Psychonaut: The Nexus

by K.Z. Freeman

“Your mind is a current. A river. An ocean. The Ancients realized this. They realized and saw the infinite potential, breached the gap between energy and matter,” he says.

  “How do I find my mind?” I ask. “As the Ancients did.”

  “The process of thinking only proves real as you look upon it. If you only think, conceptualize without examining your thoughts to try and see why they are the way they are, they all remain abstract, within a nebulous cloud of un-reality. And the cloud is infinite. What you see, hear, taste or touch, brings forth a thought, the trick is to stop this process. To simply see, hear, taste, feel, to cut the divide between thinking of the feeling and the seeing, and to instead just see and feel. This is a daunting task. For the more you think and the more you over-analyze, the less you allow yourself to "let go". You become separate from your body as focus shifts into the brain. This does not only drain the mind, but drains the body as well - more precisely, the mind drains it, it needs the body's resources. But the two are one. There is no separation of mind and body save the illusory one. The result is an unbalanced, wrongly directed mind and a weak body. To live in the Now you must remember it. Too often in the day we are swayed with what we should be doing, what we could be doing and what we aren't doing. Too often do we see a dead world. Focus on what you are doing. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless.”

  “When I try to empty my mind, I always find only my own attempt to concentrate. How can I find my mind?”

  “There is nothing to find. You are your mind. You are energy in movement. Find the energy and realize it, and your suffering will end.”

  In the process of trying to find my mind, the energy, I find only fragments of recollection. The images come even clearer now, evoked by words I had stored in my head. I feel the freezing air on my face, I smell and sense the sun on my features. It feels and has the fragrance of mornings you wish to wake up to. Mornings I had never known. I drift…

  “… I do what you would call ‘think’, and thing become.”

  “Impossible,” I murmured.

  “Look. See. Proof,” it said and the whole planet shifted as though someone had flipped a switch on a cosmic television. The barren landscape waved into an endless field of green and lush grass, the sky turned from a sickly yellow to a bright blue. Moisture clotted into clouds and hung in the air. I inhaled a deep breath, basking in its freshness and pleasantry. It smelled of fresh soil near the forest.

  “How can you do this?” I asked as we walked ahead, towards a strange spire on the horizon. I had only just noticed the structure as the heat-haze disappeared and I could see far off into the distance.

  “How does one explain the process of thinking to an animal? How does one begin such an interaction?”

  “I–“

  “Your mind thinks one step at a time,” the box interrupted me. “You process your thinking only by using one a time thought-symbols. Whether these are words or projections, abstract ideas, all come one by one. They may merge into a fuzz where there are too many and you lose focus, yet still, always, you will think a single thought in a single moment. I think all. Everything. All at once. Every single movement of an atom, every impossible nuance of every quantum. I shape the cosmic foam. I do not move, I move the space around me.”

  I had many question to ask, but couldn’t word them in a way that would make them sound worth asking. There was one question, however, which I simply had to ask. A question that had hung on the proverbial thread of humankind’s existence since the beginning of its thinking processes.

  “How did you come into existence?” I asked at length. It felt like asking a god who had made it.

  There was a pause. “I am existence. I am the core out of which all reality is emanating from.”

  “You cannot just say things like that and expect me to understand. In my head, everything has a beginning and an end, just like human lives. Flickers of existence and then we die. But you? When did you come to be and when will you die?”

  “I am forever.”

  I was beginning to lose my patience. I sighed as I walked ahead, the box following me.

  The spiraling structure in the distance slowly grew. Its impossible scale was mirrored by the equal impossibility of the monolith above me. I began to distinguish the contours of the structure’s shape, the curvature of its design. It was like a concaved needle the size of a mountain, refractive like quicksilver, smooth like the surface of a distant moon.

  “What does that even mean? That you’re forever? Don’t you have a beginning, an end?” I asked.

  “I have a beginning, Richard Bain, you are it.”

  It was at that point I truly lost the ability to follow what the thing was trying to tell me. I staggered for a moment and the box halted as well.

  “Please explain this to me, just, please, try and make sense. Plain words. Simple speech. I beg you.”

  The spiral was nearly upon us, climbing the skies and wounding it with its sharpness. “I am fate,” said the box. “I am the very manifestation of it, jumping through time. This event has happened millions of times before. You asked me if I have a beginning and an end. I do, but also do not. The process of decay afflicts all things in this universe, some of us decay slower, some of you decay faster. Flickers of existence, as you said. In a strange, paradoxical loop, I have become bound to you, to your consciousness. It is the only thing which never decays, but simply jumps through states, through different energy cycles. I need consciousness to exist. I am you, Richard Bain, and you are me. We are admixed, like alloy, through time and space. The tower before you defies explanation, it is my womb. You have a term for it which simplifies it. Time machine.”

  “I don’t understand. You are traveling back in time and repeating the process of your own birth over and over again?”

  “Yes. It is the only way I can survive.”

  “Why don’t you just go back in time again, instead of–“

  “I know what you would ask. That I should go back and stay in that time. But I too suffer from decay. It is a slow process for me, yet does happen.”

