by Davi Cao
“This is all illusory ... I exist in the void, in silence ... You are there, I know you are ... Even so, I am afraid, because I’ll lose you and then I’ll be back ...”
A black dot in the horizon watched him: Dalana, the one who wanted to help. She worried more than anybody, the one who rolled on the drums to fight for self-control, for not going to his rescue and sacrificing herself under the pillar. OOOO watched Colin’s standstill with confidence, Ai.iA punched the drum at maximum speed with her underside rod.
Colin thought about Dalana, who wanted him cherished in an Utopia, a world better than Terra, distant from Terra. He’d find one such person at every billion others, and who had ever promised him so much? Angeline, and only maybe.
Words penetrated his guts and tore his heart, giving him dirty sadness, impure blues. Distress, the hope of a new presence, and yet the certainty of his inadequacy. He could find an angel, and yet he would prefer the life among murderers, only to live the life that he knew. His old-time dreams floated in his mind as the Voice ravaged the world.
“You can’t love a worthless being like me ... You can’t even like me ... You’re just playing with me ... It’s silent again, it was just out of my imagination, or a joke, or anything else ... I don’t deserve any good ...”
He would never have Terra again, because he would never find Mae. Dalana and OOOO, his friends, they waited for him, and Dalana was human like him, she hated pain. They would create things together, they would protect the surviving humans, they would make a new world, one so different and grand that he would forget about Terra.
How wrong, to forget about Terra, to let go of all those people who died an unfair death, who still had so much to offer, who deserved so much more satisfaction than what they were allowed to have. He had to get them back, to recreate their world, exactly like it used to be.
But Dalana...
Colin collapsed on the mud, sinking his head in the ground. Divided between hope and fear, every part of his body wanted to go separate ways, and so they shut him down.
∙ 9 ∙ Friendship
“Take us there, now, you have to drive this thing to the pillar!” Dalana shouted.
“It will melt if we get closer, won’t it? And nothing we craft will resist much,” OOOO said.
“He’s down, he’s fallen in the mud, he’ll die this way!”
“We must ... We should ... we?” OOOO jumped thrice in a row, looping its head spin, its eyes turning around in its sockets.
Dalana despaired by OOOO’s breakdown and Ai.iA’s stoic expectation, losing Colin’s body from sight as the World Voice’s colossal column engulfed him. Something had changed.
“You are here ... I am not alone ... Come to me, I need to meet you ...”
After Colin fell down, new sentences invaded their minds, the World Voice speaking of a new presence. Dalana feared it, she had wondered about their experiment’s outcome: if they messed with the Voice, would they walk on a better path? She jumped from her drum.
Expecting to fall on the melting ground, she dropped again on the vehicle. Her jump went backwards with the hovercraft moving fast ahead, propelled by Ai.iA’s incessant drumming, catching her up. Ai.iA hopped on her rod, punching the instruments’ surface with fury, making them flee from that dangerous area, the most dangerous of all. OOOO’s head kept spinning, unable to decide, torn in half, like Colin himself under the World Voice.
The hovercraft started to melt down when the great pillar took up half the sky. It dripped and met its terrible fate, opening up to the torture that awaited it in contact with the ground. Nothing could be worse than the anguish it felt in the vacuum.
“I am dying in here ... Rescue me ... I am a big pile of trash, worthless ... Give me something, anything ... Spit on me, crush me, anything ...”
The Creators fell down and rolled in the mud. That close to danger, they had to make a decision, either fleeing or going all the way. Dalana ran towards Colin’s body without considering second thoughts, but Ai.iA went ahead, much faster than she could hope to go.
Dalana heard the Voice’s words crushing her self-esteem, and yet she kept on running, afraid that she would have to rescue two instead of one, with Ai.iA darting faster than her, more sensible than her. Dalana resented OOOO for not helping her out.
