by Davi Cao
Laura left Dalana’s back, relieved at Ai.iA’s departure. She approached OOOO to comfort it with a gentle caress on its neck’s loosened flesh. Her face glowed in a pure smile, an angelical expression of one ready to forgive, incapable of wishing evil to those ignorant of evil.
“Would you give up on your world for us? We can be happy with you in a better place,” she said, stroking OOOO’s body.
“No ... It’s not about good or bad, is it? It’s about—” it began to say.
Ai.iA showed up in the entrance, her reddened, blocky figure floating in the air with the frenetic punches of her bottom rod. OOOO got out of Colin’s lap to face her with legs fully stretched, an ornate column aware of danger. She got closer to Dalana without rush, hovering in the air by an invisible rod. Mat left Dalana’s back to grab Colin by the arm and pull him in to the group, seeking better defenses.
“How bad do you want this world to end?” Ai.iA asked.
“I want to destroy it right now, if we can do this, and I’m willing to help you with anything to get that,” Colin said first.
“Anything?”
“Anything!”
“Good,” Ai.iA said, turning her top head to face Dalana. “And you?”
“You know what I want. Nothing in here was capable of proving me wrong,” Dalana said.
“Another Utopia?” Ai.iA said in a dry tone.
Dalana nodded, looking down, ashamed of facing her or OOOO, who so despised her worlds.
“Fine,” Ai.iA said.
“You should learn to appreciate this place, shouldn’t—” OOOO tried to say.
“Not you!” She made it lose balance and open its legs to avoid tumbling on the floor. “I know of a way of destroying your world.”
Amanda took the courage to cross Dalana’s line of defense to analyze Ai.iA’s stance with a closer look. Since the beginning, at the round table, Ai.iA had never taken the initiative of having a new idea. All research into that world’s intricacies resulted either from the humans’ ingenuity or from Dalana’s insights.
“Did you meet anybody on the surface world?” Amanda said.
“No, I didn’t even get to the door. The answer is obvious, and I couldn’t notice it because we were too entrenched in those objects.”
“So, what is it?” Colin said, excited about the prospect of a new world, after all that hell.
OOOO tried to hold its smile, it shook its teeth to avoid expressing the curiosity that dominated its mind and didn’t allow for any resentment. It aimed its goggled eyes at her, as willing as all others to hear her new idea of how to put an end to its world.
“OOOO, it’s either you or me. I’ll go to the pillar outside, I’ll put myself under its power, and I’ll let myself die because of it. Whatever it makes me suffer, I’ll accept it and let it bring my disappearance. I’ll be killed by your creation, and you’ll have to live forever knowing that you murdered a Creator. Can you live with that guilt? Can you exist in peace knowing that you made your own existence poorer because of your stubbornness? If you can, then goodbye, you’ll never see me again. If you can’t, then give up this world. It’s your decision.”
OOOO trembled from head to feet, spinning its head, doing its best to get to Colin’s lap again. Out of spatial reference, however, because its pupils also spun out of its control, it wandered the room in drunkard steps. Nobody spoke, all waiting for its answer.
∙ 18 ∙ Standstill
Ai.iA’s threat hit the right strings. OOOO’s reaction obscured everybody’s thoughts, keeping them at bay, expecting the yes or no, while it leaned on walls spinning its head, trying to find someone to accept its body weight.
Wandering with faulty strides, OOOO managed to control its head and eyes, and took one long stare at Ai.iA. Then everything disappeared all of a sudden, obscured by a thick slime that filled the entire room.
The church disappeared, and as Colin realized that he couldn’t move his limbs without facing a strong drag, he imagined a way of getting out of that mess. His body tickled with matter penetrating his clothes and forcing entrance through his skin pores, his mind pictured the humans trapped in there, unable to breathe.
An urgent call from his imagination materialized an eater to engulf the slime around him. The creature moved slowly, though, because the things it ate invigorated themselves and kept coming in a deluge of gray ooze.
