“I don’t know much about him. Seems weird they never even talked about him during the Audits training,” Alex said. “What does he do?”
“Another good question,” Emily said. “I can’t answer that.”
“Because you don’t know? Or because you don’t want to tell me?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Fine. Be like that,” Alex said. “Are you done with your damn ice?”
Emily turned the empty glass over on the table.
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Where do we start?”
“Let’s begin with something familiar,” Emily suggested, her eyes full of mischief. “How about some sunset beach yoga?”
Thirteen
Day Three
Alex performed sun salutations facing the water and the ruddy glow of the sunset, determinedly not watching Emily flow gracefully from pose to pose. He had breathed a private sigh of relief when she went to change from the bikini she had been wearing all day, but the Lycra and Spandex ensemble she returned in was not significantly less distracting.
He noticed her laughing out of the corner of his eye, and belatedly remembered that nothing was private, where an empath with a telepathic link to his brain was concerned.
“It’s not my fault,” Alex said, wobbling as he sunk into a deep lunge. “You have to know how good you look.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t like hearing it,” Emily said, smiling crookedly. “I just think it’s funny how much it bothers you.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, sliding into Warrior pose. “Funny.”
“You’re so defensive,” Emily teased, moving smoothly into Downward Dog, and forcing him to hurriedly look away. “Are you having second thoughts, Alex dear? Are you experiencing feelings of sudden regret?”
“Every day of my life,” Alex muttered. “When do we start?”
“We’ve already started,” Emily said, turning serious. “You need to get in the right frame of mind. Let’s try a new routine, okay? A few of the poses might be new to you, but just follow my lead and keep an even pace.”
Alex began to mirror her movements, and despite his expectations, his thoughts were quickly occupied with maintaining the poses and controlling his movements. They moved gradually from one position to another, his hips opening and the tightness leaving his lower back. They settled down onto their mats, and the poses became more strenuous, and the pace increased.
Alex felt the strain in his calves and thighs, his core and his shoulders, an ache the faded pleasantly into the background as he continued the routine. He followed Emily back to his feet and into a balance segment, taking on evolving poses that started with Tree and Eagle, and progressed from there into more difficult and demanding positions and movements that he had never performed before.
The struggle grew more intense as they went, moving deeper into uncharted territory, and his arms and chest trembled with exertion. He would have asked for mercy, but something about the routine affected him, and even as he battled to hold on to a supported headstand, he felt no real desire to stop and rest. He was not curious what might come next or concerned with what he had done already.
The sun stayed right on the horizon. The wind blew steadily, drying the sweat from his body, but it never became cold. The sand sloughed from his skin easily as he moved, and the spray from the ocean as it slowly roused itself kept him from growing too hot.
Emily pushed on until he had nothing left, until his arms and legs shook with every move, and then they moved to their backs. The stretches became longer and slower, easing his tired body into a state of satiated complacence.
They ended with their eyes closed, limbs extended, hearts open to the sky.
“I think you’re about ready,” Emily said. May I tell you a secret?
***
“I never wanted to be alive in the first place,” Mitsuru said. “Why would I be happy with a second chance?”
“There are two ways you can look at this,” Rebecca said, sitting opposite her in the bubbling hot tub. “You can consider it a continuation of a life that made you unhappy, or you can view it as a fresh start, unencumbered by the baggage of your previous existence.”
“You sound like a self-help book.”
“I’m a psychologist. Self-help books sound like me.”
“It’s strange that you aren’t smoking,” Mitsuru said, adjusting her position so the jets pummeled her lower back. “It seems wrong, somehow.”
“This is your simulation,” Rebecca said. “You wanted non-smoking.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No, because I’m not all of me. I’m just a therapist, here, and a friendly, familiar face.”
“You’ve been my best friend for years,” Mitsuru said. “Or you used to be. In a past life, maybe.”
“I’m still your best friend,” Rebecca assured her. “That part of me is definitely here with you.”
“I don’t understand any of this. Everyone was already afraid of me, and what I might do, if I lost control of my protocol. Even I was afraid.”
“Yes, that’s true. We were afraid of what you might become, but we were also hopeful.”
“You might have been. I never was.”
“Are you sure that it always felt this way? I remember when you were happier.”
“Younger and dumber,” Mitsuru said. “That’s all.”
“I’m not so sure. Our outlook reflects our experiences, Mitzi. The years have sharpened you, and your experiences have made it harder for you to see what I see in you.”
“What do you see in me? I really don’t understand,” Mitsuru said, looking at her hands with an unhealthy intensity. “I see a dead woman, who only knows how to ruin and destroy.”
“You aren’t dead. You are reincarnated, perhaps, or recovered, but not dead. You never died, if you really think about it. You share a body and the memories of a woman who died, but that wasn’t you. You have the same past as that woman, but you don’t need to share her pain, or be bound by the constraints she placed on herself.”
