What the Heart Desires

by Jaime Derelle

  With that, the old man slowly disappeared like a sand statue in the wind and was replaced by empty space. Vanda looked around and realised that he was now standing. He looked to his side and saw O. She had a terribly pained expression on her face that made Vanda shudder. He looked down and noticed that she had taken hold of his hand and had led him to a corner of the room. Together they stood in front of an elongated mirror. Vanda peered into the mirror and was shocked to see his emaciated body. Its skin was a ghostly white and upon its surface stood several large, fresh scars. There was one each on his forearms; a large crescent shaped one on his abdomen and, when he turned around, he noticed a long horrific pink scar that ran from his coccyx all the way up his spine and finished upon the crown of his head. He turned his head and looked at O, who stood beside him. She shed a single tear that fell from the corner of her eye and slid down her cheek. She smiled a crooked smile at him and Vanda realised that she meant to console him with her look. But it filled Vanda with pity. Not for himself, but for O. He hated the fact that he was to blame for her tears. She looked so child-like in her expression. Her pity for him touched his heart.

  Of course, Vanda was only the witness to this; it was yet actually to happen, and he felt intensely frustrated at not being able to reach out and touch her. He so wanted to caress her face and wipe away her tears; console her pain.

  He attempted to break free and control the body of his future self; urging it on through his mind; willing it to reach out to her. He felt his whole body well up and then scream out for this, like an ancient volcano that has spent centuries waiting to explode and then finally gets its chance.

  Suddenly, his arm jolted out and he realised that he had willed it to do so. But before he had an opportunity to control it further, it once again returned to its limp former position. He looked around and saw that the walls of the room were beginning to disappear, just as Zilo had earlier, like sand in the wind. Vanda looked to O by his side and saw that she too was in the process of being swept away. Seconds later there was nothing left of her but cosmic dust swirling away into a vast expanse of blackness.

  Everything went dark for Vanda then and he couldn’t tell where he was. In the present, his body could feel nothing around it, as if he were floating in the air. He felt himself completely still; no wind or anything appeared to attack his senses. In a word, Vanda was lost; both physically and spiritually.

  ******

  To explain everything that happened to Vanda at this time would take more volumes of books than have ever been written, and it would take an eternity to write; because that’s what he experienced: eternity. So for this episode, it is better just to report several sentient moments within this almost endless realm of which our hero and heroine was cast.

  In the beginning, Vanda floated amongst the great cities of Earth and watched their entire history played out. He watched as humanity tore itself apart. Wars broke out everywhere, and he watched as whole cities were decimated; he saw great floods of blue flame enveloping them and sweeping away whole civilisations. He watched as fleets of ships left the ruins of Earth behind and fled to the colonies. He then travelled with them and watched as the colonies became unstable themselves, as humankind’s bitterness followed the survivors there. He watched the colonies begin to disintegrate with uprisings and then humanity started to consume itself once again, just as it had on Earth. He then spent thousands of years watching the ruins of humanity slowly become swallowed by nature and then crumble into dust, until even the flimsiest signs of this once fertile civilisation disappeared from the face of the universe. His heart sank at this sight and he fled into the vast expanse of the unknown universe.

  His spirit flowed along with the universal slipstream, pulled through wormholes and emerging in strange solar systems. He watched as full suns imploded into themselves in giant supernovas and sucked their surrounding planets into them. He watched as whole galaxies collapsed in on themselves and became giant nebulas of pink and green gases. He entered entire stars as they moved through the universe and absorbed other solar systems into their great being. He discovered other life forms of different complex natures; a species of amphibious humanoids that lived a primitive life until destroyed by a great planet-wide famine that decimated their numbers until their primitive civilisation was swept away by the natural forces of the universe. He witnessed a species of gaseous beings that evolved beyond their physical form and were able to move through the galaxy, inhabiting planets and infecting other species. They would be breathed in by a physical organism, and then consume it from the inside out. Vanda watched as whole galaxies were depleted of their sentient life forms by these gaseous parasites until the surrounding galaxies were no more than vast wastelands and the gaseous life forms were the size of whole nebulas. These were then themselves consumed by an imploding star whose supernova spanned across an entire galaxy.

  Stuck in the universal wilderness, having by now forgotten everything, Vanda was called to by something that struck him at the time as celestial. It spoke a strange language that Vanda somehow understood, even though he had never heard its vocabulary before. It called to him across the stars and brought him to the edge of the cosmos. There in the desert of space, he saw something so beautiful that he felt like an infant spying upon the world for the first time. It was a piercing light that looked as though it were shining in through a tear in space and time. Vanda stared into the Elysian light with wonder. It would continually change colour and shape with each of its words, like some techni-colored Rorschach. In its bizarre dialect, it told him to look upon the beginning of time.

  But this struck Vanda as odd because he believed that he was coming to the end of all time— as he watched galaxy after galaxy, civilisation after civilisation, consume itself— not the beginning.

  “From death we are born,” the light boomed in its strange language.

  Vanda turned to look upon the universe and saw it begin to whirl like a great storm, the stars swirling within it like the debris of a tornado.

