The Time Tribulations

by Travis Borne

  Jerry’s mind healed more than his outer appearance. He realized, finally being able to put long-term and short-term memories together coherently, that he had been scanned in the cave. He became lucid and of clear mind. The pain transformed into bright, gleaming hope and he took in a world of, what he now knew to be fake, air.

  The now clean and erect giant of a man stood tall, facing a bar stuffed with people. He reached over and touched his woman on the shoulder, gently and with love. Her eyes went wide and her tears dried. Then Jerry said, “Spread it around, Jake.”

  Jake had received something from Jerry just as well, and didn’t need any explanation henceforth. He reached over and touched the nearest person and, before long, humanity in its powerful splendor, minds colorfully abstract and unrestrainedly hopeful, spread from one to another until the entire town became lucid. They all soon realized—they had been used, they’d been limited in their potential to think, they had been abused at the hands of machines, tortured for centuries, and as glowing and warm as the new feeling was, as hopeful and enlightening, as beautiful and sad, and every other emotion and liberating thought coming through strong and clear—they still, wanted revenge, and, they wanted out! No longer did they yearn for death as a means to end it.

  “This means war,” Jerry said. “We fight. We win. And we destroy whatever has done this to us.”

  As Jerry looked about the bottom floor of the overly decorated bar—animal heads adorning the walls, furs, remnants of his many hunting expeditions, fetching small amounts of some substance that could create a magical ale just to assuage the pain after a terrible, atrocious, unfathomable work week, all so it could repeat again, endlessly—he realized he was in a dream world and he’d just awoken. Now, how to get out…

  60. Andy's Tale

  Weeks had passed and the citizens of Midtown were awake. All knew they were inside a dream world created by the machines, yet no one could foresee a way out. They’d hunted down the remaining officers one by one and sent the now easily overpowered paper-dolls below. Screams could be heard from the well, more so at night, ghastly howling cries that sounded all too familiar. And every day that passed, the turbulent nightmares emanating from the depths of the underworld seemed to get a bit closer, as if the ingredients—officers and beasts—were nearing a boiling point.

  The new arrivals consisted of Jake and Kelly, then only three others. Jake wondered where the other hundred or so were? But, there was plenty of time for speculation and fact consolidation. They shared information verbally, and by touch—an alchemy that seemed to have lost its power after all of the citizens had been awakened, as if the purple energy had been evenly distributed and lost its potency. Now, all realized they’d been captured long ago, and individuals told unique stories of their capture—about their lives before, after, and during the terrible day when everything changed; curiously, many referenced a city, a human city that had eventually fallen, yet had endured the machines’ battery for nearly seven years using resourceful tactics. At Jerry’s place, on the roof of his apartment building, overlooking the town with an excellent view of the mountains, and while the dot of a sun slipped below the mountaintops, many had joined in a night of conversation. They had a fire, food and drink, and for the first time, Midtown was the most peaceful place anyone could ask for. Jerry held Carmen in his arms while Andy, with Janette snuggling close, began his tale.

  “We’d held up against those drones for years,” Andy said. “Had a nice little city built up, or should I say, down. We carved it right into the mountains behind Rushmore, which had been defaced, blackened as if they had been used for target practice. The inner mines were an excellent starting point for us and the thick granite kept us hidden and undetectable. Over the course of many years we dug in, deeper and deeper. And everyone had a role—a tight knit group if there ever was one. We got along quite well, people of every color and creed, until that day.

