by Micah Thomas
"You've done well, Henry, but its him," the true Wiseman spoke in Henry's mind.
Cassie said, "I feel funny, Henry. Sleepy almost. What is happening?"
"I don't know, but it isn't good," he said.
Henry felt himself being directed closer to the platform. Was it Wiseman driving him or some other attraction, he didn't know, but he could push through with ease now. The apparent arsonist wasn't done, because another explosion rocked the hotel complex on the other side of the street. This time there were no screams nor move to escape shattered glass and dust. Henry instinctively controlled the flames, drawing them up and over the crowd, catching even dust and objects in a telekinetic force he didn't know he had.
The man's voice, carrying a slight Indian accent, echoed over the crowds, over the creaky booms of the building. He held Chissom, the President of the United States, by the arm like an unruly child, "This is your choice. The same path your species has been locked in for all time, or the golden path, open now. Instant travel, communication, endless life and exploration."
A new blast temporarily drowned out his voice.
"Who is doing that? Come out now."
Erik shuffled forward, looking like absolute hell. Dark stains on his clothes, greasy, sallow-faced. His eyes practically demonic. He approached the president's car and platform.
Henry watched, holding the flames in a roiling layer of fire above the crowd.
"You?" the man gestured for the mindless mass of people to part and they did, held in his absolute sway, "I know you. Who on earth let you out to play?"
Erik tittered and laughed. The man looked at him with disgust and snapped his fingers, causing Erik to kneel in a strange marionette motion. The man addressed the crowd again.
"You may call me Hakim, and this sort of thing will never happen again. I can perceive the harm that uncontrolled exploration has caused and I will put a stop to it."
Erik twitched, trying to stand. A shadow of darkness emanated from him, forming a dark aura.
"You aren't the only one of us here, are you?" Hakim asked in a polite cultured voice, "Come out, please. I have more important things to say."
Henry walked forward, leaving Cassie to stand in that dreamy state. He gave a piteous glance at Erik. He could see some rotting thing inside him, utterly unlike Wiseman.
Erik hissed as he passed, "You!"
Hakim looked at Henry and laughed in a booming laugh, letting go of the president who slumped down with a crestfallen look on his stupid face.
"What else from the menagerie has gotten out? Oh, man, what were you thinking?" Hakim said.
"You don't know fuck all about me."
"Oh little man, you've allied yourself to nothing more than a dog, a fiery family pet, an unthinking elemental. My pet. Come to me. We are on the same side."
"Wiseman was one of you. Didn't trust you. Would rather die than sell out," Henry said defiantly.
"I love that you called him Wiseman, or was that the name he chose? Either way, so silly. You say foolish grandfather is dead. Are you sure?"
Hakim, with a gesture of beckoning, pulled filaments of Henry's fire towards him from the air. It swirled and turned into blue white energy, merging with Hakim's own ephemeral sphere of influence. Henry felt the pull like someone tugging out his entrails.
"This dog has teeth, fucker," Henry said focusing his mind and quickening the flames above, seeking material from the very atoms of the air for fuel.
Henry directed the fire at Hakim. He felt the quickening of air, the molecules excited, electrons leaping states. The crowd felt the heat and despite being half hypnotized or whatever, flattened to the ground with moans of terror.
"Burn, damn you. Shoot him, Cassie. For the love of god, shoot."
She drew and aimed her gun at Hakim, firing quickly, draining the rounds, old training, always was a good shot. The bullets transformed into a spray of flower petals long before reaching him.
Hakim laughed. "Such drama."
Wiseman, silent through this, leapt forward in Henry's mind, and changed the fundamental nature of the colliding energies. Hakim's blueish lines of force, purple where they caught and melded with Henry's flames, burning in streams of pure plasma, both now shifted to a white light that descended in a sudden whoomp down, slamming everyone to the ground, where they lay as if asleep. The strange sudden silence was weird as fuck, but there was no one conscious to see it.
***
50,000 souls dropped into the exclusive alien world of the mind and soul. They entered abruptly, without the benefit of practice, without the drugs to speed up awareness and soften the journey, carrying into this holy place minds that on their own would never experience a religious vision, nor question the underlying nature of reality. They were scattered in an unplanned descent into the dark lands reserved for powers and principalities. In response, the quiet sleeping islands were quiet no more. Lights flared up and outward in the archipelagos, signal flares and light towers of essence, hungry awarenesses, instinctually reaching out to resume their clamoring dance.
Cassie was adrift in the dark sea, starring into the sky, observing the firework display in this dream she was having. She perceived the motion, a tide, a dark sky, and arcs of many hued light cast out like giant fishing lines. She let out a breath in long relaxing hmmmm. A wave pushed her to a small sandy shore and she sat up. In sitting she realized that she was naked and unscarred. Her body shimmered in her gaze. In that moment, she remembered Vegas, Henry, and all the rest. She knew she should feel alarmed, but the dreaminess still slowed her thoughts. Others, naked as she was, were drifting both in and out of the water, floating like dimwitted apparitions, pulled towards the outlying islands and their glowing lights by an unseen gravity. Cassie caught herself before calling out to one nearby.