  “Look upon the beginning of creation,” it cried out, as its light intensified, constantly morphing into new shapes and ever more amazing arrays of colour.

  This vision confused the already stretched mind of Vanda as he saw nothing but eternal death as the remaining galaxies smashed into one another and burst into particles of light.

  The light began to expand into the cosmic storm, consuming everything. Its sharp beam of light burst into an incandescent white glow that devoured the cosmos like an organism consumes an amoeba. He watched the cosmic osmosis until it had finished and all that existed was an abyss of incandescence.

  There was nothing left and Vanda was left to float amongst a void of nothingness.

  He roamed the dead space of the nothing for an eternity until he lost his mind and found himself melting into the white light, his consciousness spreading throughout it like the tentacles of some great marine creature stretching out in search of prey. The great light no longer spoke to him and he drifted into a realm that had no physical shape or life. There were no gases, no matter, nothing; just a vast expanse of incandescence. Vanda felt himself no longer a conscious being, but a part of the white; himself consumed by it. It was a perfect symmetry that amounted to a vast landscape of nothingness; a void.

  Just as Vanda had completely forgotten himself and was about to drift into permanent dementia, a voice came echoing across the wilderness of time. Its cooing inflexions of soft speech reminded him of who or what he was once.

  “Your name is Vanda Kline,” the voice softly said, repeating this verse over and over, sounding like it was right next to him, breathing into his ear. “You were born in New Queens, Neo York on the third of April, 2555. Your birth mother was Izis Kline. You never knew your birth father. When you were three, your mother signed you over to a government orphanage, where you were raised until you turned sixteen. You went in search of your mother and found out that she had died four years before…”

  It went on, repe
ating his whole life history over and over, bringing him back from the void of his mind. He recognised the voice and through the empty planes, he pronounced within his thoughts one word: O.

  She was somewhere out there amongst the dimensions of time and space and she was telling him who he was. Having been alone for so many eternities, Vanda cried tears from his very soul. He suddenly felt something and realised that it was his hand. She was holding his hand and rubbing its palm. He could feel her across the dimensions of space and time and he felt a great relief. His consciousness began to flow back to him then and he avoided slipping into an endless insanity.

  Then echoing out of the incandescence came the voice of the light once again, telling him that the cycle of time was once again to pass and with it the rebirth of the cosmos. He suddenly saw a vast wave of bright pink flames coming from far away, rolling along and changing everything; destroying its perfect balance. From this tide of fire, came a vast array of nebulas and the whiteness disappeared into a slipstream of matter. Vanda now became witness to a great storm of chemicals that crashed together and made a series of gigantic explosions throughout the universe. From these explosions formed galaxies and solar systems and he realised that he was witnessing the birth of the universe: the big bang.

  Vanda searched out Earth again amongst the newly formed galaxies and found it to be covered almost entirely by an ocean. He dived down into the great expanse of blue water and watched as creatures began to mutate and diversify with each passing millennia until the vast ocean began to subside with the changing of the climate and islands appeared upon its surface.

  He watched as the first sea creatures left the water and pulled themselves across the sands and into the vegetation. They then began to mutate over thousands of generations and leave the primordial waters behind forever. He then witnessed the first sprouts of humanity begin to evolve and then establish the first signs of organised civilisation. He began to realise that far from going forward through time, he had gone completely through it and emerged out of it on the other side. He realised then that time is cyclical and that he was entering the next dimension.

  He floated like a ghost of time amongst the great empires of human civilisation; one consuming another in a constant fight for control. He watched as one evolution of man destroyed the last in horrific scenes of genocide. He witnessed Homo sapiens leading crusades across Europe, decimating the Neanderthals, laying siege to their villages. He saw huge piles of Neanderthal bodies and the Homo sapiens lighting them in giant fires that burnt throughout the ancient world. Modern humanity was born from the ashes of those civilisations that went before it.

  Vanda found himself floating through the planes of Earth and witnessing the great universal struggle played out over and over again; never ceasing; never ending; always battling for survival; always gasping for air; always clambering to the top, only to be removed once they were there.

  But through it, all Vanda had but one solace: O.

  In his most desperate times, he would hear her soothing voice come drifting across the dimensions, reminding him of who he was and releasing him from his ever growing psychological despair. Through her gentle tones, he kept ahold of who he was; of what he was; and if it hadn’t been for her, he would have disappeared into the vacuum of his mind and the last tethers of his sanity would have been broken, casting him forever into madness. She reassured him that he would return soon.

  He cried out in the darkness for her and suddenly felt a soft hand brush down one side of his face, seemingly wiping a tear away from his face. At her touch, he felt an electric shiver traverse the whole of his being, welling up and threatening to burst into a cloud of the purest joy.

  Vanda moved off through the atmosphere and launched himself out into the galaxy. He watched the planet Earth from afar and saw that it was slowly changing, morphing into a face. The velvet black space that surrounded it began to move and dissolve away; its atoms splitting into a trillion particles of black sand that swirled around the planet. Earth began to change shape into an oval and its blue and green surface slowly dissolved into a milky white. The face began to emerge more prominently and soon he recognised it.

