What the Heart Desires

by Jaime Derelle

  “We have to,” Zilo asserted. “If not then billions of families like them will suffer; not just one.”

  With a heavy heart, O consented and the three carried on. But as they emerged into an alleyway they found their route cut off by shock troopers and sentry droids. They were spotted immediately.

  “RUN!,” Vanda shouted at the other two.

  They did as he said and then he stuck out the palm of his hand and opened up a vortex around the government forces. Instantly the sphere of a wormhole consumed them. He looked up and saw that the air was filled with floating battle droids; they were surrounded. He ran after O and Zilo and found them boxed into a recess of the alley that they had run into, coming under heavy fire from the surrounding troopers and droids. They were firing back, but things seemed desperate for them.

  Vanda looked around and realised they were trapped. He closed his eyes, focused his mind and stopped time; a volley of photon plasma heading straight for O and Zilo stopped in midair, inches from hitting them. Next, he opened up a vortex in the opposite wall and tore a hole in the building as a makeshift escape tunnel. He grabbed ahold of O and Zilo and carried them into the hole. Time began again and they looked about themselves in amazement, wondering how they had gotten there. But they soon realised what had happened and the three ran off into the ruins of the building.

  At each wall that they came upon, Vanda opened up another vortex and swallowed a whole section of the building within it, tunneling through it as he did so. Government forces flooded in after them. Suddenly, the ground began to shake and the building started to disintegrate around them, its debris floating up through the air. The government had let off a massive anti-gravitational bomb. The three of them immediately began floating up, Zilo spinning off out of view.

  As Vanda floated up amongst the broken pieces of the building, he saw O next to him. He reached out to her, and she, in turn, stretched out her hand. Their fingers touched fleetingly, but, as Vanda made a grab for her hand, a block of debris hit him and sent him spiraling away from her. He watched as she floated upwards, away from him. He focused his mind and stopped time once again. He only had around ten seconds to grab her. He hopped from one piece of debris to another until he reached her. He grabbed hold of her body and leapt out of the gravitational field.

  Just as they emerged out of it, time started up once more and the debris began floating up into the stratosphere again. But they were free from its pull.

  They began to fall, holding hands, and they controlled their descent, moving through the air as a couple of skydivers. They spotted a transport and fell directly on top of it. They held on as it passed through the airway, but no sooner were they on their way when a large combat destroyer, swinging into view, spotted them. They stood up and, seeing the other traffic ahead of them, and they began jumping from one vehicle to the next, attempting to outrun the government through the traffic. The government forces in their battle cruisers started to fire on the traffic, decimating vehicle after vehicle; explosions going off behind the pair as they hopped from vehicle to vehicle.

  The force of an explosion suddenly knocked O off her feet, and she fell off of the side of the vehicles that she stood on. She began to plummet to the ground, and Vanda dived down after her. But then he noticed a government vessel grab her while she was airborne with an enormous extendable claw that came out of the bottom of it. The claw grasped her, plucking her out of the air and closing around her. It drew her into it and then with a burst of acceleration, the vessel disappeared, and Vanda was left to fall. As he did, another claw came hurtling towards him, but he opened up a vortex around it in midair and swallowed it up. He then landed on another vehicle and watched in the distance as the transport carried off his love. He drew his breath in deeply, sensing that his nightmares were, perhaps, coming true.

  ************

  Vanda managed to escape the government forces by stopping time and heading unseen down one of the cities services hatches into the sewers. However, he had lost O and wasn’t sure if Zilo had survived either. He was all-alone now; lost, heartbroken and wandering through the sprawling underground tunnels like a ghost. He found a small enclave within the sewers where he could rest. He immediately sat in the lotus position and began to meditate to search for O and Zilo amongst the wilderness of the future.

  He had some idea of where they would take her: the Rhode Island camp. His consciousness traveled to that dark place and sprawled through the corridors and rooms, witnessing the countless scores of innocents who were being experimented on and kept in cages like cattle. He tore through that building removing whole sections of it, frantically searching for his lost love. But as he got deep into it, the black entity appeared once again. Frightened, Vanda fled from the dark spectre. It sent out a black smoke-like tentacle at him and grabbed ahold of him.

