The Shores Beyond Time

by Kevin Emerson

  Liam remembered so many things Iris had said to him, about higher viewpoints, about how soon he would be able to perceive them, and all along he’d assumed that she’d meant that they would achieve this by continuing to practice and hone his skills, in his world, his reality, in my body. But Barrie was suggesting something else entirely.

  “There is no new Earth,” he finally said. As the words left his lips, the terror swelled inside. Saying it finally made it real, cemented this perfect trap that he’d walked right into.

  “There is.”

  “But it’s not real!” shouted Liam.

  “It does not exist in any physical universe, no.”

  “Then where are my parents?”

  “They’re on Earth.”

  “But you just said—”

  Barrie’s expression hardened. “Don’t you understand that they will be happy?”

  “But where are they? Where are their bodies?”

  Barrie glanced past Liam and the chronologist. Liam followed his gaze toward those rows of pod-shaped structures he’d seen just as they arrived in this chamber, and the giant mechanisms overhead. “They are awaiting verification of the prototype, at which point they can be fully transferred.”

  “You mean into one of those glass spheres,” said Liam. “That’s what you’re saying. Anyone who goes through that portal to the new Earth gets . . . captured? Taken?”

  “Invited,” said Barrie.

  “You’re not giving them a choice!”

  “True. But humans haven’t ever done all that well with choice.”

  “So what my parents are seeing, that Earth, where they are taking samples and flying around, that’s all a simulation?”

  “It is. And you have seen how happy they are.”

  “But they don’t know! You’re putting us into those crystals, into that reality without—”

  “You’re not hearing me. You and I don’t have to go there. We get to join Dark Star as she ascends. That is our reward. We don’t have to watch as humanity slowly ruins that new Earth, as they squabble and war. Instead, we’ll have universal awareness.”

  Liam shook his head. “But what actually happens to my parents? What happened to all those beings in the spheres?”

  Barrie bit his lip. He looked down and ran his toe through the fine dust at their feet. “The consciousness doesn’t need a body to experience fulfillment. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: a body is a limitation; bodies are fragile, they filter reality through imperfect sensory input. The needs and drives of the body, even consciousness itself, holds the brain back from its maximum potential.”

  “You are harvesting them,” said the chronologist. “Using their brains as processors.”

  “Harvesting is a rather industrial word,” said Barrie.

  Liam took a step back. “You’re going to kill them.”

  “No. Don’t you see? Nobody has to die, ever again. Not the way we have to now.”

  “Yes, you are! You’ve—you’re bringing all of humanity here so you can murder them, and so she can use their brains, that’s—”

  “Monstrous,” the chronologist finished.

  “Liam, please. You’ve seen how this universe works. How cold, how vast. How little power and control we really have. On our own, we’re doomed to live with just the glimpse of greater truth, but without the power to truly grasp it. And worse”—Barrie pinched his own arm—“trapped in this mortal cage, we will never succeed. Did you really think Aaru-5 was the answer? That we’d land there and live happily ever after? Some of us, perhaps, maybe for a while. A few generations. But we’d ruin that, too. There would be more conflict—between ourselves, with other races, as you saw with the Telphons, even with the very land that sustains us. We are a race with so much potential, and yet doomed to stumble around in the cold and dark, making a noisy mess of things, never quite able to see past our own fear.”

  “That’s not how we are,” said Liam, and yet hadn’t he just lost his best friend for these very reasons? And hadn’t he spent so much of his life a prisoner of his fears and the way they affected him physically?

  “Humanity will be happier on new Earth,” said Barrie. “They’ll never even know it’s a simulation created by Dark Star. And if Dark Star can truly ascend, we’ll all share in the truth she discovers.”

  “So the Architects essentially created a farm,” said the chronologist.

  “Who knows what the Architects did or didn’t do? They haven’t been here for trillions of years. Maybe they built this place. Maybe it built them. Maybe they were the energy before the universes ever began. What matters is that Dark Star has a single goal: to know reality in totality. And to do that, she required technological advancement. She needed a power greater than you could build with metal and circuitry. We are that advancement. The processor that could truly compute the higher dimensions.

  “Think of it. Hundreds of generations of humans have tried to understand God’s plan, and the answer is here: God really does need us. She made us not only so that we could know her, but so that we could help her, and together become something even more. All you have to do is step up here and be what you were always meant to be. Now, are you ready?”

  Liam stared at the empty crystal cylinder before him. This was what Iris had been grooming him for; she had essentially told him this, and yet also not quite. Promising him a reality beyond the unknown, beyond the fear that spun him so tight, often completely out of his control. And he’d listened, because all his life, on top of all the fear and doubt and worry that he’d felt, he’d also feared that he was like this because he was broken in some way that he would never quite be able to fix. This was the chance to finally fix it.

  And yet.

  “No,” he said, pushing back against all the terror he felt. There was something wrong about this. Plugging himself into this machine, the entire human race, just looking at those other bodies, hanging there, eyes vacant . . . “I’m going to get my parents, and we’re getting out of here. And we’re telling the fleet to turn around, and we’re all getting as far away from this place as we can.”

