by M F Sullivan
If she did not move, time would not pass. This, she knew as well as she knew that, on Earth, she was dying. Should she return to it, that body, she could not imagine what would happen. Her high-frequency consciousness floating around in wave form now would collapse into particle form on entering the vicinity of her brain’s fading electromagnetic field, and then, what? How would she perceive it? Was it possible to perceive at all if one’s eventual fate was simply to fade into the dirt like the rest of matter? Better, was a return to such a dying body even physically possible? Was the brain’s electromagnetic field what kept her consciousness in place?
Was her awareness—particularly her continued awareness now, in this place, in this moment—not, in and of itself, evidence of her permanent security?
“There is no such thing as death,” answered Saint Valentinian, behind her. Yet if she looked, she knew she would not see him. On he spoke. “Not from an eternal perspective. There is only the illusion of death. If you are aware enough to see that death is an illusion, you can never really die; and if you were never aware enough to see that death was an illusion, you were never really alive. Those unconscious individuals who have not crafted souls, whether by blood of Lazarus or any other means, cannot experience death in a way that matters.”
“That doesn’t make it right.” Dominia closed her eye as if to shut out the notion. “Every death matters. I’ve caused more deaths firsthand than anyone I’ve known or read about. That matters.”
“Death is more a dream than this dream-space.”
“Then something—someone—needs to wake those people from the tahgmahrs of their deaths.”
“Will you?”
Dominia opened her good eye, and the dark night of the Ergosphere lit with crisscrossing beams of information. To her death-opened mind, they represented every possible arrangement of physical information—in every color, too. Even colors the General had never seen before. As she touched a cerulean thread, the information represented once more changed. Now, to a vast collection of lights. She found she could, in a delirious way that she could not retain and yet did in a way beyond knowing, reach into these lights and absorb their content: books, albums, films, private journals, tattoos, blueprints, legal documents. The entire creative capacity of Earth represented in a swarm of potentiality. So many lights filled the darkness that they appeared less a collection of individual orbs and more a vast mist of will-o-wisps stretching through the Void.
“There is an infinite variety of ways to view the information of eternity,” the magician told her. The lights refolded themselves (for that was the only verb Dominia could use to describe a process so beyond description) and became a series of objects resembling crystals, all of them in some way interlocked with their neighbors. These revealed tangible data about every physical object, imparted to the General’s consciousness in a brush. For example, she laid her hand on Kronborg, and knew then not just the history of the building represented, but the history of all the pieces of wood and stone that built the building, and the history of their trees and quarries, and the genetic lineage of the seeds and sediment they once were, stretching far, far back into the dawn of time. All the builders who were involved in its making, all the coins that financed it and whence they came—
“This is incredible.” Dominia marveled, pulling her hand away, feeling herself falling too deeply into a well of information she sensed was of limitless length. Traveling far enough into any one single jewel could reveal the entire array. “Valentinian…is this God?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, other than to say, ‘If you can describe it with words—even True Words—it’s probably not God.’ People are always looking for God outside themselves. But ‘God’ is a word invented by Man, to distinguish a phenomenon Man needed distinguishing. Everybody has a different vision of what it means. Is consciousness God?”
The crystals around her collapsed into dust, and she saw fewer lights scattered about, but still a great many: each of infinite brightness, arranged in the dark like blinding stars. As she turned her head to find the one that she thought to glow the brightest, the General marveled to find it emanated from within her.
“I don’t think the question is one of God’s substance,” said Valentinian. “Even from this height, God is an unknowable force of nature by definition. At least, by my definition. What’s your definition of God, Dominia?”
Hearing her own name in that place sent a palpable ripple through whatever substance could be said to form her body; the external reminder firmed her spirit as once it had when she was lost. She closed her eye and said, “I don’t know. Somebody like you, I guess.”
“Woah. Thanks, buddy, but I have to worry about your standards.”
Chuckling, Dominia said, “I mean, you’re versed in all of this. You maybe even are responsible for this, on some level. It’s hard to tell with you.”
When she opened her eye and found him standing there, she expected it, and was not the least bothered. “Are you responsible for this, Valentinian?”
“Sort of. Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” Exhaling in a breath that was only theoretically necessary, the General asked, “Is this it, then?” She met Valentinian’s eyes. “Is it over? Am I dead?”
“With that attitude.”
“What can I do?”
“Anything other than ‘nothing’ is a good start. One advantage you’ve given yourself is taking zero steps. You remain suspended at the instant when death is imminent—when Cicero’s sword pierced your heart. Consciousness always leaves the body when the brain knows death is a foregone conclusion, and it perceives its flight in different ways depending on the persona’s level of awareness for these matters. For some people who aren’t going to experience their own death, or can’t, it engages in a sleight of hand to tuck them off to bed in a way they won’t mind so as to use the light of their consciousness again next time around. But for most, the veil tears in one way or another, and we experience the truth.”
