by Davi Cao
The entire group followed them to church, with OOOO hopping ahead and smiling when entering the quiet place with burning fires. Ai.iA hopped along, quiet, lost and fearing death. She studied that strange concept of prayer to see if she could get something from there, any idea to enlighten her mind and guide her in a path of resolution. Zach sat down first, trying one of the chairs made from walls, soon followed by the others.
“It’s beautiful in here. You were right, Laura. We needed something to remind us that we’re still in a temple, after all,” Amanda said.
“We forgot about the spirit with ease, all it took was the devil speaking,” Zach said, shaking his head.
“Too much happened in too little time. We got confused.” Mat patted his friend on the shoulder.
“It’s never too late to get back to it. God will never give up on us.” Laura soothed them.
Dalana stood still, looking at them from a chair. She would never give up on them either, no matter how much they failed to recognize her efforts. She locked her gaze at Colin’s face, both keeping guard of the humans around them.
Angeline and Oliver didn’t sit with the group. Instead, they left the church without ceremony, in silence, while Laura spoke and the others paid attention to her. OOOO, with its spinning head and curious outlook, allowed them to leave unnoticed by the others. When it became too curious to hold itself, recognizing in their secrecy and in their busy hands a potentially interesting situation, it warned Colin of their disappearance.
“They left the room. Your Angeline seemed excited, didn’t she?” it said.
Colin looked around and took notice of his beloved one’s absence, coupled with that of Oliver. He went to the corridor to spot them and, not finding any trace of their presence, he walked back to the lab yelling their names. Dalana followed him, behind OOOO, who raced behind Colin like a privileged spectator, waiting for their showdown.
They found the door to the upper world opened in the lab. Colin’s immortal heart skipped a beat, he widened his eyes with a future vision, the premonition of human death. By impulse, he crossed the door and ran through the tunnel, finding the stairs that led to the surface.
Many steps ahead, struggling to keep their pace, two figures pushed each other to move faster up, looking down at their pursuers with fright.
“Angeline, stop, don’t do this, you’re going to die!” Colin yelled, tripping on a step, and hitting his knee on the hard matter.
Dalana helped him up, OOOO hopped by its side in electric jumps, turning its head to him and to the fugitives with mechanical precision. Colin climbed the stairs as fast as he could, but Angeline and Oliver had already reached the outer world’s exit. They turned the knob and met the outside vacuum, encountering a purple sky with grayish slimy hills and a colossal pillar of glowing blue light sweeping the world ahead of them.
Angeline suffocated while Oliver fell down, screaming in agony, embraced by the ground that sought a new presence, that deformed itself to take hold of anything fresh that approached its universal skin. They both lacked air between small bursts of their internal organs, which blew their pores and tore their bones, feeding their flesh to the ground hungry for new things.
Colin caught up with them too late. Angeline’s dismembered body penetrated the mud, her severed limbs mingling with the ground, opening up in muscle flowers, in bone honey. Her delicate face lost its eyes, its tongue crawled out of her jaw towards the slime. Oliver, by her side, lost all his limbs to the world, only his rib cage remaining.
OOOO laughed, amused at their promised deaths, “They were right, weren’t they? It’s more interesting to let them die by themselves, yes, in the end they can’t escape their doom, can they?”
Dalana let her tears roll down her cheeks, sobbing by Colin’s side. She matched the stream coming down her eyes with the one that flowed from his.
∙ 17 ∙ Ai.iA’s attack
They had taken two resistant objects, Angeline and Oliver. The red one avoided the ground’s swallowing, having a thin layer of Angeline’s skin attached to its smooth surface. Colin picked it up, scratching it off. Her burial happened in front of his eyes, entering the mud against her will.
He made his farewell, promising himself that he would bring her no more to that world. This time, she became not a puddle of melted flesh, but meat thrown to the ground fish. He found the other resistant object and held both in his palm. Dalana touched her forehead on his back, pushing him towards the door. He followed her guidance, going downstairs, carrying the last memories of the one he loved the most.
