, he opened his eyes.

CHAPTER 24

The Plunge

Greeted by a steady drone in his head, he found it impossible to rest. He never heard the sound before, and it took him a moment to realize the noise was of the ship – an emergency pulse of imminent danger. Bolt crawled out of bed, his head heavy and unrested, his eyelids half–glued.

"Fucking hell," he mumbled under his breath, slowly comprehending the droning consisted of words and instructions. The voice sounded mechanical and not at all pleasant, like parts of a machine scraping against a rusted cog.

"Premature Null–space exit. All hands report to your designated sections."

It kept repeating this over and over, and despite the warnings, all Bolt could think about instead of 'reporting to his section' was how to make the voice shut up.

What ultimately snapped him to full awareness was the floating image on his holo–display situated on top a desk by the side of the sealed bulkhead–door. It came granulose and distorted, the speech of Ia upon it scrambled and uneven.

"We'll exit Null in a few minutes, Akram. Your presence was requested on the main deck."

"By?" he asked.

"Spyros," Ia answered.

"Fine," he sighed, "I'm on my way." It wasn't so much that he had no desire to find out just what the hell was going on, it was simply that – in the moments after a premature awakening – dispelling his own disinterest in everything wasn't easy.

And then there was the ship's voice, droning and never–ceasing.

Damn you and your designated sections!

Ia bowed her head almost unnoticeably, and the holographic image vanished.

Their exit from Null came sooner than any of them had expected. But Bolt was sure they couldn't have arrived at their destination already. For reasons quite unknown to him in his current, tired state, he felt embarrassed that he had to be summoned, he should have been there, he should have already had a handle on the situation

In these mind–trips of his, not only his memories had returned, but also the responsibilities. Bolt learned his transfer to the ship came with a position of being second in command. He still wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. There were things happening on the ship, and it perplexed both him and everyone on board that, for weeks now, the technicians and engineers were utterly baffled to explain the subtle changes occurring in the very fabric of the vessel. It was almost as if the Null itself had become restless by the long intrusion of the Administrator's Will, and now wished to expel its foul material existence from its confines. Although everything on board the vessel still worked – even if not crisply – Bolt could not easily forget the resulting incident on the edges of the event horizon, where the Null–space relinquished its grip on the vessel and the natural state of matter resumed its hold.

It had caused been the first permanent death they were forced to deal with on the ship. A technician had been working on a slab near the event horizon, his mind focused on the task at hand to a point where he didn't even hear the warnings going off in his suit. Supposedly, he was listening to music, and his work had taken on a mechanical tedium –the result of pre–learned movements required in order clean the removed slab. The inner workings of the panel had reported some kind of malfunction, a baffling technical issue no one understood, at least not fully. The official explanation stated that the curled Null–space, seeping into reality at the very quantum level, altered the slab in some higher–dimensional way. It seemed to want to spread, too.

In an instant, matter around the boy had warped as the Null–space extended and claimed his flesh, intermixing his body with the shifting madness in between reality and Null. He didn't even have time to scream.

Some hypothesized the added collection of atoms was the reason why they were experiencing problems now, although they couldn't find any real connections between this and what was going on, or why a prolonged stay inside Null would cause it to claim more and more of the thick outer layers.

They had all conveniently forgotten, or chose to dismiss the problems occurring, even before the boy had been shredded. Bolt wanted to yell at them for this, but what would that accomplish?

They tried to revive the man, copy his memories onto his clone, but he never awakened. No matter what they tried, he didn't rise, nor gave any indication that he ever would. They since referred to him as the haunted. Most didn't want to admit it, but, on a regular basis, reports seeped in about people seeing him inside their dreamscapes, walking around in bewilderment, utterly lost. They reported seeing him in the corners of their eyes, as if within their heads. He would disappear inside walls, rocks, and was reported walking behind the trees. An old man hooded and hunched.

A cold sweat ran down Bolt's back. The boy's fate was one he had no desire to greet.

He exited his chambers and descended down into the depths of the ship. The main deck, as it was called, was located at the very center of the vessel, above the Essentium, protected by a maze of halls, living quarters, labs, engineering decks and recreational arenas. It was the place where a lot of people could gather. As a result, it served as an extended Exploratorium and general ship–operations deck. A bridge.

On his trek to it, cacophonies of sound made their way inside the main passage each time Bolt passed a room or a hall. He frequently ran into people he knew or recognized vaguely. Wheezing past him were scientist, technician, engineers and even small, three wheeled cleaner–bots. Most of the men and women gave greetings or polite bows while moving on. Bolt greeted each, most of them on their way to the main deck as well and, as result, a large group had gathered around him before he reached the tall archway.

The noise of movement and conversation from inside the bridge hit him like a torrent. The scent of the working men and women lingered in his nostrils for a while still. After a few moments, however, his brain began to filter out the smell. The group that had gathered around him dispersed as each of them hurried to their stations within the bridge. Having never actually taken the time to visit the place, Bolt stood a while longer, marveling at the sheer scale of it. Its enormous frontal display projected a foggy and largely unclear image upon the main wall, opposite the main entrance. The image's discord made it impossible to foresee or even assume where the Administrator's Will would surface from Null. Everything else, however, appeared ready for Null–brake and the voices inside softened as the grand hall started to bristle with the tensions of everyone present.

Bolt walked to the central podium stationed below the big wall–screen. He surveyed quickly the numerous platforms comprising the many levels of the bridge, its vaulted ceiling so high above his head he couldn't quite make it out, it was simply a white haze of light. He ascended a set of stairs where the augmented eyes of Dyekart, Ia and the engineer he knew as Marius eagerly awaited.

"Just in time, Akram," Dyekart smiled, his heavy robes rustling as he turned to meet and follow Bolt's gaze.

"What's happening?" he asked.

"A slight deviation in our path,' Marius answered, his voice crisp and natural, but deep. "We're about to arrive within a satisfactory distance in relation to the planet."

"Already?" Bolt asked.

"It would appear thus," Marius nodded.

"How? We haven't been traveling for five years, hell, we haven't been traveling for more than one third of that time."

Marius simply shrugged.

"As far as we can tell, Akram," Ia said, "the ship's found a faster way of travel through Null."

"Indeed," Dyekart nodded. "It would account for the increasing thickness of the layer between Null and reality."

"What aren't you telling me?" Bolt asked no one in particular. "How long until–" he was cut short by the vessel itself. Its entire frame began to rumble and quake. The giant display flashed and fizzled, assembling an image none of them had expected. Staring in horror, they realized the ship had been thrust out from Null and thrown into the planet.

The hooks of gravity reestablished their hold on the vessel and threw it into atmospheric entry.

CHAPTER 25

The Eye And The Fall

No–one on board had time to wonder why none of the navigational commands were working, or why, at this crucial stage, the ship itself seemed to do what it otherwise never did – dream. The consciousness of Sol who sat trapped in her life–support throne, had fused utterly and completely with her surroundings. The event had been a long time coming. She had been anticipating it, hoping for it, craving it even. But she had never expected its coming to be at a time when she least needed it. She felt something on the planet, an influence which propelled her into her new sense of even heightened circuit–activity, a field where every brain inside her became a part of her, a collective unconscious transcending into consciousness. She fought it for a time. Expelling her every imagining and every thought which jumped into her mind. She twisted on her throne, as if a pain had struck her stomach and every muscle wanted her to rub her belly in hopes of relief, but she could not. Her movements were rigid, half–performed, they spread the pain of them to everyone within her. Through her mind, onto the collective mind of everyone on board, the pain warped and wafted. Receptors grasped it all until the pain the vision became a sole reality. Each forgot they were falling, the soil that would splatter them a distant thought as they screamed with pain that wasn't theirs. Flames and fire enveloped them. The air resisted her intrusion, her fall, coloring the atmosphere with hellish thunder. She saw lights in the distance, in the darkness of the world below – a world that ceased to turn on its axis and stood quiescent with the shock of hurt that had been inflicted upon it. She saw its last moments, through the sight of another, as the eyelid of the world opened.

***

When the time came for him to watch his world die, Adras realized nothing could have prepared him for the spectacle of it. Flakes of churning ash battered his eyes as the residue of his species raked across the points of the compass, the sharp reek of it latching itself on his every breath.

His brother, Logos, stood beside him as the two 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 them, choking the air with all the vapors of its chaos.

The last of their kind rushed towards open fire.

Each soldier was a speck of silver in the distance, their forms disappearing in waves under the enemy's suppressive onslaught – the fallen constantly replaced by ranks from behind.

Enemy numbers were boundless, their ship an ominous mass above the crater. In its shadow, the homeworld army cleaved everything in its path, yet kept dying with an undisturbed frequency. Their hands were instruments of vengeance, their weapons a means to deliver molten death. Yet to stem the tide of battle with tools such as these was impossible. Troops of the fallen foe would simply reanimate, torn limbs regrow, shattered skulls rebuild, while each of the invader's handheld cannons spewed beams of electric fire in wild arcs, each impact nullifying an area around it.

Even from afar, Adras could feel the explosions. They carried a reek of burned plastic. He could taste the richness of it as he spoke with a voice low enough to almost shake the soil, "Everything is dying."

"Even memories..." Logos added, seemingly unaffected by the carnage below.

"Was it worth it?" Adras asked. "To resist?"

Logos didn't turn to face him, his words came laced with a rage only Adras could detect. "Against tyranny, even death is a sacrifice worth taking."

Adras knew they had made a mistake to resist, and the sheer magnitude of the event before him only now managed to strike true. He began to shake, his feet threatened to give in, they cried for release. He had been running for too long, Adras realized, and wished more than anything he were somewhere else. But his thoughts and feelings were irrelevant to reality. He was to watch his civilization die, yet would never truly know why. The thought perplexed him even as he watched it all unfold.

He knew the Construct only as an alien species, their origin shrouded by the vastness of space. They had never introduced themselves, and still, somehow, he knew their name.

I will never see the sun again. I will never hear my brother laugh again. I will never...The thoughts struck him like lighting, each as sobering and finite as the last. He wondered how many had thought the very same thoughts before him. What did they find in these thoughts? Did they imbue those before me with strength? Sorrow? Courage to face the enemy and spit in their face perhaps? Adras felt nothing of the kind. He felt only remorse, its depth that of space itself – devouring in its magnitude and strength.

"A glorious death, brother," Logos suddenly said. Adras could barely bring himself to look at him. He knew their climb to the top of the crater had been utterly pointless. An act of defiance. Of that, at least, Adras was proud. For they had done it together. Just as they had lived, just as they had bled, just as they will die.

Logos turned his head to look into Adras' eyes, his fractured jawbone protruding out of his chin as he clenched his teeth and waited for his brother's words.

The sounds of death filled their senses as the air shook.

Once, there had been so much to say between them, but now...

