The Time Tribulations

by Travis Borne

  “So, we shall assume they’ve discovered Herald’s secret,” Marlo said, “and these machines are using the individuals they’d stolen…to liberate themselves, continually.”

  Jon said, “I kept detailed notes during my five years in the cave. When the drones finally got us—” He turned to Jim. Jim had generated a deck of cards into existence and was shuffling them. “—when they killed your brother, my friend—” Jim stopped and nodded with sobering anger. “I witnessed hundreds of drone scans, all of us had. But there was one thing that was different, one single scan. When the drone scanned Jerry, it hesitated—that was different, something I’d never seen. Jerry knew about the lending process.”

  Jim’s skin turned red, but he didn’t say anything.

  “The drones made the very first split,” Lia said, “when they scanned Jerry, because he had inside information?”

  “I don’t believe so, at least not like that,” Rafael replied. “But perhaps the very notion had been inserted into a socket. Then, after they’d consumed the first of the seven cities, or if they’d recovered any of the lending-implemented hover-jets, and if they were to tinker, then steal a human, test it out—then, yes, it could have happened. Perhaps the secret, when found, was somehow kept from the horde mind of the machine world. The newfound objectivity could have exploited the newfound principle, causing a totally new branch of machines.”

  Marlo appended, “One that is also at war, or at least remaining hidden from the other, the destructive side of the machine world.”

  “One that creates rather than destroys,” Rafael said, “yet I cannot imagine it would have compassion. If it did have Herald’s plans it would have had to recreate his work in part, and it would have chosen the easy way out—to extract the feed via pain and suffering.”

  “This is something that Herald has already divulged,” Jim said, recalling not only the newly received memories he’d received from Amy after her sacrifice, but his conversation with Herald on the ship, about his brother. “But it makes things far easier for us and our mission if this is the only city that imprisons humans.”

  Marlo replied, “There are still millions of satellites up there, scattered like dust, and many still operational on some level or another. I’ve thoroughly scanned this entire planet, as well the outreaches of our solar system, Jim. Yes, this is the only civilization apart from the mainland machine world. Everything else is a growing metal crust, one that is soon to swallow us all.”

  “Then that settles it,” Jon said. “We know where to hit. We avoid the machine world—there’s just not enough of us to make even a dent out there. We focus here, down there.”

  “Yes,” Rafael agreed, “but we’ll need to salvage every resource we can. First, we head to Herald’s bunker in Vallecito, Colorado, then scavenge the other six cities for resources. We need to retrieve a genetic modifier and search for a cell reprogrammer—it’s Rico’s best chance. The more resources we can scavenge, the more we can purpose to assist in our recovery mission. Marlo, how detailed and up to date is your map of the Southwest.”

  “Very. In fact, I think I can plot a relatively clear course—providing the blocker is fully operational.”

  They blasted from the water. Jim led, Lia trailed, then Jon. This time Rafael and Marlo had trouble keeping up.

  73. Unexpected Weather

  Marlo, who had felt like the one in his world, a god more than a wizard, was in awe of Jim; Jon and Lia as well, but Jim’s was a mind on roids.

  Jim erupted from the ocean, first and foremost. He extended every wing the alaizion possessed and pushed with one powerful thrust. The water following him was an upside-down faucet. He spewed out and up like a nuclear surfer riding the precipice of his own mushroom cloud. The surface tension was a suction cup that seemed to punch him into the sky like an angry fist. Through troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and Jim’s mind exploited whatever the fuck it wanted.

  The others desperately tried to keep up. Clearly, Lia was the faster of the four, but Jim was losing even her. Each farted contrails of glitter and neon gas, and the unreal speed at which they were hightailing Jim lit the atmosphere on fire. The once tailgaters were fireballs. Traveling at Mach brains-in-toes—but it wasn’t enough.

  Jim shattered the rules of Marlo's world and the alaizion creature he’d become for the final time, disintegrated. Chunks of melting flesh fell into his superheated wake, burning up like newspaper ashes being blown away by a jet engine. And he antagonized his sensations of thrill, reaching ever deeper into the fabric of the so prodigious world Marlo had constructed. Amy, he thought of her. He saw her curly brown hair, her smile that had once so easily assuaged his rage. He grinned when she made him go bankrupt on that stupid board game they played for two and a half hours. He erupted with laughter, when in his mind, and by virtue of Marlo’s powerful system, she came alive again. The love made him go even faster.

