by M F Sullivan
“That’ll never happen, buddy. I’m sorry you were afraid, but I’m glad you made it here.”
“I’m still not sure what happened.” When she struggled to recall the wandering, she still felt her body’s muscles were those of that otherworldly predator. “I was lost in the dark, and then the dark was the water.”
“I told you, General,” insisted Gethsemane’s soft voice beneath the blanket. “Someone was praying for you.”
“Probably Miki,” agreed Valentinian. “She’s a pious girl. You should ask her!”
The idea of Miki Soto as some pious nun made Dominia laugh. Valentinian smiled in perfect patience.
“You’ll see her soon enough…ready to go?”
“Where to?”
“Earth! Sweet relief.” A tinkling sound caught Dominia’s attention, and she looked in time to see what her brain first mistook for rain. Broken glass refilled the window frame as though the magician rewound time. Once the pane sat as good as new, he pushed the window open to finish his cigarette.
For a funny moment, Dominia felt the window had only been put there in the first place because of his courtesy. That the City and the man were somehow the same. Such a thing was easier to fathom in the Ergosphere, where the concept of definition was nothing but a meaningless hamper on thinking. That the Hierophant and his study should be one was less incredible than the idea that Valentinian—this goofy, lazy, chain-smoking (of tobacco and pot, it seemed) martyr saint trapped in a dog’s body—was somehow inextricably tied to this strange place tucked within the event horizon of oblivion.
Yet, as he turned, and those electric eyes set upon her, they provoked a crackle in her blood. She felt obliged to tell him, “That thing followed us here, or was summoned by us, or something. I’m sorry. Hopefully the City’s men will be able to control it.”
“It was bound to show up eventually. Now that it’s crippled, it’ll need lots of time to recover, and won’t be able to follow you around. Certainly not to reality.”
Squinting through the smoke of her cigarette, the General asked, “Did you tell Gethsemane to do this?”
“What”—he touched his ear with one hand and flicked his cigarette out the window with the other—“who? Me? Huh? I can’t hear you.”
“You really are a terrible liar.”
“Still can’t hear you.”
“You heard me,” she said, trying not to laugh.
He raised his voice to ask, “Why don’t you try speaking up?”
“Did you—” began the General loudly, eliciting a shush from the nymph.
“General! Noise policy!”
The magician had used this time to beat it to the hallway, of course. In a combination of irritation and wry amusement, Dominia considered her own half-burned “herbal” cigarette, then drew the covers from the nymph’s curly head. With a smoky kiss upon those soft lips, the General asked, “Will you come back to Earth with us?”
“I am already there.” Gethsemane patted Dominia’s cheek, then rested that delicate hand upon her shoulder. “You will be so surprised when you see me, General.”
“How is it possible for you to be in two places at once without leaving here?”
“Everyone on Earth is in two places at once, General, all the time. The Kingdom is Eternal. The most amazing thing is what you and all those Lazarenes do: you can choose at any moment to reside only in Eternity, then change your mind. Most can never change their mind.”
With one last study of the delicate woman’s beauty, Dominia placed the cigarette in the corner of Gethsemane’s mouth, patted her pert little rear, then exited the room with only one pang of regret. Surprisingly, not regret for what she had done, but for leaving the nymph behind.
It was naïve, considering her age, but Dominia had never understood the mechanics of casual sex. Granted, she’d had plenty of it. Women (sometimes literally) tripped in front of the infamous General for a chance to visit her bed, and more than a few had courted, coaxed, and coddled her in hopes of becoming a member of the Holy Family. Only Cassandra had ever been worth that, but Dominia had enjoyed the attention before that fateful seaside meeting. What she had not enjoyed, however, was the procession of selfishness, hurt, and loss that came with every woman who wanted less than she did. She’d always felt the painful need to know the insides of another person as well as she knew her own, and to be known in kind—as if that knowing made her more real than her historic record. It was the real, tender side of her. Not the violent side of her.
