The Mediator Pattern

by J. D. Lee

  Then, something behind Ashram’s eyes changed. Jacob watched silently as Ashram’s pupils lost their sheen and his irises went flat. Ashram stared through Jacob as his blue eyes turned a drab and cold gray, perfectly matching the dull, bleak office. Still Ashram’s laugh carried through the room.

  The air around him undulated and flexed in time with his laugh, radiating from the floor to the ceiling. His lips moved not an inch, nor did his body. His fingers had stopped tracing the gaudy bottle beside him. He was frozen in place.

  Calmly, the words “I’d like to show you something,” emanated from Ashram’s body.

  It wasn’t the fact that Ashram’s words came without cue from his lips or tongue, nor the odd, radiating tendrils surrounding him that bothered Jacob. Instead, it was the sound of Ashram’s voice that troubled him. Through the unnatural presence of persisting laughter, Jacob could hear the subtle difference; his words did not possess Ashram’s normal, friendly tone, but instead his voice had taken on an unfamiliar hollowness—an almost electronic quality.

  Jacob nodded awkwardly to the still image of Ashram Trounce sitting before him. He was hesitant, almost fearful, of what he was about to witness.

  Abruptly, Ashram moved to the desk, knocking the gray mugs to the floor and setting the large, jewel-encrusted bottle in their place. Its stones shone and sparkled, only partially matching the relative amplitude of Ashram’s gaudy dress amongst the colorless room. Then Ashram removed the tan-colored cork and tilted the neck toward the desktop. There was no familiar flow of liquid or the sound of gulping air. Instead, a few tiny cubes fell from its mouth and deposited themselves lazily upon the desk. The small bits sparkled under the fluorescent lights.

  Ashram held the bottle upside down. For a long moment the few cubes upon the desk sat still and lifeless and nothing more came from the bottle. Then, suddenly it expelled thousands. All at once the tiny, cubic bits deposited themselves in even rows and lines, occupying the entirety of the surface. Each one twirled and danced in place, glinting and shining. Then, once the last of them had escaped their jewel-encrusted prison, they rose into the air. They moved upward about an inch and then stopped, suspended above Jacob Weller’s desk. After a moment their motion ceased and their shiny, crystalline surfaces turned as gray as the rest of the room. There they hovered, a gray blanket in the air above his desk.

  Jacob watched, his mouth agape, his eyes wide, as Ashram sat the bottle down and lifted his right hand over a portion of the grid of floating gray blocks. Small cubes illuminated beneath his hand. First they turned a bright red, and then they turned yellow. Each one began to sing and hum as they gradually gained momentum, slowly turning in place upon the desk. As the cubes beneath his hand rotated, their drag could be seen as a ripple influencing the rest of the cubes. Ashram moved his left hand over another section of the table and the same process occurred.

  Ashram began moving his hands through the air. He clenched his fists and kneaded at the air. He rotated invisible knobs and turned invisible screws. Ashram clapped his hands and rubbed them together as though he were rinsing them clean. He poked and prodded at invisible nothings before him. He gracefully controlled the movement of the cubes as though he was conducting an orchestra, and each of these actions carried with it an effect upon the grid.

  Once he had finished his orchestration of movement, the cubes were no more. Before the two men stood a small cylindrical device no larger than a pack of cigarettes. On either end of the cylinder, toroidal shapes bulged beneath uncountable rows of spiraling wire. The coils moved counter-clockwise around the device, enveloping its exterior in glossy, nylon insulated copper. In the center of the top, the wires sank into the opening, swallowed by the shadows of the small pipe. Beside the cylinder, atop the table, sat a white envelope, Jacob Weller written neatly on its face.

  With both hands, Ashram pushed the device and envelope toward Jacob.

  He said electrically, “Keep this close.”

  Then without another word, Ashram got up and left. As he walked away from Jacob Weller, the gray desk, the straight-backed chairs, and the empty, jewel encrusted bottle began to dissolve. It was as though Ashram’s proximity to these items defined their tangibility. As the distance between Jacob and Ashram grew, the gray walls began to fade. The carpet slowly turned to concrete. The fluorescent lights waned and the ceiling grew translucent as Ashram exited the office.

