Proud Infinity (VayneLine)

by E. A. Szabelski

  “The physical plane is really amazing you know that?” Her crouched form was bent over to a small flower growing out of a crack. She smelled it, then jumped out of her crouch and trotted over to me with her hands laced behind her back. “We view it as perhaps the biggest irony that those inhabiting this plane tend to not fully enjoy its pleasures or its extra joy.” She kept her hand behind her back as she leaned on the balls of her feet next to the fence and was humming something.

  “It’s probably natural, it’s all we have known. We don’t know what we are missing, or how much we have.”

  “It’s not all you have known, but your point is close enough.”

  “Careful.” I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back from the thin fence separating her from the massive fall. “I’d hate to see ‘God’ take an early exit out of here. So evidently you can influence reality as you dropped that guy’s screen, and you are quite destructive if you want to be, so why don’t you just fly in there and rock out whatever is creating this fracture and everything will be okay?” This seemed like a pretty logical flaw in her whole story.

  As usual her excuse was ready. “The magnitude of the reality effect is proportional to the energy required. I am strong, but not that strong. Crashing that display machine was easy; its impact was small as only two were actual witnesses to it, and its overall impact to true reality is minor. And actually the wall was even easier. That male did not notice it, and to you it does not matter especially given the end to this thread we are rapidly hurtling towards. But I cannot bring about massive changes to reality that will persist down through time. Not alone anyway.”

  I played along a little, but it was only a little. I actually started wondering if this crazy girl and her crazy story might be real.

  “Okay, so I understand that I think. By stopping this, while the actual action of stopping it might be small, you are somehow bound by something that is related to the magnitude of its impact that it ‘persists through time’. So since this is infinitely important given that the universe gets wiped out, it cannot be done by you?”

  “You are quite adept at piecing this together Tre.”

  ‘Damn, talk about Chrono pathways, if this is true. We really were onto something in my old research…’ In my own mind the various theories of time and ‘threads’ of intersecting time lines began to take on a much more real manifestation.

  I bent down, grabbing a rock, then pitched it over the fence as it fell down and down. “But why could I stop this then? I mean you are a shape-shifting girl who can blow walls down, I’m a chump with a gun.”

  A deep grin took over her. “I thought you were at least an ‘advanced chump’!”

  I froze. “How did you know that?”

  Her smile was good-natured. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Would you believe me that something dumb like that made me believe you way more?”

  “Our harmonic rate is finally increasing! Anyway, what you have is the power of the physical plane inhabitants. Where your freewill does exist,” and she tilted her head down to me, “and not to say it always does, your impacts are infinite in their potential magnitude. You are not bound by what your actions may cause down the time thread.”

  “That kind of implies you lack freewill as well in some circumstances?” I asked her.

  “Yes, but our definition of ‘freewill’ is far more different, let’s just leave it there. But remember this physical plane is the base from which the others arise and affect. I can affect this freely, in direct inverse proportion to what its impacts are.” She teleported beyond the fence, and was hovering in the air, her hair and ribbon slowly swaying in a breeze from the updraft of the massive pit. She lifted her hands wide to her sides, and had a playful grin on, like a kid at a playground.

  “Whoa…” My mouth was open, watching her silently floating in the air. Okay, she definitely looked more ‘godlike’ in this simple example. I had little doubt remaining something serious was occurring here.

  “However, as a physical, your actions are inherently very limited in your options. For example, you cannot do this. However, the scope of your impact can be, and indeed is, limitless. So in a way, you are the weakest, but also the strongest.”

  “Ha, so it’s like we are in the steerage of a ship. Everyone above us can dump their trash on us and do what they want, but if we sink the boat, everyone else is going down too. Evidently, the ship sinking attracted at least someone’s attention.” I sat down and crossed my legs, and she teleported over and sat next to me as we looked over to the building. She put her hand on my leg. The touch was a bit surprising, but it felt comforting. I liked her.

  It was a bit scary that the sunset had now begun. Soon that sphere of nothingness would be created, and everything would end.

  “So the base plane, this plane,” I slapped the ground hard to feel the pain, “is not only destroyed, but somehow affects everything else and consequently is prevented from coming to conclusion?”

  “That is essentially it.”

  “And for all intents, you cannot change anything, because this is not your actual realm. You have to have a physical being do it because we are not bound by the ripple effects of our actions. Any choice we make in this realm is the same regardless of what consequences might arise. This seems to imply you are someone bound by the pathing of events: bound by what happens in the future, rather than just the now.”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Exactly.” Her hand went to my leg and she started gripping it sensually; I stood up away from her.

  “Are bodies really that interesting?! Damn.” She was pissing me off switching between her preaching, her innocence, and now trying to feel me up.

  She nodded innocently. “You have no idea how amazing this feels.”

  “Anyway, what if I don’t do it?” I asked.

  “You will, eventually. You have to. A million to one probability comes out sooner or later.”

  “I hate when people tell me what to do.”

