Atlas

by Nicholas Gagnier

  I groan at this mundane orientation. My career as an FBI agent relied on pinpointing pertinent information within a mound of it. This being is not briefing, but providing lengthy exposition to things beyond my understanding over concrete answers.

  “So what do I call you?” I ask, steering the conversation to something more personal. “If someone designed you, they must have given you a name, no?”

  “I was given no such thing. I was designed to be an infinite presence, and prime residents of Atlas for entry. But supposing this attempt to establish a relationship is based on human principles, you may refer to me as the Avatar.”

  “So I’m not stuck here?” Enticing as lopsided squares of minimal exposure are, I have no desire to be locked in this room.

  The Avatar pauses.

  “That is correct. Every organic lifeform is equipped with a unique genetic sequence, or identifier. These sequences are composed of billions of numbers. Some are enshrined, and cannot be changed; others are variable and subject to environmental factors.”

  “What does that have to do with Atlas?”

  “When combined and taken into account, these factors all determine the individual’s path after death. For as many as Atlas can hold, it cannot hold all. Thus, solutions were taken long ago to prevent bottlenecking by dispersing souls to different realms.”

  “Like the Shroud?” I ask, invoking the name of Tim’s world. The man who calls himself Death showed it to me, having spoken of it for a long time. The conjuration of an emptied Manhattan is fresh in my mind, though it likely has little bearing on the bigger picture.

  “The Shroud was designed as a stopgap between life on Earth and Atlas, to protect the supreme realm from nefarious or troubled souls who might present a threat to its safety. It is mostly self-contained, and poses little threat to either Atlas or Earth.”

  “So…that genetic sequence thing. Does that mean I was supposed to come here to begin with?”

  “Negative,” the Avatar replies. “You have been summoned by the Grand Council. Its subpoena supersedes your genetic markers, which would place you in the Shroud.”

  Where all the nefarious and troubled souls go. Of course. Almost convinced I was not a monster, the Avatar’s nonchalant revelation is a point against me, placing me in a world of them.

  I run with the wild things.

  “Summoned for what?”

  “You will need to speak with Maester Siskett for that. I am not privy to the Council’s wishes.”

  “Maester Siskett?”

  “Yes. I believe you two have already met. This concludes the Atlas orientation.”

  “Wait! I have other questions!”

  The being’s bass fades. I call out to the Avatar— there are so many things I want to know, and it has most, if not all of the answers. Its silence refuses to affirm or deny whether I’m a monster, other than revealing I was meant to walk among them forever.

  What changed?

  The room around me begins to shift. It brightens, then dulls; flares with raging light, and fades to brilliant darkness. My breaths linger in the silhouettes of vapors; then, the room’s end wall begins to lift. Rolling upward like a garage door, light spills beneath the widening crack. It grows, casting wide curtains onto geometric walls, now flat as any wall elsewhere.

  Sunlight tunnels in, rendering the room little more than a metal box, and much smaller than I initially perceived. Golden glare aches against my corneas. The glare transitions, so bright my hand has to shield them from its intense spread over the dark room.

  The first steps into whatever lies beyond the fresh entrance slows my brain from initial understanding of the panorama on whose rounded border I emerge. The reach beyond what the Avatar called Atlas is a field of stars and constellations. Streaks of purple, green and yellow dance overhead, tiny beacons repressing star systems that lie centuries away by conventional travel.

  I emerge from the equivalent of an industrial shipping container. The box is beside other boxes like it, equally open and empty as the dark space behind me. It purposely exits onto the breathtaking vista, but falling from its ledges would mean death as humans understand it.

  The landscape beneath my feet is an immaculate patch of green blades, providing ample softness. Beyond the box surrounded by other boxes, that patch turns to gold hues of cobblestone. Thirty feet down that cobblestone looms a massive golden gate. A bronzed skyscraper dominates the star-studded view through chasms in the cast iron bars, birthing hearty shadows over the city beyond it. The prominent tower hosts twin statues on its east and west flanks— one poses like the Greek mythological figure Atlas, while the other is a winged warrior kneeling in respect of the centerpiece skyscraper it complements.