Time had made all words seem pointless, time and the mayhem which wailed matter about them in a form of ash and dark fumes. But more than even this, more even than the death of an entire race, it saddened him that Logos chose these words before inevitable death. There was no glory in their end. It certainly didn't feel like an end befitting the potency of their lives, their potential. But even this disappointment was trumped by what Adras felt in himself, for he had nothing else to add. Nothing to say. All the things he had hoped, the things he knew he should, got lost in the moment, as if it were all nothing more than a dream. No, not a dream, a nightmare.

The eyes of the two brothers met as their heartbeats synched. A deep sense of nostalgia permeated out of his chest, he could almost recall the first time their hearts beat in unison, inside their mother's womb. Their faces carried none of the burdens of their race, but a freedom they had never known. It was the freedom only inevitable death could bring, a freedom short lived and petrifying. Yet the prospect of eternal sleep seemed inviting somehow, welcome even.

They jumped from the edge of the crater, strafing down the nearly sheer sides with ease, their suites compensating for any lack of balance. Upon reached the plateau, they ran below the gloom of the ship. Restless, the two soon reached the center of battle. Or rather, so many had died around them it no longer mattered where they stood, everywhere felt like the center of conflict. They pulverized their enemy into dust, meld their bodies with the ground, but only more came. Pouring into them like a living river, mechanical, unkillable, unstoppable. Yet in those moments, it seemed, so too were the two brothers. They fought shoulder to shoulder, back to back, until for reasons Adras could not explain, the attacks of their enemy ceased.

A palpable sense of doom enveloped the crater, like the stillness of wind before its madness once again hurls the dust, a sense that escape now was as likely as outrunning death itself. Adras tried to draw a bit of humor out if it. Perhaps an ultimate lesson? But all thoughts which fluttered were inconsequential, dreamlike and distant.

The air began to thrum. Unnoticeably slow at first, the ship above began to crawl away. It stopped after a while, revealing a brown sky. Silence shrouded the crater.

He could hear Logos breathing.

Giant slabs of black metal opened below the ship, their circumfuse that of a vast mountain range. A delayed mechanical sound spun the air in a torrent as it hit those still standing with a monstrous shriek.

A tempest of white flame fired out from the opening and spliced through the air, crashing violently into the soil.

Froth rose about the impact, throwing shale into a vertical wall and obscuring a bright shape inside the smolder.

"From our ashes, a new race will rise," Adras said, thinking nothing of the thought he had muttered, even though it had been the one carrying the reason why he still held courage – a thought so subconsciously buried it only now, when his mind stared face–to–face with the unimagined, became evident.

He wasn't given time to ponder his own words. Nor wonder why beings such as these would seem so savage.

A form of pure what spat out from the curtain of smoke with impossible speed. He felt its warmness before it even came close. Its beams of light reached to the horizon, as the infinity of their power reduced all into ash.

***

From the dark side of the planet, he watched them fall. A fire in the sky. He wondered if any of them would live. Apparently his warnings for them to stay away came all too late. He wondered if they would ever have even worked.

The quad moons stared, indifferent towards the billowing shape threatening to smash into the planet. Unmoving and half–dreaming, he watched the skyspear vanish below the horizon, then wake the soil with its impact.

CHAPTER 26

The Core Of Reality

On the edge where space–time reality reverted back into pure abstraction, Max began to see more clearly than ever before. The shifting nature of his vision steadied for the first time in days as his cranial implant fused with the machine Leonel had referred to as the Mindforge. It held his consciousness active inside his skull, even while all of the others melted beside him.

I can rebuild them.

The conviction came with a sense of uncertainty, however, and he wondered how such a thing could ever be accomplished.

Vaguely, Max could see a shield materialize underneath him – protecting a city – and knew they would hit it with such force that the entire sphere he stood in would shatter, but even this thought with endowed with doubt. But that didn't matter, the patterns he needed to reforge them out of pure non–movement of space were clear in his mind – becoming clearer with each moment. They existed beyond the linear, beyond the straightness of time which his mind perceived. Existed in lines of abstraction that suddenly made perfect sense. Max wished he could stare at them forever. It felt as if he were gazing into some core where reality itself was emanating from. Infused with meaning, he knew what he had to do.

The sphere plunged into the dome beneath them. Buried under tons of ruble which followed in its wake, heating it even further, making it into a miniature sun. The force of gravity was inescapable and, for a moment, he swam in molten brimstone, his face stretching and bloating as if someone had blown air into his face at an insane speed. His eyes, his ears, his mouth, even his pores seemed to give in under the pressure of flames which forced themselves into everything.

There was a moment when, even his mind became pure madness, without form, swimming upon a singular plane of All. Yet out of this, inside of this, there seemed to remain a speck, his implant, made out of far more enduring material than his frail body and mind. And that speck was enough. It interconnected with the unshattered dome where the Mindforge nested and remade him, then, in turn, Max re–crafted all of the others, even as they shattered into a billion fragments. His mind subconsciously found their imprints in the memory of time itself. Extra–dimensional bubbles expanded and made new ones within new ones within new ones, interconnecting and reforming each conscious mind. Recall and genetic makeup infinitely spiraled and twisted in braids of light. Knots of matter and strings of un–matter fused into collective wholes that could breathe again, see again, remember again.

He saw the edge of reality, and suddenly understood the message which came back from the depths of space. Who was it that had sent it? Who else had seen this?

An opening began to give way below them, and a small part of the dome gaped like a tearing in silk. Drifting upon the slope of Max's own will, the sphere descended into a building in the city, crashing. Like from an inner explosion, the top of the structure burst apart, an event which Max out from from the minds of anyone who saw it. The dust billowed around him, hugging and caking the sphere, falling upon them – around them as he shrugged it off as though some invisible barrier existed between him and the debris. One by one, the people he had saved began to wake up around him.

"I told you..." Leonel croaked as Max helped him to his feet, the dust painting his clothes and that of the others, with trails of fine mist cascading down the explosion–bitten opening.

"Oh my God!" Leah stammered. "What happened? How did you–"

"We actually made it?" Bruno wobbled to his feat.

A few of them, strangers all, brought together by a feat of survival, hugged with tears streaming and cleaning their faces of dust, the droplets drying in globs of salty residue upon their faces.

A daughter ran to her father.

"I'm okay," Leo assured her.

"How did you know?" she asked him.

"I didn't. Not really. But I knew what the Proxy was made for, so I put my trust in him."

"What now? Max asked.

The old man looked up. His eyes trailed a shape across the upper reaches of the city. Golden–cast and brimming with inner light, the spear cut through a building, through the floors of it, hurling material and twisting iron out the other side, then imbedded itself into the lower streets, bursting them apart.

"The thing's not dead?" Leah spat, looking down from the edge of the still breaking–off floor.

"Will it come after us?" Bruno asked.

"For certain," Leo said.

Max didn't hear any of them, his mind puzzled over what and how he had kept everyone alive, even rebuilt them. What moments before he understood fully and completely, was now a mystery to him. "How did I do it?" he asked.

"The forge does that, it was made for that, I'm not sure how it works, but I know one thing – Einstein was wrong," the old man said. "See how they looked at me? Did you see their eyes flash with disdain as I uttered those words? Who does this old, frail man think he is, eh? Clearly, if he says something like that, and clearly because Einstein was a genius, he must think himself as some kind of a genius as well. Yet obviously they don't think thus is this case, so clearly my perceptions are irrelevant. But what is a genius? It's someone whose signals are able to transform. Whose symbols, as they interact with the inhabitants of this world, no matter if those signals are spoken or written, are able to alter the way a collective of people, or at least the way someone, views the world. But, as time often reveals, they are all wrong, even when they are all right. And Einstein was wrong. He was wrong when he said nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Because something does. Consciousness. You experienced it. You recreated it. But what is consciousness other than all–encompassing and all–engrossing? My brain, and your brain, is just a way for that consciousness to experience – a field, if you will, where it can expand and grow, perceptualize and actualize, without even doing anything in the physical world, without moving any objects but itself, – it's a field where that universal consciousness is molded into material fabric to perceive the material world around it. You see, in this sense, it can and it does travel faster than the speed of light, since because of its part in the all–encompassing reality, it does not travel at all, it has no speed, it simply is, it becomes, or becomes not. It is all, and yet it is nothing. So elusive we can't even pinpoint it. It forges itself inside the physical, and de–manifests back into pure abstraction. What do you make of the fact that the inside each brain, there are more connections and pathways between nerve cells than there are atoms in the whole known universe? Can you even imagine such complexity?"

"Honestly," Max said. "I always found that 'fact' highly paradoxical. It breaks down under the appliance of simple logic."

"Oh?"

"Yes. If, as you say, we have more neuron–connections in our brains than there are particles in the known universe, than that statement is self–defeating. Since every pathway in itself is made up of particles, those too have to be added to the number of particles in the known universe. And since every pathway is made out of particles in itself, it means that the amount of particles in the brain alone is more than that of the combined number of neuron–pathways. So that statement is not only untrue, it is downright moronic."

"That being said, I'm not sure what you're saying," Max admitted. "I know what I'm supposed to think, but what does the speed of consciousness have to do with anything?"

"You used that speed to reach beyond time, to find minds already gone."

"You're saying I reached into the back–log of the universe? How?"

"Your neurons know all, they are connected to the Allness, they are a part of it. It is your conditioned mind that doesn't know this, that fools you into not knowing as it races between thought–creation activities. So like a blind man, you do not see what is right in front of you."

"What made me see?"

"Who are you talking to?" Bruno asked him, with the other four people behind him equally confused.

"What do you mean?" Max turned. "To Leo, who else?"

"What?" Leah joined in.

Max turned back, confused to see the old man was gone. He turned around, then around again. He ceased to blink and stared ahead instead, as if he could materialize the man back. He tried to make sense of it all, could it all had been in my head? His mind screamed at this. It rejected even the idea of it. But if such was the case, what has he done instead? What did I say? In his wonderings, Max tried to remember, when the uncertainty he had seen in all things, the movements of thoughts and musings of the whole city's worth of people crashed into his skull once more. The sounds and feelings robbed him of sight, and the pain behind his eyes struck a chord, then kept smashing it until, within his own head, nothing but darkness remained. Max started to grasp blindly around him, "Where is he?" he asked.

"Who?" Bruno questioned.

"Leonel!" Max shouted, more out of panic than frustration. "You all saw him, you talked to him. He lead us to the Mindforge!"

"To what?" Leah said, grabbing Max by the shoulders, his absent eyes searching for hers with futility. "You led us to inner–workings of the station, Max, there was no one by the name of Leonel."

This is it then. I'm going insane. The only problem was, he didn't feel insane, he had perhaps been seeing what an insane man might see, but he didn't feel insane. He thought perhaps this must be what it truly means to be crazy then, to know you're not and the same time being trapped with an incapability of realizing that you are.