  Vanda immediately threw himself out of his vision, landing with a bump on his side with the violence of his escape. He lay on the ground for some time, weeping pitifully for his failure to find her. He was sure that she was there, but the entity was there too, in his vision; always blocking him, guarding the place, holding him off, threatening to take control of him, to squeeze the very air out of him and snuff out the light forever. It wanted to consume him and break his very mind into a thousand fragments.

  It was clearly guarding something there, and Vanda was sure that it had to be O. He decided to search for something perhaps safer: Zilo. He once again threw himself into meditation and searched out the young boy who used to be an old man. Before long he found him, somewhere deep in the city, another hideout. He was rigged up to a network suit, and he was contacting Cause members, organising something big. Vanda realised that he, himself, were present too; he was standing next to the old man. He willed the body to move and put his hand upon Zilo’s shoulder.

  “Where are we?” he asked Zilo.

  “Ah! I’ve been waiting for you,” Zilo said, looking up at Vanda, his eyes coated neon blue. “I guess, you’re still in that sewer. Well, we are currently at…”

  Zilo rattled off to Vanda some coordinates for his location and told him to hurry up, as they didn’t have much time. Vanda immediately raced off to find Zilo.

  It wasn’t long before he found him, deep in the city at some tech shop that sat within a sprawling length of similar tech shops that litter the sprawls of the lower cities, where people go to get unofficial work done on their computer systems.

  Before reaching the room which Zilo inhabited, he had to walk through a large room full of rows of unconscious bodies lying on beds with VR helmets on their heads and drip lines feeding them intravenously. It was a neuro-dream room, a kind of new age opium den, where people go to live out their fantasies, plugged into virtual worlds tailor-made for them. Ever dreamed of telling your boss off? Or getting with the girl from high school that you drooled over for years, but who looked at you like you were a freak? Well, this is where you go.

  Many of its clientele spend their days performing monotonous tasks in some droid factory— another grey creature amongst the endless, faceless masses— and then come here at the end of their working day to live out what has become more of a reality to them than their natural life ever was. It is only here that they feel totally at home and alive; within their fantasies.

  As Vanda walked through the lines of bodies, all of them sporting smiles on their faces, he noticed a scruffy-looking man with unkempt hair, a scraggly beard and a pair of thick glasses that made his eyes appear humungous behind them. He was pottering about, taking readings off of each of the bodies. The man looked up at Vanda with a surprised look upon his face.

  “How did you get in here?” he asked Vanda.

  “I put the code in on the door,” Vanda replied, still striding determinately forward towards the back room that held Zilo, the scruffy man sauntering after him.

  “How did you know the code?” he asked, curiosity written on his physiognomy.

  “I watched you put it in.”

&nbs
p; “You’ve been watching me?”

  “Only in the future.”

  “What?” the man said, his face contorting into a bemused expression and making him stop in his step. “You’re a shifter?”

  “Yes— I’m here to see Zilo.”

  The scruffy man raised his eyebrows and then began jogging up to Vanda once more.

  When he had reached him, he said, “Then you are Vanda Kline— the one he told me about.”

  “Yes.”

  The man instantly stuck out his hand. Vanda took it and the man held it firmly.

  “It is an honour,” he said. “My name is Tuk.”

  Tuk then took Vanda to see Zilo. The boy was sitting in a network suit.

  Without turning around, Zilo said, “Vanda, I’m glad you made it. Where is O?”

  “They’ve got her,” Vanda pronounced solemnly.

  Zilo let out a sigh.

  “Have you searched for her?” he asked.

  “Yes— but the entity stopped me.”

  “Then we don’t have much time.”

  “How did you escape?”

