When she stepped into this Verse she was laying on her back staring at the sky. She was not seeing stars. Instead she was seeing the blue of a cloudless sky. It was day. Emotions washed over her. It was always this way when one first stepped into a new Verse. There was a sudden wash of emotions as they stepped into the circumstances of a person and the particular situation that was defining that person’s present.
The emotion that washed over Catalina caught her by surprise. The emotion was pure joy. Catalina stepped into a Verse and found herself laughing. It was an amazing thing to awake into a new life and into laughter. As the knowledge of this life began to wash over her she looked to her side. Hector was lying next to her on the grass. He was the one who was responsible for that laughter. He had told her something that was funny and made her laugh in a way that that no one else had ever done before. It was a laugher of one who is lost in the joy of a perfect moment.
Catalina decided to stay in this Verse for a while and get to know this perfect man. One day became many. With each day she loved him more. The days turned into months, and these became years. This man Hector soon became a husband. Soon after that they had a family.
Catalina never wanted to leave this world of warmth and laughter. She thought of this now as she neared her Villa.
As she neared her home she noticed something strange. The door was slightly ajar. She pushed it open the rest of the way. When she did so she screamed.
Catalina’s family, her life, was gone. They were in pieces on the floor.
In the room in front of her there was blood everywhere. Her beautiful children, and her beautiful husband’s bodies lay lifeless before her. However, they had been torn to pieces. Catalina let out a cry of anguish
She ran to her beloved Ariana. She cradled her beautiful daughter in her hands. She cried on to her little girl’s body. She wailed in a way that sounded beyond human. It was pure despair.
At that moment she heard a clicking noise. It reminded her of the chirping sound insects make.
In the light from the fire place Catalina saw movement. It took her a moment to identify what it was. The walls were covered with creatures. They were large. However, their bodies took on the color or their immediate surroundings. These creatures fell from the walls and ceilings. As they did so, they stood upright. The colors faded and their skin appeared black with a shimmering quality to them.
Catalina knew these creatures were nothing the likes of which God had ever intended to exist in any Universe. She counted four of them. They had bodies that looked like they were composed of shells. The bodies were insect like, but the most grotesque thing was not their insect like bodies. It was the human faces attached to them. But the eyes were segmented. The heads of these sick creatures twitched with excitement at Catalina’s terror.
Catalina knew she needed to flee. She was about to fall back when something even more shocking then these grotesque creatures emerged from the shadows.
Out of the shadows stepped…Catalina.
It was Catalina but not Catalina. It was Catalina beautiful yet with eyes that were made of ice. Her face and body were tattooed and scared. The scarification formed intricate designs
“Hello Catalina,” the other her said.
Catalina did not understand this madness. She began to fall back into the Sea of Glass. The other her smiled. Catalina paused for just a moment when she saw that smile. A moment was all that was needed.
One of the creatures leapt at her. A moment later instead of falling back to the Sea of Glass Catalina fell only into darkness.
***
Catalina sat in a room and watched her many lives flash before her eyes. She was not shown them. She simply lived them in her memory. Those lives seemed all the more tragic now. They seemed tragic because they had led her here. They led Catalina to this place of sadness and pain.
Catalina was strapped to a chair. She was not sure how much time had passed. She had been beaten and blooded. It reminded her somehow of a life she had never lived. It reminded her of a life where she remembered being hurt. She remembered people hurting her intentionally. Though she remembered this she could not remember exactly why they had done this to her.
She felt sadness for that last life she had slipped into. She felt sadness for that perfect life that had been shattered. She stepped into someone’s perfect life and because of that the life had been completely destroyed. They had even ripped that body away from that Verse. They had taken this body fully and completely. They had pulled someone from that Verse and entrapped them in madness.
Catalina tried repeatedly to fall back. She tried to fall out of this mind back to the beaches of the Sea of Glass. She could not. There was something keeping her from falling back. She was in a prison that she could not escape. Her mind was imprisoned in her current body.
Worst then her torment was who her main tormenter was. It was Catalina. It was her but it was not her. It was her cold and vicious. It was her with hate and malice. When her eyes passed over this other self she felt dread. She felt dread of the truly wicked and the truly evil.
Her tormentor, this wicked and vicious Catalina, along with her other captors were trying to get information from her. There was one that looked like Belili who sometimes appeared. But it was not Belili. This other Belili watched the beatings and torture with joy.
They asked Catalina questions as they tortured her. Catalina was so beaten and broken that she didn’t know what information she had given them. In truth she did not know exactly what they were looking for. They asked her for minute details of events. They asked for details in moments.
They asked her for details about wind. They asked her about ripples and colors she saw at times as she stared at the Glass Sea that enveloped her world. Catalina had a brilliant mind. Her mind catalogued everything. Somewhere in between her beatings and torture she told them things. She gave them the strange details they asked for.