The voices around him painted the world. Their sounds formed rough sketches of the walls, of the ceiling, the floor, even the people, and for a moment he even became hopeful, thinking his sight fizzled in and out of his perception and the intensity and emotions of each voice he heard echo–located the sights around him.

"Leah," he cried and managed to grab her arms in both hands. "Tell me you're real. Just tell me, please. Say you're real, say you're not a figment of my mind."

"Of course I'm real," she said, rubbing the back of her hand against his chin. "Doesn't that feel real? What's the matter?"

"My world is braking," he said, wishing he could see her smile. In retrospect, however, he should have seen it coming, he realized. I should have listened, I should have...

"Don't worry," she said, "I'll help you pick up the pieces." Her voice drew a smile, he remembered it and clung onto it. The memory of it will keep me sane, he hoped. "We'll all help you," she added, and was met with agreeing murmurs, he could hear Bruno stepping close.

"I have no idea how you did it, Proxy, but you saved us all," Bruno said. "That thing is still out there, tho, and I have no small doubt it's coming after us, we need to move."

"Where should we go?" Mia asked the group, her afro–hair flailing like the mane of an insane witch. Vibrations of her voice swam through the strands and lid up in Max's head. Shapes and furls of sound whirled by endlessly. The tumultuous streets kept exploding with disarray below them. Above him the crackling of metal chipped at his ears. Due to a missing piece in the building's construction, the support struts above him caved in slowly, microscopically. Mind–body functions of those around him, the breathing, the beating, the pulsing and the convulsing, all found its way into his perceptions and formed multicolored vistas, making it obvious all objects and observers were mere variations of these same sound. On the quantum level, where pure quanta met in loops of endless possibility and where each was brought forth by the observer, each in turn a part of the observed–observer duality, the reality of the Oneness of all things dawned on him with a wave of realization. At times Max found it hard to distinguish what shapes were 'things' and what mere air. Ripples spread out of everything, disrupting the fluidity of bodies as much as it bounced of them or passed through them. Vibrational patters canceled each other out like shockwaves meeting, while others amplified each other, multiplied and coalesced, all inside his mind, yet all without. He suddenly smiled at this, watching the glow of life flooding along veins of everyone gathered, their rhythmic pulsing rippling outwards and expanding into All. Max nearly forgot he had been struck blind, instead he realized he had been blind all along.

"The chicken or the egg," he laughed suddenly, almost maniacally, understanding the split of which came first to be nothing more than a fabrication, an inherent duality an average person experiences in himself. The mind, the body, just like the chicken or the egg, they both rise separately only inside the mind's conceptual basis. Inside the mind's rational state of none–can–be–without–the–other. But in reality, both rise equally, dependent upon one another even when the mind would make it seem otherwise. There is no chicken, there is no egg, there's only the possibility of both and the impossible task of trying to rationalize the irrational. He laughed at the meaningless of the question, realizing his laugh might sound utterly demented.

"Max?" Leah asked him, and he looked. Her eyes were flaring white, the orbs perceiving each vibration around her, forming different images that what Max was seeing, drawing them in her mind. He could see them all as thought they were his own.

"I've to find Him," Max said. "I think I know where He is."

CHAPTER 27

When The Time Comes, Are We Ever Ready?

His wanderings had taken Bolt to the Armory. It was an inappropriate name for an area with no weapons or armor. There were, however, an abundance of tools. Small devices of a square design, none of which now sat on benches where they had before, but lay strewn across the floor or stood haphazardly balanced from the edges of tables. Each tool was a trap for billions of nanites. Upon their release, the nano–tech would replicate endlessly, drawing power from the molecules of air itself. In their completed and fully established form, trillions of these now graced Bolt's limbs in a form of a nano–fibered suit, the attire capable of withstanding environmental pressures and temperatures of insane variety. The suits, in fact, were what had saved most of the crew.

None of them remembered the fall.

Being one of them, Bolt recalled nothing but the dream and the moments before it hit, when his mind still felt like it was in possession of an 'I'. Somehow, in the confusion and chaos as the ship was hurling towards the soil, lighting up as if the crew were inside a sun, Marius had found him. Through the tremors, he guided him to one of the compartments designed for just such improbabilities – for impact – with cushioned walls and handless made of rubber. Presenting Bolt with one of the tools, Marius had said, "Enable it, and don't come out of this damn place until it's over!" then slammed the airlock. Despite the cushioned walls and half–working inertia dampening, Bolt still managed to get a mild concussion.

Experiencing a series of blackouts as he wandered out of the airlock, he kept losing short stretches of time. He meandered amidst the broken and the crawling. He watched bodies laying slack against the walls. The moaning of the broken left little to the imagination, most of them proclaiming the nature of their injury in delirium.

The thick hull had taken on the brunt of the fall, but the reverberations, the shakings and turmoil inside the material, it spread through the ship like an earthquake. Many found themselves with broken limbs or had awoken to find blood filling their mouths. Many hand't waken up at all.

The back of his mind seemed to hurt as though something had taken a bite out of it. As Bolt trawled the ship, mindlessly and lost, he began to notice a strange ichor oozing out of the walls. In some places it had already begun to harden into thick stalactites. He feared to even touch it. The sounds the slime made beneath his feet were thick, like stepping on honey. It smelled of burned plastic – a smell now familiar and unwelcome.

A deep voice shook his senses from behind. "Bolt!" It was Marius, his form draped in thick layers of protective fibers encasing him in cosmonautic armor. "We have to get back to the bridge, assess the damage, casualties, this should never have happened!" Marius hissed, his voice muffled behind the visor.

"What happened? Why didn't the ship compensate for the fall? Why didn't it do anything?" Bolt asked.

"I've no clue," Marius admitted. "Now come, walk, let's go."

"Where's Dyekart?" Bolt asked.

"I can't find him anywhere," Marius answered.

"It wasn't just me, was it?" Bolt said while they struggled through the hallways, most of which were devoid of suffering crew, but still others full of them. "You saw it too, didn't you? The death of this world."

"I wish..." Marius sighed. "I wish I hadn't. I wouldn't call it seeing either, I was there. Physically there. And as far as I know, so was everyone else on board the ship. What do you suppose it means?"

"A warning," Bolt said bluntly.

"A warning? Against?"

"For us not to come near this planet," Bolt sighed. "This didn't turn out the way I imagined it. Will this ship even drift again?"

"I doubt it," Marius said.

***

Dyekart had taken the winding path down to the Essentium. Every step he took made his heart race and his mind bleed out more and yet more scenarios, situations where he would find Sol trapped inside some personal mind–hell or lying on the floor, forcefully disconnected from the ship. How else could he explain her total absence? Her apparent escape from the confines of the ship? Or, what seemed more precise, _its_ escape from the confines of her mind. What he hadn't expected to find upon reaching the dreaded gate of the chamber, however, was Ia, standing in front of it, waiting for him, draped in protective layers of nano–fibering.

"I knew you'd come," she said. "We need to get to the bottom of this."

"Ia–"

"Don't you dare send me away, Dye, not this time," she snapped.

"I wasn't going to," he said, "I want you here with me, I need someone to ground me, keep me centered, I'm afraid of what I'll find in there."

"So am I," she nodded. "But that's just how it is, isn't it? I remember you telling me to steel myself whenever we came to a new planet. This is no different, we have to go look, there's nothing else as important right now."

Dyekart stretched his hand and waved it over the green panel beside the door, "I agree," he added. Ia grasped his wrist.

"What did you do?" she asked him. "Your cranium is shattered, you're bleeding. Why didn't you go into a safe–chamber?"

"I needed to go see her," he said.

"You idiot!" she spat, "We need to get you to a medical bay."

"I'll be fine," he claimed.

"No you won't be! You need–"

"Let's deal with this first, alright?" he said and walked into the chamber. Challenge

The first thing that hit them was the smell. A multitude of the connections providing nourishment, along with the main valve for excrement channeling were disconnected. On the floor, bent in front of the throne where she had sat, Sol lay motionless within her own feces. Unable to control her bodily functions regulated for her all these years, she couldn't even prop herself up. Her garbs were soaked, revealing her pale skin. The nourishment pump continued its secretions of clear liquid and the non–pleasant smelling concoction dripped endlessly from the disconnected tube beside her. Ia adjusted a wall–cogitator knob on the right side of the dome–room and stopped it. She couldn't do anything about the smell, however. Sol laid face down, her mouth frothing as Dyekart sat down beside her and rolled her over into his arms. The cabling still attached to her made the task somewhat difficult.

"Sol..." he whined.

Her eyes were milky, un–seeing, Dyekart wondered if she could even hear him.

"We need to get her to the medical deck," Ia said. "The both of you."

"Sol... I'm sorry, I couldn't control the dreams anymore," Dyekart said. "I tried to, but they escaped me."

"What are you saying? I don't think she can even hear you."

A trembling, ghostly–pale hand reached up, skeletally thin and frail, its fingers groping the air in an attempt to find Dyekart's face. Sol tried to mumble something, but all that came out was a dry cough. At length, she managed to touch his un–face. She showed no indication of noticing it was cold and made of metal alloys. His blood seeped down from the back of his shattered cranial plate and down Sol's hand, contrasting the whiteness of it, making it look even paler.

"Dyekart," Ia urged him, "get up, carry her! There's still time!"

"There was never any time," he said. "Not for us. Not for the two of us."

"Stop with this! There's always more time," she said and kneeled beside him, shaking his shoulder gently to try and focus his senses on her. It didn't help, all Dyekart's myriad eyes saw were Sol.

"The ship killed her," he said. "We were never meant to be so intertwined with machines," Dyekart proclaimed, "we already have the perfect machine, the universal consciousness, yet in out blindness, we search for more."

"Don't–"

"Always externally, never internally. It took me this long to realize it, Ia, what do you suppose it means for the rest of humanity?"

"Realize what? For once talk like a normal person, please," Ia said, trying to stop him, yet at the same time keep his ramblings going so he would perhaps snap out of it. But she didn't realize, what she couldn't, was that he had finally realized the truth.

"I have ruined myself," he said. "I've ruined her. I know now. Everything we want to be or want to possess, we already have and are. I already had her, she was my wife, on Earth, we were happy."

"That's why you need to get up, to save her. Get up!" she said, grabbing him below the armpit, trying to lift him, get him to walk. There was no point, Dyekart was simply too heavy, his augmentics alone weighting more than she could hope to lift.

"She needed to meld with the ship, Dy," Ia said. "Otherwise we could never had gotten so far across the galaxy. We needed her."

"You're wrong," he said, "I needed her, she was all I ever needed, but instead I searched outward, through the expanses of matter, failing to look within me, I failed to recognize my desires."

