by M. Modak
*Then another called and he was flying again into another row of universes. This time he was a doctor battling Sapen’s mind-altering drugs with Nano machines he had designed.
*In another life, he was an artist capturing the moment as unknown forces tore his world apart…
*And in another life, he was a singer, who had lost his lover.
*He moved on to a soldier on a mission, hopelessly battling wrath like beasts with a plasma cannon and pulse sword.
*And then he was a writer, telling this story.
*And then a clown, actor, monk, priest, king, tyrant, slave…
*And then it switched to women.
After the first few lives passed, the process sped up until hundreds of lives were passing by him at a time, in a blur of understanding. After several billion lifetimes had passed, he realized that all the information was now locked inside him. At last, when he thought he had every perspective the multi-universe could offer he hovered above the deep.
His insight broadened as he saw the lights from each universe multiply into countless shining dots as the process started again with all the animals, and then the insects, trees, plants, tissues, cells, bacteria, DNA. Then asteroids, moons, whole planets, suns, galaxies, pure energy and finally black-nothingness, and he was everywhere and was nowhere, again…
When he emerged from the nothingness he felt full and at rest. In a way, there was nothing else for him to do; he had done it all. He was finished.
He opened his eyes again to see the Great Wheel of the multi-universe. All he had to do was ask himself which life he wished to know and that lifetime presented itself for inspection.
Those histories were within him now but the futures of those lives were open to the realm of infinite possibility. For Joshua, time had become a kind of numbness, but there was still something he had to do…
Rana!…
Lavar!...
Aughra!...
Lavar had said something long ago, he thought, it was something important.
What was said to me trillions of lifetimes ago?
A thought stuck out from all his encounters. It was a nexus moment. Then the full memory of Joshua’s single life struck him like a slap in the face.
He blinked, “Stop Aughra!”
Aughra had pulled and twisted the force that linked matter together so violently that many of the universes, closest to the one John came from, were going to explode!
The Tree of Life was threatened therefore all life was threatened. He thought of all the others who had not fulfilled their life’s purpose, they had never seen all he had seen. They would never get that chance if Sapen succeeded. If he did not stop Aughra before that Earth fully aligned with the gravitational lens, surrounding Nebula311, then all the bonds of matter would vibrate so rapidly that the Earth would disintegrate into a mist of scattering particles.
By then it would be too late for everything else. Soon the sun would burst. The black hole at the center of the galaxy would reverse from sucking in all matter and turn into a mega-nova as all its pure energy flashed at once in a galaxy ending explosion. However, Aughra’s effects would keep on going. Other galaxies would start flinging their solar systems into a darkening universe in a sustained chain reaction that would end in a cold black death.
In those universes closest to the one Aughra was in, it meant the extinction of all life and the eventual separation of every particle by galaxy wide distances over a period so fast, it compared to a few thousand Earth-years.
An eternity had passed as Joshua found himself still grappling with the same profound question. The question was moot for he knew he had to do something about Aughra. However, what could he do to stop the immediate destruction of no less than four universes, and then all existence?
He remembered what he was made of, the lives he now considered his own, including all the plants and animals, countless worlds and even the space that contained it all. He was not saving them he was saving himself. He knew now that even the rocks cried out.
He had decided on a course of action. He called to the God of his new understanding. To him, Elohim was much bigger now. Lavar believed help would come and so he would put his trust there too. Elohim had never let him down before.
He decided he would go back to John’s Earth, though he had no idea how to fix Aughra. None of the lives he had encountered had ever seen or could fathom such a thing as a completed Aughra. He would return to the life John had left behind, somehow, and then he would follow his heart.
13 Body Twister
Universe 311
The sensation of entering a physical body was disgusting. Joshua’s awareness began to fill the arms, legs and vital organs of John’s limp body lying on the laboratory floor. He felt sick. He could hear the tiny sliding and sucking sounds this body was making. It adhered to his very soul. Pins and needles danced like tiny electric jolts throughout his skin, fat and muscles. Panic began to grip him as the last of his ethereal-self began to set into the hot, sticky, wetsuit of the human form.
He felt suffocated and heavy. Without his ability to move through space at will, he experienced the greatest loss of freedom. Before, in what felt like a lifetime ago when he had no physical form, there was nothing but freedom. Out there, he could not really feel warmth or pain. When he did feel them, they were more like remembering the experience rather than actually having them. Still, being able to see, really see, and knowing all that he did, a part of him hated his flesh and longed for his ethereal body.
