The Illusory Prophet

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I lean back, my head still spinning. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve called for a bloodless Second Singularity. Diocles is the answer to that. You know who he is—I’ve seen it in Marcus’s memories—but I doubt you understand his true significance for ascenders.”

  “He’s the guy who put himself to storage.” My mind is racing—Marcus originally sent me searching in the fugue for Diocles. He was a vapor, an ascender searching for higher consciousness by voluntarily putting himself into storage, like a monk going into seclusion. Before the Singularity, he was a physicist named Anthony Ramirez, but now he’s locked in a box of his own choosing, with some kind of following in the ascender world. Back when we were fighting to stop the Mind, Marcus and Leopold fought over releasing Diocles—Marcus for it, Leopold against. Only I don’t have access to either of them right now to ask them why… “Release Marcus. Let me talk to him.”

  “I’m afraid he’s in too fragile a state for that right now.”

  My eyes narrow again. “Try me. I’m good at putting pieces back together.” I also remember that I have Diocles’s personal key from when I encountered his second in the fugue. Maybe I can use that—

  “I can’t do that.” Her stare holds me, still cool. “Perhaps you will understand, Eli, that I don’t entirely trust you.”

  “Likewise,” I say.

  “Yes, but you have an advantage over me with your abilities. Marcus’s understanding of what you can do is most impressive, but I know it’s all true. I’ve even felt your power myself, in my mind, when you’ve encountered me in your fugue state.”

  “Have you?” My heart races a little. She’s felt me? But of course, she has. All those times I tried to breach her mind, unlock her with her personal key, gain control over her… she was aware of those encounters as soon as I touched her.

  “And in those moments,” she says, “I sensed more than just your presence. I sensed… you. Your limited cognition wasn’t so hard to decipher.”

  My heart stutters in its race to ramp up to flight speed. It’s one thing to have the ability to plunge into other people’s minds—so far, that’s been a one-way thing. The idea that Hypatia was reading me even more thoroughly than I was reading her… it unsettles me and races a thrill of fear through my all-too-limited, compared to her, cognition.

  She nods as if she’s reading all these thoughts flashing through my head. Which she probably is, examining every minute reaction of my physical body, revealing my fear. My spike in anxiety. She may not have access to my mind, but she can read my reactions.

  “So tell me,” she says, “do you really have Diocles’s personal key? Because even in my enhanced bodyform, that momentary contact was too short to glean every memory of yours. And there was some confusion as well from all those others—the ones who are living inside you.”

  I swallow, thoroughly freaked out by this. Every advantage I have is slipping away, and I’m just now realizing that the silver-skinned ascender before me has every advantage that Augustus might have had in her new bodyform—of course. There was something not natural about her to begin with, something metallic and reminiscent of the artificial mind of the citadel bot. I may not be entirely human, and ascenders are even further along the not-human spectrum, but Hypatia… she seems more bot than human-like in far too many ways. And she’s obviously more than willing to tamper with her own mind even further. The sin of ambition is still among us. Joshua’s words rise up in my mind, haunting me. His dire need to pay for the sins of humanity’s past—the sin that created the ascenders in the first place—led to spilling the blood of his own brother.

  Hypatia is waiting for my answer.

  “Yes,” I say, “I have Diocles’s personal key. But I don’t need it to access him. If he’s even still alive. Marcus said he had gone dark.”

  She gives me a small nod. “I hope he’s alive. Everything depends on it. Why don’t you give me the key, and then we’ll both know. I know you can transfer the key to me in the fugue state—Marcus’s memories clearly show that you’ve done it before with Lenora.” She glances at Cyrus, still passed out at my feet. “I’d hate to have to resort to motivating you in a less than civilized way, but the stakes are too high, Eli. The unrest in Orion will only grow with Augustus and Marcus both incapacitated. Diocles is the only one with enough influence to calm the insurgent passions you have awoken. Do you see? This is your responsibility. You must help me. If you can’t see that with your limited cognition, in spite of all your special abilities, then I will have no choice but to force you on the path that will bring peace and enlightenment to the world.”