Staggering on confused ground, Ai.iA stretched all her ten side rods, using them as balancing aides. She moved too fast and focused too much on the resisting materials in Colin’s hands to feel the Voice’s true power. Thus, she reached his body in no time, jumping high to give the impression of flying.
To pick him up, she stretched her thicker arms in the middle of her heads, and threw the black and yellow rugged solids on Colin’s lap with her side rods. She stepped towards Dalana and instead went sideways, lost, confused, because the universe’s violence struck her full.
“I hate it ... I despise you and whoever denies me ... You give me no chance, you only play with me ... You don’t exist, and I don’t exist too ... When will this illusion be over ...”
Dalana’s coming guided her, though, and pointed to the right direction. Ai.iA punched the ground with delicacy, carrying weight, changing tactics to avoid sinking in the soft mud. At every jump, she monitored the solid materials’ integrity, overjoyed at having them under the pillar itself and as rigid as ever. They were gold, they were reason enough to save and be saved. Hopping with the speed of a racing car, Ai.iA stopped only to pick up Dalana, putting her over Colin.
“Grab the objects! Don’t let them fall!” she yelled, struggling to keep pace with the extra load.
“What about him, we must see if he’s alright!” Dalana turned herself over Colin's body to accommodate both better.
“We’ll only find that out away from here.” Ai.iA sank her rod so deep in mud that her movement stopped and she tripped.
They flew over the land, their bodies bending and contorting themselves at every tumble, ragged dolls abandoned to gravity. Dalana held the resisting objects while she tried not to lose her grip on Colin himself, hoping that the impact wouldn’t make him give up on the life of Creators.
Before touchdown, OOOO captured all with its legs, hopping fast in the air to intercept them. Ai.iA followed behind, with heads intent on Dalana’s hands. Racing through the distressed land, Dalana held her arms up to show Ai.iA the intact solids. She hugged Colin and whispered soothing words in his ear.
On a newly recreated drumming hovercraft, Colin awoke. He nodded when the others asked him if everything was fine, if existence still made sense. He still valued life, whatever it meant in the case of immortality, they could rest assured of that.
Dalana patted his head, he blinked at every hit. So close to the complete darkness of her skin, he looked for pores, fur, scratches, or birthmarks, finding a black so deep as the darkest of nights. The image of a starry sky, the stars being her eyes, outer space her warm skin, the rising sun her yellow dress, he sensed the birth of poetry.
They crossed the tunnel to the lab in silence, forming a line of scared walkers. The World Voice had resumed its traditional lament.
“I am so alone ... Nothing I do will ever do any good ... I can’t even talk right, I can’t do anything right ... I give up, I just ... I give up ...”
“I am a coward ... am I not?” OOOO spun its head slowly.
“I can’t think for myself ... I’m taking objects so that others do the thinking, not me. I’m useless.” Ai.iA punched the ground and let her full weight impact the ground.
“I want to help everybody ... But nobody wants the same. Nobody wants me ...” Dalana stopped at every step to look down.
Each greeted with relief the big round table surrounded by humans. They murmured their inner troubles in a walking meditation, arriving at the lab with heavy minds. Colin remained quiet, still shaken by his confrontation with the Voice, shocked by the change in its tone and the danger he’d risked.
Dalana and OOOO led Colin to a room in the corridor, where she created a b
ed made of soft nails with round tips, the fashion in one of her worlds. OOOO crafted a replica of Colin’s old room in the remaining space, doing its best to comfort both him and itself. They would rest in there for a while, the two friends, remembering the greatness of a Creator’s life.
Ai.iA hopped on the big round table at her arrival and dropped the new precious objects in front of Oliver and Amanda. The others came closer, admiring the mysterious shine of those glossy, and yet rugged, surfaces. They touched it, they felt the power of extraneous matter, certain that they held no more reference to Terra’s nature.
“Invulnerable material! We’ve found it! What can you do with them?” Ai.iA stretched her thicker limbs to the sides, waiting for action.
“What do you think, Zach? Ever seen anything like this?” Oliver said.
