The Mediator Pattern

by J. D. Lee

  They entered the barn. Avant guided Marcus to a room in the far corner. It looked like a small classroom. Chairs sat in pew-like rows facing a large chalkboard. Scrawled on the board’s surface were exhaustive equations, philosophical notes, sequences of numbers, and the letters A B joined by a figure eight. Across the room sat a small tower-like device. Marcus recognized the device. It had similar characteristics to the arrangement of copper spheres, rods and wires he had seen prior to his BelisCo grand tour, a fleeting memory.

  Avant requested, “Take a seat.”

  Marcus sat; he had nothing to say. He simply listened.

  Once Marcus was seated, Avant said, “This world is an illusion; a fragile veil that Colin Belis has created.”

  On any other day Marcus Metiline would have scoffed at the idea, but considering this day, he found himself wondering how far this illusion went.

  “When you met with him, that was the real world. Do you remember anything strange about your meeting?”

  Avant waited for an answer.

  Marcus did remember strange things, and not just the morbid decor or eccentric behavior of Colin Belis. Marcus recalled his grand tour, the aches and pains, the tower. He remembered the dirty, heavy air, the harsh, unsatisfying cigarette, and the poisoned glass of wine. He remembered how different things were in BelisCo. He nodded.

  Avant said, “That was not your first meeting with Belis. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Nothing is as it seems.”

  He walked over to the tower-like device as he continued, “Colin Belis is not a world leader. Since I discovered his illusion I had been waiting for an opportunity to do something about it, to release us all. You are the first to be removed from the illusion and brought to the real world of Colin Belis. You were the first, ever. And I have been around for a very long time.”

  He placed his hand upon the device.

  “The device that casts the illusion can only be disabled from the outside. This is why I filed the patent. It took me many different attempts, but the patent frightened Mr. Belis. He sensed the doom of his kingdom. Once he pulled you out, Marcus, I started you on a journey. Those flashes of déjà vu that I know you experience are cognitive echoes of your previous passes through the loop. Let your instinct guide you. Hopefully this time will be successful. You need to disable the device. You need to remember.”

  Marcus took out a cigarette. It reminded him of Colin Belis, but he lit it anyway. Three matches remained.

  He inhaled long and deep. The butt grew bright red and then faded as smoke billowed from the corners of Marcus’s mouth. He leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows firmly on his knees.

  With his cigarette pinched between his teeth, Marcus asked sternly, “How many times?”

  Avant began counting invisible objects in the air, pointing his finger decisively at various nothings, and then concluded, “This is our thirty-second meeting.”

  He corrected himself, “I’m sorry, thirty-third.”

  Chapter VII

  As Marcus puffed on his cigarette, Avant began fiddling with the device. He squatted to reach the array of knobs and switches located on the floor. As Avant dialed the knobs and flipped the switches, the moment began to grow increasingly familiar to Marcus.

  The drab colors grew infinitely vibrant, stacked atop each other, gaining depth and beauty with each layer. The lights grew bright. The tangled sounds of a dozen conversations reverberated in Marcus’s ears, jumbling together in a cacophony of nouns and verbs. Marcus sat still, observing. His cigarette hung limply in his hand as the room swallowed him in its details.

  All of Marcus’s senses bombarded him at once. The cross-shaped impressions on the screwheads contrasted with the faded varnish of the wooden panels, then melted together into a lump of indistinguishable textures. The rafters flexed and throbbed, emerging and retreating into the shadows as nuts and bolts chattered along their surfaces. The chalkboard folded in on itself; its dingy green paint drawn deep into its tattered frame. The hanging lights shook and swayed, blinked, and blended into a fluid of blinding wattage.

  Marcus’s cigarette alternated violently in his hand, shifting between states of ashen lump and leafy tobacco. The smoke danced and spiraled, following prismatic shapes as it ran its course around the morphing cigarette.

