by Mikael Aizen
The screen rolled blank for some time before beginning again. It clicked off as Taimu groaned, looking around him. A woman with golden-blond hair, big eyes, a small nose and thin, cute lips smiled at Taimu. "How was the video?"
"Who are you?" All Taimu remembered was falling, hitting the ground. The collapse of the world around him like he was falling into a black hole. Then nothing.
"My name is Janice."
Taimu was laying in a bed in...a barn? With a projector screen in front of him. The bed looked like a giant cardboard box cut in half. He was laying on hay, it was surprisingly comfortable. The barn was made out of a strange metallic bumpy material and it was colored a navy blue. The thing that made him think barn was the large amount of hay and the animals. There were pigs and dogs, a goat. A broken down tractor with one wheel was in the corner and a trumpet had been tacked to a wall.
Something was familiar about Janice...a too-big purple jumpsuit with frills that looked oddly attractive on her.
"Yellow-green woman?"
Janice smiled. "Yes, that was me in your world."
Taimu sat up. Staring. She was pretty and there was none of the revulsion he'd felt with yellow-green woman. Quite the opposite, actually.
He looked down at himself. He was wearing the black uniform that he'd seen on the others with a thick padded collar and rolls of material the entire ways down the vest, like a North Face winter jacket. The pants looked much the same and he realized that he must look like a Michelin tire mascot, except black.
Taimu noticed she wore the combat boots. His feet were bare and on a whim he tried to move his toes. Nothing. "Start from the beginning," he said. "Who are you--not your name but WHO are you people? And why did you throw me out of a building?"
"We are the League of Real. We are people from various times and realities who have joined together to free the world from the Unreal."
"The League of Real," Taimu repeated, raising an eyebrow. "Is there a League of Unreal?"
Janice laughed and beamed. She seemed to glow from her laughter, Taimu watched her suspiciously. The last time she had glowed he'd been thrown out a window. "No," Janice said. "No League of Unreal. Just alien killers."
"The big eyes," Taimu said.
"Yes. We call them Koalas."
Jason had called them that. Was Jason an alien, too? Part of this League? "Why Koalas?"
"That was how they appeared to us the first time. They hunt us and kill us every time we find someone or something that is Real and try to retrieve it. You are Real so they wanted to get you before us. I threw you out of the building to save you."
"Thanks?" Taimu raised an eyebrow. "And that video, you've been searching for me? What's so special about me?"
She shook her head. "No, not you. We all see the same orientation video. But," Janice said. "You are very Real. More Real than anyone or anything else we've found. This is very rare."
"So you kidnapped me."
"We had to," she answered. "The Koalas were after you."
Something about the way she said it made him chuckle. The Koalas were after him... "Why did the video say you found someone Real?" he asked.
"The video was made long ago when we thought that we had found a person who was entirely Real. He wasn't," Janice said.
"What happened to him?"
"He died," she shrugged. "It was before my time."
"So I'm not entirely Real."
"Probably not. But neither am I."
"I still don't understand what Real versus fake is."
"Unreal," she corrected. "It would be easiest to show you," Janice said. "Come, follow me."
"I can't exactly move," he said.
"Try."
Nothing happened. "Stop messing with the cripple."
She frowned at him. "That is odd. You should be able to walk. Your mind must still believe strongly that it was injured."
"Or, you could be wrong."
"I'm not," she said it with such confidence that he didn't have the need to feel bitter.
She walked over to him and bent down. She picked him up, shifting him into the crook of both elbows. She was surprisingly strong. She carried him gently and she had a soft, somewhat sad expression on her face. She nodded at Taimu. "In time, you will walk as you once did. I promise." There was an air of familiarity to her, like he'd known her or she'd known him.
For some reason he hoped at her words. Even if he didn't believe them, he let her words move his heart. He wanted his toes to wiggle at his mind's command, he wanted his feet to flex and maintain balance as he shifted leg to leg underneath his body. He wanted to feel the smooth sway of gait.
The pressure from her arms lifted, and Taimu was floating.
"What's going on?" Taimu said, alarmed, then gaped in awe. "Where are we?"
They were outside the farm, hovering over a platform. Above and around him were isolated buildings floating in space. They were in the inside of a great, white sphere with lights lining flush all around the inside surface. The buildings were a random assortment, oriented in circular distribution as if projecting from a central spot in the huge ball's middle. The buildings pointed away from the center. He saw a structure that looked like the white house, a jail cell with a man in a hammock on the inside, a backyard and patio without a house. There were other buildings, too, buildings that he could only compare and try to describe inside his head, like the "farm." There were gooey shaped blob buildings and a miniature sky scraper, some buildings looked like boxes or tunnels. Most every one was made out of some foreign material he'd never seen.
