Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6)

by Terra Whiteman

  Sapphire handed me another chunk of metal; it was a portion of the sentry’s head she’d cut with a scythe. “Give him another minute. Almost there.” She squeezed my shoulder, encouragingly; such idiosyncratic warmth from her was unusual, and I acknowledged it with a look of surprise. Sapphire gave me a half-grin, saying nothing else.

  Once the metal was absorbed, I rose to a stand with a wince. Sapphire offered to help but I motioned for her to let me be; only I would bear the burden of my rookie mistake.

  I staggered to where Zira stood and we examined the instrument together.

  “This is what takes us to Halcyon,” I presumed.

  “It better be, or else we’re trapped,” said Zira.

  “What if it’s meant for euthanasia?” I asked.

  Zira shook his head. “There would be bodies. The last person couldn’t clean themselves up.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “No harm in trying either way,” called Sapphire, her scythe having since retracted. Now she repaired her hand using the last of the sentry shell. “It’s not like it will kill us.”

  “I don’t really feel like injuring myself again,” I said, wary.

  “You won’t,” said Zira, moving toward the cylinder chamber. “I’ll go first. You’ll have to flip the switch, or whatever.”

  “Are you strong enough?” asked Sapphire, concerned.

  I nodded, casting a look around the room as Zira stepped through the open door of the silica chamber. We had sorely underestimated the technological capabilities of Niaphali-X’s indigenous. This dark, expansive room—with all its wires and digitech equipment—attested to our folly. The scent of rot intermingled with that of exhaust from an unseen generator. We treaded within the tomb of a lost race whose last hope was to construct the very things in which they’d feared; all that was left of them were their reanimated dead, driven by Collective nanomachinery, beneath an underground bunker of a dying world. Honestly, it was all very sad.

  My hand hovered over the panel. “Again, you’re sure you want to do this.”

  Zira gazed ahead, at Sapphire. “Go on. Let’s see where this door leads us.”

  “To Halcyon,” said Sapphire, having moved beside me to watch the spectacle in full view.

  “May we rise in pieces,” I said with a small intake of breath, sending my palm flat against the panel. The silica chamber door slid shut immediately after.

  I closed my eyes, exhaling now, and with my breath went my essence through the circuitry—to the source. I needn’t any instructions, only its current. The hiss of hydraulics broke the silence of the priming facility as I activated the neural-transference constraints to Zira’s arms, legs and spinal base. Although my eyes were closed the circuitry showed me everything, and then finally it showed me coordinates.

  Our hunch was incorrect. This was not an instrument of euthanasia, but a prehistoric portal system. The Altrians’ last breaths had been a war cry, propelling them from a lower to upper-caste civilization while at the foot of Death’s door.

  All that I could hope was for Halcyon to live up to its title.

  It took Zira several minutes to respond once he’d vanished from the silica chamber. Sapphire and I had grown increasingly nervous, until a ping from our attica map displayed new coordinates on Niaphali-X’s satellite, titled HALCYON. He’d given the moon a name.

  None of us had actually known where the chamber would lead. In flooded the utter relief of knowing—despite every setback along the way—our mission was still on track, albeit a bit behind schedule. Hopefully Adrial and other others were relieved by the update, too.

  My abilities were no longer necessary, as per our mission we’d brought a miniature obelisk, no bigger than a centerpiece statue, used to transport us anywhere within attica’s map. Now that Zira had provided coordinates, teleportation was effortless.

  Calibrating the obelisk took a minute at most—and not a minute too soon, as a mob of reanimated Altrian corpses had found the sealed door to the Priming Facility and began to pound on it. The thunder of their nano-operated fists alerted nearby sentries. Gunfire ensued.

  Just as the door was ripped open from a group of sentries, mangled pieces of nano-corpses now splayed around their armored feet, the obelisk flashed in announcement of an attica-synchronization and we left that nightmarish world behind us forever.

  *

  Transference vertigo was a term we used to describe the acute onset of dizziness and other imbalances suffered when taken from one environment and placed directly into another. The vertigo lessened with experience; Sapphire and Zira arrived perfectly fine, while I stumbled right off the arrival platform and landed in a pile of white sand fifty-feet below.

  “Are you alright?” called Zira, clearly amused.

  I didn’t respond, trying to scrape the sand off my tongue. I had fallen from the top step of a random staircase set in the middle of an ivory desert spanning as far as the eye could see. The change in scenery was disarming, not to mention that of the lone staircase. Zira and Sapphire descended the last step and the three of us surveyed the new world.

  Before us was a winding road leading off into a hazy, violet horizon. Illuminated dust particles flitted through the air like glitter. It was colder than Niaphali-X, though not by much. The atmosphere was intact, and the air composition should have suited Altrian physiology well enough. The road, like everything else here, was made of white stone.

  “So is this the road to Halcyon?” I asked, perplexed. “I thought we’d already finished that part.”

  “Guess not,” said Zira, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Sapphi, are you getting a vis-capture?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Let’s get going, then.” With that, Zira set off down the road, Sapphire and I tailing close behind.