"Dy," Sol slobbered, looking yet not looking, "don't...fret...for I am...free." Her hands went slack, her eyelids half–closed, she stopped breathing.

"No, no, no," he cried and squeezed her to his chest. "I can remake you! I will–"

"Dy, we've never made a clone of her, you know this, we always assumed–"

"Shut up! Help me get her out of here."

***

She did as he asked and helped him to his feet. Sol's head rolled backwards in his grip, her one hand hung, the other resting on her belly. Ia disconnected the last of Sol's cranial tubes, each still relaying electric data, fizzling like angry serpents as she threw them on the paste–slick floor.

They ascended the spiraling steps, up through the empty hallways, into the main decks. The translocation walls didn't work, so they had to take the long way.

Leaving behind a trail of blood, Dyekart struggled with Sol in his hands while Ia helped him stay upright as much as she could.

She heard him whispering, "I will remake you," as if it were some kind of mantra, as though saying it over and over would reshape reality and he would be able to actually do it. For Dyekart's sake, Ia hoped it would happen. No one had come to help them carry the heart of the ship through the strange ooze–slick tunnels. They were all too busy saving themselves. With panels loosened in the crash, their edges bloody in places, there could be no doubt some of the people had gotten badly injured by the exposed plates. They pasted a few of them nearest the infirmary. Most lay unconscious or in no state to help even themselves.

The two of them managed to make a few more steps before Dyekart collapsed. His weight took Ia down with him. "Get up, leave her, you don't need to die here," she said and put a hand on the back of his head, trying to halt the blood pooling under him. The inner light of the ship's walls had faded. Reduced to a dull red, the glow only partially illuminated the hallways.

"Leave her!" Ia repeated.

"No," he slurred, blood drooling out of his mouth–grille, "I left her before, I let her to rot in her chair. I can't leave her now."

"She's already gone," Ia argued.

"I'm at fault," Dyekart said. "All of this, I needed to know, I needed to find out."

"Find out what?" she asked. "How could you be blamed for this?"

"I wanted to know them," Dyekart coughed, "I wished to see how they think, and she wanted to see what I dream."

"You're not making much sense here," Ia said.

"The dream you saw, the destruction," he said, "it was the only dream I dreamt. And each time I had found more, another morsel of how the destroyers operate. And when she saw them, when she found them orbiting a black hole, she wanted to know too."

"Why?"

"To dream," Dyekart coughed. "She must have thought I chose to dream a pleasant dream. And when she dreamt for the first time, her consciousness, her dream spread into all of you. If only I hadn't been so damn insistent. If only–"

"Stop it and get up!" Ia shook him. "This isn't the time for this, Dy. You have to get up."

"Promise me something, Ia," Dyekart whispered.

"Don't," she said, "shut up and walk! Do it!"

"Promise me you'll–" he didn't finish. Instead he threw out a blood–filled cough. His head–wound stopped bleeding and he rolled over to his side, his strength–less neck lolling his head. His hands never let go of Sol.

***

"The hell's happening to this place?" Bolt asked.

Marius gazed around as though in need of another look to make up his mind and reach a satisfying answer. He found none to his liking. "There must've been a rapture in the crash," he said. "Like a crack or something, maybe even a tearing in the material through which some kind of contaminant of this world could seep in. I don't think we're safe in here, at least not for long."

As they ran, struggling to try and ignore the pleas of others as they begged them to try and help them to stand up, the two more often than not realized that they couldn't. There were simply too many of them, too many with broken craniums, too many with shattered pelvises or broken limbs crackling as they tried to move. They couldn't possibly help them all. Not alone in their attempts to aid, the two of them could see people who had managed to clothe themselves in proper protection or made it to crash–chambers helping those they could. But there were still too few. They needed to find out how they could go about helping. They needed to get to the bridge.

There were but a few of those fortunate enough to be able to get to the Armory and equip themselves with a protective layer of nanotubing, most didn't get the chance. The dream had kicked in before they could even get to a safer deck. There were more than few with broken necks. The pain of them surrounded Bolt as though it were permeating from their bodies. He had to stop himself from kneeling down to try and help the departing. The ship was falling apart around them and a distinct sense of urgency propelled the two men towards the bridge.

"What about the cloning chamber?" Bolt asked. "The clones are pretty safe in their compartments, aren't they? The amniotic fluid? What if we simply wake them and imprint each with memories?"

"We can't," Merius explained. "Not until we find out what we can and what we can't do around here."

The halls were dim, but this did not vex their minds, despite the fact that they knew it should, if anything, the red helped to obscure and hide the blood. They neared the main strategic deck, the hall leading to it growing wider and taller. A chill most foul began to blow through them. Bolt could sense it even through his fiber–covered body, through even the mouth–grille and its filters. He felt the struggle of it to decay his skin and stop him dead in his tracks. A sensation of goosebumps and limbs falling asleep rolled past him. Bolt knew whatever had seeped in through the cracks of the ship, it wasn't natural, nothing could do this and do it with such haste.

"Must be a viral organism left behind to ensure nothing would ever rise again on the planet," Marius suggested, trying to avoid the slime dripping from the walls. Bolt could only hope the suits would protect them against it. The thought of his wife kept him moving.

They came to a halt before the massive blast door.

"Something must've happened inside," Marius said. "Otherwise these things wouldn't have closed."

"Or someone had closed them on purpose," Bolt added.

"Indeed."

The photonic panel upon it operated on reserve power, dim and two–dimensional, on first glance inactive. Mind–linking to the grid, processing commands and replacing them with his own, Marius easily hacked the console. Knowing exactly what to do, he began to make quick work of overriding the lockdown.

Bolt stood beside Marius as the man worked, his mind spinning in anticipation, his body excreting sweat within the suit. The door groaned like some ancient, rusted gate found in the deep ocean – a hidden passage opened for the first time after centuries of slumber. The gate locked within the walls with a heavy thud, and revealed an abundance of movement within the bridge. The two men took careful steps inside, their feet munching below them. Everything bubbled or pulsed, grew or decayed, even the walls upon which all the growth festered appeared to bend or peel off in layers. The main deck had become a festering hall of disease, rot, and decay, a vomitorium. Dripping and hardening before their eyes were stalactites of filth, each hanging from the edges of the many levels and platforms that composed the upper layers. Fungus grew in hairy lumps, feeding upon the walls and floors. Flies, or what sounded like buzzing insects hugged the filth, while slugs and what appeared to be limbless salamanders squirmed everywhere, blindly looking and touching everything they came across. Unsavory smells reached the two men, even through the mouth–filters in their helmets. They halted for a moment, totally lost as how to handle such insipid and absolute infestation, unsure of even how it could happen so fast.

In the middle of the deck stood a horrendous mound of hardened puss, its shape molded into a headless mushroom–like protrusion. It gave of a bizarre, white–blue photoluminescence, engulfing the deck with its radiance. Standing around it were ten disfigured, humanoid creatures, each with large, half–exploded and bulging eyes that never blinked, they couldn't. Most of them were missing their lower jaws, or had them hang loosely off their chinbone. Their overgrown, bloated tongues hung limp from their mouths – a breeding ground for the insipid flies that flew around them like a cloak of plague. None of the creatures moved. They seemed to be frozen, brittle, their lanky limbs and sickly green skin overgrown with tumors and scar tissue, most only half–healed or in the process of bursting. A sound emanated from their mouths, a chant that came off more as a presence than a vibration in the air. Both of the men felt their legs wobble at the low pitch the figures held.

"What the f..." Marius breathed, unable to finish his own words.

"Get out," Bolt said, "close the doorway!"

They turned and hastily exited the chamber. Marius attempted to close the massive doors. He struggled at the panel for a while, until the gates finally began to obey. But shut they would not. The slime had already seeped into the openings upon which the gates slid, halting them midway as slugs fell into the opening in their mindless crawling. The two didn't wait to see if the gate would manage to close, they simply turned and ran.

***

Ia needed to get Dyekart back. The thought prevailed even through the sorrow. She still had hope, she still had the cloning chamber, and with it, she could, in her mind, still see him walk again. No matter what happens, she needed to get him back.

She climbed into a narrow access tube leading to the cloning chamber, and descended down the laddering to try and awaken the clones of the dead and imprint them with memories manually. What she didn't know, however, was just how monumental a task this would be, and that only Sol had the intellect required to operate the quantum computer and flood it with commands necessary for its operation. Ia would try, however, as most beings in desperation do. But as she climbed down and entered the chamber, gazing down at the spiraling sections of it, she found, instead of undisturbed pods, a shock–theater which almost made her let go of the laddering. All of the clones, to the last, had climbed out of their cells and were now wandering about. Stumbling in the half–darkness, they kept falling of the platforms, bumping into each other, or kept walking into walls as thought they couldn't make sense of the solidity of matter. The dim lighting obscured much of their reality, and all Ia could truly see were mindless meat–things, their slow movements and the shadows they drew the only indication of their infant–like, non–existent thoughts. The only possible explanation she could come up with was that the protocols which kept the clones sealed in stasis had somehow shattered in the crash. This made no sense to her, but as she hung from the rail, thinking and examining the ramification of this, with one hand grasping the iron, she couldn't bring herself to climb back up just yet. After a while, she began to try and find a reason to even go back up. But all she found in her thoughts were dead bodies, the dying, the mystery and the pain. Her home, the place she was born in, all of her reality was crumbling, caving in around her, decaying. She began to hear something above her, she didn't even look up. He's gone. The thought sucked the breath out of her. Truly he was gone now, the only friend she would die for, even thought she had never shown or told him this.

Ia didn't notice letting go of the railing. In that moment, she didn't care. But someone else did. Marius grabbed hold of her hand in the last possible moment. He pulled her up, she could hear him struggling, his teeth grinding with the effort.

"Dammit, girl, the hell you thinking!" he shouted.

He pulled her up, "I can't keep this up forever, grab hold of the laddering damn you, do it!"

"I–"

"Do it!"

The iron bars they clung to were just wide enough for two skinny persons to pass each other shoulder to shoulder. Climbing almost a hundred meters from the ground she felt dizzy, realizing what the hell she had nearly just done. How had she not noticed the madness of it before? Marius' voice, however, began to slowly bring back fragments of her mind, reining back her senses with each condescending word. It was his way, she knew, and his way was what she needed at that very moment. A stern verbal slap. It made her realize she wasn't alone in this. She didn't want to die. Why would anyone? I can get through this, she knew. Unaware of her sudden resolve, Marius didn't trust the apparently suicidal girl just yet, he felt his grip on her hand unrelenting.

"Climb up past me," he ordered, "go!"

"What are you doing here?" she asked, passing him as he pushed her up.

"I needed to see this place," Marius said. "Now I wish I hadn't."

"I'm glad you're here," she told him. "There's something I must... Dyekart...he's, he–"

"He's gone?" Marius questioned.