  Love, warmth, her smile, her tears—her decision…his decision!

  He saw her falling. That cold chill, he felt it, then rage. He released her. A beautiful young woman, falling. He spun around. FUCK THE WORLD! NOOOOOOO! And he heated the air around him; his aura blazed with orange-red. Then red, red hot red, core-of-a-hypernova red. So red it became white. Veins in his arms popped, blood came out of—

  Stop it, Jim. Stop it, she is alive. You saw her with your own eyes! She left with Herald, her father, and Ana, her mother.

  A part of Jim, the part that’d just latched onto the rage once again, and the malcontent, liked it, loved it. Akin to smoking cigarettes and becoming addicted: the feel of having that cigarette, getting to squash a craving over and over and over again, out in the cold, anywhere—fuck it, screw it all, get sick and drag every motherfucker down with me.

  Deep down it was all still there, and like the smoker that had quit, or an addict that would never be the same again, the evil, sarcastic, grouchy asshole-in-need-of-the-SLAP, longed for it. Seeing Amy falling again as if he was really there, hearing that faint CRACK when she hit—while he flew around this simulated Earth fast enough to make it spin the other way—just fomented the rage now growing, thriving once again. His heart was on fire and he slapped his arm.

  He was in his apartment again, injecting himself with Kim’s special poison. He’d just fucked her in anger, a real grudge fuck, and he loved it, Kim loved it. And he fucked Rob too, with his evil, I-just-fucked-your-woman thoughts. Ha, ha ha ha, ha, fucking ha! He pushed on the plunger with a possessed smile. The glass piece of shit had been reused a thousand times and the green fluid was alive again, glowing like radioactive paste. Moving in slowly, an antique film projector taking a beating, film on fire, and all of it went into his vein, although not slowly; he pushed the plunger like an androgenic bodybuilder pushing through pain. His face became a tomato grown in Hell. His skin became translucent as molten blood pumped him up. He didn’t even look like Jim anymore. Evil clawed at his mind like a thousand yellow-eyed rats in a flooding white-padded room. No air.

  I don’t fucking need air. I don’t want it. KILL MYSELF!

  Right through the glass. Jim exploded from the balcony of his apartment. The leap was a sprint into a mirror, a mirror in which he saw himself playing chicken.

  I HATE YOU, JIM!

  He fell to the ground—

  He was flying through the sky—

  Pushing it, disintegrating Marlo’s motherfucking world.

  “FUCK YOU, Marlo!”

  Lender housing exploded behind him. And everything on the surface of the simulated planet below caught fire.

  “Jim!” a faint voice came through. “You must take it easy. You’re on the verge of destroying my world!”

  “Who are you?” Jim’s voice was low, demonic.

  “Jim, I am Marlo. I’m here with Rafael, Jon, and Lia.”

  “I don’t know you. LEAVE ME ALONE!” Though, the stranger’s voice did pull him out of his thoughts; he was again high in the atmosphere, carving a scar into the fabric of Marlo’s
precious world.

  The sound of Jim’s voice traveling through their mental channel could possess a priest, make him twist off his own head, but the diabolic vibes cut out abruptly, pulling away. Whatever it was left their minds like a lobotomist pulling on the barb after a deep and successful insertion.

  “It—aaaah!” Lia shrieked. “—hurts my brain!” The four of them could press on no longer. Jim’s voice had sent an unbalanced blender deep into their gray matter. The pain fell away, but as if their lobes had become relaxed noodles and the limp degalvanized pasta was sliding into their necks. They abruptly stopped chasing him.

  “I’ve lost him,” Marlo said, dizzily, regaining his mental faculties. They’d been crossing over the coastal inlets and outlets, beginning flight over the machine world. “Jim is gone.”

  “He’s lost it,” Jon said. Rafael just shook his head. Lia’s normally outspoken, captivating brown eyes withdrew and shriveled.

