by Travis Borne
“I’m beginning to feel less like a wizard and more like a cowboy, a stupid one. I shall no longer underestimate the power of the human mind. Now we are at the mercy of Jim’s mental anguish. We are subject to whatever this nightmare manifests. Let’s descend. It’s too—cold up here.”
“There’s a—canyon ahead,” Rafael stuttered.
Jon raised an arm slowly, trembling. His skin was white and hard as though he’d been locked in a walk-in freezer for six hours, and his lips were purple. “Look!” He pointed with a finger that couldn’t fully extend. On the edge of a vast canyon which seemed to cut the planet in two, stood Jim. He was again human in form, standing shoulders hunched and looking down. He raised both arms from his sides, then leapt into the abyss.
74. The Time Tribulations
They touched down, dismounted the nervous alaizions, then followed a worn path leading to the edge. Jim was gone; he’d really jumped.
What will become of him? What happened to the world? Has he committed suicide? Can he? And, where in the hell are we? Thoughts were guillotined heads rolling in all directions.
Jon approached first, kneeling. The air was warmer, nearer the ground, and the process of thawing out was a tick crawling on a turtle. He peered over the edge. Sweeeaaawlh, shoooeeawlh! A frigid poltergeist haunted his face at forty mph. The crevasse was a bottomless pit of a gash sending freezing air, but a tiny glint of white caught his watering eyes before he pulled away. He purposed his fingers as a face shield and squinted. Jim, 150 feet below on an incongruent ledge, standing in a white pile of bones; he was holding a skull high with one arm…perhaps it was a hip bone, in the other.
Marlo looked as if he’d aged ten years in the ten minutes since they’d dismounted. Rafael was doing okay and assisted him to the cliffside. They knelt beside Jon and Lia, who were peeking over.
“He’s down there all right,” Jon said. “But why, and does anyone know what’s going on?”
“What is he doing?” Lia asked.
“He’s looking up at us now,” Rafael replied. “Look at his face, his entire body, he’s—red.”
The ground rumbled beneath their feet. A few loose rocks fell into the chasm, then things stabilized and a moment of silence was shared. Five seconds, ten, twenty, a tense and bizarre minute just staring at Jim, Jim back at them. Jon shattering the quiescence was a hatchet striking a block of ice. “Jim!” His voice was loud, but hollow, as if he wore a murderer’s suffocating plastic bag. Jim stood red, staring, unmoved.
“He’s still—” Lia shivered. “—just standing there.”
“Yeah… It’s weird,” Jon uttered. He stood up and looked around. “This canyon must be hundreds of miles wide. It must encircle the entire planet. Cold, flat, gray, nothing, except for this canyon.”
Air tantalized lungs’ appetites for oxygen.
“It’s too cold for us to carry on much longer,” Lia said, folding her arms, freezing while trying to fill her lungs, but just the same, rejecting the frigid air as if it contained death. “This entire planet is devoid of life, of anything! Are we really stuck here? We actually cannot log out?”
“I’m afraid not,” Marlo said. “I have zero control over the system.”
Jon asked, “Well, can we contact someone on the outside? Ted can log us out.”
Marlo shook his head slowly. He looked a little better. His beard was falling straight down again—it had been a twisting noose of an arc around his neck—and his color had returned, albeit slightly.
“We no longer have the ability to look into the coding,” Rafael said. “And I cannot immediately think of a way to contact someone on the outside. But that’s not our most dire predicament—”
“Everything is fixed, unchangeable?” Lia answered anxiously. “We can’t use the alaizions, or change this temperature?”
“No, Lia, our biggest issue is the time difference. We might as well be on a rogue asteroid midway between the Milky Way and Andromeda, a real one without a radio or any way of knowing anything, or contacting anyone. And with time retarded such as it is, we could be here for a very, very long—
The rumble intensified, and once again like curious, helpless kittens, the four of them peered over the edge, meekly for they needed to retain the sliver of body heat that’d crept back into their bones. Whoosh! Jim soared by, tipping the edge of Jon’s nose with his boot. Startled, Jon fell back. He watched as Jim went up and over then landed like a tank that’d fallen from a cargo plane. The planet shook as he touched down. He was an outraged superhero. Jim was roaring, red, and his voice did not sound flat like theirs. The sound arrived with pain and they felt what he felt.
