by Davi Cao
She cleaned her mind, refusing to form premade sentences out of respect for Colin. Her meeting would be the most important event, and things would flow from there, no matter how positive or negative their first impressions.
She pushed the door by leaning her body against its surface, opening it with trouble, fighting against the pressure on the other side. A gush of air blew over her like a storm, making a flag out of her dress. To stop it, she entered quickly, dragging the door behind her.
The wide room’s walls pressed on her, distant and heavy, square, and tidy. One person sat down in the far corner, in front of a puddle, melted matter colored red. A man with a brown skin, short hair, mourned over lost ones, looking sad. He, Colin, stared at her.
∙ 4 ∙ The new human
After countless worlds, Dalana had developed a walking style devoid of any relation to her original roots. Sometimes she jumped with both feet, in others she took wide steps, taking her feet to the sides before landing them on the ground. Rolling, walking with stiff legs, with one squat for each stride, she could do anything when muscles never got tired and when creativity set the norms of existence.
She chose a clumsy walk to greet Colin. Swinging her body from side to side like a pendulum, hitting the floor with heavy feet, she approached him at the distant corner where a puddle of melted matter made him company. He looked puzzled and scared, watching her every move with the stillness of a spectator.
At first, Dalana greeted him in her original people’s fashion, bending her spine to the left and then to the right, balancing over one foot until nearly falling, getting down again to do the same on the other side. Remembering Terra’s people, though, she giggled, seeing herself in a clown’s role, that of a person who didn’t expect serious answers to their offerings. So, she extended him one hand, and waved it with fingers spread wide. By Colin’s cold reaction, she noticed important traces of his personality.
“Was this your doing?” She opened her arms to encompass the entire room.
He remained in silence, giving her a cornered beast’s stare. He frowned, and by doing so, he showed either his curiosity or annoyance at her presence. By the soft inclination of his head, and by awakening her memory banks of Terra’s peoples, she read curiosity in his mind, a feeling that admitted more of her greetings ritual.
“This is an amazing place, if you don’t mind me saying it. Resistant walls, nice underground access, firm floor.” Dalana stood rigid in place, putting a hand on her chest. “The entrance up there seemed eroded, but I guess the pillar must be punishing around these parts. So far, few were capable of creating strong stuff around here, you should know that.”
She pointed at him, clenching her eyes, holding herself not to laugh. “You are good, really good, I’m impressed. It’s so frustrating to see everything melt down all the time that it feels like a breeze of fresh air to enter a place like this. Are you proud of this? You should be, and I bet you could do much more using the same plan.” Dalana looked at him by the corner of her eyes.
He kept his mouth shut, however, despite the eloquence of her gestures and speech. She talked with hands raised above her head all the time, with feet going as high as her waist and then sinking on the floor like anchors. He showed through his inaction, though, that she would get little from the strategy of dialogue, and so she lowered her limbs and locked her hands in her front pocket. She pierced his expression with an intent stare, sweeping his whole body with fast pupils that read everything that belonged to him.
“You never meant any harm to anybody in your life. I can see that by the way you hold your knees so close to your belly. You are a friend for life, although you never had the chance to prove it. I can see that by the smoothness of your lips. You consider yourself an uninteresting person, and proud to be so. The fact that you don’t offer me anything is proof enough of that. You can run and you can roll, only if people don’t laugh, even if they mean well. Your clenched teeth speak to me so. You never liked fantasy or any sort of fiction. I know that by the way you ignore my greeting. Your name is Colin, and I see a lot of you. I can see a lot more if you help me to.”
Dalana waited for an answer that never came. He fled her gaze, turning his eyes to the walls, returning to her later, paying attention and not admitting so. That would amuse OOOO, she thought, while her own wishes languished in frustration.
She was in no hurry to communicate, , having only to consider how high a price she would pay. She sat down in the opposite corner to Colin, crossing her legs and looking at the door in the other side of the room.
“Are you OOOO’s creation?” Colin said, using such a low voice that Dalana hardly heard him whisper.
“Has it tricked you?” She calmed herself down and turned her gaze to him.
“I don’t think so. But ... But could it?”
“From what I know of it, no, it doesn’t play tricks. It likes everybody. I am a Creator, just like you. My name is Dalana, the one who loves Utopias.”
Colin nodded, having heard of that person more than once in his brief quests as a Creator. He associated her name with boredom and despise, the epitome of what he feared being himself. Never could he guess they would meet, having infinity ahead of him, and also the World Voice.
“Human?” he asked her.
“Yes, human like you,” Dalana said.
“I’d say you’re lying if I didn’t know Creators don’t lie.”
“What is the difficulty in accepting that? I see nothing different in us.”
“Really? Look again, try to see better, use your observation ‘powers’. We didn’t have people with your skin color back in Terra. You’re a silhouette, a stick figure, not an actual human.”
“Isn’t it wonderful, though, to discover that there are more ways of being human than you previously thought?” She crawled towards him to reduce some of their distance.
