The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne
Page 26
She knows this absence to be Lumarge, understanding that it is not so much the source of light or darkness but the blank canvas upon which both are painted in a myriad of tinctures.
Here at the beginning of her transformation in the lumarge Lexi experiences each color pour over and through her essence: the sparkling liquidity of purple; the variegated sandiness of tan, the cottony essence of azure. With vision that takes in everything, she sees the billowing scent of autumn wafting all around; watches the aroma of a blooming rose bush and hears the lovely shadows of the evening stretch over the lumarge.
There is memory here as well. She plays with the memories of her former self, inhaling the fragrance of Gramps and Alexis watching the Series together in the bitter end of October; imbibing the bouquet of the day Lexi bought her Dakota, tasting the cherry red under the July sun. She rolls the memories around in lightning fingers, shaping and altering them until they too have gone through a transformation.
At last she puts aside these fragrant recollections to encounter new ones. But these are untested, and their freshness dispels all other thoughts and memories. Lexi flickers at this revelation. The faint light here in the lumarge frightens her. She crackles with fury. And then the last memory of her former life strikes: that of dying and shifting into this plane of existence.
The life before her eyes dims, swallowed by the light of something new and terrifying.
She realizes she is traveling in the riptide of a plummeting celestial object. The tail obstructs her view, the billion-and-one particles screaming for attention, nearly overpowering perception. Lexi merges with this celestial object, gaining every byte of data it possesses and comprehending the dread nature of its existence. She knows now that this is the meteor that has been hiding for weeks in the wake of Wormwood.
Annihilation.
She detaches herself from the meteor and descends instantaneously to the former site of the Device. There she remains in the blank Nevada desert. Wind whips by and sand passes through her lightning core, but nothing affects her as she stands staring up at the meteor with the cold calculated gaze of a telescope.
Wormwood pierces the exosphere in a fulmination, the elements bonding to its freezing and melting particles, careening through the thermosphere, racing to the earth in the blink of an eye. The mesosphere bursts under the force of this raging demon, breaking it up but failing to mitigate its potential. The world shakes and sways in the wake of broken sound, and still the star descends.
Lexi watches, waits, gazes at the beast as it plummets through the stratosphere, screams through the troposphere, announcing the end of all things in a stunning eruption of energy. She closes the tentacles of phosphorescence she uses for sight and moves outside the plane of earthly life and light. From her knew promontory Lexi watches the meteor spread its wings of destruction across the globe. Nevada caves under the assault, its cracked floor disintegrating. The wings stretch to Utah, Colorado, Arizona, flies out over the Rockies until even this great mountain range lay buried beneath Wormwood’s devastating caress. The fire advances further, enveloping the States to the Appalachian Mountains. The fires burn but stop their fatal course here, taken up instead by a furrowed blanket of vapor that disperses over the entire globe in a matter of minutes.
There is a contour amid the devastation, an axis of energy that follows the path of annihilation in a quiet, almost secret manner. Lexi turns her focus from the fire and vapor to this solemn shaft of contoured light. There is a permanence to it which makes everything else, even the planet, seem feckless and ephemeral.
She phases over to this shaft and stretches a tendril finger of light out to touch it. The shaft that stretches on forever jolts her, reacting to her touch. Lexi withdraws and contemplates the nature of this event horizon.
At seemingly random points along its length, tiny sprigs of energy extend outwards: Each a different length and degree of brightness, as if marking some great event along its course.
As her old world heaves in its death throes this shaft shutters and emits a new, blazing arm, much larger than all those that came before it. Lexi considers this event and understanding dawned: The shaft is Time.
Without even considering the ramifications, she merges with this time-shaft. A distinct crackle of incipient energy, and Lexi disappears.
Immersed in the time-shaft as her old world perishes, she finds solitude. Even as she pursues knowledge, secrets of the universe, nothing appeals to her more than this time-shaft, so full of life and unity, and potential.