He let go of her shoulders. She fell. She died. She had made his choice for him. And he wanted her back! This was the place and they bore witness to the memory in every dimension a mind could absorb it; it came off Jim like snake skin enwrapping their heads. The feeling was suffocating but warm, at least, hot even, yet terrible and abrading like a meat grinder getting stuck on chunks of bone and buckshot. They all knew where they were, now, and exactly what had happened, and the four of them cried out, each in their own, hollow tone, which soon, became anything but hollow. Their screams were loud, clear, and boiled blood. They shared in Jim’s physical and mental anguish. But it didn’t last, and Jim vanished in place.
The world where they found themselves was a replica of the map that continued to torture Jim’s mind!
“It’s the place where Amy was brought to have the pith of her consciousness magnified,” Marlo said. “I could never see any of that—but I know now. A map on or in a higher dimension, perhaps, purposed to activate the purple status—as she had named it. Just as I could not see what happened when they had ventured off-map, Ted and anyone in the broadcast room, cannot see us now. You three are peacefully sleeping on a bed, and we have almost eight hours to go!”
They were deserted and stood in silence looking around, no longer cold due to the momentary blood boil that’d punched them like a possessed boxer, from the inside out. Too, was Marlo’s haunting realization: a double whammy of pain, anguish, Jim’s rage, and, “No, no, it—can’t be.” Then, a ship appeared.
“We’re saved!” The idea spun round as if they still shared a mental channel of communication. As if it had been fired from a gun, the sleek red craft left a glittering teal contrail which came from behind the closely orbiting moon. It descended rapidly and landed where they had touched down earlier. As it did it scared the alaizions. They disappeared into the void like spooked horses.
Jim exited the ship’s winged rear door and hopped off the wing, but he looked different, fearful, anxious perhaps, with different clothes: a country-western outfit now, boots and all. He went to help a young woman—it was Amy! He put his arms around her as if to provide warmth, then the ship rose up. Some noise could be heard, flatly, then a laser-pointer beam of green light nicked Marlo’s shoulder. It pointed to the cliff’s edge, exactly where the four of them were standing. The ship flew away.
The sequence repeated over and over and the loop could not be changed or altered in any way. Sometimes Jim let her fall, sometimes Amy ran and jumped. Others times he fell with her, and others, he leapt to his death, then she jumped. But every time Amy perished, and Jim’s every desperate, or clever attempt to save her, never panned out.
Eventually, after a few years, they tried to restrain Jim, pin him down, and for the first time he acknowledged just one of them, Lia. He called her Amy and took her into his loop.
Lia cried.
She called out, screamed, wailed.
She howled like a ghost in a cement-block basement.
She delivered the blood-curdling screams for years. Lia had become Amy. Like an individual possessed by a spirit, Lia now had minimal control, but Jon, Marlo, and Rafael knew she was in there, as they watched it occur over and over. Occasionally they could talk to Lia, or see her human form. At times Amy became disfigured—Lia pushing her way out, ripping at Amy’s skin as if she’d bee
n eaten by the hungry young woman, but all subsequent attempts to help her, to stop Jim, to alter the event in any way, had become futile. Since the day they lost Lia, the event became utterly immutable.
Jon tried to reason with his friend, Rafael wielded his capacity to articulate, and Marlo tried just being himself, attempting to piss Jim off. Hundreds of attempts—pissing on him—hundreds of years’ worth—throwing shit into his face—but they were trapped in the system and unable to interfere. And the closer they were to Jim the more they felt his pain, and now, Lia’s; her torture was by far worse than any of their own, for Lia had to die every 9 minutes and 44 seconds, seemingly forever.