  “Back to Jewel City perhaps?” Lia suggested, trembling. “Maybe he’s thinking about…”

  “I feel it too, Lia.” Jon said. “Amy. I can feel his thoughts like…like an aura of pain. It’s oozing from his wake.”

  “He was not ready,” Rafael said. “I cannot sense it, but if the two of you can feel his thoughts, do you think he’s going to—”

  “No, Rafael,” Jon said abruptly. “He was thinking of Jewel City, but now it’s something else, something unfamiliar to me. We could head there to make sure, or just call it and log out.”

  Marlo delivered a slow nod through their mental channel, the channel which now excluded Jim.

  Rafael cocked his head to the side—whereas Jon and Lia could sense Jim’s aura of madness, he could interpret Marlo’s cryptology. Marlo was shaking his head in dismay, not nodding.

  The sky grew dark. Daylight was replaced with an ominous shade of purple. Looking down onto the machine city: destruction, chaos, a hundred-mile-wide wake of obliteration. Drones were raining like burning embers and satellites fell from the sky as blazing white comets. It resembled Marlo’s original presentation.

  The world beneath them crumbled and the metallic machine city faded to ash as if the time-machine operator fell asleep at the wheel. Fast forward. Strong winds blew the ash out to sea—a sea that had just vanished, too, becoming a vast gray canyon. The ground floated like matte plastic sheeting on water, becoming smooth and dreary, and gray beneath low-lying swirls of gusting red metallic dust. The sky completed a dizzying transformation to pitch night and a trickle of stars appeared, enough to be counted on fingers and toes, but some twinkled brightly, like Venus in the morning before sunup. Hazy shadows of large, but distant planets, even gaseous red and purple nebulae appeared.

  The four, now utterly perturbed alaizions, continued slowly, following a faint trail of gauzy agitation, that which seemed a permanent scar in the air. They all knew it was Jim’s and followed as if walking through a dark forest, apprehensive of lions that could leap out and terrify them.

  “He cut through, how?” Rafael asked, looking at the scar as it tried most unsuccessfully to repair itself.

  Marlo replied, slowly, “I do not know.”

  A white cue-ball of a glob appeared in the sky, birthing itself from an invisible void, squeezing out and distorting like a water balloon through the singularity of a garden hose. It assumed a pristine glow and solidified with a glass-like texture. The cue-ball now orbited closely, yet oddly, not reflecting as much light as something so grand should.

  The world became cold, dim, hollow. A few of the handful of stars in the sky weakened, the rest twinkled to off.

  The sun morphed from its warm orange-yellow to a fiery dark-red, as if it had just been wrapped with Hell, and it grew, and grew, and grew. A red-giant star! It sunk into the horizon like a tank sinks into the mud, and the four of them continued creeping along.

  There were rings, now—made apparent as they flew around the barren, leaden and flat wasteland. The hazy discs were like cold spirits sliding into the depths of the abyss-like void of a sky, orbiting the red-giant star for as far as could be seen. Their once focused chase suffered a sudden extirpation of attention, and they slowed even more.

  “Where are we?” someone asked. Even the person asking didn’t know if they’d asked it. Eyes floated like buoys, bouncing around to see this and that, even the alaizions’ eyes couldn’t absorb the totality of it. The solar system was as magnificent as it was terrifying. Empty.

  The air thinned.

  Warmth was the covers being pulled off and away by a sadistic Alaskan prankster. Before another thought could toss itself around uselessly, it became downright frigid, and they slowed even more—but not because they wanted to. The four of them could no longer fly at high speeds, or manipulate the laws of the world around them.

  “I think we should log out, now!” Lia cried.

  Marlo reappeared on the back of his alaizion, as did the others. They had little air to breathe and were now freezing.

  “I would have never imagined this,” Marlo said, avoiding Lia’s suggestion as if he hadn’t heard it. He’d spoken out loud, yelling to the others with his human mouth—for there was no longer a convenient mental channel. Marlo’s voice sounded flat, hollow, and about like the world around them suggested, deathly. Rafael moved closer in formation. Jon copied, Lia too.

  “We should do as Lia suggested, log out,” Rafael called out. “Jim’s lost it. This map has become corrupt.”

