by Amy Field
The two young children, a girl of ten and a boy of seven, would sit and watch the two strangers as they ate and then ask them all types of questions about the outside world: what it’s like in the colonies, in the upper world and the city. They were so inquisitive and their parents would often scold them for their interrogations, but O and Vanda would smile and say that it was okay. Children down there never got to see anything other than what the telescreens wanted them to see, as well as the overcrowded labyrinthine streets of the lower levels. They were trapped down there, unable to move, unable to breathe.
Vanda would watch O with the children and smile. She was so good with them, a natural mother, he thought. When he saw her play with the children, his heart would be attacked with the most melancholic pang and more than once he had to hold back a flood of tears.
They had been with the family for nearly two weeks at this point. Ever since they had had to escape their last hideout when the government had swept down on them one night. Vanda had felt something within the temporal field that night which had disturbed him and they were able to flee just in time. They had come across the family by mistake and, without asking any questions, had been invited into their small dwelling that sat within one of the lowest slums of the lower city. It put this little household in terrible peril; taking in fugitives was a capital offence and punished by death; but often when one is cast into darkness, it is the most insignificant that show a person the light.
The mother and father were secret Christians and had raised their children on tales of selfless altruism. They almost seemed grateful for the chance to prove their faith and were often dutiful to the pair to the point of obsequiousness.
The children would watch Vanda meditate with looks of curiosity written all over their little faces, wondering what the strange man with the pure white hair was doing. He felt those children in those moments and remembered his vision of the great social purge that was coming; recalling the joyful children of the upper world rejoicing with their parents at the deaths of so many children like these. He wondered if those children up there shared the same wonderful spirit that seemed to inhabit these youngsters who sat silently watching him. He asked himself what heart could call for their murder and the murder of billions like them.
Vanda and O were cut off from everything and had little information on what was going on with both the Cause and the government itself. The father of the family would return and give them what little news he could garner from the telescreens that littered the streets and the gossip that littered the local mouths. But it was always only official information relayed by the government and nothing more. They were celebrating the deaths of the evil terrorist leader Neon Kahn and his general Zilo Max and claimed that soon they would crush the last remnants of the Cause that had scattered into the dust like cockroaches fleeing from the light.
Vanda and O had no other choice but to stay still. Vanda spent the days in meditation attempting to enter the temporal field so that he could ascertain what lay ahead for them. But the image of O’s dead eyes kept floating back to him and the terrible spectre that stood in the corner. O would constantly ask him what he saw and he was always ashamed to say that he saw nothing. At this point, her face would give away her anxiety and she would begin to chew one corner of her lips.
This went on until one day when the father of the family brought a small boy of around ten into the dwelling. He was shaven-headed and his eyes appeared too big for his face. Another thing that struck them as strange in his appearance was that his expression seemed too solemn for a child as if it belonged to an old man and not a boy. They first thought that it must be one of the kids’ playmates; even though they had been assured that the children would speak to no one about them and bring nobody home. But the boy wasn’t there to see the children; he was there to see Vanda and O.
He immediately walked up to the pair and said, “I’m glad that you both survived. You did well; sadly not so many were as lucky and now we scramble about in the darkness like miserable creatures cast adrift. But we have survived in the darkness before and so we shall again.”
O’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed, “Zilo?!”
“Yes, my child, it is I,” the boy replied.
“How?” Vanda asked incredulously.
“Sit down and I will tell all,” Zilo said, entreating them to be seated.
They did as they were told, and so began Zilo’s tale.
For the past year, the old man had been spending every spare moment that he had rigged up to his network suit. He was attempting to map his consciousness with it and to create a programme by which he could transport it into another being; therefore making himself somewhat immortal. Well, he wasn’t quite immortal, for he had been killed in that room for real. The Zilo of before was dead, his soul floating out there with all the others in the vast void between worlds, waiting for time to go through its cycle again and then to be returned to his vessel. But by recording his consciousness, which by the way was no easy feat, he could allow everything that he had learnt and witnessed to live forever. He had turned himself into a computer programme that would record and carry on; a constant fight against the government. He had meant to get Neon’s consciousness too, as well as many other crucial Cause members, but, alas, death respects no one and waits for nothing. When the government had raided the base, they had destroyed everything, including Zilo’s equipment. But one of the members had sent a signal out just as the walls came crashing down. This message reached somewhere deep under the city where a young boy who had been born without a mind would receive his consciousness and carry on the fight.
The boy had been one of the many victims of some of the genetic diseases that came back from the colonies with the poor workers; entering their houses with them and infecting their whole families; changing their genetics, so that even those not born yet would perish. The Cause had at one time uncovered the fact that the government not only knew about the terrible afflictions that came back from the colonies and entered the sprawling shanty towns, but allowed them to flourish so that they could monitor their progress on live specimens. They had in fact created cures and vaccinations for them long before but wished to see what the diseases would do to a population. They let them flourish, were they killed and maimed millions, if not billions, of the poor.