But was there a real side of her? Were both real? Did she only dream her tender side was the “real” side, or did her violent impact upon so many lives make her existence as servant of death the truer Dominia? Without the bridge of another being, she feared she was destined to drift along, unknowing, trapped within the cell of her own body.
When trapped in a real cell and given the opportunity to make a platonic connection, she’d wasted it. Her interactions with Benedict—this young man fresh-shipped far from his home, his mother, and the girlfriend he didn’t know to be pregnant—must have seemed, to the human, a kind of friendship. To her, it was a slow, careful, conscious manipulation that she could plan twenty-four hours a day/night cycle, every cycle, until she blacked out or got free. She had sensed from their first meeting the depths of his innocence, that innocence that sparked in him a silent but obvious hope he might somehow redeem her with his friendship. One too many United Front movies about the goodness of people, perhaps. Fine by her; small wonder her Father paid to produce so much shlock when it brainwashed them into delusional mercy.
First, she demonstrated a need. Easy enough to pretend to be lonely. She let him hear frequent sighs and made sure he was around to watch her wander the cell. As she paused by the door, she’d gaze out its little window with the most somber expression manageable, then wander out of view. It did not take many repetitions—two or three of his shifts—before she noticed him reading, and asked him about the book.
“Just my mom’s old Bible. She gave it to me when I left, and I’ve been trying to make it through this thing my whole life, so I thought I’d give it a shot while I was here, but…it’s a pretty heavy book. Fourteen pages of ‘And So-And-So begat Such-And-Such, and Such-And-Such begat What’s-His-Name…’ No offense.” He offered a meek smile. “I know martyrs are religious.”
“I’m not. Not really.” For instance, she had to wrack her brain for a book from the human Old and New Testaments, rather than the more important martyr Post Testament. “But I always did like the Book of Tobit. It’s short.”
Then, after a second’s recognition for the suitability of the text and the suggestion it would place in his mind, she lifted her eyebrows. “It’s a fairy tale, about a young man who frees a woman from a demon.”
There it was: that light of transference, of false hope sparking so bright from his irises their afterimages floated, ghostly, upon the cell wall. He would make his mistake when he returned to yammer excitedly about the story the next day, to talk to her all about the adventures of Tobit and his friend, the disguised archangel Raphael—and the dog, there, in the background.
She hadn’t thought about that dog in years. On the way down the golden elevator, she wondered about it the same way she wondered about Valentinian. What was the point of the dog in that story? What was the real goal of the magician? By his own admission, he was a kind of thoughtform. With no earthly body, he could say, “I used to be real,” until his face turned blue. That didn’t mean he was real now, so far as it concerned Dominia and the world where she lived. Yet, he was real as anybody or anything here, and was clearly known, as by Trisha, who tapped the invisible keys of her computer and blandly tolerated the flirting of the magician leaning with his elbow propped against the desk. A man as any man, albeit several degrees smugger. Like a man with a great poker hand and a terrible poker face—or a terrible hand and a great face. Impossible to say.
“Here she is. Checking out?” Outside a hat left askew and a naughty
edge to her smile for Dominia, the porter acted as if nothing had happened. The General coughed.
“Sorry about the room.”
“Don’t fret. You wouldn’t believe the things that happen in this place. And most people don’t tip me nearly that well.” With a saucy calendar-girl wink, Trisha turned the screen in Dominia’s direction, which had the odd effect of looking like she summoned it from space by spreading it between her hands. “Sign here”—she indicated—“and here, and here.”
“What am I signing?”
“You know”—with an attractive frown, Trisha turned the screen back in her own direction and nibbled the inside of her cheek—“I can’t say I know the answer to that.”
“Eternity in a black hole, yet nobody has time to read fine print.” The laughing magician leaned across the counter to kiss the porter’s cheek. “All right, Trisha, have fun, be safe.”