“What am I, Becca? I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s not true. I feel tremendous pain and confusion, just being near to you. You hurt far too much to claim to feel nothing. As for what you are, well, that’s up to you to decide. That’s probably what hurts so much.”
***
Emily whispered a word in his ear.
Or perhaps it was something more, a vast and complicated thing, like an impossibly faceted stone that transfixed his eyes. Alex was reminded of the feeling just before a migraine set in, and the feeling that followed an orgasm.
There was pain and a strange sense of elevation. Fear took hold of him and shook the air from his lungs. He exhaled and swore that he could see his breath.
The word was lightning in his brain, vivid blue fading into white, like the hottest flame at the end of a blowtorch, a fraction of a second of transmission. It was as if he held an exposed electrical main clenched between his teeth, rather than the pencil that Emily had wedged there, when the seizures began. He stared at the stars, seeing only the black absence between them, the vast empty spaces where light itself was subdued, and felt a great force pushing him down into the soft sand.
His skull was like wet and decaying newspaper wrapped around the shivering tissue of his mind, and his thoughts were liquid metal, a peculiar and dull species of quicksilver that leaked out his eyes and nose, along with the blood that Emily gently dabbed away with a handkerchief.
Alex meant to cry out, the pain was so terrible, as his eyes changed. He clutched his face, feeling the tissue squirm and deform, the live eye and the dull one both singing out their distress at the rapid change in form.
The agony came to an end before he could give voice to it.
He moved his hands away slowly, and gingerly, he took in the world around him with the new eyes that her word had given him.
***
“My protocol is too dangerous,” Mitsur
u said. “I can’t do anything but destroy, and I can’t control it. What use is it to bring me back?”
“Is it really true that you are so dangerous, so out-of-control?” Rebecca asked. “We were working on that and making progress. Don’t you remember?”
“I do, but…”
“You can do more than destroy,” Rebecca said, putting her hand on Mitsuru’s arm. “Much more! And you are very much in control of it. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Destruction is not all that you can do with your protocol – that’s what you want it to do.”
***
“There are three impossible words that I’ve been told on that same theme,” Emily said quietly, wiping away the bloody tears that leaked across his cheeks. “I’ve only told you the first, the one that allows you to see true grey. Not a mixture of black and white, or a comingled pattern, but the real and actual absence of color. Don’t worry. This won’t last. You’ll forget the word in just a moment, and then everything will return to normal. I thought that you needed to see it, Alex. This is where the Church exists, where it will come from.”
The light of the stars had gained a new quality of sharpness that pricked at his optic nerve and burst the veins in his sclera. The seizure had passed, but his fingers tapped compulsively against the sand. He could feel each grain with painful acuity, and the sensation was like standing after his legs had gone to sleep.
“The next time you see the Ether, it might look very different to you for a moment, but don’t worry. You still aren’t seeing it for what it is, because that’s impossible for us. You’re just seeing it from another perspective.” Emily brushed the hair from his eyes. “You should be glad that I’m not telling you the second two words. There are…things, hidden deeper into the monochrome range,” she said, the open fear on her face looking very out of place to Alex. “They live there, or exist there, at any rate. Things that move, and, well, you don’t want to see them. The Church of Sleep, and other things. Maybe worse ones. I don’t truly know.”
She turned away, and Alex had no idea how long she took to compose herself, or if she was even still behind him at all. He was entranced by the cruel light of the stars.
“Marcus told me that when the first colonists arrived in Central, there was writing everywhere – signs, books, documents, art. A whole body of language, just like you’d expect from a city, I suppose. It did not need to be learned. Just looking at the words was enough to know what they meant, how to speak and write them, the sound of the words and their purpose. A perfect language, with a unique word for each and everything, in each moment, universally understandable.”
He could not tell if she was speaking or thinking, or if he was just imagining the whole thing. His brain felt cooked and steaming, as if it had been given a brief pass through a microwave. His eyes ached and felt wet.
“Those early settlers gathered and destroyed most of it, according to Marcus. By the time the Administration was founded and migration began in earnest, Central was scrubbed almost completely clean of any trace of that language.”
Alex heard, but did not bother to understand. Her words seemed like fragile and crude things next to the word she had spoken earlier, and it was impossible for him to place any importance on them.
“I don’t know how John learned it, or how much he knows, but Marcus learned from him.”
Emily stood and brushed the sand from her skin.
“There were bits and pieces left over, here and there in Central. The Founder didn’t get everything. I’m not even really sure how old John is, or how long he’s been messing around with this. I don’t know if he wanted Marcus to teach me. Everything is obscure in the Outer Dark, and the Anathema are the polar opposite of organized. I think Marcus and John cooperate, at least, so perhaps he wanted me to learn.”
There was something hiding in the spaces between, he was sure. He could almost see it…
“It won’t last,” Emily said, from somewhere just out of his vision. “I just wanted you to see the way I do, for a little while.”