Purgatory, Jim’s mind contained Hell itself—they felt horrible for Lia most of all. Her perpetual torment tore their hearts out, stomped them while beating, and into the fine dust of the gray, solid planet at their feet. Even in dreams they heard Lia’s cries, knew she felt it all, Jim’s pain and emotions, his heartache, his rage, and her own torture, and Amy’s collision with a pile of bones on a ledge so surreal it seemed to have been placed there by a sadistic, evil soul. Marlo fell to his knees and cried and cried. Rafael lamented. And Jon felt like he was in the cave again, but alone, living forever in cold darkness.
For years, which soon became hundreds of years, they tried to escape. They tried to contact the broadcast room, to get Ted’s attention in any way possible. They ran. They journeyed. Digging deep was impossible, a waste of time—the substance, the core of coding and control had been utterly and totally lost, and the planet was as hard as a diamond marble.
All efforts were as fruitless as Marlo’s trillion-year-old tree. Nothing could be changed.
75. System Crash
Red lights flashed in the broadcast room and the HAT went dark. Lenders supporting the feed were logged out unexpectedly. Whatever just occurred had a detrimental effect on the feed and yellow status came quickly.
The landline to town had been repaired and Ted called in Ron and Devin, as well the twins. During the past week, the system, with Marlo unlocked, no longer needed even him. But now Ted found there weren’t enough humans to keep things running! The system was crashing and all previously automated systems, even those that had been untouchable before, were opening up and pleading for human intervention; it was the final safeguard before an unrecoverable crash.
Ron arrived within minutes from the facility’s cafeteria; it had been reopened, its stinky freezer cleaned out. Devon came shortly after, dripping with sweat. They assumed their stations. Ted was frantic, trying to manage everything.
“What do you make of it, Ron?” Ted asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” Ron exclaimed.
Topping off the buffer had been a cakewalk, since Amy passed, but now it was plummeting again. Lights flickered. Screens went haywire.
“We need to find out, and fast,” Ted replied. “Every lender has been logged out and when the buffer is fully depleted, there will be no ability to reboot or jumpstart the system. We’ll lose all that live in the Old Town map, and Rafael, Marlo, and every machine empowered by the feed, permanently.” Ted understood the need to maintain at least a sliver of the feed, interminably. Only one man could jumpstart the processes from nothing—and he was probably on the other side of the universe.
“Red status will probably do us in first,” Devon said, “once and for all this time. Another terrorizing hour in the safe room, with no possibility of some omnipotent savior. The builders have probably dropped already. Red status, yes, red will signify a stop sign—for human existence on Earth.”
“Don’t give up, Devon,” Ron said. “Ted, we’ll send someone back down to the fusion room. Another reset could fix this.”
“Useless,” Ted said. “Not enough time. Twenty minutes until we’re in the red, and it had taken Jim and Rico almost a half hour just to get down there. This time the feed control system has crashed and we only have what is left in the buffer. Currently the feed is being rationed to priority receivers.”
“What about them?” Devon said. He looked to Rafael, Lia, Jim, and Jon.
“They seem to be doing fine,” Ted replied, “although they are not supporting the feed, hence not connected to feed control. They’re logged in to Marlo’s map as planned, strategizing our next move.”
Devon ran his hands along his skewed, puffy doo, smashing it, then examined the vitals of the three, plus one machine, Rafael. The lenders, having been logged out unexpectedly, were being helped by the twins and Rob Price, who’d just arrived. They headed to the break room, delirious, dizzy, and discombobulated. Devon sparked: he panned through several data overlays, scanning relentlessly, and stopped on one then expanded the graph. A puzzled countenance smacked his face.
“What is it, Devon?”
“It’s weird, Ted, I’ve never seen a pattern like this—” He hesitated in thought then waved his hand at another screen above his main. “—except when they’d—” Old recordings of Jim and Rico appeared, in Old Town when they’d went off-map. “Look here! Their mental frequency was greatly increased. Brain activity near maximum, but—”
“Yes, I remember what Rico had said,” Ron interjected, “and Jim acknowledged him oddly after he’d said it. Rico said they had been in Old Town, when they had gone off-map, for several hours. But here we recorded their journey as less than a half hour: they went off-map, then returned shortly after with the code.”