  With the uniform environment we were able to move faster than on Niaphali, covering hundreds of miles in only an hour’s time. At our fastest we could break the sound barrier, but that was reckless if we didn’t know our surroundings perfectly—not to mention any clue that might lead us toward Rhazekan artifacts would have blurred by without detection.

  We stopped to rest and replenish several hours into our trek, seated on the road that seemed to go on forever. The moon’s tranquil scenery had since grown monotonous and lonely. It was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked. “We should have seen some activity by now.”

  Zira’s conflicted gaze remained ahead of us. “Dead, probably.”

  “This road is well-maintained,” noted Sapphire. “It would be covered in sand otherwise.”

  He acknowledged her point with only a nod. Judging by his grim expression, Zira had other thoughts on the subject but chose to keep quiet.

  Just then attica alerted us that we were within close proximity of the detected Rhazekan chemical footprints. From the coordinates, it seemed the road was leading us directly to it. Now I understood Zira’s expression; it was likely the Altrians hadn’t carved this road. Or maintained it.

  The alert prompted us to continue, this time harrowingly. We didn’t travel as quickly as before. “What are the odds that the Rhazekan are still around?” I asked.

  “Slim,” said Sapphire. “They were not an upper-caste civilization and had no way of getting here.”

  “You said that about the Altrians and not a day later we found their primitive portal system.”

  Sapphire gave me an annoyed look. Zira kept on, listening to our little argument unfold with a smirk. “Rhazekans were an early civilization; they didn’t even reach industrialization and relied on man-power for agriculture and trade.”

  “So why are their chemical footprints located here?”

  Sapphire sighed. “A chemical footprint means their architecture and trace DNA fragments were detected. That doesn’t mean whatever is—or was—here are wholly Rhazekan.”

  That made me slow. Zira and Sapphire slowed as well, looking back at me in question.


  “You’re suggesting that there might be more proxies?” I demanded. “If so, the risk involved here has just quadrupled.”

  “There is nothing to suggest they are still alive yet,” assured Sapphire.

  “Then who is maintaining this road?!” I exclaimed, surprising even myself.

  Zira intervened. “Look, do we want to stand here and hypothesize or find actual evidence? Proxies or not, our mission was made clear.”

  “Pariah, you’re tired and frustrated; we understand,” added Sapphire. “You need to keep a level head, no matter how exhausted.”

  They were right, and all I could do was look away in concession. This was not me; I was more collected than this. I had spent countless hours in Euxodia researching exotic worlds yet had never stepped foot on one. I had overestimated my capacity for real-word experience, no pun intended.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said.

  Seeing my humility, neither one said anything else and resumed down the road. I was still catching up as they froze once more, and this time their eyes remained ahead. They were looking at a cluster of what appeared to be massive, ivory spears sticking up from the ground, glinting in the sunlight. They were large enough to be visible from several miles away, stabbing at the violet skyline. At first I thought they were some type of terrestrial-formed escarpment, but attica was telling us our destination was there.

  “That look Rhazekan to you?” Zira asked Sapphire with a slight tilt of his head, eyes never leaving the spears.

  “No,” she said.

  Zira clicked his tongue. “Yeah, didn’t think so.”

  I gaped. “Is that a city?”

  “It’s something,” said Sapphire. “The road leads directly to it.”

  “We should pause and consider what we might be walking into,” I said.

  “That ship has sailed,” said Zira. “They saw us coming long before we did them.”

  I cursed and rubbed my forehead, swallowing down the tension trying to claw its way up my throat. Having my legs blown off and neck broken wasn’t something I ever wanted to feel again.

  “If they wanted to hurt us, I imagine they would have already tried to,” offered Sapphire. “Or perhaps no one is there and we’re scaring ourselves for nothing.”

  “I’ll update the thread,” said Zira, nodding in gesture for us to continue. “Who wants to keep their vis-capture on?”

  “I will,” I said, trying to be somewhat useful.

  We walked side-by-side the rest of the way. If this place was indeed what the Altrians called Halcyon, it wasn’t difficult to see why. Under any other circumstance everything here was beautiful, serene. Strange to think how something so resplendent could be equally dysphoric.

  At a hundred yards from the escarpment-city, eight black-robed figures ascended from an entrance leading underground. They arranged themselves in a line, blocking the entrance, but made no motion to approach us—only guard the door.

  We stopped as well, leaving fifty yards between us.

  They were on the taller side, and lean; even through their robes it was apparent. We couldn’t see their faces because their heads were bowed, hoods drawn.

  When it was made clear we weren’t going to be the first to speak, one of the figures moved forward—shuffled, almost—and pulled back their hood.

  “You are from the land of the red sun,” it said, in fluent Exodian. Its voice was light and tonal, like strings music. “What business do you have here?”

  None of us replied at first, too busy staring at its antennae.

  XIX

  CALLING

  Yahweh Telei—;

  I SAT ON A LOUNGE SOFA AS Leid slowly ate the meal Aela had brought in half an hour ago. It was a small portion of moistened sweet-grains and fruit, but I’d only seen her take four bites so far from my peripheral surveillance.

  Leid was an anomaly, and not just in a physical sense. Normally she was as tough as nails and determined in whatever the cause. Body count was an insignificant thing if it meant getting what she wanted. She was like Qaira in that way, albeit more rational.

