by Amy Field
At first, the father had been a little dubious of the boy who spoke like an adult and had refused to answer any of his questions. But Zilo had a way with words, and a way with people in general, that put them at ease. The father had eventually consented to take Zilo to them.
“How has your meditation been going?” Zilo asked Vanda when the three were alone.
“Not well. Something’s blocking me.”
“Is it a recurring vision that haunts you which is stopping you? Or something else?”
Zilo had instantly seen inside Vanda.
“It is both a haunting vision,” Vanda slowly said, “and some entity too. Something I haven’t seen before, but it appears to feel me.”
“Mmm,” Zilo mused, his face taking on the kind of bemused expression that you would never expect to see on a ten-year-old boy, “it must be another shifter— something strong too if it can present itself in your visions”. Then his eyes brightened up, and he announced, “But first, we must complete your training. The government has rallied itself and are putting all its efforts into catching you. It is not safe anywhere; even here. But we must continue.”
Over the next days, Zilo and Vanda spent them together, while O sat with the family. She seemed to enjoy very much being a part of their little clan and would often help them with their daily household duties. In private, Vanda told Zilo about his reoccurring vision of O’s death. Zilo told him to hold it off: “It could be an implant, a false image, from one of the government’s own shifters,” he said, “Possibly the very same entity that you saw. They could be using your love for her against you.”
With Zilo’s help, Vanda was able to push it away for the time being and began to feel the flow of time once more. Zilo taught Vanda the next phase of his training: physical representation within his visions so that he could change aspects of them. Zilo told him that time and matter were deeply bound together and through manipulation of time, one can manipulate the physical as well.
“I think that I’ve done it before,” Vanda told Zilo. “When I was sick, I had a vision that I once stood next to O in front of a mirror. I willed myself to reach out and touch her, and I did.”
“That is exactly it, Vanda,” Zilo stated to him. “Try to feel it again; that pressure that builds up in you— use your love for her to will your movement and in the visions in which you are not present, you must use it to become a physical force. He added: "This is not like physical movement; it is more ethereal, and it is accomplished through you mind and your manipulation of the temporal field.”
Firstly, Zilo got Vanda to enter a vision in which Vanda himself was physically present. Vanda then had to will his body to move. “Concentrate on the energy flow of your physical form,” Zilo urged him, “and not its material form; forget the corporeal and enter the ethereal.” Vanda began to feel the force of his being and was able to move his arms and then control where he walked. He was able to move about until he was running; running through the city, onwards across the cityscape planes, through crowds of people in some future realm, people watching the strange running man as he passed them on the street. He flew down the streets and boulevards, feeling no restriction from bodily needs. He felt no fatigue, either in himself or his body and he ran forever. He felt as a child does when he runs with his friends, unrestricted. Suddenly he noticed ahead of him a group of shock troopers, evidently waiting for the purpose of tackling him. But he wasn’t afraid of them; his body was a boundless coil of energy ready to spring at any obstacle that threatened to stand in its way. As he came upon them, they opened fire; but he felt the flow of their energy beams before even the troopers knew where they were going and, thus, avoided them with ease; dodging right and left. He got right up to them and stuck out his palm, opening up a vortex that sucked them all into its sphere. Then, without making a conscious effort, he jumped into the air and found himself spiraling up towards the atmosphere, government droids following him as he manipulated the temporal field to fly. He twisted and turned, racing ever faster through the air, until he no longer saw the droids behind him. He felt so free as he moved through the sky and burst in and out of the clouds. In his visions, he learnt that he could control and manipulate anything that he wanted.
Zilo then got Vanda to enter into a simple vision of the city; one where he wasn’t present, but only a viewer. Vanda found himself floating amongst the throng of people that littered the upper platforms of Neo York. With all his energy and thought he attempted to will himself to move objects using the temporal field. He found it tough at first, but with practice, he was able to manipulate the physical structures around him. Within a day or two, he was tearing whole buildings from their foundations and tossing them across the sky. “The unknown future is like a dream,” Zilo informed him, “It is only in the present that we can make an actual change. In the future one is no more than playing with one of the endless possibilities of the temporal realm. By moving things, you can learn of what lies beneath. I want you to rip up the city and search for something.”
"But won’t I kill the people there?”
“Not in the present you won’t; so, therefore, they won’t be harmed in the real. I want you to find their camp that lies somewhere within the planes of this coast. I want you to find all their camps. I want you to tear through their world and discover all their misanthropies, Vanda. Through the future planes that you will decimate, we will break their grasp upon the soul of man in the present and free it like a bird to climb into the stratosphere of self-liberation.”
Vanda did as he was asked and travelled through Earth tearing up whole cities. His heart was tormented, though, by the faces of all the people that perished at his actions; being thrown about and having whole cities smashed around them. But Zilo kept reminding him that it was necessary and that those people would be saved as a result of his actions and not die, as he was seeing. “But their screams; their broken bodies; they haunt me, Zilo. Do they feel pain?” “Only in your visions; but it is a pain that they will never feel; pain that you are saving them from by unearthing everything that the government has built to hide its horrors.”
