by Davi Cao
“For one who won’t ever die, old age is still just a blink in time. Why do this to you?”
“I can perish if I want to. Old age can be as long as I wish it to be.” Colin retracted from Dalana's hand, turning his face away.
“You have no reasons to hope for mortality. This pain will fade if you let it go, if you treat it with care and allow it to leave in peace. It’s just a phase, like you told me yourself. Why would you choose to disappear?”
“If you are so sure of that, why does the World Voice affect you, then? Yeah, you talk to me like you’re the wise one, the universe’s Oracle, you and all the other Creators.” Colin stepped to the side, getting some distance from her. “And yet, look at you, running scared from a thing that only talks and nothing else. What does it tell you, huh? What sort of words does it shove into your mind? Tell me, I’m curious to know!”
“It tells me that I am worthless, that life is misery and that I’m trapped. It tells me that nobody cares about my ideas, that my worlds are the most boring of all, that all the others despise me because of that and that not even when I give up on myself I can be of any value to anyone. Here, is that what you want? It makes me sad too, you should know that, very sad.”
“See, you’re not the wisest, the immortal one. You risk dissolution as much as I do, you have as many reasons to die as I have.”
“Yes, I do, I won’t deny it.” Dalana drew herself closer to Colin, caressing his arm with sweeping fingers. “The Voice tells me nobody wants me, it makes me depressed and wishing to disappear from the face of the worlds.”
She held both his shoulders firmly, bringing him near her face. Something missed in her words, some conclusion to her admission of sadness, otherwise she wouldn’t advise him on the purposes of life.
He allowed her handling of his body, he saw darkness closing in on his face, approaching his nose. She was night, night for the first time with pores and ridges and tiny moles, for the first time he could see it, see that she was really just like him.
“And that’s why I need you to be my friend. That’s why I need it so much,” Dalana said, taking him from side to side with the swaying of her spine.
∙ 10 ∙ Bang!
A bang struck the world. An ancient bell trembling, rippling through the universe’s fabric after an even heavier bell’s carcass hit it. Both collided with the violence of pure weight and immaterial metal, they vibrated in all realms of conscience and reached even those who sought secret dimensions to hide their minds.
It shook solids and the mud, cells, and atoms. It impacted the World Voice itself. A loud one, a deafening one, removing hearing from those who carried this sense for at least a few seconds. It shook the soul, arisen from its core.
A loud bang.
Dalana’s conversation with Colin came to a halt. Something grand had happened, putting an abrupt end to their line of thought. Had OOOO done that, it, who dominated the world? Without words, they stared at each other in fright and ran out of the bedroom, both going the same place. Passing many rooms along the big corridor, they looked for the one with the microscope.
“Hey, do you hear me?” Colin tested their senses, studying the nature of their silence.
“Now I can, still a bit low.” Dalana kept her eyes intent on the entrance just a few doors away.
“Can it be the end of this world? Did another Creator find a way to destroy it before we did?”
“Who knows ...” She clenched her jaw, digesting the possibility.
They didn’t have to reach the microscope to find OOOO and Ai.iA. They hurtled in their direction, all going towards the humans’ hall with the round table. Oliver followed them, holding a piece of resisting material, with his mouth opened, barely able to hold his jaw in place. Colin and Dalana stopped running, waiting for the others arrival.
“They found something out, I’m sure!” Ai.iA said, racing through them without ceremony.
“It’s not the end, is it?” OOOO ran over Colin, fitting in with him.
“Maybe it is. We have to see.” Colin put his hand on the creature’s disheveled hair, hopeful of change. “Did you discover anything new?” he said to Oliver, admiring the shiny piece of solid matter in his hand.
“No, nothing. It’s like this thing is not made of matter as we know it. The scientist said it isn’t made of atoms like the ones we had in our world,” Oliver said.
“It isn’t, is it? It’s made of sad atoms!” OOOO said.
“Sad atoms? That’s a stupid name, and it helps us in nothing. What is it for real?” Oliver said.