Before he could think of a plan B, he fell to the floor, freed from the surrounding matter. Dalana had found a way of releasing them from the trap, she who already ran towards the humans to check their vital signs. They moaned and crawled on the floor, spitting odorless ooze, scared above all, having lost some air.
OOOO, giving no signs of guilt, hopped inside the circle of chairs, around the extinguished flames over the dead flowerbed. Ai.iA yelled at it, demanding an answer, but her voice took the shape of colored rays that hit the walls and the floor and bounced and multiplied themselves once they struck anything.
OOOO bathed in those rays, jumping with the help of only two feet, delicate, elegant like a ballerina, or with all the might of its self-propulsion, getting fast to the ceiling between the colors and angled shapes of Ai.iA’s reprimand made visual.
She yelled again and stopped midway, because the rays of red and yellow coming out of her heads bounced at the wall and created a mist of intertwined lines in which OOOO jumped and faded the more those rays multiplied.
At every shout, they became lost in a room of colors, where barriers became blurred, where even Colin’s touch on Dalana’s arm, groping the air to find his friends, gave birth to that kind of visual sound, which trailed through the void and remained traced in the air forever.
“Where are you ... You disappeared ... Don’t do this to me ... Say something, please, tell me how stupid and needy I am ... It is the truth and it still hurts ... And it is better than not saying, for both you and me ...”
The room’s interior saturated in a burst of rays, multiplied exponentially by the World Voice’s presence. They grew so fast that OOOO thought it got blind and, out of fright, created anti-visual silence.
It cleaned the air in a sweep of its power. Standing on the floor, the Creator looked at the company it still had, and began to imagine another way of running away from the answer without lying.
“Do you want me dead by your creation? Or do you want me alive?” Ai.iA said, insisting on her threat.
“You shouldn’t disappear, should you? No, it will be a big loss, we will miss your potential. Don’t die, Ai.iA, don’t let the World Voice take you down, you see?” OOOO said.
“That’s not a choice anymore. I want you to tell me exactly what I must do.”
“Don’t disappear. That’s what you must do!”
“Do I die because of your world, or do I live to see another world? You have these only two options, don’t play the fool. Say it, I want to hear it coming out of you, say what you want me to do.”
OOOO’s head spun a full three-sixty degrees around its neck, now facing everybody with its goggled eyes, now hiding its face behind clumped hair. It pained Colin to see his friend cornered between two tough choices, both meaning serious losses to it, but he hoped that the threat would work.
“I will answer you, won’t I? Not in this room. In another one, you see?” OOOO fixed its head in place to speak with Ai.iA.
“Which one?” Ai.iA gave him a calm reply, accepting its proposal.
It hopped past her, into the corridor, wandering to the rooms further away from the lab and the church. Ai.iA went right behind, followed by Colin, Dalana, and the humans, who didn’t dare staying alone anymore, risking death by countless means while those two distressed Creators negotiated the end of everything.
When OOOO chose an empty room, the size of a squash court, Colin’s mind anticipated joy. He rushed to the room, hoping to be there in time to hear from the creature’s own mouth the final words of their fate.
“Not this room, no, it’s not good, is it?” it said, hopping
to the opposite wall of the room, and then getting back towards the entrance.
Ai.iA tried to protest, to no avail, as OOOO left again to the corridor and walked ahead with its spinning head analyzing each door passing left and right. Laura stopped, letting the group gain distance from her, considering that dilemma’s uselessness. Whatever the outcome, them humans had little to get from any new world not made for them.
Laura got back to church, where she found the resistant objects brought back from the surface after Angeline’s death. She prayed alone, hearing the World Voice’s constant whisper who so wanted to get some company, who wanted an end to its lonely existence. They shared the same prison, locked in a bad world.
She had to speak with it and tell that people suffered its pain and wished it well. Laura rubbed the stones with her hands, spun one in front of the other, and then hit them with a gentle touch, wishing for the best.