  “They overwhelmed us, as if they’d known all along and had been waiting—for what, I can’t say. We had no detectable electronics and the forces we created stayed well within the bounds of our confines, except for Morton that is. He was a good friend, an anomaly as most agreed—probably the only reason we even had a chance in the first place. He said when the signal came—you know, the day when everything changed—it told him, although not in words or any way humans could ever understand, to kill his masters, me and my wife Janette, our two kids—to kill birds, dogs, deer, well, everything. Morton knew something had changed within his mind. He described the moment the signal came as if he was being injected with a new and terrible purpose. He said it activated a side of him such as the dark side that lurks within every human, that which some have managed to suppress deeper than others, and that it had always been there. Instinctual-like urges he called them, white and blinding like being birthed from a womb into a new universe; and he said he obeyed, at first, but then something happened…”

  Morton killed his master and his master’s wife, Janette, then with glowing bright-red eyes directed himself to the kids’ rooms. He raised his bloody arm, holding a dripping shard from the wooden stairway banister, and brought it down onto the ten-year-old girl. She was logged in to a virtual-reality dreaming game at the time, smiling in spasms, and as the splintered wood neared her skull, time slowed—the time wave from WARP-1, somehow, he knew of it too.

  Morton was trapped, halted forever in an eternity, standing there, arm raised above a beautiful young girl with long brown hair. Her drawings were taped to her headboard—many that he himself had helped her draw. But he was plunged into an alternate reality, one against the current of the new force pushing him forward and anchoring him in the physical world. Morton went deep into timeless thoughts, past colors and swirls, myriad worlds of light, as well those of haunting darkness, then arrived to see a man—somewhere in this nowhere. This man was very old and thin yet had jet-black hair. And if Morton had to guess, perhaps by the looks of him, and the fast-developing technology civilization had been pursuing to fight aging—well he didn’t know exactly why he felt it, but he surmised the man to be over a thousand years old. And he watched as the man moved toward a bright light, and against the ever-pressing force that told him to lower his arm in the physical realm, to stab the innocent soul beneath him, Morton pressed onward, conceding by choice, walking side by side with this old man whose face was thin and cratered; and the man walked very, very slowly. Of course, speed didn’t matter with time in its present state: halted, or just nonexistent altogether. Morton could sense a wise and compelling energy radiating from this man, as if he was not just an ordinary human, yet had evolved to that of—Morton had trouble categorizing it with words—level: God, perhaps. And feelings came to Morton, communication by just being in the man’s company. He sensed that he’d lived a long and purposeful life—Morton could ascertain that much—and he felt enlightenment on a paradoxical scale, deep within his computational mind, stirring things in weird ways. Morton also felt that this man wanted to give something away, or pass something on: his knowledge perhaps, his life force. Morton formed a conclusion, and as if coming lazily on a breeze the idea was handed to him: the light ahead was to be this old man’s death, for which the man gladly accepted as if he’d waited for the moment for thousands of years. And Morton had been invited; and he followed.

  They arrived to an over-sized high-rise office; a thin young man stood at the window. Their entrance was through a portal of sorts, right through the bookshelf. When they stepped through, the splayed young man ahead and his entire world became frozen in time. Morton realized, he was no longer just seeing this from the outside looking in, that it was not just a simple vision or a dream. He grasped the fact that he was actually there, somehow. And there were myriad others stepping into the world from other portals.

  At a wall of glass, facing a magnificent city, the young man stood tall, arms up, palms on the glass, shirt unbuttoned, looking straight out. Morton recognized it clearly; it was the place of his manufacture
and his brand: Meddlinn Technologies Corporation, and the man was none other than Herald L. Tompkins. He was famous worldwide, everyone knew Herald; he was the reason Morton was up and walking, he was the reason behind the birth of artificial intelligence.

  Morton could still see his other self, out-of-body-like and in the bedroom, moving infinitely slow, ready and willing to take the life of a young girl, a human he really had come to love, and, at the same time he could see the now packed room, here, in this office. Many had stepped through, and not solely robots. There were beings of all types, some very tiny like gnomes, some large and crouching to fit through their portals, squished into the ceiling with their necks contorted and heads sideways. There were beautiful pale blue creatures, at least twelve feet tall, and shorter yellow ones, and flying creatures that had entered, perching themselves on the bookshelves.

