by K.Z. Freeman
She visits me in my dreams again. She is beautiful and bright, just like I remember her.
"What paths would you tread to find me?" she asks. "What universe would you shatter to have me?"
I know she knows the answer before she even asked. She wants to hear me say it.
"I would walk all of them, annihilate everything. I would then ascend to godhood to remake it all for you, see it all burn again with you in my arms." I say, watch her smile the most wicked grin a person could muster. In truth, I would do it all just to see that smile again. Yet she wants more than the universe – the bitch – desires the one thing I can never give her. Ever. She wants my soul. She wants it and I cannot give it to her because I don’t have one.
“Now you understand?” my father asks me as I open my eyes. I rise to my feet to see him framed by the rising sun. “You didn’t carry a way for us to kill them. All those millennia ago, you carried and transmitted a way so we wouldn’t even have to.”
“I don’t understand,” I admit.
“The Ancients breached the gap between matter and energy. The way the world is has not come to pass because of extraterrestrials, if that’s even what they are. It is because of the massive release of energy when we all became one. Some were left behind. It is always like this. But most have transcended. They have become one movement, like an ocean. The Ancients have found a way to transcend death and become something beyond what we who stayed here can image. The White.”
“Then why are you here? Why do the Templars exist? Why are the aliens still here?”
“They have waited to feast on us again.”
There’s so many things parading inside my mind I find it difficult to focus on any one of them. Too many questions merge into confusion. Above them all drifts the thought of Calyx. Only one question stands out.
“Ia said he can bring them back. What does he mean?”
“Where is he?” my father asks.
I don’t have to answer, he sees what he needs in my mind. He enters a silent command into his helm. I can see it, I can read it. A command to intercept. I lunge at him and grab his neck. We fall to the ground, tumble, his head hanging over the precipice and the yellow cloudcover shifting in the distance below.
“You bastard!”
“It is what must be done,” he manages, his face turning red. My hands fumble around his neck.
“I’m a robot, am I? How easy is it for a robot to crush a windpipe, I wonder?”
“That is a… gross oversimplification,” he manages.
I know I won’t be able to kill him. His face won’t let me.
“You can’t kill me, son,” he says.
I hesitate. My grip grows firmer. I hesitate. And he is right. I let go. It hurts when I breathe, it hurts when I speak, but I still want it.
“Then un-simplify it for me,” I tell him as I stand up. I put my boot on his chest and keep him pinned. Good enough.
“A cybernetic organism. You are human, Loregar. The only difference is you were made to be the best of us.”
“Do I look like I’m the best!?” I yell.
“Your responses are in place, you fight for the right things,” he tries to comfort, catching each breath over the pressure of my heel.
It is the first time in my life that I feel like there’s nothing more to say between us. I feel my limbs soften, I look into the distance. The sky is bright above me, the clouds shift like thoughts in my head. I don’t know how or when it happened, but somehow, in all my time, I’ve managed to lose track of the truth.
Yet after all that has happened, I will remember this day the most. Not because of what I’ve learned or who has died. Those things begin to pale in comparison to what happened next. It is this day I will remember forever. I will remember it because it is the day my own father tries to kill me.
He lunges upward and in the process throws me back. I manage to catch my feet and steady my stance. His footsteps are heavy, his brow dark, eyes determined. His gaze holds a kind of malice most men run from. I’m not a man.
“I had enough of your foolishness, boy,” he growls. He steps through time and space and in a blink of special displacement and a sound of something heavy thrown into a distant lake, he is upon me. He doesn’t run or walk towards me, he is simply there, here, in my face, instantly. A headbut tones a bell in my ears and throws me back into the lift door. I can feel the alloy bucking under the force of my landing.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel. I remember it now. I was dead then, on top of that spire all those thousands of years ago, just as I will die now. There is no light. There are only dreams. A landscape of dreams and dreamscapes. I see the men in wide-brimmed hats around my father as he trudges towards me. His face is dark. I see only his eyes, darker still. But those men. They laugh. They laugh their litany of victory of a battle I didn’t even know waged. It would seem my dreams have found a way to find me even in my waking hours, as they have done before. I look at each man in turn. They are all the same. The lift door opens behind me and I fall between the gap. It doesn’t fully open, but enough for me to squeeze through. I hear the thumping of my father as he begins to run. He is a shadow in the light surrounding him. I smell my own blood clogging my nostrils. I wonder if it’s even real blood. I hear the sound of his fist as the doorway closes and I am sent down. I have pressed the number 23.
CHAPTER 26