“That’s how I call them, and that’s how I created them, isn’t it? Sad atoms,” OOOO left Colin’s comfort to challenge its opponent face to face.
“Particles can’t have feelings, they are simple physics manifested in—”
“In my world, they get sad, don’t they? I wanted it, and so it’s done, you see?”
“But you can’t—”
“Shh, don’t try to argue.” Dalana interposed herself against the two of them. “This is not Terra, and if you don’t like the name, call it something else. It won’t change its nature, though. We have to work with what we’ve got, and right now we need to take care,” she said to Oliver.
“Yeah, we have to see the others.” Colin led them, running faster than all.
In the round table’s hall, the humans formed a circle around Amanda. Ai.iA jumped high with her underside rod, unable to break the wall of bodies that kept her from whatever they had in their middle. Nobody greeted the Creator’s arrival, all too focused on their excited talks.
“We’re too small to speak with God, it’s dangerous!” Laura said.
“Dangerous is the world! Do it again, it’s time. Whatever we get from it is better than staying here. Get Earth back, finally!” Charlotte said.
“It’s just noise, so what’s good about it? It won’t bring us any closer to another place. Let’s stay here, at least we’re free. I’m changing my mind,” Mat said.
“It’s new stuff! Good step, right we go, eh?” Zach said.
“Ok, wait, wait, you all! I don’t even remember what I did.” Amanda rose her hands to push everybody back a bit, giving her space to grab something on the table in front of her.
“It was that and this one, I know it pretty well.” Charlotte picked up two of the objects.
“But I just didn’t bang them, I did something else, let me see it.” Amanda took a deep breath and aligned her elbows with her shoulders.
As the Creators approached the group, Amanda held two shiny objects with colored spots unseen before. Those marks showed the same colors of the spilled matter on the table, apparently stuck on them, glued to their surface, unlike the table’s case. Melted matter didn’t stick to anything in that world, too sad to for any bonding. But it stuck on the resisting objects.
Amanda hit the two glossy shapes once. She performed a gentle touch, a scared one, afraid of hearing the big bang again. Her measured strength played a necessary role, though, because she did the same the other time.
She rubbed the yellow disk with a cratered skin on the black stone, starting slowly, twisting one on top of the other and vice-versa. She stopped. With attentive ears, she eyed all around her, warning of incoming danger.
She kept both pieces in contact with each other, getting ready to make the separation. Like a saboteur pulling the wires from a system, she tore the objects apart and felt her body shiver with the bang.
The universal bells of noise and violence struck the world and made all matter tremble with their swing.
Suffering from the impact, deaf for the moment, Colin turned his face around to alleviate his headache. He stopped at Dalana’s face, who held her agony with semiclosed eyes, unable to contain her pain. To communicate with her, he nodded with pressed lips, and she took that for a sign of comfort.
Dalana leaned on his chest, rubbing her face on his shoulders. Cautious with her action, unsure of whether she hugged or kissed him, or simply fell in weakness, he embr
aced her, also needy of consolation. The bang disconcerted his brain.
“Something is here ... What’s that ... Am I not alone? I am the loneliest of all ... The most worthless ... My life is only misery ... Is anybody there?”
The World Voice climbed on the wall, curious to see the other side. Words invaded everybody’s mind, crashing through their temporary deafness, words showing life beyond depression. Ai.iA realized the impact of that discovery more than anybody.
She took the objects from Amanda’s hands, poking the woman’s skin with her thin rods, grabbing the two pieces with the two thicker ones, placing them on the table again. She had no fingers to manipulate them, and sliding them on a surface would have to do it.
By her physical limitations, she couldn’t repeat Amanda’s ritual. She would have to try another set of moves and attempt even better results. Using all the thirteen limbs at her disposal, she dragged the objects in circular patterns over the table, crossing one on the other’s path, painting beautiful motion trails with the speed of her action.
