by Davi Cao
∙ 21 ∙ War
Honey was knowledge, the link of time in Ai.iA’s world. It saw everything, a substance of infinite sensitivity. The realm of Creators lay outside its scope, but it had enough wisdom to understand that the dark splotches in its universal fabric formed a pattern, and through this pattern honey assumed a plan of existence out of its reach.
As the city’s ou.uo raced to produce more of it before the human crowd came to fulfill their predicted invasion, the ecosystem had a short glimpse of what had just happened.
The grenades thrown against the immortals bore mystical holes through the col.loc, it made people fall without any clear alteration on the world’s surface. That information, gained with the infinite knowledge only starting to become accessible to the ou.uo, resulted in a new possibility: they could replicate the phenomenon.
Thus, the ou.uo kidnapped inert ous lying underneath the col.loc’s skin, coated them with a mix of dust, honey, rituals, and sparks, and threw them on the invading people.
When it hit one follower of Laura, the person fell to the depths of the col.loc, disappearing under a hole that formed no relief on the ground, a ghost traversing a wall. Scared by the sudden vanishing of their dear friend, people screamed and started running back, stopped by others who waited for Laura’s order.
“We have to set them apart! Pull them out, make them release the hold in her hands. And drink the honey, drink all the honey you can find! That will weaken them.” Laura yelled, and the message traveled among people to reach the thousands following behind.
The ou.uo threw a wave of hole boring ous on people’s chests. Some hit chests and heads and drowned colonists in the ground, others missed targets and proved that the fight had begun. With their blood warmed by adrenaline, the crowd chanted the war cries of Laura and her generals, propelling them toward the city with the decisiveness of a blind army.
“God is on our side!” Laura said, and it echoed behind her, waves and waves of sound and fury, weaker with every person falling in the depths of the col.loc, hit by the defending army of the native city.
At last, the first people reached the chains of native humans, Laura leading them in the front line. She gobbled a whole backpack of honey, struggling to hold the native person in place, while he walked along the chain, pulled and pushed by the others by his side.
Laura punched his hand, she pulled his fingers up. Other followers came to help her, grabbing the man to break his bonds, but the man held his strong grip, he wouldn’t let go of his chain, until someone screamed.
“Run!”
Laura turned around to see a hole-digging ou falling toward her, aimed at her chest, too fast to allow for a quick escape. Thus, she held on tighter to the native humans circling by her side. The ou hit her, it electrified her pores, her vision shook without focus and a hatch opened under her feet, opening the way to the col.loc’s core.
She fell with all her weight, taking along the native she had grabbed, who still wouldn’t release his hold on the others’ hands. Because of his strong purpose, he managed to walk, carrying Laura, whose feet dragged at the edge of the invisible hole dug for her. Dragged out of it, she managed to step again on solid ground, saved from doom.
“She’s on God’s side,” someone said in the crowd.
Followers came back to her, lending her a cane to hit at the human chain. Laura struck at the native man’s arm, then on the hand joined with his front partner. It weakened his grip, after she hit tendons and muscles, so that when she and the followers pushed him again, they tore him apart from the chain, breaking a bond while others everywhere in the human chain did the same, some falling in infinite holes due to the attacks they couldn’t stop, some drinking honey to weaken the city and struggling to push people apart.
“They are too many, and it’s too hard!” a follower screamed by Laura's side.
“We’re hundreds stronger than they! We can do it, just keep pulling and drinking!” Laura said, hitting a native person’s hand with her cane.
“What if we lose everybody? We don’t know how many were dragged down!”
“You don’t want me to—” Laura said, interrupted by a shadow of rocks hurtling toward them.
“We must—” the follower began to say, before an ou hit his chest and sent him to the depths.
Laura jumped through the chain of humans, fleeing from the darts aimed at her, hiding behind a native person. She escaped the hit, saved by the native person who got hit by the ou in her place. Nothing happened to him.
She looked around, hearing people scream as the attacks intensified against the caravan, with people falling but others resisting, learning with the natives and Laura’s escape that if everybody held their hands, they could save one another when the holes opened under their feet.
Pilgrims formed massive chains of people who put their heads on backpacks to drink honey like animals, not daring to let go of their peers, kicking the natives’ backs and arms to force them to break the enemy chains, all during rains of hole-digging ous falling on their chests and backs, forcing people to rescue all the time.
“We have to do something! They are using your idea, too many people are dying already, it has to stop!” Dalana said, running on the battlefield with hands crossing desperate people.
“It’s... It’s war. This is what happens in war...” Colin said, eyes widened, not blinking, action reflected on his pupils and pumping up his inert blood.
“And you’ll let it go on? We can stop it at any time!”
“Wait a bit more... I want to see them. If they win by themselves, it will be amazing.” Colin followed Laura’s adventure up close.
Three towers stood high above the ground, all dark, one smooth block over another, rods coming out of their waists. Laura ran to the closest one to her, looking for shelter once she realized her loneliness, having become an easy prey for the hurtling hole-diggers.
