Fifty-three
Corin’s every sense sharpened to excruciating
sensitivity. The intensity of the reality of his surroundings took his
breath away.
He stood in the entrance to a cave surrounded by
curved walls of dirty stone. He stepped closer to a low, wide opening
that looked out over an incredible vista, a desert stretching to horizons
an unbelievable distance away.
This was King’s world, he reminded himself. This was
the nightmare lurking in King’s soul that had driven him for so long.
Suppressed far below his desperate hopes and fervent dreams, this
was what King imagined the world to be like outside the Matrix.
He stepped out onto a ledge, shielding himself from
the glare of the sun with a hand held to his eyes. Millions, perhaps
billions of years had passed in this simulation of the world’s end.
Something was wrong with the orb of the sun, an angry quality of light
that warned of impending disaster. Soon, its supply of hydrogen would be
exhausted. Its core would collapse and ignite other, far less stable
reactions and expand its shell to a red giant that would incinerate what
remained of the body of mother Earth.
Something was still alive here. Corin could hear it
screaming at an inhuman pitch from nearby.
A trail led down the face of the cliff to a forest of
small volcanic chimneys of black rock. They formed a maze of deep
canyons. Corin knew better than to wander too far from the cave. It
wasn’t too late to turn back. Behind him, the Gateway remained open, a
doorway of mirrors in a wall of ugly rock.
Corin began the long climb down, scrapping his bare hands on the jagged
rock and sweltering beneath the intense sunlight. The rigorous journey downward took too long. The
return climb would take far longer. At the foot of the trail, Corin
stopped and wiped the stinging sweat from his eyes, reminding himself that
he was exploring a living mind convinced of its own impending doom. It
contained traps that would snare an unsuspecting visitor with far greater
ease than its wary author.
The base of the field of miniature volcanic chimneys
was littered with black gravel. Corin shuffled his feet as he proceeded,
leaving behind a record of the path he had taken. He dared not risk
losing himself in the maze.
The nearby screaming was in short, quick bursts of
sound followed by long, drawn out wails. It hardly seemed human in its
intensity, but maybe it was. If so, it was most likely associated with
the harm that King had inflicted upon himself. A mere simulation would
not have been so persistent.
Corin began a systematic search, peeking from behind
each tower of rock as he passed, growing more anxious as he put a greater
and greater distance between himself and the cliff’s base. Each time he
looked up at the ledge overhead, it seemed a further distance away,
hundreds and then thousands of feet up the treacherous slope.
He caught sight of movement finally and ducked back
behind a chimney. His heart hammered wildly in his chest. What he had
briefly seen had too quickly burned itself into his memory. He didn’t
need a image of King’s madness sullying his own psyche for the rest of
eternity.
He looked again, sighed dejectedly and stepped into
the open. As he had feared would be the case, there was nothing he could
do for King.
There were survivors in this nightmare world after
all, gnarled, degenerated, starving remnants of a species that may have
once been human. They were larger and stronger than even King. They had
stripped King of his clothing and bound him nude on a boulder no more than
a meter high. They had gathered brush about the base of the pillar and
had set it afire.
King was being roasted alive. The inhuman screaming
Corin had been hearing for the past few hours had been human after all.
It seemed incredible that King could resist sensory pain of such intensity
and not succumb to the feedback loop. Apparently, King’s greatest fear
was yet to be realized.
The ground about the rock was littered with
human-like bones, and Corin could guess what that greater fear might be.
In the end, King would be devoured. It was the horror that would drain
his last bit of hope and close the feedback loop.
That was King’s greatest fear then, to be devoured by
the cannibal that he himself had become in his desperation to escape the
Matrix Gateway. The pain he was suffering was the pain he knew he had
inflicted upon others. Only his intellect had believed Silver Ridge to be
a simulation. On sensory levels, the simulation had been utterly
convincing. King had not escaped a burden of guilt for the crimes he
suspected he had committed.
Corin backed from the scene of terror, trying to hold
his own panic at bay. King’s own predatory nature and lack of compassion
had laid claim to his soul. Retribution would never end for his sins, not
for as long as the Matrix existed.
There was nothing he could do
for King now. Corin turned back to the face of the cliff. He
searched for the base of the ridge that would take him back up the wall to
the Matrix Gateway in the cave high overhead.
Horror upon horror washed over him. The ledge was
gone, although he recognized the alteration in King’s scenario as a product of
his own influence. He was doing this to himself. There was no going
back. If there was any escape from the Matrix, it lay ahead in this world
at the end of time, just as King himself had believed.
He spun around and looked out over the desert. The
face of the desert was the maw of hell itself. His imagination had a
considerable knowledge of deserts upon which to draw. He
was geared to fill this particular desert with exquisite horror.