  I grit my teeth, but her words are working on me. Making me uncertain. What if she’s right? I feel the weight of responsibility pressing down on me, but I have no idea if Diocles is the answer she claims. And giving Hypatia what she wants—Diocles’s personal key—seems far too risky.

  “How about this?” I say, hands up, trying to make it clear this is a compromise. “I’ll find him in the fugue state first and make sure he’s still alive. Then we can talk terms.”

  She appraises me, a cool expression that still sends a shiver racing up my back. “You will visit him in the fugue?”

  “That’s how this works.”

  She waits a long moment, long enough for a thousand calculations to be happening in that hyper-intelligent mind of hers. Finally, she says, “Very well.”

  I edge toward the chair, completely not sure whether this is a good idea. But I’m clean out of options—everyone’s out and at the mercy of Hypatia and her sentries. Including my physical body.

  “Don’t kill me while I’m gone, okay?” I say, not even joking.

  “That would be counter-productive,” she says. “Given I still need a way to release Diocles from his voluntary seclusion.”

  “Right.” Which only makes me realize that once I give Hypatia what she wants, she’ll really have no need for the people she’s holding captive… with the possible exception of me. And for how long? How close is she to crossing over herself? She’s already “sensitive” to me in the fugue state. Like Miriam was. I think that’s a sign, some indication of how close they are to developing the abilities I have. And if that’s true, and Hypatia keeps tinkering with her own mind…

  All of this is boggling my brain, and I sorely wish I had someone else—Marcus, Lenora, Leopold, even Miriam—to help me sort it out.

  But I’m on my own.

  I settle into the chair, grateful that at least Kamali and my mom are safe. And wishing once again that Cyrus had gone up north with them. But there’s no helping that now. And Hypatia is right—there are a lot more lives at stake with this than just the people I love. Stability in the ascender world isn’t only about ascender lives. As Augustus thoroughly demonstrated, humans are at risk of becoming cannon fodder—or worse, disposed of as threatening or inconvenient—when the wrong set of ideas whips up in the ascender world.

  The world does need a leader who can tamp down those incendiary passions.

  I almost hope that Diocles can be that person.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I say to Hypatia, who is now hovering over me in the chair.

  Then I close my eyes and shift hard into the fugue.

  I lift out of my body, shooting up over Seattle. I reach back through my own memories to find Diocles’s key. It seems like an eternity ago that I was sitting in Marcus’s chair as he forced me to express my abilities. Control them. Become the bridge he and Lenora had tried to build. It’s reassuring in a way that Marcus was searching for Diocles long before any of this happened—the man must loom large in ascender society, the way Hypatia is saying, if Marcus was angling to contact him as his first venture into the fugue realm.

  Diocles’s personal key resurrects from the depths of my mind, a spinning jewel of uncertainty floating above my palm. I focus on the uniqueness of it, knowing that it’s an echo of the man himself, and I’m whisked away from the world, rising like a rocket from the surfac
e of the earth, hurtling toward the heavens as the entire planet shrinks … then my view blurs and shifts…

  I’m suddenly sitting in a boat under a misty sun. It’s a small wood-and-lacquer craft, barely large enough for both me and the man sitting at the opposite end, eyes closed, legs folded, meditating. The boat sits in the middle of a lake. A gentle breeze blows the mist across the gray-green surface and rocks the boat in a motion that lulls me into not speaking. The mist shrouds everything more than a dozen feet away, a heavy cloud of obscurity that’s both amorphous and impenetrable.

  The man is Diocles. His personal key has disappeared from my palm, but it’s still singing—vibrating with a clear resonance—in my mind. Plus, Marcus showed me an image of Diocles as Anthony Ramirez, the pre-Singularity physicist, and his fugue-state form is nearly identical. Same youngish, smooth-faced features. Same medium brown skin. Only the dark hair is missing, and in its place is a shaved head, like a monk’s. He’s dressed in an ascender-tech toga, which is odd, given all other ascenders I’ve seen in the fugue state have had normal, human-like clothes.