The tower had an entrance. Behind it, it had a ramp made of roundish shapes with streaks marked deeply on it, made of a matter that melt down in the contact of her shoe and reformed again at lightning speed, pushing her impulse upward, propelling her climb.
The ramp rose like the circular stairs of medieval towers, the ascent of a lighthouse, and at the top she found a wide space, not a room, not walls, just a hole, an incomplete structure in which a couple of native people held hands and spun around each other, eyes locked on eyes, every step pushed up by the constant reconstruction of the melted floor.
A window allowed the view to the outside, a hole the size of people, from where the horizon faded against the dust enveloping the whole city, from where the giant human chains of both native and immigrant humans colored the bluish ground with all shades of color.
The ou.uo spun in their orbits, forming a glittering galactic disk which shadowed the people below. From up there, Laura put a hand on her heart when a cloud of ous dove in the ground then moved faster than her eyes could see, throwing a concentrated blast of hole-digging ous on the caravan.
Their strike hit a chunk of the pilgrims with about fifty people, and despite their holding hands, the holes were so many that many fell at the same time, snapping people’s spines and shoulders, releasing their hold, and disappearing at once, cleaning the ground of their presence.
Laura turned to the spinning couple behind her, hidden in the tower, and grabbed their arms. She pushed them to the window, luring them into mere walking, seducing them. They conceded to her efforts, keeping their momentum when she threw them out of the hole.
They fell, hit the ground, and bounced, one on top of the other, the one on top then struggling to get up again, while the one beneath didn’t move. A cloud of dust fell upon them and turned into liquid, coloring them blue. Laura watched their death, revengeful, unaware of the incoming danger.
A hole-digging ou flew toward her and hit her chest, removing everything under her, and only for her. She fell from the tower, and instead of hitting the ground, she kept falling, falling, and falling,
disappearing from the face of the world.
“Laura fell! The prophet fell!” a pilgrim yelled behind the line of native humans.
Those around him looked around, deprived of evidence. Death brought by the alien city came silent and uneventful, one second you were hit, the other you were gone forever.
“What? No! Where did you see her?” a woman screamed back.
“At the tower! She threw that couple down, look, they’re still there. And they she got hit and fell.”
Covered in blue, the couple of native people who spun together in the tower’s room got up again. The one who took the brunt of the fall’s impact struggled to find balance, placing his hand on the ground until his feet managed to stay fixed in place, waiting for the damage in his spinal cord to be repaired by the dust.
“Are we over? Oh, Jesus, we are on our own... What are we doing, oh, dear God, Laura is gone...” the pilgrim said, weeping on his friend’s shoulder.
“She can’t be gone, no, oh, no, she can’t be...” The woman patted him while tears streamed down her cheek.
The caravan lost a fourth of their people, and the crowd drank whatever honey appeared in front of them, and pushed the natives apart, destroying their bonds after intense sweating.
“Slap them on the face, I did it the last time, it worked.”
“They’re robots, they’ve got to be robots, I can’t believe it,” an old man said, pulling a native’s arm with all his might, his body leaned back, feet dragging against the smooth floor.
“Not humans like us, definitely not, I tell you that.”
“I don’t see any brothers in here, only zombies.”
But no supernatural force held the natives' hands, thus with enough insistence, pilgrims broke the chains and weakened the walking line. At every separation, a rain of ous fell on them, and instead of digging holes in which to trap people, they traversed the ground and never came back.
“That thing is getting weaker, it’s working!”
“Break their groups, don’t let them get back. Mary, over here, help me out, keep these two separated.”
“Go help Frank, he’s hanging on a hole!”
Hole-digging ous still fell on people’s heads and chests, condemning them to disappearance. They protected themselves by chains of peers, some tying ropes on their waists in case they were the next, although the fall was often more drastic than anticipated. Pilgrims fell, others lost balance and fell along.
“Hit their heads, release their hands no matter what! We can win this! For Laura, for Earth!”
Native humans lost their bonds by the caravan’s insistence, putting hands on other people’s backs to hold hands again, set apart by force and denied approach by the immigrants, herded away from human contact like dangerous animals.
A native woman fell, lifeless from her line, a crack in her skull gushing blood. The settler behind her raised his fist, holding a stick. The dust around the woman liquefied into blue, healing her bruise. She started moving again soon enough, about ready to get up and rejoin her group, if only the pilgrims didn't push her apart.
Heads cracked as people realized that nearly killing natives became the quickest way to separate them, guilt-free because they would soon be healed and get back to walking. The orbiting ou.uo disintegrated faster than ever, hundreds of its tiny components falling into smaller orbits around individual natives, lacking integration with the greater ecosystem to make a difference in their world.
The great galactic disk dwindled, it lost its grip on its knowledge of the universe. Hungry people who lived alone and despised the gathering of collective energy devoured the fabric of its conscience.
Colin walked from side to side with a hand on his mouth. A pilgrim struck at a native’s head to release her from the chain, and he crawled on the ground to see her closed eyes twitch with intermittent electric spasms. Dust covered her, Colin wished for it to cover him too, so it did, and he became blue, so did the woman, and she regained conscience, alive, and well, able to get up again and resume her walking life.