  Beyond the folding tendrils of smoke, the crumpled chalkboard blossomed. Marcus watched as the wooden and granite flower seeded the room with its green, oil based mist. The paint coagulated midair. The walls grew infinitely close, the floor shot through Marcus’s feet, the ceiling collapsed, the lights buzzed, and the room exploded.

  Then the layers dissolved. The agreeability of controlled sensation returned. His surroundings became an orderly arrangement of subtly differing moments. No sound was louder or more quiet than any other sound. No light was brighter nor dimmer than another. No shadow loomed any darker than another, but each instance, each sliver of reality, was proportionately unique, uniformly vivid, and equally tangible. Marcus possessed an intimate connection to the room.

  He saw the various chairs that he had sat in, felt the individual contours, and relived the exchanges of dialogue associated with each. He recognized the desk. He acknowledged the coffee pot and the empty mug he had once drank from. He knew the number of bolts that bound the device. He understood its operation, knew the number of turns of wire in its coils, the positions of its many knobs and switches, even its operating frequency.

  He listened to the number of lectures the doctor gave about the Belis generated illusion, perceiving and knowing the various changes, omissions, and additions. Marcus gained the entirety of the different explanations, the concreteness of the similarities, the benefit of the repetition, and most importantly, the strength of Avant’s conjecture. He possessed as much information as the doctor could spew in thirty-two meetings, and at the rate Avant spoke, Marcus knew quite a bit.

  He also knew what would happen next.

  Marcus’s cigarette smoldered as he exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  “How about the mug this time?” he said.

  “You remember. Good. Welcome to my world.”

  Avant stood and gave the top of the device one heavy push, whirling it clockwise.

  With that, Marcus’s previous manifestations in time dwindled and were replaced by the novelty and unfamiliarity one would expect; everything was new again, and Marcus’s cognitive echoes, as Avant called them, retreated from reach.

  Sparks jumped between the wires that were wrapped upon the device’s base, gravitating upward as the machine hummed and whined. The cracks and pops of arcing electricity and the sizzle of ionized air sounded in time with the singing device. Unlike the demonstration outside, this sound filled the air densely, creating a heavy, inertial field around Marcus. He felt the sound permeate his entire being. It made its way through his skin, sliding between his muscle fibers, navigating his circulatory system, overwhelming his nerve endings, and vibrating him down to the marrow in his bones. His cigarette fell to the floor.

  Avant said nothing as he made his way toward the desk. He quietly picked up the coffee pot by its handle and proceeded to fill the mug to the brim. Then the room flickered, Avant vanished, and Marcus was alone.

  A rushing wind replaced the stillness of the room. As the wind spiraled around him, Marcus watched the porcelain exterior of the mug dither. Piece by piece, the ceramic disappeared until only the coffee remained. Marcus could see the swirls and bubbles as the liquid sloshed against invisible walls. Beams of light bent and refracted upon its muddy surface as the shaped liquid stood proudly upon the desk, maintaining the molded structure of its now missing exterior.

  After a moment, the heavy field around Marcus retreated and the wind began to slow. Its rushing forces deteriorated into blurs of white and blue, then halted to reveal Avant. The doctor was moving around the desk, white ceramic pieces piled in his hands. Marcus watched intently as Avant replaced the pieces like a puzzle, rebuilding the container he had disassembled.

>   Once Avant finished covering the liquid cylinder in its ceramic skin, he said, “You see, events that are seemingly entangled can be separated and tuned individually. Yours and the coffee’s temporal evolution was made slower than that of myself and the mug. Hence the display you just witnessed.”

  Avant took the mug in hand and drank of its contents, saying, “I believe we are through with demonstrations. Let’s get to it.”

  Marcus shrugged. Picking up his cigarette, he took one last drag, and mashed the butt into the floor.

  Avant returned to the device, where he crouched to reach its controls. It had since stopped humming and spinning. It was tired, wilted and slouched like a worn out spring. It glared mercilessly as Marcus watched Avant locate the compartment door beside its base.