The moves created tension, they increased the gap between silence and noise potentials. Humans, Creators, and creations alike felt their structures shudder, fishing hooks scratching on their skins and surfaces, promising to take their inner selves out when the big moment came.
Laura got frightened and moved her hand over one of the objects, getting hit by Ai.iA’s leg with strength. She jumped from the shock, holding her forearm on her chest, pressing it hard to deal with the pain. Tears formed in her eyes, her face contorted and her mouth opened wide, announcing a cry made worse only by the hooks about to tear her guts.
Dalana knelt down in front of Laura’s broken wrist and crafted a healing lotion to help her. Colin could hear again, greeted by the anguishing voice of human pain. He joined Dalana in taking care of Laura, soon to need as much help as she did.
Ai.iA touched one piece on the other in the middle of their curving trajectories over the table, and the bang that struck the world threatened to break their jaws.
Colin’s teeth begged to be pulled out of his mouth, his eyes rolled down and nearly ripped their muscles, his neck jerked back to dissociate from his spinal cord. The most acute of sounds perforated the world, overcoming the image of colossal bells, becoming a mountain sized knife scratching the walls of a metallic volcano.
He lost his hearing and his vision, entering a dark void that pushed him closer to the World Voice’s experience itself. Lost in darkness, detached from the physical realm, disoriented, immersed in pain and anguish, he wanted someone to save him. Dalana, please come and take me out of this hell ...
Another bang to crush all bones, the colossal knife entering the planet’s titanium core and swinging and twisting its blade to tear it apart, to damage it to fit between walls.
Bang!
The void, the emptiness looming on eternity, giving Colin no hope of ever getting out of that, of wishing for the end and losing hope that he could materialize it. His mind grew into pain and shut down from time to time, taking him thousands of years through time, freezing and unfreezing him as the world around flowed in its pace, or stood still like him and unable to move forwards because of the bang.
Illusions, soul-crushing illusions. His vision returned with his other senses, presenting him a realm of silence. Everybody around him waited for something. They all looked down or up, expecting it, fearing for the Voice, for the unrelenting lament of the saddest of the saddest.
The World Voice didn’t speak. Could it be dead? Could it be that they had defeated it by becoming themselves Voices, by sharing its sensory deprivation and fate, releasing it from its lonely position of miserable wanderer?
“I hear you ... Come to me, please ... I need you ... I heard something ... I am not alone ... I am not alone ... I am not alone!”
OOOO didn’t root for the World Voice, it wasn’t the creature’s child. It created the World Voice to see how many challenges it could withstand before disappearance, a concept played out for fun, to remedy boredom. Or so its Creator believed.
Hearing the Voice behaving outside its intended sadness, OOOO hopped overjoyed in the room. Its creation overcame its original expectations, rising in the glory of autonomy. And nothing excited Creators more than autonomy.
When the World Voice spoke of another presence, when it perceived the loud bang that invaded every cell’s core, it turned into an even more fascinating entity. They could reach it, after all, despite all the layers of defense OOOO had crafted for it. Something as simple as noise, and yet so powerful for a receiver that lacked everything.
OOOO fixed its eyes in the infinite above it, pretending to see the great pillar of light coming from outer space and crushing into land. Its creation lived, and it responded to stimuli.
OOOO hopped on the table where Ai.iA still waited for her conscience’s return. It took the resistant objects from her tiny rods, throwing them in the air and keeping them up by careful juggling. Its clumsy legs couldn’t handle fine details, but it learned to use them to perform incredible acts. Playing a clown’s role, OOOO invented another ritual to the talking pieces, making them fly and risk collision at every throw.
“Wait, not now, put them down, please,” Oliver said, recovering from the dark abyss of pain.
“It is my child, isn’t it? I need to talk to it! I need to show that we are here,” OOOO said with a voice unlike its own, grave and echoing.
“It’s torturing it ... It’s only trying to make the Voice suffer,” Dalana said, reading through OOOO’s unusual intonation.
“Family meeting, like humans do, isn’t it?” OOOO juggled the objects higher up, giving its words the boldness of a creeper.