“They thought they could beat the World Voice, didn’t they? All alone, two little fragile things, two mere creations! Isn’t that funny?” OOOO said, laughing and gleeful with Oliver’s death. “He was right, though, I have to admit that, don’t I? Watching them disappear is more entertaining than making them go away myself.”
Colin went downstairs in silence, ignoring the creature’s boasting. Neither him nor Dalana could reply it with indifference, as they both cherished creations and hated to see them fade. When OOOO reached the lab, however, it got ahead of them to announce the new event, hopping around the circle of the church’s chairs, disrupting the humans’ peace.
“They tried to go outside and exploded! They died without even noticing it, didn’t they?” It burst into laughter.
“Have you no respect for your Creator? Why do you rejoice in the death of your brother and sister?” Laura stood up from her chair to face the devil’s work.
“Brother and sister? So what, they were creations! Creations die all the time, that’s the fun of it, isn’t it? I wish you could see it too!” OOOO said.
“Repent! Pray for their souls, show some humility, I command you to do so.”
“I pray for the World Voice!” OOOO jumped in the middle of their circle, over the flames that didn’t burn it. “The true ruler of this world, isn’t it? The one who wanders, the one who is trapped, the one of which we can laugh and flee while we laugh some more! It is so simple, and yet so powerful, isn’t it? It is my gift to the worlds, one of my best creations ever, and we’re having so much fun with it, aren’t we?”
“You monster! How dare you speak like this?” Mat got up with fists raised.
“What, do you want to go up there too? I’ll be glad to watch you explode, won’t I?” OOOO said.
Charlotte rose, gritting her teeth in rage and advanced towards OOOO with clenched fingers. Gripping one of its legs, she fell on the flower bed in the middle of the room. The Creator made a ragged doll out of her, shaking her, amused at her strong legs’ effort at pulling it down.
Mat joined the coup, grabbing OOOO’s neck flesh with rigid fingers, getting a kick on his belly by accident, as the creature tried to balance itself on the flames.
Colin made a dash to remove both humans from OOOO’s legs, but Charlotte dropped it first, shouting from a burn on her chest when she rolled over one of the flames. Mat fell down with the scare, and OOOO jumped away from the middle, standing by the door, to appease their mood. Dalana healed Charlotte’s burn with her will, pressing her dark hands on the reddened skin with her soothing ritual.
“Laura, say us a prayer, they need to get back to a peaceful place,” Dalana said, smoothing Charlotte’s skin.
“My dears, let’s not fall for the devil’s work. Evil is not fought with violence, for it feeds on it. Love will burn it, only love will make it repent and join us on the side of light.” Laura turned her eyes to the ceiling with hands raised by her side.
“That monster is mocking us ... We’re beaten down already, and it has no mercy ... It’s too hard on us poor folks.” Zach tried to justify himself.
“It doesn’t do it to hurt us,” Colin said.
“What, are you like it now?” Mat faced Colin with a disgusted look.
“No, I don’t like what it says to us, but I know it’s not evil. Creators like it don’t care about good or bad. That’s human stuff. They only care about new experiences.”
“You’re a Creator too, aren’t you, little boy? How about your new experiences? Did you enjoy watching your girl blow up?” Zach separated his hands to simulate an explosion.
“You’re angry at the wrong guy.” Colin caressed the resistant red stone with tiny bits of Angeline’s skin still attached on its surface.
Ai.iA stayed put in her place, her rods retracted in her body, her heads oblivious to her surroundings. Dalana touched her hard cover and called her name, getting no reply.
“I am so alone ... So worthless ... You are here, I know you are ... Talk to me, anything, please ... I can’t find you ... You have to find me ... Please, come to me ...”
The circle of prayer restored itself by Laura’s insistent hands. She grabbed Charlotte and Amanda, who in turn grabbed Mat and Zach. Out of research material, out of hope in the science of their lab, now that Oliver died, with Ai.iA stranded like a marble sculpture, they hoped for heaven.
