by Davi Cao
The col.locs in the infinity of space, one by the side of the other, colored the sky with abundant worlds. They spun amid a perfect vacuum, no gases to form nebula, no freedom to form black holes.
Under the crowded sky, a man and his wife dug the earth. They had garlic cloves by their side, a dog sniffing at their tools, a small plot of land marked by a handmade line. People worked late at night, when they should and could be sleeping.
“A lovely couple, aren’t they?” Colin said, squatting in front of the man who dug the ground.
“They are, and very dedicated as well. Look at their faces. Why do you think they’re working now?” Dalana touched the woman’s back with her ghost hand.
“Hm, I guess they don’t feel tired and had nothing to do. I always thought planting stuff was relaxing.”
“It looks like so. What I see, though, is that they aren’t doing this for the love of work. It’s for something else.”
“I know. I see what you mean.” Colin picked up a pebble on the earth with enough focus to affect the creation's world.
The dog noticed something moving and barked. It enticed its owners' attention to the floating pebble that fell on its own as they turned their gazes to it. Dalana caressed Colin’s head, calling him up. He stood and walked away from the house, looking back to marvel at the couple who worked until so late.
“My first creation wasn’t Utopian, you know that? I took a while to become what I am now. When I saw what I could create, I was the opposite of you. My world was ripe to disappear, and I had lost my husband since I was eight, so nothing bounded me. I made a world of contrast.” Dalana kicked dirt under her feet, pushing her front pocket down with clawed fingers.
“I thought you were born in Utopia, and couldn’t see beyond that. If a person only knows perfection, she’ll never want anything else,” Colin said.
“Perfection is something I learned. It’s not a prevalent concept, and it wasn’t in mine. What triggered me was what they did to my first world.” She bobbed her head in silence.
“Did they... did they destroy it soon?” Colin encouraged her to continue.
“I wish. They vandalized it.” She faced his eyes with clenched lips. “Humans in that world were fountains of time. One met the other and their waves sent them back and forward, disentangling them from one’s contemporaries, a perpetual dance of vanishing people, deep bonds, and terrible farewells. It was beautiful, it was my first world, it was my pride and joy.”
She gripped her front pocket, stretching it down to her waist, pulling it along her gestures. Colin, by her side, closed the gap between his lips, swallowing air, taken by her story. Dalana smirked, and continued.
“For some reason, a large group of Creators started bathing in my humans' fountains, traveling through time with them. But they tortured my people... they tortured them. Did awful things to them, causing pain for as long as they lived, unable to meet others, crippling their bodies and isolating every human of my world. They turned it into a nightmare, a true hell of unstoppable suffering.”
The col.loc above grew a mustache, or so it seemed to those wandering on New Terra. A large mountain range grew at a fast pace, evident to the naked eye.
“And all for a few laughs, a welcoming parade for the new Creator.” Dalana looked down again, away from the marvelous col.loc in the sky. “I had no idea Creators could interfere in our worlds if we didn’t say anything about it, and I learned the hard way that most of our kind uses creation only to escape boredom.” Dalana spun around herself while walking, looking down then to Colin’s face, extending her hands to explain her story. “I’m interfering in your creation, Colin, I know I am, and... and I wish I didn’t do it... I know how bad it is. But if we can have a Utopia where even Creators feel good just to be in, then nobody should suffer anymore, nobody ever.”
“That’s like keeping us on drugs. You’ll make us forget about existence, and everything will stop. I can’t believe I’m the one to say it, but... But, well, suffering is part of creation. It’s what gives us intensity, and intensity is what I want.”
“You want repetition, you want the same thing that you had before. That’s not intense. You’ll fall in the same problem you accuse me of.”
“I don’t want the same life, I just want to finish what I started. I don’t know what will come out of Terra if I get the chance to live there again. It might be bad, it might be good, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just want to live it in full. Then, only then, I’ll be ready for something new.” Colin pleaded for Dalana’s comprehension with trembling eyes.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She nodded and mimicked Colin’s walk, letting go of her spinning around while they explored the countryside at night.
They crossed paths with a cluster of modern houses surrounding a glassy three-story building with Laura’s logo on it. Driven to that which he didn’t know, Colin guided their walk there, traversing a tall fence with barbed wire and alarms. In the middle of nowhere, that small village surprised him.
Despite giving Laura her wealth, he had no control on how she used her money, and the communication he kept with her assumed such a functional and sporadic frequency that she had plenty of space to act in secrecy.
It was one hour before dawn and people worked inside the building. Security people guarded the entrance, others patrolled the hallways. Dalana and Colin followed the main path and got to a large door, behind which lied a running track, where two shadows walked together under the faint glow of spotlights, simulating the night’s clarity. These two had dust rings and small things orbiting their bodies. They held hands, they were aWa’s people with an active ou.uo, a tiny galaxy on its own.
“See, I knew we’d have more of them visiting us here,” Colin said, matching speed with the walking pair.
“And it seems like she did like you wanted. This might be one of the places to separate them from the world,” Dalana said, thrilled to meet so soon other people from Ai.iA’s col.loc.