“In my life, I dealt with all sorts of crazy stuff, but I doubt anything I’d ever seen would come close to it. It’s kinda like plastic, ain’t it? Heavy, though.” Zach weighted one stone in his palm.
“I don’t remember collecting anything in this tone of yellow. Reminds me of a kind of orange I used to sell in my stores.” Charlotte handled a curved disk with a cratered surface.
“We can try to make them react with each other. That’s how we do science, right?” Amanda sided with Oliver, picking up another piece.
“It could react with anything, anything at all, let’s not forget the things yet to be separated.” Mat lifted a bucket of collected stuff on the table.
“Alright, first, why don’t we analyze their properties in the chemical baths? Ai.iA, can you create us another scientist to help with that?” Oliver picked up one of the objects and went to the opened corridor.
Ai.iA hopped ahead of him, following his suggestion, eager to put her powers at use. Amanda stayed in the room, pressing, and twisting her thumb on one of the three objects left with them. Touching it produced therapeutic feelings, sending waves of pleasure to her hands, arms, and chest. Something special lay in that thing, revealing its presence little by little.
“Do it with me,” she said to Zach. “Press your thumb, yes, here, gentle, and now harder. Push it on three. One, two, three. There you go.” She giggled, amused at the ripples of satisfaction running in her veins.
“Hey, if we do more of this, we might not need to do anything else.” Zach smirked at her. “This is way too good to be true.”
Laura blushed with her friends’ insinuations, hiding her face between raised shoulders at the table. She picked up the remaining two objects and hit them together. Her strength increased at every hit, closing her eyes in anticipation to an eventual flash of light, hoping to blind them all and stop all that naughty nonsense. It didn’t happen. She rubbed one against the other, hearing a low sound of attrition.
“You guys should focus here. You’re getting weird, and I’m not comfortable with your touching,” Laura said to Amanda and Zach, looking down.
Amanda swallowed dry, squeezed her eyes, and grabbed an untested object from their yet-to-select pile. She used it as a hammer on the resisting object she had at hand. The untested thing melted in contact with the glossy material, spilling violently over her clothes. Zach, Charlotte, and Mat chose other objects and began a new series of trials.
Colin’s bedroom had music, although not what he would call so. It was the sound of Dalana’s worlds, a monotonous blowing of distant whispers. They soothed him by giving the impression of a multitude of people praying for him, taking loneliness away.
OOOO recovered by his side, energized enough to hop around again, and pretend to be cooking something to help his friend in getting back to life. It heard the music’s tiny voices and nodded in agreement, pretending to understand them. To it, truth required respect, the essential aspect of fitting in, and to be one with all things, he could have truth by showing respect.
From the small oven that burned without fire, OOOO prepared milk pudding and offered it to both Colin and Dalana, he lying on his bed, she sat by his side. None of them showed excitement in front of food, not needing any of it, but they took it out of sympathy for the creature’s efforts at comforting them. It hopped and banged on the walls,
“Good for mind health, isn’t it? Yes, yes, it calms down, it brings happiness, you see?” OOOO rambled, spinning its head and eyes. Nothing suited it better for the occasion than playing the housewife.
A shout clanged in the lab, a loud one, a painful one. Someone took a hit. Dalana stood up, attentive to noises. She turned back to Colin and pushed him down, placing a hand on his forehead, above his startled eyes. A person screamed again, the voice of a man.
“I’ll see what’s going on. Stay here and talk to OOOO. It will remind you again of how nice it is to exist,” she said, leaving the room.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” OOOO tickled Colin with one of its legs.
“Hey, hey, stop that.” Colin laughed at the creature’s smiley face, trying to disengage from its tickling limb.
“You are well, you are recovered, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am well.”
“Then we can leave this place and get back to the others, can’t we?” It disentangled from Colin, getting back on the floor.
“I guess so. You can go there, if you want. Right now, I see no point in doing so.”
“I thought you liked to be with the other humans.” OOOO squatted to stare at Colin face to face.