Ia snorted, she couldn't even bring herself to say it.

"Fuck!" he spat. "We need to get the hell out of here. And Sol?"

"We tried to save her, she—"

"God DAMN it!" Marius growled. "I'm open to suggestion here, any ideas what we should we do?"

"Round up the survivors," she said. "Get the hell off this ship."

"And do what? Where would we go? We can't just leave," Marius said..

"You saw what'll happen if we don't, we can't stay here," she said, "I saw the slime, it's gonna eat this ship whole."

"But what's in here is also out there," Marius pointed out. "Which leads one to assume we won't be any safer out there."

"The dark side," Ia added. "Perhaps whatever this contaminant is, it can only survive in the light, like a plant."

"It looked more like a fungus to me," Marius said. "And the damn mushrooms can grow any fucking where."

"You're right," she said. "But we have to try, besides, I think the dead here are what really gave it a kick. We should never have come here," Ia sighed.

"Then it's good we brought a God damn Sherlock with us," Marius added.

***

The ship had changed. Changed so much Bolt couldn't recognize it anymore. The walls themselves felt dead. Now more than ever, he wished he hadn't come here. He missed his wife, their life, he missed Max.

Every few minutes, he looked down at what looked more like a sheer drop surrounded by red walls than a tunnel leading to the cloning chamber. Just looking at it made Bolt's head whirl. He had little doubt that, had he gone down with Marius, he would have fallen into the abyss. Yet no sooner had he began to think Marius too succumbed to such a fate, Bolt began to hear voices streaming outward from the opening. The two sounds talked about what to do next, and what he heard didn't fill him with hope.

"Good," Marius said as soon as his helmet reared up from below, "you're still here."

"I don't dare to go anywhere in this place anymore. It's gone to hell," Bolt said.

"We need to get out of here," Marius grunted, pulling himself out with the aid of Bolt's hand. "We decided staying here is not an option. It's safe!" Marius yelled down into the hole, "Get up here!"

"I couldn't agree more," Bolt nodded. "Who's we? Who did you find down there?"

Ia climbed out of the shaft as Marius helped her to her feet. She rushed into Bolt's arms as soon as she saw him, sobbing into his shoulder. "You're alive!" she gasped. "Thank the Gods for that suit!"

"Gods had nothing to do with it, girl," Marius retorted. "I made those suits, remember?"

Despite everything, she managed a smile.

"Where'd you get yours, Ia?" Bolt asked her.

"I took as many as I could carry with me," she said. "Dyekart always used to keep them on him just in case."

"Used to?" Bolt asked.

CHAPTER 28

I Am All Things

She was in no rush. He would come to her, she knew. Looking down from atop the Grey Spire, Taryn thought of little, but saw all. She saw the confused state in which the streets below her had suddenly found themselves in. Above her, material slowly slid down the slopes of the dome, scraping and whining as it went. There were gaps in the field above her now, reveling a halo in the sky where the station exploded. The sight came with amazing clarity, as though a layer of ozone had torn away in the blast, and the particles of oxygen could no longer obfuscate the vision.

She looked down, taking in the confusion and chaos with no emotion, the winds whistling outside the glass–wall before her. The night's darkness was made purple within the bubble, the shield. The office where she waited remained empty, but this was not where they would meet, she knew. She went even higher, ascending a stairway made of what looked like photo–luminescent marble. She ended up in a room with five figures seated upon thrones. Their combined placements made a rough circle. Their heads were hunched as if in thought, or perhaps asleep, she couldn't tell nor cared. They looked identical, bearded and un–kept, with white–knuckled hands grasping the edges of their thrones. Taryn looked closer, noticing their faces looked as if straining, their eyes moving inside closed eyelids, their lips mumbling words unheard. She found herself strangely fascinated. They reminded her of old kings who had gone insane in their thrones. This thought, however, perplexed her, it had been so long since she had thought of anything in terms of imagery or metaphor that even an image such as this, a simple connection in her mind, came as a surprise. Internally analyzing her own circuits, she came to realize her brain had begun to form a rough outline of her former consciousness. The longer she stayed separate from the machines which had made her slumber, the more of her own mind seemed to come back to her as thought it were a nebulous cloud trailing her. In fear of what it might mean, she shrunk away from it, took backward steps, unaware of even doing it. It took her a moment to notice someone else was already there. She wondered how she didn't see the shape before. The reality of the figure kept fading out of focus, and she found it hard to concentrate on it.

"How does it feel," it asked with a mellow, motherly voice, "to get your mind back?"

***

Zack was the only one who managed to escape. The colony on Europa seemed like the best place to hide, so that's where he went. Used his unique knowledge of portal technology, he orchestrated a workaround the dampening capabilities of the rampaging maniac decimating the station. The warden seemed to be projecting a kind of field which immediately had nullified any attempt to establish an active wormhole. Some kind of EMP shockwave perpetually expanding and contracting, circumfusing the station. But, for a brief moment, Zack had managed to canceled it out, to make the intrinsic field of reality upon which the portal needed to be opened simply ignore it. Urging the others to follow as quickly as they could, the wormhole cracked open, its raw, tenebrous power–expulsions nearly killing them in the process.

"Say behind me!" he yelled, urging them again to follow. None of them had the chance, the wormhole shut, cutting off the lower part of his left heel.

He found himself alone on the other side.

To his dismay, Zack found something had disturbed the workings of the portal, and before he stepped upon the plinth on top of the Grey–Tech tower, situated upon the frozen moon and groping at his severed, heat–seared leg, Zack found himself staring into the eye of a God. Unable to stand, resting on his side–thigh, he found himself before the deviant fortress. A massive head bent down, the sounds of it like grumblings on the surface of a sun. For a second Zack thought he might get crushed, instinctively shielding himself with one hand. But the giant stopped before him, its eye rippling and staring, so huge he could not see the ends of it. The intensity of its stare made him shake as though freezing, his heart smacking against his ear–walls. His body hairs stood up in the electrified air. The shadow–form was not endowed with a month, yet still Zack heard it speak.

"Hide it," it said, handing him an orb, a round, eye–looking metal sphere. It floated above his hand, bobbing gently. The object felt heavy as the being dropped it from its clawed hand – a hand whose reality, much like that of the being itself, constantly smoked with two–dimensional and static gas.

"What is it?"

"It is the cipher."

"To what? Why can't you keep it here? Where should I hide it?"

"You already know," the being said before the whole scene shifted, and Zack lay staring into the red eye of Jupiter.

***

The world had changed, and a distant sense told Max that not only his world has. He found it hard to concentrate inside the tunnel–vision of his senses. All of his sensations appeared to coalesce into a single perception that was neither sound, nor sight, nor smell. He perceived the word down to its very fundamentals, each morsel of the collective whole twisting endlessly in his mind, forming new patters within a rippling ocean of possibility. Colors intertwined as sounds traveled and misted the air around him. Max felt like he could touch them. His mind seemed slippery, as though it could wiggle away at any moment. He felt on the verge of discovering some elemental truth, but the words to conjure it up and the images that would make him understand would not come. Within his thought–patters, one question shone far more brilliant than any other. _I am going mad?_ He figured he was not, since a madman would probably not question such a thing. Or would he?

By the use of his will, Max and his group were able to pass below the massive archway of the Grey Tower undisturbed. His projected demands rippled out like a wave, outwards and all around him, a bubble infecting the minds it came in contact with, making them move aside. He saw pulses racing within the skulls around him, expanding in all directions within each synaptic matrix, performing miniature big bangs each and every nanosecond. For the first time, Max saw what his mind actually did. His will caused the bang to skip an expansion midway, disrupting the flow, and in that moment of cancelation, imprinted his own idea.

"Will we see him?" Leah suddenly asked him. "I always wanted to see him."

"We will," Max assured her.

"How do you know the Admin's even here?" Falk asked, a middle–aged man with the type of face you might expect in an astronaut, friendly and strangely frail–looking.

"I can see him, he's like vibrations that spread outwards, a nuclear explosion in the sky," Max assured them.

Moving in front of him, Leah stopped him for a moment. "We need to get that thing out of you," she said. "You do realize that, don't you?"

"Not before I find him," he said. "I'm not sure we can undo what has been done anymore."

"We'll find a way," she assured him. "There's always a way."

"Honestly I don't think he should," Bruno said, gazing around him. Unaware of the group that moved invisible in their midst, the people around looked up at the sundering dome, talked amongst themselves, or eyed the events about them in open–faced wonder, their expressions pale. "Look what he can do, all of these people here have no idea we're even here. I doubted him before, I admit, but, honestly, I've always wished I could do something like this."

"Who knows what's actually going on in his head," Leah said. "He needs to be cautious with this. The brain is a like a sea of vibration, disturb it and you run the risk of it never settling again."

"Don't worry about me, I'll be fine, I think..." Max said. "Anyone have any family on the planet? I'm guessing you all do. You should go to them, who knows what other chunks have landed and where, I can't ask you to come with me."

"I want to see Him," Falk said, and both Leah and Bruno agreed, Mia's hair waved as she nodded.

"Why?" Max asked. "Chances are you won't remember him afterwards."

"That's quite inconsequential," Falk said matter–of–factly. "Wouldn't we all like to see a living God?"

"What if he hates us?" Bruno chipped in.

"Then he's not really a God," Falk answered.

"As you wish," Max signed as they passed further below the tower's vast opening.

They walked through the cavernous lobby, the walls climbing upon themselves in his mind, the voices within splattering them with color, like paint thrown upon a canvas without heed for composition or artistic sense. Through the madness, the thought–haze, a quad of men approached the group. The four men appeared oblivious to his mind–projections.

"Turn back, citizen," one of them uttered, his mouth hidden behind the tall collar. The Warden's hands were long and slender, and they all stood tall, their backs arching backwards ever so slightly.

"I was wondering when you guys would come," Max smiled. "At least this way I don't have to look for you."

"There is nothing for you here, the truth is out there," the warden said, pointing with his hand outside.

"And who told you this, hmm?" Max asked.

"The source."

"And that's where I'm going. I want to hear it from Him." Max said, trying to ignore the four men, but they wouldn't move. Why are they even trying to stop me? Max remembered how one of them had turned, back in his apartment, how he halted when Max focused his thoughts upon him. He sought to do the same now.

***

Rob felt him before he saw him. The man in question had awoken a strange sensation within Robert's mind, a sense as though the entire world was under some massive hydraulic pressure, the center of which was this man, this black–haired and bearded man, an individual who everyone but the five of his followers around him seemed to ignore. They were all telling him something, advising perhaps.

Around him, the vast lobby stifled Rob's senses. It was packed full of people rushing about, most of them trying to get outside, to the site where something had penetrated a building and landed on a square behind it. The devastation was a source of wonder and talk amongst the population, but mostly dread – everyone wanted to see it for themselves. To see the source of their terror. Humans... Rob sighed in his head.