“Yeah, they are separated, for sure... I just don’t know if it’s for their safety.” Colin noticed a line of metallic barrels in a wall’s recess.
He got closer to investigate them. A thick lid closed three of those barrels. He saw an opened one, found it half filled with something viscous, a liquid that behaved like soft blobs stuck together.
“That’s the honey produced by the walking people!” Dalana said, puzzled by the sight.
“They are collecting it. Laura is researching it, or... or harvesting it,” Colin said.
“What for? She doesn’t need food, nor money. These people are locked in here to serve her purposes?”
“Wait, calm down, we used to do this all the time. Maybe she’s doing it because this honey is good. You are human like us, you know we need pleasure besides the basic needs.”
“Drugs? The same argument you used against Utopia making everybody well all the time, keeping them idle?”
“No, not drugs, just good things. It’s what mortals can do to make sense of life, you ought to remember that. Laura may want to share this honey with the world, because of how good it must be.” Colin looked back at the peaceful pair of walking people finishing another lap on the running track.
“This few? You can’t share it with the world. Unless...”
“Unless she goes out looking for more.” Colin smiled and widened his eyes, taken by an image. “Terra will spread itself over to the other col.locs!”
“Oh, you love it, don’t you?” Dalana said, half-closing her eyes, shaking her head.
“I do! Come on, Dalana, that’s amazing! It will make all the noise I need to find Mae, it will reach her, wherever she is, and she’ll know that someone wants her creation back.” Colin grabbed her shoulders to stare at her in the eyes.
“While you seek your goal, we all have to pay the price of conformity.”
“Wouldn’t it be the same if you wanted to turn the entire world into Utopia again?”
“And wouldn’t you co
mplain about it?”
“It’s not the same. I’m reacting to what they did to me. They destroyed my world, and now I want it back. And it was a wonderful world, so it will be good to watch it spread in this universe, it will be interesting.”
“Are you really sure about that?” Dalana disengaged from his grip, turning around toward the walking couple.
“Yes, I am.”
“Then put your beloved ones out there.” She faced Colin again, her whole face darkened by her own skin.
“What? What are you talking about?” Colin narrowed his eyes.
“Create Angeline again, your parents, everybody you want. If it’s such a great concept, I’m sure they could live wonderful lives in here.”
He stared at her, savoring the broad smile sprouting on his face. “Oh... ok. I can do that.”
∙ 12 ∙ Worker
Fires burning the sky, spherical flames blowing up and coloring the atmosphere with hues of yellow and red. Only decorative, this time, not eating the air, because Colin created them, not OOOO. Terra on the col.loc would be his test tube to a future life in his original world.
And for the experiment to be perfect, it had to start from where his old life ended. He put the strangeness there, the unknown phenomenon that intrigued scientists for days, the apocalypse showed its face again, setting the tone of the narrative about to begin once more.
“I had no idea OOOO was trying to take Mae’s world. But when the fires showed up on Terra, I was torn,” Dalana said, looking straight up to the sky with arms attached to her body.
“You saved people, Laura among them. If you were also tired of Terra, why didn’t you let it perish whole?” Colin strolled on an avenue to get to his parents' old neighborhood.
“I grew attached to people. I always do, actually. It was a mistake, now that I think about it, but I hoped to have them live with me in whatever new world showed up.”
“Didn’t you have Ai.iA to make you some company?”
“No, she was only looking for help, and I can’t deny help. She wasn’t the kind of company I was looking for, though. I wanted friends.”
Colin smiled, blinking three times in a row, looking down, flattered by her tender gaze. Divided between duty and temptation, struggling to reach his goal, he felt unable to be the friend Dalana deserved.
To accept her full embrace, he’d have to let go of his past life, for once in the arms of Utopia, why would he ever want to get out? Utopia didn't have to be boring, no, it could be so, but he could think of ways, yes, of better worlds, of a mishmash, of a marriage between them, of a world where... No, no, to forget meant condoning cruelty, it left his beloved ones to die without a chance of a full life. He had a mission, and no matter how muddled it got into his mind, he’d never give up, even if it meant recreating his beloved ones once again to watch them live happy lives without him.
Colin recreated his parents' house in the same plot of land in the recreated city. The power of imagination, of a mere wish come true, it tempted his mind. He could make it a bigger house, he could give them a swimming pool. All free and instantaneous.
“They’ll love it, do it, go on, do something different for once.” Dalana blew him sparks of creativity.
“Not now. Our house was good enough the way it was.” He smiled at her frustration.
Sarah and Francis, his parents, showed up in bed, enjoying the last hour of sleep before waking up to go to work. Colin watched them breathe under the blankets, calm air blown out of their flat noses. He felt home again, every corner of his creation filled with stories from his past life. He made everything according to his memory, including his room.
“But you can’t interact with them. Are you going to create a clone of yourself to dwell among them?” Dalana came downstairs to check on the living room with him.
“No, that would be weird. In this world, I died yesterday, when Angeline left the office and abandoned me with Mr. Alden.”
“Oh... Sad. Your parents will feel terrible.”
“They already cried yesterday. Now they’ll learn to accept it.”
