by B C Woodruff
Looking Back: Who I was – and What I Wasn’t
Sidestory: The English Door – Pimm’s Definition Character Profile: The Neuronaut – Capital J.
Character Profile: The Owner – Pimm
Character Profile: The Violent Lady – Gae
Traveling Oddities: My Other City – Oh, How it Shimmers
Addiction: The Boon – The Bane Insider: I Met a Lightblue Dick – The Tetranne Where Are We: What... What the FUCK!
Location: The Spiral City – Reddal
Flashforward: Philosophy – The Plan
Flashforward: The Escape – Up Shit’s Creek
Returned: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Nothing: The Dead Circle – What I Found There
Clarification: Timeline – Where I Was and How I Got Here
The Near-Present: Standing Out – She’s Not Alone
“What am I looking at here?” I asked him. “What the FUCK am I looking at?”
“May I ask you a question, Nobody?” I nodded. Why not?
“When I spoke of the club that I was part of in University, did it not strike you as… familiar?” He turned to the others. “How about you?”
I had an inkling, but and Lisa and Richard were still hung over.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Are you saying that they are connected?” I asked.
“They are.”
Being so close to an answer had never made me this angry before. “How?”
“To find people. To discover those among us that are incapable of living in the world as it is and want to believe in the promise of something better. Something more...” He put out one cigarette and started another. “They are, for lack of a better term, training camps. They are used to cultivate agents with the capacity to bring about great change and either put them to work creating their world, or remove them from circulation.”
“Then what?”
He was smiling. “That depends on whether they like what they see.”
“It’s too much.” Richard rubbed his face in his hands. “It’s too fucking much.”
“I know what you’re capable of, Nobody. They would have come for you eventually. But after the bleed, well, that must have put you on their radar early, must have made them nervous. Our… systems were breached. Somehow.” Arata picked up a sheet he had taken from the pile earlier. “I think it was this. I think it was the place you visited. The Tetranne. We’ve never encountered someone who has returned through one of the Dolmen Gates.”
Dolmen? I thought. I must have mispronounced it to LightBlue.
Arata handed the sheet to me.
It was different from the first. Analysed. Collected. Informative.
I looked at who signed the order.
“Is this right?” He nodded.
“Precedent. Not President?”
He nodded again. “As in those who set the precedents. They are the guiding forces for change, and for social and political progress.
They created the ACC, and the ACC creates their new world.”
“But… Pimm?”
“Pimm?” Lisa spat as she spoke.
“You mean President Pimm?” Richard added. “That crazy owner of the club back home?”
“Apparently… uh… not so crazy?”
“I can’t tell you much more than that, really. It gets darker and goes deeper than you can even fathom.” Arata coughed. “But now that you know…” He coughed again. “Now that you know…” Blood dripped from his mouth. “Ah. I see.” He sat down.
“What’s wrong?”
“They know what we I done – what we have done.” Arata struggled to say. “They will be here soon.” He looked at us. “One of you has betrayed us…”
“They? Who the hell are they? And what do you mean by us?!” Lisa frantically searched the room for clues. “Who would betray us? We’ve been together the whole –” She stopped, turned around, and knew.
“All this time?” she asked Richard.
“Not all of it. Pimm asked me to keep tabs on you after he discovered that you and this guy had a little fling. I didn’t really think we would get back together, butr…” He began to walking away, heading towards the nearest exit, but I cut him off.
“Why would you do it? What could he possible give you?!” she screamed.
“I wish I could tell you, Lis. I wish you could see the world as he has made me see it. I’m so much more than I was when we left each other. I… know more than I ever believed was possible.” He waved his hands in the air. “It’s all a facade! It’s all an illusion… Gods be good, if you even knew a fraction of what was going on… if you even knew what… what’s going to happen to humanity, well, fuck, you’d beg me to kill you. No one who hasn’t passed the Trials should be allowed into that future. No one.”
He ran past me, pushing me aside with more strength than I could have imagined coming from such a small man. Our resident turncoat was just full of surprises. .
“Don’t!” I grabbed Lisa as she rushed after him.
“We have to get him! He’s–”
Lights exploded like grenades from the shoreline at the front of the temple, through the sheets of paper walls, through the opening where the moonlight had illuminated us.
It was everywhere – like the counterfeit daylight of a false star.
Footsteps, hurried and heavy, echoed from the other side.
“They’re here!” Arata’s words escaped with spurts of blood.
“What… What do we do?”
“Help me up. I know a way.” So we did and brought him to the water.
Warnings from a Light in the Sky – The Lie and the Promise
“A boat? I don’t think that will help us much,” Lisa said, but he insisted – and in the absence of any other options, we obeyed. The engine sputtered to life and launched forward just as we removed the rope from the dock.
Arata was fading, his face a cool shade of pearl, and yet, he seemed aware enough of us and where we were so we listened to him.
Nearly halfway across, he demanded we stop.
“Down,” he said.
Lisa didn’t say anything but I could read it on her face.
She felt it too.
“Is it… another Dolmen?” But Arata was silent, his breathing slow.
He had no time left.
We took each other in hand and lept off into the cold, dark water, following the pull into a swirling vortex, and just as I felt my lungs heave their last gasp of air and my eyes catch their last
glimpse of light…
Where We Go/Went: Eyes Open – See a New World
* * *
Some Time Later
I closed the binder. “That was the last time I saw them. Something happened in that lake, Precedent Pimm. To speak of what it was, I cannot say, and if you asked me to speculate I would be at a loss for words. If you hadn’t arrived we might have...” I stop just short of blaming them for ruining my cover. Everything else I’ve told them is the truth, but it probably won’t matter. I will likely be punished as a reminder to the others of the price we pay for our knowledge, power, and privileges.
I wait in silence.
No one says anything, although the look on their faces speaks of unanimous disappointment that we lost track of an unclaimed Lie and another Dolmen.
Three Inevitable Truths. Eight Shadowed Lies.
And Beyond Them All –
OOBSLOW
That’s what they always told us, right?
Now I wonder. What does that really mean? What is this OoNnEe and why have we been chasing after it for so long? We found a Lie a long time ago, and It (or She – or He) changed the way we looked at the world. Seeing behind the veil, even for a moment, gave us power.
But who can you trust when you work behind the scenes… but struggle to escape an absurdist play of your own? I wait in the dimly lit chamber, glaring eyes and grimaces my only company, until, without a word, the Heralds leave. Finally, even Precedent Pimm is
gone.
I’m alone and left to my thoughts.
Part of me hopes that, wherever my friends went – and however I betrayed them, they were definitely my friends – that they found a world beyond the shadows that drown our own.
B C WOODRUFF
Montréal-born Brian Woodruff is a writer and bibliophile with an appreciation for life, the universe and nearly everything.
IAN MORGENHEIM
A lifelong love of gaming and a stroke of baffling luck led writer/editor Ian Morgenheim a third of the way across the world. Things have only gotten better.