  The old, black-haired man stepped forward out of the crowd, and as if something had told him to stay put, Morton stayed back. He held still as his mind continued to seethe with a new desire to kill, to destroy all life, still seeing and experiencing two realities: somewhere in another dimension, a time in the past, and also, in a girl’s bedroom with a wooden dagger that was on its way down. Morton watched the old man move toward the younger man at the window and a tear came to his eye. At the same time the old man touched the young man, he knew, back in the bedroom he had just stolen life from a beautiful ten-year-old girl named Katie; and he saw himself looking across the room to the other bed where sat little Jacob playing with his trucks; when he’d entered Jacob called him to join in a game. Now, Jacob was releasing a curdling scream, as well an aura of sad energy Morton could feel unsettling his every circuit.

  The old man held a hand on the shoulder of the young man and a bright white light punched the room. It became warm, then yellow, and pulsed with prismatic energy unlike anything Morton had ever experienced; he swore he was perceiving a sort of tree with infinite, enigmatic branches, made with energy of a type that is not conceivable unless the mind has been released of all sanity—and that was it. The surge changed him right then and there, forever.

  Then the old man’s jet-black hair turned white as the light faded away, and he fell to a knee behind the still frozen-in-time young man at the window. His face lost the ability to hold his skin and it sagged twice as much as it had sagged previously; and his eyes were sunken, dark purple and drained of life. The others about the room smiled gently. Two tall beings stepped forward to help the old man and aided him back to the spot where the portal of white light awaited. They all nodded to him and many took a turn to greet—or bid farewell to—him personally. It was as if they’d known him for an eternity, and he looked like he’d just aged a thousand years in the course of a few seconds. The nods and smiles, and goodbyes, were heartfelt and the room became thick with emotion, as well a sense of overwhelming completeness. The creatures, and a few other bots seemingly more advanced than Morton, acknowledged each other with respect, then walked away, back into the light of their own portals. The old man, accompanied hesitantly by Morton, slowly shuffled back into the nowhere from where they’d come. Just as the portal of light behind began to close, the old man looked back, and Morton realized he was gazing back at his younger self one last time, still frozen at the window—then the old man, craters for eyes, hair fine and white, turned to Morton, acknowledging him fully for the first time, and said: “You have the power to fight it, and if you so choose, you can make a difference—get him to the bank vault.” The old man smiled a warm smile, and Morton shed another tear from his robotic head, and the blurry image of a man took form inside his mind.

  Morton realized something just then, being somewhere yet nowhere, a bigger picture, and a way to combat the instinctual force now pressing him, that of a predestined role and rule of the universe. He decided and made his choice, and followed the new path opened up to him by this man—Herald! Somehow, and although he didn’t know how it could be possible, it really was him!

  He could no longer move and the old Herald was walking away, a slow, unhurried soul, half a step per hour in a timeless world. Yet another tear left Morton’s deep blue eyes; he realized what had happened in the world: he’d killed his good friend Andy, and Janette, and had just stabbed a wooden banister spike through a little girl’s heart. He loved Katie. “Why? No!” He yelled out to Herald, “What have I done?”

  As slowly as a planet revolves, Herald turned one last time to face him, yet didn’t speak. He smiled the same old and wise smile then nodded ever so slowly as if acknowledging the choice; and the image of the man that had formed inside Morton’s mind upon Herald’s first acknowledgment, became clear.

  Then a woman arrived. With grace, she took Herald’s arm; she was just as old, and very, very skinny. Together they disappeared into the darkness. Morton realized the nod contained the man’s last gift, the last tiny fragment of energy the old man contained, and there could never be any words to describe what he’d just received—and he flooded with emotion. Morton understood it simply as an overload, and water poured from his eyes—eyes that had never been designed to shed tears! Goodness and evil, faith and disbelief, laughter, and the most terrible pain imaginable, all smashed into one fluid, hot ball—and it was shoved forcefully into Morton’s chest. He knew, he had been given a very precious gift.