“Join us too, Dalana. We have space for you.” Laura bowed her small-eyed face at her.
Dalana widened her eyes and turned her head at Colin. He touched the resistant object in his hand, poking its surface with a lazy finger. He had seen his creation flee from him and die in a horrible way. Dalana approached him, to which he reacted by crossing his arms and losing his gaze on the floor.
“She was a reflection of yourself, above all, a part of you. Despite everything, you should keep that in mind,” she said in a whisper.
“I know. She was not the Angeline I loved. I won’t have her until I can get Terra back, it’s nothing new to me. Still, she looked human enough this time, right?” he said.
“Yes, she was lovely. Did her presence here satisfy you?”
“A little, at first. In the end, it became a nightmare. I wanted to get closer to her, but I couldn’t compete with the more interesting people. I don’t blame them, because I know it’s all my fault. Do you think I’m interesting?”
“Much more than you can imagine.” Dalana leaned her back on the wall.
Colin nodded, savoring the Voice inside his head, the speech pushing him at Dalana, the new presence. He had no purpose in life, he did nothing right, he craved for love and friendship, and she offered him everything.
If he ceded to her company, it would be easy to forget about Angeline and focus on the here and now with Dalana. The World Voice commanded him to do so. But if he fell for that, he would also forget his goal of having Terra back. Without Terra, how could he live? In the battle of ideas disputing territories in his mind, he kept his mouth shut.
“Where I was born, we had just one person following us constantly throughout life,” Dalana said, speaking low and sweet. “Time was broken. We began our lives at random periods of a full existence, and traveled through random time without knowing it. I was born at fifty-six years old, barely knowing how to stand up or what were colors and shapes, and was at the high of my old age with this young body here. I learned to walk at fifteen, I created my first philosophical work as a baby drinking milk from a friend’s breast, I started to forget things at thirty-one. And throughout my life, one man, and this man only, was always there following me through the time jumps.”
He turned his face to watch her tell her tale, intrigued by the workings of her native world. She smiled at his interest.
“I saw him dying in my arms on my third jump, when I was twenty and he was nearly forty. At every jump, we had challenges to solve. Mine, in that one, was saving him, and I failed.” She shook her head. “Oh, I liked that, don’t worry. It was a relief to deal with his death so soon in life, having the rest of my existence to enjoy his company, already knowing that it couldn’t end anymore. Only I could die then. It was good, you know, to have him again, forever.”
People prayed, intoning words of love and compassion. They forgave OOOO, they called it back to their midst. The Creator, fascinated by their easygoing temper, watched them whisper words very unlike those that pervaded the world, and admired them for their resilience.
“So, I know how you feel about Angeline,” Dalana said to Colin. “I think you’ll like to have her back the way you really deserve. You know how she dies. Now you can live with her forever in peace. It will be a pity if you don’t get this chance.”
“That’s a good way of putting that. Like you and your husband, I’ll meet her in the future, or in the past, and we might not always understand each other. We’ll always be together, though, and that’s what I want the most. I can count on you to help me, can’t I?”
“You can, for as much as it pains me to do so.”
“Pains you ... I’m sorry, why should that affect you so much?”
“Because if I don’t help, I don’t exist,” she said, fixating her pupils on his eyes.
Ai.iA returned from meditation. Propelling her body with a strong push from her underside rod, her upper head hit the ceiling, making a loud bang that stopped the people’s prayer. Laura lifted her eyebrows to look at her, checking on the circle of chairs to find an empty spot for her.
“Would you join us in our faith? You’re not lost if you’re with God.” Laura extended one hand.
“Can your God kill me?” Ai.iA said.
“He, er ... Yes, he can do anything, but he wouldn’t do such a thing, not when time is not ripe.”
“Then this thing doesn’t suit me. I want to face death.” Ai.iA jumped in front of OOOO. “You, yes, you, kill me now. I don’t want to live anymore.”
“No, I can’t kill you, can I? Creators are precious, none of them should disappear. I want you here with us, doing interesting things, don’t I?” OOOO said, with small mouth and teeth joined together.