  Then, suddenly, he faced only a black expanse. It flexed and throbbed before him.

  “What did you see?” Avant asked eagerly.

  Slowly Ashram turned away from the column of death and decay that occupied his friend’s property. He looked Avant dead in the eyes and said, “I did this.”

  His voice trembled and tears had begun welling in his eyes, but he continued. “I built him something. That’s what made this. That’s what started this.” He waved his hand in condemnation toward the imposing, black column. “You don’t have any more time, Avant.”

  As quickly as the words left his mouth, dozens of black columns appeared across the horizon.

  “There is always time,” said Avant, “There has to be time. I made this place. I’ll meet with Marcus. He can fix this.”

  “I don’t think he can.”

  “He can.”

  With that, Avant pulled out his small, black, knob covered device, turned a dial and dithered away.

  Long after Avant had vanished into thin air, Ashram remained still. He stared longingly into the dark void, attempting to draw some comfort, some reason from its grip, but it was no use. Whatever reason there was for this prevailing darkness, this black vacuum, had long since been swallowed somewhere deep inside.

  Finally, Ashram withdrew from the Weller property. He backed away slowly and made his way down the snake-like road back toward Trounce Farms.

  His steps were long and exaggerated. He took his time placing his feet as he moved forward. No particular motive drove him, no destination called to him. Ashram only walked to walk. His mind swam with ghosts of his friend, Jacob. He saw his home far ahead of him, and beyond that, BelisCo.

  Through his tears, Ashram realized the black columns all throughout the bay area; thousands upon thousands of them. They marched forward like an army. Like a swelling black fire, they consumed the sky and the ground.

  He witnessed as San Jose was swallowed into the blackness. He watched as the tall redwood trees north of him curled up and shriveled away. He saw the Pacific Ocean rise up and evaporate, spreading itself into a thin, pixelated mist across the retreating sky. The ground swelled and shifted in the distance, forming deep cracks and tall ridges as it moved for him. Like a rising tide, it rolled forward, destroying everything in its path. The sun turned its back on the coast and the display of death and destruction, allowing the darkness to take control.

  Ashram saw as Trounce Farms crumbled piece by piece. His crops died. His buildings vanished. The walls of his extravagant home collapsed in a storm of dust and debris, revealing the grandiose skeleton of marble and steel. He watched as his massive marble staircase dissolved, taking with it his beautiful crystal chandelier and ornate stained glass windows. He heard the cries from the animal complex as its roof folded in on itself and its walls burst away. In only a matter of seconds, the entirety of Trounce Farms was swallowed in darkness and the sky above had turned a deep oily black. The sun itself seemed to be avoiding Earth completely, as if some force were guiding the light rays around what little remained of the planet’s decrepit ground.

  Then it was on him. First, Ashram was stricken by a prevailing silence. His heart pounded without sound. No birds chirped. No leaves rustled. No insects moved. No noise escaped his lips. Even the steady whisper of his breathing had been muted by the darkness.

  In a flash, the long, thin blades of grass beneath his feet and all along the hillside dried up and burst away in plumes of dust. The soil that held their roots in place turned muddy, drawing Ashram’s feet into it up to his ankles. He began to struggle, tugging at
his pant leg, digging deep into the canvas with his neon orange talons. It was no use. As the muddy topsoil resolidified around his legs, Ashram gave in to the encroaching destruction. He closed his eyes in submission as he lowered himself onto the resin-like ground.

  “I’m okay with dying,” Ashram mouthed as he pulled his chest to his knees.

  He knew it was time.