  Zilo then explained that he had just about managed to escape the effects of the gravitational pull by holding onto a piece of the building. He had then wandered out of the rubble. On emerging, the government had let him go, thinking him no more than an innocent child caught up in the battle. He had then immediately come to Tuk, an old friend of his. He was currently attempting to assemble a team for the purpose of infiltrating the camp and destroying it.

  That evening, six men and three women arrived. They were all seasoned fighters for the Cause and ready to die for it. Tuk then linked Vanda into one of his VR helmets to search his mind for his visions of the camp. From the information held inside his head, they were able to plot a plan for its destruction. The plan was that Vanda would meditate and get there some minutes before them and begin freeing all the captives. That way the government forces would be busy with them while the others arrived.

  They loaded equipment into a large transport. In the back of it, Vanda sat meditating as they set off to the camp. He sent himself ahead by ten minutes within his mind and arrived as an entity at the base. He began to travel through the camp, tearing off the doors that held the people. They began sprawling out and attacking their captors, many dying in the process. Eventually, they overwhelmed the troops, taking their weapons and then turning them on the forces. The camp quickly disintegrated into chaos, people everywhere fighting and smashing their way through the camp. Vanda opened up vortexes everywhere to pull in the troops and pave the way for the freed prisoners to overrun the camp.

  But then Vanda was presented with his old foe: the entity. It began opening up vortexes of its own and sucking in the freed people. Vanda opened up a vortex at the entity, sucking it into it. But that wasn’t enough; it reemerged again somewhere else and once again Vanda had to fight it off so that it didn’t kill the freed people.

  When the others finally arrived at the camp, deep underground, they found it to be in chaos, firefights everywhere and whole sections of the building destroyed. Zilo awoke Vanda.

  “We’re here,” he stated as Vanda slowly opened his eyes. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be— but the entity is here too.”

  They all burst out of the transport, shooting troops and droids with photon bolts as they did so and sprinted into the base. They began setting photon charges and placing them upon the walls, in readiness to destroy the place.

  “Vanda, find O,” Zilo shouted.

  Vanda set off into the labyrinthian base, setting his lapse to five seconds, ducking and weaving through the enemy fire and pulling the troops and droids into vortexes. As he was moving through the base, smashing through walls with his vortexes, he began to get deeper and deeper into the camp and made it to the underground laboratories that he had seen earlier in his visions. He emerged into a large open space full of bodies lying on beds, wires and cables sticking out of them, some of them completely mutilated so that they no longer resembled human beings anymore. His heart sank as he looked around him, surrounded by the tortured and twisted remnants of the government’s evil. The spectacle seemed so pointless, and Vanda failed to see the science of it all; only seeing horror. Above his head, he heard the rumble of the battle that was going on. The government had evidently ordered more forces to the camp.

  Remembering why he was there, he set off again down a long corridor. He felt O. He felt her in his very soul; felt her pain increasingly as he got closer to her; he was homing in on her; feeling her light slowly becoming diminished. His heart was beating faster and faster.

  As he was passing a room he suddenly felt something; he felt the entity. He ripped the doors open with a vortex and entered. All around were monitors on the walls and masses of equipment. Wires and cables led out of it all to the centre of the room. And there in the centre, he saw something truly awful; something that made him momentarily despair.

  In the middle of the room was the most wretched creature strapped in a chair. His grey face looked eternally sad, and a stream of tears fell from his dead black eyes, like the flow of some never ending stream. Wires and cables came out of him everywhere, and tubes fed liquids into his body. A large clump of wires sat out of the back of his head, and his pulsating brain tissue showed through a large cavity. Wires had been soldered into his central nervous system, and the man - if you could still call it that - looked like a corpse. But it breathed. Vanda watched as against all the odds its rib cage slowly pulsated in and out. He just stood watching it.

  Just then, Zilo came swinging around the corner.

  “Have you found h…,” he called out to Vanda, but his words were cut short when he saw the creature in the chair.

  Zilo placed his hand over his mouth and came slowly forward. He dropped his weapon, clearly in the most dreadful shock.