Brushing the shoulders of others and grazing their arms, Rob raced towards this man, towards the only man he didn't hear in his mind at all. A blank slate devoid of thought amidst the froth of intangible feelings and sensations. There was, however, a thing which Rob didn't hear, but sensed. A prevailing impression that the man was after something, and that the three individuals which stood in his way, bickering with him, were about to have a very bad day. One of the three opposing men, the one standing closes to the tranquil one, lifted a hand and suddenly, everyone around seemed to notice the one, as if a veil had been lifted before their eyes. The tranquil collapsed on his knees. The raised hand of the robotic, stiff–moving man seemingly brought great discomfort. The others tried to comfort him, a women got on her knees beside the tranquil, another began to yell in protest. Rob raced towards him, struggling through the crowd to even see him. Palms were raised to cover the eyes, as if the tranquil was trying to keep his eyes in. A sound like an electric discharge wobbled in the back of Rob's mind, a familiar buzz that sent his heart racing. Rob's hand squeezed around a piece of metal in his right hand, a tube of material with rounded edges that could be screwed between a doorframe, in fact that was what his father was going to use it for, "To get into shape" he had said. Rob, however, didn't even remember taking it. He could not recall why he would even do such a thing. He didn't know what could propel him towards such an act, or why he would chose to carry it around with him. It simply made sense that he should, as if a synchronicity of events had compelled him to do it, a feeling like the world suddenly felt right should he pick up the tube and take it with him. Racing towards the screaming man, he reached the edges of the crowd standing in a 'safe' circle ten meters about the screamer. Rob raised the iron shaft in both hands, and even as he brought it down, bending the arm of the warden with a heavy clang, he saw the tranquil remove his hands from his face. Eyes burst out as if the sockets themselves chose to vomit blood. Before the feet of the Warden, the eyes landed as slimy, blood–covered globs. The optical cords shone with strange luminescence.

Rob realized the warden must have used some kind of magnetic force on the implant, pushing it out from within to blind the tranquil one, but to what and he was unsure. Perhaps merely to blind him? It seemed reason enough. The act appalled him. Rob slammed the rod into the warden's face. Features bent, sparks flew, and the sound of metal upon metal rang inside his head, his hands. The iron vibrated, spreading the force of the hit through his palms and into his torso until Rob could not hold the thing anymore. He dropped it, his hands throbbing. He rubbed the aching palms and squeezed them together. Doing this, trying to expunge the pain, Rob was given no time to realize he got smacked over the face, back–handed by the same hand he had mangled, throwing him over the floor, unconscious.

***

Max fought through the pain. His sockets bleed, his hands, holding him up and spasming with discomfort, shook. Not only the sockets seemed to hurt, but his entire face, his head, he could see the pain leaping out of him, not just within the blood, but as a presence of agitated vibration, maiming the air black around him as though it were heavy. He could hear Leah next to him, saying something which came incoherent, rambling. Max wanted to close his eyelids, but even when so trying, he could feel the blood pooling behind them, he could smell it streaming through his sinuses and down his face. The pain made him cry, and that in turn made it even worse. The whole process lasted until something clicked inside his mind. It seemed to happen suddenly and with a ferocious strength Max could not deny. He saw his eyeballs, the froth of their organic matter, the mirage nature of them and how the two organs have lied to him all his life. They had lied about the nature of reality, they lied about the illusion of matter, they had even lied about such a seemly obvious thing as the air being invisible. He wanted this to happen differently, in his meditations perhaps, yet suddenly, he was enlightened. A calmness passed through him, and the pain became less biting. Max almost laughed at it all. At the beings around him and their obsessions, none of which were permanent or lasting. He even laughed at their thoughts which they believed, like the air around them, were invisible, perhaps even non–existent outside of their skulls. He could see them think, the golden lines of their thoughts spiraling out of them, affecting others, melding into the collective ocean of unconscious. _When will they wake up?_ Perhaps like him, they would need a profound shock equal to their own eyes being pulled out of their sockets. Max didn't like the idea. Having experienced that very shock, he realized he would need to find a way to do it.

"Your path ends here, citizen," the Warden said, the voice of him like cement melding Max with reality.

"You're wrong," Max said. "My path has just begun." The faces of the three machines before him became patterns of light. The cogs within turned and twisted, with each contraption visible and framed by silver expressions of photonic movement. Layers of inner material constantly folded and enfolded within this new perceived reality. The lights following a rhythmic pulse, loops wherein the metal itself and the silver outlines of it pulsed outwards and reformed into nothing, then pulsed again. Max willed one of the cogs to stop and stood up. The people around him saw him and his group disappear before their eyes, yet, as usual, thought nothing of it. Nor did they think of the fact that they were walking around a ten meter area which appeared empty, empty but the white tiles and the light bouncing of them.

"Intriguing," Max said under his breath. "Metal minds, who would have thought," he said to his assailant.

The Wardens stopped like frozen. They never moved again.

"Max! You okay?" Leah touched his hand. He smiled at the absurdity of her question. "What... Why are you smiling?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said. "I just... your face just makes me smile," Max said, smiling again as she blushed and the air visually heated around her face.

Max walked to the unconscious Rob, picking him up, cradling him in his arms like a babe. The workings of the kid's mind fascinated him, and for what felt like a long while, Max simply observed the throbbing of it. Pathways formed within and light streamed upon them, dancing in Rob's head like wisps emerging out of nothingness then disappearing into themselves again, crawling over the synapses like ants within an antfarm. Slowly, Robert's eyes half–opened.

"Why are you here?" Rob asked.

"I made a choice."

"What choice? Why?"

"On a planet that increasingly feels like a prison, the only intelligent thought I could think of was to escape. Now I see I must change it."

"Are you a God?" Rob asked him.

The question made Max laugh.

"No."

"A saint?"

"No."

"Then what are you?"

"I am awake."

CHAPTER 29

The Universe Is Within

The walls bled. The sticky mucus was everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling, it ran down corridors and it mired about their feet. The dead lay embalmed within it, like insects in amber.

"The hell's up with this place?" Bolt asked Ia next to him, shaken, hoping for an answer. The group, now numbering in a few hundred behind them, trudging over the slime, each careful in their movements over the visually slippery, yet sticky substance.

"Dyekart told me once," Ia said. "That this ship isn't real. I never really understood what he meant. But I think Sol kept it all together. Supposedly this vessel isn't just a thing of material, but her consciousness given form, expanding around us like a brain. And now that she's gone... now... it's decaying, like her body, like the bodies about us, putrid and–"

"That's still doesn't explain what we saw on the bridge," Marius said. "What could make those things walk, what could manifest the strange animals?"

"It's her brain," said Ia. "Her consciousness is no more. Perhaps in its departure, it manifested in forms that she may have thought about when she could still think of how the decay of it might look like."

"Seriously?" Marius asked.

"Well, I don't know," Ia said. "Look around you, what other explanation fits it more?"

"Whatever the case, we need to send a distress signal," Marius advised. "Then fly out of here."

"Fly?" Bolt asked.

"In a sense," Marius nodded. "There're still vehicles that we can use, in the upper hangar, we used them for planetary explorations and whatnot. If the mag–locks held in the crash and the machines didn't get thrust about, we could use them. Altho how we'll get them out here is quite another matter."

"Do we have weapons? Explosives?" Bolt asked.

"Some," Marius nodded.

"Then we'll blast our way out. Where can we send a signal?"

"The only one who could do it was Sol," Marius said. "Now that she's gone, the only other way is on the bridge itself, the main console keeps reserve power for this no matter what happens, hopefully the 'no matter what' applies to this situation as well."

"I'll got send the beacon then," Bolt said. "The rest of you go to the hangar and wait for me there, blast open to the other side."

"You'll go alone?" Ia asked. "Why?"

"None of you need to endanger yourself over this," Bolt said. He knew it sounded stupid, but also knew he needed privacy for what he was planning to do. "I'll do it, don't worry."

"As you say," Marius frowned.

***

The main bridge was just as he and Marius had left it. The gate had remained stuck and the floors crawled with creatures who may have considered the slime they rolled in as a kind of bliss. The strange and half–decayed beings surrounding the central puss–mound ignored Bolt completely, stuck in their apparent reverence for the pile of filth and its light. Bolt moved closer, futilely careful not to step on any of the slugs. The task proved impossible and they squashed under his feet.

Lights within the main bridge were covered by slime, and the only illumination provided was by the growth in the middle. The blue bioluminescence seemed to flicker almost unnoticeably within the puss, as though the mound was breathing light. Bolt's feet adopted an even quieter style of movement as he approached the men standing around the heap. Upon looking at them, he realized he really could not tell whether he was looking at a man or a woman. They were all naked. Some, however, still had bits of nano–fabric hanging off their shoulders or around their necks like decaying necklaces. Their sexual organs were not there. Their stomachs hung, bloated, all of them had flaps of skin where their breasts should be. The things were even more discussing up close. Bolt could smell them too, they rank like the corpse of an animal. None of them acknowledged him as he went past. Bolt wondered if they were even aware of anything at all. Their throats continued to emit an eerie sound, an annoying siren on the edge of hearing. By this he figured something must still reside in those skulls. Something more than just the appreciation for the light in which they basked. He didn't stick around to try and find out what that might be.

He ascended the set of wide stairs leading to a podium where the central console was located. It too was covered in translucent filth, as thought someone had piled up a thick layer of yellow spider webs on top of it. A faint light managed to shine through. To some extent, the console was still active. Bolt wasn't as surprised by this now that he knew what the ship was, or had been. He reason that, having predicted what would happen should a disaster befall the vessel, Sol had most likely made a conscious effort to make the consoles with increased durability in mind. She had to postulate that the crew might want to use them. What perplexed him, however, was where the power came from. He realized a plasma core existed somewhere on the ship, an area he visited but once – one vast and throbbing with condensed power. To that extent, he was impressed it could still keep some of the important functions of the ship active.

Approaching the console, it immediately recognized him and opened a menu in his mind's eye. The image of it came incoherent, fuzzy. Bolt selected the option for a distress–call transmission, and checked the power levels still available. They would have to do for what he wanted. Bolt sent the distress pulse, then dialed a set of numbers. The small scale of the transmitted data, namely his voice and holographic image, reached out through Null and traveled at infinite speed. The mechanism of the console linked with his conscious intentions and projected them onto his wife's monitor – on the edge of his home galaxy.

"Yes?" She looked up from her newborn's face and into the hologram. Her eyes widened. "Akram? Oh my God, where are you!?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm sorry, Sara, I shouldn't have left you."