Colin lowered his head, regretting his speech. She arrived at the wrong time, his heart swelled with the heaviness of his latest losses. Watching the first non-melting human after the apocalypse talk to him and be nice, however, tore his heart.
“The concept is always the same, I assure you,” Dalana said, breaking the silence. “I didn’t come from primates in my world, and we had no such a thing as an evolutionary process. We just fell from the sky and the universe ended without us being able to understand what or who created us and sent us down. Still, we felt cold, hunger, thirst, we were tired, we got bored, we fell in love, we hated and we made art. You can relate to that, can’t you? I could list you many other worlds where humans were used as the basis for all creative activity, all with different origins, with explanations that made as much sense as the ones from Terra. And countless others where we were secondary or tertiary figures in places filled with other more imposing creations. Your world was just one among many others. You and I are alike for being human, and even more so for being Creators.”
He allowed her to speak because she told of their kind. And precisely because of that, he wanted no more. “I need some time alone. Would you mind leaving this room? Please.”
“I won’t leave you now. You are important to me and I am to you. We must come to terms.”
“Like this? By forcing yourself upon me, against my will?”
“In this case, yes, until you are aware of the options I bring to your life.”
“Options ... ok, I know, I know, I can do anything I want, it’s just a matter of wishing for it. I was told that many times already.”
“I mean more—”
“What you guys have to realize is that I’m not afraid of pain, ok? Not anymore. I want it, I need to have it as my company. It is the thing that connects me the most with Terra, and if I forget about my world, I’d rather melt down and let go of all this. I can live with sadness, I learned my lesson,” Colin said.
“Good. Then let me help you. I see that you want to be alone, but that may not be as nice as you believe it is.” Dalana turned her eyes on him, probing his openness t
o her. “I see a puddle of melted stuff in front of you. Was it, by chance, someone you knew?”
Silence. He wished for it, and it materialized, without the need of special powers. The burden of loss reverberated in his mind, weakened by the smooth voice of Dalana. She filled the space and made void impossible in the room.
“It was. I create her from time to time, almost like an addiction. That’s cruel, I know, I asked her to forgive me. But it’s good, even if it’s always so bad in the end. That’s what I do to remind of my own Utopia, you know?” Colin said.
“Your own Utopia? You mean to say that your life in Terra was perfect?”
“Sort of, I guess. Not in the sense that everybody was happy. I don’t have these illusions.” He glanced at Dalana with one raised eyebrow. “I mean, didn’t you like Terra? That was a world of humans, like us. Don’t you want more of it?”
“Colin, I do wish for a different world. You probably already know the kind of place I would like to see realized again.”
“Maybe I don’t. When you talk about Utopia, I see Terra. We had everything there. Nothing needed to change, no, we would find a way on our own, by playing to the same rules we were used to.” He looked down, spreading his legs on the floor so that he could touch it with the tip of his little fingers. “I need to have it back and try again. Do you ... err ... Would you help me in that?”
Dalana opened her lips to speak, before a big blob fell from the ceiling over Colin’s head. She seized the opportunity to get by his side, to help him recover from the scare. He looked up, unharmed, taking notice of the damage. The fallen matter left a small gap in the construction material above the room. It kept melting on the edges, with formerly resistant stuff dripping on the floor at a scary rate. The floor itself became softer, turning into slime on the surface, threatening to swallow both humans in the room.
Colin recognized the World Voice’s passage on the land, it came as no surprise to him, the pillar of depression shaking every atom in existence, coming right above them. For Dalana, distracted by chatting, she had to pay attention to the Voice itself to realize what threatened to invade their shelter.
“This is a terrible place ... I need to get out of this life ... I can’t, I can’t ... Why can’t I do anything right, why ...”
The walls waved, its upper layers flowed down in rivulets of desperate matter committing suicide. Dalana’s own body trembled with empathy, receiving sentence after sentence of misery with examples of her own life through her many worlds.
She represented the utmost failure among Creators of her branch, avoided by all those who sought radically different ideas, having to beg for the opportunity of helping them anyhow just to be accepted and have a voice of her own.
“We have to flee! Quick, to the stairs, we can do this together.” She ran towards the door.
“You go there if you want. I’ll stay,” Colin said.
“What, no! It’s not the time to lose hope. I have something grand to show you.”
“Then come back later. Or stay and protect yourself. I can help, if you want.”
Dalana dropped the door’s handle, returning to Colin’s corner with cautious steps on the slippery floor. “If you can protect yourself, why is the room melting down then? You have to get away.”
“I don’t need shields. You do. If we cover you with boxes of negotiating matter, you can resist one passage.”
She raised her hand to make an objection, before her vision darkened. A small room surrounded her out of nothing, only a dim source of light behind her, giving sense of her trap. The World Voice’s lament slid back to the depths of her conscience, always there, but manageable, and the walls around her, which she could feel with her fingers, resisted firmly to the cries eating the outside world. If left on her own, she could craft her own lab’s material, even more resistant than Colin’s, although less flexible, as it required a special attachment to a place deemed holy.
