“Who are you to disturb the silence of Time?”
“Who is asking?” My question is rhetorical; the voice is only in my mind. I cry again with no sounds and tears flow, shimmering water with glitter floating around me. I am still alive. Maybe. I cannot stop the weeping that brings relief, resuscitating my fear-obsessed mind. The spheres gracefully move into my view, one by one. I know it is an illusion, they are rotating, as is mine, in fixed points belonging to an imaginary grid, but there is an exquisite harmony in all this, the harmony of darkness and light. I try to attune myself to that harmony to which the whole universe dances 'Ordo est amoris'. I recognize some human silhouettes that fill them: Batranu, Armin and the two known Travelers, all in similar yoga positions. Xiriaxis! Why are you here? After a complete tour, I count thirty spheres, so all the people confronting one another on the planet are here. So many, no wonder that our shield was destroyed. Why are they here if we vanished in a plasma cloud? Where is Houston? The other Gates are missing too. ‘The threshold is close.’ I remember. What threshold? The threshold of death.
I am alone with my thoughts in a virtual time beyond time. I have no memories of how we left the planet and furthermore, how we arrived here, wherever this is. The last thing I remember from the planet was the flash. The next second I was here, if indeed only one second passed. It is a relief that I can still remember something. Altamira's face lingers in my mind and I involuntary respond to her smile. Is she here too? I think not, I hope not; she ran to the castle, or at least I hope she did, she is so stubborn sometimes.
I have no measure of time, and I am lost in tedium and monotony, forcing myself to interrogate the day's past, seeking memories. Shadows are still floating beneath them, but I find nothing new. I try to sleep, I can’t. Older memories, from the Primes and even older than that are taking me over, but I push them aside. I still want my day back. I am not hungry. Am I dead? You already asked this. And? I play games in my mind and sing – soundless songs. My fear seems to have dissolved a long time ago; I want something to happen, something to extract me from this vegetative confinement. Feeling nothing and doing nothing seems to be more unbearable than the now extinguished fear. I am not sure that I would like that fear again, but I am tired of the nothingness surrounding me.
I think that I was asleep, and awakened by something creeping inside, filling me, like water. Still, there is nothing in the outside world, be it in my sphere or outer space. Your sphere? I am smiling at the thought of the sphere being mine but at least, for now, it is my place; a place I do not own having an unknown master. Who are you? With no answer, the infiltration goes deeper and deeper, but I have already passed every level of fear. What are you? Maybe this set-up is a huge antechamber for keeping people waiting until everything has gone from their mind, fear, curiosity, capacity for reaction. What do you want? I am a lonely spectator – the other spheres are too far away and they have no access to my mind nor do I to theirs – of something taking me over and I no longer care. Why am I here? I am waiting for something to happen as though this is happening to somebody else, not to me. My motionless motion stops, and I am completely numb.
A flash resuscitates my memory – the exact image of the confrontation – pushing images to flow slowly, from a thousand memories of other experiences, like pictures first, then like movies: Armin and me before the fight, with Altamira in the library, a palace meeting, Maug cutting off Scharon’s hand. The images accelerate, they flow forwards before arriving at a point when the whole scene moves back to another event, always deeper in the past, asleep and forgotten, scattered in the debris of my memory; they revive, fresher and younger, after the one which fades away: I am fighting Borg, making love with Delena, meeting Altamira in the volcanic valley. I am ...I am … I start to lose track of the movie, the speed is now so fast that I am no longer able to follow the images even when they are produced in my mind or by my mind at somebody else's request. Me and a young woman in a blue robe. She has green eyes, but she is not Altamira. There is something else further back in the past, far away and deep in my memories as I am young again. I am ... I am ... I am at school, very young, around ten years old, me. Me ... me ... I am walking slowly through the grass into my mother's arms, a very young and smiling version of my mother. I am passed into other hands, a young version of my father. I am thrown in the air, I am giggling; I hear my giggling only inside my mind. In fact, now there is only the inside, I have lost any connection with the outside. I am still giggling when I am caught. It is dark and I move slowly in water with irregular strokes from my hands and feet until I see some light. I am going towards that light. I feel a shock; I realize there is no more water. The light is getting stronger and stronger until it is surrounding me completely. I am caught and lifted by two unknown hands. A strange fluid is now around me; I open my mouth and the fluid is filling it, creeping into my body. I feel a hand on my back; a strong sound is coming out of my lungs: “Aaahhhhh.”