O would sit with him at night and listen to his explanations of the horrors that he had committed in his visions. She soothed him with both her words and with the warmth of her caring soul that he had become more and more aware of as time went on; their lives forged together so that their destinies entwined.
“Let me tell you of my time with the military,” she said one night as they sat together. “I’ve never told anyone this. Out in the colonies, people tend to feel a freedom that they seldom enjoyed back here on Earth. Far away from the statues and monuments that glorify the government and the constant telescreen updates that feed them lies, they feel able to flex their own souls more and begin to deviate from their instructions. Open rebellion is much more frequent out there and often colonists will go off and create their communities away from the official ones. Uprisings are almost constant and the government has to constantly crackdown upon them. Most of the time they just hit them with air strikes and wipe their communities from the face of the planet. But sometimes these communities are too close to mining facilities or other government resources, so a more personalised approach is needed. That’s when they send in ground units. I was often one of these units. My training taught me to conform; to rid myself of emotional bonds with my fellow humans; to live for the greater good of the government like an ant does for its queen. They gave us medication— just as they did to you— that would suppress our emotions. But I still got the most terrible nightmares…” At this point she stalled, and a single tear floated down her cheek, “…I would see the faces of children the moment before the light left them forever. I would see their communities and feel within those simple homes a warmth that had become lost within my community. The world that I lived in then had become stale and dead; no longer alive but mutated beyond life into something synthetic…” Again the tears began to choke her words, “I did questionable things then, Van
da; things that still shame my very soul. I killed hundreds of men, woman and children; I tortured them; brought them to camps knowing full well that they would be experimented upon; I laid siege to whole villages; piling up bodies, covering them with corrosive liquids or burning them to ashes. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t remember each and every one of my victims’ faces, staring out at me from the wilderness. I now fight for those faces with everything that I have. Remember the faces of the people from your visions, Vanda; remember them and fight for them; fight for every one of them.”
Eventually after several days of meditation under the tutelage of Zilo, Vanda found a camp deep within the restricted zone; a place that used to be called Rhode Island, but was destroyed when a photon reactor blew up there fifty years ago and made the place uninhabitable. Deep below the surface of rubble that made up the place, he found an underground camp where people were kept in cages like livestock awaiting the killing instruments of the abattoir. He travelled through its rooms and witnessed the shocking experiments that were performed on live humans by men in white plastic coats. He saw Dr Kelvin in one room removing pieces of a woman’s brain as she sat watching films on a telescreen in front of her, fully conscious, but seemingly unaware of the horrors that were done to her. With each piece that the doctor took, her eyes went even blanker.
Vanda came out of his meditation and looked at Zilo, who sat opposite him.
“I found it,” he pronounced to Zilo.
“Good. Do you think that you can find the others?”
“Yes.”
Over the next days, Vanda tore apart the human world and found several more of the government’s death camps. However, it was in one such vision that he came into contact with the entity again and this time, it threatened to destroy him.
He was flying through the air when he suddenly saw what looked like a giant shadow floating up ahead of him. Curious, Vanda flew towards it, but on reaching it, it struck out what looked like a giant claw made of black smoke. It grabbed ahold of him and began to squeeze his body in its grasp. He felt the shadow attempt to enter him; to snuff out the light within him. He began to struggle. But as he did, it clamped down on him even harder. Vanda let out a scream and came out of his meditation.
He suddenly realised that he had ahold of Zilo by the throat and that O was trying to pull him off of the boy. Vanda instantly let go of him and Zilo fell to the floor, gasping for air.
“What happened?” he asked, terrified.
“You attacked Zilo,” O said, looking at him with fear in her beautiful green eyes.
“I’m sorry. The entity was in there with me. It took hold of me.”
“Another shifter,” Zilo coughed as he regained his breath. “It was able to take control of you through your vision.”
“How can something do that?” O asked.
“It must be incredibly powerful,” Zilo stated, a worried expression creasing the young boy’s brow. “I was unaware that the government had something so powerful. They must have set it up to trace you and now it’s finally found you. You are lucky Vanda. We must stay away from meditation until I have had time to figure out exactly what it was. It could permanently infest your body and turn you against us. We know where the first camps are and we’ll start with those.”
“Do you think that was how they found the base in the first place?” O asked Zilo.
“Yes,” the boy replied, “I was hoping that they had found us out by coincidence; but the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if it wasn’t another shifter feeling Vanda out and therefore locating his position at the base. Now that this has happened, I am sure of it.”
Vanda felt a level of shame at having been responsible for the location of the Cause’s secret base being found out, but Zilo reassured him that what had happened had happened for a reason.
The next day, the three of them began making plans to contact the other surviving Cause members to assemble a team that could infiltrate the camp and free those held captive, as well as destroying it. Zilo then informed Vanda and O that he believed this was where the government held their most powerful shifters. If they could get into the camp, free those within it and destroy the shifters, then they would make a huge stride towards defeating the powers that be and restoring balance to humanity.
