by Abhishek .
“Mathias! Mathias!” I heard someone scream from a dark alley to my right. I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw Shanbhag and Vivek huddled in the shadows.
“They have Ram and Odin! Baldr got them arrested! I tried to save them but I couldn’t! I’m so sorry! They even know about Nanna and Heimdallr!”
“It’s alright, Mathias,” Shanbhag held my shoulders. “Calm down. I’m going to go and see what can be done.”
Shanbhag turned and whispered in Vivek’s ears. “Vivek, take Mathias away to a quiet place and stay hidden. Don’t try to take him to the Lok Vve district, it can be too risky.”
With that, Shanbhag jogged away down the road, towards Valhalla. A huge crowd of people had started to appear in the streets, chanting “Death to Odin!” and vilifying him using pictures of Lok Vve.
“Come this way, Mathias! Follow me!” Vivek beckoned me and started running towards the crowd. I began to follow him when I tripped on a shoe lace and fell down. I couldn’t breath properly as I realised I was again going through one of my asthma attacks. I felt like a boulder came crashing down on my chest, blocking my trachea with all its might.
I tried to take my inhaler but it slipped out of my pocket and slid away from me on the floor. My vision was blurring. It felt as if my lifeline would soon sink into the milky surface of the impeccably clean room. Although I seemed to have got accustomed to the drainage of energy felt after a teleporter journey, it felt like a truck was ramming my chest. I opened my mouth to breath, but my airways were blocked, shut due to a nervous attack. I reached out for the inhaler on the white surface, the reflection of my creeping fingers imitating me on the other side of the floor. The inhaler was just out of my reach. I stretched little more, feeling a sense of drowning. My body burned from within, craving for some oxygen. My muscles writhed spasmodically like seizures. A sheet of blackness started to descend upon my eyes.
A pair of shoes moved into my line of sight. It stepped lightly on the inhaler and casually kicked it away from me. My chest went completely taut and just before I passed out I looked upwards into the strangely icy eyes of Vivek standing above me. The world went black with the sharp sound of the plastic inhaler cracking open under Vivek’s mighty shoes.
Kapittel 83
Mathias’s story
Somewhere
No sense of time
“Vivek! What is this place?” Vivek looked back at me. A certain brotherly warmth radiated from him, yet there was a strange rigidity in his face, as if his watery eyes had turned to stone, a particular Mr Hyde peaking through the windows to his soul. “Trust, Mathias. Trust me. That’s all,” he turned back and walked briskly while I followed.
I looked around to find myself back on the bifrost bridge, walking an illuminated path stretching across a void. This time, the blackness of the void seemed to shift and stretch chaotically. The faintest sounds of shrill screams reached my ears from below the bridge. Whatever lay beneath, I was safe from it up on the bridge... with Vivek by my side.
Up ahead, a stark wooden door materialised, marking the end of the bridge. There were no niches or cracks through which we could peer into the other side, just scratch marks to leave our imagination working.
“Your father, Mathias. He’s right there, on the other side!” Vivek beamed and instantaneously, the twinkle in his eyes came back.
I looked at him, then at the formidable size of the door, then back at him. “Are you sure? I don’t think it’s right.”
Vivek looked at me and smiled. He didn’t need to say anything. His words ‘Trust me. That’s all,’ came from somewhere, a soft volume. As I looked around, trying to find the source, I realised it was coming from the shifting darkness of the abyss below us. “Trust me. That’s all. Trust me. That’s all.” The voices turned from shrill to deep bass, increasing in a rapid crescendo.
I faced the door and took a deep breath. The voices clashed with each other as they tried to overpower one another.
“Trust me. That’s all!”
I touched the cold wood and pushed open the door. The screams reached their peak, overwhelming me, assaulting my auditory senses and tearing away at the insides of my head. The darkness writhed even more violently.
Suddenly, I saw a blurry picture of my parents on the other side, the moment when they strung the amulet on my neck. I reached forward but my foot felt nothing. Before I had the chance to regain my balance, I started falling off the edge of the bridge into the unforgiving black. As I tried to break my fall, my nails raked the wooden door. Time slowed down and a firm hand gripped mine to leave me hanging over the edge, my feet dangling loosely over the moving shadows. The screaming stopped, a sudden tense silence drowning us.