He saw on opposite sides of the sphere large screens with a rotating diagram displayed. It was like a map of a spaceship, but shaped like a round coral reef.
"What is this place?" he breathed.
"Welcome to the Realest reality we've found. This is home, Gateway. We are in the Great Sphere at the center of Gateway," Janice said, floating beside him. "This is our collection of Real things that we've searched long and hard for. We have explored several millions of realities to find these rare things. It is our greatest treasure."
"Wow," he said, then looked down. His arms waved in the air, he was leaving the platform. "H...how do I stop?"
"Just think it. Desire yourself to move and you will move."
Taimu tried, but he kept floating. "It's not working."
"Look at the patio, there. Imagine that you are there now. Believe it and you will be there."
Taimu looked at the patio. He pushed away his disbelief. With all that he had seen, why not? He pictured in his mind, sitting on one of the lounge chairs, checking out the grill, standing beside Janice who now stood waving at him from across the space. But Taimu kept floating off the platform. From here he could see a bright light in the very center, so bright that it looked like the sun. It pulled at him and he felt himself floating towards it. He wanted to reach out for it.
Janice appeared out of nowhere and knuckled him across the head. She grabbed his hand firmly. "Come, Taimu," she ordered.
He again wondered how she'd known his name.
They floated to the patio. Janice stood and Taimu sat in luscious green grass.
The grill was on and he could smell the sweetness of BBQ meat. Pork he'd bet. "You are bad at this," Janice scowled disapprovingly.
"I'm sorry?"
She sighed.
"What was that light?" Taimu asked.
"The center of the universe," Janice answered.
"...really?"
"Yes."
Taimu didn't know what to say.
"Only Real things can approach this close to the center."
"What is it, though?" Taimu asked. "I mean, OK, center of the universe. But...that's it?"
"It is a portal, like the others." Janice pointed at the numerous lights around the ball's surface. "On the other side of the center of the universe is the True world. Our final destination."
"Those
lights are portals? To what?"
"To the other worlds. The other realities and times. From within each portal branches many more. That is how we get to the different realities searching for Real things. We collect Real things from the Unreal worlds and bring them here. Someday, when we can cross the center of the universe, we'll be able to take our Real things with us to start a new civilization in the True world."
"How do you know what is on the other side?"
Janice shrugged. "We don't. Some have made it across, rarely more than once. Every one that does returns crazy."
"What if the other side is just another room, like this one. Maybe that's why they go mad? There might just be another 'Great Sphere' just like this with another center portal?"
Janice frowned. "That would be impossible."
Taimu leaned back, propping himself on his elbow. "What I don't get, besides everything going on, is why we're trying so hard to live in a True world when the worlds that we came from were perfectly fine to begin with. I was happy and I had my life figured out before you came along."
A horrible glare stared back at him. "We saved you from the Unreal," she hissed. "At a deep cost."
"I was happy in the Unreal," Taimu said.
"You were happy crippled? You were happy with your job that you hated waking up every morning to? You were happy without a friend in sight because since your legs didn't work you thought that it was impossible for you to make friends?"
"I'm still a cripple," Taimu reminded.
"No, you aren't. Your will is just too weak," she scowled.
There were people around them. Many faces he recognized. They didn't wear the uniforms and each wore something distinctly odd, but they were the same people that had rescued him in the AIG building. These were the members of the League of Real. "All I'm saying," Taimu explained to the hostile glares, "is that I don't understand what is driving you guys so much. Why are you fighting these Koala aliens just to live here," Taimu waved his hand at the floating buildings. "Only to end up in perhaps another place that may look perfectly identical to this one."
"You could be satisfied living in something you know isn't Real? You would be happy knowing that every sensation you felt and every relationship you made was fake?"
"Yes," Taimu answered. If he couldn't tell what was Real and what wasn't, who cared?
Janice snarled, and from a cute and small blond woman, it was surprisingly frightening. "Well, WE can't."
One of them, Jason, Taimu recognized, spoke. "Even I liked the old Taimu better."
"What?" Taimu asked.
"Janice," Jason said in a warning tone.
She snapped a scary glare at the guy. "I know," she said.
"What." Taimu said again.
"If you don't want to be here, our rule is that we can't force you to be here. We'll return you to your reality once we can organize an escort."
"...Good," Taimu said. It seemed too simple. It felt kind of satisfying for him to stand up for himself and not be pushed around.
"Good!" Janice humphed, turning her eyes on the League. "You heard him, get ready."
One by one, the League members disappeared until only Janice stayed. "So, once I'm back. No more Koalas?" Taimu asked her.
Janice nodded. "Once you are back, you'll meld with your reality and the Koalas will not be able to find you."