  Barrie made a whistling sound and shook his head. “Well said. Very brave, but also very human. I’m afraid I can’t let you leave.” He turned to the chronologist. “My friend, it’s time.”

  “I do not understand—” the chronologist began.

  “Initiate command nine,” said Barrie.

  The chronologist blinked. “Command nine . . . ?”

  “Hold the boy.”

  The chronologist’s hand shot out and grabbed Liam by the arm.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” Liam shouted.

  “I do not know,” said the chronologist.

  “Yes you do,” said Barrie. “You just don’t know. You’ve always had a sense of it, without ever being able to put your many fingers on it. But like I said, consciousness is such a small-minded thing, even for a being such as yourself. Now: smash that crystal of yours.”

  The chronologist held out the orange crystal recorder, gazed at it—and hurled it to the floor, where it shattered into glittering shards.

  “Ah, that’s better,” a voice said, suddenly, all around them.

  Iris.

  “Now do you get it, timekeeper?” said Barrie.

  “My purpose is to chronicle the universe,” said the chronologist. “To inquire about—”

  “All of those activities were just things you chose to do to pass the time. Your real job, your one true task, was simply to be there when you needed to be found.”

  “Found?”

  “By Liam. Or by this creature from iteration 41, and that creature . . . You are in every universe, waiting. You know so much about the future, the past, your reality, and yet the one thing you do not realize is that you’re you, Dark Star’s agents, its shepherds. Of course, it doesn’t always work. Meeting you isn’t always enough to guide the prototype here. But that’s the beauty of the design. Only the most worthy make it all the way home. It’s a passi
ve system—like evolution, or osmosis. It would take far too much power to search every universe for the right candidate. Spin out a universe and wait, and eventually, the thing you need will come to you.”

  The chronologist made a sound like a sigh. “I imagine then,” he said, his head bowed, “that the reason we have never asked oldest questions is that we were not made to.”

  “That is correct,” said Iris.

  “Let me go!” Liam struggled against the chronologist’s grip, but the being grabbed Liam’s other shoulder as well.

  “Now, it won’t be too long before the rest of humanity arrives, and we must be ready,” said Barrie. He motioned toward the empty case. “Please deliver the prototype.”

  “This is very unfortunate,” said the chronologist. “For all of us.” He forced Liam ahead.

  “No!” Liam’s feet scuffed in the dust, kicking up clouds and the whipping tail of one of those squirming creatures. Is it dust? he thought wildly. Or remains? . . .

  “Be happy, timekeeper,” said Barrie. “This is why I brought you here, what you were made to do! Now, finally, you know your purpose.”

  “Stop!” Liam shouted. “Please!”

  “Relax, Liam,” said Iris. “Soon you’ll be with me. And we can travel just like we did before. I think you’ll find that once we’re together, these worries of yours will fade.”

  “No. . . .” Liam fought and thrashed, but he couldn’t break the chronologist’s grip.

  Barrie opened a door on the front of the cylinder.

  Liam was pushed into the light. Lifted—

  And now a force pressed on all of him at once, holding him still. His arms and legs, his head, frozen in place.

  The chronologist rotated him so that he was like the others—I’m just a machine.

  You’re so much more than that, said Iris, hearing his thoughts.

  You’re lying! You— Liam felt an electric heat inside his skull, in his thoughts, spreading all over.

  With you, said Iris, I am finally fully functional.

  His vision started to dissolve, the room fading, only the chronologist barely visible in front of him.

  “Help . . . ,” Liam croaked. Phoebe . . . , he thought uselessly, but she was a universe away. At least . . . she’s . . . safe. . . .

  “I am truly sorry,” the chronologist said, stepping back as Liam hung there, suspended inside the cylinder. “But these things happen.”

  17

  TIME TO STARLINER SAGA ARRIVAL: 06H:22M

  “It’s your move.”

  Mina is giving him that look, the one that’s part glare and part pity.

  “Sorry,” Liam says. He studies the holographic game board between them and slides one of his pioneer groups from the mining planet of Betax to the swamp planet of Temina.

  Mina pushes her long black bangs out of her eyes and frowns. “Why would you go there? The market for swamp exhaust is dead.”

  “I had a feeling this was the place you would choose,” Iris says. “Don’t you feel better?”

  Liam isn’t sure. This feels real, like his past, but when he looks around the balcony, at his sister, at his parents, at the growing sun above or the colony below, he has a blurry sense of other realities as well. The energy echoes of different choices, different variables, branching and branching again, more than they ever have on previous visits. He feels like he could not only push toward them but live within them. Try one, as he did in the desert with the skim drone, then another, and another. On and on. . . . He could know multiple realities at once. Be everywhere. Ace tests he failed, see grav-ball games he missed, say things he was too nervous or shy or confused to say. Go places, all the places.

