Diamond Sky Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Clarkson

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Emmy.

  ‘We are nowhere,’ replied Lucas. ‘In the event of a crisis, Sammy, Davo and myself agreed to meet here.’

  ‘So where are they?’

  ‘That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I can’t give you the answer.’

  Emmy contemplated him for a moment, and then she stepped forward and slapped him hard across the side of his face. Although she had the power to block out pain in this place, she allowed the blow to sting her palm. She wanted her strike to feel as real as possible.

  ‘That’s for almost feeding me to those hillbillies,’ she told him. ‘Do you care to explain what that was all about?’

  She threw the phone back at him. Lucas caught the device and placed it into his pocket before running his fingers along the spot where she had struck him. He too savoured the pain. It was the closest sensation he had felt to something genuinely tangible in a long time.

  ‘Heaven is not all it’s cracked up to be,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been a prisoner in my own memories for longer than I care to remember. Even when others came, things barely changed. All we had was the town and each other. We soon tired of both. The hypnosis could take care of the hopelessness of the situation, but there had to be one who stayed behind to keep the system running. That was me.

  ‘To make things more interesting for myself, I created a few different scenarios to pass the time. Sort of like live action video games. Bank robberies, hostage situations...’

  ‘Zombie outbreaks,’ interrupted Emmy.

  ‘Yes – and zombie outbreaks,’ said Lucas. ‘Each time I programmed in a sub-command whereby your grandfather would become an overriding target, just in case. No harm was done. These people are practically immortal. Take Jimmy. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve shot him in the head and he’s doing just fine. If anything, it’s an improvement when I think how he used to be.’

  Emmy stared back at him in disbelief while Jimmy did not react at all.

  ‘You used these people for target practice?’ asked Charlie, incredulously.

  ‘Eternal death isn’t easy to cope with,’ said Lucas. ‘It doesn’t come with a manual. There’s nobody to guide the way. Nobody to pass on their knowledge.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ said Emmy. ‘You told me yourself. Sammy had some sort of insight into this place. You said he was in communication with his ancestors.’

  ‘And you believe that?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘Take a look at us,’ she said. ‘You and Jimmy are both dead, whilst Charlie and I are lying in suspended animation in a laboratory on the other side of the universe. I would say that from here on in I’m willing to approach things with an open mind.’

  ‘So what’s your plan?’

  ‘The same as the one you had when you brought us here. We find Sammy and then we get the hell out of here.’

  Chapter 43

  Emmy closed her eyes. She cast her mind back to Tibet and the teachings she had received from Yonten on the art of meditation. The wise monk had taught her how to tame the tulpa from within. She would use the same teachings she had employed then to repeat the trick.

  She recited her mantra. Focusing her mind and blocking out all thoughts and feelings other than those pertaining to her other self. Once a connection was established she opened her eyes.

  Darkness surrounded her. This was not merely the darkness of shadows created by the absence of light; it was the absence of everything. She was suspended in an absolute void, but she was not alone. Her father and Sammy were with her.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Emmy, is that you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here. I’m projecting through the tulpa. Where are we?’

  ‘We are nowhere,’ he said. ‘It’s a prison. We are cut off from existence itself. This place was created to hold your grandfather. A purpose it served for millennia until he found a way out.’

  ‘How did he escape?’

  ‘Like you, he had a second spirit. One that was created unnaturally. Your Conscience told us all about it.’

  ‘My conscience?’

  ‘Yes. That thing you call a tulpa.’

  Emmy knew at once this second spirit of her grandfather’s was the demon baby created by Dr Stark. She only hoped Esteban had avenged her. It pained her to think that all of the tribulations they now faced could be traced back to that stupid, arrogant woman.

  ‘How do I get you out?’ she asked.

  ‘You can’t’ he replied. ‘Only you can leave here.’

  ‘By me, you mean the tulpa.’

  ‘Yes. But it will come at a price.’

  ‘Name it. Whatever it takes to stop my grandfather – I’ll gladly meet the cost.’

  Her father hesitated. When he looked away from her she realised just how high the price would be.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘there has to be another way.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ he replied.

  ‘But I need you. You and Sammy. Only you have the knowledge that can defeat my grandfather.’

  ‘That knowledge will be yours when you take our spirits.’

  She closed her eyes, fighting back the tears.

  ‘I also need you to be my dad,’ she said. ‘There are so many things I want to tell you.’

  ‘If you do this,’ replied Davo, ‘I will always be with you. I’ll become a part of you. That’s worth more than a thousand words.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Trust me, Emmy, this is the only way.’

  However much it pained her, she knew that he spoke the truth. If she was to defeat her grandfather, she needed an edge. A secret weapon that he would never expect. The tulpa would give her just that.

  ‘What do I do?’ she asked.

  ‘Just take our hands,’ her father replied. ‘Instinct will guide you the rest of the way.’

  She closed her eyes tightly and when she reopened them she was back in the desert with her friends.

  ‘Did it work?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Yes,’ was the reply, but it had not been issued from Emmy’s lips.