This place is forever—the only thing that has no end.
She slides intangible into this new plane, to the quantum level, merging with Time itself. When their collective energies couple in perfect synchronization: fermions with fermions; photons with photons and bosons with bosons, Time ceases to matter and becomes yet another plaything which she might explore and manipulate.
And with this potential comes hope, hope of saving that which was lost.
Chapter 44
Lexi wanders haphazardly along the unending length of the time-shaft. There is nothing to restrain her from observing all that has ever occurred, but this unrestricted access come at a price. She dims by degrees, her amethyst streams dulling to tinctures of pink, her lightning-brilliant yellows diminishing to ancient amber as she begins to lose herself in the immensity of it all.
During these travels she acquires megabytes of knowledge, and then gigabytes of knowledge, followed by terabytes and then petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and on and on until her sphere of data surpasses the entire Web (1 yottabyte) and comes to encompass an immeasurable level. She essentially becomes data. With this transformation she realizes that time has been relative due to her position in space and that it is she who has moved as the inconstant, the variable.
Now she activates this knowledge, evolves beyond variables and Time.
Not surprisingly ennui overcomes her, and arrests her development just as she is investigating the Industrial Revolution. With nothing to interest her, she ponders the unlimited scope of her nature and freezes at this contemplation. For days, years, she hangs absurd in the heavens, a star 650 parsecs from Earth called kepler-9d—which will not be discovered or named for thirteen more decades. When at last she wearies of her repetitive concentric orbit, Lexi phases back into the time-shaft.
As photons, bosons and fermions reunite, energies exchange on the quantum level, and she perceives in thirteen dimensions her essence, distinct now from the sphere only by the measure of atomic energy being received in obverse to the measure given.
This pleases her, for this unlimited supply of energy suggests an infinite number of possibilities, even to overcoming atomic decay, which was the only thing left to fear.
She understands now with intense perfection.
The full mass spectrum of colliding particles and atomic reinforcements recede into intangibility; her old, strangely simple world reappears in stages: first the earth arrives; second comes the anomaly known as Dorl, in an early epoch of the planets’ history, long before the pyramids were ever built, when men united to construct a tower in Babel.
The life contained within the facility of her transformation hangs innocuous all around. She walks among the dead and the dying and the soon to be born and knows that she can manipulate all these events.
With the power of a quasar she breathes life into the world before her, permitting Time to continue unabated; she watches each movement in a collage of her past.
Here is Lexi Montaigne fleeing Dorl and the bomb; and there moves the bullet like a stop motion movie, towards the Tesla coil. Cotes is here too, flying through the air. He lands hard but survives briefly, his back burning as he observes the coil explode and envelope Lexi.
The great Device falls, emitting its particle stream. Lexi raises a glimmering tendril of light and the entire collage freezes, even the energies cease their enterprise. Lexi hovers, crackling through the air over to Lexi Montaigne, who stands frozen in the rictus of he
r transformation.
For a moment it seems, impossibly, that the eyes of Dorl are tracking her progress.
Turning her focus back to Lexi Montaigne, she hold up her hand again, and the collage reverts back in stages, the escaped magnetism of the coil shrinking and returning to the coil as it repairs itself. Cotes soars back into the air, landing on his feet by the bomb, staring at Lexi Montaigne as the woman runs backwards one slow step at a time. The bullet retraces its path from his gun, the .9mm inhaling a small spark of fire before swallowing the bullet and jumping forward within the confines of Cotes’ hand.
Lexi pauses the collage once more; sparks emerge from her anterior lodes—an atomic smile under the raining night sky. Concentrating on Cotes’ arm, she tries and fails to move it. Stumped, she tried again, this time latching onto Cotes’ essence with shoots of sun-drenched yellow energy.
With the speed of light she combines her essence with that of Cotes, beholds the world through his narrow mortal perception. This novel sensation is both surprising and gratifying.