His mind had been altered too. During the transition into this body, he focused on the pain, cold and wet feelings he was experiencing. Now he realized he had lost a great deal more than freedom, he had forgotten entire lifetimes, googols of them. He now remembered only a few hundred lives. He could recall many more names than whole-lives. He felt them inside him, but who they were what kind of person they had become was lost.
Pain shot through his head as if it was being struck repeatedly. It was not the typical kind of headache felt in the temple or on the top of his head; his whole brain shook violently in his skull. It felt like a fire was spreading down his neck and spinal cord and into the rest of his body. As he convulsed and screamed he forgot where he was, what he was doing, even his name; all he knew was pain.
Then, all at once, Joshua felt a great force pinning his body against the wall, and he heard the terrifying sound of a freight train bearing down on him! His eyes snapped open and he saw a blur of blue and purple light. He blinked away the sting from the wind tearing at his eyes. He looked up and saw Aughra!
The experience of it took a moment to register in his mind. The distortion he saw had nothing to do with a lack of vision. Aughra was spinning so fast he could see only the hazy light and little else of the machine in any detail. From the memories he had gained, through John, he knew what Aughra looked like. He remembered John running countless computer simulations with a low percentage showing this very thing happening, but only under extreme circumstances.
Something had gone wrong. John did not believe something like this could happen, but he knew of the possibility. This could have only happened if everything that could go wrong did go wrong, or sabotage.
Something bolted to the floor had caught his body. He was sure that bolt was keeping him from being sucked up by the wind and smashed to death by all the debris flying around.
Aughra howled as she spun, violently shaking the whole building with her fury. A black tornado twisted high above her extending up through the ceiling, and into the night sky beyond. Several floors, which had existed above Aughra and the roof, had been destroyed. The External Air Pressure Release Doors had not activated. The pressure from all that spinning air had nowhere to go but up and out. He wondered how the building was still standing.
Dark clouds illuminated by cracks of lightning were being pulled down from the sky and into her yawning mouth. On the lab floor, a strong steady wind pushed against the ground, and swirled out and up the walls in a great loo
p. He could see several small tornadoes spinning across the lab’s floor caught between competing currents.
To Joshua it looked exactly like what the end of the world must be like. He recalled all the sermons his mother was told when she was a child and then tried to indoctrinate him with. She had grown up in a southern church, where they taught about the terrible wrath of God and his judgment to come. They believed that soon only fire and brimstone would fall on man. As an adolescent, her worldview seemed to border on the insane but seeing this, he wondered how much she had been told was true.
Then his reason reminded him that this beast was made, not by a demon or an angel, but by a man. He understood that man needed no help from evil spirits to unleash a final worldwide flash of doom. Man, all by himself, could unleash nuclear bombs and a highly contagious plague that could kill everyone on the planet within weeks, and it could simply be an accident.
He remembered the boy he had met on his trip through the multi-universe, stuck alone trying to save his friends from Nano-infected zombies. We’re playing with fire, he thought!
It was easy to lay all the blame at John’s feet, and that was what he wanted to do, but John was neither a good, nor a bad person. He was just someone trying to unlock the secrets of the universe. And he had a lot of help too. Clearly, they were not ready for this discovery. It had happened before its time, and by accident, and now he had unleashed hell.
Now, I have to stop it, there’s no other choice I can make.
He remembered the judgmental God his mother feared so much and then he remembered Elohim whom Lavar believed so deeply in.
What if I tried to stop this thing? Will I be acting against the God of my mother who wants to destroy everything and start over? What will it be, life or death?
After a moment’s hesitation, he decided, once-and-for-all, this was the direct consequence of the actions of man, not Elohim. He had to let that old idea about a lesser god go and walk in faith that Elohim does not desire to kill everyone, even though there are times when he could not blame Elohim if She made that choice. No, if the world ended it would be due to man’s ignorance and arrogance.
Our collective lack of wisdom will be our undoing. Elohim is on the side of life.
He remembered the first part of that day when Lavar was given the staff. A partial memory he had gained thru the link between them. On that day, he had met a being claiming to be Elohim and from what he could tell, He was. He decided that he would combine reason and faith. In his moment of need, he prayed to Elohim for help. In his heart, he heard a response.
Understanding flashed before him. He held within himself the knowledge and life experiences from hundreds of different lives.
I have already answered your prayer, was the response.
He hoped, no, he knew all he needed was inside him even though he had forgotten so much. He was here to stop Aughra and that was what he was going to do.