  They all turned to see that they had been joined by another.

  ‘Lucy?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘No,’ replied the tulpa, ‘but I do find her face to be most comfortable.’

  ***

  Having been starved of every sensation for so long, the pain that coursed through every atom of Jackson Fox’s being was amplified to a magnitude of eleven. For a long while he lost himself to it. He revelled in its irrefutable connotations.

  I think therefore I am.

  If thought was the confirmation of being, then pain was the confirmation of living.

  And he was most definitely now alive. The insubstantial dream world he had left behind to wallow in the prison of his own despair had taken on something more tangible. These monsters that now fed on his flesh were not figments of his imagination, cruel ghosts from his past - they were actual conscious beings. They had spirit. They had energy.

  Energy that was his for the taking.

  ***

  The tulpa provided them with the answers they sought. It had full access to all of Sammy’s memories. By combining the Aboriginal man’s experience with Emmy’s knowledge it was able to figure out what was sustaining this bizarre netherworld they now occupied.

  It explained that this galaxy had once been host to a great civilisation spanning hundreds of solar systems. Barely a drop in the ocean on a galactic scale, but compared to mankind’s level of technological advancement they were like Gods. These alien beings, whom Sammy had mistaken for the ancestral beings of Aboriginal folklore, had grown so powerful that they sought immortality. Not just for themselves, but for all other inhabitants of the universe that were and would ever be.

  Using the vast power source of a giant star, they constructed a computer so advanced it had the capacity to store a seemingly endless amount of data. A signal was then broadcast into all corners of space that would embed itself into the core of every life-form it touched. Once it found
a host it would clone the very energy giving that being life, producing a permanent record of every living memory and feeling the host had ever experienced. Upon death, this precious memory would be ejected into the ether where it would attract others of the same composition like magnets. When the two energies combine they produce a reaction, which traces the signal all the way back to the source, where they are then uploaded to the celestial mainframe.

  Of course, the aliens never figured on Emmy’s astral radiation. The spirit energy of the infected duplicated not only memory but consciousness as well. As these poor unfortunate souls were uploaded to the mainframe they threatened to infect and bring down the entire system. This was only prevented by a failsafe built into the original programming that partitioned this group from the pure untainted records.

  Thus the system was protected, but at the expense of those who were partitioned. They would have to spend eternity confined to living within the boundary of their memories. They would be unable to go anywhere or meet anyone they had not encountered in life. Immortality was theirs, but with strict limitations.

  ‘You were right all along,’ Charlie told Emmy. ‘The final three minutes. Whoever these beings were; they cracked it. They just had to wait until the end of time and they could bring everyone back. It’s incredible.’

  ‘It’s a great big shit storm is what it is,’ said Lucas. ‘How do we know this Lucy imposter is telling the truth? There’s no way Sam knew anything about aliens – he would have told me.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘If the tulpa is simply accessing Sammy’s thoughts it should be telling us about the Dreamtime, not aliens.’

  ‘The partition was not the only failsafe,’ said the tulpa. ‘The mainframe is controlled by an advanced A.I. It scans every spirit that comes here. Professor Fox was flagged as a potential threat. Based on his personality and past actions, it was calculated with ninety seven percent probability that he would eventually figure out what this place was, and with a further sixty four percent probability that he could find a way to hack into the mainframe. I don’t need to tell you the results of such an occurrence would be cataclysmic.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how Sammy knew so much,’ said Lucas, eyeing the tulpa with suspicion.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Emmy. ‘Think about it. The A.I. needed to neutralise Pops, but the only means it had to do so was by drip feeding the necessary information to one of the other spirits in here. When it scanned you all it must have deemed Sammy to be the most susceptible to persuasion due to his indigenous beliefs.’

  ‘Okay, I get that,’ said Lucas. ‘What I don’t understand is how she knows everything else.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ replied Emmy. ‘She absorbed Sammy’s essence. The AI is now communicating directly with my tulpa.’

  ‘In that case, ask it what the hell we need to do next,’ said Lucas.

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’ replied Emmy. ‘We need to eliminate my grandfather.’

  Chapter 44

  ‘How do we kill someone who’s not actually alive?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘You don’t!’ came a bellowing reply from behind the group.

  They all turned to see Jackson Fox standing on the desert sands about twenty metres away from them. He had the eyes of a bitter old man, but the body of an athlete in his prime. As he strode toward them, the air around him distorted, creating an artificial boundary where Fox began and everything else ended. Though he was just a single man, he exuded the combined strength of his dozen earlier victims.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ said Emmy. ‘We’re not ready. I need more time to come up with a plan.’

  ‘Then go,’ said Lucas. ‘I stalled him once, I can do it again.’

  ‘Your music is no use here,’ she said. ‘Hiding is our best defence.’

  ‘Only if surviving is a priority. Now go. I’ve got this.’

  She saw the resolve in his eyes. The real battle between these men had already been won and lost what must seem like a millennia ago for her friend. This was merely an encore. A chance for him to bow out on his own terms.