“I should be telling you that, shouldn’t I?”
“Nah. Age doesn’t matter in a timeless space, but if it’s a contest…I still win.”
To be sure, the magician had lived forever if he had lived a day. Flat-out reading her mind, he said, “Same goes for everyone. Shall we?”
“What?”
If she was annoyed when he responded, not with words, but by dropping his hands on her shoulders and turning her around, her annoyance melted into awe as she noticed what she had missed the first time: a square fountain in the center of the lobby shielded—along with rows of ferns and begonias that she’d thought to be the entirety of the centerpiece—a tranquil sitting area with black leather benches and a firepit waiting empty like the mouth of a cauldron.
“We’re going home,” he said.
“And what does a nice sitting area have to do with getting us home?”
“You remember when we had that conversation about projectors? And Trish talked to you about holograms, right. You understand it all better now, I think. If, in reality and the Ergosphere, we’re in the movie and the film—”
“The hologram and the interference pattern”—called the porter, to his eye roll.
“—then this is arguably the ‘real real world’ of images being filmed, scanned, super translated, whatever. And not just for this film, but every scrap of footage that was ever shot for any film: back in reality, we’ll become editors of our one film again. Or you will, at any rate.” With a grin and a pat on her back, he strolled to the sitting area and expected her to follow. “I’m just a supporting actor.”
“Are you saying I’m the editor, the actor, or the projector?” He ignored her question and stood with his hands in his pockets, chin craned high and eyes angled as if in search of the ceiling. He gestured she should do the same, and she did, but failed to see. “Okay. What are we looking at?”
“The ceiling.”
“I thought we were supposed to stare at the sun to get home. There’s no way you can see the ceiling from here! Aren’t there infinite floors in this place? Look at it up there!”
“You remember how you got here?”
“I remember walking into the sun.” As she started to look down or at him, he urged her, “Just keep looking. Tell me about it.”
“Well, I was—I was about to be captured by Akachi and his men. Then I saw you. Or…Basil. Out across the street, in the shade.” She frowned. Her eye, struggling for purchase throughout the infinite floors, must have constructed one, for she now imagined she did see a ceiling: so far away, it appeared a pixel. “Is that—”
“Then what happened?”
Annoyed, she answered, “Well, you walked out into the sun, didn’t you? That’s how you get back and forth, from reality to the Ergosphere. You and Lazarus told me that.” Yes, that was definitely a ceiling. And growing. Or descending?
“Consciousness is all about momentum, vibrational states and the electromagnetic spectrum. However, all things, including consciousness, are subject to the principle of inertia; that goes for creativity, too. If information is the basis of reality, you can understand how information that already exists requires certain conditions—certain levels and types of energy input into the system—in order to reach an appropriate escape velocity from unconsciousness to consciousness. You’re a logical woman, General, you were all right with higher level math in sixteenth grade. Think of it in purely numeric form, with the Mandelbrot set, otherwise known as the first fractal.”
“That creepy, black beetle fractal?” It discomforted her just to think on it.
“Reminds you of your old man, right?” While they both laughed, he said, “Because it’s an appropriate mathematical symbol for how you escape his world. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—the Mandelbrot set is generated by iteration, or the repetition of a process, in this case, quadratic polynomials.” The numbers of the floor at the lowest level of her vision, printed across the columns by the stairs (who could take the stairs in such a place!) changed from a real number into the example form . “In the Mandelbrot set, , so if , so does the first iteration of . You are our cheeky variable of , and Lazarus is our constant of . You started off as 0—0, if you’d prefer—and applying the function of reality to you yielded 1…which we iterated again.”