  “I am sorry; I don’t mean it like that.” Her facial features dropped a bit, the outside part of her eyebrows angled downwards. “I thought we were getting somewhere…This rebellious part of your persona is the one major negative that nearly ruled you out.” She kind of shrugged to herself. “It is what it is I suppose, I will try to be better.”

  I really felt my anger rising at all of this but tried to stay calm because I hated making her sad. “Can’t you just mind control me, or teleport my body into the reactor?”

  “I cannot. Why can you not realize that?” Her eyes looked moist.

  “What if I don’t? What if I can’t?”

  “Trego…” Her down turned face hid her soft voice coming from it

  “You are asking me to deny everything I’ve known in my life to trust some crazy girl who shows me some tricks and makes me seriously consider she might be some god. That thought alone makes me think I am the crazy one.”

  She lifted her face up and her blue eyes were watering hard. I was surprised how hard she was crying but how focused she still looked. “These types of resets are always the hardest to endure. So painful…it physically hurts when you don’t trust me.” She squinted her eyes closed; a burst of tears fell out as she shook her head a bit to regain her composure. “We can be so close, yet so often you choose distance and anger.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.” Seeing my anger do this to the sad beautiful girl made my anger drain away. “But you don’t seem too worried about all of this succeeding.”

  “It already has,” she stated evenly as she wiped her eyes with the black cloth of her bodysuit. She then bent down to rub her fingers on some different colored rocks that had caught her attention. “It already has because it already will.”

  “What?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant.

  “Not in a way you would understand due to your thoughts occurring linearly. But it cannot be allowed to be brought to completion, therefore in the final loop it do
es not truly occur. Because We will not let it happen, it will not occur on the true time path.” Was I included in the ‘we’? I was not sure.

  I was legitimately confused if she was talking about victory but we had not done anything. “To be clear, we are still stuck in this time fracture right?”

  “Unfortunately yes and it will keep occurring until you stop it. So in a way, your hand is indeed forced because the reset will occur until you decide, and figure out how to stop it.”

  “Is this kind of like you know the ending, but you still have to get through the book first right? You know the destination, but still have to make the journey.”

  “Fairly accurate.” She was colder now. Women were really good at this kind of stuff, and unfortunately it worked. I regretted making this playful girl act in this way. I wanted her to go back to being friendly, even though it was me who was yelling at her.

  “So what do I have to do? How can I stop something that destroys everything?”

  “It sounds much harder than it is. It simple is a complex machine that is creating it. Simply disable it and reality will march on.”

  “Shoot someone, or drop a tool and that’s it? And then what, reality goes forward and I end up in jail for the rest of my life?”

  “I do not know. We have never made it past today. I cannot promise anything for you, that is the truth. The other truth is that I will do everything in my power to help you and would not abandon you.”

  The color of her bright ribbon and hair started draining. The color of the world was disappearing. “Damn, looks like it is starting. I thought I might be prepared for this, but…nothing but fear. When I died once, you said you would protect me. Was that true?” I asked her.

  “It was. To the best of my power I will.”

  “Uh…so this actually is reality, right?” I asked her. “I actually die here?”

  “Unfortunately, it is.”

  “Well I guess this is good-bye.” This time it was my eyes watering, from a subconscious terror of my soon-death. Now I really wanted to hold her.

  “For now,” she stated.

  “For now,” I agreed. I stepped forward to hug her. We held each other tight. Part of my grip was based on fear, and that maybe getting as close as I could to her would somehow save me. At the least she felt very good. Warm. Real.

  “Save me, Prou…”

  ***

  “Uhh…” I woke up, looking at the beam of light on my colored pillow. I woke up from something that had just killed me, of that I was fairly sure. The longer I sat there thinking the clearer and more coalescing my thoughts became. I had recalled variations of the unfolding day, at first thinking it was just dreams within dreams but they were too vivid, too painful. On some level something really messed up was happening here.

  I felt this aura or field around me, as if it was a physical medium. It was dark and thick, like the feeling at graveyards but a thousand times stronger. The more I lay there the more I could slowly start feeling experiences of sorts wash over me. It was strong ones at first: fear, anger, lust. But it had an instructive element to it, that I was relearning or recalling old knowledge or skills I had. Like grabbing a bicycle after not riding it, I ‘remembered’ on a vague level of stuff rushing back to me.

  What was this, the third? The fourth? My head swam, and I had a grim feeling somewhere in my mind it was much higher than that.

  Maybe I had finally remembered simply by raw repetition of being unraveled. It appeared to be true what that girl named ‘Proud’ had claimed: I was stuck in a time fracture. Something at ReCorp had created a particle that was so destructive to our reality that either it or the universe somehow reverberated that destruction back into time to before it occurs to ensure it never actually occurs.

  And according to Proud, I was the one who had to stop this. My stomach dropped; the universe was probably screwed.

  At this point I was seriously trying to decide how many times had I ‘lived’ this day. I remembered the couple recent ones. But it seemed like the further back ‘times’ I remember, the vaguer they were. It was entirely possibly I had been through this a thousand, or a million times.