"OK."
"Taimu," Janice said. She touched his arm. "I know that you can't understand, and that you may feel forced to have come here. But try to understand the sacrifices we made to find you."
"Why do I care? This is your thing, not mine."
"Taimu," she said again. He saw wetness in the corner of her eye.
That wasn't fair.
"Look," he said, "I'm sorry, but this is all too much for me. As much as I've felt stuck in my chair, my life, it was my life. This," Taimu gestured at the floating world around him. "This is yours."
Janice's lips tightened. "I understand. It is not my decision."
"No, it isn't," Taimu said.
She kept staring at him with that defiant teary look.
"Why do you care so much?" Taimu asked.
"Because I felt stuck," she said. "Just like you. All of us felt stuck in our Unreal worlds. All of us felt like there was something more, a greater potential in us than the lives we were living. This," she flipped the back of her palm at the Great Sphere, "as pathetic as it is, is the journey toward that potential." She pointed at his legs. "You can walk."
"I haven't been able to so far, whatever you say."
She nodded sadly. "I'll come back." She disappeared.
Taimu laid back into the grass, thinking to himself. The events had been exciting, strange, and in truth his curiosity has piqued. But curiosity wasn't a good enough reason to give up his entire life. The boot, as pungent as it had been, was as Janice had said. A Real sensation. The grass underneath him gave him a deeper sense of tingling than the grass he was accustomed to. The bed of hay he'd woken up in, it'd been relaxing, fresh, better than laying in a tempur-pedic mattress.
Taimu looked at the center of the universe. He wanted to see what was on the other side. Taimu closed his eyes, focusing on it, imagining that he was there in front of it. A sense of light flooded his mind and internal vision. Time stretched and Taimu felt weightless. He peeked open one eye, just to make sure the light wasn't coming from outside. It was. The center of the universe hovered right in front of him and he was floating towards it.
Taimu reached for it and from the corner of his eyes, he saw spidery creatures with Koala heads crawling through the surrounding portals. They weren't teleporting, but there were a thousand of them and they lunged across the spaces between buildings fast as speeding cars. At him.
Taimu heard alarmed yells come from several buildings, and just as the Koalas descended on him, Taimu reached out into the portal.
He was sucked in.
It felt kind of like stretching, except that the stretching felt like tearing, and relaxing only made him tear more until his muscles and tendons gave out and his nerves and arteries were next, threaded into little strands as his bones also separated. He felt like he was going to die.
The stretching peaked and he was shot out of the portal, intact and in one piece.
He saw green grassy plains rushing towards his face and he reacted. He didn't know what he did, but it was something akin to flipping completely and landing on his feet like a gymnast. His muscles caught the earth perfectly and it was like jumping into a bed of feathers, so soft was his landing.
He was standing. He was standing.
He could feel his toes in the grass. He could feel his muscles contract. Taimu took a step. His foot turned and flexed for balance over the contours of the earth. He bounded forward and threw himself from a jog into a run into a dead sprint, amazed at the feeling. Of his legs. He laughed like a child and spun a circle, tripped. He tumbled sideways but he rolled right back up, onto his feet.
He almost wept at the feeling.
Taimu finally lifted his head to look about in wonder.
If paradise was coffee in a mug, this whole world was coffee. Green plains of such pure, dark, luscious green. A fresh breeze like the mountain cliffs after rain, animals, diverse and mingled grazed near smooth flowing streams. A bright, warm sun blanketed him with energy and vigor and Taimu felt powerful. He looked at his limbs and saw thick muscle, a broad frame. He turned his face upward and caught the glare of the sun in his eyes and without thinking, he willed that a cloud give him shade.
A cloud gathered from a nearly transparent line that drew out from the stream below. It grew just large enough to shadow the sun but not block it. Out of sheer impulse, Taimu willed a distant hill to flatten, and to his astonishment, the hill began to sink. Peacefully and smoothly like a fading wave.
On the other side of the hill was an army of monkey-Koalas.
The hooted and ho
llered when they saw him and they charged across the grassy plains, throwing grass in their wake. Taimu raised his hands and willed them stop, but they didn't. He knelt, putting his hands into the ground and his power moved into the earth. The earth opened up and the Koalas fell into it, out of sight. The earth closed over them.
Taimu sighed in relief.
But seconds later, monkey palms punched out of the earth like zombie ghouls and the Koalas had risen, screaming aggression and charging toward him in their lumbering quadrupedal gait. Taimu knew that anything he did wouldn't stop them. There were a thousand of them, enraged. He stepped back, retreating further and further until he had no choice and the monkeys were right on him. He dove back into the portal.
He stretched, and tore.