The floor numbers flashed from , and trailed beyond at a pace outmatching her capacity to observe. They were passing those floors by: this whole time, they’d moved. He had stopped her from looking down because she would have seen how far they already were above the floor. Over her astonished gasp, he continued, “The list of generated numbers is called ‘the orbit’ of 0 under iteration of . You can use this function for a mind-blowing amount of models, including reality itself, you now understand. There are two primary results with iteration: in the case of a positive constant in the example I just gave, the orbit tends to infinity by growing larger each iteration. But with a constant of zero—no constant, no blood of Lazarus, no hope, no soul—the orbit remains fixed for all iterations. Snore! You Father just keeps winning, and winning, and winning.”
“You’re as responsible for controlling probability as the Lamb, aren’t you? You’ve been altering the odds in Lazarus’s favor and keeping him on the right side every time.”
“And keeping that sweet, sweet blood of his available to you and all the others in need of a way out of the loop.” Yes, they flew: the floors whipped past, a thudding wind that accompanied the shifting of colors as layer on colorful layer whirled by, peeled away, dissolved into the next. “That mutated blood activates the CRY gene; in humans and normal martyrs, it isn’t fully functional. Fruit flies and birds, among other beings, use that gene to perceive magnetic fields and so much more. Activated in a human or a martyr by Lazarus’s blood, we see the same but struggle to put names to them as other beings don’t. Yet, we are able to use the blood of Lazarus, through the lens of the gene, as other beings don’t. When high-frequency wavelengths—like those of blue and ultraviolet light—interact with the mutated CRY in our eyes, our molecules are excited to such extent that it becomes possible to travel through those frequencies of light and beyond the Plancks of reality. Light travels through the optic nerve, into the brain and down into the nerves of the solar plexus, which is where we perceive the source of our fields. They indicate far more than direction, by the by. They measure the electromagnetic spectrum and connect you with devices and people sensitive to it. The Ergosphere itself is not radioactive, but individuals who have returned from it briefly are, because they have traveled at frequencies unrecorded by Earth’s populace; their bodies, and their realities, have been reconstructed by what a great man once termed “Hawking radiation,” the electromagnetic field around black holes that is responsible for their diminishing mass. It’s pulling information back out to be constructed elsewhere, realized by the Higgs field: a result of the constant activities of souls in and around the black hole, backward across time.”
“And when this black hole’s mass is completely diminished?”
“An almost infinite amount of time from now? Don’t worry…it’s
all the same black hole, anyway. If I’m being honest, the black hole itself is just a door to the highest reality there is…but this nesting doll of metaphors has to stop somewhere for your three-dimensional brain, right?”
As Valentinian spoke, that distant ceiling grew ever larger, ever closer, and at such speed that her bones felt on the verge of bursting. They moved so fast, a hundred floors passed them in a second. What a speed at which to fly! It was almost more like… “Wait,” she cried, “are we falling?”
She took his lack of response as confirmation. “The blood of Lazarus creates a spiritual yearning in those who take it, because it has created a soul with or without their knowing. It takes a soul to experience the Ergosphere; most people never consciously experience it, even with the blood of Lazarus, because they never learn to mount that soul. But when the body knows it’s but an organ of the soul, well…your organs have to come along, too, right?”
Clutching his arm, Dominia screamed, and tried to indicate that the ceiling—decorated with a mosaic depicting the swirling rays of a sun—prepared to crush them. As if to indicate these highest floors were somehow larger than the ones below, the work of tile stretched the length of a North American football field and was intent on growing. Grinning, the magician pointed to something black upon the face of that ceiling: a sunspot, the pixel’s width the whole mosaic had been at first glimpse. While this black dot grew, the magician said, “You can go anywhere, and even humans will be unaffected by their own body’s radioactivity… They should take a shower before visiting with friends and neighbors, though. And it’s not instant teleportation when it’s a chemical reaction within the body, but it’s better than nothing. It could be engineered to give the answers to actual teleportation, though, if men look.”
To Dominia’s relief, the mole resolved into an open skylight and the night beyond. She relaxed her grip on her friend’s arm, and asked, “I can do this from anywhere? Go back and forth, up and down, the electromagnetic spectrum?”