  Avant turned to Marcus and said, “I’ve made a few adjustments this time around. Practice makes perfect.”

  He stood up and pointed at the exposed circuit. “Not to beat a dead horse, but it will be like this. You’ll need to short the distribution of the crossover coupling. Beneath the access panel, you’ll find two thick wires wrapped around a common ferrite core. Flip the switch below the ferrite.” He ran the syllables off as fast as one breath would allow him.

  He paused, took a breath and said slowly, “It might look a little different.”

  Marcus grumbled as he got to his feet. “If your devices can do this much, and this truly is an illusion of Belis’s... shouldn’t his be capable of so much more? Why can’t he stop you?”

  Avant replied in his typical verbal sprint, “His presence here would collapse the whole infrastructure. Just as a potter cannot live the life of his clay, nor can any creator directly experience that of his creation, so too is Belis limited. His communication with the illusion is one-way. The device he has created produces outgoing data transmissions by highlighting cognitive activity of certain individuals within. Belis’s only window into the illusion is by way of these reports. It is programmed to seek out glitches and self-correct. My patent was seen, by the machine, as an error—an accidental replication of the device within its own illusion, a fractal, a Universal Turing Machine, a paradoxical anomaly, a danger. In its attempt to self-correct, a move I anticipated, the device orchestrated a scenario in which a job for you was created, one that would allow Belis to bring you from the illusion without suspicion, without damage.”

  Avant headed for the door as he continued, “There is no doubt the device has already begun running algorithms in an attempt to predict the outcome of my patent’s existence, but it does not anticipate me and it does not anticipate what I can do.”

  He left the room.

  Marcus took out his matches and a cigarette. He stood alone in the room pondering the various manipulations Dr. Avant had shown him. He inspected his matchbook as he considered its reality. He turned the book over in his hand, feeling it edges, experiencing its shape. He flipped open the cover; two matches remained. Marcus ripped a match from its binding and brought it to his nose. He inhaled the pungent sulfur, allowing it to linger, tasting it in his throat, experiencing it. He considered its reality as well. As he strained to formulate his place in it all, he brought his cigarette to his lips and struck the match.

  The flame froze in mid-ignition. The device popped, the room palpitated, and the air rippled like an agitated puddle. The visible, streaming currents made their way to the tower-like device. The ripple ceased upon its surface and the device’s confident stature was reborn. It screamed at Marcus.

  The chairs began to teeter. The floor shook beneath Marcus’s feet. He knew what was happening—what has been happening—what is happening. He didn’t know how he knew; only the knots in his stomach told him he was right. His unlit cigarette fell from his mouth. He stepped aside reflexively as the top drawer from the file cabinet across the room whizzed by his head, crashing heavily into pieces against the far wall. File papers flew into a flurry around the room, spiraling and spiraling as if gravity itself had failed to latch onto them.

  The lines on the chalkboard began to merge. The mathematical masterpiece scrawled on the board warped in on itself; numbers became letters, and letters morphed into colors. The left floated to the right, and the top replaced the bottom. In an instant the room toppled on its side. Then Marcus was on the ceiling.

  All around him, the walls began to fold into wonderfully vibrant kaleidoscopic patterns. Circles and spots melted into surging, neon octagons that split into an infinitude of rose-colored triangles. Like a fluid, the triangles that once were the walls whirled about Marcus’s head. The room continued flipping and the vortex of geometry continued to gulp and swallow at the room around him. Oddly, through it all, he was not dizzy.

  It sounded as though the room itself were one machine of cogs and gears spinning, grating, and pushing as the world around Marcus folded, latched and shifted, melted, and spun before him. The whirring of gears approached closer and grew louder as the attributes of the room became increasingly indecipherable.

  Like a puddle of oil paints, Marcus thought to himself.

  “It looks like a muddled palette of paint,” he coughed the words out.

  Bubbles took form as the vocalization left his lips.