Dalana spent her time inside the box getting rid of contamination. She heard enough to fall into a state of resentment, treated by Colin with hostility, he who could become a new friend.
“Be my friend ... anybody, please ... I need care, I can’t be alone forever ... Don’t leave me here ...”
What proof did she have of her capacity to help others, if her attempts at Ai.iA’s research brought nothing productive until then? She gave OOOO’s snails a brief outlook into eternity, and it disgusted their Creator to the point of preferring them dead. She was a human, Colin’s sibling, and yet he struggled to consider her as an equal. Even him, having never seen one of her worlds, refused to give her credit for her ideas.
By her own will, fearing her thoughts could only go downhill from there, she destroyed the box. Outside, the warehouse had an intact ceiling, restored, curated by a man who stood in front of her.
“Are you still Colin?” she said, surprised to see his calm countenance.
“The same since birth. And so is this place,” he said.
“You need our help, and we need yours. You should join us.”
“Join who?”
“Have you never noticed that not everything melts down in this world? We are those researching it. Some things resist naturally, or combine with other stuff and forget about sadness. Also, this new kind of matter, either the resistant kind or not, has dynamics of its own, similar to forces of nature, if we can say so.”
“It’s just the World Voice melting ruins of old Terra. It’s that simple.”
“The basis is that one, for sure. This place has more rules than you think, though, to make it all possible. We are collecting everything we can, testing them out against the Voice, and experimenting with new creations, to see what is possible.”
“So, Creators can be scientists too, that’s funny. Can’t you just have an idea that annihilates this reality? Aren’t we that powerful?”
“We are once we can beat the dominant concept. And, right now, that’s what we’re trying to do. We want to destroy OOOO’s world to replace it with another one.” Dalana emphasized her words to her indifferent companionship, hoping for his strong reaction.
Colin stared at her with contracted fists, a smile beginning to form in his face. “Destroy this world? You have others helping in this ... I want it. I want to help, please, we have to bring an end to this place!”
He opened his arms to embrace her and closed himself on her warm, soft body. His first hug on a Creator, an act of fragility and despair, after so many fruitless attempts at dealing with his craving wish alone. A team, a group of beings devoted to the same goal locked in his mind, or at least part of it. Dalana was human indeed, human enough to deserve his thanks and soothe his loneliness.
Hugging posed difficulty to Dalana, unused to Terran ways. She remained stiff at first, making sense of his intentions. Humans of Terra, or most of them, she remembered, used to express their care with front embraces, and it felt nice, she admitted to it. She patted his back and swung her spine from side to side, to show him her own ways, in a fast dance.
“We are a good team, and if you can resist the World Voice’s pillar, good, that will be perfect to advance our tests. Besides, you’ll find friends, you’ll get to talk to others—” Dalana said in her pendulous movement.
“And does any of you have a clue of what to do, or what we should find out?” Colin released his hold on her.
“Currently, we are dealing with the World Voice itself. If we can affect it somehow, maybe we have a chance at something. That’s why we’re so interested in things that resist its sadness. And I’ve been noticing some weird phenomena in the interaction of a few pieces.”
“That’s exciting, I want to see it. If OOOO doesn’t allow us to have a new world, we’re taking it by force then, aren’t we?” He spoke with an acute voice, hardly able to contain his joy.
“Only if it works. We may fail and make things worse, you should know that.”
“Better than watching everything melt down and getting bored to death.”
“Yes, I see where you’re coming from, I agree with you. I’ll just remind you, however, that we’re never bored when we have friends. I assure you that you’re not alone,” Dalana said. “Shall we go?”
Colin nodded, coping with the myriad of expectations now taking over his mind. They walked out of the room together, through the door and up the stairs, running. He raced, anxious, crazy to meet the new group of Creators that shared his goal.
Dalana followed behind until the exit, from which point she became the leader, looking for the obelisk in the horizon. OOOO waited close by, spinning its head, eyes, and teeth, suffering with the suspense of their coming.
“It worked out well, didn’t it?” it said, siding with Dalana. “Where are you going now?”
“We are going to destroy your world,” Colin said, with a confident grin.
∙ 5 ∙ Mud vortex
Dalana prepared to roll on the mud. The World Voice’s passage left a trail of soft terrain, something to which she developed her own moving style. Colin’s presence, sharing humanity with her, shamed her creativity for the first time in a long while.
“It’s harder to talk if you’re bathing in mud like this. Stand up, please. We can put blocks in our path,” he said, aware of the world’s problems, confident about his strategy.
“I do that sometimes too. When I’m alone, that makes no difference, because I don’t like to rush, and rolling is fun.” She knelt on the mud.
“She is boring, isn’t she? What do you think she wants to put in place of my world, heh? You don’t really want it, do you?” OOOO followed their lead, hopping from one human to the other.
“If there’s one thing you should know about me until now, is that I want it more than anything. Come on, laugh with us, I’m sure you’ll be amused at our attempt,” Colin said.
“Not if she does things her way! Ask her, you see? Dalana, you want Utopia again, don’t you?” OOOO said.
“Yes, another one,” she said.