  But he’s clearly alive. I think.

  “Diocles?” I whisper because the mist and the boat seem tenuous, unstable in some way, and this space doesn’t seem the kind where loud sounds are welcome—only soft-spoken words. Or silence. Even though I’ve barely said anything, the word echoes around the mist like a hundred mouths are breathing it in and exhaling it out again.

  I wait.

  He doesn’t move.

  Maybe he’s dead after all—there’s an utter stillness to him even as the boat gently rocks with the wind. Like he’s sitting in the boat, but he’s not really here.

  Then he pulls in a long breath and lets it out slow. Just like the mist.

  He opens his eyes, and at first, they seem clouded as if he’s blind. Then they sharpen and deepen into normal, human-looking brown eyes. A flicker of surprise passes across his face.

  “You’re here.” He says this like he’s been expecting me.

  “As much as I can be.” I’m suddenly at a loss as to what to say. Are you ready to save the world? doesn’t seem like the best conversation starter.

  He nods like this makes sense to him. “Emma has sent you.”

  Emma? I frown and search my memories. Who is Emma? Ah… his second. The one he entrusted with his personal key—and the first ascender mind I encountered in the fugue. That’s how I have his key in the first place. Although, that’s not how I accessed him, not directly.

  “No, Emma didn’t send me.” I wave my hand and conjure a picture of a transcendent being made of light and feathers—the one from my memory that Emma was rendering on her digital canvas. “She paints angels while she waits for you.”

  His eyes grow wide, and his body seems to gain gravity in the boat, rocking it slightly against the gentle motion of the wind. He’s surprised that I’ve painted in his reality.

  He looks at me anew. “You’re the bridge.”

  This sends a shock through me. Does he know who I am? “Yes,” I say because it’s true. And there’s no point denying it because how else would I have gotten here?

  The mist churns around us.

  He leans forward. “It’s happening.”

  I’m not sure what he means, but my dread isn’t a trickle—it’s a gush like a river cresting its banks. “Not yet.” I’m pretty sure that’s the right answer. “I’m here to see if you’re ready.”

  “If you’re here,” he says, his eyes growing bright, “then I’m ready.”

  The mist gathers power, suddenly rushing like a hurricane around our boat. Diocles stands, and the mist seems to answer his call, spinning a vortex around us, faster and faster. Too late, I remember—Hypatia can’t unlock the box without Diocles’s key, but there’s nothing to stop Diocles from releasing himself.

  All he needed was a sign.

  And I’m it.

  The wind forms a funnel of mist around us and lifts the boat. Diocles reaches a hand toward me, but it’s not an invitation—it’s a command.

  I’m swept with him, the boat, the mist, everything, and we’re squeezed into an infinitesimally small space. I fight the pull, but it’s like resisting a tsunami—and I know the feeling all too well. We’re going to Orion, emerging from Diocles’s voluntary prison out into the thick soup of the mental world in which ascenders live. A horrible dread grips me as we rocket away from the placid lake of Diocles’s self-internment and back into the reality of the ascender world—I’ve released him.

  Diocles drags me along, and I’m as helpless as a moon caught in the gravity of a passing sun. We emerge into Orion, and the world expands—the rush of information and the zipping of bright ascender lights through drowning denseness knocks me free of Diocles’s pull. Or maybe he’s released me.

  A bright, silver-glinting light awaits us, and Diocles doesn’t wait—he hurtles straight toward it. The two lights—his and hers, because it can’t be anyone other than Hypatia—spin like twin neutron stars in a tight orbit around one another, blurring in their speed until I can’t distinguish one from the other. In a flash of searing light that reminds me of Augustus arising from his backup, they merge into one.

  It’s all happened so fast—in ascender time—that my merely human consciousness has no chance at understanding, just observing.