  ‘Lucas I...’

  The policeman put a finger to her lips.

  ‘Just go.’

  She vanished before his eyes, taking Jimmy with her. He then turned to face Charlie.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do here,’ he told the scientist.

  Charlie nodded, before he too vanished into the ether leaving only the tulpa behind. Lucas had no idea just how powerful this strange being, born of Emmy’s subconscious, would be. All he saw was the face of that sweet girl from out of town. He did know that whatever trick it had up its sleeve would be better employed in the service of Emmy and not him.

  ‘You should go too,’ he told it. ‘She needs you more than I.’

  Rather than spontaneously disappearing as the others had, the tulpa levitated ten feet into the air where it began to spin. It proceeded to rotate its body at speeds not humanly possible. In just a fraction of a second it had gathered enough velocity to whip up a column of sand, which it then redirected into the path of the advancing Jackson Fox, before following the others to safety.

  Lucas took full advantage of the tulpa’s parting gift. He smashed his disorientated foe in the centre of the chin with an uppercut that defied the laws of physics. In this wasteland of the unreal, feats of strength well beyond the capabilities of mortal man were possible and had Fox been alive the punch would have taken his head clean off.

  The impact launched Fox arcing into the air. Before hitting the ground, Lucas jumped up and slammed his boot into his foe’s side, sending the professor spiralling into the dirt. The former policeman had no intention of letting his opponent gather a breath, and extended his combo by taking a gravity busting leap that brought his feet crashing down onto Fox’s back. There was a sickening crunch as the stricken man’s vertebrae were crushed like ice.

  ‘You never should have come back,’ said Lucas. ‘But I’m glad you did. Emmy will figure out a way to destroy you once and for all. And when she’s through with you, she can finish me too. We’ll both have peace even if you so little deserve it.’ He grabbed Fox by the hair and pulled him to his knees. ‘In the meantime, it’s my job to take care of you.’

  The desert, which had surrounded them, was instantly replaced with the familiar buildings of Main Street, Jackson’s Hill. Keeping hold of his opponent’s hair, Lucas kicked Fox in the base of the spine, snapping the old man’s already broken body back until he was bent double, agonisingly surpassing the capabilities of the most nimble contortionist. Lucas then let go and took out his phone.

  ‘I’m tempted not to do this, you know. It would certainly be more satisfying to prolong your suffering. But it would also be riskier too, and you and I both know that taking risks just isn’t my style. My only consolation is in knowing that you will spend the rest of your miserable existence back in the chair.’

  He swiped the screen on the device, causing music to echo forth from the speakers mounted to lampposts all along the street. For Jackson Fox, this would offer not a reprieve from his current pain, but a death sentence.

  ***

  ‘How much time do you think Lucas can give us?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Not enough,’ replied Emmy. ‘The only way to stop Pops for good is to shut this whole place down.’

  The scientists and Jimmy were hiding out in a recreation of the Buddhist temple in Tibet, where Emmy had first discovered the truth about her tulpa. It was an unreal holographic projection that had been pulled from the memories of both she and Jimmy.

  ‘How?’ asked Charlie. ‘Even if you can hack into the core processor, there’s no way to do so without also granting access to Professor Fox. You’re smart, but his intellect is incomparable. He would take over the whole system in no time. With that kind of power he could manifest himself as...well, as a God!’

  ‘That’s why we can’t shut this place down from within. You have to go back and do it externally.’
>
  ‘It’s too far. Conventional weapons could not even reach this place in a million years.’

  ‘So try an unconventional one. Do you remember when I got trapped here and you shocked me to pull me out?’

  ‘Of course, I used your astral cord to transmit a short burst of electricity in order to pinpoint your location. How is that going to help?’

  ‘Replace the small electrical charge with a large nuclear one. The onsite reactor should be enough to do the trick. I’ll do the rest. If I can start a chain reaction, this place will go supernova and then implode in on itself. It’ll be completely obliterated into a singularity.’

  ‘And so will you.’

  ‘There’s no other way.’

  ‘There’s always a way.’

  Emmy shook her head. Since losing Lucy the second time, she no longer feared the end of her own life. Her reason for living had already been taken away.

  ‘Not this time,’ she told him. ‘As soon as you’re in a position to do so, you have to destroy this place. You cannot hesitate – do you understand?’

  He nodded. They then both turned to Jimmy.

  Their friend shrugged.

  ‘I died already,’ he told them. ‘Everything after that has been a bonus. It’s well past my time to go.’

  Emmy hugged Charlie. She wished she had been given the same opportunity to say goodbye to Lucy.

  ‘Remember,’ she warned him, ‘no hesitation!’

  ***

  The music quietened the agony of the injuries Lucas had inflicted upon him. It took the edge off his anger and made him feel human again. Any renewal of strength, however, was short lived. As his injuries dissipated, he could feel his body weaken as it was taken over by the ravages of age. Dark liver spots appeared on his arms and he fell limp below the waist.

  ‘Noooo!’ he screamed. ‘I will not go back.’