  Unable to cross the gate’s threshold for now, I focus on the immediate area. A small militia on my side of the enormous gate recalls the Red Army at the Cold War’s peak, lined in perfect rows— six in a line, twelve on either side of the gate. Identical sanguine robes and winged helmets remove any tenet of individuality among them, conscripted to protect the access point from invaders with standard-issue spears. The wall attached to the spiked bars is gold but also iron, and at least two hundred feet tall. It stretches far above the gate itself; from my place at its summit, I could not see if more of these red-robed warriors wait from above. The phalanx on either side does not so much as sway or flinch. Each side mirrors the other, positioned to align on either side of the gate, allowing about twenty feet between the closest man of any row and the one corresponding in the opposite troop.

  A short elder with curly grey hair waits between those troops. His robe is brown and though he smells of lavender as we approach each other, it does not look altogether clean. His fingernails are long but immaculate and all his teeth are intact — the man I met eating beans as I awoke from my coma in a hospital bed is unmistakable in resemblance.

  “Ramona Knox.” The elder’s voice is raspy, as if he has smoked all his life. “I have been expecting you.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Maester Siskett, and I am a humble servant of the Grand Council of Atlas, into whose realm you have now entered.”

  “I thought your name was Wilson,” I tease. “Pretty sure I saw you die, didn’t I?”

  Siskett frowns. The teeth make him appear more human, and don’t move like dentures when he follows up with a polite smile, asking me to accompany him. The enormous barrier shifts with no one evidently operating it. Loud creaking intrudes on the otherwise serene atmosphere; the spiked bars gravitate inward at a volume they must hear through the entire city. It opens fully, overcompensating for our microscopic scale. Siskett and I have passed its threshold well before it reaches its full expansion, and begins to close behind us.

  The main cobblestone road cuts up to the skyward tower surrounded by stone angels, where it encircles the reinforced iron wall around the skyscraper.

  Identical white buildings with no obvious purpose dot the curbs. The people in and around them are people like me. It takes me a moment to notice the sky has changed from an interstellar panorama, replaced by a more conventional assembly of clouds over light blue.

  “You must have many questions,” Siskett says. We pass people from all walks of life and time periods. Some dress like they come from a different century, and speak to each other using archaic words like thy or ye. Others adorn clothing and adhere to customs I have never observed. Their garments are like foil, appearing more futuristic- which implies the Atlas exists on a plane that transcends the flow of time.

  “Many might be an understatement,” I reply.

  “No doubt, the Avatar is meant for less exceptional individuals than yourself,” he explains. “There is only so much customizing one can make to an artificial intelligence.”

  “She said— it is a she, isn’t it?— I wasn’t even supposed to end up here. I was supposed to stay in that Shroud place.”

  “Like I said— as with many things, there are conce
ptual limits to even the most creative devices we’ve come up with. The Atlas has many resources, but alas, those limits remain.”

  “What do you mean I’m exceptional, though?” I ask the monk-like figure escorting me down an otherworldly road, no idea what I did to earn the favor of its overseers. “And where are you taking me?”

  “Ah,” Siskett smiles. “Those questions are separate, and yet, have a singular answer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The elder chuckles, and the sight of him falling dead to a masked assassin flashes before my eyes. Siskett cares nothing for it, and does not ever quicken or slow beyond his regular snail’s pace.

  “It means, that is for the Council to know and for you to find out. Patience, child.”

  The condescension is annoying, but it seems I have no choice. Rather than trying to rectify this floating city in the sky, my mind drifts as we arrive at the Spire of Atlas. The tower’s protective outer wall is decorated with more soldiers in winged helmets, patrolling its ramparts. Others guard the ground level with spears at the ready to defend the building. The stone angels loom over either side of the wall, residing behind sections of a brick-and-mortar running all the way around the plaza’s far edges. Arches along its thirty-foot wall lead into the back corners and various sections I would quickly be lost within.