“Ai.iA, my friend, you’re not thinking straight. Every world has an end, we can—” Dalana began to say, walking to Ai.iA to caress her head.
“Won’t you try to hurt me anyhow? I’m ready, I accept dying. Hit me, give me some trouble,” Ai.iA said.
“Calm down and wait until we think of something to stop hearing the Voice. We all want to destroy it. Creators have no effect on others, believe me.” Colin smirked at OOOO.
“Destroy me, why not? Come, hit me, strike me with your best.” Ai.iA hopped towards Colin.
The Creators relaxed their limbs and watched her come and go, waiting for her to calm down. Ai.iA jumped over them, to the middle of the humans, crushing flowers and candles.
Extending the rods circling her waist, she spun around her axis to hit Laura’s knees with ten hard maces at high speed. Laura screamed with the immediate pain of her crushed kneecap and shin, triggering Colin’s fast reaction. He embraced Ai.iA and made her stop.
Ai.iA punched the floor with strength, using her bottom limb to throw herself up in the air, from where she extended her thicker rods and used them to take him off her body. Released from his hold, she invested her square body against Mat, who fled in panic from his chair, taking all the others with him. They ran to Dalana’s protection, while OOOO hopped in place and laughed.
Colin grabbed Ai.iA by the thick arms which protruded from the meeting of her heads, and made her stand in place by brute force. She fought his grip wildly, she squirmed and threw his body over and under her, but he felt no pain and, therefore, he would resist until the end to keep her away from the fragile mortals.
“Why are you doing this? You turned wild all of a sudden!” he said, pulling her down.
“If you attack me before I can get to them, then I won’t cause them any harm, can’t you see it? Attack me!” Ai.iA said.
“I don’t want to hurt you, and I can’t do this even if I wanted! I’m on your side, Ai.iA, I like you! Stop this nonsense, let’s work on this together!” Colin said.
“We tried what we could and got nothing. I don’t want your help anymore.”
“Not even mine?” Dalana opened her arms in front of the humans.
“Yours, I need.” Ai.iA halted her insistent advances.
“Then leave them alone. I won’t help you if you hurt anybody, includi
ng yourself.”
Ai.iA turned her upper head at every face in the room, she stared at Colin behind her, and at Dalana in front. She calmed down. With a waistline rod, she patted Colin’s arm to signal her surrender. He slowly let go of her, standing by Dalana’s side, covering her view from the humans, waiting for her next move.
“I should go. Maybe I can find others who will help me more up there. Let’s go, Dalana, leave these people behind. We have a world to destroy and new ideas to find.” She hopped towards the church’s exit.
“No, I won’t leave them here. They are our community. They want us with them, don’t they?” Dalana looked at their faces, relishing their nods.
“Fine, if that’s what you want, then stay with them. I won’t lose my time anymore with a failed mission,” Ai.iA said.
Before leaving, she turned to face OOOO, who came closer to her to watch her decisive actions.
“Stupid Creator of a stupid world! You’re a murderer and pretend you don’t like it. Others like us have died already, and I might die because of you! Nobody likes you, nobody likes your world. I hope you die from your own creation.” She jumped to the corridor.
“I’m ... I’m not a murderer ... I didn’t kill any Creator ... I ... I ... I did interesting things, didn’t I?” OOOO said, its smile fading, looking at Colin in the hope of consolation.
Even a repugnant-looking creature like OOOO aroused Colin’s compassion. When it came walking with its nine legs, its thick neck and gray face, enveloping his body with its bent limbs, trying to fit in with him, he embraced its head and patted its forehead. Now that he had Dalana to strengthen that aspect of his personality, Colin couldn’t deny help to anyone.
“I don’t want to destroy ... I want to create, don’t I?” OOOO said, inconsolable.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, you don’t mean us harm, but there are other ways of hurting us,” Colin said over its head.
“Is it bad to hurt?”
“I guess so. To me, it is, and I believe we can’t reach a good mutual deal with you.”