“A time adjust?” Ted queried. Devon looked back at his primary screen, nodding. Ron looked up at him, concurring. “Marlo did mention he wasn’t going to need more than one day, and as little as one hour depending on how deep they could take it, yet it’s been nearly a full day. He said they would absorb a lot of information in a short time—the reason we couldn’t watch from the HAT. And he declared he’d log them out once they’d finished discussing plans for the rescue mission. I figured they would have logged out by now.”
“With these readings, it seems they should have,” Devon said. “The pattern I’m seeing here—” He pointed to the old recording, manually highlighting a section of the three-dimensional graph. “—it matches almost perfectly, at least its initial climb.” He moved his long black arms and fingers in the air like a symphony conductor and the graphs of now, and then, became superimposed. He next removed the unnecessary data leaving only the two frequencies. “This is their current session with Marlo, and this is off-map for Old Town. Both initiate the spike in the same way, although today’s session doesn’t stop.” He zoomed out: more, more, and more, and a whole lot more. Eyes bulged as if invisible men were at their backs performing the Heimlich. “Today’s spike keeps going, and the current frequency is far beyond what even seems possible.”
“Suggesting the same sort of time adjustment within their minds!” Ron agreed.
Ted asked, “Can we correlate the data and calculate the degree of time adjustment they are perceiving?”
“We’d need to know how long they’d been off-map in Old Town,” Ron replied.
Devon’s eyes went into his forehead, deep contemplation engaged. “I recall them saying several hours, but not how many. If we assume it’s less than a day, it could be anywhere between 23 and fewer hours. We can only surmise based on what we recall, by their facial expressions, how long they acted like they’d been gone.”
“I’d guess four,” Ron said, interjecting from his station which sat right next to Devon's. “How long could they have plodded around in an empty desert? And several usually means more than three.”
“Okay, if I factor in four with this frequency, and overlay it onto their current session I get…” He swung a portable screen over to his left and waved two fingers above dual calculatory dials. “One minute equals…in their current session with Marlo…wait, this can’t be—”
Ron, leaning over, could see the result. He exclaimed, “One minute equals—1.4 years!
Devon unlocked his portable, detaching it. Speechless, he held it up so Ted, who was standing behind him, could see.
Ron, as if he’d just exploded from the start of a marathon, began calculating on his own.
Aghast at the possibility, Ted knew exactly the number they were trying to come up with. He said, “How many years, no, how many centuries, have they been logged in? That must be it! The system is crashing because their minds are crashing with it.” He looked over at them. “We must unplug them now and hope it’ll come back.”
“It’ll mess them up for days,” Ron said, “especially with the extreme difference in mental activity. This will be nothing like a typical unexpected logout, it’ll be far, far worse.”
“Ron is correct,” Devon agreed; his low voice wasn’t as low now. It was Devon’s job to access mental stability in connection with the dream state; he knew the fact better than anyone. “It’ll mess them up all right, mess ’em up bad. And who knows what it’ll do to Rafael, or Marlo, or the intelligence of the main system. We might lose the feed control system for good.”
Both had been calculating nonstop while talking. Being the tech genius he was, Ron beat Devon to the chase. “They’ve been in Marlo’s map for—” He choked. “—approximately 633 years!”
“I don’t care about the repercussions, we’re about to lose it all, the whole town.” Ted again turned to face the only four lying on the beds. As if his voice had fallen into the pit of his stomach, he said, “Unplug them, unplug them now!”
76. The Happening
It had taken them 27 years, give or take, to walk around it; the best part was distance from Jim, and the hypnotizing void of a ceiling. Since, they’d traversed the planet many times in many directions: never needing to eat, barely needing sleep, and unable to leave—or interact with Jim. The realm was 100% Jim’s making, a tormented, cruel memory stuck in a loop; like a ghost in limbo, he remained trapped within his most painful life moment, and Lia was meshed into his fabrication of Amy.