Zilo spent the next day within a network suit. With the help of the family, they had been able to assemble some equipment for the purpose. Zilo surfed the networks and began contacting the waifs and strays of the scattered Cause forces. However, no sooner had he started than the father of the family came bursting in and informed them all that the government forces had come down to the lower level and were sweeping the district in search of them. They were close.
“I had feared this,” Zilo announced. “I suspected that the entity that Vanda had come into contact with within his vision would be able to locate his position.”
The three instantly took what they could, thanked the family and left through a side door that led to the back of the dwelling that the father showed them. Outside they heard the government forces laying siege to the district. O suddenly stopped and grabbed Vanda by the arm.
“We can’t just leave them,” she said, a look of deep anguish on her pretty face.
“We have to,” Zilo asserted. “If not then billions of families like them will suffer; not just one.”
With a heavy heart, O consented and the three carried on. But as they emerged into an alleyway they found their route cut off by shock troopers and sentry droids. They were spotted immediately.
“RUN!,” Vanda shouted at the other two.
They did as he said and then he stuck out the palm of his hand and opened up a vortex around the government forces. Instantly the sphere of a wormhole consumed them. He looked up and saw that the air was filled with floating battle droids; they were surrounded. He ran after O and Zilo and found them boxed into a recess of the alley that they had run into, coming under heavy fire from the surrounding troopers and droids. They were firing back, but things seemed desperate for them.
Vanda looked around and realised they were trapped. He closed his eyes, focused his mind and stopped time; a volley of photon plasma heading straight for O and Zilo stopped in midair, inches from hitting them. Next, he opened up a vortex in the opposite wall and tore a hole in the building as a makeshift escape tunnel. He grabbed ahold of O and Zilo and carried them into the hole. Time began again and they looked about themselves in amazement, wondering how they had gotten there. But they soon realised what had happened and the three ran off into the ruins of the building.
At each wall that they came upon, Vanda opened up another vortex and swallowed a whole section of the building within it, tunneling through it as he did so. Government forces flooded in after them. Suddenly, the ground began to shake and the building started to disintegrate around them, its debris floating up through the air. The government had let off a massive anti-gravitational bomb. The three of them immediately began floating up, Zilo spinning off out of view.
As Vanda floated up amongst the broken pieces of the building, he saw O next to him. He reached out to her, and she, in turn, stretched out her hand. Their fingers touched fleetingly, but, as Vanda made a grab for her hand, a block of debris hit him and sent him spiraling away from her. He watched as she floated upwards, away from him. He focused his mind and stopped time once again. He only had around ten seconds to grab her. He hopped from one piece of debris to another until he reached her. He grabbed hold of her body and leapt out of the gravitational field.
Just as they emerged out of it, time started up once more and the debris began floating up into the stratosphere again. But they were free from its pull.
They began to fall, holding hands, and they controlled their descent, moving through the air as a couple of skydivers. They spotted a transport and fell directly on top of it. They held on as it passed through the airway, but no sooner were they on their way when a large combat destroyer, swinging into
view, spotted them. They stood up and, seeing the other traffic ahead of them, and they began jumping from one vehicle to the next, attempting to outrun the government through the traffic. The government forces in their battle cruisers started to fire on the traffic, decimating vehicle after vehicle; explosions going off behind the pair as they hopped from vehicle to vehicle.
The force of an explosion suddenly knocked O off her feet, and she fell off of the side of the vehicles that she stood on. She began to plummet to the ground, and Vanda dived down after her. But then he noticed a government vessel grab her while she was airborne with an enormous extendable claw that came out of the bottom of it. The claw grasped her, plucking her out of the air and closing around her. It drew her into it and then with a burst of acceleration, the vessel disappeared, and Vanda was left to fall. As he did, another claw came hurtling towards him, but he opened up a vortex around it in midair and swallowed it up. He then landed on another vehicle and watched in the distance as the transport carried off his love. He drew his breath in deeply, sensing that his nightmares were, perhaps, coming true.
Vanda managed to escape the government forces by stopping time and heading unseen down one of the cities services hatches into the sewers. However, he had lost O and wasn’t sure if Zilo had survived either. He was all-alone now; lost, heartbroken and wandering through the sprawling underground tunnels like a ghost. He found a small enclave within the sewers where he could rest. He immediately sat in the lotus position and began to meditate to search for O and Zilo amongst the wilderness of the future.
He had some idea of where they would take her: the Rhode Island camp. His consciousness traveled to that dark place and sprawled through the corridors and rooms, witnessing the countless scores of innocents who were being experimented on and kept in cages like cattle. He tore through that building removing whole sections of it, frantically searching for his lost love. But as he got deep into it, the black entity appeared once again. Frightened, Vanda fled from the dark spectre. It sent out a black smoke-like tentacle at him and grabbed ahold of him.