Catalina’s mind was a like a recorder. It recorded everything in detail. They asked her things over and over again. The littlest details would sometimes intrigue them. They asked her positions of stars when she looked at skies in various Verses.
However, there were moments as she was being tortured that she knew the darker version of her didn’t care about the information. This Dark Catalina just enjoyed inflicting pain.
There were others in the room at time that took all of the information Catalina provided and they wrote it down. On the walls around Catalina they wrote equations. She noted many of them were variations of wave equations.
Catalina’s body was now broken and destroyed. It was withered and weak. Catalina would have once believed that a body could be so broken that it could no longer feel or fear pain. However, she discovered this was not the case.
Catalina had begun to realize her torturers were like her. Some of them were geniuses who could jump into multiple Verses and live a hundred lives. Her torturers had learned torture in thousands of lifetimes. They had studied it as serial killers. They had studied it as inquisitors and interrogators. They had studied it as doctors and surgeons. They understood how to execute endless agony upon the nerves and senses.
Now as she sat sobbing and bleeding Catalina heard the lock on her door turn. When the door opened Catalina’s heart sank. It was the cruelest of them. It was herself. Catalina looked up and found herself staring into her own eyes.
Dark Catalina smiled as she walked into the room. She looked down at herself tied to the chair.
She began to slowly circle the chair where Catalina of the Glass Sea sat. The walls around them were covered in equations and blood.
Catalina of the Dark began to speak.
“Your whole life you have been deceived,” she said. “You have been taught about the virtues of life. You have been taught words like courage…and love.”
Dark Catalina pulled up a chair and sat opposite herself.
“Those things are lies,” Dark Catalina said. “Do you realize that? Those words…the
y’re…made up things. Because our worlds are always presented back to us by artists and poets. They give us words like courage. But in truth it is stupidity. The hero is always a fool. Those who are about to face death don’t realize how close to death they truly are. If they were they would fear it. They would flee from it. They don’t understand what that moment of death is like. Courage is ignorance. Love...love is even less of a tangible thing. It is a sad way to quantify a life.”
“We tell ourselves how meaningful love is. Love is merely a derivative of lust. Even the love of parent to child is a lust for life. It is a lust to see one’s legacy extended. It is buried in the selfish.”
Dark Catalina stared at the equations on the walls. “I have lived countless lives and I have used words like courage and love to destroy and burn things away.”
“Love and courage are not virtues. Poets use words like this and they build an idea of how they hope things to be, but these are just made up words.”
“As are all words. They mean nothing. I have seen lovers abandon each other. Kill each other. I have seen love kill. Lovers kill each other with shocking ease.”
Dark Catalina leaned forward. She grabbed Catalina of the Sea of Glass by her bloody hair and looked herself deep in the eyes.
“You live for love and courage. You live for…the greater good. But…there is no good. What is good for the virus is lethal for the carrier. Good is merely…perspective. I do not deal in these petty words. And in your last moments…my love…I want you to know the truth of it all.”
Dark Catalina smiled as she said these things.
“Remember my courageous love…life…is death.”
Dark Catalina stroked the face of Catalina of the Sea of Glass. She was in truth stroking her own face.
“You are so beautiful,” Dark Catalina said. “We are beautiful.”
“Why are you doing this,” Catalina of the Sea of Glass asked.
Dark Catalina smiled again. “I do this for love. For lust. For the lust and thirst for truth beyond words. I do this…for death.”
Dark Catalina let her statement sink into the mind of Catalina of Glass.
“I want to thank you, my love. You have given us what we need. You have given us a path to follow so that now we may go to your awful city of false goodness and wipe it away. From your mind, your beautiful mind, from my…beautiful mind…we have what we need.”
Dark Catalina leaned closer and she kissed herself. Dark Catalina kissed Catalina of the City of Glass deeply and passionately. A moment later Catalina of Glass felt pain. She saw Dark Catalina pull away.
Catalina of Glass saw there was blood on those perfect and cold lips of her Darker self. Catalina of Glass coughed. She realized it was her own blood on those lips. She looked down and saw a blade protruding from her stomach.
Dark Catalina sat back and watched herself die. She saw herself coughing and the tears flowing down her cheeks. She was disgusted by how pathetic and weak this other version of herself was.
“You could have been so much better then you are,” Dark Catalina told her dying self.
Catalina of Glass felt a sudden truth in the moment as her life left her. Dark Catalina was right. As she was close to death she did not want her life to end. She gasped and coughed for life. She did not feel brave. She did not want to let go. Would she have been courageous if she knew this moment was coming? Would she have moved forward or would she have fled? In the end the answer didn’t matter. In the end death took her. In the end death won and made all questions of love and courage pointless. The Martyr always loses.
Dark Catalina looked over her corpse. Her heart was beating very fast. One could never know something more erotic then killing oneself. Catalina knew she had just killed her better self. Goodness was an imagined virtue. However, it was still a virtue.