“Vivek! What is this?” I looked up at him, incredulous.
Vivek didn’t say a word. He let go of my hand and watched as I fell down and was swallowed whole by the shapeless beings of the dark.
* * *
My eyes opened, light filling the darkness that had befallen me. I tried moving my hand but my wrists were tied tightly to metal crossbars on either side of me. I realised I was lying on my stomach in an unusually comfortable bed that moulded its shape around my body. I turned my head slowly to the side and found myself inside a glossy white cylindrical chamber. Claustrophobia gripped me loosely. I was being buried alive in an ultra-modern, next-generation coffin. The pristine white light came from the lower niches of the coffin, illuminating the inside in a plain, uniform, clinical glow. I shivered slightly in the cold when it struck me that I was lying completely naked. Instantly, helplessness clutched me in its talons. I was unclothed, cuffed and tied to a bed inside a coffin with not the slightest idea of the sinister mind responsible for all this. Just then the dark picture of Vivek crushing my inhaler flashed inside my head. Was this where it ended for me? Was my mind clouded by fake admiration and respect for Vivek? Did he harbour machinations all along? No. No, obviously not. Was I still being overtly cynical?
The frontal part of the coffin, right above my head, was sealed by a transparent screen. Two silhouettes slid into my line of vision, dark figures against an even darker background. They stood beside each other like father and son. As soon as one of the silhouettes leaned forward, bringing his face close to the transparent screen, a snigger lit up, followed by a sharp nose, fair skin and rippling eyes with a certain frenzy in them. Baldr’s familiar face took shape, a face that was meant for a person with the most pleasing disposition. Perhaps, the artist that created him was unaware of the corrupting effects of power.
Baldr stepped back into the darkness. A second later, a hologram was projected on the inside of the screen. My brows furled and I bit my lip as I saw Vivek’s somber face right beside Baldr’s. This wasn’t happening. This really couldn’t be happening....
“Do you believe in pure coincidence, Mathias? A certain inevitability that is theorised to pervade through history?” Baldr smiled thinly. “Do you think that if your famous Cleopatra’s aquiline nose had been any different, the present would have been different? That the fact that we finally meet, in such strange circumstances, is just... chance?”
I kept staring at him, trying deliberately to stay deadpan. “I beg to differ,” Baldr hissed, his serpentine voice sending chills down my body. “Everything happens because everything is planned out. You never realised, did you? You have one of the most brilliant minds ever created and yet, you didn’t realise that Vivek was my boy!” He guffawed in the darkness.
“Why Vivek? I trusted you. Like a younger brother I looked up to you. Why?” I asked, with parched throat and wet eyes. Still, I brushed away emotion. I had been disillusioned. Emotion and trust work only for a few. Shrewdness and cynicism work for all. It was quite disappointing that I was forced to abandon that warm, fuzzy feeling but I knew that being cold and robotic would ensure survival.
“Oh, Mathias! You are still so innocent, so... pure. But in order to cut diamond, one needs a knife of diamond. You were fooled all this while by an equally sharp
brain, Mathias. Vivek. Vivek is my creation! He was born the same way you were, in a pod here and was thus bestowed by the same awesome brainpower that you have. He is my genetic son!”
“The pod. You grew him in a pod. But why? After all my father went through for running the programme, why?”
Baldr chuckled. “People don’t understand what’s good for them. I appreciate what my brother did: try to create a superior race of humans like you. But NO! The conservative masses felt it was against nature, that they will get angry, that their position in the society will get endangered. So it was stopped. But I revived it with Vivek and I knew, that if I could make millions of other Viveks and Mathiases, social Darwinism as it is called in Mandagaar would do the work for me here in Asr-Gawa. Only Vivek does not have your mind control Mathias, your link with the amulet is unique.”