“What about those people who don’t have a conscious light?” She thought, as she asked, of Cassandra. “Those who don’t even have souls to be bound to the Very Low Frequencies? Do they just disappear?” She imagined a confused soul taking a step beyond the moment of their death and leaving themselves irrevocably stranded in the mists of the Void, but then realized these soulless individuals had not even vessels with which to step.
The magician, unconcerned, emphasized, “You can perceive this information any way you want.”
Frowning, Dominia contemplated death. Throughout the course of her life, the General had carefully venerated the dead. The dead she made, and the dead she knew. She lost soldiers to the battlefield, friends to depression, and, as her human family aged, all artifacts of her humanity to Chronos. She had not been a praying woman until her final year, but she had been a respectful woman, and had kept in her mind a long list of names that the DIOX-I had offered to digitize for her while in her possession. This, perhaps, was what she expected to see when the information of the black hole resolved itself into a form representing the dead: some list, or the wide variety of floating names awash in the ocean of her dream about the Lady.
But that had been a nebulous pool of information that included potential deaths. It was more abstract than that which she sought now. The organization of the black hole’s information into the dead of her world, from her iteration of her reality, was a different and more specific request that yielded a different, far more startling result. Nothing but the Void, and the magician, standing before her as he had.
“Where did the information go?” she asked, even as she began to understand.
“Did you ever ask yourself what dark energy is? That force that hastens the expansion of the universe; that energy with a proposed scalar field called ‘quintessence’—it changes over time and is attractive or repulsive, depending on the ratio of its potential energy to its kinetic energy.”
Reaching into the darkness of that place�
�s night, the General marveled as he said, “The information stored in the black hole is only an abstraction of what we would consider physical objects. Unsouled people, for purposes of the Ergosphere’s categorization, are the same. The information and energy of these unilluminated beings cannot be physically destroyed any more than it can be abstractly destroyed. It only seems to be destroyed. In reality, it has been stored.”
“In the cloud,” observed the General wryly, which made the magician laugh. “Dark energy is really…”
“There are a lot of beings with psychic substance in the universe, and a lot of things that seem to die or get destroyed—including inorganic and non-sentient beings or objects. One of the reasons quintessence changes over time.”
“‘This quintessence of dust’?”
“Science, Shakespeare, and metaphysics have been involved in a torrid love triangle since long before Willie picked up The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony in 1604 CE and started going even heavier on the alchemy references.”
“But how can anybody distinguish one member of the dead from the other in a format like this?”
With the giggle of a goofy teenager, the magician shrugged. “I know, right? It’s not only like finding a needle in a haystack: it’s like finding a needle in a haystack that’s been covered in tar, and the needles and the haystack are also tar, and you might become tar if you spend too much time monkeying in it.”
“Okay—so what do I do?”
“Try praying,” said the man, winking again into nonexistence to leave the General, as usual, annoyed and alone. Of course, it was when the magician was at his most annoying that he was usually imparting a very important truth. This somehow made it all the more annoying.
But, it did make sense. When she was lost in the Void, her form exchanged for that of a tiger, the prayers of Miki led her back to herself. They reached her and she heard them—and, just now, when Valentinian used her name, the General felt a great many degrees more substantial. Was it not the desire of the dead, surely, to be remembered? Honored? Called out and spoken to? No wonder so many cultures practiced careful ancestor veneration. Even if, in the course of the physical universe, the expanding collection of unsouled personas separated from Earth were unable to hear the prayers of the living, in the black hole they would know.
What strange complications were inspired by eternity; in what strange circles it forced the mind to turn! But it made perfect sense to her now. Still in place, the General knelt, and bowed her head until it touched whatever could be said to form the ground. She had asked Farhad to teach her the proper posture for the prostration that Muslims called sujud one night when she could not sleep. After observing it in the quarter of the encampment’s men who practiced the faith, she found the position to be the only way for her to approach the godhead.
Now, in the hour of her death, she was glad she learned it. Here she was, less than nothing, asking for the world. Upon sorting her disordered head for prayers, she selected her long since memorized one for the dead on behalf of Saint Valentinian. There were several other she knew, actually, including one adapted from an old Catholic prayer for souls in purgatory, but they were too short.
Though the words to that Catholic one finally made sense to her! Purgatory made sense to her, now that she found herself here. And how many souls there were in purgatory—how many souls there must have been in purgatory! She remembered Dante’s travel through it guided by Virgil. Did the writer imagine the scale of the place? A place that, by definition, had to encompass the righteous pagans of tens of thousands of years’ worth of good people who, through lack of opportunity or lack of interest, did not cultivate their soul while on Earth? And what of hell, the VLF bands of the Void? There had been so many souls, such a great many. Who would pray for them all? Which of them, the lost, had hope to find themselves in this world where consciousness forever waxed and waned, where humanity eternally suppressed itself in the form of martyrdom or something—anything—else?