The boy had been a perfect avatar. Downloading Zilo’s consciousness into him had taken several weeks to complete and then after that he had immediately gone about searching for Vanda and O; safe in the knowledge that the government would not be looking for a young boy. It had taken him a week to discover them at their little retreat and it wasn’t easy. The family had no forms of electronic equipment and was completely off the grid. He had hacked into a government network and found out about their last refuge and its subsequent raid. He decided that they couldn’t have gone far in the vicinity and had guessed right when he decided that they must be in the poorest district. He had hung out there for three days— no one suspecting a young boy, as many in the district would play in the streets— searching for any news or rumour. Then he had discovered two children playing who let slip about a white-haired man and his green-eyed, beautiful wife. They had then refused to answer his following questions and became very sheepish. He realised then that they were hiding the two fugitives. He had followed them to the family’s dwelling and produced himself to the father.
At first, the father had been a little dubious of the boy who spoke like an adult and had refused to answer any of his questions. But Zilo had a way with words, and a way with people in general, that put them at ease. The father had eventually consented to take Zilo to them.
“How has your meditation been going?” Zilo asked Vanda when the three were alone.
“Not well. Something’s blocking me.”
“Is it a recurring vision that haunts you which is stopping you? Or something else?”
Zilo had instantly seen inside Vanda.
“It is both a haunting vision,” Van
da slowly said, “and some entity too. Something I haven’t seen before, but it appears to feel me.”
“Mmm,” Zilo mused, his face taking on the kind of bemused expression that you would never expect to see on a ten-year-old boy, “it must be another shifter— something strong too if it can present itself in your visions”. Then his eyes brightened up, and he announced, “But first, we must complete your training. The government has rallied itself and are putting all its efforts into catching you. It is not safe anywhere; even here. But we must continue.”
Over the next days, Zilo and Vanda spent them together, while O sat with the family. She seemed to enjoy very much being a part of their little clan and would often help them with their daily household duties. In private, Vanda told Zilo about his reoccurring vision of O’s death. Zilo told him to hold it off: “It could be an implant, a false image, from one of the government’s own shifters,” he said, “Possibly the very same entity that you saw. They could be using your love for her against you.”
With Zilo’s help, Vanda was able to push it away for the time being and began to feel the flow of time once more. Zilo taught Vanda the next phase of his training: physical representation within his visions so that he could change aspects of them. Zilo told him that time and matter were deeply bound together and through manipulation of time, one can manipulate the physical as well.
“I think that I’ve done it before,” Vanda told Zilo. “When I was sick, I had a vision that I once stood next to O in front of a mirror. I willed myself to reach out and touch her, and I did.”
“That is exactly it, Vanda,” Zilo stated to him. “Try to feel it again; that pressure that builds up in you— use your love for her to will your movement and in the visions in which you are not present, you must use it to become a physical force. He added: "This is not like physical movement; it is more ethereal, and it is accomplished through you mind and your manipulation of the temporal field.”
Firstly, Zilo got Vanda to enter a vision in which Vanda himself was physically present. Vanda then had to will his body to move. “Concentrate on the energy flow of your physical form,” Zilo urged him, “and not its material form; forget the corporeal and enter the ethereal.” Vanda began to feel the force of his being and was able to move his arms and then control where he walked. He was able to move about until he was running; running through the city, onwards across the cityscape planes, through crowds of people in some future realm, people watching the strange running man as he passed them on the street. He flew down the streets and boulevards, feeling no restriction from bodily needs. He felt no fatigue, either in himself or his body and he ran forever. He felt as a child does when he runs with his friends, unrestricted. Suddenly he noticed ahead of him a group of shock troopers, evidently waiting for the purpose of tackling him. But he wasn’t afraid of them; his body was a boundless coil of energy ready to spring at any obstacle that threatened to stand in its way. As he came upon them, they opened fire; but he felt the flow of their energy beams before even the troopers knew where they were going and, thus, avoided them with ease; dodging right and left. He got right up to them and stuck out his palm, opening up a vortex that sucked them all into its sphere. Then, without making a conscious effort, he jumped into the air and found himself spiraling up towards the atmosphere, government droids following him as he manipulated the temporal field to fly. He twisted and turned, racing ever faster through the air, until he no longer saw the droids behind him. He felt so free as he moved through the sky and burst in and out of the clouds. In his visions, he learnt that he could control and manipulate anything that he wanted.