  Then the whirling display around him froze. Pages of paper lingered in the air, the metallic fragments of the file drawer, the triangles, the swirls, the puddles, all static, all unmoving. The room had stopped gulping. It had stopped swallowing and breathing.

  Marcus found himself absolutely content with the state of things; no longer confused, not a sign of fear or worry within his entire being. He was satisfied and happy, serene. A childlike wonder washed over Marcus.

  He was drawn to the suspension of vocal bubbles. They sparkled and gleamed, even in their frozen state. They compelled him.

  He watched himself reach for one, his index finger crookedly extended.

  On contact, the bubble burst and the room went dark. Fear consumed Marcus Metiline as he closed his eyes.

  A faint whine in the distance replaced the whirring and gnashing of machinery.

  He awoke to find his hand hovering over a digital alarm clock atop a cardboard box beside his twin bed. Harsh rays of light jabbed at his eyes. He halted the shrill scream of the alarm clock as soon as it began, as if anticipating it. Squinting and shielding his face from the light, he drew himself out of the tangled mess of sheets and reached for the crumpled pack of cigarettes on the floor.

  Chapter VIII

  As Ashram approached the double-door exit, he depressed a small button in the wall. The aluminum doors whispered open, disappearing into the barn frame and revealing the expansive, rolling hills of Trounce Farms. Sunlight bathed the fields, cascading across the vineyards, orchards, and crops. The tree tops were greener, the corn more golden, even the blue sky seemed to hug the ground tighter here than anywhere else. Light dew was deposited across the grass and leaves, sparkling and glistening as the cool breeze softly moved the plant life into a calm, hypnotic dance. It truly was a beautiful sight.

  Ashram stood in the massive doorway of his animal complex. He breathed in the morning air, stretched his arms, and basked in his scenery. It was a clear day in Tranquility and beyond his acres of farm, he could see flawlessly white clouds drifting westward over San Jose, 200 miles north. They gracefully carried themselves along the distant sky, taking care not to obstruct the towering steel block of BelisCo glinting on the horizon.

  Ashram depressed another button located upon a small pedestal-mounted box, and a moment later, an unmanned BelisCo transport arrived silently. Ashram let himself in to the front seat of the vehicle, closed the door, and opened an access panel embedded in the dash. There, he flipped a switch labeled, home.

  The transport instantly initiated, quietly moving along its predetermined track. It traveled through a variety of orchards: apple, tangerine, banana, avocado, mango. It effortlessly climbed the hills as they came upon the vast writhing vineyards of grapes and tomatoes, efficiently terraced on either sid
e of the road. They continued as they wound through immense fields of wheat, corn, cannabis, soy and barley. The transport carried Ashram through miles of cultivated landscape before, finally, they arrived at his home.

  There, Ashram slowly opened his door and eased himself out of the vehicle. Once both of his feet were on the ground and the vehicle's door was secured, the transport silently drove away, leaving Ashram alone before his house.

  He slowly made his way up the sloping ramp to his door. Removing a large key from his pocket, Ashram shakily guided his hand toward the thin slot on the wall beside the doorjamb. The large, wooden door swung inward revealing a marble clad entryway that hosted a massive spiraling staircase with gold accents upon its banister. A chandelier hung prominently from the distant ceiling. Its dangling gold- and silver-wrapped crystals sparkled, orchestrating a galaxy of tiny, dancing stars upon the walls and floor. The grandiosity of his entryway always comforted him.

  The room echoed with the sound of his sandals slapping against the hard floor as he made his way to the stairs. His loose-fitting trousers undulated as he climbed, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of his slow steps. As he traversed the perfectly cut stones, as gorgeous as they were, Ashram Trounce began to regret his extravagant taste.

  He paused halfway up the staircase, resting heavily against the gaudy banister. He hung his head, examining the swirls in the marble floor as he took short, calculated breaths through his pursed lips. Ashram wasn't a young man anymore, and he knew that one day these stairs would be the end of him.