A single sheet of the space-time stratum is as though a nanometer thick, a Planck length apart from the next and varying from gigaparsecs to tetraparsecs in length and height. The multitude of translucent space-time sheets of marbled multiversal membranes are aligning to resemble slices of mineral assemblage. Merging and melding into a single magnificently radiating foliated massive habit mineral of metastable energy. The base of the single panchromatic space-time mineral is submerged, standing at the edge of a white hot ocean of photons flowing like rough winded water waves through instant cycles of annihilation and amalgamation. Forever fusing into an immeasurably large protean body of astral mass as unlimited shades of churning white light miming the fluid movements of the open ocean for as far as can ever be seen. The surface waves of the ocean of perpetual annihilation are battering the base of the supercelestial crystalline structure like hurricane waves rage around a lone lighthouse. Causing reverberations through each multiversal sheet as waves of causality, stimulating change on such a scope it can only be understood by the space-time sheet's inhabitants as the passage of time.
The supercelestial crystals grow more numerous and more magnificent in their pupil illuminating lustrous splendor and size. Gradually amassing into greater more intricate foliated membrane minerals that cleave the white light ocean with their massive abstract shapes. Each standing against the sea like icebergs glowing from the inside outward like a soul glows through a person’s eyes. As the two continue in their astronomic approach, the glimmering waves of varying white winnowing energy intensifies exponentially, increasing in magnitude by centuries compared to a second, per passing second. If a second is the scale of the entire known universe, a single mother of pearl wave is now a millennium high and the ocean is of a million of years span so far, and continually expanding by the blink of an eye. All of it, the scene they're sailing though on the prominence bridge, is minuscule in comparison to the source from which the endless quanta of energy is emanating. A rupture greater in scale than all eternities ever known, though is only a pin sized hole in the incalculable existence of Central.
Central, the grandest intersection of all the InterAltonevers, with trillions more than trillions of interceding crystalline amber rails visible from any point in time. Looking like tinsel tangling and untangling as streaks of lightning massive and miniscule, resembling synapses firing into every direction of space at once, with most becoming binary and imitating the helical strands of DNA just before disappearing into a mind stopping unknowably immaculate, unblemished, immense, unseeable, boundless black sphere. The center of any conception of infinity to ever be conceived, seamlessly coexisting with its antithesis, oblivion, as a single eternally existing entity. An infinitely persisting singularity of unfathomable possibilities persisting as a netherless nadir of a nihilist's nightmare.
The two eventually after hours more of sailing the energy annihilating white sea’s come close enough to touch the skin of the forbidden field. An invisible field where no energy but what spills from the rupture that’s releasing reality itself as an ocean below them, may ever pass. Instantly Anna, Cider and the rest of the partially pulverized passengers soundlessly atomize entirely out of perceivable existence.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Soul penned station
“SUNNY WARM BEACHES,” she sees upon cognizance. Staring at a colorful poster print with blue skies and a beach, though standing in an InterAlto station that smells like things. In front of a ten foot by ten foot square filled with an infinitely layered holographic map of the InterAltonevers in its entirety. The two are next to each other and next to a turtle faced attendant encased in a thick glassed ticket booth, who's speaking softly into a microphone that's amplifying and distorting her voice into incoherent hollers. Shouting over an unending flood of feet mechanically marching on the other side of a rusting black iron gate spaced by cobwebbed turnstiles. Separating the two from a rushing river of apparitions forming one fluidly moving body that fills the volume of a white and blue tiled tunnel from wall to wall without spilling a drop through the spaces of rust wrought gates. Their passing murmurs collect into a single wale of incessantly echoing sorrow as their spectral heads and shoulders are rising and falling in a rhythm resembling a surface waves of white water river of ethereal light.
This is just one of many entries to the tiled tunnel catacombs of a subterranean super system interconnected by stations and escalators and stairways. Designed after the pathways and chambers of an ant colony, more likely, it is where the ants picked up the habit. The flow of bodiless lament perpetually gushes a thousand people passing her eye per second and purging to their proper platforms for soul placement by the sort of authority.
“Uh...what exactly is that?” she asks.
“It's one of the ghostly streams of soul penned station, where souls are siphoned off to their stations, to then arrive at their new stations of reincarnation, repurposed, recycled, to replenish the other side, or whatever,” he says.
“We're dead?” she asks.
“No this is just where we got off. They’re dead, or without physical bodies at the moment, would be a little more on the nose,” he says.
“Is it predetermined?” she asks.
“I don’t know, I mean I don't think so. It's more like scooping a handful from a flood passing through your fingers. Can you tell exactly what part of the water will be in your palms?” he asks.
“I guess not. Or it's as simple people going about their lives,” she says.
“Eh, either way.”
The woman in the booth presses her turtle face to the scratchy glass, fogging it with bullishly breathing steam seething nostrils. She starts shouting into her microphone that squawks gargling static into the damp underground mildewed air.
“What do you think she's saying?” She asks.
“Who knows, you ready?”
“I think so,” she says.
“If you go under don’t hold your nose, you can still breathe, okay?” he says.