As he tried to move, he noticed that this body felt strange though familiar. He felt some numbness as if he had been stuck in a fetal position for some time now and the blood had ceased to flow to the muscles in his neck, arms and legs. This body was also weaker than his body. Years of sitting around, staring at flexscreens, had made John flabby.
It will have to do.
He scanned the room and found that all the power had been lost. He could only see by the blue glow of Aughra and the flashing that came from the lighting in the broiling clouds high above; and the memories John had given him. He tried to move again and found the numbness in his limbs replaced by a stinging sensation that shot through his body in painful jolts. After a minute, he attempted to call his body into action again but the shock still kept his muscles frozen.
The wind flowing down below Aughra had not only pushed the remains of the lab’s tables, chairs and flexscreens up into the air but there was also a lower current circling the room throwing the wreckage around in a great torrent.
He tried to move his body again and this time it responded, painfully, but his legs could move! Carefully he sat up. He had to duck quickly as a chair flew over him, missing his head by inches. He pulled his limbs up to his chest and then let them fall back down to the ground. He did this a few times until he could feel the stinging nerves and blood began to act together and this body started to respond to his commands.
He still did not know how he would stop Aughra. There wasn’t an off switch or a plug he could simply pull that would shut this thing off. He knew, after all John had gone through to make this experiment as safe as he thought possible, that this was no accident.
The release of such energy would have blown any other thing to smithereens but trillions were spent so that Aughra could turn that explosion into the spinning motion she now had. For all he knew nothing short of another antimatter explosion could hope to stop it. On the other hand, if he could get Aughra off the ground, high off the ground and before the axis of her spin rotated too many times in the wrong direction; the competing forces might cancel out and she would be neutralized. But how on Earth would he do that? If not done right he was sure that such a mix of violent forces would blow a hole in Atlanta at least a mile deep and three miles wide, and then take out everything else as far as the eye could see. Where was he going to get another antimatter bomb?
Moreover, there was another problem. His mind simply didn’t work as John’s mind worked. He had all John’s memories and thoughts at the ready, just as easily as he could recall what he had eaten for lunch, but it seems there was more to the mind than just data. John had a different way of thinking than his own. He was brilliant at mathematics, greater than any other version of himself that Joshua could recall. Nevertheless, John held a view of the world that he had a hard time assimilating, even with all his memories. It was his belief in statistics and probable outcomes, the way he interacted with life to such a mechanical degree that gave Joshua a hard time processing John’s work.
John had learned to create mathematical trains of thought, lead them through a labyrinth of chutes and ladders, and emerge with an answer as a whole thing. It took years of practice for him to gain that kind of discipline. His way of thinking ran exactly counter to John’s thinking. In some ways, he could easily see what he needed to do but as he followed the train of thought, he began to stumble through the most esoteric details. He would get it soon enough, but for now he knew he would need help. Just having John’s knowledge did not mean he had his discipline, but right then he wished he did.
He thought about all the people who had opposed John in making Aughra. As he sifted through those memories, he recalled John debating this very scenario with a university professor of mathematics named Dr. Dmitry. John greatly respected the man from a Brazilian university. It had been over a year since they last talked. They had never actually met in person. They knew each other by reputation and after an online debate between them, John had given the Professor more personal chat time than anyone else, just to prove him wrong; but he never could.
John never really considered that Aughra would fail, so in the end he never thought about how to stop it. It was the mathematical implications Dr. Dmitry had introduced into the equations that had intrigued John so much. It now seemed that the Professor had predicted the future for John better than any prophet could have dreamed of.
I have to find that man!
He stood up and put his face into the roaring wind, and pulled himself from one jutting, electrical pole still held to the ground, to another, each one was where a workstation use to be. He moved slowly. He felt a little weak from the low blood pressure, but the adrenaline had taken over. He started for the exit using all his strength and balance as the wind repelled his body. He could barely see in the dark as he crossed the laboratory floor. However, before he made the last few feet to the door he saw another chair flying straight for him and he ducked just in time, missing his head. It continued spinning and caught him in the shoulder. The impact spun him around and he fell to the floor against the door. He t
urned again, reaching up for the handle and he heard a sickening crack! He wondered what could have made such a horrible noise… then he saw no more.
14 Who’s who?
Universe XJ824
8:35pm
John had stopped crying and had pulled himself together, as he got up out of the wet booth and tried to help Kayla. Most of the people in the Crystal Ball Room were starting to leave now as the rain fell steadily through the broken skylight. This is a grand place to enter a new universe, he thought.