by Bō Jinn
* * *
The recording stopped and the light of the holoscreen evaporated with his memory.
A dead calm ensued across the chamber; there was only the sound of the air pumping hurriedly through his locked throat. He could not speak. His eyes bulged from their sockets. The sweat covered his face and streamed down his heaving chest.
“Do you remember now… Saul?” Pope’s voice spoke from the dark as step by measured step he re-entered the circle of light, then stopped, waited, drew a deep breath and exhaled, lifting his eyes up to the light. “The nightmares … they all begin and end the same way, don’t they? Then, one day, the nightmare finally comes true. What if they were always true?”
He paused and his eyes lowered again.
“What if the mind had a way of always bringing us back to the same place we started? You wake up. And the cycle begins again. And again. And again”
He gasped the only word he could heave to his mouth:
“No…”
“It is a paradox, I know,” Pope continued, pacing around. “To think that the illusion you have been chasing all this time is the same thing from which you have been trying to escape.”
“No…”
“The cycle ends precisely where it begins: The truth. The answer to the question: why are you here? The first people you ever loved, you destroyed. To chase down that paradise lost, only to find it and destroy it over and over and over again – it has been the predicate of your every action since the moment you were conceived. It is your meme. It is your fate.”
“NO!”
“Saul, try and think. Why did you want to escape from us? You had to know that you would never find the freedom you were really looking for. The martial world became the manifestation of everything you despised about yourself – your past self. You merely lacked the memory with which to see it clearly. It is for this reason you did not trust us. We knew the truth that you did not want to know.”
“No.” The word became a platitude of denial. “No.”
“Think back to any moment that might have roused some shadow of the past,” Pope persisted. “I know that you always felt, deep down, what you now see clearly – that you belong with us, Saul. You have always belonged with us. You chose us. You were not trying to escape from our world. You were trying to escape the truth. You were trying to escape from Vincent.”
The universe imploded upon him. He fought back with all of his denial, but there was no escape from the monster which now confronted him, having lurked in the backdrop since the very beginning, eluding him, leading his every step up to that precise moment. His throat locked to suffocation, his sweat turned to blood before his eyes and the screams deafened his soul until his eyes turned into his skull in an attempt to flee from the nightmares. But there was no waking this time.
Day 0