This notion struck Dominia so severely that she found she could not complete her third simple prayer, which had been generically said for all the souls of the dead. But now…well, now. After considering the vastness of the operation before her, and her position frozen on the cusp of death, the General said to herself: It’s a good thing I tried to memorize all those names.
She also said to herself: If I don’t have names, I have faces, and occasions.
And she also said to herself: I think I’m going to feel like I’ve been here forever.
But she also said to herself: All things can be accomplished by doing one portion at a time.
So, one portion at a time, one prayer at a time, one name at a time, the General Dominia di Mephitoli, former Governess of the United Front and the notorious Bitch of Europa, began to beg the forgiveness and freedom of the dead.
There were so many names. If she had given the DIOX-I permission to catalog them for her, its software would have crashed. The General had fought a thousand battles (okay, more like eight hundred, seven hundred and ninety-five…she’d rounded up) and usually killed no fewer than fifty men, herself. That was a staggering number of dead, and a staggering number of names; and she wasn’t sure that, forced to recount the list on Earth, she would have been able to remember them all. Indeed, as she herself had just considered, many names had been irretrievable on Earth due to time or severe destruction of dog tags and facial features—or, in some very awful cases, the mass destructions of cities and/or encamped individuals. But, in the Void, as she repeated the same short prayer with each iteration single-mindedly devoted to one person (often more than once per person, for she could never pray enough), the names blossomed without the least effort on memory’s part.
It was the other way around. Effort was required not to produce but to endure the memories arising with each name. Though on Earth thoughts of killing haunted her with increasing concern until her conversion to decency, here, memories of each death came upon her like an accusation made by the dead—or made by her against herself on their mute behalf. The more innocent the person, the more painful the memory. Working back from the officers killed on their escape from New Elsinore and the martyrs she’d allowed to die in the dim sum restaurant, she wasn’t off to a great start. By the time she got back to Tobias Akachi, she heard his chiding.
“Now you feel bad about killing me, eh? You did not seem to feel bad about it at the time. Nor did you feel bad about it at all during the last year of your life. Not until now, this very moment. You expect me to forgive you?”
Feeling obligated to respond as though he were really there before she continued on to her next prayer, she licked her lips and allotted, “Well, no.”
“Then what do you expect, General?”
What did she expect. What did she expect? “I expect you’d want to be some place better than this.” In the immediacy of that place, she re-experienced the surprise of seeing Akachi’s big smile in the crowded market square. “Someplace that’s not just miserable death, floating around in the vacuum of space with only your memories of the end.”
“What do you actually want from me, General,” asked the spirit, or Dominia’s memory of Akachi, or something that borrowed his voice. “If it is not forgiveness that you want, why bother to feel guilt over all these deaths?”
That was a good question, in a way, although it oversimplified the emotion of guilt into an option. In the General’s opinion, it was the furthest thing from. Guilt was like pain; it was not a bad thing in and of itself, but it was a sign of something wrong. Both guilt and pain seemed to thrill the masochist and antagonize the sadist. She did not dwell in guilt because she wanted to, or because she expected forgiveness. After all, what would she do with it if she had it? What would the forgiveness of her victims matter if she had yet to forgive herself?
“I guess I need help,” she decided. “I’m appealing to you, Tobias, because I need help, and I know that you do, too. Neither of us liked the other in life, but it doesn’t have
to be that way here. Nothing matters anymore.”
The spirit gave no answer. She went on, emboldened by his silence. “I don’t want you to forgive me—but if you would help me pray, maybe that could help us both. You’re a Christian man, right? You can help me call out the dead. People I don’t know. Since you’re here, you have your own guilt, too. Might make you feel better, right?”
“And you think my dead will want to hear from me any more than your dead want to hear from you?” Tobias’s voice was now so clear and direct that he must have stood before her. She did not lift her head to look.
“Of course they won’t want to hear from you. You did something to them that you need to pray about.”
After a few seconds’ silence, the dead dentist scoffed, and his footsteps echoed around the General until he found a place to kneel behind her. “If there is one thing I do not like, it is a martyr who is closer to God than I am.”
The softly smiling General restrained her desire to tease him for the wording of his comment and resumed her prayers by throwing out one for the dead tulpa. (Not too many, though.) Name by name, falling out of the rough chronology and instead allowing them to emerge as they would in her mind, the General prayed for the souls of the dead. The lost dead, the historical dead, the influential dead. All those many martyr saints depicted in paintings, real and false. All those who had died by her Father’s hand before she was ever born. But, most of all, she prayed for her dead. In the distance, their lights bloomed awake in acknowledgment. How was it she could even know so many names? They were incredible to her, these prayers pouring out at a rapid clip. The most recent ones felt just as raw as the oldest ones: those first kills on battlefields long since rendered simple farms and normal cities, as safe and happy as any others.