  Siskett blathers on, revealing the Spire’s history; but wondering how many years were lost asleep in that bed, or how the man who calls himself Death fares after I bolted from his dark manifestations barely heeds the elder monk.

  “The original Spire was silver,” he explains as we approach widening gates in the outer wall. These are not barred, but solid iron blocks scraping against the ground as it shifts inward, revealing red felt carpet beyond the growing chasm. “In the second Age of Creation—”

  “Second Age of Creation?”

  “Yes,” he replies, and tells me to stop interrupting. “It would stretch from the beginning of your world’s Jurassic period, to about the death of Christ. Alas, the Third Age is young, yet.”

  “You’re saying Christ was real?”

  “Oh yes. Not as powerful as your texts make him out to be, but a fine envoy for humanity.”

  “Jesus was an envoy of Atlas?”

  “Unofficially. I wouldn't have called him quite a Nephalim— who are a league of angels here in Atlas— but more of a shaman, seeking humanity’s salvation. He really believed in your kind.”

  I have so many questions— like what specifically separates a second Age from a third, or when I get to speak with God himself. But before I can ask any of them, we pass through the thick solid gates and up the ascending carpet. The gold Spire of Atlas stations two of the winged-faced sentries at its double doors. My white crew neck and slacks stand out against their red robes and glinting helmets, marking me a prisoner to this elder’s custody.

  “So be straight with me,” I say. “Am I about to be sentenced to some kind of eternal damnation?”

  Siskett scoffs. We pass the guards and the double doors, and suddenly, I am too spellbound to hear the answer.

  The hall inside the Spire possesses none of its exterior’s golden flair. The floors are a purity of white that match the Avatar’s chamber. The walls extending from its foundations are also white at the base of impressionist paintings reaching high into the dome above. They begin half way up the spherical ceiling whose climax disappears in a tunnel of ever-evaporating glare. My eyes canvass parts of a visual history I’m too short to absorb in full, but puts Michaelangelo’s Basilica to shame. I spot the Burning Spire— a silver ingot inside a bright pillar of flames on one side of the dome about twenty feet up. Another illustration depicts some sort of celestial being lobotomizing a spherical shape I can only assume is Earth.

  Rejoining my escort and another, similarly-clad monk awaiting our arrival beyond the inner doors, my sight catches on a final painting etched not high above the Burning Spire. The dark figure flickers like a mirage in the desert of my emotions. Its horned head is complemented by deep crimson pupils that snarls at me over extended claws. Wings unbefitting of its size make the demon logistically incapable of flight, but are raised over its sunken, cavernous shoulders.

  “Ramona,” Siskett says, pulling my attention back to Earth. “This is Grand Maester Barrett, the head of our Order.”

  My eyes fall on the second elder, who must be even older than Siskett. Barrett’s head is devoid of pigment; spots inhabit his receded hairline like a skin cancer patient, radiating white like the floors beneath him. His robes are shoddy as Siskett’s, who tells me that he will leave us to get better acquainted. Once my original escort has vanished beyond the Spire’s doorway, Barrett hangs his head with a slight smile on his lips.

  “I sense you crave answers, child.”

  My former trepidation at this giant building falls away at his soft-spoken voice and eased posture. If I am due for some kind of hellacious punishment, Barrett does not let it show.

  “What’s with the demon?”

  The question slips out before I am aware of asking it, and find my eyes constantly drifting up to its dark composure, casting long shadows over the commission’s brighter imagery.

  Barrett’s smile widens.

  “You are a student of history, then?”

  “If you count reading the back of my history textbooks in high school for spoilers,” I joke. The elder frowns, unable to relate. “Nevermind.”

  “The demon’s name is Ziz,” Barrett says, glossing over my nervous humor. “Although sealed at the First Age’s end, his cult of followers were responsible for the Spire’s burning at the end of the Second Age.”