Horrific possibilities came to mind. If the
cannibals had survived in King’s scenario of a future world, then the
desert must harbor an ecology of other life forms. In this brutal
environment, they’d be creatures of unmatched speed, stealth and
lethality, species evolved to survive in the harshest environment Earth
had ever known.
He had to risk it. He had to get away from King and his overpowering
influence. The gesture would be a symbolic one and lead him into realms
of his own creation.
The challenge was a daunting one regardless. It
mattered little that his reality was taking place inside an electronic
brain, or that his mind was being fed a lie. Conscious experience was the
only true reality, and the sun was an oven, and the desert floor a torture
chamber of jagged shards of volcanic glass. When he tripped over the
larger shards as he did from time to time, he often cut himself on the
leg. As time passed, be bled profusely.
It seemed a gross oversight on the part of the Matrix
engineers not to have allowed the Matrix to snuff a consciousness
consigned to hopeless suffering, to at least simulate death as well as
life, but his lacerated legs bled without draining his strength. He
walked for hours, for days. His shoes were cut apart and his bare feet
baked to shredded meat by the hot glass. And still he could walk. He
walked until the volcanic chimneys were like a stand of needles against
the base of the cliff. Somewhere over the horizon, he told himself,
awaited a cool land of green forests.
One of the denizens of hell rose from its lair in the
ground to greet him before he reached paradise. It took the form of a
towering, scorpion-like creature covered in chitinous armor. Corin gave a
moan of despair at the sight of it, wishing he knew more of the life forms
of early Earth to deny the reality of the creature rushing his way. He
thought of using flakes of volcanic rock as a weapon, but he doubted if a
two-inch blade would damage a thirty-foot exoskeleton, or if his own
reflexes were up to the task of dodging its claws, mandibles and poisoned
stinger. The only way he had of minimizing the nightmare was to close his
eyes and deny himself visual feedback.
Mandibles closed about his waist like steel clamps,
cutting off his breath, but not his life. The creature whirled about and
raced across the desert. Corin endured the searing wind for as long as he
could. A scream of agony failed to lessen his torment. Long past the
point where consciousness should have left him, his suffering continued.
The trek across the heated desert implied a
destination. The conviction of his own doom hadn’t quite reached peak
intensity. The feedback loop hadn’t as yet closed.
The scorpion jerked him abruptly downward. With a
cry of dismay, he was plummeting through a tunnel of dirt and rock
straight into the ground. His eyes were wide open when he was flung into
a phosphorescent green chamber reeking with a stench of death. He rolled
across a pile of rattling bones and struck something the size of a man
that writhed and snapped at him with mandibles capable of severing an arm.
The nest swarmed with the slug-like larvae of the
scorpion. Corin rolled, twisted and contorted in a continual dance to
avoid their gaping, serrated-edged mouths. If only he had remembered his
distaste of the prolific insect life of the twentieth century, perhaps he
would have thought twice before risking this monstrous inevitability. He
had forgotten about the unending succession of public television nature
programs Billy had watched while recuperating in the hospital. Insect
life had been his favorite, true-to-life stories of spiders feeding upon
paralyzed corpses of ants, of parasitic wasps laying eggs upon helpless
spiders for their larvae to feed upon, and preying mantises devouring the
head of its mate even as it continued to perform its sexual function with
relish.
The larvae were blind, but far from helpless as they
groped toward the scent of raw flesh. Once they began tearing at him, he
would be helpless. The feedback loop would close as he was being
devoured. He could see King’s influence in his demise. The final moment
of agony would replay itself forever. Rather than succumb to that horror,
he had to find the logical loopholes of his plight and make changes.
The dirt walls were the source of bioluminescence,
probably a fungi or a bacteria. The bones and partial skeletons scattered
about him were human. His imagination would not have bothered with the
bones of mere animals.
A flash of insight offered him his first clue for an
escape. If there were human bones here, then there were humans nearby.
Humans could never have survived in the desert heat. Logic dictated that
they had taken refuge below the earth’s surface.
Corin rolled toward one of several tunnel openings in
the nest. If there had not been tunnel openings there a moment earlier,
logic dictated that they exist now. He imagined the dirt tunnels leading
to a vast natural cavern somewhere below, then dived head first into the
nearest of them. He slid along a steep dirt path for several hundred
feet, then fell through open air and struck a stone surface with enough
impact to knock the wind from his lungs.
He climbed to his hands and knees, startled by the
image of a subterranean city aglow with internal lighting crouched beneath
the arched ceiling of an enormous cave. This would be the end of the
world for humanity. Humanity would be dying in this gloomy refuge,
falling easy victim to desperate predators. Humanity would no longer be
at the top of the food chain, but they’d be resourceful creatures,
tenacious and determined to hold out for as long as possible.