Zilo then got Vanda to enter into a simple vision of the city; one where he wasn’t present, but only a viewer. Vanda found himself floating amongst the throng of people that littered the upper platforms of Neo York. With all his energy and thought he attempted to will himself to move objects using the temporal field. He found it tough at first, but with practice, he was able to manipulate the physical structures around him. Within a day or two, he was tearing whole buildings from their foundations and tossing them across the sky. “The unknown future is like a dream,” Zilo informed him, “It is only in the present that we can make an actual change. In the future one is no more than playing with one of the endless possibilities of the temporal realm. By moving things, you can learn of what lies beneath. I want you to rip up the city and search for something.”
"But won’t I kill the people there?”
“Not in the present you won’t; so, therefore, they won’t be harmed in the real. I want you to find their camp that lies somewhere within the planes of this coast. I want you to find all their camps. I want you to tear through their world and discover all their misanthropies, Vanda. Through the future planes that you will decimate, we will break their grasp upon the soul of man in the present and free it like a bird to climb into the stratosphere of self-liberation.”
Vanda did as he was asked and travelled through Earth tearing up whole cities. His heart was tormented, though, by the faces of all the people that perished at his actions; being thrown about and having whole cities smashed around them. But Zilo kept reminding him that it was necessary and that those people would be saved as a result of his actions and not die, as he was seeing. “But their screams; their broken bodies; they haunt me, Zilo. Do they feel pain?” “Only in your visions; but it is a pain that they will never feel; pain that you are saving them from by unearthing everything that the government has built to hide its horrors.”
O would sit with him at night and listen to his explanations of the horrors that he had committed in his visions. She soothed him with both her words and with the warmth of her caring soul that he had become more and more aware of as time went on; their lives forged together so that their destinies entwined.
“Let me tell you of my time with the military,” she said one night as they sat together. “I’ve never told anyone this. Out in the colonies, people tend to feel a freedom that they seldom enjoyed back here on Earth. Far away from the statues and monuments that glorify the government and the constant telescreen updates that feed them lies, they feel able to flex their own souls more and begin to deviate from their instructions. Open rebellion is much more frequent out there and often colonists will go off and create their communities away from the official ones. Uprisings are almost constant and the government has to constantly crackdown upon them. Most of the time they just hit them with air strikes and wipe their communities from the face of the planet. But sometimes these communities are too close to mining facilities or other government resources, so a more personalised approach is needed. That’s when they send in ground units. I was often one of these units. My training taught me to conform; to rid myself of emotional bonds with my fellow humans; to live for the greater good of the government like an ant does for its queen. They gave us medication— just as they did to you— that would suppress our emotions. But I still got the most terrible nightmares…” At this point she stalled, and a single tear floated down her cheek, “…I would see the faces of children the moment before the light left them forever. I would see their communities and feel within those simple homes a warmth that had become lost within my community. The world that I lived in then had become stale and dead; no longer alive but mutated beyond life into something synthetic…” Again the tears began to choke her words, “I did questionable things then, Vanda; things that still shame my very soul. I killed hundreds of men, woman and children; I tortured them; brought them to camps knowing full well that they would be experimented upon; I laid siege to whole villages; piling up bodies, covering them with corrosive liquids or burning them to ashes. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t remember each and every one of my victims’ faces, staring out at me from the wilderness. I now fight for those faces with everything that I have. Remember the faces of the people from your visions, Vanda; remember them and fight for them; fight for every one of them.”
Eventually after several days of meditation under
the tutelage of Zilo, Vanda found a camp deep within the restricted zone; a place that used to be called Rhode Island, but was destroyed when a photon reactor blew up there fifty years ago and made the place uninhabitable. Deep below the surface of rubble that made up the place, he found an underground camp where people were kept in cages like livestock awaiting the killing instruments of the abattoir. He travelled through its rooms and witnessed the shocking experiments that were performed on live humans by men in white plastic coats. He saw Dr Kelvin in one room removing pieces of a woman’s brain as she sat watching films on a telescreen in front of her, fully conscious, but seemingly unaware of the horrors that were done to her. With each piece that the doctor took, her eyes went even blanker.
Vanda came out of his meditation and looked at Zilo, who sat opposite him.
“I found it,” he pronounced to Zilo.
“Good. Do you think that you can find the others?”
“Yes.”
Over the next days, Vanda tore apart the human world and found several more of the government’s death camps. However, it was in one such vision that he came into contact with the entity again and this time, it threatened to destroy him.
He was flying through the air when he suddenly saw what looked like a giant shadow floating up ahead of him. Curious, Vanda flew towards it, but on reaching it, it struck out what looked like a giant claw made of black smoke. It grabbed ahold of him and began to squeeze his body in its grasp. He felt the shadow attempt to enter him; to snuff out the light within him. He began to struggle. But as he did, it clamped down on him even harder. Vanda let out a scream and came out of his meditation.
He suddenly realised that he had ahold of Zilo by the throat and that O was trying to pull him off of the boy. Vanda instantly let go of him and Zilo fell to the floor, gasping for air.
“What happened?” he asked, terrified.