“We need your bone marrow to do that. Without a catalyst, the process of growth is very slow and has a miniscule success rate. With your bone marrow, we will be able to clone you in mass production,” Vivek said frostily and motioned to invisible personnel to get going with the process. Instantly, a hissing sound filled the coffin as fluid pressure was released. The delicate, thin metal tubes moved with the fluidity of snakes as they slowly made their way to my exposed hip girdle.
“How? Tell me how, Vivek!”
For a moment, nobody spoke. Only the soft clinking noise of the metallic instruments tore at the veil of silence. Few seconds later, the veil was lifted and Vivek spoke.
“You are a brilliant boy, Mathias. Think and you’ll know.”
I looked at the hard, robotic face of Vivek, staring at me through the holographic projection. The slightly grainy projection gave him an uncanny virtual aura. Was this the real Vivek all the time?
“So getting me inside the temple in the biosphere, your willingness to help me, your parents, your house and job. Everything was fake? You feigned everything, Vivek?”
“You were never even suspicious! That was the lackluster bit! When I left you guys in the tent near the mountain temple and went to find another entry, I was informing on the Jargantaans and father about your arrival. My parents, my history, everything was fabricated so perfectly that you, Mathias, couldn’t even doubt its authenticity,” he gloated, with a tight grin. “You think it was just chance that when you evaded the police in Meerut, you found my truck? It was part of the game, Mathias. A game where you were the poor pawn.”
A thousand knives pierced the insides of my throat. I blinked and felt a stream roll down my cheek into a puddle on the base of the coffin. I had never been betrayed before, but this smack on my face hardened me more than ever before.
“Even when you took so long in Japan, when you were apparently negotiating with the old Japanese antique seller, you were, in fact, selling information to Baldr,” I reflected.
“Not selling. It was my duty as a son to help my father! I bear no contract. Only the contract of kinship. Who do you think planted that chip in Ram’s Maglite impersonating as Ram’s uncle using the time portal to go back in time?” A wider grin tore across Vivek’s cheeks. I remembered my dream and the blurred figure of Ram’s uncle handling the torch and everything fitted into place.
“Then why did you expose it and throw it away?”
“To gain your trust, Mathias! Didn’t I do just that? When the tracker was useless because I was directly giving information to my father, I gallantly got rid of the tracker and earned your trust! I had thought it’d be tougher than that, but you turned out to be way more naïve than I had presumed!” Vivek sounded eerily like Baldr.
I remained silent, biting my tongue out of rage. Even though I was lying bare, with the cold metal needles slowly poking my hip, my eyes felt like they would pop out. My body was shaking in a wrath I tried my best to control. My jowls were as tight as hard rope, my muscles as taut as steel. My face reddened and torrents of hot liquid oozed out of my tear ducts, a liquid I was familiar with, a liquid I would try to forget from now on. I convulsed in my coffin, but the rigid straps kept me in my place. I looked up at the display. Vivek and Baldr were smiling at each other, Baldr with his arms slung around Vivek’s shoulders like a proud father.
“He was my master stroke, Mathias. Even when you thought you had evaded me, I was there, lurking in your shadow. Now with your vital marrow, we will make an army of you that will take over Asr-Gawa! A race highly superior in intellect and... in physical combat. Your silly respiratory problems will not be present in them. How perfect, no?”
Baldr grinned as he gloated and spoke, “I even named him Vivek in a bid to plant him in the region where he would be most useful: near the Himalayan teleporter. His accent, looks and habits were all programmed into him by me. The calculations were extremely accurate and he delivered.
“You see this place? This was where your father started his pod programme. This desolate landscape that once used to be a mineral rich region. Here, his programme came to an end and here, he came to an end during exile. A fitting way to die, radiation poisoning. When the radiation levels are too high, like here, you don’t have to worry. A day or two and your organs would fail....”
I wasn’t listening to Baldr anymore. I shut my auditory senses to his voice and looked deep into the blankness of my mind. I was meditating before an anesthetic liquid was injected into my spine. As my blankness turned to darkness, I pondered about how Baldr called this place a ‘region’ and not another dimension. Was this somewhere in Asr-Gawa?
