Psychonaut: The Nexus

by K.Z. Freeman

I am not allowed to commune with The All Seeing Eye. Although I am fairly certain it wishes to talk to me. Awir doesn’t let me. But I heard it. It said one thing, a sentence, something which I am certain no one else heard but me. It said, “Come see me when they fall.”

  I plan to do just that.

  We move back to the elevator and continue on our way. I use the momentary silence and the world shifts. I open the box in my head and allow its contents to spill.

  I squinted my eyes, the sun’s red pulsing like a vertical wall ahead of me, reaching infinitely high. I could see the mesh comprising the star’s outer layer, the smaller, hotter sun beneath the surface shifting and rearranging like magnetized liquid. I looked back at the object in the distance. It was black, utterly black. Dark and shimmering against the glare of the dark-red sun behind it.

  “Now you’re fucked,” I said.

  “It’s just the artifact,” I tried to convince myself.

  “It’s coming closer.”

  It grew in my vision, expanded.

  I waited. The air began to buzz. My ears popped.

  “You realize this is it, don’t you?”

  “Shut up,” I spat.

  The thing floating was a box. A big, apartment block sized box. It shrouded me in its shadow as it stopped above me. Monolithic in its size, the thing didn’t bob up or down, it didn’t move sideways, it did nothing but float in space and rape my ears with its incisive, subsonic growls. My hands began to shake, my mouth dropped. Yet I wasn’t afraid, at least not as much as I perhaps should have been. That is, until the thing started talking. Its words were clipped, the voice that came out so expansive, it felt like I could stand on the other side of the world and still hear it. The small pebbles around me shook, dust plumed the soil. The clipped nature of the grumbling voice was strange in the sense that I could distinguish but a few words. Slowly, however, almost as though the thing was reading my mind, I began to understand the rearranging words, the adjustments in sentence structure and composition, all to the point where I began to understand what it was saying. I wish I had never understood it. For the meaning of its words bound my thoughts with fear.

  “I have come to destroy you,” it claimed.

  “Fine!” I shouted back, scared shitless but shouting my lungs out anyway. “I’m dead then. Just end me. Do it!”

  I wished it wouldn’t. No matter how much pain I knew still awaited me. No matter how many hours I shall lay, dying. None of that mattered right now, right then as I faced the prospect of my immediate demise, it didn’t matter. The end of existence? It suddenly felt like there was so much left for me to experience, so much left to learn and absorb, to see, to hear, taste and feel.

  The box didn’t move. It felt like it was staring at me, looking and trying to figure out just what kind of an idiot doesn’t want to live.

  “You desire death?” it rumbled. The soil reeked with its words, their rumble exciting a stench from the dirt as thought a million men had died and were buried just inches below the dehydrated crust.

  I didn’t speak at first, lost in the process of thinking about what I actually wanted.

  “You don’t want to die,” I said out loud, despite myself.

  “I know I don’t, but what else is there?” I answered.

  “There is life,” the thing above me added. “Even upon this barren world. There. Is. Life.”

  “What are you?” I asked. “Are you an object?”

  “No.”

  “A being trapped within an object?”

  “No.”

  “A god?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I am All. I am the universe in its true form.”

  “I don’t understand. What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “Come,” it willed. “I shall show it to you.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “I’m having a bit of a difficulty with the ‘coming’ part.”