Her vision pales by degrees, a shock of such scope that she very nearly experiences fear. Her myriad streaks of lightning dance in a kaleidoscope of light as she attempts to acclimate. She knows darkness for the first time in eons—darkness and decay. But there is beauty here too, the beauty of human hope mingling with the fragile nature of the human soul.
It is intoxicating.
She remains in Cotes to coalesce and consume his essence. It seems right and good that she should do this, as though all her travels have led to this very moment. She turns the Cotes marionette, and looks at Dorl through Cotes’ eyes, catching a knowing grin from the anomaly before turning back to face Lexi Montaigne.
She fires a few volts through Cotes’ synapses in an attempt to manipulate his right arm so that it aims at Lexi. It works. With another jolt, the Cotes marionette fires.
The frozen collage surges to life again, but this time the bullet strikes Lexi Montaigne in the back where it plunges deep into the sacrospinalis and fells the woman. The force of the bomb throws the Cotes marionette across the room just as before, only this time it disgorges Lexi.
With her celestial perceptions returned she observes an explosion on an astronomical scale, entire spectrums rending loose from each other to birth new spectrums.
An entire universe grows as she watches events unfold. A new tendril emerges from the time-shaft, encompassing and piercing every colossal and minute facet of a new universe. As Lexi watches, riveted, Lexi Montaigne in this new universe, the coil does not explode and for a moment Lexi thinks all is well.
But then the chain reaction from the explosion roves like a blanket, unfurling over the facility, eventually reaching the Device and bringing it down. The meteor hidden in the ionization of the gases of Wormwood plummets like a raging god upon the earth, destroying this new world just as it had the other one.
The pulse of the world races to a roaring crescendo, a frightful dirge for the world that filled Lexi’s perceptions like the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. She rips herself free of this dying world to move back into the time-shaft, roams the past for the apocalyptic scene now twice-played.
She moves about this frozen scene again, contemplating every painful detail of that singularly fateful moment.
With the memory of the Cotes marionette still before her, she spreads herself to invisibility, calling forth all data on the slipstream of light. The bomb. She looks back through Time to where and when Lexi Montaigne had grabbed hold of it.
This time she enters Lexi Montaigne and forces her to set down the SEMTEX at the elevator, then descends and moves for the Device, a triumphant smile on the Lexi marionette.
A cold shudder runs through her shoulder, jolting Lexi out of her former self. She watches as the woman falls in a bloody spasm. Cotes is standing over the dying woman with a raised blade in his hand. He moves for the Device, depressing a few buttons before easing back on the lever, the gentle sonorous decrease of energy indicating the shut down sequence of the Device. Cotes looks up, sees Dorl running towards him.
He raises his .9mm. “Stop right there or I will fire.”
“Turn it back on!” Dorl screams, racing for the controls of the Device. “You don’t understand. Turn it on now!”
Cotes pulls the trigger.
The shot rings out across the new universe, a fateful Eden to a godless realm. Dorl staggers, his essence or soul phasing from within the body as it slumps. Cotes holsters his pistol and removes a satellite phone. He holds it to his ear for a moment before the new sound comes. He drops the phone and looks up through the shaft above the Device. Only with human eyes does he see his fate, but they are sufficient.
The meteoroid that came in the wake of the Wormwood firestorm, from beyond Wormwood’s anti-tail, now descends from the heavens, gaining momentum with every millisecond. Lexi is powerless to stop it.
Defeated, Lexi enters the original time-shaft once more; it accepts her energy signature. She fades, retracting from the universe lying on the precipice of its annihilation. The Device, silent in its uselessness, dematerializes along with the rest of the facility, its purpose and long years in development failing to attain fruition for a third time.