One piece hit the other and their clash struck everybody’s minds, a hammer piercing thin wood. Colin took the brunt of the collision with fear, although his vision and hearing remained safe after impact. OOOO’s ritual seemed to produce less power than Ai.iA’s.
As the objects spun in the air, they generated waves of tension that troubled everybody’s expectations, making them wonder when the next strike would come, when they would have to close their eyes and seize their beloved ones to go through the bang intact.
“Who are you ... What is happening here ... Oh, please, please, oh, please, I need more than this ... I am so alone ... I don’t know how to talk to you ...”
The World Voice cried with hope. The whole world felt it by the way things stopped melting down. It stayed fixed in place while the weight on their structure interacted with the noise penetrating its dimension. For sentient and nonsentient beings alike, the pause in sadness relieved their flogged backs, lifting them from a bottomless pit and putting them on a tightrope.
“Stop that, give it a break, you’ll only confuse it.’ Dalana got up to put an end to OOOO’s dangerous juggling.
“It is funny, it wants to find me, doesn’t it? We can have fun with it, we can’t know where this is going, you see?” OOOO took wide strides away from Dalana to continue its game.
“You’re not doing this right! It must be stronger, to make it hurt on the Voice.” Ai.iA hopped towards it faster than any human could do.
She jumped on OOOO and forced it to drop the objects on the floor, from where she regained control of the situation. At OOOO’s insistence, she punched its body and kept it away. Colin watched them without taking sides, seeing a dog protect its bone. The attacker, in that case, had pointy teeth and admitted defeat with a big smile.
Being the group’s self-appointed leader, or the only one to care for that concept in the lab, Ai.iA threw the objects back on the table and extended her side rods, aiming one at every person in the room.
She jumped back to her canvas, the table, where she would experiment new ways of entering the World Voice’s realm. War, with or without human help, would ravage the world and make it hers, at all costs.
She put her whole self in the task of dragging the objects and colliding them. New trails came up with the vibrations emanated by
her handling of them, each new step echoing a giant’s step. The house trembled, the people feared.
Although scared, they waited for the strikes, wishing for a better place, willing to pay the price. Tension and vibration became music to Colin’s ears, recognizing in Ai.iA’s motion brief melodies that formed and faded at the same time.
“That’s beautiful.” He spoke out loud without noticing.
“And also, terrible,” Dalana said by his side, spreading her arms straight down. “Will it bring us any good?”
“Does beauty have to?”
“If it doesn’t, why are we attracted to it?”
Bang. And bang, and bang. Ai.iA found a loop in which the objects hit each other at the central point of an eight-shape path, and she repeated it for as long as she kept control of her body. Those powerful bangs incorporated colossal bells, powerful, mind-numbing, but weaker than before. Awareness survived. All things suffered through the noise and watched the world around them shudder with their senses intact.
“Someone is there ... I know, I can feel it ... Will you be my friend? Please, I am here alone. I need someone to talk to. Something to make existence worthy. Can you be the one? Where are you? I hear your presence. You will hate me, I know. I have nothing good to offer. But hate me, don’t be afraid. It is better than being alone. Be my enemy, come try to destroy me. Anything! Or love me. Or talk to me. Anything! Speak, don’t stop, I beg you ...”
Dalana’s tears rolled down her cheeks, human, crying by Colin’s side. She pressed her eyes shut, her face disappeared in absolute blackness, struggling to keep her mouth from opening. She sobbed, showing through quick snapping sounds what her dark face concealed from others.
The other humans twitched their lips and eyelids, all holding their pain. The World Voice’s lament spoke of truth. Following Dalana’s example, who leaned on Colin’s shoulder, Amanda did the same on Oliver, by her side, and so did all the others.
They cried in unison, willing to help that poor, sad being, locked in a state so similar to theirs. They all rummaged in a universal desert, surviving in a land that refused their presence, a sentient being depressed by the Voice. At least they had each other, unlike the World Voice.