  “I see,” I said, even thought I really didn’t.

  “And it will happen an infinite many times more. It has to happen. Right until I discover why it is happening. So you see, my existence is much like the human existence.”

  “And if I refuse?” I asked.

  “You will die on this planet.”

  “You have picked the right recollection, I see,” says Adir. “How did you like your cousin?”

  The question stuns me more than the fact that he seems to be able to see into my mind. The clouds below me are an endless sea of yellow puff. Wondrous. The beauty of it overcomes my reason and fails to tell me plummeting into those clouds would not end well. It most certainly wouldn’t end with a type of pleasant feeling I am imagining at that moment. I focus on that beauty and leave my mind to wander upon it.

  “Awir…” he sighs, his hands crossed above his crotch. “He is known for his shifts in mood.”

  A faint glimmer of a smile curls his lips. I feel my heart leap into my throat, the heat of its pulse warming my cheeks. Beside me, I recognize the face of Adir. As though he had never left, I see my father.

  There are moments in a man’s life when time appears to cease to have meaning. Moments where you meet with the unexplainable and start to beg for an elucidation well before your mouth demands it. But Adir knows my mind well enough, and his own words precede mine.

  “When I died, I was reborn here. Ancients dabbled in everything. They found it, Loregar. They found the tune, they found the tune that rebuilds consciousness. I remembered how I chose to forget. How I moved, walked the land. Love does that to you. It finds you and takes you away. I searched for your mother, but in the end, she found me.”

  He touched my mind then. Used a method I thought could change the world if put to the right purpose. He showed me how he came here.

  I felt cold embracing my limbs, the scent of freshly tailored flesh thick
in my nostrils. I knew there had been others before me, standing on this very pad, resurrected and given a second life, a second nightmare. Precisely how I came to this understanding was a mystery to me.

  The sounds around me were that of industry, of machinery grinding on unlubricated pistons and old servos, yet the sound was somehow serene, as if in I had lain dormant in this room for so long I got used to it, like a child to the sounds of his mother’s heart. Emblazoned in the back of my mind, I possessed a vague recollection of my own death. It didn’t come in a series of images or feelings, but like a wind passing, a distant dream-thought, a fire in the flesh brought forth by a forgotten idea. More than anything else, more even than my own face, I remember a name. An acronym? It seemed to resonate within me, as if its meaning had been imprinted and locked into my code. I could smell it, this fear, it was a smell of decay and total annihilation, a mix of every living fiber boiled and rotten. The smell of an atmosphere burning.

  I stepped down from the plinth and took a good look about me, taking in the sights of the huge place and the strange machines which moved objects I could not place or understand the purpose of. A strange, blue radiance filled the air and carried with it a metallic smell not particularly to my liking. The tang of blood was palpable. I took another step closer to the railing surrounding the round platform. No sooner had I done so than another person materialized behind me. A male, lean and moderately proportioned, his hair blacker even than the endless sleep from which I had just emerged. He looked just as confused as I, an understanding burning in his eyes. An understanding I could not place. With a parched throat and a raised hand in greeting, I spoke my first word.

  “Hi.” I sounded less confident than I had hoped too. He looked at me for a moment, then moved past me without saying anything back. From what I could tell, he had done this, all of this, before. Confident in his strides he moved swiftly to another pad on the level below us. He stepped on it, and I saw a person disappear out of thin air for the first time. There had been no sound. One moment he was there, standing on the pad surrounded by a fine white mist and four pillars, and the next moment, he was gone. Fear gripped me. For a second, I thought this was it. I will never leave this place. The thought chilled me. But something burned in me all the more. An understanding that a man must do what he seemingly cannot do, otherwise he may as well rot away and wallow in his own piss. I had to try. My foot touched the pad, then the other, then, I was somewhere else. The feel of the place had not changed even though the scope and the view of it has. I could see the cavernous facility where I had awakenen stretch out beyond the glass-wall. A machine stood before me, telling me something, imprinting its desires onto my mind. As soon as I accepted its wishes, a part of it slid open to reveal pieces of gear, a mask, boots, leggings. I could just see him, the man, stepping onto another portal. He seemed to know what needed to be done and where to go, so after I had suited myself, I followed him. It didn’t take us longer than a few thousand heartbeats to come to a teleport leading to the outside. I had no sense of direction and zero feeling of where I needed to go, but the natural light felt nice. My eyes protested for a moment, but only for a moment. I had expected to find new sounds outside, but silence was nice too, a good change from the constant and invasive thrum of distant and half-dormant machinery within the facility. Following the male, I went through a series of trials given to me by some kind of robots. Their will and what they required of me was imprinted on my mind as soon as I came close enough. Their voices were pleasant, almost too pleasant. Evidently I was a ‘Templar’. They told me to have a fine day, but fine was the last thing I felt. I made sure to keep up with my male friend though all the trials and agility, dexterity and strength tests. I broke a sweat. Yet no matter the effort, he remained a step ahead of me, glancing my way when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t look too comfortable with the fact that I had also been given a gun, many of them in fact. Things fell apart under the weight of my gun’s supper-propelled and seemingly infinite bullets. Targets burst into dust under the shots from my shotgun, and melted into bubbling piles under the heat of my flamer. I discarded it, however, too hefty for my tastes. We came upon what looked like the last portal together, when he turned to me and spoke, his words venom, “Why are you following me?”