She hangs motionless in the time-shaft, pondering the paradox she has found herself in. What is the use of manipulating events in Time? What use the power to alter what was and to create new things that never were when it always results in an equally catastrophic end? In the absence of answers Lexi reflects on the suffering of mankind, on its part in the vast catalogue of misery and depravity in the ethos. What’s the point of life when joy grows dark and the struggle to survive is fraught with death and continual agony, no matter the power that seeks to sway destiny?
She loses herself in the time-shaft, amalgamating with Time, knowing now that simultaneity is the truth of reality, that all that ever was, occurred in the same blistering instant, that what separates one event from another is not Time or space but merely the position of the observer.
The theory of relativity is a bitch.
Here in the time-shaft there exist vistas of stunning tranquility: of stars dying and transforming, of the birth of new celestial bodies born from the ashes of fallen worlds.
The ever rising tone of the second movement of the 7th symphony keeps pace with Lexi’s racing thoughts, an accompaniment of devastating beauty. Inspired, she unfurls limbs of glimmering lightning to better observe a moment from her own past.
Moving backwards along the time-shaft, she stands behind Lexi Montaigne as the woman gazes into a mirror in the Carnegie Library. The two become one.
Chapter 45
Batavia New York - 2011
Virgil watched his granddaughter leave his house in a huff.
At times like this, when she was especially stubborn, she reminded him of himself, when he was young and certain, so certain, that the world was a simple place.
Plato 5 jumped up onto his lap and purred—relieved that the female human was gone.
It’s time.
The voice, or more accurately, the impression of a voice, which Virgil felt originated from the cellar of his mind, had been especially active these last days. He could no longer ignore it. As he stroked Plato, the centenarian sighed once and then stood.
Of all the choices, all the opportunities, of all the methods of steering Lexi onto Dorl, there was only one with the capacity for success. Virgil had long known this. “Perhaps I’ve put it off for too long,” he mused to Plato, who stared expectantly up at his master, waiting for his tuna.
Struggling to open the can of tuna with arthritic hands, Virgil said to the cat, “If Dorl is resurfacing, it’s only a matter of time before he sends one of his trilby freaks after me.”
Once Plato had his can, Virgil dug through his cupboard. Behind a dozen tomato soup cans and boxes of expired instant potatoes, he found it: the old folded-up brown paper bag with the plastic vial inside. He spent an eternity looking at it. Then
he decided. The contents of the vial, fine white powder, would dissolve in water, leave no residue or odor, and absolutely could not be traced in the blood—unless someone was looking for it specifically. In a one-hundred and one year old, no one would be looking for it.
After carefully disposing of the baggie and the vial, Virgil took his glass of now-lethal water into the living room and eased down into his old wing-back chair.
Rim of the glass inches from his lips, Virgil suddenly laughed. No one would ever know it, but he was about to become the world’s oldest suicide. It had to happen. Nothing else but his sudden unexpected death would stir the hunger in Lexi, the hunger to KNOW. There wasn’t any time to waste. Virgil consumed the toxic contents in one long gulp.
Chapter 46
Startled by the familiarity of the human confines, Lexi at first considers remaining here, alive within her human self, but the future stands by as a constant omen, warning against such emoting. So she does what she has come here to do and speaks from a hidden realm of consciousness, in a voice cold and distant, as though from a deep, dark dungeon, strangely familiar to the woman standing in the library lavatory.
The woman receives this unspoken voice as the compulsion to Break the glass and slice open your wrist. End this now before it gets worse.
She hesitates, despising and needing the whisperer from the dungeon. “I should,” the woman says to her reflection. Reports of gunfire reach her and reinforce the gloomy decision. She balls her hand into a tight little fist and beats the mirror, shattering it on the third, frantic blow. Glass tinkles on the tiled floor and light dances off of the shards, reflecting in her eyes.
Acting on another gentle prod from the dungeon, where fear and hope give birth to compulsion, Lexi Montaigne stoops and picks up a three-inch shard. She catches a glimpse of her face in the shard, the image plucking a chord of depression on the heartstrings of despair.