  “So basically every time you beat him back, a new Age begins? Sounds like you guys live in a cycle of fear, doesn’t it?”

  “It is more nuanced than that. Each Age of Atlas represents a spectrum of social, technological and cultural change. Of course, change rarely happens without causation, which is what Ziz’s forces represent. The threat of his return is always a consideration, but hasn’t been a real concern for the Council in quite some time.”

  Despite Wilson/Siskett’s assurances it is too simple to grasp my unique situation, my conversation with the Avatar returns to me as Barrett speaks.

  Every organic lifeform is equipped with a unique genetic sequence, or identifier. These sequences are composed of billions of numbers. Some are enshrined, and cannot be changed; others are variable and subject to environmental factors.

  “So what’s the deal, then?”

  “Pardon me?” the elder asks.

  You have been summoned by the Grand Council. Its subpoena supersedes your genetic markers, which would place you in the Shroud.

  I wasn’t worthy enough to be placed here on my own merits.

  “You obviously pulled me here for a reason. So no, Maester. I don’t really crave any answers other than knowing what that reason is. I am not a child, but a grown fucking woman who would like to know why weird artificial intelligences think I belong in the realm of freaks, and I’m only here because of some weird subpoena!”

  If Barrett is taken aback by a mortal’s petty anger, it doesn’t show. He doesn’t flinch, nor does his finely trimmed beard bristle. He pouts momentarily, weighing the wealth of knowledge against his disposition of sharing none of it.

  “Have you heard the story of David, Ramona?”

  “Sure. He beat Goliath, became king.”

  “The Bible is a book of many diverse revelations. You have already seen how its words can be twisted by perverse souls.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Barrett sighs, annoyed having to explain such apparently basic things. In this city of golden gates and mysterious Maesters, nothing about this is basic. The world I know is gone, every explanation with it. From the moment I told Tim to reincarnate me, we set in motion a chain of events my home will never recover from.

  I am complicit.

  “You were a remarkable agent for the FBI. Yes, the Atlas k
nows very well of your exploits, Miss Knox. The Council is many things, but susceptible to change is not one of them. And seeing how you and our infectorum mundi were responsible for the Breach, it puts us in a unique position to make use of your mind and skills.”

  “Okay,” I say. “First of all— infectorum mundi?”

  “It means world-killer, as members of the Council have taken to calling him of late.”

  “And the Breach?”

  Again, Barrett sighs at my ignorance.

  “It is the term given to the catastrophic effects of the World-Killer reviving you. Obviously, it was compounded by several third-parties, making it irreversible, but its origin can be traced back to your return to the dead.”

  “So you’re basically saying I owe you one?”

  “Please,” the Maester says, clearly offended by my oversimplification. “The Atlas does not resort to the petty transactions you mortals are so fond of. The Council has undergone a great deal of trouble, Miss Knox. Much of it lies with the infectorum mundi, but you also played a part.

  “I will not split hairs with you. The Atlas faces a grave predicament, and seeks to utilize your talents and help us.”

  Escorted into the chamber I will face down celestial judgment for my actions, my old friend Tim’s words return to me, replaying over and over in my clusterfuck of emotions until they finally, at last, mean nothing.

  You don't need to be afraid, Ramona.

  I wish they did mean something, because I have never been so damn scared.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Despite visits from the man who called himself Death through my early life, many memories have nothing to do with him. The suited figure was only disposed to show up in times of crisis, as if I wouldn’t have made it through without him. The reasons were varied— a broken leg, a lost animal companion, as I sat in a little white room after being caught shoplifting. They all followed that similar theme.

  Tim was only interested in my sorrows and fuckups.

  Most of my first memories are of Maya, who sat in the chair across the kitchen table from me. One leg folded over the other, a blue plume of cigarette smoke trailed from the stick between her fingers. I never took up smoking— insane, considering everyone I grew up around smoked— but the dancing smell of menthol filled the small room with sweet, distracting columns of monoxides washing above the words I struggled with.