Henry, she should find Henry. With that thought in mind, she perceived a signal, a homing beacon, and she could feel a pull in his direction. It was like the planchette at the flea market. She could sense him somewhere nearby. The feeling was so strong that she even started to see it. An ephemeral golden string, thin as spider silk, running from her midsection, out and down, towards wherever Henry was at. Her mobility was a struggle. Walking didn't work here as she discovered that her legs were symbolic, perhaps a carryover from her mental imagining of herself. She kicked and like in a dream, barely moved, hovering above the ground, grazing sand, but not making traction. Turning in the air, she found she could swim/fly, directing her attention in a way, she could move and quickly. Directed floating turned to true flight and she was soaring like an arrow, up and up, giving her a view of the landscape and its surreal transformations. She giggled as the thought popped into her head, the complex light structures fishing for the floating souls was just like a metaphysical game of hungry hungry hippos. She could sense the competition, an emotion or feeling or something, that emanated from the groupings of light, to collect and explore. She fought the distracted impulse to investigate and returned her perception to the goal of finding Henry. Tracing the golden line, she descended back to the island where she found land. He was there, up from the beach, along a grassy trail between dark tree like things.
Henry was sitting, cross legged, eyes closed in meditation, the golden thread emanating from his midsection, joining them.
"Hey," she called, realizing that she wasn't really making any sounds, but sending the thoughts in Henry's direction.
He looked up at her and she felt a pang of love for him. Something deeper than reason could explain.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"Another world. Not meant for us," he sent back to her.
"What should we do?" she asked floating down to him until very close, almost touching, their shimmering bodies exchanging sparks of light between them.
Henry raised a hand and placed it on Cassie's chest. The umbilicus of energy thickened out from her body and enveloped Henry's hand. He drew his hand back, but the connection persisted, moving in thicker, stronger, more visible
threads between them, now a rope of radiating light emanating from their midsections, binding them.
"We are connected," he said standing up with her.
"I think we have been ever since we met," she said.
Their moment was broken by screaming streams of force blasting through the ecosystem. With it, thoughts and words carried as if over a distance.
Henry detected Hakim's voice in the mix, "Why? Old man? Why? This place is a prison."
"I need to find the fire. It needs me. There's someone else seeking it, and that would be a bad thing," Henry said.
Cassie didn't disagree. They rose into the sky as a single entity, sharing thoughts and observations. Beneath them, the land screamed, itself a manifestation, a something made in part by the imagination of visitors, and the newness of so many interlopers was causing something like a schizophrenic episode. Henry/Cassie noted that nothing here was real in the same sense of a planet and objects. The perceived physicality was a spun up representational layer, and the land was merely another part of a deeply-rooted entity. Henry shared what he knew from Wiseman in a series of quick mental images. Together they now understood more of what Wiseman had attempted to show him, but Henry cursed his stupidity at not inquiring more, not understanding more.
As they soared beyond their initial landing place, they witnessed the entity forms raise up into spheres of expanded provenance. The initial perception Cassie felt, that the entities were intrigued by the new comers, had shifted into something more. They were processing, manifesting and magnifying the dream stuff of the people into visions, into simulations, microcosms, a common place with something they both could understand. Human experience distilled and channeled into the essence of the inorganic entity, dreams, experience, and emotions. Henry knew this was a common language that these things understood.
Each island was now a thing, a sphere or dome, closed off and containing something, but they'd have to dive into one to find out. Henry didn't know which contained his friend, his familiar, his fire, but knew he needed it back. He could feel it out here, but the psychic noise was too loud, battled being fought, strangeness too alien for him to comprehend.
"How can you navigate this?" Cassie asked, allowing herself to be carried in Henry's thoughts and direction.
"Part of me has been coming here for my entire life, though I didn't know it. Another part is what Black Star did to me. I just know things about this place."
Out of the many dozens of potential sites, Henry chose the closest and dove in. They pierced the envelop of energy with a tingling frisson upon their skin like static electricity. Diving in was a good analogy, Cassie thought, as it felt like plunging under water, pressure replaced the airy floaty feeling and they slammed into seats with an alien and heavy gravity, up and down orientation collapsed into place as the scene generated around them.
They were in an office. Any office in the world. Low ceilings of dimpled panels, obnoxiously bright florescent lights, and a CRT-style computer monitor in front of them. They were in a cubicle, Cassie laughed. The monitor blinked out the word, 'WORK,' and they both felt a pressure bending their necks to the screen and mechanical keyboard. Cassie looked at the yellowing plastic and thought about data entry, and deadlines and anxiety in her gut.
Henry shook her, "This isn't real."
This gave her the strength to stand and look around at the rows of cubicles and the drone like people clicking away. She could perceive the bored existence. Both of them could. Waves of mundane make work effort pouring into the machines, draining something vital from the souls plugged in.
Cassie shouted at their cube neighbor, "Hey, you don't have to do that."
The woman looked up scared, then angry, then returned to her nonsense typing.