It was like one of those trick images that people post on Reddit, the sort of thing where you were supposed to stare at a blue cube in the middle of a black diamond until the whole thing turned pink and flipped over. Or one of those hidden image things they sold in stoner-oriented gift shops, posters and advertisements that appeared to be nothing but abstract shapes and colors, but if you looked at them in just the right way, you saw whatever the artist had hidden.
Dolphins or some shit, Alex thought, sitting up. It’s just like that.
Emily looked at him curiously from where she perched atop the trunk of a tree that the river and the ocean had worn perfectly smooth, but he did not care. He was completely absorbed, slowly taking in the ocean, the sky, the beach.
He had never seen them before, not in full and truthful awareness, until she told him the secret.
Now that she had, he saw them everywhere.
“I had no fucking idea,” he said, his feelings of awe creeping into his voice. “There are exits. There are exits fucking everywhere.”
Emily nodded as she watched the ocean.
“And you don’t need to use a protocol?”
“It’s not an apport or anything like that. I don’t need any sort of ability at all,” Emily said. “Once you can see them, it’s like any other open door. You just walk on through.”
“There’s no locks?” He wondered, his throat a little tight. “There’s no sort of…barrier? Nothing to stop you?”
“Never,” Emily confirmed, covering his hand with her own.
“It doesn’t cost anything? You know, like my protocol or whatever. Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt at all, but it is rather exhausting,” Emily said, shrugging. “I don’t truly understand it myself, but there are holes everywhere, and they connect to everywhere else, and all you need is someone to tell you about it, in the only language that’s equipped to describe it.”
“Holy shit,” Alex said, wiping the blood from the corner of his eyes. “Exits everywhere.”
***
“You’re saying that my protocol is a threat to the entire world because I want it to be that way,” Mitsuru said. “That means everyone was right about me all along, doesn’t it?”
Mitsuru suspected that the beach they walked along was cleaner than what she remembered from Mexico, but if that was the case, then she appreciated the deviation from reality, and not having to worry about stepping on glass or horse shit with her bare feet.
“I think that the woman you used to be hurt so badly that she thought she wanted to die, and we all secretly believe that dying and the end of the world are one and the same,” Rebecca said. “The woman you used to be got what she wanted, eventually, but the world didn’t end, did it? She died and the world moved on.”
“That’s just the way it happened. It could have gone differently.”
“It certainly could have.”
“I mean that it could have gone worse.”
“That’s one way that it could have gone. There are always other possibilities. You are just that, right now. Possibilities.”
“I don’t feel very possible,” Mitsuru said, kicking the sand. “I feel extremely anxious.”
“That’s better than nothing. Anxiety can be managed.”
“About my protocol. You said that I can do something besides destroy with it.”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean? What sort of thing can I do?”
“All of our blood is precious, when you think about it,” Rebecca said, shading her eyes from the sun. “Life is a miracle on so many levels. Even so, your blood is particularly miraculous, Mitzi. The kind of thing a medieval alchemist would have killed for. You can transmute your blood into a perfect acid, a self-replicating corrosive.”
“Yeah,” Mitsuru said sourly. “That’s the problem.”
“Is it, though? Have you considered the possibility that it is your outlook that is the problem? The acid is sim
ply a reflection of what you feel, a physical manifestation of your internal distress and anger. The black blood is the result of how you feel when you operate your protocol, not the extent of it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your protocol transmutes your pain into a universal acid,” Rebecca said, smiling at her. “Just imagine what a little happiness and peace might transmute into!”
***
“I have another secret for you,” Emily said, lying in the sand a chaste distance from where he had sprawled. “If you’re ready.”
There seemed to be no point in reckoning time in the simulation. He had been lying there for an indeterminate time, staring at the ferociously burning stars, waiting for the strange feeling in his eyes to pass and not thinking about very much.
It seemed like a million years since he had left Eerie in his dorm at the Far Shores.
His eyes never quite returned to normal, though Alex could not precisely define what had changed. He was haunted by the conviction that both his eyes, the new one and the original issue, had been replaced by new organs with a subtly different purpose. Not sight, but something more unpleasant.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still kinda sore from the last one.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Emily said. “This is just conventional advice.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “I’m game.”
“This is nothing more than my suspicion, but I do have reason to believe it. I’ve never talked about this with anyone else, and I don’t plan to,” Emily said, her voice hushed and apprehensive, even within the simulation. “Gaul Thule is a precognitive. According to testing when he attended the Academy, his protocol is off the charts, the most perceptive they’d ever seen, and that’s when he was sixteen. John Parson – well, I’m not sure what he is, to be honest, but he certainly knows a lot about the future. They know more than any of the cartels, even with precognitive pools working in tandem. Gaul has run Central under one pretext or another for decades, since John created the Anathema, and if the Anathema have a leader, then it’s John. Make sense?”
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 34