She moved closer to him and he could tell she was walking, the hologram of her appearing with a clarity surprising even to him. To an extent, and for a moment, his brain fooled him. It fooled him so utterly and completely, Bolt could have sworn she was there. He could smell her. Felt like he could touch her.

"I tried to understand," she said. "And I think I do, you'll come back though, won't you?"

"I must," he said.

"Yes, you do," she agreed, smiling, happy to see his face even when that face was a holographic image. "And look what I made," she grinned, holding out her baby as if it were a cake, presenting it to him. "Look what we made."

Bolt moved to her side as she cradled the babe in her arms again, he could see the wonder in its eyes. The amazement at the holographic lights dancing around it. It giggled, then made an 'o' with its mouth as Bolt moved a finger to try and brush it against its cheek. His heart sunk as the finger went through the image.

"Akram," his wife said in a half–whisper, and he knew what she'll say next. "What's wrong? I can tell something's not right over there."

"The ship, it's gone," he said bitterly. "Have you named him yet?"

"What!" Sara jumped. "How will you get back?" she asked, ignoring his other question.

"We'll find a way, I promise. There's nothing that can hold me here. I will chase you over the stars!"

"You hear that, Chase?" she said, looking down at the baby.

"That's how you'll name him?" Bolt asked, realizing the image had begun to lose its consistency, fizzling out of focus.

"So you don't forget. So you'll never forget," Sara said.

***

The first explosion they charged up tore through the ship in a tidal wave. None of them had been prepared for the shocks that rolled over what was left of the vessel. Most of the people were thrown of their feet, reopening wounds or simply knocked unconscious. The slime wobbled under their feet, dripping from the ceiling at an increased, agitated rate.

They had managed to direct the explosion directly into the wall. One had been enough to punch a hole through the outer layers. Through those layers, however, it spread a concussive reverberation which shook everything and everyone. The inner–lights of the walls went out, returning moments after at an slither luminosity, a luminosity which could hardly still be said to exist at all.

The explosion shredded its way to the outside, and the warm air instantly spread into the station. Light shone through the opening, and after almost an hour of preparations, they were ready to take off with a total of nine, almost train–sized land–rovers.

"It's good we have actual scientists on board," Marius joked. "Otherwise I suspect this might have gone very badly for us."

"I didn't find the outcome particularly good," Dan said, a fat man of quick laughter and fool's tricks, standing in the midst of people looking anxious and confused, defeated almost. Marius was certain the blubber was what had saved him in the crash. Dan didn't find much to laugh about now, however, he held his lower back as he stood back up and looked at Ia. "This couldn't have been predicted? The shocks?"

"Not to this extent, no," she answered. "None of us knew the current viscosity, or should I say solidity of the outer layers."

"I guess now we know what a piece of crap feels like inside a farting ass," Dan laughed. He was the only one.

CHAPTER 30

Into The Sun

The world below them was broken. The tectonic plates had been transmuted into a singular plane of crater–covered landscape. Huge cracks in the world reached to the other side it seemed, and as the gravitational forces worked to rebind what had been torn apart, the world constantly rattled, the enormous moon–sized chunks crashing and grinding against each other. Sounds of earth–thunder were constant. Bolt heard them even through the thick hull–plating of the rovers. An impression as though he were in a tunnel below a train station where all of its trains were released at the same time, each of them infinitely long and always moving, prevailed in his mind. Every survivor held tightly against the constant shaking of the elongated rover.

They navigated over the tops of the continental–sized craters, always fearful of cracks which from a distance appeared minute, but up close looked like they reached to the very core of the planet. In places of increased subterranean activity, magma oozed out as two plates were squeezed together, or shot out in the distance, spitting high into the ash–rich air.

Bolt, as well as the rest of them, knew where they needed to be. Where they needed to go. One object, over the far horizon, a sole familiarity on an alien world, was what they followed. What they raced towards. It was their goal, even though none of them had a clue of what it might actually be. The objects were two ribbons of light, pillars even, rays of golden energy, thick and moving, flowing like a sky–river and forming half a figure eight, its upper half lost in the churning skies.

Upon coming closer, the size of the lights only grew, and Bolt began to notice a multitude of smaller energy ripples and waves permeating outward and away in vectors of spectacularly spiraling flames. He began to see the source of the energy within a few hours of speeding over the wasteland. A dark and hollow, teardrop–shaped structure sat in the middle, made out of similarly light–fashioned ribbons of solid material. The lines of the structure twisted and turned on each other, forming a cage, like skeletal remains of a construction that might have once been solid, tear–shaped. Its upper tips reached out and away, each ending in a spike disappearing into the light. It wasn't until they moved closer that Bolt realized just how massive the construction was.

After reaching a certain height, the pillars of light became more as one in their vastness, growing out of the central light, shifting contently as if alive and imbued with purpose. Something else waited inside the tear–drop structure.

A silence of the grave took over everyone, the display of awesome brilliance and its unknown purpose leaving them speechless. They had finally gotten what they searched for – a sign of superior life on an alien world. At length, and quite unexpectedly, Meridia, a scientist and genius–mathematician, one who calculated exactly how much explosive they would need to puncture through the confides of the ship, doing it all in her head, spoke. Her tone told of excitement, barely heard over the sounds of constant humming around them, increasing as they neared the great edifice of light.

"Anyone else feel like their lives had been a constant struggle to get to this very place?"

Only a few spoke, only a few even heard her. But those who did, agreed. Bolt kept silent, he couldn't look away from the light. Its warmness splashed upon his face, like that of the early–morning sun.

Suddenly, in between them and the golden spire, the sky grew restless, foreboding. Sparks which looked small over the distance but were in fact several kilometers in length spread like roots over the air. Monstrous sounds of rending iron – as if the sky itself were vomiting – screamed through the air and shook the air. Whatever was happening, the sky resisted it, becoming even thicker where the center of the phenomena appeared to be. Blasts of red and blue–colored nebulosity erupted within the storm. Webs of lightning strikes lunged outward into the surrounding atmosphere. Within the cloudcover, lights flashed, explosions seemed to be taking place within the hidden reaches of the haze. The first segments of the atmosphere began to break apart, revealing behind them a solid mass which slowly grew and spread until it burst out from the storm with the supremacy of a vast structure rising from an ocean in the sky. The more of it emerged from the clouds, the more it looked like a colossal city growing, or rather expelling itself from beyond the heavens. A giant cog nested in the middle of the ship's belly. A crudely carved eye had been worked into the metal in a fashion portraying the duality of half machine half flesh of the Transhuman. The quad engines roared below it, their blinding power keeping the vessel afloat as it descended down on top of their heads.

"Holy shit!" Dan shouted, realizing the monstrosity was about to crush them.

"Speed up damn it!" Bolt urged Marius, who was driving the rover–train.

"We're already at maximum velocity!" Marius shouted back, looking up the frontal view with some concern.

Dust and particles of debris long since turned to ash billowed around them within an ever–increasing twister, like a reminder that they too will soon be transformed into the same specks of insubstantiality. Ahead of them, their goal grew wider and larger, the structure of unimaginable power and light. The focus in Bolt's thoughts was a vision of an eye of the world, cackling over their imminent demise.

The sudden surge of survival instinct encoded into every fiber of his genetic code felt overpowering, sweat poured down Bolt's face, misting his visor. So close was the ship above them now, Bolt could almost feel it above his head, its engines scorched the earth around them. He became unsure if the interior too had heated up, or if his racing heart had done it. The dust walled around them, and as the ship touched down, three of the trains were crushed, the rest thrown into the air by the resulting air–pressure and thrust into the soil ahead.

They were thrown about, the suits managing to save most of their necks. "Bloody idiots," Ia spat, panting and half–conscious, her helmet muffling her voice. "Of all the places to land on this forsaken planet..."

Dan stood up, holding his lower back again, whining, "At least now we know how–"

"Don't," Meridia said, "just don't."

"Everyone in one piece?" Bolt asked, standing up himself.

No one did any excessive yelling, shouting, or moaning in pain, so he guessed most got off with a few more bruises. Some lay unconscious. It came as somewhat as a surprise considering the whole set of rover–trains rolled over like a log tossed downhill.

In its thrashing, the train had landed on its side, and the view outside the ports allowed them to see the ship they had just dodged.

"Is it ours?" Dan asked.

"The design looks like something we would make," Ia nodded.

"They must've picked up on the same distress pulse we did," Marius added.

"This can't be a coincidence," Meridia pointed out. "What are the chances that a ship would show up exactly when we needed it?"

"I'd say the chances are pretty slim," Dan said.

"Slim?" Meridia snorted, her face cringing as if Dan had said something even worse that what he usually does. "Imagine the wide ocean, then imagine a donut floating on it, then also imagine a turtle that comes up every thousand years to take a breath, its head just happening to poke through the said donut. Even then I don't think you'll be close to the amount of coincidentally this would require."

"A synchronicity," Bolt said.

"You're saying we somehow willed this ship to come?" Ia asked.

"How would they know when needed to come?" Dan added.

"Consciousness is indeed a strange thing, isn't it?" Bolt nodded. "If you believe in the model that it permeates all of space and existence, and that it is in fact the creative force behind all matter, and if you consider time as a non–leaner thing, then we could have sent our distress from the future, and they have unconsciously picked it up."

"That's a stretch if I ever heard one," Meridia said, almost laughing.

"I think a simpler explanation can do" Ia said, the people around her jostling for position near the widows. "They simply followed the distress signal like we did. If you consider the fact they nearly crushed us, then I bet they don't even know we're here."

"Hopefully they're headed to the pillars," said Marius. "We have to get out of here. And I know I'm not the only wondering what the in the hell could be making those lights..."

"I think all of us are," Bolt nodded.

"Good," Marius said. "Then let's go, shall we?"

One by one, they climbed out of the rower–train after negotiating the side doors open.

"Anyone else puzzling over the fact humanity seems to have more than one ship out there? That there are others roaming the galaxy?" Ia asked no one in particular as she climbed up, with Bolt helping her down. The mood of everyone was sour, and none eparticularly wished to answer her.

"Was just about the say the same thing," Marius said. "Seems we've been traveling the stars in droves."

"Unaware of one another," Ia added.

The remark made them all silent.

The skies outside were dark. Ahead of them the pillars of light drowned out even the sky. There were no clouds this near the pillars, however, and the air stood windless. The earth beneath their feet shook, but those tremblings too were diminished. Still, deep beneath them, the crust growled as though it were hungry. They didn't wait for whoever had came to crawl out of the ship, they simply walked, and the lights grew...