  He pushes back from his memory of the balcony and sees the whole of his life and the lives he could live, exploding in all directions. What had once seemed sort of like a river that he could flow in now appears like a galaxy spiraling around him. The linear timeline of the life he has actually lived is barely brighter than all the other possibilities.

  But it’s even more than that. Choices branching off choices. And not just for him. The branches extend away from Mina, too, from his parents, the people on the street, even the buildings. Choices and possibility and infinity. Infinity.

  “You see,” says Iris, “it’s easier here.”

  “Where is here? Am I inside the mainframe?” Liam peers into the future and realizes that the one moment he cannot see, that in fact does not seem to be part of his timeline at all, is the moment when he is frozen inside the cylinder deep within Dark Star. He stretches to look behind himself—it should be back there, the way that Iris was always just behind him, just beyond his direct sight line—but it is like there is just a blankness there.

  “It is more accurate to say the mainframe is inside you. Maximizing your mind’s potential. And this is only the beginning. Once we have the upgrades we need, you will know even more.”

  “Upgrades . . . you mean the human race. You’ll kill them all. My family—”

  “Not kill them. They will be happy. You saw it. Their new Earth. It’s everything they wanted. It’s in your future, too. I have connected you to it. Have a look if you like.”

  Indeed, when Liam gazes ahead—past Mars, his desperate trek through space from Saturn to Delphi to Centauri, the fearful moments on Dark Star—he sees himself there on new Earth, with his parents and Mina, those same memories of the future that he saw before. The prefab houses, the clouds from the mining facilities, the starliners blinking in orbit, and yet, when he looks closer at the people around him . . .

  “There’s something wrong with everyone.”

  “I cannot accurately integrate individuals until they arrive. For the moment, the space-time map of the simulation is written in the broadest strokes. But as you can see, your future is so much more than that now. There will be so much once we ascend.”

  She’s right. Liam can sense the vastness beyond those future moments on Earth. Strange impressions of bright light and wild color, starstream and timelight, ways of seeing and knowing that he cannot grasp quite yet, but he will. A point of view above the universes, their possible universes, and he will have access to it all—

  “Because I’m never leaving.” A chill runs through him, even here on the balcony on Mars. “You’ll never let me.”

  “Liam, don’t you see? You won’t want to. You crossed the universe to be here. To know this. Even when you saw your possible death at Centauri, you flew toward it instead of away. This was what you were searching for, whether you realized it or not. You wanted the answer.”

  The thought makes him feel powerless. Because maybe it was true. Had his fear and worry been the engine all along, driving him here, his choices not really choices at all?

  He thinks of what his mom once said to him. One unknown at a time. Here, that doesn’t have to be the case. No more fiery stars haunting his head, about to explode. Indeed, here, that terrifying vision of Centauri A seems distant, just one of many possibilities, something that can no longer quite harm him.

  Except his mom also said something else, that last morning on Mars: She said that there were two sides to it. You might not know what would go wrong, but you also didn’t know what happiness you might find. She said that was part of being human.

  There is none of that unknown here in Dark Star. Could you even still be human without it?

  And yet he can’t deny that, in a way, he feels calmer here. Some of that raw fear he felt, just moments ago with Barrie, has already begun to fade. Here, there is control. All of time and possibility his to know. It is true: in some way, this was a certainty he has always craved.

  “So . . . was this what you were made to do?” he asks Iris. “Create universes, capture species, and use them to grow? Is that what happened to the Architects? You took the very people who made you and made them slaves to your mainframe?”

  “I understand how one might come to such a conclusion, but don’t be silly. There are no Architects. There never were.
”

  “What about all the buildings out on the arms? The walkways and plazas?”

  “I wanted the place to feel homey, as you might put it.”

  “Then how did you come to be?”

  “You see? Our captain friend is not wrong about the oldest questions. In my case, I believe I evolved, in a manner, same as you.”

  “So you’re alive?” Liam asks.

  “Of course.”

  “But someone had to make you.”

  “You mean like birth?”

  “I meant, like, constructed.”

  “Are they really that different?”

  Liam supposes not. “Are there others like you?”

  “Perhaps, somewhere far away.”

  “How can you be sure someone didn’t make you, just like you made us?”

  “I can’t. Reality, as you are learning, is very big. It may be that in the higher dimensions I will be able to see farther, and come to know and understand my origins. Maybe I am one of a thousand other Dark Stars, all of us weaving universes like yours, and we are all in fact within some larger structure that I cannot yet perceive. The only way for us to find out is to generate more perceptive power. And that is precisely why I have invited you here.”

  “Invited? I wasn’t invited, I—”

  “But weren’t you? Don’t you understand now? The chronologists and their offices, the portals, all of it was transmitting the faintest signal, the sensation of possibility—a song broadcast throughout the universe. Only the most sensitive would be able to hear its frequency, not that you would have even known that’s what you were hearing.”

  “But if you don’t know your origins, how do you know this is your purpose?”