Psychonaut: The Nexus

by K.Z. Freeman

  Do you ever have days when everyone seems utterly pathetic? Their dreams, their thoughts, their aspirations and the flesh they wear... all of it, utterly pathetic. Do you? I do. I look upon the world and its residents and all I see is wasted potential. Dark thoughts take me then and sometimes, sometimes, I wish the human race would simply curl up and die. That a great apocalypse would come in a form of an alien race, beings whose ship would darken the skies and just hang there, like a second moon, linger and watch us, judge us, consider if we are worthy to live or if they should just obliterate us into nothing. I gaze upon the people who offer no smiles, only frowns and coldness as you pass them by, and my heart sinks further. But why should they offer a smile to me? I am just as pathetic as they are, slogging through existence as a blight upon a blighted world. But then, when I reach down into myself and begin to hate everything for reasons I cannot quite comprehend, I remember her... But she is not close, not anymore. She is far and her distance offers little comfort when my heart turns sour and black. Yet the thought of her is enough to remind me I am not without merit, that we all have merit, if we but believe we do, act like we do and manage not to over-think. To forget how little our lives mean and how the world and its time will devour us, bury us under its soil and forget us... Yet on days like these, it pains me that, in the end, even she will forget me…

  My father stares at me. He had elevated my mood. Yet my darkest wish for something to come and destroy us had already come true. A big ship did turn up, a colossus in the sky. It’s still drifting in our orbit, has been for thousands of years. But how and why it came only my recordings seem to know.

  My father smiles. He nods. He wishes me to know. I access the Mind Bank to try and find the truth, see if I can…

  The log begins where it had left off.

  I found that I hadn’t moved from the spot where the sphere first appeared, my fingers still touching it. The round object was real enough, but everything else had been a lie. Only a second had passed. A second wherein I lived years. My hand fell to my side and the sphere disappeared just like it had appeared.

  First contact for the human race came in the year 2134, on the same day that I had touched the sphere. It came in a somewhat expected way. Most had hoped the aliens would simply descend onto the planet to some public arena and walk out of their craft in numbers. This is what eventually happened, but not in any way we have envisioned it. Because when it finally happened, we had no choice but to shoot the bastards.

  But before I get to the grind of it, allow me to say one thing first. Never, ever, trust anyone who brings an energy rifle to a diplomatic meeting. This might seem obvious to anyone with half a wit, but, apparently, the collective human race has less than half of such commodity. It was that very rifle that has wounded me, and as I now lie, dying, logging this in my mind-banks to distribute over the world-link, I can only hope my story will reach as many minds as possible.

  I have no idea why they left me and not finish me off. My only thoughts on the matter are that they knew my wound fatal and saw it fit not to waste any more energy cells. They cleansed the building where I ran to, floor by floor, room by room, compartment by compartment. Why they didn't simply bomb it from orbit was beyond me. I could only assume they actually enjoyed doing it by hand and were after me in particular. And from what I’ve seen, I had a vague idea why this might be the case.

  I now sit propped up in a corner, in a room on the two hundred and thirtieth floor, thinking these words and storing them in my mind. My blood is slowly pooling around me, warm and dark. I had programmed a routine that will post this message, or rather, story, in all social networks and email them to 79 billion different mind-mail accounts.

  We all know how it began, we have all seen it, but the reasons why remain elusive. You can say the world is dead, and that we killed it. But I have seen our true enemy.

  The enemy is us.

  “They are still here,” my father says, his hand pointing to the sky. The sun had gone from its original spot, and the black shape followed. The two now hang low on the horizon, the sun red as though wounded. “But they are coming again. The cleansing will begin again.”

  “How long?” I ask. I wish to ask my father other things. I want to ask him how it was like to die. I desire to know how–

  “Four days,” he says. There’s something cold in him. As though whatever had taken him in death had left a part of itself within, imbedded in his flesh. His lips smile, but his eyes never do.

  “Come with me,” he rumbles, and I follow his footsteps to the elevator. We leave the red light behind and go down. A silence grows between us. How do you begin a conversation with a dead man? He sees my discomfort and begins to talk, and talk. We exchange words like father and son. Our journey down passes all too soon.

  We are met with sounds of shouting far ahead, at the main entrance. I rush ahead to a familiar voice and cross the distance to where the dead bodies lie scattered and discarded. The smell hits me, but a sight before me trumps even the stench.

  “We know he’s here, you bastards!” Ty’s voice!

  I push my way between the Templar bodies to see Calyx and Ty aiming their guns at me.

  “You plan on shooting me?” I smile.

  “I was going to,” Ty grins, “but these Templars look more inviting. That merde-armor of theirs could fetch a fair price.”

  We hug like old friends, and when our eyes part, I meet the gaze of Calyx. I can barely find the strength to walk to her. We stare at each other for a moment that seems too long and too short at the same time. I smell the beauty of her. I see it in her smile. She presses her face over chest and embraces me. I had never realized how tiny she actually is. She feels fragile and I fear a firmer grip might shatter her. She is akin to a story unfolding before me. The warmth of her seem to trump even the sun.