Henry said, "They can't hear you. Can't you see it? They are dreaming. Locked in their own fantasies."
As if on cue, or on noticing that there was a drop in their productivity, a parade came through the office. Men in suits, repeating in unison a mantra, in that ever-condescending managerial tone.
"I'm the boss. I'm your boss. Work harder. This is what matters," they said.
Henry and Cassie could feel the guilt projected at them. They weren't working. They weren't feeding... something. Like a dumb conga line, the bosses came around to their cube to blast Henry/Cassie with the speech.
Words and thoughts spilled out at them, "Work harder. We'll reward you if you work. You must work. This matters. Suck me off and I'll give you a raise. But don't tell anyone. Work harder. Compete. You could climb the ladder. This is who you are. This is what you were made to do," the voice dripped with condescension, persuasive and completely disgusting in its gloating pressure.
Henry and Cassie shimmered, bound tightly by their glowing umbilicus.
"Fuck this," they said together and drove a righteous fist into the face of the nearest manager. Like dominos, the row of suits toppled one after another. Henry/Cassie moved through the thick pressured air, fighting the gravity pulling them down, following the line of managers back to the corner office. Cassie kicked the door open and sitting at a large oak desk was a massive fucking frog. It's slimly skin leaving snail trail lubricated slime over the plush office chair. Its eyes rolled around in an unfixed nightmare of twitchy energy. The pulsing throat croaked and bulged outward as its respired. Henry could perceive the lines of manic work energy feeding directly from the worker drones into this shit happy thing. Whatever its essential quality was, he wanted no part of it. It sent out even greater motivation to work, the distilled bullshit of every motivational poster and meme that ever crossed middle management's greasy hands. Henry and Cassie, in unison, glowed with rage-filled resistance.
"Not today," they said as they pushed off the ground, becoming a spear of light aimed at the window, entirely focused on escaping the gravity well of the banal power. The frog thing made a deep ribbit sound and cast out its wet and rough tongue around the Cassie/Henry spear of light. They felt it slow their escape velocity, and Cassie felt, perhaps more strongly than Henry, the guilt at leaving work, was her shift covered, had anyone suffered because she abandoned her workplace duties.
Henry's thoughts interceded, "That's not you. Work is just something we do. It will never be who you really are."
His determination gave her thoughts speed and the managerial frog entity recoiled with horror and rejection. They escaped, shattering the glass, out and upwards, and the illusion shattered in a frisson of static, and they were back above the fray. Loops of power lashed out, grabbing up more nearby floating souls, but Cassie/Henry were moving on. Again themselves, in shimmering bodies joined at the waist.
"Dear lord, that sucked," Cassie thought to Henry.
"I think it will get worse before it gets better. Do you see what's happening?" he said.
"Yeah, the garbage in our heads matching to things, like the frog thing, that feed on that specific nightmare."
"That's about it. Ready to try another?"
"Fuck it. What else can we do?"
The landscape below had settled down as dominions were being established and tested. What other pieces of human experience could these things glom onto and make real, Cassie thought. In a single unit of mind, they descended like a falling star, piercing another sphere of influence and dream. She was braced this time for the rearrangement of perception, the false world within a world.
This one was dark, and neither Cassie nor Henry could see each other, but they knew they were still tethered and that was a comfort. The dim world was crowded and sticky. Something large was binding them down before scrambling away to attend to others. Once it moved, they could see a glow emanated from all around, like a laptop screen in a dark room. Henry clawed at the junk around his hands, getting an arm free. He knew this was an illusion, but still, the physicality of it was undeniable. Whatever he was in, it was nasty. He fought to get his body free and managed to pull himself up and look around.
Bodies, or at least mental projection of bodies we
re embedded as far as he could perceive, knotted in a web, and embedded up to their necks in cocoons of cables and muck. He looked at his bindings with disgust. It looked like shit, super sticky shit, covered black cables and cords. The mass of knotted cables on keeps behind their TV, or under their computer desk. Henry fretted at it and worked himself entire free.
The people seemed half asleep, just as they were in the other one. They didn't seem to realize their plight.
Henry crawled on his hands and knees looking for Cassie. He got close to one of the sleeping faces, and said, "Hey, man. What's this about?"
The man opened his eyes and started screaming.
"Look at me," he yelled, slamming his head back and forth but not making effort to escape.
His screams triggered a chain reaction among the trapped who began in their own ways, screeching for attention.
"Like me, share me, repost, retweet! IFB!" they cried, each citing a litany of events and accomplishments ranging from how hot they are, how much weight they lost, vacations they've had, things they've made and want to sell.
This was some sort of narcissism trap and Henry thought it might even be funny till he saw the spider, the master of this web. This is what had bound him in its gross digital webbing. It shuffled its fat body along on hair legs in obscene twitchy movements. The damned thing was huge, 20 feet long and eating the essence out of people. It was quick in its work, dashing person to person like a hummingbird, taking sips of their need with a long pink tongue. It fed on their mix of vanity commingled with bitter, bitter under tones of self-loathing.