  But not here, now. All reason had flown out the window the moment her husband’s life was in danger, and thus I was forced to ensure she got appropriate rest and nourishment so that she wouldn’t die of exertion.

  Love was also an anomaly to me. I’d loved people and ideas, but never with the kind of love that shoved a wrench into the cogs of logic. I wasn’t a selfish person by any means, but watching Leid certainly made me feel like it.

  “Are you going to sit there while I sleep, too?” demanded Leid.

  “Yes.”

  Leid set the plate aside and attempted an icy glare. In her exhausted state, it was anything but intimidating. “I could remove you from this room.”

  I tilted my head. “You could, but would you?”

  She smiled curtly and looked away. “We’re wasting time.”

  “Then you should stop resisting and rest. I’ll wake you in two hours.”

  “I can’t sleep with someone staring at me.”

  I sighed, moving the sofa to face the wall. I plopped back onto it, saying nothing.

  Leid said nothing either, and I heard her blankets rustle. As much as she had fought it, her status in the conscious stream moved to stasis within minutes. I looked behind me, verifying that she was asleep.

  Then I crept out of her room and closed the door, heading for the pharmacy to hold up my part of our agreement.

  *

  I was still unsure as to what Leid meant when she’d asked for ‘something to help her focus’. I imagined a stimulant, one that kept her alert for days on end. Being alert was something entirely different from being focused—and Leid knew that, surely—and staying awake for days on end for a reason she had yet to fully explain to me sounded dangerous. Two hours of rest after a period of overexertion wouldn’t bring focus from a stimulant; perhaps at first, but it would quickly lead to delirium and if Leid became any more detached from reality then there would be no reasoning with her.

  Leid didn’t need a stimulant. She needed a relaxant; the only way she could truly focus involved cutting down her panic and anxiety over Qaira’s circumstances. I was sure she was expecting a stimulant, and I’d tell her it was. Eventually she would figure out I had deceived her, but she’d never specified the type of substance she wanted, only something to help her focus.

  After some consideration, I selected three types of vials from my collection: two CNS depressants from differing worlds, and one mood enhancer. I combined them with careful measurements and sealed the mixture to take to her room. The resulting vial was mostly clear, with a slightly blue tinge. It smelled acrid, but Leid wouldn’t care about that.

  I placed the vial on the end table next to her bed and returned to my post on the sofa. She was still asleep and would be for another hour and a half. I thought about letting her sleep longer, but that would only tarnish her trust in me. Instead I used the remaining time to catch up on the Niaphali-X fragments.

  I brought Leid out of stasis exactly when promised. As expected she was groggy and disoriented, and even shooed me away several times.

  “You said you only wanted two hours,” I reminded her.

  “Five more minutes,” she murmured, burying herself in her blankets.

  I rolled my eye and returned to the sofa. She fell into stasis thirty seconds later. At exactly five minutes I tried to wake her up again; and again, she asked for five more minutes.

  “Leid, either you wake up now or I am letting you rest until you’re refreshed enough to get up on your own. I’m not spending the entire day waking you up every five minutes.”

  She was unresponsive, and returned to stasis.

  I huffed and vacated her room after leaving written instructions of how to administer the vial on her nightstand.

  Adrial and Aela were in RQ3, combing through the meager collection of writings and artifacts left by the proxies upon their arrival to Exo’daius. Obsidian tablets and grass-woven pa
rchments were splayed on a table between them. Judging by their expressions, they hadn’t found anything hinting toward our current situation. I deduced they wouldn’t, as it was made clear the proxies hadn’t wanted to risk their survival on the curiosities of their descendants. Ironic.

  “Have you come to join the fun?” asked Adrial, noticing my presence.

  “No. Leid is asleep; I’m going to find something to eat.”

  “There’s a plate left in cold storage for you,” Aela said, eyes trained on a sheet of parchment before her.

  I murmured thanks and headed for the dining hall. I poured myself some spirits and ate my meal alone. The silence was a bit unnerving.

  But the silence didn’t last. An attica alert informed me that Pariah was logging a vis-capture into the Niaphali fragment. They had reached the satellite by some act of a miracle, which they’d called Halcyon. Having nothing else to do, I abandoned my half-finished meal—yet taking my spirits—to Euxodia to analyze the capture via remote stream.

  I watched through Pariah’s eyes the events unfolding at a strange, jagged, crystal-like monument that the group had labeled to be a city. They were met by a group of anthropoid creatures concealed in hooded robes. I felt my body tense while watching this, having not expected to see any other lifeforms. I pinged Adrial and Aela to acknowledge the updates, and nearly dropped my drink when one of the hooded figures stepped forward and revealed their face. Data scrolled beside its image; faint squares framing its features, identifying something we hadn’t ever logged ourselves.

  Fehe’zin

  Attica had just given us a species name. How that was possible, considering none of us were familiar with this race, eluded me. But there were more pressing facts to dissect from these creatures—;

  Most importantly, they were identical to the corpse-statues found at the ruins across the gorge.

  I pinged Adrial again, this time in distress. Leid would have to be woken up as well.