  “What makes you think I’m following you?” I asked. His face twisted into a sneer.

  “There’s no one else here, and you’re always at my back, I don’t like it.”

  He took me to a machine and I pressed my eyes to it. The holographic projection around me faded and, in the following days, I remembered everything.

  “Most of all, I remembered you, Loregar.”

  Tears haze my eyes. “I think I forgot a lot, father. I forgot your smile, and I fear I will forget mother’s as well. I’ve already long ago forgot the sound of her voice.”

  We only truly die when people no longer remember us.

  Our reunion makes me think of Calyx.

  “Where is my friend’s father? The one who came here?” I ask, figured that, if anyone, my father could tell me.

  He stands up. I try to do the same, but my world sways, the clouds below me change. He turns towards me, but I don’t see his face. I see the box. I see a memory. I see how the death of this world began…

  “You will die on this planet.”

  “Seriously? That’s your answer?” I asked. “You bring me here for this ultimatum?”

  “The decision is simple. Live what is left of your pathetic life on this planet, or become one with the universe, the mind of the universe. A living god. The decision is nothing. Wrap your mind around it and you shall see it is a non-brainer, as you would say.”

  “What will become of me?”

  “You will be what you are, but you will be more than what you are now.”

  “You say this process has been going on for a while, why?”

  “No matter how long I ponder, no matter what I attempt, I cannot find a means to do this differently. Perhaps in your cycle – as I am reborn through you again – you shall be able to do things differently.”

  I had become tired of listening to the box. I was intrigued, appalled, afraid, glad, sad and a myriad of other emotions all at the same time. I turned back at the thing as I walked into a brightly lid entrance of the spire and said, “You know, perhaps being able to think only one thought at a time is a good thing. Because if thoughts were like emotions and you could think a multitude of them all at once, I’m not even sure I could keep up.” I smiled.

  “A last question,” I said. “Why me?”

  “Why not you?” it asked. “You were selected randomly out of all the being in the universe. There is a process of selection, one needs appropriate cognitive skills, but ultimately, the selection is random. If it were any other being who was selected, he would have asked the very same thing, thought it to be an equal impossibility that he should be chosen out of all the beings in existence.”

  “But why are you doing this?”

  “I will die. I cannot sleep. More than anything, I wish I could,” said the blackbox, floating behind me, its sound gyrating off the inner-walls of the spire, the sound splitting my head as my eyes adjusted to the glare inside, revealed the interior to me. The insides stood devoid of life and substance. Hollow and empty save a circular device in the distant middle of the structure.

  “This is the universal cycle and I am the mind of god, my thoughts resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace. I root out into the omniverse where all realities and multiverses come together into a unified field of existence.”

  I was only half listening now. To become a god? To shape reality? What was it like, I wondered. I had to know.

  I walked over to the central sphere and could see the outline of my body receding, could no longer see where my body ended and the air began. My surroundings became not saturated with light, but were light. I felt like I was threading upon the surface of the sun. I knew what will happen, knew what shoul
d happen. In an instant of unified thought, I became one with all that will be and all that has been. Something, however, still gnawed at me. A problem, a thought. I had no idea where I’ll end up. Will I remember anything? Would I even need to remember? If I believed in reincarnation, I knew this would be exactly what I’d think if I knew my rebirth was forthcoming. A distant moment remained to me. A moment wherein I still knew what I had been. I blinked for the last time as I was flung to all the far out placed and all the places in between them, I was everywhere, everything, all at the same time. The speed of my journey flayed the meat of my flesh and left my bones between dimensions, until I became nothing more than a thought, a spark igniting the universe into existence.

  I made worlds, I crafted suns, I swam within black holes and made galaxies, then shattered them again. I watched species rise and fall, make war upon one another. Until after a time, I couldn’t even tell if what they did was what I had willed into existence, or had a mind of their own. I later discovered they all streamed through me, but were independent of me. They were tiny cogs in the grand machine, programs within a program. I was merely the source. The universal code. Most of the time I just watched, observed – did nothing. Sometimes, I walked amongst them as one of them. But just like the universe, they too, all of them, expanded and grew, then shrunk, fizzled out and died. Only I was eternal. And after a passage of indiscernible amount of time, eons, I came to the same scene that I knew I had seen a billion times before. I talked to myself as I crawled, broken and defeated, over a distant planet. I remade him and the circle was complete, the cosmic snake bit its tail and I watched the man walk into the spire, into the sphere, starting the cycle of creation all over again.

  But it was all a trick. A lie. Everything I had experienced served to do only one thing. Attract. I was like a lure cast into the water. In my state, for a moment, I could feel it, stirring. Something ancient and vast, outside our own galaxy. I could see it draw its gaze toward us like some great eye consisting of trillions of minds. I could see – feel its hunger, heard the voices and their litany as they turned towards our planet.

  CHAPTER 21