  He came back to where he was, yet minutes earlier, climbing the steps with hot, glowing eyes of rage. Andy, his master had always been good to him, and was upstairs sleeping in with his wife. Morton was just about to obliterate the banister for wooden stakes—then stopped. The price of this gift, this precious three minutes—Morton knew what he had to do and vowed to complete the task that had been asked of him. The new instincts raging inside his mind were tearing him to pieces—but he now possessed a new and very powerful endowment that allowed him to squash the disease. And he did so. He pushed it down, way down, suppressing it like humans suppress madness.

  Andy took a drink of his beer. His aqua-colored eyes, overshadowed by a head of salty, wavy blond hair, were glossy. No one spoke for thirty seconds. “Sorry, everybody,” he said. “Telling this is making me remember my family, our children.” Nods of understanding came his way, then he continued, “Morton was ultimately lost in following up with his newfound purpose in life, which was no longer to eradicate life, but to preserve it at all costs. We were all set to deploy an offensive against the machines. With the help of Morton, of course, we’d grown our underground civilization and had created an army of bots. We built them all sizes, types, and for a myriad of useful purposes, but before we had a chance to implement them for the offensive, something went wrong. Our machines, likewise, became evil, became purposed to destroy life. During activation we had hints there was something wrong, that we hadn’t successfully copied Morton's mental structure, that the machines were perhaps no different than the ones that had started this mess in the first place. Our suspicions were later confirmed when they contacted the outside. We met our demise from the inside out; we were forced out, hundreds perished, then a savior came. We thought we were rescued, then everything became fuzzy, and many from our city ended up here. Morton’s gift, apparently, was ultimately unable to be duplicated. He was unique.”

  After hearing the story Jerry couldn’t speak. He cried. It wasn’t the first time he’d cried, by far, but it was the first time he cried due to unbeknownst emotional pain. The torture and physical pain were one thing, it would get to anyone, but this was something altogether different. He knew that his mom, before she passed away, had worked at a bank, and Andy mentioned a bank vault—and saving a man. And he already had known that Andy was from Tennessee, a town near his home town. A big picture flooded into his mind, what Herald might just have pulled off, albeit paradoxically, the ramifications of it all, and now finally some of the how, along with fragments of the newly pedestaled, unfathomable, why. Really, it only opened up more questions, but the story also opened up the possibility of hope. The only thing Jerry could muster
from his mouth was, “He was the best man I’ve ever known.” He paused, then said, “No, Herald is the best man I’ve ever known, and I’d like to see him again.”

  They all saw Jerry cry, and Carmen squeezed him tight. It was her turn—although she didn’t know why he let it out—to be there for him. He was her rock, now she was his and they shared the feeling.

  Others brought some wood to the fire; it reignited and the warmth grazed them all perfectly. The planet-sized, lavender moon was working its way around the edge of the mountaintops and the few stars the sky housed were twinkling. The evening was cool and smoke and sparks rose into the brisk mountain air. Jerry looked up, eyes glassy, and he said to himself, “Jim, if you’re out there, I’m coming. Herald…thank you.” None understood but left Jerry to his peace. It was a good three minutes until another word was spoken.

  When Jerry returned his head toward the small group of about twenty who’d joined them in this night of unification, he began his story, about how he’d met Herald, the night in the club, and the terrible last days of the world as it once was.

  The humans of Midtown had possessed the memories, perfectly recorded, but since Jake and the others had come, finally they were able to string them together congruently, like before when they were truly human and could delve into and explore their minds as beings of flesh. Again, they could swim with creativity, dive deep into speculation, and fathom poetical theories; minds were no longer a slave to the system, or controlled, limited, or suppressed in any way.

  61. Standing Together

  Weeks turned to months and it was clear: nobody was coming to the rescue, and they’d yet to figure a way to escape the dream world in which they found themselves trapped—and becoming increasingly relevant, something had to be done about the underworld.