The light is gone; darkness begins to press, leaving my mind submerged by fog. I have another short flashback of my mother – she is smiling. I sense the advent of a crisis and fear is gripping me again. The fog grows denser, its heaviness harder and harder to support. I try to scream, but I can’t. The pressure is blocking my mind more and more; only a small part of me is still alive, smaller and smaller. The pain is unbearable. A last flash and all that pain is gone. I am free. I can move. I try to put as much distance as I can between me and that grip in my mind but I am not running, I am flying. It is dark again; the darkness is surrounding me like the sphere before. I am turning furiously to catch a shadow of something, a landmark, faster and faster, in the dark, turning left and right, up and down, in despair until a small light appears from nowhere in front of me. It is white, brighter than white, like a star of silver, a candle in the night, suspended, motionless, attractive, bringing hope to the hopeless me.
I am relieved and fly to it, only to realize that she is running from me or is too far, never able to catch her pure beauty of light. Anguish engulfs me again, but as if reading my mind, rays of pure light emerge from the star, guiding me to a crossroads made of light and shadow, a confluence between two mysterious worlds. I have to choose…Then another light appears and another and another, slightly different, like candles in the sky, only there is no sky and no sun or moon, only darkness and small, distant lights. I am alone in the nothingness, the candles and me. I look at my body and I see no body. I turn around and see nothing of me. I am a floating shining point of silver in the night. Maybe I am a star myself.
*
My eyes open with a strange and diffuse sensation and see Houston on my terrace at home. It was just a nightmare. A wave of sadness in my chest, that expands more by the second, threatens to break me apart from inside, and fog circles in my mind, slowly disappearing – colors, ghostly noises and smells push it out. Each step to clearness is coming with more pain, a pain that comes from nowhere, a nowhere deep inside me. The normal state of soreness begins to wear off – a chaotic mass of thoughts and feelings is mounting within me. The fog has now gone and the pain is in full force. I take my head in my hands and moan. Houston stays impassively in front of me without a word or gesture to calm or to help. It is as if she has no feelings. What do you expect? She is not capable of this human sentiment.
“Your pain is also within me,” she finally says. “It was like this for a long time.”
“Then stop it!” I shout. Why are you not stopping it? “What do you mean for a long time? How long was I asleep? What happened?” The memories have started to come back to me, and I don’t know if they are really my memories or her recordings of them.
“They are all yours, but they are also mine at the same time. This is my punishment, to feel whatever you felt after the fight ended.” Her words help a flow of memories to find their way back. A small spring at the beginning, growing steadily, then overwhelmingly until all my senses are filled with dream images and sounds erasing everything else, Houston, the sun
, my garden. The pain disappears, replaced by a feeling of huge sadness, and I start crying without knowing why. It takes a while to recover without being yet certain about what happened. “What is this dream? Did I lose my consciousness in the fight? Did they hurt me?”
“No, they didn’t hurt you, and yes, in a way you lost consciousness.”
“What do you mean ‘in a way’? In what way?” Don’t play with me.
“You died when The Universe contacted your brain. That is the feeling of sadness which is enveloping and confusing you, coming from nowhere like a fire that burns. You will not be able to remember some things for a while, for your own sake, and until then you will keep this exaggerated sensitivity.”
“But I am alive,” I barely whisper to her, “I am not one of your recorded memories.”
“Yes, you are alive. When The Universe realized the mistake, he returned you to life. Your brain is not developed enough to face the strength of his mind, not even in a short conversation. And this was my mistake, for which I have to apologize, and hence my punishment to feel whatever you felt in that unfortunate event. You just had an extremely rare first-hand experience of a spiritual enlightenment that people have dreamed of since time immemorial. You can choose to mourn yourself and stay in a condition of self-pity for the rest of your life, or you can consider it a unique rite of passage making you a living soul, reborn, stronger and more resilient.” I could not say anything for long seconds.
“Do I have to thank you for this strange transcendental experience?”
“I cannot help your mind, but whatever you choose will be also engraved in my memory, like my own experience.”
“So I cannot have even my own death to be my experience alone. You have to sneak everywhere with your recording camera.”
“This is not something I looked for, this is my punishment for not being able to preempt that unfortunate event. And to make you feel more special, even The Universe felt guilty about your accidental death and gave you a small gift.” Only later did I realize how cleverly Houston was conducting the discussion, emphasizing their guilt to make me feel proud. Even now I am not sure that she was entirely telling the truth and then making me curious about the gift given to me by the mighty Universe himself. Of course, my next step was to ask her about the gift. “It created a quantum nucleus within your brain, similar to the Erins' capabilities. It is small and its development is entirely dependent on you. The Erins' mystery is also solved. They are not an insertion from another universe. A Seeding Crawler inserted her own specifications in the Factions’ project. This is the start of a long process of enhancement The Universe has in mind. There are only three Seeding Crawlers in this galaxy, the oldest crawlers; they had started all life in the galaxy. It is not definite that it will go in this direction but it is the first sign that another cycle has just begun. You are now part of it and in the long term, you can enhance yourself to their own level.” So she said, and I fell further inside the trap she had set for me.