Before Dalana could turn her incriminating eyes on him, accusing he who had so much trouble in accepting loss, he got back to the street to go all the way down to the office’s old block. They walked in silence, watching the big elongated sun mingle with the sky flames and paint the atmosphere with the colors of apocalypse. Clouds glowed with red, yellow, and orange, inundated by light coming from a shiny rod rising parallel to the horizon.
The office’s building already existed downtown, but it lacked the agency. Colin remade it with all its computers, with Mr. Alden’s private room and ongoing contracts with the same clients from their last day on Terra.
“You used to spend the entire day in this room?” Dalana said, walking behind the computer tables.
“I did, mine was the last one in this row, near Mr. Alden’s door. Those were good times.” Colin puffed out his chest to show pride at his workstation.
“Alright. This is work, this is what you like, I’m trying to accept that. And now what? Angeline?”
“Yeah. I guess I know where her house was. She used to live alone in a tiny flat.”
Angeline lived near downtown, isolated in a bedsit on the tenth floor of a half-century old building. She had a sink, a stove, and a small refrigerator, right next to a two-person dining table, a cabinet, and a sofa by the bed’s side.
So small and cheap, rented by her only because she came from another city looking for work, from where she couldn’t escape unless she paired up with another person or got a job that paid more. Still, she called it home, the place Colin tried to recreate based only from Facebook photos he once saw on her timeline.
Then she showed up in bed, her eyes shying away from the sun’s light entering the window, her black hair rebelling against its bun on top of her head, her white skin glowing with the new day’s freshness.
“Dalana, does she risk melting down or going crazy? Do you think I’m putting her in a bad place?” Colin said, fighting incoming tears from the sight of his beloved one so alive in front of him.
“No melting down here, that world is gone for good. Whether it’s a good place, though, that’s what we’re here to find out. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m aware of what you consider a bad place,” Dalana said, swaying her torso left and right toward Angeline in bed.
“It’s one where people can’t live their lives in peace.”
“Then make her live in peace. You have the power to do this here.” She touched Angeline's cheeks with her ghost hand.
Angeline opened her eyes and glanced at the fires in the sky through the window. The world hadn’t ended, after all, despite the apocalypse party at the beach. What a day she would have, now that Colin would mock her for being wrong again.
She got up and washed her face, widening her eyes to get rid of a sticky slime blocking her lashes. Due to a worried mind, she woke up many times during that agitated night, having trouble to calm herself down after an intense day. She worked for hours, she ran away from work and... And left Colin behind. Many things needed work, not just the job itself.
Thin slices of bread, old butter, and an empty juice box. Her fruit bowl was empty, the cheese pot smelled funny. She had a quick and frustrating breakfast then took a brief shower to wear her work jeans and t-shirt.
“Come on, let’s give her some privacy.” Colin pulled Dalana by the arm, leading her out of the bedsit.
“She can’t see us, what’s the matter?” Dalana raised one eyebrow.
“It’s creepy to invade her space like this, I wouldn’t like to have anybody watching me change without knowing it.”
“We’re humans alike. She’s got nothing I don’t already know.”
“Ok, wait, you’re freaking me out. Do you know the concept of privacy?”
“From other worlds, yes, including yours. It’s interesting, but I never understood its charm. I think individuality can flourish even without it.”
&
nbsp; “Fine, suit yourself, just not now, ok? Angeline would prefer to be alone now, I’m sure of that.”
They only followed her again when Angeline herself left her room. Red lips, delineated eyes, wavy hair flowing over her back and a purse hanging from her shoulder. She got down the street and walked one block until the bus stop. After ten minutes of waiting, she got into the bus and took a ride to work.
When she entered the office, Colin and Dalana followed suit, he going right, behind Angeline, she going to the other side, browsing the computer screens opposite to them. Out of the ten workstations, the designers occupied eight, now that Angeline arrived. The empty one by her side announced a missing Colin, the one who always arrived on time. She stared at it with blank eyes, frozen in place.
Mr. Alden walked through the front door, heading to his own private room. Lazy red eyes framed his countenance, lips hanging open, looking down. He murmured good-morning, fading into the door, interrupted by Angeline.
“Sir, did Colin say anything about not coming today?”
The boss stopped, licked his lips, and took a deep breath.
“Colin, err... Colin... his parents just called me, before here, they... err... they told me he... he died. He died yesterday, after... after leaving here. I’ll be in my room... if you need me, just call... just come if you need me,” Mr. Alden said, shutting the door behind him.
Angeline dropped her purse on the table, looked left, then right, everybody stared at her, at each other. Everybody lost, their workmate dead, like this, so sudden, Colin gone forever, unbelievable.
She went to the bathroom, her mouth trembling, her eyes twitching, her stomach pushing her guts, making her breathless. Behind closed doors, she contorted her face and cried, throwing water on her face to let the tears flow unashamed. Her skin turned red, she sobbed with a hand pressed against the wall, keeping her from falling and suffering the sadness on the dirty floor.
“I have to get back to her... I didn’t think she’d act like this,” Colin said, his body burning from the impossibility of hugging Angeline.