They walked for hours, until, hungry and exhausted, the gold began to envelop them. Swimming inside the color Bolt could see brilliant plumes of white, lines racing outward and inward, flickering in and out of existence, reaching into his mind, implanting feelings of comfort, but also fear. The fear however, manifested in question. Questions of what they'll find once they reach the center of it all. What they'll find and of what'll happen when they do. What could happen? What could possibly await them? He tried to settle his mind, to think of Sara and their baby, but none that helped. The dream of unknown proved itself as the prevailing force. He looked behind him, amazed by the fact that so many people could be so silent. Each looked about themselves, eyes staring, mouths gaping behind the helmet–grills. They continued to walk. And it was like walking into a sun.

CHAPTER 31

"Enlightenment Must Come Slowly, Otherwise It Would Overwhelm."

Max followed the cat. Through the breathing corridors, through spaces that seemed to expand and contract at the same time, into lifts taking him and his group higher and higher into the upper strata of the spire. He had come to know the cat as illusionary. He accepted it, although he didn't like it. It made him wonder what else he was imagining.

The cat itself remained the sole thing whose image never wavered. It remained constant, superimposed on the surfaces which throbbed and flickered with energies. Sometimes, while sitting at a juncture or before the next mag–lift, waiting for him, it would turn, revealing its single, unblinking eye. It sent shivers down Max's spine. Sometimes its face seemed to possess a strange anthropomorphic quality. It took a few of its turns, a few looks, for Max to recognize his own features in them.

The walls of the vast inner–corridors, the open areas of park and the walkways which wound around and above them, the people, all wore colors of pulsing madness. Ripples spread out of bodies and interacted with others, membranes of thoughts formed around individuals, expanding outward time and time again, radiant and self–contained, like the expulsions of the sun.

"This place is amazing," Leah said at one point. "I forgot just how huge it really is."

"You're not the only one," Mia agreed, her afro flailing as she nodded. "Did you guys realize that, if you look at this place from orbit, it's circumfuse is that of a small country?"

"Hah," Falk snorted, "you seem to forget we spent the last few years on the station looking at the Earth from orbit."

"Somehow feels so long ago now, doesn't it?" Leah asked contemplatively.

No one answered.

"What happened to the station? I mean I saw the explosion, but what caused it?" Rob asked, slugging along on the edge of the group.

"You don't want to know, kid," Bruno said.

"Obviously he does," Mia said. "Since he just asked."

"Okay," Bruno said, "you tell him then."

"It exploded," Mia told Robert.

"Why?"

"As far as I can tell, it was some kind of an attack," Mia answered. "Don't ask me by who tho, I'm not sure. Perhaps some–"

"We're here," Max said and stopped in front of an unassuming door. It looked just like any other, yet the path leading to it had been complex and mazy. Clearly someone wanted this passage to be a difficult thing to get to. Very few even went so far up the spire. It felt uncomfortable to be on its upper tip. Max felt the structure sway. The feeling wasn't pervasive, but if one focused, it was possible to recognize the brain's struggle to maintain balance.

"Is he in there? The Admin?" Bruno said, walking next to Max, looking up and down the metal port.

"Yes," Max nodded. He willed the door open. The metal fell into the slid below it. A sense of retrocausality hit him. A sense of backward motion. He felt as though he could see his feet move before they did so, a shadow–self walking in less than lockstep with his own feet.

An inner light lived within the floor, a dull blue which left imprints of their boots in clear white. Time felt thick here. A shape stood in the middle of the empty room, waiting for them.

"I am here to take you up," Taryn said.

"You bitch!" Mia lurched, but not daring to move closer.

"You could've just come for us, you didn't have to blow up the station," Max told her.

"A necessity, as is this," she answered, and collapsed. A burst of tachyons ripped open Taryn's skull, although only Max could see the event, only he could recognize the instant nature of the traveling particles. Her thought–patterns merged with Max's and made a place for themselves inside his mind. His head snapped back like someone had hit him in the nose. He fell on his face. The two consciousness' merged, influencing one–another in a strange loop of causality and thought–dimensions invisible even to a microscope. Taryn's mind remained buried within him. Leah helped him back on his feet, and after what felt like a decade of confusion, Max began to hear a voice in his mind. He tried to see where it resided, where it nested in his skull, but found the act akin to trying to lick his own tongue, as by doing so you only feel your own effort to lick it.

>This is not for them,< Taryn spoke in his mind, >you alone will go to the most upper level.<

"No," Max said, intentionally speaking out loud. "They go with me, they've come this far, they deserve to know the truth."

A pause.

>Do not say I did not warn you.<

A golden stairway materialized in the middle of the room, coming to life from a waterfall of light particles that solidified into a gilded spiral which led them up. A palatable sense of dread streamed from all of those who followed, Rob collapsed.

>Do not,< Taryn said, in response to Max thinking about picking the kid up.

>He really wanted to see this,< Max thought.

>Unimportant,< Taryn whispered. >Walk.<

The upper room was dark, surrounded by a glass wall and a ceiling lost in shadow, the room was a source of constant emissions spreading in a wall of abstraction, as though a hydrogen explosion were taking place inside the room. Pulsing, dissipating in the atmosphere, pulsing, pulsing...

>Space–time itself is what makes the mind eternal, as it too is eternal.< Taryn said as she realized Max's perplexment over the nature of what he was seeing. >The mind is a connection to higher–dimensions of existence, yet the inability of energy to be subjugated to destruction – but instead only reversed to a different energetic state – is what makes the mind able to dream of possible futures, the past. It sees all. It knows all. But it does not not know how to consciously tap into these regions. To call the mind a collection of particles is purely a necessity brought forth by the use and limitations of language. You know all this.<

Max said nothing, he knew didn't need to. She could tell what he wanted to say before he even said it. Words became a hindrance.

Taryn burned inside his mind, his head began to throb, and he started to feel the early onset of a migraine. Dismissing the pain, blindly and without eyes, Max gazed upon the four individuals arranged into a circle, sitting upon thrones, hunched and ancient–looking. Their bodies appeared inactive, yet their minds were flames, blazing and shifting, each a nebula spreading outwards from a radiant center.

"Who are these?" Leah asked, closing the distance between her and the motionless men. Max too moved closer. Their faces reminded him of someone, and it was only when he leaned closer, that a memory awoke in him and shook him to the core.

He remembered the time he killed his own father.

***

Seawater reached to his knees. Clear in the early morning, it raveled pebbles and fish hiding below rocks, even an occasional crab, sidestepping in the low–tide, searching for things to devour. The sky was clear, seagulls yelled and dived into the ocean ahead, or relaxed upon the water. He felt happy.

The Mediterranean air began to blow, awaking the early–morning waters. His father's voice suddenly made him stiffen as he shouted, framed by the main doorway to the large stone villa upon the hill behind Max.

"Get in here! You have to study," his father demanded.

It made him angry. He couldn't understand why he needed to comprehend everything, know everything. He wished to simply play, to swim and be free. The voice came back.

"Well?"

"I'm coming!" Max shouted back.

It was the first time something else awoke within him. Anger seemed to fuel it, anger and a feeling he couldn't quite place. Despite this... anger, Max turned and went up the slope, the warm rocks only further serving to awaken his desire to stay outside, to bask in the beauty of the world. He wanted to cast out the feelings he felt. He loved his father, even if sometimes he wished he wasn't there. Despite the effort, each step towards the villa managed to make him angrier.

"You should have told me you woke up, we could have gotten an early start," his father said, enthusiastically.

"Why? I don't wanna," Max whined. "Let's go take the boat, you said we'll go fishing."

"Soon, don't you want to continue our studies? String theory isn't going to help you later if you don't understand it."

"But why me? Why do I have to understand it?"

"You were made for this," his father claimed.

That was what had always aggravated Max the most. The way he would say he was 'made', the word always come out of the man's lips so matter–of–factly. It always reminded Max his father wasn't really his father. He was just some man, bending him to his will, controlling him. Suddenly he didn't care that all this, all the studying and learning was, as his father said, 'for your own good', a flash of hate rolled through him.

>Do it,< a voice hissed within him. >Destroy him.<

His consciousness shifted. Max raised his finger, pointed it at the man's forehead. A flash of shock rolled past the man's face as he realized what Max was doing, what he was about to do. His fathered managed a shout. A single syllable of objection, before he burst apart, dissipating into the wind as though he had never existed.

***

The revelation brought him to his knees. He sobbed into his hands, then heard a voice, a female voice, lacking even a shred of empathy. "Are you quite done?" it asked him.

He looked up. The people around him stood frozen, their eyelids moving franticly, wide with terror. Leah's hand stood inches from where she tried to touch one of the men sitting upon their thrones.

"You're him aren't you? You're the one I've been searching, the Admin."

"Don't be stupid, boy," the female said. "It comes as no surprise you still don't understand anything. Perhaps it's even better that way."

In flashes of recollection, he recognized the voice. She never liked my name, he realized.

"Of course I didn't," the woman said, reading his thoughts.

"Why?"

"It portrays none of the greatness for which your mind was forged. It is so... terrestrial."

Despite what he had just heard, despite who this woman was, only one thing remained in his heart. He had to bring them back.

"Which one of these is the Admin? Is it him?" Max asked, moving closer to the man which looked the most worn out, the oldest.

"It's you. It's always been you."

***

The promise of what they would find in the center of the energetic ejections drove them. It propelled their feet, almost made them run despite their exhaustion and thirst. No one spoke.

Eyes remained wide. They were like children captivated by things they didn't understand but wanted to with all their being.

Warm, welcoming light enveloped them from all directions, producing sounds that passed through their minds in soothing patterns of pressure changes.

They walked below what, from a distance, looked like metal, but now resembled impossibly dark glass which soaked in illumination like a sponge might water.

Every part of the ribbed, mountainous structure stood kilometers in height and width, the passages that led into the inner workings of it equally far apart, if not more. From so close, Bolt could no longer tell where the two pillars of light separated, he was unable to see where they split in two above him. Everything gleamed in an endless spire of speeding particles. Some of them shone with a silver glow, others orange, yet all were twisting and dancing around them, all of them over a backdrop of the most brilliant gold Bolt had ever seen.

The perception of time fled from him at some point and Bolt could not when exactly it happened. He figured it had been a gradual process that had accelerated with their approach. Suspicions of what they might find ran high, all of them had their own ideas, yet none voiced them. The awe of the magnificence robbed them of words. Bolt knew they would never see anything like it again.

And then Bolt saw it, a throne of gold outshining everything else, even when such a thing seemed impossible. Whips of white lashed out around it, and while they still remained far enough not to see it with clearly, Bolt knew who sat there. He thought perhaps he knew all along. His eyes struggled to penetrate the brightness. Slowly, he began to recognize a silhouette of a living, breathing, immobile figure. They neared the silent God. The golden shape had its head hunched down as if asleep – or in deep thought. Bolt's heart pounded in his chest, his every nerve pulsed and the significance of the unfolding event dried up his mouth, his teeth felt hot. He could see the movements of hundreds around him stiffen and come to a halt.

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? Where? 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.<