Even for one such as Dark Catalina who lived in a cold reality, those who existed in her Verse understood how far from the virtues of poets they dwelled. They realized in those idealized minds of the poets the word they would be labeled with was wretched.
This understanding made the cruelty of the wretched towards the good pleasurable.
***
Sarah and Patrick sat on a beach. It was not a beach on the Sea of Glass. Instead it was a beach in a world they had leapt to far from Verse Zero. They had lived in this place together for three years now. In this Verse they met each other at a train station.
Together they formed a beautiful life. Now they sat together next to a bonfire as dusk began to fall.
Patrick was sitting behind Sarah. His arms were around her and they stared at the setting sun together. All that Sarah had learned about Patrick had changed her. She understood him in a way she never imagined possible. She understood the pain and tragedy of who he was.
Her fight with Belili had been for naught. Belili had used the Brain Weaver’s journal to manipulate her. It worked. It worked the way Belili had hoped. How could it not? The truth can sometimes force our hands. Sarah wanted to be the link of this poor and beautiful boy to the world around him.
If she was being used so be it. We all served a function in life. If love was to be the function she served she realized she could live with that. Because in the end Patrick made her truly happy.
Sarah reached back and stroked Patrick’s face.
“This world is so beautiful,” she said. She was happy in this moment. She was happy in this Verse.
“You are beautiful,” Patrick replied.
After a few moments he went on. “My mind sometimes…it ebbs and flows with the possibilities of what directions I could have taken. I can look in the mirror and see myself. I see myself for who I am and who I could have been. I can start to see and trace all the infinite possibilities. And when I trace those my mind is suddenly in those other places. I am in those places where I am a different me. In one of those places I am a father. In one I am prisoner. It’s easy to get lost if I’m not careful.”
“Sometimes as I look in the mirror and see these alternate possibilities that I have lived, I wonder which is the real me? Am I the true me or is it those could have beens that are me?”
“It’s haunting,” Patrick said. “It’s haunting to be able to see so clearly into the other possibilities. You see ghosts of who you are not but who you are all at the same time. It is easy to lose your sense of self if you are not careful. And sometimes Sarah…I feel so lost.”
Patrick kissed Sarah’s head. “You keep me grounded…you help me remember who I am. Who I am supposed to be.”
Sarah smiled. She knew this is the purpose that Belili had hoped she would serve. She did not care. She loved Patrick and would do anything for him.
“Sarah,” Patrick said.
Sarah turned to face him. He went on. “Tell me…tell me you love me. Tell me that you love me for me. That you love this person who has stood with you in our glass world. Tell me you love me for the way I laugh there. The way I breath. The way I smile. Tell me that this person is as relevant or more relevant than all the people I could have been. Tell me that is the person you love.”
Sarah felt her heart fill with happiness. It was a beautiful moment.
“I love you, Patrick. I love you so much. You are perfect. You are perfect to me. Just the way you are. You are all I could hope…you are all I could dream.”
Patrick touched Sarah’s face. He caressed it. He then kissed her. The kiss was perfection. It was the last perfect moment Patrick would ever know.
The first thing that Sarah noted was a strange sound. It was a droning sound. Patrick noted it too. The world around them, the very air, began to crack. Their surroundings looked like a mirror shattering. Through these cracks reality began to splinter. The sky around them with its shards showed different stars. Some showed sunlight. Some showed clouds. It was very similar to their glass world.
There was a loud sound. It was like the screams of a million different worlds in a million different pitches. With that sound reality broke.
Someone was walking behind him. It was a girl. To Sarah’s horror the girl looked very much like Catalina. However, the girl had scars and tattoos all over her face and her arms. She carried with her something shiny. Sarah realized she was carrying knives.
Another woman appeared. It was Belili. But she too had tattoos and scars on her face. Behind them in the tunnel other figures emerged. When Sarah saw them she fought back a scream. They were terrible creatures. They had dark bodies like insects. However, their bodies began to flow with colors of the shifting world around them. The faces of these things were horrifying. They had faces of men but those faces were blind and gaunt.
Sarah and Patrick were uncertain what was happening but they knew some horrible variable had just entered into their equation to save reality.
“We need to fall back to the Sea of Glass,” Patrick whispered to Sarah.
Sarah knew he was right. She began to fall back in her mind. However, nothing was happening. She was not falling back to safety.
The old man smiled.
Belili began to speak. “We are…the same,” she said. “We have the same goals. We seek the same place. We seek the Threshold. The beautiful Threshold of Degradative Concurrence.”
This Belili turned and looked to the one who resembled Catalina. “Our Catalina is very special,” she said. “She can fragment reality. She can carry us all with her. And more beautiful she can trap you in that fragmentation.”
“We will find the Threshold. However, we seek it to hastens its demise of creation. We seek to take existence back to its natural state of un-existence. That is where our paths diverge. That is where our paths split.”
Dark Belili pointed at Patrick.
Prisons of Stolen Dreams Page 23