“Okay,” she nods.
“You'd be surprised how many people die that way,” he says.
“Huh, suffocating themselves in the souls of others,” she says rubbing her chin a bit. The tremors of a train passing somewhere nearby shakes black dust from the bowed ceiling down to neon yellow grime covering the walls to an iridescent green. They sprint toward the gates and hurdle through the thick dusty cobwebs of the turnstile. Anna gets her foot caught and stretches forward, diving into the side of the rapid river of wrathful wraiths wailing in woeful waves, swept a thousand feet submerged in what feels like a sense muffling, fluidly moving perspective blur of very heavy gusts of warm air. She holds her breath for almost a minute, watching the tersely turning translucent undercurrents she’s is the rushing grips of. Cider nearly loses his coat rolling head over heels sideways, and gasping for air below the swells of heads and shoulders. She’s almost suffocating herself to save herself from drowning in what is actually easily breathable. Swirling and swooshing through twists and turns, declines and inclines, up stairs and down. At times the tunneled tide tosses them at ten times their height up the walls to splash down and be swept away through continually splitting, splintering and snaking caverns.
The two struggle to tumble toward each other, and she stretches out from a cannonball, taking a minute to pounce on him and wrap her arms around him like a wildcat. They roll in a ball through the eddies and whirlpools of an unending labyrinth not meant to be known by any form of energy that would be in its tumultuously twisting Coriolis undercurrents.
“Are you alright?” He shouts through the muffling of passing souls.
“Yes,” she replies as a blurb of bubbles. They swim to the surface to hear one another through the wailing of the flowing fluid faces filling their ears.
“Are you okay?” he asks still having to shout.
“Yeah.”
“Fun, huh.”
“Not too bad.”
“Right,” he says.
“Right,” she agrees.
“No, Right!”
“Right?”
“No! Anna, to the right, lean to the right,” Cider yells.
“Oh! Shit!,” she yells, as a split in the tunnel quickly nears. They swim in opposite directions though not letting go of each other. Slamming into the wall with a thud and rolling against mossy tiles of the lefter path. Flushing through tunnels of vesper velocity and leaning together to choose their path through the vapid channels of the endless abyss of paling the underworld of Pluto's creation.
A bright shining light, like day peeking through clouds, grows in glow as it comes closer to them. And before either can scream, a flash of brilliant color blinds them the instant they're ejected from a subway station’s stairs. Soaring twenty feet into the open air riding a rush of souls, dispersing under them like water, splashing onto a lustrous black four lane street, sliding over an equally black sidewalk, each reflecting vibrant blurs of even the slightest light that comes to touch them. Then crashing to the corner of a pale yellow building and washing with the stream of specters and screams ascending seven hundred feet up its side, then staying suspended for a second or a few while sitting still in the sky. The atmosphere of Central, whose every floating particle is visible and is collectively illustrating the currents and eddies, as particle path like jet streams, of the ambient moving through itself. Filling the volume of the sky with variances in shade by the spin of each particularly hued particle of passing atmosphere. Presently rendering a spectra of orange particles oscillating in a body of themselves, and composing the color of the ambient throughout the sunless ether around them. The two are high above the vibrating variegated particles of the building’s yellow stone face visibly dancing in shades of fluorescence, but never break the right angles and curves of its mason measured shape.
The wailing stream of souls dissipates as it falls and separates fluidly splashing to the ground Creating outward rolling ebbing circles of bending blacktop resembling drops of water rippling through a still pond. The two in the few seconds of stark silence overlooking Central’s eternal city from a bird’s eye view, seeing the acervate splendor of the infinite cityscape’s incessantly shifting skylines resembling lunar light sliding over shallow surface water waves. Endless grids of blacktop streets and avenues radiating vitreous blurs of any light to even slightly touch their fluidly undulating surfaces. Lucidly contrasting the variable oranges of the visibly vaporous sky. The ground splits and ripples around anything it touches. Splashing about the bottoms of trees and poles, parting into wakes around the wheels of automobiles. Each footstep of the people passing propagates outward in near perfect circles flowing in proportion to lightness of one’s foot. While maintaining its own fluidly fluctuating flow forever in mellifluous motion, and rolling the reflections of the slightest shapes and lightest color that fill Central's everlasting cityscape. The obsidian sidewalks eternally lap against the foundations of the city's fluorescent, and mineral shapes and structures.
Some of these supersized structures and skyscrapers are made of naturally growing primordial vines guided in their growth to form the floors and walls of elaborately detailed dwelling’s and high rises. Side by side with enormous mineral and crystal growths grown from the fluctuating protean semi-fluid ground, and carved into buildings and skyscrapers that form the bulk of the metropolis' endless mass. Others are made of laid brick fashioned as archaic cathedrals and sacredly constructed ancient stone structures. Oranges and blues and whites aglow in abounding adularescence, beside lucidly labrodescent greens and grays of lush and dull luster, and the palest patches of spectralitic city, are all in a single pupil's fill of the panoramic crystalline scene seen from high above. Appearing to her as more opulent in their beauty then any sunset she’d ever seen. Everything in Central is composed of spinning particles appearing to be pulsating in place. Portraying every angle and aspect of the mammoth metropolis' vibrating, shade shifting solid surfaces.