“How I can enhance myself?”
“Each strong experience and cognitive effort you have will start a chain reaction in your quantum nucleus, forming new quantum cells and replacing your neurons with them.”
“But will I still be me if my neurons are replaced by quantum dots?”
“Neurons are only storage and logic-performing mechanisms. What really matters is the information stored inside them. That is you, not the storage material.”
“The same can be said for a chip replacing the neurons, but then I would be only a cyborg, not a living being.”
“There is no advanced life in the universe without passing through this phase.” She ignored me. “Enhancements have to be done at the DNA level in order to enable the body to sustain the advances and the need for new materials the old code is not able to provide. Your DNA was changed to reflect this possible evolution; it now has six pairs of bases, putting you on the same level as the most advanced races in the galaxy. Only the Erins have a superior one, it being at quantum level. The quantum nucleus is for now self-reliant in the constituents your organism is not yet able to produce. Once it begins growing it will change the gene expression of your new DNA, remodeling some of your cells to meet the new requirements.” Experiences? What experiences? Do I have to die again? “Search for examples in your own past: the decision to help the Primes.”
“So I have to always do ‘good’ things.”
“As in your saying: the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Remember that The Universe is rewarding new experiences. It is not influencing in any way how you conduct the experience, not until a certain level. Like on the Baragan planet, it intervenes when a certain mental or energetic threshold is crossed in The Field.” The threshold! I remembered. You planned this. “Crawlers report these changes, and … for the first time I was in contact with other Gates. We coordinated the energy flux to reach the threshold with no damage to any of you. Don’t ask me about this now, we have plenty of time to discuss it later.”
“So, in the end, I am only an experiment to him, and it doesn’t matter what I am feeling and thinking,” I said with bitterness.
“You are egocentric, a typical behavior for your civilization's level. Do not take it personally. It is The Universe’s way of changing himself, using 'experiments'. I am also an experiment, your own planet is an experiment, in the end he is experimenting on himself as you, me, Earth are also parts of him. Do not try to separate yourself from him. Once you arrive at the conclusion that you are in him and he is part of you, you will step into a new phase of evolution. I will leave you now to rest for a while and visit you from time to time.”
“Why was Xiriaxis there?”
“He helped to reach the threshold. Shadowminds are the balancers; a subtle check and control mechanism.”
“What happened to Batranu? Did he die as well?”
“No, he was questioned after you, a Gate interface was used. Lesson learned.”
“Houston, what if I chose to remain on that planet and never return? I am allowed to do that?” I changed one uncomfortable subject to another.
“The choice is yours as always, and yes, it is possible, as it is also possible to return when your life there is fully spent.” She answered the question I had found too difficult to ask.
In the end, I was able to logically sustain the strange experience of my death and rebirth, but all the cells of my body were still somehow wired to that event, in an unknown way, and they did not recover to their normal state for a long time. I had around three months of vacation before I was able to go back to the Baragan planet, even when I wanted an earlier return for understandable reasons. Houston would not allow me to go until she felt that I was able to emotionally sustain the whole experience. Meanwhile, she put a lot of effort into talking with me and providing all the mental tools I needed to heal myself and to understand what had happened on the planet and after.
*
“Why did they not try to annihilate me in the first moment they realized we were the missionaries of the first Faction? Would it not have been easier than gathering all three together?”
“They wanted to, but they could not; the nature of your influence and theirs on the temporal gradient dynamic was so strong that the time continuum constrained any return to the planet for days after. And then they wanted to catch all the eggs in one basket.” We are not eggs! “All events have their own signature on the temporal gradient. Once the level of influence surpasses a certain threshold it makes space and temporal traveling difficult around its own zone of influence by raising the amount of energy needed to bypass the barrier. An event of high temporal significance happened there. The energy that the respective Gates would have had to use in order to manipulate the timelines and to overcome the event time-gradient would have been unattainable. Or at least, at levels Gates are not willing to challenge, due to the impossibility of being able to predetermine temporal disturbances. We do not want to alter the fabric of time so drastically. Even if
we want to, we are not allowed.”
Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler (The Living Universe) Page 44