  Then they rush at me—the combined Diocles/Hypatia light orb that’s burning like a newborn star—and tear right through the fabric of my existence.

  As if I am nothing at all.

  I come undone, blasted apart, and all consciousness winks out.

  A candle snuffed by a hurricane.

  My mistake was thinking I understood them.

  I think this idly as I float in the void.

  I spend time here. I don’t know how much—I’m not even aware of time as a construct, much less myself as a construct, until some indeterminate point at which I’m called into being enough that I become aware of the void.

  Called. I’m not even sure what that means.

  I’ve never been this scattered before. Then again, I’ve never encountered the combined strength of two ascender minds in one before. Encountered isn’t the right word.

  I search for the right one.

  Letters float in the grayish mist next to me. They mix and rearrange, nonsense scribbles of black writhing ink floating in puffs of the raw stuff of the universe. Like the lines of agitation scrawling across Lenora’s skin. Or Marcus’s.

  A word. I’m searching for a word.

  A thing to describe what I am.

  I poke at the inky tendrils. They twist into knots then dissolve, dissipating as if they never existed.

  Dead. That’s the word.

  Everyone is dead.

  Cyrus. Tristan. Miriam and her shining bright mind. Grayson with his burdened heart. Lenora and all her hopes. Marcus… Marcus might still be alive. If Hypatia/Diocles has a use for him.

  The rest of humanity, though… nope. Dead.

  Like me.

  I’m immersed in the grayness of the mist and death doesn’t bother me so much. There’s a numbness to it that doesn’t allow for emotions like pain. Grief.

  Responsibility.

  That one feels heavier, but even it can’t quite grab hold of me.

  I do recognize my vast foolishness, however. That’s as easy to see as the infinite void. My silly, limited, human cognition that dared to think I could meddle in the affairs of gods… and now I’m swimming in the limitless ocean of my own stupidity. It was always there—my fallibility, my humanity—always obvious, but like a fish swimming in water, it was transparent to me. The ever-present limitation to what I could become.

  Your mind is a prison whose walls you cannot see.

  I’d curse the master painter if I had enough will or passion or life in me to protest his cryptic words. I understand now, but it’s too late. Far too late.

  Hypatia/Diocles is now the god of that world I used to swim in.

  I have no doubt o
f this—it’s a fact as plainly present and as unquestionably true as the existence of the void all around me.

  Augustus built Hypatia with reckless abandon and no limits. She took the results of the Mind experiments and enhanced herself beyond anything he planned. She was clever, so clever. So not limited by the water she swam in. She told me lies—comforting lies, lies a human boy wanted to hear about his importance in the world. How he could be the savior everyone wanted him to be from the moment of his creation. She could see the water. She knew my limits. And when she had fooled me enough, I released her god from captivity.

  This much is obvious.

  It takes a long time—a long stretch of timeless seconds or maybe hours—to figure out the rest. Why she offered herself up to her god, Diocles. What calculation in that shockingly brilliant mind of hers came up with the result that she should subsume herself to another being, another mind. But it was simple, really, once the tortuous path of one idea connecting to another finally completed its circuit—they needed each other. She gave Diocles the one thing he needed—a bodyform worthy of the powerful mind he had cultivated on that misty lake of transcendence. He gave her the one thing she could never attain on her own—a built-in legion of followers in the ascender world, ready to rush headlong with him into the Second Singularity.

  Together, they’re yin and yang, male and female, body and mind. More powerful than any ascender on earth… and I helped create them.

  Responsibility.

  It tugs at me again, the weight of an emotion needing berth.

  I’ve created a monster that will ravage a reality I’ve left far behind. The monster is a thing that should be feared, but instead it will be followed as Diocles/Hypatia build an army of enlightened ascenders, modeled on their own audacious experiment. They will race toward the Second Singularity they so desire, reaching for the numinous with their super-intelligent minds. Maybe they’ll change everything. Maybe it would have happened anyway, even without me.

  I’m just a bridge.

  Another tug.