Seeing every few hundred blocks, thousands of the obsidian streets drawn into geometrically symmetrical shapes resembling the electromagnetic force drawn patterns of crop circles. Appearing as circular craters of diffusing light between the otherwise endless grid of living and constructed structures collectively forming colossal citified canyons of mostly the fluorescent and crystalline Central. A subway train appears and dives into a white hole that opens in the orange sky. Elaborately decorated with graffiti of algebra and calculus explaining the properties of the train and what it's passing through at any given moment. The arithmetic graffiti strongly resembles the footprints left by pan-time pigeons, covering every train car to be seen, and is spread to rogue walls and rooftops through the entire endless city. They’re thought of as the hieroglyphs of one of Central’s longest extinct cultures, supposedly explaining the complexity of the ceaseless metropolis' nonsensical emergence and perpetually persisting existence in imagined mathematical terms.
A skyscraper not far from the suspended two snaps, instantly into and inky magma falling from its gothic shape of crafted angles and cascading down to quake through the liquescent ground. Flooding the street with millions of fluid tons of raging fluorescence splashing tens of stories up the structures around it, and is absorbed by them, enriching the brilliance of their fluorescent and mineral facades like new washes of similar energy in flux. The rest is re-assumed by the primordial obsidian blacktop as an amorphous mass of lustrous fluid melting like a pile of snow into the mellifluous ground well beneath them, that the two are suddenly plummeting toward like a feather falling next to a rock. Splatting against the ground with a painful splash of pins and needles, while reverberating waves in the shapes of their bodies outward and down the street for nearly a mile in either direction, though further through the air.
“Ouch,” she says as she pulls her face from the floor, that's dripping sheer black from her nose and cheeks. She's close enough to see the glittering gold fluidly flowing particles visibly swimming in a vacuum to form the fluctuating waves of the obsidian ground.
“Which way is which?” she asks.
“Who knows.”
“How?”
“It's never the same, so whichever way we go for now is where we're headed. Until we find our footing anyway,” he says standing to his feet, and reaching for his pockets and searching for his smokes.
“Damn,” he says.
“What? smokes?”
“Lost 'em.”
“Good, quit.”
“Blah Blah,” Cider says waving her off.
“To cure yourself from the stress of not having one?”
“I'm immune.”
“That's right like a vampire or something.” she says.
“Something,” he says and the two stroll along the edge of the curb, on the fringe of the people passing on the sidewalk. One after the other, she after he, teetering inches over the drains and gutters, evading the clusters and crowds like streetwise city people. The curb echoes each of her footsteps, just as the ambient echoes even the slightest twitch of her eyelash or flick of her finger. The surfaces and ambient of Central illustrate even the slightest of physical movements. She’s walking in the wake of his, and watching the passing pedestrians often overflowing from the pavement onto the street. Thinking of how much they resemble the spectral stream from the subterranean catacombs, though they're opaque with barely vibrating faces, hats, hands and clothes. Clothed in the celestial styles of Central, where even the peasants and paupers are dressed more regally than the royalty of all the known Altonevers. A collection of all beings of all places and times and Altos to ever or will exist, are physically persisting here at the eternal birth place of their essential energy.
Particle people are native here from forever ago to now, though they weren’t the first, are sometimes vaporous, solid, or fluid humanoid figures that like everything native to Central have a tendency of popping in and out of existence as they please. And sometimes out of probability, instantly teleporting out of place to return again secon
ds later and a few paces ahead of themselves. Though most are tourists or recent arrivals that consider themselves Centralers after their first day here, and emulate the endlessly erupting culture’s of the endless civilizations at the epicenter of existence, until they are absorbed to become the emulated. A culture of cycles, repeatedly regenerating over unknown revolutions of assumed generations.
Murmurs of passing mouths are mixing with the cityscape sounds blending into audible walls of static with the chirps of birds chaotically compounding to envelope her ears in a single volume of cosmic noise. Her ears are aware as a scared hare's, in the random rhythms resounding all around her resembling the sounds of a spring rain forest. All of structures large and small are adorned with styles of architecture favoring spirals, and are detailed by tiny to large carved people accentuating the angles and of contours nearly everything from the arches of bridges and halls, to where any one surface meets another. Decorating countless rotunda's, Amphitheaters , skyscrapers, towers and spires and coloseums nestled next to types of pyramids spread throughout the florescently dressed Central.
The two pass twisting light poles that are holding up globes of glowing plasma lighting illegibly scribbled street signs leading to equally scribbled paths of the primordial city planners indecipherable design. Passing runic trees whose green and other color leaves drain, dwindling in drops of wax into semicircular shapes encircling the tree's trunk while melting slowly into the ebbing protean pavement perpetually undulating underfoot. The bare branches replenish their leaves in seconds, only to drip and shed them by the drop in a continual cycle of loss and renewal.
The Altonevers Page 34