  It was O.

  She stood over him and he realised that he was back in the room, staring out from the bed. She had a half wrinkled smile upon her red lips and a genuinely worried expression had hold of her features. Vanda reached out a hand towards her face and she moved her head towards it. He almost jumped out of the bed when he felt the softness of her cheek upon the palm of his hand; she was really there. For the first time in nearly ten years, Vanda was seeing the present moment.

  O’s expression instantly changed when she realised that he was awake and a gentle smile opened up on her lips, replacing her worried expression. She immediately looked behind her and began calling someone. A man dressed like a makeshift doctor came jogging over to Vanda. He sat down on the edge of the bed next to him and took hold of one of his wrists. He pricked the wrist with a device, which Vanda instantly felt, and then checked a readout upon it.

  “Well,” the doctor gently pronounced, looking confidently into Vanda’s eyes, “it appears that you are finally with us. You had this one,” he signalled O with a nod of his head in her direction, “very anxious. But from your read out it appears that your brain functions are about as normal as a shifter’s will ever be.”

  The whole time, O stood at the foot of the bed and looked down upon Vanda, her expression giving away her relief at seeing Vanda recovered from his ordeal.

  On the outside, she had watched his body spasms and cries with such heart rendering pity that she had melted into tears almost every day that she had come to see him; and apart from her duties with the Cause, she had visited him every spare moment that she could. She felt an almost instantaneous connection with Vanda the moment they had fled from Neo Time Square together.

  At his best during his illness, Vanda had just stared out from his bed with dead eyes. But on those days when his condition had taken ahold of him, he had had awful convulsions and his body streamed with a translucent, yellow liquid that smelt like rotting metal. It was the toxic meds leaving his body, pouring out of every pour like a poisonous stream. He looked so childlike to O then that her pity for him had threatened to overwhelm her.

  “How long have I been gone?” Vanda timidly asked in a hoarse voice, his throat a little sore.

  “Not as long as it must have felt for you,” the doctor remarked. “You’ve been out for about three weeks now, which isn’t so bad— I’ve seen some who have taken months to recover and others who have never left the state of withdrawal; lost within the void of time.”

  Vanda looked down upon himself and saw that he had become terribly emaciated. He realised that the withdrawal had eaten into his body. His skin was becoming transparent and his hair had turned a brilliant white. He also noticed the pink scars on his forearms that he had seen in one of his visions during his illness.

  The doctor observed him looking and said, “We had to remove several devices from your body that had been placed there by the government. Our tech team are trying to fathom them now— we’re not sure exactly what their purpose was, but we believe it had something to do with controlling your actions and mind waves. They aren’t tracking devices, but something else. Eventually, we will be able to remove the scars, but I don’t yet possess the desired equipment for that.”

  O came over to Vanda, crouched down beside his bed and took his hand in hers, pressing his palm gently with her fingers. Vanda felt a surge of warmth traverse his body at her touch. She smiled gently at him and he returned her smile with one of his own.

  “You know I saw and heard you while I was in there,” he softly said to her. “You called me back from the abyss of my own mind on more than one occasion. Thank you.”

  O blushed deeply and smiled, her face lighting up with a transcendent beauty that shone a light into Vanda. He too blushed at its sight.

  “The patient needs time to recover
his energy,” the doctor said, breaking the two’s moment. “Neon wishes to see him as soon as his energy returns.”

  With that, he laid a hand upon O’s shoulder and signalled for her to leave the room with him. She stood up, smiled one last smile at Vanda and the two began to leave the room.

  As they were walking through the door, Vanda suddenly asked, “Doctor, why can I see the present?”

  “Sorry,” the doctor said from the doorway, “I forgot to say. The drugs that the government gave you kept your condition in a state that the government could control. They stopped your time lapse from staying stable, but also gave you a dependency on them. That meant that if you stopped taking them then, your condition would spiral out of control, giving you the impression that you needed them. But the meds themselves do no more than block your ability to manage your condition independently. You’ll see when you begin your training.”

  “My training?”

  “I won’t say too much for now, but you have a crucial part to play in the future of humanity. Neon will explain everything to you tomorrow.”

  And with that, the two left, O smiling briefly at him as she disappeared through the door. Vanda lay back down on the bed. His whole body ached and he found that he had grown terribly weak and fatigued. He slowly began to sink into unconsciousness.

  3.

  Vanda slept soundly that night. He dreamt about O.

  They were together walking along the edge of a blue sand beach of one of the many small islands of Vespes 3. In the light green sky, the iridescent duel suns glowed intermittently orange and purple. The pink ocean’s waves crashed upon the shoreline as they walked barefoot along it holding hands.

  O’s red hair sparkled in the glowing orange light of the dancing sunbeams and her emerald green eyes sparkled within it too. They came upon a shape in the sand and realised that it was a beached silver ream (a kind of small dolphin with two dorsal fins). At its sight, O pulled her hand out of Vanda’s and steadily jogged up to it. He followed her.