  “No, no,” he repeated to himself, tears appearing in his eyes. “The bastards. The terrible, terrible bastards.”

  He walked up to the creature and placed his hand on its cheek, staring sadly into its black eyes.

  “What is it?” Vanda asked him.

  Zilo looked up at him, tears flowing down his cheeks, and solemnly said, “It’s him— it’s the Founder. He’s the entity; the Founder. They didn’t kill him, but turned him into this.”

  The most appalling look of hatred now took control of Zilo’s features, his face screwing up into pure loathing.

  “Kill it,” he commanded Vanda. “KILL IT!”

  Zilo stood back from the Founder and Vanda opened up and vortex, folding the pitiful creature up into it.

  Suddenly, they heard a gunshot from somewhere near. Vanda instantly sprang out of the room and began running down the corridor towards a door that sat at the end. He pushed his palm out and smashed through it.

  Inside was Kelvin holding a pistol and a technician by a trolley of dials. In the centre of them was O, strapped to a chair, slumped forward, blood dripping from a wound in her forehead. Kelvin instantly turned his pistol on Vanda as the latter entered, but Vanda opened up a small vortex just big enough to swallow the gun and Kelvin's forearm, but no more. Vanda turned to the technician and opened up a vortex for him, pulling the shrieking man straight into it. Kelvin fell to the floor grabbing the stub of his arm, screaming with blood pouring out of the wound. Vanda ran up to O and lifted her head in his hand. She was dead. He took her in his arms and held her dead body to his breast, crying desperately as he did.

  “No, no,” he kept repeating through his tears.

  He then turned to Kelvin, who was holding his wounded stub of an arm and attempting to crawl out of the room. Vanda shot another small vortex at him, swallowing up both his legs below the knee, the doctor hitting the floor at once. Again the doctor screamed out.

  Vanda held on tight to O and began to feel an energy within him grow and develop until it started to consume him. All his pain and suffering overwhelmed him and surrounded him like the temporal
field, merging with it and sending it into ever increasing spirals that threatened to tear everything apart. Every muscle in his body ached with the most wretched, melancholy pain. His love had been ripped from him; his very soul torn in half and scattered to the wind like ashes. He held her face in his hands and pressed his forehead up to her’s; his sobs convulsed and rippled through his body. He wept so hard then that he was unaware that the room around him had begun to disintegrate and flow around him like a tornado. He held on to O’s body as they were lifted up into the air, through the camp and up into the stratosphere.

  Zilo watched from the ground with the others as the two floated off through the building, ripping a hole in the camp as they floated upwards and out into the open, towards the stars that glittered in the night’s sky. He had never seen anything like it; Vanda was controlling matter in the present, not just in his vision. He watched as the two disappeared upwards.

  He turned to the others and signalled for them to leave the base; the government forces destroyed. They escaped out of there and blew the whole place to the heavens. Zilo watched the sky as they raced out of there in a stolen government transport, wondering if he would be able to see the lovers flying up into space.

  As Vanda carried O’s body up to the edge of the stratosphere, he opened up an orb around them, trapping oxygen inside and creating a vessel that would contain them. Inside the glowing blue orb, he held her body, and they floated out of Earth’s atmosphere. Once they had reached space, he opened up a vortex that led to the other side of the universe, to the outer rim. They were pulled into the wormhole and traveled through a tunnel of colourful, speedily rotating stars. He held onto her limp body as they sped further and further into the unknown reaches of space.

  They emerged on the other side, and Vanda looked around him. Everywhere it was velvet black, and a soothing silence surrounded them. He frantically searched the area around them but found nothing out there in the wilderness of velvet space. He bellowed into the dark abyss, crying out at it, imploring for something to show itself. But nothing did. He looked down at the limp body that he held in his hands, within the orb, and sobbed so loudly that he made a noise that no one would ever think a human was capable of making. It sounded like something was shredded within him, and he howled like a melancholic wolf would if he looked up at the sky and realised that the moon was no longer there.