Slowly under the effect of the anesthesia and the combined effect of my own exhaustion, I slipped into unconsciousness.
* * *
My eyes fluttered open gingerly and I found myself once again somewhere unknown. A uniform, bleak grey wall covered my frame of vision. I felt a strange numbness near my hip where the anesthesia had been injected. My head felt light and my body stiff, as if waking up from a hangover. My body was tightly snuggled in the bed I was lying in, the bedclothes wrapped around me so firmly, it seemed as if the bed wanted me to lie in it forever and eventually sink in deep enough to become a part of it. I fought the intense urge to go back to sleep and tried to get up, but I couldn’t. My imagination turned to fear, and then perhaps turned to reality. I wriggled harder but the bed wouldn’t let me go, gripping my entire body with a deceptive softness on the inside but the rigidity and strength of iron. I looked downwards and found my right kneecap, left lower arm and left chest the only exposed parts of my body bar my head. All of the rest had been engulfed by the bed’s strange fiber. I felt as if I was lying in a pool of cement that had solidified over me and had the chilly feeling of plunging deeper inside until I had no place to breath....
Out of the exposed part of the left arm appeared the end of a hypodermic needle. The thin pipe attached to it snaked out of the bed into the port of a thin white panel jutting out of the bed. The end of the pipe that was inserted into the panel glowed an ominous green. Once again, I was not in control of my body.
A Jargantaan walked casually beside me and checked the displays and meters on the panel, making adjustments by hardly touching the panel; his mind was enough.
I thought thrice before uttering anything. “What is this? What are you doing to me now?”
The Jargantaan spared me an indifferent look before going back to the panel displays.
“What are you doing to me?” I yelled at him, writhing within the confines of my bed. “This is enough now!”
The Jargantaan moved like a snake, slapping me across my cheek and grabbing my mouth shut. I stopped moving immediately, his cold steel like fingers digging into my sore face, his icy eyes piercing through mine. Slowly, he let go.
“Your marrow has been extracted,” a button glowed red on his collar near his throat. “We are to dispose of you now. Lie down quietly. I can make this much more painful.”
I found no words. I lay there in absolute silence. It felt as if a coffin had shut close with me in it. The next moment, I started wriggling again, this time looking around for
anything that may help me get out of here. Nothing in the room. I looked down and to my horror, my amulet was missing. Baldr had been smart enough to do so. A second or two of wriggling and I gave up, realising the full state of my helplessness, my predicament.
“How can you do this? You’ve taken what you wanted and now you get rid of me like a plastic bottle? Do you even have any conscience?” I asked him in vain. There was still time until he introduced the toxin into the panel, so I kept my eyes open for as long as I could, absorbing and reflecting as much as I could in the seemingly last moments of my life.
I looked around my residential quarters. Strongly resembling a cell, the fifteen feet by fifteen had solid grey walls, one bed that moulded itself around the sleeper’s body, one small green panel and a thick door made of something metallic. A reddish glow illuminated the room in a ghastly incandescent light. To my left, the entire grey wall had been replaced by a sheet of transparent substance, opening up to the gigantic, voluminous, hollow centre of Baldr’s base.
I looked through the window, breathing shallow and unnaturally calm breaths. My dilated pupils took a while to get adjusted to the dark red glow of the cavernous space outside.
A thin veil of mist wafted around the area languorously, creating a haze and concealing what lay underneath. As the fog started to clear, I held my breath for something sinister. A palpable fear gripped me in sharp steel talons from within, paralysis spreading through me, my eyes fixated on the base of the immense space.
A series of glossy globes of suspended liquid bubbles swam through the disappearing mist. As the ethereal smoke became thinner, thousands of such orbs materialised, arranged in uncountable rows and columns. The bubbles were transparent and not well defined, like thin sheets of clear plastic holding something more viscous than water. Each bubble was suspended in between two grey pillars, a conduit snaking out of each one and plunging into the delicate surface of the sphere. Two thinner pipes emerged from the ground and plunged deeper into the bubble.