  It is then, as I look down upon her smile, that my memory betrays me. Layers of it peel off into my conscious sight and Calyx disappears into the distance, slowly fades until she is no longer there…

  They came from the sun. At least, that’s how it looked like. Thousands of small vessels, luminous orbs which coalesced above the skies of central Europe, China, India, Japan, South and North America, Canada, South Africa and Australia. They waited for an hour and a day, then began their travel over our world. Slowly, the orbs drifted above the globe, passing over all of the continents, all the countries. They were seen by all. Millions of digital images and no fewer videos and holographic estimations were taken to attest to the reality of this event. What we collectively perceived were thousands of bright and trailing comets. They were too far up in the upper atmosphere to see from up close by our craft, and our instruments could spot nothing but light when looked and zoomed in upon the objects. They merged over England. They merged and transformed from brightly colored orbs into a singular, black, utterly black derelict.

  A black sun blotting out our own Sun as the thing swam between the clouds during daytime, and blocked the stars at night. It just hung there, like a second moon. Silent and unmoving. It appeared to spin, the clouds circling about like an accretion disk. It agitated the waters of oceans with its mass and the tides rose, rivers spilled and flooded large parts of London. It followed the Earth, always in the same position.

  A panic-state ensued across the world. We sent our own craft to look at it from up close, but it was like it was surrounded by some barrier ten kilometers thick. Nothing could penetrate it and no signal whatsoever escaped it, or seemed to get to it, all navigation systems would simply fizzle out and die. Aircrafts would plummet, and could only restart their engines upon exiting the field around the dark vessel. The roundness of the derelict appeared to be perfect, until, on its side, a lump the size of an apartment block split like a cell dividing. It was equally as perfect, symmetrical, a sphere of utter black. We followed its descend towards London, to France, to Budapest and back to France where it stopped. It then floated above the Eifel Tower for exactly 6days 6hours 6mi
nutes 6seconds 6… It then shot back up and merged with the black ship again. It was then that it became somewhat obvious the intelligence inside the vessel was examining us. It was assessing us, monitoring us and, as it later turned out, trying to figure out if we’re worth to live on this planet, or if they should simply blast us into oblivion.

  When the first alien appeared in the middle of the European Parliament, we were shocked to say the least. It was an ugly, crude thing. It floated above the ground, suspended on what looked like the currents of its own will. Waves of heat haze flew from its head and to its feet, a head that was nothing more than a triangle with a single, large and ugly eye. I was there when the thing appeared. I was there when it silenced the room with its speech, words that shook the walls. I was there when my colleagues shat themselves. And I was there when grown men began to cry out of fear. The alien was naked, larger than two of the tallest men, with a body seemingly composed not of muscle tissue or skin, but out of a grey, almost black form, like a statue. Its shape was a paradox. For it looked to resemble stone and what could have been its muscles looked angular, as though it were composed of triangles, or pixels. Yet it was almost opalescent. To look upon it was like looking at the stars. Within its body, light would twinkle inside black, boiling liquid that sloshed and moved as though alive, magnetized. Its head was two dimensional. I tried to look at it from different angles, but it would always, always show itself from but one side, perfectly triangular and overly large even for its titanic body. The thing seemed so huge, it felt like it sported its own gravitational field as it floated in the middle of the large room, reaching to half its height. The eye in the middle of its ‘head’ was lidless, always staring and strangely human looking, intense. The appearance of it was all the more reason that it looked so terrifying. For it was an enlarged, never-blinking eye, which stared at you no matter where and from what angle you looked at it. We soon discovered it stared at us all, like a mirror, simultaneously. Its words were so simple, so familiar, yet felt so vile. The alien said what we were hoping someone would say for untold millennia. And for the first time, the sentence came out of something that could actually be what it claimed to be. Yet it filled us with the uttermost dread. The three short words rang inside our minds and made our ears bleed.

  “I am God,” it claimed, it’s voice like mountains colliding. Our shock turned to awe. In deference, some fell to their knees or simply stared, dumbfounded and in trance. The hall bristled with whispers and doubt. I was not sure most even saw the strange device the being held across its lower chest. Well, not until what had at first seemed like a peaceful meeting turned into a scene of slaughter.

  The energy rifle spat fire. Its sound tore through the air like a razor of jagged reality. My field of vision shook as light enveloped all of existence for a second, then another flash, then another. Screams and shouts, feet milling and the sound of bodies exploding, desks shattering and chairs melting. I looked at the God spewing tormented fire the color of madness and oil and my knees began to shake. What had before been a sense of adoration and hope, turned into a full blown hatred for the being that stared at me and wished nothing but my demise. Its blank gaze remained motionless, yet the space around it shook when it spoke again. It felt as though the whole building was rocked by its word.

  “Die.”

  Why a being, or beings so advanced should be so violent I only later understood. Only I could understand it, since somehow, either by some act of fate or dumb luck, I alone managed to survive. I had hid myself under a shattered pile of desks that were flung aside and just kept still. Like a corpse. A very dead corpse.

  But I could not close my eyes.

  I watched as the being watched me but did nothing else. It did not attack me or wound me, nor did it do much but stand and wait. It waited until a slit on the air, like a curtain drawn aside, manifested beside it. Within the slit, I could see what I imagined was the interior of their vessel. The thing stepped through.

  CHAPTER 22