The noise entered the World Voice’s dimension, it talked again with it. A weak bang, not enough to spread pain throughout the land, but bang everybody heard.
Colin noticed Laura missing from the group following OOOO from room to room. He made the connections, poked Dalana’s back, and asked, “Did you see Laura?”
“You are there! Oh, please ... oh, please, I beg you, come to me ... Save me from this void ... think of me and tell me so, either love or hate, or indifference or annoyance ... I want you now ... I want you here with me ... embrace me, let me feel you somehow ...”
On listening to the Voice’s desperation, Mat embraced Charlotte. Zach looked at Amanda with pitiful eyes and she shook her head with opened arms to hug him. Their clothes found new fabric and liked the feel of it, exchanging molecules and creating new bonds, curious about those new presences. That layer of blended fabric also met the skin of the new presence, also very interested in it, willing to engage in its softness.
The humans balanced themselves and moved their arms slightly, finding them attached to their partners, ripping their clothes and skin, getting rashes that burned the more they stayed in their loving embraces.
Dalana resisted the impulse of reaching out for other people, aware of the danger under those circumstances. She distracted her thoughts by trying to separate Zach from Amanda and Mat from Charlotte, before they got hurt badly.
Colin considered recreating Angeline, his love, the presence he wanted more than most, just to have a chance to hug her and be with a best friend. The image of her exploding body, though, and her conspiring behavior, made him disgusted with himself. How could he think of doing that to a living person? OOOO’s reign had to end, and to that, he needed to help Ai.iA.
“I offer myself to die too,” he said, cutting Ai.iA’s repetition of her threat. “I’ll go with you to the pillar and let it do what it might with myself. If it makes me disappear, I’ll allow it. You’re not alone, Ai.iA. It’s either a new world or the death of two Creators. Your choice, OOOO.”
“No, no, no, no ... Please, no, not you, don’t disappear, you can’t go, none of you, don’t do that, you see? I’m a good friend, am I not? Why do you do this to me?” OOOO said, jumping, and spinning around itself.
Charlotte, Zach, Amanda, and Mat made of Dalana the center of their world. They hugged her to blend their personalities in one sole entity, reacting in unison under circumstances that reduced them to the specter of Terra’s humankind. The specter wanted a new presence, a new world, and it feared losing their gods.
Their touch mingled with Dalana’s dress, beginning their slow process of blending with her, tearing their fingertips off, leaving them in live flesh. They lived in pain in that world, and their fate lay in the hands of others. If Colin and Ai.iA were to die, what a nightmare to imagine them delivered to the monster of OOOO! Thus, they grabbed Dalana’s body, holding on to their cradle of life.
“I admire your decision, you are wise like me,” Ai.iA said to Colin. “You see that it’s playing the hard game. I won’t leave until it gives me an answer.”
“If our threat is real, we must not wait for an answer. We just go up there and let the pillar take us. If OOOO doesn’t like it, it is the one who must act.” Colin drew his brows tight together.
“But I want to hear it saying that it wants us dead. I want it!”
“Ok, then let’s give it an ultimatum.” Colin turned his face to the jumping Creator with the spinning head. “OOOO, you have one hour to answer us.”
OOOO stopped, and it smiled. It had an answer to that.
“What is an hour? We have no sun in here, do we? How do we measure time?” it said, puzzling Colin.
“I see what you’re doing. Never mind, look at it here.” Colin created a human-sized hourglass in the room’s corner. “When the sand gets to the bottom, your time is up and we’ll go to the surface to die.”
“How will the sand get to the bottom if it’s not falling?” OOOO grinned, watching the dust clumping, blocking the hole, and blending with the glass itself to become one with the new presences all around.
“No problem, here it goes.” Colin created a digital clock protected by an alloy of several different substances that could distract matter until enough time passed.
“It’s not ticking, is it?” OOOO looked at the numbers that seemed to flick between past, present and future.
“Ok then, I’m going to count to ten-thousand. When I get to the end—” Colin insisted, interrupted by Laura’s arrival at the entrance.