  I got up and splashed some water on my face, helping remind me ‘this’ was real. I sat down against the wall, trying to think critically.

  Last time I actually seemed to gleam a lot of information. I recalled the last loop in pretty good detail, but looking back on it, I knew things I should not have. There were a lot of things I remember personally saying I was not sure I might normally understand. I was accepting of a lot of Proud’s crazy ideas, and jumping to conclusions that did not necessarily follow. What this meant to me is that somehow I knew things I normally should not have. Maybe indeed I was many iterations into this fracture, and that knowledge was slowly accruing within my consciousness packets or whatever she said I had.

  So, the question then was, when do I remember? Right now I was piecing a little together, but not to the extent I was talking to her last time. Wait….‘last time’ certainly isn’t the right word, but what else to call it?

  I saw my white shirt on the desk and remembered her changing it to pink. Today was definitely a new cycle, but her show definitely had something important to it, I just could not grasp it yet. What did it mean that she could change a shirt, but I could not? There was something profound I was missing.

  Sitting there holding the white shirt I was thinking of the people I ran into this day, and how any of them could possibly help me. One thing that was clear is that I seemed to only remember the most recent resets clearly. There was no telling how many I actually endured, I might be really early, or really far in. I’d have to keep that thought in mind.

  There were a few major characters excluding Proud that stuck out and maybe had some clues for me. There was the bartender, either of the two guys I fought, that old man at the pit, and the android girl. They likely had some key to this.

  But in a way, I was in a game that had a set boundary specifically tied to the time limit. This made it hard, as I could not do ‘anything’ as there simply was not enough time in this singular day. Was it even possible to pull off whatever Proud thought needed to be done? So my options were not limitless, as there was a practical distance I could travel before my ‘time was up’ so to say.

  ‘Time was up…’

  With those thoughts, a huge wave of experiences came flooding over me. My eyes started watering and I fell backwards. My eyes zoomed outwards as I fell out of my body. The simple act of me sitting in my room faded away to nothingness as so much blanketed my mind.

  This was not the fourth; this was not even the tenth, even a hundred would be low! I had been though thousands. All the experiences came flooding back. All the cycles lived, and then died.

  “Shit…” I said, holding my head as I rolled down to the floor, my mind hurting so bad with this new awakening.

  First were endless denials out of me, the ‘no way this is happening’ of thinking each cycle literally was new, and I had just been dreaming. Hell, even the last couple of times I thought it was just a dream and I had already been looping thousands of times.

  I could see why Proud made a comment about annoyance or something along those lines. It was frustrating seeing myself constantly deny what was actually happening. I was trying to ignore the important events like the guy at the fence, the android girl at the spaceport, and the whole bar scene or talking with Proud. Even though little things like my banter with the android girl, or me gunning that guy down rather skillfully were a bit beyond my normal ability. With grim realization it was probably hundreds of repetitions that had improved me.

  My hand found something, maybe the leg of a desk, and I held on tightly like a sick child. Even my most recent memories I was not sure had actually recently occurred. I talked about winning against that guy, but if I had looped so often, I never would have got shot, or avoided it all together. Thinking about it this way, I felt that there actually was a far deeper well of combat prowess
inside me than I currently appreciated. Honed over thousands of random battles.

  The more my head swam, the more I realized how far down the line I was in regards to loops. The denials lasted forever, but gave way to sadness before darkness.

  When I started realizing I was looping, it was perfect to learn about people. There were women I could get close with and my loneliness faded away for the cycle. I had met a lot of girls and felt so close to many of them. But each reset I was greeted with words that cut into my heart deeper and deeper each time hearing them: ‘who are you?’

  Nothing that I had done with them remained. No clever date, no laughs we shared, no talks about our past. I would remember vague things about them, but no one else perceived the loop, I was just as unknown the hundredth time talking to them, as the first. The closeness I thought I had with them was an illusion. It was only in my mind. That sent me down a dark road as I no longer had this to comfort me given the end I experience without fail.

  The terror of dying every cycle started grinding on me until the desperation reached a breaking point. I started trying to kill myself out of this nightmare, thinking that this simply wasn’t real. If it was, I would rather be dead than be trapped in this fearful world where nothing I did mattered. And it ended in absolute pain every single time.

  Sitting here huddled on the floor, crying while this multitude of memories flooding back was not fun. I wondered if every time was like this. Probably.

  The desperate loops were short lived, and then it became rampant hedonism and dark experiences. When I realized I would indeed be reborn each cycle anew my curiosity took a dark turn. How many people could I kill before I was stopped? How many girls could I get within a single cycle knowing the perfect things to say to them from thousands of scripted conversations I had tried?

  The killing sprees honed my abilities. I learned to fight with my fists, knives, my Liner pistol. Each cycle was a new challenge. How many could I kill with just my hands, or could I beat my score using my gun? It became this dark abyss where others only existed to see how many I could blow through. It didn’t matter when I was maimed, shot or imprisoned, I was reset every morning.