“They’re good people, and I’ll go see them again later. What’s the rush?”
“Then we should do something in here, shouldn’t we?”
“Why?”
“To not get bored! I’m bored. I want to see things, or create things, you see?”
“Go there, watch them, follow Dalana. No one is stopping you.”
“I want to see what you do, don’t I? Do something!”
Colin put his hands on the back of his skull, looking up to the ceiling. The room resisted intact, signs of melt down showing up only at the corners and at some objects’ edges. When he thought about the still alive humans who resisted a sadness so pervasive that it didn’t even spare inorganic matter, his mind went far.
“Ok, do you know what I’d like to do?” he said, seeing OOOO nod at his every word. “To have Angeline again. Maybe she could survive in this house, like the other humans.”
“So, make her!”
“No, it’s better not. She might get lost among them.”
“Then I’ll do it better than you, will I not?” OOOO turned its head to the opposite side.
It crafted a human being in their room, a woman with a face very alike Angeline’s, black wavy hair, white, spotted skin, thick, dark eyebrows. But her body was bulkier than the strongest of men, her feet glowed with the shine of resisting materials rescued from the World Voice, and her palms were swollen balls of flesh with tiny fingers attached to their sides. That grotesque vision pierced Colin’s heart, his beloved one deformed by OOOO’s reckless creation. Her first spoken words crushed him.
“World ballerina fit in fit in and off I go with you with you,” she said with a silly grimace.
At her command, OOOO hopped in front of her and jumped in place, supporting itself on her shoulders. She tried to jump with it, giggling at her failure, for she could hardly lift her heavy feet from the floor. Thus, she swung her hips and made waves with the line of her spine.
“They were just testing the—” Dalana began to say, entering Colin’s bedroom.
OOOO jumped with the new human, a massive body with the head of a delicate woman, both overjoyed at their play. Colin raised from the bed, shaking his head, holding hands over his chest, looking at the floor. Dalana walked closer to Angeline, admired her face, and turned back to Colin, who twitched his eyes.
“Do you need help?” Dalana then asked Angeline, placing a warm palm on her cheek.
The grotesque woman nodded in quick spasms, babbling grave sounds that gave no indication of actual words. She collapsed on the floor and melted down, leaving Dalana’s hand
in the air, guilty of bringing death.
OOOO, smiling at its creation’s dissolution, continued its joyful display. It hopped in front of Dalana and jumped with two legs propped on her shoulders. She stood still, black in fullness, her eyes closed, her mouth shut. OOOO stopped.
She reopened her eyes, looked at Colin and swung her spine from side to side with OOOO’s legs slipping to her neck. Dalana raised one hand, spread her fingers wide, and then waved them at Colin. He stepped back, instead of getting closer to her. She patted OOOO’s leg.
“Can you leave us alone for a while? Go find Ai.iA. She’s at the microscope down the corridor, doing interesting things,” she said to it.
“You don’t want me now ... Do you?” OOOO lost its smile, turning its head to Colin and her.
“No, not now,” she said. “But later we’ll be together again, and you’ll tell me everything new that you learned, ok?”
“Ok! We’ll be back later, won’t we?” It hopped out of the room, keeping its eyes aimed at them.
Dalana balanced herself in her slow walk, risking a fall at every step, standing in front of Colin with busy eyes. Reading him, she saw hope. She raised her hand and placed her palm on his cheek, feeling the thin fur of his shaved face, the round scars of swollen pores and old-time pimples. That hand could cause no destruction on him, she could entice no threat, no danger. She could only confuse him, still hardly aware of that.
“If ... If I, hm ... If I bring Angeline to this world, to ... To this room, to live with us, err ... Do you think she would survive with the others?” Colin stuttered with those soft fingers on his face.
“She may survive if we treat her with care and teach her how to fight the Voice and give her hope. But she will die later, and you won’t.” Dalana fixed her eyes on his.
“If she dies of old age ... that will be fair. She deserves that.”