A pilgrim on his side got hit by hole-digging ou, now rarer than ever as the ou.uo lost energy and honey, and he fell in the abyss of infinitude, where Colin himself believed the grenades had sent the immortals. The panic face in the falling man was a portrait of creation, things started to make sense to him, they were his people and yet they died, and they died because he sent them to a challenge. Creation fought, and creation resisted.
Dalana followed him in silence, distressed by the action. Native people didn't die, counting on the dust's fast healing power, but Colin’s people disappeared in vast numbers.
“Colin, won’t you do anything?” she said to him, and he turned his face to another place, where he found people pulling a hope buried in the ground, a rescue in the making.
Dalana stayed in place, while he fulfilled his curiosity in slow steps. He watched things unfold in a state of hypnosis. She, on the other hand, strolled around the three big rising towers, those unique works of creation, mysteries worthy of a whole new world. Without honey, the towers would never come to fruition. Thus, Dalana imagined a rain, and she wished for it to come without clouds.
Water dripped on heads and shoulders, not pure water, but perfume, water with the scent of flowers. The smell impregnated the skins and created an attraction from one person to another. A woman looked at a naked native, torn apart from the human chain, wandering alone after company, and she let him go.
She rubbed her cheek to spread the perfume all over her face, a delicate scent, not aggressive to her sensitive nose, and the more of it fell on her body, the better her fingers responded to the pleasure of her own pores. She smiled with the tickling, with the satisfaction of having fingers, with the innate ability of groping and scrubbing herself on other things.
She got closer to the man on her side, who walked toward her with the same inebriated smile of a person just noticing his humanity, the joy of stepping on the ground and walking to touch things, and when they touched their hands, their minds collided and their memories walked.
Instead of a horizon, they saw a core, instead of the sky, they saw sparkles, instead of another person, they saw a running ghost, a ghost who left a trail of himself in countless poses, each better than the other, and to see more of them, they had to walk.
From the ground around her, as she walked with the man, dormant ous rose to her passage, energized by her steps, orbiting her waist in reverence to her existence. The woman got an ou.uo of her own, so did the man on her side, so did all other participants of the caravan, who touched things and each other with gentle fingers.
The woman walked until she saw the naked back of a native man, a dark shiny skin, an organic fabric spread over a tiny chain of round mountains, which moved as he contracted his muscles and swung his bones, a portrait so loyal to the world in which they inhabited, and if it was impossible to touch a mountain, to enclose it all with a tiny human hand, it was possible to grab it all on the back of another person, a world to call her own.
The woman touched the native man’s back, and he held her a free hand, which she took with the naturalness of a person drinking water. The world disappeared from her mind, replaced by the ghost of sound and heartbeats, something thundering under her feet, speaking to her, asking pleasant things of her, in a language she didn’t make sense of, but which she spoke fluently with each step that she took on the skin of the world. She sat at a table at a big celebration, and the ghost of her host wanted to meet her closely.
∙ 22 ∙ Love
Mountains grew where the pilgrims had parked the monstrous caravan trucks, tumbling them down. The trees on their oasis broke, the water spilled on the rubbery ground, and metal slags left a trail of destruction as the vehicles rolled on an ever-growing hill. Apart from that, however, the caravan stayed at peace. Every single pilgrim had joined the human chain, doubling the city’s former size.
The ou.uo celebrated their regathering with the fallen bits of its ecosystem,
and rejoiced at the new additions. Honey production resumed at a faster pace, repairing the damage caused by the thirsty invaders. When they looked into infinity, they saw their place in the universe shine with the glory of their situation. The first case of fully converted humans from another world, and for this case alone, the grandest of cities.
Colin circled by the side of the human chain, pressing a hand on a naked native’s back. He wished to see what his people saw, but he was unable to hold hands with them, not allowed to become part of the realm of creation in Ai.iA’s world. Dalana approached him and touched him the way he wanted to touch the woman in front of him, greeting him with her warm palm fully extended between his scapulae.
“Is... Is everything alright?” she said.
Silence, mist, shadowed people. He stopped and turned around to face her. A silhouette in a yellow dress, the face of a woman waiting for him, worrying for him after defeating his creations. The whites in her eyes rounded her irises, making her curious and caring. She raised her hand to caress his face, to see what he had seen when touching the native person’s back.
He let go of his restraint, allowed his belly to contract and his mouth burst in a big laugh, clenching his eyes with the hilarity of everything. He fell on the floor from a laughing attack. He rolled away from the human chain with arms raised, giving his whole body the chance to touch the rubbery ground, while joy invaded his heart and pumped out giggles, loud, outrageous laughs, rolling on the floor, a child on the perfect lawn, after the perfect picnic, after the perfect kiss from his parents.
Dalana knew of that walking style, she was good at rolling on the floor, thus she threw herself down and followed him, laughing along because it was contagious to hear him let go, because she hoped to see him well. He then stopped suddenly, while she kept coming. She rolled on top of him, stopping eye on eye.