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
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