The buildings were low, rounded, and metallic in
hue. He limped to the nearest of them, racked with pain from numerous
lacerations and burns. He was thwarted by a closed door of metal, but
putting his hand on a plaque engraved with the imprint of a hand opened it
for him. All humans could enter this realm.
A corridor appeared to view, stretching for as far as
the eye could see. He entered, moving quietly, but knowing his
imagination would conjure human survivors at the earliest opportunity.
They were huddled inside the first empty room he
passed. The perversity of his own imagination appalled him. They were
all female with distinctly oversized heads, dressed in tatters of
iridescent garments that reminded him of Evie’s satin negligees. Their
eyes were the eyes of does.
“Evie?”
They reminded him of Evie, feisty, but shy creatures
doomed to fall easy prey to the deathly forces at work in their world.
There were too many of them for him to befriend on a one to one basis.
Inexorably, he could feel hope failing him and the scope of his
imagination narrowing. He’d never escape this entombed city. It had dug
its own grave an eon ago.
Claws scrapped against the metal of the passage
behind him. With a cry of dismay he realized that he had imagined himself
an impregnable fortress, and then left the door open for the scorpions to
follow.
The entire group of little females leaped to their
bare feet and filed through a rear hatch. Corin followed them through a
maze of narrow maintenance corridors filled with conduit and pipes. Their
whispers echoed in the surrounding darkness.
A scream sounded from directly behind him. Corin
looked back in time to see one of the little females caught in the claws
of the monster gaining on them. She was fed to the serrated edges of the
mandibles and devoured bite by rapid bite before he
could tear his eyes away from the awful sight.
Shock narrowed his focus of consciousness to a
sequence of individual sensory perceptions. Reality became a deadly march
toward death. They reached a dead-end, a wall of dingy metal at the end
of a three meter high tube. Hot bodies huddled together in an
instinctive, but futile gesture of mutual defense. He could not help but
join them. One of them slipped her arms about his neck, whispering alien
words of terror into his ears.
And then the predator was upon them. The darting
venomous stinger speared soft bodies. Pinchers reached and grasped.
Thrashing victims were drawn away, trailing even more victims to their
deaths as the little females clung to one another and refused to let go.
Mandibles snapped through meat and bone, spraying Corin with gouts of
blood.
The stinger grazed his arm. Corin’s eyes opened in
surprise to the impossible intensity of the pain. A pincher caught his
leg, snapping the bones of his ankle and inexorably pulling him into the
open.
A glare of light appeared off to his right. As it
intensified, the lucidity of his nightmare diminished. It was an
anomalous intrusion. No psyche in the Matrix had the strength to defy the
power of the Gateway’s sensory feedback.
Regardless, the light became impossibly bright, and
then became something more than light. Corin’s sensory perception
sloughed away, leaving behind nothing but a clear, conscious perception of
the void.
An image of Evie’s smiling face took form.
“If you remember Billy,” Evie said, “I
wonder who remembers
me?”
“If no one else,” Corin said softly, not knowing if
this was real or imagined, “I remember you.”
“If you had forgotten, had the bond between us been
broken, I would never have found you.”
In his dreams, or in a reality long lost, they had
been separated centuries ago. The entity that had expressed itself as
Evie Darker would have gone on to live lives in unknown worlds. Even his
own imagination had failed him in this regard. Perhaps human imagination
had never been up to the task of anticipating the true measure of
reality. In that greater reality, then, Evie had continued to evolve in
worlds beyond description.
Corin had no way of telling whether this was real or
more self-imposed deceit, except that positive feedback within the grip of
the Matrix Gateway was at least theoretically possible. Unlikely, but not
impossible.
“Is has been so long,” Evie said, “and we have
drifted so far away from one another.”
Corin tried to reach for her in some manner. He had
no means of doing so. The dimensions through which Evie reached out to
touch him were alien to the structure of his own psyche.
“I cannot take you with me,” she said. “I can only
end your suffering.”
Corin was not thinking of his suffering. He thought
only of the bright and vivacious gem of a human soul he had once known in
that obscure existence so long ago. He had thought her lost to him, but
the tie between them had lasted an eon.
But he could not reach her. He could feel her
nestled deep in the heart of the alien light, smiling sadly at him. He
tried desperately to clear his vision and make sense of what he was
seeing. He could see movement, like great wings undulating in the glare.
They opened for him, beaconing.
Corin reached for her again, and this time the light
guided him through labyrinths of time and space. Colors swirled, and
patterns took form, and a strangely familiar reality congealed around him
like dreams made solid to the touch.