  “Rafael, Jim has…hijacked the system. I have lost all control and we are at the mercy of his changes, and this world as he has created it, here and now.”

  Rafael yelled, “The power of the human mind, Marlo, should not have been underestimated! I assumed you would have foreseen this.” Like dismayed creepers sneaking around in a graveyard, they flew along slowly. “This is just what I experienced in my world. I drew from the minds of the others I had allowed in and had to split myself. I’d not only lost my power, only being able to reach a small part of my previous self only when I had tripped a trigger—one which I had set to be the worm in a bottle of mezcal—but had to critically limit the world for the duration of their stay. The world had to contain extensively fixed and rigid rules, else the creative minds of those I had allowed in could quickly and easily achieve just what we are witnessing here. Risky, very risky, Marlo. It was a gamble for you to allow this. I figured you would have constructed safeguards during your time of preparations.”

  “I know little of this, so it seems. Perhaps I was foolish to…demonstrate as I have done.”

  “Marlo, your demonstration allowed us to join together and absorb much data in short time. But your lack of experience with the human mind is that of which I speak. There are more powerful safeguards, similar to that of the lending maps—most of them devised and created by a human, Herald—which could have been implemented. But what’s done is done. Hopefully we will arrive to wherever Jim has gone, and soon. And if we do, I hope we can talk him back.”

  “So, we cannot just log out?” Lia asked.

  Marlo, just an old, defeated wizard riding a bird, dropped his head. He answered her this time, directly but with only his deflated countenance. The response to his despondent puff of lackluster went round like empty drinks at a bar of lost souls. Marlo’s white beard, that had been flowing backward like a noose, became solid, as if frozen. The beast he was riding moved through the air as if it was struggling. And none of them were still connected mentally with the now somber, bucking creatures.

  “We’ll get him back,” Jon said, shivering. “We have to. But—” He fumbled with the loosening reigns. The creature became difficult to control. “How do you—fly these creatures?” His orange-red alaizion bucked, descending. The others went off in various directions and flew more haphazardly as if getting annoyed by their riders. A good thing: focusing on something immediate prevented panic attacks, for Marlo’s puff was an uncool, kick to the nuts!—even for Lia, and the pain leaked into her gut, and Jon’s, and Rafael’s
, and Marlo already looked saturnine.

  “We must try to regain the mental link,” Marlo yelled. “Grab your reigns, try!”

  Rafael added, “Jon, you have a human mind, perhaps you can connect with Jim. Try to disturb the balance he has achieved. Think deep. Go deeper than you ever have.”

  Jon, fumbling wildly, went away with half of his mind. Part of him managed to, at least in part, stabilize the creature, the other part saw the world as data—mountains, universes of it. He tried, really tried, but it quickly overwhelmed him. Though, he could feel Jim, he also felt—Amy; she was strong within him, and Jon worked his way closer, closer… “Almost…there… Amy, I can almost see her. She’s alive within him. I see him holding her by the shoulders—on the edge of a cliff.” Jim’s mind, Jon realized, had a stronger grip on the world than Marlo, even Rafael, had realized was possible. “There will be no getting it back, Marlo, not mentally. I must pull out, this is not going to happen.”

  The creatures were bucking Rafael, Marlo, and Lia, terribly now. Jon’s stabilized but they continued on a descent toward the barren gray world. Jon tried one last time and said. “I think I can, at least—” The four creatures stabilized within ten seconds. “I stabilized our control of the alaizions but there’s little else I can do, and little time. I see Jim and his presence in this system is still growing. Soon it’ll—”

  “It’s too late,” Marlo said. “We are at his mercy now.” He flew back up to meet the others. They formed a close formation once again, although they were at the mercy of new rules, rules of a completely hijacked system. The creature was just a creature and it had to be ridden and disciplined like one. Now it felt like they were riding a flying horse, more so, a real live dragon!

  “Rafael, can you—”

  “I already tried, Lia, when he’d first taken off. I cannot even get close. I see red when I get near. Jim has constructed an impenetrable mental wall. Hate, disgust, rage, much pain. He cannot even see beyond it himself and therefore I cannot enter. We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”