She brought the resistant objects in her hands, holding them casually, with the face of bliss. She took one step in the room, keeping herself at the door, ready to leave.
“I miss you in our church. Zach, you who like to sing so much, come sing us a prayer. It will make us at peace. Our place is among ourselves, not between these others.”
“Laura, please, this is not the time—” Colin said, raising her an opened palm.
“Every time is the right time for communion. I want you all with me, all of you, my dear ones.”
“They are going to die! They are going to offer sacrifice!” Charlotte yelled to her from behind Dalana.
“So will we. We belong to the one true Creator. Our sacrifice is love,” Laura said, drooping her eyelids.
“It is true, isn’t it?” OOOO hopped in front of Laura, smiling at her with its lips wide. “You love everything, don’t you? You would sacrifice yourself to save others, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes ... Yes, I would,” Laura said, fearful, and somehow attracted, to the presence near her.
“Don’t let Colin and Ai.iA die, then. Offer yourself in their place! Let the World Voice meet you in heaven,” OOOO said. “It will consume you and purify this world, won’t it? Isn’t that what you believe?”
“I’m not sure. Will Colin die because of me too?”
“He says so, but it’s bad, isn’t it, to let others die because of you? You should be the one to offer the sacrifice, you see?”
“You speak of wisdom, although it’s strange ... I want to—” Laura muttered, lost in the idea of martyrdom.
“Stop! Laura, you don’t have to do this. We are the ones who can save you, not the other way around,” Dalana said, putting herself between OOOO and Laura. “I’ll go up there and let myself be killed too, with Ai.iA and Colin. I don’t want to exist in a realm where Creators die like this. I’d rather go with them. OOOO, you have to make a decision.”
∙ 19 ∙ The board of immortals
“We’re in this for real,” Colin said to Dalana, frowning at her.
“So am I. I wish I didn’t have to, I wish I could just project us all a better world and live in bliss for an eternity. I wish for it, but it doesn’t happen. This world has to go. And if it takes your existence away, then why should I stay?” Dalana hit her own chest with one closed fist.
“We hardly know each other,” he said, touched by her words. “You can deal with our loss, I’m sure you can.”
“No, I can’t. And I won’t. I’m going with you.”
OOOO jumped bet
ween them, breaking their gaze. It drove their attention to its hopping legs, bending the overall mood towards silliness. Spinning its head nonstop, OOOO caught Colin on its head and raised him, taking him out to the corridor. Colin cut himself loose from his kidnapper and got back to the room.
“You are Creators, you can all do interesting things anywhere, can’t you? Look at this house, so many things happened in here! Together, meeting new ones, playing with creations, isn’t this fun?” OOOO reentered the place, pleading with them.
Laura, behind the line of Creators, caressed Mat’s arm, pushing the others together. She enjoyed the feeling of his skin, her whole body craved for contact with new presences, for the comfort of new beings, of any extraneous company lying around in her world. Like the World Voice, she urged for it.
But she lived in a world where matter needed no brain to have conscience, where her skin cells displayed the same agency as the institution of her mind did, where things suffered what the World Voice did. Laura’s hands started to blend with the muscles in Mat and Charlotte’s arms, enjoying the feeling of intersection and utmost communion.
They didn’t scream, they didn’t complain. Their bodies wanted that, ignorant of the danger involved in their dissolution. Colin, noticing the human’s doing, pushed Laura away from the others, tearing their blended skins without mercy.
“I’ll take you to church. Come on, you can pray there and be together while we take care of the issues in here. Don’t touch each other, please, see those rashes in your skin. It will only get worse of you don’t resist the Voice,” he said, resisting himself the tempting smell of their sweat.
Charlotte followed him with a hand on his shoulder, which he gently dismissed. To encourage her to keep on their path, he looked at her with a warm smile, muttering “It will be nice in there, at peace.”
The group entered the small church and sat down on the resistant chairs after Colin herded them. Left on their own, they’d hug each other and never leave.