  As he sat there, curled and alone on the hillside, darkness all around, he thought to himself, What an interesting reasoning… realization… rationalization… consideration… admiration…

  Then the pressure came. It stretched his final seconds. It toyed with him as he tried to submit, but the darkness didn’t want him easily. It tugged first at his clothes and then his skin. It moved to his muscles and into his bones. It weighed on him like a ton of bricks, compacting his chest and stealing his breath. Then it worked its way inside of him. It began pushing from within. It pressed on his wrists and his knees. He felt it behind his eardrums, stretching the flesh, deafening him without sound. It wore on him, bearing down on his body, enveloping his soul, and overpowering his mind.

  His eyes sprang open one final time as his last breath was torn violently from his lungs.

  Then, as had the world around him, Ashram Trounce died.

  Chapter XVI

  The room was dark.

  “Catastrophic loss of life. Cognitive stasis disrupted. Recovery impossible.”

  A flash of red lit the room. The banks of various cold, lifeless components occupying each square inch of wall space were infused with a momentary, eerie, florid glow.

  “Catastrophic loss of life. Cognitive stasis disrupted. Recovery impossible,” the voice repeated.

  It emanated from above.

  Suddenly, the comatose devices activated; blinking lights, scrolling sine waves, and oscillating digital graphs lit the room in an inconsistent coalescence of colors. Two oblong rings of light appeared on the floor, dividing the center of the room into thirds. Gradually, the rings grew in size and intensity until, finally, the ovate steel plates opened outwardly in a spiral, revealing a glimmering white light below. Gears ground and motors whirred as two stainless steel beds were lifted out of the white, water-filled tunnel. Light shimmered and danced as the beds cut through the liquid on their way to the floor. After a few long moments, their frames emerged entirely with not a single drop clinging to them. Along each of the beds, hanging distended from the frames, were bundles of cables that braided in and around each other and attached to a large computer-like device on the floor. Long silver tubes ran from the device's face and terminated in the left temples of the two men that lay motionless upon the beds.

  When the beds reached waist height, the whirring ceased. They clicked in time with one another as their bases locked in place. The metal plates below reassembled, slamming the floor shut. After a brief moment of darkness, the floor turned translucent, perpetuating the long tunnel's diffused glow and bathing the imposing arrangement of electronics, computers and hospital beds in a harsh, white light.

  “Catastrophic loss of life. Cognitive stasis disrupted. Recovery impossible.”

  The man on the right twitched violently. His arms flopped up and down as he started to cough. His torso wrenched upward, forcing him to sit. He withdrew the long silver tube with a loud slurping sound and quickly flung his feet onto the floor. His body convulsed as he held himself upright. Shakily, he massaged his perforated temple as he stood over the man in the neighboring bed. He stared long and intently, blinking wildly as he looked the man over with his steely blue eyes; he couldn't help it. It was a side effect of the machine.

  Once his muscles had calmed and his blinking was under control, he placed his hand over the man's mouth. He felt for breathing through the man's thirty-five-day beard. Then he moved his open palm over the man's nose and round cheeks, feeling for air. He stopped just below the incision above the man's eye. He quietly examined the laceration. The skin around the incision was dry. A small vise-like contraption held the cut open, forcing it to heal around the large steel cable embedded inside. The cable attached the man's brow to a large apparatus on the ceiling. Millions of coin-sized mirrors and small golden knobs covered the cumbersome device above.

  “Catastrophic loss of life. Cognitive stasis disrupted. Recovery impossible,” the voice repeated again.

  “Thank you. One moment,” the standing man replied to the announcement.

  He ran his fingers over the cold skin surrounding the cable protrusion in the man's head and said, “I really thought we could do it, Marcus.”

  After a moment of silence, he moved toward a row of computer monitors along the wall. He flipped a switch embedded on a console before him and a chair emerged.

  He seated himself and moved a portion of wall leftward, revealing a glass panel of brightly lit keys.

  “Welcome, Horatio Avant. Vocalize initiation code please,“ the wall of monitors requested as they blinked from black to white.

  “Mediator,” he said calmly.

  “Initiation code verified. Accessing communications.”

  A moment later a single monitor lit up with a thin green line running horizontally across its face.

  “How many did we lose?” The green line jumped up and down as the computer screen spoke.

  “Directly? We were hosting two hundred and sixteen terminal patients through him. They are in a warehouse near here,” Horatio said as he punched his knobby fingers into the glass keyboard.

  On an adjacent screen appeared rows of hospital beds, each occupied with a different patient tethered to tubes and cables. On the monitors beside each of them was the faint glow of their flat lined ECG waves.

  Then he added, “Indirectly, we’ve lost thousands.”

  Another monitor powered on. It showed a similar warehouse containing an identical setup of occupied hospital beds. They too were illuminated by the faint glow of their flat-lines.

  “Tell me what happened, in detail,” the green line quietly demanded.

  “We hosted them in his pituitary, as discussed. We implanted the chip in him with success and began uploading information into his cortex six weeks ago, as much as we could fit, as much as he needed to build such a vast and convincing world. Once we induced the dream-state, his dimethyltryptamine levels shot through the roof, increasing over a thousand fold. I knew the increase in DMT would allow us to upload the rest of the patients into the chamber, occupying the new world I built in his mind. The program was simple.”

  Horatio cleared his throat and continued, “Once their minds were immersed, I started the time-loop. That was thirty-five days ago. Since their physical bodies were held separate, the loop allowed their cancers to heal in an accelerated real-time. At peak, we reached a ratio of nearly eight experienced days to one real day, or solar day. Which meant their cancers were regressing nearly eight times faster than any known treatment can accomplish. Their bodies responded perfectly to the artificial time scales they were experiencing and not that which was occurring out here, physically... We were adding not just minutes or seconds, but days and weeks to what would otherwise be death sentences... It was exactly as we predicted and we had great success. For the first fourteen days it was everything we could hope for. We showed an overall plummet in the cancer's growth kinetics as well as an increased healing rate of nearly fifty-four percent. From the data, it appeared to be working; physiological time had slowed.”

  He lowered his head.

  “But by the fifteenth day, it had taken a turn. Cancer kinetics had grown exponentially in the host and by day sixteen we had lost a patient; Colin Belis. That's when I altered the program.”

  Horatio rubbed the small red dot in his left temple.

  “I altered the program so I could enter. It wasn't easy. I had at first thought that my entrance into the reality had disrupted my programming, but once I was inside, I had discovered what had gone on and why I couldn't manually wake any of the patients. When Colin Belis's physical body was consumed by cance
r and passed away, his mind wasn't expelled from the chamber; he had not left the illusion. He remained behind, lingering, devouring the patients' hard-links to reality and reprocessing them into his own conceptualizations, overpowering Patient One's constructs entirely. Somehow he altered the program's historical records, manipulating the causality structures, and built himself an empire within the illusion, placing a few patients in power and others within his control. He was choking them... I immediately assigned an archetypal representation of their collective cancers to a device within the program, a device under the control of Belis's empire. Utilizing this single infectious patient, Colin Belis, as an antagonist, a necessary half-truth, I attempted to guide Marcus toward attacking the cancer directly... fighting it psychosomatically, so to speak... by disabling that device. I honestly thought Marcus would be able to kill the cancer, all of their cancers, by disabling that device.”

  “Who is Marcus?”

  “My apologies, the mediator. Patient One.”

  He pointed to the man on the bed behind him and then continued, “It took immense planning to create a convincing enough reality for Patient One to fight back, but it was all in vain. Somewhere along his thirty-fourth loop, the inhabitants began working against the program. Seemingly all at once, they took on duties bent on destroying the substructure of their reality. They went out of their way to subvert it. They stood directly in my way; in their own way. To some extent it was as though the program was on their side, working against me. They knew things they shouldn't know and did things they didn't know how to do, even Patient One. He had gained knowledge that I had never input into him, understandings and abilities that weren't part of the program. Him and dozens of others marched through the reality placing small devices in the hands of other patients, devices that wiped them and their anchor locations out of the reality. Repetitious loop after repetitious loop, they found ways to break the rules, killing each other one by one. Then all at once it collapsed.”